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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…

Peculiar Strangers as Divine Gifts

Strangers from the East presented extravagant gifts to the child Jesus (Matthew 2:1-12). This became known as “The Epiphany,” but I’m realizing these days that those strangers, the “Magi,” are the gifts to us—and not a moment too soon in a xenophobic world of rampant white supremacy.

Reading the Magi as themselves gifts is thanks of course to the Gospel writer known as Matthew, who is the only one of the four canonical gospelers to include the story. It’s worth pondering why that story mattered so much to Matthew, or more significantly, to Matthew’s community, and now also to us—on this very day when many Christians celebrate the Epiphany, just as my parish did yesterday in worship.

We might recall, first, that each of the four accounts of the Gospel emerged from its own particular community of faith, each with its own demographic profile, colorful characters, and distinctive perspectives on God and Jesus. These communities had access to a variety of stories and traditions about Jesus, and eventually someone in each of these communities—or perhaps a small group—decided to write it all down and create a “gospel.” These writers adapted and revised those stories to meet the needs of their respective communities, and this helps to explain the variations among the four canonical accounts.

Scholars generally agree, for example, that Matthew’s community consisted mostly of Jewish followers of Jesus. A classic indication of this is the “Sermon on the Mount”—just as Moses brought the covenant to the people on Mount Sinai, so Matthew’s Jesus preaches about the “new covenant” on a mountain. Luke’s Jesus does this instead on a level place, a “plain.”

By noticing how these gospel writers connected traditions about Jesus to the particular issues facing their own communities, we can do the same work today—and not just theologians, pastors, or preachers, but the whole community. The Church is a “community of interpretation” where all of the members prayerfully discern how to read our sacred texts for the shared ministry to which God is calling us today.

How, then, might we read the iconic story from Matthew about the so-called “wise men” from the East, the ones who followed a star to Bethlehem and presented gifts to the child Jesus?

The divine presence in Jesus is shown to these gift-bearing strangers who were probably something like astrologers or perhaps those who practiced what we might call today an “earth-based religion.” The Greek word for these “wise men” in Matthew is magoi and it’s related to a Persian word for “powerful” (it’s also at the root of our word “magic” and “magician”). Some have suggested that this might have been a title given to Zoroastrian priests, an ancient monotheistic religious tradition that emerged from present-day Iran and Iraq. That tradition was devoted to connecting cosmic powers to earthly affairs—thus the appearance of an unusual star in the sky would have caught their attention.

Matthew’s story is often interpreted as a depiction of the global significance of Jesus—the meaning of his humble birth extends beyond Judea, and will have influence beyond the people of Israel, and reaches beyond standard borders to the East, to outsiders and foreigners. That sounds rather benign, but recalling that this is Matthew’s story, and that Matthew was likely embedded in a Jewish-Christian community, this story of the Epiphany would have been startling and should be read as both encouraging and scandalous at the very same time.

To live as inheritors of ancient Israel’s traditions and as followers of Jesus, as Matthew’s community apparently attempted, was often a complex religious undertaking. It was not always clear to which kind of religious or social category one belonged, or where one should belong. In many ways, those first-century Jewish Christians were boundary crossers—just like the Magi.

Those foreign astrologers traveled a long way, probably crossing a number of geopolitical borders. They were not Judeans, not even Israelites, so they were crossing a religious boundary as well. And these religious outsiders are among the very first to encounter Jesus—and by doing so because of the appearance of an unusual star, perhaps Matthew is suggesting that God deliberately called foreigners as witnesses to this profound moment.

Outsiders with privileged access to God’s own self-revelation: that’s a scandal that turns out to be a comfort.

Imagine Matthew’s community of Jewish Christians hearing this story: If God can lead peculiar border-crossers to God’s own presence in the flesh, then perhaps our own shifting and jumbled religious borders can be a source of insight for us as well.

Matthew’s approach to the quandaries faced by his own community seems to me quite compelling for every human community. The story about the Magi encourages us to look for epiphanies in unlikely places and among unexpected people, maybe even other species. But Matthew takes that encouraging scandal even further.

