Matthew 28:16-20
It is a busy day on the church calendar, what with Trinity Sunday, Pride Sunday, and Communion Sunday for us once-a-month types. Even though we are more Reform than Lutheran, I’m going to fall back on Martin Luther’s admonition against preaching on Trinity Sunday, and just not preach on that. Hey, two out of three ain’t bad…
I like sports, as you all know. Unfortunately that includes ice hockey, which hasn’t worked out so well for me this year. The Maple Leafs, my favorite NHL team, made the playoffs, again, because they pretty much always do, then promptly collapsed, which they pretty much always do. I mean, when they last won the Stanley Cup, I was four.
Then there is that train wreck in the money pit across the street. I mean, I’m gonna root for the hometown team every time, but the Elmira Mammoth were pretty awful if we’re being honest, with constant player turnover, and now the whole enterprise seems to have failed, as the team could not attract enough fans to pay the bills.
Now, if you love hockey like I do, you know a particular end-of-game strategy, called “empty net.” This happens when a team is down by one goal near the end of the game. In desperation, they pull the goalie to get another attacker on the ice. I mean, a loss by one goal is no different than a loss by two goals, which is often what happens anyway.
All the leading team needs to do is snatch the puck and send it down to the other end of the ice, where there is a big fat nobody standing in goal. Then, with seconds left on the clock and the opponent now up by two goals, the goaltender comes back.
This past season, only one NHL team scored more goals than they gave up when they pulled their goalie. Our closest team, the Buffalo Sabres, tried empty net 33 times. They scored the tying goal three times. They gave up an additional goal 17 times. And if you are doing the math, 13 times, neither team scored.
Those are not great odds.
And as ineffective as pulling the goalie is in the NHL, it is still wildly successful compared to attempts to explain away the anti-gay passages in scripture. I’ve watched both scholars and amateurs try it, twisting themselves into knots trying to make scripture not say what it so clearly says.
The best argument, which has nothing to do with the actual words in the Bible, may be that rigid definitions of sexuality and gender are a mostly modern invention, quaintly Victorian, and the poor have rarely had the luxury of following them.
We know, for example, that men in heterosexual marriages often had male lovers before and even during their marriage in ancient times, and that even when sex was not involved, same-gender intimacy was not uncommon. There are tough heroic women who do not fit modern ideas of the feminine, women who are prophets and judges, and one who wields a pretty mean tent peg.
We see relationships that read as queer today in ancient Greek literature, like Achilles and Patroclus,in scripture, like David and Jonathan. This extends well into the Christian age, with a whole list of seemingly queer saints. There is even reason to suspect that Paul, who provides one of the infamous anti-queer passages, might have been a self-hating homosexual himself, with the never disclosed sin that causes him such anguish and self-loathing being same-sex attraction.
Women are less present in the narratives in that ancient age of patriarchy, but they are there.
Still, Leviticus says what Leviticus says, and Paul said what he said, and we can’t explain it away. We also can’t explain away the misogyny, genocide, and slavery in scripture. And we don’t need to, because we understand that even the most strident evangelical doesn’t obey every word in that ancient text, that everyone picks and chooses, and that what we pick and what we choose says far more about us than it ever did about God, who is bigger than all of that.
We don’t need to work quite so hard when we seek to lift up and celebrate members of the LGBTQI+ community in more modern times. A rose is a rose is a rose, and a lesbian is a lesbian is a lesbian, thank you Gertrude and Alice. Though, of course, even today, the world isn’t always so kind to queers, with the lives of one creative genius after another cut short, never mind plain folk in intolerant communities. That even Alan Turing, the code-breaker and father of modern computing so essential to the Allied victory in World War II, could not escape actual torture at the hands of his own government says a lot about the sexual insecurity of lawmakers, then and now.
There are so many stories to tell, but this morning I’d like to turn to one from the same time period, when Turing was working at Bletchley Park to save the United Kingdom and by extension, open society, or what passed for open society in the middle of the last century. Across the English Channel, in Nazi-occupied Holland, another queer hero was hard at work.
