Tag: Queer Lectionary

Categories
bible study Queer Lectionary Unpacking Antisemitism worship-planning

“You in me and I in you”: Many voices on the interbeing of God and all things

Medieval manuscript page featuring a blue figure (Jesus) standing in golden concentric circles

Year A, Sixth Sunday of Easter, John 14:15-21 & Acts 17:22-31 through a queer & interfaith lens.

Both the John 14 and Acts 17 readings for this Sunday depict a God who is wholly interconnected within Godself and with all humanity (and all Creation). Paul references two Greek poet-philosophers to describe this state of interbeing. We too can respectfully draw from various traditions to get a better picture of what that means.

Key points

  • Jesus promises not to leave his disciples orphaned, or “fatherless,” and names that he is in the Father and the Father is in him. Exploring this “father” language alongside other terms Jesus uses for himself across the Gospels, we uncover something of the limitations of human language for relationships both human and divine. Jesus, like many queer found families, is taking the words he has available to him and ascribing them with deeper meaning.
  • The concept that Jesus is in the Parent as the Parent is in Jesus, and that we too are in Jesus as he is in us, has parallels to the Buddhist concept of interbeing. Paul’s reference to a classical Greek philosopher-poet’s words, “In [God] we live and move and have our being,” reiterates this inextricable interconnectedness, or mutual indwelling.
  • Paul quotes two Greek poet-philosophers to carry Christ’s good news to the Greeks. When we gather as many voices as possible at the table, we are granted grander glimpses of the divine in whom all things “live and move and have their being.”
  • I’ll be posting an article on one of those references, Epimenides of Crete, soon, exploring the queer resonances in this sixth century BCE sage.
Page from an illuminated medieval book featuring Hildegard's Universe. Yellow petal-looking flames form a vulvic shape. Inside is a border of red "flames," inside which is a blue sea of white stars and red and yellow starbursts. At the center of this is a round mound of moutains / hills, waters, fields.
“The Universe” by Hildegard von Bingen, c. 1165 in Scivias. The vulva-shaped cosmos is enfolded in divine fire, which “descended from heaven to earth and…gave help by showing heavenly things to people while they were in their souls and bodies… These people living in their souls and bodies raised the Word up with faithful joy.” Between divine fire is a “globe of reddish fire” that is the “light of burning Love”: “every creature is illuminated by the brightness of the Word’s light.” For more, listen to this.

John 14:15-21

The lectionary continues right where it left off last week, with Jesus’s tender reassurances to his disciples that even though he must soon leave them, he will not abandon — or, as he says here, orphan — them.

“I will ask the Parent, [who] will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth…You know hir because xe abides with you, and xe will be in you.
I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Parent, and you in me, and I in you.” – John 14:18-20

The picture Jesus paints here is a queer one, blending relational language and dissolving boundaries.

The limitations of relational language

Shortly, Jesus will tell his disciples that he no longer calls them servants, but friends — which moves him from a higher status of master (the Greek kyrios means master as much as it means lord) to the mutuality of friendship (John 15:15). Meanwhile, Jesus frequently names himself as Son of the Parent God throughout the Gospels. Yet here he promises not to leave his disciples orphaned (from the Greek ὀρφανός, orphanos). The Septuagint uses this Greek word to translate Hebrew’s yāṯôm, “fatherless” — it describes those left bereft and vulnerable due to the loss of either both parents or their father (in biblical iterations of patriarchy, losing your father opened you up to more insecurity and potential exploitation).

If Jesus’s absence could be described as the disciples becoming “fatherless,” then that becomes yet another way to describe his relationship with his followers. He is teacher, friend, father, mother hen, master, servant, bridegroom, God.

In traditional human relational structures, no one person could be all those things to another! But some queer relationships come closer to achieving it. In queer found families, the same person might serve as mother and sibling and even lover all at once. To be clear, this is not incestuous! What we are doing is repurposing traditional terms because there are no words in the mainstream lexicon that exactly match what we mean; we use limited language to describe queerly unlimited ways of experiencing each other

…Of course, these queer ways of being in relationship aren’t truly unlimited. But Divinity’s connections both within its Triune self and with its created world might just be!

Jesus as Father or Parent as well as sibling, servant, friend makes perfect paradoxical sense, both through a queer lens and in light of the picture he continues to paint: That he is in the Parent and the Parent is in him.

