Category: Queer Lectionary

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bible study Holy Days LGBT/queer Queer Lectionary

One Spirit, many gifts: Pentecost’s preferential option for the poor

Pentecost Sunday, 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13 and Acts 2:1-21 through a queer, liberationist lens

Key points:

  • Throughout scripture and culminating in Pentecost, God’s breath pervades all creation and lavishes gifts upon all persons — yet also demonstrates what liberation theologians call a “preferential option for the poor,” often selecting society’s shamed and shunned to speak God’s good news to the world.
  • Too often, we dismiss God-given wisdom and leadership as it manifests in the oppressed; we must resist the hierarchy of gifts humans construct and learn to recognize Spirit wherever She moves.
    • For instance, many dismiss the powerful Spirit-movement of Pentecost; they aren’t prepared to see God among Galilean hicks, so they don’t. But there is Spirit-movement there, which lesbian theologian Kittredge Cherry envisions as an erotic, ecstatic, polyamorous marriage between Holy Spirit and human spirits (passage below).
  • At Pentecost, it’s people who know society’s in-between spaces, the not-quite-belonging-anywhere that many bi- or multicultural people experience — Jews who were immigrants or visitors from outside Judea. Spirit speaks to them in their own heart languages! We too are called to practice linguistic hospitality and the radical belonging and centering of marginalized voices, vocations, movements.
The disciples,men and women depicted with deep brown skin, sit or stand in a roomy hut, many smiling as tongues of flame hover over each head. One of them beams as she reaches up towards a ball of light.
“Pentecost” by the JESUS MAFA project

God’s Spirit: both prodigal and particular

Happy Pentecost! This Sunday’s readings show us a Spirit who blows across all creation, blazes into the bustling heart of community life, and bestows Xir manifold gifts prodigally yet particularly — prodigal as in almost “wastefully” generous, an overflowing abundance of blessing lavished over all created things; and particular in that Xe is intentional about which gifts each individual receives, often with what liberation theologians call a “preferential option” for strangers and outcasts.

There’s Psalm 104, wherein God’s Spirit, or breath, is what animates all things — then Numbers 11:24-30, in which Spirit rests upon a select group in a particular way:

“I’ll take some of the spirit that is on you and place it on them. Then they will carry the burden of the people with you so that you won’t bear it alone.” So Moses…assembled seventy men from the people’s elders and placed them around the tent. …When the spirit rested on them, they prophesied, but only this once.

Two men had remained in the camp, one named Eldad and the second named Medad, and the spirit rested on them. They were among those registered, but they hadn’t gone out to the tent, so they prophesied in the camp. – vv. 24-26

Along with the recognition that we all need support and that decision-making power must be shared, what I love about this passage is how God’s Spirit does what She always does — surprises us.

We expect Divinity to remain within the safe confines of the boundaries we devise — in this case, the meeting tent Moses established where he and God carry out important conversations. But God’s breath blows where it will; the Spirit isn’t solely in the tent! Off in the center of things, out among the people, She gifts Eldad and Medad with prophecy too.

It is as 1 Corinthians 12 tells us:

Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services but the same Lord, and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
– 1 Corinthians 12:4-7

Resisting a hierarchy of gifts

All of us carry gifts from the Spirit intended for communal good; it is in using and joining our God-given gifts that we participate in the delivery of God’s Kin-dom here on earth.

Unfortunately, we tend to create a hierarchies out of these spiritual gifts, vocations, and activities: some are put on pedestals, while others are belittled, overlooked, or even cursed as sin.

For instance, we too often fail to recognize disabled persons’ unique gifts — and I don’t mean “they have so much to teach us” in the paternalistic, infantilizing way that is mainstream. I mean that their/our experiences of moving through a society structured to exclude them/us often compels them/us to cultivate wisdom and resourcefulness that could help liberate everyone.1 This is true of every oppressed group that “makes a way out of no way.”2

Some of our God-given gifts are even denounced as curses. Take queer ways of loving and being — ways that defy and demolish normative constrictions, that challenge society to think beyond “the way things are.”

This is why I can’t tolerate the “love the sinner, hate the sin” rhetoric or see it as anything but hate wrapped up in pretend piety — you are calling Divine activity in my life, the bounty of love and holy transformation flowing out from my queer experiences, sin.

I’m not one to throw around words like blasphemy, but Jesus does warn us that insults against the Holy Spirit — which I interpret as divine activity in the world — are unforgivable. Now, Jesus often employed hyperbole to get vital points across, and I don’t think that by “unforgivable” he means “damnable”; even so, we must all take great care not to rush to denounce God’s movement as sin just because it grates against the status quo.

In Acts 2’s Pentecost story, some of those who witness God’s movement in the disciples’ multilingual exclamations of Christ’s liberation don’t declaim it as sin, but do dismiss it as drunken ranting (v. 13).

A queer vision: Pentecost as erotic, ecstatic union

What some dismiss as debauchery was in reality an ecstatic encounter with the divine. Lesbian theologian and QSpirit host Kittredge Cherry envisions Pentecost’s arrival of the Spirit as an orgy-like ecstasy of mystical love-making; Holy Spirit weds human spirit as divinity is distributed through a fiery kiss:

Medieval illustration of Jesus and a woman figure seated in a letter O, holding each other and kissing
Kittredge Cherry is by no means the first Christian to envision Pentecost as betrothal, Divinity erotically wed to humanity, or the Holy Spirit as a kiss, as evinced in this illumination of Christ the Lover kissing the Church his beloved in a medieval manuscript of the Song of Songs. St. Bernard of Clairveax was particularly smitten with the concept of a kissing Trinity: “If … the Father is he who kisses, the Son he who is kissed, then it cannot be wrong to see in the kiss the Holy Spirit, for he is the imperturbable peace of the Father and the Son, their unshakable bond, their undivided love, their indivisible unity.”

When the Holy Spirit loved me, our contact produced a ripple of energy similar to a heartbeat. She was ringing me like a bell, and the “sound” would roll on forever.

“It is without end, because it is without beginning,” She said. She rang me again, and this time when the edge of her heart crossed mine, the rapture made me lose control and we melted into One. …

We kissed everyone in the room…We licked them with Our flaming tongues. They welcomed Our electric kisses. Each of them inhaled sharply and deeply in preparation for a sigh. We swept into them as breath, passed through each soul’s new doorway and fertilized the sacred chamber within. At the same time, their sparkling souls penetrated my divine heart and swam into a new womblike space that had just unfurled for them. The glorious friction made me feel flushed.

Holy Spirit and human spirit were wedded, catalyzing a chain reaction of power bursts. Every soul in the room ignited in such a way that flames appeared to blaze from each person’s body. They looked around at each other’s auras in astonished admiration.

All that happened on one inhalation. When they exhaled, they could taste how much God loved them as We flowed over their tongues. They let their tongues flutter and writhe in ecstatic abandon. Each one released the tension of the wedding consummation in his or her own unique speaking style. Some of it sounded like gibberish to them as they praised God. Others spoke in exalted words. …

The Holy Spirit and I rode the sound waves of their voices, still actively making love. We granted everyone within listening range the same gift that I had received that morning: the ability to hear pure thought.3

Pentecost’s preferential option for the poor

As the disciples’ spirits merge with the Divine Spirit, their joyful response flows out into Jerusalem. As aforementioned, some dismiss their ecstasy as inebriation.

To them, these students of the executed rabbi Jesus are nothing more than homeless hicks who’ve wandered too far from their backwater region of Galilee. Perhaps they should “go back to where they came from” instead of continuing to disrupt the peace — peace as in “quiet,” in this case; but also as in the Pax Romana, empire’s false peace of enforced order.

Of course many dismiss them, just as we today dismiss the ways God is speaking through those we consider backwards, badly behaved, or unworthy of our time.

