“The Bible Tells Me So. Oh, really?”
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 2, 2008
May I speak only the truth, and may only the truth be heard by you. In the name of God our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier. Amen.
+++Mary Lou Wallner
Mary Lou Wallner is probably about my age.
She grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home.
It was a place where the Bible was taken literally, verse by verse, not necessarily verses in their context, but single verse by single verse.
She was taught that Catholics were going straight to hell, and then she married one.
She had two daughters by her first husband.
They lived in Missouri.
She describes her family as typically all-American.
As an adult, she also attended a conservative, “Bible-believing” church.
Her term: “Bible-believing.”
Anna, her oldest daughter
Her oldest daughter, Anna, was just two weeks old when she as first taken to that church.
Homosexuality was not “taught”, again, her word, homosexuality was not taught when she was growing up.
In other words, nobody talked about it, really.
She wasn’t tuned in to clues that her teenage daughter was giving her.
She realizes now that Anna had been trying to tell her something.
In high school Anna had done a lot of singing.
She had been involved in drama.
The drama teacher at the school was a lesbian, and Anna had been especially fond of that teacher.
Mary Lou did not want to know what she later found out.
She dismissed the clues, blocked them out completely.
Anna at college: the letter
Anna went away to college.
In her freshman year, she wrote her parents a letter, telling them that she was a lesbian.
In the letter, she said that she had never been very comfortable with men, and that she found that she was more comfortable with women.
Mary Lou said that after she read that letter from her daughter, she went into the bathroom, and she and threw up.
Then she went underground with the information.
Mary Lou was ashamed of her daughter, and embarrassed for the family.
When she wrote back to Anna, she said some things in that letter that she now knows were not very loving.
“Undoubtedly the most difficult part of your letter,” she wrote, “is the gay thing.
I will never accept that in you.
I feel it’s a terrible waste, besides being spiritually and morally wrong.
For a reason I don’t quite fathom, I have a harder time dealing with that issue than almost anything else in the world.
I do and will continue to love you, but I will always hate that.”
The church Mary Lou was going to at that time taught that “it” was a sin.
The six or seven passages in the Bible that touch on the subject were preached on from time to time, she said, and she was clearly in accord with what they were teaching, that it was a sin, and not just a “regular” sin, but a sin above all others.
Mary Lou had harsh words with Anna many times.
Mary Lou thought that it was a choice and that Anna should get her act together and simply stop it.
In early 1996, Anna began to withdraw from her mother.
There was no contact on Mother’s Day that year.
That, was very painful for Mary Lou.
In July of that year she wrote Anna a letter asking Anna to tell her what she had done.
“Whatever it is,” she wrote, “I’d like to make it right.
The letter back from Anna was more difficult than the first one had been.
This time Anna said basically that Mary Lou had done colossal damage to her daughter’s soul with her shaming words.
Anna told Mary Lou that she considered Mary Lou to be merely her biological mother, nothing more.
She did not want to forgive her mother.
She said she didn’t have to.
She wanted nothing more to do with her mother.
Mary Lou said that when the phone rang at 10 o’clock at night, eight or nine months later, there was a part of her that knew what had happened.
Anna had committed suicide by hanging herself from the bar in her closet.
She used the chain of her dog’s leash.
She wrapped it around her neck, and she stood on a chair.
Then she kicked the chair out from under her.
She hung there for about 15 hours before anyone found her.
That’s the way it ended for Anna and her mother.
Anna had taken her life before there could be any reconciliation.
But, as it turned out, there was another reconciliation of sorts.
+++A different kind of reconciliation
It took Anna’s death to make Mary Lou really research the topic of homosexuality and what the Bible really says about it.
She did her own study of the scriptures, instead of relying on what someone else was telling her.
And she prayed a lot.
She says she can remember asking God if God really wanted her to change her beliefs about all this.
The answer she always got was “yes.”
God did want her to change her beliefs.
After researching extensively, she says, she began to understand that homosexuality is not a choice.
Why would anyone choose something that would inspire hatred, and misunderstanding, alienation, and even death!
What she learned is that instead of taking the Bible literally, she would take it in the context of the culture in which it was written.
Once you’ve made that transformation, she says, there’s no turning back.
“Somehow, she said, “I don’t want Anna’s death to have been in vain.”
Mary Lou needed to do something.
“But,” she said, “I had no idea that it would look like this!”
Mary Lou now belongs to an organization called Teach Truth.
She makes speeches.
She marches, side-by-side, with young men and women of different sexual orientations.
She protests with them.
She writes letters to politicians for them.
She listens to their stories, and they listen to hers.
“God,” she says, “has changed my heart, has transformed me into a person who loves unconditionally, and I’m thankful to now have hundreds of surrogate gay and lesbian “Annas” in my life
It’s my greatest joy to love and accept them just as they are.
It just feels so good to be able to do for them what I could not do for Anna.”
+++The Sundance documentary
Mary Lou Wallner’s story has been profiled in a documentary film called “For the Bible Tells Me So.”
It premiered at the Sundance film festival last year.
Got good reviews.
Was even nominated to be nominated for an Academy Award.
It’s a film that goes to the Bible to examine the ways in which conservative Christian groups have used, and sometimes exploited, holy scripture to deny basic human rights to others, African-Americans, women, and right now, especially, persons of different sexual orientations.
Highlights of the film include interviews with Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the gay daughter of former U.S. Representative Dick Gephardt.
Thursday night I watched the film tearfully, and made the decision to scrap the sermon I’d been struggling with and talk about Mary Lou instead.
It’s a perfect fit with this morning’s gospel, a story that’s less about a magicical medical intervention, and more about seeing and not seeing, perceiving and not perceiving.
Jesus struck a hammer-blow to people’s thick skulls, over an over, and again in today’s story, breaking rigid preconceptions that we glue and wire together to support our wobbly, rigged-up ideas, of what the world should be like.
It wasn’t anybody’s “sin” that caused the blindness.
“Sin” doesn’t cause blindness or leprosy or lameness or anything else.
But that’s what people thought.
The Pharisees were not what they seemed, either.
They were the sinners.
The man in this morning’s story from John, whose sight was restored, said it this way:
“All I know is that once I couldn’t see, and now, I can see.”
Mary Lou Wallner was taught that Roman Catholics would go straight to hell.
Then she married one.
Mary Lou Wallner was also taught that homosexuality was a sin.
Not a regular sin, but a sin above all others.
Then she gave birth to a gay daughter.
All I know is that once she couldn’t see, and now, she can see.
+Prayer
Let us pray.
Eternal God, the Great Mystery that is outside everything and yet at the same time inside, keep alive in each one of us the search for a faith that is real, a faith that helps us to live happier lives, a faith that gives us a fuller meaning to life and the events of life. Bring us to know the goodness that flows from the heart of the universe and may we be expanded in heart and soul by that goodness.
This is our prayer. Amen.
Jerry Brooks
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