Pride month asks us to take sides

I had this thing I used to do with teams of short-termers when they came to Haiti, called a lifeline.

I'd hand them a length of string and encourage them to tell their story as they wrapped the string around their hand. Tell the story that you want to tell, and tell it at your own pace. 

I brought the string out in 2010 when we brought our first team to Haiti from The Point, and at our first set of evening devotions, Jonathan Zila shared how he had come to faith. When it was her turn, Robin Nussbaumer told us about her childhood and some of her formative experiences.

And then one night it was Caroline's turn.

Caroline wasn't from The Point. In fact, they weren't even from New Jersey. They lived in Atlanta. Caroline had known me for about 10 years by this point, and after Jon and I had agreed the trip was strictly for members of The Point, and no one else would be invited, I'd called Caroline immediately to ask if they wanted to come with us. (Spoiler: They did.)

The team wouldn't have been complete without Caroline, but that night I knew how deeply out of place Caroline felt. They took the string, they held it, and they stared at it without saying anything.

"I can't," they finally said.

"You don't have to," I told them. "There's freedom here."

Caroline did share, later. I knew their secret, and I'd marveled the past several days as I'd watched them play the pronoun game, never referring to their ex by name or as "she," but always as "my ex" or "my significant other," sometimes coming close to the edge but always staying on the safe side of the precipice and never daring to say nor even daring to hint at the truth: "I am gay."

And when Caroline did share, it was safe, as I had been confident it would be. But they also shared something I have never forgotten: "I've always found more acceptance among the gay community for being a Christian than I have among Christians for being gay."

The words should shame us, because they are true, but they shouldn't be.

It's Pride Month, a time when gays, lesbians, bisexuals, the transgender and other queer-identifying folk celebrate their presence and survival in a society that keeps them on the margin. Every advancement in LGBTQ rights since Stonewall has been met with howls of outrage from conservative and religious leaders who want the right to discriminate.

Who don't want to recognize the emotional need to be loved and to express affection with a life partner.

Who think it's better for children to grow up without a family than to have two parents of the same sex.

Who think that "Mrs. Doubtfire," Monty Python, "La Cage aux Folles" and the plays of William Shakespeare pose a graver threat to children than a society awash with unregulated AR-15s.

It honestly disturbs me that so much of this fear, this hatred and this agitation is coming from the church. Look at the gospels and you'll see in Jesus a man who embraces the outcast, no matter who they are or what they've done.

"If he knew what sort of woman she is ..." his critics think.

Funny thing is, Jesus did know. He just didn't care. His heart belonged to the people whom religious folk were too good for. They poured expensive perfume on him, they washed his feet with their tears and then dried his feet with their hair. Jesus took it all in stride, and he got a reputation for eating and drinking with sinners.

That's what holiness does. It doesn't push people away. It doesn't tell people they're not good enough. Instead it pulls out a seat next to the campfire, tosses on another log and welcomes the newcomer to a meal and conversation, and it invites them to pitch a tent at the campsite.

And when someone makes a scene about the visitor's presence, it's not the visitor whom holiness encourages to find another place to camp.

In the past 52 years I've got to know a number of people in the LGBTQ community besides Caroline. I've seen them driven to the edge by family members, former friends and community leaders who justify mistreatment by moaning and howling like an open grave about choices, mental illness, protecting the children and a particularly toxic form of love that I never want anything to do with again.

Through it all they've taught me about resilience and forgiveness; the unexpected seas that friendship will sail through, and the islands of wonder one can visit along the journey; a long form of patience , and the integrity that draws the line that says, enough. I will take no more of this shit today, and tomorrow doesn't look good either. 

It's Pride Month. They're here, they're queer. They will not disappear.

Jesus is standing with them. Will you?

Getting the message right for Easter

 So many churches are going to preach the wrong message today at their Easter services.

They're going to talk about the gift of forgiveness, as though we're all crushed beneath the weight of overwhelming guilt. If that's you, that message is true and it's worth listening to. More power to you as you seek it.

But most of us are looking for something different.

We want people to stop shooting children.

We want people to stop telling lies about drag queens, about the transgender and about our gay friends. They're not a danger, and we know it.

We want everyone to have a seat at the table with equal say in the conversation. We want their stories heard and not hushed up because it makes the powerful uncomfortable to hear them.

We want debt wiped away, and we want inequity balanced out.

We want justice, not law and order.

We don't want to die.

