PRIDE Sermon
Holy Covenant UMC, Sunday June 27th 2010
Rev. Kate Hurst Floyd
Galatians 5:1, 13-25
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Here it is! Pride Sunday, finally. We’ve been building up to this joyous day for the last month. We’re ready to leave here and have fun, celebrate, be set free into Lakeview to march and sing and dance.
And then we hear this scripture passage, from Galatians, which can seem to squelch all our fun. It starts off well and good: Paul is talking about freedom in Christ, telling us that we are no longer under a burden of law or oppression. And he tells us that the fulfillment of the law is summed up in the one commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself.
It’s freeing and it’s beautiful…and then we get to the end of the passage, we’re on the edges of our seats ready to have fun, and Paul seems to ruin it: He tells us about all the things we can NOT do; he tells us that flesh is bad and in Christ we live by Spirit alone. It can be a bummer to hear on this day when many of us want to go carousing and engage in pleasures of the flesh. It doesn’t feel very freeing and it doesn’t necessarily feel like a Scripture passage we want to take pride in. Is this what it means to be Christian? To separate body and Spirit?
It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Plus, many of us have been oppressed because Christians have told us are bodies are bad. This passage is about freedom, but it can feel constraining.
Is this something to be proud of? After all, we are gathered today to be proud!
I couldn’t preach a “Pride” sermon without mentioning my all-time favorite book, Pride and Prejudice. I know, I know, this isn’t the kind of Pride we’re talking about today…although with all the fabulous dresses and tea parties and witty banter, it is a pretty gay book. In it Mary, the most sensible of the 5 Bennett sisters, says this: “Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” (Mary; Ch. 5)
I really like this definition of Pride because it moves it away from a desire to always be afraid of and influenced by what other people think of us, and instead, pride being centered in knowing who we are and what we believe, and unashamed to share that confidence. Even if the world tells us otherwise.
We gather today as Christians, as Holy Covenant, as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, queer, straight, allies, and we ask: Where is our Pride? What are we proud of? What is it that we know and believe about ourselves and the world that makes us want to share it, boldly? And how do pride in our sexuality and our Christian faith line up with one another?
I was 13 years old when I first discovered that I was proud to be a Christian. I had been in church my whole life, baptized as an infant, raised as a United Methodist. I was always in Sunday School, memorized bible verses, played my violin in Christmas Eve services, read scripture in worship, sat on committees, even sang in the children’s choir—God help the adults who had to listen to me butcher music—they were very Christ-like, I assure you. I loved the church, but I didn’t realize the fullness of why or what this means until I was a teenager.
When I was 13, my church, St. John’s UMC in Lubbock, TX, decided we were going to undergo the process of becoming a Reconciling Congregation. The Spirit had moved my pastor and the lay leaders to start the conversation about officially welcoming people of all gender identities and sexual orientations. We thought this process would take under a year, and it took nearly four years from the time we began to the time we took a congregational vote. During this time, I witnessed plenty of fear, confusion, and hatred. But none of that won out in the end—because during these four years, as I was growing and developing my own identity, trying to make sense of the world, my church community witnessed to me to wide love of Jesus Christ and what it meant to love our neighbors as ourselves. And I was so proud to worship Jesus, because of the stories I heard, stories about body and spirit being intertwined, about God’s love reaching to everybody:
*I heard Evelyn and Betsy, a couple in their 50’s, share with tears in their eyes in front of our whole congregation that this was the first church they could come to together and be who God created them to be. They still weren’t safe to be out in other areas of their lives, especially in West Texas in the mid-90’s. Church was home.
*I heard my pastor preach from the pulpit about God’s wide love and mercy, that sexuality is a good and sacred gift from God, and that we should welcome all people, even though these sermons made some in the congregation unhappy and threaten to leave. I was proud he was prophetic instead of quiet and scared.
*I learned in Sunday school about the passage in the Bible that people use to say homosexuality is a sin, and then we did careful interpretation to discover the context and real meaning of God’s word.
*I heard Tom tell about the 4 churches that had kicked him out before he came to St. John’s. As churches let go of him, he never let go of God, and God never let go of him.
*I sat on a committee with Betty, the retired preacher’s wife, a woman in her 80’s who fit every stereotype of “retired preacher’s wife” she had grey hair in tight curls, wore sweaters and turtlenecks when it was 80 degrees, and of course she played the piano. But Betty was anything but stereotypical: She told us in that meeting about lobbying at the state capitol for adoption rights and encountering a group advocating for transgender rights…she had learned about the high-incidence of suicide among trans persons and job discrimination. She led the way for our church to embrace facing transphobia and being a place of welcome. I was proud when she said: If Jesus were here today, he’d be spending time with transgender persons.
*I listened as Sarah, a girl a few years older than I was, bravely came out to our youth group. She was fearful, though, to tell her parents because they were leaving our church because of our reconciling identity. We were a safe place when her home was not.
*And one day I sat in the cafeteria of my jr. high, at my regular table with girls I had been friends with for years, many from my girl scout troupe. And they ambushed me, each bringing a Bible and confronting me with texts, telling me I was going to hell and so was my whole church for welcoming gay people. It was so freeing to be able to look at them and say that Sodom and Gomorrah is actually a story about the evils of gang rape, and that it’s violence and objectification that God detests, not two men in a committed relationship. I was proud to be a Christian in that moment, to worship that God, the God of love.
