Doing God: A Pride Sunday Sermon

Members of the Claiming the Blessing Task Force after the Requiem Mass for Louie Crew Clay

Chapter Ten of Matthew’s Gospel consists of a long set of instructions that Jesus gives to his twelve disciples.  Although the Twelve receive this teaching, in Matthew’s Gospel the Twelve are stand-ins for the whole community: this teaching is meant for all who wish to follow the way of Jesus.    It is a to-do list and a how-to manual of discipleship.  

Our reading today consists of the last part of Chapter Ten.  We heard a portion of the earlier part of the chapter last Sunday.  This is the gist of it.  First, we are told that Jesus gave the disciples power to cast out unclean spirits and cure every disease and sickness.  Then he gave them the following to-do list:

1.     Proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.”  God’s long-awaited reign of justice, peace, and joy is breaking-out among us.  Pay attention!  Believing is seeing.  Imagination precedes creation.  Make it so.

2.     Cure the sick.  Take care of the most vulnerable members of the community.  Illness is social as well as person; political as well as biological.

3.     Raise the dead.  Most people are not fully alive.  Not even close.  Help them to claim the life that wants to live in them.  God has given us everything we need to live.  Make sure everyone has access to those things.

4.     Cleanse the lepers.  Restore outcasts to life in the community.  Impurity is not contagious.  Purity is.  Start spreading it now.

5.     Cast out demons.  Evil is real, and it knows how to get inside our heads.  The first revolution is internal.  Let go of the false and harmful thoughts and behaviors that prevent people from being fully alive. 

This is a pretty ambitious to-do list.  How do we do it? 

1.     The first thing is to claim the power that Jesus has given us.  We don’t have to wait upon anybody else’s authorization to do these things.  We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for!  You claim power by using it.  Don’t leave it on the table.

2.     Do it for free.  This work is not transactional.  It is not about payment or exchange.  The reward is intrinsic to the work.  Whatever markets are for, they are not for organizing the proclamation of the good news, curing the sick, sustaining life, expanding the circle of inclusion, or resisting evil.  It is all gift. And it is already ours.

3.     Make yourself vulnerable.  Power is increased by sharing it.  We have to learn to depend upon each other.  Since this is about gift rather than payment, we need to be open to receiving the gifts of others; recognizing our own need, as well as sharing our gifts.  This is not a “me” program.  It is a “we” program.

4.     Operate from a place of peace.  Don’t outsource you serenity to other people.  You can’t control how others respond.  Let go of expectations.  Jesus said, “If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you.”  Don’t engage in the dynamic of reciprocal violence.  Shake the dust off your feet and move on. 

5.     Expect conflict.  See “cast out demons” above.  Evil is real and it is entrenched in structures of domination and exploitation.  Expect conflict in your family, in your congregation, and in your political community.  You will be hated because of the name of Jesus; that is, for what he stands for and stands against. 

6.     Don’t be afraid.  Trust that God’s spirit will give you the words you need to speak at the right time.  Trust that everything that is covered up will be revealed: the truth cannot be concealed forever.  Trust that God loves you and that you are of infinite value in God’s eyes.  Nothing and no one can separate you from that love or diminish that value.

Jesus concludes this teaching by saying something that is kind of astonishing.  He tells his disciples, whoever welcomes you, welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes God.  Proclaiming the good news, healing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, and casting out demons is the kingdom of heaven; it is the drawing near of God.  God is not a noun.  God is a verb.  

Jesus is about practicing what God is like rather than believing in God.  By their fruits we will know those who follow the way of Jesus, the way of love; not by their beliefs.  Jesus demonstrates in word and deed what God is like.  His instructions are a guide to “doing god.”  He invites us to “do god” too.

Today is the 50^th anniversary of the LGBT Pride celebration in San Francisco, and the first to be celebrated without a parade in that fifty years.  You don’t have to tell queers who lived through the AIDS crisis how to respond to a pandemic twice; been there, done that.  The parade was cancelled months ago.  We got the memo the first time around.   We learned the hard way that when the exercise of your freedom means my death, the common good trumps liberty every time.  

Thinking about Jesus’ operating instructions on how “to god” and thinking about Pride Sunday, reminds me that the Spirit of God subsists in the church, but it is not contained by the church.  Folks who aren’t part of a church community often “do god” better than many self-identified Christians.  I’d say that, on the whole, the gay community has “done god” better than the church in the last fifty years; and, in fact, has often had to drag the church kicking and screaming into “doing god.” .

We queers were imaging that God’s kingdom of peace, justice and joy was breaking-in among us long before anyone else could see it or believe it.  We were curing the pandemic of homophobia, and the virus of misogyny that causes it, long before most people even realized it was a disease.  After advocating for AIDS funding and research as our brothers were dying, people were literally raised from their death bed when HIV treatment regimens finally came online.  We know about raising the dead.

