Jesus Is Queer

The interplay between spirit and body provides the very fabric of the creation story in Genesis: “Then God said, ‘Let us make human kind in our image, according to our likeness; …God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” But the depth of this account of creation has been lost in our social context because our visual sense has eclipsed many of our other senses and the interconnected use of all of our senses so much so that our contemporary understanding of God has been reduced to two dimensional images in paintings and movies. Especially in our movies, we begin to see that God is often portrayed as the big man upstairs and can somehow be captured in human form through men like George Burns and Morgan Freeman. The Western church has often played into these images when God is portrayed as a fatherly figure that either is going to discipline you or reward you depending upon your behavior.

These images do not come close to capturing the fullness of God, who in space and time brought the universe into existence so that we may experience it with all of our senses and who has given us gifts, abilities and vocations that we express through our bodies for the glorification of our Creator. It is in this context I approach the subject of embodied experience that is expressed and experienced through our senses and desires. In this work I hope to understand my own embodiment and the spiritual implications of all that it represents. I will be approaching this study through the embodiment of our creator who determined to take on fleshly existence through Jesus. However, before I continue I want to remind the reader of Paul’s words in Romans 14: "Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another. I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean. If your brother or sister is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died."

I will be approaching my understanding of embodiment through the full fleshly experience of Jesus. For many, the idea that Jesus was fully human and fully God is unquestionable, however to discuss anything other than a spiritual Jesus is nearing blasphemy. If you are one who is unable to consider Jesus’ full humanity through all of the senses including sexuality, then this paper is not for you. It is not my intention to be a stumbling block to anyone’s faith because I am choosing to explore the embodied experience of Jesus. I believe that unless one is ready to contemplate such ideas, they will seem distasteful at best and blasphemous at worst.

Until recently I had never truly considered the concept of embodiment nor the implications of such a concept on my life in any way including spiritual. Like many things I took my embodiment for granted. Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines embody as “to give a body to (a spirit); to make concrete and perceptible; to cause to become a body or part of a body and to represent in human or animal form.” A significant understanding of the first definition is the idea of incarnation. Jesus is described as the incarnate word or the word become flesh in John chapter 1. The intersection between our own embodiment and the incarnate embodiment of the God of creation through Jesus Christ is a significant intersection with regards to our spiritual understanding, development, and journey with God. Elizabeth Leung states “Embodiment, therefore, includes the lived experiences of our individual body, as well as the representational uses of body as a symbol of nature, culture, religion, and, the techniques, regulation and control of bodies.” For Christianity the concept of embodiment is even more significant. Leung goes on to demonstrate this significance when she says: "For Christianity, human beings are created in the image of God, who has manifested in human flesh in Jesus the first century Palestinian Jew, and who continues to enliven the Body of Christ that lives among the creation of God. Therefore, human embodiment is already implicated in any lived Christian spiritualities, their practice and discourses."

John 1:14 says “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. This is the beginning of my understanding of what it means to be fully embodied as a human being. My association with the first century Jew named Jesus, based on space and time shows that we have very little in common. Our cultural contexts are vastly different and yet the tie that binds us is our humanity through embodied life. Robert Goss in his article about the book of John likens the appearance of Jesus on earth as God’s coming out. He quotes Mona West’s description of coming out as “break-in moments in our spiritual growth…break-in moments are those moments of invitation that happen throughout our life in which we catch glimpses of something more, something bigger in which we participate.” What is important for me in God’s coming out is the experience of embodied life. What was Jesus’ experience of being flesh? What impact does his fleshly existence have upon my own fleshly existence?

Goss states that “embodiment has been a major problem for Christians through the ages.” He goes on to state that “body negativity developed with the syncretism of Christianity with the body-despising philosophies of the Graeco-Roman world and the development of Christian asceticism.” In approaching this study I find myself departing from any notions of asceticism which carries with it, self denial for the sake of spiritual enlightenment. While this is certainly a path that people are called by God to follow, not everyone is given this gift. Paul helps us in understanding our gifting as it relates to sexual embodied experience. In addressing marriage, sexual practice and celibacy in 1 Corinthians 7 Paul admits that not everyone is gifted with celibacy as he is. He says: “This I say by way of concession, not of command. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind.”

