© Davidson Loehr
17 June 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Last fall, in a silent auction at church, I agreed to offer the right to name a sermon topic. Ian Forslund was the highest bidder, and asked that I reflect on what I think it means for this church to be a “Welcoming Congregation.” Taken narrowly, that refers to the fact that this church is on record as a church that welcomes gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people into fellowship. But how? As tokens? I have overheard the greeter in a UU church (not this one!) tell a visitor “Oh yes, we have lesbians – there’s one over there!” How welcome would that feel? It’s an important topic, I’ll borrow some wisdom from the man Jesus, as we explore it together on this Father’s Day.
STORY: The Welcoming School
Once there was a small school in a small town somewhere in Texas where everybody was alike. They had all been born in Texas, they all had dark hair and brown eyes. They all got along, and it was a quiet and peaceful place. But times change, and they changed in this sleepy little town. People started moving in, from all over the place, and before long people didn’t all look alike. Some actually had blonde hair; they had never seen a real blonde in person before! And some had blue eyes: what an odd color for eyes! And some had actually moved there from other states, or from Mexico. They weren’t all native Texans any more.
The school principal didn’t know what to do, though he knew they needed to find some way to make all these new kids feel welcome. But he didn’t know what to do, so he decided to pass the problem on to the students. He called a school assembly and told them that people were starting to come to the school who were different from them, and they needed to find some way to make sure and notice them and welcome them to the school.
The kids talked and talked about it. They decided they needed a way to identify all these different sorts of people. And before long, they had one to practice on; a girl named Susan came to town with her family. She had been born in Austin. And though she had brown eyes, she had blonde hair!
Well, they were ready for her. “Oh great!” they said as they gathered around her on her first day in school. “We’ve been waiting for somebody to come who had blonde hair, and you’re it! We need a way to mark you so everybody will know you’re here, so they can all make you feel welcome. Here, wear this!” And they put around her neck a special kind of necklace they had made by tying together about thirty jingle bells. “Now whenever you move, you’ll make noise! Then when you come into a room, the first person who hears you will shout “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!” and then everybody in the room will shout “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!” and they can gather around you and make you feel welcome!” And that’s what they did.
Within a couple weeks, they had another new student. Stevie moved with his family from Dallas. And his hair was the right color (brown), but he had blue eyes! Amazing!
Again, though, the students were ready. “Here Stevie,” one of them said, “you need to wear this. It’s hard to tell you have blue eyes till we can get up really close to look at your face, so this will make it easier to mark you. Just wear this around your neck.” They gave him a very big capital letter “B” (for “blue”) made out of thick blue paper. “Now whenever you come into a room, the first person who sees the big blue “B” will shout “Woop, woop, woop!” and a signal that you’re here. Then all the other kids will should “Woop, woop, woop!” and gather around you to look at your eyes and make you feel welcome.” And that’s what they did.
Before long, another new family moved to town, and another new kid enrolled in the school. Her name was Maria. She had the right hair and eye color, but she wasn’t from Texas. Her family had just moved up from Mexico.
The kids were ready for this, too. They had learned a new work in their vocabulary-building exercises for people who came from strange places: alien. And here was their chance to use it. So they went up to Maria and explained that they were the welcome team from the school, that they needed to mark her so the other kids would know she was different. But since she had black hair and brown eyes, nobody could tell by looking at her that she was really an alien. So they had made something for her to wear, too. It was a very big capital letter “A” kind of a scarlet color. “Here,” they said, “you need to wear this. Then, whenever you come into a room the first person who sees your big “A” will shout “Alien! Alien!” and then everybody will shout “Alien! Alien!” and we can all gather around to see just what an alien really looks like and make you feel welcome. And that’s what they did.
Well, as more and more new kids moved into town, that became a very noisy school. The kids looked for all the differences they could find in every new kid, and invented new kinds of noises and letters to mark each one with, so the new kids would feel welcome.
But while a few of the new kids just loved all the attention, most did not. And, they told the principal, they didn’t feel one bit welcome there. The principal was stumped. Gosh: what should they do?
SERMON: Welcome!
If you’ve been coming here long, you’ve probably noticed by now that I don’t talk much about Jesus. It’s not that I haven’t heard of him. I’ve studied a fair amount about the man, I’ve been a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar for a decade, so I’m not completely ignorant of the man and his teachings. But for me, he’s never been the most interesting or insightful religious teacher. It’s a personal thing. For me, the teachings of the Buddha and Lao-Tzu were wiser and more useful, and I have quite a few books from quite a few thinkers whose insights seem more relevant and useful. So I’ve just not used Jesus much.
