The Strip Tease: Take It Off! Take It All Off! Living Without Shame! John 8:1-11

This is the 4th Sermon of PRIDE 2011. I preached it at my church on June 19. It will also be preached at the Seattle PRIDE Community Worship Service on Saturday, June 25.

(Pink shirt and blue breast cancer tie hanging on front of pulpit)

This is my shirt of shame. It’s a gorgeous pink cotton dress shirt that I used to get particular pleasure out of wearing. I bought it a couple of years ago for Easter and have also used it to wear on days when I want to support women who have or who have survived breast cancer. I used to think I looked great in pink! I even got this nice Breast Cancer tie with the little pink ribbons across the blue background to wear with it.

A couple of months ago I wore the shirt to my retail job at Penney’s in Bellevue Square to celebrate my own sister’s 18th year of breast cancer survival. It turned out to not be a great day. One of the other employees decided to be difficult. Thought I tried to be patient and understanding and reflect Christ’s treatment of others in my supervisory capacity after repeated incidents with her, I had had enough and I spoke rather harshly to her. Now, I really don’t need this microphone, my voice booms out across rooms and people literally jerk their heads around to see whose talking. It used to be very useful when I needed to quiet down an auditorium of noisy children in public school. So, of course, everyone heard me tell the young lady that I was in charge and we would do things my way.

A customer who this saleslady was helping, but who had not heard what my co-worker had repeatedly said to me, only what I said to her, decided to come to the young lady’s defense and confront me in front of everyone present. In short, she said that she was tired of men attacking women verbally and that she wanted me to know that she was particularly displeased with my behavior. That would have been okay. I wasn’t very proud of myself. But then she finished, “You are nothing but a fat old man in a gay pink shirt!” I turned to her and said, “Cheap shot, lady.” To which she responded, “Yeah, well, you’re still nothing but a fat old man in a gay pink shirt.”

The rest of the evening I found myself wondering, is that the way everyone is seeing me: Just a fat old man in a gay pink shirt? It really didn’t do any good for others that evening to tell me how much they appreciated my wearing the pink shirt and tie to support those with breast cancer. All that I could think about was other people looking at me wearing a pink shirt and snickering because I was gay. It shouldn’t have bothered me: I am totally out at work, and everywhere else in life, about my being gay and my partner works at the same store. It’s not like my being gay is a secret.

But the confrontation with this woman psychologically took me back to my middle school and high school years when other students ridiculed me for being gay. It made me remember being threatened with physical violence just because I was gay. It reminded me of the times so-called Christian authorities had tried to tell me how unacceptable I was to God because I was gay. I spent a sleepless night reliving the incident over and over again. It was so traumatic for me that I stopped wearing my gorgeous pink shirt. I haven’t worn it to work since then.

My humiliation that day pales in comparison to what happened to the woman in the scripture passage I read to you. She is dragged before Jesus and thrown down in the Temple Court where he is teaching, charged with adultery, caught red-handed in the very act. They demand that Jesus make a judgment on the woman based on the Law of Moses which said that persons caught in such situations should be killed. They even have the stones ready to carry out the sentence upon his ruling.

At my church we have “Talk Back Time” during my sermons during which I ask people for their opinions and thoughts. So let me ask you today, “What’s wrong with the situation in today’s scripture?”

(The man she committed adultery with is missing.)

Yes, where is the man? You can’t commit adultery without a sexual partner.

Do you have any thoughts on why they didn’t bring the man for judgment and condemn him, too?

(Congregation offers thoughts.)

Some have suggested that the situation was a set up both for the woman and for Jesus. They conspired together to trap the woman in a questionable situation so that they could in turn trap Jesus into doing or saying something that they could use against him.

It’s the classic no-win situation for Jesus.
If he says that the woman is guilty and should be killed according to the law then they can make charges against him to the Roman authorities who were in charge of the law and government of the land since the Roman government only could condemn anyone to death. But if Jesus didn’t condemn her then they could incite a riot against him with the people because he refused to uphold their own Religious Law. They reasoned that they had Jesus over a barrel and there was not much he could do about it.

However, they were looking at things the way most of us look at things: right or wrong, yes or no, as if there were only two options Jesus could take. But Jesus, in the creative love of God, surprises them by taking a totally unexpected option. He doesn’t answer them. Even though they have set him up as judge over the woman he turns the question upon them.

