Today is Gay Pride Sunday, and many of our gay and lesbian friends are participating in special parades and celebrations. As the label suggests, the accent is on the positive: to give up apologizing for homosexual orientation and life style, instead to affirm it as good, what we Christians would style a special giftedness, a calling from God.

Sadly, many Christians still disagree with this assessment. Some insist that homosexual activity is contrary to Biblical norms. Ironically, today's epistle includes one of their proof-texts, where St. Paul lists pomeia-fornication, impurity, and licentiousness-among works of the flesh that separate one from God. Other passages include the "Holiness Code" in Leviticus, which counts male homosexual acts among the "abominations," and the first chapter of Romans where St. Paul makes homosexual encounters paradigms of the depravity to which God abandons sinners. To the authority of the book, many would add Church pronouncements and canon law, which recognize celibacy and heterosexual monogamy as the only legitimate options. These Christian brothers and sisters ask how we who celebrate Gay Pride Sunday'; can conscientiously contradict such prominent elements of our tradition.

Their's is a fair question. In a nutshell, my answer is that both Church and Bible are human as well as Divine. Inevitably, Divine-human communication is filtered through culture, which highlights some things and screens others out. The Bible stories themselves range over a two thousand year period, during which social organization, religious practice, norms and taboos vary considerably. Appeals to the Bible for ethical guidance make assumptions about how it is to be interpreted, give some passages or themes precedence over others. Such presuppositions are usually controversial, consciously or unconsciously driven by other concerns. This is why Christians can, in good faith, so radically disagree.

It is also why the contemporary relevance of Biblical norms is often unclear. Sometimes, as in 1 Timothy 1:10, the reference is obscure: is St. Paul talking about homosexual acts between consenting adults, or merely pagan temple prostitution? For other passages, meaning is straightforward, but applicability is in doubt. Early Mormons found precedent for polygamy in the patriarchs and Israelite kings, while appalled mainline Christians made them give it up as a condition of Utah's statehood. Few Christians feel generally bound by the Levitical code: e.g., we feel no qualms about wearing mixed-fiber clothes, we don't break the bowl just because a bug lands in the soup. Our Lord's only explicit remarks about sexual mores forbid divorce and remarriage. Yet, several decades ago, our Episcopal church conceded that permission in this area is a present pastoral necessity. Despite his Damascus Road conversion, St. Paul did not achieve full escape-velocity from his culture. His relationship to Christ gave him courage to trample Jewish taboos against eating with Gentiles. But in my opinion, "God wasn't finished with him yet" I don't believe he saw clearly in the area of sexuality or gender stereotypes. You haven't caught me obeying his injunction that women should keep silent in the church. And he probably knew even less about homosexual love than he did about the opposite sex!

Likewise, the Church's remarkable narrowness on this subject has a social-psychological explanation. For sexuality is one of the most powerful forces in human personality. Because lack of channeling produces ruin of great personal and collective proportions, social groups over-protect with rigid taboos and prohibitions, institutionalize repression, and forfeit creativity. Again, sexual-identity and orientation are at once central to our self-images and fragile. Many feel safer in a society that narrows down the options, forces everyone into simple molds. Deviation threatens by reminding the fearful that they don't really fit either! The Church qua human institution seeking to maintain organizational control on chaotic seas, deploys merely human methods, and in doing so betrays the Gospel. For the survival of the Church is entrusted to the Holy Spirit, Who is both omnipotent and infinitely creative and needs no help from taboos!

Personally, I take my clue to a Christian understanding of Gay Pride from the book of Acts, which relates how the Church handled its fIrst major crisis. Recall how Christianity began as a sect of Judaism. When religious leaders fIrst harassed, then instigated a government pogrom, fleeing Christians spread the Gospel to diaspora Jews. They had no intention of addressing Gentiles. But when eavesdropping Gentiles heard and believed, the Holy Spirit unmistakably fell upon, worked signs and wonders through them. When the apostles investigated, confirmed how the Spirit of God "dared" to violate Jewish taboos, the Jerusalem council weighed experience against tradition, agreed with the Spirit to count Gentiles in!

I am convinced that homosexual lifestyle is one way of living out Christian commitment, for some a positive vocation, because as a priest I have witnessed the Holy Spirit clearly at work in the lives of gay and lesbian persons. The AIDS epidemic forces our attention on hundreds of icons of Christ's passion, of resurrection courage and creativity, of sacrificial love that will not let brother or sister, friend, lover, or stranger die alone. I have been awestruck by the spiritual depth in those left behind. As a spiritual director, I have nudged ex-fundamentalist gay men to come out of the closet to God in their prayers, only to watch their stature in Christ sky-rocket, their gifts burst into flower.

Friends, our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve a celebration. We have promised to support them in their life in Christ. The Lord Our God, that Lover of Lovers, will hold us accountable for our failures on Judgment Day! What, then, shall we do?

First, Gay Pride Sunday is a day for the Church to humble Herself by apologizing to gay and lesbian persons, to repent before God for Her collusion in the way society has persecuted them throughout the ages. Gay Pride Sunday is a day for the Church to ask forgiveness from gay and lesbian persons for all of the ways She has cramped their style, crushed the image of Christ in them. It is a day to vow fruits of repentance, to commit ourselves to erase all traces of discrimination from our canon law!

Second, Gay Pride Sunday is a day for the Church to humble Herself, to confess Her failure to nurture gay and lesbian persons by publicly identifying, canonizing role models, both sexually active and celibate. For centuries, Mother Church has aborted her responsibility to teach us all how to be lovers in the image of Christ. Taboos and authoritarian pronouncements declare that all is forbidden, invite the counter-thesis that all is allowed. With homo- as with heterosexuality, not all things are helpful. Having idled in inarticulate gears for centuries, Mother Church now has become a "foolish virgin" with little light to shed. Gay Pride Sunday is a day for Mother Church to humble Herself, to beg Her gay and lesbian children to teach Her which patterns of love best focus the image of Christ in them.

Third, Gay Pride Sunday is a day for the Church to advertize how gays and lesbians number among the spiritually most advanced. Baptism, our birthing into God's family, cuts us off from every human blood line, cancels our entitlement to identify ourselves in merely human social terms. The epistle to the Hebrews says we are to count ourselves strangers and exiles upon the earth, because our true citizenship is in heaven. Those who slide readily into pre-established social niches are easily entombed by them. By contrast, the misfitting of gays and lesbians can free them to learn who they are directly from the Creator. The process of corning-out is a prototype spiritual journey, in which the person has to wrestle in the desen, like Christ did, to invent a unique integrity. Gay Pride Sunday is a day for Mother Church to humble Herself, to beg her gay and lesbian children to guide others on their way to God.

Fourth, Gay Pride Sunday is a day for the Church to humble Herself, to seek to know from Her gay and lesbian children what they have learned about God's own nature. Two weeks ago, we celebrated the Blessed Trinity, confessed the mystery that God in God's own essential nature is a society of persons eternally in love. Traditionally, the linguistic image -- of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all referred to as "He"-- is of same-gender love affairs. Even if we switch genders, the analogy is not to heterosexual monogamy. Who better than gay and lesbian Christians to give fresh insight into what Trinitarian romance is like?

All in all, Gay Pride Sunday is a day of Gospel reversals: a day for Old Mother Church to come out of the closet and confess her failures, to receive absolution from her priestly children, to parade with them behind Christ our Drum Major, onward to Zion, that beautiful City of God!