"Coming Out to God" Exodus 3:1-12

This is the first in four PRIDE sermons for the month of June:

LGBT people are making a difference in our nation and in our world as we actively strive for acceptance, for justice and social changes that mean we are included in all of the privileges society has to offer any other person regardless of sexuality, race, color, ethnicity, creed or religion. We are truly coming out.
Have you ever stopped, though, to notice that the Bible is a book about coming out? The Garden of Eden in Genesis chapter 3 is a story about coming out of innocence and shame to enjoy our bodies and sexual pleasure which is a radically different way of looking at the story than focusing on sin and punishment.
Joseph and his coat of many colors is the coming out of a dreamer, a person with a special gift. We who are gay or queer have special gifts to share with our communities. Joseph’s very special coat of many colors, a rainbow robe, if you will, is a promise that our differences are not wrong.

Coming out to love is reflected in the biblical story of David and Jonathan’s passionate devotion to each other, and in the story of Ruth and Naomi’s loyalty and devotion to each other. Their relationships may not have been sexual, but what justifies any relationship isn’t the sex but the love that is involved.
Coming out of privilege is the story of Esther, a beautiful queen who is secretly Jewish in a Persian culture. Esther comes out of her privilege to identify with her people in order to save them from a decree of death. She asks her people to fast in solidarity with her as she risks her life before the king, mirroring queer people who can pass as heterosexuals and yet give up their privilege in society and come out boldly.

Jonah, the reluctant preacher, who comes out of anger and learns the hard way what God intends for him to do after running away the first time. Jonah is called to preach repentance to the Ninevites—the very people oppressing Jonah’s people. When the Ninevites repent, Jonah becomes angry because they received the same mercy and grace as the Israelites however Jonah didn’t want to share this with his oppressors. It will do us all good to remember that God is even the God of our oppressors The same God in whose image we are created as LGBT people is the same God of the Christian Coalition, of Focus on the Family, who actively persecute us today. We must not forget to offer our oppressors opportunities to turn from their shameful ways and receive God’s mercy and grace.

Coming out of “traditional family values,” at the age of 12 Jesus ignored his family’s departure from Jerusalem to go and sit in the temple, his “Father’s House;” He left his family, he never married, and as far as we know he never had any children; he called his disciples away from their families and told them he had no home, claiming his message would set family members against one another. Jesus was hardly the supporter of so-called traditional family values—meaning one man, one woman and some children. Instead Jesus extended the meaning of family by calling anyone who does the will of God his brothers, sisters and mother. Jesus defended the eunuchs—traditionally outcasts—by drawing a circle of love and acceptance that included them.

The story of the Samaritan Woman is a story about coming out as ourselves. Jesus’ conversation with her at the well is just one example of the way Jesus did not follow traditional society’s norms for religion, race, gender, or morality—he spoke to a Samaritan woman who had five husbands and who wasn’t married to her current partner. He offered her living water—acceptance and hope for a new way of living—and she was transformed. Jesus’ encounter with this woman illustrates the call to a right relationship with God. When we seek transformation of ourselves we find Jesus calling out to us, repeating: “God loves you, God loves you, God loves you.”

The biggest coming out in all of history is the exodus from Egypt. Their experience parallels our own coming out experience, our own joyous release from the captivity of heterosexism. But then we are faced with possible death in the wilderness, no real home, no road map to follow. We may even want to go back to our former life of captivity, the closet, where at least we felt safely hidden and had food to eat.
Leaving the wilderness Moses and the Israelites got close to the promised land but they did not think that they could conquer those who were living there, so they stayed by an oasis in the desert, deciding to settle for far less. As LGBT Christians we are often told to wait and be patient for full inclusion, but waiting will not prompt the changes that need to take place. It is agitation and discomfort, not complacency that brings about the necessary changes. It is hard being out of the closet and working for change.

Exodus is a story about transformation. God tells Moses in Exodus 19: 3-6
3-6 As Moses went up to meet God, GOD called down to him from the mountain: "Speak to the House of Jacob, tell the People of Israel: 'You have seen what I did to Egypt and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to me. If you will listen obediently to what I say and keep my covenant, out of all peoples you'll be my special treasure. The whole Earth is mine to choose from, but you're special: a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.'

