HARRY KNOX, M.Div.

United Church of Christ
Washington, DC

Director, Religion and Faith Program
of the Human Rights Campaign

Harry Knox experienced a clear call to ministry on Lincoln's birthday, Feb. 12th, 1977 (now Freedom to Marry Day).  In church that day, the spirit told him, “I want you to be my man in South Georgia.”  When Harry asked, “Does that mean you want me to be a minister?” God answered, “for now.”

Harry's ministry has been continually shaped by God's words, "for now."  This calling took him from Candler School of Theology at Emory University, where he attempted to shut off his sexuality, to Lancaster Theological Seminary where he prepared as an openly gay man for ministry in the United Church of Christ.  When Harry was denied ordination in the UCC Georgia-South Carolina Association of the Southeast Conference, God called him to do social justice work instead.  

At the American Cancer Society, he ministered to people dealing with life and death and modeled how an organization can better care for people in crisis.  At Georgia Equality, at Equality Florida, at Freedom to Marry, and now at the Human Rights Campaign, he has pastored to a community under attack and served as a spiritual guide to those actively engaged in the struggle for equality.

 This stole honors his remarkable ministry outside the official church. In the face of prejudice and homophobia, Harry became pastor to people on the margins.  He cares, as Jesus would, for those who have been castigated, shunned, and abandoned.  His is a ministry of presence, teaching us the importance of being available when needed and representing God the best we can. 

Harry currently plans to pursue ordination in the United Church of Christ, Washington, D.C.  To all of us, he was ordained in 1977 when he heard his first call.

 – His colleagues and friends at the Human Rights Campaign

Comments from Sharon Groves at the Dedication of

Harry Knox’s stole for the Shower of Stoles Project

 

Thank you all for coming out tonight.  Assembled here Harry, are your partners in faith, in political advocacy, your wonderful colleagues from HRC, and many, many good friends who love you.

 

We want to give a special welcome to Harry’s longtime friend Jeff Whitney.  On his own dime and with virtually no advance notice from us, Jeff decided to catch a plane from Atlanta to be here with Harry.  Special thanks also to  Rev. John Mack and Rev. Barbara Gerlach, pastors of Harry’s Washington, DC church, First Congregational United Church of Christ and other First Congregational members for coming out tonight.  I also want to thank those we’ve asked to speak.  Winnie Stachleberg and Barbara Menard are the women responsible for creating HRC’s Religion and Faith program a year and a half ago and for hiring Harry.  Also, my pastor and Harry’s good friend Rev. Louise Green will lead us in a short dedication service. 

 

Others wanted to be here but couldn’t make it.  In particular, Rev. Rebecca Voelkal the program director for the Institute for Welcoming Resources, home to the Shower of Stoles project.  Rebecca is due to deliver her new baby, Shannon Mackenzie, any day now.  Though she can’t travel she still wrote a letter in honor of Harry’s, which Kyla will read later in the program.  We also want to thank the artist who created the stole for Harry, Darcy Dye.  Harry and I met Darcy in Iowa and liked her immediately.  After talking to her at length about her work, her faith, her commitment to LGBT equality, Kyla and I knew she was the right person to create the stole.  Darcy was captivated by Harry’s story as you can see from her artist statement on the back of the program.  The stole she’s created is a labor of love bringing together the pivotal moments in Harry’s life as a person of faith.   

 

I’d like to say a few words about Harry’s ministry, but first let me give some context to the Shower of Stole project.    In 1995, no longer able to work in the Presbyterian Church as an out lesbian, Martha G. Juillerat, the project founder, decided to forego ordination knowing that it would be revoked from her. Although she had been asked to spend the previous three years telling her story as a lesbian and Presbyterian pastor, the presbytery then told her she couldn’t be out.  Rather than be defrocked she relinquished her ordination.  

 

To mark the decision and to let the presbytery know that she was not the only LGBT person of faith in the Presbyterian Church, she sent out a request for stoles that would be hung in the church where the presbytery was meeting. The stoles were intended to be evidence that homophobia and heterosexism affected many, many more people.  

 

Instead of the dozen stoles she expected, she received 80, almost all arriving overnight and most of them anonymous.  With that, the Shower of Stoles project was born.

