S3E03 Transcript: Psalm 139:14

Ellie Brigida: Welcome to Sweetbitter where we explore the queer history of the Bible and Christianity. We're your hosts, Ellie Brigida...

Leesa Charlotte: ...and Leesa Charlotte.

EB: This episode we're talking about queer ways to read the Bible.

LC: But before we get into that, let's bring in our resident Christian, Alyse Knorr. Welcome, Alyse.

AK: Hello.

EB: Hi, Alyse. So good to see you.

AK: So good to see y'all, blessed day.

LC: Blessed day.

AK: I sound like I'm on The Handmaid's Tale now.

EB: Yeah, I know, blessed be the fruit. Let's see what you have for us today.

AK: I have Psalm 139:14. And the New International Version translation is: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

EB: Aw, fearfully and wonderfully made. Beautiful.

AK: Isn't that nice?

EB: Yes, it is very nice. And why did you pick this one in particular?

AK: I picked this one because I mean, for our last two episodes, like we've kind of talked about all of the harms committed by the church against queer people. And we've debunked the Clobber passages. So we spent a lot of time kind of talking about this negative stuff that's in the Bible. And like how to debunk it. But today, we're going to talk about how to read the Bible through a queer lens and like, see all the queerness that is in the Bible, and enjoy the text from this queer perspective, and find all the cool things in it. And so one of those things is this verse, which I love so much, because it's just that reminder that like, you are beautiful the way you are, everything about you, everything about the way you are, in all of your queerness and all of your identities. You are fearfully and wonderfully made by nature or by a Creator, like whatever you believe, you are a made thing, you're made of stardust and atoms and genes and personality and spirit and soul. Like whatever you believe, like you are good. And you are wonderful.

LC: Ellie, did you start singing in your head, Christina Aguilera then? Because I did, and I saw your face and I was like, did Ellie just do the same thing as me?

EB: No, I was singing something else. I was gonna say, so you're saying we were born this way?

AK: Not only were you born this way, but it's wonderful.

EB: I'm beautiful in my way. Because God makes no mistakes. I'm on the right track, baby. I was born this way. Right? That's this verse.

LC: If this podcast couldn't get any gayer. We're like Christina, Lady Gaga, let's go.

EB: Christina Aguilera, Lady Gaga, and the Bible.

AK: It's really fitting because the Psalms are all like songs that you're supposed to be singing. So this is very fitting.

EB: Yes. Yes. Yes.

LC: That's really beautiful.

EB: I love it. Don't be a drag, just be a queen.

AK: Yep.

EB: Psalm 139:14. That's my interpretation.

AK: But that rhymes. It's what you just did there.

LC: It did! You're a poet, Ellie. We have more than one poet on this podcast. I love it.

EB: I love it. I mean, I also just love – thank you for bringing this up to us because we know that people use the Bible in a negative way towards queer people. I find it very empowering when people like Brian, who we're going to talk about today, really take the text and own it. Not like, hey, we're going to ignore the text. No, let's take parts of this text and really, like, embrace it. Because the things that we talk about in the Bible are like, like you said, this gorgeous verse of like, we are beautiful because we are beautifully made.

AK: And not saying like, the Bible is cool like, you know, despite these few passages, like we can find ways to love the Bible. It's like, no, the Bible is so queer. Like the Bible is queer. I'm not even just talking about queer characters. I'm talking about queer ideas, the Bible queers our understandings of power relations. The Bible is super queer and radical and woke and socially just. I mean, it's problematic and fucked up. But we've already talked about that. And so...

LC: I'm bored of talking about that. Let's talk about the happy stuff.

AK: Yeah, no, it's just like, this is the really radical stuff is the reclamation and the centering of queerness in Christianity, not just like, the inclusion. Inclusion means like, oh, yeah, you're allowed, but like centering queerness in Christianity is possible.

EB: Also, yeah, something that Brian from Queer Theology told us is it's okay to be queer and Christian, it's just the starting place, not the finishing line. I love that of like, like you're saying – it's like, when people say like, oh, tolerance, right is like, the bare minimum, honestly.

LC: Like, fuck tolerance! Sorry.

