A Sermon for the First Sunday of Lent, March 9, 2003
St. Paul’s, Fayetteville
Gen. 9:8-17
Psalm 25:3-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1: 9-13

Quiet our minds, O God, that we may hear Your voice. Amen.

It is easy to identify with Jesus in today’s Gospel. When he is baptized, the heavens open up and he hears a voice from the heavens saying, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." I don’t mean that we necessarily have had Jesus’ experience; what I think we can identify with is what he does. To be told that he is God’s beloved must have shaken the foundations of his self-understanding. When he hears the voice, he flees. He is driven into the wilderness to be alone and think and pray; he needs time to try to fathom what it all can mean.

It isn’t easy for any of us to accept ourselves; it is just part of being human that we are anxious about whether we are acceptable. Maybe we wish that we would hear a voice from the heavens reassuring us, as Jesus did. Actually I think that that voice, the one that proclaims, "You are my Son, [My Daughter,] the Beloved," is always there. Maybe the difference between Jesus and us is that he was able to hear it so clearly; hearing that voice made him so open and accepting of others that they saw God in him. It is, after all, hard for us to be really accepting of others until we know that we are accepted; until we know, really know, that we are accepted, the differences among us tend to fill us with comparisons and cause us to reject either others or ourselves. And, despite Jesus’ dramatic experience, the way we come to know that we are accepted and loved by God is, for the most part, by discovering that we are accepted and loved by other human beings.

I have a friend from far back in my childhood. As adults we live in different parts of the country and rarely see one another. But a number of years ago we decided we would go camping together. My friend had been married twice and divorced twice; her daughters were in college. On the second day of that camping trip, she told me she had fallen in love with someone she had met who was in love with her; my friend had fallen in love with another woman.

I would be less than honest if I did not say that I found what she was telling me unsettling. In fact, she was finding it unsettling too. Through the rest of that week, as my friend tried to understand her own life, we talked and talked. Perhaps if my friend had been part of a different generation, her process of self-discovery would have happened earlier in her life; who can say? After a time my friend "came out" to her friends and colleagues and members of her family. She never told her parents.

What is the consequence when we feel that we have to hide who we are in order to be accepted? There are thousands of ways in which this happens, of course. My father was still living in 1997 when I went to seminary, and I told him I was moving to New York to study. I never told him I was studying for the priesthood. I did not tell him I was going to seminary.

Sometimes we hide what we believe will cause distress or conflict or condemnation. Often, in doing so, what we hide is something wonderful; we hide it because we fear it will be criticized or laughed at or misunderstood. My father’s way of defending himself from whatever was outside his experience was to resort to ridicule. That is why I did not tell him I was preparing to be ordained.
If I had that decision to make over again, I might make the same decision. All of us do choose, and should choose, those with whom we want to be open, and to what extent; we are vulnerable and the desire for privacy and self-protection is healthy. But to have to be hidden in order to be safe does have a cost, and perhaps I should have tried to talk with my father about that cost. Over the phone my father and I talked about his health, and the weather. Thomas Merton writes that if we could all see one another as we are in God’s eyes, we would "fall down and worship each other" (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 142). "You are my Son, [my Daughter,] the Beloved." When we cannot see, when we cannot hear, there is profound loss.

Frank Griswold, our Presiding Bishop, speaks, with intentional paradox, about the "diverse center" of the Episcopal Church. When I was in seminary, the seminary’s housing policy was one of those Anglican compromises meant to accommodate diverse points of view. Gay or lesbian students not in the ordination process and lay faculty could live in seminary housing with their partners, in accordance with New York City’s fair housing ordinance; gay or lesbian students who were in the ordination process and gay and lesbian ordained faculty could live with their partners if their bishop approved.

Some weeks ago someone in this parish said he would like to hear how the clergy are thinking about these questions, and I can tell you how it has been for me. I went to seminary wanting to be part of General’s Center for Christian Spirituality, which included both seminarians and others who were learning to do spiritual direction; there I happened to be assigned to a small spiritual direction group where only two of us out of five were not lesbian or gay. By the time I returned to Fayetteville a year and a half later, what had once been somewhat frightening had come to seem familiar, a part of God’s good creation. Study of scripture and pastoral theology had something to do with that. But mostly, for me, it was a matter of coming to know other human beings in all the deep complexity and mystery of their lives and finding God there.

To be an Episcopalian, to be an Anglican, is to be adept at flourishing amidst difference and ambiguity. That is our tradition, ever since the Elizabethan Settlement in 1559 when Queen Elizabeth wanted to make the Church of England as nearly as possible the Church for all the English people. We value common worship. We trust that prayer will shape belief. We know that the processes by which we come to consensus can be clumsy and stressful and that they can take time, but we trust that it is out of bread broken and shared that God will lead us to wisdom. As we think about these things, we need to remember that we all, inevitably, do harm to one another, however unknowingly. I am convinced that when we harm one another, even when it seems intentional, that is not what we really intend to do. It is no accident that the English church embraced science; we value knowledge. We need to continue to grow in the understanding of one another and ourselves; we need to continue to learn.

In Lent we are called to live in the desert; the desert is a place where survival depends on hope and attentiveness. It is a place to pay attention to the difference between the way we think we might have created the world if we were God—-surely we would have made it simpler--and what is really there. Perhaps Lent feels a little more communal to you this year; it does to me. Perhaps we fear for what lies ahead for our country, and our world; perhaps we have been thinking more than usual about our church.

My friend Tom Breidenthal, a priest on the faculty of General Seminary at the time I was there, liked to say that we do not go to the communion rail to find the familiar but to find the Unknown Other; we go to find the Other who is God, the Other in one another, and the Other in ourselves. Human life is a matter of learning to love as God loves and all creation is an expression of God’s love. Jesus heard a voice that said "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased"; that voice is trying to tell us that we are the Beloved too.

Quiet our minds, O God, that we may hear Your voice. In the name of the God who is Love. Amen.

The Rev. Lynne Spellman