Mark Belletini is a Unitarian Universalist Minister and a gay man.
His poem is called Because: Gay and Lesbian Studies 101

And so one of the members
Of the Search Committee asks me
“But why do you people” –
he really said that, “you people” –
“have to talk about it?”

Right.
Well because:

Because, if I fell in love,
You know, with sonnets and everything,
And wanted to name all the stars of heaven
One at a time with a goofy smile on my face
I’d like to be able to.
Because if I didn’t fall in love, I’d like to grouse a bit,
Or work up a bitter Theory
To explain it.
Because if my lover got run over
By a drunk driver (it happens, you know…)
I’d like to be able to take a few days off work
To cry and stuff, OK?
Because if my partner-in-life
Whom I can’t legally marry because
It upsets someone’s stomach or something
Suddenly developed an infection
And got Job’s sores all over his body
And had to go to the hospital
(you know, just like my friend Stephen)
I’d kind of like to take him there
And hold his hand for a few days
And still get paid on family emergency leave
So I could eat food and pay rent and all.
Because if my love left me
After fifteen years I’d like to be able to sob
Without consolation
And feel suitable depressions
And not have to smile a lot
And pretend to be stunned for months,
Because lying all the time is still wrong, isn’t it?
Oh and because
Whether you believe it or not,
My life is just as important to me
As yours is to you.
READING #2 from Carter Heyward, Episcopal priest (from Passion for Justice)

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies.

Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.

For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called “love.” Love is a choice — not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity — a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.

The Heart of the Matter, Here in the Heartland Victoria Safford

The smiling faces of two grey-haired men shine from the “Style” section of a recent issue of the New York Times:
The Rev. Dr. Richard Thomas Nolan and Robert Charles Pingpank were married Thursday in Hartford. The Rev. David T. Taylor, a minister of the United Church of Christ, officiated at the Trinity College Chapel, with the Rev. Allison Read, an Episcopal priest and the chaplain of Trinity College, taking part.
Dr. Nolan and Mr. Pingpank, both 72, graduated from Trinity, where they met.
Dr. Nolan retired as a professor of philosophy and social science at Mattatuck Community College in Waterbury, Conn., and is the retired priest-in-residence at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Lake Worth, Fla. He received a master’s degree in theological studies from Hartford Seminary and a master’s in religion from Yale as well as a doctoral degree in religious studies from New York University. In 1965, he was ordained as an Episcopal priest, and in 1992, he became an honorary canon at Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford…
Mr. Pingpank retired as a mathematics teacher at Thomaston High School in Thomaston, Conn. He received a master’s degree in secondary school administration from the University of Hartford and also received a certificate of advanced study from Hartford Seminary. He is a son of the late Mabel J. Pingpank and the late Henry F. Pingpank, who lived in Thomaston.
To millions of Americans, the Rev. Dr. Nolan and Mr. Pingpank represent a
potent threat to the very fabric of American culture, more insidious than swine flu and as worthy of red alert alarm as any action of al-Quaeda. For millions of other citizens, who may not be on red-alert exactly, but hover in the orange-yellow range, the fact of this marriage may not be outrageous, but it is just troubling enough that it will be the decisive factor in how they vote for the foreseeable future, what kind of church they attend, and what they teach their children about tolerance and the limits of tolerance, about love and the limits of love. My guess is that this union between the theologian and the professor of mathematics in respectable Connecticut could represent much more of a threat than that of a flaming, feather-boa-ed couple marching in last week’s Pride Parade. These two guys in the New York Times look “normal” – in fact, in their suits and ties, degrees and pedigrees, they look hyper-normal, even. More than one observer has noted that homophobia and resistance to same-sex marriage are acceptable hatreds still, more deeply entrenched in the American psyche right now than racism, or fear of atheism, or xenophobia, even against Arabs, Asians and Muslims – though where all these various bigotries fall on the hierarchy of hatreds hardly matters. The opposite of love is always fear.
_________________________

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness…

Every year, I hear these two hundred- year-old lines on this holiday. They are still a stirring aspiration. The only phrase with which I can take issue is “self-evident,” because history has clearly shown so far that the absolute equality of all citizens has never been self-evident – it is a plain fact which must be made plain again in every age, in every legislative session, every classroom, named, argued, debated, triumphed and taught to children, again and again and again. We hold this truth. And we hold this history. What shall we make of them, together?

All men created equal? All women? All slaves and immigrants and migrants and white people and people of color, and people with disabilities and temporarily-abled people and straight people, gay people, transgendered and bisexual people, all poor people, and elders and the young, and everyone? Nothing about this has ever been self-evident to anyone but Jefferson, and we know that he had his own issues and demons to wrestle. These most radical lines in our radical declaration of independence express a radical hope that is our greatest inheritance, our most beautiful collective aspiration – and, as individuals comprising families, neighborhoods and nation, living into them, making them sing, is our hardest work.

