The sermon was delivered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City during an event called the "Celebration of Trans Joy and Resilience," timed to coincide with the March 31 Transgender Day of Visibility. The priest — Rev. Flourish Klink, an assistant at Christ & Saint Stephen's Episcopal Church and a self-identified nonbinary person — stood behind one of the most famous pulpits in American Christianity and told the congregation that the Son of God changed genders.
The footage went viral on September 23, and now the Episcopal Diocese of New York has a theology problem it can't walk back.
Klink's argument, delivered in March 2026, works like this: God is beyond male and female. When God became human as Jesus, Mary saw "a baby boy." From there, Klink concluded that God was "assigned a gender at birth, and later on, it became clear that that gender wasn't quite right."
Klink then moved to the Resurrection. "I think Jesus was resurrected as Jesus's true self, which is beyond male or female," Klink said. The kicker: "I think Jesus was not only transfigured, I think Jesus transitioned." Klink pointed to the Gospel accounts in which the disciples didn't immediately recognize Jesus after the Resurrection — not as a mystery of divine glory, but as evidence that Jesus had physically changed gender presentation.
Two thousand years of Christian theology interpreted those passages as encounters with the risen Lord in glorified form. Klink looked at the same text and saw a transition narrative.
People who saw the clip commented that the sermon was "heresy" and "grossly offensive." That's the polite version of what most people watching the clip were thinking.
Watch the clip for yourself and decide
The Episcopal Church's trajectory here isn't exactly a surprise. In 2012, the denomination amended its rules prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity. In 2015, it approved same-sex marriage. In 2018, the General Convention adopted transgender inclusion guidelines. By 2022, the General Convention had passed a resolution supporting gender-affirming medical care. Each step was framed as pastoral compassion. Each step moved the goalposts further from anything recognizable as orthodox Christianity.
Klink didn't appear out of nowhere. Klink is the product of an institution that spent fourteen years signaling that progressive identity categories matter more than scriptural ones. When you rewrite the personnel manual, eventually someone rewrites the theology to match.
"God is non-binary, but I'm going to go further than that," Klink told the congregation. "And I'm going to say God is actually also trans."
The Episcopal Church has roughly 1.6 million members in the United States, down from over 3.4 million in the 1960s. Mainline Protestant denominations that chase cultural trends tend to follow a predictable pattern: affirm, celebrate, lose congregants, wonder what happened. The ones that hold the line — the Southern Baptists, the Missouri Synod Lutherans, the traditional Catholic parishes — keep their pews full.
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine hosted a "Celebration of Trans Joy and Resilience." The celebration part is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What's being celebrated is the replacement of Christian theology with progressive anthropology wearing vestments. The resilience part is presumably what the remaining Episcopalians will need.
