I gave a 45 minute sermon today, the longest ever for me off the top of my head. Here is the sermon Intended to give.

Today, we celebrate the 43rd anniversary as a church. Eleven and half years ago I came to the Valley church. The actual numbers of members were then 30 something. The facility was not kept up, and I observed layers of dust and pizza stains on the banners in the sanctuary. One clergy, interested in the position of pastor, attended a Sunday service quietly while the search for pastor, he later told me the bathrooms on the street side were “terrifying.” He declined to apply. I later learned that the MCC denominational office in West Hollywood had written off the church and gave this church a year or two of surviving.

Here we are eleven and half years later. Like most Protestant denominational churches our size, we are principally an older congregation. And our numbers decrease through attritions: people moving because of jobs or the expensive cost of living in California; folks becoming more house-bound as they age or through illness. The MCC denomination from which we originated has shrunk from 40,000, when I joined in 1995, to well below than the 8000 globally, with fifty percent or more of churches smaller than our own. MCC has lost its cutting edge and prophetic voice when Troy Perry retired. This is not Troy’s fault. It is the lack of qualified leaders and leaders with a passionate vision for service. Their concern is maintaining their own positions. We have lost talented pastors, flourishing congregations, and theological thinkers. More importantly, there is no vision of the movement for a viable future. Maintaining your position or institution is not vision that sustains anything but decline.

One social change author writes,

Ultimately, the relation and legitimization of established authority and power structures weaken the bonds of religious community and threaten to dissolve the fascination of the original movement. (Wolfgang Vondey)

I have to confess that I was fascinated and attracted to MCC as a movement through its Pastor in St. Louis, Brad Wishon, and then Moderator Troy Perry. In 1995, we shared a protest on the steps of St. Louis City Hall together. Then there was creativity spirituality, passionate energy fighting for our human rights, laced with a vision of radical inclusive love and prophetic courage to stand up against cultural hatreds and discrimination. Many were fighters and prophets for LGBT justice. But the fascination disappeared after Troy retired. We shifted from prophetic to preservation mode.

The mission was lost for maintenance of the institution. And that is always a dangerous turn. The denomination has been unable to adapt to the realities of changes that the millennium brought: greater acceptance of LGBQI folks, the marriage and family movement, the migration of more 30,000 members to other churches because they no longer wanted to be part of a ghettoized church and because other churches have welcomed them back. But more important the prophetic and cutting edge fascination was no longer there.

What lesson can we learn from this picture? The lesson is that mission, not preservation, defines a movement and a church. When mission is no longer the central driving force of church, it becomes a museum whose mission is preservation of artifacts, dead bones, and past memories. I am reminded by today’s reading “Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” Mt. 9:17

Jesus makes it clear that disciples need to live out the tensions between the claims and memories of tradition and the contemporary warrants of the gospel mission. Our inclination as human beings is toward the safety of tradition or what we are familiar with. The mission, Jesus understood very well, involves inconvenience, energy, passionate commitment, and the desire to follow Christ. The easier path for us, and I include myself, is to fall back on what we know.
Let’s move to today: Many are churches are unable to adapt to change, they become increasingly evolve into museums, preserving the past. I can’t tell you the number of stories how congregations in decline have to choose whether they can afford the expenses of the church facility or a pastor.

This church in the last eleven years had its ups and downs, with the ebbing and the increasing of membership. Early on I grieved every person who left the church, and finally I realized that no one church ever meets the needs of all folks for all times. I found myself prayer for those folks and grateful for their time spent in community and prayerful for their journey.

But we are here today, while you may celebrate the 43rd anniversary, I thank God that the church has existed these past years, despite the prognosis that it had one or two years left. What has let us to this point?

First, we had the ability to adapt. We had a make-over of this church. I heard for awhile from a current board member that this was an ugly little church, but when he and others tapped their creative and decorating genes, this church became a lovely church with a spectacular garden, with a new pipe organ, solar panels, a new altar with a redwood burl, and comfortable seats. One of our deceased members Bob Cross complained that his butt hurt from the uncomfortable seats we had. Many times when I sit down I am aware of his comments about the chairs. For him, one of the greatest positive changes were the seats you now sit in. So thank Bob Cross for his complaining, it brought the change you are sitting on.

While making-over the church to be more welcoming is part of our mission of hospitality, our primary mission as church is to imitate the radical inclusive love that Jesus practiced in sharing the good news of the gospels in word and in the witness of our lives and the actions of the church.

Rev. John Dorhauer, the newly elected General Minister of the United Church of Christ, calls for the church to be “risk-taking, creative, and cultivate ingenuity.” These were the virtues exemplified earlier by Troy Perry that MCC has sadly lost. They are virtues for adaptability to change and thus survivabilty.
Adaptability to change has been a central virtue of the Jesus movement. A bunch of Galilean and Judean outcasts, fisherman, tax collectors, and housewives from the countryside, single women like Mary Magdalene after the resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit, transformed the Jesus movement ragtag bunch of rural misfits and outcasts into an urban movement. Within three years of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Jesus movement spread through the cities of the Roman Empire; all of Paul’s letters are addressed to communities in cities. They were house churches that brought men and women, upper class and slaves together in the weekly worship around the Lord’s Supper. Women found equality with men in this Jesus movement. Slaves dreamed of the freedom that they experiences in these churches. Remember Paul’s baptism formula in his Letter to Galatia: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Gal. 3:28 Slaves could dream of freedom, and there was only one identity generated from baptism, being in Christ.

These country social misfits of the Jesus movement were charged to spread the good news, and the good news of Jesus Christ challenged the power structures of the Roman Empire and it cult of Emperor worship. Risk-taking, creativity, and ingenuity were descriptive of the post-Easter church.

Risking-taking is about radical inclusion and openness, and I will add openness to change. Barbara Fiand asks Christians a significant question, “Why is it that many of us do not even connect anymore in the day-to-day living out of our religion with Christ’s ancient vision of inclusiveness?” We have become a radical inclusive church. What is preventing us from filling these chairs on Sunday?
We have actively worked to move beyond just being an LGBT church to welcome heterosexual folks at worship? How often have we bragged about or church to others? Or invited folks to join us for events and worship? The strongest drive for inclusion comes from the outside. And this was the ingenuity that Jesus had. He invited strangers, outcasts, the poor, women, men, and children to dinner with himself. It is our mission as congregants not only to live the good news of Jesus but imitate him. We will become more inclusive as individuals see that as part of the mission of the church and as community we market ourselves as an open and inclusive church. Let’s not keep that a secret any longer. Tell a friend. Tell someone each week and invite them to join us.

Creativity is built upon risk-taking. How willing are we to explore various spiritual practices, change our worship style and experiment? There are few churches as creative as us. Look at our fund-raisers over the years. We may need to become creative in the style of worship to attract folks to our service. I am now talking to Roxy Mountains about a gospel drag fundraiser for January or February.

