Preached Sunday, August 15, 2010
Luke 12:46-59
This isn’t an easy text to preach on, or even to understand. We just don’t like for Jesus to say things like we read in this passage. This isn’t the Jesus we usually think we know. This is a very different Jesus. Jesus uses the idea of fire as a symbol of judgment. But it is important to remember that though Jesus uses the language of judgment and social violence, that he never resorted to any violent actions, and never was suggesting that violence should become a part of our lives in disagreements with others.
We want a Jesus that talks about harmony and peace, not one that talks about conflicts between people. And then he goes even further and says that he will be the cause of such conflicts. In short Jesus is saying, “Follow me and you can expect there will be trouble and misunderstandings. It’s a given fact. Don’t think life will be comfortable and easy if you follow me.”
(From Out in Scripture) “But this passage begs the question of why Jesus would want to use such violent imagery when he was peaceable. One reason is to remind us that a life as a follower of Christ will inevitably lead to conflict. Jesus is certainly the "Prince of Peace," but that is far different from peace at any cost. The peace that Jesus sought to bring is first and foremost a peace with God. Such a peace will lead to peace among humanity, but we must remember the direction in which godly peace flows. It flows first from a life lived in communion and obedience to God and then outward to the world around us. What Jesus is reminding us is that such a peace is not always welcome and is often met with violent resistance. Jesus' words are cautionary for those who take a life of discipleship too lightly”
Jesus’ disciples have continually misunderstood what he has been telling them about the New Community of God he will usher into existence. They think it will be an earthly kingdom and them will be the officials in charge of everything, enjoying the honor and prestige of their new positions next to him, their new King. But Jesus keeps telling them that’s not the kind of community he will create. He is facing a time of turmoil that will ultimately lead to his death. He is not so much being a prophet of his own future as he is being a good interpreter of the signs all around him. He knows he is on a collision course with the powers and authorities of his day and that they will use all the necessary violence and perversion of the law they can muster to get rid of him because to allow his teachings to take hold on their society would mean that they would be out of power. That’s something that they won’t let happen.
Jesus isn’t satisfied with the status quo. Greek stoicism taught that there was a certain order to everything, even human society and that everyone had a place and should stay in their place. Change was not something you desired for your society because that would mean adjustments and adjustments often mean somebody loses and someone else wins, somebody suffers and some one else reaps a reward. But Jesus isn’t buying into that kind of thinking, because Jesus knows that change must happen in a society if the poor and the outcast, the widow and the orphan, the lame and sick, the eunuch and leper are to be included in the community, too. And Jesus will not tolerate a future where anyone is rejected or cast out of God’s new community.
Many fundamentalist Christian leaders talk abundantly about how Jesus supports their interpretation of Family Values. But that isn’t what we read in the gospels about what Jesus is actually saying. Respect your parents? When Mary comes to Jesus with his brothers to take him home because they think he’s gone off his rocker, he refuses to speak to them and tells his disciples that his mother and brothers, his family, are those who obey his teachings. Pretty harsh stuff from a guy who is held up as the icon of Christian Family Values.
Think about it for a minute. Jesus never did what was expected of a male in his society. He did not have what we would call a home, though many do think he probably had a house in Capernaum. He did not have a regular trade to make a living at, instead he roamed the country as an itinerant preacher, hardly a wealth producing occupation. He did not have a wife or children, something someone of his age would have been expected to do. And he apparently encouraged a whole lot of men to leave behind those same expectations of their society and follow along after him from place to place, living off of the wealth of the women who supported Jesus’ ministry with their money. That’s what the scriptures tell us. I’m not making any of this up. He was not a stand up macho man living up to society’s expectation of who and what a man should be. He was in fact a very Queer person and he called his followers to become Queer persons too, people who were outside of the expected norm of that society. That’s what Queer really means.
The patriarchal society of the time, that means that the father was the primary person in the family structure, was modeled after the Roman Empire with the most powerful father of them all being the Roman Emperor. Christian fundamentalists will still tell you that they believe the best family structure is that of the superior father with an inferior mother and their children living a life together with the father having the last word on everything and everyone else obeying him peacefully without disagreement or turmoil. Sounds like a great way of living if you are the father of the family. But what if you aren’t the father. What rights do you have? None, if Dad chooses not to give them to you.
