One Nation Under Guns

After yet another mass shooting incident at a school...this time in Winder, Georgia, a rural community between Atlanta and Athens...I found it hard to concentrate on the upcoming lessons for Sunday. 

And so instead...I wrote this. The beginnings of what maybe will be a song. Or a rap. Or just an expression of the rage I feel every time I hear of people getting slaughtered in this country because Congress refuses to crackdown on gun manufacturers. 

One Nation Under Guns
Susan Gage
  
We are
What we believe.
A nation in bereavement
An ineffectual response from government
to the slaughter
of our daughters,
fathers, mothers, lovers,
colleagues,  
sons and friends.
Somebody tell me:
When will this end?
When will this end?!
 
Columbine, Virginia Tech,
Sandy Hook, Connecticut,
Vegas, Parkland, Winder,
Dayton, Stockton,
Pittsburgh, Charleston, Buffalo
Lewiston to Orlando
Nashville, Dallas, and El Paso
Baton Rouge and Atlanta
Aurora,
Thousand Oaks, California:
 
Do we hear ya?
Do we know ya?
Do we even give a damn?
 
At a concert, in a movie,
In a school, or buying groceries
There is no place we are free
From this sick mentality
That puts guns over people
Shooters’ rights as a staple
of the freedoms
we were promised with that life and liberty
Pledge allegiance to this land
With an AR-15 in your hand
 
Thoughts and prayers
Lifted high
But no action in reply:
 
Faith without works
is more death.
 
We are
What we believe
One Nation Under Guns.
 
We are
What we believe
One Nation Under Guns.
 
Bang.

Look for the Helpers: A Sermon for All Trauma

I don't feel the need to do a lot of explaining here. Needless to say Ascension Day came and went...and where I lived was greeted the next day with two...possibly three...EF2 tornadoes and 100-mile per hour straightline winds. It was a harrowing experience. And it greatly changed the trajectory of my sermon.

The Collect for the Seventh Sunday of Easter:

O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son
Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven:
Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to
strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior
Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and
the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

+++

Sometimes…unexpected things happen.

I had had many thoughts on our readings at the beginning of the week.

But my life…and the lives of countless others in Tallahassee… took a strange turn in the pre-dawn hours Friday morning.

It’s the same…or at least very familiar…experience many of us have been having these past several months...where wind and rain have done more harm than good to us…and those people and possessions we hold dear.

The National Weather Service has confirmed what many of us already knew: we in Tallahassee had lived through a tornado….and it’s associated straight-line winds of 100 miles per hour.

Those of us who paid attention to the weather the night before knew that we were in for some rocky thunderstorms and strong winds.

But somewhere between 6:30 and 6:45 in the morning…the alarms on our phones…and even off in the distance…signaled for us to seek shelter immediately in an interior room.

And so we did.

A roaring sound of wind.

The exhaust fan overhead began rattling.

 Rain pelted against the house.

When it all had finally stopped…our phones starting vibrating with texts.

“We have trees down, no power. We need to recharge batteries for an oxygen machine. Who has power?”

“Huge tree branch cracked through our ceiling.”

“Our house was hit by the tornado. Our back porch is smashed to pieces.”

“I smell gas in the neighborhood.”

“OMG. We’re calling the city.”

Gradually…all of us began emerging from our homes.

We met in the street…the rain still falling…but much more gently…as we stepped carefully over downed wires and branches from trees…some of them from trees we didn’t recognize.

A plastic drink cup here…a roof tile there.

A screen door bent open at this house.

And indeed…our neighbors’ washer and dryer on their elevated back porch now looked like a Salvador Dali design…metal warped and tilted and smushed together.

One neighbor couldn’t join us in the street.

A pile of busted trees limbs and large sections of a live oak had practically barricaded her front door and the lock for the gate to their backyard was on the outside.

Because they’re in the restaurant business…her husband had gone to work hours earlier.

Some of their friends arrived.

I told them she was trapped inside.

One of them climbed over broken limbs and steady himself until he reached the front door.

She was able to slip her hand out to give him the keys to back gate.

Carefully…he retraced his steps over slippery branches and was able to get around to unlock the gate and get her out of her house. 

Smiles…and celebrations lasted for a few minutes.

Then it was back to the reality of this huge and daunting task.

When can we get someone here to get rid of these trees blocking the street?

How can we cut up and lift these heavy limbs?

How can the city get our power back on with all this mess?

Only a half-mile away…the scene was even more bleak.

