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In Our Image We Create Them

July 18, 2021

Rev. Douglas Taylor

https://youtu.be/FfYJPQOIiLM

“God is queer”

The interviewer followed up, asking, “Would you care to elaborate on that?”

To which the person responded, “no.”

I looked all over the internet to find the source of this exchange. It would be good to provide a source for this quote; but alas, I have none. Instead, I will pick up the thread and offer an elaboration of my own. God is Queer. Let me explain.

First, let me acknowledge the word ‘queer.’ It may feel out of place to hear it in the pulpit, it may not. There was a time when it was used as an insult, as a slur against LGBTQ+ people. There was a time when it was not a kind term. You may remember such a time and find it jarring to hear me say it even though you know times have changed and our uses of words and language evolves. It has been a few decades now that the term queer has been used for self-identification. The way people are using the word queer to describe themselves is the way I am using the word to describe God.

God is not locked in a descriptive box or label. God does not always line up with our expectations. God is not what we would call normal or ordinary. God is changing from one day to the next and what we thought we knew about God last week may not be quite accurate anymore this week. That’s what it is like for people who identify as queer. That’s what it is like with my experience of God. God is queer.

I remember some radical conversations a few decades back asking what if God was a woman? Why were people always talking about God in the masculine? And it wasn’t just pronouns, it was the cultural valuing of men over women because God was a man, or at least that’s what we were reading in the books.

So, the Feminist Theology of the day said ‘Let’s do away with the he/him pronouns for God. Let’s say she/her instead.’ It was pretty cool. It was a way of reclaiming holiness for women. It was a way not only of challenging a theological idea, it also challenged cultural expectations and values of what it meant to be a man or a woman.

It was wild stuff to reject the masculine dominant version of the divine. Of course, I was in seminary around the end of the 90’s and feminist theologies had been raging for several decades by then. The conversations were not whispered by people in fringe groups. The conversations had arrived in the Mainline and middle-of-the-road communities. Feminist theology was respectable.

In fact, by the time I was paying attention in the late 1990’s, the conversation had begun to shift. Some people were still very strong advocates for using female pronouns for God. But I was not the only one at that time to refuse to ascribe masculine or feminine pronouns to the divine. I did not think of God as female any more than I thought of God as male. Putting a gender on God just did not fit my experience of the holy.

Early in my spiritual growth I decided God was non-binary, certainly in terms of gender and now that I consider it, likely in every other binary I could imagine. For such is life.

But let me drift, for a moment, into some interesting Biblical commentary. There is this moment in the Bible, right at the front in that first story, that has caused confusion and consternation to scholars throughout the ages. In that opening poem about creation, the one that happens over the course of seven days, there is a moment when the text has God say these words: “Let Us create humanity in Our image.” This is verse 26 of the first chapter of Genesis. In the very next verse, it says “So God created humanity in his own image.” The pronouns shift quickly back to the masculine singular, but for a brief moment God was plural.

There have been some interesting interpretations of this moment. If you were raised in a Christian church, you likely heard the interpretation that the ‘we’ is the trinity; that this is a hint way back at the beginning of Jesus. I don’t find this argument compelling. This bit of scriptural revisionism is untenable for anyone who will acknowledge Genesis as Jewish scripture instead of merely a pre-Christian text.

If you were raised in a Jewish community, you likely heard the interpretation that the ‘we’ is the celestial court of angels who accompany God in the creation of everything. This second explanation is also a little hard to take in given there is no mention of angels anywhere nearby this text.

A third possibility I’ve heard is the idea that God is using the ‘royal we’ that kings and queens will eventually start using around the late 12th century. This third option is only possible if you think God fancies themselves to be a 12th century European monarch. So, no.

A non-sensational option is that the author of this passage used the Hebrew word Elohim for the word God, which loosely translates to a generic role rather than a name or title – and according to the grammatical rules of that language, the 1st person plural pronouns were required; grammatically. I actually like this explanation best. The delightful stumbling block in this ancient text is not a hint or vague clue to doctrine and theology. It is a matter of little-known grammatical necessity.

Anyway, even though I am comfortable with the interpretation that says it’s a simple grammatical glitch, I can’t help but wonder about God’s pronouns. What if God is transgender and people just didn’t know how to talk about it back then? What is God is genderqueer and folks simply did not have words in the language at the time to say that?

