I was asked to speak last weekend at the first national the Gender Liberation March in Washington D.C. I’ve been in movement spaces with the organizers, working on body autonomy, reproductive justice, and a free Palestine, just to name a few. When we call on each other, we do all we can to say yes. Why? Because our movement is intersectional. We are not free, like Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer said, until all of us are free. In the spirit of the Zulu philosophy ubuntu, we are only human together. Our destinies are intertwined. Dr. King said, “I can’t be fully who I am unless you are fully who you are.”
So, I took my Black, straight, cis, married, Boomer body to DC. and marched and danced and sang and twerked and spoke on behalf of all the people who need this democracy work. We were there for trans and queer folk, for non-binary folk, for cis and trans people who need reproductive justice. And we were there to shout down Project 2025 and the ways it wants to erase the human rights for which our people sighed, bled, and died.
My congregation, Middle Church, sponsored the march. We are a multi-everything congregation on the lower east side of Manhattan. We’re lefty in our politics, progressive in our organizing, and fiercely loving in our faith. We believe the religion of Jesus is Just Love. Period. And inside that love, all the people belong. All the people flourish. All the people are seen, known and loved. We believe it is our job to take that love to the streets, to build what we believe God wants for creation on Earth—right here, right now. And we believe God is still speaking; that God is multi-vocal, that God wants to have a relationship with all of us. We believe God is love, non-gendered and all genders. Our scripture tells us God is love, and that whenever we love, God lives inside that love. When we love, we are Love Shacks, Baby! Each loving human created—our texts say—in the image of God; each of us bearing the divine imprint.
None of us knows what God looks like. I don’t. When scripture says we are created in the image of God, what does that mean? We don’t know fully who wrote the texts we call scripture, but we know the ones that made it into the Bible are the ones that reflected the cultures of the time. Therefore, the images are primarily masculine, patriarchal, warring, and hierarchical. To be sure, there were some other images that made it in. God as a nursing mother, God as a mother hen. When Jesus prays, many translations of the Aramaic indicate its Father/Mother not just Father. That’s in there!
How do you see God? What is the image that comes to your heart and mind when you pray, or sing, or dance, or meditate? If you believe in God, is he a white old man, long beard? Or is there another image? Sometimes, I see God’s face clearly a mountain top vista, or in the rise and fall of the ocean. But when God comes to my mind in a human-like way, I’m just as likely to see a hairy, Black, Middle Eastern man (Jesus-like) as to see a brown, curvy womyn, with a soft bosom, and strong arms. This one holds me when I’m afraid and laughs with me when I am joyful. That’s the image I conjure when I read Isaiah; “For you will nurse and be satisfied at her comforting breasts; you will drink deeply and delight in her overflowing abundance” (Isaiah 66.11 NIV). It is inherently human to wonder about the divine, and to see the divine image in unique ways. Is God queer? I see that, too! I love what Mary Daly says, “It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.”
Queering Ourselves; Queering God
In my first year as Senior Minister at Middle Church 20 years ago, I heard mixed messages on the word “queer.” My colleagues in LGBTQIA+ movement-building spaces held the word with pride, noting the power of its sweeping inclusion around sexuality and gender. There were, though, some members in the Middle Church community still smarting from the pejorative way “queer” had been used as a weapon against their bodies and souls. I took to using the word more recently in solidarity with my beautiful queer family and the ways my theology and politics have been queered by them. By queered I mean, liberated from the patriarchy. I mean broken free from the binaries. I mean unconventional, exploring how we as scholars, artists, activists, parents, lovers, and friends work to undo hierarchies and fight against social inequalities.
I’ve been queered, meaning I’m called to honor the fluidity of life—the transgression of unjust borders, love’s persistence to travel where it’s needed, the willingness to grow and change. I believe that in Their queerness, God came into the world to break the binary of human/divine. God came to love us when we are loving and when we are hateful—a dynamic creative love that pursues us and wraps us tight like Spanx to keep us safe. A love that is unbounded even as it creates and honors boundaries. A fierce love that will not be broken, that will never let us go.
When we see queerness in God, we see the Divinity in the queer community, and we protect that divinity with our whole self. We put our bodies between them and those who want to crucify them.
The ACLU reports that Project 2025 plans to “weaponize federal law to require states and private actors to discriminate against transgender people by threatening to sue schools that protect the rights of trans students or telling hospitals that they would lose their Medicaid funding if they provide gender-affirming medical care to trans adolescents,” that is a crucifying act. When Donald Trump promises that his presidency would enable discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, that is a crucifying act. His campaign is readying crosses, and our votes in November will determine whether he gains the power to nail queer siblings to them.
We can be crucifixion people or resurrection people—that is what is on the line in this election. One candidate promises policies of suffering and death, the other candidate seeks to expand access to abundant life. And queer-affirming culture isn’t just a blessing for LGBTQIA+ people. I have been queered in relationship to the inescapable God who speaks to me through my queer friends. I have been bent, stretched, blurred, and re-formed in relationship to love that forever seeks fuller expression. That’s why I was marching in DC. My faith and an ethic of love demand we queer what this nation believes about queer people. They belong to God, and we are all made in the image of God. They’ve had my back for as long as I can remember. God knows I’m gonna have theirs.
I love this so much. I’m grateful for the way that my queer friends have helped me to queer my ideologies, or rather, to become emboldened enough to claim the ways that I have always enjoyed blurring the boundaries.