March 31 - A Sermon on Trans Day of Visibility

 March 31, 2022 - LTS - Trans Day of Visibility (Preaching for LTS Worship)

Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; John 12:1-8 (Lent 5)

Mary and Judas. The one who sees and accepts, and the one who refuses to see and accept. Mary, blessed with strength, is able to accept what Jesus has been saying to everyone for so long - that he is going to die. Perhaps she’s willing to accept this because she‘s already seen in her brother Lazarus what death looks like, and more importantly, that death is not the end. Whatever the reason for her willingness to see, she takes the nard, one of the oils used to prepare bodies for burial, and she anoints Jesus with it. She accepts that he is going to die and she cares for him while he is still alive.

And Judas berates her for it. Now, the writer of the Gospel of John was a little cynical in his description of why Judas did this, and we are always warned as preachers not to ascribe intentions to people, but whatever the reason, Judas refuses to see and accept what Mary does for what it is. He’s heard all of the same words that Mary has, that Jesus has uttered about his death, and about his resurrection, but he rejects it. He does not accept that Jesus will die, and so he does not accept Mary’s death-associated ritual. 

Instead, Judas attempts to redirect everybody’s attention. He tries to stop others from seeing what Mary is doing, from seeing that Jesus is, in fact, on a journey that takes him through death to new life. He says, “Why was this perfume not sold and the money given to “the poor?” He refuses to even acknowledge the purpose of the perfume. He attempts to hide what Mary is doing by pointing elsewhere - don’t look at this act of accepting Jesus’ death, look over here, look at the poor! “The poor” – Judas is not particularly interested in people who are actually poor, in the widow and the orphan, he just waves over in the direction of some generic “poor.” He will not let go of this Jesus he is currently following, and thereby refuses to allow the process to unfold whereby Jesus will be fully transformed into who he has come among Israel to be. Judas refuses to bear witness to Jesus’ death - perhaps he doesn’t trust that Jesus will be resurrected… and he redirects everyone’s attention “over there.”

But Jesus does not allow that. Jesus calls out Judas’ redirection. “You always have ‘the poor’ with you.” This is not Jesus saying Judas shouldn’t take care of the poor, or making some point about the eternal condition of poverty in this world. This is Jesus saying, Judas, you are using “the poor” as an excuse to ignore what is happening right in front of you. You are using “the poor” as a reason to hold me back from ne life. You always have “the poor,” you do not always have me. Jesus is chiding Judas for refusing to see and accept what Jesus has said over and over again. He is going to his death. He was not sent to earth to continue on living the way he had – to be with them, and heal them, and feed them in a constrained way, limited to this particular part of Israel for this particular set of years. Jesus was being called to die to this finite existence, as life-giving as it was for some, and to be transformed through resurrection into the eternal Son of God who would heal and feed and give life to all people, in all places, for all eternity. God did not take on flesh and become incarnate in order to stay in the way his followers had encountered him up to now. The “old” Jesus that he was needed to come to an end to make room for the new resurrected Jesus, the incarnate Logos who was and is and will be the life of all Creation. Jesus was trying to prepare those who loved him for his leaving, for his death. He wanted them to accept that this Jesus whom they knew and loved would soon be gone. He wanted Judas to do what Mary was doing - anoint him, honour him for his life so far, and let him go.

Today is Transgender Day of Visibility. It’s a day when we are called, like Mary, to see and to accept. Particularly, we are called to see and accept that there are people among God’s beloved, within our communities, within our families, who are being called to transformation. Who are on a journey of dying to whom we have known them to be, and transforming into whom God has always intended them to be.

At times like Mary and at times like Judas, I have witnessed this journey because I love someone who is transgender. My daughter. My daughter is a wonderful almost-16-yr-old who is proud of being trans, who is a light to those who know her, a wise friend to her peers, and a proclaimer of the Gospel that “God loves you no matter what” to the church, and who has read this sermon and graciously encouraged me to preach it.

But she was not always my daughter. For 12 years she was my son. My gender-nonconforming, dress-wearing son, but my son nonetheless. I raised two boys, both of them he/hims, and although my eldest son was “different,” I still knew him inside and out.

Until the day I didn’t. That is, until the day my child came to me and said, hey mom, my pronouns are she/her.

Now I knew the statistics. I knew that 65% of youth who are trans experience mood disorders, and that 45% of them have attempted suicide. I’ve known that number since my child was 4. And I knew that a supportive family and community makes a huge dent in that statistic, and that being supportive means letting children dress how they want to dress, and using the pronouns that align with their gender. I did not arrive at this moment ignorant. I knew that for transgender people, being seen and accepted as the gender they wereare rather than the gender they have been assigned, is necessary for their well-being and even for their life.

And yet I still behaved like Judas. I prevaricated. “Are you sure? Are you sure it’s not they/them? I mean, you’re still a boy in some ways.” I described her to others as gender non-conforming, gender queer, nonbinary. I couldn’t hear her words that this old life that I had loved her in was death for her. I refused to accept that I had to let that old person I knew go. I focused on other things. I talked about how gender identity wasn’t that important anyway, that it was better to focus on being kind, or a good Christian, or compassionate for others. I introduced her to others as “my oldest child,” or sometimes “my oldest,” leaving her gender out completely. I was happy to introduce her as a kind, caring, wise child. But not a girl. Not my daughter. I couldn’t quite let go. I couldn’t see that the path she was on would lead to new life, or resurrection.

