Welcome home

(The article this week is from Rev. Elder Don Eastman – former vice moderator for Metropolitan Community Churches and retired minister.)

A few months ago more than 1,500 people from Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) all over the world gathered in Chicago for our 25th General Conference.

Again and again, every day we heard wonderful stories of personal transformation experienced by people coming into MCC. The theme I heard so often was expressed by a young man from Puerto Rico who said, “When I came to MCC I found a home. MCC is a church. MCC is a denomination. But more important, MCC is a family. Now, I’m at home.”

The book of Isaiah is the story about the exile of the Jewish people. The defeat and separation and loneliness of the captivity in Babylon is about to end. Israel will come from a place of isolation to a place of restoration. Something new and wonderful will happen. A new day is dawning. A new exodus is coming; an exodus from exile. The reality is that we could summarize the whole message of Isaiah in two words: welcome home.

I see a parallel in this story of Israel and in the story of Metropolitan Community Churches. 94 percent of the people in Metropolitan Community Churches had a previous affiliation with a Christian church. Yet, more than two-thirds of the people coming into MCC no longer are attending or participating in a church.

Many of us were condemned, excluded and even persecuted by our congregations. We had lost our spiritual home. Often, we experienced the pain of alienation and isolation. Others may have been turned off to a religion that was toxic or simply did not work for them anymore. As a people who have experienced our own kind of exile, the pictures and promises of Isaiah can have a very special meaning to us.

Isaiah 42.9 “The former things have come to pass and new things I now declare.”

Isaiah speaks of three new acts of God.

God is doing a new thing.

God is gathering a new people.

God is giving a new song.

God is doing a new thing

Isaiah 43:18-19 says, “The Eternal One says, “Forget what happened before, and do not think about the past. Look at the new thing I am going to do. It is already happening. Don’t you see it? I will make a road in the desert and rivers in the dry land.”

The new thing God was going to do for Israel was to make a way for the people out of exile. The time of restoration was at hand. From the vantage point of looking over the past 45 years, with MCC God has definitely been doing a new thing. But the reality is that God is still doing new things.

The time has come to let go of the past. It is time to go to a new place in my life. God will lead me. God will help me find the way. Until we let go of the past we can’t move on toward God’s promises for our future.

Sometimes we need to let go of things in our past that have been difficult or painful or hurtful.

Or, perhaps we may need to let go of something in our past that was wonderful. You know, it is one thing to remember with gratitude a great blessing or experience or achievement in our past. It is quite another to be stuck in that place, convinced that we will never experience anything so good again.

Or, we may need to let go of regret that we hold for a past that we wish might have been different.

God has a place of restoration. But it’s not back to the past – it’s not about creating a better yesterday. It’s about building a brighter tomorrow. The world is changing and something new is needed. It is time to let God do a new thing. It’s time to go to a new place in my life. This is true for each of us as individuals and for us together as a congregation.

Faith’s journey always leads us to places we’ve never been before.

It’s always filled with uncertainty.

It usually leads us to a place of the impossible.

It’s often obstructed by the fear of failure.

And at times it’s another walk to our next miracle.

What in the world could ever make me want to take that first step?

For me, there is only one answer; it’s who I am going to be traveling with. Jesus promised that God’s spirit would always be with me. Isaiah 44:3-5 says, “I will bless the thirsty land by sending streams of water; I will bless your descendants by giving them my Spirit.”

And, very importantly, we have each other. This is another thing that God is doing with us.

God is gathering a new people

God has always been gathering people together. In our reading today from the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophet Isaiah proclaims an inclusive promise of God who gathers the outcasts of Israel and says, “I will gather others to them besides those already gathered. God says this diverse gathering will be “joyful in my house of prayer; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”

In those early years of MCC we had a profound sense that God had gathered us together. So many of our number had been rejected, condemned or persecuted by churches. But in MCC we were together; we were loved by God and we could love ourselves and each other. We were filled with incredible joy.

I came into MCC in 1974. MCC in Des Moines, Iowa had just begun a couple of months earlier. It was started by Jerry Sloan who was a member of the MCC in Kansas City.

In his younger life, Jerry had been a Baptist. He felt called to the ministry. So he attended and graduated from the Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo.

But, in coming to terms with being gay, ministry for Jerry as a Baptist would not happen. When his pastor learned Jerry was gay he asked him to leave the Baptist church. For the next decade, Jerry Sloan was an outcast.

MCC in Kansas City changed everything for Jerry. It was a resurrection. It was a new life. He had returned from exile. Jerry Sloan was home again.

Upon his arrival in Des Moines, Jerry went to speak with the religion editor of the local newspaper. He told her about MCC and his plans to start a new congregation there. She was fascinated: A church for gay people in Des Moines? This was news!

Her story included Jerry’s education at the Baptist Bible College. The Baptists were not amused. Within a few weeks, Jerry received a letter from the president of the college. The letter demanded that Jerry Sloan return his diploma. The last sentence warned, “I pray that you will repent of this evil or that God will remove you from the face of the earth”

Jerry took the letter to the religion editor of the newspaper. Now the story was carried worldwide by the Associated Press.

Jerry returned to Kansas City and recruited 15 people from the MCC to go with him to Springfield. He contacted the local television stations to let them know he was going to lead a demonstration in front of the Baptist Bible College to inform them that he refused to return his diploma.

Jerry later learned from some of his Baptist friends that college leaders were horrified. The school went into nearly total shut-down.

Jerry went from Des Moines to Wichita, Kan. to start the MCC congregation there and then to Fort Worth, Texas where he served as the pastor of Agape MCC. In Fort Worth, Jerry and his church became the target of a very prominent and highly homophobic television evangelist, James Robinson.

