Timothy B. Tutt
Pastor, United Christian Church
Sunday, May 27, 2012
8:30, 9:30 and 10:45 AM Worship
Pentecost Sunday
(Lectionary Year B)
"The Messiness of Being Human:
A Pentecost Sermon In Response to Hatred"
Acts 2:1-21 and Romans 8:22-27
My sermon title in the bulletin is “Years of Wonder,
Days of Spirit.” And that is a very fine sermon. But I am not
going to preach that sermon this morning. That sermon is about Pentecost in the first
century and Pentecostalism today. There’s a little bit in that
sermon about Albert Einstein and some about Moses. I will leave copies of
that sermon here on the pulpit. Feel
free to take a copy home today.
Instead, I would like to speak to
you, for a moment or two, about a situation that has been bothering me the past
two week. I’ve had this nagging issue in my mind.
Two weeks ago the President of the United States
expressed his personal support for gay marriage. Those were historic
words from our nation’s chief executive officer. People responded in a
number of ways to his comments. Some cheered, some questioned, some said,
“About time.”
In the middle of those responses, a pastor in North Carolina preached
a sermon offering his views on gay marriage. The pastor’s name is Charles
Worley, and his congregation is in Maiden, N.C.
(MSNBC.com, May 22, 2012)
Now let me say a few general
things about his comments, before I address his sermon specifically.
First, I support, and have the
privilege of, a free pulpit. No one in this congregation has ever
told me what to preach or what to say. Sometimes you disagree with me and
argue with me, and that is okay. That is
a hallmark of Protestant Christianity, ministers being free to speak on issues
as the Spirit leads them, and church members being free to use their minds to
think.
I also treasure the corollary of
a free pulpit, the freedom of speech that our Constitution guarantees people in
this country. As we celebrate Memorial
Day tomorrow and honor this nation, the freedom of speech stands first among
the things I cherish.
And, I also strongly support the
separation of church and state. I think keeping state and church
separate allows both to better fulfil their purposes. And part of the separation
of church and state is the freedom the church has to criticize the state.
I think, as Christians, we have a duty, a responsibility, to speak out when we
feel the state is wrong, is unjust.
On the issue of marriage, I also
understand that there are some people who hold very strongly to traditional
views of marriage. And by traditional, I mean the Western views that we
have held for about the past four hundred years, based on romance, love, mutual
respect, and maintenance of the nuclear family.
So, this preacher in North
Carolina, Reverend Worley, has the freedom to preach as he feels led, he has
the freedom to speak as he feels called, he has the freedom to critique our
government as he sees fit, and he has the freedom to support marriage as he
defines it.
But his words went far beyond
freedom and tradition.
You may have seen his sermon on
the news or on YouTube.
Two Sunday ago, Mr. Worley said
in his sermon that he opposes gay marriage. From his pulpit he called the
president some very childish names. He
also stated for whom he would vote and implicitly instructed his congregation to
do the same.
And then he went on to say that
we should round up all of the gay and lesbian people in this country. He
said we should put them in a pen of some sort with an electric fence around it.
To show how kind he is, he said we should
fly airplanes over and drop food from time to time. And he said that because they won’t
reproduce, we should just wait for them to die off.
This man is proposing a Holocaust,
concentration camps.
I have been to Auschwitz .
I have seen the barbed wire and
the bricks and the ovens.
I have seen humankind’s
inhumanity to others.
I understand the Apostle Paul’s
words about groaning for the world.
(Romans 8:22)
I have been to Eastern
Europe where the walls of communism kept others in bondage.
I have been to a Navajo
reservation where Japanese Americans were jailed by our government, trapped on grounds
of suspicion.
I have crossed the Trail of Tears
where Native Americans, where my children’s great-grandparents, were rounded
up, forced to leave their homes by an oppressive government.
I have stood on plantations where
one race, my race, my great-grandparents, enslaved another race and forced them
to do their bidding, or die.
Those acts were wrong.
Often, the Christian church
supported those acts. That was wrong.
Friends, we must stop the hatred,
the language of violence.
Christianity is a faith of grace
and love, not a system of hatred and intolerance.
We must not allow our faith to be
used to build prisons of intolerance, whether they are actual prisons of fence
and of stone or whether they are prisons of the mind and of the spirit.
Pentecost is sometimes called the
birthday of the church. It is time for
the church to be born again, not born of ideology and segregation, but born
again of integration and peace.
Pentecost is a freedom. The Jazz Ensemble played “Freedom Jazz
Dance” as the prelude. Very
appropriate.
Pentecost is the story of the
free spirit, the free mind, the free soul.
It is a story of God’s unbounded love for diverse humanity.
Pentecost is also a story of
fear. The scripture says that God’s
spirit came upon these early Christians in a new and powerful way. They ran out into the street. And the people who met them, who heard them, were
afraid. They made fun. They called them names. They thought they were drunk. You read the scripture (Acts 2). They were afraid of them. They were afraid of new ways of speaking,
new ways of living, new ways of loving.
We live in a time of fear.
As horrible as Reverend Worley’s
words were two weeks ago, I understand something of why he said them. He is afraid.