EB: That was like below the bare minimum, right? But we can bring our full queer selves into interpreting this text and really get a lot more out of it. So I love that from Brian. I'm excited to see where this episode takes us and I hope that all of you out there get some empowerment from it. But thank you so much, Alyse, for talking to us about this verse.

AK: Pleasure.

EB: We will be back after a quick break.

LC: We're back. As we said at the top of the episode, this episode, we're discussing queer ways to read the Bible. Center it on queerness, baby.

EB: We're going to start off today's episode with a personal story from Father Shannon TL Kearns, AKA Father Shay, one of the cofounders of the Queer Theology podcast and platform.

Shannon TL Kearns: So I grew up a fundamentalist evangelical, who then became the first openly transgender man ordained to the old Catholic priesthood. And so I bring into that old Catholic tradition all of the best and sometimes the worst of my evangelical upbringing, and my sojourn through mainline progressive Christian spaces. So like radical Christian is probably the best descriptor, but filtered through all of these other different mostly Protestant, but now Catholic Christian traditions.

LC: So what does radical Christian mean?

STLK: I think for me, it is really both deep rootedness in tradition, but also a sense of the liberative power of Christianity, and not just Christianity, right? Like I don't believe in Christianity as exclusive or excluding other paths to God. But for me, there is something in the Christian story about the idea of the reconciliation of all things and that we can be a part of – we can play a part in that work of reconciliation. And so for me, that also means standing against and resisting all of the forces of empire that would keep us from that reconciliation of all things, which in an America that is rapidly sliding to Christian nationalism, slash is already there, that work becomes much more important and much more radical. And really, for me, like the radical is going back to the root of what this movement has always been about, this justice work and this reconciliation of all things. I mean, I feel like for me, my entire queer existence has been joy, other than when straight and cis people get involved, right? For me, it's very much about like – my experience of coming out was only traumatic because there were straight and cis people in my life who were jerks. And my experience of queerness and transness was only traumatic because of growing up in a tradition that said there wasn't space for me. And frankly, growing up in a world that said there wasn't space for me. But coming to terms with my own identity, and really embracing that and going on the process of transition has been all joy, right? It's been returning home to myself, it's been reclaiming of my body. It's been just really, really powerful. It's been a resurrection experience for me. So by the time I came out as trans, I had two coming out moments. I came out as gay first and was like, this still isn't quite it. Then I came out as trans a couple of years later. And by the time I came out as trans, I had really done a lot of unlearning of the harmful messages I had received about LGBT folks, growing up in evangelical church. I had like, found new ways to read the Bible, I no longer believed that being gay was sinful. And so coming out as trans wasn't a struggle as far as like a theological struggle. Because I had already done that work. The thing that happened that I wasn't expecting was how my trans identity and coming back into my body as a trans person changed the way that I read scripture, and returned me to a like integrated Christianity that combined head and heart. After I came out the first time, my theology and my faith became really intellectual, and it needed to be that way. But when I came out as trans, and started doing work through a trans theological lens, suddenly, my head and my heart were joined again. And that was something that I wasn't expecting to happen. And it's been a real gift. And I'm so, so grateful for it.

EB: I love, as we're talking about reclaiming, that this has come up for us before, of that queer existence being a joy. And I do feel like, if you are a queer person, you can understand that, of coming back to the Born This Way, of like, how can my joy and my love be sinful or bad, right? Like, it doesn't make sense when you're living it. So I love that Father Shay has reclaimed that for himself.

LC: Absolutely. I think that's very important. So what does this way of reading scripture entail, exactly? I hear all of our listeners asking.

EB: This is exactly what Brian and Father Shay try to do with Queer Theology. Here's Brian, Queer Theology's other co-founder, followed by Father Shay again.

