We live in constant hope - A reflection for Advent and Christmas by Beth Powell
Beth Powell sharing her reflection at the Open Table carol service in St Bride’s Liverpool on Sunday 19th December 2021.
The service was streamed on Facebook Live, but due to technical issues, the sound quality was variable. We have published an edited version of the video on our YouTube channel, with subtitles to make it more accessible. You can watch it below [44 mins]. As usual, Liverpool Rainbow Chorus, the city’s LGBT+ choir, were booked to perform much of the music, but due to positive Covid tests on the day, most of the choir could not attend. So we shared videos they and others made for last year’s online service instead. We hope you like it.
You can download the order of service here. Please note that some of it is different because of the absence of the choir and the need to edit parts where the sound was not recorded.
OUR FIRST Open Table community in Liverpool has hosted the carol service for the parish where it meets for 13 years. This year, Beth Powell, one of the leadership team, shared this reflection on what we as LGBTQIA+ Christians can learn from the Christmas story.
Imagine being Mary - she’s a pregnant, unmarried teenager living under Roman occupation. However most of her struggles would have come from the shame of other people.
Few people would have listened to her if she said that she was carrying the Messiah. You can almost hear folk whispering ‘She’s clearly been at it with someone, don’t know whether it’s her fiancé’s or someone else’s’. She would have been judged and pushed away by almost everyone. From the moment folk knew she was pregnant; she would have instantly become an outsider. Mary’s biggest issue would have been the shame of those around her, even though she had no reason to be ashamed.
Like Mary, queer and trans folk are judged and pushed away by people who refuse to listen to us, and like to tell us we’re wrong, without knowing anything about our experience. Well-meaning folk will try to help us to ‘avoid public disgrace’ without listening to us, just like Joseph did to Mary when he planned to dismiss her quietly, or when the disciples tried to stop Jesus being arrested.
Advent and Christmas are a time of hope, wonder and anticipation. For Mary, she would have had hope for the future as she knew who the child she was carrying would become. She would have looked at the child with wonder and waited in anticipation of the work he was yet to do. For queer folk, and those of us that are not fully accepted in society or the church, Advent is constant. We live in constant hope that things will change. We look with wonder at the work that has already been done by people who have come before us, and we anticipate and we long for, the changes that are yet to come.
I am a big fan of the idea of the stewardship of God’s work, this brilliant and beautiful movement of love and social justice that has been handed down from generation to generation for thousands of years, with every person doing a tiny, but essential part of God’s work, like gears in a massive, complex machine. In Call the Midwife, Sister Monica Joan once said,
‘The hands of the Almighty are so often to be found at the ends of our own arms.’
I think God often chooses the hands of outsiders. After all, this movement started with someone that wouldn’t have been accepted at the time, and I’m not certain that the church of today would fully accept a pregnant, unmarried teenager. The very heart of this movement of love and social justice is with outsiders, those of us who are not fully accepted by society or the church, that know our own experience and can tell those that do not fully accept us and those that want to help us exactly what needs to change to allow us to be fully accepted.
There are so many people today that are pushed to the edge of society because they are not listened to - LGBTQIA+ people are only one example. Just as Mary carried both the shame of others and the hope and wonder of Christ, queer and trans folk struggle with the shame of those around us, but our queerness is not what’s shameful.
