Pride, Interrupted (6/29)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3lYoz39kHY&t=2233s

Sermon: 

The sacred rarely arrives in resolution. It arrives in the breaks, the pauses, the moments when we let go, and allow a deeper truth to speak. The end of June is not a smooth transition from Queer Pride to Disability Pride. It is a holy interruption. Not a scheduling problem, but a rupture in the calendar that reminds us liberation is not linear, and sacredness is not tidy. This moment invites us to listen differently. Queer and disabled lives that exist in this liminal space invite us to embrace the holy that emerges in contradiction, in resistance, in softness, and in refusal. Rev. Elizabeth Edman writes in Queer Virtue that queerness is a practice of moral clarity, a refusal to make truth palatable for comfort’s sake. Julia Watts Belser writes in Loving Our Own Bones that sacredness lives not in transcendence, but in the disabled body, in pain, in grief, in pleasure. Their work challenges us to see interruption not as a threat to spiritual life, but as the place where our own internal voice begins to speak truth.

The language of “voice” is complicated, especially for those who are queer, trans, neurodivergent, disabled, or chronically ill. Voice itself is a sense, an ability, that not everyone possesses or retains. Some of us are born without it, and others lose it along the way. Yet the idea of voice lives far beyond our physical capacities. It is our deepest vibration, the resonance of who we are at our core. For many, finding a voice has meant squeezing into someone else’s mold or being told that our truths do not count unless they arrive in neat, coherent form. Some were told we were too much. Others were told we were not enough. But voice is not volume, it is what hums within us, extending vibrations outward into what is real and sacred, even when it trembles, contradicts, or confuses. Sacredness often lives in the places we were taught to hide. It lives in the interruptions. When we stop performing and start telling the truth, even with shaking hands or scattered timelines, we step into a deeper kind of holiness. One that belongs not just to the marginalized, but to everyone brave enough to listen.

Julia Watts Belser and Elizabeth Edman both offer theologies rooted in sacred interruption, not in escape from pain or difference, but in a deep embrace of what is already true. Belser, writing as a scholar, rabbi, and disabled person, refuses the story that pain must be hidden or overcome. Her theology makes no separation between the holy and the embodied. Her wheelchair, her grief, and her joy all belong within the sacred frame. She calls us not to wait for healing in order to be worthy, but to recognize that we are already sacred. Similarly, Edman insists that queerness is not an obstacle to faith, but a source of moral clarity. Queer lives, she writes, do not disturb holiness. They reveal it. Together, Belser and Edman challenge theologies of purity and perfection. They show us that holiness begins not in transcendence, but in presence, in contradiction, and in the refusal to disappear.

These works invite us to reimagine integrity not as coherence, but as disruption. To be queer or disabled is to challenge the dominant script that equates wholeness with linear progress or moral clarity with control. For many of us who live at the margins, the first moment of recognition does not come through tidy conclusions, but through rupture. A therapist who does not pathologize. A name that feels true. A ritual that honors difference rather than erasing it. These holy interruptions crack the narrative of shame and create space for sacred truth to emerge. Even when these disruptions are alarming, they also invite a pause in the story of erasure, a breath between what was and what might be. The words we speak, the truths we name, the identities we claim, even when they unsettle others, are acts of spiritual resistance.

My life has been interrupted repeatedly. Interrupted by trauma, by chronic pain, by all the ways our bodies and minds fall out of sync with systems that were never built for us. These interruptions have not followed a clean arc of crisis and recovery. They have remade everything: my memory, my movement, my sense of time, my understanding of what strength looks like. I performed wellness for a long time, and I had spent years pushing myself toward an imagined wholeness, a version of myself that could pass for fine. Along the way, doctors dismissed my pain, denied my reality, and made me question whether I could trust my own body. I learned to doubt what I felt, to fear that my truth would always be treated as exaggeration or error. The effort of holding myself together, of masking my pain and confusion, consumed so much of me that there was no space left for comfort or ease. But trauma and pain eventually shattered that illusion. In the wreckage, I began to understand that what I needed was not fixing. I needed rest. I needed room to stop apologizing. I needed the grace to be held as I was.

Returning to school during that time was not an act of resolution, but a movement toward deeper truth. Though I went back to school thinking I would earn a computer sciences certificate, I fell in love with the social sciences. Through my anthropology major and sociology minor, I began to encounter frameworks that did not ask me to erase my pain, only to see it differently. The social model of disability allowed me to shift from asking what was wrong with me to asking what conditions would support my comfort, and my joy. Access became more important than healing. Comfort became a spiritual value rather than a personal failure. I stopped treating my body as a problem to be solved and began listening to it as a sacred text. Belser reminds me that I was not an unfinished version of someone else's ideal. Edman affirms that my refusal to disappear was holy. I stopped waiting for coherence. I began practicing honesty. Slowly, I began to feel whole, not because the pain ended, but because I finally made room for it. This is not a final declaration of my wholeness because it can't be. The story is still unfolding, and I am still learning how to offer hospitality to the complexities of my body and spirit as they are today.

