The Rev. Dr. Jay

A Queer Gospel for Father’s Day

“Jesus said, ‘I have come to set a man against his father’” (Mt. 10:35).

You can thank the lectionary for assigning that verse for this Sunday, Father’s Day, just one verse in a Gospel passage that make foes from members of one’s own household (including daughters against their mothers and in-laws against everyone else).

My gratitude is really quite sincere for this lectionary mashup with the secular calendar. In this mashup, Matthew’s Jesus invites directly a particularly haunting question not only for Christian faith generally but for this LGBTQ Pride Month: what in the world (quite literally) does “family” have to do with “faith”?

If that question doesn’t nudge you awake at night, some of the related ones from that passage might: Why does Jesus use slavery as an illustrative analogy for discipleship (especially in a week with Juneteenth in it)? What does Jesus mean by insisting he doesn’t bring peace but a “sword”? How does one “take up a cross” for life?

“We have a Rainbow House,” J. Kirk Richards

Questions about family suddenly seem more manageable. So let’s begin there.

Back in the late 1980s, when the so-called “Religious Right” (with figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson) conducted public battles in a culture war against lesbian and gay people, they insisted on the primacy of “traditional families” and the need for “biblical values.”

Those pithy slogans raised some obvious questions: exactly which biblical families should we emulate today? The one God blessed for King Solomon with his 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3)? Or perhaps we should follow the example of both Jesus and St. Paul, who remained single for their entire lives; Paul even urged the readers of his letters to remain unmarried like himself (1 Cor. 7:8-9). Let’s not forget that “traditional” biblical families also made wives little more than property, and men as “lords” of their household (which, frankly, some men today would prefer).

These mismatches between ancient families and modern ones urge those of us who still care about a biblically rooted faith to consider carefully what exactly we’re supposed to do with the Bible in today’s world. Biblical scholar and theologian Walter Wink, for example, proposed that we set aside any attempt to adopt a “biblical sexual ethic”—there really is no such thing. As Wink notes, biblical books reflect a wide range of cultural customs and social mores, none of which fit neatly into a single paradigm of sexual morality. Indeed, many of the sexual practices of those ancient societies would be woefully out of place today: eleven-year-old girls getting married, for example, or the prohibition against marrying outside one’s own “tribal circle.”

Rather than trying to make the Bible into a coherent rule book for a “sexual ethic,” Wink urged us instead to develop a biblical “love ethic.” By this, he meant that we need to engage in a process of shared discernment about what care and compassion look like in loving relationships for today’s world, the kind of foundational values we might more readily carry into a variety of temporal and cultural contexts. That would make biblical discernment both more difficult and more rewarding than just reading a Bible verse and doing what it “says” (that’s mostly how I was raised to think about the Bible and with pretty grim results).

This week’s lectionary collision with the secular calendar can invite us still deeper and invite us to wonder about the social shape of the world we now inhabit. How much about today’s household economics and political convictions (all of which infuse whatever we mean by “family”) do we just assume as “natural” or “normative” when they might actually be corrosive and impairing?

More pointedly, to those who still insist that lesbian and gay couples disrupt “traditional families,” we can (gently) remind them that Matthew’s Jesus already did that a long time ago. We might even insist that the patriarchal household of the ancient Mediterranean world was not at all compatible with the “good news” about the coming Kingdom of God that Jesus preached—which certainly poses some potentially awkward questions about the dynamics of White Patriarchy in the modern West.

Or how about this: rather than the form of a family, perhaps a Gospel-rooted approach can prompt us to ponder what we want to value about a whole range of family configurations: how do we love, and for whom do we care, and where does compassion lead us? Surely questions like that reside at the very heart of politics itself and nearly every decision about public policy.

Maybe Matthew’s Jesus sounds harsh because the consequences of “baptizing” cultural norms chart a path that’s eventually far more destructive (thus his urging not to fear those who kill the body but can’t kill the soul). So if there’s nothing especially “sacred” about the “nuclear family” of modern Western society, then there’s certainly nothing sacrosanct about male privilege or white dominance—which is of course putting the matter far too mildly. White patriarchy stands as the antithesis of the Christian Gospel and opposing it comes with a hefty price tag. Matthew seems especially attuned in that regard to the cultural blowback the first-century Jesus Movement should have expected in their witness to the Gospel. (That “witness” today would surely include the potent interweavings of race and sexuality for a “queer Juneteenth.”)

In my view, that’s the essence of the Gospel’s queerness, especially in the American history of the modern West in which Christian faith has appeared as mostly the religious patina on patriotism. That’s why I’m so grateful to the lectionary for this particular passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel on this third Sunday in June. What if Pride Month invites more than merely “tolerating” the presence of LGBTQ people? What if the “queerness” of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people provokes a realization about the queerness of Christian faith itself?

I have struggled for many years now with that word queer and how disturbing and dismaying it is to many, and rightly so—its original meaning in sixteenth-century Scottish contexts meant “odd” or “off-center,” and evolved into a slur for people who don’t “fit in” for any number of reasons, and then finally in the nineteenth-century it became attached to what some considered “perverse” sexual practices or gendered identities. But precisely because of that unsettling history, queerness can inspire our shared work as Christians to recover the destabilizing and energizing character of the Gospel for our own day. (I attempted to do exactly that in my book Peculiar Faith, for which this blog is named; a review of that book soon after it was published still offers a helpful summary.)

It is certainly quite telling that so many will struggle and even become alarmed when Matthew’s Jesus seems to undermine “traditional families” but hardly blink an eye when that same Jesus concludes this coming Sunday’s lectionary passage by telling his followers to take up their cross, follow him, and lose their lives—which he says is the only way to find true life. Have we really forgotten just how queer—that is, how odd, peculiar, jarring, disruptive, and revolutionary—that Gospel exhortation truly is? Which sounds “queerer” to you, that families are disrupted or that we have to die in order to live?

This Father’s Day, the third Sunday in LGBTQ Pride Month, and right on the heels of Juneteenth, Matthew’s Jesus declares that the Gospel will set sons against fathers and daughters against mothers and basically overturn every social bond that gets in the way of true liberty and genuine flourishing and the thriving that God intends for all.

This is a truly strange mashup of texts and dates—let it be strange, just as strange as it wants to be. After all, the Gospel is meant to be transformative, for the sake of life.

Are You a Sodomite?

That’s a rather rude question, and I cannot imagine asking anyone that question with any seriousness. I pose it here to make this observation: while that question has always been rude, it has not always been rude for the same reasons.

The word itself is derived, of course, from the ancient biblical city called “Sodom,” which was (as the story goes in Genesis 19) destroyed by “fire and brimstone” (and yes, that’s really the language used in the King James Version of the story). That event of divine destruction fell on that ancient city as divine punishment for “wickedness.” Ah! But what kind of wickedness is the key issue.

“The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” John Martin

Interpreting ancient texts for a modern context is always challenging, a process that also exhibits a rich and complex history. An entire field of academic study emerged for that kind of analysis in the late twentieth century when scholars devoted deliberate attention to what came to be known as the “reception history of the Bible.” This field of study investigates and analyzes how particular passages of the Bible have been received in a particular community or society, and how those understandings shaped social trends and cultural artifacts.

Studying how the Bible has been “received” over time and in different places is not only multidisciplinary (involving sociology, economics, philosophy, and art, among many others), it also traces the legacy of a certain strand of biblical interpretation in one context and how it makes an impact in others, even those far removed in place and time. I appreciate that kind of historical analysis as a way to inspire my own proactive reading of the Bible—there isn’t just one meaning for a given passage that waits our discovery; people of faith are invited to make meaning from these texts for our own distinctive purposes in our own day.