Goss states that “God’s embodiment in the human Jesus is a fleshly event.” The very use of the term fleshly can cause trembling among those who find talking about the full embodiment of Jesus to be unseemly and unnecessary. By the full embodiment of Jesus I mean to suggest that, like all human beings he has bodily responses to life. His “diaper” was changed by a loving mother, he was bathed and experienced the pleasure of being held and kissed by his loving parents. As a child he would have matured into a young man experiencing all of the typical passages of puberty including nocturnal emissions, erections and an emerging understanding as a sexual being. I believe that even his knowledge of being the Christ was something that developed in him as he matured. I doubt that as a five year old Jesus would have had the depth of understanding of that reality as he would have when he was twelve, twenty or thirty. To deny this in my opinion is to deny his full humanity. Why would God have chosen to be born as a defenseless child who was at the mercy of his caregivers if his embodied experience as a child was not important to whom he would become as the Christ later in his life? While we have no information of his first thirty years of life it would be false to assume that those years were unimportant to the man he would become during his ministry. To deny this embodied experience is to deny the influence of his mother and father who most assuredly shaped him into the man that people saw as he emerged onto the scene at the beginning of his ministry.

One caution that we have to consider when looking at the humanity of Jesus is stated by Joan Timmerman. She says that “the humanity of Jesus, like femininity and masculinity, is constructed by us as a cultural symbol.” This helps guide our study in that we can attempt to see Jesus in his time and see how he expresses his embodied life and then attempt to make meaning out of that for our day and age. We must avoid just overlaying our contemporary sensibilities and understandings on our understanding of scripture. Timmerman further demonstrates the error of dualism:
"When the classical descriptions of Jesus’ manhood were formulated, it was in line with the conventional dualistic model, biased in favor of the concept of rationality in Greek thought. It was unthinkable to include in normative humanity those things associated with women, connectedness, vulnerability, immersion in nature. Today, a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn has been made: any formulation about the human which fails to take into account the experience of women is simply wrong."

In this work I want to state that I reject any tendency toward dualism as a way to order reality. Dualism applied in the context of this paper is the philosophical thought that separates the physical and spiritual realities which cling to the belief that the physical world is bad while the spiritual world is good. Dualism is a philosophy that makes masculine over and opposed to feminine, heterosexuality over and opposed to homosexuality as well as a host of other arbitrary either or descriptions of life. It is the philosophical belief in dualism that diminishes the full embodiment of our savior.

Timmerman points to how dualism has caused significant misunderstandings regarding our theological Christology. She states that “an element of Christology is lacking until we can allow ourselves to formulate images of Jesus entering into the passion of his sexuality as we have done regarding the passion of his suffering.” William Stayton offers the notion that “we are born both spiritual and sexual. One of the tasks of life is integrating into wholeness these two aspects of our being.” Sexuality is one of the sensual experiences that we have in life and in fact, it can bring into our awareness and use, all of the primary senses that we posses as human beings. The primary senses include sight, touch, taste, hearing and smell but each of these senses are nuanced by other expressions that have not been called senses. When your hand feels heat from the stove and pulls away in order to avoid being burned it involves touch in that the nerves within the hand “feel” the heat and one’s mind interprets that “feeling” as danger and sends a signal to the hand to move away. Memory, while not properly a sense contains within it the ideas of senses. Dancers often speak of body memory such that they find that their body has a memory that causes it to make the movements necessary for a particular dance without even thinking about it. When walking, there is a sense of that movement although we do not feel the air passing over our skin as touch there is a sense perception of that touch regardless of whether that can be properly classified as a sense. These are three examples of how our five primary senses come together to form a fully embodied experience.

Peter Sweasey in his book From Queer to Eternity quotes Michael Sean Paterson regarding Christianity and the value of embodied experience: "At the heart of Christianity is the astonishing claim that God became fully human in Jesus and took on human flesh. With body, circumcision, erections, ejaculations, sexual attractions. With eyes that noticed beauty, skin sensitive to the massage oil and the touch of a woman’s hair. Spittle that he rubbed on the eyes of a man born blind. A taste for good wine and feet that could dance the night away in Cana."

