Pride Sunday Sermon: The Rev. Charles Graves, IV

Friends, please pray with me.  Unto me who is less than the least of All Saints is this grace given. Holy Spirit, speak through me and fill the hearts of your people. Amen.

I’d like to take a moment to give gratitude to Dean Hollerith and Canon Duncan and the whole cathedral family for this incredible welcome. If you’ll permit me a personal note as one born here in Washington DC and raised up just the road from here at the historic St. James Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square, in Baltimore.  More than a few members of whom are here with us today.  It is so good to be back home in the DMV.  I bring you special greetings also from our incredible congregation at Christ Episcopal Church, Shaker Heights, who are joining us via livestream today. And from the whole Diocese of Ohio where we always say, Love God, Love your neighbor, Change the world.

I am incredibly humbled and honored to mark with you this pride Sunday, the 50th anniversary of Washington’s first Pride March and the 2025 World Pride Celebration. I’m especially mindful that just one year before that first march in 1974, Louie Crew called San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral to ask if they could help him connect with other gay Episcopalians, and as he reported, he was laughed off the phone.  How much has changed in 51 years.

Thanks to Louie’s tireless work and that of so many others, both living and gone on to glory, 25 years later, Louis became one of the first two out gay people to serve on our church’s Executive Council, on which I am blessed to now serve.   And their work to build the church’s first LGBTQ organization, built the foundation not only for my own marriage and ordained ministry and that of so many others of us as deacons, priests or bishops, but also for the General Convention LGBTQ Caucus, which I was blessed to co-found a few years ago.   And today I know that Louis and so many others rejoice with us on this glorious day and call us to continue to carry the church forward.

Today in the observances of our church year marks the Seventh Sunday of Easter, sometimes informally known as Ascension Sunday.  The scriptures tell us that Christ ascended to heaven 40 days after the resurrection and that the Holy Spirit fell upon them on the 50th day after that Easter Resurrection, which we’ll mark next week at Pentecost. Unfortunately, because Ascension is the 40th day, it drew the short straw in the calendar of feasts and always lands on a Thursday, so it hardly ever gets the celebration it deserves.  Poor Ascension Day.  And so, we find ourselves today at the one Sunday that we get each year between those 10 days in the midst of Jesus having ascended to the Father and the Holy Spirit descending upon us at Pentecost. The interesting thing is that the Ascension is the last story in the gospels, particularly in the gospel of Luke. And Pentecost or the Holy Spirit’s appearance is the first story in the Acts of the Apostles, and so we have 10 days that we have absolutely no idea what happened. All we know is that the last we heard before he ascended, that Jesus said to his disciples to stay in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes upon you with power. When we pick up 10 days later, the disciples are in fact still in Jerusalem, so they followed instructions that far, but I have no idea what they did in those days. I wonder that often.

I think it’s most fitting that we observe this time, this day that sort of goes unnoticed, because I think it’s the perfect time of our liturgical year to mark those messy middle moments, those liminal places where we most often feel alone or lost or confused. The old has gone away and yet the new has not yet come. Frankly, we have no idea what’s going to happen. I know that doesn’t feel familiar to any of you here or to some maybe the whole world feels like that messy middle place. I remember as a young child, my dad taught me how to ride a bike with a helmet and knee pads and most especially, training wheels. He taught me slowly how to pedal and then how to turn and how to speed up and how to slow down, and I followed him all around our neighborhood.  Then the day came when he told me it was time to take off the training wheels, and I looked with absolute horror.  And yet when he did, suddenly I could barely stand up straight. I fell countless times over and over as I was trying to ride just a few feet further, and I wondered many times why he had had to take off those training wheels. After all, I never fell when I had the training wheels on.  And then, little by little, I started to go a few feet further and a few feet further and I started to get a little bit more comfortable. I fell more times than I could think of and got hurt at least a little bit, scratched myself up a few times to be sure, but managed to get a little further almost every time.  And before long I could go a few blocks and before long I could ride around the whole neighborhood.

I never got it down perfectly. I mean, who among us ever does anything perfectly, but at least I knew enough to get around the neighborhood and feel mostly comfortable. We find ourselves in this very moment just after the Ascension when Jesus has, in a sense, just taken off the disciples’ training wheels, and they are equally horrified, I think.  They have to actually figure out how to do this thing without Jesus being right there in body alongside them. Jesus isn’t there with them anymore as a parent and teacher and guide, walking alongside them. They don’t have Jesus and his teachings and miracles right before them, like those training wheels, to show them how to stay on course without falling over. No, they’ve gotta try and figure out how to do this thing.

One of the amazing things we see in our readings this week is that those struggling followers of Jesus start to actually do just that. They begin to pedal without training wheels thanks to a little power of the Holy Spirit. Of course, we heard in our gospel from John just now that Jesus prayed this prayer on the night before he died that night that we call the Last Supper and part of what scholars call Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. Now, before I was a parish priest, I was a college campus minister and I used to always call this Jesus’ commencement address.  Right? He’s telling his students, ‘Remember all that I’ve taught you over these last couple of years? Remember all the lessons you’ve learned with me? Well, it’s time for us to part ways, in a sense. I need to go away from you so that you can go out on this journey on your own’.

