[pride] Ours is the Task

Ours is the Task: a Litany of Remembrance and Commitment
(Written for the Kansas City Pride Interfaith Service 2017-05-31)


Credits:
The core of the Litany that we’re about to say comes from the novel Wanderground by Sally Miller Gearheart.
[Gearhart, Sally Miller. The wanderground: stories of the hill women. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1984. Print. Page 196]

I was reading this novel when my friend Jeane died in 2000, which is probably why the ritual of grief that ends the novel engraved itself into my heart.

If you so believe, then so it is:
Ours is the task,
Yours is the passing.
And, although you may, you may not come again.

If you so believe, then so it is
If you so believe, then so it is

Ours is the task
Ours is the task

Yours is the passing
Yours is the passing

And although you may, you may not come again.
And although you may, you may not come again.

We gather tonight as people of many faiths and none, believers and wanderers, pilgrims and proselytes, converts and clergy. We believe in many Gods and none, in many paths to many destinations.

We believe in the transforming power of community and of faith itself.

If you so believe, then so it is
If you so believe, then so it is

We gather tonight to promise each other, our communities, our Gods and our universe that we will stand together for justice.

We are many people, of many faiths, many colors, many genders. We have many ways of worshiping, many ways of loving.

Ours is the task
Ours is the task

Ours is the task of building bridges out of our differences, weaving flags in many colors, writing poetry in many languages, learning from one another and loving those we do not understand.

Ours is the task
Ours is the task

Ours is the task of telling our stories, naming our heroes, remembering our ancestors. Ours is the task of insisting that trans women of color and homeless youth are not erased from our memory of Stonewall. Ours is the task of honoring the messy, complex identities of our forebears without collapsing them into the categories that we prefer today.

Ours is the task of reminding the world that we were not the first men to marry men, not the first women to kiss women, not the first people to realize that gender binaries can’t hold us.

Ours is the task
Ours is the task

Ours is the task of solidarity. It is ours to realize that when any people suffer, when any people are not free, when any people live in danger, we must work for liberation.

Ours is the task
Ours is the task

It is our task to be specific and fearless. It is our task to practice saying, "lesbian," "gay," "bisexual," "transgender," and "queer" precisely and clearly.

It is our task to protect Muslim women riding the bus.

It is our task to end child marriage in all fifty states.

It is our task to raise the minimum wage.

It is our task to write and speak, to remember and pray, to comfort and grieve, to protest and publicize and protect. It’s ours to give what we can from what’s been given to us.

Ours is the task
Ours is the task

Yours is the passing
Yours is the passing

Beloved ancestors: Harvey Milk, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Leslie Fienberg, Brenda Howard, Audre Lorde, women and men and queers of all genders, people of all kinds, to whom we owe our communities, people remembered and people lost to history –

Yours is the passing
Yours is the passing

Beloved ancestors who died in the closet, who never found names for yourselves, whose names we’ll never know:

Yours is the passing
Yours is the passing

Beloved generation lost to AIDS, dying fearlessly on statehouse steps:

Yours is the passing
Yours is the passing

Beloved who have been martyred recently:
The 49 victims of shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando
Gay and bisexual men murdered in Chechnya
Brenda Bostick, Sherrell Faulkner, and nine other transgender women of color killed this year in this country:

Yours is the passing
Yours is the passing

We name the horror of your deaths and the beauty of your lives, and with hope and doubt, with faith and fear, we remember you, we honor you, and in your name we say

OURS is the task
Ours is the task

Yours is the passing
Yours is the passing

And although you may,
And although you may,

You may not come again
you may not come again

[sermon] on activism, shame, power, and pride

Sermon for the people of St. Mark Hope and Peace 2015-06-28

Primary Preaching Text: Mark 5:21-43
Secondary Text: 2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27


I fully intended to talk about David today.

