Lutheran Seminary Holds ‘Glitter Ash Wednesday’ Chapel to Honor ‘Queer and Trans Siblings’
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, is one of the main seminaries of the decrepit and apostate Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). In 2023, the school had a yearly endowment of $48. 5M and 121 students, nearly all of them goatlings headed to hell.
Yesterday, the seminary held a Glitter + Ash worship service, linking to a primer on Queer Virtue, which states:
Glitter is an inextricable element of queer history. It is how we have always displayed our gritty, scandalous hope. We make ourselves fabulously conspicuous, giving offense to the arbiters of respectability that allow coercive power to flourish.
Glitter+Ash is an inherently queer sign of Christian belief, blending symbols of mortality and hope, of penance and celebration.
Naturally, this event prompted both positive and negative feedback from current students and alumni.
The pushback also resulted in a statement from Chapel Director Dr. Christian Scharen, who explains:
“We are offering traditional ashes, the result of burning palms from a previous Palm Sunday, mixed with cosmetic-grade glitter, for the imposition of ashes. Our offering of this service is in deep alignment with our status as a Reconciling in Christ Seminary, and with the recent LSTC Board-approved faculty statement supporting our Queer and Trans siblings in the current culture of hostility in our nation. Please do reach out for further conversation as I am not on social media.”
During the service, the Dr. Karri Alldredge explains the purpose of the event:
It is an important act, especially on Ash Wednesday, that we take a moment to name that harm has been done to our community around this service. It’s an important practice that we begin engaging here to publicly name when harm is done against marginalized communities and especially our queer communities who just had to witness last night in very public, political, social ways the attempts to erase and demonize, especially our trans and non-binary siblings.And so, in the process of naming, also calling us to reaffirm our commitment to one another as the body of Christ, our commitment to queerness, to queer theology that says spaces like this are beautiful gatherings of community where we get to try new things, where we get to examine traditions, theologies that we have always held as fact and truth
often truth for those who are in power.
To ask, what does it mean to expand our theologies, to expand our understanding of God in this space that we will carry out into other spaces to ask, for whom Ash Wednesday? Well, a reminder of the cross is often sometimes doubly a reminder of shame and sin put upon queer communities.
What does it mean to hold stardust, to hold glitter, to hold resilience of queerness alongside the solemnness, the importance, the cherished space, the solemn space of Ash Wednesday within our community.
So I ask that we continue to recommit ourselves as we move into this Lenten season to publicly affirming our queer siblings, our other marginalized siblings, and that we work to stand with one another in our collective work towards justice, God’s love and that we do that today in wearing, in imposing our glitter and ash. Thank you.
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To summarize their crafty statements …
“The commandments of God are unjust, unloving, hostile, and grievous”
The grace of God is perverted into permission and license to sin, and sin is considered something to be celebrated. They are among those condemned from long ago (2 Pet. 2:3, Jude 4)