Tony Kushner, the playwright, just completed several weeks in residence at the Guthrie Theater. Some years ago he wrote an essay called “American Things:”

Summer is the season for celebrating freedom, summer is the time when we can almost believe it is possible to be free… On my seventh birthday, midsummer 1963, my mother decorated my cake with sparklers she’d saved from the Fourth of July. This, I thought, was extraordinary, fantastic, sparklers spitting and smoking, dangerous and beautiful atop my birthday cake. In one indelible, ecstatic instant my mother completed a circuit of identification for me, melding two iconographies, of self and of liberty: of birthday cake, delicious confectionery emblem of maternal enthusiasm about my existence, which enthusiasm I shared; and of the nighttime fireworks of pyro-romantic Americana, fireworks-liberty-light which slashed across the evening sky, light which thrilled the heart, light which exclaimed loudly in the thick summer air, light which occasionally tore off fingers and burned houses, the fiery fierce explosive risky light of Independence, of Freedom.

Stonewall, the festival day of lesbian and gay liberation, is followed closely by the Fourth of July; they are exactly one summer week apart. The contiguity of these two festivals of freedom is important, at least to me. Each adds piquancy and meaning to the other. In the years following my seventh birthday I had lost some of my enthusiasm for my own existence as most queer kids growing up in a hostile world will do. I’d certainly begun to realize how unenthusiastic others, even my parents, would be if they knew I was gay. Such joy in being alive as I can now lay claim to has been returned to me largely because of the successes of the political movement which began, more or less officially, twenty-five years ago on that June night in [Greenwich] Village, [when the gay customers of the Stonewall Inn refused to be beaten to death by the New York City vice squad].

Lesbian and gay freedom is the same freedom celebrated annually on the Fourth of July. Of this I have no doubt; my mother told me so, back in 1963, by putting sparklers on that cake. She couldn’t have made her point more powerfully if she’d planted them on my head. Hers was a gesture we both understood, though at the time neither could have articulated it: “This fantastic fire is yours.” Mothers and fathers should do that for their kids: give them fire, and link them proudly and durably to the world in which they live.

… The American political tradition to which my parents made me an heir is mostly an immigrant appropriation of certain features and promises of our Constitution, and of the idea of democracy and federalism. This appropriation marries freedom – up-for-grabs, morally and ideologically indeterminate freedom – to the more strenuous, grave and specific mandates of justice… Over the course of two hundred years, brave, visionary activists and ordinary moral people have carved out a space a large sheltering room from which many [have been] excluded, but which was clearly intended to contain multitudes…

Jews who came to America had gained entrance into this grand salon, as had other immigrant groups: Italians, Irish. Black people, Chicanos and Latinos, Asian-Americans would soon make their own ways, I was told, as would women, as would the working class and the poor; it could only be a matter of time and struggle.

People who desired sex with people of their own gender, transgender people, fags and dykes, drag kings and drag queens, deviants from heterosexual normality were not discussed. There was identity and then there was illness. … For any gay man or lesbian since Stonewall, the politics of homosexual enfranchisement is part of what is to be added to the fund of human experience and understanding… that we pass onto the next generation. … No freedom that fails to grow will last.

Same sex marriage is legal now in 6 states: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Iowa. Civil unions, with limited legal benefits to gay couples, are recognized by a handful more, but few unions are upheld beyond the borders of the states where they’re filed. That 6 states are committed to marriage equality (and that not all of them are in New England) is cause for celebration, but it is a solemn celebration when you consider that 28 states have amended their constitutions in recent years to define marriage as between one woman and one man; these resolutions have passed overwhelmingly, in tidal waves of fear. At the Federal level, the Defense of Marriage Act and the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy remain as firmly rooted as they were during the Clinton and Bush administrations. Of President Obama (who, admittedly, has plenty of issues on his plate right now, but still– ), one writer recently said “that where gays are concerned, his fine-tuned ear for the emotional resonance of his actions has an alloy of tin.” A brief issued from the Justice Department two weeks ago called the Defense of Marriage Act “a cautious policy of federal neutrality towards a new form of marriage;” one fairly mainstream response to this said, “Unlimited, incautious and hostile is more like it.” (Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker, July 6 and 13, 2009)

Seven years ago our church board passed a resolution of its own, voting to support a decision to sign no marriage certificates for heterosexual couples until I can sign them for everyone. At the time, no other congregation in Minnesota had taken that step. Very few have joined us now. I still preside at lots of weddings, especially at this time of year, but despite the fabulous dresses, the tuxedos and flowers, the music, the brie and Chablis afterwards, the vows, the adorable ring-bearers, the limousines and liturgy – none of the weddings I perform are legal marriages. They’re not illegal (much to the disappointment of one over-eager maid-of-honor, who thought she might be embarking on an act of civil disobedience), but they are all what some gay couples have come to call “ceremonies of holy union.” I could pronounce them all married by the authority vested in me by the state of Minnesota, but I won’t do that. For that, for now, until the state of Minnesota broadens its embrace of the phrase “created equal,” the brides and grooms have to make an extra stop at City Hall.

Since 2002, only one couple has questioned this policy – and in their case it was not the couple themselves who took issue with our stand, it was one parent on one side who chose to make a scene (a scene that became a rant that lasted several months, and eventually involved the sheriff). In every other case, and there have been dozens of weddings, people who might never have chosen it have told us they are grateful to be part of this action toward justice, to be brought into this witness, especially on their happy day. Some couples decide to get married here precisely because of it. Others have struggled a little, mostly with the inconvenience of having to make an appointment with the county office, and then said afterwards that it really made them think about “inconvenience,” and privilege and entitlement. Who’s entitled to the 1,049 benefits bestowed by a marriage license? Who even knows what they all are, until you’re up against their denial, until your child is brought to the emergency room, and you can’t go past the waiting room because you lack a piece of paper?

