Scripture: Mark 10:17-31
Sojourners United Church of Christ. A safe place to begin. A safe place to begin again. Those are words you probably recognize as being at the top of our bulletin every Sunday. They describe, I suppose, some combination of who we think we are and who we hope to be. Hope to be, because it would be a very large claim to say that we are and have always been a safe place in every way for every person who has come our way, way too large a claim. It would be arrogant to claim that, and I know it to be untrue. But I do not believe it would be untrue to say that for many people who have not necessarily felt safe in churches, Sojourners in fact has been and is in important ways a safe place. There is evidence for that too. It is not a lie, and we do not have to be embarrassed about putting it at the top of our bulletin. But I do want to reflect on the notion this morning, the notion of being a safe place.
Partly I want to do this just on general principles, just so we don’t take the idea for granted. It’s easy to slide right over that phrase in the bulletin and look down to see what hymns we’re singing today. It may also be easy to think that this is just an understood part of who we are, that being a safe place is good and that we are pretty good at it, and that we therefore can slide right over thinking about it very much. I want to take the “safe place” idea out of the realm of the taken-for-granted this morning.
I also have been led to think about this because the role of gay and lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered people within the church—the church in general, not just Sojourners—is on my mind. By the way I will be using the shorthand term “lgbt” this morning to refer to a group of people who are not a group, who are human beings, not labels or letters, and who are in fact much more diverse than the letters and labels indicate, but who have in common that their varied sexual orientations and gender identities have resulted in their being treated poorly by and within the Christian church.
The Episcopal Church has been making the news lately. It’s tempting to make some comments about what’s going on there, but I decided to resist that temptation. Maybe another time. Definitely another time. What is going on in the Episcopal Church does affect church life in the United States. It will affect church life in Charlottesville. It is of concern to me. It is not just someone else’s business. But another time. Offering commentary on Episcopalian issues, I decided, is not what I want to do this morning. But it did lead me to think about the issue of churches being safe places.
Also the forum this morning. This sermon is one way I have of contributing to the dialogue. And the conference coming up at the end of the month, the EVER conference, and the ad for people to sign and contribute to, and National Coming Out Day—it’s no accident that there are a number of things going on that attempt to draw attention to the issues facing lgbt people in our society, all within these few weeks in October. October is one time of year that some communities choose to have a pride week or month. Some have been thinking that it would be good to have such a time in Charlottesville and have been looking on this October as a kind of a “pride month” in Charlottesville. It’s not a tradition here, and it’s not at this point a huge coordinated effort, but maybe we’re taking a few small steps this year toward what might be a stronger effort in the future. In any case, even the few things going on this year have led me to reflect on how the church has often not been a safe place for lgbt people, in fact has often been one of the least safe places, and how it needs to be, but also to just think about the idea of being a safe place, and how it applies to our life here at Sojourners.
My first thoughts in this regard were along the lines of what I have already said. First, that being a safe place is not something to be taken for granted, not even something we can necessarily assume we understand very well. It is some time ago now, but more recent than I would like to admit, that I first realized, really realized and took seriously that there were some places that I “knew” to be perfectly safe that in fact were not safe places for African American people. A friend of mine in Chicago, an African American, some years ago made a chance remark about how scary it was for him to drive through certain suburban areas of Chicago. I thought he was joking at first, making a light-hearted comment about how he felt out of his element, but it eventually got through to me that he in fact meant scary, not just out of his element which was also true, but afraid for his safety, as in hoping he didn’t have a flat tire while driving through these neighborhoods.
My first inclination was to tell him he shouldn’t feel that way. There were neighborhoods around Chicago that were clearly unsafe for everyone, black, white, brown, anyone. If you didn’t know what you were doing and it wasn’t daylight, best not to go there. There were neighborhoods, whole towns around Chicago that were known for being hostile to people of color and where violence was known by everyone to be a real possibility. But these places he was referring to were not those. These were what I would consider “safe places”, and I was about to tell him that when I caught myself and for some reason decided to listen to the feeling rather than tell him what I thought he ought to feel.
I tell that story I think just to say that the whole question of safe places, even just on the level of physical safety much less when we get into psychological and emotional safety, is extremely complicated—dependent on who we are in terms of gender, race, and sexual orientation, dependent on life experiences and social realities, dependent on all sorts of perceptions and prejudices, dependent on the kinds of fears we carry inside us and how we live with and deal with those fears.
