by Rev. Cindy Maddox & Jackie McNeil — July 12, 2015
C: When I was five years old, I thought I was going to hell.
J: When I was five years old, I had already been there.
C: I thought I was going to hell because I hadn’t gotten saved yet, and my Heavenly Father would send me to hell if I died before I asked Jesus into my heart.
J: My father marched on Washington with Dr. King, trumpeting peace and justice and free love, but what he brought home was not peace, or justice, or love.
(Cindy) I grew up with Bible games. All the kids in Sunday school would sit in rows with our Bibles in hand. The teacher would call out a Bible reference, and the first child who could find it, stand up, and start reading it, was the winner of that round. I was awesome at it! This Bible game had a name: Sword Drills. So my first real experience of the Bible as a child included calling the Bible a weapon. It was a while before I realized just how sharp that weapon could be.
So, yes, I was taught about fear and hell and that God’s love sometimes took the form of punishment. But I also knew that my earthly father, who I couldn’t help but compare to my heavenly father, loved me. If I was safe in his arms, that must mean I was safe in God’s arms, too. Well, as long as I was good.
When I went to college, I was taught the definition of the Bible that my church proclaimed: “The Bible is God’s oracle of self-disclosure, divinely inspired, infallibly transcribed, without error in all that it affirms, and Holy Spirit illumined.” Even with my good, strong, Bible-based childhood, I didn’t know I was expected to believe that the Bible was infallible and without error. Was I supposed to believe that Jonah actually got swallowed by a big fish and lived in its belly for three days? I was eighteen years old. It wasn’t the first time I questioned. It was the first time I admitted it.
(Jackie) My family didn’t go to church much when I was young. When we did, we went to the Baptist church down the street, where the young minister and his wife were just back from a mission trip to Africa and taught us “Jesus loves the little children” in Swahili. I think I went more often than the rest of my family. I liked Sunday School – it was safe; it was away from home. I distinctly remember a day, I was probably 7, walking home from Sunday School and trying to figure out Lazarus. Was he really dead, and did Jesus really raise him from the dead? And as clear as the question was in my head, an answer came just as clearly: It doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter if Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, or rose from the dead himself. It didn’t matter if he walked on water or turned it into wine. Jesus taught us how to live, and if you could follow that example, the rest of it just didn’t matter. The miracles were there to get you to pay attention to the message, but the message … that was the point.
(Cindy) So what I couldn’t admit until I was 18, Jackie knew intuitively at age seven. I’m a wee bit slow.
(Jackie) I never felt the need to join a church. I could follow the message by myself, and through my coming out in the 1980s, churches were leading the charge against gay folks. “AIDS was a plague sent by God,” they said. “You are all going to hell,” they said. “We need to Save Our Children from you,” they said. I wasn’t wounded by the church because I wasn’t invested in the church. I was very aware, however, that words like faith and family values were not intended to include me. Churches didn’t open their doors to me, and “Christians” opposed my very existence.
Many things have changed since then, and many have not. Just in the past month, Black churches in the South have been set ablaze;
(Cindy) But the FBI says they’re not “connected”, so who cares?
twenty Black women pastors have received death threats;
(Cindy) The guy who sent the letters said God would kill them so he’s off the hook
and across the country those calling themselves Christians have been quoting chapter and verse, declaring a holy war against the Supreme Court, the Constitution and anyone who believes that our marriage is valid and sacred and worthy. And did you hear? A leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Virginia says they’re not a racist organization, they’re “Christians.”
All of these attacks – violent or verbally violent – are about restricting, limiting Christianity, to only the few who believe exactly as they do. We sing about drawing the circle wide. They would narrow it until it chokes the life out of anyone even slightly different from their ideal.
(Cindy) But as you know, that’s not all there is to church. I have experienced the best of what church is and can be, from both ends of the spectrum. When my mother almost died in childbirth, a man from our church—a man who was terrified of needles—gave blood in my mother’s name. When I was 14 and rebellious and trying my best to prove that I wasn’t a goody two-shoes preacher’s kid, it was a woman at church who loved me, even though she didn’t have to, who saved me before I went too far astray.