Brian G. Murphy: Yeah, and I would say that reading the Bible, and developing spiritual practices that fit for you, and understanding how your queerness and your faith could fit together – those are all skills that you can learn and you can practice. Obviously, like Shay went to seminary, I studied religion and filmmaking in college, and then did intensive civil rights nonviolence training. And so I've been, for my whole entire adult life, working with telling stories and reading the Bible. And so like, my process now is probably different than my process when I was 18. But also that, like, now, this is kind of our job, but it's our job because we started doing it and we found how valuable it was. And we wanted to share that with other people. Like I studied filmmaking because I wanted to be a filmmaker, and I studied religion, because I had angst about being queer that I needed to work out. And I did that. And then I saw how powerful combining my queerness and my faith could be, and then combining that with either telling stories through film, or through video or through plays or through sermons that, you know, they're all sort of a similar art form of telling stories. And so even if you're not going to be a pastor, or an activist, or an author, I think it's still vitally important for everyone, but not just queer people, especially queer people, but everyone really, to figure out, like, how do we read the stories that are sacred to us? And how do we locate ourselves within those and you know, Shay has a Master's degree and we, you know, both have an undergraduate degree and, you know, lots of years on the road doing activism, but like, you don't need to do that. And so we tried to sort of like, take all of that and to really distill it down to like, what's most important for people who aren't going to be professional filmmakers, or professional pastors, to learn just for their personal practice? And so that's why we teach workshops on digging into the Bible for the first time or to revisiting the Bible and how to read the Bible well, how to read the Bible from a queer perspective, so that you don't have to, like, go to seminary and rack up $100,000 in debt, just to sort of lead a rich spiritual life. But I think it's a skill that you can and you sort of need to practice in order to do it well, but it's well worth it, whether you self-study, or whether you get some help through classes or books to sort of figure out how to do that.

STLK: The other thing that evangelical churches teach you that is not true is that you can just like pick up the Bible and read it and understand it. That like in English, like you're gonna get all of the nuances, and you can just do your thing. And it's a yes, and. Like, you can just pick up the Bible and read it and draw meaning and comfort. But to really fully understand it, you actually do have to learn a bit more about the historical context and the political context and all of that stuff. And like Brian said, you don't have to go to seminary to do that. But you do need to invest in learning some of those tools. And so some of what we do is try to make those tools easier and more accessible for folks or to break it down in a way that is digestible, but also really encouraging folks to take the next level and go a little bit deeper.

LC: Okay, so I was a little under the weather this weekend. And I like to watch old trash TV when I'm not feeling well. And I've been rewatching Desperate Housewives, shout out to our podcast friends, Wisteria Gays. Anyway, there was an episode, one of those recent episodes I watched was at, I think it was a Presbyterian Church, so I pay attention. And it was like Breeze Church, and Lynette like, puts her hand up in the sermon. And is like, I have some questions. And Bree is just like, oh my god, I cannot believe this. I'm so embarrassed. So when I was looking at this it was like, oh, no, just like pick up a Bible and read it. But anyway, it's a great episode.

EB: I do love a good Desperate Housewives.

LC: Oh my god. And like Lynette just being like, I have questions. Why are people suffering? Explain.

EB: We all have questions, and that's why we're doing this show. Here we go. So one way of reading the Bible in a more queer affirming way is taking advantage of these tools, whether it's through queer theology, or getting a copy of the Queers the Word 40 Day devotional, or the Queer Bible Commentary.

LC: We heard from a lot of our guests this season that once you start reading the Bible through this queer lens or any other like social justice-oriented lens, you'll never see Christianity the same way again.

EB: Here's M Jade Kaiser with more on this. M is the co-founder and director of Enfleshed, a collaborative effort to create and facilitate resources of spiritual nourishment for collective liberation.

M Jade Kaiser: So one of my loves about religion and spirituality is doing theology. In seminary was where I was introduced to these concepts of theology that are queer-based, liberation-based, like black liberation theology, womanist theology, feminist theology. And having grown up under these, like conservative fundamentalist religious ideas, being exposed to ways that people were talking about God through the lens of queerness, or racial justice, or feminism, etcetera, was like, just world-changing for me. It just met me in the right places to like make sense of things that weren't otherwise making sense, right. And so I just fell head over heels with the like, idea of talking about God and divinity from these wildly different angles that felt so freeing to me. And surely, they might feel free to other people in a similar position, right. I just loved that. And so then I was also able to see how much the ideas I did inherit and embody had done damage to me and to others. So just this thread of theology has just shaped my capacity and desire to think about God and what we mean by God over the years. And so my understanding of what I even mean when I say that word God has like, shifted so, so much from where I started and continues to shift all the time, which is something that I feel like queerness has really gifted. My sense of religion and spirituality is the sense of like, it's always changing, like what I mean, and what I experience in this world of God is something that is fluid and is shifting and is unstable, and it pushes back against anything that's been overly defined and we're too sure of or is unquestioned because it's so normal. I love like thinking about religion in that kind of queer way.

