Oliver Smith
Sermon 07/06/03
Lyndale UCC
One More Step
< CyberPoet.com < Jim Smith home < Writing < Essay Index
|
|
Oliver Smith
Sermon 07/06/03 Lyndale UCC One More Step < CyberPoet.com < Jim Smith home < Writing < Essay Index |
|
Readings from the Hebrew and Christian canons: 2 Samuel 5:1-5; Ezekiel 2:1-5; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13; Psalms 48; Psalms 123 Thirty years ago this summer, in 1973, I was a pentecostal preacher, a pastor in a tiny church adjacent to the railroad tracks passing through the small Mississippi community of Mt Olive, forty miles north of where my first wife and I lived in Hattiesburg. When I was "called" to this position, in the summer of that year, I had only been married for six months and I was starting my second year in the department of Biblical Studies at William Carey College, a Southern Baptist institution in the heart of the deep south. How I got there from where I was in Boston, Massachusetts only a year before is a story that I would like to reflect on today, as I think about about my personal physical will to survive, my personal spiritual will to praise the universe that has given me birth and my personal psychological will to be myself (as is) in spite of the familial, societal, cultural and religious objections that may exist to me being whom I am. The period of time from January of 1972 to the summer of 1973 was more than just a radical change in geography for me, it was also a time of rapid, monumental shifts in my sociological and spiritual contexts. In December of 1972, I married a woman from Colorado, whom I had met in Boston in January of that year, after never having even one real date with another person. I asked her to marry me in May of 1972, not long after she suggested that I go into the ministry. At the time, I didn't object to this idea because my mother had long desired that I go into the ministry and I didn't really have much of an alternative plan. You see, like David and Ezekial, in two of the passages upon which this meditation is based, I too was feeling the weight of outside forces dragging me down into the belly of service to a god known for its coercive techniques. For David, the will of his god and the will of his people were calling him to be their sovereign. This came after the well know story of his battle with Goliath. This accomplishment, which was the result of David's skill as a herder who had learned effective techniques for protecting his sheep, turns out to be David's last real connection with his own free will. Immediately afterward, Saul (the sovereign of Israel) took David into his home and refused to let him return to his own home. The rest of his life was pulled in various directions by political and religious forces that were beyond him to contain. David quickly fell in love with Saul's son, Jonathon, to the point where Jonathan "stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle". But this relationship was quickly challenged as Saul made sure that David was preoccupied with a rapid succession of battles that would bring David fame, jealousy from Saul, politically arranged marriages, assasination attempts on his life and ultimately, the "call" to become the sovereign of Judah, and then later Israel, to unite all twelve of the Hebrew tribes. The real David, the David who was the poet, the muscian, the herder who knew his own soul, was soon lost in the quagmire of exernal forces coercing their will upon his life. Ezekiel, too, speaks of his god's spirit entering him and forcibly lifting him to his feet and compelling him to listen to commands which demanded that he attack those people around him, that he call them rebellious, insolent, uncivil, arrogant and stubborn children. He was told to do this just so the people would know that a preacher had been in their midst. Ezekiel's will was not at play here, it was irrelevent. In my own family, this was called the "will of god", or the "will of the lord". It was a force that was far beyond all efforts to counteract it, and whatever effort that I may put into resisting the "will" of their god was considered to be the work of the devil. So even when I was trying assert my own will I was robbed of the acknowledgement that it was my will. In the world that I grew up in, everything was either god's will or satan's will. There was no recognition that I had any significance in anything. I was simply a battlefield upon which the wills of the god and satan fought between themselves. This is why personal boundaries were not only disrespected, should you have the presence of mind to establish them, there was no effort whatsoever to inform you about boundaries and there was much work committed to ensuring that you never had the psychological or spiritual opportunity, or will to create them, for if you did, the various demands upon you, to force you into accepting what was considered to be god's will for you, would have no chance at taking seed and growing into the monstrous web of religious obligation that has oppressed so many of us. There is an expression that I heard many times while growing up. That expression is, "that child needs to have their will broken." This was used when there was some young person who was deemed too rebellious, considered to be be to much "of their own mind". This was considered to be the work of the devil and that all vestiges