Song: All God's Creatures | Article on Nonbinary Identity

Friends,

My home church did exactly what I suggested for Memorial Day. It was a sermon on mercy, a(complicated) critique of war, and honoring of those that have died in a the most beautiful way. (Any critique of war that is not complicated is not useful, either.) It was moving and faithful.

Walking gets easier and easier, but I get tired pretty easily.

-Liz

The Genesis of My Faith

A neighbor, at his daughter's funeral, shared one of the eulogies. It was a deep exploration of faith and included the emphatic line: "I believe in God, I believe in God, I believe in God".

Maybe he was trying to convince himself? Perhaps it was a question, then an answer. Perhaps it was pleading, confidence, or desperation. All I can say is that I knew what he meant. When my life was hard I refused to talk to God, but I was confident God was there (and worthy of my anger.) When my life was full of doubt I argued with myself about God's nature, but not God's existence. When my life is doing well, my belief is expressed as praise.

The very foundation of my faith is Genesis 1. The whole chapter. It is both the essential of my faith, and a good explanation of how I use the bible to support my faith. I cannot cover the fullness of this text here, but I will get at some of the fundamentals for me.

I always start in the middle.

Then God said, "Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion/stewardship over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created humans in Their image, in the image of God They created them; male and female They created us. (Genesis 1:26-27, NRSVUE, slightly edited).

You can see right away that in this text God is plural--let US make humans. That's not my edit. We read this on Trinity Sunday in part because of that plurality. While I'm a strict monotheist, I do think God is know, or seen, or experienced, in many different ways. My objection with the trinity is not that it is too many, but that it is not enough. I like the Hindu suggestion that there is only one God, with hundreds of manifestations.

The Hebrew for God here is Elohim, definitely plural. One scholarly explanation is that the earliest followers of the God of Israel were not yet monotheists when this very ancient text first was told. They would grow from a faith in many gods, to our God, to the one Best god, to our modern understanding of a single Deity.

What it means for today is that God's pronouns, when the Hebrew Bible is using Elohim, is clearly They. Elohim is used for God over 2500 times. When editors substitute "he" they are editing the text to match the other non-plural words for God, and to match the later patriarchal writing.

Next we see that God makes humans in God's image. I don't think this means that we look like Them. I think it means that something of our essence is that of God's essence. Not that any individual in the room is God, but all of us together, are indeed God. Panentheism is the word for the idea that God is in all the things of the world, and God is also separate, the creator, of the created world.

I read an article suggesting that humans have created God in our own image--that we have it backwards, or that God is not real. But I don't think that proves anything. We probably have created descriptions of God that are way too human. Not because that is all that God is, but because that is all we can comprehend. Perhaps it is the part of us that is in God's image that can understand God at all. Maybe butterflies or elephants see a part of God that we do not recognize. Our creation of God in our own image does not reduce the reality of God, it simply points out our inability to know all of Them.

Humans, based on these verses (and Psalm 8!) are like God. I've written earlier about how I believe Jesus, the new Adam, really gets this in a way ordinary humans don't. Jesus is a model for how we should get in touch with the divine within us, created by God.

Humans are created, male and female God created us.

We humans, in our inability to see completely, do this weird thing with this verse. We assume that and means or. Because the earliest followers of Elohim specified that God create male and female, some think that each human must therefore be only male or female. It's kind of odd that we make this mistake--and clearly does not mean or.

We also have the example of Genesis 1:10, after creating land, God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together God called seas. I mean no one thinks that there is no water on the land mass, we can see rivers, lakes, and ponds, but also marshes and wetlands, where the land and the water are together creating a combined thing. And under the sea, and popping up as Islands, some permanent, some not. And spits of land that come and go with the tide, somewhat sea, and somewhat land. And yet no one is calling for all these natural things to be clearly one or the other, because, well because we know that when God creates this and that, it simply does not ever mean this OR that.

I haven't even gotten to why every human deserves to be treated as the image of God, or to how dominion means caretaker, not abuser of the earth, nor to any of the other beautiful theologies of the first creation story. Genesis 1, In the beginning God created faith.

What is your most basic theology? Let me know what's happening.

All of God's creatures have a place in the choir, by Celtic Thunder (4:13).

Christian Century Article on non-binary identities.

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