love that re-members

Twenty-seventh Sunday After Pentecost ● November 24, 2024

M Jade Kaiser, Guest Preacher © 2024

You can view the full worship video recording at:

https://youtu.be/lwZgPZK-M_Y

Scripture Readings: 

1 Corinthians 13:1-10 (NRSV)

The texts of the readings are in the worship bulletin linked here.

Good morning to you, friends at Church of the Village - long time fan, here. And I’m honored to be meeting with you virtually on this Sunday when we honor the sacred lives of trans people and remember those who have been stolen from us this year and years prior.

So, thank you for inviting me into your church home - I do hope one day to have the pleasure of being in physical sanctuary with and alongside you.

I’m M - my pronouns are they/them. And I’m tuning in from the shores of Florida - particularly the land originally tended by the Ais, Mascago, and Seminole people - I’ve been spending a great deal of time prioritizing life outside the last few months.

Whether it’s a lone flower growing unexpectedly among the concrete sidewalks or a whole forest of creaturely life, I find that for me, the company of non-human life tethers me to something that gets so lost in all the noise of commentary and cruelty.

It is a simple and ancient and holy truth to which the whole planet testifies quietly, ordinarily, persistently:

There are so many ways for life to blossom. The closer attention you pay to this life or that, to this ecosystem or that - the more true this truth becomes.

There are so many ways for life to blossom.

And what is God, if not, life blossoming?

It is one of the most obvious truths - and most gorgeous offerings of this planet - and somehow. Somehow. This simple gift has been drowned by out commitments to keep things in order, in boxes, in terms we can control and predict.

So I find myself more at home with lifeforms less invested in such noise.

There’s a line that the late trans ancestor Leslie Feinberg wrote into the mouth of a trans character in the book ‘stone butch blues: ’Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.”

There are plenty of people and systems and stories that find great fault with my “more other than either” gender - with my and our insistence that gender is far more a constellation, with innumerable possibilities for how it manifests in a life - so many ways to be a woman, so many ways to be a man, so many additional ways to be genderful, genderqueer, genderless. There are many that find great fault with this, with all trans people. With trans women, especially. And I think most trans people feel that fault every day.

The way our blossoming is targeted. The way we are pruned - and for what reason?

In this tangle of life we share, for what reason would we seek to extinguish what makes life possible for a relatively small people group?

I chose this scripture today because I love engaging this ancient reminder that we are inclined to forget, as people, that alllllllll our ideas and knowledge and study and science and medicine and politics and prophecies - all of it - is a partial truth. Which is, of course, why science changes over time. And education. And politics. They change because at every moment of every culture - we are just touching one part of truth. And we are entirely unequipped to ever grasp hold of the whole thing at once.

And without love, even that partial truth - which will one day also fade - becomes noise.

When experts in study or opinion - insist, demand, even legislate a world parsed evenly and rigidly by categories of thought that are absolutely incomplete - noise.

When the facts of life on this planet - birds and fish that change sexes, fungus that contain thousands of sexes, human biology that makes a mockery of what most of us learned in school - must be hidden away so as not to reveal the fragility of our human expertise - or collapse the binaries on which power depends - noise.

When what we do - we say - we write - we believe - we pray - is not practiced with love at the center. With love that wishes for life to blossom - at the center - the scripture says - than i am only a resounding gong - or a clanging cymbal.

Not noise like something in the background that can fade in or out. Not noise like a little buzzing in your ear. But noise like a clanging cymbal. LOUD noise. Crashing noise. Noise that echoes over time.

Noise, I think this is the point - noise that is consuming, it makes it difficult to hang onto, to find, to keep at the center, even the most basic and necessary truths:

Life can blossom in so many directions - love wishes for life to blossom.

There is a great deal of loveless noise targeting trans people.

In one way, it is new. This election saw $215 million dollars spent on anti-trans TV ads alone. 26 states have implemented anti-trans laws with many more expected to come this year. Following these and other forms of escalation against us, we should not be surprised by teh recent CDC study noting ¼ trangender kids have attempted suicide in the last year. We are a very resilient people - and - we are facing a great deal of struggle that is freshly arising. In this moment, politically, we are being used as a political scapegoat - trans women enduring the brunt of this violent force. Not so much new - as renewed.

In other ways, this antagonizing has been with us a very long and intentional time. Since the earliest days of settler colonialism in this country, settlers came with unfamiliar stories of two distinct genders - permanent, fixed, opposites - and very importantly, one, with more power over the other. This is as God intended they declared. Just like the white racial hierarchy that came with it. A story that guaranteed the power of a few, and provided a story - a Christian story no less - to justify the violence against people original to this land.

