This, however, is a dangerous thing.  It is a dangerous thing for those with power, or those who desire it, to be like Dr. King and connect the dots, to see how racism, and classism, and militarism – and sexism and nationalism and homophobia – are connected by the aphrodisiac of power.   Our church’s wavering support of the full inclusion of gay and lesbian persons is just one part of our ambivalence about widening the circle of our mission and ministry to address the feminization and color of poverty.  As a religious leader, I’m on a slippery slope when I publicly abhor the treatment of Gene Robinson on one hand, while not equally proclaiming intolerance for a lack of safe space for our infants and toddlers and the physical barriers that inhibit all persons to have access to our sanctuary and office and meeting space.

We cannot allow ourselves the illusion that we somehow have been granted the power to decide who God loves, and who matters most, and which outsider is really important in God’s sight.  Either every outsider is welcome when the doors are opened, or actually none are welcome.  For as long as I stand at the door with the power to open and close it for whom I choose, I have ceased to understand the significance of my own complicity in disempowering many of the outcasts around me.  Not one of us can claim our manner of life to be superior to another’s manner of life while we simultaneously in our own words and deeds act like it’s ok to be an overt or covert racist, sexist, polygamist, heterosexist, or materialist, or to live well off the profits of war and exploitation of other countries without child labor laws.   The manner of life that Jesus was most concerned to help us avoid, in fact, was that way of life that does not forgive, that chooses participation in gossip as an acceptable part of the Christian lifestyle, that treats retribution as sport, cliquishness and ridicule of ‘the other’ as just the way things are.

There will not be just treatment of gay and lesbian persons until the inhumanity experienced by each outcast is acknowledged by each outcast and then, we, collectively, take up the agony of our vocation as outcast and do something about it, one by one.  The agony of vocation is to remember the ways that we have tasted the ravages of exclusion.  And the glory of the Christian vocation, standing not at the center but on the edge of Empire, is to be the voice that can be heard and believed, the voice of empty belly child saying to empty belly child “be of Good Cheer”  -- for Christ has overcome the Empire, and instead is bringing in the very Reign of God.  For where Christ reigns the only power that holds any sway is that which holds open the door.  And with that one gesture of radical hospitality, each of us has the chance to change the world, to begin a new creation, where there are no outcasts in this church.