Fifth Sunday After Pentecost: Vigil for Orlando

This is the rough text of a sermon preached at Atlanta Bar Church's Vigil for Orlando in Atlanta, Georgia on the 19th of July, 2016, The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost.  The reading for the day was Galatians 3:23-29..   Please note that these are not exact transcriptions and that there may be some spelling and grammatical errors.

A week ago, 49 of our sisters and brothers were murdered during an attack in Orlando.   And as if it were possible for it to be worse, they were murdered because they were living their lives as who God created them to be, as members of the LGBTQ community.  And as I think back on the murders and about the events of the past week, I find myself struggling.  I feel this intense and sustained sadness, but out of that sadness, I find myself desperately needing hope.  And I don’t think I’m alone.

I think a lot of us are torn between feelings of sadness, feelings of anger; or just mourning the tragic loss of life.  And I think that in the midst of this, we are longing for hope.

Part of the reason that I find myself sad is because I read this letter from Paul to the Galatians and I am reminded that all of the distinctions that we draw amongst ourselves in this world, whether based on race, or gender identity, or sexuality, or nationality; all of the judgments that we inflict on others are the work of humanity.

I’m sad because in seeing these distinctions that we have created, I see our own complicity in the murders.  I see how the church, how the government, how so many institutions, have been silent in the face of hatred, how we have tolerated bigotry, how in the face of hatred we have not spoken out, but have stepped aside and not defended our sisters and brothers.

I’m sad because my church made overtures towards full inclusion in 2009, but left a backdoor open for intolerance to fester in the church under the respectable title of ‘bound conscience’, as if the gospel would ever condone hatred against another person because of who God made them to be.

I’m sad because 49 of my LGBTQ brothers and sisters are dead tonight because of the fear and the hatred that we as a society, and as a church, let grow unchecked in our midst, and in doing so, we perpetuated the hate that led to murder.

And while that sadness can easily begin to turn into anger, we can’t let anger win.  If we let anger win, we only continue to give rise to a similar hate to the one that left our friends dead, similar to the hate that drove the killer. 

But I do understand some of us may be angry because we are afraid that we could be next, or that our friends or our family members could be next.  But that fear keeps us divided because that fear drowns out our capacity to love.

So while I think it is possible for a righteous anger to drive us towards acts of justice, I don’t want us to give into anger based on our fear.  What I want, is to believe in love.

I want to believe in the divine love of the Creator whose love drives out fear.

I want to believe in the divine love that drives out divisions and brings unity.

I want to believe in the divine love that gives us new life.

And so I read Paul’s letter and I also find hope because I am reminded that in God’s eyes we are all beautifully and fiercefully created in the image of God.  Whether male or female, cis or trans, straight or queer, regardless of race or nationality, we all bare the same image of God and we are all loved by our Creator.

I’m reminded that the current state of the world, which seems to be brimming with fear and anger; that this state is not the end.

This is not the end.

This is not the end because we see change in our world, we see reconciliation.  We see support from groups we never expected.  We see changes in attitudes and we see individuals and institutions looking at how they have treated and spoken about the queer community and recognizing the hurt they caused and apologizing and inviting people back in; saying we cannot truly be the church and speak hatred and bigotry from the pulpit. 

We are seeing people abandoning their fear, abandoning their hate and choosing to be on the side of love and inclusion.

We are seeing evidence of the inbreaking of the kingdom of God.  We are seeing the steps that lead towards the world that Paul talks about where we are all one.

I think that maybe it’s in this place that our hope and that righteous anger that is coming from our sadness can come together because the hope that we find in the God who loved us enough to die for us is the same hope that drives us to work for justice, to work for inclusion.  It’s the same hope that drives us to speak love into the world. 

It’s the same hope that drives us to not let fear and anger win, but to work to remind the world that love wins.

That unity wins…

That hope wins…

That God’s love wins.

And I know that the work of love is a challenging and trying road to walk because we are called names, we are harassed, some of us have been killed fighting for the basic recognition that all people are created in God’s image and are beautiful and loved.  But we are sustained in this by the God who calls us do justice and to show mercy, the God whose entire being is love; the God who is always present with us.  We are sustained by the body and blood of Christ, because it is here at the table that we are reminded that all are invited and all are fed and all, and I do mean all, male or female, straight or queer, Jew or Greek, all are loved.

It’s here that we can gather and be filled by the love of God so that we might continue to have hope and we might continue to bring love into this world.   And it’s because of the hope and because of that love, that we can stand together and say, ‘Thanks be to God.’  Amen.

Fourth Sunday After Pentecost

This is the rough text of a sermon preached at Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Atlanta, Georgia on the 12th of July, 2016, The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost.  The Gospel reading for the day was Luke 7:36-8:3.   Please note that these are not exact transcriptions and that there may be some spelling and grammatical errors.

So this has been an interesting news week.  I’m not sure how many of you have heard of the story of the student at Stanford who was raped and then her rapist was, basically, let off the hook because of the damage that jail would have done to his future.  There was no concern for the victim, no thought as to how this act of violence had damaged her life and how this new act of injustice would just continue to hurt her. 