This is the promise Jesus left his church with. He announced it  when he read from the scroll of Isaiah that shabbat service in Nazareth, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” 

It's a promise Jesus proclaimed with every healing he performed. He taught it in every line of the Beatitudes, and pushed it every time he reminded the wealthy to give to the poor. He wove it like a golden thread through his parables.

Jesus never said "wait until you go to heaven, and it'll work out then." His message was always "The kingdom of God has arrived, it is in your midst." It was this life Jesus focused on, not the next.

Empire exists by order. Jesus promises to pull down empire, to disrupt order and to promote justice. Jesus is a threat to those in power because they like to claim that God is on their side, and the way of Christ reminds them that he is not.

So they killed him.

And as a sign, God raised him from the dead.

Lent: Test

When I read that today's prompt was "test," my first thought was of school, and the grades I would get on Fridays in high school geometry when Miss Loughlin assessed how well we understood the week's material.

But we're called to test lots of things that have nothing to do with school. We test ideas to see if they're good or bad by trying them out  We can test ourselves, to see how we measure up to our own expectations and the demands others place on us. And of course we can test others, to measure them and their value. 

It always comes down to success or failure, though, doesn't it? The A you earn is worth its weight in gold, while the F is scarlet and hangs around your neck like an albatross.

It's not supposed to be like that. 

Grades, and the tests that generate them, don't reveal your worth. They measure other things. How well  you understood the material. (Looks like you need to review the properties of a rhombus.) How well the teacher taught you. (Maybe interpretive dance wasn't the right medium.) How well-suited the test was for you. (Maybe asking a turtle to climb a tree wasn't a fair assessment of its ability to hide from birds.)

Those are the measurements we're supposed to look at, not to see if we're any good, but to discover the areas where we can shine and what we have to offer.

That's the longest test there is, and it's the only one worth taking.

Lent: Wilderness

There's not much wilderness out my front door these days.

It was a different story four hundred years ago when the first waves of white settlers started arriving on these vaunted shores. In those days the Midatlantic region and the Northeast were covered in a forest, and settlers claim there were flocks of birds overhead so vast that it could take days for them to pass.

To visitors from Europe, where hills, valleys and moors had long been denuded of their ancient forests, it seemed like a goldmine. There were woods to be felled, land to be plowed, animals to be trapped for pelt or meat, and plenty more.

Not so much these days.

I've got a red oak growing on my property, and there are squirrels that run around the yard; but the birds I can hear at any time can be counted with one hand, not two. You can smell out a skunk at night sometimes, and hear the coyotes yipping in a nearby park. Once I saw a fox trit-trotting up the street like nobody's business, but the wildest this city gets is at the nightclub downtown on weekends.

Paradise has been torn to pieces, and we were the wolves that did it.

That's an idealized view of the wilderness as Eden. There's another, older view, that views the wilderness with caution if not outright fear. In the old days, people didn't go into the forest for a weekend of camping, it was something they avoided. If you had to go in, you went in quietly, to avoid being noticed, or you went in with a small army, to be ready.

The wilderness was a hostile place, without the creature comforts of home, like food, roads, cisterns, city walls and gates that closed at night. It was a liminal place filled with fairies, lawless humans, and wild beasts. The ancients believed it was filled with pagan gods, and as late as the 17th century the Puritans told stories about the Scratchman waiting in the forest outside town, willing to make deals with anyone who'd sign their name in the book he kept.

So take your pick. We tore down Paradise and in its place built a new wilderness of pavement and steel, and filled that wild place with monsters of our own creation; or we pushed the wilderness back, hedged it in and tamed it.

Either way, something else is true. Neglect a farm, a shopping mall or an entire city for long enough, and the wilderness creeps back in. Flowers grow in the cracks of a parking lot, then brush springs up in odd places. WIthin twenty years trees have appeared and ten years after that, the forest is back in business.

No matter how you look it, the wilderness returns. 

Lent: Consume

I was into stories about Thor long before Chris Hemsworth picked up the hammer and started wearing a cape for Marvel Studios.

The stories I knew were written in the 13th century by a man named Snorri Sturluson. In one story, Thor takes Loki on a trip to Jotunheim and Loki boasts that he can eat faster than anyone. He's soon put to the test: a wooden platter is laden with meat, and as Loki starts eating at one end, his opponent begins at the other.

They meet in the middle, but Loki loses because all he ate was the meat. His opponent ate meat, bone and platter alike, leaving nothing. It was all consumed.

