Pastor, Lord of Life Lutheran Church,
Ames, Iowa
Delivered 27 June, 1999 at St. Paul-Reformation Lutheran Church
St. Paul, Minnesota
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Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal, have mercy on us.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ. It is oftentimes the task of
a pastor to spend a good deal of time during the week teaching various
classes: catechetical school classes, Bible study classes, new member
classes ~ you can come up with any number of them. I know that there is
some chance that some of you are engaged in the profession of teaching in
one way or another. If you are at all like me, you find yourself
frequently standing up at the beginning of a class and saying, "Let's
review." So, I would like to begin today's sermon by saying, "Let's
review."
Since the Feast of the Holy Trinity we have been in the 10th
chapter of Matthew and today we read the end of that chapter. It has been
difficult reading, but important reading, because in it Jesus sets the
stage for all that we are to do as his disciples during the great
"green season" [Pentecost season] when we move on from the business of
renewing in our heads and in our hearts the story of our Lord's work
among us and take up, instead, the apostleship and go out the door and
start doing the work of a disciple sharing all that we have experienced
in the first half of the church year - the Semester of the Lord - by
doing the work of discipleship in the Semester of the Church.
Now, I have to go on faith that you have all faithfully been here
or other places for the past five weeks so that you have read the rest of
the 10th chapter of Matthew. So, let me review just a little bit. Jesus
says to his disciples, I want you to go out, and when you go out, I want
you to proclaim the good news that the kingdom of God has come near. I
want you to put that into effect by healing the sick, by casting out
demons, by raising the dead. And on that first Sunday everybody, I think
everybody, nods their heads and says, "That's sounds cool!" "Good news! I
like that!"
Then immediately thereafter, the next week, actually, (it's
sometimes too bad that we cut the stories up; we sort of need to hear
them all together), Jesus says, Oh, and by the way, while you are doing
this people are going to get mad at you.
Now, I've always thought that that was very important right
there, because as we deal with the human condition, as we talk about the
world in which we live, as we deal with society and culture, one has to
ask the question: "why in the world would telling good news, raising the
dead, healing the sick, casting out demons, doing nice things for people,
why would that get you into trouble? But if we are at all honest, we know
that's precisely what happens. Because in giving effect to the kingdom,
the kingdom "whatever you want to call it" in giving effect to God's
loving address to us, we undermine the way in which this world works. For
most of us, we'd much rather take a familiar hell than an unfamiliar
heaven.
The Word of God turns what we are accustomed to on its ear, sets
it upside down, saying, we're not going to do it that way anymore. If any
of you have ever been to Synod assemblies, or, worse yet, national
assemblies, you know that the sovereign argument that is used in
contradiction to any proposal is, "we've never done it that way before."
So, right from the start we recognize that being a person who
follows the Gospel doesn't make you a particularly good Lutheran. I'm
sorry to say that, but it's true, because it says that you have to do
things in ways that you have never done them before. We're not accustomed
to that. It gets worse, by the way. Because not only does it say that
you're going to get into trouble with strangers. Of course, Lutherans
have trouble with strangers to begin with. You all know that the Vikings
had a great reputation for being raiders, but they didn't raid very
often, because they spent most of their time in their longship off the
coast talking about whether the villagers were going to laugh at them
and saying, "but we don't know anybody there." Then as Ragnar the
Terrible said, "if you're going to argue like that I'm going to turn this
ship around." And they'd go back to Norway.
Not only will you have trouble with strangers, but then the next
week it says we're going have trouble with family. It's not going to make
family life easier. We are going to be at odds with each other over the
Gospel, because once again it is going to call us to do things in ways
that we have never done them before.
Now let us jump to today's Gospel. We are at the end. It seems
pretty simple, and now it even turns nice again. You don't happen to have
the bulletin service from the ELCA, but I do in my congregation and there
is this nice essay on the back of it about hospitality.
I love that. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, we
have a special place in our hearts for hospitality. You see, for three or
four thousand years we have been given the short end of the stick because
of the inhospitality of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Everybody says, "ooh, that's your fault." Of course, they tend
not to think of it in terms of hospitality or inhospitality. In fact, I
find it interesting these days that if you are called into a debate about
those particular passages, if you say, "well, this is a passage about
inhospitality," people sort of scratch their heads and look at you rather
angrily and say, "Oh, it has to be much more serious than that!"
Well, again, my brothers and sisters, here is a way in which we
have to do things in ways that are different from any way we have done
them before. We need to learn a new lesson. We need to recognize that as
we see with God's eyes we are going to see things differently. In
Scripture, inhospitality is not a little thing! It's not a failure to
answer the door when someone rings the doorbell. It's not forgetting to
bring a hotdish to the potluck supper.