MCC’s Rev. Dr. Mona West says that the haibru in the ancient East were known as the aliens, the strangers, the marginalized. She points out that word is related etymologically and sociologically by Walter Bruggemann to the biblical term Hebrew, coming from the root word abar, meaning ‘to cross over.” The Hebrews were those who crossed over boundaries, who had no respect for imperial boundaries, someone who is not confined by boundaries of others but crosses over them in a desperate search for the necessities of life. It is these people who were transformed into the nation of Israel.

Bernhard Anderson says that Exodus is the crucial event by which Israel became a historically self-aware community. It is a coming out story of a people.
That identity did not happen the moment that they came out of their closets in Egypt and crossed the Red Sea. It was through their wilderness journey and their conquest of the Promised Land, as they faced trials and rebelled against God that they were able to discover more fully what it meant to be a holy nation. Even once they attained the Promised Land they found that this journey to self-discovery had not ended. They faced new oppression and enslavement and were challenged to live fully as God’s people who embraced a new identity.

In today’s scripture passage from Exodus, Moses is out tending his flock. He believes he has covered up his previous life and would not be bothered by memories of his privileged existence in Pharaoh’s court, nor the suffering of his own people in their slavery. He has escaped a potential death penalty put upon him when in a fit of anger he kills one of the oppressors of his people. While trying to find grazing space for his flock, he encounters God in the form of a bush that burns but is not consumed by the fire and is introduced to God who calls Godself “I am the I am,” or I am who I am. God came out to Moses and in so doing God calls Moses to accept himself. God encourages Moses to be all that God had created Moses to be.
The Bible teaches us that we are made in the very image of God. Just like Moses, we sometimes try to argue with God: Surely, you wouldn’t pick me? Why, God, I’m not worthy. We make excuses about why God couldn’t or wouldn’t choose us and why we can’t be or do what God is calling us to be and do. But God keeps right on calling us, refusing to accept our excuses or our reluctance, moving us forward toward the promised future God wants us to inhabit.

When I was much younger I didn’t understand this urging by God to move me out of my former life and into a new existence that God had waiting for me. I didn’t know other possibilities existed for me than what society and family told me that they expected of me. Knowing I was different and not understanding that difference I believed what my church told me was about its so-called traditional beliefs about same sex love and what it believed was the only acceptable relationship between two people: marriage between a man and woman. I forced myself into the mold of complacency and tradition when I married my former wife.

Don’t misunderstand. I did love my wife. She was my best friend for many years. We formed a loving family that was blessed with four children of whom I am very proud and who I love more than life itself. But throughout those four years of dating and 32 years of married life I couldn’t help but think that there was something I was missing, something that my heart and soul longed for. For many of those years I was miserable and depressed as I tried to put down the real, true me and live a closeted life of acceptance by society.

Seven and a half years ago my life changed. My wife, for her own reasons, decided to end the marriage. I have to tell you that though I was upset and angry with her decision, I was also relieved. Throughout the years I had the God-given privilege of dealing with the question of whether or not God loved me just as I was, just as God had created me. I had prayed for God to change me, to make me straight, to take away my desire to be with another man, but the same answer kept coming back to me, “My grace is sufficient for you.”

In other words, God kept telling me that God loved me just the way God had created me and that God wasn’t going to change me.

So forced out of an unhappy marriage, I had to deal with the question of what did God want me to do now? It was late in 1993 and we had moved back to Knoxville, I tried going back to the same church that had ordained me to the Gospel ministry more than twenty years earlier. I was accepted, even asked to preach, to join a committee whose purpose was to plant another Southern Baptist Church in the area. Because I had previously founded a church that grew rapidly into a major congregation, I was even asked to pastor the new church. They could accept my being divorced, after all it was a fairly liberal church, but I knew that if I revealed my true self to them that their invitations to be involved would evaporate, or at least raise some significant questions about my suitability in those new roles.

So I left that church and began attending the Gay Men’s Discussion group. I found a group of men who shared my feelings and who supported one another in the questions life was handing us to answer. I found Christian men who were gay and who invited me to attend MCC Knoxville where I found a community that accepted me and loved me just as God had created me. There were many ups and downs I had to face as the marriage was dissolved and I built a new life for myself, but I found a supportive community that helped me to negotiate all the hurdles I had to overcome.
God had called me to be a Christian minister. My sexuality and major conflict with others over what our stance as a church should be concerning ministry to the marginalized persons of society, had caused me to leave the active ministry several years before. But at MCC Knoxville, a place of restitution I found grace and mercy and came to realize that God had not changed God’s desire for me to be in Christian ministry. That church acknowledged my history and my calling and eventually made a place for me to renew my vows as a minister and serve them and God. I will always thank God for the wonderful people at MCC Knoxville, for Pastor Bob Galloway and for all who gave me the love and care, mercy and grace that I needed to move forward with God into a new future of possibilities.

