Matthew 11:28-30 | Galatians 5:13-15

I really shouldn’t need to be preaching this sermon. We shouldn’t need to be having a series on the Church being inclusive.

The Church is supposed to be the people of Jesus, Jesus’ followers. And if you read through the gospels, the accounts that we have of the life of Jesus, I don’t think you’ll find anything that suggests Jesus was anything other than inclusive and welcoming.

In fact he seemed to make a particular point of including, treating as important, those who were excluded or marginalised by the cultural and religious norms of the day. This was, in fact, the most common criticism levelled at him! There’s a story recorded in three of the four accounts of Jesus’ life, shortly after Jesus had invited Levi, a tax collector, to follow him.

(Tax collectors were despised by the people of Jesus’ day – they were taking the Roman coin, working for the enemy, seen as traitors to their faith and their nation, betrayers of their own people.)

We read: And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax-collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax-collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’

At other times Jesus talks with women (no good Jewish man would be seen with a woman who was not his wife), welcomes children, touches lepers, goes to the homes of foreigners – all things that the religious folk said were against the rules, and attacked him for.

Jesus was consistently criticized for including people that others thought he shouldn’t.

But we in the Church have never been as good at welcoming as Jesus was.

And in particular, we in the Church have a terrible track record at making anyone who doesn’t fit a particular model of gender and sexuality welcome. Instead of being a safe place for people to explore who they are, and how they fit into the story of God, we’ve attacked, and excluded those who are different, leaving a trail religious trauma in our wake.

So I want to start by saying that if you, or someone you care about, has been hurt by the often very public attacks on the queer community by the Church, I am sorry.

We, the Church, have been in the wrong, and people have been hurt by that, and I am sorry.

And I want to acknowledge that this is a big topic, and although we’re taking three weeks to look at it, it’s worthy of much examination. So if you would like to talk more, over coffee, or in a group discussion, or whatever, please make use of the response flyers that hopefully you’ve found in the pew. 

In our gospel reading today we heard Jesus’ words – “come to me all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens… by burden is light”.

These words were spoken at the start of a section in the gospel in which Jesus argued with the religious leaders of his day about how to live. In a sense, it was an argument about the letter versus the spirit of the law; for the Pharisees, those he was arguing against, were really big on keeping the law down to the smallest detail.

In particular, Jesus has a series of arguments with them about keeping the Sabbath. There were lots of laws in the Torah, the Jewish scriptures, but this one seems to have become a sort of purity test, by which you could judge whether or not someone was ‘in’, ‘acceptable’, ‘righteous’, or ‘out’, ‘excluded’, ‘a sinner’.

There’s something very human about this – we try to boil complex ethical, social, cultural, relational issues down to simple tests and simplistic slogans.

We take what is visible and external, and use it to judge what is within. The heart of the Jewish law was to love and serve God, to be faithful to God; but people always prefer objective external measures.

So they fixated on specific phrases from the law, keeping the Sabbath, tithing, maintaining ritual purity, and mistook external conformance for devotion to God. As Jesus will later say “you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith”

And we, in the Church, have too often paid attention to particular externals – who you love, whether you present in a way that conforms to an immutable gender binary – and missed the weightier matters: God delight in each person, made in God’s image, each a beloved child of God.

As the story goes on, Jesus makes the same argument in different ways – that the law is there for people’s benefit; to help people, to set them free; not to stop people doing something good.

He makes a point of deliberately breaking the rules, by healing a man on the Sabbath, and declares “it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath”. And he ends by telling the Pharisees that they have failed to understand the words of their own scriptures, where God says “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” – God cares about the right treatment of people, not blind obedience to rules.

So when Jesus says, “come to me all that are weary and bearing heavy burdens … you will find rest for your soul … my burden is light”, the burdens he was talking about were religious ones. The loads he was offering to take away were those placed on people by the religious judgement of others.

