A few years back, when I was told by the Standards & Practices Department of Turner Networks that I could no longer use the affectionate term “lesbo” on television, I started using the term “lesbyterian,” unaware at the time of how theologically prescient I was, since the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) would spend much of the past decade adjudicating the rightness or wrongness, legality or illegality, of lesbian coupling within the church. The centerpiece of this battle was one Jane Spahr [1], an ordained Presbyterian minister who is also a practicing lesbian in Marin County, California, and who had performed quite a few gay marriage ceremonies over the years, until she was put on trial in March 2006–not a real trial, one of those ecclesiastical play-trials–at the Church of the Roses in Santa Rosa, where she was formally charged with violating church rules by marrying two lesbian couples, including one happy pair who had traveled all the way from Rochester, New York, for the occasion. After two days of testimony, the court found her innocent, but the local Presbytery (not to be confused with the local Lesbytery) appealed to a regional body (apparently in church play-court, the prosecution can appeal even when the verdict is not guilty), and the regional court voted to censure Spahr–to, in essence, give her the lightest possible punishment, but to make it clear that gay marriage was verboten. Then Spahr appealed to the national ultimate Presbyterian Lesbyterian High-Hat Court of the Last Resort, which only meets once a year in Louisville, Kentucky–the real name of it is the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission–and that august body of clerics decided that Spahr was innocent [2] of charges that she performed same-sex marriages, because if the people are of the same sex, it could not be a marriage. Since no marriage occurred, Spahr didn’t officiate at a marriage. This is really what they decided. I’m not making it up. I think they had a party in Marin County, but at some point during the party they probably went “Huh? We should celebrate, right? Read that again.”

Then Again, Pharaoh Doesn’t Care What the Jews Think, Does He?

Was anybody listening to Jeremiah Wright’s actual speeches during that weekend when he pulled off the Trifecta of appearing on Bill Moyers’ show, keynoting the NAACP convention, and appearing at the National Press Club? He took every opportunity to point out that his theology was not Black Liberation Theology. And yet here we have a massive New York Times piece [3] by Michael Powell describing Wright as a disciple of James H. Cone, the professor at Union Theological Seminary who did invent Black Liberation Theology in the sixties. When Wright describes his church tradition at all, he calls it “prophetic,” and by that he means the Old Testament call away from the world’s ways, away from complacency, away from comfort, and he adds to that that we must harken to the poor. The poor will lead us out of Egypt. And in order to get that message across, the preacher occasionally has to identify Egypt. And when he identifies Egypt, it turns up on YouTube.

The Sisters Looked Like Ballot Stuffers

There’s nothing like turning away 12 nuns from the polls in Indiana [4], telling them they can’t vote because they don’t have proper ID (in fact, some of them may never vote again because they’re too elderly to go to the motor vehicle office) to make the recent Supreme Court decision look especially ugly and unnecessary. Remind me again: why did we do this?

L’Chaim

Last week the Central Synagogue in New York rededicated a Torah that had been buried at Auschwitz for more than 60 years before being found with a metal detector in 2004. The four Torah panels that were actually used for services inside the concentration camp had to then be retrieved from a Catholic priest who had been keeping them all these years, unaware of where the rest of the Torah was. The whole remarkable story is told by James Barron in the New York Times [5], but apparently the name of the sexton who placed the Torah in a metal box and buried it three days before the Germans marched into the Polish city of Oswiecim (later renamed Auschwitz) is lost to history. Whoever he was, he did such a good job of hiding the Torah from the Nazis that it took four years of efforts by Rabbi Menachem Youlus of Wheaton, Maryland, before he finally unearthed the lost Torah. I’m not a superstitious man, but there’s something about these Found Torah stories that, every time I hear them, make me think something powerful and restorative has been released into the world.