Jesus bends down and writes something in the dust. While he is writing they keep shouting and demanding that he answer them. Listen, friend, when things get rough and people start yelling and screaming at you the best response is to attempt to slow the situation down and help people think things through calmly. That’s what Jesus does. I can’t help but wonder what he wrote. Some think he wrote a list of sins the men might have committed. I think he probably wrote the very law of Moses regarding the situation from Leviticus.
Which is where they misquoted their charges against the woman. For there it says that both the man and the woman should be killed.

They have set this up like a court, so Jesus the judge of this court, calls for witnesses when he says “Let the one who is without sin throw the first stone.” From what I understand, it is the one who witnessed the crime and reported it to the authorities that should throw the first stone. So who witnessed this crime? Well, I submit it was the person who set the situation up to trap the poor lady. To admit that you were present while the crime was being committed was essentially to say that you were the male figure who sinned along with the woman. Which is to say that you also deserved to be killed.

The concern of the legal experts and the Phraisees is not for the woman caught in sin, nor even for Jesus. It is to uphold their own understanding of their scriptures which Jesus is turning upside down by ministering to and accepting people they thought were outside of God’s love. Jesus the friend of the leper, the widows, the orphans, the hated tax-collector, the handicapped and ill, is hanging out with all the people they think are unloved and unwanted by God.

This poor woman is probably a widow, may have had children she was responsible for providing food and life. In that society a widow had no rights, could own no property, and if she did not have family that would take her in she was left to fend for herself and her children out on the street. Essentially she was homeless, living off of the handouts of others.

Forced into prostitution to provide for herself and her children she was the perfect foil for the Pharisees and lawyers to use to trap Jesus. They had no problem with heaping shame upon her and using her as a weapon against Jesus because they thought her beneath them for she was already condemned by God for her sinfulness or she wouldn’t be a widow and she wouldn’t be out on the street. God had already pronounced God’s rejection of her according to their way of thinking. Why not use her just like others had used her, for their own purposes and desires. And they thought they were men of God.

After issuing his demand that the ones who witnessed the crime should be the ones who throw the first stone, Jesus writes in the dust again. By now they have read whatever it was he wrote first and they have begun to understand that in responding to his question they may be convicting themselves.

What did Jesus write next? I would like to think that he wrote from Deuteronomy which says that you should not bear false witness against another. If the situation was a set up in which they have trapped this poor lady then they would be bearing false witness against her and according to the scripture they would be condemned with the death penalty also. Oops, perhaps they forgot about that one.

There is something else going on here that many people miss. Jesus is making a statement about who he is and with what authority he is speaking. Jewish tradition and the scripture says that God wrote the Law given to Moses with God’s own finger in the stone. So Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, writes with his finger the same law in the dust of the ground. I believe that would have infuriated the legal experts even more, leaving them beside themselves and enraged with anger, but unable to respond to the very situation they had set up, but which Jesus now owns completely.

One by one the men leave beginning with the oldest, also significant in their law because it is the oldest, the elders of the community, who were charged with carrying out the punishment of any crime. The wiser and older men see that the trap they set for Jesus has now been sprung on them and they depart before they can be implicated and accused as bearing false witness or worse.

Soon, Jesus is left with the woman to whom he says, “Where are those who condemned you?”

She responds, “There is no one who condemns me.” And she was right. There was no one left to condemn her. The only one left with her was Jesus, Jesus who did not condemn her, but who wanted her to live life without shame or condemnation. So he says to her, “Go and do not sin.” He does not list rules for her to follow. He does not extract a promise from her to never sin again. He does not tell her that she should avoid prostitution in the future, nor does he give her any particular advice about how to live her life. He just says, “do not sin,” which means to me to not do anything that separates you from the love of God.

You and I have a problem. We let other people and our own circumstances separate us from the love of God in Christ. We let the shame we feel about the way other people tell us we should live, act, talk, and walk and believe take control of our lives and paralyze us from being the person God created us to be.

The apostle Paul tells us in Romans 8:38-39 “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.

It’s time that you and I realize that we need to get rid of the shame that controls our lives and live in the love of God in Christ. It’s time to take it off, take it all off!

(Bawdy music begins. Strip Tease. Remove Coat, Tie, and shirt.)

