Matthew 15:29-39, a sermon by Harry Knox
Speech to The Foundery
South Georgia Conference, United Methodist Church
Tifton, Georgia
June 8, 2010 speech
Welcome Bishop Wilke…
Before there was a Bishop Wilke or a Disciple Bible Study, here in South Georgia we had Dr. David Seyle, who drummed in our ears the value of regular Bible study as a tool of ministry, and particularly, the discipline of the lectionary. I want to us to hear the Gospel lesson for today, but if you will indulge me, I’ll make reference later to a metaphor from the Revelation and a word picture from the Exodus – you’ll recognize them – but we only have time to hear the Gospel lesson
Matthew 15:29-39
29After Jesus had left that place, he passed along the Sea of Galilee, and he went up the mountain, where he sat down. 30Great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and many others. They put them at his feet, and he cured them, 31so that the crowd was amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel.
32Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, "I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat; and I do not want to send them away hungry, for they might faint on the way." 33The disciples said to him, "Where are we to get enough bread in the desert to feed so great a crowd?" 34Jesus asked them, "How many loaves have you?" They said, "Seven, and a few small fish." 35Then ordering the crowd to sit down on the ground, 36he took the seven loaves and the fish; and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 37And all of them ate and were filled; and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full. 38Those who had eaten were four thousand men, besides women and children. 39After sending away the crowds, he got into the boat and went to the region of Magadan.
Friends, it is a great privilege, and one I have long coveted, to be with you today. I am grateful to your leaders for inviting me home to the South Georgia Annual Conference, in whose bosom I was raised. The great love for the scriptures that has been the joy of my life was instilled in me by dedicated teachers and youth leaders at Cordele First UMC. My role models in ministry were pastoral souls like Claude Fullerton and John Quillian and prophetic preachers like Bill Hurdle. My earliest calls to ministry were heard around bonfires at Camp Dooly and in youth circles at Epworth by the Sea. David Johnson helped me affirm my call when everything else in me cried, “Oh, Hell No!” And an irascible, sweet man named Nat Hamlin taught me that questions were not signs of faithlessness, but were, rather, acts of deepest piety. Lessons I learned here have proved so valuable and so timeless, they must surely be divine. For me, this is holy ground.
I need to take off my shoes.
Disciples of Jesus of Galilee, I come to you at a historic moment with what I fear will be a prophetic call to deeply pastoral duty. God’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people find ourselves at a frightening, hopeful time when political success that mirrors cultural change shimmers on the horizon – and Leviathan the Beast licks his chops as he stands between us and achievement of our dreams of equality.
Last fall the Congress passed, and the President signed, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. After eleven years of advocacy by LGBT people and our allies, under the loving, mothering, Godly guidance of Judy Shepard, the laws of the United States for the first time recognized LGBT people’s right to basic safety.
I think I surprised some folks by not celebrating too loudly. See, I’m old and bald-headed and I’ve seen some things, so I held my breath in fear of what would happen next. Sure enough, the reports began to come in from all over the country, but particularly from rural, Southern places – of the very hate crimes now called unconscionable in law being perpetrated in defiance.
In Terlingua, West Texas, a young man of 17 was thrown out of his house by his Christian parents. The last words he heard before the slam of the door was a Bible verse. He had nowhere to go, so he lived in his clunker of a car – and somehow he managed to go to school each day and to hold down two part-time jobs so he could piece together enough to eat. He was determined to finish high school.
One evening two older men abducted the young man and drove him out into the desert. They beat him severely and torched his car. They burned his home and left him to die. Somehow he managed to walk three miles through the desert at night to the highway, where a sheriff’s deputy picked him up and took him to the hospital. Of course, everyone knows everyone else in Terlingua, so the perpetrators were quickly arrested and are awaiting trial. That in itself is a pleasant surprise, considering the history of biased neglect most hate crimes receive. But the shocking thing was still to come.
When the young man returned to high school after recovering from his wounds, he was called into the principal’s office, where sat, not just the principal, but also the superintendent of schools, who doubles as the county commissioner in Brewster County. She told the young man he was no longer welcome in that school because she “didn’t want to have this conversation in (her) schoolhouse”.
