Preaching That Affirms Sexuality with Rev. Dr. Sarah Travis
How can preaching help heal a church that’s been divided by conversations around sexuality?
In this recast from a Knox College book launch, Dr. Sarah Travis and a panel of ministry leaders explore how preaching might become a space for repair, honesty, and renewed connection. Drawing from Sarah’s book Remembering the Body, the conversation holds space for complex themes of affirmation, uncertainty, and the lived reality of diverse congregations.
About Rev. Dr. Sarah Travis
Sarah Travis is the Associate Professor, Ewart Chair in the Practice of Ministry and Faith Formation at Knox College and has been teaching at Knox since 2012.
Sarah is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Her primary areas of research and teaching are preaching, worship and the practice of ministry. From decolonizing worship practices to trauma-informed preaching, Sarah has published several books aimed at facilitating a conversation among Christians about topics that matter for the church today. She is a 2023 Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Teacher-Scholar Grant recipient, exploring how playful theologies can enhance the worship and self-identity of very small congregations.
Show Notes
Remembering the Body: Preaching That Affirms Sexuality
Debates about human sexuality have divided the church across denominations. The Body of Christ has been wounded by profound theological disagreement. Preaching can be a healing balm for those who have been bruised and harmed by these debates. This book asks the church to remember its own nature as a Body that has a baptismal identity rooted in the triune God. We remember the beauty and value of the human body and we remember that we belong to a baptismal community with a distinctive ethic. Sermons are an opportunity to refresh and heal a Body that has been broken by division. By affirming sexuality and the body, preachers can build toward an affirmation of all sexual identities while making space for those whose theology is not affirming. In recovering the body as a focus for preaching, this book argues for a more equitable and inclusive understanding of Christian identity.
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Transcript
[Introduction]
Welcome to the Ministry Forum Podcast where we believe that you are not alone in your ministry journey. I'm the Reverend John Borthwick, your host coming to you from the Center for Lifelong Learning at Knox College here, we connect, encourage and resource ministry leaders all across Canada in the joys, the struggles and everything in between. I love that I get to do this work, and most of all that, I get to share it with each and every one of you. So thanks for giving us a listen today. Whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting out, this podcast is made with you in mind.
[John Borthwick]
Today on the Ministry Forum Podcast, we're featuring a recast of a special event that was held at Knox College in May of 2025 the book launch for Remembering the Body: Preaching that Affirms Sexuality by the Rev. Dr. Sarah Travis. The event featured a panel discussion with colleagues responding to Sarah's work, and we're so very pleased to be able to share that conversation with you here on the podcast. Sarah Travis is Associate Professor and the Ewart chair in the practice of ministry and faith formation at Knox College. She is also an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Her body of scholarship is remarkable in its range. Her books like Decolonizing Preaching, which brought post-colonial theory into conversations with homiletics, to Unspeakable, which explored trauma-informed approaches to the pulpit, to Metamorphosis, which re-imagined the church's identity after Christendom. In each case, Sarah has pushed the field of homiletics into territories that matter deeply for the life of the church today. Remembering the Body continues that trajectory.
