Sunday, November 20, 2016
Dave Grishaw-Jones, Peace United Church
1.
Back
in 1993, the city of Billings, Montana, was rocked by a series of hate
crimes. Skinheads were running around
town painting swastikas on synagogues, and even the Ku Klux Klan was showing up
outside black churches, encouraging black worshippers to get out of town.
Late
in the year, during the holy Jewish festival of Chanukah, a skinhead went to
the home of Tammie and Brian Schnitzer, local human rights advocates and
leaders in the synagogue in town. The
skinhead stopped at a window decorated with Star of David decals and a menorah,
which is, of course, the nine-branched candelabra symbolizing Chanukah
itself. Then he hurled a huge cinder
block, sending ragged, jagged shards of glass into the bedroom of little Isaac
Schnitzer, who was just five years old.
Isaac’s
mom waited for the police to arrive that night: Tammie felt cold, but she said
later “it wasn’t the winter air coming through the broken window.” It was her sense of being so helpless. It was her fear of what would come next. The next day, she told a reporter from The
Billings Gazette that she and her husband would probably be taking the Chanukah
symbols off their windows for a while.
And the reporter included the quote in a story that week.
As
it turned out, a bunch of folks read that story in the paper, including a
Catholic priest, a UCC pastor and Margaret MacDonald, one of his key lay
leaders. Margaret called her pastor
right away, with an idea. “What if we had
our children draw menorahs in Sunday School?” she asked. “If we photocopied as many menorahs as we
could? And then if we told people in
churches to put them up in their own windows?”
And
this is what they did. In Protestant
churches that weekend, and in Roman Catholic churches that weekend, and in all
kinds of black churches and universalist churches as well. The following week, hundreds and hundreds of
menorahs appeared in the windows of Christian homes in Billings. Margaret MacDonald put one in her own living
room window—facing a busy street. “It
wasn’t an easy decision,” she said later.
“I had two young children at the time, and I had to think hard about it
myself.”
Another
among the first to put a menorah in her window was Becky Thomas, a Catholic
mother of two who lived very near the Schnitzers. She told a reporter, later that year, and
these are her words: “It’s easy to go around saying you support some good
cause; but this was different. This was
putting ourselves in some kind of danger.”
And then she told her husband: “Now we know how the Schnitzers feel.”
2.
 |
| Pulse Massacre, Orlando, June 2016 |
So
let’s be real for a moment.
We’ve
just elected a vice presidential candidate who openly advocates for conversion
therapy. And if you’re not up on that,
conversion therapy is a cruel form of homophobic abuse—usually promoted in
fundamentalist Christian circles—in which LGBT folks are ‘converted’ back to
their so-called ‘natural’ state. Now I’m
not making this up. Governor Mike Pence
of Indiana has openly advocated for just this kind of thing. And you and I know how devastating this kind
of thing is—and even just the idea of it.
How devastating religious hatred for LGBT friends can be—for LGBT
friends themselves, for their families, for folks like the 50 who were killed
at the Pulse Night Club last June.
Friends,
we may live in a bubble of sorts, here in the Bay Area. But homophobia is still very much with us,
and it’s still horribly dangerous, and it’s still our calling to call it
out. Just like those good folks in
Billings got real and got active and got creative in 1993, we’ve got to
continue our work, and we’ve got to get real and active and creative here. What’s the next step for an OPEN &
AFFIRMING church like ours? How do we
make our WITNESS shine, and shine brightly, not only in Santa Cruz, but in
Watsonville and across the Central Coast?
And, just as importantly, how do we protect, with our hearts and with
our faith and with our lives: how do we protect LGBT friends who may be
susceptible in any way to the hatred and homophobia of folks promoting
conversion therapy? In the bulletin, you
see the wonderful, brave response of my friend David Wellman to last week’s election. And David says, “For the next four years, I
vow to be as outrageously and openly homosexual as possible. In other words,” he says, “I don’t intend to
change at all. Bring it.”
And
that’s my question for us. How can we
BRING IT?
So
one more pivot, and this one back to this morning’s gospel lesson from Matthew.
Every
now again, as some of you know, I like to go to the original Greek in these
texts. Just to see what was going on
there. And this morning it gets kind of
interesting.
We
read Jesus saying: I was a stranger, and you welcomed me. I was a stranger, and you welcomed me. And as far as English goes, as far as English
can take us, that’s pretty good. Jesus
is saying that welcoming others is holy work, that treating our guests well is
Christian practice. And this makes sense.
But
the Greek goes something like this: “POTAY DAY SAY EIDOMAIN XAYNON KAI
SUNAYGAGOMAIN.” And here, in the Greek,
it’s not simply about welcoming the stranger, or the other, or the
neighbor. It’s not simply about
politeness or tolerance. It’s about
SUNAYGAGOMAIN…a verb in Greek that quickly becomes the world SYNAGOGUE, the
place of Jewish life, community, worship and development.
You
see, Jesus wants us to build communities together. Jesus wants us to grow leaders together. Jesus wants us to break bread and learn one
another’s stories and resist evil and racism and homophobia together. Jesus says: “POTAY DAY SAY EIDOMAIN XAYNON
KAI SUNAYGAGOMAIN.” I was a stranger,
and you built a new community for me. I
was a stranger, and you made me a leader.
I was a stranger and you honored my gifts. I was a stranger and you celebrated me and my
lover when we got married. I was a
stranger and you helped us raise our kids.
I was a stranger and you loved me.
And,
friends, that’s what we’ve got to do these next four years. Yes, we’ve got to build a community—to
continue to build a community—for gay and straight, and trans and nonbinary,
and questioning, and all the rest. We’ve
got to grow LGBT leaders and allies and loving friends. We’ve got honor the gifts of those who love
in all kinds of ways. We’ve got marry
folks and baptize their kids and love, love,
love them all. And yes, my
friends, we’ve got to BRING IT. Because
that’s the gospel. That’s Jesus’ urgent
call to you and me. We’ve got to BRING
IT: because that’s what Christians do.