(Music stops as I pick up pink shirt and blue tie. Put shirt and tie back on as sermon continues.)

I told you that I had been unable to wear this gorgeous pink shirt because of what the woman said to me and the shame I felt at what she said. Well, I’m getting rid of the shame today and putting on my gay pink shirt. I can’t do much about the fat old man part, but I can be proud of who I am, of who God created me to be and put back on the shirt I had been proud to wear, proud to declare my support of women who suffered from cancer, proud to be OUT about who I am and not afraid for all the world to know.

When other people twist the words of the Bible to condemn you and make you feel unworthy of God’s love and acceptance you remember this story in which Jesus gave a woman back her pride in herself and let her know that she was not a reject, for God in Christ loved her and lifted her up to begin again.

God can do the same thing for you if you will do your own strip tease today, get rid of the shame, take it off, take it all off, and begin to live in the love of God. There is nothing that can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

It's Not About the Rules Mark 7:1-23 PRIDE WEEK 3

“It’s Not About the Rules” by Rev. Ray Neal

This is one of four sermons being preached this year during PRIDE in Seattle. The first three are 'repeats' of PRIDE sermons from previous years rewritted and updated. The fourth will be an original and new sermon just for PRIDE 2011.

Have you seen the announcement that Fred Phelps and his congregation will be protesting the PRIDE Parade here in Seattle on June 26? You do know who they are don’t you? I won’t go into a long description of their beliefs or their past history, but they have caused much distress and dissention due to their frequent protests at anything they believe supports or defends homosexual behavior. You may remember seeing their signs in news reports: God hates Fags! But, do remember, Fred Phelps and his family see themselves as the good guys, as on the side of God.

With that thought in mind, I want to start off by saying that there are no bad guys in Mark 7:1-24. The Pharisees and the Lawyers that confront Jesus about the behavior of his disciples do so from the stand point of their own deep belief in God and their desire to live godly lives according to their own history and traditions. They don’t know anything different than what they have learned and been taught. They haven’t had their minds and hearts opened to the revelation that perhaps there is more to being a godly person than they have ever imagined.

It is truly frustrating to work with fundamentalist type religious persons, especially when it comes to interpreting scripture and applying scripture to the way we live and worship today. I doubt it was any different for Jesus in his day.

A fundamentalist will tell you that there is only one way to interpret a particular passage of scripture…his or her way, of course…and that their own interpretation is based on a literal reading of the scripture passage in question and 2,000 years of Christian practice and application…though they offer no research as to how they came to that conclusion.

They make it sound like they have all the answers and that anyone that questions how Christianity has, in their viewpoint, historically interpreted scripture and believed about God and what God desires all of us to do—that anyone that questions that so-called ‘historical’ truth, must therefore be evil and in direct league with Satan or so seduced by evil that they don’t even know they are wrong. As I related to you last week, I’ve been accused of being demon possessed more than once because I had a different opinion from what I was told was the standard, operating procedure for all Christians, including me, whether I believed it or not. Of course, that always means that they think I must believe it their way.

When one points out to them that Christian history is full of many different ways of believing and interpreting, hence our different denominations, they will tell you that they, uniquely, are the only ones with the absolute truth as revealed to them by God. Everyone else is out of the will of God. The same thing the Pharisees felt about themselves compared to Jesus.

The most frustrating thing about dealing with these fundamentalist types is that they aren’t open to examining the scriptures any differently than they have already decided, nor in discussing any options in interpretation except for their own. They are not interested in your helping them to discover any new revelation about their own set of beliefs and applications of those beliefs to how they live, or more importantly to how they think you should live. In their way of thinking anyone who opposes them or offers a different interpretation of the scriptures must be in league with the devil and therefore they don’t have to respect you, or listen to you, or do much of anything with you, except to condemn you, because in their way of thinking, you are not even a Christian.

As an example of this kind of thinking let me introduce you to pastor Steven L. Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist church in Tempe, AZ, who said from his own pulpit less in July 2009, “The biggest hypocrite in the world is the person who believes in the death penalty for murderers and not for homosexuals. The same God who instituted the death penalty for murderers is the same God who instituted the death penalty for rapists and for homosexuals - sodomites, queers! That’s what it was instituted for, okay? That’s God, he hasn’t changed. Oh, God doesn’t feel that way in the New Testament … God never “felt” anything about it, he commanded it and said they should be taken out and killed.”