Jesus said that his real family was those who followed after him, those who took his teaching seriously and applied it to their lives and to their relationships with others. He modeled for them what that meant by how he cared for other people. I’ve pointed it out before Jesus had great eyesight. He saw the person in trouble before anyone else could see them. Jesus saw people just as they were, not as they wanted to be seen by society. He looked at them and he really saw them, and then he spoke to them and cared for them in ways that demonstrated to them that he was seeing them and he was caring for them. The blind man who was rejected from his Synagogue because Jesus had healed him: Jesus heard about what had happened to him and went to find him and care for him. The woman on the street who had been bleeding for years and touched the hem of his robe believing that if she did so she would be healed. And when she did, and was healed, Jesus stopped the crowd and found her and cared for her. He restored her to society, a society that had rejected her because she had something different about her that she couldn’t change and so society rejected her and cast her out and refused to associate with her, calling her unclean and unfit for human society. But Jesus brought her into the New Community of God he was creating.
In the Queer community we talk about our chosen family, those who we have built a family relationship with because often we have been rejected by our own families of birth because of who we love or because of our gender identity. You are my chosen family. In many ways you are more important to me than any natural family member I have, except perhaps my children and grandchildren. But then, you are my family who I am in contact with every single day of my life, unlike my children who live on the other side of the continent.
Plus, some of my natural family members don’t want to associate with me. They think I’m sinful and unclean because of who I love.
I’ve been pissed off all week about the kinds of rejection and isolation that members of our church family have gotten from their own natural family members. I have been told about parents that reject their own children because they are gay or trans or lesbian. Parents who tell their children that he or she must change and be just like everyone else if they are to receive the love of their parents. Sometimes it is subtle, and sometimes it isn’t. One parent told her child this past week that the blessings he was enjoying in his life which he attributed to God, were not from God because God wouldn’t and couldn’t bless anyone who lived the kind of lifestyle that he did. That’s blatantly telling her own child that he is going to hell because he is gay, something he can’t change about himself because that is who God created him to be and how God created him to live his life, in love with another person of the same sex. That’s pretty damn cruel for any parent to say to his or her child.
I wasn’t going to preach this way today. I was going to preach differently, but the stories you told me in person and over the phone kept adding up and it made me mad. Then on Thursday I got up and turned my computer on, giving up the idea that I would preach a sermon this way, and there on my facebook page was a question from a complete stranger, a young lady in her twenties who is a friend of someone who came to our church. Her question: do you promote homosexuality?
I sent her a message asking: Who are you and why would you ask me this question?
She replied: Just wondering because the Bible says it is wrong.
Thus began a conversation. One which I almost didn’t have with her because I wasn’t really in the right mindset. But I prayed and asked God to help me help her see how wrong she was and hopefully open up her heart and her mind to begin to see things differently than she had been taught by others. Listen friends, whoever you are, when you feel that the Bible gives you the right to reject another person or cut them out of your life or out of the New Community of God, then you aren’t reading the same Bible that I am reading and you aren’t acting like a follower of Jesus.
Here is the usual thinking of our fundamentalist friends: If you are homosexual then you are a sinner in need of forgiveness for your abominable sinfulness. They equate homosexuality as a more horrible crime in their thinking than even murder. You don’t think I’m right? I’ve been in churches where members were excommunicated because they were gay though they weren’t in a sexual relationship with anyone else, just gay. And that same church welcomed into its membership and eventually ordained and called to their staff a person who had committed murder during a robbery. Another church kicked a young man off its drama team because he appeared to be gay by how he spoke and used his hands when speaking, while allowing a young straight man to return to singing in their choir after he had an affair with a married women in the church and agreed to attended two counseling sessions with the pastor as penance. Penance if you are straight. No penance if you are gay. And you think I’m exaggerating. Wish that were true, but it’s not.
Jesus is saying that “Peace at all costs” has no place in the New Community of God. We must stand up for ourselves and for anyone else who is rejected from human society because they are simply different. I use the term Queer to refer to anyone who is different, not just sexually or gender wise.
This conflict will take its most horrible toll within our own families. Jesus knew that the family was where most of the turmoil would occur as individuals accepted and followed his teachings. Jesus was dethroning the family from its absolute claim over its members and freeing them to become what God created them to be and do what God was calling them to do. Jesus’ warning is not an invitation to the kind of religious fanaticism we often witness in ultra conservative or fringe groups like the Phelps family or Focus on the Family. Instead it is a passion that springs from the heart of our human condition. It is a passion for love, for change for the better, for justice for all, for a renewal of society so that no one is rejected and all are included. These are not the fanatical tenets of a cult leader, but they are the foundations of hope for the world.
