Please hear Rev. Troy Perry preach at Temple
Sinai tonight at 5 PM if you possibly want to and can. I’ll even offer to
drive you. It’s a little like having John Wesley in town. In 1968 when
Troy despaired of finding a church to accept him and other gay people as
children of God, he turned to God and offered to start a church. It has
become the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches around
the world today. It clearly has had the blessing of God to grow against all
worldly odds. Yet as he spoke here last night, Troy was as unassuming and
plain as your next-door neighbor. As he said, last night he only spoke.
Tonight he’s going to preach!
With our Lenten theme of “Body Parts and
Spirit Congregations,” we are trying to connect up all that goes on in our
own words-of-God-made-flesh we call our bodies, with all that goes on in the
body-of-Christ called the church. We are excerpting chapters from Stephanie
Paulsell’s book Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice.
Parts of chapter two, “Pondering the Mystery of the Body,” are on the
table in the parlor. In it she cites the poetry of Mark Doty, especially
poems about his partner, Wally Roberts, dying with AIDS, which consumes so
much of our world today. Metropolitan Community Churches have lost more
than six thousand members to AIDS. Stephanie Paulsell says to our Lenten
theme, “It is when the body’s vulnerability is most fully exposed, as it is
in illness, that the question about what the body is becomes so acute.”
Mark Doty writes, “Michael, / when we
support our friends, / one of us on either side, our arms / under the man or
woman’s arms, / what is it we’re holding? Vessel, / shadow, hurrying
light? All those years / I made love to a man without thinking / how little
his body has to do with me; / now, diminished, he’s never been so plainly /
himself – remote and unguarded, / an otherness I can’t know / the first
thing about.” And the section of the poem, called “Michael’s Dream,” comes
to this end: “What is the body? Rain on a window, / a clear movement over
whose gaze? / Husk, leaf, little boat of paper / and wood to mark the speed
of the stream? / Randy and Jerry, Michael and Wally / and John: lucky we
don’t have to know / what something is in order to hold it.”
How many of us have nursed loved ones, of
whatever ages or conditions, through illness and even through dying? How
many of us have wondered, even out loud, even loudly out loud, at the
insufferable yet unsearchable mysteries of our being in bodies, our being
bodies ourselves? How many of us have concluded what a miracle it is that
we can love so passionately, ache so wrenchingly, care so tenderly for one
another, sometimes without a clue why? How many of us have felt lucky that
we did not have to know what something, or what somebody, is in order to
hold them? Even to their last breath? . . .
“Such is the mystery of the body,” Paulsell
reflects. “Sometimes we know that we are our bodies, that our capacity for
life and death makes us who we are. At other times, we feel that we simply
inhabit a vessel that is inadequate to contain all that we are. But at all
times, it is the body that allows us to reach out for one another, to steady
each other on our feet when we are weak, to embrace one another in joy and
in despair. Thank God,” she reiterates, “we don’t have to know what
something is in order to hold it!” Is that not just as true of who we are
as a congregational body? Are we not sometimes just as inadequate to our
needs as we are wondrous by our very existence? Are we not sometimes just
as impossible to diagnose, figure out, relate to, even accept without
understanding? Yet we reach out. Yet we steady each other. Yet we embrace
one another in joy and in despair. Yet we go on, a body of so many parts,
connected only in Christ.
And once in a while, by the pure grace and
courage of God, who loves this world so much as not to withhold God’s very
own body, Christ’s very own flesh and blood, -- once in a while, we as a
body in Christ do the same for our community, our given portion of God’s
beloved world, as we do for one another! We do so with just as much wonder
and misunderstanding, with just as much impossibility, often, of knowing
what we are doing, or how we are supposed to do it, and why. Once again,
even in spite of ourselves, we reach out, to steady and to embrace. Once
again we discover, we don’t have to know it, anything, in order to hold it.
Brothers and sisters, we are who we are in
these bodies! Old bodies, new bodies, nobodies! Individual bodies and
corporate bodies. Personal bodies and political bodies. Bodies of church
and bodies of state. Global bodies and cosmic bodies. There is no
avoiding, there is no ignoring, there is no escaping, these bodies in whom
angel and animal meet. These bodies in whom divine and human, earth and
heaven, spirit and dust, body and soul are as one. These bodies in whom we
are in God, God is in us. There is no other way for us to be.