LC: But wait, how do you think about religion in a queer way? Especially if it seems like queer things are hard to find in the Bible?

EB: Here's M again, to let us know.

MJK: In some ways it does, like there are scripture verses that – well, even that is complicated, right, like the language of quote, unquote, homosexuality wasn't even in the Bible, you know, originally. And so I guess more simply, what I would want to say about that is like, people have always been prejudiced in various ways. We are the same humans we have always been in the sense that there are always norms and dominant views in cultures that we then hold against minorities. And that is true for the Bible as much as it is any other historical document. And so that is one way of reading the Scripture, is to look at the prejudices of the people who were represented in those scriptures. And then to say that's what God wants or believes, and then to condemn queer people. Or we can say, gosh, here are some complicated human realities that get mixed up with divinity, because that's how we engage divinity as humans. And prejudice is there, just like it is still in all of us. And we have to learn how to disentangle those prejudices and those evils from our understanding of what love is, of who God is. And that's always a part of what we're called to do. And there are so many things in the scriptures that are queer and queer-affirming, even if it's not as simple as like – getting as brass tacks as like, a woman and a woman, you know, having sex together. Like it's just so much more interesting than that, to like – let's talk about, like how the incarnation can be understood as an act of transition, as God saying, like, "Hey, I've been here all along, and you keep missing me, you keep like – you didn't see me in the bush, you didn't see me in the cloud, you didn't see me in all these ways. So like, let's try Jesus, you know, like, let me reveal myself, the same God I've been, you know, in a different way. Because you can't seem to recognize who I am, you know, so here's another try." And so I think like when we bring the concepts that queer people teach us about life and God to the scriptures, then we can see there's queerness all over it, and we can see how like Jesus was queer. I don't know what his sexuality was. Nobody does. He didn't talk about it. But like, was he a non-normative, like, man in his context, in how he practiced his relationships and his ethics against dominant norms and empire? Oh, yeah. He was so queer in that way, you know, like, in his little family, like this young woman who was like, just pregnant. We don't know where that came from, you know, right. And then this man in this culture where like, he's taught to deny her, but like, chooses her anyway – like, what a queer little family. It's not about sexuality, but it's still very queer. And that is the like, the place of understanding what it means to birth God, like, you know, it's everywhere. But you have to look at it differently, yeah.

LC: Okay, so can we or our listeners practice doing this?

EB: Yes, we can. Let's hear how M does it with the loaves and fishes story. For our listeners, or anyone who might not know this loaves and fishes story, there's a story in the Bible where Jesus literally turns like very minimal food into an incredible amount of food for a huge amount of people, loaves of bread and fishes, and multiplies them. So M is gonna talk to us about that.

MJK: I find the overarching ethic of sort of strange choices, strange ethics, strange relationships to be such a helpful way to look at so many of the different stories. Like we live in a world that tells us to hoard our wealth, if we have access to it. And even if we don't, hoard whatever resources you have, whether you have a few or a lot, right? And the strange thing to do is to say, no matter what I have, let's see what we can do with it together, right? Like that is a weird thing to do under a system of capitalism, that is queering resources and how we understand sharing them, right. And so I see Jesus doing that in loaves and fishes. And then there's the rich man with his barn, right? Who like has the field of abundance, and then he's like, "where am I gonna store it? All of this, I don't have the room, I'll build a bigger building." Instead of like, "Where's my community that I could share this with? Like, where are they, you know?" So many different stories. The rich young ruler who's like, doing everything right, but like, won't get rid of his goods. You know, I mean, just so many different examples of resource hoarding. So certainly that. Family, right, like I see Jesus queering family, not just in the story of Mary and Joseph, but like, again, I'm so bad with like, remembering references, but there's one story where somebody's like, Jesus is busy teaching, and somebody's like, "Hey, you know, your family wants to talk to you." And he says, "Who's my family?" He says, "Anybody who does what, you know, the will of the Divine asks of us is my brother, is my sibling, is my sister." Like queering where our loyalties should align, like what our relational priorities are. Not centering given family just because, right. And queer people know the importance of thinking about family differently, and choosing our family. Yeah, there's so many and again, when he's on the cross, he's like, "Hey, here's your new son, Mary, right and here's your new mother." Like always messing with the boundaries of a family and how we relate to each other.

