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Last Sunday, June 26, I preached at Trinity, my first time preaching on LGBT Pride Sunday. The lectionary texts I treated in the sermon were Romans 6.12-23 and Matthew 10.40-42.

Sisters and brothers, how good it is that we share this morning together, this Sunday when we celebrate LGBT Freedom. Most people usually know this Sunday as LGBT Pride Day or Gay Pride day, since this afternoon is the 36th Annual LGBT Pride march. But I deliberately called our church’s celebration LGBT Freedom Day, rather than Pride Day. Why? Because when it comes to LGBT people and pride in our church, to borrow words I heard Pastor Heidi use years ago, “yes, we are proud, and no, we are not proud.”

Yes, church, we – you and I and everyone in Trinity – are proud to boldly proclaim ourselves a Reconciling in Christ congregation. We are proud to say at the very beginning of our bulletin that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people are welcome here along with everyone else. I am proud, deeply proud, to be standing here as an openly gay man, preaching in an openly LGBT-inclusive church as we openly celebrate the gifts and struggles of LGBT people. And we are proud – and we rightly should be proud – that we strive to embrace the gifts and honor the struggles of all people who have been marginalized, oppressed, violated, and left behind in our society and our world.

Yes, church, we should be proud. And yet, church, no we cannot be completely proud. We cannot be completely proud when, in seven weeks, our national church will once again debate whether lesbian and gay marriages are worth blessing, and whether lesbian and gay people who are married are worthy of ordination. No, we cannot be proud that over 60% of our fellow ELCA members think the answer to both of these questions is “No, not now, not ever.” How can we be proud when, after decades of deliberation, our church is still not even considering how to include bisexual and transgender people in our life together in Christ. How many bishops and congregations, after all, are ready, willing, and able to support members who have sex changes, much less pastors?

No, church, we cannot be proud that most of the people who are pushing hardest for equal rights and equal protection for LGBT communities want nothing to do with Christianity, because it has caused, justified, and even at times sanctified the killing of LGBT people, just as it has sanctioned the killing of women, Jews, Muslims, African-American slaves, Latino immigrants, native peoples, Communists, wrongfully convicted death-row inmates, and, most recently in our history, detainees who were never afforded even the most basic rights of legal justice.

So, church, today pride is not enough. The best we can do is celebrate the freedom we as a congregation offer to LGBT people seeking refuge in a gay-bashing world, and remember the freedom we are fighting for for all people. That fight is a long, long fight, and it is hard enough just fighting for freedom among our fellow Christians. I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, at a meeting that Pastor, Joyce, Ilion, and I all went to. At this meeting were over 200 Christians of many denominations and traditions. Yet although the denominational diversity was very high, the theological and political diversity was not: a church like Trinity, and we members from it, were clearly in the minority.

Ilion and I were talking with some folks about our church’s programs when a woman came up with an important question she was burning to ask us. I had met this woman the day before, and I assumed that she would want to talk more about the joys and challenges of bringing together European, African, and Latino American members and traditions. But I was wrong. She looked quizzically at Ilion and me, and asked point-blank: “How do you deal with ‘the issue’ when the Bible clearly says that homosexuality is a sin?” And I’m pretty sure “the issue” did not mean whether we call it “Gay Pride” or “LGBT Freedom” Day, or whether the right order is GLBT, LGBT, BTLG, TLGB, and so forth.

For much of my life, I’ve dealt with questions like these, so I was ready to respond, without a hesitation and with a huge smile that has taken years of pain and fighting to summon: [smile] “We at Trinity are simply convinced that the Gospel calls us to welcome all people to full participation in the life of our church. We recognize others disagree with us, but we are certain this is what we must do.” But thank God for Ilion, who was right there to follow-up with stories about the almost thirty years of Trinity’s care for LGBT people. As long as people have been dying from AIDS, he explained, and almost as long as people have been marching in the Pride Parade, Trinity has welcomed, cared for, and supported them – in life no less than in dying.
I don’t think the woman was quite ready to hear all this; it was a bit overwhelming for her to realize that “the issue” about which she is so concerned is not an issue for Trinity and has not been for decades. She was worried about sin; our best and only response was our many, many stories. Sin and story – I think that is ultimately the difference between we who fully welcome LGBT people and our siblings in Christ who refuse to do so.

Sin and story is also a tension that runs through our lessons today. The second lesson, you heard, is all about sin and Paul’s understanding of it. Just a little before the section we read is a passage that many people cite to show that the Bible condemns lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. And at any rally of Christians who oppose equal rights for LGBT people, you are almost sure to see at least a sign or two that quotes today’s lesson – “For the Wages of Sin Is Death” – probably right next to a few that gleefully proclaim, “God Hates Fags.”

For many Christians, sin is the beginning and the end of whether and how churches ought to relate to LGBT people: “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it,” goes one popular slogan. So some read Paul’s letter to the Romans, which talks about men and woman who exchange “natural” sex for “unnatural sex,” that is, between people of the same gender: Paul writes that this is sinful, and well, you know what the wages of sin are.

