Year: 2020

By Kayla Sadowy

So much is going on, but you can always come around. Why don’t you just sit with me for just a little while? Come and tell me, what’s wrong? Gimme all your love, gimme all you got. When I hear these lyrics, I clearly hear God’s cry for God’s people. I hear instructions for care and concern for each other. But when I take the time to listen deeply, I hear the many nuances and risks behind the words embedded in the music. I hear a divine embrace of the queer experience.

So many highs, so many lows both in register and volume. Different tempos, layers of instruments at different times, all sorts of textures, all contained within four minutes. Most popular music would not dare touch all of these elements in one song, but the Alabama Shakes do it with minimal lyrics and maximized emotion. 

See, in Gimme All Your Love, there is no mistaking the contrasts and adventures in sound which relay a pronounced intensity open to the listener’s interpretations. Is Brittany Howard’s androgynous, raspy voice lamenting? Celebrating? Seducing? What are the Alabama Shakes trying to say with those four big notes followed by sparseness? What do we do with the open instrumental section in the second half? To me, these refreshing deviations from predictable pop music scream the queer experience. The rich textures of our voices carry the complex wisdom of life experiences. Taking risks for expansive, life-giving experience is something queer people know well. One second we are high on our own freedom and liberation, and the next we know the pain of phobias and -isms meant to trap us. So I am left wondering, are we hearing the music of our communities? And, what is the music of our own words?

In a world starving for liberation, God calls us to deeply listen to all of the LGBTQIA+ community, especially those living with layers of oppressed identities. We have the capacity to turn up the volume of these voices and listen for the many textures shaping them. We can make sure our words are more than words, that they are backed up by the act of making sound and the perpetual motion of tempo. We can take a back-up role when necessary, while also understanding when it is our time to be featured. We can also remember that we are part of one absolutely fabulous band, bound together by the music we make.

Let us pray…God of all sound and music, widen our capacity to listen. Sustain our voices when they proclaim the liberation found in Christ. Give us the breath of your Spirit to sing for justice. Bless the queer voices we bring to witness. Amen.

Kayla Sadowy (she/her) is a bi-vocational seminarian based in Philadelphia. Her work as a music therapist has proven the power of music to be a force for transformation and new life, especially to oppressed people. Kayla’s public witness seeks equity over equality, justice over fairness, and aesthetics over beauty. She loves cooking anything from scratch, hiking with her partner, and experimenting in ever-elusive urban gardening.

by Anna Czarnik-Neimeyer

CW: mention of White Supremacy Culture, Police Violence, Transphobia

—

Who makes you feel real?

I invite you to actually think about that. 

Are there two, maybe three people in your life who help you feel acknowledged, loved, understood, and safe? Oh, and also affirmed in who you REALLY are? 

We all deserve to be acknowledged and loved for who we really are, but for many, that is not the reality. Though we are known and loved by our Creator, human systems do not always follow this example.

George Floyd was lynched by Minneapolis police just over a month ago, on May 25. Two days later, Tony McDade, a trans man, was killed by police in Florida. Initial reports of his murder misgendered him.

White Supremacy relies on dehumanizing black and brown people, distancing from Blackness. Transphobia relies on willfully ignoring the trueness of affirmed selfhood. Both rely on denying the real personhood- the real Good-ness of another. That can look like questioning if a Black person suffocated under the knee of the state somehow “had it coming” or “should have listened.” That can look like valuing buildings and possessions over people. Or in Tony McDade’s case, it can look like malicious reporting and simply less coverage overall: erasure.

White Supremacy (which we know is intertwined with the social sins of Imperialism, Capitalism, Heteropatriarchy) reproduces itself by valuing buildings, property, and merchandise over Black lives. I defer to Sonya Renee Taylor, divine black Woman scholar-prophet, to help us understand: “As long as capital is more important than black bodies, black bodies will need to disrupt capital.”

But God, who knit us in Their womb, knows we are real. Knows each one and knows each one in their divine Blackness, Transness, Queerness, Made-Good-ness.

From my Christian perspective, I choose to- have to- believe in Good News. The Good News from the Gospel of Sylvester: “You make me feel mighty real” can be a prayer to the One who dwells within us, the Constant One- our God. And this Source, this Creator knows, through Jesus, what it is to be fully human- to be “real” in the way that we understand it in our corporeality. In fact, Jesus (a brown man) also knows what it is like to suffocate on the cross at the hands of the state. 

