When we think about human history, we have in mind a wink of time compared to the full stretch since homo sapiens first arrived on the evolutionary scene—which makes sense. Humanity’s written record only goes back a few thousand years; the first homo sapiens evolved three hundred thousand years ago. (And the earth has been around…way longer than that.) History is often just the last few layers on the tree of time.

The deepest ring of civilization we have discovered is Göbekli Tepe, ruins of a place humans lived some eleven, twelve thousand years ago. The site is in modern-day Türkiye, where I was when I first learned about it. If I get a second trip to Türkiye, I want to go; this trip was on the other side of the country. I stayed in Istanbul for a few days before traveling around western Anatolia. There were six archeological sites on the itinerary, each dating back to the centuries around those in which the New Testament was written. Compared Göbekli Tepe’s remains from the tenth millennium BCE, these were but toddlers at two to three millennia old.

The trip was a short-term study abroad trek hosted by Drew Theological School and led by my PhD advisor, Dr. Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre. It was, for me, a trip of many firsts: my first time to Istanbul and to Turkiye, my first time out of the Western Hemisphere for more than a few days, my first time to Asia, my first time to a country that not predominantly Christian. It was my first study abroad program, too, something I regret missing in undergraduate and something I knew I wanted to do while doing my doctorate.

The rings of time have been on my mind since. In the back of my head, I keep hearing one of the trip’s refrains: “Look at the layers!” My professor said this several times on our first day in Istanbul, as we toured places like the Hagia Sophia (above), the famous church-turned-mosque, and thought about the layers of Byzantine, Ottoman, and Turkish history all wrapped around each other. We looked at architectural layers while on a boat tour down the Bosphorous, the strait that separates each half of the city, one part in Europe and the other in Asia. We saw buildings with centuries-old foundations that dated back to the Byzantine world. On top were floors that looked like Ottoman-era architecture with more recent, Turkish-era construction above that. I remember one with a fourth floor that looked something like the 21st century apartment architecture that you can spot nearly anywhere in the contemporary world.

During our time across Anatolia—the peninsula that makes up most of Türkiye—we saw other layers woven on top of and around each other. Our first ancient site was Hierapolis, a city that first developed in the third century BCE at a site where people had pilgrimaged for centuries for the healing properties of hot springs dedicated to the mother goddess, Kybele. Those hot springs became sites to Greek and then Roman temples. Then, in the centuries of Christendom, the site became a popular destination for Christian pilgrims, with legends that it was the site of St. Phillip’s murder by persecution and burial. That one of the twelve apostles named in the biblical gospels is remembered to have died there is more than passive, religious history. The Martyrium of St. Phillip—a fifth- or sixth-century church complex (below)—was not just a place of worship; its ruins included different rooms dedicated to visitors who were traveling to pray for St. Phillip for healing, just like humans had traveled to that city for centuries before. Elsewhere, we saw temples with corners cut into churches, layered spaces in which traditions took on new meanings and new forms throughout time.

Before I left for Türkiye, I told people that the trip had two learning goals: to learn about contemporary culture, religion, and politics in Türkiye and to explore sites of biblical archeology. The second one was a bit misleading. While visiting ancient cities that are mentioned in the New Testament (mainly in the letters written after Jesus’s life) there was nothing too biblical about what we saw: no fragments of writing that became part of the biblical canon, no physical traces of the people who wrote or first read what became the Christian scripture. Any signs of Christianity came from centuries after the Bible was written, edited, and organized and mostly after Christianity had evolved into the official religion of the Roman empire, quite a shift from the marginal movement of people talking about a Jewish peasant crucified for the risk his message and ministry posed to Rome.

Yet, the archeology did affect the ways I think about biblical texts. Having seen just some of the space in which the ancient writings originated helps them shine with new life. After touring the ruins of Hierapolis, we had some free time to wander. I quickly changed into my swimsuit to hop into the part of the hot springs open to visitors. You could swim and relax in the same pools people had swam and relaxed thousands of years ago. (Some say that Cleopatra made her own pilgrimage to Hierapolis in her lifetime. Maybe she sat on top of the same stones I did that afternoon.) At the bottom of the pools, excavators left different pieces of statues and columns as they were discovered. It was surreal to wade on top of those layers of time. Even more stunning was the site of the springs from far away, for they created cascading ponds down the mountainside. The millennia of the water’s movement had left behind snow-white calcium deposits (below), turning the mountainside cotton-white. The modern-day city around Hierapolis is Pamukkale, Turkish for “Cotton Castle.”

