The Rev. Dr. Charlie Bell
Happy Pride to you all!
Well, whilst it was fantastic to see St Paul’s Cathedral front and centre of yesterday’s Pride March, I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that St Paul is one of the more unlikely candidates for patron saint of Pride. Those of us committed to embracing LGBTQI people in the life of the church have all – I’m sure – found ourselves taking at least a little time wrestling with some of the things that St Paul, or someone writing in his name, has to say about human sin and sexual ethics. It often doesn’t make easy reading, and for those who prefer to read the Bible as an instruction manual rather than a record of God’s revelation, what appear to be St Paul’s condemnations are often front and centre of the arguments against same sex, same gender, relationships. St Paul is anti-queer, we are told – and because of this, so is God. Case closed.
Except I’m not quite sure that is the case – in fact, I am quite sure that isn’t the case. The problem with reading the Bible like that is that for all our pretence and for all we say otherwise, we always – whoever we are – bring our own interpretative lens to it. We are never quite free of our culture, or our context, or our ideologies, or our desires. In other words, we are never free of our humanity when we engage with God and when we engage with Scripture. Indeed, God was not free of humanity when he engaged with us, either, in the person of Jesus Christ. And so whilst I could make all the usual arguments to you about why those clobber verses, those texts of terror so often used to condemn LGBTQI people do not in fact do what they are claimed to do, I want to offer something slightly different – which is to lay out a simple yet objectively true fact – queer people exist in God’s church.
Now you and I both know this, and praise God the Episcopal Church knows this – at least in the main – and even those who oppose us might grudgingly recognise this, too. Yet this little fact is actually incredibly powerful, because it offers a huge challenge to the lazy thinking that says you can’t be queer and Christian. We who are LGBTQI sit as an awkward presence, an awkward reality check, in the face of those who continue to pretend we don’t exist, who would rather we didn’t. Our very presence is a challenge to the idea that God only created heterosexuals and only loves them – because if we are to take our scriptures seriously, which we should, then we will be reminded that God’s creation of humankind in God’s own image was not partial. God didn’t create only a subgroup and then let someone else finish the job – God created the lot, each and every one of us. And because of this, each and every one of us is endowed with that full humanity, with that full human reality, in exactly the same way as other people are, too.
Theologians don’t always appear that keen to engage with human life as it actually is – it’s easier, maybe, to engage with human life as we wish it were. Yet that is such a fundamental error – such a fundamental mistake – because in doing so theology ends up having very little to say to vast swathes of people, and in so doing, has very little to say to anybody at all. IF our theology cannot address the world as it is, in its entirety, then it’s not really theology – it’s just idolatry and ideology. Trying to speak about God is hard enough as it is without ignoring the reality of God’s creation.
The problem is that believing that can sometimes be hard, even for those of us who know it to be true. Society, even our churches, love a scapegoat, love to find a group of people who might be able to take on those things we don’t like about ourselves and therefore who can be blamed for them – taking away our sins in the process. The church’s historical almost pathological obsession with sexual purity sits in that drawer, I think – and queer people are a perfect group on which to hang all the church’s worries, self-doubts, frustrations, fears. Yet to do so is to fundamentally deny who we are as human beings – that is, who we are as queer people and who we are as humanity as a whole – and to embark on a really rather restricting theological enterprise.
Imagining humankind as essentially, ontologically, of God’s nature, heterosexual is not something that will stand any scrutiny, and nor will it enrichen or enliven our Christian journeys – it’s just a nonsense, a pretence, an untruth. And if we do this, we imagine something about God too – and imagining God as essentially, ontologically, heterosexual is also not something that will stand any scrutiny, and worse than that, it is an ideology, it is making God in our own image rather than the other way around, it is blasphemy. It is replacing God’s primacy in creation with our own, and this kind of thinking has never ended well. The history of colonialism and the enslavement of black children of God shows what happens when we start out on that kind of enterprise, when we turn ourselves into the normative, when we choose to ‘other’ people different to ourselves, or rather when we decide which differences matter and which don’t.