The young lady who contacted me was named Michelle. We talked throughout the day on Thursday exchanging emails. I refused to discuss her questions about the Bible because she had already made up her mind about scripture. I did tell her that there were many passages in Leviticus that she obviously didn’t obey when she quoted me the Leviticus passage that says two men who have sex should be stoned to death. She responded by telling me that Jesus had freed her from the law and she wasn’t under any obligation to adhere or follow the Levite rules any longer, but she still persisted in using those same passages to tell me that I was under the law because I was a homosexual person.
The usual thinking goes this way: You are gay and you are a sinner in need of salvation. If you think you are a Christian then you need to think again, because you can’t be a Christian and gay at the same time. Therefore you must not be a Christian, so you are going to hell. When I persist that I am a Christian in these conversations I am told that I am a false teacher and as such I will enjoy an even more horrible experience in hell than I would have if I had simply been gay.
Sometimes they will allow that I can be gay and Christian and am therefore only in need of healing for my sickness. When I insist that I’m not sick and don’t need healing, then I am told I am possessed by an evil spirit and need to have it exorcised because it is keeping me seeing the truth. When I say that I am not possessed and that I am thinking very clearly then I am told that I am so far out of God’s will that God is going to give up on me and I can never receive forgiveness in this lifetime or the next.
When I point out to them that they are judging me, they tell me that they are only repeating to me what the scripture says and that they are responsible for saving me from a life in hell, even though they know nothing about me except that I am the pastor of this Queer congregation. It’s a circular argument, with many points in contradiction of other points, but it seems to be logical to them, even if it isn’t logical to me.
When I ask them why they would want to pick me out from the facebook pages or the phone book and contact me to tell me I am an abomination they usually tell me that it is because they love me but hate my sin. You’ve heard it as ‘hate the sin but love the sinner.” When I tell them I’m not sinning, in fact, I am living with my beloved partner in a committed relationship not unlike the one they enjoy with their own partner in life, they go back to telling me that I’m lost and headed for hell. I can’t seem to win this argument.
Now remember they say they love me and hate my sin. So I want to know what it is about me that they love, because love usually comes out of a relationship lived with another person. And as far as I know I didn’t ever have a relationship with these persons before they contacted me to condemn me. So I took a different approach with Michelle and began to tell her about my life, about my children, about my grandchildren, about my daughter that died five years ago, about my youngest daughter that was in a car accident this summer, about Mark and our life together, about this church and how we are growing and caring for people that other churches have rejected. I wanted Michelle to get to know me as more than just a gay pastor she read about on the internet. I am happy to tell you that her last two posts to me demonstrate that she made a change in her perception of me and began to see me as a real person. Her last post was an apology and a statement that she was sorry to hear about my daughters.
It may not happen for you. You may not get that person who has decided to confront you about your sexuality or gender and condemn you to ever see you as a real person, to begin to have a real relationship with you based on love and respect. But don’t stop advocating for yourself. Don’t stop trying to get them to see you as a beloved child of God created in the image of God and a beautiful follower of Jesus Christ. Sexuality and gender have nothing to do with following Jesus, no more so than the color of your skin, or the origin of your ancestors. It may take the rest of the world a long time to accept those facts, but those facts are true and you need to accept them for yourself.
(From Out in Scripture) “Even we in the LGBT community have remarkable freedom to worship as we see fit despite being cut off from larger faith communities. It is important for us to recognize that despite our difficulties, we have the ability to live our lives with a level of openness and security that many LGBT people in other parts of the world can't even imagine. Even when denied many of the same rights our fellow citizens enjoy, there are LGBT people around the world who would accept the level of freedom we have without complaint.
“The point is not to accept what we have, but to recognize that as we advocate for our equality we should not be surprised when we meet resistance. (Jesus met great resistance, even violence for his beliefs. As followers of Jesus should we expect anything less than the same thing?) Our encounter with God affirms our full humanity and it is from that place that we must speak out. As we speak from this place, we will meet resistance from those unwilling to hear God's voice as it relates to us. We also must not be so concerned with our own rights that we neglect to advocate for others around the world who live in fear and oppression.
Let me leave you with these words from another of today’s scripture passages: (Psalm 82:3-4)."Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked"
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