Pride Sunday Reflections

This post contains a diary selection read by our worship leader, Russ Schmidt, plus two reflections on Act 15:1-2, 4-14, 19-20 by Eli Ramer and Eli Reimer.

Russ Schmidt’s diary entry

The other day I accidentally found my first journal that I started when I was in Mennonite Voluntary Service in Cincinnati.  I had just come to accept that I was gay.  The week before I remember looking at myself in the mirror and saying to myself for the first time, “I’m gay,” and smiling.

2/12/1982

How do I begin?  For anyone who find this, let me make it easy for you to figure out.  I’ll just say it right away.  I’m gay.  Yeah, that’s right – GAY!  How do I know?  When did it start?  It’s not something I decided to be.  It’s who I’ve always been.  It’s just that now I can’t go on hiding it.  A person’s sexuality is part of their whole being – not the whole, but definitely a part.  It’s like a piece in the puzzle that is our whole life.  When a piece of the puzzle is missing, or is covered up, the picture isn’t complete.  And even if a piece from another puzzle fits in size and shape, the picture isn’t right until the right piece, with the right size and shape, and the right picture pattern and design is fit securely within the puzzle – then it’s complete!

Yeah, I’m gay, a homosexual, a faggot, a queer.  Call me what you like – it doesn’t matter.  No, it does matter!  You can’t change me, but damn it, it does matter what you think.  It matters because I need to feel loved and accepted for who I am, not for who you think I should be.  I need your love!  People wonder why so many of us commit suicide.  You think it’s proof of our forsaking God and then coming to grips with our condemnation.  Well, it’s not that at all.  It’s because you have shut us out of our families and communities.  It is you who have refused to love us.  God hasn’t done that.  God continues to love.  But God lives in and through people, and when people refuse to let their love, God’s love, encircle each person, even us queers, we slowly die. 

But I realize that our lives are all so interconnected that when you withhold your love and try to kill my sexuality and individuality you are also killing yourself.  And I guess I want so desperately for us both to find the fullness life – here and now.  For me God is life.  In order for me to be a whole person I need to see that you are also a whole person, for somehow we are pieces in each other’s puzzle.

Eli Reimer’s Reflection

I should begin today by saying that I originally wrote this for a queer audience. I have decided to keep it that way, though I am aware that there are at least a few straight, cisgender people in the audience. When I say “we,” then, I am referring to queer people.

What does that mean? The queer identity has always been a nebulous thing. It is fitting, perhaps, that the word “queer” was often used as a slur against us, and that we are reclaiming it. For a long time, being queer simply meant that you were deviant, in either your gender or sexuality, in a way that made the majority uncomfortable. That’s one of the reasons trans people were so involved in the gay rights movement—most straight, cisgender people couldn’t be bothered to know the distinctions between someone who’s a queer because they’re gay, and someone who’s a queer because they’re trans.

I quite like the word “queer,” though I’m aware that not everyone is comfortable with it. I like it because an ever-growing acronym is cumbersome, and I like it because we have a long tradition in the queer community of reclaiming slurs.

The main reason I like it, though, is because it recognizes our community as a coherent whole. You can’t draw a line in the middle of the word queer in the same way that you can draw a line between the LGB and the T.

How we define ourselves as a community is a strange and murky process, and it takes time. Privileged voices tend to end up with more say in the matter. For some people, the chance to define who is “in” and who is “out” means a chance to rebrand ourselves to the wider world, a chance to be as normal and respectable as possible. We want rights, God damn it, and so we need to show all those straight people in power that we’re just like them, really, which means that they are being unjust to deny us the same rights that they have.

In order to do this, some people have drawn boundaries between themselves and the stranger elements of the LGBTQ acronym. “We are the good queer people,” they said, “and those are the bad queer people.”

This is a process that is not unique to queer people. It has happened so many times before in human history. And one of those times was with Christianity. There’s a reason we have so many denominations. There’s a reason the Mennonite church has split again and again.

But such divisions are not, it should be noted, in this passage today. I imagine it would have been tempting to draw the line at circumcision. Here’s a fringe group that no one respects, and they follow this random dude who rose from the dead, which is weird enough, but now they’re letting uncircumcised people into their group too! How embarrassing. These Jesus-followers could have chosen to cling to that scrap of credibility. They could have looked at the other Jewish factions at the time and said “No, we’re just like you, really. These uncircumcised people aren’t us. We’re legitimate.”

But being seen as legitimate in the eyes of the majority wasn’t the goal of early Jesus-followers. Sure, it would have been a plus, but not at the expense of their fellow followers, even if those fellow followers were a little weird.

