A sermon on the inclusive love o

A sermon on the inclusive love of God

by the Rev. Paul Capetz

Paul Capetz, recently restored to ministry in Twin Cities Presbytery, carries the good news of God’s inclusive love to Scotland

The Rev. John Mann (left) and the Rev. Paul Capetz

The Rev. John Mann, formerly a minister in the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area, has for the past few years been serving St. James' Parish Church in Glasgow.

When Dr. Paul Capetz laid aside his ordination after the addition of the “fidelity and chastity” requirement to the Book of Order, John Mann ceased wearing a stole in worship, “as a sign of solidarity.” Capetz was restored to ordained standing by the Presbytery in January, 2008.

Paul Capetz recently visited John Mann and his wife, Lindsay Biddle, also a Presbyterian minister, in Glasgow. To welcome him, Lindsay Biddle made two stoles with a rainbow motif for both John and Paul. John Mann surprised Capetz by presenting him with his new stole in worship on Sunday, May 25. Mann adds that “it was somehow fitting that the first time I wore a stole again in worship was in solidarity with Paul.”

Mann concludes his note: “The session at St. James' recently adopted a statement of inclusion, which essentially makes it the first explicitly welcoming and affirming congregation in the Church of Scotland. Paul's sermon was wonderful and perhaps your Witherspoon readers may enjoy it. ... Life here continues to unfold in the most interesting ways.”

For a glimpse of earlier communiques from John Mann in Glasgow, click here >>

For Paul Capetz’ sermon >>

Sermon for St. James Church of Scotland (Glasgow)

Paul E. Capetz
May 25, 2008

[5-28-08]

Good morning. It is a great honor to be speaking from this pulpit and I am grateful to my dear friend, Dr. John Mann, for the invitation to give the sermon. I have known John and his wife, the Rev. Lindsay Louise Biddle, since we were colleagues in the Presbyterian Church in the United States before they departed for their new life here in beautiful Scotland. And after a fun-filled week in your bustling city of Glasgow I’ve come to envy them this exciting opportunity. From what I’ve experienced, Glaswegians are very friendly to strangers. Thanks to you all for welcoming me as your preacher on this Lord’s Day.

John wanted me to share with you my story as a gay man in the church. Although I am an ordained minister, my life in the ministry has not been easy. Indeed, it has led me to re-examine the very meaning of Christian faith itself. As a result, I have felt called to challenge the church to come to grips with the full implications of the gospel’s message of God’s grace for all people. After I tell you a little bit about my own life, I want to share with you the story of another gay man who can no longer speak for himself.

I grew up in the church. From earliest childhood through my teen-age years to young adulthood, the church provided the framework within which I came to know myself as a child of God. By the time I had entered high school, I knew that God was calling me into the ministry. In addition to the formative influences of our youth pastors, there were certain life-changing experiences at church camp each summer that crystallized the future direction of my life. I remember one campfire sermon in particular that deeply affected my sense of call. It was based on the story at the end of John’s Gospel where the risen Jesus says to Peter: “Do you love me?” Peter answers, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” To which Jesus replies: “Then feed my sheep.” That night it was as though Jesus had posed the question directly to me: “Paul, do you love me?” “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” “Then feed my sheep.” In responding affirmatively to that call, I had found the direction for my life. For me to serve the church as an ordained minister meant dedicating my life to an alternative set of values than that which dominates society in general with its competitive and exclusionary values. It meant to direct my heart to service of God above all else and to love my neighbor as myself. It meant to give myself entirely to God’s will for me and to seek to discern that will in every situation of my life. This call gave my life meaning and purpose and hope.

But in addition to this youthful sense of purpose and direction, there was an undercurrent of despair that threatened whatever meaning this call to the ministry promised to bestow. That undercurrent was the result of awakening adolescent sexuality. While the teenage years are confusing under the best of circumstances, in my case they were doubly so because what I had yet to learn about myself was that my sexual orientation did not conform to the expected norm. Moreover, there was no language or concepts even to assist me in identifying what it was that made me feel different from other kids my age. I graduated from high school in 1975 and at that time there was no public discourse about homosexuality in the media or in religion or politics. I never saw a television show or a movie or read a book that dealt with the lives of people like me. In fact, there was nothing but a deafening silence. Indeed, I don’t recall ever having heard the word “homosexuality” uttered once during my high school years. All of which is to say that I had to come to terms with this on my own with no help from parents, teachers, friends, or the church. In this respect, the church was no different from the rest of the society around me.

While much has changed in the secular culture on this front, not much has changed in the church, at least not in the United States. In the 30 plus years since then, I have never heard a sermon that offered wisdom as to how a gay man should live his life in a faithful Christian manner. All I have heard is silence—or, when there was something other than silence, the words have been condemning. If I asked how I was to live my life in a morally responsible way as a Christian, I was told that celibacy was my only option—a life of permanent renunciation of any embodied expression of sexual desire and love. But that was nothing but a counsel of despair. I had answered the call to the ministry when I heard Jesus’ words “Feed my sheep,” but looking back upon my life I have to admit that the church has left me starving: starving for understanding, guidance, wisdom, and compassion.

