The Rev. Dr. Jay

Up, Up, and Away?

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to journey beyond Earth’s atmosphere and into outer space. He completed one orbit of Earth in 108 minutes and did this in 1961 (roughly five months before I was born). A quote famously and mistakenly attributed to him actually came from a speech by Nikita Khrushchev about the USSR’s anti-religion campaign: “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there.”

I have always loved that story, and I used it a lot in my seminary teaching to debunk the three-tiered universe of the ancient world: Heaven is not “up there” with Hell “down there” and Earth in-between the two. Yes, but then what about the exaltation of Jesus ascending into Heaven?

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Ascension. It’s a major feast day of the church comparable to Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, but it never falls directly on a Sunday. The event it commemorates occurred forty days after Easter Day—that’s when the gospel writer Luke indicates it happened, after a forty-day period of the risen Jesus appearing to his disciples and instructing them about the “kingdom of God.” (And by the way, Luke is the only one of the gospel writers to give us that story explicitly, which is found in Luke 24:50-53 and Acts 1:1-11).

What usually captures my attention straight away is just how unbelievable, quite literally, this story of the Ascension really is—an assessment with which Mr. Khruschev would likely agree wholeheartedly. As Luke tells it, the risen Jesus was “lifted up, and a cloud took him out of sight.” Two angels then appeared to the disciples—who were gazing toward heaven—to ask them why they were standing there looking up. They then returned to Jerusalem to wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus had promised to give.

Even the most devout Christians likely find this story difficult; it stretches our credulity to the breaking point. Where in the world is Jesus going in this story? Beyond the clouds? To outer space centuries before Yuri Gagarin? I remember how deeply my piety was offended back in my Evangelical youth when I first stumbled upon Salvador Dalí’s painting of the Ascension, which features the bottom of Jesus’ feet, as if portraying that moment from the viewpoint of the disciples on the ground. It seemed to me back then that the painting was a mockery or a caricature of the Gospel; much closer to the truth, I was probably chagrined at being confronted with the absurdity of the story itself—how could I possibly believe this?

By the time I went to seminary in my mid-twenties, I had come to appreciate the mythological character of gospel stories, which are not journalistic accounts of what happened, but visually dramatic invitations into a mystery. I recall fondly a celebration of the Ascension in the seminary chapel, which we offered with great solemnity and lots of incense. As we processed out of the chapel singing, all of us vested and seriously pious, our talented organist was playing that final hymn in the upper register but with his feet, and in subtle tones, he played “Up, Up, and Away in My Beautiful Balloon.” We all had a big grin on our faces as we sang and we had a good laugh back in the vesting area. I considered myself far too sophisticated to be offended by such good-hearted humor; besides, no one really believed that gospel story…right?

While more than a few biblical stories can render us incredulous, the Ascension of Jesus surely sits toward the top of that list. I try to make that incredulity a reminder of the symbolic character of all theological speech, including biblical stories. The infinite mystery of the living God is always beyond our direct comprehension, I say to myself, which is why we fantastical stories to awaken our imaginations to the presence of mystery at the very heart of the universe. After all, just because a story is mythological does not mean it is false; to the contrary, a myth might capture the truth far better than any journalistic reporting ever could. (And that’s a really good reason to stop using the word “myth” as a synonym for “untrue.”)

Now that I am no longer the pietistic Evangelical of my youth nor the clever sophisticate I fancied myself to be in seminary, I hope I am much more theologically humble as well as properly devout. I strive to live, in other words, as open as I can be to the presence of God all around me and in others and in my own life—a divine presence I can neither control nor manipulate and which is not at all reducible to propositional logic; music, poetry, and visual art are the best modes of engaging with that unfathomable mystery.

So how do I read Luke’s story of the Ascension today? In more than just one way, for sure, but at the very least with the conviction that the risen Jesus now dwells at the very heart of Creator God, and then also with the reassurance that where Jesus has led the way, we too shall follow.

Those convictions have helped me appreciate Dalí’s painting in fresh ways. As one commentator has noted, Dalí is fond of messing with our sense of conventional perspective. “Is the image of Christ rising? Is he traveling back into a distant vanishing point? Could he even be descending toward us? Our sense of space, and even time, gets a bit turned on its head here.” And I think that’s exactly what the gospel writers were likewise trying to do—to invite us to let go of our conventional perspectives and encounter the Mystery. (That observation came from an intriguing online web collective on art, which also quotes from another online source about the painting.)

Good-hearted humor can be part of all these convictions and assurances, too; I still smile when I think about the organist’s footwork in the seminary chapel. That musical moment helps me remember the essence of the story: up and up the risen Jesus goes, but not away. “Up” can more than only a vertical direction but could also mean “in, and close, and intimately.” The “heart of Creator God” abides not only above us but also around us and beneath us and in us, as well as in our relationships and communities and all the many ecosystems of this precious Earth in desperate need of the healing love of Easter.

Yes, and still in this Easter season, and on this eve of the Ascension, my heart is heavy. The daily news is filled with horrors and dismaying vignettes. Near the top of the items on that worrying list is Israel/Palestine. To be sure, the attack by Hamas on Israel in October 2023 was horrific and terrifyingly violent. And this is also true: the ongoing response by the State of Israel has been far worse—more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza; of these, 17,000 are children. These are conservative estimates; many more are missing and unaccounted for, and currently another heartbreaking 14,000 children are, right now, in danger of starving to death or dying from untreated wounds and injuries. As more than a few commentators have noted, we are witnessing genocide happening in real time—on our televisions and in our news feeds.

I am at a complete loss about what to do or how to think and preach about this. (I’m grateful for the Office of Government Relations of The Episcopal Church, which maintains an extensive list on its website with links for the latest news, updates from our partners in the region, and resources for donating money. I’m also grateful for organizations like Doctors without Borders, and their dedication to providing not only assistance but also accurate reporting on the ground. (They note, for example, that humanitarian aid is in fact not getting through Israeli barricades despite the official reports to the contrary from the State of Israel.)

Meanwhile, tomorrow is still the Feast of the Ascension, and the Christian calendar invites me to reflect on that ancient story, not apart from the heartache of the present world, but in tandem with it. That’s where I land, as it were, even with a gaze fixed skyward: the risen Jesus dwells at the very heart of Creator God—and God’s heart is breaking in Gaza.

Daniel Bonnell’s art helps me in many ways, not least in recalling that God’s own heart always resides not only “above” us but at the depths of God’s own creation, which includes the suffering and pain of God’s creatures everywhere. Bonnell’s image of the baptism of Jesus, in a cruciform shape, including the Spirit-as-dove, invites me to connect and unite all the many aspects of the Jesus story into a singular proclamation: God is with us.

“The Baptism of Christ with Dove,” Daniel Bonnell

God is with us, in both heights and depths. May that great declaration of faith grant us the courage to do exactly what Jesus instructed his disciples to do as he “ascended”: to be his witnesses, in Jerusalem and to the ends of the Earth (Acts 1:8).

May we do precisely that, in every way we can, for however long we can, and for the sake of peace, with justice, and the healing of the world—everywhere.

Easter for Earth

Earth is being crucified. Is there an Easter for Earth, too, or just humans?