of satan must be obliterated from that child, or that child will be lost not only in this life, but for all of eternity. So if a boy wasn't acting enough like a boy should act, or a girl wasn't acting enough like a girl should act, or if a child was eight years old and hadn't gone down to the alter on a Sunday morning to "give their life over to the lord", their "spirit was going to need to be broken," just like a horse needed to broken. They needed to be brought in line with the "will of the lord". In one of my sermons from thirty years ago I heard myself say that "if you weren't following the will of god, then you had no purpose in life." I made this statement absolutely, resolutely, without even a moment of hesitation. I had been hearing statements like that from the time I was born. I had no idea that there was another spiritual point of view, and it is no accident that such a narrow theological focus had descended into the collective consciousness of what we call "Christianity" today. It turns out, though, that there were followers of Jesus who made bold attempts to express these alternative perspectives and they paid dearly for their efforts. They were branded as heretics and banished from the face of all that is visible within Chrisitianity today. One such so-called "heretic", was the Celtic theologian, Pelagius, who dared to say that human free-will was sufficient to allow each individual to find their own way to salvation. In other words, according to Pelagius, it was OK for me reject any "will" which has been thrust upon me, and it was OK for me to accept myself, to acknowledge myself and to set upon my own, personal path of reconciliation with my creator. But Pelagius was a contemporary of Augustine's and Augustine had a different take on Christianity, one closer to Paul's point of view, which basically says you are nothing. You are incapable to seeking the truth in the first place, knowing the truth when you find it or even accepting the truth. Today, we know very little about Pelagius. All of his works have disappeared, except for excerpts that appear in Augustine's rebuttals to his arguments. He was not assimilated, he was eliminated. This goes to to illustrate the nature of the writings that Jews and Christians consider to be sacred, within their corresponding canons. They are actually the writings which have survived the theological, political and military campaigns. You can thank the sword of Constantine for preserving and enforcing the dogma of Paul, Augustine and the others who invented the theological universe that evolved from whatever the historical life of Jesus was. Imagine what the United States would look like two thousand years from now if only the writings of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed and their friends on the religious right were preserved. My mother told me many times that she had dedicated me to her god and had promised to bring me up to be a minister of her god's word. When she was young, she dedicated herself to be a missionary and she was filled with the guilt for not following through with that promise, so she hounded my dad about being a minister after she married him. He became so frustrated with these forceful appeals that he left his job on the pipline in Agua Dulce, in south Texas and moved us all up to Decatur, to attend North Texas Bible College. When he failed out there, he moved us to Phoenix, Arizona where he tried once again to move in the direction that my mother insisted he go, but he failed there as well. According to my mother, my dad couldn't hold a job. He was so inept, in her words, that he stopped making payments on the trailer we lived in on the back lot of a dusty baptist church in Phoenix. The trailer was reposessed and we had to move into a low rent apartment. Before too long, my dad moved us up to Denver in search of work, and even there my mother continued with the pressure to push him into some form of ministry, so he opted to become a deacon in Metropolitan Baptist Church in Denver, a Southern Baptist missionary church to spanish speaking people. It was at this time that he simply said that he had enough and left. In an interview that I conducted with him a couple of years ago he talked about that period of his life. He said that he should never have left his job on the pipeline. That was who he was. He wasn't a preacher, and never would be, but he felt like he was constantly on the burner when he was with my mother and he just couldn't be himself. Her expectations and the expectations of the so-called "will of god" were simply too much. So he left. With him gone, my mother turned her religious zeal on me. If my father wasn't man enough to be the head of a nuclear family then she was going to make sure that I would not only become a minister, or missionary, but also her husband. I tried very hard to do that. I lifted most of the boxes during most of the thirty moves across five states that we accomplished during my first seventeen years. I helped my mother study when she was finishing her undergraduate degree at the University of Northern Colorado. I even read the books she was supposed to read and I gave her the reports that she could hand in. My life had become infused with the responsibilities of church and home. There was no life outside of those two places, and for all practical purposes, I might as well