There are Queer People in Your Bible (and Jesus Says They're Special)
A Homily for Pride Eucharist 2022 • Jubilee Episcopal Church in Austin, TX
In anticipation of Jubilee’s Second Annual Pride Eucharist, I thought I would (finally) share my sermon from last year!
Texts: Acts 8:26-40 & Matthew 19:3-12, The Feast of Simeon Bachos
For a Pride Eucharist that might have felt like an odd Gospel lesson; but I want to promise you from the top: there is a lot more happening just beneath the surface, and I am not about to bait and switch on you.
Because there is a lot happening in today’s Gospel reading: we are placed right in the middle of a robust internal religious debate between Jesus and the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders of Jesus’ day. And the arguments we overhear between Jesus and the Pharisees are an internal religious debate. Not unlike a passionately divided Seminary classroom. So of course they’re debating hot button issues – like divorce. So the Pharisees ask Jesus: can men divorce women for any reason? Because of course, women did not have the social or political power to initiate divorce.
Jewish divorce law actually was quite protective of women when compared to laws of the Roman Empire; under Roman Law, a man could divorce his wife for such reasons as “losing her good looks” or “not bearing him children” or “being argumentative.”1 So while our modern ears may rightly! flinch at the undergirding assumption that only men could divorce women and the only marriages were heteronormative, contextual to 2,000 years ago, the fact that Jesus and the Law said the only grounds for divorce were truly egregious sexual harm is a provision for women in a society that offered basically no legal protection for us.
To which the disciples – whom we may imagine as a bunch of white men with beards because of white supremist iconography but were actually a mixed gender crowd mostly of teenagers and young adults – says, “dang. Maybe it’s better to never get married.”
But then, Jesus doubles down. At every twist in this story, Jesus is pulling out something unexpected and defiant of social norms and customs that privilege the relatively powerful.
Because as humorous as it might be to imagine a 17-year-old wide-eyed and daunted at their first revelation of the severity of lifelong partnership, to suggest that one ought not to marry was radically counter-cultural.
The ancient world essentially demanded one be married to someone of another sex. I know we today live in a culture that assumes heteronormative marriage, but honestly, even our standards pale in comparison to Jesus’ time. To be unmarried in the ancient world was to live completely outside the gender and social expectations of the day; marriage was a means of survival, literally and culturally and economically. Marriage and making babies meant you had enough hands to plant seeds and harvest food so you had enough to eat every day.
So to suggest one not be married was to suggest that you be dependent on the people in your whole community to help you eat, which made you very vulnerable – and, to be unmarried and childless was so far outside the norms it was essentially considered a whole other gender – and this gender was often referred to as being a “eunuch.”
Which is why, in response to the disciples wondering if it might be better to never get married, Jesus says, paraphrase: “Yeah. This a tough teaching for a lot of people, and a lot of people just won’t get this but some are meant to understand: some people are born eunuchs, some made eunuchs by others, some make themselves eunuchs to glorify the kin-dom of God.”
Eunuchs, in Jesus’ world, were people who chose to never get married – or, rather, to never get married to someone of the opposite sex. And, “eunuch” applied to all kinds of people whose physicalities, lifestyles, partnerships, and choices covered a wide range of marginalized experiences. Being a eunuch could mean everything from a person who had been forcibly physically changed to not procreate, or eunuch could mean someone who consciously chose to live outside gender norms, or eunuch could mean someone who could not have biological children.2
Biblical eunuch, then, is a big ol’ category that does not exactly 1-to-1 match with gender nonconformity or transness or being childfree today; and that is ok.
It is a fool’s errand to try and coerce Scripture and the stories of people from 2000+ years ago into our modern norms. We shouldn’t approach the bible like it is a bottle of mustard that we can squeeze direct, applicable meaning out of; of course, the Bible can speak meaning and purpose and direction into our lives! But to treat the Word of God like it must immediately and directly correlate to a world of texting and airplanes and antibiotics and the printing press is not actually our task when we faithfully read the Bible. Our task is to enter into holy mystery and listen, widely and deeply, for what God is saying through the Word to us today.
And what I think we can hear today is this: Jesus is not disparaging divorce, nor is Jesus elevating a gender binary as the definitive way to be in partnership, nor is Jesus saying no one should get married ever.
