Three Meditations for Pride

West Hollywood Pride, 1979.

Meditations selected from my 1994 book, The Word Is Out.

This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to [God], throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance. 

Exodus 11:14

As Jews celebrate Passover in remembrance of their deliverance from Egypt, so we celebrate gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender pride month, week, and day, as a remembrance of our deliverance from spiritual and societal bondage.

A straight minister invited to deliver the sermon at a gay pride worship service approached me for advice. “I’ve always been taught that pride was a sin,” he said, perplexed.

I explained that I believe shame, not pride, is more of an issue for people today. False pride, or hubris, may itself be an expression of deeply felt shame, the need to puff oneself up because of low self-esteem. Current theories link shame to many of our personal and social ills. Then I told him that one cannot apply a concept of the sin of pride to a marginalized people like us who have always been taught that we should be ashamed of ourselves.

Isak Dinesen (nee Karen Blixen) wrote in her book Out of Africa, “Pride is faith in the idea that God had when [God] made us.” Lesbian and gay pride simply expresses “faith in the idea that God had when God made us.”

We celebrate our faith in your idea in making us, Creator God. 

We pray others will share our faith and our pride.

Atlanta Pride, 2005.

“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” Mark 11:9

What a day of pride! Yet a day of humility, too, for Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and was heralded by everyday people, not local officials or dignitaries. But it was a moment of kairos—a spiritual turning point. And it was so powerful that, as Jesus said to the religious fundamentalists objecting to the revelers, “If these were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19:40).

“Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” This is how I praised God for my first encounter with a gay Christian minister, Bill Johnson. This is how I praised God for my first encounter with a lesbian and gay Christian church, Metropolitan Community Churches [founded nine months before the Stonewall uprising]. This is how I praised God for my first Christian boyfriend, Stan Schobert. If I had not cried out with joy, church walls would have screamed!

That’s why the religious organizations get extra applause and shouts in lesbian and gay pride parades, so the pavement beneath them doesn’t bellow!

Hosanna! Blessed are all those who re-present you, God!

Atlanta Pride, 2009.

But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” 

Acts 16:28

Paul and Silas are beaten and jailed for delivering a young female slave from those who were exploiting her psychic powers. Midnight finds them praying and singing hymns to God, when an earthquake opens the prison doors and unfastens all the prisoners’ chains. The jailer awakes. Knowing the penalty is death for allowing an escape, he intends to take his own life. But Paul shouts, assuring him no one has escaped.

Paul’s generosity of spirit prompts the jailer to ask about the gospel, and he is converted, caring for their wounds and feeding them.

The chair of the committee guiding my preparation for ministry opposed my ordination because I was gay. Years later, on a visit to the church I served in a non-ordained capacity, he asked more about the gospel we proclaimed. His son had come out to him. In our dialogue that followed, I invited him to serve on the board of my ministry.

Our liberation is not complete until we free those who imprison us. Through prayer and singing, God will give us the grace to prove redemptive even to our captors, and proclaim the gospel of the integrity of spirituality and sexuality.

God of Mercy, we pray for the liberation of our captors rather than their harm. 

Grant us grace to be gracious.

The above meditations for June 25, 28, and 30 are from my 1994 book The Word is Out: The Bible Reclaimed for Lesbians and Gay Men, re-subtitled for the 1999 edition Daily Reflections on the Bible for Lesbians and Gay Men. Each month of the year-long daily devotional has a theme. The theme of June is Liberation.

Also see last week’s post: A Prayer Quartet for Pride

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Copyright © 1994 and 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Pride and Shame

I was one of two original grand marshals of the 

2009 Atlanta Pride parade. That's Wade in the front seat.

Along with others, Dean Lewis has been the longtime conscience and “better angel” of the Presbyterian Church on multiple social justice issues. He was on the staff of the Advisory Council on Church and Society of the former United Presbyterian Church under whose auspices the Task Force to Study Homosexuality (1976-1978) was formed and did our work. Knowing of my intern work for the Christian Association at the University of Pennsylvania with LGBT people on campus (1975-1976), I believe Dean was the one or among those who recommended me for the task force.

I served as its only openly gay member, appointed by the first African American woman to serve as General Assembly Moderator, the Rev. Dr. Thelma Adair, and Elder Jeanne Marshall, chair of the advisory council, who became a good friend and later advisor and board member of the Lazarus Project, a Los Angeles based ministry of reconciliation between the church and the LGBT community that I served as founding director.

In his birthday greeting to me last week, Dean reminded me that this year was the 40^th anniversary of the delivery of our task force report to the 1978 General Assembly meeting in San Diego, a report whose majority of 14 recommended that homosexuality not be considered a bar to ordination.

