Christopher Thomas
Sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost, Year B – 6/6/21
1 Samuel 8:4-11, (12-15), 16-20, (11:14-15)
Psalm 138
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35
I remember that day, so many, many years ago, as though it were just yesterday.
Even driving into, onto the parking lot, my stomach churned with anxiety, for I had heard story, upon story, upon story, of the awfulness of that place.
Oh, I had spent weeks training, sweating, for this moment, for just such a moment as this. But let’s be honest. Do you really train your way into a moment like this? I’ve come to the conclusion that conversion moments aren’t particularly “train-able.” Maybe that’s why they are conversion moments.
For on that day, so many years ago, this 23 year-old, lower-middle-class, white, suburban gay kid of privilege stepped through the doors, onto the floor of something called the AIDS ward, in the Jefferson Davis County Hospital in Houston, Texas. How completely ironic and yet appropriate that a place so disgusting and so horrible to all of my white-privileged senses was named after the President of the Confederate States of America.
But that is where those who had no means, the margins, for my intents and purposes that day, my newly assigned “buddy” through the Aids Foundation – Houston, went. They didn’t get to go to the palaces that even I might ascend, like St. Luke’s glorious Episcopal Hospital, or any of the myriad of other gleaming institutions.
Jefferson Davis County Hospital.
The original building opened in 1924, constructed over the burial ground of thousands of Confederate army soldiers. It should be no great surprise that “lost cause” theorists, those who posited pseudo-historical, negationist ideologies advocating the heroic position of Southern states in the battle over slavery, were, in the early to mid-twentieth century, throwing up monuments, naming schools, and hospitals, and streets, after these “heroes,” all in misguided efforts to continue the subjugation of an entire class and race of God’s creation. It was fear-mongering, pure and simple.
So I guess it should be no great surprise that this was home to Houston’s HIV/AIDS ward, the place where people who were thrown away by society went to die.
That was my one and only time in Jeff Davis Hospital. In the few years that followed, that hospital was replaced by another, thank God renamed, in a completely different location. I can only imagine that so many horrible things had happened there that someone had the great good sense to decide that healthcare for the impoverished needed a fresh start, somewhere else. The building was razed, and for years the ground lay fallow. God knows it needed to.
I never ever want to forget it, and I am eternally grateful for every single thing, every disgusting, sad, awful, tragic detail, that I experienced on that blessed day, because I was converted, on that day. I “came out” on that day, of a drunken, privileged stupor. I saw, for the very first time, the reality on the margins, and there would be no going back into the closet of ignorance. Once you have seen the light, once you have smelled, and tasted, and touched, and heard, and emoted over the Great Good News, there is no going back! I’m sorry!
Now, I also remember that there were plenty of questions, of me, at that time.
“Why are you getting involved with this?”
“Why is this important to you?”
“Why?” “Why?” “Why?”
“He has gone out of his mind!”
Remember, this was the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis, the original pandemic of our lifetimes, and people thought that if you were concerned about it, it was because you were in it. Guilt by association. You were either gay, or you had it, or both. Or you were crazy. To go stand with THOSE people. They will think you have it.
Now, I was out, but not out, at that time. As those of us who are anywhere on the LGBTQ spectrum know, coming out is a lifetime process. We constantly evaluate whether we can be our honest, true selves, in every situation. It happens so often that it is unconscious. We swim in a sea of heteronormativity, and so, every single day is coming out day, because we constantly encounter “the other,” and we have to decide, can we be who we are, without being beat up, or bullied, or in some other way pressed into “the world.”
Oh, Jesus!
The crowd came together again, so much so that Jesus couldn’t even eat!
“We want more of our Jesus!”
I can just see all those AIDS patients standing up on their beds, in the ward, that day, rattling their bedpans, screaming for Jesus, “We have got to have more of our Jesus! We are dying here. They leave us for dead. Heal us. Bring us hope. Drive out the demons. Defeat the systems that put us in an insane place called Jefferson Davis. You better believe we want more of that!”
