sermons

Summer of Community

Queer Theology Is For Everyone

Lydia Shiu

Jun 28, 2026

I remember in college, one of the first things you asked when you met a new person was, “what’s your major?” At my school, if you say, “Guess.” then the other person would say, “North or South?” It wasn’t about North or South Korea, but asking, “are you North or South campus?” You see, UCLA was divided into two types of people. North Campus or South Campus. North campus was generally social sciences, like psychology, sociology, political science. South campus was bio, chem, engineering, math, you know, the real sciences. It categorized people immediately. Like you were trying to figure out what kind of a person you are. The stereotype was, and I’m not saying these things are true, it was just a bunch of 18 year olds making stereotypes, South campus, you’re like actually smart, probably pre-med and so forth. North campus, eh you’re probably opting for an easy major. Unless you were double majoring of course, like Anthropology and Bio, then you were smart and hot. 

I say that this is just based off of 18 year olds making up stereotypes but let’s be real, grown-ups kind of do this too, no? I remember at the Church Retreat, the dinner tables had lovely cards with fun questions, like “what’s your favorite childhood memory?” So we’re not resorting to boring questions like, “What’s your major?” “What do you do?” for which I totally did ask someone next to me, “So, what do you do, for work or school?” (I thought I was giving options) to which the person generously diverted me by reaching for the cards at the table, “I… work but… let’s see these cards…” 

You see, humans, we love categories. We draw these lines to put people here, north campus, and put people there, south campus, to make it easy for us to make assessments about each other quickly. I mean, they’re probably just trying to suss out if you my type or not. 

This past month, our church celebrated Pride Month two weeks ago. It was a beautiful reminder for me of the struggle of the LGBTQIA community, and the strength, liberation, and hope. It reminded me of this text from Galatians 3:28, where Jesus talks about Oneness, that I wanted to share today’s message from. Let me read it for us. 

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

We are meant to be one. Not male or female. Slave or free. North or South campus. But one. And I want to talk about this Oneness Jesus invites us into through the lens of Queer Theology in celebration of Pride Month, it’s still June, we got a few more days. I wanted to do this because I believe that Queer theology, which if you’ve never heard of it before, I will get into it in a bit, but I really believe that it has a fresh access point and lens for us humans to speak and think about God in a new way that is abundant and life giving. And I bring this to us, not just as queerness being about gender and sexuality, though so much of it derives from the departure and liberation from “traditional” perspectives of gender and sexuality, but as a way to combust the box, the box in which we have put God in. 

• Do you have God in a box? 
• Have you had God in a box?

Just as the white male God theology of the European ancestors and histories have contributed to the message of Jesus through systematic theology (ones that were pretty popular in my days growing up) with John Calvin’s Institute of Christian Religion – someone who used his training as a lawyer to speak about God – and its thinking becoming central, almost normative for all people to receive wisdom and knowledge about God in this perspective, I think it would behoove us to consider various points of views that expand the whole picture of who God is. By interacting and receiving wisdom and knowledge from the queer community, not just describing a God to fit their needs but describing a God that can expand all of our views. 

It really is not that systematic theology is the standard and other theologies are mere offshoots or supplemental theologies, but ALL of these theologies and perspectives describe a God from their point of view that helps us to get a better picture of God, or the elephant. Therefore, just as systematic theology isn’t just for lawyers but anyone who wants to learn about God in a systematic method, and Queer Theology isn’t just for the queer but Queer Theology is for Everyone who want to learn about God in an open and expansive ways that blur the lines of binary thinking. 

So what is Queer Theology? 

In An Introduction to Queer Theology book titled Radical Love by Patrick S. Cheng, it says that,

“queer theology refers to a way of doing theology that, in the word of the Magnificat (the song that Mary sang when she was pregnant with Jesus in Luke 1), brings down the powerful and lifts up the lowly.” 

Cheng lays out a few different ways to define Queer Theology. One being, the thinking from the queer/LGBTQIA community and its activism. Another being, he says, “self-consciously transgressive.” I was like, what does he mean by “transgressive”? 

“Transgressive” describes actions, ideas, or behaviors that violate or go beyond established social norms, moral codes, rules, or boundaries. It means stepping over the line of what is considered acceptable, conventional. 

So doing queer theology is just like the act of pushing and going beyond what is socially acceptable. Okay. 

