Current Events – Peculiar Faith

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.

For the Healing of the Nations

Patriotism is not a Christian virtue.

To be clear, I find nothing inherently wrong with patriotic ardor. Indeed, I grew up loving my country and still do. I want to see the United States thrive and to live more fully into its founding ideals. But Christian discipleship—living as a disciple of Jesus Christ—is not attached to any one country or confined to any national borders (and let’s also note that discipleship might, on occasion, demand actions that run counter to national interests).

The timing of the Eastertide lectionary this year reinforced those convictions just yesterday about “God and country” and did so quite directly. On this Memorial Day weekend, we heard a poignant and beautiful image from the Revelation to John (21:10, 22-22:5), an image of the “Tree of Life,” whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

I have never been particularly fond of observing national holidays in a Sunday morning liturgy, but that passage from a complicated biblical book suggests a powerful way to frame our shared ministry as Christian people—not patriotically but for the sake of shared endeavor. More particularly on Memorial Day, the best way to honor those who gave their lives in service to this country is to work for peace, with justice, and the healing of all the nations.

That’s a tall order for any faith community, and certainly for the small parish I am privileged to serve in a lakeside resort town in the American Midwest. And yet, the way we shape our lives together in a community of prayer and service really does matter and does make a difference for the wider world.

Hearing also from John’s account of the Gospel yesterday presented some rich images for this kind of reflection and commitment (John 14:23-29). That passage features the promise Jesus made to send the Holy Spirit—a reminder that the Feast of Pentecost is just two weeks away. That gift is mission-critical for the Gospel because the Spirit creates, not a nation-state, but Beloved Community.

That image originated with Josiah Royce, a late-nineteenth-century American philosopher of religion whose work shaped the world-changing efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Civil Rights Movement. Royce seems particularly insightful just now, especially as an inspiring guide for Christian communities trying to navigate the perplexities and anxieties of this cultural moment.

We might recall that the lectionary portion of John’s Gospel yesterday comes from what is often referred to as the “farewell discourse.” Setting aside all the convolutions of those chapters in John, overall Jesus is trying to prepare his closest friends for his death, and to reassure them about his impending departure. “Don’t let your hearts be troubled,” he says. They don’t fully understand what is about to happen, but they certainly understand enough to be terribly sad.

Royce would have us notice in this passage what he called the religious mission of sorrow. Few of us likely think of sadness as having any kind of a purpose; it just is, and we either accept it or deny it. But Royce—who was well acquainted with very deep sorrow and grief in his own life and family—Royce urged us to consider that sorrow carries potential for insight; sorrow itself, he said, is a source of religious insight.

For this to be so we must look at the world courageously, not as we wish it to be or with any filters of denial, but as it really is right now—a world of injustice, and pain, and violence. Royce would have us see the world as it really is so that we can meet that world as bearers of light, workers for peace, and agents of healing.

This is what Royce means by the “religious mission of sorrow”—and I freely admit that this often sounds to me like a fool’s errand. The much more prudent path would surely lead instead toward self-protection, and the securities of privilege, and the isolating walls of safety so that we don’t have to see the wounded, the fearful, or the lonely.

But we don’t follow a “prudent path” when we follow Jesus. As the approaching Feast of Pentecost reminds us, we go where the Spirit leads—we go, as Royce put it, to the “homeland of the Spirit” to build Beloved Community.

I love Royce’s use of “homeland” for this, which is not in this case about finding a place of cozy rest but to situate the hard work of forging the bonds of lifegiving—and for Royce, that means “atoning” and “saving”—community. “Hard work,” because for Royce, the Spirit is always, without fail, what he called the “Spirit of Interpretation.”

“To interpret” in a Roycean sense is to make meaning from a particular moment or an event so that the world becomes a better place—not a perfect place (we can’t do that), but a better place than it was—and with the Spirit’s energy and guidance, we can do that!

The “event” Royce would have a Christian community constantly interpret, and not only in the Easter season but always, is the death and resurrection of Jesus—the one who was killed by imperial violence and raised by the God of new life.

What does this mean for us, right now, today?
How do we then live, in our neighborhoods and in the public square?
What should we do with what we have been given?

