Reverend Marci Scott-Weis, MDIV

Friends, today we hear the story of Ruth and Naomi and I’ll cut right to the core meaning of the story, this is a story about how we take care of each other. Well there are probably many potential meanings of this story but the one I want to focus on today is about how we take care of each other.

The story I’ll share with you all today isn’t about a woman from the bible, it’s about me. This story begins just about 30 years ago when I was 26 years old, and I was running away. I was running away from Michigan and memories of poor choices and catastrophic decisions. I was running away from a relationship that broke my heart and my spirit. My heart was bruised and battered, and I had a weariness to my spirit that I described as feeling like I was wearing a thick wet heavy woolen blanket on my very being.

And so, I ran away to Washington State. There was no reasoning behind why I ended up out here beyond that was where I-90 ended. I fully intended to stay just for a few months before continuing west to spend a few years working in Asia. A couple of weeks after I arrived here though, my world changed. I met a woman whose smile and spirit woke me up and helped me figure out how to begin to breathe again.

It turns out this woman and I were both similarly bruised and battered in our hearts and spirits, and both scared to believe in something different than what we had known of love and caretaking so far in life. But we each took a chance and that chance resulted in thirty amazing years together, two incredible kids and a legacy of love. Most of you have met said woman, she’s in the back room yonder, taking care of our sound and streaming today. But I’m jumping ahead of this story!

I knew very early on that what I had with Jasper was something different and rare. And I knew that our being together was going to be really challenging. It was the early 90s and homophobia was raging in our world. I didn’t feel safe being out at work because I was worried that I would be fired. We were denied housing because a potential landlord ‘didn’t rent to our kind’. My mom told me that she didn’t want Jasper and I to visit her because she didn’t know what the neighbors would think. It wasn’t safe for us to express our feelings for each other in any way when we were out in public. And yet even with all of that, the love that I felt in our relationship was healing in a way that I didn’t dream possible.

I’ve told my kids that the best sorts of love are where you find someone who will be with you when you are sick, when you are sad, when you are celebrating and when you are in pain. The best sort of relationships recognize that the person you fell in love with is not the person you end up with and who celebrates and embraces change with you. The best sort of relationships give you the foundation to go out into the world and be who you dream of being, knowing that you have a safe harbor to return to each and every night. And I was really blessed to have found all of that in my relationship with Jasper.

Jasper and I chose to recognize that loving relationship through a wedding ceremony and again this was in the early 90’s. We struggled to find a church that would allow us to hold the ceremony but eventually found that the Unitarians would welcome us. Mailing the invitations was one of the most vulnerable moments of my life. Receiving the rejections and the lack of responses to many of those invitations was one of the most painful moments of my life.

Very few of my family attended that lovely wedding. My mom chose not to attend, and I was told that the majority of my siblings would not attend in order to support my mom’s decision. I cried for a long time on that wedding day as I struggled to not internalize my family’s absence as a referendum on my relationship. Now two of my sisters did attend, Dianna and Kathleen and their presence was both powerful and deeply meaningful, not only on that day but throughout our relationship and their legacy of support lives on my youngest daughter’s name, Dianna Kathleen.

The vows and promises that Jasper and I shared on that wedding day so long ago, in front of the folks who truly were our family, did not carry any legal weight but were hands down some of the most sacred promises that I have ever made in my life. Jasper and I knew that we wouldn’t be able to rest in any legal acknowledgement of those promises and so instead we rested in the power of the blessing we felt from our community and from our God on that day.

Four years later, we welcomed our daughter Frances into our family and two years after that Dianna came into our lives. In those early years as a family, we were quite an anomaly. We encountered so many who had never seen a family like ours. We were the first ‘alternative family’ to give birth at Overlake Hospital, a really challenging experience. And in those early years, we had painful experiences of rejection and homophobia from clergy, teachers, grocery clerks and hospital personal. But we also had loving welcome and acceptance from people and places that surprised us, humbled us, and sustained us.

In 2012, a referendum was put forth in the State of Washington that would allow Jasper and I to legally marry. Up until that point we had no legal protection, no rights, no protections as a couple. If she were to be admitted to the hospital, I was not considered family. If she were to die, I would not have been allowed to collect her body. Looking back, it is shocking to realize all of the ways that we were not protected as a family.

During that time, I remember my youngest daughter asking me if the vote did not pass, could we still be family. I told her that no law could make or unmake who we were as a family. Love made our family and love would continue to guide and hold our family regardless of how anyone voted. But that being said, it was a very stressful couple of months as this state deliberated the worth of my family and my relationship.

Now when the referendum passed, there were a whole lot of tears and celebrations and discussions of just how big the wedding was going to be. I told the kids that Jasper and I were already married and that this was just the document that would allow us to stop paying so much in taxes each year and thus we were going to the courthouse. The kids countered with a proposal for renting out a local football field and getting me a ballgown with a 20 foot train.

We settled somewhere in the middle and in the summer of 2013, we welcomed about 180 folks to our backyard. It was a beautiful day and Jasper and I were escorted into the ceremony by our two daughters where we were surrounded by friends and family who had loved us through some very hard times and stood with us and for us as a family. That included my mother and most of my siblings. Time has a way of changing and healing many, many things.

So why share this deeply personal story today? Because the scripture that we chose to read on both of those sacred and special days was the one you heard earlier today. ‘Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. 17 Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”

After that text was read, Jasper and I shared the exact same vows that we had made to each other almost two decades prior. And then our family of 180 folks all stepped forward and placed their hands on Jasper and I and our two children and blessed us. To this day, I can still feel those hands holding us, blessing us, and loving us.

I told you at the beginning that this text is a story about how we take care of each other. It is about how love in all forms endures, when it is hard and when it is easy. It is about how in the taking care of each other, we save each other, and I do believe, we save the world. ‘Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.’
And so I end this story by simply saying, thanks be to God for love that endures, love that saves, and love that calls us all into the taking care of each other.

Amen