The book begins with a candid acknowledgement. Debates about human sexuality have divided the church across denominations, and the body of Christ has been wounded by that disagreement. But rather than retreating into polemic, Sarah offers something different. A homiletic. She argues that preaching can be a healing practice for communities that have been bruised by these debates. And the book invites the church to remember two things at once, the beauty and value of the human body and the church's own nature as a body with a baptismal identity rooted in the Triune God. What's striking is that Sarah doesn't draw a line and demand everyone stand on one side of it. She builds toward an affirmation of all sexual identities, while also making space for those whose theology is not affirming. It's a book about Confession, repair and reconciliation, and it trusts the sermon as a place where that work can begin. In the panel discussion, you'll hear Sarah in conversation with several panelists from the wider church exploring the themes of the book and what they might mean for ministry leaders navigating these questions in real congregations. Here's the book launch for Remembering the Body held at Knox College way back in May 2025
[Sarah Travis]
As much as we don't like to talk about it, most of us have the experience of being broken. Life experiences and trauma shatter us in 1000 ways, conflict and illness and pain tear us apart until we no longer resemble our whole selves. Sometimes a good friend comes along and literally puts us back together. How do they do it? How do they transform us from broken bodies into whole beings. With a mixture of compassion and direct speech, they remind us of who we are when we have forgotten. They literally re-member us telling us that we are fully known and fully loved, telling us that our brokenness is not permanent or inevitable. What is broken can be repaired. It can be remembered, be put back together, and our broken bodies and hearts do not return to some former state, but instead are transformed into something new. This book is meant to do the work of a good friend that reminds us who we are as a church and the body of Christ, and what we might become if we are put back together. I perceive that the church has been torn apart by sexuality, by our failure to remember who we are and to whom we belong, by our fear and discomfort and shame. By our odd interpretations of Scripture and our lack of compassion for those who are different. This book was written for preachers who already lean toward inclusion and affirmation, recognizing though, that we preach in diverse settings. In any congregation, there are people who identify as LGBTQ, there are those who adamantly hold traditional views, there are those who hold progressive views, and perhaps most prominent are those who land somewhere in the middle. Central to this book is the way I define the concept to affirm. To affirm is not only to celebrate sexuality in all its forms, it is also to make space for those who wonder and struggle. While this book explicitly argues against theologies of hate and exclusion, which cause intentional harm. It does not intend to push those who wonder and struggle out of the conversation. If we are to be affirming, we must make space for those who wonder and struggle. I personally could not have written this book from anything other than a progressive perspective, but I do question whether this book leaves enough room for those who exist in more traditional spaces of theological inquiry. It is not customary to critique one's own book at a book launch. But I do want to say that this is only the beginning of a conversation and that must continue if the body of Christ is to be remembered. It occurs to me that those of us who preach affirming sermons, no matter how sure and certain we are about our theological correctness must wonder and struggle alongside those who are not so sure. Even alongside those who are very sure that we are wrong. This approach to preaching is intended to help heal divides, and I believe it will do so, but to do so is not to push and pull people into submission. Instead, we are invited to journey together. There is not enough respectful conversation among those of different theological persuasions on this matter, there are too few opportunities to be in conversation about Scripture and experience among those who disagree about the sacredness of queer bodies. I talk a lot about my own shame in not preaching affirming sermons sooner, but I do not talk about my shame and discomfort about not listening well enough to alternative perspectives. My point is that to be affirming is in its essence, an exercise in inclusion of various voices and perspectives. The body cannot be remembered without dialog, and the body cannot be remembered unless all are invited into the conversation. This I do not know how to do, but ironically, writing this book about affirming preaching has me thinking a lot about those who are not affirming, and recently, I had a conversation with a more conservative friend who reminded me that I have not listened well enough. But maybe, just maybe, if we remember that we are all bodies encased in flesh who live and love and breathe and hurt, belonging to one body, maybe we will find common ground. Thank you.
[Karen Pozios]
Hi, if we haven't met before, I'm Reverend Karen Pozios. I'm a minister in Mississauga Dixie, Presbyterian Church. I'm also engaged in our Camping Ministry in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. I love this book, and I would even if Sarah wasn't my friend. And. Um, because I'm always bugging her and everybody else I know who writes for the church to actually write for the church, for the church that is doing this work. I appreciate every scholarly treatise you've ever made me read here at Knox College. They're all very good for me, and they have informed my theology and my preaching and my work. But we need things we can plug and play. We need things that we can take and do because we're doing it. The place where those conversations are happening are churches like mine that are incredibly diverse, where so many different beliefs and understandings are coming together because we reflect Mississauga in every way, in age, in stage, in background, in race, in sexual orientation and gender expression, and we're always not certain how it works to be together. And so this works, the talking about especially baptism and the vows of baptism, and what those mean. Those are things I can do, and that I think I have been doing, but maybe not leaning into. And I see words in here about communion as well that I think will be very teachable moments for the whole community of welcome, of understanding that at the base, God intends for us to love everyone. I also love the last three the last sermons that you put in. They're fantastic. And I think that with crediting them, they could honestly be read and used in worship or for study, for Bible study. So this, to me, is a book that is meeting the church where it is and where it needs to go, and giving us things that that we can do and use. I think the work of that you're doing at the college is hugely important for training and teaching, but for the rest of the church, we need books like this that can actually help people to keep doing what they need to do every Sunday and all the days in between. I was sharing with Sarah earlier this morning, I'm getting calls like I did last week, saying I'm reading the Bible and it hates me, and then I have to go and where are the words for that? Was I taught those words? I'm not sure I was always taught those words, but this book has some of the words that we can share. And those experiences, I'm not being dramatic, those are real experiences people in our churches are still having. They believe everything they've read, but they don't know how to read the Bible in a way that affirms them as being children of God, and that's what we're supposed to do, I think, thank you for the book.
