Gay Years

A Sermon by Mel Harkrader Pine

Unitarian Universalist Church of Loudoun

October 11, 2003

There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole

There is a balm in Gilead to heal a troubled soul

- Adapted from the African American Spiritual

The Rev. Barbara Pescan is, by anyone’s standards, something of a star among Unitarian Universalist preachers. Last week Leslie Wright talked about the people in the back of the book – those credited with contributing to the hymnal. Barbara Pescan is listed four times back there for readings, and she’s not even dead yet. As a matter of fact, I’d peg her age at around 40 when the hymnal came out in 1993.

Barbara was asked in 2002 to deliver the sermon at the Service of the Living Tradition. That’s the Sunday morning service during General Assembly that’s attended by upwards of 4,000 UUs. It’s a showcase that honors ministers – marks their passages – and raises via the offering many thousands of dollars for the benefit of ministers and their families in need. Certainly it must be the greatest tribute to a minister’s preaching ability to be asked to deliver that sermon.

Barbara had been a friend and minister to me, so when I heard that she was giving that sermon – and for the first time it was going to be webcast – I asked Carol to watch it with me. I had once before seen Barbara – in a sermon that was particularly important to her – sing a couple of lines at the beginning and the end. I predicted, correctly, that she’d do that again, and it is in her honor that I sang today a slight modification of the opening lines of the African-American spiritual Balm in Gilead. The song is about healing, in spirit as well as in body.

I’ll tell you in a few minutes about the previous time I heard Barbara sing her way into and out of a sermon, but first I’d like to explain the title of this talk – Gay Years. It’s a phrase I once heard used about the rapid rate at which society’s norms have been changing around gay issues. So much has changed since the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York City, a gay male Unitarian Universalist minister once told me, that you have to use a special measure of time – “gay years, like dog years,” he told me. “One gay year is the equivalent of seven human years.”

That phrase struck me as remarkable, both for the power of the metaphor and for the self put-down. On one hand, the pace of change has been dizzying since the 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn that was every bit as pivotal for gay issues as the police blocking civil rights marchers trying to cross the bridge in Selma, Alabama, four years earlier. Thinking in today’s mindset, it’s hard for most of us to believe that at the time of the Stonewall Riots the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual still listed homosexuality as a disorder. That didn’t change until December 1973. And who in 1969 would have believed that the government of Canada would be recognizing gay marriages less than 35 years later?

But just as with the problem of racism, when you look through one lens, the changes seem monumental, but you can pick up another lens seeming to show how little has changed. The gay minister who talked about gay years still needed to put himself down. In the Washington Post just yesterday, there was an article about the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina expelling a church just for accepting two gay men as members and baptizing them.

The Social Action Committee very much wanted to do a service today about gay issues, and as they were looking for a speaker I came across a sermon I had delivered 10 years ago at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Reston on that subject. I thought it might be interesting – and the committee agreed – for me to revisit the issue from another decade’s perspective.

One of the things I learned when I researched my 1993 sermon was that there's a continuum of sexual orientation – with some of us at one end of the continuum capable of being attracted only to people of the opposite gender, some of us at the other end capable only of being attracted to the same sex, and the remainder in the middle with some degree of sexual ease with either gender. But wherever you are on the continuum, the predisposition is set either genetically, or at a very early age, and apparently is not subject to change.

In the middle of that continuum, I know two women who when growing up were each capable of feeling attraction to either gender, who each married a man and thought they were happily married, who each had children, who each were left by their husbands, and who found each other and have come together in a committed relationship. At the same-gender-only end of the continuum, I suspect, is the Rev. Barbara Pescan, the highly respected preacher I talked about at the start of this sermon.

In the early 1980s Barbara was the minister of a substantial-size UU church in the Chicago area when she entered into a committed relationship with a social worker named Ann Tyndall. Ann decided that she too wanted to become a UU minister, went to seminary and was ordained. Now there’s a built-in problem for any UU couple who are both ministers: It’s very difficult to live together and both follow their calling since there aren’t generally loads of UU churches in the same area needing a minister, and there are far fewer churches needing two.

So it has become common for couples who are both UU ministers to look for opportunities for co-ministry. This means that the two of them share one job. The ministers get to work with each other in their calling, and the church gets two ministers for the price of one. They each theoretically work half time, but in reality the church gets about a minister and a half out of the deal. The Reston church currently has a husband-wife team as co-ministers.

