Divided No More
Glenna Shepherd,
MCC Portland, Portland, OR, USA
Title: DIVIDED NO MORE
Preached on Pride
Sunday 2004
Texts: a reading
from Religion is a Queer Thing by
Elizabeth Stuart
Genesis 3 – Acts
8: 26 - 38
We have a lot to
celebrate on this Pride Sunday!
A lot has
happened during the last year for which we are incredibly grateful.
And so today is a
celebration like none other, especially for us here in xxxxxx!
It’s also a day
of hope as we look forward to our marriages being upheld.
It’s a day of
hope for us as queer people and especially as people of faith.
Many (I forget
this because I’ve marched in so many Pride parades) –
many will march
this year for the first time.
It’s just a
simple fact of our community –
more and more
people are coming out.
More and more
people are willing to be visible every year.
As people of God
and GLBT people and kindred spirits, this day takes on another dimension:
You see, we dare on this day (on
every day, really–but this day even more vividly)
we dare to fly in
the face of the bastion of sexual denial:
(You know what it
is, right??) the church!
The church has
been the bastion of the denial of the goodness of human sexuality
for just about as
long as the church has been around!
We fly in the face
of it when we celebrate sexuality and spirituality – sex and spirit –
spoken in the
same breath and celebrated in our very same queer bodies.
We are saying,
when we march under the banner of MCC today,
that in this body
is both queer sexuality and
a spirit that is
in such deep communion with God
that we believe
it’s the very essence of our being.
As MCC, we hold
this dangerous tension deep in our very roots!
In fact, it has
been said by our opponents
that our primary
doctrine is the celebration of gay sexuality.
That’s not so –
that is not our primary doctrine.
But it’s that
visible in us.
MCC can’t refuse
to talk about sexuality because we wear it visibly in our being.
From the
beginning, you see, queer people of faith have held as sacred
and in sacred
tension
the
mystery of and our passion for God AND
the mystery of
and our passion for another.
That has been at
the very core of who MCC is from the very beginning.
Listen to that
again:
The very mystery
of and our passion for God AND
the
very mystery of and our passion for another.
We have held
those two things at the foundation of our spiritual and our relational life.
We believe that
both – together – are integral parts of what it means to be human
– fully human – image of God.
Historically, the
church has made it clear to us:
Spirit is more holy than body.
In fact, we hear phrases like “the
desires of the flesh”
and are told that
this desire keeps us from knowing and serving God.
The book of
Genesis tells that story of the serpent, Eve and Adam…
The story tells us that Adam and Eve
were disobedient
when they ate the
forbidden fruit.
And isn’t it interesting that we put terms like that
around sex,
calling it
“forbidden fruit”?
And we know the sex-body-gender
punishment that ensued:
Shame in nakedness –
isn’t that odd that
shame is considered punishment??
Pain in childbirth – the
result of sexual sin
Creation of hierarchy of
man over woman
Expulsion from the
garden and an end to perfect communion with God
Now let me tell
you what I think this story is.
This story is, I
believe, not prescriptive –
I don’t think it
tells us God’s desire for humankind.
Rather, I think
it was simply a way to describe just
how fragmented we human beings are:
I think that’s the point of that
garden/expulsion story –
just how
fragmented we are…
Hiding our nakedness – not only from
each other – but from God.
Did you notice? When God
came around, they covered themselves.
An unwillingness to
allow our body-selves to be vulnerable before God.
An unwillingness in the
way we move through the world to be our full selves:
our spiritual and
our sexual selves.
Sexual and
Spiritual fragmentation has been the state of the church!
If it’s about God, we can’t say too
much about sexual pleasure.
And if we’re
talking about sex, I think we always have a shadow of fear
that maybe God
can’t be in it
and we have to be
really careful about how we word things
because God probably wouldn’t approve
of our talking about sex.
The exception, of
course, is in the context of heterosexual marriage,
that is, the
modern, American kind of heterosexual marriage –
removed, as it
always is in current discourse,
from the
patriarchal economic and political institution
that we see so
clearly in scripture.
Here, I think, is
clear example of how fragmented we are as people of faith:
We’re perfectly
willing to say – and the church has said for centuries –
that Jesus was
fully human,
but just watch
how people squirm (Watch how we
squirm!)
at the suggestion
that Jesus may have been a sexual being:
that he even had
sexual feelings,
much less that he
may have been sexually involved.
That’s
revelatory, isn’t it, of how we feel about speaking of sex and God in the same
breath.
Are you
squirming? Just a little?
I remember my
first Pride parade years ago in the city of xxxxx.
We marched down
xxxxxxx Street, past church after church.
I had Bibles
shaken in my face and curses shouted at us, especially as MCC.
We heard
scripture quoted from angry, red faces.
