Below is an edited version of the Keynote delivered in at the United Church of Christ General Synod on June 29, 2015 in Cleveland, Oh. The theme of the Synod was "Unexpected Places."
It is great a honor to speak with all of you this morning and I feel very fortunate that I am here, with the United Church of Christ, because walking among you and hearing the important conversations you are having is giving me hope for the church in this historic time for our country.
These last few days have been deeply emotional, with a whiplash between outrage and elation. The tears of joy at the Supreme Court vote to grant marriage equality to LGBT Americans blends with tears of loss and rage at the burial of Rev. Clementa Pinckney and the rest of the 'Beautiful Nine.'
And so, I want to use these few moments I have with you to talk about the church, and what I see as the ongoing struggle for the soul of the body of Christ.
Church is not a particularly fashionable place these days. The theme of this gathering is "Unexpected Places," and according to current wisdom, the absolutely last place anyone expects to encounter the living God is within the walls of a building with a steeple on top where two or three are gathered in the name of Jesus.
Well, don't try telling that to Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston.
And don't try telling that to Dylann Roof. That young man knew what he was doing when he committed his racist terrorism at Emanuel AME. Emanuel was founded almost 200 years ago as an act of resistance to white Christian racism. Within a brutally hostile world, Emanuel provided spiritual power, dignity and active resistance -- so much so that the church building was burned to the ground by a white mob and the congregation was forced to meet in secret, as their faith was feared for the gall of having attempted to follow Jesus and liberating the oppressed.
Emanuel has been Church for thousands of lives over the years; people who individually and collectively lived out the Gospel. It is a community that provided the healing balm needed to mend bodies, minds and spirits bruised from a world rife with systematic racism and everyday challenges. Within that sanctuary, the living body of Christ praised God and strengthened their faith. The congregation also flirted, giggled, fell in love and got married.
In that sanctuary, they baptized babies and new believers, prayed for the healing of sick friends, had great meals together, celebrated new jobs or collected funds to support those in need. In that church, people mourned the loss of loved ones and sent them home. We saw the power of the Church when, just days after the shooting, the congregation reopened, held worship and refused to let sin and death have the final word. Both in its prophetic and pastoral ministries, Mother Emanuel has known since its very beginning that black lives matter -- Because Mother Emanuel is the Church.
But it is not the only church.
Immediately after the murders, many white pastors and commentators on the right attempted to describe the attack not as racism, but as an attack on Christianity. They did this in what appeared to me as an effort to subsume the event under their broader agenda that they term "religious freedom." It was a painful display of willful ignorance after such a devastating loss.
Emanuel A.M.E. wasn't attacked because it was a church. This is Charleston -- there are hundreds of churches Dylann Roof could have picked. No, Emanuel was targeted because it was a specific kind of church. And since the shooting in Charleston, five other black churches around the south have been targeted by arsonists.
The shooter knew the history enough to know that all churches are historically not his enemy. White southern churches legitimized slavery from their pulpits, although they repent for it today. Prof. Harry Stout at Yale explains: "If you pull the church out of the whole equation, it's highly likely that there never would have been a Civil War. Southern clergy had no doubt that slavery was not a sin."
White Churches were complicit in Jim Crow and responded to the mandate to integrate public schools by founding independent "Christian" schools so that they could keep segregation alive. The KKK continues today to insist that it is a Christian organization.
And so we must struggle for the soul of the church.
Likewise, as we celebrate marriage equality it is worthwhile considering the role of the church in that fight for justice. Unfortunately, the record is equally mixed. Self-described Christian leaders have legitimized discrimination and destroyed LGBT lives under the guise of maintaining morality. Over the past few decades, Christian conservatives have been politically organized and activated to counter even the smallest efforts at non-discrimination legislation.
On Friday when the Supreme Court made its decision to include millions of Americans in the privileges and responsibilities of marriage, a group of evangelicals put out their prepared pledge called "Here We Stand," saying they will resist the ruling every step of the way. With no irony, the Southern Baptist Rev. Mike Huckabee quoted Dr. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail as he called for civil disobedience against a law that granted a minority group equal rights.
But that is not the whole story -- the history of gay activism includes courageous religious leadership starting in 1965. Prof. Heather White says that in the 1950s and 1960s, homophile organizations saw religious leaders as likely allies and there were times when clergy stood up to police and protected queer bodies from being imprisoned. And some of the biggest gay rights organizations, such as PFLAG, started their work in churches. If you want to know more about this history, study The LGBT Religious Archives Network. They were first located in the Chicago Theological Seminary and now are at the Pacific School of Religion.
Throughout the '70s and '80s, even as the religious right had the microphone and formed the perception that the church was uniformly against LGBT equality, there was slow but steady movement within mainline churches, often led by the UCC. Roberta Kaplan, who was one of the lawyers on the DOMA case, told me how important the amicus briefs of religious groups supporting LGBT rights were in convincing the Court to strike down DOMA in 2013.
The story of the church and LGBT rights is also my story. I first came back to church as a gay, recovering alcoholic. My cousins invited me to a UCC/ABC church in the village in New York City, and by some miracle, I actually went. (The moral of that story, in case you missed it, is that it is OK to invite people to church.)
Of course, I was wary of church. But once inside, I came to love the church for teaching me that I was beautifully and wonderfully made; and that to love myself and care for myself was a form of gratitude to my Creator. Years later, after I had been with my partner for 11 years, I was married in the Episcopal church we now attend, and It was one of the most moving events of my life, only rivaled by the baptism of our son, Walter, on this last Easter vigil.
You see, the Church for me, as a gay man, has been literally life-saving. Through its prophetic and pastoral care, the Church affirmed my humanity as a beloved child of God. In doing so, it called me to solidarity with others different from me, allowing me to recognize them as my sisters and brothers, all of us children of a God who loved us into being and wishes us to live together in peace with justice.
The issues of race and sexuality are just two recent examples of the vastly different ways people understand the role of the church and underscore the struggle that is happening right now. I know you can all think of many more examples from your own lives -- starting with gender, approaches to science, immigration, climate change income disparity, militarization and the list goes on and on.
In order to give us some clarity around the real purpose of church, I want to turn to the recently martyred Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who, in a 2013 speech, spoke about the essential quality of the church.
Rev. Pinckney said: "Could we not argue that America is about freedom whether we live it out or not? Freedom, equality and the pursuit of happiness. And that is what church is all about: freedom to worship and freedom from sin, freedom to be full of what God intends us to be, and to have equality in the sight of God. "
Or to go more immediately to the source we can just listen to Jesus' first sermon when he quotes Isaiah in Luke 4:18: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me, to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free"
In a world that continues to discriminate, denigrate and even murder, God's church can be recognized when it provides sanctuary for all people are free to be fully themselves and free to feel the dignity and pride in who God made them -- whatever race, gender, sexuality, culture, religion or size.
The church should not be fighting for the freedom to discriminate, but for people to be free from discrimination.
God's church will be known as really God's church when it is out there on the streets demanding justice, as well as offering spiritual health within its walls using the spiritual resources of our faith.
That's the church. And we need to let people know it. Believe or not, there are people who never have met a Christian like you all. And I hope that they do and so I want to urge the UCC to get fired up and get out there, and show the world what the real church is all about.
We are living in a crucial moment in history -- in America and around the globe. Let us honor the beautiful nine of Charleston, as well as those LGBT lives that never made it to this moment of dignity. Let us live out Rev. Clementa Pinckney's vision for the church.
The world crying out for redemption, for liberation, for freedom.
Let's be God's church -- in both expected and unexpected places -- and respond to the call.
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