LGBTQ Pride Month – Peculiar Faith

A Queer Gospel for Father’s Day

“Jesus said, ‘I have come to set a man against his father’” (Mt. 10:35).

You can thank the lectionary for assigning that verse for this Sunday, Father’s Day, just one verse in a Gospel passage that make foes from members of one’s own household (including daughters against their mothers and in-laws against everyone else).

My gratitude is really quite sincere for this lectionary mashup with the secular calendar. In this mashup, Matthew’s Jesus invites directly a particularly haunting question not only for Christian faith generally but for this LGBTQ Pride Month: what in the world (quite literally) does “family” have to do with “faith”?

If that question doesn’t nudge you awake at night, some of the related ones from that passage might: Why does Jesus use slavery as an illustrative analogy for discipleship (especially in a week with Juneteenth in it)? What does Jesus mean by insisting he doesn’t bring peace but a “sword”? How does one “take up a cross” for life?

“We have a Rainbow House,” J. Kirk Richards

Questions about family suddenly seem more manageable. So let’s begin there.

Back in the late 1980s, when the so-called “Religious Right” (with figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson) conducted public battles in a culture war against lesbian and gay people, they insisted on the primacy of “traditional families” and the need for “biblical values.”

Those pithy slogans raised some obvious questions: exactly which biblical families should we emulate today? The one God blessed for King Solomon with his 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3)? Or perhaps we should follow the example of both Jesus and St. Paul, who remained single for their entire lives; Paul even urged the readers of his letters to remain unmarried like himself (1 Cor. 7:8-9). Let’s not forget that “traditional” biblical families also made wives little more than property, and men as “lords” of their household (which, frankly, some men today would prefer).

These mismatches between ancient families and modern ones urge those of us who still care about a biblically rooted faith to consider carefully what exactly we’re supposed to do with the Bible in today’s world. Biblical scholar and theologian Walter Wink, for example, proposed that we set aside any attempt to adopt a “biblical sexual ethic”—there really is no such thing. As Wink notes, biblical books reflect a wide range of cultural customs and social mores, none of which fit neatly into a single paradigm of sexual morality. Indeed, many of the sexual practices of those ancient societies would be woefully out of place today: eleven-year-old girls getting married, for example, or the prohibition against marrying outside one’s own “tribal circle.”

Rather than trying to make the Bible into a coherent rule book for a “sexual ethic,” Wink urged us instead to develop a biblical “love ethic.” By this, he meant that we need to engage in a process of shared discernment about what care and compassion look like in loving relationships for today’s world, the kind of foundational values we might more readily carry into a variety of temporal and cultural contexts. That would make biblical discernment both more difficult and more rewarding than just reading a Bible verse and doing what it “says” (that’s mostly how I was raised to think about the Bible and with pretty grim results).

This week’s lectionary collision with the secular calendar can invite us still deeper and invite us to wonder about the social shape of the world we now inhabit. How much about today’s household economics and political convictions (all of which infuse whatever we mean by “family”) do we just assume as “natural” or “normative” when they might actually be corrosive and impairing?

More pointedly, to those who still insist that lesbian and gay couples disrupt “traditional families,” we can (gently) remind them that Matthew’s Jesus already did that a long time ago. We might even insist that the patriarchal household of the ancient Mediterranean world was not at all compatible with the “good news” about the coming Kingdom of God that Jesus preached—which certainly poses some potentially awkward questions about the dynamics of White Patriarchy in the modern West.

Or how about this: rather than the form of a family, perhaps a Gospel-rooted approach can prompt us to ponder what we want to value about a whole range of family configurations: how do we love, and for whom do we care, and where does compassion lead us? Surely questions like that reside at the very heart of politics itself and nearly every decision about public policy.

Maybe Matthew’s Jesus sounds harsh because the consequences of “baptizing” cultural norms chart a path that’s eventually far more destructive (thus his urging not to fear those who kill the body but can’t kill the soul). So if there’s nothing especially “sacred” about the “nuclear family” of modern Western society, then there’s certainly nothing sacrosanct about male privilege or white dominance—which is of course putting the matter far too mildly. White patriarchy stands as the antithesis of the Christian Gospel and opposing it comes with a hefty price tag. Matthew seems especially attuned in that regard to the cultural blowback the first-century Jesus Movement should have expected in their witness to the Gospel. (That “witness” today would surely include the potent interweavings of race and sexuality for a “queer Juneteenth.”)

In my view, that’s the essence of the Gospel’s queerness, especially in the American history of the modern West in which Christian faith has appeared as mostly the religious patina on patriotism. That’s why I’m so grateful to the lectionary for this particular passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel on this third Sunday in June. What if Pride Month invites more than merely “tolerating” the presence of LGBTQ people? What if the “queerness” of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people provokes a realization about the queerness of Christian faith itself?