We knew that the purity of love was more powerful than the impurity of exclusion, and it was drag queens and dykes on bikes who showed us the indomitable dignity of human beings.  Casting out demons has been our daily bread; both the evil of self-loathing we’d internalized and the structures of discrimination and domination that drive gay teens to suicide and an epidemic of violence against transgender women of color.

We claimed our power.  We couldn’t wait until some authority told us we were fully human.  We claimed our full humanity as God’s free gift, not as something we had to earn or demonstrate but as a self-evident truth, something that we all share.  As a tiny minority, we had to acknowledge our vulnerability and our dependency upon others to realize the dream of equality. 

Here, it is important to acknowledge our debt to the Black freedom struggle in America, whose courageous “doing god” led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which was finally extended to include the rights of LGBT Americans earlier this month; even as its promise has yet to be fulfilled for African-Americans themselves.  We know we depend upon righteous straight allies.  Our weakness has been our strength; in the crucible of our need profound relationships of solidarity were forged.  We built a ghetto, and then a community, and then a movement that is liberating people around the globe.

We know what it is like to be brought before tribunals in our congregations and synagogues, to be denounced and banished and even murdered for “doing god.”  I will never forget the courage of David Kato, the father of the Ugandan gay rights movement, who I visited in Kampala in 2008.  He was murdered at his home in 2011, shortly after winning a lawsuit against a magazine which had published his name and photograph identifying him as gay and calling for him to be executed.   At his funeral, the Anglican priest railed against gays and lesbians, comparing them to Sodom and Gomorrah, until activists rose up and drove him from the building.  We know the pain of family conflict, of fathers rejecting their daughters and daughters rejecting their mothers, and brother set against brother.  Jesus said that “one’s foes will be members of one’s own households.”  He was right.

And still, we trusted that there is nothing secret that will not become known.  Coming out is an act of truth-telling that sets us all free.  It is only in secret that evil can flourish.  Homophobia and misogyny had to be brought into the light.  When our peace was rejected, we shook the dust off our feet and went on to the next town:  eventually making our way to San Francisco!  And when you welcomed us, you welcomed Jesus.  And you welcomed the One who sent Jesus.  You “did god” in the way that Jesus “did god.”

This Pride Sunday, let us pause to give thanks for our queer siblings and straight allies, who have showed us how “to god,” both inside and outside of the church.  Let us renew our commit to “doing god,” not with our creeds but with our deeds.  The operating manual that Jesus gave us is under warranty for eternity, and whoever welcomes those who follow those instructions will never lose their reward.  Amen.

The Death of White Innocence

I speak to you in the name of Jesus, who protested injustice, was executed by the state, and continues to rise up.  Amen.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

These last words of George Floyd, like those of Eric Garner before him, serve as an indictment of white America’s refusal to perceive reality.  As that great American prophet, James Baldwin, pointed out some sixty years ago,

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. (Baldwin, The Fire Next Time)

We are living through the death of white innocence.  For more than 400 years, white Americans have looted black bodies – stealing their labor, their health, their safety, and their lives – and have pretended to be innocent.  We have collectively denied the reality of a racist society and its victims, and now we are surprised at the destruction of our social fabric unleashed by that “innocence.”  400 years of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, “separate but equal,” the “War on Drugs,” mass incarceration and criminalization, discrimination, and brutality and, still, we pretend that we are innocent.

“I am not racist!”

“How could this happen?”

“We just need to get rid of the bad apples in the police department.”

“My family didn’t own slaves!  I haven’t benefitted from slavery!”

“All lives matter.”

These are among the protestations of innocence that we hear.  They seek to obscure the truth of racism and protect the fragile feelings of white people.  Let’s take “All lives matter” as an example.  It is patently false that “all lives matter” in the United States of America.  Historically, we have very precisely calculated the value of human lives:  people of African descent counted as three-fifths of a person; not quite fully human.  The coronavirus pandemic belies the claim that “all lives matter,” revealing the ongoing and cumulative racial disparities in access to basic health and safety.  Clearly, some lives matter more than others; some, not at all.

We cannot watch Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling placidly with his knee on George Floyd’s neck, with Officers Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng pressing on his chest and legs, pushing the breath out of his body, while Officer Tou Thao diligently ensures that no bystanders interfere with this public lynching, and pretend that “all lives matter.”  The history of state sanctioned terrorism against black lives exposes this lie over and over again.  “White innocence” seeks to divert our attention from the truth. 