On our way out of Hierapolis, we gathered by the necropolis (below) before hopping in the bus that took us to that evening’s hotel. This “city of the dead” was like Hierapolis’s graveyard, located some steps outside of one of the city’s two gates. Dr. Johnson-DeBaufre finished the day’s tour with a mini-lecture about how the road on which we stood was the same road that Roman imperials would have used to march into cities in the first century CE. Their arrival—their parousia in ancient Greek—would march them first by the city’s dead, then to the baths in which they would clean and present themselves to the city’s living.

The first text to be written that became a part of the New Testament is 1 Thessalonians, a letter dated to about 50 CE. In 1 Thessalonians 4, the author—Paul, a leader in the early Jesus movement named Paul—addresses a community in Thessaloniki that seems to have recently lost some loved ones. “We do not want you to be informed about those who have died,” Paul says, wanting them to be able to grieve with hope (4:13). He then discusses some future “coming of the Lord” (4:15), using that same word parousia that Roman officials used to describe their arrivals into different cities, even those like Thessaloniki and Hierapolis that were distant from Rome, the city at the heart of the empire. Paul describes how Christ’s parousia will first bring the dead to rise, and then “we who are alive…will be caught up in the clouds with them to meet the Lord in the air.”

As a kid, I was taught that this was the biblical evidence that the rapture would one day happen. This idea that one day true Christians would suddenly float away or vanish into heaven was not much of a belief before a few centuries ago; it takes this text in 1 Thessalonians and reads it into Revelation through a modern kind of biblical literalism. However, these texts were meant to predict the future like such literalists have come to believe. Dr. Johnson-DeBaufre explained how Paul likely had on his mind the imperial parousia in which officials would first greet the city’s dead before arriving to the city’s living. The New Testament’s description of Jesus as the Christ is not just a reference to ancient messianic hope across Jewish traditions; it is also a form of mimicking and protesting the Roman kings proclaimed as Lord. To talk about Christ as Lord was more than a religious commitment; religion was in the ancient world (and is, today, if we’re honest) much more interwoven with other layers of culture and politics. Paul inverted the Roman parousia in order to evoke a tangible sense of hope for those to whom he wrote. Instead of their loved ones living on through the memory of places like the urban necropolis, which was often only where the city’s rich, elite, and imperially connected were buried, their loved ones lived on through the same way that Jesus was remembered as the Christ

As Dr. Johnson-DeBaufre finished explaining this, a rainbow broke out of the clouds opening up over Hierapolis behind her. (Can you see it in the photo above?) It was stunning. We had six more days of ancient sites afterwards, and I quickly lost count of how many times I got distracted from the history by the sheer beauty of the mountains and valleys around us. The weather changed quickly. The world felt alive. No wonder ancient writers like Paul could sense the divine imagination in the world around him, offering images that animated hope against the death-dealing and brutal ways of the Roman empire in which he lived.

The layers of history are not puzzle pieces to put together to figure out the perfect understanding of the present or to perfectly predict the future. Many people have buried themselves in biblical texts trying to do this, but as I saw the world from which the Bible came, I realized how simplistic this approach to history’s layers really is. Time wraps around us in ways much more brilliant than that; when we lift up and peek through history’s layers, we do not find ways to figure it all out. There is always so much more that will always remain a mystery. Instead, the layers of history rise up like a rainbow to show us something in a different light.

Our last ancient site also took us to the top of another mountain (above) with sights even more stunning than Pamukkale. We were in modern-day Bergama, a city build on top of and around the still-standing ruins of ancient Pergamon. There was a huge temple to Zeus in Pergamon—it’s now on display in Berlin at the Pergamon Museum (which is unfortunately closed until 2027—keeping my hope of seeing the temple when I visited Berlin a few weeks ago). During our parousia, it began to thunderstorm, as if Zeus was welcoming us with an invitation to end the trip with a bang. Pergamon is mentioned once in the New Testament; Revelation 2 describes it as “where Satan’s throne is” (2:13). Some guess this is a reference to the same temple. Ironically, we saw a snake slithering around the ruins when we made it up to the top of the mountain the next day. Satan has a sense of humor?