I have struggled for many years now with that word queer and how disturbing and dismaying it is to many, and rightly so—its original meaning in sixteenth-century Scottish contexts meant “odd” or “off-center,” and evolved into a slur for people who don’t “fit in” for any number of reasons, and then finally in the nineteenth-century it became attached to what some considered “perverse” sexual practices or gendered identities. But precisely because of that unsettling history, queerness can inspire our shared work as Christians to recover the destabilizing and energizing character of the Gospel for our own day. (I attempted to do exactly that in my book Peculiar Faith, for which this blog is named; a review of that book soon after it was published still offers a helpful summary.)

It is certainly quite telling that so many will struggle and even become alarmed when Matthew’s Jesus seems to undermine “traditional families” but hardly blink an eye when that same Jesus concludes this coming Sunday’s lectionary passage by telling his followers to take up their cross, follow him, and lose their lives—which he says is the only way to find true life. Have we really forgotten just how queer—that is, how odd, peculiar, jarring, disruptive, and revolutionary—that Gospel exhortation truly is? Which sounds “queerer” to you, that families are disrupted or that we have to die in order to live?

This Father’s Day, the third Sunday in LGBTQ Pride Month, and right on the heels of Juneteenth, Matthew’s Jesus declares that the Gospel will set sons against fathers and daughters against mothers and basically overturn every social bond that gets in the way of true liberty and genuine flourishing and the thriving that God intends for all.

This is a truly strange mashup of texts and dates—let it be strange, just as strange as it wants to be. After all, the Gospel is meant to be transformative, for the sake of life.

Are You a Sodomite?

That’s a rather rude question, and I cannot imagine asking anyone that question with any seriousness. I pose it here to make this observation: while that question has always been rude, it has not always been rude for the same reasons.

The word itself is derived, of course, from the ancient biblical city called “Sodom,” which was (as the story goes in Genesis 19) destroyed by “fire and brimstone” (and yes, that’s really the language used in the King James Version of the story). That event of divine destruction fell on that ancient city as divine punishment for “wickedness.” Ah! But what kind of wickedness is the key issue.

“The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” John Martin

Interpreting ancient texts for a modern context is always challenging, a process that also exhibits a rich and complex history. An entire field of academic study emerged for that kind of analysis in the late twentieth century when scholars devoted deliberate attention to what came to be known as the “reception history of the Bible.” This field of study investigates and analyzes how particular passages of the Bible have been received in a particular community or society, and how those understandings shaped social trends and cultural artifacts.

Studying how the Bible has been “received” over time and in different places is not only multidisciplinary (involving sociology, economics, philosophy, and art, among many others), it also traces the legacy of a certain strand of biblical interpretation in one context and how it makes an impact in others, even those far removed in place and time. I appreciate that kind of historical analysis as a way to inspire my own proactive reading of the Bible—there isn’t just one meaning for a given passage that waits our discovery; people of faith are invited to make meaning from these texts for our own distinctive purposes in our own day.

So, are you a sodomite?

Don’t be too quick to answer that question without first consulting the ancient Hebrew prophet Ezekiel. Modern Western society has shaped most of us to assume that “sodomy” refers to a particular kind of sexual act—usually between men. But Ezekiel insists instead on a significantly different interpretation. Ezekiel portrays that ancient city as rife with social and economic injustice. “This,” he writes, “was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy” (16:49).

That one verse should make quite a few of us a bit squirmy and uncomfortable. After all, anyone who has indulged in arrogant posturing or refused to help the financially impoverished qualifies, in Ezekiel’s view, as a sodomite. As one scholar has noted, rather than imagining a relatively small percentage of the population engaged in unusual or exotic sexual acts—indeed, rather than thinking of sex at all—we should probably admit that modern Western economic policies make most of us guilty of sodomy.

Most of us are sodomites, and sex has nothing to do with it.

The focus in Ezekiel on economics faded over time in Christian history (not coincidentally when the story was interpreted by affluent people). Justin Martyr in the second century used the story for anti-Jewish polemic. In the sixth century, Gregory the Great rather vaguely named Sodom’s flaw as “sins of the flesh.” And then finally, but not until the eleventh century, Peter Damian defined “sodomy” exclusively as same-sex sexual acts—and that definition reshaped the history of Western jurisprudence all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 when the court deliberated over whether state “sodomy laws” were constitutional (they determined that such laws were not and overturned the remaining state statues to that effect).

This coming Sunday, the lectionary includes a Gospel passage in which Matthew’s Jesus makes a reference to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (9:35-10:23). As it sometimes happens every three years, the lectionary has assigned this passage during LGBTQ Pride Month. I can all but guarantee that every LGBT person in the country who hears this passage on Sunday will cringe, and for some, it will trigger a history of religious trauma.

The story about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah has been weaponized—especially in the modern West—in some painful and heartbreaking ways to condemn gay and lesbian people, and sometimes violently. It wasn’t that terribly long ago—in 1895—that Oscar Wilde was accused of being a “sodomite,” which led to his trial for “gross indecency.” He was convicted and sentenced to prison with hard labor; Wilde’s two sons were raised to forget him, and he died within three years of his release from prison, never to see his family again. All this based, not on “gross indecency” but on a gross misinterpretation of an ancient biblical story. (Wilde’s only grandson, Merlin Holland, has just published a memoir on the legacy of that tragic story.)