Robinson’s national telecast originated weekly from a major network television station in Dallas. Robinson condemned MCC by name on the telecast. So, Jerry Sloan went to the TV station and demanded equal time under the “fairness doctrine” which was a federal regulation at the time.

The following week, Robinson was taken off the air and Jerry Sloan was given his time slot. So, Jerry had 30 minutes of free national television time to share MCC’s message of God’s unconditional love and acceptance of gay and lesbian people.

From Fort Worth, Jerry moved to Sacramento, Calif. where he was a founder of the LGBT Center. Now here’s where the story that Jerry shared with me gets really good.

You see, when Jerry Sloan was a student back at Baptist Bible College he had a classmate also named Jerry: Jerry Falwell.

By the early 1980s, Rev. Jerry Falwell was a nationally prominent pastor of a Baptist megachurch and a television evangelist with millions of viewers. He was also the founder and leader of the Moral Majority, a very powerful political arm of the religious right in the United States. Falwell was one of the most homophobic voices in the world.

It was during this same time that our denomination, Metropolitan Community Churches, was applying for membership in the National Council of Churches (NCC) in the U.S. In November 1983, after two years of intense dialogue and debate, the controversy over our membership application was so great among the 32 member denominations the NCC that they voted not to vote.

The next week on his telecast, Jerry Falwell talked about the vote and Metropolitan Community Churches. He called us “brute beasts” and said “this vile and satanic system will one day be utterly annihilated and there’ll be a celebration in heaven.”

Several months later Falwell came to Sacramento. He was the guest on a local morning television talk show. Jerry Sloan was in the audience. Jerry Sloan stood facing his former classmate: “Hi Jerry; Hi Jerry.” Jerry Sloan then confronted Jerry Falwell with the hateful comments made about MCC. Falwell denied making the statements. Jerry Sloan said he had a tape cassette with the statements. Falwell got very agitated and offered Jerry Sloan $5,000 to produce the tape.

Jerry Sloan brought the tape cassette to the television station and on the evening news the reporters played the tape and interviewed him. They all agreed that Falwell had made the statements. So, Jerry Sloan wrote to Jerry Falwell asking for his $5,000. Falwell refused to pay. So Jerry Sloan filed a lawsuit in a California court and won the case.

Jerry Sloan received a check from the Moral Majority. The amount was more than $8,000 because of sanctions added by the court against Jerry Falwell. Jerry Sloan told me that a condition was stated on the back of the check where it was to be endorsed. It provided that in accepting the payment he agreed not to gloat. So Jerry Sloan called a press conference to say he was not gloating but just wanted to say what the money would be spent for. The Moral Majority was buying new furniture and equipment for the Sacramento Gay & Lesbian Center.

I will forever be grateful to Jerry Sloan. He inspired me to come out. He created a new community of faith where I could finally be honest with myself and with others. His confidence and courage were contagious. We had found our new spiritual home. And for 45 years many thousands more have found their spiritual home with us.

God is giving a new song

Isaiah 42:10-11 says, “Sing to the Eternal One a new song, God’s praise from the ends of the earth! Let the inhabitants sing for joy, let them shout from the tops of the mountains.”

Isaiah tells of a time when God will give a new song to a people who had stopped singing the songs of Zion. The people of Israel loved the old songs, the songs of Zion. But in the midst of their isolation and oppression they weren’t singing anymore.

Psalm 137:1-4 describes it, “By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked us for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How could we sing God’s song in a strange land?’”

A lot of us here know what is like to be isolated, alone, away from that place of joy we once knew. And we just stopped singing.

Marsha Stevens as young woman was a very talented song writer and singer. In the spiritual revolution of the 1970s she wrote one of the most popular Christian songs; “For Those Tears I Died.” But in accepting her lesbian identity it seemed as though she had to lose her spiritual identity. She lost her spiritual home. Marsha Stevens was in exile. So she just stopped singing. She stopped writing songs.

But then, Marsha found MCC. She went to hear Rev. Troy Perry speak at MCC in West Hollywood. She was very well known in Southern California. Troy spotted her in the congregation. He asked her to come and sing for the congregation. “We even have your song in our hymnal.” Once again, Marsha began to sing her song: “Jesus said come to the waters … stand by my side … I know you are thirsty … you won’t be denied.”

The next year, she wrote a new song that expressed the theme of our 1985 General Conference – Free to Be. Marsha has been singing and writing new songs ever since.

There are two kinds of songs, old songs and new songs. Both are very valuable.

Old songs can play a vital role in how we remember God’s blessings and faithfulness in times past.

New songs are born of our spiritual journey. They speak of and celebrate the new things God is doing.

Sometimes, a new song is an old song sung by a new singer.

Sometimes a new song is the music of a new generation.

Through the years in MCC some of our most powerful moments have been those times when people who have been separated and isolated from their church return and experience God’s love and acceptance.

So often, the thing that makes it feel like home is a song from a person’s spiritual past. For that person it is like one of those songs of Zion.

One thing I believe so strongly; when we sing for joy, God is celebrating with us. And the chorus of all of heaven joins in.

I believe that God’s promise to Israel is God’s promise to us:

Isaiah 42:6 says, “I chose you to bring justice, and I am here at your side. I selected and sent you to bring light and my promise of hope to the nations.”

Welcome home!

Rev. Dan Koeshall is the senior pastor at The Metropolitan Community Church (The Met), 2633 Denver Street, San Diego, California, themetchurch.org. Services every Sunday at 9 and 11 a.m.