LC: Oh my god, Jesus was a communist?

EB: I guess so.

LC: Shock, horror!

EB: I mean, this particular story is a communist story. You are correct.

LC: Wait until the Republicans hear about this, who's telling them? Let's get 'em on the phone.

EB: I mean I think plenty of people have been telling them and they do not want to believe it. So you're not wrong on that. But yeah, I mean, I love this idea of like sharing resources instead of –

LC: Of course!

EB: – as we're talking about a society that hoards resources, and Jesus is like, "Well, how about we share with everyone so that no one goes hungry?" It's pretty beautiful.

LC: What a flipping concept. So this queer lens isn't just about finding the queer or gender non-conforming characters in the Bible. It's also about a whole different outlook on the text: looking for friction, disruption, resisting anything normative, foregrounding previously silenced voices and perspectives, and queering traditional understandings of things.

EB: Here's the Reverend Jakob Hero-Shaw with some thoughts on this. Jakob is the senior pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church, or MCC of Tampa. MCC is a Protestant denomination founded by and for queer people.

Reverend Jakob Hero-Shaw: Being queer is, at least in my understanding, in my lived experience, is about more than just gender and sexuality. It's about being able to have like a completely different worldview and think things differently. And in that way, like not in the sexuality way, but in that way of the broader worldview sense, I see that Jesus was very queer. Jesus was like shaking things up and saying – all these things that you've been told that are how things are, this is not the purpose. And to me that's just so queer.

LC: I remember having this conversation with our friend Jacob Thomas, Ellie, who I think that you had them on your show?

EB: Yes, love Jacob.

LC: I remember having this conversation with them. Before I knew that I was bisexual and just thought that it was totally normal behavior for straight women to sleep with other women. Everyone's doing it. I remember I had this conversation with them, and they sort of said something kind of like this, which is like, even if you like – you're queer in your identity, even if it's not your sexuality. Something to that effect. And I remember just feeling like that felt very right. So I really love this interpretation of, you know, it being more about gender and sexuality and more about just like a worldview.

EB: Yes, radical beliefs not being, "the opposite of being normative is queer." And we've also heard a lot of our guests calling this kind of religious philosophy and practice "liberation theology." The Reverend Altagracia Perez-Bullard shared some really interesting thoughts with us about this from her personal life and her areas of expertise. Reverend Perez-Bullard is the director of contextual ministry and assistant professor of practical theology at Virginia Theological Seminary. Here she is.