And that’s just one example; there are plenty more.

Over the years I have found that it isn’t worth my time or effort to argue with such persons. You won’t be able to change their opinion or their interpretations of scripture. I am willing to tell them what I believe, how I read and interpret the same passage of scripture, but I will only discuss it politely and respectfully and lovingly with then, and when they start arguing with me, or condemning me to hell and calling me a demon…because of my different way of thinking from them…then the conversation is over. I will turn my attention toward those who are willing to investigate a different way of thinking and believing. Jesus takes this same approach in dealing with the Pharisees.

These Pharisees from the local synagogues in Galilee where Jesus has his ministry headquarters are very interested in what Jesus has to say and how he and his disciples are living their lives. So they have been following them around, suspiciously listening to what Jesus teaches, seeing the miracles Jesus performs, and seeking evidence for whether he is from God by how he and his disciples conduct their everyday living.

They think that if Jesus is truly from God then the evidence of that will be reflected in how the disciples live. And they are right about that. The evidence of whether you are truly a child of God will be reflected in the way you live your life, the way you speak to other people and care for them. It’s that simple.

However, there are problems with the assumption that we reflect our godliness in our behavior. The Pharisees and lawyers are only looking for the evidence of outward behavior that is consistent with their own belief system and traditions which tell them that people who believe in and serve God will only act in particular ways, and that they will do certain things at certain times in certain ways, and if they don’t, then they conclude that those aren’t very godly persons.

That’s well and good if everyone agrees on what those things are. But as we have seen in our own time not everyone agrees. Some of us believe very differently about what it means to love God and live according to God’s Will and Way.

Hence here in Washington State we faced Referendum 71 in the last election year which was designed to cancel the law passed by the legislature and signed by the governor that gave domestic partners all the rights and responsibilities of marriage without the name. Why? Because there were those who believed that God demands that they call you and me evil because of who we love and they did not believe we need what they called ‘special rights’ and what you and I call ‘equal rights.’ Luckily, we won that political battle at the polls and the Domestic Partner Law was retained as it was written. We don’t have equality regarding marriage rights in Washington, but we do have equity. And that is a step in the right direction.

On this particular day in the scripture story the Pharisees are joined by religious lawyers from Jerusalem, probably also belonging to the Pharisees. Jesus is a threat to their power and their influence which they believe comes directly from God through the traditions and scriptures handed down to them from their ancestor Moses. Remember: They see themselves as the good guys on the side of God.

They attack Jesus’ disciples because the boys did not follow the traditions of preparing and eating a meal correctly, nor did they wash their hands in the ritual manner that was required by tradition in order to reflect the truth of God’s presence in your life. Moses said that God is holy and therefore we should be holy. To the Pharisees, that meant doing things in very particular ways and order so that you could honor God the proper way. They had a whole list of things, more than 600 rules, that they had decided people had to keep and do to build a protective fence around their lives that would remind them that God was holy and that God demanded that they be holy also.

Some of these rituals were quite complex. Some were extremely expensive to carry out. The requirements to wash your hands, to prepare food in a certain way, to only use certain kinds of pots and pans and other utensils, which also had to be washed and prepared in particular ways, were more than most poor people could afford.

Many of the disciples and most of the crowds that surrounded Jesus are from what would we would call the lower economic class of their time and therefore they couldn’t afford to follow the prescriptions for holiness that the Pharisees do. Hence, according to the Pharisees, who don’t make any allowance for your financial ability to follow their traditions, the disciples are not holy or pure, and therefore they are not godly persons. It’s only logical to reach that conclusion if you are a Pharisee or a religious lawyer. There thinking goes something like this: Isn’t it obvious to everyone? What is there to argue about? The evidence is clear. They broke the law. There can be no other interpretation.

That’s when they get surprised by the answer Jesus gives. For Jesus sees things quite differently than they do. He begins by telling them what the prophet Isaiah said: ‘These people mouth all the right words, but their hearts aren’t in it. Their worship is just one big charade. They invent rules to suit themselves and then teach those human made rules as the word of God.’

