Monday, June 2, 2025: The Holy Spirit, who births the Church should always make the Church uncomfortable.
As scripture scholars delve deeper into the history of the early Christian community they have reevaluated Pentecost through the lens of Queer Theology (explanation below). This week we will present several days of this reevaluation based on the study of our friend Diarmuid O’Murchu and other theologians who have spent lifetimes unraveling the origins, archaeology, languages, historical implications and mysteries of the Gospels. They call their way opf looking anew as one part of a larger body of work called "Queer Theology"
The first statements come from a 2020 article written during the Covid pandemic by Diarmuid O’Murchu called Queering Pentecost in a time of Lockdown
Heres a link to the full article:
https://diarmuidomurchu.com/home/news/38-queering-pentecost
The celebration of Pentecost, 50 days after Easter Sunday, has long been regarded as marking the foundation of the Church, when the Holy Spirit formally empowered the first apostles to go forth and proclaim the Gospel. The relevant Scripture text read in all Christian churches is that of Acts 2:1-11.
Acts 2:1-11
The Holy Spirit Comes at Pentecost
2 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues[a] as the Spirit enabled them.
There are actually two parts to this passage:
a) Verses 1-4, describe the descent of the Holy Spirit through tongues of fire on what is assumed to be the reconstituted group of 12 apostles. Additionally, early Christian art depicts a woman in the midst of the group, widely regarded as Mary the mother of Jesus.
b) vv.5-11: these verses describe an amorphous group from diverse countries, cultures, and languages, none of whom has yet been evangelized (according to the chronology of Acts), and they hear the preachers, each in their own native language, acknowledging the message of Gospel declaration, for which they give glory to God.
5 Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. 6 When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. 7 Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? 9 Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,[b] 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome 11 (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”
I have long been puzzled by the fact that I have never heard a homily of Pentecost focusing on vv.5-11. And I wonder why not? In my attempt to answer that question for myself, I have discovered Queer Theory to be enormously helpful. So, please forgive my digression while I briefly introduce what Queer Theory is about.
Faith in Queer Theory
Often associated with LGBTQI-related scholarship, Queer Theory is a development of the 1990s, associated with critical theory in literature, history, and the social sciences. Adopting the insights to religion, theology, and scripture is more recent still. The British theologian, Chris Greenough, provides a fine overview in Queer Theologies: The Basics (Routledge 2020).
According to Greenough, queering sacred texts seeks to move beyond the rigidity of dogma, and to expose the power dynamics that can tolerate only one understanding of truth. He outlines five dimensions of this process:
Queer resists ideas of categorization;
Queer challenges the idea of essentialism;
Queer challenges ‘normal’;
Queer removes binary thinking and assumptions;
Queer exposes and disrupts power relations and hierarchies.
(Greenough, 26).
Comments from an article on Bleak Theology
Pentecost is the queerest day of the Christian year. It is strange. It is unexpected. It is unwieldy. It is overwhelming. And we have sought to encapsulate and confine and control it within time, within a calendar to bring it back when we want it to occur. When we can expect it. When we can anticipate it. But that’s not how Pentecost operates.
Pentecost is about the Holy Spirit, the wind, the breath of God. “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
The Holy Spirit makes people uncomfortable. People look at Pentecostals and charismatics and see strangeness, madness, and more. And they have laid claim to the Spirit and have institutionalized, defined, delineated, and laid claim to the vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric of the Paraclete. And we have let them. Pentecostals are not uncomfortable with the Holy Spirit, they revel in it. But they should be uncomfortable. They should be as uncomfortable about the Paraclete as anyone. The Holy Spirit, who births the Church should always make the Church uncomfortable.
David Halperin writes “queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. What is the wind? Nothing. It has no Being It is action and praxis.
The Holy Spirit is queer. And s/he would embody queerness, except s/he has no body, per se. S/He is spirit. S/he is enthusiasm, God-within-ness. S/He enables bodies by entering bodies, Church bodies and human bodies, alike. S/He queers bodies.
The Paraclete resists the heteronormative hegemony that the Church has sought to claim since its beginning. The Holy Spirit upends every and all normativity. And it upends the power of men, giving power to such women as Lydia and Dorcas. Because the power does not belong to men. It belongs to the Paraclete, the Helper. Power belongs to the doer, the doer in Christ. And in that, there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek in Christ, therein lies the universal, the universal that upends own universality. There is all the dynamism (from Greek’s dunamis, meaning “power”) of trans- and inter- that is human, all too human, human that shapes and molds and is shaped and molded like wet clay. Gender and sex and ethnicity and nation and culture are all queered and queering. This is the power of the Holy Spirit. S/He makes the holy profane and profane holy.
And today we remember that the Church is made up of all of us. Pentecost is when the Church remembers its birth. So there should be cake. I was told there’d be cake. We read in the Book of Acts that there are candles, that the apostles have flames appearing over their heads and the wind blows and the candles are not blown out. And the Church is the Bride of Christ, so I guess there should be wedding cake? I like cake. Where’s the cake? Where’s the Gift, the charismata?
Link to Full Article
https://www.bleaktheology.com/2013/05/19/the-queer-day-of-pentecost/
Comments
Post a Comment