My friend Dr. Steve Sprinkle of Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth heard what had happened and contacted the social worker in another county who is trying to help this young man get some form of high school diploma so he won’t be sentenced by this superintendent to a life of poverty. He asked the counselor who in Brewster County could be reached out to for help. Was there not a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ who could be called upon? “No”, the counselor said sort of incredulously, “did you really think there would be?”
Well… Unfortunately, he only speaks to the silence of pastors and people of faith. In Texas, as all over the South and parts of the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states, there is an active anti-gay industry that provides propaganda that incites hate violence under the guise of – wait for it – saving souls.
A year before the incident in Terlingua, I had been a guest of Steve’s at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth. My visit coincided with the tenth anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s murder in Laramie, Wyoming. A group of students at Texas Christian University hosted Judy Shepard on that campus the day before I was next door at Brite. The campus was flooded with post cards announcing Judy’s appearance and bearing Matthew’s slight, blonde image on the other side of the card. I remember it clearly because someone brought me another flyer they found stuck on their car window at the grocery store. It announced a local church’s Halloween Hell House – one of those truly monstrous places where church youth groups dress up as zombies and seek to frighten other teenagers into avoiding hell by becoming a Christian. On the front of that flyer was a picture of a ghoul – a slight blonde young man made-up to look as if he had been beaten to death and wearing rainbow colored suspenders.
In an environment where churches sponsor satires of hate crimes, it didn’t surprise me to hear six months later that police in Fort Worth celebrated the 40th anniversary of the uprising at the Stonewall Bar in New York City by brutally harassing patrons of a gay bar in Forth Worth.
I focused a good deal on Leviathan – shall we have a little hope? Take some from right here in Georgia! With outstanding leadership from Georgia Equality, the statewide LGBT advocacy group, the Georgia Legislature approved comprehensive safe schools legislation this year that will help curb bullying of all kinds, including that based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
When a young man in Cochran asked to take his male date to the prom, the school authorities in Bleckley County allowed him to do so. Now friends, I’m not going to kid you that they did it out of genuine empathy. But they did manage to moan out some syllables about treating everyone equally on their way to avoiding a lawsuit and for now, we’ll take it.
The Promised Land where LGBT people can live in peace and mutual respect with our neighbors is just, just over there…but still Leviathan lurks. As the folks in Bleckley County, Georgia were doing OK, the school district in Itawamba County, Mississippi denied access to the prom to a lesbian couple. When the courts intervened, the district cancelled the prom altogether, and in a particularly cruel hoax, local parents then put on two private proms – one to which most students were invited – and the other, to which the lesbians and the mentally disabled students were invited. These are Christian people.
LGBT people are stumbling our way up the mountain toward healing – maimed by physical violence, lame from stumbling blocks like employment discrimination, blinded with tears of anger and hurt, often mute with bitterness and distrust – but making our way up the mountain nonetheless, looking for healing. Is Jesus up there?
Two weeks ago the Senate Armed Services Committee joined the House of Representatives in voting to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the policy of legal discrimination in the US military that allows lesbians and gay men to serve their country only if they lie – and which has resulted in the discharge of more than 16,000 badly needed, skilled service members since it was implemented in 1996. Just before the vote in the Armed Services Committee, we learned that several senators were wavering. One of them was Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska. We knew Sen. Nelson wanted to do the just thing, but we were equally sure he was under tremendous pressure from fundamentalist clergy in his state to vote for discrimination.
I called my friend Steve, another Steve, who is a United Methodist minister in Lincoln. I asked him to help me circulate a letter to his clergy colleagues in Nebraska asking them to sign onto the plea for Sen. Nelson’s vote for repeal. When I called to ask Steve to help, there was hesitation on the line.
