We cannot rest.

The following post is a sermon I preached in class last week.  The assignment was a narrative structure sermon, with an option to preach on a public issue. I chose to preach on violence against the trans community.  I went back and forth on whether to post this or not, but today is Trans Day of Visibility. And while I celebrate that, and wish that my own gender identity (which I call "genderqueer") was more visible in general, there are also very real dangers that visibility can pose for people.  So, I've felt led to post this.

There have been a couple of things that have happened since then that are not in this sermon that I should mention: one, the religious discrimination laws that have been passed or are gaining momentum (I refuse to call them "religious freedom" laws), and two, the suicide of 18 year old trans activist Blake Brockington.  The events of this past week "date" the sermon a bit, and while there's a part of me that thinks I should keep revising to include them... this is an ongoing struggle, so the sermon will ALWAYS be being revised, and also, it's Holy Week.

Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain—that is, the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees—as far as Zoar. The Lord said to him, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, “I will give it to your descendants”; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.’ Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command. He was buried in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day. Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigour had not abated. The Israelites wept for Moses in the plains of Moab for thirty days; then the period of mourning for Moses was ended.

(Deuteronomy 34:1-8)

To many, it seems like we have come out of the wilderness to behold the promised land.

Marriage equality has come to this country like dominos falling.  As of right now only 13 states don’t allow same-sex marriage, though all of these bans are being challenged in court.  Not only was the Defense of Marriage Act struck down in 2013, but the Supreme Court is set to rule on marriage equality this summer, and hopes are high.  Just the other week, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the church I proudly call my own, approved an amendment to change our definition of marriage to being between “two people” as opposed to being between “a man and a woman”, making national news—isn’t it wonderful to see a church in the news for love instead of hate?  And we who have marched, we who have written letters and signed petitions, we who have prayed, we who have longed for this day can taste it.  We can feel it.  We have watched the spectators at the Pride parade have changed in the last couple of decades, from menacing, suspicious presences to joyful, revelling supporters.

And we’d like to live here.  We’d like to live in this joy, in this light, in this triumph.  But even with all these trends towards marriage equality, we cannot ignore other trends—namely, a resurgence in violence against the trans and gender non-conforming communities.  We know of at least 13 trans women murdered in the US in 2014.  In the first 7 weeks of 2015 we saw the murders of 7 trans women and one gender nonconforming person who was murdered by their own father, who called the transgender support group his child was involved with “a cult”.

This Thanksgiving I found myself in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, where I lived for several years before starting seminary.  I stayed late catching up with folks at a friend’s place, then got ready to make the 20 minute walk back to my old apartment—it was a walk I’d made dozens of times, often late at night, without any problems, especially since at first glance I can pass for male.  My friend stopped me, telling me to crash on their couch that night, telling me about the recent rise in anti-trans violence in the area.  She told me about a 28 year old trans woman, who was attacked two blocks from my apartment.  Some men started talking to her, and when her voice was lower than expected, revealing her to be trans, these four men beat her with a plexiglass board, calling her a “faggot”, knocking her unconscious, breaking her eye socket and causing internal bleeding.  This happened on Oct 12th—she did not get out of the hospital until Nov 5th.  Upon going home she had to undergo rehab, take ten medications a day to, among other things, prevent seizures, wear a helmet outside, and be monitored 24 hours a day.

Two blocks from my apartment.

2014 ended with the suicide of transgender teen Leelah Alcorn, who cited her parents’ religious convictions as one of the major reasons for her choice to end her life.  She said that her parents would tell her things like “God’s going to send you straight to hell,” and explained, “I was a Christian at the time so I thought that God hated me and that I didn’t deserve to be alive.”  Movements have been sparked in Leelah’s name, songs and award wins dedicated to her, a petition began circling to support “Leelah’s Law”, a law that would ban conversion therapy.

As wonderful as that is, the support and movement for change that has come out of such a tragedy, it is only a part of the large story.  While many people have heard Leelah Alcorn’s name, a white middle class teen from Ohio, few people have heard the names of the seven trans women who have been murdered in 2015… each one of those victims being trans women of color.  Of all the LGBTQ-motivated hate crimes in 2013, 72 percent of the victims were transgender women, and 90 percent of THOSE were trans women of color.