The gifts these Magi present to Jesus are not just random but function as symbols for the way Matthew wants to tell the rest of the story: myrrh was an embalming oil, prefiguring the death of Jesus; frankincense—an aromatic incense derived from medicinal plants—evoking the priestly prayers Jesus offers for our healing and thriving; and gold, representing the sovereignty of the risen Jesus, who appears on a mountain once again at the end of Matthew’s account of the Gospel, where he claims “all authority in heaven and on earth.” That mountaintop moment uniting the skies above and the ground beneath is precisely the moment those Zoroastrian Magi had dared to hope for.

Set aside those particular symbols for a moment and notice Matthew’s story-telling strategy for his community of Jesus-following Judeans: foreigners can help us navigate our own and often disorienting history.

Right there, in that strategy, is where Matthew’s Magi become gifts to us. This is the insight they embody: we need strangers and outsiders to help us interpret our own story.

Matthew’s strategy is not easy to embrace, of course, and it challenges the all-too common human tendency to gather only with those who are just like us. This is actually a cautionary tale from Matthew, warning us about borders: the walls we build for “self-protection” can instead prevent the insights of strangers from reaching us for our thriving.

The journey of the Magi offers a wonderful image for embarking on a journey into 2025, and for at least two reasons. First, the Magi were brave, setting out with only the light of a star to guide them to an unknown destination. We cannot know what’s ahead in the coming weeks and months, but the Magi themselves would encourage us with the courage of companions, and to make the journey together, trusting in divine guidance.

The second reason fortifies the first: the journey of the Magi led them to a place, Matthew says, of overwhelming joy. Whatever the coming year might hold for us, it will certainly require from us some hard work, careful discernment, and courage. Yes, and the journey itself will lead us toward joy.

Perhaps now more than ever, we need the divine gift of peculiar strangers to inspire trust on a journey toward joy. I know how trite that sounds, and this even more so: Matthew’s story can guide us along this path, like a bright star in the night sky—trite perhaps, but also vital for what it means to be “church” in an age of anxiety. Our shared faith and our brave companionship is the starry light we need.

The Art of Love in the Advent of God

Disaster movies make a lot of money for Holly wood producers and movie studios. It’s also oddly the case that real-life disasters sell more newspapers and increase the ratings of television news channels.

Human curiosity is heightened and intrigue sharpened in moments of disaster, far more so than in situations of joy. Why is this? Researchers from various fields have noted that humans are generally fascinated by what can kill us, injure us, or even end the world, a fascination that occurs for a simple reason: evolution.

Those who pay attention to potential threats and prepare for them, especially those who cooperate with others to manage the threats, they are the ones most likely to survive actual disasters.

This evolutionary advantage, however, diminishes dramatically in what some researchers have called “apocalypse anxiety”—being so paralyzed with worry about disaster that we do nothing about it, except perhaps to engage in incessant “doomscrolling.”

Yesterday, on the first Sunday of Advent—one of my favorite days on the church calendar—the lectionary assigned a portion from Luke’s account of the Gospel (21:25-36) where Jesus describes disaster preparedness: when disaster appears on the horizon, he says, “be on guard” so that it will not catch you unexpectedly, “like a trap.”

The lectionary always assigns apocalyptic and world-ending texts like this for the first Sunday of Advent—and that’s pretty weird. How odd to begin the new liturgical year with the “end”! But the apocalyptic character of this day is not just peculiar; it has always been deeply challenging, and for multiple reasons.

For certain types of Christians, passages like this one from Luke are treated as predictive timelines for world events—that’s how I grew up hearing them in the Evangelical tradition of my youth. This approach invites ways to map global politics to biblical prophecies, but of course this kind of “mapping” can easily treat our precious Earth as disposable, not to mention particular groups of humans.

Another problem with predictive timelines is the perpetually delayed “end” they seem to predict but which never arrives. We’ve been living with these apocalyptic texts for nearly 2,000 years now and I seriously doubt that this very moment, right now, is the culmination of biblical prophecies (even though Luke’s Jesus sure sounds like he’s describing the effects of global climate change in yesterday’s passage).

