I preached this sermon on Wednesday, June 12 at Lord of Life Lutheran Church, West Chester, OH for the Butler County Affirming Churches service of Healing & Affirmation. The Scripture cited is Mark 12:28-34.
When I was in the sixth grade, I had a friend…we’ll call him Chris. And in a particular way that maybe some of you can relate to, I had confusing feelings about Chris. All I wanted to do was spend time with him. I went over to his house to play video games even though I didn’t care one bit about video games. And I hung on every word he said, even though he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. I got nervously excited whenever he was around.
In my young mind, back in a time and place where “liking” other boys was not acceptable or even acknowledged, I interpreted these feelings as simply wanting to be “best friends” with Chris, and so I told myself that this ardor, this devotion, was probably what any two friends were supposed to share with each other. But I had to know…did he want to be my “best friend” too? So I decided that, clearly, the thing to do was to tell Chris exactly how much he meant to me…as a “friend.”
Back in those days (and I’m dating myself here) we had typing classes in a special computer lab in our elementary school. This was pre-smartphone, pre-internet, pre-everything. But on these computers, you could send little messages to someone at another workstation, like a very early version of email. And I decided that I was going to send Chris a really special message so that he knew what a good friend I wanted to be.
And so (remember, I was in sixth grade, but I still cringe recalling this)…I decided to type out the full lyrics of the Simon and Garfunkel song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and send them to him as an expression of my friendship.
Yes, really.
If you don’t know that song, look up the lyrics later, and I promise you, no matter what your sexual orientation is, you will be embarrassed on my behalf.
So I hit send on this message and I was eager to see what he would write back. But…of course he didn’t write back. He didn’t say a word to me after that. And although, to his credit, he was never cruel, there were definitely no more invitations to come over and play video games.
I realized then, as much as I could at the time, that I had gotten things mixed up somehow. The feelings I had were real, and true, and earnest, but all the cues around me said that they were something I should be embarrassed about, something that was unwelcome, and perhaps for the first time, at 12 years old, I understood what it was to feel like a stranger in one’s own skin.
Now, I know that unrequited affection and feelings of shame are not experiences restricted to LGBTQ+ folks alone, but I do think that, more than most, we are intimately acquainted with the great gap that can exist between the love we have to give and the desire of others to accept it. To express queer love and queer identity is to live with an ever-present sense of risk.
So many of us, whether in 6th grade or much later in our lives, have stood at the edge of our own troubled waters, looking for a bridge, looking across toward our childhood crushes, or our family members, or our churches, or our communities. And many of them are standing on the other side of the gap, too often refusing to extend a hand back toward us, turning away in confusion or embarrassment or worse.
And so we queer folks learn something important as we navigate this reality: we learn that love, true love, is never a guarantee in this life. It is something that must be fought for and claimed and created and protected, from within the deepest parts of yourself.
We learn that love is not the prize for successfully assimilating to the dominant culture. We learn that love is not passive compliance with the accepted order of things. It is not medal you win when you meet everyone else’s expectations of how you are to live or be.
No, we queer folks know, firsthand, that love—love for ourselves, love for the ones our hearts and our bones and our flesh cry out to hold—this love can be costly. We know this because that is what you learn when it is a political act every single day to take your partner’s hand in public. You know this when it becomes a profound act of courage to put on the outfit that best expresses your identity or dare to name the pronoun that resonates most with your spirit.
When that is your life, you realize that love is not just a nice feeling among pleasant people; it is something tangible and active that requires strength and vulnerability and the willingness to be misunderstood. The willingness to put yourself out there and sometimes to pay the price for what is deeply, wholly, inescapably true, even if it’s not popular or acceptable to those around you.
It can be bewildering, sometimes, all of this. It can feel like you’re the only one who gets it.
But it’s interesting. You know who else had something to say about that real, hardscrabble, costly, risky sort of love? That true, inclusive, expansive, all-encompassing sort of love? Jesus.
Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus, the Son of God. Jesus, the One who embodies divine mystery in his flesh. Jesus, who came as a teacher, as a Savior, as the champion of all who have been trampled upon and left behind. Jesus who was himself rejected and misunderstood and deemed a threat to the accepted order.
