Who is My Family?

Detail from the "Two Brothers" sarcophagus in the Vatican Museum.  Are they two brothers, Peter and Paul, or a couple?  Inquiring minds want to know?

Since I haven't posted in awhile, I thought I would post the sermon I preached at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Winston-Salem earlier this summer.  It was their Pride Sunday service:

I want to thank you for inviting me to speak on Pride Sunday.  I’m honored to mark this day with a congregation that stands in support of LGBTQ equality and justice.  I am, as I’m sure many of you are, still processing and trying to understand the implications of the vote on May 8.  Given this I want to frame my comments in relation to this vote, an event that signals that we still have a long way to go to winning over the hearts and minds of our neighbors.  Many of these neighbors, folks who supported the Amendment, identify as Christian and they claim the Bible as justification for their perspective, a perspective that is often described as “pro-family.”  Given the importance of this “family” language, the campaign against Amendment One was cast in similar terms, protecting all North Carolina families.  In some sense, the fight for LGBTQ equality here in North Carolina was cast in terms that tried to make LGBTQ individuals and families seem less threatening and, perhaps, even more “Christian.”  Gay and lesbians may seem scary, but surely families aren’t threatening . . . or are they?

As someone who studies and teaches the New Testament, I resist the notion that the writings of the New Testament unequivocally and primarily support the vision of family espoused by the Right in our country.  I also resist the suggestion that “family,” understood in terms of the heterosexual, nuclear family unit, is a superior value within the New Testament.  In contrast, the texts that we will explore today suggest early Christian ambivalence about traditional notions of family and prioritize love of God and neighbor before family and marriage.  Hopefully, thinking about these texts together can inform our conversations with our Christian neighbors, but also help us find pride in the variety of ways we configure our closest relationships.

Who is my family?

The Gospel of Mark is my favorite Gospel.  This is primarily because Mark’s depiction of Jesus is so different than the saccharine portraits of Jesus we’re used to seeing around us.  Unlike Luke and Matthew, Mark doesn’t dwell on the birth and infancy of Jesus, instead introducing us to an adult male who seeks baptism from a radical religious leader in the wilderness before preaching his own message about the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God (1:15).  Jesus in the Gospel of Mark is a man of few words and when he does speak, nobody quite understands him for he speaks in parables and riddles (Mark 4:12).  Mark’s Jesus is more interested in faith, than understanding.  Early on in the story of Mark, Jesus is noted for challenging social mores, eating alongside of tax collectors and sinners and even taking it upon himself to pronounce people forgiven of their wrongdoings.  That is, Jesus flaunts social expectations and acts in ways that seem . . . perhaps . . . a little queer.

In Mark 3, after healing a man’s withered hand on the Sabbath (another action that resists social convention), Jesus returns to his family home only to have a crowd begin to gather around him.  The crowd is so large, in fact, that Jesus and his followers can’t even eat, according to the text.  The scene is one of chaos.  Given this, those “around him,” which English translations often render as “his family,” try to restrain Jesus because he is “beside himself” or “out of his mind” (3:21).  In other words, those who should be close to him, namely his family, have been made so uncomfortable by Jesus’ actions that they think he’s crazy.  Perhaps they are embarrassed by the company he keeps.  Or, perhaps, they are offended by his failure to follow social rules and expectations.  Whatever the motivation of those around him, the idea that Jesus’ family might have tried to restrain because of his odd and inappropriate behavior is a striking image, as we think about all the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and trans children, teens, and even adults who are rejected by their families because their behavior is deemed strange, abnormal, or sinful.  Families, for many of us, can be threatening.

In the first century world of Roman occupied Judea, the land in which the Jesus movement emerged, family was the most important social unit.  According to historian Ross Kraemer, “much ordinary social life was family life” (p. 539).  You ate with your family, cooked with your family, worked with your family, worshipped with your family.  Your family determined who you would marry and what type of role you played in the wider community.  It was through the nexus of the family that you interacted with the rest of the world.  Families were so important in this context that an individual’s actions necessarily shaped how the entire family was understood and treated by the rest of the community.  The last thing anyone would want to do would be to bring shame upon his or her entire family in some way.

