By the Rev. Amanda Hendler-Voss

First Congregational Church, WDC

When I lived in Asheville, North Carolina, my  favorite coffee spot had a delicious drink called “Cesspool of Cinnamon.” A buttery warmth with a  tingle of cinnamon and punch of caffeine, the drink’s name was a play on the accusation made by a  state senator that gay-friendly Asheville was a “cesspool of sin.” While we chafed at his words, I was  grateful for the queer, creative reversal that transfigured his insult into my delight. 

I arrived in Asheville having already grappled with issues of gender and sexuality in college.  A self-identified evangelical raised in a conservative, pro-life home, I had selected a Christian school aligned with those views. Yet during my college years, I leaned into my feminist sensibilities, survived a natural disaster, and witnessed abject poverty working summers for the Appalachia  Service Project. My doctrinal certainty was toppled by lived experience, and I became a seeker— hunting God in afflicted places.  

Most of my generation did not grow up in open and affirming families or congregations. We have our own stories of how we got here; that moment when we could no longer justify a God  associated with bigotry. It might be a coming out story or personal relationship. For me, it was a  biblical studies class. Our feminist professor at this conservative Christian college insisted we read  “both sides” of the debate over what the Bible said about being gay. Both sides? No one had  bothered to tell me there was any other way of reading the Bible.

So, when I read these rich theological reflections on Jesus as fundamentally inclusive and  traversed the wild context behind stories like Sodom and Gomorrah or Paul’s letter opining on the  sexual practices of those devoted to fertility goddesses, my whole way of interpreting the Bible was  blown open. The way Jesus sums it all up is, “love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” The  way God is defined as love and all who love know God. It’s the way scripture tells on itself, providing a liberating corrective to the oppressive texts. I took seriously Howard Thurman’s question, What does our faith have to say to the masses who live constantly with their backs against the wall? 

So, I did something inadvisable in evangelical circles. I changed my mind. And it was a good  thing, because my roommate came out the very next semester as the only out person on campus.  When I tried to talk to my parents about it, fully equipped with the freshest biblical scholarship on  the matter, the conversation did not go well. You see, I could win the argument but still not change  their minds. And while I maintained a loving relationship with them, that is not true for many of the  people I have pastored over the years. I have encountered stories of conversion therapy, exorcisms,  and excommunication. I have listened to beloved people with more integrity than I can convey,  debate whether to go home if they couldn’t bring their partner or wrestle with a religion that had  excluded them so decisively.

So, I take heart to read that Jesus had some trouble with his family and faith tradition; that he was called delusional and of the devil; that they attempted to intervene so he would abandon his calling; that he was too much for them; too provocative, too radical in his concept of divine love. It brings me some comfort to know that before he overturned the tables of  the moneychangers, he overthrew the kinship structure rooted in obedience to patriarchy.

Mark’s gospel text for today begins with Jesus returning home after a mountaintop retreat  with the disciples. And the house, that structure so associated with family, is over-run by a voracious  crowd, hungry for healing and teaching and belonging. The crowd is so thick, Jesus cannot sit down to eat. His family thinks he’s taken this whole thing a little too far. Perhaps his siblings already  resented the humiliating rumors about his paternity. Perhaps his mother recalled the dire words of an old man who prophesied, “A sword will pierce your soul too.” When his family heard of the  crowds, they went to the house to restrain Jesus, a word used elsewhere to mean political  detainment. 

But it was too late. The scribes had already arrived from the capital to press charges. “He’s  out of his mind,” said his family. “He’s possessed,” said the scribes. Doubly denounced as deluded and demonic, Jesus decides to respond. One way of reading his parable is that it’s a call to  unity, for a house divided cannot stand. Lincoln’s famous use of this phrase notwithstanding, there is another compelling way to read this parable. Perhaps what Jesus is really saying is that the unholy  church-state alliance cannot stand. For the community of God does not belong to  power structures. It is God’s alone. And therefore, when it is divided, giving a portion of itself to the respectability of the status quo and a portion to line the pockets of politicians, the entire thing is bound to collapse. It is like a gilded mansion into which God breaks and enters like a thief in the night to plunder, to inaugurate the great reversal.  