That question asks more than whether our pets “go to heaven” (thank you, Pope Francis, for reassuring us about that). By wondering about an Easter for Earth, I mean to wonder whether Earth can be our heavenly home. Biblical writers seemed to think so, and in ways that I never would have imagined in the Evangelical world of my youth. Realizing this shifts the frame of my faith so dramatically, it almost feels like a different religion.

“Streams in the Desert,” Jennifer McClellan

I’m not sure I would have grappled with such a question if I hadn’t wrestled for so long with religious attitudes concerning lesbian and gay people, which shaped a great deal of my scholarly life for many years. By delving into critical social theory as an academic, I have since then appreciated how helpful such theorizing is for my life as a parish priest—in my life as a “woke” priest, I suppose one might say these days.

“Queer theory,” it turns out, seems rather at home in religious spaces, and it offers handy tools for doing constructive theological work in Christian traditions—even pastoral care. The Easter season reinforces that supposition at nearly every turn: however we wish to think of the “risen Jesus,” he’s not a ghost nor a resuscitated corpse but continually defies tidy categorization—just as a queer theorist might hope.

It helps to recall the suspicion queer theorists harbor for binary categories, which nearly everyone uses quite regularly: day and night; young and old; black and white. That’s an extremely short list of examples, and they are considered “binary” in character because they are usually defined by means of opposition, with each term neatly separated from the other. Daytime is the opposite of nighttime, in other words, and to be young is not yet old, and whatever black looks like, it’s not at all white.

But upon further reflection, the lines and edges between such categories quickly start to blur. We have words for that, too: dusk when day starts shading toward night, and middle-aged when we are no longer young but still some years away from “old,” and of course the color palette offers many different shades of gray between “black” and “white.” (That palette certainly calls our racial categories into question just as the new Pope apparently does with some “creole” ancestry, which is a Caribbean mix of both European and African lineage.)

Taking all of that into religious institutions can feel a bit harrowing or at least unsettling. The Bible itself, for example, is typically divided between the Old and New Testaments. Are the terms “old” and “new” binary opposites? The older testament is surely not obsolete given how often the Gospel writers quote from the Hebrew Bible to describe the good news of Jesus.

And that brings us to Easter. If we dare condense the richness of the Easter proclamation, it might be this: God, the giver of life, is also the giver of new life.

But what exactly does that word “new” mean in that sentence? Is there any continuity between the “old life” that has passed and the “new life” that is given? Or does the hope for the “new” rely entirely on discontinuity in an absolute sense? (I’m indebted to British theologian and scientist David Wilkinson for framing the question in that way.)

The Gospel writers had an opinion on that question, which they offered by giving us a risen Jesus who still bears the scars of crucifixion—a risen Jesus, moreover, who is not at first recognizable until those scars are seen. “Old” and “New” blend and mix together in Easter stories in ways that defy tidy classification schemes—to which queer theorists would likely smile and nod their heads.

But what about Earth?

Modern Western Christianity has instilled in so many of us, in both subtle and explicit ways, a religious vision of the Christian Gospel as an “escape hatch” from Earth; the Christ event is framed mostly as a divine rescue mission, saving those who believe by transporting us to a far-off, distant place called Heaven.

I’m caricaturing that vision to make sure we notice how it lurks around the edges of even the most “progressive” congregations in the liberal Protestant world—and it’s literally killing the planet. The late-nineteenth century social theorist Max Weber voiced a deep concern that the Protestant Reformation had in effect evacuated God from Earth, leaving this planet a “disenchanted place,” basically a giant storehouse of stuff for us to use however we wish. All sorts of writers, activists, ministers, and scientists since then have been sounding the same alarm on this—and its clarion call needs to wake us up, now.

The stubborn separation of human life from planetary life has been inscribed not only on our liturgical texts and in our ecclesial patterns, but also—and largely because of this—on our electoral politics, public policies, and corporate business plans. The Roman Empire killed Jesus; the human empire is crucifying Earth—will she, like Jesus, enjoy an Easter?

Perhaps practicing a (queer) suspicion of binary categories should belong more directly among Christian spiritual disciplines, which might make the question of Easter for Earth a bit less peculiar and more obviously woven into Gospel proclamation.

It just so happens that tomorrow, on the Fifth Sunday of Easter, the lectionary will invite us to hear a passage from the Revelation to John (21:1-6) that rather dramatically features a classic binary construction. The passage includes a vision of a “new heaven and a new earth.” How do we think about that word “new” in relationship to God’s creation? Does it mean that the “old” is entirely set aside or even destroyed? Is God starting over with a blank slate? Couldn’t we and shouldn’t we find a much more fruitful and constructive way to imagine the relationship between “old” and “new”?

Maybe it’s the American obsession with “frontiers,” or maybe it’s the tech world’s obsession with “innovation,” or maybe it’s global capitalism’s reliance on the “latest shiny thing” to bolster profits—whatever the source, the modern notion of new in relation to Earth has been nothing short of a disaster. When Earth herself is considered ultimately disposable, it grants (religious) permission for environmental destruction and unthinkable ecological ruin.

How then do we live as an “Easter people” observing a season of new life in which the old has not entirely disappeared? The scarred but risen Jesus poses precisely that question, reminding us that something new has indeed emerged from death, not to erase the world death marred but to heal it and raise it up into the light of a new dawn.

Perhaps the passage from John’s account of the Gospel (13:31-35), which we will also hear tomorrow, offers the only possible answer to the question of Easter’s newness: “Love one another.”

It’s not queer theory, after all, that will save any of us, but only love. Only love can heal the wounds from our past we cannot even bear to name and then carry us into a future we barely dare to imagine.

So, love one another, John’s Jesus says. Love whatever remains from our older selves, and whatever is emerging as something new—just love one another. And let’s be clear, this is not optional. It is so mission-critical that John’s Jesus calls it a commandment.

We must love one another, everyone, no exceptions—and we must love Earth herself into healing and renewal. Love alone will render Earth into our heavenly home—the hopeful Eastertide for this precious Earth.

“St. Francis Mandela,” Giuliana Francesca

Queering the Lamb as Shepherd for a Mothering God

My theological education continually confronted me with the claim that theological language is symbolic and analogical. Not just some God-talk, but all of it. Everything we say and try to say about “God” is a symbol (it points toward a reality we cannot grasp directly) or an analogy (a comparison of two things that are not the same but sufficiently so to help us think and communicate).

Most people get this readily enough when they come across biblical texts with images that so clearly rely on common literary tropes: God as a “mother eagle,” for example, who hovers over her nest (Deut. 32:11-12), or describing God as a “fortress,” “rock,” “shield,” and “horn” (Psalm 18:2), or Jesus as the “vine” and his disciples as the “branches” (John 15:1). But the claim about symbolic language applies not only to the obvious examples, but as some theologians have noted, to all theological speech. Even when we declare that “God is love” our experiences of human love fall far short of what divine love is actually all about.

This coming Sunday, as it does every year on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, the lectionary gives us another image from the Gospel according to John. It comes from John’s tenth chapter about Jesus as the “good shepherd.” Also appointed for this very same day is a passage from the last book of the Bible, the Revelation to John (7:9-17), where Jesus is portrayed as the “lamb who was slain”—a lamb who is now not only alive but living at the center of heaven’s throne as a shepherd.