But she persisted, like Jesus. (Not that my daughter is like Jesus, just to be clear, she’s a teenager…) But, like Jesus, she continued to remind me, she continued to proclaim to me that the person I knew and loved was leaving, was dying, and that I had to say goodbye and prepare for her transformation, for her new life. I had to allow her “him” to die.

And by the grace of God, truly by the grace of God’s Spirit, I was able to see and accept that. Perhaps it was because I, like Mary, have been given the strength to trust that death is not the end, that resurrection is real. And so I accepted the death of this son I loved. I stopped using he/him pronouns. I stopped referring to my son, or even my non-gendered child. I began using her pronouns, I began calling her my daughter, I supported her in hormonal transition, and I will support her in surgical transition, which permanently ends her capacity to reproduce. As the oldest child of the oldest child of the oldest child going back twenty generations, I accepted the death of that genetic progression, so that she might move into the new life God has waiting for her.

And with the proper pronouns, with the proper hormones, and with the promise of gender-aligning surgery, my daughter is experiencing new life. She has become the wonderful, light-giving, life-giving girl she is today. The way that I introduced her in the beginning, as a light, a wise friend, and a proclaimer of the Gospel? All of that emerged after she began transitioning. After her old self died. Yes, the son I thought I had for 12 years was a delight to us, but this daughter I have now is a delight and a blessing to the world. She speaks up for those who are bullied, for the oppressed, for victims of racism, for victims of sexism, for victims of religious discrimination. She has a keen heart for justice and now she is bold in proclaiming that God’s love comes in the form of justice for all.

“Thus says the Lord … do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old, I am about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? … for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself, that they might declare my praise.” (Isaiah 43:19-21)

In this period of Lent, I lament that I was too often like Judas, refusing to allow the promise of resurrection to be real. I lament that I tried to make invisible my trans daughter. And I give thanks that on this day, and every day, Jesus calls us to be like Mary. To see and accept transgender people in our midst, to let their old selves, their old pronouns, their old names, their old bodies die as they move into the new life that awaits them. As they are resurrected, as they receive this new thing that God is doing in their lives, as they fully and truly become the people whom God has formed for God’s self. I give thanks that even when we act like Judas, God acts like Mary, who not only allowed Jesus to go to his cross, but was the first to witness his resurrection. I give thanks for the witness of trans Christians who offer their praise that death is not the end, that resurrection is real, that God is constantly bestowing new life. I give thanks that in their resurrection, they give us hope for new life for all. Thanks be to God. Amen.

An Anti-colonial Gift of the Land

 Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Luke 13:31-35 - a sermon preached for LTS Chapel

“On that day Adonai (the LORD) made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.””

In 1984, biblical scholar Phyllis Trible introduced us to “Texts of Terror,” stories of abuse of women in the Bible that, because of their place in the Bible, were used to support the continued abused of women in communities that consider the Bible an authoritative text: the rape of Dinah, Amnon’s rape of his sister, Tamar, the fatal rape of the Levite’s concubine at the end of the book of Judges. Trible exposed the ways these stories terrorized their women listeners. 

I would like to suggest this morning that what we have here in Genesis is a different kind of text of terror, one that has been used, along with texts from Exodus and Joshua, to support the colonization of lands in Canada and internationally, and to displace Indigenous peoples. It has been heard with terror as it has been used to foster colonial attitudes toward the land that have done violence to the non-human inhabitants of the land, not just the human ones. Christans in particular have used these texts to argue that God has given land to us, as spiritual inheritors of Abraham, and that God intends for us to take control of that land. Christians, working together with colonial powers, have used these texts to argue that God has given this land to us, to us Christians, to control and use. This is one of the theo/logics behind the ideas of manifest destiny, the Doctrine of Discovery, terra nullius, the exploitation of the environment and its resources, and the tangled mess we find ourselves in today.

But notice the conflation in this theo/logic of what are actually three separate ideas. The gift of the land itself, that the gift is to us alone, and that the gift bestows not just the land, but control of it and its inhabitants. In this text, leaving the stories from Exodus and Joshua to the side, this conflation is imposed. It is not inherently there. This passage can, in fact, be read as an anti-colonial text, an anti-ownership approach in which God gives us land to live with, rather than on, in which land becomes a gift for all, not just some.

Shai Held, a Jewish scholar and rabbi, helps us to see this when he points out that this promise of the land and descendants to Abram is immediately followed in Genesis by the story of Sarai and Hagar, wherein Sarai takes her Eyptian slave-girl Hagar and forces her to be a procreational surrogate, and then “deals harshly” with her. Held points out that the word for “deals harshly” is the same word God uses to describe the oppression that Abram’s descendants will experience in the land that is not theirs, and he goes on to note that God does not support Sarai’s behaviour. Rather, the angel of the LORD makes a promise to Hagar, similar to the promise to Abram, that Hagar will be the mother of multitudes. 

