My Sunday Feeling

Being a Methodist is pretty much all I’ve ever been. I know. I know.  My by-line when I used to write for the paper’s Religion page identified me as “a Methodist with Catholic tendencies.” And I suppose that’s still pretty much true.  But I was baptized at the Methodist church in Mabelvale.  I became part of the United Methodist church by operation of law when the Methodists merged with….somebody……. when I was 13 or so.  About the only impact the merger had on my young self at the time was that the MYF (Methodist Youth Fellowship) became the UMY or United Methodist Youth which in retrospect sounds kinda fascist.  Anyway, I was educated as an undergraduate by the Methodists and they loaned me money to go to law school.

And I’m still a Methodist, albeit a somewhat lapsed one  I like to think that i make up for it by being married to a UMC Deacon.  I like to think it at least.

So I’m about as Methodist as it gets.  The Methodist church I was raised in was a “big tent” informed by the Wesleyan Quadrilateral of Scripture, Reason, Tradition and Experience.  The church I grew up in and remain still, Catholic tendencies notwithstanding, is a tolerant place where a person can get all the welcoming grace he or she wants along with all the religion they can stand.  

Which suits me, and a lot of my cohort, just fine.

All is not well however in the UMC.  The church is experiencing an honest to God (you should pardon the expression) schism.  The reasons for same vary depending on who you talk to.  The schismatics (which is what they are) who wish to “disaffiliate” and become something called the Global Methodist Church will tell you that they are leaving to return to a more biblical and “Christ centered” church, which by the way, defines marriage as between a male and a female and whose clergy are at least unlikely to be gay.  

Many UMC types I have talked to view the GMC as crypto bigots who are being led by narcissistic Baptist wannabe clergy who are tired of Bishops calling all the shots.  And they highly resent the fact that the churches that are leaving at least on paper get to keep their church properties at a discount which would allow said clergy to create their own fiefdoms on somebody else’s dime.  Which is what many of the folks in the UMC camp think is the primary motivator for the guys trying to go out the door.

Long story short, things are about to get ugly here in Arkansas really quick.  The second largest Methodist congregation in Arkansas, First UMC in Jonesboro, voted to disaffiliate.  The Arkansas Annual Conference of the UMC which is the ruling body of the church denied Jonesboro’s application to hit the trail.  Long story even shorter, it is pretty clear that we are heading for litigation over all of this.

Which will be good for nobody.

Last year I assisted with the Theology Club at Catholic High.  The sponsor asked me to explain what was going on with the Methodists.  Which I did.  But what I mainly did was to urge the boys to watch this very carefully.  The United Methodists are the second or third largest worldwide denomination.  And it is in schism.  Which doesn’t happen every other day. This is important as a matter of history, both church and human.

What I didn’t tell the club is that the Christian church in America has historically splintered over social issues in the body politic.  Mainly slavery, civil rights and now matters of human sexuality.

Somebody always winds up on the wrong side of history in these deals.  

We shall see.  

PS…I drafted this post a couple of days ago.  Since then the Bishop of the UMC in Arkansas has suspended the Senior Pastor at Jonesboro FUMC from ministry pending formal charges.  The suspended pastor has vowed, in a post on his Facebook page, to be in the pulpit today despite that fact.  

Like I said.  Things are about to get ugly here in Arkansas.  

    

My Sunday Feeling

Random thoughts while fending off a cold…

To paraphrase a beloved but pretty lousy musical, the hills are alive with the sound of impeachment.  The Republicans are threatening to impeach the heads of Homeland Security and the FBI.  And that’s just for starters.  I guess they figure that their constituency put them back in charge of the House (albeit by the width of a razor blade) in order to exact Trumpian style revenge on his Democratic oppressors and to do nothing else.

Well, good luck with that.  In the event that they can get Articles of Impeachment out of their Chamber (which is by no means clear despite their majority status) the damn things will be DOA when they hit the Senate.  It will sound and fury signifying nothing as Shakespeare might (and did) put it.  Or a colossal waste of time and money as I would.

Such foolishness is not confined to the Red side of the bench.  There is a move afoot amongst earnest and weak-minded liberal types to impeach US District Judge Aileen Cannon who was appointed to the bench by Donald Trump.  You may recall that Her Honor was the one who granted a Motion (Petition?  Complaint?  I was never real clear on what they called the damn thing she decided she had jurisdiction over) to basically stay the investigation into Trump’s retention of classified and unclassified documents he took with him into private life.  She also appointed a Special Master to go through the docs before allowing the FBI to get its mitts on them.  

Long story short.  Thursday the 11th Circuit reversed her outright and dismissed the case brought by Trump to try to queer the investigation into his retention of theses docs.  Words and phrases such as “eviscerated” and “slam dunk” have been bandied about in the press to describe DOJ’s victory therein.

Not content with the Rule of Law being followed at last in this whole transaction, as was alluded to earlier, certain groups are calling for the Impeachment of Judge Cannon.

This is stupid.  Even stupider than what the Republicans are fixing to turn loose come January.  Look.  If committing error is a “high crime and misdemeanor” than we’re going to have a bunch of judges back in private practice.  No doubt that Aileen Cannon was wrong on the law.  She was so wrong on the law even I knew she was heading for reversal at warp speed.  But being wrong is not an impeachable offense.  And thank God for that.  

US District Judges toil, for the most part, pretty much in obscurity.  One has to screw up pretty bad to get into the zeitgeist.  And as some of my colleagues have suggested, perhaps this is Aileen Cannon’s legacy.  She will be forever remembered as the Trump appointed judge, sitting in the District where he resides (and whose forum was pretty clearly placed in a grocery cart) who issued one of the most idiotic decisions in the history of the United States Criminal Code and Code of Civil Procedure, two tomes which are seldom mentioned in the same sentence.

Sure it looked bad.  Really bad.  But the Nation got bailed out by the Rule of Law, which has been popping up more frequently lately.  And thank God for that.

Life tenure is a pretty sweet deal.  Unless the legacy of being thought of as a partisan hack or an incompetent follows one along in the discharge of that tenure.

Now guys like me know her name.  That’s punishment enough.