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ADVENT CHRISTMAS EPIPHANYBeing Seen: The Word Becomes FleshIn a very real way, transgender people deeply live the days of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. These days are marked by a profound longing for God and for us to become real in this world, to become visible. |
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See us, hear us. Listen to our Advent and Christmas stories…
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"A few months ago I was flying to another city for a meeting. I had been assigned the middle seat in a row of three, and had just finished stowing my carry-ons when a young family approached — a man, his pregnant wife, and a soon-to-be big brother about two years old. When I realized they had been assigned the seats to my right and left, I volunteered to move to another seat to give them some room to spread out and get comfortable. While I waited for the flight attendant to find me another seat, the harried young mother thanked me profusely. Oh, it’s no trouble at all, I told her, I know what it’s like to travel with kids. How many do you have, she asked. When I told her I have four, she looked me up and down. Honey, you look incredible! It took me just a moment to realize that she assumed I was my children’s biological mother, and that the truth of the matter — that I am a trans woman and actually their biological father — was completely invisible to her."
"A couple of weeks ago I had a very different experience. On my way to work, I had just come up out of the subway and was walking the couple of blocks to my office when a man stopped me to ask a question. My answer didn’t satisfy him and he became angry and closed in on me — close enough to pick up some subtle cue that caused him to suspect I was transgender. He yelled loudly an accusation to that end, accompanied by epithets, as I was walking away, and I felt my cheeks flush with anger and embarrassment."
As transgender people, many of us focus a great deal of energy on the way the world “reads” us, and, perhaps more importantly, on the way the world interprets us. When people look at us, what do they see? What do they think? The feeling of being incorrectly interpreted by others, the very starting point of the transgender experience, is reminiscent of Jesus’ own starting point.
The flawed expectations placed upon him by years of national oppression and anticipation threatened to overwhelm him from the very beginning. And yet, in spite of the pressure, Jesus refused to let those expectations deter him from becoming the person he knew himself to be. The Advent-Christmas-Epiphany cycle can bring comfort to God’s transgender children, and to all of us, by reminding us that much of the world “read” Jesus wrong and interpreted his incarnation—the embodiment of his personhood—incorrectly. And it can inspire us by showcasing Jesus’ courageous insistence on his own sense of identity despite being “misread” by nearly everyone who knew him.
Through Our Eyes: Seeing Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany
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Advent
The traditional Bible readings in Advent speak to people’s longing for the Messiah and the birth of Christ. We hear the hope for the Divine becoming real and visible in the world. We also witness the church’s waiting for the fullness of the realm of God to break in and for our world to be made just. Transgender people experience this intense period of longing, waiting and anticipation in very personal ways, often through the deep, yearning for our true selves to become real and visible.
For trans people who grew up knowing that we were gender different, the birth of our true self takes years and sometimes decades to come to fulfillment. Even the medical profession imposes a “waiting period,” requiring one to live full time in our identified gender before being allowed to proceed with gender-confirming surgery. Trans people also experience the waiting of advent in a communal sense, in all the ways our people long for justice in a trans-phobic world.
Advent’s theme of waiting and longing is marked further by the experience of wilderness and exile. We see this in the promises of the prophet Isaiah, a voice crying out in the wilderness, and the stories of John the Baptist. As trans people, these passages speak to our times in the wilderness, times when we were isolated from ourselves and one another, and exiled from communities of faith. These are times when like Israel, we perceive God as having forsaken us. Yet it is also a time when the promise of God becomes real and our hope is awakened as our true selves will become visible.
Many trans people live in in-between places, experiencing themselves as gender different, knowing they are one gender and yet being “read” as another gender. Some experience themselves as neither gender but both genders simultaneously. Similarly, during this season the church lives between the two advents of Christ, a time when our often profound and painful feelings of longing and exile live side-by-side with a sense of joy-filled anticipation. Oh, how hard it is to wait for new birth and the fulfillment of our desire!
Christmas
“For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a child which is Christ the Lord.” Joseph, Mary, the shepherds, Herod, the magi, the people of Israel all had expectations for the birth of the Messiah. They were often confounding expectations. The circumstances of Jesus’ birth are not what you would expect for a Messiah. How did those expectations affect people’s experience of the Christ child? How did they impact Jesus who was growing up under the weight of them and struggling not to allow them to control his destiny?
We think of all the gendered expectations people have for us and growing up under the weight of these expectations. We struggle to find our own way and God’s way for us. When a child is born, the first thing people typically do is ascertain the child’s gender.
At our Out In Season conference, a participant told a story about her/his arrival in this world. Ryan/Megan said, “When my mother was pregnant, the heart monitor revealed that I was a boy and so my parents named me Ryan and began to imagine life with their soon-to-arrive son. But when I was born, the doctor announced, ‘Oops! It’s a girl!’ and so Ryan became Megan with a whole new set of expectations for how my life journey would evolve. Today I identify as gender queer, experiencing myself as a reflection of both genders, It doesn’t seem like an ‘Oops!’ at all that my heart told my parents I was a boy and my body told them I was a girl.”
