[I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 1 at Pilgrim Congregational Church UCC in Lexington, Massachusetts on the occasion of their Pride Sunday. It was my first Pride Sunday in a pulpit, and incredibly special. I was thinking of you when I wrote it.]
Dear Babes,
Happy Pride, Y’all! Pride Sunday makes me feel like a kid in a candy store: I wanna wrap myself in rainbows and feathers and I wanna put on my most daring eye makeup and dance down the streets with you, celebrating the movement of joy, resilience, and fierceness that, we always remember, started as many of the best things in America do, as an uprising against oppression, and in the case of the Stonewall Uprising, against the NYC police.
Can I be honest? Sometimes I’m skeptical of Pride celebrations in churches. It’s okay if you are, too. It makes sense to me to look at Pride celebrations in houses of God with some side eye. Organized religion does not have a reputation for caring for queer & trans people or our ancestors with kindness. The churches I grew up in were NOT open and affirming. There was no day on which the queer & trans community was celebrated, no Pride season, a season of resilience and healing and celebration of how we as gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, intersex, and ace folx exemplify and are living out the kin-dom of God. Many of y’all share my reality and upbringing: any way of life other than straight and/or cisgender was at best tolerated with the chestnut of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and at worst, was condemned from the pulpit as sin that would send us to hell. Fortunately, I found my way into a church that helped me grow. I remember my first Pride experience at my home church when my pastor preached. She began by announcing that her sermon that day was for the queer and trans folks under the sound of her voice, and that the straight and cis folks weren’t her target audience. Straight and cis folks were still welcome, but they weren’t being given the privilege that they experience regularly. At that point, I hadn’t come out yet, to myself or anyone else, and I remember feeling indignant and left out. What do you mean I’m not the target audience for her sermon, what am I even doing here then? But I thought about it, and the truth is that the queer & trans community, just like other communities on the margins of our white, cisgender, able-bodied, patriarchal society, is decentered all the time. So on Pride Sunday, a place where we can come to celebrate our identity and worship our God, it’s right that queer and trans folks take center stage.
I want to tell you about my own experience coming out as bisexual, to myself, and to the people that I love. I want to laugh and cry with you about how long it took me to love and accept myself as bisexual, and how I still struggle sometimes to exorcise the self-hatred that I was given, both by larger culture and by the church. But these are stories for a different day. Today, my beautiful, beloved, fierce and resilient queer, trans, and gender non-conforming siblings, is about you.
When we come out, we have to come out over and over and over again, don’t we? We come out to ourselves, and we come out to people that we’re in relationship with, and because the culture around us assumes all people are straight and cis, we come out to everyone we choose to, who looks at us and assumes that we’re straight and/or cisgender. Which is why I’m sharing with you the story of Jesus coming out.
Someone will hear me say this and think I mean that Jesus came out as a gay man. That’s not what I mean. Don’t get me wrong: I’d be really interested to see what it would look like for Jesus to have any kind of sexuality at all, but that part of Jesus’ life has been scrubbed from the narrative. Only those people who knew Jesus, who walked the earth with Jesus, and were with Jesus to hear Them speak about Their relationships and sexuality will know. What I’m referring to is the moment in Jesus’ ministry when They come out as the being Who we know Them to be, the Only Begotten One of God. Can we just talk for a minute about what a baller move it is for Jesus to come out the way They do in scripture here? Jesus has just been baptized and then has wandered in the desert for forty days wrestling with evil in the form of ego and self-aggrandizement. Jesus had to wander in the wilderness for a month to come out to Themself. Jesus had to wrestle with Their vision of Themself, and to begin to believe that Jesus could actually live into the ministry that God was calling for. We know about the way Jesus was tempted during this time, but we don’t have any account of the self-doubt, suspicion, or even grief Jesus might have experienced. I remember when I came out to myself, feeling giddy and delighted, and having an explanation for so many choices I’d made and feelings I’d had in my past. I remember being sad that it took me so long, and feeling grief about what I might not experience as someone who came out in middle age. It was, actually, very much like experiencing the call to ministry on my life.
