By Kateri Boucher, a homily for a Pride Celebration at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (Detroit, MI) on June 4, 2023. Click here to watch the video version (homily starts around minute twenty-six).

It is a powerful thing to be celebrating this holiday in this space, with this community. I don’t take it for granted that we can gather here today in this way. It was only in 1976, 46 years ago, that the Episcopal church officially became open and affirming. As we know, there are many other streams of the Christian tradition that have done so even more recently, or still haven’t yet. 

There are many people who believe that the phrase “queer Christian” is an outrage or an oxymoron. And I can feel it coming from both sides… I’ve joked with my friends that coming out as queer was not a very big deal for me, which I’m very grateful for, but coming out as Christian to my queer friends has caused a bit of a stir. People are like, “Oh my gosh… Are you okay? Can we support you?” Just yesterday I was at a brunch with a bunch of young queer folks and I told someone I work for a church. It was kind of uncomfortable. They were kind of like, “Why?” 

And to be honest, I don’t blame them! I’ve definitely asked myself that question sometimes too.

This tradition, these texts, have been used in so many hateful, violent ways. And yet – and yet – for me that doesn’t feel like the end of the story. 

A few weeks ago I got to join Janet in a workshop she was taking as part of a course she’s doing called Social Justice in the Anglican Tradition. The workshop was titled Queer Apologetics. Which for those who aren’t familiar with that word, doesn’t mean that queer people are apologizing! Really the opposite of that. Apologetics refers to a practice of defending a religious belief or position. In this case, a belief in the inherent goodness and humanity of queer people! 

The workshop began by talking about some of the passages in scripture that have often been used in defense of homophobia and transphobia. Maybe what we could call Straight Apologetics. These passages are sometimes called “the clobber passages” – as the name suggests, for the violent ways that they’ve been used against queer and trans folks. You may have seen them or heard them or even had them used against you… 

And they can be heavy. It’s hard to read these passages and know how they have been used, the violence that has been inflicted in their name. And yet, for each passage that we read, we were given more context or another interpretation, each one showing that homophobia or transphobia were not clearly inherent to the text. 

This Genesis passage that we opened with today is one of them. At first glance, it may seem like an odd passage to have chosen for this Pride celebration. It’s one of the texts that’s been used to point to some kind of natural gender binary… Written very clearly in this first chapter of the first book of this sacred text, it says right there – God made male and female. And so that’s it, no further discussion needed. Right? 

But if we look more closely the story doesn’t actually seem to end there. Let’s go back to God’s other creations on this list. Day and night, land and sea, creatures of the sea and creatures of the sky. Queer theologians have pointed out that in these categories, what God is actually creating is not just what is named, but actually everything in between. 

God didn’t just create day and night… But also dawn and dusk and sunsets and sunrises, those first moments in the early morning when the sun has not come up yet but the birds have just started to sing. Could that be characterized as either day or night? 

And God didn’t just create land and sea… But also all those places where water and soil meet. Marshes and beaches and bogs, deep estuaries where tidal pools gather. The brilliant blues and oranges and reds of our ocean’s coral reefs. Would those be land or sea? 

And even the difference between creatures of the sea and those winged creatures of the sky. Queer theologians have brought out some truly hard-hitting apologetics by reminding us of the existence of penguins. These beautiful in-between creatures who use their wings not to fly but to swim. What category would they fall in? Who would argue that they are not a natural part of creation? 

By the time we even get to this verse about male and female, the supposed binaries named by God have been expanded by the strangeness and beauty of the natural world. What if the naming of male and female is not a way to describe the only two genders, but actually to show, as with all these other parts of creation, the beautiful endpoints that hold an expansive, infinite array of expressions between them? An expansive, infinite array of ways to be human and love other humans here too? 

One queer theologian who I’ve been learning from is Pinar Sinoupolus Lloyd. They started an organization called Queer Nature, which creates spaces to engage queer folks in nature-based education and mystical spirituality. They carry this Genesis theme even further, saying,

“The binary doesn’t need to be destroyed, but rather blown open and expanded to reflect the complexity of our ecological and celestial kin. I stand for a queerness that is inextricably informed by interspecies solidarity- by lichen, dusk chorus, swamps, coral and cryptobiotic soil. Our genders are forests full of hermit thrushes, canyons echoing with the canyon wren, plains rejuvenated by native hooves, shimmering galaxies, gurgling streams, bogs fostering rare carnivorous plants and wildflowers – an unapologetic natural phenomena.”