Ingenuity is built upon the previous two virtues: It differs from creativity because it involves cleverness. How clever are we for the Lord? For the church? Cleverness has traditionally been called “discernment,” the ability to listen to God as God calls us to mission and service. Can we initiate and implement new things to realize our mission of radical inclusive love?

Let me give you example: We were ingenuous enough to make the Earth a member of our congregation and embark upon a journey of greening our church with solar panels, efficiency saving and conserving measures for water. How do we reach folks who care for the Earth and life and invite them to the church? You might say, “That’s the pastor’s job.” You would be partially right and partially wrong. It is our job together.

These characteristics must transform us enough to engage the gospel mission. There are those who are consumers and those committed to mission, and many in between. The consumers come on Sunday and take away the message and grace home with them. We all hope that it provides for a seeding of their lives in God’s grace.

But we be transformed to become missional. Besides the above, we have vacancies on the board. We are down in our numbers of people for our feeding program. We need volunteers for caring for our garden. And we need people to take an active interest in bringing folks to church. We can’t be just consumers or what I understood as Sunday Christians as I called them as a child. We must be the living word of the Gospel, and our mission is to share the good news of God being with us and inviting us to create a mission to transform the world. God bless you!

Today’s gospel healing story is the only story that names a person healed, excluding Lazarus raised from the tomb. Bar means son in Aramaic. I first thought it could mean the son of Timaeus, a Greek man who was with Socrates before he was forced to take his life for corrupting the youth of Athens. If “timaeus” was borrowed from the Greek, it would translate as “honored one.” A second possibility is the Aramaic word means “unclean, impure, unchaste, or abominable.” One translator has used the second to name Bartimaeus, “Son of Poverty.” A case could be made for either, but I choose the second.

Bartimaeus’ name could be symbolic of the poor and those afflicted with blindness. He is a no-body in Jewish society, a sinner and unclean and abominable. Persons born with disabilities were not allowed in the Temple, nor were blind priests allowed to serve in the Temple. Bartimaeus was literally side-lined in Jewish urban life, moved to the margins of Jewish social life. He was on the road to Jericho when the crowds gathered on the road outside the gates of Jericho. That was the best place to beg for assistance. Have you noticed the places in society where the poor and the homeless beg for assistance? I have seen mothers asking for monies at the traffic light entrances to the entrance of the Empire Square Mall or homeless veterans with a sign pleading for help as I have come off a highway such as Lake St. in Pasadena. There are many others.
Now Bartimaus probably heard something about Jesus from those gathering to meet him. When he hears Jesus is passing by, he calls out to him: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

When he raised his voice (10:47), people were quick to remind him he was a no-body. The reaction of the crowd to Bartimaeus was to threaten him to keep quiet. “Shut up, blind beggar, sinner, abomination; you have no right to speak to the teacher.” Or perhaps one of Jesus’ disciples said, “You can’t approach him without first going through us. We are in charge and have to clear you first.” Disciples have become gatekeepers to Jesus, monitoring who had access or not, and they are not unlike the attitudes of many clergy who claim such power.
Have you ever noticed how people silence the poor or make them invisible? The poor are crying in our midst, and we pass them, unable to hear their cries or see them as people.

But Bartimaeus is persistent, he cries out louder, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” By calling Jesus the Child of David, Bartimaeus recognizes Jesus as a prophet, a person of power. The blind Child of Poverty forcefully engages the Child of David despite the crowds threatening him and shushing him. .

The mood of the crowd changes as Jesus calls him to be brought forth. Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man asks, “Rabboni (my teacher), let me see again.” Jesus heals him and says,”Go your faith has made you well.” Simple right, I end my sermon here. Wrong!

No there are three levels of meaning to this healing story.

My first point is a simple observation, often missed. When Jesus call him, Bartimaeus stood up, threw aside his garment, left the few coins he may have received from begging, and came to Jesus. He threw aside all he had to come to Jesus. These could easily been stolen. This reminds of the story in the same chapter I preached two weeks ago about the rich young man whom Jesus asked to sell everything he has and give the monies to the poor and follow him. A poor, blind man has greater faith than a pious religious man who refuses to give away his wealth and follow Jesus.

But have you ever notice in the stories of healing, Jesus never says, “God heals you,” or “I heal you.” Jesus speaks of having faith to move mountains. Albert Nolan, in his book, Jesus Today, writes,

…it is clearly faith in God, not only in the existence of God or even the power of God, but as Jesus saw it, faith in God as the loving and forgiving Father (Abba). Faith is a particular kind of consciousness, the consciousness of God, or the divine, as loving and caring for us. And that is why, the faith that Jesus speaks of includes trust. Jesus was able to do the things he did because he put all his trust in God. And the lives of others were transformed when they learned to trust God.

Secondly, Jesus’ healing of Bartimaeus becomes a critique of the crowd. Jesus criticizes the crowd who judge Bartimaeus that his parents have sinned against God and he carries the burden of their sins. He was named by them Son of poverty, unclean son, abominable child. Jesus explodes their shallow notions of sins. His healing says clearly, “You are the sinners in your judgment of the blind man. How dare you silence him for his speaking up and speaking with faith! You are completely wrong.” On other occasions, Jesus discouraged his disciples to judge blindness as punishment for sin. Humans during Jesus and other times have understood a baby born blind or any affliction was a curse, a punishment. Often parents would leave the infant exposed on the hillside to die from the element, starvation, or wild animals.

Bartimaeus has faith, he has placed his trust in God and Jesus. He is literally blind but his eyes are open in faith. For the Jews at this time, the heart and eyes are the seats of emotion; they are connected. Bartimaeus’ heart is wide open with faith, not blind. So he cries out to Jesus to bring healing to eyes to reflect the faith of his heart.

Jesus also chides his disciples as gatekeepers of access to himself. Bartimaeus does not have to access Jesus through them. He can speak up for himself, not through yourselves. He is an adult child of God with faith shining forth. There is no need for a go between faith and God. How often we silence the afflicted and the ill, treating them as children and attempting to speak for them. Jesus criticizes such behavior of muting the voices of the afflicted.

My third point is the location of the story in the gospel and Mark’s criticism of the disciples. Jesus’ journey starts in chapter 8, the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida. This is an example again of a Marcan sandwich, placing significant narration in between two stories of healing blind men. The two stories of healing blindness highlight the difference sight and blindness of among Jesus’ disciples.
Between the two stories, there are a number of occasions that the disciples who accompany him and are with him on a nearly daily basis are blind since they are unable to see truly who Jesus is and hiss mission. For example, Peter answers the question of Jesus, “Who do you say that I am?” He affirms that Jesus is God’s Christ, but when he Jesus predicts his passion and death. Peter denies, and Jesus responds: “Get behind me, you evil one.”

Or just before this story, the sons of Zebeedee ask him, “Teacher, grant us that we may sit, one of the right and the other on your left side, in your glory.” Jesus asks whether they can endure the baptism that he be baptized, in other words, his passion and death. Jesus’ disciples are irritated Jesus tells in very clear language:

You know that those who are considered rulers over he Gentiles lord it over them, and their great one exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you, but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your slave. And whoever of you desires to be first shall be a slave of all. For the Child of Humanity did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.

