Osler's Razor

Today I am preaching at the Church of the Holy Comforter in Richmond, Virginia. This is more or less what I will say (and you will probably notice the strong influence of my mentor, Wacoan of the Year 2011 Bob Darden):

I received a note from Geoff [the Rector] about giving this sermon, telling me that the sermon should be about justice, and hope, and same-gender Holy Blessings, and also about John the Baptist. Which is, let’s face it, a lot to wrap up in 15 minutes, but I’m going to give it a shot.

Two decades ago, I was in law school. In the summer, I worked in Chicago, and lived in a small room in Streeterville. On Sundays, I would often walk up a few blocks to Michigan Avenue, and into a beautiful cathedral. That church, Fourth Presbyterian, was a rich and fascinating place, overwhelming. I didn’t know anyone there, or really anyone at all in Chicago. I was alone on a hot summer.

One Sunday I found myself sitting beside a woman and a girl, a mother and daughter. As the sermon began, I saw the girl writing on an envelope, the way children will do. It was… different, though. She was counting something, making hash marks in groups of five. I looked for a pattern, and couldn’t see it for a while, until it clicked—she was making a mark every time the minister, John Buchanan, used the word “love.”

That’s it, isn’t it? Justice and hope and new social institutions and the riot of John the Baptist do not usually all live in the same place. We have to pick them up and take them with us to somewhere unfamiliar. There is a… journey. And it must be a journey defined by love.

That was the thing that was most revolutionary about Jesus. His answer to everything was “love.” They were stoning a woman, and he loved her despite her sins; they brought him children and lepers and those who were despised, and he showed them love; they asked him which of 600 rules was most important, and he announced two great commandments of love… to love your God and to love your neighbor. Every time he was confronted with a rule, he responded by talking about the principle of love. Not easy love, either, but a love that required sacrifice and heartache and change.

There is this, too… that when Jesus was to leave this earth, he told people there would be one to come after him—the Holy Spirit, the Holy Comforter. I’ve always found that remarkable, that there is this sharp breaking point there, with prophets before that time who had come to shake things up, and the Holy Spirit afterwards, to challenge and comfort, a spirit of love in full.

That love, God’s love and our love for God, does not always provide us with easy answers, or even any answers at all. It's often troubling and unformed. When I read the story of John the Baptist, what amazes me isn’t the bug-eating and the beheading, but the fact that his message was so vague. He told people to repent and be baptized in the name of… well, he didn’t know who yet, someone who was yet to come. And somehow, people bought into this! He told them to share their possessions, and they came. He told them to sacrifice for love, and they came. With no Messiah but a promise, with no riches, with no theology, really, they came. Love is that strong.

The Gospels are full of journeys. The people journeyed to see John the Baptist. Joseph and Mary journeyed to Bethlehem, great with child. At Passover, the pilgrims would journey to the Temple at Jerusalem, as Jesus did.

This church sent me on a journey.

As many of you know, I worked for ten years at Baylor University, which bars gays and lesbians from working there as faculty or staff, or as students. I confess that I did not think much of this while I was there; it didn’t seem that any of my students were gay.

I was wrong. After I wrote an article about my own repentance from bigotry, I heard from many of my former students who told me about the problems they had, being forced to hide their true selves when they were studying with me. They were some of my favorites, too (you know there are favorites), the ones who were bold and sharp and questioning. I was stunned, and ashamed. What we at Baylor had told them, quite clearly, was that there was no love for them, on earth or in heaven, and I knew that to be wrong.

So I went back to Baylor. I wrote an article urging the school to change its policies, and set up an interview with the NPR station there to talk about it. The local paper, the Waco Tribune Herald, agreed to run my article on August 28, and I booked my trip for that week. I also asked my old church in Waco, Seventh and James Baptist, if I could speak there about the issue.

It all fell apart. I woke up on the 28th of August and looked online at the paper—the article wasn’t there. A Baylor Regent had stepped in (as was his right-- he owned the paper). I found that my interview at the NPR station (located in a Baylor building) was also off. Perhaps hardest of all, I got an email from the minister of my church, saying that not only would I not be welcome to speak that week, but that it would be an inappropriate topic any week.

I was at a loss, and heartbroken. This church was my spiritual home, and turned me away when I needed it most.

There was a moment of hope, though. I pulled up a message from a member of this church, reminding me of the importance of what I wanted to do. So, I regrouped. I submitted the story to the Huffington Post, and it was read there by over 100,000 people. I went to Waco, and ran into an old friend who asked me to speak on campus. I did, and found an informal group of Baylor students who wanted to examine issues of sexual identity. They had been denied student group status, and they would be meeting the next night in the dining hall. They asked me to come speak.

I did, of course. A local TV station came to cover it, and something remarkable happened. I spoke, and then some of the students, and then the President of the group concluded, giddy with excitement. During this time, other students had come into the hall from a pep rally across the street—the cheerleaders and the freshmen and the sorority girls. They sat quietly and listened. When the president finished, they all started to cheer: first the members of that group, but then the rest of them, too, the cheerleaders and the freshman and the sorority girls. It was a moment of grace and love and redemption and, yes, justice. They are still meeting every few weeks, too, and their numbers grow.

Of course, I heard from those who disagreed with me. They would also oppose same-gender blessings in church, I suspect. They stood on rules, for the most part… rules from Leviticus, rules from what they called “common sense.”

But I know what Jesus said about rules and the principle of love, every chance that he had. There may be judgment, certainly, but that is God’s work. Ours is to love one another, and to love God. Jesus came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it, and he did fulfill it through his life and death and life again, allowing us to move forward under the principles he taught.

In a world where two men or two women can blessed before this altar of God, things will be unfamiliar. That is the nature of the journey. That is the cost of justice and hope and love.

I am here to walk with you.

When I was a child, my mother would sing a song whenever we were going on a trip. We called it the “Packing Up Song,” and it went like this:

Packing up.
Getting ready to go
Packing up
Getting ready to go
Packing up
Getting ready to go
I’m all packed up getting ready to go.

I found out years later that it was an Appalachian version of an African-american spiritual, about the journey to freedom. But isn’t that every journey we make with the Holy Spirit, a journey to freedom, to the unfamiliar?

Let me walk with you.
I'm packed.