[hymn rewrite] Away in a Manger

In this humble feed trough still half full of grain,
placed there by his mother, worn out from her pain,
lies Jesus Messiah his first night alive.
Through groaning and bleeding our savior arrives.

Though Mary's exhausted the baby won't sleep.
He whimpers and fusses and then starts to weep.
With weary arms Mary lifts him to her breast,
croons, "Jesus, I love you, but please let me rest."

The baby who's crying in fresh, itchy hay,
will grow up to teach us, for he is the Way.
Christ loves us and leads us and helps us to learn
to build up God's kingdom until Christ's return.

[sermon] Living in Sin

[sermon for the people of Abiding Peace Lutheran Church. Preached 2010-07-06.]

Luke 7: 46-50

Living in Sin

I have Good News for you -- wonderful news -- gospel news -- you are an incorrigible sinner! You are living in sin.

That phrase has been co-opted to mean cohabiting with a person with whom you aren't in a publicly committed relationship, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about LIVING in sin, living in a sin-drenched world. Being born into sin and growing up in sin and being steeped in sin.

Living in a world of broken promises. A world with no right choices. A world where, by going about our daily lives, we sin. We are gluttons, consuming the world's energy and polluting its resources. We are disconnected from each other by cultural mores that define the spaces between us with privacy and shame and keep us from life-sustaining, nourishing relationships.

I, personally, think uncharitable thoughts about fifteen times an hour.

We spend money on luxuries. We are soaked in inescapable privilege. We do not do all the good we could do.

We are lazy, slothful, arrogant. We sell ourselves short and deny the goodness of God's intention for us.

No matter which way we turn, we sin, because we live in a sinful culture and are part of a sinful species. We are called to perfection and we fall short.

When we make a searching and fearless moral inventory (Step Four) we discover that we are powerless over sin. We are slaves to sin and cannot free ourselves.

I know the last time you 'went to confession' -- it was only a few minutes ago. And I gave you space for that fearless moral inventory, and maybe you used it, and maybe you confessed to God, in the safety of this holy place, the nature and extent of your sin.

I hope so.

I hope you realize that you, just like everyone else, just like me, are sinful. Because knowing is so much more joyful than not knowing.

This morning's gospel tells us about two sinners -- one a woman of the city, the other a Pharisee named Simon.

I say they're both sinners, but I could just as easily say they're both human. To be human is to fall short of God's glory, to take actions that thwart God's plans, to be unheroic and cowardly and judgmental and slothful and sinful.

But we know, specifically, that these two humans are sinners, because the text tells us. It doesn't tell us the nature of the woman's sin -- no, it really doesn't! -- just that she is a woman of means, a sinner, and faithful.

Simon, on the other hand, is inhospitable, unloving, self-righteous, and judgmental. He sins in failing to anoint and welcome Jesus, and he sins in judging the woman who does. Simon is a sinner like lots of us -- a self-righteous sinner with a log in his eye. He is religious and good at religion. He is good at the Law, and you know what? I bet he's good at giving alms. He invites Jesus into his house! He sets a place for Jesus! -- He knows, let us say, that just living, and not burnt offerings, is pleasing to God. He is a Pharisee, which means he is moving away from Temple-focused, sacrifice-rich Judaism. He interprets the law for daily living for diasporic Hebrews under occupation. He's very good at this.

And he is miserably unhappy, because he refuses to accept the Good News that he is a sinner.

The woman has accepted this news. She's absorbed this news into her skin, and if Simon's reaction is any indications, she's reminded of it daily by people in the city.

Nevermind them, though -- she's learned to ignore them.

It's the way queer folks are ignoring protesters at Pride events this weekend -- those sad, miserable-looking men and women holding signs that tell gay, joyous marchers that we are sinners. Duh, we know that -- at least, I do -- although not at all for the reasons the protesters think.

