“Fight fundamentalists - with your love”

Sally Gearhart

(Photo by Peter Carni)

“I call you to fight the fundamentalists -- with your love,” said lesbian activist professor Sally Gearhart in a powerful 1990 sermon in San Francisco. Her words still ring true today as they did 20 years ago.

The same conflict between the Christian right and the LGBT community continues to rage two decades later. Only a few of the names have changed.

I was clapping along with the rest of the crowd when Gearhart preached the sermon on Aug. 19, 1990 at Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco. We kept bursting into applause as she talked about how to counteract the Christian right while rethinking our own beliefs.

I never forgot her sermon, so I decided to listen to it again recently while duplicating tapes of worship services. I was amazed by how contemporary it seemed. She could have preached it yesterday! I wrote the following summary of Gearhart’s sermon so that we can keep on learning from her wisdom.

Gearhart taught speech and women’s studies at San Francisco State University, where she was the world’s first open lesbian to obtain a tenure-track faculty position (in 1973). Her books include the lesbian utopian novel “The Wanderground” and “Loving Women/Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church.” She lives in California.
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Gearhart opened her sermon with a friendly question to the congregation of MCC, which affirms the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community as people of God. “Who else could better confront the people who CALL themselves Christians than a church that I think understands Christianity far better than they do?” Gearhart asked.

She described her recent visit to a conference sponsored by the Traditional Values Coalition, a Christian right group founded by Lou Sheldon.  The theme of the conference was “eradicating homosexuality.” This evoked lots of laughter -- she called the congregation “rowdy.”

Gearhart was surprised to some shared concerns with the right-wing activists. They discussed common issues such as, “What do you do when you’re getting ready for a demonstration?” It turns out there were other proudly gay and lesbian people there to check it out, too.

Then she posed the question: Why should we concern ourselves with the Traditional Values Coalition? When we do, “we’re right at the heart of the storm… at the fire’s center” “They’ve got us on their hit list. We are second only to abortion.”

She pointed out that conservative Christians are effective and control a lot of media. She said that televangelism scares her, especially the hypocrisy of preachers involved in sex scandals such as Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker.

“The mindset underlying fundamentalism is the thing that’s doing most of the damage to the world. Christian ideology is supplying a lot of the rationale for the destruction of the earth and for the oppression of women and for the oppression of people of color, etc. etc. etc.,” Gearhart declared.

In her view, the root of capitalism is greed. It comes from the feeling of not having enough, not feeling loved. She described how the oppression of women leads to overpopulation and more unloved people. Lack of love also manifests as theology that condemns sex is sin, dating back to St. Augustine in the 4th century..

“St. Augustine hated his penis,” Gearhart joked, provoking HUGE laughter and squeals!

The contrasted “God the Father” as an outside authority versus God inside each individual. She critiqued the exclusivity of the fundamentalist approach. “‘No one comes to the Father but by me’ leads to nothing short of judging other people,” she said.

Gearhart advocated pluralism. “The more ways we see to salvation… the better off we actually are,” she said.

She admitted that she used to espouse a kind of lesbian fundamentalism. She recalled telling her classes that all women are lesbians and all women are superior. “Now I’m a lot less certain, but a lot more secure,” she confessed.

She urged the crowd to rethink the concept of salvation, asking, “What is it that we need to be saved from?”

Gearhart identified the root of the problem as the concept of original sin. “We’ve got to stop believing that we’re bad…. Original sin is the source of a lot of self-hatred,” she said.

She got HUGE applause when she stated, “The only bad we have in the world is the bad of serving someone else at the expense of ourselves.”

Finally Gearhart issued a call to action: “I call you to fight the fundamentalists -- with your love.”

She recommended the following tactics:

• Education (not persuasion because “persuasion is violence”)
• Living our lives as an example
• Telling our own stories
• Listening. She emphasized the importance of listening by quoting feminist theologian Nelle Morton’s vision of God as “a great ear at the heart of the universe.”

Gearhart concluded by listing the particular strengths of lesbian, gay and bisexual people. (“Transgender” was not yet part of the common vocabulary in 1990 when she gave this sermon.)

1. We have a special capacity to perceive, understand and affirm variety and difference.

2. We have some growing understanding of death and dying. (This evoked BIG “amens” from the crowd, which included many people with AIDS at a time when there was no effective treatment and a lot of people were dying.)

3. We know something as a community about feminism, which Gearhart called “the transformative philosophy of our time.”

4. We know something about love.

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Immediately after Gearhart’s sermon, the MCC-SF choir sang the anti-apartheid anthem “Something Inside So Strong” by Labi Siffre. Their voices rose with such power that the whole church seemed to shake. The soloist was the wonderful Scott Galuteria, who later died of AIDS. The audience clapped in time with the music. The energy level built to a feverish pitch, especially during these lines:

When they insist that we’re not good enough,
What am I gonna do?
Look ‘em in the eye and say,
I’m gonna do it anyway!

Scott got the congregation to sing that line over and over, louder and louder:


I’m gonna do it anyway!
Sing!
I’m gonna do it anyway!
Sing!
I’’M GONNA DO IT ANYWAY!

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Here’s a video of the song performed by its composer, Labi Siffre. His version sounds mild compared to the boisterous way that MCC-SF belted it out on the night that Sally Gearhart shook our souls.