Reverend Altagracia Perez-Bullard: I guess I fall in the box of like a liberation theologian. I don't guess I am a liberation theologian, in terms of my sense of the way I engage the Bible, I engage theology. And so I believe that God is in the business of freeing us from all oppressive forces – material, spiritual, cultural. And so for me, especially now, kind of at this age and this stage of my life, I do think of a lot of what I do – like the image in my mind when I'm trying to think of like, how will I say something? Or what will I do? How will I engage? Who am I writing for? Sometimes, depending on what I'm writing. I do think of like, queer young people of color, like black indigenous people of color, young adults, that really feel alienated by the loud voices of Christians in the United States whose message is very judgmental and harsh and obsessed with certain things. I feel like, why are you obsessed? So yeah, for me, it means that I get to preach the good news of Jesus Christ, as the person who came, you know – through whom God comes to us to set us free. And that means to set us free from all the things that bind us. I think God created us beautiful and amazing. And it was that God's intention that we should be so broken, and so that the liberation and healing is what God wants for us. And so to be a Christian, for me, is to share that I, too, have experienced that in my life, to continue to heal from hurtful things myself, but then to let everybody else in on the secret. This can be really good for you, this could be a blessing. God loves you and God wants you, wants to be in relationship with you, and that God knows who you are and loves you like who you are. The rest of us human beings might have a hard time, but that's our problem. The only way I guess I've survived in the churches – there's always a distinction between the gospel for me, and the church. The church is a very human institution. And we need to decolonize the church. It is a white supremacy project in the United States. It is coddled and nurtured and nursed to express all of the white supremacy movements that exist in this country. It is a Western imperialist project. It is an enslaving project. It is a genocidal project. Like the church has been the handmaiden of the forces of governments that have raped and pillaged all around the world. There is no question about that. And that they use scripture to do that. People use scripture for everything, but I don't think that that's what the Gospels are about. I see, in the midst of the history that is expressed in Scripture, a thread of hope and life that is about liberation and freedom from oppression, even though clearly there are colonizing forces going on, there are violent things and colonizing things going on in the Bible as well. But, you know, as I understand Jesus, and as I understand God and what God calls us to, by definition, it is a decolonizing project, because colonization is oppressive, and that is contrary to the gospel.

LC: Reverend Perez-Bullard raised an important point about how we can use liberation theology to decolonize the church, which is something that the Reverend Jeanelle Ablola talked about from their firsthand experience. Reverend Ablola, to remind you, is a queer, trans, non-binary child of immigrants, a Filipino Filipinx, born, raised and living in the US diaspora, and is currently serving as lead pastor at Pine United Methodist Church in San Francisco. Here's Reverend Ablola.

Reverend Jeanelle Ablola: A lot of things that come up for people around like Christianity is also its colonial history. And there's no denying that Methodism made its way into my family for generations because of US colonial history, and before that, Catholicism making its way into the Philippines through Spain, right. So I think the Philippines is still like 80% Catholic, you know, in regards to power and culture, right. So Methodism in the Philippines is definitely a product of the US coming in and trying to, quote unquote, liberate the Philippines from Spain, and then Christianize them, even though they were already Catholic. You know, I think these movements for liberation actually help me in my Christianity, because it gives me a practical way to be a person of faith. I mean, I guess you could be a person of faith anywhere you go. But the context of the severity of human rights violations in the Philippines, the context of – I mean, I had mentioned that the Bible was written in the context of a feudal socio-economic system in the Philippines. It's still a semi-feudal, colonial, socio-economic system that very much caters to US interests. All of that said, there's this one theologian, Professor Revelation Velunta, who is a professor at Union Theological Seminary in the Philippines. When I started getting involved in this work, he was working on Jeepney Hermeneutics. So the Jeepney – it's like one of the main public transportation in the Philippines, like my parents rode a Jeepney, like it's old. So Jeepneys are actually made from vehicles that the US left behind from World War II, and from previous times the US military had presence in the Philippines. So what the Filipinos had done is that they extended the back of it so that it's sort of like a bus, they took out the things that held the weapons and the armaments and put seats in. They also decorated them, if you go to the Philippines, and you see Jeepney, every single one is different. They're very colorful. And so now they're a means of bringing community together, they're a means of taking people from one place to another. The seats in the Jeepneys are facing each other. And so you're with other people in that space. Also within a Jeepney, how you pay is that you pass your fare down from one person to another. And while the Jeepney driver is driving, he is able to take the fare and also make change if he has to. And then that change is passed back person to person, back to the person who it, you know, who the change goes to. So within the Jeepney there's this sense of like community, even for just a moment. Professor Velunta is talking about how these vehicles that were made for war, that were brought into our lands for violence, have been transformed into these vehicles for community and these vehicles to help bring people together. These are vehicles of trust in a very basic way. And so how can we use the Bible in that way, the Bible that's been used as a vehicle for violence, as a vehicle for imperialism, how can we then transform it to be a vehicle for community, a vehicle for our collective liberation?

LC: I love this. I have been to the Philippines. I love the Philippines. And I love the Jeepneys. And I did not realize how radical they were and how they could be applied to our podcast. But like, shout out, although traffic in Manila, worst in the world, I would say, of all the places I've been to, worst traffic. Famously bad traffic, which is why we need more public transportation, like Jeepneys.

