A New York City Episcopal priest declared Jesus transgender in a recent sermon and said denying that claim rejects his divinity.
Reverend Flourish Klink delivered the message at Christ & St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, telling the congregation that God is non-binary and “actually also trans.” Klink, who considers herself a transgender nonbinary individual, framed the claim as central to Christian belief.
Breitbart reported that a viral clip of the sermon captured Klink equating rejection of the idea with rejection of Christ’s divinity itself. The remarks arrived as similar progressive theological fights play out elsewhere in American church and political life.
Klink built the case from modern gender language, not from the plain sense of the texts she referenced. She told listeners that people assign a gender at birth based on what they see, then later learn that assignment was wrong.
She put the framework onto the birth of Jesus in direct terms.
Before quoting her, note the core claim she advanced from the pulpit:
“God is non-binary. God is non-binary, but I’m going to go further than that, and I’m going to say God is actually also trans,”
Klink continued:
“And now let’s get on the same page here. When we trans people are born, folks assign us a gender based on what they see. Then, when we’re old enough, we realize that that wasn’t right, and we’re not in our deepest selves the gender that everybody thought we were.”
She then applied that sequence to the nativity.
“Here’s why God is trans. When God, who as we have established is non-binary, was born in human form as our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary said, ‘Oh, look, a baby boy.’ God isn’t a boy. We have established this. God is beyond boy and girl. God was assigned a gender at birth, and later on, it became clear that that gender wasn’t quite right.”
The next step was the ultimatum aimed at the pews.
“So, if you’re going to deny God as trans, I think you’re going to be denying the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I have some notes about that.”
Scripture itself, as presented in the same reporting, records the angel Gabriel telling Mary she would “bear a son” to be called Jesus, “the Son of the Most High” and “the Son of God,” language that treats the child as male from the announcement forward. Klink’s sermon treated Mary’s recognition of a baby boy as a mistaken assignment rather than the fulfillment of that word.
Klink argued that Jesus already failed to match “your average first-century Judean man.”
“When I say that later on it became clear gender wasn’t quite right, I mean it. We already know Jesus didn’t live life exactly the way your average first-century Judean man did,”
She added:
“To the best of our knowledge, he didn’t get married. We don’t know for sure. He chose to teach and to engage with women in ways that were very unusual, that were not the traditionally masculine way that people might be behaving with each other.”
The resurrection supplied her final move. Klink said the risen Jesus looked different and was not recognized at once by disciples who had known him to the end.
“And then Jesus died, and when Jesus was resurrected, Jesus was different. Jesus didn’t look like himself. There was something different about Jesus, and now I will admit the Bible does not tell us what that is,”
She cautioned against anyone claiming certainty about the difference, then offered her own reading anyway:
“Now I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t there, but based on everything else I know about God, I have an idea. I think Jesus was resurrected as Jesus’s true self, which is beyond male or female. I think Jesus was not only transfigured. I think Jesus transitioned,”
Reporting on the sermon also noted the John 20 account in which Mary Magdalene first mistook the risen Jesus for the gardener and addressed him with the masculine Greek term “kurios,” rendered “sir.” Klink treated the delay in recognition as support for a change beyond male and female. The biblical text, on the same account, does not describe a gender transition.
The clip circulated while related disputes over core Christian claims continued around Democrat Senate candidate James Talarico in Texas. Talarico, a self-described Christian, has drawn scrutiny for statements that treat Jesus as one path among others rather than the only way to God.
His pastor and mentor, Rev. Jim Rigby of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, has questioned the resurrection in an Easter message, leaving open the possibility that Jesus may not have risen from the dead. Rev. Babs Miller, a lesbian chaplain at the same church, has cast doubt on whether Jesus existed at all and, if he did, whether he died for the sins of humanity.
Those episodes sit in the same lane as Klink’s sermon: clergy and candidates reshaping definitive New Testament claims to fit contemporary progressive priorities.
Klink used male pronouns for Jesus while insisting God and the risen Christ stand beyond male and female. She quoted none of the Gospel writers describing a mistaken sex assignment or a post-resurrection transition. She did assert that denying her reading amounts to denying divinity.
Congregants at an Episcopal church in Manhattan heard their priest place gender theory inside the incarnation, the earthly life of Jesus, and the empty tomb, then tie assent to that theory to orthodoxy itself. The Luke passage cited in the same coverage still calls the child a son and the Son of God. The gap between those words and the sermon is the story.
When pastors revise the Gospels to match the latest identity script, they stop guarding the faith and start auditing it for cultural approval.