If you're my friend on Facebook you might have seen that weeks ago I posted excitedly about this text being appointed for this day, the eve of the 46th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. The love of David and Jonathan, and particularly this text from Second Samuel is beloved in many lgbtq Christian and Jewish spaces because we can so easily claim David as one of our own -- especially for gay and bisexual men, this is a story that we can look to and say unabashedly, David is one of ours. Rev. Nancy Wilson, current moderator of the Metropolitan Community Church, says, exuberantly and with exclamation points, that David is the most clearly bisexual figure in the whole Bible.¹

I was planning to preach about David until yesterday afternoon, when I finally noticed the woman who'd been tugging at my sleeve all week. My plans to talk about David, central to the institutions of both church and state, and what Rev. Wilson calls, a bit anachronistically, his "same-sex, lifelong relationship" with Jonathan, were disrupted and interrupted by a person on the very fringes of society, a person in desperate need who demanded -- and demands to be seen and heard and healed.

In this complicated moment in our nation, when joyous news from the Supreme Court and tragic news from Charleston compete for our emotions, the woman with a flow of blood speaks more fully to my identity as a queer person and our identity as a Reconciling in Christ church than does King David with all his power.

The woman with the flow of blood is the filling in a sandwich story about the healing of Jairus's daughter. Jairus is a person of power and influence, a leader in the synagogue. He summons Jesus to heal his sick daughter, and Jesus goes with him, and on their way, they're interrupted by a woman who has suffered in many ways for the way her body is made.

There are physical torments of her constant hemorrhaging, and the ungentle and unsuccessful cures she's endured from a stream of doctors, and then there is the cultural torment of being perpetually unclean. She is excluded from her society, rendered untouchable by the flow of blood she can't control.

She has nothing to lose. She's spent all her money on ineffective doctors and she had no social capital to begin with. Her physical condition has deteriorated, and she constantly endures rejection. Everything in her culture has taught her that bodies like hers, and her body in particular, are shameful.

So she reaches the point beyond shame, beyond propriety, beyond fear, where her need for healing is greater than any force that would constrain her.

Forty-six years ago, the patrons of Stonewall reached this point. The police raided a gay bar, as the police did. And that night, when tempers were hot, when activism was in the air -- Vietnam, civil rights, women's liberation -- that night drag queens and trans women, bulldykes and sex workers, homeless youth, most of them people of color, all of them people who had nothing to lose and so nothing to fear -- that night those patrons of Stonewall Inn refused to comply.

A few years earlier, transgender and transsexual patrons of Compton's Cafeteria reached that point, and they threw first coffee, and then dishes and furniture at police in protest of harassment and mistreatment.

The nineteen-eighties and nineties were full of those moments, and ACT UP, (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) picketed and protested to draw attention to the AIDS crisis, to demand access to medical intervention, to share accurate information about HIV transmission and safer sex. A people dying of AIDS screamed that "SILENCE=DEATH" and refused to be silent.

This past Wednesday, Jennicet Gutiérrez, an undocumented trans Latina activist, reached this point at the White House LGBT Pride Month Reception. She interrupted President Obama's speech to shout, "Release all GLBTQ immigrants from detention and stop all deportations!" She later wrote, "In the tradition of how Pride started, I interrupted his speech because it is time for our issues and struggles to be heard."²

Indeed.

In the tradition of Pride, and in a tradition older than Pride. In the tradition of Jesus, who announced in the Nazareth synagogue that he had been sent to proclaim release to the captives, and in the tradition of Isaiah, whom Jesus was quoting.

And in the tradition of a nameless woman with a hemorrhage, who had endured all that she could endure.

She didn't ask.

She took.

When we remember the activism of the previous century, we sometimes sugarcoat it. Last fall we saw many white lgbtq people deride the protests in Ferguson, crying, "Remember Stonewall! Peaceful protest is totally possible!"

Oh yes. Remember Stonewall, with thrown pennies, thrown bottles, thrown shoes. Remember the patrons who thought to set the bar on fire.

We don't need to condone violence to remember that it's part of our history.

The path that led to the Supreme Court decision this week that legalized same-sex marriage across the country was not always peaceful and it was not always nice. It did involve middle-class gay men and women asking nicely if they could please have their rights now, if it's not too much of a bother.

And it involved thrown shoes and burning police cars and groups called Lesbian Avengers and Queer Nation and Transexual Menace. It involved shouting and crying and name-calling.

There are couples who have waited patiently for decades to get married, and we rejoice with them this week.

And there are couples who got married decades ago who fudged applications for marriage licenses, people who changed their names to more gender neutral alternatives.³ Further back in time, there are people who didn't ask, but simply lived as members of their true genders, butches and trans men who married women and were their husbands.

