Taking a Chance on Love: God's Kind of Love

Scripture Passages you should read: I Corinthians 13, Luke 4:21-30, and Jeremiah 1:4-10.

You may think it from the way I begin today’s sermon that I’m going to talk about something other than God’s kind of love today and how we should evidence kind of love in our lives by loving ourselves and loving others like we love ourselves.

We have this picture in our minds of Jesus as always being overly polite and extremely courteous, never ruffling feathers or making anyone angry or upset. We snap at other Christians when they say or do something that we don’t like, “Jesus wouldn’t act that way,” as if we are delivering some kind of chastisement for their so-called offensive behavior. But is that a true picture of Jesus or even of a Christian. Are we supposed to always be so meek and mild as to never offend, never upset, never disagree, never act with courage and honesty? I don’t think so. Is it ever possible that doing or saying the Christ-like thing might just result in a riot?

I’ve said many times that Jesus was first and foremost honest, calling for persons to lovingly act with integrity, honor, justice and mercy toward others. Jesus wasn’t afraid to be honest with people when they misunderstood and misinterpreted God’s Truth from the Scriptures. That’s one of the biggest reasons why the religious authorities of his day had him arrested and killed. They couldn’t allow anyone to disagree with their interpretation of who God was and how God would act in the world. Killing Jesus would prove they were right and put an end to his kind of insolence, wouldn’t it?

In Today’s gospel reading from Luke, Jesus is the hometown hero returning to his adoring family and friends where they are sure he will work for them the same kind of miracles he is reported to have done for others. Why shouldn’t they expect this from him? They deserve it, don’t they? He grew up here among them. He owes it to them. When he begins preaching however they quickly develop a very different opinion of him.

This scripture story is an example of just how honest Jesus was with his own family and friends, as well as with others, and as Dan read to us, the folks he preached to that day tried to kill their hometown hero because he pointed out to them their own misunderstanding of how God would act in Love toward those who they thought didn’t deserve God’s Love and Care. In fact they felt that such people, the gentiles, were so far beyond the hope of God’s love and help that they could rightly ignore them, reject them, even hate them without any fear that God would disagree with their opinions or actions. But Jesus reminds them that the scriptures tell a very different story about whom God is and how God will act.

The prophets of old said that when God declares the Jubilee, that great celebration party of God’s New Community, all people will come together, even the hated gentiles, and the diseased, and the handicapped, and the stranger and even the eunuch; everyone that they thought God would exclude would be right there at the party with them sharing in the same happy blessings that they thought only they deserved. What? Those filthy people coming and enjoying the same holy blessings as we are promised? That was more than they could accept from him. It went against everything they thought and felt to be true about God and about them.

The truth is they were terribly confused about who Jesus was. They thought they knew this kid from down the street, Mary and Joe’s oldest child. He may have gone off and made a name for himself, but just who does he think he is telling us this kind of crap? But Jesus refuses to fulfill their expectations of him and so ‘filled with rage’ they try to throw him over a bluff to his death. Not only does Jesus elude them physically, but he eludes them spiritually as well.

Have you heard about any modern day religious authorities who think or act this same way when we don’t meet their expectations of who and what a Christian should be? They yell at us “You have no right to disagree with us because we have history on our side.” So did Jesus’ adversaries. “We understand the scriptures exactly the way God intended for people to understand scriptures,” they say. That was what Jesus’ adversaries believed about themselves. “We know exactly what God thinks,” they say. So claimed Jesus adversaries. And like Jesus we have to say to these modern day religious authorities, “We don’t think so. We think that there is another way to look at these scriptures and to understand them that are more in line with God’s kind of love.”

Some of you sitting here today have been so beaten down by others by their way of interpreting scripture that you have given up on loving yourself or ever being loved by anyone else, let alone by God, because of who you are and who you love. Listen to me clearly, when you are in a situation where religious authorities make your feel rejected, hated, excluded and judged, because you aren’t living up to their heterosexual standards, you aren’t in a situation where God’s kind of love is being shared with you the way that God wants God’s loved shared with you. So get out of that situation! Go someplace where you feel God’s kind of love evidenced in the hospitality, and welcome and acceptance that God wants you to have so you can live a healthy, happy life together with those who share your best interests and want to see you succeed being yourself exactly the way that God created you to be!

Some of you flip flop frequently between religious communities. You may come here to get some relief from the oppression you feel from other religious communities, then you start to question your feeling better about yourself and you go to back to them and get beat up and abused one more time. Stop that. Don’t let them do that to you anymore. Give up being a part of those kinds of negative religious groups and claim the wonderful, positive, life-giving Love of God for yourself. Love yourself with God’s kind of love!

Remember: God knew you were queer long before you came out about it. How? Because God created you that way. Accept that if God created you gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, or trans, or heterosexual, then God loves you exactly the way that God created you and God wants you to live an abundant happy life exactly the way you were created. God doesn’t make mistakes. You don’t have to change yourself, even if that were possible, which I believe it isn’t, in order to be loved by God. God already loves you exactly the way God created you.

Others may try to tell you that it is a failure of faith on your part that you won’t allow God to change you, when in reality it is a failure of faith on their part to accept God as being much greater and much more creative, loving, and welcoming than they ever thought possible. That was the reason the people in his hometown wanted to kill Jesus. His concept of God was so much bigger than their own, that they couldn’t accept it, couldn’t and wouldn’t even let him say it out loud.

