Joy in Our Purpose
Debbie: Hey, good morning, everyone. Welcome to the table. Thank you, Maggie. I am Debbie Manning. I'm one of the co-pastors here at the table. And Justin, my co-lead is down at the Pride booth today. Did anybody have a chance to get down there yesterday? We want to welcome anyone who met us at the Pride booth.
We've been doing it for about five years. Could we give a little hand to the Baakers, Sara and Hannah, for putting it all together every year? Every year. Patti, I don't know. Do we have a few pictures from-- there they go. OK. We were at the booth, and I don't know, thousands of people down at Pride. And it is really beautiful and kind of fun and funky and some holy moments. But what we realize is what we have in common with all the different booths down there is that people are trying to create a space for people to belong. And that certainly fits with who we are, that all belong and all are loved. So that was such a fun weekend. Welcome if you are visiting for the first time from Pride weekend.
Hey, a few announcements next Sunday, which is the day after the 4th of July. So for those who aren't up at their cabins and on the lake, we will be meeting instead of here, we will be doing a little worship service and a lot of fun at Beards Plaisance. That is the pavilion. If it's kind of the northwest-ish side of Lake Harriet, you see the tennis courts were right above there. Maggie Keller will be bringing the good word. And we will have some music and games and bring your own food, because we're going to be picnicking after. So please join us. Invite friends. We'll hope(...) for a beautiful day. Maybe not such a rainy one, but a beautiful one. So we'll do that as well.
The other thing is, many of you know, some, this might be new news, but we are having our very first vacation Bible school this summer. Yes, we have grown so much with all of our kids that we decided to give it a try. So this week is the last week to sign up for that. So if you have kids between the-- give me the-- four years old to fifth grade. Please go online. QR code, and you can sign them up. It's going to be so much fun. Marta, Caitlin, they are rocking out with all the plans. And Ben will be there. And Justin and I and everybody else and Maggie, maybe you'll be there. I don't know. Yes, she will. So we're going to have fun that week. So please go online and sign your kids up that first week in August for vacation Bible school.
I want to take just a moment. Hannah Baaker, I'd like to invite you up to the stage. Many of you know Christian Ankrum, who had been our worship director leader for probably close to 15 years, back at when The Table was at Christ Presbyterian Church. He left last fall. And we have a gifted, talented, wonderful member congregation who stepped into that gap and stepped in beautifully. And she arranged all our songs and got the musicians. And she led week in, week out. And I just wanted to have us all give Hannah a big thank you for stepping in in this space where we need to go. Many of you know if over the years, whenever Hannah is leading a song, especially if it's bluesy at all, you will look at me and I will be going, looking at her wife, going, oh my gosh, because she's so, so darn talented. So thank you, Hannah, for sharing your talent with us. Thank you.
And then I just wanted to announce, officially moving forward, that Ben Richter. Ben, stand up so people can see you. We'll be our leading us in worship every Sunday. Ben has graciously stepped in as well. And we're so grateful for your leadership in that. And we are-- Hannah, you continue to be our lead vocalist whenever we can have you. We want you up there. So we're great with that, too.
Before I introduce our Cody Sanders today, I wanted to just have-- I'm going to have you all sit for a moment under this blessing for Pride Month. If you were at our Pride event on Wednesday, you heard this. It's a blessing. Many of you know who Meta Herrick Carlson is. It starts with a little bit of a blessing she wrote. I wove in a little bit about who we are as the table. And so please hear this blessing as we close up Pride Month.
In this Pride Month, we give thanks for the holy work of reclamation and joy.
Blessed are you who name the codes and platitudes the church uses to comfort the comfortable. You've been welcomed, but as portions of yourself, as fragments of a person, into limitations of sacred love.
Blessed are you who challenge simple binaries and good theology in the image of God.Your courage and your faith magnify the creator's delight in your true and unique selves, a gift to the church and to the world.
Blessed are you who keep showing up with questions, with scars, with joys, with hope, with stories that some tried to silence and love that refuses to be made small.
