This hymn (original lyrics here) is a beautiful call to solidarity and activism among Christians of all denominations; what if we made it interfaith, too? Revisions alter Christian-specific language and also add in two new verses.
Credit info & explanations of changes are below the lyrics.
We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, we are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, and we pray that our unity will one day be restored —
Refrain: And they’ll know God is with us by our love, by our love; yes, they’ll know God is with us by our love.
We will move with each other, we will move hand in hand, we will move with each other, we will move hand in hand, and together we’ll spread the news that God is in the land —
(Refrain)
We will work with each other, we will work side by side, we will work with each other, we will work side by side, and we’ll guard each one’s dignity and save each one’s pride —
(Refrain)
All praise to our Maker, from whom all things come and in whose holy image every human belongs. Let us join our rich harmonies in one holy song —
(Refrain)
Credit Info
Please feel free to spread this around, to sing it in your own communities, etc.! Just include credit to Avery Arden at binarybreakingworship.com.
If your community does make use of my revised verses, I would love to know about it. If you post a video of it being sung anywhere, I would love to hear it!! You can contact me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com.
And if you have any suggestions for further revision, please do let me know that too. Let us all join together in the endless effort to draw our circles wider!
Reasons for Revision
Also called “They Will Know We Are Christians,” this hymn was written in the 1960s by Catholic priest Peter Scholtes for use at ecumenical and interracial events. Its themes reflect the post-Vatican II urge to bring Catholic tradition to life in new and active ways, and to interact with our neighbors in faith more intentionally.
As such, “We Are One in the Spirit” “has become an important piece in the church’s efforts to sing a theology of active participation and discipleship in and for the world.”
The songs we sing in worship shape the people’s conception of who God is and what God is doing in the world. I think this song excellent as it is! But I think it could be powerful to utilize at interfaith, not only ecumenical, gatherings — particularly gatherings of persons of the Abrahamic faiths, who share our one God and for whom language of spirit and Lord is familiar.
At this moment in time, I am thinking of places like Minneapolis, where leaders of many faiths — particularly so many Jews and Christians! — have joined together to broadcast the message that God is on the side of the immigrant.
My revisions are light, simply taking out the word Christians and altering the last verse so that it is not longer Trinitarian (praising Father, Son, and Spirit) but emphasizes a shared Creator.
Another small revision is altering “walk with each other” to “move with each other” to include wheelchair users and other modes of transportation. (It could also be interpreted as moving together in the form of dancing, or marching, etc.!)
What wondrous love is this, o my soul, o my soul! What wondrous love is this, o my soul! What wondrous love is this that caused the God of bliss to join earth’s wretchedness and our woe, and our woe — join brokenness to make all things whole.
When I was sinking down, sinking down, sinking down — oppressed and sinking down, o my soul! When I had nearly drowned in suffering’s waves around Christ cast aside his crown for my soul, for my soul! In weakness he was bound, for my soul.
To God and to the Lamb I will sing, I will sing, to God and to the Lamb I will sing — to God and to the Lamb, who is the great I AM, while billions join the theme, I will sing, I will sing! while billions join the theme, I will sing.
And when from death we’re free, we’ll sing on, we’ll sing on; And when from death we’re free, we’ll sing on. And when from death we’re free, we’ll build community in peace and equity in the Son, in the Son — shalom community in the Son.
So all disciples, go, share the news, share the news! All you disciples, go, share the news! All you disciples, go to where injustice grows and be Christ’s truth that sows life anew, life anew! Yes, be Christ’s love that sows life anew.
Credit Info:
Please feel free to spread this around, to sing it in your own communities, etc.! Just include credit to Avery Arden at binarybreakingworship.com.
If your community does make use of my revised verses, I would love to know about it. If you post a video of it being sung anywhere, I would love to hear it!! You can contact me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com.
And if you have any suggestions for further revision, please do let me know that too. Let us all join together in the endless effort to draw our circles wider!
Reasons for Revision
I know too many people — mostly exvangelicals — who grew up with the message “Jesus died for YOUR sins; YOU are the reason God had to suffer and die on the cross; every single sin YOU make is a nail in Christ’s body” drilled into them until they were drowning in shame. In Christian Doctrine, Shirley Guthrie shares an anecdote that conveys this terror and shame:
“Once upon a time a boy went to a revival meeting. …The preacher held up a dirty glass. ‘See this glass? That’s you. Filthy, stained with sin, inside and outside.’
He picked up a hammer. ‘This hammer is the righteousness of God. It is the instrument of God’s wrath against sinners. God’s justice can be satisfied only by punishing and destroying people whose lives are filled with vileness and corruption.’
The preacher put the glass on the pulpit and slowly, deliberately drew back the hammer, took deadly aim, and with all his might let the blow fall.
But a miracle happened! At the last moment he covered the glass with a pan. The hammer struck with a crash that echoed through the hushed church. He held up the untouched glass with one hand and the mangled pan with the other.
‘Jesus Christ died for your sins. He took the punishment that ought to have fallen on you. He satisfied the righteousness of God so that you might go free if you believe in him.’
“What Wondrous Love” perpetuates this kind of substitutionary atonement theology, especially in stanza 2. So I decided to change that.
Removing substitutionary atonement in favor of divine solidarity
We are sinking down to hell “beneath God’s righteous frown,” and that’s why Jesus had to lower himself and suffer. It’s our “fault” — it’s your fault. Don’t you feel horrible? Wallow in your guilt!
Guthrie continues his anecdote by pondering the fruit of such theology:
When the boy went to bed that night, he could not sleep. Meditating on what he had seen and heard, he decided that he was terribly afraid of God. But could he love such a God? He could love Jesus, who had sacrificed himself for him. But how could he love a God who wanted to ‘get’ everyone and was only kept from doing it because Jesus got in the way? The thought crossed the boy’s mind that he could only hate such a hammer-swinging God who had to be bought off at such a terrible price. But he quickly dismissed that thought. That very God might read his mind and punish him.
…Finally, he wondered what good it had all done in the end. The glass had escaped being smashed to bits, but nothing had really changed. After the drama was over, it was still just as dirty as it was before. Even if Jesus did save him from God, how did Jesus’ sacrifice help him to be a better person?
