Sermon: The Images of God in the Reversed World
(Scripture: Matthew 22:15-22)
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After the ConXion service, Oct 23rd, 2022, celebrating the Matty's Birthday at Broad View United, Victoria |
“The Images of God in the Reversed World.” Doesn’t it sound like a fiction title, something like my teenager would read from his favourite Japanese animation?
What are the images of God for, and in, the Reversed World—the Kingdom of God? The world Jesus was proposing, “a community resistant to the programme of Rome”? The images of God in and for a community resistant to the dominant power, that counters the normalization of oppression.
This world in reverse would also encompass Jesus’ eschatological vision, which means the end of the world as it is now, anticipating the alternative world to come. In this vision, in this world of reversal, the last becomes first and the least and the lost are not only found, but lifted up. What are the images of God that we are called to lift up?
Some years ago, I had the pleasure of leading a youth group, and one high school kid, Kelly, said the Kingdom of God almost sounds like an “inverted” world. He liked the word a lot, inversion. He said he learned it from Physics class. In our discussion on Sunday morning, myself and a handful of young people were journeying towards insight. We caught something about the character of the Kingdom of God. It is different from the power and order of the here and now, of the present world, or of the past. It’s at least inverted. It’s a world in reverse. The key principles about life, the definition of abundant life, are turned upside down. The table of the Roman Empire is flipped.
Some years ago, I met Marie at church. She came to a Sunday morning service just after New Year’s Day. Her hair was handsome and short in a two-block cut, just as mine is now. Her eyes sparkled with intense interest, looking forward to something. She was looking for something. After worship, I approached her and asked, “Tell me one thing about you and one thing you are most interested in today.” She said she had been reading Kwok Pui-lan’s book. I knew right away we could be friends.
One spring day, we walked beside the river at the Forks, where the two rivers meet in Winnipeg, and she told me a story about something that sustained her through the most difficult time in her life.
When she was in school, a professor brought up a question: What if? Or imagine. Or just live as if—and not just as if, but truly as if—the world is in reverse, even here and now. As if the world has been turned upside down. A world in reverse. The world upside down or backwards or as it could be.
Marie told me that in that moment, she imagined a world where all of us were queer, or where most people she met were queer, and that reversed reality would change her life and her engagement with the world. She understood that even in the world of now, she could live the As-If-World with confidence, authenticity, trust, and love for herself and others.
Have you ever been in a lake, or on a river, and seen another world reflected on the surface of the water? The forest above, and the forest in the water. And you stand on the horizon in between, looking at the two forests. It could look like the water holds two kinds of heavens above and below, when the water becomes a mirror for them.
I love Emily Dickinson’s poems. In one poem, she illustrated that sitting under her favourite tree, she realized that she was in the middle of two kinds of tree: the tree above her and the roots under her and under the ground, which must be the size of the tree above. The world is full and filled with two BIG trees. Leaning against her tree, Emily Dickinson sits and composes herself between the two trees, the two worlds: the skyworld, the rootworld, and her poem.
That’s one image of God—the Root—the image of God in the reversed world. It is specific, concrete, and at the same time it requires us to imagine with the power of wonder. The image of God is not something you can inscribe on coins permanently; you can only touch it through who you are, through your struggles and your pursuit of justice. Touching our strength is constant work. That’s the image of God I am suggesting: the image of God in the world reversed in order—the order of who is the last, first, lost, and found.
Then the next question for you, and for me: How specific can an image of God be? How specific can an image of God be in and for a world of radical reversal? What is the root image that would enable the tree of hope, love, and justice to grow with vigour above the ground?
When I first encountered the phrase “Gay God” in Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology by Patrick Cheng, I was shocked. He writes that in September 1972, the Gay Christian, a newsletter of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York, featured a number of articles about gay theology. Howard Wells, the pastor of MCC New York at the time, wrote a provocative piece called “Gay God, Gay Theology,” in which he described how the gay community has the right to refer to God—whom he called “our liberator, our redeemer”—as our Gay God.
I was shocked because the image of God, the image of the Resurrected One, was, in my mind, too specific. That was my first response. Can an image of God be so specific, such as Gay God? Hadn’t I learned over the years in theological school and at church that God’s love is universal and God is for all? Is this very specific image of God able—legitimate—to serve the world? I will leave the answer to you and to your own power of wonder.
How about Father God? Isn’t that image also very specific? What kind of specific and alternative image of God can empower the disenfranchised in the world? A new understanding of God has the power to change how we engage with the world, how we live in and for the world in reverse, the Kingdom of God. When God’s image is too abstract and distant from our life at the grassroots, it might serve, without being questioned, the agenda of the powerful.
Wonder is one way to practice queering religion, queering faith, queering the world. José Muñoz wrote in Cruising Utopia that utopia lets us imagine a space outside of heteronormativity. It permits us to conceptualize new worlds and activities that are not constrained by what constrains us now. Try imagining a Kingdom not constrained by ongoing colonization, racism, or fossil companies and banks that fund a climate emergency, and see what that feels like.
Muñoz continues that utopia offers us a critique of the present of what is by casting a picture of what can be and perhaps will be. He also writes that queerness is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future, an insistence on the concrete possibility of another world.
Could this be inviting us closer to a fuller understanding of the Kingdom of God? Just as Kelly once wondered whether the Kingdom of God might be like the world inverted by the radical love of a queering, anti-normalizing God—God who empowers the disenfranchised, lifting up the lost, the least, and the last first, and loving them first. Loving all first.
These are only a few images of God in and for the reversed world. We can search for more, find more, and celebrate more. Let us invest in the images of God in the reversed world, and let us turn the table of empire upside down in faith and wonder.
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