CLGS

Minister at First Parish in Concord (UUA)

This sermon was born on a day in early November, the day after the election. I came downstairs, looking for coffee, and turned on the radio.Listening to the coffee drip down and the election results—a tight race, percentages, exit polls, moral values. I had different reactions to different things that were said, but when I heard all the states that had voted against gay marriage, my heart sank. What would it be like to live in this culture and know that so many people essentially oppose who you are at your core? Since then, I've read the analyses. I understand more about how the vote on gay marriage may have come too early. Sixty percent of voters in America are in favor of some kind of recognition of same gender marriage, the Pew Research Center tells us. Time has passed, I've brought my head into the equation as well as my heart, but that moment in the kitchen in the sunlight stays with me.

"You do not have to be good," writes Mary Oliver. "You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." Meanwhile the rain and the wind go on, the bear and the deer, the small sea birds and the great-horned owl, each being what they were created to be in this universe, each finding their place in the family of things. "You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." But that is easier said than done, of course, this finding of ourselves, this coming to be who we really and truly are. "Now I become myself," writes May Sarton. "It's taken time, many years and places. I have been dissolved and shaken, worn other people's faces . . . " "What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been," writes Parker Palmer.

It can be hard to figure out who we are, and how much harder when everything that surrounds us—our culture, our schools, our religious communities—is telling us that if we think we are gay or lesbian, there is something wrong, sick, immoral, or sinful about it. You pick the words. The list is long. What courage to become who you are in the face of all that.

"The rules break," writes poet Adrienne Rich. Noticed by W. H. Auden when she was twenty-one, she went on to win all the major literary awards, came out as a lesbian in the 70s and established herself as a "political poet" on the American literary landscape.

"The rules break like a thermometer,
Quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
We're out in a country that has no language
No laws, we're chasing the raven and the wren
Through gorges unexplored since dawn
Whatever we do together is pure invention
The maps they gave us were out of date
By years . . .
We're out in a country that has no language."

Indeed, to be out in America, to be gay and lesbian in 2005 is still, after all these years, to be in new and uncharted territory. Territory that is rife with snipers, unexpected explosions around every turn. Sometimes they are silly snipers like the man who wants Sponge Bob off the air. Sponge Bob Squarepants, if you don't know him, is a cartoon character who looks like a yellow sponge.

Apparently his crime is that he holds hands with a starfish, Patrick, his friend who lives next door. A silly sniper, perhaps, but the man making the charge is James C. Dobson, the head of a major media empire, whose commentaries are heard every day on American radio and TV. There are the lesbian moms who happily agreed to be part of a PBS children's show, "Postcards from Buster," only to be told that the show had been pulled off the air by the president of PBS, who is unsure whether it is okay to expose elementary school children to "this type of material." This "type of material" is a family in Vermont milking cows, making syrup, riding bicycles—two (gay) parents and their children.

Sometimes the snipers are more sinister. I think of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. I think of the suicide rate for gay teenagers. I think of Jerry Falwell who said, in speaking about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, "I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle. . . . I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'"

I think of the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston who before the vote last spring mailed anti-gay marriage literature to each and every Catholic family in the Commonwealth, because they said their message was not "getting out" in the secular media. I think of the President of the United States who yesterday questioned the ability of gay parents to raise children. Scholars in the field say there is no research to bear this out.

"We were born in a poor time," wrote lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde in her poem "Sister Outsider" almost thirty years ago, and it is still a poor time, one can argue, to be gay and lesbian in America. There is a vicious war being fought right now with hateful words that can turn into gestures, fists, fights. Some of the fighters use Biblical ammunition. They argue that biblical teaching condemns homosexuality. Well, yes and no, and it is way more complicated than that. Leviticus 18, verse 22 is probably the most quoted biblical text: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination." The penalty is death. Leviticus sets out a rigorous set of laws known as the Holiness Code. They were a set of laws designed to help the Jews remain a distinct, culturally cohesive group on the hostile Caananite frontier. Other things were forbidden as well: sowing your field with two types of seed, wearing garments of two different materials, round haircuts, sexual relations during menstruation, eating certain foods.

Biblical scholar Walter Wink says: "The bible is unequivocal in denouncing homosexuality. But there are many other things in the bible that we no longer accept: Its sanction of slavery, women not being permitted to talk in church, women being treated as the property of men."