After finishing this vision quest, Jesus returns home with a deeper understanding of themselves and their ministry. They roll up into their synagogue, pick up the sacred text, read from one of the great prophets, and then have the audacity to look teachers and leaders dead in their faces and say, I am the one you’ve been waiting for. I am who the prophets were writing about. I am the answer to your prayers.
Come on, y’all! As the kids would say, Jesus ate, and left no crumbs.
When I came out as bi, and when I was accepting God’s call to ministry, I read this passage over and over. It gave me such comfort and inspiration, to think about Jesus as coming out. If Jesus could live into the fullness of Themself, so could I: I could live as a follower of Christ, a happily married monogamous person, a minister of the Way of Jesus, and a vivid, unashamed bisexual woman. I feel less lonely when I consider Jesus as a model for coming out. Jesus knows what it is to have the self-loathing or fear of others projected onto Them. Jesus knows how to undermine identity polarities in a meaningful way, and Jesus knows how to trouble societal constructs and conventions. As a servant of Christ who is a bisexual woman, I threaten the idea that sexuality exists in poles; as a minister of Christ who is genderfluid, in my ministry I invite a spacious, genderfluid reading of our savior and our faith, I trouble the idea that our faith conventions are fixed, and I point at the truth of gender as a concept, not a dogma of spirituality. I know, Sibs, that I am but a facet of the beauty in the queer and trans community. We are different, and in our difference we are glorious. And Jesus has as much access to our diversity and beauty as we do, because Jesus knew in Their life, and knows in Their resurrection that They exist beyond the gender, sexuality, and cultural constructs of their time, and of our time.
It is a hard time to be us in this world, siblings. It is a hard time to be queer, trans, nonconforming. We have done a remarkable job of caring for and loving ourselves when queerphobic, transphobic cultures, policies, and ideologies have made it hard. Some of us are fleeing the united states because it is safer to live elsewhere than in our home country. Some of us are still closeted because we can’t leave—we can’t afford to, we don’t have the access, and we aren’t willing to risk our lives. And I’m not judging. Coming out is deeply personal, and we do it when we can, how we can, and if we want to. We don’t all have to do it like Jesus did. I’m just reiterating what you already know, queer besties. It’s really hard out here.
As I’ve been thinking of you, and preparing for this day, I’ve been hearing the words of James Baldwin in my head and heart. I know, I know, I can’t stop talking about James Baldwin: I can’t help it. The Holy Spirit offers me Baldwin’s language as sacred and as meaningful as a psalm, or as holy as the words of Christ Themself. In a letter to his nephew published in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin teaches his nephew that it is the culture around him that is the problem. He is Black, beautiful, perfect, and the damaging stronghold of white supremacy in America is the problem. I read his words, and I hear echoes of the same reflections of cis-heteronormativity. I’m not surprised: Baldwin was both Black and gay. He knew. Baldwin writes to his nephew, “Please try to remember that what [white people] believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear… There is no reason for you to try to become like white people, and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are… still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it they cannot be released from it.”
A neon rainbow on a dark background. Photo by Ana Cruz courtesy of Unsplash.
I think this is a teaching for us, too, besties. I hear Jesus Christ in these words. Yes: if you’re wondering if Baldwin, and if Jesus, are telling us to love the oppressor, to turn the other cheek, to be compassionate for those who are confused, unwilling, unable, or afraid to love us, the answer is yes. It’s hard to swallow, and there aren’t many models of folks who can do it well, and still keep their self-respect and their self-confidence, who can remain honest, gracious, compassionate, moisturized, and unbothered. Jesus is the best example I know, and even Jesus got it wrong sometimes. But I believe you can do it, you know why? Because you are beautiful and powerful and made of the same stardust and the same divine breath that Christ is.
So, besties, as Uncle Jimmy said to his nephew, you, don’t be afraid. You are beautiful. You are loved. You have a profound understanding of liberation that others cannot know. Live. Live full, live right, live just, live out loud, live together, live in community, live compassionately, live generously. Live in the love of our Christ, the Anointed One who dances with us under the rainbow of promise and love.