This is about the simplest sermon that I can possibly deliver: no jokes, poems, songs, quotes from books I read last week, nothing. It’s just about as simple and straightforward as I can humanly be. I’ve looked forward for a long time to saying something about what it means to be a welcoming church, and I can’t think of a better day to do it than on Association Sunday. I’m very happy that all those years ago I discovered Unitarian-Universalism—not in a sense of complacency, but a sense of delight that there is a hospitable place for me to be (and for you to come to) with a message that’s very powerful and liberating. A. Powell Davies, one of the great ministers of the last century, was once accused of being a liberal (you know that dirty word). He said, “I am not sorry for being a liberal. I am only sorry that I am not more liberal than I want to be.” There’s something of that instinct that brings me to you today.
What does hospitality really mean? I keep coming back to its similarity to the word hospital. They both come from an echoing of a medieval concept of an inn along the way, where people could rest and recuperate. In the rudimentary medical ethics of the time, they could be cured; they could have a place to sustain themselves and to get back on their feet. That’s what this congregation is; we are hospitable in exactly that sense of being truly a hospital. Each one of us enters this room wounded in powerful ways. We’re imperfect. We are not gods. We are limited in what we can feel and think and experience, and in our energy; but we are not limited in our hopes and dreams of what we might be, and what the power of love might be able to heal. We are not limited in our wish and our yearning to be whole, and to be drawn together, and to have a vision of life which (though imperfect) draws us on. This is what our hearts wish. It’s why we’re here.
Back in my candidating week, I remember saying very clearly—as clearly as I could—that I hoped in the years to come that we might become a Welcoming Church. What is that? It is a program that our denomination established a while ago. Nearly half of our churches have gone through a fairly rigorous two-year process where we think about this. We don’t just knee-jerk ourselves into it (“Oh, we’re liberal , we’re Unitarian-Universalists; of course we’re a welcoming church.”) We actually have to go deep inside and examine unthinking prejudices that we bring to the table. This Welcoming Church process is largely directed to issues of gender, of really being able to speak to the life-situation of gays, lesbians, transsexuals, and transgender people. Can we sympathetically begin not just to understand, but to be a community—which is only a way of saying to be friends, to be able to listen, and to understand other people’s life-journeys. What brought them into the door? What is their brokenness, and what is their yearning? Precisely the same as ours; there is no difference.
I don’t think ministers should play their cards close to the vest and work in the shadows. I said very plainly that I hoped the day would come when we would have this vote; but the story doesn’t start there. I’ve learned in 27 years that what a minister wants, or doesn’t want, frankly isn’t all that important. This had to come when we, as a congregation and as a community, were really ready—not until the Standing Committee said let’s do this, let’s go; until we had a critical mass of people who were willing to do the work, and to host the events, and to make the calls, and to inspire their fellow members to take this step into a new kind of relation. It really doesn’t even start there; these are seeds that were present long ago, in the ministry of Rhys Williams. It is in the experience, that Nancy so eloquently expressed, of mothers and fathers and sons and daughters along the way: Hey, this is who I am! This is me! It is in moments like the day when I got an E-mail from a stranger, someone who asked eloquently but very plainly if we as a church might have a place for him, as a gay man living here in Boston, taking care of his terribly sick father and his mom. I typed a response within the hour (which proves that the age of miracles is not yet over), saying yes, yes! And Carlos is now on our Standing Committee; he keeps the church’s computers humming; he has been a loving and vibrant spark-plug for the Interweave group that has helped bring us to this point in the Welcoming Church process, which is a vote. It is a heartfelt vote. In other words, this is your church; it is your choice; it is your voice.
What I’m really trying to say today is that this whole issue (if that’s even the way we want to put it) is about people, not theology. Theology, it seems to me, throughout the generations, has gotten us into very deep trouble, literally for thousands of years, as we have persecuted, harried, and harassed those whom orthodoxy has deemed to be different, even deficient. The relation of religion to the LGBF community is, frankly, a horror show of pain and negation. But things change! Things shift. They shift when people stop having ideas, and instead start looking into each other’s eyes—when honesty has a little breathing space in which to work, and to operate. “This is who I am!”
As I said, I cannot think of a better way to celebrate Association Sunday than to say, “Yes! Yes, we are indeed a welcoming church, in all senses of that happy description.” But I do have to say that the time is over for us (in our good intentions and kindliness) to quietly tolerate. Something new is being born among us. We are opening our hearts, and we are saying, “Come in! Sit beside me. Let me know you.” Even more importantly, what we’re really saying now is this simple phrase: “We didn’t know we weren’t complete until you walked in.” The beauty of the Welcoming Church process is that it’s going to open doors for all of us to begin to examine the tough Gordian knots of racism, and of class, and of age—all the things that artificially separate us from one another. And they are artificial separations, let me assure you! The beauty of the Welcoming Church process is that it presents an astonishingly happy paradox to us. We can learn to accept others as uniquely and powerfully different from ourselves; and if we can have the patience, and the comradeship, and the little bit of love, then we can learn an even higher message that is equally true. We can learn that in our essence we are not different at all, and we never were.