Eventually, after contending with some local officials who accuse him of being an agent of Satan, an evil person in other words, Jesus’ mother and brothers begin asking for Jesus.  At this point maybe they are trying to do some damage control.  If they could just get ahold of him and get him inside the house, maybe, perhaps, the family could still save face.  Jesus, however, resists their attempts at bringing him back into the household.  He rejects those who would have him restrained, turning to the crowd of people who had followed him there and asking the crowd, “Who are my mother and my brothers?”  In one question, Jesus challenges the importance of the biological and socially determined family.  And then, answering his own question, Jesus explains, “"Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."  Risking social shame by rejecting his biological family, Jesus proclaims that true family is defined by a shared commitment.  In these few lines, Jesus replaces his biological family with an intentional and alternative a family. 

The commitment that binds the alternative family affirmed by Jesus is a commitment to God’s will, which in this ancient tradition is associated with loving God with all one’s heart, soul, and mind and loving one’s neighbor as oneself (12:28-31).  This is described in Mark as “the greatest commandment.”  In fact, this understanding of God’s will as love of God and neighbor is not unique to Jesus, but was a part of the Jewish tradition of Jesus’ day.  This is important for a number of reasons.  First, Jesus does not define his true family by whether or not they do what he wants. This radical new family structure is not built out of narcissism, it is not a cult of personality.  Rather, it is a family based upon acting in love toward God and neighbor.  Second, given the history of Christian oppression of Jews and Judaism, it is important to recognize that in this moment Jesus isn’t rejecting his tradition, but building an alternative family based upon the heart of this tradition.

From my perspective, I find in this text a bit of good news, which is what “gospel” literally means.  For those of us who have been rejected by our families, we see that experience being acknowledged here.  The Gospel story is our story.  We also see that the option of creating an alternative family through intentional community is honored.  Moreover, we are offered a precedent for challenging the norm of what’s socially acceptable in terms of our family configurations.  Here, family, as traditionally understood and socially sanctioned, is not the ultimate good; instead, the love of neighbor that binds us to one another is essential.

The ambivalent attitude exhibited by Mark’s Jesus toward his biological family is not unique in early Christian tradition.   Historically, the Christian tradition has challenged the societal tendency to lift the family relationship, including the marriage relationship, above all others.

The apostle Paul, the Christian tradition’s earliest witness and one of its most controversial, offers the most detailed discussion of marriage in the New Testament in a letter sent to the Corinthian Church.  This is a congregation in turmoil.  It is a congregation divided, as different groups compete for status, trying to one up each other in terms of piety, faithfulness, and wisdom.  They are apparently arguing about who offers the most important gifts to the congregation, who has the best or most “faithful” diet, and who is the best leader to be baptized by.  The congregation seems a mess.  In fact, the congregation also is trying to out-do one another in terms of their familial arrangements, arguing that one type of familial arrangement is better than another—some apparently advocating marriage, while others advocating celibacy.  You can imagine that each group brings to the argument an absolute sense of being right.  “Surely, God wants us to be married!”  “Surely, God wants us to be celibate!”

During the first century Roman Empire, the setting for Paul’s ministry, marriage was understood in terms of being a good citizen.  Marriage supposedly ensured the strength and longevity of the Empire, by promoting childbirth.  There were legal incentives, as there are today, for citizens who married.  While marriage was highly valued in the Empire, only Roman citizens could legally or officially marry one another.  Soldiers, even if there were citizens, were not allowed to marry.  In other words, only some within Paul’s communities, only a portion of early Christians, would have been able to legally marry; most would have lived in common-law, unofficial, marriages.  In light of this, when Paul talks about marriage he might actually not be talking about legal unions since marriage was limited to only an exclusive group.