Consider with me the context of this whole poem right at the top of the scroll of Genesis. The creation poem is filled with binaries and dualities. But when we really consider the world and how we experience it, these binaries are not as rigid as we think. Yes there is the binary of gender ‘male and female he created them,’ and I’ll get to that part in a minute. But first let me start with light.

And here I want to quote to you this elegant analysis by a non-binary Christian on Twitter named Michaela Nicola. https://wordsfrommichaela.blogspot.com/2021/06/a-little-reflection-on-genesis-1.html

“God made “day and night.” this sounds like a binary, similar to “male and female,” right? but that isn’t quite all we experience in 24 hours. sunrises and sunsets do not fit into the binary of day or night. yet God paints the skies with these too.

“On the second day God separated the sky from water. seems like another binary. yet the clouds hold water for us in the sky, the condensation and rain cycle refreshing our earth constantly. the sky, separate from water, contains and releases water.

“God also said “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” that isn’t the full story, either. consider marshes, swamps, bogs, and fens. not fully land, not fully waters. there is such glorious variety in God’s creation.“

That’s pretty cool, yes? Our experiences of the world reveal such binaries and divisions to always have blurring and blending at what some think of as the edges. But what if those are not the edges? What if the words we’ve been using to describe our experiences were simply the best words we could find at the time? What if those lines we drew were just our attempts at understanding, at figuring this all out?

I have found that’s what it’s like for everything. We draw a line between land and water. There is either land or there is water – and yet, as Michaela Nicola put it “That isn’t the full story… consider marshes, swamps, bogs, and fens.” Nicola continues to reveal the binaries of that creation poem. The creation of the sun and the moon are written as if they are a binary, when in truth they are merely the closest bright objects in a vast multitude of “planets, asteroids, black holes, supernovae.”  They continue to unpack the next days of creation with the creatures of the sea and winged birds of the air. To which Michaela directs our attention to the reality of the penguin; “definitely a “winged bird,” they write but do not fly and instead walk and swim.”

I love that they mention penguins. I love penguins. Consider all the other flightless birds and all the diving birds. Consider the amphibians and those creatures that transform from land to air like a caterpillar to butterfly. These are not exceptions and anomalies. We live in the blended experience of these so-called binaries. We are not limited by them.

So, when we come into this conversation of gender non-binary, of trans and queer people – how can we refuse to see this blending and blurring of this binary! The world is bursting with examples of how this works.

“Male and female he created them.” Sure, that’s what it says. But we live in a world of sunsets and penguins. How can we pretend God is so creatively limited as to not allow a profusion of ways to be people in this glorious world?

Michaela Nicola wrote their post to honor God and to honor those people who don’t fit into the boxes of “male” or “female.” It just means there is more to the story. They conclude saying: “and so we worship the God of more. The God of the marsh, the penguin, the God of the sunrise, the cloud, the supernovae. The God of the nonbinary.” 

Nicola names God as “God of the nonbinary.” And I work my way through this argument to say that God is nonbinary. God is love, and is in all things. God must be queer. I know that small textual curiosity in Genesis where God uses ‘we/us’ pronouns is not God revealing their non-binary status. I know. But I still believe that the rest of the story points toward a God not contained by either/or binaries.

Scripture is a form of seeking. What we have in this Good Book is the earnest efforts of people seeking to understand the worthy mysteries of God and life and our wonderous experiences of the universe. It is not a book of answers. It is a book of seeking. We are all just trying to figure this out. And life does not line up evenly. How can we conceive of a God that lines up evenly when most things in creation do not? When things that do line up evenly are considered note-worthy rather than normal?

And when we give such value to God, we will, by extension, give such value to people who live in the blurring and blending of the binaries such as gender. All of creation sings of this blending. If you don’t feel like you fit – consider the sunrise and the beauty of that blending. You are beautiful, you are part of God’s love.

As my colleague Rev. Leslie Takahashi wrote in our reading for today,

“The day is coming when we will all know that the rainbow world is more gorgeous than monochrome. That a river of identities can ebb and flow over the static stubborn rocks in its course. That the margins hold the center.“

Following this wisdom, I say God is in that river with us, ebbing and flowing over the stubborn rocks of ignorance, injustice and exclusion. I say, God is in the margin; God is in the rainbow and the supernovae, God is queer. And everyone is included. If you think you don’t fit, if you have been told you are not right – hear me when I say, you are included and God’s love is not bound by our small boxes and expectations.

Let us all learn to love the blended beauty beyond the binary

In a world without end,

May it be so