So, are you a sodomite?

Don’t be too quick to answer that question without first consulting the ancient Hebrew prophet Ezekiel. Modern Western society has shaped most of us to assume that “sodomy” refers to a particular kind of sexual act—usually between men. But Ezekiel insists instead on a significantly different interpretation. Ezekiel portrays that ancient city as rife with social and economic injustice. “This,” he writes, “was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy” (16:49).

That one verse should make quite a few of us a bit squirmy and uncomfortable. After all, anyone who has indulged in arrogant posturing or refused to help the financially impoverished qualifies, in Ezekiel’s view, as a sodomite. As one scholar has noted, rather than imagining a relatively small percentage of the population engaged in unusual or exotic sexual acts—indeed, rather than thinking of sex at all—we should probably admit that modern Western economic policies make most of us guilty of sodomy.

Most of us are sodomites, and sex has nothing to do with it.

The focus in Ezekiel on economics faded over time in Christian history (not coincidentally when the story was interpreted by affluent people). Justin Martyr in the second century used the story for anti-Jewish polemic. In the sixth century, Gregory the Great rather vaguely named Sodom’s flaw as “sins of the flesh.” And then finally, but not until the eleventh century, Peter Damian defined “sodomy” exclusively as same-sex sexual acts—and that definition reshaped the history of Western jurisprudence all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 when the court deliberated over whether state “sodomy laws” were constitutional (they determined that such laws were not and overturned the remaining state statues to that effect).

This coming Sunday, the lectionary includes a Gospel passage in which Matthew’s Jesus makes a reference to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (9:35-10:23). As it sometimes happens every three years, the lectionary has assigned this passage during LGBTQ Pride Month. I can all but guarantee that every LGBT person in the country who hears this passage on Sunday will cringe, and for some, it will trigger a history of religious trauma.

The story about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah has been weaponized—especially in the modern West—in some painful and heartbreaking ways to condemn gay and lesbian people, and sometimes violently. It wasn’t that terribly long ago—in 1895—that Oscar Wilde was accused of being a “sodomite,” which led to his trial for “gross indecency.” He was convicted and sentenced to prison with hard labor; Wilde’s two sons were raised to forget him, and he died within three years of his release from prison, never to see his family again. All this based, not on “gross indecency” but on a gross misinterpretation of an ancient biblical story. (Wilde’s only grandson, Merlin Holland, has just published a memoir on the legacy of that tragic story.)

I did a deep dive into some of this history for an essay that was later published in the Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (2011). I chose to focus my attention on how the story in Genesis 19 has been read in the worldwide Anglican Communion and the way it has been received rather relentlessly through the lens of gender dominance. The modern world, in other words, prefers to treat “sodomy” as a violation of gender roles for physical intimacy. Let’s be clear about this: what I’m describing reflects a long (patriarchal) history of defining “proper” sex as a bodily act in which a man is penetrating a woman, who is by virtue of being a woman, always and only penetrated; sodomy violates that natural order by “treating a man like a woman.”

In short, misogyny is always at the root of homophobia. We need look no further than the Bible itself for evidence: the story of Sodom’s destruction in Genesis 19 has a heartbreaking parallel in Judges 19, where we read about exactly the same threat of violent inhospitality (basically gang rape). But unlike the threat againts the male figures in Genesis, the story in Judges features a threat against a woman—and no divine intervention saves her.

It matters to take note of how this gendered “reception” of biblical texts unfolds in a multi-national religious network, like the Anglican Communion. Rather than staying put in debates about sexual ethics, the contestation over gay men ripples out to a whole range of issues at stake in the maintenance of patriarchal religious structures. Objecting to the betrayal of gender in “same-sex” relationships simply fortifies the objection to the ordination of women as priests; women are designed to receive the Gospel (“penetrated” by the divine Word), not sow its seeds—to ordain a woman, in other words, is in effect “religious sodomy.” (I’m really not making this up; this online essay is a classic articulation of the argument against ordaining women—just note that male “headship” in this essay is the slightly more polite way of referring to male “penetration.”)

I, for one, will not be preaching about penetration this Sunday (my parish is rightfully relieved). But all this backstory for the reference to Sodom and Gomorrah in this week’s Gospel reading actually does matter for a richer and more robust appreciation of that passage: Jesus is sending his disciples out into the world on a shared and dangerous mission. The “sending” and the “mission” create the link to the story in Genesis19 in which God sent angels to Sodom for a divine mission.

There are several hair-raising components of this week’s Gospel passage (some aspects are downright dystopian), but the overall sense of urgency of the mission on which Jesus sends his friends ought to get our attention, especially since Matthew underscores that urgency by evoking the dramatic story of destruction in Genesis.

The world is on fire, right now, and no less severely than if heavenly brimstone were igniting our cities and forests. I honestly don’t know what it will take to wake more of us up to the societal collapse and environmental catastrophe unfolding on our little electronic screens in real time. At the very least, I pray (I might even beg) that preachers this Sunday don’t just casually dismiss the ancient urgency Matthew infused into the Good News.

Can any of us change the whole world? Of course not. But everyone can do something. As for me, as my little parish gathers on the second Sunday of Pride Month, I will urge this resort-town congregation to do all we can to ensure that we are creating a community of genuine and believable hospitality for LGBTQ people, especially those who have been traumatized by religion, and to consider carefully what role we can play in changing a social order that continues to terrorize not only “queer” folk but also women more generally—this is a modest but important part of the healing mission on which God sends us. (And I would say, in contrast to the fire of Sodom’s destruction, we might embrace the image of the Pentecostal breath of God for the world’s healing and renewal…)

I’m not sure how yet, but I’ll offer that exhortation with the kind of urgency Matthew believed was necessary for effective Gospel proclamation—the kind of “fire and brimstone urgency” only Sodom and Gomorrah can inspire. The Church, generally and broadly, is way overdue for a heaping dose of that world-changing energy—that’s the Gospel mission to which God calls every generation of God’s people and for which God is sending us, right now.

Coming Out with Matthew: A Queerly Religious Gift of Healing

Reading the Bible in LGBTQ Pride month can be hazardous to your health. Hurtful Bible verses trip off the tongues of mean-spirited people like nursery rhymes—it happens with horrific regularity at Pride festivals every year. Especially for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, the Bible should really come with a warning label, the kind slapped on cigarette packages from the Surgeon General. Ditto for women generally, for people of color (in the U.S.), and for nearly every plant, animal, and ecosystem on Earth.

The Bible itself is not to blame for all this harm (even though I’m sorely tempted to rewrite parts of it myself); religious people behaving badly have tainted those texts with power grabs and political machinations that would make even Machiavelli blush.

The Bible is so easily weaponized for nefarious and even violent purposes because religion itself is such a potent source of community manipulation; religious language can quickly coat human malevolence with a divine patina. Nearly every imperial and authoritarian regime in human history has known this well: securing the support of religious leaders is not only helpful but essential and indispensable for social control.

Quite remarkably, given all that harmful history and religious riskiness, the Bible still offers a path toward healing and life. If that’s really true and not merely pious cliché, then how we read the Bible matters. In this LGBTQ Pride Month, it’s high time to read the Bible queerly, as the kind of queer book it actually is.

Just yesterday, for example, the lectionary assigned a portion from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (9:9—26) that I had not read before during Pride Month. It’s a familiar passage—the calling of Matthew as a disciple, healing a seriously ill woman, raising a dead child back to life, all very religiously biblical sounding stuff—and certainly not chosen with Pride Month in mind. But I read it as if for the very first time precisely because I read it through a queer lens—and my heart was strangely warmed, as Charles Wesley would say.

