What Does the Rainbow Teach us About the Love of God?
The rainbow has long served as a symbol of Queer pride and hope. What can we learn about Divine Queerness by exploring it's Biblical roots?
The first time I realized I was Queer I felt deep peace wash over my body. My Queerness ushered me into myself and answered a question I had long wondered “What does authentic love and connection feel like to me?” In the revelation of my Queerness, I found and felt God. Celebrating my Queerness invited a deep part of myself, a part of myself I prayed away and maligned in the name of God, to finally come home to rest.
It’s strange to feel God in places you are told God doesn’t exist. These experiences invite us to challenge and call into question everything we’ve ever been told about God. Religious deconstruction is an embodied experience, it begins when we encounter God in a way that challenges who God is “supposed to be”. Deconstruction meets us when we discover God in unusual and forbidden places.
As a child of the Pentecostal church, I grew up listening to sermon after sermon about how God hates Queerness. But after being Queer for over a decade, I believe Queerness is one of our greatest teachers when it comes to understanding the vast love of God.
God and Queerness in the Bible
The rainbow, which is now a symbol of Queer pride and hope, first appears in the Bible in Genesis. God places the rainbow in the sky after eliminating all life on Earth, (except for Noah, his family, and some animals) in a genocidal flood.
Central to God’s wrath sat God’s deep anger concerning humanity’s sin and corruption.
In Genesis chapter 6 it says, “God observed all this corruption in the world, for everyone on earth was corrupt. 13 So God said to Noah, “I have decided to destroy all living creatures, for they have filled the Earth with violence. Yes, I will wipe them all out along with the earth!”
God frames killing all humanity as a righteousness act, he posits this ergregious behavior as a humane way to eliminate immorality in the world. However, I don’t believe that God’s action to destroy humanity was virtuous. Instead, I believe that in Genesis, God was demonstrating the pitfalls of unbridled pettiness and anger. Surely there must be a better way for God to deal with frustion, anger, and disppointment than genocide.
Fascinatingly, after this extreme act of violence, God demonstrates a swift change of heart, “Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16 Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”
In Genesis we see God undergo a kind of spiritual transformation. God destroys humanity in anger only to realize that humanity is beautifully messy and complex and that this complexity does not need to be replaced or erased. In Genesis we see God transform from requiring monotheism (the practice of only recognizing one God), to accepting that not all humanity will exist in deference to God.
As such, in Genesis, we witness God move from a binary understanding of life and death to a more nuanced and Queer- like understanding of the inalineable value of humanity.
Queerness is the belief that every single person has the deep right to be exactly who they are. Queerness is the belief that all people deserve to express themselves and that this expression does not need to sit within a rigid binary of. Queerness acknowledges the vast beauty of what it means to be humans and removes all limitations concerning the many ways we can identify and express ourselves.
The rainbow is God’s recognition that all life is sacred. The rainbow is Queer for it serves as a symbol that none shall be cast out for being who they are. The rainbow is God’s Queer promise that so long as one’s heart is beating, they are worthy to live life fully and freely, not beholden to rigid judgment. The rainbow is a divine-Queer promise of belonging, one that signals God’s reformed understanding of honoring authenticity and human expansiveness.
In the rainbow, we are reminded that God and Queerness are deeply tied and that in Queerness we can better see the ways in which the nuanced, dynamic, and complex parts of ourselves and others are divine and sacred.
Reflections for Pride Month
How do my personal experiences shape my understanding of God?
What qualities do I believe are essential to God's nature, and why?
How does my understanding of LGBTQ+ identity intersect with my faith?
How does the rainbow as an LGBTQ+ symbol resonate and connect to my understanding of God?
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