To accept the Queer within, we must sacrifice the constructs of normativity that our minds are bombarded with every day through messages that try to convince us that who we are is not good enough. To accept the other, communities, peoples, the world, and the universe, we have to sacrifice the security of non-engagement or isolation. These acceptances are all interconnected. The more we are able to accept the world without, the more we are able to accept the world within. If you want to heal yourself, then you are going to have to love somebody. If you want to heal the world, then you are going to have to love somebody. Love begins and ends with the sacrificial act of acceptance.
In Mark 12:30–31, Jesus says that one should “love . . . God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength . . . You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” To love God, or the Queer, we must push past normative constructions about meaning and value in this life, which often deprive us of being the Queer within we were created to be. To love the neighbor as the self, we must sacrifice our hesitancy to accept or find the Queer within the other. We must value the Queer in the other as much as we value the Queer within ourselves. Jesus, in John 15:13, states, “Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” It seems that we cannot lay something down of our own accord unless we know what we are laying down. There is a need to know the Queer in order to give or sacrifice the Queer. One must know the self in order to give or sacrifice the self. In 1 Cor 13, Paul states, “the greatest of these is love.” In the end, though there will be other constructs remaining, love is the greatest. If 1 John 4:8 is correct and “God is love,” then love and God are inextricably linked. Love will always be non-normative or queer in a world of insecurity, violence, and hate. Love will be God, and the greatest measure of that which is queer is God. Queerness functions as that which powers love and, consequently, life. Fitting ways of talking about our experience of this amalgamation of divinity might be: Queer the universe, love. Queer the world, love. Queer your community, love. Queer your self, love. The mystery (or that which is beyond our normative explanations) explodes from the activity of love, which is the very queer creator or core of the universe.
Theologies are constructed from an individual point in time and should speak beyond time. Traditions and histories inform theologies, and this theology will be no different. I will begin the construction of this theology in a place of perfection and conclude in a place of perfection. Perfection, or eschatological hope, is at the core construction of this theology.
The Queer Theological Approach
To pursue holiness is to pursue Godliness. That which is holy is that which is most intimately connected to God. The Queer within is the image of the God who made us. Holiness is the pursuit of the Queer, or God. Queerness is a recognition and pursuit of the God within and without. Queerness and holiness are ultimately synonymous terms. Holiness is pursued and found from where you are—your context.
Since the beginning, theology has always been constructed in context. We speak from where we are. We are always seeking, wondering, loving, fighting, and dreaming from our own time and our location. We raise our voices to speak, to name who and where we are. We wander and grope in the darkness to find the God who made us. We love each other in hopes that we might touch something eternal and transcendent by sharing love. We fight for a more just world because we believe justice is possible. We dream of a world made whole because there is something in us that believes that once, in a faraway place, wholeness was real and perhaps wholeness might be made real again. In a world being slowly demoralized by oppression, those of us who theologize in context choose to believe that there is hope for our local and global community and for us. Theology is an exercise of contextual hope. We are not alone in our efforts, as the consistent incarnation of God in Jesus is the ultimate expression of the continual creation of contextual hope.
In Matt 25:35–36 and 40, Jesus makes it quite clear where the incarnational context of Jesus or God will always be: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you gave me clothing, sick and in prison and you visited me . . . Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.”5 In the context of the consistent denial of rights, the consistent hate crimes, the consistent religious violence, and other marginalizations committed against those we call non-normative or lacking in their ability to fit our categories or idealizations of acceptance, it seems quite obvious to me that queer folk, or those who defy normatized constructions, are indeed the least of these. The location of the Queer is where we need to go to find God and any constructions of theology that might follow.
In order to arrive at the place where we can look to the Queer to create theology, something must die—namely, rigid normative traditional concepts that are consistently used to oppress. I have often found that traditional concepts of God do not allow room for expressing humanity’s varied experiences of God. Death is not something to be feared, as I do not believe in death without resurrection; things die and create new life. God in Jesus gives up life so that life may be made full. There is a sense in which God is consistently giving and receiving life. The danger of traditional theologians is their unwillingness to open up to the possibility that God’s death and resurrection is the true path to loving acceptance of queerness in the self, each other, the world, and in the divine.
Theology must be contextual, but contextual categories can only take us so far in our attempts to reach a place where we recognize the God within and without. We must realize that context comes from the individual, and therefore theology must spring from the individual. Genesis 1:27 purports that we are created in the very image of God. This means that every human being is a unique reflection of God. It is important to state that God is black. It is important to state that God is brown. It is important to state that God is a lesbian. It is important to state that God is intersex. It is important to state that God is disabled. It is important to say all of these things and more because the individual is important. Constructions of shared identities can help us to understand God, but we must push further. We need to push to a place where we can discover the source of the whole of humanity by championing the uniqueness of the individual so that we may proceed to a place of community constructed in difference. There is something uniting and guiding us, something that draws each of us deep within the self so that we might discover the creator and sustainer of the universe.
There is a need for sacrifice and death in order that we might find the uniquely non-normative source and sum of the entirety of all uniquely non-normative creations. It is irreparably harmful to say that God loves someone but hates a core biological part of who they are. It is divisive and unhelpful to argue that a certain identity characteristic makes one superior to anyone else. No matter the source, words of oppression are shallow and have never made sense. There is a deep need to create a theology that celebrates the unique dignity and worth of all people as individuals so that unique individuals can come together to create honest community. I am interested in a theology that can speak to a woman I met not long ago. She was the product of four different races—her mother was of Mexican and Japanese descent and her father was of Irish and Ghanaian descent—and she also identified as a lesbian. When I told her that I was a pastor, she asked me bluntly, “I have wondered my whole life, where do I fit?” One of the great tasks I seek to accomplish in this project is creating a theology that allows such a woman to be the unique, non-normative creation of God she was born to be in her context. I believe if God is near and here in the diversity represented in every individual, then surely God must be queer.
A resurrection of theology requires a willingness to deconstruct and let die traditional and modern concepts that do not allow room for the Queer, or God. New constructions and ways of thinking must give way to experimental constructions of hope and promise. In the gospels, Jesus consistently deconstructs the egotistical religion. Jesus takes things even further by placing the center of spiritual life outside the normative gates, squarely in the midst of those people a society of boundaries has left out, marginalized, and oppressed. We must stand with Jesus against efforts to divide and disenfranchise by firmly creating theology that upholds the inherent worth of each individual at their core. I am simply no longer comfortable using the same constructions of theology that were used to lock out, deny communion, and brutalize those people deemed out-of-bounds or non-normative by our churches. The theological resurrection I have experienced continues to come in