Second Sunday after Pentecost
June 11, 2023

Sermon

Slats Toole
Co-Moderator, Covenant Network of Presbyterians

Isaiah 56:1–8
Matthew 13:54–58

First of all, it is so good to be with you all today. I moved from the East Coast to Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, which was quite a time to move, and I haven’t gotten to do much travel since then. So this is actually my first time in Chicago despite living so close, so thank you for the invitation and introduction to your home.

I bring greetings and gratitude from the Covenant Network, though I know Fourth Church is blessed to have one of our Covenant Network board members, Lucy Forster-Smith, as one of your pastors! Though the work of the network has shifted as the Presbyterian Church (USA) has changed its policies around same-gender marriage and the ordination of LGBTQ+ individuals, there is still so much work to be done to ensure that people of all genders and sexualities are truly embraced and experience God’s love in our churches, and we are grateful for your witness and for your support.

There is also something surreal and beautiful about being able to do this work openly in churches, receiving invitations like this, that I didn’t think would be possible in my lifetime. I am a person who is attracted to people of all genders. I am a person whose gender identity falls outside of the “man/woman” binary categories. I use words like transgender and nonbinary to describe myself. I am part of the group that reclaims the word queer — not everyone in the community is comfortable using that word, but for me, reclaiming this slur is a way of saying, “Yes, I am different, yes, I may seem strange to many of you, and that is something to be celebrated.” Growing up with these identities swirling inside of me, even before I learned the language to name them, and growing up in the church — it was unimaginable that someone like me would be standing in a pulpit.

Now, I was lucky. I do say lucky, not blessed, because I do not believe God decided to bless me and not others like me who grew up in less-affirming spaces. I grew up deeply in the church; my parents are both church musicians, so I spent more time at the church than the preachers’ kids. I grew up in the South. I grew up in a time and place where not only did marriage equality sound like an impossible dream, but where sodomy laws were still actively on the books. And yet I also grew up with supportive parents, with a pastor who years later would be brought up on ecclesiastical charges for officiating a same-gender wedding, and in a church that put love first. The congregation was definitely mixed on whether or not same-gender attraction was a sin, but I felt sure that even those who disagreed with who I am loved and cared for me as a human being first. Upon leaving my hometown, I moved to New York City, where there was certainly no shortage of affirming churches. Compared to so many LGBTQ+ people, I had it so easy.

But even with that “almost as affirming as you could possibly get at the time” background, I carry my own baggage, the pain and grief and weight that comes with the territory of being LGBTQ+ in this religion and this country. The idea that my sexuality was “incompatible with Christian teaching” did and still does permeate this culture. I cannot remember a time when I did not have to justify my presence in the church. While my peers got to focus their energy on developing their relationship with God, I spent mine on trying to make people see why I would even be allowed to have a relationship with God. I joke about it now, about how I knew more about the book of Leviticus than any fifth grader should ever have to know about the book of Leviticus, but some of the first Bible verses I ended up memorizing were the verses that were thrown at me to prove that my being was sinful. But I couldn’t square those verses with the loving God I heard the preachers talk about in worship, so I dove in, thinking somewhere there must be more. And the church … didn’t have much to help me out. The best I got was, “It’s not wrong to be gay!” which is a far cry from actual celebration of queer identity as sacred, beloved, part of who God made me to be. I followed this yearning all the way to seminary, and I graduated still wondering, “Where am I in this text? What in this holy wisdom, holy word, is there for me, not just as a byproduct, as crumbs the dogs eat from the master’s table, but a table spread for me?”

By the time we get to this story in Matthew, of Jesus preaching in his hometown, we are already almost halfway through this Gospel. Jesus has already been baptized by John, tempted in the wilderness, and called the disciples. He has done many miracles. He’s preached the Sermon on the Mount (one of his greatest hits) and gotten in trouble with some of the religious leaders of the day for doing things like healing on the Sabbath. Jesus is well into his ministry by the time he comes home to Nazareth, and I have to wonder what it was like for him as he returned home, to the buildings and streets that he knew so well he could walk them in his sleep; to the synagogue where he had learned and joined in faith, tradition, and community; to the people he grew up with, he played with, he mended furniture for, whose houses he’d gone over to for dinner and whose children he’d gotten scraped knees with and who cared for him in that way that we care for those who we knew as babies who have suddenly shot up like a weed and it makes us feel uncomfortably older to see.

I wonder what he hoped for his time teaching there in Nazareth. He had spread words of life to many who had come to hear; he had sat with those in need of healing and helped them find wholeness. He must have wanted to do that here, amongst those he knew and loved and who knew and loved him. He would have known the ailments and illnesses that no one believed could ever go away. He would have known who needed hope, who needed guidance, who needed encouragement. Here he was: ready to teach, to heal, to proclaim good news for the captive and freedom for the oppressed. Here he was to tell of a God working for liberation, who blesses those who are persecuted, who gathers the outcasts.

