United Methodist Church (UMC) Rev. John Makokha of Kenya has worked tirelessly to bring “education and understanding” of homosexuality to a country where gays and lesbians face church-sanctioned discrimination and physical persecution. This brave straight ally and his wife Anne have suffered financial hardship and ostracism for their open and affirming stance, and now it appears that church leaders are conspiring to force him out of the ministry.
Makokha is the Kenya coordinator for Other Sheep, an international ministry that supports gay Christians in East Africa and beyond. Below are some excerpts from Other Sheep co-founder Steve Parelli’s interview with Makokha in their latest e-newsletter. Behind the Mask, cited below, is an African webzine that promotes GLBT rights.
Steve Parelli (Other Sheep) asks: John, according to the January 29, 2009, article by Behind The Mask, “you may face an axe from the United Methodist Church” at the next annual conference this April (2009) because of your “positive stance on homosexuality.” How likely is this, and do you think it could take place this April?
Rev. John Makokha replies: Well, it is anticipated that the next East Africa Annual Conference may be held during this time. The Bishop has the prerogative of making any appointments but with recommendations from each member country leadership. Looking at the way UMC leaders in Kenya have been strategizing and scheming against me, there is a strong concerted spirit of isolating and discriminating against me further during this session due to my positive stance on homosexuality. This session is likely to give homophobic and homohatred leaders an opportunity to shoot.
Steve Parelli (Other Sheep) asks: So, you could “get axed” by your denomination. Does that mean you’ll be defrocked? Do you have any recourse? What will this mean to you financially? What will happen to the church you are now pastoring?
Rev. John Makokha replies: You can call it defrocking, or anything, but this is only a human decision. I will only be worried if I loose Christ. They are not the ones who called me in this ministry. They will not shut my mouth. I will raise a red flag using the social principles on affirmation of LGBTI persons in our UMC churches and the Great Commission. We talk of open hearts, open minds and open doors in the UMC. We need to be welcoming congregations, not unwelcoming. Discrimination is sin. I have affirmed my belief in an inclusive church, that is, a church that welcomes all of God’s children, that is free from any discrimination, including that based on sexual orientation or gender identity. If I am stopped, this church will dearly miss an affirming spiritual leader but the mission field is wide. The workers are few but the harvest is plenty. I will also miss my all- inclusive sheep that I have trained and preached to so far. Financially, it will not change my position since I have not been on any salary from the UMC. God has been providing for us in His own ways, through the gifts of his people. I am sure He will continue providing for my family through caring people who will choose to support us financially. God has been faithful and keeper of His promise.
Steve Parelli (Other Sheep) asks: You’ve been involved with Other Sheep, an ecumenical Christian pro-LGBT international organization, since December of 2007. Is that when you first became pro-LGBT, or was it before then? Briefly, what is your history in speaking up on behalf of LGBT people of faith?
Rev. John Makokha replies: Thank you for that good question. Before joining Other Sheep, I had been actively involved in the LGBTI ministry for more than 5 years. I have conducted capacity building seminars ecumenically for ministers and laity on mission/evangelism work and human sexuality as a component in Eastern Africa region. I have counseled pastors, youth and married persons on sexual orientation. I have taught in Bible study sessions and preached sermons for inclusion and affirmation of LGBTI persons.
Steve Parelli (Other Sheep) asks: Some Kenyan Methodist ministers, according to the article by Behind The Mask, have accused you of “promoting” homosexuality in the church? Of course, no one can “promote” a sexual orientation. A person either does or does not have same-sex attraction. What you are doing is “promoting” education on the topic of homosexuality for the sake of learning and understanding because the gay Christian community — a marginalized people — is being spiritually abused by the church by its outright complete social rejection of LGBT people. Would you agree that you are “promoting” education and not homosexuality?
Rev. John Makokha replies: Oh! My God, no one can promote homosexuality. Sexual orientation, according to scientific research, has shown that it is innate and cannot be changed. You only promote what is outside. You cannot promote what is inside. What is happening, so far, is ignorance on matters of human sexuality that has caused a lot of suffering to LGBTI. This has perpetuated both physical and spiritual violence in Africa. I have been promoting education (awareness) and not promoting homosexuality the way it has been alleged; through capacity building programs such as seminars and distribution of materials. I have also been carrying out counseling of LGBTI and PFLAG. We have been requesting dialogue and praying for tolerance and not intolerance. Inclusion and not exclusion.
