It's Monday morning and time to head back to work. Well, it's time for some of us.
But not for Susan Stanton. Fired from her job as city manager of Largo, Florida after announcing she was transitioning from living as male to living as female,
her latest bid for employment hasn't panned out either.
Such is the body politic, which has a tendency to consume its own pieces. Surely the church is better.
Alas, no. Marla Evans has more free time on Sundays, now that her
church has told her to stop coming to play guitar (for which she was paid) and to stop volunteering to teach Sunday School. This even though Marla never showed up at church as Marla - always as her pre-transition identity as Mark. The church found out she was transgender because of a news story.
Can we justify this separation? I've heard the phrase "sin is anything that separates us from God", but to me that's only half the picture: sin against God. What about when we separate others from us? Is that not sin against each other?
I Corinthians 12 suggests it is such a sin.
The Apostle Paul writes that we are all one body and the body is not made up of one part but of many.
The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you!" And the head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you!" On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.
If that is so, how can the Body of Christ, represented by this church, say to this member of the body "I have no need of you"? Are Marla's talents diminished by her being transgender?
In fact, the members of the church are harmed by missing Marla's musical and educational talents. Again in I Corinthians 12, Paul writes:
If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
And so, every part of this church - the children in Sunday School and the people in worship services - suffer because the person they knew as Mark has been severed from the body.
Every organization, every body, should guard against removing persons that offer so much to their organizations. And if any organizations should know this, it should be the churches.
references:
http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070928/NEWS0119/70928016/1075
http://www.wdio.com/article/stories/S202050.shtml?cat=10335
http://rebeccaaugephd.blogspot.com/2007/09/transgendered-woman-says-she-was-asked.html
