This Week's Sermon: "High Park's on Fire"

Isaiah 1:9-17

If the Lord of heavenly forces had not spared a few of us,    we would be like Sodom; we would resemble Gomorrah.

¹⁰ Hear the Lord’s word, you leaders of Sodom.
    Listen to our God’s teaching,
        people of Gomorrah!
¹¹ What should I think about all your sacrifices?
    says the Lord.
I’m fed up with entirely burned offerings of rams
    and the fat of well-fed beasts.
    I don’t want the blood of bulls, lambs, and goats.
¹² When you come to appear before me,
    who asked this from you,
    this trampling of my temple’s courts?
¹³ Stop bringing worthless offerings.
    Your incense repulses me.
New moon, sabbath, and the calling of an assembly—
    I can’t stand wickedness with celebration!
¹⁴ I hate your new moons and your festivals.
    They’ve become a burden that I’m tired of bearing.
¹⁵ When you extend your hands,
    I’ll hide my eyes from you.
Even when you pray for a long time,
    I won’t listen.
Your hands are stained with blood.
¹⁶     Wash! Be clean!
Remove your ugly deeds from my sight.
    Put an end to such evil;
¹⁷     learn to do good.
Seek justice:
    help the oppressed;^[b]
    defend the orphan;
    plead for the widow. (CEB)

“They Like Jesus, But Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations,” Week Five: They Think the Church is Homophobic

My college friend’s email to me was kind, but direct and to the point: “We are so close to the High Park fire.  Our home is fine, but I have friends who have lost their homes, and that is sad.”

There isn’t really a way to mince words or pull punches when describing something like the wildfires that devastated Colorado earlier this year.

High Park’s on fire.  A town, a city, is on fire.

In the past—heck, even very recently—that would be the opportunity for preachers to leap forward and proclaim that such disasters were God’s punishment visited upon the world for whatever sin of the day we were complicit in.  Jerry Falwell famously blamed 9/11 in part on feminism.  Pat Robertson claimed that the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake happened because Haiti’s leaders had made pacts with Satan.

And there are, I know, pastors who will tell you that these disasters—fire in particular—have to do with the radical notion of being open and accepting to all people.  After all, they say, wasn’t it Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by fire for their sins?

Indeed it was.  But what those sins were…well, therein lies what Christianity now wrestles with on a seemingly daily basis.

This is a sermon series for us to begin the fall season here in the life of the church, and it is a sermon series that, as it takes us now through September and into October, I imagine will likely challenge and maybe even distress us a bit…which I promise you is a good thing, even in the comfort zone of church.  In fact, church has become such a comfort zone for us, and for many Christians, that an increasing number of folks feel shut off from us because they worry that they do not speak our language, or understand our thoughts, or follow our precepts.  And that separation has not been easy on us, as church memberships decline and the average age of remaining church members increases.  In the midst of these sociological trends, a California pastor named Dan Kimball wrote a book entitled, “They Like Jesus, But Not the Church,” in which he documents—qualitatively, rather than quantitatively—the stereotypes that people who live outside the church hold of us.  And none of those stereotypes are good.  Each week we will hear—through Dan—from a member of my generation about how they see the church, and we’ll do so while also exploring what the Bible has to say about it.  And so we began the series with a message with the theme of, “They think the church has a political agenda, and “They think the church is judgmental and negative,” followed by, “They think the church arrogantly claims that all other religions are wrong.” Last week, we turned to the theme of, “They think the church is dominated by males and oppresses females,” and this week the theme is—and probably most challenging theme of Dan’s entire book is—“They think the church is homophobic.”

As Dan Kimball describes her, Penny “works at a local newspaper as an advertising director.”   She “was born and raised in England, where she went to an Anglican church during her childhood.”  She is also openly gay, and this is part of her story:

“It seems that homosexuality is one of the main things churches consistently and publicly condemn.  So picture being gay and wanting to seek counsel or spiritual advice.  Why would I go to a church?  They have already thrown heaps of guilt on me and condemned me before I’ve even stepped my foot in the door.” 

She continues:

When I was volunteering at the gay center, I would be on the phone talking to teenagers in trouble and feeling I was making a positive difference in the world.  But then I’d go out to my car and find tracts which would utterly condemn me left by Christians on my car windshield.  I’d look at these heartless words with little pieces of Bible verses quoted out of context and wonder, why do they hate me so much?  Why don’t they even have the decency to come in and talk to me rather than leave anger and hate on my windshield and run?”

