I wasn’t expecting
that kissing you
would be so easy

I wasn’t expecting
that putting my hand on your neck
would feel pleasurable

I wasn’t expecting
that I would be
thinking about you

I’m glad for the unexpected

Words have been bombarding me
all week. difficult words, painful words.
my church, the Methodist church, has been the victim
of a carjacking by people who in the end
only want to wreck the car after a brief joyride.
The words coming out of this, heard over and over:
“the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with the Christian faith.’
Men, of course men, standing at microphones and saying publicly,
parents if your child is gay you should pray that they die before the get to puberty
so they don’t ever have sex and don’t go to hell.
or other men suggesting that gay people should be drowned.
what does it even mean to have Christian faith if it leads you to hate.
When I’m feeling a little less awful intermittently
I wonder, how long must one practice homosexuality before you get it right?
But those are the words my church remade again, 40 years on, into church law.
My church has been taken over by bigoted white men,
bigoted white men who cannot abide that my bisexual, sparkly self exists
or for that matter that any gloriously queer person exists
as if it’s contagious, queerness; I say, if only…
There have been consequences for me, but not horrid ones:
no one has thrown me out on the street like so many parents of trans kids have;
no one has beat me up in a parking lot for being out and open;
no one has taken my job away unless you count the last two churches
that fired me for speaking out against their injustice;
I”m pretty fucking safe in my privileged bisexual middle-class life.
but they, my former church, can’t abide me. It should read in the rules:
The practice of honesty and transparency is incompatible with the Christian faith.

So what I have to fucking fight with are words
fighting against the patriarchy,
fighting against the definition of so -called biblical marriage,
that’s their code word for one penis/one vagina;
I ask them, which version of biblical marriage are you going to go for,
one man, a woman and her slave, that’s Abraham,
one man and two sisters, that’s Isaac,
one man and no woman, that’s Jesus,
if, as you insist, he was like us in every way,
then either he had sex or we’re not supposed to do it at all;
or maybe if you’re a teenage boy
you would go for one man, 600 wives
and 1200 concubines, that’s Solomon.
yeah, fucking ignorant people who read what they want to
in the Bible and ignore the other parts.
They take 6 little passages and make them be the whole story,
and I wonder, why those, why are they not on a rampage
against people who wear clothes with two kinds of fibers mixed
because the Bible calls that an abomination too,
why is it lesbian and gay people that you are so afraid of
and not the clothes you buy at Walmart and Neiman’s;
why aren’t they all gung-ho about selling their daughters into slavery
cause that’s right there next to the parts they quote about us.
And there are already bishops in the Methodist church expelling out gay pastors
and two young lesbian couples in a Methodist college campus ministry
tried to kill themselves
and this is what you have sown, you hateful bigoted white men,
and I am only hitting the tip of the iceberg of my anger,
at bigoted white men who shoot down young black men
in their grandmother’s backyard for being black with phone
and who stop my dear friend who is part Hispanic
every time she crosses back into the US
and one time strip searched her
‘because you have a suspicious name’
and every other thing that all of you know about,
every act of hate.

What I’ve been doing here is called a lament in the Bible.
Laments are for those times where the current is intermittent
and the light bulb is flickering and we don’t know
how to turn it on all the way or what the fuck to do next.
Laments are for when everything has turned to shit.
I always think of that cartoon that has a guy asking Jesus,
when are you going to do something about injustice,
and Jesus answers the guy, funny, I was going to ask you the same question;
but the people who wrote the Bible didn’t buy into hopelessness
and so all the laments end with hope except one, psalm 88,
and I have been reading it because I am not fucking ready to have hope;
I am only ready to sit in grief and let my lovers hold me and comfort me
and to finally own publicly yes I am bisexual and queer and gender queer;
if my queer clergy friends can risk everything to demand justice from our church
then the least I can do is be honest in public about who I am

but that damn hope shit keeps coming back even when I don’t want it
because even sitting in lament I know, beyond any doubt
that I am beloved of the Divine and everyone else is,
everyone hearing these words and everyone who never will
everyone who loves someone and everyone who doesn’t
everyone straight, queer, trans, cis, nerdy, handsome,
everyone afraid or courageous, vulnerable or shut down
everyone I have not in some way named out of my blind spots
you are all blossoming, unfolding into the brilliance of the Divine in you;
bigots and haters want to hand you a pair of pliers and say,
it’s in your best interest to cut the wires to the bulb,
but if we can all remember that we are Beloved
we can instead all put in a little bit of extra current
and the bulb will flicker just a little less.