Mark wants to point out how blind are Jesus’ disciples to his teachings and understanding his mission. It seems that real blindness is among the disciples rather than the two men born blind and who are healed because of their faith. The blind men healed become models of discipleship and faith. Their eyes are opened, and this means that their hearts have become open to Jesus and God. It is a heart to heart trust and placing their hearts in the heart of God.

This brings us to today. What blinds us or the faith of hearts? What stops or prevents us from trusting Jesus in our discipleship?

Nolan notes that Jesus worked healing through steadfast faith in God:

He (Jesus) trusted God without hesitation or reserve. He could then quite confidently challenge others to trust God too. He encouraged, strengthened, and liberated people to believe that the impossible could happen. An example of this which would be the way in which he challenged the lame, the paralyzed, and the crippled by issuing a simple command, “Stand up and walk.” Empowered by his confident faith, people found that suddenly they could stand up and walk. In such circumstances, it seems that miracles do happen, that people’s lives are transformed. Healing becomes a reality.

The great miracle Jesus performed was to help facilitate people to trust that God was with them, to place their trust in God. Jesus’ faith in God was contagious, and that contagious faith enable the sons and daughters of poverty—the abominable, the sinner, the unclean, and impure to escape at the religious judgment and silencing of the crowds and religious elite.

The term “Truth decay” was coined by Matthew Fox in his book Creativity for addressing how religion distorts the message and experience of the gospel. Today’s gospel ends our five week exploration of Jesus’ sermon on the Bread of Life. After his teaching, Jesus notices a reticence of some of his listeners and hears some plaints of his disciples, saying, “This is a hard saying; who can understand it?’ And Jesus responds, “Does this offend you?” It offends some, and they walk away.

In John’s Gospel, in particular, Jesus not only speaks in parables as he does in the other gospels, but he speaks on a non-literal level, a symbolic level about his mission and Abba God and himself. And generally there is a lack of understanding between Jesus and his audience and his disciples. Nicodemus confuses Jesus’ message about being born again in the Spirit. He literalizes the conversation, or the Samaritan woman at the well. But she fares better than Nicodemus because she persists in her conversation with Jesus and realizes that he is talking metaphorically about “living water” and eternal life.

At the end of his sermon on the Bread of Life, Jesus has confused and offended the fundamentalists among the crowds. He has proclaimed, “I am the living bread come down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I give is my flesh.”

Immediately, the fundamentalists ask, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” It is cannibalism, it violates the purity laws. This problem of literalizing the message exists equally strong with contemporary fundamentalists. Truth decay happens in the politics as we listen to candidates for the presidency, but it also occurs in religion equally. In both cases, I would this decay of truth a crisis of imagination. Literalizing Jesus’ words distorts Jesus’ message. You do not exercise your imagination in interpreting Jesus’ words and stories literally. What is so threatening about using our imaginations?

Religious fundamentalism has an endless capacity for simplification, generating uniformity and authoritarianism, and hatred of those with imagination. It encourages neither understanding of, nor sympathy for, nor an expansive appreciation for the plurality of new possibilities. It fosters unconditional belief while actively discouraging any folks to think for themselves.

Matthew Fox tells a story that a county election of a new school board in New Hampshire resulted in a majority of Christian fundamentalists. Their first decree was that no teacher in the school district could use the word “imagination” in the classroom. Fox narrates how he asked some citizens why they were afraid of the imagination, and their response makes me cringe, envisioning Church Lady from Saturday Night Live: “Satan. Satan lives in the imagination.” They insecurely identify our imaginations with evil.

Christian fundamentalists oppose fantasy-role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons or the myriad of computer fantasy quest games. What they attempt to preserve is their own socially constructed reality as God given, and they fear any other possibilities. Fantasy-role games, however, teach people how to imagine and play with possibilities.

I feel sorry for fundamentalists who exclude their imagination because they also exclude the powers of creativity. The response of the New Hampshire fundamentalist indicates a fear-based world, where imagination might reveal new possibilities, new dreams, many interpretations of texts, and hopes for ourselves and our world. It is the place where the Holy Spirit works to generate creativity and thinking outside the box.

Fear of imagination leads to a system where thought police censor us, and authoritarianism kills the imagination and transforms mind control into a god. It is the rule of law over Spirit. I have fought my whole life against such narrow mindedness and lack of imagination. For myself, imagination is the fount of our personal creativity of the artist, the poet, the musician, the gardener, and the many ways each of you express your creativity. We co-create our lives with the Spirit. Creativity and imagination are the playground of God’s Spirit.
When l look back at my childhood and education, I credit my imagination for stretching my mind, dreaming and freeing me to imagine what Jesus means by the reign of God. I fell in love with the English romantic poets in high school, fantasy works such as Lord of the Rings, and science fiction. They helped me to imagine a world where people might be free, loving, caring for one another, establishing peace, and living with nature. I have taught courses on religion and the Lord Rings, or with Gene Roddenberry’s series, or science fiction. I found students using their imagination anconstraints d the language of science fiction and Star Wars as means to express their spirituality and finding meaning in the world.

I understood that Jesus hardly ever spoke literally, maybe with the exception of the commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That could be taken literally, or when Jesus proclaims the forgiveness of sins. And his notion of neighbor was illustrated by the parable of the Good Samaritan, Our neighbor was the stranger, and he broke the imaginative constraints of his disciples by widening the definition of neighbor to include Samaritans, “a hated group” and a Gentile.

Jesus was a brilliant storyteller, and he spoke in parable and metaphor to talk about God as Abba. The name of God was so holy that Jews would piously replace the name of God with “My Lord” (Adonai). He spoke intimately that God was Abba, “daddy”—an intimate metaphor. God was like an intimate loving daddy, and he spoke of God as the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. This broke with traditional orthodox Jewish piety.

But Jesus used his imagination in the creation of his parables and stories, or when he symbolically acted out God’s reign through inclusive meals, washing the feet of his disciples, or riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Through his own creative imagination, Jesus spoke to our imaginations, to inspire an imagined world where we and God meet, where we respond with awe and wonder, where our hearts and emotions are touched by Jesus and God. Jesus’ religious imagination has poetry to enchant rather than coerce, to touch our hearts and move us to imaginative engagement and action than command blind obedience.

Matthew Fox writes, “Imagination takes us to nothingness, to emptiness, to what is not yet and therefore to hat might still be. The space of elsewhere, indeed. No wonder the prophets relied so heavily on the imagination.” Imagination allows us to imagine the elsewhere from our social conditions.

I will make two bold claims this morning about our imaginations and scripture:

First, we cannot read or listen to the gospels or scripture without imagination. Fundamentalists try their best to read the gospels literally for a sake of notion that truth is unchanging and easily measured. This style spiritualizes Jesus, makes him safe and unchallenging. It strips power from the historical ministry and message of Jesus; it flattens the message of Jesus who spoke in poetry, parable, symbol, and metaphor. He performed archetypal and symbolic acts. His storytelling and symbolic actions entertain paradox and ambiguity, and through your imagination and faith, you fill in the ambiguity gaps with your own experience. You play with his words with your imagination, and the Spirit opens new meanings to stories you have heard so often and discover unexplored or surprising meanings.

