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“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.” ↩︎
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John 10 & Acts 2: abundant life is anarchic life

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

John 10:10

If I had to pick a favorite single Bible verse that isn’t part of one of my favorite passages, John 10:10 would probably be it. In many ways it encapsulates Jesus’s ministry and purpose — what he is for, and what he is against. In other words, it names what Christ’s salvation actually is — what we’re saved from, and what we’re freed for.

Jesus is for life abundant — or, as the CEB translates it, “life to the fullest.” The Greek adverb he uses is περισσός (perissos), which has an intensity to it, a vehemence, a sense of excess. One might also translate it “excessively” or “overflowingly.” Because it has that prefix peri, one source1 suggests you could even translate it “all-around.”

However you translate it, it’s clear that Jesus’s liberation is all-encompassing, is holistic, floods every area of our lives, individual and communal. We aren’t freed just to survive, but truly and fully live.

An icon in traditional style of Jesus with brown skin and dark hair and beard, holding a lamb.
“The Good Shepherd” by Kelly Latimore

Queer abundance — liberated for

As a queer person, this truth set me free to pursue the things I needed to live fully.

It’s possible I could have eeked out a shell of a life constrained to my assigned gender, in a body I felt utterly severed from rather than experiencing my body as me. (It’s also very possible I couldn’t have survived that way; one of the violent fruits of nonacceptance and restricting trans people’s access to affirming healthcare is suicide.) However, I could not have lived life to the full that way. I would not have experienced Christ’s salvation holistically. I wouldn’t be open to the divine presence in my body, mind, psyche, and relationships with other people and all living things.

Embracing my trans self, daring to fall in love with someone of my assigned sex, discovering the power of queer community — these are some of the things Jesus liberated me for; these are the things that have brought me into life that overflows outward, joyously spilling out into my connections with everyone and everything.

Liberated from

In this example from my own life, we also see what kinds of things Jesus liberates us from — the thieves that break in to steal our joy and destroy our peace, who attempt to rob us even of our inherent dignity as creatures made in the divine image.

Any person or group that preaches Jesus’s salvation only as something we’ll experience in some abstract heaven, that denies the divinity in flesh and dirt and the everyday mess and miracle that is embodied life, is one of these thieves who threaten to destroy us.

Those who seem to hold nothing but contempt for this life, to hate this world — who seek to control other bodies and minds as well as the created earth, to constrain sexuality, to bring shame and fear and starvation of body and spirit — work against the abundant life Jesus came to bring. Even and especially when they do so in Christ’s name.

Comic by the Naked Pastor. An angry sheep is preaching while holding up a bible and pointing accusingly at a rainbow sheep sitting in the pews. Jesus is sitting next to that sheep, covering its ears so it doesn't have to hear the hate
caption…

“Us” and “them”

I’ve been saying “we” and “they” in too vague a way — who are “we,” the sheep whom Jesus the gate protects and guides into flourishing?

Whether the Gospel writer meant Jews, or early Christians, or something else when writing about Jesus’s “flock,” the verses leading up to verse 10 make it clear that the evangelist doesn’t mean all humanity; it’s a limited group. So did Jesus come to bring abundant life, life to the full, to his followers alone?

If we continue reading beyond the lectionary passage, the question of who gets included in this overflowing abundance expands exceedingly:

“I have other sheep that don’t belong to this sheep pen. I must lead them too. They will listen to my voice and there will be one flock, with one shepherd.” – John 10:16

In her book Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others, Barbara Brown Taylor refers to this passage to explore salvation beyond Christianity. God’s liberation, the abundant life that we as Christians believe Jesus came to bring into the world, is for all people.

At the same time, Taylor warns us against disrespecting our non-Christian neighbors when naming this not-Christian-exclusive, universal liberation:

“Once my holy envy led me to ask more of my tradition than the narrative of exclusive salvation and everlasting triumph, I began to search for counternnarratives that sounded more like Jesus to me. In particular, I looked for stories that supported Christian engagement with religious strangers — not as potential converts but as agents of the God who transcends religion and never met a stranger. …

In Judaism they are called ‘righteous gentiles.’ I do not know what they are called in Christianity, but Jesus receives them more than once, whether they come from Samaria, Syrophoenicia, Canaan, or Rome. …

If it is easy for Christians to overlook the ‘otherness’ of these religious strangers, then I think that is because we assume that once they enter our story they never leave it. In gratitude for their blessing, we baptize them as anonymous Christians. We make them one of us. A few do join us, but this is not the norm…”

Rather than declaring John 10 is evidence of “anonymous Christians” — Karl Rahner’s idea that non-Christians who sincerely seek to live ethical lives are essentially living as Christians and thus included in Christ’s salvation2 — perhaps we can focus less on the hypothetical details of Jesus’s gate and shepherd analogies and more on its overarching sense of radical inclusion and belonging.

