Third Sunday of Pentecost
June 2, 2002
Year A
Sermon Title: So, You Haven’t Told Your Family?
Theme: Coming out as a Christian, as a person of faith, is sometimes
hard to do. Jesus reminds us that being one of his disciples’ means to
open and honest about being a part of his radical new family, to be
honest about whom we are as people of faith, even in the uncomfortable
places.
In college, I had a good friend named Joey in college and Joey was one
of those people that was just incredibly talented—he was about to finish
college and he was about to have his first book published by St. Martin’s
Press, which is a fairly major publishing house. I’ve always been
attracted to artistic folks, maybe because there isn’t an ounce of artistic
talent in me—and so Joey and I became good friends. I even helped him
edit that first book and my one personal claim to publishing fame is that
he thanked me for my help with about 12 other people at the beginning
of that first book. Of course, he misspelled my name—there is only one
“c” in McLemore. In fact, he gave me the gift of the original manuscript
he sent to his publisher to be edited and so I have this marked-up
manuscript by his St. Martin’s editor, Michael Denny. Whenever people
ask whether I am published, I always say, with a very wry grin, “Why, yes,
I am…” which is of course not actually true…but that is just like us people
who have no talent—we live vicariously through those people who do
actually possess talent!
But Joey was one of those radical free thinkers at the University of
Alabama, where we both went to school, and one of the things he always
challenged me on was my faith, my Christianity—he had dumped his faith
a long time ago, if he had ever really had it, and he could never
understand my faith or even my willingness to struggle with Christianity.
And he never got how I, as a fairly intelligent GAY man, how I could
tolerate being a Christian when a good amount of Christians disagreed
with how I made love in this world. And I understood where he was
coming from and its not as if I hadn’t asked those same sort of questions
of myself ALL THE TIME. And it was always rough, in many ways, having
to come out to him, over and over again, not as a gay man, of course,
but as a Christian—of not downplaying my faith or what I believed in,
DESPITE the many negatives things that have been done in the name of
the one whom I follow as well, this Jesus of Nazareth.
And for many of us, we have had that experience of coming out as a
Christian, in the weirdest and oddest of places. A lot of times we had the
weird experience of having to come out AGAIN, not as a gay or lesbian
person, but as a Christian to our parents or to our families of choice or
biology. Whenever we came out of as lesbian or gay or bisexual or as a
transgender person, some of our friends or family just assumed that
coming out about our sexual orientation automatically meant that we
were no longer Christians—as if we had, of course, abandoned our
Christian faith. Now, that’s not really a surprise, of course, because a lot
of us were taught that love and lovemaking between persons of the
same sex was just wrong and was simply not Christian. And, of course,
many of us struggled with that question, that dilemma, for many years,
until finally, we got it—that it wasn’t God that was the problem, but it was,
ironically enough, the people who often claimed the Christian faith who
were the real problem.
So, in many ways, it was a lot easier to just not come out as Christians—
let our families of blood or choice believe we what they want to believe,
we thought, whether or not it was true. And, of course, some of us did
come out as Christians who just happened to be gay or lesbian, but the
battle royale that followed was enough to send a few of us right back into
the closet. I mean, who wants to constantly have to defend your faith
AND your love-making?!? Sometimes it felt like an impossible battle, so
we just let it go and stayed firmly in that closet of faith. And so a lot of us
just stopped going to church for a long time, even to those churches we
knew we were welcomed at. And whenever someone brought up that
whole faith thing, we just stayed quite, neither affirming or challenging
other people’s assumptions about what we believed or didn’t believe,
about what they assumed about our lack of faith, even in those moments
when we probably should have said something.
The problem, of course, for us closeted people of faith, is that Jesus
asks us to say something, to speak up about what we really believe and
about whom we really follow—that its not enough, in many ways, to leave
our families, whether of biology or of choice, in the dark about what really
matters to us, even when we know its going to be difficult to come out as
a person of faith. Isn’t it funny that some of us have a much easier time
coming out and declaring our sexual orientation than we do coming out
and declaring our faith as Christians?!? For most of us, we spend a lot
of energy getting to a point where we can name who we are really are—
and we forget, in many ways, that coming out as a lesbian or gay or
bisexual or transgender person is not as big a deal as coming out as a
follower of the Christ. Jesus in this passage from the Gospel of Matthew
reminds his disciples that day thousands of years ago—and reminds us
as well, here and now, that to be one of his disciples means speaking the
truth, it means living without fear of the ways people can challenge or
dismiss you and I—to be one of Jesus’ disciples means knowing that
when we speak up, we will be spoken up for, by the one whose opinion is
the only one that really matters. “So, don’t worry about it,” Jesus says,
“and speak up, because what is whispered in your heart about your first
love, about me, is bound to be seen, so you might as well go shouting it
from the mountaintops!” And the great thing is that Jesus keeps
reminding them that he gets them, that God knows them deeply and
intimately, to the point of knowing the strands of hair on their always
changing head of hair. Walking out of that closet, that closet of faith,
declaring ourselves to be one of his disciples, in the face of those who
doubt such a thing, is not something that he’s going to let us do by
ourselves—this Christ will be there for us, reminding us that we are
known and that our heart, despite the doubts of others, is held in the
very gentle hand of the living God and that heart is known as well.
