June 24, 2018 – LGBT Sunday: [Today we have as a guest preacher a member of our choir and vestry, Mark Richardson.  Mark is a psychotherapist at Beth Israel Medical Center (Newark), he also maintains a private practice in Montclair, NJ, focused on helping survivors of trauma. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Art, 1983) and Rutgers, New Brunswick (Social Work, 2012). Mark’s partner, Louis, is also a social worker.] 

Good morning! May God’s word only be spoken, and may God’s word only be heard.

First I’d like to thank Mother Diana for inviting me to speak today. My name is Mark Richardson, and I’ve been a member of this congregation for the past four years. And here’s something else you should know: I am absolutely petrified of public speaking, and this is my first time ever speaking in church. So as my heart races, and my hands shake, I’d like to share a few words with you in honor of LGBT Pride month. And if you have mixed feelings about homosexuality, if you agree with some issues but not others, or if you oppose gay rights entirely, I want to say: welcome. I will not doing any indoctrination today. These walls are strong enough to contain us, together, with our differences intact. I don’t speak for the entire LGBT community. My thoughts will be mine alone.

I was born in Columbus, Ohio, in the mid-1960s. I have two younger siblings. I attended public schools in Columbus throughout the 1970s and early 80s. I went to the University of Wisconsin—Go Badgers!—got a degree in art, and graduated in 1987. I’ve spent most of my adult life in the tri-state area: 12 years in Manhattan, and about as many in New Jersey.

I grew up in the suburbs. I fraternized mostly with other boys, but was not particularly athletic or concerned with winning, getting trophies or being a star. My father says he noticed, early on, a particular intensity to my friendships, and that I always had a single, male, best friend.

Then, in Elementary school, things got strange. The boys and girls in my classes had previously been satisfied to avoid one another, but by the fourth grade some boys were saying they liked certain girls, and by fifth grade they were “going with” girls. And there was growing pressure not only to feel this way, but also to talk about it. It made no sense to me. I had always been perfectly content with the other boys, and felt in no hurry to change things. And I couldn’t just manufacture this feeling out of thin air. I didn’t feel it.

When I expressed concern to my parents, they assured me that I, too, would soon like girls. I would want to hold their hands, “go with” them, and so on. I waited, anxiously, listening to my peers boast of their new affections. But for me the change never came.

No—quite the opposite. I was changing as fast as anyone. I was noticing boys even more than before, wanting to hold theirhands and be near them. I had always had an eye for good-looking male classmates, but now I was having crushes for them. I felt like I wanted a boyfriend.

Now, I was about eight years old, and I was a smart kid. And so I realized that I was gay, in Ohio, in 1973, without any help from Anderson Cooper, Ellen, Rachel Maddow, RuPaul, Tim Cook, or Neal Patrick Harris. Although—I think Elton John may have had some influence.

But what’s important to notice here is that I was not struggling with my sexuality. I knew who was beautiful to me, and what kind of person I liked to be around. That part was crystal clear. The struggle was with the world’s rigid ideas about sexuality, none of which matched my internal experience.

Now, I didn’t know this at the time, but things were already changing. It started four years earlier, and some 500 miles due East.

On a hot Saturday night in late June, 1969, the police had raided a tiny gay bar in Greenwich Village, called the Stonewall. Why did the police come on that night? They came to punish the people having a drink there: to punish them for being too masculine, too feminine, being dressed the wrong way, being different, and most of all, for being together.

But on this night the patrons of the Stonewall did something that the police had never seen homosexuals do before: FIGHT. When the police vans pulled up, and the reporters arrived, scuffles broke out, and neighbors and bystanders soon joined the fray. Cars were rocked. Shop windows shattered. Trash cans went up in flames. Parking meters and signs were uprooted. The rioting lasted, off and on, for three days. The LGBT community of Greenwich Village fought as if their lives depended on it, and won. Nothing would ever be the same.

Such an awakening is never only political. At a minimum it requires psychological growth. But in my view it is the result of something more profound.

