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Sermon |
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Celebrate Pride Day: Testament of Hope |
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June 29, 2003By Rev. Tessie Mandeville Well, it is exciting to be back home in San Francisco! And I love this choir, right here! I am honored to have this opportunity not only to return home to San Francisco but to return home to my spiritual community, this community of pride. I love being back in a place where I can use the word ‘queer’ as often as I like and where we can pray to the Goddess! Just for a point of information—they don’t like the word “queer” in Oklahoma, and they don’t know who the Goddess is. Lisa and I have been doing well in Oklahoma, and it’s where we’re doing some of our greatest work. You won’t like it when I say this but Lisa and I just bought a two-bedroom home for under $70,000! And when we planned our trip here we wondered which gifts to bring people that really represent Oklahoma. Lisa said, “Well, the only things we can bring are beef, oil, and Baptists!” We assumed that you really didn’t want these! Not only is it a privilege to be back here for Pride, it seems appropriate too for us to be in San Francisco when the Supreme Court finally overturned the archaic law about sodomy. Of course this will affect us greatly in Oklahoma where the sodomy laws are still on the books. And I can’t wait to go home and celebrate this decision with the community and with Lisa, if you get my drift. And I hope that all of you have engaged in sodomy since Thursday afternoon because I can’t think of a better way to celebrate! Let me read a small story to you this evening out of the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a prophet during the time that the Babylonians were in exile. He wrote a letter to the Israelites and this is some of what he said as he spoke for God: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,” declares God, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen.” God said to these people who were exiled and away from all they had ever known, “Hope is my plan for you.” I don’t know about you but there have been times over these last few months when I had a lot of feelings but not a lot of them were feelings of hope. First off, I’ve been living in Oklahoma which has got to be one of the most conservative states in the union. Oklahomans are ‘pro’ everything that I dislike, such as big business, oil, Baptists, beef (I am a vegetarian, so that’s where that’s coming from, and I am a Southern Baptist, so I love Baptists too, but it is challenging to be back in Baptist country), and war—which means that I constantly line up on the other side of the field from them. It was an incredible challenge to be in Oklahoma when my country declared war on Iraq for the second time in 12 years. Not only was it a challenge, it was downright scary. I found great hope by reading the papers from San Francisco and hearing about the protests that were taking place in the streets. Thousands and thousands of you standing together and drawing strength from one another. You filled me with hope and courage and let me tell you what I did with that! I joined a group of about 30 people on the evening that President Bush gave his “State of the Union address.” We watched this together and then we took to the streets. We marched around the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial. Many of you will remember that on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols detonated a bomb at the Federal Building and killed 168 people. There is a beautiful memorial there now which remembers the lives of these people and I’ve been to it several times, and I tell you the truth, it is holy ground. Our group of people marched around this memorial as a statement that one bomb is one bomb too many. We sang. We prayed. We marched. We cried. But we held out hope because we stepped right into the middle of the struggle, which is exactly where our God is, in the middle of the struggle.
And so this is what I said: “I have just heard the President of my country talk about human cloning and ask us to pursue a ‘higher form of humanity’ and to resist this cloning. I would like to see us pursue a higher form of humanity and to find paths to peace.” They asked me why we marched around the bombing memorial and I said, “I believe that people in Oklahoma City, perhaps more than some, know the impact of violence. They know that one bomb is one bomb too many. They also know that violence has never been the answer and that violence will never be the answer.” They thanked me for interviewing with them and the next morning, it was all over the news. It was a scary time. I hope you hear me when I say this: It is one thing to come out against the President and the war when you are surrounded by thousands of people in San Francisco and New York. It is quite another thing to come out against the President and the war when you are surrounded by 30 people in Oklahoma. But as you can see, I lived to tell this story (but I have aged dramatically) and the truth is, many people thanked me for speaking up. But here’s the thing sisters and brothers, I spoke out because I found
freedom and liberation in San Francisco. I spoke out because I learned
courage from this community of faith. MCC San Francisco is a community that
has seen many winters and much darkness. We are a community that has fought
AIDS, breast cancer, poverty, classism, homelessness, and misogyny. We have
experienced our own days when it looked like hope was nowhere to be found.
