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July 28 - August 8, 2023
It’s less definitive; it does not point to you or me and say, “You are queer,” but instead makes a wide-open space for all people to find footing in relation to one another and their own lives.
Jesus acted queerly. Certainly, we could describe his actions as the dictionary definition of queer, “strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different.” Yet he doesn’t merely act queer. He enacts and embodies queerness. Jesus is queer.
God, in Jesus, is oriented toward us in a queer and radical way. Through the life, work, and witness of Jesus, we see a God who loves us with a queer love. And our faith in that God becomes a queer spirituality—a
Queerness matters. It is a matter of faith and a matter of spirituality. It matters to people who are trying to live but dying because of who they are and who they love. It matters to me as I struggle to orient myself in this world truthfully. It can matter to anyone, whether we identify with queerness or not, whether it resonates a little or a lot—because whenever we love ourselves and our neighbors with the boundary-breaking love of God, we enact this queer spirituality in the world. Queerness matters because we need to see all the ways that we ourselves are loved by God, and loved in so
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A desiring God. A God who desires.
As Christians, we’ve tended to demonize and vilify sex. But desiring God, wholly and fully, not only makes space for but inspires our pleasure. And then loving a desiring God is a fuller picture of a God who also yearns for our happiness, our joy, and yes, even our pleasure. To reiterate the Westminster Shorter Catechism, this is God’s glory. To enjoy a gorgeous cityscape or breathe in a mountain scene or drink deeply from the sight of the ocean at sunset or a delectable meal and, yes, even physical intimacy with another person—all this suggests something divine and eternal.
What a person desires tells the truth of the person’s being. Desire frees us to see our innermost being, and that shines a light into the caverns of each person around us. When that desire is given space for expression, it allows humanity to expand outward, and the love that results is richer, fuller, and sweeter. When we are rooted in the queer love of God, all our existing boundaries dissolve—and these boundaries do not merely exist between people but are the kinds of lines drawn around people, marking off who we think we are or should be, and what that looks like. A desire rooted in
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God who desires life and love for each of us.
the realization that my identity wasn’t completely internal and innate, but that the people around me who love me hold up mirrors for me to see myself more clearly.
an identity that is an invitation, a beckoning into freedom. An identity that is a call into being one who is loved.
a gateway into connection and communion,
We can create, we can discover, and we can know ourselves, but we live in a world where others also answer the question of who we are. This shapes us, but when identity is experienced in terms of desire and love, we can choose to let it shatter our world or expand it beyond our imagination.
I want to simply be. I am who I am.
But the word promiscuous means more. It is rooted in the Latin word for “to mix” and carries with it a sense of bringing together various elements. This notion of promiscuity as indiscriminate mingling
It’s an orientation outward toward others, and particularly the Other, to see and love with the indiscriminate excess of divine love.
What I did was certainly irresponsible and risky, and in the end, it was not life-giving. But queerness has helped me redeem this story in a way that’s meaningful for my life. A queer spirituality reminds me that beneath any struggle and story is a desire to love and be loved, and to love extravagantly and capaciously—to love without holding back.
Queering hospitality blows the doors wide open in human interaction; it’s not selective or methodical but a table overflowing. Hospitality is a continuous recognition of another’s humanity, and simultaneously, it’s a loving solidarity with that person. Further, it is seeing not only the humanity of the person in front of us but our own humanity, too.
This capacity to work on and against the ideological structures that would normally prohibit their interaction is part of the core of Jesus’s queerness.
At its heart, queerness is promiscuous. It makes space for mixing and mingling, and for multiple identities to exist at once. It invites creative identity making and connection in every moment. Identity is fluid in that boundaries are porous, so interactions possess the potential of that slippage at any moment—as in this moment between Jesus and the Samaritan woman.
destabilizes and refashions identities not as strict categories but as multiplicities and subjectivities.
Without promiscuous searching and a willingness to engage beyond one’s borders, this connection would be impossible.
we do not see anyone as a stranger or foreigner or outsider or enemy; every human being shares our humanity. Every human being is our neighbor.
A queer spirituality challenges us to think about what it means to live in this world together by recognizing the plurality of the question. This neighbor question must take into account the reality that we have systems and institutions that permit these tragedies—the killing of black and brown bodies, refugee children, LGBTQIA persons, and police officers—to occur on a regular basis. We won’t experience true healing and reconciliation until we reform those structures so that all are free and equal, and this won’t happen unless we are willing to cross over and connect with those normally out
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Addressing Who is my neighbor? means to live as if we belong to each other, to live as if we need each other, because we do.
What keeps happening now in the continuous crossing over is an affirmation of not just the other’s humanity but also my humanity. For now, this is why I keep showing up. I need to be regularly and blatantly impressed with the miracle of humanity all around me, to realize that the people in front of me are my people and not “those people.”
rooted in the imago Dei as I experience it always in radical connection to those around me.
A queer spirituality is about both hospitality and solidarity.
To make space for a queer spirituality, then, is to challenge these systems of power that rely on the visible, verbal, and violent constructions of bodies. Queer bodies embody lived forms of experience that resist these structures. They are themselves redemptive, and not only in the religious sense.
