Delivered at my church on September 1, 2019; inspired by Luke 14:1-14 (the lead-up to the Parable of the Great Dinner).
Let us pray, uniting our voices whenever God is called upon, with the words “hear our prayer”.
God of hosts — not of armies but of dinner tables — let us acknowledge that our world continues to be like those ancient banquets, where some have conspicuously exalted themselves and others come with barely a crust of bread. Remind us that to transform our tables into places of equity requires ongoing work. May our gatherings not be replications of the hierarchies of this world, but tiny examples of conscious communion. God of openness and grace, hear our prayer.
Remind us, O God, that though we are made in your image, our words alone do not have the power to transform the reality of this world. May we accept that even our noblest motivations can perpetuate harm to those around us. Let us humble ourselves in body and spirit, sitting quietly at the lowest seat so that we may learn from giving our neighbours pride of place. God of the sidelines, hear our prayer.
Let us name the ways we may hold power over others, whether personally or systemically. We may be white where our ancestors’ self-interest painted other human beings as lesser; we may be male in a world that sees us as default. We may be straight or cisgender in a society where other ways of loving, more complex ways of being, have long been judged as deviant. God of complications, hear our prayer.
We may be gainfully employed while others struggle to make rent; we may have secure housing while others search for a place to sleep at night. O God, help us renounce the advantages we have been given, and share our abundance with those who have been dealt an unfair hand. God of wealth within poverty, hear our prayer.
God who sees all things for what they are: let us not assume the texture of any playing field. We pray that every valley may be raised, and every hill and mount made low. May the lowly be magnified and the powerful dethroned, as all rugged ground becomes level. May all beings experience your unbounded presence, which speaks, ever so surprisingly, in a still small voice. God of overturning, hear our prayer.
May we commit to learning the wisdom and courage to overturn our own tables, to relinquish the seat of honour and be accomplices in the project of justice. May our hearts be broken open and rivers of compassion flow forth, washing away our self-conscious guilt, that we may truly listen and understand one another. God of vulnerability, hear our prayer.
May we empty ourselves of our egos; our self-interest, our need to stay on top, and our need to be right. Remind us that your Way can be difficult to walk, and is never quite what we expect. Give us the courage to let our false selves and defense mechanisms be crucified with Christ, so that our true and better natures may rise, plain and raw and shining with a new sincerity. God of transformation, hear our prayer.
May we become agents of a true peace that does not avoid uncomfortable questions. In seeking peace, let us not be doormats of the rich and powerful, but let us opt out of the games of power altogether. Teach us to hold a mirror up to the domination systems that surround us. Show us how to become servants to a greater purpose than this world can imagine. God of peace through justice, hear our prayer.
Let us echo the prayer that Jesus taught us, a prayer of openness to your Divine Way; a prayer in which we humbly ask that the basic needs of all may be met, knowing that many are still hungry; for forgiveness of debts when economic inequality is a stumbling block for more people than ever before; and for your vision of love and justice to be made manifest on earth — an in-breaking un-kingdom far greater than any human government — as we say together: Our Mother, Our Father…
(My first try at a sermon, for Pride Sunday 2019. You can also listen on Soundcloud.)
Why do we need a Pride Sunday? Especially in June? [Note: our local Pride festival is held in July.]
Because there is still a great lie that queer people — LGBTQ+ people — and Christians can’t get along.
I’ve had people on the internet tell me that my decision to go into ministry as a genderqueer person is worthless, because “the belief system of some two-thousand-year-old desert tribe didn’t care about being nice to gay people”. We routinely get messages telling us our church sign is wrong.
Anyone can spout talking points about this; but wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. [cf. Matthew 11:19]
I’m going to tell you about Jesus today; how he lived, and what he taught. For me, there is something powerfully relatable about the shape of Jesus’ life; not just as a person of faith, but as a queer person. I want to talk about how Jesus’ story resembles, in many ways, nothing so much as a queer life — with all the upheaval, scandal, and confounding of expectations that implies.
I’m certainly not saying that Jesus was gay, or trans, or intersex. Queer is a more expansive term than that, and is a much more immediately transgressive term; it’s a term, quite honestly, that is still very much connected to its origins as a term of abuse. While it can refer to anyone who experiences homophobia or transphobia, it carries with it a connotation of a way of being that goes against the grain; a state of being not quite one thing and not quite another.
But, fair warning: its use is sometimes quite contentious, even discouraged, within the wider LGBTQ+ community, especially when used by people who would not consider themselves “queer”. I’m using it today, however, because I’m speaking from my own point of view.