My favorite moment was when the began to feel like a playground. Part of the city that remained was the foundation of one of the town’s temples. Underneath were huge arches that you can still walk through, now with the sun shining above through where a building once sat. As we wandered through something humans built over two thousand years ago, we stumbled upon a few kittens who had made a cranny their home. New still finding life among the old. That part of the trek was cute and fun, but it was nothing compared to where it lead. After walking through a narrow stairwell at the end, we turned to overlook Pergamon’s stadium (below), one of the best-preserved (and steepest!) stadiums from the ancient world. I could have sat there for an hour absorbing the view.

Like any history, my reflections here only scratch the surface of everything we did and the ways in which I learned and grew as a scholar and as a human. Elsewhere, I will write about the academics and activists we met, about the transnational conversations we had about religion and politics and ethics, about how I teared up in Ephesus and Laodikeia over the frescoes that were so preserved that you could see vibrant paint still resting on the ruins.

In some ways, however, the whole trip is summed up in the moment above the stadium in Pergamon. It was all a process of crawling through the history of things to turn and see the living world anew. It taught me how history is not something we learn about from its outside; we are each a layer of living history, too. Even ancient buildings that have barely stood the centuries teach us that the past is not far away but an encounter in the present with what has gone before. Each layer is part of what is alive now in a world under ever-moving sun, moon, and sky. Perhaps this is why each time I conjure up a mental image of my time in Türkiye—from ancient sites to contemporary city—I think of what the weather was like, what the sky was like, what the natural world was doing around me. Indeed, even the three hundred thousand years of human history is nothing compared to how long life has populated the planet or the earth has spun throughout space. In the layers of it all, we are small, we are interconnected, and we still have so much yet to learn.

Okay, a few more photos—of me underneath the ruins in Pergamon (above); of our team at Lambda Istanbul, the city’s main LGBTQ+ organizing group, at the Chora Mosque (built as a church in the 13th century), and of one of the many column capitals that I gasped over throughout the trip (all below).

Maybe you’ve noticed that I’ve been quiet on Substack this year. Intention does not always equal outcome, including publishing the essays I have been wanting to publish. I could offer a lengthy apology or some excuse about how school and church have kept me swimming in other types of content creation. (They have!). Instead, here is a piece I have been working on over the past few days that I also shared with our Christ Church NYC LGBTQIA+ Ministry newsletter this afternoon.

There’s been a flurry of conversation since the New York Times closed out Pride Month with an op-ed piece called “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.” by Matthew Vines, a gay Christian author. I have seen many helpful responses (like this, this, and this), one of my favorites being simply the reminder that respectability will not save us. I have tried thrice now to pen a response focusing on the specifics of Vines’ piece. Instead of rehashing what others have offered, I’ll start by saying simply that his title is not that wrong. Vines—or any of us—are not (quite) queer.

Queer theorist José Muñoz introduces his most influential book by saying that “we are not yet queer” and that “[w]e have never been queer.” Instead of an identity label to claim and inhabit, queerness is an ideality, a “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” Queerness is an element that emerges from experiences like that of being gay in a heteronormative world. It is an impulse through which we imagine what the world could be within the world as-it-is.

Even before the past couple of weeks, I have been bummed out by much of the conversation among Christians in the USA regarding LGBTQIA+ folk, especially the conversation within predominantly white circles. It seems that we are often caught in a bind of dissecting how or why to include and affirm marginalized sexualities and genders instead of taking queerness’s invitation to ask bigger questions about living in relationship with each other and within our bodies. Instead of including LGBTQIA+ folk into things that already are, LGBTQIA+ folk—and others who embody queerness—should invite us, as Christians and as humans, to challenge assumptions and catalyze curiosity about everything from sexuality and gender to race and nationality and class and ability and all the other levels of living as human beings in our big old world.

I came out in 2014, the same year that I both read Vines’ book God and the Gay Christian and watched the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the police murder of Michael Brown in St. Louis, Missouri. I quickly realized that my own queerness is wrapped up in how I navigate this world as a white man. The paradigm shift it took for me to embrace my own sexuality also led me to consider what it would mean to be anti-racist. I’m still working on that, if I’m honest; disentangling white supremacy culture is no overnight task.

