Text: Acts 10

Coming Out

I was born a fifth-generation Mormon–which means my family has been Mormon for almost as long as there have been Mormons. My Dad raised me to believe that if we listen, God will speak to us. He taught me to believe in visions and miracles, but he also taught me to listen to the voice of God in ordinary ways as well. He taught me that the Holy Spirit could speak to me through my mind and my heart. When I felt and knew at the same time, I could be sure God was guiding me. I trusted God so implicitly as a child, my first instinct was to turn to God whenever there was a problem. When my mother and I were in a terrible car accident when I was 12 years old, as soon as the car had stopped spinning, I turned to my mother and said, "Let's pray."

Because of what my church and family taught me about sexuality, as I grew older and began to lose my childhood faith. It's not that I really stopped believing in God, but I lost faith in my ability to speak to and hear God. From the time I was 14 years old on, I was aware of my sexual feelings, and I pleaded with God to take them away from me for 10 years. When God did not "change me" or "heal me," I began to believe that I was damned forever, and I started to plan my own suicide. My heart was so full of fear I could not hear the voice of God any more.

The way God saved me from killing myself is a long story–and it involved many people whom God sent to help me out of my dark depression, including an Episcopal priest, a Lutheran pastor, and ordinary Christians who reached out and made the love of God real to me. Like Peter, I had a vision. I saw millions of people standing around the throne of God, and among those praising God, I saw ancestors of mine that I recognized from family photographs, and I heard the voice of God telling me not to fear because we were all in God's hands. This vision allowed me to trust in God again, to know that God's love for me was greater than my limitations, greater than the incidents of race, class, denomination, history, sexuality. God transcended all that and would reach out and save all of us.

I still struggled with being gay for a number of years. I was very close to this church–over at the Lutheran Campus Ministry–when I determined to get a final answer from God. A friend of mine was reading a dear Abby column out loud, with a letter from a man who was desperate because his marriage of ten years was a sham and was falling apart because he was gay and he could not love his wife the way he ought. I believe Abby's advice was for him to come out, to "be true to himself." I decided that was not going to be my fate. So I began a fast, and I began praying. I went without food for three days. I wanted God to tell me what to do. Finally God spoke to me. It was right in the middle of that long walk-way bridge over on campus that connects the east bank to the west bank. I looked up and I heard God tell me I was free. If I wanted to live in life-long celibacy, God would support me in that choice, but he did not expect it of me. If I wanted to make my life with a man, God would support me in that choice too. I was overwhelmed with this new knowledge of God's love. I had come wanting God to tell me what to do, and God's answer was that I had freedom to follow my heart. That following weekend, I began to come out. First I told a few select friends at the Lutheran Campus ministry. Within a few short months, I had told everyone who was anyone to me. That closet door slammed open with a bang. And each time I told someone new, I felt a little bit freer, and I knew more surely than before God's incredible love for me, and for all of us.

My greatest struggle since then has been to learn to live the affirmation of the scripture we read today from Acts 10: that God is no respecter of persons. I have had to face many Christians who have told me that my spiritual journey could not possibly be real or valid because it did not fit with their preconceived notions of what God expects of us. And I have not wanted to believe in the reality or the validity of their spiritual journeys. The truth is, we cannot make judgments about the path by which God has led each of us here. If we can trust that God has brought each of us here for a purpose, perhaps we will learn from each other what God has for us to learn.The story of Peter and Cornelius has special significance to me, because it helped change the heart of someone I know who is still dear to me, and who I hope is still a brother in Christ. This scripture came to life for me as I was struggling to find a place in a Church of Jesus Christ where the assumption was that being gay made me an outcast and disqualified me as a Christian. My pastor at the time, the senior pastor of Bethany Lutheran Church, was a man who had recently gone in print labeling homosexuality as one of the great modern threats to the sanctity of the family. I did not know this at the time. All I knew was that he was my pastor, and I needed to talk to him about my coming out. I needed his support in my struggle to make sense of my sexuality and my faith.

When I told Jonathan I was gay, he did not say a lot. He listened. He did not have any answers for me. Little did I realize that my confession created something of a crisis of faith for him. Given what he believed, what should he do? How should he respond? He later told me that the Sunday after I had come out to him he had a moment of doubt as he saw me kneeling at the communion rail. Should he deny me communion? He decided that he could not. He had no right. Our unity in Christ had to be greater than his fear about what was morally correct, sexually correct. He gave me communion, and he opened his heart to larger answers. He became a true pastor to me in the very best sense of that word, and I will always be grateful to him for that.

Jonathan later told me that this scripture–Acts 10–had helped him make sense of his relationship to me. I was his Cornelius. I was the unlikely but true believer who had come forward in faith seeking the communion of the saints. Even though everything he believed had told him I could not be gay and Christian, there I was. Surely God was no respecter of persons. Praise God! I have never been more moved by a sermon on this text than I was when I heard my pastor Jonathan tell what doors this scripture had opened up for him. And now as I reflect deeply on the meaning of this scripture to me, I realize that he was my Cornelius. He is the man I came to in fear and trembling, the man I approached not knowing if we might find unity in Christ. And I saw the Holy Spirit fall on him and transform him, as surely as it fell on the church at Pentecost and as surely as it fell on Cornelius and all his house. Surely God is no respecter of persons. There is no gay or straight in Christ Jesus, and praise be to God.

