scapegoat

sermon by lay minister, alyssa kai

“This is another day, O Lord. I know not what it will bring forth, but make me ready, Lord, for  whatever it may be. If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely. If I am to sit still, help me to sit  quietly. If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently. And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly.  Make these words more than words, and give me the Spirit of Jesus. Amen.” 

Hi everyone! I’m usually in a back pew, up in the loft, or sick at home on the livestream, so it’s  really nice to share space with you today—much less speak to you directly. Before I begin, I want to thank all of you, for being my church; Heather, for the chance to speak; and my friend jay, for  helping me sort through my thoughts when the topic overwhelmed me. 

Today’s readings place us in a constellation of distances from God—in the wilderness, in the sound  of sheer silence, in the multitude, in bone-breaking mockery—and nowhere do I feel closer to God  than in Galations 3:28. “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”1 This line is what I want to speak  with you. I want to dwell with you in a vision of boundaries broken and brokenness healed. I long  to expound with you a pearl of wisdom from poet Julian K. Jarboe: "God blessed me by making me  transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that  humanity might share in the act of creation."2 Paul, who I wrestle and argue and beef with so often,  sent this beam of undisguisable love across two millenia directly to me and my trans siblings. I  want to bask, dream, and rejoice with you in God’s love that frees us, God’s love which dispatches  the strict binaries that bind our life, God’s love which throws open all prison doors and gathers  everyone into unending jubilee. 

I cannot speak with you about Galations today. 

Instead let’s voyage to the shores of the Sea of Galilee, where we will meet a man possessed. He  used to have a home, clothing, a community. Now, he is alone, nude, covered in scars and open  wounds where he has harmed himself. He lives, ritually unclean, among the long-dead, not far from  a herd of as many as two thousand pigs. More than once, his community attempted to bind him in  chains and shackles so he would not cause harm to anyone. But he could not be bound; binding  could not help him any more than it could contain him. When he broke free, did he flee solely at the demons’ whim? Did he flee in shame, or for his life, from a community whose only intervention on  his behalf was imprisoning him? Whether by his own actions, by the will of the demons, or by the  abdication by his community, Jesus finds him as one theologian said “dehumanized, animalized,  marginalized.”3 And suddenly, as so often happens in the midst of our suffering, before we know  how, or why, or what it means: here’s Jesus. The man recognizes him, who he truly is, what he’s  capable of, and he cries out (in the Greek) “what to me and to you”—perhaps “what business do  you have with me,” or “what have I done to deserve this,” or “why are you dragging me into this?” 

We could read this story dozens of ways. We could contrast this passage with its immediate  predecessor—the settling of the stormy sea—and admire Jesus’ power over both the natural and  supernatural4. We could focus particularly on Jesus’ unflappable calmness in both scenarios. We  could decide the man suffers from mental illness5; we could decide that mental illnesses are literal demons, and maybe so are parental disobedience, or autism, or transgenderism6. We could blame  the man for his pagan religion, or for some unnamed sin, which allowed the demons to more easily enter him7. We could praise the man as Jesus’ first apostle to the gentiles8. We could read a veiled  critique of the Roman regime, and celebrate the metaphorical self-destruction of the occupying  forces as the pigs charge into their lake. In other words, we could substitute “demonic possession”  for “colonial occuption.”9 We could retreat to celebrate a story of healing, ignoring the real corpses  floating in the water. We could even claim, as Aquinas and Augustine did, that Christians have no  moral duty to animals1011. All of these explanations suffer from the same terrible choice; we have so  many stories we could tell about someone else’s wretched suffering.  

Perhaps that’s the point. The philosopher René Girard focused on this passage specifically in his  1992 text The Scapegoat. Girard describes the possessed man liberated from chains yet captive  from madness, among the tombs yet alive, a collapse wherein “there is no longer any difference  between life and death, freedom and captivity.” He holds the man’s community responsible. They  tell Jesus to leave after the possessed man has been freed; whatever their direct reasons, economic  or sociopolitical, they have been deeply disturbed by the loss of their scapegoat, not his healing. To  Girard, the stones the man used on himself were the same ones the community might have used on  him otherwise. Alone or in community, his punishment becomes unavoidable, all chains and stones,  in what Girard calls the “scapegoat mechanism.”12 

In preparing for today, I thought of scapegoats, and I certainly cried for the demoniac. I also cried  for the pigs. In Girard’s view, Jesus sent the demons into the pigs to symbolically sacrifice the  crowd for the individual, rather than the one for the many, thus breaking the scapegoat mechanism  by inversion. This reading is not literal enough for me. I cried for the intelligent, social, friendly  animals who were forced to bear the weight of great evil. I imagined my life, bearing the mantle of  “ritually unclean,” being made an example of on the shores of Galilee. I imagined the pigs’ minds  overtaken by self-destructive impulses driving them to oblivion; and, I imagined them fleeing from  horrific pain the only way they knew how. Pigs can swim—on that day on the shore they were  forced, or chose, not to13. I cried for the scapegoats. I was reminded of my people. I cried for a  world not ready for Paul’s Letter to the Galations. 

