Lectionary texts:
Psalm 84
John 6:56-69

I'm just going to tell this story, let the chips fall where they may. As I wrote it, I prayed for the Holy Spirit to help me tell it the way it needs to be told. And now I pray for the Holy Spirit to be here in our midst so you can hear this story the way it needs to be heard.

About a year ago, while Göran and I were spending our summer vacation in Utah with my parents, I attended a few sessions of an annual gathering of (mostly) liberal Mormons called the Sunstone Symposium.

My decision to go to Sunstone was not made lightly. A former professor of mine from BYU--one many of you have heard me speak about before--invited me to attend. And then for a good part of a week I vacillated. Should I attend or should I not attend? I went back and forth so much about it, that finally Göran said, "Just go! You obviously need to go, so just go!" So I went.

I was still so intimidated by the whole idea of it! For most of the last twenty years, I have gone out of my way to avoid contact with Mormons. And with the exception of my parents and my brothers, I pretty much did. (Both of my sisters have left the church.) And now here I was going right into the middle of a whole nest of them. I would be surrounded by them. Granted, they were the liberal variety of Mormons. Feisty, cantankerous, free-thinking Mormons, who aren't afraid to argue with the leaders in Salt Lake. Kind of like what Mormons would be like if they belonged to the UCC. That's ultimately why I felt safe going to Sunstone, though I was still just a bit apprehensive.

What I wasn't counting on, though, was coming face to face with the Holy Spirit.

As a young boy, my father taught me how to recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, he taught me, speaks both to your mind and to your heart. In your mind you experience clarity and understanding, and in your heart you experience a great sense of peace. You may even--on occasion--have a physical sensation, a kind of "burning of the bosom." The Spirit may bring tears to your eyes. You may be aware of a specific message that the Spirit is communicating to you. When you experience the presence of the Holy Spirit, it's not just a "good feeling." When the Spirit speaks to you, it certainly inspires good feelings, but the Spirit is more than a feeling. You will be able to tell the difference between the Spirit, and the mere sensation of being moved by a beautiful song or beautiful words. The Spirit is unmistakeable. The Spirit is unique.

As a boy and later as a young man, I had many experiences with the Holy Spirit. You could say that I was a very spiritual young man. I actively sought a relationship with the Holy Spirit. I prayed to God and listened to the Spirit to help me discern religious truth. I also sought the guidance of the Spirit to help me make every major life decision I ever faced, including how to respond to certain challenges at school, how best to prepare to serve a mission for the church, and what kind of career I should pursue. When I was in seventh grade, when I was twelve years old, my mother and I were in a car accident. It was a bad accident. When the car finally stopped spinning, my mother was disoriented, crying and upset. I said, "Mother, let's pray." Then we prayed together and asked for the Spirit to come to our aid while we waited for the police and the ambulances to arrive.

I even sought and received the guidance of the Holy Spirit when I made the decision to leave the Mormon Church.

Now I will tell the truth. As I said, I just need to tell this story and let the chips fall... In the many years since I left the church, I have been aware of the Spirit's presence from time to time. But never so powerfully as when I was active in the Mormon Church. Now maybe this is because in liberal Protestant churches we tend not to talk about the Holy Spirit so much, we tend not so actively to seek its presence or its guidance as in the Mormon Church. Or maybe it is because in the liberal Protestant church we tend to assume that the Holy Spirit is active in everything we do, without necessarily assuming that we can discern the presence and the activity of the Holy Spirit in a distinct and special way, as Mormons do. But the fact remains, the only other really powerful experience I had with the Spirit after leaving the LDS Church was when I was trying to decide how to deal with being gay, back in 1988.

So in August 2005 I went to the Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake. In the middle of my second session, the Holy Spirit descended on me in the most powerful and peculiar way. It was what I would call a peak experience, one of the handful of spiritual experiences I will look back on the course of my entire life as marking a major turning point. When they talk about a "burning in the bosom," that was what it was. It was literally as though there were a fire inside of me. I experienced that indelible clarity, and a peace beyond what I have words to describe. If I had to try to describe it, I would say that it was like the most pure, the sweetest experience of divine love. I felt enveloped by it, embraced by it. A sense of total forgiveness and love. And in the midst of all this, a message entered my mind with perfect clarity, and that message was: "John, it's time to come home now."

