Focusing the Light

A Sermon for More Light Sunday

June 3, 2007

John D. Green

“More light, more light,” cried the great poet Goethe from his deathbed. Sadly, we don’t know whether he meant that he wanted more light because his sight was failing, or that he was seeing more light than he had ever beheld. But light and its cousins are words that have long served our languages as metaphors for knowledge, understanding, guidance, goodness and happiness. If we’re pleased with a child’s grades, we say she is bright. If not, we say he’s dim. “Light” stands enshrined in the name of the watershed era of Western intellectual history, The Enlightenment. Surely our current decade will soon be known as The Endarkenment.

We human folk are blinded by pure light. A pure white page or canvas we call blank because it has no rational or artistic content. We require lines and shadows to understand what we see. It is only when ink or paint is applied that the page or canvas becomes legible or beautiful. As the French poet Louis Aragon put it, “Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness.”

The first letter of John assures us that “God is light, and in God there is no darkness at all.” I believe this is true, and I believe that our doctrines and systematic theologies and confessions and affirmations about God and Jesus and Holy Spirit are attempts to apply depth and dimension to God’s pure light, the better to understand God, talk about God, talk to God. We cannot comprehend pure light, we require lines and shadows in order to see God’s form and shape, behold God’s majesty and grace. But make no mistake, the lines and shadows we apply to God’s pure light are not only expressions of wisdom and insight won over centuries of faithful study and prayerful seeking. They are also expressions of ignorance and misapprehension.

In what is called Jesus’ Farewell Discourse in the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I have much more to tell you, but you wouldn’t be able to understand it now.” Leave-taking is almost always difficult, both for the ones going and the ones staying behind. There is always a rush to make sure we’ve said everything we want to say, passed along all the important information and assurances each wants the others to receive, understand and share. In the conclusion of what must rank as one of the wordiest farewells ever, Jesus promises his followers that they will continue to learn, to understand, to grasp what is real, truthful, eternal. And the things that they will learn, the things we will learn, come from God, because everything that Jesus is, God is, and everything Jesus is, the Spirit is as well.

Today’s Gospel was in fact placed in the lectionary because it is Trinity Sunday, the day when the church celebrates its most unwieldy and challenging mystery, the declaration that God exists in three divine Persons: Father, Son and Spirit. Believe me, I know this part pretty well. In a previous parish associate relationship, the two times I could always count on being called on to preach were the Sunday after Easter and Trinity Sunday.

Today we celebrate More Light, because we are a More Light Presbyterian Church. We affirm that the biblical record does not contain all that we must know about our sexual selves, any more than it contains all that we must know about geography or the weather. When the Hebrew scriptures were written, the Earth was flat, astronomy was still astrology, and the overriding religious dynamic was the separation and survival of the Hebrew people. Anything that one of their enemies revered must be condemned as an abomination. So too in the Greek scriptures, the people who wrote them and first read them knew only homosexual behavior that was exploitive and abusive. The idea of mutual, nurturing sexual relationships among men and among women was unknown. And if those were unknown, you can imagine how far off the chart bisexual, polyamory and transgender would be.

Today we’ve finally learned not to fear people with different sexuality, but to accept them as equally valuable parts of the crazy quilt that is the human family. It is clear that the numbers of primarily homosexual men and women are relatively constant across cultures and eras. We are well on our way, we think, to righting a wrong that has needed More Light for centuries. Well and good.

But when we turn on the lights in the church, we begin to see a great many more things than grave errors about sexual orientation. More Light Presbyterians are concerned with one particular thesis, that sexual orientation is both a given and a gift, an unchangeable part of us that is as important and unique as our capacity to think, to act, and to sacrifice. But we on the vanguard of the Second Reformation must not forget that Martin Luther did not nail just one thesis on the door of the church in Wittenberg, he nailed 95 theses there. So too for us, there are many more issues that must be engaged, settled quickly and well, if the church of honest, loving people is to survive and thrive in the third millennium. But we are in grave danger, the church is in grave danger, from dark forces that seek to diminish the church by making it powerful, rich and fundamentalist. And we need no more vivid example than the Middle Ages to see the ruination that power, wealth and dogma can bring down upon the church.

