This sermon was preached on the Ninth Sunday after Trinity at St. Margaret of Antioch, Toxteth for their Pride Service
Gospel: Luke 12:13-21
Old Testament: Job 28
Fear
I’m scared.
We live in a scary time and in a scary place, and I’m scared.
Violent homophobic attacks are happening in our city, and that is scary. This isn’t a good place to be queer, but it is still better than most. At least it is legal to be queer here, and we aren’t subject to arrest, imprisonment, and even execution like our siblings in some countries. This world isn’t a good place to be queer, and that’s part of the reason we gather and celebrate Pride.
As far as I can tell, there are three main reasons we celebrate pride:
To remind ourselves that we have something to be proud of. It is good to be queer; it is holy to be queer.
To remember our history. We usually celebrate in June to remember the Stonewall uprising, the people and work that led up to it, and the great strides forward our community has made since it.
To remind others that there is still a long way to go, that it is still not a good world to be queer in, that it is still scary.
So why am I talking about fear and being scared? The lectionary today intersects with queer experience, perhaps most obviously, in Job’s citation of fear. What though, is this “fear of the Lord (יראת אדוני)” and is it at all like the fear I feel walking through the streets of Liverpool at night?
Fear of the Lord
Job claims that the fear of the Lord is wisdom. When I was younger, I struggled with the idea of “fearing” God. I didn’t want to serve someone out of fear. Fear seemed far too negative an emotion to govern a relationship with someone that good and loving, and far too close to compulsion or even abuse. It certainly didn’t sound like the place where you would find wisdom. I wanted to serve God because I loved God, not because of fear.
What I was failing to understand was the sort of fear that we have of God, and how it comes, not from a bad God, but from the sheer distance between God’s goodness and our badness.
As any Sunday schooler will be able to tell you: God is big. God is really, really big. And God is good, so much better than us. God is so much bigger, so much better, so much stronger, so much queerer than us. So totally other. That distance is scary.
When we engage with the God who is so much more than us, we have to surrender a lot of illusions we’ve generated about ourselves, and that is really scary. Jesus talks quite clearly about one such illusion in the parable we’ve just read.
Parable
This parable has been selected for us today because it is Lammas (or Loafmas), the firstfruits harvest festival of the church. Readings about bread are common as we thank God for the bounty we have received, and in this one, Jesus seeks to remind us that the harvest isn’t ours by right, or even able to be secured.
Jesus’ parable shatters any illusion we might have of self-made security. He points out sudden, unpredictable death as the great equalizer, the counterexample that rubbishes any of our claims to security. One of the reasons that an encounter with God is fearful is that we have to recognize our inability to generate our own security, and live in the precarity that we spend so much of our time and effort on avoiding. At any second, we could drop dead and then who would have all that we have carefully cultivated for ourselves?
Traditional readings of this parable interpret the grain as money, time, gifts, or other resources. I would like to propose a reading where we see the grain as privilege.
Like freak successful grain harvests, or wealth or time or gifts, privilege is something which we can quite easily trick ourselves into thinking we have earned and deserve, but on closer examination turns out to be given to us at best at random, and at worst from some corrupt system. Privilege is something not to be treasured up, but to be generous towards God with, because it can so quickly vanish.
Privilege
I know a fair bit about the vanishing nature of privilege. I was raised under the assumption that I was a straight, white, cis, able-bodied, educated, middle class, western, english-speaking, British man. I had an obscene amount of privilege at my disposal. Throughout my whole life I gradually grew to recognize just how much privilege I had, but it was only when an enormous chunk of it vanished overnight that I understood it.
When the privilege was no longer at my disposal, I realised how little of it I had actually disposed of myself. I could think of one or two times that I had leveraged my privilege in a way that was helpful to others and costly to myself, and that was it. I was ashamed of myself, and suddenly super-conscious of the amount of privilege my friends around me had. It was incredibly painful to watch them behaving precisely as I had: promising help from their positions of privilege, and withdrawing the offers as soon as a risk to themselves became apparent.
To be clear, I don’t blame anyone for having privilege. It is largely randomly assigned, and Jesus doesn’t condemn the man for having a good harvest. He doesn’t even condemn the man for hoarding, he just calls him a fool. The point here about privilege isn’t a particularly moral one, it’s mostly practical. Sure, you can hoard up privilege and maintain it and gatekeep, but then what? Who gets it when you die?
Allies
So then, this would seem to a sermon aimed mostly at allies: a plea to not hoard up your privilege and fear to use it, but to embrace the fear of the Lord. Notice the precarity that we hide from ourselves, reject the illusion of self-security, and embrace your queer, underprivileged siblings, taking risks and leveraging privilege to bring more justice into the world.
Just how, exactly, might this happen though? Sometimes, it can be as simple as solidarity: as refusing the things that people want to give you only because of your privilege. This isn’t even a particularly noble or moral act. It is, once again, a practical act of self-respect. It’s about remembering that you are valuable for far more than your whiteness or cisness or straightness, and refusing to be reduced to that in people’s considerations of how they treat you.
It might be something more drastic, it might mean standing up to the very mechanisms that grant you privilege, and risking great loss. Being generous towards God by not treasuring up that which you might lose.
Intersectionality
Those underprivileged of us don’t get off the hook quite that easily though.
When I lost a huge chunk of privilege, I not only suddenly understood what privilege is, but was also faced with the overwhelming temptation to grab tight hold of what privilege I had left and use it to regain some of the stability and security I had lost. Jesus speaks to people like me in this parable too: it wasn’t the man’s wealth that made him drop dead. He just died. Even with less privilege, Jesus’ point still stands.
Any good theology of feminism, queerness, race, gender, disability, or age is intersectional. To those of us with less privilege, the call is to look to those intersections of identity which claim even less privilege, and to use what little privilege we have there. That is a terrifying prospect, and one where the fear of the Lord is absolutely tangible.
It’s not a path we walk alone though. Jesus knows a lot about privilege. He is, after all, the one who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.
The nature of Jesus teaches us something about the valid wielding of privilege too. Though he was born in human likeness, losing the privilege of divinity, he was still one of the most privileged people in his, albeit oppressed, people group. Jesus was on a boundary, he had surrendered a great deal of privilege, but still had more. He didn’t consider even that privilege something to be exploited though, using it to dine with tax collectors and sinners, to stand up for a woman caught in adultery, and to challenge the unjust structures of his society. This was all deeply, deeply costly, and is the pattern we are called to follow in how we use our own privilege.
I don’t bring Jesus up to convince you to embark on this path without fear: Jesus’ example is that of the one who sweats blood in Gethsemane. Rather, he sets the example of one who personifies wisdom: bravely fearing the Lord, and turning from the evil which has granted him privilege.
Let us, therefore, seek wisdom and find it in fearing the Lord and turning from evil. Let us find it in not treasuring up privilege for ourselves, but by being generous towards God by using our privilege to help the least, the lost, and the last.