(Have a queer / antiracist / anti-ableist, otherwise liberationist or justice-focused worship resource that’s not on this list? Let me know at queerlychristian36@gmail.com!)
When aiming to expand understandings of the divine, it’s always good to gather as many voices as you can! So while I welcome you to use any of the liturgy, hymns, and preaching prep material you find here on my site, I also want to share places to find other people’s worship materials + lectionary / preaching prep.
To queer worship is not only to pay attention to gender identity and sexuality, but to interrogate all the ways our worship excludes and harms so that we may then cultivate worship that intentionally centers all marginalized people’s voices, gifts, and ways of being and moving in the world.
So while many of these resources will indeed focus on LGBTQIA+ subjects and creators, I also include resources that center BIPOC, disabled people, immigrants, and others who are too often denied full belonging even within communities of faith.
On queering worship — the why, the how, the theology
Queering the Liturgy is a fantastic resource created by multiple queer ministers and theologians, divided into sections. You can find all sections at the above link; I’m pasting a selection below:
(Note: Call to Worship offers a limited number of free articles before asking you to subscribe. You can get to a few more by opening links in a private browser; but if you / your church has the budget for it, this is a worthwhile journal to subscribe to!)
Queering Christian Worshipprovides new imagination and tools to those who study and curate Christian worship across traditions.
The book is organized into three main parts:
An introduction to queer engagement with ritual practices,
Case studies that examine queer texts and contexts,
An examination of the horizons of queer liturgical theology and practice.
Queer Grace is Rev. Emmy Kegler’s website collecting queer Christian resources of all kinds. Here are a few pertaining to worship:
What would it look like if women built a lectionary focusing on women’s stories?
What does it look like to tell the good news through the stories of women who are often on the margins of scripture and often set up to represent bad news? How would a lectionary centering women’s stories, chosen with womanist and feminist commitments in mind, frame the presentation of the scriptures for proclamation and teaching?
The scriptures are androcentric, male-focused, as is the lectionary that is dependent upon them. As a result, many congregants know only the biblical men’s stories told in the Sunday lectionary read in their churches. A more expansive, more inclusive lectionary will remedy that by introducing readers and hearers of scripture to “women’s stories” in the scriptures.
Enfleshed’s Liturgy Library offers truly gorgeous, embodied worship materials from writers from various marginalized experiences. Explore all their stuff in the above link, or check out specific collections:
Note: much of this liturgy still makes use of binary language like “brothers and sisters.” I advise revising that language (e.g. to “sisters, brothers, and nonbinary siblings,” “kin in Christ,” “beloved community,” or other alternatives) if you make use of this liturgy.
Beyond Worship seeks to show LGBTQIA+ people that they are divine, here for a reason, and have so much to contribute to their communities.
Whether a poem, a short story, a psalm, a meditative guide, or an academic paper, each LGBTQIA+ author in this anthology explores what it means to find community and love in a society that tells them they are undeserving of both. From all over the world and from a variety of faith traditions, each author’s piece shows readers different ways of being in a world worth experiencing.
Black Liturgies is a project that integrates spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black body. You can find them on places like Instagram, or in an upcoming book.
These pieces are written by queer Black woman Cole Arthur Riley, who also wrote This Here Flesh.
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!
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.
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
“Jesus with a Stoma” by Rachel Holdforth“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 emptiedThemself, 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.
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.
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
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
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.”
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).
What other tactics have you taken in addressing anti-Jewish or supersessionist readings of scripture?
Footnotes:
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. ↩︎
John M. Hull, chapter 3 of Disability: The Inclusive Church Resource, 2014. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Greg Garrett, “For Fear of the Jews: Antisemitism in John’s Time and Ours,” chapter 13 of Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews.↩︎
In Advent, God’s Spirit comes in dreams, daring us to conceive of impossible things: that wolf and lamb might live in harmony; that the world’s despised might rise to greatest glory; that war-torn wastes might bloom and grow good fruit. – my writing in Call to Worship 59.1
Then on to Christmas, when we celebrate how (to paraphrase Saint Athanasius) the divine became human so that humans might become divine.
