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Rachael Weasley: I am excited now to welcome today's speaker, Randy.

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Rachael Weasley: Pronouns are he him. Randy has served as pastor at Boulder Mennonite Church, in Colorado since 2018.

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Rachael Weasley: In 2019 he became the first openly gay male to be ordained with Mennonite Church, U.S.A. He's also an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister.

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Rachael Weasley: and serves as community minister with the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder. He also serves on the leadership team with inclusive midnight pastors. and was one of the writers of the 2022, resolution for repentance and transformation.

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Rachael Weasley: He is currently one of the reps for the new queer Constituency Council of MCUS. A.

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Rachael Weasley: Pastor Randy has had a lifelong love of music, and has taught piano and voice throughout his life.

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Rachael Weasley: He and his husband, Gary Stephens, live in Boulder, Colorado. so excited for to for you to be here today and to hear all about it.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: So I'm going to mute myself and take it away, Randy. Thanks, Rachel. Hi! Everyone good to see you. Good to be a part of this gathering. I'm honored to be here

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and share a little bit about

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: a particular lens of queer theology that has intrigued me, and that I'm still learning about

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: so I hope you'll permit me to

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Rev. Randy Spaulding:  to share a little bit about what I'm continuing to work on and continuing to discover sort of this breadth and depth.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Of queer theory and queer theology.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: In particular, how it

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Rev. Randy Spaulding:  how it resonates with my and perhaps your Anabaptist principles at the same time. So I've got a little presentation. I'm going to start with, see if I could share the screen.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Oh, we're gonna go with this.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: this

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and this alright. So here we go.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: So

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: When I was at Yale Divinity School. I took some courses in queer theology. And Dr. Lynn Tonstad

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: was my professor. She's the professor of theology, religion and sexuality at Yale.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and is the author of a fairly recent book called Queer Theology beyond Apologetics

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Tunstadt is a constructive theologian, and she kinda works at this intersection of systematic theology feminism and queer theory the same time.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And so on. The first day of my queer theology class I got in there. I was excited.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: My professor made it clear, she said, if you're thinking that this class is going to look at all those clobber passages and see how we read them differently, she said. You're in the wrong room.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: she said. This class isn't about why Romans one should be read differently. It's we're not going to talk about the Greek word malikos or temple prostitution. And we're not going to talk about the relationship between David and Jonathan or the Ethiopian eunuch being accepted, or even when Jesus met a gay man.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and she said, You know, and I'll I'll tell you why. she said, because if if you're looking for authoritative ways

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: of making normative or making acceptable things that haven't been normative or acceptable, she said. Well, that's just not a very queer practice.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: she said. Queer theology really needs to move beyond this constant begging to for acceptance, or this begging to be at the straight folks table.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And actually, you know, I was this. men and I, country boy, and I was excited about getting into this and learning more. So it made me a little frustrated and and kind of mad.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: But over the course of the class

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: I came to understand her point of view from a queer theologian's perspective. She didn't want us budding theologians to merely find yet more ways to twist and bend our understanding of God and God's ways, to make Lgbtqia plus people acceptable in the eyes of proper Christian folk or heteronormative folks.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: She said, that that does a disservice to the dignity and worth of queer people.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and so, instead, she wanted us to be thinking in some different ways, particularly thinking of

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: different visions, so non heteronormative visions of how to live in relationship with one another.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: be thinking about different understandings.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: of the values of, say, goodness, or compassion, or honour, or love.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: different understandings of the value of the body itself.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: She asked, What if we took

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: all the various expressions and experiences that represented the word queer. And what if we did theology? As if all of these have always been acceptable ways for people to be, and they were never dependent on the affirmation and blessing of straight heteronormative paradigms.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And she said, all of this is to help you help equip you, as you know, a budding theologian, to write your own queer theology.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and to also have sort of this deeper understanding of particularly how power is used in our world and in our culture?

