#mark 8

Early Microcomputers - Ryan Schiff, Brian Boellner

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Original Caption: America's land battleship the Mark VIII Tank produced by the Ordnance department. Carries a crew of twelve men, four machine guns and two six pounders. An American twelve cylinder Liberty Motor furnishes the power for this 35 ton dreadnaught. A wireless outfit by which communication is always had with headquarters is a part of its equipment.

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I was happy to be part of this year's LPTS More Light (LGBT+) chapel service -- here's the reflection I gave on Mark 8:27-36! Our overall theme was letting go of the world’s views and embracing God’s views.

The sound quality of this video is horrendous -- not through any fault of the one who recorded it but because 1) my phone is old and 2) a horrific buzz always pervades the chapel and I tried to dampen it at the expense of further sound quality.

There is a special look of revulsion that people save for particularly unsavory, offensive things: the slug stepped on with a bare foot, the man convicted of astoundingly brutal crimes, the person who dares to be queer in public.

I have heard the same story, too many times, from too many transgender friends – whether it happens in a public bathroom, in the street, in church, at work

the look is the same: disgust.

Revolting, that’s what we are. We are breaking the rules, are flaunting…something, I’m not sure what, in public, and that makes us disgusting. Less than human.

I wonder if Jesus ever got that kind of look.

Probably not for the gender thing. Choosing to squeeze Their divinity into a human body, Jesus was assigned male at birth, and probably that was never questioned by anyone. He likely started growing facial hair in his teens. Probably wore “men’s” clothing.

But at the same time, he did break many rules of gender in his society – men were supposed to settle down, take a woman, have children who could pass on their name. As far as we know, Jesus did none of that – instead he left his human father’s profession behind and traipsed around the region saying dangerous things with twelve other men and a faithful train of women who were not related to him. Disgusting!

“Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asks his closest friends here in Mark, and so we discover that he was talked about, that people debated his identity, about who or what he was – probably without bothering to ask him about it.

and then, “…Who do you say that I am?” he asks those same friends. I’ve been in similar conversations. I know the whispers, and I know that vulnerability, that flicker of anxiety when you dare to ask people whose opinion matters intensely to you how they see you. Will they get it right? Do they really know you?

Peter responds, “the Messiah.” And we think that’s good, right? That he got it right….right?

Maybe he got the title right. But based on his reaction to Jesus’s next statement, he clearly had no real idea what being the Messiah meant to Jesus.

Jesus foretells suffering and death, so Peter takes Jesus aside and tries to set him straight. “This is what Messiah means, Jesus. So what you think is part of your future, your identity, can’t be right.” In a way, he’s saying, “I know you better than you know you.”

With priests, with friends, with people who claimed to know something of biology, I’ve had  similar talks about my identity – “What you think about your gender can’t be right. I know how gender works, what God or science has planned for your gender, and it’s not what you think. I know you better than you know you.”

Jesus’s response to Peter’s lack of understanding is to gather a crowd and explain what it means to follow him: We must deny ourselves. We must take up our cross.

But he doesn’t explain just what that means, to deny ourselves, to take up a cross. I know what the world has told me it means – what they say it means for LGBT people in particular.

The world tells me these things — my gender, my love— are just my cross to bear – and to bury, that I need to suffer because somehow these things are sins, that’s right – my love, love! the pair of wings God fixed on my shoulders to help me fly to Them is actually a heavy weight, a sin, a sickness –

but God knows I have seen far too many of my people nail themselves to that cross, bleed out as you watched

to think for a moment that God is the one who placed that cross on our shoulders.

That’s not how crosses work! The Cross of Jesus, the one he urges us to take up, was fashioned by worldly hands, not Christ’s.

After all, his yoke is easy, his burden light.

The cross is a consequence of following Jesus, yes, but not something delighted in by him— to follow Jesus means to deny ourselves a certain safety, the easy life lived when we go along with the status quo, when we don’t challenge authority as Jesus did. When we take up our cross and become visible signs against oppression the world stops tolerating our existence. When we dare to follow Jesus – it’s the world that throws the cross over our backs.

God does not bid us suffer for suffering’s sake the way humans do when they tell us to stuff ourselves into boxes we were never made to fit, to bury our way of loving and relating to other people and bear a cross of shame and fear of hell on our shoulders every day, every minute, of our lives.

When we do this, when we accept what they say about our sexuality, our gender, it’s not ourselves we’re denying – it’s God’s call, God’s vision of us.

I can attest to this as one who tried it – who tried to carry my queerness like a burden and resisted when the Spirit tugged it from my shoulders and unrolled it at my feet to behold the beautiful vision, the gift, that it is.

I can attest to this as one who finally denied myself by redefining myself, not in the paradigm of the world with its rigid binaries and its distrust of difference but according to the call of the Spirit, the Spirit of abundant life, of overflowing love, of broken-down boundaries, of diversity!

When I followed that call, I did take up the cross— rejection followed just as it followed Christ, and grief at the pains of my siblings struggling beside me. I did take up the cross – not for suffering’s sake, and not for my own sake, but to share its load with every person this world tries to crucify.

…In Jesus, divinity kissed humanness and the two became one, and while I don’t claim my story is anything like that, like God’s,

I will declare that there is something queer in the identity of Jesus,

something that resonates in a unique way with queer people, with transgender people especially, and with all who are shoved to the margins by this world, whose God-given identities are crushed and not allowed to flower.

…So, will you take up this cross with me? It is not easy to stand up to the world in this way. You will die to the world in one way or another. But friends, truly, as Jesus says, what does it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your life?