And the third way to think of it is, he says,

“In other words, queer theology argues that the discourse of classical Christian theology ultimately requires the erasing of the boundaries of essentialist categories of not only sexuality and gender identity, but also more fundamental boundaries such as life vs. death, and divine vs. human.” 

Is this not what Jesus did? Overturn life and death? 

Isn’t that the whole point of Jesus, one who moved across, through, or beyond divine and the human and life and death?

I remember when I first came across Queer Theology. 2009, I’m in seminary. I happened to be the President of our campus’ Student Association Council. My Vice President was this amazing woman named Heather. She was tall and big, and so smart. I remember thinking in our classes, how can she be the same age as me but she’s read so much more, speaks so eloquently, and I felt like her thoughts were always so beyond and ahead of my thoughts. Sher and I were a great team. We’d be in meetings with the Dean and the seminary’s president, and I’d basically just say everything she’s laid out for us in our prep meeting and things she scribbled onto a notepad during the meeting. Not sure why I was the president and she was vice. 

In her dorm room, a bunch of us would hangout for hours, talking theology, drinking beer, playing music, we would pull up MySpace, yes this was like Facebook before Facebook, yes a long time ago, yes I’m that old, because MySpace had better Karaoke videos than YouTube at the time. We’d bust out big spoons to use them as microphones and sing and dance. And her place was scattered with books everywhere. 

On her coffee table laid a book titled, I think, if I remember correctly, The Queer God. I remember feeling a subtle mix of homophobia and a great curiosity. “How could God be queer?” and quickly thinking, “well I suppose God is not a boy or a girl.”

You see, I’m definitely not an expert on queer theology but as I have been exposed to it since over a decade ago and journeying alongside and learning from books and the queer community, I realize the love for God and the love of God when seen through the queer lens, is like that crystal prism, 

It unveils beauty, a whole spectrum of magnificent color and an array of delight. 

I looked up the book this week. I had never read it, but now I will. But check out this, just the description. 

“The Queer God challenges the oppressive powers of heterosexual orthodoxy, whiteness, and global capitalism. Inspired by the transgressive (there’s that word again) spaces of Latin American spirituality, where the experiences of slum children merge with Queer interpretations of grace and holiness, The Queer God seeks to liberate God from the closets of traditional Christian thought, and to embrace God’s part in the lives of gays, lesbians, and the poor.” 

Queering God is mind blowing, mind bending, mind exploding. I would go on to say such endeavor takes us on a journey to obtain cognitive flexibility, or in this case, spiritual flexibility. 

I just finished a novel titled Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It was a fun read because she talks about Boston and LA, and the author’s half Korean so it has some sprinkles of Korean American experiences. In it, when the main character Sam is at a testing moment, his grandfather who owns a pizza place in Koreatown dishes out a piece of wisdom you’d learn in business school: the ability to pivot. 

It said,

“the most successful people in life are the people who are most able to change their mind sets. Knowing how to change their mind about something. The ability to pivot or elasticity in thinking. Elastic thinking of cognitive flexibility is the ability to break free from ingrained rules, sit with ambiguity, and adapt to rapidly changing situations. Unlike logical or analytical thinking, it relies on imagination, a tolerance for failure, and an openness to entirely new paradigms.”

I guess, the point isn’t to be the most successful, but even just to survive this complicated everchanging world, to withstand the life that life be throwing at ya, don’t we all need some flexibility and adaptation? If the rigid kind of faith or theology has worked for ya, by all means.

But if you are looking for a God that surpasses all understanding, if you are looking for a Christianity in the post-modern world that doesn’t make you smaller but expands your spirituality to hold, not just sophisticated world we live in but the complex and varied experiences and identities and the thoughts that you hold, that you are, can your theology hold it all up? 

I think that’s what so many of us are and have been doing in this day and age. Trying to do Christian faith involves, yes deconstruction, and pulling out weeds, and severing parts that don’t work for us, and finding a new footing. And that’s uncomfortable, scary, exciting, jarring. It involves grief. Lots of grief. And acceptance. 

In Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, I hope this isn’t too much of a spoiler cause it is a fun read, but Sam has had a condition where his foot eventually needed to be amputated. He ends up getting a prosthetic but experiences what they call Phantom limb pain, where the brain continues to receive and process nerve signals from a missing body part. It manifests real tingling, cramping, burning, or shooting sensations from the foot that is no longer there. The doctor tells him that the good thing is that the feelings, the pain, are “not real.”

