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Embodied, Integrated Queer Spirituality
May 23, 2004 - 11am Service
by Rev. Paul Fairley
Let’s pray together. Goddess, God, we call into this place the
voices that have cried out for freedom and justice, our ancestors in
the struggle that we share, our ancestors on the journey that we walk,
we invite them into this place. God, we invite you this day into our
hearts. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of us be
pleasing to you in all of your many names. Amen.
I’ve had this week this sense of history repeating itself. It’s
like every night I turn on the news and they’re playing a video
tape. They’re not actually there reporting. I mean don’t
you have the sense that we’ve kind of been in this movie before?
We’ve been to war in far off countries but we don’t know
why. I’ve been in that movie before. We’ve traded our fear
of nuclear annihilation and Communism for our fear of terrorism. Do you
notice the pattern? Does it feel like you’ve been in this movie
before?
Once again in this time, civil rights for a minority are in the forefront
of the public conversation. The unfinished agenda of civil rights promises
in the past are still subjects of our conversations. And so in the midst
of this loop of history that keeps on repeating itself, I sense among
many of us a fear that this will never change, a loss of hope that any
of us can make a difference at all.
And I think more damaging than the bigger fears out there, however we
label them, are that in this context of fear, each of us can turn too
easily inside to the fears that dwell in us and allow there in our private
moments, fear and doubt and despair to fester and to eat away at the
core of who we are.
I do believe, as we heard in the second reading this morning, that we
are partakers in the struggle that God’s will may prevail. So I
don’t think that there’s a Pollyanna message to offer today—that
really the struggle doesn’t exist, that there is nothing to be
authentically afraid of, and that in a sense we don’t really have
anything to do but change our minds and believe that the world is a nice
place. We are indeed in the midst of a struggle. God is our partner,
yes, but there is a place for us. There is much work for us to do.
And I do believe that we shall overcome. I do believe in this place
that our personal transformation, when we use the energy that comes from
that to make a difference in the world, will indeed transform the world
around us. This is one belief that I share with, as I like to call him,
the other Paul. (Laughter) It’s a tough name to have. It’s
a tough heritage to have.
Indeed there were many things in the reading today that I would rather
not talk about. So I’m not going to... (Laughter) Instead I want
to encourage us, invite us, to look at the reading this way: What I notice
in this reading that we heard this morning is Paul and Silas together
with others faithful to their call to go out in the world, to put their
bodies in places where transformation is needed. And there are in this
passage that we read today, four ways in which Paul and those with him
encourage and empower people around them to move from places of bondage,
places of fear into a kind of freedom and into a transformation, into
relationship in community.
The first is the slave girl who ironically goes around saying what is
exactly true about Paul and Silas. They are slaves perhaps; they are
obedient to God. They do proclaim a way of salvation. In fact to her,
they proclaim a way of salvation and in Paul’s prayer, her life
is transformed. She is freed.
This creates a problem, of course, for those who have been profiting
from her, who have kept her and used her capacity to see things the way
they are, for their own personal gain. Paul liberates them, however,
somewhat ironically. Their product, as it were, the divination of this
that can be done by this woman is taken from them. So their freedom is
a little bit ironic, but perhaps their freedom, immoral as it is, is
a freedom. Their profit, immoral as it is, is a way of life and a way
of living indeed unworthy of them. That they are called like the slave
girl to something beyond that which has bound them up, which is the cycle
and the relationship of profiting from the body of another person.
Next there are Paul and his companions themselves who are taken and
beaten and thrown into jail. They spend that time in jail together praying
and singing. Maybe they sang like we just heard this group sing, “Freedom,
freedom is coming.” Maybe they sing like choirs, like our evening
choir, “Let the walls fall down. Let the walls fall down.” (We’re
always a little afraid to sing that here. Do not tempt the Lord, your
God, you know.)
