(Here is something a bit different from the poetry I blog. It harkens back to my days of preaching. Maybe the thought on Thursday of Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday brought it on. — R.E.D.)

James Pennington, senior pastor, First Congregational UCC, Phoenix, AZ speaking from the pulpit to his congregation this past March, said (to paraphrase), “You may be taken aback by my use of the word queer. You see, I am queer…but…then…so are you; each of us is queer in some way.” After the momentary awkwardness, we all had a good, hearty laugh.

To start, everyone was thinking that he was speaking about being gay in what some would consider a slang or disparaging way. Many see it as pejorative. It certainly is not a word one would expect to be uttered from the pulpit.   However, we knew he was speaking about himself in a literal sense, because he is openly gay.

But he was using the much older definition of queer, that is “strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different.” He was making a play on words to help us understand that in our peculiarities, we aren’t so different from each other and therefore in no position to judge each other. His broader use of the word put us all in the same boat.

It was a gotcha moment, a good, gotcha moment.

A symbol of the universal church is a boat. We, in the church, are all on God’s boat weathering the storm-tossed seas of life. We hold onto each other and trust God to carry us through.

Jesus made use of the ancient concept of Kingdom, which today we would call “Realm.”

I thought about how Israel was called to be a “holy” people. The word means “peculiar.” The people of Israel weren’t to be like the people around them; they were to live as God’s children, not children of the world and they were to be a light unto the world.

Jesus called that holy living, that peculiar living — living in the Kingdom of God. For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was different from the kingdom of the world. The Kingdom (Realm) of God was characterized by trust, justice, peace, mercy, forgiveness, agape (sacrificial) love of all unlike the fear, selfishness, oppression, greed, divisions, hate and wars of the world’s kingdom.

I have to admit my idiosyncrasies, which, when I am honest, remind me that I am just one human among all other humans.  And thanks, in part, to Rev. Pennington, I know I am queer, a queer straight; I am a peculiar person like all the peculiar people sitting in the pews that day. Our personal peculiarities keep us humble.

In the biblical sense of the word peculiar, I am a passenger on God’s boat weathering the storms of this world with my fellow peculiar (holy and idiosyncratic) passengers and, at my best by the grace of God, I am living in God’s Realm with the living spirit of Jesus guiding me to live that justice, mercy and peace for all, for in the peculiarity of Jesus, we know that we are all God’s holy children.

Happy Holy Weekend.