Sunday: 5th Sunday after Pentecost
Reading: Galatians 5:1,13-25
Preacher: Dan Puchalla

You have all been invited to join with your fellow parishioners and the SPR staff to march in the 41st Annual Chicago Pride parade this afternoon. This is the second time SPR will participate in the Pride Parade. Among those who went last year, a conversation started as to what our presence at that parade meant. On the one hand, marching in the Pride Parade seems an obvious act for a parish such as ours, where we quite boldly perform blessings of same-gender couples, where openly lesbian and gay clergy have ministered, and where moral aspersions against homosexuality are few and far between.

On the other hand ... have you ever seen a Pride Parade? There is flesh everywhere, writhing, swaying, thrusting; gender identity is smeared into a goopy mess; and everywhere the rawness of sexuality is on display up to the very limits of city ordinance (and sometimes slightly just beyond). It's a scene that feels far afield from the solemnity of a same-sex marriage ceremony. It doesn't seem to jive with notions like monogamy, emotional commitment, and symmetrical relationships - values that even gay-friendly churches such as ours still uphold. And it certainly seems at odds with Paul's message to the Galatians we read today - a message not to "gratify the desires of the flesh." What more obvious image of flesh-gratification is there than a dozen muscle-bound men in speedos gyrating around a befeathered drag queen for the crowd's pleasure?

Is, then, the Pride Parade a good place for The Church generally and for our parish specifically to live out the redeeming love of God in Jesus Christ? Can we as Christians support the spectacle of the Pride Parade?

Not only can we support this spectacle, but our Christian faith demands that we do.

In this, I do not preach against Paul, as so many have done; in this Paul is indeed my good companion, and nowhere more soundly than in his message today. "For you," he says, "were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another." Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence.

Let me tell you about self-indulgence. I knew I was gay before my first day of high school. I knew it like I know the sky is blue and that water is wet. Without a doubt in my mind of my sexuality, I nonetheless used my freedom during those high school days to get a girlfriend and build a heterosexual relationship because I wanted an easier, safer, normal life where my sexuality could remain obscured within the comfortable folds of the straight majority. You want to talk about self-indulgence? That was self-indulgence - and more so than any questionable spectacle at a Pride Parade could be.

I indulged my desire for normalcy and safety; I indulged my fear of being ostracized for something so important to my very being. I exchanged my freedom for a yoke of slavery, as Paul describes it, the slavery of my own will and the presumption that I could shape myself into anything I had a mind to be. And in this feeble attempt to gain control of my own sexuality, I used the yolk of my slavery to enslave another to my desires.

Because of my youthful foolishness, I know now that to remain in The Closet is a sin and a perversion; indeed, to remain closeted is a desire of the flesh. And, thanks to Paul, we know that the works of the flesh are obvious: "fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these." It's fornication to pursue sexual relationships based on false premises. It's licentiousness at its most basic to try to ply and shape one's sexuality into whatever one wants. It's idolatry to sacrifice the truth of who one is at the altar of conformity. It's sorcery to try to cure ourselves of our deviance. The fundamental dishonesty of The Closet can only bear the fruits of strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, and dissensions. The envy of those we consider to be normal can cause us to act out in harmful ways, with drunkenness and carousing. My friends, it is the flesh that desires to remain closeted, to remain comfortably enslaved to a law, protected from its own freedom.

By contrast, Coming Out of The Closet is a work of the Spirit. My high school girlfriend was the first person to whom I came out. I did not plan on it, and I can't even say I wanted to do it. But there just came one day when my shoulders could no longer bear the weight of the lie hanging over my neck. Coming Out for me was not a moment of self-actualization, or self-discovery, or anything like that. It was a moment of God's judgment. Weakened by the shackles of my own flesh, I truly believe it was the Spirit of God who propped me up in that most difficult of any conversation I've had, so that I might finally speak the truth: "I'm gay." It was that Spirit who shoved me out of The Closet and shut the door behind me.

In that moment, as I believe is always the case with sin, I was not freed from God's judgment; I was freed through God's judgment.

Yet even now I see in myself, in my gay friends, and in the gay community at-large the constant pull of The Closet. Most of us gays wouldn't and couldn't suddenly declare we're straight even in those moments when being Out gets scary, but there are always new Closets out there, new ways of conforming ourselves, of making our sexuality less scary to our neighbors and less scary to ourselves. This is why I, for one, am deeply concerned about the obsession of so many gays and lesbians and of so many gay-friendly straights with achieving legal status for so-called gay marriage.

