June 28, 2020 – LGBTQ+ Sunday: May God’s words be spoken, may God’s words be heard.  Amen.

I want to tell you a story about a group of people who had had enough.  They were tired of being harassed, arrested, abused, pushed to the margins, killed, rejected, blackmailed, and hated.  They were gay men and women, drag queens and trans gendered, young and old, well off and homeless.  But in the wee hours of a hot summer night they united and said enough! 

They had gathered that night in The Stonewall Inn, a small, mafia run bar in Greenwich Village.  The mafia often ran the gay bars in order to provide fodder for extortion, though that wasn’t the only risk for LGBT people then.  The police regularly raided and arrested patrons of gay establishments, which could prove to be devastating – being publicly outed would cost you your job (truth be told – that was true up until last week’s Supreme Court decision in 26 states).  Worse than that, it could cost you your freedom – for it was illegal in all states except Illinois at that time.  If caught, you could be jailed, placed in mental facilities and drugged, or forced into surgery to “fix” you.  And of course, there were all the homeless young people, forced into the streets by families who rejected them.  And so on this night, like any other, there were those there who had been taking a bit of refuge from the confinement of the world that rejected them.  

Yet on that night, at about 1am, as the police once again raided the bar to arrest them for the horrific crime of being different – they fought back.

It is often said that no one knows who threw the first brick, or if that brick even existed.  The truth is – it doesn’t matter.  In many ways – everyone threw it – and it landed hard, shattering the glass of police cars and societal oppression.  However, there is one story that exists in almost all accounts, and it is of a lesbian who was struck by a police officer’s club after resisting arrest.  She turned to the crowd and shouted “Why don’t you guys do something?”

Do something, they did.

Stonewall patrons and their supporters began hurling coins and other objects at the police, some of whom had barricaded themselves in the nightclub.  Drag queens and trans women of color stood defiant and fought back.  For six days, there was a stand-off, and after that – nothing would be the same again. 

Like Woodstock, many claim to have been there, but weren’t, yet in a way, the entire nation was there.  Still, like other civil rights movements, the Stonewall Riot has its verifiable heroes – people like Marsha P. Johnson, Stormé DeLarverie, Sylvia Rivera, and that still to be named Lesbian whom most saw and heard, but no one could ever positively identify.  Perhaps it is fitting that she remains unknown – becoming everyone who ever pleaded for others to get involved and help. 

So, why am I telling you this story? 

Because it happened 51 years ago today, June 28^th 1969, and while it was not the beginning of the gay rights movement, that had started much earlier, it was one of those iconic moments that do so much to bend the arc of justice just a bit more for so many.  And today, when we celebrate LGBTQ+ Sunday, and when we hear the texts from Genesis and Matthew read earlier, this uprising, and what led to it, and what came after, needs to be remembered. 

So let us take a step back and consider what it is God is telling us in our sacred texts, for we have much to learn from them.  Starting with our Hebrew scripture from Genesis, Abraham thinks God is telling him to sacrifice his son Isaac, so he brings him up to the mountaintop, is about to kill him, when God intervenes.  Abraham then finds a ram in the thicket and sacrifices that instead.  Now given Abraham’s history of getting it wrong – a lot – I can imagine God sitting there in a big heavenly recliner, you know, flipping through the infinite channels of human existence, and all of a sudden going “What the hell is that idiot doing now!”

Of course, taken literally – this is a very disturbing tale, which I still believe led to the invention of psychotherapy, given what it likely did to poor Isaac and his mom. It is often taught that this was some sort of test of Abraham’s faith (a sermon for another day).  Yet, if we read it metaphorically, as much of scripture is meant to be studied, we come to understand what the text can teach us, because the truth is that many children of God have been sacrificed in blind obedience to the God of our own hate and bigotry – the God we fashioned in our image, rather than the other way around – and we, the followers of Jesus, have been complicit, even downright responsible. 