In the earliest days of our nation’s history, before the great debates defining church and state, marriages made in the church were always separate from civil marriage; people always made two stops, and this old separation still prevails in many parts of Europe. The sacred blessing bestowed by a religious community was not the same as a household’s legal status on the village ledger. Priests and ministers have not always served as agents of the state, and in this I’m happy to regress. Your right to hold your spouse’s hand in the hospital, or to buy a house or file your taxes jointly should not be contingent on whether or not I bless your union in a wedding.

Some members here have asked over the years whether a symbolic action such as this makes any real difference at all. I think of Mark Belletini’s powerful poem: My life is just as important to me as yours is to you. It seems to me that history is the collected anthology of symbolic actions, songs, symbols, words, metaphors, marches, demonstrations, declarations of independence written on parchment and sent to the king, declarations of love and hope whispered to our children. This fantastic fire is yours. I’ve had conversations at wedding receptions with cummerbunded uncles and chiffoned mothers of the bride that I never had before, about justice, freedom, family values, oppression, hate crimes, the rights and powers of the judiciary and the legislative branches and the very will of God, and none of this would have come up if I’d just gone ahead and signed the license. I’ve heard confessions with a glass of champagne in one hand and a plate of shrimp in the other, from people who say, frowning, shaking their heads and then looking up and quietly smiling, “You know I never thought of it that way. This is a matter of fairness.” Symbolic action is action. That’s a premise of the religious life, and civic life as well.

After the April vote in Iowa legalizing same sex marriage, I read a quote from a woman who called a local talk show to express her rage at the decision: “I’m almost ready to up and leave Iowa, and move back to Minnesota,” she said. Apparently our state is the new harbor of moral refuge. How will we welcome this woman and her anger? How, as a religious community, will we respond to refugees from Iowa, or refugees from change that we not only believe in, but that we will set our hands to bring about? How could we embrace her, and her fear (which looks like hatred, which may even be dangerous, but which at its core is human fear), without descending into the shallow politics, the narrow piety, of us-and-them? Our denomination’s campaign for marriage equality takes its name from a hymn in the green hymnal – “Standing on the Side of Love.”

The words from Carter Heyward, Episcopal priest, are often read at weddings as a charge to the bride and groom, or the bride and bride, the groom and groom – but they stand as a charge to communities as well, to neighborhoods and nations, and congregations, also:

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies.

Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. Making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.

… We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. …Love is a choice — not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity — a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.

Thomas Moore, a Catholic, says in a book written for couples, that relationship is always about “the discovery of the multitude of ways that the human soul is incarnated in this world.” That’s certainly true in the intimacy of marriage – that shocking discovery that the other person is oriented to the world in a way completed different from your own (and your choice then, to be frightened, repulsed, disappointed – or curious, excited, and prepared to learn something, about yourself, and the other, and Life). It’s true of communities, also – there is a multitude of ways that the human soul, and human love, are incarnated in this world, and we believe this beautiful, wild variance makes all of us richer, better, stronger, for as long as we all shall live.

Right after the Iowa vote, I saw this op-ed piece by a writer named Steven Thrasher:

If it weren’t for Iowa, my family may never have existed, and this gay, biracial New Yorker might never have been born.

In 1958, when my mother, who was white, and father, who was black, wanted to get married in Nebraska, it was illegal for them to wed. So they decided to go next door to Iowa, a state that was progressive enough to allow interracial marriage. My mom’s brother tried to have the Nebraska state police bar her from leaving the state so she couldn’t marry my dad, which was only the latest legal indignity she had endured. She had been arrested on my parents’ first date, accused of prostitution. (The conventional thought of the time being: Why else would a white woman be seen with a black man?)

On their wedding day, somehow, my parents made it out of Nebraska without getting arrested again, and were wed in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on March 1, 1958. This was five years before Nebraska would strike down its laws against interracial marriage, and almost a decade before the Supreme Court would outlaw miscegenation laws throughout the country in Loving v. Virginia.

When the good state of Iowa conferred the dignity of civic recognition on my parents’ relationship — a relationship some members of their own families thought was deviant and immoral, that the civil authorities of Nebraska had tried to destroy, and that even some of my mom’s college-educated friends believed would produce children striped like zebras — our family began. And by the time my father died, their interracial marriage was seen just as a marriage, and an admirable 45-year one at that.

That I almost cried last week upon reading that the Iowa Supreme Court overturned the state law banning same-sex marriage will therefore come as no surprise. I’m still struck by one thought: over the years, I’ve met so many gay émigrés who felt it was unsafe to be gay in so-called flyover country and fled for the East and West coasts. But as a gay man, I can’t marry in “liberal” New York, where I’m a resident, or in “liberal” California, where I was born, and very soon I will have that right in “conservative” Iowa.

Of course, the desire to define relational rights and responsibilities with a partner, to have access to the protection that this kind of commitment affords, is rather conservative. But it’s a conservative dream that should be offered to all Americans. Though it takes great courage for gays to marry in a handful of states now, one hopes that someday, throughout the nation, gay marriages, like my parents’ union, will just be seen as marriages.

It’s safe to say that neither the dramas of our family, nor its triumphs, could have been possible without the simultaneously radical and conservative occasion of my parents’ civil marriage in Iowa. And so when the time comes, I hope to be married at the City Hall in Council Bluffs, in the state that not only supports my civil rights now, but which supported my parents’ so many years ago.

