Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Proper 15, August 17, 2025

Jesus, Savior, may I know your love and make it known. Amen.

I’ve described in the past a few things about the church in North Carolina where I was baptized. It sits on more land than Palmer does, bordered in the 1970s and 1980s by two large tobacco fields. On the other two sides are roads that form a crossroads, hence the name Union Cross Moravian Church.

So there was a lot of grass to mow, which was always done by volunteers from the congregation. Daddy and I would take our turn in that work rotation, which included cutting the grass throughout God’s Acre. God’s Acre is the name that Moravian Christians use for the church cemetery, traditionally laid out in a grid pattern, with sidewalks around large squares filled with graves, each one with an equal, recumbent, white marble headstone.

My great-grandparents are buried there, so I remember seeing their simple headstones as I walked around them with the push mower. I also remember seeing another headstone in one of the first rows of graves, which had a rare-for-that-cemetery Masonic symbol at the top of it, just above the name of J. L. Johnson.¹ He had donated the land for the church in the 1890s and died in 1900. And that’s most of what I knew about him for most of my life.

I had never heard the amazing stories about Dr. John Lewis Johnson from my father because I’m pretty sure he’d never heard them from his father. Although my granddaddy was born in 1894 and surely met Dr. Johnson at some point as a small child because they lived close to one another, somewhere along the way, people just stopped talking about what had really happened in the past.² Those memories were buried in the ground, totally forgotten at some point.

During the War of the Rebellion, there was an inner-civil war taking place not only in the mountains of North Carolina, but also in the Piedmont region, where I grew up. And Dr. Johnson was both a founder and leader of a secret society of Unionists called the Heroes of America.³

They protected and stayed connected to each other’s families. They helped young men avoid the Confederate draft, hide from the Home Guard, or make their way to the Federal lines in Tennessee. Less than two years after the end of the Rebellion, Dr. Johnson helped to draft a number of resolutions endorsed by a large gathering of loyal citizens in the Union Cross community. They expressed their love for the American flag as a “proud emblem of freedom,” embraced congressional reconstruction, advocated for political cooperation between formerly enslaved Blacks and loyal whites, and said that:

. . . we wish to see the freedmen protected in their rights of franchise, knowing that they will not raise their arms against the just power that tore from their hands the galling shackles of slavery.⁴

Now I’m telling you all of this for two reasons. The first is because the Heroes of America also went by a nickname — the Red Strings — which comes from a story in the Book of Joshua in which a scarlet cord was used as a secret sign to protect a woman and her household in Jericho after she helped two spies on a reconnaissance mission escape by lowering them down the city wall with a red rope.⁵ That woman in the Old Testament was named Rahab, and she’s listed in the roll call of faith in the New Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews.⁶

That roll call of faith is much longer than the partial list in the passage read a few minutes ago, which included Rahab’s name.⁷ But she and everyone else on that list in Hebrews stepped out into the world in faith, helping to shape the world around them in ways which reflected divine salvation or health or wholeness. Although they didn’t see the end result, they’ve been part of what God is doing in the world, just as we’re part of what God’s doing in the world.

Even though you may not see the end result of what God is doing, what God is really and truly doing through your life, you are surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses,” as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it.⁸ In that crowd is Rahab, with everyone else from the pages of the Bible in the roll call of faith.

In that crowd are also people known to you from your family of birth or your family of choice. In that crowd are people whom you came to know because you were curious about the past — people who stepped out in faith during the Civil Rights Movement, during Reconstruction, during the Reformation — people who stepped out in faith by unlocking the doors as the first disciples did in the Upper Room after they had seen Jesus on the other side of death and chose to keep looking for Jesus.⁹ In spite of fear, they walked out those doors.

The author of Hebrews imagines us running in a stadium, with all of those people in the stands cheering us on. While keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, we can hear the roar of that crowd as we run the race — a roar which, like the love of Jesus, is for us, not against us. We’re not alone down here on the race track.