And so we find ourselves yelling at each other at the intersection: the trans and gender nonconforming communities screaming at the celebrating gay, lesbian and bisexual community, insisting, “The fight isn’t over, come and help us!” while queer people of color watch themselves being picked off, one by one, no one seeming to notice as the media attention rushes to the white queer community, most media outlets not even respecting the slain trans women of color enough to use their preferred pronouns while reporting on their deaths.

What a piece of work is man...

***

Most of the first five books of the Bible, sometimes called the Pentateuch, sometimes called the Torah, take place in the 40 years that the Israelites spent in the wilderness, searching for the promised land.  This is after the story of the Exodus, where the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, Moses came commanding Pharaoh to let his people go, the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea.  After all that, the Israelites spend 40 years in the wilderness.  A new generation is raised knowing nothing but the wilderness.  People die without the hope of seeing the legendary land flowing with milk and honey.  And throughout all of it, Moses is the leader.  Moses hears all their complaints.  Moses calms them, tries to reason with them.  Moses is the connection between the people and God, Moses even intercedes for them and argues with God in order to save them from God’s wrath.  Moses pours his soul into this journey, these people, having faith in the promised land even when everyone else’s faith failed.  Then the moment arrives—he sees it… and then he dies.

Now, Moses knew he would never enter the promised land.  Earlier during the period of wilderness wandering, God made it clear that neither Moses nor Aaron would be the ones to bring the people into the promised land.  But we know that the honor afforded Moses is the opportunity to see the promised land, to climb the mountain and gaze upon it before passing on.

Which, I must admit, doesn’t always sound like an honor to me.  I struggle with this beautiful description of Moses’ death, peaceful and triumphant, like Moses, who of course looks like Charlton Heston, is staring peacefully into a gorgeous landscape while calm-but-epic music plays, a slight breeze blowing… an image that seems to ignore the reality that Moses is seeing the exact thing he has been waiting for for 40 years and cannot HAVE it.  Like seeing and smelling a delicious meal after weeks of barely having enough to survive and being unable to actually eat. How could he then die peacefully?  Didn’t he long for this?

Or maybe the question is: why did he keep going in the wilderness when he knew he’d never set foot in the promised land?  Why did he spend his time with the “stiff-necked” Israelites, why did he stay patient through all their internal, useless quarrels, why didn’t he give up and say, “I’ll never get there—you guys are on your own”?

Perhaps Moses learned what all of us who are in these fights for the long haul eventually learn: it’s not about us.

Moses knew he would never enter the promised land—but the Israelites would.  He did it for them.  He did it for the generations that would come after, for the children and their children and their children.  He did it because he knew that the story was bigger than him, had started long before him and would continue long after.  He did it because he knew he stood on the shoulders of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and the story of God’s covenant with Israel spanned far longer than his own lifetime.

I would love to enter the promised land.  We all would.  We would all love to live in a world where every person could walk down the street without fear of being attacked.  We would love to live in a world where children and teenagers don’t find themselves homeless because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.  We would love to live in a world where the words of God are used to heal, never to hurt.  We would love to live in a world where each and every person is treated as valid, beloved, precious creation of the God who is Love and Light and Beauty and Truth.

And, friends, that’s not going to be fully realized in our lifetime.  It’s not.

But as we fight for our own identities, our own loves, even our own lives—we do not fight just for ourselves, our own identities, our own genders, our own races.  We do not fight just for our friends, our families, our own generation.  We fight for each other.  We fight for our children, and their children, and their children.  We fight for the generations to come.  We fight because we know the story is bigger than us, started long before us and will continue long after us.  We fight because we have been empowered by those who came before us, just as Papi, Lamia, Ty, Yazmin, Taja, Penny, Kristina and Bri will empower those who come after us.  We fight because we are God’s children, led by Moses generations ago, still moving on towards the land of promise.  We fight because even if the world doesn’t know, WE know that we are loved and treasured by a God who is working to make all things new.

And the gift we have today is a tiny glimpse into the promised land we are fighting for.

Thanks be to God.





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some of my news/statistics sources:
http://www.hrc.org/resources/entry/a-national-crisis-anti-transgender-violence
http://www.hrc.org/state_maps
http://hrc-assets.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com//files/assets/resources/HRC_AntiTransgenderViolence.pdf
http://gaycitynews.nyc/transwoman-brutally-beaten-bushwick/
http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20141105/bushwick/transgender-woman-beaten-bushwick-leaves-hospital-with-brain-trauma
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Leelah_Alcorn
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/02/ohio-dad-stabs-transgender-daughter-to-death-tells-police-that-son-was-in-a-cult/
http://www.thetaskforce.org/stop-trans-murders/

Sometimes, I wish that God wasn’t real.

