2024.07.21 | Scattered Sheep and Allies
“Scattered Sheep and Allies”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost,
July 21, 2024
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Today we are celebrating the 29th anniversary of Eden choosing to be an Open and Affirming congregation. For those you might be newer here and not familiar with the lingo of the United Church of Christ, Open and Affirming (or ONA) is the UCC’s designation for congregations, campus ministries, and other bodies in the UCC which make a public covenant of welcome into their full life and ministry to persons of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions.
I think most of you know that I have a longer history with Eden than the almost-year that I’ve been your Designated Term Associate Pastor. In fact, I walked through the doors of the sanctuary for the first time in November of 1995– the very year that Eden voted to become Open and Affirming.
Many of you may also know that I’m one of those rare folks who actually grew up in the UCC. I was baptized, confirmed, and had my first experiences of worship leadership and diaconal ministry at Lemon Grove Congregational UCC in Southern California.
Despite these early experiences, by my mid-twenties and after a move to the Bay Area, I wasn’t really sure if traditional Christianity was still a good fit for my identity as a feminist and my decidedly nature-based sense of spirituality. I was having trouble reconciling my feminism with a faith tradition that was so rooted in the Patriarchy. I pretty much stopped attending church, except for a few times when I was invited by friends or family.
But by my early thirties I had started to feel a real need to attend to my spiritual life and to find a spiritual community that felt like home. I wasn’t sure at first where this would lead me, but I decided to start with the tradition of my childhood. I got out the yellow pages–remember, this was 1995– and flipped to the listings for UCC churches in the area. I figured I’d start there and see where it led me. I was intrigued by the ad for Eden Church, because it declared that it was “An Open and Affirming Congregation.” Remember that I’d been away from the church for a few years and wasn’t really aware what ONA meant, but I liked the sound of it. I figured that it might mean that a nutty feminist tree-hugger like myself might feel welcome there. And I was. And it became for me a place where I was able to deepen my faith, test my call to ministry, and to understand how I am called to be an ally.
Throughout the summer, we’ve been exploring the theme of leadership as it’s expressed in the stories of the kings and prophets of ancient Israel. We’ve read the stories of Samuel, David, and Saul, the first leaders of a united Israel, and this month we’re hearing from the prophets of the divided kingdom. Last week we heard from the northern Kingdom of Israel’s prophet Amos, and today, we’re hearing a warning from the southern Kingdom of Judah’s prophet, Jeremiah.
There is a lot of doom and gloom in the Book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah preached and prophesied at a time in Judah’s history when the Babylonian Empire was a rising world power in the Near East, and Jeremiah rightly prophesied that Judah would lose its independence under the military pressure from its more powerful neighbors.
He is so known for his doom and gloom and his agony over the fate of Judah that he is known as the “weeping prophet.” He is also so known for his gloomy prophecies that he inspired the English word “jeremiad,” which is, according to Merriam-Webster, a noun that means “a prolonged lamentation or complaint or a cautionary or angry harangue.”
Jeremiah may be full of doom and gloom, but he is also full of hope, which sometimes people forget. And you can hear it in our scripture for today. Yes, the gloom is there for sure: “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. [...] It is you who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord.” Jeremiah laments the bad leadership of Judah that has misled the people and failed to nurture and protect them. If you think of the ancient vocation of a shepherd, the task of the shepherd is to bring the sheep into fertile pastures, to protect them from predators, and then to gather them into the sheepfold for safety and warmth at night. The leaders of Judah have failed to do this.
But Jeremiah offers a word of hope, too: “Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock [...], and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall no longer fear or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.”
Jeremiah looks squarely at the suffering of the world and at the failures of political leadership and weeps in despair. But he also reminds us to live in the hope of God’s powerful promise that we do not have to be bound to the fears of an uncertain future.
I believe that declaring ourselves to be an Open and Affirming church is one of the ways we live into the hope of God’s promise that Jeremiah offers. When we say yes to being allies to the vulnerable we are loosening our bondage to fear and even helping to bring about that future that God promises. When we declare ourselves to be Open and Affirming, we move from living saturated in despair and fear to working for justice, equity, and inclusion, working for dignity and hope, working to bring about the promised realm of God’s Beloved Community. We move from being bystanders observing the doom and gloom to being allies and co-creators.
The traditional definition of an ally is either a nation that is associated with another nation by treaty or agreement, or an individual or group of individuals that provides assistance or help in an ongoing effort or struggle. These days, in the work of diversity, equity and inclusion, the word has taken on an additional layer of meaning. The Anti-Oppression Network defines an ally as “an active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person in a position of privilege and power seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group”
Every movement for justice has made progress in part because it has had allies. For example, in the struggle for women’s suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was necessary to get men on board to vote for an amendment to the constitution, since only men could vote. Organizations like the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage sprang up across the country, and prominent public figures supported women’s right to the vote. Some of them called themselves “suffragents.”
The struggle for civil rights for people of color has also been aided by White folks who stand with them as allies. Often they were people of faith. In a photo from a 1964 civil rights rally in Chicago, you can see Father Theodore Hesburgh, the President of Notre Dame University, and the congregational minister Edgar Chandler, standing and singing with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Likewise, there have been many straight allies in the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. But I’m going to point out one in particular today who has had a profound impact on the movement. This is Jeanne Manford, a soft-spoken elementary school teacher from Queens, New York. Her out gay son Morty was a co-founder of the group Gay Activists Alliance, which was a group advocating for LGBTQ+ justice in the early seventies. When she found out that Morty had been severely beaten by the president of the firefighter’s union at a demonstration in 1972, Jeanne fired off a letter in support of gay activism to the New York Post that got some notice. No parent had ever written such a letter before that was published in a major newspaper.
Later that year, Morty asked his mom if she would march with him in the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, which was a precursor to New York’s Gay Pride March. She said yes, and she carried a sign that said, “Parents of Gays: Unite in Support of Our Children.” She started something. The next year, there was a whole contingent of parents who marched with her.
That year, 1973, she and her husband Jules gathered a group of 20 people in the basement of a Methodist church in Greenwich Village. They formed a group that they called POG—Parents of Gays—that advocated for their gay children and participated in activism. More people joined, and groups began forming across the country. Eventually changing their name to Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, or PFLAG, the group has become the cornerstone of the ally movement in the struggle for LGBTQ+ justice. If you want to learn how to be a better ally, there is no better place to go for information.
With their over 50 years of experience, PFLAG has learned that allies come in all shapes and sizes, but they have four core characteristics:
Allies want to learn. Allies are people who recognize they don’t know all that can be known on LGBTQ+ issues or about all the experiences of people who are LGBTQ+, but they want to understand more.
Allies address their barriers. They may have to grapple with some roadblocks to being openly and actively supportive of people who are LGBTQ+, and they’re willing to take on the challenge.
Allies are people who know that support comes in many forms. It can mean something super-public (think covering yourself in rainbow glitter and heading to a Pride celebration with a sign reading, “PROUD ALLY”). But it can also mean expressing support in more personal ways through the language we use, conversations we choose to have, and signals that we send. True allies know that all aspects of allyship are important, effective, and should be valued equally.
Allies are diverse. Allies are people who know that there’s no one way to be an ally, and that everyone gets to adopt the term in a different way…and that’s ok.
Friends, there is a lot of doom and gloom in the world, and things can seem pretty hopeless. But God offers us the powerful promise that we do not have to be bound to the fears of an uncertain future. We do not have to wallow in our despair alone. We can stand tall and link arms and march and sing until we wear out our shoes and our voices. As allies, we can help bring the scattered sheep home…and spread around some rainbow glitter while we’re at it. Amen.