But others are drawn to the disciples’ boisterous babble.

Peter stands with his back to the viewer, arms outstretched as he speaks to a small crowd. Among this crowd are women and men wearing different kinds of clothing, a disabled person, and a child
Peter explains that they are full of Spirit, not spirits!

“Devout Jews from every nation under heaven”

The Jews who stop to listen to what these Spirit-filled vagabonds are actually saying are foreign Jews, coming from nations outside Judea.

Some of them are ethnically Jewish, born in diaspora; others are previously-gentile converts to the Jewish religion.

Some are only visiting Jerusalem on pilgrimage to celebrate Pentecost, the Greek word for the Jewish holiday Shavuot, which celebrates Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. They’ve only left their gentile-majority communities for a short while.

Others have taken up more permanent residence in Jerusalem, where they get to live among fellow Jews — but, with their foreign languages and customs, they still don’t quite fit in.

Overall, these are people of the in-between:

Too Jewish for the gentiles of their homelands; too foreign for the Jews of Jerusalem, they know what it is to not quite belong anywhere.

Here in Jerusalem, these pilgrims and immigrants probably get by with the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, Greek (or, for more official occasions, Latin). They are heartsick for the ease and comfort of their mother tongues, their regional dialects. Strange idioms trip them up; miscommunications abound; jokes and banter are belabored.

As these people of the in-between journey through Jerusalem to the temple for Shavuot, I bet the last thing they expected to hear was their own heart language, breaking through a wall of Greek and Aramaic.

What wonder! What relief! What…on earth are these Galileans; where did they pick up so many languages??

Of course these are the kinds of people who stopped to listen. Judeans accustomed to communicating easily, to hearing their first language everywhere they go, are more likely to react with scorn at the boisterousness of these country bumpkins.

But for those who yearn for a quality conversation in their heart language, it’s good news. They’re disturbed all right — but in a wondrous way. They are ready to have their lives shaken up by proclamations of a Messiah of the in-between — a fringe Jew like themselves, who made time for outcasts like themselves.

…Isn’t it always the people on the outskirts, in the gaps and on the borders of things, who are most ready for revolution?

Mosaic with rectangular tiles. A group of disciples, men and women of various races, stand looking upward at the flames above their heads
Photo of a Pentecost Mosaic by Holger Schué

Many languages, shared liberation

Pentecost is sometimes referred to as a reversal of what happened at Babel — but I don’t think that’s quite right. At Babel, God creates a diversity of language; a reversal of that act would be to reduce human speech to just one language.

But that is not what God does — that’s what Empire does: It bulldozes difference and calls enforced conformity peace.

God speaks to us and hears us in our own language, whatever that language may be, and delights in our diversity! We, in turn, are called to exercise what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “linguistic hospitality,” rejoicing in our cultural diversity and enjoying the richness of our variety of language, united in the One who prays for us “with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8: 26).

At Pentecost, the apostles invite others into their community as they are — sharing much in common, devoted to one passion, but maintaining core differences, like language. Oppressive differences like class are broken down, but the things that make us unique are welcomed.

Speaking as a USAmerican, this posture of humility and hospitality goes against everything we are taught here in the imperial core. I can’t dominate you if I know I have a lot to learn from you. You can’t dehumanize me when you acknowledge the value that I alone can bring to the table.

Rejoicing in this expectation-exploding, harmonizing Spirit, let us pray:

Holy Spirit of breath and flame,
howling gale and still small voice,

We praise you in your elusiveness,
how you whirl through the world wherever you — not we — will.

You dodge every attempt to pin you down,
slipping through our fingers like thin air
when we try to claim control of you —

yet at the same time, you pulse through our cells with every heartbeat,
settle deeper into our lungs with every breath.

As you, Irresistible Wind, pour over us now,
set our hearts on fire with passion for your justice,
for hospitality and mutuality,
for abundance beyond reckoning.

Amen.4

Drawing of the disciples with light brown skin and dark hair, holding on to each other as they gaze upward and the flames over their heads. The two Marys stand in the center of the group
Pentecost” by Gisele Bauche.

Footnotes

  1. For more on the unique gifts that disabled persons often bring to the table, see Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha’s book The Future Is Disabled — or their article on the topic here, where they declare, “At the core of my work and life is the belief that disabled wisdom is the key to our survival and expansion. Crip genius is what will keep us all alive and bring us home to the just and survivable future we all need. If we have a chance in hell of getting there.” ↩︎
  2. “Making a way out of no way” is an expression of Black wisdom frequently referenced by Womanists, as in Monica A. Coleman’s book that uses the phrase as its title. ↩︎
  3. Kittredge Cherry, Jesus in Love: At the Cross, 2018. ↩︎
  4. Prayer first shared on my website, binarybreakingworship.com. See also this Pentecost call to worship and benediction. ↩︎
Categories
bible study Queer Lectionary Unpacking Antisemitism worship-planning

“You in me and I in you”: Many voices on the interbeing of God and all things

Medieval manuscript page featuring a blue figure (Jesus) standing in golden concentric circles

Year A, Sixth Sunday of Easter, John 14:15-21 & Acts 17:22-31 through a queer & interfaith lens.

Both the John 14 and Acts 17 readings for this Sunday depict a God who is wholly interconnected within Godself and with all humanity (and all Creation). Paul references two Greek poet-philosophers to describe this state of interbeing. We too can respectfully draw from various traditions to get a better picture of what that means.

Key points

  • Jesus promises not to leave his disciples orphaned, or “fatherless,” and names that he is in the Father and the Father is in him. Exploring this “father” language alongside other terms Jesus uses for himself across the Gospels, we uncover something of the limitations of human language for relationships both human and divine. Jesus, like many queer found families, is taking the words he has available to him and ascribing them with deeper meaning.
  • The concept that Jesus is in the Parent as the Parent is in Jesus, and that we too are in Jesus as he is in us, has parallels to the Buddhist concept of interbeing. Paul’s reference to a classical Greek philosopher-poet’s words, “In [God] we live and move and have our being,” reiterates this inextricable interconnectedness, or mutual indwelling.
  • Paul quotes two Greek poet-philosophers to carry Christ’s good news to the Greeks. When we gather as many voices as possible at the table, we are granted grander glimpses of the divine in whom all things “live and move and have their being.”
  • I’ll be posting an article on one of those references, Epimenides of Crete, soon, exploring the queer resonances in this sixth century BCE sage.
Page from an illuminated medieval book featuring Hildegard's Universe. Yellow petal-looking flames form a vulvic shape. Inside is a border of red "flames," inside which is a blue sea of white stars and red and yellow starbursts. At the center of this is a round mound of moutains / hills, waters, fields.
“The Universe” by Hildegard von Bingen, c. 1165 in Scivias. The vulva-shaped cosmos is enfolded in divine fire, which “descended from heaven to earth and…gave help by showing heavenly things to people while they were in their souls and bodies… These people living in their souls and bodies raised the Word up with faithful joy.” Between divine fire is a “globe of reddish fire” that is the “light of burning Love”: “every creature is illuminated by the brightness of the Word’s light.” For more, listen to this.

John 14:15-21

The lectionary continues right where it left off last week, with Jesus’s tender reassurances to his disciples that even though he must soon leave them, he will not abandon — or, as he says here, orphan — them.

“I will ask the Parent, [who] will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth…You know hir because xe abides with you, and xe will be in you.
I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Parent, and you in me, and I in you.” – John 14:18-20

The picture Jesus paints here is a queer one, blending relational language and dissolving boundaries.

