MCCNY
June 21, 2026
Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, ‘Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations. But you have made it a den of robbers.’And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching.
We’re going to spend more time talking about Holy Week this morning than anyone expected and probably wants. I know it’s Stonewall Sunday and Pride month; I know very well that we need affirmation and confirmation and Pride. Let’s get some of that going: We belong. I’m so glad I don’t belong, I’m so proud to be in this society. You’re beautiful. You are already enough. I love you.
Now bear with me, please; it’s going to be rough for a few minutes.
I want to paint a picture of the first-century, Roman-occupied Passover celebration in Jerusalem. Ironically or tragically, “They were celebrating divine deliverance from past Egyptian imperial bondage while under present Roman imperial bondage.” Think about that for a moment, and also our celebrations of Pride lately maybe always. They were celebrating deliverance from oppression while under oppression. My boyfriend John Crossan describes the Passover festivals as clusters of high tension, thick with the awareness of surrounding soldiers posted around the Temple perimeter on the ramparts. Because Passover was a revolutionary event, its festivals were often flashpoints of dissent, some of which became riots. In 4 BCE Archelaus one unpronounceable Roman general sent his whole army to slaughter about three thousand Jewish rioters during Passover as they made their sacrifices. (This may be what Luke 13 refers to, when Jesus is asked about the Galileans whose blood Pilate mingles with their sacrifices.) In 50 CE, Cumanus another guy I’m not going to try to pronounce his name sent his whole army to trample and slaughter ten or twenty thousand Passover rioters. Everyone there today knew the revolutionary import of the festival. Everyone there today knew why the soldiers were there and why they made themselves visible and how eager they were to quickly and cruelly give punishment on a moment’s notice. This is the Jerusalem Temple that Jesus entered and started throwing stuff around. Hi.
Trigger warning for this next bit. I want to paint a picture of crucifixion: a form of execution that was designed to start by carefully balancing enough brutal beating to reduce physical resistance but keep the target still-alive enough to experience a very long and tortured death suspended on a pole. They were publicly flogged, publicly marched, publicly displayed on a pole. It was public to warn everyone: Try me; this could be you. It was public to humiliate and dishonor a person and their family. It specifically and notedly was public to dehumanize and eradicate a person: their body was left unburied, hanging, to be eaten by birds and dogs and to be broken down by sun and wind. Like roadkill. Like nothing. The remains of one single person has been recovered in all of history of all of the people that Rome tortured and executed in this way. This cruelty is the well-understood and expected punishment faced by people who threw stuff around anywhere in Roman-occupied Jerusalem when Jesus entered the Jerusalem Temple and started throwing stuff around. Hi.
So, yeah. Sorry, but obviously not. So many of these details are omitted from the gospel texts, probably maybe because people just knew the context. Like if we started explaining to each other here in this room right now how we weren’t able to marry for the first thirty or fifty years of our lives and brought a fake date to family weddings and reunions to avoid getting questions and side-eye and disowned. Maybe we don’t talk about it, though, because we like to make things easier on us. Cheap grace. Either way, we aren’t very prepared to hear and understand the importance of these harrowing details. And so “Jesus’s crucifixion is most often sentimentalized” (Justice 37) and spiritualized and made abstract and easy and in the future and ridiculous.
I want us to know that Jesus knew what to expect when he entered the Temple to kick stuff over. Hey. Happy Pride; stay with me, we’ll get there.
This is the stuff, his version of it is what Jesus knew, what he knew-knew, when he entered the Jerusalem Temple and started making a ruckus. The next surprise-maybe, maybe-bombshell is that he wasn’t attacking the Temple or the sacrifices or the priests or the people exchanging graven-image money for not-graven-image money or the soldiers (that was yesterday with the palms) or the state (yesterday) or the supreme commander acting like God (also yesterday). He was criticizing us. He was criticizing us. Us. Good us, religious us, gay us. Us in the seats today. Us on the float next week. He wanted our attention: he wanted more from us.