The ordinary and everyday experiences of bodies are where we encounter those deepest connections that give us an expansive view of the universe, of the divine, of eternity, of God’s kingdom come.
A queer spirituality entreats us to see that salvation has to do with our bodies, and that salvation isn’t about a golden ticket to heaven but about the here and now—our experience in and through our materiality in this moment. Every moment becomes sacramental (holy, set apart, and a space for the Holy Spirit to play), and what seems quotidian becomes a supplication for what is divinely felt: a taste, a sip, a sprinkle of that profound connection.
In sum, there is hardly a clear standard of “biblical marriage,” yet that phrase is ubiquitous in our discussions about marriage today. The irony is that “biblical marriage” is really twentieth-century norms that are rooted in some notion of the nuclear family and homophobia.
but what we make normative doesn’t necessarily erase continuous inequities in the larger consciousness of our society.
Queerness embraces and cultivates that weirdness. It sees deviation as normal and normative. It sees what is perplexing, rare, or unfamiliar as a possibility for a new, glorious iteration not only of humanity but of all creation. So then, queering marriage is not just about queering an institution or expectation, a social script, but about queering intimacy, queering connection, and ultimately again, queering identity and desire. Queering love, then, is widening the bounds around the possibility of that expression of love. And a queer spirituality is about reproducing that love as much as
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I have become more fully myself, and then the most radical and revolutionary thing: I can be loved as myself, even if that self is drastically different from the person Andy married nearly fourteen years ago.
There’s a whole forest of my ancestors within me, a root system of a large, ancient organism connecting all of us—all their dreams, their seasons, their fights.
Expanding notions of “family” can contribute to the wider good and contribute to a different notion of normal.
We see that hardly anything in the Bible actually matches the contemporary notion of the nuclear family.
The concept of a two-spouse nuclear family is not cut-and-dried. Rather, so-called “biblical” principles are actually piecemeal Scripture passages craftily strung together. Using these as the basis for a single legitimate version of family not only devalues the witness of the Scriptures but also dilutes the daily, gracious possibility of family truly being a space that teaches the full value of humanity.
Queerness is the recognition that we are all passing for something as we work out our identities and relationships. By virtue of being human, we are constantly learning about ourselves and therefore pressing up against the boundaries of gender, race, and ultimately the definition of human. Sometimes we perform our identities—who we think we are, what we feel on the inside—and sometimes not. Sometimes we see identity and can read it, and sometimes not, but that doesn’t make it any less real or authentic.
These queer shifts in understanding the vital role of friendship invite me to organize my daily life intentionally around my connections with others. Friendship is not a second-tier, perfunctory kind of interaction.
Queer kinship helps me recognize the way heteronormative scripts I’ve internalized have created walls, not only between myself and others but also within myself.
It’s a reminder that there is much in the air all around us, and that what often becomes normalized isn’t necessarily forced or coerced in aggressive ways. Sometimes it’s just a three-letter word.
If Jesus can be changed, then I can, too, and so can the church that I love.
When work is tied to vocation, and when vocation is grounded in God’s desire for our participation in something meaningful and life-giving, then all work is liturgical; it is an act of worship and glorying of God.
The waters of baptism are deep and wide, and we are meant to swim and play like children on the first day of summer vacation. A queer spirituality recognizes that these joyous and hopeful waters not only transform each individual, their hopes, their aspirations, and their work; they also transform the shape and life of the entire body of Christ.
A queer spirituality today continues that legacy by challenging and dismantling the kind of purity that locks people out, locks people in their bodies, or locks people out of the fullest expression of faithfulness we are called to and created for in God. A queer spirituality says, “To hell with your purity,” because purity doesn’t define love or value, no matter how pretty and shiny you make it. Purity doesn’t define or indicate faith or faithfulness or the nature of God’s covenant with us. Purity doesn’t define goodness or holiness, and it isn’t a measure of salvation.
Young women are . . . simultaneously being taught that their only real worth is their virginity and ability to remain pure.”[4]
Virginity was tied to salvation. But purity wasn’t just a matter of salvation or faith; it also was and is about worth, about value. And it made the wheels of society turn. Without it, heteropatriarchy would have no power. Jessica Valenti says, “The lie of virginity—the idea that such a thing even exists—is ensuring that young women’s perception of themselves is inextricable from their bodies, and that their ability to be moral actors is absolutely dependent on their sexuality.”[5] Virginity as the measure of a person’s (especially a woman’s) morality means that nothing else matters—not what
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Through the force of religion, the cultures and systems of purity seek to control any bodies that would threaten the concept of purity—especially black and brown bodies and the bodies of those whose sexual identities are deemed unintelligible or reprehensible according to institutional powers, whether it’s the nation-state or the church, schools or the courtroom.
“In the history of dominant Christian thinking, the examples of this are many: God is privileged over world then heaven over earth, spirit over matter, the pure over impure, white over nonwhite, man over woman, heterosexual over trans-sexual persons. . . . A key example is Christianity’s centuries of linking whiteness and purity to its sovereign God, a figure which had to be stripped of its material impurities, kept in a pure white beyond”