There are other ways to understand the salvific power of Jesus’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection. That’s why I revised “What Wondrous Love Is This.” My changes remove the disconnect between the will of different Persons of the Trinity: God the Father was wrathful and would have destroyed us; God the Son therefore had to get between us and the Father. As Guthrie says,
“Jesus came to express, not to change, God’s mind. …Reconciliation is the work of God, not…purchased from God. What Jesus does is not done over or against God; his work is God’s work, for he himself is God-with-us.”
So as noted, I removed the sinners in the hands of an angry God type language in stanza 2. What I replaced it with was an emphasis on Christ’s incarnation as kenosis, the divine self-emptying, and as the ultimate act of solidarity — joining in our “wretchedness” in order to transform it into joy. “For God became human so that humans might become God” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, p. 60).
Moving from the individual to the communal
The other big thing I wanted to change about the song was its individualistic view of salvation.
I kept some uses of “I / my” in order to honor the intimacy of the original, but included shifts into the communal “we” to stress that all humanity together enjoys the love and liberation of God — e.g. “when from death I’m free” becomes “when from death we’re free.”
Still looking forward to the Kin-dom, but also emphasizing the now
“What Wondrous Love” offers us a beautiful, poetic vision of heaven’s eternity of joyful worship. I kept that in (with a small tweak to its heavenly choir of “millions,” making it “billions” in keeping with my universalist views of how many people “get” to heaven).
But I also added a stanza to the end that reminds us that before that happy day, we are called to be the Kin-dom here and now. (By the way, I built that last stanza, “So all disciples go…”, off of a stanza original to the hymn but usually taken out: “Ye wingéd seraphs fly.” There are several other such stanzas; check them out and see if any stand out to you as worth revising!)
What are your favorite hymns? What hymns does your community hold most dear? What makes those specific songs resonate so deeply — their powerful melodies? words of love, of comfort or challenge? Messages that seem to put your most treasured values into words?
On the other hand, are there parts of any of those hymns that don’t sit right with you?
Maybe there’s language that leaves youout as a non-binary person, or implies that your disability makes you broken. Or maybe you have only just noticed that a song you’ve been singing your whole life carries binary language, ableist language, language that equates whiteness with goodness and purity, darkness with sin.
These songs hold a special place in your heart and in your faith; you don’t want to throw them out (or you know that members of your congregation will protest if you try).
But you also know that the words we sing at worship matter — that many people’s beliefs are largely shaped by the hymns we choose. If we keep singing these songs as is, people will continue to absorb their harmful messages.
These hymns call for some wording updates as we seek to draw our circles ever wider, to ensure that we sing out welcome and belonging to all those made in the Divine Image.
For example, “For Everyone Born” is a beloved hymn that Shirley Erena Murray wrote with deep love and a desire to draw people together in our diversity; however, much of the language sets up binaries that unintentionally leave some people out. When I revised it, most of the verses just required breaking out of those binaries — such as expanding “woman and man” to include “all those between, beyond, and besides.”
Hearing these changes to the hymn’s language while in worship was deeply meaningful to me. To have my concerns heard and recommendations acted on, to be acknowledged in that way, explicitly in the song, after so often feeling unheard and left out in faith spaces, was genuinely healing.
…But then there are the hymns that don’t just need some wording tweaks. Some hymns are founded on downright harmful theology — are laden with implications that Christians are supreme; that God’s power is patriarchal; that suffering is either punishment or test; that we are “sinners in the hands of an angry God” who is only kept from smiting us because Jesus puts his body between us and divine wrath (rather than Jesus being God-with-us, expressing the Triune God’s united will).
So what are we to do with a hymn that perpetuates bad theology?
We might choose to dispose of it completely.
Maybe some songs can’t be redeemed. Maybe no changes to it could ever ease the pain you or your community members feel about it.
For me, a song goes straight in the trash if I look into the songwriter and find that they were racist, antisemitic, or even guilty of sexual abuse; if the writer was violently bigoted or abusive, I am not going to try to “fix” their music. There is no fixing the harm that person did. I’m not going to sing any of an abuser’s words in a space where we’re trying to ensure that all belong, especially the most vulnerable.
Even outside that exception, I respect any person or community who decides they would rather retire any given song from their worship, for any reason.
However, I have found that many people find it extremely healing to sing a once-hurtful hymn anew, now with lyrics that talk back to and refute the original message. In bringing the song back transformed instead of quietly discarding it, a more overt, unambiguous message is made about what we believe, who God is, and who we are as a community.
To return to the example of “For Everyone Born,” there is one stanza that needed more than updated wording. The verse beginning “for just and unjust, a place at the table” doesn’t just leave some people out; it has brought deep pain to many survivors of abuse.
The stanza envisions a “table,” a community, where both “abuser, abused” are present, “with need to forgive.” However, ethical frameworks for responding to abuse emphasize the abuser’saccountability and the victim/survivor’s safety, comfort, and even their right to withhold forgiveness if they choose.
So I had to make a choice: throw the stanza out, or rewrite it in a way that directly addresses the old harm? I chose the latter:
For just and unjust, a place at the table, a chance to repent, reform, and rebuild, protecting the wronged, without shame or pressure, for just and unjust, God’s vision fulfilled.
More people have reached out to me about this stanza than any other that I’ve revised, expressing how healing it was to be in worship and hear the old message refuted and replaced with one that prioritizes the person harmed.
If your community simply never speaks of a toxic hymn again, the memory of the pain the song caused you may remain deep in your psyche. You may even believe that that bad theology is the only traditional or “authentic” Christian theology — that you’re a “bad Christian” for hating it. You might think, “my church isn’t singing that hymn anymore because it makes people feel bad; but that doesn’t mean the hymn is wrong.”
But if you can receive the song anew, now with words that tear down that bad theology to build up something better, you receive an explicit message that yes, you were right, that theology was harmful. Your memories, your trauma, can be rewritten or re-woven into a new narrative:
This was a song that hurt; now it is a song that reminds us that we as Christians are constantly reforming and being reformed — constantly being called by God to unlearn and relearn divine love.
What do you think? Which hymns would you love to see transformed — and which would you simply like to never hear again?