The limitations of relational language

Shortly, Jesus will tell his disciples that he no longer calls them servants, but friends — which moves him from a higher status of master (the Greek kyrios means master as much as it means lord) to the mutuality of friendship (John 15:15). Meanwhile, Jesus frequently names himself as Son of the Parent God throughout the Gospels. Yet here he promises not to leave his disciples orphaned (from the Greek ὀρφανός, orphanos). The Septuagint uses this Greek word to translate Hebrew’s yāṯôm, “fatherless” — it describes those left bereft and vulnerable due to the loss of either both parents or their father (in biblical iterations of patriarchy, losing your father opened you up to more insecurity and potential exploitation).

If Jesus’s absence could be described as the disciples becoming “fatherless,” then that becomes yet another way to describe his relationship with his followers. He is teacher, friend, father, mother hen, master, servant, bridegroom, God.

In traditional human relational structures, no one person could be all those things to another! But some queer relationships come closer to achieving it. In queer found families, the same person might serve as mother and sibling and even lover all at once. To be clear, this is not incestuous! What we are doing is repurposing traditional terms because there are no words in the mainstream lexicon that exactly match what we mean; we use limited language to describe queerly unlimited ways of experiencing each other

…Of course, these queer ways of being in relationship aren’t truly unlimited. But Divinity’s connections both within its Triune self and with its created world might just be!

Jesus as Father or Parent as well as sibling, servant, friend makes perfect paradoxical sense, both through a queer lens and in light of the picture he continues to paint: That he is in the Parent and the Parent is in him.

Another medieval manuscript page featuring golden concentric circles around a blue figure of Jesus, who has long hair and is beardless.
“The True Trinity in True Unity” by Hildegard von Bingen, c. 1165. “Unlike the usual triangular-shaped examples, this one involves nested circles of light. The Trinitarian nature of the divine is hidden under His unity and the emergent figure is God as One.”

And then we are in Jesus as he is in us, which by implication means we are also in the Parent and the Parent is in us — an interconnectedness that would be difficult to draw on paper, as each being involved is both holding and is held by each other being! You might even call this…interbeing!

Interbeing, or the interconnectedness of all things

Interbeing is the term beloved Zen Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh coined to describe what East Asian Buddhists call perfect interpenetration, complete interfusion, or (and this one sounds very much like Christ’s “I in you and you in me”) — mutual inclusion. Whatever it’s called, this interconnectedness envisions every single thing (every phenomenon, every living being, every atom, etc.) simultaneously and entirely containing andbeing contained by all other things. Or, as Thích Nhất Hạnh puts it after inviting the reader to consider a sheet of paper:

“Everything—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat, and even consciousness—is in that sheet of paper. Everything coexists with it. To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone; you have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.”1

Another metaphor for this complete interfusion is that of Indra’s net, which originates from the Atharva Veda and thus was part of Hindu cosmology before also being adopted by Buddhism:

The net is said to be infinite, and to spread in all directions with no beginning or end. At each node of the net is a jewel, so arranged that every jewel reflects all the other jewels. No jewel exists by itself independently of the rest. Everything is related to everything else; nothing is isolated.2

A kind of dizzying spread of blue "netting" on a black background, almost kaleidoscopic.
An artistic rendition of Indra’s Net by Ganesh Rao; click here for the entire gallery. You might also imagine a spiderweb with beads of rain all along it.

Triune interbeing

It’s notoriously difficult to talk of the Trinity without committing one heresy or another (whenever I try, these two grumpy Irishmen pop in my head grumbling That’s modalism, Patrick!). But I think that this concept of interbeing can be employed to get across some of the Trinity’s key aspects: first, that while the Persons of God are indeed three distinct Persons, they are also inextricably One.

Trying to eff the ineffable, we label the three Persons of God things like “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” or “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer” or “Lover, Beloved, and Love itself.” (Note how, as with queer found family, these names sometimes seem to clash “incestuously” — how can Father and Son also be Lover and Beloved? But it’s because we’re using limited human terms to describe the ineffable. The words fail as much as they succeed in helping us grasp God; for instance, “Father” and “Son” traditionally indicates hiearchy and difference in age, neither of which is accurate for the Persons of the Trinity.)

These names certainly describe elements of our Triune God, including some of the distinctions between each Person. However, if we solidify these distinctions too much, attempting to keep the Trinity neat and tidy with firm boundaries between each Person, we cease to speak of a God who is One. No one Person holds sole “dominion” over one quality of the Divine; each Person expresses all qualities. For example, the “Son” also has creative power; the “Father” also sustains all things; the Spirit also brings liberation; and so on.

Some of the earliest Christians employed a Greek term to describe this Triune interfusion, or mutual indwelling: perichoresis (from peri, “around,” and chōreō, “come” or “go”). Modern theologians have drawn from this concept the allegory of Trinity as a dance between three partners spinning together so perfectly harmoniously that they begin to blur.

[…P]erichoresis invites us to think in a new way about the very meaning of ‘one’ and ‘personal.’ The oneness of God is not the oneness of a distinct, self-contained individual; it is the unity of a community of persons who love each other and live together in harmony. And ‘personal’ means by definition inter-personal; one cannot be truly personal alone but only in relation to other persons.

Such is the unity and personal character of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is a deep, intimate, indissoluble unity between them. They are not three independent persons who decide to get together to form a club (or a dance group!) that might break up if the members decide to go it alone. They are what they are only in relationship to each other. Each exists only in this relationship and would not exist apart from it.

…Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one social person, for each is with and for the other so intimately that they can be said to live in and through each other.

– Shirley Guthrie, Christian Doctrine

painting on a yellow background of three figures circling each other in a whirling dance
“Perichoresis” by Jutta Bluehberger

Interbeing between divinity, humanity, and all creation

The Son is in the Parent is in the Spirit is in the Son is in the Spirit is in the Parent is in the Son ad infinitum; together, they are a perfect community, a perfect relationship.

Yet God chose to create, to let that perfect, self-contained love overflow beyond Godself! Thus we are invited into this perichoresis, this interbeing, invited to recognize the truth of Jesus’s words: “I am in my Parent, and you and me, and I in you” — all bound together with the Spirit, our advocate (or, as the CEB translates, companion) whom God is sending (v. 17) and who has been here all along, from the Beginning.

That’s the picture Jesus paints in this John 14 passage: the distances of time and space melt away; the boundaries between beings merge and mix!

It’s fitting that the lectionary pairs this passage with Acts 17, in which Paul notes that “God is not far from each one of us” (v. 27b) and that

“In [God] we live and move and have our being.” – Acts 17:28

Acts 17:22-31

The verses of Acts 17 leading up to this week’s passage recount Paul’s flight from alleged persecution3 to Athens, where he spends weeks engaging not only with Athenian Jews, but gentiles as well. Due to their love of new and interesting ideas (v. 21), the gentile Athenians take an interest in his proclamations about Jesus. They lead Paul to Areopagus, where he gets the chance to give “the fullest and most dramatic speech of [his] missionary career.”4

Paul starts by appealing to the Athenians’ spirituality, noting all their altars and shrines — including one dedicated to “an unknown god” (v. 23). He explains that this “unknown” deity is actually the God who “made the world and everything in it” — the Abrahamic God.

Paul, a Roman citizen as familiar with Greek things as Jewish things, smartly finds ways to connect renowned Greek poet-philosophers, quoting two of them:

For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we, too, are his offspring.’ – v. 28

The latter half of the verse, “We too are his offspring,” most likely comes from the Stoic philosopher Aratus, who opens his great work Phaenomena thus:

Let us begin with Zeus, whom we mortals never leave unspoken.
For every street, every market-place is full of god.
Even the sea and the harbour are full of this deity.
Everywhere everyone is indebted to god.
For we are indeed his offspring …

Paul sure knew how to pick the perfect reference, selecting one that not only supports his point about divinity’s pervasiveness, but is even set in the same scene he and his audience inhabit! Of course, the poem is talking about Zeus, while Paul is winding up for his pitch about the Abrahamic God raising Jesus from the dead.