I did a deep dive into some of this history for an essay that was later published in the Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (2011). I chose to focus my attention on how the story in Genesis 19 has been read in the worldwide Anglican Communion and the way it has been received rather relentlessly through the lens of gender dominance. The modern world, in other words, prefers to treat “sodomy” as a violation of gender roles for physical intimacy. Let’s be clear about this: what I’m describing reflects a long (patriarchal) history of defining “proper” sex as a bodily act in which a man is penetrating a woman, who is by virtue of being a woman, always and only penetrated; sodomy violates that natural order by “treating a man like a woman.”

In short, misogyny is always at the root of homophobia. We need look no further than the Bible itself for evidence: the story of Sodom’s destruction in Genesis 19 has a heartbreaking parallel in Judges 19, where we read about exactly the same threat of violent inhospitality (basically gang rape). But unlike the threat againts the male figures in Genesis, the story in Judges features a threat against a woman—and no divine intervention saves her.

It matters to take note of how this gendered “reception” of biblical texts unfolds in a multi-national religious network, like the Anglican Communion. Rather than staying put in debates about sexual ethics, the contestation over gay men ripples out to a whole range of issues at stake in the maintenance of patriarchal religious structures. Objecting to the betrayal of gender in “same-sex” relationships simply fortifies the objection to the ordination of women as priests; women are designed to receive the Gospel (“penetrated” by the divine Word), not sow its seeds—to ordain a woman, in other words, is in effect “religious sodomy.” (I’m really not making this up; this online essay is a classic articulation of the argument against ordaining women—just note that male “headship” in this essay is the slightly more polite way of referring to male “penetration.”)

I, for one, will not be preaching about penetration this Sunday (my parish is rightfully relieved). But all this backstory for the reference to Sodom and Gomorrah in this week’s Gospel reading actually does matter for a richer and more robust appreciation of that passage: Jesus is sending his disciples out into the world on a shared and dangerous mission. The “sending” and the “mission” create the link to the story in Genesis19 in which God sent angels to Sodom for a divine mission.

There are several hair-raising components of this week’s Gospel passage (some aspects are downright dystopian), but the overall sense of urgency of the mission on which Jesus sends his friends ought to get our attention, especially since Matthew underscores that urgency by evoking the dramatic story of destruction in Genesis.

The world is on fire, right now, and no less severely than if heavenly brimstone were igniting our cities and forests. I honestly don’t know what it will take to wake more of us up to the societal collapse and environmental catastrophe unfolding on our little electronic screens in real time. At the very least, I pray (I might even beg) that preachers this Sunday don’t just casually dismiss the ancient urgency Matthew infused into the Good News.

Can any of us change the whole world? Of course not. But everyone can do something. As for me, as my little parish gathers on the second Sunday of Pride Month, I will urge this resort-town congregation to do all we can to ensure that we are creating a community of genuine and believable hospitality for LGBTQ people, especially those who have been traumatized by religion, and to consider carefully what role we can play in changing a social order that continues to terrorize not only “queer” folk but also women more generally—this is a modest but important part of the healing mission on which God sends us. (And I would say, in contrast to the fire of Sodom’s destruction, we might embrace the image of the Pentecostal breath of God for the world’s healing and renewal…)

I’m not sure how yet, but I’ll offer that exhortation with the kind of urgency Matthew believed was necessary for effective Gospel proclamation—the kind of “fire and brimstone urgency” only Sodom and Gomorrah can inspire. The Church, generally and broadly, is way overdue for a heaping dose of that world-changing energy—that’s the Gospel mission to which God calls every generation of God’s people and for which God is sending us, right now.

Coming Out with Matthew: A Queerly Religious Gift of Healing

Reading the Bible in LGBTQ Pride month can be hazardous to your health. Hurtful Bible verses trip off the tongues of mean-spirited people like nursery rhymes—it happens with horrific regularity at Pride festivals every year. Especially for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, the Bible should really come with a warning label, the kind slapped on cigarette packages from the Surgeon General. Ditto for women generally, for people of color (in the U.S.), and for nearly every plant, animal, and ecosystem on Earth.

The Bible itself is not to blame for all this harm (even though I’m sorely tempted to rewrite parts of it myself); religious people behaving badly have tainted those texts with power grabs and political machinations that would make even Machiavelli blush.

The Bible is so easily weaponized for nefarious and even violent purposes because religion itself is such a potent source of community manipulation; religious language can quickly coat human malevolence with a divine patina. Nearly every imperial and authoritarian regime in human history has known this well: securing the support of religious leaders is not only helpful but essential and indispensable for social control.

Quite remarkably, given all that harmful history and religious riskiness, the Bible still offers a path toward healing and life. If that’s really true and not merely pious cliché, then how we read the Bible matters. In this LGBTQ Pride Month, it’s high time to read the Bible queerly, as the kind of queer book it actually is.