This is not a theology reserved for the margins. This is a spiritual truth for everyone. Sooner or later, each of us will be interrupted. Grief will arrive. Illness will unsettle your plans. Something you thought was solid will fall apart. And when that happens, may you remember that holiness is not waiting for you on the other side of the crisis. It is already present in the middle of the rupture. It does not ask for perfection. It asks for presence. The sacred lives in your refusal to vanish, in your courage to speak even when the words tremble, in the truth that rises from your most broken places. It lives in the quiet moments when you choose to stay, when turning away might feel easier. It lives in your breath, in the softness with which you meet your own pain. It lives in the small, stubborn acts of care that remind you and those around you that we are never beyond blessing.

What if we stopped treating healing as the ultimate goal? What if we shifted our moral imagination toward wellness, not as perfection or cure, but as relationship? In Loving Our Own Bones, Julia Watts Belser offers a theology that refuses to separate the sacred from the disabled body. She does not ask us to transcend pain or rise above our limits. She invites us to honor them. Wellness, in this view, is not a finish line. It is a rhythm of returning. Returning to care, to ritual, to rest, to truth. It is shaped by softness, by justice, by the question of what we each need to keep going. Belser teaches us to hold space for the aching body, the exhausted spirit, the fractured narrative. For many of us, this wellness is fragile. It flickers. It changes shape. And yet, it is holy.

When we recognize that we are spiritually interdependent, called into capacities of wisdom, connection, and sacred presence that arise through our embodied experiences of difference, we begin to uncover a deeper truth about community. What if we stopped asking what it means to welcome queer and disabled people into spaces designed without us in mind, and instead asked what it means to become a queer church, a disabled church, a spiritually interdependent church? A community where we do not merely accommodate those at the margins, but build from the wisdom and needs of all our beloveds. Too often, internalized ableism teaches us to devalue the tools that actually sustain us. It tells us that asking for help is weakness, that needing care is failure, that we should aspire to a hollow form of independence that isolates and exhausts us. These are lies rooted in the white supremacist culture that surrounds us, a culture that hurts not only our marginalized beloveds but even those who seem to benefit from privilege. It keeps all of us trapped in systems that punish vulnerability, that mock interdependence, that prevent us from fully embracing our needs and the gifts of collective care.

The core of our prophetic work is not about making room for the margins, but transforming the center, asking what it would mean for our communities, our worship, our theology, and our justice work to be shaped from the wisdom of queer lives, disabled lives, and the many ways bodies, minds, and spirits show up in this world. It is about moving beyond hospitality and into shared belonging. About refusing to perform inclusion and instead practicing liberation. About building spaces where the question is never whether someone fits, but always how we will grow together into the sacred wholeness of our collective being.

Interruption is not failure. It is revelation. It opens a different kind of knowing, one that does not rely on stability or status but on presence and moral honesty. Elizabeth Edman, in Queer Virtue, reminds us that queer lives offer this kind of insight. Through disruption and refusal, we uncover truths that would otherwise remain buried beneath expectation. That same courage is required when illness slows us, when grief derails us, when the path we thought we were on disappears beneath our feet. These are not detours from meaning. They are sacred spaces where deeper truths emerge. Queer and disabled time does not obey the logic of efficiency. It spirals, pauses, returns, and reorients. It asks us to find worth not in progress but in presence. Each interruption becomes an invitation to realign.

So if you are wondering where to begin, begin with the interruption. You do not need to have answers, you only need to listen. Let the breaks in the story become the story. Let the pauses teach you what striving could not. Let the moments that do not go to plan become the places where your spirit breathes differently. Sacredness does not wait for resolution. It meets us in the unresolved, in the days when we do not know what comes next. And while you are listening for your own interruptions, notice the ones unfolding around you. When you see a body that does not move as expected, or a story that does not follow a neat arc, do not rush to fix or explain. Offer grace. Offer pause. The world has trained us to fear what we cannot smooth over, but sacredness lives in different paces, different voices, unruly need. Let your presence be a practice of hospitality to all that interrupts. Let your faith make room for others to arrive as they are. Let us choose, again and again, to welcome what unsettles us, and find the sacred in what we once called broken.