Sylvester was an out, Black, Gay man who excelled in drag, raised Pentecostal, and remained a Christian throughout his life. His gender presentation was expansive and glam. Sylvester contracted AIDS in the late 1980s, and the 1988 Castro Street Fair in San Francisco was titled “A Tribute to Sylvester.” He is quoted as insisting: “I don’t believe that AIDS is the wrath of God.” At his funeral a few months later, he had full makeup, dress, and sermon, and choirs at his church, Love Center. He bequeathed his future music royalties to local AIDS support organizations.

Social sins of White Supremacy and Transphobia attempt to make us believe that others are less than, less real. Hold tight to those who “Make you feel mighty real,” tell them you thought of them when reading this blog, and know that to our mighty God, through the gift of grace, you are always already beloved- and mighty, mighty real.

PS: I invite you to learn more about Sylvester through:

Recent Pride 2020 Documentary: ”Love me Like you Should” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3q-cKZX2Og

Biography: The Fabulous Sylvester  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312425692

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_(singer)#cite_note-FOOTNOTEBrogan201269-146

BBC (CW dated language around gender): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SsQhJiAm20

Short Music Doc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3lww-USS7Y

Anna Czarnik-Neimeyer (she/her/hers) is a white anti-racist queer woman seminarian in the ELCA by way of Seattle University (yay Jesuits!) and Luther Seminary (yay Lutherans!). She lives on the unceded land of the Duwamish people of past and present (Seattle). In non-COVID times, she liked thrifting, potlucks, and dress-up dance parties. In COVID-times, she likes cultivating plants, Zoom Church, a home-made mask with her partner’s dog printed on it, and being a cabin counselor for “QueeranTeen Camp” for queer interfaith youth.

I grew up in rural Montana. The discovery of my own sexuality amidst the highly conservative political and religious environment of the mid-90s left me exiled from the world that I had spent my whole life inhabiting. If there were other queer people around, they were deeply closeted. 

Eventually, I came out in one of Montana’s small cities and lived openly. Our community of LGBTQ+ people, before the digital and internet age, was tightly knit and fiercely protective of one another. We were living openly, in resistance to almost everything that surrounded us. 

The loneliness I felt was transformed by a sense of home that the queer community offered me, when I could claim it. Community became a holiness, a grace made visible for my long years of loneliness. How true has this been for so many of us? I found that I, too, was worthy of love. Because I was loved by all of you. 

That’s not to say my community then and our LGBTQIA+ communities now are perfect. It took me years to comprehend the racism, misogyny, classism, and ageism deeply imbedded in the queer culture of the 1990s and now. I noticed how queer men and women didn’t mix — how clubs and bars enforced this gendered separation through the practice of “men only” entrances and charging higher covers for women at dance clubs. I noticed that white gay men didn’t cross some invisible line in a gay bar in Eastern Montana and meet or make friends with Indigenous queer and two-spirited people. It took years to understand how my own privilege allowed me to benefit from and made me complicit in these wrongs. I am still learning. 

And, the Holy One is at work among us. Transformation requires the willingness to be broken open. Queer people of God are gifted with the ability to transform ourselves and our lives in special ways. We were broken out of the tomb of our closets, out of the bondage of our old ways of living that kept us separated from others. 

George’ Michael’s, “Freedom” remains an imperfect song, but it continues to remind me that I am liberated, set free in Love.

Jory Mickelson (he/they) is a mission developer in the Northwest Washington Synod. They are currently looking for ways to build connections and imbed service to the LGBTQ+ community in the life of the church where they live. A writer and educator, their first book Wilderness//Kingdom was published in 2019.

Brittany Howard, notably the former lead singer of band Alabama Shakes, debuted her first solo project with a message that went straight to my heart. You’ll have to forgive me for how on the nose this is y’all, but she took it there and I couldn’t think of a better message for a Pride Devotional.

Request: Listen to the song before you read this. Collect your own ideas/feelings before you consider mine.

Howard is giving her testimony in this song. She is unraveling her theological thought process here for us. Spliced with the familiar sound of a Black southern preacher, Howard’s roots are reified. It’s as if she is saying to us: Yep, it is possible to be queer, be southern, be Black, be disabled and simultaneously loved by the Divine.