have spent all of my time at church because home was simply an extension of church. In many cases this was quite literal, since my mother was continuously trying to start missions out of our various houses. By the time I was in fifth grade I was faking illness in order to avoid church, but it usually backfired on me because it only meant that I was stuck at home, in that extension of the church I was trying to avoid. I gave up trying to have friends. I gave up trying to write or having any kind of hope. I gave up on being myself. In order to survive I became a chameleon, taking on the colors that my mother, her religion and her god demanded of me. "You have been chosen", was the message I would hear throughout my youth. "It is god's will that you do these things." My will didn't mean a damned thing to my mother. The "me" inside was inconsequential. To be thinking of "me" was considered selfish. To be wanting to do anything but the will of my mother's god was quite simply heretical. Even though my thoughts were moving towards my mother's gravest fears for my apostasy, I had grown quite adept at concealing my true feelings, hiding the "me" my mother and her god despised so deeply, that I had even lost touch of it within myself. I was becoming whatever I thought others wanted me to be. I felt that I was being asked to become David, succombing to the coercive appeals of his people and his god to become their sovereign. I felt as though I was being asked to become Ezekiel, taking on the mantle of a prophet whose own self had disintegrated in the presence of a demanding god, calling those who disagreed with him "rebellious", "impudent children" and "stiffhearted". For you see, their wills needed to be brought into submission as well, just as the Bush administration seems to feel that the Iraqi people need to be brought into submission under the supposedly righteous power of the United States. The militaristic metaphors of the christian machine I was a part of were instrusive and debilitating. "Onward Christian Soldiers", we would sing in Vacation Bible School. We were being prepared for battle. We were putting ourselves on hold...for life...for there is no life without the "will of the god". We were to be assimilated or burned into the crispy critters of eternity. It is all so simple when you simply repress and assimilate. So it should be no surprise that by the time I arrived in Boston in 1969, three thousand miles from my mother in Richland, Washington, that I was the proverbial chicken remaining in the coop, even though the door was wide open and there were people trying to help me out. It was natural, by that time, for me to resonate with my first wife's suggestion of going into the ministry. "It was the god's will" for me. I had no idea that my first wife had this fantasy of marrying a Norman Vincent Peale type preacher who would go to seminary, take on a church with a large, respectable congregation, write a bestselling book of spiritually insipid affirmations and raise maybe two children, who would become wealthy doctors or lawyers. I also had no idea that a Southern Baptist acquaintence of mine would write to Dr Ralph Noonkester, the president of William Carey College, and tell him about my interest in the ministry. At that time I was quite willing to respond to a personal invitation from the president of a college to attend his institution, even if it was in the very depths of the south. But I was trying to be a good fundamentalist, I really was. Only a few months before arriving in Hattiesburg in August, I had been given Southern Baptist preaching credentials back in Chelsea (just across the harbor from Boston), where I had been the minister of music for three years. Once the decision had been made to be a preacher I couldn't get behind the pulpet fast enough. I soon found myself giving sermons at nursing homes around Hattiesburg and was taking Greek and Hebrew at the college. I was involved with the ministerial association and well on my way to fulfilling my mother's greatest dream for me: to be a minister. What's more, I had decided that I wanted to be missionary to some Spanish country, so I was taking Spanish as well. I was on a spiritual roll. I guess you could say I was on fire "for the Lord", as they would say in the Baptist churches I grew up in. The fact that my mother went to college in Hattiesburg, at the same school, back in the forties, made the experience even more special. I even had the army green trunk that she used when she left the family shack in McComb, Mississippi to attend college in Hattisburg. It truly was a spiritual destiny. She said that she prayed constantly that I would fulfill this promise that she had made to her god. That fall, my first wife and I were planning our wedding in December, It was to take place in Greeley, Colorado. Meanwhile I had applied for ministerial housing from William Carey College, which we planned to live in after the wedding. Then I discovered that the daughter of my mother's best friend from her Mississippi college days, who had since married a man who became a missionary to Africa, was also attending William Carey College, so I made it a point to contact her. As it turned out, she was involved in a clandestine charismatic group on campus and I found myself caught up in a controversial whirlpool of tempestuous spirituality not long after my