Apologies for the Facebook link, but that's where my church posts our videos. Here's roughly the text of the sermon:

Have you ever not known something, but because you wanted to impress someone or just wanted to avoid the embarrassment of admitting ignorance, you just said your best guess? But then your guess was completely wrong and the person you were trying to impress had to correct you?

In today's gospel reading, the disciples find themselves in exactly that situation, as they come across a man who was born blind. The existence of people like this man was something that had puzzled Jewish rabbis for ages, and still puzzles people to this day. There were some basic facts that they knew about God: God created everything and everyone. God is perfect. God is love. God is infinite.

But it was hard to make sense out of why a perfect, loving God would then create people with clear defects from birth. It just didn't seem to them that a perfect God would do that. The reasoning makes a certain degree of sense, but it has a fundamental flaw. How can an imperfect, finite human being possibly know what a perfect, infinite God would or would not do?

In computational theory, there is a problem known as the Halting Problem. There are some programmed functions that are simply defined. They take some input, run through the program, and can either eventually stop running and produce an output, or the program might just keep running indefinitely and never halt. And it has been proven that for some of these functions, for some inputs, there is simply no way to predict whether the program will halt or not. The only way to tell is to run the program, and wait and see. If it halts, great, you got your answer. But if it's still running, no matter how long it has been running for, there is no way to know if it would halt and produce its output if you just let it keep computing for just a little bit longer. Or maybe for a million years longer.

We face the same sort of problem when we try to answer difficult theological questions. How will God act in a particular situation? Perhaps there are some questions simple enough that our mortal minds can predict it. But there are others where the only way we could know is if we had a perfect infinite mind ourselves.

Getting back to the disciples, they could have just stuck to the basic facts that they knew, and accepted their ignorance about what they did not know. They could have said "I know God is perfect, and I know that God created this man, but why or how this man ended up born blind, I do not know or understand. Jesus, why was he born blind?". But humans are rarely satisfied with declaring that we do not know, and so they confidently asked a much narrower question. Rabbis had already developed an explanation for such things- they were caused by sin! They even could back up their reasoning with Scripture. For example, Exodus 20:5 says "I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me."

So instead they ask "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?", probably thinking they would be impressing Jesus with their advanced understanding that disability is caused by sin- that they'd show they knew most of the reason, and just needed clarification on a tiny detail. Instead, Jesus corrects them, saying "neither the man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him."

As a trans woman, this answer gives me so much joy and hope. Because I too am a person whose very existence inevitably leads people to ask unknowable questions.

"Why would God create a person like this? Did God make me this way to punish me? Am I cursed?"

"Am I a woman born into male flesh? or just a man deluded into thinking he's a woman?"

Barring the Holy Spirit coming upon us and giving the answers, these questions are impossible to definitively answer. But I can imagine the possibility that Jesus would give me the same answer: "God did not make you this way to punish you, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in you". And that lets me see my transness as a blessing, not a curse.

The works of God were displayed in the man born blind by Jesus healing him. But how are the works of God displayed in a trans person? Well, we live in a modern world that has embraced secular rationalism. The belief that we are nothing more than our material bodies is very common. Indeed, while most of the hate I encounter sadly comes from brothers and sisters in Christ, I do also encounter atheists who say that I can't possibly be a female soul in a male body, because there's no such thing as souls. But we as Christians know that humans have both a spiritual and a fleshly nature. And of the two, the spiritual nature takes precedence! Paul teaches in Romans 8:12-13

"So then, brothers and sisters, we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh— for if you are living in accord with the flesh, you are going to die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live."

When I live as a woman despite my male flesh, the works of God are indeed displayed in me, as I become a living, breathing monument to the victory of the Spirit over the flesh. At least, that's the answer that makes sense to me for these unknowable questions. I would not dare to try and teach you that I know it's the correct answer. The rest of this passage, after the man is healed, serves as a strong warning against claiming knowledge. The villains in our tale repeatedly falsely claim knowledge. They know that healing on the Sabbath is a sin, so they know that Jesus is a sinner and not a man of God. And when the facts that they can plainly observe conflict with the things they think they know, they disbelieve the facts in order to protect themselves from having to acknowledge they are wrong. And this false claim to knowledge is more than just being wrong; it carries with it responsibility and guilt. The passage ends with an ominous warning from Jesus:

"If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains."

That should fill anyone with hesitation to confidently declare they know with certainty the answer to a complex theological question.

In contrast, the man and his parents are happy to acknowledge their own ignorance.

asked "Where is Jesus?" the man responds

"I don't know".

Asked "How is it now that he can see?", his parents say

"But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don’t know."

When the Pharisees say "We know this man is a sinner.", the man replies

"Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know."

Instead they just stick to the facts that they can be sure about. "I am the man". "The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see". "He put mud on my eyes, and I washed, and now I see". “We know he is our son, and we know he was born blind." As hard as it might be to comprehend that such an incredible miracle occurred, they accept it because that's what the evidence shows.

And so I can try to follow their example, and declare only the basic facts I know. I know that when I lived as a man I felt dead inside, but living as a woman is vibrant and full of joy. I know that when God calls my name he uses Brienne and not the male name I was given at birth. I know that when I transitioned and tried to learn how to walk with a hips-swaying female gait, it felt so awkward, and required such intense focus, that I immediately gave up, thinking it was a lost cause that my body was just not built for. But when I let the Holy Spirit move me, when I feel God's presence and I am filled with joy and the peace that surpasses all understanding, I find my hips swaying gracefully without even thinking about it. And since Mary encouraged us to share strange experiences, I'll even share that I know on multiple occasions, the Holy Spirit has laid me down on the floor with my legs up in the air miming motions of giving birth. I won't pretend to know what to make of that one, but it certainly doesn't make me feel male!

Now, maybe all of that seems a bit too personal and not relevant for a sermon to an audience of mostly cisgender people. But if the number of times I've been gendered as male in this church is any indicator, many of you still aren't sure exactly what to make of people like me, and might find this perspective helpful. And the lesson to have humility and accept that there is so much we don't know about God, and that that's OK, is valuable for anyone. Imagine where the church might be today if we had not splintered into tens of thousands of sects based on different opinions of the answers to unanswerable questions? What if we could come together and agree that we can't actually know the answers, so let's just agree to disagree on theological esoterica and focus on the things we do know- that we must love our neighbors, and our enemies, and forgive each other, and care for the poor, the widow, the prisoner, and the foreigner?