EB: True. I love, too, this idea that Jeanelle is talking about, of like, reclamation, right. Like reclamation as a force of decolonization.

LC: Yes.

EB: Which is awesome.

LC: 100%. So to go back to where we started this episode, with Father Shay identifying as a radical Christian, is this what that means? Is that how they interpret the text through this queer lens?

EB: Yes, that's a part of it. And also how they live out the message of the text, especially its calls for social justice. So we asked all our guests this season what being a Christian means to them, and here are a few of our favorite answers. All from LGBTQ clergy, starting with Baptist pastor Tim Schaefer, then Reverend Hero-Shaw, then Reverend Dawn Bennett, who is a pastor developer at The Table in Nashville.

Tim Schaefer: Yeah, for me personally, it is this identity of following Christ, right, the example of Jesus in our gospels. And this idea that the gospel is good news for people, and in my opinion, especially people who are vulnerable, especially people who are at the margins. How many times does Jesus talk about how you should treat women and children who would have been the most vulnerable groups of people in his time, or the poor? That is, I think, kind of the overarching message of the of the gospel, that's what I think it means to follow Jesus. And I think that extends to the queer community as well.

RJHS: For me, following Jesus is a central part of Christianity. And in that broader idea, for me, the most important part is community – building community, supporting community. I feel like solidarity is a huge part of that, and what we're called to in Christian community, supporting each other. We have a little thing that we started saying in my church a few years ago, which is "solidarity as discipleship." And solidarity is difficult, it's hard work. Because you have to really struggle through who you are, and what does it mean to support communities outside of your own identity, and understanding that the struggles are intertwined with each other.

Pastor Dawn Bennett: So I consider myself a person of faith, even though I am an ordained pastor in a mainline Protestant denomination, which is a religion, right? But for me, religion gets very wrapped up and entangled with rules and doctrine and creeds and sometimes politics and money and things that are difficult when living in community, right. And sometimes it does not make good bedfellows. Religion does not always make a good bedfellow. But to be a person of faith, for me, means that my life has purpose, my life as a person, my life as a parent, my life as a pastor, it has a purpose. And so to me, that's what being a person of faith is, a person who's deeply engaged in the things of my life, the things that I understand and things that matter, things that I don't understand, and just navigating that space of what it is to be an embodied human being in a relationship with a divine entity that is bigger than myself. For me, that's what it is to be a person of faith, because how I understand my lived experience as a human being, and my relationship with other people, it requires of me to think of more than just me. And so the way that I do that is through the lens of faith. It's just a tool that I use to operate as a human, really.

EB: I love what everyone has said, but particularly Dawn, because I think that's like, a big part of what we're talking about in this episode, right? That like, the institution of religion, versus like, the faith, the beliefs, like really living that kindness, and helping others. And especially like, as a Catholic, I feel like that hits hard, right? Because it's like, Catholicism itself is like so institutional, so many rules, and when you break it down to that just like core tenet of like, believing in a higher power that leads you to living a life of kindness and justice. I just feel like that really resonates with me.

LC: I also like it because it makes it feel like it doesn't mean you have to be like, quote unquote, like Christian. It's more about being like someone with a higher purpose, which could extend to like, anyone.

EB: Yeah, I mean, I think there's plenty of people who don't identify as a Christian, who live their life through this deeper meaning, higher purpose. Not to say that that means that they are like Christians in that way. But it's just like, that is an innately human thing.

LC: Yes, beautiful.

EB: Also for all of our guests that have talked today, it's clear that none of these people are Christian despite being queer, like we talked about earlier, or that they found ways to merely reconcile their queerness with their religious identity. For these folks, queerness is absolutely central to their Christianity and to their role as church leaders. Here's Reverend Ablola on that idea.