There is the sacrifice of LGBTQ+ people beaten, oppressed, and killed by so called Christians holding signs saying “God hates Fags.” 

Or the sacrifice of people of color who are slaughtered and abused not only by those burning the image of a cross, but by those entrusted to protect them.

There is the sacrifice of indigenous people, and also those of other faiths, slaughtered or persecuted because they, like Jesus and his earliest followers, are not Christian, or at least not a white Christian.

There is the sacrifice of undocumented immigrants denied dignity and freedom by people wearing crosses and clinging to bibles.

And…thinking of the poor ram here how much of God’s creation have we sacrificed on the altar of ignorance and selfishness, to where our earth, the home created for us, and the innocent animals entrusted to our care, are suffering beyond measure?

Oh the altars we, a people called to follow Jesus, have built listening to the voice of a God of our own making– with stones of doctrine and dogma the church provided.  Which, if you read the gospel today, or really, any other day, is unfathomable. Jesus throughout his ministry made one thing very clear – to be his follower, you must take up his cross.  You must love and serve as he did.  You must see and hear the voices of the oppressed – go to them, be a healing presence for them as he did.  And you must welcome them – all of them – as you would him.  That is what he means in the gospel today when he says “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me…and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple– truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”

 “…whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones…”

Think about that – what is Jesus telling them – telling us?  Why would he choose something as simple as a glass of cold water to a little one to demonstrate the life to which we are called? 

Because it is the “little ones” – the vulnerable of our world, the ones we have pushed to the margins – it is they that thirst for what is given so plentifully to others – respect, love, and welcome.  Jesus calls all who follow him to be his water of life to those who are dying from thirst on the altar of our neglect, our hate, our selfishness, and our indifference. 

I began this sermon with the story of the Stonewall riots that began so long ago because of all the many altars we as a people of faith have built in service of a God of our own making – who just happens to hate the very same people we do, it seems that LGBTQ+ people were, and still are, the ones we most often sacrifice. And if we are to be redeemed in him, we must never forget how we denied him in our LGBTQ+ sisters and brothers, for as he speaks of throughout this same gospel, how we treat the least of these, we treat him.  He is each one of those little ones whom we turned away when they thirsted for the welcoming grace of love.  And we must never forget what we have done, and what we have left undone.

We must never forget the thousands of gay men who died of the AIDS pandemic while our government, and many Christians, turned their backs on them.  I lost many a good friend in those days, and remember all too clearly that there were Christian leaders who said this was a curse of God wrought upon homosexuals.  Which, if you think about it, as heterosexuals also got the disease (and we later found out it started with them), not to mention that Lesbians did not often get it (or really any STD) by that logic – gay women were God’s chosen children! 

During this pandemic, as with Stonewall, a tipping point was reached, and rising from the ashes of the dead an organization of LGBT people and allies called Act Up was born.  It was essentially a Gay Lives Matter movement and the slogan was – “Silence=Death.”  While targeting the government inaction, it could equally have applied to the church, for the silence from our pulpits, and by our closed doors, was as deafening as it was deadly to those suffering, and to us.

And, we must never forget Matthew Shepherd, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, who in 1998 was robbed by two men, pistol-whipped and tied to a fence in Laramie, Wyoming, where he hung – arms stretched out as on a cross, bleeding in the cold, until a passing bicyclist spotted him the next morning.  He was taken to a hospital where he died from his wounds. His family could not find a place to bury him, for fear of people desecrating the site.

His murder was, and is, a shocking event, yet sadly is just one of thousands. As part of our Good Friday Stations of the Cross every year, we include an image of a painting of Matthew hanging from that fence to remind us that we, the church, were for so long not only complicit in the systemic oppression that led to this murder by our silence, but were the foundation for much of the hate.  We were the ones who helped crucify him – crucify Jesus – who is always in the stranger, the outcast, and the little ones we ignore. 