Meanwhile, in describing a God in whom we “live and move and have our being,” Paul seems to be paraphrasing the sixth-century BCE sage Epimenides of Crete. I have grown short on time to dive into the queer resonance of this prophet; I’ll put out another article soon on how for the Greeks, this sage embodied both the awe and horror of one who is “unnatural” — just as Christ does in exploding the binary between life and death.

Subscribe to be notified when I put out the article on Epimenides!

stone altar with Latin inscribed, which is translated below
While no altars to an agnostos theos, an unknown god, have been unearthed in Athens, this altar was unearthed on the Palantine Hill. Its inscription reads, “Whether sacred to god or to goddess, Gaius Sextius Calvinus, son of Gaius, praetor, restored this on a vote of the senate.” When purifying Athens of plague, Epimenides ordered the erection of altars in various locations to “whichever god” was god of that location.

At least some of the early Christians recognized this reference to Epimenides, including Clement of Alexandria, who noted that Paul was willing to “attribute something of the truth” to a Greek, a gentile” and was “not ashamed, when discoursing for the edification of some and the shaming of others, to make use of Greek poems.”5

There is somewhat of an air of condescension in both Paul’s and Clement’s words, but I do appreciate the biblical precedent in quoting voices from other religions and cultures. If God truly is the one in whom we all move and live and have our being; if we truly are all interconnected like jewels in a net or raindrops in a web, then the divine pervades all peoples. God’s Spirit, God’s Breath “blows wherever she wills” (John 3:8). Only when we invite all voices to the table do we begin to catch a grander glimpse of God.

Footnotes

  1. Thích Nhất Hạnh, In The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries, 2017. For more on Buddhist conceptions of interconnectedness, check out this article. ↩︎
  2. https://pragyata.com/the-vedic-metaphor-of-indras-net/ ↩︎
  3. For information on Acts’ depictions of Jews as violent persecutors of Paul and other apostles and how these depictions have motivated antisemitism across Christian history, give this video a watch. ↩︎
  4. Mikael C. Parsons, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-acts-1722-31-5 ↩︎
  5. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata Book 1, chapter 14, c. late second century. ↩︎
Categories
bible study Other search markers Queer Lectionary Unpacking Antisemitism worship-planning

“How can we know the way?” From exclusivity into God’s home of many rooms

Print of a building set up like townhouses, narrow but tall units all pressed together. Each unit represents the religious building of a different religion.
Yes, I’m reusing this image from last week. It fits better here anyhow! “In My Father’s House There Are Many Mansions” by Irving Amen

Year A, Fifth Sunday of Easter.
Using a queer lens + addressing anti-Jewish supersessionism.

This Sunday’s readings explore what it means to be followers of the Jesus Way. Is this an exclusive path? Do we supersede the Jewish people as God’s chosen people? (Spoiler: hell no!)

Taking these passages together, we can paint a picture of a Way wherein we dismantle standing structures in favor of building up with living stones, with the rejected stone as the chief cornerstone — creating a Kin-dom home that has room enough for all.

Key points

  • The passages from Acts 7 and 1 Peter 2 embody the tension present in so many parts of scripture: They offer gorgeous glimpses into God’s Kin-dom, and they lay the groundwork for later Christian antisemitism.
  • I urge preachers and teachers to name the danger in these texts, rather than simply skirt around it. Address these verses so that your audience won’t fill the void of your avoidance with the assumption that “we” agree with this rhetoric.
  • At the same time, these two passages can help us explore what it means to be followers of the Jesus Way. We open ourselves to the multitudinous ways God speaks to us through diverse voices. We celebrate the people rejected by the upholders of unjust structures and systems. We commit ourselves to unpacking our biases and learning how to be in solidarity with oppressed peoples, even when we mess up.
  • And we remember that, as Jesus promises us in the John 14 passage, God’s home has room enough for us all. Everybody belongs. Everybody feasts.

Acts 7:55-60

Queer meditation

But filled with the Holy Spirit, [Stephen] gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him.

– Acts 7:56-57

How do we respond to divergent interpretations of our shared faith? Are we open to and interested in mutual dialogue, eager to potentially glean new wisdom — or do we cover our ears in horror? Do we let ourselves sit in the discomfort of possibly being wrong (or at least not wholly right) — or shame and shun the “heretic”?

One of my partners grew up in a fundamentalist household in which new ways of understanding God and scripture were received as threats.

Once when he was a teen, he dared to wonder whether every single sentence in the Bible had to exactly reflect God’s will — or whether it might make more sense that human biases entered the text. His father flushed beet red, face twisting as he pointed a shaking finger at his child: “Don’t you dare say that. Don’t you dare blaspheme God under my roof.”

There was rage in his father’s voice — but more than that, there was fear. A real, ferocious terror in what could happen if his child were to rebel against what he believed were God’s truth and will.

Maybe something deep inside him recognized that his faith in a punishing God who despises queerness, deputizes whiteness, and demands perfect obedience was actually quite flimsy — that it was utterly dependent on this understanding of scripture as the literal and inerrant Word of God (with very specific interpretations of said scripture); and that if he were to allow himself to start asking questions, his entire belief system would crumble around him and leave him floundering. And wouldn’t that mean that his whole life had been empty, shameful, wrong? He simply had too much to lose to risk even a shred of doubt or questioning.

…Maybe that’s where his fear came from, maybe not. I think also of the flip-side fear: the terror of growing up being told God hates you, has no options for you but a hollow life or hellfire.

Drawing of stormclouds from which a huge pale hand holds a person dangling by one foot over a huge crevice of hellfire. A gaunt / skeletal being stands with arms raised looking up towards the figure. Text from Edwards' sermon is also on the page, as is notes on the sermon's "Purpose: to frighten the crowd into religion..."
Art by student Lucy Wright based on Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God”

Sometimes the good news of God’s expansive and unconditional love, the holy truth that humanity is intentionally, divinely diverse — how else could we be in the Image of an infinite God? — is received with trepidation rather than relief. Could it be true, or do I just want to believe it’s true to “justify my sin”?1 What happens if I embrace my queerness and it turns out I’m wrong?

We can turn to Thomas Merton and his beloved prayer of unknowing (which matches the John passage we’ll get to later very well):

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore I will trust You always, though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me,
and You will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.

We can live in fear of new perspectives. Of admitting we were wrong. Of punishment. Of exclusion. Of a scarcity of love and grace.

Or we can place our trust in Divine Wisdom to guide us, in Christ’s mercy to cover us — and take the plunge.

Naming anti-Jewish rhetoric

The above meditation takes the Acts reading as it is laid out for us. But context matters, and Acts 7’s is rather troubling.

So to start with, I urge preachers to provide context for the lectionary passage by summing up the events of Acts 6 as well as Stephen’s speech in Acts 7, especially its closing lines in verses 51-53.

After all, the lectionary passage severs the alleged reason that the Jerusalem Council supposedly stoned Stephen. It’s not just that he’s a Jesus-follower. It’s that he accused them of setting themselves against God’s Spirit (v. 51).

Painting of Stephen, with pale skin and light brown hair pointing heavenwards as he stands in a fancy chamber with the Council, who are covering their ears and looking horrified or ferious. The Council are designed with stereotypically large, hooked noses. A speech bubble has been added so that one of them says "Them's fightin' words!"
“Saint Stephen Accused of Blasphemy” by Juan de Juanes, 1560s. This is just a silly meme, but the artist’s choice to give the Council members exaggerated noses while depicting Stephen, who is likewise Jewish, with more “European” features certainly highlights the effectiveness of Acts’ rhetoric in distancing Stephen and the other Jewish Jesus-followers from their kin.

When Stephen adds perceived blasphemy to that accusation, proclaiming Jesus stands at “the right hand of God” — that Jesus is himself divine — it’s enough to spur them to violent action.

…Or is it? Did the stoning of Stephen really take place? And if it did, did it occur exactly as the author of Acts recorded it?

