The themes of this week’s texts range from judgment and repentance to an attack on self-serving, dehumanizing religion.  They also include a personal plea for forgiveness, enemies making peace and the gospel’s admonition to humbly practice our religious and spiritual acts. There is much to be said about LGBT lives in relation to each of these themes.  Yet the prevailing theme haunting the imaginations and hearts of the writers this week is the horrible plague and ravaging that the prophet Joel points to so vividly. The writers of this week’s commentary pretend no objective reading and experiencing of these passages. Rather as two lesbians and a gay man, we invite you to “listen in” on the face-to-face conversation we had in struggling with these texts in relation to our own lives and the lives of our LGBT community.

In Joel 2:1-2, 12-17 the prophet is calling for repentance in the face of terrible disaster descending upon the land unless the people “tremble” (verse 1) and mend their ways with fasting and with weeping and mourning (v. 12). If the priests and ministers of God weep “between the vestibule and the altar” (verse 17) and the people “rend their hearts” (verse 13) and radically change, perhaps God will turn from punishing them.

	How do you understand repentance in your own individual life and in the life of a religious community?  What kind of repentance is needed in many of our churches to end the ravaging of LGBT lives?

One of the first things religious people must contend with when reading these kinds of judgment and repentance passages is the way God and God’s action was understood at the time the text was written. People often thought: If something terrible happened personally or to the whole people, then God must be angry and the whole people must deserve to be punished. Today, those of us looking at this text might want to think less about God’s wrath and punishment in interpreting personal and social tragedy, and more about the violence and oppression that human beings perpetrate upon one another.

Perhaps we might want to think about how we are the “locusts and armies of enemies” (verses 1 and 2).  When have we become such enemies in relation to our sisters and brothers, and to the planet itself? We do indeed need repentance in the land and around the globe not as a means to “persuade” (verses 13, 14) God, but as a righteous and just act of accountability for all that humans have done unjustly. 

The ravaging that the prophet Joel predicts as impending in verses 1 and 2 has already come across the landscape of LGBT lives.  The locusts of hatred and violence are still daily realities in the lives of our community. The ravaging from many arms of the church and society continue to literally destroy the lives of young LGBT people, and have cost many of us our jobs, our family connections, and our intimate, partnered relationships. 

The God that Joel describes seems to be both our ally and our enemy. God seems to be on the side of the ravaging and against the lives of LGBT people.  Yet, on the other hand, this same God is also the one to whom we must repent. It feels exhausting to encounter yet again a God who has to be pleased in order for the “plague of violence” to stop, and to come face to face with a God who needs for us to beg for mercy and forgiveness in order for the heterosexist punishing to end.

For the three of us, however, it felt too easy to simply sit and talk about all the ways that the heterosexist church and society has perpetuated this “army of violence” upon our lives.  It is abundantly clear that Joel is calling “all” the people to repent (verse 1), not just some of the people. The LGBT community has some repenting to do as well. This repentance is not for who we are as LGBT people, or for our same gender love and sexuality, but for the ways we have not been bold enough and outraged enough about what continues to happen to our own lives and to the lives of our families and friends.

Perhaps we have not always lifted our voices against the self-serving, dehumanizing religious practices that the prophet Isaiah speaks about this week. A part of what is so insidious about abuse and violence is that it drains away a persons’ energy to respond and to act with outraged resistance.  We have not always called for the kind of “moral reformation” that Isaiah 58: 6-8 calls for so prophetically. In reality, many members of our own community are the “naked” (verse 7) and vulnerable ones that Isaiah demands we respond to with our concrete actions. Sometimes it has simply been easier to protect our own “small sphere” of safety in our own neighborhoods and among our chosen family, than to become the ones who “loose the bonds of injustice” (verse 6) and “undo the thongs of the yoke” (verse 9) from members of our own LGBT community who are much more marginalized, oppressed and vulnerable than those of us who have assimilated well into mainline communities and churches.

We have not always prayed for forgiveness in the powerful way Psalm 51 confronts us to pray.  We have had some of the same defensive excuses that the psalmist urges the people to turn from in order to have their hearts and lives renewed (verses 1-17).

	For members of the LGBT community, what forgiveness do you seek in relation to other members of the LGBT community?  For our allies, what prayer of forgiveness will you offer God for the ravaging of LGBT lives, and how might you concretely loose the bonds of injustice that abound all around us?