To listen to this sermon, click here.
Hebrew Scripture Reading—Genesis 9: 8-16
Let’s imagine that you’re living life as normal. You’re walking around and all around you is this bright, radiant light. It’s like sunlight on a beautiful summer day. You’re walking around with this light, but you just take it for granted. You don’t stop to appreciate it. We could say this light represents the light of God or the love of God. And, we could say that the kind of life that does not recognize and appreciate this light is like life without religion.
Religion at its best helps us to see and interpret the light of God. Part of how religion does this is by telling us stories about God. A story can say, “Look at the father welcoming home his prodigal son. There is the light of God.” That story can make us think, “Ah, hah, now, I can see God’s light in my own life. I can see it wherever there are acts of forgiveness and unconditional love.”
But does any old story about God help us to see God’s light? What if I told you a story about how humans are messing up, doing one bad thing after another, and God decides to just wipe ‘em all out, just kill them all? That’s a lovely story to imagine right across this stage. So let me ask the question: how many of you would say that this story helps you to see the light of God in your own life? The story completely contradicts the earlier story about the God of forgiveness and unconditional love, so obviously both stories can’t point us in the direction of God’s light. In fact, we might argue that instead of revealing God’s light to us, this second story sends in a bunch of poisonous smog that keeps us from seeing God’s light altogether.
Alright, now many of you probably recognize that the story I just told you is actually very similar to the story of Noah’s ark. The main difference is that in the story of Noah’s ark God decides to not only kill almost every human, but almost every animal as well. God’s chosen a harsh punishment for the sins of humans. I don’t know about you but that part of the story doesn’t resonate with me. Don’t get me wrong. There’s part of me that loves the story of Noah’s ark. The image of the ark is like the image of our church being a bus. It’s an image that makes us think of humans and animals all being in the same boat as we make our way through the flood and the storm. I love to sing the song about how the animals came in by twosie, twosies, but if look closely at the story of Noah’s ark as its told in the Bible and not as its told in children’s songs, we have to question whether this story really points us in the direction of God’s light.
This past week I had a bit of dejavu moment when I was reading about the history of the anti-gay movement in this country. It mentioned an article written in Harper’s Magazine. In 1970, the magazine ran a story about the gay lifestyle in which the author, Joseph Epstein, declared, “if I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth.” It’s like Noah’s ark theology for gays, but what’s interesting is that this wasn’t some rant by the fanatical Christian right. This was a rant that appeared in a secular, liberal magazine. The Christian right didn’t make being anti-gay one of its big causes until later. Those of you who have seen one of the movies about Harvey Milk might remember that it wasn’t until 1977 that the former beauty queen and pop singer Anita Bryant became a major anti-gay crusader with her campaign to “Save Our Children.”
From that point on, being gay went from being hardly discussed in the pulpit to being a common subject. We might consider the impact of this religious trend on people’s lives. Imagine on our stage Matt Comer. Born in the 1980s, Matt grew up in a church feeling surrounded by the light of God. The people in his church were like family. He was thought of as a young “preacher boy,” but Matt was gay, and soon he began to choke from a poisonous smog that was all around him. One Sunday his pastor said, “Put all the queers on a ship, cut a hole in the side, and send it out to sea.” The poison in this statement and many others like it literally threatened Matt’s life.
Now, let’s imagine on our stage Jared Horsford. He too was born in the 1980s and initially felt surrounded by the light of God. He was a devout Christian who worked at a Christian summer camp, but who, like Matt, was gay and soon he began to choke on the smog all around him. You’ve heard stories about Jesus healing people. Well, Jared heard stories about Jesus healing people of homosexuality, if only they were faithful. The poison of this story caused Matt to repeatedly cut himself. The leaders of an ex-gay ministry who counseled him told him that this was a positive sign. It showed that his spirit was fighting his flesh.
