scene from Sense8 Ecstasy – what does that word mean to you? Ecstasy certainly has many associations! Some of these are deeply sacred, others far more profane. Each however has something in common: they are about standing out: standing out of the ordinary. For in its Greek origins, ecstasy means exactly that. ‘Ek’ means ‘out of’ and ‘stasis’ means ‘standing: hence ‘ek-statis’ – standing out, or away from, the norm. Ecstasy certainly therefore has important philosophical and theological aspects. Take, for example, the queer Cuban American theorist José Esteban Muñoz. I have been thinking about Muñoz because the theme of this year’s Sydney Mardi Gras is ‘Our Future’ and Muñoz gave a great deal of creative thought to imagining more loving futures. For Muñoz suggested that, in contrast to what he called ‘straight time’, at their/our best, queer people live and invite others into what he called ‘ecstatic time’. In other words, instead of living with the ‘normal’ expectations of time and this world, at their/our best, queer people seek to live and reshape this world differently. Instead of our pasts, our presents, and our futures being shaped by our birth families, and by ‘straight’ drives’ for power, children, inheritance, and wealth, at their/our best, queer people seek different kinds of happiness and societal arrangements. For, like other historically marginalised people, queer people have typically been ‘ecstatic’ people. We/they have stood outside of ordinary life and time: which is very much where our two main figures in our biblical story tonight come in – Naomi and Ruth – as striking models of the ‘ecstatic community’ into which God calls us…
The book of Ruth as 'ec-static'
A word first needs to be said about the book of Ruth itself. For, in its own way, this book is somewhat ‘queer’, in the sense of not fitting ‘normal’ expectations and, thereby, reflecting God’s subversive grace. For Ruth is the only book in the Protestant Bible to be named after a woman: and Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Jews, only include one more in their authorised scriptures - the book of Esther. At once, we see that, despite ancient patriarchy, our faith traditions were never quite as neat nor as oppressive as some conservative Christians, and vehement secularists, might allege. Always, this reminds us, our quite ‘queer’ God could never be pinned down. God is always popping up in new, wonderful, and also very queer, ways even in the midst of elements of the faith which some have tried to use to oppress us and others. The book of Ruth is but one sign of that, and its message goes on to overturn a whole series of common expectations and oppressive ways. No wonder then that I love it, just as so many queer, feminist, and other historically marginalised people have loved the book of Ruth, and not least this great ecstatic love passage we hear again this evening. What does it mean to you? Let me restrict myself to three things I see in it, and still more, feel in hearing it, and jump for joy in receiving it…
chosen family
Firstly, the book of Ruth affirms chosen family as core to God’s ecstatic community. As the old saying has it: ‘be not proud of face, place, or race’. It is grace that is at the heart of divine life together, not the family or other background from which we come. This is a key reason that the book of Ruth is in the Bible. For many scholars believe that its origin lies in the 5th or 4th century before Christ when there were tensions within the Israelite community about the place of outsiders, at a time when intermarriage with foreigners had, for example, become controversial. The book of Ruth explodes ideas of such attempts at racial and sexual purity and exclusion. For Ruth herself is from Moab, which was not only a foreign country, but one which had been associated with hostility to ancient Israel, with sexual perversity, and idolatry. Indeed, Deuteronomy 22.3-6 even excludes Moabites, with Ammonites, from ‘the congregation of the Lord; even to their tenth generation.’ The book of Ruth up-ends all of that. Instead, it affirms that supposed outsiders, and the marginalised, are at the heart of God and God’s community, even if people of faith oppress them/us.
