June 16, 2002
Fifth Sunday of Pentecost
Year A
Sermon Title: Going Home
Theme: Just like the disciples, one of the things we are called to do at
CoH is to tell the good news first to the people we know, the people we
love—our own community.
My father had a way of cutting to the quick of things—he could always
put things in perspective. Now, maybe it was HIS perspective, but my
dad was always ready to offer you that perspective, uninvited or not. I
was back home in Meridian, Mississippi, right after I had begun seminary
and a few years before my father passed away, and we were having one
of those conversations that revolved around either one of two topics: the
first was how well or poorly the Alabama Crimson Tide football team were
playing that particular year, and whether his favorite school, Mississippi
State had any chance of beating them that year. They rarely did, by the
way. And the other major topic we always talked about was money,
which seems to be a favorite topic for sons and their fathers, especially
as their sons struggle through getting out of school. Anyway, I don’t
know how we got around to my choice in careers, which had finally come
down to ministry, and, though he was very supportive in many ways of
my choices in life, and despite the fact that he was an agnostic himself,
he said to me, half-kiddingly, half-truthfully, over the dining room table:
“Gee, Kevin, could you have possibly chosen a career that will make you
any less money?!” Now, I wish I could say that I said something clever
back to him, but, you know, he had a point! Of course, what he didn’t
understand is that most ministers don’t see ministry as a career, as if it
was something you choose—most of us minister types see ministry as
something that chooses us, that we have a particular calling from God to
tell the good news of the Gospel, which is simply the story of how much
God loves the world, each and everyone of us.
But of course, the calling to tell the good news is really a mission for the
whole church, not just the preachers or the staff or the leadership of a
church. Some people are called to serve the church in the ordained
ministry, but the vast majority of the church, the body of Christ, are not
called to such a specialized ministry—and yet the mission remains the
same, which is to tell the world that grace is everywhere, that hope is in
the very air they breathe, that resurrection is the end of the story, and
that God is fundamentally, essentially, basically, primarily Love. We
Christians experience that love through the gift of a life, a particular life,
lived some two thousand years ago in this Jesus of Nazareth, who we
think “got it right,” if anyone has ever “gotten it just right.” And because
Christ got it right, we all entered into a new way of understanding and
experiencing God, and all of creation is more alive and more hopeful
because of what happened in Christ and what is happening, even now,
in our own lives.
One of things that my father and I didn’t talk about was my own struggle
with where to go with my calling to be a minister. The reality is that I had
been out as a gay man since I was 17 years old and there was no way I
was going back into any closet, even if it meant not being able to follow
my calling towards ordained ministry. I was a Presbyterian for most of my
spiritual life and I knew that I had a choice: that I could lie about my
sexual orientation by an act of omission, of not telling them fully who I
was, when I came before the Presbyterian committee who would decide
on whether or not I was fit to be a Presbyterian minister. Or I could
promise the committee celibacy, a life without sex, and that was simply
not going to happen, because I knew I didn’t have that spiritual gift! For
years, I struggled with how to serve the Presbyterian Church, but there
came a moment when I realized something. I realized that I really wanted
to serve the people I lived with and loved and sometimes struggled with—
and that was the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community. I
even resisted that truth for years, but as I looked around I realized that I
was already doing it, on a very practical level. I had been on a spiritual
journey with my gay friends most of my life, starting in those moments in
college when people would find out that I was a Religion major, and the
conversation inevitably turned to their own struggle with faith, even at
parties this would happen. I can’t tell you how many conversations,
sometimes painful and tortured conversations, I’ve ad with former youth
group presidents in bars or parties, or simply meeting them in everyday
life. I was going to live and tell the good news to people who were my
people, and I realized that I was called to be a minister in this community,
our community, and not in an overwhelmingly straight church like the
Presbyterian Church, though it is a wonderful and good tradition. And I
now I think I was just instinctively doing what Jesus asks all of us to do,
which is tell the people closest to us first about who God is, and what it
means to love and be loved in the light of this God who meets us in the
Christ.
In this passage from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples to
do something that one of the folks in the Lectio Divina Circle described
as almost seeming bigoted: Jesus tells them to go to the people of Israel
first to tell the good news that kingdom of God was near, and to avoid
the towns of the Samaritans, those folks who were considered to be Jews
gone-bad by more traditional Jews, and to avoid the towns populated by
the Gentiles, the folks who were just non-Jews. It feels awfully, well,
awfully uncomfortable for some of us, who think that Jesus’ mission was
all about getting people to realize how included they really were, how
chosen they had always been. Of course, the thing is that Jesus was
always welcoming of Samaritans and Gentiles—he was constantly
breaking all the rules when it came to these two groups of outsiders, at
least in the mind of first-century Israel. Jesus was in relationship with
Gentiles even when it was understood you shouldn’t even talk to those
people, much less treat them as equals. He even used the Samaritan’s
status as outsiders to remind people that there are no real categories
like outsiders and insiders—remember the parable of the Good
Samaritan?
