The Walk of the Beloved
Byron Walker
Day 1 of 5: From the Beginning
In the very beginning the Living Expression was already there.
And the Living Expression was with God, yet fully God.
They were together—face-to-face, in the very beginning.And through his creative inspiration
this Living Expression made all things,
for nothing has existence apart from him!Life came into being because of him,
for his life is light for all humanity.And this Living Expression is the Light that bursts through gloom -
the Light that darkness could not diminish!
John 1:1-5 (The Passion Translation)
In our culture, there’s a type of honor or comfort in being the first at something — at being the original, intended design. What follows, of course, is that anything other than the original is somehow second class.
If you really get down to it, this sort of existential second-bestness lies at the heart of much external animosity about LGBTQ+ folx, as well as much of our internal insecurity. As a bisexual man, I experience this on a personal level. Even if you can get past all the “clobber passages,” it’s right there in the first pages of scripture: In the beginning, “God created mankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” And Adam the man and Even the woman were made to be with each other. Divinely mandated cis-heteronormativity (and a male God to top it all off!).
I was told that anything else, anything new, was wrong. Even if I could be a queer Christian, I was told it would require me to give up core aspects of who I am, to bend and break myself in ways others would never have been pressured to do. There is an accusation lurking in the corner of most conservative theologies that at its core says: “You’re a mistake, a broken knock-off, and a burden to the original design that God made ‘very good’ from the beginning. God’s creation was one-and-done, and any variation or change from that is sinful and defective. The only way to be right with God is to go back to the peak of creation in Eden and stop anything else from drifting away from its intended design.”
However, the Beloved Disciple in the Gospel of John tells us something quite different. Countering the narrative of his culture of progressive degeneration, John revisits the creation narrative, not as an event of the past but as a fact of the now and not yet. His message? Hope.
God is still creating.
How do we know that? The Living Expression, the Word — Jesus — came into the world. The very creative force of God just spoke Himself into human flesh. This does something powerful to that regressive look back to Eden; it shifts the focus from the origin and past to the present and future. Jesus does not guide us to look at what came before, but rather at what is coming.
“The Kingdom of heaven has come near,” Matthew says. Or better yet as Luke says, “The kingdom of God is among you.”
Where do LGBTQ+ folx fit in here? In the beginning? Maybe. We can certainly look back quite a ways and see hues of queerness even from early on. But more importantly we find queerness with Jesus in the present and in the future vision for creation, right alongside the rest of all the “very Good” creation in the world. God’s imagination has always been full of creative improvisations and beautiful embellishments like queerness. There is no shame in that. The standards of what is good is not set by God at just one time in the past, never to grow, but in the present and future in the Kingdom of what leads us most to love and service for others.
So, have queer folx been around since the beginning? Who cares, it doesn’t actually matter! In order to embrace Jesus fully, we must reject the lies that tell us we’re not worthy of Him. In Jesus’ Kingdom, we must scrap the hierarchy and pride of any sort of original prioritization.
John harkens back to the original opening of the Hebrew Scriptures — “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” — reminding us that the grace and love and redemption of Jesus wasn’t some new concept in first century Palestine, but that Christ’s same love, acceptance, and creative spark had been there all along. Sure, God spent some time making things from the beginning and calling them very good, but how awesome are the parts of Creation that we get to co-create with God after that?
That’s the place of queerness; right alongside the Word, face-to-face with God.
Once we deny this fear and power-based capitalist conservatism of first-place priority, we can replace it with Jesus’ love and service-based communal mindset. But if we live in the trust of Jesus who created it all, we must see that we are all growing and co-creating with God as we get closer and closer to the Kingdom of heaven. Not in fear, but in love and grace.
You and your queerness are not a mistake. As you find yourself in Jesus, you find yourself in God’s intention and love. My own, co-creative experience of God’s work through my queerness has been proof enough of that for me.
An origin story can be an empowering thing; take some time to find and sit in yours today. What sort of “creative improvisations” were involved in making you who you are today? Share your story with someone you trust or write it down. Whatever it is, know Jesus was with you “face-to-face” and created you with deliberation and beauty, beloved as you are.
Byron Walker (he/him)
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