Legal protections for domestic partners are one thing, but why must we also have marriage by name? I suspect that, for many, though certainly not for all, gay marriage is a very seductive Closet that will make all of us feel much better by normalizing homosexuality with heterosexual standards. Gay marriage can give us queers our normalcy and safety back, and it can give straights a much easier time explaining to their children why their classmate has two mommies. Everything will be much safer because everyone will be equal again.

I believe the Spirit of truth will have none of that, because that kind of equality is yet another self-indulgent desire of the flesh. We are not equal, at least not in the sense of being equivalent; we're different. We're strange, we're other, we're queer! And if we queers submit again to a yoke of slavery, we do an injustice to our neighbors by lying to them once again. And more than that, we miss an important opportunity to serve our straight sisters and brothers in a way only we can: to be living symbols of the queerness of their own sexuality.

You see, the Closet is not just for the gays. I daresay most of us are closeted. We have all submitted our sexuality to a yoke of slavery because in our sexual selves, perhaps more than in anything else, it is just too risky, too dangerous, and too difficult to live with the freedom for which Christ sets us free. And so it is not surprising that the Church through the millennia has failed so miserably to be guided by the Spirit in matters of sexuality, choosing to enslave all sexuality to an impossible norm of heterosexual marriage, or else, and more ideally, negating sexuality through religious vows. Neither marriage nor celibacy are instruments of slavery in themselves, but they have been and continue to be quite easily used to enslave our sexual, private selves under the dominion of our rationalized, public selves.

In sex, each partner lays bare his body for the delight of the other; experiencing himself through the other's experience of him, and thereby opens himself to be recreated by the other. In contrast to individualistic notions of self-sufficiency, the fullness of sexuality requires making my joy dependent on the joy of another. This is why there is so much potential in sex for embarrassment and rejection — as well as injury and abuse — both in the encounter itself and in the relationship subsequent to the encounter. There's no wondering why all of us seek The Closet, seek to isolate, to segregate, sexuality from the rest of human life by safely submitting our sexual selves to social norms.

But if Christians cannot live with the freedom for which Christ sets us free in our sexual selves, then perhaps we fail to live in Christian freedom at all. Paul says, "through love, become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" By faith we exchange our own comfortable yoke of slavery for the servanthood of Christ. This servanthood does not merely mean lending a helping hand to the Samaritan in the ditch, but indeed it means to open my entire self to the other as an object of his joy even as he likewise opens himself to me, and for us both to be mutually transformed by each other. This mutual transformation is impossible if I obscure the otherness, the queerness, of my partner, or if I refuse to see myself through the eyes of the other, to experience myself queerly. The giving of oneself as an object of joy and the possibility of mutual transformation is the freedom for which Christ sets us free. This is the pattern of human flourishing, of love divine and all-excelling.

As Rowan Williams once said before he was Archbishop of Canterbury, sex, in its fullness, "is an experience whose contours we can identify most clearly and hopefully if we have also learned or are learning about being the object of the causeless loving delight of God, being the object of God's love for God through incorporation into the community of God's Spirit and the taking-on of the identity of God's child." We can only love God and neighbor because God, through the grace of Jesus Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, loves us first. And the love of God is certainly the queerest of all loves: that the holy and eternal creator of the universe desires us and holds us as the apple of her eye; and that that love is not diminished by our sins. What is queerer that that?

To live in grace is to accept and experiences ourselves as the object of God's love and joy. But if we cannot accept that we are accepted, if we refuse to experience ourselves as the object of that queerly uncaused love and joy of God, we have fallen away from grace.

And thus our Christian faith demands that we march in the Pride Parade today, not to witness but to be witnessed to. The parade, though in many aspects an occasion for licentiousness and self-indulgence of a different sort, is in itself a great liturgy of Coming Out, of the Spirit throwing off the yoke of the Closet, and of us encountering the queerness of sexuality so that we might be open to the queerness of God's love. And maybe, just maybe, our church will one day have its own great Coming Out to this neighborhood, to this city, and to the world about the queer love God has shown to us.

May the Spirit so lead us today and until the end of the age. Amen.