Queer people throw excellent parties. Some of our most important parties are our Pride celebrations, which become more fabulous with every new person who attends. We want as many people at those parties and marches and protests as possible, not least because the more people who are there, the stronger we feel and the stronger our community becomes.
Pride is shot through with an ethic of hospitality. Hospitality is the business of receiving guests and making them feel welcome. These guests may be travelers who are seeking shelter, or food. They may have been invited to dinner, or to a celebration. They may be people who need protection of some kind. They may be family members, friends, or complete strangers. A posture of hospitality begins before anyone has arrived, and entails preparedness for those whom one does not know to anticipate. Once guests are present, hospitality involves a proactive impulse to see what people need and to provide it. A good host is alert to hir guests, observes their needs, and responds generously and appropriately.
More broadly, an ethic of hospitality guides transactions between Self and Other. If you are from a culture that takes hospitality seriously—and many do—you know that the rules of hospitality apply not just to hosts (Self) but also to guests (Other). There’s a way in which one is rather constantly assuming one of these two positions, host or guest, and is having to navigate the ethical norms that pertain to whichever position one is in.
Healthy Pride makes authentic hospitality possible, because Pride encompasses two levels of awareness that are crucial to hospitality: first, awareness of human value, both one’s own and others’; and second, awareness of our connection to and dependence upon one another.
Queer people have a visceral instinct for hospitality, which is inherently incarnational. Hospitality involves meeting needs that are bodily and often fairly intimate: what you eat, when you eat it, and who shares your food; where you sleep, when you sleep, and yes, sometimes, who shares your bed.
This means that hospitality, like queerness, has to deal constantly with an awareness of scandal. When the awareness is conscious, a person navigating hospitality has to decide where the traps are set, whether she or her guests might be snared in them, and how she feels about the danger.
In the 1980s and ’90s many people, queer and nonqueer, rushed to bedsides and into hospitals to care for people with HIV/AIDS. The decision to provide hospitality came at no small cost. I knew a nurse who was forbidden to hold her newborn nephew because his parents were afraid she would infect him just by virtue of her proximity to AIDS patients. The fears had absolutely nothing to do with a realistic assessment that transmission of the virus was a risk; it had everything to do with people on the front lines being “tainted” by their association with a medical condition that frightened or even scandalized others.
Queer people have long dived willingly into scandal for the sake of hospitality. We do so in our parties, and we do so when we care for people on the margins. We also do so in our political activism.
In October 1995, Pope John Paul II came to New York City. I sat in on a meeting at which several AIDS activists planned an action to protest John Paul’s position on condom use, which in their eyes put millions of lives at risk. Those were the days of direct action, protests carefully choreographed and scripted to achieve maximum media attention. We needed a chant that would succinctly state the problem and be short, snappy, and rhythmic. People started tossing out ideas, which quickly devolved into angry caricatures of John Paul’s person. Finally, one man in the group asked to be heard. “I understand your anger. I do. This pope is terrible on our issues. But he is doing more to call attention to extreme poverty than anyone else I know. His work is important, and it is important to me. I won’t participate in disparaging him as a human being.” Silence fell in the room. I had no idea what was going to happen next.
It took courage for this man to speak. So many of our people were dying. It felt like war. There were Catholic hospitals on the forefront of caring for people with HIV/AIDS, but the Vatican continued to issue statements disparaging queer identity and denying the efficacy of the most basic vehicles for stopping transmission of the virus. There was truth in this man’s statement; but for those of us dealing with the fallout of Vatican condemnation, defending the pope was scandalous. Would we respect this man in our midst, respect the marginalized people for whom he was speaking? Or would we be offended by him, and cast him out? When we started up again, the tone had completely changed. I doubt that a single person changed hir opinion about the pope, but we all allowed ourselves to be affected by this man’s witness. I saw this over and over again in meetings where people were organizing direct actions: the ability of queer activists to see one another and hold with respect our complex concerns, our intersectional identities. This man called us out on the risk of insularity, demanding that we also see the people living in poverty across the globe, and that we respect the interconnection among experiences of marginalization.
Queer people often understand that advancing our self-interest includes advancing the well-being of people whom we may not yet perceive to be part of “us.” That’s because many of us are aware of our complex identities and the intersectional dynamics at work. Being aware of our intersectionality means that when we “look to the margins,” we know that we are often looking around right here in the room where we’re sitting. We aren’t looking “over there” at “those people.” We know, therefore, that we have strength even as we inhabit marginal space. We know that we have power that can be used to make life more possible for folks who are barely surviving on the margin, right here in our midst.
That’s why our definition of “us” is ever expanding. We are keenly aware that we are part of a larger movement. We are a people who, at our best, always have a vision in view—a vision in which life is better, more possible, for each of us, and for all of us. We know that our ability to move forward is dependent on our ability to see people who are on the margins. including ourselves, and weave them—us—into the fold. Our needs as individuals and our needs as a community sometimes exist in tension, but they constantly inform each other and constantly serve as check and balance in our ethical deliberation.
