In this op-ed, Reverend Broderick L. Greer, an Episcopal Priest, reflects on the sermons he delivered after the Pulse shooting in Orlando in 2016, and the message of hope and resilience he hopes to impart.

In the two weeks following the Pulse nightclub shooting, I preached at two different LGBTQ Pride Month services, one in Tennessee and one in Minnesota. I was invited by both communities long before we knew the lives of 49 people and a whole nation would be irreversibly transformed. As the occasions to preach drew near, I could hear my preaching professor reminding me in only the way she can: Sometimes the news demands that you change your sermon. While there were two sermons, there was one grief.

Here are two excerpts from those sermons that still resonate with me, nearly a year later:

“The eunuch, like so many of us, was devouring every inch of Scripture in order to find some word affirming his existence.”

That evening in Nashville, the designated Scripture reading was a story from the Acts of the Apostles about an Ethiopian eunuch. (Eunuchs were usually castrated at an early age to serve in a royal court.) Like so many marginalized communities before and after him, the eunuch takes the texts of his faith and interrogates them, placing himself in a narrative that very well could have been used to diminish his humanity.

LGBTQ people of faith and no faith alike have been told time and again that either we don’t belong in our communities of faith, or that sacred texts aren’t ours to read, mark, and own. The Ethiopian eunuch subverts all of this by creating a place for himself where there wasn’t one for him before, much like resilient sexual minorities have done for millennia. I grieve for LGBTQ people who — because of the heterosexism, transantagonism, and homophobia of others — have been expelled from their families and communities of faith. Every time groups and individuals have sought to weaponize texts, traditions, and trauma against us, we have defiantly asserted our humanity, living as the people we understand ourselves to be. The LGBTQ people of Nashville taught me that.

“But I don’t never git used to it.”

In my Minneapolis Pride sermon, I referenced a vignette from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Celie said this in response to another character who said, “You better shut up and git used to it,” where “it” refers to repeated dehumanization. Central to cycles of oppression is convincing those being oppressed that they, first, deserve it, and, second, need to grow accustomed to it. This could be heard, if ever-so-subtly, in the calm and reasonable statements of some talking heads in the immediate wake of the Orlando massacre. “It wasn’t targeted because it’s a gay nightclub,” some said. Less cordial voices spouted off, “Well they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” They sought to erase, deflate, and write off our suffering in insidiously subtle ways.

But we should never grow accustomed to places we consider sacred — churches, temples, mosques, and LGBTQ-specific nightclubs — to being violent spaces. Nor should we grow accustomed to being treated like second-class citizens on our jobs, in hospital waiting rooms, or at adoption agencies. Like Celie, LGBTQ people can’t bring ourselves to settle for the world as we’ve known it: violent, antagonistic, and exclusive. Like Celie, we act in our own interest to engender the reality that we deserve not only to survive, but to flourish in our various contexts. The LGBTQ people of Minneapolis taught me that.

Even a year later, I hold onto this message of unlikely and defiant hope in a time of great unrest, not because I am an optimist, but because I know LGBTQ people: our generosity, creativity, and imagination. If I were preaching those sermons again, I’d simply stand and say, “Thank you,” to our gritty, resilient, and thoughtful LGBTQ communities for teaching me — one of your own — how to love myself — and our communities — against seemingly insurmountable odds. Thank you.

Related: I Am a Priest, and This is Why I’m Pro-Choice

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