I am so very, very grateful that we held toasts for my ministry last Sunday, because I fear that this Sunday, you will want to take it all back!

Far too often—and I think this is part of why the mainline church has declined over the years—I think we in the church are apt to, when there’s a divisive political controversy a-brewin’, to pretend it isn’t there until the whole thing passes.  And this head-in-the-sand strategy might work in the short term, but I think that in the long term, it's like an anesthetic: it may numb the pain in the short term, but then the pain returns, and sometimes even worse. It turns the church into a space where it isn’t safe to talk about, and seek guidance on, important issues of the moment, just as much as a church that tells its congregants how to vote and that if they don’t, they’re going to hell.

Even mainstream churches actually do this.  The Roman Catholic bishop of Springfield, Illinois, made a video last month telling his flock that voting for Democrats because, in part, of marriage equality, puts your salvation, in his words, “in serious jeopardy.”

In any case, it would be naïve for me to pretend that this sermon does not take place in front of the backdrop of Referendum 74, which puts forward the question of marriage equality to Washington’s electorate.

But I also think it is profoundly unethical to use a sermon to tell you how to vote.

More to the point, I will never, ever tell you that your salvation is dependent on how you vote.

But I do want to talk with you about what the church’s place and role is in all of this.  After all, a lot of people will tell you that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is all about homosexuality, including Jude, who writes in his epistle that they were destroyed for their sexual immorality.

The Old Testament prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel also write about Sodom and Gomorrah.  But what they say destroyed the town was not sexual immorality, but a sin far more profound.

Ezekiel 16:48-9 reads: “This is the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were proud, had plenty to eat, and enjoyed peace and prosperity; but she didn’t help the poor and needy.  They became haughty and did abominable things in front of me.”

Before you leap to conclusions about what “abominable things” is, keep in mind that Leviticus, in chapters 7, 11, and 20, refers to certain animal sacrifice practices as “abominations.”

And that is what Isaiah leads off with--it is he is talking about here, in chapter 1 of his book, when he refers to his listeners as Sodom and Gomorrah—not sexuality, but the inappropriateness of animal sacrifices!

Ezekiel condemns Sodom for not being hospitable to the poor and the needy.  Isaiah does so for their sacrifice practices, and says that instead of acting like Sodom, we should “seek justice.”

And as it relates to Sodom and Gomorrah, whose inhabitants were so inhospitable to Lot and his family that they forced sexual relations on them, so much of that justice, that practice of being hospitable to everyone, the radical, difficult, loving notion that “all means all” begins at church!

Because it is, in part, Christian prejudices that made it acceptable, when I was in school, for my classmates to use words like “gay” and “fag” as insults.

Because it is, in part, Christian prejudices that have created a world where gay and lesbian teenagers are two to three times more likely to commit suicide than their heterosexual peers.

To be inhospitable to our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in Christ is, I believe, much closer to what Isaiah and Ezekiel condemn than the relationship that two consenting adults might share.

Which means that it is not enough to merely tolerate the presence of gay and lesbian persons in the “I do my thing, you do yours; leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone” sense, because I believe that, in the church, gay and lesbian believers are not always on that neutral footing.  In other words—we have ground that we have to make up.  And this church can help do that.

It is my hope, my belief, and my prayer that this congregation would not only allow a same-sex person or couple to become members and for us to respect the integrity of their relationship, but also, if they had the spiritual gifts for it, to serve in any lay leadership post of the congregation.  And if Referendum 74 passes, I will obey the law and treat same-sex couples as I would any heterosexual couple who came to me asking me to marry them.

It is, in many ways, the same dilemma we tackled last week—and that our denomination tackled decades ago—on the place of women in the church, that despite what Paul wrote in 1 Cor 14, on balance, we believe it is Biblical and right to ordain women to ministry.  We realized that we had taken individual verses out of context against women and super-sized those verses’ importance compared to the rest of Scripture.  What if we have done the same thing against gays and lesbians?

Which ultimately means that likewise, I believe it is Biblical and right to treat our gay and lesbian neighbors as full members in the body of Christ, without reservation or hesitation.

May it be so.  If this be against divine will, may God have mercy on me.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

October 7, 2012