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.
