Read and Proclaimed

When my preaching career began in earnest in 1994, I was a minister in training at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, California. The worship experience there was not governed by chronos time, but by the kairos time of the Holy Spirit. Sunday worship services started at 11:00 a.m., but we were never sure about the time they would end.

In the second chapter of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, Robert McRuer analyzes the case of Karen Thompson, whose live-in partner, Sharon Kowalski, was disabled in a car accident. Because this happened in the 1990s, these two women’s relationship could not be legally recognized. Kowalski’s medical care and consent defaulted to her parents, who denied Thompson the ability to visit Kowalski and insisted that Kowalski was too disabled to go home, effectively incarcerating their daughter to a medical facility.

(Today, we sing a song of holy insistence in the key of confession.) Verse One. Do we know we are texts read in the carefullest of ways? —lest we forget our constitution, the declarations that got us here, stay us here, in history’s substantial yet somber junctures.

For forty years the people of God wandered in the wilderness. They were living in “liberation limbo,” a dry and dusty place somewhere between Pharaoh and the Promised Land. Exodus 17 suggests that this was the first “protestant” congregation—the people protested bitterly to Moses that they were parched with thirst. God answered their prayer, giving them water from a rock.