Rev. Flourish Klink is a priestess at Christ & St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church who calls herself ‘Father Klink.’ Self-identifying as “non-binary trans,” she uses they/them pronouns.
Along with her role as priest, she’s the co-chair of the Greater New York Area Episcopal Trans Task Force., a member of the diocesan Liturgical Committee, its Editorial Sub-Committee on “Psalms for All People” and “Prayers for All People,” and was a Trinity Leadership Fellows 2024 cohort.
This past March, in a sermon unearthed by Protestia sister-site The Dissenter, she gave a sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where she explains:
Teaching about the realities of life as a trans person. I spend a lot of time arguing against proof-texts, those little bits of the Bible that people use to claim that God agrees with their transphobia. I spend a lot of time introducing people to the basics of trans theology, helping them understand why the Hebrew Bible is not as anti-trans as they might think.
…God is non-binary—but I’m going to go further than that and say that God is trans….When God, who is non-binary, was born in human form as our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary said “Oh, look! A baby boy!” But God isn’t a boy. We have established 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.
So if you’re going to deny that God is trans, I think you’re going to be denying the divinity of our lord Jesus Christ
She concludes:
When I say that “later on, it became clear that gender was not quite right,” I mean it. Jesus didn’t live life the way your average first-century Judean man did. To the best of our knowledge he didn’t get married, and he chose to teach and engage with women in ways that were very unusual. Then Jesus died and was resurrected, and when Jesus was resurrected Jesus was changed. Jesus was different. Jesus did not look like himself. There was something different about Jesus.
Now the Bible doesn’t tell us what that was. The Bible doesn’t tell us why it is that Jesus’s best friends, his disciples, the people who had walked with him to the end of his life, the people who buried him in the tomb, still didn’t recognize Jesus for a good long time. I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t there. But I have an idea. I think Jesus was resurrected as Jesus’s true self, which is beyond male or female. I think that Jesus was not only transfigured. I think that Jesus transitioned. And I think that when the disciples met Jesus they were astonished because they were seeing who Jesus truly was.
