|
||||
| ||||
|
|
|
The Welcome Table June 26, 2005 The Reverend Terry Ellen Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland Opening Words We light this chalice in honor of the hope that dwells in all people- the hope for a place to feel at home, to be who we authentically are and to be seen and appreciated for that, the hope to be part of a community of people moved toward kindness and drawn toward justice, the hope to breathe easily, at peace with ourselves and with our neighbors, the hope to do for others as we wish them to do for us. Remembering all those before us who have struggled for such a hope, we dedicate ourselves to making this hope real among us and for the wider world. Centering in Words Out of wonder are we born. Out of a majestic reality no language can fully encompass have we come. Our brains, starting out on any path and following it more perceptively and deeply, arrive by these myriad ways at the marvel and beauty, elegance and subtlety of what simply, incredibly, is. God, goddess, love, cosmos, mystery, Tao, Brahma, the unutterable, AH!, whew, on and on our words go, still and always the miracle resides. We are so much more than we commonly suppose, than our restricted self-definitions allow. From this whole universe, ineffable, mind-boggling, humbling, exalting, multifaceted yet one, we each and we all emerge here, with each other, with flowers, plants, trees, birds, two- and four-legged ones, the whole panoply. Alive, with each other, all given a gift beyond the ability to tell, enjoying a munificence we had nothing to do with providing, freely given an inheritance the acceptance of which leads us irresistibly and joyfully to compassion, towards justice, into beauty, right at home in love, full of mercy. This inheritance, this reality, this chance, is not the province of any one religion, dogma, language, viewpoint, or people. It is for us all, and it is for everything, not just humans. It is our supreme privilege to be part of this miracle within us and around us, one and the same. It is our unfathomable ever-present opportunity. It is our transformation, it is our growth, it is our learning, it is our fulfillment. Amen Sermon There is a graciousness in you people gathered here. I felt it early, and it has continued during my two years here. It is a tone that permeates this place. My experience is that it is a basic kindness joined with intelligence and a love of beauty. Your flowers, your music, your well-done booklets and flyers and procedures, even your policies!, and the way your Board and other groups interact with each other—these all enter into the tone of graciousness. But the real proof of the pudding is the feeling of being welcomed by you. Of course, as a Unitarian Universalist minister I occupy a kind of special place in a congregation like this, but, trust me, you can’t assume a gracious welcome from being in this position. In fact, UU’s are kind of famous for making sure to whittle their ministers down a peg or two to keep us clergy from getting too big for our britches, or dresses, from thinking we can start getting religiously dictatorial like some of our distantly-related religious professionals. So I did not necessarily come here expecting a warm welcome, even with your reputation as a minister-friendly congregation, born at least partly out of the long years of good ministry here. But I found such a welcome, and it has made my time here joyous. Thank you for that. It makes all the difference. And I certainly hope that everyone who walks in through these doors finds something similar. I’ve heard of some who have not. I’ve talked to many who have. I know with Bonnie Beavers and Sara Deshler as your welcomers, the chances of people slipping between the cracks and ending up reading the notices on the wall at coffee hour have no doubt dropped precipitously. And I know Roger and Susan, Lyn and Glenis, Jeannette, Lucy, Bob, Pedro and Mickey, Burke, Glenn, Mary and Richard with their music, and your wonderful Call Girls at the front desk do all they can to welcome people. But gracious welcome is something that is done by and felt from a whole group, and that is where I have felt it. And it is the most ancient and most elemental form of blessing that there is, a generosity of spirit, an openness to new experience, a curiosity about another human being, a living out of the Golden Rule, made even more precious and powerful by being extended toward the stranger rather than the known friend. In the Bible you go back to the early parts of Genesis where God and one of his angels disguise themselves and visit Abraham and Sarah and are welcomed. The resulting early biblical injunction is to be kind to strangers, for thereby many have entertained angels unaware. The Greek gods and goddesses you remember also disguised themselves and judged people by their welcome of strangers, of the different, as was the case with Philemon and Baucus. And you can read Homer’s Odyssey not only as the story of the value of home and a man’s desperate need to return to it again, but also as the saga of how a stranger is welcomed by various people in his travels, for Homer knew well that the difference between gracious welcome and exploitation of or cruelty toward the stranger was the difference between civilization and barbarity. Think about it, friends: in a society with no police force to protect or to punish, your only protection among those outside your family lay in the strength of this custom to be welcoming to strangers, to those somewhat different. So this is a powerful ancient principle of welcome and protection. And it is worth far more than money. It sure has been for me here. But