first semester as a ministerial student got underway. I was already fascinated with the whole notion of the "baptism in the holy spirit" and speaking in tongues because I had read Pat Boone's new book "A New Song" just a few months before leaving Boston, so this charismatic group on campus was more than a little intriguing. What I didn't realize was how deeply the college administration resented the presence of this charismatic terrorist cell on campus. The fact that I was participating in the ministerial association and preaching at the local nursing homes under the auspices of the ministerial association was particularly troublesome to them, not to mention that I was applying for ministerial housing, so the adminstration had to take action. I was called into Dr Dorman Laird's office for a special meeting. He was the Academic Dean, as well as a professor in the department of religion and philosophy. Dr Laird opened his big Bible and he started telling me about his god's will, and he made it clear that I was not following his god's will and that I was in danger of burning in the fires of his god's hell. Not long after that experience I attended University Assembly of God across town. It was the first time in my life that I had become a member of any church other than a Southern Baptist Church. It was the begining of a slippery slide away from what I had always been told, was the "will of god". P.T. Pettus, the minister at University Assembly of God, was also the presbyter for that area of the Mississippi District of the Assemblies of God. He liked the enthusiasm that I brought with me, so he made sure that I had plenty of opportunities to preach in various churches when there was a need for a substitute preacher. Then he made arrangements for me to be considered for the pastorate at Mt Olive Assembly of God. I pastored that church for three years and preached three sermons a week: on Sunday morning, Sunday night and on Wednesday night. I guess you could say that I had my life in line with the "will of the lord" at that time of my life. I was a minister, which my mother and my first wife had set me up for, but my mother wanted a Billy Graham and my wife wanted a Norman Vincent Peale, and the "me" inside was starting to wake and ask..."what am I doing here!?!" But at that time in my life, most of what I had known was extreme Christian conservative fundamentalism, which meant that anything to the left of that world view was Satanic at it worst and "backslid" at its best. I was already toying with the forces of evil when I embraced the rock musical "Jesus Christ Superstar" and grew an Afro when I lived in Boston. I even sneaked into an oyster bar once on Boylston Street and ordered a cold beer. And worst of all, I developed a friendship with George Cox on the job at Jordan Marsh and Company (a department store headquarted in Boston). George was a very nice gay man in his mid-thirties. He was from Portland, Oregan and he took an instant liking to me...as a friend. He would have liked for the relationship to become more intimate, but it was George who helped me, an eighteen year old virgin who had never dated anyone, male or female, to understand that I was straight, not gay. George became my guide to the big city, and he opened my eyes, even if it was only a glimpse, to the possibilities of thinking outside of the fundamentalist box, but I wasn't out of the box yet, and the woman who was to become my first wife had no intention of letting me out yet. If she had anything to do with it, I would still be in there today. As for me, at that time, I didn't have any idea that I was in a box that I needed to get out of. This is where the scriptures themselves started to give me pause. My study of the Jewish and Christian texts, in English, as well as in Hebrew and Greek, and my study of the development of these texts and cultural contexts in which these writings evolved gave me a new sense how to approach these documents. The Bible was no longer some incontrovertible source of religious direction to me. It was becoming a biased, human-derived document with all of the markings of history designed to create a world view that supports and promotes a dogma that is partial to, and convenient for, a patriarchal, misogynistic, imperialistic and (in recent centires) even eurocentric perspective. I was becoming increasingly aware of the comfort I felt when I read accounts relating to Jesus and the discomfort that was present when I read the dogma of Paul, which (as it turns out) is the foundation for most of what we see in Christiantiy today. I was becoming appalled at how little of Jesus I was seeing in the Christian books and in the mountain of systematic theology which has evolved in the wake of Paul's writings. Today's text from Second Corinthians is a good example to consider. In this text, Paul is trying express how humble he is, and why we should consider him to be humble. In an effort to get to the core of this text, I have simplified Paul's unnecessarily complex logic and I have done something that has been done to Hebrew and Christian texts for millenia, I have paraphrased the text to give it a different feel. One of the principle aspects of this particular reading is his mentioning of the "thorn" in his "flesh". I have heard many sermons on this and I have read many a treatise relating to this passage, and there