Luke 6:20-31
All Souls Day
November 2, 2025
Williamstown, MA
Scripture: Luke 6:20-31
Last weekend Amy, my wife, Allegra, our daughter, and I saw an art exhibition of Kent Monkman’s paintings at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Monkman is a First Peoples Canadian queer artist whose work upends and subverts the classic western narrative which has done much to erase indigenous culture. His paintings have layers of meaning beginning with anti-colonialism and its multiple dimensions and sexuality, particularly gender identity. His art reclaimed native identity from the traditional colonial western romanticized version. His work also challenged the typical dualistic, binary, framing of the world: white western and indigenous, men and women, straight and gay, body and spirit. His paintings confronted contemporary power, including law enforcement and the church. In essence, Monkman through his paintings told a new and different story.
Many of his paintings were mash ups drawn from classic painting genres and compositions. An example was his painting Sunday in the Park.
Monkman drew upon the work of Albert Bierstadt, a German American painter from the Hudson River School. Bierstadt’s paintings of the American West in the last half of the 19th century romanticized its landscapes which spurred people to settle it. This painting, “Yosemite” is an example.
He also referenced Georges Seurat’s 1884 painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte.” Seurat captured an idyllic afternoon among people who appear to be generally well-off and quite proper.
Drawing upon Bierstadt’s backgrounds and Seurat’s afternoon idyll, Monkman reclaimed the land and the indigenous people’s narratives from colonialism. He made his point that the land has always been that of the indigenous people before white people drove them off their ancestral land in response to the painters who romanticized the American West’s wide-open spaces.
Monkman created Miss Chief Eagle Testickle as his alter-ego. She was the lone figure painting the people in their idylls. By having Miss Chief be like the painters who romanticized their depiction of native people, he took control of the narrative.
Emanuel Leutze intended Washington Crossing the Delaware to inspire Germany’s 19th century liberal political reform by grounding it in the American revolution. The painting with Washington standing and a diverse group of soldiers depicted heroism and a united democratic front.
Monkman’s painting “Resurgence of the People” is one of two paintings in a diptych entitled “Wooden Boat People.” The title, “Wooden Boat People,” referred to the name that the native people gave to the Europeans who sailed across the ocean to occupy the New World. This painting reclaimed an old story to create a new one.
“Resurgence” drew upon Leutze’s painting. Miss Chief Eagle Testickle’s pose was reminiscent of Washington and modeled after the Statue of Liberty. “Monkman described the painting as a conversation between ‘arrivals and migrations and displacements of people around the world’ and Indigenous generosity.”[1] The people in the boat were indigenous people saving the white westerners. By subverting the traditional narrative that the indigenous people were savages, he told a different story.
Monkman packed a lot into Miss Chief, both in the name and the image. Miss Chief was gender-fluid not androgynous. Miss Chief appeared in many paintings in this show. Monkman depicted their actions in ways that could conform to traditional male roles and traditional female roles.
Maybe the Holy Spirit was lurking in the gallery. At one point, the cumulative effect of Monkman’s works got me thinking about life and death and this service.
Though he did not portray the church with a high regard, I’m not sure if he was aware that his persistent subversion of dualism was consistent with queer theology.
Queer theology erases dualism. Gender identity for example is far broader than man and woman. Queer theology goes far beyond accepting gay interpersonal loving relationships. Queer theology also erases the dualism of life and death.
It rejects the body-spirit dualism to favor of an embodied spirituality in which the physical body is holy and that death is the end of a unique, embodied life. Though it acknowledges life’s finitude, it emphasizes a livable and just life in the here and now, rather than a future life of eternal peace.
Furthermore, death is not one event. Queer theology acknowledges that oppression and persecutions have caused premature deaths through physical abuse and erasure and that resurrection is the triumph of the body over oppression. Thus, a queer theologian would believe people experience death and resurrection throughout their entire mortal lives.
A queer theologian would emphasize the here and now aspect of sermon on the plain. These beatitudes were not promises for people after their mortal lives end. They were promises for now,
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
Jesus told them that the kingdom of God is here on earth. He described how in the actions at the end: “Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who asks of you, and if anyone takes away what is yours, do not ask for it back again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Furthermore, the woes would come in this world, too, for those who oppress and persecute.
Living, then, is not simply sentient life. It is living by the spirit. Living with resilience against oppressive societal definitions. Living is subverting harmful and oppressive narratives and stories to claim our power to write and tell our own stories.
We invoked that spirit this morning when we told of our loved ones who died. Though their mortal life ended, their spirit lives in our memories and the stories which formed us to be who we are today. Furthermore, we can take the oppressive stories of the past and write them anew as our own stories of peace and justice born of love.