Do you think I was happy to have this experience? No, I was not. Quite the opposite. I was angry. I was frightened. I think my very first, gut reaction was something along the lines of, What the hell am I supposed to do with this? I wanted to ignore it, pretend it hadn't happened. I wanted to argue. Come home? What's that supposed to mean, come home? Mormonism isn't my home any more, I wanted to argue. How could it possibly be? And I could rehearse in my mind all the thousand reasons why the Mormon Church had to be false and why Joseph Smith had to be some kind of crazy charlatan, and how Mormons were racist and sexist and homophobic--the worst racists and sexists and homophobes. Even if I wanted to go back, I argued, they wouldn't have me. I'm gay. I'm in a relationship with a man, and a black man at that. There was no way this could be my spiritual home.

I kept this experience to myself. I returned to Minnesota and I told no one about it. I tried to forget about it, pretend it hadn't happened. But when the Holy Spirit speaks to you, it is unique. It's not "just a feeling." You can't ignore it, you can't pretend it didn't happen, and you can't make it go away. You can say no to it. But how could I bring myself to say no to perfect love?

So finally one night, sometime last September, I surrendered. I gave in. I told the Spirit, OK, what the hell do you want me to do? And the Spirit said, Just one step at a time. So I took one step at a time. I contacted Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons and agreed to become the Minnesota contact person. I subscribed to Sunstone Magazine. In October of last year, I started attending church at the Lake Nokomis Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In January, I started reading the Book of Mormon again. This past week I finally just finished reading the Book of Mormon from cover to cover again, for the first time in over twenty years. And I find I am a believing Mormon again. And I find that I experience a daily presence of the Holy Spirit, a kind of peace and centeredness unlike any I have ever experienced in my life. I am at peace with myself as a gay man. I love my partner Göran more deeply and truly and with more commitment than ever before. I have a testimony of God's love, and I understand the full depth and nature of Christ's atonement in my life. I am more whole than ever before. I see the hand of God in my life.

When I was at Sunstone last year, I had another spiritual impression that one year from that time, I would be back at Sunstone, but this time I would be invited as a presenter. A very odd impression, one that made no sense to me at the time. But in February I wrote an essay entitled "A Gay Mormon's Testimony" that ended up being published in the April 2006 issue of Sunstone Magazine. And shortly after the article came out, I got a call from the editor of Sunstone, Dan Wotherspoon. He asked me if I would like to speak at the next Sunstone Symposium, and without even needing to think about it, I answered yes. Two weeks ago I was in Utah again, this time presenting a paper about scriptural models of faithfulness that might be helpful to gay Mormons.

Now most of you are probably listening to this and thinking that this is a goodbye sermon. Audrey Benson called me on the carpet last fall after she heard me do a fictionalized performance piece at Patrick's Cabaret based on my experience at Sunstone. She said, "Uh oh, we're losing you, aren't we?" You too probably all think I'm getting ready to leave you and go away and join the Mormons. Well, you're quite not so easily rid of me. I can't say what the distant future holds; none of us can. But for the foreseeable future, you are still stuck with me. I have an understanding with the Holy Spirit, and that understanding includes alternating my church attendance, one week at the Lake Nokomis Ward by myself, and the following week at Lyndale United Church of Christ here with Göran. This is my commitment for the time being, I ask for your understanding--and lacking your understanding--your indulgence of this.

No matter what happens, or where the Holy Spirit leads me, Lyndale is and always will be my spiritual home too. One analogy of how this works for me is that years ago, after leaving the Mormon Church, my parents and I went through a very difficult time. For a time I was almost completely estranged from my biological family, and I believed that I would never be reconciled to them again. So I set about creating a "family of choice," dear friends who loved me and nurtured me, and became a kind of surrogate family to me. Now my biological family and I are reconciled; they fully embrace me as their own again, and they fully embrace Göran as they would any son-in-law. But I have not lost my "family of choice." They are still near and dear to me. I now have a wonderful, interesting, very diverse and wonderful extended family that includes individuals I chose and kin I didn't choose.