But here, for some reason, Jesus narrows his mission, at least
temporarily, and he asks his disciples to go to their fellow Jews and tell
them the good news that the realm of God, the presence of God is near,
even now, even in this moment. Later, St. Paul would say that the
Gospel, the good news, was “for the Jew first, and also for the Greek,”
for the Gentile, the outsiders, as well. Maybe the reason he wanted to
narrow the mission was because of what he saw amongst the people
gathered around him on the day that he uttered these words. Jesus
looked in their eyes and saw that they needed direction, they needed
hope—these people, his people, needed a shepherd, someone to make
sure they got home OK and the wolves wouldn’t pick them off one by
one. I think most of us can relate to these words—most of us have been
there, lost at times in our lives, especially as we struggled with our
connection with God, and our faith. And most of us know people right
now who are exactly where we’ve been at different points in our lives—
truly people who don’t know where they are going because they were
told, they were lied to and told that the great and gentle shepherd wasn’t
interested in being their shepherd anymore, especially if they were going
to be that kind of sheep. In this moment, Jesus sends his disciples out to
tell the good news to the people he loved, that had raised and nurtured
him, that had given him his faith, and whom he felt incredibly tied to
through their common experience of being a Jew, these people who were
often persecuted for being faithful to themselves and their God. You go
to the people you love first, that is a very human instinct, and maybe it’s
even a divine instinct.
Over the next couple of months, even weeks, there are going to be a lot
of changes—it seems as if change is just part of the fabric of life,
something we all know, of course, but we spend a lot of time struggling
with. People come, people go, structures shift, what was solid ground
feels less solid, and what was shifting sand suddenly becomes a rock,
solid and strong. Someone reminded me this week that change is just
the fabric of life—the only way change will stop is when we stop—
breathing that is. The good news is that there are some things that don’t
change, hopefully some of the more important things, and one of those
is this charge, this command for us at the Cathedral to go out and tell the
people we love, and sometimes don’t love, the truth about who God is
and how much God loves them. That’s why we exist—we are community
of hope, our mission statement says, proclaiming God’s inclusive love,
removing barriers to faith, and empowering people to grow in grace
towards wholeness. The mission is unique, because it is us, we the
people who were once like sheep without shepherd telling our friends,
our lovers, our community the truth about God and ourselves. You go
home first, because the people at home matter to you, and so that is
what we do at the Cathedral—we go first to people we know, and love,
and we tell them about this grace that gives us the beginning of a
wholeness that all the world is need of.
This coming week is the beginning of Pride week in Oklahoma City,
where the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community here
tries to put away its many differences and celebrate what it shares in
common—a commitment to justice, a desire to live our lives truthfully and
without fear, and to celebrate the many ways we live out our lovemaking
in this world. This is a special week for us, I think, at the Cathedral,
because we get to share that good news with some beautiful and not-so-
beautiful people just like us who share a common story. This week we
get reminded that our story, our experience is not so unique, that there
are people who know exactly what we’ve been through, and can honor
that in ways that only people who have been through that experience
truly can. Our mission remains the same, whatever changes come,
because there are people whom need our compassion, our presence,
and our truth, the truth we have found in our relationship with God. If I
had another opportunity to have that conversation with my father again,
and maybe I will someday, I think I would tell him of the people I have met
along the way, at those parties, in places that we gay people gather at,
about the people who poured out their stories of faith and pain, and I
would tell him that is why God has called me to do ministry with this
community, the people I love—because people need to know the truth,
that God does really love them as they are, beautiful and fragile, full of
goodness, full of brokenness. And knowing my father, I think he would
get it because he would know that it came from my heart, and certainly
that meant more than any six-figure income he was hoping I would make
one day, and then I think he would tear up, as he often did late in his life,
and I think he would be proud of me. We exist, the Cathedral exists
because we are called to tell the people that we love that they are loved
in ways that they can’t even fathom at the moment. Whatever changes
come, and they will come, as surely as we take in our next breath, that
clear and true purpose remains, we who have been called to go back
home to our people, to tell them the realm of God is near, that the
kingdom is around the corner, and that it includes, and has always
included them. Amen and amen.
