The Rev. Dr. Annie Lawson
St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Detroit
Feast of Pentecost

This is a message: A message of love

Love that moves from the inside out, Love that never grows tired

I come to you with strange fire

This sermon is indeed inspired by the words of Amy Ray from the Indigo Girls' first album in 1987.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them

Not tongues OF fire. Tongues "as of fire." Tongues that at first glance appear to be fire, but on further examination, are not of the same substance, but of a similar substance. Tongues that fall into that uncanny valley where they seem like fire, but are somehow off.

I come to you with strange fire

And strange fire is a scary thing.

In Leviticus, we read: Now Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, each took his censer, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered strange fire before the Lord, such as he had not commanded them And fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.

Holy Scripture is a record of humankind's wrestling with the divine, an account of our attempts to find meaning in the records of our existence. Nadab and Abihu made strange fire and offered it to God, and they were consumed by flame. And so humankind took the lesson to fear strange fire. 

When scary, brutal things happen in the world, we don't want to tell a story that they are mere chance. So those of us who interpret scripture told stories attributing their sudden death to an angry God. Because as dreadful as that is, imagining a wrathful God scared the storytellers less than a story in which the world was chaotic and God was not in control.

In this story, we are taught to fear that which was _like_ the holy, but uneasily dissimilar. To draw a sharp distinction between the holy and the profane; between the unclean and the clean. If the sin of Nadab and Abihu was to offer strange fire, the lesson humankind, led by those who would call themselves religious leaders -- the lesson we took away was to eschew strange fire. To cut off any expression that is like the canonical examples, and yet somehow eerily dissimilar. We mercenaries of the shrine, the ones who draw our pay by interpreting the divine record and teach God's people what they ought to do have seized upon this account to draw border lines between who is in and who is out. If your offering matches the canonical example, you are in. But to any who find themselves not quite in the proper box, our leaders have ordered them cast into the outer darkness, to protect the purity of the holy. Anathema to those whose offering is strange fire.

The Pentecost event is here to tell us that maybe we took away the wrong lesson.

In the third chapter of Exodus, the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. In the second chapter of the second of book the Kings, Elijah was taken up to heaven by a fire in the strange form of a chariot and horses of fire. And now on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples in the form of tongues somehow like and yet not like fire. Strange fire is not unholy, not unclean, not foreign to God. Strange fire burns with the motion of love. Strange fire is indeed of God.

But if strange fire is holy, why then were Nadab and Abihu condemned and consumed? If offering strange fire to God is not inherently wrong, if their sin was not improper worship that offended the divine by being like and yet not the same as the divinely appointed offering, what did they do wrong? This is no idle question, for we hope to avoid their fate.

The Pentecost event and the subsequent revelations in Acts are a redemption of strange fire in Acts 2, of unclean food in Acts 10, of those whose sexuality is rejected in Acts 8, if the category of "unclean" or "abomination" is categorically rejected when God tells Peter in the 10th chapter of Acts, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane."

But this is very much NOT a proclamation that anything goes. God's judgment is not removed. In Acts 5 we have spontaneous death meted out by the Lord just like in Leviticus 10. When Ananias and Sapphira sold a piece of property and kept back some of the proceeds, bringing only a part and laying it at the apostles' feet, claiming it to be the whole thing, they immediately fell down and died!

Perhaps what Nadab and Abihu did was the same as what Ananias and Sapphira did centuries later: they tried to hold power over God. Idolatry is not the worship of false gods, but rather trying to control the power of God. Not surrendering to the power of God, but rather trying to force God to accept our agenda. So many of the ancient rites involving incense and strange fire were idolatrous rituals that attempted to manipulate the divine, to dictate to God what the divine power must do, because humans cranked the handle, we expect God to jump up on cue like a mighty Jack-in-the-box to do our bidding. When Ananias and Sapphira retained money that they said they were offering to God, they claimed control over the divine agenda. This goes to the heart of idolatry: attempts by human kind to invoke divine power for our own ends.

Perhaps the Pentecost is to redirect our understanding of Nadab and Abihu. We ought not call offerings of strange fire unclean. Rather, attempts to manipulate the divine are wrong. But what cost has come to those whose offerings of strange fire have been rejected over the centuries? What damage have we gatekeepers done to those whose only offerings they could bring were *like* the canonical examples, but not the same as the canonical examples?

I speak today of those who would stand before God's altar and make a holy offering, an offering of love, an offering brought from the integrity of who God created them to be, who were turned away for so many centuries because they didn't perfectly match the canonical image the church held of what the offering and offerer should look like.

Of Simeon Bachos, the Ethiopian Eunuch who would have been cut off from the assembly of God's people because his body didn't match the canonical norms for gender presentation, and yet whom God commanded Philip to proclaim the Good News and baptize into the Church.

Of the Philadelphia Eleven, whose priestly ministry was rejected by so many because their bodies did not match canonical expectations about gender roles.

Of gay and lesbian people whose offering of love the church so long refused to bless because their bodies did not match canonical expectations about pairings.

Of trans folx today whose very existence is strange fire, so similar to the canonical examples, and yet in that uncanny valley that for so long we have been taught to suppress, to eschew as strange fire.

I come to you with strange fire 

I make an offering of love 

The incense of my soil is burned 

By the fire in my blood 

I come with a softer answer 

To the questions that lie in your path 

I want to harbor you from the anger 

Find a refuge from the wrath

For the Pentecost event tells us that strange fire is not unholy; rebelling against God is unholy. It is not in offering our strange fire, but in trying to suppress who God created us to be, that we commit the sin of Nadab and Abihu. Sin is not being our strange selves whom God created and proclaimed as very good. Sin is trying to control that strange fire and fit God into the box of normality. Sin is calling profane that spark of strange fire in ourselves that God has made clean.

When you learn to love yourself 

You will dissolve all the stones that are cast 

Now you will learn to burn the icing sky 

To melt the waxen mask 

I said to have the gift of true release 

This is a peace that will take you higher 

Oh I come to you with my offering 

I bring you strange fire

The Pentecost event shows us that while the attempt to control God is not holy, the strange fire that God continues to create is indeed very very good. The Pentecost event shows that indeed, God shows no partiality to those who perfectly match the canonical examples of holiness, but that in every people anyone who worships God and does justice is indeed acceptable. The Pentecost event shows us that even those of us whose offering must be strange fire, as long as we serve the Lord, are indeed agents of God's holiness in the world.

This is a message 

A message of love 

Love that moves from the inside out 

Love that never grows tired 

I come to you with strange fire

Episcopal Church Pride Eucharist: Acts 1:1-11; 1 John 3:1-3 (Saint Helena Breviary); 
Revelation 22:12-14,16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26
The Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge
Sunday, June 1, 2025
 
Video of the whole service can be found at the link below. The sermon begins at 29:10.

https://www.episcopalchurch.org/organizations-affiliations/lgbtq/

“I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." – John 17:26
 
Good afternoon, good evening, church. I am so glad to be with you even across the miles for this Pride service. Thank you to Presiding Bishop Rowe and to all who organized this service for the honor of being invited to preach today. 

This past Christmas I received a quirky gift: a little RadioShack mini cassette player. I had asked for it, even sharing its Ebay listing, because of two mini cassette tapes that had been sitting in my desk drawer. I had been carrying them around in my life since my undergraduate years at Bryn Mawr College – shout out to my classmates who have celebrated our thirtieth reunion this very weekend. When I sat down and placed the first tape into the recorder, there was my voice as a twenty-one-year-old senior in December of 1994, interviewing a priest and openly gay man for a paper in a course called Peace and Conflict Studies. My chosen topic was the conflict over sexuality in the Episcopal Church as it was unfolding at that time. I myself had come out a year and a half earlier – as gay, not yet as trans – and had been exploring a vocation to priesthood since my first semester when I had read about the Philadelphia Eleven, the first women ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church in 1974. I was eager to know more of the history and evolving landscape of the ground on which I stood as I anticipated graduation and a new life chapter. John – that is all I know of the Philadelphia priest’s name – gamely shared his experience in my recorded interview. Since he had described himself as having “been out for a long time,” I was curious how he thought about being gay in relationship to his ministry. “Do you see it as integral to your ministry or do you see it as somewhat a part of you that isn’t necessarily in the forefront,” I asked him. “Hm,” he replied, 

"Let me answer this way. And you may have had this experience, too. That people say to you, ‘oh, I love you even though you are gay.’ And my answer is, ‘on the contrary, you love me because I am gay. That the things that you love about me – my warmth, my empathy, my identification with the marginalized, my passion for justice, my humor – all of those things have been shaped by the experience of being gay. So if you love me, not only is being gay part of the package. In a very, very real spiritual sense, gay isthe package. So that’s how I view it."
 
And then after a pause he continued, “I define success in my life based on the quality of my relationships. And so that is, in a sense, saying that my life is defined by love. And being gay is how I love.”  “I’ve never heard it put that way,” I responded, “but I like it.”[1]
                  
In our gospel passage today (John 17:20-26), Jesus lifts his voice to God the Parent in the presence of his disciples. It is the conclusion of an extended prayerful discourse, unique to John’s Gospel, situated at the last supper but shared with us today on the other side of Christ’s Passion in the latter days of Eastertide. The Feast of the Ascension was this past Thursday, as our first reading reflects (Acts 1:1-11), and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is on the horizon next Sunday. Our passage conveys a combination of already and not yet, of time both extended and compressed, and of impending struggle anticipated. Jesus is lending the disciples strength for that struggle. That strength is conveyed through the power of union, of relationship – a oneness of community that reflects the bond of God the Son with God the Parent. This communal bond is also open-ended, as Jesus’ prayer is spoken not only for the benefit of the disciples present at that supper but also for those whom they had not yet met, those with whom they would come to be linked, whom they were called to connect with. Jesus speaks of how glory pervades the oneness he shares with God the Parent, and how that glory also radiated out into the community of the disciples (John 17:22). This was a glory borne out by love: love circulating within the Godhead, love shared by Jesus – by God the Son – with the communion of his collective body. Love gloriously abiding, opening, connecting, strengthening this motley crew for all that was to come. It was through this love that they could be seen, recognized, known. Their love would convey God’s glory. They were to be defined by love, as the Philadelphia priest put it.
                  
And yet there was a gap. Both God and the community were not and would not be clearly seen for who and what they were. Jesus speaks to this dynamic in our passage when he says, “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you” (John 17:25).  The very first chapter of John’s Gospel had also declared of the incarnate Word, “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him” (John 1:10). Jesus knows that the disciples would also experience being unseen, misperceived, or actively distorted in their Roman imperial context – his prayer in this moment is meant to uphold the disciples in anticipation of this reality. To strengthen them not by might or power but by grounding in a love that cannot be shaken, by the knowledge that their deepest identity as children of God can never be taken away. 

Our canticle from the first letter of John also reflects this perspective. “The world does not recognize us, for the world has not recognized God,” it explains (1 John 3:1). There is an abiding connection between our perception of God’s presence in its mystery, and our ability to see one another in the various dimensions of our humanity, as people made in the divine image and bearing forth that image in the myriad ways we have been shaped: by our gender and sexuality, our race and ethnicity, our countries of origin, our socio-economic contexts, our abilities. Our canticle, expansively rendered for communal prayer by the Order of Saint Helena, speaks to this perception connection.[2]

The passage always reminds me of a moment in seminary, 2000-2001, a few years after my conversation with the Philadelphia priest. I was reading 1 John for a class. By this time I was a candidate for the priesthood and had begun coming out to myself and others as trans. At that time I was frequently misgendered, particularly in gender specific activities or spaces such as restrooms, or situations that required me to show identification—experiences many in the trans, non-binary and Two Spirit community have on a regular and much more intense basis, particularly now as our community is targeted on so many levels. It was unsettling at best, downright scary at worst. The gender and sexuality conversations of the Episcopal Church that I had researched just a few years before did not register such experiences. In that context, the words “the world does not recognize us” resounded in my ears. The sentence that followed it spoke directly to my heart: “Beloved – beloved – we are God’s children now” (1 John 3:2). Right now. Even as I read then. Even as I speak now amid this country’s widespread misrecognition and pointed distortion of so many marginalized communities. We are God’s children now. Amid the unknown, overwhelmed by risk, I heard in our canticle a grounding acknowledgement for all of us who walk together in uncertainty across lines of identity, embodiment, relationship, and experience: “what we later will be has yet to be revealed” (1 John 3:2)). There is indeed much we do not know. 