This demonstrates that everything about Jesus’ life on earth draws his full participation in embodied experience within his own body as seen in his personal circumcision, to the miracles that he performed in his ministry by the use of his own spit to bring about sight to a blind man. To be fully alive means to be fully present in the body and all of our experiences, including spiritual, involve our body and its responses to experience. T. J. Gorriage in his work The Education of Desire expresses this idea when he says: “At the heart of theology of the senses is the perception that the possibilities of the material be within the immaterial God, that the material is not foreign to God, but a form of God’s self expression.” Jesus was God’s self expression to the world. Jesus was a physical manifestation of a spiritual being. What an incredible revelation he is indeed, if we allow ourselves to receive his full expression in all of his senses and desires. We are only able to do this if we disengage from a dualistic philosophy. If we continue to cling to the belief that anything physical is not godly and everything outside the body, that which is spiritual is godly then we will not see the passion of Jesus in his full embodiment and we are left with a Christology that only speaks to our spiritual condition and not to the physical manifestation of our image in God. My body, my earthly image is the manifestation of God’s image and we have Jesus and his life as an example that we can learn from and it demonstrates for us that our bodily experience is indeed a full expression of God in the flesh. Philip Sheldrake articulates this point when he says:"Conventional images of holiness do not encourage us to befriend our desires. Indeed, they usually suggest that saints, if they ever showed signs of having personal desires at all soon lose them in some overwhelming conversion experience."

It is at this point I want to turn our attention to three embodied experiences of our savior that point to his queerness (in opposition to the dominant) and his full embodiment that help to illustrate for us that we, his disciples can indeed befriend our physical forms and in doing so act in spiritual ways which are indeed sensual expressions born out of our desire. Three experiences in Jesus’ life that include his full embodiment as well as the embodiment of his fellow actors are found in Jesus being bathed by a woman, Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, and the beloved disciple reclining on the chest of Jesus. These stories I think are examples of authenticity that if applied in our spiritual journeys can transform the way we live. Sheldrick puts it this way “the more honestly we try to identify our authentic desires, the more we can identify who we truly are.”

Our first illustration of embodied life is found in the Matthew 26, Mark 14 and Luke 7. We find a description of a dinner party that Jesus is attending at the home of a Pharisee. A sinful woman becomes aware of the fact that Jesus is present and enters the home and proceeds to bathe Jesus who is reclining at the table. In Matthew and Mark they describe that this sinful woman pours the perfume over the head of Jesus and in Luke we are told that she uses the perfume to wash his feet as well as kissing his feet for an extended period of time. If we accept the philosophy of dualism we will accept only the spiritual implications of this story, but then we are left with the question of why Jesus was born in human form and why we have, as humans, physical responses to the presence of others as an act of devotion seen in this woman. Although the lesson that Jesus draws from this story is a spiritual one, we cannot, nor should we deny what is happening physically in the bodies of Jesus, the woman and all those present. The first reactions of the Pharisees is disgust at the sight of a sinful woman in their midst. The woman herself was likely feeling shame and fear upon entering, but her desire to be in the presence of Jesus was so compelling that she disregarded any social convention that would have kept her from entering. As she begins anointing Jesus with the perfume, whether the feet or head, both Jesus and the woman would have experienced a heightened sensual response. How lovely that liquid must have felt as it ran down his body and even more lovely would that bodily response have been for Jesus, knowing the desire and devotion toward him that this woman expressed in her physical act. What a powerful, sensual experience this must have been as the woman took her own hair in her hands and began to use it gently on the feet of Jesus. Every pour in her being must have been excited in that moment as she was expressing the deep devotion of her heart in the physical act of touch. For Jesus, the softness of this woman’s hair mixed with the lovely smelling perfume must have elicited an incredible feeling of intimacy with this woman. For everyone in the house, the smell of the perfume elicited physical response. For those who felt she was being wasteful the sensual experience would have elicited anger, but for the women it elicited devotion and love and for Jesus it elicited love and forgiveness. Jesus and the woman in this story are queer. Both act in ways that do not support the dominant social conventions.

In our previous example of embodiment, the agency is carried out through the women who chose to embody her devotion for Jesus in the act of anointing him with perfume and Jesus welcomed and received this expression in his embodied life. Our next illustration found in John 13which speaks of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples. This is such a queer act on the part of our savior. Goss states that Jesus “takes on a submissive role as slave or woman to wash the feet of his male disciples.” This again is a fully embodied sensual experience for Jesus and for his disciples. The very act of taking on the role of a slave or woman by Jesus elicits a very sensual response from Peter. He is at first, perplexed at Jesus’ actions but responds exuberantly when he understands that to reject Jesus’ servant act is to reject him and so Peter responds by asking Jesus to wash his feet, his hands and his head! Peter was ready for a bath!