My first UU church was Community Church in New York City. Founded in the second decade of the 20^th Century by the Rev. John Haynes Holmes, who was also a founder of the NAACP, Community Church has a long and distinguished history in civil rights. When I joined in the mid-1980s, it still drew a large number of African Americans loyal to the legacy of Holmes. While the membership was (and still is) about 50% African-American, I used to joke that the “little old black ladies” ran the place. You could always count on one of them to hand you an order of service, to greet newcomers, to serve the refreshments, and so on. Many traveled in from their suburban homes to attend the church that John Haynes Holes built.

Bruce Southworth was and still is the senior minister there. Betty Baker was the interim associate minister as a search was under way to fill that position. I was Chair of the Denominational Affairs Committee and a member of the Church Council in 1986 when the Search Committee made its recommendation for associate minister – Barbara Pescan and Ann Tyndall as co-ministers. So here was Barbara, even then a well respected preacher, willing to share a junior spot with her partner so that they could live out their dream of being ministers together.

The usual procedure was followed. Barbara and Ann came to New York for a week of candidating – lots of meetings and other opportunities for the church members to get to know them – capped by a sermon on Sunday morning, after which the congregation held a special meeting to vote. If I remember correctly, two-thirds was the required majority to call a minister. So that was the other time I had heard Barbara sing at the beginning and end of a sermon. She sang a couple of lines from a Maya Angelou poem, and she and Ann delivered the sermon together. The subject was how you treat “the least of these,” a subject I plan to cover in a service a little later this year. I was extremely moved by the sermon. Barbara and Ann had obviously poured their hearts into it.

As the service ended, Betty, the interim associate minister, took Barbara and Ann to lunch as the members went downstairs for the meeting. As they were leaving, Betty asked me to come up to her apartment after the meeting and let her know how it went.

The next two hours was one of the most difficult periods I’ve ever gone through. I saw the community I had joined become a lynch mob and the place I considered safe turn into a hanging tree. Many – not all – of the little old black ladies who were the backbone of the church rose to denounce Barbara and Ann for their sexual orientation and for wanting to “flaunt” it by openly working together in co-ministry. Just about every word spoken against Barbara and Ann echoed the kinds of things said about African Americans a decade or two earlier.

When I rose and compared what we were doing there to the bias shown against blacks, an African-American women responded, with much emotion: “I am sick of being compared to the dregs of the earth.”

Barbara and Ann failed to get the vote they needed to be called, and with a heavy heart I walked to Betty Baker’s apartment to tell her the news and perhaps to get some solace. But when I knocked on the door, it was Barbara Pescan who answered. It had never occurred to me that the three of them might have stayed together after lunch and that Barbara and Ann might be there when I arrived. I froze and could think of nothing to do other than to give her the news right there in the doorway. The anguish that I then witnessed has stayed with me as a lesson in how cruel we can be to each other. I looked into the face of the woman who three hours earlier had sung and preached movingly about how we treat “the least of these,” after she had been treated as the very, very least and had her dreams shattered.

Community Church did not remain a safe place for me, of course, and I probably would have left Unitarian Universalism if it were not for an odd combination of events. Two years later I found myself in Connecticut with some children under my care who needed a church to go to. I made some calls to find out where the closest UU church was and learned that is was the UU Fellowship of Upper Fairfield County and that the minister there was the Rev. Barbara Pescan. She had taken a call to that church, and Ann was working as a social worker in Danbury.

I joined that church, and Barbara and Ann helped me a great deal through a difficult period of my life. Ann later was called by the UU Fellowship of Upper Westchester County, across the river in New York State, and the two of them bought a small house between their churches. They eventually did serve together as co-ministers of the Unitarian Church of Evanston, Illinois. But more importantly, what happened at Community Church in New York was a major reason why the UUA launched its Welcoming Congregation movement, a program designed to sensitize UU congregations to gay issues and help them become more welcoming to gays.

There’s a rigorous program churches are encouraged to go through before they adopt the designation “Welcoming Congregation,” and remarkably Community Church of New York was one of the early churches going through that program, although I went looking yesterday and couldn’t find the designation on its website.