Steve Parelli (Other Sheep) asks: So, what are you doing to bring “education and understanding” about issues relating to homosexuality to the United Methodist Churches in Kenya? How are you accomplishing this?
Rev. John Makokha replies: I am not only reaching out to United Methodist Churches, but working ecumenically. So far, almost all United Methodist Church leaders have received handouts and books on the Bible and homosexuality. I am passionately involved in organizing interdenominational seminars and workshops for clergy and laity. I have also been initiating dialogue with them. Counseling clergy and laity who are LGBTI. I have distributed resource materials to seminary and university students and professors. Lastly, I have been involved on KISS 100 radio and a TV talk show on the topic of homosexuality and social and religious justice.
This will create safer spiritual communities for LGBTS persons, their families, and their friends. I am confident that Jesus will break down all dividing walls of hostility and discrimination.
We are telling the church leadership that diverse understandings of Biblical texts is not disbelief.
…
Rev. Makokha has been ministering without a salary for the past two years because of his pro-gay stance. His wife was also fired from her job as a part-time lecturer at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology, from which they both graduated. Makokha says, “Our children were told not to mix with others because they would ‘recruit’ them into LGBTI ministry. We were also advised to seek alternative housing elsewhere because of the nature of our ministry. We prayed, God opened a window and we moved out. But we still love our school.”
He adds that it is difficult to start a dialogue about sexuality within the church, as many people fear reprisals for speaking out. “We organized a seminar for the clergy in Nairobi but ministers feared to attend. It is a pity that even some resource materials donated to some evangelical colleges have sometimes been returned to us due to disapproval on the basis of phobia and lack of academic freedom.”
If you would like to ask the UMC leadership in Kenya to show grace to Rev. Makokha’s ministry and consent to an open dialogue about sexuality and spirituality, please email Mrs. Winnie Adhiambo, the lay leader of Riruta United Methodist Church. To help support the Makokha family, click here for the Other Sheep donation page.
Author Archives: Jendi Reiter
“Fidelity” Video Puts a Human Face on Equal Marriage Rights
The Courage Campaign, one of the groups fighting for equal marriage rights to be restored in California, has posted dozens of beautiful photos of gay couples and their supportive friends and family members, saying “please don’t divorce us” to the California Supreme Court, which is currently deliberating on a legal challenge to Prop 8. Ken Starr, of Clinton/Lewinsky fame, has filed a brief in that case on behalf of the “Yes on 8” campaign, seeking to invalidate the 18,000+ same-sex marriages performed in California last year.
Now some of these images have been set to music in this poignant video featuring Regina Spektor’s song “Fidelity”:
I really think that a civilization is measured by the largeness of its moral imagination: its willingness to see the full humanity of every person, despite differences of class, race, gender, disability, and other accidents of unequal power. How will history judge us? How will it judge the church?
The Poet Spiel: “the end”
the end
i don’t think
anyone cried
on the first day
but
there was loud silence
around
the kitchen table
dad phoned
the wheat-threshers
told them
there would be
no filthy sweat work
one out-of-hell
sweep of hail
had wasted his readied crop
one day too soon
no one wanted to talk
so i hid my mouth upstairs
just played and played my harry belafonte
till it numbed me dead
when i came to
my dumbed diamond needle
was banging
deep grooves in my head
my folks were still
in the kitchen
staring
at dark
the dogs were scratching
our screendoor
and i wasn’t sure if
the cows had been milked
my dad had to quit
a lifetime
dedicated
to farming
and we had to move
where our only harvest
was just a dumb little patch
of green grass where i rooted
a pussy willow cutting
hoping it might spring up
to cast cover over
the naked bathroom window
of a little white house
crammed between
everybody-strangers
who did not have trucks
who made their lights
push through
my bedroom walls
after bedtime
and me just listening
to the slick-black street
where a kid could not
kick dirt
This poem was reprinted by permission from The Poet Spiel’s chapbook once upon a farmboy (Madman Ink, 2008). Visit his website here.
