“It Takes a Vigil”

II Corinthians 4:7-5:1

A Sermon preached by The Rev. Douglas M. Donley

June 22, 2003

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

            (The congregation had just signed a stole that will be taken to the American Baptist Biennial Convention next week to add to the Shower of stoles display.  Our stole represented the allies to the GLBT liberation movement in our Welcoming and Affirming church).

 

            As I look at this stole, I think with fondness of my village here at UBC.  There’s an old African proverb that says, “It takes a village to raise a child.”  That statement has gotten a lot of play in the recent past.  It’s become a political slogan, the title of a book and it has almost lost its meaning.  It’s meaning is grounded in the fact that a village represents diversity.  It represents that one or more of us might have some truth that we might need to share with another.  And that each and every one of us has a different kind of power that we give and a different kind of experience that we can share with people.  And when we pull together, amazing things can happen, like we can raise our children to be tolerant, respectful of diversity and they can discover and celebrate their whole selves. 

            I took our village, my village, my University Baptist Church village with me just a few days ago as I went down to visit a few other villages.  I went down on Friday to Phoenix, Arizona because it’s such a wonderful climate there in the summer…It’s a dry heat they kept telling me which means that if it’s a hundred and ten degrees it only feels like ninety.  When I got there on Friday, I got to see my sister whom I hadn’t seen in two years.  She work as a nurse in Tuba City on the Navajo reservation and she took the four-hour drive south to see me and to visit with the Soulforce village that she has heard me talk about for years. 

            One of the things that is special about my younger sister is that she came out of the closet to me about ten years ago.  This was a few years after I had been denied ordination twice because I would not say that homosexuality was a sin.  I guess I had proven safe to her.  I’m glad she got to meet my Soulforce village before she had to go back to work on Sunday. 

            Soulforce was founded by Mel White, a former ghost writer for Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and a whole bunch of other folks before he came out of the closet himself.  It is an organization that uses the tactics of nonviolence to confront  spiritual violence against the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities perpetuated largely by religious institutions and denominations.  When we get together with Soulforce people from around the country it’s like a family reunion—a healthy and joyful family reunion.  We realize the diversity of our experiences from across the country.  We start telling stories and hearing each other’s stories to each other.  We started preparing ourselves to meet another village: the Southern Baptist Convention who were holding their annual meeting in Phoenix.  This was the fourth time Soulforce has gone to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting.  They asked me to be the co-chair of the last three of those events, I guess because I’m a Baptist Minister. 

            Our goal in this whole time was not to confront them or beat them over their heads.  The large issue goal of nonviolence and of Soulforce is to make that village into our village and to make our village into that village.  It is to reconcile us to those sisters and brothers who are apart from us.  Their being apart from us and doing violence to our community breaks God’s heart in my opinion.  So we prepared to see how we could change hearts and minds within the Southern Baptist Convention and then have our hearts and minds changed as well.  We do this through negotiation and letter writing.  Many of us from the peace and pizza group and across the country have written letters to members of the Executive Council of the Southern Baptist Convention asking them to change their policies toward the GLBT communities.  Those policies, when taken to their extreme, cause people to commit suicide and some people to commit murder on behalf of God.  That is just wrong and something that we cannot abide.  And so we went to the Southern Baptist Convention.

            Our requests to the Southern Baptist Convention had always been denied.  We had always been told that “We cannot and will not meet with you.”  So when negotiations break down, the next step is direct action.  Direct action can take the form of a vigil, arrests in civil disobedience or a number of other forms.  Over the past three years we have performed civil disobedience and I was arrests twice at the Southern Baptist Convention trying to get our stories to be heard.  This year, we didn’t feel there was a great need to perform civil disobedience, although we were prepared just in case our adversaries pushed the envelope and caused us to reconsider our plans.  So instead of being arrested this year, we decided to stand vigil.  Now we stand vigil at every Soulforce demonstration.  At the Southern Baptist events, our vigil lines were often across the street from the Convention Centers or outside of stadiums, even near buss stops where we spent hours breathing in the diesel exhaust belched from the buses.  It never felt very effective.

            Last year in St. Louis, a number of us took off our Soulforce uniforms, dressed like Baptists and went into the convention Center itself and tried to interrupt the remarks of the President of the convention, because he had refused to meet with us for three years.  Since this didn’t make them very happy, they were prepared for us in Phoenix.  At tremendous expense to them, they rented out the entire Civic Center Plaza, a two block area so that they could restrict Soulforce from being anywhere near the place of the convention.  They had to hire their own security guards in order to keep Soulforce away.  They were prepared for us. 

