Disrupting the “In Group”
Today’s reflection is from Bondings 2.0 Contributor, Angela Howard McParland.
Today’s liturgical readings for the 4th Sunday of Ordinary Time can be found here.
Pope Francis recently said that he hoped hell was empty. “It’s difficult to imagine it,” the pope said. “What I would say is not a dogma of faith, but my personal thought: I like to think hell is empty; I hope it is.”
In so much of his ministry and writings, Pope Francis emphasizes God’s mercy over judgment, redemption over condemnation. And many of his critics claim the pope’s message of God’s abundant love feels somehow unjust: surely, they claim, some people deserve punishment. Often, these same critics condemn full affirmation for LGBTQ+ people in the church. In their view, to be “chosen” means there must be some people who are left out. Full acceptance without discrimination seems to threaten their own inclusion.
This in group/out group dynamic isn’t limited to the church, of course. Human beings desire to belong, to be part of community, and often, defining who is “in” our group, means also being clear about who is out. This is familiar to many LGBTQ+ Catholics, who identify as part of both the LGBTQ+ community and the Catholic community and yet, are called hypocritical for staying Catholic on the one hand, and demeaned as “objectively disordered” by their church on the other.
In today’s Gospel reading, us/them dynamics are on display in two different ways. The man with the unclean spirit who has disrupted Jesus’ teachings is clearly not one of the synagogue crowd. He would have been seen as impure, an outsider. Whatever socially unacceptable behaviors he was exhibiting were explained by the demon possessing him. And yet, Jesus speaks directly to this outsider, healing him.
The second layer of insiders and outsiders pertains to the way the crowd considers Jesus himself. They were “astonished at his teaching” as he preached and then further “amazed” at this command of the spirit as he taught and healed with a new sense of authority they had not previously witnessed. In these moments, Jesus challenged his fellow Jewish religious leaders to avoid exclusionary traditions and teachings. Like the man with the unclean spirit, Jesus’ presence, too, is disruptive to those who consider themselves the “in group.”
For some, the presence of LGBTQ+ folks in the church is also disruptive. It invites those who feel disrupted to bend old ways of thinking, outdated understandings of human sexuality and gender, and the myriad of ways that faithful individuals, couples, and families can exist. But Pope Francis reminds us that God’s reality is always more creative and vast than our wildest human imaginations. Any binary, from gender identity to us/them ideas, cannot be from a holy one who not only focuses first on the out-group, but who often shows up to disrupt these dynamics themselves. Our own challenge is to find ways we perpetuate these boundaries and continue to widen our acceptance and affirmation of all and potentially disrupt in places where we see exclusion continuing.
—Angela Howard McParland (she/her), New Ways Ministry, January 28, 2024
Wonderful blog, Angela! Thank you!
Angela,
Thanks for your article. The theme or for many what is the “dilemma” of the IN and OUR or INCLUSION vs EXCLUSION challenge is our route to growing and understanding more TODAY than we did YESTERDAY..I have said here often that NEW WAYS MINISTRY has been almost my “exclusive” means of participating in the synodal process in our Roman Catholic Church. Where I last ministered in Philadelphia before coming to my assisted living “retirement” community there simply was no place or parish where I could participate in the pre synodal process. And so, especially since this area of gender, sexual identity, transgender is the area that has most challenged me in my older years, I am so very grateful for NWM. Many in my family do not at present actively form part of the Catholic Church, I mean “actively” though we were all baptized and grown up in that tradition. And one line in your piece today that most struck me is where you referred to those LGBTG Catholics who still identify with the Church despite being labelled “intrinsically disoriented” by a now very disputed and incorrectly expressed Church document. My now three year deceased brother, Dan, who, as he put it “worshiped within the Roman Catholic Church” despite many of what he would continually call “false teachings”. He, like many still faithful LGBTQ Roman Catholics have “very large, forgiving and understanding hearts”..I’ve said this here before but it bears repeating…DILEMMAS ARE PAINFUL, BUT IT IS ONLY IN ACCEPTING THEM THAT WE CAN GROW IN UNDERSTANDING, KNOWLEDGE, JUSTICE AND PEACE. Thanks again Angela