June 4, 2023

Genesis 1:1-5; Matthew 28:16-20

In the beginning there was darkness. In the beginning there was a formless void. In the beginning there was chaos. And then, that changed. Light came into being. Light which was good, light which broke open the darkness.

Imagine the very beginning. Prior to that moment, there was no beginning, at least no beginning in a sense meaningful to human beings. There was darkness, which is really not much of anything until it stands in contrast to the light. And then, suddenly, nothing became something. It was seen and it was named. Darkness became Night which alternated with Light which became Day. There was order. There was understanding.

And it was good.

Why is the light good? Because it helps us to see? But not everyone can see. Does that mean that the blind are cut off from the good? Or is there more to it than a simple dichotomy of light and dark? And does that make darkness bad? Are nights bad in comparison to days? Not at all. But they are different. And different is by no means bad.

From the moment of light breaking through the darkness, Creation began rolling along in the Book of Genesis. Creation as an unfolding sense of purpose: first light and darkness, then water and land, earth and sky, plants and animals. The Earth comes into being, from nothingness and disorder shifting into the complex state of being of which we are a part.

Human beings therefore exist within a pattern of beings. I have always wondered why the term is “human being” as if human was not enough. In fact, it is an old term, with “human” as the adjective modifying being, like a mortal being or a finite being. In both senses, mortal and finite, humans seek out a place within a world larger and more intricate than we are. Larger and more intricate than we can imagine.

One of the great challenges of human existence is to understand what it means to be, to find somehow and someway a place for oneself within Creation. Is there meaning to be found in our lives? Is there purpose? Is there a plan for you, for me, for us all? We ask of God in the Psalms, what is Man that thou art mindful of him? Who are human beings that we dare to look back unto Creation?

After next Sunday, we end the regular church year, moving on to the summer schedule. It is something new. Not earth-shattering or world changing new, but still new in its way. Change is new even if we recognize those changes.

What do these changes mean? Earlier and shorter services with a relaxed dress code. Actually, there is no formal dress code here at church, just what is implied looking around the room. The way we often choose to come to church. And there is truly no dress code at summer services. Well, except maybe for me. You all could come here in T-shirts and jeans, even pajamas if the mood took you. But there are traditions, and I will spare you any insights into my pajama preferences.

Our Gospel reading this morning was rather short, but its length by no means diminishes its importance. It is one of the most significant passages in the New Testament.

Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you…”

There is a lot here. This passage includes the formula for baptism, the entirety of what needs to be said. I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. That is a beginning, like in the Book of Genesis. But it is only the beginning. After that opening moment, there was meant to be teaching and understanding, discipline and obedience, actions taken and meditation about it all. From the beginning much should unfold.

This short Gospel reading has another name. It is known as the Great Commission. It was the moment when Jesus commanded his followers, the Apostles, to go forth to spread the Good News of the Bible. In a way, we also begin our work here in this house of God.

For example, our church has begun a new task, an effort of discernment to use a fancy term. First Church has begun the process of becoming a Welcoming Congregation. Actually, we started this process in 2019 by a vote at our annual meeting. But the pandemic caused our time together to be limited and our ability to attend to such tasks even more so.

Now, as a refresher, we must consider what it means to be a Welcoming Congregation. A question naturally arises in response to such a name: we were somehow not welcoming up until this moment?  Not welcoming meaning not friendly and open, not embracing new people with a sense of hospitality and fellowship. Were we somehow deficient?

This form of welcoming is rather specific in this instance. It refers to welcoming a certain group of people, LGBTQ people. Examining our programs and habits of being to see how welcoming we are to this group of people. To be honest, even the most welcoming of places needs to be conscious of how it approaches questions of hospitality. This is not unique to this process and would need periodic attention regardless of our focus.

June is notably a month in which LGBTQ identities are celebrated. A good time to put a little thought into these questions. And again, it brings up the worry about whether we have been somehow lacking in our welcome for these folks in our midst.

This year has been a time of great challenges for those who identify as lesbians or gays, bisexuals or transgender, or queer folks broadly speaking. Great challenges in our country and a challenge perhaps for us all.

In the past few decades, one might have observed that religion in the United States has been used by some as a reason to forbid people from acting in certain ways. Think same-sex marriage. Conversely, the law has been used in other respects to protect the freedom to live by one’s own choices, one’s own conscience. Again, same-sex marriage.

And yet right now in many places in the United States, laws are being crafted to dictate what people can do in their private lives. Those have to do with women’s rights in many respects. They have to so with the rights of children to access certain books or to learn about certain subjects. And they have to do with the rights of some people who choose to live differently from others, whether that has to do with gender roles, sexual orientation, or even the structure of their bodies. Some people want those rights to be protected and some people want to control, to condition, or to limit those rights.