There are Lutheran pastors who waited patiently for ELCA policy to change. And there are Lutheran pastors who were ordained extraordinarily years before the 2009 Churchwide Assembly.

There are people like Jairus, people with power and with a lot to lose, who got on their knees and begged.

And there are people like the woman with a flow of blood, people with no institutional power and nothing at all to lose, who reached out and claimed power, demanded healing.

Violence is still not God's will for God's people. God still doesn't want us to harm each other; God doesn't want us to take what's not ours. God has made that perfectly clear. We can and should feel conflicted about those parts of our history. Reaching out and touching a person in a crowd -- on purpose and without permission -- is a blatant violation of bodily autonomy, and that is also not okay.

But it's understandable.

Activism is not pretty, because it arises from the mess we've made of the world.

There is a point of desperation where everything falls away but the need for healing.

From the outside, it's a stillframe, a single moment in time of explosive rage, or uncontrollable weeping, or a woman reaching out her hand.

But inside, it's year upon year of oppression and pain.

It's the experience of an African-American woman, a single mother working two minimum wage jobs, whose body bears the aches of standing all day every day, of working through illness, of walking the long mile from work to the bus stop, the half mile from the bus stop to day care, from tensing whenever she sees a police officer. Whose face aches from smiling at customers and wishing them a nice day. Whose heart aches from the death of her husband to gang violence, the incarceration of her brother, and the endless, endless news stories about anti-black violence, and the stories her friends tell that don't make the news.

It's the experience of a transgender woman whose body aches with an undiagnosed condition because she can't access a health care provider who will treat her with dignity, whose muscles are tense from cringing whenever she walks alone after dark, who spends day after day warding off crude sexual advances but who can't find a partner who loves her for herself.

It's the experience of an African-American man, perhaps the most powerful man in the world, whose body aches from sleepless nights, whose head aches from recalcitrant congresspersons, and mostly, whose heart aches with the death of his siblings in the place that was their sanctuary. It's the experience of President Obama, whose wisdom and education and credentials and deep faith are invisible to those who, still, after eight years, see only the color of his skin.

It's the experience of the heroines and heroes of Stonewall, women like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha Johnson, who sold sex and took drugs and sometimes lived on the streets and felt themselves excluded from the movement they'd started, pushed to the side for the sake of the politics of respectability.

It's the experience of a woman whose body is despised by her society, who's been abused by the medical establishment, and who lives in poverty, alone and outcast.

Let me be clear, these experiences, all of them, are only part of the story of people's lives. There are moments too of transcendent joy, moments of beauty and love and laughter.

But in this time of grief, in Ferguson and Charleston and all the places in between-- this is a moment that's poured onto people already hurting from year after year of violence and fear.

This is a moment of pain, but also a moment of possibility, a moment of promise.

Those moments in scripture, those moments in history, this moment now --

The moment when survival is more important than manners, when the only words that will give voice to anguish are not polite words, when power that's been stolen from people and hoarded by institutions must be reclaimed --

that moment when with thrown rocks and raised voices and a hand lifted up to touch the fringes of power

that moment of desperate hope reaching up from anguish

it's that moment when God's power flows like lightening into the hands of God's people.

God can transform a bleeding woman's desperate faith into healing and restoration. God can transform angry arson and vandalism into the rainbow people who rejoiced on Friday. God transforms debt into jubilee, slavery into freedom, death into life.

The world fills us with shame -- for the shape of our bodies and the depth of our grief, for our passions and our pleasures, for the places we live and the clothes we wear, for the color of our skin and the fluency of our language, for who we love and for who we are.

Activism is the moment when people who have been made ashamed become shameless, because we have nothing left to lose and no other recourse left.

And grace is the moment when shame and shamelessness alike are transformed into pride.

Amen.


¹Wilson, Nancy L. Our Tribe: Queer Folks, God, Jesus, and the Bible. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995. Print. 146.

²Guttiérez, Jennicet. "I Interrupted Obama Because We Need to Be Heard." Washington Blade. Brown, Naff, Pitts Omnimedia, Inc, 25 June 2015. Web. 28 June 2015.

