Embracing Sunlight and Growth | Monday Invocation
This week as we continue to consider the colors of the Pride Rainbow, we shift our focus to the colors yellow and green, representing sunlight, happiness, nature, and growth. Let's delve into their significance:
The color yellow represents sunlight and happiness. It embodies the joy and positivity within the LGBTQ+ community. Green signifies nature and growth. It represents the progress and evolution within the LGBTQ+ community.
In the first chapter of Ecclesiastes, we hear about the persistence of nature and of God: “round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full” (6-7). While the author may have lacked the knowledge of the water cycle that we now have, there was still a recognition that some kind of equilibrium was being kept. At creation, God tamed the chaotic waters so as to create earth and raise land from watery depths. God’s balance with the chaos of the waters, the vastness of the seas, persists. What we’ve designated as nature will continue on and on forever without human intervention and, as we have witnessed in our lifetimes, human intervention based in greed and accumulation will often make our environment worse for all Creation. In failing to respect and care for the earth, we are making our world unlivable for future generations of humans and non-humans.
For those of us in the LGBTQ+ community, climate catastrophe is likely to affect us more than most. Research has already shown that climate change is having a disproportionately larger impact on people of color and women, identities and intersections some of us already live at. And while research on climate change’s impact on LGBTQ+ people specifically has not yet happened, its disparate impact on other marginalized groups points to higher impact for our community as well.
At the same time, we have witnessed a growing number of attacks not only on our rights, but also on individual members of our community. As Ecclesiastes says “all things are wearisome, more than one can express” (8). We are tired and facing hopelessness. “There is nothing new under the sun,” (Ecclesiastes 1:9) as we feel our options and avenues of liberation are shrinking. It may feel as if the old ways no longer work and the new ways are far too unimaginable. We have all these new technologies and we’ve done everything we can personally think of and yet it can still seem like we are limited to the patterns and cycles of the past, that history is doomed to repeat itself and possibly more catastrophically this time.
And yet, I want to bring in the prophetic writing of Afro-futurist writer Octavia Butler: “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” This quote, from Butler’s unreleased final book of her Earthseed trilogy (a profound exploration of theology in its own right), points us to the possibility that we have thought too narrowly about God’s creation. We may have assumed that when God said “let there be light” in Genesis 1 that the only light was our Sun, its reflection off the Moon, and the pinpricks of stars in the night. In the vastness of the universe, we know there are other suns, dying and coming into life. Many of them light their own collections of planets, filled with infinite, unexplored possibilities. This is not a call to take to the stars and colonize other planets, but rather to consider that the depth and breadth of the universe reflects a Creation whose surface we have only begun to scratch.
Some may read Ecclesiastes “Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘see, this is new’? It has already been in the ages before us,” as a hopeless statement (10). For me, I see it as a remark on the inevitability of the liberation God has always promised. Just as we have seen liberation struggles win out in the past, we can go into our own with the knowledge that we will be free. We will become better stewards of the environment because we have to in order to survive. We will achieve full rights and liberation as LGBTQ+ people because we have to in order to survive. I say this not full of naive optimism, but rather full of the faith, knowledge, and experience that God fulfills God’s promises to us and purposes for us. Just as the sun will shine and the green will grow, we will be free to have pride in who God created us to be.
Stay tuned for next week's email, where we will explore the colors blue and purple. Until then, let's embrace the sunlight and growth within the LGBTQ+ community.
Happy Pride Month!
Best regards,
