My sermon on June 25, 2023 at Bluegrass United Church of Christ in Lexington, Kentucky on Pride Weekend.
You can hear the audio version at kennybishop.com/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Proverbs 16: 18 (CEB)
Pride comes before disaster, and arrogance before a fall.
Before I say anything else, and I think everyone here is aware, but for those who may not be, I want to state that I am a gay man. The LGBTQ+ community is my community. You’ll be hearing me talk a lot today about “us” and “we,” and I wanted to make sure that you have that context.
So, happy Pride!
Just down the road from where Mason and I live, there’s a church that you can tell takes a lot of pride in the clever messages and sayings they post on their sign - which is actually sort of ironic right now because the message they’ve posted for this Pride month is the scripture we just read.
“Pride comes before disaster, and arrogance before a fall.”
These few words from Proverbs about pride leading to something horrible are a favorite of anti-LGBTQ+ religious folks. They get good use out of it when Pride month rolls around every year. It’s their way of speaking out against the LGBTQ+ community without mentioning the LGBTQ+ community.
Truth be told, I’d be thrilled if that was the extent of their acrimony and hostility toward this beautiful, loving community. But we all know - we’ve all seen that their bitterness runs deep, and their hostility, especially lately, is becoming more and more obvious.
Folks who used to at least try to frame their ire toward LGBTQ+ people as concern for our souls and our eternal destiny now seem to have abandoned that worry altogether. Even if it was misguided, what used to be a caring effort led by compassion to keep us out of hell has turned into anything but caring and void of any compassion. Now it almost feels like there’s a competition to see who can hate the most and who can say the worst things about LGBTQ+ people.
Maybe at one point they were genuinely concerned about our spiritual well-being, but now, as best I can tell, it seems like getting rid of us en masse is the goal. Apparently, they think we’re all pretty much unredeemable now.
To them, we should be ashamed. They can’t understand why we’re not just hanging our heads and beating our chests and moaning in repentance at the horrible people we are. And it’s completely beyond their ability to comprehend why we would actually be proud of who we are.
So they pull out the proverb and once again remind us that pride is a sin. Well, kinda sorta sometimes under certain circumstances it’s a sin.
Let’s be honest, the folks who preach warnings to us this time every year about the “sin” of pride and the penalties for being proud are really only talking about gay pride. They can’t be talking about all pride.
Want to know how I know? This time next week, the same people who this week are preaching to us about the evils and the dangers of pride will have Lee Greenwood turned up to full volume. They will sing to the top of their voices how proud they are to be an American.
I know some people who believe emphatically that it’s impossible to be a proud Christian if you’re not also a proud American. Conservative media and Christian nationalism have convinced them of it.
Those folks never grasp the irony of condemning one kind of pride this week while embracing another kind next week. The irony of daring a whole community that has fought hard for their own freedoms and rights and had to prove their value and belovedness - those same patriotic Christians want to tell us that we are not allowed to be proud.
Look, I claim everything they claim. I claim the God they claim and I claim the country they claim. And if I am “allowed” to be proud about my faith and proud about my country, then I’m allowed to be proud about who I am as a gay person. And I encourage them to be proud of who they are.
If they want to have issues with pride, they should at least have issues with every kind of pride. Otherwise, they don’t know what to do with someone like me who is a proud gay man who is a proud American and a proud Christian. I’m also a proud father and a proud grandfather and a proud husband and a proud pastor who couldn’t be more proud of his church and his congregation.
If pride as a whole is wrong, then we should avoid every opportunity to be proud - of anything. But we know that this proverb and all of the other passages that speak to the mindset of being proud are not blanket condemnations of pride, they are warnings about allowing ourselves to become arrogant and haughty and to see others as less than ourselves.
Now if we want to talk about that kind of pride - and I believe that is exactly the kind of pride the scriptures are speaking of - if we want to talk about being arrogant and condescending to others and flexing our muscles and flaunting our power, I think it’s a conversation that many in the wider fundamentalist and conservative church world might find uncomfortable. I know the Pharisees back in Jesus’ day didn’t like it much.