There are many things in the Old Testament we no longer consider normative or binding. So why single out one or two phrases and treat them literally while ignoring the rest? It makes no sense. Those with a particular agenda like to pick out individual verses from the Bible that support their point. They mistranslate words from the original languages, distort their meaning. They ignore culture, context, history. In the Christian scripture, the New Testament, Jesus says nothing about homosexuality. He said plenty about spending time with those who were on the margins: women, the poor, the tax collectors, the Samaritans, the prostitutes. He said nothing about being gay. He said an awful lot about love and about justice. If you step back from the individual verses, you may recall that the overall theme of the Bible is liberation. "It is that God sides with the powerless, God liberates the oppressed, God suffers with the suffering and groans toward the reconciliation of all things. . . ."

Now for many Unitarian Universalists, the Bible is not central. I respect that. There are others of us for whom it is central. I was given the Bible as part of the Unitarian Universalist Christian tradition in which I was raised. I do not take it literally. I do not agree with everything it says. But its stories and images, prayers and poetry, hold a central place in my heart and will always be part of my spiritual grounding. I am not ready to hand it over to those who I believe distort its essential message.

In the same way, I resent the use of the word "God" in this debate. Again, for some Unitarian Universalists, the word God is not particularly relevant, and I respect that. But for others of us, it is. We may not always know what we mean by the word. We may have questions, confusions, doubts, but it is a sacred word, an image of holiness, of love and energy and presence that has been passed down to us by our parents and grandparents, by women and men we never knew, but who guarded this spiritual tradition, spoke up for it, fought for it, sometimes even died for it.

Our Universalist ancestors spoke about God as a God of Love that cared for each and every person in this world. Our Unitarian ancestors said that God encouraged each of us to grow and become the best person we could be in this world. They didn't believe we were all set in stone, saved or not saved, from birth. They said we had radical freedom, to do and be and grow and change. I have wrestled with the tradition I was given, wrestled and reworked it and made it my own, but essentially, this is the God of Love I was given, and this is the God of Love I am trying to pass on to my children. The God of Liberation and the God of Love I see in the scriptures bears no resemblance to the judgmental God who others bring out to bolster their arguments against gay and lesbians.

My daughter who is ten comes home from school with a new assignment. She has to write an "I Have a Dream" speech. She practices out loud, standing in the kitchen, passionate. In her speech there is a line about gay and lesbian people as friends. In the middle of practicing, she looks up at me, a wave of recognition dawning on her face.

"Mom, some of the kids in my class don't believe this."
"I know, honey."
"Amanda says it's against her religion."
"I know, honey. But our religion says we don't leave people out. Our church welcomes people the way they are, whether it is a woman and a man, two men, two women, parent and child, friend and friend. God is Love, and God wants more love in the world not less."

I watch her face as she takes this in and turns away, practicing the words, thinking about what she will say to her friends at school.

In a culture where gay teenagers continue to commit suicide at a rate higher than their non-gay peers, in a culture where children at an early age hear kids on the school bus calling other kids "gay" as a slur, in a culture where grown up women and men are still pressured to hide the truth about their lives and who they love, I am so glad we have joined hundreds of other Unitarian Universalist congregations across the country in becoming a "welcoming congregation." That means we have gone through a thoughtful process, that we are trying to reach out to gay and lesbian people, families and their children. We acknowledge that the church as an institution has been amongst the forces that have hurt gays and lesbians through the centuries. We are sorry. We are trying to rectify and remedy that. We have joined a wide range of faith communities from Episcopal to Congregational to Catholic to Jewish who are speaking out. Perhaps not always the official bodies, but individual ministers and priests and lay people are standing up on the side of love.

"The stars will come out over and over," Adrienne Rich writes.
"The hyacinths rise like flames
From the windswept turf down the middle of upper Broadway
Where the desolate take the sun
The days will run together and stream into years
As the rivers freeze and burn
And I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
Which will we claim
How will we go on living
How will we touch, what will we know
What will we say to each other."

Which of our visions will claim us? A colleague of mine at the First Parish in Lincoln has these words framed over his desk: "In those days we finally learned to walk like giants and hold the world in arms grown strong with love. And there may be many things we forget in the days to come, but this will not be one of them."

To me, this is a vision of who we are called to be as people of faith. To walk like giants and hold the world in arms grown strong by love. So let's get on with it. There are children who are still hungry. There are nineteen-year-old boys dying in a war. There are orphans half-a-world away. There are gay and lesbian sisters and brothers who live right here, who deal with contempt and hatred and fear every day. There is a lovely and troubled world crying out for more and more love. Let's get on with it.

"In those days we finally learned to walk like giants and hold the world in arms grown strong with love."