Lectionary texts:
Psalm 138
Luke 11:1-13

In May 2003, I preached a sermon at Lyndale Church expressing doubt about the meaningfulness of the Atonement. I said that I feared belief in the Atonement would have the effect of discouraging Christians from taking responsibility for their actions. In February 2005, I preached a sermon at Spirit of the Lakes, taking God to task for the mean-spirited and homophobic behavior of his followers, and vowing that we should not believe in him until we saw evidence of his love in the behavior of all those who took his name upon them. In April 2005, I preached another sermon at Lyndale Church, struggling with the biblical witness of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, and suggesting that all Christians have the right to demand, like doubting Thomas, tangible evidence before assenting to any system of belief that "decenters" us intellectually.

[I feel incredibly grateful to have found in you a community of faith that believes every human being is entitled to his or her own journey of faith, wherever it may lead him or her. I want to thank you for your patience with me over the years.] I am going to preach a different kind of sermon this morning. I have come to understand faith in very different terms lately.

In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins suggests that faith is inculcated, pure and simple. Take away religious education and within one generation, faith will have vanished. But this assumes that faith and religion are the same thing, and we have very good reasons to understand that this is not the case. All of us, whether we are raised religious or not, from the moment of our birth are bombarded with thousands of stimuli from the world around us. Our brains have evolved to be able to process these stimuli and form them into some cohesive conception of the cosmos and our place in it. And a significant portion of the data we use to organize these cosmic maps comes from whatever rational systems are presented to us by our family, friends, communities, and teachers, whether these systems are religious, scientific and secular, or some mix of both. But none of these things have to do with real faith. I'd like to suggest that you can grow up a devout Methodist, Muslim, Mormon, Hindu, UCC'er, MCC'er, Catholic, or Buddhist, and still have nothing of what real faith is.

Faith does not come from internalizing whatever belief systems we happen to absorb from the world around us. Real faith begins only in the moment when we first begin to realize that there is something fundamentally wrong with our cosmic map, whatever that may happen to be. Real faith begins in the moment when we realize that there is something more out there, something intangible, something literally beyond our capacity to apprehend by mere means of how we process and make sense of everything in the world around us. Faith begins when we take a good, hard look at ourselves and our religion, and realize that it cannot connect us to whatever that "more" out there is.

From that moment, we become seekers. In the gospel text for today, Jesus says, "Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened" (vss. 9-10). By corollary, we may understand, "Do not ask, and it won't be given to you; do not search and you will not find; do not knock and the door will not be opened for you." True faith is impossible if we are content with ourselves and content with the world and everything in it. "They that are whole," Jesus says in the Gospel of Mark, "have no need of the physician, but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance" (Mark 2:17). "Verily I say unto you," Jesus says of the good shepherd in the Gospel of Matthew, "he rejoiceth more of [the one lost] sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray" (Matthew 18:13). Or in Luke: "Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance" (Luke 15:7). It is in our hunger, our lack, our sickness, our lostness that we open ourselves up to a much larger calling.

So once we realize, like Hamlet, that "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," we may then be able to hear the call inviting us enter into relationship with the One in whom all things in heaven and earth are contained. We each experience this call in unique ways. Some may experience something dramatic: a burning in the bosom, a bright light, a vision or an epiphany. Some may hear the still small voice, the voice that speaks to us without words. Some experience the call through remarkable events in their lives that break them out of mundane ways of seeing or understanding things and point to a more transcendent order of things. It can even come to us through scriptures and the teachings of the Church! But the one thing we almost always experience in common is that the call forces us to make some significant choice. We may choose to continue in the way we have always gone, going with the flow, sticking with what we know, what is normal, what is familiar. Or we may take a step off into the abyss, to leave the normal train of events and enter into a new and unfamiliar reality, one that is at fundamental odds with the world we live in and the way we have always made sense of that world. If we choose the former, we have stepped back, away from faith, and cling instead to the comfort of mere religion. If we choose the latter, we have embraced faith, and we have entered into a dynamic, risky and disquieting relationship with the almighty, living God to whom all true faith leads us. And the remarkable thing about this choice is that we are always and ever free to choose one way or the other. We may choose faith and later retreat from it. We may reject faith, only to reconsider and embrace it. We are supremely free to go wherever our heart leads us.

There is also a fundamental principle at work in how faith operates in our lives. The call that God extends to us always requires us to go beyond who and what we are when we receive the call. It always presents a challenge, something that requires us to give more than we would ever be willing to give if we relied solely on mundane, logical, ordinary ways of seeing things as a guide for our behavior. Remember, mere logic, mere religion is what got us into the fix we were in when we first recognized that something was palpably wrong with the world as we perceived it. Yet, when faced with trial, the temptation is always to scurry back to the security we find in the slavery of the normal. But if we accept the challenge, if we make the leap of faith, if we go beyond what our ordinary minds, our mundane logic tells us we ought to go, new worlds, new understandings, new levels of meaning are opened to us. This new understanding then lays the groundwork for new calls, new challenges, and new tests.

