‘In the beginning was the Word’
Preaching on John 1:1-16
The prologue to the Gospel of John is beautiful, and adopts the mythic poetry of direct revelation – in the beginning, was the word – in order to express its fundamental picture of the universe, with all of creation pointing towards one person – Jesus of Nazareth – being one and the same as the creator of all things.
The prologue’s simplicity, though, obscures the preexisting stories about God that it is hitching a ride on. It would feel kind of hand-wavy to justify the divinity of Christ by appealing to an attribute of God that you were describing for the first time.
The Word has been one with God for a while.
Around the time of Jesus’ birth, Philo, a Hellenistic Jew, in an attempt to justify the Jewish encounter with God in the Greek philosophical discourse (and vice versa!) refers to ‘the Logos of the living God as the bond of everything, holding all things together and binding all the parts, and prevents them from being dissolved and separated.’ He refers to the Logos as God’s son, but often describes him as a set of blueprints, a binding receptacle for the paradigms used in creation.
Philo’s argument, however, refers to the depiction of hokmah (wisdom) in the Book of Proverbs. Hokmah is alive and vibrant, and unambiguously feminine. She is equivalent to God the creator, seemingly a divinity in her own right. She is a major player in the unfolding process of creation and is continually present in the world.
“I have insight, I have strength,” she says of herself, in the Book of Proverbs, “by me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just.”
“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
Logos is a plausible translation, but as Jewish people read the text in the Greek, we can imagine Hokmah battering away at the constraints of her linguistic captivity, longing to demonstrate the vitality of her calling. All of which would be quite academic if there hadn't been a human being, who seemed a lot like God..
Liberated, at last, alive in the world even, within the body and soul of a man from Nazareth - the living and vibrant hokmah has returned into the world that she so loves.
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As we celebrate Pride together this year, I would invite you to turn inwards.
Having spent months dwelling intimately with ourselves, with the nature of our character cast into stark relief, its nuances magnified by the lack of available juxtaposition, we have come away with a fun-house mirror of self-awareness, a carnival-caricature depiction of our soul, our noses bulbous and eyes squished, our warts magnified by the exclusivity of our gaze.
I would invite you to turn inwards.
As we watch the world, from afar, and are caught up in the drama of its unfolding until we find ourselves stretched far from the place of our authenticity, reacting to reactions to reactions, mesmerized and distracted from any genuine possibility of organic and integrated interconnectedness with others.
I’d invite you to turn inwards.
Observing the way that the stream of our consciousness ebbs and flows around the stimuli it catches against, learning its submerged contours and its hidden geography, watching ourselves drop stones of stories and noticing their ripples, I would invite you to return home to the wellspring of yourself and observe how it is that you genuinely respond to the world that surrounds you.
As we celebrate Pride, what is it in yourself that you’re celebrating?
Having been given straightness as a norm, and cis-ness as a norm, and a certain set of gender expressions and relationship patterns as norms, where do you find yourself? In the genuine awareness of the river of consciousness that we arrive at from rejecting the fun-house mirror and the world-watching distraction, what do we learn?
What do you observe in the pattern of your love? In the contours of your attraction? In the geography of your performance of femininity and masculinity, and the melding, mixing and absence thereof?
As we collect ourselves from their diffusion into the world, and love ourselves through their fun-house obfuscation, we turn inwards and have the opportunity to reckon with the new insights into that which we find.
I would invite you to celebrate that which you witness.
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When it comes to Jesus, we see some of the ebbs and flows, but not the contours, we see some of the rippling, but never the dropped stone.
We know that even though he was thirty, in a regimented world, he’d never married. In his ministry, he travels with a big group of other seemingly unattached men; in a world where strength and masculinity are equivalent, he largely advocates for meekness. On his last night, he is met in the garden by a friend who greets him with a kiss.
We can tell stories of Jesus’ gender non-nonconformity, and of his complex identity as both a man and the incarnation of the divine feminine. We think of the Bible as a tool for establishing and maintaining normative relationships and identities, and it often has been, but it is our set of texts too, and we can use it for our purposes.
I’d like to shout out Peterson Toscano’s work unpacking the story of Joseph and the Coat of Many Colours, plausibly translating the ‘coat’ as a dress for a young princess.
Matt Laney (echoing Justin Sabia-Tanis’ work) describes the creation of Eve as the first gender-reassignment surgery. He notes that “the Hebrew word adam (ha'adam) is not a gendered name. Adam means human or more precisely, earthling.’ God attempts to address the earthling’s loneliness by gender reassignment: ‘splitting the nongendered earthling into two gendered beings: Ish and Ishah.’
I want to express gratitude for the time and the ink and the emotional labour that has gone into theologizing about the Ethiopian Eunuch in the book of Acts – “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” – and the forbidden love of King David and Jonathan – “greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”
I’d like to shout out my friend and colleague Ruth Wood – the first United Church minister to come out as trans and to explicitly transition while serving in a congregation. She names the importance of asking, in all of the events going on in her personal life, where God is in all of it, and wrestles with scripture.
While she expresses that looking for a direct answer is like looking at scripture for God’s thoughts on airplanes, she draws on Psalm 139 – ‘God, you have searched me and known me. Before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it,’ she quotes, noting that ‘God really does know me, that we have an intimate relationship with God,’ further, ‘for it was you who formed my inward parts. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.’ ‘I am a part of God’s great diverse creation, and – as such – as a transgender person, I am loved by God.’
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I do think that scripture is an integral component of the formation of theology, and that theology is an integral component of the formation of our implicit philosophies of the world, which are an integral component of the stories we tell about ourselves and one another.
‘If God is male,” Mary Daly wrote back in 1973, “then Male is God.”
Reclaiming scripture, and theology, and telling new stories with it is a crucial part of being able to tell correspondingly new stories about our selves and one another, and being able to imagine new implicit philosophies of the world.
If God is trans, what then?
If the first earthling was intersex, or had gender confirmation surgery, what then? If the high king of Israel loved another man? If the first convert to the apostololic community was a eunuch? If one of the Israelite patriarchs wore a dress?
Often, in church, we talk about ‘welcoming people of all sexual orientations and gender identities,’ which makes it sound like an act of charity to be able to get by the stern gatekeepers we have at the door. What I have loved about Kimbourne Park, and what I increasingly see in the United Church of Canada, is the affirmation that we are a queer church, of queer people, in a tradition rich with queer figures.
As we turn inwards, and witness the contours of our own identity, we are invited to tell new stories about what we see, to reclaim narratives and imagine new possibilities.
If we are each fearfully, and wonderfully made, by a God who has searched us and knows us, what then?
I’d like to pause for a moment, and invite you to ask yourself what new story you are telling.
(pause)
Thanks be to God. Amen.