I would submit that modern American political life has selected a few groups to be prime public  scapegoats. Among them are our undocumented neighbors, Palestinians, and transgender people. I  can only speak for one among these, and I do not mean to elevate my people’s suffering over any  other. But I asked Heather for the chance to speak today to try to convey just how bad things are  right now for us. 

Let’s trace a path in numbers. In 2015, 21 anti-trans bills entered state legislatures. Some of these  bills banned youth trans healthcare, criminalize drag, prosecuted parents or teachers supporting their kids, banned trans care for adults, restricted bathroom and sports access, banned drag performance  in public, or restricted schools from discussing gender identity at all. In 2016, there were 55; in  2017, 37; 2018, 30; 2019, 32. Then in 2020 there were 91, the most ever, roughly the same as the  past three years combined. In 2021, we saw 144 anti-trans bills enter state legislature; 18 passed. In  2022, 174 bills introduced, 26 passed; in 2023, 615 bills introduced including 40 first-ever national  bills, 87 passed; in 2024, 701 bills, 51 passed; and thus far in 2025, halfway through the year, 937  bills14. Ten times as many as 2020 already. 

For example: in 2023 the Utah legislation passed a ban on gender affirming care for youth, pending  a further report. At the time, Governor Cox described the bill as “pausing” treatments “until more  and better research can help determine the long-term consequences.” Because despite the clear,  peer-reviewed evidence affirmed by The American Academy of Pediatrics, The Endocrine Society,  The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and The Society for Adolescent Health  & Medicine, despite a small population of trans youth on hormones or hormone blockers15, despite  regret rates for surgical intervention around the 1 to 2% far lower than almost all elective  surgeries16, despite many millenia of gender expression beyond the binary, despite over a century of  modern trans healthcare, there is never truth enough for our critics. Utah’s report came out this year, and affirmed that youth gender medicine is a public good associated with positive outcomes; the  Utah legislature appears unlikely to act on it. According to Governor Cox: “there doesn’t seem to be an appetite to readdress it.”17.  

Laws follow rhetoric. As early as July 2022, the Trump campaign realized they could garner  excessive applause for demonizing pediatric gender medicine, trans healthcare for prisoners and the  undocumented, and trans women in sports or bathrooms18. A year ago, the gruesome “Kamala is for  they/them, president Trump is for YOU” political advertisements entered circulation; I hope you did not have to see them. Since inauguration, executive orders have referred to “the invented concept of “gender identity,”” “taxpayer funding of gender experimentation,” “ideologues us[ing] legal and  other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women,” “radical gender ideology to appease activists,” “endanger[ing], humilat[ing], and silencing of women and girls,” “force[ing]  Christians to affirm radical transgender ideology against their faith,” and, in reference to gender  youth medicine, “Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”19 Fox news aired 424 weekday segments  about trans athletes over four months—the number of trans athletes in this country can be, at the  highest estimate, around 100.20 I was one of them, over a decade ago in the midwest; it was pretty  bad, it boggles my mind how bad it would be now. The state of Florida has been allowed to  medically detransition trans prisoners under its care21. Lawmakers have routinely blamed trans  people without evidence for helicopter crashes and mass shootings22. A few weeks ago a trans  woman in Philadelphia, who I undoubtedly share friends with, suffered an acid attack at the hands  of a group of children. Children who were not born with this hatred; children who were taught. With state bans forcing young people into a body they know isn’t theirs, many of my people have become refugees in their own country, fleeing to states like Massachusetts, or—if they can manage—fleeing the country entirely. And the current senate budget reconciliation bill currently bans trans healthcare for approximately 275,000 trans people on Medicaid—myself included. I would rather not enter  menopause at 33, and thankfully that’s the worst I’ll face; but many of my siblings are faced with  the choice to detransition or die. That’s the point—to eradicate trans people from public life entirely. 

That’s all I had to report when I finished my draft last week. Then last Monday the president’s son  called trans people “the most violent domestic terror threat if not in America, probably the entire  world.” On Tuesday, a court temporarily allowed trans people to renew their passports with their  gender marker; our passports had previously been categorically denied. Last Tuesday night, the  administration ended a program of the 988 suicide hotline service which provided queer-focused  counseling for queer people via the Trevor Project. Trans people in transphobic societies are at  extremely high risk for suicide--that is the public health crisis here—and as a survivor who’s lost  many friends, this news stung intensely. I went to bed, woke up Wednesday morning, and the  Supreme Court declared Tennessee's ban on gender affirming care for trans minors, SB1,  constitutional. (The law still allows hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and surgical intervention for cisgender (non-transgender) children with a variety of conditions.) In the court’s view, SB1 does not discriminate care based on whether or not a patient is transgender; it simply prevents doctors from  treating gender dysphoria, the thing that transgender people get treated for, which is somehow  different. Justice Roberts affirmed SB1's goal to "protect minors from physical and emotional harm" by "encouraging minors to appreciate" rather than "become disdainful of" their bodies; in other  words, conversion therapy: protect them from being trans by making them not23.  