So may it be. And may our love and our work be sufficient for freedom to ring before too long from every City Hall and every county office in every state in our union.

Sermon used by permission of author.

I’ve been reading a pair of completely unrelated texts that came across my desk in recent days. One is a now-classic book by Quaker activist and writer Ched Myers entitled Who Will Roll Away the Stone? It’s one of those books I’ve seen and heard referred to for a number of years, but only just recently decided that, with a title like that, it would make excellent reading for Eastertide. Indeed, it does, but more on that in a bit.
The second text is a six-page, hand-written piece headed, “The Church is a Theocracy Not a Democracy,” that was sent to me and a handful of other clergy who were mentioned or quoted in a recent Baltimore Sun article on same-sex marriage. The writer, a clergyman from southern Maryland, wrote to explain to us that we are leading our flocks astray with our un-Biblical teachings and ecclesiastical waywardness.
With those two disparate texts on my desk, I opened the Bible to read the lectionary passages for this Sunday and read these words:
Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame.
Always be ready to give an account of the hope that is in you, scripture charges those who would call themselves followers of Jesus, disciples of Christ, people of the way. Always be ready to give an account.
I want to give you just such an account this morning, but first let me share with you why I bothered to wrestle at all with a long-winded screed attacking me and, to be sure, by extension attacking this congregation for, among other things, “seeking to help same sex couples sink deeper into the pit of sexual perversion.” I receive such stuff somewhat regularly. I suppose it comes with the territory, and most of the time I just throw it away. But last week, when Peg mentioned the “Unbinding the Gospel” event, I asked myself, “what is the gospel, the good news, that needs to be unbound at Clarendon?”
Then I read this letter attacking us for leading people into sin. Then I read Ched Myers’ reflection on a line from Native American author Leslie Silko’s novel Ceremony:
Stories, Silko’s elder says, are all we have to fight off illness and death. Christians finds such Stories in scripture – what I call the narrative of biblical radicalism. The problem is, the North American church has been fooled into thinking our Stories are just entertainment, or it has forgotten them altogether. At the same time we have been seduced by stories spun by the imperial Dream: the official narratives of the National Security Council and the six o’clock news, the fabulations of Madison Avenue and Hollywood. These tales promise prosperity, power, and prestige, but deliver only captivity. Worst of all, we Christians have confused our Stories with the narrative of empire, thus allowing scripture to be expropriated into the service of oppression.
Be prepared to give an account of the hope that is in you. Unbind the gospel. Tell your stories. Share the good news. Let the chips fall where they may? Perhaps. But also, trust God with the outcome.
In the lectionary passage from Acts this morning, Paul is standing in the Areopagus proclaiming to the Athenians the good news about Jesus. He stands ready to give an account of the hope that is within him. The source of that hope comes to us clearly in the reading from John’s gospel: “I will not leave you orphaned, I am coming to you. … Those who have and keep my commandments are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father.”
That’s the good news, sisters and brothers, that we are loved by our Creator God, that we are graced by the continuing presence, the accompaniment of the risen Christ, and we are empowered by the Spirit to live out the commandments of Jesus: namely this – that we love one another just as he loved his disciples.
Unbind this gospel and share it with a world that so desperately needs to know itself as beloved. Give an account of the hope that is within us. Share our stories.
So, let me then give you an account of the hope that is within me by way of two stories from last weekend.
Last Sunday afternoon we went up to Rockville for the installation of our good friend, Leann Hodges, as associate pastor at St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church. Some of you may have heard us tell tales of Bud’s babysitting adventures with Alex. Alex is Leann (and Ray’s) four-year-old son. Alex is adopted, and he is a biracial child. He is, in the way of every child, extraordinary and also perfectly ordinary, and he was energetically hosting us in his home Sunday evening as we sat around telling tales of family and church, and breaking bread and sharing wine.
Simple, sacramental gifts of shared time and purpose. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in any of it, except for the fact that Leann and Ray are white Southerners, from Kentucky, and I am another one, born in Alabama, and at the time when I was a four-year-old boy an interracial couple would have been grounds for violence in our home states and the marriage of any such couple would have been against the laws of those states, and this one, and any child born of such a union would have been spurned and shunned by many if not most good Southerners.
Nothing out of the ordinary in any of it, except for the fact that such a child would not likely have found a home in very many southern churches not that many years ago. Nothing out of the ordinary in any of it, except for the fact that the infamous “way of life” defended for so many years in our part of the world saw itself as based on Christian scripture but that was, in fact, much more accurately understood as imperial court theology than as any faith in Jesus seeking new understanding for a new time
As I hopped on the Beltway to drive home last Sunday evening, I thought of Alex and wondered, “is that what people were so scared of?”
Second story from last weekend:
Last Saturday, Cheryl and I had dinner at Mike and Clark’s house. We had a wonderful time, sitting out on the back deck watching the birds splash in the birdbath, talking about our gardens, telling tales of growing up small town or Southern. We shared a delicious meal, breaking bread and sharing wine.
Simple, sacramental gifts of shared time and purpose. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in any of it, except for the fact that I am a minister of the word and sacrament in a denomination that still has so far to come toward welcome and embrace and empowerment of Mike and Clark and millions of other gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered sisters and brothers in the faith. Nothing out of the ordinary in any of it, except for the fact that we are living in Virginia, where the rights and privileges that Cheryl and I take utterly for granted as a straight, married couple are constitutionally denied to Mike and Clark. Nothing out of the ordinary in any of it, except for the fact that those civil restrictions – civil wrongs, as it were – are based in a theology that calls itself Christian but that is, in fact, much more accurately understood as imperial court theology than as any faith in Jesus seeking new understanding for a new time.
As Cheryl and I turned onto to Rt. 7 to head home, we asked one another yet again, for the thousandth time, “is that what people are so scared of? Mike and Clark?”
The hope that is within me this morning is simply this: that we might move the broader church and culture beyond such fear; that we might live into the day when there truly is nothing out of the ordinary about any of this; that such a day might be soon and very soon. That hope is based on nothing less than an utter conviction that God created us all and loves us all, and that we are called to love one another in that same unbounded way.
Why do I believe this, when the vast majority of Christians around the world see it differently? Because my faith is in a God made known to us through the lived experience of Jesus, who had love for all beyond all the bounds and borders his culture, his faith community, his ecclesiastical authorities erected in defense of the imperial status quo of his day. And because Christian theology ought to teach us that truth is not first and foremost propositional, but is rather relational and incarnational. We shall know the truth, as Christians, to the extent that we know Jesus and walk in his way, and to the extent that we know and love one another. To precisely that extent, we shall be set free from all that binds our hearts and minds in fear.
Finally, I believe this because human beings do not think our way into new patterns of living; we live our way into new patterns of thinking. And we share these patterns of living through the weave of stories that bind us together and make sense of the often chaotic, incoherent scraps of life. As Ched Myers puts it, “while logic can often persuade us to change what or how we think, only the circle of Story has the power to transform what we live by.”
Those may seem contradictory claims at first, but I believe not, in the end. For it is the stories of our ways of living that move us to think differently about a new time. Without the experiences of breaking bread with folks not like me, I might live in fear. Without sharing the stories of those experiences, I might live in silence and fail to live into the calling to give an account of the hope that is within me.
Without the gospel witness of the transformative and revelatory power of breaking bread, I would have no context for explaining how the experience of breaking bread fills me with a faith, hope and love that casts out all fear.
We are all witnesses here. We are all called to share the good news that we experience together in this good place. We are called to unbind this gospel of love, precisely because the world is bound by fear. Sisters and brothers, always be ready to give an account of the hope that is within you.
Ched Myers, Who Will Roll Away the Stone? (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1994), xxi.
Ibid. xxiv.