looking out at our wider culture, and seeing what Richard Madaleno has been up against in the Maryland legislature and what other gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are up against in our culture, seeing the very clear and pernicious unwelcome mat often put out before them, I knew what this service needed to be about. I couldn’t value what you all have so generously given me and not want that sense of welcome for everybody. Having felt free to blossom here because of your graciousness, I know people need that sense of acceptance to blossom themselves. And what is going on against G/L/B/T folk, as the shorthand for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people shortens it, these days is nothing short of persecution. As they ask to be treated with the kind of respect just naturally accorded heterosexual people, a great cry of protest erupts. The Bible is trotted out to make of same-sex attraction a horrible sin condemned by God himself. They, like women and African-Americans before them, let alone Irish and other immigrant groups, are seen as pushy, seeking special advantage if they ask for simple equality before the law. Let me say here that we UU’s do not ask for uniformity of opinion on all the issues involved. There is no dogma here. We know feelings about sexuality run strong and deep. We know, for all the fact that many rale against the fundamentalist preachers on this one, that we have, most of us, grown up in a culture strongly influenced by a certain reading of the Bible, and, just like racism or a denigration of womanhood, we have osmosed a lot of attitudes unconsciously. But that is precisely why we are asked to look with new eyes at the spectrum of human sexuality, to look consciously, thoughtfully, and well, and with what we now know, at these issues. That’s why we UU’s have not been sleeping, but rather have engaged in study, reflection, and action. On the wall in our entrance hangs the Welcoming Congregation certificate testifying to a diligent self-examination of this congregation in the 1990's in its altitudes and welcome towards gays and lesbians. You have a right to be proud of that certificate, though it is now in need of renewing and updating. And from 1970 on, our General Assemblies have passed resolutions against discrimination against gays and lesbians, in favor of welcoming them as ministers in our congregations, in favor of our ministers performing services of holy union, in favor of including bisexual and transgendered people into this welcome. We do not require unity of thought, and we know well that this is a long process of study, thought, and action, but we have taken a stand as a gathered people. And we are committed to examination of attitudes and to action for just behavior and law when warranted. And now before us is the issue of opening the institution of marriage to same-sex couples. I can tell you that when I first heard of this issue, I was in favor of just keeping the standard understanding of marriage as it was and finding another term for same-sex couples, as long as the rights of shared property, hospital visitation, inheritance, health insurance, etc. were also granted with whatever word we came up with. It seemed at first look easiest to me. But it dawned upon me that the old separate but equal argument inherent in this stance was just the same as that argument with African American rights. Legally separate is never legally equal. Further, it was pointed out that there is no chance of the 1,000 federal legal benefits to married couples being retroactively enacted for same-sex couples in a separate manner. Without the word “marriage” giving those rights, that will simply never happen. And, most surprising to me, was a dawning realization of just how much marriage has changed over the years, although many these days seem to think it has been a fixed, unvarying institution for centuries. For one who thought that marriage was pretty much the ability to just show up at the right place and the right time and say “I do,” this has been a real revelation. For instance, for its first one thousand years, the Catholic Church never considered marriage a sacrament. It was seen as an arrangement between families for the transferal of property and determining of inheritance. When women acquired the right to own their own property within marriage and keep their own earned wages, the demise of marriage was bemoaned far and wide. So it was bemoaned, too, when divorce was legally allowed. So it was too when contraception was made legal. So it was too when people of different races were allowed to marry, which happened by Supreme Court ruling in 1967 overturning the laws of forty-one states forbidding it. Restriction after restriction has been changed historically, and the evolution has also been happening toward changing marriage from a property transaction to a commitment of mutual loving commitment to one another. The change has been gradual, but consistent and clear. In fact, at weddings I do, I remind people that a wedding happens in the mutual pledges of love made between two people. Everything else in the service is frosting. Even the officiant pronouncing them married at the end of the service means that he or she is merely the first one to be able to say they are married, since their vows have been witnessed. But the pronouncing in no way means that the officiant has made them married. Everyone gets confused by this, and also by the mixing of civil and religious in the classic phrasing, “Therefore, by the authority vested in me by the state of. . . , I pronounce . . .” I just leave it out. So now other couples ask to be included in this newer