The Eastern Rite

Revised Common Lectionary:
Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17

Eastern Rite Lections:
Vespers:
Isa 43:9-14
Wis 3:1-9
Wis 5:15-6:3

Liturgy:
Heb 11:33-12:2
Mt 10:32, 33, 37, 38; 19.27-30

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life.

HIS SERMON Is being drafted on Hallowe’en.

What I mean by that is that it is the Eve of the Feast of All Saints as I write. In the Eastern Rite the Sunday after Pentecost is the Feast of All Saints and it has been so for quite some time – long before the Pope moved the western observance of this feast to November (although, that too, was the Orthodox action of an Orthodox Pope). All Saints day will be important in a minute… hold on.

Here, in Buffalo, it is also the weekend of our Gay Pride parade. Like many smaller towns we do not celebrate the gay community on the Last Sunday In June because a large city nearby – in this case, Toronto – has their parade that Sunday. But today I’m struck by the coincidence of these festivals, the sacred and the secular: All Saints and Gay Pride.

To put a fine point on it: I’m wondering if a gay man can become a saint.

Certainly there are gay saints – saints who experienced attraction to their same sex. We have reason to believe that Sergius and Bacchos were thus attracted or the David and Jonathan experienced it too. Others imagine this saint or that one to intimate it in his or her writings. Using the expanded definition of saints that we discuss here, Eleanor Roosevelt was said to feel thus attracted, for example.

We can debate the theological issues of the rightness of sex within a same-sex relationship, but falling to one side or the other of that issue (provided one is not Roman Catholic) does not answer the question of can a gay man be a saint. Rome’s rules are written oddly just now and seem to say (by some lights) that being attracted to one’s own gender makes one so broken as to prevent one from being a priest, etc.

Can a gay person be a saint?

In some sense this has been my struggle for most of my life. It’s the whole spirit-flesh balance, really. How does one be a saint – living the heavenly life on earth as Jesus was God living Man?

When I was 16 the “problem” as I called it then wouldn’t go away. I remember weeping before God asking to be cured. This was happening without preacher in-put, mind you (I was Methodist): no one had been told. It was my dark secret although most of my friends and enemies even had figured it out. One is allowed to have enemies in High School. After joining the Episcopal Church something happened that left me rather traumatised and realising that other people could “see” it, could act on it in ways that left me rather stunned. The first advice I was given by my youth pastor and our priest: stop calling it my “problem”. I remember a bright sunny day, standing on North Street in Middletown, NY. On my way in to Mass I used the word “problem” for the last time. And Julie, the youth director, told me to stop it.

We crossed into a new world of gay clergy (some of whom were predators) and lesbian activists and celibate monastics who were same-sex attracted. It was a very different world and it included Roman Catholics and Episcopalians and quite a few others. In the early 1980s Gay was the new Ecumenical. For some folks it was easier to latch on to gay clergy than women clergy. For others the reverse was true. This political reality led to a division between those who supported women and those gay men who felt threatened by women. But I remember crying at my friend Linda’s Ordination party as her friend, Bill, told of how just that morning his vestry had fired him because he was gay.

Some time in this part of my life, I made a choice. Instead of trying to be a Christian who was gay, I became a gay activist who was a Christian. This was, for a lot of reasons, a good choice and I’ll get to those in a minute. But it was, for a lot of reasons, also a bad choice. All real choices are both good and bad. They move some things forward in this fallen world and other things backward.

Sadly what moved back was my calling, my sense of priesthood and community within the church. In college I lost touch with parish life although I didn’t stop going to church. I was at mass every Sunday at St Luke in the Fields for a while and then, at St Mary the Virgin in Times Square. But it would take me several years to learn how to move into a parish and be active and even then, my first attempt fell afoul of a rector who, being closeted himself, didn’t want out gay youth in his parish.

And then my spiritual director told me I’d made the wrong choice if, in fact, I wanted to be a priest. He told me that I couldn’t be a priest and be the type of gay man I was. First I’d have to be celibate. Then I’d, essentially, have to return to the closet, letting only a few friends know. Years later, I can see that this conversation was an older generation speaking about how it had always been to a younger one that was seeing something new. I didn’t know that counter argument then… so I never went back.

