Domes - Our Monthly Newsletter
Dunbar UCC
December 3, 2006
Luke 21:25-36
A Minor Key
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I apologize for something I’ve been doing all these years. I’ve played Christmas hymns the month of December. They are beautiful, but I gave you the wrong message of Advent. So, let me try again.
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There’s a big difference between Advent hymns and Christmas hymns, A few minutes ago we sang the Advent hymn: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. It’s not happy or cheerful. It is not, “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing, or O Come All Ye Faithful.” It is a prayer, asking God to ransom captives -- people who are slaves or in prison. Probably the prisoners we are holding at Guantanamo pray a hymn like this every day to Allah. There’s hope in this song, but not joy. It suggests that we are all exiles here -- we have not found our true home -- until God appears in our lives. Most of the Advent hymns are in a minor key, like the blues. They are sung by people who are suffering or longing for a better life.
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Maybe like us. We don’t have to be in Guantanamo to feel like prisoners. We can feel like a prisoner of our own minds, unable to stop bad habits or behaviors. Unable to follow the Christ’s command to love everyone. We can feel like a captive to a Christmas tradition that’s gone out of control -- as we try to park our car at one of the malls, or as we fight someone to get the last Sony Playstation 3. And we don’t have to live in North Korea to feel that we’re not free. We can be a captive to our prejudices and bigotry. Our Declaration of Independence tells us that all people are created equal and entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But until recently in our history, if you were black, you could still be lynched, and the people who hung or beat you would not be punished. If you were black you could not vote, or marry a white person. You could not eat in restaurants or use drinking fountains or restrooms that white people used. We are prisoners to our prejudices. We believe that some human beings are entitled to more rights than others. With God’s help, we are trying to correct that kind of thinking in this church.
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Most churches today teach that homosexuality is a sin. In USA Today, a Baptist minister named Oliver Thomas asked: “What if Christian leaders are wrong about homosexuality?” Every year, science discovers more evidence that being gay or lesbian or bisexual is not unnatural, but it is something determined by hormones in the womb, and by genes. Thomas confessed that in the coming years, as the evidence mounts, it will be impossible to deny that people are born gay. But even with the mounting evidence, church leaders still say homosexuality is a choice, and it’s an abomination.
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And if you ask many Christians why can’t women be ordained or why gays are an abomination, they will tell you: “Because it says so in the bible.” Yet, in bible study, we learned that it’s also an abomination to touch the skin of a pig -- like a football. We learned that it’s OK to keep slaves, or for a man to have many wives. We learned that anyone who works on the Sabbath, or who uses the Lord’s name in vain, should be put to death. We realized that many of the over-600 laws of the Old Testament were conditioned by ancient and cultural practices and do not apply today. But people still use the bible to justify their prejudices.
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We don’t want to do that here. That’s why the Deacons are giving reasons why it’s important for this church to become Open and Affirming. We hope that some time in 2007, we will take a vote on this issue, so that we will say, PUBLICLY, ON OUR SIGN AND IN OUR BULLETINS AND DOME, that we do not agree with those churches that call people an abomination because of the way they were born.
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But for now, we continue to sing, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” because we are waiting for the love of Christ to enter our world, and our hearts. For now, we will sing our hymns in a minor key.