As is so often the case, it’s important to note is the possibility of anti-Jewish polemic in this text — inherent to the text, and/or easily produced by our interpretations of it. I recommend this YouTube lecture on the stoning of Stephen, which draws heavily from Shelly Matthews book Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Creation of Christian Identity. Starting especially around 25 minutes into the video, a shift is pointed out between more positive depictions of the Jerusalem Jews in the first 6 chapters of Acts, and the vilification of non-Christ-following Jews after the account of Stephen’s martyrdom. From that point on, Jewish people are no longer described as the People of God.

Stephen’s own speech highlights this rhetorical distancing of Jesus-followers from other Jews; he opens his speech by naming “our ancestor Abraham” (v. 2), yet ends with:

“You continuously set yourself against the Holy Spirit, just like your ancestors did. Was there a single prophet your ancestors didn’t harass? …” – Acts 7:51-52a

While Stephen is most likely a Hellenized Jew, e.g. one who speaks Greek and holds a lot of Greek culture and values, he is a born Jew. These are his ancestors too! But here the author writes Stephen as setting up an us and them binary in which Jews with no interest in Jesus are “those people,” stiff-necked and murderous enemies of God Themself.

It’s important to recognize the biases in the NT texts, the context that caused these anti-Jewish polemics. We can recognize that the majority of the NT writers were Jews, that this was for these earliest Christians largely an intra-community conflict, while also naming the harm these texts have done and continue to do. We can experience these scriptures as sites where God’s Word speaks to us, while acknowledging their imperfections as human-written documents. In so doing, we refuse binaries of good and bad, us and them, that don’t leave room for the messiness of human realities.

1 Peter 2:2-10

Continuing to address antisemitism

They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people…

1 Peter 2:8b, 9a

The author of this epistle has such a gorgeous vision of the margins being made central, which I’ll get to in a minute; the tragedy is that he turns that vision into polemic, using his words to sever the Jewish people from their status as “God’s own people” and bestow that title upon Jesus-followers instead.

With passages like these in scripture, it’s no wonder supersessionism — the notion that Christians replace, or supersede, Jews; that our covenant through Christ renders their covenant through Abraham null-and-void — is so prevalent and deeply-rooted in Christianity.

I urge preachers and teachers to name this rhetoric, rather than simply skirt around it. Address these verses so that your audience won’t fill the void of your avoidance with the assumption that “we” agree with the letter writer’s point of view.

Like all of us, the Bible’s authors contained multitudes — their transcendent glimpses into the divine are weighed down by worldly ideologies that say God’s love is a finite resource; that life is a competition; that there can only be one “first,” one “beloved”; that to uplift one group is necessarily to sideline another.

Let’s keep naming that truth as we seek to follow Jesus in ways that bring justice and joy, rather than harm.

And central to the Jesus Way is the declaration that the ones rejected by human structures and systems are the very ones God works in and through! This too is something 1 Peter’s author recognized, as the next section explores.

Queer stones

Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house…
For it stands in scripture:
“See, I am laying in Zion a stone,
a cornerstone chosen and precious,
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame”
[…and]
“The stone that the builders rejected
has become the very head of the corner.”

– 1 Peter 2:4-7

This passage is very queer indeed. A stone rejected by the builders becomes the chief cornerstone! The ones who fabricated the structures that enclose us all are not the ones with the final say — God is!

The God of the stranger, Liberator of the oppressed, the One who always chooses to stand outside any dividing line we draw between “us” and “them,” finds that castoff rock and makes it central, indispensable:

[The] members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable… God [gives] the greater honor to the inferior member.

– 1 Corinthians 12: 22, 24b
Two panel comic. The outline of a church holds a bunch of white sheep telling a rainbow sheep, "Sorry but you're just not welcome here." Second panel shows the rainbow sheep walking out the church door with Jesus by its side as the white sheep go, "Hey, where'd Jesus go?"
Comic by NakedPastor.

We the shunned and shamed ones, we who are considered to be “no people” (v. 10) — nobodies — become the living stones with which Divinity constructs a new Creation.

We whom dominant cultures despise create our own cultures — queer culture, Black culture, disability culture, and more — where our unique gifts and ways of manifesting God’s love to the world are uplifted.

We are Christ’s hands and feet on earth, helping usher in a Kin-dom in which the last are first, the margins are drawn to the center, and all dividing walls are dismantled, piece by piece.

Babies in Christ: we learn along the way

Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation — if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

1 Peter 2:2

When we taste that God is good, we grow hungry for more. One major way we taste that divine goodness is when we look to the poor for God’s good news and join in liberation movements with the captive and oppressed (see Luke 4:18-19). By becoming co-conspirators with those “living stones” God centers in the building up of Their Kin-dom, we are submerged in Spirit.

Peter doesn’t elaborate on “spiritual milk” in this chapter, but Paul does in his first letter to the Corinthians:

…I could not speak to you as spiritual people but rather as fleshly, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still fleshly. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not fleshly and behaving according to human inclinations?…

– 1 Cor 3:1-3
Meme in a two column format. There's "talking about gender with trans people," showing a detail from that famous painting of Greek philosophers conversing; versus "talking about gender with cis people," showing an adult guiding a baby with a toy.

This old-school trans meme identifies a truth about what it’s like to start down the road of solidarity with any oppressed group to which we don’t belong: We are like babies! (But babies with capacity to cause harm.)

As we unpack the presumptions, prejudices, and skewed perspectives we’ve been absorbing since birth, we’re left with big gaps in knowledge. We finally know how little we know.

And as we live into a commitment to true solidarity with the oppressed, we mess up. To step up is to mess up, over and over — and remain committed to making amends and continuing to show up.

Back to John 14

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

– John 14:5-6a

As we devote ourselves to uplifting the stones rejected by the builders and keepers of our unjust systems, as we grow in our purpose as the living stones God uses to build up Their Kin-dom, how do we know we are headed in the right direction? What happens if we get it wrong?

I think again of my partner and his father. The feral fear of fire and brimstone awaiting the ones who believe wrong, let alone do wrong.

But God doesn’t await us with hellfire. God waits to welcome us into Their home with open arms:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

– John 14:1-3

I hear so much tenderness in Jesus’s voice here. He knows his friends are anxious and uncertain about what the future holds, so he paints them a picture of where their journey is headed: Past the terror and trouble, there is a beautiful home where a place has been prepared for us. For you! for me! — and not just for “us,” but for “them” as well.

Here we find the antidote to the supersessionism in the story of Stephen’s martyrdom and Peter’s first letter. In those two readings, there is an assumption that God can have only one favorite. Only one people. That as the divide between the followers of the Jesus Way and Jews with no interest in Jesus grew, it necessarily required a dethroning of Jews as God’s chosen people so that that title could belong to Christians.

That myth of scarcity sure has been around a while, huh?

Jesus tells a different story: God’s home has rooms, has room, for everyone. Everyone!

The very nature of God is overflowing love — infinite love, love enough to go around and still spill over. Just like we saw last week, Jesus ushers in life abundant — there is plenty for all.

No one gets scraps — everybody feasts!

Thanks be to God.

Illustration on a red background of a Black fem person with a curly blue afro, a medical mask, a crop top and skirt, wielding a staff while striking a cool pose. A quote from Audre Lorde reads "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house"
Art by Ayeola Omolara Kaplan. Audre Lorde’s powerful words can help guide us as we deconstruct and rebuild: We do not dismantle unjust systems by using the same tools of exclusion and exceptionalism, purity and punishment, suspicion and shame that built them in the first place. Thus antisemitism, Christian nationalism, and other key components of the white supremacist project have no place in the Kin-dom God is building with and in and through us.

