February 15, 2004
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture
Jeremiah 17:5-10, Psalm 1,
Luke 6:17-26
"Deviant Hearts, Defiant God: Let the Church
Say, ‘We Are Baptized, Too!’"
Just a word of thanksgiving for all those who have gone and are going
before us in this place as congregation and as pastoral leadership. I
have come quickly to know and appreciate the high qualities of trust and
respect in our times of study and reflection together, even when we face
controversy and conflict over insights and interpretations. Those
qualities have led us well while watching Spike Lee’s movie on the
Million Man March in the 9 am adult group. They are a real tribute to
the care with which both teaching and learning have been happening here.
To prepare for the Lenten journey with Jesus from desert wilderness
up to Jerusalem, we take the Sunday of Jesus’ Transfiguration, the
mountain-top confirmation of his baptism, next week as a chance to
invite healing and wholeness into our lives and our life together. The
service of worship will include corporate prayer and consecration of
healing oils. After worship as many as will are invited, individually
and together, to come for a moment of anointing and personal prayer. We
will pray quietly for healing and wholeness -- in mind, in body, in
spirit, and in relationships. Please ask me if there are questions.
In a spirit of full disclosure, I admit, no one is making us offer
this service. It is not mandated by the official church. In fact, the
official church may well wish what it stands for would just go away! But
I am asking us, and thanking you for letting me do so, to observe this
"Reconciling Sunday" for at least three reasons. First, a year
ago this congregation adopted a self-description as "A Progressive
Christian Church." There is a lot to that statement we are trying
to learn to work better with all the time. It includes the words,
"We are a reconciling and inclusive church. By that we mean ‘our
hearts, our minds and our doors are always open’ to all sorts and
conditions of people . . . as full partners . . . . believers and
agnostics, conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, the
despairing and the hopeful, people of all races and cultures, all
classes and abilities, all sexual orientations and gender identities –
who would share alongside us their spiritual journey without imposing on
any the necessity of becoming ‘just like us.’"
As such we have become what is called, unofficially, even deviantly
and defiantly, as will we say this morning of hearts and of God, a
"Reconciling Congregation" of the United Methodist Church and
part of the "Reconciling
Ministries Network" (www.rmnetwork.org)
whose life and work are outlined on these equally unofficial inserts to
our bulletin. Jesus in this "Sermon on the Plain," on the
level playing field, addresses himself to all who have felt left out of
the promise of God Dr. King calls "Beloved Community" –
poor, hungry, weeping, hated, excluded, reviled, defamed -- as well as
to all who have taken the promise too much for granted – rich, full,
laughing, and spoken well of – reputable and respectable! So, too, we
address ourselves specifically on this day and through this part of the
Freedom Movement to those who call themselves "LGBTQ" –
"Lesbian/Gay/ Bisexual/Transgender/Questioning!" We know
"they" are here. We know "they" are "us!"
We know we all take some special assurance for any of us even to be just
who we are. Jesus comes to be that assurance for us all.
Second, our General Conference, the quadrennial meeting of the whole
United Methodist Church, is coming soon, April 26 -- May 7, Pittsburgh,
PA. The whole world, literally, is watching, waiting to hear how we as a
Wesleyan movement of both personal and social holiness, of love for each
and of justice for all, think and pray God through Jesus and the Spirit
is speaking and acting in us at this precious moment in both God’s
nature and God’s history. The theme for General Conference is taken
from our last hymn for today, "Water-Washed and Spirit-Born."
Reconciling Ministries Network’s "take" on that theme is
"Watermarked: Witness of Assurance," precisely the witness of
Jesus here to all excluded: God has not forgotten! God’s promise,
Beloved Community, is good for all of us yet!
This is the promise of baptism. As LGBTQ folks who have not given up
on the church keep saying to us, We are baptized, too! Not to mention
communed and confirmed. The promise of baptism, the promise of God’s
unconditional love for us, once and forever, is not withheld from us for
who we are. This is not about what we do. Everyone is accountable for
what they do. This is about who we are. And baptism is the very
foundation of our life in faith! How can anything flowing from it be
withheld from us for who we are? How can marriage or holy union be
withheld from us for who we are? How can ordination be withheld from us
for who we are? How can who we are, the image of God we are created to
be, somehow become unnatural, unacceptable, unforgivable, filled with
shame? Baptism, communion are sacraments of God’s love, God’s favor,
God’s Jubilee, and of equal access to them for all, just like this
level place where Jesus speaks.
Third, Julie and I want to share bits and pieces of our journey as a
way of inviting us all to share the journey of healing and wholeness
around sexual/spiritual parts of being human and being the church. The
church, the whole Church of Jesus Christ, Greek Orthodox, Roman
Catholic, German Protestant, and New Age, continues to damage our
children, as we ourselves have been damaged, by our failure to be fully
embodied, fully engendered, earthen vessels in whom the Word of God
dwells as one people expressed in so many mysterious and wondrous ways!
We have learned so much in many ways with our own children. Our
daughter, still a single parent, gave birth to her first child just
after she finished high school. Our first son came out to us as a gay
man when he was twenty.
In part because of our college work in theater, Julie and I had known
and had struggled with at least some of what gay persons face, in
others, including us, and in themselves. The congregation where we were
mentored in seminary, where I was confirmed, in fact, openly confronted
institutional sexism both around the church and within it. I served on
the district committee who interviewed Phyllis Athey, a candidate whose
lesbian identity could have been generally known, but who was not asked,
and did not tell, whether she was, in fact, "a self-avowed,
practicing homosexual." (Those are the words of our Book of
Discipline.) Shortly after our committee’s recommendation of her, on
the basis of gifts and graces for ordained ministry, was rescinded for
who she was as a sexual/spiritual person, Phyllis Athey committed
suicide.