All that is a negative way of saying something positive, which is that this morning I think one of Jesus’s insights is more useful and more on point than others I can think of. That insight was his most important teaching, and the teaching that was also most important to him: his idea of what he called the Kingdom of God.
That phrase “the Kingdom of God” wasn’t unique to Jesus, it was used by a lot of people in the first couple centuries. Jews, Christians, Greeks and Romans wrote about the kingdom of God, which they also called the Kingdom of Wisdom. They all used the phrase to mean the ideal world, the kind of world with the best chance of sustaining peace, justice, and love among people who were different. That’s the challenge, of course. It doesn’t take much talent and isn’t much of a victory to get along with people who look, think, and talk like you. That’s more like looking in the mirror and approving of your reflection. The challenge is to do it among people who are not like you. And the ideal world, in which that challenge was met well, was what many called the Kingdom of God.
For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was not supernatural. It wasn’t something coming, had nothing to do with any sort of end of the world. It was, at least potentially, here and now, within and among us, and his frustration was that we couldn’t see it.
For Jesus, our deepest human failing – you could almost call it our “original sin,” though he never did – is our destructive but abiding habit of defining ourselves in terms too small to do justice to the idea that the whole world is God’s creation, to put it poetically.
The Jews – and of course Jesus was a Jew – often defined themselves by their differences from others. They defined themselves by their customs of animal sacrifices in the Temple, by their language, their dietary restrictions, and a dozen other ways. These differences made them feel special. They thought of themselves as God’s chosen people.
But to the man Jesus, if I understand him correctly, everyone was a child of God. And the exclusive identity of the Jews was too narrow, too small to serve life. He wanted the walls broken down, he wanted small identities sabotaged. This is the meaning behind his telling his disciples – who begged for their food, as he also did – to eat whatever was put before them.
That didn’t mean “eat your broccoli.” Jesus and his followers were all Jewish, and they all begged for their food. They lived in a world with Romans, Greeks, Samaritans, and a whole array of other ethnic and religious styles, each of which had different food laws. When Jesus told his followers to eat what was put before them, it meant “When you beg from a Roman and they offer you pork, eat it! Eat shellfish, eat whatever is put before you by the Greek, the Samaritan, and the others from whom you will be begging food.”
He was saying “Don’t allow yourself to be defined by your differences from others. Insist on defining yourselves by your similarities to others: you are all brothers and sisters, all children of God. And when people realize this and act this way, the Kingdom of God will be here.” Amen, end of sermon, end of religion, now go do it! This kind of talk is what makes the lives of prophets nasty, brutish and short. After all, nobody would ever have bothered to kill someone who just told you to love one another and have a nice day! That you can get from cheap greeting cards or bumper stickers. No, the most significant prophets and sages are deeply disturbing, because they are rearranging the foundations of our world.
I think Jesus’s teachings here are profound and disturbing. I believe if we could ever understand and act that way, the world would indeed become something that might as well be called the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Wisdom, because I can’t think of a better kind of world, no matter how unlikely it may be.
Now if this were a different kind of church and I were a different kind of preacher, I might get away with saying to you, “There, you’ve heard it, just listen to Jesus and obey, Amen!” Odds are though, it isn’t likely to work here. Most of you wouldn’t care who said it, unless you were persuaded that it was wise and might work. Knowing that I can’t just proclaim to you, but must also try to persuade you, is one of the things I like most about this profession.
So I’ll leave Jesus for awhile, and come at this from a different direction.
Remember: There’s never a problem accepting or welcoming people who are just like us. We know they’re the right kind of people. But how do we accept and welcome people who seem to differ from us in important ways? That’s the test of every personal belief system or religion, I think.
As you may know, the right to name the topic for this morning’s sermon was auctioned off to the highest bidder last fall. It feels a bit odd, being so bought and sold so openly! It’s the first time I’ve ever tried this. Ian Forslund, the lay leader this morning, was the highest bidder, and he asked me to reflect on what I think it should mean for a church to be a “welcoming church” – that is, to welcome into full participation and membership people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered.
You know all the liberal platitudes here about how, by golly, just everyone is welcome here because we don’t have a prejudiced bone in our collective body. I’m just not going to say those things. I won’t pretend that it’s easy, because it isn’t. I won’t pretend that it always really happens, even here, because it doesn’t. And if there is blame for this, I think it is shared by everyone. To persuade you of this, I’ll come at this from an odd angle, because the point I want to make runs counter to most of the talk I hear among cultural liberals – of any religion.
