Some of the first people I came out to almost 20 years ago were the chaplains on my college campus. I remember our associate chaplain looking across her desk and saying, “God doesn’t make trash.” What she meant was God creates each person in God’s image and that includes LGBTQIA+ people. As a college student deeply concerned about God loving me if I was Queer and not yet believing that I could live a full life as both a gay man and a Christian, these words were infused with an empathy that spoke directly to my soul. That empathy and the permission to have pride in both my identity as a Queer person and my identity as a Christian child of God, helped bring me through to accepting and affirming myself. It was the foundation I needed to be in Christian community with other people.
Clinging to the coattails of Christian nationalism and the new administration, an argument has emerged that empathy is a sin. This argument says that empathy draws Christians into supporting sin and sinful situations. Another sin that conservative pastors and preachers like to discuss around this time is pride. Sermons are preached that celebrating “pride” month is evil and demonstrates our “fallen” condition, but few of these same people consider what it means for the LGBTQIA+ community to demonstrate pride publicly throughout the year and particularly during June.
More than celebrating pride in ourselves and our lived experience, even though that’s important, the goal of Pride Month is to celebrate the history, resilience, and ongoing struggle of the LGBTQIA+ community. In a season when the forces of hate and government are aligned against our community, Pride Month is a reminder that we have survived worse and that we will survive our present reality. Rather than narcissistic pride or vanity, it’s the radical stance that where the world stubbornly refuses to celebrate us, we will do the celebrating ourselves.
The Queer community is well known for embracing the strange, different, and countercultural. From drag families to chosen families created out of the ruins of biological families to biological families which welcome in all the Queer cousins and friends, empathy characterizes as much of the LGBTQIA+ experience as rainbows and glitter. Empathy not only opens up spaces to radical welcome, empathy builds the foundation for the safety and wellbeing of people who know rejection all too well.
And lest anyone think that empathy is some co-opted principle used by the “Queer agenda” to advance sin, empathy is deeply Biblical. In Matthew 25, Jesus’ classic words speak directly to lived empathy: “Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me…Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these siblings of mine, you did it to me.’” (34-36, 40; NRSV).
“Just as you did it to one of the least of these siblings of mine, you did it to me.” Just as you have shown empathy to others you have to Jesus. This is what empathy is about, not sin, but blessing. As we have been blessed, we should then bless others and bless them extravagantly. This Pride Month, I encourage you to look to empathy as you interact with all the people God puts in your path.