This was clarified fort me a few years later. I was serving on the board of a queer, Christian organization with a particularly white history when it became evident that we had major internal cultural work to do to become a safer space for the presence and voices of Black folk in our midst. Over the course of a short season, each of the Black board members resigned; one used the language of “death by a thousand microaggressions.” I clocked such microaggressions as they occurred, but I had yet to learn how to proactively step up and speak out. It was too tempting to rest on my laurels, thinking that because I was doing the good work of LGBTQIA+ inclusion in the church, other social issues were less mine to work out. I was wrong. The horizon of queerness calls us to find new ways of moving in all sorts of directions.

When I think about the Vines op-ed, I am surprised there has been scant said about a similar situation in his own organization, The Reformation Project. Around the same time that I watched my LGBTQIA+ organization implode because of its microaggressive culture, each of the staff members of The Reformation Project resigned or were fired. I am not sure of all of the details; several of the major statements made on either side have since been taken down. What I remember and can trace is that the culture at The Reformation Project was—and likely still is—a landscape of microaggressions from which Vines has not quite learned.

July always makes me wonder about what it means to integrate Pride month into the rest of the year. This July, I am reminded that it is about finding wide ways to work towards worlds-that-could-be within the world-as-it-is. The good news is that the world-that-could-be is already, in some ways, in our midst. In Luke 17:20-21, a Jewish leader asks Jesus about the coming of God’s kingdom, a loaded and dangerous question to ask in the ever-arriving imperialism of Rome. Asking about the arrival of God’s kingdom was a prayerful hope of Jewish people for liberation from Rome. However, Jesus’ answer is quite queer. He says that God’s kingdom would not come “with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”

To me, queerness is one invitation to see the reign of God present all around us, not to affirm things the way they already are but as an invitation to see the new things God is doing and inviting us into. Perhaps that means that as Pride 2026 recedes into the past, we can continue to find the queer ways that God is already doing something new in our midst, transforming how it is that we relate to each other on each and every level of our lives. Let it be so.

Look at that rainbow over the Dyke March last year! It’s as if God really does bless the most intersectionally radical parts of our queer movements the most… Or something like that….

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If you saw me throughout the final weeks of 2025, you probably heard me say something about how I have stepped across a certain threshold in my theological education. In December, I wr…

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The first was a gift: a small, folksy drawing of a frog holding up a smiling sun. A friend-of-a-friend was traveling the U.S., tattooing along the way, and crashed on my couch for a few days in exchange for the tattoo. For no specific reason, I had been itching for a frog tattoo, and we both agreed that this one, a pre-drawn image in her flash collection, was the right fit. You might say it leapt off the page, right onto my right leg. Later, someone pointed out that the design might actually be a toad, not a frog. But, whatever: frogs and toads are both anurans, the scientific term for these specific amphibians.

The following year, while visiting Memphis for the holidays, I came home with my second frog. A college friend had just started tattooing, and I wanted one of her pieces. She had a few frogs drawn up; who was I to say no?

In the midst of the appointment, I laughed about how my mom once used frogs to warn me against getting tattoos. Let me explain. For years, my mom worked at a church preschool, where, in her early days, she put up a poster of a frog. Underneath, there was text proclaiming “F.R.O.G.: Fully Rely On God.” Pretty soon, frogs were her thing. She got more anuranian decoration: posters, figurines, and other trinkets. They became the go-to gifts given by her students and their families at Christmas or the end of the year.

Eventually, she had enough. “I hate frogs,” she told me some years later. Too much of a good thing is still too much, it turns out. So, she scaled it back, giving away a bulk of her frogabilia when she left the classroom for an administrative position in the school. She kept a few; they are now shown across a couple decorative shelves at my parents’ home. There is the small, hand-painted figurine I bought her for Christmas in 2005. There’s the wooden frog my dad got her, the kind that doubled as a percussion instrument. My brother and I would often play with it to bother each other. (Maybe that grating noise was the start of her frog-disdain.)

After one of my first tattoos, my mom looked at me and asked: “Remember how I used to love frogs? What happens if you don’t like your tattoos one day?” I could not get rid of my tattoos or relegate them to a shelf in a room that’s rarely seen. So, during my second frog tattoo, I jokingly decided that if someone asked what it meant, I’d say that it was to prove a point to my mom. It fits the silly design: the bright-green round frog sits in the middle of my right shin, tongue sticking out. Friends often tell me it’s their favorite; even my mom has warmed up to it. (She tells me she likes it when I send her photos of my new frog tattoos, too.)