³Eckholm, Erik. "The Same-Sex Couple Who Got a Marriage License in 1971." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 16 May 2015. Web. 28 June 2015.

[pride] Litany of Binding and Loosing

[written for the Kansas City Interfaith Pride service 2014-06-18]
[potentially triggering themes include: suicide, drug use, sex work, murder, and various kinds of shame-fueled self-destructive behavior. And if any of that is too heavy for you to read about right now, know that this is for you, too. Especially for you.]

A Litany of Binding and Loosing

This is for you.

This is for you when you looked in the mirror with loathing.
This is for you when people in power sensed your pain
and used it to hurt you.
This is for you when you hid your true name in the back of your closet
with your shoes and your dresses and your powder compact.
This is for you still living
behind your picket fence.
This is for you bleaching your skin and straightening your hair.
This is for the bone-deep blush
when strangers, colleagues, family, lovers
cut you with humiliating slurs.
This is for you whispering euphemisms,
lighting a match and searching
in the dark
for family.

Many: we bind up your shame and let loose your pride.

This is for you when you damaged your lungs, binding with ACE bandages.
This is for you barebacking and bug-chasing.
This is for you refusing to be tested for HIV.
This is for you downing uppers and booze
This is for you when you knew
that only johns would want to touch you
This is for you when you knew
that you'd never marry.
This is for you with a knife in your hand
with a gun to your temple
at the end of a bridge

This is for you every time you make choices
Like you have no future.

And this is for our siblings
who didn't make it this far.

Many: we bind up your despair and let loose your hope.

This is for you, denied hormones
by insurance companies, doctors, therapists
every institution who knew you only as an illness.
This is for you, unemployed because you came to interviews dressed up as yourself,
and you eliding for your co-workers the genders of your spouse,
and you fired because of who you married.
This is for you homeless
because you're denied housing,
denied work,
denied hope.
This is for you, named unfit to parent.
This is for you imprisoned for defending yourself.
This is for you, Sylvia, and for you, Marsha,
rejected by the movement you incited.
This is for you, my trans sisters, especially for you
for every time the rest of us refused to name you
and sold your rights in exchange for
broken promises that we'd be given ours.

And this is for you when you're dead
and your murderers walk free.

Many: we bind up all forms of oppression and let loose your justice.

And this is for you, too,
beribboned in rainbows and dancing your truth
radiant on your wedding day,
glittering at Missie B's,
splendidly strong and courageously meek.
This is for you working for a pittance at nonprofits
giving voice to lost stories
and lifting strangers into
your heart's tomorrow.

Many: we bind up your apathy and indifference, your hurt and your exhaustion, your painful past and uncertain future, and we let you loose to heal all that is broken in your heart, in your community, in our world.

[liturgy] Outing God: Prayers of Confession and Forgiveness for National Coming Out Day

One: Abram, scared, said, "Sarai's my sister, not my wife."
Many: We've evaded.
One: Naomi, bitter, told Ruth, "Marry a man, it's easier."
Many: We've bearded ourselves.
One: Jonah, angry, abandoned God's calling and tried to live a different life.
Many: We've run away.
One: Peter, terrified, denied he knew Jesus.
Many: We've lied.
One: Like the saints throughout the ages, we've tried to hide,
Many: and in hiding ourselves, we've closeted YOU.
One: Scared of your truth, we've hidden in lies. We deny the lives you gave us and the ways you made us. We stay in the closet. We live double lives. We are cautious and careful. We avoid the truth. We internalize shame. We hate the children you love.
Many: Forgive us.


One: Beloved, I share with you good news. The God who made you has been closeted too, by false prophets and idolaters who worship law instead of God. Hear this truth: God is wildly in love with you and made you exactly as you are, a precious child, a beloved friend, a cherished partner in the work of re-creating the world.

God will use you to give birth to nations and beget kings. Through you God proclaims forgiveness to sinners and Good News to all peoples. God is hidden in your heart and revealed in your life. God lurks in your shadows, whispering hope. God sleeps in your secrets, dreaming of truth.

God knows your true name, your passions, your fears. God loves you and wants to share you with the whole world.

Many: God, we love you, and want to share you with the whole world.