Here’s the thing: reading the Bible because I’m a gay man (not in spite of it) actually brings the text to life in fresh ways. I’m convinced that freshness is a gift, not only for LGBTQ people but for the whole Church.

Unwrapping that gift means knowing a few things about what it’s like to live as an L, G, B, or T person in the modern West. Start with this: every LGBT person who comes out, who decides to live at least a bit more honestly in the world, does so only after making a complex calculation of risk management.

That kind of calculus includes questions like these: What cost am I currently paying to stay invisible? Will my family reject me if I come out? Would I be putting myself in immediate danger of physical harm? Where would I go if I’m cut off from my network of support?

Moreover, we queer folk don’t come out just once. In every social situation, LGBT people must decide whether or not to show up as ourselves, and to what degree—and we do this every single day. It may not always be a fully deliberate process (it’s often like breathing—necessary and automatic), but at some level I am always aware of my clothing, my bodily gestures, and the timber in my voice, and whether any of these might be putting me at risk in any given context—every single day.

For some, the risk in coming out is low but never zero. For others, the courage to come out is a matter of life and death—staying in the closet is suffocating and soul-killing.

Here’s something else to note carefully: even today, in 2026, and even here in the United States of America (increasingly here, actually) a large number of LGBT people must make this complex calculation alone.

We learn from an early age that it is not safe to be different; we learn that being who we are—and even trying to decipher what that is—can be dangerous, even in our own families and among friends. Just about everyone learns this in some fashion: safety means conformity.

What I’m trying to describe here is a social world riddled with fear and defined by isolation. That’s not only today’s world for many LGBT people; it’s also the first-century world framed by the passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel so many of us heard in Church yesterday, a passage that works beautifully to invite us into LGBT Pride Month, and—because of that—to invite all of us to come out with Matthew.

At the center of this passage stands a woman who had been suffering for twelve long years from painful hemorrhages, basically slowly bleeding to death—and because of that, ostracized by her own community and isolated from her network of support. To this woman, Jesus says, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”

He calls her daughter.

It’s a beautifully tender moment between this woman and Jesus. It’s also an important story-telling clue from Matthew. This short passage of several interactions with various people is not just a collection of randomly assembled encounters; this is a carefully crafted portrayal of faith and healing.

That intimate address Jesus uses for a stranger—daughter—brings this Gospel portrayal into clearer focus. That word daughter stitches together the three narrative moments in this passage, creating a life-changing world of loving, healing relationships.

The first moment features Matthew himself, the tax collector. We need to resist the temptation to imagine agents of the IRS in this moment; we should think instead of collaborators with the enemy.

When the Roman Empire occupied Judea they levied imperial taxes, just as they did in every province. The chief collectors of this tax were themselves Judeans and they hired workers—like Matthew—to gather the money. As long as Rome received the required amount, the collectors could keep whatever extra cash they were able to squeeze out of their neighbors.

Here’s the point: Jesus calls one of these tax collectors into his inner circle of friends. This is not just a career change. Jesus frames this moment as a matter of healing—I have come, he says, not for those who are well but for those who need a physician, and in this case, the ones who suffer from what we might call “imperial sickness.”

Seduced by imperial privilege; attracted to monetary gain; entangled in the systems of greed, corruption, and influence—this is a sickness of the heart and soul, a disease of isolation.

To this “dis-eased” one, Jesus extends a hand of healing welcome—and it’s scandalous. The Pharisees, the religious leaders, were rightly outraged by this public embrace of a traitor.

The second narrative moment might seem unrelated to the first, except that the man seeking help from Jesus is one of those religious leaders. Whatever complaint he might have made about the embrace of a tax collector quickly fades in his panic over his precious child, the daughter who has died. Please, he says to Jesus, help me.

Many of us likely know similar stories of rigid and strictly religious families who must suddenly confront the tension between having, say, a lesbian daughter and observing their religious rules—that’s the story of this religious man in Matthew.

This poignant encounter is then interrupted by the third moment—and an interruption in the narrative is a signal; it becomes the key to interpret the whole passage. The woman, seriously ill and slowly dying, likely struggling on her own, probably rendered poor from her illness and isolation, reaches out—quite literally—in desperation.

“Take heart,” Jesus says to her.

Those words stitch these three narrative moments together with courage—a powerful reminder that faith is not certainty; faith is not a guarantee; faith does not erase fear. Faith is the courage to trust, even when confronting our deepest fears. We know what those are: being left out, excluded by family, rejected by friends, living with unmitigated pain, lost in grief, adrift in a world of strangers.

We step out in faith—with courage—and God is there. Matthew steps out from behind his tax booth and into a family of friends. A religious leader steps out from behind his regulatory orthodoxy and into a compassionate embrace.

“Take heart, daughter,” Jesus says, “courage has brought you home.”

I’m so very eager to use that image of “home” for the social healing of Matthew, the physical healing of that woman, and the restored life of the little girl. I’m eager and also cautious: homecoming can itself be an image of profound healing—but not always.

Part of the poignancy of LGBT life is how often “home” becomes a dangerous place. “Home” could refer to biological family or—as it did for me—it could be a church family, a place where safety and belonging suddenly dissolve into danger and betrayal. The Evangelical culture of my childhood—the friends, the comradery, the sense of family, the deep esprit de corps—all of this collapsed when I came out as a gay man; it was (and still is) heartbreaking.

I’m now glad to come out with Matthew—to come out, that is, from the stultifying structures of merely “fitting in” and pursuing whatever “belonging” might actually mean and portend, which is surely a lifelong endeavor.

I think Matthew would wholeheartedly embrace such an image of coming out precisely because he made sure to include the dramatic moment of Jesus raising the religious leader’s daughter from the dead. As many LGBT people have learned, usually over a lifetime of painful encounters, “death” doesn’t always mean the end of biological life; it can mean ruined relationships, failed communities, the erosion of trust, betrayal by those closest to us—each of these the ending of a world.

In this short Gospel passage, Matthew evokes a whole world, a social order stratified by status, organized with institutional power, riddled by the terrors of disease and decay. He evokes this world and then invites us to see it being unraveled and then remade by the healing Word of God into a new world of abundant life; all of us, right now, are being drawn into the re-weaving of our true home.

LGBTQ Pride Month offers a powerful Gospel reminder: shared efforts to make our churches genuinely and believably hospitable truly matter. This always matters as a vital component of Gospel witness, but especially in Pride Month, Christians must not take the discipline of hospitality for granted; for some, it offers a lifesaving vision of home.

For Matthew the despised tax collector, for the woman bleeding to death in public, for that precious child of a religious leader who risked everything for love—for all of these, for all of us, the divine hospitality of Jesus rescues, renews, and raises us to new life.

Take heart: beyond that closet door a whole world of healing and thriving life awaits; so let’s come out together.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

A remarkable array of momentous conversations, epic arguments, and tender lovemaking happens around the dinner table—all those “kitchen table conversations,” as politicians like to call them, that bring families together in good times and crises alike.

The Table sits at the heart of biblical accounts of the Gospel and at the very center of Christian worship for all the obvious reasons that come quickly to mind, and also the subtle ones that shape all those moments of shared meals: food, in short, is necessary for life.

The story many of us heard yesterday from Luke, the story of encountering the risen Jesus as a stranger (24:13-35), comes with the added benefit of sounding terribly queer—I don’t mean it’s an LGBT-related story (necessarily), but that it scrambles expectations and refuses tidy conclusions (the risen Jesus, after all, vanishes from the dinner table before anyone can even gasp and he refuses to be contained). I used it for the preface of my book Peculiar Faith (from which the name of this blog site is derived) and it never fails to both console and unsettle me.