“Harry”, he said, “you don’t know what’s been going on with me, do you?” I told him no. He said, “Well, my wife left me at Christmas and I’m having a hard time. Some days I do well, but other days I really struggle. Right now, I have a hard time laying claim to what it means to be a man, or a pastor, or even a Christian.” I commiserated as best I could. He said it was helpful, but you know…
I assumed the conversation was over. I knew what he was telling me. Steve was telling me he was up on the mountain and he could see the needs of the people, could feel the urgency of the moment, but he couldn’t figure out how to feed himself under the circumstances, much less anyone else.
I prepared to hang up the phone, but then Steve proved to me what a Bible-believing United Methodist pastor can do. He swallowed hard and said, “Tell you what – you draft the letter and I’ll circulate it by email. Then I’ll get on the phone and pester folks to sign it.” I did. And he did. And pretty soon there were emails pouring in – lots from Lincoln and Omaha – but also from places like Grand Isle and Beatrice and Milford. Think Hahira and you’ve got a picture of Milford, Nebraska. Clergy of several denominations and other faith traditions were included, but most were United Methodist. They knew the need, and they also knew Steve, and they responded in pastoral chorus, speaking out for justice.
You know the rest of the story. When the votes were counted, Sen. Nelson voted for repeal. The next day a staffer from his office shot Steve a quick note. “You’ll never know”, she said, “how happy the Senator was to receive word from clergy back home that he was doing the right thing.” Steve’s excited letter to me that day let me know he had found some nourishment in simply acting as if there would be bread.
Later this summer and into the fall we anticipate a vote of the full Senate on repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and we expect a vote in the House, and perhaps in the Senate, on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act – which would prohibit discrimination in hiring, firing and promotion of employees based on sexual orientation of gender identity. The General Conference of the United Methodist Church has endorsed both pieces of legislation. The employment bill exempts religious institutions, effectively preserving churches’ privilege to discriminate. And it exempts employers with 15 or fewer employees so as not to put an undue burden on small businesses. The only reason to be against this law is to send a message to LGBT people that we are not welcome, that we are not loved as neighbors and sisters and brothers in Christ, that we, in fact, deserve the worst life can throw at us.
When I began this morning I promised you a call to pastoral and prophetic duty. Here it is. As these votes happen, Congressmen Sanford Bishop and Jim Marshall and John Barrow will all be on both sides’ lobby lists. Even Jack Kingston and Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss need to be urged not to do the wrong thing too loudly. Your LGBT sisters and brothers need you to preach and teach and pray and work for passage of these historic protections. We need you to use the curricula we’ve developed at the Human Rights Campaign to encourage conversation in your local churches about the need for these protections for some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
Our resource that accompanies the movie For the Bible Tells Me So will help people in your congregation understand what the Bible really says about homosexuality and will invite them to become advocates on behalf of justice. Our resource on Gender Identity and Faith Communities will help you and your neighbors know who transgender people are and why they are particularly vulnerable, which is most important because including protections for transgender folk in the bill is its primary barrier to passage now. The materials are available on our website at www.hrc.org/religion and they are free of charge.
I know time is short and this is not how programmatic decisions are made in church. But my people are suffering and they need help. My plea is that you will sign-up on the sheets at your table to talk with me on the phone over the next few weeks about what you can do. My pledge is that the 750,000 members of the Human Rights Campaign will walk with you through whatever you may face as a consequence.
Over 25 years of advocating for LGBT justice in Georgia and then nationally, I honestly believe I have heard every reason there is for doing nothing with my call to action. I’ve said South Georgia is holy ground, and it is – the place where God has called us to honor God’s sovereignty in our lives. I know it can seem sometimes as if this spot is more fire than bush, it can feel as if you are alone in a desert place, it can seem more like a place the dust of which you want to shake off your shoes than one into which you want to step without protection on your feet and every other part of your body.
Disciples, welcome to the everyday, every-place world of LGBT people. For too long, we have been sacrificed on the altar to the idol called the unity of the Church. The problem is: the idol always wants more. The idol is never satisfied. For too long we’ve been told to wait by people who worried about where their bread was coming from.
Now we find ourselves on this mountain together. We can sense healing and wholeness before us. You have heard the call. The only question now is: do you believe your Master can make bread?