by Christopher Schouten, MID

Preached June 29th, 2025, Pride Sunday

First Church Phoenix UCC, Phoenix, AZ

Beloved community, Happy Pride Sunday! What a joy it is to gather here at First Church Phoenix UCC, an Open & Affirming church for decades, a beacon of extravagant welcome, especially today as we celebrate the vibrant tapestry of queer lives and the powerful love of our allies! 

On a day like today, there are so many powerful messages and themes we could lift up! I could preach on the sacredness of queer identities, the resilience of the LGBTQIA+ community in the face of adversity, the biblical foundations for radical inclusion, or the ongoing fight for liberation and justice, based solidly on the gospel of Jesus Christ. All of these would be deeply appropriate for Pride Sunday.

But instead, I'm drawn back to the profound journey we've been on this past month. Through her "Mirror Reflections" series, Pastor Susan has invited us to hold up a mirror to ourselves, to search our souls for our darkest and most difficult truths, and to bring them into the light of grace, understanding that God loves all of who we are. This path toward internalizing God’s deep and abiding love resonates with all of us, but it has special significance for anyone who has ever been told that they are NOT beloved children of God.

Sadly, it is precisely this message – that some are not truly beloved – that has had a deep and devastating impact on the queer community. So I want you to know that if you identify as LGBTQIA+ and you are hearing my voice right now that you are a miracle. The fact that you are hearing these words means that you have at least begun to deconstruct the negative messages that we have all received from the harmful religious institutions and un-Christian individuals in our lives. You may or may not have fully embraced your birthright as a beloved child of God, but you are on the path, and that puts you ahead of most of our beloved siblings who have been so damaged and disenfranchised by so-called religious people that they have dropped out of the game and are going it on their own not only without the church, but without God. I don’t know how they do it - especially today - but please know that wherever you are on your journey - First Church has got your back! We are here to help you discover and experience the joy of knowing just how much God loves you for exactly who you are!

This path to inner wholeness and grace changes our lives - it has changed mine - yet once we’ve found it, the natural next step for all of us is to take that grace we've found in the mirror and turn it outward to those around us. Now you might think - oh - that’s easy! I practice radical welcome, grace and love with everyone around me every day in my family, my circle of friends, and in my community. And that’s a great start! We need to build grace-filled communities of support. They are our foundation and our bedrock. But that’s NOT what today’s scripture reading is about.

The REAL challenge, as our New Testament reading encourages us, is to extend that grace even to our enemies. For grace, in its truest form, is love that we've done nothing to deserve. This is why we do the inner work: to truly internalize God's grace for us, to bathe in its warmth, so that we can then extend that same boundless love to others. Because Jesus’ charge to “Love thy enemy” has no exceptions, no footnotes, no asterisk, and no fine print.

But let's be honest: we are living in a time of extreme stress for LGBTQIA+ people in this country. Our rights are under attack. Trans youth are being denied life-saving health care in 20 states, and trans people in general have become scapegoats in ways they do not deserve. Marriage equality, which was affirmed by a very different type of Supreme Court ten years ago this week, is even under threat, as state legislatures petition the Supreme Court to reconsider something we once thought was a victory secured forever. We are rightfully feeling under attack and disillusioned with life where the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" is starting to ring hollow for many communities, including ours.

These attacks come at a time where we see an increasing gulf between two opposite sides at war for control over the soul of this nation. Most people seem to prefer to either shout at each other or ignore each other, and no one is actually listening to each other. Within our social media feeds, our favorite news channels, even our churches, we live in echo chambers. We seek community and safety with others whose values and belief systems are like ours, and that makes perfect sense! Thank God for communities like First Church, which is a safe haven and a sanctuary for so many! But what happens when we get so comfortable in our bubbles that it’s easier to pretend like the other side doesn’t exist? When we despise the harm they cause us and those we love, and we feel powerless to confront them? It can start to feel very easy to dehumanize them and disappear them from our lives, rather than to engage with them in any way.

But if you think about it, where does this path ultimately lead? Two groups of people who have no desire to know and understand one another? Two parallel cultures, each one fighting for dominance? Two countries, no longer indivisible with liberty and justice for all but divided with liberty and justice for them but not for us? Or for us but not for them? Without this attempt at compassion, even for our perceived enemies, the very foundations of our civilization, and certainly our democracy, begin to crumble. If we cannot even try to understand the humanity of "the other," dialogue becomes impossible, and all that remains is tribal conflict.

I understand the desire to remain within the safety of our communities and the powerlessness of not knowing what to do in the face of what feels like such an incredible evil. After the elections in November, I just wanted to hide in a hole and pretend none of this was happening. This problem felt so huge to me that I was paralyzed by disbelief, impotence and grief. Can any of you relate to that?

But as I’ve grown in faith this year through my discernment process, my thinking has started to change. I have come to believe that there’s another way. And it’s not an easy way… but it IS Jesus’ way!

In the Bible, God plays a lot of long games. Take, for example Jacob and the newly emerging Israelite nation. After entering Egypt during a time of famine, the Israelites remained there for 430 years before God parted the Red Sea and Moses lead them to the Promised Land, but only after wandering for 40 years in the wilderness. The process took almost 500 years! And this story repeats many times througout the history of the Hebrew people. There’s a lot we could say about Israel today, but one thing is for sure: our faithful and brave Jewish siblings know how to play a long game.