You don’t even have to imagine that roar since you heard screams and cheers from across the street this morning as you walked through the doors of the church. New students — new Owls — are being welcomed, loudly, to the campus of Rice University. The message is that each of them belongs there, just as each of you belong at the center of the action in the stadium of faith.

But here’s the other thing, the other reason why I wanted to share with you those stories about Dr. Johnson. When people stop telling stories from one generation to another, when people stop remembering things as they really were, what had once seemed important not only diminishes but can evaporate into thin air as if it had never existed. That’s true not only for our historical memory but also for our theological memory, our Christian faith and life.

If you saw the sci-fi movie Interstellar about a dystopian future for the whole planet, you may recall Matthew McConaughey, in the role of a widowed former NASA test pilot, going to a meeting at school which included his young daughter and her teacher. The daughter had brought to the classroom an old textbook showing the Apollo missions had not been faked. But that contradicted the stories being told to future generations. Watching that scene, you see how folks are living in an alternate reality, shaped for them by others.

Christians are not born, they are made, reborn in each generation. But they will not automatically appear in future generations if we stop paying attention to that, if we think that someone else will tell our children, our friends, our neighbors, our guests within these walls the stories of faith that have led us to the present moment, if we think that others will remember the Christian past on our behalf while we choose to remember something else, perhaps how we have succeeded on our own, how we were not dependent on God’s grace.

If that is what is most important to us, something separate from Christian community, that will become most important to those who come after us. And then we will be shocked at how quickly faith starts to fade into nothingness.

Faith is something each of us can hold on to throughout the hard times, like the scarlet rope offered by Rahab — and make no mistake about it, there will be hard times, difficult chapters in our own lives and the world around us.

I mentioned earlier that Dr. Johnson died in 1900, just long enough to see much of what he had worked for and hoped for slip away before his very eyes. The only successful coup d’état in the history of the United States took place in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898.¹⁰ It was the culmination of a white supremacist political campaign throughout the state that year, which included threats of violence and acts of violence to keep Black citizens from voting.

An armed white mob seized control of Wilmington, expelling Black politicians and others. Before sunset, they had forced the mayor, the board of aldermen, and the chief of police to resign. A week later, the publisher of the Chatham Record newspaper, Henry A. London, wrote these words in an editorial:

Wilmington is once more ruled by respectable white men and all her citizens are now safe and secure in their lives, liberty and property.¹¹

Then, just three months and one day before Dr. Johnson’s death, white North Carolinians, having once again kept Black citizens away from the polls, voted to approve an amendment to the state constitution which would ensure the legal disenfranchisement of most Black voters throughout the Old North State.¹² It would take decades for this to become undone, and Dr. Johnson, of course, didn’t live to see that undoing.

I can’t help but believe that Dr. Johnson kept his eyes on Jesus as he ran with perseverance through this life in the midst of turbulent times and that it affected deeply the way he looked at the rest of humanity — the way he looked at his neighbors, they way he looked at those with whom he worked closely, the way he looked at the individuals and families who lived in his community. He did not, in the words of the author of Hebrews, “receive what was promised.”¹³ But he was faithful to the end, his work was not in vain, and his hope, a Christian hope, for a better future for all of us wasn’t unfounded.

I believe he will awaken in the likeness of Jesus when the darkness of death is dispelled by resurrection light on the Last Day, and whatever stories of the past that are true but have been intentionally forgotten will be raised up as well and remembered. Whatever is true, lovely, and merciful is not lost to God. I also believe that our lives are just as important as his life was. So like him:

. . . let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.¹⁴

AMEN

1. Moravian Christians are not buried in God’s Acre beside members of their immediate family. Men are buried next to one another in sequence, and women are buried next to one another in sequence, demonstrating in death not only equality through the uniform headstones but also the reality that they belong to the larger family of God, which is more important than their own family or their lack of a family. Although he died in 1900, it is surprising to see that Dr. John Lewis Johnson is buried next to but after my great-grandfather Charlie Tucker, who died in 1949. Dr. Johnson and his wife had first been buried elsewhere on part of his land that was not originally donated to the church but that later also became part of the church property. They were both reinterred in God’s Acre after it had been laid out at Union Cross in the 1940s. With that, Dr. Johnson and his wife both rejoined this larger family of God. ↩︎
2. According to the 1900 federal census, Dr. Johnson, a widower at that point, was living with his son near the farm of my great-grandfather Jacob Williard. My grandfather Clifton Williard/Willard would have been six-years-old when Dr. Johnson died that fall on November 3, 1900. ↩︎
3. William T. Auman and David D. Scarboro, “Johnson, John Lewis,” NCpedia website, 1988. One book about the larger context is Civil War in the North Carolina Quaker Belt: The Confederate Campaign Against Peace Agitators, Deserters and Draft Dodgers by William T. Auman. Another book about the larger context is Rebels Against the Confederacy: North Carolina’s Unionists by Barton A. Myers. ↩︎
4. “Republican Meeting at Union Cross,” The Daily Standard (Raleigh, North Carolina), April 2, 1867, p. 3. ↩︎
5. Joshua 2:1-21; 6:12-25. ↩︎
6. Hebrews 11:1-39. ↩︎
7. Hebrews 11:29-12:2. ↩︎
8. Hebrews 12:1. ↩︎
9. John 20:19-31. This passage describes how “the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked” before they met Jesus, risen from the dead, for the first time on the evening of the same day that women had discovered his empty tomb. That empowered them to unlock the doors, cross the threshold in faith, and go into the world. ↩︎
10. “1898 Wilmington Coup,” North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources website. There are many sources from which one can learn about this historical event, but I think the best book-length treatment is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino. Unfortunately, my public high school in Forsyth County, North Carolina, is named for Robert B. Glenn, one of the main orators for the white supremacist political campaign of 1898. Glenn was elected Governor of North Carolina in 1905 and, ironically, testified the following year in the trial of a white man accused of orchestrating the lynching of five Black men after Glenn had ordered state militia to try, unsuccessfully, to stop the murders. Glenn also took a hard line against all lynchings after the public outcry about this case. It’s an example of swinging wildly toward law and order only after violence and other illegal means had been used to establish white supremacy. Lynchings were also bad for business. ↩︎
11. H.A. London, editorial, The Chatham Record (Pittsboro, North Carolina), November 17, 1898, p. 2. ↩︎
12. “On this day — Aug 2, 1900, North Carolina Votes to Disenfranchise Black Residents,” A History of Racial Injustice website, The Equal Justice Initiative. Astonishingly, although nullified by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the language requiring a literacy test to vote remains in the North Carolina State Constitution to this day despite attempts to remove it. ↩︎
13. Hebrews 11:39. ↩︎
14. Hebrews 12:1-2 (emphasis added). ↩︎

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Proper 9, July 7, 2024

Jesus, the Morning Star, shine in the heavens above
and in our hearts below, now and always. Amen.

A good friend of mine from high school, who died a couple of years ago, was a Baptist minister, but not the kind you’re imagining at this very moment. At some point he exchanged his suits and ties for overalls and a beard that made him look like an Old Testament prophet. A motorcycle took him away from the City of Atlanta, back home to North Carolina. There he spent a lot of time hanging out at the Waffle House, talking to people about their lives.

I don’t know if there was any kind of mystical experience that led to that transformation, which was pretty radical. But I do know how my friend, named Don Durham, described himself, at least sometimes. He said:

I’m just “a guy.” Like when you hear folks say, “I can’t help you with that, but . . . I know a guy.”¹

That’s how Paul, a devout Jewish pharisee who became a devout Jewish follower of Jesus, begins today’s reading from his second letter to the Corinthians.² He essentially says something like this: “I know a guy . . . a person who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. I don’t know if this came to him in a vision or if he was actually taken there. Only God knows that. But I do know this guy. He got a glimpse of paradise, of this third heaven, and in the midst of that, he heard things that are not to be told, that aren’t allowed to be repeated to anyone else.”