If Jesus is a poet and storyteller, one can only approach Jesus’ poetry and symbolic saying with imagination, intuition, and our emotions. When we imaginatively approach these stories of Jesus and his stories and action, we perceive multiple levels of meaning and are enrichened a range of new possibilities that we have previously missed. The living word—Jesus—is encountered through imagination and prayer.

Let me give you a technique I use when I approach the gospel. It is called “imaginative composition of place:” This is a prayer or meditative technique used in reading scripture. You enter a scriptural text by imaginatively envisioning yourself in the story as much detail as you can visualize. I would ask folks in bible study on a given text: Where are you in the gospel story? Who are you in the story? What do you see around you? Jesuit Joseph Tetlow writes about this technique: “You do not merely imagine the event as though you were watching it on film….You enter into the scene as though you were a part of it, standing warm in the temple or ankle deep in the water of the Jordan.” Try this approach to scripture; it is like entering a virtual reality or the holodeck of Star Trek.

Secondly, I want to claim that there is no possibility of faith or a heart to heart relationship with Christ or God without imagination. If you tap into your imagination, you move into a spiritual realm of faith, for heart will have little difficulty of envisioning a gospel story. Your emotions and passions are stimulated along with your imagination. The living word—Jesus—becomes alive, imaginatively connects deeply into your emotions and experiences of life. Suddenly it reveals or unveils or perhaps awakens to weaving your story and Jesus’ story into a new interwoven story in which Jesus and you participate. Imagination opens the paths of hope and love. Without imagination in prayer, we cannot travel the path of discipleship that invokes compassion, love, forgiveness, peace, hopefulness, and working for social justice and caring for the Earth and neighbor.

Jesus expresses God’s dream for us. When I say “God is incarnated in Jesus” in John’s opening prologue. Jesus is described as God’s Word (logos), and that Word was present at creation and has become enfleshed in our stories and our imagination. And the Spirit hovers over creation and continues to be in our creativity. Are not fundamentalists suppressing the Spirit and the incarnate Christ when they suppress the imagination?

The brilliant Austrian psychologist, Otto Rank, a member of Freud’s inner circle, taught that artists give through their creations a gift to God. Our many gifts of creativity originate from God, and they are places where we intimately encounter the Spirit and Christ. When we express these gifts of art and creativity, we express God’s grace. It becomes an act of generous gratitude and intimate and imaginative connect with Christ and the Spirit.

One of my favorite mystics is the 12th century Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote music, poetry as well as texts on gardening, medicine, and theology. She writes, “The Word manifests in every creature.” It was an expression of God’s greening grace—constantly creating, refreshing our imagination and inviting us to imaginatively appreciate the creative present of the Holy Spirit and Christ in our creative abilities and ability to love. God has touched our hearts through Christ and the Holy Spirit. And our art and imaginative creativity touches, in return, God’s heart.

Now you protest that you have little imagination and no artistic creativity. I will counter your protests with the claim that each of us are creative and that we artists of our lives. Let me give you examples: The two Gregories express their art in gardening; Cindy and the happy hookers with their work to knot a 170 scarfs for a women’s shelter by Christmas; Rev. Joe in his creating pyskany or decorated eggs; or Joe’s facilitating The Artist’s Way, the choral group and out musicians, our feeding program, our commitment to care for God’s creation, and all what we do personally and communally to realize God’s dream for us and all creation. My creativity comes out in ministry and my theological writings. We are all artists and poets of our lives. Tap into your imagination, live faith, and unleash the power of the Holy Spirit who colors outside the box and brings a creative play in our relationship with God.

On Pentecost, The Holy Spirit inspired Peter to quote the prophet Joel:

I will pour my Spirit on upon all flesh,
And your sons and daughters will prophesy, and your young men and women see visions,
And your old men and women shall dream dreams.
Even upon the slaves both men and women I will pour my Spirit.

Our imaginations need to be unleashed in our hearts and to be touched by the Holy Spirit.

Diarmuid O’Murchu borrows the Jesus biblical scholar John Domenic Crossan’s translation of Jesus Aramaic word, malkuta meaning kingdom as “a companionship of empowerment.” It was empowerment through mutuality and living in the presence of an unconditionally loving and forgiving God. Jesus empowered people through healing, including, forgiving, eating with them, and imagining with them a world living with God. He proclaimed that this was God’s dream for us. We often translate in our worship as ‘kindom” to capture the flavor of a movement of family of faith choice in Jesus’ use of kingdom.

The issue that Jesus confronted was his own experience of God whose love was unconditional and radically inclusive while his religion maintained a system of exclusions. This still is our problem today: a radically inclusive and loving God and an exclusive religions that try to limit access to God. We seem through history to deal with human religious leaders and groups who fall into the temptation to try to control access to God’s grace by making it exclusive.

There is a raging cultural war in Christianity not just about same-sex marriage or women’s right of reproductive choice. It crosses so many other issues social issues, including the homeless, climate change, race, undocumented immigration, peace, economic justice, AIDS, health care, and more. It lacks a compassionate heart for the stranger or for people suffering who are different from themselves. This type of exclusivist Christianity is very disturbing, for it seems to lack the passion and heart of Jesus’ message of a companionship of empowerment. It envisions an exclusive God and narrowly focused practice of Christianity that rules out so many. It seems heartless to me and lacking Christ. It is obsessed with a sin management strategy that pushes drives so many people away from God just as Jesus experienced in his ministry. It does not care if it excludes anyone who differs in the practice of their sin management Christianity.

I have heard so often from exclusivist Christians, “Have you been saved?” Their world is exclusively divided into saved and damned. But more importantly, such a statement plays on emotional insecurity of people. Such Christians play God, making a judgment who is saved and who is not. If there is ever a sin against the Holy Spirit, it is to use and make God wrathful and not loving, inclusive, unconditional in offering a share in the divine life.

The danger, confronting churches through history, is the distortion of the gospel of Jesus. Wendy Farley says it very well in her book, Gathering Those Driven Away,

Christianity moves through history carried by the impulses of domination an exclusion. It despises uppity women, no-hellers, contemplatives, queers, and thinks even less of those people outside Christianity altogether. But without their witness to the nearness and tender mercies of Emmanuel, the memory of Christ is impossibly distorted.

I grew up Catholic, a church driven and obsessed with sin management, guilt, and shame. It was hard to get to the core of the gospel as grace and not as judgment, punishment, and penance for sin. When I look back at Christian history, it makes me cringe in horror how many people have been harmed, driven away, excluded, or even killed in the name of Christ. They acted in the name of an exclusive god.

In his message of about an inclusive and loving Abba God, Jesus attempted to shift his people and religious tradition from religious exclusivity to religious inclusivity: “No one is out, everyone is in.” Those who have only known exclusion, the poor, the marginalized, the despised, and the disenfranchised. Jesus was not obsessed with sin management; he preached a gospel of grace, forgiveness, compassion, and love.