Yet ultimately, amid that uncertainty, 1 John gives us a vision of transformative love. “What we do know is this,” the canticle continues, “when [God] is revealed, we will be like God, for we will truly see God as God truly is” (1 John 3:2).  Or as the Sisters of Saint Helena have rendered our canticle, “when all things come to light, we will be like God.”[3] All things coming to light suggests a scene of cosmic justice, of all of us coming to know the truth and being collectively set free by it. This phrasing also evokes revelation, even transfiguration, a radiating reflection of the divine that dazzles us and actively changes us “from glory into glory,” as Paul wrote to the community in Corinth (2 Cor. 318). Beholding, actively honoring, celebrating the glory of God in one another is a participation in this process even now. It goes to the heart of our call in Pride month. Such participation was reflected just this weekend here in California in the talent and poise of openly trans track and field athlete AB Hernandez, whose mother has declared, “my child is not a threat: SHE IS LIGHT!”[4] She is light. We are light, beloveds. We are light. As this month unfolds, as we celebrate Pride around and beyond our church, let us seek out and celebrate that light in one another. Let us actively seek to perceive one another, refusing the distortions and dehumanizing political rhetoric all too often uttered in the name of Christian theology. Let us behold and uphold one another in recognition of the divine beauty in which we stand, queer, trans and allied beloved – something many of you have literally testified to from pulpits to state houses in recent weeks. Thank you for doing that. Let us love one another, not even though or despite our queerness, our transness but because of the unique human beings God has created us to be and to become. In the face of so many who refuse to know us, may our love, our lives reflect the glory of God upholding us, transforming us, strengthening us, and charging us to make our way forward in this moment, together. 

The grace, the love, the light of Christ Jesus be with you all. Amen.



​
[1] C. Partridge interview with the Rev. Dr. John ____?______, Philadelphia area interview, early December (8 or 9?), 1994.

[2] https://www.osh.org/about

[3] The Saint Helena Breviary (New York: Church Publishing, 2006), 179.

[4] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/article/trans-athlete-embraced-california-track-field-20352080.php Nereyda Hernandez’s full statement is included in this article: https://www.kcra.com/article/us-attorney-california-title-ix-transgender-athlete/64907325  

The Rev. Dr. Annie Lawson
St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Detroit
Feast of the Ascension

The Prayer Book lists Ascension Day second on the list of Principal Feasts of the Church. And yet it falls on a Thursday, so many churches around the world, including us this week, don't gather to celebrate this highest-importance feast on its actual date. But what's the big deal? What are we celebrating on Ascension Thursday? Why does this day matter?

There's a fundamental tension in Christianity. We believe in an incarnate God, who was born and dwelt among us. We believe in a bodily resurrection, where Jesus came back from the dead not as a spirit, specter, or ghost, but as an embodied soul, a living human being, with physical scars from his crucifixion and breath in his lungs, who ate and drank and embraced his followers. A living human being who can never die again, who can never become a disembodied spirit. If Christmas is about the incarnation and Easter about the resurrection, they both celebrate a world in which God, in the person of Jesus Christ, walks around us still wholly God yet also a human being with a physical body.

So where is Jesus? If incarnation and resurrection are at the core of our belief system, and they are indeed, then the incarnate, resurrected God should be here. Like Thomas, we should be able to touch his hands and his side, and embrace our Lord and God. We too should be able to walk by sight, and not by faith. Because if we can't, it rather puts a damper on this bodily-resurrected, incarnate God of ours, no?

Despite our faith in Christmas and Easter, we live in a Pentecost world, a world marked by God as Spirit. We walk by faith, and not by sight, and depend on the gifts of an unseen Holy Spirit to perform our ministry in the world. In this Pentecost world, we are called to see Christ in the least of us, and to be the hands of Christ to one another. This understanding of God is no less real, but more spiritualized -- the ordinary people, things, and institutions of the world are imbued with the Spirit of God to take on divine significance. In this Pentecost world, the Body of Christ less resembles a particular literal human body and becomes more elastic, more conceptual. The Body of Christ can be the Church, a consecrated loaf of bread, the poor, a particular person in need, a particular person doing God's will -- all at once, and in many places simultaneously. That's a different reality than seeing a person called Jesus standing on a particular hillside outside Jerusalem.

Which is why the Feast of the Ascension isn't optional. This isn't something we can afford to skip. This is the bridge between the Pentecost reality we live and the Christmas and Easter faith we profess. At its core, Ascension is an acknowledgement of this juxtaposition: Jesus used to be a person who walked around on the earth like other human beings, and continues to really be present with us, but our experience of Jesus' presence isn't the same as the disciples' experience. Encountering Jesus after the Ascension is not the same experience as encountering him before the Ascension. He was with us then, he is with us now, but something is different.

And really, that's the heart of this feast. Artists have tried to capture the moment over the centuries, but the fact is, it's a mystery. We don't understand how Jesus "went away" while simultaneously remaining with us. All we know is that that the Body of Christ, to Mary, was a baby she gave birth to. The Body of Christ, to Joseph of Arimathea, was a dead human body he took down from the Cross and laid in a grave. The Body of Christ, to the women at the tomb on Easter morning, was missing from the grave, until they recognized that the man, alive, speaking to them, was, in fact, the Jesus they were seeking. To all of them, the Body of Christ referred to a particular human body. And the Body of Christ to us today is just as real as it was to them, but it's not one particular human body. It's a much more elastic concept. Something is different.

Living in this post-Ascension world, it would be easy to assume it was always this way, and in doing so, to deny the physical reality of the incarnation. Ascension is important as part of our creation story, part of our account of how the world came to be this way. Because once upon a time, before the ascension, Jesus had a human body like other human bodies. 

Given that today is June 1, the first day of the month in which we celebrate the uprising 56 years ago that marked such an important turning point in the liberation of queer people in this country and the world, I need to point out that part of the reason the incarnation is so important is because yes Jesus took on a human body, but he did it in a particularly queer way.

There is a strong tendency in human history to sacralize heteronormativity. In agricultural societies, reproduction is literally the source of wealth. The more offspring your plants and herds have, the richer you are. The more offspring your humans have, the bigger your armies. The processes by which plants, animals, and humans reproduce and make more plants, animals, and humans had elements very apparent to human observers and behind-the-scenes components that sometimes worked and sometimes did not that could easily be attributed to the divine. The success or failure of these reproductive processes determined the survival, wealth, and military strength of human civilizations. It is no wonder, given the economic importance of reproduction, the mystical ecstasies associated with it, and the mysterious and unpredictable processes that followed that sometimes did and sometimes did not lead to new life entering the world, that so many ancient societies practiced fertility cults, worshiping the acts of plant, animal, and human reproduction as the processes by which the gods granted wealth. Scripture attests disapprovingly to Hebrew and later Christian encounters with other religions practicing ritual sexual acts that often accompanied their worship of the gods, a practice in which the surrounding religions literally called heterosexual reproductive acts sacred.

Despite the centuries of heteronormativity creeping into Christianity, it is urgent, especially today, to point out that first Judaism and later Christianity is an explicit rejection of the fertility cults that culturally surrounded it. Judaism and Christianity condemned the surrounding fertility cults' sacral heteronormativity as idolatry. The fertility cults we reject are the clearest example of making that which is heterosexual not just the norm but the vehicle by which humankind access the blessings of the divine. When we proclaim that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary, Mary's virginity is not urgent because sexuality is icky, as later centuries of Christians have tried to assert, but in its cultural context, the virgin birth is urgent as a rejection of the fertility cults surrounding Jesus's birth's worship of heterosexuality and its link to wealth and power. Fertility cults assert that the heterosexual copulation of plants, animals, and humans are how humanity accesses the divinely bestowed wealth and power. Christianity is first and foremost a rejection of the worship of wealth and power, and the rejection of the worship of heteronormative sexuality is actually core to what made and makes Christianity countercultural. When heteronormativity creeps into Christianity, it is really a denial of Christ's good news, an apostasy akin to the so-called prosperity Gospel. In fact, heteronormativity, the prosperity gospel, and the fertility cults of old are fundamentally the same error. But we do not worship the powerful, nor do we worship the processes of accumulating wealth; we believe our incarnate God chose to live his earthly life among the poor, the downtrodden, the outcast. Christianity, at its heart, is a fundamentally queer religion, and to deny that is to miss the point of Jesus's incarnation. Anathema sit!

The authors of the ancient hymn the "Te Deum" understood this. The hymn contains the lines "When you became man to set us free / you did not shun the Virgin's womb." In the expectation of anyone that associates reproduction with the source of wealth and power, which is to say, any agriculturalist, a Virgin's womb is an unclean, improper place to look for reproduction. Heifer cattle neither give milk nor increase the size of one's flocks. Human virgins are similarly un-reproductive -- which is to say, without economic (and military) value. But Jesus willingly took human form outside the heteronormative source of reproduction -- the source of wealth and power. In rejection of fertility cults' embrace of the heteronormative process of wealth, the incarnation is a fundamentally queer phenomenon. Ascension Day is urgent because it affirms the incarnation while acknowledging we live in a world that doesn't have that incarnate God walking around the way the world once saw God walk around.

Our lessons for Ascension Thursday give us not one but two accounts of the Ascension event. These two accounts, like many accounts in the Bible, conflict with each other. But these particular accounts' conflict is especially jarring because they are attributed to the same author. The Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles both come from the same writer or school of writers. The central message of the stories is the same in both accounts: Jesus was "there," and then, rather abruptly, he wasn't "there" in the same way anymore. One might even be tempted to say he was gone. On that fundamental, the stories agree. But why would Luke tell two different accounts of the story?

In the gospel account, this is a happy ending. The disciples get it. Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures. They walked out of Jerusalem with him, he blessed them, he disappeared, they praised God and worshipped Jesus, then went back into the city with great joy, continually blessing God in the temple. And they lived happily ever after. What a spectacular finish to the Good News according to St. Luke.

And then there's the Acts account. The author of the Acts account claims to be the same author of the gospel account, but in Acts they retell the story with some key differences. Again, the disciples gather with Jesus, but this time, rather than having divinely granted understanding of scripture, they show Jesus they clearly don't get the meaning of scripture. After everything: all Jesus' preaching, and healings, and passion, and resurrection, they still don't get what it's all about. They ask, "Now is it time to restore the kingdom to Israel?" Jesus' exasperation must have known no limits at that point. After all they'd seen and been through, they still expected he was about to build a royal palace. That the Kingdom of God would look like the Kingdom of David. And then, Jesus ascends. In the Acts account, the disciples respond not with joy, but with confusion. It takes some angelic explanation so they can figure out not to just stand there staring at the sky wondering where Jesus went, and the angels assure them that Jesus is coming back.

The thing about these two stories is that despite the fact that they say different things, they could both be true. The Ascension story occupies a liminal place in Luke's account of Christian ministry. It falls at the end of the Gospel. It is also the first story in Acts. This story is the end of something, and the beginning of something else. It marks a fulfillment of one kind of presence of Jesus, and the beginning of another. And yes, it is the source of both consolation and confusion.