I get hate mail all the time telling me I’m going to hell because of my understanding of God and God’s Truth which I try to share with you. We got one of those letters this past week from an anonymous person in Florida telling us that gay cities in America were going to be destroyed and all of us gathered here today will be destroyed, too, simply because the person who wrote the letter believe God hates Queer persons. Mostly I just throw those kind of things away. They aren’t worth the time it takes me to open them, and I don’t read them once I figure out that it is hate mail. But I used to be bothered greatly by that kind of belief. Yes, truthfully, there was a time as a teenager when I thought it might just be possible that I would go to hell simply because I was gay because I believed the lies that others were telling me about God. I also knew there wasn’t anything I could do to change myself. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to change.

It took me a long time to get this God-loves-you-just-the-way-God-created-you stuff straight in my own head. I prayed for many long years for God to take away the gay. I had been so thoroughly brain-washed by those in authority over me telling me what the scriptures said that I didn’t read those scriptures for myself to discover what they really said. I thought my only choice as a Christian was to live my life unhappily in a heterosexual relationship with a wife. Don’t misunderstand. I loved my wife and my children. I still do in fact.

But, imagine my surprise when I got to seminary and began to read all of the scriptures on my own and see those few verses used against gays and lesbians, trans and bi folk, were just that, a very small part of a vast amount of scripture which told a extremely different story about the incredibly affirming love of God for everyone, even for me, even if I was gay.

The first thing I started doing was to stop repeating what other people had told me was true and to stop acting on their false truths in my ministry with others. Imagine the complaints I got from my churches when I began to include Queer people and other outsiders in my ministry, to support them, to encourage them, to love them? It was okay as long as I was going away from the church to minister to them during the week. But when I started inviting these Queer folk into the church and allowing them to volunteer to work in the church they decided they couldn’t put up with that any longer. “You can’t have a gay man reading the scriptures because someone might think our church thinks gay people are okay.” “You can’t have a divorced person teaching a children’s class, someone might think we supported her decision to divorce her husband.” “You can’t let a pregnant teenager interpret for the death, someone might think we encourage premarital sex among our teens.” Oh, they didn’t try to throw me of a high bluff to my death, but I got kicked out of the church I had originally started in my own home. I had led that church to grow from a small handful of people to more than 300 worshipping together on Sunday mornings in less than two years, but that congregation had no place for a pastor, even the pastor that had led them to grow so quickly in so short a period of time, if that pastor believed that when the Bible said that God loves everyone that God really did mean everyone.

The leaders of that church wanted to keep excluding, hating, and rejecting those who they felt didn’t live up to their kind of definition of holiness, be they gay, lesbian, pregnant out of wedlock, divorced, or of a different race or ethnic group. Their vision of church was so radically different from the one I had when I began the church that I didn’t recognize that church as God’s church any longer. They called a meeting to censure me because according to them I wasn’t administering my pastorate in a biblical manner since I had officiated at the marriage of two formerly divorced persons. It was an angry, hostile group. There was no way I could win, so I got up and I walked out of that church and never went back. You and I owe it to ourselves to not stay in so-called Christian situations where people are twisting and breaking the Word of God into something God never intended and doesn’t desire. Rejection and hate are never part of God’s kind of love.

Several years later, following the failure of my own marriage for reasons other than my sexuality, I ultimately came out about who I truly was. And I found this wonderful denomination called Metropolitan Community Churches where I could be myself and could enjoy the company of others who felt about God’s kind of Love for all persons just like I did, and I could be a pastor again living my life with integrity and truth and love and hope.

We who are Queer have been excluded from communities because we haven’t fit their heterosexual norms. But we should ask ourselves the question today, “Have we excluded members of our own Queer community because they don’t fit our expectations of what it means to be Queer?” Are we doing the same thing to others that has been done to us? We need to seriously consider and answer this question if we are to truly become the New Community of God that welcomes and includes everyone.
God knows you and me more intimately than anyone else could ever know us. God’s love and knowledge of us is deeper and more profound than anyone else’s, including hometown family and friends, or even our own selves. This is what the Jeremiah scripture is trying to tell us today. When God called Jeremiah to be God’s prophet, Jeremiah responds a lot like you and me. “Oh, no God, you can’t possibly mean poor, little, pathetic me. Surely there is someone much better you could call upon to do your great and important work.” But God is insistent and tells Jeremiah that God knew Jeremiah before he was formed in his mother’s womb, long before he was born God had chosen and blessed Jeremiah with the abilities and skills to do exactly what God was calling him to do. God knows you and I better than anyone else knows us because God created us exactly the way we are. God knew us before we came to know ourselves. God is creatively present in our formation and our sexual orientation and our gender expression.
“One commentator I read this week (Allen) says that we are all OUT to God. God calls LGBT people from the very beginning and knows us in every moment. We are set apart by God and given the holy work of being fully ourselves. Sometimes just being who we are as LGBT people and witnessing to God's knowledge, love and acceptance of us in this world is our (holy work), our (divine) calling. Being known is like coming out—being out is being known.” (Out in Scripture).

We did not read it today, but Psalm 71 affirms that God who knows us chooses us to speak out God’s truth. God is our ever-present refuge from a world that shames us. God is our confidence in our weary fight against injustice. God is our stronghold in the climb over the seemingly unmovable rock of prejudice. (Out in Scripture)

How do we demonstrate God’s New Community to the world around us and welcome them into to celebrate the party with us? Paul tells us it is by loving others with God’s kind of love. It is a love that proclaims the good news of grace and acceptance, and it commands us to love God, and to love our neighbors as ourselves—to do justice and to love mercy. Now, lest you fear I am now going to preach on 1 Cor 13 also right now, I have good news for you. That is a sermon for another day.

Remember: No matter who you relate to this week, take a chance on Love. Be God’s light and love to the world by what you do and what you say. For Love, God’s kind of Love, is the more excellent way!