Ezekiel 16:49-50 CEB

49 This is the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were proud, had plenty to eat, and enjoyed peace and prosperity; but she didn’t help the poor and the needy. 50 They became haughty and did detestable things in front of me, and I turned away from them as soon as I saw it.

Genesis 18:20-32 CEB

20 Then the Lord said, “The cries of injustice from Sodom and Gomorrah are countless, and their sin is very serious! 21 I will go down now to examine the cries of injustice that have reached me. Have they really done all this? If not, I want to know.”

22 The men turned away and walked toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing in front of the Lord. 23 Abraham approached and said, “Will you really sweep away the innocent with the guilty? 24 What if there are fifty innocent people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not save the place for the sake of the fifty innocent people in it? 25 It’s not like you to do this, killing the innocent with the guilty as if there were no difference. It’s not like you! Will the judge of all the earth not act justly?”

26 The Lord said, “If I find fifty innocent people in the city of Sodom, I will save it because of them.”

27 Abraham responded, “Since I’ve already decided to speak with my Lord, even though I’m just soil and ash, 28 what if there are five fewer innocent people than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city over just five?”

The Lord said, “If I find forty-five there, I won’t destroy it.”

29 Once again Abraham spoke, “What if forty are there?”

The Lord said, “For the sake of forty, I will do nothing.”

30 He said, “Don’t be angry with me, my Lord, but let me speak. What if thirty are there?”

The Lord said, “I won’t do it if I find thirty there.”

31 Abraham said, “Since I’ve already decided to speak with my Lord, what if twenty are there?”

The Lord said, “I won’t do it, for the sake of twenty.”

32 Abraham said, “Don’t be angry with me, my Lord, but let me speak just once more. What if there are ten?”

Luke 11:5-10 CEB

”5 He also said to them, “Imagine that one of you has a friend and you go to that friend in the middle of the night. Imagine saying, ‘Friend, loan me three loaves of bread 6 because a friend of mine on a journey has arrived and I have nothing to set before him.’ 7 Imagine further that he answers from within the house, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up to give you anything.’ 8 I assure you, even if he wouldn’t get up and help because of his friendship, he will get up and give his friend whatever he needs because of his friend’s brashness. 9 And I tell you: Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. 10 Everyone who asks, receives. Whoever seeks, finds. To everyone who knocks, the door is opened.

What I want to talk about today is persistence in the face of injustice, but because of how the story of Sodom and Gomorrah has been misused to villanize and criminalize gay men, I’ve got to address that injustice first.

You’re going to need the scripture, so keep your bulletins handy!

I chose to have us start with the Ezekiel scripture because Ezekiel, who was a Levite – that is, a person of the Priestly family, as well as a prophet, offers us the definitive interpretation of the story of Sodom and Gamorrah, as a message from God, written down as the duty of a prophet.

The English word, sodomy, is wrongly derived from this story, because at one point the people of Sodom and Gamorrah, threatened to rape Lot’s male guests.  Threatening rape, is bad.  Period.  The gender of the victim is not the important part here!  And gay marriage and consentual gay sex are not the same thing as rape!

Also, rape was not the only sin, for which God was planning to punish the Twin Cities.  Look at that Ezekial passage:

• They were proud in the bad way.
• They had plenty to eat, and enjoyed peace and prosperity; but didn’t help the poor and the needy.  
• They became haughty and did detestable things in front of God, and God turned away from them as soon as God saw it.

When you read the story of Sodom and Gamorrah, please read it in light of Ezekiel’s prophetic interpretation.  This story has NOTHING to do with condemning Gay love.  Nothing!

Having addressed that particular injustice, let’s move on to the topic of persistence.

I read a hopeful post on facebook the other day, insisting that the average dictatorship only lasts 3-5 years, but like so much that is posted on social media this little snippet of hope, was not exactly true.  Like so many things in life, the truth is much more nuanced.

What I was hoping for, was some clear, historically vetted timeline, to give me hope that it will only be a little longer before this season of ICE raids, defunding medical care for the most vulnerable, and Christo-facism defaming the name of God by praying over actions that Ezekiel would call detestable, will soon be over.

I cry out to God like a Psalmist, How Long, Oh God!

How Long, Oh God!

Will the taxes of the middle class be given to Billionaires while they raise the cost of living and pay their workers starvation wages?

How Long, Oh God?

Do you not hear the cries of hungry children?

Do you not see the sleepless nights of gay couples who wonder if they will still be legally married in the morning?

Do you not hear the cries of the asylum seekers snatched as they showed up for court?

How Long, Oh God!

Are you not a God of Justice anymore?

Will you let our entire country suffer for the sins of the 1%??!

OK, maybe more than 1% of us have supported these detestable actions.

Will you let the whole country suffer for the sins of 30% of the US?

What if only 50% of us are innocent?