As Taylor explains, Jesus does not elaborate on these many sheep of other flocks, but we can imagine a “God of many sheeps, many folds, many favorites, many mansions.” With this good news, we are challenged to engage respectfully with people of all religions and values, and work towards their abundant life as fervently as our own.

Illustration of a single building constructed almost townhouse style, with each individual unit representing a different world religion
“In My Father’s House There Are Many Mansions” by Irving Amen

And that leads us to the anarchy and mutual aid of Acts 2:42-47!

I know that for many, the term anarchy evokes visions of Heath Ledger’s Joker who “just wants to watch the world burn.” But the anarchists I hang out with are deeply committed to the world’s flourishing, believing that true equity and justice can only be achieved by removing all hierarchy.

An anarchic community has no central leaders. Decisions are made communally. Resources are shared equally. A core component to anarchy is a complete leveling of class, the systems by which the few wield power over the many. There’s no bigger threat to Empire. To white supremacy. To capitalism.

Images of Paul and Karl Marx wearing sunglasses. Under Paul is text from Acts 2: All the believers were united and shared everything. 45 They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed them." Under Marx is his famous slogan, "From each according to their ability; to each according to their need"

In Acts and various Pauline epistles, we see an effort to dismantle hierarchies, reflecting Mary’s Luke 1 proclamation that God lifts up the lowly and casts down the powerful, fills up the hungry and sends the rich away empty.

Here in Acts 2, the rich Jesus-followers liquidate their wealth and distribute it among the poor Jesus-followers, effectively making themselves one of the poor. What a radical act of faith and commitment to true equity!

The mutual living, or koinonia, of this community reminds me of one disabled activist’s care webs.

In texts like Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha describes webs of care that they have participated in among other disabled queer and trans BIPOC — i.e., people who are failed by the government and institutions, by school and church and even family, and who therefore know deep in their bones that only “We keep us safe.” Because disabled persons often need to figure out mutual aid in order to literally survive, Piepzna Samarasinha explains, the disability community has much to teach everybody about how to live into mutual care.

The first such care web Piepzna Samarasinha helped form came together when “three disabled queer Asian femmes” were prepping to travel to a conference and going through the “very common disability experience” of “having your freak-out about how badly the whole thing will fuck up your body.” They decided that instead of choosing “between handling our access needs on our own or crossing our fingers that the conference and the airlines would come through to take care of us,” they would “experiment in coming together and caring for each other,” with powerful results:

We didn’t just survive the conference—we made powerful community. Committed to leaving no one behind, we rolled through the conference in a big, slow group of wheelchair users, cane users, and slow-moving people…People got out of the way. Instead of going out to inaccessible party sites, we chose to stay in, and ate and shared about our disabled lives. For some of us, it was our first time doing that. People cried, flirted, and fell in love.

…It was just four days, but people went home to their communities transformed.

We were no longer willing to accept isolation, or a tiny bit of access, or being surrounded by white disabled folks as the only kind of disability community we could access, or being forgotten. …We came back less willing to accept ableism from conferences and community spaces, because we knew it could be different—and if CCA could happen in someplace with scarce physical resources like Detroit, it could happen anywhere. Being part of that wild pack of slowness, talking tentatively about our disabled lives in ways we’d never said out loud before, changed everybody’s lives.

Of course, these care webs are never perfect. Piepzna Samarasinha describes how many fall apart due to unresolved harm, disagreements, or other interpersonal conflict. But they’ve never seen that as a reason to give up on the concept altogether:

“[T]he struggles we hit weren’t failures or signs of how inadequate we were but incredibly valuable learnings. …[O]ur struggle to figure these questions out is at the heart of our movement work. CCA [a disbanded care web] is another worthy, imperfect model in my body’s archive, one I build on as I build care in my life now.”

