LET THE RAINBOW SHINE
Exodus 13:17-22; 1 Corinthians 12:4-31; Galatians 5:1, 13-14
By Rev. Dr. Jeanne Knepper
August 13, 2006

Some  of you may know that I worshipped at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church for nearly a decade while I lived in Denver Colorado. While I was there, I got to know Julian Rush, the author of the hymn we just sang. Julian wrote these words in 1985; our small choir may have been the first people to sing them. Did you notice, as we sang the words together, that they seemed very familiar? If you were to take your copy of The Faith We Sing and turn to number 2238, you would find almost the same song, called “In the Midst of New Dimensions.â€�

Well what, you might wonder, would be worth photocopying a song so similar to the one we already have in a hymnal? To answer that, we’d have to examine the words together. First off, you might notice that the original version had six verses, not five. Verses 3 and 4 of the original sing out,

Through the years of human struggle, walk a people long despised,
Gays and lesbians together fighting to be realized.

We are Black and we are Asian, Indian, Hispanic, White
We a rainbow coalition, all of value in thy sight.

These verses have been replaced, in the version canonized in a United Methodist hymnal, with one verse:

As we stand a world divided by our own self-seeking schemes,
grant that we, your global village, might envision wider dreams.

Do you hear what has been left out of the approved version? All of the specificity, all of the color of our lives and experiences! It becomes, in a way, a black-and-white photograph of a rainbow, a sad and puny substitute for the awesome color and beauty of God’s many and varied creation. And it suggests, in the language, that naming all of our wonderful particularity is, or could be, part of “our own self-seeking schemes.� Oh, how sad, how very sad.

Julian Rush is a United Methodist minister, an accomplished writer of music and musicals, a wise, gentle and courageous gay man. In 1982 he told his senior pastor what he had been learning about himself in therapy. His senior pastor decided that the church must be told and suddenly Julian was at the center of the cultural maelstrom around sexual orientation, his story featured, even, in the New Yorker magazine. Julian sold tires for a while, until the congregation of St. Paul’s UMC made it clear that they would welcome him to serve as pastor in their church. Julian served quarter time at St Paul’s while also founding and directing the Colorado Aids Project. While at ST. Paul’s, and because he was the focal point for many people’s anger, he received graphic and vicious death threats. Someone burned a cross on the church parking lot. Our ushers were an alert lot, watching for missing bulletins, yes, but also for handguns. Julian knew something firsthand about “a people long despised.�

As the Director of Colorado Aids Project, Julian counseled with who were living and dying of AIDS. He told a story of one young man who had moved to Denver from a small town where his home church and family both believed that homosexuality was utterly sinful, a willful choice to disregard God’s plan for all human beings. It had been easier, the man said, to leave than to stay in the monochrome culture of his home. He left, and over time had less and less to do with his family. But then he contracted AIDS. When he came for counsel, he knew that death was in his near future. And he wanted to be reconciled to his family. He wanted them to know who he was, and what he faced. So he sat with Julian to craft a short letter, one that told his parents that he was gay, that he had AIDS, and that he expected to die soon. When a response arrived, the young man carried it to Julian’s office to open it. He slit the envelope and found a folded sheet of paper. When he unfolded the blank paper, torn up pieces of an official paper, his birth certificate, fell out. There were no words. None were needed to convey the utter rejection his parents expressed. Thank God Julian, a United Methodist pastor, was there with him.
When the Hebrew people walked into the wilderness, God accompanied them, by day and by night. It is the nature of God, to be there with people who are oppressed, terrified, and trying to find the way to a new life, to a new way of being God’s people. God goes before us, in fiery pillar, in a tower of cloud, in the bright and shining light of a rainbow. God goes before us, in the stories of Moses and Jesus and Julian, in the struggles of black and white and red and gold and brown people all over the world. God goes before us, carrying a huge rainbow banner that flaps over our heads, reminding us over and over that all of us, all our colors, all our ways of being, everyone of us is a part of the rainbow of God’s creation, necessary for the fullness of creation.