My experience is well captured by Andrew Sullivan, an English journalist now living in America, who has written of his own experience growing up gay in the Roman Catholic Church:

With regard to homosexuality, I inherited no moral and religious teaching that could guide me to success or failure. In my adolescence and young adulthood, the teaching of the Church was merely a silence, an increasingly hollow denial even of the existence of homosexuals, let alone a credible ethical guide to how they should lead their lives. It is still true that in over thirty years of weekly churchgoing, I have never heard a homily that attempted to explain how a gay man should live, or how his sexuality should be expressed. I have heard nothing but a vast and endless and embarrassed silence, an awkward, unexpressed desire for the simple nonexistence of such people, for their absence from the moral and physical universe…. The teaching I inherited was a teaching that, in the best of all possible worlds, I simply would not exist. ¹

Sullivan goes on to pose these questions:

What incentives were offered for you to choose one way of life over another, when all possible expressions of your identity, from love and fidelity, to promiscuity and prostitution, were regarded as morally indistinguishable…? How can a human being navigate an ethical life in the midst of such moral nihilism? The answer is an obvious one, made explicable by the thought that, in the minds of such theologians, homosexuals aren’t fully human beings at all. ²

The point Sullivan is making here is that gay people cannot really be good Christians since, in the eyes of the church, there is no way for persons like us to be moral. Sullivan, who nonetheless remains a devout Catholic, goes on to render this verdict upon his own church, one which applies equally as well to the Protestant churches:

A doctrine that seeks to extinguish love from the hearts of a whole segment of humanity, is so onerous and anomalous that silence is its only decent expression. But it is and was this silence that defined for me, and still defines for millions, the ethic of a homosexual life in America and around the world. Which is to say, it is an unethic, a statement that some people are effectively beneath even the project of an ethical teaching. ³

I agree with Sullivan. In the 25 years since AIDS first reared its ugly head, the churches have not offered any constructive ethical guidelines as to how gay men should express their sexuality. This is the real immorality, not what the churches decry as our supposedly “immoral” sexual practices. Christians believe that ours is a religion of love, but the church’s message to gay people calls such self-assurance into question.

Yet the attitudes of the church toward homosexuality have had even more dire consequences for gay persons than the ones I’ve been describing in my own life. Most of you may never have heard of Matthew Shepard, but his story has become for gay people in America a symbol of our plight. Before the evening of October 7, 1998 when he was kidnapped by two men, tied to a fence, brutally beaten, and left to freeze in the cold night air of Wyoming, he was just an ordinary young man attending college who happened to be gay. He died in the hospital five days later. At his funeral conservative Christians stood outside the church with signs saying, “God hates fags” and “Matthew is now burning in hell.” Some commentators have likened his death to a “lynching” of the kind black people experienced repeatedly at the hands of American white racists. Others have called it a “crucifixion.” I think these are apt comparisons. Both lynchings and crucifixions were designed to keep oppressed people in their place. Matthew’s murder was intended to send a powerful message to gay people that we do not have a rightful place in this world.

Matthew’s death is not an isolated event that can be understood apart from the context of historic Christian teaching about homosexuality. Earlier two passages from the Bible were read that have been invoked to justify the oppression of gay people. According to Leviticus, a man engaging in sexual activity with another man was considered an abomination deserving of the death penalty. In the New Testament, homosexual activity is described as “unnatural,” which was a category that the apostle Paul borrowed from the Greek philosophers. Not only does the Bible teach these things but the death penalty has actually been carried out on homosexual persons throughout history. In the 6^th century the Christian emperor Justinian made homosexuality a crime to be punished by death,⁴ and more recently in the 20^th century homosexuals were targeted by Hitler for genocide, placed in the concentration camps and forced to wear the pink triangle.⁵ A few years ago, two teen-age boys in Iran were publically executed for loving each other. And what about Matthew Shepard’s killers? What message about gay people did they pick up from Christian teaching about homosexuality? Does the church bear any responsibility for the violence directed at Matthew Shepard and others like him? I don’t think it’s possible to take the church off the hook here. The church has condemned people like us as violating the natural order of creation through our sexual expressions of love, it has preached that we are going to hell, and in America it continues to work on the side of our political opponents who want to deny us full equality with respect to marriage and service in the military. Even those of us who have not been physically abused the way Matthew Shepard was carry within us the wounds inflicted upon us by the church and our Christian families. How many of us have been turned away by parents and siblings when we came out to them? How many career opportunities have been denied to persons who are in every relevant respect fully qualified for the position? How many of us are denied the basic civil right of being married to those we love?

If the gospel is truly to be a message of good news for gay people, then we Christians have to ask ourselves some hard questions about the implications of God’s unconditional love for the shape of our churches as communities that should be havens of inclusion for all of God’s children, not just some of them. The story of Matthew Shepard is a sad one, indeed, and unfortunately it continues to be replicated in countless varieties all over the world. What makes it even sadder is that it has for too long been confused with the story of Jesus Christ, which the evangelist Matthew captured in his story of the Last Judgment. In the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus pronounces this verdict: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me….Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.” Jesus is here identifying himself with the sufferings of Matthew Shepard and reminding his followers that whatever we do to one another, we do to him. So too, when we refuse to come to the aid of one in need, we have refused Jesus. What have done or left undone to gay people, we have done or left undone to Jesus.

Each of us has a story to tell and while these stories may differ greatly in their particularities, there is something common to all of them: experiences of exclusion and inclusion, hate and love, injustice and justice, rejection and understanding. As Christians, we know that all of our individual stories are somehow related to the great story of God’s love and grace in Jesus Christ. Let us pray for the day when all of our stories are celebrations of God’s justice, inclusion, love, and grace. Amen.

Notes

1 Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable, p. 42.
2 Love Undetectable, p. 46.
3 Love Undetectable, p. 45.
4 John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, p. 171.
5 Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle; also, Martin Sherman’s powerful play, Bent.