Another medieval manuscript page featuring golden concentric circles around a blue figure of Jesus, who has long hair and is beardless.
“The True Trinity in True Unity” by Hildegard von Bingen, c. 1165. “Unlike the usual triangular-shaped examples, this one involves nested circles of light. The Trinitarian nature of the divine is hidden under His unity and the emergent figure is God as One.”

And then we are in Jesus as he is in us, which by implication means we are also in the Parent and the Parent is in us — an interconnectedness that would be difficult to draw on paper, as each being involved is both holding and is held by each other being! You might even call this…interbeing!

Interbeing, or the interconnectedness of all things

Interbeing is the term beloved Zen Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh coined to describe what East Asian Buddhists call perfect interpenetration, complete interfusion, or (and this one sounds very much like Christ’s “I in you and you in me”) — mutual inclusion. Whatever it’s called, this interconnectedness envisions every single thing (every phenomenon, every living being, every atom, etc.) simultaneously and entirely containing andbeing contained by all other things. Or, as Thích Nhất Hạnh puts it after inviting the reader to consider a sheet of paper:

“Everything—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat, and even consciousness—is in that sheet of paper. Everything coexists with it. To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone; you have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.”1

Another metaphor for this complete interfusion is that of Indra’s net, which originates from the Atharva Veda and thus was part of Hindu cosmology before also being adopted by Buddhism:

The net is said to be infinite, and to spread in all directions with no beginning or end. At each node of the net is a jewel, so arranged that every jewel reflects all the other jewels. No jewel exists by itself independently of the rest. Everything is related to everything else; nothing is isolated.2

A kind of dizzying spread of blue "netting" on a black background, almost kaleidoscopic.
An artistic rendition of Indra’s Net by Ganesh Rao; click here for the entire gallery. You might also imagine a spiderweb with beads of rain all along it.

Triune interbeing

It’s notoriously difficult to talk of the Trinity without committing one heresy or another (whenever I try, these two grumpy Irishmen pop in my head grumbling That’s modalism, Patrick!). But I think that this concept of interbeing can be employed to get across some of the Trinity’s key aspects: first, that while the Persons of God are indeed three distinct Persons, they are also inextricably One.

Trying to eff the ineffable, we label the three Persons of God things like “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” or “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer” or “Lover, Beloved, and Love itself.” (Note how, as with queer found family, these names sometimes seem to clash “incestuously” — how can Father and Son also be Lover and Beloved? But it’s because we’re using limited human terms to describe the ineffable. The words fail as much as they succeed in helping us grasp God; for instance, “Father” and “Son” traditionally indicates hiearchy and difference in age, neither of which is accurate for the Persons of the Trinity.)

These names certainly describe elements of our Triune God, including some of the distinctions between each Person. However, if we solidify these distinctions too much, attempting to keep the Trinity neat and tidy with firm boundaries between each Person, we cease to speak of a God who is One. No one Person holds sole “dominion” over one quality of the Divine; each Person expresses all qualities. For example, the “Son” also has creative power; the “Father” also sustains all things; the Spirit also brings liberation; and so on.

Some of the earliest Christians employed a Greek term to describe this Triune interfusion, or mutual indwelling: perichoresis (from peri, “around,” and chōreō, “come” or “go”). Modern theologians have drawn from this concept the allegory of Trinity as a dance between three partners spinning together so perfectly harmoniously that they begin to blur.

[…P]erichoresis invites us to think in a new way about the very meaning of ‘one’ and ‘personal.’ The oneness of God is not the oneness of a distinct, self-contained individual; it is the unity of a community of persons who love each other and live together in harmony. And ‘personal’ means by definition inter-personal; one cannot be truly personal alone but only in relation to other persons.

Such is the unity and personal character of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is a deep, intimate, indissoluble unity between them. They are not three independent persons who decide to get together to form a club (or a dance group!) that might break up if the members decide to go it alone. They are what they are only in relationship to each other. Each exists only in this relationship and would not exist apart from it.

…Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one social person, for each is with and for the other so intimately that they can be said to live in and through each other.

