Who Taught You to Doubt that Christ is in You?
Preached at Cityview Church on Sunday, May 31, 2026
Sermon begins at 45:00.
Note: On May 31, 2026, I guest preached at Cityview Church in the morning and also preached at my congregation, Blue Ocean Faith Columbus, that evening. Both sermons were similar, but my sermon at Cityview was the fuller version so I’m using that recording above and the text below.
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in Paul’s 2nd Letter to the Corinthians, the 13th chapter, verses 5-13.
Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless, indeed, you fail to meet the test! 6 I hope you will find out that we have not failed. 7 But we pray to God that you may not do anything wrong—not that we may appear to have met the test but that you may do what is right, though we may seem to have failed. 8 For we cannot do anything against the truth but only for the truth. 9 For we rejoice when we are weak but you are strong. This is what we pray for, that you may be restored. 10 So I write these things while I am away from you, so that when I come I may not have to be severe in using the authority that the Lord has given me for building up and not for tearing down.
11 Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell.[b] Be restored; listen to my appeal;[c] agree with one another; live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. 12 Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you.
13 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of[d] the Holy Spirit be with all of you.
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Movement One: The Letter Nobody Wanted to Write
Paul didn’t want to write this letter.
Ok, that’s an odd place to start. I get it, but hang in with me, because it matters. In Second Corinthians, particularly these final chapters, Paul’s frustrated. He’s trying to balance charity with the anger he’s feeling. His apostolic authority has been challenged. There are people in Corinth – he passive-aggressively calls “super-apostles,” in chapter 11:5 and chapter 12:11 – who’ve been telling the community in Corinth that Paul doesn’t really represent Christ. That his ministry is illegitimate. That he’s not qualified to speak.
And Paul has spent most of this letter defending himself. Defending his credentials. Defending his record. Defending his right to claim the title of apostle. Frankly, it’s uncomfortable reading. There’s something almost wounded to it: Paul, the great evangelist, having to argue for his own legitimacy to people he helped bring to faith in the first place.
But then he gets to chapter 13, verse 5, and something shifts.
“Examine yourselves,” he says, “to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves.”
He turns it around. The Corinthians have been examining Paul, questioning his authenticity, testing his credentials and Paul essentially says: fine. But while you’re at it, look in the mirror. Examine yourselves.
And then he asks the question that’s going to stay with us this morning:
“Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?”
Movement Two: The Test You Were Never Meant to Fail
The word Paul uses for “examine” is a word for testing metals. You put gold in the fire to see if it’s pure. You assay it. You verify whether it’s what it claims to be.
But Paul’s not asking the Corinthians to examine themselves to figure out if they’re good enough. He’s not setting up a purity test, a bar they might fail to clear. He’s asking whether they recognize what’s already true.
“Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?”
The examination isn’t a test of worthiness. It’s not an academic test or an ordination paper. It’s a test of awareness. In order to ask if you realize that Christ is in you, Paul has to assume, he has to know, that Christ is indeed in the Corinthians. The question for the moment is whether they’ve talked themselves out of knowing it. Whether someone or something has coached them to miss it.
Paul’s astonishment is palpable. How can you not know this? How have you gotten so turned around that you’re over there measuring my apostolic credentials when the presence of Christ in you is the thing that matters?
Do you not realize?
And that’s when I have to stop and ask: Who taught you to doubt that Christ was in you?
Movement Three: A Story I Know
Like many of you, I wasn’t raised in the tradition that I profess as an adult. I was raised, educated, and socialized in Roman Catholicism, including 13 years of Catholic education. When it came to homosexuality – I can’t remember ever discussing gender and gender identity in Catholic schools – Catholic teaching held that being gay or lesbian was an “intrinsically disordered” orientation, but not sinful in and of itself. Homosexuals were to be treated with respect just like everyone else. It was only when a person chose to act on their on their sexual inclinations that one committed a sin. Until recently United Methodism referred to this as being “a self-avowed, practicing homosexual.”