At Christmas, Creation sings a new song; God’s prophets proclaim good news: The Word of God has put on flesh so that we may put on divinity. Through Jesus, our newborn brother, we are adopted into God’s chosen family. – my writing in Call to Worship 59.1
In preparation for this holy time of the year, I want to share several resources created for Advent / Christmas 2025 that I had the honor of being part of.
First is More Light Presbyterians’ Advent devotional!
This resource offers a ~100 word devotion for every day of Advent. They will be posted daily on MLP’s Instagram and Facebook pages. It’ll also be published all at once in MLP’s monthly newsletter for December; sign up to receive it here.
Along with an Advent calendar that lists a trans organization or trans activist for each day of the season, Unbound’s devotional provides a reflection by a trans author for every Sunday & special day of Advent & Christmas. It’s a fantastic resource for communities or individuals who are hoping to queer up this season.
Click this readmore for a snippet of my reflection on the second Sunday of Christmas.
In the beginning, God spoke the Word; and God was the Word; and God was the breath that pushed that Word out into the void to spark life.
In the beginning was Wisdom, flowing forth from God’s mouth to unfurl Herself across the earth, seeking out those who’d welcome Her peculiar gifts.
Starting with Paul, who identified Christ as “the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24), Christians have traditionally connected the Hebrew scriptures’ personified Wisdom — often called Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom — with Jesus. Yet while the Word took on a human body whose features led those present at Their birth to declare, “It’s a boy!”, Wisdom is described — and speaks of Herself — in feminine terms.
Sophia, Woman Wisdom, assigned male at birth! Now that’s a trans story if I ever heard one. […]
And yet…I still default to thinking of Jesus as male. Why, when many of us have expanded our language for God beyond exclusively masculine terms, does it still feel strange — even inappropriate — to speak of the Person of God who is Jesus as she or they?
…It’s the physical body, isn’t it? In many ways, Jesus is as constrained by his (/her/their/zir…) assigned gender as the rest of us.
From birth, we are bombarded by messages telling us that our flesh is our gender — that, as feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir put it, “biology is destiny.” From the moment the Word put on flesh, that flesh (or our assumptions about it, because the Gospels don’t actually tell us much about Jesus’s physical appearance beyond what we can deduce from his circumcision in Luke 2) sealed Their fate: Creator God can exist beyond human labels, and the Spirit is, well, Spirit; but God the Son is a human man.
But trans folk know deep in our bones that biology is not destiny. Trans wisdom cuts through the bonds of the binary’s imposed futures, freeing all of us to imagine new possibilities…and, sometimes, to remember old ones. [… read the full thing here]
I wrote liturgy based on the Common Revised Lectionary for every Sunday and holy day of Advent 2025 and Christmas 2025/2026.
This liturgy is in many ways more “subtly queer” than Unbound’s devotional, as I wrote it to fit a broader range of contexts and church communities. However, I was delighted by the authorial freedom Call to Worship gave me; along with sticking to inclusive language for people (e.g. saying “siblings” instead of “brothers and sisters”), I was able to employ expansive language and pronouns for God! I also incorporate a lot of liberationist theology, from Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s concept of the Kin-dom of God to prayers emphasizing the goodness of embodied life.
To access all the Advent and Christmas material, you may need to subscribe to Call to Worship. If you are unable to do so, email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com and I’ll get the material to you.
In the meantime, click this readmore for a sampling.
Fantastically scandalous God, in being born into human life you burst through the rigid binary between worshiper and deity, Creator and creation. Inspire us to proclaim your astonishing news wherever we go — not only with words, but through actions of justice and love. Push us to prophecy against hoarding and exploitation; Empower us to rise up with oppressed peoples everywhere; Illuminate our path as we tend to your poisoned planet, so that all Creation may feel your embrace through us — your hands, your feet, your body here on earth. Amen.