The third frog is a smaller one: a Western chorus frog, one of the small treefrogs native to Missouri. They are all over Kansas City, and while I never glimpsed one with my eyes, I heard them creak all night each spring. When an apprentice at a friend’s studio sketched one for a flash sheet, I jumped at the chance to fit it into a spot on the back of my right ankle.

If my sun-lifting frog is actually a toad, then I was unintentionally spanning the full spectrum of these anurans with my first three frog tattoos—a bumpy toad, a delicate tree frog, and “Bing Bong,” the nickname Abby (the Memphis artist) gave the one on my shin. He may be the most “quintessential” frog of the bunch. Of all of them, he’s the one you read instantly—you see him and you know exactly what he is. But, as I have learned, there really is no quintessential member of the anurans. There isn’t even a technical distinction between what makes a frog a frog or a toad a toad; these distinctions, like many that we use to talk about the living world, are artificial.

Taken together, these frogs (and the fact that they’ve become a series—I say I’ll stop at seven, the number of completeness) tell the story of how tattoos have taught me to make decisions differently. You could even call it an epistemological shift, to use some academic language. Tattoos have re-trained my sense of what it means to know, to understand—what the Greeks wrapped up in the word epistēmē—particularly by giving me a better understanding of the graduated ways that we experience life and change.

A lot of people tell me they haven’t gotten a tattoo because they don’t know where to start. They’re waiting for the perfect one, and that keeps them from actually deciding. The truth is that no tattoo is perfect. No tattoo exists in a vacuum; they emerge in context—shaped on and by the bodies that hold them. Once I realized that, the pressure to get a perfect tattoo lifted. Now, I choose them as much as they choose me.

Each tattoo is an exercise in making a decision within a particular context. Where on my body am I getting tattooed? What type of imagery does this artist really like to do? What time of year is it and what kind of healing process am I up for? These questions can be as important as the ones you have about what the tattoo will end up looking like. The best tattoos come with a sense of trust in the artist.

Each decision, then, is an exercise in transformation. Not overnight change, but slow, contextual becoming, an unfolding metamorphosis. Tattoos have helped me exercise my decision-making muscle in other ways, too, as it has taught me to treat transformation as it unfolds in shifts and seasons within the interconnected contexts and dynamics.

Transformation was on my mind when I got two more frog tattoos this summer. The first is a big bullfrog who sits on top of my right knee. One of my best friends, Phia, made this one for me; it has been nearly five years since they gave me the bunch of daffodils that sit in the middle of my chest. That was one of my first big tattoos; it will always be one of my favorites, the daffodils reminding me of my birthday on the vernal equinox. They are an Aries’ bloom.

The knee-frog sits, surrounded by wisps of whimsical smoke, as a representation of where I might yet go. (No frog looks anything like they did when they were born.) Anuran metamorphosis may be what made me so fascinated by them as a kid. Each spring, tadpoles filled the puddles-turned-ponds in my elementary school field. I was in awe that they would soon be the creatures hopping around my neighborhood, often greeting me as I came in our house’s main door on a muggy, summer evening.

Finally, I got a fifth frog. He sits next to Bing Bong; they look like they would be friends. He comes from an artist in Portland who is known for her frogs, and he is my most anthropomorphic frog. He is wearing a bright blue robe, looking up with what is almost a slight smile, hands outstretched. A wavy rainbow hovers from his hands over an eight-point star over his head. He is magic.

The artist posted the flash as a drawing called “I Create My Own Joy.” Towards the end of the appointment, after plenty of conversation about my work and its “why,” she disclosed that the original title was actually “Jesus was a gay frog.” She changed it so as not to offend anyone. It turns out that for me, it was a perfect name for the tattoo, transformation being a key theological value for me. (I am thankful to the seminary professor who made me read Monica Coleman’s theology of creative transformation.) A lighthearted association with Jesus and my frogs only makes sense.

Maybe that’s what I love most about the creatures crawling up my “frog leg.” (You may have noticed that they all live on my right leg.) Tadpoles into toads, spring into summer, questions into joy. Each tattoo, each leap, each decision is a step in the never-ending process of transformation, a story that I’ll keep telling, one frog at a time.