 

The project now contains over a thousand stoles from LGBT people and allies from twenty-six different denominations.  The stories these stoles tell are always poignant, and sometimes gut-wrenchingly so.  They tell of children who have been denied baptism, clergy partners forced to live in separate towns for fear they’ll loose their positions, and church elders who have remained closeted for decades.  They also tell positive stories of churches that have become welcoming, and of Out clergy honored by their congregations.  Together they create a stunning picture of resilience, creativity, and grace in the face of tremendous obstacles. 

 

It is fitting that Harry should be included in this company.  As you’ll hear more about later, Harry was denied ordination because of his sexuality, but through his deep faith and personal perseverance he refocused his energies and became a pastor to organizations that serve people on the margins, first cancer survivors and then the LGBT community.

 

In thinking of what I wanted to say about Harry, I come back to a riveting performance I recently saw of Lorraine Hansberry’s, 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun.  In the penultimate scene, the son in the family has hit rock bottom and is contemplating selling out the family to a white racist neighborhood association, to the complete disdain of his younger sister.  In response: Lena Younger, the Matriarch in the family, posed the question that makes me think of Harry: She asks: “When is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy?”    She continues, “when you start measuring someone measure him right.  Make sure you take into account the hills and valleys he’s come through before he got to wherever he is” 

 

To my mind, Harry is a pastor for the LGBT community the way Mama Lena Younger is for her family.  Harry never looses site of the hills and valleys with which we all wrestle.  He knows his own too well.  He knows that to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender in this country--whether living openly or in the closet, whether an advocate or not—means that at some point or another there is going to be struggle often combined with degrees of shame, denial, and exclusion.  He also knows that our religious communities, the place where we are at our most vulnerable and where we go for solace and refuge are often the places that hurt us the worst and are the first to shut us out.  

 

Yet, just as Harry became stronger through his struggle, his ministry to others is as much about hope and buoyancy as it is about compassion.   Harry loves when it isn’t easy to love and he believes in our gifts even when we forget we have them. By so doing, he models a compassionate strength that empowers us to work harder for justice and to love those in our lives more deeply and freely.  In my mind there could be no higher religious calling than this. 

 

 

Rebecca Voelkel’s Words About Harry

 

For Harry Knox as his stole is donated to the Shower of Stoles Project

With love and gratitude from Rev. Rebecca Voelkel, friend, colleague and Program Director of the Institute for Welcoming Resources, home of the Shower of Stoles Project

 

I must begin by saying that my understanding of our vocation as human beings is to help participate in bringing in God’s realm here on earth.  In order to do this, God has given us all gifts and graces, skills and passions so that we might be co-collaborators and co-conspirators with God in this joyful, justice work.

 

But one of the truths about our world is that the powers of death use a variety of means to keep justice at bay and righteousness a far-too-distant reality.  Among these means are the isms and phobias that would have some defending their humanity instead of using their gifts to hearken the realm of God.

 

The Shower of Stoles Project seeks to both illustrate the sheer sinfulness of denying the power of God as manifest in many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lives AND to highlight the creativity, power and beauty that are released when LGBT folk refuse to allow homophobia and heterosexism to keep them from sharing their God-given vocations.  In other words, the Shower of Stoles Project calls the question on the powers of death and challenges us all to use what God has given us to make this world more like the one God intended.

 

The fact that we are honoring Harry Knox today with a stole in this collection seems perfectly fitting to me, because Harry represents the best of Christian leadership and ministry if I have even seen it.  If anyone in my life has embodied the gifts and skills, the graces and passions to help make this world more like God’s, it is Harry.

 

Whether it is as a Southern raconteur whose self-deprecation and humble humor focus the listener’s attention on the moral of the story or as the soft-spoken man whose fearless presence in the halls of power have literally transformed minds, Harry is a minister of the Word.  Whether it is as a ubiquitous presence at practically every conference on faith and LGBT issues around the country or as the man who responds almost immediately to your email, Harry takes seriously the call to embody God to those with whom he ministers.  Whether it is as strategist and thinker or as behind the scenes organizer, Harry knows that faith without works is dead.

 

The Church was wrong to deny Harry ordination the first time around.  But Harry has refused to have his gifts go unused.  As we receive Harry’s stole into the Shower of Stoles Project, we gift thanks to God for Harry’s co-conspirator status, for his co-collaborator heart that has meant that God’s ministry has been so powerful in his life.

