The love between David and Jonathan is the most powerful love story in the Hebrew Bible. You don’t hear much about it because it is suppressed by the heterosexist majority who are embarrassed. They say it was about bonding. They like to point out that both David and Jonathan had wives.
When we were working toward marriage equality at the William Way Community Center in Phialdelphia, it came to us to sponsor an annual prayer breakfast for marriage equality, even though it meant getting up very early in the morning. We invited leaders of the gay faith community, gay leaders of the faith community, and leaders of the faith community who were allies of the LGBT community. And we had exciting guest speakers.
I apologize that I do not remember the name of the woman whose impact was perhaps the most powerful. But her point was, the lives of millions of women had been affected, mostly negatively, by marrying gay men.
How different it might have been, had so-called biblical literati actually read the text?
Mournfully, David sang (2 Samuel 1:26): “I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”
In 2 Corinthians (8:8) Paul writes that he is “testing the genuineness of [their] love.” He is trying to help the members of his church understand that giving is about the love involved, that the gift itself is almost irrelevant, when love is the purpose. It matters more that we give from the love in our hearts than the shape of what we give. Of course, this applies even more to the love shared between people. It is the love that matters more than the shape of the relationship. It is this law of love that is at the core of all LGBTQ love, it is this God-given law of love that defines us.
In Mark’s Gospel (5:34) Jesus says: “Go in peace … and be healed.” There passage contains two healing stories, but the point is that healing is in the community of love. That to be healed indeed is to go in peace. And that to go in peace is to be genuine in love.
It is “Pride” today in many cities in the us, timed traditionally to coincide with the anniversary of the liberating June 28, 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. The pride we celebrate as people created to love is the pride we have in the genuineness of the love we share. When we celebrate Pride, we go in peace … and we are healed.
Proper 8 Year B 2021 RCL (2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27; Psalm 130 De profundis; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43)
©2021 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.
Dimensions of Reality: glbt Christian spirituality 