S3E00 Transcript: 1 Thessalonians 5:21

Ellie Brigida: Welcome to Sweetbitter. We're your hosts, Ellie Brigida...

Leesa Charlotte: ...and Leesa Charlotte.

EB: This episode, we're very excited to introduce you to our third season, where we'll be discussing the queer histories in the Bible and Christianity.

LC: Which I'm very excited about. We also have Ellie here. Ellie?

EB: Double Ellie.

LC: We have double Ellie. No, we also have Alyse here, who is our Bible expert, I guess, for this season?

Alyse Knorr: I'm the Bible expert amongst the three of us. But other than that, no expert.

EB: That's okay.

LC: Okay, so let's talk about season three and why we chose it, because it's definitely a little out there compared to our other two seasons.

AK: Is it though? It's historical badass women and queer people.

LC: That's true. That remains true of our podcast. We have Lilith as our fantastic artwork, which is very exciting. But I guess, I mean, I'll start, because I think I'm the first one who pitched this to both of you. I think I wanted to do it last season, even. But for me, it was really – and this was like, you know, back in 2021 that we started talking about this, or back in 2020 – so I grew up atheist. I am not religious. Just putting that out there to start. And I definitely just – I mean, I had grown up with some level of religious education and enough religious education to understand that what we're learning right now and what society is doing right now is not religious. So, like, in terms of, like, what I learned about the Bible, and so for me, I wanted to, I guess, like, arm women and queer people with the knowledge of the Bible and the stories of the Bible that are queer and women-centered, to kind of combat what's happening in the world. Yeah, that's my take.

EB: And it's sort of crazy, because since you had brought that up, it just keeps getting worse and worse.

AK: Yeah.

EB: I think coming from an atheist is such an interesting way to start this because, like, the Bible is like a text also, it's like, a historical text. That, I think, is why it's interesting that we are diving into it in a different way. And I know Alyse, you have a different experience than Leesa, growing up. So what's your motivation for season three?

AK: Yeah, I grew up in a non-denominational evangelical Christian church, but that was really fraught with a lot of struggle and challenge for me, because I was queer and closeted and for lots of different reasons, that church just kind of, you know, wasn't a good fit for me, right? So I kind of sensed that it wasn't super cool to be gay. And also, I don't know, there was just – it felt very impersonal to go to a church with, like, thousands and thousands of people and jumbotron screens and electric guitars, kind of like selling this, I don't know, this really slick product. I'm at my heart like a poet, English nerd. I like old books, and I like stories and symbols and cool characters, and I like questions more than answers, right? And so just the way I was taught the faith growing up was around dogma and certainty and like, right, and shame. And so I left, you know, I never kind of identified with Christianity. I never really believed in it. And then when I was coming out in grad school, I was just curious what gay church was like. So I started going to gay church, which is the Metropolitan Community Church. It was founded in the 70s by queer people, and it's a Christian denomination by and for queer people. And I was just amazed. I had a really powerful experience taking communion from like a trans pastor, and being in a Bible study with all these OWLs. Which – do you guys know this acronym? OWL? The old, wise lesbian?

LC: I do know the acronym, but I think just for our listeners, it's important.

EB: Yes, it is a good clarification that you were not just having birds commune with you.

AK: I remember like reading the story –

EB: I found that I could speak to the soul of the owl.

AK: Yeah, you guys should please check on me, please check on me if I do anything with owls. But these women sort of – like I read the Sermon on the Mount and how, you know, the faith is about caring for the poor and the marginalized and the oppressed and the downtrodden, and it's about welcoming the stranger and hospitality and care for your neighbor. And once I sort of actually read the text for myself and re-encountered it, I really wanted to, like, reclaim that for myself. And that was very, very healing. Just for the record, I'm still agnostic around, like, I don't really believe in, like, an anthropomorphic, monolithic god. I'm much more, like, I don't know the universe. We're probably all cells in the universe's body, like everything's under – you know, I'm much more here for the mysteries than the certainties. Don't really believe in a heaven and hell, but I do identify as Christian now. We take our kids to church every week. It's a great way for them to practice being bored and being around older people.

LC: That is actually true. My parents used to send me to church with my grandma, and it was really good practice.

