Sammy Ramsey grows up in an Evangelical church, where both his parents are preachers. He is the youngest of three siblings; he has an older sister and brother. Smart boy, loves God, wants to do the right things. In his family, the Bible is so much a part of everyday life that when he and his siblings learn the alphabet, there’s a scripture verse attached to each letter.
A: All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23
B: Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.
C: etc.
“Scripture was as basic as refrigerator magnets for everyone else.”
He memorizes so much scripture. The Bible is like breathing for him. Church is a refuge. His parents hold services in his family’s living room.
Eventually he figures out that he is attracted to men. Like many young people in his situation, his first instinct is to get rid of these feelings, to force himself to like women so that he will conform to others’ expectations. He goes through a process called a “deliverance,” where a minister and lots of people lay hands on him and pray for this demon to be cast out. He doesn’t, of course, do this deliverance at his own church, where his father is the pastor; rather, he makes his way to a youth convention in another state and does it there. Of course, after he whispers the issue to the pastor, the pastor announces to this whole mega-gathering that they are praying for Sammy to be freed from the sin of homosexuality.
He really, really wants this deliverance to work. As you can guess, it does not. So he lives with this “flaw,” this “defect.” He doesn’t act on it, doesn’t date anyone, and he doesn’t say anything.
When he goes to college at Cornell, he majors in entomology, the study of insects, and he joins the campus ministry group. One day, as he and a friend from that group are hanging out playing video games, the friend—who is a fine, fine specimen of the male human—puts the moves on Sammy. And Sammy realizes, “Oh, I like this. This is absolutely who I really am. I can’t cast this out because it is the authentic me.”
Unlike many people who experience their sexuality as being in conflict with their faith, Sammy dives into the Bible to see what it has to say about human sexuality. Remember, the Bible is very familiar territory for Sammy. This is his home turf. He’s been reading it and memorizing parts of it his whole life. But he’s never read it with this particular lens before. Now he does.
“I found so much beauty in the love letter that’s written to humanity from God. I went in looking for a legal text to explain to me what I could and couldn’t do as someone who is attracted to men and is a man. And instead, I found something very different. What I kept seeing throughout scripture was the beauty of diversity. See, . . . I was already in training to be an entomologist at the time. I was getting my undergraduate degree in entomology. So I started looking at what we know about God from biology, and you see that God absolutely loves diversity. There’s literally nothing that exists that God made one kind of. . . .
Was it Holding who was asked, “What do you know about God from biology?” And his response was that “God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” . . . There are more species of beetles than there are birds, fish, and mammals combined. . . .
When you think about that bonkers-ness, I want you to consider what it says about a God who would spend that kind of time caring about that level of diversity. And then thinking about how important diversity is that it would even be a core value with God such that it’s built into God’s character himself.
The Bible says that God exists as three beings in one. So even within the existence of God, there is diversity built in. The [Creator], the Son, and the Holy Ghost—that’s diversity, baby. . . . God . . . exists as three beings in one, embodying diversity in the very character of God. And the Bible says very clearly that God is love. So what space do we have to even think for a moment that love itself would not be diverse?
In his deep dive into the Bible, Sammy latches onto this verse from Romans 12:
Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what
is the will of God - what is good and acceptable and perfect.
And the verse right before that, which we also read this morning, talks about our bodies being “holy and acceptable to God.” What Sammy hears in these two verses is that his body is holy and acceptable to God just as it is. He does not need to conform his sexuality to this age, to this social expectation that somehow everyone will be heterosexual. If he denies his sexuality in order to please others, he is denying what God has called holy and acceptable just as it is.
So he’s convinced that it’s okay to be gay and a Christian. But now he needs to tell his family.
He tells his mom on New Year’s Eve 2011, after everyone else has gone to bed. He tells his sister and brother. They are all supportive. He finally tells his dad in November, almost a year later. His whole family comes with him to lend support, because they know this is not going to be easy. And it’s not easy. They ambush his dad in his pajamas as he’s getting into bed one evening. His father rejects this news. He barely looks at Sammy or talks to him for weeks, maybe months, which is awkward because Sammy is living with his folks.
Sammy enters graduate school and gets very involved in the Evangelical church on campus. He’s teaching Bible study, singing in the choir—all the things. Little by little, he starts to come out to people in that group. Eventually he comes out to the pastor, who is initially very supportive.
But after a few months the pastor starts getting some pushback from members of the congregation. He calls a congregational meeting. A friend of Sammy’s sees this coming and takes him out of town that weekend. The pastor tells the congregation that Sammy has been “ensnared in sexual sin.” Sammy is excommunicated from the church. He tells his parents what happened. They are upset. His dad looks mad. No one from that church continues to communicate with him.
