Pastor Josh's Remarks to the Federal Way City Council

NOTE from Pastor Josh: I'm not used to preaching three-minute sermons. I ran out of time to finish what I had prepared, but if I'd had more time, this is the entirety of what I would have said.

I am Josh Hosler, and my pronouns are “he/him.” I am the priest at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd on 312^th. I’m here tonight to express my disappointment with the City Council’s resolution to stop flying on city property any flag other than the nation, state, city, and POW/MIA flags.

In my work as a parish priest, there’s always a list of folks I’m paying more attention to than others. We’re a medium-sized church, I’d say, with about 150 people on our rolls. I care about all of my parishioners. But some people have more needs at any given time than others do, so they’re the ones I focus on. And that list is always shifting and changing.

Life in the church would be a lot easier, of course, if everyone came to me with equal needs. But that will never be the case. A lot of people come to Good Shepherd because they’ve been badly hurt in other churches: excluded or even reviled simply because of who they are. Or they’ve been told that their gay child is not welcome.

I have a big heart for these folks, because emotionally, it’s difficult to internalize the fact that rejection by a church does not mean rejection by Jesus. It’s quite the opposite, in fact, because in the Beatitudes, Jesus lifts up those who have been excluded and reviled and proclaims that they are the holiest people in the room. So these are the people I most need to welcome and care for right now. And not once have I said to myself, “By going out of my way to include this person, I’m excluding others.”

Yet I hear from Councilmember McDaniel: “That flag supports one group, not other groups. It’s not inclusive.” Whom, may I ask, does the Pride flag exclude? I’m straight, cisgender, married with an adult child, a posterboy for what others (not me) might call “conservative family values.” Yet I know that the Pride flag includes me, too. And more importantly, it includes a host of people I love.

How about the Juneteenth flag? I’m white, but more accurately, I appear white to others, based on some nebulous idea of “whiteness.” Because you know what? Whiteness is only a thing because a bunch of people decided they wanted to be white so that others could not be. Since I understand this, I see clearly that there is nothing about the Juneteenth flag that excludes me. The whole point is to include those who have been excluded for so many centuries.

You can’t change the range of your sexual orientation or the color of your skin. And gender identity is deeply personal and not at all objective; some of us take a lifetime to figure out how to define it for ourselves, let alone figure out how to express it safely to the rest of the world. But you can always change your level of intolerance. It’s as simple as learning and growing from others, and then deciding to change your mind.

Councilmember McDaniel said of the practice of flying various flags, “We are allowing the government to choose winners and losers.” Are we really? Who loses when we fly these flags? Bigots? OK, let them feel uncomfortable, then. When it comes to the fundamental dignity of every human being, we don’t get to “agree to disagree.” Not when the flag of the United States flies to remind us that “all … are created equal … endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights … life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I suppose the City Council’s intent with this vote was to clean up what you saw as a clutter of flags. Well, diversity can indeed feel like clutter … until we truly see people and not just flags. Removing these flags at this specific moment in American history brings a detrimental impact you did not realize. The message you are sending is something like this:  “We said for a while that you were included because people twisted our arms. Now that there’s a new king at the top, we don’t have to do keep up that charade anymore.”

I don’t believe for a moment that this was your intent. But it is most definitely the impact.

Councilmember McDaniel introduced the resolution with these words: “There is a massive battle going on in our country.” He’s right. There is a massive battle going on over who gets to be in the United States, and under what circumstances. There’s a massive battle over who gets to have appropriate and adequate medical care … over who gets to feed their families … and who gets a custom Qatari jet, a Great Gatsby-style ballroom, and total legal immunity.

And there’s a massive battle over whether the United States will even continue as a representative democracy—in other words, whether the flag Councilman McDaniel most wants to preserve will continue to stand for the ideals we’ve fought for 250 years to establish. We have yet to establish these supposedly American ideals, but I haven’t given up yet.

As I just said in my sermon last Sunday, “All are welcome at [the communion] table except those who would unseat others from the table.” There is indeed a massive battle going on in our country right now, and I choose to stand with the vulnerable. Thank you.