I read some poems a while back
at an open mic in a bar
and I sucked.

Lots of ways to say that. One friend I had
who is very prim and proper, wouldn’t use the word suck
things “Hoovered” or sometimes
if she was really upset, “that vacuumed”
I could have said, I blowed.
But let’s stick with the word suck.

I like that word. It feels like something I can own.
I’ve sucked at lots of things
in my life. Being a school-teacher,
being a husband, being calm and secure in meetings.
Sucking is something I’m used to.

I didn’t used to be used to sucking.
My ex-wife said, women don’t like to do that
they just do it so they won’t lose their man,
But even at the time I knew she was wrong
because I had a girlfriend, before I met her,
who couldn’t wait to get my zipper open.
So yeah, I like to get sucked.
and I am with women who like to do it,
thanks be to God.

I bet you think that’s an odd thing to go to,
when I’ve switched to talking
about oral sex, thanks be to God.

I used to be a pastor.
I say used to be, because the powers that be
in the church I was part of
found out that I like, among other things,
being sucked, that I liked fucking,
that on occasion I liked flogging someone
and tying them up, consensually, of course,
and a lot more, and I’m single,
and the rule-book says single people have to be celibate,
and I said, on my blog, that’s a stupid rule
and I’m not going to follow it
and so I broke their rules and
they did what they had to do
and asked me to resign, and I did
because I’m trying to live authentically
and I don’t fit their rules.

But anyway, I like sex and I am in love
with a few amazing women,
being polyamorous in my orientation,
and the church is messed up
in my opinion, (which is only that)
about sex and about love and about real intimacy.
It’s one thing to live your conviction
that sex is good and sacred even outside [gasp]
the narrow bounds of hetero marriage,
but it’s another to say so publicly
and I went too far in that to be ignored,
so I am no longer a United Methodist deacon.

When I was in seminary, I went to a Presbyterian seminary,
right about then the Presbys were arguing
about whether gay and lesbian people
could be ordained, and they voted yes,
and half of my class came out.
And some churches took their toys and went home,
left the denomination, and how stupid is that
because the Presbyterian church uses a call system
for their pastors, if they need a pastor,
people apply and are interviewed and hired,
and no one can force a church
who doesn’t want to to hire a queer pastor.
But they left, and the same thing
happened in the Lutheran and Episcopal churches,
and is about to in the Methodist church,
and they all wonder, they spend hours and weeks
wondering and studying and having conferences about
why young people don’t want to come to church
or why gay and lesbian people don’t want to come to church,
and that is such a waste of time, it’s totally obvious
that no one would want to go someplace where the leadership
doesn’t and can’t ever look like them;

so I was in seminary at that time, and I saw
a tee-shirt that one of my classmates had,
and on the front at the top it said:
Everything Jesus said about Sex,
and there were two Bible verse listed, two,
and on the back it said at the top:
Everything Jesus said about money, greed, and the poor,
and the whole back of the shirt was covered in tiny print
with Bible verses, over 200,
and still, the church in general is way more
worried about who fucks who
than who is fucking over who.

But I am convinced, from everything in the Bible, even,
that the Divine is way more worried about who is fucking over their
sisters and brothers than who is fucking who consensually.
I think this because I think the Divine is about love,
the Divine is love, and love, at least among humans
and that is all we can really know,
(because anything we say about the Divine is mostly incorrect)
among humans, love craves to be expressed;
and if the Divine really is about love
and really is, as Christian theology says,
three persons in one, in eternal conjoined bliss,
mutually holding one another completely in union,
then the Divine is polyamorous
and having one continual creation-long energetic orgasm.
You can see, probably, if you ever went to church
how this could be considered false doctrine.

And so, because of all this, I am no longer a fucking preacher
but I am now, and will always be, a preacher of fucking.
Can I get an Amen?
[that’s an inside joke for any
of my former colleagues who might
be reading this…]