TWIBAR’s annual Christmas episode
Every Christmas, The Word in Black and Red podcast puts out an episode featuring the short reflections of largely Christian leftists; I’m one of them! Keep an eye out for the episode on the podcast feed.
As a church that aims to live into God’s call to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly, we must acknowledge where we’ve fallen short —
particularly when it comes to the horrors that Palestinians have faced in a Western-backed colonial project since the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922, into the Nakba, or great catastrophe of ethnic cleansing in 1948,
and up through the present day, in these many months of violence escalated to genocidal levels.
If our desire for peace is true, we will let go of any false peace built on top of silenced voices and disenfranchised bodies.
We will cease to cry “Peace! Peace!” at a people that has not known peace for over 100 years.
As one step towards a true peace, let us confess together the ways in which, individually and collectively, through action or inaction, we have aided and abetted atrocities against fellow human beings with whom we share God’s image:
We confess our compliant silence from inside the heart of Empire.
Allowing hopelessness to collapse us into inaction, we shrug in despair as Western powers fuel our excess with African, Asian, Latin American, and Arab suffering, and the stealing and stripping of Indigenous lands all across the weeping Earth, including in Palestine.
We confess our complicity as Christians with our long and ongoing marriage to Empire —
our bloody past of crusades and pogroms, missionary schools, eugenics, and all kinds of evil wrapped in a guise of Christian “love” — that extends into our present.
We confess our ties to Christian Zionism begun in the nineteenth century British Empire and continued through our “progressive” theologies of the late 1900s.
We confess the ways we reduce all Jewish people into a monolith instead of respecting the diversity of perspectives and allegiances therein. We confess how we treat our Jewish siblings as pawns in our guilt and savior complexes, our various redemption myths:
We imply our faith supersedes Jews’ own on the one hand, while on the other, we twist the very real issue of antisemitism into a weapon to forward our colonial projects and anti-Arab racism.
When nationalism and Christian supremacy erect murderous walls and stifle the reality of one Beloved Community of all human beings, Forgive us, redeemer God. Move us into honesty.
In our complicity, we confess our willful ignorance, our failure to seek out accurate information — allowing vital stories to be silenced or twisted into lies.
We allow ourselves to be lulled by pretty propaganda lifting up modern Israel as a “promised land” for Holocaust survivors, for environmental justice and queer inclusion, because that feels better than the truth: survivors silenced and kept in poverty; desert biomes forced into European molds, ancient olive trees obliterated, and the searing truth that no place that enables racism and apartheid can ever be a queer friendly or environmental paradise.
When fear or uncertainty keeps us from speaking up; When we choose our own comfort over courageous conversations, Forgive us, redeeming God. Move us into courage.
Finally, we confess a collective failure of imagination.
We have fallen for the lies that this conflict is too complicated to resolve, that justice is impossible, that hope is dead — instead of listening for Spirit’s wisdom and noticing God’s inbreaking Kin-dom in the vision and voice of Palestinians who have never given up on justice, on believing in peace, on believing in a multicultural, interfaith future for the land.
Forgive us, redeemer God. Move us to seek, center, and celebrate Palestinian visions of justice and peace.
In repentance and hope, we pray to the God of both Sarah and Hagar, both Isaac and Ishmael, Parent of all peoples and protector of the oppressed:
Help us recommit to seeking your Spirit at work among ruins, to lifting up the voices Empire aims to silence, to God’s Kin-dom where all peoples, all Creation, can live together in joy.
__
Friends, our shortcomings are great, but God’s love is greater.
In his invitation to peace after his execution and resurrection, Letting go of the betrayals of the past in order to initiate a faithful future, Jesus reminds us that it is never too late for collective wholeness and healing.
