Was Jesus gay and, if so, would it have mattered? Part 1

A question asked in grief

I miss preaching so much more than I imagined I would. When I retired nearly 4 years ago, I stopped preaching cold turkey after nearly 35 years, as a full time pastor, delivering at least one sermon per week in addition to weddings and funerals and holiday services, such as Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving Day. There were 5 additional years, before the 35, when I was a part-time student pastor, though still preaching on a weekly basis. A huge chunk of my life, therefore, was invested in envisioning sermons, coming up with titles for sermons, preparing sermons, delivering them.

The astoundingly popular and influential liberal preacher in the first half of the 20th century—Harry Emerson Fosdick—was pastor of Riverside Church in New York City and often a professor of preaching at Union Theological Seminary, kinda sorta next-door. Dr. Fosdick taught his students and others who wanted to learn from him that he believed excellence in the pulpit required about an hour of preparation for every minute of preaching to a congregation; he was preaching in an era when sermons were significantly longer than they are today.

Dang! I didn’t keep track of how much time I invested in preparing my sermons, but I think it would’ve been very close to Dr. Fosdick’s estimate. But, dang! In my earlier years of preaching, my sermons lasted about 30 minutes each, and over the years as attention spans of congregants shrank I learned from communication theorists that I needed to cut it back to about 20 minutes. I refused even to try to compute how all of that time added up to years given to actual sermon preparation and delivery.

At some point I got brave enough actually to ask my congregants what topics they wanted to hear addressed in sermons. If you don’t think that was a gutsy move, then you don’t know congregations. But in fairness, most of these people were listening to me Sunday by Sunday week in and week out, year in and year out; it occurred to me that they needed to be more involved in having a say as to topics wrestled with.

Once I began this practice, I didn’t offer to take on topics suggested to me every year, but most years I did. I typically would devote three months of a year to it. To make the process fair I always agreed to take whatever topics were suggested and not toss any I preferred not to consider; so the plan would be that a staff colleague or the worship committee would receive these recommendations and take the first twelve submitted. I got some doozies!

One year the collected topics were delivered to me, as always—anonymously. I should add that I did not know for sure who was attached to which topic. I glanced through that year’s collection as usual to begin making mental notes about how much sleep I was going to lose in the next three months. All three of my full time congregations were filled with academics and other smart theological nonconformists. Just so you know.

My eyes came to rest on one of those sermon-subjects-to-be that forced my eyes wide open and my jaw to drop. It was: Was Jesus Gay, and If So Would It Have Mattered? All of my congregations were gay affirming so addressing issues of concern particular concern to LGBTQIA members and advocates wasn’t unusual, but bringing Jesus into the conversation in this way was something I had not given thought to. I was pretty sure even in an open and affirming congregation that there was no way I could deal with this matter in a way that would avoid ruffling all feathers. A preacher unwilling ever to ruffle any feathers isn’t worth her or his salt, but a savvy preacher would not want alienate too many people at a time.

Not that I needed to know or, as I mentioned, was supposed to know the source of this hot topic, I was pretty sure I did know who submitted this one; and I would later discover my hunch was correct.

At a time when an AIDS diagnosis was still a death sentence more often than not, I was still burying members and friends who died from that God-awful disease, that plague. One of my congregants had lost her son a few months prior to AIDS. She was rightly repulsed by those in too plentiful a supply, though not in our particular church, who claimed that AIDS was God‘s punishment on homosexuals and a rapid ride to hell. Loving mother that she had been all of her son’s fifty-something years she wanted the privilege of being able to envision her beloved son in God‘s more intimate embrace in the next realm and not eternally separated from God by anything—most particularly not by his sexual orientation.

(More to come.)