Jesus’ primary hang-up, however, is not bad theology. Incorrect interpretation can be forgiven. “What is not pardonable,” according to Juan Luis Segundo, “is using theology to turn human liberation into something odious. The real sin against the Holy Spirit is refusing to recognize, with joy, concrete liberation taking place before one’s very eyes.” 

I felt this strongly on Day 1 in North Carolina, when the state legalized marriage equality  after a lawsuit brought by the United Church of Christ. I had participated in the “We Do” campaign championed by the Rev. Jasmine Beach Ferrara. In small, southern towns and cities, Rev. Jasmine recruited faith leaders to accompany LGBTQ couples who requested a marriage license at the register of deeds. It was a form of civil disobedience. We knew they would be turned away, and yet we wanted to pressurize the system and to support couples sharing their stories.  

On the day the ruling on marriage equality was set to come down, we gathered outside the  Register of Deeds. Hours later, having heard nothing, I picked up the boys from school and headed  home. My phone rang, and I was told, the court had ruled! When I returned to the register of deeds,  I tell you it was like the best party you can imagine. People were weeping and singing, unfurling flags  and waving signs. Joy was scrawled on every face. Clergy donned their stoles, couples pulled out  wrinkled copies of vows and spoke in earnest, halting voices. Partners who had spent years, even decades together, were pronounced married with the blessing of Christ’s church and the power  vested in us by the state. It was so beautiful. I can fathom a deficient theology that gets this issue wrong; what I cannot fathom is refusing to see the joy, the love, the liberation that broke loose on  that day.  

Our LGBTQ siblings have been teaching us all along about alternative family structures.  When your blood kin refuse to accept the most basic aspects of who you are, sometimes, like Jesus,  you have to expand your concept of kinship. You have to extend the circle of grace to those who  delight in you, who affirm and covenant with you. I believe that’s what we have here at First  Church. A family of faith, a people who bind themselves in God’s redeeming presence to walk  together in ways revealed by the Holy Spirit. And this community has its own story—of welcoming  the Metropolitan Community church to share our building and ministry in the 1970s. In 1987 we  were the 14^th congregation in the UCC to declare ourselves open and affirming. We have been home  to such saints as John Shepherd, former Music Director, who came out to the congregation in a  sermon and showed us how to live tenderly even as he died of AIDS. 

Beloved community, now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things  not seen. By faith our ancestors walked. By faith Abraham opened his tent in all four directions to  welcome sojourners from every walk of life, knowing that strangers are sometimes angels in disguise. By faith Joseph, despised and sold into slavery by his brothers for his princess coat of many colors, believed in his own wild dreams and saved the nations from famine, even his own brothers.

By faith Rahab the sex worker negotiated survival for herself and the women in her household. By faith  David loved Jonathan as his own soul and they bound themselves together in a covenant. By faith  Ruth told Naomi, where you go, I will go, and your people will be my people and your God my  God. By faith an Ethiopian eunuch asked, “what should prevent me from being baptized right here,  right now?” and by faith Philip baptized him immediately with the power of the Holy Spirit. 

And what more should we say? For time would fail us to tell of Priscilla, seller of purple  cloth; transgender patron St. Marinos, Pauli Murray, legal scholar and priest, Bayard Rustin, civil  rights organizer; James Baldwin, prophet and writer; Harvey Milk, activist and torchbearer; Audre Lorde, poet; Marsha Johnson, revolutionary drag queen; and Sally Ride, who soared to the stars— who through faith in love brought down powers and principalities, administered beauty, obtained  promises, shut the mouths of bigots, carried us with their words, escaped the barrel of the gun, won  strength out of weakness, became mighty in mercy, put oppression to flight. Others suffered  mockery and harassment, even assault and imprisonment. They went about clothed with  righteousness though persecuted—of whom the world was not worthy. 

Yet all these, though we commend them for their faith in love, did not receive the fullness of  the promise, but God provided for them so that, together with us, the seeds of truth might break  forth from the soil. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay  aside every weight and the shame that clings so closely, and let us pluck up hatred and plant with  perseverance the seeds of liberation and justice, looking to Jesus, the author of our faith. Amen.