But Lyndale is becoming a spiritual home to me in a new sense as well. Since experiencing my spiritual awakening, I have become more sensitive to the presence and the movement of the Holy Spirit here at Lyndale. I testify that God is still speaking among us. God was speaking here last Tuesday night at the installation of Rebecca Voelkel, when people of faith from many different traditions gathered to celebrate the ways in which God is at work in the lives of gay and lesbian people of faith. I wasn't even the only Mormon here at Rebecca's installation. Rebecca introduced me to some members of the Independence, Missouri-based Community of Christ. They're different from the Utah Mormon stock I'm descended from; but we could talk about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and the Restoration of the Gospel and still be more or less on the same page.

It may seem like my loyalties are divided, but they are not. My loyalty is to the same God and the same Christ that Mormons and UCC'ers both encounter in scripture, through the Spirit, and in each other. Perceptions and understandings and doctrines differ in significant ways. But to the extent that we all serve the God of Love, we can still all be one. Indeed, it is in acts of Love that the only kind of unity that really ever counts will be found.

In the text I chose for today, Jesus' disciples took offense when he told them:

This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever. (vs. 58)

What exactly is difficult in this teaching? In the ears of modern Christians this sounds conventional, not difficult at all. We hear words like these every time we take the eucharist: "The one who eats this bread will live forever." But perhaps we do not take offense only because we do not really listen. Perhaps we do not take offense because we have heard this teaching framed so often in ways that insulate us from its truly revolutionary implications, in ways that insulate us from really hearing what Jesus is saying.

Implicit throughout the Gospel of John is the notion that the relationship between Christ and God is a model of the ideal relationship between the believer and God through Christ. Christ manifests the love of God in the world so that humanity--so that we--can see the nature of the divine love, understand how it works, and through the power of that love be drawn into it and conform our lives to it. By conforming our lives to Christ's, by in a sense becoming Christs, the love of God manifests in an ever-widening circle until it redeems all of God's children, in Christ's words in this text, "that of all which [God] has given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day" (vs. 39). The ultimate expression of this theology is found in John chapter 17, in the great intercessory prayer of Jesus on behalf of his disciples, when Jesus prays "that they all may be one; as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us" (John 17:21).

In today's text, this concept is conveyed through the symbolism of eating Christ, of taking Christ's body and blood into us. "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me" (vss. 56-57). If we eat the body and blood of Christ, we take Christ into us, we become one with Christ and one with Christ's mission. And what is that mission? "For I came down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him that sent me."

This text is often presented as if the "offense" here was in the person of Jesus; in the inability of listeners to accept that Jesus was the "bread of heaven" and the "Son of Man" who would ascend "to where he was before" (vs. 62). But this makes no sense to me; in fact it runs counter to the sense of what Christ is saying here. This would make salvation contingent upon belief in some external miracle or reality. But the whole thrust of Jesus' teaching here is to push people away from external miracles and toward deeper spiritual truths; in this case toward oneness with him and with God.

At the heart of the Gospel of John is the demonstration in the cross of the utterly radical nature of God's love. Love is positioned in John not merely as one of God's attributes, but--in the words of Greg Boyd--as the only attribute of God so closely associated with God that, the gospel writer insists, God is it. If God is Love, and if Christ comes to us as the exact image of God, as the embodiment of Love, his mission to do the will of God and to make us one with God in Christ, then our mission, if we choose to accept it, is not merely to practice the love of God, but ourselves to become Love, to become God's embodiment of Love in the world.

This more than anything else is what it means to me to have accepted the calling of the Spirit to "come home" to the church of my upbringing.

What is it like attending the Mormon Church regularly as an openly gay man? What is it like to embrace the Mormon faith again as a gay man? It is challenging. It is often painful. Sometimes the discipline of the Spirit in this context has required some lessons in humility and love that are both incredibly difficult and incredibly rewarding. To answer this question in any more detail than this would be too complicated right now. I'm happy to discuss it with any who are interested during the coffee fellowship, or one-on-one in the weeks and months and years ahead. But most of all, I feel at one in ways that I never have before. I find myself with a clearer understanding than ever before of my calling in this life, and of my destiny as a child of God.

I leave you with a simple prayer: May the Holy Spirit descend on each of you. May you feel the Spirit's presence in a way that you cannot deny, in a way that shocks you out of the complacency of taken-for-granted faith, in a way that opens you up to new possibilities, fresh truths, and a deeper, deeper love. And when the Spirit speaks to you--and I promise you the Spirit will, on a time table known only to God--you may argue, you may curse, you may wish it never happened. But I pray you will ultimately say yes.

In the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.