Reading and reflecting on that story again this year, I was suddenly reminded of the iconic 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Few probably imagine Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy as a Gospel-story tableau—least of all those actors themselves—but doing so brims with critical insights. Race, gender, and sexuality all appear so clearly intertwined by pushing Luke’s story into that film, and in ways that lend some much-needed cultural flesh, as it were, to an Easter hope.

Recalling the film’s plotline, Tracy and Hepburn are hosting a dinner party at the request of their daughter, who wants them to meet her fiancé. How lovely! But prior to that party they didn’t know that their daughter’s fiancé was Black. Their daughter also invited her fiancé’s parents—her future in-laws—to the same dinner party, and they didn’t know that she was white!

The movie portrays both families as socially liberal, generally speaking, and mostly supportive of tolerance and equality in that mid-twentieth-century middle class way. But then they must confront their own stubborn and deeply rooted biases when those social issues are suddenly part of their own family.

It’s remarkable, actually, that this film was even made at that time. It was released in the same year as the landmark Supreme Court ruling “Loving vs. Virginia,” a unanimous decision that overturned bans against “interracial marriage.” That was not terribly long ago—in 1967 I was six years old!—and prior to that ruling, it was illegal in sixteen states for a white person to marry a black person; you could go to prison for doing that.

These state statues were generally clustered together as “anti-miscegenation” laws (an arcane way to register one’s disgust at “mixing” otherwise pure races) and it’s important to note that these laws were not evenly enforced. It was considered much more scandalous for a Black man to marry a white woman than the other way around.

Why would that be? Back then (still today?), it was widely assumed that a husband exercises final authority over his wife, and it was culturally repugnant to suppose that a Black person could ever have that kind of authority over a white person.

These racially-gendered dynamics also help to explain why so many Black churches have been reluctant over the last few decades to embrace marriage equality for gay couples. That seems odd at first until one recalls the long history of using marriage as a tool for white supremacy, stretching all the way back to institutional slavery and into Jim Crow segregation.

Given that history, anything that even carries a hint of destabilizing the Black family is treated with suspicion by Black churches—and quite rightly so, and with that hint comes the poignant reminder of how inextricably interconnected race, gender, and sexuality are, and always have been.

When I first started delving into these forms of social analysis, I confess: I was impatient with them. It just seemed terribly convoluted, even unnecessarily complex—until I returned once again to the tools for biblical interpretation. Modern social dynamics are not any more complicated than the established rules for proper meal sharing in first-century Mediterranean societies, and indeed, those ancient patterns easily rival today’s expectations for dinner party etiquette in “polite society.”

It matters, in other words, when Christians gather to hear the wonderful story from Luke about the journey to Emmaus to recall that table fellowship was one of the ways to monitor and maintain social order in that first-century world—and Jesus was constantly disrupting that very order.

In that world, who is “allowed” to share food and fellowship at the same table was determined through a tightly orchestrated flowchart of cultural categories filtered through religious regulations and purity codes. Those determinations were rooted in biological family, of course, but much more: social and economic status, and also ethnicity and proper religious observance.

Traces of those many rules and regulations show up in the constant scandal Jesus caused by eating with prostitutes and tax collectors—and also the invitations he accepted from Pharisees and Sadducees—and also in the parables he told about wedding banquets and dinner parties, which included the anxiety about wearing the proper outfit and not messing up the seating arrangement at the head table!

So, guess who’s coming to dinner!

Someone who shows us a more excellent way of being human with each other, and of building thriving communities devoted to justice, and perhaps at the root all of that, of finding oneself loved fully, exactly as we are—no caveats, no conditions, no green card required, no proof of insurance necessary, no credit check, no references needed, no passport, no driver’s license, not even a baptismal certificate! you are embraced at the Table just as you are.

Guess who’s coming to dinner!

It’s a stranger, someone we don’t recognize, someone outside the standard social conventions and the rules of proper behavior; someone to break us free from whatever holds us back from abundant life—including our own resentments and insecurities.

The key to Luke’s story is hospitality—those disciples on the road to Emmaus decided to extend hospitality to a stranger, to invite him to dinner, urging him to spend the night with them at the inn. Hospitality breaks through the boundaries set by social norms, and that’s exactly when they recognize the risen Jesus: when he is at table and breaks bread with them.

While I often find myself distracted by the many tasks associated with genuine and effective hospitality, I need to remember always that hospitality in essence is a posture of love. Hospitality sometimes springs from love; sometimes hospitality creates new forms of love that weren’t there before; and sometimes hospitality renews a love that had grown old.

The God of love—the God who is love—welcomes each and all of us fully to the Table, so that we can in turn welcome others, without condition, in love and for love.

This is Peter’s point in the portion of his first letter assigned by the lectionary yesterday (1:17-23). Now that you have embraced the truth, he writes, the truth of God raising Jesus from the dead, be sure to live like it. You have been born again, so live like you mean it, he says, and practice mutual love—love each other, especially when it’s hard—love, love, love each other.

And lest that Petrine text sound dusty, Spencer Tracy’s character is basically channeling St. Peter in the final and impassioned monologue Tracy delivers at the end of that 1967 film.

As he reflects on having welcomed strangers into his home for dinner, the enduring love for his dear wife becomes even more vibrant (Hepburn has tears welling in her eyes), and the love for his precious daughter illumines everything, and he then declares that love is indeed stronger than any social bias.

Luke would heartily agree: Love put those disciples together on that road; and then love opened their hearts to hear the words of a stranger; and then love moved them to extend hospitality to that stranger, whose presence at the Table reveals once more that love itself is even stronger than death.

Luke’s story—and every queerly disorienting Gospel story about the risen Jesus—pushes me always to remember the very heart of Gospel proclamation: there is only love in the heart of God.

Declare and repeat, often; cross-stitch it, frame it, and post it above your computer if need be. It’s the truest thing in the Universe: There is only love in the heart of God; nothing else, absolutely nothing but love, and this love—poured out on the world in Beloved Jesus and the Abiding Spirit—this love inspires forgiveness, reconciliation, and the kind of healing that leads to new life.

And not even death can stop it.

Holy Harrowing

Icon in Chora Church, Istanbul, Christ Harrowing Hell

“O God, in Christ you have searched the depths we cannot fathom, and touched the dread we cannot bear to name: grant us the grace of patient stillness and the courage to sit with uncertainty, that we may wait in hope for your promised dawn of redemption; through Jesus Christ our Savior, by whose name even the gates of Hell cannot stand. Amen.”

This day is one of my favorites on the Christian calendar, the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. After a very full and busy liturgical week with intense religious fervor and a few logistical meltdowns, eveytyhing suddenly becomes still and quiet.

To be sure, items remain on the “to do” list, whether its polishing brass, rehearsing music, or finishing an Easter sermon (!) but the pace has slowed…except for Jesus.

Yes, this is obviously, in one respect, a day when the crucified Jesus is in the tomb, but there are certain strands of Christian traditions that suggest something a bit more active and even dramatic: Jesus harrows Hell on this day. Descending not only into death, in other words, but into the depths of Hell itself, Jesus launches a rescue mission by demolishing the gates of Hades and liberating everyone who is there.

Everyone, no exceptions.

The classic icons of this dramatic scene include (as illustrated above) the wonderful moment of yanking a startled Adam and Eve from their tombs and dragging them into new life.

I like to expand that vision even further to include the wider world of other-than-human creatures and places. On this day when God leaves no one behind, all animals, and plants, and rivers, and trees, and everything that is declared “good” and “very good” in the biblical book of Genesis is taken up into the new life of Easter.