Openly gay and lesbian membership and ministry were a pastoral, and
therefore, because of heterosexism, a prophetic part of much of our life
and work in Chicago. In fact, wherever we have been appointed, we have
seen ourselves as doing "inner city" or "downtown"
ministry. Which means ministry of and to diversity and complexity,
albeit diversity with provision for identity, and complexity with
provision for integrity. To minister in this time and place, like a tree
that’s planted by the Truckee, means to celebrate the inherent gifts
and graces of all of the aspects of cosmopolitan life and cosmopolitan
living! Communities of sexual minorities are very much a part of that.
This is the only relatively safe place for many to be. The question is,
will we be here, in ministry, with them?
When the Judicial Council, in the name of the General Conference,
singled out the social principle prohibiting the performance of holy
unions by our clergy or in our buildings, as perhaps the only social
principle enforceable as church law, we felt we had no choice of
conscience but to take part in the union of Ellie Charlton and Jeanne
Barnett, an act of ecclesial disobedience which could have cost us our
orders to preach in the United Methodist Church. Now that social
principle also has been written into church law! So what else is new?
150 years ago, our Discipline prohibited offering marriage to runaway
slaves. 100 years ago our Discipline prohibited interracial couples. 50
years ago it was divorced persons -- Reno, imagine that! Steadfast love,
as St. Valentine witnesses with his life, has a way of overcoming every
barrier to it at last. (Please the dramatic script entitled "Those
Whom God Hath Joined" at www.northcoast.com/~hat/play.)
Four years ago, just before General Conference, a member of our
congregation in San Rafael met the partner of Karen Dammann, a pastor on
leave from her appointment in the Seattle area, because she dared not
reveal her love both for Meredith and for their son Beckett. Imagine
what it is like for a preacher not to be able to live and speak publicly
out of the sources and strengths and stories of his or her own family!
Our congregation asked if we could make a stole for Karen to be placed
in the "Shower of Stoles" (www.showerofstoles.org) of persons whose gifts of witness and service were being
denied by and to the church. Out of the trust built by that action,
Karen turned us again to support her in asking for appointment, which
she did on Valentine’s Day three years ago, as a person and pastor
"living in a partnered, covenanted, homosexual relationship."
Eventually she was appointed and, though charged, considered and
sustained in her ministry through several legal processes, she is
happily serving even now as pastor of the United Methodist Church in
Ellensburg, WA. In fact, the chair of her SPPR used to live and teach in
Reno and recently visited us in worship here! Now Karen faces a trial
for her orders to preach, beginning March 17, in Seattle. Julie and I
ask your prayerful support for us to be there for her trial, as we do
for us to attend at least part of the General Conference in your name. (www.pnwumc.org/Dammann.htm)
The lives that touch ours, and the issues that grow out of our
connections, our relationships, have become for us all, personal,
pastoral, prophetic, and, now political. Yet we avoid or evade them at
our peril as a whole world as well as a whole church. The same God who
gave up the life of God to become flesh and blood in the form of Jesus
out of love for this world is yet loving, yet dying and living again
for, our flesh and blood on this day.
Jeremiah here warns us how dangerous a heart can be! How devious, how
perverse! "Who can understand it?" he pleads. God alone tests
the mind and searches the heart. Our hearts are so small. Yet our hearts
hold so much! So much more than we may think them capable of holding.
The words "earth" and "heart" are made up of the
same letters. The good of the earth now depends on our changings and
growings of heart, to heal and make whole all the systems of life,
beginning with our own life systems, our own bodies, our own genders.
This prayer of Howard Thurman just reminds us, how complex, how diverse,
each and every heart is. Convictions and commitments, conflicts and
contradictions on every side of these issues and these events must be
respected as equally deep and heartfelt. It is the place of our hopes
and our resolutions, yes. It is also the place of our fears and our
hates! Our loves and our hungers! How can this be? How can so much be
going on so mysteriously? If we will but look at our hearts, and listen
to them, we will find everything there! Nothing human is alien to us.
Unless and until we learn to love one person well, it is not likely
we will learn to love others as well as we want to. That is, I believe,
what marriages and holy unions are meant to provide: the chance to learn
to love one other person so well as to enable our love for others, even
for all others. I believe every one of us, every child of God, is
entitled to that chance. And we cannot name their loves for them. Each
of our deviant hearts must find its own way! Our defiant God loves us
all. I would invite this congregation, in the spirit of St. Valentine,
and in gentle and loving defiance of both church and state, to go on
record as supporting our pastors in providing, through our buildings,
the full range of pastoral care and service, including marriage and holy
union, to all who come to us for them. I would even invite us to do so
before the General Conference and to let those in authority over our
life and our work as a congregation to know of our decision.
Else Tamayo, of our congregation in San Rafael, quoted the poet
Gerald Manley Hopkins to me: "for Christ plays in ten thousand
places, / lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / to the Father
through features of [our] faces." Else asks, "How can we as a
believing community embrace the vastness of God’s love in these times
when LGBT people are courageously speaking up and with a solid voice
declaring, we are here! We love, too! We want the same blessing on our
unions. We are your children, your sisters, brothers, uncles, nephews,
cousins, neighbors, best friends, bowling partners, co-workers, peers,
hairdressers, mechanics, teachers, doctors, . . . We live in ten
thousand places and have ten thousand faces!" Let the Church say,
"We are baptized, too!" And, amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
