Soft Like fruit, a perpetual harvest

Sixth Sunday After Pentecost ● June 30, 2024

Becca Love, Guest Preacher © 2024

You can view the full worship video recording at:

https://youtu.be/Pl5ISs5mr90?si=i5ejqVZlZ6udUn2S

Scripture Readings: 

Luke 10:25-28, Leviticus 26:3-4, Matthew 13:23, & Psalm 92:13-14

The reading text is provided at the end of this sermon.

Good morning, beloved Church of the Village and happy Pride! It is always amazing and a huge honor every time I get to stand up here with the mic and speak to this queerfully and wonderfully made church. And of course with today being Pride Sunday, I am nearly ecstatic with anticipation and reverence for this holy opportunity. Hallelujah! Here we are.

And with all this anticipatory ecstasy, I want to start at a place that sort of feels like an ending. I want to start by sharing an obituary with you. Perhaps some of you have seen it, it went a little viral on the internet a couple of weeks ago. It’s an obituary for a U.S. veteran named Edward Thomas Ryan. The obituary lovingly shares his acts of military service and awards, and talks about Edward’s volunteer work and his participation in a number of valuable civic pursuits, along with listing his siblings, his nieces, his nephews, and his church membership. It is both impressive and also fairly standard for an obituary. Just before its conclusion, however, the obituary shifts to a personal message from Edward himself, presumably written very shortly before his passing.

"I must tell you one more thing. I was Gay all my life: thru grade school, thru High School, thru College, thru Life. I was in a loving and caring relationship with Paul Cavagnaro of North Greenbush. He was the love of my life. We had 25 great years together. Paul died in 1994 from a medical procedure gone wrong. I'll be buried next to Paul. I'm sorry for not having the courage to come out as Gay. I was afraid of being ostracized: by Family, Friends, and Co-Workers. Seeing how people like me were treated, I just could not do it. Now that my secret is known, I'll forever Rest in Peace."

 Last week we heard an incredible sermon from guest preacher Rev. Dorlimar about all of the ways this world can try to bind us, to keep us from being known and seen by a world who may not understand our joy or our grief. Rev. Dorlimar pointed us to the story of the community in Bethany, where Lazarus and his family, both nuclear and found, resided. In the story, Lazarus has died and those around him are mourning their loss. Asked to do something, Jesus weeps in grief and then says, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” Jesus then asks Martha, Lazarus’ sister, “Do you believe this?” …church, do YOU believe this?

 What is Jesus asking of us? And what does he mean when he says we will never die? “The one who believes in me will live, even though they die.” Friends, these bodies will not live forever. These lives are designed to have a physical end, when we transition from this life into something else. That can be a scary thought. But the amazing thing is this, we are given the power to *live* our *entire* lives. From start to finish, we are living and becoming and changing, and that can mean some big living can still happen, right up to the last moments. “Those who are planted in the house of the Eternal shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bear fruit in old age; they shall be fresh and flourishing.”  And all along the way, we can be planting seeds of change that will continue life after this physical body is done. It takes a whole life to learn who you are. And like Edward writing his own obituary message, it can take an entire life to feel ready to share who you are, especially if it feels dangerous. I’ve preached before on the very real risks that come with being known. But be assured- God knows who you are, always, and God delights at your becoming, and your becoming can be the seed for a radical future. Those discoveries of self are both harvest and seed.

Like Reverend Tyler preached two weeks ago, we exist in a perpetual yearning for future possibility, and that is a good thing. We dream of radical worlds and also that dreaming is what makes that radical future world possible in this moment. In each moment of our perpetual becoming in this life, we are shaping who we are and moving closer to that for which we yearn: a world where we know God and feel God’s love. A world where we can see that all people are loved and safe and cared for and feel beautiful. In short, we are longing to witness and experience the kindom of heaven. Like Reverend Tyler preached, that kindom of heaven exists in our faithful yearning and also it can exist here, now, today. We discover it through our yearning and we build it through our becoming.

About a year and a half ago I attended the wedding of two of my dear friends, members of my chosen family and beloved members of the queer nightlife world. Friends, my experience of this wedding was so incredibly moving, I am not exaggerating when I say that I felt utterly changed afterward. What I witnessed that weekend was a huge amount of love poured out onto this couple and then all of that love reflected back at us. The wedding couple consisted of my friend Fischer, who is transgender, and my friend Matty, who is a professional drag queen. Matty’s family is Mexican, his father came to the US on foot as a teen, was a mariachi musician and professional clown who, while giving a toast thanked God for this union between Matty and Fishcer and reminded everyone that Jesus loves them for exactly who they are. Matty’s dad passed away on Wednesday this past week but that toast was a harvest of radical love and a seed that continues to yield fruit.

The wedding was officiated by Lady Quesa’Dilla, in full glorious drag, her pink wig towering over the grooms. This wedding had no dress code and every single person looked so incredibly amazingly fully themselves. It was joy beyond my wildest dreams. With the sun shimmering down on a sea of hemlines and haircuts and family, we joyfully wept as the wedding couple shared their vows and blessed us with their love. And there was a palpable collective intake of anxious breath at one very brief moment during the ceremony when we could hear police sirens in the distance. You see, the wedding took place in Texas, in March of 2023, just as Texas Senate Bill 12 was starting to pick up some traction. In case you’ve lost count, Senate Bill 12 was an attempt to essentially ban all drag performances, making it a criminal offense to perform or even just be in drag. It’s not a stretch to imagine how this could be used to police all manner of gender identities and personal expressions, and this wedding was a blessed and holy host to a wide variety of all of the above. I know I had a moment of fear when I heard those sirens, imagining that this God-filled experience we were having could be deemed illegal and harmed in an instant. The sirens faded, moved off in the distance and our evening went on. Senate Bill 12 was struck down several months later, thank God, but I do remember those sirens in the midst of that heavenly moment. Far, far more importantly, however, I remember what the overall gathering felt like. I remember the feeling of risk in that moment, but I more remember the holy connective experience that I feared could be taken away. I remember what it felt like to glimpse the possibilities of the kindom of Heaven in the here and now. I remember Matty’s father’s toast. I became something new in that experience.

