Introduction
Today is an anniversary - 35 years ago this Sunday a young Pentecostal ex-minister held a service in his front room for the lesbian and gay community. 12 people showed up and two of them, he thinks, were undercover police officers. Even though he advertised the service for lesbian and gay people - he wasn't that pc in those days, some heterosexuals and trans people showed up. The minister, the Rev Troy Perry our moderator.
Troy had been thrown out of this church a couple of years before and had given up all hope of being a minister. Instead he was enjoying the emerging gay sub-culture of LA. One night he was in a bar talking to a guy who was very depressed. The man wanted to kill himself and Troy was trying to persuade him not to. The man was depressed as his employers had sacked him for being gay, his family had become estranged from him because of his gayness and he was being thrown out of his apartment. Troy tried to encourage the lad by saying "well God loves you." The man was a Mexican and had been brought up a Roman Catholic replied "how can God love me when the Church hates me?"
This chance conversation led Troy to the realisation that in order to convince people that God loved them, he would need to start a church which loved them. From that first service in that front room in LA on October 5th 1968, MCC has grown into a world-wide denomination with congregations all over America, Canada, Latin America, Puerto Rico, The Philippines, England, Scotland, Denmark, France, Germany, South Africa, Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand.
That question "how can God love me when the Church hates me?" rings down the years and is the fundamental driving force in our ministry - to show that God does not hate.
Today is also another anniversary, but a more personal one for me. Because 16 years ago today I walked into my first MCC. I was a Roman Catholic, though I had spent some time in an evangelical church. I was in my first gay love affaire (which had precious little to do with love) and in my final year at university studying theology. A friend of my boyfriend asked me and him along and we went to the MCC meeting in Balham and I met the Revd Jean White for the first time. Its strange the way we meet people and have no idea how they are going to be used to change our lives. Jean had got the congregation to celebrate Fellowship Sunday by sharing what God had done in their lives through the ministry of MCC and I can still remember two of the people who spoke who are still in MCC and whom I now consider friends.
Anniversaries are important as they allow us to reflect, to rejoice and to ponder. We reflect on the stories that led to our church being founded. Things have moved on so much. There is so much more widespread acceptance of our community now, the police don't routinely harass us in our bars, landlords don't routinely evict us and employers tend not to fire us just for who we are. Families may still find difficulties with us. The one organisation that doesn't seem to have changed very much is the Church! The question of that young man "how can God love me when the Church hates me?" must have echoed through quite a few hearts and minds recently with the rows in the Anglican Communion about gay bishops and with the shameful edict from the Vatican telling Catholic politicians to work against civil rights for our people.
We rejoice that God has blest our church against all the odds! We have grown despite having very little training and structure in the early days. We have grown in the face of Aids. We have grown and developed and matured and yet we are only 35 years old. By the standards of the Church we are not out of our nappies yet! We rejoice that at that first service there was such a mix of people, lesbians, gay men, straight people, and trans people. This was an icon of what our church is trying to be - Catholic in the widest sense of the word - open to all. We rejoice that our church continues to touch and inspire people with the powerful message of God's love which demands a response.
And we ponder. We ponder why God raised us up here in Manchester. We say in our mission statement that God raised us up, today we ponder why God should do that. Will you pray with me?
Loving
God,
We thank you for the growth of MCC throughout the world,
We thank you
for the lives you have touched
and saved through our ministry,
For the
way in which you have used our church
to bring home the estranged,
and to
renew faith in you.
We thank you that in your Sovereign power
You have
raised us up to serve you here in this city.
Amen.
Why Did God raise up MCCM
God's plan and purposes are not always easy to discern. God has many reasons for raising us up here for bringing along the people to receive from us and to give to us. Some of these reasons we will never know until we reach Heaven. We will never know all of the lives we have touched, the hope we have given and the grace that some people have received. We will never know all the seeds of faith that have been planted or nurtured through this congregation. But there are some parts of God's plan and purpose which are clearer, which we can know and from which we can draw strength.
Our starting point for trying to understand what God was about in raising us up is our reading this evening from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah.
A Space for Eunuchs
The passage from Isaiah, at first, has very little to say to us. Isaiah is offering a future where foreigners, or outsiders, are included in God's people. This was quite radical theology as the Jewish people are chosen by God to be God's own people. To include foreigners or gentiles in the chosen people was quite radical. But Isaiah says more than this, not only outsiders, but eunuchs would be included.
Now when we think of eunuchs we think of men who have been castrated and who worked in harems or pagan Temples. But in the ancient world a eunuch could mean quite different things. At its most basic level it meant a man who had been castrated, but more than that it meant anyone who was not able to transmit life. Someone who was, therefore, sexually different.
Jesus follows this line of reasoning in St Matthew's gospel where he says:
"For some are eunuchs because they were born that way, others are made that way by others, and others are eunuchs because of the Kingdom of Heaven".