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It is officially summer. The solstice was last weekend; yesterday New York City saw its warmest day in years. In this new season, I have a new Substack series to share. I am calling it “Inklings.” He…

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For our Thursdays in Lent services at Christ Church NYC, a few of us offered brief reflections on “Singers of God’s Song”—folk who show us something about what salvation means. I chose Octavia Butler…

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I’m still …

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Growing up, I was taught that God will forgive some of us and damn many more; this life is just a lead-up to the next, and those of us desti…

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Someone said something along these lines in an online program I lead with Christ Church. “A Faith Worth Having” blends Bible study with small gr…

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Returning to the book a few years later opened my eyes to other elements of the text, notably the way in which it seems to be a letter with which, in some ways, Paul wanted to limit the activity and leadership of women prophets in the church. Some other scholars have suggested that perhaps these same women were followers, somehow, of Mary Magdalene, or at least represented the streams of proto-Christianity that elevated the stories of Mary to more prominence than the stories of Peter, Paul, and other ancient leaders of the movement.

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul offers an image of “Christ’s body” as one but many-membered, which I explained on Sunday was not his own concept but one he borrowed and adapted from political discourse in his contemporary world. (You can watch the sermon on YouTube here or scroll below for a full transcript.) The Roman empire often talked about itself as one body with many parts, each carrying out a designated role somewhere within the hierarchy of the collective society, some members more necessary, others more dispensable. Paul shifts the idea to say that, because a body is one, no member is dispensable.

Still, Paul does not challenge the idea that every member has a specific role to play. Why can’t one member transform from one role to another? We live in a moment in which we are forced to recognize our interconnectedness across the globe—one body, many members—and what it means to need to transform from one way of being together into another. The past two weeks have highlighted that especially in the USA. I’m thankful that there are ancient words wrestling with similar ideas; what can we do with this idea today?

A friend, after preaching, reminded me that I was spot on when I suggested that a member of the body might transform into another—an eye into an ear, a hand into a foot. From the magic of gender reassignment surgery to other miracles of modern medicine to the way in which certain people readapt limbs to serve new purposes (using a foot, quite literally, as a hand), the human body bears a myriad of ways in which it might take shape and form. Likewise, we are ever offered invitation to recreate ourselves as humans, even in moments like this in which we feel impossibly stuck in a damaging shape that harms too many members of our collective body.

Sermon: Many Members, New Forms

Monsters, Inc.

There’s a Disney-Pixar film that’s been on my mind over the past few weeks as I’ve been preparing to preach on this passage about Christ’s many-membered body. The 2001 movie Monsters, Inc., is an endearing exploration of the world in which live the monsters that hide under our beds and in our closets as children.

It mostly takes place in Monstropolis, the main city in this monsters parallel universe— which is not that different of a world: an opening scene looks like an animated NYC but with monsters of all shapes and sizes going about daily chores and jobs and social lives.

The two main characters are Sulley (a big, blue, bear-like monster) & Mike Wazowski (a small, green, one-eyed monster), friends, roommates, and coworkers at Monsters Inc., who makes the odd energy that powers Monstropolis. Sulley works as a “Scarer.” Each day, he clocks into a warehouse full of doors that work as portals (by some magic technology) into the rooms of human children.

Sulley’s job is simple: he enters a room, scares a child, and Mike (on the other side) harvests the screams that the monsters turn into electric power. The plot begins when, one day, Sulley accidentally lets a kid follow him back through the door into the monster world. This little girl (nicknamed “Boo) poses a huge threat. Monsters believe that even the touch of a human is toxic enough to kill. (Ironic, huh?) When Sulley finds out that “Boo” snuck through, he smuggles her home so that he and Mike can try to return her the next day.

There’s an iconic scene, back at the warehouse, with Boo hiding in a monster costume and Mike and Sulley about to send her back home. However, Sulley’s hesitant; he’s grown attached to Boo and is sad to let her go. Mike is not. In earshot of another worker, he accidentally exclaims: “Put that thing back where it came or so help me!” In order to cover up any suspicion, Mike looks around and repeats the line in singsong, announcing loudly that he’s rehearsing for a new play called Put that thing back where it came from or so help me! This line, then, becomes a silly refrain and reference throughout the movie.

Paul’s Putting Back

I hear Mike Wazowski sing this line every time I read today’s passage from 1 Corinthians with its language about one body with many members. Let me explain.