If the two accounts emphasize different reactions by the disciples, it is perhaps because both are true. The disciples simultaneously "got it" and were completely baffled. The disciples rejoiced at the fulfillment of Jesus' earthly ministry and were utterly in awe and confusion about what _they_ were to do next. It's not unlike other liminal moments in life: graduation, the birth of a child, getting a job. There's joy and fulfillment and celebration that at last, things have come together and finally make sense. And then, the bewildered realization that now you have to live in that different new world. Now you have to find what comes next after graduation! Now you have to actually take care of this new baby! Now that you've got a job, you actually have to figure out how to do it! Now that Jesus has ascended, he isn't standing there talking to you any more! What comes next beyond the comfortable world you knew? The disciples praised God at the conclusion of the Gospel, and stared into space, lost, at the beginning of Acts. Because this transition from the Christmas/Easter world to the Pentecost one is both awe-inspiring and terrifying.

And so, with great rejoicing and great bewilderment, we celebrate the Feast of the Ascension. We mark the transition from the obvious certainty of a physical person Jesus in the presence of the disciples to a presence that requires a leap to faith to find. We celebrate the fact that Jesus is no longer confined to a hillside in Palestine, but is with us everywhere, even to the ends of the earth. And we wait, with the assurance that again the day will come when we, with our physical bodies, will see the physical person Jesus at the resurrection of the dead. Even so, Lord Jesus quickly come! Amen.

Earlier this month, the Rev. Gwen Fry, priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Maine and TransEpiscopal Steering Committee member, testified at a Judiciary Committee hearing in opposition to eight bills now before the Maine legislature that would roll back trans civil rights protections. These bills emerged in the wake of the February National Governors Association confrontation between the President of the United States and the Governor of Maine over the state's nondiscrimination protections. Read Equality Maine’s information for taking action on the proposed legislation here and the ACLU’s account of the legislative hearing and its political backdrop here.

****

The Rev. Gwen Fry
Brunswick, Maine
May 8, 2025

Senator Carney, Representative Kuhn, and Honorable Members of the Judiciary Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to address the Committee regarding the human rights of transgender Mainers.

I am The Rev. Gwen Fry. I’m a resident of Brunswick. I am an Episcopal Priest who also happens to be transgender. I’m currently serving St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Waterville as their Priest in Charge and I am here on behalf of the Episcopal Diocese of Maine and the transgender community.

I rise in opposition to the bills before the committee today because I have personally experienced the devastating effects of not having the basic rights and protections afforded most people. 

I came out and socially transitioned in Little Rock, Arkansas 11 years ago. I have experienced being ignored by people working in restaurants and department stores. I have been the recipient of hateful speech and death threats. I have been stalked by a person in my neighborhood. I didn’t reach out for help because the trans community has learned that it is not safe to get the authorities involved because of the abuse and assaults perpetrated on trans people, particularly transgender women, by those in authority. That is a major reason why I left the state of Arkansas and relocated to Maine. I saw that the trans community was protected from discrimination under the nondiscrimination laws here in our state. 

It is also here in the Diocese of Maine that I have been able to return to serve a parish after eight years of not being able to serve a congregation because of discrimination for being my authentic self. Because of the expansive theology of The Episcopal Church, I found a home here in the Diocese of Maine. I have been given the opportunity to exercise my ministry because of the inclusion of gender identity and gender expression in the Episcopal Church’s non discrimination canons. I believe this inclusion is an extension of the church’s baptismal vow to respect the dignity of every human being. I am honored to serve in a church that feeds the hungry and affirms and celebrates the outcast. 

My church and now my state protects the trans community. I no longer live in fear to leave my house like I did in Arkansas because of the protections afforded me here in Maine. If these eight bills pass, I fear we will be taking giant steps backwards and my small community will experience the same discrimination and oppression I fled by moving to Maine.

As Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde preached in January, “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”  I ask that the state I have chosen to call home choose mercy over oppression and discrimination against a small, extremely vulnerable, population. I ask that you respect the dignity of all of us in the transgender community. All of these anti-transgender bills are solutions in search of a “problem” that doesn’t exist.

If this bill passes, Maine will be on the fast track to mirroring the oppression and ostracization of transgender people – just like Arkansas has. We are not Arkansas. We are a state who prides itself on the adage of live and let live. In the name of the One who fearlessly and wonderfully created me just as I am, I urge you to vote “Ought not to Pass” on these bills.

Thank you for the opportunity to share my perspective and experiences with the Committee.

On Saturday, April 12, the Diocese of Olympia’s first Trans Day of Visibility liturgy was held at St. Peter’s Episcopal Parish in Seattle. As the Rev. Nat Johnson wrote in their parish newsletter, “It was a powerful service, and we were blessed and challenged by the incredible word brought by The Rev. Canon Carla Robinson…. Trans Day of Visibility is a day that provides time and space for the celebration of personhood and belovedness, particularly for folks who society tends to ignore. In our present moment, when so many in power across our government and society are attempting to erase and punish trans-identity, our liturgy offered a powerful resistance by honoring the beauty and gifts of our Trans, Non-Binary, and Two-Spirit siblings. Thank you to all who participated in the service, and thank you to the allies who joined us for this incredible liturgy!”
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Watch the Rev. Canon Carla Robinson’s powerful sermon below!

Lent 4C: Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-2; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
Grace Cathedral, March 30, 2025
The Rev'd Dr. Cameron Partridge

Audio on the Grace Cathedral sermon podcast, linked here.
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Good evening, friends. It is good to see you here in this sacred circle, on this holy hill at this particular moment in time. This evening we celebrate Trans Day of Visibility (TDOV), a day that many in the trans, nonbinary, and two-spirit communities have been observing over the past several days, even as its official date is tomorrow, March 31st. This day was created in 2009 by Rachel Crandall, a Michigan-based trans advocate who envisioned an occasion to celebrate trans life, joy, and resilience, our diversity and strength. A day or week to bask unabashedly in gender euphoria. It is a counterpoint of sorts to Trans Day of Remembrance which occurs annually on November 20th, naming and lamenting our losses while drawing strength in community and pressing back against the violence this world inflicts upon us. You may recall that last year Trans Day of Visibility coincided with Easter Day. There was something of a political reaction to that felicitous coincidence. And while, no, no one planned that intersection (which will next occur in 2086), it was such a gift to receive the Good News of resurrection life through the lens of trans exuberance, was it not? And vice versa: how glorious to view trans life through the radiance of resurrection joy! This year the closest Sunday to TDOV is today, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, which some Episcopal and Catholic congregations observe as Laetare Sunday, using the Latin declaration “rejoice.” Like Gaudete Sunday in Advent, which translates similarly, this is a Sunday that centers the emergence of joy ahead of the full glory of the season for which we are preparing: Christmas at the close of Advent, and for us now, Easter on the other side of Lent. So once again, God (via the historic emergence of the Christian Liturgical year) is smiling upon us, inviting us to stand in our truth and claim our joy as trans, nonbinary and two-spirit people. And further, to claim and share our life in community as a gift, a sign and an expression of newness of life.

Our readings issue a call to joy. “Be glad, you righteous, and rejoice in the Lord,” our Psalm intones, “shout for joy, all who are true of heart” (Psalm 32:12). True of heart. There is a phrase for our community. You do not come to a deep, abiding awareness of yourself in the face of powers that seek to keep you from being who you are in this world without being true of heart. As St. Paul wrote to the community of Jesus followers in Corinth, “we are treated as imposters and yet are true; as unknown and yet are well known; as dying, and see — we are alive” (2 Cor. 6:8-9). We are alive, beloved. Living and fierce, beautiful and powerful. Gloriously made in the divine image, living out in our particular lives God’s call to become, to be changed from glory into glory, as the Wesleyan hymn phrases Saint Paul (2 Cor. 3:18). Active participants in the in-breaking of the reign of God, what theologian Verna Dozier called the “dream of God,” which Jesus announced everywhere he went. 

And what did that reign, that dream, look like? Jesus proclaimed it at the start of his ministry, quoting the prophet Isaiah: good news to the poor, release to the captives, liberation of the oppressed, the centering of the marginalized (Luke 4:18-19). All of this got Jesus in all kinds of trouble – he was cast out, pushed aside, targeted, and stigmatized, yet the forces of death could not contain his risen life, his divine joy. Our gospel passage reflects this pattern in parable form. A grumbling observation that Jesus welcomed and ate with outcasts drew forth three parables in reply – two brief and one, ours, more elaborate. The first of these, skipped over by our passage, asks “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices” (Luke 15:4-5). Perhaps you have seen the drawing of this vignette showing Jesus shouldering a lamb rendered with the pink, blue, and white stripes of the trans flag. The sheep, at left, tell him that the lamb wasn’t lost but kicked out. By them. To which Jesus responds, “I know, and I found him” (or her, or them). We know all too well, dear friends, that the response to our lives and witness, the living out of our truth, should not be rejection but rejoicing. Rejoice with me, the shepherd of Jesus’ parable exclaims. And not simply on your own but join in rejoicing. Come together in the joy of your shared becoming, you who are trans, nonbinary and two-spirit, you who are cisgender. Be a bullwork against tyranny and oppression in this world, including from within churches or other faith traditions who fail to recognize and respect you and cause deep spiritual harm. Live out loud in the joy of God who made you, claims you, and calls you to shine in the resplendent beauty of who you are. 

The father in the parable of the Prodigal Son reflects this shared call as well: we had to celebrate he says of his youngest who had returned after what likely felt like a lifetime away (Luke 15:2). There is so much we do not know about the circumstances and relationships of this beautiful, challenging story. So much to wrestle with, as many of us may in relation to particular characters of this parable. But what I would lift up from it for us on this day is the father’s bedrock clarity: we have to celebrate and nurture our life-giving relationships. It is imperative to center our connection in joy. God longs for us to experience the joy of divine belonging in our closest experiences of kinship – whether chosen or of origin, or perhaps both. God revels in our communal reflection of the people we were created to become. 

How might we characterize this becoming? As Paul declares in his second letter to the Corinthians, new creation (2 Cor 5:17). Creation is not static. It is living and active, reflecting the vibrant mystery of the Word through which all things were made. In Christ the binaries of oppressive division, including male and female, slave and free (Galatians 3:28), “all hierarchies of human worth,” as Aaron Scott preached at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine yesterday, are destroyed. In Christ we are called to lives of transformation, creating living, breathing space for fullness of joy. In their beautiful book American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era, Nico Lang quotes Ruby, a young, trans Episcopalian in Texas. Lang writes, “Ruby says the joy I hear [in her laughter] is not just the terms of her survival but an act of protest. ‘Trans happiness is subversion,’ she explains. ‘I think we’re just supposed to sit down, be quiet, and disappear.’” But no, she continues, “I am who I am” (American Teenager, p. 122). We are who we are. We will not sit down, be quiet, or disappear. Our joy is transformative. So today, may we claim that joy. May we rejoice together, gathering strength for the road ahead. This joy urges us onward.

Earlier today Aaron Scott, Episcopal Church Staff Officer for Gender Justice, preached a powerful, inspiring word at the Celebration of Trans Joy and Resilience at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. His text is below the video. Thank you, Aaron!

I come before you today in the name of the One who creates, redeems and sanctifies all of us—no exceptions. Amen.

Good afternoon. Thank you so much for having me with you today. My name is Aaron Scott, my pronouns are he/him, and I’m The Episcopal Church’s first-ever Staff Officer for Gender Justice.

I want to thank the Greater NY Episcopal Church Trans Taskforce, not just for inviting me to be here, but also for your leadership in these times. Along with that I want to thank every trans and nonbinary person who showed up today, in person and online. We are, in the end, a small community, very much under the boot of repression. And yet we continue to lead. 

We speak for ourselves. 

We set forth our own vision for what justice means for our people—trans and nonbinary people. 

We determine what justice means for us in our bodies, in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our churches, in our workplaces, in our country. And while we need everyone here to join with us in that struggle, we are the ones responsible for setting the vision. We are the experts on when we are free. Only we get to say when we are truly safe, truly honored, truly afforded our God-given dignity and rights. So thank you to every trans and nonbinary person here for the visions you put forward into the world. Thank you for standing in your power and your leadership.

