Feeling That This World Is Not Enough

Reflections on the Lectionary for the Third Sunday of Pride Month

Photo by Avinash Kumar on Unsplash

This week we continue our Pride Month series, which is focusing our interpretation of the lectionary texts for the month of June on the questions brought to bear by queer biblical interpretation. We’ve already seen how queer biblical hermeneutics can disrupt our usual patterns of interpretation and bring awareness to the ways the church has been on the wrong side of questions of gender and sexuality. And we have also seen how kinship and belonging can happen by choosing family, and how the biblical text records a number of instances of that happening. This week, in the lectionary for June 16^th, I want to focus on one of the most exciting aspects of queer theory—futurity, or thinking about the future—and how it can help bring new understanding to this week’s texts.

As I have said a few times already this month, queer biblical interpretation is about much more than simply looking for queer characters in the biblical text. People in the ancient world held a variety of genders and sexualities just like we do in the modern world, but the norms and customs of the time have obscured many of those lives from our view, and a book like the Bible can’t be expected to preserve very much evidence of them (though there is some, as we will see in the weeks to come). But because of the way queerness has been suppressed and hidden over time—through the imposition of all kinds of societal norms and standards—one of the big focus areas of queer theory has been the interrogation of norms themselves. Queer theory helps us see the ways our lives are sneakily structured by the hidden norms of religion, culture, politics, family, capitalism, race and ethnicity, and of course gender and sexuality. Even those of us who conform to those norms without much fuss are probably not always very aware of how much they hem us in and control our lives.

Because of a research project I’ve been working on for the last 18 months or so, I’ve been paying special attention to one corner of queer theory that has been working to illuminate and then undermine one particular set of norms. A pair of books came out about 20 years ago that has reshaped queer theory (and many academic disciplines beyond it): No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive by Lee Edelman which was published in 2004, and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz which came out in 2009. I first encountered these books in my work with a doctoral student, and they have captured my imagination ever since. They are both books about the future, and they think about the future in sometimes similar and often very different ways. And both of them dwell on the question of flourishing.

Edelman’s book hums with energy and righteous anger. It’s a thoroughgoing critique of the ways we always seem to place flourishing in the future, and especially the ways we postpone flourishing into the future as the special possession of someone Edelman calls “the child.” “The child” isn’t any particular child, but it stands in for children generally, and the way we blithely assign them full agency and full standing in society while forsaking the flourishing of people who are living their lives today. We’ve all heard the handwringing “what about the children” or “do it for the kids” stances, and Edelman notices the ways those future, abstract lives often get more of our attention and resources than the present, actual lives of people in the world right now. Edelman was writing out of the immediate experience of the AIDS epidemic, in which the flourishing of millions of people—many of them gay men—was stripped away and forsaken. He saw the way no one was willing to expend political or monetary resources to help AIDS patients, who were usually coded as gay or criminal or both, and marginalized in various ways. Then Edelman juxtaposed that lack of action to the energy being spent on hypothetical future kids, which is almost always a popular political stance. (Edelman wrote his book before Roe v. Wade was overturned, but consider how much the rhetoric about abortion falls into precisely this pattern that he’s describing, with the rights of potential future children overriding the health and safety and autonomy of actual living people today).

Muñoz’s book came a few years later, and it’s both an agreement with Edelman and a response and rebuttal. I think Muñoz essentially agrees with Edelman’s diagnosis of our culture and society, but he has a dramatically different response. Muñoz focuses on flourishing as a future possibility, as a horizon toward which we can make progress, and he thinks of flourishing as a quintessentially queer gift. Muñoz opens his book with a claim, on the first page, that “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough,” and so the gift and the work of queerness are to diagnose and to heal—to reshape the world so that it comes closer to enough-ness. This, I think, makes Muñoz’s work especially amenable to theology, although I don’t think that’s at all how he intended it. “The thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough” is as close as I’ve ever heard to a synopsis of what Jesus meant when he talked about the “kingdom of God,” with its radical inclusion, revision of the status quo, and hidden forms of flourishing.

In the two decades since those books came out, lots of responses and challenges and agreements have emerged, and the conversation has moved onward from there. My particular interest in queer futurity comes from the question of reproduction, and the norms that surround it. Muñoz asks in his book, “can the future stop being a fantasy of heterosexual reproduction?” A number of other scholars have taken that question up. Jack Halberstam in particular has written about the norms of heterosexual reproductivity that govern our lives—the ways reproduction is presumed culturally and encouraged by policy, but also the ways it constrains all of us, even the ones of us who feel no friction with the expectations of reproduction. I’m currently working on revising a paper I gave at a conference not too long ago, to get it published as an article. The paper reads the story of the Prodigal Son as a parable of heterosexual reproductivity, and I’m finding that people like Edelman, Muñoz, Halberstam, and Sarah Ahmed are perfect conversation partners for interpreting that parable. Ancient people, including Jesus and the gospel writers, were aware of the constraints put on us by norms and normativity even two millennia ago, and that awareness shows up in texts like the parables of the Gospel of Luke.

In the lectionary for this week, we can see glimpses of the logics of “the child” and heteronormative reproductivity, and we can therefore catch sight of queerness as “a manifestation of a ‘doing’ that is on the horizon, a mode of possibility…imbued with a sense of potentiality,” as Muñoz puts it in his book. I’m thinking in particular of Mark 4:26-34 and 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13, both of which point to questions of futurity and flourishing. Although they are very different texts, the Mark and the 1 Samuel passages both rely on a structure that’s laced with norms and assumptions about the future. Both place flourishing in the future, and both traffic in the rhetoric of “the child,” as Edelman puts it, albeit in different ways.