I want to look at this through the lens of some of our history as a society. Somewhere around 35 years ago, some time during the civil rights marches and the Vietnam War, we began losing our center as a society, and we haven’t got it back yet. We used to consider ourselves Americans. We were black, white, Hispanic, theistic, atheistic, liberal and conservative, but we were all Americans.
Then it started pulling apart. We began identifying ourselves by smaller and smaller identities, splitting ourselves off from one another by our differences. We became, and remain, Afro-Americans, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and the rest. This was a battle that had already been fought and won in the early decades of the 20th century, when we were taught not to hyphenate our identities – the hyphen was defined as a minus sign – but to define ourselves simply as “Americans.” But 35 years ago, it all began coming undone. Drugged by the narcissism of the 1960s and 1970s, we began defining ourselves by what was local, special, or different about us. Freud wrote about what he called “the narcissism of small differences” over 70 years ago, and we are still living it out.
I see our current “victim culture” in the same way: as definitions of one another isolating us through our differences rather than identifying us through our similarities. It’s almost as though we want others to like us because of the ways that we’re not like them. If there is much that’s more naive than that, I don’t know what it is.
Why? Because I don’t think we ever accept or welcome others based on their differences from us. We feel kinship when we feel related. We feel we all belong to the human family when we identify ourselves as brothers and sisters. And we can only feel related when we define ourselves by our similarities, by those things we share that we value more than those things we do not share.
For example:
If someone saves your life at the risk of their own, how much else do you really need to know about them? How much else do you really care? Or if a teacher finds a way to reach your troubled teenager for the first time, and it turns her life around – how much else do you need to know about that teacher who just saved the soul, maybe the life, of your kid? A young athlete scores the winning touchdown for your school, a young woman kicks the winning soccer goal. They just became local heroes. Nobody’s asking anything else about them.
Maybe it’s easiest to make the point I’m trying to make in sports, so let’s take some sports stories.
In the 1930s, a whole generation before the civil rights movement, the status of black people in this country was far worse than most of us could imagine. There were still a few lynchings in the South. Restaurants, restrooms, even drinking fountains were segregated, marked “whites only” or “colored.” I remember as a young boy living in Tulsa, Oklahoma seeing all of those signs. No one would argue that colored people, the negros, as they were called then, were in any sense full citizens of this country.
Also in the 1930s, our country was building a growing antagonism with Germany. Hitler had come into power, and was teaching the German people that their white race was the Master Race, immeasurably superior to blacks, Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and others. When Jesse Owens beat the fastest runners in the world – including Germany’s best – to win a gold medal at the 1936 Olympics, held in Germany, he was celebrated back here as an American hero. He was black, and he was a hero. And “hero” trumped “black.”
Joe Louis agreed to fight the great German boxer Max Schmelling around the same time, and we called him “America’s Hope.” He lost to Schmelling the first time and the Germans gloated. When Louis fought Schmelling again, and knocked him out in the first round, he was an American hero.
Jesse Owens and Joe Louis were not celebrated because they were black. They were celebrated because they were American, and they were great. The categories of being an American and prizing excellence were categories they shared with about 100 million other Americans. As long as they could be defined by their similarities with us, they were welcomed. When they were defined only by their differences – as they were in other areas of their lives – they were not welcomed.
After World War II, major league baseball – known then as America’s Favorite Pasttime – began to be integrated when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. Many people, including many baseball fans, hated him at first, because they just saw him as colored. They identified him by his differences, and they hated him.
But before long, they began to see him, instead, as a baseball player, and a very good one. Then they accepted him. Not as a negro, but as a remarkable athlete who made America’s favorite game better.
Today, it’s hard to believe that a half century ago all major professional sports in this country only allowed white players. Today, white players are a distinct minority in baseball, basketball and football. It has been a big change in the right direction.
Thirty years ago, as some of you will remember, the most famous person in the world, the man recognized by more people than anyone else on the planet, was Muhammed Ali, the loudmouth boxer. He changed his name from Cassius Clay – which he called his “slave name.” He refused to go into the Army to fight in Vietnam, and he converted to become a follower of Elijah Mohammed, the white-hating leader of the Black Muslims. If you’re out after three strikes, that’s at least four. Ali was attacked, reviled, his boxing championship was stripped, and he was forbidden to fight for about three years. But during this time, as he spoke at college campuses and everywhere else, people began to realize that he had a strong sense of integrity and authenticity. When he returned to the ring, he demonstrated both great boxing and great character, and became the best-recognized and one of the most admired people on earth.