CA Supreme Court to Hear Prop 8 Legal Challenge
From the latest Equality California e-newsletter:
The California Supreme Court announced today that it will hear oral arguments on Thursday, March 5, 2009 in the Proposition 8 legal challenge.
On November 19, 2008, the California Supreme Court agreed to hear the legal challenges to Proposition 8 and set an expedited schedule. Briefing in the case was completed on January 21, 2009.
The California Supreme Court must issue its decisions within 90 days of oral argument.
On January 15, 2009, 43 friend-of-the-court briefs urging the Court to invalidate Prop 8 were filed, arguing that Proposition 8 drastically alters the equal protection guarantee in California’s Constitution and that the rights of a minority cannot be eliminated by a simple majority vote. The supporters represent the full gamut of California’s and the nation’s civil rights organizations and legal scholars, as well as California legislators, local governments, bar associations, business interests, labor unions, and religious groups.
In May of 2008, the California Supreme Court held that laws that treat people differently based on their sexual orientation violate the equal protection clause of the California Constitution and that same-sex couples have the same fundamental right to marry as other Californians. Proposition 8 eliminated this fundamental right only for same-sex couples. No other initiative has ever successfully changed the California Constitution to take away a right only from a targeted minority group. Proposition 8 passed by a bare majority of 52 percent on November 4.
The briefs in the case, Strauss et al. v. Horton et al. (#S168047), can be read online here.
Allison Amend: “Dominion Over Every Erring Thing”
This short story is excerpted from Allison Amend’s first collection, Things That Pass for Love. To give credit where credit is due, I discovered her through the blog Andrew’s Book Club, which was a featured link in this month’s Practicing Writer e-newsletter. Here’s the opener:
I am teaching my fifth graders to add fractions when the body falls. Only one of the students looks up. I have placed Kendrick next to the window at a desk by himself, away from the table clusters because the previous Friday, as I walked by his desk, he said, audibly enough so that José, sitting closest to him, snickered: “I smell white pussy.”
Today he is ignoring his paper, purposely avoiding drawing in the bars that measure 1/5 and those that measure 2/5. I see the body fall out of the corner of my eye, and Kendrick stands up and shoves his head so far forward that I hear it hit the glass just after the body thumps to the ground.
“Oh my God,” I say. I go over to the window, and through the soiled glass I can see the body, toes up and eerily straight, in the dirt of the playground. In the background, two planes land and take off from the airport in symmetry.
“What?” Tisha wants to know.
“Nothing,” I say, and I hurriedly close the blinds. “It’s nothing.”
“Just another body,” Kendrick says.
“Kendrick,” I warn him.
There is a bored sigh, and then the class settles back into its worksheets. I stick my head out the door and ask the floater to watch the class.
“Come on.” I put my hand behind Kendrick’s head to steer him downstairs.
“What, what’d I do?”
“Nothing,” I say. “We’re just going to see Ms. Sabarowski.”
“Awwww,” Kendrick says. “Why? I didn’t do nothing.”
Ms. S is the guidance counselor. Her office is next to the overworked principal’s, and she has become the disciplinarian. Inside, Ms. S is standing at the window, watching the paramedics drive over the dirt field to the body, her hands on her broad hips.
“Another one,” Ms. S says without turning around.
“He fell feet first,” Kendrick says. “And no blood.”
Confused, I strafe my gaze from Kendrick to Ms. S and back again. I feel like there is a joke that I’m not getting.
…
Want to know what happens? How can you not? Read the whole story here.
Alegria on God’s Two Natures, and the Nature of Love
Poet Alegria Imperial recently shared with me these thoughts inspired by my post about postmodern evangelist Peter Rollins, below. Since I’ve had to turn comments off, I’m reprinting them here. She writes (emphasis mine):
I fully understand what Peter is saying and what you said is his main point “that our priorities are often topsy-turvy”, and that the reason we are in such a bind is we cannot see—”beyond the color of their (other’s) eyes, beyond the contours of their political and religious commitments…”
I would like to take that main point further—that the reason for such “topsy-turviness” is that we cannot see the intrinsic nature of things but especially of man, which goes beyond what nature ordains. And Christ came to show this to us. Christ, who is God, by being born as man already defies two opposing natures as we understand: can God be man and man be God? As God and thus, king of the universe, Christ chose to be born poor, died poor and thus, ostracized because intrinsically, kings are born with power and wealth; he didn’t although his lineage had to be of David, a most powerful king. As man he belonged to a religion but which he changed by turning its essence around: “the Sabbath for man and not man for the Sabbath”, and thus was viewed as a rebel.