The growing and eclectic Arts District in a small former industrial park called Railroad Square…had suffered huge losses.

This included the roof of the theater company that has been part of my life since the early 1990s.

My friends….the neighbors whose back porch was mangled….now stood inside this theater that they’d built and developed…creating a creative community of writers and performers.

Now we stood with them…looking up through the trusses where the roof once had been.

The blue theater seats soaked and sprinkled with pink insultation.

It was a lot to take in.

These are moments that any of us can relate to.

The underlying emotion is grief.

Grieving a profound and sudden loss.

It leaves one feeling numb…unmoored from everything else…and plunged into a liminal space of neither here nor there.

It isn’t very often that you’ll hear me…or likely anyone…preach a sermon on the words of the Collect for the Seventh Sunday of Easter.

But the phrase “do not leave us comfortless” has been playing on repeat in my brain since about seven o’clock Friday morning.

In its context…the phrase is a prayer recognizing that last Thursday…the church marked the fortieth day of the Easter season….the day on which we say that Jesus finally ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of God.

We pray for the arrival of the Holy Spirit…which we will celebrate on Pentecost next Sunday.

So where we are in our church story is also a liminal space.

Jesus’ earthly ministry is over…but we have not yet…in theory…received the Holy Spirit.

At least that’s the story.

But in reality…that spirit is already with us….in us…and moving in and out…and up and down in our lives.

We know that’s true when something like a natural disaster…or any other major disruption happens to us.

When we’re plunged into a liminal space.

Because the spirit of God…is a spirit that doesn’t sit still.

The Holy Spirit of God is a motivator.

It pushes us to move outside of our selves…and rise up.

As the great theologian…and Presbyterian minister…Mr. Fred Rogers told those who hung out in his PBS Neighborhood… these are times to look for the helpers.

Because the spirit moves people to help…to support…to carry us when we feel the weight of sadness and despair pressing us down.

That spirit is present in a guy who climbs through a wet messy pile of moss-covered tree limbs to free a woman trapped in her home.

It’s those helpers…opening a home that is running on a generator to give respite from the heat…a cold cup of water…and a place to plug in battery packs…cell phone chargers…even running an extension cord to a neighbor so they can have a fan blowing in their home.

It’s the loaning of cars to those who’ve lost their transportation…the giving of clean clothes to those who can’t access their closets.

The offers to help clean up debris…run to get water and ice…or simply sit and hold the hand of someone who just needs to cry…and process the grief.

In those times when we want to scream…”How long O Lord, how long?”

Look for the helpers.

Be ready to receive them.

For they are the ones whom God’s spirit has called upon to show up…in answer to our prayers.

In the name of God…F/S/HS.

 

Palm Sunday 2022: Beware of the Powerful

 

Here it comes: my first Holy Week as a priest. As I was sipping on my coffee in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, a text came in from my seminary classmate, Mtr. Melina, wishing a slew of us all the best this week. It was a nice reminder that I have a crew of colleagues in the church spread throughout the country. That helped to give me a lift as I got in the car for the long drive to Valdosta. 

As is the custom, we did the reading from the Passion Gospel of Luke in parts. As a Mickee Faustkateer, I don't believe in gender-specific casting. And...like so many churches...St. Barnabas has more women present on any given Sunday, so the women have to play men. And, in the case of St. Barnabas, one of members is Transgender and volunteered to read the part of Jesus, a much better choice than the usual casting they've done (apparently, the priest has played Jesus for years. I refused. Theologically, it is not right to have the authority figure in the worship service play the role of the one questioning authority. So says this priest!)

Because the Gospel is so long, I kept my sermon to less than my usual 10-13 minutes. See what you think. 

+++

 

Text: Luke 22:14-23:56

 

Politics makes such strange bedfellows. And that can be found in one of the lines in the Gospel text:

“That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies.” (Luke 23:12)

The whole scene involves Pilate and Herod passing Jesus back and forth between each other to determine which imperial leader was going to take responsibility for convicting this upstart Jesus. Would it be the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate or the Jewish tetrarch Herod Antipas? 

This scene only appears in Luke…and no other authorities can verify that it happened. So why is it there?

Maybe Luke wanted to further establish just how much of an outsider Jesus was to the authorities of his day.

It could also be that this ping-ponging of Jesus between the two leaders recalls some of the gruesome details of the execution of John the Baptist…another agitator…whose head got passed from person to person at a birthday party.

I don’t know why it’s there.