I remember very well a transsexual couple, Noel and Lindsay. Many of you will remember talking to them in coffee hour. They were attending over a space of about six months, and they were in the long pilgrimage to go through the process from male to female, and they were a couple. There was a lot that a kid from a small town in Tennessee didn’t understand. They took me under their wings, and they said, “Stephen, we want to take you out to lunch and tell you what our story is, and what’s going on with us, because you seem curious and you want to know.” I was, and I wanted to understand what they were experiencing. It was a journey that was sadly and tragically foreshortened, because Noel died of a heart attack at Arlington Street Station, and then Lindsay moved to the Cape. That’s a journey that I didn’t get to go on with them, but I think about Noel a lot. I think about this concept where the orthodox churches of all shapes and descriptions have somehow tried to convey, to folks like that, that they are part of a freak show. What I learned from Noel and Lindsay is that all they wanted, all they needed, was to be comfortable in their own skin. That seems to me to be the least that life and God can offer us: to be whole, to be able to move through the world and to be comfortable within ourselves. It doesn’t seem to be that much to ask. Why do people have to pay such a horrific price? I don’t know, but it has been true, and it does not need to be true any more.
What could be more religious, in the end? What could unite all parts of ourselves, to let us feel for the first time that we are whole? We come in broken, in interesting and hidden places, and life is a pilgrimage through happiness and more than a little pain. Religion isn’t worth anything if it doesn’t help us and heal us, if it doesn’t try to comfort us, and doesn’t help us to know who we are in our irreducible, gut-level essence. Years ago, I preached from this pulpit a sermon entitled “I Was a Teenage Racist.” I described, as bluntly as I could, what it was like to be raised in a Southern family where my parents talked about Martin Luther King being a Communist and a troublemaker, and about how slavery was a great myth. I have to tell you that to climb up from that—and even if you do climb up, even if you stand in a pulpit like this, First Church in Boston—you still have to realize that the whole experience of growing up that way still clings and still stains the best-intentioned heart. It was a kind of wrenching sermon to write; but it really did help to make this one easier, because I have come a long way, and I had a very long way to go, to open myself to my own limitations. That’s what the Welcoming Church process invites you to do. Don’t make assumptions that you are more liberal than you think you are. Try to be as liberal as you can possibly be. It’s a journey that I really want to be on. That’s why I came here, to be challenged by you and by this great city, and to make one very simple realization: that love may overcome fear.
All the prejudices and narrow little legalistic projections of the past are reducible to that one concept: fear. Fear makes us do terrible things. It allows terrible things to go on and on. Think for a moment, if your mind and heart can bear it, of the small, painful rejections that go along this path for so many of our brothers and sisters—and beyond us, into cultures far beyond ours where such inner realizations can quite literally be a death sentence. As Ahmadinejad so recently said, to derisive laughter at the U.N., “In Iran there are no homosexuals.” I want you to stop and do a little thought-experiment with me right now. Thousands and thousands of ministers and priests say today, in their own way and their own fashion, that there are no homosexuals here either. Every time they stand at a pulpit and say that they refuse to believe that this sexual self-understanding is intrinsic to the person, and their body, what are they really saying? They are saying that a person’s experience of sexual identity is choice, a free act, and therefore, in their understanding, a perversion. That’s more than stunted ignorance. It is cruelty, and it is a lie. That sounds really harsh, so let me add one thing: that they are sure mistaken, and can hopefully someday be converted. Yes, I believe they can be converted, swayed to a higher understanding of human expression and identity.
What they’re really lying about is the nature of God. Radical hospitality is taking people more importantly than ideas. It is taking care of people more readily than to try to convert them. It is being more ready to heal them than to judge them. Hospitality is taking this “hospital” idea seriously enough to say that if God is love, as our Universalist forebears told us, and as they swore, then this Divine essence does not hate people for who they irreducibly are. “This is who I am!” Little rhetorical tricks like saying “we hate the sin and not the sinner” will not do, because in fact they are proclaiming the lie that this kind of person is hateful in God’s eyes, and I don’t believe it.
What we do next month in our vote really does matter, as humble and small as the act itself may be in the procession of truth. It’s a marker along the way, and it really does matter to us, because it encourages us to keep changing, and to be a little more radical with our kindness and our friendship—to engage, to listen, and to learn a little more. This goes right to the very heart of our tradition. You may remember the story of Abraham in the desert, when he and Sarah entertained three strangers. This whole story is about hospitality, and there’s that great biblical phrase, that we entertain angels unawares. This is our opportunity to become more and more aware of those angels in our midst. Liz said to me this morning, “There’s a universal mandate to hospitality, and it’s not just about cocktail parties for people that we like.” This has always been about the stranger.
I had an experience at my previous church in West Hartford that I will always remember. It’s one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had as a minister. I was talking to a member the church about what the dynamics and dynamism of a church might be. I thought she was going to say that we take care of each other; we encourage each other; we’re a tight little group; but she didn’t say that at all. Her answer inspired me to try, as best I can, to take this at the very heart and core of my ministry. It’s a really simple idea that she told me (and if you’re smart, you listen to members of your congregation). She said, “Stephen, what this church is about is the next person who walks in the door.” I had never thought of it that way. The church is about the next person who walks in the door. That’s what makes a congregation: to entertain angels unawares, to be a hospital, to be intentional about being the place where we heal, the place where we can be whole, the place where we can be understood.
On our journey, as long as it may be, there is a place to rest. That’s what makes us a community; that’s what makes us a place for yearning hearts. Welcome home. Amen.