Now, I try my hardest to not be one of the weird ones. When I first came out as nonbinary, I told my parents that if it felt too complicated to explain my transition to their friends or colleagues, it was okay if they used my old name and pronouns then. It doesn’t matter to me, I said, since I don’t interact with them. I didn’t want navigating my gender identity to be any more of a burden than it already was.

Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, my identity means that I am a complicated thing that requires effort. It requires effort for many people to remember to use the correct pronouns, the correct words. It is always easier for people to simply ignore me. It is more convenient to draw that line.

So, I thank God that there are people in the world who are willing to be inconvenienced. There are people who are willing to give up their claims to respectability in order to associate with me. And, to my surprise, this church has done more than that. I will never forget the bake sale that we held for trans kids, which is the sort of thing that I was not expecting when I came here for MVS.

Is there more to do? Of course. There’s always more to do. Lines are always being drawn, and it will require constant effort to reach across them, to erase them. For the early church, the conversation about circumcision didn’t end with this passage. And I’m sure our conversation about what inclusion looks like won’t end here, either.

Eli Ramer’s Reflection

I like to read the Christian Bible in the translation by Willis Barnstone called The Restored New Testament. In it we hear about Yeshua and his mother Miryam, his friend Marta, and his students Shimon and Yehuda, on their way to the city of Yerushalaim, Jerusalem.

Today’s scripture reading comes from a book that Barnstone translates from the Greek, not as the familiar Acts of the Apostles but as The Activities of the Messengers, the Greek itself a translation from the Aramaic and Hebrew that Yeshua and those messengers who are usually called apostles would have spoken. I like this translation, as it steps down for me the elevated, separated meaning of apostle, and opens a door to the inclusion that we’re talking about today.

In this passage we read about a conversation between Shaul and Bar Nabba, Paul and Barnnabas, about how to include non-Jews, gentiles, in the community of the followers of Yeshua. Some of their community felt that non-Jews – and they’re only talking about men – would have to be circumcised, according to the laws in the Torah, the five books of Moses. In the end, as we heard in the reading, what’s decided by the Jews who were the first generation of the followers of Yeshua, inspired by the words of Shimon Kefa, Peter, is that non-Jews who choose to follow the path to one God – will have to abstain from sexual immorality, and from certain foods that are prohibited in the Torah – but they will not have to be circumcised.

This decision opens a doorway to inclusion that’s grounded in earlier texts. The Torah tells us that the very first human being, and thus all of its descendants, was created in the image of a God who is both male and female, and thus invites us to include everyone into our communities. And far more often in the Torah than reading about the oneness of God, we read a version of these words – “The strangers who reside with you shall be as natives among you, and you shall love them as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The Hebrew word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, comes from a root that means “narrow place,” so we can read these words as – “for you were stranger in a narrow, constricted, place.”

These texts and the decision of the messengers to open their community to outsiders is deeply relevant to us always, not only during Pride month, and texts and translations of texts have long been important to me. I began my journey of coming out as gay in 1971, sitting by myself in a movie theatre in Yerushalaim during my junior year abroad, watching the translation into film of the homoerotic novel Women in Love, written by English author D. H. Lawrence, with a screenplay by the gay American author and activist Larry Kramer, although I did not know that at the time.

It took me another year of silence, of secret reading, and working with an amazing therapist in Berkeley – thank you Mary Auerswald – before I was ready leave my narrow constricted place and come out to others. At the time I couldn’t image how the world would change, how the brave decisions of lesbians and gay men of that era would empower those who followed us to embody and affirm their identities as trans, non-binary, gender-queer, gender-fluid, asexual, aromantic, and other terms of self-affirmation that I find myself too old to keep up with – and – celebrate!

There’s much in the history of humanity that invites fear of others and otherness. But again and again we must come back to the oneness of our textual first ancestor, the repeated call to include everyone around us in one community, and the messengers’ own inclusive decision, made two thousand years ago. 

In the face of global challenges, a dance of droughts and raging fires, in a world where the UN estimates that by the year 2050 there may be ONE BILLION climate refugees, it’s more important than ever for us to include – everyone!

So I ask you. Who feels or seems other to you? Not a part of your or our community? And I ask – what might you do to create an inward shift so that they become family? And are there queer folk who make you uncomfortable? I have queer friends who have negative judgments about other queer people. But – now is the time – to leave the narrow place of exclusion and oppression – and welcome all the descendants of Eve and Adam, Chava and Adahm – into our one big family – by all of us becoming messengers of transformation, inclusion, and love – to all the world.