I was supposed to be doing a whole lot of things yesterday—including getting ready for yet another birthday of another child—so what better thought than to sit down and watch this whole facebook live video. In it, Robert Gagnon debates Megan Rohrer, a transgender pastor, with moderation by Sarah Stone and Evan McClanahan of Theology on Tap. Dr. Gagnon has a number of technical difficulties. He has to go out and come back in, and then ends up ditching his video function. It makes for an interesting picture. You hear his disembodied voice and yet see Dr. Rohrer’s smirking reactions.
The conversation/debate began, to one degree or another, with the Bible. Dr. Rohrer claimed that God’s creation of Adam and then taking Eve from his side should be read “literally,” as in a sort of trans-surgical exercise, taking something and making it into something else. From there Dr. Rohrer (goodness, avoiding all pronouns is hard) suggested that the biblical category of repentance, like that of God’s habit of changing people’s names and the institution of circumcision, can be thought of in trans categories.
In some ways, this effort to appeal to scripture felt like a throwback. It used to be the starting point, of course. Attempts to make the Bible say that homosexual practice is something that God would like to bless were drug out of Genesis and the gospels and Acts and sometimes even Galatians, though never Leviticus or Romans, as you can imagine. But those attempts were so quickly and easily demolished that they were abandoned and I haven’t heard them in a while. It took Glennon Doyle’s subversive, and one might say, Satanic reading of scripture to remind me of those long lost days. This conversation was interesting because Dr. Rohrer did try, in some way, to revive them, but then, in failure, took refuge under the spurious claim that Jesus himself was trying to figure things out.
I find it interesting because, as all commonly held vestigial knowledge of scripture disappears—and it is almost completely gone—reading the Bible isn’t just counter-cultural, it is a separate life unto its own. There is no way in which the Bible’s texture and color and richness are translated into American secular life at all. Going to the text is like stepping into the wardrobe and into Narnia. One finds oneself in a strange and wondrous land, where the landscape and the characters are peculiar and bright. They act and speak and live out their lives with a logic and beauty all their own. Then you shut the book and go away once again into the cacophony of ordinary life. There you find Jadis wielding her wretched lamp post, trying to kill everybody and ruin everything.
Take the curious simplicity of this morning’s gospel. The creators of the lectionary snipped out all the brief, bright parables in Matthew 13 (all those at the center of the first level of Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, incidentally) and put them together. The Mustard Seed, the Leaven, The Hidden Treasure, and the Pearl of Great Price. In each, Jesus holds up a choice, the clearly demarcated hope that if one wants to have him, everything else must be left by the way, but that, if you do choose him, his life will take over and transform everything. It is the same one that Solomon seeks after in the Old Testament reading, the one the Psalmist weeps over at length in 119, the one anyone who looks at Jesus and sees him as he is must really consider, must count out, going back over all his other pearls, selling all that he has to claim that one, beautiful, perfect prize.
The best way to consider this choice, even when everyone in the world is shouting and crying and smirking, is to open the text and sit very quietly and contemplate each image in turn. Dr. Rohrer, in some kind of perverse catechesis, imagined that Jesus himself “wonders” how people are to love each other. Whereas, if you go and peer at the text, it is you who are to wonder about Jesus. He holds up the pearl and knows how valuable it is. He knows what kind of treasure has been buried in the ground and will burst forth on the third day. He knows how his own life spreads invisibly through his own creation—the mind and heart of the believer—so that it is completely transformed. He does not wonder, you do. He does not change, you do.
“Your testimonies are wonderful,” cries the Psalmist, “therefore my soul keeps them. The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple. I open my mouth and pant, because I long for your commandments.” How could you not? When you behold such simple, clear, astonishing beauty? The choice isn’t the least bit hard to make.