You have your own stories, too—stories of how this church saved you or held you so you wouldn’t fall.
(Jackie) I didn’t join the church until I was 43 years old. After I’d met Cindy, after we were married. I was sitting in the pews one Sunday and out of nowhere the insight was crystal clear – If I had always believed in a God of connection, why was I following a solitary spiritual path? It wasn’t the expectations of the parishioners that decided it for me. It was the parishioners themselves. That church was so full of love, of mutual concern and compassion that I had to be a part of it. And the part of me that had always stayed aloof, kept myself at a safe distance was silenced. And out of it, I got another unexpected gift.
My grandmother saw herself as a devout Christian, and while she may have never called me an abomination, she seemed convinced that I was going to hell. She didn’t speak to me for years. She had softened up a bit by the time Cindy came into my life, but it was her visit to King Street Church – seeing all those people, worshipping the same God she worshipped, and not only accepting but embracing me, and Amelia, and Cindy, and welcoming my grandmother BECAUSE they loved me – that changed her. Because of that church, those wonderfully loving people, my grandmother and I were able to heal some deep wounds before she died. It is a priceless gift.
(Cindy) Our church was thirteen miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School. When news first started coming out that day, we didn’t know if our children, in nearby schools, were safe. Teachers in my church were in lock-down with the siblings of children who were killed. What did we do that night? We went to church. I led an interfaith worship service, and Protestants and Catholics and Muslims and Jews—we all prayed and cried together. In moments like that, it’s not about who believes what. It’s not about your interpretation of the Bible versus my interpretation of the Bible. It’s not about the text. It’s about the love.
And that was my problem at the Gay Pride parade last month. I wrote the story in the form of a poem after the event so I share it with you now. It’s called: “God is still speaking?”
You came to our booth and asked about our sign: God is still speaking.
We had just finished the parade.
The crowds had cheered in appreciation
for they’d heard enough damnation from groups like us.
Our very presence was the voice of God to those who’d been taught to fear it.
We entered the park still filled with joy,
the joy of the day,
the joy of the Lord
is our strength
and oh, we needed it when you showed up.
You asked about our sign.
I knew who you were—not your name, but why you were there,
some part of my heart still tuned to fundamentalist frequencies.
But mostly it was the way you held the book.
Clasped tightly, as though fearful it could be stolen.
Held to your chest, as though it would shield your heart.
You quoted from it freely. You knew all its finer points,
wielded it like the sword of truth
you believe it is
God’s will to wound.
You spoke of God’s wrath.
I spoke of God’s love.
You spoke of God’s punishment.
I spoke of God’s grace.
You spoke of hell.
I asked you to leave.
You kept arguing, kept quoting,
until a man stepped between us and made you stop.
Of course it took a man.
You never would have stopped for a woman
no matter how many times she said “no.”
Which is probably why I was shaking when you finally walked away.
It wasn’t your words, which I’ve heard ad nauseam.
It was your patriarchy that made me sick,
your belief that you had the right to speak for God,
your Blessed Assurance that you alone possess the Truth.
And then I got mad . . .
because when you walked away, you didn’t go far enough.
You stopped a few yards away, still in front of our booth,
and tried to read your Cliffs Notes version of the Bible to people who passed by.
I couldn’t let you do it.
I couldn’t let you rape souls right in front of me,
in front of my thirteen-year-old daughter,
and my three-year-old son,
and my parishioners who are mine no matter their age.
I couldn’t let you do it.
So I threatened you.
I told you I would follow you around all day
and tell everyone you talked to that you were wrong
and that God loves them
and that the wrath of God is a myth
told by those who want to keep others under their control.
It was an idle threat.
I couldn’t have done it,
didn’t have the strength to stand toe to toe for hours,
because the joy, not the wrath, is my strength.