But it serves as a useful allegory for us in the 21^st Century of what happens when politics and “religion” become bedfellows…when power perceives a growing threat from those it considers “other.”  It gets ugly. It’s worse when the representative of “religion” is barely recognizable as a true religious authority. Even though Herod was Jewish…he was a puppet of Caesar Augustus…and his kinfolk would have seen him as a collaborator with Rome. And Pontius Pilate was widely known to be a brutal authoritarian.

Even today…when politics and religion get intertwined in a competition of power and dominance…it’s usually those without the power who get hurt.

In our society…our extremely polarized society…there are those claiming moral authority in the halls of power who keep stoking the fires that have led to distrust…and anger…and our inability to have rational conversations with each other.

Here enters Jesus.

Once more…Jesus is showing us that when faced with a corrupted version of justice…when dealing with self-serving power brokers…he refuses to play their games.

When Herod wants him to perform a sign, he stays silent. When Pilate wants to know if he’s the King of the Jews, he gives a non-answer of “You say so.”

Some commentators say that Jesus is presenting an alternate reality. But what I think he’s doing is establishing what is the real reality: Love. 

Love as the more powerful force that doesn’t demand dominance.  

That Love gets nailed to a cross…and yet that cross and grave cannot contain that Love because Love is a greater force than evil and death.

We…as followers of Jesus are invited through our baptism to live into this reality and walk this path. 

This is a way of Love which takes us into the suffering world just as Jesus went…with the promise that if we stick with this source of Love…and when we fall away…come back onto the path…we can and will overcome the obstacles put in our way.

One more thing before I conclude.

As we enter into this Holy Week, we are going to be hearing readings from the Gospel of John that need a lot of context because of his repeated use of the term “the Jews.”

We must always remember that our evangelists were writing at a particular time and to particular groups of people….Luke, for instance, is really more for a Gentile audience.

What John gives us is an insider’s view of the polarized times in the Second Century. There was dissension in the Jewish family between those who believed in Jesus as the Messiah and those who looked around at a troubled world and said the Messiah had not yet come. This was the beginning of the split which would eventually lead to Christianity. We read these texts because John is the one Gospel that makes the strongest claim of Jesus as God…the Word made flesh.

Unfortunately…this Gospel has also been one of those texts that prove my point about what can happen when religion and political power get too cozy and corrupted.

The result has been horrific crimes against humanity…from the medieval Inquisition in Spain…to the Holocaust in World War II to the rise of anti-Semitism in this country and around the world. The Gospels…especially John…have been used to persecute Jews.

The terrible irony is that Jesus was a Jew.

So was Peter.

So was Judas.

So was Mary.

Each of them provide us an example of discipleship:

There’s the one who denies Jesus because he’s afraid of what ridicule and consequences he might face.

There’s the one who betrays Jesus for a profit.

And then the one who loves Jesus and bears witness to both his brutal death and his incredible resurrection.

All of them were on Team Jesus. To be anti-Semitic is to miss the point of Jesus’ whole ministry and mission which is to Love.

With that caveat…I invite you and encourage you to take this week…this Holy Week…as a time to slow down, and experience in body, mind and spirit what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Come back for a meal on Thursday…and the foot washing at the service. Take a moment to pause and take in the site of an empty altar.

Remember Jesus’ death on Good Friday with the stations of the cross and in the evening service where we name the many ways in which we need God’s help to make for a more just society.

And then return next Sunday to remember the reality: Resurrection is real. We are redeemed. We are loved.

Getting Right in the Heart: A Sermon for Ash Wednesday

 

There are some sermons that flow out of my brain and into my fingers on the computer keyboard pretty easily. This was not one of them. Between mourning the deaths of my godmother and a good friend from the Mickee Faust Club, a war raging in Europe because of a tinpot dictator such as Vladimir Putin, and the ongoing efforts to marginalize people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community in this country...I was having a hard time getting 'excited' to write a sermon for a day that is all about our mortality. As my spouse noted, I had a little bit of the late Fr. Lee Graham sitting on my shoulder exclaiming loudly, "I ain't dust!!" 

I understand his point, and I don't fully agree. I am dust. We all are dust. But we aren't dust yet, and we have work to do while we're still here in these bodies on this planet. And, in the end, it begins with getting right in our hearts. 

Texts: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21; Joel 2:12; Ps.51:18

+++

As I stand here tonight…I am aware that so many people have been experiencing loss because of death. We have been burying family, friends, parishioners, colleagues and neighbors. Beloved celebrities have passed away and with each of those deaths goes a little piece of ourselves…a remembrance of our childhood or some other part of our past that we thought we’d have forever.

