By Our Lives Be We Spirit:
Holy Identity

Sacre Coeur

Greta Ehrig

In the space of two
lightly touching hands

Rodin saw tenderness, prayer,
a form of holiness he called

Cathedral. What is after all
the architecture of God?

If our Creator's house is constructed
cruciform, if Spirit only enters

the clean, curved coolness
of mosque or synagogue,

what about the high-vaulted
moss-strewn corridor of trees

which leads me
not into temptation but

the redemption of river
and leaves? Hail, my own

mucky body, regaled
by the scintillant light.

Tell me.
Who to love. When.

I can not hear for the multitude
singing, and in the vast and intimate

chambers of my heart,
whether Love comes as a man

or a woman, singular or
plural, is of no concern

to the soul flown open
as a window to God.

The Holy Leper
and the Bisexual Christian

Amanda Udis-Kessler

There is no longer Jew or Greek there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
?Galatians 3:28

If Jesus is holy, then clearly holiness is not about separation.
?Mike Riddell

Jesus' life calls to me in many ways, inviting me to love God, myself, and myneighbors, to trust God utterly and to relinquish my fear, to give myself inservice and to strive for a justice that would do justice to God's mercy. Jesusoffers me a model of what it means to be a teacher, a healer, a servant, aprophet, a martyr. I could spend the rest of my days trying to learn from himand striving to follow him in the particularities of my own life circumstances.

    One lesson I draw from Jesus' life is that God meets us where we areand welcomes us into abundance. God does not invite us by demandingthat we abandon our deepest selves. Instead, the kingdom is offered to usat precisely those most sad and joyous, most broken and healing, mostvulnerable places. If I am to take this lesson seriously, I must ask whatJesus has to say to me as a bisexual person, capable of emotionally andsexually loving both women and men, often mistrusted and sometimesrejected by both heterosexuals and lesbian/gay people. If I am to find Godin the life of this Rabbi from Nazareth, what word of hope is there that mysexual identity can draw me closer to God, through Jesus, in some way?

    The Gospels, of course, do not record any sayings of Jesus on homosexuality,let alone bisexuality, and it is impossible to know from theavailable biblical scholarship whether he was attracted to women, men,both or neither (though I would tend to doubt the last possibility). Yet,there is another level of inquiry for me, which draws upon plentifulGospel material and beyond, into mystery and silence. Jesus was notmerely a teacher, preacher, healer, and prophet; he was also, at his core, ashatterer of boundaries, destroyer of margins, and dismantler of statusesin the name of God's boundless, all-inclusive love. It is this facet of Jesus'work that most threatened the authorities of his time and brought him tothe cross, and it is in this legacy that I find my own potential for lovingbeyond at least certain boundaries, welcomed and sanctified.

    Biblical scholar Marcus Borg, among others, has detailed the status-drivenpolitics of holiness and purity which had become manifest amongJews in Jesus' culture. Social inequality in Jesus' time depended on hierarchicaldualisms, as do today's commonly recognized forms of socialinequality?racism, sexism, class inequality, heterosexism, ageism, ableism,and the like. Hierarchical dualisms are value systems in which twoopposite social categories are defined, one of which is valued (white, male,rich, heterosexual, adult, able-bodied) and one of which is devalued (personof color, female, poor, lesbian/gay, very young or very old, disabled).

    Borg's account of the politics of holiness, on which I rely below, hascertain limitations which bear mentioning before exploring his explanationof hierarchical dualism. First, it is but one of a number of analyses ofthis period and has not by any means received scholarly consensus. Second,for the purposes of this essay, I am not focusing on the ways in whichJewish law was frequently grounded in deep concerns for social justiceand in caring for the stranger and the poor, for example, the tradition oftikkun olam, the repair of the world. While this tradition may not havereceived primary attention under the circumstances faced by Jews in thatera, it was not absent. In fact, it can be helpful to understand Jesus (as Borgdoes) not as the founder of a new non-Jewish religion but as the leader ofa Jewish revitalization movement attempting to refocus Jews on this veryissue. Finally, no account of Jewish life in this period is complete withoutrecalling that the Jews lived under Roman occupation and faced aspects ofoppression ranging from unjust taxation and imposition of Roman religiouspractices to arrest and death for any activity that could be seen as athreat or challenge to the Romans.

