Hope and Pride
Welcome one and all to our First Annual celebration of the Holy Eucharist for the Pride Community! This has been a long time coming and we are overjoyed to be here tonight!
The very fact that we are here worshiping our God in a loving community; with a Bishop that stands with us as a great ally; with a Dean who announced almost immediately upon accepting her new call that she was going to make sure we had a Pride Celebration; with a wonderful Cathedral choir combined with the renowned River City Mixed Chorus; these are all reasons for us to rejoice.
And so, we do.
But ever since Dean Vanessa asked me to preach for this service - I have be honest with you – I’ve been thinking a great deal about the first time I preached in a Cathedral for a Pride celebration - this was in the early 2000’s – I can’t remember the exact year – I was not yet a monk and I had been chosen to preach at an Evensong at St. John the Divine, the evening before New York City’s Pride Parade. That liturgy was presided at by the Episcopal Church’s first out gay bishop, Gene Robinson, and he was going to preach as well.
As I was preparing for the evening, and getting dressed in my best suit, I thought to myself, “oh great – people will have to endure two sermons and, anyway, who listens to a gay guy in a suit, everybody is going to pay attention to the gay guy in the fabulous magenta dress!
Well, this evening, I decided to go with a more formal black gown and I think that works beautifully on me!
But seriously, at that service so many years ago, while we had many less rights than we do today, we were not yet allowed to marry for example, I can remember feeling more hopeful that night, than I do tonight.
We still had a great deal of work to do – but public opinion was moving in our direction, discriminatory laws were falling in many states, our own Pride community was working hard and never losing sight of the goals we shared, many progressive Christians were working for change within the Church.
But tonight, with so many rights having been secured by our hard work over many long years, we are confronting the forces of evil in both our society and in our political climate.
These forces of evil are seeking to destroy our democratic institutions and appear to be stopping at nothing to achieve this.
It would be a mistake to see those who are supporting anti-LGBTQ policies and laws as simply on some misdirected moral crusade.
No, this comes from a philosophy of White Supremacy and Christian Nationalism. These are not legitimate theologies, they are heresies, and they must be opposed, first and foremost, by those of us who follow Jesus.
This heresy – White Supremacy and Christian Nationalism – seeks to subjugate people who are not, well, themselves. In other words, all people of color, all LGBTQ persons, immigrants, non-Christians, refugees, and more. This latest version of the evil force began on the fringes of our society and seemed like something to simply ignore. A few extremists with nothing better to do.
And while we were ignoring it, this evil force took hold of a seemingly legitimate political movement and rooted itself in various parts of our country.
This has led to ever more violence against our community, especially the Trans members of our community. It has led to attempts to outlaw marriage for our community; to ban books regarding our community; to muzzle teachers even mentioning the existence of our community; and has even led to proposals to make our very existence illegal.
So, yes, I felt more hopeful all those years ago at St. John the Divine.
But feeling hopeful and being hopeful are two different things. Feeling hopeful is an expectation of good things to come. Nothing wrong in and of itself, but it is mostly based on our own ability or that of others to “do the right thing”.
Being hopeful, on the other hand, is a theological virtue and it involves the expectation of the good to come, which is of human origin, with the assurance that the good will happen – which is of Divine origin. Hope is, as a theological virtue, the perfect example of the Incarnation at work. Humanity and Divinity joined together by an act of God.
As so are we. What do I mean by that? When God chose to send God’s child, Jesus, to become one with us, God was seeking to send part of Godself to become united with humanity. By the Divinity taking on our humanity, God elevates our humanity to God’s level. With all due respect to St. Paul, it’s not so much that Jesus lowered himself, as that he elevated us. Christ’s coming is not about how awful each one of us is, a pitiful group to be saved, but rather it is about how wonderful we could become. How wonderful we could be.
Where do I get this from? Well, the theology begins with that opening Collect we heard at the beginning of Mass. “Almighty God, who created us in your image…” That comes directly from the theology of the book of Genesis. Humanity was created in God’s own image. Think about that.
Note that it did not say “Almighty God, who created White, Cis-gendered, heterosexual, males in your image”. It just used the all inclusive “us”. That means that when God created you, God created you Lesbian in God’s own image; Transgendered in God’s own image; Bisexual in God’s own image; Gay, in God’s own image; Queer in God’s own image; Straight in God’s own image; non-binary in God’s own image; Cis-gendered in God’s own image.
God created us – us – in God’s own image.
And that should be cause enough to rejoice. But there’s more! As St. Paul tells us in our reading from Second Corinthians – in light of the Resurrection, we are no longer to be considered from merely a human point of view – but rather from the point of view of the new Creation in Christ. Yes, we are those same bisexual, gay, transgendered, queer, lesbian, straight, cis-gendered, non-binary persons newly created in Christ. We have taken on Christ’s Incarnation, Christ’s Passion, and Christ’s Resurrection in our own bodies.
And our bodies are marvelously made. Listen again to the last verse we read from Psalm 139: “I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well.”
I’d like you to say that with me:
“I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful and I know it well.” (2 or 3 times).
That is why I hope. It is because God, who created me in God’s own image and who, by the way, did so marvelously, and then created me ever anew in Christ, gave me the assurance that the Reign of God is not only near at hand, but in my heart, and will be brought to completion in people exactly like me and you and you and you, and all o us.
When I began the process of coming out, in the summer of 1980, the summer right after high school, one of the worst enemies of the Gay community was being elected president and the AIDS crisis was just beginning. Had I depended on myself and my own lack of hope, I would not be here today. But one of the good things about being a grizzled old veteran of the gay rights movement is that I’ve learned a few things along the way. Having marched in D.C. more times than I care to recall, having participated in die-ins in front of the White House and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, having donated a good deal of money which I didn’t have to the cause, having come out to family, friends, and foes, having done so in school, at work, in the theater and in the church, I can tell you that all of those actions are good and necessary. Even hopeful in the first sense of the word.
But living hope, embodying hope, knowing the assurance of hope only comes from the reality that is the liberating love of Jesus. And though evil has befallen our community before and is doing so again, we can agree with St. Paul that “nothing will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus” because we have been marvelously made in that very image of God.
Now, none of that makes the political attacks, the profane laws, the threat of violence, or the violence itself, an easy thing to endure. But standing in solidarity with one another and in the full knowledge that God made us in God’s own image and that God did so marvelously, that makes it bearable.
And even more than that it reminds us that in the days to come we will be the ones who helped to realize the Reign of God on earth. We will be the ones, having embraced our beautiful marvelous-ness, having thanked God for creating us in God’s own image as gay, queer, lesbian, bi, trans, straight, non-binary, cis-gendered, who have stood firm in our faith, resisted the forces of evil, and created in our own small way, a beautiful land where all people of good will live in peace, harmony, and joy.
Is that all a dream? Yes, but it’s God’s dream for us. A dream, a hope that fills God’s heart and is given to us in Christ Jesus. So as we go forth from this beautiful Cathedral tonight, let it not be said that our spirits were crushed by the hatred and vitriol that poisons the air. Let it not be said that we lacked hope or faith or love.
Rather, as we go forth from this beautiful Cathedral tonight, let it be said that we dreamed God’s dream for us. Let it be said that these faithful followers of Jesus were marvelously made. And let it be said that this Pride Community knew how to be hope, how to embody love, and knew how to follow Jesus. AMEN.
Brother James M. Dowd, OSB