April/May 2009

Last Wednesday night I walked into the State House in Montpelier in a black suit and collar, to be welcomed by some, and regarded with cool suspicion by others. When I put on a yellow badge supporting Marriage Equality, those who had welcomed me were a lot less cordial, while the others looked at me with curious skepticism. It was at once a relief not to be counted among those so certain of the limits of God’s mercy and God’s hospitality and God’s delight, and a sadness to be reminded that the Good News had become such bad news in so many people’s lives.

Time and again we read in the Gospels about people who once counted for nothing in the ordinary scheme of things now being invited out of the shadows and given dignity and a place at the table. We see people who could be relied on once to feel ashamed, and to be silent, and to know their place, now being regarded in their poverty, and heard in their need, and embraced and healed and helped to their feet. When we see into the good heart of Jesus – as we know Jesus looks into our own struggling hearts – we glimpse there the possibility of restoration and recognition and wholeness for us all. And sometimes we realize that the categories imposed on us by a violent and death dealing culture, categories that you and I have so often accepted as somehow reflecting our truth, are utterly irrelevant to God.

We listen to the Gospels together, as a church, so that the living and Risen Jesus might change all our hearts, not just mine, and so change our behavior as a people. And that explains why occasionally, as a church, we defy the culture in which we were raised, and refuse to hate all the people our relatives hate, because our eyes finally recognize once again, in our midst, the long silent one, crying out for justice and mercy.

One English theologian cautions about any plans we might have to make all the difference: instead he suggests we attend to the difference we can actually make. The apparently small gestures – the signature on a petition, the email to an elected representative, the sign, the button, the vote, the march, the mere presence – are, like splashing a little water, dabbing a smear of oil, taking a small piece of bread and a sip of wine in the presence and power of Jesus – moments when we invite God’s kingdom to be present, locally and specifically, here and now. Small tokens perhaps, but when made in faith and trust and radical openness to God’s transformative power, then signs also of the future God wants, and pledges of its coming.

Introducing the Marriage Equality bill, Senator John Campbell commented on frequent references to “those people” in the opposition’s testimony. He then asked, “You know who ‘those people’ are? They’re our policemen, our firefighters, our teachers, garbage men, the guy who plows the street. They’re our children, our sisters, brothers, they’re human beings, and as such … they should be treated equally.” Surely this lies at the very heart of the Good News - the conviction that one limited human story has included and made sense of all of our stories, and that the restoration of our fallen humanity is now taking place among us. In Christ, God has declared radical unity with us, in the hope that in time there will be no more ‘those people’, but all shall be ‘our people’.

TPG+

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