This principle is stated succinctly in the Book of Mormon: "Ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith" (Ether 12:6). Only after we've put our life on the line do we understand the inner workings of the principle for which we risked ourselves. Or, another, particularly moving way of looking at it is found in a passage in the gnostic Gospel According to Philip:

It is not possible for anyone to see anything of the things that actually exist unless he becomes like them. This is not the way with man in the world: he sees the sun without being a sun; and he sees the heaven and the earth and all other things, but he is not these things. This is quite in keeping with the truth. But you saw something of that place, and you became those things. You saw the spirit, you became spirit. You saw Christ, you became Christ. You saw the father, you shall become the father. So in this place you see everything and do not see yourself, but in that place you do see yourself -- and what you see you shall become. (Philip 61:20-35)

When we abandon the world of reason and religion, and enter the road of faith, we are no longer guided by formulas, laws or rules. We enter into a dynamic relationship with the true and living God. As it says in the psalm which was the other text for today, "On the day I called, you answered me" (vs. 3). We no longer rely merely on the dead letter of scripture left behind by generations past. The scriptures are opened to us as living texts that tell us about our own days, our own relationship with a living God, and our lives become a kind of living text on which God writes for all the world to see.

This relationship is a real relationship with a real being. We cannot fashion it according to our fancy. The moment we try to do so, the Spirit flees from us. We are left alone, constructing sandcastles that are no different from the ones we once thought we once left behind in order to embrace God. There is no faith without listening; without a call; and without obedience. The thought of a true relationship with the True God should fill us with fear and trembling, because we cannot approach it without a very real surrender of everything we are and everything we aspire to. We cannot approach it without humility and repentance. In the Book of Moses, another text from the Latter-day Saint canon, after Moses sees God face-to-face, he says, "Now ... I know that man is nothing, which thing I had never supposed" (Moses 1:10).

I grew up Mormon and gay. For most of my young life, I followed a path that was clearly laid out for me by my religion and by familial expectations. At eight years old I was baptized, at twelve I was ordained a deacon. I rose through the ranks of the priesthood until age eighteen, when I received a call to serve a mission, was ordained an Elder, and received my endowments in the temple. I felt the warmth of the Holy Spirit testifying to me of the truth of the Latter-day Gospel, revealed through Joseph Smith in the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times, and that testimony led me in the expected course. But as I entered adulthood, I began to struggle with the bits and pieces that didn't seem to fit into the ordained picture of things. I had to come to terms with the fact that deep within my flesh was a hunger for intimacy with men, not women; I had to face the fact that the expected path of marriage, temple and family would be considerably more complicated for me than it would be for most of my peers. This contradiction became life-shattering. It broke me out of the comfortable, expected path. It almost led to my suicide. And in the darkest moment of that struggle, I heard the voice of the Spirit calling to me again, not in the expected way but in a very unexpected way. I was to leave the Mormon Church and embark on a different journey. That was August 1986.

In August 2005, I heard the call of God again, this time inviting me to return to the Mormon community. I had learned what I needed to learn outside of the Mormon Church; I had developed strengths and understandings I could develop only in following that unique path. But now it was time for me to come home. [Since then, I have experienced a kind of dual citizenship, continuing to worship here at Lyndale with my partner Göran Sunday morning, and worshiping at the Mormon Church Sunday afternoon.] Those sermons I mentioned earlier, the sermons I preached in May 2003 and in February and April 2005, might have been signs, had I had eyes to see them, of a new readiness in my life to hear the call of God again, of a new weariness with and despairing of the worldly ways of thinking and understanding I had slipped into in my life. And when I felt the unmistakable voice of the Spirit whispering to me and calling me, while it was joyful in a way, in other ways it was also extremely painful and frightening. But as I have heeded this call, my eyes have been opened to new understandings, and I have found myself in the presence of a living, loving, and very real God, who guides me, comforts me, and continually challenges me.

People ask me how I can be gay and Mormon. Mormons generally have a way of living that is completely centered around heterosexual family; and they believe that exaltation in the next life is contingent upon our ability to marry heterosexually in the temple, "for time and all eternity." Few denominations seem more inhospitable to those of us driven to seek the comforts of family with a member of the same sex.

