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“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
Hymns Hymns Multifaith Other search markers worship-planning

“We Are One in the Spirit” revised for interfaith use

Painting of four figures holding hands on the shore, each one marked with a different religious symbol, with an orange sunset sky and water with a boat behind them. Two smaller figures are dancing under a tree nearby.
"Unity in Diversity" by Nayana Mevada

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.!)


Categories
Hymns Hymns Other search markers worship-planning

“What Wondrous Love Is This” revised

Oil painting of the risen Christ, glowing gold, standing over a pit of dead bones and under the blessing hand of God, sweeping up the things of earth into a whirlpool of color. Birds, balls, and bicycles; musical instruments and charcoal grills; plants and houses, pets and people, mowers and swing sets. Also present in the cosmic swirl are a loaf of bread and a glass of wine.
James B. Janknegt, "Make All Things New," 2005

See below for credit info and an explanation of changes made.

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!)

Categories
Hymns Other search markers worship-planning

Why (& when) might we revise a hymn?

Photo of hymnals lined up in their little shelves on the back of pews

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 you out 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’s accountability 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?