OUR LILY IS BLOOMING OUT OF SEASON. It sent up the bloom unexpectedly three months after it usually blooms in the spring.

WHAT AMERICA LOOKS LIKE...

Have you noticed. Americans are beginning to look like what we say we are. We are finally in reality a rainbow society with rapidly shrinking pockets of population where the people who live there behave as if they believe the best society is a caste system with white straight people in the preferred, most blessed stratum. We still have a way to go, but we are no longer a nation where executives are all white and male. Although it’s obviously an aggravation for some folks, the President of the United States is not white, and people of other-than-white complexions are sitting in anchor chairs reporting national and local news. Medical clinic and hospitals, and not just in the poorest sections of America, are staffed by people of color working alongside supervisors who are no longer mostly white. When I went for my annual physical recently, the receptionist was a Latina speaking Spanish to someone on the telephone before she turned her attention me and asked in perfect, educated English to know my identification number and my doctor’s name. An African American medical assistant got me ready to see the doctor by checking a computer data file the system maintains on me, and then she checked my blood pressure and temperature. My primary care physician’s parents were born in the Philippines. After a good visit with him, I went to have blood drawn by a man who grew up in Tijuana, Mexico.

There are exceptions to the multi-ethnic trend in American life. Mainline Protestant churches in America look pretty much the same as they did in 1960. In San Diego one of the places where the “old America” (quite literally old America because people there are mostly over sixty) still exists is in the Methodist church which I attend in Mission Valley. On any Sunday the sanctuary is a sea of white heads and white faces, the color pattern broken only occasionally with a person of color. Two white women (That’s a change from 1960), two white men and one Korean man serve as full-time clergy. They are good people who serve the congregation with dignity and great care. Generally members of the clergy have no problem with integration and would welcome it in their congregations if they could make it happen without taking a hit to the church’s treasury. They would just like to see the pews filled on Sundays. They know that all those old gray-beards and silver-haired women are the people whose contributions keep the church afloat financially; so however enlightened the clergy may be, social and political issues must be addressed subtly.

Most other protestant churches in San Diego look the same. The exceptions are the large retro-fundamentalist mega-churches that appeal to younger people, some of whom are people of color. Urban Roman Catholic churches are more multicolored because recent immigrants from Latin America and Asia are usually Catholic. Of course, Catholic churches can’t openly affirm non-traditional sexual orientation, so that particular kind of integration can’t even be discussed. Few churches in any belief tradition overtly welcome gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons of any complexion. They are most comfortable not talking about it.

Many people going to church in America came of age before the civil rights movement of the Sixties and Seventies. For many of them the place they call “my church” is still a familiar, comfortable setting that reminds them of “the way it used to be.” Seniors who have not been transformed by their faith into people with “the mind of Christ” described in the Christian Gospel don’t change easily. They have difficulty making a late-life conversion to any new way of thinking that threatens to invalidate the way they have viewed the world up until the time they retired from active employment.

The future of the church may depend on whether or not it is successful in attracting into membership “All God’s People.” So far, that strategy has been a difficult sell to many lay people and even to some clergy. I end this journal writing abruptly with that same familiar quote from that same wise sage, Pogo. “We have seen the enemy, and it is us.” I also note, and I expect him to forgive me for naming him without his permission, that Mark Trotter, a retired pastor, is the prototype of my hope for the future of the church. Anyone who wishes to know why I have such faith in him may find out by going to the WEB site of The First United Methodist Church of San Diego and reading his three recent sermons about the patriarch Jacob. Click on “Worship” in the menu bar, then click on “sermons” at the bottom of the drop-down menu.

http://www.fumcsd.org/