On that Friday afternoon in late August, I had just finished outlining the church’s events for the upcoming program year, color-coding everything with permanent markers in our denominational calendar. I reread my sermon, printed it, and turned off the computer. The phone rang not an hour later.
The work of artist Rachel Barnard titled Wisdom Pavilion is situated in a dreary office of the City of New York Department of Probation. In this unlikely location, she suspended hundreds of sparkly cobalt blue pinwheels from the ceiling of a meeting room for parole officers and young parolees. Barnard is also the founder of Young New Yorkers (YNY), an arts-based initiative for teens in the adult criminal court system.
God is queer. God’s original pronouns are we / they. Genesis 1:26 states that God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness. God incarnates in Jesus a female wisdom in a male logos.
Queer musicians have always existed within the church. Throughout history, music has served as an avenue for queer people to engage with their faith and express themselves authentically. In general, musical arts can provide liberating opportunities to depart from rigid gender expectations. Today, church music programs can model inclusivity to all children of God.
This writing comes at a particular time when, at least in the American landscape, exploring the idea of queerness in familiar, some would say normative, sacred spaces can be seen as a political act. This conflation of politics and theological aspiration is not the focus of my thoughts around queering worship.
I took communion for the first time on Pride Sunday at a church beside Stonewall in New York City. There were already celebratory crowds gathering outside, and we would join them at the end of the service. There was a small mural of a dove, descending, above the altar. The congregation was small enough that we all gathered in a circle to receive bread and wine.
I am the solo pastor and only full-time staff person at a rural church in East Texas. As an assembly, our life together revolves around planning and enacting worship. What we say and do in worship is formed in our beliefs about God, to whom we turn our devotion, and forms us as God’s people. What it means to queer worship also has everything to do with what we believe about God and about our life as a community.
In the early stages of lockdown in 2020, I began to say what has now become a repeated refrain in my life, “If you want to know how to worship outside of a church building, talk to the people who’ve been told they cannot worship in a church building. Because it is among those folks that you’ll begin to realize why it is we worship in the first place; you’ll engage a level of authenticity that has been lost from much of our traditional worship these days.”
I’d like to start with one of my favorite jokes about Unitarian Universalists, a joke I feel comfortable telling because I spent thirty years with the UUs and still maintain a connection with them. The joke goes like this: Why are Unitarian Universalists such bad hymn singers? Because they are always reading ahead to see whether they agree with the words.
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