Matthew Shepard
[Letzte Aktualisierung: 30.04.2002]
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Matthew Shepard |
[Letzte Aktualisierung: 30.04.2002] |
Die folgende Predigt wurde am Sonntag, 11.10., in einer Gemeinde der Episcopal Church in Rhode Island gehalten, unter dem Eindruck der Nachrichten von der
Gewalttat
an einem jungen schwulen Studenten der University of Wyoming in der vorangegangenen Woche.
Wiedergegeben mit Erlaubnis der Pastorin.
October 11, 1998
19 Pentecost
Luke 17:11-19
In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. Amen.v
Just last weekend this parish, along with several others in this Diocese, included in the Sunday bulletin a small card with a rainbow ribbon attached to it, in observance of Solidarity Sunday, a project of Dignity USA. Those who donned that ribbon pledged to work to end verbal and physical bashing on the basis of sexual orientation. Today marks National Coming Out Day for the lesbian and gay community. Both of these events mark extraordinary progress in opening the minds and hearts of many Americans to neighbors who do not share their own sexual orientation, but do share a common humanity.
How ironic, then, to open the newspaper yesterday and read about a University of Wyoming student who just this past week was abducted, robbed, pistol- whipped, cut, burned with cigarettes, lashed to a ranch fence and left for dead in near-freezing temperatures for 18 hours—apparently because he was openly gay. The victim was found Wednesday by two bicyclists who thought at first he was a scarecrow because of the manner in which his body was sprawled on the fence.
Matthew Shepard lies in a coma today, fighting for his life. Two young men, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, are charged with kidnapping, aggravated robbery and attempted murder in the assault. Their girlfriends, Kristen Price and Chastity Pasley, have been charged as accessories to attempted murder. Five lives—and the lives of their families and friends and neighbors—will be scarred from this. One life may be lost, and if it is, two more could well follow, in punishment.
Wyoming does not have a hate-crimes law. Wyoming’s legislature has repeatedly rejected any hate crimes law that covers sexual orientation on the ground that it would grant «special rights» to homosexuals. Incidentally, the Rhode Island legislature just this year passed a bill increasing penalties for those convicted of sexual orientation bias crimes. The difficulty now is in getting victims to report those hate crimes, because they fear a backlash from family members and business associates who don’t know their orientation. Sometimes they fear further victimization from the police—the very people to whom they must report crimes committed against them.
What makes Matthew Shepard’s story all the more poignant for us is that the victim is an Episcopalian, a member of the University of Wyoming campus Canterbury Club.
I would be willing to bet that his attackers and their accomplices were raised as Christians too. Perhaps they are Episcopalians as well. But somewhere, somehow, something went wrong. The word of grace that should have set them free, that should have enabled them to accept Matthew Shepard as a fellow human being and a member with them of the body of Christ—that saving, liberating word was denied to them. Perhaps they were taught in Sunday School that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of homosexuality, that the Bible prescribes the death penalty for homosexuals. Perhaps they were told from the pulpit that homosexuals are a threat to their families, their community, their churches, even civilization itself. Perhaps, and this is far more likely, they were simply told nothing at all. And into this spiritual vacuum swept a legion of demons—prejudice and anger, fear and hate, violence and murder.
This past week I attended one of three information sessions held in this Diocese to prepare for our upcoming Diocesan Convention. Delegates to Convention will be considering five resolutions, and three of them have to do with sexuality: one regarding the Lambeth Conference sexuality resolution; one urging parish education on the Bible and sexuality, and a third addressing the needs of lesbian and gay teenagers in the Diocese. All three emerged from our sister parish, Church of the Messiah. At the session which I attended, considerable discontent, accompanied by some derisive laughter, was expressed at the fact that the sexuality issue was even «taking up space» on the agenda, let alone the subject of three of the five resolutions. Yesterday at a meeting, a priest from another parish—someone who could be described as «moderate-to-liberal»—asked me why I was «so upset» about Matthew Shepard’s beating. There is a spiritual vacuum around this issue in Rhode Island too, and many of our fellow Episcopalians prefer it that way.
In this morning’s Epistle reading, Paul writes to Timothy: «Warn them before God that they are to avoid wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.» Since becoming your Rector, I have preached many times on the evils of unjust discrimination. Until this past summer’s Lambeth Conference, however, I rarely preached specifically on discrimination against lesbians and gays, perhaps because it is my own minority group and I feel the obligation to give «equal time» to those who might otherwise have no voice, no one to speak up for them in this place.
But events have overtaken us. Lesbians and gay men are being targeted by powerful foes for cynical purposes—because hate raises money and wins elections in many parts of this country. The time has come to speak up for my own as well. And the time has come for you and me and all of us who profess the faith of Jesus Christ to «come out» as Christians who oppose and deplore violent speech and violent actions against lesbians and gays, bisexuals and transgendered people, not in spite of the Bible but because of the Bible—because we have learned «rightly» how to «explain the word of truth.» The time has come for us to confront the thinly-veiled contempt for brothers and sisters in Christ that «hates the sin but loves the sinner» with the Good News that faithful love is not sin—but calling unclean relationships that God has blessed is sin.
In less than a month, it will be sixty years since violence erupted against the Jewish community in Germany and Austria with an unprecedented fury that culminated in the Holocaust. Some of us are old enough to remember Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass—a two-day orgy of German anti-Semitism in November of 1938. Over a thousand synagogues burned. Seven thousand Jewish businesses were looted; cemeteries, hospitals, schools and homes were torched and vandalized as firemen and police stood by with instructions to intervene only if Aryan property was threatened. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested; ninety-six lost their lives. Not one attacker was apprehended or charged. And there was no place for Germany’s Jews to flee. Certainly not America, which had a strict quota system for immigrants, and where polls showed more than 90 percent of the population opposed lifting restrictions on German Jewish refugees—and this was after Kristallnacht.
But not all of Hitler’s fury was expended on the Jews. Germany before Hitler had a thriving lesbian and gay community. That famous photograph of the first Berlin book-burning in 1933 depicts the torching of the world’s first research library devoted to homosexuality. Thousands of gay men were worked to death in concentration camps. Thousands of lesbians were forced to become prostitutes for Nazi officers, bearing children to build the «master race.» All this—in the home of the Protestant Reformation.
Paul tells Timothy, «The word of God is not chained.» The word of God was not chained for Ruth, the childless Moabite widow who defied custom to cling to her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law’s God. The word of God was not chained for the Samaritan leper who disobeyed Jesus’ own orders in obedience to a higher law—the law of love and gratitude, expressed to a stranger of another race and religious tradition. The word of God was not chained for Matthew Shepard, who ignored both hate and silence to worship God as an openly gay man and an Episcopalian. And the word of God is not chained for us. It breaks our own chains of fear. It heals us from the unclean dis-ease that separates us from others. It sets us free to praise God, not only in the temple but in the middle of the road. And by it—by faith in Christ the Word—we and all whom we touch may be saved and made holy and whole.
Amen.