In my very first call as a minister, I served as an associate pastor for a church that had more than 900 members on the books, though the reality was a shade lower. There were still kids in church back then, a very different time culturally and economically. A desirable local school system didn’t hurt either, though in that context desirable meant white and economically advantaged, the same kind of urban/suburban split that poisons so many communities.
One of my tasks as the junior pastor was to teach the confirmands. And in that region, there was a conference-wide confirmation retreat every spring, so the kids and I headed off to church camp for a weekend.
As part of the retreat, the kids had to role play being a pastoral search committee, so they were divided into congregations and given a brief description of their church and community, while the clergy sat through interviews.
I ended up being called by Country Club United Church of Christ, which, for those who know me, is absolutely the last place I’d ever want to serve as Pastor and Teacher. And that isn’t even the point of my story.
As the young teens described their imagined church to me, they explained that the sanctuary was quite lovely, and included a large golden statue of God.
Just to be clear, God, not Jesus.
I had questions. I had concerns.
What did they think God looked like? Were they familiar with this thing called the Ten Commandments? And in particular, did they know which one came in at number two on the list?
It would have made me wonder about the religious education programs in their home churches, but truth be told, I already had a good idea how that went. They had mostly attended Sunday School in programs intended to entertain rather than educate, missing months at a time due to cheerleading or basketball. About half were in the confirmation process against their will, which made things tricky when it was actually time for confirmation.
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the kids thought a graven image of God was okay. American Christians worship an idol they call “God” all the time. Not just American Christians, of course, but that is my context, the one I can most confidently address.
So let me just get this out there. God is not a giant old white man in the sky, despite the image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Not in the sky. Not white. Not male. Though definitely old.
God is also not a book written over the course of a thousand years, give or take a few centuries, and completed two thousand years ago.
Humans created God in our own image, not the other way around, then wrote it down and declared it to be true, which does not make it true.
Most of those efforts were well-intentioned, humans trying to make meaning out of our fragile and finite existence, though some of our less stellar traits made it into the mix, a good dose of patriarchy and nationalism. So we end up with a Bible that endorses genocide and slavery, where God looks co-dependent and sociopathic.
There are 613 laws in the Torah according to the Rabbinic tradition, and we ignore the vast majority of them, eating shrimp wrapped in bacon and wearing clothing made of mixed fibers, both of which I endorse.
The Bible is filled with contradiction, and not just the Hebrew Testament, but the Christian Testament as well. Even something as familiar as the Nativity narrative is not as simple as it looks. In Luke, the Holy Family travels for a Roman census that historians tell us is a fiction, while in Matthew, Mary gives birth at home. So much for the manger!
So not only is God not a giant old white man in the sky, everyone, and I mean everyone, picks and chooses how they read the different parts of scripture, the poetry and the fiction, the legal codes, the histories, and the letters. Everyone picks and chooses, just some of us are honest about it.
And what you pick and choose says far more about you than it does about the ancients who wrote the text or the God they were trying to figure out.
God did not create Adam and Eve and a Garden of Eden. The ancients did not take that story literally, and they didn’t even know what we know now about evolution and natural selection.
Biological gender and sex may be an inverted bell curve, with the overwhelming majority of humans at the poles, but that has never been the only reality. Children are born with ambiguous genitals every day, somewhere around two thousand in the United States alone last year given the average rate, leaving a child’s physical gender as a surgical decision for some parents. The rate of abnormality in the sex chromosomes is as much as six times higher still.
And that is only the biological. Social constructs of gender are context dependent, changing from culture to culture across time. I’d begin to dissect these social constructs of gender, but I suspect you’d all leave for brunch before I’d even gotten started, because there is just too much there. I will say that even as women move into ever more traditionally male roles, fighter pilots and football coaches, the “girl” lane for teens seems to be getting narrower, a product of social media’s comparison culture. If you can’t be a Tik-Tok teen with the latest fast fashion and make-up videos, with Insta-posts from Aruba, maybe you aren’t a girl at all, at least not one worthy of peer-attention. Which is just crazy.
I know how silly all of this role expectation is, even among minority communities. It is always a challenge when my gay card comes up for renewal and they find out I like Nascar. But then I tell them I like opera, so I must be okay.
Even if the Bible was a practical guide for daily living in our postmodern age filled with quantum weirdness, and it is not, it still says nothing about little boys and dolls, less than nothing about teen gender expression, because teenagers did not even exist. Life was hard and very, very short.
Our faith demands we walk humbly with our God. It looks more like arrogance than humility when evangelicals declare God hates who they hate, especially when Jesus spent his time loving those who his religion hated, who they treated as unclean, those shunned and deemed worthy of execution in the street. Indeed, his own execution came at the request of the religious.
Our particular branch of Protestant Christianity figured out four centuries ago that we did not have all the answers, and decided that that was okay. We see that expressed in this congregation’s particular heritage and in the broader Congregational movement in the 19th century, so that today, we are non-credal, which is to say we care a whole lot more about what you do than about what you think. And while I am up here talking for what must seem like forever to you, our mantra, if we have a mantra, is “Show me, don’t tell me.”
Which is all a roundabout way of saying there is a reason we have always been the ones out front when it comes to love, because we let God be God in all of that divine mysterious love, and choose not to pretend that we are God, the love part being the operative part, for if you follow the trajectory of the Bible story, it starts with that God who looks like us, but lands on love and grace.
You are called to be your best self, and your best self is a reflection of holy creativity and holy love, though how that is expressed in your life is going to be unique to you, to all the things that made you you, the good, the bad, and the beautiful.
And in the end, it is no more complicated than that. God is not some golden statue at Country Club United Church of Christ. God is the holiness that is flowing through the world, exuberant and flamboyant. God is present in the nurse who should have clocked out two hours ago, and the twelve year old sitting on the bed trying to play “Stairway to Heaven,” and you, queerfully and wonderfully made.
Amen.
Unfortunately I missed this message. It is dear to my heart. Two of our grand daughters (each from different families) are revealing that they are trans. Their journey has been painful. Thanks to some excellent treatment facilities they are both happier because they are learning to cope with those who refuse to accept their truth. Their struggles are caused by those that refuse to accept them as who they are. Of course, you already know this. But it is a gift for me to be able to share it with you.