Speaking of new bodies, old bodies, please
read both of our “Words for Meditation:” the letter from Susan to God and
the story of Pearl Buck occasioned by an earlier tsunami. Jesus, like all
of us, is born to die, and lives to be born again! Lives to be born into
that “eternal life” that makes possible whatever life-without-fear, even
life-in-spite-of-fear, we can find in this world. For us “eternal life” is
not to be found off in some other time or space but in the quality of our
courage to live, truly live, fully and freely, in this time, in this space.
Troy Perry said of the founding of the Metropolitan Community Church, the
mother church in Los Angeles was torched two years after it started. 12
church members died in a fire in the theater of a tavern where they met in
New Orleans, and only a black United Methodist church would give them space
to perform the memorials.
All told, twenty-one MCC churches have been
burned. Clergy and laity alike have been murdered. We look for signs of
what it was like for the early church to thrive under persecution. Troy
says, in words about this morning’s gospel, we are not afraid. To be absent
from this body is to be present in the body of God. Take away this life, we
find eternal life. Nothing this world we love so much may do to us can hurt
us, can stop us, in the end of things. When Jesus tells Nicodemus, and us,
we have to be born again, it is precisely into the knowledge of death! We
are the only creatures we know who know we are going to die! That is what
the story of Adam and Even leaving Eden last week was about.
It is at least part of this story of Abraham
and Sarah, in their very old bodies, giving up every assurance, every
security, they ever have worked so hard to enjoy, and, on the promise of
giving miraculous birth again, setting off into the vastly unknown. In
Pearl Buck’s story, Kino’s father explains we face death best as we remember
how we faced birth, and we did not even know it! We thought it was so hard
and fearful! We cried and we screamed so against it! Yet, as your parents,
“Here we were waiting for you,” remembers Kino’s father, as every child
should know at birth, “already loving you and eager to welcome you.” Even
like death. Already loving us and eager to welcome us. Be not afraid.
What greater love does God have to give than
God’s very own child? God’s very own flesh and blood? What greater love do
we have to give? Not that we all become parents directly. I say to couples
who come to me be joined together in marriage or holy union, there is more
than one way to bring children into your life! Adoption, foster care, Big
Brother/Big Sister programs, . . . What greater love does any of us have to
give than a future for all the world’s children? Starting right where we
are? Making the word of God’s nonviolent and longsuffering love flesh in
this and in all of the bodies that make up our life? Even to the end of
things! Just look at who Jesus is, just hear what Jesus says, just do what
Jesus does. Every fiber of Jesus’ being, every gesture and every word, give
of God’s love for us, God’s desire for friendship with us, not to condemn
us, or anyone else in this world, but to save us, and everyone else in this
world.
And please do not tell me, please do not
tell Abe and Sarah, please do not tell Nicodemus, we are too old, too wise,
too feeble, too anything else to bring any more children into our lives!
Sisters and brothers, the children are already there! The children are
already here! The only question this Rally Sunday, of “People of Faith for
Homeless Children and Families,” in Carson City tomorrow, is how do we love
them? How do we bear them, even as Jesus bears us in the cross, and how are
we born again in return? I love a poem by Janet Morley called “The bodies
of grownups” Got any here? –
“The bodies of grownups / come with
stretchmarks and scars / faces that have been lived in / relaxed breasts
and bellies / backs that give trouble / and well-worn feet / flesh that
is particular / and obviously mortal / They also come / with bruises on
their heart / wounds they can’t forget / and each of them / a company of
lovers in their soul / who will not return / and cannot be erased / And
yet I think there is a flood of beauty / beyond the smoothness of youth
/ and my heart aches for that grace of longing / that flows through
bodies / no longer straining to be innocent / but yearning for
redemption.”
Can I please get a witness? Would we not
love to be part, not just of a personal body, but of a church body like
that? No longer straining to be innocent? But yearning for redemption? Not
trying to turn back the clock. Not even for some timeless and painless
Garden of Eden. But knowing, like Abraham and Sarah, like Nicodemus, we,
too, have nothing to lose by giving up everything to be born again by the
promise and Spirit of God! With all of our stretchmarks, all of our scars,
our tired feet and our wounded hearts, let us, too, find life, -- even at
the very time folks think we should be dying! Surely this Jesus who bears
the cross can bear any of us to new life. In the midst of all our
barrenness, bear us again! Bear on, Cross of Jesus, bear on! Amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