Just yesterday, for example, the lectionary assigned a portion from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (9:9—26) that I had not read before during Pride Month. It’s a familiar passage—the calling of Matthew as a disciple, healing a seriously ill woman, raising a dead child back to life, all very religiously biblical sounding stuff—and certainly not chosen with Pride Month in mind. But I read it as if for the very first time precisely because I read it through a queer lens—and my heart was strangely warmed, as Charles Wesley would say.

Here’s the thing: reading the Bible because I’m a gay man (not in spite of it) actually brings the text to life in fresh ways. I’m convinced that freshness is a gift, not only for LGBTQ people but for the whole Church.

Unwrapping that gift means knowing a few things about what it’s like to live as an L, G, B, or T person in the modern West. Start with this: every LGBT person who comes out, who decides to live at least a bit more honestly in the world, does so only after making a complex calculation of risk management.

That kind of calculus includes questions like these: What cost am I currently paying to stay invisible? Will my family reject me if I come out? Would I be putting myself in immediate danger of physical harm? Where would I go if I’m cut off from my network of support?

Moreover, we queer folk don’t come out just once. In every social situation, LGBT people must decide whether or not to show up as ourselves, and to what degree—and we do this every single day. It may not always be a fully deliberate process (it’s often like breathing—necessary and automatic), but at some level I am always aware of my clothing, my bodily gestures, and the timber in my voice, and whether any of these might be putting me at risk in any given context—every single day.

For some, the risk in coming out is low but never zero. For others, the courage to come out is a matter of life and death—staying in the closet is suffocating and soul-killing.

Here’s something else to note carefully: even today, in 2026, and even here in the United States of America (increasingly here, actually) a large number of LGBT people must make this complex calculation alone.

We learn from an early age that it is not safe to be different; we learn that being who we are—and even trying to decipher what that is—can be dangerous, even in our own families and among friends. Just about everyone learns this in some fashion: safety means conformity.

What I’m trying to describe here is a social world riddled with fear and defined by isolation. That’s not only today’s world for many LGBT people; it’s also the first-century world framed by the passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel so many of us heard in Church yesterday, a passage that works beautifully to invite us into LGBT Pride Month, and—because of that—to invite all of us to come out with Matthew.

At the center of this passage stands a woman who had been suffering for twelve long years from painful hemorrhages, basically slowly bleeding to death—and because of that, ostracized by her own community and isolated from her network of support. To this woman, Jesus says, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”

He calls her daughter.

It’s a beautifully tender moment between this woman and Jesus. It’s also an important story-telling clue from Matthew. This short passage of several interactions with various people is not just a collection of randomly assembled encounters; this is a carefully crafted portrayal of faith and healing.

That intimate address Jesus uses for a stranger—daughter—brings this Gospel portrayal into clearer focus. That word daughter stitches together the three narrative moments in this passage, creating a life-changing world of loving, healing relationships.

The first moment features Matthew himself, the tax collector. We need to resist the temptation to imagine agents of the IRS in this moment; we should think instead of collaborators with the enemy.

When the Roman Empire occupied Judea they levied imperial taxes, just as they did in every province. The chief collectors of this tax were themselves Judeans and they hired workers—like Matthew—to gather the money. As long as Rome received the required amount, the collectors could keep whatever extra cash they were able to squeeze out of their neighbors.

Here’s the point: Jesus calls one of these tax collectors into his inner circle of friends. This is not just a career change. Jesus frames this moment as a matter of healing—I have come, he says, not for those who are well but for those who need a physician, and in this case, the ones who suffer from what we might call “imperial sickness.”

Seduced by imperial privilege; attracted to monetary gain; entangled in the systems of greed, corruption, and influence—this is a sickness of the heart and soul, a disease of isolation.

To this “dis-eased” one, Jesus extends a hand of healing welcome—and it’s scandalous. The Pharisees, the religious leaders, were rightly outraged by this public embrace of a traitor.

The second narrative moment might seem unrelated to the first, except that the man seeking help from Jesus is one of those religious leaders. Whatever complaint he might have made about the embrace of a tax collector quickly fades in his panic over his precious child, the daughter who has died. Please, he says to Jesus, help me.

Many of us likely know similar stories of rigid and strictly religious families who must suddenly confront the tension between having, say, a lesbian daughter and observing their religious rules—that’s the story of this religious man in Matthew.

This poignant encounter is then interrupted by the third moment—and an interruption in the narrative is a signal; it becomes the key to interpret the whole passage. The woman, seriously ill and slowly dying, likely struggling on her own, probably rendered poor from her illness and isolation, reaches out—quite literally—in desperation.

“Take heart,” Jesus says to her.

Those words stitch these three narrative moments together with courage—a powerful reminder that faith is not certainty; faith is not a guarantee; faith does not erase fear. Faith is the courage to trust, even when confronting our deepest fears. We know what those are: being left out, excluded by family, rejected by friends, living with unmitigated pain, lost in grief, adrift in a world of strangers.

We step out in faith—with courage—and God is there. Matthew steps out from behind his tax booth and into a family of friends. A religious leader steps out from behind his regulatory orthodoxy and into a compassionate embrace.

