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I've Got a Secret, February 17, 2008 |
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Written by Barbara Jean Sawyer
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Sunday, 24 February 2008 |
I’VE GOT A SECRET
Acts 9: 1-15
February 17, 2008
First preached by Barbara Jean Sawyer, June, 1992
Bishop Leontine Kelly, the first black woman to be elected bishop in the United Methodist Church, is a model and a mentor for me. Often, when I am with Leontine Kelly, I find myself saying, “When I grow up I want to be just like Leontine Kelly.”
Leontine Kelly is a preacher. In my wildest fantasies I have imagined myself as a preacher (many lay people do). Now I’m not talking about imagining myself to be a . . . preacher, I’m talking about a “gr-r-reat” preacher. When I was a little kid my parents took me to hear Billy Graham. While other kids were making idols out of Roy Rodgers or Dale Evans, I day dreamed about Billy Graham. When other children were having tea parties, I begged my grandmother to play church. I was always the preacher . . . she, my adoring congregation.
Last year Leontine was scheduled to preach at the Older Adult Convocation. I contacted her for her text, and the title of her sermon. She gave me the text she had selected immediately. When I asked for a title, she hesitated and then responded . . .”I’ll give you a title, but what I think I’m planning to preach and what the Holy Spirit leads me to preach are often two different things.” Leontine pays attention to the guidance she receives from the SPIRIT. When I grow up I want to be just like Leontine Kelly.
I’ve heard Leontine Kelly preach many, many times. She never seems to use notes. When I grow up I want to be just like Leontine Kelly . . . in the meantime I have a script.
I trust that the SPIRIT will be found in the words that I have to share with you tonight. I trust that the SPIRIT that moves Leontine Kelly is the same SPIRIT that moves me. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight oh Lord. Amen.
This and other services being held across the country are designed to be a response to what happened at General Conference. I went to General Conference . . . I was there. I was there because the Conference Personnel Committee thought it would be a good continuing education experience. I was there because there were a number of things that I felt passionately about . . . the Native American Initiative, the Hispanic Ministry proposal, the new Book of Worship, the abortion issue, the new health care proposal from the Board of Pensions, the question about whether or not the General Board of Global Ministry would remain in New York City. I cared about all of those things AND I cared deeply about what the General Conference would do with the Report from the Study Committee on Homosexuality.
Something happened to me at General conference! On the way home I wrote a sermon about the experience. It was one of those sermons that sort of wrote itself. I expected to preach that sermon someday. When I learned that there were Services of Reconciliation being planned, both here and in Estacada and in Salem, and when I was asked to preach, I thought I was going to preach THAT sermon.
But when I pulled that General Conference sermon from my file and began to rethink it, I knew I wasn’t going to preach that sermon tonight. As I read it I knew that writing that sermon had simply been a dress rehearsal. I knew it had been one more step in my “coming out” process . . . both as a LESBIAN and as a PREACHER.
There. I’ve said it. Many suspected it, and now I have said it. I AM A LESBIAN. I’ve said it in the church.
I said it to myself years ago and I did not die. I said it to God and I didn’t die. I said it to my friends and I said it to my mother. She kept breathing, and I didn’t die. It was a close call for both of us. But, I’ve never said it in the church.
I can’t even begin to describe to you what it feels like to stand here and say it out loud to you tonight. I am a lesbian. The secret is out. I have said it out loud . . . I said it in the church . . . and we’re all still alive.
Why am I saying it now when I haven’t said it before? Nothing has changed. The church is no less homophobic today than it was yesterday. The General Conference has not altered its position in the slightest in terms of gay men, lesbians and bisexual persons. It is no safer this week than it was last. Nothing has changed; the world around me is the same, but . . . something has changed, something has changed in me. It happened at General Conference.
I’ve had a conversion experience of sorts, and I, like Paul following his conversion with the “living Christ,” will never be the same.
While I was at General Conference I visited the Cokesbury display, and I bought a book by Bishop John Spong entitled Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. I had heard about the book; I had read Spong’s book entitled Living in Sin: A Bishop Rethinks Sexuality; and I was curious about what this relatively radical thinker had to say about scripture.
