(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.
Pentecost Sunday, 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13 and Acts 2:1-21 through a queer, liberationist lens
Key points:
Throughout scripture and culminating in Pentecost, God’s breath pervades all creation and lavishes gifts upon all persons — yet also demonstrates what liberation theologians call a “preferential option for the poor,” often selecting society’s shamed and shunned to speak God’s good news to the world.
Too often, we dismiss God-given wisdom and leadership as it manifests in the oppressed; we must resist the hierarchy of gifts humans construct and learn to recognize Spirit wherever She moves.
For instance, many dismiss the powerful Spirit-movement of Pentecost; they aren’t prepared to see God among Galilean hicks, so they don’t. But there is Spirit-movement there, which lesbian theologian Kittredge Cherry envisions as an erotic, ecstatic, polyamorous marriage between Holy Spirit and human spirits (passage below).
At Pentecost, it’s people who know society’s in-between spaces, the not-quite-belonging-anywhere that many bi- or multicultural people experience — Jews who were immigrants or visitors from outside Judea. Spirit speaks to them in their own heart languages! We too are called to practice linguistic hospitality and the radical belonging and centering of marginalized voices, vocations, movements.
Happy Pentecost! This Sunday’s readings show us a Spirit who blows across all creation, blazes into the bustling heart of community life, and bestows Xir manifold gifts prodigally yet particularly — prodigal as in almost “wastefully” generous, an overflowing abundance of blessing lavished over all created things; and particular in that Xe is intentional about which gifts each individual receives, often with what liberation theologians call a “preferential option” for strangers and outcasts.
There’s Psalm 104, wherein God’s Spirit, or breath, is what animates all things — then Numbers 11:24-30, in which Spirit rests upon a select group in a particular way:
“I’ll take some of the spirit that is on you and place it on them. Then they will carry the burden of the people with you so that you won’t bear it alone.” So Moses…assembled seventy men from the people’s elders and placed them around the tent. …When the spirit rested on them, they prophesied, but only this once.
Two men had remained in the camp, one named Eldad and the second named Medad, and the spirit rested on them. They were among those registered, but they hadn’t gone out to the tent, so they prophesied in the camp. – vv. 24-26
Along with the recognition that we all need support and that decision-making power must be shared, what I love about this passage is how God’s Spirit does what She always does — surprises us.
We expectDivinity to remain within the safe confines of the boundaries we devise — in this case, the meeting tent Moses established where he and God carry out important conversations. But God’s breath blows where it will; the Spirit isn’t solely in the tent! Off in the center of things, out among the people, She gifts Eldad and Medad with prophecy too.
Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services but the same Lord, and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. – 1 Corinthians 12:4-7
Resisting a hierarchy of gifts
All of us carry gifts from the Spirit intended for communal good; it is in using and joining our God-given gifts that we participate in the delivery of God’s Kin-dom here on earth.
Unfortunately, we tend to create a hierarchies out of these spiritual gifts, vocations, and activities: some are put on pedestals, while others are belittled, overlooked, or even cursed as sin.
For instance, we too often fail to recognize disabled persons’ unique gifts — and I don’t mean “they have so much to teach us” in the paternalistic, infantilizing way that is mainstream. I mean that their/our experiences of moving through a society structured to exclude them/us often compels them/us to cultivate wisdom and resourcefulness that could help liberate everyone.1 This is true of every oppressed group that “makes a way out of no way.”2
Some of our God-given gifts are even denounced as curses. Take queer ways of loving and being — ways that defy and demolish normative constrictions, that challenge society to think beyond “the way things are.”
This is why I can’t tolerate the “love the sinner, hate the sin” rhetoric or see it as anything but hate wrapped up in pretend piety — you are calling Divine activity in my life, the bounty of love and holy transformation flowing out from my queer experiences, sin.
I’m not one to throw around words like blasphemy, but Jesus does warn us that insults against the Holy Spirit — which I interpret as divine activity in the world — are unforgivable. Now, Jesus often employed hyperbole to get vital points across, and I don’t think that by “unforgivable” he means “damnable”; even so, we must all take great care not to rush to denounce God’s movement as sin just because it grates against the status quo.
In Acts 2’s Pentecost story, some of those who witness God’s movement in the disciples’ multilingual exclamations of Christ’s liberation don’t declaim it as sin, but do dismiss it as drunken ranting (v. 13).
