“He has told you, oh mortal, what is good: what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.”  Micah 6:8

What is good.   The heart of my work is to equip you with the interpretive tools you need to live your faith in a complex world.  Living our faith is always challenging.  These last months, especially so. The pandemic wilderness has laid bare our deepest wounds as persons and as a society.  In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death we see a country rife with racism, bitter partisanship and violence; we have also seen an extraordinary capacity for what is good.  

I know that most of us, either in social media or personal conversation, have witnessed a debate play out whether or not affirming Black Lives Matter is an offense to the fact all lives matter.   I think I can be helpful to you in this.  Biblically this is nonsense.  If in their distress we cannot affirm unequivocally to black Americans that Black Lives Matter, period, there is little hope for a kind of justice where all lives matter, equally.  This truth is embedded in the narratives of Scripture itself.  A failure to do this deep work within our faith will result in shallow action and reaction, not systemic change.  So, bear with me.  This will take more words than a tweet, but it will be a quicker read than Plato’s Republic.  I promise. 

Justice.  Racism as we know it is not addressed in scripture.  Racism is a much later  development of the colonialist empires of Christian Europe from the 15th century onward.  Perhaps, the deeply rooted resentment between ancient Jews and Samaritans is close enough an example in kind.  When one of Jesus’ fellow Jews asks what he needed to do to be in good stead with God, Jesus responds,“What do our scriptures say?”  His answer is a good one. The heart of Torah is love of God and neighbor.  There is little debate on that, then and now.  That is the right answer.  Anyone with sense, though, knows that neighbor love is the tricky bit, depending on who your neighbor is.  

Seeking to get himself off that hook, our questioner pushes further: “Who then is my neighbor?”  In response, Jesus tells him a story about the apparent victim of a robbery left to die on the side of a dangerous road —  this was a common ruse for an ambush in that place.  Two faithful Jews pass him by — the point being, that any one of us under those conditions might have done the same and be justified. The hero, of course, is a Samaritan. The hated Samaritan is the one with the courage and empathetic heart to help the man who turns out to be very real and suffering.  Now, go and do likewise.  End of parable.   In context the parable is pushed even further, for by the end of the gospel itself, Jesus is the one laying brutalized on the side of a cross, suffocated beneath the knee of Roman justice.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the most famous texts in our tradition. Out of familiarity, we often miss the bite of it.  John Wesley did not.  Here is Wesley’s note on the parable for his methodists:  “Go and do thou in like manner—Let us go and do likewise, regarding every [person] as our neighbor who needs our assistance. Let us renounce that bigotry ... which would contract our hearts, into an insensibility for all the human race, but a small number whose sentiments and practice are so much our own, that our love to them is but self-love reflected.” 

Our tendency, when left to our own devices, is to shrink our neighborhoods to the people most like ourselves. This is bigotry.  Again, from Wesley, “And this commandment we have from ... both God and Christ; that he who [loves] God, love(s) ... Every one ... purely because he is the child and bears the image of God. Bigotry is properly the want of this pure and universal love. A bigot only loves those who embrace his opinions ... he loves them for that, and not for Christ’s sake.”  So there you have it: All lives matter.

Each and every life is sacred.  This is, of course, the very first affirmation in the Bible: God created all humanity in God’s image.  “And God said that it was exceedingly good.”  As dramatically affirmed in the Bible's opening credits (Genesis 1-11), equality of all in God’s sight is a fact never in jeopardy in Scripture.   We are created to live freely without shame; we are to live in harmony as stewards of an astonishing diverse and fruitful world; we are forbidden from using that freedom to harm others.   We are due equal treatment under this law. This is justice.  However, the first eleven chapters of Genesis are also archetypical stories about how badly we get this wrong.  As it has been said, the point of these stories isn’t that they happened once a long time ago, it is that they happen all the time.   

Oh Mortal.  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (Covenant and Conversation: Genesis) has helped me see these texts as a sophisticated drama about the failure of human responsibility in God's all- lives-matter world.  Adam and Eve fail the test of personal responsibility: neither take responsibility for what they’ve done.  The result is the experience of shame.  Cain, kills his brother, Abel.  He fails the test of moral responsibility:  “Am I my brother’s keeper.”  The answer of course is yes you are.  

