Rex Piercy’s Homily from Oct. 12, 2025

Last month marked fifty years since my ordination.  I’ve been doing this for a long time! As I prepared this homily it occurred to me that I have been preaching for even longer. I think my first attempt was on a so-called “Youth Sunday” in my hometown Iowa church as a high school kid. And, Lord, have mercy, I had a student parish assignment during my seminary years in Dubuque. Those gentle souls in McGregor, Iowa must have been very patient and tolerant with their wet-behind-the-ears, twenty something preacher.

Over the years of my ministry, first in United Methodist churches in Iowa and later in United Church of Christ congregations in Illinois and Hawaii, I can say I have generally enjoyed, if not relished, the weekly homiletical task and the attendant worship planning that goes with it. Even the very occasional preaching I have been doing these days in retirement, mostly here, has been embraced generally with a positive spirit. Though it would be remiss of me if I didn’t admit that in five decades of sermon crafting, there were times when I found the work challenging. There are times when I wanted to thump a few of the heads of those anonymous souls who craft the lectionaries we follow. What were they thinking throwing THOSE lessons together??? And in all these years there have also been some “dry spells” when the sermonic “well” seemed to be low if not dry! But even then I could usually find a little something to offer my gathered congregations.

But I must confess to you upfront today that crafting this one was like pulling teeth- something painful and most unpleasant. Not that today’s lections didn’t have some meat on their bones I guess, but it was more that my spirit, my enthusiasm, was at an all-time low. Whatever humph I had for church and worship and preaching and even the Divine has sort of ridden away on a horse with no name into the proverbial sunset. The news of this world and this country has gotten to me, leaving me pretty devoid of much that passes for deep spirituality or faith right now. Frankly, not that it matters, but I’m rather ticked off with God who could but doesn’t do anything about this debacle called American fascism that is happening before our eyes, along with the utter devastation the world and this country have allowed Israel to perpetrate upon the people of Gaza and what Russia has inflicted upon Ukraine, to mention but three of the festering wounds on the earth’s skin. And I know my view may be somewhat unpopular, but this new American pope that the world is all a-gaga for just said he has no intention whatsoever of changing the church’s hateful and hurtful stance on those of us who are LGBTQ+. That is a huge disappointment! It flies in the face of what this community, for one, stands for. And as a member of the queer community, the daily rightwing religious and political assault on us, attacking trans folk, ripping up rainbow crosswalks, banning the flying of a rainbow flag, endorsing hurtful conversion therapy and threatening to de-legitimize my same-sex marriage – well, all of that has me pretty much totally frustrated with God and country!  No Scout merit badge for me, I guess!

Yet here I am standing in this pulpit. Earlier I alluded to an ongoing quarrel with those who manufacture the collection of readings we hear every Sunday. I mean I get the juxtaposition of the Naaman leprosy story, bizarre as it is, from II Kings, with the Lucan account about ten lepers. But in most every lectionary I know, the Luke story is often the Gospel passage for the Day of Thanksgiving, yet here it is today. So be it.

There does seem something about the story from Luke 17 in particular that is strangely congruent with this assembly’s recognition of Solidarity Sunday today. Solidarity Sunday was a creation of the Catholic LGBTQ+ group called Dignity, though their website doesn’t seem any longer to support it with new worship materials. The idea was that Solidarity Sunday was held every year on the Sunday nearest to the annual National Coming Out Day in October. It started back in 1995 as a way of making opposition to anti-LGBTQ+ violence visible and was dedicated to the memory of the many who lost their lives through violence because of who they were or who they were perceived to be. The current political and religious hate that is directed at the LGBTQ+ community makes the meaning of this day even more relevant.

Most of us would like to think that there has been progress since 1995, but now I’m not so sure, thus making a faith-based anti-violence initiative like Solidarity Sunday even more important. Why just the other day a right wing candidate for governor in Virginia has boldly said that discrimination against LGBTQ+ folk in marriage and employment is not discrimination. OMG!

So these stories from Hebrew Bible and Christian Testament today do say something to me. I remember well as AIDS began to emerge and ravage and I officiated at my first AIDS-related funeral how the gay community in particular felt as ostracized then as these lepers must have felt thousands of years ago in Palestine. While probably reaching for straws, one commentator on the Luke story made a point that Jesus’ encounter with these ten took place in a region between Samaria and Galilee, to suggest that often the marginalized are somewhere in between, never permitted to belong.

That is certainly how community after community from immigrants and racial minorities and women to LGBTQ+ must be feeling today as they are under attack, ostracized and demonized and marginalized. Old stories about lepers may still speak volumes in our cultural milieu. Just look at us. I once thought we had made some headway, but I’m finding myself suffering a rather severe case of spiritual torpor. I am finding my living and moving and having my being in much of anything a tough go right now.

I remember when Roe V Wade was overturned after a half century as established case law. A dear friend and UCC ministry colleague, a woman now in her late 80s, a woman who officiated at our wedding in 2016, a woman who fought her entire life for women’s reproductive choice, said to me, “How can this be? How can we find the fight in us again?”

I get that as we are assaulted on many fronts in ways that drain off the vitality necessary to maintain a truly civil society. Perhaps like the lepers in our stories, it is easy to find oneself feeling hopeless, wandering in some land in between, bereft of God’s living promise, as if somehow the heavenly realm has absconded from our midst.

We cry out, “Look at us. Look at what has happened to us.” Many of us have heavy souls rarely feeling the lightness of being that is intrinsic to life. What has happened to me, perhaps to you, is that life erodes little by little, even when we’re not aware of it. The daily barrage of depressing news from DC and Palestine and elsewhere collude to make me feel helpless, and just not up to the challenge. Maybe it’s a factor of my age. But still….

I want to be hopeful, I really do. I want that hope which Paul says does not disappoint us, that faith which Paul told Timothy comes with endurance.

So perhaps just maybe today’s Bible stories do have a clue to dissolving my spiritual sluggishness. Maybe they are not just stories about the healing of a disease.  Maybe they point also to the healing of a rift in the warp and weft of society’s fabric that can take us all the way from outcast to acceptance to welcome to embrace.

I know that the hope I need is not some pie in the sky by and by, rose colored glass kind of hope. It’s grittier than that. It’s the kind of hope that hangs in there and remains. It’s the kind poet Caitlin Seida writes about with saltiness. You have been warned! It goes like this:

Hope is not the thing with feathers

That comes home to roost

When you need it most.

Hope is an ugly thing

With teeth and claws and

Patchy fur that seen some shit.

It’s what thrives in the discards

And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,

Able to find a way to go on

When nothing else can even find a way in.

It’s the gritty, nasty, little carrier of such

diseases as

Optimism, persistence,

Perseverance and joy,

Transmissible as it drags its tail across your

Path and bites you in the butt.

Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,

Emily.

It’s a lowly little sewer rat

That snorts pesticides like they were lines of coke and still

Shows up on time to work the next day looking no worse for wear.

I need that kind of hope right now. And maybe just maybe if you and I and a few million others could just latch on to some of that kind of hope, maybe this world and this land could be healed, maybe my soul and yours, perhaps, wounded though we are, can be made whole again, like those lepers found that day in a place in between, no longer saying “I am what happened to me” but “I am what I choose to become.”  Maybe then all this brokenness and this feeling of being all beaten up can be the very place that lets the light get in, to quote another of my favorite poets.  Maybe with hope like that we can show up and endure to the end, making a little good trouble along the way, if you know what I mean.