As a feminist, I love how, when the patriarchal, and heteronormative, order fails Ruth and Naomi – when the men die, and ‘straight’ options disappear from their lives – this is not the end, but the beginning of love, not just for themselves but for others. For it is their chosen family from which Jesus, like David, will emerge. Indeed, note well, Ruth is one of five tremendously significant women who are mentioned by Matthew’s Gospel in his genealogy of Jesus. Each of these women is highly sexually and/or racially impure by the standards of the respective conservative religion of their day. Cast aside as she was, Tamar, let us remember, becomes a sex worker and seduces Judah. Rahab, whose profession was as a sex worker, is instrumental in saving Joshua and the early Israelites, even though she was also a Caananite, a member of Israel’s sworn racial enemy. Bathsheba was married to Uriah, a Hittite, who was then murdered by David so he could possess her, possibly by rape. Mary, of course, was the mother of Jesus, who was born under allegedly extraordinary, we might even say ‘queer’, sexual circumstances. Ruth similarly stands as an awkward model and instrument of God’s love for any conservative understanding of faith. She is a racial, and quite likely, a sexual, outsider; yet a vital part of God’s very unrespectable, we might even say ‘queer’, family tree. So, if you identify in any way with people like Ruth, feel affirmed that you both belong to Gods’ chosen family and also continue it.
the depths of love
For, secondly, the book of Ruth points us to God’s ecstatic community by expressing the deepest love of all. Indeed, the depth of divine love in which we can share are expressed in the words of tonight’s passage perhaps more powerfully than anywhere in the Bible except those related to the cross and resurrection of Jesus. The nearest parallel is in the story of David and Jonathan, significantly also about the love between two same gendered people. At the very least, these two stories are what we can legitimately call ‘queer coded’. Both speak so powerfully of the nature of divine love: found in the depth of same gendered, as well as differently gendered, relationships. For, as the best of the rabbinic tradition has put it: the love of Jonathan and David is “the epitome of eternal love, a love unqualified and independent of worldly benefit”.[1] Ruth’s words are similarly so striking and moving:
Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus to me, and more as well,
if even death parts me from you! (Ruth 1.16-17)
Surely it is hard to beat that, not only as a biblical statement of what a marriage, or committed relationship, is about – but also as a reflection of the covenantal love of God in human expression?!
transformation through ecstatic community
Thirdly, and vitally, as a pointer to God’s ecstatic community, the book of Ruth calls us to transform faith and society. For unlike so much secular love, the love of God is not focused on ourselves, either as individuals or as couples. It is wonderful if we have the gift of partnered love, sexually and in other ways. Yet that love is also given to us to help us enable others to thrive. After all, the real story about love and marriage in the Bible is about God’s love, and God’s marriage to the whole of God’s people and to the land, the whole of God’s Creation. Similarly, our chosen families are intended for us not only to know ecstatic love ourselves, but also to share divine love with others. This is what Martin Luther King certainly had in mind when he promoted the concept of the beloved community as the purpose and future of the Christian Church. Building on an idea of the Harvard professor Josiah Royce, Martin Luther King saw the beloved community as a means to transform human divisions and embrace loving unity for the whole of Creation. As King put it, the purpose (or end) of God:
is reconciliation… redemption… the creation of a beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this kind of understanding and goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles.
That is what we see in the story of Ruth and Naomi, and in the life and work of Jesus: an ecstatic kind of love, expressing the depth of divine love, which, in chosen family, can help transform our world. Another name for this beloved community is ecstatic community: a future for our own faith communities, and for the queer community as a whole, to own and live out.
Let me therefore conclude with one creative contemporary image of ecstatic community shaped by the transgender sisters Lana and Lilly Wachowski. In their Netflix drama Sense8, created with J. Michael Straczynski, they explored the idea of a community of persons, known as ‘sensates’, who are mentally and emotionally – we might even say mystically – intimately inked, despite their very different backgrounds and locations. Some of the eight characters are explicitly queer, but all are ‘ec-static’ in the sense of standing out from their societies and cultures by virtue of their identity or vocation. Now the series is flawed in some important respects, particularly in its reflection of Western and white assumptions.[2] Those of us who are white and Western sadly have so much work yet to do in decolonising queer, as well as faith, spaces. Nonetheless, Sense8, like the book of Ruth and other bible passages, invites us into the journey of embracing empathy across difference: an ecstatic future for us all, and crucially also for others, which involves the integration and growth of all our differences, not least those aspects and people who have been outcast and marginalised for so long. As Nomi Marks, a trans woman in Sense8, says:
The real violence, the violence I realized was unforgivable, is the violence that we do to ourselves, when we're too afraid to be who we really are.
For as Hernando, a gay character in Sense8, expresses it:
Love is not something we wind up, something we set or control. Love is just like art. A force that comes into our lives without any rules, expectations or limitations.
