finding the future now

Fourth Sunday After Pentecost ● June 16, 2024

Rev. Tyler Heston, Guest Preacher © 2024

You can view the full worship video recording at:

https://youtu.be/IwFEgPDSaK4?si=foW_RZ7d0wJgeJr-

Scripture Readings: 

 John 4: The Woman at the Well (adapted from New Revised Standard Version updated edition)

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz

The reading text is provided at the end of this sermon.

I moved to New York City less than a year ago, as I was brutally reminded when I redownloaded StreetEasy last week to start thinking about where my husband and I might move once our lease runs up.

When people ask why we moved to New York, I often say “Where else?” The short of it is that I first wanted to move to NYC when I got clear in discernment that I wanted to pursue doctoral studies in theology at the intersection of queer theory. With schools like Drew, where I’m now studying, and history like the history of this very neighborhood in which I join with you all today, I truly mean it when I say “where else?” 

It’s a treat to live here now, doing ministry with Christ Church, a congregation that immediately felt like community, and doing school at Drew, and finding a sense of home here with my husband and our old friends who have also found their way here and new friends we’re meeting along the way. It’s particularly sweet to sneak down to be here with you this morning, too, during Pride month, to share a word about what I have a hunch to be a sacred and queer encounter in the Gospel stories about Jesus.

Positioning Pride

I have to admit, when Jeff first asked if I would preach today, I wondered— who am I to bring a word here in the context of Pride month? I feel like you have so much to teach me, with how much of LGBTQIA+ history has happened in this neighborhood— and how much of it is tied to your congregational story in particular. It’s inspiring. 

So, in preparation, I made sure to do a bit of extra homework to brush up on my homework so that I could at least know some of what you might now after years of ministry here in the Village.

One of the people I learned about was someone named Steven F. Dansky, who was one of the marchers and organizers of the Christopher Street Liberation Day in 1970, what some consider the “first Pride parade.”

Dansky had a history of political activism, having marched for civil rights, women’s rights, and economic justice. He was involved with a group called the Gay Liberation Front, an established group using traditional tactics for political and cultural change. Yet even with his past experiences, that first march on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots the year prior was unlike anything Danksy had experienced before. He later commented:

“In 1970…, we were illegal sexually, hospitalized for mental illness... We could have been arrested for so-called sodomy…  So when the first march occurred, we were not legitimate. We were legitimate for ourselves, but not legitimate for the world.”

Positioning the Well

I wonder if Dansky’s feeling of illegitimacy is something like that which the Samaritan woman felt when she encountered Jesus sitting there, asking for a drink. The town well is way different from Stonewall or Julius or the many other bars where people have gathered, legitimate to each other but not to the world. But the story shows her coming to draw water in the middle of the day, not the early morning, while it is still cool enough for such an errand.

This suggests that the woman may not have felt legitimate around the others in her town. She’s even hesitant to even talk to Jesus, feeling illegitimate as a Samaritan being asked for something by a Jewish man. The text reminds that, normally at least, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.”

And yet here Jesus is, talking with a woman and offering her “living water,” a “spring” of something that gushes “up to eternal life.” He then uncovers why it is, perhaps, that she feels illegitimate to others in her town: her complicated marital history. 

It seems like many, at least in my experience, have assumed that when Jesus names that she has had five husbands and is now living with someone with whom she’s not legally married, that she must be at blame. She can’t keep a man, she’s guilty of divorce. But the story doesn’t say any of that. 

There are plenty of reasons why one might have had a story like this hers: sickness, sudden death, the fickleness of men, and more. But even more important, Jesus does not blame her or tell her that her past is something from which she needs to repent. He simply brings the truth to light. He sees her, acknowledges all of who she is, as he invites her into something he describes as “living water” and “eternal life.”

Positioning the Present

I wonder how the Samaritan woman reacted when she felt legitimized by Jesus. I wonder if it’s something like I felt after moving here to NYC last year, a city that in many ways is a world of difference away from the city Dansky lived in through the sixties and seventies.

Late August, right after I moved, the MTA still had Pride flags all over their cars. Across the city, I saw myself reflected through other LGBTQIA+ advertisements and opportunities and to the abundance of queer people I see out on the street. I felt seen and celebrated even in the Midwest and South by communities I found, but I took a deep breath— a gulp of fresh water— when I first got to the city.

When you go to the Heritage of Pride’s official website for the NYC Pride March, it offers a timeline of the ways in which “the spirit of Stonewall” lives on. It talks about the riots in 1969 and the activism of the seventies that birthed what became Pride month across the globe. It talked about the AIDS crisis and the political problems and progress in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Then, it ends with the 2015 moment in which the Supreme Court rules in favor of same-sex marriage, after which it simply presents that we are in “The Future.”

Is this “The Future” that Dansky and others envisioned as they dared to dawn publicly their queer ways of being in the world in 1970? Is it as simple as saying that pre-Stonewall was a past from which we’ve fully moved? Or is there a queerer way to relate to “the future” that we dare to dream about.

Jesus’ Future 

I do think that the woman felt relief when Jesus said simply that “what you have said is true!” She wasn’t judged by this strange Jewish man, but seen, and perhaps trusted.

She responds: “I see you are a prophet,” and then asks what he thinks about where appropriate worship is supposed to happen. “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain,” she says in reference to the mountain Gerizim, which was to the Samaritans what Jerusalem was to the ancient Israelites. 