Psalm 56 says “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.” The psalmist didn’t write “If I am afraid.” Or “When I am afraid, I will trust in you and the scary thing will stop.” The psalmist writes “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.” I trust that another world is possible and to get there we must imagine it, yearn for it, and build it through our becoming. We let go of what is, move through the risks and trust that the seeds we plant today can grow into a future full of God’s radical love, one that we may not be physically present to witness but parts of us are there, just the same.

 In our becoming we are given access again and again to the love and the tending and the pruning and the harvest that God offers us through God’s love. Just like a garden, just like a fruit on the vine, we are participants in this becoming when we respond to God’s tending hand, allowing our seeds, our dreams of future possibilities, to be shared and planted in good soil, for future abundance. We are being given a gift of perpetual life and we are giving possible life to a radical future. In this giving, we are receiving. In the planting, we are harvesting.

 Similarly, fruit is designed to be harvested for nourishment, and its design also ensures its own survival. The perpetual life of fruit is found in its seeds. The catch is that these seeds depend on the fruit’s softness, its consumption, and its transformation in order for them to possibly reach fertile soil. Fruit, in its gentle generous abundance, gives nourishment and sweetness in the here and now as well as seeds for sustenance. This sustenance refers both to its own future existence, so that the seeds can be planted and that particular fruit species can continue, but also for future sustenance of those who can continue the harvest, and be nourished by the fruit.

A friend shared a poem with me this past spring, written by his beloved uncle, a true lover of nature who had lived in Alaska until his death just over a year ago. The poet, Arthur Mannix, had written a piece about picking berries, the intimacy and gentleness of the gathering. He wrote,

While berrypicking, the fruits-of-ones’-labour are obtained

honestly…with no cunning involved. One needn’t stalk, but

come back to the same spot season after season.

For the preyed upon gives willingly…its seeds dispersed

in this act of consumptive love – with the afterbirth of

fertile feces.

Berry-stained fingers, in an ever-quickening landscape, bear

witness to this fruit-borne harvest.

No apologies, no regrets,

just caught red-handed

in an act of nutrition.

I love the way he describes the gentle and consistent cycle of seasons that invite us back when it's time. Rather than hunting the fruit, we merely return to the same spots, again and again, to see what has grown, what has died, what is being generously offered for our own nourishment. Is there tending that is needed to ensure the plant’s future?

This of course makes me think of communion. We come to the same spot, again and again, to see what has changed, in ourselves, in our community, in the way we feel when we take in this gift. Our participation in receiving communion also continues its existence and shapes its future.  We are given a marker of time to pause, harvest, and replant. Pride functions similarly, in the sense that our participation shapes its future. We return to Pride, to the same spots, season after season and we observe: what has grown? Who have we lost? What is being abundantly gifted to us and what needs our gentle tending to ensure we continue to grow into God’s most radical love? As the writer Julian K. Jarboe once tweeted, “God blessed me by making me transgender for the same reason he made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine: because God wants humanity to share in the act of creation.”

And the commandment to love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength? To do that you must try to find love for all versions of who you are, and to love the becoming that you embody. You must try to see yourself and your neighbor the way God sees us, knowing that God sees their own image in all of us. Love God with all your heart and all your strength and all your mind and all your soul, knowing that you are in God and God is in your becoming. We are the seeds of a perpetual harvest.

Are you brave enough to be soft like fruit? To offer yourself willingly, seasonally, constantly to a world that might not be ready to receive it? To a world where it can be hard to tell the difference between who wants to envelop your softly evolving knowledge of self in grateful delicious consumption, and who seeks to devour you as prey. It is dangerous to be soft but it is the only way for the seeds to make it to good earth, the afterbirth of fertile feces. Pray for the knowledge of self and pray for the knowledge that you are brave.

Pray for the soul of our beloved Edward Thomas Ryan, who shared himself fully and finally in his own obituary. Pray, thanking him for sharing his life with us, planting that seed in us so we can carry his life into the future we continue to build. Let him know there is no apology necessary for he did live his truth, he made a life for himself in a world that he did not feel safe in and in his faith in us to be able to finally accept him, his full self can be unbound, be seed on our good earth. No regrets, no apologies, God gives rain in due season and the fields yield their fruit.

Pray that your knowledge of self is soft enough to change shape and allow new discovery and pray for the firmness required to share those discoveries when the time is right, even if it is the very last step of your becoming in this life. “Those who are planted in the house of the Eternal shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bear fruit in old age; they shall be fresh and flourishing.”  Your life is new in every moment and your becoming is constant.

Praise be to the person who is humbled at the magnitude of love and life found on the other side of their own self discovery, however many times it happens and at whatever points in life. And praise be to those who then share that transformative grace with the rest of us, so that we can all be nourished. May we all be as soft and generous as fruit, finding in due season, the moment when our seeds can be shared, consumed, sown, and buried in order to birth our *own* everlasting life, in the transformative and transforming future for which our *collective* hearts yearn.

Luke 10:25-28

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put Jesus to a test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”

Leviticus 26:3-4

If you walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; Then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit.

Matthew 13:23

The seed cast on good earth is the person who hears and takes in the News, and then produces a harvest beyond their wildest dreams.

Psalm 92:13-14

Those planted in the house of the Eternal will thrive in the courts of our God. They will bear fruit into old age; they will be fresh and flourishing