Bible – Peculiar Faith

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.

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.)

“Spirit of the Horse,” Gordon Henry (known as a “ledger artist” who used pages from commercial ledgers as “canvas” to create images of vitality of the very natural world that had been reduced to commodities on that paper.)

Women’s Lib Comes to a Village in Samaria

A big shout out to lectionary “Year A” in the three-year cycle which gave us just yesterday the intrepid and resilient (though sadly nameless) “woman at the well” in John’s account of the Gospel (4:5-42). She herself was a fount of living water as we gathered for worship in this Lenten season, in these days when white patriarchy is running amok across the globe and an oily rain is falling on the people of Tehran—an unprecedented environmental catastrophe.

Rather than oil in the streets, and as if like Moses, we struck the rock in the wilderness in worship and out from ancient biblical texts streamed the kind of clear watery refreshment we hardly knew we needed so terribly much. How fortuitous and perhaps even divinely inspired that the lectionary landed on these biblical texts in Women’s History Month—a month that really should feature actual women (with names, damnit!) and not merely stereotypes.

It’s dismayingly difficult to keep women real given the long, the achingly long literary, religious, and political history of turning the stories of women into archetypes, symbols, and violent cliches. As we now know in some fresh and horrifying ways from Jeffrey Epstein’s island of misfit billionaires, women (and girls) are not merely tropes but objects to be traded, trafficked, bartered, enslaved, raped, tortured, and killed.

A Sunday lectionary hardly seems up to the task of unraveling and dismantling such an infernal misogyny, unless we pay attention, and unless we take ancient stories as contemporary beacons, and unless we insist that Scripture really can inspire and equip us—with the Holy Spirit’s charisms—to live as revolutionaries, just like Jesus.

So let’s be sure to notice when reading the story about that fierce woman at the well—and then notice again, and then still once more (because deeply ingrained patriarchal habits are insidiously hard to break)—that there’s absolutely nothing in this story about repentance and forgiveness; but there’s quite a lot in this Johannine story about cycles of patriarchal domination.

Let’s take a step back from that observation (which sounds like heresy in my Evangelically-shaped ears) and consider carefully the calcified cliches behind which women so often disappear. Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, on the first Sunday in Lent, the lectionary assigned the classic story from Genesis about the temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent.

Ah! But that’s not how most of us remember that story. Most of us have heard it referred to as the “temptation of Eve,” who then seduces Adam to make the same mistake she did.

That difference makes a significant difference: imagining only Eve present for the serpent’s temptation makes Eve a symbol of the original seductress who leads to the fall of man (both in the generic and particular sense)—and who does so again and again, from generation to generation, wearyingly repeated as stale caricature on a manly stage.

John’s story at a well in the desert has often been read in much the same way as that iconic story from Genesis. In fact, the literary figure of “Woman as Wicked Seductress” is so common—infusing the air we breathe and the water we drink—most of us don’t even have to know about it to read John’s story with that motif as our interpretive lens.

I grew up hearing this story as an encounter between Jesus and a sexually promiscuous woman—a woman who had led astray no fewer than six men—and how wonderful it is that God’s forgiveness can extend even to someone like her; but none of that is even hinted at in John’s telling.

The first-century context of the story offers alternative ways of reading that are much more plausible. Given the ancient mortality rate, this woman could have been widowed multiple times; cultural customs would have forced her to marry the brothers of her deceased husbands, one after another.

It’s even more likely that she was struggling because of religious marriage regulations in which only men could initiate divorce, and for any reason at all; the social and economic vulnerability of unmarried women might have forced this woman to remarry after multiple divorces just to survive—and perhaps that’s why she resorted to living with a man who was not her husband, a way just to put food on the table.

To repeat once more: Jesus says nothing at all to this woman about forgiveness, not even repentance; what startles and astonishes this woman is that Jesus apparently knew—he knew and he named—what she had been enduring and living through.

Reading this story apart from the usual patriarchal assumptions about sexual morality can itself be quite liberating, and a way to notice a remarkable first-century embrace of a woman as student and disciple, as compelling witness and evangelist, and some would say one of the earliest apostles! A whole village follows Jesus because of her ministry!