For some, these scenes from the lives of Matt and Jared might cause a crisis of faith, but if one follows their stories further, something interesting occurs. The smog begins to roll back and rays of light begin to break through. For Matt, the first ray of light came in a public library while he was in eighth grade. Matt recalls going to the corner of the second floor where there was a section devoted to books about gay men. There Matt read about gay men who were proud and living in utopias like San Francisco. He also read about gay teenagers. The first book he checked out that was entitled One Teenager in Ten. His reaction was, “Teenagers just like me? I was in heaven. I finally began to understand that I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t worthy of death. And I wasn’t headed to hell.” As a side note, I found the stories of Jared and Matt in a book that I checked out from the public library in La Center. That was the only library in the area that had it. Let’s hear it for public libraries. They can be places of light.
After his affirming experience in the library, Matt recalls:
My church and preacher had only themselves to blame for what came next. They had raised a future fire-and-brimestone preacher, full of conviction and a hardheaded spirit, and those were all the life lessons I needed once I found the courage to speak out.
Matt became “the most flamboyant, outspoken queer teen” his hometown had ever seen. From then on, other rays of light began to break through. One came from a gay youth support group that in its safe confines helped him to feel whole and happy. Another ray broke through when he saw two teens on C-SPAN speaking at a demonstration in DC. The teens talked about a club at their school that was called a Gay-Straight Alliance. The next ray of light was discovering that he wasn’t the only rabble-rouser in his high school who wanted to start their own Gay-Straight Alliance. Yet, another ray of light burst through when his mother went from condemning him for being gay to embracing him and becoming his biggest supporter. Today, Matt says that he has God to thank for making it through all the hard times. God’s love kept shining through, and now God’s love shines through him. Matt says, “Ever since becoming that huge flame of pride at the end of my eight-grade year, I’ve sought only to create a world in which gay people can experience the full love of God.”
And, what about Jared? One the first rays of light for him came in his workplace. Jared was one of three gay men who worked there, but he was still in the closet until one of the other gay men pushed him out. All his co-workers were told that he was gay. At first Jared was hurt, but then the first ray appeared. Amazingly, his co-workers still liked him. No one ostracized him. No one told him he needed treatment or counseling. They acted as if he was normal. They implicitly affirmed him for who he was. The next ray of light came when he joined a gay volleyball league. A smart move for someone who is 6-10. On the team, he made friends and did the “normal things friends do.” Contrary to what he had been told, gays weren’t “a bunch of sex-crazed people who just used social gatherings as an excuse to find their next sex partners.” And, then finally, a very important ray of light burst through when Jared joined an open and affirming church. Today, Jared likes to believe that the reason he is fortunate enough to not have any scars on his body is that it is God’s way of reminding him “that no matter how much” he hated himself and no matter how much poison he was taught, God always loved him.
Well, I’ve been telling you all of these stories, and some of you might be wondering how they relate to our scripture about Noah in a positive way. I personally like to think of the rainbow as being a different story about God than the story of the flood. In the story of the flood, God is a vindictive, arbitrary punisher. In the story of the rainbow, God is a peacemaker. Back in ancient times, the rainbow represented a bow without its arrow. The rainbow was a weapon laid to rest. I like to think that back then when the storms of life hit people had trouble making sense of all their suffering and they got confused. They might not have had smog back then, but they had thick, torrential rain. Through all that rain, they had trouble seeing God, and they started to make absurd claims about God, but when the rains finally stopped and the flood waters finally receded, ah-hah, they could see. They could see God as a God who inflicts no harm. They could see God as a God who loves us no matter what.
Today, science tells us how rainbows are caused by the refraction of sunlight passing through droplets of water. I like to think this makes for a pretty good metaphor as well. In life, we might be walking around taking all of this light for granted, but then we have these stories of faith that not only enable us to see the light more clearly but also allow us to see all the many different colors contained within it. Next year our church will have been an open and affirming church for 20 years. My challenge to us, myself included, is to imagine what we can do during the year of our 20th anniversary that will further enable people to see God’s rainbow. What can we do to continue being a church with a rainbow steeple full of rainbow people? Amen.