If you pretend you aren't a sinner -- if you fight and fight and fight against all your body's urges -- if, like Martin Luther, pre-lightning bolt, you tally every evil thought as if you could exorcise the sins by listing them 00 if ou make a fearless searching moral inventory of Them, of the religious right, of Roman Catholicism, the Republican party, the people marching in the parades you don't approve of -- you will be miserable like Simon.

BUT, if you hear the Good News, and let it change you -- if you believe the Good News --

-- you will be like the woman and throw yourself at God's feet, begging for mercy.

You will not count the cost or consider the consequences, because you will know you can't save yourself.

You will not wonder when the money you spent on the ointment might've been better spent, because you will know that, no matter how wisely you give, there will always be better causes, more equitable distributions.

And God will welcome you home, wash away your tears and forgive your sins and turn you around to face the world again, telling you to try, this time, to fail better.

So you will try, and you will fail, and you will confess, and God will forgive, and you will repent, and you will try again --

and like the sinful woman, you will come and go in peace.

[Christology] Jesus is my Girlfriend

[my usual disclaimers about being lesbian and Christian are relevant here, but perhaps most importantly and inescapably in this reflection, I am an English-speaker. While the limitation of language is, of course, part of the point, it is also worth mentioning upfront and remembering throughout: I am fluent in English and only in English.]

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing." - Luke 13:34, NRSV.

What if you never used gendered pronouns for God?

Well, if gender is a deeply ingrained marker for you, if it's part (perhaps an important part) of how you perceive people (including yourself), you might feel God was a wee bit impersonal -- a bit like the Platonic Form of a Person, maybe, without gender or sex or sexuality or skintone or eye color or an accent or affectations or mannerisms or in fact any of the things that make us people.

And perhaps if you have lived in (and still live in) a culture where "people" default to white middle-class college educated cisgendered WASPy straight men, perhaps you might envision God -- in the privacy of your own head -- as being an old white man, just like He God is depicted in so many works of visual art.

Perhaps the discipline of never using gendered pronouns for God would make your experience of God distinct, would remind you that God is transcendent, unlike us, unlike you, and you would be careful not to attribute to God your own human thoughts and feelings.

Perhaps you would adopt a discipline of using personal pronouns, of addressing God, and thus experience God not as Mother or Father or Bride or Bridegroom but as Thou, personal, intimate, and unutterably Other.

Perhaps the discipline of never gendering God would help you to find other metaphors for God: Rock, Spirit, Breath, Word, Wisdom, Flame. Perhaps you could look at that list of sexless concepts and forget that anyone, anywhere, has envisioned Wisdom as feminine or Fire as masculine.

Perhaps you know a God through meditation Who is so transcendent and other that you could not imagine gendering God anymore than you could imagine holding God's hand or kissing God or running to embrace God early in the morning in a quiet garden.

What if you never used gendered pronouns for God? What if you never used gendered metaphors for God? If God were Parent, Child, Sibling, Spouse, Monarch instead of Mother, Son, Sister, Bridegroom, Queen?

There are non-gender-specific, personal metaphors for God that are a lot more evocative than "sibling," of course -- Lover, Shepherd, Potter, Prophet.

What if you never gendered God? Perhaps your language for God would be rich and evocative, creative and nuanced, every word carefully chosen, first because of the newness of the discipline, then because of the joy of finding new ways to tell old truth. Perhaps you would become more aware of gender as a construct, of the unconscious ways we use gendered language all the time. Learning to use inclusive language is an exercise, a discipline, that renders visible the invisible and omnipresent structure of gender in our culture.

++

Noli me tangere. John 20:17, Vulgate.

This tiny scrap of scripture has been central to my spiritual and academic life (which are, by their nature, one) since I was a senior in college and writing a thesis (if the kind of theology I do -- speculative, constructive, inventive, creative, poetic, imaginative and only discursive when it can't be helped -- can rightly be anything so formal as a 'thesis') about the romantic relationship between Jesus and Mary called Magdalene.

