queer theology – Binary-Breaking Worship

There’s something queer about a Triune God.

A diagram of the Trinity featuring a triangle with each angle labeled The Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit respectively. In the center of this triangle is the word "God." Connecting lines between each angle read "is not," so that it reads "the father is not the son is not the holy spirit is not the father," while lines that connect each angle to the center read "is" so that you get the message "the father is god, the son is god, the holy spirit is god."

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.

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There’s something queer about a Triune God.

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