God seems to have a little hobby of renaming people at dramatic points in their lives.
Jacob’s grandparents Abram and Sarai became Abraham and Sarah after God visited them to tell them they would have a child. Many centuries later, Jesus renamed Simon as Peter and called him the rock on which the church would be founded. And Jacob, in our reading today, becomes Israel after a long night of wrestling with a mysterious being.
My idea of the way God creates the world is that God does it through speech and song. I’ve kind of absorbed, deep down in my soul, the first chapter of Genesis, where God creates the universe by saying “Let there be light” into the void of chaos that existed beforehand, and let there be sky and waters and land and plants and animals. And in the part of my mind and soul which create the mythology underlying my theology, I’ve added images from some fictional creation stories—in particular, Ursula LeGuin’s islands of Earthsea being raised from the waters by the word of a divine being and JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth being sung into existence by God and angels. And then to that mix we add the first words of the Gospel of John—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
So in my mind, all of Creation is a cosmic word which God is speaking—STILL speaking, actively, not a word which ended after the legendary seven days of creation or when the Bible was finalized. All the truth of the universe: past, present, and future, are contained within that Word God speaks.
And names are part of that Word as well.
The prophet Isaiah reminded the people of Israel that God called them by name, and John tells us of Jesus as the Good Shepherd who knows the sheep and calls them by name.
God knows us in our entirety, all the things we know and don’t know about our selves—everything we love, hate, or are indifferent about. It may be that to God, a person’s name conveys the fullness of that person—their needs, their hopes, their challenges, their joy.
I could spend my time with you today telling you about the challenges and hardships of being a trans person—in general and in an American social landscape which is becoming more and more difficult to navigate with anything resembling safety or security. I have a whole presentation about the challenges we face and some ways allies can help us with those challenges, which I’ve already given for St. Clare’s and for St. Paul’s Brighton and would be happy to share with others.
And God knows, the trans community is facing a terrifying time in this country. Various localities are trying to legally define us out of existence, restrict the medical treatments we can receive, and force us to hide these fundamental aspects of our identity. The propaganda alone is enough to create a slow simmering atmosphere of potential violence and fear that could pop up anywhere, when all we want to do is live our lives safely and freely.
Or I could spend my time theologically justifying our existence. I could remind you, as Austen Hartke, Patrick Cheng, and other queer theologians have done, that even though our Genesis creation story speaks of God creating humans in male and female varieties, Genesis was written in stark binaries for literary reasons. There are, after all, many things NOT named in Genesis which exist in real life—sunsets, swamps, opossums, mushrooms.
But to tell you the truth, I’m pretty tired of being on the defensive. I don’t want to spend my time with you talking about my fears or justifying trans people as beloved children of God. I’m going to assume that if you’ve come to a service for Trans Day of Visibility, you follow the news well enough to know that we’re in some trouble, and that you’re on board with the deep theological work the Church did before General Convention adopted resolutions supporting us in 2018.
I want to tell you about how I’ve found being trans to be a joy. I want to tell you why it has been a blessing.
I wouldn’t say I was WRESTLING with God like Jacob did on that night by the river, but my ordination process involved a great deal of wrestling with my own mind and spirit. And it involved a great deal of vulnerability and exposure—it’s not really accurate to say I was allowing myself to be known by God. God knows us in our entirety already, as part of that great Word of Creation being ever-spoken. But I did have to allow myself to become aware of some of those aspects of myself which were hidden from me and known to God.
What I had to wrestle with—am still sometimes wrestling with, to be honest—is that God knew—already knew! all these things I hid and hated within myself. All the things I saw as cloaked with shame and wrongness. And God loved, and loved, and loved, until I had to admit that they were there. And that they were real, and that they were me.
There is more than a little terror in realizing that God loves the things we hide. There is more than a little challenge in realizing, in a society designed to make us feel never good enough, that God’s love makes the idea of worthiness completely and forever irrelevant. Whether we deserve it or not, God loves us and calls us by name.
My gender transition is one way of claiming that love for myself—that’s the part that feels like Jacob wrestling God. Holding on, stubbornly, knowing that I’m not going to come out of it unscathed or unchanged, but also knowing that the chance to claim that transformative aspect of God’s love—God’s blessing for me—is one way in which I love God and bless God in return.
I do think of the fear, and of the danger. But I also think of Jacob, given his identity as Israel, given his blessing, limping across the river at sunrise, going home to a new life with a new name. And I remember with Jacob that blessings in their fullness are no guarantee of safety, only of love. And I know deep in my soul that to cling to this blessing, to hear my name the way God will call me, is worth all the risk and struggle.
The Rev. Toby Darrah
Genesis 32:22-30
3/30/25
Transgender Day of Visibility
Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Detroit, MI