Aug 25 | “Come out,” (Sermon, August 25th, 2019)

On Thursday of last week, I was privileged to join people from our Diocese and a few other churches at St. Anselm’s near UBC for Queerest and Dearest day camp.

Queerest and Dearest is a camp for LGBTQIA2S+ people and their family members: birth, chosen, found, immediate, extended, church, or otherwise. Last year, campers were fortunate enough to have five days and four nights at Camp Artaban on Gambier Island, which were taken up with arts and crafts, outdoor games, time in nature, and queer and trans-positive worship and programming.

This year, camp could only be one day – but what a day!

There were so many things that struck me, but two of them stand out in particular.

The first was an activity we did at evening worship. The Rev. Carolina Glauster of Mount Olivet Lutheran Church, our chaplain for the day, led us in a reading of the raising of Lazarus.

Carolina instructed us to pair up. Then, we were told to say two things to our partner, using their name and proper pronouns.

The first, of course, was “Person’s name, come out.”

It wasn’t just an ordinary command – we were to imagine that this was God’s command to emerge into daylight, fully ourselves; a personal command, encompassing our entire being – that’s why we had to use the name.

I turned to my partner and said, “You should know, I’m probably going to have feelings.”

He said, “Me too.”

We were so nervous we did rock-paper-scissors to decide who would go first.

I think I had the deep honour of speaking God’s word first. Then he spoke God’s word to me.

“Clare, come out.”

I thought his voice might come full of weight, full of depth and meaning. But it was almost conversational. No need to make this a big deal.

Because it’s not.

I don’t mean that in a negative, minimizing way. I mean that raising someone and calling them out of the tomb others have erected around them is not a monumental task that requires all of God’s elbow grease. That might imply there was something beyond salvation within that person; that their state of being was more complicated for God to manage than a so-called normal person.

It’s not.

It might be hard for other people to accept and welcome, but never God.

Never God.

Which leads me to the next part of the exercise, a command for the symbolic crowd gathered around the tomb.

Jesus’ command in the story is, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

Again, we turned to each other. We had to use the correct pronouns.

My partner’s were he/his. I identify as nonbinary – neither male nor female, kinda in the middle. This is something that is relatively new. Many of you might understand what I’m talking about. I’m thirty-four now, but I had no vocabulary for how I have always felt until I was about twenty-seven. That was when I first heard the term genderqueer. I remember using it for myself because it felt so right, before I even really knew what it meant. All I knew was that it was me.

I’m still struggling to live into this identity that has always felt like mine, still struggling to claim pronouns, still struggling against the narrowness of how nonbinary is “supposed” to look and present

I call myself a pronoun avoider because I mostly prefer to use my own name as a pronoun. In this terrifying new wilderness of possibility, they/them felt too impersonal. But as I gain more and more friends who use it, it feels less impersonal. It’s become part of the fabric of the people I love.

So when it was my turn, I asked for they/them.

“Unbind them, and let them go.”

There were definitely feelings.

That activity was the first thing that struck me about the day.

On the Sabbath day, into the synagogue, comes a woman, bent over for eighteen years. Eighteen years spent only looking at the earth, only looking at her feet, or the feet of others. In English we sometimes talk about people being “bent double,” and when I think of this woman, “bent double” seems appropriate, because this woman isn’t just physically bent. This lady is also carrying all the weight of the patriarchy and ableism! No wonder she can’t stand up straight, girl is bent triple!

But that doesn’t stop her.

That says something about her, don’t you think?

She just shows up – the text says she “appears.” Jesus is teaching – was she already in the congregation, or did she hear him from outside and come in? It doesn’t say. What matters is that Jesus first proclaims her freedom, and then lays on hands.

He names her and performs a public action – both for her personally, but also so that others may witness his acceptance.

And of course, like the raising of Lazarus, this brings trouble.

The established hierarchy never likes to be unsettled. If this woman is determined enough to bring herself to the healer even with all of this weight piled on her back, just imagine what she’ll be able to do when she’s standing up straight.

The first thing she does is start praising God. That might seem innocuous, but it isn’t.

Which brings me to the second thing that struck me at Queerest and Dearest.

We came to the end of our time together, and I was standing outside, waiting for my ride to come.

At the end of a full day like the one I had experienced, I’m usually pretty tapped out, energetically.

But I was so, so full, that I talked at length with an old Indian couple walking by. Later a bat fluttered wildly above my head, catching bugs, and I couldn’t help but tell it how clever it must be to fly so well.

I’m not normally the kind of person to be so genuinely open and cheerful like that. I wanted to hug everything I saw. I was drunk on the Spirit.

It occurred to me that if I had had Queerest and Dearest when I was young, I might have grown into a totally different person.

No hiding, no hanging back, no fear of sharing myself.

I thought, “Wow. If we engineered a place like this for every person on the planet, where they could be fully themselves – what kind of human family would we have today?”

The world we have would certainly be totally turned upside down.

And that’s scary for the people at the top.

Just imagine the leader of the synagogue looking at this woman praising God with her whole heart, and perhaps understanding better than some of Jesus’ other detractors what people do when they feel like God has freed them to be themselves.

Freedom and joy are an invasive species. They upset carefully manicured lawns of hierarchy like dandelions. Funnily enough, dandelions are actually packed full of beneficial things like potassium and other vitamins. But a lot of people hate them, because they pop up uninvited and can’t be contained.

The weeds of God’s liberation likewise cannot be contained. And Jesus proclaims that, in front of everyone. For ancient peoples, ailments were seen as connected to malevolent spiritual forces, but it doesn’t take much mental gymnastics for us to see Satan as not the disability itself but all that extra weight I talked about earlier.

At least the leader has the decency to feel shame when Jesus points this out.

Friends, I invite you today, and in the days to come, to consider what weight you might be carrying on your back – and indeed, the weight that others carry. Jesus is not only committed to pulling you upright and letting it roll off your back. Jesus’s intent has always been to extend the power of healing to everyone. You may yet be called, once upright, to speak those words to others bent double under the weight of oppression and self-hatred: “Come out.” “Stand up.”

Don’t forget that that might bring you into trouble sometimes, and that you may yet be called to speak to the crowd: “Unbind the children of God, and let them go.”