Religion is a queer thing - A Christmas reflection by Warren from Open Table Liverpool

Warren Hartley, co-founder of the first Open Table community in Liverpool. PHOTO: Mark Loudon.

Open Table Liverpool now has a podcast where you can hear recordings of past reflections. LISTEN HERE to Warren delivering this reflection [7mins]

THIS WEEK our first Open Table community in Liverpool once again hosted the carol service for the parish where they meet.

This year, LGBTQIA+ ministry facilitator Warren Hartley offered this reflection:

‘QUEER’ has been used as a word to wound people like us, and our community for a long time. It was fired at us like arrows, and they left us bloodied and scarred.

And yet I mean the word in the sense that I took those arrows that wounded me and I have held them long enough that they have now bloomed into a bouquet of sweetly scented flowers which I wish to now offer back to the world. Yes I’m queer, and it really is a divine way of being!

So how is this religion thing ‘queer’? Well, you have a profound introvert like me for whom faith is a deeply intimate and personal thing, yet here I am standing in front of a crowd of people speaking about it. And the fact that I, you and we are all more than welcome here, and yet there are many spaces within the same national institution in which we would not be.

Think about the Christmas story we’ve heard too. You have to agree that it is a queer story. A baby’s birth heralded by angels, and the baby has grand names like Prince of Peace, King of Kings, and yet was a powerless child born without a home to unmarried parents in poverty. A baby that was fully human, and yet is believed by Christians to be fully divine.

Some Christians think the story is literally true, just as presented. Some think it purely allegorical or poetic, some think it’s a mixture of the two. What the facts of the story are, though, is irrelevant to the truth of the story. And that’s the gift that being queer can give back to the world. We can dismantle the false binaries that imprison our churches and our culture binaries like gay / straight, worthy / unworthy, to see a far more colourful spectrum, rather than a bland either / or. Humanity is far more diverse and amazing and complicated, screwed up and glorious than we dare to imagine, and it is all the more beautiful for it. We should treasure and nurture this diversity, not bind it and lock it away. We are called to be midwives to its birthing, and the blessings its brings.

This baby whose birth story we retell grew up and told queer stories where he said the first shall be last and the last first, the weak strong and the strong weak, and the meek shall inherit the earth. His mother sang of how the poor eat their fill while the rich are sent away empty, and tyrants will be torn from their thrones and the lowly lifted up.

This story has been told for two thousand years, and we continue to tell it. Stories have power as they seem to be the way humans see deeper into truth. Even today we look for stars and angels and miraculous signs from outside of us, yet it is the still small voice deep within that shows us the way of liberation. Not a grand person leading armies into battle, but a baby born into poverty in an obscure part of a brutal empire, who opens our eyes to new possibilities and the simple value of being human.

Faith is mostly about doubt and questions rather than certainty. It is about opening my eyes to something beyond the end of my nose, and my own limited perspectives. The Christmas story isn’t simply about something that may have happened 2000-odd years ago, it’s about where can I see the queer happening today. The one opens my eyes to the other. The exciting potential of new life born, the expansion of perspectives, the drive for social justice where we can change the world for the better. That’s what this story calls each of us to in our own unique and queer ways.

Words are so inadequate, and yet my hope is that this Christmas, through our readings, songs and time together, you catch just a glimpse of the miracle that is you, and that of the person next to you, and so on to the ends of the earth. St Athanasius in the third century, when speaking about Christmas said:

‘God became human so that we may might become like God’.

To be human is a good thing, and something we need to be reminded of, year after year. So, in the words of L.R. Knost:

Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.