Jesus is born as an ordinary peasant, the son of a teenage mother and a carpenter — you know the story. He lives under military occupation by the Roman Empire, which has annexed all the best land; demands punitive taxes to build palaces in fortified seaport towns; has taken over the Jerusalem Temple, hiring and firing high priests at will, and doesn’t hesitate to violently crush any sign of dissent.
But as Jesus grows up, he starts to realize that he is called to be something different, something that will disturb the very fabric of the society that he lives in. He finds community through John the Baptist, a strange, wild figure who has quite a following, mostly among the more downtrodden parts of society — and through John he gets initiated into a new kind of life, a new way of being.
Then, Jesus begins to get noticed. Imagine the young Jesus, certainly no older than I am now, speaking in the synagogues all across the countryside of Galilee. And when he gets to his hometown of Nazareth, he stands in front of all his family and friends and begins to read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives … to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” … The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:18-21)
This reads, to me, like a coming-out narrative. Because Jesus immediately follows up this seemingly empowering message with a bunch of uncomfortable truths that they don’t want to hear — namely, by citing the story of the prophet Elijah to make the point that God works from the margins of society, and plants the seeds of prophecy and change from the bottom up. “No prophet is accepted in their own country,” declares Jesus — and the congregation who had just minutes before said “Wow! This kid is going places! Joseph, isn’t this your son?” turn around and try to run him out of town.
There is something else here that the gospels aren’t quite obvious about. Jesus is giving up his place in the family structure that bound Judean culture together; striking out on his own, all the way to the raggedy edge — to share his message of healing and justice and resilience in the face of Roman occupation with those whom his people would have considered foreigners and outcasts.
It’s almost certain that Joseph assumed that Jesus would come of age and take on his father’s trade, inheriting his tools and going to work as a day labourer in Roman construction projects. All of a sudden, that’s not going to happen — because Jesus has fallen in with a very strange crowd; he’s been influenced by these people, and has come back home full of uncanny zeal and radical ideas.
I can imagine all too well the sight of Mary grieving for the image of the son she loved, who she assumed would grow up, settle down, and have children of his own — but all of a sudden he’s someone different; someone or something that can’t quite be contained. I can imagine this all too well because my own mother, my own father, have both gone through this.
But as it turns out, Jesus had discovered — he had understood, had even begun to embody — a kind of love that had never been thought possible; a kind of love that was so radical and so powerful that a lot of folks outright rejected it. The people in power certainly weren’t into it.
This is a kind of story that should absolutely resonate with queer folks like me, because we have a very similar experience — with and through each other. The dawning realization that we are meant for a different kind of life; something which not everyone can understand, but which we suddenly realize is beautiful. That moment when you see someone else, in person or in the media, who embodies an indescribable feeling that you have kept tucked away inside of you for your entire life.
Isn’t it possible that those ordinary semi-literate fishermen, Peter and Andrew and James and John, had a similar experience — seeing something in Jesus that was so powerful, so compelling, that they couldn’t help but respond when he said “follow me”?
We queer people know a kind of love that wrenches us out of the closet and into the sunlight; a kind of love that makes us feel beautiful and strong and valued in a way that no other love has before; a love that opens our hearts to weep at the injustices done to our queer siblings, our trans siblings, our Two-Spirit siblings throughout history;
A love that can make us fearless, so that no catcalling, no misgendering, no homophobic preaching, no gay-bashing, no parental rejection can dissuade us from living out the kind of love to which we are called; the ways of being that upset cultural assumptions and power structures that most of us take as fact.
The love that took root in Jesus’ movement was one that breached walls and broke down borders; that reached across ancient religious schisms — such as the one between the Judeans and the Samaritans, who wouldn’t even speak to each other; that uplifted and empowered women; that extended all the way to the Ethiopian eunuch in the book of Acts — who would have been considered not only foreign, but ritually unacceptable as a person! — to heal and unify and plant the seeds of distributive justice through small, beautiful, subversive actions. And it didn’t stop there.
Near the end of the Gospel of Matthew, some of the Roman-backed chief priests and elders come up to Jesus and start questioning him. But he takes the wind out of their sails by telling them a parable:
“What do you think? A man had two sons [keep in mind that in a lot of Bible stories, the second son is the underdog who comes out on top]; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the [sex workers] are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” (Matthew 21:28-31)
(Look at it this way; at least no one can accuse me of not being Bible-based.)
That passage is a proverbial smoking gun; of all the sayings in the Gospels, it’s the one that is still immediately subversive to us today. But it’s true, Jesus explains, because there’s one thing that the most stigmatized, most down-and-out people in society have that the respectable folks who actually obey the traffic laws and run the Temple don’t — and that is, a thirst for hope and meaning and healing, and a reason to imagine that another world is possible.
