gathering for the Charleston Pride parade, June 1, 2024

“Dismiss whatever insults your own soul!” (Mark 2.23-27)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

June 2, 2024

for Charles, Mark, David, Ann, Michael, Millard, David, Richard, Dennis, and Barbara, who taught me more of love, in many ways, than a lifetime in church

Buster and Terry came to the church with their wedding license in hand. They had waited for it a long time. The clerk told them she believed they were actually the first two men to receive a license to marry in South Carolina. She must have meant well, but her words were astonishing if you thought about them. It had taken the state a couple of centuries.

The two men had seen our rainbow flag and reached out to me. They had both grown up in church before being ostracized for their identities as gay men. So they had lived most of their lives outside of church, but they still felt a connection. Not to the institution per se, but to a few of its values they learned as children. Love, kindness, and compassion, along with a sense of something greater than themselves.

We met to conduct their wedding on a quiet morning. It was just us, a couple of witnesses, and the light falling through the stained-glass windows. I knew from hearing their story that they had been together for decades. Yet the truth of it made us all laugh during the vows. When I invited the grooms to repeat after me, they made minor additions. For richer and poorer, said Buster. But we’ve already been rich and poor. In sickness and in health, said Terry. And we’ve been those things, too. They wiped the tears away as they considered their many years of love and partnership. So their wedding felt less like a celebration of what was to come than a blessed recounting of all that had been. At the end they kissed, said I love you, and then I was able to say, to our shared delight, that they were legally married.

At the end of the short ceremony, they thanked me and asked that I share their gratitude with the church. I told them they were most welcome and would always have friends at Circular. But what I really wanted to tell them was how sorry I was. And how angry.

Friends, I am very proud to pastor here in a place that hangs pride and transgender banners and, not only that, budgets to replace them every time they are defaced or stolen. I am proud to be in a church that has long celebrated our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ family, who are essential parts of our church community and its leadership at every level. I am proud to march in parades, officiate at weddings, lobby for equality, and amplify LGBTQ+ voices. . .

But I am also very angry that we have to do any of these things at all. I’m angry that in a city with this many churches, the vast majority either won’t say anything about equality or will actively discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. I’m angry that so much religion fails the basic test of love. I’m angry that I grew up in a Baptist tradition that I had to reject in order to love and accept my friends.

You may wonder, then, how I ended up as a pastor in a church. Honestly, I have often wondered that myself. The best explanation I have was recently given by my dear friend, The Rev. Nelson Rivers, when he found himself appointed to a school district committee after showing up for months to criticize the school board. It’s proof, he said, that God has a sense of humor. But, of course, it’s a little more than that.

I’m here because I’m a philosophical pragmatist. I’m interested in how we might put things to use. Religion, as we know, can be used in incredibly harmful ways. Yet it can also be an instrument of powerful transformation. Buster and Terry were a case in point. After a lifetime of rejection, they returned to church with a wedding license. Sure, they saw the rainbow flag and knew that this was probably a safe church to visit. But they took the risk of stepping inside, standing at the front of the sanctuary, and receiving the blessing of a pastor on behalf of a tradition they had known since childhood. And it didn’t validate their love or partnership, life had already done that, but it brought them full circle in a way. It was powerful for them. I cannot honestly say if those men experienced any kind of deep healing from having their wedding in a church, but I can say that I did. I can say that this church was made a little better by their presence. Because for a moment we all got it right. Love was the thing, nothing else.

Of course, I’m not the first one to feel this way. Jesus himself was a critic of religion any time it lost the point, which was surprisingly often. This morning’s reading came to mind when I thought of Pride Sunday and remembered Buster and Terry.

In the story, Jesus and his followers were traveling on the Sabbath and picked ear of grain as they went. Religious leaders saw what they were doing and challenged them. It was forbidden, they said. Jesus replied with a story about their shared ancestor David when he had once been hungry, one-upping them with an example of when it was all right to bend the religious rules. But then Jesus changed his tack and simply got to the heart of the matter. The example of David, the old sacred stories, the religious rules, none of those things were as important as people’s lived experience.

Jesus said to them, Look, the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. In other words, maybe Jesus was a pragmatist, too. He wanted to know about the effects of our ideas. About their application. About lived experience. What is religion even for, he was asking, if it would criticize hungry people taking some food? Or, we might add, loving people making a partnership? Beautiful people marching in a parade? All people being themselves?

It’s a beautiful thing to have a religious text that criticizes religion. Choose to hear it how you will. Earnestly. Curiously. Playfully. I choose to hear it angrily. I think Jesus, like so many of us, had enough of religion failing the basic test of loving our neighbors.

It brings me back to a final word as I think of all the work the church still has to do. This word comes not from Jesus, whose clear critique we’ve already heard. Rather, it comes from one of our great American poets, Walt Whitman. In the Preface to “Leaves of Grass,” his book-length series of poems that is as thrilling and ecstatic as a Pride parade, Whitman appeals to conscience. This is what you shall do, he begins, and the words may be familiar because we have read them in church before. You shall love the sun and the earth and the animals, despise riches, give alms. Whitman continues with a litany of admonitions, each more outlandish than the last, before pausing and getting to the heart of the matter himself:

Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem. . .

And that’s a word for us today. Dismiss whatever insults your own soul. Just dismiss it. You do not have to answer to anybody. You do not have to justify yourself with a religious rule or book. You do not have to accept the judgments of others or go along with an oppressive and shameful status quo. No, you can dismiss each of these insults to the soul. Live your own wild, unmatched, and singular life. And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

In the words of the founding teacher of our tradition, this religion was made for people, not the other way around. And it’s all right to be angry when the church gets it wrong. It’s also all right to refashion the whole thing with banners, parades, weddings, and an expanded and expanding sense of beloved community for everybody. Love willing, we are on our way to making this church a great poem, too.

Amen.