Other types of Christians have mostly dismissed these apocalyptic passages entirely as rather crude and ancient mythologies that more rational people have outgrown. Some early twentieth-century scholars tried to “demythologize” these texts and then psychologize them instead: the apocalyptic moment refers not to world events but to an individual’s moment of crisis, a moment of decision about whether to live a fully authentic life, for example.

This approach has its own set of problems, not least the tendency to detach Christian faith from the wider social world of political and economic concerns.

Those on both ends of this spectrum overlook something terribly important: world-ending moments actually happen quite regularly. Worlds of meaning and beauty and also tragedy and conflict—whole worlds come and go all the time.

The advent of AIDS in the 1980s made this pattern shockingly plain, which having World AIDS Day land on the first Sunday of Advent compellingly invites us to remember. To see young and otherwise healthy men, and then children, and also women waste away into death was a rude reminder—just like Polio had been, or bubonic plague, or more recently Covid-19—a rude reminder indeed of our mortality and what it looks like when worlds end.

The point of these apocalyptic texts is not how to predict when those world-ending moments will occur, but rather how to prepare ourselves to live in them; and to bear witness to faith, hope, and especially love while those moments unfold; and to proclaim by the way we live that God is with us—always.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus makes absolutely clear to his disciples that they must not try to predict when the end will occur. Jesus instead urges them to live with hopeful expectation—not for any unraveling, or ending, but for the coming of redemption.

Honestly, I rarely heard that note of hopefulness growing up in my thoroughly apocalyptic religious tradition—these texts are not proto-scripts for the latest Hollywood disaster movie; they are like textual vitamins to nurture a life of hope. Luke’s Jesus was especially clear about this yesterday: When you see all the shit going down, raise your heads! Your redemption is near!

Reading a recent essay on Thomas Mann’s classic German novel, The Magic Mountain made that apocalyptic hopefulness poignantly clear. That novel was published exactly 100 years ago last month; Mann had begun working on it in 1913 but then put it away during World War I.

The “mountain” in the title of that novel was in the Swiss Alps where Mann’s characters were convalescing in a tuberculosis sanatorium. For Mann, it was the kind of place where one learns things that only disease and death can teach you.

“The Hotel Schatzalp” (inspiration for Thomas Mann; photo, Jules and Bear)

But then, lost and isolated in a blizzard while skiing, the main character in this novel has, what was for him, a startling realization—and this occurs nearly in the precise middle of the novel, a pivot point for the whole story: the only thing that can stand up to death, the only thing strong enough, is love.

Needless to say, Mann was not a romantic sentimentalist. By “love,” Mann did not mean a “cozy feeling” but rather the arduous work of forging bonds with each other, not from a sense of shared doom, but with the enlivening conviction of our shared humanity.

This turn in the novel represents a dramatic shift for Mann himself. He was a German loyalist and a supporter of the Kaiser in the First World War. But his entire philosophy changed after that war (as it did for many). He was dismayed to see the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and he was stunned to see how quickly and how deeply that party was able to divide Germans against themselves, and to turn dear neighbors into monstrous enemies.

Witnessing this horrific turn of events in his homeland, Mann insisted that the only kind of love that can stand up against death is the love of an artist.

Living as I now do along the so-called “arts coast” of West Michigan, this caught my attention and it’s worth noting: for Thomas Mann, the kind of art that truly matters is the kind that excludes nothing that is truly human—all of our complexities and ambiguities, all of our moral failures and triumphs, each of our joys and sorrows alike—the artist must gather all of this and then bind all of it together with love.

The lectionary was kind enough to make this same point yesterday in a passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Christians in Thessalonica (1 Thess. 3:9-13). Those Thessalonians were terribly distressed that some of their friends had died—which they didn’t think would happen after they became Christians. That distress is what prompted Paul to write them a letter.

The cycle of life and death will indeed continue, Paul tells them, even as we wait for the glorious coming of Christ with all the saints. All the more reason, he says, for you to “increase and abound in love for one another and for all.”

I couldn’t help but tie all of these various texts together—from Luke and Mann to Paul—and imagine our worship at the Eucharistic Table yesterday as a gathering on the “Magic Mountain”—a place for healing and insight.