But there’s more: John goes still further in his portrayal of Jesus as a divine social revolutionary with a story that isn’t about just any (anonymous) woman; this woman is from a village in Samaria, a region denigrated and despised by the religious elite in Judea. (It takes hardly any imagination at all to bring to mind today’s “Judeans” and “Samaritans”.)

Recall the biblical story (1 Kings 16—2 Kings 9) about Ahab, a corrupt ruler of the northern Kingdom of Israel, who made a political alliance by marrying a Phoenician woman by the name of Jezebel. Together, they set up their own capital city away from Jerusalem and in Samaria, where they established a temple for idolatrous worship.

Even when those details from the biblical story are unfamiliar, very few would fail to recognize the name “Jezebel”—yet another emblematic figure of the dangerous seductions of women in the affairs of men.

John the Evangelist may have been enamored with a misty-eyed neo-platonic mysticism (and I confess to finding wonderful insights when I read him that way), but right now, today, it matters even more to see in this one Johannine woman the embodiment of both the vexations of gender and the hostile rivalries of ethnicity.

I mean, what if John is writing this story not as a way to illustrate God’s gracious forgiveness of a “sexual sinner” (dare I repeat this? that is not in the story at all). What if he is instead writing a story of God’s own determination to liberate women from their patriarchal classifications, and to heal the wounds of ethnic rivalry and hatred? Sure, preach forgiveness, but not with this story; this one is about freedom.

Oh, how much richer this story becomes when it’s not merely and crudely about how many sexual partners a first-century woman may have had (honestly, who cares?) but rather how often women become trapped in cycles of male domination and control, illustrated by this one woman—an illustration embodied by a woman of undesirable ethnic heritage.

John may be rooted in thick and even convoluted theological speculation, but he is also (I am convinced) committed to taking otherwise simple and ordinary encounters and rendering them with a brilliant divine presence and transformative insight.

Consider the lectionary’s rich texts last week, for the first Sunday in Lent: not only the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation but also John’s story about Nicodemus, a member of the judicial counsel of the Judeans, coming to visit Jesus at night. The symbol of darkness can remind us of seeds planted in the soil of Earth, just as the body of Jesus himself is eventually planted in a dark tomb, from which will sprout an Easter life.

Yesterday, by contrast, John’s Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman drawing water at high noon, in broad daylight. Something important is being brought into view, being revealed and illuminated for us to see.

As I read this familiar story once again this year, I kept returning to the frame John seems keen to create for it: authentic worship. If “proper worship” divided Judeans and Samaritans, then John insists in the bright light of day to show us living water flowing like a crystal stream of healing between the Judean Jesus and the Samaritan woman—water that not only restores life to a parched land but also provides a balm for the ethnic violence that has scarred the land.

That violence is rooted in the ethnic and patriarchal hostilities that have marred human history for millennia. True and life-giving worship, in other words, will always lead us into relationships of healing and reconciliation for the sake of Beloved Community.

The day is coming, Jesus says, when the true worshippers of God are not tied to any one location or belong to only one chosen race or exhibit a favored gender but shall instead all worship together in spirit and in truth—both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, as the lectionary collect for the day declared.

As these lectionary texts lead toward the Eucharistic Table, it’s worth remembering that John is the only Gospel writer to include a rather grisly detail in the story of the crucifixion: both water and blood flowed from the pierced side of the crucified Jesus (19:34).

Now, it is certainly possible to read that moment as a forensic examiner: the Roman centurion’s spear likely pierced through the pericardial membrane around the heart of Jesus, releasing its watery fluid along with the blood.

Sure, but I don’t think John cares one little bit about that. I think John cares that human beings are physically born from their mothers in a mix of both blood and water, and here it flows from the Jesus who invites us all to be “born again.” The fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich imagined exactly this: the wound in the side of Jesus as the womb from which we are reborn into New Life—Jesus, she said, is our blessed mother.