"Isaiah" by Richard McBee; "The Annunciation" by Daniel Bonnell
During the season of Advent, Christians traditionally read Luke’s and Matthew’s Nativity stories alongside the book of Isaiah. It makes sense to do so, as Matthew himself makes the connection:
22 Now all of this took place so that what the Lord had spoken through the prophet would be fulfilled:
23 Look! A virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, And they will call him, Emmanuel. (Matthew 1:22-23)
But when we read Isaiah only in service to our Christian story, we do harm to our Jewish neighbors with whom we share these scriptures. To utilize the Hebrew Bible (= “Old Testament,” the Jewish Bible) solely as a promise fulfilled through Christ is to suggest that these scriptures are incomplete without and dependent upon Jesus — and therefore that Jews’ interpretation of their own Bible is incorrect and irrelevant.
So how do we simultaneously honor our Advent traditions, draw from Isaiah’s wisdom, and respect the vibrant, living faith of our Jewish neighbors?
The purpose of this post is to share some of the wisdom from Mayfield’s work, and to urge pastors, teachers, and others who help shape the Advent experience for their communities to check out the entire text for even more invaluable commentary.
Contents of Unto Us a Child Is Born:
An introduction that, well, introduces the issues with current Christian uses of Isaiah and suggests a bifocal framework as remedy
Chapter 1: Using Our Near Vision During Advent
Chapter 2: Using Our Far Vision to Love Our Jewish Neighbors
The remainder of the chapters delve into each of the Isaiah passages offered by the Revised Common Lectionary for the Advent season.
This post will survey key points from the intro and first two chapters, and close with actionable ways to incorporate Mayfield’s message into Sunday worship and classes. Preachers and teachers will find it immensely helpful to read the rest of the book’s chapters as lesson/sermon preparation for each week of Advent.
The Bifocal Lens
In order to maintain our Christian traditions without monopolizing the Hebrew Bible, Mayfield recommends a bifocal view:
Our near vision focuses on our worship practices and liturgical celebrations, grounding us in our living religious tradition;
Our far view pays attention to the ways those practices affect those not in our communities and “compels us to critique and reject some aspects of this tradition, those that are hurtful, inaccurate, and derogatory toward our religious neighbors” (intro).
Using Isaiah and other Jewish scriptures responsibly during worship is not merely a scholarly endeavor; as Mayfield reminds us, reading and interpreting the Bible is a matter of ethics:
[…L]iturgy and ethics are not easily separated. In her excellent and provocative book on racism and sexism in Christian ethics, Traci West notes, “The rituals of Sunday worship enable Christians to publicly rehearse what it means to uphold the moral values they are supposed to bring to every aspect of their lives, from their attitudes about public policy to their intimate relations.” …We want our worship to spur us to live out our ethical claims. (Introduction)
Using Mayfield’s bifocal lens, we can ethically navigate “the tension between identity within a particular faith tradition and openness to the faith traditions of others.”
So what are some of the ways that traditional Advent worship can lead us to do harm to our Jewish neighbors?
Supersessionism
Supersessionism, also called replacement theology, claims that Christianity has replaced or supplanted Judaism; that our covenant through Christ cancels out Jews’ covenant through Abraham and Moses (hence the labeling of the two parts of the Christian Bible as the Old and New Testaments, from the Latin word for covenant).
Synagoga et Ecclasia, two statues on the Notre Dame cathedral representing the Jewish and Christian faiths. This juxtaposition of crowned Church standing strong next to the Synagogue who is “blind to Jesus,” the ten commandments almost falling from her hand, is unfortunately depicted in numerous artworks of Medieval Europe.
Mayfield brings in Susannah Heschel’s description of supersessionism as a “theological colonization of Judaism“; she defines it as:
“The appropriation by the New Testament and the early church of Judaism’s central theological teachings, including messiah, eschatology, apocalypticism, election, and Israel, as well as its scriptures, its prophets, and even its God, while denying the continued validity of those teachings and texts within Judaism as an independent path to salvation.” (Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, 2008)
The seeds that the early church planted have born violent fruit across the centuries. This attitude of judgment and/or pity has led both to ideological violence — “render[ing] Jews invisible or irrelevant or as incomplete Christians” (intro) — and immense physical violence through to the segregation, scapegoating, forced conversions, expelling, and flat-out murder of the Jewish people across multiple continents.1
Detail from Pedro Berruguete’s “Saint Dominic and the Albigensians” (1490s), depicting a Medieval “trial by fire” in which potentially heretical texts were determined to be “false” if they burned.
There are multiple instances of the Talmud — the central text of rabbinical Judaism alongside the Jewish Bible — being likewise gathered and burned across Medieval Europe due to the anti-Jewish belief that the Talmud was the primary obstacle keeping Jews from converting to Christianity. In 1242, for instance, King Louis IX of France ordered the burning of “24 cartloads” — something like 12,000 volumes — of priceless, scribe-written copies of the Talmud. This event devastated France’s Jewish community, which had been one of the seats of Jewish scholarship. Louis also followed up the book burning with a decree to expel all Jews from France: violence against Jewish scripture goes hand-in-hand with violence against Jewish bodies.
All this to say, the views we shape through worship and elsewhere truly do have real-world implications.
Mayfield argues that it is possible — indeed, necessary — to share scriptures respectfully. After all, he says, Judaism and Christianity are siblings.
While Christianity is often envisioned as the “shoot” growing from the dead stump of Jesse in Isaiah 11:1, a child who has improved upon the parent, in reality Judaism and Christianity are more like two branches extending from the same tree. They “grew out of the same milieu,” developing from the religion depicted in the Hebrew Bible during the chaotic era of that first century CE:
While early Jesus followers were formulating an identity distinct from Christ’s Jewish origins, Rome’s 70 CE destruction of the Second Temple spurred on new iterations of Jews’ own religion; following the Pharisees,2 they recentered faith around local life rather than the temple. In this way, the two religions are around the same age, growing from the same foundations! We are sibling religions; and we are neighbors. The problem is that we Christians have frequently behaved as very poor neighbors indeed.
Why Jewish “Neighbors”?
In Isaiah, Advent, and Our Christian Neighbors, Mayfield has opted for the term neighbor to describe the Christian relationship to Jews in the present day. Why? For one thing, love of neighbor is a central tenet of both Jewish and Christian tradition, originating in Leviticus 19:18 and emphasized by Jesus in Mark 12:31 and Matthew 22:39. Reading scripture through the ethic of love thy neighbor, we must ask, “If a particular reading of Scripture leads us to think badly of Jews, then is this reading Christian?” (chapter 2).
