“Who’s In,
Who’s Out: Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry?”
It is a bit evocative, to say the least,
that on Monday, All Hallows Eve, the week of All Saints, we remember and
celebrate ALL the saints -- as those in whom for us at least a little bit
of God shows through! Those saved by faith (which is who we are in Jesus
Christ) not by works (not what we do in this world)! Those saved and set
free, healed and made whole by the pure grace of God, the free gift of God,
the cosmic gratuitousness of One who makes all things and everyone!
It is a bit evocative that on Monday the
“high court” of United Methodism, the Judicial Council would, in effect,
kick out one pastor – the Rev. Elizabeth Stroud, Germantown, PA -- for being
lesbian, and reinstate another, in Virginia, for refusing church membership
to a gay man. What we have done, in effect, is to require celibacy for some
of our pastors and not for others – That’s called discrimination, a double
standard – and to place the limited god of human prejudice before the
unlimited God of Jesus – That’s called idolatry.
How can we reconcile these actions with our
public proclamation in recent years that the United Methodist Church
practices “Open Doors, Open Minds, Open Hearts?” One theologian has called
the church “a community of open questions.” Each time we think we have all
the answers, we cut ourselves off from others. We need only read and hear a
little of Jesus to know how he loves questions -- how many more questions
his teachings and actions raise than anyone can answer! In fact, we could
say, they put him to death for all his unanswered, unanswerable questions.
Who are we to decide whom God has created
and whom God has not? Who are we to decide whom Jesus has called and whom
Jesus has not? Jesus Christ is for us the very essence of life and of
living – source of baptism and communion, of salvation and liberation – not
from this world but for this world whom God loved so much as to give Jesus
up to reveal the fullest and freest breadth and depth of all that it is for
us to be human!
What are we to say to Merry this morning?
To Jennifer and to Victor? As they join this congregation? What are we to
say especially to Macy, at the age of 21 months?! With so much life, so
much future before her – in a church, a culture, a world, and an earth –
always raising more and more questions for us. We question ever more
complexity within each person (we may come to know ourselves in ways
generations before us did not dare!) and ever more diversity among all
peoples (we may come to know one another in the same way!)?
To choose discrimination and idolatry for
ourselves is one thing. To lay it on our children, our children’s children,
as Jesus says, is to sin against Holy Spirit and hang a millstone around our
own necks! How do we determine the eligibility and qualification of these
candidates for membership – as if we were some fraternity or sorority? How
do we say how they are intrinsically made? What gifts they are given? What
calls they have heard?
We just read in the membership ritual all
the questions scripture and our tradition ask of us – Do we renounce sin?
(Do we seek to stop doing harm, in John Wesley’s words?) Do we profess
faith? (Do we seek to do all the good we can?) Will we first trust and
serve Jesus? Will we be loyal to the United Methodist Church? (Now there’s
a question to wrestle with!) Will we participate in the ministries of this
congregation? That’s it! Nothing about whom we sleep with.
It is as true for our denomi-nation as it is
for our nation – for any power, any principality, Paul would put it – that
we are loyal to it right AND wrong: Where it is right to support it, where
it is wrong to change it. But that is the whole “we” of us, not just “some”
of us. I know by experience when we start talking seriously about color or
race, ethnicity or nationality, gender or sexual orientation, class or
handicapping condition – those made uncomfortable by confronting questions
of difference and change will claim we talk about nothing else and dwell
only on “single issues.” We live in a culture of such competition -- of
acting as if God and creation are in such short and scant supply that we
have to be fighting over them all the time. There have to be winners, there
have to be losers. Some have to be in, some have to be out. Some have to
be saved, some have to be damned. Some always are with us, some always
against us. Never enough God for all!
Do we not hear the scriptures this morning?
The scriptures for ALL the saints? The practice of honoring saints begins
with the earliest church -- gathered at graves of her martyrs -- to remember
the deeds of witness and service that cost them their very lives! There
have been times and places, and are still today, where not only calling
oneself “Christian” but acting that way may kill us! Knowing Jesus as we
say we do, how can that surprise us?