    Having thus provided a context for Borg's perspective, let me turn tothe core of what Borg calls the politics of holiness: the question ofwhether a given individual was pure or impure, clean or unclean. Borgclaims that the answer to this question meant the difference betweensocial welcome and social disapproval, even ostracism?which, in such anhonor-and-shame-based culture, could amount to social death. On thepure/clean/valued side of the equation Borg locates rich (or at least economicallysolvent) Jewish men in good health and in a position to countthemselves among the righteous by following the extensive Jewish laws intheir entirety. Among the impure, unclean, and devalued, Borg finds thepoor, Gentiles, women, the sick, and those Jews considered sinners for notbeing able to keep the laws (usually by virtue of being poor, women, sickor some combination of all three). Jesus' frequent references to whoresand tax collectors should be understood in this context, argues Borg;whores (unchaperoned women, some of whom were actually prostitutes)and tax collectors (seen as shills for the occupying Roman empire, forcedto handle "profane" money, generally trusted about as much as youngAfrican-American men are trusted by security guards in stores today) werethought of as among the biggest "sinners" in the purity system. It is nota coincidence that Jesus welcomed them over and over again, told storiesin which God's love for them was clear, and told the purveyors of thepurity system that tax collectors and prostitutes were getting into thekingdom of God before the so-called righteous.

    Jesus could offer this welcome to outcasts because of his own experienceof God's love and welcome, which Jesus translated into a call to becompassionate as God is compassionate (Luke 6:36)?that is, beyondboundaries. He spoke of a gracious Father who sends rain on the just andunjust, urged his followers to love not just neighbor but enemy as well,and instituted a new social structure for eating, a table fellowship inwhich rich and poor, righteous and sinner, men and women were at thesame table in total violation of the purity rules (e.g., Matt. 9:10; Mark14:3-9; Luke 11:37-38; 14:1; 19:1-10). He treated women, Gentiles, thepoor and the sick with dignity and respect (with one interesting exception,Matt. 15:21-28, in which he came around at the end), and he welcomedchildren, considered nobodies in his culture (e.g., Matt. 18:1-6, 10;19:13-14; Luke 9:46-48; 10:38-42; 21:1-4; John 4:5-42; 8:1-11). He challengedhis culture's hierarchical family structure in ways that would horrifytoday's "family values" crowd if they paid attention to it (e.g., Matt.8:21-22; 10:34-37; 12:48-50; 23:9; Luke 11:27-28; 14:26), and he skeweredwealth (Matt. 6:19-21, 24; 19:21-24; Luke 4:13-14; 6:20, 24, 30, 34-35;12:15-21; 14:33; 16:19-25), piety, and prestige (Matt. 6:1-6, 16-18; Mark9:35; 12:38-39; Luke 14:7-11; 18:10-14) as marks of status. He also engagedin what AIDS activists would call a direct action against Purity Central(the temple, heart of the politics of holiness). Jesus apparently saw God'sgraciousness as shattering boundaries and understood the appropriatehuman response as right relationship with God, others, and self, whichlikewise required boundary shattering. Jesus offered us/called us to liberationfrom legalisms into love, from class into compassion, from statusinto solidarity. (My best understanding of the kingdom of God today isthat it is simply life in love, compassion, and solidarity with self, others,and the Holy.)

    Perhaps Jesus' most awesome boundary crossing took place in his healingwork. Sickness was a mark of uncleanness, and many of the people hehealed were doubly unclean, such as Gentiles (Matt. 8:5-13; 15:21-28;Luke 17:1-19), or the woman with a "bleeding problem" (Matt. 9:20-22;Jewish law defined menstrual blood as an unclean substance). Jesus alsohealed on the Sabbath, breaking the temporal boundary between sacredand profane (Matt. 12:10-13; Luke 13:10-17). While the story about thedemoniac in the graveyard (Mark 5:1-17) is probably not historically accurate,it fits what we know of Jesus that he would enter a graveyard(unclean) inhabited by a man with unclean spirits (worse) and send thespirits into a herd of nearby pigs (the most unclean animal, according toJewish law). Crossing the barriers between healthy and sick peopleallowed Jesus to offer people with little hope a chance to cross back intothe world of the well, but he was only able to do this by himself crossinginto the world of the sick and, therefore, the world of the unclean.

    Most of the time, when Jesus healed those with eczema or psoriasis,what is commonly mistranslated today as leprosy, he touched them (e.g.,Matt. 8:2-4; Luke 7:22). Touching a leper meant that Jesus took on leprosyhimself, both in the sense of risking exposure to the condition, and in thesense of socially becoming a leper for all intents and purposes. Jesus,beloved of God, accepted this "uncleanness" in order to offer healing, andrather than becoming a leper, he sanctified leprosy. Lepers in Jesus' culturelost their status as clean when their condition became public. YetJesus appears to have interacted with lepers without losing his "clean" status,perhaps because of his healing ability or the authority with which hetaught. At the very least, there is no evidence that he either behaved as anunclean person was supposed to, or that he was treated as unclean by thosearound him (with one exception, Mark 3:30). Thus, Jesus became what wemight call a holy leper or a God-filled outcast; he was somehow simultaneouslyclean and unclean, an impossibility in the face of the dualism atthe heart of the politics of holiness. His impossible status did what nopolitical protest of the time could have done: it collapsed the core of thedualism undergirding the politics of holiness. In other words, by becominga holy leper, Jesus demolished the categories of "holy" and "leper" ashierarchical opposites, freeing lepers to be holy and enabling those peopledefined as pure (e.g., the Pharisees) to encounter their own "uncleanness,"their full humanity.

