06/14/2026
This Pride weekend in Colorado Springs, I want to post the last part of a sermon I gave last summer in Sarasota, Florida, during a consulting/preaching weekend. The sermon was called Praise with Pride, and here's where that topic picked up in the sermon. Hopefully the relevance will be obvious.
"This last practice, praising with pride, raises one more topic worth considering. The idea of praising with pride may sound strange. Praising God suggests cultivating humility. Aren’t pride and humility opposites? Don’t they exist on a kind of continuum with pride at the bad end and humility at the good end? And here, I’d like to propose that the answer is no. Humility and pride are not opposites, and in fact can and should co-exist productively within us.
Pride is, rather, the opposite of humiliation and shame. When we have pride, we have faith and trust in our own worthiness as beloved children of the holy. When we are ashamed or humiliated, we feel unworthy, not as though we have done something wrong but as though we are something wrong. And lots of people who have encountered the cruelty, rejection, and spiritual violence of conservative Christianity are well aware that one conservative Christian goal is in fact to make LGBTQ+ people feel ashamed and humiliated, unworthy, unacceptable, and unloved. That truth I learned about Christianity years ago [about its homophobia] was incomplete but it was not a lie. It is indeed true of much of conservative Christianity. It’s simply not true of inclusive, justice-focused Christianity, such as what you practice here. And I thank God for that.
The brilliant Black gay author James Baldwin once wrote, “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.” Baldwin is talking about shame here, and about pride. He had to release his shame to take up his pride. Those of us who have similar shame, who have been humiliated in the name of love, must similarly release our shame and take up our pride. And when we do, I believe we will find that that perfect pride casts out all shame, just as perfect love casts out all fear.
What about humility? If pride is not the opposite of humility, what is? Arrogance. The certainty that we know everything there is to know, that we have arrived at the end of our journey of growth and development, that we are better than other people. We should indeed repent of our arrogance and work earnestly to replace it with humility, with understanding our place alongside all other people, no better and no worse than anyone else. The “no better” part of that statement is important. But so is the “no worse” part.
And so, my friends, may we praise with pride today, rejecting both shame and arrogance as we cultivate humility. May we celebrate our worthiness, which the world cannot take away because it comes to us from God whose love is steadfast. May we do the justice demanded of us by Jesus and the prophets, rescuing the oppressed and defending the devalued. And may we love ourselves, our neighbors, and even our enemies by creating a world in which every last one of us can flourish as God intends. Amen."
Happy Pride, everyone!