is much speculation with regards to what this "thorn" is. The view that I have become fond of in recent years is the opinion by some scholars (and not conservative scholars, mind you) that this "thorn" is related to Paul's sexual orientation. If you look at Paul's collection of writings, there is much to bolster this idea. First, is his attitude towards women, where he says that they should "learn in silence with all subjection," and that they should "not teach nor usurp authority over men". Secondly, he felt that it was best that men stayed away from women, conceding to marriage only if one was weak and needed to be married in order to contain their lust, but he was insistent that men remain celibate. Karen Armstrong (the author of the book "History of God"), in an editorial this past week in the Guardian, commenting on the recent supreme court decision to strike down the sodomy laws in the United States, reminded us that in the early church, thanks in large part the Paul's world view, even heterosexual marriage was looked at with disdain, to the point where heterosexual marriages were held on the doorstep of the church, NOT in the sanctuary, because it was not considered a "sacred" ceremony. She quotes St Amrose as saying that "virginity is the one thing separating humanity from the beasts". The notion of a "sacred" heterosexual ceremony is in fact a rather recent development within the christendom when it was introduced by Calvin in the sixteenth century, and Ms. Armstrong recommended that Christianity should take the "next step" and accept homosexual marriages as "sacred" events as well. Then there are the oft-quoted statements by Paul regarding same-sex relationships as "vile affections". With these thoughts in mind, I have paraphrased today's passage from second corinthians to encourage a different view point: 2 Corinthians 12 Over fourteen years ago, I knew someone who was caught up into paradise and who heard illegal, unspeakable words. Now, whether this was in the body or not, I just don't know. Only the creator knows. I am happy that this individual experienced this, but for me, I can only find glory in my flaws, for although I would like to be glorified, I don't want to be praised just because of my eloquent sermons. That is why I was afflicted by this satanic homosexuality. It forces me to repress these feelings and remain humble, preventing me from being exalted. Even though I have asked the creator three times to remove this imperfection, the only answer I got was, "my grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in your weakness." Therefore, I take pleasure in my inadequacies, reproaches, persecutions and distress on behalf of the creator, for when I am weak, I am strong. By reading Paul's words in this manner, we can more easily see through to the repression that has taken place within Paul, where he is not only unable to accept himself, he has taken glory and (if I might say so) pride in this repression. He has achieve the ultimate status in abiding by his god's will. But in Jesus, we see a different tactic brought into play. In the passage from Mark, Jesus says to his disciples, in essence, "that if you are not received in a place, shake the dust off your feet as a statement against them." I would like to suggest that we take this teaching from Jesus and take it a step further. If someone, or some group of people, or your family, or the culture at large does not accept you as you are, then shake the dust off your feet as a statement against them and move on down the road. Find a community where you can be yourself, where noone is going to presume that you should a preacher, or that you should behave a certain way if you are female, or that you should keep to yourself and not get involved if you are moving about the church on wheels, or that you should be straight, or that you should dare to exercise your own will. Last Sunday, at the Gay Pride Parade, I showed up at our designated spot for the start of the parade, with the coalition of churches from the United Church of Christ. I was the only one there, and there was no banner for Lyndale UCC. I wasn't all that worried, because I know that Lyndale doesn't follow the rules and I knew that Lyndalians would find their way, that they would take one more step into themselves and into our spiritual community as their own wills dictated. Sure enough, just as the parade started, Vicky Keck showed up in a rainbow inspired outfit. Then the Don Portwoot zipped in on his motorized foot scooter. At the first corner, Audrey slipped out of the crowd and joined us, rolling about in circles like a one-person Shriner motorcaid. Before long, we had a dozen or more Lyndalians wandering from curb to curb, twirling streamers and hugging everyone we knew along the way. We had no banner, but we had our personal, independent will and we were proclaiming our right to step forward, shake the dust off our feet and our wheels in the face of all those people in our lives who have rejected us because we have found our way to ourselves and because we have dared to not only acknowledge who we are, but we are willing move on down Hennepin Avenue and on into the rest of our lives. I personally, will always be grateful to this community, even though it took me forty five years to get here. It has been worth the wait.
The End
|
|
( Count from 08/09/2003 ) |