But like Mann’s characters, we don’t stay in that sanctuary. We are sent out from that Table—we go back down the mountain—fortified by the hope for the healing of the world.

This world of flourishing will emerge not from our own efforts alone but from changed hearts and minds, from making ourselves open (and vulnerable) to the transforming power of God’s love.

This is the God who comes not just once, centuries ago in Bethlehem, nor only for a second time, at the so-called “end of time,” but the God who is always arriving, always appearing, always as the God of Advent, always ready to remake us with love, and then always sending us out with that love for the healing of the world.

“Be on your guard,” Luke’s Jesus says, “so that your hearts are not weighed down…”

“Increase in love,” Paul says, “for one another and for all.”

Hold Fast and Stay True

The horizon before us is looking a bit apocalyptic.

I suppose that could refer to the apocalyptic character of current events, but I have especially in mind the tone of the lectionary; it likely works for both.

As the liturgical year winds down, the lectionary starts assigning dramatic readings about the so-called “end” of the world. When the new year starts on the first Sunday of Advent—on December 1 this year—these apocalyptic glimpses become full-blown visions of scary times to come.

Now would be a good time to recall what that powerful word “apocalypse” means. It comes from a pretty ordinary Greek verb, actually; it means something like removing the lid from a jar. Doing that reveals or discloses what’s inside.

Eventually, this otherwise simple Greek verb wandered into religious texts where it came to mean “divine revelation,” or making hidden things visible and known.

At this time of year, the lectionary always gives us a series of biblical texts with apocalyptic themes, with moments of disclosure, and of unveiling, and often rather vivid if not also disorienting revelations.

It is of course very common to suppose that apocalyptic texts are by definition oriented toward disaster; Hollywood loves that approach for blockbuster movies. And we still use it in ordinary speech when trying to name a moment that seems particularly catastrophic.

Usually overlooked or mostly forgotten in these cultural appropriations is the energy of hope that nearly always accompanies an apocalyptic text.

“Hopeful apocalypse” now seems like a contradiction in terms, even though these ancient texts were written to be a source of comfort for communities in trouble. These communities needed to be reassured that their own moment of anxiety, even fearfulness, perhaps also threats of violence or depravation, maybe even signs of war on the horizon, that such a moment belongs to a larger and still meaningful story.

That reassurance, that sense of “meaningfulness,” might be anchored in a notion of divine design, or attached to an enduring sense of providence, or more generally the reminder of God’s own faithfulness to God’s own creation. This could easily be the very key to the whole letter to the Hebrews. In the passage assigned for yesterday, many of us heard a wonderful declaration about God: “the one who has promised is faithful” (10:23).

Apocalyptic writers want to reveal that faithfulness, to offer signs of that divine presence even in the midst of seemingly random events and figures—no, it’s not just chaos; God is still present even in the most unlikely circumstances.

Yesterday’s Gospel reading came from what is often called the “mini-apocalypse” in Mark (13:1-8). This chapter usually grabs our attention when Mark’s Jesus refers to the darkened sun and moon and the stars all falling from the sky. But first-century hearers would have been just as startled (and dismayed) by the fate of the temple.

Jesus describes the coming destruction of that holy place—not just how it will be damaged, but how it will be utterly demolished, without one single stone remaining on another.

To appreciate the level of shock this caused, we need to understand something about what was one of the wonders of the ancient world, this temple built during the reign of King Herod.

It was built on the top of a small mountain with a plaza of roughly 350,000 square feet. The walls supporting this plaza were made of enormous stones, some of them weighing as much as 400 tons each. No mortar was used between these stones, and yet no daylight passes between them. Modern engineers are baffled by how ancient builders pulled this off; even modern machines can’t move stones that big with that kind of precision.

The plaza and the temple itself could be seen from a long distance away; it would shine brightly in the sun as many parts of it were overladen with gold and the rest built with bright white granite. (Herod himself, by the way, undertook this project with over 10,000 laborers because he wanted to secure his own “eternal remembrance—it apparently worked since we still refer to it as “The Herodian Temple.”)