Blessed are you who are still finding your way home to yourself. Blessed are you who have made room for others along the way and for those who have chosen truth and tenderness and courage when the world of the church offered fear instead.
Blessed are you who reclaim your whole self, your body, your story, your name, your love, your faith, your joy.
Blessed are you who have refused to let shame have the final word.
And blessed are you who have made a way where there was no way, who have turned survival into celebration, and who have taught the church more fully what love can be.
This month, may we celebrate the beautiful diversity of LGBTQIA plus lives and loves. May we honor the elders, advocates, artists, parents, friends, and chosen family who've made room for others to live more freely and more truthfully.
May our joy be more than a moment of celebration. May it be an act of resistance. May it be a reclaiming of what God has always called good. May it be a witness that every person is made in the image of God worthy of safety, dignity, belonging, and love.
May we be a community, practicing the ways of Jesus by creating space for all to belong and to be loved. And may our tables be wider, are welcomed deeper, our love more honest, and our courage more generous.
Beloved, you belong. Amen.
And with that, I'd love to invite Cody Sanders. Cody was our interim pastor for about 11 months, kind of the fall of 2024 into the following year through last August in 2025. He is a pastor, the Reverend is a pastor. He's an author. He's a professor. He's got it all. And he has so beautifully loved and served this community. And we're excited to have him back. Thank you, Cody. Thank you.
Cody: Really good to be back with you. Still feels like a home to be in this place with you. The scripture reading this morning is from 1 Peter 2, 7 through 10.
"This honor, then, is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, the stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner and a stone that makes them stumble and a rock that makes them fall. They stumble because they disobey the word as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the excellence of the one who called you out of darkness into God's marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you're God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy."
First Peter isn't one of the more well-known or beloved books of the New Testament. It's sometimes hard to read because it can be rather rigid and prescriptive and kind of harsh in its tone, which I imagine may be one of the reasons it was selected as a scripture in this series, as it has been used for some very harmful purposes over the course of history.
Has a lot to say about enduring suffering, but even those messages can sometimes rub us the wrong way. It's the book where passages like, "Be subject to every human authority, and slaves be subject to your masters, and wives be subject to your husbands," comes from. And a long way from the anti-imperial tone of many texts in the New Testament, First Peter admonishes its reader to, quote, "Fear God, honor the emperor."
So it's important to get the context upfront. It's a letter addressed to a group of early Jesus followers who were trying to find their way in the world, to form an identity as a people. And they were doing all of that amid intense scrutiny and persecution.
And one strategy that many people who have faced persecution from age to age within a social and political situation that's hostile to their group, often employs is a strategy of respectability. It says something like, "Just be good citizens so you don't draw unwanted attention. Show how good you are by your obedience." This message is not the major thrust of the New Testament's way of navigating life in the shadow of a violent empire. But it is the prevalent message to congregations who were receiving the letter of First Peter. And it's an understandable impulse, even if it's one we want to push against. The recipients of this letter were not the elite of society. And they were forging an identity that ran against the grain of both the empire and its norms and the religious landscape of their day.
But it's also a good passage for Pride Sunday. Because First Peter opens like this: “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the exiles of the dispersion.” And for many queer and trans-Christians, the image of exiles resonates with experiences that we have had in the world and even amid the body of Christ. And queer and trans-Christians have had to navigate this temptation toward respectability amid an oppressive religious and political landscape, too. Sometimes succumbing to it. And at other times, throwing off the weight of respectability for a more audacious queer way of faith.
But one point of the letter of First Peter insists upon-- and this is one I want you to hear really clearly. Because I think you also insist upon this truth. It is the centrality of the church as the gathered body of Christ that plays an absolutely essential role in our participation in the way of Jesus.
And that truth has animated the lives of LGBTQ Christians for generations, too. Think of how easy it would be for queer and trans people to just reject the church wholesale, to just walk away. And of course, many have needed to do that, either for a time or for a lifetime, in order to extricate themselves from the consistent retraumatization of the religious violence that's been inflicted upon them. And the ages of spiritual violence and religious trauma that has been visited upon queer and trans souls for generation to generation would be enough to warrant a strong separation in our lives from the church. But that isn't the story of queer and trans faithfulness. Queer and trans people, too, have insisted upon the centrality of the church and participation in that body as a part of our way of following Jesus.
