Welcoming Transgender People Into the Church

Early in the Old Testament, in the Law, there’s a statement about who is allowed into the temple to offer sacrifices. Religious leaders through the ages have interpreted these words in ways to exclude eunuchs, people born intersexed (with ambiguous genitalia, about 1 in 3,000 births), and what we’d call transgender people today. This is what the Law says:

For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles. - Leviticus 21:17-20

But, in conversation with itself, the Bible shifts the story in Isaiah 56, when the prophet casts a vision of the ultimate reality of what God’s holy people look like. The key ingredient is "to love the name of the Lord” (Isa 56:6) and then there is this specific words to eunuchs (who had been excluded from the temple):

…to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters.- Isaiah 56:5

Jesus picks up this conversation a few hundred years later, extending the arc of this trajectory towards inclusion. In a discourse on marriage (which was considered the ideal social state of the day), Jesus rifts on the place of eunuchs in the kingdom of God. He names three types of eunuchs, which seem to capture some of the variance in the transgender community today. He speaks no negative word about them, but instead lifts them up as examples to his disciples. He says:

For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it. - Matthew 19:12

So how how you thought about sexual minorities who typically have experience exclusion in our culture? How do you feel about this idea of the Bible being in conversation with itself? If this is the arc towards inclusion of all peoples in the kingdom of God, what is your role in joining with Jesus in this sort of renewal of all things?