Weeks later you’re still with me,
because I am concerned for any fragile souls you cornered,
but also because I’m afraid that, in that moment, I shared your flaw . . .
claiming to speak for God,
claiming to have the Truth,
claiming a still-speaking God when I’m not willing to listen
to you, another child of God.
I’m not sorry I guess.
I guess I’m not sorry enough
that someone filled you so full of fear
that you feel compelled to share the contagion.
But I do know why you hold the book so carefully.
I remember how it feels
to be pierced
by your own sword.
You see, I came from a good place: the belief that it’s not about the text. It’s about the love. I wanted people to hear the love. But what about love for those three men? My love wasn’t big enough, in that moment, for them.
(Jackie) I was here, in church three weeks ago, thinking about the people elsewhere in this country and around the world who were also sitting in pews. It was four days after nine people had been massacred in a church in Charleston and I was aware of how it had become an act of courage to simply go to church. Like people getting back to work in the days after 9/11, going to school after Sandy Hook, or running a public race in the weeks after the Boston marathon bombing, going to church had become an act of courage. Maybe less so in an overwhelmingly white church in Maine than it was in historically Black churches throughout the South, but still an act of courage.
But it occurred to me that being a Christian is always an act of courage. At least if you do it right. Because Jesus called us to live differently. Jesus called us to love – openly and unconditionally, even in the face of violence and hatred and all of the garbage life throws at us. It turns out, love is a courageous act. Love is revolutionary. But love is too rarely the mark of Christianity in America.
Fox News will tell you there’s a war against Christianity in America right now. You won’t be surprised if I tell you that Fox News has missed the mark. In truth, there is a war going on WITHIN Christianity right now, and it seems to me that Christ is losing. Many of those who feel connected to Jesus’ message are leaving the churches in droves, separating themselves from the vile rhetoric of pastors who let judgment rain down like water and vengeance like an ever flowing stream. And those of us who remain, who focus on the love, and the peace and the abundant welcome are being drowned out.
(Cindy) But the world NEEDS our voices right now. God needs our voices right now. And it may take all the strength and all the courage we can muster, but we need to speak, even if our voices shake. Can you go out there, into the world, and say “I’m a Christian”? Not in a whisper, and not in a “that-makes-me-better-than-you” tone. Can you say it like a manifesto of LOVE and GRACE?
(Jackie) One of my favorite poems is called “I am a Dangerous Woman,” by Joan Cavanaugh, and came out of the women’s peace movement and anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s. It suggests that we are dangerous simply by refusing to play by the rules laid out for us. And it came back to me as we were writing this sermon:
I am a dangerous woman
Carrying neither bombs nor babies
Flowers nor molotov cocktails
I confound all your reason, theory, realism
Because I will neither lie in your ditches
Nor dig your ditches for you
Nor join your armed struggle
For bigger and better ditches.
I will not walk with you nor walk for you,
I won’t live with you
And I won’t die for you
But neither will I try to deny you
Your right to live and die.
I will not share one square foot of this earth with you
While you’re hell-bent on destruction
But neither will I deny that we are of the same earth,
Born of the same Mother.
I will not permit you to bind my life to yours
But I will tell you that our lives are bound together
And I will demand
That you live as though you understand
This one salient fact.
So dear Christians – those who deny us and decry us, those who think they can send us to hell, hell-bent on God’s vengeance, those who believe they guard the gates of Heaven –let me tell you this …
I am a Dangerous Christian …
I will not yield one square foot of this faith with you
While you are hell-bent on destruction
But neither will I deny that we claim the same faith,
Born of the same God and following the same Christ.
I will not permit you to bind my life to yours
But I will tell you that our lives, our faith, our futures are bound together
And I will demand
That you live as though you understand
This one salient fact.
(Cindy) That is our calling as Christians: to be the kind of dangerous woman the poem told us about; to be dangerous men because we refuse to make room for violence; to be dangerous Christians because we will not rest until all God’s children are free.
It’s not about the text. It’s about the love.
(Jackie) It’s not about the text. It’s about the love.
(Say it with us.) It’s not about the text. It’s about the love. Amen.