Radical Vulnerability: The Self-Threshing of God

“They’re trying to kill us. We’re just trying to live and understand our lives, but they hate us. They HATE us! We’re nonbinary, we’re poly, and we’re just trying to live, and they are killing us—they are harming us. Why do we have to live in fear of people who hate us for being alive?…Why can’t they SEE we’re just people? Why do we get demonized?…You talk about making changes, you talk about getting involved locally and putting yourself out there. I’m scared someone is going to come after you.”  

This writer, who is non-binary and uses the name “Glitterbeard” online, says their partner, who is also non-binary, sobbed these words into their lap in despair and near-panic. Then, addressing the reader directly, Glitterbeard says,

“I need you to hear my partner’s fear.
I need you to know this is the truth.”

So before continuing, a prayer:
Almighty God, may you guide us to seek the Truth: come whence it may, cost what it will, lead where it might. —Phillips Brooks

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I’ve been surprised at how difficult it is to get Episcopalians to understand my urgency about religious trauma. After all, the Episcopal Church consecrated the first openly gay bishop, didn’t we? Westboro Baptist picketed our General Convention with signs calling us THE F*GGOT CHURCH. Within our admittedly self-selected and at times insular faith community, a person’s orientation or identity has passed beyond acceptance and into unremarkability.

So when I bring up ex-vangelical former students—smart, responsible adults with jobs and mortgages—who have experienced ‘rapture panic’ upon entering an empty house, terrified that they’ve been ‘left behind’—it’s easy to exoticize that sort of thing because we believe we, ourselves, don’t contribute to it. When I talk about ex-vangelical former students so damaged by evangelical ‘purity culture’ that they have serious difficulty with sexual intimacy even with their spouses, it’s second nature to shake our heads and cluck our tongues at those churches that teach such a distorted, damaging vision of the Kingdom of God. Whenever we hear of opportunistic politicians who plan to ram through a nationwide ban on abortion care, my parish can take refuge in our ministry of making up care packets for clinic patients, and escorting the vulnerable women safely into the building. And of course, many of us are LGBTQ folks ourselves, so we can’t see what more people expect of us whenever a new anti-gay or anti-transgender law is passed somewhere. Because we don’t promote that sort of thing.

But that dog won’t hunt.

When people’s only experience of church has been opacity, deflection, gaslighting, abuse of power, breach of trust and the shunning and silencing of those who speak out, they are not going to make distinctions between denominations; the damage is already done, and ‘the way of truth (brought) into disrepute’ (2 Peter 2:2). If the church is to effectively witness to the Good News of Jesus, we must ‘mourn the sins of which it is guilty, and repent and forsake them’ (the Book of Common Prayer) and we must call out those who inflict trauma in ‘the noble name of him to whom [we] belong’ (James 2:7). We cannot, like Pilate, wash our hands of the blood of the innocent. 

As an acquaintance of mine put it, 

I have said to more than one friend who has announced they are cutting off their racist uncle or whatever, ‘Please don’t do that! That’s YOUR racist. If YOU don’t take responsibility for trying to educate them, who will?‘

The church-traumatized don’t need to hear a lecture about why our church isn’t like the ones that hurt them. #NotallChristians or #Notallchurches are no more appropriate responses to the cries of the wounded than #Notallmen or #Alllivesmatter, and demanding that traumatized people make distinctions between different denominations of an institution, their lived experience of which tells them is a danger to them as a whole, is unreasonable. To the traumatized, our protestations can only be interpreted as defensiveness about the indefensible.

‘When I criticize a system,’ wrote Thomas Merton, ‘they think I criticize them and that is of course because they fully accept the system and identify themselves with it.’ Our attempts to deflect criticism of our church, or to distance ourselves from those who have harmed people in the name of Jesus, fail because our critics see this defensiveness as an evasion of responsibility at best, and as evidence that we ‘fully accept the system and identify [our]selves with it’ at worst.

‘The pain I have is not about the church,’ said Glitterbeard’s partner. ‘It’s about the racist bigoted history of the people who will use Christianity as an excuse for the crimes against me.’ As we followers of Jesus begin to engage with this history, I think it absolutely essential that we do so from a place of radical vulnerability, laying down our armor and steadfastly refusing to be defensive. Consider John the Baptizer’s metaphor of the wheat and the chaff.

The ‘chaff’ is a protective layer that forms around the growing kernel, shielding it in its delicate juvenile phase. When the grain is ready for use, the grower threshes it to remove the now-superfluous chaff, which, along with every other unfruitful thing, is disposed of.

I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.  —Matthew 3:11-12

My takeaway from this metaphor is twofold. First, each individual grain sheds its protective layer of chaff before being put to use, which tells me it is not entire souls that are burned in the ‘unquenchable fire,’ but only the useless parts of each—the unnecessarily defensive, the unfruitful, the not-useful. 

If we are to make any progress in reaching out to the traumatized, we must do so in a similar state of radical vulnerability, without armor, without argument, ‘as a sheep before its shearers is silent’ (Isaiah 53:7). We must be like the grain that, having shed its chaff, is ready to bear fruit: 

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.  —John 12:24

My second takeaway is this: perhaps the Crucifixion is the self-threshing of God—God shedding all armor and taking on radical vulnerability before an accusing world. The difference, of course, being that Jesus was without sin, while we—the church—are not. Jesus sends us out as ‘sheep among wolves,’ and we need to take him seriously. Teach us to be defenseless, Lord. We have reaching-out to do, truth to know, and fear to hear.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, ‘Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.‘