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Sermon |
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APA/API Month of Celebrations
- Sharing of Stories:
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May 18, 2003By Paul Fairley Have you ever been wandering through a field of tall grass on a bright sunny day like today and in the midst of all of that grass you come across one single tall flower improbably growing in the midst of the field and stopped, look at it, seen that flower, that miracle? Have you ever been walking along the beach, maybe you’ve taken the N to Ocean Beach, and you’re walking along on a bright sunny day like today, hearing the waves crashing against the sand, and then has your eye caught by the glimmer of the sunshine in a simple rock pushed into the sand, and stopped to look at it and wondered how it got there, or where it came from? These are the kinds of moments that I want to lift up tonight, as we talk about what it means to know a God that is so vast and so infinite, the God of the sky, the God of the ocean, the God of the field. And yet, to know a God as well, that dwells in our hearts, a God so intimate, a God that knows us better than we know ourselves. In 1993, my friends Laurie, Mark and I embarked on a great journey from Toronto down to Washington D.C. for the March on Washington. We were part of, I think, somewhere between 20 and 30,000 Canadians who were among the million or so people who came to Washington. I remember particularly that week a few things: four guys in a hotel along the march route with a big sign that said “We Need Husbands.” Some of us had t-shirts that said “Canada: the Country on Top.” I was going through a little bit of a radical phase at the time (as radical as you can get as a Canadian) and I need to paraphrase this t-shirt. The shirt that I had on said something like “Enough red ribbons; find a cure.” Do you remember 1993? After the march, we skipped and jumped and laughed our way all over the Washington Mall. (I mostly skipped). The energy of the million or so people, was phenomenal that day. That was—oh what was that about? Gays in the military? That was the energy, this great wave of queer power moving all the way through Washington. And for me, it all came to a stop in an instant. Without realizing it, my friends and I were being carried by the throng of people this great wave until in an instant I stopped as the crowd parted around us and I realized that I stood pretty much in the middle of the AIDS Quilt. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what the AIDS quilt looks like when it’s all put together. Right now there are 44,000 panels just like this one. [pointing to blank panel, laid out on the floor] At that moment, in the midst of this whole scene, as far as I could see before me, as far as I could see behind me, to the left and to the right, were panels and panels and panels in this beautiful (and terrible) display lifted up into the bright sun. It’s really too big to see. It’s certainly too big to comprehend, and in a lot of ways, it’s way, way too big to feel. And then I looked down. When you’re standing in the midst of the quilt and you look down, you meet people. You see name upon name upon name. You see prayers that say, often and very simply, “I miss you,” “I love you.” All those names. There’s really no making sense of it. There’s no amount of thinking that can convince your feet to move. It’s really all too much I began to wonder, in that moment, how I could ever move again. Modern people—we like to think—think, think, think. We get in a jam—think, think, think. We have a problem—think, think, think. We’re somewhere we don’t want to be—think, think, think. And how many of us have a God of our thoughts? How many of us try to keep God in our brain? And if we just think, think, think about God, God’s going to tell us what to do: think, think, think for us. We’ve been handed on a God who is supposed to rule our minds, and then from our minds colonize our body, and rule our body. But in a time and in a place like this, where we’re all standing right now on this quilt, the God of easy answers, and the God of rules and regulations isn’t going to be much help. There’s the kind of “infinite” that we know with our minds, and there’s the kind of “infinite” that we know with our hearts: the more “intimate infinite.” The heart is the gateway to this intimate infinite. It’s the organ in our body of knowing the infinite. The panels that we see in the quilt evoke the person in our minds, yes, and they bring the person into our hearts. When we see the quilt, as queer people, we see it uniquely because we can experience in our heart space a connection with our sister or our brother and learn with the wisdom of the heart what it means to be a part of this queer body that we have been born into. We learn resurrection. In that moment of beholding another, the finite life becomes infinite love, a love that never ends. Our bodies, you see, are the holy dwelling place of God. A living God, a God of relationships, of love, of transformation, of resurrection. Our bodies, woven together as queer community are the great and mysterious presence of God in the world. The quilt is alive because we are alive. In the quilt we see, not those who are gone, but we see the God of many, many, many names. We see the queer body alive. And so we are free to move. We are a living and moving body. Blades of grass in a field, grains of sand on a beach, panel after panel after panel in the quilt. Infinite, really. A flower, a stone, you, me, we, standing tall, shining bright, in the sun, intimate, one body. God calls out from inside of us. When we look inside, we hear God saying, “I miss you,” “I love you,” “Remember me. I remember you.” Our hearts tell us our place in the world as queer people in our queer body. Through us, God is calling out to the world. “I miss you,” “I love you,” “Remember me. I remember you.” This is our witness. God is with us. We are not forsaken. We are never forgotten. We are beautiful. We are the presence of the Living One for each other and for the world. And so, not only can we move, but we must move. We must remember who they are. Holy. May it be so. |
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