Photo of Leah Lakshmi, who has brown skin and long blue hair, smiling at the viewer. Next to them is the cover of Care Work.

We can say the same for the earliest communities that sought to live by Jesus’s example, in and through and as Christ’s body.

The early Church did not live out Acts 2’s vision perfectly.

“First of all, when you meet together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you, and I partly believe it. 19 It’s necessary that there are groups among you, to make it clear who is genuine. 20 So when you get together in one place, it isn’t to eat the Lord’s meal. 21 Each of you goes ahead and eats a private meal. One person goes hungry while another is drunk.” – 1 Corinthians 11:18-21

Eavesdropping on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, we learn that the Corinthian community of Christ-followers is not living the way Acts 2 claims the Jerusalem community was living. Instead of unity, they form cliques. Instead of divvying up resources, some eat richly while others go hungry.

None of us manages to live into our own values all the time. Paul is as human as the rest of us in that matter:

At some points, Paul seems to possess a transcendent glimpse of a Kin-dom that demolishes the systems that pit one ethnicity above another, that enslave some and empower others to dominate, and that situate men over women and all other “non-men.3

At other points, Paul (if Paul is indeed the author of these passages) clearly retains the biases he’s spent a lifetime absorbing. Take Ephesians 5 and 6, where Paul instructs wives to obey their husbands (5:22) and enslaved people to obey their masters (6:5). He does so while acknowledging that God does not classify people by status (6:9), seeming not to notice the cognitive dissonance in therefore reinforcing these hierarchies of sex and class.

Paul, if you believe that God’s Kin-dom is one in which these human hierarchies are no more, live into that now! For God’s Kin-dom isn’t just a far-away dream; it’s here, and we are the midwives tasked with delivering it.Paul, as you tell us, don’t conform to worldly systems and structures — be transformed by the renewing of your mind, constantly reassessing your presumptions and beliefs through the lens of Christ’s words and actions.

Decolonizing one’s mind is a lifelong effort.

Just when we think we’ve unpacked all the biases we’ve been absorbing from birth, we mess up again, cause harm. Thus it is essential to keep paying attention, to keep listening to those whom unjust systems place under us — so that we might partake in both the daily work of lifting up the oppressed and casting down the powerful, and the big-picture struggle to completely dismantle the systems that created poor and rich, oppressed and oppressor, powerful and disempowered.

In essence, let us always strive to be Christ’s hands and feet on earth, living in ways that bring life — full, abundant life that spills over into all things! — to ourselves, to each other, and even to those we think of as “other.”

  1. https://biblehub.com/greek/622.htm. I’m not a fan of HELPS Word-studies in general, or the Discovery Bible that produces them, but I did find this “all-around” translation option intriguing. ↩︎
  2. Admittedly, this explanation of “anonymous Christians” is oversimplified and Rahner himself would probably have a bone to pick about how I’ve summed up his concept. Go read his own writing for more depth. ↩︎
  3. “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” – Galatians 3:28 ↩︎
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When normativity controls our vision: Emmaus through a queer & crip lens

Key points:

  • One way we might interpret the disciples’ inability to recognize Jesus is by looking at how cultural expectations shape what we see and fail to see.
  • Perhaps the risen Christ’s wounds cause him to walk differently than he used to — slowly, haltingly, with a cane. Just as the blind man isn’t recognized by his neighbors once he becomes sighted, perhaps no one recognizes Jesus because he has become more visibly disabled. They don’t expect to see Jesus alive, or the divine in a disabled body — so they don’t.
  • When trans people transition, loved ones often “grieve” the person they “lost.” But you didn’t “lose a son”; you gained a daughter! Your beloved is not dead — they are becoming ever more alive!

The Emmaus story of Luke 24 reminds us that there are more disciples than just the Marys, Martha, and the main 12: Cleopas and an unnamed Jesus-follower are the ones to whom the risen Christ first appears.

And they fail to recognize him. Or, as verse 16 puts it, their eyes were “prevented” from recognizing Jesus — what’s that all about?

The Greek root for that word “prevented” is κρατέω (krateó), which more literally means “take hold of,” “take control of.” The passive voice used in this verse begs the question, taken control of by what/whom? Many, many people have speculated, but here’s my queer/crip reading:

It’s normativity that has taken control of the disciples’ gaze.