These are the questions we ask together in the “homeland of the Spirit” as we seek to build “Beloved Community” together.

John the Divine, the scribe for all the fantastical visions and wild prophecies in that final book of the Bible—John shows us what such a community entails. First and foremost, it’s about healing.

His vision of the heavenly Jerusalem—a classic and ancient symbol for “beloved community”—features a river flowing from the very throne of God, a river of the water of life. Planted on the banks of that river is the “Tree of Life,” which not only produces an abundant harvest of fruit, but also leaves that are for the “healing of the nations.”

Untitled (“For the Healing of the Nations”), Doug Himes

That word, “nations,” is a rough Greek equivalent of the ancient Hebrew word more simply meaning “gentiles,” or “non-Israelites,” basically all those who are not Jewish. Or in contemporary parlance, all the others, whether those “others” are on the other side of the world or just the other side of town. And hearing also from the Hebrew prophet Joel yesterday (2:21-27), those “others” are also not-human—the soil, the grasses, the trees, the vines, all other animals.

That’s a common English translation of that phrase, but not very helpful if it evokes only the modern Western concept of a “nation-state.” John did not have anything like the United Nations or the European Union in mind but something much closer to home, indeed we might even say he had something more “homey” in view.

What John seems to describe, in other words, is God’s own heart for making a home among us, and not only from our biological kin or with our closest friends, but all those “others,” the ones who are different from us—sometimes just a little “not-like-us” and sometimes very different in skin color, and accent, and language, and custom, and even species.

And that’s precisely why the leaves of the Tree of Life are for healing.

Differences and animosities and hostilities—whether inflicted on those who are far away or by those who are across the street or unfold in the mini-ecosystems of our own backyards—all such differences create wounds, and some of them are very deep, and last for a very long time, making all of us terribly sad and sorrowful.

Now is the time—or as Royce would say, every moment is always the perfect time—to embrace the religious mission of sorrow and to interpret across our differences in postures of healing, toward thriving, and for the sake of the home God envisions for all.

“Tree of Life for the Healing of the Nations,” Kelly Schumacher

Those who gave their lives for this country—for the sake of the democratic life and abundant liberty for which this nation ostensibly stands—they would surely urge us along this path and toward that Homeland of the Spirit.

Building Beloved Community together in that homeland, interpreting this present moment across our differences, would certainly be a legacy worthy of their memory.

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

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

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.

Down by the Riverside: Divine Solidarity and Radical Hospitality

Wading into a river presents a range of bodily sensations: the water might be cool and crisp, it might quickly or only gently swirl around your calves, and the riverbed itself could be slippery clay or a sandy silt, or a combination of the two with some gravel thrown in.

Depending on its composition, standing on that riverbed might mean sinking into it—up to your ankles, or maybe a bit farther, and it might be challenging to lift your feet out of the muck.

These bodily sensations are important to recall when reflecting on the story about the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan. Most Christians always hear some version of this story on the first Sunday after the Epiphany each year, and many of us can’t help but think of neat and tidy sanctuaries with just a shallow dish of water tucked away somewhere for our baptismal rituals.

Back in the first century, by contrast, baptism would have been a full-bodied experience and likely with feet sinking into a muddy riverbed.

More than just historical context, the bodily imagery of a river matters theologically, spiritually, even socially and politically.

The imagery I mean includes this: When Jesus was baptized it was not merely a sprinkle but was an immersion experience, a plunge into the fragility and vulnerability of human existence as well as its beauty and tenderness and fierce resilience.

I never really thought much about this Gospel moment other than how it serves as a kind of storytelling preface, a way to begin the ministry of Jesus with a ritual of initiation. In more recent years I’ve come to appreciate just how profound this moment is. On display here is nothing less than divine solidarity—I mean God’s own communion with creaturely life.

The humid air Jesus likely breathed on that riverbank, and the water of that river on his skin, and the silty mud into which his feet likely sank—this is an image of God’s own full-bodied experience of God’s own creation.

This year especially I have come to imagine the image of a river as equally important as the image of a manger to symbolize God’s bodily presence among us in Christ. Indeed, a river with its movement and depth enhances the significance of the manger itself: the union of God’s Word with Jesus is not merely superficial and not crudely transactional but fully immersive.