Even if John only gestured toward the socially transformative power of authentic worship, it’s high time we take that conviction with us to the Eucharist Table. There we remember the death of Jesus and proclaim the hope of Easter—the intertwining of memory and hope creates true and genuine community, as Josiah Royce once noted, and leads to the formation of Beloved Community, as Martin Luther King, Jr., later preached, and which John the evangelist insists leads to rebirth.

Rebirth as mere “blank slate”? No, but being born again into a world where the life of a woman at a well in the wilderness can reassure us that God’s living water shall not fail to heal us and free us from the racially gendered systems of domination that wound us all.

We Have Nothing to Fear

Eighty years ago this week, an atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima, Japan, a city of around 300,000 civilians.

That type of weapon is detonated in the skies above its target. In addition to the unimaginable destruction of both structures and lives, the intense flash of light from that detonation blinded anyone who looked at it directly, up to twenty miles away. The blindness could last a few minutes to several hours, and for some, it was permanent as the light burned their retinas.

Needless to say, that one bomb transformed not just that one Japanese city but the whole planet as we lurched into the so-called “Atomic Age.”

A nighttime view of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, featuring the iconic A-Bomb Dome through a curved memorial structure surrounded by flowers and greenery. — Hiroshima Peace Memorial

Christians try and hope to focus on a different kind of light: the divine light of Christ illuminating the path toward lifegiving transformation.

We sang a wonderful Charles Wesley hymn yesterday morning in church, which brought that different kind of light to mind: “Christ, whose glory fills the skies, / Christ, the true, the only Light, / Sun of Righteousness arise!”

That glory of Christ filling the skies stands in stark contrast to the destructive light of in the skies above Hiroshima. And that’s a really good reason to note the unsettling confluence of dates this week: Wednesday, August 6, is not only the 80^th anniversary of the Hiroshima detonation; it is also the Feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the church calendar—a commemoration of that moment when Jesus was transfigured by the brightness of divine glory.

An abstract painting featuring a bright light at the center, surrounded by warm hues of orange, yellow, and deep blues, evoking a sense of divine illumination and transformation. — “Transfiguration,” Lewis Bowman

An unsettling confluence, yes, but a potentially felicitous one as well if it prompts reflection on the character of transformation itself: what is it, and how does it happen, and to what end?

It’s rather common to suppose that violence is the most powerful agent of change, and this seems even obvious with the explosive violence of modern weapons. But that supposition is simply not true; the most powerful source of change and transformation in the whole universe is unconditional love infused with grace.

The Word of God is that powerful source, which not only created all that is—including the atoms we have now learned how to split—but also lived in the very flesh of God’s own creation, living lovingly among us as Beloved Jesus. That claim inspired all the lofty language the lectionary has been assigning for the last few Sundays from the letter to the Colossians (contrary to most biblical scholars, I think Paul wrote it…but I digress).

Christ, Paul writes in the third chapter, is “the image of the invisible God, in whom all things in heaven and on earth were created, the firstborn from the dead, and in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”

And on and on the lofty language continues until Paul makes a stunning declaration: your life, he declares, is “hidden with Christ in God” (3:3).

That image always makes me pause, often takes my breath away. In the vast and inconceivable cosmic Christ whom Paul wishes to praise, exactly there, our lives are tucked away, in the very heart of Creator God. Contrary to how I usually think about that wonderful image, being “hidden” is not the same thing as “hiding away.” If I am truly safe and secure in Christ, then I can live outrageously and boldy and audaciously. In a political climate of terror, perhaps I can even live bravely.

Or to put this a bit more simply and directly: we have nothing to fear.

I know that sounds unreasonable and even delusional; the list of fearful things is quite long these days, from scary medical diagnoses to ecological collapse and even nuclear sword rattling. But that’s what makes that little first-century letter to the Christians in Colossae so astonishing: nothing, not one thing, can ever separate us from the Source of Life and the Fullness of Love and the Depth of Grace—not even death.

If our lives truly are so remarkably hidden with Christ in God—if it really is true that we have nothing to fear—well, how should we then live?