Thus reminded and redeemed by the God who crosses every border and tears down every wall, we may extend the peace of Christ to one another —
not an easy peace, not a halfhearted peace, but a peace built on justice and mutuality —
both here in this space, and across the world.
The peace of Christ be with you…
Please feel free to make use of this piece in worship or Sunday school, in ceremony or across social media. Just credit it to Avery Arden of binarybreakingworhsip.com — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
You may make small adjustments to fit your own particular context.
About this piece:
We are many months into genocide, and misinformation still abounds; the USA and other Western nations continue to fund Israel’s violence; Palestinians continue to be bombed, starved, imprisoned, defamed.
We cannot lose steam; we must continue to speak up, to educate one another and get active till Palestine is finally free.
My hope is that this Confession can be one piece igniting further conversation and action in faith communities. If your community is not at a place where a confession like this could be shared in worship, make it the subject of a Sunday School lesson or coffee hour conversation instead.
For resources describing the various claims in this piece, see this post.
My top recommendation on Palestine & Christianity is Mitri Raheb’s book Decolonizing Palestine; read a summary of it here.
For discussions on fighting antisemitism while supporting Palestine, my top rec is Safety through Solidarity by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber.
As Presbyterians, we believe in a God who takes up the cause of those whom human societies consider “least.”
In this era of escalating anti-trans rhetoric and legislation, in our own state and beyond, our faith calls us to affirm God’s movement among and through the trans community in particular.
Even as we leave room for some differences in belief, we can agree that there is no place in the life of the Church for discrimination against any person.
United in this belief, let us confess together the ways in which we continue to fall short in protecting and celebrating the gender diverse members of God’s human family:
CONFESSION
When we refuse to recognize the unique ways our transgender siblings participate in co-creation and manifest the Divine Image of a God far vaster than any rules we devise or boxes we build,
Forgive and transform us, Creator God. Open us to choose respect over rejection, conversation over misinformation, relationship over alienation.
When we look on as oppressive forces hold our trans kin captive —
suffocate their free will, strip them of health and safety, drive them to desperation and rob them of their very lives — and we shrug off their plight, assuming it has nothing to do with us;
or else stay silent out of fear for our own security and comfort,
Forgive and transform us, Liberator God. Wake us to the life-or-death urgency of this struggle. Open us to choose action over silence, to risk much in the name of justice.
When our denomination’s promises of full participation and representation for all persons and groups remain unfulfilled —
with many queer candidates still finding their ministry obstructed, and trans parishioners forced to choose between staying in hostile spaces or leaving their spiritual homes to seek belonging elsewhere,
Forgive and transform us, God who favors outcasts. Open us to see both the possibilities and perils of our institution, so that we may revise the things that harm and bolster the things that liberate.
God who hears and joins in our lament, God who speaks through unexpected prophets,
instill in us a hunger for your justice that will drive our solidarity and action until we have become — in fact as well as in faith — a community of all people made one in Christ by the power of your Holy Spirit.
PARDON
Friends, we have a long way to go, and much work to do — but we rejoice now in the assurance that, through Jesus Christ, we are forgiven and renewed to continue the journey.
Thanks be to God.
PEACE
Assured of God’s mercy, we may be bold in sharing Christ’s peace — a peace built on justice, a peace that preserves diversity — with all we meet.
The peace of Christ be with you. And also with you…
Please feel free to make use of this piece in worship or Sunday school, in ceremony or across social media. Just credit it to Avery Arden of binarybreakingworhsip.com — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
You may make small adjustments to fit your own particular context.
About this piece:
I wrote this confession and pardon to be used during morning worship at the PC(USA)’s 226th General Assembly.
I was asked to center its call to acknowledge where we have failed our transgender kin around Luke 4′s account of Jesus reading from Isaiah in his local synagogue — the prophet’s proclamation of good news for the poor, the imprisoned, for disabled persons and all whom Empire oppresses.