There's a story that I told here, at least in part, in my very first sermon that I preached here on Pride Sunday, three years ago, I suppose, before I became interim. I'm going to tell that story again for two reasons. One is that I didn't tell you the story of the person who came to lead this particular congregation. The other is that we need to keep stories like this one consistently in our circulation lest we forget the stories of our queer and trans ancestors and the lessons they hold for us right now. It's the story of the first time a group of gay and lesbian people formed a church in resistance to their exclusion within the existing church structures. And the story goes like this:
At least one, possibly more, members of a Catholic parish confessed to their priest their own homosexuality, soliciting spiritual guidance from that priest. And the priest's response to them was that each week when one of the gay members of the parish approached the altar rail for communion, and the priest was passing out the elements to each person who knelt at the rail, when he came to one of the gay parishioners, he would pass them over and serve the next person.
And this happened week after week. And then a young man named George Hyde enters the picture. Hyde had been dismissed from a Catholic seminary that he was a student at because of accusations that a fellow seminarian had made against him that he believed Hyde had behaved inappropriately with another male student. So Hyde left the seminary, joined the Orthodox Catholic Church, and Hyde heard about this gay parishioner who had been denied communion every week down in Atlanta.
So Hyde wrote to this person, he found out his name from an associate pastor at this church who apparently was also concerned about this person's exclusion from the table of grace. And the reason he was excluded was that he would not confess that his sexual orientation was a quote, grave sin and an abomination that endangered his salvation.So Hyde reached out to this person, and he made himself available to the gay members of the Catholic parish in Atlanta. He offered them pastoral support through this experience of spiritual violence.
Eventually Hyde agreed to come down to Atlanta and stand beside this man at the communion rail. Hyde said that if either of us is passed by during communion, we will stay at the altar rail until the very end of mass as a silent protest against that exclusion. And that is precisely what happened. The priest denied both Hyde and the gay member of this parish communion as they knelt at the altar rail, and they refused to leave until the service was over.
After this, Hyde began meeting with the group of seven members of the parish on Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons in an apartment of one of the participants, and they held Bible study and discussion. And Hyde says that this is his words, this Bible study was to express opinions on how to coordinate in a harmonious doxology, spirituality and sexuality. Then the group grew to about 19, four of whom were straight members and others gay. And around that time Hyde had been ordained in the Orthodox Catholic Church, and the small group in Atlanta called him as their spiritual leader.
Then those who were excluded from the table of grace mounted an audacious faith-filled response by renting space in a hotel lounge down the street. And you can see this is the church, Sacred Heart Catholic Church, which they left and rented space in this hotel. That's George Hyde there in the middle, who eventually became a bishop in the Orthodox Catholic Church. They rented space in this hotel lounge. They pulled together some cocktail tables into a makeshift altar, and they founded what became known as the Eucharistic Catholic Church, a reminder of the sacrament that was once, but never again denied them.
And the Eucharistic Catholic Church didn't start in New York or LA or San Francisco. It started in Atlanta, Georgia, the heart of the American South in 1946. It was the first explicitly welcoming religious space for queer worshipers. But what's more remarkable is they broke with other exclusionary social norms of the day, forming a racially integrated community in 1946, Atlanta, Georgia, with queer members and straight members, some Protestant, some Catholic, some who just wanted a place to belong, with about 85 members by mid 1946. So within the first year of their founding, they had grown from about a dozen to about 85 members. The church then grew to 200 members by the end of 1947.
And I want you to note here that the first time that queer folks ever created a space of belonging for queer people to be a part of a church together, it was not only a space of spiritual flourishing for queer folk, it was a place of belonging that challenged the dominant exclusionary and prejudice discourses of the day, becoming a space of flourishing for everyone who needed a place to belong.This is indicative of queer spirituality.