I am telling you all of this for two reasons. First: I frankly do not see an organized political body  who is ready to unilaterally defend us. Some liberal leaders have demonstrated only symbolic and  conditional support of trans lives; some are willing to abandon this scapegoat on the other end of  the culture war. The New York Times, for example, has repeatedly fomented, laundered, and  rebroadcasted a gender-critical voices, anti-trans talking points, and skepticism of the clear,  scientific, demonstrable reality that youth gender medicine is a good thing24. Their reporting has  been in turn cited in many court cases, including Wednesday’s supreme court ruling. When that  ruling came out, a Democratic leader called it "cruel," and then "an attempt to divert attention from  ripping away healthcare from millions of Americans."25 As if we, also, aren’t millions of Americans. These days I am often reminded of something someone once said about the words of our enemies  and the silence of our friends. 

But more importantly, I am telling you this much in the way that Luke tells us of the scars and  wounds on the Demoniac’s body—because God’s work of healing necessitates understanding the  illness. I want to affirm and remember with you what is is real, and what is true. I have no creed to  offer you, but I have a few things I can tell you. 

God blessed me with a fat, trans, and disabled body. Hormone blockers, hormone therapy, and  surgical intervention has saved my life, saved my friends lives’, saved my peoples’ lives. There is  an obvious, uncontroversial, manifest reality that transgender people exist and benefit from trans  healthcare at any any age. There are people who benefit from lying, from treating the truth as  controversial. They do this out of fear, out of revulsion, out of academic ambivalence, and above all because it gives them power. I pray for them whenever I can.  

It is not inevitable that trans people must be treated this way, not some unavoidable backlash nor  necessary consequence to so-called progress, anymore than it is inevitable that humans scapegoat  each other. To follow Jesus is to reject the inevitability of the scapegoat. We do not believe in a  good guy superhero Jesus who came here to cast out the bad guys. We believe in a Jesus who finds  the broken things and heals them. I was a miserable, suicidal child, and I was healed by God’s love,  puberty blockers, and exogenous estrogen. God did not ask me to change who I was or what I  needed; God was in the healing. And I and you and all of us are called to reject the inevitable seeming earthly things and cast our hearts and hands to deeper certainty. 

I imagine the man, formerly possessed, standing on the shore of Galilee as Jesus and his followers  leave on foot, or in boat, by a sea of corpses. The man turns back around and sees his community— we can only imagine their joy, or their fear, or something in between, at his transformation. As he  walks toward them I am reminded that many things are inevitable in this life, but welcome is not.  We do not get see the brokenness between this man and his community healed. We only know that  he told the truth about what happened to him as honestly as he could, so that people would  understand. We are in the position of his community today; we must choose to welcome. And we  can take heart that gender variance, gender trouble, is at least as old and as rich as the bible we hold  dear. We can hear it in the Song of Songs, the “labor pains” in Galations 4, women putting on  Christ’s body in Ephesians 5, the eunuchs of Matthew 19 and Acts 8, Jael’s fraught tale in Judges 4  to 5, the promise of Isaiah 56, in Joseph’s coat and in Deborah’s ways26, an infinite becoming in  every direction. What I am has not always been; something like me always has. I wish to move with you, the Body of Christ, through this challenging time to, as we like to say here, “God’s dream for  this world.” I hope we can carry each other across the need for a trans scapegoat that possesses us,  across the victimization and brokenness waged upon our neighbors, toward a world more less like  the Gerasene, and more like Galations. 