If God wasn’t real it would mean that I could toss these fervent prayers into air, where they vanish and can’t hurt me (can’t change me, can’t transform me), that I can be as pious as I want in the comfort of words, sincerely meant but non-committal.

If God wasn’t real I could acknowledge, “Oh, yes, this keeps me from God,” and symbolically offer it up but in reality change nothing because there’s no real relationship to maintain.

If God wasn’t real all this “Christian life” could be merely a string of rotating New Year’s Resolutions, promises to get better-get right-change with no accountability and no real consequence.

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10:31)

I prayed two stupid, stupid prayers recently, overzealous and dangerous.  One, in one of those moments of “identify what things separate you from God” and I wrote down “my independence”.  The other was whispered late one night after an exhausting, discouraging day: “Break me.”  A sign of submission, of breathing into the pain rather than trying to fight it (fighting it rarely ever goes well for me), making sense of what was happening, putting it into a narrative of “God is working through this, and if this is what needs to happen, may it be so.”

But these prayers, of course, were prayed to the carefully constructed version of God I have in my head, a god who is not living and vibrant and dangerous but understood and mild, who I can keep at a safe distance.  A god who hears these prayers and appreciates them and nods at me with a slight smile and pats me on my head and sends me along my merry way.  Not God.  Not the living God who takes me at my word and says, “Okay.  Let’s go.”  

And the last few weeks have been utterly disorienting.  Some things that have been wonderful, some things that have been awful, and all of it swinging back and forth so much it feels like I have whiplash.  No balance, no equilibrium, disruption of routine to the point where getting basic tasks accomplished is nearly impossible, and “bad luck” to farcical proportions, where despite all my best efforts, something goes wrong and I’m right back to where I started.  The full story of all that’s been piling up actually sounds too ridiculous to be true.  And most of the time when I stop all the action to just exist, to be, to think, to feel, I feel this deep sense of defeat.  It’s not depression, it feels distinctly different than that.  (it feels like I am trapped in a Beckett play?)  Depression, as I’ve experienced, tends to feel like a losing all desire, motivation, joy.  This feels… well, it feels like my bones are being broken, one by one.  I still want to move, but moving takes so much effort and causes so much pain, so I live in this, well, returning to Beckett, state: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;

a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (Psalm 51:17)

They say that “God will never give you more than you can handle,” but I think God comes damn close.  Remember, this is the God that told Abraham to kill his own son as a sacrifice.

“But wait!” you say, “God was only testing Abraham! God saved Isaac at the last minute!”

You know what?  I don’t care.  Try telling that to Abraham, who goes through the experience of leading his son, who he loves (the Bible specifies that), to death at God’s command.  Try telling him, on that journey to the place God showed him, that everything’s going to be okay.  I spend a lot of time reading commentaries and I am TIRED of the ones that try to justify everything, take the bite out of it, smooth it over.  Try telling the Canaanite woman, “it’s okay, Jesus didn’t REALLY mean to call you a dog, it was a term of endearment!”  Try telling Mary and Martha that it’s okay that their brother died, it’d all be fine in the end.  Try telling the Egyptian families who lost their firstborn children because the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he would not let the Israelites go that the deaths of their children were for God’s glory.  TRY.

I’m in a really phenomenal Hebrew exegesis class right now focusing on women in the Old Testament, where all questions can be put on the table no matter how heretical they sound, and it feels like one of the underlying questions in this class is always about the character of God.  We Christians often ignore the majority of the Old Testament and I don’t think it’s because of then often used excuse of “the Old Testament is boring, just names and laws,” which is so utterly UNTRUE, the Old Testament is filled with story and philosophy emotion and sex and violence.  I think we ignore it because we are scared of many of the images of God we find in the Old Testament.  An inquisitive God, a violent God, a God who strikes people down, a God whose mind is changed, did I mention violence because I’m not sure you know how violent I mean (think “killing someone by driving a tent peg through their skull so deep it pinned his head to the ground”), a God whose whims are absolutely unknowable, a God who uses people (and not in the good way), a God who turns away from those who God once favored.  A God who works under the operation that “these people are good” and “these people are bad” and the bad ones die and we accept that because “that’s God’s will”.  A God that certainly does not seem merciful.