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Who uses it? Who gets to use it.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and to look at how that those power structures are used through different lenses. Particularly, she said, the lens of the marginalized and oppressed.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Now our class studied the writings of the theologian. Marcella Aalthos read. She was a central figure in queer theology and a large part of my professor's book that she wrote

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: she quotes, Alphas! Reed and I always love this quote, where she says, terrible is the fate of theologies from the margin when they want to be accepted by the center.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and we can sort of suss that out. Why, why would that be? And II think it's because those theologies from the margins wind up, compromising often in unhelpful ways their best impulses.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: They then become in danger. Once they sort of find their way to the centre of scapegoating others or others that remain on the margins.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: So we have to think of queer of querying and queer theology in different ways. She wrote 2 major books before her her death she wrote one called Indecent Theology.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and she wrote the queer God, as well as lots of articles and chapters in other books.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: She was raised in Argentina.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and spent many years in Scotland, where she was the first woman professor of theology at New College in the University of Edinburgh.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: She was trained in feminist and liberation theology.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: but she came to believe that those 2 didn't go far enough.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And she basically in her work, she queers theology itself by what she would say, deconstructing a moral order that is based on heterosexual constructions of reality.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and those constructions of reality have have been

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: organized into approved constructs of sex and money and God. And so in her work she takes those 3

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central areas. And she

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: she disrupts them in a way she queers them, basically

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: her work. If you've ever read it, it's incredibly hard to read. It's in sort of this impressive, impressionistic, creative way that's sometimes hard to suss out, and it takes reading it several times.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: She gets concerned with issues of decency and inclusion.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and those who are considered indecent or excluded, including those in the queer community.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: For example, she would say that you know queer theologians are often accused of reading sex and gender into our faith stories.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: But Marcella, also sried, would say, No, they're already there. Sex and gender are already in those stories.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and what she does is she takes them and points them out in real ways.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And other theologians, she said, have already done this, too.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding:  and it's sometimes uncomfortable. But we need to talk about that. So she would talk about the church teachings around what she would call what I'll just read would call Mary stonewalled Hyman

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: where she says male theologians have posited as some of you know that. We need to keep Mary chaste and virginal and pure. And so the theology is that when Mary was ready to give birth to Jesus, somehow her Hymen moved aside so that Jesus could be born.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and then it quietly moved back into place. So it, re. She remained chaste and virginal. and other other theologians have said that, you know Mary gave actually gave birth to Jesus through her ear, and the thought, the reasoning that you know the where it says that she inclined her ear

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and again, in order for her to remain virginal.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and so that Christ's mysterious being, human.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: but also needing to remain sort of this unstained God unstained from the dirty, indecent body.  so Marcella also sort of asks questions about these kind of theologies and stories, and she makes us look at this.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: She says things like, you know where I was often told, particularly when it came to feminist theology by pastors who wanted to seem feminist. They would say, You know God, the father has nothing to do with male fatherness. No, no, no! But

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: we still have to call God a He. I'm sorry.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: or you know it's not about gender theologians would say. However, we still have to call God a he.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And you know all the trees said, what what is that all about?

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: She'd say, here's what we have to do. What we have to do is lift God's skirts to do theology after having lifted our own skirts first.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and she uses this kind of language to and these images to sort of shock people. Some of it's shock language to challenge us to unpack.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Why, such language impacts us

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: for me to queer. Something in in one way is to look at it kind of sideways or upside down.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: or from another viewpoint, particularly from a non-dominant perspective.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Some of the older ways of understanding queer is that, you know. I remember my grandparents using the word to mean something odd, something

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: different. or even not proper, maybe something indecent.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: So queer. Theology is both understanding God and God's ways from an upside down perspective.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: But it's also an active way of doing theology

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: to queer something is, is using it as a verb.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: To queer theology is to take our understanding of God and God's actions in the world, and question them and wrestle with them, if need be.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: deconstruct, and reconstruct and look up the heterosexual God's skirts whenever there is social, political, religious, gender, and economic inequity and injustice

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and heterosexual, heteronormative Christianity has failed to do this.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Althis Reid would say.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: She gives one example of her