About a decade later I figured out the answer. But a lot of good had been done in the mean time. God used my energies in community building and political activism. The gay rights law got passed in NYC. We managed to get partner benefits as part of a union contract with a Catholic university. And a couple of times, working at the Church Center, I got to call Episcopal leaders on their duplicity in saying one thing (usually pro-gay) and doing another (anti-gay). But I also was in a place to call other folks (bishops) on doing anti-gay things whilst living with their gay clergy “friends”.

Ironically, during this time I’d stopped going to church. I’d become a gay activist who worked for a church and nothing more. I had other religious activities: in the pagan community. And I went looking for a real community here, a pagan community that was strong and socially active and a gay community that wasn’t always fighting, but rather getting on with its being in the world. So I moved to San Francisco to be a gay pagan.

And I found that, given their political and social freedoms, gays and pagans, and gay pagans, can be just as petty and back-biting and non-communitarian and greedy and hateful as the next social group.And, for a while, I invented my own religion, my own path of paganism, jammed into a box holding some Crowley, some Wicca, some Grail Christianity and some Astrology woven together, but it didn’t last long. I can’t do this all by myself.

When I started going to church again, reconnected with a community where one could be gay – but it wasn’t a gay church – but where a lot of healing and connection took place, where we could be together at God’s altar and turn out to feed hundreds of people, or drum, or dance. The answer was staring me in the face. I stopped one night on the corner of 17th and De Haro and asked Jesus into my heart again. If I was going to keep doing this, he had to do it for me. The answer was to be a Christian who was Gay. To make Eucharist with all of my life – including the parts that I didn’t understand or know how yet to express in a healthy way. Bring it all to Jesus table and say Mass. I remember preaching at St Gregory’s (on Gay Pride day!) and announcing that I’d come to SF to “be a gay pagan”. Looking around, indicating my robes and the pulpit and the icons… Here was this Gay Pagan preaching in a Christian church on Gay Pride day. Laughter ensued. I had found the right answer.

And I promptly forgot it again.

If the time from 1982 to 2002 had been spent (as some would see it) letting flesh win out over spirit, I spent the next five years trying to let spirit win out over flesh. I’ve documented in the pages of my blog my journey through that time. For some, this period defines my life. I realised that to be a devout Orthodox Christian I’d have to take serious the teachings of Orthodoxy, including those on human sexuality. I had to leave everything behind and hope to be rewarded a hundred-fold in the future.

So I tried.

I tried to be a saint – which is making Eucharist with the entirety of one’s life – by stomping out part of the life God gave me. Essentially, in becoming Orthodox I became a Gnostic because all my flesh could do was be evil.

I tried to paint as evil everything that had hitherto been good.

And nearly died in the process.

But it only took me 5 years or so to realise my mistake.

How does a gay man become a saint?

What is the new part of life? What does “Middle Age” look like for a man on the road to sainthood?

How do we celebrate All Saints Day and Gay Pride?

In the western liturgical tradition the Sunday after Pentecost is called “Trinity Sunday”. It’s a day most preachers loath because they think they have to stand up and “explain” the Trinity. Bah. They are chickens and no theologians. It’s easy: the Trinity is an image of God who is so loving that his personhood overflows into multiple persons to better experience love. But Trinity as a doctrine is useless. Trinity as a Mystery is important: it is a Mirror for ourselves. Trinity is God as an image, an icon, of the way we are supposed to be: the Church, the world is supposed to mirror the Trinity. We are to share that kind of communion, that kind of intimacy, that kind of devotional self-sacrifice one for another that we picture in Trinitarian love.

And if we don’t then all of our math and abstract theological diagrams about the three in one and one in three are all useless.

Someplace in this idea – that humanity in Christ should mirror the Trinity in Communion – is the answer to how a gay man can become a saint. Some place deeper than letting one side or the other of the equation erase 50% of my personhood, some place deeper than simple political activism (no matter how much good comes out of it), someplace deeper than simple celibate gnosticism, the answer is there.

After Mass today I’ll go to the local gay pride parade. I’ll watch and wave. But I’l come home to my community of living afterward. And like all festivals, when the parade had faded into the distance, I’ll have to get on with living with these people whom I say I love.

Some place in there, after the parade and also after mass, there is the answer.