RJA: For me, to be Christian is to – I mean, before it was about, as I said, it was about the answers. Now it's more so about the questions, and asking quality questions. The main question that kind of led me to where I was, was this question about, well, what are we supposed to be doing in the meantime? How am I supposed to live as a person of faith in this life, in this lifetime? And so I was reading a lot of Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, these are people that I found in the aisles of Borders, you know, whatever I could get my hands on at the time. And then they were able to just – reading them helped to sort of ground me in regards to extending salvation, not just about me and my own personal salvation and my own relationship to the Divine, but extending that to community. Like it's about salvation, our collective salvation, our collective liberation. So for me, being a Christian now is participating in the work of our collective liberation, in our collective healing. I think that being queer helps form and shape and mold my Christianity, or how I am a Christian in the sense that it allows me to question, and it allows me to redefine, it allows me to sort of think beyond binary understandings of things. And it's also helped me question power dynamics. And the Bible is so full of power dynamics and relationships where politics, where economics, where all of those things were impacting people, the people in the Bible. What is most important to me is the ability to wrestle with the text, this text that's been used to hurt us and harm us. How can we make it into a text that is liberating, you know? Because it's, I mean, it's possible. It's not impossible. I'm sorry, I just have to shout this out. And I know like, it's a lot of Desperate Housewives for one episode, but literally the outcome of the episode – like Bree said to Lynette, she was like, churches about answers, not questions. And then the like the pastor, Reverend, whatever of the church was, like, you know, church is about questions and answers. And then Bree was like, "Oh my god, I'm totally wrong. And Lynette is right." And then they had a reconciliation. It was very sweet. Anyway, I'm sorry. That's it. That's all I'm going to talk about Desperate Housewives the whole season. It's just fresh in my brain.

EB: That's okay. I'm like, I'm gonna bring it back to psalms and the Bible, but that's okay. It just makes me think of like, that is one of my favorites. There's a psalm called "Lead Me Lord," that sings about like, "Blessed are the poor in spirit longing for their Lord, for the coming kingdom shall be theirs." Like, I just love that like, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." I know that's like a Bible verse. But like, that always just like, gets to me of like, when you're talking about the world, like the people who are the most blessed in the Bible are the people who have nothing, and who still give of themselves, right?

LC: Yes, Jesus said this, right? Blessed be the meek.

EB: Yeah, it's not about like, riches. It's like, there's another parable too, that's talking about like this one person who has like, let's just say in like, common day currency, like they have $50 and they give $45 to the poor, right? And then this person who like has tens of thousands and gives $100. Like, actually the person who is more like kind and compassionate is like the person who's giving as much as they can give, because they care more about others. And like fighting against – I love this – like rising up against evil together.

LC: Overthrowing the rich, I love it! Like, do it! That's what Jesus was about. And speaking of Jesus, that's who we'll be discussing next episode.

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

Brian G. Murphy: Jesus is the one who flipped the tables, the moneychanger tables, in the temple. And we don't like to think of this Jesus that is angry, right? Society tells us that certain emotions are okay and certain emotions are not okay. And then there's Jesus who has this righteous anger, who gets upset because people are being taken advantage of. And I think that's a valid reason to get angry.

Reverend Jeanelle Ablola: Well, one that's been on my mind most recently is just Jesus feeding the 5,000. I mean, not Jesus feeding 5,000, but the 5,000 people being fed because of them coming together and pooling their resources. And then the disciples going to Jesus and saying, "Look, you know, we have this problem, people are hungry." And Jesus, his response is, "You feed them." And I really liked that because it takes it off of him as an individual. He's not the superhero. He's just like, "You all have the capability to feed these people. And so let's feed these people together."

LC: Thanks for listening to Sweetbitter. Our next episode will be released on the 17th of April.

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

LC: Like any church, we have an offering plate. We can’t pass it down the pew, but if you can give us your tithings, please do at Patreon. You can find us 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. Our audio engineers are Cora Cicala and Ana López Reyes, and our artwork is by Istela Illustrated.

LC: Thank you to our guests this week, Father Shay, Brian G. Murphy, M Jade Kaiser, Reverend Jakob Hero-Shaw, Reverend Altagracia Perez-Bullard, Reverend Jeanelle N. Ablola, Tim Schaefer, and Reverend Dawn Bennett. You can read more about our guests and where to find them on our website,

sweetbitterpodcast.com.

EB: Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and Bluesky at @sweetbitterpod. Stay sweet!

LC: And bitter!