    This perspective on uncleanness is, I suspect, a somewhat uncommonway to think about Jesus' gift to humanity. Christians are more likely tofocus on Jesus' bridging of the gap between humanity and divinity, to celebratehis conquest of death for all time by the way he died, or to argue(as René Girard did in Violence and the Sacred) that Jesus, in taking on therole of scapegoat, rid the world of its need for scapegoats. However muchthese characterizations of Jesus' work may speak to me, I am most awedand humbled by his willingness to become unclean and his resulting conquestover uncleanness and the pure/impure dichotomy that has fueled somany hierarchical dualisms. This work of Jesus offers me hope that mybisexuality, far from being a sin, disease, or case of confusion, might beGod's way of working gracefully in me against exclusivism and categorization,on behalf of God's joyful and inclusive kingdom.

    Different people, of course, have different gifts, challenges, and lifemissions, and I don't mean to suggest that being bisexual is in any waybetter than the alternatives, or that everyone must become bisexual inorder for the kingdom to come. That would require a miracle beyond anywe see in the scriptures! It does seem to me, though, that Jesus, the holyleper, is well situated to welcome Amanda, the "neither gay nor straight/both gay and straight," to challenge me and to reassure me.

    Jesus the holy leper speaks to my bisexuality by offering me a modelfor life outside the boundaries of destructive hierarchical dualisms. Jesusdoes not appear to have spent much energy worrying about the impossibilityof his status, since there was too much kingdom work to do andsince his experience was that nothing was impossible with God.

    If I am to follow Jesus in this way, I can and must relinquish my concernsand anger about people who deny the existence of bisexuality. Letthem believe what they believe. In the meantime, I'd rather work on bringingthe kingdom a little closer than wrangle over the "truth" of my sexualidentity. If bisexuality really is a threat to the gay/straight dichotomy, if itchallenges people overly invested in the status quo on both sides of theequation, perhaps that's because it is supposed to do so. In the meantime,says Jesus, I'm free to stop worrying about rejection and to offer suchhealing as is mine to give by crossing boundaries in love. He challengesme to do this work in remembrance of him, and if the boundaries I crossare somewhat different from the boundaries he crossed, so be it (thoughthe people defined as unclean today include sexual minorities of allstripes).

    I suspect that, in addition to my being called to feed the hungry, attendto the sick, visit the prisoner, and house the homeless as much as anyoneelse on the planet, I'm also called to find ways to use my bisexuality, myform of "holy leprosy," in the service of inclusivity and welcome. I can,for example, strive to make God's love manifest in all of my relationships,sexual and nonsexual, regardless of the genders involved. I can refuse tobehave as though men were superior to women (traditional sexist values)or as though women were superior to men (a common response to sexism,but not, I think, the ultimate word about who we can be as humanbeings). I can offer particular encouragement to others who cross boundariesof gender, sexuality, race, and class, by word and by example, and Ican try to be alert to the unique, wonderful, and surprising gifts of individualswithout either disregarding or idolizing their gender identities orsexual orientations. These kinds of work are not limited to bisexual people,of course, but my bisexuality can help me carry them out. Undoubtedly,there are more tasks ahead which I cannot envision now, but forwhich my bisexuality will also be a gift.

    Finally, then, Jesus does offer a word of hope for my sexual identity.Jesus' example, if "translated" as I have tried to do here, reassures me thatif I live my bisexuality with such kingdom values as love, compassion,honesty, integrity, and forgiveness, my sexual identity can and will beused in the service of the kingdom and will be part of the solution ratherthan part of the problem (as the street evangelists would have it). The"symptom of sin and alienation" so derided by biblical literalists can actuallybe a gift of grace to draw me closer to God the Great Lover, as I seekthe kingdom through my bisexuality and offer that bisexuality back to thekingdom again. I pray in Jesus' spirit that this work may give shape to mydays, I offer thanks for a God who won't let mere human boundaries stoplove, and I praise the Rabbi whose love took him beyond all such boundariesin God's service. Amen.

Copyright © 2000 Debra R. Kolodny. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8264-1231-9