Sammy is heartbroken. He throws himself into research on bee parasites. One day his father texts him: “We need to talk.” They go to the Olive Garden. His father is really upset at what happened to Sammy at that church. He is upset at the way the pastor had talked about Sammy as a gay man. Sammy is confused; this is the same way Sammy’s dad had talked to him. But Sammy’s dad prayed and asked God for help. He began to feel different about it. Sammy’s sadness forced his dad into introspection. He went through the Bible looking for help. Like Sammy, he found that the whole thing is a great big love story. Sammy is impressed that his dad came around. And his dad says, “With a son like you, how could I not?”
Up to this point, I’ve been retelling an abridged version of a story I heard last week on a radio show called “Snap Judgment” [Deliverance - Snap Judgment or https://snapjudgment.org/episode/deliverance.] It’s a good story, happy ending, very affirming of our LGBTQ+ family—in a Christian setting, no less.
So that story is in the one hand. In the other hand, I’m seeing various news stories about Christians holding a vigil in D.C. a month or so ago to reclaim this nation as a Christian nation. As we approach our 250th anniversary, they want to rewrite our history to claim that our founders wanted this to be a Christian nation, which is actually the opposite of what happened.
There was a story this week in the New York Times about 4,500 Christian men and boys holding “Freedom Con” last weekend at the Gorge here in Central Washington. This event was all about testosterone, all about what it takes to be a “real man” for God. Reporter Ruth Graham writes,
There were exhortations from the stage to run for office, to have more babies, and to reject “woke secular gay paganism.”
“Heterosexual, sober men who marry girls and read Bibles, we’re the new punk rock!” the pastor Mark Driscoll said in a fiery sermon that brought attendees to their feet. [Freedom Con: Thousands of Men Gather for Christianity and Feats of Strength - The New York Times]
Oh, Mark Driscoll. If that name rings a bell, it’s because he used to head the Mars Hill churches here in Seattle and was run out because he was so toxic. Now that toxic leadership is more in vogue, he has put together a megachurch in Scottsdale, Arizona. He’s back.
This gathering told people how to vote, which up until recently was illegal for a church gathering to do. I will encourage people to vote for justice issues, for compassion, for inclusion, but I do not lift up specific candidates by name.
Some men at Freedom Con have found the strength in this group to get sober, to take their marriages more seriously, to be better fathers. More power to them. My concern is the one-size-fits-all male role that’s being lifted up, and the intolerance for people like Sammy Ramsey.
Imagine if Sammy had attended such an event at the age of 14 or so, when he was figuring out his sexuality, and he had been told that this is what it takes to be a male Christian.
Do the men and boys at this event feel justified in gay bashing? I imagine they might think they were sent on a mission from God to do just such a thing.
So today, Patsy and I—and any of you who are willing and able to join us—will carry the Prospect UCC banner in the Pride Parade, marching it through the streets of downtown Seattle. We will be wearing our rainbows. The first year I was here at Prospect, Bob Bakke and I drove down to the end point of the Pride Parade just to watch. There were naked people covered in paint. There were people dressed all kinds of ways: feather boas, platform shoes—fabulous. There was music. There were balloons. Tons of rainbows everywhere. So much joy! So much diversity! And here, marching down the street as part of the parade, came a Methodist church with their banner and their rainbows, affirming our LGBTQ+ family. I burst into tears.
This is the fight. And this is where we are called to be, people. It is so important, to have the Church show up at the Pride Parade with the message that we are all holy and acceptable to God just as we are. And if we say we are standing in the light of God but we hate other people for their skin color or their sexual orientation or some other aspect of how they were born; if we are bashing them for being authentically who God made them to be, we are not standing in the light of God. We are out there to counter the message that if you are a Christian man you have to be a chest-thumping heterosexual. you could be Sammy, loved by God for being gay, for being a science nerd, for being most authentically who he is.
There’s a song by a musician named John McCutcheon called “Everything.” Here are the lyrics:
A bunch of the guys were beatin’ their gums at the corner bar one day.
The jokes were gettin’ rougher and the targets all were gay.
One of the fellas had a bracelet that read WWJD.
I wondered what would Jesus do, so I thought I’d go and see.
I reckoned it was liable
To be there in the Bible
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
This is what I came upon:
Here’s a little song with everything Jesus ever said about homosexuality.
Here’s a little song with everything Jesus ever said about being gay.
He said
Then he said
And don’t forget
And of course he said
Oh he said
Then he said
Don’t forget
And he said
But God said you are holy and acceptable, in all your diversity, just as you are.
Amen.