“A revolutionary Jesus looks at each of us and is not satisfied with the 99% of ourselves that we think might be lovable, but wants desperately to touch that one percent, that secret we hide so deeply in fear … to caress that broken childhood dream … to reach that painful secret that is feeding on our heart like a cancer … to look deeply into our eyes and tell us that even that part of us … and maybe even especially that part of us … is infinitely loved as well.”
Sermon by Mike Kinman at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Homecoming Sunday, September 15, 2019.
Follow All Saints Church on Twitter @ASCpas. Like us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AllSaintsPasadena/.
Donate to support the mission and ministries of All Saints at https://allsaints-pas.org/donate/donate-now/.
++++++++++
Secrets and songs.
Secrets and songs.
Our hearts are full of secrets and songs.
Secrets we fear someone will find out.
Songs we long to cry out and shout.
Secrets and songs.
Secrets and songs.
Our hearts are full of secrets and songs.
+
What song does your heart long to sing?
What secret do you wish there was someone to tell?
In November, 2004, a man named Frank Warren decided to become a collector of secrets.
He printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards. One side blank and the other side inviting people anonymously to share a secret—something they’d never told anyone before.
Then he walked the streets of Washington, D.C. — where he knew there were plenty of secrets — and handed the postcards to anyone he met.
He had no idea what to expect.
Then he started getting a few of them back … then a few more … then a few more.
Then something incredible began to happen. He started getting secrets on different postcards … postcards people made themselves.
The secrets began pouring in, not just from Washington but from all over the country … and then from all over the world. Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands … of secrets.
People’s longing to share their secrets was so great and the secrets themselves were so moving, he started a website called PostSecret.com to collect and share these anonymous secrets. PostSecret.com became the most visited advertisement-free blog in the world. To date, he has received well over a million secrets.
“Secrets can take many forms,” Frank says. “They can be shocking or silly or soulful. They can connect us with our deepest humanity or with people we’ll never meet again.”
Listen to some of the secrets people shared.
Everyone who knew me before 9/11 thinks I’m dead.
I had my dream wedding with the wrong person.
I’m an atheist, but seeing how close people are brought together by religion makes me jealous. I wish I could believe in something.
My dog winks at me sometimes. I always wink back in case it’s some sort of code.
This summer it will have been 3 years since you died. How come I feel like I am cheating on you? You left me, remember?
I use a bracelet of Jesus to hide my cutting scars.
My daughter hates women who have had abortions. I had one.
The man I’m having an affair with is finally getting a divorce, but now I don’t want him anymore.
I put weed in the incense at church.
I wish we had loved each other at the same time.
I’m more scared to believe in God than not to
One person made a postcard out of a flattened-out half of a Starbuck’s cup and wrote:
When customers are rude to me … I give them decaf
Another drew a picture of a young girl and wrote:
I want to tell you about my rape so you can know who I really am.
“Secrets can take many forms. They can be shocking or silly or soulful. They can connect us with our deepest humanity or with people we’ll never meet again.”
Why did PostSecret become a global phenomenon?
Because our hearts are full of secrets.
So many secrets.
So many kinds of secrets.
Secrets we hold for fear they will meet judgment that is about retribution and shaming and not healing and transformation.
Secrets that are deeply hidden by the lies we tell ourselves. Lies we tell so often that they seem true from our lips even as they betray the secret in our hearts.
Secrets we fear to tell because of the collateral damage of loved ones wounded and lives changed.
We have secrets we cannot tell because they involve stories that are not only about us or maybe are not ours to share at all.
We have secrets we don’t even know borne of history we were never taught because it did not fit the narrative of the ones who got to write the story.
We have secrets we don’t want to tell because they are the only thing that is ours in a life where we feel every other part of us belongs to someone else.
We have secrets we keep bound deep in our hearts because we are so afraid they reveal something unacceptable and unlovable … not so much about the thing we had thought or felt or done or even had done to us … but something unacceptable and unlovable about us. That we ourselves would be found out as unacceptable and unlovable forever.
Our dear sister Becca Stevens writes:
We come from childhood dreams broken before dawn
Where our lives became waking nightmares,
Requiring us to swallow anger and sit
At tables with unsatable hunger… and say grace
In his book, No Ashes in the Fire, Darnell Moore says of the secret of his father’s beating of his mother … a secret his mother demanded that Darnell keep because “whatever happens in this house stays in this house.,” Darnell writes:
“Holding onto painful secrets feeds on the heart like a cancer.”
We all have secrets. And too many of them are bound to our hearts with chains of fear exhausting to carry. And we have learned to swallow anger and sit at tables – including this one — with unsatable hunger and say grace, while the cancer feeds on our heart.
And yet, that is not all that is in our heart.
That is not all we come from.
Becca sings on:
We come from passionate melodies born in us,
Where tunes rise like cicadas and sit down on porches
Where gathering is sacred business
And longing is woven into table cloths
We come from old love that wants to rise
Like drum majors for a new generation
In a land where children are safe, women are free
And all of us are invited to sing our song.
Our hearts are full of secrets
… and our hearts are full of songs.
Songs of who we truly are and who we are becoming.
Songs of beauty and joy, creativity and wonder.
Songs of an old love that is longing to rise from us if only we could find that place of safety, that place of freedom.
Songs from each of our hearts that long to join together in a chorus of joy… and justice … and love.
Secrets and songs.
Secrets and songs.