Next, the story of Noah and the flood.  It is commonly misread.  The first experience of human identity is tribalism (Sacks).  We love those who are related to us, of our kind, but we fear and ultimately are violent toward the stranger.  The earth is a violent mess.  We’ll start over, God says.  With one faithful tribe.  Noah is given grace enough to save his family and as many creatures of the earth as he can.  But Noah fails the test of collective responsibility.  He doesn’t help remake society when the flood is over.   He unloads the Ark, thanks his God, and plants a vineyard for himself, apparently living out his latter days as a drunkard.

Finally, the last act in this drama of responsibility: humanity discovers the power of  technology and common purpose (Genesis 11:1-9).  All humanity gathers into one place and one language.  We think the solution is to be one people of a single identity, uniform, the same.  There will be no limit to what we can do. Come let us make a name for ourselves, and build a tower into the heavens, lest we be scattered over the earth.  Sacks points out that the only other place in scripture that the formula “Come let us ... verb, or" occurs at the beginning of Exodus.  Pharaoh sees that the people of Israel are numerous enough to be a threat, he says, “Come let us deal with them or they will become”  This is a text about tribalism’s opposite: empire.  Neither leads humanity to Justice, just the opposite.  Here we fail the responsibility of mortal humility. Empires live with the idea of universal justice too. They bend all into this universal image, mistaking it for God’s image.  

Now, thank you for sticking with me this far, because here is the reward for close reading: this is how racism begins.  Christian Europeans imagined any one whose skin color or culture was different than their own was less than; they enslaved native peoples or killed them in order to tame the world to their common purpose.  And until we take responsibility for our own actions, for the moral responsibility that comes with freedom, for the collective responsibility that comes with grace, in humble recognition of the beauty of God's diverse creation, we will continue to do the same.  Sin lurks at our door, we must master it.

So then Justice, all lives matter, equally.  This is not in dispute.   However, it is not enough, not sufficient to make human life humane.   And here the curtain rises on the grand narrative of the Bible.  The whole of the rest, the entire scope and tenor of it,  is the story of a God of Justice who teaches the world to love kindness in order to save it, one chosen people, one beloved person, one act of kindness at a time.  God enters into our suffering and calls us to love.

Love Kindness.  The defining characteristic of God in scripture is not justice, although God is just.  God is above all things, in the Old Testament and New, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love (in Hebrew: hesed; variously in Greek, but Christians commonly speak of this loving as agape).  

Of course, in a just society ALL lives matter, but that is not enough as we have seen. To Justice, the Bible appends the call to love kindness.   It is a great mystery, but our faith is witness to a God who steps into creation to suffer this loving with us, for us (Emmanuel).  This loving isn't emotional, though it begins in empathy with the suffering.  It is an action, an act of kindness toward the stranger or friend for no other reason than they are in need and loved by God and worthy of being loved (as are each and every one of us).  From Abraham to Jesus, God loves the world toward justice.  All lives matter, but when black lives cry out for justice, our hearts must be called to that other essential capacity which is loving kindness.  Hearing another's cry, beholding another's need and acting selflessly to comfort them: this isn't justice, because it is in the moment not universal it is particular, preferential, it is honoring the blessed uniqueness and infinite value of the person before us.  

The Bible understands that humans in power will always attempt to create a justice favorable to themselves; it is why we are commanded to this other thing, the thing which Jesus and Paul finally imagine is the only quality of life worth living. Jesus enfleshed this loving in our living. When the afflicted cry out, we are called to love: to say first to black Americans, Black Lives Matter, without qualification. It is this act alone that has the power to mend the world.  If one cannot do that, we can never find our way to Justice. This is the wisdom of the Bible. This is where God walks.  That is what is in the book our President held in his hand before St. John's Church.

 Walking Humbly.  In the 1960's, Stephen Carter was an 11 year old black boy who moved into a white neighborhood in Washington.   When he and his brothers sat on their front porch after moving in, those white neighbors who walked by didn’t smile or give any sign of welcome or acknowledgement.  Stephen became afraid that all the terrible stories he heard about blacks living among whites were true. Then a remarkable thing happened; well actually, one kind thing. Their white neighbor across the street, came home, noticed them, smiled and went inside.  She came out some time later with a plate of cheese and jelly sandwiches and crossed the street to welcome them. That moment, he wrote changed his life. Her name was Sara Kestbaum.  She was Jewish.  She knew her scriptures.  She knew what was good.  

