Yesterday at the Hands Off demonstrations in downtown Honolulu, I had (at least) two encounters that felt like they might be blessings from God. One was when I was handed a trans pride flag (which I wrote about already). The other was when a guy wearing a Trump hat yelled at me (and my clergy colleagues) something about illegal immigrants and then told me to “go back to the mainland.” I know that last one probably doesn’t sound much like a blessing to you. So, let me try to explain.

I’m trying to shift my understanding of the concept of blessing. In the Matthew Beatitudes, Jesus notes that blessings do not always skew toward what we might consider “positive.” For instance, Jesus refers to mourning and persecution as blessings. He says things like:

Blessed are people who are hopeless…

Blessed are people who grieve…

Blessed are people whose lives are harassed because they are righteous…

Blessed are you when people insult you and harass you and speak all kinds of bad and false things about you, all because of me… (see Matthew 5:1-12*)

So having people wave and be welcoming to see a priest carrying a trans pride flag is a great thing and feels like a “typical” blessing (even though this is the sort of thing that Jesus cautions us about in Luke 6:26). But I have to consider the possibility that being yelled at is also a kind of blessing. I mean, consider the words of Job:

Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity? (Job 2:10, NASB)

In the Hawaiian Bible, this verse reads:

Eiʻa, e loaʻa anei iā kākou ka maikaʻi mai ke Akua mai, ʻaʻole anei e loaʻa iā kākou ka ʻino kekahi?

I put the two key words in bold. Maika‘i is a word that means “good, handsome, delightful.” It is the root for the Hawaiian term for “blessed,” pōmaikaʻi (the word pō is a word that refers to “thickness” and works here as an intensifier, indicating a “state of goodness,” thus “blessed”). The other word, ka ‘ino, (ka is the article, so “the”), is a word often used for “evil” and “wickedness,” also used for “spoiled” or “gone bad.” It is also a word used to refer to a storm. In this sense, we get an interesting read from Job: do we accept only the good, maika‘i weather as being from God? Do we not also have to accept that He sends ka ‘ino, stormy weather as well? Or as Jesus Himself puts it, right after He gives us the Beatitudes:

[God] makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matthew 5:45 CEB)

Both clear weather and stormy weather can be both “good” and “bad”—even at the same time. So it is my (and our) duty to accept both as blessings, to find the blessedness in even what we might call “bad.”

So what’s the blessing in having an angry Trump supporter yell at me to “go back to the mainland?” Well, before I get to that, allow me to unpack the baggage of that statement for haoles (a Hawaiian term for “foreigner” that has turned into a phrase and sometimes epithet for exclusively Caucasian people). Hawai‘i is one of the few places in the United States where Caucasians are not a majority and don’t hold outsized cultural power, and, thus, one of the few places where they can experience the sort of discrimination usually experienced by people of color in other parts of the country. So being haole is already a touchy thing. It carries with it an assumption that one does not belong here. Darker skinned Hawaiians will sometimes call light-skinned Hawaiians “haole” as an insult. As a Caucasian myself, there is the automatic assumption that I am on vacation, or am clearly from somewhere else—frequently expressed as being given a fork and spoon at a restaurant and not chopsticks**. One of my friends once referred to a guy as “he wasn’t a haole, he was a local-looking guy”—as though there aren’t “local” haoles. So, being told to “go back to the mainland” is about the closest I can get to the experience of being told something like “go back to Africa.” It’s telling me that I do not belong here. That I belong on the “mainland” of the United States (what we here prefer to call “the continent” since, from the Hawaiian perspective, the Hawaiian islands are the mainland).

This is something of which I’m very sensitive. While I am from the continental US, I’m here in Hawai‘i by invitation—I was invited by the Saint Mary’s to be their priest. I never held dreams of living in Hawai‘i, never once vacationed here. My first time ever on Hawaiian soil was for a job interview. Further, the Episcopal Church here in Hawai‘i has its roots in the Hawaiian Reformed Catholic Church, which resulted from King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma inviting Church of England clergy to come and establish a church here in Hawai‘i because they felt that it offered a vision of Christianity better reflective of the Hawaiian people. So, I am not following a colonizing trajectory. But I also understand that I look an awful lot like the sort of people who have colonized this place. So, while it hurts to be lumped in with the people who continue to pillage this place for profit, I do understand the reasons why it happens. Doesn’t make it any easier, though.

