• 2 Samuel 11:26 – 12:13a
• Psalm 51:1-12
• Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15
• Psalm 78:23-29  
• Ephesians 4:1-16
• John 6:24-35

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ

VERY WIND of Doctrine… If you’ve spent any time in CHurch, you know how this sermon is supposed to go. By “every wind of doctrine” the apostle clearly means fads, current silliness, treating whatever comes through the front door as the most important thing ever – until something else comes through the front door. And, in the way this sermon is supposed to go, the preacher is then supposed to hold up his church (and it is usually a man doing it) or his Bible or his denomination, or the Pope or maybe a copy of the book of order – whatever. And say, “HERE is Sound Doctrine not pertaining to the wisdom of men, but rather to the wisdom of God…”

Then we’re all supposed to rejoice that we are right.

And that, of course, means that everyone else is wrong.

Here’s a story…

Back in 1999 or so, when – after 10 or more years as a Wiccan elder and a Gnostic priest – I returned to Church, I went to the most amazing parish ever: St Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco. Eventually I joined the parish, started taking classes, took on liturgical service, recommitted my life to Christ, renewed my Baptismal vows and began to explore the possibility that I was called to Ordained ministry. They are a loving community, dedicated to offering the hospitality of Jesus to anyone who comes through the door. They feed the hungry around their altar, they sing beautifully, they dance in church. They laugh, they drum, they explore, they struggle…

But in my time there, I became convinced they were doing it wrong – not as Episcopalians, per se, but as Christians. I began to struggle with them – when they asked questions like “Is Jesus really God?” or when I heard things like “Trinity is one way of understanding God, but not the only way…”

We know how this sermon is supposed to go now. I left the Episcopal Church, looking for the Church that was not blown about upon the winds of Doctrine and I found Holy Orthodoxy (play here the Chorus, “Hallelujah”, from Handel’s Messiah). St Raphael of Brooklyn (my patron, and whose relic we have here on our altar), said, “The Holy Orthodox Church has never perceptibly changed from Apostolic times, and, therefore, no one can go astray in finding out what she teaches. ”

Except, of course, that’s a myth. It’s one we like to tell ourselves because it helps us feel “Right”. And a visit to any Orthodox Parish (if you get honest people) will let you see people who struggle, people who question, people who don’t quite get it 100% right all the time. To this you should expect to hear a reply, “Yes, but the church herself is right…” as if there is an invisible church other than the people in front of you who – like the saints and fathers before them sometimes got it right and sometimes wrong, or as if, simply because the doctrines on paper somewhere are 100% right, it matters not what these living souls in front of you do or do not believe. The Doctrines are right here we may or may not believe them.

I met Orthodox CLergy and Laity who support gay marriage. Who don’t. Who even like the idea of women clergy. Who don’t. Who do like – and use and accept – modern biblical criticism. Who don’t. Who do believe all the stories in the Bible and/or of the Saints. Who don’t. Thing is, I know this all to be true of every other denomination I’ve visited or experienced: Roman right on down.

THere was one other issue, of course: officially, on paper, the EOC doesn’t support persons who sexuality is different from the accepted norm of heterosexuality unless they follow rather difficult path. For five years I tried to follow that path of celibacy. To be honest, I really wanted to hold hands again, and I missed cuddling. Simple physical contact – where I wouldn’t have to go to confession and admit that something had transpired internally that was “a sin”. When I say that the Orthodox – no more than any other church – have something on paper in a room somewhere and an entirely different thing “in the pews” or “Where the rubber meets the road”, I began to ask myself, “Why am I wrestling with these doctrines???”

The doctrines are not the problem, per se. (The same word in the Greek, didiskalia, is used in both good and bad ways in the NT.) The problem is in being blown about on the winds of them…

Paul says the purpose of the Church – that is, us here – is to build each other up using the gifts we each have until all of us “unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”

Follow that? “The faith” is not a set of Doctrines… It’s not a creed. It’s a growing together into Christ. It’s the “Faith of christ” – not the Doctrines of Christians! (THe Greek word translated “Faith” means “Trust” rather than a set of Doctrines.) Somehow we are all to move into the trust Jesus had, the quiet trust in the Father of Jesus. We become Christ here on earth. We – the Church, not individuals each of us, but all of us as one – are to be the “Body of Christ”…

Paul even puts this above political doctrines: he says there is “one lord”, One Kyrios. That’s a title reserved for Political Officials – Especially Caesar. To say “Jesus is Lord” is to take the debate out of the political realm. Here, growing into the unity of the faith… we are to be beyond even the political debates that divide us, police and republicans, drugs and democrats… stop being blown about by the winds of doctrine and come here, to the calm center where we feed each other at God’s own table. And meet. In love even when we disagree about things that are not important.

There is a prayer in the Eastern tradition that I will use in a few minutes at the end of this service: it’s not normally used there, but it seemed to make sense today. It asks, specifically, to grow us into the “unity of the faith” surrounded and shielded by the Angels.

How can we be angels for each other? Shielding each other by our wings from the winds of Doctrine: how can we grow to the unity of the the faith.

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.