The reading this morning is from one of my favorite social critics and novelists, James Baldwin, one of the most incisive commentators on religion in America:

"If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him."

Baldwin always could put a fine point on it.

Not too long ago, an African American member of All Souls knocked on my door and told me he had a story he wanted to share. (We'll call this member Jim, not so much to protect his anonymity, but that of the other people in the story.) Jim told me that about a year back he had invited a colleague from work and her husband to come visit All Souls. They were a black couple in the 40s or 50s who'd been looking for a church home for some time, but hadn't felt comfortable in the more traditional black churches. Jim was delighted a few weeks later when he spotted them in the balcony on Sunday. He went over and welcomed them and encouraged them to return. And return they did, Sunday after Sunday. Over the course of one fall they came fairly regularly.

A few months later, though, Jim noticed that he hadn't seen the couple at church for a while, and so one day as he passed his colleague in the hallway at work, he just casually asked if they were still coming to All Souls. The woman was quiet for a moment and she looked at Jim with an ashamed look on her face. She said, "Jim, we loved your church. Its warmth. The music. The sermons. We liked it all. But my husband just couldn't get over the fact that the ministers were gay. So we've stopped coming. I'm sorry."

Now Jim's not the only one with a story like this. Other folks have shared similar tales.

It's stories like this that have got some people wondering -- usually in private, usually only among close friends or in the confines of the pastor's study -- whether or not All Souls can be both a multiracial congregation AND a congregation that is welcoming to gays and lesbians. They wonder if somehow our commitment to these two goals -- these two peoples -- isn't contradictory.

Now there's a reason that people rarely raise this question in public; it makes us awfully uncomfortable to talk about it. To even raise it might seem as though we're questioning our commitment either to gays and lesbians or to folks of color. Lots of us don't want to talk about it because we don't want our church -- our church of all places -- to be a place where we're reminded that things like prejudice still exist. Where we're reminded that our very identities can sometimes still be contentious. Sunday after Sunday we say that this will be a place where the divisions that separate us in our daily lives will come tumbling down and that we will recognize ourselves as part of one human family. This is a faith statement we make each Sunday. And as a statement of faith, it's true. We are brothers and sisters, all. And because it's true, some people believe that at church we shouldn't emphasize or talk about what makes us different. That we should focus on what unites us. I sympathize with that feeling.

But here's the problem with it. The faith that we are one family is true as a statement of faith, but it is not the whole truth. There are divisions that threaten to tear apart the human family and as a human institution, the church is susceptible to these same divisions. And that's hard for us to admit sometimes. That's why as a minister, I spend a lot of time talking with people who feel disappointed or let down by the church. People who expected that somehow in the church people wouldn't do the dumb things they do everywhere else in the world. That here, somehow, we were all magically transformed into whole and living and loving human beings. But let me tell you, no such church exists. At its best the church is a place where people are on the journey. On the journey toward transformation, on the journey toward becoming the great family of all souls. But along the way we are still tripping and stumbling and hurting each other.

So I think we need to have the uncomfortable conversations, not only in private but here, in public, and in this holy place on Sunday mornings, even though it's uncomfortable. Believe me, I didn't get much sleep last night, knowing I was going to preach this sermon this morning. But if the church can't be the utopian zone of human perfection that we hoped it might have been, then at least it can be this: a safe and loving community in which to have the difficult conversations that might lead us toward transformation. The worst thing we could do is remain silent.

So let's look at this question then: "Can our church be welcoming to people of color AND to gays and lesbians?" But before answering it, let's examine a couple of the premises behind it this question. Because actually I've got a problem with how the question is even posed. First of all, the question presumes that people of color aren't gay. I don't know about you, but I know a few thousand people who went to Black Pride last weekend who might beg to differ about that. And it further presumes that all gay people are white. And not only white, but they're like the white people we see on Will & Grace -- urban professionals, with sharp senses of humor. These stereotypes exist inside and out of communities of color, inside and out of the gay community, with the result that people of color who are gay and lesbian are often "disappeared" in both communities. I don't want that to happen here. That cannot happen here.