Being accepted in all these other and larger categories made his race nearly irrelevant. He is still one of the most admired people alive. When he appeared as the mystery person chosen to light the Olympic torch a few years back, there was hardly a dry eye to be found. Sure he was still black, still a Muslim, still a loudmouth. But he was also a man of great integrity, a man of principle, a man with a great sense of humor, and a champion. And for the overwhelming majority of people in the world, those are far more important facts than the color of his skin.
Today, though we don’t mention it nearly enough, heroes and role models can be any sex, any race, and any sexual orientation. Five years ago the most famous man on the planet, and one of the most admired, was Michael Jordan. His Chicago Bulls basketball jersey, number 23, outsold all other team jersey numbers combined. You saw them on kids of all colors, because color didn’t matter any more. Everybody wanted “to be like Mike.”
If anyone had simply said “love him because he’s black,” we wouldn’t remember his name now. But we were saying we loved or admired him because we had learned to define him in much larger categories. He embodied values we respected but could not demonstrate as dramatically as he did. Jordan was fiercely competitive, he played fair, he was the best player the game had ever seen, he seemed almost to will his Chicago Bulls to six world championships – defeating at least two teams that were better.
And whether you saw him in press conferences, commercials, or funny and satirical comedy skits on “Saturday Night Live,” you saw a quality of character you couldn’t help but admire – and, probably, envy. Michael Jordan, like Muhammed Ali, Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens and Joe Louis, embodied the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., who hoped we would someday be able to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Slowly but surely, we are making progress in this, the most heterogeneous society on earth. Thirty years ago, interracial marriages were hardly ever seen. Today, 10% of the marriages in this country are between different races or ethnicities. And as it is with race, it is also becoming with sexual orientation, though we have farther to go there.
But Elton John was king of the world as an entertainer, and nobody cared that he was homosexual, and about as garish and flaming as you can get. Today there are many entertainers and actors who are openly gay, lesbian or bisexual, and who draw crowds because, more importantly, they’re talented, and we love talent.
Martina Navratilova was hated by some because she was a lesbian, but she was admired and applauded by far more, because for about a decade she was the greatest women’s tennis player in the world. The bigger categories trumped the smaller ones. She excelled in things we really cared about, and her differences from the sexual norms of the country became secondary, if they were even that important.
The social norms are changing for the better, and I think it is clear how they are changing and what the secret is, the secret of expanding our boundaries and welcoming people who differ from the social norms. We do have work to do, of course.
For one thing, we have to learn to accept a wider range of behaviors and life styles as parts of the social norm. We’re used to seeing couples holding hands. And the more couples we see holding hands who happen to be of the same sex, the more we’ll come to see it is natural that while most love is heterosexual, some love is homosexual, and what is important is that it is love. The more families we see where both parents are of the same sex, the easier it will be to understand that what we really value are loving parents. And if they’re loving parents and loving partners, we’ll be glad those kids have them, and glad those two people found each other.
It happens gradually, the way the rate of interracial marriage moved from almost zero to around ten percent.
But do you see what’s happening here, how and why it works? What’s happening is that when we begin to stop identifying ourselves by small or exclusive identities, it gets easier to feel related to one another. I think it is a self-defeating mistake for blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians – or for that matter religious liberals – to define themselves, or allow themselves to be defined, by the things that make them different from others. We should all want, instead, to be known by the content of our characters and the courage and compassion of our deeds.
So: how do we become welcoming people? The same way we become welcome people: by identifying ourselves and others only under the most important values and categories, the traits we all admire, the traits that can unite rather than divide us.
What are those? There’s no mystery here. We value people of integrity and courage, people of character. We value people who try to love, and try to offer their love out into the world in ways that give the world a blessing as they pass through it. We need and admire people who want to be in committed relationships, whether those relationships are with another person or with the larger human community. We admire and need good parents in our society, honest citizens, good workers and fair employers.
You know this list. You can finish it as well as I can. We admire and welcome people who act like they really are children of God, people with a little spark of divinity in them, folks who try to become better people, partners, parents and citizens: people who make our world better because they are in it. And the more we can identify ourselves and others by those standards rather than by lesser ones, the better our world will be. I do not believe that gay people want to be accepted merely as gay people, or that black people only want to be welcomed as our token blacks. I think they want what we all want: to be recognized and welcomed as our brothers and sisters, as children of a God of love. That’s the better world we need to create together.
How good can it get? Well, Jesus once taught that such a world, where we simply see ourselves as brothers, sisters and children of God, would be a world so perfect it could only be called the Kingdom of God. I can’t improve on that, so I’ll say “Thank you Jesus” – and Amen.
