“Made in God’s Image”
2 Kings 2:1-18
As is the case with so many things, there seems to be some disagreement on what Pride is all about.
The difference boils down to this: Is Pride a celebration, or is Pride a protest? Many of the folks posing the question like to provide their own answer: “Remember, they will say, that the first Pride was a riot,” meaning the spontaneous demonstrations that erupted after police raided the Stonewall Inn—a popular gay bar run by the Mafia—in 1969.
Then the celebration folks counter with something like this: “Remember, protesting injustice and standing up for our rights is something we have to do 24/7, 365 days a year. But Pride month and Pride festivals are a unique opportunity to celebrate our community, to let the public see all the joy and love and life we experience and want to share.”
This binary, like most binaries, is false, reductive, and unnecessarily divisive. It presumes that Pride can only be one of these two things, and that it can be only one thing.
How ridiculous is that?
Can’t Pride be both a celebration and a protest? Can’t it also be party to which everyone is invited? Can’t it also be a time to notice and honor diversity? Can’t it also be a time for churches and businesses and other organizations to both extend an extravagant welcome and learn a few things?
And yet we keep coming back to celebration or protest.
It’s as if when our creation stories say that God created day and night there was no dawn or dusk, morning or afternoon or evening. It’s like saying God created dry land and the sea—as if there were no marshes or rivers, wetlands or tides or lakes.
No one, when reading those stories, believes that the named categories of creation were all-inclusive, that all creation was either one category or another. No one.
But when the same story says that God made humankind in the divine image, male and female, most folks for most of history have understood that to mean there are only two genders and that every human is one or the other. (Ignoring the fact that God is apparently both.)
This, too, is a false binary. Depending on your source, the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Old Testament) identifies six to eight different genders. Of course, there really was no such concept as “gender” thousands of years ago—just as there was no scientific or social concept of sexual orientation—but there were different terms to reflect different combinations of biological attributes, behavior, and cultural understanding.
There was also an ancient rabbinic tradition that the first human, created in the divine image, was both male and female.
Unfortunately, most humans are not very good with grays. For most of history, most people have needed the certainty of black and white, this or that, one or the other—often insisting that the “other” was somehow wrong, evil, less than, different, or even dangerous.
And in that sense, heterosexism, homophobia, anti-trans policies, and all other efforts to limit or deny the rights and authenticity of queer folks are no different than racism, slavery, sexism, patriarchy, able-ism, classism, and other systems created to control, ostracize, oppress, and even criminalize people who are deemed “other.”
Every one of these systems, biases, and hateful social structures has tried to deny the essential truth of humanity: that we are all made in the holy, creative, multifaceted, expansive, and—above all—loving image of God. That we are all of equally sacred worth in God’s sight and in reality.
Now I know I’m preaching to the choir here. After all, our church has been officially Open and Affirming for no less than 39 years; we were one of the very first UCC churches to do that holy work, and over the years our Open and Affirming stance has resulted in a destroyed communion table, stolen rainbow flags, hateful graffiti, hateful letters, phone calls, and Facebook comments, and more.
And, all the while, we have persisted in growing in our understanding of sexual orientation and gender identity. All the while, we have worked hard not simply to include LGBTQIA-plus folks, but to celebrate them and get to know and understand them, and invite them to change us and our understandings.
Over the past 18 years, we have become much more intentional about having a presence at Pride events—as we will today—so that we might honor and celebrate queer folks and stand in solidarity with them. We know we have a lot of work to do in countering the church’s historical condemnation of queer folks. We have a lot of loving and blessing to do.
But I also know I’m preaching to folks who aren’t super-familiar with our scriptures, and whose sense of belovedness and sacredness may sometimes be shaken when Christians use a few random Bible verses to justify their bigotry and hatred.
So, right from the get-go let’s be clear:
The Holy Spirit is forever moving God’s people toward welcome, openness, inclusion, acceptance, and affirmation of all people. Our shared history—which is to say both human history and the history of our understanding of God—begins with fear and exclusion but is always moving toward understanding and a widening of the holy human circle where everyone is beloved, everyone is of sacred worth.
Here are just a few examples:
In the 23rd chapter of Deuteronomy, several different types of people are singled out as being unwelcome and even unfit to dwell among God’s people, much less be considered as being people of God. Among those deemed unworthy were all so-called “foreigners,” but especially people from Moab, and eunuchs, men who for one reason or another had been castrated.
But Ruth, as in the beloved story of Ruth and Naomi, was a Moabite. What’s more, Ruth is one of five women named in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. Jesus was the descendent of a so-called foreigner.
Turns out that Moabites, too, were made in the image of God. Moabites, too, were people of God.
As for eunuchs, their reputation begins to shift in the 56th chapter of Isaiah, where God says through the prophet, “Don’t let foreigners or eunuchs think they are separated from God’s people. I give them an everlasting name. They are my people.”