So, I’ll say it right now: I am not going into ministry to uphold the stability of the mainline church in its current form. I am going into ministry in the hope that I can help make the church into a refuge, where everyone has the opportunity and the tools to heal and thrive and care for one another; where this transformative divine love is as present and as accessible as the air we breathe.
I believe that I am called, among other things, to be a minister to and for my queer and trans siblings, for my radical siblings; to be an instrument of disorientation and reorientation and renewal and healing for the wounds that the church at large has inflicted by confusing white heteronormative Western social conventions with the actual, radical teachings of christianity.
Because how many queer and transgender children have been turned away, just like Jesus was run out of his hometown, by parents and communities and churches who don’t understand them?
I think what Jesus says to his own people later on in the Gospel of Matthew is something he might say to my radical queer siblings, and to the church that has historically rejected them, today:
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children [— your queer and trans and non-binary children —] together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate.” (Matthew 23:37-38)
Because the great tragedy here is that that vital, transcendent love should have been the church’s stock in trade all along. We, the church, have the capacity and the knowledge to reach back to our radical, counter-cultural roots and throw people a lifeline of meaning and hope and healing in a tempest-tossed world — but in the eyes of far too many, we are still at best a bastion of the status quo.
I’ve connected with some wonderful radical theological people through the internet; one particular person, by the name of Jane Nichols — a remarkable lesbian trans woman who just completed her master’s degree in theology — says it better than I ever could:
[O]ur stance towards exclusionary theology should not be ‘well, actually, if we look in the Bible, we can see that it never actually forbids being gay,’ but instead, ‘how dare [we] presume to limit God’s love? What blasphemous arrogance could have possibly led [us] to where [we ended up]? When did [we] start worshipping [our] own image in place of the Divine?’ (Jane Nichols, Tumblr post, May 2019)
Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.
Where I have found the Holy Spirit alive and well and pushing the envelope is on the margins of almost every sphere. Most immediately, I encounter it in the deep insight and vulnerability of the women clergy members in my life — and most recently, I have seen it spring to life in the passion and brilliance and vision of the lesbian and queer women clergy with whom I was privileged to commune on the sidelines of the former Maritime Conference.
By the way — Jesus’ story is hardly the only one that’s relatable to queer and trans people like us. The Bible is replete with stories of transformation, of coming into new identity and purpose, even gender-ambiguity, if you know where — and how — to look.
Yes, queer people — LGBTQ+ people — and Christians, followers of Jesus, can and should get along. Yes, queer people can be Christian, and Christians can be queer; and yes, we can and should learn from one another!
Because we have a remarkable common ground — a remarkable birthright:
We are called to go against the grain; to challenge the basic patterns in which our societies operate, and to embrace a new and powerful kind of love;
a love that reshapes the way we think about ourselves,
a love that beckons us to healing and renewal,
a love that calls us to take action and cry out for justice,
a love that is itself a radical way of being;
a love that is potentially more beautiful and more life-giving
than the power structures of this world are ready to understand.
Amen.
June 2, 2019 — St. Andrew’s United Church, Halifax
I attended the regional conference of the United Church of Canada this past weekend, where I got a lot of questions answered, saw church governance in action, witnessed the tension between quiet renewal and confident status quo, and went really deep with a number of fascinating clergypeople - some of them young, most of them queer. I’ve been doing a lot of debriefing on Instagram, so here are some of my impressions of the weekend.
I attended the regional conference of the United Church of Canada this past weekend, where I got a lot of questions answered, saw church governance in action, witnessed the tension between quiet renewal and confident status quo, and went really deep with a number of fascinating clergypeople - some of them young, most of them queer. I’ve been doing a lot of debriefing on Instagram, so here are some of my impressions of the weekend.
I support this: the United Church of Canada requires me to be vaccinated because it’s my responsibility to be “sensitive to the vulnerabilities of all.” #uccan #getvaxxed #ɢᴇᴛᴠᴀᴄᴄɪɴᴀᴛᴇᴅ (at Knox United Church) https://www.instagram.com/p/CVBbzC7hJDos2aN4PNX_eDQbIR-7-paRwDNlPo0/?utm_medium=tumblr
I joined Sunday at Knox from #Edmonton / #Treaty6 this morning. Was great to hear Jesse Peters get things started with Radiohead’s High and Dry. . . . #spiritualformation #passthepeace #uccan #affirming #yycchurch #sbnr #yyclife (at Edmonton, Alberta) https://www.instagram.com/p/CSCm9f6rnjhkXKQBNOjKVZjwO_0ri_QG-pSb2I0/?utm_medium=tumblr
Back on Sunday! @kxcalgary #passthepeace #uccan #affirming #yycchurch #sbnr #yyclife (at Knox United Church) https://www.instagram.com/p/CGtnI2DhR82/?igshid=1rlbb05k7wy73