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: origin of birth in in Argentina.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: She'd say. During the brutal military dictatorship in Argentina. the Plaza del Mayo, outside the big cathedral in Buenos Aires, was often filled with

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: with people, particularly mothers, shouting, they were taken away alive! We want them back alive.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: This was about the the disappeared folks, and she would say, and inside the cathedral, this beautiful cathedral the church continued its business.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: feeding the body of Christ to people, and nourishing them with the promise of resurrection. Under this benevolent gaze of the proper Virgin Mary.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and she relates the work

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: of queering theology to economy and money and capitalism.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: She emphasizes that we can't think of sexuality without its connection to the economy.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: It's good of us as developed countries, you know. We're such inclusive nations and cultures. But she says inclusion becomes a tool

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: when it's promoted by oppressive, heterosexual norms that are bound up in capitalist economy and control

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and queer theology.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Part of its its work is to disrupt that narrative that everything's okay. Don't look behind that curtain. You know. There might be things happening on the plaza. But let's just go inside the church, where everything is proper, and you can pray to a very pure and chaste Virgin Mary.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: What would our theology, what would our understanding of God say if we told these truths.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: If the Church told these truths.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: what would theology say if we? It told the truth that heterosexual norms were not truthful norms.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: you know, again, theology talks about a God, the Father and a God the Son, but then pretends that fatherhood and sonship have nothing to do with sex and gender. even as Christianity has been a system of patriarchy throughout its history.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: What if Christianity, and what if we told that truth?

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: My Professor Hunstead and the theologian authors read, would say that in a nutshell.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: This is what queer Christianity or queer theology can and should mean and should be doing. And if you're doing queer theology. It should have 5 characteristics.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And the first one

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: is that queer theology needs to take the messy realities and complexities of people's lives seriously.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Queer theology recognizes that our lives are messy and proper. Theology resists this messiness often.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: particularly the messiness of God. of a queer god. Even

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: queer theology asks, what would it look like when we love with justice? But outside of the law?

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: What if Mennonites started accepting that life is messy.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: that in being poor or queer. or a sex worker. or an undocumented immigrant.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: or an addict, or a criminal, or a church-going prayer. They are wearing Mennonite, that God is present in all of these people.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: We do queer theology when we take all of this seriously.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: when we stop trying to make some people decent and label others as indecent.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: So we take these messy realities seriously.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: where theology needs to stand against the distortive powers of capitalism and colonialism.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And what do those 2 share in common. What do capitalism and colonialism share in common

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: patriarchy.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: which sees people

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and things as objects to own

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: property.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: is very important. In both of these children

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: we need good breeders. We need children for the continuance and the growth of capitalism.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and that private property is legitimized. Then, for the sake of one's children. Right.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Monogamy, then, is enforced.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: often, sometimes violently, to ensure that the proper children inherit.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And so sexuality and reproductive capacities of women come to belong to men.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: So the nuclear family's role in capitalism, then, is to ensure one's private property. and Christianity or proper Christianity gives this an aura of holiness, of divine will and ethical responsibility.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Women are to be like virgins like Mary.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Women are to be valued. You'd hear people say, right? Yes, we value women. But

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: in capitalism and colonialism. A valued thing can be bought and sold as well.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Queer theology's work is to upend these narratives, to queer them, to question them, to wrestle with them.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Althus Reed would say that capitalism is always gendered

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and it's always race-based.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: It's according it's a system of inequities and injustices that need to be combated.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: But again, the solution isn't to move queer people and queer theology from the margins into that centre.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: That's that's

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: the struggle.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding:  the whole reality in which people's economic and sexual lives and relations are organized, all needs to be transformed, no matter how impossible the fulfillment of that transformation might be.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And one of the areas that has been a struggle. and I admit it. It troubles me somewhat because

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: I've actively engaged in it is gay marriage.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: You know the whole issue of gay proponents that marriage proponents trying to make queerness, in a sense into the image of heterosexuality.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: which, of course, is decent and straight.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: So does that make? Garrett does, you know? Does does gay marriage make us decent? And does it make those gays indecent?