Tossing those two readings together on a single Sunday puts “theology-as-symbolic-speech” on steroids. The peculiar pairing of lamb-as-shepherd is just one of many illustrations of what drew me more than 20 years ago to the academic discipline known as “queer theory” in my theological work, and why I felt certain it could provide useful tools for Christian theology.

As queer theorists often want to note, the categorial classification schemes we devise for our identities and relationships—male and female, gay and straight, among so many others—simply fall short, and sometimes hideously short, of how people actually live and who they understand themselves to be. Those categories become tightly sealed boxes, restricting our movements and dictating our behaviors. In that sense, at least for some of these social theorists, to “queer” a category is to scramble its standard definitions, unravel its regulatory certainties, and liberate a whole new set of evocative possibilities from its conceptual prison. Surely this is what John the Divine intended (even if he didn’t think of it this way) when he queered the image of a lamb, the one who had been slain by the Roman Empire, and who now sits enthroned as a heavenly shepherd.

Dealing with the limits of language in texts where the symbols are obviously scrambled is one thing; it’s quite another to loosen one’s grip on religious terms that more truly have their grip on us, as it were. One of the most obvious and highly-charged examples of this is the language of God as “Father.”

That paternal image of God was so deeply embedded in my Christian faith for so many years, I could scarcely imagine a Christian life without it; therein lies the challenge of appreciating the symbolic character of not just some but all theological speech. I find it helpful in that regard to remember the long history of patriarchal societies from which most religious traditions emerged; in those societies, anyone who is “in charge,” or has power, or can make decisions, is almost assuredly male and probably a father. It’s a fairly short step from that social arrangement to configuring “Creator God” as a paternal figure.

But there’s another underlying assumption to notice carefully in that historical development: the analysis I just outlined relies on a notion of God that involves, by definition, someone “being in charge” and “in control.” Power itself needs to be “queered.”

So I have to wonder: could the annual observance of “Mother’s Day” falling on “Good Shepherd Sunday” in the Easter season help us navigate these quandaries in theological speech? Maybe. But just exchanging one word for another—God the Father is now Mother—won’t take us very far down that road if all the patriarchal power is still in place. What is “power,” anyway? Who wields it? Under what conditions and for what ends? I’m certainly glad my own mother ran our household—my dear old novelist-dad would have made a mess of it. Did power actually reside anywhere in that domestic arrangement, or did it continually circulate throughout our relationships in glimmering gyres of affection and Midwestern practicality?

I’m not paying nearly enough attention to my own power as a white man as I write this (what this blog post needs is a trans-woman of color at the helm), but I am trying to pay attention to the image of the “lamb as shepherd” even as I harbor lovely memories of my mother—as she writes the checks to pay the bills while dad sits at his desk in the basement writing his novels.

It’s at least a bit subversive to suppose that a lamb can function as a shepherd, and by putting a lamb on the heavenly throne at the pinnacle of divine glory John the Divine certainly invites a reassessment of our standard modes of describing divine authority—or rather, that those typical modes just don’t apply. And that’s when I need to get busy and sort out what my own gendered power and privilege.

In the end, we only begin to realize that our job is not somehow to “make sense” of our theological traditions (whatever that may mean) but instead to allow those traditions to invite us ever deeper into the mystery of divine life at the very heart of the Universe—a mystery not merely to marvel at but find ourselves undone by and then changed.

For now—or maybe for always—in this world of so much pain and sorrow, I turn to the queerness of theological speech for comfort. It might lead me still deeper into the heart of the Universe where a rather queer Creator God transcends yet also fulfills everything I had always hoped a “father” and a “mother” might offer: unfailing care and undying love.

Or as John the Divine will invite us to imagine for Good Shepherd Sunday:

“The Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,
guiding them to springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

“The Good Shepherd,” Jacinta Crowley-Long

The Word of the Lord?

“Just rip out those pages from your Bible!”

That was the advice given by one of my faculty colleagues to a seminarian some years ago. The student was a gay man who had been tormented for years by the so-called “clobber passages” about sexuality in the Bible, those verses that seemed to label him an “abomination,” or “unnatural,” certainly “immoral,” and by extension even “spawn of Satan.”

Rather than dragging up all the historical-critical textual tools at our disposal as modern Christians to engage yet again with the insidiously deceptive practice of using sacred texts to justify cultural bias, my colleague (both exasperated by this student’s religious PTSD and also seeking to be kind) said, “oh, just rip those pages out and be done with it!”

As a gay man myself, and also a proud “liberal” (sometimes even an aspiring “progressive”), I empathized with that advice—and I was also appalled. Granted, the project of integrating religious faith and sexual orientation can feel terribly arduous, especially in a society with a well-established repugnance toward “non-straight” people. But integration at least implies some level of respect for both sides of the equation, in this both the human and the divine, and I can’t imagine physically shredding a sacred text.

On the other hand, preserving the “sanctity” of a text is often used as an excuse to maintain a cultural status quo rather than engaging with the much harder work of historical analysis, or communal confession, or the tasks of healing and reconciliation.

Consider, for example, the long and brutal history of Christian anti-Semitism. The Gospel according to John (among other texts) has been used frequently in Church history to both justify religious discrimination against Jews and, in some cases, to promote social and political violence. John refers to “the Jews” more than 60 times in his account of the Gospel (and no fewer than 19 times in John’s so-called “passion narrative” in which Jesus suffers and dies); these ancient texts continue to show up in contemporary contexts where “Christ-killers” still operates as a dangerous epithet for Jewish communities.

Some have suggested replacing “the Jews” with “religious leaders” in those particularly problematic passages. But this can easily obscure the underlying social dynamics of that powerful story in ways that drain the story itself of its human/divine drama. Equally troubling: in this harrowing time in U.S. society when our own government is erasing our own history—of transgender people, of Black people, of indigenous people, basically anyone who isn’t straight, white, and male—we must resist doing exactly the same thing with our sacred texts and our sacred history; erasing the problem won’t solve it and will likely make it worse.

Adding to these canonical conundrums, the progressive ire toward problematic texts is rarely applied evenly or consistently, and for some good reasons. The Bible has been used poorly and sometimes with horrific consequences concerning such a wide range of issues that no one person can keep track of them, whether with reference to race and ethnicity, or gender and sexuality, or economics and ecology. If “erasure” were generalized broadly—just remove, delete, ignore, or omit whatever troubles us, might cause harm, or doesn’t align with our preferred theological positions—we would not only have very few pages of the Bible left, we would surely eviscerate what it means to refer to a text as “sacred.”

But doing nothing about these religious vexations is not an option, either. I have spent too many years picking up the pieces of religiously ruined lives not to appreciate how damaging institutional religion can be, including these ancient texts that can sometimes be brutal, violent, and soul-killing.

So, what’s to be done and what can we do? I would propose taking three modest but nonetheless important steps.

The first step: stop calling the Bible “the word of the Lord” in public worship. That ritual declaration enjoys a long history and appears in most mainline Christian churches, and it’s time to retire it. Referring to texts from the Bible as God’s own “word” perpetuates the notion that even the vilest of biases originates with God and thus grants (religious) permission to act with (cultural) violence. “Don’t blame me,” misogynists like to say when treating women badly, “it’s in the Bible.”