[Konnie Vissers ]
Thank you, Sarah. I'm Konnie Vissers. I'm a minister in the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and I am sessional faculty here at Knox, and this book was very surprising to me in very positive ways. I assumed rightly that it would be a book about affirming sexuality in the church, about the diversity of sexualities and gender identities within local congregations, but there were a few things that surprised me. One of them was Sarah's utter humility in how she frames her whole argument. If you've been involved in any conversations around sexuality in the church, humility is not the first word that I would think of that comes to mind, there are very strong opinions on all sides. And I say all sides because there are not two sides. There are many. I love this quote from the book she writes, “As we interpret the gospel as preachers, we have an opportunity to invite, rather than demand, accompaniment on the journey toward healing, building trust with congregations is essential to preaching that affirms sexuality,” and I think that represents the book as a whole. She gives a very self-aware understanding of where she is coming from and how that affects her own preaching, and how it affects how she interacts with those from the LGBTQ community. Another thing that surprised me about the book is some of the resources you drew on. One of the authors that she. Draws from is Brian Cunnington, who is an evangelical minister and professor. He studies biblical interpretation and recently wrote a book called, can you remind me? Open Wide the Gates, and it's a biblical interpretation, a theological interpretation for LGBTQ inclusion, but that's one of the resources you drew on, which very much surprised me, because she actually looked at quite a gamut of scholarly resources that address LGBTQ inclusion from very distinct and different points of view, biblically, theologically, practically, and I do I would agree with your own critique in one sense, I guess my question for you is, how do we have those conversations? Personally, I come from a family of origin where one of my siblings is gay and identifies with the queer community, and another is Indigenous and identifies with the Indigenous community, and I find myself as a white liberal, educated individual, and how do you enter those conversations where there are more than one individual who have been marginalized by the church, who have lived out what it means to be oppressed and enter into those conversations with that humility that you present in the book, without saying, I have the right answer. And so that's something I really struggle with, personally and you present a way forward in that, and that's just utter humility walking into the conversation. And I appreciate that about the book. The other thing I would say about the book is that it assumes a certain level of understanding on the part of the reader. This book is for those who are already at least in the middle and trying to navigate what it means to practically engage with those who have diverse sexualities or genders, who are in your congregation. And I wonder what books you might recommend to get people to the middle, if they're not in the middle yet, if you have come across any in your research, because the middle, I would say is most of our congregations, but having served in three rural congregations in Ontario, I've heard people say things like, I've never met somebody yet. And so how do you have those type of conversations with real people who are being humble, who just don't know. Maybe haven't encountered anyone. I mean, they probably have, anyone who is openly part of the LGBTQ community. So I would love to know if you've come across any resources in that way.
[Linda Endicott]
Hello. My name is Linda Endicott, and I'm a student here at Knox College in the MDiv program. I want to qualify everything I say by telling you that I was asked yesterday afternoon to take the spot. So I obviously haven't had a chance to read the book, but I was a part of the discussions going into in the writing process, so I do have a pretty good inkling of what's going on. So my reflections from yesterday afternoon till today are I was remembering being here at Knox College early on in my journey here, and being in chapel and listening to the preacher who was and is in this room, but he's from this college so and he was preaching away, and I don't remember anything else that he said, but these words about Presbyterians, which is more known as the frozen chosen. And like you or some of you, I chuckled a little bit along, because it’s kind of a funny thing. And then I sat there and wondered about that. Like the image of a group of people in a room frozen, quite frankly, was terrifying to me. So and then I kind of wondered about the implications of that in you know, a group of people who are doing the work of Christ in this world, and a group of people who, if you're frozen, may be dead to themselves and dead to the world. I'm not judgmental here, by the way, was just reflecting on this. But in terms of this book and where the churches, the Presbyterian Church, is at today, as far as I understand is, I think we're beginning to thaw out. As more and more of the church body are starting to thaw out and or maybe even refusing to be frozen in the first place. I think we're experiencing maybe what I call an awakening, or coming into awareness of ourselves and others, of our fleshly solid, yet mostly liquid beings. So Dr. Travis, my friend Sarah over there, calls this Remembering the Body. And the definition of remember is to know again. And she uses it in the sense of knowing our own bodies, being aware of ourselves, and also as a metaphor for the body of the church, as Paul does in First Corinthians, one body, many parts. So a consequence of the frozen chosen is that we have forgotten as we have focused on our rigid rules and judgments about who can be in and who can be out, and about what certain people can do based on who they are and what they look like. So we became frozen in our attempts to freeze out parts of ourself, parts of our body, by denying and ignoring the parts that we don't like or understand, but just as a thing, I don't know if you eat steak or whatever, but if you take a steak out of the freezer, it thaws from the outside in, and those of us who have been on the outside have found our voices and our identity in Christ, and we're helping in speaking by helping the church body to remember whose we are and who we are.
