The Audacity to be Proud
[Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15]

edited from a sermon preached for Pride Sunday, June 3, 2007
at Pine United Methodist Church, San Francisco, CA

by Rev. Elizabeth Leung

I am very honored to be worshipping God with you all today.  Pine United Methodist Church has been a leader among Asian American churches in the nation in welcoming lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) folks to full participation in the life of the church.  I praise God for your continuous commitment to be a Reconciling congregation since 1994.  It is so important to let LGBT people know explicitly that Pine would be a safe space to worship and serve, for folks have heard so many horror stories of Asian American churches being less than a sanctuary for LGBTs. 

If only all progressive Asian American churches would choose to make that commitment, in order to resist the injustice and the violence of blatant homophobia in our society.   If only all progressive folks, together with LGBT folks, would continue to learn and become even more aware of the unexamined and internalized homophobia among ourselves.  To LGBT folks here today, for one Sunday in a year, you are put on the spot, so that ALL can give thanks for the numerous ways God’s grace has sustained us in our living and being, as well as in the midst of our losses in the past year.

Let me begin by paraphrasing Romans 5 as prayer.  Let us pray.  O God, we give you thanks for you have justified us by faith.  We have peace with you through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we now stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing in your glory.  And not only that, may you honor our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because your love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. Amen.

Gay Pride Sunday.  I do not know how many years ago it was when I first heard the words and associated those words with all the flamboyant images one can usually find at the Pride Parade.  For me, to be explicitly proud of oneself is so contrary to the way I was raised.  My mother taught me to be always humble.  “Keep your eyes and ears open and learn.  Keep your mouth shout about yourself and your opinion.”  Or, “other people’s praises are cheap words, so do not take it to heart.”  One of the effects of such family education is, as an adult, I took a long long time to learn to readily give genuine compliments, and to feel okay in receiving them. Growing up Catholic does not help very much either.  The sin of pride is the first on the list of the seven deadly sins.  According to the Catholic dictionary of spirituality, the sin of pride is marked by a self-aggrandizement that clouds not only God’s sovereignty and others’ worth but also an appreciation of one’s true self.  Distinct from healthy self-esteem and from a justifiable pride in one’s own God-given talents and achievements, the sin of pride often involves disregard or contempt for ideas and judgments other than one’s own.  A chief aspect of pride is vainglory, which comprises the inordinate effort to show one’s own excellence and the insatiable need for approval.  It is a strong force for self-deception.

But that is NOT the pride we are talking about today.  No indeed.  When it comes to being LGBT, I would venture to say that many feel the need to be proud of their sexuality, exactly because of the chronic shame surrounding it.  Early on in social upbringing, LGBT folks learn to feel shame about their sexuality in a way that is different from other people.  When you found out that you are not attracted to the opposite sex, as most people do, you realize that you are not only different but you are in the minority, and, you may also be ridiculed or attacked.  Some keep it to themselves because they do not want to be exposed.  Some are made to keep it to themselves because their family do not want to be exposed.  People in the church know about it, but does not want to talk about it. 

However, suppressed shame does not remain silent.  As James and Evelyn Whitehead said in Shadows of the Heart: a Spirituality of Painful Emotions, when shame is hidden, it recruits other emotions to speak for it.  Such as anxiety.  A person may feel constantly afraid.  In another person, shame recruits the emotion of anger.   In still another, shame speaks through compulsive achievements.  Shame is not individual but familial.  When one member of the extended family is hurt by silence and anxiety, how can the rest of the family continue in denial and say, “Please continue to sacrifice for us, so that no shame will be brought to the family”?  When a member of the body of Christ is suffering from secrecy and anger, how can the rest live in inauthenticity and say, “Suffering is good for you, because this is the order of biblical worldview and theological authority as we know it” ?

Jesus said to his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you … when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truths.”  The Spirit of Jesus has guided his disciples into understanding the truth that his glory resides in his death by execution and his resurrection.  This same Spirit of truth continues to lead the church to understand what it means to believe in Jesus Christ, that is, what it means to be a disciple and to live according to Gospel values of justice and compassion.  Even as it comes to matters of biblical interpretation. 

The LGBTQ bible study group here at Pine UMC has been studying the “clobber” passages.  “Clobber” passages are scriptures that are used to beat LGBT folks over the head, so to speak.  They are used, or abused, to torture the psyche and bruise the spirit of LGBT folks, all in the good name of biblical authority.  In the past 50 years or so, the so-called “objective” biblical interpretation of these passages, which has been declared with such certainty in the past centuries, has been shown to operate from the privileged position of heterosexist worldview.  Of course, not all heterosexuals are heterosexists, but only those who consider their sexual orientation and behavior to be the exclusive cultural norm.  These heterosexists continue to claim that the selected biblical passages transcend their cultural contexts and condemn homosexuality universally. 

For those of us who grounded our faith in Jesus Christ and seek to live out Gospel values, we prefer to read scriptures through the lens of justice, peace and compassion of Jesus.  In the words of the reading from Proverbs you heard earlier, the Wisdom of God is crying out to all in our times to speak to the injustices of our majority culture.  Does that mean that the wisdom of God is limited by cultural circumstances?  Jesus Christ is the Word of God coming to us in the flesh of a Jew in the Roman colony of first century Palestine.  The Scriptures are the words of God coming to us in the “flesh” of ancient Hebrew and ancient Greco-Roman cultures.  Such are the wisdom and logic of God.  In the classical devotional, My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers, he said, “the spiritual life is the life of a child. We are not uncertain of God, just uncertain of what God is going to do next.  If our certainly is only in our beliefs, we develop a sense of self-righteousness, become overly critical, and are limited by the view that our beliefs are complete and settled.”  The Spirit of the risen Jesus continues to teach us to read and to understand the Scriptures through the “flesh” of our cultural contexts today.     

Meanwhile, LGBT folks do not wait for the dust of biblical debate to settle before coming out to live in faith in God.  The Spirit of Jesus has also witnessed in the hearts of LGBT Christians.  We realize that we indeed have peace with God through Christ.  We can stand in this grace and BOAST in our hope of sharing the glory of God.  But even more basic, that is, more radical, the Spirit has witnessed in the hearts of many LGBT of whatever spirituality the truth that - we are all created in the image of God, just like the rest of humanity.  From this truth comes the audacity to be proud.  Because God is love, and the truth that we are created in the image of God means that love is the reason for our existence. Others may tolerate your existence and continue with their talk of love the sinner and hate the sin.  But let us NOT sin, that is, missing the target of the will of God’s love for us. 

Let us practice this truth of our created existence before God – with the audacity to be proud.  Proud of ourselves because of God’s grace of creation.  Proud of our sexuality before God.  For the Holy One who created our sexuality is the divine source of our pride.  This truth is the healing of of shame for us, so that we can begin to truly appreciate our divine self that is in God.  We are delivered from a desperate need to please others.  We are delivered from the other addictions that had covered up and numbed the pain that had no name.  Shame can become healthy self-awareness again.  We can be free to return to ourselves: real,  limited, fragile.  Truly human. 

We can boast in our sufferings, not as victims agreeing with those who oppressed us, but as witness to the injustice inflicted upon us.  As we endure the losses, betrayal and rejection that accompany our lives because we seek to live the truth, we trust that God is the one who will not forget.  May such endurance in turn produce compassion rather than bitterness in our lives, so that we too can have compassion for other oppressed people, and thereby enable to live the full purpose of God’s love for all through the Holy Spirit.  And such are the practices of our spirituality: the audacity to be proud, the healing of shame, the freedom to be real, the remembrance of losses, and the insistence on compassion.  Truly human. Truly divine.