“I don’t need to know why
‘Cause I know what love means”

I was raised a Christian and there have been people that told me (or my parents) that I couldn’t be all the things at the same time. That some of my identities would contradict or invalidate the others. They claimed that choices had to be made in order to be worthy of Divine love and acceptance and, for many years, I believed them.

What I know now is that my Blackness, queerness, nonbinary-ness, and my spirituality all harmoniously exist in the same soup that is my life and purpose. I came to understand that through experience. The evidence I have of an ever-present Divine is an experience more than it is a prescription, idea, or aspiration. I recognize that may not be enough for some people and I have perfect peace with it. I don’t stand in the need to defend my experience, rather I sing along with Brittany and an infinite choir of those who know:

“He loves me when I do what I want

He loves me.

He doesn’t judge me.

Yes, He loves me.”

Love is the message, y’all. I am loved by many (here on this Earth and those who are no longer). I hold all of that love as a gift. I hope that you do too, this Pride month and forever after.

Olivia LaFlamme (they/them) is a Black queer nonbinary person residing in Durham, NC. By day the Program Director for ELM and by *evening* avid knitter, dedicated eater of anything sweet, and amateur TV critic (because I watch everything). Current knitting project is a baby blanket featuring fluffy clouds for friends’ first baby! 

The album was Erasure’s “Pop! — The First 20 Hits,” a compilation that came out in the fall of 1992, about a month after I’d come out at the beginning of my sophomore year of college. The song was “Chains of Love,” which had come out in April of 1988, near the end of my freshman year of high school. The lyrics began:

“How can I explain when there are few words I can choose?

How can I explain when words get broken?”

And the second verse asked,

“Do you remember once upon a time,

when there were open doors

an invitation to the world?

We were falling in and out with lovers,

looking out for others,

our sisters and our brothers.*

Come to me, cover me, hold me.

Together we’ll break these chains of love.

Don’t give up, don’t give up now.

Together with me, my babe,

we’ll break the chains of love.”

(*apologies for the lamentable 80s gender binary.)

It was a song written to be played in queer spaces with a melody that dared you not to dance, and it was a song about life before the HIV/AIDS pandemic had put a generation of lovers into an early grave. To be honest, I didn’t remember that idealized “once upon a time,” because I’d was ten years old when AIDS first hit the public’s consciousness and I’ve never known what it means to be gay apart from the reality of HIV/AIDS. But coming out and becoming part of the community meant learning the stories and the strategies of resistance that those who’d gone before me passed down in poems and novels and movies and dance clubs from friends and lovers and strangers.

In this moment, when we are asked to consider what it means to celebrate Pride in the midst of another global pandemic and a worldwide uprising in response to the ceaseless racist violence of life in a police state, I am feeling a sense of raw urgency that takes me back to the very first weeks and months after I came out. Once again we are being called to find our place in a movement that started long before any of us arrived on the scene. Once again we are indebted to the elders who survived generations of the worst of this world’s violence so that we could stand at the precipice of the future and fight for something better and more beautiful.

CW: white person processing, mention of riots

I first heard Sweet Honey in the Rock perform this song at the inauguration of my college’s first black President, Dr. Ronald Crutcher. Sweet Honey in the Rock performed during the ceremony as did the college’s choir with which I sang. After we performed, I remember their smiles and encouragement as we returned to our seats which were right behind theirs. Then, it was their turn.

“Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons.”

I remember feeling a dissonance in my gut as these lyrics rang through the stadium. “Wasn’t this a celebratory day and a celebratory event? Weren’t we celebrating that a black man was president, why did they pick to sing a song that brings up murder.”

This was not the first time, nor the last, when my privilege and whiteness would feel that dissonance as it encountered racism and white supremacy and its daily effect on the lives of my siblings of color. 

The election of Dr. Crutcher as our college’s president didn’t wash away the racism and white supremacy that permeated my beloved alma mater. Were Sweet Honey in the Rock trying to let me and my white siblings know that they knew this and were calling us to attention? Perhaps.

“We who believe in freedom cannot rest, We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.”

The month of June is celebrated around the world as Pride month because it was in the early hours of June 28th, 1969 that queer folk — specifically queer folk of color like Marsha P Johnson and Stormé DeLarverie — took a stand against the New York Police Department who were raiding one of their sanctuaries — the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar — and arresting its patrons.