I wondered if some of us experience that as we grow in faith and sometimes have to sever ties with those who were our faith groundings, those who first taught us about Jesus, those who taught us to pray and recite Bible verses, who may have had a difficult time embracing some of the new ways you’ve matured in faith that they don’t agree with. Change is hard. 

This is a bit off topic but I’ve even thought about the ways our church has been and will be going through some changes. I just saw the Benjamin Banneker school that’s been on our church campus even before we moved into this campus, move out this week. I did snag a really nicely built bookcase. Those things are expensive! But it’s kind of sad. A big change for our campus. It is a good thing for Banneker  – their kids and community get their very own school. We’re happy for them. But also it is a loss for us – loss of sharing the space with them, loss of financial security which we’re actively working on and there’s new opportunities in sight. I’m just saying though, a pivot, a shift, seeing a new tomorrow is both exciting and filled with grief. 

Anyhow, letting go of a picture of a God who is a powerful omnipotent mighty king, was also hard for the people who were watching Jesus get beaten and hung on the cross. Holiness hurts. Beholding the divine in our mind is a mind trip. Let’s just say, it’s not boring. We haven’t learned all that we can about God. God’s love is endless and just when you think you have God figured out, God’s like,

‘I’ve got something new for you. Come here. Follow me.’ 

In Outside the Line: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith by Mihee Kim-Kort, she says that

“queerness emerges as a means to embrace the gray areas and the ambiguities.” 

I was at a conference for Progressive Asian American Christians with Mihee in 2019, where we suddenly heard the news of her good friend Rachel Held Evans’ passing at the age of 37, Rachel, the one who wrote books like “A Year of Biblical Womanhood” and “Faith Unraveled” that ushered in so many of us toward the journey of deconstruction and asking questions. These thinkers and believers like Mihee and Rachel kept pointing back to Jesus again and again to derive their conviction and theology of expansive and inclusive love. 

Mihee said that Jesus

“challenged the racial, sexual, cultural, religious, and economic realities and more around him. He did so with a compelling fervor and creative brilliance, undoing the structures and systems with a mere parable or blessing, a touch or gesture. Finally, he himself was undone on the cross.” 

She goes on to say,

“Jesus acted queerly. Certainly, we could describe his actions as the dictionary definition of queer, “strange or odd from conventional viewpoint; unusually different.” 

This is good news for all of us because on that cross, it says in

Matthew 27:50-53

“When Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.

51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split

52 and the tombs broke open. 

The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.

53 They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.”

 

Jesus’ audacious, scandalous, indecent act of surrender split open the heaven for us. 

Plenty of churches and temples were torn in two when people in the church started coming out of the closet. I’ve been through churches shaking, the congregation splitting, budgets were cut. But in that, there, new life was happening. Resurrection in people’s souls was happening. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.  They came out of the tombs after and went into the holy city and appeared to many people with much pride. 

All this so that we may know new life, he did for us. 

God is everything. Not just a he. 

In

Genesis 1:2 “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

The Spirit of God is Ruach (רוּחַ), which is a feminine noun. 

In Genesis 1:26 God refers to Godself in the plural pronouns. 

26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness,

He. She. They. 

And God created humankind in God’s own image, 

In the image of God, God created them

And so you, who may identify as he/she/they

You are made in the image of God, just as you are. 

I want you to turn to the person next to you and say, 

You are made in the image of God

I want you to turn to the person on the other side or behind you and say, 

You are made in the image of God

You are made in the image of God. 

And in God there is no division. North or South. Male or Female. Slave of Free. We are one. 

Let me pray for us. 

God who loves us across the boundaries of divine and human, one could say like a queer love, bursting through the walls of what the religious leaders thought were correct and right, you simply loved. You simply were a human being even though you were so much more. In Jesus you showed us the scandalous love that shocked the world. Whether it’s through queer theology or not, help us to know that each of us are fiercely passionately absolutely loved by you. May we surrender to you and receive that love, without any excuses, oh no I need to fix myself up or be a better person, but to simply know, just as we are, in all our complexity and contradictions, that you love us. I pray in the name of sweet lovely Jesus, Amen.