What if only the children are innocent?

Abraham argued for the lives of the innocent minority in Sodom and Gamorrah because Lot was family.

Maybe Lot wasn’t the most innocent person, because, later in the story, Lot offers the crowd his daughters to assault in place of the guests, but Lot was family.

Have you ever had a relative like that?

Maybe they’re not smart.  

Maybe they don’t make the best choices.

Maybe you can’t agree with their values or their politics.

But they’re family, so you don’t want them to suffer.

Not even suffer the consequences of their own actions.

So Abraham, having heard that his nephew of questionable values and choices, is in the path of God’s wrath, is persistent in bargaining with God.

Now, personally, I think that Abraham questioning Lot’s life choices is pretty much the pot calling the kettle black.  After all,  Abraham was willing to pimp out his wife Sarah to protect himself, even after God demonstrated God’s protection.  Abraham kicked out his firstborn son, Ishmael and his baby-momma Hagar, straight into the desert to die with no child support or anything.  And Abraham got it into his head that God wanted him to sacrifice his second son, Issac… probably because sacrificing your children was a common religious practice in the area at the time, and God had to put a stop to that child-sacrificing nonsense by tangling a ram into a nearby bush, which is generally agreed on as the beginning of animal sacrifice as a replacement for child sacrifice – one of the greatest religious innovations of the time.

All of that is to say that, Abraham was no angel, because sometimes we think that we need to be worthy to pray.  

That we need to be extra holy to dare to question God, like Abraham or the Psalmists.  That it’s somehow dangerous for us to ask, How Long, Oh God? Because that is questioning God.

But persistence is Biblical.

Persistence is Biblical.

And not just Hebrew Bible Biblical.

Although, those who try to claim that the New Testament is somehow more valid than the Old Testament are ignoring the fact that Jesus himself said, in Matthew 5:17,  that he did not come to abolish Torah, but to fulfill it.

Jesus often referenced these Biblical concepts in new ways.

I’m going to have our Worship Leader come up here and read/

5 He also said to them, “Imagine that one of you has a friend and you go to that friend in the middle of the night. Imagine saying, ‘Friend, loan me three loaves of bread 6 because a friend of mine on a journey has arrived and I have nothing to set before him.’ 7 Imagine further that he answers from within the house, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up to give you anything.’ 8 I assure you, even if he wouldn’t get up and help because of his friendship, he will get up and give his friend whatever he needs because of his friend’s brashness. 9 And I tell you: Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. 10 Everyone who asks, receives. Whoever seeks, finds. To everyone who knocks, the door is opened.

This passage comes right after Luke’s version of Jesus teaching the disciples how to pray – what we often call, The Lord’s Prayer.  So the topic is prayer.  

Jesus is telling them, telling us, to imagine that God is like a friend who has the means to help us with whatever unexpected visitor life has brought us, but might not feel like helping us in the moment.  

But because we kept asking…  

Because we kept praying…

God answered.

And as with so many things that Jesus taught, they apply on both a spiritual and an earthly level.

Yes, we must keep knocking on heaven’s door and asking for God’s reign to come and God’s will to be done here on earth as it is in heaven.

And, we must be persistent in accepting the freedom and power that God has given us to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves, as it says in our Baptismal Vows on page 35 of the hymnal.

Friends, one of the healthcare providers who donates his time at the free clinic that Rahab’s Sisters is doing a pilot program with this summer didn’t show up last week, because he was detained by ICE while dropping his child off at care.

They have asked us to pray.

So every Sunday, from now on, we will be praying Micah 6:8 – for our leaders to do Justice, act with Mercy and walk Humbly with God, and I ask you to join me in persistently praying throughout the week.

And we are also called to leverage whatever freedom, power, or privilege, we might have, to resist the evil, injustice and oppression that presents itself in our city, our country and our world.  

This can look like a lot of things. 

From being persistent in emailing your legislators.

To more direct actions such as protest, and boycotts.

I can’t tell you how long these evil times will last, but I can tell you that they will not last forever.

God will eventually inspire enough people and change enough hearts, to change the course of history.

Until then, we will persist in prayer and action.

We will persist in hope.

Matthew 11:28-30; 12:1-8  CEB

28 “Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest. 29 Put on my yoke, and learn from me. I’m gentle and humble. And you will find rest for yourselves. 30 My yoke is easy to bear, and my burden is light.”

1 At that time Jesus went through the wheat fields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry so they were picking heads of wheat and eating them. 2 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are breaking the Sabbath law.”

3 But he said to them, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and those with him were hungry? 4 He went into God’s house and broke the law by eating the bread of the presence, which only the priests were allowed to eat. 5 Or haven’t you read in the Law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple treat the Sabbath as any other day and are still innocent? 6 But I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. 7 If you had known what this means, I want mercy and not sacrifice, you wouldn’t have condemned the innocent. 8 The Human One is Lord of the Sabbath.”