Imagine a young LGBT person, growing up isolated, thinking she is the only one. She will be warned by experts notto trust her own heart. But if she is courageous and looks inward, and also looks into the faces and hearts of her LGBT peers, she may see something new. This is not just the realization she is attracted to other women, but the realization that this attraction has a place in creation, that she is beautiful and necessary, exactly as she is. Once she feelsthis, and knowsit, she will find herself standing on firmer spiritual ground. Like the patrons of the Stonewall, she will no longer drink society’s Kool-aid, or align herself with bullies, and she will also start to set appropriate limits, in order to protect what is sacred.

This is not pride in the boastful or arrogant sense. This is a quieter, deeper kind of pride that says, I know myself. I have been there. I am true, I am alive, and I know I belong.

The gay poet Allen Ginsburg, who always kept a finger on the spiritual pulse of America, was living on Christopher Street at the time of the riots, and noticed this change. He said, “The guys in front of the Stonewall were so beautiful. They had lost that wounded look.” And that’s what happens when someone trusts his own soul. The wound starts to heal, and the person starts to come back to life, and define his or her boundaries.

And soon, other people were losing their wounded look too. The next year, the riot became a block party and a small parade. And each year the parades sprang up in new cities: first in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. And today Pride is a global event.

I have talked about these two worlds—Greenwich Village in 1969; Columbus, Ohio in 1973—to bring us to a third, even stranger time: the present day.

In 2018, we are living in a country where same-sex marriage is a Constitutional right, and where the last two sitting U.S. presidents supported marriage equality while in office. Where same-sex couples can get married in mainstream denominations. Where LGBT Americans serve openly and with distinction in the U.S. military, in law enforcement, and the judiciary. Where LGBT Americans can get security clearances and work at the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the Congress, and the White House. Where 89% of Fortune 500 companies have policies against discrimination. And where even the Pope says he agrees with Lady Gaga, that we were born this way.

Now, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that everything is finished, because it isn’t. But this is an astonishing change, because as recently as 1995 none of these things were true.

How did this happen? I was a witness to, and participant in this history, and perhaps you were too. I’ll borrow a few words from today’s readings to help explain what I saw. It happened through great endurance, through afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments and riots. It happened through labors, sleepless nights and hunger. But most importantly, it happened through purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, genuine love and truthful speech.

It happened within the span of a single human life. Will it last? The world appears to have matured on LGBT issues, and the LGBT community has matured as well. Gay Liberation, as it was once called, was once the ultimate long shot. And this gives me hope for some other impossible, long-shot issues we worry about today. And I wonder what what we will be saying about them, 40 years from now.

There is much still to be done. For LGBT Americans, our relationships still get downgraded in the popular imagination, reduced to a behavior, a preference or a lifestyle.But the spiritual dimension of love and sexuality cannot be appropriated. Society cannot make a person fall in, or out, of love with someone, or control what is meaningfulor beautiful. These are forever beyond the reach of human hands. Love comes from somewhere else.

There’s a moment in the weekly service at this church each week when Mother Diana points to the Eucharist table and say says, “This is not our table to control. This is God’s table.” When I first started coming here that statement inspired me. It was like someone pulling out a chair and saying, take your seat, if you’re willing.

I believe that we degrade love, and love’s mystery, when we try to colonize another person’s soul, or dictate the contents of their heart. When we have the courage to admit that there are things beyond our reach, we stop trying to play God, and we start to grow up.

And this is why Stonewall was necessary: so that we could start to know ourselves again, and bring ourselves back to the table. Saying, in humility, “I know am a man,” or “I know am a woman.” And saying, truthfully, “I know I love men,” or “I know I love women,” or “I know I love both.”

The spirit of Stonewall is not to wait for approval to come from the outside. The spirit of Stonewall is to take that journey ourselves, all of us, straight and LGBT, on purpose. To know who we areby direct experience, to know our spirit, and to take our seat. The changes of the last 40 years happened because the LGBT community summoned the courage to speak truthfully, and because heterosexuals did something just as difficult: they listened.

And so today we celebrate, as a community, the feeling of spiritual maturity we have earned together, through love, riots and truthful speech. And in humility, we call it PRIDE.

Amen.

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Ezekiel 17:22-24
Psalm 92:1-4,11-14
2 Corinthians 5:6-10,[11-13],14-17
Mark 4:26-34