Jesus’ response moves beyond the standard expectations one might have for this Samaritan encounter. He says that an hour is coming— “and is now here,” even— in which true worship will happen not on the mountain or in Jerusalem, but “in spirit and truth.” God was up to something beyond the norms of the present, the “norm” of the mountain or of Jerusalem, the “norms” that kept this woman feeling like she had to hide, drawing water in the heat of midday.

Not only did Jesus see and make space for this woman in all of her own story, he invited her into a new story about the realm of God. God is spirit, and sought connection with people through worship not limited to the norms of either tradition, the Samaritan woman’s nor Jesus’ tradition. Jesus’ offer of living water was an invitation to live into a new kind of future that was coming— and, for that woman, was “here now” as she was liberated into being legitimized in all of who she is by the one that created and loves her.

Pride’s Future

I think Dansky’s experience of that first commemorative march in 1970 was something like realizing that an hour was coming and was now even here. 

The type of activist groups to which Dansky belonged were unfamiliar with some of the tactics that made up the riots in 1969 and the genesis of what we now know as “Pride.” An early organizer of Philadelphia Pride, Tommi Mecca, remembered the friction in those early days between the newer groups and groups like Danksy’s, which were less sold on the idea of coming out and using your real name for the world to see. But they “saw the writing on the wall, saw that we were the future,” regarding the groups willing to say hey— let’s be our whole selves, here and now for the world to see.

Folk like Dansky— folk like me: cisgender, white gay people— in some ways had to learn to get out of the way and listen to others who were often considered even less “legitimate,” by LGBTQ+ activists and by the world. And we still, in many ways, need to learn to get out of the way now to let others continue to lead. This whole project of Pride was from the beginning led by trans women, queer folk of color, others who knew that they were the future.

But the future that Dansky and others experienced in 1970 and those early Pride years was not something that slowly started and reached its culmination in 2015. I’m thankful for the legal rights I have to share my life with my spouse, and I recognize that the threshold of 2015 is but a small piece of the puzzle of queer liberation that we long for.

Studies may suggest that change takes time and happens incrementally. But we lie to and limit ourselves with narratives that we just have to wait until the future makes things better. What if there’s something to Jesus’ idea that shows us this isn’t about the slow arc of time but rather a queerer way in which that future for which we’re waiting is actually available now.

Greek Future

When we hear that “an hour is coming and is now even here,” we think of an hour marked out on our calendar. A simple segment of linear time, something that moves from future to present to past.

But the “hour” that Jesus was talking about was not a concrete or passing moment but rather a quality of cyclical time, of time that moves through circling seasons rather than a single, straight line. When Jesus was saying that the future, the “hour,” is here, he was naming the queer quality at hand in his encounter with this woman, and the ways in which God was inviting her within her complex present into a future of being legitimate, of being whole.

One of my favorite queer scholars, José Esteban Muñoz, would describe this quality, this possibility of a new future within a complex present, as what “queerness” is all about.

He says that “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality.” (Not an identity.) He calls queerness a “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality,” something “that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain…”

Queerness is more than the fixed status of certain identity groups, as much as queerness is the thing that mobilizes us to wanting rights for people across spectrums of sexuality and gender. Queerness is more than something that can be legalized or even legitimized across the board by threshold rulings. Instead, queerness is that realization that “the future is here,” and there are better ways to live in the world even right now.

The Samaritan Woman’s Future

When the Samartian woman leaves her encounter with Jesus, she returns to the village sharing the good news about this man she has met. And she later returns to Jesus with a crowd. This woman goes from being cast out, illegitimate, to being a person of influence and change in her corner of society.

But that did not make the world all better. It did not solve the tension between her people and Jesus’ people. It did not fix the political and social issues in her world nor usher in a future in which things would be fixed forever.

And yet, in reintegrating this woman to her own world, in inviting her to find wholeness in even the most complex parts of how she is perceived, Jesus says that an hour is now, a future has come, in which— “in spirit and truth”— she could be all of who she is before God, before others. This invitation into living water was an invitation to see a horizon imbued with potentiality, a “future” way of being lived out in her own present, in ways transformative for her and those around her.

Our Future

Here in 2024, around the wells of our own lives, how might we receive Jesus’ queer invitation to drink of living water today? 

I think for us in the context of Pride, thinking about what God is up to through the channels of queer liberation, it is to realize that 2015 was not a moment in which God or the rest of us wrapped up the project of Pride. But this is not to push out further the day in which the “future” of queer liberation is finally here. Instead, maybe we can get a glimpse of the horizon onto which Danksy and all those others around him stepped in 1969, in 1970, and in those early years. We can know that the future is here— that even in the midst of a complex present, with the complexities of our own lives and how we are perceived by others, that God sees us, loves us, appreciates all of who were are, and legitimizes us and lets us loose into a future-here-now.

This means, too, that we can go about our lives, individually, collectively, day in and day out, making space for that future-here-now that Jesus carved out in his encounter with the Samaritan woman.  We can go about all the ways we work towards more justice and peace knowing that we are not working towards a single point in the future but embodying the presence of something queer, something divine, that’s here now. 

We can be proud of all of who we are and the ways in which the divine weaves her way through our complex nooks and crannies, and we can bring that future to others in the world, creating space— beyond any one day or month— for others to know that they are legitimate, that they are seen, that they are loved.

 John 4: The Woman at the Well (adapted from New Revised Standard Version updated edition)

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘“Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 

The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 

The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” 

Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!”

The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain…

Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”