“Take heart, daughter,” Jesus says, “courage has brought you home.”

I’m so very eager to use that image of “home” for the social healing of Matthew, the physical healing of that woman, and the restored life of the little girl. I’m eager and also cautious: homecoming can itself be an image of profound healing—but not always.

Part of the poignancy of LGBT life is how often “home” becomes a dangerous place. “Home” could refer to biological family or—as it did for me—it could be a church family, a place where safety and belonging suddenly dissolve into danger and betrayal. The Evangelical culture of my childhood—the friends, the comradery, the sense of family, the deep esprit de corps—all of this collapsed when I came out as a gay man; it was (and still is) heartbreaking.

I’m now glad to come out with Matthew—to come out, that is, from the stultifying structures of merely “fitting in” and pursuing whatever “belonging” might actually mean and portend, which is surely a lifelong endeavor.

I think Matthew would wholeheartedly embrace such an image of coming out precisely because he made sure to include the dramatic moment of Jesus raising the religious leader’s daughter from the dead. As many LGBT people have learned, usually over a lifetime of painful encounters, “death” doesn’t always mean the end of biological life; it can mean ruined relationships, failed communities, the erosion of trust, betrayal by those closest to us—each of these the ending of a world.

In this short Gospel passage, Matthew evokes a whole world, a social order stratified by status, organized with institutional power, riddled by the terrors of disease and decay. He evokes this world and then invites us to see it being unraveled and then remade by the healing Word of God into a new world of abundant life; all of us, right now, are being drawn into the re-weaving of our true home.

LGBTQ Pride Month offers a powerful Gospel reminder: shared efforts to make our churches genuinely and believably hospitable truly matter. This always matters as a vital component of Gospel witness, but especially in Pride Month, Christians must not take the discipline of hospitality for granted; for some, it offers a lifesaving vision of home.

For Matthew the despised tax collector, for the woman bleeding to death in public, for that precious child of a religious leader who risked everything for love—for all of these, for all of us, the divine hospitality of Jesus rescues, renews, and raises us to new life.

Take heart: beyond that closet door a whole world of healing and thriving life awaits; so let’s come out together.

The Freedom to Belong

“For freedom Christ has set us free.”

That wonderful declaration from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians (5:1) sounds like it was crafted precisely for this July Fourth holiday weekend—an ancient religious endorsement of Independence Day!

The lectionary assigned that text for the last Sunday in June, which for many is also LGBTQ Pride Sunday. Would Paul have endorsed that celebration, too?

“For freedom,” Paul says, “Christ has set us free. “

Whatever Paul meant by “freedom,” I doubt he was thinking about armed revolution against a monarch or living as sexual libertines. He certainly would not encourage us merely to do whatever we want; after all, always following the whims of a fickle desire is just another form of enslavement (as anyone recovering from substance abuse would quickly note).

I’m imagining Paul had a very particular kind of freedom in mind, the freedom God embodies in Jesus, which God likewise calls the Church to embody through the power of the Holy Spirit: it’s the freedom to love without fear; to embrace others without anxiety; to live with an abundance of grace, and laughter, and joy without ever worrying whether or not there will be enough.

Paul would not have imagined a life without constraint whatsoever and instead probably thought of “freedom” as more like a capacity, the ability to receive the abundant life that God intends for all. In that sense, spiritual practice is in large measure a process of decluttering, of clearing out space for that life, removing whatever stands in its way or blocks us from even seeing it. That’s the work of the Holy Spirit—freeing up room for God’s own life in us.

For that kind of freedom, Paul says, Christ has set us free.

Being “set free” for the sake of “freedom” does seem a bit redundant—unless we are not yet free to follow freedom. Many years of trying to live faithfully as a Christian has shown me how certain cultural assumptions usually interrupt the divine flow of love and grace: assuming, for example, that I must earn abundant life by working at it; or insisting that the harder I work for it the more of it I deserve; or worrying that others might steal it; or imagining that I’m surrounded by rivals and thieves whose very existence poses a constant threat.

These common assumptions keep me shackled, holding me back from the freedom to live—for freedom I must be set free.

I noticed this a bit more clearly by pondering what else the lectionary assigned for that same Sunday from Luke’s account of the Gospel. It seems to me that the “cultural assumptions” I just named are lurking around that unsettling story from Luke (9:51-62).

Luke opens a tiny first-century window in that story on a longstanding ethnic hostility between Judeans and Samaritans. Those first-century characters usually framed their hostility as a religious conflict—Judeans were constantly critiquing the Samaritans for not worshiping properly; this was so irritating to the Samaritans that they apparently refused to receive Jesus in their village.

This moment qualifies as a bit more than mere “irritation”; two disciples of Jesus, James and John, actually want to call down fire from Heaven to consume that village!

As often happens, naming a conflict as “religious” usually masks something deeper—religious rivals often emerge from a stubborn anxiety about one’s own goodness and worthiness: I can’t feel good about myself unless I feel bad about you; to live with confidence as divinely favored, others must live as divine exclusions.