Some context: 1 Corinthians is part of the letters Paul wrote to Jesus followers in Corinth maybe 20, 30 years after the crucifixion and resurrection. Of all the letters in the Bible, the Corinthian correspondence is the longest. Paul had a lot to say to this church. Some of it we may agree with. Other parts, we may not.

One part that may make us bristle today is how Paul admonishes women in the church, telling them (in chapter 9) to veil when they pray (because it’s socially appropriate) and (in chapter 14) saying that “women should be silent in the churches.” Even though many scholars think (or hope) that this was added by a later editor— it’s still in the text and something that shouldn’t sit well in our stomach today.

However, Paul (in chapter 12, which we read) offers an inspiring imagination for how
he and his audience are integrally interconnected together as they embody Christ. Paul did not make up this metaphor; he’s borrowing it from ancient social/political discourse that would, for example, call the Roman empire one body with many parts.

This typically implied that “bodies of different social ranks were valued hierarchically,” a concept that, at the core, assumes that people are born into specific parts of society and should not question where they belong. Paul himself seems to assume some standard human body— there’s nothing monstrous about this many-membered creature—but he does improve it by emphasizing the unity of the one body and how this means that “members that seem to be weaker are indispensable” and in teaching that “if one suffers, all suffer together with it.” Amen.

But he does not radically alter the concept itself; at the end of the passage, he even ranks certain roles and gifts in terms of greatness.

Where do things belong?

It is this idea that every member has a specific role to play— an ear is supposed to hear, an eye supposed to see— that harmonizes to me with that song Mike Wazowski sings: Put that thing back where it came from, or so help me.

In Monsters, Inc., Mike represents the conventional knowledge of the world he lives in. Monsters live in the Monster world and humans in their own. Beyond the necessary work of “scaring,” the different members are not supposed to touch. Things work well this way, and the transgression that occurred when Boo snuck through that forbidden door should be corrected, forgotten. That member needed to be put back.

The movie is thus a parable for the fear that we feel in our human world in the face of change and its perceived risks. Once Monsters Inc. detects that a human has escaped, the entire city of Monstropolis erupts in chaos and fear. But it’s in the midst of this, while he and Mike are still stowing “Boo” away at home, that Sulley learns that there is reason to be afraid. He’s playing with a Boo, who giggles and lets out a huge laugh. The lights in their apartment surge, and Sulley realizes that laughter is way more powerful than the screams on which his world runs.

I won’t spoil the whole movie, but eventually Boo makes it back home, though things are not quite put back into old places. Along the way, MIke and Sulley expose a nefarious plot brewing within Monsters, Inc., and reveal the power of children’s laughter as exponentially better than scream energy. Sulley becomes the new CEO, and Mike, who always felt like less of a monster—he’s more silly-looking than scary-looking— becomes the company’s top comedian, now sneaking into children’s room’s to make them laugh, leading the monster and human world together into new places, new ways of being connected and transformed.

We are afraid!

In our human world, we know we are interconnected, which can be scary; sometimes something slips through that we want to put back. However, being one but many-membered, means these things may be opportunity to transform.

This is true on small-scale levels, as we belong to people in our daily and weekly lives with whom we may not get along but still, sometimes, have the power to transform us in our mutual connection. This is true on a larger level, too; Mike’s fear was mirrored by Monstropolis as a whole.

On Monday, as I was leaving the gym, I saw a TV showing footage of the Inauguration. I watched as the address, met with a standing ovation, promised to “return millions & millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” Our nation’s body is infected with a fear of people being where they should not be, dismissing parts of our global body as dispensable and dangerous, as things to be put back where they came from (so help me).

I’m still sitting with the words of the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, who lifted up these good neighbors the next day at the inaugural prayer service, speaking truly that
“God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger” and praying that “God [may] grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being.” Amen.

We know we are connected. We are afraid. Yet this very connection can transform us and open the door into new ways of being together. Paul’s use of the one-body metaphor instructs “members [to] have the same care for one another.” He teaches that if one suffers or rejoices, all suffer or rejoice, too. Activist Lilla Watson puts it this way : “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let’s work together.”

Our liberation is bound up together; when one member of our church, of our city, even of our country and of our world suffers—in our sacred interconnectedness—we all do.

Transforming Bodies

I wonder if Paul could have adapted this metaphor in even better ways.

