On Palm Sunday, 2014, I went to church at St. Mark’s in the Bowery in lower Manhattan. Winnie Varghese, the rector, a queer priest whose prophetic voice gives me hope for the church, quietly preached a sermon so powerful that it felt like my soul had been grasped and shaken.
Palm Sunday is a fiercely challenging day. This is the day when Jesus strides into Jerusalem, hailed by his followers. Within a week, he will be killed. Winnie gazed unflinchingly upon this day in all its complexity—all of its hope, all of its impending violence. “When there was a parade [in Jesus’s time],” she said, “it was Rome coming in to show them they were conquered, that their God had been humiliated, that they would never be free. And Jesus comes in looking like David . . .”1 She reminded us that for these people, living this moment, there was no cozy postscript to soften the violence he was about to face. “This is not a bunch of people thinking resurrection comes at the end of this week”:
In that little moment before he dies—they don’t know how many days it will be, but they know he will die—they just celebrate their freedom. Now hear it, because no freedom has happened. They are not any more free than the day before or the day before, but they have in this brief moment—as we have in this brief moment—a little bit of a vision of what the reign of God might look like. That a gentle, healing, wise man, in the position of the prophets, enraged by injustice against women and children and his people and the sick and the outsider, that this one could be a sign of God’s reign now. That this might be who we are. And the people respond with this glorious procession, every one of them potentially marking themselves also for death by Rome.
These are people who have hope—hope as a kind of knowledge of themselves, knowledge of an identity that cannot be crushed:
They risk themselves to sing aloud a memory of who they knew they could be because God had told them they could be those people: the chosen, the beloved, the wildly inclusive, those believing that all of creation were vessels made to be good forever and whole, not shattered, as they were and were about to be again.
I have written that my faith in the Christian gospel is not based on someone drumming it into my head, nor on my confidence that it all makes rational sense. Rather, my faith in the gospel is based on the fact that I experience it to be true. There are two places where I have most deeply experienced the truth that Winnie describes here—the wild, reckless dream of a life where love truly reigns: in the narrative of Jesus’s final days in Jerusalem, and in my experience of queer community. Leslie Feinberg might have used language similar to Winnie’s to describe a community of women who knew absolutely that violence was coming, but who went to the bars anyway, who dressed the way they needed to dress anyway, because they knew who they were and they knew that they needed to be those people, together: “They risk themselves to sing aloud a memory of who they knew they could be.”
What happens on Palm Sunday is important for myriad reasons. It matters that people come together as a people to remember who they are, and who they are meant to be. This happened for Jesus’s followers on that day. It matters that people who live under repressive regimes demonstrate against coercive violence. It matters that people engage their bodies in proclaiming their desire for a better life. It matters that people live into hope. It matters that people proclaim aloud, with their hearts, minds, souls, and bodies: “We are creatures of infinite value. What is alive in us cannot be killed.”
This book has explored the trajectory of two paths, queer and Christian. Our discussion has moved like this:
Discernment of identity leads individuals and communities to:
Risk the proclamation of that identity;
Touch others, despite risk to oneself;
Navigate the inevitable scandal;
Participate in communities that demand integrity within ourselves, require justice in our dealings with one another, and look to the margins to address individual/communal/global degradation and suffering.
Queer people live this path without talking a lot about it. I suspect many of us don’t even see the virtue that is plainly at work among us. One primary purpose in writing this book is to lift up this path in a way that both queer people and Christians can see, encouraging all of us to acknowledge the virtue that is both demanded and made possible by the facts of queer life.
Another primary purpose is to offer queer virtue as a model for Christian faith. Precisely because queer virtue is so visible in our world—much as those gathered on that first Palm Sunday would have been shockingly visible to everyone around them—it provides a model that one can observe, ponder, and emulate. This is a model that could help Christians better understand how and why we live the way we do; but also, very importantly, it is a model that can help more of us proclaim our faith in words and deeds more powerfully, with greater consequence.
Our world is beset by vexing, terrifying iterations of violence, from income inequality to severe economic deprivation; from religious intolerance to radical religious militarism. We are confronted on a daily basis by violence both horrific and mundane: gruesome beheadings, the savage destruction of cultural heritage, and throughout the globe, families chased from their homes by people waving the profane banner of rigidly intolerant, nominally religious views.
The Christian tradition, along with other faith traditions that are based on a law of love, speaks deeply to the terrorizing violence that pervades our world. Yes, Christianity condemns murder outright—as do Judaism and Islam. Christianity joins other world religions in calling for peace, for justice, for basic human compassion. These ethical calls are important not least for their clarity and simplicity, and moderate/progressive voices are correct to draw upon these simple, clear ethical standards when we condemn acts of violence.
But there is more at work in these traditions than basic ethical statutes that, when applied to the real world, sometimes prove not to be so simple after all. Christian ethics are constructed upon a sophisticated and robust theological infrastructure. If Christians were better able to perceive and name the Self/Other dynamics that undergird our tradition; if we were able to stand inside our tradition and comprehend the ways that we are individually and corporately involved in these dynamics, I tell you: we would far more often know what to say about the violence that runs rampant in our world. We would far more often know how to lift our voices and position our bodies to refute violence. And we would far more effectively be able to locate ourselves among the vast numbers of good, loving people in our world who seek meaning, who need hope: the gritty, determined, scandalous hope that is the very marrow of our tradition.
Winnie Varghese’s sermon emanates from the core of the gospel. The Jesus she describes is both gentle and enraged. The setting she evokes exudes a sense of menace, and of home. The people in the crowd are on fire with love, even as they look fear directly in the eye. This is a story about people who, in remembering who they are, also remember that who they are is greater and stronger than whatever violence may come their way.
This is a story about a God who shows up to stand with them, with us. This is a God who not only understands the depth of our joys and the immensity of our heartaches, but who also turns them into opportunities for us to touch one another, to be touched by God. This is a God who is very queer, indeed.
In our midst, this God has raised up priests, both lay and ordained: people who have an innate sense of the divine working in their lives. Among these priests are countless people who identify as queer, who possess an innate sense of the essential queerness of the divine. The church needs their witness, just as the world now desperately needs the church’s authentically queer witness. The moment is upon us for the church to step boldly into this place of radical vulnerability—discerning and claiming our identity, risking, touching, facing down scandal, adopting and being adopted by one another—and in doing so, open pathways for people the world over who are clamoring to enter the sacred.