Luke offers an answer to that question in the passage many heard yesterday morning (12:13-21). Luke’s answer to the question of how we should live is simply this: with generosity.

Luke offers that answer in a parable about wealth and greed, a familiar parable about a wealthy man with an abundant crop and a barn too small to hold it all; he builds bigger barns and sits back to enjoy all his stuff—and then he dies.

Unlike many Gospel parables, there’s no arcane mystery to decipher here; you don’t need an advanced theology degree to see the point in a story about a rich man who takes ultimate pleasure in his possessions and apparently forgets entirely about his own mortality.

This parable does become a bit richer, so to speak, by noting Luke’s context and especially his audience. Luke addresses his account of the Gospel to the “most excellent Theophilus,” a wealthy patron of apparently significant social status; Luke himself was referred to as a “physician” and thus likewise someone of means and elevated status. In addition, though we don’t notice this in our English translations, Luke wrote in a fairly sophisticated form of ancient Greek, with the kind of stylized language used mostly among the highly educated classes.

Luke writes, in other words, from within a community of cultural elites, which includes himself. Quite remarkably, given that context, there are more mentions of the poor and of poverty in Luke than in any of the other Gospels; there are also far more stories in Luke about the dangers of wealth.

(That passage from the letter to the Colossians includes a powerful little parenthetical notation that makes those dangers plain: greed is at root idolatry. Like that man with his barns, relying on our “stuff” replaces reliance on God.)

Luke is the only one to include this little parable we heard this morning about the foolish rich man with his big barns to hold all his stuff, the man whose smug decision simply to “eat, drink, and be merry” has since then become a byword of caution.

The caution here is what those who are greedy always fail to understand, whether or not they are wealthy: our possessions do not give us control over our lives

That bears repeating (because I too often forget it): we do not gain more control over our lives by buying more stuff. This matters to just about everyone because almost everyone I know fears losing control—and we all fear that loss quite pointedly; but our possessions won’t help us. We might also fear losing our own lives, of course, but they don’t even belong to us—they belong to God.

Once we realize this, even just glimpse how little difference our possessions make, our lives change; what matters most to us changes.

When we split open an atom, a blinding light explodes into the surrounding space, transforming it violently. Luke would have us consider what happens when we split open human greed—and especially the fear that drives it. Split open that greed, Luke might say, and the divine light of generosity suddenly transforms everything around it.

Find Heaven on Earth…then share it.

When I first read this passage from Luke for yesterday’s liturgy, I expected Luke’s Jesus to say what Matthew’s Jesus says as part of his “Sermon on the Mount.” There Matthew warns his hearers not to “store up treasures on earth” but instead to “store up treasures in heaven” (6:19-20).

Luke, however, says nothing about heaven in this passage; Luke’s Jesus instead warns those who store up treasures for themselves and are not rich toward God. The contrast for Luke is not between “earth and heaven,” but between “greed and generosity.”

Luke wants us to find heaven on earth…and then share it.

Some of my friends were visiting from out of town last week, making their annual summer pilgrimage to Saugatuck. During their visit, we made an afternoon trip to a local orchard and picked peaches—and that was just about the easiest labor I’ve ever done for the most delicious food. Every single tree was bending with the weight of its abundant fruit; even the ground was littered with the peaches that had dropped from the branches.

That image of abundance could offer healing for this current age of anxiety—this age of fear over so many things. This rich and fertile Earth is easily capable of providing more than enough food for every single human on this planet. With virtually no strain or struggle, Earth can feed every single one of the 7 billion of us on this planet.

Our problem today is not scarcity; it’s greed, especially the greed born of fear.

Our lives are hidden with Christ in God—we have nothing to fear.

A close-up view of a peach tree branch laden with ripe, fuzzy peaches surrounded by vibrant green leaves. — Crane Orchards (Fennville, MI)

The Freedom to Belong

“For freedom Christ has set us free.”

That wonderful declaration from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians (5:1) sounds like it was crafted precisely for this July Fourth holiday weekend—an ancient religious endorsement of Independence Day!

The lectionary assigned that text for the last Sunday in June, which for many is also LGBTQ Pride Sunday. Would Paul have endorsed that celebration, too?