I remember when my grandmother was ill with Alzheimer’s. She was still living at home with my grandfather and he would daily help her down the stairs to the basement bathroom where he had room for her to sit. She would lean her head back while my grandfather washed her hair and this act of devotion on his part was a way to physically convey his love to my grandmother. I suspect by this point in their lives, sexual expression of their love had ceased, but the act of washing grandmother’s hair was most surely a sensual experience of their love. As my grandfather gently rubbed my grandmother’s head and worked the shampoo into a lather carefully washing all of the hair on her head there must have been an intimate connection of these two life-long lovers. As there must have been both a spiritual and sensual connection between my grandparents, there was equally a physical and sensual connection between the savior and his disciples. Oh, what it must have felt like to have the savior’s hands gently take Peter’s foot and begin to bathe it clean. Touching the rough skin of the heal which would have born the brunt of walking and the soft skin of the arch of the foot which would not have seen as much wear. This was a fully embodied experience of Jesus as he willingly took on the role of a slave in order to convey his love and devotion as a servant to his disciples.

This story is only eclipsed by the experience that the beloved disciple must have had in being the one to recline on the chest of his beloved friend and savior. While this was a cultural custom that was practiced throughout the region and in this era, it was still an embodied experience. Even if you take the titles of Christ and disciple out of the mix of this story and we read this as a servant and master in an earthly kingdom no one can deny that the two men would have experienced this as a sensual experience. I can remember my grandfather rubbing my back as a child. I would be lying in the living room watching television and he would sit down next to me and place his warm hand underneath my shirt and begin to gently rub from the waist of my pants to my shoulders. As I write I can almost feel his hand glide across my back and I am carried back to his living room. I can almost smell him, feel him breathing and experience the love that was shared between grandchild and grandfather. It warms me even now.

Now imagine being the beloved disciple. Being at supper with the man you believe to be the Christ and only now learning that he is going to be betrayed and die soon. How the beloved disciple must have leaned into Jesus and taking in every moment and sensing every bodily connection to Jesus. How he must have breathed in the scent of Jesus as his head lay on the chest of the savior. How his body must have longed to be near his beloved. Jesus’ love was being poured out in this supper and he would have been bodily present to his beloved disciple. It was not two cardboard cut outs of men lying with one another at the dinner table. These were two living men who expressed deep love and devotion for one another realizing that this would likely be their last earthly experience of each other’s presence. How can we not see the sensual expression of that love in this physical act of intimacy? How can we rob Jesus and the beloved disciple of the full expression of their love for one another? When love is fully expressed between two people there is nothing more beautiful. This is what we see between Jesus and the beloved disciple. The power of this sensual moment which would have included, sight, sound, smell, taste and touch is beyond imagination and if allowed, can bring us that much closer to touching the heart of God in a way that can bring freedom. To be the beloved disciple and Jesus, fully alive in that moment enjoying the company of one another must have been ecstatic. Sheldrick states that the “more authentic our desires, the more they touch upon our identities and also upon the reality of God at the heart of our being.”

Jesus did not operate within social convention. He did not carry himself in the socially dominant way that was expected of him as a first century Jewish man. This fact makes him a uniquely queer man who everyone can identify with because each of us to some extent does not fit the social convention that is dictated to us. In identifying with Jesus in his full embodiment, we are able to see how his queerness frees us in this life, both physically and spiritually. For Sheldrick this poses a paradox, and with that I leave you: "I have said that deep desires reflect what is uniquely personal. Yet, at the same time, the more deeply we go into ourselves, the more surely these desires are seen to transcend individualism. At the level of deep desire, any distinction between what we desire and the desires with which God gives us begins to blur. The more profoundly we reach into ourselves the more we experience desires that are both uniquely our own and also uniquely God-given."



Bibliography:
Dictionary and Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online. Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. Web. 08 Dec. 2010. .

Gorriage, T.J. The Education of Desire: Towards a Theology of the Senses. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2001. Print.

Guest, Deryn and others, eds. The Queer Bible Commentary. London: SCM Press, 2007. Print.

Harrelson, Walter J., General Editor. The New Interpreter’s Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrapha. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003. Print.

Leung, Elizabeth. Senses, Desire, Spirituality: SPRS 2401 Syllabus. Berkeley: Pacific School of Religion, 2011. Print.

Nelson, James B. and others, eds. Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflections. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1994. Print.

