This Queer Creation: Genesis 1:1-2:3
Ordinary Time--Pride Sunday
When God began to create the heavens and the
earth— 2 the earth was without shape or form, it
was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters— 3 God
said, “Let there be light.” And so light appeared. 4 God
saw how good the light was. God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God
named the light Day and the darkness Night.
There was evening and there was morning: the first
day.
6 God said, “Let there
be a dome in the middle of the waters to separate the waters from each other.” 7 God
made the dome and separated the waters under the dome from the waters above the
dome. And it happened in that way. 8 God named the
dome Sky.
There was evening and there was morning: the second
day.
9 God said, “Let the
waters under the sky come together into one place so that the dry land can
appear.” And that’s what happened. 10 God named the
dry land Earth, and he named the gathered waters Seas. God saw how good it was. 11 God
said, “Let the earth grow plant life: plants yielding seeds and fruit trees
bearing fruit with seeds inside it, each according to its kind throughout the
earth.” And that’s what happened. 12 The earth
produced plant life: plants yielding seeds, each according to its kind, and
trees bearing fruit with seeds inside it, each according to its kind. God saw
how good it was.
13 There was evening and
there was morning: the third day.
14 God said, “Let there
be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night. They will
mark events, sacred seasons, days, and years. 15 They
will be lights in the dome of the sky to shine on the earth.” And that’s what
happened. 16 God made the stars and two great
lights: the larger light to rule over the day and the smaller light to rule
over the night. 17 God put them in the dome of the
sky to shine on the earth, 18 to rule over the day
and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. God saw how
good it was.
19 There was evening and
there was morning: the fourth day.
20 God said, “Let the
waters swarm with living things, and let birds fly above the earth up in the
dome of the sky.” 21 God created the great sea
animals and all the tiny living things that swarm in the waters, each according
to its kind, and all the winged birds, each according to its kind. God saw how
good it was. 22 Then God blessed them: “Be fertile
and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds multiply on the
earth.”
23 There was evening and
there was morning: the fifth day.
24 God said, “Let the
earth produce every kind of living thing: livestock, crawling things, and
wildlife.” And that’s what happened. 25 God made
every kind of wildlife, every kind of livestock, and every kind of creature that
crawls on the ground. God saw how good it was. 26 Then
God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may
take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all
the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.”
27 God created humanity
in God’s own image,
in the divine image God created
them,
male
and female God created them.
28 God blessed them and
said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take
charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, and everything crawling on
the ground.” 29 Then God said, “I now give to you
all the plants on the earth that yield seeds and all the trees whose fruit
produces its seeds within it. These will be your food. 30 To
all wildlife, to all the birds in the sky, and to everything crawling on the
ground—to everything that breathes—I give all the green grasses for food.” And
that’s what happened. 31 God saw everything he had
made: it was supremely good.
There was evening and there was morning: the sixth
day.
2 The heavens and the earth and all
who live in them were completed. 2 On the sixth day
God completed all the work that he had done, and on the seventh day God rested
from all the work that he had done. 3 God blessed
the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all the work of
creation. (CEB)
One of the
favorite questions of children when you first meet them, alongside, “What is
your favorite color,” is “What is your favorite animal?” Very often, it’s actually “what is your favorite
dinosaur,” and I will confess to being one of the adults who no longer has a
favorite dinosaur, but I do have a top five list of favorite animals just in case
a kid is around to ask.
No, you don’t
get to know it. I have enough
knickknacks, thank you.
But one of the
wondrously hilarious things about kids is that, once they’ve established that you
have a favorite animal, they feel free to tell you all about theirs. And since their brains aren’t full of tax
laws or meal prep recipes or the Pythagorean Theorem, they have so many
facts about the animals they have claimed as their favorite. I absolutely love the hyperfixation ability
of kids—and adults with ADHD—because it reminds me that the world is deeply
weird.
Take, for
instance, the platypus. When I was a
child, I had a fling with knowing far too much about the animals of Australia
thanks to a book that was given me that had removable stickers. So a part of my brain will always know that
the platypus lives in eastern Australia and is one of the few mammals that lay
eggs, as well as having a bill, webbed feet, and a skeleton more closely resembling
a reptile.[1] Or the toucan, which Microsoft Bing wanted me
to know about earlier this week because it’s eerie how platforms discuss
information when you’re researching; the toucan is actually an umbrella term
for several different variations of bird, but their bills are one-third of
their total body length and made out of the same material—keratin—as human
fingernails.[2] Imagine a pair of fingernails a third your
size coming out of your face.