A queer vision: Pentecost as erotic, ecstatic union
What some dismiss as debauchery was in reality an ecstatic encounter with the divine. Lesbian theologian and QSpirit host Kittredge Cherry envisions Pentecost’s arrival of the Spirit as an orgy-like ecstasy of mystical love-making; Holy Spirit weds human spirit as divinity is distributed through a fiery kiss:
Kittredge Cherry is by no means the first Christian to envision Pentecost as betrothal, Divinity erotically wed to humanity, or the Holy Spirit as a kiss, as evinced in this illumination of Christ the Lover kissing the Church his beloved in a medieval manuscript of the Song of Songs. St. Bernard of Clairveax was particularly smitten with the concept of a kissing Trinity: “If … the Father is he who kisses, the Son he who is kissed, then it cannot be wrong to see in the kiss the Holy Spirit, for he is the imperturbable peace of the Father and the Son, their unshakable bond, their undivided love, their indivisible unity.”
When the Holy Spirit loved me, our contact produced a ripple of energy similar to a heartbeat. She was ringing me like a bell, and the “sound” would roll on forever.
“It is without end, because it is without beginning,” She said. She rang me again, and this time when the edge of her heart crossed mine, the rapture made me lose control and we melted into One. …
We kissed everyone in the room…We licked them with Our flaming tongues. They welcomed Our electric kisses. Each of them inhaled sharply and deeply in preparation for a sigh. We swept into them as breath, passed through each soul’s new doorway and fertilized the sacred chamber within. At the same time, their sparkling souls penetrated my divine heart and swam into a new womblike space that had just unfurled for them. The glorious friction made me feel flushed.
Holy Spirit and human spirit were wedded, catalyzing a chain reaction of power bursts. Every soul in the room ignited in such a way that flames appeared to blaze from each person’s body. They looked around at each other’s auras in astonished admiration.
All that happened on one inhalation. When they exhaled, they could taste how much God loved them as We flowed over their tongues. They let their tongues flutter and writhe in ecstatic abandon. Each one released the tension of the wedding consummation in his or her own unique speaking style. Some of it sounded like gibberish to them as they praised God. Others spoke in exalted words. …
The Holy Spirit and I rode the sound waves of their voices, still actively making love. We granted everyone within listening range the same gift that I had received that morning: the ability to hear pure thought.3
Pentecost’s preferential option for the poor
As the disciples’ spirits merge with the Divine Spirit, their joyful response flows out into Jerusalem. As aforementioned, some dismiss their ecstasy as inebriation.
To them, these students of the executed rabbi Jesus are nothing more than homeless hicks who’ve wandered too far from their backwater region of Galilee. Perhaps they should “go back to where they came from” instead of continuing to disrupt the peace — peace as in “quiet,” in this case; but also as in the Pax Romana, empire’s false peace of enforced order.
Of course many dismiss them, just as we today dismiss the ways God is speaking through those we consider backwards, badly behaved, or unworthy of our time.
But others are drawn to the disciples’ boisterous babble.
Peter explains that they are full of Spirit, not spirits!
“Devout Jews from every nation under heaven”
The Jews who stop to listen to what these Spirit-filled vagabonds are actually saying are foreign Jews, coming from nations outside Judea.
Some of them are ethnically Jewish, born in diaspora; others are previously-gentile converts to the Jewish religion.
Some are only visiting Jerusalem on pilgrimage to celebrate Pentecost, the Greek word for the Jewish holiday Shavuot, which celebrates Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. They’ve only left their gentile-majority communities for a short while.
Others have taken up more permanent residence in Jerusalem, where they get to live among fellow Jews — but, with their foreign languages and customs, they still don’t quite fit in.
Overall, these are people of the in-between:
Too Jewish for the gentiles of their homelands; too foreign for the Jews of Jerusalem, they know what it is to not quite belong anywhere.
Here in Jerusalem, these pilgrims and immigrants probably get by with the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, Greek (or, for more official occasions, Latin). They are heartsick for the ease and comfort of their mother tongues, their regional dialects. Strange idioms trip them up; miscommunications abound; jokes and banter are belabored.
As these people of the in-between journey through Jerusalem to the temple for Shavuot, I bet the last thing they expected to hear was their own heart language, breaking through a wall of Greek and Aramaic.
What wonder! What relief! What…on earth are these Galileans; where did they pick up so many languages??