No longer referring to a liturgical reading from the Bible as “the Word of the Lord” will sound to some people nearly as severe as my faculty colleague’s suggestion to rip pages from that book’s binding. But The Episcopal Church already approved that liturgical change back in 1997 (the “Enriching Our Worship” collection of supplemental liturgical texts). In the parish I’m privileged to serve here in Michigan we use those newer options more often than not: the lay reader usually concludes a reading by saying, “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”

I love the ambiguity, or perhaps “Anglican breadth,” in that liturgical statement. After all, the Spirit might want to encourage us to heed a biblical exhortation, or the Spirit might urge us to resist a given biblical writer’s point of view—there’s no way to predict in advance what the Spirit will be “saying” to God’s people concerning a particular text for a specific occasion. Even so, that liturgical invitation still affirms the inherent value in the Bible itself, reminding us that biblical texts can always prompt insight or provoke engagement.

Inviting people to hear what the Spirit is saying right now with a biblical text can also remind all of us that the Bible has been heard and read in many different ways in countless contexts over the course of many centuries; our job is not to figure out which one is “correct,” but to hear what the Spirit is saying—right now. (And this, by the way, is just one piece in the ongoing and urgent need to develop a robust “theology of Scripture,” which the late-biblical scholar Dale Martin passionately urged: if the Bible does not just contain “meaning” we’re supposed to “find,” what does it look like actively to make meaning today from those texts?)

And by the way, even the great Protestant Reformer Martin Luther insisted that the Bible is not the “Word of God.” But, Luther said, the Bible can become the Word of God when good news is preached with it. How we use the Bible matters, and the “good news” we might make from it will vary depending on the time and place in which we use it.

A second step, related to the first: clergy need to step up and shoulder their responsibilities not only as “pastors” but also “teachers” in their congregations (teaching should actually be considered part and parcel of providing pastoral care). If the lectionary assigns a particularly difficult or challenging text for a given occasion of public worship (and what counts as “difficult” will vary depending on the community and current events, among other factors) the ordained minister has a spiritual responsibility (and in some instances, an obligation) to name that problem explicitly. Even if the occasion does not afford sufficient time for a thorough treatment of the passage, it matters to have the challenge named.

Not long ago, I preached at a diaconal ordination on the Feast of St. Barnabas. The Gospel text appointed for that occasion came from Matthew (10:7-16) and included a reference to “Sodom and Gomorrah” and divine judgment. While I did not dwell on that portion of the text, I also did not ignore it.

“We just heard a reference to ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ in the passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel,” I said in that sermon. “And I can guarantee that every LGBT-identified person in this assembly today experienced stomach-churning anxiety, even if only for a moment, when they heard that reference.”

I then connected that anxiety to the ministry of a deacon, who is called to make the needs and concerns of the world known to the Church—and this includes, of course, the ongoing and shameful abuse of the Bible that traumatizes whole communities. Simply omitting that phrase from the proclamation of the Gospel in that liturgy would have been a form of religious denial and also a missed opportunity to illustrate how a religious text can shape the ministry of healing even when the wound itself came from that same religious text.

A third step, and perhaps the most important: remind ourselves regularly that the Bible was assembled by the institutional church for the sake of the church’s mission. The church does not exist to serve the Bible, in other words; the Bible exists for the sake of the Church. (As a priest in The Episcopal Church, I would say the same thing about the Prayer Book.)

Putting this point in a slightly different way: not everything in the Bible reflects something “true” about God; but every book of the Bible does reflect something vital about the person who wrote it or the community from which it emerged. And that matters—to me, it matters a lot. One of the many things I appreciate about the Bible is how it preserves stories of people and communities who struggled, sometimes mightily, in their efforts to know and love God, and to discern how they ought to live as God’s people in the world—exactly what I hope the church today is likewise trying to do.

Remembering in that way what the Bible is and the Bible’s proper role in the life of the Church does not in any way diminish its religious significance; it still counts as a “sacred text,” and I would say, even more so. After all, what could be more sacred than a tool to help God’s people participate in God’s own mission of healing, reconciling, and promoting a life of flourishing for all God’s creatures?

I can’t think of anything more “sacred” than that.

Sing Alleluia and Practice Resurrection

“If for this life only,” St. Paul writes, “we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Many Christians heard that verse yesterday, on Easter Day. It comes from Paul’s great fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, his extended, full-throated defense of a robust embrace of resurrection, of Easter.

In the excerpt appointed for yesterday’s celebration (15:19-26), Paul seems to insist that the great “Alleluia” of Easter morning must have consequences for more than this present life alone; the risen Christ leads us beyond the grave into new life with God.

I give my heart, with Paul, to that very hope. And yet, and still…perhaps now more than ever the flip side of that coin demands equal attention: if only for the “next life” we trust in Easter’s hope, we have ceded God’s precious Earth to the cruel and torturous forces of death. As in the Incarnation of God’s Word in Jesus, so also the resurrection of Jesus from the dead: this is no religious escape hatch from earthly concerns but the deepest possible union of Heaven and Earth; the Church ought to live like this is actually true.

Just like every compelling word and concept, the great “Alleluia” of Easter comes with important context, especially when we read Luke’s account of the Gospel (24:1-12). Writing in an occupied province of the Roman Empire, Luke constantly urges his readers to note the contrast between imperial power and the power of God. The Easter “Alleluia” resounds with its clearest tones when proclaimed with a brave resistance to Empire.

Biblical scholar Walter Wink offered a helpful framework for what it means to speak of “imperial power,” and especially as a caution against supposing that such power remains consigned to ancient history; imperial power always remains a present possibility, and for what Wink calls the “domination system.”

Whenever a society creates a network of power characterized by unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, biased race relations, and patriarchal gender relations, and then uses violence to maintain this network, that’s a “domination system.”

The first-century Roman Empire was a domination system, so was the Babylonian Empire before that; particular empires come and go, but the system lingers—even today, even in our own backyard.

Consider how Wink might help us read that passage from St. Paul. The risen Jesus, Paul says, is the first fruits of an unimaginable harvest. On that Great Day, the risen Christ will defeat “every ruler and every authority and power”—that’s the cue for Wink, who would remind us that Paul would surely have in mind the imperial principalities of the domination system that rob so many of abundant life.

Paul goes on to imagine that Great Day when even death itself is among the principalities defeated by Christ. But just as our joyful “Alleluia” deserves some textured context, so does that word death, which can sound a bit abstract in tidy religious spaces; it also rarely means just one kind of thing, especially these days when death comes in so many forms.

We see it in the destruction of whole ecosystems that give life, the clear-cutting of old-growth forests, and intolerable extinction of countless species, both plant and animal. We hear it in anguished cries from women with problem pregnancies who are heartlessly refused lifesaving medical intervention; we must acknowledge it in the short-sighted defunding of HIV prevention programs and the discontinued distribution of AIDS drugs around the world—a decision that has already killed people; and death lurks around even the bureaucratic cruelty in erasing—quite literally—transgender people from public policies and government websites.

That’s a short list of death’s many guises in today’s world, and we Christians must realize that this list has nothing to do with partisan politics. It makes no difference whether we align ourselves with Republicans or Democrats or Independents, as followers of the risen Christ, as followers of the Lord of Life, Christians cannot stand idly by while public policies rend the very fabric of our ecological existence and political postures shred the very basis of the common good.

We may not be able to change the whole wide world, but we can and we must practice resurrection right here, and right now—the empty tomb compels us and the great “Alleluia” equips us.