– Shirley Guthrie, Christian Doctrine

painting on a yellow background of three figures circling each other in a whirling dance
“Perichoresis” by Jutta Bluehberger

Interbeing between divinity, humanity, and all creation

The Son is in the Parent is in the Spirit is in the Son is in the Spirit is in the Parent is in the Son ad infinitum; together, they are a perfect community, a perfect relationship.

Yet God chose to create, to let that perfect, self-contained love overflow beyond Godself! Thus we are invited into this perichoresis, this interbeing, invited to recognize the truth of Jesus’s words: “I am in my Parent, and you and me, and I in you” — all bound together with the Spirit, our advocate (or, as the CEB translates, companion) whom God is sending (v. 17) and who has been here all along, from the Beginning.

That’s the picture Jesus paints in this John 14 passage: the distances of time and space melt away; the boundaries between beings merge and mix!

It’s fitting that the lectionary pairs this passage with Acts 17, in which Paul notes that “God is not far from each one of us” (v. 27b) and that

“In [God] we live and move and have our being.” – Acts 17:28

Acts 17:22-31

The verses of Acts 17 leading up to this week’s passage recount Paul’s flight from alleged persecution3 to Athens, where he spends weeks engaging not only with Athenian Jews, but gentiles as well. Due to their love of new and interesting ideas (v. 21), the gentile Athenians take an interest in his proclamations about Jesus. They lead Paul to Areopagus, where he gets the chance to give “the fullest and most dramatic speech of [his] missionary career.”4

Paul starts by appealing to the Athenians’ spirituality, noting all their altars and shrines — including one dedicated to “an unknown god” (v. 23). He explains that this “unknown” deity is actually the God who “made the world and everything in it” — the Abrahamic God.

Paul, a Roman citizen as familiar with Greek things as Jewish things, smartly finds ways to connect renowned Greek poet-philosophers, quoting two of them:

For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we, too, are his offspring.’ – v. 28

The latter half of the verse, “We too are his offspring,” most likely comes from the Stoic philosopher Aratus, who opens his great work Phaenomena thus:

Let us begin with Zeus, whom we mortals never leave unspoken.
For every street, every market-place is full of god.
Even the sea and the harbour are full of this deity.
Everywhere everyone is indebted to god.
For we are indeed his offspring …

Paul sure knew how to pick the perfect reference, selecting one that not only supports his point about divinity’s pervasiveness, but is even set in the same scene he and his audience inhabit! Of course, the poem is talking about Zeus, while Paul is winding up for his pitch about the Abrahamic God raising Jesus from the dead.

Meanwhile, in describing a God in whom we “live and move and have our being,” Paul seems to be paraphrasing the sixth-century BCE sage Epimenides of Crete. I have grown short on time to dive into the queer resonance of this prophet; I’ll put out another article soon on how for the Greeks, this sage embodied both the awe and horror of one who is “unnatural” — just as Christ does in exploding the binary between life and death.

Subscribe to be notified when I put out the article on Epimenides!

stone altar with Latin inscribed, which is translated below
While no altars to an agnostos theos, an unknown god, have been unearthed in Athens, this altar was unearthed on the Palantine Hill. Its inscription reads, “Whether sacred to god or to goddess, Gaius Sextius Calvinus, son of Gaius, praetor, restored this on a vote of the senate.” When purifying Athens of plague, Epimenides ordered the erection of altars in various locations to “whichever god” was god of that location.

At least some of the early Christians recognized this reference to Epimenides, including Clement of Alexandria, who noted that Paul was willing to “attribute something of the truth” to a Greek, a gentile” and was “not ashamed, when discoursing for the edification of some and the shaming of others, to make use of Greek poems.”5

There is somewhat of an air of condescension in both Paul’s and Clement’s words, but I do appreciate the biblical precedent in quoting voices from other religions and cultures. If God truly is the one in whom we all move and live and have our being; if we truly are all interconnected like jewels in a net or raindrops in a web, then the divine pervades all peoples. God’s Spirit, God’s Breath “blows wherever she wills” (John 3:8). Only when we invite all voices to the table do we begin to catch a grander glimpse of God.

