Pride Sunday
Sermon, 2019
Rev. Ha Na
Park, Immanuel United Church, Winnipeg
When I was asked by our Worship Elder to share this Sunday about what the
Queer and Faithful conference experience was like last weekend, I was very glad.
The reflection on this conference is timely, as this is Pride Week in Winnipeg,
and some of us, including our own Danika and Sherri, are currently celebrating
the diversity of sexuality and gender identity and relationships at the Pride
Walk! I’ve been told that this will be their first participation, not only with
Immanuel but also in their lifetime.
Before sharing about the Queer and Faithful conference, let’s look at
the Gospel passage Sharon read for us this morning. It is not my special choice
for today’s Pride Sunday service; I am just following the Common Lectionary
which Christian mainline denominations and Roman Catholics follow world-wide. This
means that many Christians share the same sacred texts today. And today’s
reading is a remarkable passage that could be read as a text that urges radical
inclusion and affirmation. How? Through empathy, let’s try to imagine ourselves
as someone who, standing beside Jesus hears this prayer of Jesus. You are a
queer person or a person of transgender identity, a queer person of colour, and
Jesus, too, is a queer person. This could have been true: Jesus and their
disciples were not from here, born in an occupied country, being Jewish. So, a
person of colour. Even though they were members of an ethnic majority group in
their society, speaking in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, they were also people in
an oppressed land annexed by the Roman Empire.
Jesus prayed to his Righteous Father in Heaven, “The world does not know
you, but I know you… Because you loved me before the
foundation of the world.” Let’s ponder what this prayer means to us now:
the queer and faithful, of colour, of certain economic status, or some other
social status that has become a barrier against their full inclusion in
society. In their prayer, (explain about the pronoun “they”) Jesus talks about
the love God has for them that is not harmed, closeted, damaged, judged,
narrowed down by heteronormative and patriarchal expectations, rules and norms
of society - - indeed, “the foundation of the world.” Then, Jesus continues to
intercede for the radical inclusion for all people because of the love God has
for them. Jesus says, “I made your name known to my people, and I will make it
known to them, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them,
and I in them.”
Jesus is so confident, so courageous, so certain about the love God has
for each of them, including themselves, and it is their faith that God has the
same affirming love for everyone - every queer person, every trans person,
every queer and trans person of every colour and faith -. Jesus wants everyone
to know that they have, (inherently have), the expressed love of God
which affirms the whole self, every part of the individual. To me, “Queer and
Faithful” means, regardless of which faith tradition these people are
affiliated with, nothing can keep them in the closet forever, nothing can keep
them in pain and in the prison of themselves forever, in the intersection of
queerness and faith and religion, especially when faith helps them to claim the
worth of every part of themselves (who they love, what culture they come from,
what they believe, the faith they practice, the faith by which they are
supported emotionally and spiritually.)
One of our panelists (A Filipino Methodist Christian, non-binary
transsexual, who grew up with affirming aunts and mother. Their father is a
roman Catholic; they identify themselves with their mother’s faith in
Methodism) shared that their faith helped them truly affirm who they are and
supported them to grow confident in their self-worth and God’s love. It was so
inspiring to hear how confident they are about their identity because of their faith.
It is really up to the queer people of colour and faith to discern and
decide how they would place themselves in their relationship with religion and
faith, whether they would keep these elements and their childhood background,
or let go of them, separate them from their present identities, as they are
often in conflict and make their life harder. Some of our panelists shared that
even if they would hold them all as one, in order to belong to a community
centering on one aspect of their identity, they are pressured by their peers
and community members to be quiet about their other identities. For example,
one person said it is quite stressful to be fully Jewish and speak up against
antisemitism when she is in the LGBTQ community, because she would be told, “We
don’t want you to talk about it”, even when she has been selectively
associating with those whose identity aligns with hers. Most of her friendships
are queer friends and students. When queer people of faith decide to hold all
of these important identities as one, reconciled, united, inseparable and
indispensable, that’s a bold choice. Society, culture, dogmas, their own community
members’ fear of being challenged make queer people of faith feel that
they are alone, they have to hold their identities separate if they want to
belong. That shouldn’t be; we need to be together, be “one”, across identities and
boundaries, challenging our ignorance of the truth (in fact, multiple
truths) of others, standing on interfaith spirit and dialogue. In the world of
queer people, you can’t divide them across religions. You just can’t.
