Accomplish justice with grace - A reflection at Open Table #lgbtqia+ #comeasyouare

Reflection by Warren Hartley, LGBTQIA+ Ministry Facilitator at St Bride’s

Reading - Matthew 18:15-20

While we don’t always follow the lectionary here at Open Table, it does have some distinct advantages and disadvantages.  The lectionary prescribes readings for every day over a three year cycle, and were one to attend church daily or follow the daily round of prayers of the church you would read or hear a large proportion of the entire Bible every three years. 

I like it as an idea as it gives a breadth of scripture readings rather than just sticking to the ones I like or know well. They can also challenge me. This reading from Matthew’s Gospel is one that has left me challenged. We like to think of Jesus as a cool guy, ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’, as the Christmas carol portrays him. Not this disciplinary guy who is working towards excluding people from the community and giving people power on earth to ‘bind and loose’. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m always suspicious of those who gather this kind of power to themselves. Needless to say, there are times we do need to challenge people and their behaviour - we can’t live in a world where anything goes, particularly if we are to honour Jesus’ call to care for the poor and those most vulnerable to the abuse of power so evident in Jesus’ time and our own political world.

This story has also often been seen as being about how one can convince someone that one is right, and it has been used against LGBTQIA+ people to say that we are ‘sinning’ and should be reproved. The narrative goes that it is WE who are sinful and so we should be disciplined by the church to draw us back in. We’ve all heard stories of how LGBTQIA+ folk have been publicly shamed in front of congregations just as Jesus describes here, and many within our Open Table Liverpool community, and others more broadly, have felt the sting of exclusion from communities and families of the type described here, i.e. ‘be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector’.

In first century Judaism, an observant Jew would not even enter the house of a Gentile or a tax-collector. These people were shunned, outside the community, not of the chosen people of God - they were pariahs in the culture. This is perhaps a very natural response to the violent oppression of the kind dealt out by the Romans and other occupying forces in the previous centuries to the Jewish people.

Yet, I also see this reading as a challenge to us as LGBTQIA+ Christians. The Church has sinned against us as a community, it has borne false witness about who we are, it still derides our love and often still won’t bless our marriages. I see in this reading a model for how to advocate for justice. We share our individual stories with the wider church and yet it does not change. We gather as communities such as this one and challenge them with the integrity and beauty of our lives and our love and we see small change. We speak to the whole church through our witness and our faith and, just like the persistent widow and the unjust judge, we can keep advocating for justice.

That is one disadvantage to the lectionary - just hearing snippets of a story can make it come across as dictatorial or rule based. Yet I find it most striking that here Jesus says to let folk be to you as the ‘gentile and tax collector’ and yet he then goes to the home of a tax-collector and eats with him - a truly shocking thing to do in his day. He speaks to a Samaritan woman at a well - again scandalous behaviour. He heals the servant of a Roman centurion, the daughter of the Syro-Phonecian woman, and many more. This directive is far more nuanced than a cursory reading may offer. Immediately after this reading is the parable of the unmerciful servant who is forgiven a huge debt but who is then harsh with those who owe him considerably smaller debts. All these readings need to be read in much deeper context, and I’ve barely begun to share the bigger context tonight’s reading is set in. That is why reading scripture is such a fascinating and endless endeavour - there is no such thing as simplistic in/out, or good/bad!

So while we may quite appropriately need to step apart from those who demean and / or do violence to us, there is always a path for reconciliation.  None of us have a monopoly on virtue. Many folk seem to think if we only gather as LGBT+ people and don’t seek to integrate with the wider church, all will be well. The argument over trans* women in ‘women-only’ spaces is another example of one group pushing others out due to fear and prejudice. ‘Keeping the foreigners out’ is another vain attempt at creating a ‘pure group’ where all will be well. However, life just doesn’t work like that. It isn’t the group that holds the virtue, thereby creating safety, as each group is made of individuals who can still harm others.

Let’s challenge the church, call out its sins to our community and to us as individuals. We too are the part of the body of Christ and He is present with us now as we gather. We are not the ‘gentiles’ nor are our Church leaders the ‘gentiles’. We are all part of the body of Christ, and one day the Church will face that truth, when each of us as individuals, Open Table as a community, along with so many others, will be part of the ‘loosening’ that is currently binding everyone, whether they recognise it or not. 

As we say so often at the end of our services, ‘go now, the work of the world lies before us, accomplish justice with grace’.