EB: For doing nothing. Yeah, I feel like in the Catholic Church, I would stare at the ceiling and count. There was like, all kinds of, like, beautiful architecture, and I would just be staring at it, and, like, counting down the time until I could leave.

LC: My church was like, all old people. But I loved the singing part. I started singing at church, actually, so I could be grateful for that.

AK: The singing. I mean, singing with strangers about just the beauty and the mystery and the anxiety of being alive. I just love having a weekly practice of being with people who want to be better and who want the world to be better. My church is mostly queer people. It's a really beautiful, you know, Methodist Church, where we just, like, you know, we try to fight oppression and racism and all the things that, you know – so we're very much part of, like, the Christian left. Yeah, that's where I'm coming from. What about you, Ellie?

EB: Nice, well, it's interesting you talk about singing. I also find it funny, like I feel like I've seen this online where people are like, you know, like, "Some people at those megachurches, like, they just believe in God because they've never been to a good concert." They're like, this is the best concert I've ever seen. It must be connected to something, some higher power, which I think, both can be true. But I started going to church in the Catholic Church, because I'm from Boston, and anyone who knows anything about Boston, there is a Catholic church on every corner. When I grew up, there were two churches that we could have walked to, St. William's and St. Margaret's. When I meet someone from Boston, like, specifically from Dorchester, where I'm from, one of the first questions they'll ask is, "Oh, what parish?" And that's like, how they'll know within a like 10 block-radius, where you live.

LC: That's wild.

AK: That is so wild.

EB: It is crazy. I mean, there was also so many other things, like as I was growing up, that happened within the Catholic Church. I mean, obviously Boston, we all know the like, big Roman Catholic scandals surrounding the churches in Boston. But even just like, you know, less and less people going to the churches, churches combining. There's a lot of like drama in Boston Catholicism. But for me, I started going to church because I feel like it's just like a thing that you did because your family did it, and I started singing in church. I don't sing in church anymore, but even, like, going back four or five years, like I would still sing in church. And to me, it was a complicated experience, because, like, I know that the Catholic Church as a whole is against gay people. And I am very, very gay. And so –

LC: What?!

EB: I know, it's so crazy. But like growing up in Boston is interesting. Like Boston Catholics are super Catholic and also super liberal.

LC: Interesting.

EB: So even though, like, the Roman Catholic Church as a whole is super anti-gay, I never felt like the people in my church were anti-gay, until I grew up and I was actually singing in another church that wasn't my, like, home parish, and they did give, like, an entire sermon against gay people. And I was like, oh, wow. Like that hit. I was like, oh, I knew that this was sort of a thing, nebulously. And then to have it, like, actually, like, be communicated in a church that I was in, like, hit different. Like, I didn't even think about it so much that – I think, like, I've told this story before, but like, the first girlfriend I ever had, she was – I don't even know what kind of religion, which is gonna kill me. Presbyterian? I don't know. There was, like, maybe, you know this, Alyse. There is a, like, Southern kind of denomination where, like, they split into two, because, like, one version of them – recently, was just super, like, "yay, gay." And the other one, like –

AK: A lot. Most of the Protestant denominations have split. So the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Baptists have all split, and the Methodists very recently, over whether you accept gay people or not, whether you, you know, will endorse gay marriages or allow queer pastors. And so there's often, like, you know, there's the, like, gay-friendly branch of the Presbyterians, and there's the not gay-friendly branch of the Presbyterians, and this is literally what they split over, which is insane.

EB: Yes, so to her – I think it was Presbyterian – for her, she was a part of the pro-gay Presbyterian split. And we were having a conversation, and she was like, "How do you feel that, like, you can't get married in the church?" And to me, being so ingrained in Catholicism, I was like, "Oh, why? Because you're not Catholic?" Like, because that was like, the thing that, to me, was more like, oh, well, you would have to convert. Like, I've had, like, my uncle and aunt, like, she had to convert to Catholicism for them to get married in the church, right? So I was like, that's what I thought of first. Not like –

AK: Right, right, right.

EB: Oh, I'm gay. I can't get married in the Catholic Church. Like, it didn't even hit me.

LC: This would have been before same-sex marriage was even legal, no? How long ago was this first girlfriend?

EB: No, it was like right after, it was like right after. I was with her when DOMA got overturned.

AK: That's wild.

