You Are The Image Of God

What does it mean to be fully, courageously yourself — and what does the first poem in scripture have to say about it? On the first Sunday of Pride Month, we explore the audacious claim at the heart of Genesis 1: that all of humanity — across the infinite spectrum of who we are — is created in the image of God, and called very good. But first, Deuteronomy warns us: don't shrink God into an idol in the shape of a man or a woman, because God is bigger than all of that. The same God who transcends our categories is the God who blesses every variation within them. Drawing on the Hebrew poetic tradition of dualisms — day and night, water and land, male and female — we discover that the most life-giving places are always at the shoreline, at the sunset, where things meet and mix and become something new. That's not a departure from the image of God. That is the image of God. Woven through the exegesis is a personal story: what Jonathan learned about being his truest self — a boy who didn't fit in every locker room but fit perfectly in his own skin — from siblings who modeled the courage to be exactly who they were. What happens when the people closest to us have the courage to be themselves? They give us permission to do the same. And when the whole community of creation shows up as its truest self, we finally get to see the full image of the God who made us all very good.