I love that notion of “practicing resurrection” right here and now. I first heard it from my friend and ministry colleague Jim Mitulski, who always devotes the season of Lent to the various ways we can “practice resurrection,” to make Easter matter in a world of violence and death—and we do that by the way we live, now.

When first-century imperial religion did its worst and killed Jesus, God refused to give Empire the final word. And we must stand as bold witnesses to God’s own Yes to life. No matter the cost, we must “practice resurrection” today.

This is why Easter is not only the unswerving confidence for that Great Day still to come—and it will come!—but also the courage to live in the light of that Great Day now.

I believe Luke was so eager to inspire this courage that he entrusted the news of Easter to women. He makes sure to name them: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James. These and others were among the women who had been with Jesus in Galilee, Luke says. By some accounts, these women supported Jesus in many ways, making that first-century Jesus movement possible.

These women were the last ones at the cross, and the first ones at the empty tomb.

When men are the measure of what matters, when only men can give testimony that counts in courts of law, and when men own other living beings as property, that’s when God reveals to women a path to new life.

Let us not overlook this crucial point: Luke entrusts the message of Easter to women in the midst of a patriarchal society. There’s not one bit of subtlety about this: the women share the news, and it was men, Luke says, and disciples of Jesus no less, who thought this was just an “idle tale” (Lk. 24:11).

When men are the measure of what matters, when only men can give testimony that counts in courts of law, and when men own other living beings as property, that’s when God reveals to women a path to new life.

The great Easter Alleluia invites us to walk that path and to practice resurrection; to live as friends in a community of equals; to extend a bold hospitality to everyone, no exceptions; to strive for justice and peace among all people; and to respect the dignity of every living being—just as we promise to do in the Baptismal vows we make.

Easter points to that great dawn over the horizon, beyond which we cannot presently see; in its dawning light, we must live as an Easter people now.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

“The Women Come to the Empty Tomb,” Mary Stephen

A Day for Rest and Harrowing

After a midnight thunderstorm roused me from sleep—and my Australian shepherd companion River, too, with wild barks—this Holy Saturday morning dawned quietly and with thick clouds. Birds were singing, though in muted tones, as River and I walked through our shoreline neighborhood before most others were even stirring in their houses; a rabbit hopped across the sidewalk in front of us.

This is one of my favorite days on the Christian calendar, though I can’t quite articulate the reasons why with much precision. I’m tempted to suppose its restfulness appeals to me after a thick week of liturgical intensity—but I still haven’t finished my Easter sermon, and I need to rehearse some of the ancient chants for the morning, and of course the altar guild will be cleaning the sanctuary and arranging lilies around the Table and Font–perhaps accompanied by the organist’s own rehearsals with the choir–while the hospitality brigade bakes or shops for festive refreshments in the parish hall.

Likewise Jesus, who was also not truly “resting” on this day, at least according to some traditions, and even though he was ostensibly confined to a rock-hewn tomb. This is the day—between Crucifixion and Resurrection—when Jesus “harrows Hell.”

Western Christianity seems content to leave such matters to a single phrase in the Apostles’ Creed: after declaring that Jesus was “crucified, died and was buried,” the creed then notes that “he descended into hell.” Eastern Orthodox Christians pull out all the theatrical stops to make this point (and I’m glad they do); Jesus doesn’t merely “descend” into the nether realms but topples the gates of Satan’s domain, liberating all those who had been held captive there by “sin, death, and the devil,” that “unholy Trinity,” as Martin Luther called them.

One of my favorite icons is of this very moment, with Jesus portrayed as trampling those hellish gates underfoot and literally yanking Adam and Eve from their tombs. I take great delight in just how startled those first humans appear to be by this arrival of Life. I also appreciate the crushing of those gates: Jesus not only rescues those who had been there, no one will ever go there again, not a single one; the realm of “sin, death, and the devil” has been destroyed, forever.

Visual and literary artist Jan Richardson invites something similar in a Lenten poem, one that blesses God “in whom nothing is wasted.” Nothing is tossed aside or thrown away—every “remnant, scrap, and shred” returns to God.

Poet and Anglican priest Malcolm Guite, in his collection of sonnets for the Christian year, focuses his attention instead on the tender care of a dead body on this day, the anointing of “ruined flesh” and the “kissing of wounds.” I’m grateful for this reminder that rest still matters—this is the Sabbath day, after all—and even with Hell to harrow, there must be space for renewal. Even so, and especially so, Guite weaves with the same thread as Richardson, insisting that “Love is never lost,” even at the grave—“harrowing” is replaced with “sowing” in Guite’s vision and love is the seed that shall not fail to sprout.

Here, then, an offering for this Holy Saturday from Malcolm Guite:

Here at the centre everything is still,
Before the stir and movement of our grief
That bears its pain and rhythm, ritual,
Beautiful useless gestures of relief.
So they anoint the skin that cannot feel
And soothe his ruined flesh with tender care,
Kissing the wounds they know they cannot heal,
With incense scenting only empty air.
He blesses every love that weeps and grieves,
And makes our grief the pangs of a new birth.
The love that’s poured in silence at old graves,
Renewing flowers, tending the bare earth,
Is never lost. In him all love is found
And sown with him, a seed in the rich ground.

On the Good Road into the Heart of God

“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly.”

Those familiar words of course come from the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise in the very first chapter of Luke’s account of the Gospel.

Luke is the only one of the gospel writers to include this song from Mary, and he features it right up front, setting the tone for how he wants to tell the story of Jesus, especially to frame his telling with the dynamics of power.

Every human society, every community, all relationships exhibit in various ways those dynamics. The schools we attend, the money we make, where we live, the gender we manifest, whom we love, the color of our skin—all of these and more are infused with varying degrees of social and political, even religious power.

Modern Western society trains most of us to think of power as residing in just one place at a time. Many of us suppose that power is something like an object that passes from one location to another, like a football that gets passed from one team to the next so we know who the winners and the losers are in this game of life.

Power is obviously much more complex than that; it’s never merely a zero-sum game, as if when one person has power, everyone else has none.

Power is much more fluid, resembling a stream, or a river—always moving, always changing, sometimes showing up in the foaming cataracts of a waterfall and at others as a quiet eddy circling around a shallow bay.

Luke appreciates these complexities about power and repeatedly contrasts the power of empire and the power of God; he does this in nearly every encounter with Jesus, in nearly every parable Jesus tells, and in all of the relationships he chronicles.

Luke shows us how power can intimidate, control and dominate, even oppress entire communities with a coercive force. He also shows us another kind of power—the power to heal, to comfort and console, and perhaps especially the power to welcome and embrace, something we might call the “power of belonging.”

This power to welcome in a loving embrace hardly ever gets noticed like all the spectacular displays of coercive power. For Luke, “welcome” and “belonging” stand in stark contrast to imperial power—the kind that divides and fragments, the kind that creates categories of competition, rendering every encounter as a moment of exchange and potential aggression, even hostility.

I am always intrigued by the moment in Luke’s account of the passion when Luke rather casually mentions that the trial and torture of Jesus created a friendship between former rivals: Pilate and Herod—the Roman Governor and the Judean King (Luke 23:12).

Whenever we deal with Jesus, Luke seems to say—even when we stand opposed to him—an energy of “welcome” emerges, creating friends from enemies.

