Remember This Rainbow Day | Looking Forward
Beloveds, the 2024 United Methodist Church General Conference has been historic for our LGBTQ+ siblings who are members of the UMC. Today, we want to uplift the words of Rev. Tyler Sit as he offers his response to The United Methodist Church lifting its 40-year ban on gay ordination.
Rev. Tyler Sit is the founding pastor of New City Church, a church in Minneapolis that is led mostly by queer people of color. New City became the first 'built from scratch' church plant to charter in Minnesota United Methodism in decades. And in 2022, New City launched its second branch, Northeast United Methodist Church. Rev. Sit is a second-generation Chinese American, and he focuses his racial justice work into Intersect, a church planting network that he co-founded during the pandemic. He has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Minnesota Public Radio, and more.
Photo of Rev. Tyler Sit.
Remember this rainbow day.
Look around, and see how LGBTQ+ people found a way to look out for each other.
Feel the energy crackling across your skin, let it sink into your memory.
Because LGBTQ+ children of God, and the allies God sent to protect us, are embodiments of resurrection.
When they put us into the tomb that is the closet, the Creator rolled away the stone and said, “Come out when you’re ready.”
When they kicked us out of our jobs and our houses and our churches, Jesus said, “You now get to choose your own family.”
When they sharpened the word “queer” and pierced us again and again with it, the Holy Spirit took that word and said, “I have turned this blade into a key to your freedom.”
Remember this rainbow day, because God is a God who makes promises and keeps them.
And we know by tomorrow those scared preachers will find a new way to ban us, to erase us, to defile sacred ground.
But now we have this memory in our bones. Another, and another, and another rainbow day where God shows us five minutes that make five decades of resisting worth it.
God made a promise to Noah that the floods would not overwhelm him;
The floods will not overwhelm us, either.
You cannot drown a rainbow.