Many of those efforts to control, condition, or limit the rights of others are surprisingly similar to prohibitions set forth in various religious texts. Whatever your views on the concept of the separation between church and state, they do not seem to be as separate as they were even in the recent past. And so, as a part of this process of becoming more welcoming to others, we are obligated to consider how we might do so in a time when such a sense of welcome is harder and harder to find in certain parts of our country.

There are many reasons for us to do this, to consider how we might become more welcoming. Reasons of inclusion. Reasons for building a more loving, caring community. And reasons for correcting longstanding misperceptions about such folks and out about how they might be received in a place like this. In a church, in a religious community. A place dedicated to the lessons set down by Jesus of Nazareth long ago.

One of the challenges of any religious community is to define what it means to be a part of that community. What does it mean to belong here? What are the threshold matters, the membership requirements as it were? How do you get in and how do you stay within the community? Do you have to pay dues? Do you have to behave in certain ways? Do you have to be baptized?

And as we consider those questions, we also should consider the history of Christianity and how gays and lesbians were not always welcome as members in places like these, even though the words “gay” and “lesbian” would have meant nothing to a first century resident of the Roman Empire. To be honest, those words would have meant little to many residents of the United States for most of the 20^th century. Instead, the words used would have been far less clinical and far more loaded with moral judgment and scorn.

There have been varying degrees of exclusion of gays and lesbians from religious life through the centuries. Some historical periods were stricter than others, while other periods barely gave such questions of personal behavior a second thought. With the onset of the 19^th century Victorian period in the English-speaking world, issues of sexual propriety rose to the forefront of social concerns. Interestingly, there was no law banning being a lesbian in Victorian England, and one explanation was that Queen Victoria could imagine such a thing ever happening. Victoria also was allegedly quite uninformed on what we might call marital matters. The royal tutors obviously left out a few things.

During that same timeframe, the City of Boston was notoriously prudish. “Banned in Boston” became a familiar term as influential moral activists were empowered to control what could be sold, seen, or published. Books, plays, and movies were banned if they contained objectionable content. I am sure a few fig leaves were glued onto master works at the Museum of Fine Arts. This moral crusading even extended to banning a version of the $5 bill, because on one side was depicted partially nude figures from mythology.

Please let us stop and think for a moment about that. Representations of the human form were banned because they showed the human form in its natural state. That means that the human form itself is the problem. It is bad, it is obscene, it is shameful. There is of course a reference in the Book of Genesis about Adam and Eve realizing that they were naked and hiding themselves away from God.

And yet I find that passage to be problematic because it relies upon the assumption that the natural state of the human body is inherently sinful. More than problematic, I do not think anxieties about human nakedness came from God at all. Why? Because in the first part of Genesis God looked out upon creation and declared that it was good, nakedness and all. What changed? The Bible is in many instances contradictory, but the first part makes more sense than the second. Why? Because what God declared to be good has often been declared something else by human beings.

There are for example a few passages in the Bible that declare gays and lesbians to be engaged in sinful behavior. And yet I could sit here and explain to you in glorious detail all the legal, textual, and theological reasons that these passages are inaccurate or misleading or inapplicable in our day and age. I will not do that this morning, as it trends toward the tedious. But if you have a few hours to kill someday, we can have coffee and go over them. Instead, I will offer two simple arguments for why those who consider themselves followers of Jesus should reject such notions about the alleged sinfulness of gays and lesbians and in turn welcome them as blessed children of God into this and any other such community.

First of all, it is hypocrisy. It is the height of hypocrisy to point at gays and lesbians and call them sinners because of a scant few references in the Bible. It is hypocrisy because the vast majority of people who call themselves Christians do not follow even a tiny percentage of the requirements of the Bible. And yet the few lines about gays and lesbians get trotted out with a sense of great severity, while everything else is swept under the rug.

The many, many detailed rules of the Hebrew scriptures generally served the purpose of differentiating between groups of people. The faithful and the unfaithful. The insider and the outsider. As a faithful person, you could not eat many foods that are common on an American table. You could not eat in the presence of someone who was not from your religious group. You could not wear clothes made of blended fabrics—no polyester blends, no elasticized blue jeans. And you could not charge interest. No house loans, no credit cards, and basically no capitalism.

This building we are in right now, this church is filled with objects that could arguably be defined as “abominations.” I looked it up. I checked it twice. These are disgusting, unclean, and wicked things. Any idea what they are?

Carvings of angels. Stained glass windows. Perhaps even the golden cross on the altarpiece. These are graven images. Images of things that divert our worship away from God.

