Beyond Affirmation
Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.
Dan: All right, today's reading is from Romans 8:31-39:
What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own son but gave him up for all of us, how will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies, who is to condemn, it is Christ who died, or rather who was raised? Who is also at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us?
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword, as it is written, for your sake we are being killed all day long. We are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. For I'm convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Cody: My apologies in advance, not for the sermon, but for my allergies, which are really bad today. Despite all medical intervention. But it's good to be with you here at the outset of Pride Month at The Table. The Table, if you're new to this community, as I am relatively, has been around as an independent congregation for about eight years. And you came into your own as a congregation amid a heyday of LGBTQ rights and inclusion in US society. Just to review: Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed in 2011. The Minnesota legislature made same sex marriage legal in 2013. The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of same sex marriage for the entire country in 2015.
The Table launched as a congregation on its own in the world in 2017. And you did so as a congregation that welcomed and affirmed the lives and faith practice of queer and trans people. And that is no small thing. You've not only had LGBTQ members and leaders on the board, but you've also had queer and trans people on ministerial staff, including me. You've had one of the best Pride booths at the Twin Cities Pride Festival. And whereas many churches might dedicate one Sunday to celebrate Pride, if they are affirming of LGBTQ people, you dedicate a whole month to celebrate Pride.
And all of that is worthy of celebration. And it's likely why we have so many LGBTQ people and straight people with trans and queer family members always coming to The Table to make this their spiritual home. But the heyday of LGBTQ rights and inclusion is over. So I want you to hear this on day one of Pride Month: Your commitment as a church to LGBTQ inclusivity and justice will be tested in the coming days.
As an example, this week I was looking at the website of the Stonewall Monument, because that is where Pride began, and the National Park Service has erased any mention of transgender people from the website of the Stonewall National Monument. The very uprising that gave Pride Month its launch led by drag queen Marsha P. Johnson and Latina trans woman Sylvia Rivera, and black trans woman Miss Major Griffin Gracie, whose jaw was broken by the police that night at the Stonewall Inn. And when you click on the link to see the 15 part video series on Stonewall, the website that you find says, "Page not found."
Erasure of history and tampering with collective memory are powerful tools of oppression and violence.
The Trevor Project, the leading suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ young people in the US operating suicide crisis and phone and text lines, they reported that after analyzing their data for the day after the 2024 election, they saw a nearly 700% increase in crisis calls and texts on November 6th in comparison to the weeks prior. And the anxieties and the fears behind those calls are not unfounded. The ACLU is tracking 588 anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures across the US this year.
Your commitment as a church community to LGBTQ inclusivity and justice will be tested in the coming days. It will be tested by LGBTQ people showing up here because they've heard that this is a place where we can belong in the fullness of ourselves. But we will bring with us a lot of things you might not be expecting. Spiritual stress and trauma from past church experiences that make even an affirming church sometimes a difficult place to be. We'll bring with us material needs that have been created by a lack of family support because of our sexualities and gender identities or by unemployment discrimination, by trans people relocating from other states, trying to establish a home here because Minnesota is a trans haven in an increasingly violent map of the US for trans people. And we'll bring with us the uncertainties of the current era when our very existence, especially that of our trans siblings, is being actively erased from the institutions of our society.
Your commitment to LGBTQ inclusivity and justice will be tested in the coming days by the current administration, which will continue its campaign to heap hardship and distress upon LGBTQ people, erasing us from historical records, diminishing our abilities to serve in government capacities, crushing diversity inclusion programs at universities and corporations with punitive measures. And it is not too far fetched to imagine the administration attacking the nonprofit status of religious institutions working against the administration's aims.
Now churches take several steps in the direction of LGBTQ inclusivity and justice. So I want to invite you to see where you've been over these last eight years or so, as a really good step along that pathway of standing for LGBTQ people. But it is just the beginning. And frankly, most churches that become affirming of LGBTQ people don't make it past that step. That's where they see the end.
Now that first step is what I would call and what most churches would call being openly welcoming and affirming, stating our affirmation for LGBTQ people in ways that they can perceive and become a part of the community. And that step generally sounds something like, “LGBTQ people are just like us and they should be a part of the community just like we are.”
In a Christian religious landscape where LGBTQ exclusion is the pervasive norm and public affirmations and commitments to LGBTQ inclusion are the extreme minority position, being affirming of queer and trans people can seem like a radical step. It is going against the grain of the dominant religious expression in this country. But let me just put this in perspective for you so that you can see it as a step and not the eventual goal: If you believe that God's love embraces all people, including LGBTQ people, as beloved people of sacred worth because that is the message of the gospel as you understand it, then being an LGBTQ affirming congregation is just basic Christian decency. It's where we all should have been decades and decades ago.
And I'll add this because it's important to recognize that many LGBTQ people also stop there: “Just accept us for who we are and let us belong. Once we're on the same level playing field as everyone else, we can stop thinking about the intersection of queer and trans lives and faith.” But stopping with welcome and affirmation of LGBTQ people, which I hope we can agree is just the baseline we should have all achieved decades and decades before most churches have. Stopping there misses the richness and beauty that LGBTQ people bring to communities of faith and it sets us up to falter at the challenges that are currently facing us.