Christianity, the religion established on his life and words, ensconces compassion and forgiveness as intrinsic attributes of judgment: the essence of a human being is not who he appears to be but who he could possibly be or the sum total of what is hidden in the eyes and ears of others, or in Christ’s words, “his heart”. He then summed up the Ten Commandments in one the word, “love”. More than two thousand years after he died, we are still grappling with that word, pushing and bashing people and things we cannot understand, such as the intrinsic nature of man versus the intrinsic nature of male and female.
What is love, indeed? Christ who is God became Man out of love. Is there any place for that love in this utterly complex life, this entangled world we have created, a life and a world we have layered with structure after structure so much so that these have caged our heart, our intrinsic nature as human beings, which has languished beyond our reach, our recognition. Take all those dying if not bodily as those caught in raging wars, emotionally and spiritually as those abused by those deranged with power, or those misunderstood thus denied of rights to live like those who find love beyond their intrinsic nature as male and female. In trying to keep order, trying to keep nature intact, there is so much dying around us, so much killing, so much pain inflicted on each other….
What actually got me thinking about this absurdity of forcing “love” into a mold that cannot transcend physicality was a post on Dec. 7 in the Today in Literature column about the suicide of Hart Crane during a cruise. He couldn’t reconcile his feelings for the stewards of the ship and the presence of his fiancee—they were getting married. I imagined the same thing as I did while watching another same sex couple at the inner harbor in Baltimore how it must have shredded their souls to pieces and submitting to melancholia simply gave in as in this poem that wrote itself (published in LYNX):
melancholia
by Alegria Imperial
in the haze,
crow circling bare trees
finally alights
while sun
tints bay, i dive skimming
crimson-bottomed boats
duck pairs braid
shadows on my back—
i slurp refuse
gulls overhead fight
over what’s left,
screaming mute—
the same scraps
i tossed in my daze
a moment earlier
before i plunged
mesmerized by
melancholia
Cleve Jones Speaks at Camp Courage GLBT Activist Training
In the wake of Prop 8, a new group in California known as Camp Courage has begun training marriage-equality activists in community organizing skills. Visit their website for videos and photos from their kickoff event in Los Angeles earlier this week, and consider making a donation. I enjoyed this video of veteran activist Cleve Jones’ keynote speech:
Jones spoke out against the temptation to blame black and Latino voters for marriage equality’s defeat in California. On the contrary, he said, the GLBT community’s diversity is its strength. There are GLBT people in every ethnic group, which creates a unique opportunity to build bridges and set an example of racial reconciliation.
In other gay news, if you can get to Sacramento on Feb. 17, sign up on Equality California’s website to register for the 2009 Marriage Lobby Day, when GLBT Californians and straight allies will gather at the state Capitol to share their stories about why everyone deserves the freedom to marry.
Feb. 12 is also National Freedom to Marry Day. Visit the Join the Impact website to find an event near you.
Live in Massachusetts? Lucky you. I’m proud of our state, the first to provide full marriage equality. But there’s more to be done: call your legislator to ask him or her to support “An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes”, a pending bill that would add gender identity and expression to the state nondiscrimination law.
Poet Robert Cording on “Craving Reality”
The literary journal Image, a journal of the arts and religion, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year with an issue featuring various writers and artists addressing what it means to be fully human. I was moved by this essay by poet Robert Cording, “Love Calls Us to One World at a Time“, whose title is a riff on one of my favorite Richard Wilbur poems. Both poem and essay celebrate the inextricable union of finite and infinite, spirit and matter–a creative tension that the religious mind is so often tempted to resolve in favor of rejecting this world, not realizing that this disconnects us from direct experience of God and the people He has given us to love. Cording writes:
A few days before his death on May 6, 1862, Henry David Thoreau was asked by Parker Pillsbury, a former minister become abolitionist, that question so many would like to have answered. Noting that Thoreau was “near the brink of the dark river,” Pillsbury asked Thoreau how the “opposite shore” appeared to him. Thoreau, according to the biographer Richard D. Richardson, “summed up his life” with his answer: “One world at a time.” Thoreau’s reply, polite but firm, was in accord with the way he deliberately chose to live his life. Just months before his death, he was still collecting material for projects on the succession of forest trees and seed dispersal, newly taken with nature’s economy of abundance and its genius of vitality. Years earlier, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau had come to a similar understanding: we need, he said, “not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of the earth…. We need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born.” Thoreau, who is too often mistakenly placed under the convenient label of pantheist, was not choosing to be “earth-born” over and against being “heaven-born.” He believed, rather, that both births depended on each other. To be “heaven-born” did not lie in redirecting attention from the natural to the supernatural, but in seeing more deeply into the sources of the natural. Those sources, like creation itself, were always a mystery.
