In God's Image

Genesis 1:27 and Galatians 3:28

Excerpts from The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

October 12, 2025

By Rev. Nicole Lamarche

As you know I love reminding us that one of the oldest names we have for

God is Ruah, wind, breath so may we never get disconnected from our

breath… I invite you to breathe in peace, breathe out discord, breathe in

hope, breathe out despair…

As you are moved, let us put our hearts and hopes together in a spirit of

prayer. God of many expressions and many faces, God of all that is and

that shall ever be, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all

our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

“Lizards can change sex” she said boldly or something like that. I don’t

remember her words exactly because it was the 1990’s in the upper floor of

my high school. Beth was maybe the smartest person in our entire class,

with short wavy brown hair and round spectacles. She did not do sports

and she did not wear makeup or dresses. And also she also did not do

bras. Beth was just super-duper smart and a non-conformer and so well

you can guess what transpired when one day she wore a light-colored tank

top, with her now trendy again tattered jeans. For our small conservative

town, infused with Latter Day saints and Jehovah’s witnesses and

conservative Christians, it was just too much. Beth’s refusal to be forced

into an underwire framed box, almost did Mr. Gorman our Principal in. I

could still remember his flustered face. He informed Beth that she was in

violation of the dress code. She would have to cover up or change or go

home. Beth would remind us that the boys did not have to wear bras and

she would say things like the fact that gender was a construct and that

there are many creatures for whom sex itself changed, which is how she

said something like “Lizards can change sex.”

I understand now that the adults were threatened by this idea for a variety

of reasons. We had less language than we do now and all we could say for

sure was that some kids were just different, they were just really made that

way. We all kind of knew that. But the adults for a lack of awareness of the

reality of human diversity and for the fact that theologically, many were

taught and still are that God values the humans in a binary. Period. There is

male and female. Period. There is husband and wife. Period. And

furthermore, an interpretation of some texts in the Bible are used to say

that human beings, and certain family combinations beyond these do not

reflect God and are against God. So this is what I am speaking to today.

Whoever you are, you are created in God’s image, whoever you are,

however you are made, however you express. And then in June there was

an executive order proclaiming that the U.S. government will only recognize

only two sexes, male and female, and ending "radical and wasteful"

diversity, equity and inclusion programs inside federal agencies arguing

that this work to protect women because and I quote “eradicating the

biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of

their dignity, safety, and well-being.” As a woman I can say with certainty

that I do not feel attacked by that. There are 5,000 things I feel attacked by

and it’s. not that.

So it feels urgent to say: We are all made in God’s image. I love what we

heard from James Baldwin. “If the concept of God has any validity or any

use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot

do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” I believe that the presence that is

God is so far beyond our human understanding and so much in the natural

world does point out the diversity and the beauty in it. We are all made in

God’s image, human expressions of a Divine Mystery so far beyond our

comprehension and the way we get to have this human experience is from

a whole range of different expressions of flesh. In spite of what we might

have heard we are all on a holy spectrum. As Beth was saying, even in just

one part of the animal kin-dom there are female bearded dragons in

Australia who are actually males but they are fully functional females too

that mate with males. That’s just one little slice of the animal kin-dom.

Some cite passages like what we heard here in Genesis 1 or in Genesis 2

to point to a binary, saying that God created both male and female, but

many scholars and thoughtful people have pointed out that simply because

the energy of love, that is God, the life force started that way doesn’t mean

God stopped there. This is just the beginning. As as we say in the UCC,

God is still speaking …

And the passages that are more specifically about eroticism between

people of the same genders are widely confirmed to be about condemning

the exploitative, non-mutual, non-consensual practices of the ancient world.

I am talking about the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19), the

Levite’s concubine in (Judges 19) that for example are about sexual

violence. As one writer notes, “the injunction that “man must not lie with

man” (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13) coheres with the context of a society anxious

about their health, continuing family lineages…” There is lots of evidence,

cultural, historical and linguistic data, that just like now, in the ancient world

there was tons of diversity.

In the early Christian writings, each time we something in this category

addressed, it’s a list of vices (1 Corinthians 6:9, 1 Timothy 1:10), speaking

against once again exploitation, in this case, the practice of older men

sexually exploiting younger men, a practice called pederasty, something

common in the Roman Empire.

I would argue the bigger wisdom underneath, our takeaway now in

2025, as people of faith, is these are invitations to be intentional about our

relationships, even in our most intimate partnerships, a place to live out

love and mutuality and the fullness of partnership.

I think part of what was meant by this letter to the early Church when we

read this “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither captive nor free,

there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” I read

that to believe that those human categories fall away when we follow in

the Deeper Way, grounded in our God of love that is beyond all of our

categories fall away.

Communal Reflection

Did you grow up thinking you were made in the image of God?

Beloved of God, whoever you are, you are made in the image of God.

Amen.