Held sees a connection between these two stories, not just a sequential relating of events. For Held, Sarai’s treatment of Hagar, told immediately following the gift of land to Abram’s descendants, is meant to be a caution. Abram’s descendants are not to treat those they encounter they way they would be treated by the Egyptians (the grammatical tense gets a bit muddled here because Genesis was written after slavery in Egypt but tells of the time before.) Abram’s descendants are not to “deal harshly” with the non-Hebrews in their midst. They are not to oppress others the way they would be oppressed. More to the point, for Held, they are not to enslave or oppress the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites, onto whose land God has directed them.

This idea that one group of people can live on the same land as other groups without one becoming dominant over the other is not unusual. Indigenous peoples here have done it for centuries. In the time of Abram, “nomadic-sedentary symbiosis,” as Lawson Younger, a biblical scholar specializing in the Hebrew and Ancient Near Eastern history, describes it, was a reality. Multiple peoples shared the lands of the Ancient Near East, including the land of Haran, where Abram was before he came to Canaan. Some were nomadic and some lived in more settled habitats, but they lived in patterns and systems that were mutually beneficial to one another.

And so when God says to Abram, I give your descendants this land, the land of all these other peoples, there is no indication in this text that God is saying, I give this land to you alone, to subdue it, to eliminate the other peoples here. That may occur in other places in the Bible, but it is not here.

What is here is that God makes a gift of God’s land to one people among many, within the parameters of God’s covenant, as Walter Brueggemann emphasizes. Which means that this gift of land becomes truly a gift, which is to say a gift for all and not just some, when it is understood as a gift to live with, rather than a gift to live on.

This is a message of Good News that we hear when we pay attention to Indigenous perspectives on this text. Indigenous peoples understand land as something to live with, not on. Land is full of others with whom we live in relation, human and non-human. The Creator calls us to live in mutual life-giving with one another, not conquering or controlling one another, but offering our gifts to them and receiving their gifts in return. The people, the plants and animals, the rocks and rivers, they are all part of this web of relationality that is meant to provide life for all.

And so when we hear these words from Genesis with this deeper understanding, we hear God’s covenant with Abram and with Abram’s descendants promise that God will ensure that they––us––will always find a place to live where God brings us into relationship with other communities and helps us to find our place. This is not a promise about territorialism, or nationalism, or statehood. This is a promise about God gifting us with relationship with all, about being given our place as the one amongst the many for abundant reward and blessing.

We know that God yearns for this mutual relationship with others on the land, and not for us to subdue them, in part because of Jesus’ words in our Gospel reading, that he longs to gather the people under his wings as a mother hen gathers her chicks. As he witnesses the deaths visited by people upon one another, “Jerusalem” on the prophets, the eagle of Rome on the people of Jerusalem, he cries out and laments. This is not the way people are supposed to live. This is not how God’s gift is meant to be received.

Rather, I would like to suggest that God’s gifts are meant to be received with reciprocal giving. That is, that when God gives us something, we are to give of ourselves in return. Now I realize this sounds like a kind of conditional giving, and very un-Lutheran, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that when God gives us something, we give of ourselves to that gift. In other words, when God gives us land, we give of ourselves to the land. More specifically, to the land and all of its inhabitants, human and non-human.

This is, actually, what we see Jesus doing. Jesus understands himself as one of the children of Israel, a descendant of Abram, a recipient of the land. And he gives of himself to the land and the people. He lives with the land, rather than on the land. He gives of himself to the children of Israel, and to the Hittites and the Jebusites of his time––to the Samaritans, the Syro-pheonicians, the Romans. He lives with the land and its inhabitants, not on or over them.

We, who follow Christ, are called to do the same. We are called to be the reason that others say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD.” This land we live on, across all these provinces and territories, this land is a gift to us. But not to us alone. And not for us to live on. This land is a gift for us to live with, along with all the other humans and non-humans to whom God has also given this land as a gift. And we are called to follow Christ in making of ourselves and our descendants a gift to this land and to its humans and non-human inhabitants. We are called to give of ourselves in such a way that those who have lived on the land since before we arrived, and continue to live here still, might join us in the words of the Psalm, “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.”

In a few minutes we will celebrate Holy Communion, the gift of Christ to us. We will each do it from our own land, with the fruits of the land. The prayer that Jesus prayed during his last Passover celebration with his disciples would have included the Hebrew blessing, Baruch ‘atah Adonai, melech ha’olam, hamotzi lechem min haaretz. Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth. And then, Baruch ‘atah Adonai, melech ha’olam, borei pri hagafen. Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who brings forth fruit from the vine. Jesus knew his connection to the land, and then he went on to give himself to others on the land, by making a gift of himself, “This bread that has been given to me is also my body given for you.This fruit of the vine that has been given to me is also my blood given for you.” Weaving together the gift of the land and the gift of himself, he brings us into a sacred relationship with the land, with its inhabitants, and with one another. And so as we, some of those descendants of Abram, receive the gift of land and of Christ, we give thanks that we are strengthened to give of ourselves in return and to be abundance for all our relations as Christ is abundance for us. Thanks be to God. Amen.