One Coin Found
Reviewed by: Brandon Smee
Summary
Rev. Emmy Kegler’s book One Coin Found: How God’s Love Stretches to the Margins is a meditation on an LGBT pastor’s relationship with Scripture. The book’s central idea can be summarized in the opening line of the final chapter: “I have come to love the stories of Scripture because I was found by love first” (173). Kegler reads Scripture in conversation with her own experiences, and through that conversation she discovers God’s love for her and learns new ways to think about difficult parts of the Bible and her life. Most of the book’s ten chapters open with autobiographical vignettes that set each chapter’s theme. The body of the chapters then moves between Bible stories and life stories.
The book follows Kegler’s spiritual journey from childhood to the present. In the first chapters, Kegler relates her childhood experiences with religion, sharing how her nurturing parents and open-minded church invited her to develop a serious faith even in her early years. The second chapter hones in on her distressing experience of feeling different from her peers and how discovering her LGBT identity led her to identify with times when Jesus suffers or is isolated in the Bible. In the third through sixth chapters, Kegler addresses a number of subjects, including her alienation from churches as an LGBT woman, what sin is, discovering her call to ministry, and the rekindling of her love for Scripture. In the final chapters she explores how her understanding of faith and the Bible has evolved, ending on an exploration of the love she discovered through her engagement with Scripture.
What Rev. Kegler is Doing
Kegler, Emmy. One Coin Found: How God’s Love Stretches to the Margins. Augsburg Fortress Publisher, 2019. 200 pages. $18.99. ISBN: 9781506448213.
Where many popular LGBT Christian books tell their readers the how-to’s of apologetics or biblical interpretation, Kegler shows rather than tells. Her book reads more like a memoir than a devotional or guide. Yet in between her retelling of life experiences, Kegler brings in stories and sayings from the Bible and explores the resonances and tensions between her life and the texts. Reading the Bible alongside her experience gives her new ways to understand troubling texts. For example, in Chapter 8, “Unknown”, Kegler relates how she struggled at first with the prominence of Paul’s writings at her Lutheran seminary. Paul’s prominence was troubling for her since many churches that bar women and LGBT people from ministry cite Paul’s letters as justification. But then her supervising pastor suggested she treat Paul like any other person in her church and to learn to love him by learning his story (141).
Kegler takes us through her process of reading Paul’s story in Acts and finding bits of herself in his life. She learns to relate to Paul as a fellow Christian, recognizing their mutual passions, limitations, desires, and shortcomings. In this way, Kegler comes to read Paul’s expressions of outrage through her own anger at churches that hurt and reject people. She does not let Paul off the hook for incorporating harmful ideas from Roman culture into his writing, but she understands that weakness within Paul’s own insistence that we all rely on grace. She comes to read Paul as a conversation partner.
As Kegler shows the reader her conversations with the Bible, she draws on insights from Bible scholars and theologians to introduce her readers to ideas and resources she found helpful in her process. Readers more familiar with popular books on LGBT-friendly readings of Scripture will recognize the ideas and scholarship she cites. For people new to this field, I imagine they would want to further familiarize themselves through the “Suggested Further Reading” section at the back of the book, which presents a robust list of resources for people who may want to go deeper. In all of this, Kegler is presenting a resource that focuses less on introducing LGBT Christian apologetics—arguments for why LGBT people belong in the Christian family—and more on how reading and meditating on Scripture can become a restorative part of an LGBT Christian’s spirituality via her own experience. Kegler is gentle in that she does not exhort her reader to adopt new spiritual habits or start a reading plan, but each chapter of the book shows how one can be “found” in Scripture and in the love of God by reclaiming the Bible’s meaning within one’s experience.
Reading Scripture as a Conversation
As someone who resonates with elements of Kegler’s story - her childhood interest in religion, her encounters with charismatic spirituality, her reconstruction of faith later on as an LGBTQ+ person- I find her approach to creating space for LGBTQ+ Christians to engage Scripture compelling. Some writers resolve the tension between LGBTQ+ lives and Scripture too superficially; dismantling the “clobber passages” may not give people a sufficient framework to experience Scripture as a place where God expresses God’s love. Yet, Kegler does want to move to something more settled than a “hermeneutic of suspicion;” she wants to love the Scriptures (105, 112). Kegler’s love for Scripture is not an uncritical acceptance or apology for texts of terror that have been used to oppress people. Rather, it is an affirmation of a commitment to live in conversation with the Bible, allowing it to be a relationship marked by passion and mutual knowing.
In effect, Kegler’s book offers a vision for relating Scripture to one’s experience as a way of learning to love the Bible as a marginal Christian. Kegler demonstrates this early in the book, narrating how experiences of isolation and difference in childhood connected her to the stories of Jesus in the gospel accounts. Seeing her suffering in light of Jesus’ suffering changed her understanding of the Bible stories and how she thought about her experience: her difference identifies her with Jesus. Within that conversation between her life and the Bible, Kegler experiences God’s love and mercy toward her in myriad ways. Kegler presents a way of practicing Christianity that is at once traditional in its refusal to be parted from a life of prayer and meditation on the Bible, and revolutionary in its insistence on leaving no stone unturned in the Bible and no question unasked regarding faith. Her book is an exercise in living and finding God within the tension.
My Recommendation
One Coin Found personally makes me want to read the Bible more. Through her story and experience in conversation with tradition and scholarship, Kegler offers a vision of how Scripture can come to be a generative part of the spirituality of LGBT Christians and allies. Her work goes beyond many popular pieces in LGBTQ+ Christian literature in reimagining how we relate to the Bible. She models reading Scripture with different assumptions than inerrancy or verbal inspiration. People strongly attached to those ideas may find her book unsatisfying. But Kegler’s approach recognizes that the difficulty an LGBTQ+ person may experience with Scripture and with Christianity is not limited to a handful of verses and doctrines. We are wrestling with experiences of difference, isolation, shame, misunderstanding, and trauma. All these factors affect how we engage with Scripture.
Kegler models a dialogical approach to reading Scripture: an approach that looks like a conversation between the readers and the text. Bible stories can offer commentary on our lives, and our life experiences can help us read texts and hold their meanings in new ways. This approach recognizes that people from different social locations read texts differently and find different meanings in them. Meanings and interpretations are diverse. Kegler’s approach to Scripture relies on a particular idea of canon, that the Bible is a collection of texts the community has recognized as authoritative because God shows us who God is when we read them. This is different than saying the Bible is authoritative because it’s what God said or because it tells us only true facts. Rather, it says that the Bible is authoritative because we come to know God and experience God in the process of reading it and learning to relate to the characters, stories, and thinkers inside it. Kegler is not offering a pro-LGBTQ+ reading of Scripture that holds on to inerrancy. Rather, she provides a vision for Biblical spirituality for LGBTQ+ Christians and allies with roots in older traditions.
In light of that, I would recommend this book to LGBTQ+ Christians who want to find ways to reconstruct their faith in light of their experiences and who want to find ways to read the Bible that nourish them spiritually. I would also recommend it for women, allies, and other marginalized people who have often had the Scriptures wielded against them. Kegler presents a constructive vision for how marginalized Christians can reclaim the Bible and reclaim their relationship with God, and she offers vocabulary and insights that can help people understand their experiences. I think this book could be appropriate even as an introduction to LGBTQ+ Christian literature, yet I expect that Kegler’s book will resonate best with late teens, young adults, and adults. Overall, I find One Lost Coin to be a compelling meditation on one LGBTQ+ pastor’s journey with the Bible that may help others engage the Bible in new ways as well.