As an adult, writing decades later, Stephen Carter said, “Nothing in contemporary secular conversation calls us to give up anything truly valuable for anybody else … Only religion offers a sacred language of sacrifice-selflessness-awe that enables believers to treat their fellow citizens as fellow passengers.   But even if religion is the engine of civility, it has too few serious practitioners, which is why those who are truly moved by it to love their fellow human beings are so special.  I learned that truth in 1966, and, to this day, I can close my eyes and feel my tongue on the smooth, slick sweetness of the cream cheese and jelly sandwiches that I gobbled on that summer afternoon when I discovered how a single act of genuine and unassuming civility can change a life for ever.” (1)

What more has the Lord asked of you, O mortal, but to do justice, to love kindness and walk humbly with your God.  

(1)  Stephen Carter, Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp 61-63, as cited in by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World (London: Shocken Books, 2005).  Cited above, for the analysis of Genesis 1-11, Jonathan Sacks, Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings (Jerusalem: Maggid Books, 2009), pp 49-63).

Genesis 37 - 45 (sel.) God’s faithfulness is hidden in the mystery of providence

Joseph, being seventeen years old, was shepherding the flock with his brothers … 3 Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves.[a] 4 But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him. 

[a Traditional rendering (compare Gk): a coat of many colors; Meaning of Heb uncertain]

12 Now his brothers went to pasture their father’s flock near Shechem. 13 And Israel said to Joseph, “Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send you to them.” He answered, “Here I am.” 14 So he said to him, “Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock; and bring word back to me.” So he sent him from the valley of Hebron.  …. So Joseph went after his brothers, and found them at Dothan. 18 They saw him from a distance, and before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. 19 They said to one another, “Here comes this dreamer. 20 Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.” 21 But when Reuben heard it, he delivered him out of their hands, saying, “Let us not take his life.” 22 Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood; throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but lay no hand on him”—that he might rescue him out of their hand and restore him to his father. 23 So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleevesb that he wore; 24 and they took him and threw him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it. 25 Then they sat down to eat; and looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels carrying gum, balm, and resin, on their way to carry it down to Egypt. 26 Then Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? 27 Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.” And his brothers agreed. 28 When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt. 

Many years later, Jospeh has found favor in the court of the Pharaoh of Egypt and is governor of the land.  In a time of famine his brothers (not knowing it is Joseph) have gone to Egypt seeking help.  After much drama they are reunited …

4 Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come closer to me.” And they came closer. He said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. 5 And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. 6 For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. 7 God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. 8 So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. 9 Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, ‘Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me lord of all Egypt; come down to me, do not delay. 10 You shall settle in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children’s children, as well as your flocks, your herds, and all that you have.

Romans 8:18-28  God’s faithfulness is ever-present hope in the midst of suffering

18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.  26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27 And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirits intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. 28 We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

One of the things I learned as a musician is that one begins by imitating the masters.   The following sermon has evolved over the years as such an example.  The late Fred Craddock was one of the most acclaimed American preachers of the 20th century.  This sermon takes its form and inspiration from one of his sermons.

 We don’t study the bible only to look into the witness of the past for truth; we study the bible to look through it into our present with new vision. I hope that is what you hear me trying to do each week. It is not easy.  The ways of God are not obvious.

 I confess, as well, that I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason, especially bad things. I wouldn't begin to suggest that this pandemic is the work of God.  I don’t believe that Bible says that either; but the Bible does suggest God has more of a hand in encouraging our lives than we know.  Some of you are better readers of your bible and your lives than I.   I have heard stories, moving stories of coincidences  that you connect to God’s unseen hand: random happenings that led you to this church or to that fateful first date.  Just a coincidence?  Of course.  

