A Sermon For Renew Inclusive Church, Cambridge
Pride Sunday, 14th June 2026
Revelation 7.9; 21.1-5; 22.17
It was a joy yesterday to be present for the Pride parade in Cambridge.
When Jess told me she'd love a focus on God's inclusive love for Pride Sunday,
my mind went straight to the book of Revelation.
And I'm aware that for some of you,
that might feel like the last place to look.
Revelation, after all, has a reputation.
It's the book that gets quoted at you by street preachers.
It's the source of the imagery on the placards that tell you you're going to burn.
It's the book that's been used, again and again,
as a weapon against the very people we're celebrating this weekend.
So I want to begin by saying: that's not what Revelation is.
The people who use it that way haven't really read it,
or at least they haven't read it properly.
Here’s the key thing to know: Revelation is resistance literature.
It's a letter written by a man called John, exiled on the island of Patmos,
watching the Roman Empire crush the communities he loves.
It's his act of defiance,
his insistence that Rome doesn't get to write the final chapter,
that the empire's version of reality isn't the only version on offer.
The Greek word we translate as "revelation" is apokalypsis,
it’s the word we know as apocalypse, but it doesn't mean catastrophe.
It means unveiling.
It means: let me show you what's really going on.
And what John shows us, when we let him, is extraordinary.
The first text I want us to sit with is Revelation 7:9.
John writes:
"After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count,
from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,
standing before the throne and before the Lamb."
That image, a crowd too vast to count,
drawn from every nation and tribe and tongue,
is John's counter-vision to the Roman Empire.
Because Rome had a version of unity too,
it just didn't look anything like this.
Rome's unity was enforced sameness.
One language, one currency, one Caesar,
one way of being in the world,
and if you didn't fit, there was a cross waiting for you.
Rome called it the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome,
and it was real enough if you were wealthy, male, and Roman.
For everyone else, it was a peace built on their silence,
their servitude, their erasure.
Does that sound familiar to you?
But against that, John offers this:
a multitude of dazzling, irreducible human difference,
gathered not by conquest but by love,
not in uniformity but in unity,
every language still spoken,
every people still recognisably themselves,
all oriented around the Lamb
who gave himself rather than taking from others.
Now, I want to be clear about how I understand this vision,
because it matters enormously.
This isn't a picture of heaven as a future destination
we'll arrive at one day if we're lucky.
This is a vision of what God wants,
held up as a mirror to the present,
a challenge to the church to ask:
is this what we look like?
Is this what we're aiming for?
The question Revelation puts to any community
that calls itself the body of Christ
isn't "will you be ready when the end comes?"
but "are you becoming this now?"
And here's where I need to be honest,
because I think part of what we're doing this weekend,
not just celebrating, but actually lamenting and repenting,
is acknowledging that the church has so profoundly failed this vision.
The church has, for most of its history,
been the empire in this story, not the multitude.
It has been the force of enforced conformity,
the institution that told people their love was wrong,
their identity was broken,
their presence conditional on their silence.
The church has been the source of wounds
that are still being carried by people who may be in this room.
And it's not just the church.
Just over a year ago, the UK Supreme Court ruled
that the words "woman" and "sex" in the Equality Act
mean biological sex at birth;
and the Equality and Human Rights Commission has followed that up recently
with guidance that trans people must use the facilities
of the sex they were assigned at birth,
in workplaces, public services, and schools.
The British Medical Association’s Resident Doctors called it scientifically illiterate.
What it means in practice is that the state has decided
that it gets to tell people who they are,
regardless of how they live,
regardless of who they know themselves to be,
regardless of the dignity and safety of having to use a bathroom
that publicly marks you as other.
In 2015, the UK was ranked first in Europe for LGBTQ rights.
By the time of that ruling, we'd dropped to twenty-second.
That's not progress.
That is empire logic: the insistence on enforced categories,
on making some people invisible or impossible,
it is the empire doing what it always does.
Which brings me to the second text. From Revelation 21:
"And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
'See, the home of God is among mortals.
God will dwell with them; they will be God’s peoples,
and God will be with them; God will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.'