Everything.

I know this universal vision of divine life make some people nervous and uncomfortable. But how could it be otherwise? How could Creator God, revealed in Beloved Jesus, ever bear to leave anyone or any thing out of the promise of new life?

Artist Doug Blanchard included a marvelous image in his “Passion of the Christ–a Gay Vision” series for this very day, this day of breaking down the prison walls of Hell for a breathtaking vision of Easter. I feel privileged and deeply honored to have this painting on my wall in the rectory; pairing it with the traditional icon above creates a synergy of spiritual insight, a rush of grateful hopefulness on this singular, remarkable day when God leaves no one and no thing behind.

May we live into that divine promise as a people of unshakable joy.

Saved from Violence: Witness to Solidarity

I still remember rather vividly the O. J. Simpson case back in 1994. The former NFL football player and television personality was accused of murdering his wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman.

On June 17 of that year, Simpson refused to surrender to the authorities and led the Los Angeles police department on a low-speed chase in his white Ford Bronco, and did so for about 60 miles of southern California freeways.

The chase itself was televised live on NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN. An astonishing 95 million people watched it live! It was the highest-rated television broadcast of the year, comparable to the Super Bowl!

Back then, an NPR commentator captured an insight about that moment that seems to have become truer over the decades. Reflecting on the Simpson case—the car chase and the infamous trial that followed—the commentator noted how we have become “audienced,” rendered as passive observers by our media-drenched culture.

That passivity has only become exponentially worse since then: the advent of the Internet, and smart phones, and social media make it nearly impossible now not to be merely an audience. As we scroll through online reels, we might come across a clip of a stand-up comic in one moment and with a simple swipe, we are watching horrific episodes of genocide happening in real time, right there, on our little screens.

It’s hard to say whether our technology has changed us or whether we just have new tools to do what humans have always done. We might recall Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri back in 2014—he was shot by a police officer, who simply stood there and watched him bleed out and die, and many of us watched him do that on television.

Or we might go farther back to the era of Jim Crow segregation and the practice of lynching. Some of those violent episodes took place at church picnics, of all things, when faithful churchgoers shared food at picnic tables while “strange fruit,” as some have called those Black bodies, were hanging from nearby trees.

We can certainly go much farther back, recalling that early Christians described the Cross of Christ as a “tree” and the body of Jesus as its fruit, his blood watering the roots.

Is that how the street mob thought about it, the ones calling for the death of Jesus? Is that how the cohort of religious leaders thought about it? What about the disciples?

What kind of meaning do we make from the violence we witness? Whom do we hold responsible for the violence we witness? When do we cease witnessing and become “audienced”? What kind of people are in that shift? Who, then, have we become?

Public theologian Jon Paul Syndor has recently referred to these times in which we live as an age of “performative cruelty”: children ripped from their parents’ arms by government officials, immigrants warehoused in filthy detention camps, tens of thousands of children buried in the rubble of Gaza, hospitals and schools targeted for bombing—the violence of our age is stark, gripping, and dismaying.

How, Syndor wonders, do so many religious leaders, most of them Evangelical Christians, support such cruelty, visibly and vocally? Why would they ever do so?

Syndor is convinced it’s because of their religious interpretation of the Cross of Christ; they firmly believe that the death-by-torture of Jesus is the means by which God saves us, and so violence will continue to save us today.

That ostensibly pious supposition sounds traditional and even biblical, but I have become convinced that it is instead just bad theology; and bad theology is deadly.

To be clear, I do believe that the cross of Jesus Christ is a symbol of blessing and divine salvation; but I do not believe that God ever uses violence as the means to save anyone or anything. To the contrary, God is committed to saving us from violence, not with violence.

In today’s world of unrelenting violence it is all the more imperative for religious people to be very careful—especially religious people—not even to appear to embrace or endorse violence as a means to an end; as human history shows time and time again, religious faith adds a dimension of justification for the most brutal actions. So we must be as clear as possible about this instead: brutality and torture cannot heal us or anyone; there is nothing soothing, healing, or saving about brutality, whether we commit it ourselves, watch it being done by others, or proclaim it as religious doctrine.

We must never imagine God as violent lest we ourselves embody violence itself.

In my western Michigan parish along the Lake Michigan shoreline, we include an opportunity in our Good Friday liturgy to venerate an image of the Cross of Christ. The cross we use for that purpose is made from driftwood found on the beach near where the sanctuary sits—a tangible reminder that God is committed to saving us from violence not only in first-century Judea but also right here, today.

That moment of veneration must include, I believe, a commitment to stand firm in a shared rejection of violence, and to say clearly, in both word and action, every single day and at every moment we can, that violence will not save us.

What is soothing, and healing, and yes, saving, is the God who joins us in our pain and confusion, who stands with us in our foolishness and tragic missteps, the one who dwells among us and travels with us all the way to the cross, and from there to lead us through it toward a bright day of new life.

Christians are never an “audience” in our religious sanctuaries; we are rather witnesses and participants in an ongoing and still unfolding story of God’s own solidarity with us, and how this story shapes us to set aside our violent tendencies, and our brutal nightmares of vengenance, and even our petty resentments that can fester into bitter hositilities. Set all of that aside as we witness the Cross of Christ among us and live in deep solidarity with others, with the vulnerable, with the wounded, and the forgotten.

And that is how God saves, and that is what the Cross means: gracious accompaniment; tender presence; and bold solidarity.

Three Days and One Liturgy for a New World

It’s hard to know what difference it makes, if any. I fuss over sanctuary furniture and proofread too many liturgy leaflets while the world is literally on fire, wondering whether any of this really matters…and then, the three days.

The Christian religion in all its many forms and modes so often gets so terribly mired in institutional banalities, all the arcane terminology, the sheafs of coded language for the “insiders”—even I, with a doctoral degree in theology, have trouble sorting it all out…but then, the three days.

Even with all the complexity of doctrinal history, the multi-layered versions of rites and rubrics in countless prayer books, even in the midst of all that, three profoundly simple and deeply moving days reside right at the heart of Christian faith. We now call them Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Vigil of Easter (or Easter Day itself).

To be sure, these three liturgical days are just as complex and sometimes even more convoluted than anything else in our Christian traditions, but they do present what we might call a “divine starkness,” a laying bare of at least one singular kernel of divine reality: God’s own heart. (Graphic artist Martin French created the poster above for a modern dance company’s retelling of these three days—”triduum,” in Latin—for the sake of a more dynamic, we might say “grittier” narrative arc in which the flesh of God rises up from the truly human.)

I remember vividly the very first Holy Week I marked when I was still in college, which is now quite a long way back in that rear-view mirror. Those high-church, highly-stylized and complex liturgies quite literally changed my life: the ritualized gestures of that week invited me deeper into the rawness of human life and relationships, precisely where we encounter the embodied presence of God. Now, many years later, the planning and organizing and rehearsing that shape this one week feel both overwhelming and exhilarating all at once, which can still pose the question of why any of this might matter for a deeply wounded world.

So I pause just now to remind myself that performative perfection matters less than the textured hope this week might still offer. Surely with the world in disarray, the international order in tatters, Middle East oil fields ablaze, and climate chaos on track like a runaway train, surely now is the time when we need what Christians are on the brink of doing: gathering with companions to remember a final meal shared tenderly with friends, a torturous journey toward a cross of state execution, and the sweet hope that bubbles up like springs of water in a desert: not even a violent death can have the final word with the God of life.