What followed was a week of riots, rebellion, confrontation, and destruction of property which gave life to the Gay Liberation Front and a movement for the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community in New York City and beyond.

My ability to live openly as a queer woman and to be legally married to my wife without losing my job and livelihood is due, in large part, to those first moments of riot, rebellion, confrontation, and destruction of property.

Pride today is celebrated with parades, rainbows, and often PRIDE worship services led by the very religious communities that once shut their doors to our community. It is a time of joy.

“Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons.”

The dissonance experienced by these lyrics — is yet again — within me and our community. 

This year’s Pride is not a time of joy — it is a time of anger, mourning, and remembering that our community’s journey toward justice was ignited at the hands of our black LGBTQIA+ siblings who are, once again, rioting, rebelling, confronting, and destroying property to declare their lives matter.

Let not the Pride flag — with all its symbolism of “welcome” — be put to shame by being waved this month in ignorance of our siblings’ suffering. Let us acknowledge as Emma Lazarus, the Jewish-American poet, so poignantly wrote that “Until we all are free, we are none of us free.”

During the months of June and July, ELM has asked members of Proclaim to use our blog as a space for Pride Devotionals: songs that have inspired action, spiritual awakening, tied to an unforgettable moment, associated with captivity/freedom, Pride. We are specifically asking all of our writers to acknowledge the intersectionality of identities that remind us that seeking justice in a silo — a queer-only focus — ignores and dishonors the great diversity of bodies, minds, abilities, genders, and orientations with which God has blessed us.

Let us pray…

Oh great Mystery, whose Word sparked all things into being at the start of creation, bless the words and actions of our community. May your Spirit — who toppled towers when humanity thought itself too proud, and parted the seas to liberate your people from the death-dealing ways of empire — convict us to act on behalf of our neighbor for the sake of your Kin-dom. And, may we who believe in freedom not rest until it comes. Amen.

Amanda Gerken-Nelson (she/her/hers) believes black lives matter and is educating and training herself to dismantle the white supremacy and racism that has scared and paralyzed her in the past at the expense of her siblings of color who have experienced great harm. She seeks to be an ally and — in the words of long-time ELM supporter, Margaret Moreland — an accomplice in the movement to eradicate racism and white supremacy in ELM, the Church, and society.

Dear Beloved, I write you a day late and a dollar short turning in this blog post for this community, my community, on a day where white supremacy has been allowed to once again feed black bodies to the machine that is the so-called American Dream. I write this to you in deep and sincere love, but I have to beg the question, where are you? As I am losing my breath. As the corners from my eyes start to fill with darkness. As I take my last gasping breath of life and the imago dei fades out of my eyes over and over again on social media your silence is perhaps the loudest.

I’m supposed to be writing about where I see queer leadership rising up in this time of crisis. But other than queer boots on the ground who are now forced to mop up the blood of my people, leaders who are now chaplains to the revolution whether they wanted it or not, what are we doing? Where is our organizing? Why aren’t we raising funds for bail money? Why aren’t we supplying leaders we know on the ground, right now, with everything organizers say they need? How many times have you called Minneapolis mayor or the chief of police and demand murder charges for all four officers? And if you are doing all this and more and find yourself indignant ask yourself as a white person why me asking you this upsets you? What have you done historically or literally to earn my trust?

What is this community willing to sacrifice to end white supremacy? Our calls? Our livelihoods? Our reputations?

Queer theology, frameworks of mutual trust, love, boundaries, joy, compersion, and accountability, waging peace in the face of war and death. These are the things that we can bring to this important struggle.

I’m telling you as a queer black man in America that I don’t think this community is committed to dismantling white supremacy within it or in the world. You don’t believe me? Ask other black queer members of this community if they feel you got their back when the tear gas starts flying. So, where do I see queer leadership rising up in this time where a global pandemic has laid bare what some of us have lived with since day one?

Where am I to find hope?

In you. Still in you beloved. Because I also know this community. This community is full of hope and proof the Kin-dom of God has come near. Because I see some of you also trying. We have a Bishop who responded to a lynching on his territory. He doesn’t know that I was almost killed in that same area at 14 years old by men who dragged me in a car and took me to the woods. He doesn’t know I barely escaped with my young life.