I also want to thank the leadership of this diocese and this house of worship for supporting and following the trans and nonbinary leaders who have made this celebration possible. Let’s make that the norm everywhere. 

It’s a beautiful day to be alive. 

It’s a beautiful day to exist, in flagrant defiance of executive orders. January 20th came and went and I still haven’t been whisked away to Oz—like the rapture, but for trans people only. I briefly wondered, “Am I not transgendering hard enough, if two whole months have gone by and I’m still stuck here in America?!” 

And then I remembered myself, and I remembered: this is a sham. Because we have always been here and we are not going anywhere, ever. 

You heard it in the Gospel reading just now, out of the mouth of Jesus himself. He’s recognizing third gender people who live as themselves “for the sake of the kingdom of Heaven. And the one who can accept this SHOULD accept it.” Jesus’ teaching on gender diversity in this passage is echoed in the Talmud, which legally recognizes somewhere between six and eight genders. Isaiah chapter 56 says that third-gender people who keep God’s commandments will have “an everlasting name, a name better than sons and daughters.” The book of Esther includes no less than ten gender nonconforming people and they all have names. One of our first conversion stories, in Acts 8, is about a Black third-gender person—who is not proselytized into conformity but rather rejoices at hearing Philip teach that God wants justice for those who have been deprived of it in this world.

Trans people are part of a long and sacred lineage. The Bible is ours. It does not belong to those who seek to erase us because by erasing us, they erase the Word itself. And we have a name for that kind of theological malpractice: it’s heresy.

The erasure of trans people is heresy.

And the violence of setting up systems and policies that exclude trans people? This is idolatry. It is idolatry because it makes false claims about where God does and does not reside. It claims that the image of God resides in cisgender people only, and therefore only cisgender people deserve belonging and thriving. It is idolatry of self to say to your transgender neighbor, “I contain more of the image of God in me than you do.” And it is an idolatrous society that takes that falsehood and enshrines it in policy.

Heresy and idolatry are two grave sins that every Christian—trans or not—should be concerned about. They are insidious, and dangerous, and when we do nothing to counter these sins in our teaching and preaching and public witness, we allow more and more people to be misled about the world God wants for us all, and how we get there together. We are seeing the results of that mass-misleading now, with trans people caught squarely in the cross hairs—offered up as a false scapegoat for the real problems in this country. But as Laverne Cox said, “Trans people are not the reason the price of eggs is so high. Folks are mad at the wrong 1%."

Well. We will only get what we are organized to take. No powers and principalities are going to hand trans people our joy and our thriving down to us out of their benevolence. That’s not how change happens. Change comes because we demand it, and we labor for it. So today we celebrate our joy—and tomorrow we get back to work organizing to defend our joy. Organizing to defend our young people. Organizing to defend our dignity. Organizing to draw in more and more people to stand with us, move with us. And we can’t do all that on an empty tank, so today: We sing. We shout. We strut. We swagger. We rejoice in our trans-ness so that the memory of this joy can continue to carry us forward even in the hard times.

Miss Major speaks to this so clearly. A survivor of the Stonewall uprising who still today, at 78 years old, continues to organize and teach and write, has more reasons than most of us to be tired. And so, as she says, she takes breaks. She lives fully and has the stories and rap sheet to prove it.

I think one of our favorite mini heresies, even in an affirming church, is to expect that Christ the Liberator will appear in the form of someone flawlessly marketable. Someone with a shiny backstory and no mistakes. Someone who hasn’t constantly had to navigate murky moral terrain because their survival depends upon it. 

We should read the Bible more. 

We should read history more. 

Christ the Liberator is a PR nightmare. 

Ms. Major is not marketable—she is fully alive, fully agitated, and fully activated. 

The abolitionist Harriet Tubman was not marketable—she was a destroyer of markets, just like Jesus himself amid the money changers in the temple. 

Our text from Galatians has been sorely distorted on this point. We read “in Christ there is neither slave nor free” as if that pointed to individual friendship between the enslaved and those who hold them in captivity, which is a heretical interpretation. In Christ there is neither slave nor free because Jesus Christ destroys the institution of slavery. Jesus Christ destroys all hierarchies of human worth. And wherever systems of oppression are being toppled, Jesus Christ rises again.

But we forget this because those of us with some access to comfort want to stay comfortable. So we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves things like: when the right kind of oppressed person appears, they’ll lead the way.

When we tell ourselves this lie, the unspoken coercion behind it is that we do not want oppressed people to be real human beings. This is just as great an enemy to our liberation as words that more directly dehumanize us.

Trans joy is not about marketing a false, palatable version of ourselves. It is about enjoying being alive and not dead. 

What do you do when you are so thoroughly in touch with your mortality and choose to get up and live anyway? 

You eat and drink and smoke with your friends.

You make love.

You make art

You go dancing

You hustle to survive, and you refused to be lied about.

I refuse to be lied about.

We refuse to be lied about.

We do not exist to be respectable. We exist to be respected. 
We do not exist to be respectable. We exist to be respected. 

We do not exist to be afraid. We exist to be powerful. And we must understand that when people fear us, it is because they fear our power. But if we are to be feared, then we should be feared only in the way that a true Christian fears God—feared because the breadth, and depth, and complexity of our lives force everyone to admit that breadth, and depth, and complexity have always been here, have always been part of God’s creation.

The more that trans people stand in our joy and our full messy humanity without apology, the more powerful we become. That is why this day is important. The less afraid we are to live—even when there is so much to fear—the stronger we get.

There is always backlash to this. That is why the work of the church could not be clearer in this moment. The good shepherd protects the sheep from the wolves. And I don’t love being compared to a sheep, but I know that wolves are real. Trans people know what happens when there is nobody to stand between us and danger. Resilience does not come from easy living.

Maybe that is the gift and the teaching that we as trans people can offer to this church in this particular moment. 

We know what it is like to not be able to imagine a future version of ourselves, even as we understand we must move toward that future unknown self or die.

We know what it is like to be despised and lied on, and still refuse to allow any of that to sway us from our deepest knowing.

We know what it is like to move in the public eye with a target on our backs every single day. And to still get up and get out there anyway, dressed to kill.

We know what it is like to choose one another again and again and again—in love and in faithfulness—when we have been abandoned by parties, and institutions, and fair weather friends. And there is no greater joy than that continual choice. We are worth it, every single time.

Amen.

TransEpiscopal and Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission (APLM) have collaborated on a liturgical resource for use in observance of Trans Day of Visibility which falls annually on March 31st. 
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The prayers attached here include a Collect for Trans Day of Visibility (TDOV) and a special set of intercessions with a concluding collect. For congregations that use the Prayers of the People in the Book of Common Prayer, we have also provided petitions adapted to each of the six forms. These prayers are additionally preceded by a brief theological introduction. We intend for this resource to be used in flexible ways, as befits your community. We offer them for your use, consideration, and feedback.

In 2025 TDOV comes in the midst of an unprecedented wave of anti-trans legislation and policies at state and local levels as well as Executive Orders and related policy changes at the federal level. The EOs in particular are intent upon denying and actively erasing our existence, forcing us into dangerous forms of visibility in a variety of settings, depending upon where we live or other life circumstances. Anti-trans animus is being normalized in legislative and everyday language, even as other restrictions are being proposed or enacted, depending on location. Much of this activity is being undertaken under the banner of Christian theology, as an aspect of Christian nationalism.

In this context, it is more important than ever for Christians to affirm, embrace, and uplift trans, non-binary and two spirit people, to say loudly and consistently that the violence and demeaning actions being perpetuated against this community is not in our name. 
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Thank you for lifting your voice in prayer, in solidarity, in action. 

Ash Wednesday: Isaiah 58: 1-12, 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Preached at Good Shepherd, Berkeley
Rev. Weston Morris
March 5, 2025
 
In 2021, my wife and I moved from Denver sight unseen to North Berkeley so that I could pursue my Masters in Divinity at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, the next step in the path toward priesthood. We were blessed to land in this wonderful, living, active neighborhood. Immediately, after we moved here, we fell in love with this place. It wasn’t long before we became volunteers at the community garden and began to invest in building relationships around the neighborhood. Over time we made friends with a couple of our neighbors and established a rhythm which included late afternoon walks around the neighborhood. We spent a lot of time sitting on the bench near our apartment. In seminary there is a lot of thinking to do, so we came to call that bench the thinking corner.

Around this time last year we went on our usual evening walk, stopping at the thinking corner. Parked in front of the thinking corner was a man who was living in his car. We had seen him a few times before, since he had parked there for a while because he couldn’t pay $300 to get his flat tire replaced. He cooked dinner with a camp stove on the sidewalk and I always made an effort to say hi to him and make sure he had food and water. One evening we were at the thinking corner as the sun was setting and we began to talk to our neighbor who lived there. I don’t remember how we started chatting but we invited him to stay with us for a while. We talked about a lot of things: his frustration about the state of the world. Rage at obvious genocide. The books he liked to read. We got on the topic of religion and talked about Islam and Christianity. He named his disillusionment with religious leadership these days and we agreed that Christians could do better. He was formerly incarcerated for violent crimes but was starting over again. He was proud that he knew where he could find weapons and drugs but that he hadn’t gone for them. The way that he talked about his beliefs and goals made me proud of him too. We talked for so long that the stars came out. I looked up and thanked God for being good and providing this encounter. There was a period of profound peace in silence.
 
But in that silence there was a pivot. Our neighbor started to do what some cisgender men do when they don’t know what else to say around each other. He lamented loudly the weakness of masculinity in this sensitive country. “Isn’t it crazy that some people think that men can be women and women can be men? What a shame it is that they are doing sex change surgeries on kids in school! How disgusting is it that doctors give people all those dangerous sex change drugs!”

I was so shocked that for a while I didn’t cut in as he ranted. Little did he know that as he ranted to me he was ranting to a transgender person - me. We all were silent praying that he would lose the plot, but he kept going and going and going. The line for me was when he likened gender affirming care to child abuse. Finally, we spoke up kind of all at once and I said, “I’m going to have to stop you right there. It seems we agree on a lot of things but this is one thing that we fundamentally disagree about. You are speaking to a transgender person right now and it is clear to me that you don’t know what you are talking about.” He began to argue and I said, “Man, we’re going to have to agree to disagree.” He stood in flustered silence for a few seconds before murmuring something about not coming out here to fight and returned to his car. We sat in silence at the thinking corner… thinking about what had just happened and what to do next. After a few moments of silence, we stood up and walked away from him, the opposite direction of our home, just in case. As we walked away I remembered he said he knew where there were weapons. I wondered if he would go back for those weapons and that my name, our names, would be added to the Trans Day of Remembrance list. I was filled with fear, a fear all too familiar these days.

In 2024 there were at least 32 murders of trans and gender non-conforming people in the United States, 350 recorded in the world. Murder is an extreme and obviously illegal form of violence that is lethal to transgender people. But it’s not the only form of lethal violence used against us. A recent study showed that anti-trans laws - bathroom bills, sports bans, bans on gender affirming care, etc. - cause up to a 72% increase in suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary young people. Let me say that again: Anti-trans laws cause up to a 72% increase in suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary young people. Suicide attempts. Not suicidal ideation. Not bullying. Not harassment by parents. Not condemnation from religious leaders. Suicide attempts. Between 2018 and 2022 alone, 48 anti-trans laws were enacted in 19 different states. Now in the year of our Lord 2025, I wonder how many transgender children want to die before they have even really lived.

And now here we are, by the complicity and prejudice of Christians all over the country, the US Government sanctified the oppression of transgender and gender non-conforming people. Make no mistake, no transgender person is surprised by this. This is the sanctification of a decades-long tradition of harassing gender non-conforming people, whether they are non-conforming by virtue of sexuality, gender identity, culture, or disability. No, we are not surprised. We are not surprised because we have endured through afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger. Sound familiar? Paul’s letter to the Corinthians speaks to me of the transgender community that I know and love so dearly:

“We are treated as impostors, and yet are true;
as unknown, and yet are well known;
as dying, and see–we are alive!
As punished, and not yet killed
As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing,
As poor yet making many rich
As having nothing and yet possessing everything.”

