Gay Reformation Hymn
Tune: Ein feste burg is unser Gott
Two thousand years we feared our love,
condemned “unnatural sinners.”
Now stepping forth from heaven above
Christ makes gays special winners.
This world is filled with hate.
It seems almost too late
for God to interfere
again to bring love here,
but that’s what God is doing.
No more can foes God’s plans decide,
nor obfuscate God’s choosing.
God’s love for gays they cannot hide,
their puppetry is losing.
The God of heaven and earth
affirms gays’ priceless worth.
Our ransom has been paid:
joint heirs with Christ we’re made:
let homophobes take notice!
The Church once asked to have us killed:
our blood has writ this witness.
All ignorant minds must now be filled
with sexual truth and fitness.
The pressures still are strong
to work on gays much wrong.
We’re called to persevere,
endure our holy fear,
for Christ commands our army.
Our strength is not in guns or laws.
Our weapon is but Meekness.
We can forgive our foes their flaws:
Gay Might is just such “weakness.”
More friends will join this fight
because the Lord is right.
Gay bodies house God’s Spirit,
but only through Christ’s merit.
God’s love will triumph through us.
The Bethlehem Holiday Inn, 9th Janus, 0001
Joseph Carpenter,
I hereby evict you, effective tomorrow noon, for obvious reasons: 1) You did not father the baby, as you claimed. 2) You and your woman have kept up a perpetual racket in our stables, disturbing our animals. 3) You have wasted hay not required by your small donkey. 4) You have lured undesirables to the neighborhood, including mephitic shepherds from the hillside, some of whom had the audacity to hide on the roof and sing as “angels.” Many of our better guests complained. 5) This week three rich sissy foreigners (one of them black!), who should have booked in the Inn, slummed out back with you, to avoid paying us. 6) We hear that Herod is out to get anyone who traffics with parents of newly-born boys.
Be on your way back to Nazareth by noon if you know what’s good for you. Let’s have no more talk of Joy to the World.
The Maledictions
Unhappily we are arrested and thrown
into prison, for theirs is the law
as well as the court.
Unhappily are we called queer, lezzy, punk,
faggot, nellie, queen…; for theirs
are the media.
Unhappily are we diagnosed neurotic, narcissistic,
OEdipal, and “arrested,”
for theirs is the money when we pay the bill.
Unhappily are we accused of child molestation,
corrupting the young, and destroying the
family, for they are our mothers, our fathers,
our sisters and our brothers.
Unhappily are we tempted with rewards
for every time that we might betray
our sisters and brothers,
for we are spirit of their spirit,
flesh from their flesh.
Unhappily are we comfortable and rich
and educated and integrated with straits,
for we have to hide the truth.
Unhappily are we praised for our sensitivity,
for our artistry, for our humor,
for our intelligence, and for our sweetness;
we hurt and grow loudly angry,
for so humored they our gay ancestors
before genocide.
We are indeed the salt of the earth,
in a world sickening from saltlessness.
We are the light of the world,
revealing the secrets of the heart,
offering obvious witness
of what it is to be whole.
A prolific author and lifelong campaigner for the acceptance and inclusion of LGBT people by Christians and in the mainline church, Dr. Louie Crew Clay founded IntegrityUSA, a gay-acceptance group within the Episcopal Church, while teaching at Fort Valley State University in 1974. He married Ernest Clay in 1974 and then again in 2013, when marriage equality had become the law of the land. Known as Louie Crew for most of his life, he took his partner’s surname in his later years.