Scripture Reading: Luke 4:16-21

NRSVUE text modified by Jo Schonewolf

Our scripture reading for today is from the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 4, verses 16-21. Jesus is returning to his home region of Galilee after being tempted in the desert. Hear these words from Luke:

“When he (Jesus) came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because she has anointed me
    to bring good news to the poor.
They, the Lord, have sent me to proclaim release to the captives
   and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’

“And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’”

The word for us today.
Thanks be to God.

Sermon: Today’s the Day

Rev. Dr. Dorothee Benz

In the 1992 cult classic film My Cousin Vinny, two college students from Brooklyn decide to drive south for a warm-weather vacation in January. They cross the Alabama border as the opening credits roll, and the movie immediately sets up the culture clash between these urban ‘yutes’ and the rural South. They pass a “Dirt for sale” sign as well as a Confederate flag before stopping at the Sac-O-Suds convenience store, where they stock up on snacks and one of them inadvertently shoplifts a can of tuna – putting it in his pocket and then forgetting about it at the cash register. Soon after they leave the Sac-O-Suds they are pulled over by police, and the first of many misunderstandings ensues. They think they’ve been pulled over for the can of tuna, but in reality they are being arrested for shooting the store clerk. Only after they have casually confessed does it become clear that Bill and Stan are actually accused of murder. A panicked phone call back home results in a lawyer in the family, the eponymous cousin Vinny, coming down to Alabama to represent them.

The scene when Vinny and his fiancée Lisa drive into the small town where the whole story takes place is priceless. People on the street start whispering when they see the New York license plate. Then Vinny and Lisa get out of the car, both dressed – as we New Yorkers do – in all black. People stare. He’s got on a leather jacket. She’s wearing a mini-skirt.

“You stick out like a sore thumb around here,” Vinny says.

“Me? What about you?” Lisa retorts.

“I fit in better than you,” Vinny says. “At least I’m wearing cowboy boots.”

To which Lisa sarcastically replies, “Oh yeah, you blend.”

I’ve always loved this movie because of how well it represents the experience of New Yorkers in other parts of the country. But honestly, it’s also the perfect description of what it is like to be a queer person trying to get ordained in the United Methodist Church.

To be our authentic selves was never really an option. Certainly during the half century of official theological abuse and codified discrimination, it was always an internal negotiation: Can I be out? How out? Maybe I should let my hair grow a little longer. Perhaps I shouldn’t be the one to speak out at annual conference. So many of us left. Or hid. Or were kicked out. The ones who stayed maimed themselves in order to blend.

And while the rules have changed, the church – really – has not. Institutional priorities and conformity are still the norm – people who don’t have the “right” call story, a sufficiently tamed theology, and the willingness to fall in line, need not apply.

Jo Schonewolf, our beloved Jo, tried to blend. They tried to pursue ordination in the UMC. In a conversation we had a few months ago, Jo described the UMC process to me as “the inevitable track to Ninevah.” As in, knowing you have a call, being told that the only way to answer it is to sail to Ninevah, having everything in your being rebel against that and try to run away, understanding at some gut level that this is not the way for you, only to be forced in the end to sail to Ninevah after all. And Jo’s experience, like so many others’, was that the UMC pretended that there was only this one way – the inevitable track to Ninevah – in which you could be faithful to your call. And so after majoring in physics and astronomy (instead of religion) and pursuing a Masters of Science (instead of a Masters of Divinity), Jo finally got on the boat to Ninevah and went to seminary and tried to blend.

Jo’s plan was to keep their head down, follow the rules, get through the process, not draw attention to themself, lie if they needed to, to get to the other side, get ordained, and then –bam! to let loose the ministry to queer youth in the South that they always knew was their true call. And not to take anything away from the fabulous uniqueness that is Jo Schonewolf, but this is a lot of people’s plan for making it through the UMC ordination process.

