A sermon delivered by an Episcopal priest at Christ & St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in New York City has drawn sharp criticism after video of the remarks circulated online.
Reverend Flourish Klink, who identifies as transgender and nonbinary, told the congregation that God is nonbinary and, in her view, transgender as well. She argued that Jesus was “assigned” male gender at birth in the same way transgender people describe their own births, and that this assignment was later revealed to be incorrect.
“Here’s why God is trans. When God, who as we have established is non-binary, was born in human form as our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary said, ‘Oh, look, a baby boy.’ God isn’t a boy. We have established this. God is beyond boy and girl. God was assigned a gender at birth, and later on, it became clear that that gender wasn’t quite right.”
Klink went further, telling the congregation that rejecting her characterization of Jesus as transgender amounted to denying his divinity. “So, if you’re going to deny God as trans, I think you’re going to be denying the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I have some notes about that,” she said.
In support of her argument, Klink pointed to aspects of Jesus’s life and ministry, including that he did not marry and that he engaged with women in ways she described as atypical for a first-century Judean man. She also cited the accounts of Jesus’s resurrection, during which some of his closest followers did not immediately recognize him.
“I think Jesus was resurrected as Jesus’s true self, which is beyond male or female. I think Jesus was not only transfigured. I think Jesus transitioned.”
Klink’s remarks have been criticized by some as inconsistent with scripture. The Gospel of Luke recounts the angel Gabriel telling Mary she would “bear a son” who would be called “the Son of the Most High” and “the Son of God.” In the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene, who initially mistook the resurrected Jesus for a gardener, addressed him using the Greek term “kurios”—a masculine term denoting a figure of authority.
The sermon has drawn attention amid broader debate within some Christian denominations over theology and gender identity. It also surfaces alongside separate controversies in Texas, where Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, who describes himself as a Christian, has expressed uncertainty about whether Jesus is the only path to God. Talarico’s pastor, Rev. Jim Rigby of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, has questioned whether Jesus rose from the dead, while a chaplain at the same church, Rev. Babs Miller, has expressed doubt about Jesus’s historical existence and rejected the idea that he died for humanity’s sins.
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