But back to the Corinthians, Paul responds to the issue of whether marriage or celibacy is the best way, by explaining that while his personal preference is that people are unmarried, as he himself is unmarried, both positions are fine:  marriage is fine and being unmarried is fine.  If you can’t keep yourself from having sex, get married.  If you can exercise self-control, stay unmarried as marriage leads to anxieties.  The reason for Paul’s ambivalence here has to do with two things.  First, he believes Jesus is coming back any minute . . . so, it doesn’t much matter if people are married or not.  Second, and more important for our purposes, is that these social relationships are secondary to the primary relationship the community should embrace.  That is, the community should be focused upon living as a single body, in spite of their differences.  Arguing over what to eat, proclaiming superiority because of one’s gifts, debating over whether it is better to marry or not marry creates division.  Instead of division, Paul advocates unity through love.  It is in light of this that Paul writes one of his most famous passages.  Talking about the Christian community and not about couples, Paul proclaims,  “4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails. “

In this way, the members of the community are called to love one another; they are to put aside differences, hierarchies, and status markers to be united in love.  For Paul, the greatest virtue within the community is not marriage, but love within community.

While we would be hard pressed to say that Paul offers a positive perspective on homosexuality, as a product of his day “gay” and “lesbian” identities are a completely foreign concept to him.  However, Paul does go against the norm of his day by suggesting that marriage is an option that is no better than not being married.  In other words, he challenges the perception that a heterosexual pairing is the best and most desirable relationship to have.  He refuses to mimic imperial rhetoric that values marriages as a means of strengthening the state.  Rather, Paul downgrades the importance of marriage in favor of the love shared within Christian community.  Again, love of God, love of neighbor, love of community is valued over the socially dominant vision of the family. 

I share these two New Testament traditions with you today, Pride Sunday, because, first of all, they complicate the dominant assumption that the Bible is “pro-family,” meaning that the Bible values heterosexual families as an ultimate value.  And, as we saw in Mark, there are instances when the traditional vision of family is challenged or rejected.  There is the recognition that families sometimes can be threatening and that there are times when there is a need for redefining family and for creating intentional families.  There is a precedent for creating families outside of the strictures of what the broader family finds acceptable.  This, for me, is a powerful witness to the importance of non-traditional families.

Second, in both of these traditions we see the valuing of love.  This does not preclude love within traditional families, but it includes love of family within the context of something bigger—love of God, love of neighbor, love of community.  This is an expansive notion of love, which calls us to put aside differences and loves none-the-less.  We can and should love those within traditional families and we can and should love those within non-traditional families and we can and should love those who would understand themselves as family-less.  This is a picture of love that I hope we all can embrace.  A picture of love in which we can find our pride.

Kiki, Herb and Grilled Cheezus

In the past few weeks, with the allegations being made against Bishop Eddie Long and the spate of gay teen suicides, the attention of many Americans has been drawn to questions of homosexuality and religion, specifically Christianity. While productions schedules suggest that the Fox network’s show Glee could not have planned the recent “Grilled Cheesus” episode as a response to these issues, the episode does reflect the current climate. In this episode, the Glee club is interested in celebrating their faiths. Kurt, a young gay man, expresses a sentiment shared by many LGBTQ individuals: “"Sorry, but if I wanted to sing about Jesus, I'd go to church. And the reason I don't go to church is because most churches don't think very much of gay people. Or women. Or science." After making his views clear, Kurt’s father suffers a serious heart attack. While his friends turn to faith for comfort and want him to do the same, Kurt is resolute in his stance. At one point, Kurt’s friend Mercedes pleads with him to believe in something. Kurt’s sadness and pain is visible in his every move, yet the expressions of the divine offered to Kurt by his friends is simply not sufficient to meet his pain. Finally, in tears by his father’s bedside, Kurt proclaims his belief in their relationship, their family. His comatose father lightly grabs Kurt’s hand, as the rest of the cast sings Joan Osborne’s “What if God Were One of Us.” The message being that the queer divine, that queer religiosity, is found in relationship.

