Living In Complicated Times - A sermon for the second anniversary of our vote to become a reconciling congregation

Matthew 9: 9 - 26

 

These past few weeks, I have been swimming in the challenge of what it really means to “love.” We say at Faith, that as we belong in community, become followers of Jesus Christ and believe the good news, the outward resulting action is to BE LOVE in the world. 

Pondering love has spilled over into June, which is PRIDE month, a month when we pause to remember and honor the Stonewall uprising in New York City in 1969 – an incident in which patrons and supporters of the Stonewall Inn staged an uprising to resist police harassment and persecution on LGBTQIA+ folx. 

 

Annual conference, which dominated the first week of the month, always includes painful conversation around the inclusion of LGBTQIA+ folks in the full life of the church. Ironically, the theme was “All About Love.” This year, while stuck at home with COVID, I listened online to someone on the floor droning about “proclivities” and whether one should act on “various inclinations” inherent in the letters LGBTQIA. It was painful. 

 

I am a cis-gendered heterosexual person - meaning that my gender identity matches the gender I was assigned at birth, and meaning that I am attracted to persons of the opposite sex and in a marriage I have not had to fight to explain or defend. As a cis-gendered heterosexual, I am not being “talked about” as a problem, an inclination, or a sin. So if the conversation hurt my heart, I can only begin to imagine how it affected my LGBTQIA+ siblings in Christ.

 

Also crammed into this love packed season, our Source Collaborative team planned Love in Action, an event to help us explore some social justice issues that we face today and to think about ways we might act with our hearts, hands, feet and minds to bring the Kin-dom of God just a little closer. 

 

And as a reconciling congregation, we’ve been gearing up for yesterday’s DC Pride Parade for a while now. I am grateful for the enthusiasm, curiosity, and excitement folks here at Faith have taken in joining in that celebratory march through the DC streets celebrating the idea that love is love. 

 

All of that falls against the broader backdrop of a news cycle that includes “don’t say gay” legislation in Florida that restricts discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. Or legislation moving through statehouses that limits access to affirming gender therapies for transgendered youth. 

 

And that broader policy backdrop fuels sniping comments on social media and friend and family tensions…like a hard conversation about the use of non-binary pronouns over dinner with my extended family in the past couple of weeks. 

 

So swimming around in that, seeking some solace and some understanding, I prayerfully listened to a podcast hosted by our own Bishop Easterling entitled Love in Practice. In it, she has a conversation with two young adults, Rev. Dolimar Lebron Malavé, who serves First Spanish UMC/The People’s Church in East Harlem, NY and JJ Warren, a young adult who as a lay delegate offered a passionate plea on the floor of General Conference in 2019, advocating for the full inclusion of young adult voices in the church. I commend the podcast to your listening...it was really good. But until then, here’s what has stuck with me.

 

Bishop Easterling focused on a definition of love offered by author bell hooks, who was adopting words from German psychologist Erich Fromm: "Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”

 

The Bishop went on to say in her own words then, 

“… helping each of us to become everything God intended for us to be, not what we think each other should be but everything God intended for us to be, again, as we were being knit together in our mother's womb” 

 

She continued to quote bell hooks, "Love is as love does, love and abuse cannot coexist."

 

From there, JJ Warren seized a verse from 1 John 4:

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

 

If God is love, and love and abuse cannot coexist, then God cannot be abusive and if we are in God, neither can we be abusive. That kind of love is not sentimental or sappy – that kind of love is active and hard to live out. That kind of love should be actively seeking to help each person to be all that God intends. While unpacking all of that, JJ Warren referenced “queer theologians” who are writing about active, engaged, justice oriented, sacrificing love as God’s love. 

 

Did you catch that? Queer theologians?

There is a whole movement of “queering” theology or “queering” the church, “queering Wesley,” or “queering Jesus.” And in full disclosure, I have struggled with that terminology. I resonated with the Bishop who described her reaction to the use of the term this way:

 

The first time I heard somebody preach on queer Jesus, I was like, ''Oh no, LaTrelle’s getting off the train with you. Now LaTrelle is an advocate; she's been down with you; I've been hanging with you, I'll take to the streets, but queer Jesus, I don't know.''

 

Yes. Yes! I felt all of that…BUT… did I mention it is Pride month and I am swimming in the challenge to understand love and be love and figure out how it all works in the middle of a commitment to be fully inclusive of LGBTQIA folx?? 

 

So in my spirit, as I listened to this podcast, I knew I had to seek some understanding about this verb usage – the idea that we can “queer” something. That something can be “queered.” That somehow “to queer” as an activity and thought process is useful.

 

Now stick with me here. No eye rolling. No huffy dismissals at this point in the process. That is not listening to understand.

 

When and where I grew up, the word “queer” was derogatory. Right? For how many of us was that true?

 

And as we went through the reconciling process at Faith, we learned a lot about how folks had “adopted” that word, queer, as an acceptable identity. The word queer has been “reclaimed” and “reappropriated,” as an act of refusing to be negatively labeled. Once derogatory, it is now embraced by many as a way of describing their non-binary identity. 