It takes a lot of work to sustain those distinctions. Eventually, the time and energy required to maintain a system of the “favored” and the “excluded” builds up, breaks down, or explodes.

Just such a moment happened quite dramatically on a late June night in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. It was a moment of protest that marked a turning point for what became known as “gay liberation.” When I first learned about that moment, I imagined people who look mostly like me carrying posters in a parade; that’s not what happened.

On that night fifty-six years ago drag queens of color and homeless gay youth fought back against the humiliating brutality of New York City police officers at a gay bar. The rage had been building for decades, and it finally blew up. Those brown and black drag queens actually ripped parking meters right out of the sidewalk and refused to be arrested yet one more time just because of who they were.

That’s a powerful image of being liberated from shame and embracing one’s own God-given dignity—and that’s why we now celebrate a whole month dedicated to Pride.

“For freedom,” Paul says, “Christ has set us free.”

Roughly five years ago, a gay activist by the name of Alexander Leon posted an observation on social media that very quickly went viral; it resonated so deeply with so many of us—thousands of people started reposting it.

Paraphrasing his insight, Leon noted that queer people “don’t grow up as ourselves.” We grow up playing a version of ourselves, a role on stage that sacrifices authenticity to reduce the risk of humiliation and violence. “The massive task of our adult lives,” Leon notes, “is to identify which parts of ourselves are truly us, and which parts we created for our own protection.”

Let’s be sure not to stumble over the word “queer” in Leon’s insight; that word does not refer only to those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. It can refer to anyone who recognizes a mismatch between inner-self and outer-world—hasn’t everyone felt that at least once? Some of us feel it every day.

LGBT people have illuminated these dynamics of modern life in which we try so hard to fit in that we scarcely even know who we really are. Conformity for the sake of safety is soul-killing—and this was James Baldwin’s point back in the 1960s when he referred to the notion of “double consciousness squared,” the complexities of not only living as a gay man in straight culture but also as a Black man in white America.

These complex dynamics take not only time to untangle but also a community of care in which to do it. For LGBT people, finding a safe religious space to do that work feels like a miracle—quite seriously, miraculous. Religion, after all, is what prompted so many of us to adopt safety mechanisms in the first place, just to survive.

So even though St. Paul would not have understood “Pride month,” he would surely endorse whatever it takes to liberate ourselves from merely surviving, even just “fitting in,” and instead living for the kind of freedom that makes room for the fruits of the Spirit.

Those fruits were also part of the passage from Paul’s letter to the Galatians on Pride Sunday, and they include what seems far too often overlooked in movements of social change: joy.

Everyone needs not only a community of care for the arduous and lifelong process of unlearning and truly embracing who we are, but also a community of joy. It’s actually impossible to be joyful when you’re trying to “fit in”; joy springs instead from belonging, from the conviction that one truly belongs for exactly who they are.

This, it seems to me, makes LGBTQ Pride Month much more than only “welcoming the formerly excluded.” Creating and sustaining a genuinely inclusive community of faith offers a compelling witness to the wider world of that crucial difference between “fitting in” and “belonging”—and thank you, Brene Brown, for that compelling distinction!

Most of us learn very early on what it takes to “fit in”—usually hiding aspects of ourselves that we think others won’t like, or that we’ve been told are unacceptable. Belonging, by contrast, is being loved for exactly who we are, and knowing it.

Belonging sets us free to show up as we are and to learn how to love others in the same way. Belonging to Christ Jesus, Paul says, enables us to live like that, fruitfully, in the Spirit, with love, joy, peace, kindness, and generosity.

Here’s what I think Pride Sunday urges: do not waste any more time, not one single minute, on trying to “fit in.” Life is far too short for that and we don’t have the time for it.

Instead, let’s pour that energy into creating a communities where all of us can learn how to belong to each other, with love and for joy; this alone would take us quite a long way down the road toward the world’s healing, and not a moment too soon.

So, stand firm, Paul says, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

For freedom Christ has set us free.

“There is Joy in the Presence of Jesus,” Rebecca Brogan

The Sword-Wielding Jesus at the Stonewall Rebellion

This past Sunday, many Christians heard a troubling portion of Matthew’s account of the Gospel (10:24-39). Jesus apparently disavows peace-making, takes up a sword, and promises to divide families.

Like so many others, I have struggled with this passage for many years. To be clear, wrestling with the texts and traditions of Christian faith can be a very good thing indeed, but Jesus is certainly pushing against the edges of our comfort zone in that particular text. He is, it seems to me, provoking us to consider seriously what it means to live authentically and openly, truthfully and with vulnerability—what is hidden, he says, will become known, and what is only whispered in the dark will be shouted from the rooftops.

In this last week of June, of this LGBTQ Pride Month, what Jesus describes and its consequences resonates in some startling ways with the Stonewall Rebellion.

Recall this: back in the 1960s that gay bars were secretive places, often unmarked, where respectable people should not be seen. These taverns were routinely raided by the police, their patrons arrested, and many careers and whole lives ruined as a result.

