Today, in
Winnipeg, it’s Pride Sunday. Pride started as a protest movement,
born in the Stonewall riots of 1969. This season has, historically, been a time
of advocacy and protest for basic
human rights to be shared with sexual and gender minorities. And I would love to say that things have
gotten better but considering the anti-LGBT+ laws being created in the US and
around the world (especially anti-trans laws), the rising number of teen
suicides, and the high rate of murders against the LGBT+ community, this unfortunately
is a topic that needs to remain in the forefront.
So isn’t it appropriate that as people rally at the Winnipeg
Legislative building and march down Broadway and Portage Avenue, the reading
for today is the first chapter of Genesis, one of the stories of creation, a story
frequently used against queer people to say that we shouldn’t exist, both from a
sexuality perspective and also from a gender perspective, and a story filled with binaries.
A lot can be said in celebration of
the binary. It’s an ancient system of organization, dividing reality into
complementary or contradictory halves. Binary thinking is said to be a trait of
Enlightenment thinking as modernity desired to classify and
categorize, and with that to control. Binaries give easy handles. Pairs.
Opposites. They’re definitive, comprehensive, and universal. They come in handy
when trying to explain and teach. Think true/false tests and yes/no
answers. Male-female.
Right-wrong. Conservative-liberal. First world-third world.
Capitalist-socialist. Civilized-uncivilized. White-black. Rational-irrational.
Human-beast. Spiritual-material. Friend-enemy. Clean-unclean. Either-or.
Good-bad.
Arranging reality in black-and-white
terms can make it as interconnected as swirls of yin and yang or as conflicted
as two armies squared off on a battlefield. Dualisms – whether black and
white, male and female, or good and evil – are appealing, but often fail to tell
the whole story.
The reading from Genesis and all the binaries found within is a perfect example
of this.
“God called the light
Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was
morning, the first day.” (1:5) Light and dark, day and night. These are two
distinct and opposite binaries. But is there only light and dark, day and
night? What about gray, dusk, and dawn?
“And God said, ‘Let
there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from
the waters.’…
God called the dome
Sky…
Let the waters under
the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’… God called the dry land Earth, and
the waters that were gathered together he called Seas.” (1:6, 8, 9, 10) People used to believe
that the sky was heaven and the only way to get there was to die and go to heaven.
History has given us airplanes to the sky and shuttles to space creating all
the in-between spaces of the atmosphere. As for land and sea, who doesn’t like
a good beach? If there was strictly land and sea, there would be no beaches, nor
would there be swamps. Are you see where I am going with this?
“And God said, ‘Let the
waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the
earth across the dome of the sky.’… And God said, ‘Let the earth bring
forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild
animals of the earth of every kind.’” (1:20, 24) Here come the fish, birds, insects, creepy
crawlies, and every type of animal and creature you can imagine. According to
the binary system, fish will swim and birds will fly. What about the fish the
fly and the birds that swim? Insects that both crawl on the ground and fly in
the air? Not so clear cut, is it?
Finally, after light and dark, after
sky, sea, and land, after fish and birds, after insects and animals. Finally, God
creates human beings. Here is the damning verse, “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (1:27) When Christians think about
gender, they return to this verse.
If you grew up hearing these stories
and living with people who seemed to fit inside these gender boxes, the
existence of transgender people might seem to fly in the face of God’s created
order. However, when we look just a little closer at each of the passages in the creation story, we find a much more
complex and beautiful world. When God finally gets around to creating men and women, it’s
after creating
all of those other opposites. Humans, then, are also
created in an opposite pair – male and female. The text might set up these binaries,
but God’s creation exists in spectrums. No one would argue that a penguin is
an abomination for not fitting the categories of Genesis 1, or that a beach isn’t pleasing to God
because it’s neither land nor sea. In the same way, God gives every human a
self that is unique and may not always fit neatly into a box or binary.
I believe that many people understand
Genesis 1 to be a story, a metaphor of how the world came into being, not a
scientific paper. I think there has been enough scientific proof that the world
was created over the millennia, not a week. But many Christians get stuck on
the binaries listed within the text, especially with regards to gender. We don’t
have to argue that dark and light mean only dark and light, or male and female
mean only male and female. They can also encompass all that falls between what
is named. Rather than writing Genesis 1 off as fiction that doesn’t
match reality,
affirming Christians recognize that the stories set down
in this chapter were never meant to catalogue all of creation, but rather to point us towards God’s
power and love. Not every microbe and constellation must be named in this
chapter in order to have a purpose and a blessing. God’s creatures are all wondrous, strange,
delightful, and surprising. All are necessary to the fullness of creation, from
amoebas and spiders to buffalo and orangutans.
The story of creation lists many
binaries, but does that mean God didn’t create everything in between? It’s as
if God got bored creating binaries after a few days and began to have some fun.
Despite the push to honour God’s binary creation, perhaps blurring that binary
was always part of the plan. Days and nights enjoy fuzzy
transitional moments we call dawn and dusk. Swamps are neither dry land nor
lakes, necessitating the curious term wetland. The Genesis writer takes pains to
describe the uniqueness of human beings who bear the divine image and they represent perhaps
the greatest binary: not maleness and femaleness but rather the division
between a species bearing God’s likeness and all the rest. As Justin Welby, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, once said, “Each of us is made in the image of
God. That’s why we have the chance to encounter Christ in every person we meet
– especially those on the margins.”
Binary pairs are useful for simplifying
large amounts of information we are required to process. But binaries are limiting
and inadequate. If binaries are part of a grand project to categorize and
explain, and
probably also control and restrict, it is amazing how small and limited to our time and
circumstances many of our most cherished binaries actually are, especially when it comes to gender.
So, on this Pride Sunday, I want you to recognize our responsibility
to challenge traditional understandings of gender because of the danger they
pose to some of God’s children. I want us to acknowledge our responsibility to rework
our theology to remove the binary as a show of support and advocacy for
transgender people. And I want you to know that your role in this is to accept
all people as members of the family of God, and thus your siblings in Christ. You
never know whose life you may save.
Amen.