It is the upside down empowered companionship–transgressing all boundaries and tearing down walls of religious exclusion and ethnic and gender prejudice. I want to call Jesus’ life and ministry as “grace gone wild.” He preached a wild grace that could not be domesticated, controlled by anyone or any institution. It was totally under the inspiration and outside guidance of the Holy Spirit. He gathered back those people driven away and excluded from religion.

Companionship denotes community, mutuality, co-creating together and empowering one another to form a loving and hospitable community where everyone has a place at table. The meals, the healings, and parables of Jesus imagined a freedom, equality, and compassionate care. Jesus awakened the imagination of his disciples and audiences through stories and symbolic gestures—to empower the new vision of God. His parables are subversive stories to stimulate our imaginations to envision a world where we all are living with God in our midst.

Today’s gospel, Jesus flees from the crowds after the feeding by boat since they wanted to make him king. But there is no way to escape them. Thus, he instructs them in the beginning of the Bread of Life midrash or sermon. Jesus says, “I am the Bread of Life. Whoever comes to me will never hunger and whoever places his faith in me will never thirst.”

There is no room for exclusivity in his teachings and ministry, and he rejects the attempt to make him king. Jesus rejected power over people as kings or priests exercised. Power was shared, for he empowered them to act on God’s dream of inclusive love and understand that the greatest would be a slave to all.

Central to companionship of empowerment is sharing food. Jesus shared food with a wide range of people at the table or in field feeding thousands; these were meals of radical inclusiveness, marking not merely a revolutionary concept with far-reaching implications but deep expression of companionship of empowerment. Companionship is made possible when people gather around the sharing of food. Friendships are formed and deepened, love and care are reinforced. We help and serve one another in love and because of love.

Celebrating a meal of God’s grace of forgiveness and unconditional love provided occasions for healing empowerment to take place. People began to dream of a new future with God. They did not dwell on repentance, guilt, and shame.
For Jesus, the open table is a symbol of communal sharing in which nobody is ever hungry. The open table was a place of God’s wild grace operated. For Jesus, there seems to be no doubt the table always had to be open. Nobody was to be excluded. From highways and the byways all are brought into the banquet—prostitutes, sinners, tax-collectors, the outcasts and the marginalized of every type.

Anne Primavesi has noted for many churches today: “The table companionship of Jesus has lost its true bite and scandal. The salt has lost its taste.” There are so many conditions placed around the communion table: the correct words and gestures by an ordained clergy, open to baptized members of that church or denomination, correct beliefs and doctrines, correct state of purity to receive the bread of life and drink the from the cup of life. When you take mirror to other church practices of exclusion around the communion table, you upset and offend Christians. They give back justifications for their actions, just as the Pharisees justified why only the pure could sit at their tables or the priests justified who could be excluded from the Temple. Whatever justifications are used, it is still excluded. There is a wonderful line from the prophet Micah 4:6: “Beloved, I will assemble the lame and those who have been driven away.” No question the Pharisees and holiness groups in Jesus’ era would exclude the lame from their gatherings. But God goes on to say, “I will assemble those who been driven away.”

How many people have driven away from churches and from God’s communion table? Hundreds of million! Because they are insubordinate women, a different race or ethnicity, LGBT, homeless, have a fetish lifestyle, a different religion, fight against climate change and find God expressed in nature, or some other difference. Jesus’ unconditional invitation to the open table is lost within such church eucharists. Christians from another denomination or non-Christians are not welcomed at the table. The inclusive God’s table has become exclusive. The invitation of grace of the open table, subversive and radically inclusive, is no longer accessible to everyone. Insiders are welcomed, outsiders are excluded from the inclusive God.

Radical inclusion means God’s wild grace! Many clergy from exclusivist denominations or churches will give you theological excuses for their practice of limiting access. You have to be baptized first before you come to the table. Or you belong to another church. Or you don’t believe the doctrine we believe.
The only possible reason for exclusion from the communion table is when someone disrupts the safety of the sanctuary. Over the nearly eleven years as pastor, I can recall a few such individuals at this church who threatened the safety of the sanctuary or assaulted someone at service, were drunk or high, or inappropriately touched someone. I have spoken to such individuals that such behaviors violated the hospitality of the sanctuary and not acceptable. In a couple of extreme occasions, we have to ask someone to leave. Or even threaten to get a restaining order on attendee who assaulted myself and JJ during the service.

Hospitality is another form of inclusivity, but as family members we welcome folks to the dinner table of God. When you enter a home, you are welcomed to share a meal. That was my Greek grandmother’s notion of hospitality who welcomed anyone coming to her home.

Do we invite people to service and then tell them that they are not welcomed at the dinner table? As a newly ordained Catholic priest, I celebrated the eucharist at my family’s home. Do I follow Catholic legal exclusion of my Greek Orthodox grandmother from communion because she is not Catholic? Do I exclude my niece from communion because she had not made her first communion from communion? Both actions would been harmful to my family.

I invited a Hindu classmate to dinner, and she came for mass before dinner. She came to the table for communion, and I did not turn her away. Or a Japanese Buddhist friend who I also welcomed at the table for communion? He was so touched that he was baptized and became a Catholic several months later. Hospitality touches people who then decide they want to be part of God’s family because of their extravagant welcome and inclusion. I like the UCC welcome:

No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here. We believe in extravagant welcome. This is why we insist that God’s communion table is open, not closed, and God’s gift and claim in baptism are irrevocable. We advocate justice for all.

To the horror of Jewish exclusivists and Christian exclusivists, Jesus sat down, indiscriminately eating and drinking with suspect men and women who were sinful and impure. He told them that they were “beloved children of God,” already forgiven before they even asked God. He was accused of being drunkard and sinner because he associated with sinners. He did not care about sin management but making God’s grace thoroughly accessible and inclusive to all. He proclaimed a universal salvation based on a divine mercy and love like the father of the prodigal son who ran out to greet his son, hug and kiss him. God’s extravagant love exceeded the example of the father in the parable.
Just as the religious exclusivists—the fundamentalists, the Pharisees, scribes, and Temple clergy—were upset and brought charges against him, so today when we proclaim the inclusive grace and love of God many churches become upset. They have invested too much time and effort in their sin management strategies to control the faithful and become wealthy. They control access to God’s table, and I believe in my heart that is not what Jesus did during his ministry. He did not exclude Judas from the table at the last supper, nor Peter who foretold of his denials, or disciples who suspected would flee at the first sign of danger.

Jesus died because of his meals symbolized that there are no more outsiders! He died because of the people he shared an open table with. Everyone is in—irrespective of religion or any condition. Radical inclusiveness is a core value of empowered companionship with God and with one another. It is accomplished not me but by a community who is welcoming, caring, and inviting.

Christians for centuries have maintained that Jesus died for our sins. There is truth that creedal statement. He died because of human sinfulness. Human sinfulness—exclusive religion and ruthless political power—arrested, tortured, humiliated, and crucified Jesus. But Jesus died for God’s wild grace of radical inclusive love! That is why I understand the mission of our church and the Christian church as “gathering in those who have been driven away.”

