Gay Pride after Orlando

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Gay Pride Sunday

Luke 9:51-62

The Rev.d Richard Smith, Ph.D.

The Sunday before last, a dashing young man named Edward Sotomayor was shot in the back and killed when he shielded his lover from a bullet. It’s what our greatest teacher calls the highest human act: laying down one’s life for one’s friend.

The story would be powerful and poignant enough, but remember that Edward was a gay man, one of the 49 gay Latinos killed in Orlando, and this adds a layer to the story.

Before that dreadful moment when he would form a human shield around his beloved to protect him from that fatal wound, he had already gone through the long journey that each and every gay person has had to go through simply to say, “I am gay”, what each and every gay person has had to go through to find the one whose lips they could kiss, the long journey every gay person has had to travel to finally look into another’s eyes and say simply, “I love you”.

Before arriving at the point where he would give his life for his beloved, Edward Sotomayor had already been formed by that very long gay journey. His love was a product of that journey. That long, perhaps arduous journey was the crucible that formed his love.

And it is that long and sometimes arduous journey of love that we queers celebrate today.

We know we can’t take our love for granted; it’s been condemned and denied us for centuries by church and state and society at large. There are forces who would deny it to us still.

• You can YouTube what the Christian lieutenant governor of Texas posted on his website the morning of the Orlando shooting: a passage from Galatians: “They shall reap such as they sow.”
• Or the Baptist pastor in Sacramento who ranted that same Sunday morning, when the bodies in Orlando were not yet cold, that the gunman ought to have lined up everyone at that nightclub and shot them all, but having 50 of them dead was better than nothing.

Such hatred accounts for the alarmingly high suicide rate among gay teens, and that a large percentage of homeless youth in San Francisco are gay kids, some of them transgender, who were forced to flee from families that either disowned, abused, even threatened to kill them.

It’s because of such hatred that we have to march defiantly, and dance, and kiss our same-sex partners and friends right out in public -- a lot!

But this day is not just for us queers. This unconquerable desire to love and be loved may play out differently for us queers, but it's fundamental to every human being. It is placed deep inside every one of us by the One who made us. No one can take it away. It will always win.

In 1963, several years before Stonewall, a woman wrote to an attorney at the ACLU:

Dear Sir:
I am writing to you concerning a problem we have.
5 yrs. ago my husband and I were married here in the District of Columbia. We then returned to Va. to live. My husband is White, I am part negro, and part indian.
At the time we did not know there was a law in Va. against mixed marriages.
Therefore we were jailed and tried in a little town of Bowling Green.
We were to leave the state to make our home.
The problem is we are not allowed to visit our families. The judge said that if we enter the state in the next [25] yrs., that we will have to spend 1 yr. in jail.
We know we can’t live there, but we would like to go back once and awhile to visit our families and friends.
We have 3 children and cannot afford an attorney.
We wrote to the Attorney General [Robert Kennedy], he suggested that we get in touch with you for advice.
Please help us if you can. Hope to hear from you real soon.
Yours truly,
Mr. and Mrs. Richard Loving

The attorney she wrote that letter to accepted the case. Four years later Mildred Loving, who was Black, and her husband Richard, who was White, made history when their struggle led to the landmark Supreme Court ruling that overturned the ban on interracial marriage.

The couple, who shunned the spotlight, made it clear they never set out to be social revolutionaries. It was simple: they loved each other, wanted to marry, and beyond that, as Mrs. Loving said, “It was God’s work.”

In the end, love must trump everything else, but sometimes only after a struggle.

A man in today’s gospel declares his intent to follow Jesus. He speaks without any conditions: “I will follow you wherever you go.”

Wherever? Really?

At that particular moment, as a result of his own struggle to love, Jesus is on his way toward being executed as a criminal in Jerusalem. Has this man’s unbounded zeal taken that into consideration?

Love is a choice we make, a powerful decision, and, yes, it involves a struggle.

This year, the struggle takes on a new facet, as the queer community joins so many others in fighting for an end to gun violence.

The South African theologian, Alan Boesak, said, “When we go before Him, God will ask, "Where are your wounds?" And we will say, "I have no wounds." And God will ask, "But why? Was there nothing worth fighting for?”

In this morning’s gospel, Jesus says to a second man, “Follow me.” It is a call to love, and it demands an immediate and wholehearted response.

But the man does not immediately act on that call. Instead, he allows his duties as a son to take precedence. He decides to go back home and live under the command of his father until his father dies. Then, after he has buried his father -- sometime in the indefinite future -- his calendar will be cleared for following this call to love.

Jesus is blunt here: “Let the dead bury their own dead”. Loyalty to past commitments, even to the cultural scripts about good sonship, should no longer hold him. If he stays in these commitments, his heart will shrivel and he will have missed the whole point of his life, which is to love. He may end up burying his physically dead father, but he himself will have become spiritually dead.

So on it goes, this journey of love that involves hard choices, a struggle, a fight that requires our immediate and wholehearted attention.

The actor and writer of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, recently captured this so powerfully, and let me close with his words:

When senseless acts of tragedy remind us
That nothing here is promised, not one day
...history remembers
We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger
We rise and fall and light from dying embers
Remembrances that hope and love lasts long
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love
Cannot be killed or swept aside...
Now fill the world with music love and pride.