A Pride Month Post: God of the In-Between

Also, our journey through Apple Music's Top 100 Albums of All Time continues with Elton John, Madonna, Bad Bunny and Missy Elliott.

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I’ve been thinking about Mick Atencio’s now classic Twitter thread about being a nonbinary Christian. Some Christians struggle with reconciling the existence of nonbinary people with Genesis’ declaration that “male and female, God created them.” Mick notes that far from presenting a binary view of gender, this verse in Genesis is actually an invitation to appreciate the full spectrum of creation. 

God made “day and night.” This sounds like a binary, similar to “male and female,” right? That isn’t quite all we experience in 24 hours. Sunrises and sunsets do not fit into the binary of day and night. Yet God paints the skies with these too. On the second day God separated the sky from the water. Seems like another binary. Yet the clouds hold water for us in the sky, the condensation and rain cycle refreshing our earth constantly. The sky, separate from the water, contains and releases water.”

And so on. Mick points out that while nearly every day in the creation narrative describes what seems to be a binary (water AND land, sun AND moon and stars, sea creatures AND birds), we actually experience these things in a vast spectrum of in-betweens (marshes, bogs and swamps; black holes, supernovae and asteroids; penguins, flamingos and herons). Why, then, should we expect any different from “male and female, God created them”? 

It seems to me that so much of the biblical narrative — indeed, so much of our own spiritual growth — is learning about how much of God there is to be found in the in-betweens, the spectrum. Think of Jonah, who wanted so badly for Nineveh to either be saved forever or wiped off the map, and instead got something infuriatingly in-between. (When Jonah protested, God simply asked: “Is it right for you to be angry?” A good, eternally relevant question). 

Think of Peter, who saw the Kingdom of Heaven as strictly divided between clean and unclean. God dismisses Peter’s binaries: “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” When Peter relates this experience to others, their response was “to praise God, saying “so then, even to Gentiles God has granted repentance that leads to life.’” It is in this bounteous widening that I find my own experience. I, who would have once been considered on the wrong side of a divine binary, can now be counted among the new thing. 

All these people and so many more came to God with a strict “either/or,” and were sent away with a beautiful, gracious “and.” It was a fuller, truer experience with God. And God offers us that same trade. 

So, I’m grateful for the people who exist outside our cultural binaries, to remind us of the God of the Spectrum, God of the In-Between, God of bogs, penguins, black holes and nonbinary people, to whom is granted an experience of God that we’ll never know until we welcome them into our midst, rejoicing.

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Applecore: Elton John, Madonna, Bad Bunny and Missy Elliott

Liz and I are listening to Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time. One album a day-ish, counting down to number one. We did this with Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 500 Albums of Al Time, and it took more than a year. This should only take a hundred days or so. I’ll be posting a few thoughts here as I listen. We’ll be dropping standout tracks from the listen on this Spotify playlist here.

Here’s parts one, two, three, four, five and six.

78: Elton John — Goodbye Yellow Brick Road