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Written by Jeanne Knepper
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Sunday, 12 August 2007 |
A STORM-TOSSED FAITH
Hebrews 11:1-3; Mark 4:35-41
August 12, 2007
Mikey lived in Riverside, California. He was a gentle boy. His father thought he was a “sissy” who needed to be toughened up. He urged Mikey to beat up on his Elmo doll. He slapped the boy, trying to drive him into tougher behavior. He slapped, kicked, and punched Mikey. He dropped him on his head. One year ago, on August 15, 2006, Mikey Vallejo-Sieber died. He was three years old.
We’re accustomed to hearing the stories of adults, or even teens, who have come through periods of oppression to a stronger place, a place of self-acceptance where they can name themselves as lesbian or gay and claim their belovedness as children of God. We know people, here among us, who could tell stories of confusion and courage, grief and grace, rejection and redemption. We celebrate their stories and rejoice to be a community of faith blessed by their presence. These are all reasons to celebrate being a Reconciling Congregation on this day of our third annual North Portland Pride Festival. And we do celebrate.
It might be easy, on a day of celebration like this, to imagine that this is becoming pretty old hat. I mean, UPUMC has been a Reconciling Congregation for 15 years now. Could it be that this is almost a case of “been there, done that?” Why make such a big deal of something we all agree on, that the church is blessed when it can celebrate a wide diversity of peoples within its membership. Isn’t this a bit of preaching to the choir?
Actually, I think it’s more a case of preaching to the Sunday School, to the nursery, to the children among us. Let’s count them up for a moment. Among the kids who belong to us, we would name Alyssa, Mariah, Anthony, Aurora, Issac, Brett, Love, Christo, Sammy, Julian, Penelope, Solomon, Aaron, Sarah, Taylor, Morgan, Carey and Alex—that’s 18 kids, eleven of whom have been baptized in this sanctuary. If they are an ordinary bunch of kids, we can expect that at least one of them, likely more than one, will come to identify himself or herself as gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual. But even more, any of them could be perceived as soft or butch, as a sissy or a dyke, regardless of whether the perception was true to who they “really” were or not.
Last week, we sent three of our kids to camp, to grow and thrive in an environment designed to teach them, in every way possible, that God loves them. It is our privilege, delight and duty to do this. We have all promised, at their baptisms in this church, that we will do all we can to raise them up to believe that they are beloved children of God. We tell them, as their sponsors, as their church, that we believe that we are all given the power to resist evil and oppression in whatever form it takes. And one of the forms that evil takes in our world is homophobia. Homophobia kills children. It killed Mikey. It also wounds children, teaching them to conform, to be cruel to other kids, to cut off the parts of themselves that don’t fit into rigid molds of male and female. And the cruelest, the most dangerous and deadly of all homophobias are the ones that are supported and undergirded by the language of faith. When churches teach that God hates gays or that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching,” they are fueling confusion and hatred that are the reason why one third of all homeless teens are lesbian or gay, kicked out of their homes because they are perceived to be sinful, damaged or deranged.
Our culture is not neutral on the subject of sexual orientation or gender identity. It teaches our children to be homophobic. If you have been around kids, you know that the worst names they call each other are names that spring from perceived sexual orientation. If we are to provide a counter-cultural environment, we must not be neutral either. We must be open, public, insistent, celebratory, and determined witnesses to a different vision, a vision that receives differences as a gift, a way of being that celebrates the courage and grace of people who have come through the fires of self-doubt to claim their place at the Lord’s table.
University Park UMC became a Reconciling Congregation 15 years ago. Some of you were here for that vote, and we honor you today. You started a process that has made this congregation a beacon of light in a tossed and stormy church, in a denomination torn between its proclamation that God loves and claims everyone and its fear that embracing people who are gay or lesbian, bisexual or transgender will undermine its attractiveness in a homophobic culture.
University Park United Methodist church has been a player in this struggle against the forces of evil for over 15 years. The United Methodist Church has been struggling with its own questions of identity since 1969. I don’t use the word “evil” easily or loosely. I believe that the attitudes and mindsets that try to convince us that we should hate, fear, or reject each other are forces of evil. They are forces that want us, more than anything, to be afraid, of each other, of being different, of chaos. They spring out of a mind-set that sees all being as a struggle between chaos and control. But our gospel lesson shows us a different way to see things.
Mark’s story of Jesus in the boat can be read as a simple tale of Jesus, who could even still the storm, and of disciples who just didn’t get it that he was really the Son of God. It can also be read at a deeper level. Do you remember the first verses of Genesis? They read: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” Many Middle Eastern creation stories identify chaos, the forces of confusion and evil, with the stormy and raging sea. When God swept over the face of the deep, bringing form and order out of chaos, God was establishing the essential nature of all being for all time. Creation, being, all that surrounds and underlies and sustains us—creation is not formless and void, it is not chaos, it is not a mad swirling of indifferent forces. Creation is also not a controlled and rigid framework for life, a set of rules that must be followed, to great peril. No, all being is an expression God’s interaction with chaos, of God’s loving breath, of God’s spirit moving across the face of the stormy sea, of the love and creativity and desire for relationship of a God who can create great beauty and wonderful being by encountering and moving with, moving upon, that which seems most terrifying.
Oh, that’s easy to say in the quiet of a Sunday morning sanctuary. Easy to affirm when God’s in the house and all is right with the world. But not so easy, not so easy when the storms are raging and our boat, our little ship of faith, is all tossed about on the chaotic sea. Haven’t we been there, caught in forces beyond our control, swirling, fearing, and crying out to God, “Are you asleep? Don’t you care that we are perishing!?!”
And Jesus said to his friends, the disciples in the boat with him, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
For way too long, we Christians have been inclined to imagine that faith is the same thing as belief. We hear the promise, “You are saved by faith” to mean that we have to believe the right things, generally things about who Jesus was. But Jesus didn’t mean faith in that sense. His question makes much more sense if we understand that faith in God is about trust, trust in God, trust in life, trust that there is nothing, nothing beyond God’s presence, nothing to be afraid of, nothing that can separate us from the love of God which is our refuge and our enduring comfort.
God is creating life and beauty, even today, in a great dance with the stormy, raging sea. And we are called to be a part of that dance, of that on-going work of creation. Sometimes it frightens us to our very core. Sometimes we want to pull back, to force the wild sea into engineered channels, to shake our fists at God and cry, “Don’t you care that we are perishing?” Sometimes, we imagine that Mikey died alone, far from the presence of God. But this is not so. God was there, I believe, shouting “Stop!’ at Mikey’s father, who did not listen. God was there, catching that small broken spirit as he died. And God is here, demanding that we take Mikey’s death seriously, that we speak up and speak out and stand up and make our very lives a witness so that none of our children will grow up believing that he or she is less than God’s beloved. God is calling us, on the deep and raging sea, to be a safe harbor, to be a light house, to keep illuminating the rocks of destruction even as we are a beacon of hope. We are a part of the still continuing drama of creation. We have a role to play; we have a light to shine. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
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