Even as police chiefs and police officers unions issue statements condemning these officers’ behavior, they do not actually call for their arrest and prosecution.  Statements such as these allow police officers to distance themselves from the “bad apples,” while preserving the racist structures that produce and abet them, and resisting genuine accountability.  When you have a system that protects the “bad apples,” then the whole system is rotten – to its core.  This is the truth that “all lives matter” elides.

“I’m not racist,” Amy Cooper has assured us.  Yet, watch her encounter with Christian Cooper (no relation) in Central Park carefully.  Observe how readily she resorts to the basest calumny when a black man politely asks her to leash her dog in conformity with park rules.  Offended at the temerity of a black man making an equal claim on the safety of a public space, she immediately threatens to call the police and tell them that an African-American man is threatening her life. 

Ms. Cooper plays on the racist trope of black men as sexual predators; an old canard that white women have used to reinforce their privilege against countless black men, whose bodies were hung from trees by lynch mobs.  She knows that in the absence of a lynch mob, the police will do nicely; if not to lynch Christian Cooper, at least to keep him in his place.  Ms. Cooper has internalized fully how racist social structures work.  And she is fully prepared to deploy the full force of their power.  “I am not a racist.”  She just plays one on social media.

Racism is not who we are, it is what we do – and allow to be done in our name.  All white people face the same temptation to wield our privilege to our advantage.  We’ve all done it.  It takes considerable discipline and self-awareness to resist this temptation.  Privilege happens, its conditions set in place before we were born.  It is our patrimony, accumulated from the looting of black lives and passed down to us.  This is the reality in which we are living.  The façade of white innocence is wearing thin. 

We are now beginning, belatedly, to realize that James Baldwin’s acute analysis was correct.  Baldwin writes that

. . . this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. (Baldwin, The Fire Next Time)

We should welcome the death of white innocence. Only by acknowledging the truth of the crime of racism, and the white privilege that obtains from it, do we become free to affirm that black lives matter and empowered for the work of antiracism.  Those of us formed by Christian traditions know this.  We just celebrated the feast of Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth which Jesus told us would set us free.[1]   Jesus told his disciples that when they received the Spirit they would be empowered to be his witnesses, beginning in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.[2]  What is it that the disciples witnessed?

They witnessed a lynch mob sanctioning the state sponsored murder of an innocent man.  They witnessed to the injustice of empire and the innocence of its victims.  Jesus was a brown man from a marginalized social group living under occupation.  He resisted the evil of the system which fostered the oppression of his people, and died in solidarity with all victims of evil.  His disciples also witnessed to his resurrection:  his continuing life with them in the movement for justice that he empowers through his Spirit. 

They began in Jerusalem, the very place in which Jesus was lynched outside the gate of the city.  They gathered a community of repentant sinners and innocent victims who together became witnesses to the truth.  They witnessed to the power of reconciliation grounded in truth-telling to overcome ancient injustices between Jew and Samaritan, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, rich and poor, women and men.  The power of that witness has now spread to every part of the earth.

The gift of the Holy Spirit, the spirit of Jesus, is the power to perceive the truth and call out the reality of injustice.  It is also the power to create an alternative community – a beloved community – in which former enemies come together as witnesses to the truth.  We see this power at work across our nation today, as millions of people, especially young people of all backgrounds, rise up together to fearlessly resist racist oppression and make no peace with creeping martial law.  By this truth, we become free to live in an entirely new way, unafraid of the coercive power of death that unjust regimes use to perpetuate injustice. 

We, who are white, are not innocent.   The Church is not innocent.  St. John’s Episcopal Church, “the church of presidents” in Washington, D.C. and the backdrop for Donald Trump’s most recent blasphemy, was founded by wealthy plantation owners, built on slave labor.  We are not innocent. But we can be free.  We can acknowledge the reality of racism and witness to the power of love to create God-breathed community.  We can engage antiracist work, affirming the worth of black lives; the intelligence of black minds; the beauty of black bodies; the creativity of black cultures; and the resilience of black communities.

There is much work to do to dismantle the racism that we have internalized.  Antiracism begins as a contemplative practice of observing and renouncing our own racist thoughts and reactions.  It opens us to building real relationships with people of color; the kind of solidarity that makes us willing to put our life on the line for them.  It requires us to organize for justice, building institutions and implementing policies that promote equality and dignity.  Antiracism is repentance, reparations and reconciliation.   Too often, white people want to jump over the first two to embrace the third.  That is cheap grace.  There can be no racial reconciliation in America without the death of white innocence and collective amendment of life.

The confessing church, the church that witnesses to the truth, knows how to move from the death of innocence through resistance to evil, and on to new life. Echoing James Baldwin, the confessing church poses this question to white America today:  Will we die to our innocence and choose life?  Or will we protest our innocence and become a monster?

Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.

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[1] John 8:31-32; 16:13.

[2] Acts 1:8.