For National Coming Out Day.

Who would have imagined - I least of all - that four years after my own "coming out" I would be coordinating a worship service in seminary for National Coming Out Day, this past Monday?! Here is the call to worship I wrote and read at the service (I omitted the section in italics due to time constraints):

“God did not make you queer.” “The truth will set you free” – presumably from being gay. These are words that greeted some of us in the very first weeks of this school-year. These words screamed out, as best they could, from the 8.5-by-11 Queer Caucus flyers they sought to deface. Perhaps these words indicate a vicious spirit of anti-queer bigotry, lurking beneath the all-too-polite, Good Christian surface of this seminary. Perhaps these words cry out the deep pain, rejection, and self-hatred one of our members is currently experiencing. Perhaps they were left by someone who does not even know our community and bears no accountability to it.
   We in the Queer Caucus and we in this seminary do not know which it is - and we have no way to know. We could respond to these words in reasonable fear, and seek to control another anonymous but infamous “incident.” But instead, today, here, we have chosen to respond by asking you to reaffirm your commitment to a seminary and to a world that welcomes all queers, in all the names we choose for our-selves – and we challenge you to choose your name for yourself as a queer.
   [We have gathered to celebrate our presence today in a place that welcomes people with many expressions of the gift of sexuality. We come especially to lift up and affirm the experience of those who have fought and are fighting to create such a welcoming place – in our souls and in the soul of our society.
   Yet no space or community is ever ultimately, statically safe – safety and security are not stopping-points to reach if one has just the perfect mission statement or commitment to diversity or na-tional defense policy. Safety and security are rather means of being and continuing in relationship, relationships that constantly ask all to adjust, in big and small ways, to the changing realities of each.]
   Instead of words of defacement, we have come today to speak face-to-face, as real, live human beings. And we gather to believe again in other words, words that sustained those who have blazed out of the closet before us: (various quotes were read).
It is these words that gather us today. And it is in the spirit of these words that I welcome you and all our guests.