I hear this as permission to be unapologetic in our queer apologetics! In our own deep knowing of ourselves as natural phenomena – each and every one of us – every bit as beautiful and unique as the penguins and sunsets and swamps. 

As this Apologetics workshop went on, even though we were reading more and more of these challenging texts, I found myself being filled with an odd sense of comfort and joy. And not just because we were exploring alternative interpretations and explanations for these troubled clobber texts. But because I realized that all of these texts actually contained glimpses and records of queerness, even if they seemed to be denouncing it.

I realized, if everyone back then was just going around getting straight-married and identifying as the gender they were assigned at birth and only having sex for procreation, why would there need to be so many rules and laws describing what people could and couldn’t do? It would be a waste of precious paper!

No, these texts seem to be proof that queerness is an ancient and natural phenomenon, as natural as any attempts to create human community, as natural as being human itself. Over thousands and thousands of years, even when there have been efforts to stamp out or subdue or marginalize queer folks… We have not gone away. We have persisted. No matter if those in power have named it “unnatural,” no matter what any specific laws have said about us and what we can or can’t do.  

And this brings us to today’s gospel passage. To the law. 

Fast forward about 1,400 years after this Genesis passage was recorded, we find a radical young carpenter being questioned by the authorities. They ask him: Teacher, Rabbi, in all these laws, in all these sacred texts that have been given to us by our ancestors, what is the most important rule to live by? 

Now, Jesus is known for answering questions like this with another question, often sometimes cryptically. It is an incredible practice of his ministry and also sometimes kind of annoying – can’t you just tell us the thing? I can only imagine how it felt to those asking him! I looked it up and found that throughout the gospels, Jesus is asked 183 questions. Of all these questions that he is asked, he answers only three of them with a direct response. Just three. And this passage is one of them. 

What is the greatest commandment in the Law?

Unequivocally, Jesus responds: Love God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself. 

Without question, without hesitation, this is what Jesus tells us it all comes down to: Love. 

Love God, love neighbor, love self. 

Love.

This is what alllll the other words in these texts are supposed to point us back to – what they are rooted in, what they hang on. 

Love.

If we’re trying to interpret some text or law from the Bible, or if we’re trying to create laws or rules for our communities today, this is the rubric we can come back to. Does it help us be more loving? 

How would Christianity be different if this really was the commandment that we took to be most important? If that text isn’t enough evidence of queer affirmation in the Bible, I don’t know what is. 

And the records of our queer ancestors in their own words may not be written in these Biblical texts, but I don’t think that means they aren’t there… between the lines, between the supposed binaries, underneath the words, just around the corner, in the spaces and margins and silences and sacred “selah”s in the psalms. 

We may not know their stories, but I can imagine them. The widows who found ways to build lives together… the shepherds who fell in love under the stars… the people of all genders who found comfort and community and beauty and love during hard times, just like we are doing today. 

And today, as we turn to these stories from our past and also look forward to an uncertain future, I wonder about these questions:

Where is queerness present in our bodies, our lives, our communities, where we may not even be aware of it, or where it may be relegated to the margins? 

What can we learn from the natural world about blowing open binaries and building interspecies solidarity for collective liberation? 

How are we protecting our queer and trans children and kin, especially those who are being harmed in the name of this Biblical tradition?

And what laws are we willing to break in order to follow the most important one – the law of LOVE that all the other words merely hang on? 

I really do believe that there is Biblical precedent to love ourselves – all of ourselves – unapologetically. We are all part of this beautiful, mysterious creation story that is still unfolding. That continues to unfold through our lives. 

I believe that God made this day, this sun, this breeze, the trees, these seagulls… those penguins, wherever they are… and that God made all of these minds, these hearts, these spirits, these bodies….

And God said – it was so good.