Sermon given by Aiden McMahon, May 19, 2024.
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue,” says the book of Proverbs. Death and life are in the stories we tell. It saddens me how many of the stories we tell about the Bible are stories of death, when I have come to see it as so full of life.
Tell me your stories.
In her book The Queer God, Marcella Althaus-Reid, one of the earliest voices in the field of Queer Theology wrote that “Queer Theology is…a first-person theology: diasporic, self-disclosing, autobiographical and responsible for its own words.”
I believe that your stories are in this book, upheld as scripture by millions. Today, my hope is that you have the opportunity to claim or reclaim this book as your own.
Though I never was on the receiving end of abuse justified by this text, many of the people dearest to me were. I think that’s where my journey of trying to figure out the Bible began. It’s hard to love something, to believe the best of it, and then see it misused. I spent a lot of my 20’s keeping it at arms’ length, approaching it intellectually from time to time and reading a lot of theology. But that was never life giving.
And if I’m being completely honest, my decision to go back to school after nearly a decade was not motivated solely out of some selfless desire to become a spiritual care professional. It wasn’t even really about my education. In my heart of hearts, I was hoping to regain something I had lost long ago. More than anything, I was hunting for whatever would make this book, and my tenuous faith, matter in my life again.
So when I say that I was practically begging for my Hebrew Scripture professor to give me a framework, I’m not really exaggerating. “Just let it all make sense again, please!” Can we say the Bible has authority? How are we supposed to read it? I just wanted a better answer than the one I had given up.
To his credit, my professor did not give me an answer. He gave me counsel. The Bible, he told me, has authority whether we want it to or not. It has for millennia and that isn’t going to change any time soon. So instead, it’s up to us to decide what we’re going to do with it.
What are we going to do with it?
My deep desire is to see a world where liberative readings of the Bible become the dominant ones. I hope that UUs can be part of that shift. Given our origins as the product of two Liberal Christian denominations, I believe we have just as much claim to it as anyone else. So how might we start?
That same professor said we must approach the Bible with what he called “A Holy Curiosity.” You can and should question it. You can and should critique it. There are terrible things in the Bible, after all. But also beautiful things. You can reject it, or you can embrace it. But whatever you do, do not underestimate it.
He did share one opinion with me, though. While the Bible does contain rules, ethics, and advice, it is first and foremost a book of stories. Find the stories which resonate with you, and you’ll find your answer. You’ll find your Bible.
So tell us your stories, because the Bible is a book of stories about people.
People like David and Jonathan. David, who loved Jonathan with a love he said he preferred to that of women, and yet this did not stop God from saying that David was a man after God’s own heart, in 1 Samuel 13, the only person described that way anywhere in the Bible.
People like Ruth and Naomi. When Naomi was determined to return to her homeland alone, Ruth makes this vow; “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.” This vow has now become a model for many queer wedding vows.
And people like the Ethiopian eunuch, who God tells the Apostle Phillip to find in the wilderness between Jerusalem and Gaza, a man who traveled all the way to Israel from the court of his queen to worship, even knowing that the law would not allow him, a foreigner and a eunuch, to enter the temple.
The story goes that Phillip, sent by the Spirit, finds the eunuch reading from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, the same prophet who wrote “Do not let the foreigner joined to the LORD say, ‘the LORD will surely separate me from his people’; and do not let the eunuch say, ‘I am just a dry tree.’ For thus says the LORD: to the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast to my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”
This eunuch becomes the first non-Jewish convert to the nascent Jesus movement. And he’s the first person that God seeks out specifically in the book of Acts, even before the man who would become the Apostle Paul.
Since “eunuch” was a catch-all term in those days for many types of gender and physiological difference, many have come to read this as God’s invitation to trans, genderqueer, and intersex people of faith. A promise to give them a home and a family. The Bible can be a story of the divine desire for Queer people to be fully included, and you can read it through that lens.
I think there are many ways to read the Bible.
When we talk about how to read something, we’re engaging in what’s called hermeneutics. There are all different types; I just presented one of a plethora of Queer hermeneutics, a story you can use to frame your understanding of other stories.