When Jesus announces after he reads, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled,” his audience raves, impressed by this local boy grown up into a wise teacher. It’s only when he continues his commentary to make it clear that gentiles will be receiving the Spirit of God’s liberation as well — for did not Elijah and Elisha minister to gentile widows and lepers? — that the crowd’s praise sours into rage.
What a fitting text to draw from when confronting our own resistance to expanding God’s liberation to those we consider outsiders. God is lavishing Their Spirit on Their queer children, freeing Their trans children from bondage and into ministry — and there are many who refuse to recognize this divine activity.
Just days before this confession was shared in worship, the General Assembly discussed and ultimately approved the Olympia Overture, which seeks to solidify protections for queer members — particularly queer ordination candidates — of our denomination. Though I rejoice that this overture passed, the debates were painful to witness, reminding me that I share this spiritual home with people who deny my humanity, my vocation, or God’s movement through me and those like me — and who balk at naming this denial “discrimination.”
I give thanks to all who courageously spoke up in support of the Olympia Overture; may they find themselves surrounded by support and love after living out such brave vulnerability. And I pray that those who feared or raged against its passing will find themselves broken open, bit by bit or all at once, by the Spirit of Wisdom who guides us all into understanding. Maybe this overture’s passing can be an opportunity for deeper conversations that will draw us all closer. Maybe. If we all are brave, and bold, and ignited by love. If we all commit ourselves to living into F-1.0404‘s call to openness:
"...a new openness to the sovereign activity of God in the Church and in the world, to a more radical obedience to Christ, and to a more joyous celebration in worship and work;
a new openness in its own membership, becoming in fact as well as in faith a community of all people of all ages, races, ethnicities, abilities, genders, and worldly conditions, made one in Christ by the power of the Spirit, as a visible sign of the new humanity;
a new openness to see both the possibilities and perils of its institutional forms in order to ensure the faithfulness and usefulness of these forms to God’s activity in the world; and
a new openness to God’s continuing reformation of the Church ecumenical, that it might be more effective in its mission."
We worship a Mystery, a Being too vast to capture in words, who reveals Godself to each of us in different ways.
While making room for different understandings, let us affirm the faith that draws us together:
We believe in the God whose Word birthed the cosmos,
Who shaped human beings from the rich topsoil, breathed Her own breath into us, blessed both our earthy bodies and celestial spark, and declared us Good, very Good!
When evil taught us shame for those very bodies God had blessed,
God became a seamstress, tenderly dressing Her children, Adam and Eve — never dismissing our distress but giving us what we need to believe in our inherent dignity again.
This God reminds us at every opportunity That we are destined for freedom:
God did what it took to liberate Her people from enslavement in Egypt — and from countless future captors, human powers who wield control through violence and fear.
The God who walked through Eden put on wheels — the throne Ezekiel saw rolling through the heavens to follow Their people into exile, and back again.
And then, this same God settled into flesh:
For God so loved the world They’d made that They entered into it Themself, weaving Godself a human form within a human womb.
From boundless power to an infant in the lap of his teenage mother, God learned to crawl, to walk, to speak with human tongue the news They’d been proclaiming through pillars of flame and cloud, through prophets’ cries and in the stillest silence.
In Jesus, God brought restoration to bodies and spirits aching under the yoke of empire, the shackles of shame —
and then God died.
But no tomb can restrain Life itself for long: Christ rose with wounds — reminders of what happens when we allow violence and fear to reign unchallenged.
This wounded Christ ascended into heaven, but his Spirit abides with us still — stirring up our indifference, whispering hope into our despair, and whisking us up into the hard but holy work of unrolling a kin-dom accessible to all.
Amen.
About this piece:
If you this piece it in your own service, please credit it to Avery Arden — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
I wrote this affirmation for a worship service centered around John 20:19-30’s account of Jesus inviting Thomas to touch his wounds.
