In 1971, in a London television studio, author James Baldwin, then 47, and poet Nikki Giovanni, then 28, sat down for a conversation about the state of Black life, love and gender relations.  

In that conversation, James Baldwin said this: “I am no expert with theology, which at the moment I realized, I carried in myself. You know, it was not the world that was my oppressor only. Because what the world does to you, is the world does it long enough and effectively enough.

You begin to do it to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice of your own murder, because you believe the same things they do. No, you think it’s, they think it’s important to be white, and you think it’s important to be white. 

They think it’s shameful to be Black and, and you think it’s shameful to be Black. And you have no corroboration around you of any other sense of life. You know, all those corroborations which are around you are, in terms of the white majority standards, so deplorable, they frighten you to death.” End quote. 

You begin to do it to yourself. 

You become a collaborator,

an accomplice in your own murder,

Because you believe the same things they do.

Let us pray. 

Help us, O Lord.

Amen. 

The gospel reading for today from John 17, should be a meatball over home plate for someone who works for the unity of all Christians.  It’s the classic text “so that they may be one, as we are one.”

Except, that as Biblical Scholar Jennifer Garcia Barshaw writes, “the excerpt from the Farewell Discourse in John reads like a messy and repetitive word salad. Scholars and preachers throughout history have called this passage in John 17 “Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer,” which makes it sound theologically organized and deeply meaningful, but in reality, our modern brains and contemporary contexts make it difficult to follow its structure or grasp its layered intricacies.”

She’s not wrong. so that they may be one, as we are one” becomes “ I am one as you are one, and I am the walrus as you are the walrus and I am you and you are me and we are all together. 

The text bends and wraps in on one another, a Mobius strip of words for insiders and outsiders, what Garcia Barshaw calls, “antilanguage,” language established as an alternative to the greater society around it.  We who are queer know how this works, the codes, the head nods, the flipping of terms that bends back on itself. I’m forever grateful for the senior lesbians at my church who taught me about the olden days of touching your pearls in a certain way to signal your fondness of other women or the wearing of your bandana in a certain back pocket to signal your fondness for other men.  Like so many oppressed communities, a creative people who flip and bend words back on one another, who take slurs and reappropriate them, in ways that confuse prior generations and outsiders. You call us queer? That’s our word now. You use that pink triangle to send us to the gulag? We’ll use it to act-up. 

Advertisement

In the words of Bishop Missy Elliot, “I put my thing down flip it and reverse it.” Inside and outside, upside and down, verse 24, “Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundations of the world.” 

Because You  

Because You loved

Because You loved me.

Jesus, the precious, beloved child of God, reaffirming their foundational belovedness with the Divine Parent, before the before the foundations of the world. 

Because some of us didn’t have that. Some of us don’t have that. Some of us ache deep in our bones for that foundational belovedness that no earthly parent gave us and only our heavenly Parent can give. 

You heard Brother James say it himself, “You know, it was not the world that was my oppressor only. Because what the world does to you, is the world does it long enough and effectively enough. 

You begin to do it to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice of your own murder, because you believe the same things they do.

And if we are honest, if we are truthful, if we are candid, some of us do. Some of us become our own oppressor. Heterosexism and transphobia kills parts each of us each day, and not just queer folx. 

To our straight kin in the body of Christ, we will let you listen in on this sermon.

And to be clear, that is a privilege. You are listening in to an internal queer theological conversation about what it is like to live under the stultifying gaze of heteronormativity, the pressure to perform according to deadly binary of strict gender norms, and the death-dealing theology of all while the Church asks us to believe the mystical reality that our One Lord and Savior is both fully human and fully divine. I dare not speak for all my precious queer kin, but I long for the day when the Church moves from outward hostility to benign neglect to marginal tolerance to begrudging welcome to performative inclusivity to the absolute necessity of queer folx, because you cannot understand the Gospel without us. 

To our straight kin in the body of Christ, we will let you listen in on this sermon. Because we all need healing. Straight kin, gender confirming kin, all of us. Even now. Especially now. Gender policing kills parts each of us each day, and not just trans folx. Any of us who step out of a strict binary are being punished in a world that that is saying there is only Black and white, and nothing inbetween.  

In May, in Boston, Ansley Baker and her girlfriend Liz Victor when to a Kentucky Derby party at the Liberty Hotel in Boston. The couple are both cis-gender women, or women whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth. But Ansley went into the women’s bathroom, and someone called hotel security. 

“All of a sudden there was someone banging on the door… I pulled my shorts up. I hadn’t even tied them. One of the security guards was there telling me to get out of the bathroom, that I was a man in the women’s bathroom. I said, ‘I am a woman.’” 

Then Ansley and Liz were forcibly removed from the hotel.