Consumed.

There's something so final, so total about that word. A consuming desire is one that devours you, overthrowing wit, wisdom and any semblance of self-restraint. It brooks no distraction, permits no other recourse. It's as relentless as fire itself, and ultimately as destructive.

Years ago in church we sang a tune by Hillsong, "Inside Out," that expresses the longing that drives worship: "In my heart and my soul, Lord, I give you control. Consume me from the inside out." One can almost see the worshiper drawing closer to the Eternal Flame, until they are lit from within, and holy fire consumes them beginning in their chest and spreading outward until nothing is left but embers that soon are gone themselves.

In the end we're all consumed by something, but be comforted. The experience is only as glorious or as terrible as the consuming fire that we choose to be caught in.

Mardis Gras

Today is the last day before the 40 days of Lent.

Mardi Gras caps off a weeklong celebration known as Carnival. It's a period of revelry known for music, partying and alcohol that flows like water. Amid all the hoopla and pageantry of the floats in New Orleans it can be easy to forget that Mardi Gras in its roots is a religious celebration tied into Ash Wednesday tomorrow.

The cynic might look at the Mardi Gras celebration as an attempt by the faithful to squeeze in as much last-minute fun and debauchery as possible. After this, it's off to the confessional and time to put on an appropriately penitent show to satisfy the sad-sack priests during Lent.

This misses the point. While God surely does want us to keep ourselves free of wrongdoing, fun and pleasure were God's idea. It was God who showed humanity how to make wine and rum and their cousins. It was God who gave us music and friends. It was God who invented sex and made having it his first commandment.

People might overdo it getting drunk on Bourbon Street, but Mardi Gras falls into a grand tradition of festivals rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Celebrations of spring. Celebrations of fall. New Years celebrations. Private parties. National parties. "They tried to kill us, but we're still here and they're not" parties.

There are common threads running through all of them. Eat. Drink. Let your hair down. Jesus' first miracle involved giving people at a wedding better wine than anything they'd had so far. There's even an entire book of the Bible about the joys of sex.

Enjoy yourself, God tells us. Live a little.

Lent begins Wednesday. It's a 40-day period that leads up to the events of Good Friday, when Christians of all stripes traditionally mark the Crucifixion. It's a liturgical marker of the time between when first Jesus and then his disciples realized that things were not going to go the way they had first hoped, and when things got as absolutely bad as they possibly could.

Carnival is a time for wine and celebration, a season for living large and loving life for all that it gives us. Mardi Gras marks the end of that season.

Tonight is the night we celebrate. It is the last bottle, the last cup, the last drink we will have before we find that there are ashes in our wine.

The Feast of Sunday

 Today is Sunday.

In church we call this the Lord’s Day and celebrate it as the Christian sabbath. It’s meant to be holy, a sanctuary carved into time itself, a time when the most wretched of us can walk into the Presence and be welcomed not just by the Creator but by others as well.

The medieval church had more days set aside for fasting and penance than you could shake a stick at, but never Sunday. Sunday is always a feast day.

Sometimes the feast is hard.The liturgy may be clear of sour faces and there’s no vinegar scheduled for your corn flakes, but the liturgy doesn’t always match the weather. The sun will shine when it will shine, and dark clouds will block it out when a cold wind blows them in. It may be a feast day, but that doesn’t put food on the table or wine in your glass. The fiddlers may play but that doesn’t mean you want to dance.

Sometimes when you want sun, it just keeps raining. The night ends but instead of dawn, dusk comes again until the only light left is the last failing ember of a candle that has burned itself away. Joy becomes the friend who moved away with no forwarding address, who left no number to call. Holding onto her feels an impossible task.

There are times you feel so fundamentally alone that the only thing that makes sense is to yell at God and tell him off.

So go ahead and do it.

There are times life is so unjust that the only thing left is to let loose your inner Karen and complain to management that their customer service sucks.

Go ahead and complain.

It won’t make your life better. Your friends and family will still ignore you. You’ll still have lost the family home. Your goldfish will still have been eaten by the cat, and the cat will still have choked to death on the goldfish.

It will still be dark.

But you’ll have changed. You’ll have raged into the whirlwind, and while it probably won’t grant you the answer you wanted, still you’ll come away with a new appreciation for its power.

It’s Sunday. You don’t need to go anywhere. The sanctuary came to you, and it ushered you in.

Grace be with you all.

 

Copyright 2023 by David Learn. Used with permission.