Worship and prayer won’t “fix” things, but I do believe prayer matters—it releases energy and reshapes matter; liturgical prayer can form a people to do work they never imagined attempting; beautifully crafted prayer with multiple colors and sweet odors and lingering melodies can offer a beacon to the wider world, a cautionary light and a hopeful one, maybe even for a brand new and different kind of world.

In preparation for this very day, Maundy Thursday, I’ve been reflecting on a poem by Joy Harjo, the first Native American poet laureate of the United States, who writes about the kitchen table and how the world might end right there. All sorts of worlds come and go, and many of them right there, where we gather to eat.

Perhaps, if we learned better how to set a table with genuine hospitality and welcome, the world of hatred might end. Perhaps, if we stopped trying to monitor and regulate who gets to approach the table, the world of racial bias and gendered hostility might actually and finally end. Perhaps the Table we set in our sanctuaries can bring all sorts of worlds to their well-deserved ending—but what kind of world will come next?

“Last Supper–Passion of the Christ, a Gay Vision,” Doug Blanchard

We might hazard some guesses about the world still to rise up from those ashes, phoenix-like, but just as the risen Jesus was mostly unrecognizable by even his closest friends, the world yet to be born won’t fit in most of our present categories. But we can make room for the birthing—sweeping away all the lingering detritus of failed experiments and violent ruptures and reckless raiding of this precious Earth’s “resources.”

Three days.

My liturgy professor in seminary, Louis Weil, urged his students to think of the ritual observances of these three Holy Days as one continuous liturgy. It begins on Thursday evening, extends throughout the day on Friday, and over the course of a whole Saturday before we arrive to the moment when we declare once again that God’s love is strong, stronger than even death.

Three days.

There are so many ways to mark these holy days, from austere to elaborate. How we observe the one liturgy that stretches over these three days doesn’t matter nearly as much as the hope and intention we bring to them for a new world—for a world of healing, grace, and love. That intention itself in this holiest of weeks can shape how we live the rest of the year. And while I may not be sure of much, of this I’m certain: the wider world needs the shared witness of the Christian Church this week, our witness to the healing love and transformative grace of the Gospel of life.

Shelter to Storm, Crown to Cross: On the Road in Holy Week

We begin a symbol-rich journey tomorrow morning on the first day of the holiest week on the Christian calendar. Much of Holy Week can feel like we’re engaged in a religious version of historical re-enactment—tracing and “performing” the events of the last week of the life of Jesus—but if so, it’s certainly not chronologically tidy.

Biblical accounts of the Gospel likewise resist theologically neatness, too, which makes it almost impossible to focus on what we might want to believe about whatever it is we happen to be doing on any given day of this week—if you observe a service of Tenebrae on Wednesday, for example, you’ll likely be reflecting on the Cross, even though we haven’t had the Maundy Thursday observance of the “last supper” yet.

In addition to the biblical, liturgical, and doctrinal complexity, we now face the cultural chaos of the wider world: bombs falling in the Middle East; “No Kings” rallies around the United States; a new Archbishop of Canterbury “enthroned” for the Anglican Communion; and planetary ecosystems devolving into climatic chaos faster (much faster) than scientists had predicted (and that’s a short list).

The title of that wonderful 2022 film notwithstanding, we can’t think of “everything everywhere all at once,” but we can take one step a time, with biblical stories in one hand and liturgical texts in the other—and especially with the deep breathing and gentle accompaniment of companions to travel with us along the road.

Even more, I’ve realized over the years that the Holy Week journey is made richer by choosing just one image or a single vignette or a narrative arc among the many stories we’ll hear and then letting that carry me through the week into Easter Day. This year, I’m intrigued by the image of a road, and a particular one at that: the one from the village of Bethany to the city of Jerusalem.

The lectionary this year has been giving us a series of stories from John’s account of the Gospel on these Lenten Sundays, and last week’s was one of my favorites: the raising of Lazarus from the dead (11:1-45).

The small village of Bethany—just about four miles or so from Jerusalem along a road that crosses the Mt. of Olives—was apparently a place of rest and renewal for Jesus in the home of Lazarus and his two sisters, Mary and Martha. That quiet spot was sufficiently removed from the urban hustle-and-bustle of Jerusalem (including all the religious intrigue and imperial adornments) that I can easily imagine Jesus relishing that spot as a place to take a deep breath and leave his worries behind, at least for a short while, whenever he spent time with that family of friends.

Having lived for many years in the metro-urban San Francisco Bay Area, moving five years ago to Michigan in the lakeshore resort of Saugatuck felt luxurious. This beautiful shoreline region certainly qualifies as a type of “Bethany” for me, and I am so grateful to be living and working in a place that offers both comfort and renewal in so many different ways, not least the trees, and dunes, and the lake itself.

Tomorrow morning, Palm Sunday, the lectionary Gospel narrative pivots away from the Bethany of renewal toward the Jerusalem of confrontation. This particular day on the liturgical calendar, the one that begins Holy Week, carries a rather awkward liturgical title: “The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday.” Well, which is it? Do we engage with the story of the suffering and death of Jesus (his “passion”) or his so-called “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem as people waved palm branches? Like so much else in Christian traditions, the answer is both.

Palm and Passion belong together, not as juxtaposed opposites but as mutually informing symbols—even though their convergence on a single is something of an historical accident. Back in the sixth century or so, when some Christians, especially in remote areas of the vast Roman Empire, could not attend Good Friday services, the story of the crucifixion was mashed together with the story of the palms on the Sunday before Easter, that way everyone could reflect on the death of Jesus before celebrating his resurrection.

Yes…and: the palm-strewn entry into Jerusalem is not really a victory lap, and the “triumph” is not removed or separate from the “torture” that soon follows. The historical “accident” of Palm Sunday is actually more closely attuned with the very heart of the Christian Gospel than it might at first appear: it speaks directly of God’s deep solidarity with us, not just in comfort but also in confrontation, not only in shelter but also the storm. (I love John August Swanson’s painting of this story, which he names only as the “entry” into Jerusalem, no “triumph,” which includes a stormy sky to greet him.)

“Entry into the City,” John August Swanson

As our liturgical calendar pivots this week from “shelter to storm,” leaving the safe harbor of Bethany behind and into the turbulent sea where religion and imperial politics mix, I’m particularly mindful of the importance of this shift for those of us (myself included) who live so comfortably, actually insulated from the wider world of pain.

As war continues and oil fields burn (on the far side of a vast ocean) and spring temperatures break all-time heat records (climate chaos all the way on the other side of this country) and the island nation of Cuba sits in the dark (still securely south of the U.S. border), very little of the world’s trouble seems even remotely close to the Blue Star Highway—the lovely two-lane road the marks a kind of border between this shoreline resort and the world “out there.”

Reflecting on that road—together with the one from Bethany to Jerusalem—the Sunday of the Passion is indeed Palm Sunday precisely because Jesus refuses earthly power of all kinds in favor of a costly solidarity with the most vulnerable—and in this case, those dominated and oppressed by imperial power; Cross displaces Crown.

I’ve actually walked much of that road between Bethany and Jerusalem myself, back when I was (much) younger and testing a career in archaeology. The terrain is hilly, the route curvy; when walking from Bethany, it’s not always easy to see the city around bends in the road or through scrubby olive trees, but one trusts the journey anyway.

We embark on the Holy Week journey knowing that Easter is just a week away—or rather, we know it’s on the calendar. Trusting the promise of Easter is another matter, and more difficult, and frequently fraught with all sorts of cultural and personal entanglements (I try to stay liturgically focused but can’t stop thinking about the canker sore on my tongue and an achy jaw from a long session in the dentist’s chair this past week).