And from 1947 to 1950, the congregation was frequently harassed through acts of vandalism. They had rocks thrown through their windows by segregationists who didn't really care that much about them being a queer church, but cared a lot about them being a racially integrated church. Hyde himself had a rock thrown at him and hit him in the head, and he held on to that rock for the rest of his life as a reminder of that day. They were the focus of at least two, maybe three demonstrations by the KKK. And Hyde notes that many of the people that harassed them through those early years were professed Christians. And the Eucharistic Catholic Church embodied a courageous faith that most of our congregations could never imagine embodying.
And this is why we need the stories of people like this, to put our individual narratives back into a larger narrative of collective belonging. And also, as stories that bolster a church's larger narrative of faith in a time when our own courage is being tested again and again as we stand against the dominant exclusionary narratives of our era.
Transgender sci-fi writer, Charlie Jane Anders, says visualizing a happier, more just world is a direct assault on the forces that are trying to break your heart. Anders continues, "We are shaped by our communities "for good and bad, and our communities define "the worlds we belong to." Queer and trans people have been very good at imagining a more joyous and just world. And if you are an LGBTQ person of faith in this world, and if you are an LGBTQ person of faith in this room today, the Eucharistic Catholic Church is a community that has shaped potentials for your own life now, even though you've never heard of them likely.
And I want to say this really clearly to those in the room who are queer and trans: Meet your ancestors. Celebrate their courage. Let their story be an assault on the forces that are trying to break your heart too. These are your people. You belong to them through time and space, and their story belongs to you.
The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone, and a stone that makes them stumble and a rock that makes them fall.But you are a chosen people. God's own people.
This passage is trying to help people understand who they are in relation to God. People who were nobodies. People who were of no status. People who were scattered about, exiles. People who were small, struggling communities being swallowed up in the big cities of the empire. People who literally had no households to belong to. And the message of this passage in 1 Peter is this: Now you belong to God's household. You are a chosen people. A royal priesthood. A holy nation. God's own people. In order that you may proclaim the excellence of the one who called you out of darkness into God's marvelous light.
And it is written to congregations. Not to individuals, because we were never meant to be solo disciples. We were always meant to belong to one another within the community called together by Christ. Which is why it has been such an act of profound spiritual violence for queer and trans people to be exiled from their communities of faith.
Even when we had no place to belong. Even when we had no status in church and society. Even when we had no household to belong to. Queer and trans followers of Jesus have had this promise to cling to. You belong to the household of God. Rejection is not a mark against you in the kingdom of God. And while suffering is a terrifying path for anyone to tread. You follow the voice of the one who called you out of darkness into God's marvelous light.
In his new book which you can see here, Born Again Queer, historian William Stell who's pictured here. Tells the story of several gay and lesbian evangelicals. The whole book is centered on gay and lesbian evangelicals who walked this path before us. And one of the stories is that of a man named Troy Perry. And I've known Troy Perry's story for a long time. But when I read William Stell's book I learned things about Troy Perry's story that I hadn't heard before. So if you want to reclaim some of the stories in this faith tradition, here's a good place to start.
In the rural South Georgia in the 1940s. 13 year old Troy Perry attended the service of a holiness minister named Aunt Lizzie. Sounds really interesting. She spoke in tongues. She healed the sick. She handled snakes. And at the end of this service that 13 year old Perry attended she placed her hands on Perry's head and spoke these words. God has his hand on this boy. And prophesied over him that God would call him to be a pastor. And a week later Perry preached his very first sermon at a prayer meeting in Aunt Lizzie's home. Perry then became a Baptist preacher at age 15. Later joined the church of God as a traveling evangelist.
At 18 years old he confessed to another minister that he struggled with same sex attraction. And the minister told him that he could solve that by marrying a good woman. So Perry married the minister's daughter. You can't make these stories up. Wild thing. So by 19 years old other leaders in the church had heard about Perry's homosexuality. They drove to where he was, put him in the car with them, told them that he had to leave and never return. He was excommunicated from the church that he had been serving. And he continued his ministry and his marriage. But by his mid 20s he was overwhelmed by depression and on the very edge of survival.