A totally different example I know many of you are familiar with would be the Jefferson Bible. It’s the product of an anti-supernatural hermeneutic. Jefferson cut all of the miracles out of the four gospels, but left in the teachings. His guiding story about the Bible was clear cut (and pasted). A purely rationalist framework.
One of my hermeneutics is that the Bible is a profoundly Queer book, and has been since its inception.
To understand what I mean you have to know what is meant by the word “Queer,” which is admittedly a challenge. Some theorists say it’s actually undefinable, or once you name queerness it ceases to be! For our purposes today, I’m using a definition provided by Queer Theologian David Halperin, who writes in his book Saint Foucault that queerness is an inherently relational force, known through how it reflects, critiques, or resists norms, especially oppressive norms. It inverts power structures and makes boundaries porous, if not altogether erased.
When the religion of the Hebrews uplifted rest as not only permissible, but holy and necessary, you can bet it turned some heads. The sabbath was, and remains, profoundly Queer even today. Institutionalized rest was (and one might say still is) completely countercultural; it would be millennia before the first modern labor law.
And these sorts of narratives are everywhere in the Bible if you know where to look, like in Matthew’s beatitudes.
Blessed are the poor, the peacemakers, those hungry for righteousness. Not the wealthy, the warlike, the well-fed our world is inclined to see as blessed.
These liberative impulses are part of the story, because the Bible isn’t just a book of stories about people, it is a book of stories about people trying to be faithful, to do what is right. They fail as often as they succeed, but they keep trying. The story of the Ethiopian eunuch highlights the Jewish scriptures negotiating with themselves. Isaiah’s promise of inclusion in conversation with Deuteronomy’s laws of exclusion! I don’t think that makes them less authoritative or less sacred; it makes them profoundly human and relational. We can see the drama playing out across the centuries.
And this drama is what, I think, makes it scripture. The push and pull of continuously wrestling with all of life’s questions, and sometimes getting it wrong.
In his essay Postmodern Scripture, Queer Theologian Gerard Loughlin writes that “the Bible itself, abstracted from the life of the community in which it lives, is not and cannot be inspired…The text is a dead thing until it is taken up and performed by the Church.”
Scripture only comes alive when we can see ourselves in the text. When its stories become our stories.
Let me share another one with you.
Rev. Robert Goss, whom I had the profound experience of hearing speak to my Queer Theology class, writes extensively about food and purity in the Bible. Rev. Goss’ career has been one of unceasing HIV/AIDS activism, a source of both tremendous grief and holy joy in his life. He knows what it meant for Jesus to have touched the sick, eaten with sex workers, and invited in the unwanted and the marginalized while telling his followers to do the same; how the rules meant to keep us clean just as often keep us from loving those most in need of it.
These “acts of indiscriminate love,” as Rev. Goss calls them, made Jesus ritually unclean – and never in the Gospels do we see him doing anything about that. When he symbolically offers bread and wine as his body and blood, as this holy thing, something to be joined to, something healing, it is an abolishment of all exclusionary purity systems forever. Goss also names it as the erotic act that it is. Take my body into yours. Become one flesh with me. It is a holy thing. It will never make you unclean. This, too, can be your Bible.
The Bible is also a book of stories about people trying to be faithful to their God.
This God, too, set the Israelites apart. They had only one. Though they often spoke of Him, so too was this God like a mother, a nurturing, comforting presence. She shielded them in battle, and He brought the crops in season. But They were not God of war or harvest or anything like that; They were a God of covenant.
The God of the Bible is a Queer God. A relational God.
I know God is a difficult topic around here. Like all of this you can, of course, take or leave what I’m saying. I’m a staunch Universalist, after all. I don’t think what we believe about God matters all that much, in the eternal sense.
But I am not particularly Unitarian, in the classical sense.
I understand the impulse to try and make God rational. But I find paradoxes to be beautiful things and sources of the deepest truths. I prefer a God that’s a little messy because we’re a little messy too.
“Let us make humanity in our image.”
He, She, They. One, but in Relationship. Three, but united. In constant flux, and yet perfect. Fully loved, and fully loving. A masculine, maternal Father. A Son who gives birth to a new world. And a feminine Spirit of wisdom and power.
You are made in the imago Dei. Queer, relational, evolving, perfectly imperfect. And so, so deeply loved. Tell me your story. Maybe we can find it in here.