Paul wrote it, we believe it, that settles it, see? Allegedly, the Bible is clear that all LGBT relationships, of any kind, are inherently and always sinful. Every argument in our churches – and many in our broader society – against equal rights for LGBT people comes down to this. For instance, LGBT relationships are sinful because they threaten the supposedly Christian one-man-one-woman ideal of “the family.” Or else LGBT relationships are sinful because they are purely driven by sex or lust or selfishness. And the one I find most disturbing is when some Christians see the disproportionate rates of depression, substance-abuse, and suicide among LGBT people – especially youth – and claim that these things are caused by the assumed sinfulness of the “homosexual lifestyle.”

To approach LGBT people from the perspective of sin is to begin with the answer – “It’s wrong and God condemns it” – and fit every question to it: “How ever do you deal with the issue when it’s clearly sinful?” But we, sisters and brothers, know that there’s a different way, the way of listening to stories, rather than looking for sin. As a Reconciling in Christ congregation, we at Trinity hear the Gospel calling us to listen for the stories of hurts and hopes that LGBT people carry with them, instead of looking to see the sinfulness that others put upon them. It’s the difference between questions that flow backward from answers we already know, and questions that flow forward to honest understanding and deeper relationship. That is what was so perfect in Ilion’s answer to that woman’s question: “How do we ‘deal with the issue’? I don’t know – but I do know lots of these real stories of real love and real freedom that we offer to all people at Trinity, and have for thirty years and for a hundred years.”

The longer I have to fight for recognition as an LGBT person in an LGBT-oppressive denomination, the more I see that telling the story – my own and others’ – is the only defense against the sin-approach. When we confront our fellow Christians doggedly hunting out sin wherever they can find it – and we must confront them – our only power and our best power is to tell the story of love, of freedom, of grace that appears where and how we least expect it.

When others start shouting about sin, we gently start telling the stories. Stories of finding acceptance after years of rejection. Stories of couples who can hold hands publicly for the first time. Stories of holding the hands of those who are dying of an illness so shamed by society that obituaries lie about the cause of death. And we keep telling these stories, but we also add the sad one, like stories of pain and fear that God actually hates us. Stories of feeling one’s body is evil, that what one feels in one’s body will lead one straight to hell.
The louder others shout about sin and threaten us with hell, the more vigorously we must re-tell the laughter, the tears, the hugs, the embraces, the bitterness, the beatings, the dyings, and the healings in our stories. And when we feel outnumbered and insignificant against all the folks shouting about sin, then we do the most radical thing our Gospel demands of us – we dare to invite others into the circle of storytelling, to hear their stories and to tell them ours.
We, here on 100th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, dare week after week, Sunday after Sunday, to ignore the shouts about sin and instead trust one another with our stories. And when we dare this, we follow the example of the source of our salvation, Jesus, whom we call the Christ. Jesus, gives us one command, “Love one another.” Jesus, who in our lesson from Matthew promises to be with us whenever we welcome one another. Jesus, who welcomed all those who were supposed to be sinners – prostitutes, polluted bodies, criminals. Jesus, who on the cross welcomed sinners into Paradise and begged to be welcomed by God as well.

It should be clear by now that I’m not talking about telling and listening for the stories only of LGBT people. I’m not just talking about my own coming-out story, or Kevin’s, or our story of coming to Trinity together as a couple. No, I’m talking about the stories of all people who have sought freedom for themselves or for others. For the Gospel of Jesus that calls us to lift up and honor the stories of LGBT people calls us to honor all people in struggles against oppression and injustice. That is why, in the space of one liturgical year, we mark LGBT Freedom alongside Sundays commemorating Juneteenth, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Martin Luther King, Earth Day, and many others. We are a Reconciling in Christ congregation most of all when we hear the many stories of the pursuit of justice together, no one drowning the others out. Listening to and telling each other these stories is the only power in this world that can reconcile us across the divisions of sin.

Some will hear this and think it’s a nice, unrealistic dream. Others will hear this and accuse us of going “soft on sin.” But a community based on trusting one another with our stories of liberation is combating the deepest forms of sin. Contrary to those who condemn LGBT people, sin is not simply something that exists in some individuals who make bad choices and commit evil acts. Sin is a web that traps all of us in systems of evil and oppression. Sin is the result of small choices each of us makes every day, choices that allow a small minority of people to live comfortably off of much, much more than their fair share of the Earth’s resources, and at the same time require a vast majority of people to try to survive on much, much less than their fair share.

Every one of us contributes to those systems – that’s what it means when Paul says “All have sinned.” And yes, the wages of such sin are death: the death of poor people, of people of color, of LGBT people, of people with inadequate health care, the death of children without clean water or necessary food, the death of minority communities and indigenous peoples, the death of rain forests and oceans and the Earth itself. We cannot afford to pay these wages, and we will die even trying.

Our churches have been preoccupied with excluding LGBT relationships based on love, when instead we should be confronting and transforming all relationships based on inequality and injustice. And the best way we can do that is to strain to hear and to honor all the stories of suffering and oppression that are ignored when Christians shout too loud about other people’s sins, especially right now LGBT people’s sins. Refusing to ignore those stories is the only way to begin honest relationships of justice and love, freeing us from the web of destructive relationships that is the reality of sin.

Sisters and brothers, on this day we lift up the stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people who have struggled and continue to struggle for freedom in love and through justice. We do this to affirm once more that we fight against sin by honoring the stories of all who struggle for justice. To share and cherish these stories with each other, week after week, is to be part of the greatest story ever told. It is the only way our congregation has survived all these years, and it is the only way we will survive in the future. More importantly, it is the only reason a church like ours needs to survive in the first place.