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Does it pit the queer community against itself. That's been one of the struggles that queer theology has has wrestled with and has asked questions about. And I ask myself questions, too.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: instead of defending sort of this sacred sacredness of property rights. They would say, we need to learn about the that. The kingdom of God is not about reward for hard work.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: but about giving the same pay to those who worked a whole day as those who worked less than an hour.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Matthew 20.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: We know that wealth. Inequality is incomparable to any other time in history right now.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and it's not how it needs to be. It's not in tune with

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: fundamental theological convictions that it's God's will that every creature live and flourish.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and the place that we're taught to look for God in Jesus

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: doesn't distinguish Jesus doesn't distinguish between the hardworking and the not so hardworking right?

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Where is the place where the church can queer this queer theology would ask that question. and maybe we need to look at the Book of Acts. where the Church held all things in common.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: This was a very crucial time in

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: the early Christian community, and it says something, I think, about the potential of where the Church can be.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Another characteristic of queer theology is that it needs to express and honor human bodily being.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: I think this is about simply accepting that we're sexual beings. that sexuality is a gift, a joy not to be repressed or suppressed.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: All those tropes about Mary being a virgin.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: that Jesus was born immaculately. because for Mary. God forbid to have had sexual intercourse even with God. And you have given sort of this messy, bloody birth to the Savior of the world was just really too much for the Church fathers.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Queer theology might disrupt this.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Did Mary have an orgasm when she conceived the Son of God.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: You know, Marcella, authors read what asked, did you know? Did did she give God a blow? Job?

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Was Jesus gay. I mean he was never married. He had a bunch of men hanging around. He had a disciple whom Jesus loved

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: altars, read questions, even if you know. Maybe Jesus had His own temptations to to be a sinner, and maybe even a sex worker, because what else would he be doing hanging around those people.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And this is this is definitely provocative language, right? It's a little scandalous for us to hear this. But it's part, I think, of queer theology itself.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: It asks provocative questions in order to shake us out of our fixed color in the lines, mindsets

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: to get us thinking creatively.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and it demands that we stop thinking about sex as a dirty word, and honor it for all its complexities, its mystery, its fluidity

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: for being an integral part of our humanness, and not something that we have to sort of get rid of

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: our bodies. Queer theology says, are not indecent.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Another characteristic

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: of queer theology is, it needs to get beyond the search for fixity and identity and finality.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Queer theology considers de-gendering God completely.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: my professor would say. The last thing we want is an all female Deity

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: gender. Which is this acculturation of of all those social constructs which can be fluid, culturally specific or not, is never complete identification. As long as we're living is never complete. Our story with sex and gender is always on the move.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: as is God through time and space.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and queer theology stops being queer theology when it gets to the point that says. that's what that is. And now we're done.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And that's always been the danger of proper theology

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: or heteronormative theology.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: My professor quotes a German theologian, Wolfhart Pennenberg, who says, theological statements are hypothetical

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: as long as history continues. and I find that very interesting to think about. We are always on the move

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: as human beings never complete as long as we exist in history and time

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and quithology thinks about what it means to imagine a a full and complete identity.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And right now that's only imaginable in death, at least for now.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and that brings up the issue of like total inclusion.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: This sort of fixed thing we we tend to want to find. We want everyone to be completely included. But then there's a danger that those targets are those, then, who stand in oppos to inclusion.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And then we find more scapegoats. It's this interesting wrestling with with these concepts

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and queer theologians. Queer theologians have done a lot of thinking around. This

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: one theologian has said that queerness can never define an identity. It can only ever disturb one

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: that might be something to talk about. Queerness can never define an identity, it can only ever disturb one.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Identity is never complete.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: never unambiguous, never uncomplicated. At the same time. And the last characteristic is that quithiology needs to be about God's presence in identification with.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and love for the body. and the way God calls us to bring love and lust and justice together.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And this is a section of I think there's intersectionality here with queer theology.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: It's as bodies and through bodies that we know ourselves, that we know each other, that we know God. Our bodies are drawn into the story of God's body.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: the the crucified, the resurrected and ascended body of God's anointed.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And my professor would say that Christianity, while always claiming incarnation