Last night the President of our country stood in front of millions of Americans and said the following words:

“A few years ago, January Littlejohn, and her husband, discovered that their daughter's school had secretly socially transitioned their 13 year old little girl. Teachers and administrators conspired to deceive January and her husband while encouraging her daughter to use a new name and pronouns. They/them pronouns, actually. All without telling January, who is here tonight, and is now a courageous advocate against this form of child abuse. January, thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Stories like this are why shortly after taking office, I signed an executive order banning public schools from indoctrinating our children with transgender ideology. I also signed an order to cut off all taxpayer funding to any institution that engages in the sexual mutilation of our youth. And now I want Congress to pass a bill permanently banning and criminalizing sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body. This is a big lie. And our message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you.”
 
Exactly the way God made you…
 
Ash Wednesday is a day that we think about our frail reality. Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. We posture our bodies in prayer, lamentation, and repentance opening the transitional time of Lent – a time where we move through the reality of our existence, turning away from our death dealing ways to the way of life everlasting, the way of love. One way we do this is through fasting: we mark the holiness of Lent and our focus on God by denying ourselves of the things that take us away from the love of God. There are certainly personal, individual sins, things that we do to one another that we could repent from. But I don’t know if you have noticed all the chaos in the world recently. It seems like a lot of it has more to do with collective, systemic failure to live the ethic of love that Christ lived and died for. Isaiah tests our fast, and we are found wanting. This “Christian” nation has sanctified injustice, tied the thongs of the yoke, stolen bread from the hungry, evicted poor from their homes, stripped the vulnerable, and hidden from the goodness of our common humanity.

I read the portion of the president’s speech to emphasize how it is that the politics of this is our business. When God’s name is invoked in a political speech from the highest pulpit in the country it is inherently the business of all Christians. This kind of theology, this kind of God talk, is a perversion of the message of the Gospel and should be condemned with urgency. For the freedom that God promises us is not for a few, but for all, and the oppression of one robs the freedom of another. Yes, our world is burning. Yes, our neighbors are being stolen. Yes, our children are being bullied, tortured, and killed. But there is hope still.

We are not dead — we are alive! We are still part of God’s creation, and we have a responsibility to the most marginalized in our society to stand against injustice including the injustice of anti-transgender violence. We know the end of the story – we need not wait for the resurrection, for “Today is the day of salvation.” So during this season of Lent:

“Should this not be the fast we choose? To loose the bonds of injustice and undo the
thongs of the yoke to let the oppressed go free?”

May it be so.

In the wake of the executive orders being released this week and last targeting our community, including yesterday’s order seeking to restrict access to gender affirming care for anyone under the age of nineteen, we want to highlight the January 13th webinar "Building a Fighting Church, Part 1: Defending the Dignity of Trans, Non-binary, and Two-Spirit People." This webinar was organized by the Episcopal Church’s Gender Justice Officer Aaron Scott, and co-sponsored by TransEpiscopal. Over 400 people attended via Zoom, with another three hundred registered to attend. 

Video of the webinar can be viewed here, and we highly recommend watching all of it. 

In one section of the webinar, one of our steering committee members, the Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge, spoke on anchoring our commitment to trans justice in our Episcopal identity. His remarks, shared below, underscore the commitments the Episcopal Church has made over the past fifteen plus years at its highest level – the General Convention – to support and stand with trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit people, a stance that directly opposes what has been unfolding this week.
 
We share the webinar link and these remarks as an urgent call to stand with our community. Please watch this space for opportunities to connect and get involved with TransEpiscopal and other supportive groups around the church as we respond to all that is unfolding. Please particularly stay tuned for the Building a Fighting Church Part 2 webinar, focused on reproductive justice, with huge thanks to Aaron Scott for his leadership!

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This is a time of urgency and precarity for all of us who are trans, non-binary, and/or Two Spirit; and for all of us who are connected to this community: spouses and partners, parents, siblings, friends, community members. We’ve heard about our call to be a Fighting Church from Canon Carla Robinson. I want to underline that call for us as Christians and as Episcopalians. Many of us reaffirmed our Baptismal Covenant yesterday, as we celebrated the First Sunday after the Epiphany, traditionally centered on the baptism of Jesus. Among the promises we reaffirmed was our call to persevere in resisting evil, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, and to strive for justice and peace, respecting the dignity of every human being.

This is a moment in which the basic dignity of trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit people is being widely disrespected, undermined, and demeaned for political gain. Such action is happening at local levels in the form of schoolboard actions to ban particular books or flags, or to prevent trans people in general and trans girls in particular from accessing sports teams or other gender specific activities and spaces. This disrespect is happening at state levels with bans or attempts to ban access to gender affirming care, as well as sports bans.And it is happening at the federal level, as we just saw in the massive money spent on transphobic, transmisogynistic commercials aired particularly during sporting events this election season. This is part of a widespread pattern of anti-trans violence intersecting with racism, classism and sexism. This pattern is unfolding in so-called blue states as well as red states. It is happening in my own state of California. This avalanche of demeaning anti-trans activity has an impact that is serious and widespread. Not only on our laws, our spaces, the activities we may be barred from participating in, our basic safety and well-being. But there is also a spiritual danger of this pattern seeping into our hearts, of lowering the horizon of our expectations; squelching what we imagine is possible for our living and thriving. I think this is especially the case for the youngest trans, non-binary and two-spirit people among us, who hear of the violent rhetoric second hand if they haven’t already experienced it firsthand, and may feel the horizons of their own lives being foreclosed, even if they are in supportive families and friend groups. As we persevere in resisting this life-limiting evil, trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit people are counting on the Episcopal Church to honor its commitment to our community to respect not only our basic dignity but our presence, our creativity, our lay and ordained leadership, and our full flourishing as members of Christ’s body in this church we love.

The Episcopal Church has been on an intentional path to fully embrace, uplift, and honor the gifts of trans, non-binary and Two Spirit people for well over fifteen years now. At the churchwide level we began specifically affirming trans people in 2009 when the General Convention passed legislation encouraging churches to create flexible and expansive language church forms, allowing people to share their pronouns and their names. We went on record supporting a fully trans inclusive version of what came to be called the Equality Act – then the Employment Non-Discrimination Act – as well as state and local nondiscrimination legislation efforts. We went on in 2012 to add gender identity and expression to our own non-discrimination canons for lay and ordained leadership (first access to the ordination process, and then in 2018 expanded to employment and deployment opportunities) and underlined in 2022 that these canons include non-binary people. We named the epidemic of the bullying of young people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity and called upon one another to support the LGBTQIA youth among us. In 2022 we – the General Convention – specifically called upon the Episcopal Church to “advocate for access to gender affirming care in all forms (social, medical, or any other) and at all ages as part of our Baptismal call to ‘respect the dignity of every human being.’” We came out in official opposition to so-called “conversion therapy” in 2015.  We called for and later incorporated into the Book of Occasional Services a Rite for changing one’s name. And to support the journey of this call to fully embrace our community, we have called for and are increasingly taking up formation programs so that congregations, dioceses, and wider groupings of the church, can learn more about how to be supportive and actively affirming. (A comprehensive list of the Episcopal Church policy positions I have been describing is on TransEpiscopal’s website.)

Looking through the work our church has been engaging over these last fifteen plus years, the Episcopal church at the highest levels of its collective authority has a very clear, unambiguous stance of support for trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit people. That stance is founded upon a theology of the human person that is comprehensive, not complementarian or rigidly binary in its conception of gender; that honors the complexity of the human within the wide-ranging beauty of God’s creation; that makes space for the discernment of gender identity and the unfolding of its expression in various cultures and contexts. We have committed as a Church to the ongoing work of equipping ourselves to answer our call to respect the dignity of this community in our congregational life, and in the public square. Now more than ever, it is vital that we step forward and into this work.
 
Closing Prayer
Holy One, we give you thanks for this community, for its commitment, its questions, its energy and urgency. Fire our hearts as we leave this space, that we may take our learnings and connections out into our communities, into the world, strengthened by God’s transforming love. Amen.

This piece by TransEpiscopal Steering Committee member the Rev. Kori Pacyniak first appeared in the November 2024 issuer of Justice Jottings, the monthly newsletter of the Marianist Social Justice Collaborative.
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Every year, on November 20, communities around the world come together to remember transgender and gender non-conforming people who have been lost to violence within the last year on Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR). These vigils are often marked with the reading of names and candles, honoring our transcestors who are no longer with us. I attended my first TDOR vigil on a chilly night in November of 2009, with light drizzle coming down. It started out at the Episcopal Church that I was interning while doing my MDiv. As the church filled up with a gender diverse community from all around Boston, some looked uncomfortable due to the harm often caused to trans people by religious institutions. Soon a candlelit procession begins from the church down Brighton Avenue to near where Rita Hester, a Black transgender woman whose death in 1998 prompted the first vigils in Boston and San Francisco, lived. Candles to brighten the way, to remind us all of hope in the midst of despair. As we reached our destination, I realized that we had moved from one sacred space to another; the street corner has become just as sacred as the church. Slowly, reverently, the names of all the transgender people lost to violence within the last year were read. It became a litany, a prayer for those we’ve lost, and a voice echoing through my soul to bear witness. To not turn away. It reminds me of the passion, of the witness of the women at the foot of the cross. The moment when Jesus turns to his mother and says, “Woman, there is your son.” And then Jesus turns to the beloved disciple and says, “There is your mother.” Every year on Trans Day of Remembrance, as a too long list of names is read, I hear Jesus’ voice: “Bear witness for me. This is your kin. Your sister. Your brother. Your sibling. These are my beloved. Do not let any one of these be lost. For they are precious to me.” 
 
Right now, in the wake of the 2024 election, the trans community is shaken and afraid, because of anti-trans rhetoric cloaked in religious values coming at us from all sides. Afraid because of the 664 anti-trans pieces of legislation that have been proposed in 43 states in 2024 alone. Afraid because we do not know if our faith communities are safe places for us to live authentically as ourselves. 
 
This Trans Day of Remembrance offers an opportunity for transgender allies, accomplices, and co-conspirators. To learn about the history of Trans Day of Remembrance. To learn about local legislation and policies in your area and how they affect trans adults and youth. To listen to the stories of trans folks. To stand side by side with us in our grief, fear, and anger. To remind us that we have allies in the battle for our survival. To remind us that we are loved and beloved by God and by our communities. Paraphrasing the words of theologian Sallie McFague, “Great action requires great faith.” Both great faith and great action will be needed in the days ahead, as we face the unknown. We must protect trans children so that they are able to grow into trans adults. We must recognize the face of God in the face of our trans siblings. These are our siblings, friends, lovers, children, grandchildren, parents. It will require all of us, working together in solidarity, to stand up to the injustice of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation and help bring about a world where our trans siblings are not merely tolerated, but where they can flourish to the fullest. 
 
On this Trans Day of Remembrance, I offer this prayer: 

God of grief and lament. God who hears our cries and knows our innermost hearts. Be with us in our grief and sadness. Be with us in our anger and lament. Remind us that every one of us, in all our gender diversity, reflects Your boundless wonder. Help us to listen with open hearts, to be transformed by Your love, and to never cease working for justice in Your name. Amen.  

Jesus said, "Take away the stone." – John 11:39

This past Sunday, many of us celebrated the Autumn Triduum of All Hallows, All Saints, and All Souls. The veil between the living and the dead is thin in these days, and we are grateful for that great cloud of witnesses who stand here beside us, as some of our All Saints litanies repeated. We need the strength of that communal cloud as election day unfolds across the United States today. 