I also want to suggest that the reason we're asking the question is because it's a question that we hear a lot in the media these days. You can't follow D.C. politics and read the local media without being aware of their fondness for portraying gentrification as a conflict only between gay people and black people. Have you noticed this in the press? It came up in the debate about black churches in Shaw double-parking on Sundays, and then more recently about the bar that someone wanted to open down in Logan Circle and the owners happened to be gay and the black church ministers opposed that opening. The media seems to really love this tension between black folks and gay folks.

I even read it in the Post yesterday on the national level. You may know that President Bush is holding a Rose Garden ceremony tomorrow in support of the Federal Marriage Amendment. Yesterday, a Post article mentioned that, in addition to shoring up his popularity with his conservative base, the Republican operatives hoped that the ceremony would lure African American and Latino voters away from the Democratic Party.

This seems to be real popular in the media these days, this conflict, and I've been trying to figure out why that is the case. And the other day it hit me; I think I've figured it out. Which is this: On the local level, at least, it's a lot easier to blame gentrification on a bunch of gay men with a penchant for fixer-uppers than it is to confront the shadowy mix of economic inequality and racism that has been at the heart of every wave of urban displacement in this city's history. Conversely, I think it's easier for white Americans to project their homophobia onto a few intemperate black preachers or only Catholic Latinos, for example, and sort of say, "Well, you know, they're a little backwards. We've gotten over our homophobia." Well, I happen to know very well, because a gay person can sometimes "pass" at a straight bar, I know very well that the gay joke is the last respectable bigoted joke in white America. Or at least it is at Friday Happy Hour in Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan.

This is all a way of saying that I think this whole "conflict" between folks of color and gay folks is fueled by our culture's unwillingness to talk about deeper systemic problems. Let's be clear. The problems are racism, economic inequality and homophobia. The problem is not gay people and black people. Which isn't to say that there isn't homophobia in the gay community or racism in the black community; it's only to say that homophobia and racism are prevalent in all of our communities. And we need to own up to that. So we need to be careful what we're buying into when we frame this question the way we do.

I have to say that when "Jim" first shared with me this story about his colleague from work, it sounded strangely familiar to me. And after awhile I realized that I'd heard a version of this story before. I remembered where it came from. It reminded me of a story that one of my predecessors here at All Souls, David Eaton, used to tell about the early days of his ministry. I want to share with you David's story, because I think it suggests to us a possible way forward.

David Eaton was called to be the first African American senior minister of All Souls in 1969, a year after Dr. King's assassination, at a time when the nation, the city, and especially this neighborhood were deeply divided along racial lines. And in that environment, David and this church created something that was remarkable: A thriving, genuinely multiracial church. But from what I've been told, race and racism weren't often talked about explicitly during David's tenure. They were felt to be too explosive to address directly. But one time a group of folks got together and asked David to preach about this subject head on, and in the early 1980s he preached a sermon called, "Racism is Alive and Well." After spending the first part of the sermon defining racism and describing his experience growing up in segregated Washington and being a black man in the Army, he moved on to his experience at All Souls Church.

David said, "Some of you know that between 1969 and 1975 I went through the worst experience of racism that I had ever encountered since I left the Army. It happened right here, at our church."

David talked about how when he first came, there was a group of white people in the church who tried to undermine his authority, who questioned his qualifications as a minister. After they failed to convince him to leave, they went ahead and left the church themselves and went out to the suburbs. If you look back at the numbers, they bear the story out. In 1968, the year before David was called as senior minister, church membership stood at around 1,200 or 1,300. By the mid-70s, it had declined to around 700 or so. I don't mean to suggest that everyone who left during those times left for this reason, but I think it explains something. In the sermon, David spoke of how painful it was for him to watch this Exodus take place and he ended his sermon with a story that I want to share with you today. Since I have a transcript of that sermon, I'll tell the story in his words.

"Something wonderful and beautiful happened in the midst of it all. A woman, 62 years old, came to my office. She was crying, and I went over and held her in my arms. She said, 'I've got to leave the church.' I asked 'Why?' She said, 'I'm just not comfortable anymore. It was all right before, [when our ministers] were white. There were a few blacks, but now there are too many joining the church. I'm not comfortable anymore. I feel ashamed of myself. I'm a liberal and I never thought that I could have racist feelings, but I do.'"