Pride Sunday

Happy Pride everyone! Yesterday, I was at Pride in the Plaza in SLO and had a great time. It was nice seeing the whole community out in support of LGBTQ rights. Before coming to St Peter’s, I spoke to Rev Caro over the phone and asked if St Peter’s was planning to do something to commemorate Pride Month. She told me that although St Peter’s is a LGBTQ inclusive and affirming church, that we do not have the history of commemorating Pride. So, I thought that we should at least, in a small way commemorate the lives and gifts of all our LGBTQ siblings today with this day being the last Sunday in June.

Growing up as a queer person, I also had a difficult relationship with the church. Although I was not very open about my identity, and that the churches I went to growing up were not condemning LGBTQ people outright with threats of hell fire and brimstone, the marginalization was quite subtle and institutionalized. Churches operated on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy but would slide in comments during sermons and conversations by saying “love the simmer, but hate the sin”. When the Singaporean parliament was debating to repeal the colonial-era penal code which criminalizes mutual sex between adult men, a cell group I was at even prayed to God asking for the code to remain for the fear of unleashing “LGBTQ values” onto society. Churches were discreet in their combat of what they see as the debauchery of the LGBTQ community by funding and lobbying the government to adopt conservative sex ed in schools run by right-wing organizations such as Focus on the Family to the detriment of the mental health of LGBTQ children across the country. When the debate of the repeal of the penal code was heating up, churches became more open, often citing their opposition to the LGBTQ community using what is commonly known as the six clobber passages of the Bible to argue their point. One of these passages is the one where God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah in Gensis supposedly for “engaging in homosexuality”. I am sure that many of you here were also exposed to these homophobic troupes in Christian circles when growing up in the US. After all, many of these were brought to my country by evangelical missionaries in the 1980s and 1990s.

It was years later when I discovered progressive and inclusive Christianity first in the Scottish Episcopal Church when I was studying my undergraduate degree in the UK and in my home church – Free Community Church, the only openly LGBTQ inclusive and affirming church in Singapore that I realized that a lot of the way I was taught the bible and interpreted what Christianity really is was problematic and wrong in many ways. However, this was so ingrained in me that although I loved the person of Jesus and saw his compassion and welcome to the very least of us all, I could not shake notion that Christianity was an intolerant religion. It took years of deconstruction and reconstruction of my faith before I could get where I am today.

Jesus reminds us of radical welcome in today’s Gospel passage and I think it is very apt that this passage falls on the day we commemorate Pride in church – if we do to the very least of us, we do to Jesus. And that is the calling of every Christian. But to even identify with the LGBTQ community, to identify with myself, we have to learn to let go off and reinterpret many theological notions, doctrines, and biblical interpretations were taught. For example, I now know that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was not welcoming the poor and the oppressed as Ezekiel 16:49 clearly states that the sin of Sodom was having pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy. Another contemporary example in relation to the LGBTQ community is the reinterpretation of the word “queer”. In the past the term queer was seen negatively but the word was reclaimed by the younger LGBTQ community in the 21st century as a broader term that went beyond the terms “gay”, or “lesbian” or “bisexual”. Queer, hence, became a more inclusive rallying term of identity for the wider LGBTQ community and many would prefer to use the word queer to identify themselves. Thus, many of us had to learn to change and accept the word queer as a preferred term of identification especially amongst the youth.

Our reading from the Hebrew Bible today is one such reading that needs significant reinterpretation in Christian circles. The binding of Isaac is often used to teach us about faith but a faith which is dangerous, blind faith. A faith in following whatever we think God commands us to the extent that it hurts us and people around us. After all, if God is good, we should be obedient to the extent of killing our own first born, right? While I feel that this passage affirms Abraham’s unwavering faith in God, I also believe that it tells us something more about the issue of good discernment. If one reads this in the original Hebrew language, one discovers that there are two words used for the same word “God” in Hebrew – Elohim and Yahweh. The passage starts off with Elohim; a plural term used for God before the final part where the word for God changes to Yahweh. The angel of Yahweh called to Abraham telling him to not lay a hand on Isaac. I wonder if the original writers of Genesis did this intentionally. I interpret them trying to tell us that Abraham was still not apt at discerning God’s voice. He heard only one side of God calling to him – Elohim. He had heard the call of Elohim to sacrifice his son but might have interpreted it wrongly till the angel of Yahweh, another side of God appeared to him. Perhaps this was a challenge God presented to Abraham to discern whether he was really asked to sacrifice his son – perhaps it was a challenge to disobey even the orders of God of someone would be harmed. To put the life of a human being even before the commandments of God. The story, then, is less about faith but about discernment in the face of challenge and the value of human life.

And this is what Jesus was sent to preach to us about. Jesus reminded us that God’s love is all about putting others before us and before our rigid doctrines and codes of purity. Love is turning the rules and regulations upside down if it means putting the very least of us before us and the structures of the world we create to order it. But this radical love requires sacrifice and sometimes sacrifice in the name of loving one’s neighbor means giving up one’s life for it. It means even going to the cross like Jesus did.

But I think God does not call solely for physical sacrifice where we have to die for love. Not all situations demand for us to do that but God calls for us to give up certain values and beliefs so central to us that it means sacrificing a piece of ourselves if that means that someone else is loved for who they are. Let me tell you the story of my late pastoral mentor the Reverend Dr. Yap Kim Hao who first identified my calling and sent me to seminary in Los Angeles. Rev Yap was the former bishop of the Methodist Church in Singapore. He was a straight man with children and grandchildren. Upon his retirement moved away from the church to serve the LGBTQ community, migrant workers and people living with HIV in Singapore as the church did not want to support or be affiliated to those groups. In fact, he was the very first senior clergyperson to come out in support of the LGBTQ community in Singapore. Because of that, Rev Yap was shunned by many of his former colleagues and congregants and eventually found his way to become pastoral advisor to Free Community Church, my home church in Singapore.

The current executive pastor of Free Community Church, the Rev Miak Siew recalled an incident he had at an LGBTQ conference at the church some years ago. At the event, a transgender woman who was a former sex worker approached him and asked him, “a pastor of another church told me that I would go to hell. What do you say?” And while he was trying to formulate his answer, theologizing deeply in his mind, Rev Yap appeared. The woman then turned to him and asked him the same question, “a pastor of another church said that I would go to hell. What do you say?” Rev Yap chuckled, and in his deep resonating voice said, “Where you go, I will go.” “Where you go, I will go.”

In that one moment, Rev Yap tied his entire destiny to hers. He sacrificed whatever he was taught by the church when he was young and gave up his supposedly strict and pious identity as an older clergyman in order to put someone else, a hurting transgender woman marginalized by the church before him. The sacrifice of his ideals and how society viewed a former bishop occurred when he identified himself and his identity with the woman. In that moment, he became the Christ figure for tour church. Even after his death in 2018 while I was in my first semester in seminary, he continues to be remembered, quoted on, and loved by not just LGBTQ Christians but by the entire the LGBTQ community in Singapore.   
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Rev Yap’s story reminds us that if we are to be followers of Jesus that we must radically welcome the stranger. We must give even to the little ones even if it means giving up and sacrificing a piece of ourselves. I hope that my sermon today gets us to challenge ourselves on our long-held beliefs and interpretation. Radical welcome means that we must continue to question ourselves and change our ways of thinking by putting our neighbors first especially those who are the very least of us. “Where you go, I will go.” Glory to Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Amen.

​the Rev. Dr. Ollie Lim