Baptism, especially in a river, evokes this astonishing sense of God’s full embrace of God’s own creation, to the muddy depths and sparkling gems of human existence, our mortality, our courage, our terror, the ecstasies and vexations—all of it.

For reasons I’m likely unable fully to name, it strikes me powerfully at this moment just how much Creation, Manger, and Baptism should be read together, and for the sake of the life-changing claim that God is fully with us—never against us, but always fully with us.

Yes, and that preposition “with” is probably not strong enough for this claim, which I started to realize when a seminary colleague back in Berkeley introduced me to the work of Danish theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen.

Gregersen retrieves an ancient theme in classical Christian traditions for what he calls in his work “deep incarnation.” He wants us to see God’s purpose in Jesus as nothing less than to give a future of thriving to a world now marked by decay and death.

This way of framing the incarnation as “deep” is meant to suggest that God enters the material conditions of all creaturely existence (the “flesh”), shares the fate of all biological life forms (as in the ubiquitous biblical images of the “grass” and “lilies” of the field), and also experiences the pains of all sensitive creatures (the Gospel “sparrows” and “foxes”), and God does all this from within—not on the surface, not only “alongside” but to the very depths and from within.

Gregersen pushes this even further: in Jesus, Creator God actually enters the very process of biological evolution on this planet, all the way down to the cellular level, for the sake of guiding the process forward with love and toward flourishing—imagine the mighty flow of life on this planet as river: God plunges into its depth.

That is certainly not how I was taught how to think about Christian faith as a child, and it’s probably not how most people think about God. I’m guessing most church-goers hear the stories of birth and baptism as mere prologue to what matters most—the saving work of Christ on the cross.

And of course death and resurrection—the cross and the empty tomb—are central to the Good News of the Gospel. Yes, and the Gospel writers would urge us to place “salvation” firmly in Christmas and Epiphany just as much as we do in Holy Week and Easter.

I am increasingly convinced that the transactional character of how the Church generally presents the saving work of Christ merely denigrates nearly everything about our bodily life together–we’re not saved from being human but rather for the sake of living a more fully human life. It’s high time the Church embraced a theological mashup: The religious symbols of Manger and River belong together with Cross and Empty Tomb for the fullness of God’s embrace of what God has made.

All four Gospel writers would likely endorse that mashup with vigor; each of them feature this baptismal story, including the bodily appearance of the Holy Spirit as a dove, as if the Spirit herself shows up to point dramatically at this watery moment and endorse its significance, to bathe this encounter down by the riverside with the light of the grand arc of God’s creating and redeeming work.

God comes to us in the flesh; joins with us in our creaturely existence; immerses God’s own self in the material rhythms of God’s own creation.

That key claim about God carries some concrete and practical consequences—liturgically, socially, and politically. Here at All Saints’ Parish in Saugatuck, for example, we have continued the Eucharistic practice that began during the COVID-19 pandemic: the ministers come down from the altar area to the head of the center aisle to distribute the Eucharistic elements.

We have continued that pattern even beyond the crisis of Covid for the sake of performing liturgically the good news of the Gospel: God comes to us.

Our Eucharistic worship reminds us every single week that Creator God does not remain sequestered in a far-off Heaven, not even on a mountaintop, and certainly not behind any walls or fences. The God of Jesus comes to us, right where we are; God comes in search of us, and wants to be in loving solidarity and gracious communion with us, and as far and as deep as our creaturely existence runs—all the way down to the riverbed and beyond.

The social and political consequences of worshipping this Eucharistic God extend well beyond church walls, perhaps especially in a world of alarming xenophobia, tribal segregation, threats of mass deportation, immigrant-blaming, and the relentless bodily shaming of basically everyone who isn’t white and male. Those Eucharistic consequences can actually take root in our sanctuaries: Our worship as Christians ought to form and shape us to live as a community devoted to bold hospitality.

How people are welcomed, whether people feel safe and embraced, the tenor and tone of our greetings and interactions are not incidental to Christian faith; especially in the world today, radical hospitality is likely the most important thing Christians can do to live as witnesses to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to embody the good news of the God who always and without fail comes to us with the promise of healing and the hope of flourishing, for all.

So, shall we gather at the river? Yes, please…