As trans and nonbinary people, together with our closest companions, today’s election feels especially fraught and downright dangerous for our community. Truly, the stakes have never been higher. We have watched, grieved, and raged as at least 662 pieces of anti-trans legislation have been filed in this country thus far in 2024. These efforts seek to take away our access to gender affirming care and constrain our bodily autonomy; to block our legal protections and our ability to change our legal documents; to erode our access to education and to gender specific activities and spaces in educational settings; to increasingly erase us from public life.  

The Trump presidential campaign has also exploited anti-trans sentiment in the electorate with an advertising campaign that is viciously transphobic and trans misogynistic. Just yesterday the Daily Podcast discussed this strategy in an analysis of both major party campaigns’ advertising. Sporting events broadcast on live TV have been a favorite venue for these commercials. We grieve this dehumanization and exploitation of trans people for political gain. It is a pattern of political violence that has built over several years and is now surging, as the Trans Legislation Tracker documents. Regardless of the election results, we recognize that this pattern of rhetorical and legislative violence against trans people is a deathly strategy that will continue. 

In the gospel passage assigned for the Feast of All Saints this year, we heard a portion of the raising of Lazarus (John 11:32-44). The scene is one of grief, anger, stench, and decay out of which a new chapter begins to emerge. Jesus stands with Mary and Martha outside the tomb and tells the crowd to roll away the stone. It seems ill-advised. What could possibly emerge but more death, given all that had already unfolded? And death does emerge at first. Lazarus, whom Jesus had called to “come out” (our queered ears appreciate), is still “the dead man.” He remains bound by grave clothes. As our new Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe preached at his investiture on Saturday, Lazarus needed the community to “unbind him and let him go,” which is exactly what Jesus called them to do.

In a very real sense, the political rhetoric has left us for dead, treating us as things and not people. In the Lazarus story, it is indeed God who raises Lazarus from the dead, but humans who are given the task of rolling away the stone and unbinding him. We put our trust in our liberating God who, as the womanist theologians say, makes a way out of no way, but we call upon those who would aspire to be allies to actively seek out opportunities to roll away the stones and unbind those of us rhetorically (and sometimes far worse than rhetorically) slain by policy and discourse.

We pray that this election will help roll back and unbind obscene oppression stoked against so many marginalized communities in this country – immigrants, Black and Brown people, women, poor people, incarcerated people, trans and nonbinary people, including and especially in intersectional combination. We do not imagine that the violence against these communities will stop on a dime, regardless of election results. In the meantime, we long for the Word of life to meet us where we are, to begin to lead us forward, collectively unwinding the structures of death. As Presiding Bishop Rowe imagined, “we will stand together, sometimes afraid, sometimes bewildered, looking for life, hoping for wholeness in all things.” 

To do just that, next Monday, November 11 we will hold a Zoom space for trans and nonbinary people and our allies, to gather in prayer and support, to begin to process what results of this election are known to us at that point. We will hold the space from 5:30-7 PM pacific / 8:30-10 PM eastern. You can register to attend here.

We also encourage you to access the emerging spaces around the church that are affirming and equipping our lives, such as the Gender Justice Jam series organized by Aaron Scott, the Gender Justice Officer for the Episcopal Church (which Episcopal News Service reported on today). Its next session will take place right before ours. We are inspired by the rich offerings and communal support being shared in that space.

Another opportunity is coming this evening, as the Episcopal Public Policy Network will host a virtual space for prayer from 5-7 PM pacific / 8-10 PM eastern, led by leaders from around the church, including our own steering committee member Sarah Lawton. 
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Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Today that charge is our prayer. 

At this fiftieth anniversary of the ordination of the first women to the priesthood in The Episcopal Church, we celebrate the pioneering spirit of the eleven who forged a Spirit-led pathway in Philadelphia on July 29, 1974. We salute their courage to risk the consequences of what was deemed an “irregular” ordination and punitive reactions to it. We give thanks as well for the solidarity of those who joined the women in that risk: the bishops who ordained them; the Church of the Advocate who supported this effort with both space and leadership, particularly from the Reverend Paul Washington and from then-Senior Warden, later first woman bishop in the Anglican Communion, the Right Reverend Barbara C. Harris; Vice President of the House of Deputies Charles Willie who preached at the ordination and later resigned his position in solidarity with the women. This anniversary inspires us to recall how the church’s work for racial and economic justice has long intersected with and supported the work for gender justice.
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This solidarity and collectivity, modeled by the women and by all who supported them, was crucial to the moment’s impact, as shown in so many scenes of the documentary The Philadelphia Eleven which is available to watch at home on Kinema this weekend. As a collective ourselves, we in TransEpiscopal know that it takes collaboration, critical analysis, strategic wisdom and friendship to bring about change – together with God’s help. Working together helps push back against isolation and overwhelm. It brings hope, hope that “does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).

This week we have also appreciated an article in Episcopal News Service anticipating the anniversary: “Women priests who were caught in ‘conscience clause’ hope the church remembers their stories.” The “conscience clause” refers to a statement passed by the House of Bishops in October of 1977 after General Convention had changed the canons to officially sanction the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate the previous summer (ordination to the diaconate had been canonically affirmed in 1970). As the article explains, “the House of Bishops gave cover to any process gatekeeper who refused to follow the canon because of ‘his or her conscientious objection.’” The article goes on to describe how that conscience clause impacted the ability of women to obtain positions as priests in dioceses or parishes where male bishops or priests did not support the women’s ordained ministries. “The conscience clause had no official standing because it had not been considered, much less approved by both houses of General Convention. It simply was announced during the October 1977 House of Bishops meeting and included in a pastoral letter calling for unity in Christ. However, it took 20 years and an act of General Convention (Resolution A052) to eliminate the loophole.”

As the article’s headline underscores, it is crucial to remember the years-long impact of the conscience clause. 

Because we do remember, we remain concerned, as we wrote for ISSUES on June 26th regarding resolution A092, that the 81st General Convention ultimately passed this resolution in June. A092 added canonical nondiscrimination protections for anyone exercising ministry who has a “conscientiously-held theological belief that marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman, or that marriage is a covenant between two people.” When the House of Bishops discussed A092 – the very first resolution they considered at this General Convention – no one said a word about the parallels between the proposed language and the language of 1977. The only testimony was from Bishop Bauerschmidt of the Diocese of Tennessee who spoke of A092 as “one of those canonical amendments with purchase in both directions, folks who may feel that they’re in a minority in a diocese, and offer some protection in terms of licensure and canonical residence…. It does provide some support for minorities of whatever sort within a diocese.” (Committee report and testimony can be found at this link starting at 51:00.)

By contrast in the House of Deputies the discussion was robust with several speakers evoking the conscience clause parallels. (Testimony can be found at this link starting at 2:28:44). Deputy Katie Sherrod of the Diocese of Texas noted, “except for its subject matter [A092] is virtually identical to the conscience clause adopted in 1977 by the House of Bishops…. That clause was designed to appease the episcopal opponents of the ordination of women just as section three of [A]092 is designed to appease opponents of same sex marriage.” Because of the 1977 conscience clause, Sherrod explained, it took thirty-three years for the Diocese formerly known as Fort Worth to ordain a woman to the priesthood. “I believe we have outgrown the need for conscience clauses,” she continued. A092 “enshrine[es] our differences in a form that has the potential for harming those it purports to protect.” Likewise Deputy Jennifer Adams of Western Michigan (now the Diocese of the Great Lakes) expressed concern that the canon changes in A092 have the effect of protecting those who are against same sex marriage while “making those who seek such a blessing – LGBTQ+ people called to ordination, LGBTQ+ people who have recently found a home in our pews, it makes them, it makes us, more vulnerable.” Adams continued, “There are better ways to protect those with privilege than by putting those who are already vulnerable at higher risk.”

Those who acknowledged the conscience clause parallels and voted for A092 anyway have tended to cite our different contexts. Women’s ordination was not as widely accepted in 1977 as LGBTQIA+ people are in our church now, they have argued. “We’re not going back,” they have said. 

We appreciate that the historical contexts are different, and we don’t believe TEC is reversing course now. Our concern is that trans, nonbinary, and two spirit clergy, as well as cisgender lesbian, gay, bi and queer clergy – especially those who are partnered but not called to marriage – are having difficulty gaining access to jobs, licensure, or canonical residence because of their lived realities, who they are first and foremost, not their “conscientiously-held theological beliefs.” Opponents of women’s ordination did not need protection in 1977. Women did. Those who disagree with LGBTQIA+ ordained ministries and relationships (whether marriages or not) are not in need of canonical nondiscrimination protection today. LGBTQIA+ people – especially queer and trans women, and nonbinary folks – are.

And so this weekend, we give thanks for the Philadelphia Eleven and all those who stood with them. We give thanks for their courage and persistence on July 29, 1974 as well as the everyday ministries they engaged after that momentous day. We know, as The Philadelphia Eleven documentary dramatically shows, that they faced major obstacles for years. Through it all, they changed the church. In so many ways, they made our ministries possible. We pray that in the years to come we will continue to learn from them, that in community and friendship, with strategic wisdom and courage, with the Spirit’s inspiration, we will join them in continuing to transform the church.

Earlier today we published a piece in ISSUES, the General Convention publication shared by the Consultation, on why we do not support resolutions A091, A092, and A094. Our reflection is the second piece in the above-linked ISSUES. Since then we have heard from the Rev. Elyse Gustafson who wrote the below piece from here at General Convention and as she made her way to the airport. We thank her for sharing it with us, and for giving us permission to share her perspective with you.

I am a partnered gay priest in the Diocese of Florida. I am not a deputy or a member of the Communion Across Difference Task Force. I am attending General Convention primarily because of my interest in Title IV, as I am the named Complainant in the discrimination case against the former Bishop of Florida—a case that has been referred to what is basically an ecclesiastical trial. 

Because my focus here has been on Title IV, I was not going to weigh in on the task force’s resolutions. However, I have heard Florida mentioned several times as a reason to pass these resolutions, and so I feel the need to clarify a few things. 

First, I want to say that no one from Florida was ever asked their opinions about these resolutions, so using us in this way feels inappropriate. 

But more importantly, I also want to say that I respectfully but strongly disagree with these resolutions, especially A092, and ask you to vote against them. 

I do not doubt the good intention of the task force or that good work was done. I am sure relational progress was made and participants found ways to make room for each other. But that does not always translate into good legislation. 

I want to be very clear: these resolutions would not have helped us in Diocese of Florida. They would not have helped us, and it is very easy for me to imagine how they might have hurt us.

The disenfranchisement and mistreatment of LGBTQ+ people and our allies was *already* in violation of our existing canons. The problem was not in the implementation of canons but in our inability to enforce them. We should have been protected under the canons already in place. The failure is not with III.1.2 but in the implementation of Title IV.

And one of the many, many reasons it was difficult to implement Title IV to enforce the anti-discrimination canons was a misapplied sense that we need to make room for everyone— even those actively causing harm. There were several times in the years prior to our failed bishop elections in which I tried to raise concerns about the then Bishop of Florida and the response was “well, communion across difference is the new thing now!” Which was a way of saying because he has conservative views, he could not be challenged on anything. Just *existence* of the task force provided political cover, even when what I was challenging was not the bishop’s views (personally, I could care less what anyone’s private views are) but rather his *behavior,* behavior that was in direct violation of our existing canons. 

Again, I am not saying this outcome was the intention of the task force. I am only saying this is an example of the ways these resolutions could make protecting vulnerable people more difficult. 

I have been focused on clergy discipline and so I am only superficially aware of the complex conversation around the prayer book and marriage rites. I am not weighing in on that. I am only here to say that these resolutions scare me on a gut level. I would much rather pause a moment to let the discrimination trial play out. That way we might be able to see if we as a church are capable of protecting the historically marginalized before we extend those protections to the historically privileged. 

Note: this was written very quickly from the airport as I await my flight home from GC. 