US Christian religiosity exceeds any developed country. So if that is the case, we might expect that American churches would be heavily involved in charitable donations and volunteer work with the poor, the homeless, and the oppressed in the US and outside. Unfortunately, that is not true.

Johann Baptist Metz, a German theologian, who as young man fought in the Second World War. But the German holocaust of Jews and other minorities deeply impacted him as he became a priest and a theologian. He asks a very relevant question for modern Christianity, “Do we share the sufferings of others or do we just believe in this sharing, remaining under the cloak of a belief in ‘sympathy’ as apathetic as ever?” You might ask this question to different Christian churches, and you will discover some disappointing answers. And maybe a few good answers!

What Metz designates as “Bourgeois Christians,” I would term as “capitalist Christians,” who are unwilling to donate monies and volunteer time to any cause that does not agree with their central beliefs. Bourgeois Christianity fosters an individual obsession with personal sin and salvation rather than with collective concern with social suffering. It has a commitment to church doctrine rather than engagement with human suffering. Sin management has become more important than human suffering, let alone the suffering of other life from climate change.

Bourgeois Christianity fosters an individualized response, conditioned by their central doctrinal beliefs. And the sad part is that it fails to understand compassion as a viable response to global calamities. They may be willing to provide feeding the homeless and the poor with the proviso that they attend a worship service. But they often are unwilling to give anything to strangers or people suffering. While some churches, and our church, contributed to the suffering and destruction wrought Hurricane Katrina striking the New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Many did not, for New Orleans is party town of full of sinners. .

Charity and giving becomes extremely selective: Fundamentalist Christians will donate to a pastry shop that refuses to bake and sell a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, and they will refuse the pan-handler in the street by ignoring and walking on the other side. Capitalist churches will ignore human suffering from severe weather events or earthquakes or AIDS in Africa. But they will contribute to support the Uganda government legally criminalizing LGBT folks or people living with HIV. They support missionaries of hate at home and abroad, but where is God’s love or the ministry of Jesus in their charity?

At the core of capitalist Christianity is the rejection of “compassion” and ultimately, the radical inclusive ministry of Jesus. The inclusive ministry of Jesus has been distorted into a salvation religion that separates out the sheep from the goats, but they fail to hear the words of Jesus.

A lawyer asks Jesus asks the question: “What must I do inherit eternal life?” Jesus returns the question with: “What is written in the law?” asks him “The lawyer recites the verse: “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with all your soul and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The lawyer suspects that Jesus understands neighbor differently than the traditional view that restricted neighbor to fellow Israelites and restricted by Pharisees to the pure like themselves. So he asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” This is question becomes the occasion of Jesus’ parable of the God Samaritan.

First, it is the only parable that takes place in a specific location: The road to Jericho. Jericho is a lush and green town. It is the Palm Springs of ancient Palestine. It was called the “City of a Thousand Palms” because the surrounding area is desert. It was a sort of oasis city. King Herod had a winter palace there. There was wilderness from the road from Jerusalem with a lot of caves, inhabited bandits and dispossessed peasants.

Jesus draws the listener into his parable, in particular, into the perspective of the wounded traveler. The passing travelers set up the expectation that one will be the neighbor. The first two are a Temple priest and a levite; both are from the same Israelite tribe, the difference is that priests trace their ancestral lineage back to Moses’ brother Aaron for the claim of priestly inheritance. Jesus uses the phrase for the priest and the levite: “upon seeing him (the wounded traveler) passed by on the other side.” The priest and the levite pass the wounded traveler. According to a verse in Leviticus, a priest may not touch a corpse without incurring contagion of impurity. The same goes for the levite who avoids the impurity and contagious situation for the sake religious ritual. Jesus’ audience are probably thinking Jesus will have some anticlerical punch line.

Never would they dream of the shocking scenario that Jesus has in store for them. “A Samaritan,” the word falls of the lips of Jesus, and his audience experiences scorn or gasp in horror. Surely this hated Samaritan will do likewise and pass on the other side of the road. Samaritans hate Jews as much as Jews hate Samaritans. Instead, the Samaritan is overcome with “compassion;” he does not pass the wounded traveler. He had compassion, literally “his heart was moved” for the man. The Samaritan provides a shock. There is no Jewish person rescuing the wounded man. The Samaritan cares for the man’s wounds with oil and wine, places him on his mount, and takes him to an inn. He instructs the innkeeper to care for him and promises to further reimburse the innkeeper for additional expenses. A hated enemy is moved with compassion for a fallen enemy and cares for his needs to nurse enough him to health. He overcomes the emotions and fears engendered by centuries of cultural prejudice to identify with the wounded traveler

Jesus queers the response with the unanticipated and subversive introduction of the compassion of the Samaritan. He challenges the lawyer on three levels: First, Jesus challenges the traditional commandment to love God and love your neighbor by indicating that the lawyer’s understanding has to be more inclusive. Secondly, when Jesus turns to the lawyer and asks him, “Which of the three proved to be the neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” the lawyer is forced to say, “The one who showed him compassion.”

If your substitute “LBGT,” an African American, or an undocumented Hispanic worker for the certain prejudicial audiences, you capture the original shock of the parable. The Samaritan is labeled “good and a “neighbor.” Jesus shatters ethnic barriers of centuries old hatred and violence between Jews and Samaritans. Jesus chose a known and hated outsider to test his vision of radical inclusiveness, and the Samaritan becomes Jesus’ hero of radical inclusiveness and in history as “good.” And this moral lesson lives on in the number of Christian institutions that carry the name “Good Samaritan:” hospitals, nursing homes, suicide or crisis hot lines, orphanages, food pantries and care for the homeless and the vulnerable.

Diarmuid O’Murchu calls the parable of the Good Samaritan an “inclusive transgression on a truly provocative scale. Richard Kearney describes it as

Love of the stranger as infinitely other! And wonder at the very strangeness of it all…the spiritual epiphany of welcoming, the poetic shudder of imagining, the ethical act of transfiguring our world by caring for the stranger as watch the world become sacred.

Let me rehearse the conclusions of the parable: The priest and Levite striving to be faithful to their religion—the same religion as Jesus—walk on the other side of the road to make sure that they do become ritually contaminated. Jesus chooses a known and hated outsider to test his vision of radical inclusiveness. Other examples of Jesus’ encounters with Samaritans is the Samaritan woman at the well whose response to her encounter goes back to her village to tell people of her graced encounter with Jesus and the ten lepers healed healed by Jesus, in which the only healed leper to return and thank Jesus was a Samaritan. Jesus knew first hand what it meant to be an outsider, growing up with up with the suspicions that he was illegitimate and denied access to his village synagogue.

Johan Metz, who wrestled with Christian complicity in holocaust in post-war Germany, asks “Do we share the sufferings of others or do we just believe in this sharing, remaining under the cloak of a belief in ‘sympathy” as apathetic as ever?” In other words, do we do something about human suffering or just like the idea of sympathy and do nothing?