It was just a coincidence that a caravan of merchants passed by at the moment Joseph’s brothers were working out how to kill him.  Joseph was the favorite son of Jacob.  Dad had given him a fancy coat with long sleeves, unsuitable for real work.  The coat of many colors is an older translation — sometimes ancient Hebrew itself is ambiguous; the point is that this isn’t a coat for field work.  Jacob was that annoying favorite son who passed along every bad thing his brothers did on to dad.   He was the informant in the family.   After some debate his brothers decided to be done with it and tossed him in a pit; but, at just that moment, a caravan of traders passed by on their way to Egypt.  “Let’s at least get some money out of this.” A coincidence?  Sure it was.  

In the moment, the text doesn’t mention God at all.   This is interesting.  To this point the Bible has not been embarrassed about God talk.   In the beginning God said and it was so.  The command to Adam and Eve was unambiguous, “Don’t eat that!” To Abraham and Sarah, “Go!” and they went.  The Joseph story is different.  It is realistic.  We don’t hear God talking to us like that today.  If we do it is a whispered hope, easily mistaken for something else.  The story of Joseph is one long sustained piece of writing, filled with coincidences, where the word God is rarely spoken.  Yet the entire future of ancient promises hang by a thread at every turn.

There are other coincidences in the bible.  I heard Fred Craddock preach on this once.  He gave the example of Rufus and Alexander’s father, Simon of Cyrene.   Simon of Cyrene just happened to be in Jerusalem on a certain Passover.  He was crossing along the side of the road at the very moment a Galilean on the way to be executed fell beneath the weight of the cross he was carrying.   A solider looked to the side, saw Simon, and pulled him out of the crowd to carry Jesus’ cross to Golgotha.   A coincidence? Of course it was.

Stranger things have happened without calling them an act of God.  They happen all the time. When I was in seminary, a couple of times a year I would drive from Austin Texas to Kansas City to visit my family.  It was a long day’s drive: up the middle of Oklahoma; hang a right at Oklahoma City; over to the lower corner of Missouri; then up to I-70.  (On the map the shortest way from Texas to Missouri looks to be through Arkansas — take my word for it, there is no short-cut through Arkansas).  At the six hour mark or so, I pulled into McDonalds — a famous McDonalds as far as Oklahomans are concerned — Double arches over the interstate.  The largest McDonalds in the world they brag.

As I unbuckled and opened the door, another car pulled to the left beside me.  I thought the car looked familiar.  The man getting out of the car looked even more familiar.  He looked at me in the same odd way I was looking at him.  It was my brother!  We had pulled into the same McDonalds, at precisely the same moment, into the exact same spot in a gigantic parking lot in the middle of Oklahoma.   He was returning from a business trip.  Was that a coincidence? Of course it was! 

On his next trip my brother stopped there again and bought two souvenir shot glasses and gave one to me for Christmas.   Neither of us have played the lottery since. We figure that we spent all our luck on that moment.  It was only an unlikely occurrence to me until a far more significant moment several years later.  It was an extremely difficult time, filled with feelings of personal failure and regret.   I was packing.  On the back of a forgotten shelf I discovered one dusty souvenir glass from the largest McDonalds in the world.  You see, in that moment, that glass and that event became a symbol of something else: family, an unexpected blessing, the hidden grace of God made visible as surely as I write this today.  A coincidence?  Sure. 

If you are patient with me, for just a moment, I will try to say it differently.  It was a coincidence that God intended for the good. Joseph will say something similar after the long sequence of events in Genesis plays out.  I paraphrase: “Even though you intended me harm, God intended it for the good in order to preserve a numerous people.”  Whoever wrote the final version of the Joseph tale was wiser about life than I am.  Some scholars think that the text belongs to a generation of enlightened faithful for whom the God talk of their ancestors was embarrassing.  The author answers with a story that is modest in God talk, but pregnant with hope.

 Joseph spoke more than he knew. The twelve of them and their wives, will multiply into the people we call Israel, and from their lineage will come Joseph and Mary, and the one we call Jesus, whose cross Simon of Cyrene was enlisted to carry along the way.  From that old heavy cross and Christ’s broken life, forgiveness and love will flow into our history and set in motion a cascade of random occurrences that extend to this very day to you reading or hearing these words.