It is also many layered. We can feel safe at a certain level in certain settings so long as we don’t have to reveal certain things about ourselves, as long as we don’t have to reveal too much of ourselves. Is it safe to be “out” in church? Is it safe to be “out” as to one’s sexual orientation? Is it safe to be “out” in church as to one’s doubts or questions about religious belief? Is it safe to be “out” even with people we know and like, is it safe to be “out” to this person or that about the places we hurt, about the ways we are crazy or vulnerable, about the loneliness we feel, or the fear of dying? We may not feel safe even at superficial levels, if there are important parts of ourselves we need to hide in order to feel safe, and in any case the more vulnerable we make ourselves to others, and the deeper we go in revealing that vulnerability, the more we put ourselves at risk.
A safe place to begin. A safe place to begin again. It sounds so simple and straightforward, but it is anything but. My lgbt friends have taught me over the years that coming out is not something you do once and for all and its over. It’s something you are confronted with again and again as you decide who you will come out to, and how and when and under what conditions. Coming out is a continual process. Being a safe place, becoming a safe place, is also a continual process, something that is not done once and forgotten about, something that is repeated every time a new person comes into the community, that is built in to the ongoing life of the community, that needs to be spoken of, that needs not to be taken for granted.
One reason, of course, that the church cannot take for granted that it is a safe place for lgbt people is because it has so often proved itself to be exactly the opposite. One can almost take for granted that a church is not a safe place, even if it says it is, even if it is an open and affirming church, you can almost take for granted that it is not until it proves itself otherwise. And one big reason the church has not been safe for lgbt people is, frankly, scripture. Or I should say the way people have interpreted scripture, namely carelessly and unlovingly. Still, even though it is only a handful of passages, questionably interpreted to say the least, scripture has played a role in making the church not a safe place for lgbt people.
That thought, however, led me to a related but somewhat different thought. Sometimes scripture contributes to making churches unsafe in negative and unjust ways. Sometimes the lack of safety is just how things are and maybe even how they are supposed to be. I almost always read the lectionary scripture readings for the week, even if I know what I’m going to preach on, even if I already have some other scripture picked out. I read this week’s scripture having already decided that the topic would be safe places and the church as a safe place. I read Jesus telling the rich man that what he was looking for he would only find by selling what he owned and giving the money to the poor. I read what he had to say about how it would easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. I read these passages and I thought to myself that sometimes scripture is not safe because people misuse it, and sometimes scripture is just plain not safe.
The only way to make those sayings of Jesus safe, at least for those of us who live pretty comfortable lives, is to ignore them, or to dismiss them, to pay as little attention to them as possible. If we choose to take Jesus’ words seriously, to actually pause over them and ponder what they might mean, if we admit the possibility that there might be some message or lesson here for us, then these are not safe words. And I don’t say that because I think I know what the message is, but just because if I am going to be truly open to the words, and not just open to them so long as they don’t make me uncomfortable, then I have put myself in an unsafe place.
In at least some ways, maybe, the church is not and should not be a safe place. Or maybe I should say it is not and should not be only a safe place. It is true, of course, that we need safe places, and that the church has often failed to be that. We need the church to be a place where we can be ourselves, all of ourselves, not having to hide some important part of ourselves. We need the church to be a place where we can speak the truth that is ours without always having to measure our truth against THE TRUTH. We need the church to be a place where our questions are ok, and our clothes are ok, and our skin color—whatever it is—is beautiful, and our sexual orientation is perfect just the way it is, and we don’t have to keep who we are to ourselves. We need the church to be a safe place where we can hear unsafe words and consider together how we are going to take them and what we are going to make of them. It is clear to me that the church does need to be a safe place, and in ways that it has too often not been.
But this much is also clear. Being safe is not enough. The church needs to be much more than a place of warmth and acceptance and safety. The church needs to be not only a place where words of condemnation are not spoken but where words of justice are spoken. The church needs to be a place that not only helps us to hear words that are somewhat unsettling, it needs to be a place that encourages us to speak words that are maybe out of our comfort zone. The church needs to be more of a safe place for some of us, perhaps a bit less of a safe place for others. It needs to venture beyond its given, comfortable place in society and try to do some unsafe things together that we might not be willing to do alone. I’m not sure precisely what that means or where it will lead us. I hope we continue doing things that will help us find out. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 12. 2003