He is afraid of a changing world.
And our world is changing
rapidly. Issues of marriage, issues of economics, issues of technology,
are all changing. We live at time of great change. History shows that
about every 500 years, the world undergoes dramatic upheaval. The birth
of Jesus and the Pentecost explosion (0), the Constantinian domination (c. 500),
the Great Schism (1054), the Reformation and the printing press (1500s.) (Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence)
It’s hard to live in a time of
change. How we communicate is new, where we live is new, how we relate to
each other is new, even the hymns we sing may be new. And people are afraid.
Over and over again, our Bible
sings out to us, “Do not be afraid! Do
not fear!” When those early Christians
gathered in that upper room, they must have been terrified also. It
wasn’t just the people outside. It was
the people inside, as well. They were
afraid. Jesus, their lord and leader and
teacher, was gone from their midst. They
were all alone. So they hid in a
room.
And in an experience that defies
our understanding, the Spirit of God showed up. It wasn’t enough for a prophet to speak or a
writer to pen the words, “Do not be afraid.”
This time, God spoke in a new and powerful way.
Did the wind really blow? I don’t know.
Did fire really sit on their heads?
I have no idea.
But something happened. Some moment of great connection with God
occurred that caused them to cast off their old ways, to cast off their fears
and to live and speak in new ways.
I don’t know that I have the
words to speak to and for our world. I
lean on Paul’s words that the Spirit will speak for us. (Romans 8:26)
I pray, I pray fervently and deeply, that the
Spirit of God will move in the heart and mind of this Mr. Worley, that he will
see the new work of the Spirit, and that he will not be afraid. At a minimum, I pray that he will
renounce the words of violence and the images of Holocaust and hatred that he
used. I pray that he will be freed from
his narrow-mindedness and be opened to the love of all God’s children.
And I pray for
myself. I pray that I will be freed from
my own narrow-mindedness. I pray that I
will be open to the love of all of God’s children.
After all, God’s
children are a fascinating, wonderful mix of critters. You are, just you the people in the room,
are different and unique and wonderful and weird. And in the Pentecost story, the Spirit meets
us “where we are: in the midst of a multitude of languages and experiences” and
weirdness.
Theologian Eric
Barreto has pointed out that, “The Spirit translates the Gospel instantly into
myriad languages….Imagine then the miracle of Pentecost and what it means for
us today. God meets us in the messiness
of different languages and does not ask us to speak God's language. Instead, God chooses to speak our many
languages. God does not speak in a divine language beyond our comprehension. At Pentecost, God speaks in Aramaic and Greek
and other ancient languages. Today, God continues to speak in Spanish, Greek,
Hindi and Chinese alike. At Pentecost,
God makes God’s choice clear. God joins
us in the midst of the messiness and the difficulties of [the human experience],
speaking different languages, eating different foods and living in different
cultures. That is good news indeed.” (Huffington
Post, May 21, 2012)
Freeing,
liberating, life-giving Good News that transcends our fears and opens the
prisons of our minds.
It is easy to take
the same kind of hatred that Reverend Worley used in North Carolina and turn it back on him. It is easy to call him names and belittle
him, as he has done for others. It will
be harder for me to pray for him. But I
will try. And in a moment, out Jazz
Ensemble will remind us of that when they play, “Speak No Evil.” So I will try. And I invite you to join me in praying for
him as well. He is part of the messiness of the human experience. God speaks his language too.
And I’m going to
do one other thing as well. I’m going to
write a check for our United Mission Offering.
And I’m going to give it our church to give away. On the memo line, I’ve noted that this gift
is in honor of Charles Worley. I didn’t
want to write that phrase, but I did it.
However much I disagree with him, I feel compelled to honor him as my
brother in Christ, my sibling in this messy human family.
Now, there may be
a little “dig” in there, maybe I’m not as pure as I should be, because, you see,
part of this money will go to support the Justice and Witness ministries that
seek to include all people in the church.
Part of this money
goes to support new churches like Hope United in Georgetown
that is an Open and Affirming church that is working to be a welcoming presence
in Williamson County
Part of this money
goes to support the reconciliation ministries that bridges divides and brings
people together.
I don’t know that
Rev. Worley will appreciate the way this money is used. But I’ll tell him about it in the letter I
will send him. And rather than lambast
him, I hope this is a way, one small way, to promote the unity of Spirit that
we find in the Pentecost story. So I
invite you to join me in this giving.
I invite you to
join me in praying for those with whom you disagree.
I invite you to
join me in dedicate our lives, once again, to living as people of the Spirit.
Prayer
God, this Pentecost living is messy
business.
We, your people are complicated,
difficult people.
Warm our hearts once again and open
our minds to your ways.
I pray for Charles Worley.
I’m sorry for the fear in which he
lives and the ways he expresses that fear.
I pray for myself, O God, for the ways
that I am afraid and the words I have used to harm.
I pray for those who are left out
of the church, those who feel belittled and forgotten.
I pray for our United Mission
Offering, for the ways that our gifts can help and heal.
Visit us all with a sense of your
renewing Spirit,
that we may all be instruments of
grace and peace, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