“For freedom,” Paul says, “Christ has set us free. “

Whatever Paul meant by “freedom,” I doubt he was thinking about armed revolution against a monarch or living as sexual libertines. He certainly would not encourage us merely to do whatever we want; after all, always following the whims of a fickle desire is just another form of enslavement (as anyone recovering from substance abuse would quickly note).

I’m imagining Paul had a very particular kind of freedom in mind, the freedom God embodies in Jesus, which God likewise calls the Church to embody through the power of the Holy Spirit: it’s the freedom to love without fear; to embrace others without anxiety; to live with an abundance of grace, and laughter, and joy without ever worrying whether or not there will be enough.

Paul would not have imagined a life without constraint whatsoever and instead probably thought of “freedom” as more like a capacity, the ability to receive the abundant life that God intends for all. In that sense, spiritual practice is in large measure a process of decluttering, of clearing out space for that life, removing whatever stands in its way or blocks us from even seeing it. That’s the work of the Holy Spirit—freeing up room for God’s own life in us.

For that kind of freedom, Paul says, Christ has set us free.

Being “set free” for the sake of “freedom” does seem a bit redundant—unless we are not yet free to follow freedom. Many years of trying to live faithfully as a Christian has shown me how certain cultural assumptions usually interrupt the divine flow of love and grace: assuming, for example, that I must earn abundant life by working at it; or insisting that the harder I work for it the more of it I deserve; or worrying that others might steal it; or imagining that I’m surrounded by rivals and thieves whose very existence poses a constant threat.

These common assumptions keep me shackled, holding me back from the freedom to live—for freedom I must be set free.

I noticed this a bit more clearly by pondering what else the lectionary assigned for that same Sunday from Luke’s account of the Gospel. It seems to me that the “cultural assumptions” I just named are lurking around that unsettling story from Luke (9:51-62).

Luke opens a tiny first-century window in that story on a longstanding ethnic hostility between Judeans and Samaritans. Those first-century characters usually framed their hostility as a religious conflict—Judeans were constantly critiquing the Samaritans for not worshiping properly; this was so irritating to the Samaritans that they apparently refused to receive Jesus in their village.

This moment qualifies as a bit more than mere “irritation”; two disciples of Jesus, James and John, actually want to call down fire from Heaven to consume that village!

As often happens, naming a conflict as “religious” usually masks something deeper—religious rivals often emerge from a stubborn anxiety about one’s own goodness and worthiness: I can’t feel good about myself unless I feel bad about you; to live with confidence as divinely favored, others must live as divine exclusions.

It takes a lot of work to sustain those distinctions. Eventually, the time and energy required to maintain a system of the “favored” and the “excluded” builds up, breaks down, or explodes.

Just such a moment happened quite dramatically on a late June night in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. It was a moment of protest that marked a turning point for what became known as “gay liberation.” When I first learned about that moment, I imagined people who look mostly like me carrying posters in a parade; that’s not what happened.

On that night fifty-six years ago drag queens of color and homeless gay youth fought back against the humiliating brutality of New York City police officers at a gay bar. The rage had been building for decades, and it finally blew up. Those brown and black drag queens actually ripped parking meters right out of the sidewalk and refused to be arrested yet one more time just because of who they were.

That’s a powerful image of being liberated from shame and embracing one’s own God-given dignity—and that’s why we now celebrate a whole month dedicated to Pride.

“For freedom,” Paul says, “Christ has set us free.”

Roughly five years ago, a gay activist by the name of Alexander Leon posted an observation on social media that very quickly went viral; it resonated so deeply with so many of us—thousands of people started reposting it.

Paraphrasing his insight, Leon noted that queer people “don’t grow up as ourselves.” We grow up playing a version of ourselves, a role on stage that sacrifices authenticity to reduce the risk of humiliation and violence. “The massive task of our adult lives,” Leon notes, “is to identify which parts of ourselves are truly us, and which parts we created for our own protection.”

