Bold Conversations + Transforming Courage

Transcripts are computer generated and may not be 100% accurate

Cody: Now I want to invite Dave Groth up to lead us in our pride blessing. These are a series of blessings written by one of our pastors here at The Table, J. Bates, read by LGBTQIA members of the community. And Dave, would you come and lead us in this morning's blessing.

Dave: God who our Christ called Abba Father

We thank you for the calling of fatherhood

In Pride Month, we especially thank you 

That so many gay, bisexual, queer, and trans men 

Have responded to this call in the complexity of their identities

We thank you for the diverse ways of living out that calling

We also thank you that the calling of raising up a child

Is not always expressed through parenthood

That you created all people

For nurturing love

Gentleness

And loving kindness

In your image 

And as such, so many will respond to this call 

As neighbor

As teacher

As mentor

As coach

As pastor

And so much more

We pray for the supportive fathers of LGBTQ+ youth 

Empower them to abide in love 

To exemplify Christ to their children 

And to stand strong against the lies & fear stoked by hate

We also lament for those who have been hurt by their fathers

Or by the father figures they once trusted

We especially lament for queer and trans folks in your world

Who have been shunned and shut out by their fathers

Those whose fathers refuse to see them or speak to them

In the wholeness of who you created them to be

You know our circumstances

Where human words fail 

We know your presence will bring

Things we know we need & those we don’t 

Amen.

Oby: Good morning. What a gift to be with you this morning especially. And thank you to Cody for extending the invitation on behalf of the table. Thanks to this community for your generosity of heart and for welcoming me already with such open and warm spirits. I am Oby Ballinger, a pastor in the United Church of Christ, and we'll share more about this ministry and this work downstairs in a forum after after worship but also as part of the sermon here. I will say as a pastor in the United Church of Christ I'm used to preaching for about 12 to 13 minutes, and Cody sent me a sample sermon that was about 30 minutes, and so watch out. No, I will set myself a little timer.

Let us pray. O God of tender mercy and compassion, we give you thanks for gathering us together in community this and every time we gather for the tables that convene us, for the dreams that are shared over them and for the hearts and souls and bodies strengthened at them. Feed us with the word of your spirit. Flow through us and lead us as you would have us go. May the words of my mouth and the reflections of all our hearts bring something to light of your realm come, your will done on earth as in heaven. Amen.

It was already a hard week, wasn't it? It was already a week filled with terrible headlines of attacks in Iran and Israel foreboding rampant militarism and the response in our nation's capital and in places all over the country. Our lungs here were choked with wildfire smoke and ever-present reminder of the ongoing climate catastrophe through which we're living.

And then the paralyzing heartbreak of the news of yesterday's assassinations when that broke. My husband and I were at home and as Pastor Cody has said, we have been in meetings and worked with Speaker Hortman and others in the legislature so knew up close some of the pain and anguish and the risks that they were taking and also the good work that they were seeking to be about.

And to hear more in drips and drabs over the day of what happened and it was it was all we could do to hold one another close and watch the press conference and feel like how now do we live? What what does this look like? How do we respond? Someone told me later in the day it felt like it felt like the day after the last presidential election when many of us were holding a sense of anguish and disbelief and wondering where is God calling us in the midst of this time.

It brought to mind that sense of despair and cynicism and hopelessness that is often with us at times and when we gather in church we draw strength from and try to live an alternative path. But it brought to mind this line of James Russell Lowell's poem "The Present Crisis" which was written almost 200 years ago but it includes a segment quoted by Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King sometimes. He would quote this passage from the poem talking about death and evil and hardships quoting the stanza:

"Careless seems the great Avenger. History's pages but record. One death grappled in the darkness, twixt old systems and the word. Truth forever on the scaffold. Wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown standeth God within the shadow keeping watch above God's own.”

That stanza makes the move from despair and forelornness pointing to a God who remains hidden but nevertheless present even in the face of truth on the scaffold wrong on the throne. And so we come to scripture now bringing all of this and we come to a story in John's Gospel the fouth chapter. John's Gospel tells of Jesus on a journey and the fourth chapter begins with several dozen verses describing John's encounter with a woman of Samaria. Here's how the story goes (John 4:1-30):

When Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John,” although it was not Jesus himself who was baptizing but his disciples he left Judea and started back to Galilee but he had to go through Samaria so he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there and Jesus tired out by his journey was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water and Jesus said to her "Give me a drink." His disciples had gone to the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans. Jesus answered her "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you give me a drink you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." The woman said to him "Sir you have no bucket and the well is deep. How will you draw water? Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?" Jesus said to her "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water it that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." The woman said to him "Sir give me this water so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water."

Jesus said to her "Go call your husband and come back." The woman answered him "I have no husband." Jesus said to her "You are right in saying I have no husband for you have had five husbands and the one you're with now is not your husband. What you have said is true." The woman said to him "Sir I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus said to her "Woman believe me the hour is coming when you will worship God neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know. We have come to worship what we have come to know for salvation has come through the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth who seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth." The woman said to him "I know that Messiah is coming who is called Christ. When he comes he will proclaim all things to us." Jesus said to her "I am he the one who is speaking to you."