Great sermon: Never lose sight of goodness

Cleve Jones at Vancouver Pride 2009 by Pipistrula

Gay rights activist Cleve Jones spoke at one of the most powerful worship services that I ever experienced -- on Gay Freedom Day 1989 at Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco.

“There’s a huge struggle ahead of us, but we must never, ever lose sight of the reservoir of goodness that exists out there, and most especially of our own power as individuals to reach people and find that goodness and DRAG it out of them,” Jones said.

I listened to the whole service again recently while duplicating MCC-SF worship tapes for a history project. Exactly 21 years later, it’s still inspiring -- perhaps even more so because the emotions of the AIDS epidemic seem so raw in retrospect. It was especially eerie to hear the prayers spoken by friends who died two decades ago. I am sharing highlights from that service here to celebrate this year’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.

A packed audience sang enthusiastic praise songs, even though most of the church faced many obstacles. Most of the congregation was HIV-positive, there was no effective treatment for AIDS, and many were dying. More than 500 MCC-SF members died of AIDS from 1982-97. Maybe those obstacles actually gave us a reason to sing our hearts out.

Jones spoke in detail about how he founded the Names Project and built the AIDS Memorial Quilt. He got the idea after being beaten in a gay bashing, diagnosed as HIV positive, and grief-striken by a friend’s death from AIDS. Inspired by a quilt that his grandmother made, he created the first panel in 1987. The quilt was an immediate sensation. It was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and has been seen by more than 14 million people worldwide.

The service sticks in my memory not only because of the sermon, but because it was probably the biggest and most enthusiastic crowd that I ever experienced in my years at MCC-SF. The sanctuary was packed with hundreds of LGBT people who were exhilarated from a day at the Gay Freedom march and festival.

I was on the clergy staff as program director at the time. I felt honored at the chance to meet Jones in the pastor’s office right before the service began. Pastor Jim Mitulski invited Jones to choose a reading to accompany his sermon. I was surprised by Jones’ Bible literacy as he immediately chose this scripture:

“Some of them have left behind a name and people recount their praiseworthy deeds; but of others there is no memory, for when they ceased, they ceased…Yet these also were godly people whose virtues have not been forgotten.”

The pastor knew right away that the quote came from Sirach 44. I had the privilege of reading this scripture aloud and introducing Jones at the service.

Music is another highlight of the tape. Music director Jack Hoggatt-St. John leads the congregation in rousing praise songs, including “Great Are You God,” “Bless Our God” and “We Are Standing on Holy Ground.” We used to sing these every week. Listening to them again 21 years later, I thought, “No wonder we loved these songs!”

There’s also a powerful version of “We Are the Church Alive,” a hymn that St. John wrote with David Pelletier. There’s nothing like hearing a church full of men with AIDS, back when there was no effective treatment, sing out,

We are the church alive, Our faith has set us free;
No more enslaved by guilt and shame, We live our liberty.

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This post is part of an occasional series on great sermons from Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco. Click here for the whole MCC-SF history series.

Great sermon: We ARE light, all of us

Rev. Karen Ziegler preached an unforgettable sermon on AIDS, grief, sexism, friendship between gay men and lesbians, and the parable of the “wise and foolish virgins” during the height of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.

I listened to the sermon again recently while duplicating tapes of worship services. More than 20 years later, it is still just as powerful and inspiring!

I have never forgotten the sermon that Ziegler delivered on Nov. 8, 1987 at Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, where most of the congregation was HIV positive, there was no effective treatment for AIDS, and many people were dying. I had just joined the staff as student clergy and women’s programming coordinator. More than 500 MCC-SF members died of AIDS between 1982 and 1997.

Like me, Ziegler was a lesbian whose primary relationships were with women, but she unexpectedly grew much closer to gay men as they faced death. She never stopped challenging sexism in the church, but a “transformation” happened. “My heart has been opened in a way it never has before,” Ziegler said in her sermon. She was pastor of MCC New York at the time.

She urged us to think of ourselves in an empowering new way. Decades later I still remembered this part of her sermon, and now I transcribe it here:

“Keep your light burning. We ARE light, all of us. The light of the world, each of us. We’re all like little lights, like in space suits, you know. That’s all our bodies are, like these space suits. Men’s suits, women’s suits, gay suits, straight suits, different color suits, differently abled suits. They’re just SUITS! We are lights really, that’s what we are. Lights that nothing can quench. But the world needs us, and we need each other to keep our lights burning brightly and clearly.”

Ziegler interacted with the congregation and spoke eloquently about the importance of loving oneself in the midst of the AIDS crisis -- especially because we have been wounded by the homophobia of the church. “Growing up in the church, we learned that our very capacity to love was the thing that God hates,” she said.

Ziegler’s life partner, blues singer Randa McNamara, gave a powerful performance of “Old Devil Time” at the same worship service. The Pete Seeger song brought everyone to tears and we all talked about it for weeks. It still made me cry when I listened to it again recently. If you have never heard this song, it’s a definite MUST, and nobody sings it better than McNamara. You can hear it on Randa’s album “Living in My Heart.”

Ziegler went on to become a nurse practitioner who teaches at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina. A preaching prize was established in her honor at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. It is awarded annually to the student who “represents the highest ideals of feminism and liberation theology in the present day by articulating anew a vision for a more just church and world for all God’s people.”

Thank you, Karen and Randa, for helping our light shine.
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This post launches a series on great sermons from Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco. Click here for the whole MCC-SF history series.

Photos: Karen Ziegler (above) and Randa McNamara (below)