Scholars think that Paul’s language towards the women in Corinth has something to do with his disagreement of how certain Corinthian women leaders, women “prophets,” acted & understood Christ in different from him. What could Paul have learned from his connection to these women & their unique experiences of God? Could he have learned something new about how Christ’s body was shaped?

Surely, not all human bodies have the same parts. If the human body can teach us ways to consider how we collectively embody Christ, then it teaches that the divine is embodied in ways more dynamic and transformative than any single human body can sum up.

There is a trans scholar named Marquis Bey that I’ve been reading recently who talks about how transgender and nonbinary people in particular invite us into more dynamic ways to think about our bodies and the idea of a body as a metaphor.

They quote another theorist who says that “our epistemological certainty about our own bodies is not given, but is delivered by processes and interactions…that connect us to the world through which we move.” Bey takes this and then says that “there is [thus] an immeasurable array of wondrous ways I might have come into the world,” particularly because of this way in which we are all connected.

This theory gives me words for something I have learned from my friends who are trans and nonbinary, something I think trans folk can teach all of us: that there are infinite forms in which the divine might incarnate in our flesh.

Transforming Metaphors

Perhaps this means we should take the image that Paul gives us and transform it in even more expansively to understand how we embody Christ. I took an attempt to draft one different way this metaphor might have been read:

“For just as the body is one and has many members,
the members can make up one body in many ways.
So it is with Christ.

If the foot would say, “I am not a hand, I do not belong,”
it would not make it any less part of the body.
Instead, that part could learn to be a hand,
or some new part of the body it wanted to be.

As it is, God arranged the members in the body,
each one of them, not as one single member,
but interconnected, as many members taking on new forms.

No part can say to another “I have no need of you.”
On the contrary, each member of the body
needs the other to discover
the many forms that Christ’s body can take.”

Loaded in the idea that we are one-but-many, integrally interconnected by the creator in whom we all share one source, is the good news that we can change and take on new forms in how we relate to and who we are together with one another.

I hear this echoed in Psalm 19, the other lectionary text for today: “The heavens tell the glory of God, the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork, day to day pours forth speech.” This ancient song seeks to speak to the eternity of our cosmos that is endlessly pouring forth new ways to understand the fullness of God who Paul tells us we embody.

Monstrous Manyness

Paul is right: in our divine interconnectedness, we belong to each other—we are one body, many parts, suffering and rejoicing together—and together we can find room to go new places in how we pour forth the embodiment of God.

Just as Monsters, Inc., shows Mike and Sulley leading the Monster world in learning that there are new ways to coexist with others in their difference, exchanging fright for laughter, finding transformed ways of being that look nothing like things were supposed to—how might we learn to embody an ever-transforming sense of manyness, both in the microcosms of our communities as well as the macrocosm of society? What would the world look like if we knew more what it meant to be one body, many embers, always finding new forms?

Christ Church, I do think that this is something we know well. We embody this in the way we do diversity and difference in our community life. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of when I tell people what it’s like serving here, and it’s something I often hear others, from within and outside, say about us.

My friend and poet Rye Lanae Boothe witnessed this firsthand when here from KC at our Fall Fest a few months ago. Rye is a women prophet of sorts in my own life, and you may have met her and caught a glimpse of this as she joined another poet offering spontaneous typewriter poems to welcome people to Fall Fest in October. You may also remember the poetry video we offered during the event that night.

With the poem “More than an Open Door,” Rye took our theme of “widen the welcome” and reflected back to us the ways in which we are one body with many members finding new forms of embodying Christ in our midst.

More than an Open Door

The poem has a part (partially inspired by a story in Acts) that goes like this:

We are used to being told to stay the same in order to fit, to belong
In the fabric of God’s story
But doesn't God bring down the sheet in front of Peter’s eyes,
full of forbidden food
To say, what you thought was unclean
I have made clean

And to open Peter’s arms further
To make clear God’s embrace of all people
This is God—unconditional welcome
Talking, learning, asking questions
Open eyes, open hearts, open hands

There’s more to it even than just an open door,
There's a place for you inside the house
A place for you to talk about what it feels like to exist
How it feels to be God in this body, this skin
Nobody excluded from the embrace, from the falling in love with each other,
with existence, with God
Over and over again

Friends, God is alive in our interconnectedness. As we embody Christ in our midst, may we embody new forms on every level through which God’s love finds more life in in this world that needs it, especially in a moment like this. Amen.

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