Linked by Love: Sermon for Worcester Pride
This sermon was preached at the 3rd annual Rainbow Worship Service at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church - this is a special service hosted in partnership with the Worcester Pride festivities in early September. This year’s theme was “Linked by Love,” focusing on queer interdependence and solidarity. The gospel readings were Job 2:11-13, 1 John 4:16b-21, and John 11:1-16, 30-44.
You know those mugs you can get– where the picture on the outside changes after you pour the hot liquid inside? Under the right conditions, the punchline to a joke is revealed, or the drawing of an animal is suddenly wearing an amusing hat of some kind. My bisexuality is kind of like that. It’s not hidden, but if you don’t know that you’re supposed to be looking for it, you might miss it.
I don’t necessarily have time to get into the nuances of femme invisibility, but I explain this in the hopes that you all understand why it’s fairly common for me to ask a friend if my outfit is gay enough, to surreptitiously stand closer to my more visibly queer fiancee if we think that the cool barista taking our order might also be trans. In the past decade or so that I’ve been out, I’ve noticed that other LGBTQ folks tend to see me for who I am, even if others don’t look twice. They’re the ones who know to add hot cocoa to the color-changing mug, if you will.
I’ve experimented with changing the way I present in the hopes that my identity will be more apparent– I’ve cut my hair and worn more beanies and rocked a shirt and tie to a formal event. But I want to feel like myself while I’m still seen as myself. I want to be linked to my community without having to prove the strength of that linkage. Like all of us, I want to be seen clearly.
And it is kind of magical that queer and trans people are so often able to find each other in unlikely places, that we draw together in friendship and solidarity without necessarily needing to acknowledge why we’re doing it. We have a long history of knowing how to look for each other, and look out for each other– unfortunately, this process was honed in the days when secrecy was an absolute necessity, but it still serves as a testament to queer resilience, to our ability to connect despite any forces that try to convince us we’re alone. We can see one another, sometimes even before we can name what it is we’re picking up on. We understand a bond exists, whether or not we can quite name why.
I think a lot about one particular scene in the TV adaptation of the Heartstopper graphic novel series. The main characters, Charlie and Nick, are about sixteen or seventeen, and still keeping their relationship a secret in its early days. While on a school trip to Paris, they walk past a gay couple– just two adult men, walking down the street talking and holding hands, no big deal. But when the two teenage boys see them, look at one another, and decide to hold hands too, I always have this funny feeling like I might start to cry.
That’s why I care about whether or not my sneakers have Pride flags beaded onto their laces, or why I’ve resolved to casually mention “my wife” as often as possible once we’re married. Because there might be someone else out there that needs to know that I can see them. There might be someone out there who needs to know that we are linked.
Whether you’re part of the LGBTQ community or not, you know what it means to recognize a kindred spirit. You know that spark inside you that says, me too! You know that funny ache that wonders, like the famous line in the musical Fun Home, “do you feel my heart saying hi?”
It feels like friendship and belonging. It feels like being understood without having to explain everything. And sometimes, it even feels a little bit terrifying, because when we acknowledge that we’re linked to something or someone beyond ourselves, we also acknowledge we have a responsibility to care about that thing. We acknowledge that we can get hurt if that someone or something is hurt, or if it gets taken away from us. The link makes us vulnerable, just as it makes us strong.
The Scripture passages for today put that interplay on display– the way human relationships make us stronger and braver, just as they make us more vulnerable to loss. Love makes our burdens lighter, but with it we carry a different weight of responsibility towards each other.
In the passage from Job, we see an example of the most excruciating responsibility we have to our friends: to sit in grief and pain with them, to mourn when they are mourning and to wrestle with our own inability to take away that hurt. Through the love they have for him, Job’s friends are linked to his tragedy. And I wonder if there were times in those seven days, sitting in silence and dust and ripped robes, that they wondered whether it might have been easier to separate themselves from him, if it might have been better not to be tied to his misfortune. To be linked in love means to be linked in loss and heartbreak too.
And in the words from 1 John, we hear that to be linked in love means to be linked in accountability– sometimes to be linked to people we did not choose and would rather be rid of. Whether they are biological siblings, chosen family, or community members by proximity and chance, our adoption into the family of God means that we are given a responsibility to our siblings in Christ: to see the Spirit’s presence within them, no matter how annoying or aggravating or strange they may seem to us. And though God does not require us to love every person in the same way– we can and should maintain boundaries with those who harm us– we can never fully separate ourselves from the mess of human flaws and failings. After all, it is into the midst of that mess that God makes God’s presence known.
The story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is one where God enters into the heartbreak and heroics of human relationships. Jesus takes on a body that can eat and drink, that can grow weary, that can walk and dance and embrace, that can laugh and cry. We see Jesus trying to juggle his teaching and preaching, the many people who seek his presence, with the needs of his close, intimate friends. We see the humanity of those friends– their fear that religious authorities may persecute him, their confusion about whether Lazarus is dead or asleep, their overwhelming grief that leads Thomas to proclaim that he wishes to die too.
Mostly, we see Jesus feeling his feelings– feeling our feelings. We hear that he wept, that he was greatly disturbed, that he was moved by the grief of his friends. This story is proof of God’s empathy for us– God’s closeness to us in our scariest and saddest moments. We are linked with Christ in a love so powerful that our loss is his loss, and his triumph over that loss is ours too.
To me, this is the truth that brings me back to this story again and again: that Jesus is proof of the part we play in God’s unfolding story. That Jesus’ humanity is proof of our beloved and beautiful humanity, even in its brokenness. And Jesus’ life among us is proof that God’s grace is eternal belonging, and we are never alone.
No matter who we are or who we have been, we look for a way to be seen, to be understood and connected in the fullness of ourselves. It’s why we look for ourselves and our loved ones in stories of the past, in sacred texts and ancient traditions. It’s why LGBTQ folks worry about queer representation in the media, why we mentor one another and signal our queerness in ways both big and small. We want to know that we are not impossible to understand– or impossible to love. We want to know how we are linked.
God answers, over and over, with such abundant and unstoppable love that it looks death in the face and still rises again. When Jesus says of Lazarus, “unbind him, and let him go,” he speaks for all of us. We are connected by a love that liberates us. How perfectly paradoxical and miraculous it is, then– that we are truly set free only when we know who and whose we are, when we know the sacred love in which we are forever linked.