One: Some name you as Father,
Many: and we know you as our strong Mother and tender Daddy, as a wise Grandmother who gentles her grandbaby and as an ecstatic new Parent who rejoices at every marvelous fingernail of hir new child.
One: Some name you as a human rabbi,
Many: and we know you as the Child of God, the eternally creating Word who took flesh for our sake and delighted to be vulnerable with us. We know you as Wisdom, handmaiden of the Most High, who lived and taught among us.
One: Some name you as divine, infallible, impassible
Many: and we know you as one of us, exhausted by travel and hungry for bread, angry and sad, sarcastic and kind, bound by old prejudices and challenged by God, a mortal sinner like us who saved us forever from sin and death.
One: Some say you are dead.
Many: We know that You live.
One: Some claim to understand you.
Many: We love you in a paradox.
One: Some say that you hate us,
Many: and we know that's not true.
One: Some think your work is finished,
Many: and we receive your challenge, acknowledge your forgiveness, accept your grace, and name you as our own, our Creator, our Savior, our Comfort.


One: Beloved, will you come out?
Many: With God as our guide, we will search ourselves, and with God as our companion, we will live with integrity. We will reclaim the pieces of ourselves that we've forgotten and abandoned, rejected and denied, loving ourselves as God loves us.

One: Beloved, will you out God?
Many: When evil is done in God's name, we will do good more boldly. Where injustice dwells in God's church, we will exorcise it. We will reclaim the sacred book that's been turned into a weapon. We will reclaim the sacred house that's become a den of thieves. We will reclaim the name of God that's been used to instill fear and to separate God's children from each other. We will reclaim the name Christian and live in the world as little Christs, sharing gentle justice and fierce love.

One: Go, then, and bring God out with you into the world.
Many: We go in peace; thanks be to God.

[sermon] dance with the One who brought you

[Delivered 2010-06-02 at the Kansas City Interfaith Pride Service, hosted by Spirit of Hope MCC, speaking on the given theme of Then - 1978]

Dance with the One who brought you.

In 2008, I moved to Kansas from Massachusetts for the only reason that a sane queer person would move from Massachusetts, the state that pioneered equality marriage, a state where there's been a Pride parade in the capitol city every year since Stonewall, home of my big fat queer family where I'm not the first but the fourth person in my family tree to identify as queer. I came because I was in luuuuuuuv.

In 1978, I wasn't born.

In 1978, my mother was 16 years old and going to Baptist Bible Camp and being told that even though she was a fine public speaker, she wasn't being called to the ministry because God didn't call women.

In 1978, my mother had no idea that she liked girls. The idea wouldn't occur to her for another two decades.

In 1976, Carter Heyward, a pioneering lesbian theologian, was making history because she was ordained. It wasn't historical because she was queer; it was historic because she was a woman, among the first batch to be extraordinarily ordained, contrary to the policy of the Episcopal Church in the USA.

So in 1978, this twentysomething queer girl [cock head -- woman? no, this was 1978, she was definitely a girl] from Boston flies to Kansas City to live with her girlfriend.

We met at a women's college, before "women's college" was synonymous with "dyke haven." We didn't come to college expecting to find a girlfriend; people were telling us, quite seriously and worriedly, that we'd have a hard time getting our M.R.S. degree at a girls' school. We were planning to pursue careers, not unheard of but not usual. I knew I liked girls, but I also knew that it was just a stage and that I'd grow out of it soon. That's what all the books told me as I secretly marked the pages that mentioned this little problem about liking girls. It was just a stage and I'd stop when I grew up.

It wasn't something we talked about at church. I knew other churches did, in a pretty horrific way, but I grew up in mainline churches that preferred to think that this wasn't happening, that this movement was outside religion and apart from it and that the church didn't need to have a response to the gay rights movement because the gay rights movement wasn't asking for one.

So then I met this girl, right, and suddenly it was important for me to tell the people I cared most about, the people who were part of my church, my family.

I came to Kansas City in 1978 and I wanted a place where I could worship -- and now I had to make a choice.

And even though, secret, not all of us are from 1978, it's a choice all of us have to make.

Dance with the One who brought you.

But what brought me here, to Kansas City in 1978, a femmey Christian dyke with a backpack full of books?

What brought you here, tonight?

What brought this church into being, and what brings the other churches and communities in the Coalition into being and together?