John Shelby Spong, a bishop in the Episcopal Church, does not take the Bible literally . . . he does take it seriously. In his introduction he writes: “. . . I write as a Christian who loves the church. I am not a hostile critic who stands outside religion desiring to make fun of it . . . I am a bishop. . . . When I left fundamentalism, I did not leave my love of the bible or my desire to serve God through the church.” His words speak to my experience.
Spong writes that in order for the Bible to have meaning in his life that he must understand the human experiences that are within the stories that lie behind any distortions rationalization, or imposed theological formations that may exist. He says it is not only OK, but essential for us as modern, thinking Christians, to use the Bible and all the tools at our disposal, as we search for meaning in our lives, and ultimately, as we search for God. Bishop Spong gives me permission to use the biblical account of the conversion of Paul to examine, understand, and share my own experience.
In writing about Christ, resurrection, and grace from a Biblical perspective, Spong explores the Damascus experience of Paul. He seeks to understand a “real” human being, a man, to see all there is to see and hear all there is to hear in the world of the Epistles attributed to Paul, the Book of Acts, and the mythology of Saint Paul bestowed by institutional Christianity.
Spong climbs into Paul’s life, to find and feel his humanity, to recognize his pain, and, from that perspective, to understand who Christ was for Paul AND who Christ can be for us.
Who was Paul? Paul could never be called a “universal man.” He was clearly a man of his time. His writings reflect assumptions common to his day. Paul thought women inferior.
Paul accepted uncritically the patriarchal attitudes of his day toward women and the cultural reality of slavery. I find contradictions in some of Paul’s writings—Paul believed men and women were better off single, yet he compared the relationship of Christ and the Church to marriage.
What I read of Paul convinces me that Paul did not like himself very much. His words reflect his self loathing over and over again. He wrote: [beginning at Romans 7:14, NT page 157]
I am carnal, sold under sin; I do not understand my own actions. [Romans 7:14-15].
Nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. [Romans 7:18].
I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin. [Romans 7:23].
With my flesh I serve the law of sin. [Romans 7:25].
These are harsh words, words that don’t seem consistent with a man who knows himself to be accepted by God.
Spong suggests that these passages can be seen as a confession of a sexual passion beyond Paul’s control, a part of his very being about which he feels so profoundly guilty that it becomes self-loathing.
Here is a man who judges himself, a man who believes himself deserving of wrath because he believes himself under the control of evil powers, his body a slave to sin.
I no longer believe that I can blame “evil powers” for my unwillingness to be all that God intends for me to be, but I certainly identify with Paul for having adopted the condemnation of his society and his religious traditions and values. I squirm with him in the small closet his beliefs create for him.
PAUL HAS A SECRET! He doesn’t tell us what his secret is, but he alludes to it. . . .He writes, “A thorn was given me in the flesh . . . Who will deliver me from this body of death”? [Romans 7:14]
All of us know the ways in which we are like Paul. All of us have secrets. Our secrets lock us up. We swallow our own keys. Rather than face the condemnation of one another, the world outside our closed doors, we isolate, stagnate, and shrivel up in the darkness of our won closets. And, in the darkness our secrets grow to gigantic proportions and our fears become monstrous.
“You have to be perfect, don’t make mistakes!” “What if someone discovers I am gay?” “Please, don’t tell anybody,” my straight friends whisper to me, “it isn’t safe.” “You’ll be judged!” “It will divide the church!” “Someone will be angry!” “Hide!” “Hide!” “I have to hide!”
If you are good, I will give you bits and pieces of myself. I will test you to see if you are safe. I will let you peek through the key hold until I am sure you are worthy of my trust. . . . WHY? Because I have come to believe that what you, or someone else, think about me is more important than what I think about myself. That what you “know” is more important than what I know. I have come to concur with your assumption that you can define who I am, that your truth is truer than mine.
Thank God we have Paul’s whole story. Thank God my story is not over.
Thank God Paul, this man who had so little regard for himself, this man who persecuted others, this man who murdered, imprisoned, and behaved so hatefully, this man whose opinion of himself was loathsome, discovered that God’s opinion was the opinion that counted.
It is amazing in the light of what the Christian Church has to say about homosexuality for someone like me to look at Paul’s story.
