May 13, 2012 Easter 6
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Acts 10:44-48
44While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. 45The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, 46for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, 47"Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" 48So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibVlVzGI9y0
A graduate student at MSU once asked me if I would be willing to talk with his parents. He had tried "coming out" to them on his own and it had not gone especially well. The evening of our appointment became more like a committee meeting. The young man's mother and dad were there alright, but they also brought grand parents, siblings and cousins.
I had a very large office in those days but even still, it was crowded. It got hot quickly. I tried, in a pastoral and professorial way, to talk about some Bible passages that they felt made it impossible for them to accept their gay son. Our conversation was apparently the first time they had ever encountered a Biblically literate pastor who disagreed with their vehement prejudice against homosexuals.
The conversation quickly fell into argument, grandma was on her feet shouting at her gay grandson, shaming him. His mother was red faced, and screaming at heaven asking God to drive the demons from me. Someone started speaking in tongues and the whole evening looked like the setting for some existential morality play but, and you should not resort to this too often, but one person armed with the truth becomes a majority.
We need to be careful that we do not become blinded by the false certainty of arrogance but when you know that you are right, it doesn't matter how many people in the room are calling you demonic, or are claiming a greater spirituality or moral superiority..... one person, armed with the truth, becomes the majority.
Thankfully, in my twenty years of meeting with families to discuss their newly discovered gay family member, the tide has turned significantly. I remember leaving the movie, "Philidelphia" in 1993, that powerful film in which Tom Hanks portrays a young attorney who was fired for having AIDS, after watching those scenes in which the main character's family had been so supportive of him and his partner, so loving towards him in his last stages of death..... I said to my friends as we left the theater, "Where is that family?"
Parents used to wonder aloud what they did wrong to have a child turn out to be gay but it has finally dawned on our culture that having a gay child doesn't mean that you failed as a parent. It is disowning a child because they are gay that makes you fail as a parent.
Thankfully, being HIV positive does not result in certain quick death anymore and that loving, accepting family is not so hard to find. Now they are in the majority. But there was a lot of angry accusation, guilt, screaming and even some speaking in tongues on the way to where we are this week, when the President of the United States could state openly on national television that he believes that gay people should have equal rights in marriage.
As with the end of the policy of "don't ask, don't tell" a couple of years ago, it seems to me to be coming several years late but I don't want to take anything away from the fact that this day has come. Getting the president to speak his mind does not change the minds of many people immediately. There is still a lot of work to be done but we are going in the right direction.
Even one Fox News reporter said that Obama was on the right side of history. They had started out early this week decrying Obama's "war on marriage" but Shepard Smith stepped forward and changed the channel's tone and the other Fox commentators evidently stood down.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the church should be the society's headlights but we often end up being the tail lights. Women got the vote early in the 20th century but still can't speak or hold office in many of our 21st century churches. We integrated schools in America in the 1960's and yet the worship hour on Sunday mornings is still the most segregated hour of any week in America. We gave women the right to control their own reproductive health in the 1970's and religious groups have been trying to reclaim their wombs and now their contraception ever since.
The United Methodist Church, the second largest protestant denomination in America, met this past week in their General Conference in Florida and again refused to change their policy of discrimination against gay pastors and their refusal to allow same sex marriages in their churches. They will change in the next decade but not soon enough to rescue themselves from their downhill slide into moral irrelevance.
In the first century of the Common Era, the first great moral crisis faced by the church was the assumed prejudice between Jews and Gentiles.
I don't take much of the Acts accounts as literal history, but even if the story is entirely apocryphal the fact that Luke wants to tell the story records the undisputed truth that early Jewish Christians found it to be virtually inconceivable that God would want them to accept Gentiles into their Christian fellowship. There were Jews who wanted to kill Paul for even suggesting it. And Luke makes it seem that even the best and closest friends of Jesus where shocked almost beyond their ability to believe it, to see the Holy Spirit including Gentiles.
Prejudice is its own logic. It doesn't make sense but we live with it until we can be liberated from the prison of judgment, moral condescension, anger and hatred.... Then, when you look back on it, you can't even remember why you were prejudiced in the first place. I grew up in segregated schools and didn't think a thing about it.... It seemed to me that was just how the world worked. Until it was all over, and little league and the community pool was integrated and in very short order, I would have never wanted to go back into that former way of living for a day without all of my new friends.
Even though I went to a very progressive seminary where, in 1978 they appointed the first woman dean of a Divinity School in America and shortly thereafter, Vanderbilt's new dean, Sally McFague, let it be known that she was also the first lesbian dean of a divinity school. Even with lots of fellow gay students, I never really thought about the church's prejudice until an associate minister of mine came out of the closet and then I had to either watch him be crucified or I had to figure out what was right and what was wrong.
It was not my progressive seminary professors who taught my prejudice out of me.
It was the church's malice towards this gay man that forced me to look at the issue seriously and nearly 20 years before the president said it, I had to stand up to a church board and affirm my belief that gays were just like the rest of us, a blend of saint and sinner and watch the backs of members and donors as they left the church.
For the most part the church has been drug into the present kicking and screaming and regrettably years after public institutions had arrived at the same point. The church often becomes the protector of the status quo rather than the proclaimers of social justice. But that's the church we don't go to anymore!
We don't want to appoint ourselves as judges of other churches or other religions but I will draw this line in the sand..... genuine, legitimate spirituality brings people together. Sick, misleading, evil religion divides people. Any church that says that there are two tiers of people with one being superior to the other is not a church that deserves to have members. If your church says that you have to be a male to preach then that church has a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of genitalia in sermon writing. If your church says that straight people can get married in the sanctuary but gay people can't then self respecting straight people shouldn't get married there either....and I wouldn't give them a dime of support as long as they defend their prejudice...... but that's the church we don't go to anymore.
Today we celebrate with our gay members and friends now that our president's views have evolved. We pledge ourselves to work with you in making full equality not just an idea but a reality in our time. Have courage. It gets better.