The holiest of weeks for Christians began just yesterday, with “The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday.” That awkward moniker signals just how odd the day itself is, actually one of the strangest on the Christian calendar. This mashup of what seem like competing liturgical goals creates significant religious whiplash as we shift rather jarringly from the so-called “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem to the abject suffering on the cross.

“Jesus Enters Jerusalem,” Patrick J. Murphy

How tempting to suppose that such a shift yanks us from a moment of celebratory power to a moment of power’s absence. But Luke urges us to suppose otherwise, with different kinds of power circulating through these moments.

In the story about the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem (Lk. 19:28-40)—the iconic “Palm Sunday” story—Luke doesn’t give us any palms. There are no palms in Luke’s version of Palm Sunday. We might recall in that Mediterranean society that palm branches were often used to celebrate a military victory, and in ancient Israel, they marked the royal power of King David.

As Jesus enters the “City of David,” Luke narrates that entry with the conspicuous absence of any symbols of royal power. And yet, as Luke says, the crowd of disciples joining him on that road were praising God for all the “deeds of power” that they had seen in Jesus—the power to heal, the power to console, the power to welcome.

Switching our liturgical gaze to the scene of execution, we don’t see a moment of complete powerlessness; Luke would have us to see something quite different (Lk. 23:1-49).

In his tortured weakness, Jesus nonetheless exercises his power to pardon—he asks God to forgive all his executioners, and that moment appears only in Luke.

Luke is also the only gospel writer to give us the touching exchange between Jesus and the thief who was crucified with him. Jesus is dying and in the kind of pain we can scarcely imagine; and still, he declares with confidence to the thief, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.”

There’s an old story about this Gospel moment, and it is told in various versions. The story goes like this: that thief showed up at the Pearly Gates and stood before St. Peter.

“So,” Peter says to the man, “did you earn a degree in theology to get here?”
“Oh no, sir, I never studied theology.”
“I see. But you do understand how atonement works for the sake of salvation.”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t know about such things.”
“Well, then you must have lived quite a virtuous life to be standing here.”
“No sir; I was a convicted thief.”
“Why then,” Peter says, “why are you here?”
“Because, the man on the middle cross said I could come.”

The power of “welcome” in the midst of weakness is at the very heart of God.

That’s where we’re headed on this road through the holiest of weeks on the Christian calendar: we’re going right into the very heart of God, where the power of love can change the world.

We speak often in the parish I’m privileged to serve about the importance, even the primacy of extending a bold hospitality as a vital component of our shared ministry. In our life together, we aim to welcome everyone, no exceptions whatsoever. And we do this because we are convinced of this: there is only love in the heart of God.

I was not raised to believe such a thing about God’s own heart; I fear very few were. The world would be a different place, nearly unrecognizable, if this were the “good news” of the Christian Church.

I’m grateful to Christian songwriter Zach Williams for that line from one of his songs, which captures with such elegant beauty what I have struggled for so many years to express and to live: There is only love at the heart of God—nothing else, only love—and the power of that love welcomes all, everyone, home.

The Devil’s a Liar!

The first Sunday in Lent always features Jesus in the wilderness tempted by Satan. Reading this familiar story again this year (Luke 4:1-13), it strikes me that those iconic temptations all spring from the ongoing and stubborn desire for certainty and security.

Imagine having the capacity to create food whenever you’re hungry, or to control the world’s wealth (all of it), or never to worry about physical harm ever again—to be certain of the capacity for even just one of those, let alone all three, would surely provide a sense of safety if not absolute security.

Personally, the chaos of our present world makes that desire for “certainty and security” sound pretty good. And that ancient story offers a timely invitation to consider exactly what I’m most tempted to do when the stakes are high in my life and when the consequences of my choices are potentially severe.

But this story is not merely about resisting temptation (as I have almost always taken it to mean), as if the point is to follow the lead of Jesus in exercising heroic willpower. The indigenous translation of this story we use during Lent at All Saints’ Parish refers to Satan in this story as the “evil trickster”—he’s a liar, in other words, the Great Deceiver, and he cannot make good on his promises; no one can. No one can give us perfect certainty or guaranteed security about anything—these are not possible for human life.

So much time and energy, even anguish, not to mention money, is devoted to obtaining these very things, these things we long for but cannot have—not because we’re unworthy of them or haven’t yet said the prayers properly, but because these things are not even compatible with being authentically human.

We cannot be perfectly certain and absolutely secure and still be human.

Living a genuinely human life is an ongoing journey of liberation, a theme all three of the biblical texts from the Lenten lectionary yesterday articulate directly and powerfully. In this case, being set free especially from all the stuff—material goods or a wealth of control—all the stuff we’re constantly told will keep us safe but actually keeps us afraid, always worried about scarcity, always terrified of loss.

Luke seems especially keen to help us travel this “freedom road,” and returns often to the Exodus of God’s people from slavery in Egypt as a favorite image. Jesus prepares for ministry just as Moses did—with forty days in the wilderness, exactly where the ancient Israelites wandered for forty years on their way to the Promised Land.

Even the particular temptations in Luke’s story harken back to that iconic moment. Almost immediately after their liberation from Egypt, the Israelites are hungry in that wilderness because they have no bread. It’s from that very story in Deuteronomy that Jesus quotes to fend off the devil—not just once, but for each of the three temptations.

by the Spirit into the Wilderness,” Stanley Spencer

Let’s also recall that the Spirit anoints Luke’s Jesus to let the oppressed go free, and as we heard last week, the transfigured Jesus is joined by none other than Moses, who discusses with Jesus his upcoming “departure,” which Luke calls his “exodus.”

Liberation from captivity and the freedom to flourish—this is the good road Luke invites us to travel our entire lives, urging us especially to let go of whatever we think will give us “certainty and security” along that road; these are not our provisions for the journey, no matter how often we’re told to pack them.

Always lingering in the background of Gospel texts is of course the Roman Empire. Regardless of whether it’s the first-century version of today’s Global Capitalism, imperial systems tempt us to acquire and accumulate more stuff, and always with the promise that still more stuff will finally make us safe—and that is an outright lie.

Sister Joan Chittister, a Roman Catholic nun and social justice advocate writes about the severe consequences of giving in to this imperial temptation. She describes what’s at stake in terms that are especially appropriate for this Women’s History Month.

“It is precisely women’s experience of God,” she writes, “that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the Creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion,” she says “does not know God the Spirit.”

Imperial religion has given us instead God the rule-maker, God the judge, and God the monarch in control of everything—and not just coincidentally, those are the roles men most often aspire to occupy and to use religion to advance their cause. That kind of religion, Chittister says, “has consumed Western spirituality and shriveled its heart.”

Luke’s Jesus shows us how to expand our hearts by letting go of imperial promises—those promises are in fact lies, and they keep us enslaved to a system in which there is never enough stuff, never enough money, never enough power; it’s a system that holds us captive to the demand for certainty and security—and it’s killing us while it kills the planet.

Indigenous peoples around the world, including in the Americas, have known these dynamics for a very long time. We must let go to live, and this is precisely why the First Nations Version of the New Testament refers to Jesus as “Creator Sets Free.”

The best Lenten disciplines really have nothing to do with chocolate or sugar or whatever else your indulgence of choice might be. Giving up treats for Lent will not keep us on the good road toward life, as if the point of our faith is self-denial for its own sake.