Just then his disciples came they were astonished that he was speaking with a woman but no one said "What do you want or why are you speaking with her?" Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done. He cannot be the Messiah can he?" They left the city and were on their way to him.

May God add understanding to our hearing of this sacred word. John begins the story here with a bit of biblical geography and a puzzle built within it. John's gospel introduces this encounter by describing how Jesus went was in Jerusalem, leaves Judea and goes north again to his home territory of Galilee. And John writes that Jesus had to go through Samaria to make this trip but that's just not the case. Any reasonable traveler between Judea and Galilee would have used either a coastal route along the Mediterranean or an inland route along the Jordan River. Both are well-established paths of travel and trade, easier to navigate than the high hill country between them and to the east which was called Samaria. So when John writes that Jesus had to go through Samaria, that's like saying a person traveling from Minneapolis to Moorhead had to go through Mankato. It makes no sense geographically. There's a better way which clues us into a deeper purpose in Jesus’ actions.

Jesus does have to go through Samaria but it has nothing to do with geography. He must encounter and affirm another unlike himself, a follower of a different faith but someone on a similar quest for spirit and truth. In the heat of the day when the disciples are off buying lunch, Jesus is approached by a woman while he's at Jacob's well. She's apparently an outsider in the community and we know this because she's likely not permitted to draw water at the sensible customary time which would have been in the morning with other women of the village. From her conversation with Jesus we learn that she's been married five times and the man she's with now has not married her. The most likely biblical reason for this is that the woman is unable to bear children so one man after another divorces her and turns her out to be homeless.

She lives with broken dreams in a phrase describing her by writer Edith Sinclair Downing. She's a woman who's been abandoned often who has learned to fend for herself, put up a stiff upper lip and act like she's got nothing left to lose. Neither Jesus whom we've known well in our lives nor the Samaritan woman behave according to fear of the other even though they were polar opposites in some key ways and in their connection new possibilities are born.

Their conversation breaks the norms and the conventions of culture in multiple ways. A woman talking to a man alone and you know what that means. He is a Jew and she's a Samaritan, he's a rabbi and she's a woman of unknown quality. Yet she and Jesus treat each other as equals. They have witty banter about the multiple meanings of water and worship. She offers him her bucket to draw literal water from Jacob's well and he offers her the living water of God's eternal love. Jesus wouldn't have had water, her kind, if she hadn't been there and she wouldn't have had the other kind. They each meet a need in the other by crossing the common cultural expectations that would have kept them strangers apart. They form community in an encounter of mutual honoring, of connection at the heart. In their life-changing conversation we glimpse the realm of God on earth as in heaven.

What the good news of Jesus Christ can open up, can lead into and by grace the Church of Christ which thousands of years later still seeks to walk in his ways can be one place in our society where people come together who have a great deal or who have only a little. Where people come to who are black, white, brown or another magnificent shade who live in town, people who live in the suburbs or people who live wherever their car is parked if they have a car. We each come to the table, to church from our own life experiences but are no longer defined by them. Encountering God here as the Samaritan woman did in the face of neighbor and stranger alike.

When the Church is at our best in these moments we're not divided from each other, we're not forever separated by fear and suspicion but are connected to form a new community called into transformative relationship with people of other backgrounds than ours. Here we pray and we trust here is a watering spot like Jacob's well where wounded hearts are connected to others for today's Jews Samaritans and everyone else. But you don't have to come into a sanctuary like this one to have these sort of transformative conversations because building diverse resilient courageous relationships is possible and necessary everywhere we go.

We've seen worsening stereotypes in the last several years and othering against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people throughout recent months with dangerous and deadly consequences. We just passed the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting that's been on our hearts and we're not safe as community members in every place we would go. In fact the worsening political climate is having consequences in our own lives.

The Trevor Project which is a national effort to reduce LGBTQ youth self-harm runs a hotline, a crisis hotline and reports that in the 24 hours after the most recent presidential election emergency calls to their crisis line went up 700%. That's our community, that's our babies, that's our siblings, our kids, our grandkids, that's our community. Queer youth and adults especially those who are transgender in this time recognize that the coming and current years of dominance by anti-LGBTQ forces threaten our deadly marginalization and legal erasure.

So after 15 years of leading churches in the United Church of Christ God has called me to do something new to step into this current moment. Four and a half months ago using my experience as a pastor and also as a community organizer I launched a new multi-faith, multiracial and statewide organizing effort for LGBTQ equality. I've called it PRISM after that little triangular object that makes visible the rainbow spectrum that's always present though hidden anywhere there is daylight. PRISM organizing likewise seeks to make visible the rainbow communities that are already present everywhere in Minnesota. We're already in every faith, place, race, speaking every language and from every community and zip code in this state.