++

So he went his way, and was alone. But the way of the world was past belief, as he saw the strange entanglement of passions and circumstance and compulsion everywhere, but always the dread insomnia of compulsion. It was fear, the ultimate fear of death, that made men mad. So always he must move on, for if he stayed, his neighbours sound the strangling of their fear and bullying round him. There was nothing he could touch, for all, in a mad assertion of the ego, wanted to put a compulsion on him, and violate his intrinsic solitude. It was the mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion upon a man, upon all men. For men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own nothingness. And he thought of his own mission, how he had tried to lay the compulsion of love on all men. And the old nausea came back on him. For there was no contact without a subtle attempt to inflict a compulsion. And already he had been compelled even into death. The nausea of the old wound broke out afresh, and he looked again on the world with repulsion, dreading its mean contacts. - The Man Who Died, D.H. Lawrence

Jesus asked, "Who touched me?" When all denied it, Peter said, "Master, the crowds surround you and press in on you." But Jesus said, "Someone touched me; for I noticed that power had gone out from me." - Luke 8:45-46, NRSV.

It got stuck in my heart my first semester at seminary and it won't unstick... when Jesus Sang the Stone Butch Blues:

She does not touch, learns not to touch, discovers to her horror the draining of touch, the power of touch, the healing and the scarring that is skin touching skin, daubed spittle and fingertips, aching with sensation, nerve endings and desire...

++

People have very kindly not asked me why I've suddenly become so freakish around my pronoun usage, why I sing or say "Child" and "She" or "Ze" when everyone else is saying "Son" and "He." And yet I have an instinctive defensiveness around this topic, a fictional interlocutor against whom I defend myself admirably, as if theology were a contest and not a conversation, as if I could tell you what your relationship with God looks like. That, as they say, is between you and your God.

++

I have worshiped mostly in contexts where the First and Third Persons of the Trinity are referred to with gender-neutral language most of the time, to the point where hearing "God -- He" is not just a little jarring to me.

Jesus, of course, was male.

Of course.

++

There are three ways that we understand the Body of Christ. One is female, one is male, and one is genderless.

The bread we share at the communion table is for us the Body of Christ. This bread is tangible, physical, palpable; we can feel and taste and smell it, and to us it is the very Body of Christ. It is a capital-S Sacrament of God's presence in the world. It is the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.

The Church is the Body of Christ. She is Christ's hands and feet and voice and heart in the world. Paul explains to the Corinthians in eloquent detail how the Church -- She, we -- is Christ's Body (1 Corinthians 12:12-31).

Jesus' body was the Body of Christ. Jesus' body was male, and Jesus was resurrected: actually, physically, tangibly, literally. Jesus died, and lives again. Christ is Risen. Magdalene encountered the living Christ in the garden on Easter morning. He is risen indeed.

++

He says, "Noli me tangere."

The risen Christ is not quite the Jesus who died.

++

"Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me." Matthew 25:40, NRSV.

The Second Person of the Trinity -- Son, Christ, Word, Wisdom -- is that Person Who becomes incarnate. The Incarnation was Jesus Christ, the Anointed One, God's Beloved, God's Chosen, the Word made flesh.

And Jesus was, presumably, male-bodied. Was identified as male by Jesus' contemporaries. Identified Christself, without question, as male.

So.

What?

In 1981, Rosemary Radford Reuther asked, "Can a male savior save women?" and those of us who ask it with her have been told (I assume it's not just me) that Jesus' maleness is not important, no more than Jesus' thirtyness or able-bodiedness or Semiticness or 1st-century-CEness. What is important is that Jesus was particular, scandalously particular, that God chose ONE BODY, just like each of us has one body, that Christ's humanity was, just like our humanity, particular and contingent.