The conclusion to Kurt’s spiritual struggle is one that many LGBTQ individuals reach: The divine is not for us; our church is in the community we create with one another. While this is a perfectly legitimate position, for some LGBTQ individuals within the Christian tradition there is a desire for a queer Christology that plumbs the depths of our experiences and even pain. In a less well known, yet critically acclaimed, drag act, Kiki and Herb’s “Year of Magical Drinking Tour” (recorded at the Knitting Factory in 2007), we are presented a theological reflection that pushes us to think about the figure of Christ in relation to queer experience.

Kiki, the drag persona created by artist and actor Justin Bond, and Herb, played by pianist Kenny Mellman, have been performing together since the late 1980’s/ early 1990’s. Kiki is the weathered and often drunk lounge singer, while Herb is her long-suffering, gay accompanist. As Kiki explains in this performance, she is the “hag” to Herb’s “fag.” Biblical or religious references comprise a recurring theme in their shows: Their off Broadway Christmas show, which won an Obie award in 2001, was entitled “Jesus Wept.” Their more recent comeback tour was called “The Second Coming” and in “Kiki and Herb Would Die For You” Kiki describes Jesus as the ultimate showbiz martyr. While the duo has toured internationally and received critical attention, their work is certainly not as mainstream Glee.

This particular show opens with Kiki dressed in a black cocktail dress covered with red-glitter explosions and a large black bow in her teased blonde hair. Kenny wears a lamé tuxedo jacket. Both of their faces are lined with “wrinkles,” obviously drawn with stage makeup. Kiki, drink in hand, explains that the “Year of Magical Drinking” celebrates their Tony nomination and the death of Jerry Fallwell. The costumes, the dramatic atmosphere, the biting humor are pure camp.

In all of their performances, Kiki offers extended monologues, seemingly alcohol infused prattle, which spin a fantastic narrative about their fictional lives. In this particular show, she explains her and Herb’s connection to Jesus. Present in the stable at Christ’s birth and a little hungry, since they were poor little Jewish urchins, they drink milk from a cow that has eaten Jesus’ afterbirth. The milk grants the duo eternal life and they grow up alongside of Jesus. Continuing the story as she drinks her cocktail, Kiki offers that both she and Herb have a “hot nut” for younger men and, consequently, have known Jesus in the “biblical sense.” In fact, Kiki had quite an affair with Jesus, who she describes as a tender lover. She then tells of Jesus’ true character, as the “first hippie,” who drove people like Fallwell out of the Temple. People today have gotten the story turned around, Kiki intones: If Jesus was still in the grave, than he’d be rolling over in it. Jesus was just coming into his sexuality when he died and had he lived he would have likely gone in “Herb’s direction.” The singer wistfully proclaims that Jesus “was bisexual, spiritual and beautiful . . . and they killed him.” It’s a cautionary tale not to “challenge the man.” She then describes how both she and Mary Magdalene plead, upon seeing Jesus on the cross, “Bring him down!” Kiki ends this monologue by explaining that she is looking forward to Christ’s supposed return and she dedicates a song, a poignant rendition of Emmylou Harris’ “From Boulder to Birmingham,” to the only man she ever loved--Jesus Christ.

One of the most striking aspects of this show is the way Kiki, or Justin Bond, appropriates the tradition of a lounge act monologue in order to collapse time, subvert the conventions of history and construct a queer history. This a-historicity, an ability to exist in the present, past, and future, is characteristic of camp: A camp queen can live in the 30’s and 40’s as the incomparable Marlene Dietrich, while drag king Murray Hill stylistically inhabits the late 60’s, early 70’s. By retelling their history into the history of Jesus’ life, Kiki and Herb point to the fact that all history, including Gospel accounts of Jesus, is story, is constructed. In some way, Kiki is a modern day Albert Schweitzer as her story reveals how interpreters weave their historical and cultural perspectives into the life of Jesus. She reminds us that even things such as Jesus’ gender and sexual identity are constructed in the stories of his life as they are told and re-told. Furthermore, Bond collapses history, taking Kiki and Herb back and time, in order to weave Jesus into queer history or the shared cultural memory of the queer community. This is arguably one of the functions of camp for queer communities, whose histories have been erased and assaulted by heteronormative constructions of history.

