yrieithydd

So a few weeks ago - 4th July to be precise, I was contacted about whether I was going to Greenbelt and whether I'd be interested in being involved in the OUT eucharist at Greenbelt. I said I'd be there, and was interested, though I'd have to arrange the time with my volunteer team leaders. On 10th July, this developed further into being asked to preach. After some time, and wibbling and talking to various people and remembering a TSSF principle, I eventually agreed.

I wrote what I could and printed what amounted to two drafts, neither of which really worked, on Tuesday evening before leaving for GB on Wednesday. On Saturday morning I sat down with the drafts and scribbled over them and came up with something that made more sense, but had interesting navigation! People have said good things about it (and not just the people I knew, and not just to me) and a couple asked for the text, so I've tried to type up my notes. I ad libbed slightly in places and I've tried to add the one I remember best in, but I haven't tried to remember how I expanded the bullet points about the state of the world and the church.

The readings were "verses from Isaiah 43" (actually Isaiah 43:1-4, 14-21) and Luke 19:29-40

May I speak in the name of the living God who is Source of All Being, Eternal Word and Holy Spirit.

Jesus wasn’t popular with the religious leaders of his time. He disrupted their control over the narrative, challenged their ideas about God, broke with tradition. They tell him off, or as here want to him to tell his disciples off.

And this tension is apparent down the centuries. We need the tradition, the things handed on, the stories of what God has done through the ages. But we can hold them too tight, make God’s love too narrow, try and control God, keep God in a box. And God doesn’t stay in a box – Jesus shows that when he bursts from the tomb. As Isaiah says (in the passage we heard) “Behold I am doing a new thing”. Jesus was doing a new thing. The religious leaders wanted him to shut his disciples up, but the narrative was so powerful, the declaration of what God has done so great that if the people were silent the very stones would cry out.

There are many voices in the church today telling us to shut up because we don’t fit in their ordered world of a narrow view of sexuality and gender, and yet despite all the stuff the church throws at us there are still queer people offering themselves to the service of the church as priests and lay ministers and churchwardens and musicians and many other roles. Despite everything we still want to tell of the things which God has done.

At the Out stall people have been invited to decorate stones with words of hope and positivity.
Here are mine – Fearfully & Wonderfully Made; Faith, hope, Love; Justice, Peace, Truth; ~~Fear~~

Psalm 139, which we sang in Bernadette Farrell’s version has been important to me – first when I was a nervous 20 year old about to go on a year abroad when it was knowing that God’s hand would guide me on the far side of the sea. Then in 2019 when I came to realise I was non-binary, it was “fearfully and wonderfully made” that was important - praying the psalm late one night and then waking up in time for Morning Prayer, when the psalm was … 139. So in a world where my very identity is ridiculed and denied at times, that is a phrase to which I cling. People often point to Genesis to say God only made male & female but the other binaries – day & night, land & sea have liminal spaces between them – twilight and marshes.

This morning at Morning Prayer we heard Ezekiel’s Vision of the waters from the temple to the sea and I was truck by something that I’d not noticed before – when the waters meet the sea, it will become fresh “But it’s swamps and marshes will not become fresh, they are to be left for salt; - here are those liminal spaces having a purpose, even though they are not mentioned in the creation accounts in Genesis.

It is also a psalm that I find useful in thinking about confession. In verses not set in Bernadette Farrell’s version the psalmist asks:

“Search me out, O God, and know my heart; ♦
try me and examine my thoughts.
See if there is any way of wickedness in me ♦
and lead me in the way everlasting.

Because the language of sin has been weaponised against queer people, confession can be complex. Our identities are not what we are confessing, but those things where we fall short in our dealings with each other and with God. [Jesus in the Gay bar] It’s not about feeling guilty but about being honest with ourselves and God about what could have been better, so that we can begin afresh to bring all of us to God to be the people God has created us to be.

Then ~~Fear~~ crossed out. So many reasons to be afraid:

Trans panic
Ukraine, Gaza
Trump
Asylum protests
Church a mess – safeguarding, equal marriage, Christofascism

But yet ‘Do not fear’ Isaiah tells us.

The basis for the call not to be afraid is not us; it is God, who they are and what they have done for us. “I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine”. “For I am the LORD your God. The Holy One of Israel, your Saviour”. That is why we can survive the floods and the fire, because God is with us.

It is hard to cling to , but coming together as we can, telling of what God has done, receiving Jesus’ body and blood in communion, gives me hope and strength. God is bigger than all this and calls us to work for the coming of God’s kingdom of Justice, Truth and Peace with Faith Hope and Love.

May we all, gay and straight, cis and trans, queer and ally, be unafraid and be voices raised to testify to what God has done and is doing. In our churches and in the world.