In his famous poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” Richard Wilbur enacts the way love calls us to extend ourselves toward a world which will always remain irreducible in its otherness and yet open to our understanding and recognition. In Wilbur’s poem, the soul cannot exist free of the body’s restrictions. Each day it must learn to keep a “difficult balance” in a world which asks us, as Wendell Berry has said, “to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is.” As Thoreau’s life had taught him, if we try to leave behind the earth, if we choose religion simply to quiet our fears and prop up our hopes rather than connect us with the sources of life, we ignore the call of love and heed only the usual summons of the self and its needs….
****
…Great art, according to Iris Murdoch, delights us “because we are not used to looking at the real world at all.” In her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she uses Plato’s system of thought to give, ironically, a place to art and the artist that Plato did not envision in The Republic. Murdoch argues that the moral life in Plato is a “slow shift of attachments wherein looking (concentrating, attending, attentive discipline) is a source of divine (purified) energy…. The movement is not, by an occasional leap, into an external (empty) space of freedom, but patiently and continuously a change of one’s whole being in all its contingent detail, through a world of appearance toward a world of reality.” We know, of course, that the simple exposure to and even the study of great art may or may not lead to transformation, to care for the other. Art requires our consent, and in Murdoch’s view, our “morally disciplined attention” in order to enact the change from “a world of appearance toward a world of reality.” What we may learn from art is its closeness to morals, since for Murdoch the essence of both art and morals is love. And love, as Murdoch defines it in her essay “The Sublime and the Good,” “is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real”; it is the “discovery of reality.”
Great art is the enemy of fantasy; fantasy always leads to the creation of idols. Our weakness as human beings is our tendency to make idols of whatever is at hand, whatever makes the world easier, more understandable, and meets our most immediate needs. Poets have always argued that the imagination is the opposite of fantasy. Imagination is an exercise in overcoming one’s self, of extending oneself towards what is different from ourselves. And, in their loving respect for a reality other than oneself, imagination and art call us to attend, with devotion and care, to a world which will always remain a mystery, but a mystery in which love calls us to the things of this world where we may become most fully human.
Michael Franti & Spearhead: “The Obama Song”
I just heard this song on our local station WRSI (93.9, “The River”) and hey, I just can’t get enough Obama happiness, OK? So here it is:
Rainer Maria Rilke: Excerpt from “The Book of Pilgrimage”
Poet Lois P. Jones, whose “Milonga for a Blind Man” I reprinted here earlier this month, was inspired by my “Mu!” post to send me this Rilke poem. In the spirit of hermeneutic indeterminacy that we pride ourselves on here at Reiter’s Block, I’m sharing both of the translations that she found. The first, which I like better, is courtesy of The Old Bill blog (I’ve queried him for its source), and the second is from the Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy translation of Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (Riverhead Books, New York).
from The Book of Pilgrimage
(version one)
All will come into its strength again;
the seas will rage, the field will be undivided,
the trees will tower and the walls will be small,
and in the valleys, nomads and farmers as strong and varied
as the land itself.
No churches to encircle God as though
he were a fugitive, and then bewail him
as if he were a captured, wounded creature.
Houses will welcome all who knock,
a sense of boundless sacrifice will prevail
in all actions, and in you and me.
No more waiting for the Beyond, no longing for it,
no belittling, even of death,
we shall long for what belongs to us,
learn the earth,
serve its ends,
and feel its hands about us like a friend’s.
****
from The Book of Pilgrimage
(version two)
All will come into its strength;
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong
and varied as the land.
And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.
No yearing for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us,
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.