Reverend Goudy here, and I bring you greetings from Metropolitan Community Church of the Lehigh Valley located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA – where I’m honored to serve as Pastor. I’m also honored to serve as an elder with Metropolitan Community Churches.
Prayer covers all God’s people for a most wondrous Christmas Eve. On this night on Christmas Eve, many churches sing a song titled “Oh Holy Night” – Oh holy night, the stars are brightly shining. It is the night of our dear savior’s birth.
What does it mean to be holy?
Well to be holy is to be set apart, not better than anyone but instead to be holy is to step away, to separate one’s self from ordinary awareness and enter into spiritual awareness.
I will never forget one of the sermons of the founder of Metropolitan Community Churches – Reverend Troy Perry was preaching one day about God’s love for all people. God’s love for LGBT people, and this was pretty early on, when I was with MCC so it was probably in the 1990s – and during this sermon Reverend Perry quoted from chapter 2 of the first letter of Peter and it’s that marvelous verse. That you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. God’s own people, in order that you might proclaim the mighty acts of The One who called you out of the shadows and into God’s marvelous light.
Once, you are not a people, but now you are God’s people.
Now, that day, without a doubt, it was confirmed to me through Reverend Perry’s sermon that LGBT people were holy, that MCC was holy, that we were a people separated out, called to proclaim God’s mighty acts, and while we may not have been a people, we were now God’s people, and we were expected to share God’s mercy and grace and justice and goodness and love.
So this night, this holy night is unlike any other night. It’s separated out, set apart from those 364 other nights of the year. On this holy night, the Prince of Peace and wonderful counselor breaks through to our broken world, giving us renewal and hope.
Through the savior of the world, God has called us, is calling us, and will continue to call Metropolitan Community Churches in the decades and in the centuries to come.
God says you are my Chosen Ones. You are my people, you are holy, and we are astonished. And yet we say “Amen” and we trust that it is so.
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