And the one who was seated on the throne said,
'See, I am making all things new.'"
God will wipe every tear from their eyes.
And God is making— not God will make, not God has made,
but God is making, present tense, ongoing, now — all things new.
This isn't a promise you wait for.
This is a description of what God is doing in the world at this moment,
the continual divine project of making new things,
healing broken things, restoring what has been damaged.
And for this to be good news on a Pride Sunday,
we have to name honestly what some of those tears have been.
Some of them were shed in churches.
Some of them were caused by people wielding scripture as a weapon.
Some of them belong to teenagers who were told they were an abomination,
to adults whose relationships weren't recognised,
to people who loved God and were told by God's representatives
that God didn't love them back.
When the text says God will wipe every tear,
all those tears are included too.
Maybe especially those tears.
There's something important in the phrase "the first things have passed away."
The old arrangements, the old hierarchies, the old mechanisms of exclusion,
John sees them as part of what God is in the business of dismantling.
The new creation isn't just a bigger and better version of the old one.
It's built on fundamentally different terms.
And communities like this one, small, imperfect,
doing their best to be genuinely what the church is supposed to be,
are signs of that new creation,
not because you've got everything right,
but because you've committed to a direction of travel.
The third text is the one I want to end with,
because I think it's the most beautiful and the most radical of all.
It comes right at the end of Revelation, chapter 22, verse 17:
"The Spirit and the Bride say, 'Come.'
And let everyone who hears say, 'Come.'
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift."
Come. The Spirit says it. The church says it.
And then, and this is the bit that gets me,
everyone who hears is invited to say it too.
The invitation becomes contagious,
spreading from person to person, community to community,
until the whole earth is echoing with it.
And then: let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.
Anyone who wishes, anyone who wants to.
That's it. That's the criterion.
Want to come? Come.
The welcome isn't conditional on your sexuality, or your gender,
or your relationship status, or your past,
or how other churches have treated you.
The Spirit holds the door open and says: anyone.
If you're thirsty, there's water here.
I'm not part of the LGBTQ community myself,
and I want to be honest about that,
I'm here as an ally, and as a witness to what I've seen.
I've been minister of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church in London
for fourteen years now,
and one of the things I'm most grateful for is that we've tried,
often imperfectly, to work out what it means
to be a genuinely inclusive community,
not in a way that has people prove their credentials at the door,
but in a way that simply assumes whoever walks in belongs there.
We haven't always got it right, and we're still learning.
But what I can tell you
is that when you try to be the kind of community that Revelation 7 describes,
extraordinary things happen.
People come home who'd assumed they'd been permanently expelled from the faith.
People find healing they'd given up expecting.
People discover that the God they were told didn't want them
turns out to want them very much indeed.
The vision of Revelation isn't a destination we're waiting to reach.
It's a calling we're trying to answer, today, in this room,
with this particular gathering of people.
And the word the Spirit keeps saying, right to the very end of the whole Bible,
is simply: Come.
Come as you are.
Come, and find the water of life.
Come, and take your place in the multitude
that no empire can number and no power can silence.
That's the vision. That's the calling.
And I think you already know it's yours.
Discussion Starters:
1. "Has there been a moment, in a church, or somewhere else, where you felt genuinely welcomed as you are, rather than welcomed on conditions? What made the difference?"
2. "John's vision in Revelation 7 is of a community where every nation, tribe, people and language is present. If you picture the communities you belong to, including this one, who's missing? And why might that be?"
3. "The sermon suggested that these visions in Revelation aren't about a future destination but a present calling. Does that feel like good news, or does it feel like too much pressure? Or both?"
4. "God wiping every tear, if you take that seriously, what does it ask of the communities who claim to follow that God? What would it mean for this community, specifically?"
5. "The ruling that trans people must use facilities based on their birth sex was described as empire logic in the sermon, the state insisting it gets to define who people are. Do you think that's a fair framing? What do you think the church's response should be?"
6. "Revelation ends with the Spirit and the church together saying 'Come', an open, unconditional invitation. If you were going to say 'Come' to someone who'd been hurt by the church, what would you need them to know first?"
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