Seeing Clearly; Take Me To Church

So I was cleaning my contacts, and I stumbled.  I thought I mighta torn it, but I looked at it and it didn’t look torn, so I put it in the solution and let it soak.  Contacts are 35% to 75% water, so as long as they are in the solution, they’re fine.  When I put them on, they were fine, but as the day went on and they dried out, they irritated my eyes more and more.  I barely made it through a midday meeting, got back to my office, and took out the lens.  As I did, the tear became evident, and I threw the lens out.  With no spares or prescription glasses at work, this left me with one contact in and one out. In one of my eyes I am legally blind without correction, and the other one has nearly normal sight.  Thankfully, the normal eye was the one that had the torn contact, so even with the torn lens out, I could see just fine.

Went to a game and saw my favorite ballteam struggle to win a game I’d thought they would win easily.    It seemed the opponent had this very effective defensive play in the paint.  My team seemed unable to figure it out, and kept falling for it over and over. But they finally got their act together and won by three points.  A W is a W.

After that I went down to the vigil at the Stonewall Inn.  The Stonewall is known as the epicenter of the Gay Civil Rights Movement in America, and, short of traveling to Florida, it seemed to be the appropriate place to go to stand in solidarity with the gay community.  I still maintain that terrorism directed at gay people is a human tragedy, and in stating that, I reaffirm that gay people are as much a part of humanity as anyone else.  It’s not intended to be exclusionary, like the #alllivesmatter hashtag strives to invalidate the #blackliivesmatter movement; but rather, I maintain that homophobia – and all hatred – are problems for all of humanity; while they manifest in horrible ways with the group bearing the brunt of the hatred, this continuing hatred hurts ALL humanity.

And at the Stonewall tonight, I saw a lot of hurt.  Maybe it was the smell of alcohol coming from human pores – I don’t do well with that  --  or maybe it was the young man rambling on for so long that I couldn’t tell whether alcohol or grief was the impetus for his conversation that everyone needed to “be who you are, don’t be afraid.” Maybe it was the group on the side of the vigil having a loud personal conversation while the young man was trying to speak to the crowd, or the people coming for photo ops but not paying respect, or maybe it was the way white guys shifted uneasily when I was in the crowd behind them, or the fact that the crowd was overwhelmingly white (wasn’t this an atrocity visited upon people of color?  Where are the mourners of color?).  Whatever it was, what I felt all around me was the pain of a people.  It was for Orlando, yes, but I felt the kind of pain that alcohol wouldn’t make go away, the kind of pain you feel when you’re trapped inside someone else’s impression of you, the pain that can’t be abated by conversations or mementos demonstrating how important you were.  I’m not sure exactly what it was, but I am sure that I felt – or rather, sensed -- pain all around me.

So I left the vigil after a while and went wandering around.  I came across a couple of guys talking about how homophobic the national climate has become.   One was talking about how nothing was going to interfere with his right to party, but the other one was like, “Guuurrrrlll!! It’s so bad out here, I might even go to church on Sunday.  I’ll be like, ‘Pastor, Can you save me?’”  Of course I had a conversation with him about how Jesus could save him, and how, if any pastor told him differently, he should run out of that church and find another one.  He might have been a little tipsy;  he was more interested in his new box of Fig Newtons than he was in what I had to say, so we chatted a bit more, I reminded him that Jesus loves him just as he is, and we parted ways.

But that encounter remains with me.  Christopher Street at 10:30 on a weeknight night was almost as busy as 125^th Street on a Saturday afternoon.  I would go so far as to say it’s busier than mid-morning on the main streets of all but the largest American cities.  There were scores of people walking around and eating and shopping and hanging out, in addition to those gathered at the vigil.  Clearly, I only had an interaction with a couple of them, and while a good number of the out gay people I know are devout Christians, this encounter took me right back to the party days of my youth, when Hozier’s “Take me to Church would have been the closest we’d come to singing an anthem.   While they seemed a little too old to be club kids, these guys had the club mentality, and what struck me was that going to church was only something they considered as an act of desperation!!  Even then, the thought that they could be saved by God was a concept with which they had some passing familiarity, but which they could only jokingly apply to themselves.  While I didn’t think of the song at the time, I’m betting these guys know every word to “Take me to Church.”

I’m not sounding some sort of spiritual alarm, nor trying to evoke any mass hysteria among the "saints of God."  But I do echo the words of a Facebooker named Cody Lewis who, on June 12, posted the following:

“Just so we are clear, the tragedy in Orlando wasn't caused by Islam or Islamic ideals, it was caused by you. YOU, the guy who has gay friends but won't defend them in front of others. YOU, the mom who kicked out her child for being gay. YOU, the pastor who preaches hate over love every sunday. YOU, the politician who votes against gay rights only to give blowjobs in airport bathrooms. YOU, who don't stand up for what is right and allow innocent people tge same rights as you. YOU, the weekend christian who posts about their daughters bathroom safety when their own pastor is the one with his hands where they dont belong. You did this and the blood of 50 people is on your hands. Jesus and Allah didn't have anything to do with this, this is your fault. Welcome to America, are you ashamed yet?”

