Lectionary texts:
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17

Hello, God!

Last November we went to Utah to spend Thanksgiving with my parents. Until about two years ago when my parents moved to Utah to retire, I had not been to the Beehive State since 1986. There was a very good reason for that.

See, I was born in Provo, Utah, and spent my early years there. I grew up in the east, near Rochester, New York. But we always had a special connection to the state of Utah. That was where my great, great grandfather James Wrathall immigrated in the 1850s, after being baptized by missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Yorkshire, England. That was where C.A. Carlquist, my grandmother's grandfather immigrated after he and his mother believed the Mormon missionaries' preaching near Upsala, Sweden. That was where five generations of my family settled the desert and helped to build Zion. And it was where my father went to school, at Brigham Young University in Provo, even though he grew up in the East, first near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and later near Buffalo, New York, where my grandfather is buried. And Brigham Young University in Utah was where I went to school, even though I grew up in a suburb of Rochester, New York. Because that is where a devout, fifth-generation Mormon goes to school.

So I last Thanksgiving, I actually ventured onto the BYU campus, where I literally had not set foot since my shadow last darkened the gate over the main entrance there, the gate emblazoned with the words, "The Glory of God is Intelligence." As I said, there was a good reason for that. The main reason I was going back to BYU for the first time in almost twenty years was because I had reconnected with an old friend of mine through the Internet of alll things. He'd found my web site, and we'd exchanged a few e-mails, and it sounded like he was doing well, and he seemed to have a longing to reconnect with me. And I guess the longing was mutual. Well, he's a professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies at Brigham Young University now, so we agreed to meet on the campus. So that was why I went there.

I brought my partner Goran with me. He was afraid to go there, because I'd once told him a story of how, in my sophomore year at BYU, my French professor had gotten involved in a little tiff with the campus police. See, there had been a robbery on campus, and a foreign exchange student from Africa, one of his students, had been arrested in connection with the incident, as it turned out mainly because the perpetrator had been described as black. So my partner, who is of the darker complexioned persuasion, was a bit nervous about going with me to this mythical place called BYU.

We drove there together in my parents' car. I took him on a tour of the campus. Showed him where I had spent hours on the commons outside of the Harold B. Lee Library, the main library on campus, named after a former Prophet, Seer and Revelator of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I pointed out the buildings where I had had most of my classes. I showed him the dormitory where I lived during my first year at BYU, the year before I went on my mission to France and Switzerland. We met my friend -- who brought along another mutual friend -- and we had lunch together. My other friend, who is now an archivist in the rare books collection at the Lee Library took us on a tour of the rare books section, where I got to hold a copy of a first edition Book of Mormon, from 1830, in my own hands.

We left BYU. We got into my parents' car, and drove off campus. And as I was driving down a side street, a bit lost, not quite sure where I was and trying to get back to the main highway to get back to my parents' home in Springville, that's when I saw it. It stopped me cold. I felt a black pit open up in my stomach, and my hands went a bit shaky. We were just a few blocks away from the Provo Temple. You could see its white steeple from that section of the street. And right in front of us was the apartment building where I had been living in 1986 when I decided to end my life.

I hit the brakes and took a sudden right turn into the parking lot of the apartment building. I said, "We have to stop here!" and my partner was saying, "What? What is it?" So sitting there in the car, under the shade of the trees in front of the parking lot, I explained to him. The white bricks looked the same. The dark, decorative wood panels surrounding the stairways on the edge of the building facing the street were the same, if a bit more faded and worn than when I had been there. The name of the apartment complex was the same. Park Plaza Apartments. I had left all my stuff there. All my beloved games, my books, most of my clothes. I had left there thinking, someone else can have them. We sat in the car for a moment, and Goran asked, "Are you OK?"

I said, "You have to take a picture of me here."

So we got out of the car, and I stood in front of Park Plaza Apartments while Goran took a photograph of me. I was smiling. This was the place I almost hadn't survived.