EB: So, like, we were talking about it after that, and like, to me, I was like, "Oh, well, it's legal now." I like didn't think that it's not legal in the Catholic Church. You know, that was – so to me, it was a very like, it's a complicated relationship with religion.

AK: I love that like, between the three of us, we've got the atheist, the person who's like a cultural Catholic, but not a practicing Catholic.

EB: Yes, I consider that very deeply.

AK: And I'm like a practicing queer Christian, but I kind of rejected the culture.

EB: There's so many. Many, many perspectives.

LC: And then the timing of this has ended up pretty interesting. I mean, we've all had our own little journeys, and we have some like, kind of exciting news about, like, joining this new network, which we'll talk about in more detail in maybe like a bonus episode. But yeah, like, just the political moment that we're in right now, and we're recording this a little bit before you'll hear it, and who knows what could happen in the next like month. But I think it was when – we'd sort of been talking about it, talking about it, and then I think it was when, I don't know if you want to talk about this, Alyse, but like Alyse and I messaged each other after that speech.

AK: Yeah, so at the Presidential Inauguration, there was an inaugural prayer led by Reverend Mariann Budde, "Buddy" – I'm really sorry, I don't know how to pronounce her name – who's an Episcopal Bishop. And you know, this is just kind of a standard thing all presidents sit through after the inauguration. But she, at the sort of tail end of her prayer, said directly to Trump, like looks down at him from her pulpit and locked eyes with him and said, "I want to ask you to have mercy on the people who are scared right now." And she listed, you know, immigrants and queer people. And she just said, "These are good people. These are our neighbors." So she used the language of Christianity – mercy, love your neighbor – and he lost it and trashed her on social media afterwards. And you can also watch the video of him, just like, him and JD Vance just kind of rolling their eyes and getting angrier and angrier, but he trashed her on social media, demanded an apology, said she was biased, all these things, when really she wasn't talking policy. She was not being partisan. She was just being Christian, like classic Christian messaging, and so that, just like, I don't know, brought to my attention how the Christian left is going to be an important part of how we resist from, you know, from within, sort of, like the religious movements who are pro, you know, this kind of extremism. Like the Christian left is going to play a role in the resistance, but also in just the, I don't know, like caring for the people who are going to be hurt by these policies.

LC: Absolutely, and I think it's not just the Christian left. I think that people who are not – you don't have to be Christian to identify with Christianity. We're not making apologies for Christianity, like as a whole, and the things that it has been responsible for in the past. As I said, I don't believe like in anything. I don't have time for that. I just try to be like a good person to other people. But I do think that when these things are being used against us, it does help to have armed yourself with the knowledge of what's actually in the Bible and like – yeah, the far right is weaponizing Christianity against us. But that does not mean that Christian people are bad as a whole. It does not mean that the whole church is like, you know – or maybe the church, but not the people within it, let's say, and so –

AK: It's nuanced. I mean, you know, throughout history, there have been so many really awful, horrific atrocities and tragedies that the Christian church have been involved in or led or been part of. But also, you know, it's complicated enough that even, for instance, you know, I was teaching about the HIV/AIDS crisis last week, and we were talking about how the HIV/AIDS activists were sort of reacting against the Catholic Church's imposition against condoms, saying that's worsening the spread of HIV/AIDS, which is true. But also, at the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Catholic churches – or excuse me, Catholic hospitals were the only ones accepting HIV-positive AIDS patients, right? So that idea that like we can have, you know, these values of mercy or of kindness and love alongside some really horrible things, it's just the nuanced, complicated, gray truth of it all.

EB: Before we spend a season unpacking how queer people and women feature in important ways in the Bible and how queer Christians interpret their religion, we want to acknowledge, as many of our expert guests do, that some Christians are to blame for a lot of really bad things in history and in the present day committed in the name of faith.

LC: A short and incomplete list, and I'm sure this will have grown since we record, sadly: the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, conversion therapy, incest, child abuse, murder, genocide, Native American boarding schools, forced indoctrination, terrorism, the Holocaust, the anti-choice movement, hate crimes, book bans and other forms of censorship. Most recently, anti-queer hate crimes and bigoted laws like the Don't Say Gay act in Florida, not to mention countless anti-trans actions being taken at present, which are all unfolding before us right now.

