Introduction

Today is an anniversary - 37 years ago this Sunday Troy Perry a young Pentecostal ex-minister held a service in his front room for the lesbian and gay community. On the screen is the advert Troy put in the press and the picture of the house he lived in at the time where worship was held. As you can see from the more modern picture of him, he was very young when he started MCC! 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 - some heterosexuals and trans people showed up.

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 18 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 then boyfriend asked ome and him along and we went to the MCC meeting in Balham and I met the Revd Jean White for the first time. It's 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 and how their stories moved me.

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. o 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! o 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.

We rejoice that God has blessed our church against all the odds! Our journey has been bitter and sweet. 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 37 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, gay bi and Trans people are included in this Biblical term "eunuch" with those who "were born that way".
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. 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

People need different things in churches depending on their own faith journey and stage in life. In MCC we tend not to get people who are happy in legalistic churches. Those who come along wanting that don't find it here and become frustrated. 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. Sometimes people want MCC to be a place which keeps them in a legalistic phase, but allows them to be gay or lesbian or transgendered. We help people reconcile their faith but we will also help them move on. We give people 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 folks will make the legalistic Christians very uncomfortable! We recognise the value of the certainty, 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 that God raised us up to be both evangelical and Catholic. We have learned to value the intimacy of the evangelical songs we sing which stress the intimate relationship we have with Jesus and 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 Reformation was 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 and unhinged! 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 and prostrate themselves. 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.

Amen.

This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.