Reformation Project: Reconcile and Reform
I spent the past weekend in Seattle to attend the Reformation Project conference, an annual gathering of LGBT+ Christians and our allies. The weekend was full of worship, coffee, crying, and laughing—oh the laughing. It also led to my most popular tweet to date. (That’s really not saying much, but still I’ll take it.)
This is the third (and final) national Christian conference I have attended this year, and all of them have had the acceptance and affirmation of LGBT+ people as part of their mission, whether this inclusion was the cornerstone or just an important pillar. Each of them blessed me tremendously. Maybe it’s just the sleep deprivation or maybe it’s that the recent memories are stronger than the distant ones, but in any case it seems, in this moment, that this weekend was different. It was somehow harder, somehow fuller, and somehow more confusing—at least at the beginning.
Unlike the previous conferences, I decided to volunteer for the Reformation Project conference this weekend: selling books, greeting people, and the like. None of these are “major” in the grand scheme of things, but I still felt more invested this weekend than I had previously. I wasn’t “just” a spectator or attendee, but I actually had a role in directly supporting the mission and work and the conference—both of which I believe in quite strongly.
And so I was a little bit surprised when, an hour into my first slot of volunteering, a pit developed in my stomach as I began to ask old, haunting questions: “What if I’m wrong about this? What if I have been deceiving myself, and I’m participating in the work of deceiving others?”
“...affirming Christians are often critiqued as attempting to wrest the Bible to fit their already-formed convictions about gender and sexuality.”
Now, I have been theologically affirming—that is, I have believed that same-sex marriage and non-traditional gender experience and expression are compatible with Christianity—for something like two years now. To be sure, this conviction has had its ebbs and flows since it first settled in my soul, but it has largely been steady. My experience of myself, my experience of other people past and present, my understanding of Christian theology, and my understanding of the Bible all make it difficult for me to come to any other conclusion. These days, I rarely perceive tension between any of these things, but this has certainly not always been the case. The Bible, in particular, once made it very difficult to imagine coming to the conclusions I have, and I think this has been or is true for most other Christians. Because of this, affirming Christians are often critiqued as attempting to wrest the Bible to fit their already-formed convictions about gender and sexuality. Encounters with the Bible in my own personal history have raised questions similar to those that were brewing inside me at the conference. So these sudden questions and uncertainties felt familiar.
Despite the joys of being with old friends (looking at you, Gary!) and meeting new ones, I carried this dis-ease with me through the rest of my first volunteer slot and into the first plenary session of the conference. I was not at peace through the opening worship, the introduction to the conference, and the beginning of Nicole Garcia’s impassioned testimony of her experience working for justice and inclusion as a transgender Latina in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. (It was quite moving, and I’ll update this post with a link to the talk when it becomes available.) Still, not for want of her eloquence, Garcia’s story did not really assuage the malformed but pressing fears behind my questions.
They did not assuage these fears, that is, until Garcia reminded us of the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. Found in Acts 8, this narrative is a major pillar in queer Christian theology. In it, the apostle Philip feels the Spirit of God call him to minister to an Ethiopian eunuch—a sexual and racial outsider—who is returning home from a visit to Jerusalem, where the eunuch was likely rejected from entrance into the inner courts of the temple on the basis of both his gender and racial identity. As the two are journeying together, they pass some water, and the eunuch asks what is preventing him from baptism. The answer implicit in the text is that nothing prevents the eunuch from partaking of this sacrament: Philip baptizes the eunuch, who then continues on his way rejoicing. This is quite the cursory retelling of the story, and I highly recommend Austen Hartke’s exposition and interpretation of this passage if you’re interested in looking into it further. But the main point is this: the conversion and baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch inaugurated the trajectory of inclusion for the once-outsiders that continues in the affirmation of LGBT+ people today. While it is anachronistic to refer to the eunuch with modern categories of gender identity, I personally believe that this story represents one of a number of biblical passages that pushes me toward affirmation and inclusion. I have yet to encounter a compelling interpretation of this passage that leads me otherwise.
The use of this passage in this way, at this conference, and by this woman was not at all surprising to me. Indeed, it would have been surprising if it had not come up. Still, something was new here. In that moment, for what I think is the first time in the long process of adopting an affirming theology, I knew unambiguously that Scripture was leading the way in my self-acceptance and that of other LGBT+ persons [1]. In that moment, there was no deep-seeded, internal conviction that God loved me as a gay man; the theological paradigm I have come to develop and accept didn’t bring me comfort, and neither did the joy that I was seeing in the queer Christian people all around me; even my own memory of the hardship and spiritual death that alternative theologies have led to in my life and others’ lives didn’t quiet the questions. But in that moment, when all my other pillars couldn’t seem to hold the weight of my fears that I was misled and was misleading others, the text of Scripture and Garcia’s exegesis of it reminded me of the radical love and acceptance that God has for LGBT+ people. It reminded me, as Hartke says it, that God “breaks the rules to get us in.” [2]
This, perhaps, could be the end of my post, a rhetorical “check” to conservative critiques that affirming theologians just try to upend or ignore Scripture. But that would do a deep disservice to that experience in itself, not to mention the experiences of the rest of the conference because in that moment—that beautiful, beautiful moment—winning some hypothetical argument about whose interpretation is right, about who is being more faithful, was the furthest thing from my mind. Instead, I felt only the peace of one loved deeply by God. I felt only the comfort of knowing that God, through the words of Scripture and the words of a transgender woman, was quieting my soul and inviting me to rest. In that moment, the opinions and arguments of other people, whether they agree with me or not, accept me or not, did not matter. It was just about me and God, and particularly just about knowing that God accepts—present progressive tense—me.