He was hospitalized for self-inflicted injuries and his memory of Aunt Lizzie's prophecy over him brought him back from the brink of his depression and he felt the presence of God flood him with peace and joy and he knew in that moment that God knew he was a gay and loved him as a gay man. This is not a message he had ever heard anyone else tell him. This was a message that he received from the presence of God in his life as he lay in a hospital bed with self-inflicted injuries.
So in October 1968, Perry had moved to LA, he had been working at Sears. He put an ad in the Advocate Magazine for a gay affirming worship service in his living room and 12 people showed up. There were eight friends that he already knew. There were three strangers and Perry's mother and they sang hymns together, acapella. They read a passage from the book of Job and then Perry served them communion from a glass candy dish that he had borrowed from his neighbor and a silver cup that belonged to his boss at Sears. And Perry said of this moment years later, looking back on it, he said, "There wasn't a dry eye in the place. "We all felt that we were part of something great." And this is something only a southerner could say so I'm gonna summon my South Carolinian here. He said, "God was fixing to move."
And that is exactly what happened. Two years after that service in his living room, the 12 people had grown to over 400 people and the newly named Metropolitan Community Church had launched eight other congregations across the US. By 1971, there were 19 congregations and 1200 members. By 1974, there were 69 congregations that included over 4,100 members and the MCC became the largest grassroots movement in LGBTQ history. God was fixing to move.
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood. Queer and trans people have lived out that sense of call(...) for generations in astonishing and even miraculous ways. Did we show the picture of Perry as we went on? Let's put his picture up there. That's Troy Perry. Queer people have fooled me. Queer people have forged a path through their own suffering and rejection to become sources of healing for others and communities of faith that summon exiles out of darkness into God's marvelous light. Sometimes in the direct circumstances that would be unimaginable to most of us.
Another story of a friend of mine, Jim Mitulski, who you'll see in this next picture. He's the one over here in the middle of that photo on the left. Jim was the pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco years later. He was the pastor there as a seminarian. He started as the pastor there in 1986. So think about what you know of San Francisco gay culture in 1986. This was in the midst of the devastating early days of the AIDS epidemic.
And the MCC church in San Francisco's Castro district was almost entirely gay and lesbian. Jim says this about the church in that era. He said, "It was a protest every Friday night "which turned into a dance party." Sounds like the kind of church I would enjoy. Except for the dance party actually, but a party. A party. Dance, whatever.
Nothing more encapsulates the title that you all chose, you gave to this Pride Sunday sermon, Joy in Our Purpose. That was the title that was applied to this. And I think this statement encapsulates it, a protest every Friday night, purpose that turned into a dance party, joy. And you cannot have the purpose of working and striving for justice without breaking into moments of wonder and joy. It is what will sustain you in that journey. In this era, about half of the city's 60,000 gay men had AIDS and there was no effective treatment in those early days. Jim said they were dying and in great pain and in some instances barely able to talk.
If you want to hear more about this church's story through the first 10 years of the AIDS epidemic, I recommend this podcast to you by a historian friend of mine, Lynn Gerber, When We All Get to Heaven, you can get to it with that QR code. Eight episodes, one of the best podcasts I've ever listened to. And I'm not the only one who thinks so because they also won a Peabody Award a few weeks ago.
Jim says, "By the time anyone realized AIDS was sexually transmitted, the damage was widespread. The disease could strike a fit, healthy young guy and he'd be dead in months. Our moods became darker, our hope dissipated." And he said, "I became kind of nihilistic. My capacity to sustain an interior sense of self-preservation waned. We felt like our world was dying and this is impossible to communicate if you weren't there."
The only treatment for HIV at the time required 36 pills a day. They weren't very effective. They made people really sick. People would come to church with their IV poles. People would not have the energy to sit up in the pews or they would lay down in the pews. At some point during the service, everyone's watch alarm went off because that was the time when everyone needed to take their AZT.
And the only thing that really helped with the nausea that the medication produced was marijuana.It reduced some of the pain, it helped some of the side effects, pressed the nausea, increased the appetite. And the city government of San Francisco just ignored marijuana use among gay men because they knew that they needed it. But there was a man who wanted to become the governor, he was currently the attorney general and cracked down on the marijuana buyers clubs overnight. He started to seize the assets of gay men who were dying of AIDS, who were taking marijuana for the side effects.