This season invites us instead to identify whatever it is that prevents us from thriving, and then to let it go, for good. Whatever still holds us captive as a community—longstanding resentments, perhaps, or entrenched bigotries, or inherited assumptions, or the economics of privilege—whatever holds us back from flourishing, now is the time to let it go.

The lectionary also gave us a beautiful passage from Deuteronomy yesterday (26:1-11), which sits right at the heart of the Torah, the law delivered by Moses. The great Christian mistake is to suppose the Torah is all about keeping rules; it’s not.

Remember, Moses says to the people, remember you were slaves in Egypt. God set you free, and now you must live as free people.

It’s high time we notice carefully what that passage indicates so clearly is the essence of living as God’s free people: it means living with a grateful generosity and welcoming the stranger.

Let that be our good road this Lenten season—for life.

“Consider the Lilies (Christ in the Wilderness Series),” Stanley Spencer

The Revolution is Now: The Blessing and Cost of Discipleship

I cannot imagine reading Luke’s version of the “Sermon on the Mount” (6:17-26) as a recipe for passive piety, not these days. That classic text struck me this past week as a manifesto, a revolutionary posture of solidarity in the face of imperial domination—do I mean in the first century or the twenty-first? Yes, both, because God erases no one, not ever.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is thoroughly political (though never partisan), and while I have been convinced of this for many years, it has rarely been clearer than it is today, in this age of erasing Black history, forgetting Indigenous trauma, and deleting (literally) transgender people. Now, right now, is the time for a Gospel revolution toward flourishing for all and not just a few.

The lectionary this past Sunday proclaimed this revolutionary moment with a manifesto from Luke’s Jesus. As I tried to suggest from the pulpit, noticing Luke’s distinctive treatment of that so-called “sermon” can help form us as God’s people to stand bravely at this time in American history with a fierce and transformative grace, a posture rooted in both memory and hope.

Luke introduces what turns out to be the “sermon on the plain” with images of healing, which Luke would have us understand as images of liberation. Just prior to this sermon, Luke’s Jesus declares that the Spirit anointed him to preach good news to the poor and to let the oppressed go free (4:18-19).

Detail from the Hunger Cloth at the Wernberg Monastery, Austria

It’s worth remembering in that regard that first-century society certainly had physicians and healers. They had what we might call today a “healthcare system.” But—and just like today—not everyone had equal access to those resources, and a whole multitude of them, Luke says, were coming to Jesus, presumably because they had nowhere else to go for healing.

These are the ones who were left out, forgotten, unable to find relief from whatever prevented them from thriving. Jesus heals all of them, Luke says, he sets them all free, and then he turns to his disciples—not just the “twelve apostles,” but a large crowd of disciples—and he says, look, what I’ve just done is what you must do as my disciples: dismantle injustice, stand with the poor, grieve with those who weep.

And you must understand this, he says: your discipleship will make some people hate you, and exclude you, and revile you “on account of the Son of Man.” That antique phrase usually trips us up, but he’s referring here to what happens to those who live as authentically human. That’s what that odd title “Son of Man” means: born of the truly human.

To be fully human with each other, we must look directly at how the world operates, name courageously what is broken, and identify the cause of our shared pain for the sake of healing and for a world of flourishing—for all.

Discipleship comes with a cost, in other words, and Luke is very clear about this. Throughout his account of the Gospel, Luke always writes with the context of an imperial regime in mind, a social system of oppressive power and control that robs people of their humanity, and thus their dignity as God’s own creation.

To live as disciples of Jesus—to follow the truly human one—is to stand opposed to powerful systems of domination that exploit the weak and crush the vulnerable.

We must also remember this about such “social systems” of oppression: they almost always include the collusion between religion and empire. All four accounts of the Gospel make that painful collaboration plain. Imperial Rome co-opted Judean religious leaders to keep the population passive. History shows us repeatedly how essential religion itself is for sustaining the power of empire; very few imperial regimes succeed without the cooperation of religious leaders.

All of this begs the question at the heart of Luke’s text: what does it really mean to be blessed?

One rather odd response to that question emerged over the last century or so, mostly in the United States, and often referred to as the “prosperity Gospel.” In this view of Christianity, those who are truly blessed by God enjoy material wealth and bodily comfort; those are the physical signs of divine favor.

Not vaguely or indirectly but with no room for doubt, Luke categorically rejects that view of Christian faith with his distinctive additions to this sermon from Jesus: woe to you who are rich, Luke’s Jesus says; woe to you who are always full and never hungry; woe to you who mistake material comfort for divine blessing.

But this is no simple binary opposition; Luke does not mean that “poverty is good” and “wealth is bad.” In a world divided by excessive wealth and deadly impoverishment, Luke wants us to see what discipleship looks like when we follow the one whose own mother praised God for bringing down the powerful and raising up the lowly.

The thriving of all—not just the few at the expense of the many, but of all—that’s the world of divine blessing we seek as disciples of Jesus.

The lectionary this past Sunday gave us a wonderful and organic image for such a world of blessing: a flourishing tree. For the prophet Jeremiah (17:5-10) and the psalmist (1:3), those devoted to the practice of justice are like trees planted by flowing water and bearing fruit in due season.

“Tree by Stream of Water,” Janice Larsen

The image of a tree of course enjoys a rich and complex history in both Jewish and Christian traditions. Standing in the Garden of Eden is the “Tree of Life,” which appears again at the end of the Bible, in the Revelation to John, where its life-giving leaves are for the healing of the nations.

We might recall that the cross on which Jesus was crucified is sometimes referred to as a “tree.” Quite remarkably, some early depictions show the cross as a budding tree, and by the sixth century, the cross is a tree in full flower.

In this Black History Month, we must also recall the horrifying practice of lynching Black people in trees—their broken bodies sometimes referred to as “strange fruit.” Kelly Brown Douglas, an Episcopal priest and womanist theologian, laments how often such lynching happened at church gatherings; she describes one such occasion that took place during a Methodist church picnic after Sunday morning worship.

That ghastly image shocks with its violence—and yet, Christians remember Christ crucified every single week in our Eucharistic fellowship. As another womanist theologian, M. Shawn Copeland, so poignantly reminds us: we Christians gather at the table over which the shadow of the lynched Jesus falls.

Copeland blends ancient and modern history with that image, reminding us that the collusion between religion and empire remains as a perpetual risk, and that we must always recall the execution of Jesus by the Roman Empire and the raising of Jesus to new life by God.

Memory and hope belong together at the Eucharistic Table, always—the memory of the crucified one and the hope of new life. We must keep these together not only concerning Jesus, but also concerning ourselves and the wider world.

Today’s world illustrates clearly and painfully the vital importance of memory. Black History Month has been taken off public calendars; residential boarding schools and programs of indigenous genocide are being removed from public school curricula (they were barely there to begin with); and transgender people have been deleted from the National Park Service website—even on the pages devoted to LGBT memorials.

We must remember—even the most painful memories of our shared history—we must remember for the sake of hope.

To that end, I made this vow to all the saints at All Saints’ Parish this past Sunday: so help me God, I said, we will not erase transgender people in this parish—not on my watch. And we will not forget the history of indigenous people as work for healing and reconciliation. And we will not remove Black History Month for our community calendar—not on our watch.

God erases no one.

