Our board had a productive planning retreat in January, finished off by a tasty Swabischen dinner served by our host and treasurer, Markus Mueller. As I reviewed notes from board meetings, I was happy to note that a number of ideas discussed last fall and at our January retreat came into being in the course of this year. Among the most meaningful of these was the establishment of a closer relationship with Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary. Professor Gary Pence has joined the LC/SFBA board as a liaison to the seminary. Earlier this year, we and others expressed concerns about the disturbing anti-gay statements and activities of the PLTS chaplain. PLTS leadership heard us—her contract was not renewed, and she has left the school.

Our traditional involvement in the annual Gay Pride parade was enhanced this year by a pre-parade worship service held jointly with the Episcopalian group Oasis, with whom we marched. Our chapter also placed an ad in the parade magazine Inside Pride.

Thanks to the tireless leadership of board members Max Kirkeberg and Pr. Chuck Lewis, Lutherans were organized to participate in San Francisco’s annual AIDS Walk. And . . . these Lutherans were three of the top five religious group fund raisers this year.

Five members of our chapter, three of whom are on our board, attended the 2002 Lutherans Concerned national assembly in Baltimore. One chapter member, Janine Jansen, was elected co-chair of Lutherans Concerned/North America, and another, Markus Mueller, was elected new regional director for our region.

Two new RIC churches were added to the roster from the Bay Area this year, thanks to the dedicated work of RIC chair Joe Haletky. Plans are underway for outreach to the remaining non-RIC Bay Area churches. Joe also conducted the chapter’s first survey of Bay Area RIC churches, to learn about how they are making their Reconciling in Christ welcome known (see RIC Survey).

This past year, our board focused on laying the groundwork for our next contribution to the Lutheran dialogue on sexual minority issues. Currently we are seeking opportunities to be a joint sponsor of events relating to the ELCA’s national sexuality study. In the near future we plan to meet with David Mullen, the new bishop of the Sierra Pacific Synod, to discuss plans for the sexuality study and offer our chapter resources.

We have an exciting membership event in the works, and we are designing a new chapter membership brochure (thanks again to Max Kirkeberg). Our superb newsletter producer/editor/author/ designer deluxe Judy Streets has added “webmaster” to her long list of titles, for which I am eternally grateful. We all thank Brian Knittel for making our website a reality and securing our domain name.

We were sorry to bid farewell to co-secretary, Karl Arasmith, who brought his experience of long involvement with LC/North America to the board, along with many other gifts. We know his new ministry in La Crosse, WI will enrich the people there. I am personally thankful for the continued faithful participation of our other co-secretary (now secretary!), Debby Elliott, as well as vice-president Barbara Lembcke.

Finally, we have expanded our board for the coming year as we look to a future focused on increasing and strengthening the network of Bay Area RIC churches, as well as our own membership, and on being an active participant in the ELCA’s sexuality study.

You get the drift here of the approach Mark Jordan, a religion professor at Emory University, will take in his new book, The Ethics of Sex. The book jacket describes the author as “part of a group of theologians who represent a concerted attempt to reconceptualize and re-engender Christian theology from non-heterosexual, marginal perspectives.” Already praised for his earlier books, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology and The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism, Jordan here broadens his view to encompass the whole landscape of Christian responses to human sexuality. It is not an altogether pretty picture.

Jordan begins with the uses and abuses of scriptural authorities. Although the biblical references to sex contain multiple images and principles reflecting different circumstances and different preoccupations and although the interpretations of these references by Christians through the centuries have displayed as much diversity and contradiction as the texts themselves, each Christian group has nonetheless portrayed its own interpretation of Scripture as an authoritative reading of a monolithic Christian sexual ethic that never in fact existed. “A person may justify a specific interpretation by appeal to Christian tradition, but in fact the ‘tradition’ is no more than the latest communiqué from a denominational agency.” Jordan appeals for Christians to be “faithfully multilingual” in their use of Scripture, to follow secular scholarship by giving serious attention to “what a passage says, why the passage says it, how the passage is traditionally assigned to a topic, and whether the passage is normative for contemporary Christians.”

As Jordan demonstrates, the core of the problem with traditional Christian sexual ethics doesn’t lie in the Bible itself, however, but in the anti-erotic idealization of virginity as a “new life beyond sex” which came to dominate Christian sensibilities and continues to influence Christian attitudes to this day. While renunciation of sexuality altogether was commended as the Christian ideal, marriage—a second-class status—was reduced to an inferior state grudgingly tolerated for the majority of Christians, who were incapable of sustained abstinence from sexual activity. Sex within marriage was excusable, forgivable, and yet severely circumscribed. Referring to “sins of nature” and “sins of Sodom,” Jordan notes that “the two categories have included, in one author or another, every erotic or quasi-erotic act that can be performed by human bodies except penile-vaginal intercourse between two partners who are not primarily seeking pleasure and who do not intend to prevent conception.”

Jordan provides evidence that even Luther and Calvin succumbed to theological suspicions of sex, even within marriage. For Luther marriage redeems sex from its fallen condition and can serve good ends, both physical and spiritual. Yet even within marriage sex must be guarded with cautious restraint, for immoderate exercise of sex within marriage is as coarse, filthy, defiling, and demonic as he assumes unredeemed sex outside of marriage to be.

With such views controlling Christian understandings of sexuality, it is hardly surprising that homosexuality, masturbation, and any sexual activity except conventional heterosexual intercourse have been viewed by most Christians with discomfort and suspicion, if not outright condemnation. Jordan asks, “Where is a religion that begins with such a strong critique of human sexual life to find principles for constructive teaching of it?” “We should notice,” he writes, “how little positive instruction Christian theology has traditionally given about married sex. There is no Christian pillow book or Kama Sutra, no Christian saint is revered for attaining the vision of God through disciplined erotic refinement.” “Theological shame has corrupted or determined the language of sex.”

Near the end of his book, Jordan poses an alternative vision of what might have been:

Such a history is still open to us, he writes, in the writings of the Christian mystics and the language of prayer, and the future appears hopeful. “Who would have imagined, two decades ago, that an introduction to the Christian ethics of sex would be written by an ‘unrepentant homosexual’? For that matter, who would have imagined that church blessings for lesbian and gay unions would be a matter of debate? Or that gays and lesbians would be serving proudly in the churches of many denominations with the full support of their congregations?”

November 6—10, 2002 “Creating Change 2002”—National Gay and Lesbian Task Force 15th Annual Conference (DoubleTree Jantzen Beach Hotel, Portland, OR) See details on their website (www.ngltf.org).

February 7- 9, 2003 at Lutheran Center, Chicago, IL. Task force for the ELCA Studies on Sexuality will meet. Scheduled for this meeting are consultations with invited constituencies. This is an open meeting; observers are welcome. Contact www.elca.org/faithfuljourney/.