In 2006, I wrote:

If Jesus was human -- and he was, fully human, subject to human temptations, emotions, and desires -- then his human particularity becomes overwhelmingly scandalous for me. If Jesus was the perfect embodiment of God's intention for humanity, if Jesus' relationship with God was one of total trust, complete obedience, and mutual confidence, then the particularities of this one human person become problematic. This one human, Jewish, aged thirty, poor, so tall, and, most troubling for me, celibate (probably) and male (definitely) knew God as no one else has. I feel in my discomfort my own gender essentialism; Douglas John Hall notes that imaging Jesus as a young white male excludes "the weak and handicapped, the old and feeble, the members of nonwhite races, and women" (490) and in a footnote describes a study of Christ images in the visual arts -- Christs of all colors, but all of them men. I find myself saying, "But of course, Jesus was male;" gender is essential for me in a way that race is not, for obvious reasons. As a white woman, I can ignore race, pretend colorblindness, but I am always aware of gender, and as a queer white woman, I am always aware of sexuality.

When James Cone says that Jesus is Black in every way that matters, that the essential point of Jesus' humanity was his identification with the oppressed, not his skin color (which of course was not "white" according to our categories), he is perhaps making a true statement about the Black experience and what it means; to say that Jesus is female, I feel, is qualitatively different and a more difficult intellectual move. The tradition informs us that the importance of Jesus' particularity is not his particular aspects -- age, sex, race, religion, sexuality or lack thereof -- but his full participation in an essential aspect of humanity. To be human is to be a particular human; no one is "human in general." Jesus cannot be identical to me, his attributes identical to mine, any more than I could be identical with my father, my sister, [or others with whom I share deep intimacy].

[...]

For black liberation theology, as for all liberation theologies, Christ identifies entirely with the oppressed and downtrodden of any society. In this connection, as a white person of privilege, I cannot begin to speak, but only listen and accept the real, physical liberation that Christ offers to the world's poorest and that is so desperately needed.

At the same time, with the imagined feminist theologian in Migliore's dialogue (pp 298-299 especially), I must supplement the discussion of economic injustice with acknowledgement and discussion of, to claim Migliore's word, "linguistic" oppression, but, moreover, the hegemonic thought patterns that color our ways of thinking God, Christ, redemption, resurrection, and the whole panoply of related concepts. At one and the same moment I accept with almost mantric faith that Jesus Christ died for me, that I am a sinner and that I am redeemed, that even at my most despairing moments I am the beloved child of a God who loves me enough to suffer with me and die for me, working a redemption that I cannot hope to understand, that the drama of Christ's passion is the story of God's love enfleshed in a human body. I believe, incredulous, confused, that Christ is Lord and savior. I believe in a gendered Jesus who was fully human and who loved God with all his heart, and a Christ beyond gender and history who loves the created world, humanity, and me enough to die for us, and I believe at the same time that there is no distinction or difference between them, so much so that I find any discussion of two natures disingenuous and confusing [...]

[Cited: Douglas John Hall, Confessing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context; Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology; James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation]

++

Why do you use gender-neutral or female pronouns for Jesus? no one has asked me.

The smorgasbord of quotations and ideas above provides context, I hope, for two answers.

1. "Inclusive language" for God frequently results in God-talk that is entirely neuter except for the male pronouns that are, unquestioningly, used for Jesus and by extension Christ*. The result is that all the pronouns used for the Godhead are male.

*I'm not entirely comfortable with using "Christ" as shorthand for "the Second Person of the Trinity," but the usage is ubiquitous and, I think, understandable to my readership. "Jesus" is "the historical Jesus," a human person who embodied Godhood; "Christ" is "the Christ of Faith," coeternal with the Creator and the Spirit, God from God, Light from Light, of one being with the Creator, the Word and Wisdom of God. The relationship between "Jesus" and "Christ" you can fill on for yourself until such time as I write a book or seven, and until then I won't ask too hard why "Anointed One" became God's middle Name.

