BEATI QUORUM VIA INTEGRA ESTThis morning Margaret and I attended a memorial service in Trotter Chapel for friend Robert Stadge who died at age eighty-seven. The homily was given by retired minister Mark Trotter (Trotter Chapel was named for him and his wife, Jean.) who had been Robert’s pastor and friend for several decades. His remarks were meaningful, sincere, and honoring statements about a man for whom he obviously had tremendous respect. Robert, the son of a Methodist pastor, had graduated from a Methodist university. A man whose life was an example of grace and integrity, Robert had been a member of First United Methodist Church in San Diego since the mid-sixties. It is appropriate and fitting that the funeral service for this good man was held at the church he loved and served.
I sat through the service feeling very glad to have known him, and I am glad to know Mark Trotter and other of Robert’s friends, like Joe Brooks and Doug Walker, who honored his memory by preparing a luncheon for people who came to the service.
Robert would not have pointed out an irony in his having been memorialized at a Methodist church. He was much too polite and gentle to call attention to the church’s failure to invite him and include him in all of the ways that it invites and includes most other people including me. I am not as polite as he was. It isn’t easy today for me to shake off a sense of sadness, not so much because of Robert’s death for he was “ready to go,” I am saddened that the church he loved limited his participation. The United Methodist Church didn’t apply fully it’s “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors” to Robert while he was alive. A funeral service for him is permitted; but if he had wanted to be married in the church or even in another venue with a member of clergy attending, he would not have been allowed to do so. Robert was gay.
4 comments:
I recently spoke to the Cabinet about my visit and 3 hour tour of Gettysburg and how painful it was for me to again realize that there is something within us that makes it possible for us to kill each other whether or not we are family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, citizens of the same country or members of the same denomination or religion. I asked the Bishop when would we, as the United Methodist Church, stop killing our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers. He then spoke of living within the context of The Discipline of the UMC and I reminded him that it is a book based on majority rule and as long as that is true it cannot truly represent The United Methodist Church of which I am a vocal part of an active, committed, dedicated minority. Robert and I would have been on the same side. within the church. How sad for everyone that he could not have been married or ordained within such a church.
Bob
"... with liberty and justice for all."
One day, all 31 words of the Pledge will apply, not just the first 25.
And who knows, maybe another pair words that ARE currently included will be reconsidered.
Personally, in the interest of inclusiveness, I'd be willing to keep "under God" if the half dozen quoted above held genuine sway in governance of this one nation.
RIP Robert Stadge. Though I may never have met you in person, the introduction below makes me glad you shared parts of our journey under the rainbow.
Amen.
Stewart
Beautiful rainbow, and very appropriate for the death of a gay man,
David F.
Wow...that's incredible. Thanks.
And, I pray one day our church will be more open to the rainbow!
Lynn
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