Sermon

Welcoming All Who Enter In

October 12, 2008

First Church and Parish in Dedham

The Rev. Rali Weaver

Maybe some of you already know this but yesterday was in fact, National Coming Out Day. So in honor of that day I want to come out to all of you. I must admit that I am and have always been a heterosexual. I am sorry to have to tell you in this way and I hope you can forgive my directness.

You might think it odd for your minister to make such a proclamation. Why should your minister stand in the pulpit and tell you her sexuality at all?

Why should it matter in this day and age? As President Bush calls for States to affirm that marriage is just between a man and a woman- When heterosexual privilege is affirmed in all but three of our fifty states- when both of our Vice Presidential candidates can talk of giving privileges to same sex couples but just not allowing them to call it marriage and When heterosexual rights are affirmed everywhere why should it matter what I am?

What if anything does my heterosexuality and the world-view supporting heterosexuality have to do with welcoming every person who enters our doors anyway?

This is really the essence of the question I want us to try to answer today.

Putting the question in even more positive and perhaps less facetious terms- I want to address how we, a very welcoming congregation already, can strive to be even more welcoming.

I believe that finding ways for each of us to be fully known and accepted in the full expression of our humanness can help us to live in right relationship with our principles and purposes as Unitarian Universalists and help us to be more welcoming.

As real progress seems to be being made, as states, one by one, affirm the civil rights of same sex couples to marry- first in Massachusetts then in California and just this Friday in Connecticut you might wonder why I am bringing this subject up.

In a world that is changing more quickly than many had predicted, in a state that is a liberal bastion of thought it would be easy to become complaisant about civil rights.

And for some of you there might be a question of why we need strive to be more welcoming when you have long since stopped thinking about whether someone is black or white or blue or green or male or female or straight or gay or trans-gendered and find that the first thing you notice about a person when you meet them is whether they smile at you or not, or whether they use a kind hearted voice.

It is easy to think our biases are gone because we hold up a value of affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person as one of our core principles.

But, I believe we can always strive to be more affirming, more welcoming and more open. We can strive to open our eyes to the subliminal messages in our culture and the quite nagging prejudices still left in our subconscious.

Just as we can strive to have a deeper understanding, get closer and closer to the truth by examining our spiritual and scientific beliefs, I believe the best way to become more affirming, more open, more welcoming, to all that enter our doors begins when we closely examine our own hearts.

Now I wouldn’t be surprised if more than one of you in this room thought when I spoke of coming out day I was about to tell you that I am a Lesbian.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if their was one or more of you who might have felt some relief to hear me say the world heterosexual and perhaps one or more of you who was disappointed I did not say the word homosexual in my coming out statement.

Now some of you might have seen through my sermon beginning today as a silly parlor trick. But a few weeks ago, after asking the children if there was anything people in the room didn’t know about them when I shared that I had a tattoo- I bet there were a few more of you that had a shock to your senses and had to reconcile your brains to who you know me and what your expectations of a persons with a tattoos are.

I say this not to make you come out of the closet in your bias. But to point out that we all have unconscious norms and when people don’t meet our expectations we sometimes feel discomfort. This unconscious discomfort might show its head by expressing difficulty saying hello or making eye contact.

So examining very closely what our beliefs are and how they influence our expectations of others is a necessary step in being our most welcoming.

Part of being welcoming has to do with how we use our language. The reason some of the hymns were re-written with different lyrics from the red hymnal in your pews to the grey hymnal we usually use,- is because the words in the red hymnal were not gender inclusive.

Imagine for thousands of years women coming to church and hearing the liturgical words of the prayers and hymns every week that spoke of God as a man. And implied that men were the only sex who would reach salvation. What might that do to a woman’s self-esteem?

This gray hymnal was first printed in 1993 only 15 years ago. And although the thoughts of inclusively were prevalent in our denomination long before 1993 it wasn’t until that time that inclusive language was institutionalized into our liturgy. Part of changing a cultural idea requires institutionalizing it for the next generation. Writing things down and creating rituals to address changes helps to perpetuate progress.

And this is part of the reason we need strong laws that protect the civil rights of individuals -- in order to maintain consistency for generations.

So we don’t waiver in our resolve based on some subjective politicians beliefs or the publics whim. This is the same reason we have bylaws in our church to institutionalize our practices so they have some consistency over generations. Changing our laws, or our bylaws or even our liturgy is necessary to becoming a more welcoming congregation because we must institutionalize our intentions and maintain consistency of our beliefs and our practices generations for change to take place in our thinking.

