Apocalypse and Hope: A Trans Day of Remembrance sermon

The assigned scripture for lots of churches today is the “little apocalypse” in Mark. The end-of-the-world seems like a very fitting topic for Transgender Day of Remembrance Sunday. I had two thoughts when I saw today’s text. 1. This is the word of God? (Thanks be to God?), and 2. Go home, lectioners, you’re drunk. We’re going to have an apocalypse again in two weeks, and I’m not going to have anything left for that sermon. But you don’t care about my problems…

Many commentators talk about apocalyptic material by arguing about whether it is meant to be a warning or a threat. (I imagine many of us thinking, “These are my options?”) The distinction between warning and threat basically boils down to Is it too late? or Is there still time? What did it mean when my mother said, “Just wait until your father gets home?” Was it fundamentally about, “You really blew it, Sparky; and now you’re going to get your butt beat,” or was it more of a, “You better change your tune, Smarty-pants before you get your butt beat”?

But I suspect you may know by now how I feel. These are both inherently based on spankings, and I’ve said it a million times: I do not and I cannot and I will not believe that Good ever uses violence or threat of violence. Period. I don’t think that Good understands violence to be a tool to increase life and love and wholeness. Quite the contrary.

Other commentators talk about apocalyptic material like this in terms of a future timetable, like the so-called Second Coming, Armageddon, the tribulation, the rapture. Some folks are looking for hidden meanings in the words and they find Nostradamus-y subtexts, and so “wars, rumors of wars, great portents, earthquakes, and plagues” become Iraq or Russia or usually Israel and other current nations and events.

But Jesus says relatively clearly (for Jesus), a couple times, that no one knows the day or hour, not even the angels, and he says that no one knows at what hour the thief is coming, and, right here, he says that many will come in his name and say, ‘It’s me!’ and, ‘This is it!’ but don’t go with those fakers. And like clockwork the end-time predictors Hal Lindsey and Harold Camping and John Hagee and David Meade came and said, “It’s me!” and “This is it!” and then all of their end-time predictions came and went – the 1980s came and went, and the 1990s came and went, and May 21, 2011 – no October 21, 2011 – came and went, and September 23, 2017 – no October 15, 2017 – no April 23, 2018 – all came and went. And here we are, un-Second Come and un-raptured and still trying to sort it out.

Still other scholars think that apocalyptic material like this is trying to express a fundamental symbolic clash between the way the world does things and the way Good does them, that these images correspond everything happening with us to a larger struggle between good and evil. Everything that is happening here on earth has a greater, cosmic significance, and so there are references to great, cosmic events: the sun goes dark, the moon turns to blood, stars fall from the sky, the heavens are torn open, and so on. And I’m into that. I dig that way of thinking about apocalyptical readings. Partly because I’m a fan of poetry and metaphor. Partly because there is a beauty in finding ways to articulate the explosive transformation that occurs spiritually and physically when Love truly becomes the Good of our waking and sleeping, of our going out and coming in, the Good of our words and our hands and our hearts. It’s the end of the world as we know it. And the former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.

But this doesn’t quite work for us today.

Because today is not a day for discussing poetry and allegory and metaphor and figures of speech.

Because today is the day that we name our dead. 369 names, according to the Transgender Europe’s Trans Murder Monitoring Project. More every year. Too many, always, members of our tribe – and horrifyingly disproportionately trans people of color – who have been beaten, stabbed, shot, strangled, sexually assaulted, beheaded, dismembered, run over with cars, thrown from buildings and bridges. Who are violated again in death by being misgendered and dead named and mocked and erased and belittled. The upheaval described in our reading today is not poetic or metaphorical; it is real and present. It describes for those named a very literal end of the world.

And we can’t name our trans dead without naming our African American and Jewish dead. Unarmed. Holding a BB gun. Trying to get help after a car accident. Reaching for his registration. Sitting in his own apartment. Shopping for groceries. John Crawford III, Renisha McBride. Philando Castille. Botham Shem Jean. Maurice Stallard and Vickie Jones. Dozens more that we know by name. That we can name by heart. And 11 murdered during sabbath worship: Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, Irving Younger. We must name their deaths and name the violence that went on after they were killed, when they are criminalized in death and when their deaths are justified by school suspensions and blood alcohol levels and so-called erratic behavior. When their deaths are made fodder for a mid-term election. The upheaval described in our reading today is not poetic or metaphorical. It is real. And present. It describes for those named a very literal end of the world.

And we can’t name our trans dead and our African American and Jewish dead without naming those killed by disasters in Puerto Rico and Indonesia and California, who are killed by unnatural disaster and are killed again in our hearts and minds when we turn away, when partisans and televangelists use their lives and deaths as religious and political kindling to decry queer sexuality or access to abortion or personal insult, when we refuse to stop and pay attention to the devastation or blame them or think of them and their loss as separate from us.

The upheaval described in our reading today is not poetic or metaphorical. It is real. And present. It describes for those named a very literal end of the world.