As the 81st General Convention approaches, TransEpiscopal is supporting C010 “Access to Prison Ministries.” This resolution affirms the power of ministries with people who are incarcerated and calls for such ministries to align with our nondiscrimination canons and not exclude people who are openly trans, non-binary, and/or queer. If a non-affirming prison ministry is unwilling to change its policies to be open to people of all sexualities and genders, then Episcopal congregations or dioceses should develop and share alternate programs that align with our church’s current teaching on gender and sexuality as expressed by our nondiscrimination canons.

Resolution C010 originated in the Diocese of California, where people from across the diocese have participated in Kairos Prison Ministry at San Quentin since the program’s founding in 1989. As this timeline shared by the Very Rev. Deborah White indicates, late in the summer of 2023 local volunteers discovered that Kairos International’s ethics code, which volunteers are required to sign, “uses sex assigned at birth for volunteers and for Kairos Outside Guests” (p. 9). The policy prohibits trans and non-binary volunteer participation, requiring them to literally cosign a denial of who they are. The policy also puts any clergy signing on behalf of parishioners in conflict with the Episcopal Church’s non-discrimination canons (I.17.5 and III.1.2).

Last Wednesday evening, as this Episcopal News Service story has also reported, C010 received a public hearing in Legislative Committee 17 on Accessibility and Inclusion. Four people testified in support, with none against. All four were from the Diocese of California, with two also serving on the diocese’s General Convention deputation. Two of the four are additionally part of TransEpiscopal’s steering committee – the Rev. Mees Tielens and the Rev. Cameron Partridge.

The Rev. Tielens testified,

We need queer folks, trans folks ministering to people in prison. As a trans person, I know what it is like to be considered not-quite-human, not quite deserving the same rights, dignity, bodily autonomy or privacy that other people get, to have people judge you before they even know you. Prisons are parallel worlds that society likes to tuck out of sight and surround with shame. Well, if there’s anything queer folks know, it’s the destructive power of shame.  

He continued:

I write with a condemned trans woman at San Quentin, and visited her recently to take her confession. She had been taught, as had I, that God couldn’t love us the way we were. I don’t know if I can convey the damage that did to us. And so it was incredibly healing to both of us that I could offer her absolution as a trans priest, living proof of there being churches that don’t just tolerate but celebrate trans people and their gifts for ministry.

I’m here today asking the Episcopal Church to stand behind its principles not for my own sake. Because the real issue is that Kairos doesn’t just deprive me of the opportunity for mutual ministry–it deprives queer and trans folks on the inside, a particularly cruel reality for people already so deprived of connection and authenticity.

Christina Reich, a member of Grace Episcopal Church in Martinez, California, spoke of how meaningful this ministry has been to her and her son who was formerly incarcerated: “I devoted fourteen years of my life to Kairos Prison Ministry because it literally saved my life and that of my son.” It was devastating for Reich to discover the discriminatory policy. “I LOVE THIS MINISTRY and want to continue, but I cannot and will not sign my name to any such discriminatory policy. Our queer siblings are beloved children of God and have endured so much pain from people that call themselves Christian.” Continuing these ministries unchanged in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mode is also not acceptable, Reich argued. Instead, “Let’s work together for change and continued reconciliation as an interfaith community. Let’s ensure this beautiful ministry is available to ALL of God’s children, not just SOME.”

The Very Rev. White spoke of her experience as a forensic psychologist prior to her ordination, providing counseling to trans people incarcerated in the California prison system. “Prison is a hard and unforgiving place, but no group of individuals is more brutally abused than transgender inmates. These individuals are punished unmercifully for simply being who they are. They are the people of whom Jesus spoke when he asked his followers to care for those that society considers least because what we do for them we do for him.”

The Rev. Partridge connected the resolution to the idea of “communion across difference,” a theme in the Episcopal Church and wider Anglican Communion’s continuing reflection on sexuality and gender (and represented in several resolutions coming before this General Convention, as this ENS article reports). Multi-faith and ecumenical ministries with people who are incarcerated “are important forms of communion across difference, which are crucial in this moment when our country, our wider world, and our church are all too often divided. But we cannot allow such engagement to include signing onto policies that conflict with, and in fact violate, our own hard-won non-discrimination canons.”

As the Rev. Tielens concluded, “Trans people work across differences every day. It’s time for the Church to take some of that burden off our shoulders and stand for what it believes: seeking and serving Christ in all persons.”

The Committee voted unanimously to recommend to their respective houses to adopt the resolution. Stay tuned for further news on its journey through Convention next month.

TransEpiscopal joins our friends in the Diocese of Massachusetts, the wider Episcopal Church and especially our coalitional partners in the Consultation in mourning the loss and celebrating the extraordinary life of the Reverend Canon Edward W. Rodman. Canon Rodman was a lifelong advocate for racial and social justice, a pioneering advocate, mentor, and encourager who had a foundational impact upon our ongoing work. 
 
Beginning in his teen years when he became an organizer in the civil rights movement, Canon Rodman was deeply influenced by Ella Baker’s conviction, “what we need are movement-centered leaders, not leader-centered movements,” as this Boston Globe obituary recounted.  “It’s not about me, it’s about the people… It’s not about me, it’s about the work.” 
 
As a statement from the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts recently reflected, “Ed Rodman was known churchwide as a strategist, advocate and activist for social and racial justice, and as an educator and mentor across generations in The Episcopal Church.” His strategic advice, solidarity, and encouragement were instrumental in TransEpiscopal’s early years as we sought to bring our voices and witness to the wider Episcopal Church. In the wake of the 2006 General Convention, when our early efforts to change the church’s nondiscrimination canons fell short, Canon Rodman offered compassionate encouragement and sage counsel: join the Consultation.
 
The Consultation is a coalition of progressive organizations within the Episcopal Church that since 1985 has worked intersectionally to support the justice-oriented goals of its groups at the Episcopal Church’s triennial General Convention. Thanks to Canon Rodman’s counsel, TransEpiscopal applied and was accepted into this consortium in 2007. (In fact, a press release about this acceptance constituted the first post we made to our blog.) The gift of his mentorship and solidarity opened a door for TransEpiscopal to organize ourselves more effectively and to join in the crucial coalitional advocacy that the Consultation had been doing for decades. Racial and economic justice, the ministry of all the baptized, commitment to peace, gender and sexuality justice – TransEpiscopal has been working side by side with our partners around this intersectional table since 2007, thanks Canon Rodman’s wisdom and support.
 
We also want to lift up and appreciate how Canon Rodman’s outreach to us highlights a powerful, long-standing pattern of Black leaders and communities within the Episcopal Church opening up liberating, life-giving spaces of solidarity across racial, economic, gender, and sexuality lines. The Honorable Byron Rushing – former Vice President of the House of Deputies, retired former Massachusetts state legislator, and long-time Consultation leader – is another powerful example of such solidarity: several times over he co-sponsored legislation in Massachusetts protecting transgender people against discrimination as well as one of the first resolutions to pass General Convention in support of our community (D012). This pattern of support is also dramatically showcased in the recently released documentary The Philadelphia Eleven, in which we witness the historically Black parish, the Church of the Advocate, opening its doors in 1974 to the first women to be ordained priests in the Episcopal Church. The late Bishop Barbara C. Harris, who was the Senior Warden of Church of the Advocate and served as the crucifer at the Philadelphia ordinations; who was a founder of the Consultation; and who became the first woman bishop in the Anglican Communion in 1989; was also a crucial early supporter of TransEpiscopal’s work. 
 
We are so grateful for the inspiration, solidarity, and liberating energy that Canon Rodman and so many others have unleashed in our beloved Episcopal Church. As we give thanks for Canon Rodman’s life, may we honor it by continuing the coalitional work he invited us to step further into. May we do this work together, in community, welcoming others as he welcomed us. 

Easter and Trans Day of Visibility coincided this year for only the second time since the inception of TDOV in 2009, and the last time until 2086. In congregations around the globe, the inspiring power of this overlap was lifted up by and for trans and non-binary people and our beloveds even as other corners of the U.S. criticized positive, public acknowledgments of this overlap, as various news stories – e.g. here and here – reported. As the Washington Post noted, "it isn’t just that Easter and Trans Day of Visibility fell on March 31. They fell on March 31 during a [United States] election year, one that is underway as the trans community becomes a more frequent target of the political right."  

At the close of his Easter Sunday sermon at St. Aidan's in San Francisco, the Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge lifted up the inspiring overlap of these days. Describing an experience of attending the pre-dawn Easter Vigil at the SSJE Monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts several years ago, he shared,

"Exhausted and shivering, I stood in the courtyard and observed the lighting of the New Fire... Then came the Paschal Candle. As the presider traced the Alpha and Omega, and the year on the candle, declaring Christ the beginning and the end, a sense of sacred temporal layering, the presence of deep time, washed over me. Then the presider pressed into the candle red nails, their wax encasing grains of incense – marks of the wounds that are present in Christ’s risen body, as next week’s gospel reading emphasizes (Jn 20:19-29). I was so struck by the sentence that was then spoken: “By his holy and glorious wounds, may Christ our Savior guard and keep us.” In that moment, gazing upon that candle and taking in these prayerful words – the same we prayed in our vigil last night – I took in this holy, physical presence that burns throughout the Great Fifty Days of Easter, accompanying our most profound moments throughout the year, from baptism to burial of the dead. But I didn’t just see a candle. I saw a body. A Paschal body. A risen body, resplendent in all its waxen plasticity as all bodies are. I saw in its layered depths all the stories we have passed through and over. It is a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. It is a light to all peoples. It is marked by wounds the prayer so rightly names as glorious, as one of the Wesley hymns invites, “with what rapture gaze we on those glorious scars.” In that predawn moment, I thought of my own journey, all the pathways I have traveled, losses and delights, mysteries yet to unfold. I thought of the marks on my body as a trans person, the stories I have lived. There in that candle all of it was lifted up as glorious. On this Trans Day of Visibility I share with you this sign of glory that I have seen. I say to you, you who are trans, you who are non-binary, you who are cisgender: in you, in your body, Christ is revealed in glory. And we, all of us together, reaching across our chasms of experience and understanding, in solidarity and hope, in the face of death and denunciation, are invited to be changed by that sight. We are called to make our way back out into the world as Christ’s fiercely compassionate gardeners, as people on whom the Spirit of resurrection life is breathed even now, even in a world so full of toxicity spewed at our fellow humans and at our planet, targeted to tear us apart. See and believe. Believe and see. Show to the world around you – your neighbors and friends, your family, your work, your layered communities: resurrection life is profoundly present even as it also awaits us in final fulfillment. Christ is among us in glory. May we declare with Mary: I have seen the Lord." 

The whole sermon is linked here.

In the comments, feel free to share other sermons you know of that celebrated this Easter / TDOV overlap.

As we make our way through the 50 Days of Easter, may we uplifted by resurrection joy.

Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

St. Peter’s Redwood City, September 9, 2023
The Rev’d Dr. Cameron Partridge

The recorded livestream of the entire service is on St. Peter's Facebook page, here. The homily begins at 30:57. 
 
I invite you to join me in singing this refrain:
 
My heart shall sing of the day you bring. Let the fires of your justice burn. Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn! – Canticle of the Turning by Rory Cooney[1]
 
I’m certainly neither ready nor able to wipe away all tears. Yet may this Canticle be our prayer today. Amen.

Dear friends: St. Peters parish community; family and longtime friends of Iain; colleagues and friends of the Diocese of California and the wider Episcopal Church; the TransEpiscopal community; ecumenical and interfaith colleagues; kindred connecting online; Bishop Marc; all you who loved Iain Michael Stanford: I greet you today in celebration of a beautiful human being who lived a life that proclaimed the Good News of God, who discerned and answered God’s call again and again, who urgently joined in God’s mission to “turn the world around,” and invited us to join him in that work. 

