In response to Elliott Darrow's poem "God Is Gay," which I posted (in video format) yesterday, Barbara makes a good point:
Sorry Bill! Saying "God is Gay" is just the opposite side of saying "God is Straight", or "God hates Gays". Prejudice is ours, not God's. The Creator of all loves all of Creation. We need to catch up to that inclusiveness of love.
And I reply:
I think I see your point, Barbara: no group can or should claim God for its own, and that tactic can divide the community of the faithful.
But there's another side to be seen here, it seems to me. God is implicitly (and explicitly) identified with the victors and owners of any society.
And so we need to develop theological imaginations that cast God in the image of those thrown away and excluded by the victors and owners of any society. I believe that God is Red, God is Woman, God is a Prostitute, God is Black, God is a Latina, God is a Prisoner on Death Row, etc.
None of this means that I believe God is confined to those categories or that God is literally any of these categories. What it means is that, by the logic of incarnation, I need to struggle to see God's face in the suffering and dying of the wretched of the earth.
And doing that requires spinning theologies that subvert the texts used to make God the exclusive possession of the victors and owners of the world.
The graphic: Edwina Sandy's "Christa," from the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which permits non-commercial duplication of images from its holdings under a Creative Commons license.