Reflection
Good morning everyone. To any visitors who do not know me, my name is Richard and I am the chair of the Affirming Committee. I use they/them pronouns. The Affirming Committee acts to advocate for 2SLGBTQIA+ people in our congregation and in the world outside the walls of our church, helping us grow as Allies in our Public, Intentional, and Explicit support of our sexually- and gender-diverse siblings and neighbours.
Now, a quick prayer before we begin.
God, grant us wisdom as we celebrate the life of your son, Jesus, our eternal ruler, and help us learn from the lessons he taught us in his words and actions. Amen.
Today is Reign of Christ Sunday, the last Sunday of our liturgical year. We will soon begin Advent, where we anticipate the coming of a savior, born of mortals, in the most humble of circumstances. But today, we celebrate a king, who reigns eternally on a throne of love, truth, and justice.
Celebrating a king. Now? Didn’t we get all our monarchal celebration out of the way in May, on Victoria Day, the observed birthday of our reigning monarch? Not that anyone remembers that that’s what we’re celebrating. Our monarchy is purely ceremonial anyway, a relic of colonial rule that allowed the British to profit off the people and resources of colonized nations – where global reparations, just for the slavery part, would be worth 18 trillion British pounds in today’s money [1]. Reparations the British government says are off the table. A Common wealth? I don’t buy that. And it’s not like we celebrate King Charles for being a model Canadian citizen. Why would we celebrate a second monarch? Isn’t one more than enough?
Perhaps we’ve got something wrong here. Let’s look back at our readings. Here we go. Pilot, representative of the colonial megapower of Rome, talking to Jesus directly, saying, clearly you are not Emperor of Rome, so do you claim to be king of the Jews, king of this colony? No. That is a mixup it seems. “My kingdom,” Jesus responds, “is not of this world.”
Not a king of anywhere on earth. Not recognized by any government. So what makes Christ worth celebrating?
One of my favourite description of Jesus comes from a modern work of literature: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. In its introduction, the story is said to begin “one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change”. Nailed to a tree for saying people should be nice to each other? Seems like a bit of an overreaction, don’t you think? It’s not like he was asking people to radically change their everyday lives. They would still eat the same food, do the same jobs, live in the same house. Just, you know, maybe consider someone else’s situation instead of casting them out of your society for circumstances outside their control.
But, then again, it’s not like we don’t see backlashes against Christ’s “love your neighbour” message now. Let’s look at an example. In 2016, we started implementing the SOGI 123 (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identities) teaching guides in schools across BC. The goal of the program is to create safe and inclusive environments for students of all genders and sexual orientations. Basically, it gives teachers recommendations for changing their language to be more inclusive – giving examples with both same-sex and different-sex couples when talking about families, for instance – and telling children that bullying someone for being gay or trans is unacceptable. In response, thousands of people protested, shouting misinformation about children being told that they should be undergoing sex-change surgery. Does that sound familiar? Thousands of people protesting about their children being told to be nice to each other? That anti-SOGI backlash is still alive. For example, 43% of British Columbians voted in the provincial election last month for a party that, among other things, promised to remove SOGI 123 resources from the hands of teachers.
As we should suspect from a program designed on the basis of “love your neighbour,” research shows that SOGI 123 resources work. Schools using SOGI teaching guides have seen bullying reduced by a statistically significant degree, even bullying of cisgender-heterosexual students (those students who aren’t sexually or gender- diverse). This teaching makes a safer school environment for everybody! So why the backlash?
Across the US, Republican-led states have been introducing legislation removing the rights of transgender people. These laws severely restrict access to gender-affirming healthcare. They say that anyone born as a man, but with the soul of a woman, who is going through the struggle of publically transitioning so those two things match, should not be able to do so, that they can’t change their driver’s license to reflect their gender, and they can’t use women’s washrooms. And that transgender men can’t transition either. Following their American counterparts, conservative governments in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan have implemented similar laws. Unlike SOGI, I would call these laws “hate your neighbour” laws. And can you guess what their result was? A 72% increase in suicide attempts amongst transgender and non-binary youth [2]. Let me be very clear: THESE LAWS KILL CHILDREN. And yet, the Conservative government in Alberta is actively passing more laws just like them!. And so we ask: why would people push harmful policies like these?
Well, let’s look back at the example of Jesus. The crux of Jesus’ teachings – “Love your Neighbour” – is really about changing perspectives. To treat your neighbours as people, regardless of circumstance, deserving of compassion and respect. And that made people uncomfortable – it threatened the comfort of the Roman elites and temple authorities. It made them uncomfortable enough to nail a king to a tree.
People sometimes impart serious harm on others to protect their own comfort and security. Slavery. Apartheid. Invasion. The sins of humanity, for which and by which Christ was killed through public torture. Jesus. Saviour. Mentor. An ally: a person who dined with people collecting tax for Rome, with prostitutes making money the only way they could, with lepers scarred by their disease.
Being an ally is not about comfort. We can change neither ourselves nor our society by only doing what is convenient. As allies, when we feel discomfort around people who are different than us, we can acknowledge our discomfort, look at what it is that causes it and ask ourselves: what about this situation makes me uncomfortable? Is my discomfort justified by this person’s actions? Or is it just something taught to me by others who were scared of people who are different. You’ve probably shared buses, restaurants, and public bathrooms with sex workers, CRA agents, people with skin lesions, gay people, trans people, and people of all manner of different faiths, ages, and ethnicities, and been none the worse for it – I bet you usually don’t even notice.
When we are allies, we go out of our way to help those who are less privileged than ourselves. We experience the discomfort of being with the unfamiliar but don’t act out with fear or disgust. We experience the inconvenience of advocating for the marginalized. But, because we know our mild discomfort will help less privileged people through their greater discomfort, we go out of our way to help. And, in time, maybe we find it isn’t a discomfort after all.
Our season of commitment theme this year is to Love our neighbours, Serve our communities, and Give unto our God. Each asks us to put others before ourselves, to come last so others can come first, following the leadership Christ – the one “who is, and who was, and who is to come”. Today, on our last day of asking you for your commitment this year, I ask you to commit to helping the work of this church in Allyship, in advocacy, and in worship of our greatest Ally, Jesus Christ.