What we just heard from scholars is also called Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer. Jesus prays at length for his disciples, his fledgling sheep.   Of all things, Jesus’ most fervent prayer for them is that they all may be one as Christ himself is one, as Christ and the Father are one. That unity, that basic, simple unity, friends, is the heart of the whole thing. When Jesus told us to love one another as he loves us and to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, as our neighbors, as ourselves, you remember that one?  When he healed the sick, proclaimed release to the captives, and told us to love even our enemies. Every single lesson Jesus ever, ever taught us was at the end of the day about unity.  That perfect holy unity with God and with one another.  Everything, everything comes down to unity and everything comes down to love.

Then we read from the Book of Acts, right, this morning, which picks up at Pentecost, the beginning of the Book of Acts.  And for the last seven weeks now as I know, you all pay very careful attention to your cycle of lectionary readings, so I don’t need to remind you that we’ve been reading these stories from the Acts of the Apostles about how Jesus’ disciples, by the Holy Spirit’s power, become something entirely different.  They’re no longer disciples in fact, but as Jesus has ascended into heaven, they’re not students following their teacher around in the same way.  No, by the Holy Spirit’s power, these disciples have become apostles. That is to say they are now sent out to go and do the work, to go and preach and teach and baptize. They are called to go out and transform the world as they never could have done if Jesus had stuck around and kept leading them around everywhere he went.

And friends, we see that very factor in our reading this morning.  This hotshot missionary convert, Paul, who wasn’t even one of those disciples there with Jesus, by the way.   Who never met Jesus in person, was out teaching in Philippi, in modern day Greece, where he met Lydia in our reading last week.  And this time he meets another young woman. He meets a woman who was enslaved under the Roman system who despite having some ability to move around because she was so lucrative for her masters, is still fundamentally enslaved. That enslavement was itself essential disunity and division. There is no unity where there is slavery and by the power of the Holy Spirit, Paul expels that demon that kept her enslaved. It should be no surprise to us that when we break the chains that keep ourselves and one another enslaved, the forces of profit and power grow more vicious and violent than ever. We are told that seeing that their hope of making money was gone, that’s crucial, the girl’s masters get the magistrates to arrest Paul and his companion Silas, and note, throw them into the innermost cell, chaining their hands and their feet. The magistrates in this story say in our translation that we just heard, “you are disturbing the city”.   But I prefer the New International Version which says, “you are throwing the city into an uproar”.

And they make spurious accusations to imprison Paul and Silas, and yet even in prison, even in that innermost cell, Paul and Silas never ever lose heart. They refuse to become hateful or bitter. They refuse to cave in to the disunity and division that tears people apart. No. Instead, they find a way to keep on living and keep on loving.  And guess what? The Holy Spirit shows up. Paul and Silas pray and sing to the Lord without ceasing. They continue to rejoice to the Lord even while locked up in the innermost cell. And an earthquake of the Holy Spirit springs them free.  And even then they go and save the life of the man who imprisoned them, who was about to take his own life. The guard then becomes a brother in Christ because not even slavery and imprisonment can prevent one from being and becoming a brother or sister or sibling in Christ. Nothing can prevent us from being siblings in Christ. The immortal love to which our Lord calls us to is that perfect unity.

Dear friends, I don’t have to tell you that we live in a world positively torn apart by division and hatred. We are called to remember, just as Paul and Silas remembered, what Jesus taught them. They sing and they pray unto the Lord, and I really believe that in doing so, Paul and Silas were remembering what Jesus taught them on that on that last night before Jesus died, that Paul and Silas I’m sure had learned from the earliest disciples.  They were remembering Christ’s prayer that all may be one.  Our world today does everything it can to set us apart from one another and put us at enmity with one another rather than in connection and love with one another. Our world is so overcome by division and hatred, violence and brutality. We inhabit a world where systems of greed and power continue to enslave not millions but billions of us and our siblings around the world to everything from racism and hatred to poverty and disease. The divisions that turn us against one another are every bit as evil and every bit as powerful as they were in the days of Jesus and Paul and Silas. Some of them go by old names like greed and poverty and racism. Others are called by names like misogyny or xenophobia, Islamophobia or antisemitism, queerphobia or transphobia. Each one just as evil and pernicious as the last.  And in combination with one another, especially in combination with forces like greed and power, they become downright explosive and positively deadly.

Not long ago, a colleague and I were discussing this vast network of evils that echo from the halls of government to every city and town and country around the world.  And that in many ways feels more emboldened and empowered than many of us can remember in our lifetimes. My colleague asked me, “As a black man and as a gay man, do you feel scared about what’s going on? Are you worried about what will happen or what we’ll do in these terrifying times?”  I paused for a moment and I thought about it for a second and I said, “Well, of course I’m worried.  To worry is natural, to worry is human.  But if I didn’t believe in God, I would be terrified and I’ll tell you why. To fear is natural and it’s human, but we must never be enslaved to it.”