So now I'm here to suggest how we win this battle by playing the long game that Jesus laid out for us: the game of winning over the hearts and minds of those we call our enemies through the very compassion that we are developing for ourselves by looking in the mirror. I'm asking us to take the inner work Pastor Susan has encouraged us to do to find grace, love, and forgiveness for ourselves, and then to turn it outward on the people who expect it the least: those who would seek to harm us and deny us of our rights, our dignity and our humanity.

Why might we want to love our enemy, beyond Jesus simply telling us to do so, especially as queer folk? Because, as hard as it is, THIS is the path of true transformation. We are playing a long game for cultural change, built not on mirroring hate, but on embodying a profound, almost defiant love, something I believe we as a community are very good at when we choose to be. This isn't a new strength for us; it is born from the very resilience we've cultivated in our fight for dignity and acceptance for many, many decades. And many of you have been part of that fight for much of this time.

Extending love to our enemies is a posture of strength, not weakness, because it requires immense inner fortitude cultivated through our own self-reflection, self-awareness, self-love and self-control. It frees us from the corrosive grip of hatred and resentment, allowing creativity and grace to flow through us, rather than being blocked by bitterness. It models God's radical, inclusive love, which desires the flourishing of all creation. And perhaps most powerfully, it holds the potential to plant a seed, however small, for the transformation of hearts, a seed that might one day blossom into understanding and even allyship.

I experienced the power of this transformation in college. As soon as I hit campus at age 19, I quickly became an LGBTQIA+ activist. I became a member of the Gay People's Union's speakers bureau, leading discussions all over campus about LGBTQIA+ awareness, especially on dorm floors with freshman, many of whom were coming to college from their tiny towns and farms across rural Iowa. Once, I was speaking to a group in the lobby of the University of Iowa's largest dorm—a very intimidating experience with such a large crowd—and a young freshman woman came up to me afterwards in tears. She told me: "Christopher, I've been taught my entire life to believe that you are a sinner and that I should hate you. But now that I actually know someone who’s gay, I wonder how I ever could have thought that, because you're a human being just like me." This taught me, in a visceral way, the incredible, transformative power of authentic, human engagement with "the other side."

I haven't always remembered that lesson, especially not in the "MAGA age." The vitriol, the dehumanization, the constant barrage of attacks – it can harden even the most open heart. It can make you want to unfriend, dismiss, or simply walk away. And I have done that too. I’ve often failed to remember what Jesus asks us to do, because it feels so much easier to just write people off and banish them from our lives.

But since I began to heed my call to ministry about 5 years ago, my heart has started to change and I’ve been looking at life differently. This period of discernment has taught me a lot about myself and about God’s love for me, and the grace I’ve developed for myself and for others has started to fundamentally change my view of how to respond to “the other side”. Because when we begin to understand that we are worthy of God’s love, the only logical conclusion is that: so is everybody else. No fine print!

So how did I approach perceived adversaries in the past and how do I try do it now? Having wrestled with these truths, I now see a clear evolution in my own approach to perceived adversaries. Allow me to illustrate this journey with two stories, a 'before' and an 'after' from my own life:

First, there’s my Aunt, who lives in small-town Iowa. She is a kind woman in many ways, having been an educator most of her life. Because she and my mother shared a difficult childhood with an abusive father, she grew up with deep anxiety and a pervasive fear of the unknown. Her past traumas made the familiar feel safe, and anything unfamiliar, especially people who were different, feel like a threat. Without much exposure to diverse communities or cultures, at the dawn of the MAGA era, emboldened by Trump’s brand of hateful rhetoric, I watched her anxiety transform into xenophobic positions she would publish on Facebook. When I challenged her, she would passionately label my rejection of her intolerance as being intolerant of her intolerance. There wasn’t actually much dialogue involved because most of this conversation took place on Facebook when we were 4500 miles away from each other, which didn’t help matters much. At the time and under these circumstances, I didn’t understand what was driving her dehumanizing rhetoric, so I cut her, my uncle, and one of my cousins out of my life, not able to stand their allegiance to a regime that I found so antithetical to my values. From my perspective today, I feel sad for having abandoned those relationships, yet I have not yet decided if or how to repair them. This wrestling with forgiveness has shown me that I still have unhealed places in me as well to address. But today, knowing what I know, I believe I would do things differently.

Fast forward about ten years to early 2023, and after a lot of personal growth and growth in my faith, I got a chance to do things differently. I found myself in an unlikely and unexpected relationship that taught me the transformative power of love across deep differences, giving me a profound taste of what it means to play Jesus’ long game.

