The high school Wind Symphony in Watertown, WI spent months preparing for their spring concert. The program included a piece called “A Mother of A Revolution!”, a tribute to the black, transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson, written to honor the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. The school board voted to pull the song from the concert, stating that the piece was “indoctrination” and violated school policies. In response, students walked out of school and the community rallied.

A steering committee was quickly formed to arrange an alternate performance of the banned piece. A local church, Immanuel Lutheran, offered to host. Many members of the Wind Symphony and alumni prepared to perform. The band director from a neighboring school district helped organize. The composer of the piece, Omar Thomas—an award-winning artist whose work often explores themes of queer and black liberation—travelled all the way from Austin,Texas to conduct the four minute piece himself. To the folks gathered that evening he said, “I had to come. I had to feel the energy you all have generated by deciding that community is what matters.” He explained that he writes music to tell stories that have been absent, silenced. He pointed out that empathy is not a given, saying, “We have to choose to learn about each other and what makes each of us part of the same story.” The power of knowing each other’s stories, he said, is that “differences become places of fascination rather than points of fear.”

Similarly, today’s Gospel text weaves together diverse stories of healing. When Jesus chose to call Matthew, the tax collector, he probably upset a lot of people, including his own followers. Tax collectors generally extorted their neighbors to satisfy Rome and line their own pockets. “Follow me!” Jesus said to Matthew. And Matthew physically got up and left his station, ending his quest for unjust wealth and his complicity with oppression. It was a holy moment of profound healing and reintegration with community. And then Jesus turned and followed Matthew—to dinner, where they ate with people I assume were Matthew’s friends, “tax collectors and sinners.” “Why does your teacher eat with those people?” the Pharisees asked. I think there’s room for this question to hold curiosity as well as critique. Jesus, with his response, invited the Pharisees also to follow him: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’”

The conversation with the Pharisees was left unresolved, since Jesus abruptly got up from dinner, summoned by a leader whose daughter had died. As he was on his way, he was again interrupted by a woman’s touch. It was a bold and risky move for her to sneak up on him like that. She, who was ritually unclean, was supposed to stay away from other people—a primitive form of public health. And in those days, unrelated women and men simply didn’t touch each other. The reference to grasping the fringe of Jesus’ cloak suggests she specifically reached for a sacred object, the knotted prayer tassels that Jewish men wear. For all these reasons, onlookers would have expected Jesus to rebuke her. Instead, by calling her daughter, he affirmed that after all those years of exile, she belonged to his family, to the community he was gathering. He attributed her healing not to anything he did, but to her agency, to the power of her faith. The set of stories comes to completion with Jesus arriving at the home where mourners had gathered to grieve the death of a child. Once again, he stretched out his hand, in a wordless invitation to experience healing. And this girl, too, arose and followed Jesus into inclusive and life-sustaining community.

There’s a pattern I see here, when I step back and view these diverse stories of healing as part of one larger narrative. Jesus alternated between calling people to follow and being the follower himself. He initiated and responded. He often showed the way by letting others lead. It was all about relationship and mutuality. He made no claim to be in charge of the healing process, or to be the source of the healing. He was a conduit through whom God worked, and so were the people he encountered. These stories, woven together, show us that individual restoration depends on communal wellness, which, in turn, depends on the community’s ability to receive each other’s stories with curiosity, mercy and respect instead of judgement and fear.

During this Pride month, I am grateful that the community in Watertown prompted me to better learn the story of Marsha P. Johnson. She was born into a poor family and was poor and precariously housed throughout her life, even when she gained fame as a drag performer and became a key leader in the movement for queer liberation. She struggled against racism and transphobia within her own community of activists. She was a sex worker, and was arrested more than 100 times simply for doing what she had to do to survive. She struggled with mental health and died at 46, likely the victim of a hate crime, which was not properly investigated at the time and therefore remains unsolved.

The struggle for liberation goes on as, in our own time, powerful people continue to use fear to erode our capacity for empathy and set us against one another. A key aspect of their strategy revolves around weaponizing our most sacred stories. The evidence is everywhere. My kid comes home from school saying “gay” is still used as a slur. And that people are going around this month embarrassing their rivals and enemies by wishing them, “Happy Pride!” My own spouse was confused by the smear campaign against James Talerico, the Senate candidate in Texas, whose opponent is seeking to undermine the political success of an inclusive platform by questioning his masculinity. And finally, I was startled to learn from my colleague recently, the Lutheran Campus pastor, Kate, that a multitude of young men she knows, even those raised in progressive households, are at high risk of being “red pilled”—that is, pulled into by social media algorithms that project a toxic and deeply misogynistic version of masculinity. Investigating further, she discovered this trend is widespread and substantiated by research. ¹

Long after her death, The New York Times published an obituary honoring Marsha P. Johnson’s life and contributions. In it, Susan Stryker, an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona, is quoted, saying, “You might expect a person in such a position to be fragile, brutalized, beaten down. Instead, Marsha had this joie de vivre, a capacity to find joy in a world of suffering. She channeled it into political action, and did it with a kind of fierceness, grace and whimsy, with a loopy, absurdist reaction to it all.” ² And Omar Thomas, composer of “A Mother of A Revolution!”, reflected on the trans people in his life, saying, “When I think about them, I think about strength, I think about people who choose themselves… despite the world wanting to destroy and erase them.”

Friends, in these times of fear and polarization, when so very much is at stake, the strength and joy of ancestors like Marsha P. Johnson is the antidote we need. Let us live together with courage, live into the healing mutuality Jesus shows us, who invites us into relationship, calling us to follow him even as he follows us, honoring our diverse stories and binding us together into a community that is well and whole. Amen.

¹ “What is the manosphere and why should we care?” from UN Women
² “Overlooked—Marsha P. Johnson” by Sewell Chan