A great deal of theological thinking is fiercely imaginative. One of the theological questions that demands an imaginative response is this: Where are we going? I don’t mean “tonight,” or “this weekend,” or even “next summer.” I mean, ultimately. Where are we—as a people, as sentient beings in this universe—headed? This question draws us into the realm of eschatology.
Eschatology is the study of “the end times.” That’s what the Greek literally means. Eschatology keeps us looking to the future for . . . something. It bears a relationship to but is not the same thing as apocalypticism, which is the expectation that the world will end in destruction. Progressive Christians often have virtually no idea what to do with these ideas because, along the running theme of this book, they are in theological territory that has largely been hijacked to advance causes that we progressives find offensive.
Queer theologian Elizabeth Stuart argues that eschatology is important not because by talking about it we can figure out exactly what heaven is like, but rather because our visioning tells us “a great deal about our current values and aspirations.”1 Such discourses, she argues,
are spaces where we dare to dream impossible dreams, where language cracks and the divine presence may seep through. . . . Like Jesus’ parables, which were eschatological in content, eschatological discourse makes room for God by cracking “the deep structure of our accepted world.”
Eschatology speaks of our destiny, and our destination. How do we know where we are going if we have given up dreaming about what it will be like when we get there?
Eschatology is deeply embedded in early church understandings of what Christianity is all about. It is woven through our scripture. And, as Stuart suggests, it has practical impact on the work that we do. Revealing both our understanding of ourselves and our dreams, eschatology should inform our decisions about the actions we take that are designed to make the world a better place, a place that somehow manifests God’s realm on earth.
We have been talking about the relationship between theology and ethics. We have observed that theology and ethics work together, that in a sense, they make each other possible. Eschatology asks us foundational questions about why we do justice work at all. Are we building a better world simply to demonstrate our faith, because Jesus told us to do it? Or does something in all that action actually accomplish something that is important to God, and to us? To put it another way: Are we simply walking this path, or are we paving it as we go?
Jürgen Moltmann is a German theologian who in the mid-twentieth century pushed liberal Christianity to take eschatology more seriously as a lens for comprehending our purpose.
Drawing on the scriptural concept of adventus—the God “who is and who was and who is to come”2—Moltmann asserted that God is not a static being, a final destination for humanity, but rather that God is a dynamic presence who is actively moving toward us from the future, empowering us forward. Thus, Moltmann wrote, God becomes the ground for our freedom and “the ground of the transformation of the world.”3
What Moltmann describes is a very queer idea, and I include in that phrase an appreciation for one of the early definitions of queer: it is strange, puzzling. I have spent years trying to comprehend—trying to imagine—what it means for God to be coming at us from the future. Moltmann begs remarkable questions about our relationship to time, about the meaning of human progress. His idea is also queer because he is suggesting that there is a binary at work in human experience of now and then—a binary that God ruptures decisively.
By queering perceived separations between now and the future, eschatology dramatically informs both the ministries we take on and, significantly, our approach to those ministries. Eschatology answers the basic question, “Why do we do outreach ministries anyway?” with a much richer answer than, “Because Jesus said to.” Eschatology helps frame our work not as “service to people who are not Us,” but rather as “looking to the margins to see and be in relationship with those whom I have not yet perceived or acknowledged, to meet needs that will bring us into a new understanding of who We are.”
Churches often characterize this work as “service” or “outreach,” but “looking to the margins” is a better description of what happens in queer community. The queer community rarely looks around, as churches sometimes do, to say, “We should help some people. Whom should we help?” Rather, in queer community we tend to hear the cry of someone inside the community who is in pain, and many of us respond. Our human response is in some ways resonant with the action God takes in Hebrew scripture when Ze goes into action because Ze has “observed the misery of my people” and “heard their cry.”4
Thus as the new millennium set in we finally began to pay attention to the voices of trans* people whose identities and needs had long been shoved aside. Thus we began to pay attention to the plight of runaway and homeless youth. Thus have attempts to name our community evolved, from “gay” to “gay and lesbian” to “lesbian, gay, and bisexual” to “LGBT” and on and on to a veritable alphabet of specific identities and experiences. Growing awareness of the need to invite people onto that list proactively was one of the factors that eventually led many of us to embrace the word “queer” as something of an umbrella term—and an infrastructural identity. That history, from “gay” to “queer” itself, says a lot about our ethical path: the work that we do is shot through with a deep awareness of our queer connection, while it simultaneously shakes up our comprehension of who we are and how we are distinct from one another.
One does not need to be queer to be able to perceive what this movement feels like. Human migration has a similar trajectory and ultimately demands a similar response. People seeking refuge, asylum, or simply a better life for their children set out for a new land. Those who are already in that land may be welcoming or hostile, but eventually “the immigrant” becomes part of the cultural landscape. “They” become “us.” Some of the most interesting social justice work being done in the United States today involves listening to the voices of young people who live in that liminal, transitional space between us and them: the Dreamers, for instance, many of whom have lived most of their lives in this country and regardless of their documentation are as culturally American as any of their peers in school.5
Those of us who listen to these voices, queer and nonqueer, understand that our awareness of others will shape our understanding of ourselves and will shape the work that we know we must do, as we live into the future that calls us forward, as we strive to be a community that will continue to grow in strength, in numbers, and in integrity.