When Jesus started knocking things over in the Temple that day, he was holding hands across the capital building doors, he was laying down in from of the county courthouse, he was throwing red paint on the draft office. He was symbolically shutting down the shop. No business as usual. That’s probably part of why folks have assumed he was criticizing the Temple or its ritual system, but probably not entirely because also lots of people are just anti-semitic and Christian supercessionist turds. But Jesus was keeping *us from ritual as usual. He was yelling some stuff that clarifies what this was all about; John says he yelled something a little different than what Mark says he said, but they work similarly more or less. In Mark, he quotes Jeremiah 7: “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? but you have made it a den of robbers” and it meant, hey parishioners, God’s house is to be the hub of diversity, equity, and social inclusion and we’re not doing that, but we have an “All are welcome here” graphic on the church bulletin. It meant, hey congregants, God’s house is supposed to feed people and clothe people and we’re not doing that, but we include a prayer for those folks before communion. He’s saying it’s not enough to do the ritual acts that represent our connection: the annual dues, the animal sacrifice, attendance at service, weekly communion, the Pride parade or even the Dyke March (better, it’s better). It’s not enough to do the rituals that symbolize our belief in connection, we must do the behaviors that create and sustain real connection and real enoughness and more safety and more wellness. And if we don’t do that relationship work, that justice work, if we only do the ritual stuff and attendance stuff and even donation stuff (keep doing the donation stuff), then we are using church or ritual or Pride as cover, as Performative Goodness, as our beard.
In Jeremiah 7, the people chant, “This is the temple of the Lord temple of the Lord temple of the Lord” and do nothing to rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. I’m not accusing anyone here of defrauding vulnerable people or exploiting labor. And. But, if we aren’t taking action to defend and restore dignity and autonomy to trans folk being erased and exposed, God doesn’t want to hear our love is love, gay is good, God made me queer chants. God definitely wants to hear our love is love, gay is good, God made me queer chants. So do I. I definitely want to live in world where the Pittsburgh Pirates and LA Dodgers rainbowtize their logos. I feel seen and stuff. And. But, worship does not excuse us from making justice. Being gay does not exempt us from doing Queer.
The beauty of queering the bible has always been naming characters like Deborah, Jonathan and David, Ruth and Naomi, the Ethiopian eunuch, Lydia, and that lesbian power-couple house-church leaders. The beauty of studying queer theology and queer bible study is finding ourselves not just always having been around (we’ve always been around), not just included in the story and participating in the history of being and making lasting faith communities, but the beauty of it is how many of us in the canon are exemplars, are models, are revered kings and judges and embodiments of the creating and sustaining relationship that drives and defines our faith.
We think of Ruth and Naomi as gay ladies gaying up the bible, but hold that thought for a second. Happy Pride. Love you; Jesus wants more from us. The book of Ruth is read at the festival of Shavuot, which celebrates the giving of Torah. It’s not history, probs; she probably wasn’t a historical person probably definitely. And her importance as a parable isn’t as the great- great- whatever- grandmother of David, but more the opposite, like probably David is named as her heir because she is so important. Naming him lends him some of her riz. She exists, the parable exists, to embody chesed, which is central to Torah, to Jewish faithfulness and obedience. It’s not easily defined, and I don’t presume to define it for Judaism, and it’s something that is expressed here: I will not abandon you; your people will be my people, spoken by someone who was not of Naomi’s people, and in fact was disliked or even despised by Naomi’s people. It encompasses steadfast love and covenant loyalty; it inspires grace, mercy, kindness, and generosity to others. We understand it in many ways colored by things Jesus said and did, like the shared meal, like give away everything you have to people who can’t pay you back, maybe especially things like love your enemies.
Were they gay? Who cares. Two women don’t have to feel hubba hubba in order to express love and loyalty, or to commit to lifelong mutual aid. The emotional intimacy and interdependence Ruth expresses here is part of what we know to be our queer family, our friends’ chosen family. It’s not about sexuality; it’s not limited to queer sexuality or queer people. This book is read at the festival of Shavuot, for Pete’s sake, to represent a central quality of Jewish faith for all.