Once upon a time I was interviewed on Talk of the Nation, a national radio show. In the course of the show, I was asked how a church could welcome homosexual people into worship. Wouldn’t that destroy the beauty and message of the church? I thought for a while, and then responded by asking the questioner whether he thought we should keep purple in the spectrum? Isn’t it the color of bruises and strangled flesh? Why not just leave it out of life, or at least of worship? Wouldn’t the world be more beautiful if we dispensed with purple hues, even if that meant losing gladiolas and irises and lilacs and purple mountain majesties? And orange, isn’t that a loud and awkward color? Why not limit ourselves to red, yellow, green, and blue? But then, you know, some greens are sort of grayish, and some reds shade towards brown, and oh, mustard yellow isn’t so beautiful, is it?

We’re into Paul’s territory, aren’t we? There are many gifts, and one Gifter, many parts and one body, many kinds of people, all wonderful, all necessary, and one community of faith. Paul was writing to a congregation at Corinth that was torn apart by dissension, that was unraveling because some of them felt that others of them weren’t appropriately a part of the body of Christ. Back then, they fought and argued, just as vehemently as the church is arguing now, only the question was different. Could people who were not Jewish be Christian? Could Christians who were Greek and Jew, who were slave and free, male and female, could they take communion together, could they eat the bread of life side by side? Aren’t some things just beyond the pale of acceptable behavior? Can a man who has not been circumcised serve bread and wine to people who have always kept the laws of holy eating? How can you expect us, Paul, to be one community when we are so different from each other. It would be so much easier if you sent those idolaters—the ones who eat meat bought in the markets—if you sent them out of the fellowship. Change a few words, and it seems a lot like what the church struggles with, even now. And that makes some sense, for the question of the limits of God’s welcome have plagued the faithful always.

Paul took on the same issue when he wrote to the Galatians. He had started those churches in Asia Minor, had stressed from the beginning that God’s love expressed through the life and death of Jesus had nullified the law, making its provisions of kosher irrelevant for the community of faith. Once again, he had taught them that all were welcome, all were set free, in the life in Christ. No one had a right to impose religious duties on another: God had called them all to freedom from cultural expectations.

The issue had come up because teachers from the Jerusalem branch of the new Christian way had visited Galatia and had up-braided the Jews among the believers there for eating with Gentiles who did not keep kosher and were not circumcised. The Jerusalem branch of the Christian community was composed almost entirely of people who were Jewish before they were Christian; they taught that believers had to keep Jewish law as a requirement of faith.

We didn’t read this part, but Paul was so angry about these teachings that he wrote to the Galatians that he wished that the ones who taught them to exclude each other would go castrate themselves! You are called to freedom, he told the Galatians. To imagine that your neighbor needs to be like you to be a part of the faith is to deny the power of Christ to fulfill all of the law, is to diminish the freedom that is God’s priceless gift to all of us.

I chose to wear a Hawaiian shirt today, one more celebration of color and diversity, but also one more witness to God’s persistent call of freedom and creativity. You see, Hawaiian shirts are an artifact of another time when church folk got it wrong about what is required to be a part of the community of faith. Protestant missionaries from chilly New England thought their own attitudes about clothing were an essential part of Christian faith. They insisted that Hawaiian people who lived in a warm and comfortable climate must cover their bodies with “Christian� clothing to be converted. So it was that they furnished plain boxy work shirts and dresses to the Hawaiian people, demanding that they dress modestly as new Christians. The new converts complied, sort of, but chose to sew their own shirts out of fabric that expressed the color and warmth of their island home. I like these shirts: they are another reminder that God’s people have many different gifts and ways of being. Like the rainbow, like irises and lilacs and saris and green fingernail polish, they remind me that God is so much bigger than all of our human-imposed boundaries. And I hope they remind you that you, whoever you are, however old or young, whatever race or country of origin, whether you are gay or lesbian, straight or transgender, dating, coupled, married, widowed, divorced or single, you are a very special crayon in God’s color box; you are a very special thread in God’s tapestry of life; you are a very special hue in God’s bright and shining rainbow. You are well-created just as you are; you are beloved; and you are an absolutely essential gift, God’s gift, to the community of faith. You are beautiful, each and every one of you. Shine. Shine, let the rainbow shine!

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