St Mark’s Cathedral
ECMN Pride Eucharist Sermon
June 28, 2026
Readings:
Aelred extract
Galatians 3:25-28
Mark 12:28-34a
Some of you may know that our bishop, as well as going on sabbatical, has recently taken up hockey.
I am keen to learn as much about the culture of my new home as I can, and in an effort to pick up the finer points of the rules and strategy of hockey, turned to a specialist documentary series put out by HBO called ‘Heated Rivalry’. I thought this might be a source of shared conversation with our bishop, but when I asked him, was sad to learn that he has not yet watched it.
I didn’t pick up all the rules, so think I need to watch it again, if I can find the time for a study day.
For those of you who have not seen Heated Rivalry, there are the main characters, Shane and Ilya, who are guided by the Holy Spirit to see beyond the ‘heated rivalry’ of their teams. I was rather more taken however by the sub-plot romance that formed between Scott, another closeted player, and Kip, the barista who makes Scott’s daily smoothie.
I surprised myself by crying even, when, after a great victory on the rink, Scott came out by announcing his love for Kip, after months of telling him their relationship had to remain hidden.
I hadn’t actually thought about my own coming out for a long time, but I cried because this scene brought back to me that foundational point in my life. For most of us, I suspect, our coming out remains our ‘origin myth’, one we tell again and again, particularly on dates! I am now more often asked about my calling as a priest, but sharing that identity for the first time was not a million miles away from coming out as it happens.
As LGBT people, most of us (and I am now middle-aged, so I hope and pray this isn’t still generally the case) – but for most of us, we spent our adolescence hiding a core part of ourselves, running away from it even.
We grew up with the world, and all of those closest to us, showing us and telling us that the most important thing in life is to be attracted to – and then to find someone of the opposite sex to spend your life with. And goodness knows most of us have tried to do just that.
I remember the girls I persuaded myself I fancied, largely because they fitted a certain mould of conventional attractiveness, and were genuinely really lovely people; and the fear I felt at growing into a man and having somehow to fabricate a whole life.
And for those of you who have not experienced this, it is not so simple as trying to lessen a part of yourself – that would be too logical. It is more of a cognitive dissonance, imagining that this whole part of who you are might simply go away, while also knowing on another level that it cannot.
I was reminded of this recently while reading what James Baldwin wrote about seeing some students in Florida protesting against segregation (about his ethnicity, though I suspect there was also something of his sexuality in this experience): ‘I was never like these students, [for it] took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.’ [Repeat]
If you are here, you have likely already come a long way on the journey from feeling like that. And yet as we celebrate Pride together, it is important that we remember how we have felt, so that we can demonstrate a different way.
Many of us have also been harmed by the church because of our sexuality. I have been struck by how many of my own congregation have found the Episcopal Church because of how different it is from the churches you have come from.
The Church of England still stands against gay marriage, and I have a vivid memory of telling my bishop that my partner and I were going to enter a civil partnership (which is all we are allowed). He kept referring to my ‘friend’, and in prayer gave thanks to God that we would remain celibate, even though I had not promised that. I felt physically sick at having my integrity so compromised.
Oh, and on a lighter note, I almost got thrown out of seminary for my drag performance as Miss Patti O’Doors, but that’s another story!
I had not expected to be so moved by how different things are here: I wept when standing for a blessing at this service two years ago, as I looked out and saw Ellen and Sarah and their children, from my church, in the front row also standing.
Our goal as Christians is union with God.
In the incarnation, God enters into the depths of human pain.
This is why Jesus tells us that he is particularly present in the hungry, in the thirsty, in the stranger, in the naked, in the sick and in those in prison.
He also of course tells us that ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, … blessed are those who mourn, … [and] blessed are the meek.’
This is not because these things are God’s will for us, but because God is closest to us when we are in these places – because we are closest to Christ in those places.
For those of us who are otherwise in places of privilege, what has been most difficult in our experience as LGBT+ people is what brings us closest to Christ.
Speaking for myself now, it is also what I think enables us to draw closest to others who are outsiders or rejected.
This is not to say that as LGBT+ people we can somehow understand the experience of other groups, but it does I think give us a real imperative to stand with them.
As someone who was more conservative when younger, no doubt trying to fit in, I know that my experience as a gay man means that I can no longer stand by and ignore the rights of women in the church, of people of colour in our country, or of immigrants in our communities, though God-knows I fall short.
And it is of course all too possible to be a misogynist, racist gay man.
But all of us have a choice: do we put our coming out in the past, and say ‘Thank God I now fit in’; or do we rejoice in our God-given queerness – in not being part of the identikit hetero-normative majority which is serving our world so well at the moment?
And acknowledge the experience we have lived through, learn from it, and reach out to others in whom we see Christ?
It is Christ’s will that we have life, and life in all its fulness.
All of life, and all of creation, is to be used to draw us closer to God. And we draw closer to God in our empathy and in our desires. For all love is of God, and perfect love casts out fear.
I don’t particularly subscribe to the anachronistic myth that St Aelred, the author of our first reading, was gay, but we don’t need him to be. That falls into the trap of the fundamentalists in making all same-sex attraction about sex, whereas the reality is so much closer to that meme of Bert and Ernie watching TV together.
As well as finding Christ in those in need, we find Him in those with whom we can find a more intimate ‘embrace of holy love’, in whom ‘your spirit can rest, to whom you can pour out your soul’, ‘to whom you can safely retire’, and with whom you can wrestle through the hardships of sharing a life.
God knows how much our world needs love at the moment.
And how proud I am to be part of a church which celebrates love wherever she finds it, and that instead of closing our doors to this great festival of love, opens the doors of this cathedral, rings our bells, and pours rainbow-striped love out into our city and the world, and welcomes it in.
If this is your first time in church: ‘You are loved. God loves you. We love you.’ Say with me, shout with me:
You are loved. God loves you. We love you.
And when this Eucharist is ended, when we have been fed with the Body and Blood of Christ who became one of us – yes, one of us, let us go out and live Christ’s love in the world, knowing each of us is made in God’s image, and all are one in Christ Jesus.
Amen and alleluia!
Can I have an alleluia? Alleluia!
The Rev. Christopher Rogers