Instead, the institutions put in place to protect us let her down and in doing so, they also demonstrated how even today we still see rampant acts of sexist injustice and we see how men in our society are given special treatment, are held to different standards, and women are so often treated as less than worthy.  And it could be argued that this continued institutionalized difference in treatment is a continuation of long held beliefs about the masculine nature of God.

So it’s interesting to keep that in mind as we look at the gospel reading today.  We find ourselves with Jesus in the home of Simon, a Pharisee.  And let’s give Simon some credit, he is making an honest effort to understand this whole Jesus thing.  He wants to see what the big deal is and so has invited Jesus into his house, is feeding him, and he wants to learn.  But then this woman, this sinful woman (and please remember, we don’t know what her sins are and the particularities don’t really matter), but this woman crashes the party and comes to Jesus weeping and washing his feet.  Annointing him with oil.  Showing amazing affection towards Jesus. 

And rather than seeing that as an act of somebody who is filled with repentance and also with gratitude for God’s grace, Simon sees only a person who is different.  He sees a woman filled with sin and, in his mind, not worthy of grace, because she has not kept the law like he has.  And he’s kinda scandalized by it all, I mean she barged into his house uninvited, she is a known sinner, and, to top it all off, she’s a woman! 

To Simon, some people just aren’t worthy of the salvation offered by God.  Some people don’t deserve the respect or grace that Jesus offered her.

But Jesus reminds us that God’s grace is not based on our own doing, because even Simon fell short of what hospitality laws demand.  Instead Jesus reminds us that God is different, and in doing so, Jesus tells us a lot about who God is and what that means for us and our relationships.

You see, for God, there is no concept of ‘not worthy’.  There is no exclusion.   Instead what there is, is love.  An open and embracing love that is extended to all of us regardless of our sins.

And I love the way that the reading for this week is framed because it begins by showing us Christ’s love for the woman who was a known sinner and it ends by telling us about the female disciples. 

Cause what we learn in these readings are that for Jesus, unlike Simon, gender is not an issue.  Jesus reminds us that we all, both male and female, have been created in the image of God.  And I think that fact is something that we don’t talk about too much.  We don’t talk about the fact that if we are all created in God’s image that it means that God isn’t just male, it means that God is female too, that God is too big to be confined by a single gender identity.

And this text reminds us that it wasn’t just Jesus and twelve dudes wandering around, but that there were also a number of women disciples as well.  And, in case you missed this detail, it was the women who were actually funding the whole operation.  So they weren’t just passive bystanders, the female disciples where at the core of the ministry.

So I think that part of what this text invites us to do is to consider the role of the feminine in the divine image.  It reminds us that discipleship is not gender specific because God is beyond gender.  It reminds us that God is both male and female, both mother and father to us.

And this isn’t a new concept or something crazy that your vicar just made up.  The Hebrew bible, both in the book of Proverbs and in the Wisdom texts talks about the ‘Wisdom of God’ in feminine terms, it refers to the ‘Sophia’ of God. What’s more, the prophet Isaiah refers to God in feminine terms, as do the Psalms, and even Jesus, in both Luke and Matthew, refers to God in mothering, feminine, terms.  There is gender fluidity in the description of God in the bible. 

And I have to admit that I kinda love that.  I love it because it is a reminder to me of how big God is and how big God’s love for us is.  When we can recognize that God reaches out beyond any box or category that we try to put him in, we can see that her love for us is truly massive.  And just like God’s love towards the woman who came to Jesus transcended any sin she could commit, and even just like God’s love still remained for the judging Simon, so too does God’s love for us go beyond anything about us.  God’s love stretches beyond our own physicality and beyond anything that we do because ultimately there is nothing innate about us that brings us forgiveness and salvation, there’s nothing that we can do to warrant it. 

And that’s how God is, fortunately, so different from us.  We tend to assign judgment based on characteristics that we see in people, so that women are all like this, or men are all like that, or queer folks are all like this other thing.  But God calls us to recognize that God is present in all of those categories, that all of the people we judge are actually made in the image of God and in calling us to recognize that, we are being offered an expanded view of who God is.

And I have a strange feeling that about now at least a few of you are wondering, why this talk of the multi-gendered nature of God.  Why is it important to recognize God as a he and a she?

It’s important because when we expand our image of God, our understanding of who is created in God’s image is also expanded.  We are reminded that God represents 100% of the people gathered here today.  And when we start to do that, we can start to remember that we are all children of God.  And perhaps, unlike Simon, we can begin to better see that salvation is freely given to all of us.

And maybe as we start to recognize that, we can let God work in us so that we are drawn towards acts of love and reconciliation.  So that we recognize the image of God in our neighbor.  So that we recognize that all the people around us are deserving of the same grace that God has extended to us. 

Sisters and brothers, ultimately what Jesus reminds us of in the text today is that in the eyes of God we are all loved.  That we are all called by name and embraced as the beautiful children of God that we are.  Male or female, straight or queer, regardless of race, we are all created in the image of God.  And what’s more, we are all brought together and redeemed by the grace of our mothering God who loves us with all of her might and saves us despite our own actions.  And because of that, we can truly say, thanks be to God.