And so at this service, where we remember our mortality, with those words that “we are dust and to dust we shall return,” there’s a part of me that is reminded of the old song refrain: How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away? How much more “reminding” do we really need that our time on earth is limited and fragile?

Then…on a night when our baptismal cross is re-traced on our forehead in black ash… we have the reading from Matthew’s Gospel, which seems to counter Jesus’ instructions to not make much ado about our piety and our prayers.  I don’t think you can get more obvious that you are a follower of Jesus than to walk around with a black cross smudged in the middle of your head.

But these ashes aren’t about showing off our piety and our Christianity, at least I hope that isn’t the motivation.

The Matthew passage highlights three practices that Jesus’ Jewish audience would have known…and we get the sense people are praying, fasting, and doing acts of charity and social justice. And since we’re here, I would be willing to guess we probably do some if not all those same things in our own lives.

But the actions themselves isn’t what is at the center of this Gospel. It’s about the intentions of the acts rather than the attention the acts receive.

The more I looked at it, the more I wrestled with this, I realized that a key line in the text comes at the end of the passage:  “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

The heart is a powerful and vital organ. It works to take in deoxygenated blood and pumps back out blood filled with oxygen into the body. This anatomical lesson became a point of mystical meditation for me some years ago when I was walking the labyrinth at my massage school. As I moved slowly through the cut grass, I had a vision of God as Love. And Love being represented by the heart symbol. I thought about how the heart and the lung work together in this kind of cleaning up and sending out blood into the body. And I thought about how the heart has four chambers…in the same way we hear that God’s house has many rooms. I remember that feeling I had that if God is Love, and Love is a heart, then what an amazing thing this is that Love takes in all the imperfection, cleans it up, and gives it new life to be sent out?  

Our biblical ancestors saw the heart as the center of thought, intention, and moral disposition. What happens in the heart becomes the way in which a person lives and moves and has their being in the world. If we think about the acts we do…such as if we make a charitable contribution…it can have the affect of helping another person or entity. It might also make us feel good or useful to have helped another. It can also be a means to draw attention to ourselves. That’s more of an ego trip and isn’t so much about relieving another person from suffering as it is about us feeling good for having performed goodness. It can also keep us separated from the other rather than entering their experience in a true sense of solidarity. We continue that siloed existence of “us” and “them” instead of seeing that we…every one of us…are in this life together…and have a responsibility to each other.

What Jesus is calling us to do in this excerpt from Matthew is to do an examination of ourselves, our motives, and be less about the performance of doing what is right, and actually fixing our hearts on God so that we live in right relationship with others. Jesus wants more than status updates on social media or checks in the mail.  We are called to have our hearts broken by being in relationship with the person who is hurting. As Mother Teresa was quoted as saying “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.”

That crazy, counter-cultural Jesus who wants us to break our hearts!

But he’s no crazier than the prophet Joel. The prophet calls upon people to “return” to God… with all our heart…rending our hearts and not our clothing.

God doesn’t need us to rip up our outerwear; God is looking for us to do a self-check and pull apart our hearts…figuratively speaking… and examine our thoughts, our intentions and how we go about living in the world.

Soon…we will hear the psalmist remind us that God doesn’t despise the broken and contrite heart. In fact, that’s exactly what God is looking for so God can get to work on us…just like the heart and lungs work to clean up the blood.

When we acknowledge our imperfections and mistakes, our anger and frustration at loss of control over events in our lives or the world around us, and even acknowledging the weight of our grief, that’s the moment when God comes to meet us. So if you have come here tonight with troubles…or a sense that things aren’t quite right in your world…this is your night…your season…to give space…and allow your heart to crack open. Begin the practice of fasting on the fears of falling short and feasting on the faith that we are loved by God as the Holy One’s human creatures.

May the cross of ashes on our foreheads serve as a visible reminder of that.

 

 

 

Pride Hits 50ish

Hello to those of you who are still occasionally checking this blog site. Seminary definitely has taken the ginger out of me having the mental bandwidth, energy, or actual time to keep up with posting on here. Pity! And that's why God gave me a summer break. That's right: a break. No tests. No papers. No CPE. I will have to do all of that in good time. But for now, I can do things in my own way, and at my own pace. 