Furthermore, Mayfield continues,
I also use the concept of neighbor because neighbors do not always agree. In fact, they sometimes disagree and have to take seriously one another’s perceptions, feelings, and opinions. Being neighborly is being attentive and listening well to the concerns of others. It is realizing that your actions affect those around you. Christians act neighborly when they take seriously Jewish critiques of Christianity and Christian teachings, just as Jews act neighborly when they offer these critiques. (Chapter 2)
In reconsidering how we read and teach scripture, we can imagine that scripture is the fence we share with our Jewish neighbors, even while we dwell in different “geographies.” But when we accept supersessionist theology, we deny Jews their side of the fence; we colonize it.
Let’s look at how supersessionism manifests specifically in the ways we use Isaiah during Advent.
Resisting a Christian Isaiah
Mayfield describes how, over the past two millennia, Christians have disconnected Isaiah from his ancient Jewish context and Christianized him, even going so far as to call this eighth-century BCE prophet’s book the “fifth Gospel” alongside Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John (intro).
The Virgin Mary and Jesus, flanked by Isaiah (right) and Peter (left).
In lifting Isaiah from his seat among Jeremiah, Amos, and all the Hebrew Bible’s prophets, we sever him from his original ancient Jewish audience and deny his relevance to our Jewish neighbors today.
We hear Isaiah (and Handel in his Messiah) proclaim: “For unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given” (Isaiah 9:6) and everything in our tradition preps us to assume that the “us” in question is us Christians; that this child must be Jesus!
In our presumption that Isaiah’s prophecies are all about Jesus, we render this prophet irrelevant to our Jewish neighbors, denying the validity of their interpretations of this biblical book. But if we dig into the historical context, we can broaden our ways of understanding these texts and thus learn how to better share these scriptures.
A Christ-exclusive interpretation of Isaiah misunderstands what biblical prophets did.
We hear the word “prophecy” and think of foreseeing the future, often the distant future. But the prophets of the Bible, from Joel to John the Baptist, were largely focused on their own here-and-now:
The prophets of ancient Israel (and ancient Mesopotamia) did not see their sole activity as foretelling. They were also “forthtellers,” speaking to the religious and political issues of their day with courage and strength. As mediators between God and the people, prophets delivered messages, oracles, and visions to audiences that included kings and commoners. They interpreted the past, analyzed the present, and spoke of the future but were undoubtedly more concerned with events of the present than events several hundred years in the making. …
[T]he notion of prophecy as foretelling renders the prophet’s words irrelevant to, and uninspired for, the first hearers and readers of these messages. (Chapter 1)
There’s another historical issue with reading Isaiah’s prophecies as exclusively about Jesus as his people’s anticipated Messiah:
At the time of Isaiah in the 700s BCE, the concept of the eschatological Messiah had not yet been developed!
While the Hebrew Bible does describe figures like David and Cyrus as anointed ones (which is what the Hebrew word mashiach, “messiah,” means), the concept of The Messiah who would usher in an age of justice and peace was most likely a later development of Second Temple Judaism (516 BCE – 70 CE).
We only see The Messiah in Isaiah’s descriptions of a “Wonderful Counselor…Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6b) and a just judge on whom God’s spirit rests (Isaiah 11:1-10) because of our own bias: “We think we know what we will find before we look” (chapter 1).
Learning about a passage’s original context helps us interpret the text more faithfully as we seek its relevance today. What is more, we can and should consider its multiple historical contexts, the whole breadth of what it has meant for different groups in different eras:
Texts in Isaiah have an entire history of interpretation, which includes the “originating” context in ancient Israel, their reuse and interpretation in Second Temple Judaism perhaps, their Christian context in which some Isaiah texts became christological, the Jewish context in which some texts became messianic, and then later Christian context, that is, when these texts were attached to Advent.
The book of Isaiah was composed by ancient Israelites over several centuries, from the eighth to the fifth centuries BCE. These authors wrote for their ancient Israelite audiences with no comprehension of later events such as the life of Jesus and the growth of Christianity. Thus, the book of Isaiah does not predict the birth of Jesus. (Chapter 1)
Recognizing the long history of a piece of scripture helps reduce our sense of ownership over the text; we realize that its messages are not for Christians alone, but for faithful Jews and Christians (and Muslims, to an extent) across the millennia and today. This recognition is vital for unpacking biases and beliefs we often don’t even realize we carry deep in our psyches — and that some of the tools we use reinforce.
A Complicit Lectionary?
A key concern Mayfield explores throughout Unto Us a Child Is Born is how the lectionaries we use can guide us towards supersessionist readings during Advent. He focuses on the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) because of its popularity: Denominations ranging from the UCC to the Roman Catholic Church make use of it; overall, a huge portion of all sorts of Christians (largely in Canada and the USA) use it.
Mayfield explains that for each Sunday, the ecumenical team that created the RCL selected the Gospel reading first, and then selected an “Old Testament” text (plus a psalm & Acts/epistles/Revelation passage) to complement that Gospel reading.
The theological ramifications of always prioritizing the Gospel in this way include an unbalanced dialogue: If we imagine the readings in conversation with each other, the Gospel always gets to choose the topic; the “Old Testament” only ever gets to respond.
Actionable Ways to Be Good Neighbors
After learning about Advent’s supersessionist pitfalls, you might be tempted simply to drop Isaiah in an effort to avoid the issue entirely. But Mayfield argues that that is a mistake:
We need Isaiah to celebrate Advent. The book’s treasures are too marvelous to set aside as ancient history or consign to another liturgical season. As we begin the liturgical year, we need to hear of swords beaten into plowshares and of barren lands blooming. …To use only the Gospel readings during Advent limits our theological reflections while also insinuating that only those four biblical books are worthy of public reading and proclamation. (Chapter 1)
Instead of ditching Isaiah, Mayfield offers practical suggestions for using the prophet responsibly:
First, we can open readings of Isaiah in church with an explicit statement: “Today we hear words from a book held sacred by both Jews and Christians.” As Mayfield explains, “This simple and accurate statement…compels us to recognize our religious neighbors even as we worship” (chapter 2).
Going further, a preacher can remind congregants that “As Christians, we understand Isaiah through our histories and theologies, but Jews do not read Isaiah this way.”
