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And let the Church say Amen!
By Melissa Hrdlicka

When I enter a room, especially with my collar on, people tend to notice me. I am almost 6 feet tall, I have red hair, I’m plus-sized, and I have a fairly loud voice and laugh. I take up space, and this used to be something that made me shrink. As a kid I would hunch over so I didn’t tower over as many people and say my hair is brown and I wouldn’t speak unless spoken to. 
 
I loathed the largeness of my body and the loudness of my voice almost all of the time except when I was at a concert. At a concert I can see over everyone’s heads, I can sing as loud as I want knowing no one will hear me, and I can join in the collective dance knowing somehow I belong here. In a crowd with music pumping, I didn’t care how much space I was taking up. I was just there in the moment embracing all of me. As Sabrina Benaim said in her poem First Date, “I like my body best when I am not worried about how much space it is taking up, I mean dancing!”   
 
As a new pastor, I am still learning how to take up this space, how to let my name come second to my role and yet not be fully consumed by this beautiful, challenging, and important work. 
 
I am learning how to do this through a group of fellow queer pastors who meet weekly for text study over Zoom. Our jobs are often heavy so to lighten the space we start with songs either relating to the text or how we were feeling that day and we all dance in our little zoom squares like a silent disco. 
 
When someone offered “Amen” by Todrick Hall, I danced around my home office and suddenly everything came back together for me. I no longer worried about how much space I was taking up, I was just dancing. 
 
Even states apart, I felt safe in this sacred space we shared. This song was a call to worship for all of us queer preachers doing our best in ministry that doesn’t always love us, and doesn’t always allow us space to flourish. But in this moment of dancing in our own little boxes, we were free. 
 
The song beckons us in the same way I think Jesus would have, “come to the altar, you don’t have to be altered…come and rejoice here, come raise your voice here, love ain’t a choice here.” In Jesus there is no expectation, just an invitation to be in relationship with him and with each other just as we are. 
 
In the sacred space of music, queer community, and dancing, I find freedom, joy, and Jesus all over again. 
 
“And let the church say, Amen!”  

When I was in high school in the late 90s, I was a huge boy band fan. But, I kept this love of boy bands to myself.
 
Whenever the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, 98 Degrees, LFO, or O-Town came on the radio, I felt my little gay heart bursting from my chest. I kept it cool on the outside though. Nevertheless, the music touched my soul in a way that no music ever had before then. 
 
I was team Backstreet Boys all the way (Nick Carter was just the cutest). I envied the girls who put up posters in their bedrooms of the boy bands they liked.
 
The Backstreet Boys song “I Want it That Way” was (and still is) one of my favorite songs. “I Want it That Way” spoke to my desire to love my way, to love another man. With the lyrics, “You are my fire / the one desire” my heart was aflame. I imagined saying that to a crush. The lyrics, “But we are two worlds apart / Can’t reach to your heart” spoke to being in the closet. All I could do was quietly pine after a crush – there was no way for me to reach out to them. “Tell me why / Ain’t nothin’ but a heartache” spoke to the heartache I felt at the time.
 
But there were other songs by the Backstreet Boys that just made me feel good. “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” and “Larger than Life,” made me feel like everything was going to be OK. Those songs made me forget any troubles and worries going on in my life. I could step into the Backstreet Boys world and have fun.
 
When I would later come out in the mid to late 2000s, I would buy all of the Backstreet Boys CDs (as well as all of the other boy bands I had liked). I no longer had to listen to them by myself with the door shut. 
 
It wouldn’t be until the mid-2010’s, while in seminary, that I would finally see the Backstreet Boys perform live in person. 
 
Well, sort of.
 
After my first year of seminary I was looking through the Chicago Market Days schedule (kind of a mini Pride held in August) and one group stood out: Boy Band Review. I Googled them and learned that they covered all of the 90s and early 2000s boy band songs – all of the songs I loved as a closeted high schooler. 
 
I knew I had to go.
 
The Boy Band Review did not disappoint. At their show, I was able to dance and sing and jump up and down to my heart’s content. 
 
That scared little high schooler was finally able to fully be himself and openly love this music, surrounded by other people with a similar love. 
 

Who Carries You Through?
By Mycah McNett

I have an entire playlist of music that brings my queer self-abundant life! I started developing the latest iteration of this playlist during a unit of summer CPE. It was my driving music that helped put me in the spiritual care mood, and spiritually cared for me when I was on my way home.
 
Often, the first song I would hit play on was “If You Got a Problem” by Joy Oladokun. I needed the reminder from the chorus: 
 
If you got a problem
I got a problem too
If you’re standin’ at the bottom
I’ll reach out for you
If you need someone to lean on
Baby, I can be strong
I will carry you through
If you got a problem
I got a problem too.
 