In this way, queer ethics seems intuitively to mirror something of Moltmann’s eschatology with a clarity that can be helpful to progressive Christians.6 Envisioning God as one coming toward us from the future enhances the meaning of the queer/Christian path we are on. The path is not just a discipline that leads to meaning, (ethics leading to theology), but it is in a way an emanation of Godself. The path itself is an encounter with the God who is coming toward us.
The challenge for ministries that work toward justice is to be deeply cognizant of how the work itself articulates and manifests a healthy awareness of dynamics between Self and Other, making it possible for more people to walk the path on which we encounter the living God. “Justice” can be defined broadly. Justice ministries might focus on food insecurity, or housing, or health care, or extreme poverty, or climate change, or political/religious/economic persecution, or . . . the list goes on. The term “justice” is intrinsically relational, whether it is being discussed in scripture or in a court of law. That’s why framing it as part of the work of hospitality is so deeply correct. Whatever you are called to address, wherever your heart and body are going to show up to work, be sure to go there with a strong sense of who you are and what your stake is in the relationship with the Self/Other you are going to encounter.
There are many progressive churches that take these questions and dynamics seriously. Social justice ministry is something progressive Christianity often does well. It is the place where many Christians have worked hard to comprehend a healthy relationship between Self and Other, such as by supporting immigrants and providing safe havens for refugees. This ethic deeply informs contemporary international outreach as work that is fundamentally about solidarity, partnership, and relationship building.
We prioritize this kind of social justice work as an essential part of our mission, and it often manifests robust and gracious hospitality. It is, in fact, a starting point for many progressive Christians and communities, a way to enter into a deeper understanding of our faith and of God. If you are one of those people, and if you were writing this book, maybe you would have written these chapters on ethics in a different order. Maybe instead of starting with the section on “Pride,” you would have started with “Looking to the Margins.” You could make a strong argument for doing just that.
The most authentic social justice ministries exact a price even as they cultivate joy. That’s because hospitality requires that one confront scandal. We have looked at numerous biblical passages in which Jesus had to deal with being scandalous or scandalized. What we didn’t talk about were the many passages in which Jesus scandalized his contemporaries simply by occupying the same space as people who were considered unclean. And he didn’t just occupy the space—he touched people. Touching someone who is considered unclean means you get contaminated—ritualistically, socially, and sometimes physiologically as well. This means that Jesus took on the state of being unclean, and he took on whatever stigma was applied to the people he was engaging: women, children, Samaritans, lepers, you name it. In other words, Jesus’s work meant that he constantly scandalized people by becoming a scandal to them. And he did this at the exact moment when he was doing the kinds of work that Christians are often trying to emulate when we engage in outreach or social justice ministries.
Where is the scandal in your work? What pressure exists to dispense with it? To the extent that your work is scandalous to others, how willing are you to enter and own the scandal of it? If your work is completely “safe,” why is that? It is common for people of privilege to feel “unsafe” when we enter into spaces that are decrepit or engage with people who are sick or hungry or haven’t bathed or whatever. It’s worth figuring out how and why feelings of safety get stirred up in those situations, but those feelings are not a sufficient barometer for assessing your work. When it comes to scandal, being “unsafe” means a whole lot more than just “it makes me uncomfortable to be around people like that.”
Facing down scandal means rupturing binaries that do violence to people, both conceptually and in practical life. Right in line with what queer people comprehend, it means understanding the scandal that you, as a Christian, already are. We Christians are called to look to the margins, knowing that we already exist there: it is the space we inhabit. This is one of the most important reasons that we have to come out, understand our intersectional identities, and name ourselves as scandalous: we have to queer the lines between “those people over there” who are on the margins, who are scandalous, and “us” sitting in whatever marginalized/privileged space we occupy.
This kind of queering gives offense to others, especially to people who want to stay safely in their privileged world, whether on the Left or on the Right. This kind of queering scandalizes, and if it doesn’t, it isn’t doing an important part of its job.
But remember that the scandal itself is part of our eschatological vision. An awareness of scandal helps clarify some of the most vexing Self/Other dynamics that we humans face. By looking to the margin and claiming our place there we allow ourselves to be called together, rupturing the binary of those who are in and those who are out. We stand together, imagining God in our midst, undermining the power of false scandal by putting away the trap for good. The ethic and discipline of hospitality confronts scandal, shows the lie of the false binary, and makes our eschatological vision possible. In the doing of justice, ethics and theology work together so closely that the lines are almost queered. The vision and the work so reinforce each other, so thoroughly depend on each other, that they are nearly inseparable. Without one, neither is truly viable. With both, we may just find ourselves treading on a solid path, toward the God who is rushing to meet us.