Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ
I always try to keep these articles topical, either to the seasons and holy days of the church or to current events in the world. However, due to the fact that I write these articles more than a week before you receive them, how topical they end up being is variable. And these days, with everything going on in the world and in our country, I may be writing about yesterday’s news by the time you read this. Every day it seems something crazy is happening. Yesterday our military was patrolling the streets of Los Angeles; today, we’re bombing Iran. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.
So as much as I would like to weigh in on what’s going on in our country and in our world, I’m going to step away from those topics and instead focus on something that should be entirely noncontroversial: Pride Month. Okay, that bit about this piece being noncontroversial was a bit tongue in cheek. I know this is a subject that the Church as a whole and including our congregations are divided over. I know more than a few of you don’t approve of the pride flag mounted on the parsonage porch. That’s okay, I’m still glad to see you on Sunday morning.
The month of June was selected for Pride Month to commemorate the Stonewall riot, an event considered by many to be a turning point in the fight for queer liberation. You see, in the 1960’s, homosexuality was criminalized in much of the country, the police would regularly conduct raids on gay bars and clubs and other places where gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people would often gather. The cops would bust in, guns drawn, rough people up, and take them away in handcuffs – all for the sin of gathering together in the only spaces where they could express themselves without judgment. Until one day the queer folk fought back. At a crusty old dive bar in Greenwich Village in New York, the patrons of Stonewall decided that if they were going down, they were going down swinging. And throwing bricks. The police were pushed out of the bar as the riot spilled out onto the streets, years of pent up rage finally exploding. The riots grew and spread across the city and lasted several days, garnering the attention of the national news. It would be a long time until gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people would obtain equal rights to free expression and protections under the law, and in many ways the fight for equal rights wages on. But stonewall was the breaking point, where LGBT+ people across the country decided they would no longer accept being pushed into the shadows, forced to hide who they are for fear of being shamed or hurt with violence. They would organize, protect each other, and fight back. They chose pride in themselves over the shame the world tried to heap upon them.
1969 was not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, and LGBT people still face a great deal of legal discrimination and social marginalization. If anything, in recent days, those with hateful feelings toward queer people have been more emboldened to express their hostility openly. Not long ago, it was considered shameful to be a bigot or a bully, to anyone. That seems to be changing. And that’s why I fly that flag on my porch. Because the fight isn’t over. Because queer people across this country still live in fear of unprovoked violence, of social marginalization and rejection, of losing their rights to live as their authentic selves. I fly that flag to say that, as long as I am pastor here, these congregations will be a safe and welcoming place for *everyone* – queer people included.
Maybe you disagree. Maybe you have hostility in your heart for LGBT+ folks. I pray for you. I know God’s love will root out the hate in all of our hearts one day. But maybe you don’t feel any sort of way about the struggle for queer liberation. Maybe you simply feel that it isn’t your fight. If that’s you, I’d just like to remind you of the old adage that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and that tolerating the violation of anyone’s rights is a threat to your own rights. I’d also like to point out that, without a doubt, there’s a queer person in your life. Probably someone you love, whether you know it or not.
One more point I’d like to touch on. June is also Men’s Mental Health Month. Did you know that the demographic with the highest suicide rate in the US are men over the age of 75? I think it is very fitting that Men’s Mental Health Month and Pride Month happen concurrently, because I think social forces that have oppressed queer people for centuries are the very same social forces driving the contemporary phenomenon of male loneliness and depression. Whether we notice them or not, there are so many social forces pressuring us all to conform to certain expectations about how we live and express ourselves, and those forces are particularly limiting to men, especially when it comes to male expression of affection and intimacy. Men have long been expected to suppress their emotions; going to therapy feels shameful for a lot of men; expressing platonic intimacy with other men is often shunned for fear of being perceived as “queer”; young men and boys are pressured into intimate relationships with girls and women long before they’re ready; any behavior that is perceived as “feminine” is ridiculed. Many of us, men and women alike, often reinforce these arbitrary and harmful standards of masculinity without even realizing it. And the end result is too many men ignoring their mental health problems, being deprived of intimate and affectionate friendships with other men, and being disallowed to pursue interests and passions that aren’t “masculine.” Queer liberation is about breaking the bonds of societal expectations around sex and gender – it’s about the freedom to be who you are and whoever you wish to become. In that way, queer liberation means liberation for heterosexual men too.
I’d like to leave you with an image to meditate on. At the Last Supper, after washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus reclines at the table. Saint John, The Beloved Disciple, reclines against him, resting his head on Jesus’ chest. Jesus literally had a snuggle with one of his disciples at the Last Supper and no one batted an eye. And not because Jesus was a special case. It’s because, for all of the ways ancient near eastern culture was restrictive in its understanding of gender roles, it was not restrictive when it came to intimacy and affection among men the way contemporary western culture is. I think men today desperately need that same social permission to be intimate and affectionate with each other, to be vulnerable with one another, to be supported by one another. Saint Paul tells us that “in Christ there is no longer Jew or gentile, slave or free, male or female – for we are all one in Christ.” But boy, we sure don’t act like it a lot of the time. May we behold the Savior, gently holding his Beloved Disciple’s head to his chest, and let that be our model – not only of masculinity, but of humanity. And even more, our model of Divinity. For as the Beloved Disciple taught us, “God is Love.”
Thanks be to God.
Pastor Adam