I imagine, at times, that this is Jesus singing through Joy Oladokun to the rest of us that if we got a problem, so does Jesus. Of the many, incredible things God has given us in this life, one of them is the gift that is Jesus Christ embodied in our community. That we can turn to each other and to Christ to lean on each other.
 
One of the biggest, joyfully queer parts of myself is how meaningful community support is in my life. I have learned so much about how important mutuality is in my relationships, personal and ministerial. Writers like bell hooks and Adrienne Maree Brown have formed my understanding that I won’t get very far in this life and call without you coming along with me, and the way we get there is radical love for each other. Love is an action word, and I love seeing us in action from a place of radical love.
 
For me, that love is incarnate in Jesus who came to build a joyfully, beloved, abundantly queer community starting with the disciples and Jesus’ early followers. We have the ability to reach out for each other, to cling to one another, because we got to know God in Jesus. Because Jesus knew what it was to be standin’ at the bottom, and the importance of carrying each other through. 
 
I would not have survived seminary, candidacy, internship, or any ministry without the support of my Proclaim community, without the ways we carry each other through following Jesus, carrying out God’s ministry in the world. I thank for each member of Proclaim and the wider community of support that carries us through.

A melancholy Eastertide love letter to camp on the cusp of the summer season

It is my queer agenda to remind people of the world’s beautiful cycle– or maybe that’s just my agenda, who’s to say. 

            I grew up in the American South, North Carolina, a storied land woven into the fabric of history and its people; there’s plenty to say about the checkered saga I was born into, and the garbage that comes along with it, but I did at the very least get a blessing from the place I grew up. A blessing from the years spent at camp out in the woods. 
 
The Creator loves wholly.  
 
Even before I loved myself or feigned belief that another person could love a queer me, the substance of the world outside the door would offer up little glimpses of divinity. Moments that screamed the Imago Dei before I even knew that phrase. 
 
I know you just got the crap kicked out of you in school, but did you see this pattern in this new leaf unfurling? Check out this beetle…
Oh, it happened again… did you notice the resplendent yellow this oak has turned? I’m sorry my dear…
You really weren’t meant for P.E. class were you… have you seen the hawk circling the field? Best not to look at your friend in his gym shorts. 
You seem sad, have you noticed how I’m sad too?
Did you notice that I, too, am dying every day?
Did you notice that we are resurrected with the dawn?
 
It was in the bosom of the woods where queerness was explored. Where I was always myself with everything I was and could be and everything that hurt and wanted to reject. Conversations with close friends, lovers, and all the things that get lifted up as prayers of laughter in the squeals of kids playing games, broken hearts, and views from dirty windows. These were and are souvenirs from moments long gone and seasons spent in the woods. Beloved, these souvenirs fade with time, but they are not lost because the Resurrected Christ says nothing is truly lost. Yes, die and can decompose, but the star stuff that carries your souvenirs has never been lost since the beginning. 
 
I can’t quite place the exact memories anymore, and I’m not sure how they slipped, but I carry the embedded feelings gifted by the cycle­– the smell of the first Spring rain, the stark silence of snowfall, the oppressive humidity of July. It’s a kind of creation cycle we honor in our liturgical calendar. One that reminds us in the depths of winter that the light has come into the world, one that reminds us of our dust-to-dust-ness even when Spring is about to get going.
 
            I think “queer-God talk” and an “eco-God talk” are kind of one in the same. To be queer is, for me, to hold such vast complexity in your being. To think eco-theologically– or whatever– is to bear witness to the vast complexity of another being. That vast complexity both in and out is God’s creation, it’s the image you’re made in. “Let us make them in our image!” A singular yet plural bang of creation that got called good and was loved even when it isn’t at its best.

It was Earth Day 2022, and I was walking through Central Park in NYC, trying to find a quiet place to play in the dirt. 

Weird idea, I know, but I wanted to put my hand in soil and love the Earth for a second. Earth Day is about loving the earth, right? And love is a feeling/action before it’s a concept, right? Right. So let’s get my hand in some dirt. 

The problem: I was embarrassed. Far more awkward than I expected. So like, I just walk up to the earth, and in full view of thousands of people, put my hands on it and try to love it?   

I really didn’t want to be loving the earth – like, you know – *in public*

So there I was in Central Park, wandering through historic, secluded old gay hookup groves, shamefully looking for a place to sit and love creation.

Awkward and ashamed, I meander through the woods; a patch of woods haunted quite literally for over a hundred years by queer bodies seeking quietly in the dark for a safe space to love another body. 
—
I promise this is a 100% true story, although tbh I clocked no more than 10% of the irony at the time. I can’t always tell where the shame is coming from right in the moment, y’know?  

