May 22, 2011

Clay Nelson

Easter 5     John 14:1-14

Video available on YouTube

I faced a dilemma this week in how to prepare this sermon. The problem is today is May 22nd. It is the day after Harold Camping announced on a billboard over our car park on January 1st that May 21st would be Judgment Day. The dilemma wasn’t whether or not I’d have to give the sermon. I knew I wasn’t getting out of it that easily. Harold warned that people still in a church, which he says is ruled by Satan, would not be raptured. According to him, Jesus doesn’t want to hang out with us. So, I knew we’d be here today and I needed to have a sermon. What I didn’t know was whether we would need comfort after seeing family members and friends leave us behind to float up to Jesus or would we need encouragement to get on with life because Jesus wants spiritual fruit not religious nuts?

When I wrote this on May 19th I didn’t know the answer yet, but I decided to boldly step out in faith and trust, that come Sunday, Harold and his followers will be pretty disappointed. So my sermon will not focus on comforting the afflicted, which we weren’t, but afflicting the comfortable, which we are.

In the past I’ve shared some inside secrets of how preachers create sermons. Well, here is another one. Sermons are often the distillation of a collage of seemingly unrelated events during the week that then collide with the Gospel reading for the coming Sunday. The point of impact is what I attempt to express.

The Gospel I read a week ago is not one I take comfort from. It is an affliction to those of us of a progressive bent. It is one of the seven “I am” statements John has Jesus say. Instead of I am the good shepherd, the bread of life, the true vine, the door, the light of the world, the resurrection and the life, Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

While John may have been trying to comfort his afflicted community of Christian Jews who had recently been kicked out of the synagogue for their beliefs, today many Christians use it as a weapon to afflict those who do not believe in Jesus or don’t believe in Jesus the way they do, or don’t read the Bible the way they do or don’t talk about their faith the way they do. It is used obscenely to authorize who is worthy of hanging out with Jesus – who is worthy of being called a Christian. Funny, that often means excluding people who are not like us. You want to hang out with Jesus? Don’t be an atheist, a person of colour or a woman or poor or gay. Certainly that’s how Camping and his ilk see it. For instance, an increasing, yet way too slow, acceptance of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) community in churches is why, according to him, we were left behind if the rapture was yesterday.

Sadly, it isn’t just the religious nuts that see it this way. In my collage of experiences this week I had a young man visit me to ask if I would be his partner in ministry. He testified to how Jesus had come into his life – complete with illustrations and photos. He talked about his EveryNation Church and their mission to save the world by sending missionaries around the world to bring everyone to accept Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. I listened with my hand firmly on my jaw to keep my mouth from falling open. He came into the lion’s den to make this pitch? He was either very ignorant about who we are or features of his anatomy are particularly large. When he finished I told him with tongue firmly planted in cheek that it would seriously undermine his ministry if it got out that he was in partnership with me. He quickly assured me he wouldn’t tell anyone.

He left disappointed. What I didn’t tell him is I’m already in partnership with a Christian ministry that is in the business of screwing up a large part of the world – the Anglican Church. I was reminded of that the day before when I was sent an article from the Guardian that pointed out how homophobic the British Commonwealth is. Its 54 member nations represent one-quarter of the world’s nations and one-third of the world’s population. Forty-six of them still criminalise same-sex relations in all circumstances, with penalties including 25 years jail in Trinidad and Tobago and 20 years plus flogging in Malaysia. Several countries stipulate life imprisonment: Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Uganda, Tanzania and Bangladesh. By my calculation that means 84% of the countries in our Anglican Communion deny basic human rights to our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.

These 46 homophobic Commonwealth countries account for more than half of the 76 countries in the world that still have a total prohibition on homosexuality. The Commonwealth has never come out in support of the human rights of the GLBT community. This is surprising as the Commonwealth defines itself as a free and equal association of nations committed to the core principles of democracy, human rights, equality, non-discrimination, opportunity for all, liberty of the individual and human dignity. 

