Untidy and Unashamed
June 2, 2024 - Romans 12: 1-2
For me, living a spiritual life has meant living a life as open to ongoing transformation and renewal as possible. I still remember sitting with a young person once who asked me what I thought the Bible had to say about being LGBTQ. I told them then what I still believe to be true. That is that for me the Bible is a library of writings about God and what it means to live love-filled lives of faith. Therefore, there are a lot of things written there by a lot of different people over a long time - and all of them lived a long time ago from the time in which we live now.
The culture those people inhabited, the stories they told, the way they understood and experienced God has so much for us to learn from. And, it is also so very different from our reality, too. What’s more, when we read the Bible, we bring ourselves to it. There is no way to read it objectively. We bring our stories, our experiences, and everything we have been taught to how we understand the words before us.
So, for example, when I pick up Romans 12: 1-2. The line that stands out for me is the first part of verse 2. And I hear it in the King James because there is a powerful Dr. King sermon that lives in my mind in which he quotes this text this way: “Be ye not conformed to this world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
What is it in this world to which we do not want to be conformed? I told that young person that day who asked me about the Bible, that I have often heard preachers rail about the world’s culture that corrupts people. And these preachers often mean the corners of the culture where LGBTQ people find support. But in my mind it is entirely the other way around. The thing I don’t want to conform to – the problem with the culture I see is that it is laden with unnecessary expectations about how people are supposed to be in the world and who people are supposed to love.
The metaphor that comes most easily to me is one of boxes. The culture hands out boxes to which we are meant to conform –inside of which we are meant to fit. Being a man looks like this. Being a woman looks like this. Being in love looks like this. And it happens with this set of people only. But what if we don’t fit in those boxes?
Some of us find reasons for building those boxes in the Bible. I just don’t. I think the Bible has a lot more to say about love and mercy and the beauty of life than it has to say about punishing each other for not meeting rather arbitrary expectations of sexuality and gender. That’s what I told that young person that day. That I personally find readings of the Bible that denigrate anyone on the basis of who they are to simply be readings that conform to the cultural expectations some readers bring to the text.
When that young person asked me about the Bible I assumed that they themselves were not accepting of LGBTQ people. I made this assumption based on the person’s cultural and religious affiliation. What I learned years later was that at the time this person was discerning their own identity. With me though, they simply nodded, asked a few questions, and moved on to other topics. Years later, I learned they found a same sex partner and made a new, happy life in a new place together.
We are all always unfolding, if we let ourselves. We may not all discover we are LGBTQ ourselves. But what I think the LGBTQ community does for us all is refuse to live inside boxes that do not serve them, and therefore, sets a standard of freedom and liberation that I think is entirely consistent with the gospel of Christ and to which we are called in this chapter of Romans. I like the way Eugene Peterson puts it in the Message version: “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.”
Being changed can be very scary. Allowing yourself to be who you are can be scarier yet. Even if it doesn’t have to do with your gender or sexuality, you may well have been told that there are only certain feelings that are acceptable to feel or there are only certain ways of dressing or acting that are acceptable to embody. Some of those ways can help us access the power in the culture. They can protect us. They can be means of surviving. But when they are all we are - an acceptable character we play that is only a slim version of who we really are - well, I’m just not sure that’s all the freedom, safety, liberation, or joy that God longs for us to experience in this life.
I’m not saying that how we act in the world doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is that when we fix our attention on God, we do so often find ourselves changed from the inside out. And then the way we act in the world is governed by the things that really matter like love, justice, and peace.
“God,” the Message version of Romans tells us, “brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” That’s a more apt translation to me than the NRSV’s “discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
I think it does a better job conveying the meaning of the Greek word teleios translated as perfect in the NRSV, and I think it does a better job describing what we can actually do in this life. We’ll never be perfect, and I don’t know that we should try. I’m not even sure how we’d measure it in a healthy way - perfection that is. But maturity, that sounds like a God thing to me. We can grow mature. We can grow deeper. We can grow kinder, wiser, and more loving to ourselves and to others.
No matter what age we are or what we are learning about ourselves or those we love, with God’s help, we can, as the Message version of this scripture suggests, “Take our everyday, ordinary lives—our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around lives—and place them before God as an offering.” We can come to God in all the wholeness and holiness of who we are and who we are becoming. We don’t have to have ourselves or each other all figured out. But we can present ourselves to God for continual transformation, unashamed and unconcerned about the world’s boxes and expectations that no longer serve us.
Queer theologian M Jade Kaiser writes about this in the following poem at enfleshed liturgies, titled Untidy God:
What of a God who doesn’t believe in having it all figured out? In this idea of a single, tidy story. But instead a God who changes with the day and never stops asking you to learn how to love every messy, complicated, seemingly contradictory side of Themselves?
What of a God who has been so many different things. And ways. One that has always been transitioning. Taking on new flesh. Shedding what hurts. Claiming what frees. Finding a fresh way to show us the Divine that we’ve been. And everything that’s kept us from living it out. What of a God that is tired of being misgendered? Isn’t interested in excuses any longer. Gets a little rude about it. Doesn’t mind asking you to try a bit harder. To let go of everything you’re more loyal to than love.
What of a God who spends more time dancing [all night], cooking a hot meal for the turned-away youth, or protesting to abolish [injustice] then attending any worship on Sunday mornings?
What of a God whose inclusion is radical? One who calls from the fringes to the halls of power and the places of comfort saying, “come! There’s a place for you here. If you just lay down your life, your power, your privilege. You can be family. You will become alive again.”
What of a God who is queer? As in politically. As in strange and proud of it. As in about the things of love and bodies and liberation and solidarity.
What of a God who is found in the flesh of everyone you have denied a kind word, a safe bathroom, a marriage ceremony, a friendly smile, access to health care, a home, a faith community, asylum, or even just respect? Listen for this God today, you will find them in selfies and stories, coming out again and again in testimonies and silence, in gracious invitation, and fierce and radical calls to a different kind of living, a different kind of family, a different kind of love. Bring your offerings. Lend your hands. Whisper your prayers and wail your laments before all that is Holy and Gay. Holy and Lesbian. Holy and Queer. Holy and Bi. Holy and Trans. Holy and Asexual. Holy and Intersex. Holy and Still Finding Their Way.”
Whoever you are and however you come today, may you continue finding your way toward the God who loves you just as you are and who wants to continue to transform you with that holy love, too.
May it be so. Amen.
