During Pride month, I’ve been talking about the relationship between Christianity and the LGBTQIA+ community. Thank you to all of you who joined the people of St. John’s Episcopal for worship at Waterfront Stadium this past Sunday to celebrate that final Sunday of Pride Month and all of God’s beloved children. My deep hope and prayer is that we will be able to do this event again next year and have more churches in the Tri-Cities join us.

In this final Christian Mythbusters episode for Pride Month, I have one final thing I’d like to talk to you about, something that often gets overlooked in discussions surrounding the place of LGBTQIA+ persons in the church: the gifts that the individuals of this community can bring to the church—indeed, the gifts that many of them already bring.

When meeting with one of the same-sex couples at my church back when they first joined, they shared some of their story with church in the past. It broke my heart. I then told them that not only would they be welcome here, but that I was excited to see the gifts I knew they would bring, how they would bless us. They expressed surprise at this response—because the best they’d ever gotten from the church was being tolerated. They’d never been celebrated.

In an essay called “The Body’s Grace” by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Archbishop Williams talks about the gifts that same-sex couples can bring to the church. He notes that for far too long the church has often treated sexual intimacy as only good when it is for procreation. The Roman Catholic Church today still treats the desire to procreate as an essential component of the sexual act between a married couple.

The problem with this view, from Archbishop William’s perspective is that it depends on a strained reading of the Biblical text. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, when the mother of the yet-to-be born prophet Samuel weeps because she doesn’t think she can have children, her husband responds by asking if he, as her husband, is not more than ten children. In the passionate Song of Solomon, both the partners in the relationship clearly delight in sexual intimacy using some pretty strong and descriptive language that doesn’t have a lot to do with making babies. In the New Testament, both Jesus and Paul talk about marriage and sexual intimacy, but neither uses procreation as the rational or functional justification. Indeed, Paul’s emphasis in both First Corinthians and in Ephesians is the partner willingly giving herself or himself to their beloved, that this is the richness of the sexual relationship.

Williams suggests that this giving yourself to the other, this mutual delight, could be described as “entering the body’s grace.” And then he then wonders if “we are afraid of facing the reality of same-sex love because it compels us to think through the processes of bodily desire and delight in their own right.” That is, Williams is suggesting that one of the gifts same-sex couples bring to the church is that they can help straight couples understand marriage and sex better… because their relationships as same-sex couples are not founded upon pro-creation in the same way, but instead on a mutual delight in the other.

I’d also suggest that the commitments I’ve witnessed in same-sex marriages can be instructive for straight marriages in the church. Many same-sex couples have faced significant adversity in their own lives and that has helped them build a rock-solid commitment and trust in one another—and I have a feeling they could teach straight couples how do to that better.

Many LGBTQIA+ people also know what it feels like to be rejected by your church, even by your own family. In response, they have built rich communities and friendships, places where the lack of blood relationship does not preclude deep commitment and trust. They can teach straight and cisgender people in the church who have experienced rejection from their own families or churches how to move forward, how to forge lasting relationships in other ways.

And it’s not only gay and lesbian individuals and couples who have wisdom and gifts to bring. Bisexual, queer, and questioning individuals can help us better understand that sexuality isn’t a black and white question, but that it is a spectrum of attraction that functions differently in each individual. Pansexual people love people for who they are, regardless of their gender, a truth that has its own richness. Asexual people find delight in many other places in life and lack the desire (even the sometimes obsession for sex) that others have.

And people with different gender identities, whether transgender or intersex, have much to teach us about the biology and spirituality of gender. They are often invisible, many times even violently pushed to the side or hidden from view, but they are also a part of God’s created order, worthy of love, celebration, and inclusion. They have much to teach cisgender people.

So, I’ll hope you’ll take these final days of pride month as an opportunity to learn, to make new friends, to grow in your own understanding of sexuality and gender identity. And I hope that churches that are not affirming will wrestle with these questions once more. Because let me just say, as the pastor of an affirming church, by not having LGBTQIA+ people publicly affirmed in your pews… Wow, you are missing out on some absolutely amazing and godly people in your own congregation.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

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