Paul didn’t change who he was before God came to him, before God claimed him. I want to share again the scriptures as they are written regarding the Damascus event in Paul’s life, beginning with the third verse in the ninth chapter of Acts:
Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what to do.”
The Christian church has interpreted those words, “Why are you persecuting me,” to mean, why are you persecuting the church? We have assumed that Christ was confronting Paul because Christ was interested in protecting the Church . . . . That Paul’s conversion was designed to halt the persecution of that church. Now I believe that God is a God of community, and that God certainly used Paul to build up the church, but I am suggesting the possibility that Paul’s conversation was a profoundly personal experience, between Paul and God. That God’s confrontation with Paul had less to do with the protection of the Church than it did with God’s ability to love Paul unconditionally.
Jesus did not say to Paul, “Stop, quit persecuting the Christians and I will be with you.” Jesus said, “I am Jesus, whim you are persecuting . . . now get up go into the city and you will be told what to do.” If we were to continue to read Paul’s story in the ninth chapter of Acts we would learn that Jesus says to Ananias, in a vision, to go and lay hands on Paul. When Ananias objects out of fear, the Lord says to him,”Go, for he (Paul)) in an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel.”
I need to believe God confronted Paul, not because the church needed saving, but because God loved Paul, simple as that.
That is the essence of the Gospel. God loves us . . . individually . . . personally . . . . specifically. Nothing Paul could do, or be, placed him outside the love of God present in Jesus the Christ.
Somehow that message broke through the hostile, hiding, vindictive, fearful Paul. That message, the message that he was loved by God, had all the force of an exploding, blinding light at midday. What the law couldn’t do for Paul, what Paul couldn’t do for himself, the grace of God did. Paul was justified. Paul was loved. Paul was accepted. Nothing could separate him from the love of God.
And the wonder is. . . that message is still being delivered to people today. People like me.
I heard it at General Conference. It came to me as members of the Study Committee on Homosexuality were sharing, at a luncheon sponsored by the Reconciling Congregation Program, the important elements one should include in a local church study on homosexuality. Tex Sample, a very liberal theologian spoke. He said that the most important thing is to create a “home,” a place where people can feel like they are accepted no matter what they do or think. Dr. David Seamands, a conservative Biblical traditionalist spoke. He said the most important thing was to read the Bible faithfully, to guide people to understand the bible from a traditional Christian perspective. I asked David Seamands a question, I don’t remember the question, but I do remember he answered me in a paternal, yet very gentle and pastoral way. Unfortunately, I found myself wondering how David Seamands would respond to me if David Seamands really KNEW me. I quit listening to David Seamands and discovered myself “watching” David Seamands, being “suspicious” of David Seamands, “judging” David Seamands, through the keyhole of my closet.
As that session came to a close we sang together a song written by John Rice, entitled Walk with Me. You have the words. John Rice is a gay man who writes longingly for people to join him in the ministry of reconciliation. As we began to sing the words, God opened the door to my closet.
Walk with me, God said to me . . . I will walk with you
And build the land
That God has planned
Where love shines through.
When Moses heard the call of God,
He said, “Lord, don’t send me.”
But God told Moses,
“You’re the one to set my people free.”
Walk with me; I will walk with you . . .
This song will probably never make it into the United Methodist hymnal, but it was the vehicle for me to hear the voice of God calling me. Like a blinding light I KNEW that “there was nothing separating me, Barb Sawyer, from the love of God.” I KNEW! It was the message God brought to Paul; it was the message God had for me; it was the message that keeps being repeated. God keeps breaking in on the most unsuspecting, unworthy, unprepared, people to say . . . “Nothing can separate you from the love of God.”
Because Christ loves me, I can accept myself. As with Paul, I can know myself . . . all the parts of me. The good parts and the not so good parts. I do not have to become someone else. God has declared me righteous by the gift of divine love. God in Christ has reconciled me. Nothing will separate me from that love—not death nor life, not angels nor principalities, not present things nor things to come, not powers over which I have no control, not heights, not depths, nothing in all creation—not even THE SECRET. The church cannot separate me; the Oregon Citizens Alliance cannot separate me. NOTHING can separate me from the love of God.