So to return to St Paul, and indeed to our Gospel today, the way we read the scriptures really matters, and the interpretative lens that we place on those scriptures really matters too. If we approach the letter to the Romans from a starting point that says that God isn’t really very keen on LGBTQI people, then we can find all kind of verses and themes to condemn them with. We can describe them as setting their mind on the Flesh rather than the Spirit, we can then suggest that they cannot please God, we can suggest that they don’t have the Spirit of Christ. And yet when we look around us, we see – plainly see, in front of our very eyes – that the Spirit of God does indeed dwell in queer people – and not only in them, but in their – our – lives, our loves, our relationships, our engagements with the world and with society and with those around us. For all that some churches don’t want to see it, it’s happening – refusing to look just means we miss the party, rather than that the party doesn’t happen.
So if we come to St Paul’s writing with our starting point that the world is as it is, rather than as some might wish it to be – male, cis, white, heteronormative – then suddenly the richness of the scriptures opens up to us, and in doing so, these very scriptures offer a challenge to the church more widely. They ask us – are we really listening, watching, the work of the Holy Spirit in the world? Are we willing to listen rather than always talk – are we willing to truly listen to the experience not only of oppression that continues to blight queer communities, but are we willing to listen, too, to the voice of God that speaks through these communities of faith? Are we willing to accept that God might be saying something particular to us through Pride – and just as importantly, are we willing to take that in, process it, fully engage with it, and learn to embody it? Might it be that setting the mid on the flesh, to use St Paul’s words, is actually about our trying to create God with human tools, rather than receiving God in the creation that God has already brought about – and might we be called, instead, to refashion our own lives in the light of queer experience?
When we read Jesus’s parable today in the light of that, if we recognise that the queer experience has something particular and important to say about the God who we worship, then it offers us – and it offers the wider church – a serious challenge. It suggests, too, that the word of the kingdom might just come to us in unexpected places – not just from queer communities but from other places that the church has historically turned its face away from too. Where might the word of the kingdom be found in our world today – who might be its prophets? And even more challengingly, what if we read today’s parable as if we were not the hearer who refuses to listen, but instead we are the ones who do not do enough when trouble or persecution, or when the cares of the world, arise – and in doing so, choke the word of God and get in the way of all that God is trying to do, despite rather than because of us?
Now let me offer you a final awkward thought, and bear with me because it might sound a little unexpected at first – are we ready, as Christian churches, to take the step, and stop being inclusive?
You’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m about to add the ‘but’ into the sermon – that we should love LGBTQI people ‘but’ hate the sin, love the sinner – and I’m happy to reassure you that I’m not planning to do that. Queer people are not two entirely separate entities, who we are and what we do, in any more of a way than anyone else – and it is quite simply a nonsense when we try to separate out the acts of love from the love itself as so many self-professed Christians appear to try to do. That’s to entirely miss the point of what being human is all about – our integrated selves, and queer people often have a lot to teach others about that.
So my call to stop being inclusive is not because I think somehow the liberal agenda has gone too far, or because I think queer people should be seen and not heard, or because I think despite everything I’ve said, I think God really is a heterosexual man.
I think we as a church need to stop being inclusive – or rather, we as a church need to rethink what we really mean by that – because it is not for us to do the including – God has already done that. It is not for us to invite people to the holy table, because God has already laid the places. It is not for us to welcome other people into our tent, but instead to recognise that we are guests in the tent in exactly the same way that others are. God is the includer, the inviter, the welcomer – God has the initiative and not us; God has the primacy and not us; God has the open arms to which we are all called. And that very fact must surely shake us to the core.
The radical, terrifying reality at the heart of the Christian faith is not that queer people have been included, but that you and me have been – in all our extraordinary human reality, in our failings, and in our glories, in our successes and in our failures, however good or bad or indifferent or right or wrong we might be – all of this was loved into being and all of this is loved into redemption. God’s love for each single thread of our lives, each fibre of our being, is so infinite and so extraordinary that Jesus died for us. And God’s love for us is for us in our whole humanity – because of our humanity, not despite it.
Queer people can help us see that, if only the world were willing to see. Our very existence as queer people can change everything for everyone – for the better. God grant us the grace to learn from those that God has welcomed to God’s table, grant us the grace to open ourselves up and orient ourselves to listen to the voice, the workings, of the Spirit in our midst, to commit ourselves to being that fertile soil and believing what God makes clear through the Spirit that dwells in us – all.
Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
That’s quite enough to be getting on with for now.
Amen.