It also means I've been free to participate in the Mickee Faust Club's "Queer As Faust XII" cabaret. Originally, I was only cast in one piece, in which I was acting behind a screen. Not much to do there. I was also directing two other pieces.  Fortunately, our artistic director made the artistic decision to put me in the cast of our opening musical number, one of the pieces that I read and had wanted to direct. But to be in it was much sweeter. It was a chance to dress in drag, Drag King in my case, leather jacket and blue jean cut off shorts. And it was the opportunity to tell the story...in song...of our liberation as same-gender loving people.

The struggle which, in truth, began even before those hot summer nights in 1969 in New York City remains a modern day movement of continuously working for our right to be treated with respect and dignity. Transwomen of color are at tremendous risk of being murdered. The attacks on lesbian and gay people are on the rise worldwide. And we are living under a presidential administration in this country where the second in command pushes for policies to encode homophobia in the name of "religious freedom." All of these things seem to me to be contributing factors as to why the youth
of this country are showing signs that they aren't as "tolerant" of the LGBTQ+ community as in previous years.

It is a curious argument to make that Christians, who should be living in the liberating love of God, lack some sort of earthly freedom that keeps them so shackled that they need a law to protect them. Of course, they aren't actually under any kind of duress; they just want ban queer people from jobs, housing, or public accommodations. In other parts of the world, it is permissible to kill someone if they are discover they are gay.

This is why it is so important, now more than ever, for Christians who are queer and have known the loving, lifegiving, and liberating God make themselves known and seen. This isn't the time for us to be tame and toothless. We know we are part of the Gospel story. We have experienced God's truth as a loving, loyal, leader for Love. Therefore, if there is a group that must be ready to take to the streets on behalf of our community and show our young men and older women that when Jesus talks of "other sheep" who he must gather into the fold, he is searching for all those who have been hurt by the church corporate. And we must also be ready to shine the light of Christ into the dim places of our society where racism and anti-immigrant feelings still prevail. We are called to be bold and brave...just like those drag queens, butch lesbians, and street hustlers were at the Stonewall Inn in 1969. As this Pride Month ends, let's not forget the struggle our predecessors endured gives us the strength to keep fighting on. Or in the words of our Faust opening anthem:

We're here! We're queer! We'll never give up the fight.

Endings and Beginnings

The remains of Immanuel Chapel and the new Immanuel Chapel at dusk.

Welcome to three years of intense community-living.

OK, that's not what they said, but that was my sense at the end of today's first day of orientation at Virginia Theological Seminary. 

This has been a very long, strange trip to get to this point. And I had a very long drive with Isabelle, made longer by rainstorms and insane amounts of traffic on I-95, to reflect on where I have been, what I was leaving, and....

What the hell am I doing?!?!?!?

I had a happy life with a cat who had become very attached to me. My spouse and I have been through many ups and downs and twists and turns together for more than 27 years. I have friends, some very close to me. I had a massage practice with wonderful clients and participated in all the antics of the Mickee Faust Club. 

And yet....here I am. 

It made me think about all those stories in the Gospels about the calling of the various disciples. The way the evangelists tell it, Peter and Andrew and James and John and Matthew and all the others caught sight of Jesus, heard "Follow me," and just dropped their lives and went on their way after this itinerant rabbi who was preaching a radical old idea of love God and love your self and your neighbors with no asterisk or black out dates. I wondered, "Really? Did these guys just so easily and willingly drop their lives to follow Jesus?! Didn't they think this was a bit wild? Did our chroniclers of Jesus' life and miracles clean these stories to avoid the messiness of human attachment and emotion?"
After my own experience, I am convinced that if we wanted to do some midrash on these stories, we'd find that it wasn't so easy for them either. In fact, we get hints of that, dropped here and there in the Gospels, where these followers of Christ express frustration with their decision to leave behind everything. In Matthew's Gospel, right after Jesus informs the rich man that to "be perfect" he needs to sell all of his possessions, give the money to the poor, and follow Jesus, Peter basically says, "We sold everything. We have nothing. What about us?" Later, in that same Gospel, the disciples get testy with each other about who is the greatest apostle of them all. It is the attachment to things, to comforts, that seem to needle at the apostles in ways that I, as one who is going through that process of endings and beginnings, can relate. Even if our evangelists don't outright tell us things, my sense is that the women who followed Jesus and the men who get the credit for being "the twelve" had parts of them that were pained in all of this, and had hoped for something not as a difficult. Even the greatest of saints can get the blues.
With that in mind, I guess I'm in good company. Certainly in the first few days of meeting my new classmates, I can sense that I am not the only one who is experiencing the pain of separating from all that was familiar to embark on something as countercultural as devoting your life to love and serve for the purpose of extending God's Love to a world that isn't fair, isn't just, and can be unbelievably mean. 