I have seen members of this community from the Twin Cities push through eight weeks of decision fatigue, and the malaise of existential loneliness, and jump right into action. Some of them have been doing this work since the Ferguson uprising and some are taking their first halting steps into direct action work. I see hope because I love your queer bodies so much even on a day where all I can do is look at the news and weep deep and mournful sobs and swallow trauma the way most of you gulp air after a good cry. Yet I still wrote you this evening. Because it is in this love and the frameworks of relationship and community that only queer souls can create, can we find a way to awaken this church and maybe even this country to the great task ahead of us. I love you even though you keep killing me and I’m a fool for that. I hope to see you on the front lines in the weeks and days ahead. A lot of folks are always asking me after I say something like this, what can I do? Start in your own backyard. Do the research to discover the history and current manifestation of systemic racism and white supremacy in your context. A great curriculum to start with is called White Homework. Click the link, do the work, and support the author!

Also, support our siblings on the ground in the Twin Cities who are providing Lutheran witness. Don’t second guess them, you aren’t there. Send them money and supplies for folks on the ground. Pray for them.

In the Name of the Parent, the Rebel, and the Spirit

The Rev. Lenny Duncan

Rev. Lenny Duncan (he/him) is a mission Developer in the #PNW and likes to think he is a writer.

Have you ever had the Spirit move you when you least expected it?

I am a candidate for ministry in Word and Sacrament in my final semester of seminary. I’ve been assigned to a synod, but have not yet been called to a parish. And I’ve been wondering what my life might look like after all this pandemic business ends (if it ever ends.) 

Will churches be able to afford a full-time pastor?

Will churches want to call a queer, transgender pastor?

These are questions I’ve asked myself already prior to COVID-19, but find myself asking them more nervously as we shelter in place on a global level.

I was having a cup of coffee with my partner one afternoon. She has three kids, two of which identify as queer. We were talking about how hard life would be if, during this time of lockdown, you were surrounded by folks that didn’t understand you, or, worse yet, did not accept you. This was a reality for some of her kids’ peers. 

I asked colleagues and friends if they knew of any spaces online for youth that intersected faith and queerness. 

They did not. 

I felt the Spirit calling me in the way she does sometimes when we least expect her to. Urgent. Poking your side. Loud. 

Watching the youth around me try to seek meaningful community in a pandemic is hard to watch. I knew I needed to answer the Spirit’s call. 

We began to dream about creating a safe place for LGBTQ+ youth to foster community, hear from LGBTQ+ leaders, and have some fun. 

One verse in the Hebrew texts that’s stuck out to me in the last few months is הנה אנ׳, “Here am I.” 

I think this is a way of saying, “Okay, Lord. I believe you are limitless. Give me the strength to do this and I will go and do your work.” 

Queeranteen Camp was born. It was born in community conversations with the youth that surrounded me. 

Queeranteen Camp is a free, online, interfaith camp for LGBTQ+ youth ages 13-19. Originally we thought we’d make a fun flier and maybe 20 youth would sign up.

As of April 22nd, there are 153 campers, cabin counselors, and helpers registered from around the world!  

I recognized immediately that this would require a community to work. 

I was reminded that God is a God of community and that possibilities are realized among all of us working together.

People from all over the country have reached out to me, offering their help and resources. I asked in the Proclaim Facebook page and was immediately met with a handful of emails from friends and colleagues offering assistance. 

Proclaim! A word of declaration. A place where new things are breathed into being, a place where community gathers to embrace the way the Spirit is moving. 

 How am I handling COVID-19? I’m scared. I’m tired. I’m uncertain.

How am I handling a rapidly growing response to a new ministry? I’m scared. I’m tired. I’m uncertain. 

Yet, in both, I am sure of one thing. That God has not left me, that God’s Spirit is moving, and I am being called to a new time and space. 

It is now, perhaps more than in the last month, that I am seeing that I am not alone. 

I am relying heavily on people I have recently met online, folks who have been doing this work for years, and those I have known for years. 

I am relying heavily, vulnerably on my community. 

At the end of the day, that’s all we really have, right?

I have my community. I have God. Through both of those, we can do amazing, shocking, beautiful things.

Drew Stever (they/he) is in his final semester of his Master of Divinity studies at Luther Seminary. Originally from St. Paul, MN, he is currently located in Southern California. Two of the greatest purchases he has ever made in an attempt to deal with COVID-19 is rice pudding and a pink onesie.