Sermon: October 9, 2011
I don’t remember the first time I heard a derogatory reference to gay and lesbian people in my family; but I knew, all the time I was growing up, that in their eyes – the worst thing there was, would be to be queer and a faggot. Whatever that was, that was the bottom.
Now in many ways, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, I never felt completely a part of my family of origin. To them, queer signified about the worst thing one could do and be, but those prejudices didn’t take deep and permanent root in me.
So while I understood the force of my family’s belief, and was certainly affected by it; it never became completely ingrained as a part of who I was – the way prejudices like racism or homophobia can come to define a part of a person’s life.
Today, even though some gay and lesbian people have adopted the word queer as a badge of honor, I have a very difficult time even saying it. In my early life, it was a word of such denigration and hatred.
In elementary school, those words were used whenever someone wanted to wound somebody. Calling a boy queer, particularly if the other kids picked up on it and said it too, was a good way to really hurt someone.
But while some used the word against other kids, what I remember most is watching the ones who were called those names: the ways they flailed against it in futility, or shrank away – almost like someone was physically attacking them.
I wanted to be a part of the in-group, the cool kids; I certainly didn’t want to be queer, whatever that meant. Yet I saw those kids getting hurt really badly by words of exclusion and hatred.
And I identified with their pain. Because the thing I feared most was being excluded. I was not fully part of my own family. I couldn’t bear to be left out of my friendships.
I remember a boy in our high school class. He wasn’t athletic. He wasn’t one of the guys. He had what one of our teachers called slightly effeminate mannerisms about him.
I hardly ever saw him talking to boys, but he was regularly with one group of girls or another. Some guys made fun of him – called him one of the girls. I think that secretly, they envied his ease around those beautiful but completely foreign creatures.
For many of us, girls were an unknown species.
I have no idea whether he was gay. Some of the guys implied that in their teasing. He seemed to show no reaction on the outside, but of course I have no idea what he really felt or thought.
I remember that I didn’t want to be like him – I was afraid of being ostracized throughout my time in school. But I was also envious of his comfort with himself, and also, of course, his comfort with those beautiful aliens.
I was in seminary with Bill Johnson. In 1972, he would become the first openly gay person to be ordained in the UCC.
But when I was in seminary – from 1967 to 1971 – almost nobody was thinking about whether someone was gay. They were thinking about the Viet Nam War, and the latest round of protests.
So there was only a moderate amount of talk about Bill: and as I recall, rather generally, acceptance – or at least toleration. Coming from a very conservative CA town, that was my first experience of a gay person receiving general acceptance in a community.
I served churches in Iowa for six years. Someone being gay never came up as an issue in the churches I served during that time.
But there was a Minister in the Iowa Conference. He was single; he’d never been married. There was something about him that reminded me a little of that boy in high school.
He was a wonderful pastor. I envied his insights and his pastoral skills. He felt called to rural, small church ministry, and it was to that ministry – most of it in Iowa – that he had given his life.
He was also, I heard later, gay. He was completely in the closet, fearing – undoubtedly correctly – that if those churches ever found out, he would never serve them or another rural church again.
He spent his vacations in New York during the summer; and then returned for another year of wonderful – and closeted – pastoral ministry in rural Iowa.
When I was in Flint, MI, I had extended conversations, for the first time I knew about, with someone who was gay, and out. He and his partner lived together, and lived next door to a man and woman whose marriage I was going to perform. And this guy was doing all the flowers for the wedding.
He and his partner didn’t have a big house; but they had a pretty good-sized back yard, and the whole thing was flowers: more varieties than I could count.
It looked liked Monet’s garden at Giverny - a cornucopia of colorful profusion. We talked about flowers and gardening, at which I was still very much an amateur.
We talked about life, and about the discrimination he had faced, which he mostly just shrugged off. In our conversations, I was struck by how similar he and I were, in many ways.
As I have reflected on these and many other experiences in my own life, I have come to one, pretty firm conclusion:
While the Bible has been used to justify all sorts of discrimination and evil against gay and lesbian people, the teachings of the Bible are not the real reason people act as they do in relation to LGBT folks.
People’s feelings and then beliefs about gay and lesbian people – about homosexuality – are the result of complex factors deep inside of them, of which they are usually only dimly aware, if at all.
It has to do with early life experiences, with relationships in families and what one's parents and family believed, and also with the community or culture which closely surrounds a person. It’s very much like racial prejudice, in that way.
Homophobia, I believe, is a learned attitude and behavior; and it has, unfortunately, informed the church’s teaching about gay and lesbian people throughout its history.
There are those seven passages in the Bible; and the church has hung a history of harm to LGBT folks on those passages. It has ignored the context of the passages, and ignored the larger purposes of Jesus’ teaching and ministry, in its beliefs and actions.
It is wonderful that there are churches like the UCC that have insisted on an Open and Affirming position. It’s wonderful that Scott Anderson, the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, was re-ordained yesterday at Covenant Presbyterian Church. The Presbyterians have finally moved in a more affirming direction.
It’s wonderful that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has found a way to ordain lesbian and gay people in committed relationships.
But churches where that can happen hold a small percentage of this country’s Christians, and a much smaller percentage of the world’s Christians.
Six states, including our next-door neighbor, Iowa, allow same-sex couples to marry. But other states don’t recognize those marriages, and don’t allow them to be performed.
We are moving in the right direction, but it is a slow and painful movement – with twists and turns and the occasional retreat along the way.
Since I’m most of the way through my sermon by now, it’s probably time to say a word about our scripture passages this morning. The Genesis passage tells us that all humankind, and each individual person, are created in the image of God.
That doesn’t mean that each freckle or each skin cancer or each psychological condition partakes of the image of God.
It means that there is an inherent dignity to humankind, and to human beings; and that every attitude and belief and action which aids persons (and now we are getting to our second reading, from the gospel of Mark) to love God with our whole being, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, is an expression of that divine image.
As a side note, in Matthew, when Jesus gives the Great Commandment, he ends by saying – on this commandment hang all the law and the prophets. Not only is there nothing more important than this – according to Jesus, this commandment interprets everything else.
About a hundred years before Jesus, the great Jewish Rabbi Hillel was asked if he could teach the whole law while the questioner stood on one foot. Hillel said:
Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. All the rest is commentary. Hillel put compassion and care for the neighbor at the center of the Jewish religion. Jesus said that love of God and neighbor is the essence of religion.
I believe – with all my heart and soul and mind and strength – that the Open and Affirming position of the United Church of Christ is a direct expression of God’s love for all humankind, and Jesus’ particular concern for the outcast, the stranger, the poor, and people who have disabilities of any kind.
I did not always believe that. It was a journey for me – one that was difficult and a struggle at times. And I am glad that the prejudices I learned as a child were not so deeply ingrained that they became a permanent part of my being.
This year is the nninteenth anniversary of our decision to become an Open and Affirming Church. I’m happy for all we have learned, and the ways we have grown, in those nineteen years. I’m proud to be affiliated with this church, and proud of the stands we have taken and the work we have done together.
Next year is the twentieth anniversary of that decision. I hope this church has a great celebration of that anniversary.
After the heart-warming welcome we received from the Rainbow People when we came here almost eleven years ago, and my wonderful experience of serving this church, I cannot imagine being a member of a church that is not Open and Affirming.
Thank you. Amen.