  1. So many of us get told we’re “reading into” the Bible what we want to see there. But there are other ways of understanding our relationship to the Bible! Visit here for my framework on understanding scripture — particularly the last section, “You’re just reading into it.” ↩︎
Categories
bible study easter LGBT/queer Queer Lectionary Unpacking Antisemitism worship-planning

Liberative lectionary: John 20’s enfleshed, disabled Christ

Year A, Second Sunday of Easter.
John 20:19-31.
Trans & disability theologies; addressing antisemitic implications.

Page contents:

For the Easter Season, I want to offer brief * commentary on each week’s lectionary readings through a liberative lens — largely from my perspective as a trans, disabled Christian scholar, but also drawing from other liberationist traditions. The goal is not to write my own extended essay each week, but to prompt preachers and other worship leaders to incorporate some of these ideas into Sunday worship.

*…I say brief, but John 20:19-31 is my favorite Gospel passage to preach on so this one’s gonna get a little lengthy!

Worship materials

Hymn suggestions:

Liturgy suggestions:

Key point

In rising with a physical body that retains its crucifixion wounds, Jesus demonstrated once and for all that our flesh is good, is part of what it means to be in God’s image; and that stigmatized bodies — especially disabled bodies — are not incompatible with divinity, but rather are intimately entwined with divinity.

Ink drawing of Jesus rolling down a street in a wheelchair, arms extended outward and a radiant halo behind his head
“Wheelchair Christ” by Rachel Holdforth.
Visit her website for information on this piece and others.

Embodied theology

Presumably Jesus had the power to rise in spirit alone, but instead he keeps his wounded body. Why?

Having entered the material world, Jesus understands the human need for evidence we can experience with our senses. All throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus made use of things people can touch and taste and see – water and bread, vine and branches, baptism and the washing of feet – to embody the less tangible aspects of himself.

Jesus fed and cared for people’s bodies as well as their spirits, because he too is human, he too knows that sometimes we need to reach out and touch the Divine in order to believe. So Jesus holds out his hands, he offers his side, so that Thomas can see, can touch, can then proclaim “My Lord and my God!”

I believe Jesus also kept his body so that he can keep experiencing, with us, all that comes with having a body. He’ll still feel the breeze on his sweaty brow, feel the tug of hunger and the satisfaction of a full stomach, laugh and weep and sing with friends who hug and hold him.

He keeps his body to remind us that physicality is good. He keeps his body for the sake of all who have been told that they should hate their body, should punish it, should avoid its natural pleasures and healthy desires.

If Jesus — who is goodness itself, who is God themself — retains his body, we must conclude that physicality is part of our goodness. We are not spirits trapped in flesh prisons — we are embodied spirits, inspirited bodies.

And if that’s the case, then we cannot avoid learning to love our own bodies and learning to celebrate the amazing diversity of our species with the excuse that it’s all transitory! Our diversity is vital to our humanity. Embodiment is here to stay.

And what about the fact that Jesus not only retained his flesh, but retained the marks of crucifixion upon it?

Disability theology: The resurrected God is disabled

Blue ink drawing of Jesus, naked except a loincloth, with a large hole, or stoma, in his side.
“Jesus with a Stoma” by Rachel Holdforth
Black ink drawing of Jesus walking down a path with braces on his legs, holding two canes
“Braced Christ” by Rachel Holdforth

Across the Roman Empire, crucifixion was a shameful death, a criminal’s death. For Jesus’s people, those “hanged on a tree” were cursed by God (Deuteronomy 21:23). And this is how the God incarnate, the Creator of the universe, died!! No wonder Paul describes Christ crucified as a scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Cor 1:23).

For many Christians, disabled bodyminds are a site of scandal and shame. Drawing on the Gospels’ healing narratives, disabled persons may be accused of not having enough faith if and when efforts to miraculously remove their disabilities fail. When we envision the Kin(g)dom of heaven, do we imagine disabled people front and center? Or do we see disabled bodyminds as signs of a fallen world, things to be eradicated in the world to come?

While both mainstream Christianity and mainstream society view disability as brokenness, many disabled scholars argue that disability is fundamental to the human experience.1 It therefore stands to reason that Jesus, being fully human as well as fully divine, experienced disability.

In her foundational work The Disabled God (1994), Nancy Eiesland describes how through his crucifixion Jesus took on disabling wounds — nail holes that would have impaired his mobility and the use of his hands; a spear in his side that would have caused him chronic pain.

Other authors over the years have joined her in this vision of a disabled Christ. For example, John M. Hull supplements it through the theology of kenosis — how, in the Incarnation, God the all-powerful emptied Themself, in other words disabled Themself, so that “in [Christ] God accepted finitude, the limits of our humanity, our sufferings and our death.”2 I also recently heard someone describe the bruise that would have been left by the cross heavy on Christ’s shoulder as a symbol of invisible disabilities and trauma — the wounds people don’t see.

So ultimately, I believe Jesus kept his wounds for us — for all of us who don’t live into society’s paradigm of the “perfect body.” The glorious body of our God bears wounds, wounds that became for Thomas — and for all of us! — a site of blessing.

What are the implications of a disabled God for our own time and place? Eiesland points out the dissonance that exists in churches that fail to accommodate and accept persons with disability while at the same time accepting “grace through Christ’s broken body” – how is it that we celebrate how Christ’s body became impaired for our sake but judge and cast out the bodies of disabled people in our midst? To worship this God who willingly emptied Themself, who chose to rise from the dead with disabling wounds intact, we must rethink our conceptions of disability and transform our communities into spaces where disabled people fully belong — not just in the pews, but in positions of leadership.

Mural on a blue background and lots of people gathered at a long table with a white tablecloth piled with food. There are persons of many different races and cultures and with various disabilities, including several in wheelchairs or with canes or crutches, several who have down syndrome, one with a service dog, and so on. Jesus stands near the right end of the canvas, conversing with a child of color in a wheelchair and an older Black man in a wheelchair.
“Luke 14 Banquet” by Hyatt More.

Trans theology: Christ embraces stigma

The Christian term for Christ’s crucifixion wounds, stigmata, is the same Greek word from which we get the term stigma. It means “mark,” and it refered to a mark cut or branded into the flesh of a soldier or enslaved person — the visible, painful sign that their bodies were not their own.

Like other oppressed groups, trans people know what it is to be stigmatized in the eyes of society. Our chosen names and pronouns, our choices in clothing and haircuts, the scars of gender affirming surgeries and full-body tranformations via hormone replacement therapy all mark us as worthy targets of shunning, shaming, and violence. Our non-normative bodies become a site of spectacle, where everyone feels entitled to gawk at our bodies, to know every detail of our medical histories. In our efforts to live into our God-given identities, we face obstacles across every sphere of life — from the legal and medical to religious and social — that remind us that many powerful people aim to strip us of agency and ownership over our own bodies.

Yet many of us revel in the very marks of our Otherness, our defiance of the status quo! My top surgery scars make me feel like me; they are visible marks of the wonder of God’s works, of God’s invitation to join in our own co-creation.

Photograph of four figures staged to imitate Caravaggio's famous painting of Thomas touching Christ's side wound. In this version, the person playing Jesus has top surgery scars, which his three friends marvel at. He is guiding the hand of one friend so that the friend's pointer finger rests just under the scar.
From Swedish photographer Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin’s 2017 exhibit, “id:TRANS.”

Caveats: John 20’s anti-Jewish implications

This lectionary reading opens with a verse that can contribute (and historically has contributed) to anti-Jewish sentiments:

“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’” – John 20:19

This phrase, “The Jews,” shows up 195 times in the NT — 71 of those times are in John’s Gospel. Frequently, “The Jews” are set up in the text as “the enemies of Jesus, and thus of God.”3 That dynamic has been utilized throughout Christian history to malign and persecute Jewish people, often with accusations of deicide.