Footnotes

  1. Thích Nhất Hạnh, In The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries, 2017. For more on Buddhist conceptions of interconnectedness, check out this article. ↩︎
  2. https://pragyata.com/the-vedic-metaphor-of-indras-net/ ↩︎
  3. For information on Acts’ depictions of Jews as violent persecutors of Paul and other apostles and how these depictions have motivated antisemitism across Christian history, give this video a watch. ↩︎
  4. Mikael C. Parsons, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-acts-1722-31-5 ↩︎
  5. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata Book 1, chapter 14, c. late second century. ↩︎
Categories
bible study Other search markers Queer Lectionary Unpacking Antisemitism worship-planning

“How can we know the way?” From exclusivity into God’s home of many rooms

Print of a building set up like townhouses, narrow but tall units all pressed together. Each unit represents the religious building of a different religion.
Yes, I’m reusing this image from last week. It fits better here anyhow! “In My Father’s House There Are Many Mansions” by Irving Amen

Year A, Fifth Sunday of Easter.
Using a queer lens + addressing anti-Jewish supersessionism.

This Sunday’s readings explore what it means to be followers of the Jesus Way. Is this an exclusive path? Do we supersede the Jewish people as God’s chosen people? (Spoiler: hell no!)

Taking these passages together, we can paint a picture of a Way wherein we dismantle standing structures in favor of building up with living stones, with the rejected stone as the chief cornerstone — creating a Kin-dom home that has room enough for all.

Key points

  • The passages from Acts 7 and 1 Peter 2 embody the tension present in so many parts of scripture: They offer gorgeous glimpses into God’s Kin-dom, and they lay the groundwork for later Christian antisemitism.
  • I urge preachers and teachers to name the danger in these texts, rather than simply skirt around it. Address these verses so that your audience won’t fill the void of your avoidance with the assumption that “we” agree with this rhetoric.
  • At the same time, these two passages can help us explore what it means to be followers of the Jesus Way. We open ourselves to the multitudinous ways God speaks to us through diverse voices. We celebrate the people rejected by the upholders of unjust structures and systems. We commit ourselves to unpacking our biases and learning how to be in solidarity with oppressed peoples, even when we mess up.
  • And we remember that, as Jesus promises us in the John 14 passage, God’s home has room enough for us all. Everybody belongs. Everybody feasts.

Acts 7:55-60

Queer meditation

But filled with the Holy Spirit, [Stephen] gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him.

– Acts 7:56-57

How do we respond to divergent interpretations of our shared faith? Are we open to and interested in mutual dialogue, eager to potentially glean new wisdom — or do we cover our ears in horror? Do we let ourselves sit in the discomfort of possibly being wrong (or at least not wholly right) — or shame and shun the “heretic”?

One of my partners grew up in a fundamentalist household in which new ways of understanding God and scripture were received as threats.

Once when he was a teen, he dared to wonder whether every single sentence in the Bible had to exactly reflect God’s will — or whether it might make more sense that human biases entered the text. His father flushed beet red, face twisting as he pointed a shaking finger at his child: “Don’t you dare say that. Don’t you dare blaspheme God under my roof.”

There was rage in his father’s voice — but more than that, there was fear. A real, ferocious terror in what could happen if his child were to rebel against what he believed were God’s truth and will.

Maybe something deep inside him recognized that his faith in a punishing God who despises queerness, deputizes whiteness, and demands perfect obedience was actually quite flimsy — that it was utterly dependent on this understanding of scripture as the literal and inerrant Word of God (with very specific interpretations of said scripture); and that if he were to allow himself to start asking questions, his entire belief system would crumble around him and leave him floundering. And wouldn’t that mean that his whole life had been empty, shameful, wrong? He simply had too much to lose to risk even a shred of doubt or questioning.

…Maybe that’s where his fear came from, maybe not. I think also of the flip-side fear: the terror of growing up being told God hates you, has no options for you but a hollow life or hellfire.

Drawing of stormclouds from which a huge pale hand holds a person dangling by one foot over a huge crevice of hellfire. A gaunt / skeletal being stands with arms raised looking up towards the figure. Text from Edwards' sermon is also on the page, as is notes on the sermon's "Purpose: to frighten the crowd into religion..."
Art by student Lucy Wright based on Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God”

Sometimes the good news of God’s expansive and unconditional love, the holy truth that humanity is intentionally, divinely diverse — how else could we be in the Image of an infinite God? — is received with trepidation rather than relief. Could it be true, or do I just want to believe it’s true to “justify my sin”?1 What happens if I embrace my queerness and it turns out I’m wrong?