Interfaith connections are and should be the basis for how they can work
together for creating more affirming spaces in our society, communities and
religions. To define, to declare and to describe what that love is like,
especially the love God has given to Jesus is the Christian’s part of that
interfaith work. Can Jesus be the model for queer people of faith? I believe so!
Hear these words again: “Because you loved me before the foundation of the
world… So that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in
them.”
If you are interested in how Queer and Faithful got started and how I
became involved, I shared the details at CBC Manitoba and the Winnipeg Free
Press. (Google: enter Queer and Faithful + Winnipeg Free Press put together) Or
find the article following this link: (https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/faith/city-conference-seeks-to-highlight-faith-race-queerness-510107742.html)
Until the first day of the conference, May 25th, I really had no clue
who would comprise the majority of the participants, what stories we would hear
from each panelist, the MC and Moderator, what would turn out to be the major
theme emerging from the conversations and the shared stories. What would be the
gathered prophetic voices to challenge us and what would be identified as the
next steps for the future for the queer people of colour - - both those who
have faith and those who have left their faith (because as our
Saturday MC, Edmund (describe him) said, “because faith rejected us, we
rejected faith.”) These words from our MC, then, really made us think and ask, how
does faith work and how should it work? Because, in most communities of faith
in our world, faith is introduced with certain conditions and expectations, like
how a person should become a “man” or a “woman” of faith, or how they should
behave in the worship space. You may be welcomed at your black church, (White
churches too) – there’s an amazing welcome - and it feels so good, yet at the
same time you know that the welcome comes with a condition - - forsake your
sexuality. You find an affirming congregation, and you are so happy, but you
can’t find a clergy or community of people who represent your race,
skin-colour, culture, or your decolonizing journey. You already work in a white-dominant
organization and then, you have to deal with the same stuff - racial dominance
of the white members - in your faith community. You don’t want to spend your
Sunday like that.
During the conference, my friend Muhammad (describe him) sang a
song - he gave me permission to call it a hymn. I knew he had a beautiful
voice, but his chanting blew my mind. Then he said, once he became the
president of the Board of Pride Winnipeg, the media, carelessly, without
permission, circulated his picture all over, with the consequence that he is no
longer welcome by his Muslim community and their worship spaces. He used to
lead the congregation in singing, and he can’t any more. Even when he is in his
faith community, he could be rejected, with food itself being withheld. So he
thought, this Queer and Faithful conference could be his last chance to sing
his hymn in public, for a long time. Queer people of faith are so thirsty for
full inclusion.
Last but not least, the most devastating thing that I witnessed at the
conference was that when the world is so often rigidly programmed, with boxes
and binaries of yes or no answer sheets - EITHER/OR not BOTH/AND -, for
example, if you are queer, you can’t be faithful. If you are faithful, you
can’t be queer or you are banished to be queer. Queer people of faith have all sorts
of reasons to move themselves away from the toxic places of worship and
religions. You just need to care for yourselves first and be safe, emotionally,
spiritually, and physically. One of our panelists, a Sikh (and not just a Sikh; interfaith by having friends and neighbours of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh all around them growing up, also going to a Catholic school), revealed their
painful hurting experience with religion; it was so sadly obvious to hear that
it is the human contact, it is the community which destroys the soul regardless
of how old the individual is.
Losing faith in the Creator does not come from the Creator. It comes
from people who practice bad religion. It comes from humans. I just couldn’t
let go of what I heard, “Humans are disgusting.” Yet look at the creation.
Their friends were animals and plants for a long time, and they just began to
discover that the eyes of the Creator are good, the Creator is good. The
Creator does not make mistakes. Humans do. When losing faith in humans, many
lose faith in God. At the same time, another panelist who comes from a Hindi-Sikh
interfaith family and faith shared with us that (she studies religions at
University level as well) the official homepage of the world-wide Sikh
community affirms all sexualities and gender identities.
You’ve already got the idea that even if Queer and Faithful has been the
“brainchild” (quote) of Ha Na, the stories were so explosive, overwhelmingly
powerful and heartbreaking that it seems that we would need another
“conference” just for debriefing what we learned and what we shared. I
personally would need a full week of study leave to write down all the things I
heard and my own incomplete reflections that followed.
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