            It just so turned out that we found a great place to hold our vigils.  The entrance to the Civic Center plaza was right across the street from the hotels.  It was a public sidewalk and we got permission from the police to set up our vigil line right there.  And sure enough all 7000 people needed to pass our vigil line on their way to and from the meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.  And so we stood vigil.  We passed out flyers.  We had a banner that said, “Jesus welcomed the outcasts…Southern Baptists teachings create them”.  Remember, we are not against Southern Baptists people, we are against the teachings which are so damaging to so many people.  I found out that my role there was to be on the vigil line, but also to be a minstrel.  I brought my guitar and we sang good old Baptist hymns:  “Jesus Loves Me This I Know”, “Amazing Grace”, “Blessed Assurance”, “We are Marching in the Light of God”, “What a Friend We Have In Jesus”, “This is the Day that our God has made” (We changed the words to that one time and again and sang, “these are the gays that our God has made, we will rejoice and be glad in it…”) and so forth.  And people stopped.  Many sang along, thinking that we were from the convention.  When some of them looked at our t-shirts and saw we were from Soulforce, they didn’t know what to do with us.  That’s when we started to have conversations with them.  And we started realizing that there was a bridge being created—a bridge that had never been there before.  We started singing back and forth.  When my hands got too tired and or too hot, I simply passed the guitar to someone else and they picked up where I left off.  There emerged quite a band of singers and pickers.  Can you believe that there were music ministers on the vigil line?  There ended up being this male chorus gospel choir that just materialized from within our ranks. 

            Then young people from Soulforce started to tell their coming out stories, how they knew that God loved them as well as their opponents and adversaries.  We started seeing changes happen in people.  In the evening on Tuesday night we did a vigil with rainbow glow sticks, so our line of 70+ Soulforce volunteers greeting once again the 7000 messengers from the convention.  Again people stopped and sang along.  One person walked by us with her fingers in her ears, not wanting to be poisoned, I suppose.  But she was clearly in the minority.  On that Tuesday night, there was a young people’s rally earmarked for the open-air plaza right by where we had our vigil.  They stopped and started dialoguing with us.  They had just heard one of the preachers in the Convention say that “We have been too harsh toward our homosexual sisters and brothers.  We need to reach out with more compassion towards them.”  Now, they also passed a resolution which said that the way you reach out with more compassion is that you help them find way to leave their sinful lifestyle, which is not necessarily the most compassionate thing.  They also passed a resolution against gay marriage, which came as no surprise. 

But what we noticed was that among the young people, as their parents and youth leaders were trying to shoo them away from us, they were wrestling free and wanting to engage us in conversation.  They were seeking us out.  We would have never had the opportunity to have done this had we gone in and done arrests and the such.  A half dozen young people walked down the vigil line and hugged each and every one of us.  One of them said, “I’ve been a Southern Baptist all my life.  And my three best friends are gay.  I want to thank you for being here.  I no longer feel alone.  I know that God love them and I know that God loves me and I want to find a way that we can be in community together.”  That was the whole point of what we were doing—we were there to establish community.

            The saying goes that it takes a village to raise a child.  Sometimes it takes a vigil to raise a Baptist.  Sometimes it takes a vigil to restore in me my own hope that reconciliation can happen; to restore in my own hope that all this pushing for justice and inclusion might bear some fruit.  It will take a good bit of time, a lot more struggle and many more tears, but I think that we have started something in a very powerful way.  And I am reminded once again of Paul’s words:

            “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed

            perplexed but not driven to despair

            persecuted but not forsaken

            struck down but not destroyed

            Always carrying in the body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus might also be made visible in our bodies…for just as we have the same Spirit of faith that is in accordance with the scripture: “I believe, therefore I spoke”, we also believe and so we speak.”

            It takes a vigil to raise a good Baptist.

            It takes a vigil sometimes to restore hope.

            It has taken this vigil to help restore the hope in me.

            And I hope and pray that as we approach our pride festival this coming week and as we stand vigil at our booth in Loring Park and we find ways that we can stand vigil be it out here in front of the peace pole or other places in our lives as we seek justice \, that we might long for and work for the time that we can all become part of the beloved community to which God calls us.

            Amen.