And Jim was conflicted about whether the church should step into this situation to begin distributing marijuana to men dying of AIDS. And he contacted a woman named Phyllis Nelson, who was a member of the church with a passion for justice. Her son Glenn and his partner Rob had both died of AIDS already. And Phyllis said to Jim, "Of course we will pass out marijuana "and I'll stand right next to you while we do it."
The city agreed that they would just look the other way,(...) they would not bring any charges against them, but they couldn't guarantee protection against the federal government. Jim said, "This was right after my own HIV diagnosis. "This was a change in me facing my own mortality "and it made me realize we're only here "as long as we're here. "What are you being so cautious about?"
He said, "My ministry changed right after that." So in 1996, they began to give out pot to AIDS patients in the church, right after communion and before the closing hymn of the service. Here's a photo at the communion table of Jim giving out a little baggie of marijuana to a man who needed it. You had to come with a doctor's note, no money could be exchanged, all the pot had to be donated, they had rules around it, but they instituted it as a part of the liturgy because as a priestly people, they were about the healing of those who needed healing.
This is a quote that I have looked at so many times, I'm gonna read it in full, this is from Jim, reflecting back on this time in the life of the church. He said: "I took a risk, I used my body, I acted on a belief that was motivated by my desire to provide healing and comfort for my friends, and I didn't know what else I could do, but this was something I could do, and I did it. And the risk was real, and the spiritual intensity was real, and the tangible relief for the people who used it was real." Then Jim says to us, "Let your acts of love guide you, even if it means great risk. The greater the love, the greater the risk, and you will never regret acts of great love."
This is the story of the queer and trans ancestors in faith who came before us with joy in their purpose. People who were nobodies, people with no status, people who were scattered about as exiles, people whose small struggling communities were being swallowed up in the big cities of the empire, people who literally had no household to belong to, who heard these words through the ages and believed them. Once, you were not a people, but now you are God's people.
Maggie: Thank you, Cody. Thank you for bringing those stories to our memories again, or for the first time. It is so important to remember our ancestors in the faith. I couldn't help but think, as you were telling us the story of the Eucharistic Catholic Church, I kept looking at our altar up here on which our communion elements sit, and I thought, these aren't two cocktail tables pulled together, and then I remembered, there is a cocktail table in the back, and the rear station has communion on it!
So my friends, if you are part of the queer and trans community this morning, please know, this table doesn't belong to the table, the church. It doesn't belong to any single one of us. This table is God's table, and you are God's people. And so this morning, as we move into this time of communion, you are all welcome. Any age, any creed, if you're here, you're welcome at this table. And so the way that we will do that together this morning is there's a line on the floor. If you're in front of the line, you'll come to the front station. If you're behind the line, you'll go to the back station.
And we have a special addition to communion this morning. We have a person of the queer community who will be standing with a jar of I kid you not, unicorn snot. It is glitter gel. And if you would like, you may be marked with a blessing. You can have it on your forehead or on your hand or arm, or you can pass, this is completely optional. But this is what we are doing at our Pride booth in Loring Park this weekend. We are giving blessings to queer folks, to transgender diverse folks, and to allied parents. And I'll tell you, that was the most meaningful part of yesterday for me, was receiving a blessing. And so we invite you to receive that if that feels meaningful to you today.
And so on the night in which Jesus was betrayed, he was with his friends, and he said, you are God's own people. And he gave thanks, and he broke the bread, and he said, this is my body. Do this in remembrance of me, and in the same way he poured wine into the cup, and he said, this is the blood of the new covenant, and it's poured out for all for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you eat, whenever you drink, remember me until I come again. So that's what we're going to do this morning. We're going to remember whose table it is, and we're gonna do it together.
There will be a member of our prayer team who will be in the back. If you need some prayer today, feel free to stop by and receive that. If you are able, stand in body or in spirit as we say the prayer Jesus taught us to pray:
Our God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and our glory forever. Amen.