While these countries argue that their values are part of their authentic indigenous culture, that’s not quite true. Anglican missionaries, who opened the door for their colonization by the British Empire, played a large part in instilling homophobia. True, they weren’t always successful. Maori seem to have been resistant. Perhaps that is why New Zealand finally decriminalized homosexuality only a little over 25 years ago. But the damage was done and we are still reaping the whirlwind. 

Here is a case in point. This week I signed a petition along with 1.6 million others demanding the Ugandan parliament reject a proposed law that would have imposed the death penalty on gays and lesbians and anyone who protects them. This law had both the explicit and implicit support of the Anglican Church in Uganda.

Considering all this you might think I would’ve been pleased to receive an email from the Bishop’s Office encouraging me to do what I’d already done, sign the petition. And that I’d have been even more overjoyed to receive a subsequent email rejoicing that the Ugandan parliament had defeated the heinous law. 

No, I was furious at the hypocrisy. While most of the Anglican Community draws the line at murdering gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans-genders, it still doesn’t think they are good enough to hangout with Jesus. Only the American church thinks otherwise. Every one of New Zealand’s Pakeha bishops have complied with a dubious international moratorium to not ordain gays and lesbians in a relationship as deacons, priests or bishops until the whole church agrees – fat chance of that happening in those 46 proudly homophobic Commonwealth nations. 

What makes it worse is Archbishop David Moxon has smudged the fact that other Provinces in the Anglican Communion and the Archbishop of Canterbury have no authority to mandate a moratorium in New Zealand unless the General Synod agrees. It has not, but Archbishop Moxon has urged newly elected bishops, including our own, not to offend churches in the rest of the Communion by ordaining gays and lesbians. 

As a result most New Zealand bishops will not even let a gay or lesbian candidate begin the discernment process, which takes three years before they may be ordained. Our bishops are voluntarily giving up their authority to ordain whomever they feel is called to priesthood supposedly in the name of church unity. In truth, in Anglicanism, no other bishop or jurisdiction can tell a bishop who or who not to ordain. Nor does church law, what we call the canons, forbid them ordaining gays and lesbians. 

This conspiracy and deception by the symbols of unity in our church makes us all complicit in the violation of the human rights and dignity of a significant percentage of those with whom we worship. Saying sexual orientation disqualifies them from ordination denies not only their humanity but gives aid and comfort to those who believe persecuting them is justified. It is a slippery slope from there to justifying murdering them.

My anger was not cooled when at our staff meeting this week Geno, our events manager, announced that after five years of waiting he could not accept the humiliation any longer. He was withdrawing his request to begin the discernment process. He feels alone. The GLBT community doesn’t support him. They can’t understand why anyone would want to join our homophobic club. The Church clearly doesn’t support him when the Bishop won’t even answer his letters. Yes, he could claim to be saved and is now heterosexual or he could hide his partner back in the closet and claim to be celibate and maybe then he could go through the process. But that would require being as hypocritical as the church. That is a pretty high bar to get over.

As a result the church is being deprived of a man who has given nearly six years of his life to supporting our ministry at St Matthew’s, has completed a Bachelors of Theology, has a brilliant mind and is an equally brilliant preacher who in my opinion far exceeds his peers who are all now ordained. Geno is a priest whether or not the church chooses to acknowledge it. It is not him who is diminished by the church’s resistance to his calling. 

So I am left with what to do about it. I left active ministry once over this issue, disgusted with the church. Should I do so again? I suspect that would please those who find me not Christian enough. I’m not sure I would want to give them the satisfaction. Should I raise a bigger ruckus from within the institution just to annoy them? Yes, but will it do any good? Should I make public our shame? Perhaps.

This week I happened to read something Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his letter from the Birmingham Jail, "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." 

I no longer want to be tepid about this. I ask Jesus. I ask you. I ask New Zealand’s Anglicans. What is, “the way, and the truth and the life?” Isn’t justice delayed, justice denied? It is time to act. Not just for me to do so, but for anyone who wants to hang out with Jesus. Camping was wrong. Today is Judgment Day.