Sermon Used by permission of author.

Text: Matthew 7:7-12

The gospel of Jesus Christ – the good news – begins in Matthew’s account with these words, “repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” From that beginning, then, to this day on which the church of Jesus Christ gathered at Clarendon will take to the streets urging our neighbors to vote no on amendment one when they go to the polls on election day next month.
How do we make that leap? Is there a connection between Jesus’ words and what we do here today? What does any of this have to do with our lives? Is this not a dangerous mix of church and politics? Do we risk reducing Jesus to a precinct captain in a get-out-the-vote drive for a partisan political agenda?
And, falling as this Sunday does, in the midst of a season in which we are focusing on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, what does any of this have to do with Jesus’ words in the center of the gospel?
To begin with, we cannot help but make a leap from Jesus’ time to our own. If we do not make that imaginative connection, the gospel is a dead letter; it has no resonance and no meaning for any part of our lives if we cannot make the leap from beginning of the gospel all the way forward to this day. That is essentially true whether the connections we make lead us to progressive thought and action or in totally other directions.
Of course, it is a bit easier for people of progressive thought to accept this notion of imagination and interpretation. Too often our conservative sisters and brothers cannot or will not make the move, and accuse progressives of not taking scripture seriously when we do not take it literally.
I assure this morning, I am taking scripture with utmost seriousness as I offer an imaginative connection that, I trust, connects directly to our lives this morning.
How do we do that? In a sense, the Sermon on the Mount itself provides the key. Jesus repeats there this phrase, “you have heard it said … but I say to you.” In that one gesture, Jesus indicates a great deal about the kind of community he is gathering to himself, and the kind of community we are called to create as his followers today. It is a community born of and tied to a tradition. Indeed, if “you have not heard it said,” then you begin at a great disadvantage. This word comes first and most clearly to those who belong already to a tradition of moral and spiritual thought. In other words, the word of Jesus comes here to an already religious community – that is, to one bound back to a tradition of reading sacred texts.
At the same time, Jesus here insists, that community will also be one of rereading. “You have heard it said” … “but I say to you.” For example, “you have heard it that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’”
Now that ancient saying may sound somewhat brutal to our ears, but actually the notion of “eye for eye and tooth for tooth” represented a great leap forward in justice from a time when an injury suffered in a fight – say a lost eye or broken tooth – might instigate a bloody feud leaving entire tribes maimed. Into that frontier justice, the “men of old,” as Jesus puts it, crafted a more merciful and balanced justice marked by the traditions of the law as encoded in the sacred texts of Israel. An eye for an eye being a much more balanced sense of justice than, say, an entire family, a whole tribe, for one injured eye.
Then along comes Jesus saying, pull out those ancient texts and let us reread, let us reinterpret that founding principle of justice and mercy and push it toward a commonwealth of belovedness in which “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.”
So how do we, today, make the connection between the gospel as it comes to us in our sacred texts and the good news that we, at CPC, feel called to share with the world? Well, we listen to that ancient story of imagination and rereading and we engage in imaginative reading ourselves.
As we read and reread, we begin to see the contours of a relationship between Jesus’ words and our actions today. Now it’s clear that Jesus speaks here to an audience that already has some connection to his tradition. On the other hand, he also clearly aims beyond the confines of the established community. The Sermon on the Mount is no pep-talk to the club of the saved. Rather, Jesus’ words call forth a radically expanded understanding of who’s in and who’s out. After all, “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”
You don’t have to meet some culturally or ecclesiastically defined set of guidelines to ask, to search, to knock, and when you do ask, when you do search, when you do knock, you will be received.
Indeed, I cannot think of a more comforting and, at the same time, more challenging and prophetic a text for us to hear this morning as we prepare to go door-to-door for justice than these few simple words: “knock and the door will be opened.”
On a deeper level, Jesus’ words challenge us to understand the good news as fundamentally inclusive. Where Jesus has issued an invitation, we have no business erecting a barrier; and that’s the good news of the gospel sadly missed by the framers of the Marshall-Newman amendment, who act in the name of a narrow, tribal, conservative and constricted view of scripture and of marriage.