But indeed in this case, the walls do fall down; they are released from
their shackles. But their freedom causes the jailor to fear. He comes
and sees that the walls have fallen down, fears that they have run off
and as he is bound to a duty within a system that oppresses, fears for
his own life and indeed is about to take his life when Paul come to him
and says, “Wait, wait, wait. Here we are.”
The story then tells of the conversion of this man and his household
to the faith which Paul has brought to them. However we may feel about
this kind of conversion, this way of encouraging people into one path,
what is true in this moment is that Paul in relationship with this one
and his family, offers to them the best of what he knows is God. Paul
says, “You are free now but here is a way to live your freedom.
And indeed here is the God in whom you have and live your freedom.” Paul
frees this man who has himself within an oppressive system become an
oppressor.
If we follow Paul through the story, we see that he never loses hope
moment by moment by moment in each of the people that he meets. He brings
to them the best of what is possible within him and the best of what
is possible within them. He never loses his passion for freedom and transformation
and indeed because he has never lost his passion for freedom and transformation,
he is free to liberate those around him. He lives and journeys with a
passion for “the good.”
And so this week reflecting on this story, I found myself thinking about
those who in my life have lived out their passion for the good with particular
strength and endurance and faithfulness. And when I think of one whose
life embodied a passion for the good and a faithfulness to a call, I
think of the man who I knew by a family nickname as Popeye, my great
grandfather, the Rev. Dr. James G. Endicott.
I was very privileged in my family to grow up with many generations
around me. We shared a house with him and his second wife, Ella, and
together really every day of my life, I spent time with, what seemed
to me, this very old man who at that time was in his 80’s and then
advanced into his 90’s. We would sit together and do things like
watch the NewsHour on PBS while he gloated over Iran/Contra revelations
and things like this. (Laughter)
He was the most marvelous spirit that I have ever known.
He was born in 1898 in Leshan in Sichuan province in China to Methodist
missionary parents. Like my grandfather, the Sichuan dialect of Chinese
was what he considered his first language. He traveled to Europe as a
young man and fought and was gassed in the trenches in World War I and
indeed knew quite a lot about war although he seldom talked about it.
He returned to China after World War I with his family, his wife Mary
Austin and raised four children there until they left as World War II
advanced and the Japanese bombing all the way into Sichuan imperiled
their lives.
He worked for peace on the very small scale. In 1988, I went back with
my grandfather and my uncle through China to see where our family had
lived and worked. It struck me in trying to figure out how to describe
that journey that it did feel for me like a return to a place, not a
visit to a place. In the city of Leshan, there was erected by the local
community a stone tablet, sort of plaque, describing the birthplace of
my great grandfather and so my uncle and my grandfather and I found some
paper while we were there to take a rubbing of this plaque. My great
grandfather had never seen it; it was erected after his last trip to
China.
We wanted to take a rubbing so that he could see and read for himself
the message about his life that the community had lifted up. And while
we were doing this, a very old man came by and saw us taking this rubbing
and asked if we knew the man that the plaque was about. And we said, “Well,
yes indeed. We’re his family.” My grandfather (his son),
my uncle (my grandfather’s son), and me, the next generation. I
will never forget the look on this man’s face to be in the presence
of us. He was really quite overcome and spoke at length through our interpreter
about what my great grandfather’s life had meant to him 70 years
earlier. He described my great grandfather and his family and their work
in China on behalf of the peasants in the local community and the urban
poor. This man talked about having a very poor family and my great grandfather
helping him.
This is the kind of small scale working for peace that endures. It was
staggering really to think of a man well into his 80’s, wandering
down a narrow street in a small town in Western China to come upon us
and to be taken back to a kindness that had been done him.
My great grandfather also worked for peace on the large scale. After
the war, he founded the Canadian Peace Congress. He won the Stalin Peace
Prize, the highest honor given by the Soviet Union to those seeking a
world without war and without nuclear bombs. In Canada, this earned him
not fame, but notoriety. He was named Public Enemy #1. He, as I have
often ironically noted, was unable ever to travel in the United States.
Free speech works here for some people; other people they just don’t
let in to speak.