What a wonder it is to know that. Nothing can separate me from the love of God. Understanding that is what changed Paul. Understanding that is what has changed me. I’d heard it before. I grew up hearing that Jesus loved me. My parents told me that, the United Methodist church told me that. I also was not unfamiliar with the sense that God was calling me. But at General Conference, in that moment, I heard it clear down, in the core of my physical body, in the depth of my soul, I knew that “nothing can separate me form the love of God.” . . . I AM RECONCILED by God’s initiation and by God’s grace. I am a lesbian, and I am Reconciled by God’s initiation and grace.
And, I am changed, I am different. Not transformed in the ways some folks would expect that I might be transformed, but I am transformed.
I am a lesbian. Why am I saying it now when I haven’t said it before? Nothing has changed in the world around me. The church is no less homophobic today than it was yesterday. The General Conference has not altered its position in the slightest in terms of gay men, lesbians, and bisexual persons. It is no safer this week than it was last. I am saying it now, because God said to me, “The time is now!”
Jesus said to Paul, “Go into the city and I will tell you what to do.” That’s what Paul did; he just did what he discerned God wanted him to do.
Paul was called to build up the church, yes, but how Paul did that was by simply telling his story. It led him to tell the church, “We are reconciled in Christ.” It led him to say, “In Christ there is neither man, nor woman; free man nor slave.” It led him to say, “we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.”
Paul said to the Followers, “Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse them. . . . Do not repay anyone evil for evil . . . the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
God has put a claim on us. It does not serve us to ignore the fact that God loves and accepts us, just as we are.
It does not serve us to pretend that God’s love is limited in any way. It does not serve us to remain in our self-imposed closets, and it does not serve us to think that we are God’s ONLY chosen.
This is something that a mature Christian must understand. When we are reconciled to God, when we come to know that nothing can separate us from the love of God, we must also understand that being loved by God is not a personal privilege. God does not love Barb Sawyer differently than God loves [front row participant.] God does not love Americans differently than God loves Iranians. God does not love someone who is a member of the Oregon Citizen’s Alliance any less than God loves a child dying of AIDS.
God’s loving does not change from person to person, from situation to situation. There is nothing that can separate us, any of us, from the love of God.
God’s love is prevenient. I LOVE THAT WORD. Prevenient, it is a United Methodist word. Prevenient, it means that God’s love precedes our decision to be reconciled in God’s love. There is a moment, a moment when we must decide to let reconciliation happen between God and ourselves, a moment when we say yes to reconciliation or accept responsibility that we choose to align ourselves with alienation.
There is a model here for reconciliation in the Church. We must be prevenient people; we must love before we are loved, and even if we are not loved. We need not be about trying to convince one another that our particular positions are correct, we must be about listening to one another. We must encourage one another to question our political and theological positions in light of God’s ever-changing revelations. We must be about creating community. We must be about creating congregations who know who they are, and what Christ is calling them to do and be.
When the knowledge of God’s love comes to us, we find ourselves in a safe place. That is what the Church needs to be about. The task of the church is to create a safe place for people to be, a space where they can experience that there is nothing that can separate them from the love of God.
That is what the Reconciling congregation Program is about. Some of us here, in this room, and out there, need to explore what it means to expand our circle to welcome diversity, to declare that all God’s creation is “good.” There are people here, out there, who need to give up their agenda for God’s agenda. There are people in here, and out there, who are looking for a safe place.
IT IS TIME!
It is time for gay men and lesbians to hear the good news that nothing can separate them from the love of God. It is time for homosexuals and heterosexuals to come out of their closets, whatever their closets may be. It is time for all of us to stand in the light of God’s unconditional love, together.
God has called me, Barb Sawyer, to the ministry of reconciliation. God calls me to confront the Church, AND, God calls me to love my red-necked, hard-nosed, conservative, Bible-quoting, gay-bashing brothers and sisters . . . I’m still resistant at some levels. There doesn’t seem to be any way out for me . . . I can’t hide any longer. God calls me out of the closet. God calls me to be reconciled with the Divine. God calls me to be reconciled with the Church, THIS CHURCH, the whole church. God calls me to be reconciled with the world. Come, “Walk with me!”
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