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and seas to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.”
-Matthew 23: 15
Jesus didn’t tolerate self-righteousness very much. His patience for arrogance among the religious leaders was thin because he saw their hypocrisy in preaching one thing and living another. “Careful now,” he’d say to the proud and pious preachers, “You’re flirting with disaster there.”
Of course, we know that too much pride and the wrong kind of pride can be dangerous and even deadly. Pride that turns into arrogance will cause that arrogant person to dismiss everyone they assume they are better than. Arrogant pride leads to a kind of hubris that causes the overly proud person to see themself as more valuable than others. And once a person thinks of themself as supreme to others - to other humans, they start treating those other humans as less than. And if you can see others as less than, you can eventually see them as worthless, and if you can see them as worthless, you can see them as expendable.
You can see the dangers of the wrong kind of pride. And I would contend that there are a lot of very religious people who’ve allowed themselves to start down that path.
They see themselves as better than, holier than, more godly than people like me and my LGBTQ+ siblings. It doesn’t matter if I or any others seek to follow the teachings of Jesus, if the self-righteous judges consider us to be unclean, they will deny that we are people of faith at all. And before you know it, they’ll throw out their favorite anti-gay bible word - abomination.
They may not consider a heart that devises wicked schemes as an abomination, but according to another passage here in these same Proverbs, it is. They may not think of haughty eyes or a lying tongue as an abomination, but the bible says they are. In a nation that refuses to try and stop gun violence and places great esteem on winning a war at any cost, they clearly don’t think that the shedding of innocent blood is an abomination, but the scriptures say it is. So are feet that run to mischief, so are false witnesses who utter lies, and so is the person who spreads strife among the people. I don’t know about you, but that list reminds me of a few folks who have become heroes in the conservative Christian world these last few years.
And that’s a short list of the many “abominations” listed in the scriptures along with things like eating meat that is three days old and remarrying an ex-spouse and eating pork rinds and oppressing the poor and not paying a pledge and charging interest on a loan and so many other things.
Yesterday I walked around the Pride Festival here in Lexington. If you were there, you probably saw some pretty interesting things. You saw people in costumes and colorful outfits and t-shirts that said things like “Born This Way,” and “Y’all Means All,” and “Love Wins” and all kinds of affirming, encouraging messages. Pam wore a shirt that said, “This Pastor Loves You.”
I did see messages of defiance, and signs that defended our community’s right to exist, but I didn’t see arrogance in that place yesterday. I saw lots of people who’ve been told by certain parts of society that they are bad, that they don’t deserve a place in our world or a place in God’s plan. Among the thousands of people there, I didn’t see a single person demeaning another because of their differences. I didn’t see anyone question anyone else’s humanity or worth. I saw people celebrating each other. I saw people celebrating their own worth and celebrating the worth of everyone else in that place.
So, here’s the thing I would say to all those who can’t seem to see us as we really are. You can try to keep us down. You can try to diminish the people you don’t agree with or don’t like. You can use scriptures and misuse and manipulate and mistranslate and misdirect them to try and scare us into submission. You can threaten us with hell and eternal punishment and all the other scare tactics you seem to enjoy. But we know better. We know God better, and knowing God the way we do, we are not afraid.
But we know that you are afraid. You’re afraid because you worry that when we find liberation from your bondage, you lose your leverage, and if you lose your leverage, you lose your power. And you are very proud of your power.
While you tell us that we’re not allowed to be proud of who we are, you’re flaunting your own power and your own kind of pride.
You don’t have to be proud of us. No one is asking you for that. But you don’t get to tell us what we’re allowed to be proud of or when we can be proud, or where we get to be proud or why.
Our world is big. It’s filled with lots of ideas and dogmas and opinions on absolutely everything. I’m okay with that. I think it’s fantastic. But no one gets to tell me what I get to be proud of. And today, as gay man who tries very hard to value others and spread a message of beautiful, radical love, I’m as proud as I can be of my pride.
Happy Pride, everyone.