Of course these are the kinds of people who stopped to listen. Judeans accustomed to communicating easily, to hearing their first language everywhere they go, are more likely to react with scorn at the boisterousness of these country bumpkins.
But for those who yearn for a quality conversation in their heart language, it’s good news. They’re disturbed all right — but in a wondrous way. They are ready to have their lives shaken up by proclamations of a Messiah of the in-between — a fringe Jew like themselves, who made time for outcasts like themselves.
…Isn’t it always the people on the outskirts, in the gaps and on the borders of things, who are most ready for revolution?
Pentecost is sometimes referred to as a reversal of what happened at Babel — but I don’t think that’s quite right. At Babel, God creates a diversity of language; a reversal of that act would be to reduce human speech to just one language.
But that is not what God does — that’s what Empire does: It bulldozes difference and calls enforced conformity peace.
God speaks to us and hears us in our own language, whatever that language may be, and delights in our diversity! We, in turn, are called to exercise what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “linguistic hospitality,” rejoicing in our cultural diversity and enjoying the richness of our variety of language, united in the One who prays for us “with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8: 26).
At Pentecost, the apostles invite others into their community as they are — sharing much in common, devoted to one passion, but maintaining core differences, like language. Oppressive differences like class are broken down, but the things that make us unique are welcomed.
Speaking as a USAmerican, this posture of humility and hospitality goes against everything we are taught here in the imperial core. I can’t dominate you if I know I have a lot to learn from you. You can’t dehumanize me when you acknowledge the value that I alone can bring to the table.
Rejoicing in this expectation-exploding, harmonizing Spirit, let us pray:
Holy Spirit of breath and flame, howling gale and still small voice,
We praise you in your elusiveness, how you whirl through the world wherever you — not we — will.
You dodge every attempt to pin you down, slipping through our fingers like thin air when we try to claim control of you —
yet at the same time, you pulse through our cells with every heartbeat, settle deeper into our lungs with every breath.
As you, Irresistible Wind, pour over us now, set our hearts on fire with passion for your justice, for hospitality and mutuality, for abundance beyond reckoning.
For more on the unique gifts that disabled persons often bring to the table, see Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha’s book The Future Is Disabled — or their article on the topic here, where they declare, “At the core of my work and life is the belief that disabled wisdom is the key to our survival and expansion. Crip genius is what will keep us all alive and bring us home to the just and survivable future we all need. If we have a chance in hell of getting there.” ↩︎
“Making a way out of no way” is an expression of Black wisdom frequently referenced by Womanists, as in Monica A. Coleman’s book that uses the phrase as its title. ↩︎
Kittredge Cherry, Jesus in Love: At the Cross, 2018. ↩︎
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.
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.
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).
“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 “ourancestor Abraham” (v. 2), yet ends with:
“You continuously set yourself against the Holy Spirit, just like your ancestors did. Was there a single prophet yourancestors 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 usandthem 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…
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.”
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.
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.
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, foryou 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?…
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.” ↩︎
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.↩︎
As Presbyterians, we believe in a God who takes up the cause of those whom human societies consider “least.”
In this era of escalating anti-trans rhetoric and legislation, in our own state and beyond, our faith calls us to affirm God’s movement among and through the trans community in particular.
Even as we leave room for some differences in belief, we can agree that there is no place in the life of the Church for discrimination against any person.
United in this belief, let us confess together the ways in which we continue to fall short in protecting and celebrating the gender diverse members of God’s human family:
CONFESSION
When we refuse to recognize the unique ways our transgender siblings participate in co-creation and manifest the Divine Image of a God far vaster than any rules we devise or boxes we build,
Forgive and transform us, Creator God. Open us to choose respect over rejection, conversation over misinformation, relationship over alienation.
When we look on as oppressive forces hold our trans kin captive —
suffocate their free will, strip them of health and safety, drive them to desperation and rob them of their very lives — and we shrug off their plight, assuming it has nothing to do with us;
or else stay silent out of fear for our own security and comfort,
Forgive and transform us, Liberator God. Wake us to the life-or-death urgency of this struggle. Open us to choose action over silence, to risk much in the name of justice.
When our denomination’s promises of full participation and representation for all persons and groups remain unfulfilled —
with many queer candidates still finding their ministry obstructed, and trans parishioners forced to choose between staying in hostile spaces or leaving their spiritual homes to seek belonging elsewhere,
Forgive and transform us, God who favors outcasts. Open us to see both the possibilities and perils of our institution, so that we may revise the things that harm and bolster the things that liberate.