In fact, we might ask, Reno First United
Methodist, why are we NOT being persecuted? What are we doing wrong? What
do we need to do right? When Emerson asked Thoreau what he was doing in
jail for not paying taxes to support our war against Mexico, Thoreau asked
in turn what Emerson was doing outside of jail? What about you? What about
me? I once heard said only two things increase in value when they are
stepped on – Persian carpets and the Christian church! The saints are not
to be idealized or pedestal-ized – Dorothy Day would say, Don’t dismiss me
so easily! -- but to be lived with and loved! That’s who the saints are –
those whom we live with and love by our faith!
We heard Bishop Willimon say in his prayer
last week how Jesus longs not to be worshiped but to be followed! Each one
of us is publicly called and personally challenged to live up to – or down
to – Jesus’ example – to imitate Christ in our lives! Robert Ellsberg
writes, “The saints are those who, in some partial way, embody – literally,
incarnate – the challenge of faith in their time and place. In doing so,
they open a path that others might follow.” Who? How many others? How
open and how inclusive, how complex and how diverse, is the church called to
be? We might begin with John’s Revelation this morning – “I looked, and
there was a great multitude that no one could count! From every nation,
from all tribes and peoples and languages!” All they hold in common is,
they “have come out of the great ordeal!” They have been through hell, as
we say – where we force gay and lesbian persons, among many others, to go.
To be washed in the blood of the lamb!
Can we not hear Jesus saying so clearly who
these are? Who we are to be in relation to them? Where we are to stand?
With whom to stand? To identify our very being in radical solidarity? We
ask ourselves -- Are we with the poor in spirit? With those who mourn?
With the meek? With those who hunger and thirst for righteousness? With
the merciful? With the pure in heart? (Did Jesus say heart? Did we hear
that right? Only heart? No purity in body? Even in mind or in spirit?
Only heart?) With the peacemakers? With those who are persecuted for
righteousness’ sake? With our own selves when others revile us? Persecute
us? Utter all kinds of evil against us falsely on Jesus’ account? Taking
his name in vain against us?
What part of that do we not understand? And
how can we be surprised? Do we not believe what the letter of John says
here? That we are so loved? That we are called the very “children of
God?”! That that’s who we REALLY are? But that’s why the world does not
recognize us! Take us seriously! When we witness to justice and peace. To
openness and inclusiveness. To complexity and to diversity. Because the
world has no idea who the God of Jesus is!! Or what God in Jesus is up to
by Holy Spirit! Because we have not made that God visible, audible,
touchable, teachable, actable and follow-able.
Let us ask ourselves, with John, as we try
to keep up with God’s changes and challenges to us -- “Who knows how we’ll
end up!”? Who knows? God is not done with us yet! It is just being
revealed to us yet! Gay people -- people of color and language and class
and condition that may be different than ours – may be only the tip of our
own complexity! The hint of our own diversity! What we do know, says John
-- ALL we know, all the SAINTS know -- “is that when Christ is openly
revealed, we’ll see him – and in seeing him, become like him!”
In seeing him, become like him. I close
with a couple of quotes from the used-to-be, will-be-again Reverend Beth
Stroud since Monday – “I love the Methodist church. Some have urged me to
change denominations, to become a minister in a church that accepts gays and
lesbians, but I was born into this faith. God makes a way.” Each time we
knock, Jesus shows up, “a living presence on the wrong side of the door
where he had no reason to be.” “We’ll notice the risen Christ breaking into
the midst of the fear and concern and anger, bringing hope and joy . . .
right where we are.”
I’m sad. All week I’ve been crying off and
on. I’m remembering how much I love standing at the communion table or
baptizing a person who has just become a Christian. I grieve the ministry
that I may never have again: simply being a pastor to a few hundred people
who are hungry for love and truth and guidance, and helping them seek God
through their worship services, their Sunday School classes, their
ministries to the homeless and their pumpkin sales.” “No matter what else I
do now, no matter how many I try to help, I’m always going to be the lesbian
minister who was defrocked.”
Sisters and brothers, so am I. I am the
lesbian minister who was defrocked. So are you. You are the lesbian
minister who was defrocked. So are we all, each one of us, and so is our
United Methodist Church this morning. We are the lesbian minister who was
defrocked. God love us – as only God can. Amen.
