I saw an image (the cover image for this post) on Facebook this week that made me stop in my tracks. It is a banner over the front of the Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, CA. It says “God: the original They/Them.” The accompanying text to the image reads: “Then Elohim (the full plurality of God) said, “Let us make humankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created humankind in God’s own image, in the image of God, God created them; male and female God created them.” This translation is by Roger Wolsey ((“Kissing Fish Book”).
Now as you can imagine the comments section to this post was…well… not great. There were people losing their minds over the use of “our” people screaming in ALL CAPS at the use of the word “they” for humanity. And so much whining about pronouns and trans* folks, I can’t even describe it all. But there was another comment that really hit me too- The commenter, Sam Henderson Doubleday said this, “No one calls dusk an abomination. Frogs are both fish and land animals over time. Some birds don’t fly. All of God's creation is a spectrum of beauty.” (Doubleday).
And then someone brought up the platypus.
See, all of creation is a grand spectrum. We are just given a glimpse of it in Genesis. Yes God created day and night, but between day and night, there is dusk and dawn and sunrise and sunset. Just because they aren’t listed doesn’t make them any less beautiful or meaningful.
So when I see this declaration- that God is the original They/Them and is creating in THEIR image, or “Our” image, I am reminded of this full spectrum of humanity. The creation of humans is the literal personification of the various natures of God. We aren’t supposed to be cookie-cutter carbon copies of a Creator, but rather created in the fullness of God’s image. And that means created in the COMPLEXITY of God’s image.
Reverend M. Jade Kaiser puts it this way, “This chapter talks about night and day and land and water, but we have dusk and we have marshes. These verses don’t mean ‘there’s only land and water, and there’s nowhere where these two meet.’ These binaries aren’t meant to speak to all of reality—they invite us into thinking about everything between and beyond.”(Hartke). That everything in between is what I think it means for all of creation to be in God’s Image.
Where are the “between spaces” in this creation story? We have water and dry land. But we all know that there are places that are both water and dry land- the beach for example. Depending on the time of day, the sand is either dry land or under the water. Or we have marshes and estuaries and swamps that are somehow both water and land at the same time. When the Mississippi River floods its shores and the land becomes the river, they both exist at the same time in the same place- not separated. Estuaries are some of the most beautiful places in all of creation- that is where marine animals feel safe to have their offspring and where countless species live together in a mixture of both saltwater and freshwater. You might see a great blue heron, a blue crab, a baby shark, or a river otter. Estuaries are places of transition- the transition between types of water and transition between stages of life.
There is Day and there is night, and we know that those two things are definite times of the day. But there is sunrise on the beach when the night is becoming day. There is a sunset in the mountains when day becomes night. There’s Alaska at 2 am in July- when the sky is still light, but it is night. The sky isn’t confused at these times of the day, it is just in transition from one stage to another.
And then of course there are the animals- Winged birds of every kind, animals that swim, swarms of living creatures. But then what do we do with penguins? They don’t fly- they swim. Or Ostriches or kiwis or cassowarys? Still birds, but can’t fly. Or as mentioned above- what about animals that start out in the water like tadpoles, but then grow into animals that hop on land? If there is so much transition and infinite creativity in the rest of creation, why do we get caught up when it comes to the creation of humans?
“Male and female God created them” it reads, and folks want to be “welp, there it is- right there the bible says only male and only female can’t be anything else.” when that passage comes in the exact same chapter as all of these other binary lists of creation that we know are not actually a stark dichotomy between two things. So if we agree that there isn’t just day and night, and there are not just animals that fly and animals that swim, why do we try to assume that being created in God’s image means that there are only two genders?
“For as long as there have been humans, there have been people who fall outside of the male/female binary. A creation story from Sumer, a Mesopotamian society and neighbor to what would become Israel, has references from 1600 BCE to humans who are created with sex organs that are not immediately identifiable as female or male. The Mishnah and the Talmud, the Jewish compilations of law put together between 200 CE and 500 CE, include examples of individuals who don’t fit male or female categories, including those whose sex is indeterminable, those who have characteristics of more than one sex, and those whose characteristics change over time. This tells us that even the descendants of the people who recorded Genesis 1 did not necessarily assume that the gender or sex categories seen in verse 27 were all-encompassing.”(Hartke).
To be clear, I think we are all created in God’s image exactly how we are and exactly who we are. And because things God created can change- day to night, tadpoles to frogs, so can we. “If Genesis 1 was meant to describe the world as it is, the biblical authors would have needed a scroll hundreds of feet long. Thank goodness we don’t have to slog through verse after verse that reads like a biology textbook on taxonomy, naming creature after creature from the elephant down to the paramecium. Just as we wouldn’t expect astronomers to cram things like comets and black holes into the categories of sun or moon…” (Hartke) We can’t expect people to try to cram themselves into two very small categories. What if, instead of trying to cram everything into one of the very narrow dichotomous categories in Genesis, we look at all of creation as a spectrum? What if, we “ ask God to speak into the space between the words, between biblical times and our time, and between categories we see as opposites”? (Hartke).
We don’t even constrain God to binary categories. If you are a trinitarian you understand God existing in three ways- Father, Son, Holy Spirit. If you are Jewish, you might refer to god as Elohim- which means the full plurality of God, or even more crudely translated- All the Gods. Or perhaps Yahweh- “the one who brings into existence whatever exists” or perhaps as the understanding of God as the great “I am” as in the scripture from Exodus (which I understand to mean “I am who I am, I was who I was, I am becoming who I am becoming) because even God is in constant transition and change. Every form of religion understands God using different words, different stories, and different concepts. But all of those attempts at description are getting at the same being, the same force, and the same power in the universe.
And THAT is the image in which we are created. This uncontainable, indescribable, exceedingly nonbinary creator that made us in their own amazing image. Who are we to tell other people which image, which version, which expression of God they are created in?
But let’s take this just one step further.
What does God, the creator of all things, say at the end of each day and each act of creation?
“That’s some good stuff right there”
At the end of each day of creation, we are told “And God saw that it was good” In fact, on the sixth day? The day God creates humans, “God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good.”
And that brings me all the way back to the Psalm we shared this morning. “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon, and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.” A dear camp friend, Bob Henning, put it this way:
We were not created to be ordinary, binary, cookie-cutter humans. We were fearfully and wonderfully made as a little less than angels reflecting the great rainbow of God’s creation to each other and the world. As Pride month begins and we see the full spectrum of God’s creation, I pray that we can remember that there is room for all expressions of humanity in the creation story and the created world.
Henning, Bob. A Little Less Than Angels. 1996.
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