April 26, 2009

Geno Sisneros

Easter 3     Luke 24:36b-48

To say that I had been terrorised by the god of evangelical Christianity in my adolescence would not be an overstatement. I grew up in an evangelical single-parent home. The local church we attended was made up of the family and extended family who had adopted my mother, my younger brother and me upon our relocation to the town. My mother had become a widow at the very young age of twenty and this was to be a new start for us.

My family attended church twice during the week and twice on Sunday. The sermons preached from the pulpit were hellfire and brimstone messages. The services could last anywhere from 2 to 4 hours and at their height, the congregation would erupt into a wild frenzy of dancing, shouting and prophesying.

At every service we were offered the opportunity to “surrender” our lives to Christ. Upon asking Jesus to be our personal Lord and Saviour, we would be offered forgiveness for our sins. None of this was possible if you didn’t believe in your heart that humans were inherently evil sinful beings in need of saving. The human body was the prison of the soul and would only be freed upon Christ’s ‘second coming’. The second coming, the rapture was the day we all looked forward too. On that day, Christ, who was god, would separate the good from the bad, the good getting to spend an eternity in constant adoration of god and the bad would spend eternity in constant torment in the fires of hell.

As a child I used to lie awake at night sometimes till all hours of the morning with anxiety of the prospect of burning in hell. I struggled to reconcile the images of Jesus that hung on the walls of our Sunday school room with the Jesus who would send people to eternal torment. I tried to imagine what might be different about this Jesus’ appearance and his demeanour on the day of judgement. Would he look as gentle and meek and kind while doling out righteous punishment?

When I was 12 years-old I knew I must be gay. My anxiety about hell significantly increased. Something about my being had alerted several members of the congregation to my homosexuality; maybe it was that I had always preferred dolls to toy guns, preferred staying indoors baking with my mom instead of outside playing war. I was not being my gender correctly.

Finally at one worship service the preacher called me forward. And in front of the entire congregation, the words of god came through him, warning me that I was playing a deadly game with god. He made clear this was a warning about my disordered sexuality and the price, should I pursue that lifestyle, would be god withdrawing the spirit from me for good. Eternal damnation would then be inevitable.

I didn’t know how to react to this prophecy. My instincts told me that I better do something to show that I took god’s words seriously so I immediately knelt at the altar as I had seen others do after a prophecy. I was soon surrounded by several parishioners who came and laid hands on me to pray for the spirit to come into me, to deliver me. Two hours later still kneeling at the altar, I decided that I had better start faking some tears and fast because it was becoming apparent to me that the spirit was going to be a no-show and these prayer “warriors” weren’t letting me go anywhere anytime soon. Then relief, the tears finally came fake as they were. There were shouts of thanksgiving all around me that my 12 year-old soul had been delivered and I was finally allowed to leave with the warning, “no more games”.

From that point onward and well into my teenage years, I lived in a constant state of fear, shame and guilt. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand how a god who was supposedly all-loving and merciful could allow me to be born with such a defect as homosexuality. This was a defect for which the responsibility fell to me to overcome if I didn’t want to burn forever.

I prayed constantly for god to help me overcome the same-sex attraction I felt. Much like some girls dream of getting married to a prince, so were my dreams, but mine were not signs of a time-honoured fairytale, they were signs of a disordered being.

By this point, I felt like an empty shell, a body in a tomb, no life. The happy child who use to run around like a clown performing for laughter had died that night and gave way to the miserable being I had become. I felt numb and believed god had really withdrawn “his” spirit from me. School become unbearable too because again something about my being had alerted my classmates to my homosexuality. There were no safe places.

So it came to pass that eventually, my mother who had had enough fled with my brother and me in tow from the little white church with the big tall steeple that had once symbolised our hopes for a new life. Our little family limped away beaten and battered, wounded and exhausted from the experience. We were from then on known by the congregation as “backsliders”. We had turned our backs on god and not a moment too soon. Walking away never felt so good or so right.

Even in the midst of that experience, the Jesus story had never left me. I knew that I had not experienced his Gospel in its true form. I had experienced someone else’s diluted and distorted version of it. I had never stopped calling myself a Christian but it wasn’t until several years later I happened into a big stone church and I experienced a quickening. A quickening-- that moment in pregnancy when a mum to be first feels new life moving inside her. For me, in spiritual terms, this was the precise moment when the old god started to pass away and I embraced not a new god but God with a new understanding.

My quickening happened almost four years ago when I walked through the doors of St Matthew’s for the very first time. It was the 8’o’clock service. I had heard about these “gay friendly” churches but I was, for obvious reasons, very suspicious. I thought there must be some gimmick. I know! They get you in the door; make you feel really comfortable by being all nice to you. Before you know it, the 8’o’clockers are wrestling you to the ground while the priest makes a mad dash for the holy water and a crucifix so you can be the victim of yet another exorcism. Pass! But what did I have to lose? I had succesfully faked deliverance once before, I was confident I could do it again. Besides, this church had more fire exits to escape out of than my last one.

So in I walked with my King James Bible in hand. I remember being mildly appalled after the service that I had not once the opportunity or need to open it during the service. It was the evangelical in me that had made me feel like a fish out of water. Glynn preached a sermon called “When Buffoons Become Bishops.” By the last sentence of his sermon, somehow I knew I was in the right place. After awhile I no longer feared going to hell myself. However after that first service I was worried for Glynn. I had been baptised into St Matthew’s theology. This theology said that God didn’t require me to surrender my intellect or reason. These were gifts and that was Good News!

St Matthew’s was a beacon to me and the place where my quickening was allowed to happen and nurtured. I realised that the Jesus message wasn’t a message of oppression; it was a message of new life. It was a doctrine of hope not one of control. I begin to understand the miracle of what happened in Jesus’ tomb. I realised that dark places are sometimes where new life comes out of. Resurrection is ongoing and it’s amazing what can come out of an empty shell, an empty tomb.

Today I don’t believe that I have been blessed by God to be able to stand here sharing my wounds. To say that implies that the queer youth who didn’t make it were not blessed. It would mean they were out of divine favour and I don’t believe that’s what God is or how God works.

I do know however what a struggle it can be to try to find reason in the journey. What answer can we give for why things happen the way they do if our understanding of God means we cannot call it divine providence? In Paul Ostreicher’s simple words, “it is what it is.” That doesn’t mean to say that God isn’t active in our lives. It simply means that God is active in our lives in different ways.

So finally, if I had one last thing to say to that little white church with the big tall steeple, it would be, “it is no longer the threat of hell that controls me but the threat of hope.”