“Kaleidescope Cross,” Kathy Manis Findley

I’m grateful for the liturgies of the Prayer Book at a time like this; I myself am not responsible for generating the words and gestures to evoke hope, much less joy—the stories and the rites bear that up, thank God.

But this much I must do, and not alone but with others: decide to walk the road, to leave Bethany’s shelter for Jerusalem’s storm. What will that ask of me and require of us, now, in these days? That’s the question to carry with us…

Legacy Language and Redeeming the Flesh

My allergy to “binary thinking” in a world of “either/or” choices began in early childhood, and then took root in adolescence when I was trying to grapple with the dawning awareness of being a gay man.

Looking back on those years, the whole world seemed organized with absolute distinctions, but I remember especially how the logic of Christian faith itself seemed to run on binary categories: Heaven and Earth; the saved and the lost; faith and doubt; and perhaps the quintessential instance of such distinctions, St. Paul’s rigid contrast between “flesh and spirit,” which shows up directly in his letters to the Galatians and the Romans.

Maybe no one back then liked bodies very much, or maybe they were told not to like them: It’s difficult to say which came first in my suburban religious subculture, bodily disdain or biblical blindness. Regardless of its origins, the deep suspicion of the “flesh” lurked everywhere. Quite apart from trying to deal with emergent gay desires in adolescence, everyone living through puberty—gay, straight, trans, or just generally unsure—likely struggled to figure out how in the world to live with a body that was apparently just “bad.”

When I finally did come out as a gay man in my senior year at Wheaton College (an adventure worthy of a book), I was presented with yet another binary choice: either embrace my sexual identity or my Christian faith, but not both. For reasons I cannot fully fathom (likely an effervescent mix of my mother’s German stubbornness and a healthy dose of divine grace), I refused to choose. I insisted instead on following a path of integration, of discerning how to live as fully human and gratefully Christian.

“The Valley of Dry Bones,” Gordon Miller

Part of that journey was finding alternative ways to read St. Paul, who almost certainly did not intend to denigrate human skin, bones, and organs—the very bodies God makes—when he cautioned his first-century Christians about the “flesh.” These Greek terms we translate as “flesh” and “spirit” instead stood as markers for ways of being in the world, realms of being or social structures that shape the decisions we make and the kind of character we cultivate. “Flesh” stands for a world marked by greed, hatred, envy, and sexual exploitation, among other things. “Spirit” marks the sphere of love, joy, peace, and self-control.

This coming weekend, on the fifth Sunday in Lent, we will hear that distinction from Paul’s letter to the Romans (8:6-11), a powerful example of what I would call “legacy language,” or ways of speaking that are so resilient in our collective consciousness that we can’t just talk ourselves free of them. I could, for example, devote my entire sermon on Sunday morning to a more lifegiving way to read Paul, but that wouldn’t matter one little bit for those who grew up hearing Paul declare (and their parents confirm) that “the flesh is death” and the “Spirit is life.”

That’s not the only bit of legacy language many of us live with, but that one certainly functions like a flashback portal to a world we had hoped to leave behind, or like a password that opens once again that chamber of revulsion in our brains toward our own bodies. Having spent time not only with my own ghosts of bodily shame but also with seminary classrooms of LGBT people, this is clear: that kind of painful flashback with legacy language is sadly common, even today.

In my wonderful little parish, we often use the First Nations Version (FNV) of the New Testament in the Lenten season. It’s a wonderful indigenous translation that helps many of us, myself included, read familiar biblical texts with fresh vision. This week was another reason to be grateful for that version as I was dreading having to deal with Paul’s Letter to the Romans. But then I read the FNV translation: “If we set our minds on the broken desires of our bodies, we will see only death. But if we look to the power of the Spirit, we will have life and walk the road of peace. … If the same Spirit that brought Creator Sets Free (Jesus) the Chosen One back from the dead lives in you, then that same Spirit will also bring your death-doomed bodies back to life again.”

I nearly wept when I read that translation, which felt like the next chapter of an ongoing story of liberation. To be sure, the language of “deadly desires of our bodies” carries the same potential risk of triggering shame as the more traditional language. But the emphasis has clearly shifted: it’s not my flesh that is the problem, but the desires that attach to it, which can come from a wide range of sources, including the social and political realities in which we live.

The dangerous desires themselves are not named in this passage, but we can quite easily think of some deadly ones today: the desire that fuels a consumerism sufficient to wreck Earth’s ecosystems; the desire to treat enemies with vengeance to the point of bombing children; the desire to dominate women that leads to trafficking girls; the desire to associate only with people exactly like us and exclude everyone else, with violence if necessary; and the list goes on. Again, the FNV translation makes clear that the flesh itself is not the problem but rather the shaping and forming of that flesh with the kind of desires that “doom our bodies to death.” As Paul then declares, the very same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead will likewise bring our “death-doomed bodies back to life again.”

The Lenten lectionary this week takes me still further along this path of rehabilitating the flesh with the story of raising the flesh of Lazarus from the dead. I love that story from John’s account of the Gospel for many reasons, not least is the family of friends—Mary, Martha, and their brother Lazarus—who apparently meant so much to Jesus. He loved that circle of intimates, not just the idea of them, or their enduring qualities, or the fuzzy feelings they inspired, but their actual bodies, and their physical house, and the village where he found relaxation and respite.

There are multiple ways to read this astonishing story of raising a dead friend back to life, including all the tricks of navigating literary tropes and sorting through possible metaphorical treasures. But St. Paul has me focused on the odor coming from the grave in that story. Martha voiced that worry: don’t open the tomb! It’s going to stink to high heaven! What Jesus rescues from the grave is not just death but the stench of fleshy life I lived with for far too long.

There are some days when I relish the intricate metaphorical readings of these ancient texts and finding all the religious symbols lurking around the details these ancient writers included for our spiritual enlightenment. And then there are days when I set all that aside, days when I need Jesus to yank his dear friend from that smelly tomb with the sound of his grief-torn voice. Of course John the Evangelist would be the one to give us this moment, the Gospel writer who launches his whole account of the Gospel by declaring that the divine Word became flesh.

If you’re struggling with the legacy language of bad religion, this story is for you, for the redemption of your very own flesh. And this Gospel writer is for you, the one whose inspiration was largely drawn from (of all things) an even older collection of erotic love poetry known as the Song of Songs—poetry that affirms without any hint of hesitation the strength of love itself: it is indeed strong, stronger than even death (8:6-7).

The Holy Week journey begins just a week from this Sunday, a journey for which I, for one, will need the strongest love there is, not only for the annual sojourn toward the cross but to face a crucified world of intolerable pain and anguish with any kind of hope for Easter.

That’s my prayer: that we might find our own raspy, grief-worn voices rising with praise once again for a love that is still, and will always remain, stronger than death.

“Reaching — The Raising of Lazarus,” Michael Cook

Here’s Mud in Your Eye! Earth Healing for Lent

When the conditions on a racetrack are just right, and when one of the horses is clearly leading the others by at least a good body length or so, the hooves of that lead horse can kick up clumps of dirt and mud, which can land in the faces of the horses trailing behind.

That horse-racing image crept into American taverns in the late nineteenth century as a toast while clinking beer mugs and signaling victory for the speaker: “Here’s mud in your eye!”

Clouded or obscured vision tied to one’s standing in a race is one among many examples of physical sight as way to speak of knowledge or insight. “Oh, I see,” someone might say, referring to nothing in their physical line of sight but rather to their cognitive acuity.

This figure of speech and its many analogues are remarkably widespread, across nearly all cultures. Some have even suggested that eyesight—the physical act of seeing—is the primary way we gather information about the world around us.