Throughout the history of the Christian Church, people have at various times destroyed the religious artwork of others. Smashing statues. Scraping frescoes off the walls. And I do not mean pagan art. I mean Christian art from earlier periods. These were declared graven images not because of what was depicted but because it was depicted at all.

So, when should we schedule the yard sale?

And just to be perfectly clear, the term used to describe the sin of homosexuality is the same word used to describe the artwork surrounding us right now in this building. Abomination. Disgusting, unclean, and wicked.

Obviously, we do not look around this room and see anything abominable. And if you do, please refrain from any iconoclastic activities. Iconoclast means one who tears the icons down from the walls and destroy them, even when those icons depict Jesus Christ himself. Thankfully, we don’t do that anymore. And like this preoccupation with graven images, there are many other things that we also have chosen to place aside even though they were enormously important to those who wrote the Bible.

And I could not resist bringing up adultery. In the Bible, adultery is punishable by death through stoning. And yet, we at some point fell out of the practice of putting to death those who commit the sin of adultery. That is probably for the best because nine modern U.S. presidents are credibly believed to have had extra-marital affairs. And in case you were wondering, these alleged philanderers are fairly evenly distributed between the two major parties. Jimmy Carter seems to be in the clear.

If we are to avoid a massive case of hypocrisy, we need to place aside any notion that one small group’s behavior must be called out as sinful when pretty much all other Biblical prohibitions have been placed aside by modern Christians. Why? Because those in the majority seem to be against calling themselves sinful.

In case you were following closely, you might have noticed that I switch terminology a few times in this sermon. I mention those who follow Jesus. And I also mention those who call themselves Christians. Those are not necessarily the same people.

Jesus never used the term “Christian.” That word came from the Apostles and from Paul after he died. And I think many of those who call themselves Christians are more often invoking the teachings of Paul than those of Jesus. Paul’s rules about how to run a church. Paul’s rules about morality. And yes, Paul’s rules about how gays and lesbians engage in sinful behavior.

Again, many such Christians also completely ignore much of what Paul says, except when it comes to how being gay is bad. Paul also said that anyone having sex was bad. He begrudgingly stated at one point that if you people cannot control yourselves, you should at least get married. But for many centuries in the church, that moral failing known as marriage was interpreted as indicating that someone would not necessarily make it into heaven. That being married and having children was still kinda, sorta sinful and it was a judgment call whether you would spend eternity in hell. No wonder we ignore the Bible in so many instances.

What about those who wish to follow Jesus? Jesus said many things too, some of which are ignored. Like no divorces allowed. That might put me on the fast track to someplace very warm.

However, I think Jesus wanted to avoid that sort of categorical thinking. Instead, he came up with a simple formulation for how to live one’s life. The Two-fold Commandment: love God and love one another. This is important because it is not a laundry list of things to do and not to do. Jesus’ message is a process. A process for living your life and for figuring out what to do in any situation. When faced with a moral question, choose to do what is more loving. More loving, more caring, more concerned about others.

What then is in this “follower of Jesus” handy moral rule book? Will the act in question hurt another person? Will it help them? Will it change things for the better or the worse? Will doing nothing bring about such a result? Simple logic. Let’s apply it to a few scenarios.

Should I put carved wooden images of angels around the room? They seem quite lovely. They remind us of higher things. Thumbs up.

Should I commit adultery? No. You made a solemn promise to someone. Breaking that promise will hurt at least one person and perhaps many others. Thumbs down.

Should I be gay? Should I be a lesbian? Are those even questions about behavior or are they descriptions of who a person is? Who God made them to be? Invalid question.

Let me rephrase it then: should I engage in a loving and consensual relationship with another human being? Seems just fine.

Should I punish people for engaging in loving and consensual relationships with other human beings? Nope. That sounds bad.

Should I treat people differently depending upon whom they chose to be in a loving and consensual relationship? Still sounds bad.

Should I exclude people from my religious community for such reasons? I think you are getting the general idea.

If we are a religious community dedicated to following the life, lessons, and example of Jesus Christ, then we are called upon to love others. If any other rules would interfere with that expectation, those rules must be placed aside. Any rules, any traditions, any cultural whatnots, any and all of those must be cast aside like the graven images that they are.

We have one God and the scriptures tell us that God is love. We have one teacher, Jesus Christ, and he commanded us to love. And if we are so blessed as to be filled with the Holy Spirit, that Spirit will always, always lead us to love one another. And if it does not lead us toward loving others, then it is not the Spirit. It is not our teacher. It is not our God.

And so, my friends, we are called upon to love one another and to embrace those willing to share in that life of love. Let us then prepare ourselves to offer a warm welcome to all who might wish to follow along.  Amen.