What is all that
hatred and anger about?
Why is it that
queer people are such an affront to much of the church?
Our offense is
this:
We dare to say
that we were created for intimacy: with God and another.
That desire, longing, passion is innate
to being human:
Longing for God as the
deer longs for water.
And… a desire for
another that runs deep into our soul.
We dare to say,
with audacious lives, that sex may even be a place of encounter with God,
an intimate window to the mystery of
ultimate holiness.
I think the
marriage issue has put our offense in public in a deep and profound way.
Our marriages –
especially in our places of worship – state it loud and clear.
And it’s
especially offensive.
You see, we are a
people stereotyped by our desire.
Whether that’s
true or not, it’s a stereotype that we wear:
HomoSEXual!
We are a people
stereotyped by our desire - and now we dare gather in God’s house
to receive God’s
blessing.
And so it can’t
be denied that sexuality and spirituality – sex and spirit –
come together in
our marriages.
We can’t camouflage
it like straight people can.
For us, it’s not entangled
in the mythology of family
or in the
fairytale world of the knight and the princess.
Now – WE know
that our relationships are multi-dimensional.
We know that our
relationships aren’t just about sex.
But for many
observers, some of the media, and the religious right,
our relationships
aren’t real relationships – they’re about sex.
And here we are – flaunting it in
God’s house!!!
I for one think
that’s a good thing!
You see, we’re
saying out loud:
This sex-is-bad-spirit-is-good
theology is just plain wrong!
It isn’t godly;
it was never the intention for us to live divided.
And we say that
loud and clear in our relationships – in our identity as queer people.
We’re saying that
knowing and being known – intimacy – is beautiful and good
and teaches us
about God.
We dare to say
that desire is the spark! That passion
is vital!
In our
relationship with God and in our relationships with each other.
And that’s about
God – and it’s about sex – often at the same time.
We’re saying it
out loud: Our world need to be healed
from this spiritual brokenness.
We’ve divided ourselves in the name
of God for way, way, way too long.
And, you know, it
doesn’t really matter if you’re gay or straight –
God created us –
sexuality, spirituality, sex, spirit, all of it –
for us to live in
intimacy and relationship with God and each other.
It’s been broken
for too long.
We march today
for allowing God to repair that breach.
I love the NT
story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch.
Philip, a disciple of Jesus, had a
conversation with a eunuch –
that is, a man
who was some sort of sexual minority.
In 1st-century
biblical writings, eunuch refers to more than castrated males.
It refers to
others who are on the margins because of their sexual status.
The eunuch – according
to Jewish understanding –
did not have the
religious status of a man who was a patriarch, a father.
The writers of
the Hebrew Bible compare him to a dry tree.
He would have no descendants – the
end of the line.
A
spiritual curse, really.
As Philip told
him the story of how God’s love is known in Jesus,
how Jesus loved
and healed and brought God to all,
especially to
those who were excluded.
the eunuch – sexual outsider that he was
– asked a courageous question:
Here is
water, he said, What is to prevent me from being baptized?
The Eunuch seems
to shout at us from the pages of scripture:
Wait! That Genesis
saga isn’t the whole story!
I can be one whose sexuality DEFINES him – AND a
follower of Christ!!
My friends, they
thought he had no descendents. But, you
know what?
WE are the
Eunuch’s descendents!!
WE have asked the
question, too:
What is to prevent US from being baptized?
From
being claimed and marked as God’s own?
From
coming out in the daylight as sexual and spiritual beings?
We’ve asked the
question again and again of the church:
Here is
water.
What is to
prevent us from having our gay/lesbian/trans/straight and
out bodies marked
with God’s love?
Here is the
table.
What is to keep
us from being fed?
Here is the
pulpit.
What is to
prevent us from telling our stories about how God is alive in our lives?
I hope that we
will take it the next step and say:
Here is the
blessing of marriage.
What is to
prevent us from receiving it?
And then, let’s go
even further!
Here is our
bedroom.
What is to
prevent us from encountering God is sacred, joyful, delightful sex?
As the Eunuch’s
descendents –
queer people who
love God, seek to know God and be blessed –
WE MARCH TODAY!!
And I believe
that we march knowing a profound secret that the world longs to know!
Our secret is
this: in the light of God’s love, we
can be made whole.
We don’t have to
be divided anymore!
Gay, straight,
trans – none of us – have to be divided anymore.
We don’t have
confine parts of ourselves to the shadow places of life,
whispering in
secret, covering our nakedness.
I don’t have to
tell you what does!
God can heal our
separation of body and soul, of sexuality and spirituality, of sex and spirit.
We can integrate
our passions and love God and another with holy fire and blessing.
May God be with us and in us every step of the way. Amen.