A Prayer for Pride Sunday

by Lauren Plummer / Glendale Baptist Church (Nashville, TN)

Holy One,

Today we celebrate Pride — the gift of living into the fullness of who you have created us to be. Bless all who celebrate this weekend with joy in the knowledge that they belong.

We come with gratitude, Holy Mystery, for all the ways you are known to us and for all the ways you confound our comprehension. We give thanks to you, gender-bending God, who is both mother and father and still between and beyond all our categories of understanding. We celebrate the queerness of Spirit that beckons us out, to new horizons of hope and fuller communion with your being.

We give thanks, we give thanks for all the ways that Love finds us.

And as we celebrate, keep within in us the memory that Pride is also protest — a prophetic witness to the struggle of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, and every non-conforming ancestor who has gone before us. We remember today that joy and love dancing are courageous acts of sacred resistance: a testament to the goodness of your creation, a celebration of triumph over the forces of dehumanization and shame.

With gratitude, we call to mind the faces of all the holy trailblazers, in our own lives and in our larger story, who fought and suffered much, who modeled wisdom and compassion to show us how wide and inclusive Love’s welcome is. We hold these people in our hearts. Bless and keep also the saints among us now — those still using their gifts to speak out in myriad ways and showing us the continuing revelation of beloved kin-dom.

This morning, we remember especially those for whom living authentically has meant loss and grief. We remember those struggling to come out to themselves or their loved ones. We remember those who have been cast aside by family and friends, those abused and silenced, and all lives cut short by shame, stigma, and prejudice. Forgive us, O God, when we let fear shrink our hearts and we try to place limits on your boundless love. May we keep striving to make a world where all people know dignity and can enjoy a life of love and health and equal rights.

We pray that this remembering will strengthen our commitment to create sanctuary and deep welcome for those who have been marginalized. May our worship increase our awareness of grace — that we might give and receive it more freely with one another and all those we encounter. And may our worship reveal the work that is ours to do.

We offer this prayer with Jesus, our sibling an our friend. Amen.