God created us to be inspirited bodies, embodied spirits — in Genesis 1, God calls not just our spirits but our bodies good — and not just some bodies, but all bodies, disabled bodies included.
Disability theologians have long been inspired by the idea that Jesus’s resurrected body keeps its wounds — wounds that would impair mobility and fine motor skills, that would cause chronic pain.
In rising with a disabled body, Jesus “redeems” disability: he evinces that disability is not brokenness, is not shameful or the result of sin; and he evinces that disability can exist separate from suffering — that suffering is not intrinsic to disability.
For more on Jesus’s own disabling wounds, with which he chose to rise and ascend into heaven, check out The Disabled God by Nancy Eiesland…
…Or just email me – it’s one of my favorite topics and I’m always thrilled to get to discuss it!
The idea of a wounded Christ also connects to Henri Nouwen’s concept of the “wounded healer,” which I recommend looking into if that phrase resonates with you.
The description of God as seamstress restoring a sense of dignity to Adam and Eve is inspired by Cole Arthur Riley’s book This Here Flesh, where she writes:
“On the day the world began to die, God became a seamstress. This is the moment in the Bible that I wish we talked about more often.
When Eve and Adam eat from the tree, and decay and despair begin to creep in, when they learn to hide from their own bodies, when they learn to hide from each other—no one ever told me the story of a God who kneels and makes clothes out of animal skin for them.
I remember many conversations about the doom and consequence imparted by God after humans ate from that tree. I learned of the curses, too, and could maybe even recite them. But no one ever told me of the tenderness of this moment. It makes me question the tone of everything that surrounds it.
In the garden, when shame had replaced Eve’s and Adam’s dignity, God became a seamstress. He took the skin off of his creation to make something that would allow humans to stand in the presence of their maker and one another again.
Isn’t it strange that God didn’t just tell Adam and Eve to come out of hiding and stop being silly, because he’s the one who made them and has seen every part of them? He doesn’t say that in the story, or at least we do not know if he did. But we do know that God went to great lengths to help them stand unashamed. Sometimes you can’t talk someone into believing their dignity. You do what you can to make a person feel unashamed of themselves, and you hope in time they’ll believe in their beauty all on their own.
…
People say we are unworthy of salvation. I disagree. Perhaps we are very much worth saving. It seems to me that God is making miracles to free us from the shame that haunts us. Maybe the same hand that made garments for a trembling Adam and Eve is doing everything he can that we might come a little closer. I pray his stitches hold. Our liberation begins with the irrevocable belief that we are worthy to be liberated, that we are worthy of a life that does not degrade us but honors our whole selves. When you believe in your dignity, or at least someone else does, it becomes more difficult to remain content with the bondage with which you have become so acquainted. You begin to wonder what you were meant for.
“…On the morning of the holiday of Shavuot, Jewish communities around the world chant from the book of Ezekiel, reciting the Israelite prophet’s striking image of God. The prophet speaks of a radiant fire borne on a vast chariot, lifted up by four angelic creatures with fused legs, lustrous wings, and great wheels. …One recent Shavuot, Ezekiel’s vision split open my own imagination. Hearing those words chanted, I felt a jolt of recognition, an intimate familiarity. I thought: God has wheels!
When I think of God on wheels, I think of the delight I take in my own chair. I sense the holy possibility that my own body knows, the way wheels set me free and open up my spirit. I like to think that God inhabits the particular fusions that mark a body in wheels: the way flesh flows into frame, into tire, into air. This is how the Holy moves through me, in the intricate interplay of muscle and spin, the exhilarating physicality of body and wheel, the rare promise of a wide-open space, the unabashed exhilaration of a dance floor, where wing can finally unfurl.
On wheels, I feel the tenor of the path deep in my sinews and sit bones. I come to know the intimate geography of a place: not just broad brushstrokes of terrain, but the minute fluctuations of topography, the way the wheel flows. When I roll, I pay particular attention to the interstices and intersections: the place where concrete seams together uneasily, the buckle of tree roots pushing up against asphalt, the bristle of crumbling brick.