God changed Moses. Moses learned to accept himself as God had created him and gifted him. Moses discovered that God didn’t care about the same things that other people cared about.

Listen carefully, God is not calling you or me to become someone different than we are. God is calling you and me to become all that God created us to be…to be ourselves.

People often thank me for my gifts of ministry, for my ministry to them and to this church. That seems strange to me, because all I have done while I have been with you is to be myself. When I try to be different than the person God created me to be I don’t seem to be able to do much of anything. It is only when I allow myself to be my self that real ministry seems to get done.

Previously, during all of my life I was told that I wasn’t good enough for God, that I had to change myself and change my life to make myself acceptable to God. Boy, oh, boy, was that a great big ole lie. God didn’t ever want me to change myself; God wanted me to accept myself, to love myself exactly as God had created me.
God, the I am who I am God, the I will be who I will be God, wanted me to finally stand up and say to the world Hey, I am who I am. I will be who I will be. I am exactly the way God wants me to be. God loves me just the way I am. I do not have to change to be loved by God. By the way, world, I am a gay Christian minister.
Like Moses or Esther, there are people in our world who have lived the great “I Am”—the assurance that who they are matters and that their self worth is not built on definitions others provide.

Born in 1924, black feminist poet Audre Lorde grew up in Harlem and spent her life teaching and writing; her honest free verse gave a powerful witness about a black woman who loved women. When faced with breast cancer, Lorde reevaluated her life and become even more determined to have her words and speeches match her life. Writing of her mortality in her essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, “she says she regretted her silences most, “My silence had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.” She believed that culture had silenced women, blacks and lesbians specifically, but that all people could be silenced for one reason or another. Being silent about your truth in life will not protect you, even though it may feel safer. Coming out and being true to one’s self—who one was created to be—energizes one’s work and brings more life to all those around you.
Speaking the truth about her life, Lorde’s words and life inspired many women, lesbians and straight alike, to honor the truth of their lives and name themselves rather than letting society use derogatory labels. Rather than choosing to live an invisible life in the closet, Lorde claimed her God-given identity.

In his inaugural speech as the first black president of South Africa in May 1994, Nelson Mandela, who had spent 27 years in prison resisting apartheid in his country, said “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous? Actually who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. You were born to manifest the Glory of God within.”
The Rev. Jay E. Johnson, Programming and Development Director, for the Pacific School of Religion’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, says the following:
“There is a price to pay for telling the truth, just as there is a price for remaining silent. Of course, there’s more to human thriving than truthful speech—but there can’t be less. Speaking the truth won’t guarantee we’ll live authentically—but there’s no hope of doing so if we lie or keep silent. Nearly twenty years ago, AIDS activists reminded us that silence equals death. Not long after that they flipped the coin over and reminded us that action equals life.
“Breaking silence by speaking the truth is a form of action for the sake of life. Speech is action insofar as speaking the truth changes people—it changes both those who speak and those who listen. The words conversations and conversion come from the same root. The truth about the ways things are and about who we are tends to do that—it changes quite a lot.”

The Beautiful Body of Christ 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

The Beautiful Body of Christ
Read 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

Paul actually begins his teachings about the church being the body of Christ back in Chapter 10 of 1 Corinthians when he writes: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. (1 Cor. 10:16-17).

You and I together make up the body of Christ present and powerful in Seattle. The church, the body of Christ in the world today isn’t about buildings and budgets or programs and promotions, no matter how important American society tends to make us believe in those things.

Several years ago I went to visit an historic church in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania while on leading a youth mission trip. It was a beautiful cathedral the sanctuary of which could sit more than 2,000. However, on the day we went to worship with them there were less than 100 pitifully gathered together at the front of that enormous canyon of a room. I asked how they could care for and support such a large facility with such a small congregation. “Oh,” they bragged, “We’ve got tens of millions of dollars invested and the interest alone keeps the church running and the building cared for. We could go on for a hundred years or more without ever passing the offering plate again.” I wondered if they even cared about anyone getting involved in volunteering to do ministry to anyone. They had become nothing but a building and a budget. Everywhere we went there were signs that said things like: “Don’t touch the fabrics.” “Stay on the marked pathway.” “No entrance to this area allowed.” “Restricted admission.” They weren’t a church any longer. They were a museum.