(My own thought: A pastor can even take time in an Advent sermon to acknowledge some of the history of misusing Jewish scriptures / debunking common presumptions about Isaiah’s role in the Nativity story. A Sunday School teacher has even more space to explore that history and context, and to invite attendees to imagine how Isaiah speaks to us today.)
Beyond simple statements and one-time mentions, Mayfield urges us to commit to always interpreting scriptures through a paradigm of “do no harm” — to “share as good neighbors.”
A key part of this paradigm is an intentional shift from “a more linear approach to the narrative of Scripture (in which we read the biblical books as a progression both in time and in theological depth) to a more back-and-forth conversational approach (in which we allow various texts to speak to one another).” This conversational framework creates space for the Bible’s many voices and refuses to let “New Testament” voices dominate.
A new representation of Synagoga et Ecclasia, mutually crowned and learning from each other. Statue by Joshua Koffman for St. Joseph’s University, commissioned in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Roman Catholic Church’s 1965 Nostra Aetate declaration, which repudiated past anti-Jewish doctrine and actions and called for more respectful relations.
Here’s a longer excerpt from Mayfield describing how to put this paradigm into practice while remaining true to ourselves:
So, how do we, as Christians, continue to affirm one of our central claims of Jesus as the Messiah while also allowing space for the dismissal of that claim? Perhaps we are helped by returning to the tension between identity and openness.
Christians maintain strong identities in the claim of Jesus as the Christ while also remaining open to other visions of the messianic kingdom, thus realizing that the full realm of God has not come. It is vital to our identity to claim Jesus as the Messiah, and we are also open to other formulations of messiah.
One meaningful way forward along this challenging path is not to claim too much: to be careful, considerate, and humble with our messianic notions. For example, instead of holding to a messianic or christological reading of Isaiah as the only valid notion, Christians could admit openly and explicitly that these texts provide some of the necessary elements that will constitute notions of messiahship in first-century Judaism, notions Jesus and his biographers took up and used. However, these texts do not point immediately to Jesus; there is just not a straight line — historically or theologically — between Point A, Isaiah, and Point B, Jesus.
This sort of admission presents real possibilities for neighborly engagement since it ties the Christian claim about Jesus more closely to sacred texts that are used only by Christians. It does not predetermine the meaning of Isaiah for all traditions, but it allows Jews and Christians to interpret Isaiah’s prophecies based on their respective traditions, with neither tradition holding ultimate authority over the biblical text. …We could go even further to say that the Jewish reading is an important and necessary one from which Christians could learn. (Chapter 2)
More Benefits of Interpreting Responsibly!
Ultimately, a paradigm of respect and mutual conversation bears rich fruit not only in our relationship to our Jewish neighbors, but to our own faith. Letting Hebrew Bible texts stand on their own merit opens us to how a given passage speaks to us here and now, rather than limiting its prophecies to a closed loop of prophecy-fulfilled-in-Christ. Mayfield quotes Ellen Davis’ comment that
“We like to keep the frame of reference for prophecy within the ‘safe’ confines of the Bible, by reading prophecy solely as illuminating what has already happened—the birth, life, and death of Jesus Christ—and not allowing it to meddle much in the current lives of Christians” [and Jews!]. (Chapter 1)
We are not called to play it safe; we are called to let scripture breathe, and to welcome in God’s mischievous spirit! Making room for many interpretations, for multiple messages from Isaiah for different times and contexts, liberates scripture to speak to us in new, challenging, relevant ways today.
Doing so also helps us live into the tension of Advent’s dual theological themes: Incarnation and eschatology. As Mayfield notes,
These two foci do not naturally cohere. The emotions invoked by Advent call us to “prepare joyfully for the first coming of the incarnate Lord and to prepare penitently for the second coming and God’s impending judgment.”3Joy and penitence. …We are pulled in different emotional directions. (Chapter 1)
Churches tend to lean towards the joy — but we can’t ditch the solemnity, can’t “alleviate the tension,” without robbing ourselves of “the incredible richness and grace that result from the annual eschatological collision in the weeks before Christmas.”4
As someone who centers my ministry around breaking binaries, reveling in the in-betweens where God does Their best work, I appreciate this insistence on the “both/and” of penitence and joy — as well as of Isaiah and Matthew/Mark, and of a prophetic message for Isaiah’s time, and Jesus’s time, and for us and our Jewish neighbors today.
“Isaiah” by Richard McBee; “The Annunciation” by Daniel Bonnell
Closing
In Advent, past, present, and future queerly coalesce:
“We have hope in what the incarnation brings to our world each day, even as we hope for the setting right of things with the culmination of history.” (Chapter 1)
Though the details certainly differ, we can thus proclaim that “even though the Messiah has come, we wait with Jews for the ‘complete realization of the messianic age'” and that in this interim time, “it is the mission of the Church, as also that of the Jewish people, to proclaim and to work to prepare the world for the full flowering of God’s Reign, which is, but is ‘not yet’”5 (chapter 2).
This Advent claim “takes the unique identity of Christians seriously as ones who have seen in Jesus our Messiah yet remain open to the fullness of that claim in the future” (chapter 2).
It is possible to shape Advent into a season wherein we don’t perpetuate harm against our Jewish neighbors, but rather grow in our respect for and mutual relationship with them. The remainder of Unto Us a Child Is Born: Isaiah, Advent, and Our Christian Neighbors is overflowing with more knowledge and advice that further enables this aim. I highly recommend checking it out. If you need help obtaining a copy, hit me up.
Pharisees were cool, y’all; go learn from the fabulous Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg about what Pharisees believed, how Jesus may have been a Pharisee himself, and the context around the Gospel writers’ negative depictions of them ↩︎
Mayfield’s quoting Gail R. O’Day, “Back to the Future: The Eschatological Vision of Advent” (2008) ↩︎
Mayfield’s quoting J. Neil Alexander, Waiting for the Coming (1993) ↩︎
Mayfield is quoting Mary Boys, Has God Only One Blessing? (2000) ↩︎
In Advent, God’s Spirit comes in dreams, daring us to conceive of impossible things: that wolf and lamb might live in harmony; that the world’s despised might rise to greatest glory; that war-torn wastes might bloom and grow good fruit. – my writing in Call to Worship 59.1
Then on to Christmas, when we celebrate how (to paraphrase Saint Athanasius) the divine became human so that humans might become divine.