Mark is speaking to the catastrophic events of its own time, the devastation and crises faced by the early followers of Jesus. Its tsunamis. Its racial bias and violence. Its transphobia. Mark’s Jesus’ words are surely meant to be encouraging and hopeful. Mark’s Jesus promises here that when all this happens and when all seems lost, there Will Be words and safety. We will not be lost. By staying with it, enduring, by remaining steadfast we will be saved. And, bless their hearts after all, the lectioners stop here, so that we are left with this promise, so that we end with security and certainty rather than continuing with the horror that follows.

Because the next, like, 26 verses are actually more crises, more fear, more catastrophes, just like in real life. The violence and persecution continues in the text, just as it continues in our global communities. Ending our reading with the promise of being saved by our endurance, rather than continuing on with the litany of devastation is like the difference between ending the t.v. series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or ending it like the series Angel.

This is going to take me a minute to explain, but I think that it may be worth it. Stay with me.

The final season of Buffy ended, as every season of that show ended, with victory and promise. Every year, at the end of every season, Buffy and the gang vanquished the enemy and so evil was destroyed and the world was saved. Every season ended, and the series ended overall, with triumph. We would get to stop, pause, breathe, rest, celebrate. We won! The surviving gang of friends stand in the very end at the lip of a huge crater that was once their hometown and smile in victory.

But Angel ended in the middle of it. In the last minutes of the last show of the final season, a mob of countless demons and monsters descend on the decimated survivors from every side, and the heroes are surrounded and outnumbered and overwhelmed, and Angel takes out his weapon and says to his remaining friends, “Let’s go to work.” And the screen cuts to black.

Angel ends the way we live in the real world – in an ongoing, relentless battle, with hope. Buffy ends like the world would be if our hope were realized.

Many of us, and I may be in this group, would really like to expect and look forward to and participate in a final, triumphant victory of Good and Love and non-violence over all of the forms of death that we’ve named today. I’m as guilty as the next person of wanting that Buffy vindication of right and kindness and generosity. I believe that the time will come and is soon that trans people will no longer be murdered. That the time will come and is soon that Jews worshiping in schul and unarmed Black folks doing regular stuff will no longer be murdered. That the time will come and is soon that when unnatural disasters occur we will feel the grief as our own grief and learn the names and faces of the people lost. I want to believe that, first, I will step off the cliff and choose to risk self-preservation and risk reputation and risk worldly success, and that, second, when I do there is going to be a pillow at the bottom. That there will be a Buffy win. That I’ll get Somewhere and Someone will pat me on the back and say, Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into your glory.

And yet the lesson of today’s text indicates, and our lives testify, and the litany of horrors throughout history and up to last week attest that it will likely stay like Angel’s ending, that there may not be a pillow at the bottom of the cliff. That everything might not turn out okay in the end. That the narrative of our work and our lives may stop for a moment of reprieve but then veer right back out into more crises, more fear, more hardship, more battles. They may keep killing our trans tribe. They may keep killing our unarmed Black tribe and Jewish tribe at worship. They may keep using victims of disasters as props in their ideological debates. Things may not get better. The day may come, in fact, when not one stone is left upon another.

And. There is hope yet. There is promise. Though much is lost, all is not lost. The promise and hope found in that scenario is the promise and hope of Angel’s last words: Let’s get to work.

It is promise and hope that we will continue to find community and comradery and comfort in one another. That we will continue to recognize hate and call it out and count and name our loss and name injustice. That we will continue to try. That we will do love and generosity and kindness all the way down the cliff and hit bottom with maybe no pillow. Call us fools, Paul said, call us naïve, but we will not be weary in doing what is right. That we will keep chipping away at hate and injustice; that we won’t turn away.

Ending violence, ending racial bias and hate, ending apathy are daunting tasks, impossible-seeming tasks. They are not impossible. There’s a bumper sticker out there that says, “Forget World Peace, Visualize using your turning signal.” Achieving world peace is possible, and it will likely happen in inches and bites, in small-seeming, necessary increments. Probably not all in one fell swoop. So also with ending transphobia and ending racial and ethnic and religious violence and developing empathy and unity with disaster-stricken communities.

We can name our dead. Defend the vulnerable. Care for ourselves. Use our voices, even when we’re afraid, even when it may cost us, even when it feels repetitive and stale. Inch by inch, bite by bite. Text our donation to 80888, and then roll up our sleeves and give blood, carry water, hammer beams, never be weary in doing what’s right. Take a knee. Talk back to family at Thanksgiving dinner, gently, firmly, about who is getting hurt, and how, and why it matters.

Angel said to Buffy in Season 4, “I do know it’s important to keep fighting. I learned that from you. We never win, not completely, we never will. That’s not why we fight. We do it ’cause there’s things worth fighting for.” Lives are at stake. Let’s get to work.

Peace.

Find other trans-related writings here.

 

2017 Frederick MD

today is transgender day of remembrance.

because public restrooms are ongoing sites of shame and danger for trans folks, we can effort to make restrooms neutral and safe places for all who need to use them.

as justice-minded communities that seek to create more inclusive, more safe, and more welcoming space for more people, and since gendered forms of address are often painfully misdirected at trans and genderqueer folks, we can practice removing “sir,” “ma’am,” “ladies,” and other gendered titles from our speech.