But the hard part of it is that I am not sure whether I had much of a
choice to come out as a Christian to my friend Joey those many years
ago—I mean, I did have a choice, of course, I could have joined him in
his cynicism about Christianity, cynicism grounded in a lot of truth, sad to
say, but I really didn’t have much of choice, because if I wanted to be a
true friend to him, I had to tell the truth about who I was, even if he made
fun of that decision, or constantly questioned me about it. And I also
didn’t have a choice if I wanted to continue to be a disciple of this Jesus—
I couldn’t deny him, if I didn’t want him to deny me sometime in the
future. And more often than not, I didn’t deny anything as much as I didn’
t say anything, in those places where I knew my beliefs wouldn’t be
respected or understood or even taken seriously. There were a few
times I felt like the disciple Peter, standing with those people around a
campfire, after they had arrested Jesus, wrapped up in my fear. They
asked poor Peter three times whether he had been one of Jesus’
disciples and he denied it three times, and what Jesus had predicted
about brash Peter came true—he couldn’t take the heat when it came
down to it. I don’t know that I denied Christ so much by my words as by
my lack of words, staying silent when the simplistic, even silly statements
were being said about Christianity, my faith. I take comfort that despite
my silence, my choice to stay in that closet a few times, maybe even a
few dozen times, I take comfort that despite Jesus’ words here in
Matthew, he never seemed to have a problem forgiving poor Peter—or
even really bringing it up ever again to poor, devastated, broken-hearted
Peter.
We stay in all sorts of closets because we think staying silent, staying
hidden, will somehow protect us from the slings and arrows of others,
real or imagined. The problem with closets is that there is usually not a
lot of room in them, the lighting is bad, and the air, the air gets stuffy—
and of course, closets aren’t meant for people, they’re meant for clothes
and storage. Coming out in the most important way we can, which is to
come out as a Christian, as a disciple of this Jesus of Nazareth, is not
going to make life easier—far from it. People will question you and I,
fellow Christians will question us, and it will get tough—my friend Joey
raked me over the coals a few times, gently, of course, but still, the coals
burned a little bit, perhaps burning away a little of my self-assurance,
which is not a bad thing, really. Jesus says in this passage from Matthew
that to follow him means that whatever peace you and I thought we had
when we were snuggled inside that closet, that peace is going to simply
go away. To follow this Jesus means conflict, it means having the
courage to name ourselves as disciples, to bring the possibility of—dare
I say it?—war into our relationships, even in those relationships that
mean a lot to us. Being a disciple is like being around that fire, like Peter
was thousand of years ago, with strangers, sometimes with friends and
family, sometimes even those of our own faith, and naming ourselves,
saying “Yes, I am” when the question of whether or not we are a disciple
of this Jesus comes up. The possibility of crucifixion, perhaps not
literally, but emotionally, socially, spiritually, looms before us, when we
step outside that door. But that is what Jesus asks of us, we who often
peeked outside that closet door, wondering the coast is clear so that we
can come out and breath again.
Today, we’re celebrating our families—our families connected by blood
and love, and our families connected by commitment and love. This is
always, always a special day for us, we in this community who are
constantly challenging and re-creating what it means to be a family.
Being truthful about how we make love in this world was one of the first
steps we took toward being whole again, or maybe even being whole for
the first time in our lives. And yet, you, our families, bound to us by
blood and commitment and love, you are here to witness our most
important coming out—this moment where we share with you where our
heart ultimately lays, in the gentle hands of the living Christ, who has
asked us to live truthfully, to love passionately, even recklessly, in a
world that thinks that storing up love within will somehow protect it from
pain. You mean so much to us, we who have taken Christ up on his
commandment to continually add yet more people to our families,
because he is doing the same thing with us, and because he has asked
us to keep expanding the circle, so that some day no one will ever feel
like an outsider to Love itself, to God. Some of us have spent a lifetime
tiptoeing out the closet door, and running back again when it didn’t feel
safe, but today, for perhaps a few of us, for a few moments at least, the
closet has lost its sense of safety and we can breath again with you by
our side, which is what we’ve always wanted in the first place. Know that
we celebrate you in this moment, simply by sharing what matters to us in
this place, with these people, with our God, and our commitment to go
with this Christ, wherever he should lead us. Amen and amen.