While there are many reasons I believe it is time that we as a congregation participate in a formal discussion about being a more welcoming congregation I feel I must recognize that some of my urgency to have these discussions stems from the generation I was born into.

I was born in the year 1965. And in the year 1964, the year before I was born, Life Magazine a major publication of the day, published an issue addressing questions of sexuality and for the first time in American History acknowledged that Homosexuality was not, as previously considered some, maladjusted behavior, ---

but instead recognized it is a normal expression of human sexuality.

All of my life, same sex attraction has been coming out of the closet and has not had to be as hidden as it was before. For all of my life the science community has recognized same sex attraction and opposite sex attraction both as healthy and normal expressions of sexuality. And while full acceptance of this truth has taken some time to reach the public conscience, and be mirrored in our law- the evolution toward acceptance in my lifetime has enabled me to fully accept that my heterosexuality is just one way of being on a massive continuum of ways of being in the world. All of this is to say that part of my urgency comes from my worldview that has been informed by the time in which I was born.

Some of my sense of urgency also stems from my experience. As some of you know in my recent visit to San Francisco I re- married a same sex couple that had married in 2004.

In 2004 when I was serving as the parish intern at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco, I was invited to officiate in many same sex Marriages when the then new Mayor Gavin Newsom allowed same sex couples to be married in San Francisco without first asking for State approval. Unfortunately and very sadly for those couples several months later their unions were annulled by the state supreme court. Recently the California State legislator decided that denying same sex couples to marry was in fact denying a civil right because separate is inherently unequal.

So I was invited to return to San Francisco and officiate at Tori and Ramona’s wedding.

When we arrived at city hall this time I was surprised at how chaotic the marriage activity was. It seemed as crazy as when I was in San Francisco in 2004. And it was explained that Proposition 8 is on the November ballot to eliminate same sex marriage and establish marriage as between a man and a woman in the State of California. And so many same sex couples are re marrying in a frenzy in the state of California in order to establish a legal union in case that the state repeals the privilege.

Can you imagine the state refusing you the right to marry the person you love? Not only that but giving it and then taking it away?

As we entered city hall for the ceremony, the brides dressed in their finest and surrounded by their friends and family had to pass through a large press conference on the steps of City Hall.

The press conference was outwardly about the Folsom Street Fair where nudity and pornography has in recent years made that fair unsafe and uncomfortable for most all of the residents of San Francisco. I am pretty sure most everyone would agree that nudity and sex in the streets where anyone walking by has to be exposed to it, is worthy of protest. The problem with this press conference was that in front of the microphones sat a huge Say Yes on Proposition 8- sign. What the people who were offering the press conference were doing was equating public pornography with Gay marriage.

The scare tactics, the miss information, the lie that tells people that Heterosexuality is all right and Homosexuality is all wrong and the subliminal ways that this lie is perpetuated outrages me. As we walked into city hall on their wedding day there was a feeling of passing through a picket line at an abortion clinic. The level of hatred on the steps of the City Hall astounded me. And I know from this experience that the climate of fear we are living in is affecting everyone.

In a world where you can be hated for a physical characteristic that you were born with, for your skin color, for you body type, for your inclinations -- there are countless people who need a safe haven. And what are we as a church community if we cannot offer a safe haven to those who need it?

It takes a lot of energy to live in a world that holds up expectations that limit you and disenfranchise you. It takes a great deal of energy to swim against a tide of expectation of the world being one way when you were actually born in another way.

In times like these when the resources are more and more limited when peoples security is threatened, human nature is to want to find a place to fit in and so people begin to take sides. To get very clear that we refuse to take sides, and to intentionally offer a place where we can all belong amidst our differences and amidst our uniqueness -finding the web that connects us, is what makes us a Unitarian Universalist Church.

I could share with you a million more reasons why I as your minister and as a unattached heterosexual woman think this is a vitally important conversation for us to have. In fact I am ending this sermon before I have made every point I wanted to make and this is because this is not about what I think it is about what we all think.

So in our Fall meeting there will be a request of the membership to support with your time and energy the Welcoming Congregation Process. This will not be the definitive vote to make us a Welcoming Congregation but only a vote to begin the process.

The process includes several classes and discussions intended to help us to learn to listen to each other more deeply and to give us an opportunity to examine our beliefs and allow for all of our differences of opinion. I hope you will consider voting yes and supporting this effort with your time and attention.

And in the meantime I hope you will join with me in celebrating the wide variety of ingredients that make up our individual uniqueness and singing out praises for the wide variety of journeys, which we come together to share.