So, blessed are you who hold difficult memories, even the unbearably painful ones.

Blessed are you who live with hope, even when it seems unreasonable.

Blessed are you who hold memory and hope together, for you shall be like a firmly planted tree, its roots stretching out to streams of living water, its branches bearing the fruit of new life, and its leaves for the healing of the nations.

Coming Out with God, Coming Out for Life

We don’t often get to celebrate the Feast of the Presentation on a Sunday, just once every six or seven years. That’s a shame, really, because it’s a celebration of God coming out.

Needless to say, that’s not how I grew up reading the wonderful story from Luke’s account of the Gospel (2:22-40). But it’s high time to do so now, and then come out with God. To get there, it helps, I think, to remember that numbers are sometimes of particular significance in the Bible.

Consider the number forty: the ancient Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years on their way to the Promised Land; Noah’s ark was built to survive forty days and forty nights of rain; Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days before beginning his ministry, and his Ascension into God’s own life happened forty days after his resurrection from the dead.

Luke reminds us of another example, when women in ancient Israel underwent a ritual of purification forty days after childbirth; if they did so on the occasion of their firstborn, they also had to redeem that child, basically buy the child back from God—usually with an animal sacrifice or sometimes a payment of money.

Mary and Joseph, devout in their religious faith, observe that ritual with Jesus, a story commemorated on what is now called “The Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple.” It used to be more widely called something else, and in some churches, it is still known as “The Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

“Simeon Blessing the Christ Child,” Severino Blanco

That old-fashioned religious language about “purity” deserves attention, especially since some people of faith think sexual intercourse or even just sexual desire can make someone dirty. Since the 1990s, so-called “purity rings” have been popular in some Evangelical Christian communities; teenagers wear these rings after taking a “virginity pledge,” a promise to keep themselves “unstained” by sex before marriage. Both girls and boys do this, but by far it’s mostly girls—women are always more accountable for purity than men.

Growing up gay before I even knew what “gay” meant,” sex always had a dirty patina. Still today, it’s fairly common to see religious protestors at Gay Pride parades holding big signs that refer to “filthy sinners”—not just “sinners” but filthy ones, as if an LGBT identity is a blemish or blotch, a stain on God’s handiwork in need of purifying.

There’s an even longer history of using notions of “purity” as a religious disguise for ethnic bigotry. Muslims migrating to Medieval Europe were considered dirty criminals; in the 1930s, the German Nazi party promised to preserve the purity of the Aryan race; and in Black History Month, we need to recall how enslaved Africans in this country were sometimes denigrated for their “dirty skin” (and in a culture of white supremacy, that’s still a presumption among many).

Not much to celebrate in that litany of purification. Thankfully, ancient Israel’s purity rites more often marked moments of liminality and profound transition—certainly not anything like “ethnic cleansing.”

Recalling the high rate of infant mortality and the risks for women associated with childbirth in the ancient world, surviving childbirth with a healthy infant was nearly miraculous. It was like returning from the borderlands, that mysterious boundary between life and death—and that’s what you mark in the Temple as you redeem the child back from God.

Take all that and remember the number forty—a number to signal a hopeful journey to the land of Promise; a reminder of safety during a flood; preparation for a ministry of liberation, and returning from death while rising into life.

That’s where Luke places his focus, on the arrival of Jesus in the Temple forty days after his birth—the presentation of the one who is not redeemed by the ritual but is himself the Redeemer; and that insight is made clear in the joyful praises and prophetic utterances of Simeon and Anna.

I truly love these two Lucan figures. These religious elders devoted many years to the spiritual discipline of hope. They embody that very insight, that hope itself demands the discipline of a spiritual practice. And age makes no difference at all in this vital ministry of cultivating hopefulness.

As Luke notes, Simeon had been assured by God that he would not die before seeing God’s promised Messiah—and we need to imagine Simeon in this story shouting and exclaiming ecstatic praise upon seeing Jesus. Anna, herself a prophet, had been praying and fasting daily for decades in anticipation of “the redemption of Jerusalem,” as Luke puts it, and she ensures that the whole community knows that it has arrived in the flesh!

Luke features the Holy Spirit at nearly every turn in his account of the Gospel—and in this brief vignette in the Temple, Luke mentions the Spirit no fewer than three times in these eighteen verses. As Luke proposes when Jesus launches his ministry in Nazareth, we will know the Spirit is present and active when the poor hear good news, and captives are released, and the oppressed go free (4:18-19).

“The Prophet Anna Greets the Christ,” Lester Yocum

For exactly those reasons, the Spirit of God presents Jesus in the Temple.

This story in Luke took on yet another layer of significance for me last week during a rally in Lansing, Michigan. A few of us from the parish here in Saugatuck joined at least 150 other people in front of the state capitol building to express our solidarity with transgender people. Similar rallies happened in other parts of the country last Thursday, sponsored by the Transgender Unity Coalition, and it mattered to have visible religious support in those gatherings.

We listened as a long line of people waited for their turn at the microphone to tell their stories about coming out, stories about making themselves visible as differently gendered people. Many of them talked about how life-giving and even joyful it was to embrace more openly this vital component of who they are.

That’s the moment, while listening to those compelling stories, that’s when it suddenly occurred to me that Jesus being presented in the Temple is God’s own coming out story. Simeon and Anna’s joy at that moment underscores why this matters—it’s a story of God making God’s presence visible for the sake of abundant life.

Equally important to note were the stories we heard at that rally about the pain attached to this journey. In a society built on a strict binary gender system, it can be risky to come out in ways that do not conform to that system. Many transgender people are rejected by their families, they might experience violence in public places, even lose their jobs.

Hearing some of that anguish, I couldn’t help but think of Simeon in Luke’s story, who says to Mary, the mother of Jesus: “a sword will pierce your own soul also.” Even in that moment of joyful manifestation, Simeon intuited just how risky coming out can be.

In social systems of violence and hate, there is always a price to pay when we live for peace with justice and for love—always.

It seems increasingly clear that the weeks and months to come will present significant moments of decision for people of faith in the United States. We will need to decide how visible we wish to be about racial justice, and for gendered equality, and to protect the integrity of our ecosystems and the vitality of our environments.

It’s also fairly clear that acting on our convictions will come with a cost. Realizing the price we might have to pay for Gospel witness is one of the best reasons to gather every week at the Eucharistic table.

At that Table, God presents God’s own life to us; God strengthens us at the Table with the body and blood of Jesus; gathered around that Table, God inspires us and equips us with the Spirit, emboldened with courage to stand in solidarity with the vulnerable, the frightened, and all those who bravely refuse to conform to systems to domination and oppression.

It’s time, high time, for God’s people to come out, more fully and boldly.

It’s time to declare clearly and bravely exactly who we are: God’s beloved, the ones God is calling to make God’s glory manifest in the world.

We don’t all have to do that in exactly the same way—don’t ever forget the long and vital ministries of Simeon and Anna as they cultivated hopefulness, reminding everyone by the way they lived of the promises of God.

There are many ways to bear witness to the Gospel, and all of them are grounded in the promises of our Baptismal Covenant in the Book of Common Prayer. Chief among those promises as we look at the road before us are these: to strive for justice among all people, and to respect the dignity of every living being.

Doing that makes the very glory of God visibly present in the world. So let’s do it. Let’s come out with God and let’s come out for life.