That is also a central part of the truth of the Gospel, the truth of Ruth and Naomi. David and Jonathan, and of our own lives. Following Jesus, Naomi and Ruth, Jonathan and David, may we thus move forward into our futures in the freedom of love and the power of God’s grace. Amen.
by Josephine Inkpin, for the Metropolitan Community Church in Petersham, Sunday 25 February, and its blessing for Mardi Gras 2024
[1] quote by Rabbi Steven Greenberg in Wrestling with God and Men, 99
[2] See, for example, Anne E.Lindner ‘Reading Sense8: Visual Interchangeability and Queer Possibility in a “Post-Racial” World’at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15551393.2023.2267437
A word first needs to be said about the book of Ruth itself. For, in its own way, this book is somewhat ‘queer’, in the sense of not fitting ‘normal’ expectations and, thereby, reflecting God’s subversive grace. For Ruth is the only book in the Protestant Bible to be named after a woman: and Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Jews, only include one more in their authorised scriptures - the book of Esther. At once, we see that, despite ancient patriarchy, our faith traditions were never quite as neat nor as oppressive as some conservative Christians, and vehement secularists, might allege. Always, this reminds us, our quite ‘queer’ God could never be pinned down. God is always popping up in new, wonderful, and also very queer, ways even in the midst of elements of the faith which some have tried to use to oppress us and others. The book of Ruth is but one sign of that, and its message goes on to overturn a whole series of common expectations and oppressive ways. No wonder then that I love it, just as so many queer, feminist, and other historically marginalised people have loved the book of Ruth, and not least this great ecstatic love passage we hear again this evening. What does it mean to you? Let me restrict myself to three things I see in it, and still more, feel in hearing it, and jump for joy in receiving it…
chosen family
Firstly, the book of Ruth affirms chosen family as core to God’s ecstatic community. As the old saying has it: ‘be not proud of face, place, or race’. It is grace that is at the heart of divine life together, not the family or other background from which we come. This is a key reason that the book of Ruth is in the Bible. For many scholars believe that its origin lies in the 5th or 4th century before Christ when there were tensions within the Israelite community about the place of outsiders, at a time when intermarriage with foreigners had, for example, become controversial. The book of Ruth explodes ideas of such attempts at racial and sexual purity and exclusion. For Ruth herself is from Moab, which was not only a foreign country, but one which had been associated with hostility to ancient Israel, with sexual perversity, and idolatry. Indeed, Deuteronomy 22.3-6 even excludes Moabites, with Ammonites, from ‘the congregation of the Lord; even to their tenth generation.’ The book of Ruth up-ends all of that. Instead, it affirms that supposed outsiders, and the marginalised, are at the heart of God and God’s community, even if people of faith oppress them/us.
As a feminist, I love how, when the patriarchal, and heteronormative, order fails Ruth and Naomi – when the men die, and ‘straight’ options disappear from their lives – this is not the end, but the beginning of love, not just for themselves but for others. For it is their chosen family from which Jesus, like David, will emerge. Indeed, note well, Ruth is one of five tremendously significant women who are mentioned by Matthew’s Gospel in his genealogy of Jesus. Each of these women is highly sexually and/or racially impure by the standards of the respective conservative religion of their day. Cast aside as she was, Tamar, let us remember, becomes a sex worker and seduces Judah. Rahab, whose profession was as a sex worker, is instrumental in saving Joshua and the early Israelites, even though she was also a Caananite, a member of Israel’s sworn racial enemy. Bathsheba was married to Uriah, a Hittite, who was then murdered by David so he could possess her, possibly by rape. Mary, of course, was the mother of Jesus, who was born under allegedly extraordinary, we might even say ‘queer’, sexual circumstances. Ruth similarly stands as an awkward model and instrument of God’s love for any conservative understanding of faith. She is a racial, and quite likely, a sexual, outsider; yet a vital part of God’s very unrespectable, we might even say ‘queer’, family tree. So, if you identify in any way with people like Ruth, feel affirmed that you both belong to Gods’ chosen family and also continue it.