As I lived and worshipped in this community, I was so proud to be a Christian, to know that the freedom we have in Christ is one that breaks the chains of fear and hatred and division and creates each and every one of us a beloved child, deserving of grace and mercy and a place around the communion table. I knew, from that experience, that I wanted to be part of leading and creating Christian communities like that. To show my Pride in Jesus Christ. To share the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. And to not live out of a sense of vanity, concerned what others think, but to be proud to live out of God’s call instead.
It can be hard and painful to be proud of being both Christian and GLBT, when so many Christians are using Christ to spread fear. But what Paul teaches here, what we know in our very bones, is that God’s law is love. And that’s what we’re proud of.
But we still have the questions of the flesh and the spirit, and if Paul is calling us to divide those up. After all, it’s hard to embrace sexuality as a good gift from God when Paul seems to separate it from our souls.
Too often in our tradition, flesh and Spirit get defined as “body” and “soul”. And then the connotations that everything related to the body is bad and everything related to the soul is good. But this is a worldview that comes from Plato and trickles down to our modern culture, but it is not at all what Paul is saying, and it is not what Jesus taught and lived. In fact, God came to earth in a body, as Jesus, affirming that human bodies are good. There’s nothing biblical about separating body and soul.
Because if we look at the categories he names, that’s not what is going on here. Paul, in fact, is encouraging us to be whole persons through Jesus Christ. When he uses the word flesh, he’s talking not about the body, but about things that lead us away from God. And the categories he lists necessarily involve our bodies and our emotional, psychological, and spiritual energy to be engaged in. Listen to the list again: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing…Paul is warning us that living out of greed and objectification, that separating our bodies from the mutual love that we need and deserve, is ultimately destructive. This is the vanity Mary was talking about in Pride and Prejudice…consumed with what other people and the world think of us, not with who God is calling us to be. Our Pride comes from God, from the Spirit.
And when Paul uses the word spirit, he’s not talking about an individual’s soul. Paul is talking about the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ. Listen again to the fruits of the Spirit of God: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23gentleness, and self-control.
These are gifts of God in which we are called to participate, they absolutely involve the body! It’s hard to express joy without our bodies—when we celebrate love we laugh and dance and hug. We can’t practice peace without using our bodies to protest, our voices to speak out against injustice; We can’t be generous without stretching out our hands. When the Spirit of God calls, our bodies must follow!
Paul is not telling us to separate body and soul, because we never can. He IS telling us that with Christ, we now have the freedom to live as whole human beings, connected to one another with love. For when we are centered in Christ, we live that love out with our whole bodies, and we exhibit the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23gentleness, and self-control.
We have a choice, as Christians, to live out of the world’s energy of greed and competition and loneliness, or to live out of the Spirit of God, which enlivens and animates the world for love.
And it’s this gracious love of God that Paul is talking about here. He makes it clear that when we know and experience the unconditional love of God, in our bodies, souls, minds, and spirits, we can’t help but to respond to that love with goodness. St. John’s, my home church, was centered in God and animated by the Spirit, and what that church showed the world were the fruits of the Spirit.
Over 10 years since I left St. John’s, I’m here, at Holy Covenant. And I continue to be awed by the love of God that will not let us go. I’ve been here a year now (I began July 1st so next week marks my one year anniversary) I’m proud of many things (I could go on and on, but I know y’all want to get to the parade before it’s dark). Today I’m proud to be here because you are a community who graciously and courageously tells your stories….many of you kicked out of your homes and/or faith communities because of sexuality or gender identity. And yet, despite that pain and anger, God has continued to tug at you and you’ve taken the bold step of walking through the doors of a church again. Because you know that the love of Jesus and the hate of particular church communities are not synonymous. Because you’re proud of who you are and know that God created you to be that way. And you’re centered in that knowledge of God, whatever the world says. You have come back to church, bravely and boldly, because of the Spirit of God. I’m proud to walk this journey with you.
Being proud, today, is about so much more than having fun. We will, of course, have fun. But it’s deeper than that . We will be a testament to ourselves and the community that we are not called to separate body and spirit, but to live into the wholeness of who God created us to be.
People will be marching in the parade from different groups and as individuals, and everyone has their own reasons for marching. There’s a reason you came to worship today, that you are marching with Holy Covenant and not as an individual or with another group…we are together on this day because we are proud to be Christians; proud to be lgbtq and ally Christians; and what a gift, what a privilege it is to share this God-given freedom with our community.
Because we don’t march as any other group: we march as people transformed by the resurrection of Jesus Christ and spreading the fruits of the Spirit before us and beside us and after us.
And as we march in the parade, as we march out into the week, they will know we are Christians by our love. (and our joy and peace and patience and gentleness)
Let’s march out of here with this spirit, confident in our freedom, joyful and proud to be people who live out of love.
As we do so, we march towards the day when all will feast together at the heavenly banquet, where pain and war and tears will be no more, and God’s beloved community will be on earth as it is in heaven.
So be free! Be beautiful! And be proud.
Thanks be to God.
Imagine with me that you are hosting a dinner party. You have spent weeks preparing—cleaning the house, planning the menu, going over the guest list, cooking the dinner. And then when people arrive you are a gracious host—making sure nobody’s drink glass is empty, that the volume of the music is just right, that the trays of appetizers remain full.