Happy Portland Pride Church!

I love Portland Pride.

I love that so many people take public transit to watch the parade and attend the Pride Festival.

I love that so many different people show up, from Farmers to Drag Queens, to Bankers, showing the world that being LGBTQIA+ isn’t a just kinky lifestyle, it’s just life.

Every day, Queer folks: get up, go to work, pay their bills, kiss their spouses, pick their kids up from school, watch sports, go to the theater, pay taxes, and live with the existential dread that some politician on his or her 4th marriage will make same gender marriage illegal.

Or they wonder if the gender affirming healthcare that makes their life worth living will still be available and legal next time they turn on the news.  Or if their next doctor or dentist will treat them with basic courtesy.  Or will insist on mis-gendering and deadnaming them, “because we don’t do different names or pronouns here,” as the dentist’s office said to my foster young adult, who is Trans.  That happened here in Portland.  2 years ago.  It took us 2 more dentist’s offices to find one that would treat Them with the basic courtesy of using their correct name.

Sometimes people wonder why Pride?

Why call it pride?

Why celebrate who people love and how they identify?

Why Pride?

Because the opposite of pride is shame.  LGBTQIA+ folks have historically been shamed just for existing.  Shamed for just being who God made them to be.  

Sometimes people were shamed to death – brutally murdered, like Matthew Shepherd, or gunned down at the Pulse nightclub.  Murdered by the shame of angry young men who could not handle gay people existing.

During the first Trump administration, between 2017 and 2021, murders of Trans people nearly doubled, and while only 13% of the trans community is Black, Black Trans women accounted for nearly ¾’s of the known victims.

“In 2019, the American Medical Association recognized “an epidemic of violence against the transgender community,” who are over 2.5 times more likely than cisgender people — those whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were designated at birth — to experience violence, according to the Everytown report. 

Shame also causes suicide.  

“According to the National Center for Transgender Equality’s U.S. trans survey — the largest survey of transgender people to date, which was published in 2015 — 40% of trans youth reported attempting suicide in their lifetime. That’s nearly nine times the national average,” of all youth suicide.

(HMKP-118-JU00-20240321-SD011  PDF (www.congress.gov))

We call it pride because Pride is the opposite of shame and shame kills.

We mean Pride in the way parents are proud of their kids, or grandparents are proud of their grandkids, or when we are proud of ourselves for successfully adulting.

We mean Pride as in being proud of your friend who is celebrating 1 year of sobriety, or being so proud of you for still being here 1 year after a suicide attempt.

LGBTQ+ Pride does not mean arrogance, or haughtiness, or a lack of consideration of others.

LGBTQ+ Pride means celebrating that you’re Queer, you’re here and you’re finding ways to thrive with joy.

Today we also celebrate that we are a Reconciling United Methodist Congregation.

Reconciling, because we are a member of the Reconciling Ministries network, a coalition of United Methodists, and former United Methodists, who have worked for decades to help our Denomination and local congregations move from rejecting LGBTQIA+ folks, to affirming their belovedness and calls to ministry.

And we are still a United Methodist Congregation because of the tireless work of people like Rev Dr. Jeanne Knepper who persisted in standing up for inclusion long past the point where she lost the use of her legs, and thankfully lived to see the day that those who sought to exclude her left in frustration.

And even though the horrible exclusive language has been removed from the United Methodist Book of Discipline, it still matters that we are a Reconciling church.  It matters because even though last May, General Conference voted to “remove mandated discrimination, the option to discriminate is still available.” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f-bQNSE2U9ykwdTJWhLJnuM2Zr7RBSQTjwv1Sy2sh_I/edit?tab=t.0 

Last week, while I was at Dakota Wesleyan University, doing some continuing education, I met the Pastor of the United Methodist Congregation where Rush Limbaugh’s family attends.  We had a civil conversation over breakfast, where she insisted that the focus of her church is about being welcoming to everyone.  I responded to her that while I agree that all people are welcome in Church, not all behaviors are welcome.  Behaviors, including speech, that threatens, demeans, and excludes others, is “incompatible with Christian teaching” in my humble opinion.

I believe that speech matters because the Centers for Disease Control have collected multiple peer reviewed research studies that demonstrate that LGBTQ+ youth have higher rates of depression, and suicide, as a result of “increased experiences of discrimination and rejection.”

The Good news is that “LGBTQ youth who report having at least one accepting adult were 40% less likely to report a suicide attempt in the past year.” https://www.thetrevorproject.org/research-briefs/accepting-adults-reduce-suicide-attempts-among-lgbtq-youth/ 

I don’t know if the positive effect of multiple supportive people is cumulative, because I couldn’t find that research, but I do know from my personal Pastoral experience that churches and clergy who not only “welcome,” LGBTQ+ youth and adults, but affirm and celebrate their gifts and graces, create positive outcomes in Queer people’s lives.