If we are here together at University Baptist Church–woman and man, brown and black and white, gay and straight, rich and poor and in between–it is because God has brought us together here for a purpose. Can we continue to live out our faith together? Can we continue to learn from each other what God has for us to learn? I am never sure, because I have seen so much of disunity, hatred, and fear in so many churches–even in churches where I thought trust should be automatic. But I believe that if we are here today, if we can ask and answer these questions in honesty, it means we are still on the path of faith. I look forward to seeing where God will lead us, as I come to know you better and serve as your church administrator.

Commentary on the Text

I have often heard this story read from Christian pulpits as a tale of how Jewish bigotry was overcome by the power of the gospel. Peter the Jew wanted nothing to do with Cornelius the Gentile. He would barely permit Gentiles to cross the threshold of his home, much less travel with them or be their guest. But in the vision of the unclean animals, God showed Peter that all were equal in the eyes of God, that God is "no respecter of persons." And Peter, convicted by the Gospel relinquished his prejudice, and opened his heart–and the church–to Gentiles.

But there is a layer of this story that is easily lost today, especially when we read this passage from a perspective of ease and privilege. Cornelius the Gentile, Cornelius the Roman, was a powerful member of a merciless ruling class. He owned slaves. He was a centurion, and had commanded men in battle. He held the power of life and death over hundreds, and would not have been in the position he now occupied had he not used that power. The Roman empire had been built on the blood of slaves and rebels, and the Roman army, of which Cornelius was a commander, was the foundation of Roman imperial power. The Romans had a well deserved reputation for ruthlessness in the treatment of their enemies. After successful campaigns, Roman commanders were rewarded with grants of land which had been confiscated from their enemies, as a way to encourage the colonization of all the conquered lands around the Mediterranean. If Cornelius was living with a vast and wealthy household in Palestine, with slaves and servants and soldiers, he was there as part of a calculated Roman effort consolidate imperial power and repress indigenous peoples. He was living on the fat of a stolen land, won at a price of blood and worked with the sweat of slaves. Sure, he had made a name for himself throughout all Judea through acts of charity. But it was charity made with swindled wealth. He gave back but a fraction of what he had taken, and he–and his people–had taken much.

No Jew–and Peter was a Jew–could be unaware of the social realities that shaped relationships between Jews and Romans. Those social realities were leading down a path that in a few decades would lead to a first century holocaust. In A.D. 69, the Roman occupiers of Judea would utterly destroy Jerusalem and sack and ruin the surrounding country, massacring thousands, forcibly exiling thousands more, and sending Jews to the four corners of the empire, fleeing for their lives. When Peter approached Cornelius, there was no blossoming of inter-racial understanding in the land. The two men faced each other across an almost irreconcilable gulf, under gathering storm clouds. One must wonder, where would Cornelius' household be when Jerusalem was in flames in 69 A.D.? Would they be in solidarity with their government and with the Army that had made them what they were, or with the people of their new-found faith? An interesting question to ponder, as we struggle with the extent to which the gospel truly can transform division and hatred into unity and love. Jews had good reason to fear and avoid Romans. And Peter could scarcely have approached a man like Cornelius without more than a little fear and trembling. I doubt Peter was eating much of anything–clean or unclean–on the road to Haifa.

We often read the account of the Holy Spirit falling upon the Gentile household, just as it had upon Jews at Pentecost, as proof positive that Cornelius and all of his had truly been transformed by God. Peter certainly seemed impressed. And yet, how often do we initially respond to the gospel with enthusiasm and joy, only to lose faith in the day-to-day grind. Once the glamor of public confession wears off, how often do we return to our old ways "like a dog to his vomit"? Were these Gentiles truly converted? Can a leopard really change his spots? Or does a predator stay a predator, even when he claims the cross of Jesus the martyred Jew? The question of whether Jews and Gentiles could truly become yoked together was never satisfactorily resolved in the church; despite Paul's incessant preaching that there is no Jew and no Gentile in Christ; despite the Council of Jerusalem, declaring that Gentiles could be Christian without first becoming Jews; the tensions remained. The tensions festered. The tensions flared into violence and murder. Those old tensions between Jew and Gentile became a kind of psychopathy in the medieval church and the foundation of modern anti-Semitism. Can the gospel truly reconcile Jew and Gentile? Black and white? Slave and free? Gay and straight? I don't know. I confess that I still don't know, though some very deep part of me wants to believe.

In this story, Peter wanted to believe too. And I still have to stand in awe of the step that he took . . . across the threshold into Cornelius' house, and the many steps on the road from his home to Cornelius'. Peter wanted to believe, and against his better judgment and against everything he knew, he took a step in faith that true love, that true faith, that true unity is possible, even in the shadow of violence and slavery. It is an incredible act of faith, and I can contemplate it only with fear and trembling and with much prayer and fasting.