Of course, one might fairly ask of me – straight, married, obvious insider to the religious community – what has any of this to do with me, or with you if you are not part of an unmarried couple? What has this to do with “the rest of us”?
The other week, when Hannah and I were tabling over at the Metro stop – handing out cookies and flyers about amendment one, an African-American man stopped to talk with us. It was not perfectly clear where he stood on the issue when we began talking, so when he asked, “so, why should I be opposed to this amendment?” I turned the question back to him, asking, “well, why should you be?”
He simply said, “discrimination never stops with the first target.”
It was his own, deeply personal way of saying what Martin Luther King often said, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
We are all connected, joined in an inescapable web of mutuality. I cannot stand by and see my friends suffer without sharing in their suffering and being compelled to act to end it.
By speaking out today we give life to the golden rule that Jesus articulated in the Sermon on the Mount. “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”
And when we see anyone discriminated against – knowing that we ourselves would not like to be victims of discrimination – we are compelled to act; just as we would have others act for us when the tables get turned. We are all connected. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
At a level deeper than the words of this amendment – deeper even than its potential and serious unintended consequences – at a level deeper than all of that, this amendment is about us – each and every one of us. It names us and it defines the kind of commonwealth we share.
If, as I have suggested often this fall, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount casts a vision and articulates a founding constitution for the commonwealth of belovedness, then Marshall-Newman, if passed, would leave in its wake a constitution for an impoverished commons of bigotry, discrimination and injustice.
So it is in the name of Jesus’ vision and for the sake of a commonwealth of belovedness that we walk the neighborhood this day. Now some will say that doing so dangerously mixes politics and pulpits, and lowers that high wall of separation between church and state. More dangerously, some may say, we risk reducing Jesus to political spokesperson for our side of a partisan divide.
First, let’s be clear: Jesus is not a Republican … or a Democrat. GOP does not stand for God’s Own Party, and neither is the election of any Democrat going to bring about the coming of the beloved community or the reign of the kingdom of God. The rise or fall of the issue we speak out on today will neither amplify nor silence the still small voice of God calling out for justice and for truth in the public square.
But let us also be equally clear about this: God’s voice does persistently cry out for justice and for truth precisely in the public square; and the God of the Jewish and Christian scripture is everywhere always on the side of the outcast and the marginalized. Jesus does not proclaim power for the pious, nor triumph for those who trivialize our politics by focusing exclusively on our sex lives; instead, Jesus proclaims good news for the poor, release for the captives, recovery of sight for the blind, liberation for the oppressed.
Jesus calls us to lead holy, compassionate, loving and sacrificial lives of service to one another. His call to us is personal, but never private; and it is inherently, from the first words of the gospel, political.
Repent, for the kingdom has drawn near. Notice the language: repent – turn from your old way of living – personal; but not private, for then this word: kingdom – an inherently political word choice suggesting powers and social structures.
Repent, for the kingdom has drawn near.
In other words, turn your life around for there is a new order emerging – a new social order – and you are called to participate in its fulfillment. It is an order founded on a profoundly inclusive vision of human society in which the traditional structures of power no longer pertain: the outcast are welcomed, the orphans and widows empowered, those previously considered sinners have a seat of prominence at the welcome table.
The poor receive the entire kingdom; mourners are comforted, the meek inherit the earth, and peacemakers are called the children of God. This is the good news of the gospel. This is the commonwealth that we seek. This is why we walk.
Ask, and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock, and the doors shall be opened. Let it be so, for all of God’s beloved, and for Christ’s church gathered at Clarendon. Amen.

A sermon preached at Niles Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Fremont, on Sunday, February 8, 2009, by the Rev. Jeffrey Spencer.

Scripture: Ruth 1:16-17 and 1 Corinthians 7:25-40

Copyright © 2009 by Jeffrey S. Spencer

I know it wasn’t one of our scripture readings today, but I’m going to start today’s sermon by talking about Abraham and his family.

We aren’t told how Abraham and Sarah got hitched – just that they were married and childless. So, in order to create an heir, Abraham had a child by Hagar, Sarah’s servant, a son named Ishmael. Then Sarah got pregnant and had a son named Isaac. Hagar and Ishmael were thrown out of the house (it was a jealousy thing), thrown out to die – but God rescued them and Ishmael became the progenitor of the Arab people.