I moved to Northern Virginia in 1990 and joined the Reston Church, where in 1992 the Rev. Gretchen Woods was called. Gretchen is in a committed relationship with Judy Finholm, and although Judy is not a minister and there was no co-ministry involved, I did have some fears that I might have to live through the same sort of thing again. But it didn’t happen. Gretchen was called by a 90% vote.

Surprisingly, though, a year later in a meeting of the Worship Services Committee, when I said I thought it was time for the church to hear a sermon on gay issues, Gretchen replied that she wasn’t ready to deliver it herself, which is why I delivered that message 10 years ago, although Gretchen helped me with the research.

Gretchen’s seven years at the Reston church were generally good ones. She seemed happy with the congregation, and the congregation seemed happy with her. But there must have been some bias against gays under the surface. (By the way, I refuse to call it “homophobia.” For what other oppressed group do we define the bigotry not by its impact on the aggrieved but by the fears of the bigots? We make it sound as harmless as claustrophobia. It's the same old bigotry, but we use a name that focuses on the assumed fears and motives of the oppressor rather than the effect on the oppressed.)

The bias at the Reston church came out in the survey done by the Search Committee after Gretchen left. Some of the written-in comments made it sound as though Gretchen and Judy had sex every Sunday morning as part of the chalice lighting. Actually, they were always careful about showing affection at official church functions, and even if they wanted to have sex during the chalice lighting, Judy worked most Sunday mornings.

I recently exchanged a couple of emails with Barbara Pescan about something else and she mentioned having run into some unexpected hostility from her congregation when a problem came up after a period of apparent good feeling. When I told her that something similar had happened on the survey after Gretchen left Reston, Barbara replied that of course people are generally uncomfortable about differences, but when it comes to sexual differences it is all magnified by people’s discomfort about their own sexual functioning.

Maybe so, but our species seems to have one hell of a difficult time with differences of any kind. Here’s what the Rev. Lisa Ward, minister of the UU Fellowship of Harford County, Maryland, had to say about it in an award-winning sermon:

Difference is not an aspect of life that humans embrace easily. Ego driven in our goals for success and need for belonging, we often chart our worth and progress by comparing ourselves to others. Our struggle for right living with one another gets lost when we trigger comparisons in a search for self worth. Too often we try to conquer our fear of difference by claiming one way of being as more worthy than another. Countless debates end in deadlock and efforts for peace remain unfulfilled because of the historic claim, the false premise found in all aspects of society, that “if you are not like me something must be wrong, either with you or with me.” We resist collective understanding of one another. We resist multiplicity. We resist allowing enough room for difference. And by doing this, we discourage healthy humility toward the larger truth. And I do believe, if we don’t change this tendency it will defeat our efforts toward world community and probably destroy our species.

A great deal has happened since the Stonewall Riots in the external manifestations of how society deals with gay issues, but it’s the inner stuff that changes much more slowly. As Lisa Ward says, we don’t deal well with differences. We’ve seen it clearly in race relations. We’ve passed laws and bussed children, and social norms have changed, but the black kids still sit together in the cafeteria, as do the white kids, unemployment and violence are as prevalent as ever in urban ghettos, and bigotry lives on. “You tell me it the institution,” say Lennon and McCartney, “well you know you’d better free your mind instead.”

Maybe it’s true that institutional change for gays has occurred in speeded-up years – at a pace my gay male minister friend compared to dog years. But inner change comes at a glacially slow pace. Maybe we can call it turtle years.

As I was preparing the 1993 sermon, I had discussions that got me closer to some of my gay friends. One man I worked with then at Mobil, the son of a Lutheran bishop, was telling me about coming out with his sisters. He was in his early 40s by time he came out with one of them, because the man she was married to was very conservative, and my friend feared rejection from this brother-in-law, who had been quite loving toward him.

When my friend finally had the conversation with his sister and brother-in-law, they were sitting around the kitchen table. My friend finished, and his brother-in-law rose from his seat, walked around the table to my friend and hugged him, saying, “You'll always be my brother.”

As my friend told me this, in my office at Mobil, we both got teary, but then I had a thought, and I said, “Here we are, both choked up over this, but you know what? What happened that day was nothing more than what you are entitled to as a human being.”

There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole

There is a balm in Gilead to heal a troubled soul

- Adapted from the African American Spiritual