When you are trans or disabled, people frequently misperceive you; they see what they want to see, what they expect to see.

Cisnormativity tells us that humans come in two and only two types — woman and man. Our brains have been trained to categorize every person we encounter into one of those two boxes so rapidly we don’t even notice it’s happening unless. If you haven’t done the work to truly retrain your brain to understand that anyone of any gender can look like anything, you will fail to see us for who and what and all we are.

Ableism tells us that disabled persons are not whole human beings, that a disabled life is a tragic life. Wheelchair users, d/Deaf persons, people with intellectual disabilities, and others frequently report being talked over as if they weren’t there, or down to as if they were a baby. When we find a disabled person who is simply, you know, living their lives — making dinner, getting married, hiking, having kids, writing poems — we turn them into inspiration porn because in society’s eyes, disabled achievement, disabled genius, disabled joy is an anomaly. In reality, actor and playwright Neil Marcus tells us, “Disability is not a brave struggle or ‘courage in the face of adversity.’ Disability is an art. It’s an ingenious way to live.”

So what form did Jesus come in that the disciples’ eyes simply couldn’t process him as Christ?

As I brought up for John 20’s story of Thomas, disability theology proclaims a risen Christ who is disabled, whose crucifixion wounds would have been impairing wounds. The feet that carried Jesus across the entire Palestinian region now bear the wounds of crucifixion — his gait, his posture, his movement forever transformed.

Maybe the “stranger” who joins these two on their way walks differently than Jesus did before his death. Maybe he uses a cane. Moves slowly, haltingly, as if relearning how to walk.

“Braced Christ” by Rachel Holdforth

John 9’s story of the man born blind was in the lectionary just a few weeks ago. In that tale, a man born blind is no longer recognized by his neighbors once he becomes sighted. They don’t expect a blind man to suddenly see — so they don’t see him. More importantly, they don’t expect a blind man to act with agency, to speak up for himself, to be anything but the street corner beggar — so they don’t believe him. Insist on getting his parents so that they can confirm his identity.

I imagine something similar is happening here on the road to Emmaus. They don’t expect to see Jesus alive, or the divine in a disabled body — so they don’t.

When do they finally recognize Jesus? When he breaks bread with them.

Perhaps Jesus has a certain way of saying the blessing, or of holding up the loaf as he breaks it; perhaps he puts so much warmth into his words that logic and biases simply crumble apart as he does so. Yes, Jesus is dead. Yes, this man moves differently than Jesus did. Nonetheless this is Jesus! “Were not our hearts strangely warmed within us?” The heart burns past presumption.

A Queer joy: What we see as death is sometimes new life

The lectionary reading ends with these two disciples going to tell the others about their encounter with Christ, only to find that the others are already talking excitedly amongst themselves because Jesus appeared to Simon too! But I recommend reading a couple verses longer:

36 While they were saying these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 37 They were terrified and afraid. They thought they were seeing a ghost.

38 He said to them, “Why are you startled? Why are doubts arising in your hearts? 39 Look at my hands and my feet. It’s really me! Touch me and see, for a ghost doesn’t have flesh and bones like you see I have.” 40 As he said this, he showed them his hands and feet. 41 Because they were wondering and questioning in the midst of their happiness, he said to them, “Do you have anything to eat?” 42 They gave him a piece of baked fish. 43 Taking it, he ate it in front of them.

There is a tenderness in how Jesus addresses his friends. He knows they don’t get it; in coming back to life, he’s exploded the very definition of death. So he guides them — to touch, to see, to understand.

A narrative I hear too often from the families of a trans person who has begun to live into the fullness of who they are is that of death. You cannot conceive of someone you’ve always seen as one gender — with all the expectations and familial roles tied into that gender — being anything else. So you grieve as if that person has died — but the reality is that their loved one is finally becoming more and more alive. Becoming more and more themselves.

Once your eyes adjust, you’ll see your loved one is still who they always were — just brighter, lighter, freer. Pay attention, and you’ll know them in their “breaking of the bread” — their quirks and passions, laughter and memories.

Perhaps one day they’ll share an old inside joke and — oh, I see now! It is you!! — and your heart will be strangely, surprisingly, stupendously warmed.

God comes to upturn our every expectation. Blessed are the ones who see past presumptions, who break beyond binaries, who remain steadfast even when the world flips upside-down.

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.” ↩︎