EB: And that doesn't even begin to get into the personal pain that many queer folks experience at the hands of the church when they are outcast, disrespected, erased, or personally attacked just for living their lives, just for existing.

LC: I guess moving on from that, which is very –

EB: I know, so fucking depressing.

LC: So depressing. So what we've always done in our past seasons is tell history from a queer and women's perspective, and that's what we're trying to do here. So whether or not you're religious – and again, as I said, I'm not – the Bible is an important historical document. It's a huge part of our lives. It's increasingly being used as a justification to walk back our rights. We're not coming at this from a place of like, "We hate Christianity, we love Christianity." It's more like we want to be educated about Christianity, a force that is being used very politically at this moment in time.

AK: One of our big goals is to sort of decolonize Christianity and queer Christianity, so that it doesn't just belong to any one political movement as a tool of oppression, but how it can be used as a tool of liberation. And that's true whether you're religious or not, so some of the voices you'll hear this season are talking about Jesus as a socialist or Jesus as a queer hero or Jesus as a feminist. And you know, as things become increasingly violent towards queer people and women, it's just been really important for us to give folks the tools to reframe the conversation and also the historical context, and just ways of interpreting the text, and then ways that especially queer people and queer religious leaders are, yeah, like taking these messages and putting them into practice in ways that are very liberatory. So you'll also hear this season about really interesting historical phenomena like transgender medieval monks. You'll hear from queer theologians, scholars who are practicing Christians. A lot of the voices you hear are people who are Christian-identified, but that's because they're our experts on the history of Christianity, and they are queer. So we're definitely not trying to push the idea that if you're queer, you should be Christian. Rather that, you know, these are our experts who are living queer lives while they have leadership roles in the church or are scholars of the faith.

EB: Some of the things you won't hear this season: we aren't focusing any episodes on stories of people's trauma, and why we're doing that is because, obviously, they're very important stories, but we do think those have been adequately covered elsewhere. We have enough stories of trauma in the queer community. I know we're all tired and beaten down, and we're interested in how people are using liberation theology to preserve their dignity and take back what has always been ours. We're burned out on anger and trauma. Being angry is motivating, but it's also really, really tiring, and we wanted to find hopeful stories of people empowering themselves.

LC: So just before we go into a break, Alyse, do you want to give us a quick basic history of the Bible? What is Christianity? And also, for my benefit, what are the different types? Because I don't understand any of them. Yeah, just give us a quick little intro to.

AK: Sure, yeah, and I'm definitely not an expert. So let me give that caveat, too. I'm not a historian. I'm not a religious studies scholar or theologian or anything like that. I work at a Jesuit Catholic University, and I'm very proud of that. I love working at my Jesuit Catholic school, but the opinions I share this season will not reflect the views of the Catholic Church, necessarily. And so I'm not speaking as a representative of anyone. But yeah, I mean Christianity, right? One of the most popular monotheistic world religions of all time, across the world, obviously. The term Christianity comes from Christ, right? So Jesus Christ, and the way that he lived his life, right, is what followers of Christianity are really, you know, I guess, by definition, trying to do. So we're looking at the stories that come from the Old Testament, which is the Hebrew Torah, along with some other important historical documents around Jewish laws and Jewish history, all the way up through the New Testament. And the New Testament starts with the four books, the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And those four gospels tell the story of Jesus's life. He's a guy who was born in Nazareth and became a leader of a faith group of people that were sort of anti-Roman Empire, pro-caring for each other, pro-caring for the poor and the sick and the marginalized. And so Christians are following in the example of Christ. So as you heard me mention, you know, the history of Christianity is tied up with other Abrahamic religions, right? You have Judaism before you have Christianity, and then you have Islam after you have Christianity. So not many people realize this, but the Torah does mention, right, different Hebrew faith leaders and Jesus as well. Christianity splits into two main branches, Catholicism and Protestantism, right around the Protestant Reformation, and that's when Martin Luther nails his ninety-five theses to the door and proclaims that people should be able to have a more personal encounter with God. They shouldn't have to pay priests to, you know, be absolved of their sins, things like that. It's kind of one of the main ideas that the Protestant Reformation was orbiting around. And then from Protestantism and Catholicism breaking in half, you also have sub-denominations starting up within the Protestant tradition. So when we say denominations, we mean things like Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, all these little Protestant denominations that have their own ways of centralizing or decentralizing power, voting, their own different traditions, their own different hymns that they sing and things like that. So that is like the fastest breakdown ever.

