In most places where there is a celebration, Pride month events happen in June…except in Gainesville. I like that ours happen in October when the students with their joy and energy are in town in full force and when the weather has moderated, making it much more fun to wear costumes and wigs and wings and drama and drag and flags and rainbows. The last few weeks’ Pride events in all the places have been especially joyful, culminating last Sunday in New York City with the largest of the Pride Parades. As we say, the “UCG nation is everywhere,” and so, we had Kathy, Nicole, Jilian, and Olivia, and maybe some others, too, there, representing. For the first time ever, my hometown, Boone, North Carolina, had a small Pride parade, too. And also, for the first time ever, the World Pride Day international gathering was hosted in the USA, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the events that are named as the official beginning of the push for LGBTQ rights, the Stonewall Rebellion, June 28, 1969.
It was a hard time, back then. “Homosexuality” was both against the law and listed in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual as a mental illness. The Stonewall Inn in New York and other clubs like it around the country were regularly raided by police with the purpose of destroying havens of safety and community, harassing, beating, and arresting patrons. But on that fateful June night and for several nights after at Stonewall, trans women of color, gay men, and others resisted, and the next year, the first Pride march commemorated those LGBTQ activists and a movement was begun though before them, and after them, many, many others lived and died for causes of full personhood for all.
In our time we are the recipients of the gifts of a great company of leaders, saints, and believers who throughout history began spilling out from closets of all shapes and sizes–persons of color, the economically downtrodden, persons differently abled, and persons who identify in a variety of ways, and teach us about love and language. All these children of God, their allies and families, their friends and chosen siblings, have pressed society and the church toward the imperatives from Scripture ever more clearly and more personally–Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly, practice hospitality, live in peace. We have begun to notice the Bible stories like the two I have shared today– the story of the love of David and Jonathan which the Scripture describes as deeper than the love between a man and a woman and the stories about the love of Jesus and the disciple he loved and his mother, Mary, and how when brutality and death came in, they made a new chosen family together. So many other stories–always in the Bible and in religious history, of leaders and prophets and family members and disciples who did not fit into the majority culture’s expectations, roles, and gender binaries, stories in which sexuality and love are celebrated. Sadly, those stories haven’t gotten as much airtime as the lifted-out-of-their historical and linguistic context passages from other parts of the Bible used to judge and condemn.
But we continue to learn and every day, and in every area of life, the identities and places and gifts and graces and stories and wisdom of those previously silenced, hidden, excluded, and persecuted were and are, revealed. But the work is not done, though the progress has been great, still there are those whose blood cries out to us from the ground. As the nascent Boone Pride organizers pointed out, in that week, in two different small NC towns, two more trans women of color had been murdered. One of them was 17 years old. We have the same invitation, all of us, to be part of the God-given vocation we share, to be bent on finding more light and truth, to discover the innumerable ranges and colors and faces and names for Love, for God, however known. To intervene for justice.
I don’t really remember the events of Stonewall, though I am old enough. What I do remember are the many vignettes of time after–the people, so many of them now through the years, who taught and teach me courage in spite of the persecution, the fear, and the real danger—folks who teach me and show me the faces of God. My minister colleague, Ginny, put into a mental hospital by her parents because she was a lesbian, my choirmaster Dwight, in the United Methodist congregation where I served as a young associate who taught me the importance of offering beautiful music and the finest worship. My church member, James, living with AIDS since the 1990s who, after watching his friends die, made his life count by making chosen family for those rejected so that they were not alone and who relentlessly called our church to solidarity. My students, Melissa and Beth, who wrapped themselves together and stood through the judgments and the fear of those said they were just wild college students “experimenting” and could be prayed back to the straight and narrow. They may have been experimenting, but they’ve been together for more than 25 years now and married after it was legal and have two wonderful children who are growing and thriving. Our church members here, Mary and Ann and others, who, in 1991 challenged this church to make its Compact real in a new way by becoming open and affirming of all people and to say so with courage, growing toward full inclusion.
Our church members, Josephine and Lacy got married here on June 22, just a few days before the Stonewall 50th anniversary. I’m guessing their sweet parents weren’t even born when Stonewall happened. Lacy and Josephine weren’t even born when Melissa and Beth got together or when UCG became open and affirming. It’s been my joy to perform a lot of weddings over my life and each one is special, but I have to tell you, when I stood right here, and watched for the doors to swing wide and for their wedding processional to begin, my eyes filled up with tears, remembering all those souls kicked out of churches everywhere because of who they are and who they love. What a loss. But my tears were more profoundly ones of joy and hope, too, because Josephine and Lacy are people of grace and they have a church who loves them, and because of all the music these two 20-somethings could have chosen for their wedding march, what they chose was an affirmation of faith… a beautiful, contemporary version of the classic hymn, “holy, holy, holy, Lord, God almighty, early in the morning, our song shall rise to Thee, only thou art holy, there is none beside thee. God in three persons, blessed Trinity.” Surely the presence of the God of many names was in this place that happy day.
And it still is a work in progress as we lean into learning with our Open and Affirming committee, and the Our Whole Lives sexuality curriculum taught by Talia and through the living examples of a whole host of people of faith, old and young and in between, teaching us new ways to be siblings in faith, to learn new varieties of inclusive language and new ways to be family and new intentional ways to honor one another’s personhood. I think of the past and the present and the future… of the living, and of the persecuted and the dead and I hope that somewhere out there, they know that a gentle and angry people have not forgotten, and that time and faith have taught us that Love, ultimately, will win. We are still learning.
All that is to say: no matter how you identify or who you love, you know that this world stands at the portal of past and future. We lean sometimes dangerously close, in so many ways, to tumbling backward through the opening and into the abyss of ignorance, violence, hatred and pain. So in these times, we must press onward with fervor and strength, never forgetting those who were and are still being murdered for being trans or for being persons of color or for being gay or lesbian, for no reason at all. We must recall the ever-relevant words of MLK when he said, “Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart. But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless.”
May we remember that the struggle for the survival of the planet and for human and creatures’ rights is at once a civic responsibility and a struggle for spiritual wholeness. The prophets wrote that it is God’s will that none should perish in sorrow and in pain, but that all should live and grow and love. I close with the words of the great trans liberation theologian, Justin Tanis who writes these words about living at the edges of the portal between past and future: “All who live on the margins have learned that we can find the Holy One there. A sacred beauty is present at the edges, a kind of spiritual honesty that is not found in places of comfort and power. In seeing God at the margins, we discover something else. We learn that wherever we are, we are at the center of the heart of God.” So may it be, as we remember liberation in this season, that we do so with pride and with renewed conviction that we will continue to work with persistence for justice that shines like a great rainbow—many gifts and graces, many races and orientations and identities, with one love, that unites us all. Amen.
Prayer:
May the embrace of love wrap around us and may the gentle strength of healing and peace live through us, Holy One. Amen.
I Samuel 18- 20; John 18, 19
Shelly Wilson
July 7, 2019