Willem Arondeus was an openly gay Dutch artist and author before the Nazi invasion. The art didn’t pay, but his novels and non-fiction writing did well enough. Then came the long night of fascism.
In 1942, he started an underground periodical, and rose to a position of leadership in the Dutch Resistance. The following year, his paper merged with another, and he became connected with Frieda Belinfante, a lesbian, cellist, and Sephardic Jew. Willem’s skill in art and illustration was helpful in resistance efforts to save Jews and other targets of the Gestapo through the creation of forged identity papers.
Unfortunately, the Dutch are incredibly efficient, which meant the Nazi occupier could quickly expose the forgeries by consulting the Amsterdam Civil Registry. The obvious answer was to blow up those public records.
The plan was meticulous. Saboteurs in disguise talked their way inside, then sedated the Dutch guards and took them out of the building. Records were piled on the floor and explosive charges were set off. Other agents inside of the Amsterdam fire brigade slowed the department’s response, then used way too much water for way too long in hope that the water would add to the damage.
It was a massive undertaking, and only partially successful. Fifteen percent of the records were destroyed, and the conspirators, including Arondeus, were caught. His final recorded words, before his execution, were “Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards.”
In 1986, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial, declared Willem Arondeus “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honorific for non-Jews who risked and sometimes lost their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
The bombing of the Amsterdam Civil Registry certainly saved some lives. But the real impact was probably spiritual, as good people resisted a great evil. Doing something is way better than doing nothing.
Who knows? Maybe throwing that Size 15 heel at a bully cop will start a revolution.
I was not born with a silver spoon. My dad grew up in poverty because his father died of tuberculosis, and America is truly Darwinian and lacking, as a whole, in compassion. He dropped out of high school and lied his way into the Korean War. I was raised in the working class. And yet, despite being gay, I walk through every day with incredible privilege as a cisgender white male in a society that places cisgender white males at the top. To be sure, I’ve worked hard, often with multiple jobs, studying with people who were way smarter than me. But I didn’t earn my genetics or my spot several rungs up the ladder.
Willem Arondeus was several rungs up the ladder. He could have kept his head down, stayed under the radar, survived the Nazi occupation.
Members of the LGBTQI+ community with racial, gender, and economic privilege can just keep their heads down, fly under the radar, and honestly, we don’t even have to here in New York. This isn’t that hell hole Florida after all. Our community is afforded reasonable protections. Something near-ish to equality exists. Except this: there is a child going to sleep tonight in a room with a broken window. There is a man who cannot get a job because of one bad decision twenty years ago. There is a mom who has done everything she can to help her child get off drugs, to secure the addiction treatment and mental healthcare that will save her baby, and she is out of options.
And Matthew 25. What you have done to the least of these, you have done unto me.
I am outraged by the white Supremacy and Fundamentalist Christian Nationalism of Ron DeSantis. I am ashamed of the role American evangelicals played in crafting the murderous new legislation in Uganda. I am infuriated that the homicidal Sackler family is going to stay rich. I am baffled by how billionaires and corporations can keep manipulating people into voting against their own best interests.
But I can’t do a whole lot about those things.
I can do something here.
I can make sure we have local leadership that promotes a just economy. I can promote housing reform and the formation of a local tenant’s union. I can push back and speak up when only the most hateful and heretical forms of Christianity dominate the religious landscape. I can stand with my sisters and brothers of color in a region that pretends it isn’t deeply racist. For let me assure you as a person raised in the Jim Crow South, the Southern Tier of New York is deeply racist.
For those of you who are my LGBTQI+ siblings, you want to throw a fabulous brunch? Go for it. Pour a Mimosa for me. I’ll take me eggs over easy and my rye toast.
But then roll up your sleeves. Jesus is out there. He may not look like you. He may look like a queer kid in Florida, a worried elder in Kyiv, or a neglected child right here in Elmira. Amen.