2. Jesus' maleness has made me uncomfortable for a long time. It makes me uncomfortable because I find deep resonance in the metaphor of the Church, and the soul, as the Bride of Christ, and I am a lesbian. It makes me uncomfortable because, despite all the women who surround Jesus in the gospels, the women who provide Jesus with money and ointment and service and tears and who are the first apostles, we are still left with the image of many men and women serving one man. It makes me uncomfortable because when we speak of God without pronouns and without gender, Jesus' gender shows up more starkly still and feels indisputable, ironclad, of course.

++

But it doesn't have to be.

This is the conclusion of another paper I wrote in Fall of 2006, modified slightly:

Every writer realizes that, in recounting or writing or inventing Jesus’ words, she or he or ze changes those words and their meaning, discovers or invents or both a new Christ, responds to "Who do you say that I am?" with an answer that will never perfectly reflect the Jesus of history, who cannot be known to us, but is recounted only in stories already embroidered. We may choose, with the questers for the historical Jesus, to carefully pick out stitches in an attempt to discover the texture of the original cloth. Or, with the authors we have studied this term, we might take up our needles, choose our own threads, add our own images to those we have received, sometimes overlapping those images, sometimes discarding them, sometimes simply changing the color. We cannot know who Jesus was, but only who Jesus is, for us, today.

[sermon] "Nothing Gold Can Stay"

[Sermon for the people of Abiding Peace Lutheran Church, preached on February 14, 2010.]

Transfiguration Sunday

Luke 9: 28-37

Nothing Gold Can Stay

It's the feast of Saint Valentine, and so I'm going tell you a love story.

The story goes something like this: a young woman, just blossoming, sweet sixteen and never been kissed, radiant with newfound freedoms, becomes, for the necessary moment, a princess. And at the necessary moment, her princess or her prince arrives for her, unveils herself or himself, and the world looks --

inside out.

And the girl's heart is

upside down.

And everything is gold.

An ordinary girl is suddenly beloved, and transformed, illuminated. Her face lights up and her insides are warm, and she is radiant and her ordinary clothes are dazzling white.

Love casts a spell on her, and the ordinary boy who was her best friend is the young wizard who will make her world shake; the loud-mouthed girl who was her lab partner is her knight in armor who will whisk her away on a black steed.

Like all magic, this spell comes with an expiration date.

+

We were each other's for twenty-four hours, my boy and I.

When the spell broke and he came to his senses (and decided that loving his lesbian best friend from afar was quite different from actually having her), my boy shared this Robert Frost poem with me:

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

"Nothing gold can stay."
"Nothing gold can stay."
"Nothing gold can stay."


Since this is Transfiguration Sunday, I'm going to tell you a love story.

It goes something like this: Four dear friends spend all day climbing a mountain together -- mostly in silence, because strong and well-traveled as they are, mountain-climbing isn't easy on them. There are a few close calls when one of them nearly slips and has to quickly grab a friend's hand for rescue. It's good for them to be apart from the crowds, for once, because these days they're always surrounded by people, most of them wanting something. They reach the mountaintop late evening, utterly exhausted, and all of them are ready for sleep, but they've come up here to pray, and one of them is actually going to do it.

So the others keep their eyes open as best they can, because they love their friend and admire their friend and are, as a matter of fact, a little besotted with their friend -- not in a romantic way, of course. It's only that they've given up their lives for this person, have given up family and financial security and the chance of a long lifespan, and one of them has just declared that, in his considered opinion, their friend is the Anointed One of God.

So these sleepy-eyed friends are rewarded with what is, at the time, the most magical moment of their lives (later there will be deeper magic, from before the dawn of time, but that is a story that must wait seven weeks for telling). They see their friend transformed, transfigured. They see the greatest prophets of their faith in living color and realize that their own friend is greater still than these prophets they've revered their whole lives.

At the necessary moment, the veil lifts entirely, and they see their friend transformed and hear God's own voice, announcing, "This is my Child, my Chosen, my Beloved. Listen to this one!"

They are entranced, enchanted, and everything is gold. Their friend, their beloved friend, face glowing and clothes glittering, is the Chosen One of God and they have witnessed this moment. They will never be the same. How could anything be the same ever again?

