June 29, 2025 · Rev. Derek van Gulden · Isaiah 6:1-13; Luke 5:4-11
On Pride Sunday, Rev. Derek van Gulden asks whether flags and parades are enough, and follows Simon out into deep water, where the nets fill only after an exhausting night. Drawing on his own family's story and a World War II Marine he once treated, the sermon calls for the next step: learning, giving, and getting involved where the need is.
Transcript
People of God, would you join me in a moment of prayer? Gracious and holy God, this morning I ask you to move the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts by your love, and help me this day not to be the instrument of my own or anyone else's oppression, but to find ways to be an instrument of peace in every step, in every breath, in every moment of every day. Amen.
The two beautiful passages that Liz shared with us, the one from Isaiah and the one from Luke. You might have noticed they had some similarities. You heard Isaiah's call to be a prophet. You heard Jesus challenging the disciples that didn't know they were disciples yet. But at the end of the intervention that they talked about with two boats filled with fish abundantly. They left everything behind and followed Jesus.
People ask me not a lot, but often you know, why is there pride? Why are there parades? Why are there this? Why are there that? I remember when I first came here, I was asked that question and my response was, well, why did were you here when they voted on an open and affirming statement to be an open and affirming church? And they said, yes. And I said, what did you say? And he said, I'm all for it. So I don't need to answer your question, you know, in your heart already. And he said, but what more can we do? He said, I know we're flying. Well, eventually flying flags out front. We march and parades. We go to flag raisings. We go to events to raise awareness and also money for different pride groups such as Cape Ann Pride Coalition, which is fairly new but doing amazing work. And he said, is that enough?
Once again, I ask the question I learned long ago that the quickest way to find out what really people wanted to hear was ask them another question. I think I learned that from my father when he would just keep asking us things. But I ask you, is marching in a parade enough? Is having two flags outside our facility here enough? Is celebrating pride and worship enough? Oh, remember I asked questions. Feel free to jump in. And it's hard to hear that sometimes. Hard to hear that maybe what we're doing isn't enough.
One of the key parts of the gospel that we just heard from Luke is that Jesus. Was walking on the shore and there was a boat, and he jumped in it and asked the person who owned the boat to row him out a little ways off the shore so that he could address the crowd of people that had come. He does this often, and it was Simon's boat and Simon wrote him out and Jesus finished. And then Jesus turned and looked at him and said. Why don't you. Row out farther, or sail out farther into the deep part, into the deep end of the lake, and throw your nets over again.
And Simon, I can hear in his voice, exhausted. Theyd been up all night long fishing. They had got nothing. Nothing at all. They were probably exhausted. At least when I'm reading that story and hearing it, that's what I picture just, you know, you've just put in a long day's work. Nothing you intended to do got done, nothing was working. And all of a sudden, here comes Jesus and says, yeah, go out there again to the deeper part. So you're gonna have to go out farther, whether they're rowing or sailing and throw your nets over again. And Simon says, okay. And they go out and they throw their nets over and they pull in so many fish that they have to call their compadres that they fish with in another boat to come and help them. Both boats are filled with so much fish. Certain translations say they started to sink.
And they get to shore. And then they leave all that behind.
I remember my son telling me one time, you know, we were out all yesterday haying and we were out late into the night and we got up really early this morning to get it done before it rained. And then a family from another farm down the road came and said their equipment broke. Could we come and help them get the hay in before it rained? Which is important. And I said, what did you guys do? And he said, We took a deep breath. We got in the tractors. We pulled our equipment down there and together for families came and helped bring in the hay for that family. And I said, was it hard? He goes, oh my God, I was so tired, so tired. You're up all night. And then you try to lie down. It doesn't work. He said, we don't have a TV to take your mind away, but that doesn't help anyway. But he said at the end of it, it felt like he was exhausted beyond he'd been. But he felt joyous. He felt moved. He felt like they had done something beyond what they usually do. But in reality, it's what they've always done in farming communities. At least that one. That's how people get along.
It's kind of like the pandemic. I know it's been a long time ago and we can't remember any of it. But there were times for almost everybody. People that had to go to work because the work they did was essential. Whether it was driving trucks, whether it was working in grocery stores or hardware stores, whether it was delivering food, driving people places, whether it was working from home a new way, whether it was reaching out and talking to people in a new way. We were exhausted. Well, I was exhausted. Was anybody else exhausted? For two years plus, the only time I really wasn't exhausted is Sunday mornings when I came in here, and I think I was more depressed than exhausted because I stood right here, my laptop in front of me, two of those circular lights and a couple of microphones, and Jeff and Jim were usually hiding in there, and I could see you all on the computer. Sometime we'll talk about what you wear when you go to Zoom Church. That was probably the lighter side of stuff. But it was hard to speak to a computer. It still is, although we continue to do it in ways because it helps us.
What I'm trying to say is hearing the beautiful words of God, whether you hear them from somebody in church, reading them, whether you go to Bible study and hear them, whether you're reading them themselves, there's more to it than just hearing the words. More to it than just hearing somebody interpret what you heard in a way that they think they're called to in that moment. It's really a call to be a disciple of God, to co-create with God, to go out there and do the work that we're not even sure what we're called to do, but that God ensures that we are guided that way.