In a certain light this theology was compassionate. It definitely looks better than condemning people simply for being gay or experiencing “same-sex attraction.” But dig only a bit deeper and one could quickly find its problems. It liked being Queer to having a mental illness. Granted, mainstream society and the DSM at one time did the same thing. The real harm was theological and how Queer people related to God. God made us LGBTQIA+ and in Genesis we learn that God looked at their creation and they called it good. God looked at all of us and called us good. Yet the church told us that to be in right relationship with God; to experience God’s love, we could never act on the sexual orientation and gender identity which God gave to us. No, we weren’t mistakes, just disordered and in that disorder expected to be celibate for life.
That’s how we learned that God might not be in us.
Movement Four: The Architecture of Doubt
That theology sounds almost kind, doesn’t it? It doesn’t condemn what you feel and might not even condemn who you are. It just condemns what you do. Who you love. The body you inhabit and how you actually live inside it.
But here’s what that theology actually builds, brick by careful brick: it constructs a version of us where our Queerness, our capacity for love, our embodied selves, our way of moving through the world — is the problem. Not an accident, not a wound waiting for healing, not even a struggle to be endured with sympathy. The problem itself. The thing that has to go before God can fully arrive.
And once we built that architecture; once we installed those supports inside our souls, it no longer mattered how warmly someone said, “But Christ loves you.” Because all we could hear was that Christ loved the version of us that didn’t exist yet. The version after the renovation of prayer and conversion “therapy.” The version that was sufficiently emptied of the parts that made us, us. The version made austere by celibacy and intentional rejection of our sexuality.
Friends, that’s not compassion. That’s not grace. That’s a hostage situation.
The institutional church has been remarkably creative in the ways it teaches LGBTQIA+ people to doubt that Christ is in us.
There’s the blunt version. The preachers who thunder from pulpits that Queer people are an abomination. That Trans people are mutilating God’s image. That same-gender love is a symptom of a civilization in spiritual and social freefall. We know those voices, the voices from family members who cling to clichés like “love the sinner, hate the sin,” but refuse to get to know who we are as people.
The world knows those voices, because they’re loud and flashy. They have legislative ambitions. In state after state, far too often led by elected leaders here in Ohio, those theological convictions are getting written into law: into laws governing bathrooms and whose history and life can be taught in school; into book bans and restrictions on funding for public education; into restrictions on what medical procedures are considered legitimate and where they can be performed; into laws about what a person needs to show to vote and who gets to vote; into laws that define which lives matter and, friends, if our laws are a reflection of our national values then all lives certainly do not matter.
The church’s doubt about LGBTQIA+ people doesn’t stay inside church walls. It never has.
But the subtler experience is just as damaging.
It’s the youth group where nobody ever says anything explicitly, but the silence about Queer identities is deafening.
It’s the family that loves you deeply but asks you please not to bring your partner to Christmas.
It’s the seminary curriculum that covers every strand of Christian theological anthropology except including LGBTQIA+ identities in the imago Dei.
It’s the worship service where the music, sermons, and illustrations all assume a particular kind of body, a particular kind of desire, a particular identity when addressing your spouse or partner.
It’s the fear and nervousness my fellow Queer clergy and I feel to preach about the Queer community using first-person language: our community, we, us.
Death by a thousand silences.
It’s not hyperbole to say that those silences kill. We know that LGBTQIA+ youth are more likely to die by suicide than their cisgender, heterosexual peers. We also know that Queer youth with just one affirming adult in their life are 40% less likely to experience suicidal ideation.
We know what it does to a teenager to sit in a pew week after week hearing that the fullness of who they are is, at best, a burden to be carried in secret and, at worst, evidence of their damnation.
We know what it does to adults who’ve spent decades in churches that offered them Jesus with one hand and withheld their full humanity with the other.
It produces spiritual homelessness. Whole generations of people who love God, who feel the presence of God, who’ve experienced real grace, but can’t find a community they can call home.