LC: So it's like Catholicism is just, there's one type, and then Protestantism is like, everything else?

AK: Yeah, but what the Catholics have that's really unique is they have orders. So in the Catholic Church, you have to be a man to be a priest, right? But they also have nuns and sisters and things like that. There are Catholic-run hospitals and schools. But then the priests, the all-male priests, they can join different orders, and so, like, I work at a Jesuit school, and so you have to be a Catholic priest to be a Jesuit. It's like a little fraternity. They have like a little brotherhood. And they have their own kind of special flavors, right? So a Franciscan Catholic priest, they're kind of known for having, like, a lot of concern for the environment, and the Jesuits are really known for their like contributions to education. There's always Jesuit Colleges like Boston College or Gonzaga or Georgetown – those are all Jesuit Catholic schools. So they kind of have their own flavors. But yeah, there aren't like denominations of Catholicism the way there is with Protestantism.

LC: That's so much information to digest. I think it's best to –

AK: I know. I'm being so, like, pedantic by being so, so, so, like, duh, obvious, like, 35,000-foot view. But I just want to clarify it in case these are all, like, completely new terms, or new ideas. Like, what is the Old Testament? Is it just older? Like, yes, it is, and you'll hear – but also, it's basically like the prequel before you get to Jesus, right?

LC: Ooh, okay, I see. So it's, like, Star Wars, episodes one to three.

AK: Yeah, so like, the Old Testament's gonna have Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve. It's gonna have Noah and Noah's Ark, all these, like, really old kind of mythologies around big human questions, like, where did we come from? Where did evil come from? Why does bad weather happen, right? All of those kind of old mythical stories. And then a lot of those Clobber passages against homosexuality are in the Old Testament. We'll talk about those. But those are basically when the Jews were, you know, persecuted – they still are, you know, a persecuted people, and they were trying to stay alive in the desert, moving around a lot, trying to stay alive, trying to not eat things that would make you sick. So there are all these rules in, for instance, like Leviticus around, like, don't do this, do this. Don't do that, do that. If you have this kind of pus coming out of this kind of wound, apply this kind of – and there's medical instruction in it, right? A lot of it's about cleanliness, clean, unclean. And part of that was just so that infections wouldn't spread. Part of it is because, you know, their leaders wanted them to procreate and make a bigger race, right? Because they were under so much oppression. So that's where some of those – like, it's just social codes, like, how should I trim my beard? Where do women sit when they have their periods? These are all, like, just cultural, traditional, like religious, but also like societal rules. Then in the New Testament, you have the Gospels, the story of Jesus's life, and then a bunch of letters that early Christians wrote to each other, trying to figure out what their church should be after Jesus had died.

EB: So much, so much stuff.

AK: Yeah, it's a big old book. A book full of books.

EB: And we're gonna dive in. You're gonna hear a lot more this season, but we will be back after a quick break. We want to share a story from the Reverend Jakob Hero-Shaw, senior pastor at the Metropolitan Community Church of Tampa. A quick content warning here that there will be a discussion of suicide.

Reverend Jakob Hero-Shaw: So I didn't grow up like religious, particularly. Periodically attended the Unitarian Universalist Church. My mom's family is Catholic, my dad's family is Methodist. And they didn't really – we didn't really have church, other than just kind of sometimes go into the UU church. And then in high school I was – this was like, in the 90s, and mid 90s, I was sort of struggling with my identity and my gender and sexuality and started kind of being curious about faith. Some of it was I think, growing up in Florida with things are quite conservative. I think some of it was fear based, like, you know, I would hear people say, like, oh, if you don't get saved, you're gonna go to hell and those kinds of things, which are now that I've done a lot of study, I'm like, oh, that's just completely inaccurate. But I was trying to figure it out. And I had this one friend, who – she just really embodied the, I don't know, what I love, even 20-plus years later, about Jesus, she like, embodied Christ's love. And she was just loving, she just like, had this loving energy. And we became really good friends. And she talked to me a lot about Jesus. And she was from a really conservative church, and very much wanted me to be saved, but she was also struggling herself with her sexual orientation. She was a lesbian. And, you know, she really tried to balance those things. And it didn't go well with her very conservative church. And she got very publicly shamed, and she was a, you know, she was a child, she was a teenager. So ultimately, she died by suicide when she was 19, right after high school, and for me, that was a big turning point. She had just finished her freshman year of college and had just switched her major to religion, and wanted to go to seminary, wanted to become a pastor. And those things had personally never occurred to me to do it myself. And it's not that I did it because she couldn't. But that was where the turning point was for me and that incredible loss. And yeah, she just – it happened in 1998. And it still is something that shapes my perspective.