The next step on that journey of LGBTQ inclusion and justice is one that we might call celebration and transformation. That's our Pride theme this year. And to my mind at least, celebration and transformation says something more like, “Your life and experience as LGBTQ people bring something different into this community. And we should celebrate that difference and learn from it, because it holds wisdom that can transform us all.”
And beyond a simple welcome, solidarity. Solidarity is the eventual destination on the trajectory towards transformation in a political landscape that is intent on our erasure.
So I want to read this passage from Paul's letter to the Romans with you. By reading it from the perspective of queer and trans people of faith, with queer and trans stories illuminating what this passage can mean to us. Because as I told you in a Pride sermon I preached at The Table a year ago—my very first time here at The Table—LGBTQ people did not wait for straight and cisgender people to tell us when it would be okay to practice our faith.
Our queer and trans ancestors in the faith read passages like, "If God is for us, "who can be against us?" And they believed it. Long before any Christian denominations affirmed our lives or loved our bodies or celebrated our loves, the Eucharistic Catholic Church began as a place for LGBTQ people to practice their faith in 1946 Atlanta, Georgia. And the Metropolitan Community Church became the largest grassroots movement in LGBTQ history beginning in 1968 before the Stonewall Riots even took place.
“If God is for us, who is against us?” It is the central motif of this passage from the letter to the Romans. And New Testament scholar Beverly Roberts-Gaventa argues that it is possibly the central motif of the entire Letter to the Romans.
And queer and trans faithful through time have read this passage and had the audacity to believe it was speaking to us. Against every message intent on assailing our souls and separating us from God. And it's something that every LGBTQ affirming church needs to be reminded of over and over again. A message of condemnation is the most pervasive religious message that LGBTQ people encounter from Christian churches, period.
This is how we have typically come to encounter the faith. And despite all odds, many of us still persist in our faith practice even when we have had to do so alone. And when we have, and even when we have to create entirely new churches and denominations to practice that faith.
And I know that at the outset of Pride Month, it seems like a downer to be thinking about all of the harmful experiences that LGBTQ people have faced at the outset of this month that we usually think about as a month of celebration. But listen, from its origin, Pride is a protest against all the forces that are intent on our erasure. Pride is a protest against all the forces intent on our erasure. And you can't know what it means to revel in Pride, unless you can look honestly at the affliction and distress and persecution and peril that Pride protests against, from the police violence of Stonewall to the spiritual violence on the dominant religious landscape.
In verse 34 of this passage that Dan read this morning, the translation you heard reads this way: “Who is to condemn? It is Christ who died, or rather was raised, who is also at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us,” which makes it sound like Christ is the antidote to the condemnation of anyone else. And ultimately, this is the message of that passage, that Beverly Gaventa translates the passage a bit differently.
It can also be translated like this: “Who will condemn us to death? Will it be Christ Jesus who condemns the one who died, rather than the one who was raised, who also is at God's right hand, who also intercedes for us?” And I think that's an even more poignant translation for us to hear, because the message of so many churches, the churches that the vast majority of queer and trans people are raised in, answer Paul's question by saying yes, Christ condemns you.
Several years ago, for some research I was conducting on LGBTQ suicide and Christian faith, I interviewed a man named Thomas, who expressed the pain and turmoil of this condemnation in the most compelling way I've ever heard. He was reflecting on his childhood as a gay kid growing up in his home church, and he said these words:
“The message of Christ is love, and the message of Christ is damnation. In my heart it's love, and the world is damnation. And they used the same words. It was maddening, and a mind can't do that. A mind can't fix that ever. It's impossible. It's insane. And when you're paralyzed as a child between these two things, God hates me and God loves me. When you're beaten enough with that, and you reach the point where you say I'm done, it's a pain, it's a terrible pain. Maybe stronger people than me can deal with that pain longer. I couldn't.”
And Thomas, who was so pained by the spiritual violence of his upbringing, almost ending his own life, persisted in the practice of his faith entirely on his own for 30 years, because he had no idea that there were churches that he could belong to as a gay man.
That's why it's so important that we show up at places like Pride and proclaim our LGBTQ affirmation in ways that people can see, because there are thousands of Thomases around us, longing for a community of faith and believing that there aren't any for them. Gaventa says of these last verses of the Romans passage, that this question, who will separate us from the love of Christ, assumes that there are agents that exist who actively separate God from God's people.
And for us at the outset of Pride Month, we must honestly grapple with the fact that for queer and trans people, those agents actively seeking to separate us from God's queer and trans beloved, to separate God from God's queer and trans beloved, the agents most active in that separation are churches and pastors and theologians. Those are the forces of separation from God that Pride protests against, with a message of fierce love and extravagant celebration, even as we're under threat of erasure.
My friend Jim Mitulski tells some of the most poignant stories of this protest against erasure when he was the pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco, a primarily LGBTQ church, through the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. The congregation was thriving and dying all at the same time. It was a haven for LGBTQ people who had been spiritually abused by their previous churches, sometimes disowned by their families, dying of a mysterious illness that made them untouchable to everyone from doctors to funeral directors. They cared for one another in that community of faith in ways that most of our churches could never fathom.