Christmas is the resolution to our advent longings, the proclamation in Isaiah that you have been vindicated and proven right. You are the beloved of God. It is a time when we celebrate the great joy of new birth and new life. As Elijah, a trans man says, “I wake up every morning now and look in the mirror and laugh out loud with joy because I can finally see myself. When I walk my dog in the park and see other men, I’m often moved to tears of joy because I can see myself in the world in a way that was never possible before.” Through the lens of trans eyes, Christmas causes us to wonder does God laugh out loud when God sees God-self reflected in the world around us?
The shepherds have this good news revealed to them and yet the rest of the world does not. The shepherds are awake, keeping watch, and the angels appear to them. The old Christmas carol goes, “How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given.” The good news of Christ’s birth is not fully visible until Epiphany. As trans people, we think of how we came to know the truth about ourselves in silence long before our real selves were made manifest to the world. And we too, like Mary, often kept these things to ourselves, pondering all this in our hearts until a later time.
Epiphany and the Days that Follow
During Christmas, Jesus is named Emmanuel – God with us. Isaiah 9:2 proclaims the good news that the people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light. As we follow this theme to the Epiphany readings, Isaiah calls out to the people of God, “Arise! Shine, for your light has come.” In the time between Christmas and Epiphany we move from not only having seen the light, but actually becoming the light for others. The manifestation of Christ in this world calls for a response on our part. As trans people, our “epiphanies” are often our moments of coming out, our becoming visible in the world, and our experiences of carrying our light and gifts into the world.
The magi bring gifts to the baby Jesus. Can we think of being differently gendered as a gift? Can we make space for the gifts trans people offer the world, the unique voices of trans people, their particular experiences of God within themselves? By breaking down barriers of gender roles and expectations and pushing us beyond the gender binary, trans people can enable all Christians to become freer to bring the fullness of themselves and their gifts to the world. But gender differences are not the only gift trans people offer. We need to be cautious not to objectify or exploit trans people in our midst. We cannot expect them alone to break down the church’s historical gender boxes or insist they do the work for the church.
In John 1:10, the gospel says, “The word was made flesh, but the world knew it not.” We think of the times we have come out and others have said to us, “Oh, this may be good news for you. But it’s not good news for us. It’s too much, too confusing, too unsettling for us to deal with.” In a real way, Jesus was “too much,” too different from people’s expectations and so they often mis-read him.
Similarly, it is our expectations, assumptions, and pre-conceptions that cause us to mis-read or mis-understand a person, a situation, or an experience of God’s presence in this world.
The Baptism of Jesus
During the baptism of Jesus, the Spirit of God proclaims, “This is my beloved, the One with whom I am always well pleased” (Mark 1:11). This is indeed good news for trans people and for all people. Baptism is the affirmation of the true identity of both Jesus and us and the relationship between God and Jesus and us. These words assure us of how very much God loves us and claims us as God’s own. Our need for baptism highlights the deep spiritual longings of trans people, the ways we have been excluded from the community of faith, the ways our relationship with God has been so often dis-allowed. But God says, “You are my Beloved, the one with whom I am well pleased.”
The account in Mark’s gospel ends with this proclamation in verse 11. In the following verse, Mark says “immediately the Spirit drove” Jesus into the wilderness. It echoes back to the beginning of the advent story, those wilderness and exile moments. Clearly our journeys as trans-people and as people of faith never end. It is a continuous process. Even for transgender people for whom transitioning is the “end point,” it is not the end at all, but actually a new beginning in the cycle of life. Following Jesus’ time in the wilderness, he moves on with his ministry and is sometimes “seen” for who he is and sometimes mis-read and rejected as in Nazareth.
Transfiguration Sunday
As Jesus headed up the mountain, he took his followers, Peter, James and John, with him (Mark 9:2-9). While there, they were joined by the prophets Elijah and Moses. Each of them witnessed Jesus’ transfiguration and responded in various ways. Who are the people who are with us, who witness our transfiguration, our transformation?
Who are our bedazzled disciples, those who have known us for a long time or known us well and yet are still befuddled by our transforming selves? Who serves as our Elijah, Moses and Jesus’ companions who had experienced their own wilderness and mountain top experiences? Who are the people in our lives – our trans companions, the trans people who have been there before us – who know the wilderness times of aloneness and also know the mountaintops? Who are those who pronounce our new names when we wake up from surgery and see our new bodies for the first time? Who are the disciples in our lives who always want to say or do the right thing but don’t quite get things right with us? Who are like Simon Peter who sometimes want to “set up tents,” wanting to idealize, tokenize, or display trans-people saying, “Look at our trans members. Look how inclusive we are”?
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Spirit of longing and anticipation, Word made flesh,
Bible stories recount the events in the life of your Holy Child and closely mirror our own journeys. Through these days of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany you give us strength in the presence of adversity, hope in the presence of despair, purpose when we lose our way, and joy in finally being able to be ourselves. We pray that we may continue to draw strength and encouragement from Christ’s example as our journey continues. In Jesus’ name, Amen. |
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