Isaac grew, and after Sarah died, Abraham decided it was time for Isaac to get married. Abraham sent one of his servants back to the home country to find a wife for Isaac. The servant did this by hanging out at a village well, meeting a girl named Rebekah, getting invited to her father’s home for the night, and essentially buying the girl to be Isaac’s wife. That’s the way all good marriages are made: one of the parent’s servants purchases a spouse for the child. Or maybe not.

Anyway, Rebekah got pregnant with twins. When the twins were born, they came out fighting. Esau was born first, but Jacob was holding on to his heel, trying to pull Esau back in so Jacob could be the firstborn. The boys grew, Isaac aged, and it became time for Isaac to offer his blessing to his eldest son. Jacob took advantage of his father’s blindness and stole Esau’s birthright. This was not a nice thing to do. Esau was furious, so Jacob ran away.

Jacob headed to where his mother was from and happened to meet a girl, Rachel, at a well. Boy meets girl at a well; we know where this story is headed. Jacob went to work for Rachel’s dad, Laban, striking a deal: he’d work for Laban for seven years and then he’d take Rachel as his wife. The Bible says that the seven years flew by because Jacob loved Rachel. I think it’s the first time in the Bible that we see love as a motivator for two people getting married.

As I said, the seven years flew by and there was a wedding feast. That evening, the two love birds went off to their honeymoon tent and did what newlyweds do. But in the morning, it turns out that it wasn’t Rachel who went with Jacob to the honeymoon tent. It was her older sister Leah. No lights in the tent, I guess. When Jacob demanded an explanation from Laban, Laban said it was a cultural thing – you don’t give the younger daughter away until the older daughter is married. Well, Jacob was still in love, so he worked another seven years for Laban and then got married to Rachel. That’s the way all good marriages are made: multiple partners who happen to be siblings, along with their servants as your concubines. Or maybe not.

I retell these Biblical stories primarily to make an obvious point: there is not one unique presentation of weddings or marriage in the Bible. Even over three generations, in the matter of a couple dozen chapters of Genesis, the idea of weddings and marriage changes.

The exchange between Ruth and Naomi wasn’t a marriage vow, though that reading is sometimes used at weddings. The exchange was between two women, daughter-in-law and mother-in-law, both of them widowed, both of them needing family, both of them finding that family in each other. Ruth does go on to get married and have kids – but her marriage is about protection and survival. And her vow to Naomi, she keeps.

We get a totally different view of marriage from Paul in our reading from 1 Corinthians. Let me just say, Paul’s world view and my world view are different. He thought that Jesus is going to return at any minute to bring this age to an end, so there’s no point in bothering with marriage and families. If you’re a horn-dog, sure, go ahead and get married, but otherwise…

Well, I think that Jesus isn’t returning to end the age any time soon, so I think marriage and family is important. I think it’s important that people make a commitment to care for and be responsible for each other into an unknown future. I am pro-marriage. But just as the Biblical understanding of weddings and marriage has changed, over time so has mine.

The cliché is that girls are the ones who think about their weddings, who read the magazines and imagine what it will be like. Boys think about other things. I didn’t fit the cliché.

At some level I knew I was gay back in 9th grade, not that I would have admitted it to anyone, including myself. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. Cultural norms pushed me to date and I went out with two girls through my high school years. The second one, Abby, was a significant enough relationship that I started wondering about marriage. Would we get married? How would I know if I had found the right person to marry? Was marriage even a possibility for me?

Somewhere in that wondering was the inner conflict I had about my sexuality. At some level, I knew that my love for Abby was different from her love for me. At some level, I knew that the cultural script – boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl get married and have 2.4 children – didn’t work for me. It made me question what marriage is and what a wedding is.

Jump forward three or four years. I was a junior in college and I was sick of denying who I was even to myself. I needed to tell someone that I was gay to that it wouldn’t be a secret, so it be real and I wouldn’t be able to hide it from myself any more. So I came out to a friend and I came out to the college chaplain, and both of them – God bless them – thought it was fine. At that point, three people in the world knew that I was gay: me, the chaplain, and my friend. By the end of the year I had told a fourth person, a woman who asked me out on a date and I explained why that wouldn’t work for me. But her question made me wonder about my future. As friends paired off, I wondered if I would ever be part of a pair.

In those days, I pretty much assumed that if I was ever part of a pair I would never be married. I had never heard of any institution – governmental or nongovernmental – recognizing a same-gender couple as being married. But then I got to seminary and I had classes in theology and liturgy and church polity, and I had discussions with friends about where the church stood and where the church should stand and how we could get the church there. That’s when I came to realize that different-gender couples typically have two weddings and two marriages going on at the same time – the legal one and the religious one. I couldn’t have one of them; the government wouldn’t allow it. But I could have the other one because I was part of a church that supported equality for same-gender-loving people.

Bump forward a few more years. I’d been ordained for a few years and was serving a church in Washington State. From time to time different-gender couples would drop by because they wanted to get married and wondered if we’d “do it” for them. Some people would assume that weddings were a service churches provided for the community. That’s the way they saw it in the movie – it’s always a guy in a black shirt with a white collar saying the “dearly beloveds.” Other people came to the church because getting married in a church building, getting married before God was important to them. It became my habit that, if all a couple was interested in was having one wedding and one marriage – the legal one – then I wasn’t interested in performing the wedding. If they were interested in the other wedding, the other marriage – the religious one – then I’d perform that wedding, and I’d sign the legal paperwork as a courtesy.