In the midst of all of these things, it may surprise you to know that
what I also remember most about my great grandfather was his phenomenal
sense of humor. He could laugh. He really liked dirty limericks, (which
I won’t share with you).
But there’s a great story that he tells, “The best way to
die.” And this really encapsulates him tremendously well:
"Mary Austin (his wife) and I went to visit a ninety-year old Muslim
grand muftian --??--- in 1956. When we got there, we were told, he could
not see us because he cannot look on a woman. 'What,' I asked, 'not even
at ninety?' I then suggested that they send the following story to the
gentleman. Three old men, one seventy, one eighty and one ninety years
old, were discussing how they’d like to die. They all agreed they
would like to die suddenly. The seventy-year old said, 'I would like
to be killed in an automobile accident.' 'No,' said the eighty-year old,
'that’s not sure enough. I’d like to be killed in an airplane
accident.' The ninety-year old reflected and sighed, 'Well, I’d
like to be shot by a jealous husband.' (Laughter) My interpreter did
not think it was a funny story. (Continued laughter) He said, 'I don’t
think that’s a proper story for a minister to tell.'"
A sense of humor and a passion for peace both on the large scale and
on the small scale are the three things that I reflect most upon the
life of my great grandfather. He never in his life lost faith that peace
would prevail, though at the end of his life, there were many thousands
of nuclear weapons in the world. He never lost his passion for his peace,
though in the later years of his life, war raged around the world.
He was born into a world and carried with him a stamp that showed the
British Empire in 1898, a very large portion of the world colored a bright
pink—most of North America, most of Africa, lots of Europe, most
of Asia. And I think what he carried with him was the sense that empires
come and empires go. He carried with him the sense that we can overcome
fear, stir up the spirit in us, and in spite of the world around us,
make a difference.
When we feel the spirit stirring up in us, what shall we do? This week
I had a conversation with Lea. She was pointing out to me that the kids
of a class of one of our members have prepared these cards to put into
the lunch bags that we give out on Tuesday, so that the people who come
to Prevention Point for, to exchange their needles and to receive a meal,
will open the bag and read something like this: You’re a nice person.
(Laughter) You’re wonderful. We share because we care. You are
perfect just the way you are. And I like this one: You’re cool.
(Laughter)
The goodness that we can choose to do in the world is the doorway to
the hope that we long for. I’m not so interested really in politics
or dogma. I’ve spent enough time in community to know that it’s
really simple actions that transform moments and transformed moments
that transform the world.
Wishing as we all do for things to come true is all fine and good but
I think in the end that hope can only come in relationship. Hope is only
something that we can find when we gather together, look deeply into
each other’s eyes, share our stories and encourage each other.
A Jewish rabbi asked his students at what point, night turned into day.
One student said, “It’s when you look out into the distance
and can tell the difference between a sheep and a dog.” “No,” said
the rabbi, “that’s not it.” Another student claimed, “It’s
when you can look into the distance and tell the difference between a
peach tree and a fig tree.” Again the rabbi said, “No.” Instead
the rabbi claimed, “It’s dawn when you can look into the
face of another human being and recognize her or him as your sister or
brother. Then you know the night is over.”
We do not need to fear about finding hope because hope will always find
us. When we seek the good and we make “doing the good” a
spiritual practice, hope will find us. And when the good seems very far
away, let’s make a promise to each other that what we will do is,
we will come to this place, any one of five times a week, we will open
our hearts to each other, to the God of many names. And we will pray;
we will laugh; we will sing in this place and then hope will find us
again.
As we celebrate all that we can be for each other, let us commit in
this place, to being not just a house of prayer but a house of hope,
a house of transformation. And may we always in this place, celebrate
that hope lives in us, that freedom is coming, justice is coming because
we are here, because in us, hope is alive.
Amen. (Amen and applause)
First Reading
Acts 16:16-39
Read more 
Second Reading
Selections from a Sermon Preached in Canterbury Cathedral
Rev. Dr. James G. Endicott
Read more
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