An Episcopal priest in New York City declared that Jesus is “transgender” and told the congregation that if they deny this, they are denying the “divinity” of Christ.
Reverend Flourish Klink, who considers herself a transgender nonbinary individual, made the outlandish assertions during a recent sermon at Christ & St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church.
“God is non-binary. God is non-binary, but I’m going to go further than that, and I’m going to say God is actually also trans,” Klink said. “And now let’s get on the same page here. When we trans people are born, folks assign us a gender based on what they see. Then, when we’re old enough, we realize that that wasn’t right, and we’re not in our deepest selves the gender that everybody thought we were.”
She used this line of thinking to conclude that Jesus was wrongly assigned “male” at birth.
“Here’s why God is trans. When God, who as we have established is non-binary, was born in human form as our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary said, ‘Oh, look, a baby boy.’ God isn’t a boy. We have established this. God is beyond boy and girl. God was assigned a gender at birth, and later on, it became clear that that gender wasn’t quite right.”
It appears Klink completely ignores the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, where the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and explicitly told her she will give birth to a “son.”
“Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end,” the scriptures read.
Gabriel assured Mary again, “Therefore the child to be born will be called holy – the Son of God.”
Despite this, Klink believes rejecting her declaration that Jesus is transgender denies the divinity of Jesus altogether.
Klink said, “So, if you’re going to deny God as trans, I think you’re going to be denying the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I have some notes about that.” Further, Klink seems to believe Jesus’s life serves as evidence of a transgender nature, citing his tenderness toward women in his ministry and his remaining unmarried.
“When I say that later on it became clear gender wasn’t quite right, I mean it. We already know Jesus didn’t live life exactly the way your average first-century Judean man did,” she continued. “To the best of our knowledge, he didn’t get married. We don’t know for sure. He chose to teach and to engage with women in ways that were very unusual, that were not the traditionally masculine way that people might be behaving with each other.”
“And then Jesus died, and when Jesus was resurrected, Jesus was different. Jesus didn’t look like himself. There was something different about Jesus, and now I will admit the Bible does not tell us what that is,” she admitted. “So if anybody says they do know what that is, they are also not telling the truth, and I have some notes for them.”
“The Bible doesn’t tell us why it is that Jesus’s best friends, his disciples, the people who had walked with him to the end of his life, the people who buried him in the tomb when it was politically difficult, who were committed to him, still didn’t recognize Jesus for a good long time,” Klink said, ironically using male pronouns repeatedly to describe Jesus, who she is convinced is transgender. She ultimately concluded that Jesus’s resurrected body transitioned into his “true self” beyond gender.
“Now I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t there, but based on everything else I know about God, I have an idea. I think Jesus was resurrected as Jesus’s true self, which is beyond male or female. I think Jesus was not only transfigured. I think Jesus transitioned,” she said.
Once again, Klink is wholly ignoring another part of the Bible, where Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene in John 20. She did not recognize him at first and thought he was the gardener, referring to him as “sir,” the Greek word “kurios,” a grammatically masculine word referring to someone in supreme authority or a master — not a word typically used to refer to a woman.
The viral clip comes while similar theological battles play out in the Senate race in Texas. Democrat candidate James Talarico, a self-described Christian, has made unbiblical claims about Christianity, including doubting that Jesus is the only way to God.
His pastor and mentor Rev. Jim Rigby, head of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, has rejected a central event of the Gospel, stating during an Easter message Jesus may have not risen from the dead.
All the while, Rev. Babs Miller, a lesbian chaplain at the same church, doubted Jesus’s entire existence and said if he did exist, he certainly did not die for the sins of humanity.
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