At Christmas, Creation sings a new song; God’s prophets proclaim good news: The Word of God has put on flesh so that we may put on divinity. Through Jesus, our newborn brother, we are adopted into God’s chosen family. – my writing in Call to Worship 59.1
In preparation for this holy time of the year, I want to share several resources created for Advent / Christmas 2025 that I had the honor of being part of.
First is More Light Presbyterians’ Advent devotional!
This resource offers a ~100 word devotion for every day of Advent. They will be posted daily on MLP’s Instagram and Facebook pages. It’ll also be published all at once in MLP’s monthly newsletter for December; sign up to receive it here.
Along with an Advent calendar that lists a trans organization or trans activist for each day of the season, Unbound’s devotional provides a reflection by a trans author for every Sunday & special day of Advent & Christmas. It’s a fantastic resource for communities or individuals who are hoping to queer up this season.
Click this readmore for a snippet of my reflection on the second Sunday of Christmas.
In the beginning, God spoke the Word; and God was the Word; and God was the breath that pushed that Word out into the void to spark life.
In the beginning was Wisdom, flowing forth from God’s mouth to unfurl Herself across the earth, seeking out those who’d welcome Her peculiar gifts.
Starting with Paul, who identified Christ as “the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24), Christians have traditionally connected the Hebrew scriptures’ personified Wisdom — often called Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom — with Jesus. Yet while the Word took on a human body whose features led those present at Their birth to declare, “It’s a boy!”, Wisdom is described — and speaks of Herself — in feminine terms.
Sophia, Woman Wisdom, assigned male at birth! Now that’s a trans story if I ever heard one. […]
And yet…I still default to thinking of Jesus as male. Why, when many of us have expanded our language for God beyond exclusively masculine terms, does it still feel strange — even inappropriate — to speak of the Person of God who is Jesus as she or they?
…It’s the physical body, isn’t it? In many ways, Jesus is as constrained by his (/her/their/zir…) assigned gender as the rest of us.
From birth, we are bombarded by messages telling us that our flesh is our gender — that, as feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir put it, “biology is destiny.” From the moment the Word put on flesh, that flesh (or our assumptions about it, because the Gospels don’t actually tell us much about Jesus’s physical appearance beyond what we can deduce from his circumcision in Luke 2) sealed Their fate: Creator God can exist beyond human labels, and the Spirit is, well, Spirit; but God the Son is a human man.
But trans folk know deep in our bones that biology is not destiny. Trans wisdom cuts through the bonds of the binary’s imposed futures, freeing all of us to imagine new possibilities…and, sometimes, to remember old ones. [… read the full thing here]
I wrote liturgy based on the Common Revised Lectionary for every Sunday and holy day of Advent 2025 and Christmas 2025/2026.
This liturgy is in many ways more “subtly queer” than Unbound’s devotional, as I wrote it to fit a broader range of contexts and church communities. However, I was delighted by the authorial freedom Call to Worship gave me; along with sticking to inclusive language for people (e.g. saying “siblings” instead of “brothers and sisters”), I was able to employ expansive language and pronouns for God! I also incorporate a lot of liberationist theology, from Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s concept of the Kin-dom of God to prayers emphasizing the goodness of embodied life.
To access all the Advent and Christmas material, you may need to subscribe to Call to Worship. If you are unable to do so, email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com and I’ll get the material to you.
In the meantime, click this readmore for a sampling.
Fantastically scandalous God, in being born into human life you burst through the rigid binary between worshiper and deity, Creator and creation. Inspire us to proclaim your astonishing news wherever we go — not only with words, but through actions of justice and love. Push us to prophecy against hoarding and exploitation; Empower us to rise up with oppressed peoples everywhere; Illuminate our path as we tend to your poisoned planet, so that all Creation may feel your embrace through us — your hands, your feet, your body here on earth. Amen.
TWIBAR’s annual Christmas episode
Every Christmas, The Word in Black and Red podcast puts out an episode featuring the short reflections of largely Christian leftists; I’m one of them! Keep an eye out for the episode on the podcast feed.
The day after the inauguration I give myself my hormone shot.
Every Tuesday since I have done so again
in spite
of blowhards’ orders for two sexes and impermeable borders.
Hrt — dear dermal border crosser — pays no mind to the blustering of fools who know nothing
of what it is to sew oneself into one’s body with a needle
pierced through thigh muscle; stitches across the chest; new names spun by fumbling fingers
into the threads that stretch heartstring to heart- string. What couldthey who sever heartstrings know
of the transtemporal tapestry that interweaves our unnumbered stories, our numberless ways to be?
Even now, they try
to tear our truth out of all legal records, to blot us out from history and medical texts —
but we suffuse humanity’s warp and weft: cut us out, mere tatters will be left.
And it may be they’ll pry
our protections and passports, our vials and blue pills from our still-warm, still-alive, still-trans and intersex hands —
but our tapestry is stronger than their will, twined tighter than chromosomes, and
we’ll give them hell for every sundered string. We’ll fight like hell until their bitter end.
For now, it is Tuesday again
and my hand, with its wedding ring and thickened skin,
is steady as I plunge the needle in.
You are welcome to circulate this poem around, including on social media (please make sure to include image descriptions if you share screenshots) or at any type of gathering. Please credit Avery Arden (they/ze) of binarybreakingworship.com.
I also ask that you keep in mind that this poem is first and foremost a personal piece; I am not attempting to speak to what other trans and/or intersex persons are feeling right now. What is more, I hope it is clear that none of the various things mentioned — hormones, surgery, document changes — are at all necessary to be trans; I only center hrt here because of how it has been a grounding ritual for me these past weeks.
I welcome conversation, and would love to hear about your rituals, your remembrance, your resistance.
(By the way, this post’s title isn’t the poem title; it’s untitled / the first line kinda serves as the title.)
More about the poem:
Since Trump’s intentionally overwhelming first-day flood of executive orders, I’ve been trying to sort my tangled-up feelings:
The rage and despair and dread inextricably mixed with love, and defiant dreams of a better world, and deepest pride in the vibrant, rebellious, eternal community of those whose very bodyminds expose Empire’s lie that humanity can be dichotomized.
The whiplash of mundanity in times such as these — the way “life as usual” can lure us into passivity if we are not careful; but also the way our everyday rituals and tasks (like my weekly hormone shot) ground us, and can even be little acts of resistance to nourish our larger, communal resistance.