If you spend a little time at it, I am sure that you can point to some random circumstance in your life that might also be seen as grace, the faithfulness of God.  It’s about looking at your life differently.  Yes, our lives do evolve out of cascades of random events, but these occurrences might also be the work of whatever it is that we gesture at with the word God.  I’m not above saying both are true, well let me just say it.   Both are true.   To the old debate about free will or predestination.  I say yes. Serendipities are happy, random coincidences, but they may also be the work of God when they shape our lives toward the good.

I was on vacation, back in my 20’s and my roommates picked out a new apartment without me.  I was angry; I wasn’t happy about it, but we moved.  At the time I was a fine Presbyterian, but the big Methodist church across the street had good music and it was close.  Dr. David Wilson was choir director at that church.  He invited me to sing in a community chorus he conducted in Long Beach.  Every Tuesday, for years, long before I thought of being a preacher, let alone a Methodist, I rehearsed in the Los Altos lounge.  A room we will shortly rededicate as Heritage Hall.  Serendipity.   

I bet you have a story too.  You found Los Altos on the Internet and decided to give us a try. You were going through a difficult season in life and friend invited you. You moved into town and had the wrong time for the first church you tried, and found the next service at Los Altos. One for mother's day: a friend invited you to a dance one night and along the way you met someone with whom you would spend your life with.   Now, was that really just a coincidence?

-- Pastor Mark Sturgess
​

I See A New Church 
Rev. Mark F. Sturgess, June 2019

The following is the text of my brief part in the LGBTQ led worship service at the 2019 session of the California-Pacific Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church.  I was grateful to be there.   Many others could have offered testimony longer fought and much more deserving to be heard than mine.

The humor in the moment was intended to disarm fear, namely mine.  There was, however, strong intentionality to the sermon.  My concern is that wesleyans will continue to argue polity when the primary need is to return to the Bible with renewed theological vision and rigor.  Without this, I fear, our conferencing is futile. 

“Witness” is, I believe, the primary genre of the Bible.  My own witness here was intended to be an example of a gay man taking scripture very seriously.  As John Wesley admonished his preachers — “speak as the oracles of God” — in a brief space I make a number of allusions to the speech and stories of the Bible, both obliquely and directly.  In order to read the biblical witness well, one must also be aware of the way the ancients pulled the stories of their ancestors into their present in order to comprehend and interpret God’s action in their lives. I conclude by doing the same: interpreting my own story of “coming out” to renewed vision told through the lens of Jesus’ encounter with the beggar born blind (John 9).

I have come to believe that the original sin of the Western Christian tradition — so deeply imbedded as to be indistinguishable from the way we do theology — is our obsession with universal truths which in the end are the universals imposed by those with power.  Universal truth is God.  God created a world of astonishing plurality.  The incarnate Jesus was not a universal human being, but a particular one.  Unique.  In becoming this Word made flesh God hallows the peculiar dignity of each and every one of us. We are being called, today, to a conversion of sorts: from seeking purity in conformity to beholding the holy in the astonishing beautify of otherness and in the universal God who greets us hidden beneath the face of each and every human soul.    

As noted in the text, I am significantly indebted to several authors who have guided me to these thoughts: Emmanuel Levinas as read through my teacher Dr. William Greenway, The Reasonableness of Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015); and the brilliant commentary of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who has essentially retaught me how to read the Torah, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations, revised (London: Continum, 2003).  I am confident that Jesus had something to do with it too.

I See A New Church

I see a new church. A new church must be built upon a renewed biblical, theological foundation.   God gathers us. 

After my first Annual Conference 17 years ago, my plan was to not speak on the floor of Annual Conference until my retirement.  I’m here early, unless this goes badly.  I am grateful to be here — and grateful to that generation of queers who came before me who made this possible — but this was not the plan.

I am a Presbyterian preacher’s kid from rural Missouri — note, Methodist not the plan; preacher, by no means!  When I completed my undergraduate study in Chicago, my plan was a lucrative tech job, loving wife, nice house in a tree lined suburb, and two and a half kids. I remember saying to self, “Self, I’m willing to pursue this dream anywhere, but please not California.”  You see, Midwesterners look with a great frown in this direction: “land of fruits and nuts.” We are a people willfully, even proudly, different. Yet, here I am: Californian, Methodist, gay, single at 50, no children, and the only asset to my name is this peculiar work.  