Like all spells, this one comes with an expiration date.

The next day, they descend the mountain and go among the crowds again, still demanding, still suspicious, still completely, painfully ignorant.

Nothing gold can stay.

++

So, here's the thing about glitter.

[begin pouring glitter into the glass bowl]

It never goes away.

I worked in a craft store for two years and the thing about glitter is, it never goes away. "Clean-up in the glitter aisle" means sweep and mop and try your best, but there will be glitter in the cracks between tiles and glitter under the shelves and glitter in your hair and under your fingernails and in your apron until Kingdom come.


When I bought seven and a half ounces of glitter last week for use as a sermon illustration, the containers immediately began to leak. Containers may be airtight or watertight, but there's no such thing as a glitter-tight container. You touch glitter, and you will have glitter with you for the rest of your days.

Nothing gold can stay. The shiny fades and the romance wanes and you fall out of love and you come down from the mountain, and you're left with glitter in your hair, a poem, a memory, bewilderment and maybe a little fear, facing the world again after you've seen paradise.

So what do you do with transcendence?

There are moments in our lives when everything is clear and pure and right, when we see the world as it ought to be. We look at loved ones, strangers, enemies, and we see the glowing, dazzling face of Christ. We look at ourselves and know that we are beloved children of God; we look at the work our church is doing and we see the heart of the Gospel in our midst. The chord of music that is God's True Name, the landscape that is God's face, the poem, the painting, the lovemaking, that show signs of God's inbreaking Kingdom.

And then there are the other 525,599 minutes of the year.

There is the mountaintop experience when, with Peter and James and John, we see Christ's transfigured face. And then there's the inevitable descent. We try, with Peter, to remain, to build tents and set up altars and reread love letters and return to the place where we met God, and we find, with Peter, that nothing gold can stay.

We can't return to the mountaintop. We can't go home again. We can't become sixteen again. Once we come down from the mountain, we have no choice but to head towards Jerusalem, to follow the path that's set out for us, to go forward -- because there's no going back. But some dusty day on the road to Jerusalem, Simon Peter runs his hand through his prematurely graying hair and looks at his fingers and sees that they're covered in glitter.

We take mementos with us. We take photographs, we buy souvenirs, we save love letters, we carry wee jars of glitter that is sure to get all over everything, [pass around the bowl with the wee jars of glitter] and we look at photos, nick-knacks, letters, shiny, and remember that we have been transfigured.

transformed.

changed forever.

Gold goes, but WE stay, and the change stays with us.

It's our nature to forget, of course. It's in our nature to revert to our old ways of acting, our old ways of seeing. We come down from the mountain and see that the world has not changed, and we are tempted to despair. We come down from the euphoria of first love and the agony of heartbreak and swear we'll never love anyone again, and we forget what God's face looks like, forget that we've seen God face to face, forget that we have been named Beloved. Like Peter, we see God face to face, and like Peter, we deny God.

But like Peter, we're forgiven, and like Peter, we are transformed people. We are people who've been baptized with the Holy Spirit, people who've been fed with the Bread of Life, people who've seen God face-to-face, and we can never unsee, never unhear, never untaste, never unknow --

We are God's.

We are chosen.

We are beloved.

We are transformed for a life of service, transfigured for a life of dignity, transmuted for a life of love.

We are fairy-tale princesses, and we are beloved. We are fairy-tale knights, and we have the power to change the world. We are fairy-tale wizards, imbued with the deep magic of God's love. When the mountaintop fades into the distance and is finally no longer even visible on the horizon, when the dazzle dies and even the last shards of glitter have been washed from our bodies, when all the gold is gone --

we will still glow from the inside out.

Amen.