God who hears and joins in our lament, God who speaks through unexpected prophets,
instill in us a hunger for your justice that will drive our solidarity and action until we have become — in fact as well as in faith — a community of all people made one in Christ by the power of your Holy Spirit.
PARDON
Friends, we have a long way to go, and much work to do — but we rejoice now in the assurance that, through Jesus Christ, we are forgiven and renewed to continue the journey.
Thanks be to God.
PEACE
Assured of God’s mercy, we may be bold in sharing Christ’s peace — a peace built on justice, a peace that preserves diversity — with all we meet.
The peace of Christ be with you. And also with you…
Please feel free to make use of this piece in worship or Sunday school, in ceremony or across social media. Just credit it to Avery Arden of binarybreakingworhsip.com — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
You may make small adjustments to fit your own particular context.
About this piece:
I wrote this confession and pardon to be used during morning worship at the PC(USA)’s 226th General Assembly.
I was asked to center its call to acknowledge where we have failed our transgender kin around Luke 4′s account of Jesus reading from Isaiah in his local synagogue — the prophet’s proclamation of good news for the poor, the imprisoned, for disabled persons and all whom Empire oppresses.
When Jesus announces after he reads, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled,” his audience raves, impressed by this local boy grown up into a wise teacher. It’s only when he continues his commentary to make it clear that gentiles will be receiving the Spirit of God’s liberation as well — for did not Elijah and Elisha minister to gentile widows and lepers? — that the crowd’s praise sours into rage.
What a fitting text to draw from when confronting our own resistance to expanding God’s liberation to those we consider outsiders. God is lavishing Their Spirit on Their queer children, freeing Their trans children from bondage and into ministry — and there are many who refuse to recognize this divine activity.
Just days before this confession was shared in worship, the General Assembly discussed and ultimately approved the Olympia Overture, which seeks to solidify protections for queer members — particularly queer ordination candidates — of our denomination. Though I rejoice that this overture passed, the debates were painful to witness, reminding me that I share this spiritual home with people who deny my humanity, my vocation, or God’s movement through me and those like me — and who balk at naming this denial “discrimination.”
I give thanks to all who courageously spoke up in support of the Olympia Overture; may they find themselves surrounded by support and love after living out such brave vulnerability. And I pray that those who feared or raged against its passing will find themselves broken open, bit by bit or all at once, by the Spirit of Wisdom who guides us all into understanding. Maybe this overture’s passing can be an opportunity for deeper conversations that will draw us all closer. Maybe. If we all are brave, and bold, and ignited by love. If we all commit ourselves to living into F-1.0404‘s call to openness:
"...a new openness to the sovereign activity of God in the Church and in the world, to a more radical obedience to Christ, and to a more joyous celebration in worship and work;
a new openness in its own membership, becoming in fact as well as in faith a community of all people of all ages, races, ethnicities, abilities, genders, and worldly conditions, made one in Christ by the power of the Spirit, as a visible sign of the new humanity;
a new openness to see both the possibilities and perils of its institutional forms in order to ensure the faithfulness and usefulness of these forms to God’s activity in the world; and
a new openness to God’s continuing reformation of the Church ecumenical, that it might be more effective in its mission."
To the ones who bear witness to the church’s flaws and failings, and still believe in everything that Church could be — and work to make that holy vision real though the labor is long, and tough, and often thankless —
Let us offer thanks, remembering the unlikely blessings our subversive Savior likes to lavish on those the world least expects.
Blessed are you who make a way out of no way: who pioneer a path for those of God’s children who’ve been told they don’t belong in the pews, in the pulpit, or in holy bonds of marriage.
Blessed are you when you come in bold and disruptive, flipping the tables that make no room for you; And blessed when you work behind the scenes, change rippling out from constant conversation —
For we we need both: the Spirit of roaring flame, and gentle rain.
Blessed are you when your voice shakes and you speak out anyway.
Blessed are you in patience, persistence, and grace; Blessed also are you in frustration and righteous rage
For the psalmist joins you in crying, “God, how long?”
Blessed are you who endure judgment and scrutiny from people who are meant to be neighbors in the Body of Christ
For the peacemaker’s crown, the friendship of God is yours.
Blessed are you when you tire, and burn out, and wrestle with despair
For rest is your right, and others will take up your fight as long as you need.