(I have to say, I’m not entirely persuaded about the primacy of vision. American philosopher Richard Rorty was fond of pushing against such claims by wondering why seeing something should give us more knowledge about it than, say, rubbing up against it, or hearing it, or embracing it. The obsession with ranking lurks around these possibilities, too, as if we must always identify the best or the only way truly to know something for really real.)

The common contrast between dark and light, between shadow and illumination, likely plays a role here, too: what we truly know has come into the light of day. Nearly all of the world’s religious traditions embrace such contrasts to describe enlightenment and spiritual awareness, and the Lenten lectionary gave us a classic story about this just yesterday, the story from John’s account of the Gospel (9:1-41) about Jesus giving a man born blind the gift of sight.

“Healing of the Blind Man,” Anthony Falbo

Images of light paired with sight create the moment of divine encounter in this story when, as we like to say, “seeing is believing.” John notes directly the spiritual significance of this moment as it becomes entangled with religious regulations. While the gift Jesus offers surely counts as a reason to celebrate, the religious leaders of that man’s community are thoroughly skeptical and even resentful about it.

In fact, this long reading from John’s Gospel is mostly about religious resentment, about a near-comedic refusal of those first-century religious leaders to recognize a moment worthy of shared praise and celebration. John likewise uses images of sight for such religious folly with a reversal of fortune motif: the one born blind, now can see; the ones who should have seen, are now blind.

Full transparency: I’m a religious leader, too. I’m just as complicit in religious foolishness as those first-century figures. I know only too well how easy it is to get so caught up in the gears and gadgets of institutional religious life that we miss the very life-giving presence of God among us—we just can’t see it!

Religion can cloud our vision, but so can patriotism, and nationalism, and ethnicity, and money, and gender. Our social identities and strategies for navigating our relationships can act like blinders, rendering us oblivious to the wider world all around us.

“Wake up!” says the Pauline writer to the Ephesians—another great image for insight and awareness in yesterday’s lectionary texts (5:8-14). Waking up, of course, can happen in a number of ways, including opening one’s eyes and seeing, but also (as Rorty would remind us) touching, listening, showing up, paying attention, living bravely, forming communities of trust, standing in solidarity with the most vulnerable, to name just a few of the many ways we can awaken to God’s presence.

Two weeks ago, the Lenten lectionary gave us Nicodemus at night, under the cover of darkness; last week, the woman at the well in the bright light of day; and now sight for the man born blind: throughout John’s account of the Gospel, Jesus is waking people up, and showing them the truth, and inviting them to walk the good road toward abundant life.

John is also clear about this: traveling that road is risky, and not everyone is happy to see the truth come to light, and seeing truly may well cost us nothing less than everything—this Lenten road leads to the Cross, after all. And let’s not fail to notice that the gift of sight to the man born blind cost him his religious community, his home, his friends, and family.

To “wake up” and begin seeing even hints of the truth can cause us to question where we really belong, and with whom, and for what purpose, and to reject even religion if it offers anything less than thriving, authentic life.

I love the First Nations Version of this story, an indigenous translation our parish enjoys during Lent. In that version, the man born blind asked Jesus to tell him who the Chosen One might be, and Jesus said “look at me”—to the one born blind, he said look at me and see the One chosen to live as the “True Human Being”—woke, compassionate, devoted to healing.

Yes, and, all of that said, why the mud? Seriously, why mud?

Jesus encounters this man born blind, and his first impulse is to spit in the dirt, make mud, and smear it on the man’s eyes? Really? I’m surely not the only one who is just a bit too germ-phobic to relish the idea of having muddy spit on my eyes.

Why would John—supposedly the highly sophisticated, intricately philosophical Gospel writer—why would John include this literally dirty detail? Doesn’t this seem, well, rather primitive and crude, especially by modern Western standards?

Reading this story in the First Nations Version prompted me to reflect a bit more than I usually do on Jesus firmly planted in the land itself—on Jesus, in other words, as indigenous to the land of the Mediterranean basin. He was not only an itinerant preacher and teacher, but also a traditional healer. (A number of insightful thinkers continue to help me bridge my Western Christian convictions and indigenous practices, including Randy Woodley.)

Indigenous healers of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds around the world are typically attuned to what we modern people often call (sometimes dismissively) “natural remedies.” In that light, of course Jesus is rooted in the Earth, the land, and yes, the dirt as he makes mud for a healing salve.

Reading such stories from a gilt-edged, leather-bound book extracts these earthy stories from their natural habitat. We have so sterilized and sanitized and intellectualized these ancient texts that we have all but forgotten their fleshy origins in the land, in the dirt itself, which it turns out has healing properties.

The Latin word for soil is humus; that’s also at the root (as it were) of the word “human.” Dirt is not inert; it brings forth life, and not only our life—the soil itself teems with all sorts of life.

“When the Light Breaks Through,” Catherine Picard Gibbs

The failure to thrive that leads to death happens quickly when we tear apart the bond between human and humus, between creatures of Earth and the soil. That certainly describes today’s ecological crisis, and the deadly consequences of removing ourselves from Earth herself, where—along with the air and water—God’s own Spirit of life resides. (Yet another example of religious blindness is my constant struggle to suppose God resides somewhere “out there,” way beyond the sky, the stars, the edge of the Universe itself; the Spirit of Life, the Source of all living things is instead everywhere around us and in us–and I’m convinced that this conviction alone would change the world.)

These traces of traditional healing practices—and regardless of whether the Johannine writer intended this—evokes the indigenous bonds to the land which we need so desperately to recover today, and suggests what a twenty-first century Lenten practice really ought to entail: repairing our relationship with Earth.

It just so happens that we’re reading this story not only in Lent but also Women’s History Month. So let’s be sure to note how patriarchal systems associate Earth-based traditions with women (and are thus easily dismissed), while text-based traditions belong to men (who hold the power of interpretation and thus authority to decide what is true). More pointedly, feminizing Earth makes her suitable for male control, for ravaging, and for plundering, and for extracting resources whenever we please. This is exactly and literally and not merely metaphorically what Jeffrey Epstein was doing with girls and women on his Island of Misfit Billionaires.

Repairing, it seems to me, likewise means this: refusing to choose between Earth and Text, between healing and knowledge, or indeed between female and male.

Either/or, binary choices are part and parcel of the problem that wounds us, and they are far too limiting in the wonders of a world God has created, not for division and separation but for communion. John’s Jesus is, in every Johannine story, perfectly attuned to the energies of Earth and also to the presence of Creator God; his ministry (and most of the so-called “miracles”) quote often consisted in revealing and disclosing that deep harmony between Earth and Creator for the sake of healing and abundant Life.

That harmony (and the communion it creates) is the precious circle of light into which we are invited to step—or really, urged to step. There’s no time to waste: Let’s step fully into that light and shine as beacons of the Gospel in a grim and violent society, inviting others to wake up with us, not only to see with the heart, but to feel with the soul, and to hear with ears tuned to the rhythms of God’s presence thrumming and vibrating in the loamy soils of Earth.

Jesus spit into the dirt and made mud; Jesus made mud pies, and then he spread them on a blind man’s eyes for the gift of sight: returning to Earth—repairing and healing our relationship with Earth—this will make us shine, just like Jesus, as light for the world.

(And by the way, among the many things such light would illumine—to recall where this blog post began—is hope for horses to live a life free of entertaining humans. Severe suffering often results from their coerced performances, and sometimes dying in horrible pain because of it. The efforts to ban horse-drawn carriages in New York City continue for that reason as Mayor Mamdani indicated his commitment to ending the practice, but opposition to the ban has been fierce. It’s time to invite other species with us into that circle of Gospel light—free of saddles, free of harnesses, free of human domination.)