[lgbt] "sodomy, it's between God and me"

The first lesson at Mass this morning the morning in June when I originally wrote most of this was part of Genesis 19. I would give you a more exact verse citation? But I was less paying attention than twitching in fear. I think we started with v. 24, "Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfer and fire from the LORD out of heaven," and then Lot's wife turns into a pillar of salt and we didn't actually hear why it was that God destroyed Sodom, which as you and I and most of the delegates to the ELCA Central States Synod Assembly know was:

• lack of hospitality


• sexual violence


• nothing at all to do with loving committed same-gender relationships

But though you know that and I know that, I didn't know if the priest knew that. His homily was about the Gospel reading. His prayer that began, "Since we read part of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah today, we pray for those suffering from..." ended with "natural disasters: floods, hurricanes, earthquakes..."

Did you tense up in the middle of that sentence? I would have, if I hadn't already been a ball of tension, ready to flee at the slightest hint of condemnation.

The description of Sodom's wickedness isn't in the lectionary. [Romans 1 is Epiphany 9A, should there be 9 weeks in the Epiphany.]

Which is possibly kind of a shame, because it means we don't get to reclaim it. Because "Sodom" is not shorthand for sexual violence against women or a lack of hospitality to strangers and I know that whenever I hear the word, which is why I spent five minutes at Mass this morning cringing.

I go to midday service at Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal, and our gospel lesson was Luke 9:51-62. Vv 57-62 are difficult, troubling words about the costs of discipleship, but I was more struck by the first part:

When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set towards Jerusalem. When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, "Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" But he turned and rebuked them. Then they went on to another village.

The LORD (Lord) rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire (do you want us to command fire) from the LORD out of heaven (to come down from heaven) and he overthrew those cities (and consume them?)

(But he turned and rebuked them.)

++

There are a lot of places I could go from here. One text. My (queer Christian woman) experience (fear) of one of them in a location (Kansas) in a context (early twenty-first century USA). Another text from another lectionary with unexpected parallels.

So what?

So I think it's more helpful to think of both stories as showcasing conflicting human impulses toward retribution and mercy. The destruction of Sodom is the occasion for Abraham's bargains with God for the salvation of Sodom for the sake of fifty forty-five forty [...] ten righteous inhabitants. Abraham and God, Jesus and James and John:

it is absolutely not about a New Testament God and an "Old Testament" God, any more than it's about merciful Hebrew patriarchs and hot-headed early Christians. It's a continuing conversation about judgment and mercy, turning and turning again: repentance.

Lot's wife turns to look back; Jesus turns to face his disciples. Turn and turn again. Repent.

Before we can follow Jesus, we need to acknowledge that the potent, powerful desire to rain fire on our enemies is part of us too.

In Sunday school several months ago I asked about praying the vengeful parts of the Psalms, and one of the answers I got was, pray those parts as confession. We wanted you to rain fire from heaven, God, to smite our enemies utterly and crush them underfoot, and we are most grievously sorry.

That's one answer. Justice fire mercy and judgment.

Or this:

I'm a sodomite.

It's terribly dangerous to identify ourselves myself with the sinners in the story, because the inhabitants of Sodom were sinful in ways that have nothing to do with queer sexuality. When we talk about welcoming and affirming glbt people into our congregations (and affirming ourselves as glbt people and beloved children of God), we have to be really clear that affirmation means, "Your queerness is not sinful. Your desires are not sinful. Your lifestyle is not sinful. Your partnership is not sinful."

So that's not what I'm saying when I say, "I'm a sodomite." It has nothing to do with my sinful nature -- it has to do with my location when I hear the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, with the historical and contemporary uses of that story, which doesn't and can't exist free of its homophobic history, not for me, probably not for many other queer people.

It means, when I hear that story, I don't identify with God or Lot or Lot's wife or Lot's daughters. I identify with the Sodomites, and that means that when I hear James and John asking for fire to come down and consume a village of Samaritans... I remember that I'm a sodomite, and this story feels viciously familiar.

And after spending a morning cringing in the margins, when I move to a place of privilege, when I am most easily identified as white, able-bodied, and young, when my queerness and femaleness are less relevant -- I take my margin experience with me and remember, and turn, and repent.