When I set out
to title this sermon, I went back and forth about the use of the word “queer”
and decided on it very deliberately. It’s
an inflammatory word, to be sure—in fact, one of the pieces of legislation we discussed
at Annual Conference last week was an “Affirmation of the Queer Delegates’ Call
to Center Justice and
Empowerment for LGBTQIA+ People in The UMC” and one of the
responses in the discussion was an objection to the language. “I can’t use ‘queer’ without getting yelled
at,” the representative said, and she was right. It’s not long ago at all that “queer” was a
homophobic slur; in some places, it still is.
Tone matters, for one thing, but so does familiarity. If you aren’t in the LGBTQ+ community, I
would advise you not use it in spaces where people don’t know you well enough
to trust that you hold such a word in the respect that its history deserves.
The use of “queer”
nowadays is, especially for younger rainbow folk, a reclamation of the original
meaning. Until the early 20th
century, “queer” meant “odd” or “different from the norm.” Parking lines that were green rather than
yellow or white could be queer. Particularly
loud plaid trousers could be queer. The
platypus and the toucan could definitely be queer. And in the 1920s, gay men decided that “queer”
felt better than “homosexual” for describing the reality that they weren’t like
everyone around them, but that wasn’t bad.
Just odd.
Here, 100 years later, people are deciding
that “queer” feels more right than making the LGBTQIA2S+ list so long that no
one pronounces it. If cisgender
heterosexuality is going to be held as the norm, then “queer” is everyone who
doesn’t fit there—and the beautiful side effect of that is that there are a whole
lot of people who may not see themselves in the labels of the rainbow but
certainly see themselves as queer.[3]
Here’s the thing about anchoring all
of these linguistics in the first creation story: the whole of creation is queer. It’s Pride month, so I don’t say that to say
that everyone’s queer in an erasure of those of us who are fighting for visibility
and representation; please recognize that there is an important difference
between celebrating diversity and covering up the voice of those experiencing
systemic and personal discrimination.
However, I do say that to anchor the beauty and wonder of Pride
month, of this faith that is built on the premise of queerness.
“When God
began to create the heavens and the earth”—at the start of all things, the
writer of Genesis says. It’s the very best
place to begin a story, is at the beginning.
I appreciate Amy terrifically for being willing to read the entirety of
the first chapter; it’s long, which is not everyone’s favorite when invited to
be liturgist. But it’s so important to
get the rhythm, I think, not because this is a scientific understanding of
which day brought forth the platypus or the toucan but because it’s a poem showing
over and over that God cannot and will not be confined to the boundaries or the
seeming normality we create.
Feel the push
of it—let there be light separated from the darkness, let there be a dome
separate from the waters, let there be fertile ground separate from the life-bearing
seas, let the lights of the sky separate the days and the seasons, let the
animals be separate from each other on the land and in the skies and the
waters, let humans be separate from everything before.
And then feel
the pull of it—we have light and dark but also twilight and the first streaks
of dawn; we have sky and sea but also hurricanes and water cyclones; we have ground
and oceans but also marshes and bogs; we have sun and moon but also eclipses
and comets; we have different species but also platypuses and toucans, not
least because the scientific understanding of evolving to survive is something
we in The United Methodist Church believe.[4] We have man and woman but also intersex people
and trans people and genderfluid people and nonbinary people and agender people
and labels I don’t even have in English or any other of the eight languages I’ve
studied. Male and female God created
them, Genesis tells us, made “in the divine image”—both of them, which means
that the divine image encompasses more than one understanding of presentation,
which means that God Godself is queer, unexpected, a little odd.[5]
Do you see,
Church? Do you see that creation was
queer from the very beginning, was odd and peculiar and absolutely uncontainable
in all the beautiful weirdness that God delights in? And it is delight; over and over and over
again, this creation story returns to the refrain, “God saw how good it was.” How good, towb in the Hebrew—it’s
the same word for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that Joseph’s
interpretation of the Pharaoh’s dream was good, that the Lord is good
and His mercy endures forever.[6] The very liminality of the world is
pronounced good from the start, whole and yet still being formed, holy and so deeply
strange. This queer creation is blessed and beautiful, is bizarre and bright,
is never going to listen to the ways we tell it to fit our boxes.