And when ignorant tongues defame you, when they twist your words and accuse you of being the divisive one, when they try to shut you up and drive you out
Blessed, blessed are you!
For you belong to an unbroken line of prophets stretching back to the cross and forward to a feast laid out for all.
Yes! Blessed are you when “blessed” is the last thing you feel — you who fight the good fight even when it seems hopeless, even when you lose, again and again, even if you will not be around when the drought on justice ends and the fruits of your labor bloom into life at last
For future generations will remember you with pride.
For no matter how it looks right now, your efforts are never in vain.
For you are part of what makes Church worth fighting for, and what you sowed in sweat and tears, tomorrow’s children reap rejoicing.
Blessed are you, for yours is the kin-dom you are helping to build, one brave truth at a time.
Please feel free to make use of this piece in worship or Sunday school, in ceremony or across social media. Just credit it to Avery Arden of binarybreakingworship.com — and I invite you to email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com to let me know you’re using it!
About this piece:
The past few days have been rough ones for queer Presbyterians and those who love us. The 226th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) kicked off with the Olympia Overture, which sought to add sexuality & gender identity to a portion of our Book of Order that lists classes protected from discrimination; as well as to make it so candidates for ordination must be asked about their ability and commitment to uphold the “principles of participation, representation, and non-discrimination” found in that other part of the Book of Order.
Both parts of the overture ended up getting approved, but only after much discourse before the GA even began, and more debate before the committee. It was…really hard to watch (so hard that I didn’t watch most of it myself — but friends watching kept me informed of what was happening).
It was a reminder that there are people in my own denomination who, whether they would word it this way or not, don’t want to see me and my queer kin as fully human — to recognize us as called by God, as colleagues, as part of Christ’s movement in the world.
Also, part B only passed after the language was amended to take out the word “non-discrimination” — apparently the implication that a candidate might be discriminating against someone is Not Nice. I’m reminded how many of us — myself included as a white person — have it instilled in us from birth that it’s more important to be nice, and to avoid discomfort, than it is to call out harm.
But also, as many queer Presbyterians took their turn speaking — each granted just two minutes to make the case for their belonging, their right to have colleagues who recognize their equality in our church — I felt pride swell up deep in my soul. We are put through so much! We are scrutinized, we are shamed, we are accused of “causing division” just because we call it out — yet we remain faithful. We believe in God’s promise of justice rolling down, of a kin-dom where the last are first and the dignity and worth of all is recognized.
They can’t drive us out. We will stay, and we will persist in loving them back into their own humanity.
This prayer is for all the people across the decades, even centuries, who have fought in loud ways or quiet, in the spotlight or behind the scenes, to have their dignity recognized. For Black folk and queer folk, for women and immigrants and disabled persons, and for so many more, across all the different communities of faith.
We are Church. We are making the Church be what it was always meant to be. Blessed indeed are we.
How can one Being also be three Persons? The math doesn’t seem to add up! Some spend years attempting to articulate this theology in a way that doesn’t fall into “heresy”; others give up with a laugh and accept it as a Mystery. Ultimately, the God of the Universe is ineffable, beyond our understanding — yet we are called to seek ever deeper relationship with God, and promised that if we seek, we will find.
When people decry queer identities as nonexistent, overly complicated, or paradoxical, I can’t help but think of our impossibly Three-in-One God. I think also about my own gender journey: how I struggled as a child to name what I was feeling because I had no language to describe it; how once I discovered others had words for what I was experiencing, I delighted in every one I could uncover; and how, ultimately, even my favorite words I’ve found to describe myself fall short.
Words like trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer certainly help others understand and relate to me better, but I’ve learned to be okay with the fact that they might never fully know me, just as I may never fully know them — or at least that the deepest understanding is beyond words. Turns out that the children of a Mysterious God are micro-mysteries in ourselves!
What I’m left with is this: if we worship a Triune God, why do we try to squeeze the humans made in that Infinite, Ineffable Being’s image into two narrow boxes? And if we celebrate how, in the Incarnation and Resurrection, Divinity burst through the binaries between Creator & Creation, Life & Death, surely the binary between male and female is not so insurmountable!
Together, let us pray:
Holy God, whose very existence is relationship, we marvel at your mystery. Protect this day and always those of your children who, like you, defy easy definition and resist restrictive categories. Teach us to recognize your wisdom and holiness shining within them, for only together in all our diversity do we reflect your image. Amen.
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 