Because “the Jews” are only mentioned briefly in this passage, preachers may be tempted to gloss over the potential for antisemitism here: naming it won’t relate to the rest of the sermon; it’ll take too much time! Greg Garrett admits to feeling similarly for many years:

“Looking over a dozen years of preaching on Easter 2, I see that there were years when I skipped straight over the fear of the Jews on the way to doubt or faith or epiphany or commitment or any of the other big spiritual lessons that that particular community seemed to need on that particular second Sunday of Easter.

But in the past few years, anytime we encounter one of these parenthetical statements about “the Jews” in a Gospel reading (particularly in John) I have taken to highlighting them, at the very least, as major sources of Christian antisemitism, and sometimes I have devoted substantial space to correcting bad readings and refuting this prejudice…”4

If you aim to be a good neighbor to our Jewish contemporaries, consider taking the time to name the anti-Jewish readings of John, even if it feels like a “tangent.” (At the very least, you might consider including a footnote in the bulletin / worship handout on the topic.)

Some options for addressing the issue on Sunday

  1. State plainly that “ ‘fear of the Jews’ is a ridiculous and inaccurate statement of why the followers of Jesus are gathered behind locked doors in the Gospel lesson. These men are themselves Jews. All of them. Peter is a Jew. Thomas is a Jew. The risen Jesus, the Anointed One who steps miraculously into their midst, is a Jew…”5
  2. Provide some historical context — that by the time the Gospel of John was being written, there had been a major falling-out between those Jews who confessed Jesus as Lord and those who did not. Many progressive Christians suggest that Jewish Jesus-followers had been “expelled” from synagogues; this is possible, but Jewish NT scholar Amy-Jill Levine notes, “we have no examples of such excommunication from antiquity; to the contrary, Paul is disciplined from within the synagogue system, and centuries later, John Chrysostom complains about church members attending synagogue programs.”6 As with so many things, it’s hard to know exactly what was going on so long ago, and the truth involves nuance. Thus, if you go this route, take care to word things in a way that does not place all the blame for this falling out on the Jews who didn’t follow Jesus. Ultimately, what we know is that this was an intra-community conflict, and whatever tensions there were between Jesus-followers and other Jews can help explain (though not justify) John’s language around “the Jews.”
  3. Consider altering the translation from “the Jews” to “Judaeans,” “the Judaean elite,” or something of that nature. The Greek word typically translated “the Jews” throughout the Gospels is Ioudaios/Ioudaioi. If we alter how we translate the term, it becomes clear that “the Ioudaioi in John were neither today’s ‘Jews’ nor the ancient world’s ‘Jews.’“7 When hearing “Judaeans,” worshipers will be less likely to imagine a conflict of Jew vs. Christian; instead, the conflict is between the Galilean disciples — everyday impoverished Jews from a backwater region — and those elites in Judaea/Jerusalem who collaborated with the Roman Empire (e.g. the Sadducees; the Pharisees did not collaborate with Rome).
  4. What other tactics have you taken in addressing anti-Jewish or supersessionist readings of scripture?

Footnotes:

  1. See Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s essay “Becoming Disabled.” See also my introduction to disability basics, which explores disability as a natural part of the human experience and discusses the idea of Disability Culture. ↩︎
  2. John M. Hull, chapter 3 of Disability: The Inclusive Church Resource, 2014. ↩︎
  3. Wes Howard-Brook, “Why We Need to Translate Ioudaioi as “Judeans”, chapter 10 of Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews: Reflections for Christians in Lent, ed. John M. Sweeney, 2020. ↩︎
  4. Greg Garrett, “For Fear of the Jews: Antisemitism in John’s Time and Ours,” chapter 13 of Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews. ↩︎
  5. ibid. ↩︎
  6. Amy-Jill Levine, “If not now, when?”, afterword of Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews. ↩︎
  7. Wes Howard-Brook, “Why We Need to Translate Ioudaioi as “Judeans.” ↩︎
Categories
bible study Current Events / Activism easter Holy Days LGBT/queer Queer Lectionary Reflections for worship services

Today is Easter Sunday. Today is Trans Day of Visibility. Today is day 176 of genocide.

This year the lectionary gives us Mark’s account of the Resurrection, with its fearful cliffhanger ending — an empty tomb, but Jesus’s body missing. And isn’t that unresolved note fitting?

In the face of so much suffering across the world, it feels right to be compelled to sit — even on this most jubilant of days — with the poor and disenfranchised in their continued suffering.

Mark’s account:

Just days before, the women closest to Jesus witnessed him slowly suffocate to death on a Roman cross. Now, now trudge to his tomb to anoint his corpse — and find the stone rolled away, his body gone. A strange figure inside tells them that Jesus is has risen, and will reunite with them in Galilee.

They respond not with joy, but trembling ekstasis — a sense of being beside yourself, taken out of your own mind with shock. They flee.

The women keep what they’ve seen and heard to themselves — because their beloved friend outliving execution is just too good to be true. When does fortune ever favor those who languish under Empire’s shadow?

A painting in a style resembling stained glass of three women standing over a coffin, which is empty except for strips of white and yellow linen. The women's hands are raised in confusion and shock.
“The Empty Tomb” by He Qi.

Love wins, yet hate still holds us captive.

I’m grateful that Mark’s resurrection story is the one many of us are hearing in church this year. His version emphasizes the “already but not yet” experience of God’s liberation of which theologians write: Christians believe that in Christ’s incarnation — his life, death, and resurrection — all of humanity, all of Creation is already redeemed… and yet, we still experience suffering. The Kin(g)dom is already incoming, but not yet fully manifested.

Like Mark’s Gospel with its Easter joy overshadowed by ongoing fear, Trans Day of Visibility is fraught with the tension of, on the one hand, needing to be seen, to be known, to move society from awareness into acceptance into celebration; and, on the other hand, grappling with the increased violence and bigotry that a larger spotlight brings.

The trans community intimately understands the intermingling of life and death, joy and pain.

When we manage to roll back the stones on our tombs of silence and shame, self-loathing and social death, and stride boldly into new, transforming and transformative life — into trans joy! — death still stalks us.

We are blessedly, audaciously free — and we are in constant danger. There are many who would shove us back into our tombs.

An art piece structured like a collage featuring an elegant figure wreathed in fire, with text around them reading "& like any goddexx you are scorned & become the fire anyway." The figure is pouring pitchers of water into a pool at their feet; green hills with various flowers stretch up around the pool.
Art by Amir Khadar, based off the poem “litany in which you are still here” by kiki nicole

And of course, the trans community is by no means alone in experiencing the not-yet-ness of God’s Kin(g)dom.

Empire’s violence continues to overshadow God’s liberation.

The women who came to tend to their beloved dead initially experienced the loss of his body as one more indignity heaped upon them by Empire. Was his torture, their terror, not enough, that even their grief must be trampled upon, his corpse stolen away from them?

The people of Gaza are undergoing such horrors now. Indignity is heaped on indignity as they are bombed, assaulted, terrorized, starved, mocked. They are not given a moment’s rest to tend to their dead. They are not permitted to celebrate Easter’s joy as they deserve. They are forced to break their Ramadan fasts with little more than grass.

Photo of a blanket set with bowls of grass soup and slices of lemon
A photo of a Palestinian family’s meal, taken in Gaza.

Those of us who reside in the imperial core — as I do as a white Christian in the United States — must not look away from the violence our leaders are funding, enabling, justifying.

We must not celebrate God’s all-encompassing redemption without also bearing witness to the ways that liberation is not yet experienced by so many across the world.

This Easter, I pray for a free Palestine. I pray for an end to Western Empire, the severing of all its toxic tendrils holding the whole earth in a death grip.

I pray that faith communities will commit and recommit themselves to helping roll the stones of hate and fear away — and to eroding those stones into nothing, so they cannot be used to crush us once we’ve stepped into new life.