In this case, when Paul says, “I know a guy,” he’s probably talking about himself. He’s been talking about himself since the last chapter of this letter, in what’s often called “The Fool’s Speech.” Paul is here defending himself against opponents — those whom he refers to as so-called “super-apostles.”³ Think of them as slick, smiling, telegenic pastors of megachurches. They look better than Paul. They’re better public speakers than he is. They go around boasting about their spiritual gifts. So Paul asks the Corinthian Christians, for whom he feels “a divine jealousy,” to bear with him “in a little foolishness . . . so that [he] too may boast a little.”⁴

Part of Paul’s boasting is that he’s a better minister of the Christ, the Messiah, than these “super-apostles.” That’s because he’s suffered greatly in his ministry, both physically and “because of [his] anxiety for all the churches.”⁵ What the world sees revealed on the other side of these sufferings is a weak man. But Paul says he will boast of this weakness.

Although Paul doesn’t repeat what was heard in his mystical experience of paradise, he does share with the Corinthians, and with us, something he believes he heard in prayer. Paul believes that Jesus said to him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”⁶ So that’s why Paul says he gladly boasts of his own weaknesses.

But what are we to make of the mystical experience that Paul described earlier? It’s not the most important part of this speech by a fool for Christ. But he says it really happened to him. So what are we to make of it? Have you ever experienced something similar to this — something transcendent that was difficult or perhaps impossible to put into words?

The New Testament scholar Dale Allison, who teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary, has a theory that makes sense to me. He wonders if some people are thinner than others — not in physical appearance but with respect to the ability to have what we might describe as encounters with mystery.⁷ He knows some people have hallucinations and others don’t tell the truth, or the whole truth, about one thing or another. But he also knows that in this world where weird things happen some do have encounters with mystery that utterly change their lives because he had one of them.

When he was sixteen years old, Allison was sitting by himself “under the Kansas night sky” on the back porch of his family’s home. Suddenly it was as if the stars had “forsaken the firmament” and come down to surround him. He says they were neither really animate nor entirely inanimate. He also says they somehow made known to him the overwhelming presence of something that was “forbidding yet benevolent, affectionate yet enigmatic.” You can sense that he has trouble describing this with words, and whatever happened only lasted for about 20 seconds.⁸

But with great clarity he says that it awakened him from what he called “a lifelong slumber.” Immediately afterwards, he says that “[he] believed that [he] had run into God, or that God had run into [him].” It’s what ultimately caused him to become a biblical scholar, with all of his many doubts, questions, and curiosities about the scriptures and about the universe. It was not, he asserts, “something about which [he] could be indifferent.”⁹

I believe Allison’s story, even though I’ve never had an experience that intense. Perhaps he’s just thinner than I am, to use his language. But there are people close to me who’ve had dreams that approach this kind of encounter with the holy, and I believe them too.

The closest I’ve ever come to a mystical experience was an overwhelming feeling at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. There, by myself, I stumbled upon a dark room with black walls and some benches that were arranged not unlike pews. Bright lights were pointed at the front of the room, reflecting intensely off the silver and gold metallic foils of an exhibit on loan from the Smithsonian called “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation’s Millennium General Assembly.”

It was an elaborate representation of heavenly glory that was created out of “metallic foils, paper, plastic, strips of metal cut from coffee cans, jelly jars, flower vases, cardboard, conduit, glue, tape, tacks, and pins.”¹⁰ Silver and gold crowns rested on the floor in the front of everything else. At the center was a silver and gold wingèd throne beneath the words “Fear Not.”

James Hampton, a nighttime janitor, took 14 years to make it all, hidden in a rented brick garage until after his death.¹¹ It was as if having climbed Jacob’s Ladder after Paul, he had also not been allowed to share what he had heard about hope and being set free at the return of Christ, whose throne this was.