We can turn to Thomas Merton and his beloved prayer of unknowing (which matches the John passage we’ll get to later very well):

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore I will trust You always, though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me,
and You will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.

We can live in fear of new perspectives. Of admitting we were wrong. Of punishment. Of exclusion. Of a scarcity of love and grace.

Or we can place our trust in Divine Wisdom to guide us, in Christ’s mercy to cover us — and take the plunge.

Naming anti-Jewish rhetoric

The above meditation takes the Acts reading as it is laid out for us. But context matters, and Acts 7’s is rather troubling.

So to start with, I urge preachers to provide context for the lectionary passage by summing up the events of Acts 6 as well as Stephen’s speech in Acts 7, especially its closing lines in verses 51-53.

After all, the lectionary passage severs the alleged reason that the Jerusalem Council supposedly stoned Stephen. It’s not just that he’s a Jesus-follower. It’s that he accused them of setting themselves against God’s Spirit (v. 51).

Painting of Stephen, with pale skin and light brown hair pointing heavenwards as he stands in a fancy chamber with the Council, who are covering their ears and looking horrified or ferious. The Council are designed with stereotypically large, hooked noses. A speech bubble has been added so that one of them says "Them's fightin' words!"
“Saint Stephen Accused of Blasphemy” by Juan de Juanes, 1560s. This is just a silly meme, but the artist’s choice to give the Council members exaggerated noses while depicting Stephen, who is likewise Jewish, with more “European” features certainly highlights the effectiveness of Acts’ rhetoric in distancing Stephen and the other Jewish Jesus-followers from their kin.

When Stephen adds perceived blasphemy to that accusation, proclaiming Jesus stands at “the right hand of God” — that Jesus is himself divine — it’s enough to spur them to violent action.

…Or is it? Did the stoning of Stephen really take place? And if it did, did it occur exactly as the author of Acts recorded it?

As is so often the case, it’s important to note is the possibility of anti-Jewish polemic in this text — inherent to the text, and/or easily produced by our interpretations of it. I recommend this YouTube lecture on the stoning of Stephen, which draws heavily from Shelly Matthews book Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Creation of Christian Identity. Starting especially around 25 minutes into the video, a shift is pointed out between more positive depictions of the Jerusalem Jews in the first 6 chapters of Acts, and the vilification of non-Christ-following Jews after the account of Stephen’s martyrdom. From that point on, Jewish people are no longer described as the People of God.

Stephen’s own speech highlights this rhetorical distancing of Jesus-followers from other Jews; he opens his speech by naming “our ancestor Abraham” (v. 2), yet ends with:

“You continuously set yourself against the Holy Spirit, just like your ancestors did. Was there a single prophet your ancestors didn’t harass? …” – Acts 7:51-52a

While Stephen is most likely a Hellenized Jew, e.g. one who speaks Greek and holds a lot of Greek culture and values, he is a born Jew. These are his ancestors too! But here the author writes Stephen as setting up an us and them binary in which Jews with no interest in Jesus are “those people,” stiff-necked and murderous enemies of God Themself.

It’s important to recognize the biases in the NT texts, the context that caused these anti-Jewish polemics. We can recognize that the majority of the NT writers were Jews, that this was for these earliest Christians largely an intra-community conflict, while also naming the harm these texts have done and continue to do. We can experience these scriptures as sites where God’s Word speaks to us, while acknowledging their imperfections as human-written documents. In so doing, we refuse binaries of good and bad, us and them, that don’t leave room for the messiness of human realities.

1 Peter 2:2-10

Continuing to address antisemitism

They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people…

1 Peter 2:8b, 9a

The author of this epistle has such a gorgeous vision of the margins being made central, which I’ll get to in a minute; the tragedy is that he turns that vision into polemic, using his words to sever the Jewish people from their status as “God’s own people” and bestow that title upon Jesus-followers instead.

With passages like these in scripture, it’s no wonder supersessionism — the notion that Christians replace, or supersede, Jews; that our covenant through Christ renders their covenant through Abraham null-and-void — is so prevalent and deeply-rooted in Christianity.

I urge preachers and teachers to name this rhetoric, rather than simply skirt around it. Address these verses so that your audience won’t fill the void of your avoidance with the assumption that “we” agree with the letter writer’s point of view.