For me, and I imagine for many others, the queer journey has been about finding my way out of shame and learning to love bodies. 

Our relationships with our bodies (and our collective body) are fraught, to say the least. These bodies we are told are wrong, evil, and predatory because of what we do and what we feel with them. Bodies that sometimes even feel wrong, born at odds with ourselves, known one way by us and known another way by the world. The world is so sure it knows us that it doesn’t believe in our ability to know ourselves!

The world refuses to know, to even believe in the life of queer, trans, Black, and brown bodies, even as they are surrounded by those crucified bodies.

They insist in their disbelief, even as the crucified body itself strolls through locked doors into their glorified closet of an echo chamber, eager with good news to share of a different way. 

And what about our disbelief? What about the 200 crucified species going extinct every day? Do we believe in the life of those bodies, or do we also doubt? 

And for every crucified bird, fish, ape, wolf, raccoon, insect, otter, tiger and other species that will be extinct by 2050 — their crucified Zombie-Jesus bodies haunt our zoos. They are ghosts in captivity, unstuck in time from some Easter future, taunting us with good news of a different way things could be if only we loved this body.   

If only we loved this body. 

Bodies are complicated – yes. Difficult? Hard agree. Remember that Zombie, Fish-Eating Jesus is a gory crucified body, probably oozing multiple somethings. But at the same time, it is a resurrected body. A body in motion. A holy body that carries death but also carries life. 

The holy body breaks into our world past locked doors and says “I have good news for you.” Then they guide our hand to the open wound in their side. 

“Behold!” They say. “This is your body.” 

Behold the crucified and resurrected body — this queer little blue zombie fish-eating planet — and love it. 

God invites us to love our flesh and the world around us as the beloved, growing, constantly changing bodies they are. Resurrected life in motion, oozing and flowing, constantly shaped and reshaped by ourselves and the bodies around us in a million ways both beautiful and brutal. 

We are crucified and resurrected, fixed and fluid, extinct and resurgent. We are queer, trans, black and brown bodies like mushrooms in soil: We can be crushed underfoot, but we won’t stop growing, and by morning we shall inherit the earth.  

This is your body. 

Let us lay our gentle hands on that body of earth and learn to love it – openly, without shame or fear. 

Trust Broken Reborn as Hope

I have a lot of disappointments these days. I try to make sense of the experience of COVID, as I long for public acknowledgment of this deep loss, yet once again we are moving on, just “getting over it.” COVID is not the only thing we need to mourn. Climate change is taking a toll. I live in Northern California with its devastating fires, where fear rises in me whenever I hear the sound of a fire engine heading up the Berkeley Hills. An attempted coup in our nation’s capital has yet to be adjudicated. Our transgender youth are being targeted again and again, and I am angry at hateful rhetoric and actions towards diverse groups of people as I listen to the effect it has on my Asian American and immigrant friends. I am ashamed to live in a reality where people with brown and black bodies are treated badly, especially young black men harmed and threatened every day by police officers. I am furious at the increased protections for guns by the United States Supreme Court that diminishes the safety of children and youth in schools, abused women in their homes, and supports tools for mass shootings. 

I have seen a lot of change in my lifetime towards equality and less discrimination, including the 2009 ELCA decision towards full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements and the brave actions of my transgender friends. I envisioned that we would be in a better place. However, resistance towards full inclusion of all people persists and seems to be rising. I am disappointed and angry. As I write this, I am taking account of the times we are living in and questioning how we will move on. 

I wonder what it must have been like for the people of all genders, sexual orientations, abilities, colors, ages, classes, Jew and Gentiles, all diversities who followed Jesus as they saw public opinion sway and eventually turn against him while the powers and the principalities nailed him to the cross and killed him. Was their trust in Christ broken as they mourned?

John Kirvan, author and Paulist priest, reflected on Evelyn Underhill’s words about resurrection in the book “God Hunger.” Kirvan writes, “trust broken must be reborn into hope.” Lessons of distrust have been pounded into us all our lives and are transformed into hope. Our Easter story transforms broken trust into hope with Jesus’ resurrection.  Healing breaks through and we too are raised to a new life. Jesus Christ is risen, risen indeed! 

St. Paul writes, in Romans 5: 1-5 

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (NRSV)

Evelyn Underhill, who knew suffering, writes, “I expect resurrection!” We, in the Proclaim community know resurrection. We have certainly experienced the loss of trust being reborn as hope! In whatever words we use for our gender and our sexual orientation, including our straight allies who read this, together we have moved beyond messages that tell us to distrust our deepest longings and our deepest understandings about who we are and how we are to live out our lives. We have the gift of being gathered together in community in common pain and common hope that has birthed a new life of fully living who we are with endurance and character resulting in love and inclusion. 