Much like those to whom the words “fear not” are spoken in the pages of the Bible, I was a little shaken as I sat there alone. Truly, the most mysterious part may have been the fact that no one else came into the room.

The “forbidding yet benevolent” feeling Dale Allison described about his own experience was present in that space of momentary solitude, which was simultaneously dark and brilliantly illuminated.

Thankfully, it didn’t end after 20 seconds; and I wanted to stay there as long as I could because, in spite of how crazy it seemed then and might seem now, I was experiencing a real sense of God’s holiness. I was rendered speechless, and yet I felt as though I was praying to God. Or perhaps it was the Holy Spirit praying for me with sighs too deep for words.¹²

That sense of awe is something we experience here in worship as we come before the mystery and the majesty of God, hearing that God’s love for each of us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is always greater than our most unlovely moments and stronger than death.

But there’s something else that happens when we walk through these doors. It’s illustrated well in an essay by art historian Griffith Mann. He writes:

Several years ago, a museum professional told me about a chance meeting he once had at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. A long-serving senator from Rhode Island was visiting the galleries alone. Recognizing him, [that professional] asked how he made time to visit the museum. The senator responded, “I come to the galleries to spend time with my [late] wife by looking at all the pictures that she loved.”¹³

I love that story, which reminds me of a favorite quote by the late Jaroslav Pelikan, who was the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University. He famously wrote:

Tradition is the living faith of the dead,
traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.¹⁴

Each time I walk into this church, I think about that kind of living faith. I’m reminded me of all the people whose small acts of kindness have reflected God’s love for me in different chapters of my life. That includes parents and grandparents, teachers and friends and even strangers. It includes people from this congregation, some of whom are no longer with us in this life and who now see for themselves what that nighttime janitor imagined as heavenly beauty with silver and gold metallic foils.

I think he got absolutely right the words that crown the divine throne: “Fear Not.” That’s the message of consolation, compassion, and acceptance you should hear within these walls, even when there are plenty of things to fear beyond them. Here we put on the beautiful garments of forgiveness we’ve received through Jesus, who has taken away the sins of the whole world:

Thus well arrayed I need not fear
When in his presence I appear.¹⁵

Some people here this morning have had a mystical encounter of one kind or another. Many more have experienced the same wave of holiness I felt in front of the words “Fear Not” in a museum, alone yet not alone.

But none of those things matter if they only magnify our egos and create “super apostles” — people who brag about their spiritual gifts and, in the process, put down all those around them, whether here within God’s house or on the other side of these doors in the rest of God’s creation.

That’s not what Jesus did, and that’s not what the Holy Spirit, who makes present the love of Jesus today, does within and beyond these walls. That’s not what the Holy Spirit does within and beyond a human heart.

Everyone here this morning, regardless of how physically or spiritually weak you may feel, can participate in the small acts of kindness that reflect God’s love for you, for others, and for the world. These things that you speak or give or do have the power to change the world, beginning with the world that surrounds you. They may seem weak. They may seem insignificant. But the power of Christ dwells within you, as it did within Paul, which makes the love you share more important than any mystical vision, even “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation’s Millennium General Assembly.”

I know a guy who saw that, all of it, in the body. The reality of the words “Fear Not” washed over him, but the most important part was the fact that he didn’t stay there. He walked away from that reflection of the third heaven with a heart overflowing with love to share, the same love that will stream out of the doors of this church as we’re sent into the world today.