Let’s be sure not to stumble over the word “queer” in Leon’s insight; that word does not refer only to those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. It can refer to anyone who recognizes a mismatch between inner-self and outer-world—hasn’t everyone felt that at least once? Some of us feel it every day.

LGBT people have illuminated these dynamics of modern life in which we try so hard to fit in that we scarcely even know who we really are. Conformity for the sake of safety is soul-killing—and this was James Baldwin’s point back in the 1960s when he referred to the notion of “double consciousness squared,” the complexities of not only living as a gay man in straight culture but also as a Black man in white America.

These complex dynamics take not only time to untangle but also a community of care in which to do it. For LGBT people, finding a safe religious space to do that work feels like a miracle—quite seriously, miraculous. Religion, after all, is what prompted so many of us to adopt safety mechanisms in the first place, just to survive.

So even though St. Paul would not have understood “Pride month,” he would surely endorse whatever it takes to liberate ourselves from merely surviving, even just “fitting in,” and instead living for the kind of freedom that makes room for the fruits of the Spirit.

Those fruits were also part of the passage from Paul’s letter to the Galatians on Pride Sunday, and they include what seems far too often overlooked in movements of social change: joy.

Everyone needs not only a community of care for the arduous and lifelong process of unlearning and truly embracing who we are, but also a community of joy. It’s actually impossible to be joyful when you’re trying to “fit in”; joy springs instead from belonging, from the conviction that one truly belongs for exactly who they are.

This, it seems to me, makes LGBTQ Pride Month much more than only “welcoming the formerly excluded.” Creating and sustaining a genuinely inclusive community of faith offers a compelling witness to the wider world of that crucial difference between “fitting in” and “belonging”—and thank you, Brene Brown, for that compelling distinction!

Most of us learn very early on what it takes to “fit in”—usually hiding aspects of ourselves that we think others won’t like, or that we’ve been told are unacceptable. Belonging, by contrast, is being loved for exactly who we are, and knowing it.

Belonging sets us free to show up as we are and to learn how to love others in the same way. Belonging to Christ Jesus, Paul says, enables us to live like that, fruitfully, in the Spirit, with love, joy, peace, kindness, and generosity.

Here’s what I think Pride Sunday urges: do not waste any more time, not one single minute, on trying to “fit in.” Life is far too short for that and we don’t have the time for it.

Instead, let’s pour that energy into creating a communities where all of us can learn how to belong to each other, with love and for joy; this alone would take us quite a long way down the road toward the world’s healing, and not a moment too soon.

So, stand firm, Paul says, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

For freedom Christ has set us free.

“There is Joy in the Presence of Jesus,” Rebecca Brogan

Flying the Flag of a Political Gospel

On this annual observance of “flag day” in the United States—which will also witness many dozens of “No Kings” protest marches around the country—the only banner I’m keen to hoist bears the symbol of the Cross for the sake of justice and love.

To be clear, I will indeed take part in a “No Kings” public gathering today (and I will wear my clergy collar), and that’s because of an unswerving conviction: the Christian Gospel is never partisan but is always political.

That is hardly a popular opinion, especially when one hears the Gospel preached in a way that rubs against the grain of one’s partisan commitments. It is precisely that discomfort that generated the longstanding advice to include politics along with religion and sex among the topics we should avoid discussing in polite company, especially at dinner parties. (I have always found that cautionary advice amusing—apart from religion, sex, and politics, what else is there to talk about?)

It is fairly common in modern Western society (especially among the economically comfortable, one should note) to hear people insist that “religion” should be free of “politics,” and they usually expect or at least hope that Sunday morning worship will provide a respite from political discourse. This is, in my view, and quite simply, impossible. If we were to remove every reference to anything “political” from the Bible, I doubt we would have even a single coherent paragraph remaining.

It’s worth remembering that the English word “politics” comes from the ancient Greek word polis, or “city-state” (think “metropolis”). The connection here is this: people in groups need to navigate and negotiate how they are going to live, work, play, and also pray together in some way that is good for all involved—and that’s the shared work of politics.