I am not willfully different: I am just God given peculiar. We all are, though, aren’t we?  An ancient rabbi said that when a human being makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out the same, but when God creates in God’s image each and every one is different (Sacks 60). Each person is unique, a unique universe of experience and story.  Each one of you is irreplaceable.  This is the gift of God we are called to behold in a new church.

Each and every move of my life challenged my world view, a world view formed in the idea that one should strive toward universal ideals: some Christian, some American, all certainly right.  That view was challenged by my life, a life far more complex and beautiful than any labels I had for it.  Chicago was not Higginsville Missouri; and then, my first employer in Chicago sent me to this God forsaken land. In any given visit to a Southern California mall I overhead more languages in one place than I’d heard my whole life. It was Pentecost at Macy’s!  This terrified me.  

The first wedding I attended with my Latina fiancé was that of her best friend, a second generation Mexican wedding a black man from South Central Los Angeles in a Baptist Church.  It was the tensest wedding I’ve ever attended. Soul food on one side, Mariachis on the other, neither family pretending it was their choice to be there; and me, cowering on the edge of God’s great wedding banquet: one piece of bologna on Wonder Bread. Those two families warmed to each other, eventually.  You know what it was?  It was the first grand child: it was a child who strangely warmed their hearts. God does so often save us by reaching up out of the manger of our humanity with a tiny, vulnerable hand.   

Our God, made vulnerable to us, gathers us. 

As it turns out, our “isms” — our prejudices and fears of difference— are not healed by abstract talk, or logic, or obedience to a book. In reality, we don’t learn to love the Other in general, we learn to love by first being loved by someone unique and special before we have the good sense to resist (Sacks 55, Greenway 149f, 1 John 4:10).

A child reaches out to hold your hand.  A tearful, courageous  son comes home and pleads, “Dad, please use the pronouns she and hers.”  . The challenge before us as a church is to behold the image of God in the person not like ourselves (Sacks 60).    [If you cannot love the person you have seen, you cannot love the God whom you have not (1 John 4:20).]  Even in this place when you look to your East or West,  North or South — you will see a person, a fathomless irreplaceable mystery very different from yourself; and that person is, in the light Christ shines upon the world, holy.  This is after all the heart of John Wesley’s theology. When I became a Methodist, I actually read Wesley.  Have you read Wesley?  In Christ, Grace heals the heart so that it may behold the image of God in every soul that has breath.

The Bible predicts our behavior in a tower called Babel.  We have a tendency to desire to gather all people into one place, or one language, or one book of discipline and impose unity on God’s given diversity (Sacks 51f).  When humanity gives birth to an “ism,” we put one particular image of ourselves at the top and rank all those lower on the tower as lesser.   Colonial racism puts the white male at the top; rationalism puts secular reason at the top; fundamentalism puts certainty at the top; homophobia puts reproductive sex at the top.  Every once in a while God comes down, laughs, and throws the whole thing to the ground, which is exactly where we are supposed to be because that’s where our God, our universal God, walks, hidden beneath the particularity of each and every human soul.

God gather us.

When I came out, I finally did meet the love of my life.  It was unexpected.  Not my plan. He was no one’s ideal, but a universe to me.  Many middle eastern men are tall, dark and handsome. He was not. He was shorter than most, didn’t bathe enough, unkempt, his body wasn’t born of a gym, but of the poverty of a day working family.  And when they crucified him it wasn’t a heroic death. He died quickly. His arms weren’t strong enough to hold him for long. The soldiers didn’t need to break his legs. 

I wish it wasn’t something I could see, but he had walked by me one day, touched me.  I had been blind from birth, but now I could see.  I could behold a new world of astounding beauty and grace and senseless suffering.  I beheld a new world and a new church.  Annual Conferences all over the world argue that I shouldn’t exist.  Yet, here we are.  It’s not my plan.  

God Gather us.  

The only thing I’ve got, the one thing I know for certain is that once I was blind and now I see.

Shepherd us O god, beyond our fears, beyond our wants, from death into life. 
[the refrain is sung]