AMEN

1. This was Don Durham’s introduction on his Facebook page. ↩︎
2. Second Corinthians 12:2-10. ↩︎
3. Second Corinthians 11:5; 12:11. ↩︎
4. Second Corinthians 11:1, 16. ↩︎
5. Second Corinthians 11:28. ↩︎
6. Second Corinthians 12:9. ↩︎
7. Dale Allison has used this metaphor in many interviews related to his book Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022). ↩︎
8. Dale Allison, Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022) 1-3, 6-7. ↩︎
9. Dale Allison, Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022) 2-3, 6. ↩︎
10. “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly,” The Colonial Williamsburg Journal (Spring 2004). ↩︎
11. Artist: James Hampton, Smithsonian American Art Museum website. ↩︎
12. Romans 8:26. ↩︎
13. C. Griffith Mann, Encounter: The San Leonardo al Frigido Portal at The Cloisters,” Gesta, Volume 53, Issue 1 (Spring 2014) 1. ↩︎
14. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) 65. ↩︎
15. This is a translation of words written in German by Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1760) as part of a Moravian chorale verse.
    ↩︎

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Proper 5, June 6, 2021

Jesus, Savior, may I know your love and make it known. Amen.

Some of you will remember scenes from around the world last year when people in cities and towns either opened their windows or stepped out onto their balconies at the same time each evening. In Italy, they sang together to boost morale. In the City of Atlanta, they cheered loudly from high rises when healthcare workers were changing shifts to thank them for risking their own lives to save others. Here at Palmer, our church bells are still playing hymns in the morning and in the evening for those walking into and out of the largest medical complex in the world across the street from us.

But most of those communal gatherings that brought people outside of their homes and connected them with one another stopped long ago. Most, but not all. The folks who live in the 400 block of East 118th Street in New York City are still going at it more than 400 days after starting this ritual.[1]

Ivette Rodriguez never misses a night. She moved to that block with her mother back in 1965. Her husband sets an alarm to make sure they don’t forget. At 7:00 p.m., Ivette puts on a jacket and steps outside. Some of her neighbors are already out there, with pans or whatever else they can find that can be used to make noise. A few kids wave flashlights too.

One of Ivette’s neighbors is Frances Mastrota. She’s in her eighties and moved to the block in 1959 as a bride. Widowed since 1975, she’s still there. She’s actually Dr. Mastrota, a retired oncology researcher. A lot of the people on that block, in fact, were healthcare workers. So that’s one of the reasons they still cheer on their former colleagues. But it’s not really the main reason they keep stepping outside at the same time.

When asked about this by an interviewer, Dr. Mastrota says:

Because we are a very special block, and we watch out for each other. If they don’t see [me] come out at 7:00, they look for me. . . . If I don’t come out, this lady comes, that lady comes, the people over there come. . . . If I don’t come out at 7:00, if I don’t pick up my New York Times paper at 6:00, they look for me. They know I’m alone.[2]

The interviewer, Ira Glass of public radio’s This American Life, then asks her:

Some nights, do you just feel tired, and you don’t want to come out?[3]

And she replies with a laugh:

I have to. I have to. They will come here![4]

In other words, the 400 block of East 118th Street maintains the bonds of community by showing up for one another and by looking out for their neighbors. They did it in different ways before the pandemic. And they will continue to find new ways of doing it in the future, I am sure, because they have love for one another. To be clear, that can be a true statement even if they don’t always like each other. They have regard for the humanity of those who live beside them and those who live across the street. From our Christian perspective, we would say they recognize those neighbors, both new and old, as human beings who have been created in God’s image.

Palmer, like any other church, is meant to be like the 400 block of East 118th Street. We don’t come together every day, although we can certainly join together daily in prayer for one another. But we do gather as a community of Christians on Sunday mornings — to remember that the circle of grace keeps flooding over the banks of our experiences only and to hear again and again and again that there is more to this world than we can see at the end of our noses. It’s important to look directly at what’s there, right in front of us — the suffering within us and around us from which others turn away. But it’s also important to know that’s not the last word. And that’s why we come here, regardless of how we feel, “so we do not lose heart,” as St. Paul writes in today’s reading from his second letter to the Corinthians.[5]

We can not only look out for those who live on our block, who belong to our church, but also for those who would find a home here, a place where they can be sheltered not only during a pandemic but also in all the other storms of life — a safe harbor. The truth is that the block on which we live as followers of Jesus, crucified and risen, extends far beyond our own walls.