I was beyond honored when Iain asked me to preach today. It was June 22, not even three months ago, and the request came amid a wider series of conversations we had been having about his health and ultimately the approaching conclusion of his earthly life. “You know you don’t have to say yes,” he said. “It might be too much.” It might be. But sometimes life is too much, and with the help and support of loved ones, friends and family alike – including friends who are family, friends like Iain – we find a way forward. We show one another the way with God’s help, as the Holy Spirit flows among us, upholding us, connecting and abiding with us, opening up new possibility, purpose, life and love in the very thresholds of death. Jesus said, “I have called you friends” (John 15:15). And indeed, we are. And so I said, “there is no way I’m saying no. I want to do this, no matter how hard.” He nodded. 

Then I went on to ask him about this service. What would he like to include in it? “I don’t have a strong opinion,” he said. Seriously? Iain not have a strong opinion? “You’ll know what to do,” he said. “Okay,” I said, “but what about favorite hymns? I know you love music…” We’d had many conversations about music, sacred and secular, especially in recent years. I waited. Then he said, “well I do have to say, I love ‘Canticle of the Turning.’” As he went on to talk about why, he turned to its source, the proclamation of Mary, the mother of Jesus (Luke 1:46-55): “My soul magnifies God, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Iain loved the joy of Mary’s declaration, and the deep bond of her relationship with the God for whom nothing is impossible. As the conversation continued, Iain shared that Mary had been highly important to his dad’s spirituality, and that in Iain’s young adulthood, when he was working in Europe for Arthur Andersen, he had traveled with his dad to several Marian shrines. Over time, as Iain’s faith journey continued, the prophetic qualities of Mary’s proclamation became ever more significant: God’s lifting up of those who have been brought low, God’s feeding of the hungry, humbling of the proud, emptying of the rich. The Canticle of the Turning emphasizes the systemic transformation – the turning – of oppression that God is ever stoking, a movement that God is constantly calling us to join along with those who have gone before us. As we sang, “This saving word that our forbears heard is the promise which holds us bound, ‘til the spear and rod can be crushed by God who is turning the world around.” God is turning the world around. God urges us to join in that just transformation. And when we become weak and overwhelmed along the way – which we will – to be sustained by divine mercy and grace, by love. Iain loved this gospel word. He lived by it. He died convinced of it. He wanted us to join him in knowing and proclaiming it with our very beings. And so, despite thinking he didn’t have an opinion, he chose a gospel passage (Luke 1:39-55) that flowed from the depths of his soul, inviting us to hear “I am resurrection and I am life” through Mary’s proclamation, with Advent-tinged anticipation. 

But we were far from finished putting this service together. What about other readings? Again, he paused. Then he said, “I love the passage from Romans 8 with the message that nothing can separate us from the love of God.” I love that passage too, and lines that precede it. The Apostle Paul’s language of the Spirit interceding for us with sighs or groans too deep for words (Rom 8:26). Of creation itself groaning in longing for, in anticipation of, its redemption, its healing, its liberation (Rom 8:19-23). But the line that Iain was especially drawn to speaks particularly to contexts of challenge, distance, and separation: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39). The pastor in Iain chose these words knowing that when a loved one dies, so often the ground of our grief is separation, our longing for our loved one to be returned to us, perhaps our feeling of helplessness in the face of loss. It can feel like we stand on the other side of a chasm, “a dark and dreary land” as our translation of Psalm 23 put it[2], unable to see the one who has died, unable to fathom where God might be in the midst and in the wake of such loss. Iain knew this. He had experienced it himself many times over in his life. What had comforted him along the way, what he invited us to hear together today, and in the days to come, is that nothing can separate us from love. From God’s love for us. From the love of God that we share. From the love that abides in and among us, through which God constantly dwells with us. Nothing, nothing can in fact separate us from that love. Or as our Psalm intoned, “There is nothing that can shake me. She has said, she won’t forsake me, I’m in her hand.” God never stops abiding with us as we face chasms of loss. 

And in fact, Iain too abides with us. In an oral history / spiritual autobiography we recorded on July 5th, we dwelt upon the Communion of Saints, that “blessed company” of those who have gone before us, whose lives reveal the Good News to us, who shine like stars guiding us to action in the world and to home with God. Iain was deeply inspired by that Communion, from his growing up in the Roman Catholic tradition to his journey into The Episcopal Church. He had come to love the concept of queer saints – ancient and contemporary – whose lives affirm the beauty and goodness of LGBTQIA people, who sing glory before the divine presence, joining us in harmony across the mortal veil, expanding our imagination of God’s dream, what God’s world, turned around, might look like. I think he heard that angle on the Communion of Saints in the language of the poem “When Death Comes” that he chose for this service in our June conversation.[3] “I want a Mary Oliver poem,” he had declared, searching the internet for the right one. Suddenly he said, “This is it. This is it.” I read it and cried, thinking of how Oliver’s line “each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth,” spoke profoundly to Iain’s journey. I think of how Iain had come out as trans in his mid 40s, and Oliver’s observation of “each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence” makes me think of the deep and ongoing work of discernment that had long guided Iain’s path. So too Oliver’s emphasis on amazement, binary language notwithstanding. At the end of Iain’s life, especially, even as he struggled mightily with bodily discomfort and pain, Iain’s spiritual posture was oriented to awe. He received so many notes of appreciation and connection, including the beautiful tribute we just heard from the St. Peter’s community, as he neared the end of his life. Truly, he was amazed by that. We talked about it as the end approached. He felt so uplifted by you. “I truly had no idea,” he kept saying, “that I had an impact” in the ways you shared with him. But now he did. Now he did know. He knew he was deeply loved. He knew it in his bones.

​And he loved you. He loved you. Several of us were privileged, along with Iain’s sister Cheryl, to support him in his last weeks, including his last day. On that evening we held a small prayer service to create a container of love in which he could let go, allowing himself to be enfolded into that blessed company of the saints in light, into God’s loving arms. And the heartbeat of that last prayerful gathering, of the messages from you, of the myriad conversations and interactions he had over a beautiful, deeply impactful lifetime, was love. Love is what matters in the end, Iain said to us. Love is what joins us to God’s turning of the world. Love is so much deeper, prophetic, and transformative than we know, as our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry so often proclaims. Iain rests in that love now. And so, dear friends, from that rest his invitation calls to us, unable to be separated from us or contained by the limits of our imaginations: be emblems of Good News. Turn the world around. Do it together, sustained, released into, powered by God’s resurrecting love.

My heart shall sing of the day you bring. Let the fires of your justice burn. May we cry true tears as the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn! Amen.


[1] #527 in Gather Comprehensive, Second edition. For an account by Rory Cooney of his 1988 setting of the Magnificat to the Irish tune Star of the County Down, see http://rorycooney.blogspot.com/2014/08/songstories-36-canticle-of-turning-gia.html. A recording of this hymn can be heard online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9QeTmRCpW4

[2] Bobby McFerrin, “The 23rd Psalm” from his album Medicine Music (EMI, 1990). It can be heard online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJixdpZ5m1o

[3] Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes” in New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). The poem can be found online at http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_whendeathcomes.htm

Today the Presiding Bishop’s office and the Diocese of Florida announced that a majority of both standing committees and bishops of The Episcopal Church have voted not to consent to the bishop election in the Episcopal Diocese of Florida. We believe this result was a necessary response to an election that was shaped within a diocesan context with a documented pattern and practice of systemic discrimination against LGBTQIA+ clergy. With this vote the wider Church has said that our nondiscrimination canons do in fact matter in the breach. We note as well the significance of both groups – standing committees and bishops – discerning this response as a sign of clarity and care for the Diocese of Florida and for all of us connected to one another across the Church. 
 
We lift up that spirit of care, clarity, and connection in prayer for the Diocese of Florida, knowing that they have a long road ahead. We pray for everyone impacted by decision: for the lay and ordained leadership of the diocese; for the Rev. Charlie Holt and his family; and especially for the LGBTQIA+ people of the diocese who took significant personal risks in sharing their experiences and calling for an intervention for justice and healing. 
 
As we wrote in our statement about the consent process on March 21, “We know as well as anyone in the Church that we are all still on a journey in this Church to overcome discrimination across many dimensions.” We continue to believe this strongly, as our own recent testimonies in this blog space have underscored (here and here, for example). All of us in our various diocesan contexts must continue intentionally and urgently on this journey together. This journey is not about the “chaotic nature of church politics and clashes of personal interest,” and it is most certainly not born of “wicked motives.” ​ It is of the Spirit of truth who leads us into all truth (John 16:13). 
 
We take no joy in this outcome – indeed, we observe the pain out of which this decision has emerged – but we do take hope. Hope in Christ who has said “I will be with you always” (Mt 28:20). Hope in the nearness of God’s just reign. Hope in the collective body of Christ, knit together in baptism, journeying together in solidarity toward the mystery of resurrection life.

Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.” John 11:25
 
With deep sorrow and abiding love we write to share that our beloved friend Iain Michael Stanford died this evening at 9 pm. Iain had been navigating a rare, aggressive cancer diagnosed shortly after his sixtieth birthday in March. He received excellent care through Kaiser, including immunotherapy, but after a week in the hospital in May he never regained his strength. He went home to God peacefully at home in the presence of family and friends.
 
Iain was originally from the West Coast and grew up in California and Washington. After graduating from Oregon State in Industrial Engineering he worked for Arthur Anderson for several years, living in Switzerland before returning to the United States. After taking coursework in theology at Seattle University, he was inspired to go to seminary at the University of Notre Dame, from which he earned a Master of Divinity degree. Iain was strongly formed in the Vatican II traditions of Roman Catholicism and over the years drew deeply from the feminist, queer, and liberation theologies of various Christian traditions. At Harvard Divinity School starting in the late 1990s, he was a doctoral student in the Religion, Gender, and Culture Program, made his way into the Episcopal Church, and in the late 2000s came out as an openly transgender man. Iain returned to the Pacific Northwest in the 2010s and was sponsored for the priesthood from the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon. Ordained in 2016, he served parishes in San Francisco and Lake Oswego, Oregon before becoming the Rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Redwood City, California in July, 2020. 
 
Iain was an active leader in the TransEpiscopal community for many years. He was part of our advocacy efforts leading up to and at the 2012 General Convention at which “gender identity and expression” were added to the Episcopal Church’s nondiscrimination canons for access to the ordination process and all levels of leadership in the Church. He was on our Steering Committee for many years and contributed both his own posts and his editorial skills to our blog. Over the last year Iain had been chairing the Trans and Non-binary Task Force of the Diocese of California, and last year was appointed to the churchwide Task Force on LGBTQ+ Inclusion. 
 
Iain was fierce and compassionate, stubborn and loving. He was a truth-teller, a lover of community, a pragmatic prophet, a believer in rolling up his sleeves and digging in to the nitty gritty. He hated injustice of all kinds. He loved being a parish priest. He made connections and built community. He felt strongly both that have come a long way as a Church in our upholding of trans, non-binary and all marginalized communities, and that we have a great deal of work to do to fully realize the promises we have made as a church. 
 
Even this very day, we told him we will carry him with us as we continue the work that lies before us. We told him we loved him dearly, beyond what words can convey. So many of you have joined us in conveying this love in these last days. You sent cards and emails, you posted to his social media, you contributed to his Go Fund Me campaign, which made such a difference in easing his financial stress. Iain truly felt the love and support of the people in his life. He came to catch an authentic glimpse of the profound difference he made in so many lives. He was utterly clear that relationships are what matter the most in this life. The call to love one another was truly his commitment. 
 
Iain is survived by his three older siblings Cheryl Linder, Bob Stanford, Bill Stanford, and their children; his many friends; and his two beloved cats. In the coming days we will share a recorded conversation he made this past week with his friend Cameron Partridge. In the meantime, we invite you to share stories of Iain in the comments.
 
We release our beloved friend into the loving arms of the God who created him to become the beautiful human being Iain was. We are so grateful for his presence in our lives. We rest this night in the promise of resurrection life and in the conviction “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).