At the Sydney Mardi Gras parade on 1 March 2008, an organisation known as 100Revs will make their way through Paddington to claim that the history of abuse, neglect and general inhospitality towards gay, lesbian and transgendered humans is worth apologising for.
Distance prevents me from being part of it, so here’s my personal contribution:
Do I stay or do I go? is a question young people in church ask themselves all the time. More often than not, in my experience, this question comes about because church is boring, it doesn’t give the space to ask questions about faithful living, it places weird demands, it plays weird music etc.
However, for those who are questioning their gender or their sexuality, there are more difficult questions at stake. Questions like, “Does God love me?”, “Why would God do this to me?”, “Why am I drawn to sin?”, “Why me?” and “Am I just a plain bad person, a sinner?” taunt us, stalk us and ensure that we are not safe to grow with integrity, share with people who we are, or participate fully in a community of the faithful.
And as a minister in these churches, I am sorry.
As a minister in the Uniting Church in Australia, I wish that I could apologise to you on behalf of the Uniting Church, but nobody has given me the power to do that. So, by the authority given to me by nothing more than my own baptism, I wish to speak on behalf of all Christians everywhere.
For too long we as Christians have been halted by our own sense of moral self-righteousness, intellectual snobbery and biblical misunderstandings to be what we are truly called to be. Some of us have churned out phrases from the Bible in order to shame others into submission to a rule that serves nothing but their own self-righteousness, and in doing so ignore what the same book calls them to do. Some of us have tried to be lenient, saying you can be who you are, as long as you are celibate, as long as you don’t “flaunt yourselves” in front of us, or as long as you relate to people like we do, and in doing so are saying that you can’t be who you are.
As I stand here talking I must recognise that I represent those Christians, because it is their church in which I was cared for and whom I am called to. I benefit from the heritage of mistakes that have been made for centuries.
But unlike those Christians I choose not to believe that queer sexuality or gender identity is just part and parcel of our fallen humanity, that we have to deal with and learn to live with. I choose not to believe that we are loved despite the fact we are queer.
Instead I choose to believe that queer sexuality and gender identity is part and parcel of the great and strange creation that is moving and changing every second, and in that God is living and rejoicing. I believe that we are as strange as a cyclone and as queer as a flower. I choose to believe that we are all queer and we are all loved.
And I believe that God doesn’t go to church on Sunday and wear a suit on Monday. God doesn’t have 2.3 children, two cars and a summer holiday in Portsea. God doesn’t go to university, work in a factory or cut your hair. God doesn’t have a beer on a Friday night and watch the footy. God doesn’t have a wife to cook him dinner and God doesn’t have a boyfriend to change her tyres. God is not male or female. God is queer.
And I am sorry that anyone has tried to tell you any different, in order to make you less like you and more like them. And I am sorry that from time to time, way deep down in my gut where nobody sees and nobody knows, that I don’t like that I’m a little queer too, and sometimes wish that I wasn’t. But I know that God loves us believers despite our transgressions, and will help us make things right. So I must choose to help make things right.