Will somebody help my cat understand that?

All of Me

It was the end of a rehearsal one night at the Mickee Faust Clubhouse, and I was gathering up my scripts into a folder. We’d just finished prepping a musical number for our tenth annual “Queer As Faust” cabaret, a song poking fun at the president and his gay supporters in the Log Cabin Republican group. One of my fellow cast members wanted to know how I “do this” (meaning Faust) while being a Christian.

This was not the first time I have been asked this question. I had something of the reverse put to me years ago when I arrived at St. John’s Episcopal Church in my leather biker jacket. A member and fellow Eucharistic Minister said to me, “You can’t come in dressed like that. This isn’t Mickee Faust!” (I should note, he was smiling and clearly ribbing me.) But his joke was likely a serious matter for others.

How can I be in Faust and be an active Christian?

I doubt anyone would call the Mickee Faust Club a “holy place.” It is very rooted in the secular world with a mythology built on the quest for world media domination by a giant rat who smokes a cigar, cracks bad jokes, and is the unloved twin of another much more famous Florida rodent with a Magic Kingdom in Orlando. The woman under the rubber rat ears is an avowed atheist as are many of the company members. Some were raised in households where church attendance was mandatory or were put through a parochial school where education came with a heavy dose of Roman Catholicism or Southern Baptist Convention. Many of us identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community and as such have experienced the cruelty of Christians coming to our events and railing against us while waving the Bible in the air. Such experiences tend to color one’s opinion of Christianity and not in a good way. And when Christianity asserts that its name sake is God in human form…well, it then makes God a culprit in the nastiness of God’s followers.

But then look at Jesus and the people and places where he primarily moved and lived and had his being. Yes, he taught in the Temple, and people were astounded and amazed at his teachings. Yes, he would have dinner with Pharisees (probably because he was of that set). But much of the time, Jesus was hanging out with all those people who were “those people.” He was close to women and men who had no power to speak of, who were the discarded, ignored, or abandoned of his society. He didn’t assert himself with hellfire and brimstone; his power was in his presence and his willingness to enter the experience of these “others.”

Why do you suppose Jesus preferred to be in these settings? Some might say it’s because “these people” needed to be saved. That would be the popular approach to these stories. But I think another way to see this could be that Jesus was searching for those who were the most fertile ground for achieving His ultimate goal: bringing God and humanity together. If Jesus’ mission was to meet people where they were and not where they ought to be, and if his mission was to go in search of the lost and those who had been pushed away, then he’s going to be seen in some places that his society might have deemed “impure.”

Which brings me back to Faust and being a Christian and that whole notion that if I’m a Christian, how can I possibly be part of Faust? I’d say because Jesus expects to be part of the mix of perfect imperfection of our lives so that the mission of Love and reconciliation continues through us. God doesn’t just love that part of me that can recite prayers, or kneel at the altar. God works through me whether I’m at Faust or offering healing touch to someone on my massage table.

God isn’t contained in things and buildings. The spirit of God lives and moves within us and the way we treat one another and live into that new commandment to love and seek out each other. That can happen at Faust and at Church.

Love Boldy, Freely, Queerly

 I participated this evening in a prayer vigil at First Presbyterian which was pulled together by various LGBTQ+ groups. I spoke on behalf of both PFLAG and the Mickee Faust Club. The PFLAG comments were a last minute extemporary explanation about who the group is, how it functions, and that it actually meets at First Pres in the Westminster Room. And then, I turned to talking about the meaning of the Mickee Faust Club:

The Mickee Faust Club is known for making people laugh. But it is very hard to find humor at a time when we are hurting, and your Faustkateers…like everyone…are in pain, shock and horror over this hate crime in Orlando. Spaces such as Pulse are the safe havens for those of us who have suffered threats of violence and physical and verbal attacks for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or any other variation of non-conforming to the “norm” of society. It’s these spaces that allow us to be free and to breathe and relax and be at home. The Mickee Faust Club has been one of those comforting “queer places” for almost three decades in Tallahassee, and it is a center of activism for the gay community. So we have felt this attack on Pulse both at an individual and a corporate level.

But the spirit of our theater troupe is the same vibrant, creative, strong and amazing life force that exists within the larger LGBTQ+ community. We love. And because we love, we are able to laugh. And because we laugh, we can shed light into those dark corners of the world that are threatened and scared of our love. Forty-nine bright lights were violently snuffed out this past weekend. But the fire of our love will not be put out or put down. Or silenced with paper bags over our heads or shoved back into the closets so many of us finally escaped. Together with love we will take to the stage in Railroad Square and be Queer As Faust to the Ninth Power!!

