White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church
Sunday 5 July 2009
Sermon is used with permission of Author.
The Heart of the Matter, Here in the Heartland
by Rev. Victoria Safford
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.