How do we get food from the farmer’s field to your table? Who pays the physician when she takes care of your sick child? Where can I let my dog run free and get exercise without disturbing others? What should we do with people who are violent or threaten the safety of our neighbors? All of these questions and many more like them are political questions, and people of faith quite rightly turn to religion for help in answering them—or they should.

Biblical writers are remarkably consistent about the political implications of religious faith. At this particular moment in American cultural history, there are two overall biblical postures that seem especially worth noting in that regard. The first is the constant biblical refrain to care for the “orphan, the widow, and the stranger.” From the Mosaic Law—“cursed is anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice” (Deut. 27:19)—to the prophets, who declare God’s judgment on those who oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, and the poor (Zech. 7:9-10, as one example among many), there is no biblical room for compromise on this; as people of faith, we are obligated to care for the most vulnerable among us, and that is by definition a political concern.

The second biblical posture likewise runs consistently throughout both the Hebrew and Christian texts of the Bible, but with a bit more subtlety: expanding the circle of God’s people outward to include ever more diversity. It feels much more comfortable, of course, to be in community with those who are just like us, and also safer in times of uncertainty. But ancient Hebrew prophets like Isaiah imagine all the nations streaming to God’s holy mountain (Is. 2:2, among others), and Christian writers like Paul insist that the Body of Christ consists of many diverse members (1 Cor. 12:12, as just one example). Diversifying the people of God is actually the work of God and a divine gift, and certainly not a “problem” or something to “manage.”

The hard part, of course, is taking those broad biblical convictions with us into the public square—and into the halls of Congress or just our local city council meeting. As people of faith from various backgrounds, we will quite naturally disagree with each about how to put our faith into practice, but our faith does demand that we struggle and wrestle with precisely that challenge.

This current moment in the history of the United States sharpens the political challenge among people of faith, and in some instances, quite severely. Many of us are deeply concerned about the erosion of our democratic institutions, the demonization of minority groups (whether because of race, country of origin, language, sexuality, or gender, or a combination of all of these), and what seems like the heavy hand of authoritarian power. The political stakes are extraordinarily high in these areas regardless of one’s partisan affiliation.

The Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, Sean Rowe, just issued a letter on precisely the challenges of this moment, noting directly the Christian responsibility to be engaged politically for the sake of the common good. Bishop Rowe frames the letter with that clear purpose in view as he reflects on “how we Episcopalians can respond to what is unfolding around us as followers of the Risen Christ whose first allegiance is to the kingdom of God, not to any nation or political party.”

Writing while the U.S. military was being deployed in Los Angeles, Bishop Rowe articulated more specifically how the Gospel should shape our political engagement: “The violence on television is not our only risk. We are also seeing federal budget proposals that would shift resources from the poor to the wealthy; due process being denied to immigrants; and the defunding of essential public health, social service, and foreign aid programs that have long fulfilled the Gospel mandate to care for the vulnerable, children, and those who are hungry and sick.”

He concludes the letter by noting ways that The Episcopal Church will be taking a stand against certain public policies for the sake of the Gospel. “In short,” he writes, “we are practicing institutional resistance rooted not in partisan allegiance, but in Christian conviction.”

That sense of “conviction” emerges not only from the Bible but also the Book of Common Prayer and our Eucharistic Table Fellowship. I strongly suspect that putting that faithful conviction into practice will grow more, not less challenging in the weeks and months ahead. All the more reason to recall explicitly and frequently not only the Baptismal promise to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being” (BCP, p. 305), but also the Pauline vision of living that promise with faith, and with hope, and most especially with love (1 Cor. 13:13).

I remain so grateful to be doing the work of a parish priest at this particular historical moment, and with a parish community eager to discern together how to chart a path forward for the sake of the thriving of all. I am convinced that the world’s religious traditions were created for just such a time as this.

The Gift of Confusion

No one wants to be confused, and I would certainly not want to create confusing situations. I do mostly think of confusion itself as a bad thing, a problem to resolve or some kind of trouble to fix—but sometimes confusion might show up as a gift that leads us toward new life.