EB: This season, you're going to meet clergy and people of the faith like Reverend Hero-Shaw, people who resist the darker side of Christianity.

LC: We're going to unpack with these expert guests why the Bible actually teaches the exact opposite of the hatred that motivates all of the horrific violence and injustices that have been committed in the name of Christianity.

EB: We're going to meet amazing queer and women Bible characters, as well as the people who take inspiration from them, people who seek to use Christianity to build a more just and peaceful world for themselves and others.

LC: The most amazing thing about the guests we'll talk to this season is that they aren't redefining Christianity at all. They're simply enacting the faith the way the scripture tells them to, bringing it back to its roots, to a man named Jesus who preached a radical anti-imperialist message of peace, love, and justice for society's most marginalized and oppressed. His beliefs cost him his life.

EB: Here's preacher, teacher, and activist, Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart, with more on this.

Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart: So I think that institutions exist to preserve themselves, right. An institution wants to survive, its reason for being is to be, and so anything that threatens that has to go. That's, for me, the biggest point of departure from Jesus's life and work. Jesus was like, the most unconcerned person with self-preservation. Right? Like he acted in a way that was completely reckless if you're trying to preserve your own life, right. And that, to me, is what it means to follow Jesus, right. Now, that doesn't mean I'm going outside and playing in traffic, or that's not what that means. But it means that I have signed on to a risky proposition, that if I follow Jesus, I might just lose my life, both literally and figuratively, right? This is something that is worth my life. I'm not interested in preserving the institution and even preserving my own life, if it means I have to sacrifice my integrity and my truth and my joy and my sense of self, right. So that's one point of departure. The other is, I think that much of what passes as Christianity today is shame-based incarceration. I'm gonna use that strong of a word. I think what we want to do is keep people in cages. And we use shame to do that. So if we can make you ashamed of who you love, we can make you ashamed of what your body does, and how your body looks. If we can make you ashamed of your ambition and your desire, your professional desire, right? If we can make you ashamed of the decisions you've made in the past, then we can keep you in this cage because you'll be so consumed with shame, that you don't realize, "Oh, my goodness, I'm locked in here, right, I need to get out." So I have decided that faith is not an instrument of shame and incarceration, that if my faith is not setting me free, more and more free every day, then it's not worth having. I think it's terrible that in our quest to maybe be powerful or be wealthy, that Christianity and Christians have coded the beautiful and liberating words of people inspired by a divine spirit, and converted those words into something that keeps people ashamed of themselves.

EB: By actually looking back at those liberating and inspired words of the Bible, queer Christians are taking back the faith. Here's Reverend Florentino Cordova with more on that.

Reverend Florentino Cordova: It was a way, again, of power and control. How do we keep control of the people? How do we put rules and things in place? How do we formulate or say what scripture is saying in order to control them and in order to keep them in line? And again, it adds up, really, because we were, as Catholics, we were never encouraged to have a Bible.

LC: Just like Reverend Tino said, we want to actually look at the text of the Bible itself to find ourselves in its pages, and to empower ourselves to reinterpret it.

EB: We want to take as our model for the season some advice we got from Pastor Dawn Bennett, pastor developer at The Table, an LGBTQIA+ centered faith collective in Nashville, Tennessee. Pastor Dawn advises all of her congregants to reframe, reform, and reclaim scripture. Here's what she means.

Pastor Dawn Bennett: So the first thing I'll say right out the chute, is that somebody told you it's wrong to be queer. That was some guy's interpretation in 1946. I preach and teach on what we call the three R's: reframing, reforming, and reclaiming. And the reframing piece is not to be taken lightly because we're not talking about proof texting. What we're talking about is taking the onus upon oneself, to read more than one piece of a verse or one piece of a chapter, one verse of a chapter. We're talking about taking the time to invest in thyself. Luke, the great physician, said, "Heal thyself." How do we heal thyself? We go on exploration. So the mission statement of The Table is to create spaces for LGBTQ people to explore the things of faith, the things of self, and the deeper issues of being and belonging. And so we go on those explorations in the pulpit, in the pew, at the table.

