Sermon: The Love That Casts Out Fear
Text: Acts 2: 1-21
Last Saturday, I chose to attend a whole-day Affirm event at Churchill Park United Church, called Spirit and Soul: not Determined by Anatomy. The theme of the event was understanding and embracing the transgender community. We had four theme speakers and used the sanctuary as our gathering place, sitting at the tables cafeteria-style. The day’s work turned out to be one of the most life-transforming events I have ever experienced; it not only educated me but it solved a very personal question I never shared with anyone else, that had gone un answered for the past 20 years.
When my family and I arrived at Churchill Park, I was relieved to see that there were two other small children as well as my two boys. As the church provided child-minding in their nursery, I said hello to the other parents, introducing my kids to them and asking their kids’ names. They looked like a typical gay family composed of two young dads and their beautiful kids. I sat down; the first theme speaker came from the Rainbow Resource Centre. He taught us what sex and what gender means, who are cisgenders and who are transgenders. Cisgender refers to a person who has a gender identity that is the same as the gender they were assigned at birth. Transgender refers to a person who has a gender identity that is different from the gender they were assigned at birth or from societal expectations.
The next speaker was Trevor MacDonald and I was very surprised! My eyes were opened! Really! He was one of the dads I had briefly met that morning; he came up to the stage, and introduced himself to the gathered people as a transgender male. He transitioned from female to male before his marriage, and was married to his partner. They wanted to have children so much that they researched and started proceedings to adopt children, only to find that it would be a pretty challenging process for them in their particular situation. At the time, Trevor had had his ‘top’ surgery done and was taking testosterone. However, Trevor, whose spirit, soul, mind being all male, chose to not to do the bottom surgery as it might cause some serious health risks, and it is “terribly” expensive. That meant he was able to be pregnant. To have a child, he stopped taking hormones and as soon as his cycle came back, he took the very natural process of having a baby and now he is a dad of his own beautiful, healthy children, 5 years and 18 months old. Trevor shared many more fascinating stories that day, but I’ll stop here - if you want to know more; you can visit Trevor’s blog www.milkjunkies.net to read his amazing stories. Earlier I said the event was one of the most life-changing experiences for me, and it’s mostly due to my encountering Trevor and his husband and meeting with their family. Until I met them, my understanding was so deeply ingrained with heterosexual normativity I couldn't even think of this possibility: that a transgender man can love the same sex (male). In other words, I hadn't examined my own heterosexualism until I met Trevor, and presumed that a transgender man would love or develop a committed loving relationship with their opposite sex, which would be a woman. I was wrong. I was mistaken. I realized that I was so entrenched in a heterosexual-centered world view. Later, Trevor taught me that a person’s sexual orientation is separate and independent from the person’s gender identity, and that is true for a transgender man - and all of us, really.
It was not the end of the day’s awakening for me. I had a question that I personally had held on to me since I was a high school student in Korea. I remember that when everyone in my family was sleeping in the night, I asked my question on an online site, wishing that somebody would answer my question; there was no return answer, though. My own gender identity and sexual orientation have never been a really big life challenging issue for me. I was quite adaptive and could easily blend in. However, the way I am is never gone. (The way you are IS never gone) It comes back, in different situations and in different life phases. The question would never really change my life. However, I have known that it would not be deleted either, until it was answered. (I hope and believe that you know what I mean. Gender identity and sexual orientation is essentially part of you. Whether you are in questioning or certain about them, the process is the journey toward having the whole map of your beautiful make up.) But all I can say for now is that seeing and meeting real people in real relationships, navigating their way through life like Trevor and his partner and his children made my puzzles – my own wondering and questioning - come together. His gay relationship immediately gave me a shock of understanding and made my heart pound to know more about it. At the lunch table, I asked Trevor the question I could never solve, ALONE, – because my mind was so entrapped in my deeply internalized heterosexualism - and his answer and our very quick conversation were just enough to allow me a liberating experience to the point of understanding and embracing (for the first time) the 'otherness' in me and others for the first time in my whole life. That conversation was the string that would enable me to connect myself to the whole of myself and to what might have been considered as just a phase or passing fancy. (You can't change the otherness within you and in others.)
These experiences and my own research gave me a profound understanding of why the affirming journey of individuals and of communities like us at UCiM matter and why we need to continue to engage with our question – how to become a safe, spiritual and welcoming place for all who enter and seek God. First, there is a diverse group of people striving for self-definition. There are souls and spirits and bodies and minds who work so hard to escape from the traps and restrictions of society’s heteronormative presumptions and strictly binary gender prescriptions in order to stand in a space of freedom and affirmation of who they really are. These souls, who might call themselves non-binary gender people, teach us that genders are not two opposites, male and female! It is a PHENOMENON in Spectrum; these souls are a brilliant constellation, images of a God who is unrestricted, unreserved, non-binary. Exploring identity is an amazing thing; exploring identity becomes the way we encounter the unrestricted God of beauty, power and integrity, face to face. Seeking understanding of the whole map of oneself and learning to love oneself and others as they are is also how we strip away each layer of fear we have wrapped around ourselves to protect us from hurt. It takes a very courageous journey; the whole, integrated Identity, (in Christian terms, God’s image within us) must not be edited, nullified, judged, criticized, rejected. Affirming is the act of pulling up the anchor that keeps us moored in safe waters, to sail on the endless surface of the unknown ocean. We must become friends on this boat, in togetherness - it is the process in which we connect ourselves to what is whole and holy, God as the power, the inner movement, and the divine spark within, outside of the confines of traditional ideas of gender and societal customs. It is the sacred activity of integration of all positive elements and dimensions of our condition, (it’s important: including gender and sexuality) to create the personal identity the individual can trust.
Erich Fromm says that creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. Everyone deserves to live in a world where they feel safe to explore, understand and claim their own true and whole identity as their true calling and the way of creation of life in a way that is the most comfortable to them and makes them happy. If we don’t challenge the world we live in, which tells people to believe that there are only two poles of gender, male and female, and there is no such a thing as non-binary gender, we are denying the truth about God – God of splendid diversity - and about God’s real people who seek love, safety and acceptance.
Joan Chittister notes in her book, Between the Night and Daylight, “Certainty dies in the midst of these new questions. New data, demanded by the new questions, turn the world upside down, like the Kinsey Report, the atomic bomb, feminism, desegregation, transgenderism. … Confusion becomes the dream state of the awakened mind.”
On this Pentecost Sunday, the day of the colour Red, we commemorate the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Oppression. What is Pentecost? I would like to define it as this: It is the day when a constellation of stars across the blackness of the midnight sky becomes flames; as a matter of fact, all stars are flames, burning across the darkness. These flames, in the form of a tongue, a flare flower, descend on us, invade us, demand our acceptance and promote understanding. Receiving God in me and us, God as a myriad of flare flowers, the Others and the Otherness within us, allowing room for the strange to become our beloved IS the descent of the Holy Spirit: The Holy Spirit of Love that casts out fear.
Credit: the art work of Kotama Bouabane
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