The bitterness of all that could have been (and I’m not talking about a Democrat in the White House, upholding the same systems that enable a tyrant like Trump, just with more hand-wringing). The frustration that this is what it takes for more people to wake up to the evils that have festered in and fueled this nation from its conception. The relief that at least now there are more people ready to resist, and urgency to welcome and equip them.
The preemptive grief for all we will lose. The determination to lose as few as possible — to pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.
Before finally managing to get this poem written out, I was able to channel some of that tangle into helping More Light Presbyterians write our statement on Trump’s executive order against gender diversity. Along with concrete actions we can take to support trans and intersex persons right now (see the link for those), one of the parts I wrote was a closing message of love and promise to my trans and intersex kin:
Hateful people want nothing more than to see you feeling hopeless and abandoned—but we promise you, there will always be people in your corner, ready to protect you with our lives. We will not leave you to fight alone, no matter how dire things get. Cling to your community, nurture your spirit however you can, and remember:
Politicians were never going to save us. We keep us safe, trusting in the love and solidarity of the One who created each of us with purpose and delight (Genesis 1:31; Psalm 139:14).
Unaltered lines are in light gray; altered lines are in black.
Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee Holy, holy, holy! Justice wed to mercy, God in three persons, blessed Trinity!
Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore thee, Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea. Cherubim and seraphim, falling down before thee, Who was and is and evermore shall be.
Holy, holy, holy! Sacred darkness cloaks thee, Granting us mere glimpses of thine untold Mystery. Still, thine image showsthee in each human body: Thou art our breath, our love and artistry.
Holy, holy, holy, Although almighty, Thou stripped off omnipotence to share our frailty. Only Thou are holy, yet thou chose the lowly — With the despised, there shall thy Spirit be.
Holy, holy, holy! God of the lowly! All thy works shall praise thy name In earth and sky and sea Holy, holy, holy! Justice wed to mercy, God in three persons, blessed Trinity!
Credit Info:
Please feel free to spread this around, to sing it in your own communities, etc.! Just include credit to Avery Arden at binarybreakingworship.com.
If your community does make use of my revised verses, I would love to know about it. If you post a video of it being sung anywhere, I would love to hear it!! You can contact me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com.
And if you have any suggestions for further revision, please do let me know that too. Let us all join together in the endless effort to draw our circles wider!
Reasons for Revision
This hymn by Anglican archbishop Reginald Heber (1783–1826) is a lovely piece of pure adoration of the Triune God. My personal appreciation of it centers on how it spans centuries — published the year Heber died, it’ll be two hundred years old next year! — and traditions:
I grew up singing it in Catholic Mass; I sing it now in a Presbyterian church; and I enjoy queer musician Sufjan Stevens’s cover of it. Heck, even the non-Trinitarian Latter Day Saints/Mormons sing it (altering “God in three persons, blessed Trinity” to “God in His glory, blessed Deity”). Thus when we sing this song we do so together not only with “cherubim and seraphim,” but with a vast cloud of human witnesses.
To better encapsulate the hymn’s expansive nature, and to infuse it with key concepts from liberationist theologies, I have revised parts of it with several goals:
To move from an emphasis on God’s “might” to God’s solidarity and abiding Presence.
To remove an instance of patriarchal language (“sinful man”).
To move from an equation of darkness and sightlessness with sinfulness (“Though the darkness hide thee / though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see”) into an appreciation for the thick darkness — Hebrew עֲרָפֶל arafel — from which God guided the liberated Hebrews.
^ That stanza on God’s hiddenness is the part of the hymn I changed most — I ended up turning it into two stanzas! Refocusing that hiddenness around Mystery rather than sin, and taking the opportunity that afforded me to explore how the Trinity chooses to relate to humanity in the Imago Dei, in the Incarnation, and through the Holy Spirit.
I am thankful to Dr. Matt Webb for his input on my revisions. If you notice anything more to change up in this hymn, let me know!
As Presbyterians, we believe in a God who takes up the cause of those whom human societies consider “least.”
In this era of escalating anti-trans rhetoric and legislation, in our own state and beyond, our faith calls us to affirm God’s movement among and through the trans community in particular.
Even as we leave room for some differences in belief, we can agree that there is no place in the life of the Church for discrimination against any person.
United in this belief, let us confess together the ways in which we continue to fall short in protecting and celebrating the gender diverse members of God’s human family:
CONFESSION
When we refuse to recognize the unique ways our transgender siblings participate in co-creation and manifest the Divine Image of a God far vaster than any rules we devise or boxes we build,
Forgive and transform us, Creator God. Open us to choose respect over rejection, conversation over misinformation, relationship over alienation.
When we look on as oppressive forces hold our trans kin captive —
suffocate their free will, strip them of health and safety, drive them to desperation and rob them of their very lives — and we shrug off their plight, assuming it has nothing to do with us;
or else stay silent out of fear for our own security and comfort,
Forgive and transform us, Liberator God. Wake us to the life-or-death urgency of this struggle. Open us to choose action over silence, to risk much in the name of justice.
When our denomination’s promises of full participation and representation for all persons and groups remain unfulfilled —
with many queer candidates still finding their ministry obstructed, and trans parishioners forced to choose between staying in hostile spaces or leaving their spiritual homes to seek belonging elsewhere,
Forgive and transform us, God who favors outcasts. Open us to see both the possibilities and perils of our institution, so that we may revise the things that harm and bolster the things that liberate.
God who hears and joins in our lament, God who speaks through unexpected prophets,
instill in us a hunger for your justice that will drive our solidarity and action until we have become — in fact as well as in faith — a community of all people made one in Christ by the power of your Holy Spirit.
PARDON
Friends, we have a long way to go, and much work to do — but we rejoice now in the assurance that, through Jesus Christ, we are forgiven and renewed to continue the journey.
Thanks be to God.
PEACE
Assured of God’s mercy, we may be bold in sharing Christ’s peace — a peace built on justice, a peace that preserves diversity — with all we meet.
The peace of Christ be with you. And also with you…
Please feel free to make use of this piece in worship or Sunday school, in ceremony or across social media. Just credit it to Avery Arden of binarybreakingworhsip.com — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
You may make small adjustments to fit your own particular context.