LC: But what exactly does she mean by reframe, reform, and reclaim? Are those three separate steps?

EB: Why, yes they are, Leesa.

PDB: So the reframing is to take a piece of scripture that is maybe one line long, right? I'm trying to remember – last night, I was preaching on Romans 10, 9 and 10. And we were doing a preaching series on Tell Me More, and people were invited to send in their favorite and their least favorite scriptures. And Paul is always complicated, because, you know, he's not everybody's favorite person. But the reality is, Paul was a feminist. And that's all over all the epistles that he wrote. Salvation is a conversation we'll get into another day. But the reason I left that out is because that is one verse in all of Romans 10. And it's so easy to tell queer folks that you're not going to be saved because of what you're doing and the way that you're choosing to live your life, even if you believe it. This is hinged upon what you're doing, right? And so the reframing is to say, okay, wait one minute. Let's zoom out. And let's read – how about how about we just read all of Romans 10 and find out what Paul was talking about in verse 9. You know, Romans 10 is like 45 chapters long or something, it's a whole lot more than one verse, or 45 verses long, it's a whole lot more than just verse 9. And so when you zoom out, you're able to get a bigger picture. And that's where the reforming comes in. The reforming comes in, to say, re-form, as in to form again. We are forming our understanding of scripture based upon more information, not one verse that supposedly defines everything about who we are. And we have the capacity to do that. And so the third is to reclaim. Reclamation is a word, yes, an action, yes. But reclaim can get lost in that word of reclamation, right. So let's get it down to the base. We are going to take back our scripture, take back our belief, take back our salvation, take back our relationship, take back our pew, take back our Sunday, take back our very lives as people of faith. So when I talk about reframing, what they find is amazing. What they find on their own is better than any gold nugget I could ever give them. But the gold nugget that I give them is to say, "Here, read this for yourself. Read this for yourself. Because I'm so sorry that someone told you it was not for you. But if you will just take a chance one more time." That's the beauty of The Table right there, is it's filled with people who have dared to believe that it just could be different this time.

LC: On our first episode of this season, we'll dive into the first step of reframing, by analyzing the so-called Clobber passages about homosexuality and seeing what they actually say and don't say.

EB: Until then, here's a taste of what's to come on Sweetbitter.

Reverend Jeanelle Ablola: Yeah, I mean, the Bible, it is written in a patriarchal system, a patriarchal society. That's the result of feudal and slave socioeconomic systems at that time. It was a time of conquer. It was a time of exile. So I read it more as patriarchal, versus it being about homophobic and transphobic, you know, not that they're separate. But I feel like there's a little bit of nuance there, when we're looking at it as a patriarchal text. Our context is totally different than the one in which the text is written. So for us to use our terms, our understandings of queer and trans folks onto that context is difficult, if not impossible. And there's also like historical knowledge that ancient Hebrew cultures, like many pre-colonial cultures, were able to hold multiplicity of gender, multiplicity of roles, multiplicity of expression, you know.

Tim Schaefer: It's very likely that these are examples of queer relationships in the Bible that aren't maybe so explicit, but it certainly could be interpreted that way.

LC: Thanks for listening to Sweetbitter. Our next episode is already out, so go listen to it.

EB: If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review us. It really helps, especially written reviews on Apple and Spotify.

LC: You can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com/sweetbitter.

EB: Sweetbitter is an independent production by me Ellie Brigida, Alyse Knorr, and Leesa Charlotte. Our assistant producer is Thea Smith, and our content producer is Lungowe Zeko. Our audio engineer is Ana López Reyes, and our artwork is by Istela Illustrated. Thank you to our guests this week, Brian Murphy, Father Shannon Kearns, Reverend Jakob Hero-Shaw, Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart, Reverend Florentino Cordova, and Pastor Dawn Bennett. You can read more about our guests and where to find them on our website.

LC: You can find us on Bluesky and Instagram at @sweetbitterpod, or contact us on our website, sweetbitterpodcast.com. And that's all from us for now. We're happy to be back. See you next time, bye.