Jun 16 | “God’s a little queer,” (Sermon, June 16th 2019)

Jesus said, ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.’

John 16:12-15

 

You ever stop and think that God might be a little queer?

I’ll quickly note that I know it’s not the most comfortable term for everyone. It’s not got a fantastic history. But I prefer it for myself as a bi person, and it’s inclusive of so much and easier to say than the alphabet soup string of letters that often gets used instead.

I think God’s a little queer.

God’s love is just so expansive and intimate and over the top. It can’t be easily defined. It’s for everything and everyone. God loves you parentally, platonically, romantically, relationally, and in a million other ways. God is like a parent, nurturing and guiding us, teaching us to walk and to love. God is like a friend who knows and cares for us so deeply in all of our individuality. God is like a lover who yearns for us, always seeking deeper intimacy out of sheer desire and delight. God is like a sibling who has walked among us and knows our struggles.

There’s no nailing down what kind of love this is. It’s so much bigger than biology, so much bigger than a house with a picket fence and the Cleavers and a dog, so much bigger than all of the other family units that have existed alongside and outside that one. It can’t be contained and the traditional models may be helpful but are not sufficient for its full understanding and expression.

God’s a little queer!

A confession: I used that metaphor to prime the pump. We’re going out a little further, because our beloved is even bigger than that.

I think God’s a little transgender!

We’ve been gifted a beautiful new framework in the world we’re living in today to explore that most complicated of remembrances: Trinity Sunday. We tie ourselves up in so many knots over what it could possibly mean to worship a God who is three but also one. At the ordinations yesterday, Archbishop Melissa told us that Augustine once said that to not believe in the Trinity is to lose one’s soul…but to contemplate it is to lose one’s mind!

I’ve preached on today’s passages before, and I decided to go back and see what I said last time, and man, I don’t think even I know now what I was trying to communicate then.

But in the last couple of years I have been so deeply blessed to receive a vocabulary, a deeper understanding, of something I have been struggling to express my whole life.

What if you’re not pink OR blue? What if you’re kind of violet? What if you’re something else entirely? What if you’re handed this binary system of female and male as a little kid, and it just snaps in your hands and you panic, and you spend more than half of your life thinking, “Ohhh I can’t believe I broke  it!” and then all of sudden, you realize it was a questionable system from the get-go and in fact it wasn’t God that handed it to you because God was busy doing other stuff like making beautiful sea creatures that don’t even have a biological sex much less a gender?

And then, suddenly, you come to church on Trinity Sunday and you realize, “Wait – one God in three persons, undivided…that sounds a little trans, a little nonbinary,” and then you think, “God is so cool,” and THEN and then you think, “The church is so cool for figuring this out like 1500 years ago!”

This may sound fanciful, but it’s actually on the forefront of queer theology to reconsider our God in these terms. And it’s not as if there wasn’t some pretty fanciful stuff happening all throughout the church from the very beginning.

God, a being outside of gender who is described with archetypal images of both genders (warrior king, mother hen), and who ultimately chooses a gendered expression to reach us more closely. Jesus, transcending straight-forward male presentation with countercultural actions like footwashing and a divinity within. The Holy Spirit, so trans she eschews a body altogether only to rest upon us at times, indwelling our bodies when she is invited.

And throughout the history of the church, there were many theologies and images outside the binary system we’ve idolized in these later years. The ancient Greeks of St. Paul’s time believed that your physical behaviour could actually affect your biological sex! And for years theologians and mystics, no matter their gender, referred to and understood all human souls as female. St. John of the Cross, a Spanish contemporary of Teresa of Avila, describes his own soul this way in his masterwork “The Dark Night of the Soul” – and if you think, “Well, the soul is never explicitly named as female in that poem,” you’ve got to come to grips with the fact that the alternative is that John’s male soul was sneaking off to a romantic tryst with a male Christ!

No matter which way you slice it, God’s a little queer!

You’ve got to think that God must be at least as diverse as we are.

Imagine how we’ll be imagining God in a few more decades. “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

Now of course the church is made up of a patchwork quilt of people of all colours, creeds, nations, genders, and orientations. I suppose you could just as easily say the church herself is a little trans! But a Trinitarian God is not merely a God who presents differently. Gender and orientation is just one piece of who we are as people and as Christians.

No, a Trinitarian God also acts differently than we might expect.

A standard assumption about a divine being might be certain characteristics like remoteness, timelessness, omnipotence, omniscience.

A Trinity is, by its nature, invitatory. It is always in the process of inviting.

Here in the West, we often get caught up in the confusing whirlpool of “being” and “substance.” We ask ourselves what it means to be three-in-one and one-in-three. But in the Eastern Orthodox traditions, there is more of a focus on a sort of movement, on action. The Greek word perichoresis is used to describe a sort of dance that occurs between each person of the Trinity. If you think of three people holding hands and dancing in a circle, you will see each one has its distinctions, but joined together they are also one thing, a new thing, woven together.

I think in the world we’re living in today, this is a more helpful way to contemplate the Trinity, a way that has so much to teach us in a comparatively lonely city and a comparatively lonely time.

You can see this reflected in Scripture as we heard the beautiful words of Proverbs, describing to us Lady Wisdom calling in the streets for all to join her. She’s not going up to individuals and inviting them personally. Her invitation is total and unrestrained. She doesn’t care who comes to eat with her! Doesn’t matter if you brought your tux. Doesn’t matter if your plus one is same or opposite gender. Doesn’t matter how old you are or if you expected to be invited to dinner tonight. You’re welcome, if you heed the call.

And indeed this is simply another outpouring of her delight at the beginning of creation, laughing to watch the cosmos being spun, beside God like a master-worker.

From the beginning, from first light to the cross to the brand new light of today and ever after, this Triune God unfolds a tapestry of every colour to adorn the whole earth, and the only intent in doing so is to invite all creation to take part in the dance.

Beloved, the Spirit of truth is here, and calls us at the gates – calls us to keep her way of open arms, unfettered hospitality, and bold delight.

You will know her by her fruits: joy, peace, love, compassion, and hope.

Take a basket, and share them out.