Were they gay? You bet your sweet rear end they were gay. Prove they weren’t. I can’t count how many mainline professors and colleagues and seminarians over the years have pooh-poohed to me the queerness of this relationship, with zero persuasiveness. It’s right up there with the number of women who live together for “safety” or “to share expenses.” It’s up there with the number of times people asked if Corrine and I were siblings. These two fictional nonhistorical characters in a book-length parable analogizing a crucial divine quality are as gay as a Barry Manilow cabaret in a Dolly Parton bathhouse. In Chelsea. Who cares? Why does anyone care so much about them being queer that they need to say they weren’t? Go sit down and hush. God wants them to be gay; prove me wrong.
But the important thing isn’t their sexuality. Well, the most important thing isn’t that. Mhmm, there are other important things. Traditionally, Ruth is the model of a Torah centerpiece of grace, mercy, kindness, and generosity to others by a disliked outsider. And this is what Jesus went into that Temple in that Roman-occupied state and made that seditious ruckus to tell us to be. They killed him for inciting us to lovingkindness. They tortured and executed him for conspiring to criminal generosity.
Jesus went, Jesus himself went deliberately and strategically to a known certain and terrible death in order to make sure we get the message to be like a disliked lesbian foreign stranger. Listen, will you? Jesus went open-eyed into arrest and public beating and prolonged suffering and death to tell us that God wants more from us than perfect attendance and Protect the Dolls t-shirts.
God wants us all to wear Protect the Dolls t-shirts.
Growing up, my weird fundamentalist end-times-loving church used to ask us, if we were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict? Nevermind their definition of Christian is more or less what Jesus is throwing chairs and chickens at today, but still they’re onto something. If we were arrested for being anti-racist, if we were arrested for aiding and abetting trans health and wellness, if we were arrested for empowering and equipping women and Black women and trans women, if we were arrested for harboring immigrants and promoting the welfare of Palestinian people and impeding the carceral state, would there be enough evidence?
We’re all thrilled that a rugby player was able to come out this week in a sport it’s hard even to be a regular manly man in. Happy Pride. Jesus loves you and stuff, a lot. And he wants more from us. Jesus staged a treasonous pre-riot in front of Roman sentinels and within a week was state-murdered for it to tell us he expects more than rainbow bunting and credal recitation.
If we are not a working class fat Black trans lesbian who uses mobility support, and so few of us are, and if we’re not then it’s going to take a bit more intentional, thoughtful work to live out the justice we’re being called to by today’s Jesus. We’ll need to work at it. Jesus wants us to work at it. I understand if gay men and lesbians are worried about someone coming for marriage down the road, even soon. That’s a real possibility. But they’ve already come for trans existence. It’s already happened. Our sense of self, mobility in this country and international travel, use of public spaces, participation in sports and armed service and whatever else. Your people shall be my people. I get it if we’re starting to worry about custody of our kids again, and access to family healthcare. That’s a valid fear. But they are already withdrawing trans healthcare and wresting trans kids from their parents’ custody decisions. It has already happened. Your people shall be my people. And Black folks have never been safe in this country, not ever. Not ever. Your people shall be my people.
I think it was Malcolm X and, more recently, activist and scholar Mica McGriggs who highlight the intersectional litmus test for broad safety, and how the structural and social changes made to protect the most vulnerable intrinsically protect everyone else. If we are not the human embodiment of the most vulnerable, and if we give a shake about what Jesus said, and if we don’t want to use our faith and our Pride as cover, we must think beyond our own, personal priorities for safety and well-being.
Your people shall be my people: it will take effort and consideration for those of us who are not being harmed to chesed for the other. It’s not just a good goal; it’s the center of our faith. I’m arguing today that it’s what Jesus died for. I’m arguing this morning that caring about and risking ourselves for the people we are not is specifically and deliberately what Jesus died to make sure we know is expected.
That’s it. I love you. Happy Pride, let’s get to it.
Rev. Miller Hoffman 