Between Sundays – This Church Loves You
“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they saw.” and from the Gospel, “Lord, let us see.”
~ Matthew 20:33
I want to put on my professor hat for a moment, if you will indulge me.
As many of you know, alongside my ministry I teach US History at Stevenson, and one of the units covers the countercultural movements of the twentieth century. The slide I show my students goes something like this.
“The counterculture offered an alternative to the homogeneity of American middle class life, to patriarchal family structures, rigid self discipline, unquestioning patriotism, and the relentless acquisition of property. And it was never just one thing. There were many alternative cultures rising up at once.
- The Hippie Movement.
- Punk Rock.
- Disco.
- The Feminist Movement.
- Gay Liberation and LGBTQ+ Rights.
- The Environmental Movement.
- Black Power and the Civil Rights Movement.
- Anti-War Activism.
- New Age and spiritual movements.
- Even Biker Culture.”
Some of you lived through these, the ’60s ’70s & ’80s. Some of you watched, marched, organized, sang, rode, and maybe even protested your way through them, and you could probably add a few movements to my list that I have never even considered. It is, after all, only one lecture in a course that spans from 1866 to today.
I bring this up because it is June, and June carries a lot. It is Father’s Day. It is Flag Day. National Men’s Health Month. National Ocean Month. Great Outdoors Month. There’s National Nursing Assistants Week. Pollinator Week (June 22–28). It is Juneteenth. And it is Pride Month. And I have heard, here and there, out in the world and sometimes a little closer to home, a particular sentiment. Why do we need Pride? Why isn’t there a month for the rest of us?
I want to answer that honestly, as your pastor and, today, as a historian.
Pride exists because of a history of real struggle, real suffering, and real harm. It is not a celebration looking for an occasion. It is a response. In June of 1969, at a place called the Stonewall Inn in New York City, people who had been hunted, harassed, and pushed to the margins simply for being who they were finally said, enough. What followed became a turning point in American history. And Stonewall is only the part of the story we tend to remember. There are countless other moments, less famous, never written into the slides at all, where people endured and resisted and refused to disappear.
Here is what I have come to believe. The sentiment that says we don’t need Pride, however innocently it may be offered, carries a quiet danger. It allows us to become ignorant of another person’s struggle. And when we lose sight of someone’s struggle, we make it that much easier for that struggle to return, perhaps under a different name, perhaps wearing a different face, but the same old harm all the same.
To love someone is to try to see the world through their eyes. It is to have empathy for what they have carried, and to name it out loud, precisely so that history does not get to repeat itself on our watch. That is what Pride is. It is a community and a society saying, we see you, we remember, we care, and we stand against harm.
This is, I think, deeply Gospel work. Over and over in scripture, the people who encounter Jesus ask the same thing in a hundred different ways. Lord, let us see. The blind man at the roadside, the disciples slow to understand, all of us, really. And Jesus is forever opening eyes, restoring sight, helping people perceive what they could not perceive before. He saw the people everyone else walked past. He saw the woman at the well, the tax collector in the tree, the leper outside the gate, the children the disciples tried to shoo away. Jesus saw, included, and loved.
So my invitation to us this June is to ask honestly, where are our blinders? Where are our blind spots? And how do we come out from behind them so that we might begin to see as Jesus saw, with compassion over all?
We made our commitment as a Reconciling Church this past December, and an overwhelming majority of us, eighty-five percent, said yes to who we want to be. Pride Month is one of the ways we live that out loud. Not as politics, but as love. Not as agreement on every question, but as a refusal to look away from anyone’s struggle.
It has, as always, been a busy week. Graduates both big and little as our Weekday School celebrated a kindergarten send-off, Vacation Bible School preparations in full swing, and a Parish Hall full of treasures for our Yard Sale this Saturday, we hope you will come out. Make a morning of it, and bring a friend. There is a lot of good and ordinary life happening here, all of it held together by the same love we are talking about today.
May our eyes be opened. May we see.
Until Sunday, and all the days between,
Dr. Hutton