You Have All You Need

I was asked to preach at my home church soon after the pastor announced that she would be leaving the congregation. It occurred to me that in times of change, it is often easier to focus on what we will miss than to remember what we still have. I hope this speaks to you.

A Letter from Paul

A sermon preached at the Metropolitan Community Church of New Haven, CT

November 27, 2011

(c) The Rev. Dr. Joan M. Saniuk

Today is the First Sunday of Advent, the first day of a new church year and the beginning of a time of spiritual preparation for Christmas. On this first day of a new year, I am doing something that is very unusual for me: I am preaching on the reading from Saint Paul. When I looked at the readings that are designated for today, in the Common Lectionary of the mainline Christian churches, I discovered that the first and last ones were about the end times. From Third Isaiah and from Mark, we have doom and gloom, shock and awe, war and destruction, fear and trembling. And in the middle of those two passages, there was a little word of hope from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. I was led to meditate on that word of hope this morning.

Paul wrote to the community in Corinth in a time that was unsettled and crazy, a time not unlike ours. As I meditated on his words, I began to wonder: If Paul were to write that letter to us, MCC New Haven, right here, right now, what would he say?

I invite you to imagine with me. I imagine that Paul’s letter to us would go something like this:

See-It-Myself Thomas

A sermon preached at the Metropolitan Community Church of Hartford, Connecticut April 11, 2010
(c) 2010 by The Rev. Dr. Joan M. Saniuk
Text: John 20:19-31

This morning’s gospel tells about Jesus’ second appearance to his disciples after the Resurrection. We usually refer to this pericope as the story of “Doubting Thomas.” Thomas is the one holdout among the disciples who refuses to believe in the Resurrection just on the word of the others. I need to see it for myself, he says. Thomas needs to see and touch Jesus’ raised body before he will believe that Jesus has been raised from the dead. And lo and behold, Jesus gives Thomas that opportunity!

The usual interpretation of this story has Jesus scolding Thomas for his lack of faith. Jesus says, “You believe because you have seen. Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed.”

Come to the Water: The Queer Congregation as Healing Community

This is a brief description of the doctoral work I did at the Episcopal Divinity School between 2005 and 2008.  I can send the thesis as .pdf on request.

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ABSTRACT

Metropolitan Community Churches, and other queer-affirming congregations, are communities of faith for a population that is at once privileged and oppressed: privileged, because those who self-identify as queer are often from the middle and professional classes, and oppressed because of the social and religious anti-queer stigma that is still a very large part of the dominant culture. Because of this oppression, it is predictable that congregants will, to some extent, experience feelings of grief, shame, and anger: grief because of the loss of relationships, privilege, and social standing that frequently accompany coming out, grief over the losses due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, anger as a result of rejection, and shame as an unconscious response to the anti-queer stigma that surrounds us still. In some cases, it is fair to describe the coming-out process as traumatic. This presents a critical pastoral care issue for queer congregations because the behavioral characteristics of unresolved grief, anger, shame, and trauma are the exact opposites of those found in a thriving congregation.

  A model for the healing process can be developed by combining models for recovery from post-traumatic stress with models of the developmental tasks involved in re-integrating sexual and/or gender identity. Reflection on the model reveals that our usual church activities help a great deal in some stages of healing, but under-emphasize the need to remember, and mourn, our shared losses. We can create opportunities in public worship that facilitate this remembrance and mourning. In so doing, we can present a vision of Jesus that reinforces those in the Christian tradition who, in the words of UFMCC, “seek to serve among those reconciling their sexuality with their spirituality.”

(c) by Joan M. Saniuk, 2008.  All rights reserved.