Once again, Holy Cross will the honour of hosting York Region’s Pride Fest worship. Last year’s service took place the wake of the tragedy in Orlando, and so we did our best to be both sanctuary and celebration. You can read the sermon below. Join us this Sunday for PrideFest Worship!

Listen to the sermon here

I have a vague memory of wandering into a large sandpit. Four or five children were playing in the dirt with Tonka toys. I couldn’t have been more than five years old. I was enthralled by this big yellow grader. A kid younger than me, was using the grader to make roads so that these big yellow Tonka dump-trucks could make their way to a small kid-made hill, where another kid had a big Tonka machine that I would later learn was a front-end-loader.  This kid was moving the earth. I knew then and there that these boys were having way more fun than the little girls pushing dolls in toy strollers. I wanted a Tonka toy!

The outrage created by such a harmless desire is writ large in my memories. I learned from a very young age not to express my desires. The fear of expressing myself kept me locked inside of myself. The first time I nearly managed to free myself happened in a gay-bar in Vancouver. Now of course, I didn’t go a gay-bar because I was gay. I went to a gay-bar because my friend John is Gay and he’d never been able to must up the courage to go to a gay-bar. So, I went to a gay-bar to support my friend. The name of the club was “Faces” and I was scared to death that my face might be recognized and someone might get the wrong idea about me. I mean, heaven-forbid someone might think that I am gay. I loved Faces. I hated the music—it was the Disco era. But the atmosphere. Guys I knew, just being themselves. People dancing. Lots of freedom. And no fear.  I danced with women. I danced with men. They didn’t care if I was straight or gay. They only really cared if I was smiling. They cared about my happiness and they cared about my safety. That club was a sanctuary. Unless you’ve ever had to be careful about who you love, unless you’ve ever had to refrain from holding your lover’s hand because you are afraid, not of what people might think, but what people might do, unless you’ve ever lived in fear because of who you are and who you desire, or who you love, it is difficult to understand the sanctuary of the clubs. Gay-bars, gay-clubs, are sanctuaries. Safe havens. Sanctuary from the fears of a hostile world. Safe from oppression or persecution. Sanctuaries where Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Transgender, Questioning people can freely be who they are created to be. Sacred places.

Long before I knew who I was gay, the queer community that I met in the clubs, embraced me with the kind of welcome I never experienced in the sanctuaries of any church. The violation of the sanctity of Pulse in Orlando is an attack on a community of people who thought that they were safe. Tragically, 103 people were shot. 49 murdered, 53 wounded, 6 of the wounded are in critical condition fighting for their lives.  We’ve all heard the horror stories of young people enjoying the sanctity of the Pulse club, only to have their lives shattered by hails of bullets. Barely did we have time to grieve before the pundits began haggling over what label to apply to the perpetrator of such carnage. Hate-crime or terrorism, homophobe or repressed homo-sexual, mental illness or radical jihadist, any way you slice this unholy mess, the dead and wounded paid with their blood and their lives for the world’s inability to move beyond our tribal instincts.

The rhetoric has penetrated our tears. As we grieve, we are assaulted with words and images that move us to despair the reality that even as homophobia wanes Islamophobia is on the rise. In the midst of our grieving, the lunatic running for the highest office on the planet, as he rants about visions of what might have been if only Pulse patrons had taken advantage of their second amendment rights and pulled out guns of their own and fired back at their deranged assailant. Describing his vision of carnage as and I quote, “a beautiful thing”, it is difficult to distinguish his words from the ravings of the evangelical nut-jobs who have the audacity to voice their own brand of hate-speech as they insist that these horrendous deaths may indeed be a blessing; because Lord knows that such lives are an abomination.

Just when the stench of such rhetoric becomes unbearable we are reminded of the gunman’s father who suggests that his son should have left the punishment of gays to God. If only, one religious nut-job could cancel out the other. But they cannot. The distinction between deranged religious ravings and hate-speech has all but disappeared. And just when you think the pundits have done their worst, the reality that one persecuted minority is being asked to take up the task of persecuting another persecuted community, as the victims of homophobia are encouraged to practice Islamophobia.

Rid me of the idiots who forget that neither the Bible nor the Qur’an is free from hate-speech. Yes, Islam has prevented interpretations that encourage hatred and murder, but so does the bible. When it comes to hating the members of LGBTQ communities Jews, Christians, and Muslims have a great deal to answer for. When we shake our heads as religious fanatics quote the Quran we must not forget that we too have our fanatics. We must not forget to put the fanatics into context.

