March 30, 2025, reading then sermon by Rev. F. Vernon Wright V
Reading
(22) Jesus saw some infants who were being suckled. He said to his disciples: These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom. They said to him: If we then become children, shall we enter the kingdom? Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inside as the outside, and the outside as the inside, and the upper as the lower, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male is not male and the female not female, and when you make eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then shall you enter [the kingdom]
The Gospel of Thomas* Logion 22 BLATZ translation.
Freedom to Engender Gender
Good morning everyone! Did I ever tell you about the trans angel of Second? Maybe some of you. James knows! They are there illuminated to the street at night. Look for them next time you drive by. There is an angel with long hair, with a white robe holding their hand with a limp wrist. Is the angel male, female? Who knows! I think they prefer the they them pronouns!
It has been there since the late 1800’s but when I arrived in 2008 no one knew it was there. It had been boarded up. It was in bad shape and they didn’t want to have it fall onto the street. When I got there I wanted to help the church become open affirming. This was a purple church and leading them to vote for this was hard. And while we were doing it, we also had to take care of our aging facility. Top on the list were our magnificent stained glass windows. Lots of the more conservative members were really pushing for the windows, so I kept them busy doing that work, where the more progressive members were working on becoming open and affirming. As it happened the two projects came together. We had just voted on being open and affirming and we had just completed the boarded up window and were ready to reveal it. A group of us went up to what had been a hidden section of the church and we looked at it for the first time glistening in the sun! And then I heard it. “Wait- is that angel a man or a woman?” Another one said, “Well seeing how we just voted- that’s perfect!”
As you know Trans rights are under attack right now. Trans rights are human rights however, and where one person’s human rights suffer, all of our human rights suffer. At the heart of this issue is the social construction of gender. If others deny us the freedom to discern for our selves how we wish to construct gender, than we cannot truly know freedom. This is both an ethical and religious right. Even the ancients knew this.
Tomorrow is trans visibility day. Thanks again to Shir and James for participating with us this Sunday! Your stories and witness, your integrity and courage, are inspirational to us.
Lots of us think of our grandparents views on gender and sexuality and we think their views on the topics was the way it always was. That’s really what I thought too. My own grandparents were born in the twenties, survived the depression, served, or were old enough to serve in WWII, largely embraced the conformity the fifties, and thought Joseph Mcarthy was great. This was the generation of the my elders and I assumed that the world view of these people was the norm. Of course then I moved to Boulder CO and learned about my artistic heroes- the Beats and began to realize there were different ways of being my grand parents generation!
When I was learning about how to minister to the LGBTQ movement in Theological School, LGBTQ was relatively new. Most people knew it as the LGB movement at that time. It wasn’t until I was doing legislative advocacy work for Pride Montana that I began to learn from the director of Pride at the time, that gender, like sexuality wasn’t something nailed down to the extent it was say in the 50’s really until the late 1800’s, early 1900’s. The reason for this wasn’t the church or the greater society, as much as it was mass marketing.
Mass marketing you say? Yes Mass marketing! Mass marketers learned that sex sells. But what kind of sex sells to the most people? Well heterosexual sex. Gender normatively also sells. And what kind of gender normatively sells to most people? Male/female gender normatively sells.
First they had to make heterosexual sex acceptable enough to market. They also had to codify manliness and femininity. Music about romance- and writing which enabled people to for once feel the it was acceptable to marry someone for love (as long as it was to someone of the opposite sex) started to flourish. Women’s and mens magazines all enlisted “experts” to help sell the bourgeoning beauty, homemaking, as well as the mens sports and pornography industries.
Earlier, of course, sexuality wasn’t really talked about all that much, and women could be tough pioneer’s and queens of empires as much as they could be objects of desire. To boot, the world of music, theater, not to mention the realities of being a seaman, or serving in a military, men who dressed as women and acted as women sexually- and women and dressed as men and behaved as such sexually weren’t all that uncommon. Though the feudal class society, still largely in place until the thirties and forties of the last century, required families to have heirs, what actually happened behind closed doors, and who actually loved who, and how they may have expressed their gender was well, private.
But now, as mass markets began to heat up- always looking for ways to sell goods to the most amount of people, (even if it meant shaping the most amount of people in order to sell to them), what had been behind closed doors came out in the open and separated into the normative in anti-normative. People who had previously enjoyed a larger spectrum of sexuality, or existed in a larger, more inclusive realm of gender expression, were forced into the margins.
Back to the main idea here: gender is engendered. It is a construct. Scientifically, gender is way more complicated that we typically acknowledge. A person can have XX chromosomes- which is female, XY which makes a person male, or XXY A person who is male with female characteristics. Or X- which makes a person female with male characteristics. Sure, most people have XX chromosomes or XY Chromosomes- but the scientific reality is that the idea that there are only two sexes is overly simplistic. According to the Scientific American article ” …new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body.” The idea that there are only men or women is an idea constructed by society, more for the purposes of marketing, not the scientific reality of what genetic sex really is.
As Carol pointed out today in the time for all ages, regardless of our biology, we should be able to stretch gender normatively. Girls should be able to own jackknives and boys should be able to play with dolls. I can remember living in Newton as a stay at home dad while I was in Seminary and trying to strike up a conversation with moms in the playground while I watched Owen. “Cool we are both new parents!” Would be my conversation attempt and I would invariably receive the stink eye. Well most were probably the nannies, but really I think they just thought there was something wrong with me for not being successful enough for being the principal bread winner!
If the scientific reality of a human being runs counter to the cultural expectations of a community, what should give? Forcing people into a reality that may not be actually true for them is unethical. The trans movement is putting its finger on the reality here: ones gender should not be engendered by society, but by the individual- or rather individuals linked together in community. It is their right to stand and say “Yo your ideas about sex just aren’t correct”.
Transcending typical gender norms is not just an ethical thing it also has a spiritual dimension, however. In the Hebrew Bible, though male pronouns are often used to describe God, in the book of proverbs, God is described as having a womb. Deuteronomy 32:18 says “You forget the rock who begot you, unmindful of the God who gave birth to you” In Job 38:8 “Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb? In the Gospel of Thomas transcending the boundary between male and female, as well as other categories of opposites is what is necessary to experience God’s reign.
Sure maybe many churches and faiths, might try to bury the more trans oriented scriptures from their tradition, but our tradition embraces and celebrates them. Make sure that when you reach out to your senators and representatives, that they know that trans rights for us are more than human rights, they are also an expression of our own religious freedom and protected by the separation clause in our constitution. That’s right, the same constitutional clause religious bigots use to codify their right to exclude the LGBTQ community, is there to protect LGBTQ folks!
Tomorrow is trans visibility day. Be proud of your church for affirming LGBTQ rights and identities. And take that same pride to your legislators. They need to be reminded of the full spectrum of the their religious communities, not just the most rabidly conservative ones. Genetic sex scientifically is way more complicated than people think. Gender is always engendered- and it is our political and religious freedom to decide how it is to be engendered and interpreted. Peace and wholeness to you!