Many capitalist Christians cannot be blinded to travelers on the road to Jericho and let their beliefs and doctrines prevent them for caring and showing compassion. They forget this parable of Jesus, or take a narrow, exclusive notion of neighbor. I saw a video of town meeting in Sarasota, where a woman, who is probably identified as a Christian, gets up and makes an outrageous claim that the “homeless are not human.” I have heard similar claims in the public media on driving the homeless away from our neighborhoods, denying social programs such as social security and healthcare, food stamps. Let’s make cuts to social welfare programs.

So many Christians have been obsessed with sin and sin management, they accept that humanity is sinful and not deserving the grace of God. This sin management view is the distortion embedded in the thinking and practice of many Christians, like the priest and levite, that my purity status is more important and religious ritual as well. Christian obsession with sin management is destructive because it promotes exclusiveness, violence, and detaches us from the stranger who is our neighbor. My personal salvation is more important than feeding or caring for the poor.

What matters to God is not human sinfulness but human suffering and the failure to respond to such suffering! There are so many people wounded on the side of the road to Jericho. The road to Jericho is everywhere. Do we see as the Samaritan sees with the compassionate heart? Is the vulernerable and the poor truly our neighbor?

Metz speaks about the dangerous memories of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection “Where is God?” There is clear cut answers found in the gospels: God is on the side of the suffering, the poor and vulnerable. Remember Jesus;’ words: “When you do this to the least of my family you do to me.”
The dangerous memories of the gospels are pivotal for our response to human suffering. What do we do when we remember Christ’s word: “Go and do likewise.” We must remove the blinders of whatever privileges we have and see as the Samaritan sees. We engage face to face human suffering and not walk away, but care for the wounds of the stranger half dead and care for the suffering stranger. We move from being strangers to neighbors.

Martin Luther King Jr. made this prophetic observation in New York City in April 1967:

On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come and see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not constantly be beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars need restructuring.

Only compassion for strangers teach us the depth of the radical inclusive love of God’s kindom. Do as Jesus instructed: “Go and do likewise.”

In his book, The Wrong Messiah, Nick Page writes,

The story of Jesus’ birth, therefore, is not one of exclusion, but inclusion.. Joseph’s relatives made a place for Jesus in the heart of their household. They did not shun Mary, even though the status would have been suspect, and even shameful (carrying an illegitimate child): they brought her inside. They made room for Jesus in the heart of a peasant’s home.

Right from the pregnancy of Mary, God’s inclusivity is at work, and Jesus is born as the inclusive love of God for all into an exclusive world.
The religious institutions of Jesus’ day seem no better than our own–both then and now. Stigma is a social-identity devaluation of a person or group of people due to a characteristic mark or feature, whether it is real or imagined. Often the imagined stigma marker is as harmful as any real characteristic. Stigma markers or stereotypes can be transferred from one group persecuted to another. I found this to be true when fundamentalist Christians took stereotypes used against Jewish folks 1920s and 30s and applied them to gay men in the 1990s.

Two biblical scholars Jerome Neyrey and Bruce Malina have studied the labeling of Jesus with sorcery and demonic accusations by his religious critics. Jesus’ opponents accused him of performing or driving out evil spirits by demonic power: They claim that Jesus “is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.”( Mark 3:22) Neyrey and Malina in their book–, Calling Jesus Names: The Social Value of Labels in Matthew, write.

But a criminal or sinner is a person judged “out of place” and socially transposed into a new and negative place, often permanently. Thus, socially negative and unacceptable people are subject to public transformations of their personhood, the result of which is the creation of a special person who cannot be trusted to live within the purity arrangements shared by the group. Such people do not live by the rules of society. The rule-breaker is thus an “outsider,” qualitatively different from others in the group. This definition of the deviant person and his or her outsider status takes place by means of a process of labeling.

There is no question that Jesus’ religious critics saw Jesus as a rule-breaker, and even the Temple priests accused him of blasphemy. Religious institutions and people then and now use labeling as social degradation rituals, or negative stereotypes, to reject, exclude, and isolate “unwanted people” from themselves. Most religions have social mechanisms how to exclude people that are polluted, impure, or sinners. There are always people excluded if you have a religious attitude that some people are more holy than others.
Let me tackle the stories this morning and push further my observations about stigma creating religious communities.

Today’s gospel is a writing technique used by Mark. It is been called a “Marcan sandwich” by biblical scholars. It takes one story and inserts another story within the original story: Here the story of Jesus resurrecting Jairus’ daughter and the women with the gynecological discharge.

The two stories are linked together by the number 12. 12 is the age in which the young girl, the unmanned daughter of Jairus, biologically has reached the age where menstrual cycle begins and is considered ready to be engaged and be married. 12 is the number of years the older woman has been afflicted with the continuous flow of blood. Both women are dead, one dead to the community because of her impurity and the other physically dead. Were these two stories linked together by Mark because of the number 12? Or because one was symbolically dead and the other was physically dead? Probably! But there are symbolic issues here we need to unpack. These stories may be historical, but I think that they are richer in meaning if we understand them as parables. The two stories are deeply interwoven with these two women.

First, in Judaism, a woman is considered unclean during her menstrual period. Now the older woman has the added stigma and shame because her gynecological disorder causes constant bleeding. A woman could not attend the synagogue or enjoy normal sexual or social relations during her period, and with the continuous discharge of blood, people avoided her.

Fundamentalists would have judged her unclean and a sinner. Ancient Jewish physicians gave up on her; neighbors and family members would have followed religious tradition, asking what sin did she do to deserve this punishment? We can safely assume that she probably suffered from depression as well.
She heard about Jesus as a renowned healer. She seeks him out, breaking the boundaries of entering a crowd of people, and she creeps up to Jesus in the crowd, and her inner voice says, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.”

The woman initiates the physical contact that drains power from Jesus. She creeps within the crowd stealthily and does not want to draw attention to herself. Her covert approach to Jesus indicates her recognition of being a social outcast and looked down as a sinner.

What made her touch Jesus’ cloak? Diarmuid O’Murchu offers a possible explanation: “Has the New Reign of God caught up with her to a degree that she does not give a damn about rules and regulations? She desires one thing, and—worthy or unworthy—she is going wholeheartedly for it.”

I think she is caught up with God’s grace. She is tired of being looked down as a sinner and cut off from the community. She boldly initiates the touch. She is empowered to become visible in a religious world that made her invisible.
Jesus senses a drain of divine energy. He turns around and looks directly at her, and with a gaze of realization of her illness and exclusion, his gaze turns into compassion. It may be the first time in years that anyone has looked her in the eyes. Something has happened; it is not only a healing of her discharge but a transformation at the depth of her being. Her empowered action has transformed her image of herself. She has moved from a disempowered outsider to an empowered woman stepping outside the rules and regulations that bound her. I want to point out that Jesus now oozes out divine power as the woman’s flow of blood ceases. It is as I they traded places. Divine energy and blood are considered life force in this culture. His flow of divine energy ends her flow of blood.