Jesus is talking about what it means to be in community with each other, and even more so, in community with God and each other.
Because he says, sure, the Law allows room for divorce, you unyielding and difficult people; “… But in the beginning this was not so.”
In the garden this was not so.
Jesus is saying: in the beginning, in the Garden, you were made out of my profligate, ridiculous, gorgeous joy because I wanted to be connected with you, because I made you for each other in the wide expanse of the cosmos.
So when these beloved children of God come to Jesus asking “how exactly can we force disconnection and harm?” Jesus’ response is not critical of of divorce nor the Pharisees nor the Law – Jesus is being critical, I think, of people using our holy texts to justify oppression, Jesus is critiquing people using institutions to justify their own bigotry and harm.
And if Jesus were here today I imagine him incredulously asking: so from all of that, you assumed I care about a gender binary? I who wove the stars and nebulae and black holes and planets in their courses? Y’all. Come on.
Because God made us for joy! God made us for the joy of creation!
But Jesus also has already acknowledged: some of y’all are going to get this teaching and some of you are not —
— and the people, Jesus implies, who get this teaching, who embody the teaching from God are the eunuchs, the people castigated and forced to the margins.
Eunuchs like Simeon Bachos, the Ethiopian Eunuch whose story we heard in our first reading from Acts 8.
While Acts 8 does not name the Ethiopian Eunuch, Christian tradition gives them the name Simeon Bachos. And Simeon is a black African non-Jew who is riding in a carriage back to Ethiopia – all clues that Simeon is an extreme outsider to the evangelist, Philip, who has been literally flung in their path. And to Philip’s shock, this Black Non-Jewish African Eunuch is reading Isaiah, a text sacred to followers of God. So, perhaps incredulous, perhaps thrilled, but definitely eager, Philip asks “do you understand what you are reading?” … And Simeon says, “How can I without anyone to help me?” And so Simeon invites Philip into their carriage.
Simeon Bachos the triple-outsider, welcomes Philip into his/their carriage. Did you catch that? The evangelist is invited into the cool, dark sanctity of the Ethiopian Eunuch’s carriage. This proto-queer person welcomes the proto-Christian evangelist into their sacred, cool, safe space and they are learning from each other.
Simeon’s queerness – being on the fringe of society, choosing your family, knowing that your belonging is bigger than your biology or appearance or connections or history, being hospitable because you know what it means to be outcast – these are dimensions of queer identity that speak and teach deeply to what it means to follow Jesus. Being queer and Christian are not at odds with one another at all, but deeply complimentary understandings of the cosmos.
And after Simeon and Philip talk for a while, Simeon turns and says to Philip: look! Here is some water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?
“What is to prevent me from being baptized?”
What is to stop me from choosing to know the love of God, to die and rise with Christ, to be counted among the Body of Christ as hands and feet of Jesus in this world?
What actually is going to stand in our way from access to the God of the universe, who cast the stars in their courses and had the brilliance to teach cells to divide in order to multiply, who is going to stand in our way to the God who has counted each hair on our heads?
No one. No one gets to do that.
And I know people have tried. I know. And for my roles in that as a person and as a priest, I lament and I repent and I am sorry.
And know this: ultimately no one – no matter how big their signs, or angry their words, or catastrophic their actions – no one is going to take the love of God, who made us for joy and connection, no one is going to take the love of God from us.
Because this love has always been for all of us. From the garden where two earth-creatures were hewn from the clay to the end of time when we are all wrapped up in the tender arms of a God who has always loved us a Mother, the love of God is for us.
For whom God has joined together let no one put asunder.
Amen.
Anna Case-Winters, Matthew: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Belief: a Theological Commentary on the Bible).
For further reading:
Tony Keddie, “God made them male and female … and eunuch: why the biblical case for binary gender isn’t so … biblical,” Religion Dispatches, 2020.
The collected works of Austen Harte - on YouTube and his book, Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians.
“Is the Eunuch of Acts 8 Nonbinary?” By the Rev. Emmy Kegler, QueerGrace.com (my most-recommended resource for investigating all things queer and Christian either as someone new to being affirming, curious to become affirming, or even folks diving deeper).
I just want to thank you for sharing this homily. I've been revisiting Christianity lately after a really conservative Christian upbringing and I so appreciate your approach which actually preaches a Christianity open to all and full of love.