So I want to tell another quick story about, well, that came to mind about when I was 16, I lived in Kingston, Ontario, and I played hockey, and I was with my friend Scotty on Lake Ontario, on the waterfront in Kingston, Ontario, and we were skating along with our hockey sticks and a puck passing it back and forth, and I sent the puck way ahead of Scottie, and they scooted off to catch it, and then disappeared in front of me. And what happened was that in big lakes like Lake Ontario, the ice breaks at different times, and parts of it sink while parts of it rise, and in the sunken part, it fills in with the water from below, and Scottie scooted right into a puddle about four feet deep, and it took a bit, gratefully, she had a hockey stick, and I had a hockey stick and but between us, we couldn't get her out, because every time she went to go up the chunk of ice or she'd slide back, and some other people came and helped to haul her out. But by the time we got her out, she had had frostbite, and close to hypo being hypothermic. And fortunately, in Kingston, the hospital is right across the road from the lakefront. And so we got her there, and they took all her clothes off. And not that I saw this, but they took all her clothes off and wrapped her in blank head. And it probably took, like, four hours before she could not shiver. I thought about that too, and I thought that, you know, the solution, the way of healing from the trauma of hypothermia or frostbite, is to, well, get out of the cold immediately. So get out of the circumstance and remove the wet clothing, and to warm up gradually. Like to take your time to let your body come to terms with what happened and to thaw out. So in recovering from hypothermia is you drink warm, sweet liquids. So in my mind, this is like I looked that up, by the way, the definition, how do you recover from hypothermia? And that's the list. And I was thinking, it's just like us. We're frozen, we have been frozen, and we're thawing, and we can't do it quickly, like if you try to stick your frozen your frostbitten fingers into hot water. It's excruciatingly painful, and doing it slowly is still painful, but it's healing, and that's how I think of what we're up to in the church, and what this book brings. It brings us a way, like a method or ideas, to warm up slowly. To take time to respect each other, and the process that it's going to take for us to know our humanity in each other, to see our humanity in each other. So there you have it. My bit on your book, excellent work.
[Sarah Travis]
Thank you, all of you, for your creative and insightful thoughts. I want to respond to Konnie. I have not listened enough, and so I do not have good suggestions about how to get to the middle. So you've just identified my next piece of work that I need to do. But as you were speaking, I mean I said at the beginning, I don't know how to have these conversations. I don't know where to start. But as you were speaking, I was thinking about this idea of being embodied. I was thinking about a conversation I had with a friend not so long ago, where we were both crying, and I think we have these conversations with tears. Sometimes they're tears of shame for what we have done or not done. Sometimes they're tears of shame for who we are. Sometimes they're tears of frustration because we are so angry and irritated at other people's thoughts and positions. Sometimes they're tears of connection and happiness, where we find those moments where we relate to each other. Sometimes, I mean, there are tears of confession, and that's especially relevant for the church, which has made a confession to LGBTQ+ people. If we start with the tears, we start in a vulnerable place. And I think we need to be vulnerable to have these conversations. Too often we are we are not vulnerable. We are the opposite. We are girded up and armored up, and we need to cry first, and then we can have these conversations.
[John Borthwick]
Thanks for joining us on the ministry Forum Podcast. We hope today's episode encouraged you and reminded you that you are not alone in ministry. If this episode resonated, tell someone, please don't keep us a secret. And if you can subscribe, rate or leave a review wherever you listen, it helps. Helps us reach more ministry leaders just like you. And honestly, it reminds us that we're not alone either. Find more resources and ways to connect at ministryforum.ca and follow us on social media @ministryforum, until next time, may God's strength and courage be yours. May you be fearless, not reckless, may you be well in body, mind and spirit, and may you be at peace.