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: as

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: it's it's central event, you know that embodiment of Jesus into the world. We claim that as our central event, and yet we often seem reluctant to recognize the consequences of incarnation.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Christ becomes a celibate superhero

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: with batteries to supply that halo of light over his head. We often see in paintings. but he doesn't have sex.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: He never thinks of sex or his body, or his need to go to the bathroom, or that he might get an erection if he looks at the disciple whom Jesus loved, or at Mary of Magdala, or maybe both of them at the same time.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Where theology thinks about this, and what that means to be in identification with the body

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and for Christ to be the incarnation of God means we should take that seriously and not try to separate that part.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And that's that's a struggle. That's a real struggle for good proper Christians to think about.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: My mother would be fanning herself right now if she was listening to me. So I'm glad she's not online right now. And

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: in the end, what does the queer theologian believe?

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: The queer theologian believes that capitalism's injustices.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: the nuclear family's regulation of bodies and sexuality, and the State's violent enforcement of inequity are neither the message of Christianity nor the will of God.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: That's a pretty powerful statement. I took that directly from the book.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And it's something that I have up on my bulletin board.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Now let me say a little bit about What has helped me understand this particularly through my Anabaptist Mennonite lens. I want to talk a little bit about that.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: You know the the the lens for me that told stories of how our early Anabaptist forbearers disrupted the State religion and their own enforcement of religious laws.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: you know, refusing to baptize infants refusing to be conscripted into wars that were not their own. Looking at the Scriptures through a different lens, in part saying, You know, hey, we want to read the Bible for ourselves, and guess what. We've got some questions about what we've been told.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Now, that's not to say that Anabaptists haven't tried to make themselves mainstream or to be at the center

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and to cater to hetonorative

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: paradigms, like the rest of Christianity, has molded itself to.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: But being Anabaptist, has in some ways given me the courage to question, to do some disrupting, to see a perspective outside the center, and to say, You know, I don't need to sit at the straight people's table to be a child of God.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: That's doing queer theology

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and books like the Upside Down Kingdom. Some of you remember this book written in 1978, by Donald Crabell, who was a Mennonite author.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: scholar, an expert on Anabaptism.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: In the 1970. S. Crabell was asking us to imagine what it would mean, if followers of Jesus to day traded power and victory for hanging out with the poor.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: what would it look like if we gave up violence, and loved our enemies.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: What if we replaced force with service

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and violence with love?

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: What if we replace nationalism with following the way of Jesus.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and we could queer this further. What if we replaced capitalism with acts 2.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: They held everything in common.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Wouldn't it be a beautiful vision of our communion celebrations of being one body, of of remembering.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: of a dismembered world.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And what if we replace the nuclear family's regulation of bodies and sexuality with a complete honoring of the multitude of ways that people express themselves bodily and sexually.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: What if we replace the State's violent enforcement of inequity with nonviolent, compassionate care and equity?

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: I think anabaptism at its best

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: sees itself from the margins and doesn't try to become acceptable to the center Christian narrative of a God who needs a blood, sacrifice of a just war theory of male pronouns for the Deity, etc.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Queer theology does the same. It works best from the margins and thrives there.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: and ultimately, and this is the quirkiness of queer theology that once something gets queered or disrupted from its centre.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: then even that queer space should theoretically get ready to be queered.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: And it's this never ending cycle of of disrupting, thinking, questioning, and wrestling.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: Queer embodiment.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: I think my final statement would be that queer embodiment is always underway.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: always disrupting.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: So that's my little presentation. I know it's a lot I know it's a lot to think about, but it's it's what has really

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: the.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: It's been engaging for me to think of it this way. and it it it really provides us depth and breadth to understanding

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Rev. Randy Spaulding:  what's happening in our culture in the world, particularly with with heteronormative paradigms, and how we relate them to our our own faith.

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: So

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Rev. Randy Spaulding: that's what I've got for us today.