From the moment I left the McDonald’s, I was determined to follow the voice wherever it would lead me. It led me to a summer internship at Trinity Church on Wall Street. It took me to Bronx Youth Ministry and St. Margaret’s Church in the South Bronx where I was sponsored for ordination. Following graduation from seminary, it invited me home to the suburbs to begin my ordained ministry at Christ Church in Ridgewood, New Jersey. It then called me to become Rector of St. Paul’s Church in Paterson, New Jersey.
For over a decade, I had the privilege of serving a community of “all sorts and conditions” of people who gather for worship, service, and witness in a glorious historic landmark church located in a poor neighborhood in one of our nation’s old industrial cities. During my twelve-year tenure, the congregation became incredibly diverse. We were black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. We were native born and newcomers from many lands. We were young, old, and in-between. We were gay and straight, married and single, bisexual, and even transgendered. Some of us dressed up for church; others came in blue jeans. Some members of our church had beautiful homes in lovely neighborhoods; others lived on the streets. A number in our company had large investment portfolios; but most of us got by from paycheck to paycheck or welfare check to welfare check. Many of us took freedom and citizenship for granted; but some knew all too well its precious price. There were those among us who worked in the judicial system; and there were others who had done time in the system. We had students and their teachers, employers and their employees, doctors and their patients all sitting in the same pews. St. Paul’s became a living testament that “the things which divide us from each other may be overcome in the oneness of God.”5
At St. Paul’s Church, God frequently interrupted me with glimpses of the holy from the edge. Over the course of my time as pastor of that old church, I met the Risen Christ over and over again. S/he wandered in and out of our sanctuary, shelter, food pantry, and even my office day and night, sometimes in disguises that I found disturbing and threatening, and on other occasions, humorous and inviting. The work was hard but rewarding; the pain of the community was great, but so was its joy.
People ask me why I stayed at St. Paul’s so long. My answer is simple. I hadn’t been called to leave, and how could I leave when Christ was lurking in the shadows bidding me to remain? As the larger church and society became more polarized over issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and creed, St. Paul’s Church remained a community of faith where we had the opportunity to make a difference, to demonstrate that we could live together in all of our diversity because God had bid each of us welcome and called us to build a better world.
When I was ordained, my bishop and hero Paul Moore said to our deaconate class: “All you have to do is love them, really love them. That’s all you have to do.” It was the best and most challenging advice I ever received. Love in the public context of the church is never easy, especially if you’re gay or lesbian. How does one obey Jesus’ command to love those who hate you, especially when those who hate you say, “We love you and that’s why we want to save you from your sin.”
I learned the lesson of “love the sinner but hate the sin” the hard way in the fall of 1995 when once again I was confronted with The Question of claiming myself or passing. I am a lesbian who is not called to a vocation of celibacy but has been called to the vocation of ordained ministry. Remarkable as it might seem, somehow, some way, my sexuality about which I’ve been relatively open (everything is relative) since I was in my early twenties, did not get in the way of my ordination process or parochial ministry. I always handled it with discretion, but I was always truthful and honest about it, answering questions when asked and volunteering information when it seemed appropriate. I guess I was lucky, or perhaps God simply had another idea in mind.
My friend and fellow Union alumnus Barry Stopfel wasn’t so fortunate. His ordination became a subject of debate within the Episcopal Church, and his ordaining bishop Walter Righter became the subject of the second heresy trial in our denomination. I knew that this trial was not just about Barry or Walter. Rather, it was about all of us who were gay and lesbian, and all those who stand in solidarity with us. In the words of singer-songwriter Holly Near, “It could have been me, but instead it was you.”6
For many years, I had said that if on a given Sunday, everyone who was gay or lesbian could turn purple in church, the issue would be over. When the threat of a heresy trial became a reality, I realized this vision of purple was not going to be the case. God was not going to do our labor of liberation for us. No, God was calling us to do our own work. In my humble opinion, it was time for all of us gay and lesbian clergy who were in positions of power and relative security in the church to come and make public witness about being gay, being Christian, and being called by God to be full participants in the church.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ commands us to pick up our crosses and carry them. The cross of being denied full inclusion and open participation in church and society because one is gay or lesbian is, was, and will be for some time to come, I presume, a cross to bear, and I could not allow anyone else to carry it alone. Because St. Paul’s is a church that welcomes and affirms the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered community, the Vestry (the elected governing body of the congregation) determined it was also the parish’s cross to bear. Together, we decided that we would be as public as we needed to be to stand with Barry, Walter, and the Diocese of Newark during the course of the heresy trial.
Shortly after making this decision, as fate would have it, I read an essay by lawyer and Episcopal layman William Stringfellow. The essay, entitled, “Living Humanly in the Midst of Death,” is about why people resisted the Nazis. It captures what I believe to be the essence of resistance to oppression: “To exist, under Nazism, in silence, conformity, fear, acquiescence [and] collaboration—to covet ‘safety’ or ‘security’ on the conditions prescribed by the state—caused moral insanity, meant suicide, was fatally dehumanizing, [and] constituted a form of death. Resistance was the only stance worthy of a human being, as much in responsibility to oneself as to all other humans, as the famous commandment mentions.”7 Stringfellow argued that while resisting oppression ensured risk and peril, nonresistance or acquiescence “involved the certitude of death—of moral death, of the death to one’s humanity, of the death to sanity and conscience, of the death that possesses humans profoundly ungrateful for their own lives and for the lives of others . . .”8
For the first time, I had words to express what I knew in my heart. To exist in a homophobic society in silence, conformity, fear, acquiescence, and collaboration; to hide in our closets for fear of being caught, rejected, fired, abused, disowned, disinherited, ridiculed, and despised; to covet “safety” or “security” on the conditions prescribed by the state or the church causes moral insanity and the death of one’s soul. To come out, to state honestly and clearly who one is and who one loves is not to flaunt one’s sexuality, but rather, to be faithful to one’s integrity, to choose freedom over oppression, and to claim life in the midst of death.
On October 15, 1995, I broke a pact I had made with God, the world, and myself when I came out in the pulpit. The unspoken bargain I had made went something like this: if I had to be gay in this society, then I would be the very best gay person I could be, and I would never do anything to embarrass anybody or make anyone feel uncomfortable about my sexuality. The heresy trial caused me to realize that this was a pact with the devil, not with God. So in a crowded sanctuary, in front of newspaper reporters and television cameras, I spoke aloud from our ten-foot-high pulpit the truth of my life. I turned myself purple on that Sunday morning, finally answering The Question. I’ll never forget the closing words of my sermon: “And now, to answer your question, God: No, I will not pass! Yes, I am ready and willing to claim who I am and to live and die for my faith!” And the people responded with thunderous applause and a loud Amen!