How Much Do You Love?

This week has been a pretty big week for the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian and Transgendered community as the U. S. Supreme court heard not just one, but two crucial cases that addressed Marriage Equality for Gay and Lesbian Americans.

It’s a day that many of us never thought we’d live to see.

During his second inaugural address, President Obama mentioned the importance of equality for the gay community, some of us old activists got a little teary, because frankly, many of us never thought we’d live to see the day that the sitting President of the United States would ever say anything positive about gay people.

Denis and I were discussing this over coffee, at the Queen Bean, with a young friend of ours. We talked about having been fired for being gay, about having beer bottles chucked at us during gay pride marches.

And for me this conversation really brought a lot of my adult life into focus.

I came out as a gay man during the height of the AIDS crisis. I came out in a world where I could be fired, thrown out of my apartment and arrested for dating who I was attracted to.

And now we have a President who openly supports gay marriage and two court cases being considered by the U. S. Supreme Court.

And yet it’s not a done deal.

The thought, the dream of full equality for myself, and those in my community, is almost too precious to me to look at fully, for fear of disappointment.

Today for our Christian friends and neighbors, it’s Easter.

This is a big holiday for them, as so much of their theology rests on the story of Jesus’s death on Good Friday and his resurrection on the 3^rd day, Sunday.

I want to talk with you a little about this story.

But first a little background information.

For those who are not familiar with the Christian New Testament, it was assembled in its current form in the year 383, or 397 at the latest.

In this Christian New Testament, there are 4 Gospels. Three of them are known as the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. John is the Gospel written wholly in Greek, and follows a lot of the same material that are shared in the other three gospels.

All of the Gospels are meant to have been recorded by an Apostle of Jesus of Nazareth, though scholarship suggests that the earliest that John could’ve possibly been written was 50A.D, and more likely closer to 100 A.D.

There are some differences though between the Book of John and the other Gospels, one of them being that Jesus had a brother named James.

Another difference, one that I want to lift up today, is the existence of “The Beloved Disciple.”

When I first heard rumors and whispers about the question “Did you know that Jesus was gay?” I will admit to you a certain irritation. I thought, “what deranged gay activist decided to start this rumor just to upset the Christian Right?!?” The very statement “Jesus was gay” felt like a hand-grenade to be lobbied into the crowd of those who were already working diligently to take my rights away.

And then I read a book by a professor from the Chicago Theological School, a straight, married grandfather, Methodist minister, theologian and scholar of the New Testament, Rev. Theodore Jennings. Jennings’s book is called “The Man Who Jesus Loved.”

In it Jennings makes a very compelling argument that Jesus may have had a same sex, intimate relationship with this person, known as the Beloved Disciple, who many say is the very man named John, who wrote the book of John.

In the Gospel of John, the very last act that Jesus of Nazareth does before dying, is that he transfers the responsibility of the care for his mother, Mary, to this Beloved Disciple.

John 19: 25:

25 Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 26 When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman,[b] here is your son,” 27 and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.

After this, Jesus says “I am thirsty” and he is given sour wine to drink, and then the last recorded words of Jesus of Nazareth are “It is done,” and thereafter he dies.

Rev. Jennings posits that this transfer of responsibility for the care of his mother, Mary, when Jesus has at the very least one brother, James, is the first indication that the question of the relationship between Jesus and the Beloved Disciple warranted further investigation.

By now you may be wondering why I’m giving a sermon about gay Jesus on Easter.

I want to step away from that question, because I was using it as sort of a set up to the real question for this morning “What do you love so much, that you can’t look at it in it’s fullness?”

After Jesus’s death, according to the Gospel of John, it is the women who go to take care of the body of Jesus, which is the completely normal thing for women to do in the first century in the Middle East.  It is the women who discover the rock is rolled away from the tomb, and they who tell Peter, aka the First Pope, and the Beloved Disciple that the body is missing.

Naturally, Peter and the Beloved Disciple rush to the tomb, and the Beloved Disciple arrives there first.