About this piece:
I wrote this confession and pardon to be used during morning worship at the PC(USA)’s 226th General Assembly.
I was asked to center its call to acknowledge where we have failed our transgender kin around Luke 4′s account of Jesus reading from Isaiah in his local synagogue — the prophet’s proclamation of good news for the poor, the imprisoned, for disabled persons and all whom Empire oppresses.
When Jesus announces after he reads, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled,” his audience raves, impressed by this local boy grown up into a wise teacher. It’s only when he continues his commentary to make it clear that gentiles will be receiving the Spirit of God’s liberation as well — for did not Elijah and Elisha minister to gentile widows and lepers? — that the crowd’s praise sours into rage.
What a fitting text to draw from when confronting our own resistance to expanding God’s liberation to those we consider outsiders. God is lavishing Their Spirit on Their queer children, freeing Their trans children from bondage and into ministry — and there are many who refuse to recognize this divine activity.
Just days before this confession was shared in worship, the General Assembly discussed and ultimately approved the Olympia Overture, which seeks to solidify protections for queer members — particularly queer ordination candidates — of our denomination. Though I rejoice that this overture passed, the debates were painful to witness, reminding me that I share this spiritual home with people who deny my humanity, my vocation, or God’s movement through me and those like me — and who balk at naming this denial “discrimination.”
I give thanks to all who courageously spoke up in support of the Olympia Overture; may they find themselves surrounded by support and love after living out such brave vulnerability. And I pray that those who feared or raged against its passing will find themselves broken open, bit by bit or all at once, by the Spirit of Wisdom who guides us all into understanding. Maybe this overture’s passing can be an opportunity for deeper conversations that will draw us all closer. Maybe. If we all are brave, and bold, and ignited by love. If we all commit ourselves to living into F-1.0404‘s call to openness:
"...a new openness to the sovereign activity of God in the Church and in the world, to a more radical obedience to Christ, and to a more joyous celebration in worship and work;
a new openness in its own membership, becoming in fact as well as in faith a community of all people of all ages, races, ethnicities, abilities, genders, and worldly conditions, made one in Christ by the power of the Spirit, as a visible sign of the new humanity;
a new openness to see both the possibilities and perils of its institutional forms in order to ensure the faithfulness and usefulness of these forms to God’s activity in the world; and
a new openness to God’s continuing reformation of the Church ecumenical, that it might be more effective in its mission."
To the ones who bear witness to the church’s flaws and failings, and still believe in everything that Church could be — and work to make that holy vision real though the labor is long, and tough, and often thankless —
Let us offer thanks, remembering the unlikely blessings our subversive Savior likes to lavish on those the world least expects.
Blessed are you who make a way out of no way: who pioneer a path for those of God’s children who’ve been told they don’t belong in the pews, in the pulpit, or in holy bonds of marriage.
Blessed are you when you come in bold and disruptive, flipping the tables that make no room for you; And blessed when you work behind the scenes, change rippling out from constant conversation —
For we we need both: the Spirit of roaring flame, and gentle rain.
Blessed are you when your voice shakes and you speak out anyway.
Blessed are you in patience, persistence, and grace; Blessed also are you in frustration and righteous rage
For the psalmist joins you in crying, “God, how long?”
Blessed are you who endure judgment and scrutiny from people who are meant to be neighbors in the Body of Christ
For the peacemaker’s crown, the friendship of God is yours.
Blessed are you when you tire, and burn out, and wrestle with despair
For rest is your right, and others will take up your fight as long as you need.
And when ignorant tongues defame you, when they twist your words and accuse you of being the divisive one, when they try to shut you up and drive you out
Blessed, blessed are you!
For you belong to an unbroken line of prophets stretching back to the cross and forward to a feast laid out for all.
Yes! Blessed are you when “blessed” is the last thing you feel — you who fight the good fight even when it seems hopeless, even when you lose, again and again, even if you will not be around when the drought on justice ends and the fruits of your labor bloom into life at last
For future generations will remember you with pride.
For no matter how it looks right now, your efforts are never in vain.
For you are part of what makes Church worth fighting for, and what you sowed in sweat and tears, tomorrow’s children reap rejoicing.
Blessed are you, for yours is the kin-dom you are helping to build, one brave truth at a time.
Please feel free to make use of this piece in worship or Sunday school, in ceremony or across social media. Just credit it to Avery Arden of binarybreakingworship.com — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
About this piece:
The past few days have been rough ones for queer Presbyterians and those who love us. The 226th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) kicked off with the Olympia Overture, which sought to add sexuality & gender identity to a portion of our Book of Order that lists classes protected from discrimination; as well as to make it so candidates for ordination must be asked about their ability and commitment to uphold the “principles of participation, representation, and non-discrimination” found in that other part of the Book of Order.
Both parts of the overture ended up getting approved, but only after much discourse before the GA even began, and more debate before the committee. It was…really hard to watch (so hard that I didn’t watch most of it myself — but friends watching kept me informed of what was happening).
It was a reminder that there are people in my own denomination who, whether they would word it this way or not, don’t want to see me and my queer kin as fully human — to recognize us as called by God, as colleagues, as part of Christ’s movement in the world.
Also, part B only passed after the language was amended to take out the word “non-discrimination” — apparently the implication that a candidate might be discriminating against someone is Not Nice. I’m reminded how many of us — myself included as a white person — have it instilled in us from birth that it’s more important to be nice, and to avoid discomfort, than it is to call out harm.
But also, as many queer Presbyterians took their turn speaking — each granted just two minutes to make the case for their belonging, their right to have colleagues who recognize their equality in our church — I felt pride swell up deep in my soul. We are put through so much! We are scrutinized, we are shamed, we are accused of “causing division” just because we call it out — yet we remain faithful. We believe in God’s promise of justice rolling down, of a kin-dom where the last are first and the dignity and worth of all is recognized.
They can’t drive us out. We will stay, and we will persist in loving them back into their own humanity.
This prayer is for all the people across the decades, even centuries, who have fought in loud ways or quiet, in the spotlight or behind the scenes, to have their dignity recognized. For Black folk and queer folk, for women and immigrants and disabled persons, and for so many more, across all the different communities of faith.
We are Church. We are making the Church be what it was always meant to be. Blessed indeed are we.
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?
“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.
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.
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 withoutalso 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.
Binary-Breaking Worship 