Love may have suffered a blow to the heart this weekend, but we will pull together and we will overcome. Remember the dead with the defiance that has defined our movement from Stonewall to today. Love boldly, freely, and queerly. Faust is with you!

Sins of the Past Revisited

"The repeated Johns Committee assaults on my integrity and my worthiness as a human being left permanent emotional scars.  To this day, my emotions are undergirded by dark feelings of unworthiness; of being "less than" when compared with others.  While one learns to cope with these feelings, they never truly go away.  For me, that is the true legacy of this dark period in the social history of our country.  Hopefully, enlightenment and eternal vigilance will preclude its return."--Art Copleston, one of the victims of the Johns Committee.

During this month of LGBTQI Pride activities around the country, it is fairly customary to pause and reflect on the road that we have traveled to get to the places we are now.  Such was the case last night at the Mickee Faust Club, where we screened a 30-minute documentary called, "Behind Closed Doors: The Dark Legacy of the Johns Committee."  The film, done as a thesis project by a University of Florida journalism student in 2000, tells the story of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee headed by State Senator Charley Johns of Starke.  Johns had recently been defeated for Governor (he was serving in place of Governor Dan McCarty who had died in office), and had returned to the Florida Senate where he decided to make his legacy starting this committee of legislators, lawyers, and law enforcement officers to root out Florida's criminal element.  "Criminal element" is a euphemism for "civil rights leaders, communists and homosexuals."  
The group first went after the membership records of the NAACP.  The NAACP mounted a formidable resistance, fighting the committee in court, all the way to U.S. Supreme Court which said the organization did not have to turn over its membership list.  Having been stymied in this effort, they went to the group that had no defenders: the lesbian and gay community of Florida.  And for the period from about 1958-1965, the Johns Committee made the lives of gays and lesbians in public schools, universities and state government a living hell.  At Florida State, investigators would throw parties hoping to entrap gay male students.  They also patrolled the Greyhound bus station.  Students were either expelled or they were enlisted to become informants for the committee.  Professors were hauled out of classes by investigators and interrogated for hours in motel rooms.  It was state-sanctioned terror.

Part of what brought the committee's work to end was the publication of its infamous "Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida" booklet, which was designed to shock the sensibilities of Floridians.  Instead, "The purple pamphlet" (so nicknamed because the cover was a swirl of purple) offended lawmakers who couldn't believe that Johns used taxpayer dollars to make a soft porn publication, complete with a glossary of terms and suggestive photos of anonymous gay sex and bondage.  

There was another factor that helped end the activities of the Johns Committee.  The population of Florida was shifting more to the south which meant there was a growing number of urban, and more urbane, up and coming lawmakers coming to the state Capitol.  And when the Johns Committee decided to go after gays and lesbians at the newly-created University of South Florida campus, legislators from the Tampa area, including former Congressman Sam Gibbons, were furious.  The committee's work came to a close in 1965, and Senator Johns moved to have the records sealed until December 31, 2028.   However, voters in 1992, passed a state constitutional amendment affirming our desire for open records which forced the release of the Johns Committee's work product, all 30,000+ pages of it.  Today, those records are maintained at the Florida State archives in the R.A. Gray building.

 As I thought about this record of past sins, I kept reflecting on the message I received above from Art Copleston, one of the students at the University of Florida who ended up on the wrong side of the Johns Committee.  He shared with me that he's soon going to be turning 82, and has lived a full and rewarding life as a gay man.  And yet, he expresses the fact that he's learned to cope with the feelings of inadequacy from that period where he was interrogated and made to feel as if he was a "pervert" in need of "help."  Those feelings are still there for him.  And it made me realize that there are many of us, perhaps even a whole generation, who, despite the confidence we have and our sense that we are good and right, we are somehow a "less than."  Even as our society evolves in its thinking on LGBTQI rights, the Governor of Texas and his state Republican Party are saying that we're like alcoholics, diseased and in need of a cure.  Our own Attorney General in Florida says to grant us the civil rights of marriage would do irreparable harm to the state.  And let's not even talk about what various faith communities, and bishops, might say about our righteous selves.  Sadly, these sins are still with us today.

