Angel

Paul envied Ian for his openness. The irony was that Ian was probably a better Christian than Paul. He didn’t judge. What judgments had Paul made about the clerk, Andy, based on his bleached white hair and feminine mannerisms?

After everything Ian had been through with his mother, he had come out of it unapologetic about who he was. He could stand in a store in the mall and say, “This is my boyfriend,” without a second thought. Paul wished he could. He tried to imagine what would happen if he stood up in church and said, “This is the new love of my life, Ian Finnerty.”

It was different for him. This wasn’t a clerk in the mall. This was his community, a community that had nourished him most of his adult life. He performed the weddings, the baptisms, the funerals, all the ceremonies that marked the group’s support and acknowledgment of the passages of life. Paul had been drawn to the ministry to be part of those rituals, to make sacred the truly meaningful side of life, the part that our life of work and business so often fails to value or even acknowledge. The community could make a person feel protected and whole and part of something larger than his own concerns. It was a vehicle for compassion and service. A community can do more than any individual.

Yet many of the same people who stood beside him to bless his union with Sara would shun him if they even suspected his relationship with Ian. The ones who praised him for “helping a troubled kid” would turn their backs if they thought he loved him. It was official church policy not to allow an “avowed, practicing homosexual” to act as minister. He simply couldn’t be both a minister and Ian’s “avowed” love.

This was the darker side of community. For a group to have a sense of cohesion, a sense of being “us,” it has to define what was outside of the group. It has to define a “them”—the excluded. Who “they” are changes over time and from society to society, but the process never changes. It is part of the nature of community life. To have an inside, a tribe must have an outer boundary. For most of the members of Paul’s community, young men dancing in gay clubs, people like Andy, were not “us” but “them.” Judging by his own reactions, Paul had to admit with some shame that he felt the same way. I am not like him.

Paul thought about Jesus, how he ministered to the outcasts, the people on the fringes of society—the poor, the unclean, the prostitutes, and the lepers. Paul had told these stories over and over, but he had never felt the full impact of them until now. How brave and extraordinary an act that was. Jesus didn’t have to associate himself with the outcasts. He could have lived a comfortable life as a carpenter, accepted by everyone in his community. He wasn’t a beggar or a prostitute or a leper. Yet he chose to associate with them without fear.

If Paul had gained any sympathy for the outsiders, and if he risked being associated with them, it was out of personal i

nterest. He was motivated by his own needs and desires. Jesus included everyone because they needed him, not because he needed them. He risked everything for it. He was willing to give his life. That was love.

How small a sacrifice was being asked of Paul compared to that. Yet for the one person he loved most in the world, Paul could not risk being associated with the outsiders. Where was his courage?

The

Where does a mountain end? Mountains draw our focus to their snowcapped peaks and present us with the illusion that they are isolated, individual objects. We send postcards and take pictures and try to put a frame around them. But whatever border we create for the natural object we find beautiful is our own projection. The mountain spills out in all directions. It dips into the valley, which rises to the next peak. There is no place where you can stop and say, “The mountain ends here.”

Paul was staring at his computer screen. A Word document was open. It contained only one word: “The.”

That was as far as Paul had gotten on his sermon before his mind drifted and he forgot what the rest of the opening sentence had been. “The” was clearly not enough to go on.

Church attendance was up. There were many new members—younger members, families with kids. Pledges were up, and the board had decided they just might have enough in the budget to reopen the question of repairing the steeple. There was an open meeting to discuss and vote on the issue planned after services on Sunday.

It seemed like a foregone conclusion now that the steeple repair would be approved, something that had seemed well nigh impossible only a few months before—before Ian, before Paul’s new source of inspiration. He wanted to give one last sermon before the meeting to push things in the right direction.

The.

He must have had some second word in mind when he wrote it. Paul hadn’t been stuck on a sermon in quite a while, but his focus on architecture, history, and aesthetics was all too academic, and his mind kept wandering.

He was still thinking about his trip to the mall with Ian, and outsiders like Andy, who had carved out a place for themselves beyond the borders of “respectable” society. He was also thinking about the fearless love Ian had shown when he got that tattoo. He thought about the double meaning, the symbolism. Ian had Christ in his heart (and his heart on his sleeve). There was fearless love in that too. In this middle of this church, trying so hard to be respectable, he wouldn’t let anyone rob him of his soul. How many Ians were out there in the world?

Paul began to write. The sermon came to him in a torrent, as though he was taking dictation. That Sunday he stood before the congregation in his black robe and said:

This afternoon we will be voting on whether or not to approve a budget to repair the old steeple. Fixing that old thing will cost a lot of money. And there are those who will say it is money that could be better spent on something more tangible and practical than beauty. It’s a reasonable argument.

How do you measure the value of beauty? What is it? What does it do? What is it worth? Maybe nothing.

Or maybe, just maybe, beauty pleases the senses because it reminds us of a divine order and holds a mirror to the face of God.

(Paul looked into Ian’s eyes as he delivered this line.)

Fixing the steeple will not change the nature of our services, or my sermons, or our community outreach. We don’t even see it while we’re sitting here in the sanctuary. And that is really the key. Our steeple is not really for us. It is a gift of beauty that we give to the larger community. It is not only for our members or for the people who come through the doors, but for the people who never will.

A steeple points the way to Heaven. It is a universal symbol that reminds everyone who passes that there is a spiritual dimension to life—that there is something greater than ourselves, and it ties us together across time and across generations.

To the people who are afraid, who have been alienated from God, who have somehow learned the lesson that Christians are a different kind of people and that Christianity is not for them—let our steeple be a beacon. Let it send them a message.

Our message is not “come to our church.” Our message is this: No one lives without a soul. Everyone deserves to feel God’s love. No matter who you are, no matter what you do, if you think you have made mistakes, if your wife kicked you out, if you’re sick, if you’re troubled, if you’re black or white, rich or poor.

(The original draft said “straight or gay” here, but Paul lacked the courage to say it and struck it out.)

God loves you. You are valuable. Your life has meaning. God created you because He needs you.

That is our message. That is our gift. Our steeple is a gift of beauty to the larger community.