In her re-telling of Jesus’ life, Kiki offers a portrait of Jesus quite unlike the seemingly straight Jesus depicted in so many popular contexts (e.g. the Jesus played by Jack Black in “Prop 8: The Musical). In terms of sexuality, Jesus’ identity is fluid, having had affairs with Mary Magdalene, according to Kiki, Kiki herself, Herb, and moving in the direction of being gay. Likewise, Jesus embraces a queer gender identity, embodying characteristics typically associated with the feminine, such as tenderness, beauty, spirituality. Kiki even feminizies Jesus through her re-reading of biblical events, describing the wonderful pedicures that Jesus gave at the Last Supper. While spiked with humor, Kiki offers her audience a thoroughly queer and emphatically incarnational theology. As Marcella Althaus-Reid argued in a 2007 article, Queer Theology assumes, “God dwells in flesh and when this happens all our myopic earth-bound ideas are subject to change, the dynamic life force which is the divine erupts in diversity and the energy of it will not be inhibited by laws and statues.” (“Thinking Theology and Queer Theory.” Feminist Theology 15.3 (2007): 302-214). In this incarnational vein, Bond interprets Jesus’ death as a point of connection with those in the queer and LGBT communities who have challenged the dominant culture’s construction of gender and sexuality. It is a powerful move when you consider the violence, emotional, social, and physically, experienced by so many.

Toward the end of the show, Kiki becomes drunk and angry. No holds are barred as she explains how she was unable to protect Herb from being raped when they were both institutionalized in the ‘50s. In response, she launches into a medley of “Heroin” by Lou Reed, comparing the rush of the drug to being like Jesus’ son, “Wild Side” also by Lou Reed, highlighting the drag aspect of the song, and Radiohead’s “Creep.” Kiki screams, “But I'm a creep/ I'm a weirdo/ What the hell am I doing here?/ I don't belong here.” This medley ends and Kiki and Herb break into a frenzied rendition of “Jesus Loves Me” combined with “O Happy Day,” replete with evangelistic recitations of John 3:16 and Psalm 23. Finally, Kiki ends with the song, “Cunts Are Still Running the World” by Jarvis Cocker which offers a biting critique of social hierarchy. Interpreting this pastiche of religious allusions, queer images and raw emotion in light of Kiki’s earlier discussion of Jesus’ crucifixion, I am reminded of Mark’s depiction of Jesus on the cross. Could this be Kiki’s re-enactment of Jesus’ cry, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” Has she become the crucified Messiah who cannot save his close companions from the violence and social upheaval that he knows is to come, just as Kiki could not protect her beloved Herb? Is she giving voice to the sense of forsakenness felt by queers, gays, lesbians and trans-people, who have been rejected by their families, communities, governments and religions? As in the Markan narrative, it is in the midst of this forsakenness that Jesus’ identity is made known. In spite of the pain, or perhaps on account of the pain, Kiki asserts Jesus’ identity and love and proclaims the protection of the Good Shepherd: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and staff, they comfort me.” Even though the privileged and well-positioned, and we would add straight, people control the world, Kiki is comforted by a queer/ embodied Jesus . . . a Good Shepherd who has a “rod.”

Kiki’s Jesus, I would argue, is a Jesus of queer experience. It is a version of Jesus who shares the pain of Kurt as he sits by his father’s bedside, unable to take comfort in the churches that exclude him. It is also the Jesus who experiences the pain of bullying and violence and the despair of suicide. Behold, the Queer Jesus.

I presented a version of this paper at the 2009 meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.