Sheldrake, Philip. Befriending our Desires. Notre Dame, IN: Ava Maria, 1994. Print.
Stayton, William R. A Theology of Sexual Pleasure. American Baptist Quarterly, 8 (2) 94-108. June, 1989.

Sweasey, Peter. From Queer to Eternity: Spirituality in the Lives of Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual People. London, Cassell, 1997. Print.

21 Years Ago...

Today would have been my 21st wedding adversary to Julie K. Wallendorff. I want to thank her for the life that she gave me and for the continued presence in my life to this day.

I remember how our trip to the pet store to replace her dead goldfish, instead ended up at a jewelry store buying a gold ring. I suprprised Julie in front of her staff by proposing during one of their staff meetings. I can remember how mortified her mother was because Julie was wearing a very old pair of sweats that had holes all over them! I remember standing with Julie at the unity candle, everyone thinking we were talking romantically with each other, when in fact we were asking each other what we were supposed to be doing after we lit the candle! I remember our wedding night.... pizza and sleep - we were so exhausted!

I remember, no matter what always holding hands with Julie in church and when we walked together.

I have the honored pleasure of telling Joy about her mother and just how much her mother longed to have Joy in her life. I have the pleasure of seeing Julie's sense of humor and wit lived through her incredible son, Joshua.

I have the pleasure of being reminded of Julie's gentle touch and her powerful presence in life. If I quiet myself very still I can almost hear her laugh. I can see her taking a cigarette in front of work people and freaking them out because she was a Pastor's wife!

I can remember the moment we realized that Julie had miscarried and at the same moment I said "Well, I guess we don't have to get air conditioning for the house" she said "We're still getting air conditioning!" We laughed so hard as we waited for the doctor to come in and tell us the next steps that would happen later in the hospital. We got the air conditioning, of course!

I can remember the moment we found out that Yue Shao June was waiting for us in China. We found out that she was born on April 20th while Julie was born on April 21. That was a sign for Julie that she was meant to be ours, that and the big chubby cheeks that Joy had! We were so excited and traveling to China was both a challenge and a pleasure.

I remember the many people who commented to me after Julie died how much love they saw in our relationship. I marvel at that because Julie and I did love each other and were an amazing couple together, but we did not know how much of that love we conveyed to others.

Julie, you were my first beloved and I thank you for the children you gave me and I honor you for your life and I hope that you would look at Joshua and Joy and see the wonderful influence that you have been in their lives while you were on this earth and since. I hope and do believe you would be proud. I am indebted to you for the influence you have had in my life while we shared it and since. I have tried live my life, especially as a parent of our children that would bring you joy.

I will always love you, my Julie.

Living in the presence of G*d

I had the realization this evening that I have actually been seeking something that is already present in my life -- the presence of God in tangible ways.

Like the one who lives in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains ceases to notice their presence in tangible ways such that their grandeur begins to pale the longer one dwells in their presence, I've come to believe that I'm so deeply within God's presence in every moment that my search need not be so broad and extensive; that to search outside myself has not produced fruit because my gaze for the divine has been cast too far off...

My inspiration

My son will graduate from high school in less than a week. It is amazing. He is the most wonderful young man I have ever known. He has handled life with such grace and openness and I hope for fulfillment and joy for him in the years to come. If I grow up, I want to be like him.

It is a bitter-sweet day for him because his mother died nearly nine years ago. It was a sudden and unexpected change in all of our lives. We had just gotten back from China, with our new daughter, his new sister. Life seemed on track, but seven months after returning my wife would be in a battle for her life, a struggle that would last a short six days.

I can only imagine how proud she would be. She would marvel at his talent and beam as she gazed upon the man her son is becoming. She would wonder at how much he is like her and me, the best of each of us. She would see that his sense of humor mirrors hers. She would see that he has her kindness and ability to be unconditional in his love and friendship toward others. Even when he is frustrated or angry with his friends or me, he works through that, learning something about himself and the other that somehow makes him a better person.

He has taught me so many things about living honestly. This blog is about living life. Life is happening whether we are engaged in it or not. I am engaging in life. I am happy and sad, excited and scared. My son has the world before him and the joy and excitement of what lies ahead as he embarks on the next chapter in his life. I too am embarking on a new journey...

Thank you son for being who you are. You are my inspiration for this blog... a life honestly lived and to write all that my heart holds.