Usually, we’d get the paperwork signed before the service began, get it out of the way before the real wedding took place. It became my habit to say, as I signed the legal paperwork, “I now pronounce that you may file joint tax returns.” It would get a chuckle about 75% of the time. But I always found it strange that my signature sealed the legal contract. I’m not an officer of the court. I’ve had no legal training. I’m not even a notary public. But my signature made if legally binding. In a country that separates church and state – that just seems weird to me. And to top it off, I am legally responsible for returning the signed forms to the state. If I sign the legal documents and don’t return them, I am criminally liable. Go figure.

The idea of there being two weddings, two marriages in our society for different-gender couples was pretty well formed when I got a phone call from my father. My mother died quite young, in the first year after I was ordained. My father called because he had been seeing a woman for a while and he wanted to talk about their relationship. “Jeff, we’re thinking about moving in together without getting married,” my father told me. “What do you think about that?” Isn’t it supposed to be the kid who calls the parents to say ‘we’re moving in together without being married’ in an effort to shock the parents? But I knew what was going on. My father and his girlfriend were still a few years from retirement, but close enough that they were thinking about Social Security payments, and if they got legally married there would be implications for their incomes come retirement. I told my father that I didn’t care if they were legally married or not; I just wanted them to have a celebration where the families could come together and bless their union. Legal marriage is a legal thing, but religious marriage, that matters.

Then I had the experience to not only marrying a same-gender couple, but signing their legal paperwork, making their wedding legally binding. Because of some things I’ve learned between the legalization of same-gender weddings and the passage of Prop 8, I waited until after the wedding ceremony to sign the paperwork – that’s all legal minutia, so I won’t go into it. But there we were, in Ford Hall, signing papers, and for the second time that day I said, “I now pronounce you married.” The first time I said it, I meant that they were married in the eyes of God – which is pretty typical for any wedding I perform. I don’t think I’ve ever done a wedding ceremony and said “by the authority vested in me by the State.” This second time, however, there in Ford Hall, I meant that they were married in the eyes of the state, too. It was a moving moment in my ministry.

Which of these marriages is more important? Being married in the eyes of God. Which has more impact on their day-to-day life? Being married in the eyes of the state. I know that many people see these two types of marriage as intertwined, but for me, they are different. One, legal marriage, is a contract. The other, religious marriage, is a covenant.

I talked with my Spiritual Director about all this marriage stuff. She’s a Dominican nun from Europe. She was shocked to learn that clergy in the United States can sign the papers to make a marriage legal (to use the legal language, to legally solemnize a marriage). In her country, the legal stuff happens at City Hall, then you go to the church to get married. She also told me that in the Roman Catholic Church, where marriage is considered a sacrament, the sacrament is given by the couple to each other, not by the priest to couple. I think that’s beautiful.

Now, in Protestant Reformation tradition that comes out of the continent of Europe (in other words, in our tradition) we only recognize two sacraments, baptism and communion; so we don’t consider marriage to be a sacrament. But, in my opinion, it is still very sacred, and if the covenant the couple makes with each other before God comes to an end, God should be involved in that, too. And that’s why we have a service in our Book of Worship called “Recognition of the End of a Marriage.” And, yes, I have used it.

You know, churches (and other religious communities) have always been able to determine for themselves who can and cannot be married by their clergy in their sanctuaries. And many faith communities have placed restrictions on who can marry – due to religious status, ethnicity, gender, and whatever other criteria their religious beliefs decree – for decades, for centuries.

However, it wasn’t until June of this year that Christians like me, who support the marriage of same-gender couples, had the ability based on our Christian convictions to sign the paper work that makes the wedding legally binding. This freedom of religion was short-lived and was taken away by the passage of Proposition 8. I have prayed about how I should respond, and this is what I believe God is calling me to do:

Because I am no longer able to solemnize the legal status of marriage for some of the couples who come to me to be married (i.e. same-gender couples), I have decided that I will no longer solemnize the legal status of marriage for any couples who come to me to be married. I will continue to offer a religious marriage service that bind a couple in the eyes of God (provided they meet other premarital requirements I have set for all couples), but until I can solemnize the legal status of all couples, we will not solemnize the legal status for any couples.

I don’t take this stand to be mean. I don’t take this stand to punish. And I certainly don’t want to hurt anyone in our church community. But it boils down to is this: the marriage law in our state is discriminatory and the level of that discrimination has become more profoundly clear to me by my experience being able to legally solemnize the marriage of same-gender couples, however briefly. The law is discriminatory and I am called to resist that discrimination by not participating in the discriminatory law.

Martin Luther was condemned for his Protestant views in 1520 and appeared before the Diet of Worms. His prosecutor, Johann von Eck, presented Luther with a table filled with copies of his writings. Eck asked Luther if he still believed what his writings taught. Luther took a day to think about his answer. The next day, Luther apologized for the harsh tone of many of his writings, but said that he could not reject the majority of them or the teachings in them. Luther respectfully but boldly stated, “Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.”^[1]

I am not particularly happy that this is where my conscience has moved me, but it is where my conscience has moved me. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.