PRISM organizing seeks to show that, to reveal that in more powerful and connected and effective ways. PRISM is faith conscious, is multiracial in design from the start and finding early success in gathering and lifting up more voices, faithful voices, advocating for the full equality of LGBTQ people like myself. In the early weeks of the legislature Minnesota faith leaders within PRISM testified against bills that would have banned trans athletes from participating in youth sports. Gathering other voices that to resist bills that would have forced trans inmates into much more dangerous PRISM housing.

We've been at queer Muslim Iftars and monthly organizing meetings in a synagogue. We've had LGBT community conversations in the Twin City suburbs Monticello and Duluth with more scheduled in Winona, Mankato, Cottage Grove, Northfield and Rochester and more beyond that. The point of these LGBTQ listening sessions is to gather community together in places that aren't often listened to. To say to the rainbow community and allies in places beyond the core Twin Cities, where do you find community here? What's hard about being you in this place? If we were to work on some things for our community to make our lives better, what would be on your wish list?

At those community conversations we ask those six to a table and then we engage that conversation as a broader room listening before we decide oh this is what every community across Minnesota needs. And before we finish the night each time we asked the gathered 20, 30, 50 people to share with each other what they recommend for affirming spaces, support groups, networks, businesses in the local community. Nobody in the room knows all the resources that there are but by the end of it we have created each time lists of all the businesses, support communities, soccer teams and groups, faith communities of support where LGBTQ people who live in greater Minnesota in the exurbs and the suburbs who are facing growing fear of isolation and targeting they have a greater sense of community and connectedness right where they are.

And then in the coming months and years we will keep staying connected with those leaders so when we need to stop something that's harmful or help along something that's helpful at the school board at the city at the county at the state level we will already be in relationship with one another. And that's begun with these courageous conversations around table where people show up just as they are with their hopes and their dreams their sorrows because everywhere the light shines there is rainbow community already ready to organize already develop leaders and already building power for the thriving of our communities everywhere.

So what will be possible if congregations and communities like this one continue to live out a full full-hearted full-throated embrace of LGBTQ people and what will happen if we keep strengthening movements like prism continuing to follow a divine calling to have bold conversations to grow transforming courage and to protect the full inclusion of God's LGBTQ beloveds. I see a future and I invite you to see with me a future where thousands of LGBTQ people across Minnesota and beyond recognize each other as protected and beloved as well within God's great rainbow covenant established from the very beginning and who experienced the sincere Christian commitment to love one's neighbor as oneself.

Our faith calls us to help advance pro-LGBTQ policies and to stop the efforts of those opposed to our equality that's what it looks like to live out our faith in the public realm working for God's realm come on earth as in heaven. Because of our commitment to neighbor love as Jesus taught we will work forever expanding inclusive justice creating a better community for everyone in every place regardless of race faith money sexuality or gender identity. Together we will build a multiracial and multi-faith arc of protection statewide and beyond to care for and extend God's sheltering and embracing love.

That's what I believe we're called into and it begins with having curious vulnerable and non judgmental conversations like Jesus and the woman at the well in Samaria. Where are we called next by the Spirit to have courageous conversations deeper wondering talks? We get a glimpse of who this woman becomes at the end of today's gospel lesson. After leaving Jesus she goes back to her village and to her people she tells them of this one that she's met and calls them to go find him for themselves. He is the Messiah they've been waiting for. She becomes an evangelist for Jesus spreading his message in a community that would otherwise have little to do with him.

A conversation this conversation has changed her life and turns her into one of the first evangelists in the Christian tradition and in John's gospel. Being our most authentic selves trusting ourselves with another in conversation is that enough to meet this moment to meet this time? Is that enough? Heaven knows. Heaven only knows. But I believe that is one meaningful substantial thing that we can do in this time and place individually and as a faith community like the table to be truly ourselves to shine ourselves and to make space and curiosity for another to shine across their difference.

The church is called to be its most visible inclusive authentic and powerful self in the face of the white Christian nationalism that warped this assassin's brain and faith to the point of committing murder. We are about living out and inhabiting a different way. That's what this whole series of Pride Sundays are about in the month of June. Learning for and calling forth from one another the courage to live out loud to seek transformation in our individual and public lives. Until a world exists where Christian doesn't automatically lead someone to presume deadly judgment.

I want to close with some lines from a prayer that has accompanied me throughout ministry. It's named after Archbishop Romero who was himself gunned down while seeking work for justice and liberation as a priest and an archbishop in El Salvador. The Romero Prayer named in his honor was written and I find it useful in connecting this moment of peril and challenge and wondering if what we do is enough to the great long vision. It includes the lines:

It helps now and then to step back and take the long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts it is even beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete which is a way of saying that the realm of God always lies beyond us. This though is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted knowing they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and to do it really well. It may be incomplete but it is a beginning a step along the way an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers not master builders. We are prophets of a future not our own. May God work in each one here and in each one far beyond here that each of us does the work before us uses our mouth our hearts our actions and our lives to serve as prophets of a future not our own. Amen.