 

And, personally, as one who tries to stand in a similar place as Harry—between secular politics and Church dynamics—my heart is full that God has granted me the gift of Harry Knox in my life as colleague and as friend.  Thanks be to God.

 

 

Reflection for Harry Knox – Shower of Stoles

Sermon by Rev. Louise Green

January 11, 2007

 

The hour is striking so close above me,

So clear and sharp,

That all my senses ring with it.

I feel it now: there’s a power in me

To grasp and give shape to my world.

 

I know that nothing has ever been real

Without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things

And they come toward me, to meet and be met.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours

 

            It’s a great pleasure to stand before you for the purpose of honoring the calling and ministry of Harry Knox.  We are fairly recent friends, but since the beginning I have resonated strongly with Harry’s great open spirit and obvious passion for his work. As I thought about what to say today, I came across this poem again…one of the great things about being a UCC minister in a Unitarian setting is that you can use poetry as sacred inspiration for the preaching moment!  The urgent text moves me deeply, and also reminded me of Harry, so let me explore that for a moment with you.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote the Book of Hours, also called Love  Poems to God, from strong inner stirrings over three powerful time periods.  What he named as “inner dictations” were put to paper quickly and shaped to indicate his fervent belief in the experience of a reciprocal universe.  By this I mean that he felt in two-way communication with God, with his calling, with destiny, as it unfolded, and knew that what he chose would create new shape to his life.  This was a divine reciprocity in which Rilke’s participation was crucial and his actions significant.

When we honor Harry today, I believe that we are celebrating that lively and disruptive reciprocal Spirit, the one the moves us and guides us, but also demands our own response to create our calling. In Harry’s journey, we are reminded that the principalities and powers of this earth may speak on the subject of call, but that they are often irrelevant or flat-out wrong.  The Shower of Stoles is a project about callings that blossom and flower in spite of the limitations of human beings.  It is a testimony to how God moves people regardless of the structures and injunction that appear to stand in the way.  As we hear in Isaiah of the Hebrew Scriptures, “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

On this evening, we only give voice to what has been so apparent for so many years, that Harry has shaped ministry from his calling.  He was simply ahead of his time in the jurisdiction where he most unfortunately landed originally.  But not ahead of God’s time, sometimes named the kairos moment!  For if anyone reminds me a bell ringing clear and sharp, so that all your senses ring with it, it is Harry Knox. When Rilke says “there’s a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world” we see a map for what Harry has created.  And isn’t this like so many transgender, bisexual, lesbian and gay folks who find themselves shut out of one party but able to create their own?

Rilke goes on to say, “All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things and they come toward me, to meet and be met.”  It is a joy to see what Harry saw becoming here at HRC, and how his calling was true towards a creative vision that is literally touching thousands of people around the country. I believe this becoming, this Faith and Religion program at HRC, needed his looking to ripen the thing, his clear bell of recognition that this was his next place to be.  Now the expanded vision needs the ongoing vision of Sharon and Kyla and Rebecca and other staff here, plus clergy and lay people around the country who are stirred by the accomplishments of this fine work. We who are outside the organization see also that the hour is striking so close above us, clear and sharp, that our senses ring with it.  We feel the power of call, as it moves through Harry and this staff and directly to each of us. 

            It is kind of an odd thing to commission a stole that you will only wear once, but in a way this is also emblematic of how calling works.  We seek to give shape to what moves within us, and we let it go, we send it out into the world and pray that our blessing blesses others along the journey.  Harry, your calling began back in your adolescent yearnings to participate in the life of congregation and polity, and in your deep and urgent questions about how you would serve.  It has flowed out from you in various forms over time, and the Spirit is with you, clearly naming you a beloved child of God, with whom God is well pleased.  Thank you for not hiding your light under the bushel, and for giving freely, and intensely, of the abundant talent that the Spirit has given to you. 

            I would like to close with a blessing for Harry, and for each of us as we shape our calling and bring it forward.  It comes from my other favorite Rilke poem, also from the Book of Hours:

 

…If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,

But this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,

No forcing and no holding back,

The way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,

These deepening tides moving out, returning,

I will sing you as no one ever has,

Streaming through widening channels

Into the open sea.

 

May it be so for you, Harry, my friend and colleague in ministry, and may it be true for each of us who are so fortunate to be here with you today.  Blessed be and Amen.

Click here to read Rev. Harry Knox's biographic profile in the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network's Profiles Gallery.