Who gets to exercise spiritual authority? Who has permission to minister and speak on God’s behalf? These questions are as important today as ever. Many claim to be God’s servants or messengers, and the ones we affirm say a great deal about who we are as Christ-followers. As religious people, we want our communities to be bounded, orderly, and safe. We want to be in control.

For these reasons we might sympathize with the characters in today’s readings. In Numbers, God poured out God’s Spirit on 70 elders, selected by Moses, who “were seized with prophesying and did not stop.” Trouble started, however, when two late-comers were also seized by the Spirit and began prophesying outside the gathering. The ruckus led Moses’s protégé, Joshua, to cry out, “Moses, stop them!” 

In the Gospel reading, we have a parallel story in which John takes Joshua’s place as the nark, complaining to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone using your name to expel demons, and we tried to stop it since this person was not part of our group.” Here again, followers of Israel’s God were concerned about those who claimed to be acting in God’s name yet did not belong to the chosen few. 

Two things are striking about this reading. First, scripture has a way of capturing human nature that transcends time. How often have we suspected signs and wonders performed by those outside our own traditions and communities? How often have we looked askance at those who claim to understand and experience God differently than we do? We want to certify, classify, and control God’s movement in the world, and in doing so reveal that we are actually controlled by our own insecurities and fears. 

A second striking thing is Moses’s and Jesus’s responses to their followers. Those closest to God are neither worried nor insecure, but welcome disruptive outpouring of God’s Spirit and mercy. Moses, for example, chastises Joshua. He is not concerned about his own loss of authority but instead wishes that “all of G-d’s people were prophets! If only G-d would bestow the Spirit on them all!” Jesus, likewise, tells the disciples to not impede those doing good in his name, since “Anyone who is not against us is with us. The truth is, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not go without a reward.” 

In Ana Ester Pádua Freire’s commentary on Mark for The Queer Bible Commentary (Second Edition), the Brazilian queer theologian contrasts successful theologies/theologies of success with theologies of the fracasados/fracasada theology. The first, she explains, uses hegemonic power to privilege dominant social, sexual, racial, and gendered groups while silencing and excluding nonconformists. Successful theologies attempt to domesticate faith as a front for traditional notions of order and respectability. Fracasada theology, on the other hand, is a theology of failure stemming from those considered failures by the church and world. It belongs to those who are “not caught up by the norm” and have failed to live up to what is understood as “normal, natural, pure, and holy” (292).

Pádua Freire contends that Mark is a Gospel of the fracasos – the disasters, the mess-ups, the messy ones. The multitudes that follow Jesus are out of control, pushing him around with an unsettling urgency that demands his attention. Jesus, too, becomes a fracaso, living as a scourge to the establishment and dying as a failed messiah. The book itself, finally, is a fracaso “that comes from the invasion of the gospel by a multitude that disturbs the traditional and hegemonic religion” (297).

We might see today’s readings as the stories of fracasos who speak and minister on behalf of God, not in spite but because of their outsider status. If anything, these passages teach us that the God of Israel – the God of Jesus Christ – cannot be domesticated and does not require authorization from any religious authority. God unsettles us through the gratuity of grace, and those who find God in the fracasos can rejoice in the manifold ways that the divine disrupts our world.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a worldwide drag community of “queer and trans nuns” who “take vows to Promulgate Universal Joy and Expiate Stigmatic Guilt. We are here for our community to foster hope, creativity, and wellness!” The prophetic group began in 1979 to organize for gay rights and call attention to the hypocrisy and cruelty of anti-gay church leaders. 

In the LGBTQ community, members are known as effective organizers, educators, and fundraisers in the struggles against HIV/AIDS, mental illness and suicide, racism, substance abuse, and homelessness. Though a secular organization, the sisters are committed to values that reflect Jesus’s own, such as “community service, ministry and outreach to those on the edges, and to promoting human rights, respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment.” Because the sisters parody the traditional dress of Roman Catholic women religious, they routinely draw criticism from Christians who question their good works. In 2023, for example, the Los Angeles Dodgers decided to honor the sisters at its annual Pride Night, then withdrew its invitation after national backlash from conservative Christians before finally welcoming the group back again to receive an award. 

In spite of constant suspicion and vitriol from believers, the sisters continue the important work of ministry among LGBTQ people that many Christians intentionally avoid. For more on the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, read Melissa Wilcox’s Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody.

Image description: Rectangular folk art painting diagonally divided between images of heaven and earth. Heaven above has a blue background; earth below has a brown background with buildings and colorful plants, trees, animals, and people. Covering the painting are anthropomorphic clouds blowing in every direction and small figures with long black hair and flowing white robes flying around helter skelter. In heaven are phrases such as “Don’t miss heaven” and “Better world.” On earth are phrases such as “I see the sights of the wonder worlds” and “My faith looks up the thee.” The white edges of painting read, “I HAD VISIONS SINCE I WAS TWO YEARS OLD VISION OF EARTH QUAKES NEW DISEASES PLAGUES OF THE LAST DAYS EMANATIONS BEING HIJACKED BURNING FOREST MORE IMAGES OF VISIONS OF OTHER WORLDS BEYOND.

This work by Howard finster is colorful, chaotic, unpredictable, and unpolished, a fracasado style that mirrors the uncontrollability of God’s Spirit in heaven, on earth, and among messy human beings. Howard Finster, the painter, understood himself as a visionary prophet who was scorned by mainline Christians and society. His artistic and spiritual genius is still being discovered today.

Who are the Howard Finsters and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in your life? Where have you found God working in places and among those you thought God would never touch? What would our spiritual lives and collective communities be like if we celebrated and cooperated with prophetic ministries outside the comfort of our own institutions, beliefs, spiritualities, and practices?