The issue Jesus is attacking is this long list of rules that the religious leaders have added to the Torah, their scripture. Think of this way: Our church has a set of bylaws that govern our way of operating. There are lots of things stated in the bylaws, but often those bylaws are open to wide variations in interpretation and application. So our church has established a set of SOPs: Standard Operating Procedures which tell us how to apply those bylaws to governing ourselves as a congregation. Those are our traditions. The traditions of the Jewish people are their SOPs for following and applying the Torah.

Jesus is saying that sometimes those 600+ SOPs aren’t really consistent with the Torah and may in fact be contrary to the real truth that God wanted them to know and do. In fact they have taken some of those SOPs and made them of higher authority than the scriptures they were meant to interpret and apply.

In verses 9-12 of chapter 7 of Mark’s gospel Jesus brings up how they interpret and apply the Torah’s commandment to love your parents. The Torah clearly commands that you to care for your elderly parents out of your own wealth and income when they are no longer able to provide for themselves. But the SOPs said that if you pledged your wealth to the Temple, which is to God, in other words, you wrote a will that said when you died all your wealth would go to the Temple, then you were no longer obligated to use your wealth and income to care for your elderly parents. Your parents and your responsibilities to them could be religiously and legally ignored.

This is why Jesus says: “At the end of the day, you are more concerned about your own rules and traditions than you are about what God actually wants of people.”

What does God want of us? Well the scripture passage from James 1:17-27 (from today’s lectionary) gave us a good understanding of that. The author of James was telling us how to be and live as Christians.

Jesus elaborated on that many times. In Matthew 23 he told the Pharisees and Lawyers: “You have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced these, without neglecting the rest.”

Jesus is referring to Zechariah 7 which reads, “This is what God Almighty says, ‘Administer true justice, show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.’”

Jesus often used these SOP’s, the Holiness and Purity Codes, for shock effect. When Jesus told his followers that they had to ‘eat his body and drink his blood’ it was extremely offensive to them for those two items to be in the same sentence much less the idea of having both items together in a meal. That was completely against their holiness and purity codes, especially those that dealt with kosher eating.

Jesus knows how important the kosher rules were and he uses those rules now to teach his lesson. He doesn’t argue with the Pharisees and lawyers. He knows he isn’t going to change their understanding or opinions. So he turns away from them and to the crowd gathered around him, full of the widows and the orphans of society, those people living on the edge of respectability and acceptability. The great ‘unwashed’ as some have said, those people that the Pharisees and lawyers would not hang around with for fear of the filth rubbing off on them from the people they considered beneath them and outside of God’s love and acceptance.

Jesus says, not so politely, “The things that really pollute people are not the things they put into their mouths, but the muck that spews out from within them. If you are looking for the cause of evil, look inside of yourselves. Evil intentions are conceived in the human heart, every one of them.”

Mind you, you could read another four-letter word for excrement in place of muck if you wanted to and you would be closer to the way Jesus said it that day in his own language.

Using the idea of the kosher food laws he tells them that it isn’t what they put into themselves that keeps them holy, but what proceeds from their very hearts, from their souls, that is the proof of their godliness. The presence of God living within them will be proven by what they do, and what they say, especially in regard to how they relate to other people, even those that they consider to be out of God’s grace and blessing, the poor, the widow, the outcast, the prostitute, the sick.

Jesus keeps proving to the Pharisees and the religious lawyers exactly what he is talking about through the miracles he performs and the people he cares for.

They bring him a prostitute they expect him to condemn to death according their rules and laws, but instead they find him giving her forgiveness and shaming them. He heals the blind and the handicapped, the sick and the lepers, all of whom they believe are the way they are because of sinfulness and evil in their lives. But Jesus tells them that they are wrong about that and by healing these people Jesus proves that there is no sin in their lives, nothing that keeps them from the blessings of God. The holiness code said you can’t touch a dead body, but Jesus resurrects a young girl by touching her body and becoming unclean himself as he resurrects her to new life. These are amazing sermons in action!

Jesus is constantly calling into question the Holiness and Purity Codes and telling everyone that it isn’t the rules that are important, but how much they love God, and how much they demonstrate that love by loving others.

Why are the fundamentalists so upset with us today regarding marriage equality? Because we are calling into question their interpretation of modern day holiness and purity codes. They are trying to uphold their understanding of what it means to be a godly person, a godly society. And so are we!

