Feast of the Renunciation?: Following the ELCA Churchwide Assembly, the folks at Lutheran CORE seem to have renunciation on the brain: the headline for their August 22 newsletter reads:
Lutheran CORE leaders renounce ELCA decision to endorse gay marriage and to allow pastors to be in same-sex relationships
Further down in the newsletter you can read that Lutheran CORE has also renounced its status as an Independent Lutheran Organization in relation to the ELCA. (Independent Lutheran Organizations relate to the ELCA through the Vocation and Education program unit.)
Naturally, Lutheran CORE also suggests that you direct financial support away from the ELCA.
Our opinion is that anything worth doing is worth doing liturgically, so perhaps a rite of renunciation is in order (though we doubt you'll find one in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW). It also seems that Lutheran CORE may need to negotiate with dissident Roman Catholics should they wish to celebrate the Feast of the Renunciation.

Summer of Love?: Rubbing shoulders with Lutheran CORE in our inbox was the latest email newsletter from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies in Religion and Ministry (CGLS) at the Pacific School of Religion. CGLS pointed us to an article titled Yet Another Summer of Love? Thanks to Religion? Really?by Rev. Jay Emerson Johnson, and being of a certain age our interest was naturally piqued:
Remember those heady days back in June of 2003? Some started calling it “another summer of love,” evoking the cultural shifts of the 1960s. In 2003, Canada approved marriage for gay and lesbian couples, the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire elected Gene Robinson as their bishop, and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state sodomy statues. What about today?
The summer of 2009 looks nearly as momentous...
When major, “mainline” Christian denominations vote to embrace their LGBT members, the effects ripple out, far beyond institutional church boundaries. As cultural attitudes shift, so do public policies, and religion has always played a key role in shaping cultural attitudes.
June, 2003? Wait a minute! What about 1967?

Post Hoc, Bishops: In the days after the Churchwide Assembly, synodical bishops began to issue statements and reflections on what had transpired. Some are heavy-hearted, some are Kiplingesque (eschewing both triumph and disaster), some are uncertain, and some emphasize the optional nature of the policy changes.

In the Central Great Lakes Synod (CGLS), Bishop Thorvald "Wally" Noe-Effingway voiced a unifying sense of "relief" among the synod's rostered leaders. (In 2007, Bishop Noe-Effingway invited the synod's clergy to take on "the burden of abstinence" until the ELCA could adopt a social statement on human sexuality.)

Post Hoc in the Castro: We received from a third party a cryptic message that Pr. Jim DeLange had something to share with our readers. With one thing and another we had no opportunity to reach Pr. DeLange directly, but we did visit the St. Francis (SF) web site where we found a copy of Pr. DeLange's remarks to the congregation on Sunday, August 23. Pr. DeLange, now retired, was pastor at St Francis when the congregation called pastors Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart and when the congregation was expelled from the ELCA for issuing those calls.Pr. DeLange's remarks read in part:
I didn’t think it would happen. Not this year. Lutherans are notorious for sitting on their hands and waiting for someone else to lead the cause to justice...
But the social statement passed. By one vote out of over 1,000 cast. Don’t ever think your vote doesn’t count.
So now I am hopeful. I am hopeful that our young seminarians will feel free to come outin seminary and other LGBT pastors will feel free to come out to their congregations. Itwill not happen over night. But it will happen.

Ask Pr. Sophie: Is My Pastor Gay?:
Dear Pr. Sophie: I had a long talk with my pastor after I got home from Minneapolis, and he seemed, well, different somehow. It got me to wondering. How can I tell if my pastor is gay?
Concerned Layman
No address given.
Dear Mr. Layman:
Pr. Sophie congratulates you on posing such a brief, to-the-point, no-beating-around-the-bush question.
Her brief, to-the-point, no-beating-around-the-bush answer is:
You can't.
But of course, there's more.
You might also have asked "How can I tell if my pastor is straight?" because, after all, if you don't know who's gay, you don't know who's straight either.
There is no test you can perform to put people in any of those categories, and in any case 'putting people in categories' is a risky enterprise that can be profoundly disrespectful of personal dignity. If you really want to know if a person is gay, lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, straight or something else altogether, you'll have to depend on and respect that person's willingness and ability to confide in you.
And so the question arises: why might you need to know whether your pastor (or anyone else for that matter) is gay or straight? Perhaps you are contemplating a (publicly accountable, life-long, monogamous, possibly marital) sexual relationship with your pastor. Pr. Sophie trusts that both of you would approach such a relationship in a mature, non-exploitive way, but putting the best construction on everything, she humbly suggests it would be wise not to overload the relationship and wiser still to find another spiritual advisor during your courtship.
If you are not interested in a sexual relationship with your pastor, you probably don't need to know if he or she is gay or straight.
Now if your pastor strikes you as "different somehow," might it not also be the case that, on your return from Minneapolis, you yourself are different in some indefinable way? It may even be that your pastor is trying to figure out how to tell if his parishioners are gay.

Pr. Sophie Fortresson, our resident expert on all matters of theology, Lutheran etiquette, and social protocol, answers questions submitted by our readers and occasionally simply volunteers advice when no question has been asked. Send your questions to pr_sophie@lutheranconfessions.com.

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