Beloved, it is precisely because of who I am and who I come from that I refuse to be swept up in fear.  I refuse to be in captivity or to fear, and I certainly refuse to be held captive to enmity or hatred for anyone. Dear friends, we all, every one of us here come from people who have walked and wept and sang and prayed through the very worst of humanity and then some.   Not one of us got to be here sitting in the year 2025 because we came from people who gave up when they were confronted by the forces of evil or hatred or violence in their own day. We are all here because we came from people who confronted extreme and extraordinary challenges and found a way to keep on going. I am proud to say that you and I, we come from Christians of 2000 years, and followers and lovers of God of many more countless generations, who endured all sorts of trials and tribulations. We are here as Christians because we come from folk like Paul and Silas who were fed to lions and burned alive, who were murdered or tortured or torn apart and never gave up singing and praying to Jesus, the liberator of us all.

I know a love that is so much greater than fear. How can we be enslaved to fear when we come from those who have endured it and walked through it, and found a way to the other side by the power of the Holy Spirit?  I am blessed to come from black folk who sang and prayed on the plantations of slavery, never giving up hope, never letting up their fight for freedom. I come from folk who prayed through enslavement and prayed through Jim Crow, who prayed through every form of discrimination and violence, brutality and hatred we can’t even begin to imagine.  Even being brutalized by a weaponized Christianity that’s nothing more than hatred wrapping itself in religion. We see a little bit of that today. They knew in their sanctified holy souls that this Jesus is the Lord of liberation and never of oppression. They never ceased to call on the name of Jesus, the liberator, and they sang and prayed and walked and worked so that we could inhabit and inherit freedoms they would never live to see. I come as a son of women who fought through every form of division under heaven, who have endured from every generation of humanity, abuse and violence, misogyny and mistreatment, and so do you.

Yet never in all of the generations of humanity ever gave up on making a better world for their daughters and for all their children. I come from folk who knew what it meant to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.  To be told “You don’t belong here”, to be told to “Go back to where you come from”, because you look or sound different.  And who face threats and rejection, deportation and violence, yet still never give up.  And they too sang and prayed and walked and worked so that you and I might see a better world.  And I come here standing in a long line of Queer folk, not just over the last 10 or 20 or 50 years, but who for centuries and millennia of every generation, trans folk and Queer folk written out of history books and treated with all manner of hostility. They were never acknowledged as God’s beloved.  Excluded from marriage, rejected from family, derided as freaks and called unspeakable names, but we have never failed to show up and keep fighting and keep singing to the great liberator.

I remember as a college student just 15 years ago or so, I wasn’t yet out of the closet and I remember going to bed weeping on many nights, especially in those days when a new state would vote to legalize same-sex marriage. They weren’t quite tears of sadness, but in a sense tears of an emerging victory yet to come. It was the weeping that came with knowing, believing fully, that mine would be the last generation to not know what it was like to be able to marry the one we loved. It came from a hope, a fervent hope and a sureness of a sort that because of the work that was going on with my generation, that those who come after me would never know a world without marriage equality.  That those that would come after us would never have to live in the same sorts of fears that mine did. 15 years later. Though we are blessed to now have legal marriage equality here in the church and civilly, you and I both know that those fights are not over. We can never rest on our laurels.  Never. We have to keep fighting. God calls us to keep fighting, to keep singing and praying and laboring just as our ancestors did, not only to protect the rights we’ve already won, but most especially for the freedom of trans folks and non-binary folks and so many in our communities under the yoke of oppression.

My siblings, I know a love that is greater than fear. How can we be enslaved to fear when we come from folk who have endured so much to get us where we are? My friends, we’ve been at this a long, long, long time. And God has carried us further than we can ever dream or describe. Our forebearers of every race and gender, religion and nationality, identity and orientation have fought for the holy dream that we may all be one just as God’s very self is one.  Because that is who God made us to be. Yes friends, we may feel like a kid with no training wheels falling over and over, scraping our knees, and wondering why God had to take those training wheels away in the first place. We may feel like those lonely disciples after the ascension wondering what it is we’re supposed to do.  But guess what? So did your ancestors in every generation. They prayed and sang and worked and fought by the power of the Holy Spirit so that we could all live in a world they couldn’t dream to see. I’m here to tell you, so keep on praying my friends, keep singing, keep working and walking, and don’t hesitate to rest when you need to.

The Holy Spirit is still in the business of unity. The Holy Spirit is still in the business of overcoming fear and hatred and division by the unbeatable uncrushable, unextinguishable power of love. You and I might be tired, but the Holy Spirit is not tired.  So even when we feel alone and abandoned, when it feels that Christ has ascended and gone away, we are not forgotten. Our Lord said he would never leave us nor forsake us, and He still hasn’t. He still hasn’t. It’s just as true today as it ever was then. Amen.