That was the plan. But then one day in their first year in seminary, someone in the cafeteria asked them to sign a petition in support of queer United Methodists. Specifically, the petition was asking the Council of Bishops to include meaningful queer representation on the just-formed Commission on the Way Forward, a commission created to make recommendations on whether and how the church would continue to discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people. It was an absurdly modest request – that queer people should be part of the conversation on how queer people are treated – but in the politics of the UMC it was considered a radical idea, completely beyond the pale. And Jo, seeking ordination in the Western North Carolina Conference, part of the notoriously homophobic Southeast Jurisdiction, was confronted in that moment by a choice: a choice between institutional loyalty and basic human dignity. Jo’s entire strategy for getting through ordination and on to the ministry to queer people they dreamed of was suddenly called into question.

I like to think that what happened next is that the queer ancestors intervened.

To see what I mean, we have to turn to today’s scripture.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
Because she has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
They, the Lord, have sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

These words that Jesus stands up to read in the synagogue have always been balm to the poor and the oppressed. They ring with the yearning for liberation, and they are part of the enduring witness of scripture that God is on the side of the poor, on the side of the marginalized, the vulnerable, and the oppressed – good news to the poor… release to the captives… set free the oppressed… Yes!

But the key to this passage in Luke is what Jesus says after he sits back down: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

On first read these words are kind of a head scratcher. It was definitely not the case that captives were released when he said those words, nor were the oppressed set free. Nazareth was just as firmly under Roman occupation when Jesus sat down as it had been when he stood up to read. What does it mean to say that this scripture is “fulfilled” when clearly none of the things it calls for have happened? And “today?” Huh?

The same is true for us in 2025. There are nearly 2 million people held captive at this moment in U.S. jails, prisons, and detention centers and camps, an increasing number of them without due process of any kind. And then there are those who are being sent, again without due process, to foreign concentration camps. Good news for the poor is hard to discern at a time when our government is shoveling money at the obscenely rich while condemning countless thousands to death by stealing their healthcare. Masked government agents are abducting and disappearing our neighbors. And antisemitism is weaponized to defend genocide while our government funds the slaughter and starvation of babies. Oppressed people are not going free – quite the opposite.

Meanwhile, Christian bullies, aided and abetted by state governments and school boards alike, have taken aim at LGBTQIA+ people and are tormenting, in particular, transgender children, denying them healthcare and erasing them from public space. Twenty-nine states have so-called “religious exemption” laws[1] that invite people to deny goods and services to queer folx in the name of their faith. Books with LGBTQIA+ characters are being yanked off library shelves while laws like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” prohibit the mere mention of our existence in schools. And the epidemic of lethal violence against trans people, especially trans women of color, continues.

But queer people, queer people have always met the denial of our existence with defiant resistance. We have fought in the streets and in the courts. We have fought with our families of origin and our churches. We have faced rejection and violence rather than deny who we are. From the gay men who met and forged community at the 34th Street YMCA in New York during World War II to the butch-femme bars in working-class neighborhoods in the 50s and 60s and the seedy bars like the Stonewall in enclaves like Greenwich Village and San Francisco, we risked everything to be ourselves, our authentic selves, and to find each other. We built our own community institutions and community centers, we created our own families, long before some of them got official state recognition.

This, my friends, is what that word “today” means. It means that, despite everything, in a world in which so many are oppressed, we can still claim a piece of our liberation. We can be our authentic selves, we can live as if the world were already free through that authenticity in all of our flamboyant or flannel or ordinary queerness.

In one way, it is not much. It doesn’t protect against discrimination or violence, it won’t make your family un-disown you, and it can never bring back all the lives we lost to AIDS, hate crimes, and suicide. But in another way, it is precious beyond measure. It means that there is something no one can take away from us, our agency, our ability to define ourselves on our own terms.

In this, queer people have given a great gift of example to all those fighting for liberation. We do not need anyone’s permission to act authentically and justly now. Today. We have the moral agency to treat each other with love and dignity and without bias. We have the agency to refuse to participate in unjust laws – and indeed, as Dr. King exhorted us, the obligation to do so – and we have the freedom to do our work in a way that embodies the values and the liberation we seek for all people.

In the spaces of justice that we create as we organize, there is good news for the poor and there is freedom for the oppressed. Today.

And it is this great example from the queer ancestors that reached through time and space and entered Jo Schonewolf when that petition was put in front of them. They stood there awkwardly for three minutes – and then signed the petition and never looked back. “Eff the plan,” Jo said, and after that, as they told me, they went to every possible protest.