I don’t usually remember my dreams, but I did remember one a couple of weeks ago on a Friday morning. In that dream, while on a trip, perhaps a vacation, my family and I made a Sunday visit to a congregation very much like Palmer. Folks there were recalling with joy the time same-gender marriages had begun within that Christian community.

The sense of encouragement and interdependence and love for one another, rooted in God’s first love for us, was intense in my dream. It reminded me that people don’t have to be merely tolerated in the pews. They can belong to parishes where LGBTQ people serve on the church staff, as members of the clergy, and as congregational leaders. They can even donate flowers for the altar to the glory of God in thanksgiving for a wedding anniversary — a simple, ordinary act which reveals a lot about just how welcoming a church really is or isn’t. They don’t have to hide or believe God is completely hidden and far away, keeping them at arm’s length rather than embracing them.

This I have come to believe, wholeheartedly, as a Christian.

After I woke up, a bit disoriented from the vividness of my dream, one of the first things I read that morning were these words from an interview with the actor Billy Porter:

The first thing that is taken away from LGBTQ people . . . is our spirituality.[6]

What he said is too often true, but it doesn’t have to be that way for everyone. We can open wide the gates and doors of our houses of worship, as we do at Palmer, walking through them beside our LGBTQ friends and neighbors and family members. And we don’t have to pray for them in the third person, as if they are somewhere else, because they are here. As a Christian young adult named Mary Grahame Hunter puts it:

Queer people are part of Church’s first person plural, the great ‘we’ that begins the Nicene Creed.[7]

I love her use of that phrase — “the great ‘we’ that begins the Nicene Creed” — because it includes all of us here today. It carries us along, within something much larger than ourselves, when we’re strong, when we’re struggling, when we feel as if we can trust God with every fiber of our being, and even when, perhaps especially when, we’re not so sure about that.

Reflecting on all of his various conversations with the folks who live on the 400 block of East 118th Street in New York City, Ira Glass, said:

It’s the dailyness of the 7:00 get-together, the fact that it happens every single day. That’s what makes it mean so much to all of them. They made this part of the day a little life raft that they gathered on during this terrible, dangerous year that made it like a daily prayer.[8]

Glass then confessed:

I personally haven’t prayed every day since I was a little boy. But somebody who does it as an adult tells me that it’s the fact that the . . . rituals never change day to day that gives comfort. He has days when the prayers mean less to him and days when they mean a lot more. And feeling that difference from day to day also tells him something [about himself].[9]

In a moment, we’ll stand before the divine mystery in this life raft, this church, and together acknowledge God as the “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is,” including not only things “seen” but also things “unseen.”[10] As we heard in our reading from Second Corinthians:

. . . we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.[11]

And surely among those things that are eternal is love. It’s not something we can put under a microscope or place our finger on directly. Like the wind, however, we can see its effects and point to those places where and those people in whom we have felt it when we most needed it.

I hope you’ll experience that today in the people around you right now, in ordinary bread made holy food and placed into your hands, in the small acts of love you will give and receive after being sent into world, and in the God who made you, redeemed you, sanctifies you, and thinks you’re fabulous, arrayed in the love of Jesus, our Savior. So do not lose heart, my friends on the 400 block of the Church. You are clothed in love, and always will be.

AMEN

1 BACK TO POST Ira Glass, “The Daily,” This American Life, originally aired May 14, 2021.

2 BACK TO POST Glass.

3 BACK TO POST Glass.

4 BACK TO POST Glass.

5 BACK TO POST II Corinthians 4:16.

6 BACK TO POST Billy Porter, Tamron Hall Show, May 19, 2021.

7 BACK TO POST Mary Grahame Hunter, “By the Grace of God, Queer,” Earth & Altar, May 24, 2021.

8 BACK TO POST Glass.

9 BACK TO POST Glass.

10 BACK TO POST The first sentence of the Nicene Creed in the Book of Common Prayer (1979), according to the use of the Episcopal Church:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all this is, seen and unseen.

11 BACK TO POST II Corinthians 4:18.