When I wrote back to Art, I told him the truth as I know it:  he never was a "less than," and he still isn't today.  It doesn't matter what the committee's investigators told him.   I can only hope that when his days on earth come to an end, he will find himself standing with the other saints, Harvey Milk, Bayard Rustin, Stormé DeLarverie,and the many others and be finally freed from any lingering doubts that he is loved exactly as he is without an asterisk.  

Love and Suspension of Disbelief

The diviners of the Episcopal Church lectionary have cobbled together a curious group of readings: the beginnings of Jeremiah the prophet; the famous passage from Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians that so often gets used at marriage blessings; and finally, Jesus teaching in the synagogue to a crowd, who are at first amazed, and then so royally ticked off that they nearly hurl him off a cliff.

My favorite part of that Gospel story is the last line: "But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way." That reminds me of the Mickee Faust parody of 1940s radio plays, "Jake Ratchett: Short Detective," in which our diminutive hero is surrounded by an all-girl gang with their guns aimed at his head. He gets away by simply stating, "I escaped that time!" No other explanation needed. The audience laughs at the absurdity of it all, and suspends disbelief in order to allow Jake to get away. I suppose we are to do the same with Jesus.

Suspension of disbelief, in theater, means that the audience must pretend that physical or time and space improbabilities aren't important enough to dwell upon. The audience accepts whatever world it is that the actors and actresses and the technical designers have created. This fantasy then becomes the reality. In some respect, I think to have faith requires a willingness to let go of critical analysis and acknowledge the unbelievable as totally believable.

It takes faith, and the suspension of disbelief, to be willing to accept that God would speak to one such as Jeremiah, who argues that he is not the best candidate to be the bearer of God's word as a prophet. Jeremiah himself says, "Ah, Lord God, truly I do not know how to speak for I am only a boy." But in God's reality, Jeremiah is exactly the one to be a prophet. After all, God knew him before he was in the womb, and consecrated him before he was born. And so God puts the words into Jeremiah's mouth, giving him the power to "pluck up and pull down; destroy and overthrow; to build and to plant." It isn't often these days that God places finger tips to lips to give people the words to say what needs to be said. At least, we don't, in our very rational and reasoned minds, believe that God gives us the words to say.

The night my father told me he wanted to die, I remember that he was in such terrible pain and he couldn't articulate to me what was happening. I struggled mightily to understand him, but his mouth and tongue just couldn't form the words in a language I could recognize. Now, I was not going to church in these days, nor did I pay much attention to God at all. But in desperation, I looked up at the ceiling, tears streaming down my cheeks, and begged God for help. It was then that I had the realization that what I needed to do was instruct my father to breathe out each word, one at a time, so I could get what he was saying. I gave my dad these instructions, and he spoke plainly, and clearly, to say, "I. Want. Outta. Here." I double-checked that I understood what he'd just said, and wanted to clarify if he meant out of his assisted living home, or out of the whole she-bang.

"Whole. She. Bang!"

Difficult as that conversation was to have with my father, it was also a moment of deep and abiding love made possible by the wisdom of God. I could claim that I thought of this idea to get my dad to breathe out each word, but it really wasn't my idea. The reality was, I didn't know what to do. The faith element was that I sought God's intervention into that moment to make communication possible.

When St. Paul talks about love being patient and kind, the love he is speaking of is not an emotion. It is God. God who is also known as Love. The Love that bears all things and believes all things and can make things happen in those moments when we just don't have the ability to speak words of wisdom. This is the Love that casts out fear to bring about peace and acceptance in a conversation between a dying parent and a child.

This is the same Love that was on the lips of Jesus when he riled up the crowd in the synagogue. He had just wowed them with his teaching on the prophet Isaiah by telling them that the prophesy he'd just read was fulfilled by them hearing it. They were enthralled, but then he told them the things they didn't want to hear: that Israel has had many widows and lepers amidst its people, but the ones to whom the prophets Elijah and Elisha tended to and visited were not Jews; they were Gentiles. This enraged the crowd, who were fuming at the idea that they were not as deserving of the great prophets' attention as the Gentiles. Were they not the loved ones of Love?

Yes, they were. But Love is not envious or boastful or rude. We might also extend this idea to mean that Love is not exclusive or limited to a single group. And in this case, speaking in Love means telling the truth about those whom the Israelites saw as "others." There are no boundaries when we are talking about the Love that endures all things. Because that Love is the reflection of God's very inclusive reality.

Our task is to enter into that reality, not just as audience members, but as actors and actresses in the play, and be willing to suspend...or even give up... our disbelief. That's when God's reality becomes our reality, too.