Hospitality in Scripture, you have to remember, arises out of a
Bedouin culture where they are living on the edge of the desert. When
people stumble into your tent, if you don't give them food and a drink of
water, they die. The reason that everybody hated Sodom and Gomorrah was
because the people [portrayed in the Genesis 19 story] were mean, vicious
people. They took advantage of people who wandered out of the desert.
They robbed them. Throughout the history of the people around the
Mediterranean that was about the worst thing you could do.
Now hospitality comes up again. We are told that we are to
receive the disciple, we are to receive the prophets, we are to look
after the needs of the little ones, even to giving them a cup of cool
water. That's not phrased as the nth degree of hospitality, that's the
first degree of hospitality -- giving them something to drink.
Now in typically Gospel fashion, I would like to say that as
heinous as inhospitality was in the Old Testament, Jesus ups the ante. He
did this also, by the way, in this passage from Matthew two weeks ago
when he said that if you don't listen up it will be worse for you on the
day of judgment than it was for Sodom and Gomorrah. What's all that
about?
Well, in general, when you are not hospitable to people who
wander out of the desert, they die. But Jesus is reminding us that if we
are not hospitable to the disciples and the prophets when they come
bringing the Word of life to us, then we die -- and not just of hunger. We
die eternally. We are then without life. We are without hope.
So, all of a sudden, this business about welcoming -- this
interaction between those who bear the Word and those who receive the
Word -- is not only a matter of life and death, it is a matter of eternal
life and eternal death.
Now, let's review. We'd better listen up. Short and sweet. My
brothers and sisters, it is up to us not only to hear the call which the
Holy Spirit brings to some of us, all of us in some way, but some in
more measure than others, to bear public witness to God's redeeming,
liberating, transformative word of life and hope. Don't think somebody
else will do it. There are too few of us. We need more people who do the
work of the disciple, who do the work of the prophet. I don't think it's
easy or inconsequential. I think it's important. Please, oh, please, my
brothers and sisters set about that task.
But also, do it with at least one ear open all the time, because
at the same time that you may be bringing the word, somebody else, you
can be assured will have a mission from God to bring the word to you. For
we are in partnership, in community, and we need the diversity of
experiences and the diversity of the hearing that God brings to each and
every one of us. And this is where it gets really painful.
Personally, as you know, I am caught up in a particular struggle
right now. It has been going on in the life of the church for years. We
have been trying to decide and determine and discern what is God's will
for us in terms of the participation and inclusion of sexual minority
people. It's not a new question. We spent a lot of time wrestling with
what's the place of women in the church. We spent a lot time dealing with
the question of what's the place of people of color in the church. We
still wrestle with what is the place of those people who are poor, or
those people who are handicapped, or come up with almost any kind of
category. We excel at categorization. We come up with all kinds of labels
and we always ask ourselves afresh for some reason, we never learn ~ we
never get any carry over, we always ask, "and what is your place in the
church?" And we struggle with it.
And right now, on this day, we're talking about the struggle for
gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people to feel at home and welcome
in the church. Actually, we have been making faster progress than a lot
of people ~ I mean, women took 2,000 years. And at most, we've only been
at it for about 100. Maybe even really only 30, hard core.
But, what's the response?
We've never done it that way before! Surprise!
Let's study it! Thank you for the
results of that study. What shall we do with them? Let's study them! And
then what will we do? We'll study them again. Perhaps always in the hope
that somehow or the other it will come out different in the end.
My brothers and sisters, I would like to posit that a small girl
comes to the door and asks for a cup of water. And if you respond, "let
me study that," you're a nasty person. You are flying in the face of the
Gospel. The way the church deals with trauma now, and controversy now
lots of people would have died of thirst in the desert, all piled up
outside the Bedouin camp while there was a study going on of why these
people were thirsty; are they to blame for their thirst? was it poor
planning on their part? did God really intend for them to drink that
much? will there be enough to go around? does their thirst somehow demean
my thirst? It gets scary.
So, what do we do? I understand there's an article in the paper
yesterday or today where someone talks about seventeen passages of
Scripture that tell us about how God has already solved the problem. I
think I could come up with a lot of people with lots of degrees who would
say that these same seventeen passages solve nothing.
