Monday, February 8, 2016

Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday, Our Whole Lives Sunday, February 7, 2016

C Transfiguration BFC 2016

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36

February 7, 2016

Church of the Open Arms in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, began as a United Methodist Church with a United Methodist Church pastor. When their pastor came under attack for officiating at gay and lesbian weddings, she was brought up on charges by a member of another United Methodist Church. Rather than stay and fight within a process I think of as equivalent to the Salem witch trials, their pastor turned to the United Church of Christ and the congregation followed. I was honored to be asked to speak to their congregation on the issues of inclusive and expansive language.

But I did less teaching the weekend I was there and more learning. Their pastor helped me to understand gender and sexuality as a spectrum rather than as two distinct, binary poles. Intellectually, I was excited by these new learnings. It was transformative for me. But the real test came the next day when we greeted members of the congregation and a person I can only describe as looking like Abe Vigoda who played Fish on Barney Miller, but for his high heels and long, blond wig. He or she looked directly me in the eye, thanked me for my presentation, and waited to see if I would maintain eye contact. I’m not sure that I did. I think there was a hope that I might be different. I doubt that I was. Could I look beyond the trappings to see the image of God found in this person?

On an island in the harbor of Bombay, from around the 8^th Century is a cave one enters from a bright sky. Moving into the darkness, you lose your sight as your eyes adjust. But you keep on walking and encounter this huge 19 feet high and 19 feet across figure. From straight on, one sees only the central figure, a head or a mask. When looking straight on, one cannot tell whether the mask is male or female or both male and female. It is the mask of God, the mask of eternity. Through this mask we are to learn that eternity is to be experienced as radiance.

In turning to the left one other figure emerges and slightly to the right, another figure emerges. This slight turn to the left or right moves the onlooker out of the perspective of transcendence to the field of opposites. One mask is clearly made to represent the female. The other is clearly made to represent the male. Moving out of the field of transcendence takes us out of our eternal unity to differences that too often are found to be against one another: male and female, light and dark, good and evil, right and wrong.[1]

In a movie produced and promoted by the United Church of Christ about the life and struggles of a transgendered young man, “Call Me Malcolm,” Pastor Emily relates her divine understanding of what it means to be transgendered. She borrows language from the book of Genesis to talk about humanity being created both male and female, in the image of God. So, she says, “if you are looking for someone who incarnates the most clear and whole vision of who God is, well based on our Scriptural tradition, that it has to be a transgendered person who has experienced both male and female. That is the most whole vision of the sacred that we are going to get.”[2]

Indeed, while the second story of creation in Genesis 2 has God creating Adam and Eve. In Genesis, chapter 1, Adam alone is created as “male and female.” Adam is created in the image of God, an androgyne. Found both in the Jewish and Christian mythology is this understanding that Eden, Paradise, would only return when gender was transcended or disappeared. That culminates in the earliest baptismal formula of the church from Paul’s letter to the political associations in Galatia: “In Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female.” In other words, the newly baptized person returns to the primordial perfection found in the first creation story.[3]

It is one of the reasons we use inclusive and expansive language for the Divine at Billings First Church. We say that God is both this and that. We say that God transcends both this and that. In that understanding, we recognize the spectrum, the diversity through which God operates in the world in our sexuality and gender.

In the passage from 2 Corinthians today, Paul, a Jew is speaking to other Jews who use the Law to punish rather than enliven. Paul is really speaking to any group of people who have so long used any law, rule, idea, or standard that has calcified over time such that it is now used as a weapon against your enemies. Biblical scholar, Stephen J. Patterson writes about this passage, sympathizing with Paul, “Reading the Bible can harden your mind. Sad but true, Paul, sad but true.”[4] In the passage, Christ removes the veil so that everyone, not just Christ, might know themselves as reflection, mirroring the image of God. We may present as male or female but two somethings deeper there is the image of God that is created both male and female.

Native American theology contemplates a similar understanding with a recognition that there are more than two genders. “Two Spirit” people became a term coined to unite the LGBTQ Native community. “Many two spirit, historically, were keepers of traditions, tellers of the stories of creation, and healers. Many of the great visionaries, dreamers, shamans, or medicine givers were two-spirit people.”[5] Among the Crow, Woman Jim was not only known as a prolific warrior in the 1870s, but Woman Jim also made large tipis and leather goods intricately decorated with quill- and beadwork.[6]

In the end, two-spirit people like Woman Jim remind us that we are very often the losers when we cannot recognize the image of God, God reflected and mirrored in people with diverse gifts.

I am proud to be the pastor of a church that actively teaches and learns from the award-winning Our Whole Lives curriculum. This curriculum not only helps our young people to become aware of how God may be moving in ways that transcend gender and sexuality but also in ways that reflect God’s profound love for diversity. That may save one of their lives. That may save the lives of someone at their school, in their workplace, or in their wider community. That may welcome incredible gifts into our faith community that very well save us. May that salvation become wider and broader so that all people created in the image of God, male and female, know love and justice and be seen for who they really are. Amen.