This was Jo’s “today” moment. They understood what Martin Luther King called “the fierce urgency of now.” They understood that their ministry to queer people could not wait until some safe time on the other side of an artificial marker of authority. And that day, that moment, set them on the course that has brought them – and all of us with them – to this day, this joyous day.

The “today” of Luke 4 has also been the hallmark of the Church Within A Church Movement. The movement came together in the early aughts with the explicit commitment to being an inclusive church, now, regardless of the UMC’s official positions and prohibitions. Its signature contribution to the reconciling movement was to ordain those whom God had called but the UMC rejected, beginning in 2008.

This, of course, set Church Within A Church on a collision course with the institutional church. Virtually everyone involved in that first ordination was threatened in one way or another by UMC officials. But the movement understood that while we did not have the power to change the UMC’s bigoted rules, we did have the power – and indeed the obligation – to defy them. We had, we have – always – our moral agency that allows us to act justly in our own context, to live as if, to refuse complicity in unjust systems, to embody the “today” of Jesus’s prophetic proclamation.

I want to take note that the conflict between the institutional church and those of us committed to living out Jesus’s “today” is not new, nor is it limited to the issue of the church’s homophobia and transphobia.

Methodists in New Directions (MIND), another dissident formation in the UMC, one that I helped found, made this point with an educational action at the 2019 General Conference, an action we called “the exception.” We lined the entire balcony with people holding placards that spelled out the church’s bigoted history with dates and events.

These included Methodist support for slavery and segregation; Methodist involvement in the massacre of Native Americans; Methodist participation in imperialist subjugation of Filipinos; Methodist efforts to silence women, refuse to seat them at General Conference, and refuse to ordain them; the segregated Central Jurisdiction; and of course, our own era of anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination. We called the action “the exception” because in doing the research for it we realized that there were exactly four years in Methodist history, 1968-1972, in which codified discrimination of one sort or another did not exist. An absence of exclusionary policies was indeed the exception in the church.

This realization is depressing as hell, but critically important for us to understand. If you think bishops started prizing church unity over justice in the fight to contain queer demands, think again. They shut down debate on anti-slavery resolutions at General Conferences throughout the 1800s, and “unity” is what gave us the Central Jurisdiction. Methodist moderates, who always tell us they agree with our goals but cannot endorse our methods, have been choosing institutional self-preservation over justice since the 18th century. They always put off until tomorrow what is inconvenient or disruptive to do today.

The truth is the church as an institution has always been in tension with the church as the followers of Jesus Christ. Jesus’s priorities in centering the marginalized, the vulnerable, and the excluded are an inherently destabilizing force that demands that we constantly readjust what we are doing, constantly shift our attention away from those in charge to those on the margins, constantly decenter the most privileged.

This is the work of Luke 4’s “today.” Today is the day to demand the oppressed be freed. Today is the day to feed the hungry; to name the genocide and demand an end to the forced famine. Today is the day to call out ethnic cleansing and put our bodies in between our neighbors and Trump’s Gestapo. Today is the day to throw down and fight injustice with everything we have. Not tomorrow. Not someday. Not when it’s safe or popular. Not at the next General Conference or after you’re ordained. Today.

I have never once heard a bishop preach on the word “today” in Luke 4, but this is the true work of the church, and it explains why those of us trying to do it always end up being labeled divisive or counter-productive or told that we have to follow the process or be patient or somesuch.

But we do not! The power to be the church of Jesus Christ in the world does not flow down from the office of the bishop but rather up from the body of Christ, organizing together to enact the agency of God in the world. Never doubt that this power can change the world, for indeed it has. The power of the people brought down the Berlin Wall and threw Jim Crow into the dustbin of history. It ended apartheid in South Africa and sent the British Empire packing in India. And yes, it even ended the codified discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people in the United Methodist Church.

Now is not the time to doubt whether we can change the world, but rather to insist that we must. We must not blend. We must be the church, the church within a church. Today’s the day!

Amen.

[1] One, Alabama, actually has a constitutional provision rather than a statutory one; so technically, 28 states.