A Surprise Seat at the Table

 By: Lydia Wylie-Kellermann
A daughter and her father join together in a formal church process that questions the father’s participation in his daughter’s same sex marriage ceremony.

Image by Tim Nafziger

Slowly the arc bends. Never fast enough, never inclusive enough, but slowly with the work of many lives. Writing today, I am struck by how it is almost hard to remember back to the days before gay marriage was legal in the United States. In February 2019, when the United Methodists voted on a stricter ban on gay marriages and clergy, my heart and mind raced back eight years ago to when I married the love of my life.

It is a marriage I continue to give thanks for every day. But as we prepared to step into the sanctuary that hot October afternoon, our joy was also surrounded by fear and grief. Fear that we might show up to the church to find protests outside. Fear of the vulnerability we were taking in standing before so many people with rings and kisses. Grief of the friends and family who had declined their invitations based on our gender.

Community surrounded us and held us steady that day in what was indeed a joyful celebration. One of the people that laid hands upon us was my dad. As a United Methodist pastor, he stood beside us as we made our vows.

Yet again, in those not-so-long-ago days, he was forbidden by church discipline to perform gay marriages. With the risks hanging in the air, he acted in freedom and joy and stoodfor what he claimed was a Gospel act.

Just a few short weeks into my wedded bliss, a letter arrived addressed to my dad. The Bishop was summoning him to his office where they would bring official charges against him. His ministerial orders were at stake.

The date of the meeting was named and he was encouraged to bring one person to support him. The assumption was that this person would be an established pastor or even a church lawyer: someone whose professional work could help him save his orders.

As that day grew nearer so did the anxiety, but in a surprising moment of calm, my dad asked, “Would you come with me? Would you be my support person?”

I could not refuse. He had stood by me as I claimed the vocation of marriage as part of my discipleship call. Now I would stand by him for the risks of discipleship he had taken that day.

I walked beside him down the long hallways and into the fancy conference room for the meeting. It was clear which spot had been laid for the Bishop. We took our seats to find that before each of us was a copy of the Bible, the church discipline, and a typed agenda.

As a girl raised in Catholic Worker house churches where anarchism and justice were the disciplines, I trembled trying to grasp the layout of the church hierarchy and the ways it functioned. There was a lot of power in that room. I breathed deeply, trying to remember my own power and dignity in the space.

I wasn’t the only one startled by my presence. It was clear that neither the Bishop nor the other two in the meeting expected me to be there. There was palpable awkwardness.

We said a quick prayer and then the Bishop named who exactly were the victims and offenders. We were instructed to turn to the page in the discipline which named the law that had been broken.  My dad was the offender, the law the victim, and my marriage was doing the harm.

Yet the people reading all these words (words that had probably been said over and over in that room, from this same book), were made increasingly uncomfortable by my presence. People stumbled over words like “homosexuals.” Suddenly, there was a context, a human face on this “enemy” of the law.

By being there that day, and in the days that followed, my presence re-arranged the questions of victim and offender. Had my love caused harm to the church? Or was the church causing harm to all LGBTQ people by denying their full, visible, and beloved humanity? I begged the question that if they were going to stake their lives on this law, then they must force it to be worthy.

It took some months for the Bishop to decide what would happen with my dad’s ministerial orders. We came back for repeated meetings wrestling with the law, forcing in story and faces, and maintaining that what happened on October 8, 2011 was right and just. To the Bishop’s dismay, my dad would not apologize and he would not promise to never do it again.

In the end, an administrative solution was proposed. My dad would keep his orders and both of us were charged with being part of a restorative justice circle. We would spend the next few months gathering in circles with pastors from all over Michigan who fell all along the same-sex-marriage-theology spectrum. We would talk around the circle, listen well, and leave room for the Spirit.

The circle seemed a valuable way to go, but in truth a restorative justice circle had already happened around the Bishop’s conference room table.

It has been years since I sat at that table, trembling in fear and holding tight to courage. The arc has bent a little since then. I don’t hold the same fear I did when I walked into that sanctuary claiming sacramental justice. My marriage goes on. Homophobia goes on. Sacraments go on. And I trust that somehow those circles go on moving through us in mysterious ways.  

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Lydia Wylie-Kellermann is a writer, activist and mother from Detroit, MI. She is stepping into the new role of editor at Geez magazine as it transitions to Detroit. She is also the co-curator of radicaldiscipleship.net.

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