“I felt only the comfort of knowing that God, through the words of Scripture and the words of a transgender woman, was quieting my soul and inviting me to rest.”
Neither is this acceptance by God the end of the story because acceptance by God frees us to receive acceptance from other people and to offer it in return. That is to say, acceptance by God creates the opportunity for community to form. And, this weekend, did it form.
It is truly amazing how quickly relationships can form at queer Christian conferences. How, within a weekend, complete strangers become friends. If this is not something you have experienced personally, I am not sure how to describe or convey it. The shared experience of life and faith—of coming to terms with a queer identity in a space that forbade it, of choosing to press through the tension and confusion of it all—creates deep fraternity that is hard to come by anywhere else. I believe that this type of community formation is part and parcel of the Christian Gospel: the good news that Christ has come and is reconciling all people together. So, perhaps more than anything else from the weekend, I am grateful for friendships continued and friendships begun.
Despite the joy of relationships that did form, I am also aware of those I did not form. In some sense, everyone at this conference is at the margins of the Christian Church. But even in this space there are people who are not represented, people whose welcome is less sure than mine. There were, I think, times I did well to remember this and strive to put my own desires for the weekend aside to create more space for others. There were, I know, times where I bought into the lie that acceptance is a zero-sum game and chose to pursue my own belonging, ignoring the needs of others. I include this to say: the weekend was good, but not perfect; it was a foretaste of heaven, but contained reminders that I am still very much living on earth; it showed me my own acceptance before God and others, but also revealed that I have a long way to go in bringing that very good Gospel-belonging to the people around me.
These dichotomies and everything in between them culminated on the last night of the conference, when we shared in the taking of Communion. Now, if you didn’t know, I pretty much always cry during Communion. But at these queer Christian conferences, it’s something fierce. There is something earth-and-heaven-moving about sharing this sacrament with the knowledge that many churches would refuse it to many of those receiving it in that room. It powerfully symbolizes and actualizes the reality that the unity brought about in Christ transgresses any human boundary markers, even those set up by the Church.
Furthermore, this Communion, like all Communions, was not anonymous.
“This is Christ’s body, broken for you, Elliot.” “Elliot, the blood of Christ, shed for you.”
The naming is critical to the sacrament: Christ encounters our particulars, and our particulars encounter Christ. In this room there was no effort to skirt the particulars of gender identity or sexuality. This Eucharist was for the lesbian, the gay, the bisexual, the transgender, the queer, the intersex, the asexual, the gender-non-conforming, the cisgender, and the straight person. Particulars like this were critical in the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, too. If we fail to recognize his status as sexual and racial outsider, we miss the point of the story. He received the sacrament of baptism as a eunuch, and we received the Eucharist as queer persons.
Echoing the eunuch, LGBT+ persons in Christian spaces find themselves asking, “What is preventing me from belonging, from partaking in the richness of the life of this community?” And often, unlike the eunuch, we receive a long list of reasons for our exclusion in reply. But friends, the true answer to our question is this:
Nothing.
Nothing friends—nothing—can separate us from the love of Christ. The love of Christ is the fundamental reality that cannot be thwarted by human effort, and it flows even into the spaces where that love is not recognized or where it is qualified ad nauseam and beyond recognition. This love is there when we believe it, and it is there when we are crippled by unbelief.
This conference, in particular, repeatedly reminded me of realities: the reality that I am loved and accepted by God, the reality that this acceptance can be embodied in my relationships with others, and the reality that Christ is reconciling all people to God and to each other. As realities, they remain true even though the conference has ended, even as life settles back in and I may begin to doubt them.
“In this way, these conferences serve as liturgies in the desert, reminding us of truth and working it into our souls...They are God’s answer to our cries: ‘I do believe, help my unbelief.’”
In this way, these conferences serve as liturgies in the desert, reminding us of truth and working it into our souls. They are new wineskins that are fit to hold the new wine of freedom that we find in Christ, and we can carry them with us when we leave. They are God’s answer to our cries: “I do believe, help my unbelief.”
All of this does not change the fact that now, back home, I am left with abiding sadness. It goes without saying I already do and will continue to miss the people I met this weekend. It seems unfair, to put it mildly, that such experiences of wholeness and belonging can be so fleeting for LGBT+ Christians. The absence of this community leaves me feeling hollow.
Still, I submit that I am better for the hollowness. For only when something feels missing are we compelled to find it. And once we’re filled, we are left better aware of what is missing in and for others, left more compelled to provide it for them as well. May we strive to live in a way that offers wholeness to everyone we meet. May we offer healing, and in so doing, be healed ourselves.
Notes and References
1. This is not to say that those other categories—experience, reason, tradition—ceased to be important in that moment, or that they should or will take a backseat in my theologizing in the future. I firmly believe we misuse the Bible when we expect it to provide all answers to all things. It simply cannot. My present point is not to defend such an approach to Scripture but Christian Smith argues this point well if you are interested.
2. Austen Hartke, Transforming: the Bible & the Lives of Transgender Christians (Westminster John Knox: Louisville, 2018), 87ff.