Like all of us, the Bible’s authors contained multitudes — their transcendent glimpses into the divine are weighed down by worldly ideologies that say God’s love is a finite resource; that life is a competition; that there can only be one “first,” one “beloved”; that to uplift one group is necessarily to sideline another.

Let’s keep naming that truth as we seek to follow Jesus in ways that bring justice and joy, rather than harm.

And central to the Jesus Way is the declaration that the ones rejected by human structures and systems are the very ones God works in and through! This too is something 1 Peter’s author recognized, as the next section explores.

Queer stones

Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house…
For it stands in scripture:
“See, I am laying in Zion a stone,
a cornerstone chosen and precious,
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame”
[…and]
“The stone that the builders rejected
has become the very head of the corner.”

– 1 Peter 2:4-7

This passage is very queer indeed. A stone rejected by the builders becomes the chief cornerstone! The ones who fabricated the structures that enclose us all are not the ones with the final say — God is!

The God of the stranger, Liberator of the oppressed, the One who always chooses to stand outside any dividing line we draw between “us” and “them,” finds that castoff rock and makes it central, indispensable:

[The] members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable… God [gives] the greater honor to the inferior member.

– 1 Corinthians 12: 22, 24b
Two panel comic. The outline of a church holds a bunch of white sheep telling a rainbow sheep, "Sorry but you're just not welcome here." Second panel shows the rainbow sheep walking out the church door with Jesus by its side as the white sheep go, "Hey, where'd Jesus go?"
Comic by NakedPastor.

We the shunned and shamed ones, we who are considered to be “no people” (v. 10) — nobodies — become the living stones with which Divinity constructs a new Creation.

We whom dominant cultures despise create our own cultures — queer culture, Black culture, disability culture, and more — where our unique gifts and ways of manifesting God’s love to the world are uplifted.

We are Christ’s hands and feet on earth, helping usher in a Kin-dom in which the last are first, the margins are drawn to the center, and all dividing walls are dismantled, piece by piece.

Babies in Christ: we learn along the way

Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation — if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

1 Peter 2:2

When we taste that God is good, we grow hungry for more. One major way we taste that divine goodness is when we look to the poor for God’s good news and join in liberation movements with the captive and oppressed (see Luke 4:18-19). By becoming co-conspirators with those “living stones” God centers in the building up of Their Kin-dom, we are submerged in Spirit.

Peter doesn’t elaborate on “spiritual milk” in this chapter, but Paul does in his first letter to the Corinthians:

…I could not speak to you as spiritual people but rather as fleshly, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still fleshly. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not fleshly and behaving according to human inclinations?…

– 1 Cor 3:1-3
Meme in a two column format. There's "talking about gender with trans people," showing a detail from that famous painting of Greek philosophers conversing; versus "talking about gender with cis people," showing an adult guiding a baby with a toy.

This old-school trans meme identifies a truth about what it’s like to start down the road of solidarity with any oppressed group to which we don’t belong: We are like babies! (But babies with capacity to cause harm.)

As we unpack the presumptions, prejudices, and skewed perspectives we’ve been absorbing since birth, we’re left with big gaps in knowledge. We finally know how little we know.

And as we live into a commitment to true solidarity with the oppressed, we mess up. To step up is to mess up, over and over — and remain committed to making amends and continuing to show up.

Back to John 14

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

– John 14:5-6a

As we devote ourselves to uplifting the stones rejected by the builders and keepers of our unjust systems, as we grow in our purpose as the living stones God uses to build up Their Kin-dom, how do we know we are headed in the right direction? What happens if we get it wrong?

I think again of my partner and his father. The feral fear of fire and brimstone awaiting the ones who believe wrong, let alone do wrong.

But God doesn’t await us with hellfire. God waits to welcome us into Their home with open arms:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

– John 14:1-3

I hear so much tenderness in Jesus’s voice here. He knows his friends are anxious and uncertain about what the future holds, so he paints them a picture of where their journey is headed: Past the terror and trouble, there is a beautiful home where a place has been prepared for us. For you! for me! — and not just for “us,” but for “them” as well.

Here we find the antidote to the supersessionism in the story of Stephen’s martyrdom and Peter’s first letter. In those two readings, there is an assumption that God can have only one favorite. Only one people. That as the divide between the followers of the Jesus Way and Jews with no interest in Jesus grew, it necessarily required a dethroning of Jews as God’s chosen people so that that title could belong to Christians.

