Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 NRSV
https://bible.com/bible/2016/1co.6.19-20.NRSV
Are trans people ‘on a sacred journey’?
The bodies we have, I believe constitue ourselves, our lives. They are not just animated containers. The scripture above would speak to followers of Jesus about how their conduct in their bodies matters. Being a follower of Jesus is more than doing no harm to others it includes doing no harm to our selves. There is no body spirit divide and in harming ourselves we harm the sacred other. So what does this mean if you suffer body dysphoria; what if the body you have causes you pain because it does not match the gender your brain is telling you you are? Biology has got it wrong.
I want to approach this through relics and the facts of science, to establish the sanctity of material and of life, the twists of religion and the twists of genetics.
Relics are material remains of the life of a person. They can be body parts. When they are body parts or even whole bodies, I sense within myself an offence at their veneration. Something deeply human, to honour the dead, has been overcome for the sake of religion, parading their remains. Or has it? The sanctity of a person residing in their material being is a deeply human reaction; we honour bodies and ashes. An unburied body is an offence. We visit graves and, some sense the presence of a person at a grave side. Personally I am overcome at the graveside of my sister. Maybe to offer people the experience of the presence of a person through relics is acceptable. I am not convinced but am prepared to accept it is a human reaction to the same feeling I get on being at the grave.
The relics of Christ would be his clothes, his blood and the water that streamed from his side, elements of the cross and his burial cloths but the Bible speaks nowhere of these being collected to be venerated or admits such a practice. But there is a human instinct to invest the material remains with the essence of the deceased. Photographs, pew seat covers, vestry brooms all have significance and if they belonged to a holy person, well…
Jesus is recorded as emotional, he ate and sweated and was physically mature.
In the words of the notorious Ezra Pound,
Oh we drank his “Hale” in the good red wine
Ballad of the Goodly Fere
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o’ men was he.
Ezra Pound – 1885-1972
In all ways Christ identified with humanity, even in death. In death the material of his body remained to be resurrected, the first fruits of a new materiality, fully human but glorified, a new creation subsuming the old, the old creation wholly the new, is how I see it. So in his death and resurrection, for me, Christ reveals the mystery of all creation, the sacredness of all matter. We breath the air Christ breathed. His dead body was not just a skeleton, flesh and fluids it was the person of God, incarnate and dead. This for me is the holiness of Easter Saturday.
Paul teaches that identifying with Christ involves a physical infilling of the Spirit, an earnest of our future resurrection so that we are a new creation. He pictures our bodies as a temple of the Spirit, bringing what was to be into what is now, endowing us with the new materiality of the resurrected Christ. Part of our experience of life is the putting off of the old body and the putting on of the new.
All bodies are imperfect and subject to chance and time. No doubt some bodies are formed through choices made or marred by self harm or collateral damage. None are beyond redemption.
The number of people born intersex is between 0.02% and 0.05% and arguably 1.7%. Let’s take the low percentage of 0.02%. Today there were potentially 385,000 babies born today, so there were potentially 100 intersex babies. About 0.1% of babies are born with Downs syndrome, another chromosomal variation, so about 600 could have been born today. Every 3 seconds someone is said to be diagnosed with dimentia around the world. Each is a person. Each made in the image of God. As a Christian, the sanctity of life is important, and mercy killing, abortion and end of life occupy a sacred space.
The poet David Hodges, a Cistercian Monk taking the voice of a lady, identifying with a feminist agenda, writes,
If it’s a mistake
From Protect the Human in Watching for the Wind by David Hodges
it has no rights,
let it die
don’t incubate it.
Stick it in
a plastic bucket,
it’s not human
if I don’t want it.
I don’t like this poem, but the phrase, it’s not human if I don’t want it, is haughnting. My reaction to thus phrase confirms flesh is sacred to me; having choice doesn’t change the fact that a life has been lost and instinctively I feel the flesh should be honoured. My baby brother died very early in life and the practices of the times means he has no grave, yet he is memorialised in our family. I feel deeply that no life should be extinguished because it is less than perfect and all flesh that housed human life has dignity.
Medicine is allowing us to preserve life outside the womb earlier and earlier and share organs. Hopefully this is not leading to a brave new world where the womb is dispensed with; every intervention carries a risk of misuse. Organs can be harvested and bought. But, for now, it’s a true observation that we dispense with life and are controlling its coming into being in what seems to be an irrational way in the name of rationality.