the depths of love
For, secondly, the book of Ruth points us to God’s ecstatic community by expressing the deepest love of all. Indeed, the depth of divine love in which we can share are expressed in the words of tonight’s passage perhaps more powerfully than anywhere in the Bible except those related to the cross and resurrection of Jesus. The nearest parallel is in the story of David and Jonathan, significantly also about the love between two same gendered people. At the very least, these two stories are what we can legitimately call ‘queer coded’. Both speak so powerfully of the nature of divine love: found in the depth of same gendered, as well as differently gendered, relationships. For, as the best of the rabbinic tradition has put it: the love of Jonathan and David is “the epitome of eternal love, a love unqualified and independent of worldly benefit”.[1] Ruth’s words are similarly so striking and moving:
Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus to me, and more as well,
if even death parts me from you! (Ruth 1.16-17)
Surely it is hard to beat that, not only as a biblical statement of what a marriage, or committed relationship, is about – but also as a reflection of the covenantal love of God in human expression?!
transformation through ecstatic community
Thirdly, and vitally, as a pointer to God’s ecstatic community, the book of Ruth calls us to transform faith and society. For unlike so much secular love, the love of God is not focused on ourselves, either as individuals or as couples. It is wonderful if we have the gift of partnered love, sexually and in other ways. Yet that love is also given to us to help us enable others to thrive. After all, the real story about love and marriage in the Bible is about God’s love, and God’s marriage to the whole of God’s people and to the land, the whole of God’s Creation. Similarly, our chosen families are intended for us not only to know ecstatic love ourselves, but also to share divine love with others. This is what Martin Luther King certainly had in mind when he promoted the concept of the beloved community as the purpose and future of the Christian Church. Building on an idea of the Harvard professor Josiah Royce, Martin Luther King saw the beloved community as a means to transform human divisions and embrace loving unity for the whole of Creation. As King put it, the purpose (or end) of God:
is reconciliation… redemption… the creation of a beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this kind of understanding and goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles.
That is what we see in the story of Ruth and Naomi, and in the life and work of Jesus: an ecstatic kind of love, expressing the depth of divine love, which, in chosen family, can help transform our world. Another name for this beloved community is ecstatic community: a future for our own faith communities, and for the queer community as a whole, to own and live out.
Let me therefore conclude with one creative contemporary image of ecstatic community shaped by the transgender sisters Lana and Lilly Wachowski. In their Netflix drama Sense8, created with J. Michael Straczynski, they explored the idea of a community of persons, known as ‘sensates’, who are mentally and emotionally – we might even say mystically – intimately inked, despite their very different backgrounds and locations. Some of the eight characters are explicitly queer, but all are ‘ec-static’ in the sense of standing out from their societies and cultures by virtue of their identity or vocation. Now the series is flawed in some important respects, particularly in its reflection of Western and white assumptions.[2] Those of us who are white and Western sadly have so much work yet to do in decolonising queer, as well as faith, spaces. Nonetheless, Sense8, like the book of Ruth and other bible passages, invites us into the journey of embracing empathy across difference: an ecstatic future for us all, and crucially also for others, which involves the integration and growth of all our differences, not least those aspects and people who have been outcast and marginalised for so long. As Nomi Marks, a trans woman in Sense8, says:
The real violence, the violence I realized was unforgivable, is the violence that we do to ourselves, when we're too afraid to be who we really are.
For as Hernando, a gay character in Sense8, expresses it:
Love is not something we wind up, something we set or control. Love is just like art. A force that comes into our lives without any rules, expectations or limitations.
That is also a central part of the truth of the Gospel, the truth of Ruth and Naomi. David and Jonathan, and of our own lives. Following Jesus, Naomi and Ruth, Jonathan and David, may we thus move forward into our futures in the freedom of love and the power of God’s grace. Amen.
by Josephine Inkpin, for the Metropolitan Community Church in Petersham, Sunday 25 February, and its blessing for Mardi Gras 2024
[1] quote by Rabbi Steven Greenberg in Wrestling with God and Men, 99
[2] See, for example, Anne E.Lindner ‘Reading Sense8: Visual Interchangeability and Queer Possibility in a “Post-Racial” World’at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15551393.2023.2267437
RSS Feed