Love Eternal

“Love Eternal”

Sermon for MCC New Haven

February 3, 2013 10:00am

Rev. Brian Hutchison, M.Div.

Texts:

1 Corinthians 13: 1-8; 13

Luke 4:21-30

         Have you ever found yourself pushed to the edge of a cliff in life? No, I don’t mean literally, like Thelma and Louise, though if you have been there, I’m glad you decided to turn around and live to tell the tale! Today’s Gospel passage from Luke is about just that: telling and living our truths so loudly that we are pushed to the edge of society, or even the edge of life.

         Jesus spoke his truth boldly in his hometown of Nazareth. We heard in last week’s reading what Jesus’ mission was: to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (which to Jesus meant bringing about what he called the Realm of God). These words were at first pleasing to those he was speaking to because they had probably heard about the wonderful things that Jesus had done in other places. But then Jesus does something very unexpected: he challenges their privilege.

         Remember, prophets are not fortunetellers; rather they are challengers. Prophets proclaim hard truths in the face of those living lies and lives of hypocrisy. Jesus essentially tells the people of his hometown that he will not do the same wonderful things that he has done elsewhere for them because they were not ready to receive them. These people thought they deserved Jesus’ blessing because they were ultra-religious people who believed in God’s exclusive promise to them, and them only. Jesus demonstrates through examples in the Tanach that God’s grace is far more inclusive than they could imagine.

         Because of his message of inclusivity that challenged their privilege, the people literally drove Jesus to the edge of a cliff to kill him. They were enraged that one of their own would not give them all they thought they deserved. And this is where we can learn from Jesus. Right when they are about to throw him off the cliff, Jesus passed through the crowd and simply went on his way. He just kept going. He didn’t let anyone stop him. He knew he had a mission to live and his hometown people would not stop him.

         Many of us come from places where we were not accepted as same-gender-loving or gender-variant people. When some of us have spoken our truths loudly in the fashion of Jesus, our hometown people have pushed us out. In too many cases, violent hate-crimes happen against us, many leading to death. And sometimes we don’t even have a choice in proclaiming our truths to the world around us. Some of us naturally walk or talk or gesture in ways that are indicators to the world that we are gender non-conforming. I know when driving across the country with my husband James, his swish from the car to the gas station in states like Wyoming and Nebraska made me nervous. And someone (not to be named) told me just last week that a child asked her, “Are you a boy or a girl?” which of course she took with humor. We can’t help but be who we are, but sometimes it gets us into trouble.

         To live our lives fully in wholeness and integrity, we need to have an outlet of self-expression. Jesus knew he couldn’t stay in his hometown because they wouldn’t accept him, so he moved on. In the 1970s, many gay and lesbian people moved from small towns to large cities such as San Francisco and New York. The Castro district in San Francisco was an Irish Catholic ghetto until gay men flocked there in the 1970s and took over the neighborhood.

         In 1968, Rev. Troy Perry decided to call our denomination “Metropolitan Community Church” because of the phenomenon of LGBT people flocking to metropolitan areas for safety. So Jesus’ story is our story today. Whenever we can, we go where we are accepted and celebrated, not where we are just tolerated and even hated. That is one of the main callings of MCC today. Though other churches tolerate queer folks, we celebrate one another in our rich diversity in MCC. (We are extremely blessed to have a host church, United Church on the Green UCC, which celebrates us, not just tolerates us.)

         In many ways, we have become comfortable in the rights and privileges we now hold in the United States. Since we can now legally have our own bars and sleep with who we want to and publicly dress in whatever gender expression we want to, we have become complacent. Since the invention of life-saving protease inhibitors in the mid-1990s, AIDS activism has been reduced to AIDS walks. Protests have been reduced to pride parades. Since many cities and states have granted us some relationship rights, the fight for marriage equality has dragged on for decades. And it took far too long for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to be repealed. As a people, we have been pacified with small bones tossed to us. What we have all but forgotten is that our God holds a seat for us at the table, not on the floor where the scraps are thrown.

         As a people, we are afraid of the cliff. Once we get far away enough from the cliff, we naturally don’t want to go back to that place. I’m personally terrified of heights, so I avoid high places unless there’s glass or at least a rail to keep me from falling. I get it. Why cause ourselves more suffering when we have what we have?

         Why? Because those who came before us fought long and hard for the privileges we enjoy today. Countless men and women in the United States were taken to jail during raids of gay bars just half a century ago. Millions of our three-dollar bills have been spent on attorneys to defend us. Our spiritual ancestors put their bodies on the line in nonviolent resistance so that we could have church today without question. In countries around the world today such as Afghanistan and Nigeria, MCC has to meet secretly because they would be killed if it were found out that “homosexuals” were meeting for any purpose.