A land where there was always a wide range of gender stories - just as there has been all over the planet and across time and cultures. Stories of people that cross gender, that are multiple genders, that are other genders, that confuse the concept of gender.

This is the oldest story. Our scriptures contain these multitudes when we do the work of surfacing what has been hidden.

But with colonization of the people on this land, came the repressing of Two-Spirit people - a broad timer for gender varience of multiple kinds in Indigneous communities - actively targeted by settlers. Actively supressed so as to hide away the living witnesses of a truth that called into question the settlers teachings of god and science.

What we currently call ‘transgender’ in the United States - has always existed - in different forms, under different names, with different understandings through different cultural contexts. It is as natural as the planet to which we belong. We - trans people - are of the earth. We have always belonged.

Life finds all kinds of ways to blossom - it always has - it shifts and changes to meet its needs for the moment - call it trans, call it shape shifting, call it magic, call it the most ordinary aspect of life - whatever you call it - it is not new. We just think it and speak it into a particular language right now.

But the story of gender we have inherited - along with its entangled stories of race and class and state and a particular version of God - is relatively new. At least, our particular flavor of it here and now.

And it is certainly not motivated by love. Restrictive practices of gender are neither patient nor kind. They are indeed arrogant. And as much as they serve patriarchal power - they are indeed self-serving and easily angered. They do not rejoice in truth, but hide it away. And the protection it offers is least of all for those who need it most.

No, this story of gender and all its intersectional partners - will one day cease, will be silenced, will be revealed for all its partiality. Though it offers some a semblence of control and comfort - it will fail even them.

As we remember the trans beloveds whose lives were stolen from us this year, we make this remembering honest by also remembering how we got here. Why these deaths. What our work is if we wish for the world to be different next year.

We remember that a world of trans flourishing - from NYC to Palestine to Florida - where people of gender variance can live free of fear and violence - depends on confronting our storied histories and their ongoing consequences - how the stories of race and gender and class have been told to keep certain things and people in order. To keep certain people in power. In order to build a world where trans people no longer die prematurely means, yes, please intercede in policy - yes, please - help fund our needs from housing to medical care, yes, please tell stories of a god that is trans, yes, please - practice the basics of hospitality in accesible bathrooms and honoring pronouns.

But also, dear ones, God calls us to more. God is calling us a deeper practice of love. One that protects in the moment and also, moves forward by remembering, honestly, how we got here.

We know how we got here - here to these days of danger. Do we know how we get somewhere else?

If colonizing is, M Jacqueline Aleandar explains, an act of disconnection - of severance between what belongs together.

Then to decolonize is to do the work of re-membeirng. To put back together what has been torn apart. This includes parts of ourselves by the stories we inherit. Even you, yes, you cisgender people are severed from parts of yourself in this gross lie of two opposite ways of being. Do you remember, men, the first time your tears were corrected out of you? Do you remember, women, the first time the heft of your voice was reprimanded?

Boys should do this. Women do this. The story - like the racial stories and the class stories - hurts us all and some of us it kills just to maintain its image.

We remember in order to re-member parts of ourselves that never should have been taken from us. Just as Jazzlyn Johnson and Nex Benedict and Pauly Likens and Tayy Dior Thomas and Liara Kaylee Tsai or any of the others named and not named - should have never been taken from us this year.

Just as those last year and the year before and the decades and centuries before should never have been stolen from us Just as this land should have never been stolen from its original tenders.

We remember in order to re-member.

There is no other way to a world that is safe for trans people but that.

Because the existence of trans people will always call into question what we have been told is natural, told is right order, told is of god, told is unchangeable.

But we have faith because the scriptures assure us that all these fragile frameworks of cruelty, some cling to at all costs - especially those devoid of love - they will fall away. They will not be forever. And swift the pace of their demise, we can…

Love, however, will not fail us. Love comes with great risks of all kinds - but it never fails to serve the blossoming of life.

Love is the litmus test as to whether ideas or theologies or expertise is meant to serve life’s blossoming or whether they are invested in upholding power and control.

Love is what will remain when all our human arrogance crumbles. But we do not have to wait for more life to be lost. Love is already here doing its thing where it can through and for we who seek to serve it.

It always has. It always will.

There is a magic to life that will always outgrow, outrule, fall out of the bounds of our partial understanding. Love will always serve the blossoming of that life - in whatever directions it must unfurl - expected or surprising. May the grief of our loss fuel the fury of love.

May it be so.