Happy Pride!
The Church is queer. Our God is queer.
When I say that Christianity is queer, what I partially mean is that it is supposed to exist on the margins. It is comprised of the marginalized and worships a God who was brutalized and murdered by the state for not bending the knee to the Empire.
Pentecost is the church’s coming out party.
Christianity, rightly practiced, is queer. It does not represent normative culture. It does not represent the status quo. It actively deconstructs the status quo because Christ recognizes that imperial norms actually undermine the true nature of humanity.
We are not healthiest when Empire is is controlling us by putting us into categories. This is why Jesus continually defied cultural norms and binaries. Christianity is not a polite normative way to preserve our status and way of life, it is rightly a disruption to daily life in favor of the marginalized.
This is why I have always found it wildly appropriate for Pride Month to occur right after Pentecost, because Pentecost is the church’s coming out party. The disciples of Jesus were meeting in a house right after Jesus ascended, wondering what to do next. Suddenly, a sound like a whirlwind filled the house and the Spirit of God rested on their heads like forked tongues of fire. The Jews in the surrounding community, all from different regions, surrounded the house to figure out what the commotion was. They heard the disciples speaking in the listeners’ respective languages, even though the disciples would not have known how to speak those languages. There was such a spirit-filled commotion that some of the observers thought that the disciples were hammered drunk! This miracle revealed to the world the true queer and diverse nature of the church – the walls of division were coming down. The church was revealed to be a god-drunk, Spirit-filled wild and queer diverse community of people.
Christianity can never be considered acceptable by power structures. This is the reason why Pride Month is such a perfect time for the Church to truly recognize itself. Pride Month is a celebration of the queer reality of humanity, of our anthropological truth. It is also a riot that correctly disregards the inferior telos of the Empire. The same is true of the Christian Movement. The Church is a continual practice of subverting imperial society by worshipping Christ and obeying Jesus’ Way by adopting God’s alternative queer ethics.
Pride Month is a holy time where the Church and the rest of us queers celebrate our non-heteronormative non-imperial way. We champion those whom normative culture disregards. We deconstruct an inferior imperial goal that undermines human worth. We are Christ to a hurting beautiful world.