As a Pastor.  

As a mother of a lesbian daughter and a Trans/Genderfluid adult child.

As an ally.

I’m simultaneously  afraid to watch the news, and afraid to not watch the news.  

I feel like keeping up to date with the fresh horrors that each day brings is part of my pastoral responsibility.

I also feel like tuning out and taking a break is necessary for my sanity. 

And I’m straight, and middle class, and educated, and white.

I can’t even imagine the levels of exhaustion and fear and stress, that Queer and Trans, and brown, and hispanic, and poor, and unstably employed and unstably housed, and people on Medicare, are feeling.

In moments like this when we feel like we’re doing everything we can and nothing’s working, we cry out to God.

What in the Kentucky-fried-Crisis, Jesus!

We just can’t take this anymore!

And Jesus responds to us in much the same way that God responded to Elijah and Isaiah and Jonah when they got so sad and mad that they just sat down under a bush waiting for their doom.

28 “Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest. 29 Put on my yoke, and learn from me. I’m gentle and humble. And you will find rest for yourselves. 30 My yoke is easy to bear, and my burden is light.”

Come to me, all you who are struggling under the weight of the world.

Set that ish down because it is not ours to carry.

A yoke is a good thing because it redistributes the weight from the bags that cut off the circulation to your fingers, and puts it on your sturdy shoulders.  A yoke also increases and limits how much weight you can carry because the yoke will break if you overload it.

Setting down all the everything we are trying to be responsible for and taking up the better balanced and lighter yoke load that is our calling makes life manageable.

It’s not our job to save the world, Jesus is already doing that!

It’s our job to carry the lighter, better balanced load of our calling, which includes space for Sabbath rest.

I don’t think that it’s accidental that the next story after this passage is Jesus teaching about Sabbath.

For an editor, trying to stitch together a collection of second hand memories about Jesus, the transition from, “I will give you rest,” to teaching about the Sabbath seems like a nice segway.  

Because, just in case you didn’t know, nobody followed Jesus around and took notes while he was alive.  The gospels were written after the original disciples had all died, so everything we know about Jesus was passed down orally, then collected and edited into a semi-chronological order.  Which is to say, did Jesus actually go straight from offering a lighter load and rest to teaching about Sabbath?  Ummmm…. We have no idea.

What I can tell you is that part of the religious trauma of second Temple Judaism was that when they rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple, in Nehemiah chapter 13, Nehemiah enforced Sabbath by closing the city gates and posting armed guards to prevent any traders or sellers from entering the city during the Sabbath, and threatened the traders with violence for camping outside the wall.  Nehemiah took the gentle gift of rest and turned it into a threat of violence.

At the same time the “prophet” Nehemiah demanded that all Jewish men who were married to foreign women, divorce their wives and reject their children.  And if they refused, Nehemiah chased them out of the city.   Here’s Nehemiah in his own words:

Nehemiah 13:25-27

So I scolded them and cursed them, and beat some of them, and pulled out their hair. I also made them swear a solemn pledge in the name of God, saying, “You won’t give your daughters to their sons in marriage, or take their daughters in marriage for your sons or yourselves. 26 Didn’t Israel’s King Solomon sin on account of such women?… 27 Should we then listen to you and do all this great evil, acting unfaithfully toward our God by marrying foreign women?”

From the beginning of the second Temple era Sabbath was linked with violence, threats, and families divided by deportation.

A lot of people, especially LGBTQ+ people, suffer from religious trauma, because leaders like Nehemiah were so focused on enforcing the law of love that they missed that the point of the law is love.

Rest.  Sabbath rest and the rest that we find by accepting the lighter and more balanced load of our calling are meant to increase the love and thriving in our lives, not decrease it.

People should not be excluded for who they love.

People should not be excluded for practicing their faith a little differently, or bending the rules while maintaining the intent of love.

People should not be shamed for feeling overwhelmed or overburdened – they are not lacking faith, you are not lacking in faith, I am not lacking in faith!  Mostly, we are surviving in a world that is experiencing a severe shortage of justice and compassion.

People should not be shamed or excluded, period.

We should all be able to find inclusion, affirmation, celebration, Grace, and people who are proud of us for just being who God made us to be.

Be gentle with yourself out there.

Be gentle with each other.

Most Merciful God,

We confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart. 

We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

We have not heard the cries of the needy, 

and we have not responsibly stewarded your creation. 

We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, 

by what we have done and by what we have left undone. 

Have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, 

so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, 

to the glory of your holy name. Amen.

Hear the good news: 

Christ came not to condemn, but that the whole world might be saved through him. (John 3:17)

In the name of Jesus the Christ we are forgiven!

In the name of Jesus the Christ, we are forgiven! Amen.