 

In this situation, when I say non-binary, I am talking about people not identifying with one gender or another, or being attracted not only to one gender or another. Instead, when we talk about things as non-binary, we imagine a spectrum – where one thing melts into and become part of the next, like red is part of orange is part of yellow is part of green is part of blue is part of purple…got it?

 

And so…”to queer” something theologically is to be willing to look at it through the lenses of folx who move in non-binaries in significant parts of their life, as part of their beloved createdness – a part of how they are made in the image of God. Generally speaking that is sexuality and gender. 

 

But other ways to be non-binary might include a rejection of a two-party political system, being ambidextrous (meaning don’t have a dominant “handedness,” both right and left suit you just fine), being multi- or inter-faith, being neurologically divergent from definitions of “normal…” Beyond sexuality, you may be more accustomed to the term non-dualism. 

 

Our human minds like to say “this OR that” because it is easier to survive that way, our reptilian brains prefer limited choices. It’s how we avoided getting eaten by something with big teeth and sharp claws once-upon-a-time.  However, just because our minds prefer to process choices between just two options, that doesn’t mean that only two options exist.

 

So folks doing “queer theology” are looking through the lenses of their LGBTQIA+ experience of gender and sexuality and therefore God to see more ways of being than simply THIS OR THAT. 

 

And that brings me (finally) to our Gospel text from Matthew for today.

 

Let’s situate today’s text within the broader sweep of what’s happening in Matthew’s gospel. Then I want to challenge us to use it as a lens for the season we find ourselves in – both the season of discipleship growth that we are in and, in particular, as we recognize our two years of committing to the work of being an inclusive reconciling congregation during the month that celebrates PRIDE, as we seek to understand the diversity of God’s created order and our call to love in the midst of that.

 

In the chapters that precede the text we heard today, Jesus was born, baptized, tested in the wilderness and then headed to Galilee to begin the work of his ministry. There he called four fishermen from their work by the sea to follow him. He went on a guest preaching and healing circuit through the region, gaining followers and reputation. And when the following had gained critical mass, he went up on a mountainside and sat down to share a LONG teaching.

 

We know the first part of that teaching as the beatitudes. Many of you have heard me preach on the beatitudes before – Jesus sets out some strong messaging that turned societal expectations upside down – blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the peacemakers and those who are persecuted for righteousness. 

 

All of this goes against the grain – it suggests a different ordering of the world. It certainly isn’t a description of empire, of colonialism, of capitalism, or even of democracy. It suggests God’s preference to bless the powerless and the struggling. 

 

And then, after that big festival of outdoor teaching, Jesus returns to the work of healing throughout the region – lepers, the servant of a Roman soldier (who would have been the henchman of an oppressive government), crowds clamoring for his ministrations. All of this served as a demonstration to folks that this man had a powerful God-given authority and operated with some different lenses on how the world worked.

 

Finally in chapter 9 we arrive at today’s text – which feels like a continuation of the broader theme named for Matthew - that this man, Jesus, is preaching a different ordering of the world, and he operates by some different authority and expectation, despite the human ordering – think political, economic, social, and religious – all around him.

 

Imagine, for a moment how the things Jesus was doing, the people he was dining with, the things he was saying might have seemed disorienting, unorthodox and maybe a little unsafe to some of those around him. Those who sought to fit in according to the powers that WERE I that society.

 

Let me say that again another way – Jesus called a tax collector to follow him and then sat at his table buddied up with that tax collector and other sinners to share a meal. When questioned about his choice, he tells the religious experts that he desires mercy and NOT just the temple sacrifices described in the Law. 

 

How disorienting, unorthodox, and maybe a little unsafe. Unsettling, unfamiliar. Like maybe those religious authorities were a little concerned that if the world worked differently than they expected, their place in it might shift or change, become less powerful or (gasp) irrelevant.

At the same time, there were people who were outcast or unloved or maligned, watching all of this and seeking him out – like the woman with the hemorrhage who would have been untouchable, and yet she slipped into the crowd, pressed shoulder to shoulder with those gathered, to touch the hem of this teacher’s cloak because she knew somehow it would make a difference. 

 

It was the people most misunderstood that were seeking out this Jesus. 

 

And I kind of think it must have been because they understood his promises, his teaching, his work differently. 

 

How many times are the disciples confused by what Jesus said?

 

And how many times did someone miraculously healed testify to the power of this man?

 

Jesus did not see the world or move in the world with the power of the dominant culture (in our case, predominantly white, cis-gendered, heterosexual and middle class) that so many in mainstream Christianity in the US today do. So how can we expect to fully understand him by trying to do that ONLY through our context, our lenses?

 

As Jesus, the Christ – God in flesh, he moved with the fullness of who God is, and was, and will be. A God reflected in the diversity of every person in the world – including the many whose lives and perspective are wildly different from our own.

 

Which means that we grow in our understanding of Jesus’ teachings when we are willing to see who he was and what he did through the lens of people who are not like us. 

 

In this month, when we celebrate the pride of LGBTQ people, we have the opportunity to open our eyes and our ears, and our minds in our hearts to perceive the world, as it is perceived in non-binaries. 

 

It might help us to understand Jesus if we listen to our queer theologians…just as we need to listen to our black and womanist theologians.

 

In fact, I’m not sure we actually can understand Jesus who is the Christ until we are willing to do so.

 

May it be so.

Amen.