How do I choose? Can I forgive the denomination that kicked me out, the church that scorned my spiritual mothers and fathers, a religion that executed people like me?

Will the old forms still hold me? As I fall in love with Christ all over again, will any hymns bear that love, or must I write new lovesongs for Her?

Will new communities sustain me? Is there enough depth in them for me to put down roots, twisted and ancient?

Where will I find the stories that will speak my history?

~~~~~

Story has currency in the queer community. Story is the thing that we take with us, the thing that holds us together, the thing that embraces us as a community.

"When did you know?"

"How did you know?"

"When did you come out?"

Queer is a thing we are, but it's also a story about where we were. I'm a lesbian because I've fell in love with a woman when I was twelve. You're transgender because you were labeled female at birth and now call yourself male. You are genderqueer because yesterday you bound and packed and today you're wearing a lacy dress. You're bisexual because, although you're married to a woman now, you dated mostly men in your twenties.

And story is the way we find our way into community. Even in those years that don't stand as decade landmarks, the Pride festival is an anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and in joining the festivities, we join a story that's punctuated by that rebellion, claim kinship with the queer folks who fought back forty-one years ago.

The queer community has a fascination with our own history. Part of that history has been hidden from us, erased with words like "friendship" and "spinster." It's a history that must be uncovered obliquely. We look at our own family trees and see the maiden aunt and bachelor uncle and we wonder, but will never know. We reread old stories and claim them as our own. We look at the Bible and see Naomi and Ruth and David and Jonathan and say yep, those are ours. But it's a history that has to be claimed, a history that had to be written, within the last century. And it's one that as queer children or adolescents or young adults or older adults we had to rediscover for ourselves because it's not taught in schools like our country's history or around the dinner table like our family history, our cultural history.

So there are two reasons we're attached to queer history -- because we have to go out and claim it. And because we are in the middle of making it.

What has brought us safe thus far?

Who has brought our history to this point?

Who brought you here?

What brought you here?

WE have done the bringing.

If you've been out there making a noise, some lonely gay man heard it.

If you've been in here, building a place, a nice gay couple found it.

If you've been way, way out there in your denomination, witnessing to a Love that's greater than any law, you've been singing in justice with a cloud of saints.

If you've been joining your heart to the universe, if you've been praying for a day of justice, if you've been davening or dancing or breathing your intention, you have been changing the universe. You have been bringing people to this place.

If you've held your lover's hand in church, if you'e told your grandma you're bringing home a personfriend whose preferred pronoun is "ze" --

you've been making history.

Martin Luther King Jr. said that the moral arc of the universe is long, but bends toward justice.

The universe is bending toward justice. The universe, the Spirit, All-That-Is, God, all Goddesses and Gods, bend toward justice. We are dancing toward justice, and we are not dancing alone.

I don't know most of you, so I don't know what's brought you to this place today.

For some of you, Spirit of Hope is home, and the call to come here was as familiar as the call to come on Sunday mornings. Some of us come from other Coalition churches. Some of us come because we are proud of our queerness and long to honor that. Some of can do that at our home churches, and some of us can't. Some of us have come to a church today with a sense of suspicion, even though we've been promised welcome.

Some of us are old enough to remember when this was the only choice for queer people in search of a spiritual home, and some of us are old enough to remember when there was no choice, and some of us are young enough that we can't believe there was ever such a time.

Take a moment and think about what brought you here this evening. Was it an invitation from a friend? The movement of a spirit? A question? A doubt? A hope? This is an Interfaith Pride service, so I'm going to guess that everyone here has a little bit of faith, and a little bit of pride. Hold tight to those. What do you have faith in? What do you base your hope on? What matters so much that you will give your life to it, to him, to her, to hir?

What are you proud of? What's offbeat, eccentric or queer about you, what's so true about you that you must share it if you will live authentically?

What faith, what pride, what spirit, brought you here?

Dwell with that for a little while. Who brought you here tonight?

[pause.]

As a people, we've been brought here by the powerful moral arc of history. We've been brought here by the courage and strength and deep faith of our ancestors. Tonight we're going to join hands with those forces, join our strength with theirs, and look into the future together.

As you look, I'd like you to dance.

