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.