Epiphany on Brokeback Mountain

This is a sermon preached in 2005 by Dr. David Jenkins, who taught at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, in Atlanta.


Epiphany on Brokeback Mountain

Quick on the heels of Christmas, Epiphany takes its seat between the Slaughter of the Innocents and Ash Wednesday. It’s a skinny season of immensely hopeful proportion. During these brief winter days of Epiphany we celebrate the surprise - no, the shock, like the first lightening bolt from an unexpected storm - of the manifestation of God’s good news to the gentiles.

It is doubtful that Annie Proulx, author of the 1997 short story, Brokeback Mountain, ever imagined her story could be an apt sermon illustration for an Epiphany homily, let alone provide the narrative for the triumphant movie, but I’d like to make a case for it. For those who have yet to read the story or see the film, here is a brief summary.

In 1963, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, teenage cowboys in Wyoming, get jobs herding sheep for the summer. Ennis is desperate for a job and Jack is scratching his itch to be “somewhere, anywhere else than Lightening Flat,”, his remote hometown. Sheep herders have always been despised by cattle ranchers, a history not lost on the author who casts these discarded “pair of deuces going nowhere” as shepherds. We worry from the opening scene that nothing good will come of them.

The two boys on horseback and their sheep dogs drive the thousand ewes high into the Rockies where the dense beauty, isolation, and raw power of Nature propel the action. As Ennis and Jack guard the sheep, they are hailed on, snowed on, rained on, and struck by the kind of lightening that charges companionship with love and sex. There they discovered Brokeback Mountain, a harsh place of belonging, “a place both empowering and inimical,” claims the author, a landscape of surprise.

Over the next twenty years, Ennis and Jack married strong women, raised children, worked rodeos and ranches, sold farm machinery, and after two decades of occasional ‘fishing trips’ near Brokeback to rekindle their fire, the story comes to a tragic halt. The scene shifts from the verdant mountains to the desolate flatlands. The years of emotional and physical isolation, the internalized homophobia, the denial of self, and the denial of love, converge like rivers flooding the grief-stricken plains. All that we see and feel is desolation.

In her no-nonsense style, Annie Proulx said of Brokeback Mountain, “It is a story of destructive rural homophobia.” Throughout the film we are witnesses to the panoramic views of homophobia ruining lives - physically, emotionally, economically, and socially. This drives the drama and pathos of Brokeback Mountain. Ennis and Jack store it in their bodies like ammunition ready for battle or self-destruction. Their internalized self-hatred stifles hope, feeds their fears, blurs the lines between intimacy and violence, isolates them from each other, from the world, and from themselves. In a poignant conversation on Brokeback, Ennis says to Jack, “Bottom line, we’re around each other and this thing grabs on to us again in the wrong place, wrong time, and we’ll be dead.” In the midst of an unsafe time and culture, Brokeback Mountain was their only place of refuge, a mountainous theme looming over every scene.

A reasonable hope of belonging to a safe place and to safe people is often an anxious prayer for many people. Who doesn’t desire to be safe in our own home, at work, at school, in our church, in our own skin? Yet this is not the real or perceived reality for most lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people in our communities and congregations, even when Will and Grace airs on prime-time. Two-thirds of out LGBT youth in the U.S. were threatened or injured with a weapon at school last year. Matthew Shepherd’s crucifixion on a Wyoming stock fence, less than a year after the publication of Brokeback Mountain, still serves as a compelling symbol of the coercive, violent force of homophobia, and not only in the rural West. Wyoming is merely a metaphor.

In a New York Times article on Brokeback Mountain and gay Wyoming cowboys, journalist Guy Trebay wrote, “What is most emotionally corrosive about Brokeback Mountain, some say, is the film’s placid portrayal of the violence that has always been part of gay experience.” One gay cowboy interviewed for the story said, “The Shepherd thing goes through my mind all the time. People think that could never happen again. It could happen. It will happen.” (New York Times, 12/18/05).

I believe that the official rulings and language of our churches about something we call “homosexuality” only serves to strengthen homophobia’s hateful grip on our world. The recent United Methodist and Vatican rulings do not simply function as ecclesial decisions guarding ordination and church membership. Like judgments from the Inquisition, they are as lethal as a tire iron in the hands of violent men, for these rulings continue to isolate human beings from communities which are called upon to be life-giving. Couple this isolation with language that dehumanizes men and women as ”innately disordered” or worse, and the self-hate and desperation often lead to death. Gay and lesbian teenagers in the U.S. attempt suicide at more than five times the national average.

Annie Proulx noted the “fact that Wyoming has the highest suicide rate in the [U.S.], and that the preponderance of those people who kill themselves are elderly single men.” Ennis and Jack managed to stay alive for each other as long as they could, the way soldiers do in war, not fighting for great causes or honor, but for those particular soldiers with whom they had become inextricably bound.