That’s what I started to realize from working with a wonderful doctoral student back in Berkeley. Erika Katske identifies as a “queer Jew, married to a transgender rabbi,” and her work as a community organizer and advocate for economic justice is informed by her religious faith (including but not limited to Judaism). That work framed her longstanding fascination with the ancient and iconic story from Genesis about the Tower of Babel (Gen. 1:1-11).

“The Tower of Babel,” Abigail Lee Goldberger

The lectionary assigns that story as an optional reading for the Day of Pentecost, this coming Sunday, and for an obvious reason: God interrupts the construction of the Tower of Babel by “confusing” the speech of those constructing it. Rather than a single language spoken by all, people could no longer understand what others were saying. Contrast that moment of confusion with the story from the Acts of the Apostles (2:1-21), where the sudden outpouring of the Holy Spirit enables people to comprehend different languages. Pentecost, in other words, “heals” Babel—or that what I used to think until reading Erika’s work.

I certainly won’t try to summarize a whole dissertation on this topic of nearly 300 pages, but here’s what caught my attention about Erika’s re-reading of the Babel story: the “confusion of languages” and the “scattering” of the people throughout the earth was not punishment from an angry God; to the contrary, it was a divine gift offered from love.

I was astonished when Erika and I first met to discuss her project and she pointed out that nothing in the Hebrew text of that ancient story suggests that God was “angry” about the Tower. To the contrary, God seems instead concerned about the singular focus of the people, the devotion of all their time and resources to just one project, and the dense concentration of their dwellings in just one valley. None of this would help those humans thrive—staying on that course would actually prevent their flourishing.

God’s response was the gift of confused languages and the scattering of their habitations in a much wider region. The effort required after that to cooperate generated new forms of community and social bonds, exactly what was needed for their thriving. (The point of Erika’s dissertation was to extend that analysis of the biblical story into the dynamics of global capitalism, which exhibits all of the problems of that ancient story but now on a planetary scale.)

Combining what I learned from Erika about Babel with the work I’ve done for many years on the disparate forms of human sexuality, gender expression, and family configurations inspired me to think in some fresh ways about Pentecost. The gift of the Holy Spirit on that day was not the return to a single language for everyone; the gift of the Holy Spirit was instead the capacity to understand multiple languages and, by extension, all the other kinds of multiplicity that accompany a “language”—various points of view, diverse cultures, different ethnicities, strange customs, odd ways to dress, unusual patterns of affection, and so on.

“I will Pour Out My Spirit,” Sieger Koder

Clearly, this kind of community-building takes hard work, even though it is prompted by the gift of the Holy Spirit. In fact, in the portion from John’s account of the Gospel assigned for Sunday, the Spirit is referred to by a Greek word that resists easy translation (ironically, as Andrew McGowan helpfully points out, for a day devoted to understanding strange languages). That word is “paraclete,” and was often used to describe a lawyer who accompanies someone facing judicial scrutiny (thus the typical English translation as “advocate”). But the more direct meaning of that term is “one-who-stands-with,” especially in the midst of struggle.

Standing with others these days—whether in congregations, cities, or as a nation—certainly involves serious struggle and not a little confusion. I often wish for something “easier” or “simpler,” but both Babel and Pentecost seem to invite us instead to engage the harder and thus more rewarding work of wrestling with our differences for the sake not only of the “common” good but the greater good. As John’s Jesus suggests, we will inevitably struggle with what it means to speak the truth, how to live with love, and ways to celebrate difference rather than merely to cluster in affinity groups for a sense of safety.

Even in the parish I am privileged to serve here in Michigan, we gather as a community of people who are very much alike in many respects yet still find ourselves struggling with speaking truth, living love, and embracing difference. Extending those efforts outward into communities with much greater diversity, the struggle only multiplies. This might well be the point of gathering every week around the Eucharistic Table, a religious sanctuary that offers a “rehearsal space” or “testing ground” for the kind of love God calls us to offer to the wider world.

Thankfully, we don’t even try to do this work alone. God gives the Holy Spirit as divine companion, comforter, counselor, and advocate. The one standing with us in the struggle is God’s gift, and the struggle itself is reason for gratitude.