June 15, 2008

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 5     Matthew 9:35-10:23

As an unrepentant romantic idealist, it is not surprising that the musical Man of La Mancha is a favourite of mine. One memorable interchange is a one-way conversation between Sancho and Don Quixote who is severely depressed about ever reaching the impossible dream. Sancho sings to him:

When I first got home my wife Teresa beat me,

But the blows fell very lightly on my back.

She kept missing ev'ry other stroke

And crying from the heart

That while I was gone

She'd gone and lost the knack!

Of course, I hit her back, Your Grace,

but she's a lot harder than I am,

and you know what they say...

"Whether the stone hits the pitcher

or the pitcher hits the stone

it's going to be bad for the pitcher."

It was Sancho I thought of as I read in today’s Gospel, “When he saw the crowds he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like a sheep without a shepherd.” These people were landless, powerless, and impoverished. They were the pitcher caught between two stones. The first, Roman law and oppression, gave them no hope of rising above their life circumstances. The second, the purity laws of their faith, blamed them for those circumstances. If they were righteous, God would have blessed them. They were outcasts and justly so. In the Greek version of the Beatitudes they were the Anawim (A-N-A-W-I-M) translated as “the meek” that Jesus said would inherit the earth.

But the Anawim were more that just the dispossessed and marginalised in Israel. The prophet Zephaniah (Zeph 2:3, 3:12-19) relays God's message that, even in the worst of times there will remain " a faithful remnant" in our midst. He reveals that this faithful remnant is the Anawim.

In 1936 Albert Nock explained “The Remnant” by paraphrasing the call of Isaiah:

In the year of Uzziah's death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are." He said, "Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you," He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life."

Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job – in fact, he had asked for it – but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so – if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start – was there any sense in starting it? "Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it."

It was perhaps with Zephaniah’s words and Isaiah’s challenge in mind that Matthew’s Jesus sends his disciples only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, explicitly telling them not to go to the Gentiles and Samaritans, two groups he, himself, has offered healing. Showing love and compassion to the Anawim was an in your face prophetic act condemning the enforcers of the purity laws. Institutional faith did not get it that the most impure act was not to love your neighbour. They sought to be the dispensers of divine love, when it has already been extended to everyone. The priests and Pharisees were no better than their Roman masters. They were equally bad for the pitcher.

It was with these thoughts banging around my head that I watched this week the documentary, For the Bible Tells Me So. The film portrays the stories of five Christian families that have to contend with discovering that one of their children is gay or lesbian. The struggle portrayed is between parental love and church teaching that the Bible condemns homosexuality as an abomination. The film is both deeply moving as you hear their stories and extremely maddening as you see clips of Christians mangling Scripture to support their own bigoted hatred.

We meet Chrissy Gephardt, a daughter of the former House minority leader Richard Gephardt and his wife, Jane, who talks about her sexless marriage to a man before falling in love with a lesbian friend, admitting the truth about herself, coming out and eventually joining her father on the presidential campaign trail, with his support and encouragement.

We also meet Jake Reitan, a young man from Minnesota whose coming-out when he was just fifteen has changed his entire family, leading his once-conservative Christian parents to become gay rights activists side-by-side with their son. The Reitans, who look about as American-as-apple-pie as any family from Minnesota, never expected that one day they would be leading activists in the gay civil rights movement, getting arrested with their younger son in front of Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family and marching in parades.

We also meet the Poteats, an African-American family in which both parents are preachers still struggling to accept that their daughter, Tonia, is a lesbian. David Poteat, Tonia's father, says that when his children (a son and a daughter) were growing up, "I said God, please don't let my son grow up to be a faggot and my daughter a slut." He chuckles ironically and adds, "And he did not. He did not do that. He reversed it."

Things did not resolve so easily for the Poteat family, whose literalist biblical readings and conservative Christian upbringing (along with the ongoing reinforcement of their church family) proclaimed that the lifestyle of their openly homosexual daughter Tonia was pure unadulterated sin. By the end of the narrative the family remains on the razor's edge of estrangement, with the love of the parents for their daughter holding a tenuous upper hand over their church's unwavering condemnation.

The saddest and most poignant story is Mary Lou Wallner’s. Ms. Wallner believes her daughter, Anna, hanged herself after receiving a letter she wrote to Anna rejecting her after she came out and admonishing her to return to the path of righteous sexual orientation. She is now a political activist advocating for gay rights.

The narrative culminates with the triumphant outcome of the story of Gene Robinson, who lived for years as a "normal" married man before embracing his homosexuality, coming out to his wife and leaving her for a male partner. In 2003 he was consecrated as the first openly gay bishop of the Episcopal Church – but in order to protect himself against the numerous death threats he'd received, he was forced to wear a bulletproof vest to the ceremony. As a footnote, last week he and his partner entered into a civil union.

It was clear after watching, that the remnant, the Anawim, are still with us, and so are the enforcers of purity.

Society is quite good at marginalising people. Look at what we do to the homeless, immigrants, women; people of colour. But the church is exceptionally good at marginalising the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender community and supporting society’s homophobia and then justifying it with scripture-based faith. And lest we as Anglicans kid ourselves that it is only Evangelicals who do this. We need to remember that only one diocese in the Anglican Communion has ordained as bishop an openly gay man in a committed relationship. And that single act has threatened to fracture the Communion forever. Lest we think that New Zealand, at least, is more enlightened, we need to remember that our diocese will not approve for ordination as a priest or deacon a gay or lesbian person who does not promise to live a celibate life. As official policy neither does the diocese permit clergy to perform civil unions in or out of the church. Marriage, of course, is out of the question.

I find the church’s participation in perpetuating GLBT people as outcasts a source of deep personal shame. But at the same time I feel that we at St Matthew’s are amongst the disciples Jesus sent to the Anawim. There are many here who nurtured the GLBT community when it was still illegal to be a homosexual by providing space here for them to worship as a community. Thirty years later the Auckland Community Church is still here. You are a congregation that supports our blind eye to diocesan policy by permitting civil unions here. Our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters know this is holy ground for them, which is why they hold their annual candlelight memorial to remember those who have died of HIV/AIDS here. And why a memorial service will be held by the GLBT community here this afternoon to honour the memory of Darren Taylor, who is better known by her drag diva persona, Miss Bambi Slut. Bambi performed for gay and straight audiences across New Zealand and Australia at nightclubs, corporate functions, and charity fundraisers.

The GLBT community, especially those who hang on to their faith in spite of being reviled by their co-religionists, is to be treasured. They are part of God’s Remnant. That is why we seek to reassure them and encourage them to keep hanging on… even if we are a church. We do so because we dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, to bear with unbearable sorrow that one day no child will have cause to fear or feel shame to learn they were born with a same-sex attraction. That one day the church will celebrate that child’s presence amongst us, and the special gifts he or she brings. That is our quest, to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far.