2nd Sunday of Christmas

Jeremiah 31:7-14 or Sirach 24:1-12; Psalm 147:12-20 or Wisdom of Solomon 10:15-21; Ephesians 1:3-14; John 1:(1-9), 10-18

In the assembly of the Most High,
[Wisdom] opens her mouth…:

“I came forth from the mouth
of the Most High,
    and I covered the earth like a mist. …

Before the ages, from the beginning,
[God] created me,
    and till eternity I will never fail.”

 – Sirach 24:2-3, 9

In the beginning was the Word
    and the Word was with God
    and the Word was God.

The Word was with God in the beginning.
Everything came into being through the Word…

– John 1:1-3

On the wall above my desk, a Black transfem draped in blue, pink, and white holds up a hand in benediction, while a similarly robed transmasc figure receives a heavenly crown; a shirtless chest displays a sacred heart tattooed between top surgery scars; a trans angel announces that TO BE QUEER IS TO BE HOLY.

I’ve been gathering and creating art that commingles trans and sacred imagery since 2016; my wall has become a personal repository of reminders that, as an embroidery hoop I made declares, WE HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED. As hateful people relentlessly describe us as a fad at best or, at worst, a contagion worming its way into previously unsullied society, my constellation of artwork maps out a different story: that we who upend human binaries have been around from the very beginning. Before the very beginning, even — when there was no world, no cosmos, only Divinity, Wisdom, and a Word.

In the beginning, God spoke the Word; and God was the Word; and God was the breath that pushed that Word out into the void to spark life.

In the beginning was Wisdom, flowing forth from God’s mouth to unfurl Herself across the earth, seeking out those who’d welcome Her peculiar gifts.

Starting with Paul, who identified Christ as “the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24), Christians have traditionally connected this personified figure — often called Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom — with Jesus. Yet while the Word took on a human body whose features led those present at Their birth to declare, “It’s a boy!”, Wisdom is described — and speaks of Herself — in feminine terms.

Sophia, Woman Wisdom, assigned male at birth! Now that’s a trans story if I ever heard one.

I honor this transition into a human (yet, queerly enough, still fully divine!) form in my aforementioned embroidery piece: On olive green fabric, the words WE HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED are encircled by symbols of binary-defying biblical figures. Alongside Joseph’s colorful coat (Genesis 37) and the Ethiopian eunuch’s scroll (Acts 8) stands the manger into which the Word made flesh was lain. How very queer, how seemingly foolish is the Wisdom of God, that relinquishes omnipotence to be cradled in human arms!

The whole of the Incarnation story, in fact, resonates with me deeply as a genderqueer person. Jesus transgressed his culture’s expectations for a firstborn son. Instead of settling down and having children, he galivanted across Palestine, sometimes performing women’s work like foot-washing and employing feminine language for himself, like when he wished he were a mother hen sheltering chicks under her wings (Luke 13:34; Matthew 23:37). Jesus’s behavior upset his family, as living into queerness so often does; on at least one occasion, they worried that he was “out of his mind” and sought to control him (Mark 3:20-35). In the eyes of the world, incarnate Wisdom acts the fool; won’t Jesus stop this nonsense and please come home?

I delight in Jesus’s disregard for gendered norms! And yet…I still default to thinking of Jesus as male. Why, when many of us have expanded our language for God beyond exclusively masculine terms, does it still feel strange — even inappropriate — to speak of the Person of God who is Jesus as she or they?

…It’s the physical body, isn’t it? In many ways, Jesus is as constrained by his (/her/their/zir…) assigned gender as the rest of us.

From birth, we are bombarded by messages telling us that our flesh is our gender — that, as feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir put it, “biology is destiny.” From the moment the Word put on flesh, that flesh (or our assumptions about it, because the Gospels don’t actually tell us much about Jesus’s physical appearance beyond what we can deduce from his circumcision in Luke 2) sealed Their fate: Creator God can exist beyond human labels, and the Spirit is, well, Spirit; but God the Son is a human man.

But trans folk know deep in our bones that biology is not destiny. Trans wisdom cuts through the bonds of the binary’s imposed futures, freeing all of us to imagine new possibilities…and, sometimes, to remember old ones.

Though those of us steeped in Western culture’s gender binary may struggle to conceive of Jesus in any body but that of a cisgender perisex man, some of our ancestors in faith were not so troubled by an androgynous deity. Up through the Middle Ages, textual and artistic examples abound of a Christ whose side wound is a vulva birthing the church; or whose lactating breasts nourish Her followers, just as Zir body and blood do in the Eucharist.

In this willingness to experience Christ’s corporeal form not as fixed but flexible, our ancestors in faith were able to draw out new wisdom. For instance, Saint Augustine used that nursing image to help explain the Incarnation: “…For just as a mother…transfers from her flesh the very same food which otherwise would be unsuited to a babe…so our Lord, in order to convert His wisdom into milk for our benefit came to us clothed in flesh.”

While theologians utilized androgynous images of Jesus for educational purposes, everyday people found divine connection and comfort in them. For example, Christ’s side-wound-turned-vulva would be inscribed on medieval birthing girdles, worn while in labor as a reminder that God knows what it is to suffer the kind of agony that brings about new life.

A late example of the ways Christ’s body was treated as a malleable site of multi-gender experience is “The Lamentation of Christ.” Commissioned by a Belgian convent-hospital, this sixteenth-century painting depicts Jesus’s female followers grieving around his dead body, which has breasts.

I wonder what female patients, and the nuns who cared for them, felt as they beheld Divine flesh intentionally painted to reflect their own bodies. Did it soothe them to see themselves mirrored in their God, to recognize that Christ knows their pain intimately, even unto death?

I can’t know for sure, beyond being sure that these women’s reactions varied. But I think about how I feel when taking in a piece of art where Jesus looks a little like me, chest bearing top surgery scars. The world calls these marks shameful, signs of mental illness and “mutilation” — but Jesus Sophia scoffs at the “wisdom” of fools. Ze proudly displays the marks of Zir own “shame”: the stigmata, those crucifixion wounds that document forever how the very things the world stigmatizes are often a sign or site of sacredness.

At some point, “The Lamentation of Christ” was censored, the breasts painted over to create a flat chest. It wasn’t till the late 1900s that restoration efforts revealed the breasts concealed under the paint.

I think about all the stories buried, not by mistake but with the purpose of obscuring the truth that WE HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED. The ancient texts translated in ways that obscure any hint of queerness. The gravestones emblazoned with a name that was dead before the person it identifies. The statues smashed; the laws passed; the books burned; the love explained away.

Those in power do such a good job destroying the evidence that they themselves forget; they accuse us of revising history when we pull fragments from the wreckage and find ourselves. But eternal Wisdom calls to us, reaches through time and space to guide us back to each other.

Holy Wisdom, holy Word, Jesus Sophia,

from the beginning, You bless us.

Remind us of our holiness. Open us to Your peculiar gifts.

Gather us under Your wings, and we will be home.

Avery Arden is an Autistic, genderqueer minister living in Atlanta with zir spouse and two cats. Avery writes gender-expansive, anti-ableist liturgy (binarybreakingworship.com); hosts a multifaith podcast of transgender stories (blessedarethebinarybreakers.com); and creates resources focused on trans & disability theology & praxis (linktr.ee/queerlychristian). They also serve on the national board of More Light Presbyterians.