They say that we can’t possibly be holy because we are so far out of line with what they believe a person who is a Christian could be like that we must be demon possessed to even believe we are Christian. We are not living up to their ideal of what their holiness and purity code tells them a Christian is supposed to be. According to them we are defiled and filthy because of whom we love and how we love them. In this way of thinking they aren’t much different than the Pharisees and the religious lawyers of Jesus’ day.

During this month when we celebrate our PRIDE in who we are and how we were created, I proudly say, “I am a Christian. I am gay. I am deeply in love with my partner Mark. God is blessing our relationship. There is nothing about our relationship that is evil or sinful. I will not be shamed by anyone who believes otherwise. I will work for justice and equality for all persons regardless of what anyone else believes.”

As Queer Christians we must stand up for what we believe in--not just about marriage equality, but about all the justice and mercy issues that cause people to be pushed to the edges of our society.

Homelessness is a problem. Many in our own congregations have experienced homelessness or are currently living in transitional housing. Some of us live with the threat of returning to homelessness. What are we as a churches doing about homelessness? Are we blaming the victim for their circumstances he or she is in, or are we helping people to new life and hope? I had the vision when I came to be your pastor and learned about the critical homeless problem for our LGBTQ community here in Seattle, but what would happen if we found the funds through grants and donations to open homes for homeless gay and lesbian and transgender persons where they could live without fear of hatred or misunderstanding or violence? Could we help people get off the streets and into good jobs and their own homes by teaching them the skills they need to get jobs, by providing them with social service help to wind their way through the red tape governmental agencies seem to use to prevent them from getting the help they need?

Believe me when I say that I am exhausted and frustrated with trying to get through all the red tape to simply find out how to help someone in our current system dealing with homelessness. How do you think the homeless person feels about having to navigate this seemingly hopeless system? A very large number of those living on the streets are LGBT persons. 40% or more of homeless youth are known to be LGBT youth in the Seattle area alone. Where do we begin to help with this problem?

What about those living with AIDS and HIV? What can we do to make sure that our modern day society does not treat such persons like the lepers of Jesus day were treated? How can our church get involved in ongoing projects and actions that call society to act to treat and heal this disease? Tom will tell you about how he is involved with Shanti anytime you want to ask him.

What about the Transgender? How can we help ourselves and our society understand Transgender persons and come to love and accept them as just another normal variation of the beautiful human Rainbow Creation God has created? Let’s start by going to the Gender Odyssey conference in September here in Seattle and sharing our presence at our information table. Will you volunteer to sit at the table with me and talk about our church to Trans persons?

Perhaps you have your own problems with accepting people that you believe are outside of God’s holiness and purity. Who would that be? Who is it that calls into question for you the issues of whether they are or aren’t in relationship with God because of who they are or what they do, or how they think, or what language they speak, or what religion they profess, or what political party or persuasion they belong to? We all have people we think fall outside of God’s grace and holiness.

The question we have to ask ourselves today is what are we going to do about it? Are we going to reexamine our thinking and our beliefs like Jesus challenged the Pharisees and the lawyers to do in order to get ourselves closer to what God wants, or are we going to ignore Christ’s challenge and stay put behind the fence we have erected to protect our own thinking, our own beliefs, our own way of living regardless of what God wants from us?

Listen to me, while I lovingly tell you that this is especially true about life within our own congregation. Look around you! Who is it that you don’t want to be a part of our community life in this church? Who do you have trouble relating to because of his or her being so very different from you? We cannot become the Body of Christ if we are divided and angry and upset with each other.

I started this sermon off by saying that the Pharisees weren’t the bad guys. There are also no bad guys or gals in your church, unless you’re talking about a very different subject than what I am this morning. Mother Teresa put it this way: “Keep in mind that our community is not composed of those who are already saints, but of those who are trying to become saints. Therefore let us be extremely patient with each other's faults and failures.”

We have to learn how to love each other. We have to learn how to have mercy towards each other. We have to learn how to forgive each other and move away from the past and into the future that God wants to give to you and me and to our church. We can’t get there together if we can’t become the loving, forgiving, welcoming, inclusive Body of Christ that I know God wants us to become.

If we were enrolled in God’s own Holiness College this Fall I think we’d all have to take Christianity 101. Taught by Jesus Christ himself the course guide summarizes the class this way: “Learn how to Love God, Love yourself, and Love each other.” What grade would you like to get this semester? What grade will you get?