Genesis 1:27 and Galatians 3:28
Excerpts from The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
October 12, 2025
By Rev. Nicole Lamarche
As you know I love reminding us that one of the oldest names we have for God is Ruah, wind, breath so may we never get disconnected from our breath… I invite you to breathe in peace, breathe out discord, breathe in hope, breathe out despair…
As you are moved, let us put our hearts and hopes together in a spirit of prayer. God of many expressions and many faces, God of all that is and that shall ever be, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
“Lizards can change sex” she said boldly or something like that. I don’t remember her words exactly because it was the 1990’s in the upper floor of my high school. Beth was maybe the smartest person in our entire class, with short wavy brown hair and round spectacles. She did not do sports and she did not wear makeup or dresses. And also she also did not do bras. Beth was just super-duper smart and a non-conformer and so well you can guess what transpired when one day she wore a light-colored tank top, with her now trendy again tattered jeans. For our small conservative town, infused with Latter Day saints and Jehovah’s witnesses and conservative Christians, it was just too much. Beth’s refusal to be forced into an underwire framed box, almost did Mr. Gorman our Principal in. I could still remember his flustered face. He informed Beth that she was in violation of the dress code. She would have to cover up or change or go home. Beth would remind us that the boys did not have to wear bras and she would say things like the fact that gender was a construct and that there are many creatures for whom sex itself changed, which is how she said something like “Lizards can change sex.”
I understand now that the adults were threatened by this idea for a variety of reasons. We had less language than we do now and all we could say for sure was that some kids were just different, they were just really made that way. We all kind of knew that. But the adults for a lack of awareness of the reality of human diversity and for the fact that theologically, many were taught and still are that God values the humans in a binary. Period. There is male and female. Period. There is husband and wife. Period. And furthermore, an interpretation of some texts in the Bible are used to say that human beings, and certain family combinations beyond these do not reflect God and are against God. So this is what I am speaking to today.
Whoever you are, you are created in God’s image, whoever you are, however you are made, however you express. And then in June there was an executive order proclaiming that the U.S. government will only recognize only two sexes, male and female, and ending “radical and wasteful” diversity, equity and inclusion programs inside federal agencies arguing that this work to protect women because and I quote “eradicating the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.” As a woman I can say with certainty that I do not feel attacked by that. There are 5,000 things I feel attacked by and it’s. not that.
So it feels urgent to say: We are all made in God’s image. I love what we heard from James Baldwin. “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” I believe that the presence that is God is so far beyond our human understanding and so much in the natural
world does point out the diversity and the beauty in it. We are all made in God’s image, human expressions of a Divine Mystery so far beyond our comprehension and the way we get to have this human experience is from a whole range of different expressions of flesh. In spite of what we might have heard we are all on a holy spectrum. As Beth was saying, even in just one part of the animal kin-dom there are female bearded dragons in Australia who are actually males but they are fully functional females too that mate with males. That’s just one little slice of the animal kin-dom.
Some cite passages like what we heard here in Genesis 1 or in Genesis 2 to point to a binary, saying that God created both male and female, but many scholars and thoughtful people have pointed out that simply because the energy of love, that is God, the life force started that way doesn’t mean God stopped there. This is just the beginning. As as we say in the UCC,
God is still speaking …
And the passages that are more specifically about eroticism between people of the same genders are widely confirmed to be about condemning the exploitative, non-mutual, non-consensual practices of the ancient world. I am talking about the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19), the Levite’s concubine in (Judges 19) that for example are about sexual
violence. As one writer notes, “the injunction that “man must not lie with man” (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13) coheres with the context of a society anxious about their health, continuing family lineages…” There is lots of evidence, cultural, historical and linguistic data, that just like now, in the ancient world there was tons of diversity.
In the early Christian writings, each time we something in this category addressed, it’s a list of vices (1 Corinthians 6:9, 1 Timothy 1:10), speaking against once again exploitation, in this case, the practice of older men sexually exploiting younger men, a practice called pederasty, something common in the Roman Empire.
I would argue the bigger wisdom underneath, our takeaway now in 2025, as people of faith, is these are invitations to be intentional about our relationships, even in our most intimate partnerships, a place to live out love and mutuality and the fullness of partnership.
I think part of what was meant by this letter to the early Church when we read this “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither captive nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” I read that to believe that those human categories fall away when we follow in the Deeper Way, grounded in our God of love that is beyond all of our
categories fall away.
Communal Reflection
Did you grow up thinking you were made in the image of God?
Beloved of God, whoever you are, you are made in the image of God.
Amen.