Jim said that in the 80s and 90s, it was common for gay people to request rebaptism because of the anti-LGBTQ theology that was so vehemently preached from the pulpit in most churches, including most of the churches they had come from. And although it was theologically unorthodox to rebaptize people, the MCC made the sacrament available even for those who had already been baptized elsewhere.
Listen to the poignancy of that liturgical theological intervention. Gay rights were being passed into law and then revoked over and over again in those days in the late 80s, early 90s in California. Families could revoke their love and embrace. Churches could revoke their welcome. One's health could be revoked in an instant with a devastating diagnosis. But Jim said, being baptized as an openly gay person was a political act as well as a personal and spiritual act, a statement that could not be revoked. “I baptized hundreds and hundreds of people,” he said.
“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or a sword, as it is written, For your sake, we are being killed all day long. We are counted as sheep to be slaughtered." Queer and trans people can read a passage like that from Paul's letter to the Romans and see in that passage our ancestors in faith. That is, if we even know anything about our ancestors in faith. And it's no guarantee that we will, since those stories rarely get passed down to us. That's why I like to tell so many stories of those queer and trans ancestors.
One such story took place on Sunday evening. And this will be a really hard story for you to hear. Sunday evening, June 24th, 1973, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, in the UpStairs Lounge. Has anyone ever heard of the UpStairs Lounge before? Not a single person. It's a good illustration of how we are cut off from these stories that belong to us. Historian Jim Downs says of the UpStairs Lounge that it was a bar sandwiched between Jimani's bar on the first floor and a flophouse on the third floor at a street corner that had long been the province of hustlers and those prowling to pay for sex. Which sounds to me a lot like the place where Jesus might have gathered people.
Every Sunday night by 7:30 at the UpStairs Lounge, the party in the bar ended and those who were a part of the congregation that met there would move to the middle room of the bar and they began singing songs of worship around the bar's white baby grand piano. The churches where most of these gay people were raised refused to allow openly gay people into the full life of the church. This group of faithful queer and trans people formed their own congregation as many had before them and they made up the congregation of the New Orleans chapter of the Metropolitan Community Church.
Now when they started worship, they locked the main doors of the bar to protect those inside. It was 1973. And on this particular evening, they were singing songs of worship and solidarity and an unknown individual or possibly group of people doused the entrance of the stairwell and the drapes downstairs in lighter fluid and set the building on fire with a Molotov cocktail, sending flames quickly spreading around the room and across the floor and ceiling.
And because gay establishments in this era were so prone to attack and vandalism, there were metal bars and boards where over all of the windows to protect the building and those inside of it. And a few were able to make it out through the thick smoke and flames and some were thin enough to squeeze themselves through the bars covering the windows to jump the two stories down to the pavement beneath.
But by the time the fire department arrived, it was too late to save anyone still in the building and 32 people had died. Bodies were melted together in a pile on the floor. Two brothers and their mother who came to worship with them every week were dead, lovers, and husbands, and friends. The pastor of the congregation was stuck halfway out the window trying to escape when he caught fire and was mercifully killed by a falling air conditioner unit from above.
A third of the church's membership was lost in that fire. And many of the men had no family or friends who could identify their bodies and they remain among the anonymous dead. Others, including the pastor, had family who refused to receive their remains when they discovered that they were gay and they were buried in the city's potter's field.
It was an arson of a church, yet the national press would later call the people gathered and worship their lascivious and lewd. Downs says the UpStairs Lounge was not just a “homosexual hangout that was frequented by thieves” as the media said, but was a place also that served as a community center and a theater and of course a place of worship.
And the MCC founder Troy Perry said of those who died in the upstairs lounge fire, "These were spiritually minded people who were driven by their faith and who had turned a Sunday afternoon Beer Bust into a chance to gather as a religious community." And this story—that no one in this entire room knew—was the deadliest massacre of LGBTQ people in US history until the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016, which killed 49 people.
God who did not withhold God's own son, but gave him up for all of us. How will God not also with him give us everything else? For queer and trans people whose ancestors have been accounted as sheep to be slaughtered, for us, we can see in Christ a queer figure on the cross. One whose life was ended by the empire because the religious and political status quo was intent on erasing his life and love too. Who is to condemn? It is Christ who died or rather who was raised who is also at the right hand of God who also intercedes for us.
Friends, if what we proclaim and practice is not good news to those who are being crucified, handed over to death, afflicted and in distress, then we have not understood the gospel from its origin. Pride is a protest against all of the forces that are intent on our erasure. And in this passage from Paul's letter to the Romans, we can see the love of God enacting that very same kind of protest against the forces of violence intent on separating us from that love.
And even when our backs are against the wall and the voices attempting to separate us from the love of God threaten to drown out the voices of love and embrace, and even when our government and our schools and our churches and even our families have said we don't belong, and even against the violence of erasure from history, queer and trans people of faith have said over and over again throughout history, no, in all these things we are more than victorious through Christ who loved us. And we believed it. [thunderous applause]