One of those bars, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, the Stonewall Inn, was a gathering spot for those on the margins of this marginalized population, like transgender youth.

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, those who had gathered at the Stonewall resisted arrest and fought back against the police—they were tired of hiding in the shadows and had grown weary of whispering in the dark. For their own self-respect and God-given dignity, they started shouting their lives from the rooftops. This led to several days of unrest on the streets of New York and energized a brand new chapter for LGBT civil rights; that’s why we have “Pride Month” in June.

Many of those on the streets that night had been rejected by their biological families; more than a few of them were homeless—and this still happens today. Out of necessity they created what many of us would later call “families of choice.” They had to re-learn how to care for each other, what it means to love each other, and to cultivate relationships that would redeem for them the very concept of family.

With still more biblical resonance with modern society, many of us also heard a heartbreaking story this past Sunday about redefining “family” in the ongoing saga of Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 21:8-21). The surprising birth of Isaac suddenly made their household a rather awkward place for Hagar, their servant, with whom Abraham had already sired a child, Ishmael.

Sarah insists that Hagar and her child be put out, cast off, and sent into exile. In that ancient Mediterranean society, Sarah was likely well within her rights to demand this—Hagar was their slave, and Ishmael would have been Isaac’s rival. Abraham and Sarah might have done these things believing they were cooperating with God’s own promise of blessing.

Even so, let us not fail to notice how God cares for Hagar and Ishmael nonetheless, sending an angel to ensure their survival in the wilderness. This is of course a recurring thread in biblical traditions: regardless of cultural norms, God cares for the cast-away and the abandoned ones—both the queer youth and the single mom alike.

Not long after the Stonewall Rebellion, and not surprisingly, more than a few religious leaders started calling for a return to “biblical family values.” Quite honestly, I have to wonder whether any of them actually read the Bible.

Ancient Israel’s patriarchs often lived with more than one wife—or sired children with their slaves; the biblical story about wise King Solomon suggests that one of the reasons we know he was blessed by God is that he had over 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3).

In the Christian Testament of the Bible, Jesus himself is apparently unmarried and childless—a very unusual social status in that day for a religious teacher, a rabbi. St. Paul encourages the Corinthian Christians to remain single, just like he is; if you really have to get married, he says, that’s acceptable but certainly not ideal (1 Cor. 7:8-9).

So which of these family values in the Bible are we supposed to adopt today?

That’s entirely the wrong question to ask, of course. We should be asking today’s religious leaders directly what they mean by “biblical family values.” In my experience, that religious rhetoric is coded language for two interrelated things: rejecting gay and lesbian relationships, and keeping women in the home, where they are subservient to their husbands.

Let me underscore that these coded aims are interrelated. Resistance to gay and lesbian relationships has never been about whom human beings can love; the resistance has always been about gender, and especially maintaining (white) male privilege. Today, transgender people are bearing the brunt of this violent resistance rather acutely (75% of transgender youth, for example, feel unsafe at school). More succinctly put: homophobia has always been rooted in misogyny.

Rather than wondering how we might adopt so-called “family values” it’s high time the Church devote its entire attention to cultivating “Gospel values”—how we sustain a community of courage as we strive for peace with justice; a community of care by embracing the outcast and marginalized; and a community of compassion as we try to ensure that no one ever again needs to be afraid or alone on the streets of our towns and cities.

Without question, Matthew’s Jesus would applaud that list of Gospel values. But, he would also say urge us to notice that there’s something missing from that list: truth-telling.

Whatever is covered up, he says, must be uncovered; whatever secrets you harbor, must become known; and what I say to you in the dark, what is now only whispered, you must proclaim from the housetops.

Telling the truth about our lives, our communities, our politics, our economics—this is what will free us, and save us, and lead the whole planet toward healing and thriving.

Needless to say, truth-telling is challenging when denial feels easier in a society committed to superficial harmonies. Surely everyone knows what it’s like to keep the peace with polite avoidance. Matthew’s Jesus is clear this morning: he wants nothing to do with that kind of “peace.”

I have come, he says, to inspire the courage of truth-telling, which will feel like wielding a sword. Telling the truth, coming out, taking sides, standing in solidarity—these are risky endeavors, all of them, because they will cost us something. They might cost us some friends, our reputations, a few family members, our positions of comfort, our favorite seats at the restaurant, perhaps even our lives.

It really doesn’t matter if you’re straight, white, black, queer, trans, indigenous, lesbian, gay, bisexual, none of these or all of them depending on the day of the week—whoever you are, the sword-wielding Jesus at the Stonewall Rebellion is urging all of us along a path of courageous truth-telling in a society devoted to lies and deception.

To be sure, that path can be scary; that’s one of the many reasons I’m grateful for the Eucharistic Table, where Christians can gather with each other and find the grace and love and support we need to live the truth.

Yes of course this is scary; but also worthwhile. It might actually be worth absolutely everything, which seems to be the point of this deeply troubling and still hopeful passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel: when you lose your life by following Jesus, that’s when you find it.