The Church has tended to forget this throughout its history, but Jesus, in the deepest, most essential heart of the Christian story, is the embodiment of a truth that any LGBTQ+ person could already tell you: that love is scary and it is beautiful and it is necessary and it is all-powerful, and that this love cannot be prayed away by those who don’t understand it. This love cannot be killed or stamped out by judgment or greed or patriarchy or empire or any of the other maladies that afflict us.
Jesus lived and died and rose again to demonstrate that this type of unending, unyielding love of God queers the narrative about life—it troubles the conventional wisdom about the way things are, and who is included, and it reveals the extent to which God will go to rescue us from the binaries and the judgments that bind us. And God will go as far as it takes to save us from this, all the way to the grave and back again.
And if any Church, or anyone tries tell you that Jesus is anything other than this, then they have conveniently ignored this evening’s Scripture reading.
In this passage, when Jesus is asked about the greatest commandment, he says it is this: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. That’s it. Everything else we might do is secondary to this, and just as important, everything else we think about Christian faith must be interpreted in light of this commandment. As Michael Curry, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church likes to say, if it’s not about love, it’s not about God. Period.
And if that is so, then what I would like the broader Church—our allies and all the rest—to understand is this: if you want to know about God’s love, if you want to understand what is meant when Jesus talks about love, I suggest that one of the first things you do is talk to your LGBTQ+ neighbors and friends and family members.
Ask them what it has cost to simply be themselves. Ask them why they were willing to pay that cost. Ask them how they navigate the daily razors edge between love and danger. And perhaps when you do this, you will realize that what they are describing to you is, in fact, a reflection of Jesus’ own story—his own cost, his own love, his own danger.
You see, for far too long LGBTQ+ people have been thought of as the outsiders who ought to be welcomed inside the Church in the name of Christian love, when the truth is that the LGBTQ+ folks are the ones who have something to teach the Church and the world about what the love of Jesus actually looks like.
Because believe me, we know all about crucifixion—we have watched our siblings be vilified and victimized, we have watched them bleed in the streets because they dared to exist openly, we have watched them die forsaken in hospital beds.
And we know all about God’s abundant forgiveness and grace, because we have so often been the ones who seek reconciliation with those people and institutions who refuse to extend any charity back to us.
And we know a bit about resurrection, because although so many of us have tasted the despair of loneliness and rejection, we have been brought back to life by the power of music, of laughter, of solidarity, of chosen families, of mentors and drag mothers and allies and friends.
And we know about building the Kingdom of Heaven, too, because alongside our allies, we are the builders and champions of inclusive, affirming spaces where all are seen and known and enough, whether in a church or in a protest march or on a dance floor.
Yes, if anyone wants to know more about Christian love actually is, talk to a queer person. And then you will begin to see how, as Jesus always teaches us, you will see how the Reign of God indeed springs up in queer places, at the margins of power and privilege, not at its center. You will begin to see where the Spirit resides, how she emerges out of those troubled waters like a rainbow, like a promise, like a sign from heaven that says: even if no one else understands it, your love is enough. However mischaracterized, however rejected or rebuked or unrequited, your love is more than enough.
Because, my LGBTQ+ siblings, God is that very same love that wells up in your own heart and seeks to express itself through your deepest authenticity, come what may. Even if it is costly. Even if some people never accept it. And yes, even if your email full of sappy song lyrics never gets a response. God sings with you. God understands. And God is proud of you. So very proud of you for showing the world what love can be. Be proud of yourself, too.
Because the Pride we speak of, the pride that we have fought for and died for and chosen to live for, is not, as some might say, the rejection of humility. Pride is the dismantling of shame. Pride is the construction of dignity. And when you finally get what this Pride actually means, what it actually represents, what it actually signifies, it is a beautiful thing to behold.
Sort of like what Jesus talked about. Sort of like love.
Thank God for all the LGBTQ+ people, marvelously and perfectly made, who continue to show us what love is.
May your Pride be happy. And may it be blessed.
By Another Road 