Church, our children are dying in the streets.  They believe themselves to be outside the Arc of Safety, outside the reach of God’s Love, because our infantile and twisted theology has caused us to preach hate instead of love, to greet them with judgement instead of joy,  and to drive them away instead of welcoming them with open arms.  If the Blood of Jesus TRULY gives us Strength from day to day, if it TRULY reaches to the highest mountain and flows to the lowest valleys, then why in the world do people who don’t look, act, or love like us feel so utterly rejected by us?

Decades ago, before I formally accepted my call to ministry, I wrestled with it.  Part of the wrestling was because I worked in an environment that served people with HIV. I’d started working in the field when this new medical mystery called GRID (Gay Related Immune Disorder) was discovered, and God led me to work in research labs where the disease was studied, in dermatology offices where scores of young men came in, terrified they might have Kaposi’s sarcoma, and literally disrobing in front of me, an office assistant, begging for some sort of diagnosis.  Later, after working in a palliative care clinic, I found myself once again working with people nearing the end of their life’s journey.  It was in Harlem, and over the years dozens of gay young men died in our arms or in our care.  In perhaps 60-70 percent of those cases these men, in their times of greatest need, were abandoned.  I couldn’t help but notice how many times the “saints of god” abandoned their own flesh and blood to die, taking the stance that this terminal disease was a judgment from god and that they, the parents shared the judgement.  The Biblical stories of the lepers kept coming to me (‘but somebody had to take care of them, didn’t they?” “Child, hush”), and as I wrestled with this call to ministry, I just wasn’t sure I wanted any parts of an organization that could cause a person to abandon their dying child.  Fortunately, there were saints who loved the Lord and loved their children, and who believed in the Grace of God for all.  Those saintly mothers, though few and far between, helped give me some limited willingness to unite myself with those who (with their mouths, anyway) carry the label of Christ followers.

Sadly, it’s 30+ years later, and we’re still struggling with the same sorts of spiritual abandonment regarding lifestyle.  The church is still abandoning those who are Gay or Lesbian or Bisexual or Transgender or of any sexual orientation that it does not understand.  Rather than extending the love of Jesus to everyone, we decide, then pick and choose to whom we think that love should be available.  Instead of bearing the Light of Christ, we go forth with the judgement and accusations of the enemy, and when we do, we serve the enemy’s purpose – to atrophy the Body of Christ.

When I started writing, this was gonna be about gay people.  I thought I was gonna compare gay people to that torn contact lens, and talk about how, even though things may seem fine, if something's just a little bit out of order, it irritates us until we have no choice but to examine it and see that we have a big ole tear in what we thought we were looking through.  But see, the problem with that analogy is that gay people aren’t disposable.  So no matter how uncomfortable you may be around gay people, THEY aren’t the issue.  Instead of behaving like gay people are the issue, maybe we need to fix our contacts:  maybe we need to take the styes out of our eyes.  Maybe we need to remove those things in our vision that irritate us.  What if we don’t have all the answers, and the hermeneutical lenses through which we’ve been reading the Bible are not correct?  What if it’s not gay people who are the problem, but the way you look at them?  We don’t have to pluck out our eyes (Matt 18:9), but we DO have to pluck out the torn and broken lenses, pluck out the styes,  and throw them away.  Maybe we will find, just like I did with my physical eyes, something we could not have imagined:  that, even with our familiar but defective lenses removed, without the sty in our eye,  we can still see quite clearly.

I wonder if we can see our way to reach out to our LGBT Brothers and sisters, and to lovingly welcome them, responding to their pleas to "Take Me To Church"

Here is the link to the video.  https://youtu.be/MYSVMgRr6pw

And here are the lyrics:

My lover's got humour
She's the giggle at a funeral
Knows everybody's disapproval
I should've worshipped her sooner
If the Heavens ever did speak
She is the last true mouthpiece
Every Sunday's getting more bleak
A fresh poison each week
'We were born sick, ' you heard them say it
My church offers no absolutes
She tells me 'worship in the bedroom'
The only heaven I'll be sent to
Is when I'm alone with you
I was born sick, but I love it
Command me to be well
Amen. Amen. Amen

Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life

Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life

If I'm a pagan of the good times
My lover's the sunlight
To keep the Goddess on my side
She demands a sacrifice
To drain the whole sea
Get something shiny
Something meaty for the main course
That's a fine looking high horse
What you got in the stable?
We've a lot of starving faithful
That looks tasty
That looks plenty
This is hungry work

Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life

Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life

No masters or kings when the ritual begins
There is no sweeter innocence than our gentle sin
In the madness and soil of that sad earthly scene
Only then I am human
Only then I am clean
Amen. Amen. Amen

Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life

Take me to church
I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life