Now, this guy said his piece after reading the sign I was holding. Which, I must confess, was not my choice. A friend asked me to hold his sign while he was taking care of something else. It said “Hands Off!” followed by a list of things that included public lands, Social Security, and immigrants. We were standing adjacent to a pedestrian crosswalk and the light was red. This guy was staring us down, and I saw the red Trump hat on his head. So I gave him a shaka. His eyes scanned my sign and that’s when he yelled something about illegal immigrants. I couldn’t really understand him, except when he yelled about “going back.” Which leads me, finally, to talk about how this is a blessing.

The guy saw on my sign and in my Caucasian appearance something that, to him, screamed “mainland” and not, to him, “Hawai‘i.” I am going to assume that this guy might have been “local.” One of the interesting quirks about Hawaiian politics is that, one, we are a very “blue” state, but tend to skew “conservative” on some issues. And, second, the Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) population leaned heavily toward Trump in the last two elections. Why? Because the Democrats in Hawai‘i have had political dominance since the end of World War II, but Native Hawaiians have continually been marginalized in their own homeland. Their sacred lands are being used for various military, scientific, and recreational purposes. They continue to be priced out of the housing market (to the point where Las Vegas has become a sort of second home for Hawaiians). And their cultural concerns are treated as obstacles to be overcome rather than legitimate issues to be listened to and honored. Further, there are ten times more tourists on the islands per year than residents, but residents are taxed in order to support the tourist industry and not the other way around—on top of the plague of “income properties” that are built here for tourism purposes while beach parks are rife with Native Hawaiians living in tents and barely making ends meet. Because of this, the logic among many is to either “give the other guys a try” or to vote for someone that they think will break the system so that something better might be built from its ruins. As a Kanaka Maoli friend of mine put it at the protest: “That’s the logic. It’s not great logic, but that’s what they’re thinking in supporting Trump.”

So I have to wonder: did this guy see the sign I was holding and see it as reflective of trying to maintain a status quo that has continued to marginalize local people? Are these positions signaling to him a desire to further a kind of political system that will continue to offer soaring rhetoric about being on the “right side of history” while quietly lining the pockets of (different) billionaires who see Hawai‘i as a golden goose to squeeze of all it can offer to people who only want to take take take?

That is the question we all have to ask. And this is why his anger was a blessing to me: it’s causing me to ask what I’m aiming to do as part of such demonstrations. We’re all mad right now. What we’re doing at the moment is collectively yelling A‘ole!, no!

A‘ole to gutting the government programs that the poor rely on.

A‘ole to ignoring our environment and the unabashed pillaging of Earth’s resources.

A‘ole to sending human beings to what are effectively gulags and concentration camps.

A‘ole to disappearing students for no reason other than their political views regarding the genocide happening to the Palestinian people does not line up with the preferred narrative.

A‘ole to the path toward fascism this administration is on.

But that a‘ole cannot simply be about putting things back the way they were. We must demand something more. As a Christian, I want to see something that more closely resembles the Kingdom of God—where no one is lost, all have enough, and we reject the mechanism of death—used to provide a sense of “peace” to our people at the expense of others. To do that, we have to put a stop to what we see happening now—while also advocating for something better to be built in its place.

Hands off, yes. But also, hands on to the tools and materials for making a better world to come.

Blessed are people when they are handed pride flags, they are giving hope to often hopeless people.

Blessed are people when Trump-supporters yell at them to go back to the mainland, it gives them pause to consider how a better future is possible through Christ Jesus.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

_*Note: This is from the Common English Bible translation, which follows an odd modern English translation custom to change “blessed” into something like “happy.” It reads weird and doesn’t exactly correlate with what Jesus is recorded as saying, so I correct the translation to “blessed” for that reason._

**Note 2: My wife and I refer to this as “getting haole-d.” I can’t express to you, reader, how awesome it feels to have someone just give us chopsticks without asking first.

#Theology #Bible #Jesus #Episcopal #Church #Politics #HandsOff #Hawaii

I just sat at my desk after an eventful day. In the Episcopal Church in Hawai'i, our custom is to observe the annual Chrism Mass and Renewal of Ordination Vows on a Saturday about two weeks prior to the start of Holy Week (this is typically a Holy Tuesday observance throughout much of the Church, but given that we are spread among an island archipelago, moving to the aforementioned Saturday works to better accommodate “neighbor island” clergy). This also just happened to coincide with the April 5 “Hands Off” protests/demonstrations. The service is held at the Cathedral of Saint Andrew, which is practically across the street from the state capitol building—where the demonstrations were taking place.

