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| Members of the Claiming the Blessing Task Force after the Requiem Mass for Louie Crew Clay |
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 50th 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.
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