That myth of scarcity sure has been around a while, huh?

Jesus tells a different story: God’s home has rooms, has room, for everyone. Everyone!

The very nature of God is overflowing love — infinite love, love enough to go around and still spill over. Just like we saw last week, Jesus ushers in life abundant — there is plenty for all.

No one gets scraps — everybody feasts!

Thanks be to God.

Illustration on a red background of a Black fem person with a curly blue afro, a medical mask, a crop top and skirt, wielding a staff while striking a cool pose. A quote from Audre Lorde reads "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house"
Art by Ayeola Omolara Kaplan. Audre Lorde’s powerful words can help guide us as we deconstruct and rebuild: We do not dismantle unjust systems by using the same tools of exclusion and exceptionalism, purity and punishment, suspicion and shame that built them in the first place. Thus antisemitism, Christian nationalism, and other key components of the white supremacist project have no place in the Kin-dom God is building with and in and through us.

  1. So many of us get told we’re “reading into” the Bible what we want to see there. But there are other ways of understanding our relationship to the Bible! Visit here for my framework on understanding scripture — particularly the last section, “You’re just reading into it.” ↩︎
Categories
bible study LGBT/queer Queer Lectionary

Queering Hagar’s Story

A short reflection on this Sunday’s lectionary text, Genesis 21:8-21. Scroll to the end for further resources

a painting of a figure like Hagar who is smiling as water pours through her hands; above her is a giant eye.

Name changes occur throughout scripture, but there is only one instance in which a human being directly names God!

That person is Hagar — the woman enslaved and then cast off by God’s own chosen people, yet who recognizes God’s solidarity with her in a way that resonates with many marginalized folk, including queer & trans people of faith.

Back in Genesis 16, Hagar is forced to conceive a child with Abraham — her bodily autonomy denied — and then suffers abuse at Sarah’s hand so painful that she prefers almost-certain death in the wilderness. While waiting to die, God comes to her, nourishes her, encourages her with the promise of a better future. For a time, Hagar must return to her oppressors.

This is a hard message, but It may resonate with queer and trans people who make the hard choice to find what safety they can while in the closet, or who choose to remain in relationship with family or faith communities that have caused them harm.

It also isn’t the end of Hagar’s story: when the time is right, God leads her out — as told in this week’s text in Genesis 21.

Sarah continues to abuse Hagar, with Abraham as a passive bystander and enabler. In a society where only one of Abraham’s sons can inherit his wealth and blessing, Sarah sees Hagar’s son Ishmael as a threat to her son Isaac, simply by existing! In our own day and age, this myth of scarcity persists, causing us to hoard resources and compete needlessly.

Sarah cannot stand to see Hagar’s child playing with her own son — as if they were equals! As if a slave boy should be having a moment of fun! She reads something sinister into the play — not unlike how some people today read sinister things into queer play, into drag queens and gender expansive youth.

Having convinced herself that Hagar and her son are a threat, Sarah gets Abraham to cast them out.

But again, God is with the outcast; God comes again to Hagar, who in Genesis 16 had given God the name El Roi — “God sees me.” This God is the god of her oppressors, yet Hagar recognizes that this god is her God as well! This god is a God who sees the suffering of the lowest of society, and responds.

God sees queer and trans people, too. God is our God, too — those who hate us do not have a monopoly on the Divine!

And God walks with us through every struggle, fueling us to fight the good fight and promising blessings to come.

Questions for reflection:

  • When have you witnessed God coming to the Hagars in our midst?
  • When has your community behaved like Abraham & Sarah, hoarding God’s love as if there were not blessing enough to go around?
  • Can you imagine a world in which Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar meet again? What would Hagar need to feel safe to meet with her former abusers? What would Sarah & Abraham need to do to make things right?

Further Reading

Queer-specific resources:

Other resources:

a painting of two women with curly brown hair and brown skin embracing; the one being held has a blue shawl with “Sarah and Hagar” written in Hebrew on it, while the one embracing her has a bright blue dress. A dove with an olive branch hovers behind them
“Sarah and Hagar” by Jewish artist Hilary Sylvester, who says: “Sarah the mother of the Jewish People and Hagar the mother of the Arab people finally find reconciliation through Mashiach.”