A number of us clergy (and laity) decided that being present at the demonstrations only made sense, given the spirit of renewing our commitment to minister to God’s people and to participate in the proclamation of the good news of liberation, especially among people feeling the squeeze from those who claim the name of Christian as they support genocide, cuts to aid starving children both home and abroad, etc. etc. And so we walked over to the capitol building to “come and see” what was going on.

A view from the event

Now, I’m a rare (read: weird) Episcopal priest in that I pretty much always wear a black cassock (the fancy name for long black dress that you sometimes see priests wearing: I look like Neo or Snape or Kylo Ren, depending on your generation). So I stood out. People wanted a few selfies. Some thought it was a costume and were genuinely surprised that an honest-to-God priest was out there among them. I gave people blessings (including the Trump hat wearing dude in a car that tried to cuss me out and told me to “go back to the mainland”). Mostly I was there to be a presence, to minister and pray. I learned from my participation in the George Floyd demonstrations back in 2020 that folks are warmed to seeing representation from the Church—which speaks to the idea that (some) folks want the Church, but often feel like it is concerned with things quite disconnected from their lives.

We call this the ministry of presence, and is something we clergy also offer in times of hurt and anguish (like an illness or loss of a loved one). This refers to those times where we’re not going to offer answers, just responses, and trust that the Lord God is working through us simply being there.

While walking among the crowd, a little subset of three people saw me and said “here, now you have a sign” and handed me the trans pride flag that appears at the head of this post. I said “mahalo” and carried it with me as I walked. Something about a cassock-clad priest holding a trans pride flag garnered a few responses and I caught a number of people taking sneaky pictures of me.

Here’s the thing: that flag ministered to me.

I grew up deeply Southern Baptist, leaning toward Independent Baptist (these are the fundamentalists who think that Southern Baptists aren’t “conservative” enough). I was incubated in a very Queer-phobic environment. Our attention was mostly on gay men, but all the other letters of the alphabet were just there, slightly off camera. My views on same-sex attraction and Queer love changed while in my twenties. I was attending an Evangelical university in West Palm Beach at the time, while also working retail to help pay my bills. I had gay co-workers and I came to realize that homophobia is an exercise in abstraction. Once I met actual, open, flesh-and-blood gay people it caused me to reconsider many things. And I was doing this while part of a Biblical Studies program at my university. I began the process of trying to reconcile my religious convictions with what I was seeing “on the ground” as it were. And this all was happening alongside my conversion to the Episcopal Church.

But that’s probably a story for another time.

Suffice it to say, my journey from hating Queer people to seeing compatibility between traditional Christianity and Queer “identities” was a hard-fought battle. But along the way I continued to wrestle with reconciling Trans identities and some aspects of Christian belief, as I understand them. And, to be completely honest, I’m still doing this work (but given the current state of things, I won’t be sharing this at this point—I worry that my thinking will be misconstrued and potentially used for hateful purposes by those with ill-intent; there’s nuance there that I don’t think we’re in a place to appreciate at the moment). But one thing is absolutely certain: Trans people are human beings, created in the image of God. They are gifts, blessings to the world, and to deny them this is to deny a work of God.

I needed this reminder. It is easy to get caught up in the abstractness of ideas and beliefs, and removing them from the flesh-and-blood people that are affected or reflected by these ideas and beliefs. But people aren’t just ideas and beliefs. People live. People sweat in the heat and come home tired from work. People go to protests, or roll their eyes at protests as they drive by. People fall in love and break-up. People want to be free to pursue happiness.

When I was in seminary, a little axiom came to me one Sunday: the minister is always on the other side of the altar rail. From the perspective of the laity, the minister is the one at the altar, or giving communion. But from the perspective of the clergy, the ministers are those who sit in the pews and who come up to receive communion. This is the balance of the ministerial life. God speaks to me through the wider community as I am ordained to try and allow God to speak to you all through me.

In the midst of ministering, I was ministered to. It came in the form of a small polyester flag with marker writing on it. And so now, through these words, I hope to minister to you all in return. Trans lives are human lives. Trans people aren’t just an abstraction, aren’t just an idea. Whatever we might think about them, they are flesh-and-blood people wanting what everyone wants: a life where they are free to pursue happiness and discover who they are in the grand web of the earth and universe, who they are in light of the God who lovingly made them.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Theology #Bible #Jesus #Episcopal #Church #TransRights #Politics #HandsOff