The minority report recommended the opposite, and the view of that minority of five held sway at the assembly, putting in place a ban on the ordination of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and, by inference, transgender candidates for professional ministry and lay leadership within the denomination that lasted nearly forty years, and lingers in the less inclusive presbyteries and congregations of the church to this day.

Tomorrow, October 11, is Coming Out Day, a day inviting LGBTQ people and our families, friends and allies to come out about our “faith in the idea that God had when God made” us, in the words of Isak Dinesen (nee Karen Blixen) in Out of Africa and her Immigrant’s Notebook.

Atlanta’s Pride festival and parade/march come this weekend, moved some years ago from the traditional observance on the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion the final weekend of June because of the Georgia drought that prompted concern about the lawns and grounds of its venue, Piedmont Park. Unique to Atlanta Pride, I believe, is that it has always been an invitation for all to express pride in our diversity, regardless of sexual orientation.

Sunday I was invited to encourage the community of Ormewood Church to attend both festival and parade/march in support as part of a year-long series on “Loving Our Neighbors.” The Sunday before, Ormewood Church had celebrated our first anniversary meeting together thanks to the leadership of many fine people, including organizing pastor, the Rev. Jenelle Holmes.

When the Task Force to Study Homosexuality announced its majority/minority divide on the ordination of LGBT people in the winter of 1978, many opposed to that ordination said that, if the task force had included more lay people, the vote would have been more clearly opposed.

But the minority of five who opposed ordination of LGBT people were all straight, white, older male clergy. The majority of fourteen who saw no reason to exclude LGBT people from ordination were lay and clergy, male and female, black and white, old and young, straight and gay. Diversity welcomed inclusion.

This is especially relevant as we face this week a U.S. Supreme Court which will be dominated by five straight white men.

During the hearings on the nominee for Supreme Court justice, my spouse Wade expressed his continuing dismay that the Senate is mostly old white men. “We need a Congress that is as diverse as the American people,” he said. Amen to that!

I recently lost as a Facebook friend one of my best friends from high school when he questioned “identity politics” and I responded politely that “identity politics” has always been with us: as long as you were a straight, white male, you were welcomed into the power structures of government, business, military, and church.

I wrote in my first book, Uncommon Calling, that it was the Rev. Dr. Thelma Adair who gave me a helpful perspective on the LGBT movement as we waited in line for “The Women’s Breakfast” at the San Diego General Assembly. She said simply, “When I first started coming to General Assemblies, we [African Americans] were not allowed to stay in the same hotels with white delegates. We had to stay in private homes far from the venue.”

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God Is Bigger than Yours (and Mine)

Please join me for “The Passion: In Arts, Texts, and Music: A Contemplative Retreat for Lent,” 9 a.m. – 12 p.m., Saturday, March 8, 2014 at Columbia Theological Seminary. 

Reading “The Archaeology of the Stars” about Population I, II, and III stars in the Science Times of the February 11, 2014 edition of The New York Times, I realized again how tiny are our imaginations when it comes to God.

The tribal*, nationalist, and creationist gods are the tiniest of all. To think of God favoring a tribe or a nation, or to insist that earth is a mere 6000 years old, is a sign of hubris and ignorance that actually “disses” God—in Anglo terms, disrespects and dismisses God.

The movement gods are closer to recognizing the reality, I believe, whether that of the Jesus movement, for instance, or the gods of the ecumenical, interfaith, progressive, New Thought or New Age movements, to name a few examples. But these gods too can be trapped when enshrined in inflexible doctrines and institutions, domesticated like a pet to respond to our expectations.

The god of nature, of the environment, of the cosmos at least de-centers our anthropomorphic way of limiting God. The agnostic god recognizes our inability to imagine God adequately, while the god of atheism too often is a mirror reflection of a god rightly resisted. These three options, despite their alleged disbelief, seem preferable to a god that is nothing more than a tribal, national, fundamentalist, or movement pet.

As a participant in the Jesus movement, as much as I love Jesus—what he taught and how he lived and the life he still gives me—I have needed to move beyond the claim that he is the only child of God.

Rather, I have come to believe that he and many who followed him remind us that ALL are children of God, including the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and that we are each to have, in author Karen Blixen’s words, “faith in the idea that God had when God made us.” To paraphrase the sage Rabbi Zusya** in my own faith context: in the life to come, they will not ask me why I was not Christ, but, “Why was I not Chris?”

And further, why didn’t I recognize that my god is not God? 

*I intend that “tribal” includes any group that thinks only their group knows God.

**Rabbi Zusya famously said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ but ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

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Related post:

Knowing Your Place

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