“It was Beautiful (Stonewall),” Doug Blanchard

The Courage to Be…Seen

The pain must have been debilitating. She had been living with it for a long time, at least twelve years. Gospel writers referred to her condition as a “hemorrhage”; they are likely describing frequent and uncontrollable menstrual periods, which would have made such a woman ritually unclean, and thus forbidden to appear in public.

Many Christians heard her story in church this past Sunday, from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (9:9-13, 18-26). The story features not only physical but also social pain—a woman who is isolated, without the comfort of friends and family. Both Mark and Luke, who also tell this story, note that she had spent all her money on multiple physicians, and no one had made her any better—so she is perhaps also a poor beggar.

And so this woman, who has run out of options, alone and dejected, reaches out as Jesus passes by, just to touch the fringe of his garments with a bit of ludicrous hope.

Consider what those details mean. She was probably crouched down by the side of the road; she wasn’t supposed to be seen and she certainly should not have approached a group of prominent men—not only Jesus and his disciples but also the leader of the synagogue and his companions.

And so she reaches out—in desperation, yes, but also with courage. Touching Jesus could have led to severe social consequences for her, and still she reaches out.

As many commentators have noted, the good news in this story is not only this woman’s physical healing but also and even more so the restoration of her dignity. Jesus made her visible with respect, brought her into the center of attention, not for shaming but to heal her shame. He does all this not merely tolerating her presence but actually praising her as an exemplar of faith.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, her story is paired with another poignant story—the one about the young girl who has died, the daughter of a religious leader in the community.

By pairing these two stories, these ancient writers show us something about faith. In each of the three versions of this story, Jesus says to the woman, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.”

Given what she has just done, the meaning of faith here is not “certainty” but rather bravery. “Daughter,” Jesus could have said, “your courage has made you well.”

It is a bit strange but no accident that Jesus refers to this woman as “daughter.” Remember, he’s on his way to the home of a religious leader whose daughter has just died—these stories are intentionally intermingled.

Recall how often Jesus is getting into trouble with the religious authorities—“eating with tax collectors and sinners.” Just like this woman who reaches out with courage for healing, so this religious leader, heartbroken over his daughter, breaks ranks with his colleagues and courageously begs Jesus for help.

Paul Tillich, the great mid-twentieth century theologian, urged us to see faith as a form of courage, what he called the “courage to be.” For Tillich, the life of faith is a life in which we accept our own acceptance by God and thus live boldly, defying all the “principalities and powers” that would rob God’s creatures of their dignity and respect. I would add this: faith is also the courage to be seen, especially when we are made invisible by others.

It matters to think about such things during this LGBTQ Pride Month. We should note carefully that the Human Rights Campaign has for the first time declared a “national state of emergency” for LGBTQ Americans.

We are witnessing today an unprecedented spike in anti-LGBTQ legislation in state houses all over the country; more than 75 such pieces of legislation have been signed into law this year alone, which is more than double the number from last year.

This frightening trend is unfolding right where I live, in my own backyard. A far-right takeover of Ottawa County government by Christian Nationalists is making both queer people and people of color more than a little nervous. And along this otherwise “progressive” shoreline in West Michigan, I just recently overheard a conversation among some business owners in Saugatuck—an LGBT resort town. One of them said to the others, “I’m glad they spend their money here; I just don’t want to see them.”

It is high time that Christian communities ramp up our commitment to deeper solidarity with those who are unseen and kept invisible, whether because of sexuality, or gender, or race, or economics; all of these social categories are intertwined with each other. To see those deep interconnections would in turn help us to read stories from the Bible as not merely about ancient Mediterranean societies but also about us, all of us.

St. Augustine wrote in the fourth century about the passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel. He invited us to see in the daughter of the religious leader a symbol of the ancient Israelites—who were being reborn and coming to life—while the woman with a hemorrhage stands for Gentiles, all those who are declared “unclean” on the margins of God’s people and who are now welcomed and embraced.

Gospel stories about healing are never just about the person being healed. They are also about the reader, about us. We are the ones who need to live right now with the courage to be in a world that is otherwise risky and frightening.

We are called to live this way not only for ourselves alone but also for all those who cannot imagine such courage for themselves—the gay teens who wonder whether suicide wouldn’t be better than a lonely life; women who live only as the objects of male scorn in a patriarchal society; people of color crushed under the weight of white supremacy.

Quite honestly, modern Western society has been in a “state of emergency” for centuries now unless you just happen to be a white, straight, cis-gender male.

Living courageously—living with faith—offers visible signs of hope to the unseen, coaxing them into a Gospel light.

This, I would venture, is a compelling way to read the story of Abraham’s calling in Genesis, which many Christians also heard this past Sunday morning. “I will bless you,” God says to Abraham, so that you will be a blessing to others (12:2).

Surely this is an enduring rationale for the existence of the Church—to receive God’s blessing for the sake of blessing others. And especially today, to be a place of compassion and safety where the invisible can be seen and loved. The time to do this is now.