gay

Spiritually Queer

Rev. Douglas Taylor

2-9-25

Sermon video: https://youtu.be/4M7hXgnhhzI

This is the day to start living your authentic life. If you have not yet already started on the journey – this is the day to leave behind all that blocks you from becoming your true self. Refuse that callous call to hate what you do not understand around you and even within you. This is the day to live as your authentic self.

In her book Black Liturgies, Cole Arthur Riley has a prayer that begins: 

God of our truest names,

We confess that too often we have encountered liberation in a person and chosen hatred. We confess our own jealousy at a person capable of living into their true self, when we ourselves are suffocating. We are in bondage to binaries that limit our imaginations for full liberation. 

This is my focus this morning. The suffocating binaries we bind ourselves and others into, the cages and boxes we build around the abundant variety that is God and our own true selves – we don’t need those boxes and cages.

Let us encounter the divine (Riley continues in that prayer) … Let us encounter the divine that refuses to be contained by human definition or imagination… Protect those with the courage to stay near to themselves. May their liberation be multiplied in all who encounter it.  (from Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley, p10)

She gave this prayer the title “For Trans and Non Binary Lives.” Can we accept that being trans is an act of liberation? That being openly gay or queer in any way can even spill out liberation for others? “May their liberation be multiplied in all who encounter it.” Can we accept that God’s love is not limited by your love.

Last year I was in the big bookstore over in Vestal looking for a copy of Cole Arthur Riley’s Black Liturgies, but could not find it. I had forgotten her last name and so could not rely on the alphabetical shelving system. So, I asked for help. I stopped an employee and described what I was looking. “The author is Arthur Cole or Cole Arthur … something, The book is called Black Liturgies, she’s a queer black woman writing prayers for liberation.” The employee perked up at the description and gave me a glance and asked, “Are you fam?” I smiled and, God help me, I said Yes. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

She brought me down the scripture and devotional aisle to a shelf focused on LGBTQ+. She helped me find my book and suggested a second one as well, House of Our Queer by Bex Mui. I left the store with both books.

Am I fam? Am I part of the family? Am I LGBTQ+? “Is our minister about to come out?” Kinda. I live in this world as a cis-het man – as a cis-gender, heterosexual man – but I am a little bit queer. I will not deny that functionally I am not family. I move through this world as an ally – or at least that is how I aim to be experienced. But I am also a little bit queer. Not queer enough to be targeted or impacted by the hate and legislation, but certainly queer enough to be asked about it and to have it come up regularly. I give off a vibe. And the vibe is not entirely wrong. Am I fam? Technically no, but I love the family and am cool to hang out with fam any time.

You know who was fam? James Baldwin. (Do you remember back in August when I said I would drop a Baldwin Quote every month?) Baldwin was an openly gay black man in a time when being either black or gay could get you killed. (And it still can.) In a collection of posthumously published interviews, Baldwin said:

“The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn’t want to admit. The discovery of one’s sexual preference doesn’t have to be a trauma. It’s a trauma because it’s such a traumatized society.”

― James Baldwin, “James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations”

There were over 600 anti-trans bills across the country last year. 50 of them passed. According to https://translegislation.com/ a website that tracks such legislation, 2024 was the fifth consecutive record-breaking year for total number of anti-trans bills under consideration in the United States. I am hard pressed to imagine the trajectory changing any time soon given the new administration and their expressed plans to harm trans and non-binary people.

The world around us wants us to be small and scared. Someone else benefits by the divisions and chaos. And some among us choose liberation anyway, some among us choose to live an out-loud love of their authentic selves even in the face of the hurt and hatred poured out upon them. 

And liberation is available for all of us to grow into who we truly are. Liberation for ourselves and other. What I ask is simply that we witness to how trans and non-binary and queer people are well aware of this fact, publicly. Witness and learn. And when ready – follow their lead.

As M. Jade Kaiser said in our reading this morning: “In a world that so boringly, so violently, so stubbornly insists on its stale and narrow gender rules and regulations, God Themselves is a state of constant transition.”

We can, instead, choose life. As we see our trans and queer siblings doing every day as a faithful and true expression of faith, can non-trans people also can choose life.

In another essay, “On speaking queerly in public,” Kaiser writes this:

“Train a child up in the way they should go, says the scriptures. And I want them all to go queerly, go freely, go in belonging. I want us to raise a whole generation of kids who never learn to hate themselves. Or to treat others like monsters. Or that there’s anyone even god is against. This is indeed part of my queer agenda: To expose children as early as possible to all the possibilities of their beautiful becoming. To leave no doubt that whichever way their love blossoms and their gender blooms and their body unfurls, they will be protected, cherished, celebrated, loved.”

M. Jade Kaiser declares what I also proclaim: What I want for our trans and queer people is the same thing I want for cis and straight people, for everyone: to be free. To grow, loved. I want each of you here – everyone really (but you’re the ones in front of me at the moment) – I want each of you here to grow into your full authentic selves. Spiritually, personally, communally, politically, sexually.

Politically queer? In our opening words this morning M. Jade Kaiser wrote: “As in strange and proud of us.” Spiritually queer? I have said at times that I am a Buddho-Humanist Christo-Pagan with occasional bouts of mysticism. Don’t give me a box. Religiously queer? I hear from some people that they are religiously trans – as in the were ‘assigned Catholic at birth.’(But don’t use that as an acronym – ACAB means something else.)

I want each of you here to be a little bit queer in every possible way; to break out of the boxes and binaries that do not serve life; to grow free, loved.  As Becky Brooks said in the prayer from this morning: “This out-loud love makes no secret of its aim to get you free.”

That is why our congregation is sending the signal in so many ways to say we are a space of welcome and belonging, of protection and inclusion. From the rainbow flags and trans rights banners our front, to the nametag buttons and pronoun conversations inside. And did you know we have 11 toilets in our building, and that all of them are safe for trans or queer people to use. They are safe for cis people to use as well, of course.

Perhaps you don’t connect with all of that. Perhaps you think it is not for you. But it is. We make our space safe for all of us when we make it safe for the most vulnerable. There is much in our world causing hurt and fostering hate – if your gut response is ‘I don’t get it,’ I encourage you to be curious … who benefits from you not getting it?

In that second book I bought last year, House of Our Queer, author Bex Mui (Moo-ee) talks about the blended realities she lives in racially, educationally, sexually, and religiously. In nearly every aspect of her life – the ‘either/or’ kind of choices are false constructs that quickly become unnecessarily constraining. She shares three lessons she learned when she left home for collage.

“People will always try to tell you what you are.

Our identities are complex.
Our lived experiences often don’t show up on the surface.” (p25)
Later in the book she writes this:

“I’m so grateful to be queer, to have had the opportunity to personally define who I want to be in relationships with, and what those relationships look like. I get to determine, outside of norms, who I am and I have found such a fierce chosen family. As scary as it can be to think of branching out beyond your first family, know that there is an abundance of connection to be made in this world, and there is a chosen family waiting to love you, exactly as you are.” (p39-40)

So, I’ll ask: Are you fam? Maybe you are a little bit queer. Maybe we could all be a little bit more queer. Most of us, after all, do not fit in the boxes society provides for us. Our queer and trans siblings have shown people of faith a path toward becoming our authentic selves that we all can follow. Every faith community can learn to be more accepting, more honest, more affirming and authentic.

Are you fam? Allies included – “there is a chosen family waiting to love you, exactly as you are.”

In a world without end,

May it be so.