1 NRSVUE, my preferred translation, an opinion I’ve borrowed entirely from my friend jay, whom I love dearly.
2 Daniel Mallory Ortberg, quoting Julian K. Jarboe. 2020. Something That May Shock and Discredit You. New York:  Atria Books. 
3 Hughes, R. Kent. 2013. Luke : That You May Know the Truth. Wheaton: Crossway. p. 313.
4 cf “Lesson 37: Christ’s Transforming Power (Luke 8:26-39).” Lesson 37: Christ’s Transforming Power (Luke 8:26- 39) | Bible.org. Accessed June 9, 2025. https://bible.org/seriespage/lesson-37-christ%E2%80%99s-transforming power-luke-826-39.  
5 cf Born, Jane. 2024. “Demons and Diagnoses: Understanding Mark 5 and Mental Illnesses.” Sanctuary Mental  Health Ministries. April 12, 2024. https://sanctuarymentalhealth.org/2024/04/12/demons-and-diagnoses understanding-mark-5-and-mental-illnesses/.
6 cf Greenwell, Andrew M. 2025. “Oh Gender, Thy Name Is Legion.” Catholic Online. 2025.  https://www.catholic.org/news/hf/family/story.php?id=51873. 
7 cf MacArthur, John. Luke 6-10: MacArthur New Testament Commentary. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2011. 
8 cf Wright, T. (2001). Mark for Everyone. p. 57. 
9 McKenzie, Alyce. 2013. “My Name Is Legion, What’s Yours? Reflections on Luke 8:26-39.” Patheos.com. June 17, 2013. https://www.patheos.com/progressive-christian/name-is-legion-alyce-mckenzie-06-18-2013.
10 Spalde, Annika; Strindlund, Pelle (2012). "Doesn't Jesus Treat Animals as Property?". In York, T.; Alexis-Baker, A.; Bekoff, M.; McLaren, B. (eds.). A Faith Embracing All Creatures: Addressing Commonly Asked Questions about  Christian Care for Animals. Peaceable Kingdom Series. Wipf & Stock Publishers. p. 102.  
11 As a heavily junior biblical scholar, I can’t claim to have read through all of these arguments as thoughtfully as I’d  like, nor to have dredged up a representative sample through research. I relied heavily on the commentaries  collected by the website Precept Austin ( https://www.preceptaustin.org/luke-8-commentary#8:26) as well as some  sources found via Wikipedia—the last refuge of the too-tired. If you’d like to chat about the passage and your own  reading, or have a study bible you recommend, find me after service sometime. 
12 René Girard. 1992. The Scapegoat. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 167-183. I take issue with some of  Girard’s approach here; he makes some comments about the nature of religion and “Middle Eastern Cultures” that I  find inaccurate and unhelpful at best. 
13 Aaberg, Nathan. 2018. “Demons and Pigs - a Fresh Look.” Whole Faith Living Earth. August 20, 2018.  https://www.wholefaithlivingearth.com/demons-and-pigs-fresh-look/.
14 “2025 Anti-Trans Bills: Trans Legislation Tracker.” 2025. Trans Legislation Tracker. 2025.  https://translegislation.com/.  
15 Redfield, Elana. 2025. “Impact of Ban on Gender-Affirming Care on Transgender Minors.” Williams Institute.  January 29, 2025. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/impact-gac-ban-eo/ . 
16 Kidd, Kacie M., and Gina M. Sequeira. 2024. “Misinformation Related to Discontinuation and Regret among  Adolescents Receiving Gender-Affirming Care.” Journal of Adolescent Health, September.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2024.08.002 . 
17 “Trans Care Ban ‘in the Right Place,’ Gov. Cox Says Weeks after Utah Report Found Care Benefits Trans Youth.”  2025. The Salt Lake Tribune. June 12, 2025. https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2025/06/12/cox-utahs-youth transgender-care/ 
18 Contorno, Steve, and David Wright. 2024. “Pro-Trump Forces Flood Airwaves with Ads Attacking Harris over Past  Transgender Stances.” CNN. October 18, 2024. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/18/politics/trump-transgender attack-ads-harris/index.html. 
19 “2025 Anti-Trans Bills: Trans Legislation Tracker.” 2025. Trans Legislation Tracker. 2025.  https://translegislation.com/.  
20 “Fox News Aired More than 400 Weekday Segments Mentioning Trans Athletes over Just Four Months.” 2025.  Media Matters for America. June 11, 2025. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-aired-more-400- weekday-segments-mentioning-trans-athletes-over-just-four-months .
21 “Florida Judge Allows State Prison Officials to Withhold Medical Care for Transgender Incarcerated People.” 2025. ACLU of Florida. January 6, 2025. https://www.aclufl.org/en/press-releases/florida-judge-allows-state-prison officials-withhold-medical-care-transgender 
22 Yousef, Odette. 2025. “Trump’s Anti-Trans Effort Is an Agenda Cornerstone with Echoes in History.” NPR.  February 6, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5288145/trump-anti-trans-executive-order. 23 United states v. Skrmetti, Attorney General And Reporter For Tennessee, et al. No. 23-477. Argued December 5,  2024, decided June 18, 2025. 
24 Please confer the Open Letter to the New York Times, published Wednesday, February 15, 2023:  https://nytletter.com/ 
25 Schumer, Chuck. Tweet. June 18, 2025, 10:37 AM. https://x.com/SenSchumer/status/1935346196546990398.
26 Eds. Marchal, Joseph A, Sellew, Melissa Harl & Valentine, Katy E. 2025. Trans Biblical. Westminster John Knox  Press. Confer especially 14-20