So often instead of engaging with all of that, we play the Jesus card (the ultimate trump card), we quote John 3:16, we talk about Christ’s suffering and death as proof of God’s love for us, fallen sinners, but if I’m going to be brutally honest I thought about Christ’s death this week and there was a little voice inside of me that said, “What if Jesus’ death wasn’t about ‘paying the price for our sins’ or whatever atonement theory you put on it?  What if Jesus’ death was paying the price of how God had treated us?  What if Jesus was God’s apology to us?”

Which probably was grounds for a lighting bolt to strike me dead, but I’m somehow still standing.

O Lord, you have enticed me,

and I was enticed;

you have overpowered me,

and you have prevailed.

I have become a laughing-stock all day long;

everyone mocks me. 

For whenever I speak, I must cry out,

I must shout, ‘Violence and destruction!’

For the word of the Lord has become for me

a reproach and derision all day long. 

If I say, ‘I will not mention him,

or speak any more in his name’,

then within me there is something like a burning fire

shut up in my bones;

I am weary with holding it in,

and I cannot. (Jeremiah 20:7-9)

Some people translate that word up there, “enticed”, as “raped”.  It’s certainly a controversial translation, but it got a footnote on the Harper Collins Study Bible, which I believe also called this “the most blasphemous part of the Bible”, so of course, it’s one of the sections closest to my heart.

I’ve been in this kind of space for a bit now, theologically.  This scary living God and what that means for me and this dread that this is only the beginning and the near certainty that God will break every bone in my body before this is done.  The larger “this”, the lifetime “this”, not the temporary this that I do know will eventually pass.  I wonder if that’s bad theology, this almost interventionist idea of God, who I don’t believe truly meddles in human affairs… but, then I believe that the Holy Spirit works and leads us through the events that are happening to the path that God intends us to walk.

And through all of this, I wonder, because I hear these same kinds of questions from friends who have left religion, who grappled with these questions about God and decided to walk away from belief.  It’s a choice I understand, it’s a choice I respect—but it’s not the choice I make.  There was a time that I might have, there was a time I essentially did (though my period of agnosticism was more about logic than theology), but that time is long gone.  Not saying it couldn’t happen, but I’d be enormously surprised if it did.  And that has nothing to do with seminary, nothing to do with my “career” or whatever, this staying in, engaging with religion and God, became a permanent fixture of my life long before I ever seriously considered seminary.  And so in these moments, I wonder: why do I stay?

I don’t have a pretty answer for that.  I don’t have a politically correct answer for that.  There is a part of me that would say it’s about how empty it would be cutting out the religious, which is what I experienced when I did for those years (one sip from the hand of God and the world begins to taste like ashes… what would we not sacrifice to live among the lightning flashes? The Hidden Sky).  There is a part of me that feels like Jeremiah—if I try to stop, I can’t, it wells up within me and I can’t hold it in.  There is a part of me that appreciates it because I’ve never been fond of religion that smooths out all the wrinkles and pretends that life doesn’t happen.

But the quote that I really come back to… isn’t a quote from scripture, or a theologian, it’s actually… a tweet, from the twitter account of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale:

Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.

Ultimately none of this is about me.

Not to discount me, I know, I have a unique perspective and gifts that are important and God uses (in a good way) and God loves me and all of it.  But ultimately none of this is about my own prosperity.  That’s not what I signed up for.  It’s for the world.  The transformation of the world into a place where everyone is known and cared for and loved.  Which sounds absolutely impossible but I’ll argue that most people who are working for some kind of change in the world are working for a vision like that, whether God is part of their language or not.  I believe, ultimately, that is God’s purpose, God’s goal—the establishment of that kind of Kingdom on Earth, which I will never live to see but working towards it is worth it.  So if there’s a way that God is working through this awful time to do something to transform me to be suited for that work in a new way, that’s worth it.

To be clear: God will be dragging me kicking and screaming the whole way.  It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.  It doesn’t mean I won’t hate the whole process.  I’m hesitant to even use the word “but” because a “but” seems to try to make things okay and they are not.  It is painful and… I believe it is being used for good.