         We recall that one hundred thousand of our spiritual ancestors were arrested in Nazi Germany for being “homosexual” and were marked with pink triangles on their prison uniforms. Ten thousand of those were sent to concentration camps and were murdered along with Jews and other groups deemed “undesirable” and “unfit to live.” Paragraph 175 in the German Penal Code written in 1871 read, “An unnatural sex act committed between persons of the male sex or by humans with animals is punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights may also be imposed.” The Nazis strictly enforced this law that was previously all but ignored. Same-gender love was amounted to bestiality. The same kind of rhetoric is used by fundamentalist Christians today. We especially remember these facts today because people all over the world recall that on January 27, 1945 (that’s 68 years ago last week), the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps were liberated.

         Our queer spiritual ancestors worked hard with sweat, blood, and tears so that we could pursue happiness freely today. We are obligated to them to continue the fight. We are obligated to them to also not allow the masses to push us over the cliff. Like Jesus, we must slip through the crowd and walk on.

         The trouble in our faith after seeing the edge of the cliff is we are faced with questioning the nature of God. Jews call what is commonly called “the Holocaust” the “Shoah.” Holocaust means “burnt whole,” while Shoah means “catastrophe.” I choose to use the word Shoah because of these meanings. After the Shoah, theologies, the ways we think about God, are forever changed. From that point forward, we cannot think of God as the old man in the clouds who swoops down to save all the good people, destroying the evil ones. The reality is that the Nazis killed between 11 and 26 million sacred children of God (depending on what demographics one includes).

         This is the greatest example in recent history to tell us about the character of the Divine. God is the Light within us, and should we choose to hide that Light and deny it, we have the negative potential to do great harm. This does not mean that God does not care or that God wills evil to happen. It does mean however that God has entrusted us with being Her hands, feet, and face in the world. We are God’s body if we choose to embrace the God within. God’s body is all colors, all abilities, all ages, all gender expressions, all sexualities.

         As this Black History Month begins, I recall that in 1898, African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Bishop Henry McNeal Turner wrote, “We have as much right biblically and otherwise to believe that God is a Negro, as you buckra, or white, people have to believe that God‘ is a fine looking, symmetrical and ornamented white man. For the bulk of you, and’ all the fool Negroes of the country, believe that God is white- skinned, blue-eyed, straight-haired, projecting-nosed, compressed-lipped and finely-robed white gentleman sitting upon a throne somewhere in the heavens.
Every race of people since time began who have attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or by carvings, or by any other form or figure have conveyed the idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves, and why should not the Negro believe that he resembles God as much as other people? We do not believe that there is any hope for a race of people who do not believe that they look like God.”

         Our Christian faith tells us that God is Spirit. No one has ever seen God apart from creation because such a thing is not possible. The question of what God would look like if God decided to show up is irrelevant because God has shown up 525,600 minutes of every year! God shows up every day in the choices we make to embody the Love of God in discipleship.

         In the midst of the Shoah, Lutheran minister and anti-Nazi activist Dietrich Bonheoffer defined what it truly meant to be a disciple. Within his context of Nazi Germany, true discipleship was not easy; it was costly. He wrote in a poem, “[People] go to God when [they are] sore bested: find [them] poor and scorned, without shelter and bread, whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead. Christians stand by God in [God’s] hour of grieving.”

         The former ancient idea of a distant and wrathful god is dead. Some decide to prop up the rotting corpse of their petty god each Sunday, demanding worship of exclusion and ego. But we have moved on beyond that nonsense, church! Like Jesus who snuck through the crowd and went on his way, we do the same. We have no time in this short life for the pain that oppressive god-talk can cause us. We leave it behind because all it ever sought to do was throw us off a cliff.

         Instead, we embrace the God we know in Jesus Christ who in the words of the Apostle Paul is fully expressed in what we know as Love. Paul gives us a picture of the character of God when he writes, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

         The author of First John (4:16) wrote words that remain at the center of MCC theologies today: “Whoever lives in love lives in God and God lives in them.” So if God is Love, then God is patient, God is kind, God is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. God is not irritable or resentful. God rejoices in the truth. God…never… ends.

         Friends, Divine Love is eternal. Love will always win at the end of the day. But we cannot take that fact for granted. God gives us grace beyond measure out of Her own loving nature. But this same God grieves when we suffer. His tears saturate the earth. They are the tears of fearful immigrants who long for citizenship. They are the tears of the poor who long for healthcare and safety. They are the tears of the young women whose government seeks to control her body.

         MCC is not a complacent church; it is an active church. Its waters are not stagnant; they are living. If we are to fully embrace our calling as Metropolitan Community Church and as disciples of Jesus Christ, we must not allow even thoughts of the Shoah to throw us off the cliff of depression and despair. We must instead heed the call of our God to walk through the crowd of oppressive voices and walk on. Just walk on in the knowledge that in the words of the Course, “You are the work of God, and [God’s] work is wholly lovable and wholly loving.” Say this affirmation with me: I am … the work of God… I am… wholly lovable… and wholly loving. Take this essential truth into your spirit today and as the dissenting voices surround you this week (as they always will), the matchless Love of God will shield you. May it be so. Amen.