From the Gospel of John,

³ So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. ⁴ Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. ⁵ He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. ⁶ Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, 

Even though the Beloved Disciple reached the tomb first, he did not go in, he merely peaked in. It has been suggested that the Beloved Disciple didn’t go in before Peter, out of deference for Peter’s position as the man who Jesus designated to carry on his work.

It has also been suggested by some scholars that the Beloved Disciple did not go in out of fear.

If Jesus and the Beloved Disciple were really a beloved pair, what would stop the Disciple from rushing in first as he clearly, according to the text, beat Peter to the tomb?

Have you ever been in the position that you are so in love with an idea, with a person or a dream that could not really bear to see it in its full truth?

Have you ever ignored little red flags in your head about taking a job, or going on a second date with someone, because the job or the person was so appealing?

If you have, you have let yourself not see someone in their fullness.

I think this is what happened to the Beloved Disciple.

Think about it for a moment.

Consider yourself in the position of the Beloved Disciple, as expressed by Jennings, for a moment. This man you love, who you believed in, who spoke of eternal life, and wanting you to stay alive until he returned….. this man just died two days ago, while you stood at the foot of the cross where he was placed, in the hot sun. You stood with the women, the only man who went to the foot of the cross with them, and he looked down at you and said, “Take care of my Mother.”

What if he was wrong? What if eternal life isn’t his? What if he died, and now if you look into that tomb, and you see his body, he really is dead, and there is no future for the two of you.

If that’s true, what else had he been saying that wouldn’t be true?

You have followed this man for a couple of years, believing in his message of love, and now it all crumbles.

Or….

What if what he said was true. What if his body is gone because he ascended to Heaven to be with his Father? What if there is eternal life, and what if I live eternally, but I don’t see him anymore?

What if the Beloved Disciple was too enmeshed in grief, fear and possibility to face this tomb, which surely force him into some sort of conclusion?

When have you been in a situation where you have loved too long, too deeply, too completely that you cannot face a truth about the one you love?

Or an idea so precious to you, that you are both afraid of it coming true, and it not coming true, because you’ve spent so long, so many days, weeks, years in the liminal space of that question, that the space between answer a and answer b has itself has become comfortable, and the resolution to that question is not comfortable, and not familiar.

And the resolution to that question may not, in fact, be the resolution you desire.

And to live in the liminal space is safer than having to deal with the possibility that what you wanted won’t be coming to fruition.

Now that the U. S. Supreme Court has heard the arguments on the Cases of California’s Prop 8 and the Federal Defense of Marriage Act, the liminal space for these two questions seem to have an expiration date,

a ticking clock,

and then the truth will have to be faced.

A bolder, stronger person may have done what Peter did, he charged into the tomb, even though the Beloved Disciple beat him to the door.

But the Beloved Disciple is the one who may be easier to relate to, since his very human fear, kept him from charging in and having all his questions answered.

Can you relate to the Beloved Disciple may have been feeling, almost 2,000 years ago on an Easter morning?

Anticipation has the power to be filled with breathless anticipation, but also it can contain such heart wrenching anxiety.

Anticipation can be our companion to such frivolous questions like: “Will I be on time for this meeting?” and “I wonder if that sweater I saw last week is still on sale?” To questions like “What if I am pregnant?” and “Please, please, please, let the doctor say the word “benign.”

Or the question the Beloved Disciple may have asked so long ago “Is my Love for the all the ages, or am I now I alone?”

May, as you live your life, you take time to sit in the in between places, those liminal spaces where possibility, sweet or tragic possibility, lives.

For that space in between is also sacred.

As we wait for the decision of the Supreme Court, let us not forget to enjoy things that are happening between now and the when then, there is life to be lived, surprises do happen.

Today let us remember that to have someone, a friend, a cousin, a partner, love you is to have someone forgive you your bumps and bruises, your odd quirks, your shortcomings.

Is one form, one very human form, of redemption.

And perhaps it is true that to love and have been loved is a form of eternity.

May your days be blessed with the love of companions; friends and family collected along the journey of your days. May you, also be a blessing to them.

Amen.

© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry

Written for and Given to

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County,

March 31, 2013