So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:27 NRSV
https://bible.com/bible/2016/gen.1.27.NRSV
As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:27-28 NRSV
It’s only humanity that is so specified as being male and female in Genesis. Some fish swap gender as do worms, slugs and snails. Male bees, wasps and ants develop from the unfertilised eggs of females enabling the female genes to perpetuate.
I have written elsewhere of the miracle that is Jesus, formed from the flesh of Mary yet fully human. A harmonising of the Genesis story admits that humanity was formed male and female and became man and woman. The Fall story illuminates the consequence of division and Paul shows how Jesus restores peace. I personally can’t see how the writer of Genesis had gender politics in mind. I do see however that in God male and female coexist. God is beyond gender. Jesus’ humanity is beyond genetics.
To use Genesis in the debate on transgender identity does violence to its writing. Paul writes,
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:16-17 NRSV
https://bible.com/bible/2016/2ti.3.16-17.NRSV
What is the reproof, the correction, the training for righteousness in Genesis 1 and 2? It certainly is a challenge to the patriarchal culture of the day and so it seems for today. I believe in the plain reading of what it says and who Jesus is. All humanity is made in the image of God, however formed. Isn’t the story of the Fall an indictment of binary thinking, the knowledge of good and evil being the foundation of sin. Jesus commands us not to judge with the authority of Genesis.
“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.
Matthew 7:1-5 NRSV
https://bible.com/bible/2016/mat.7.1-5.NRSV
In the transgender debate this is for me a key scripture along with 1 Corinthians 6 . Jesus calls us to a high standard of righteousness; he takes the high ground in all disputes on the law from divorce to property. It is strange how we in the name of grace cheapen Jesus’ words. Jesus commands us to Love and not judge and calls us to a purity that would cut off our hands and rip out our eyes rather than lust, would cast ourselves into the sea with a weight round our neck rather than abuse a child.
We really have lost it when our only care is the integrity of our liturgy, the preservation of our hierarchy and power. Jesus calls us to a higher righteousness. Transgender people suffer because they feel their biology has let them down. They have a genetic mismatch in their minds.
Our only response to one another as Christians who follow Jesus must be to be with those who find blessing in the midst of destitution and hunger and thirst for the righteousness that does not judge and loves to the point of loving its enemies.
Currently we are sullying the message of the Jesus by engaging in the politics of transgender identity rather than acknowledging the sacred journey we are all on from brokenness to wholeness, immersed in the rule of God. Nobody I hope is advocating that we are called to anything less than love, anything less than humility, anything less than faithfulness: Jesus is our righteousness, and we are saved by his faithfulness.
Are we really saying that someone who is LGBTQ+ is less worthy than any of us; or anyone who is not male or female, or suffers from gender dysphoria, or has a mental disability or dimentia. Read Matthew 7 again and pray with me for God’s mercy; it’s so much more complex.
The relics of St Theres of Lissieux are seen as an ikon to a knowledge of Christ. I don’t agree and something in me cries out against such a theology. At a tender age Theres felt called to be a nun and as a nun she felt called to be a missionary. She suffered deeply physically and mentally and at one stage maybe lost her faith. However she saw in her suffering a way to heaven from where she would shower petals of love on all. She died very young. The little way she left has encouraged many to faith in Christ. Her words are her true relic. Her youthful wilfulness and dogged self identifying as a nun, who would never marry, was decided by her at the age of 15.
Mary, we believe, could have been 14 when she conceived Jesus. Her willingness to accept the word of the angel brought Christ into the world. This is not normal. Theres was not normal.
We should be very wary of excluding or dismissing what we see to be not normal. We are called to compassion, to be a source of hope and light. To wade into the argument on transgender therapy with scripture is not necessary. We should keep our arguments in the sphere of protecting the weak and vulnerable. If we exclude the weak and vulnerable our voice is not Christian.
When the woman caught in adultery was brought to Jesus, he again took the high ground as regards the law. However, in executing his judgement, we only see mercy. Jesus states that though she had transgressed, he did not condemn her. He let’s her depart with the word, not to sin again. He entrust her with a high calling. Let us go and do likewise.
https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/transgender-intersex-sex-chromosomes
We love it when you succeed. But this isn’t who you are: you are who you were made to be by God who loves you in every twist and turn of your lives. Whether you do well in the eyes of people or whether you really mess up, the Father loves you. Whether your efforts succeed or fail, you are of infinite value in the eyes of the Son.
You aren’t the letters after your name. You are the one praying alone, the one visiting the sick, the one caring for the vulnerable. You are the one living victorious in the mess of humanity. You are the light in the darkness. Be who you are.
M Emlyn Humphries 