We live in an era unlike almost any other in human history. Of all times and places for gay men, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people, 21^st-century America is arguably one of the best. That is not to say that there is not much progress still to be made, nor that other parts of the world offer even more accepting and supportive options. But for the most part, middle-class urban people enjoy greater freedom and safety than GLBT people have ever had.

But make no mistake. As Dickens observed of another time and place, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Even though things are good for most GLBT folk in metropolitan areas, our nation and many other parts of the world remain deeply prejudiced against GLBT people, and all the more perilous because we ourselves are often unaware. Recently one of the fundamentalist homophobic preachers proposed that when scientists identify the precise genetic and biological mechanisms that lead to same-sex orientation in an adult, prospective parents will be able to determine whether a fetus will grow to be heterosexual or homosexual, and to correct one that is destined to have the wrong orientation. Interestingly enough, other fundamentalist homophobes attacked the notion immediately, not because it amounts to eugenics worthy of the Nazi regime but because it implicitly acknowledged that sexual orientation is a genetic and biological reality, not a matter of moral choice or suasion.

In fact the lights have been coming on for decades: Alfred Kinsey’s study, Sexual Response in the Human Male, was published in 1948, the first to document the numbers of men with homosexual orientation in the general population. Although some quibble about his statistics, Kinsey’s work started other scientists thinking, and the rest, as they say, is history. If the light gets much brighter, we’re going to need sunglasses in church. The evidence that sexual orientation is, at least in part, genetically fixed is stronger than the evidence that left- and right-handedness are so determined. Men and women in every generation have been persecuted, prosecuted, imprisoned, tortured, condemned and murdered because of a fact of life over which they had no choice. And I don’t mean left-handedness. Although of course, left-handed children were once believed to be the spawn of the devil and treated shabbily at best, and at worst, neglected or killed.

I believe we err when we ascribe fair-mindedness and purity of motive to those who oppose the welcoming of GLBT people into membership and leadership in the church. The evidence is simply too clear and the fairness too obvious to give the benefit of the doubt to those who continue to proclaim that GLBT people are unworthy. We should issue no free passes to those who advocate bigotry in the church of Jesus Christ. Sanctified ignorance is still ignorance, and I believe that wealthy and powerful interests lurk behind groups that seek to divide and conquer the mainline denominations over the issue of sexual orientation. Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, all of us are under siege over the welcoming of GLBT folk. And if resistance over this issue is fierce now, just wait till we tackle the authority of Scripture, the doctrine of sin, and the meaning of salvation, all of which are implicitly challenged in our acceptance and celebration of human sexuality in all its various wonders. As Bette Davis once advised, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

But a necessary one, and at the end we will find a new and loving church brimming over with God’s grace and justice, filled with happiness and hope, reaching out and welcoming all people with faith and doubts into the community of grace. But of course that is what we have here, today. We are already a model for the future.

I want to share a story with you. This happened to someone I met on a cruise in the Caribbean. I do not tell you that to boast about my travels, but to frame the context: We were on a small sailing ship with about 70 other men from the US and Canada. One of the Canadians related a conversation he had with a St. Lucian man. The St. Lucian asked the Canadian if he was part of the men’s group that was boarding the Windjammer. “Yes,” replied the Canadian. “Are you homosexual?” asked the St. Lucian. “Yes,” answered the Canadian. “My partner and I are married.” “Married?” asked the St. Lucian, surprised. “Yes,” answered the Canadian, “in Canada gay men can marry.” The St. Lucian frowned. “Which one of you is the woman?” “Neither,” answered the Canadian. “That’s the point. We’re both gay men.” “We don’t have gay men in St. Lucia,” said the other. “We have queers. They dress up like girls. We kill them.”

So you see, “More Light” isn’t just about who gets to sit on the Session, and who gets to stand in the pulpit. It is also about who gets to live. And even though we feel safe and free, it is important to remember that a great, great many of our sisters and brothers are not safe, not free to live openly as they are, with the one or ones they choose. And that our own safety and security are the legacy of a great many struggles and sacrifices, and are not guaranteed.