Who told you that Christ wasn’t in you?
Was it a pastor? A preacher? A parent? A schoolteacher who was well intentioned, but got it devastatingly wrong? Was it a church that welcomed you warmly until you introduced your partner or until you volunteered for ministry? Was it a community so focused on what it considered your sins that you had to leave the fullness of yourself at the door?
Because Paul’s astonishment still stands: how do you not realize? How has the church spent so much energy constructing doubt about something the text takes as absolutely given?
Movement Five: What LOVEboldly Has Learned
Friends, this is the work I get to do every day.
LOVEboldly exists to create spaces where LGBTQIA+ people can flourish in Christianity. We’ve been doing this work in one way or another for 15 years now and we’re only getting started. Our work includes equipping and training people and congregations to affirm and include LGBTQIA+ people. We also build and curate spaces where Queer people of faith can come together and be in community with each other. One of those spaces is the annual Interfaith Pride Service which is coming up on Tuesday, June 16, at 7pm at City Creek Events.
LOVEboldly’s third focus area is advocacy, primarily at the state level where we are currently tracking 35 pieces of legislation, some good, but mostly bad, and where we’re submitting testimony at the intersection of faith, justice, and the LGBTQIA+ community.
Part of the reason I’m here, part of the reason I was invited to preach today and be with you is because LOVEboldly has learned through our collective work and personal experiences that individual LGBTQIA+ people can’t undo decades of theological messaging about their own unworthiness while they’re still sitting in pews laced with decades of rhetoric about clobber verses and “Biblical marriage.” Communities have to change. The institutional church has to reckon with what it’s built.
When churches decide to genuinely and fully affirm LGBTQIA+ people, they’re not just making a policy change. They’re not just revising their statement of welcome. They’re doing something profoundly theological. They’re saying that they will no longer be a place that teaches people to doubt that Christ is in them.
They’re answering the question by refusing to be the ones who ask it in the wrong way.
Cityview, you’re doing that work. You have out LGBTQIA+ members and leaders. You’ve made the conscious and daily decision to affirm Queer people regardless of how they find you or how they engage with you. You invited me, the preacher ordained by an activist fellowship who has a bit of reputation for saying controversial and unpopular things. You are a congregation that decided to stop building up the architecture of doubt and start dismantling it.
And I want you to know what that means. Because somewhere in this room right now—maybe someone sitting in your row, in front of you, or behind you—or perhaps someone watching online came to worship today wondering if they’d finally hear something that makes them feel like they actually belong. Someone needed to be in a community like this where that question would be answered before they had to ask it.
That’s what you’re doing. Don’t underestimate it.
Movement Six: Greet One Another in Holy Love
Paul closes this letter, this letter he didn’t want to write, this letter forged in conflict and defense and a whole lot of apostolic exhaustion with something unexpected.
After all that. After chapters of tension, challenge, and mutual examination, he writes: “Finally, siblings, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”
Feel the weight of that shift. From conflict to blessing. From examination to embrace.
Greet one another with a holy kiss.
The holy kiss in the early church wasn’t a polite exchange at the passing of the peace. It was a sign of genuine belonging. An act of recognition that said: you are known. You are part of this body. There is no version of you that has to wait outside.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.
All of you.
Not the edited version of you. Not the version of you that has passed the examination of the super-apostles or the gatekeepers or the denomination that told you to come back once you’ve got your sexuality sorted out.
All of you.
The grace of Christ — for all of you.
The love of God — for all of you.
The communion of the Spirit — for all of you.
This is the same letter. The same Paul who just said: examine yourselves, do you not realize that Christ is in you? And now he sends them out with this all-encompassing blessing.
The examination was never meant to produce exclusion. It was meant to produce recognition. Awareness. The ability to look at yourself, your full self, your actual self, and say: yes. I see it. Christ is here. Christ is in me.
Movement Seven: Tomorrow Is Pride
Friends, tomorrow is June 1st.