And I lift up to you this morning another child of God to remember – one that I met while serving as a Chaplain at Montclair State University.  He believed in God, or wanted to so very much, but he had always been told that God didn’t love him because he was gay.  He was a victim of our hard hearts created by centuries of church teaching.  Is it any wonder why so many young LGBTQ+ people commit suicide every year?

These are the little ones who thirsted – whom we ignored – whom we slaughtered on the altar of our indifference and hate. And there are so many more.

The thing is, if we really listen to our scriptures – really take in what they mean for us- the stories we heard today of Abraham in Genesis, and of Jesus in Matthew – we come to see that no altar built to worship God should ever be made of the stones of bigotry, hatred, ignorance or greed.  God’s altar is built of one thing, and one thing only – unconditional and all-inclusive love, and nothing, other than our indifference to the suffering of others, should be sacrificed in the name of our God.  For we are a people called to be the living water of Christ to a suffering world, not the cause of the drought by which others thirst.

Thankfully, we have come a long way over the decades since Stonewall and Matthew Shepherd– as a society and as the church.  And I think there is no better symbolism of our confession, repentance, and redemption than when 20 years after his death, in 2018, Matthew Shepherd was finally laid to rest at our own Washington National Cathedral, an Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Washington, DC.  His father, and others who addressed the congregation, emphasized that the cathedral was an inclusive and accepting place, where Matthew, who had grown up in the Episcopal Church, could find eternal rest. 

Matthew’s remains were lovingly carried in a candlelit procession by the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, who in his homily said, “Gently rest in this place. You are safe now. Oh yeah, and Matt, welcome home.”[1]

Yet while The Episcopal Church has traveled a long and difficult road of redemption for our sins against our LGBTQ+ sisters and brothers, we have much more work to do in our denomination, in the world, and most especially in the larger body of Christ.  For LGBTQ+ people continue to suffer, and often on the basis of what I would call scriptural malpractice, which claims a God of love, but only for some, and not for all.

Just this year, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill that would explicitly make lynching a federal crime. That’s good, right? It is good.  Yet the Liberty Counsel, an evangelical group believes that the bill should not include protections for LGBTQ+ people. In other words, these so-called followers of Jesus would have no issue with a child of God hung up to die in a noose because of who they love or what gender they claim.  I have to wonder what gospel they read, for they surely did not read the words of Jesus in Matthew. These are the ones who are wolves in sheep’s clothing, who kill the innocent, on the altar of their own hate.

The voices of those long ago can be heard today asking us: “Why don’t you guys do something?”

And do something we must – for we are not a people called to be silent, but to speak on behalf of those without a voice, who thirst for justice!  We must continue to dismantle the altars of hate stone by stone, and there in its place raise up a new altar – forged by the fire of the Holy Spirit, and cooled for strength in the water of baptism.  An altar that unites us in Christ Jesus – one to another – and calls us to spread that love to all the people on the earth, most especially to those who thirst for justice, peace, hope, and love.  This is what it means to be a follower of Christ, for when we choose love, when we welcome the little ones with cups of cool water, when we open our eyes to the God that asks us to serve, and not to slaughter, we come to a place of redemption and grace. 

And there we find no tests to pass. 

There we find no people excluded.

There we find only love – absolute, unconditional love – here, now, and always. 

The church, our Episcopal Church, has taken that long and restorative journey, and we are forever the better for it, but we are not at the end of the road.  We must always listen for the voices of the little ones who cry out: “Why don’t you guys do something?” and respond with the water of Christ’s love, because we know all too well that Silence=Death! – the death of Jesus, and of our very souls, and we will be silent no more.

Amen.

For the audio from the 10:30am service, click below, or subscribe to our iTunes Sermon Podcast by clicking here:

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[1] Parts of this came from this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/us/matthew-shepard-ashes-cathedral.html

The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
June 28, 2020
Fourth Sunday After Pentecost – In A Time Of Separation
1st Reading – Genesis 22:1-14
Psalm 13
2nd Reading – Romans 6:12-23
Gospel – Matthew 10:40-42