Proper 14B: 2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33; Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6:35, 41-51
The Rev'd Cameron Partridge
August 11, 2024 - 8 a.m. service
Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.
Last week David Mealy’s preaching took up the theme of truth-telling, and particularly the phrase “speaking the truth in love” from the letter to the Ephesians (4:15). This week our passage from Ephesians continues this theme: “Putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another” (4:25). The Pauline author references our baptismal connection as a collective belonging not only to Christ but also to one another. And this connection to one another mandates the sharing of truth with one another. Not in anger or slander, distortion or dismissal, as so much rhetoric in our country and our wider world engages today, but in kindness, even tenderheartedness, in forgiveness, in a love grounded in our belonging to, our bodily membership in one another (4:26-32). How radical the impact of taking up such a way of being, to ground our truth-telling in this spirit.
Pondering this theme of truth-telling over the past week and considered this morning’s readings, I was drawn again to a wonderful book by the queer theologian and ethicist Mark Jordan. As it so happens he was in town and came to church last Sunday. The particular book I’m thinking of his 2003 volume Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech. In it he invites us to think about truth-telling through the lens of incarnation, of enfleshment, a major theme of our gospel passage today and for the next several weeks. For Jordan, to speak grounded in our truths, acknowledging their plurality, is to speak as embodied people, as human beings of flesh and bone. He asks, “What can we do as Christian speakers to make our language more evidently incarnational? We can profess its vulnerability with confidence.” Immediately, I think of the Ephesians language of tenderheartedness. A confident tenderheartedness. But what might that mean? Jordan continues, “The confidence doesn’t point us toward a perfect language, toward invulnerable shapes for truth telling. It points us toward the flesh from which words come and the flesh toward which they go.”[1] Flesh is not invulnerable. It is mortal, caught up in a cycle of life and death. It is imbued with what ancients Greek and Latin writing philosophers often called “passions” – desire, anger, exhaustion, joy, exuberance. Flesh is gorgeously changeable and maddeningly painful. As Christians, speaking truth is always grounded in the incarnation, the Word not only made flesh but spoken as such, as Jordan emphasizes: “we keep on trying to speak truths in ever vulnerable words because we profess that God took flesh. Christian words imitate the incarnation. They are much-simplified icons of the incarnation.”[2] Our gospel passage uses deliberately provocatively speech to invite us, shock us, into consideration of Christ, the incarnate Word, as one who gives his life to and for us as bread. Bread that sustains us in the wilderness of our lives. Bread that nourishes our own enfleshment with life eternal (John 6:51). What more vulnerable truth to profess, to take into one’s own body in all its mystery, even as we cannot possibly comprehend its depths?
A final thought for this morning. To speak truth from our enfleshed reality is also to speak in the now from out of our accumulated experience. This week I have also been remembering my friend the Reverend Gari Green. I found out last Friday that Gari had died on July 25th after a brief but intense illness. I grieve that I did not know she was ill and was not able to say goodbye, even if across the miles. Gari was a deeply faithful, truth-telling, vulnerable and powerfully pioneering priest.[3] She is to my knowledge the first trans priest to have served openly in the Episcopal Church. She was outed by disgruntled parishioners just before Christmas in 1996, just as she was in the process of beginning to live into her truth — they followed her and her wife to a support group and then confronted her at church the following morning, telling her that if she did not tell the bishop they would. A despicable act. The bishop and congregation went on to decide that Gari had to leave. The bishop told her she would likely never work I the church again. But within months? Weeks? She was supplying at a small congregation that had not had a priest for a year. Before long, the congregation asked her to become their priest in charge. Apparently the bishop didn’t stand in their way, and she stayed there, working a secular job as well, until she retired in 2015. I got to know Gari through TransEpiscopal starting in 2005, not long after I was ordained. In 2009 Gari and I were both part of TransEpiscopal’s efforts at the 76th General Convention in Anaheim. There she testified in support of a canon change resolution that would ultimately pass in 2012. I’ll close with her testimony, her embodied truth.
“Good evening. I am a priest of the Diocese of Milwaukee ordained for 23 years. I am also a trans woman and began dealing with my issues of gender roughly 20 years ago. I speak in favor of resolution C0[6]1.
I could say the addition of these words are a matter of justice, which they are. I could say these words are standard ‘boiler plate’ nondiscrimination language used frequently by enlightened corporate entities across this country. I could even legitimately say the addition of these words to the Canons are ‘the Gospel.’ But I am not going to say any of these things, except in passing. I would rather place a more personal face on this issue.
As I worked through the challenging gift of being differently gendered and accepting myself as such, I grew in a personal sense of wholeness. As I grew in that personal sense of wholeness, I became more confirmed in my call to priesthood. What's more, my exercise of that call grew in both depth and fullness. I give thanks for the difficult challenge of coming to a place of peace with my differently gendered self and the strengthening of my sense of priestly vocation that resulted from the work I did.
I would urge the adoption of this language for all the reasons noted above so that the people who follow me into the ordained ministry of this Church do not have any undue barriers in their journey to wholeness of person and the exercise of their ministries in this part of Christ's Body.”[4]
Amen.
[1] Mark Jordan, Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 105.
[2] Telling Truths in Church, 104
[3] See TransEpiscopal’s tribute to Gari: https://www.transepiscopal.org/blog/remembering-the-reverend-gari-green
[4] The Rev. Gari Green, “A Difficult Blessing,” July 9, 2009: https://www.transepiscopal.org/blog/a-difficult-blessing
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