Truly being the church, the Body of Christ is about persons united in belief and faith, creating a bond of love with each other by serving Christ and serving each other through the talents, and abilities that God has given to each one of us and using those to the fullest extent possible for the development and growth of the New Community of God.

What unites us? The powerful presence of God, the Living Jesus Christ, whose Holy Spirit dwells within each one of us and connects us to all of the rest of us.

There were some obvious problems in the church at Corinth that Paul was addressing in his letters to them. These new first century Christians were trying to create and grow one of the first churches in the world. They were doing something that hadn’t been done before. Paul had to help them do a lot of course corrections as they drifted off the path of Christ and into selfish human behaviors.

Apparently some of them felt that they were more important than the other folk in the church because they had a unique talent or ability that others didn’t possess. It probably wouldn’t have been unusual to hear someone think or even say, “I’m a better Christian than you are because I’m a missionary,” or “I’m the best Christian because I’m a spiritual healer.”
This need to one-up everyone else caused some might big problems between people and pretty much took the focus of that congregation off of Christ as they got into some petty arguments with each other about who was going to rule over who and who was going to have the most important position of leadership in their church.

Leading up to Advent and Christmas this past year we took a Biblical journey to Jerusalem with Jesus and his disciples. Do you remember a similar situation where James and John wanted to Lord it over everyone else by asking Jesus to put them into the most important positions of leadership when he establishes his earthly kingdom. Their request upset the other disciples and created quite a scene that only ended when Jesus turned around to them and asked them, “Just what are you boys arguing about?”

Of course, James and John and the others didn’t understand that the New Community of God Jesus would establish wouldn’t be an earthly government with positions of authority and power but a spiritual community where each person was to become a servant to others.

Jesus said it this way, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.” Or, in contemporary language, “If you want to be first in God’s New Community then you will have to go to the very end of the line.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t like going to the end of the line in any situation. In fact, at the grocery store I’ll even switch lanes if I think I can get a shorter line. However, when I do there is inevitably a problem at the checkout counter… “Price check in lane one!”…and the line I left behind a few moments ago because it was too long suddenly become the shorter line that I should have stayed in. Isn’t life ironic that way?

Paul extends Jesus’ teaching by telling us that we are all a part of the body of Christ, the New Community of God: No part of the body can say that it is the most important part, nor can it say it isn’t important, nor that other parts are more important than it is. The body of Christ needs every single part that God blesses the body with. Likewise as we grow our church, the New Community of God in Seattle, we need every single person that God blesses us with, no matter how different he or she might be from you and me.

It is very clear that Paul speaks about the health of us all being dependent upon our honoring and caring for each other. We all need each other, we all have something to give and we need to liberate ourselves from any barrier that we or society erects to keep us from achieving God’s goal.

Reading from the scriptures in Nazareth as he begins his ministry Jesus tells his hometown community that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him, to heal, to lift up, to open eyes and free the prisoners. These are the things that Jesus will do in his ministry and he will not allow anyone to keep him from accomplishing that ministry even when he takes the Good News to those who his hometown folk feel aren’t worthy to know or receive God’s love. Now Paul says that we are the body of Christ, but the question we have to ask ourselves is are we a courageous body? IF we know what it is to be the Body of Christ, that is, if we know what it is we should be doing, if we are listening to God’s Word, then are we brave enough to bring justice and mercy to all of those who live on the margins of society and in the shadows of our community? If we are to know God fully, then we must live justly, we must be involved in bringing into reality God’s just community. If the world is to know Jesus through us then we must be about the business of bringing the good news to everyone, not just to those who are like us, but those who are different from us, too. But to do that effectively, you and I must learn how to live together harmoniously within the church. We cannot take to the world what we aren’t living out and sharing with each other.

We don’t get to chose who is a part of the our New Community of God anymore than my leg got to chose to be a part of my body or could decide to go off by itself because it didn’t like my nose. I don’t like my nose, but I wouldn’t chose to live without it. My leg doesn’t get to decide such things anymore than you and I get to decide who belongs or doesn’t belong to our community of faith.

It is God who invites. It is God who welcomes. If God invites and welcomes then you and I must do the same to and for each other and for anyone that God sends our way. To do otherwise would be to go against God’s Will and God’s Way. It would mean becoming less than God intends for us to become.

Never forget that you and I together are the beautiful body of Christ.