NeuroDivine

In Belfast for Pride, I heard a great deal of Christian preaching. Much of it seemed to contain very little joy.

There was much about sin, judgement, exclusion and warning, but little sense of the astonishing wideness of God’s love. Little sense that the Gospel is good news. Little sign of the Christ who crossed boundaries, ate with those whom respectable religion rejected, touched the untouchable and sought the lost.

I found myself thinking about two pieces I wrote earlier this year.

The first was the Holy Saturday hymn Down Through the Shadowed Gates He Came. It draws upon the ancient image of the Harrowing of Hell: Christ descending into the deepest darkness, breaking open the gates of death and seeking those imprisoned there.

It is an image of a love that goes all the way down. A mercy that does not remain safely among the righteous. A Christ who enters the places of abandonment, shame and despair from which others have turned away.

Perhaps that love extends even to Judas.

I do not offer that as a certainty, but as a holy hope. We know Judas through his betrayal, his anguish and his terrible end. Yet Jesus still called him friend. If Christ descends even into hell, can we be so confident about whom he excludes? Dare we draw our circles of belonging more tightly than Christ draws his?

The second piece was Holy. Queer. Desire., which includes the hymn Christ, You Walk the Streets at Midnight.

That hymn imagines Christ present amid queer longing, loneliness, embodiment and the vulnerable hope of being seen. Not as a censor. Not as a distant moral observer. Not scandalised by our bodies or our desire. Christ is there as wounded Love incarnate, calling us beyond shame and reminding us that our worth does not depend upon who accepts or rejects us.

These may seem like very different hymns: one written for the silence of Holy Saturday and the other written from within queer experience. Yet they proclaim the same Christ.

The Christ who descends through the gates of hell is also the Christ who walks the streets at midnight. The Love who searches even for Judas is not absent from queer bodies, queer desire or Pride. The mercy that reaches into death does not suddenly stop at the edge of an LGBTQ+ life.

That is why joyless Christian preaching feels so inadequate.

At Pride, surrounded by people who have so often been told that God despises them, I wanted to hear Christians proclaim the wideness of divine love. I wanted to hear that queer people are not theological problems to be solved, warnings to be shouted at or souls to be frightened into conformity.

We are beloved children of God, bearing the divine image in our bodies, our relationships, our longing and our joy.

Instead, too often, God was made to sound smaller than the human heart.

But Christ still descends through every shadowed gate. Christ still walks the streets at midnight. Christ still seeks those whom others have abandoned. Christ still enters the places of shame and turns them towards tenderness.

The Gospel contains joy because grace is greater than failure, mercy is deeper than shame and God’s love is wider than our preaching.

Perhaps the most Christian thing we can say to anyone at Pride is not, “God has come to condemn you,” but:

Even here, God has come looking for you.

And you were already beloved.