understanding, but are told their admittance will undermine the sanctity of marriage. Several points here. First, foremost, we must keep clear the distinction between civil marriage and religious marriage. They are joined together in all religious weddings, and so it is easy to conflate them. But no one is asking any religious institution to change any of its thinking about marriage. Any religious tradition can determine whom it will allow to marry within its rites and can define marriage any way it wants to. They can deny divorce. They can say only a man and woman, whatever. That is not in question here at all. The question is whether the state, not the religions, has an interest in excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage, the marriage defined by laws of the state, as it formerly denied mixed-race couples, or as it formerly denied the right to individual property to be held by married women. For the life of me, I cannot see any such interest, unless we are a theocracy basing our law upon the thousands of years old writings of Leviticus. But if we are such, then let us get rid of bankers, for usury is forbidden thousands of times compared to the several mentions of same-sex sex. Or lets start enforcing that the sacrificial laws of the temple be followed, or the hundreds of other arcane laws found there. To focus on homosexuality when everything else is forgotten is to be obsessive, to say the least. It is certainly to be unfair and unjust - even if you grant that the passages are interpreted properly, which usually they are not. No, our civil laws are not religious laws, nor should they be. As to the sanctity of marriage, I’ve never understood how people clamoring to gain admittance to an institution destroyed its sanctity. It seems to me they rather boost up its importance. But even further, sanctity is a religious term, not a civil one. The state is not in the business of preserving sanctity. It is supposed to be about begin fair, being equal, being just. Religious traditions can define sanctity any way they choose and proclaim, and they may even practice it. Do we really want same-sex couples who want to pledge their love to one another not to be able to enjoy the protections of inheritance, visitation, insurance, taxes, adoption, child custody, and on and on that heterosexual committed couples do? (Most of us don’t even have a clue about all the legal advantages of marriage, so accustomed are we to them.) Are we willing to toss out the accumulating scientific evidence that sexual preference is not an act of will, but rather something given us? Will we really choose three thousand year old documents to guide us in these issues, despite all that has been learned in the meantime? Are we really so committed to only seeing one acceptable form of sexual expression, even though the natural world shows us myriad manner? We need to consider these things together, to inform ourselves on the changing history of marriage, and to stand up as we see fit these days. For to me this is a question of civil rights. And for me it is a question of whether the straight community will stand up for the gay community, whether the majority will protect the rights of the minority. There is a story about the difference between heaven and hell. I know we Universalists don’t admit of a hell, at least the way it is commonly seen, but nevertheless. The story is that a person asks to see hell and is shown a huge banquet hall with people sitting around tables piled high with delicious food. It’s a feast, and it sure doesn’t look like hell, at least until the person notices that no one can eat because their arms won’t bend. They can look and drool, but they can’t eat. The person asks to see heaven and is shown a banquet hall with people sitting around tables piled high with delicious food. They, too, cannot bend their arms. So they have decided to feed each other. And that is the difference between heaven and hell. And that is why it seems imperative that the straight community start standing up here for the g/l/b/t community, start defending them, speaking on their behalf, and not leaving it up to them to have to advocate for themselves by themselves. This is our job, majority. This is our task. We need to take up our arms to start feeding our brothers and sisters. Another excluded people long ago came up with a song. “We’re going to sit at the welcome table. We’re going to sit at the welcome table one of these days, Hallelujah!” These people were very practiced at serving other people sitting around tables, but of course they weren’t invited to sit down, too. But they knew, as surely as they believed that God is just, as surely as they knew that every person has dignity and worth, as surely as they knew that we are all enriched by the sharing of that dignity and worth, that they would by and by sit at a table and be welcome at it, everyone with a place, everyone with a plate set for them. Maya Angelou even has a recipe book of African-American cuisine called The Welcome Table. Well, it’s time to welcome some more people at that table. And it’s time to welcome them to sit down as married couples if they so choose. It’s time to once again demand this country live up to its promises and its best vision. You have welcomed me to your feast, and it’s a marvelous one, and for that I will forever be thankful. I take this banquet with me in my heart. And it’s time to extend that graciousness out and about, to set our civil marriage table with same-sex plates. In so doing we all will be enriched and blessed by the company of each other. This is what it is all about. |
Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist
Church |
