Nadia Bolz-Weber - Shameless: A Sexual Reformation

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

And also with you.

The week Prince died, I was flying to Charlotte, North Carolina, to speak to a group of Methodists. That same week, the state legislature of North Carolina voted in the so-called bathroom bill, which stated that people must use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender on their drivers license. As I stuffed my carry-on bag beneath the seat in front of me, I thought of this hideous bill and the little plan I had concocted to protest it. My bag contained a roll of Scotch tape and half a dozen sheets of paper, all which borein huge purple printthe androgynous symbol for Princes name.

The plane took off, and I looked out the window. We were traveling over the dry plains of eastern Colorado, thirty thousand feet above a dot matrix of green and brown circles that revealed the geometry of industrial agriculture. As a city girl who doesnt know a thing about farming, Ive always found those green circles puzzling. Why would farmers plant circles of crops in lots that are square?

When I looked into it later, I discovered that in 1940, just twenty-nine miles from the spot where my plane made its way into the crisp Colorado sky, a man named Frank Zybach invented the center-pivot irrigation system, essentially revolutionizing farming in America. In his system, the watering equipment turns on a pivot, allowing sprinklers to water crops in a circular pattern. The crops arent planted in circles; theyre just watered that way. The water never gets to the crops in the corners.

When I arrived at the Charlotte airport, I went about my project of taping the purple Prince symbols over bathroom signs that read Men and Women. Then I went to church.

The day after I returned home, I sat on the edge of the stage at House for All Sinners and Saints (HFASS), the Denver church I pastor. My parishioner Meghan and I were watching the churchs monthly community meal take place. Groups of mismatched people of differing ages and sexual and gender orientations were situated at twelve circular tables throughout the room, eating chili out of Styrofoam bowls.

Meghan, a large transwoman with long, thin hair and a face and figure that she admits do not allow her to pass, has enough social anxiety to make sitting at a communal table a non-starter, so she usually makes her own place on the edge of the stage. Some Sundays, rather than join the fray, I hang with her and talk comic books.

That day, as our legs hung off the stage, I brought up something that had been on my mind lately. Hey, Meghan, I read my old Christian sex-ed book this morning for the first time in maybe forty years. She laughed, and I went on. It taught me that Gods plan is for everyone to be a heterosexual, cis-gender Christian who never has sex with anyone until they marry their one true love and make babies.

We both laughed. Then I shook my head. I mean, I do think there are genuinely those kinds of people out there.

Meghan held up her hand and touched her thumb to the rest of her purple nail-polished fingers. Sure there are. And this is how small that circle is.

If you were to draw a circle that represents all the people on the planet, and then inside it draw another small circle to represent the people who live according to Gods plan, then, well, very few people on the planet fit in that circle. Meghan doesnt fit in that circle. I dont fit in that circle. Also not included in the circle are divorced people, people in unhappy marriages, people who have sex before marriage, people who masturbate, asexuals, gay people, bisexuals, people who are not Christian, people who are gender non-binary

If thats Gods plan, then God planned poorly.

Maybe you dont fit into that circle, either. God planted so many of us in the corners, yet the center-pivot irrigation of the churchs teachings about sex and sexuality tends to exclude us. Many of us were taught that if you do not fit inside the circle of the churchs behavioral codes, God is not pleased with you, so we whittled ourselves down to a shape that could fit those teachings, or we denied those parts of ourselves entirely. The lusty parts. The kinky parts. The gay parts. The unwanted-pregnancy parts. The unfulfilled parts.

But our sexual and gender expressions are as integral to who we are as our religious upbringings are. To separate these aspects of ourselvesto separate life as a sexual being from a life with Godis to bifurcate our psyche, like a musical progression that never comes to resolution.

In the ten years Ive been pastor at HFASS, Ive known young married couples who did what the church told them and waited, only to discover that they could not, on the day of their wedding, flip a switch in their brains and in their bodies and suddenly go from relating to sex as sinful and dirty and dangerous to relating to sex as joyful and natural and God-given. Ive known single women who didnt have sex until they were forty and now have absolutely no idea how to manage the emotional aspect of a sexual relationship. Ive heard middle-aged women admit that they still cant make themselves wear a V-neck because as teenagers they were told female modesty was the best protection from unwanted male sexual advances. Ive seen gay men who never reported the sexual abuse they experienced in the church because the church told them being gay was a sin. Ive heard stories from women who experienced marital rape after getting married at twenty years old (because if you have to wait until marriage to have sex, then you hurry that shit up) but got the message from their church that because there is a verse in the Bible that says women should be subject to their husbands, it was not actually rape.