The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scripture: John 6:1-21
According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, the word “normal” is defined as “conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern: characterized by that which is considered usual, typical, or routine.” Oh, how dictionaries and their definitions love the passive voice. “Characterized by that which is considered…” it says. Considered by whom?
Now I get it. It would be outside the dictionary’s scope of purpose to get into the forces and authorities that dictate to us what “normal” is. That’s better left to sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, and, yes, preachers.
So I’ll ask: who gets to decide on the type, standard, or regular pattern by which we establish that something is normal? In the earliest Hebrew stories we have in our Bible, it was normal for men to have more than one wife—but not the opposite. In the Roman Empire, it was normal that the emperor was worshiped as a god. Within many indigenous tribes of North America, people who we would now consider queer or trans were called two-spirit and were given an elevated spiritual and ceremonial role in the tribe.
Normal is something we all agree to, either explicitly or implicitly, but how we define it is always in service to, well, someone.
Polygamy serves men in more widely spreading their line, their legacy, by having more children than they could with just one woman. The Roman Emperor being seen as a god obviously serves the power and authority of the emperor. Honoring two-spirit people serves the harmony of the entire tribe by lifting up different ways of being as sacred.
So whenever we refer to something as “normal,” it’s worth spending a little more time considering who that particular brand of normal serves.
For example, we’ve been hearing a lot about how a certain new presidential candidate has never had children. There are some implicit assumptions about what is normal in this conversation: that a person without children lacks certain understanding or skills. This candidate happens to be a woman, and those of us women here who have chosen not to have children, including me, have an acute understanding of how far outside “normal” we sometimes fall. If we choose our career over having children, we are often called selfish. People question our femininity and/or our ability to be nurturing. Those of us who are single and childless are often known as spinsters or, as we’ve heard this week, crazy cat ladies.
Now listen, some women who are childless by choice are quite proudly crazy cat ladies. Not to leave out the crazy dog ladies. Some aren’t particularly feminine or nurturing, nor do they necessarily want to be. But that’s not really what matters here. What matters is what all these assumptions tell us about how our culture thinks a “normal” woman should behave and move in the world.
Definitions of normal that are drawn more broadly, as with the two-spirit people in some indigenous cultures, tend to serve more people. But many of our current definitions of normal are more like…trying to feed 5,000 people with five barley loaves and two fish.
In today’s gospel, that’s exactly what Philip, Andrew, and the other disciples are trying to do.
In their world, resources are scarce and the need is enormous. Normally, they’d need more than six months of wages to feed the entire Passover crowd gathered before them. Because normally, in the systems humans make, you can’t get food if you don’t have money.
But that’s not what Jesus’ normal looks like. Jesus’ normal doesn’t serve some and not others. Jesus’ normal doesn’t favor those who have money and leave behind those who don’t. Jesus’ normal doesn’t heal some people and not others, no matter who they are—Jews, Gentiles, men, women.
Philip and Andrew forget to figure in God’s abundance, which is the only normal Jesus knows. So Jesus gives them a demonstration.
Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets.
In the face of seeming scarcity, there wasn’t just enough, there was more than enough. There was abundance.
That is what Pride is about. Making abundance normal. An abundance of ways of loving, ways of expressing gender, ways of transforming into who each of us actually is. Pride is about making transformations normal.
We heard Br. Dave read a poem about a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. The caterpillar’s discomfort in realizing that she is not being who she is fully meant to be, her fear of transforming, and her joy of a new becoming—what it feels like to fly.
Now in a world of limited ideas of normal, some caterpillars look up at the transformed butterfly and say, “That’s not right. That’s not how she was born. She was born with lots of legs, not those weird wings. And what are all those colors? Why does she have to flaunt them?”
The caterpillars who are REALLY dug in to their ideas of normal even create rules that attempt to cut off other caterpillars’ ability to transform. They criminalize the showing of wings. They force butterflies to continue to call themselves caterpillars.
But, of course, the nature of God’s creation is abundance. The nature of the caterpillar is to transform into a butterfly. Try as we might to restrict that abundance, it’s going to break through no matter what.
But here’s the trick: We are all butterflies waiting to break out in some way. That is also the gift of the LGBTQIA+ community. The queer community shows every single one of you that your desire to transform into the fullness of how God made you is real and valid and beautiful.
They show their queer siblings who aren’t able to come out yet, for whatever reason, that they know your lovely wings are there, even if you can’t show them yet.
And guess what, whether you’re part of the LGBTQIA+ community or not, we all have wings we long to stretch out, we all have a longing to live into a part of us that doesn’t fall into the prescribed scope of normal. Maybe you’ve been dressing the way you’re supposed to your entire life instead of putting on the clothes your heart constantly calls you to. Maybe you want to learn how to sing, but the one time you tried, someone laughed at you. Maybe you want to make a costume of your favorite superhero and wear it to ComicCon, but your spouse looked at you sideways when you floated the idea.
Maybe it’s something deeper, something I or anyone else could never imagine for you, but that God has known is there all along.
That is the gift of Pride. The LGBTQIA+ community showing us what abundance looks like, and how to claim it. Pride is an invitation into a world where we trust that Jesus can transform our meager five loaves and two fish definition of normal into more than enough for everyone.
Amen.
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