Pentecost / Pride Sunday
Acts 2:1-21
SERMON “Holy DEI”
In April of 1966, the cover of Time Magazine had no picture, and apart from the masthead, contained just three words and a punctuation mark, red against a black background. It asked “Is God Dead?”
It was a response to a theological movement that is a bit wonkish, and if I’m being honest, I don’t find that movement particularly interesting, except in that the Rev. Dr. King felt the need to take a pot shot at the idea.
I suppose for me, God is a bit like Schrödinger’s cat, the famous thought experiment in quantum physics. In that experiment, the cat in the box is alive and dead until you open the box, the observation collapsing the quantum state. And unless you are a physicist, that probably makes about as much sense as the idea that God is dead.
I have no question that God is alive in the sense of still present, though the god I was raised with, the petty male tyrant in the sky, egotistical perpetuator of domestic violence, is most certainly dead to me, and not just because that god is not the God I experience, not a god worthy of my praise.
Traditional Christian belief supposes that God does not change, that the salvation narrative contained in the Jewish and Christian scripture tradition is a carefully scripted divine drama, humans little more than puppets.
In that traditional reading, God’s last communication with humankind occurs when John of Patmos receives a revelation, and since then, God has been more absentee landlord than divine presence. Two thousand years of radio silence. Unless little Joey receives enough “get well” cards or our favorite team needs a touchdown.
Sure, certain traditions have people, mostly men, who claim to speak for God, and Pentecostals lean into the Holy Spirit’s activity in the church, but systematic theology is about describing God as God was at that moment when the Christian Testament became a thing.
The thing is, to be alive is to change, so in that sense, that God of Traditional Christianity is dead, unchanging, boring, and unable to love.
Those who use scripture as what we call “clobber texts” to scapegoat queer folk aren’t just taking complicated and translated ancient texts out of context, they are also saying that God has not changed in 2000 years, that God through the lens of the priests in the Temple of Solomon around 600 B.C.E. or God through the lens of the former Pharisee Saul around 50 C.E. is the exact same as God who was powerfully present with Dr. King in Memphis.
God is alive and changing. Full stop.
The god who hates who you hate and affirms your sense of entitlement is an idol. You have made a god in your own image.
Now that we have established that God is not dead, let’s look at Creation.
Against all odds, Creation seems purpose built not only for life, whatever that is, but for evolution. And while we use math to model genetic change, the result is more magic than manufacture.
I don’t say that because I need the unknown to believe. I believe because of what is known.
It is not the unseen that moves me to praise. It is what is seen and experienced.
We homo sapiens are the current stage on one evolutionary trajectory, and as the psalmist says, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. In our existential angst, we have crafted stories, convinced ourselves that we are exceptional. Racists need the lie of race to assuage their guilt and justify their cruelty, and we have done the same thing in an arbitrary way with animals, deciding that our cat has emotions, but our bacon does not.
I get it.
Well, I mean, not the part about cats having emotions. But diversity is holy. Even you cat people.
The thing is, every single living creature is an infinitely complex interplay of chemicals and electricity, and that before you factor in environment. We try to shove things into neat little boxes because that makes us feel safe in a world where we have limited control.
Creation, on the other hand, is gloriously messy, unruly.
Biological sex is a continuum, an inverted bell curve where most folks cluster at the extremes, but it is not a single switch that flips to male or female. There are many genes coded to determine hormone expression and physiological development, and that some particular combinations are less frequent does not make them bad. Different does not mean broken. Different is how it works.
No diversity means no natural selection means no humans, just a proteins in a pool of sludge.
Thousands of children are born every year with bodies that don’t match their hormones, with bodies that don’t fit neatly into typical categories, and that is even before we get to botched circumcisions.
Biological sex is descriptive, not prescriptive. And if sex is descriptive, not prescriptive, a matrix of the physical and the hormonal, things get even more chaotic when it gets to gender, which is a cultural construct. We happen to mostly be in a cultural trajectory that is patriarchal, in which traits associated with those assigned male at birth are equated with power and power equated with superiority, but there have always been matriarchies, have always been cultures that valued wisdom as much as power, and I say to you, my male-identified brothers… well, you know… we can be some serious knuckleheads.
Or as they say, “Hey, watch this. Hold my beer.”
Then we get to physical attraction and emotional attraction, and those are not always the same thing, and they sure don’t always fit the social rules. They don’t even always stay the same over a lifetime.
We like what we like, in people, in food, in music, and you can keep your heavy metal and your oysters, neither to my particular tase, though I am old enough to like the band Blue Oyster Cult, which is almost metal but doesn’t contain any actual seafood.
Same-sex physical intimacy exists in many species, and it is clearly more that physical acting out, as we have seen longtime companions and grief among animals. It was not so long ago that queer human couples were reduced to B-grade euphemisms, so let’s hear it for penguins in love.
Diversity is holy because creation is holy, and no label, no culturally constructed box is ever going to fit the infinite you that is wholly and holy God’s.
I shouldn’t even have to now build a case for why we should stop shoving people in boxes and being jerks, because the bottom line is that every letter in the queer alphabet is as holy and magical as the most traditional and typical expressions of biological sex and cultural gender and affectional orientation. But just in case you missed it, let’s be clear.
The Jewish Scripture is deeply subversive. Along with over six hundred rules, patriarchy and monarchy, you find radical calls to justice, commands to welcome the immigrant and pay a just wage, women who don’t fit in the box, in their expression of gender and even in their sex lives.
Jesus is unapologetically part of the subversive side of the Jewish prophetic tradition. He saves the woman accused of adultery, heals the mentally ill Gentile living in a cemetery, learns from the Syro-Phoenecian woman desperate for healing, dines with those scorned by the people with power.
In a world where uncleanliness was contagious, he touched and made clean, and taught us in the parable of the Sheep and the Goats that our attention, our care, must always be for those society has maginalized.
How ironic that some who claim to follow Jesus put so much effort into marginalizing others. They want to celebrate the resurrected and living Jesus, so long as he remains firmly stuck in a pre-scientific age. Though their totally down with him boosting their immunotherapy.
On this Pentecost, on this Pride Sunday, let us celebrate that God was not dead when Time magazine asked the question in 1966. God is not dead. God is alive, in the blooming of the iris, in a Tchaikovsky symphony, in you no matter how you express your gender, and maybe… though I’m not entirely sure, in your cat.
Amen.