And his own people could not hear it.

They saw him standing there, and they could not erase the image of the person he had once been. They knew him, they thought; child of Mary and Joseph, who does he think he is? They knew who he really was. They knew him better than he knew himself, they thought.

A couple years ago, I was happy for and admittedly a little jealous of the generation growing up now, who have access to so much language about gender identity; if I’d heard of the idea of nonbinary gender identity back then, my high school and college experience would have been far less confusing. But in the past year or so my heart has just broken for them. Once again, I am lucky, living in a state that is actively working to become a refuge state for trans people, while I am hearing horror stories of legislation after awful legislation coming from so many places across this country that seek to erase the existence of people like us. And even though I know there are many of these laws that won’t ultimately be passed, this onslaught of anti-transgender legislation is speaking loud and clear, saying, “We know who you are. You are who you always have been. We know you better than you know yourself. You cannot be this.”

And it is impacting people’s lives. According to the FBI’s Hate Crime Data, nearly 1 in 5 instances of any hate crime includes anti-LGBTQ+ bias as a motivator. The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ youth, found in a recent poll that 88 percent of trans and nonbinary youth have experienced negative effects on their mental health due to the debates surrounding this legislation. When I went to the Trevor Project’s website to pull that statistic, I was greeted with a popup informing me that I could press the “ESC” key three times quickly to immediately close the website, a measure put in place for those who cannot even safely access a website that offers them help staying alive. And look, you might not agree with me or everything I say here today, but I hope we can all agree that if the way this conversation is happening causes more kids to think about hurting themselves or even ending their lives, that is a problem. That is not what God intended.

And I keep going back to that last line of today’s text from Matthew: “And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief.” I don’t think that Jesus needed their belief for his miracles to “work” or anything like that, and I don’t think that Jesus was refusing to do deeds of power because he was pouting that the people didn’t believe. I read these words and I just know how hard it is to do your best work, to be your best self, if you cannot bring all of who you are with you, when there is something that makes you always need to prove your worth. One of the most beautiful parts of the Reformed tradition is our belief that our own worth has no bearing on God’s love for us. We cannot earn God’s love; we cannot lose it. God’s love is a gift freely bestowed to us, period.

But when people look at you with disgust, it’s hard not to feel unworthy.

When people actively seek to erase you from the world, to keep you from living out your full, God-given identity, it’s hard not to feel unworthy.

When you just want to live and share your gifts, to celebrate the love and perspective that God has given you, and you are met with people saying you are a perversion, a predator, a phase, a trend, a mistake?

I remember times in my own life when I have been rejected for who I am. I look around today at the backlash particularly targeted around trans and gender nonconforming people, and I wonder about the ache in Jesus’ heart that came from being rejected by people he knew and loved, who could not see past what they thought they knew about him in order to see, learn, and experience who he truly was. This intimate and personal rejection that so many of us know — our Savior knows it, too.

There is something here, in this book, for me, for us, a resonance for those of us who know what it’s like to have to justify our space in the church and the world. And diving in, the message that Jesus spread, the message of hope and freedom and welcome and belonging, is one that so many of us have been waiting our entire lives to hear. This message Christ came to share reaches farther back than even Jesus’ time on earth; the seeds are sown from the earliest of our scriptures. From God creating us in Their image, a God who can only be defined as I Am, as Pure Existence. To the first lesson we heard today, in which groups of people who had been historically forbidden from entering the temple (you can even find the verse forbidding them in Deuteronomy 23) are given a place and a title better than sons or daughters, a line that hits those of us who are not sons or daughters in a beautiful way. To that vision of peace in Isaiah, of the wolf lying down with the lamb, an image that shatters the laws of nature, the binary of predator and prey, to create an unnatural and I would say queer vision of peace. To all the unexpected ways that God shows up in Christ: the paradox and impossibility of being both human and divine, to the holy mystery of the Trinity, to the strangeness of the God of Creation coming as a vulnerable baby, eventually riding to death on a donkey, not coming to conquer on a warhorse, and ultimately shattering the binary of death and life. Whose followers kept being called throughout the chronicles we find in the book of Acts to let more and more people in, from the Ethiopian eunuch who was certainly not allowed full participation in religious community at that time, to the Gentiles who the disciples were always told they should never associate with. These images are so familiar to us that we miss the strangeness, the unexpectedness, how queer this story is. It is all right here. In this book we hold sacred.

This story is for us. For all of us — not in spite of the identities we hold, but because of them, in them, through them. May we all know, may you know, that you are beloved by God. God who says I know you, I see you, I have your name, your true name inscribed on the palm of my hand. I knit you together and know your inmost thoughts and fears and secrets and joys and pains. No matter what comes, no matter what is falsely said and done in my name, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church