Our hearts are full of secrets and songs.
This year, as All Saints Church, we have been remembering who we have been and who we are, and longing for that vision of who God dreams for us to become. And out of that remembering and longing came four core values that embody the heart of this community:
Radical inclusion.
Courageous Justice.
Joyful Spirituality
Ethical Stewardship.
Last Tuesday, your vestry unanimously and joyfully affirmed a mission statement springing from those values that will guide us in the days and years to come. It is printed on the cover of your service leaflet. Can we say it together, each speaking in the language of your heart:
We are an Episcopal church, walking with a revolutionary Jesus,
Loving without judgment
Doing justice courageously
Embracing life joyfully
Reverently inviting all faiths and peoples into relationship
For the healing and transformation of our ourselves, our community and the world.
For me, the heart is in that second line:
Love without judgment.
Love without judgment is what is revolutionary about the Jesus we follow.
Love without judgment is following and proclaiming a Jesus who loves first, without questions, exceptions or counting the cost.
Love without judgment is George Regas answering those who would say the love of Christ is only for some by saying “Whoever you are and wherever you find yourself on your journey of faith, you are welcome to come to Christ’s table.”
Love without judgment is Ed Bacon answering those who have weaponized Jesus to condemn people for how they are created, who they are becoming, and who they love by saying “Being gay (and lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer) is a gift from God.”
Love without judgment is Bryan Stevenson answering from this pulpit those who would say by our actions we can deserve only punishment and death that each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done and that “it is the broken that can teach us all what it means to accept God’s grace.”
Love without judgment is Anne Peterson singing:
If you think you can’t go home again
Because the might-haves and
The should-haves and the didn’t-quites
Have taken hold,
Then think again.
Look homeward, angels-
Prodigal sons and daughters, all
Wide is the path and wide the gate that draws us in;
…The community of faith receives us all
With strong and open arms,
Claiming us as God’s own special cherished treasures.
This is the love of a revolutionary Jesus.
A Jesus who this morning’s Gospel tells us always is out searching for the outcast who is convinced they are unlovable.
A revolutionary Jesus looks at each of us and is not satisfied with the 99% of ourselves that we think might be lovable, but wants desperately to touch that one percent, that secret we hide so deeply in fear.
…to caress that broken childhood dream
…to reach that painful secret that is feeding on our heart like a cancer
…to look deeply into our eyes and tell us that even that part of us … and maybe even especially that part of us … is infinitely loved as well.
The love without judgment of this revolutionary Jesus is how we are able to do justice courageously.
Loving without judgment means telling secrets and confessing the deep hurt we have caused is an act of sacred liberation and healing for all. Because true justice is never about the lie that justice is merely meting out an equal portion of pain … but rather a repairing of the breach for the healing and transformation of ourselves, our community and the world.
Loving without judgment means we can embrace life joyfully because we know the deepest of love is always for us and can never be taken away.
Loving without judgment is how we are able reverently to invite all faiths and peoples into relationship – not seeking to convict or convert but to stand in solidarity, knowing joyfully that we are blessed with many different companions on the many different paths to and through the love that heals and transforms ourselves, our community and the world.
Secrets and songs.
Secrets and songs.
Our hearts are full of secrets and songs.
Following a revolutionary Jesus in loving without judgment doesn’t mean we have to tell our secrets, it means we no longer are bound by fear of them being discovered. It means together we get to sing into being a world where we no longer have to say grace through gritted teeth and swallowed anger and feel the cancer of what we carry inside eating away at our heart. Where we are safe to share the secrets we long to tell and explore what our song might be without worrying how it will sound on another’s ear.
Here at All Saints, we have declared ourselves a sanctuary church. A sanctuary is a sacred, safe place where we do not have to fear danger because of who we are, where we come from, or what the world might think of us.
A sanctuary is the home we all deserve, if not the home we have necessarily ever had.
Sanctuary is that place of love without judgment. And we indeed are and are becoming a Sanctuary Church … not just for those who are being pursued by a government bent on ruling through fear, but for all who long to tell their secrets and sing their songs.
As you leave the service today, you will be given one of these cards. It has our new mission statement – Spanish on one side and English on the other … written over the gorgeous Joseph Stoddard watercolor of All Saints Church that graces our legacy wall.
Take it with you as you leave today. And every day this week, read it and ask yourself:
What song does my heart long to sing?
What secret do I wish there was someone to tell?
Then write that secret, write that song in the blank space on the card … and bring it back here next Sunday. Don’t sign it. If you’re nervous that someone might recognize your handwriting, well write with your non dominant hand, or you can even cut out tiny letters from a magazine like a ransom note!
But I hope you’ll do it … and then I hope you’ll bring the card back next Sunday and we will lay them on the table together. If you absolutely can’t make it next Sunday, mail it back to the church address on the card.
And … I really hope you will be here next week. I really hope you will come back and bring that card with your secret or your song to lay on that table together because gathering is sacred business … and generations of our longing is woven into that table cloth.
Come back and bring your secret and song with you … and while you’re at it, bring someone else with you who has a secret they are longing to tell or a song their heart is crying out to sing.
Because yes, today is Homecoming … but so is next week … and the next…. and the next
If home is where the heart is—
Some safe, comfortable place
Where one is loved as-is, without condition.
Then you are home.
Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow. Always.
A home with enough grace for all our secrets and enough love for all our songs.
Welcome.
Welcome home!
