Roger Ray, pastor
June 23, 2013 Proper 8
Galatians 3:23-28
23Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. 24Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. 25But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, 26for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 5:1, 13-23
For the benefit of our musicians, I try to outline my sermons a couple of months in advance. You may wonder how I can know two months in advance what I am going to be angry about on any particular Sunday and all I can say is, "it's a gift" but I'm a professional kids, you shouldn't try this at home.
But back in April, when I was thinking about sermons in June, I had reasonable confidence that we would have Supreme Court decisions by now about same sex marriage. Reporters even crowded into Supreme Court chambers last week expecting to hear Justice Roberts reveal these decisions only to get a head fake as he nervously fiddled with papers and appeared to be about to make a momentous announcement and then talked about a decision so innocuous that even the reporters couldn't remember what it was long enough to write it down.
But the defensive walls of prejudice continue to crumble even as we wait to see if the Supreme Court is going to be on the right side of history or not. This week we did get a long overdue admission from the most public organization that took a lot of money from gullible and desperate people for what has been called conversion therapy.
Exodus ministries closed down with week along with an apology from their president, Alan Chambers, admitting that there is not and never has been a way to turn a gay person straight and that their judgment and guilt that they have heaped up on gay people has been very hurtful and has even caused many suicides.
I am not personally satisfied with their statements because they still want to say that homosexuality is a sin but I don't want to let my desire for a better statement to overshadow the fact that they have at least admitted that they were frauds and that they were wrong. Deep seated prejudices do not change easily and they usually don't change all at once.
Liberation is usually more of an evolution than it is a singular event. Not to imply that many of them are deeply repressed in their own sexual orientation but you could say that fundamentalists are sort of skipping towards reality.
As we prepare for Bishop John Shelby Spong's visit to our church in August, we've been studying several of his recent books. In his book, "Jesus for the Non-Religious" he speaks at length about the way early humans tended to divide into tribes. Much like dogs, early humans realized that their chances of survival depended upon their ability to cooperate in packs or tribes to more successfully hunt, protect themselves and compete for resources and land.
The tribalism that gave us the ability to survive in the ancient world expresses itself in modern culture in sometimes benign ways..... like all of you who actually believe that there is some kind of substantive difference between being a Yankees or a Red Sox fan when we all know that anyone with an enlightened world view is a Cardinals fan. England, Spain, France and Germany used to whip up a good war against one another every few years and even though they seem to have gotten over that they still express their tribal rivalry in regularly violent sporting events that they mistakenly call "foot ball."....which only proves how silly tribalism can be.
As much as it is likely to offend many of our viewers for me to say it, the fierce competition between Muslims and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, and between Baptists and most of the rest of the world is little more than misplaced tribalism. In some ways, monotheistic theology is to blame for some of this.....because if my religion is the only true religion then yours must be wrong.
Ancient humans worked to resolve their anxiety about being attacked or about starving by forming tribes that worked together to have food and security. Once we were aware that we would one day die and we wanted to believe that there was a great chief in the clouds who would give us eternal life, we developed tribal religions and we fight over who owns heaven with greater ferocity than a pack of hyenas fighting over access to a water hole in the savannah.
God is not Muslim, Jewish or Christian and anyone who can't see that just needs to go take a seat in Darwin's waiting room and be quiet until they grow up. I'm sure I could say that in a more polite way but why would I?
Tribalism was necessary to our survival two million years ago. With each passing year, it becomes less necessary and, in fact, our ability to overcome tribalism becomes more necessary to our survival.
When our nation began, our founding fathers, and that is no accident of language.... It was a white boys' club, was drawn to the idealism of John Lock. They talked about liberty, equality, justice and indigenous human rights. But they didn't invite their wives to their meetings.... They also did not invite their African slaves to the meetings. No less a democratic genius than Thomas Jefferson suggested that voting rights should be limited to land owning white men.
But the seeds of liberty and equality, once planted, cannot be restricted to the white rich boys' club. It took nearly a century for Americans to end slavery and another century for us be willing to share our neighborhoods, schools and lunch counters with the descendants of slaves. We have only allowed women to vote in this free democracy since 1920.
The rights of gays and lesbians stayed under the radar for most of modern history until the televised Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 when there was a public demonstration that was the first time many of us even knew what homosexuality was. That was a wild and violent convention though for lots of other reasons. It was the same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated and the whole of the Civil Rights Movement still focused on racial issues.
It wasn't until the AIDS epidemic that the presence of a gay community pushed itself into global conversation and for the first twenty years the religious right used fear of homosexuality to fuel their take over of politics and society but the politics of fear and hate could not forever keep liberty and equality in the closet.
In many ways, the vociferous hatred of religious fundamentalists is what has helped to make it increasingly obvious to the majority of the straight world that their prejudice against homosexuals was embarrassingly stupid. There are times when humiliation is more instructive than simple information. When it comes to discrimination against blacks, women, illegal immigrants and homosexuals, the church has a lot of reasons to blush.
And most of us have some bazaar elements of hypocrisy when it comes to prejudice. The black church was the moral engine of the civil rights movement but with all the energy they brought to equality for black men, the black church was often just as passionate in their discrimination against women and homosexuals.
The Catholic Church has done more in charity work for the poor than any other organization in the world, while adamantly maintaining prejudice against women into the 21st century and, incredibly, continuing to condemn homosexuality through the sermons of a priesthood that is populated by a probable majority of gay priests.....I could be wrong about that but you would have a hard time proving it.
Americans need to get congruent with our espoused values of liberty and equality and stop discriminating against any minority. No matter what the Supreme Court decides on DOMA, America will soon be free of any legal discrimination against gay couples because an awakened population will stand for nothing less. Religious people need to stop using their religion to excuse ignorant prejudice and start practicing that love and grace they talk about all of the time.
Our Kansas City church member, Carol Hattrup, sent me a picture of a very jubilant young man wearing a t-shirt that read, "I met my boyfriend on Christian Mingle." I look forward to the day when Christian Mingle will be proud of that fact.