And just in case it isn’t obvious, when he said “come to me all that are weary” he meant all. He didn’t say “come to me all who are weary and ready to conform”. The need to conform was precisely the heavy burden he was offering to take away.

Those in our culture who are queer, who are romantically drawn to and committed to another of the same sex, or who don’t conform to classic gender binaries, carry far more than their share of burdens, as they seek to navigate who they are.

Some of those are the ‘heavy burdens’ Jesus spoke of – loads placed upon them by those who expect them to change, to fit in, to conform.

And we, Jesus’ followers, have often placed those burdens. We neglect the weighty truth, the consistent theme of the scriptures: the creativity and love of God, and God’s desire for all to have “life in all its fullness”, and instead insist that to be acceptable to God, you need to follow some external rule that we have drawn from our reading of the Bible.

Because of course there are bits of the Bible that, taken in isolation, seem to speak against being queer – you’ve probably heard them – especially if you’ve come out within a Church, or been an ally of someone who has done so.

We’ll come back this in the third week, “what about where it says…?”

But does this mean that anything goes? Is Jesus’ welcome such that there are no rules, no restraints, except for those we choose for ourselves?

Does God have no standards?

Set free from the burden of following detailed religious rules, can we do whatever we want?

That’s the question addressed in our reading, from the letter to the Church in Galatia. This is one of the earliest bits of the New Testament to be written – perhaps ten or fifteen years after Jesus’ death. And in the section we heard read the author, Paul, echoes Jesus’ teaching, telling his readers “…you have been called to freedom”. He’s spent a large chunk of the letter telling people not to fall for the lure of simple, simplistic, black and white rules to live by.

But he then he declares: this freedom isn’t intended for self-indulgence; it is an opportunity to get to the heart of the law, to what really matters to God:

The whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’

Is it more loving to welcome someone as they are, to celebrate the unique person that they have been created, regardless of how they identify their gender, regardless of who, if anyone, they are romantically attracted to?

Or to insist that they can only be really welcome amongst us if they fit one of a small number of approved patterns of gender and sexuality.

Is it more loving to affirm and welcome someone’s identity, or to label it as sinful and deformed? For a data junkie like me, the statistics answer the question. Queer youth are four times more likely than their peers to attempt suicide – around 50% of transgender and non-binary youth seriously considered taking their own lives. But that risk is halved for queer youth who have their identity accepted and affirmed by those around them.

Is it loving to treat someone in a way that leads them to consider taking their own life? Or in a way that accepts them and affirms them as they are?

That surely shouldn’t be a difficult question to answer.

Or to take it a different way – is the creative love of God, who made the wonderfully strange and complex universe we live in, more likely to be expressed by trying to fit everyone into formulaic patterns of sameness, or by embracing our differences and quirks and weirdness, and weaving from them something that celebrates diversity?

The whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’

This is why we as a Church believe that people are fully welcome within the people of God regardless of sexuality or gender identity.

It’s not that there are no longer any rules; but the interpretation of any rule needs to be done through the lens of love, in celebration of diversity. We need to read all that has been written about God’s law for life with the understanding that this law is summed up in “love your neighbour as yourself”.

Which doesn’t leave us doing whatever we want. For clearly there are some ways of living, some choices we can make, that are more, or less, loving of others (and for that matter, loving of ourselves).

It just means that whenever we turn the law: “love your neighbour as yourself” into a rule or set of rules, we need to be very aware that the rules are no more than a means to an end.

Next week Stuart is going to be exploring that idea in the context of human relationships – if the law is summed up in the command to love one another, what does that mean about how we form connections, especially romantic partnerships?

And then in two weeks, I’ll be taking a look at the bits of the Bible that seem to specifically declare same sex relationships in particular to be unacceptable to God, and asking what they are really all about, how they appear when viewed in the light of the summary of the law as love.

But the words I want to leave you with are Jesus’: words of invitation for all, but especially those who are carrying loads of guilt, confusion, or trauma:Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.