Remembering Matthew Shepard

At Columbia Theological Seminary (CTS), my friend, the Rev. Katie Ricks, recently posted a note on Facebook for the campus' LGBTQIA+ group that wanted to honor and "hold space for our queer CTS ancestors (students and staff) who came before us."

I would want to add the name of Matthew Shepard, even though he was not a student at CTS. 

I would add his name because 23 years ago, on this night, on Oct. 6, 1998, Matthew was beaten up by two angry, hate-filled, perhaps themselves closeted gay, young men in Laramie, Wyoming, and left to die on a desolated roadway outside of Laramie. Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, two young men who Matthew met in a bar in Laramie, were later charged and found guilty of first degree murder, guilty of killing Matthew. They beat him up and strung him up on a fence outside of the city proper, he was found the next day, almost dead. 

Matthew would die on Oct. 12, 1998. He was 21 years-old. That was 23 years ago. If he had lived, he would be 44 years-old today. 

But he died. He was killed. Violently. Needlessly. He did nothing wrong to these men. 

He was killed because he was gay.

I regret that one of the things I did not do when I was the LGBTQIA+ Advocacy Coordinator with the OR-ID United Methodist Church Conference was do a lighting of candles or honor those LGBTQIA+ people in the Conference who had died, upon whose shoulders we built a movement and, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., moved the long moral arc of the universe closer to justice. 

While I would like to say or write that things are a lot better today overall, I would be lying. There are pockets of this country and world in which being an out LGBTQIA+ person is fine, good, and welcomed. But there are other areas of this country and world in which being LGBTQIA+ is dangerous and scary. Many who are LGBTQIA+ still live in their self-made and society-made closet. 

Today, Matthew Shepard's remains are interred in Washington, DC's National Cathedral. They were moved there and interred on Oct. 26, 2018. It is a high honor to have one's remains or body buried in the National Cathedral. And it feels right. Because Matthew is, today, a symbol of an innocent young gay man, who had a future, which was robbed, wrongly, by the hate of the world, a hate that was embedded deep in the life of two young men who couldn't learn to welcome and live in the beautiful diversity of God's creation.

Tonight, in my home, I light a candle in honor of Matthew Shepard, and remember him, as should we all.

Amen.