In 2015, a Pew Research poll found that 42 percent of Muslim Americans supported same-sex marriage, compared with 55 percent for the overall population. To put this in context, in the U.S. Muslim support for gay marriage today is roughly equivalent to the level of support expressed by the total population as recently as 2010. Islamophobia clouds our vision of our Muslim sisters and brothers who are struggling to move beyond the constraints of our history. We can encourage our sisters and brothers or we can give into our fears and embrace policies and practices that will wall us of, separate and divide us. Sadly, the politics of division and hatred sells and so the media is drawn, toward politicians who are all too willing to cater to our darkest fears and religious mouth-pieces that give voice to our worst selves.

As hatred begets hatred, our tears well up and I find myself haunted by the images of God created by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions that have given birth to doctrines that have demonized, stigmatized, ostracized, and inspired hatred, violence, and the slaughter of LGBTQ people for centuries. My heart aches so much so that in the words of the sixteenth century Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart: “I pray God, rid me of God.”

Our images of the ONE who IS the Source of All That IS must change. That angry, manipulative, vengeful, violent, super-natural, God up there in the sky is not the Sacred Reality that we experience as LOVE. “God is LOVE.” Even the three monotheistic religions that have shaped the Western world share this insight. God IS LOVE. Almost every religion shares a version of the great commandment to LOVE our neighbours as we love ourselves. So prevalent is this religious edict that it known the world over by the religious and non-religious as “the Golden Rule.” God is LOVE. The one of whom we are all made is LOVE. We live and move and have our being in LOVE. And still the influence of that old Sky God continues to haunt us as we stumble around in this latest nightmare. The LOVE that we call God is Beyond our ability to capture with words or images. This LOVE that we call God lives and breathes in, with, through, and beyond us. That old sky-god is at its best just an educational tool to help us begin to understand that we are part of something so much bigger than ourselves. At his, and I do mean his, worst that old sky-god is nothing more than an idol whose worship leaves us isolated in our various tribes — calling upon the power of our idol to ensure the safety and supremacy of our tribe and let all the other tribes be damned.

I pray God, rid me of God. Let me move beyond images and ideas that fall short of the LOVE that called us into being.   As we learn more and more about what it means to be human, as we understand and express our humanity in new and diverse ways, it is time for us to look toward the source of our humanity in ways that honour all of who we are. Can the Creator of all this really be as small and petty as we have been lead to believe by those who cannot even begin to deal with the reality of all this? Our images of our Creator have been severely limited by what we once thought it meant to be human. Our ideas about God have been severely limited by what we once thought was true about the universe. As we move beyond simplistic notions of what it means to be human, can we not also move beyond simplistic notions about the Creator of all that IS.

No religion can continue to claim that it has the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The word religion literally means, reconnection. Religion by definition is about the very things that reconnect us. How can something that is supposed to be about our connections to that which is so much more than we are, together with our connections to one another and our connections to creation, have locked us in to such separation from ourselves?

What if we began to take seriously our human urges for connection; to explore our desire to connect with something bigger than ourselves, to explore our connections as human beings, connections to our Creator, connections to one another, connections to creation herself? I pray God, rid me of God.  Rid me of images of god that fail to express the LOVE that IS God. Rid me of images of god that are too small, too petty, too tribal, too violent, too judgmental, to infantile, to encompass the reality of the LOVE that IS God. Rid me of the jealous god of our ancestors. Rid me of the old man up there in heaven who likes nothing better than to listen to my pleas for mercy. Rid me of the bearded bloke who sits upon the thrown of judgement. Rid me of the vengeful, nightmarish Father who is portrayed as demanding a blood-sacrifice. Rid me of God. So that I might begin to discover the ONE in whom we live and move and have our being. The ONE generations of Jews, Christians, Muslims and a whole host of other religious peoples, together with people who claim no religion have experienced as the LOVE that lies at the very heart of reality. This ONE that we call God, who is beyond, the beyond and beyond that also.

Let us discover anew, this LOVE that we call God, so that we can fall in love all over again, with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our mind; and for the love of God, please don’t leave our minds out of this equation. Let us fall in love with this LOVE that we call god, so that we can discover our all over again how to love ourselves and begin to love our neighbours in the same way. Let us begin to create images of this LOVE that we call God that will provide sanctuary for all the beautifully diverse expressions of humanity, so that the dancing and celebration over what it means to be human can begin again. Let all our words about the God create images of God in which all God’s children can find sanctuary, knowing that they are beautiful expressions of their Creator, created by LOVE for love. Let our images of God empower us to be LOVE in the world. Amen.