I have come to believe this awareness reflects a quality of divine attention. Perhaps the divine presence moves through this world with a bone-deep knowledge of every crack and fissure. Perhaps God is particularly present at junctions and unexpected meetings, alert to points of encounter where two things come together…”
“When I was about 12 years old, I felt God didn’t love me as much as other people because I am in a wheelchair and because I can’t do lots of the things that other people can do. I felt this way because I did not see anyone with a wheelchair in the Bible, and nearly all the disabled people in the Bible get healed by Jesus – so they are not like me.”
She felt alienated by much of what she read in the Bible – until she was given new food for thought.
“My mum showed me a verse from the Book of Daniel (Chapter 7, Verse 9), which basically says God’s throne has wheels, so God has a wheelchair.
“In fact it’s not just any old chair, it’s the best chair in the Bible. It’s God’s throne, and it’s a wheelchair. This made me feel like God understands what it’s like to have a wheelchair and that having a wheelchair is actually very cool, because God has one.”
written upon realizing that the first days of Chanukah and Advent coincided this year
Happy Chanukah to those who celebrate it, and blessed Advent to those who observe it! Constructive criticism on this poem is invited and appreciated — particularly from any Jewish folks who take the time to point out any accidental misrepresentations of your holiday.
Image description below; or you can read the poem in its original format outside of screenshots in this google doc.
If you are interested in using this piece in a worship service or elsewhere, email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com.
Images show the text of a poem titled “intertwined inceptions: written upon realizing that the first days of Chanukkah and Advent coincided this year.”
The poem’s format places lines about Advent to the left, and lines about Hanukkah to the right, with lines about both in the center. This is difficult to transliterate in a screen-reader friendly way, so I’ll put an “A” before each Advent bit, an “H” before each Hanukkah bit, and a “B” for shared lines.
A: four tall tapers ring round a fifth on their bed of pine branches
H: eight tall tapers proudly flank the ninth along their branching arms
B: and one candle lights another
A: upon an altar draped in royal purple.
H: where passersby may glimpse through windowpanes.
B: we marvel at
A: the Word made Flesh — the miracle of Yes:
“I, Most High sovereign, will become the lowest, weakest, poorest one!”
“I’ll bear my own Creator in my womb — with joy, let it be done!”
H: “a great miracle happened here” — the miracle of Enough:
a mighty army brought to shame by one small hammer in God’s name
and a pittance of oil stretched across eight days’ flames…
B: we remember
A: the stronghold of her stomach
stretched around the Son of God:
seed of Divinity growing in a womb-dark sea…
H: the stronghold of the sanctuary retaken and restored
by that dedicated band who’d rather die than forsake their Lord.
B: we praise!
A: Magnificat anima mea Dominum et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo
God casts down the mighty from their thrones, lifts up the humble, fills the hungry with good things, and sends the rich away empty!
If the world tells you that you are unworthy of a seat at the table, that your presence is unwelcome or even unwholesome, know that Jesus extends an invitation to you personally.
This table does not belong to human beings, but to the God who delights in you, Who welcomes you without demanding you be anything but your own beautiful self.
Come, join this joyful feast without fear.
God has set a place just for you.
About this piece:
I wrote this affirmation for my church’s More Light Sunday service, an LGBTQA/queer-focused service. Themes included learning how to love ourselves, our neighbors, and our God; reclaiming scripture from those who have weaponized it; and the power of story.
If you this piece it in your own service, please credit it to Avery Arden — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
The love of our queer God unites us into one Body — not in spite of, but in celebration of our varied gifts and roles in the story God is telling even now.
As one, let us affirm some of what we believe about the God who is for us when we are in the closet, and when we come out, when we receive our loved ones with rejoicing and when we strive to understand.