So, God, you are wondering, why I am telling you this story? Well, first of all, because now that I've been there, now that I've finally been able to look it in the face and spit back at it, I finally have the courage to ask you, Where the hell were you? I know what you're thinking, I know what you want to tell me: The fact that I am here is proof that you were there. But I'm still asking, first of all because of all the people who didn't survive growing up gay and Mormon. Where were you for them? As it was, it seems to me it was only blind chance that my suicide plans didn't work. All it would have taken was one single afternoon alone with my parents' car. So I'm not entirely sure you can take credit for that, especially when I think about the ones who are dead right now. All the ones who didn't have blind luck intervene. Like the friend of Alan Keyes' daughter, who died on the streets when his fundamentalist parents found out he was gay and kicked him out of the house. What are you going to tell me, that they're supposed to be dead?

But more importantly, I'm asking you because I almost took my life because of you. Because of what your followers taught me about you. I hold you personally responsible. I know what you're saying, You never told me to do that in your name. You never told your followers to teach hate, blah, blah. But I still hold you responsible, because I'll tell you something. If people were going around and doing that kind of shit in my name, I sure as hell would not let them get away with it. I would make sure that everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY knew that anybody pulling that kind of stuff in my name had nothing to do with me, that I disavowed them unequivocally and completely. And I don't have nearly the clout and media access you do. Those people -- the people I thought I was supposed to trust the most, my parents, my Sunday school teachers, my priesthood quoum leaders, my bishops, my mission president, my church -- all the people who represent YOU, they were the ones who convinced a young child and then a young man who had no way of knowing better that YOU would rather see him in a casket, you would rather see him dead than see him gay. And they almost succeeded in putting me in a casket. And not only did they get away with doing that, they're still getting away with it, and it's getting worse and worse. So where the hell are you?

Pardon my Anglo-Saxon, but if I can't swear at God, I don't know who the hell I can swear at.

OK, here's the problem. I once thought it was good enough try to replace bad theology with good theology. If someone somewhere was teaching that God Hates Fags, the solution to that problem was to teach that God Loves Everbody, including Fags. But the problem is, God, you are the problem. Because we would not turn to you if we did not expect some kind of external validation from you. And that renders us vulnerable to rationales in which you judge, condemn, curse and hate us; and in which we should judge, condemn, curse and hate others. It happens to the best of us, liberals and conservatives and fundamentalists alike.

Our ability to love is constrained by what we think you want us to do. And inevitably, what you want us to do turns into something unconscionable. It might make sense to us at the time. It might seem reasonable and compassionate and compelling to us. But eventually it turns sour. It turns into some kind of religious test or law or requirement that will somehow, somewhere make someone else wonder whether they should be allowed to live, or worse yet, make someone wonder whether someone else should be allowed to live. It is the nature of faith.

I think about the best theology I've ever experienced. The theology that has freed me the most, made me most want to live and love and be a better person. Two of the scriptures from today's lectionary are fine examples of it. And yet, we in the long run find it impossible to learn from this theology, we find it impossible not to renege on it. And the stumbling block, I've discovered, is you, God. Let me explain.

We have today's passage from Paul's epistle to the Romans. Every Protestant understands exactly what case Paul is making here. "The law brings wrath," he says, "But where there is no law, neither is there violation." Now it is important to emphasize, because Christians frequently get confused on this point, that when he talks about the law, he's not talking about Judaism, he's talking about all of our tendency to set up artificial rules as tests. We use the law to justify some people and condemn other people. And what Paul is saying here with his fancy appeals to Abraham and how Abraham believed in God, is that in the end such false tests only bring pain and suffering. Wrath. He says, reject the law. Have faith. And every single person who accepts faith, who takes a hold of "the promise" is justified. Here, as everywhere else in Paul's writings, he obliterates the religious and moral distinctions that might allow some people to think too highly of themselves at the expense of others. By freeing us from the hierarchical, legalistic mentality, he is trying to set us on the path of righteousness taught by all good theologians, as summed up by the prophet Micah: "What does the Lord require of you? To seek justice and love kindness and walk humbly with your God." Now that's good theology, as good as it gets.