“Bless his heart, he has gone out of his mind.” The family rushes in to restrain him. The religious types rush in to restrain him. All those good, well-intentioned folk who are entrenched in systems of order, the systems of the world, the ones who like things the way they are and have always been (sic – “We’ve always done it that way”), come in to calm Jesus down.
Will Jesus be calmed down, do you think?
Do you think that Jesus, in that AIDS ward, would have been calmed down?
Would you have been calmed down, if you had crossed that threshold into that ward, that day?
Could you see that scene, and simply saunter back to business as usual?
Or would you be converted?
I want to let you in on a little secret, the secret of how closets work. The systems of injustice that make closets necessary and possible don’t want nice Christian folk to see the AIDS ward at Jefferson Davis County Hospital. They don’t want you to see what they have done with, what has happened to, the condition of those people on the margins, because they know you will be converted. And once you have been converted, you cannot go back into the closet.
Converted to what, you may ask.
June is the month set aside to celebrate Pride, the annual observance of the struggle of what has come to encompass all sorts and conditions of marginality in a world of systematic domination, as represented by the LGBTQQIA+ acronym. I often get asked what all those letters mean, and the acronym changes so frequently that even I have only a vague idea. But I know what the acronym stands for. It stands for the uprising of all of us who make our homes on the margins.
I want to zero in on the “A,” because the “A” is important in my, and maybe in our, conversion story. The “A” traditionally represents our allies, those who come stand with us on the margins, who meet us, and march with us, and aren’t afraid to be identified with us, on the spectrum. We could not be who and where we are without the “A’s.” However, at the end of the day, an ally gets to take off the garment of protest, and go to the market, or go home, to the bed of comfort, back to status and privilege.
What if those “A’s” were converted from allies to advocates? What is the fundamental difference between an ally and an advocate? What changes in the central core of who we are, in our DNA, when we can no longer separate ourselves from the radical other, from those on the margins?
The last two weeks of church, Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, have been about advocacy. God sent the Holy Spirit, the advocate and guide. Jesus empties Jesus’ self out in the forms of the Trinity. This God-given, God-driven, perichoretic, kenotic, emptying out action that says “I can’t come out to you on the margins, I can’t come to you in the AIDS ward at Jeff Davis Hospital, and then go back to my comfortable, privileged home, unchanged.” “I have to stay with you.” “I have to give up my privilege to be with you.” “In giving that up, I win!” “We win!” “God’s world order wins!”
Christians, church people, do ally really well. We are great at gathering things and blessing things and delivering things and then going home. We are great at dolloping potatoes on a tray in a soup line. Those things are wonderful, and necessary, and they call us into ally-ship, and we must do them.
Advocacy involves the kind of conversion that happens for us at the baptismal font, and at this Eucharistic table, in our DNA, because our DNA tells us that we cannot leave that person, those people there. Because those people are us, and we are them. Advocacy involves systemic, systematic change. Advocacy involves risk. Advocacy involves relationship, and change. Advocacy involves coming out of our closets, whatever those closets may be.
Advocacy is about taking on systemic, systematic change in public policy. This is something I know St. Thomas the Apostle understands well. Your last Rector, Mother Joy Daley, led you through some of the most miraculous, life-changing work in moving this Church and this Diocese forward in marriage equality. That happened through diligent, dedicated devotion to advocacy, advocacy around public policy. And that happened because of and through relationship!
If you’ve been paying attention to the sermons over the past 16 months, you know by now that I am passionate about this very kind of public policy, social justice advocacy. I believe it is what drew us together, in this thing called “call.” As I said to you on Christmas Eve, we are going to follow the star wherever it guides us, and I am telling you as plainly as I can, that is into advocacy. It will be scary, and it will involve new relationships, and it will involve risk. And people will think we are crazy.
“Bless his heart, he’s out of his mind!”
When you give up privilege, those who have it think you are crazy. When you give up the ways of the world, when you quit chasing after the gods of the world, in all their selfishness and impotence, and follow the one true God of love, they will swear you are nuts.
Maybe that’s when you will know you are on the cusp of doing something right.
Amen!