We believe in the God who came out to Moses from the midst of unburned branches with a name They had never revealed before —
a name shared with love, shared as an invitation into deeper relationship, deeper understanding of the God Who Is and Who Will Be the steadfast ally of shunned and shackled peoples.
We believe in the God of Joseph, who takes tattered lives and weaves them into wholeness.
When Joseph came out to his brothers as a dress-draped dreamer and faced their violent rejection,
God went with Joseph into slavery, into imprisonment, and out again, guiding his way into flourishing.
But They also stayed with Joseph’s brothers, never ceasing to work on their hard hearts, preparing them for the tearful reunion where they would embrace Joseph’s differences as life-bringing gifts.
We believe in the God of Esther, who protected her from being outed unwillingly in a place hostile to her very being;
and who, when the time came to act, filled her with the courage and power she needed to use what privilege she had to save the more vulnerable members of her people.
We believe in the God of Mary, the teenage girl who faced disgrace by coming out as full of grace, pregnant with divinity —
yet she did so boldly, joyously, recognizing the hand of God in the status quo’s upturning.
We believe in Jesus, whose identity as God’s beloved son and God Themself, as Word made Flesh and Life that died is too complex for human minds to fathom —
yet Jesus yearned to be known, to be understood by those who loved him most! He asked them earnestly, “Who do you say that I am?” but told them not to out him to the world before he was ready to share his truth in his own time — And oh, how he’d shine!
We believe that the God who liberated Lazurus from his tomb, and who overcame death by rising from a tomb of his own,
is the selfsame Spirit who enters into the tombs we build around ourselves or shove our neighbors into;
She looses our bindings and pulls us into Her great Upturning.
Amen.
About this piece:
I wrote this affirmation for my church’s More Light Sunday service, an LGBTQA/queer-focused service. Themes included learning how to love ourselves, our neighbors, and our God; reclaiming scripture from those who have weaponized it; and the power of story.
If you this piece it in your own service, please credit it to Avery Arden — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
[image: a digital painting of Joseph of Genesis by tomato-bird on tumblr, a figure with light brown skin, brown eyes, and curly dark hair sitting in a field. They have their head propped on one hand as they sit, gazing off into the distance with a sunset or sunrise blushed sky behind them. And from their shoulders extends a gorgeous, flowing cape, rising upward behind them as if caught on the wind so that its colors blend with the blushing sky – ripples of vibrant red and blue, with orange and yellow stars plus a moon and sun scattered along the fabric. / end id]
Gracious God, in this time of worship and wonder, story and song into which you have gathered us,
we marvel at the wondrous diversity of your human creation. Each of us — Black, white, Latine, Asian, Indigenous, and beyond — is an integral part of your magnificent spectrum.
You call us to join in joyous worship, just as we are.
Each of us — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, and beyond — is an integral part of your magnificent spectrum.
You call us into community, just as we are.
Each of us — with our bodies of diverse shapes, sizes, and abilities — is an integral part of your magnificent spectrum.
You call us Good, you call us whole and holy, just as we are.
Each of us — of all sexualities and genders, all these ways of being and loving — is an integral part of your magnificent spectrum.
You call us to share the gifts you gave us, just as we are.
Opening Prayer
Queer God beyond our knowing, we glimpse your vastness in the diversity of your children who together bear your image.
Queer Trinity, both One and Three, your very Being shows us how to be: honoring each person’s uniqueness, and valuing our interconnectedness.
Queer God, On this More Light Sunday, we humbly pray and act for the full affirmation and inclusion of all of our LGBTQ+ siblings.
Amen.
About this piece:
I co-wrote this call to worship, and wrote the opening prayer, for my church’s More Light Sunday service, an LGBTQA/queer-focused service. You could edit the last two lines to take out the reference to More Light Sunday if using it for general worship.
If you use it in your own service, please credit it to Avery Arden — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
Binary-Breaking Worship 