But here's the problem: Who justifies Abraham? God. Faith in God. And so we're left with this wormy, nasty problem. The faith, the justification, the annihilation of the law, it all comes from God. So what if you worship the wrong god? Well, the god of Abraham could give justification by faith. But what about the god of Joseph Smith? Did you know that when I joined the Lutheran Church, they made me get re-baptized, because they said that Mormons did not believe in the Trinity. Mormons didn't worship the same god. Only our god is the true God, the God capable of saving ourselves from our own pettiness. And for the same reason, this excelllent theology of Paul's has been used to persecute Jews, because Jews are characterized as being under the law (forget about all the good theology of people like Isaiah and Amos and Micah), so Jews aren't saved but we Christians are. It's you God, it's our faith in you that is the source of all that mess.

The theology is just as good in the gospel of John, but no more capable of helping us out of this conundrum. The Pharisee Nicodemus, "a leader of the Jews," comes to Jesus and wants to learn. "You are a teacher who has come from God," says Nicodemus. So Jesus gets right to brass tacks: "No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." Nicodemus is confused, so Jesus explains again: "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." If we listen to God speaking to us, we understand that salvation does not come from being bound by rules or laws that constrain, it is like the wind. It frees us. In this gospel John uses this exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus -- the representatives of the "new law" and the "old law" respectively -- to break us of that old bad theology mentality that says salvation is based on the rules that make some of us good and others of us bad. And to answer the question, where is this new law leading us, John says: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." It's not about condemnation. It's about love. That is good theology, as good as it gets.

But if we practice love because you demand it, or even because you first loved us, or even because you are love, we are not practicing love and compassion for the most immediate and compelling reason of all: Because the existence of suffering and pain and hate in themselves demand healing and reconciliation if we are to survive. Because our humanity itself demands it. If I practice love because you demand it, I should always naturally be left to question whether there are situations where you should not demand it. I see this all the time. Christians who would extend love, but who cannot because they fear that you forbid it. Christians who do not love, because they think you do not. Christians who commit acts of hate, and call it love because they say it is your will to correct the unjust.

One of the few signs of hope I've experienced in the last couple of weeks is an email I received from a long-lost cousin. He is my father's cousin Bob, the son of my grandfather's brother Leishman. Bob and his activist children fought Proposition 22, an anti-gay proposition in California during the last election. When the Mormon congregation they belong to was up in arms because they learned of a local school's counseling program for gay youth, my cousin Bob stood up and spoke passionately in support of the school program. Bob is active in his Mormon congregation, and he loves the church. But because of his outspokenness in support of gay rights, he has been blacklisted. Bob isn't invited to teach or speak or pray publicly in the church any more. He says, "It gives me more time to sleep in the pews."

But like me, though Bob remains active in the church, he has grown deeply skeptical about you, God. He wrote me that perhaps, like the ancient gnostic Christians who read and believed in the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas, we should believe that you are not the true God but an evil demiurge who conspires to keep us in misery and suffering so long as we seek to nurture the light within us.

Why is it that so many of the individuals in my life who truly have unconditional love in their hearts for all people, and who are moved to act on that love, are people who find it difficult to believe in you any more?

It is not kindness, or decency, or mortal goodness that dissuades us from love when a straight person says she would rather see me in a casket than see me gay. If we listened to our hearts there would be no question of the demands of love. Our very humanity cries out for love. But it is our connection to you, our addiction to you, that turns us away, that makes us hesitate on the brink of love. So in order to practice love we should banish you from our hearts and our minds.

Please, God! Prove me wrong! Please show me that faith in you gives birth to such an outpouring of love everywhere across the planet -- from Muslim, from Christian, from Jew, from Mormon -- that I am compelled to bless your name, that I am compelled to bow the knee and confess that you truly are the Lord of Love. Please God! Prove me wrong! Please!

Amen.