Well, maybe we should have started reading Matthew in the chapter
before where Matthew started talking about how you decide whether or not
you find good fruit by looking at what's on the tree. You know, you don't
go to the thorn tree looking for olives. Well, I look around me and at my
gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender brothers and sisters who are
faithful Christians, and I notice that they happen to be bearing the
fruits of the Gospel. They happen to do the work of discipleship. They
happen to do the work of the prophet.
Now, I have a great deal of honor for the ancient office of
deacon, but I don't think that Anita is called to wear her stole
catywampus forever! [Anita Hill is Pastoral Minister at St.
Paul-Reformation, who is excluded from being ordained because she is
lesbian in a committed relationship.]
We have a tendency to think that we pass out titles in the church
like we give out pats on the back. It's not about honor, it's not about
sitting on your laurels and saying, "ah, a good job!" We pass out titles
because we also hand out responsibility. Anita has the one without the
other. It's about time that we got a little congruency in our thinking
for a lot of people.
My brothers and sisters, we are called at this point to do the
work of prophets. I would like to suggest that although our Lord tells us
it will be tough going, that there will be controversy, and we will do
things in ways that we have never done before, he does not say anything
about patience, or waiting, or starting new studies, or waiting until the
time is better or until the people to whom we are bringing the Gospel are
a little more comfortable. I'm sorry. The time for that is past.
Instead, we are given the simple command to do the work, be
prophets, do the work of love and healing and at the same time receive
them [the gifts of love and healing] from our sisters and brothers around
us.
The church may think that the Gospel doesn't matter to all of us,
that we are infinitely patient in waiting for someone to deign to offer
the cup of cool water which is the Word of life and to say welcome into
God's family. But as it is in the desert, so it is in the church today.
Such welcome is a matter of life and death. And I, for one, wish no one
else to die either in body or in spirit. I'm not talking just about the
pain of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
I'm talking about the harm that is done to the soul of each and
every one of the faithful when God's gift of love is cheapened and made
conditional and tentative and timid in a world that is rampantly evil and
death-mongering. The Word of life needs to be put forward as powerfully.
I used to be a nice Lutheran kid. That didn't stop when I
discovered I was gay. I was still a nice, Lutheran gay kid. When it did
stop was when my church family with whom I had grown up decided that it
didn't like me anymore. I don't do that to my daughters. I'm not going to
let the church do it to me. There are no asterisks in the baptismal
liturgy. It does not say, "I baptize you in the name of the Father the
Son and the Holy Spirit * asterisk: see below; unless, of course, you are
gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, divorced, a person of color, a
radical -- any number of other things." There are none of those
conditions. We will tolerate none of those conditions.
I haven't said the word "pride" at all, because I'm not
particularly proud today. I'm actually angry, sometimes, even in my own
community, because I think we have been timid. We have also not been
honest with each other about the brokenness in our own lives and the pain
and how hard it is to feel that. We have perpetuated some of the evils on
our sisters, on persons of color "we certainly are materialistic" all
kinds of things. Let's not let that go on either.
My brothers and sisters, as we gather today only one benefit
matters. It is God's loving proclamation that whoever you are, whatever
you are "YOU ARE LOVED! You are acceptable! You are the icon of the
Christ. You are made in the image and the likeness of God and no greater
dignity is possible, desirable or worthwhile."
The Gospel lesson for today says that each and every one of us,
as we are joined to the Word of life, as we do the work of the apostle,
as we do the work of the prophet, as we serve each other's basic,
intrinsic needs, so beautifully represented in that cup of cool water, we
will not lose our reward. We will not lose life. We will not lose
dignity. No one loses their life, no one loses their dignity, no one
loses their reward just because someone else has all of that, too.
But, Pastor, we've never done it that way before! Then it's high
time we did. AMEN!
Pastor Sabin was a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America until September 28, 1998 when he was removed from the
roster of ordained ministers by the ELCA after a hearing in which it was
determined (and upheld after an appeal) that he could no longer continue
to be an ELCA pastor because he is in a committed relationship with a
person of the same sex, namely, his partner, Karl von Uhl. This action
was taken because of a statement in an ELCA document called Vision and
Expectations: Ordained Ministers in the ELCA which states: "Ordained
ministers who are homosexual in their self-understanding are expected to
abstain from homosexual sexual relationships." Pastor Sabin is a graduate
of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and the University of Iowa.
St. Paul-Reformation Lutheran Church is one of many congregations
seeking ways of having this statement or rule of the ELCA rescinded.
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The text for Pastor Sabin's sermon is the Gospel lesson for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost: Matthew 10:40-42 [Jesus said to the Twelve,] "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple -- truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward."
Websites:
Lord of Life Lutheran Church, Ames, Iowa
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