#binary breaker

Happy Trans Day of Visibility!

We want to wish a very happy TDOV to every trans person we’ve helped at FLAVNT, from our 7 partners to every person who has worn one of our shirts and felt more confident in themselves, we love you and today is for you. 

We also want to wish an especially happy TDOV 2017 to our great friend and current fundraising partner, Spencer. Spencer is a nonbinary person from Atlanta who is currently raising money for top surgery later this year. If you don’t know about them: Spencer is an EMT, vet tech, medical school hopeful, Air Force vet, twin, ex-college athlete, anime-loving, binary breaking ball of sunshine on top of being transgender. If you haven’t already, go to their blog ( @justjewit32 ) and give them a follow/some love (please keep in mind that they use they/them pronouns) and go to flavnt.com to buy something to help them raise money for top surgery!

If, for example, the border patrol won’t allow the two sides to stand close enough to hear each other’s words, they’ll stand fifty feet apart, and conduct worship over cell phones.  If the participants are forbidden to pass food and drink through the fence, they’ll practice “sacramental solidarity,” and serve parallel Eucharists on each side of the border.  

Some years ago, when the chain-link border fence gave way to a steel barrier, worshipers continued to pass the peace across the border — pinky to pinky through tiny holes in the wall.  Even these days, under Covid-19 lockdown, the church meets via Zoom and Facebook Live.

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For me, a particular revelation of Jesus happened when I thought about the metaphors in [John 10, “I am the Gate”] alongside Frykholm’s article about the tenacious little border church between the United States and Mexico. 

Suddenly, as I imagined eager, loving hands reaching through small gaps in a cold, steel barrier, as I pictured the insistent sharing of song, prayer, bread, and wine across a bleak, intractable border, the resonance of Jesus’s metaphor hit me full force.  “I am the gate.”  Not, “I am the wall, the barrier, the enclosure, the dividing line.”  Not, “I am that which separates, isolates, segregates, and incarcerates.”  I am the gate.  The door.  The opening.  The passageway.  The place where freedom begins.

Needless to say, most of us — left to ourselves —  don’t associate “gates” with freedom.  We think of bars and locks and alarms and enclosures.  We imagine toddler gates, maybe, or puppy training gates.  Prison gates and “gated communities.”  But what if Jesus is a different kind of gate?  A gate that opens out instead of closing in?  Not the barrier itself, but the aperture in it?  A place of release?  Movement?  Spaciousness? Liberty?  “I am the gate.  Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”  

I know that this chapter of John’s Gospel has been interpreted in ways that harm people.  I grew up hearing it as an exclusivist, supersessionist text, all about who is “in” and who is “out" when it comes to God and God's flock.  For years, I read it as Biblical proof that Jesus won’t love or save people who don’t look, act, think, believe, pray, love, or worship in the same ways I do.

But in fact, this passage, at its heart, is not about scarcity at all.  It’s not about the stinginess of God, and it’s not about the self-protective walls we like to build and hide behind.  (Remember, Jesus is the gate.  We’re not.  Gate-keeping is not our job.)  It’s about life.  Life that pushes across formidable boundaries.  Life that flourishes in precarious places.  Life that never denies the real threat of thieves, bandits, and strangers — and yet holds out the possibility of pasture, nourishment, protection, and rest.  Life that perseveres and maybe even thrives in the valley of the shadow of death. 

Life that reaches through any opening it can find, however small, however fragile, however tenuous, and insists on generous self-giving: “This is my body, given for you.  Take and eat.”