Karen Hollis | March 9, 2025
Lent 1/Affirming Service
Genesis 2:5-8, 18 trnsl. Alter On the day the Lord God made earth and heavens, no shrub of the field being yet on the earth and no plant of the field yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not caused rain to fall on the earth and there was no human to till the soil, and wetness would well from the earth to water all the surface of the soil, then the Lord God fashioned the human, humus from the soil, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, to the east, and He placed the human He had fashioned. And the Lord God said, “It is not good for the human to be alone, I shall make him a sustainer beside him.”
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be reflections of your word to us today, in Christ’s name we pray. Amen
I was traveling in the states a couple of weeks ago and at one point I looked at the backpack I had been carrying around and saw the pin that says she/her, correctly identifying my pronouns. I had picked up the pin from the affirming table at one of our Regional Gatherings and found a relevant place for it to live. I suddenly wondered, “is what I’m doing safe?” (shrug) Ok so far.
I wasn’t an early adopter of sharing preferred pronouns. I learned along with other church leaders that doing pronoun check-ins in a small group or putting preferred pronouns on a nametag normalizes the practice. These are ways of being in solidarity with those who need to communicate the pronouns they prefer. When I wear around a she/her pin, it says to people, yup, this is something we do.
Before this movement to identify preferred pronouns, most of us didn’t think about them much – they’re useful little tools that help the ease of our speech. There’s actually a lot going on under our pronouns. (next slide)
[See the Genderbread diagram above]
To help us unpack this topic, I’m bringing in a widely used tool called the GENDERbread person to help us break down this topic of gender so we can see what we’re talking about today and what we’re not talking about. You see 4 aspects of the GENDERbread person. Identity, attraction, sex, and expression.
Identity is our inner truth, our sacred self, our understanding of our gender, male, female, somewhere in between or something else.
Attraction is who we are drawn to – a person might be gay, straight, bisexual, pansexual (attracted to all genders), asexual, or something else.
Sex refers to our biology – female, male or intersex, if ones biology is not clearly male or female.
Expression is how we present ourselves to the world. Whether we have short hair, paint our fingernails, wear scarves or sneakers, dress up or casual.
Identity is different from attraction, which is different from biology, which is different from expression. Pronouns are connected to our identity, our inner understanding of who we are, the sacred self God created us to be, that no one can change or take from us. Today we’re talking about the identity piece. (there are copies of the genderbread person on the welcome table you can pick up after the service)
We’re in a culture shift right now around normalization of these distinctions and affirmation of people who don’t fit well into the historical boxes we created. And there is significant push back to this culture shift. The boxes are so ingrained in our culture, our Christian tradition, the way we’ve been taught to view scripture . . . making room for normalization is a process. Which is why we take time as a community of faith to look again at our tradition and our sacred texts and open ourselves to learning something we didn’t see before.
This morning we heard a reading from Genesis 2. The way this was translated in many modern versions, supports a binary view of gender. Here is how it is written in the New Revised Standard Version “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” The first thing I notice is “God formed man.” It doesn’t say A man, it says man, which used to be a common synonym for human. Not as common anymore, so our post-modern ears might hear male person rather than humanity. The end of the verse says, “the man became a living being.” But that’s not exactly what the Hebrew says.
I like to use the translations of Hebrew scholar Robert Alter, because he is very true to the original language. His translation goes like this: “the Lord God fashioned the human, humus from the soil, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature.”
I wonder if the person who wrote this story down suddenly had a pronoun crisis. God fashioned the human and blew life into the human’s nostrils, but then which pronoun to use for this representative of all humanity? And I imagine because of their own cultural influences, they default to the male pronoun. And seeing that, our own modern translators took that to mean that first human was male. You may have heard before that
Adamah means earth in Hebrew, so Adam is a word play, meaning “of the earth.”
In my reading of Genesis 2, before there is male and female, before there is gender and pronouns, there is humanity. Humanity is gender neutral. Like with everything else in creation, humanity isn’t easily binary – there are always going to be humans who don’t fit into prescribed boxes.
If we look further at the scripture available to us today, we find some texts that didn’t make it into the canon that – even in the 1st or 2nd century – challenge norms. Take this excerpt from The Thunder: Perfect Mind (whose date and location could be 2nd Century Egypt):
I am he the mother and the daughter
I am she, the lord.
It is he who gave birth to me.
Notice the gender “bending” in these lines. Does that term make sense? This text bends the gender norms and includes a broader use of pronouns. When we studied this in Queer Bible Study, we went through a kind of opening. Instead of trying to fit the text back into a box, we marveled at the fact that it exists. We marveled that the holy is present in the surprising, in the remarkable, in the quirky, the holy is present in the queer.
This text actually affirms the sacredness of queer identity more than any other text I’ve read. Remember identity is about our self-understanding. I was talking with a nonbinary person in my life one day about gender. Nonbinary means they don’t identify as male or female. I think many of us infer that a nonbinary gender would be somewhere between male and female on a continuum. That may be true for some, but not for all. Nonbinary could simply mean something else.1 Not male or female, rather something else. This beautiful human in my life showed me some images that expressed their gender in some way. It really opened my mind and got me thinking in a different way about gender. (3 images grouped together) Here are some images for us to consider that could communicate a person’s gender. (these are not the same ones as were shown to me)
So then, when we talk about preferred pronouns, we’re quite familiar with: He/him and She/her. And while we may not think about it much, if someone used a different pronoun for us, we would notice. If someone introduced me, saying “this is my minister, his name is Karen,” that pronoun wouldn’t sit well. While I have an easy relationship with my more masculine aspects, I identify as female and prefer female pronouns.
They/them are becoming familiar, over time our ears are get used to hearing and using them in reference to an individual, as well as a collective.
I learned a new set of pronouns when I was preparing for today. Rev. Lynn Young uses pronouns ze/zir/zirs,2 which offer another way, while using the same convention as she/he. (mosaic slide) Lynn describes zir gender in this way: “I felt like I was given this dirty floor and a toothbrush. As I started to scrub this floor I started seeing things, and as things were revealed, it turned out that this floor was an amazing mosaic, even though each piece by itself didn’t seem to be anything in particular. None of those pieces are unimportant because they all have to exist together to create the whole picture.”3
While normalizing the use of preferred pronouns is still a learning process for us, to use them is to affirm a person’s humanity, their worth as God’s beloved child. To use preferred pronouns is to say I see you, I affirm you, whether your gender is easy to explain or not. You are my fellow human. Thanks be to God.
1 transforming, Austen Hartke, p. 31
2 transforming, Austen Hartke, p. 166
3 transforming, Austen Hartke, p. 170