Taize Homily given by Jeffrey Weisner on 3/7/2010

Like many musicians, I am not a fan of public speaking - it makes me incredibly nervous, so please be merciful as I speak.

I'd like to speak for a moment about what being here at St. Thomas means to me in my own faith journey.  That thing more than anything else is the gift of being ordinary.

Like lots of people who grow up gay, I felt different than others from an early age.  But I suspect that, even if I had been heterosexual, I would have still been a bit of an outsider.  I was a shy, chubby nerd, and I'm sure the sight of me gamely hauling my gigantic double bass around my high school was more than enough to assure me oddball status. 

The powerful desire to fit in, to belong, to have a community, a home, has haunted me in various forms for much of my life.  Many people deal with these feelings by trying to conform to what they think will make others like them.  Some others cope with these feelings by declaring themselves special, embracing their outsider status and redefining the norm as "boring."  I have tried both of these methods at various times in my life.  In fact, I think that almost all of us have used these two methods on occasion as we navigate our way through life.

However, I think the truth about each of us is far more complex than either of these two answers.  We are each special and unique, and our faith encourages us to remember that God created each of us and loves us just as we are.  But we also have to come to terms with our own ordinariness.  We need to see that our problems are generally no greater than anyone else's problems, and that our gifts, careers, goals and relationships are fundamentally no better that anyone else's.  It is this ordinariness which is the thing I most love about St. Thomas.  We have services which, yes, are always special and wonderful.  And of course we all know in our hearts that the St. Thomas choir is the best, that our preaching is the most inspiring, that our liturgy is the most inclusive.  But I think that the truth is that a lot of our life here is actually not extraordinary. Our preachers do the very best they can, our musicians play and sing with all the talent they can muster, our various committees work hard, but can we really say that the same thing doesn't happen at other churches all over the city, the nation, the world?  We like to believe that we are special people for having given our time, our money, our attention to this place, and in a way we are.  But others all over the world do the same for their churches, their communities, their families.

And it is this sense of ordinariness, of comfortable averageness, that I love about St. Thomas.  And as with many who come through these doors, I have struggled to find a place in my life where I can be ordinary and average.  I love being able to know that I can stare at the same stain on the ceiling every time that I come here, and that the same person will ask me the same questions about how my week went every Sunday after the service.  The things that I love about St. Thomas, and yes even the things I don't love about it, will hopefully be here for me each week.

This is why I feel that, while I have attended and even belonged to other churches and other congregations in my life, St. Thomas is the first true church home that I have ever really had.  The ordinary acceptance of me as a person that St. Thomas offers gives me the space I need to grow in my faith and life. 

The irony of all this is that I know that it is the struggle and extraordinary efforts of many people over many years that has obtained for me the gift of St. Thomas' ordinariness.  The "radical" half of the phrase "radical hospitality" that is so much a part of what happens here acknowledges that truly giving a home and a safe space to everyone will come at a cost, and one of the most important parts of St. Thomas is the presence of people who have been willing to pay that cost.  But even so, it's good to remember that all that striving and sacrifice is only a means to an end - the end of being able to, in ways both unusual and common, draw each of us and our community closer to God.

The most amazing experience of the ordinary that St.Thomas has given me has been the chance to have an ordinary marriage.  My husband Silvio and I were married by Nancy Lee last Fall, and one of the greatest gifts I got from that experience was our marriage counseling sessions with her.  After many of them I often reflected on the fact that the questions that she asked of us and the conversations that we had were almost certainly the same questions and conversations that she had with other couples that she had married, gay or straight.  And why not?  Our marriage is not extraordinary.  We face the same questions and struggles that most couples do.  But in a world where some feel that our marriage is literally capable of bringing down Western civilization, it is a source of enormous grace and spiritual strength to have our love and commitment be so matter-of-fact to everyone here at St. Thomas.

Some of us attended the opening dinner for our new capital campaign last night in this very room.  If you didn't, you may in some other way be connected to this campaign or to the broader conversation about our future here at St. Thomas. Capital campaigns can tend to be laden with references to our specialness and importance, and indeed, who wants to give lots of money for something ordinary?  If we do build a new church building here at St. Thomas it will indeed be a truly special thing in many ways.  But my hope for all of us is that we'll seek to humbly remember the simple and the ordinary as we press forward with the extraordinary things that we hope to accomplish here.  Lent is a time that God gives us to remember how unimportant lots of the things we concern ourselves with in this life really are.  We fast and smear ourselves with ashes to remember, among other things, what our bodies are really made of and how weak they are.  We pray in order to remember that God hears everyone equally regardless of social status.  And we give alms to remember that we have what we have only by grace. In fact, as Jesus says today in the Gospel reading, if we presume that those who suffer more and have less than we do somehow deserve what they get, we are misunderstanding the core of the Gospel itself.  The ordinary rhythms of life and liturgy here at St. Thomas are as much a path to God as are the holidays, concerts, and building campaigns, and having a chance to listen to those rhythms is something I am thankful for everyday.