Now if we realise that a eunuch is one who is a sexual outsider, one who cannot beget children, his passage makes more sense. Some are outsiders because they are born that way, others because they have been made so (here Jesus was probably thinking of what we normally mean by eunuchs) and others who make themselves so for the sake of the Kingdom. This last category would apply to monks, nuns and priests who do not marry in order to serve the Kingdom.
In other words, lesbian and gay people are included in this Biblical term "eunuch". Trans people are also included as the term means someone who is a "sexual outsider".
So what does God say, in Isaiah, about eunuchs, about our people?
To the
eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths and choose what delights me
and keep a firm grip
on my covenant, I'll provide them an honoured place
in my family and within
my city, even more honoured than that of sons and daughters. I'll confer
permanent honours on them that will never be revoked.
We are included! We will get something better than children - which were of such importance in the ancient world - we will have an honoured place in God's own family.
MCC Manchester was raised, up firstly, to include the eunuchs, the sexual outsiders into the family and purposes of God.
A Safe space
Including those that the Church seems to hate means we have to become and remain a place of safety. As a church we have two competing tensions, we are a refuge from a world which often misunderstands us and our values and, at the same time, we are a mission to that world. Sometimes the demands of each of these roles can be quite intense. In order to grow as disciples we need to be safe. We cannot grow as disciples if the leadership of our church is suspicious of who or how we love. Two of our occasional attenders live in Leeds and have really struggled to find a church where they will be left alone to get on with their discipleship. They were in an evangelical church and they knew that God blest their relationship, but the pastor had quite different ideas and they got thrown out. We need to be safe from the attentions of those who hate.
But we also need to be safe from the damage our own communities can do. I sometimes think that if the Gay Games were really culturally appropriate back-stabbing, waspishness and criticising should be in there with all the other sports! It took just 24 hours to get the Jewish people out of Egypt but over 40 years to get Egypt out of the Jewish people. The cultural values of our communities are not always healthy or wholesome and God raised us up to offer a place of safety where we can get rid of some of those destructive values.
God raised us up to learn to healthier ways of being community. This is not a place to be a prima donna. This is not a place to use people as sex objects. This is not a place to have power struggles and dramas. You can do all that on Canal Street if you really need to, here we learn to be something different, the people of God.
God raised us up to be a safe space where we can learn to be and grow as disciples of the Lord Jesus.
A Place to Grow
Have you ever wondered why different styles of church appeal to different people? Have you ever wondered why so many people want to move on from conservative churches but aren't sure where to go? Part of the reason is that we are all at different stages in our spiritual growth pattern. The Christian writer M Scott Peck, in his book, A Different Drum, that there are four broad stages of spiritual growth and that in order to grow we need to pass through each of them.
Stage 1: Self Obsessed
Peck
holds that all young children and as many as 20% of all adults are in this stage
of development. It is an anti-social stage as people in this stage seem
incapable of loving others. Of course this is natural for very young children
but rather sad in adults. Adults in this stage may pretend to love others but
their relationships are all essentially manipulative and self-serving. They only
get involved in things if they can get something out of it for themselves
without putting anything in. It is essentially selfishness run riot. People in
this stage are basically unprincipled. Being unprincipled, there is nothing that
governs them except their own will. And since the will from moment to moment can
go this way or that, there is a lack of integrity to their being. They often end
up, therefore in jails or find themselves in another form of social difficulty.
Some, however, may be quite disciplined in the services of expediency and their
own ambition and so may rise in positions of considerable prestige and power,
even to become politicians or influential preachers. Peck things that from time
to time people in this stage get in touch with the chaos of their own being, and
when they do, endure much pain. Usually when confronted with this pain they just
ride it out unchanged. A few, he suspects, may kill themselves, unable to
envision change. And some, occasionally, convert to Stage II.
Stage 2:
Legalism
When one moves into stage two, usually as the result of some form of conversion experience, one has learnt to look outside of oneself for answers and direction. However, we are still a little obsessed and want certainty. So we become legalistic and dogmatic. We are threatened by anyone who thinks differently from us as we have the "truth" and everyone else hasn't! We are responsible to convert the rest of humanity to our version of the truth. We want religion to have clear cut answers. We might call ourselves fundamentalist or conservative and quite like the labels! At this stage we divide the world into good and bad. We are good, they are bad. We only know that we have changed from the self-obsessed former self and assume that there are only two choices, self obsessed to have the new "freedom" we have found - only that new freedom cannot cope with dissent.
However, this stage is an important one in our spiritual journeys. Great things are learnt about God in this stage and we contrast amazingly with what we were before. We learn to focus outside of ourselves, perhaps for the first time in our lives. For me this process happened in my joining the Catholic Church. I think I was in the process of moving onto the next stage but then immersed myself here by then joining a very conservative evangelical church.
Everyone who moves away from us is presumed to have gone back to stage one - evangelicals call this "backsliding"; Catholics call it "lapsing".