Brokeback Mountain, in addition to magnifying the destructive power of homophobia, also shatters a compelling myth in our divisive discourse about sexuality, the myth that we freely choose our “sexual orientation.” When Jack and Ennis were raised to despise “queers” and when they knew first-hand the life-threatening risks of getting caught, they would have been insane to make such a choice - in 1963 or in 2006. They chose this love like they chose to be wet when it rained or cold when it snowed. “Without a single polemical speech, [Brokeback Mountain] dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective “agenda” concocted by conspiratorial “elites” (Frank Rich, N.Y.Times, 12/18/05). Hopefully the church can let this myth die.

Before the movie was made, Annie Proulx said to the newly-hired director, Ang Lee, “I was very afraid about this story, that making stories sometimes took me into off-limits places.” “Off-limits places” is what we celebrate in Epiphany. Off-limits is how the Pharisees and Temple wardens would have regarded the gentiles. The sacred places, sacred people, and sacred scriptures, the hope for the messiah and the light of the world were surely off-limits to those gentiles. But then Epiphany.

I wonder as I wander at the foot of Brokeback Mountain if the church has the capacity and courage to declare a Jubilee or an Epiphany? - a time and space in which it would listen to the sacred love stories of Jack and Ennis or any of its members, setting aside worn-out labels such as “homosexual” for words we understand: son, daughter, friend, neighbor, sister, brother, partner. Could we listen well to the flesh-and-blood stories of fear and desolation, joy, discovery, liberation, belonging, and love? Like the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in South Africa, could we bear to hear our own stories of crucifixion? Could we go to those places which have been off-limits to pulpits and pot-luck-suppers?

Listening to sacred stories is what we Christians are called to do. Perhaps if we listen well, we will be transformed both by the stories and by the Epiphany hope that with unexpected people God continues to surprise us - shock us - and continues to call us to off-limits places, continues to do A NEW THING in the world.

So how do I know when this new thing is of God? When the story is true. When the news is good. When the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. At the moment we call Epiphany, while Herod’s death-dealing decree echoed through the land, the magis - excluded from the promise - arrived at the stable in the hills near Bethlehem and took their place beside the shepherds.


http://www.covenantnetwork.org/sermon%26papers/jenkins.htm

The Reformation continues with the Episcopal Church's second gay bishop

In September of 1979, at the Episcopal Church's General Convention in Denver, Colorado, the church's Bishop of Rochester gave the Standing Commission on Human Affairs and Health a resolution stating that "there should be no barrier to the ordination of those homosexual persons who are able and willing to conform their behavior tothat which the Church affirms as wholecome. . . . The General Convention should enact no legislation which singles out a particular human condition and makes it an absolute barrier to ordination." 

Mary Glasspool, then a student, was among the attendees asked to give a short witness statement.  "Shaking in my pulpit pumps", as she recalls, she told the audience of 1,500 people that "I trust that God's Love at this convention will transcend the issues and address the people -- all of us -- in our wholeness. I trust and I pray that that same love will prevent any of us from condemning others -- particularly in this case, homosexuals, in our human, and full, and loving wholeness."

Afterwards her bishop, Paul Moore, Jr., "came over to me, gave me a great big hug, and said: 'Now that you've come out to 1,500 people, don't you think it's almost time to tell your parents?"

Rev. Canon mary Glasspool (bottom left), Rev. Canon Diane M. Jardine Bruce (right) and Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori (top left)

Thirty years later, the now Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool was ordained as the Episcopal Church's second openly gay bishop.  Needless to say, this didn't happen without considerable protest, both from within and without the United States.

The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on

During the heyday of the Reformation, swords would clash and heretics would burn; and the tradition continues as best it can. Last month Archbishop Ian Earnest of the Anglican Province of the Indian Ocean , disturbed by what he dubbed "theological innovations", announced that his conscience dictated that he "suspend all communication both verbal and sacramental" with the US-based Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, "until such time as they reverse" these innovations. Archbishop Earnest made exceptions for "those bishops and clergy who have distanced themselves" from the churches' direction. Only a few days before Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda, whose country's consideration of sexual orientation cleansing has made the news in past months, wrote to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams characterizing the North American churches as "gross violators of biblical truth" who were "promoting revisionist theology." 

In March, a Church of England group describing themselves as "open evangelicals" issued a statement condemning Glasspool's ordination.

The 3,000 people present at Rev. Glasspool's ordination included two male protesters,  who were led out by security guards.

The 3-legged stool

As has been the case since the Reformation, however, questions about Protestant churches' "directions' have cycled regularly, as have the subsequent semi-clonings generally referred to as 'schisms.'  However, in a profile provided by the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, Rev. Glasspool reaffirmed a commitment to the church's most characteristic approach to ministry. "We hold that the three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition and Reason (which includes experience) is an appropriate way in which to descern God's Will. But we can be hampered by the disadvantages of the colonialism that is part of our history, institutional structures that change too slowly and a lack of the freedom that faith brings in response to fear."

Glasspool's involvement with the Episcopal Church has been lifelong. Her father, Rector of St. James Chapel in Goshen, New York, had opposed ordaining women as priests although "I became something of an exeption to the rule" for him. 

She met her life partner of two decades, Becki Sander, "as she was studying for a dual degree in theology and social work.  We have been together since 1988, and Becki has just earned her Ph.D. in Social Work, having written an excellent thesis on Restorative Justice.

"God has blessed us richly and continues to do so."