I pray for joy so vibrant it washes fear away, disintegrates all hatred into awe.

In the meantime, I pray for the energy and courage to bear witness to suffering; for the wisdom for each of us to discern our part in easing pain; for God’s Spirit to reveal Xirself to and among the world’s despised, over and over — till God’s Kin(g)dom comes in full at last.

Painting of a woman playing a flute with several birds around her, as below her a line of Palestinians make their way up towards the city of Jerusalem. The colors are warm and bright.
Painting by Palestinian artist Fayez Al-Hasani
Categories
advent bible study Holy Days My poetry Queer Lectionary Reflections for worship services

Christ is barred from Bethlehem

A photo from the separation wall around Bethlehem that shows red and green graffiti reading "Merry Christmas world from Bethlehem ghetto"

A voice cries out in the wilderness,
“Prepare the way of the Lord! Make straight his paths.”

How do we do that in the present day?
We break down walls that block his family’s way.

As Mary and Joseph draw near Bethlehem
a fence looms over them, some eight yards high

and soldiers watch from towers as they trudge
not straight into the city, but around
to find the checkpoint — where they’re turned away:
“We’re only letting tourists in today.”

So Mary groans outside the barrier
no place to lay her newborn’s bloodied head

and John the Baptist paints in green and red
across that cold wall’s surface — shepherds, lo! —
“Merry Christmas world
from Bethlehem Ghetto”

You are welcome to make use of the above poem or below reflection in worship, in classrooms, on social media, etc. Please credit Avery Arden of binarybreakingworship.com.

_____

In a 2014 article, Medhi Hasan wonders how Mary and Joseph’s trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem would go in the modern day:

“How would that carpenter and his pregnant wife have circumnavigated the Kafka­esque network of Israeli settlements, roadblocks and closed military zones in the occupied West Bank? Would Mary have had to experience labor or childbirth at a checkpoint, as one in 10 pregnant Palestinian women did between 2000 and 2007 – resulting in the death of at least 35 newborn babies, according to the Lancet?

‘If Jesus were to come this year, Bethlehem would be closed,’ declared Father Ibrahim Shomali, a Catholic priest of the city’s Beit Jala parish, in December 2011. ‘Mary and Joseph would have needed Israeli permission – or to have been tourists.’ “

Meanwhile, a Reddit post claims they’d have to get through fifteen checkpoints on their journey. Chances are, they wouldn’t make it through — just get harassed and interrogated for their trouble.

As I reflect on these statements, I ponder also the opening of Mark’s Gospel. This text, which is read in many churches during the Advent season, recalls the prophetic cry of Isaiah 40:

A voice is crying out:
“Clear the Lord’s way in the desert!
    Make a level highway in the wilderness for our God!
Every valley will be raised up,
    and every mountain and hill will be flattened.
    Uneven ground will become level,
    and rough terrain a valley plain.
The Lord’s glory will appear,
    and all humanity will see it together;
    the Lord’s mouth has commanded it.”

What does such a prophetic leveling — a flattening of land so that all people, including children, elderly and pregnant persons, and people with mobility impairments can easily travel — look like today?

I envision the 440 miles of separation wall crumbling into the earth. Watchtowers topple. Barbed wire melts away. Snipers’ guns morph into ploughshares; bombs explode oh-so-gently into fertilizer to feed burned olive groves.

No more are humans caged in the world’s largest open-air prison. No more are children dragged away in the night to be tortured and tried as terrorists.

The land is free. The people are free. God’s liberating Spirit moves unhindered; God’s holy land becomes, as promised, a “house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7).

Thanks be to God. May we be moved to help make it so.

  • A person wearing a keffiyeh secures tear gas canisters to a tree, with normal Christmas ornaments visible on trees behind him
  • A person secures tear gas canisters to a tree with Christmas lights on it
  • A spent tear gas grenade shell casing lies on the ground near Aida Refugee Camp following clashes between Palestinian youth and Israeli forces, Bethlehem, West Bank, November 29, 2013. The grenade cartridge, made by the U.S. company Combined Tactical Systems (CTS) contains labeling in English including full contact information and the company’s U.S. address in Jamestown, Pennsylvania.
  • Mandatory Credit: Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto/Shutterstock (13691022a) A graffiti of Jesus Christ wearing arafat scarf is seen near the Israeli separation West Bank Wall in Bethlehem, Palestine on December 28, 2022. Street Art And Banksy Hotel In Bethlehem, Palestine – 28 Dec 2022

Gallery images: a remake of a famous 1936 “Visit Palestine” poster to show the Holy Family and the separation wall; photos of Palestinians decorating a tree in Bethlehem with tear gas canisters in 2015, as well as a close-up of a canister showing it’s USA-made; and more photos from the separation wall, including the icon “Our Lady of the Wall,” where nuns and pilgrims pray rosaries to dismantle the wall.

Categories
bible study LGBT/queer Queer Lectionary

Queering Hagar’s Story

A short reflection on this Sunday’s lectionary text, Genesis 21:8-21. Scroll to the end for further resources

a painting of a figure like Hagar who is smiling as water pours through her hands; above her is a giant eye.

Name changes occur throughout scripture, but there is only one instance in which a human being directly names God!

That person is Hagar — the woman enslaved and then cast off by God’s own chosen people, yet who recognizes God’s solidarity with her in a way that resonates with many marginalized folk, including queer & trans people of faith.

Back in Genesis 16, Hagar is forced to conceive a child with Abraham — her bodily autonomy denied — and then suffers abuse at Sarah’s hand so painful that she prefers almost-certain death in the wilderness. While waiting to die, God comes to her, nourishes her, encourages her with the promise of a better future. For a time, Hagar must return to her oppressors.

This is a hard message, but It may resonate with queer and trans people who make the hard choice to find what safety they can while in the closet, or who choose to remain in relationship with family or faith communities that have caused them harm.

It also isn’t the end of Hagar’s story: when the time is right, God leads her out — as told in this week’s text in Genesis 21.

Sarah continues to abuse Hagar, with Abraham as a passive bystander and enabler. In a society where only one of Abraham’s sons can inherit his wealth and blessing, Sarah sees Hagar’s son Ishmael as a threat to her son Isaac, simply by existing! In our own day and age, this myth of scarcity persists, causing us to hoard resources and compete needlessly.

Sarah cannot stand to see Hagar’s child playing with her own son — as if they were equals! As if a slave boy should be having a moment of fun! She reads something sinister into the play — not unlike how some people today read sinister things into queer play, into drag queens and gender expansive youth.

Having convinced herself that Hagar and her son are a threat, Sarah gets Abraham to cast them out.

But again, God is with the outcast; God comes again to Hagar, who in Genesis 16 had given God the name El Roi — “God sees me.” This God is the god of her oppressors, yet Hagar recognizes that this god is her God as well! This god is a God who sees the suffering of the lowest of society, and responds.

God sees queer and trans people, too. God is our God, too — those who hate us do not have a monopoly on the Divine!

And God walks with us through every struggle, fueling us to fight the good fight and promising blessings to come.

Questions for reflection:

  • When have you witnessed God coming to the Hagars in our midst?
  • When has your community behaved like Abraham & Sarah, hoarding God’s love as if there were not blessing enough to go around?
  • Can you imagine a world in which Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar meet again? What would Hagar need to feel safe to meet with her former abusers? What would Sarah & Abraham need to do to make things right?

Further Reading

Queer-specific resources:

Other resources:

a painting of two women with curly brown hair and brown skin embracing; the one being held has a blue shawl with “Sarah and Hagar” written in Hebrew on it, while the one embracing her has a bright blue dress. A dove with an olive branch hovers behind them
“Sarah and Hagar” by Jewish artist Hilary Sylvester, who says: “Sarah the mother of the Jewish People and Hagar the mother of the Arab people finally find reconciliation through Mashiach.”