Kyle grew up in a world far from my own: a deeply conservative, fundamentalist branch of Lutheranism. His upbringing was highly restrictive - no movie theaters, no dating, carefully curated media, and no room for questioning the faith he was handed. As evangelical-adjacent Christians, his family is staunchly Republican. On the surface, we have a very unlikely friendship. I’m a progressive Christian from a Democratic family with decades of experience advocating for justice and the marginalized, studying progressive theology and spirituality, and with an incredibly strong sense of myself as a proud queer man. He is still just beginning to untangle and deconstruct the tightly wound beliefs of his upbringing, and doesn’t always know exactly what he believes outside the shadow of his family and his church. And yet, what formed between us was something incredibly rare: a friendship strong enough to hold space for difference without demanding sameness.

We weren’t even aware of these differences in the beginning; especially not the political ones. Then we went through the phase of finding out how different we were and just mutually agreeing not to talk about it. I’m sure many of you have family members and neighbors who are still in that don’t ask don’t tell stage as well. But after last year’s election, when he told me who he voted for - after a brief period of shock - I decided to stop judging and start listening. I wanted to understand how someone I care for so deeply could vote for a party who represents the opposite of everything I stand for. And the dialogue began. And it has changed us.

It didn’t happen through debate. It didn’t happen through winning arguments. It happened through trust. Through time. Through conversation. Through the bold and tender work of beginning to ask, “Can you tell me why you believe that?” Not as a trap or an attack, but as an invitation. When we started talking openly about our views - about God, about politics, about queerness and faith and what it means to be a good person - we made a conscious choice not to argue, not to correct, not to judge. We chose instead to listen. To get curious. To hear the story beneath the opinion. And every time we did that, something opened up in both of us. Not necessarily agreement, but understanding. Respect. Compassion.

The moment that stands out for me the most is when we discussed why he kept voting Republican. What I learned was that he is deeply loyal to his family - they are his entire world, and I am pretty much the only alternative perspective he has in his life. He is afraid of disappointing them (he’s still not even out of the closet to them). As I listened, I realized how much his vote reflected not strong political convictions on specific topics, but a desire to be accepted by the people he loves and the world he knows. I have no idea how he will vote in the future, but our willingness to dialogue from a place of love, respect and curiosity brought us closer together. We’ve discovered is that we don’t need to see eye-to-eye on everything to love each other well. What we do need is a foundation of safety and mutual respect - a shared covenant that our relationship matters more than our need to be right. And in that space, something sacred happens. We both grow. We both soften. We are changed. And in many places, we have found common ground.

What stands out for me from both these stories is that those we sometimes perceive as malicious are often good peopleoperating from a place of fear. Fear of change. Fear of unfamiliarity. Fear of no longer belonging to the families and communities they grew up in. And often, lack of exposure to alternative ideas because they don’t know anyone like us, and haven’t even been given an opportunity to get to know us and find out how damn loveable we are!

So our only hope of ever understanding them, then, is to recognize them not as adversaries, but as individuals whose values and opinions have been shaped by life experiences fundamentally different from our own. And by playing Jesus’ long game of love, HOPEFULLY, our response to them can transform from reflexive contempt into a deliberate, compassionate effort to understand not their message, but the human being that lies beneath it.

The Radical Call of Compassion on Pride Sunday

Now lest you think I’ve completely disappeared down a rabbit hole of New Age Christian lovie-dovieness, let me tell you what loving our enemy does NOT mea. It does not mean abandoning our deeply held Christian values. It does not mean we stop advocating for justice, for truth, or for the care and protection of the vulnerable – values rooted in God's boundless compassion. It does not mean we condone harmful rhetoric or actions. The call to love is not a call to moral passivity. Indeed, our very existence as queer people and allies is an act of justice and truth-telling. We deserve to take our place at the table in confidence and joy! We must interrupt harm wherever and whenever it happens. But maybe we can do so with a little more love in ways that make us look less like the other side. Because we are followers of Christ, and we do things differently.

So, how do we begin? Perhaps by asking different questions of our perceived adversaries, not in a spirit of debate, but of genuine, prayerful curiosity. Instead of angrily asking "How can you believe that?", what if we tried compassionately asking, "Help me understand what concerns you most?" or, "What experiences have led you to feel this way?" This isn't about litigation or agreement; it's about seeking to understand the human heart behind the position. It’s about embodying that call from Luke 6, to do good, to bless, to pray, even for those from whom we expect nothing in return but perhaps scorn. This is the difficult, counter-cultural path of Christian love. And in listening to them, perhaps they will give us a chance to share our lived experience and our hearts with them, and like the encounter I had with that young woman in college, we both will be changed.

And here, beloved community, is where our unique journey as queer people - with the support of our allies - becomes our profound strength in this challenge. We have fought a relentless fight to love ourselves and others fiercely and unapologetically. Our very existence has been a courageous battle for the right to love who we love, openly and without shame. We know, deeply and intimately, what it means to fight for love. So, let us take this indomitable fight for love, this hard-won wisdom, and turn it outward. Let's direct this boundless capacity to love not only because Jesus tells us to, but because we know it is one of the most powerful paths toward healing those who oppose us. Often, they fight us not because we don't deserve love, but because they themselves have not fully embraced God's boundless love for themselves, leaving them unable to extend it to others. Let us be part of their healing process, offering them the boundless love of God that we have come to know so profoundly. When they see it in us, where they least expect it, perhaps they will embrace it for themselves as well, and together, we will heal the world.

Amen.