Trust broken being reborn as hope, is an ongoing process. It is our Good Friday to Easter experience from which we can trust and hope again and again! This Easter, receive the energy of new life unfolding, let us be revived and rise again.

Beloveds, 

The International Transgender Day of Visibility, as conceived by its founder, Rachel Crandall, is dedicated to celebrating transgender people and their contributions to society, and raising awareness of discrimination faced by transgender people worldwide.

To simply say that trans people face discrimination grossly under-represents the harm and horror that persist against the trans community worldwide and in our churches. There has been and continues to be an absolute genocide enacted against trans folx. In particular, BIPOC trans people are murdered frequently and their stories often go untold. In the U.S. alone, over 400 bills have been introduced, many specifically targeting trans children. Similar laws are being proposed and enacted around the globe that seek to strip away transgender peoples’  rights and deny trans identity altogether. It’s quite literally illegal to be visible in some places. 

Protest is needed, rejecting policies that discriminate against transgender peoples’ God-given identities, and calling out those who enact these horrific laws. A spotlight is needed on untold horrors, to show the world the countless trans lives lost to hate, to say their names and make them visible. A rebuking is needed of the ELCA’s and ELCIC’s subpar efforts to support and care for trans children of God, to call them to the witness of the Gospel.

Trans folx are beautiful children of God, created in God’s gender-queer image, bringing a manna of gifts into this world. 

Allies need to do more than simply acknowledge trans peoples’ existence or issue weak proclamations about all being welcome. Allies must fight for, care for, and protect our trans siblings.

Allies need to do more than raise awareness. Allies need to act. 

We invite cisgender allies to support trans visibility today by signing on to this petition, which will be shared with political and church leaders, and by engaging in the specific action items listed below. 

ELM hereby proclaims trans folx as beautiful and beloved children of God.

ELM hereby asserts that there is an attempted genocide in the United States being enacted against transgender people. ELM hereby rebukes all policies and movements across the United States and Canada that attempt to deny transgender people their rights.

ELM hereby calls cis people of faith to contact their local and national elected officials to speak out against any legislation that minimizes or attempts to strip away transgender peoples’ visibility, identity, livelihood, and lives.

ELM hereby calls cis allies to show up in support of their transgender siblings and share in the risk encountered in all of their spheres of influence. Allyship means facing derision and risking harm.

ELM hereby rebukes the subpar positions of the ELCA and ELCIC and their leaders, offering passive statements but doing nothing to actually care for the lives and well-being of transgender persons.

ELM hereby calls the ELCA and ELCIC and their leaders to care for and protect trans folx as beautiful and beloved children of God.

ELM hereby calls cis members and friends of ELM and all people of faith to engage congregations, synods, and bishops around cultivating and opening Safe calls to trans-rostered leaders. ELM further calls for those calls to include healthcare and fair compensation, as well as protection against workplace harassment.

We recognize that there are many needs and petitions of trans beloveds within and outside of the ELCA and ELCIC, including “Help me not freeze to death, because I got fired for being trans and can’t afford electricity,” and “Please help my trans child stay alive when their gender-affirming care is taken away,” and “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Responding to these petitions is the call of the Gospel.

Join us in committing anew, to actively waiting for YHWH, our help and our shield in whom our hearts find joy, in whose Holy Name we trust, to whom we boldly pray, “May your love be upon us, YHWH, as we place all our hope in you.” (Inclusive Bible, Psalm 33:20-22)

We recognize we cannot ask others to repent and act without first repenting and acting ourselves. The cisgender members of the ELM Board of Directors acknowledge and apologize for our complicity in trans invisibility throughout ELM’s history and today. We have done harm. We have failed many. We will do better, with God’s help.

Gracious God, soften our hearts and the hearts of those who fail to witness your heavenly creation in the world. Trans communities in and out of the church suffer. You grieve with them and offer comfort, while a collective silence, violence, and things left undone continue a pattern of harm on this community. The ELCA is perpetually blessed because of Trans rostered leaders, lay leaders, seminarians, and congregants who boldly live out your divinely inspired truth. Lord, too often the needs of the comforted are lifted up in the church rather than addressing the needs of the afflicted, as Marsha P. Johnson said, “No Pride for some of us without Liberation for all of us.” Lord, stir our hearts to comfort, support, and celebrate Trans persons and the entirety of your creation. We ask these things in Christ’s name. Amen.  

Sincerely, 

The ELM Board of Directors