Evangelical and Catholic churches are very good at getting people from Stage 1 - a form of self obsession - to Stage 2. The problem is that they don't always realise that Stage 2 is just that, a stage on the journey not an end in itself. It is better than the chaos that went before and to keep out of that chaos many of us were willing to let others tell us how to live. Many of us, for many reasons, became uncomfortable with this form of faith as it was too limiting, too easy and too dangerous. Some of us never went through this stage as we had, in our childhoods, already went through this stage of our development.
Stage 3: Individualism
At this stage in our development we become deeply involved in and committed to social causes, but like to question all the things we "once held dear". Like Bono from U2 we realise that "we still haven't found what we're looking for" and we can become questioning, individualistic and unhappy with the easy answers the Church has given us in the past. We are seeking after truth, and rather convinced that the Church, as we have known it, is not offering us all the truth we need. At this stage we are likely to become agnostic or even atheistic. Those of us who have had to resolve issues around gender and sexuality may leave the Church at this stage, believing this is because of issues around ourselves, but not always realising that we are growing spiritually in doing so. For me this stage happened when I went to university, came out as a gay man and joined MCC - all these events were about becoming an individual and no longer being convinced by what they had said to me before about God.
Despite
being sceptical, in many cases even atheists, at this stage people are on a
higher spiritual level than Stage II. Yet in order to get people to the last
stage of development, people need to have been through the second. The Church's
age old dilemma is how to bring people from Stage II to Stage IV, without
allowing them to enter Stage III. Stage 3 is dangerous as it allows people to
think for themselves and we might come up with thoughts which challenge and
change us.
Stage 4: Mystic and Communal
This is the most difficult stage to explain. People at this stage are not looking for clear cut answers to the problems in life, but a set of tools with which to negotiate the mystery of life. God is experienced rather than Law. Prayer, communion, contemplation, meditation and reflection become important tools to us as we explore what it means to follow Jesus.
At stage two when we say "Jesus saved me" we mean that Jesus is a kind of fairy godmother who will rescue us whenever we get into trouble so long as we remember to ask. At stage four we mean Jesus shows me how to live and how to be connected to God, by welcoming the outcasts and overcoming prejudice.
Our view of God changes. At stage two we know that God is loving, but we think of him as a kind of paternalistic police officer in the sky. By Stage 4 we know and experience the love of God which warms us and is within us and which is never easy to describe or quantify. We are no longer afraid of God at stage 4, in stage 2 we have a strong fear of God - though we may never admit to it. As Troy Perry says "I'm not afraid anymore". This is our cry when we leave stage 2.
So What's This Got To Do With us?
People need different things at stage 2, 3 and 4. We tend not to get people who are happy in stage 2! If you are looking for a church with certainty, absolute rules, and where you will be told how to live, we can recommend many but this won't be it for you. Of course people may still want that even though they know they can't live by those rules. They want MCC to be a place which keeps them at stage 2, but allows them to be gay or lesbian or transgendered. We can help people reconcile their faith but we will also help them move on.
At stage 3 people need the freedom to question, to seek after truth, to try and work it all out. There is space to do that within MCC - though these types will make stage 2 types very uncomfortable! And then the last stage of integration is where we try to be as a church. We recognise the value of the certainty of stage 2 faith, and much of what we believe is certain, but we also see faith as a mystery to be enjoyed and experienced rather than a set of answers to the questions life throws at us.
God raised us up as a place to grow spiritually.
Catholic and Evangelical
The
final reason God raised us up for that I want to think about is something that
we have only really discerned here in the last year. God raised us up to be both
evangelical and Catholic. We are learning to value the intimacy of evangelical
forms of worship, the songs we sing stress the intimate relationship we have
with Jesus, the radical nature of our discipleship. We value and rejoice in the
insights from Scripture that evangelicals, in particular, bring out. But we also
value a traditional pattern of worship which stresses the need to confess our
sins, be forgiven, and meet the Lord in the sacrament of Holy Communion. We
value the emphasis given on being a community of faith within Catholicism. We
value the fact that we are standing on the shoulders of the giants who have gone
before us. The tragedy of the Protestant Reformation is that each side, Catholic
and Evangelical, whilst each stressing so much of what is important lost so much
from the other. Without the grounding of liturgy, a sense of community, and an
awareness of the wider church, evangelical charismatics can become a little
strange. Without the exuberance of lively worship Catholic worship can become
staid and deathly. Both together start to show what the Church should be. If you
read the
Book of Revelation and read the descriptions of the worship of
Heaven you will be struck by the worship - choirs and choirs of angels sing
exuberantly in praise of God, whilst they do oddly liturgical things like use
incense. In our worship we try to bring a little bit of heaven to earth.
God raised us up to be both Catholic and Evangelical.
Conclusion
God raised up MCC Manchester from the lgbt communities in order that we might offer a place of inclusion to the "outsiders" and "eunuchs" of our world. God raised us up to be a safe place for our people to become and remain disciples. God raised us up to offer a place where spiritual growth is taken seriously. God raised us up to be both Catholic and Evangelical. God raised us up so that our people might be saved.
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.