But at the heart of Mormonism is the principle of modern-day revelation, the notion that God literally speaks to us still; to the entire Church through a living prophet and twelve apostles; and to each individual member, in the stillness and silence of each individual heart. Mormons have a very literal take on the UCC's mottos, "God is still speaking," and "Never put a period where God has placed a comma." The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was literally founded because in 1820 a fourteen-year-old boy in upstate New York read in the Book of James, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God," and he had the audacity to take it literally! Mormons ever since then have understood that personal revelation is the soul of faith. Latter-day Saints believe that we are not only each entitled to receive personal revelation from God, but that we cannot ultimately be saved without it. And whenever we need wisdom, we do the best we can with the lights available to us to acquire it, and when we still lack it after all we can do, we turn to God "who giveth to all liberally, and upbraideth not" (James 1:5).

From the time I was a child, I was taught at every key juncture of my life to turn to God in fasting and prayer, and to trust that he would guide me. I left the Mormon Church after receiving a series of personal revelations assuring me that this was the right thing to do, that my family would be taken care of, and that God had a work for me to accomplish that would require my leaving the Church for a time. I came to fully accept myself as a gay man and came out of the closet after three days of fasting and prayer, at the conclusion of which God spoke to me ? on the bridge between the east bank and the west bank of the University of Minnesota ? and encouraged me to be open to more possibilities than just heterosexual marriage or celibacy. I began dating men after spending time in a monastery in France exploring the possibility of a life-long celibate calling, after the Holy Spirit made it clear to me that life-long celibacy was not God's intention for me and that I should open myself to finding happiness with a life partner. At each new stage of my life, I have found myself able to move forward with confidence into a life of greater openness, love, and self-acceptance because of the gift of personal revelation, something I was taught as a Latter-day Saint to seek out and to cherish.

In the past year, I have begun to enjoy fellowship with gay Mormons in every life situation imaginable. Many, perhaps the majority, have left the Church and, as I did for almost twenty years, no longer consider themselves Mormon. Others, trusting that conformity with Church teachings would bring them blessings, have married and had children. Some of these marriages have ended in despair and disillusionment. Some have ended amicably, as spouses mutually agreed that the best way to honor their love for each other was to let each other go. But surprisingly many have felt called to remain married and continue building a common life together, even under circumstances that are not ideal. Many who have not married have remained celibate in order to remain in good standing in the Church. Finally, there are even a few of us who have sought to nurture ties to the Church and live faithfully as Latter-day Saints, even though we are in committed same-sex partnerships or marriages; even though we are excommunicated or on the verge of excommunication; even though our Church community frequently tells us that because of our choices we will be damned in the next life for all eternity.

While I feel a great love for and empathy with all of us who have this intersection of Mormonism and homosexuality in our lives, I find myself feeling especially tender toward those who continue to nurture a relationship with the Church. What we all have in common is the experience I have discussed of being in a relationship with the living God, a relationship we renew every morning and every night on our knees. It is our intimate connection with the Holy Spirit, our teacher, guide, companion and comforter, that keeps us rejoining the battle, day after day, week after week. Regardless of where we stand, regardless of what choices we have made, regardless of what kinds of relationships we have forged (or abstained from), we have all experienced intense struggles. We have all sacrificed, we have all done the best we could to nurture love and faith and hope. And I have observed remarkably little judgment or animosity between us, whether we are married, celibate, or same-sex partnered. Rather, I have found gay married Mormon men and celibate men eagerly reaching out me, reassuring me, offering me hope and encouraging me. I am in their debt. Others have sought support from me, and I have given what I could from the bottom of my heart. At one point, I never would have believed this possible. But I have observed that our struggles have blessed us over time with an instinctual appreciation of the importance of the two great core values of the Gospel: love and Christian freedom. To me, there is no greater sign of the Spirit at work in our lives than this.

At one point I thought it might be my mission to change the Mormon Church, to convince its members and leaders to reverse their positions on homosexuality. But what I have discovered is that if our faith does not first change us, it is not a faith worth having. What I discovered is that whatever faults there may be in our ways of thinking or our ways of believing, these are minimal in comparison with our failure to love as we ought, and that it is impossible to persuade others to love without first practicing this prime Christian virtue ourselves. This means learning humility and patience, learning to put others before ourselves, learning to see things through their eyes and walk in their shoes. It means being willing to serve and love even those who do not regard us as their equals. And yes, even those of us who are gay, even we who have been spiritually brutalized within our communities of faith, even we can model this kind of love, the same kind of love that Christ himself modeled. Perhaps we are uniquely qualified to model it. I have found that no greater wellspring of healing has ever been opened up in my life, than to begin to live this kind of love. I have discovered after all that it is not my mission to change the Church's views on homosexuality, but rather to help prepare the world for the second coming of Jesus Christ, by helping the world to embody the love he taught.

For me, to be gay and Mormon, and to affirm both, requires a special kind of trust in God. But it is not fundamentally different from the kind of faith any of us need in order to survive in the topsy-turvy world we live in. May we each learn in our own way to trust that in the day that we call, God will answer us, and may we each, in the day that God calls, answer back.

In Jesus' holy name.

Amen.