All of this is
held in God’s hand. It’s a song we teach
children, sure, that the whole world is in God’s hands, but have we as adults
forgotten how incredibly comforting that is?
Professor Roger Nam writes, “Not only is there one God, but this God is
sovereign and powerful. God says, and it happens. God does not have a singular
specified area of competence, but rather he is the creator God of all things.
In this power, God has no spatial limitations.”[7] Creation has no patience for the boundaries
we draw on it, and the God Who made it doesn’t, either.
Today is the
Sunday we’re recognizing that it’s Pride month, and it’s also the Sunday we’re
recognizing my full ordination, and I love that those two happened to coincide
because the one is absolutely supported by the other. Without the riot at Stonewall, without Rev.
Karen Dammann and Bishop Karen Oliveto, without Josephine Baker and Alan Turing
and Bayard Rustin and Marsha P. Johnson, without the changing understandings of
King David and St. Brigid and Joan of Arc and Hildegard von Bingen, I would not
be in a church, let alone in a pulpit with a stole and the office of full elder
on my shoulders.[8]
I am part of this queer creation, made
blessed and beautiful from the very beginning, and all of the work I do in the
Spirit Who calls me will flow from that reality, that grounded fact that there are
twilight evenings and platypuses and preachers like me through whom God looks
at the world and says, “Good.”
I am very
aware of what a gift it is to be able to stand here, to preach where anyone in
the world might hear me. I am very aware
of how the very institution that is finally starting to accept me has created so,
so much pain for so many. It matters not
at all whether we are affirming now, church, if we do not name the reality that
we have not always been here. It is ours
as people who claim Christianity to say that we have not always looked at God’s
queer creation and called it good, that we are part of a tradition that is
deeply flawed and still fighting. Whether
in the reality that we in the United States are still killing trans people in
the name of a whitewashed Jesus or that we in every industry are still killing
the planet in the name of a kingmaking God, we cannot be silent about the ways
we look at the beauty of the stars and the sea and the earth and the creatures
and forget that God gave them to us to care for, to recognize as
fantastically weird and marvelous and holy.
This first
story, this long chapter, this creation narrative is, as Geoff McElroy points
out, “not science, it’s not history, but it is poetry that expresses joy,
wonderment, and awe in creation.”[9] I no longer have a book with removable
stickers about Australia, and now that I know how big the spiders are, I’m not
that interested in the creatures of that land. But I still have my list of favorite animals,
and my awe in creation, and my orders as a full elder in The United Methodist
Church. I still have my very own
queerness, made in the divine image. And
we, together, have so much yet to do as very odd creations ourselves, following
along after the Spirit Who is wind and fire and a dove and a lover of toucans
and platypuses, the Spirit Who is constantly inviting us to let go of the lines
we draw so thickly around each other so that we can dance in the lights in the
dome of the sky.
May you have
the conviction to declare a favorite animal, beloved. May you have the humility to know that your
favorites and your convictions and your voice are not the only ones that exist,
nor are they always the ones that should be heard in all spaces. And may you have the faith to follow into new
understandings of the queerness of you, recognizing that God has made us all
much stranger than we have yet begun to name.
Amen.
[4]
What
does the UMC say about evolution?; see also The Book of Discipline 2016,
¶160.I.F.
[5]
John Holbert makes an interesting point that the male/female dichotomy isn’t
introduced in any of the animal categories, only humans. This is largely because the creation poem is
focused on centering the human experience and the concept of humanity as God’s “crown
jewel” of creation, but it’s still a noteworthy difference when considering the
strawman arguments of “all of creation is a binary because we have to be fruitful”
(A
Needed Climate Crisis Conversion: Reflections on Genesis 1:1-2:4a (patheos.com)). Nature has figured out an almost infinite
spectrum of ways to be fruitful that don’t always require a male and female
component.
[6]
Strong's
Concordance (strongsconcordance.org) 02896, טוֹב
[8]
I don’t at all agree with every interpretation on this list, but it’s a good
starting point for reconsidering queerness throughout Christian history: 30
LGBTQ+ Religious Saints Throughout History (advocate.com)
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