And this so called Liberty Hotel, this $750/night hotel, was once the Charles Street Jail, built in the 1850s, under the advice of Rev. Louis Dwight in a supposedly humanitarian reformist plan.  Former inmates include Malcom X, James Michael Curley, Malcom X and Sacco and Vanzetti and Suffragists imprisoned for protesting Woodrow Wilson. It is also a prime example of a “the Auburn plan:” a cruciform building with a central tower, which allowed for silent daily labor and evenings of individual confinement were supposed to be more humane. It also allowed for constant surveillance from that central tower at the center of the cross:  

“All of a sudden there was someone banging on the door… I pulled my shorts up. I hadn’t even tied them. One of the security guards was there telling me to get out of the bathroom, that I was a man in the women’s bathroom. I said, ‘I am a woman.’”

When we break from strict binary gender norms, how quickly enforcement locks down. How quickly the guards rush in.

My dear, precious, beloved siblings in Christ: you who love and labor for the Lord, and are precious, simply because you are: our Creator desires that we might be one, as Jesus and the Father are one. But I know, that in the service of Christian unity, in the past, I gave too much of my precious self away. I lost myself. I let people, particularly other kin in Christ, denigrate me. As my colleague Rev. Dr. Jay Williams of Union United Methodist Church in Boston says “I will not do the work of Christian unity at the expense of my own dignity.” I did not hold on to that foundational belovedness of our Heavenly Parent and walk away.

Jesus says,Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

Because some of us didn’t have that. Some of us don’t have that. Some of us ache deep in our bones for that foundational belovedness that no earthly parent gave us and only our heavenly Parent can give. 

But every now and then, an earthly Parent comes real close.

Twenty one years ago, June 19 2004, at this very church, just 34 days after Massachusetts legalized equal marriage, Rev. Dr. Norman J. Kansfield, then president of New Brunswick Theological Seminary presided at the wedding of Ms. Jennifer Aull, and Ms. Ann Kansfield. 

Rev. Dr. Norman J. Kansfield presiding over the marriage of Ann Kansfield and Jennifer Aull at First Churches Northampton on June 19, 2004, wearing his Reformed Church in America stole. The wedding was at First Churches because the church administrator at the time picked up the phone, and the Church was on a list of Open and Affirming Churches when Jennifer called around. Only two town clerks in MA were issuing licences to out of state couples at the time- their marriage license came from Attleboro or New Bedford

(Ann, please confirm? I don’t want to lose this history.)

Photo courtesy of Ann & Jen

The Newark Star Ledger wrote a year later, “No one ever thought of the Rev. Norman J. Kansfield as a rebel.

The gentle Midwestern native quietly worked for decades as a librarian and professor at several Christian colleges before becoming president of the prestigious New Brunswick Theological Seminary in 1993.

Gray-haired and 65, he’s known to North Jersey pastors simply as “Norm” and admired for his erudition and friendly manner.

He seems the very model of Dutch Protestant probity.

But on the day of his daughter’s wedding, Kansfield crossed a line.” End quote. 

How quickly enforcement locks down. How quickly the guards rush in.

In 2005, Dr. Kansfield told The Bergen Record that he realized his choice might provoke a “dust-up.” In the years that followed, that parental love led to Norm’s: termination as seminary president, the first trial of a Reformed minister in 100 years, Norm’s defrocking, and the first major movement within the Reformed Church in America to publicly debate whether or not queer folx are made in the image and likeness of God. 

All because a when seminarian Ann Kansfield told her dad Rev. Dr. Norm Kansfield that she wanted to marry seminarian Jennifer Aull, Norm insisted that he preside.

Because you loved me. 

“Clad in his church vestments, he read with emotion from the Book of Isaiah about a God who extends his kingdom of love beyond Israel to cover foreigners and eunuchs.”

When Norm died in 2024, we all wore these buttons to his funeral: “I support Norm.”  The same buttons all the church queers and straight allies of the Reformed Church in America wore through the fights. There’s a particular irony about all these church queers rallying behind the least likely queer icon- a 6’7” soft spoken, theologically conservative, Dutch librarian getting defrocked that we had to go save, who didn’t really know he was going to start movement. 

Notice the blue “I support Norm” button on my stole.

Thanks, Norm. Love you.

What I’m asking you, my straight and gender conforming allies, is what are you willing to give up? Not what flag are you willing to fly. Not what yard sign are you willing to put up or to whom are you willing to donate (though I will take your donations) but like Norm who stumbled into losing his career, his income, his ordination, his friends and his reputation, while being rejected publicly by his church of 65 years and multiple generations.  We who are queer know deep betrayal. I suspect you do to from different institutions and individuals, but in the days ahead, we will need you. But we need you to know now, to reflect now so you do not just stumble across it, but step intentionally- what boundary are you willing to bust? What line are you willing to walk across, and lay down your life. Because the enforcement of these strict binaries is killing us. Do you actually believe like Norm in a God who extends his kingdom of love beyond Israel to cover foreigners and eunuchs? 

Jesus says, Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

Loved me before the foundation of the world. 

In 1996 Beloved sister Nikki Giovanni wrote a poem for the singer Lena Horne entitled, “Poem for a Lady Whose Voice I Like” 

so she replied: show me someone not full of herself

and i’ll show you a hungry person.

May all of us who are loved by our Heavenly Parent before the foundations of the world be full of ourselves this Pride, and every day to come.

Amen.