Mary Oliver writes of winters like this and says: “In the winter I am
writing about, there was much darkness: Darkness of nature, darkness of
event, darkness of the spirit, the sprawling darkness of not knowing. We
speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the
world, and the light of ______. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe
hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith,” she says, but more a faith that
is “a gesture, or a continuum of gestures.” But then she concludes that no,
“probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than
faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile and cool, and has no need
of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.” MCC San Francisco, you too, must bear the responsibilities and difficulties of freedom. What you have here is so amazing and as Lisa and I journeyed back this week, we have been reminded of what we gave up to go minister to queer people outside of San Francisco. We’re not complaining (too much) but I want you to remember that what you have here is unique and I want to ask you not to ever take it for granted but to keep fighting and screaming until all people, whoever they are and wherever they’re from, have experienced freedom and liberation. There are many people who don’t know about the hope that you have, who don’t even know that hope is a possibility. In just the short time that I have been in Oklahoma City, three queer people have committed suicide, and they probably aren’t the only ones. Two gay men were beaten up in a public grocery store with lots of witnesses. I participated in a funeral for a lesbian couple and not one time was the word ‘lesbian’ allowed to be said out loud. Their love was never honored, never even acknowledged. But as the biological family, who had disowned this woman, processed to the front of the church, we stood up out of respect for them, but we didn’t stand up for her partner. And a hundred and fifty out of those three hundred people at that funeral were lesbians. That is what happens in Oklahoma City. Legislation has been introduced that seeks to prevent homosexual people from fostering or adopting children and if there is a custody dispute and one of the parents is queer, the legislation would automatically ensure that custody be given to the heterosexual parent. We just celebrated Pride last weekend and the mayor tried to pull our permits for our rainbow flags, our festival, and our parade. We had to have city council meetings to fight for the right to have our pride parade. And you know, had we lost, I had already decided that I would drive our church float all by myself if I had to but I was not going to let them stop our celebration. They could throw me in jail but they weren’t going to take away my hope for OKC. And then there’s the community of faith that I have been called to serve. They are some of the most wonderful and loving people I have ever known and it is a privilege to serve them. But it’s also deeply challenging because most of the people I pastor are not out of the closet except for about one hour a week when they come to church. Talk about oppressive.... They are afraid and unfortunately, their fear is not irrational. There is no mass support for the queer community and they are often isolated from one another. I have one couple in particular who is out to their family but their son won’t let their grandchild come visit unless the couple agrees to sleep in separate beds, which they do, because that’s the only way they can see their grandchild. These are the choices that people still have to make everyday in Oklahoma City. And though the fruits of our struggle have sometimes been bitter, there have also been some hopeful signs in Oklahoma City, and I want to share some of those with you. This past fall we just elected our first openly gay man as county commissioner (of course we also barely outlawed cockfighting, so I wasn’t really sure....) He’s a wonderful man and what’s even more exciting is that his heterosexual niece has just asked him to officiate at her wedding, because now he’s a public official. But he doesn’t know how to officiate at a wedding, so guess who he called...? Of course I said yes. And in the midst of all the fighting for the right to have our parade, I was asked to conduct a community wedding ceremony to kick off our pride festival. There were 11 couples who publicly took the stage at our festival and professed their love for one another. There was not a dry eye in the place! And then there’s Paul Schoenayer, a police officer who was married with two children. He’s six feet, six inches tall and pretty much built like an NFL player. This man, who looked like a ‘man’s man’ wanted to be a woman and wanted to remain a police officer. Paul began the journey before I got to Oklahoma City so when we were introduced, her name was already Paula Sophia. She had been living as a woman for two years and this past fall she went to Thailand for sex-reassignment surgery. Paula Sophia is now divorced but maintains joint custody of her two children and just two weeks ago, she went back on the streets as a police officer and the first transgendered woman in Oklahoma city to be in such a public role. These stories, these people, remind me that there is always hope as long as we stay in the struggle. Harvey Milk knew this and he stayed in the struggle for as long as he could. He said he didn’t come to office because of ego or power but because he felt it was his responsibility to give people hope, to give hope to the queer people who don’t live in San Francisco. He stayed in the struggle and he gave people hope. I believe he succeeded far beyond his wildest dreams. A voice out of Bethlehem two thousand years ago sounded a clarion call for hope by removing barriers to faith, barriers such as status, power, class, and gender. That voice said that all people are children of God. Jesus of Nazareth wrote no books, he owned no property to endow him with influence. He had no friends in the courts of the powerful. But he changed the course of humanity with only the poor, the outcasts, those that didn’t fit—I call those people the queer people! I believe queer people will revolutionize this world and MCC San Francisco will lead the way. You already do and the battle’s not over. Some of our biggest struggles lie ahead because I don’t know about you but I know someone who needs to come out of the White House in 2004. So to that I say, “I do actually have a ‘homosexual agenda’” and that is to make sure that we put somebody in the White House that is not George W. Bush. The world needs your testament of hope, to know that freedom and liberation, justice and peace, are possible. The world needs the kind of hope that you have, the kind that fights and screams, especially for those who can’t even whisper their love for one another out loud. MCC San Francisco, my sisters and brothers, keep giving us in Oklahoma City hope. Keep giving the world hope. I ask you to be a new witness of hope in this world for all people. Unleash your queer spirits and your queer power and let it revolutionize this world. And may you succeed beyond your wildest dreams! Amen. |
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