Dance with the One who brought you.

[lgbt] "sodomy, it's between God and me"

The first lesson at Mass this morning the morning in June when I originally wrote most of this was part of Genesis 19. I would give you a more exact verse citation? But I was less paying attention than twitching in fear. I think we started with v. 24, "Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfer and fire from the LORD out of heaven," and then Lot's wife turns into a pillar of salt and we didn't actually hear why it was that God destroyed Sodom, which as you and I and most of the delegates to the ELCA Central States Synod Assembly know was:

• lack of hospitality


• sexual violence


• nothing at all to do with loving committed same-gender relationships

But though you know that and I know that, I didn't know if the priest knew that. His homily was about the Gospel reading. His prayer that began, "Since we read part of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah today, we pray for those suffering from..." ended with "natural disasters: floods, hurricanes, earthquakes..."

Did you tense up in the middle of that sentence? I would have, if I hadn't already been a ball of tension, ready to flee at the slightest hint of condemnation.

The description of Sodom's wickedness isn't in the lectionary. [Romans 1 is Epiphany 9A, should there be 9 weeks in the Epiphany.]

Which is possibly kind of a shame, because it means we don't get to reclaim it. Because "Sodom" is not shorthand for sexual violence against women or a lack of hospitality to strangers and I know that whenever I hear the word, which is why I spent five minutes at Mass this morning cringing.

I go to midday service at Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal, and our gospel lesson was Luke 9:51-62. Vv 57-62 are difficult, troubling words about the costs of discipleship, but I was more struck by the first part:

When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set towards Jerusalem. When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, "Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" But he turned and rebuked them. Then they went on to another village.

The LORD (Lord) rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire (do you want us to command fire) from the LORD out of heaven (to come down from heaven) and he overthrew those cities (and consume them?)

(But he turned and rebuked them.)

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There are a lot of places I could go from here. One text. My (queer Christian woman) experience (fear) of one of them in a location (Kansas) in a context (early twenty-first century USA). Another text from another lectionary with unexpected parallels.

So what?

So I think it's more helpful to think of both stories as showcasing conflicting human impulses toward retribution and mercy. The destruction of Sodom is the occasion for Abraham's bargains with God for the salvation of Sodom for the sake of fifty forty-five forty [...] ten righteous inhabitants. Abraham and God, Jesus and James and John:

it is absolutely not about a New Testament God and an "Old Testament" God, any more than it's about merciful Hebrew patriarchs and hot-headed early Christians. It's a continuing conversation about judgment and mercy, turning and turning again: repentance.

Lot's wife turns to look back; Jesus turns to face his disciples. Turn and turn again. Repent.

Before we can follow Jesus, we need to acknowledge that the potent, powerful desire to rain fire on our enemies is part of us too.

In Sunday school several months ago I asked about praying the vengeful parts of the Psalms, and one of the answers I got was, pray those parts as confession. We wanted you to rain fire from heaven, God, to smite our enemies utterly and crush them underfoot, and we are most grievously sorry.

That's one answer. Justice fire mercy and judgment.

Or this:

I'm a sodomite.

It's terribly dangerous to identify ourselves myself with the sinners in the story, because the inhabitants of Sodom were sinful in ways that have nothing to do with queer sexuality. When we talk about welcoming and affirming glbt people into our congregations (and affirming ourselves as glbt people and beloved children of God), we have to be really clear that affirmation means, "Your queerness is not sinful. Your desires are not sinful. Your lifestyle is not sinful. Your partnership is not sinful."

So that's not what I'm saying when I say, "I'm a sodomite." It has nothing to do with my sinful nature -- it has to do with my location when I hear the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, with the historical and contemporary uses of that story, which doesn't and can't exist free of its homophobic history, not for me, probably not for many other queer people.

It means, when I hear that story, I don't identify with God or Lot or Lot's wife or Lot's daughters. I identify with the Sodomites, and that means that when I hear James and John asking for fire to come down and consume a village of Samaritans... I remember that I'm a sodomite, and this story feels viciously familiar.

And after spending a morning cringing in the margins, when I move to a place of privilege, when I am most easily identified as white, able-bodied, and young, when my queerness and femaleness are less relevant -- I take my margin experience with me and remember, and turn, and repent.