"People I meet in Park Slope often tell me they can't believe in God because of all the suffering in the world. Consider the Holocaust, or the suffering of so many innocent people from AIDS – how can we believe in God? I cannot finally solve this problem, but I also know that unbelief has no better solution to suffering than belief does, and unbelief adds other problems of its own. In the same way, gay men and lesbian women and bisexual and transgendered people are asked how they can go to church when the church has been the institution that has most excluded and even persecuted them. But this problem is not solved by not going to church. Indeed, the fact that the frequency of church attendance and intensity of religious devotion is higher in the gay community then in the population at large is in itself an evidence for God, if not a proof, and it certainly is evidence that the Son of God is wounded.

"It is Christlike and wonderful that the very persons who have suffered oppression in the church respond by intercession in the church, as you are doing tonight. Tonight is an act of healing and of being healed. For those who are hurt by the church to claim their place in church is an act of healing. For us to pray not only for ourselves but also for sick little children of undetermined orientation, that is an act of healing. For us to pray not only for ourselves but also for addicts in their self-destruction and outcasts in their misery, that is an act of healing. For us to pray not only for ourselves but also for mothers in the brothels of India and children in the clinics of Africa, that is an act of healing. For us to pray not only for ourselves but also to name before God those who have died, that is an act of healing.

"AIDS does not discriminate. Would that our churches were as indiscriminate as AIDS. But to offer intercessions that are indiscriminate and inclusive is an act of healing. For us to hold up to God the individual names of those we know who have died from AIDS and the also the nameless of the world we do not know, who have the condition of AIDS, is both to touch the wounds of Christ and to be Christlike, and also to demonstrate, if not to prove, what God is like, which you are doing here tonight. God bless you."