Tomorrow is the beginning of Pride Month, and I want to be clear about what Pride Month means, because it means different things to different people, at different times.
I came out almost 20 years ago during college. My first summer out and the first time I attended Pride events of any kind, I was interning for an Episcopal congregation in Washington, DC. A congregation whose associate pastor was openly gay. So, the first Pride event I attended that summer at one of the oldest and largest Prides in the country was an interfaith service, the service which we modeled Columbus’ first Interfaith Pride Service on. The service made Pride smaller, more intimate for this introverted, baby gay kid. A few years later during graduate school, Pride was a party because the majority of my friends and colleagues were Queer and we were living in the most progressive city in one of the most progressive states in the country during the robustly liberal years of the second Obama administration which had just overturned Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Now, Pride is…well…part of my job. And this year that means I’ll be working on my birthday which happens to be the Saturday of Columbus Pride.
But more so, Pride feels like a refusal, a resistance this year when the forces of empire conspire against our community and Transgender people have been labeled terrorists simply for existing.
Let’s be clear, Pride didn’t start as a party. Pride started as a riot. The Stonewall Riots were an uprising against police brutality and state-sponsored intimidation. Gay street kids kicked out of their homes and disowned by their families and Queer People of Color, among them Black and Brown Trans women, were the instigators of a movement that not only responded, but made it clear that Queer people refused to disappear. As the rallying cry of the 1980s and 1990s made popular: “We’re here. We’re Queer. Get used to it.”
Pride Month and Queer Pride in general is resistance. It’s a refusal to accept the teaching that there’s something in you or about you that disqualifies you from full humanity. It’s a refusal to doubt what you know to be true about who you are, and about who made you; about the one who created you with their image and called you good.
And the most theological thing the church can do in Pride Month is tell the truth: Christ is in you.
Movement Eight: The Answer
So, here’s the answer.
Whoever it was, the preacher, the parent, the youth group leader, the careful theological framework that sounded compassionate but still put you in a cage, the silence that spoke louder than any sermon ever could, whoever taught you to doubt that Christ was in you:
They were wrong.
Not mistaken, not well-intentioned, but incorrect. Wrong. Wrong in the way that costs people their lives. Wrong in way that has produced generations of spiritual trauma. Wrong in ways that drove people away from their God and their communities. Wrong in ways for which the church is rightly being held accountable.
For my fellow LGBTQIA+ people in this room, or joining us online, or who are watching this video later—I want to speak to you directly:
Christ is in us. Christ is in you. Not in spite of our Queerness. Not waiting until you fix something about yourself. Not reserved for a version of you to show up which is “less gay,” “less Trans,” less you.
In you. In us. The actual you. The you that walked through that door today, with everything you brought with you, your full history and your full identity and your full self.
Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?
That’s not my opinion. That’s Paul. That’s the text. That’s the living, breathing word of God.
And nobody gets to teach you otherwise. They never had that authority and they certainly don’t have it now.
Closing: The God of Love and Peace
Paul says the God of love and peace will be with you.
Not the God of condemnation and qualification.
Not the God who parcels out belonging based on which parts of yourself you’re trying to renounce.
The God of love. The God of peace. That God is with you.
That God was with us in youth groups that pretended we didn’t exist.
That God was with us in the pastor’s office when he told us being gay would never make us happy or fulfilled.
That God was with us in the sanctuary that demanded us to be less.
That God was with us when people hurled every insult they could conjure at us.
That God was with us in the silence when no one said what we needed to hear and even our friends had turned their backs on us.
That God was with us the day we finally said the truth out loud, to ourselves, looking in the mirror at 3am.
That God was with us when we told that first important person and it all became real.
And that God is with us now.
Christ is in you. Christ has always been in you.
God loves you. God has always loved you.
Whoever told you otherwise was wrong. Completely, categorically, without a doubt.
Beloved Queer siblings and fabulous cisgender and heterosexual allies, it has always been so and will always be so.
Amen.