LGBTQ Pride Week

Since it's LGBTQ Pride Month and I am the father of a transgender daughter and the grandfather of a transgender grandson, I'll say what I think about the place of sex/gender in the gospel (this is long, sorry):

There is a particular tension in the OT between purity and holiness. Purity ("wholeness"), generally, is a condition for God's granting holiness to a creature. God is the holy one, but that holiness is from time to time disclosed in the world, in what is other than the holy God. "Glory" is the word for that disclosure of holiness. Creatures at the site of the disclosure of God's holiness are either destroyed (if impure) or become radiant with that holiness, i.e., are glorified (if pure). Purity is not holiness, anymore than an open window is the wind that blows through it. The problem is that it becomes very easy to confuse the two, to think that being pure, being whole, is the point of life. It is not in the OT. The point of life is to enter God's glory, to be hallowed. Wholeness is the condition for glorification.

What happens with the resurrection of the decidedly impure, unwhole, mutilated, body of the crucified Jesus is that a body, a human being, that lacks the condition for its entering into God's holiness, not only does enter it, it is utterly saturated by it, is so glorified that everything about that mutilated body glows with glory. Indeed, the resurrected mutilated body of Jesus is a "spiritual body," a body glowing with the Holy Spirit (who might also be described, you know, as holy spirit, as life and energy that is no less holy than the God to whom Jesus abandoned himself).

All this means that Jesus is the one who is holy without meeting that condition for holiness that is front and center in the OT. Anyone who enters into Jesus's body is made holy without meeting any other condition. That is, even if you are unwhole, impure, mutilated, to be "in Christ" is to be holy.

Is sex other than between a male and one or more females impure, unwhole, according to the OT. Well, yes, it is. Why?! Well, if the OT is the slave that accompanies a child to school, i.e., if it is the means by which Israel didn't die out on the way to Holy Week (and that is the way I read that passage), then it makes sense that the OT is concerned to keep Israel alive. Ancient Israel was populated by desperately poor people with very short lifespans, who struggled to live long enough to have babies and raise them to the age that they could have babies, too. The point of sex was to have babies [period]. The difficulty of survival was so serious that there were all kinds of ritual behaviors that stressed the oneness of the household, the village, the tribe, and especially the nation. That's why people were not to mix fabrics. They wore clothes made out of one fabric to symbolize the unity of the people of God and of their destiny and of the utter seriousness of living with care, with their "eyes on the prize."

What happens to sex with the resurrection of Jesus? It no longer needs to be protected, because the people of God, "the body of Christ," doesn't have to survive. Indeed, one enters the body of Christ by ritual dying, by baptism. Nobody has to have babies. That's why Paul says all that stuff about not getting married in 1 Corinthians 7. That's why Jesus quotes Isaiah 56, when he overturns tables at the temple. Faithful strangers and eunuchs are welcomed by him into the temple to be made holy without having met the OT condition for hallowing, even if they are barred by the champions of purity. That's why Philip baptizes the Ethiopian ("stranger") Eunuch ("sexually impure").

Faithful LGBTQ+ persons are thus welcomed by Jesus into the glory of God, i.e., into his own body, *exactly* for the same reason those of us Gentiles who are deemed "straight" are welcomed.

Dad's 102nd Birthday and the 2nd Day of LGBTQ Pride Month

Solidarity with the Poor