I want to speak about an empowered African woman who was stigmatized by the church:

At the World AIDS Day celebration in the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Bujumbura in 1995, the priest said, in the course of his sermon, “We must have compassion for people with AIDS because they have sinned and because they are suffering for it now”. At that point something propelled Jeanne Gapiya to rise from her pew and walk up to the front of the church. “I have HIV”, she declared, “and I am a faithful wife. Who are you to say that I have sinned, or that you have not? We are all sinners, which is just as well, because it is for us that Jesus came.”

The priest condemns the sin while superficially encouraging compassion. The church and priest have stigmatized the woman for living with AIDS. But the African woman, like the women with the hemorrhage, acts up against his statement, affirming she is both HIV and a faithful wife. She asserts an inclusive claim of all of us as sinners and making it clear that she became HIV not because of her adultery or promiscuous sex. It was her husband who never disclosed his HIV status and infected her the other covert wives he has.

Now let me unpack this further. When Rev. Joe returned from Melbourne at the World AIDS Conference, he reported that AIDS faith activists have pointed to religious stigma as the number one cause of the spread of HIV/AIDS globally. I am working with Joe on a book chapter on AIDS and theology, I explored the observations of the religious stigma and AIDS.

2/3 of the twenty-eight million people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa belong to Christian churches, and the majority of cases are married women. If you are African girl, you may be safer single than married. You see churches brought their European and American sin management practices and theologies to Africa and fought against polygyny (many wives for one man) and forced monogamy upon African tribal populations. Polygyny went underground, and men continued to have several wives in different towns and locations. And they seldom told their wife about other wives. If a husband became HIV+, he also did not share his sero-status. Or there is prevalent myth of being cured HIV/AIDS, by having intercourse with a young virgin. Many teenage girls die slightly older than the daughter of Jairus. This is the conditions for a massive pandemic of AIDS.

The second destructive Christian policy was identifying AIDS with gay men, sex workers and sin. The Conference of African Catholic Bishops have just declared gays and lesbians “enemies of humanity” in response to the inroads that marriage equality has made globally. Sex workers are habitually condemned by churches when Jesus had a number of prostitutes in his movement. The churches’ narrow view of human sexuality contributes to the spread of HIV.

Sin management theologies of various churches dominated in African churches, and they have made it dangerous to disclose your HIV status in a church because you were ostracized and excluded just as the women with the continuous blood discharge. Blood status of the woman with the flow of blood and blood status of HIV/AIDS both result in exclusion from the community. May young girls in Africa like the daughter of Jairus and married women have sero-converted to HIV/AIDS when churches refuse to talk about human sexuality, HIV transmission, and prevention except abstinence. Abstinence does not work in our culture, and it does not work in a culture where women and young girls do not have control over their own bodies.

African feminist theologians have criticized the churched for ignoring any attempts to fight HIV/AIDS stigma, but it has promoted stigma with the notion that HIV/AIDS is God’s punishment for sin. This is the same strategy that most of the churches practiced against gay men in the US in the first two decades of the AIDS pandemic.

Where did the African churches learn these theologies of sin management and stigmatizing AIDS as sin? From the US and European churches that established missions to Africa. For example, Ugandan government’s attempt to impose the death penalty on gay men originated from such churches as IHOP, International House of Prayer, and its missionaries to Uganda.

When you are excluded from church and from tribal life in Africa because of HIV/AIDS, you are socially dead. And you are cut off and impoverished further with little opportunities for work. And you die. And what happens to your children? What happens when your husband dies and you are too weak to work and bring in food for your children. Where is the church? Absent and separated from the reality of suffering from HIV/AIDS.

I wrote in my first book:

A leather jacket of HIV+ individual reads, “God is HIV+.” The inscription asserts God’s solidarity with HIV-infected people, their marginalization, and suffering. Queer Christians witness in their in their love-making, “To reject people living with HIV illness is to reject God.”….

In the 1990s, I and a growing number of churches in America realized that Christ was living with HIV/AIDS and that our churches had HIV/AIDS. We acted up when churches called us sinners. Many were shunned and excluded from churches because they were gay men living with AIDS. Where was Christ? Certainly not with the churches who showed no compassion.

African feminist theologians are acting up and are claiming the Compassionate Christ. I want to read you a quotation from Dr. Muse Dube, a biblical scholar who gave teaching in the university to devote her time as activist to fight AIDS in Africa:

We, the church of this era, will ask, “When Lord did we see you sick with AIDS, stigmatized, isolated and rejected, and did not visit or welcome you in our homes? When Lord did we see you hungry, naked and thirsty and did not feed you, clothe you and give you water? When were you a powerless woman, a widow and an orphan and we did not come to your rescue?” The Lord will say to us, “Truly, I tell you, as long as you did not do it to one of the least of these members of my family, you did not do it to me.”

I say Amen to her and all those Christian feminists who act up and will not tolerate the sin management strategies of church that silence women and others about the HIV-status. It is not safe to say you are HIV+ or living with AIDS, you shunned by your community and by your church.

Dube repeats the words of the compassionate Christ in the gospel. Jesus broke all sorts of boundaries because he believed that there were no outsiders anymore in the reign of God. Nobody is outsider, everyone is to be considered included. Inclusivity is the ultimate message of God’s grace: that is, Christ is in everyone. Gospel based compassion tolerates no outsiders. As churches in the US began to hear the gospel in the lives of gay men living with AIDS, they realized the harm committed by themselves and other churches towards people living with HIV/AIDS because they imposed the stigmas of sinner, unclean, and outcast. They abandoned the moral theologies and codes as they saw the face of Christ in folks dying and the love they shared with companions and friends. Compassion cries out to look with the eyes of Christ and see those suffering and labeled sinner and see Christ. Compassion, and the compassion Jesus invited his disciples to practice, included hospitality and radical inclusiveness into the community.

The prophetic edge, and the most dangerous memory of Jesus for us today, is radical inclusivity. Gospel inclusivity tolerates no outsiders. This is difficult to practice. My prayer for African-feminist theologians is continue the path of empowered activism, to speak up against patriarch sin management strategies of churches and be as bold, to ACT UP and break the rules, no longer remain silent and exercise their power to speak against the prime cause of the spread of HIV/AIDS—the African churches.

I want to remind of the final words of Rev. Joe Shore-Goss sermon when he came back from the World AIDS Conference:

The future of HIV reduction and a better world is if we can teach everyone that there is no need for boundaries. If the world could only say no matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey you are welcome here. Then to look into our neighbors eyes, the most marginalized, the most scared and frail and say “what can I do to help you make your life better.” For these lessons, these lessons of love and acceptance can only come from within their own culture and their own community; otherwise, it is just the west imposing their liberal beliefs upon them.

But his words are not only for other areas afflicted with HIV/AIDS, they are for us if we are to prevent ever again what happened to gay men with HIV/AIDS or any other group stigmatized as outsider, branded as sinner, and excluded  The Compassion of Christ lives in you!