In 1 Samuel, we find a scene of political turmoil and theological intrigue. Saul has been deposed as king over Israel, and even “the LORD was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.” God sends Samuel to the home of Jesse, with the promise that among Jesse’s sons was the future king of Israel, Saul’s replacement. Jesse, as it turns out, has a lot of sons—eight in all. (Notice how conditioned you are by the norms of heterosexual reproductivity to marvel at Jesse for having eight sons; even if we don’t buy into patriarchy, likely most of us are impressed). The stage is set for a generational shift; already the former king is set to be replaced not by someone his own age (Jesse), but by one of Jesse’s sons. Note that in 16:4, it’s the elders of the city who are most afraid, perhaps because they sense that power is about to pass to a new generation. But the norms of primogeniture were still operating, and Jesse sends out his sons for review in order of birth, from oldest to youngest. The text does not specify this order in 1 Samuel, exactly, but it becomes clear when cross-referenced to 1 Chronicles 2:13-15 (though there, David is Jesse’s seventh son, not his eighth, and two daughters are mentioned). In 1 Samuel, much is made of the obvious suitability of Eliab, the eldest, but the LORD insists that appearance and height should not be the criteria by which the new king is chosen. (Fair enough). The parade of sons continues until they run out, and it’s only then that the existence of an eighth son is revealed—David. David, the reader is told, “was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome,” even though we had just been told that appearance was unimportant. As the youngest, still just a kid, David hadn’t even been invited to the meeting with Samuel, but he ends up anointed as king and successor to Saul. This part of 1 Samuel seems choppy to me; even though he has been anointed king, the next sections (where David plays the lyre for a Saul who is descending into confusion and anger, and the conflict with Goliath) keep this new status a secret, or don’t presume it at all. We are told that the spirit of the LORD left Saul and an evil spirit (also from the LORD) entered him. Saul is left to suffer while the young David racks up attention and accomplishments.

Where is flourishing in this story? Where does God’s presence and spirit produce life? Flourishing certainly doesn’t seem to be present in the life of Saul, who is abandoned and then tormented by the same God who had previously elevated him. Flourishing doesn’t seem to belong to David’s seven elder brothers or two sisters, who were all passed over, or to anyone in Jesse’s generation. Flourishing is placed in the hands of David, who receives it despite not having done much of anything yet to deserve it. This passage follows the pattern of futurity identified by Edelman, investing flourishing in the figure of a child. It both moves toward the horizon described by Muñoz, a “doing” on the horizon that shows up as a kind of queerness in the world, and it forsakes the past and the present in the way described by Edelman, leaving Saul to torments and madness as David reaps unearned sovereignty.

My intent here is less to endorse or condemn either Saul or David or anyone else, but more to point out how the observations connected to queer futurity help us see things in the text that we might not otherwise have seen. Probably most of us have heard this story of David’s ascension to the throne as an elevation of the least and lowest—the kind of thing the God of Israel always seems to be doing. But any investiture of favor is also a denial of favor to someone else—just ask Esau, or Gideon’s brothers, or Cain, or the millions of LGBTQia+ folks shunned by churches over the years. Who do we reject when we elevate someone else? What do we forsake when we place our flourishing only in the future? What is it like on the underside of God’s favor?

The passage from the Gospel of Mark is a familiar one. It’s about seeds—one of Jesus’ favorite topics, and a stand-in for “the child” of Edelman and a kind of hopefulness placed in the future. This passage begins with someone scattering seed on the ground, despite not fully understanding where the growth comes from. The earth, we are told, knows how to give the growth even if we humans do not.

Then Jesus turns the conversation to the queerness of one special kind of seeds, mustard seeds. “With what can we compare the kingdom of God,” Jesus asks—which might be like asking how can we describe “that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough,” as Muñoz puts it. Jesus continues, “It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” Mustard seeds are not, in fact, the smallest of all the seeds on earth, and it’s debatable whether mustard plants are the greatest of all the shrubs, but the point stands: from something very small comes something pretty large, and that large thing becomes a shelter and a home for the world.

What can we see in this story by reading it with queer futurity? I can imagine a few different answers. To begin with, we can notice that once again, as in the story of David’s anointing, this parable is placing flourishing in the future and not in the present. Here, Jesus is asking us to imagine the future life of a sprouted seed, rather than the current life of other plants, or the life of the plant which grew the mustard seed in the first place. The focus is on the future and the life that will unfold then and there, and not on the present. That might be neither good nor bad, but it's something that gets highlighted when we read this text through the theoretical lenses of queer futurity.

We can also notice the attention to norms that is part of this parable. The structure of 4:31-32 underscores how much the mustard plant is violating our expectations; the smallest of seeds becomes the greatest of shrubs. That’s contrary to the way our minds would have predicted the world; we expect big and important things to come from other big and important things. But here, the expectations are being thwarted, and the norms are being inverted. What’s important here might not be what we usually say it is—that flourishing can be found in unexpected places. What’s important might be the observation that in the case of the mustard seed, the predictive powers of our normativities have failed us, and we need to recalibrate what we think we know and how we think we know it.

Returning to the world of here and now, where all kinds of norms structure our life and thought all the time, this is a valuable reminder. Even though we live in a world of expectations structured by norms like heteronormativity, cisnormativity, patriarchy, white supremacy, and classism, to name a few, those norms should not and do not predict flourishing. There are many ways to love, have a family, live in a body, move through the world, and relate to other people, and many or most of those ways resist or defy (or “queer,” to use a different kind of active verb) the norms we have been conditioned to expect and respect. The world is always more than we suspect, and as Muñoz says, “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough.” I think Jesus would have agreed, and he would have held up a mustard seed to prove the point.