In the LGBTQ plus community, there is so many things they have to overcome. So often they have to defend who they are, the way they dress, or why they have a parade to celebrate. And they're doing nothing different than we are, except they're living their authentic life openly. And getting hammered, getting yelled at, getting doors shut in their face. Right now, trans people in this country have lost more. All of a sudden lost the word. Rights. You're right. They lost more rights than anybody ever should. Rights have been taken away from them. Rights that affect their physical wellness, their mental wellness, especially with youth. But they're still pushed away.
When my wife Heidi came out, we lived in a small community smaller than this, and I'm not sure what people thought, but she was one of my oldest friends. She was the love of my life. We have children together, and people in the community noticed that we'd still be seeing together, and they couldn't figure it out. And what it meant was a community. Not everybody, but openly. All of a sudden turned against all of us. Just because we were two people trying to learn to live our authentic life for who we were. That didn't affect the love we had for each other. It didn't affect the fact that we had children and that we continue to raise them, and they're pretty cool. I think they've done really well. That's in case they're listening.
But until you I mean, as a privileged white male who is able to be educated on levels I never thought I could. These things don't happen to people like me, not because of who I am. Because being a white male in this country or any other country, you pretty much have a free pass everywhere you go. Watching Heidi go through the stuff that she needed to go through, to go through the changes in her life continue to work, continuing to be a mother, learning how to do this in a different way, in a community that would point their hands, their fingers laugh at stores. That's probably the closest I can ever come to feeling what people in the Lgbtqia community deal with every day. Every day. And trans people. Even more at times.
I met my first trans woman working in a hospital in Vermont. When I was treating an older man in his early seventies. And as I'm sitting there with him, treating him, he asked me, he says, well, you keep your hair very short. Did you ever serve in the military? I said, yes, as a Navy corpsman, I actually still am. And he went, I like you guys. And I said, and he goes, I was a first sergeant in the Marine Corps, World War two, three major beach landings. He said I was in charge of all the radio operators. And I said, wow, thank you, thank you. And he said, I don't get to talk to many people about my time in the Marine Corps because I'm a woman now, he says. And I know there are women in the Marine Corps, and I'm so excited. But people find it hard for me to share my experiences when I was a man. And then, now that I'm a woman, they won't talk to me about that.
We had some great talks. He was amazing and at his age, and this was probably thirty years ago, he went through his changes in Europe where he was accepted and where they were doing that. But I always remember him saying I'd never give up any of what I went through. He says, because now, late in life, I am living the authentic, beloved person that God created me to be. And that is more powerful than any words anyone can say to me. The day he was discharged, because he was there for about a month. He had someone bring him in his old uniform and he wore his dress uniform jacket out. And he was so thrilled. He said, this is who I am. I've always been.
We are called by God not just to hear the words, but to act on them. So what do we do? We don't take down our flags because that is a statement to this community and people who come here. What we believe and who we are and who is welcome. We won't change our own. Well, I'm not going to say we won't change our own statement because we constantly update it. We constantly look at it and say, is this. Are there more people? Are there ways we can do this better? And that's powerful. And I don't think any of us who go and march in parades and flag raisings and do the other things we do are ever going to stop doing that.
What we need to do, and this goes for anything we do in our lives. You can say in an outreach way or a mission way is we need to take the next step. We need to not just show up. We need to start to support financially and with our time. Those things going on in our community. And then we need to take another step. Well, actually, I have to go back.
The first step to any of this is to pray. The next step for some people is to learn a little bit about it and start giving of your time and of if your finances. The next step is to get more involved. Really take your time and there's places here on KPN you can do that on the back of the paper where the words this morning for for the beauty of the earth is a letter to the editor that I believe the co-chair of Cape Pride Coalition wrote to the paper not long ago, and I put that there for a reason. So you can have somewhere to go to. Open doors, a great place where you can physically get involved. They have great training for volunteers. They have more opportunities to volunteer than anybody around wellspring action programs here in town for senior citizens pathways. There's so many things. The YMCA does amazing things.
So after you start to get involved with it, then what we need to do is try to figure out how do we get involved on a level that starts to address the core problem of what's going on. And that's when we take another step. And then we're doing all the other things. But we are working towards addressing the core problem.
Each one of those steps takes us to go deeper into the lake, to throw our net farther out, even when we're exhausted. Each of those steps I call, are you ready to jump in deeper water or on the deep end of the pool, where you may not be able to touch the bottom and breathe because your head's underwater? These are what we're called to do to get involved. If you need or you want to learn how to do those things. And there's so many other things we're not even thinking about. There's so many things we probably already do.
Talk to Wendy or Marge or. Who else is on the committee? Oh, Janet and and Jay, if you can get him to stop for a minute and hang on. Come talk to me. Talk to anybody about what they're involved in. This is what it means to not just listen to the words, but to go out and do something with them. And within that, I bet you'll find hope because you'll meet other people that are doing it. And you will learn that it helps you learn more about yourself. Amen.