The destruction of such a massive structure dedicated to the very presence of God was literally unimaginable.

Whatever Jesus thought he was doing by describing the temple’s destruction, let’s be clear that he was not rejecting Judaism, the religion of his own people. He was urging instead a kind of reorientation, to remember that toward which the temple was originally meant to point—a divine purpose that had been corrupted by social and economic injustice.

We might recall in that regard the story that comes immediately before this passage in Mark: the story about the determined and defiant widow in the temple’s outer court. Her poverty put the corruption of that system on display. Jesus calls it out, denounces the religious leaders, and then bewails the failure of the temple to embody its God-given mission.

The temple was never supposed to be an end in itself; religion is never itself the point but rather what it points toward, what it evokes, what it inspires, and especially the community it’s supposed to shape and form as God’s people in the world.

Most scholars believe Mark wrote his account of the Gospel right around the year 70, shortly after the Roman Empire crushed a Jewish rebellion and then did indeed destroy the Herodian temple—which was never rebuilt.

That unthinkable disaster shapes how Mark tells the story of Jesus: the story of what truly counts and what finally matters, the story of what is worthy of our trust.

In that sense, Mark’s entire account of the Gospel and not just this one chapter is thoroughly apocalyptic—he wants to reveal and disclose genuine reasons for hope.

Do not despair, Mark’s Jesus says, even when events seem grim and dire. Even when traditional structures crumble and heroic monuments fade—especially when this happens—God will, even then, and especially then, bring something new to light, as if the turmoil were the labor pains of childbirth.

At those very moments, God is calling God’s people to the work that matters and which will not fade—God always calls God’s people to this world-changing work, of course, but it seems most important to remember this when it the work is most needed, like right now.

Hold fast to that calling, and especially to the God who calls us to do the work of repairing the world, and healing the rifts, and making peace with justice, and loving the stranger, and caring for the orphan and widow. We do that work confident that God will be with us in that work.

“Hold fast to that confession of hope”—that’s the wonderful phrase that also comes from yesterday’s passage in the letter to the Hebrews, and it has roots in nautical culture.

“Hold fast” was the command given to sailors on deck as a storm approached. Historically, more than a few sailors tattooed that command across their knuckles, a kind of lucky charm for safety, but also as a way to remember the command while they gripped the rigging as the ship was tossed about by the wind and the waves.

It’s also important to know which parts of a sailing vessel are suitable for holding fast—some of the ropes are “working lines,” the ones that move and operate the sails and spars, and you don’t hold on to those! You hold fast instead to the “standing rigging,” which is firmly attached to the deck and the mast, and which will support you as the ship heels and rocks.

“Hold fast” was usually paired with a command to the helm: stay true. Storms can quickly blow a ship off course, and it’s not always possible to discern your course by looking at the sea, or when the horizon disappears behind banks of clouds. “Stay true” is the reminder to use the compass and to keep your heading true through the storm—precisely because the only way out is to go through, whether the storm is meteorological or political.

Whatever the weeks and months ahead might bring, now is the time to embrace an apocalyptic posture: what is being revealed and disclosed?

Now is also the time to embrace once more a traditional image of the Church as a ship and the life of faith as a journey on the sea: the standing rigging—that which will keep us steady and stable—our standing rigging in the church is our worship at the Eucharistic Table; our heavenly course is set by the Gospel, and it takes us into a world longing for hope and healing.

Let us then hold fast and stay true; God is with us even on turbulent seas.

Fierce and Faithful, Persistent and Poor: Walking with Widows on the Gospel Road

In the Gospel reading yesterday morning, the road to Jerusalem in Mark’s account of the Gospel at last brings Jesus and his followers to the Holy City.

It’s worth remembering when we read this story in the U.S., where “church” and “state” seem separated on paper only, that first-century Jerusalem was the seat of Judean religious power and also Roman imperial power for the province; these two forms of power come together at the temple treasury in the story from Mark (12:38-44).

Mark wastes no time in setting the stage for violent conflict in Jerusalem. Mark’s Jesus quickly clashes with every possible authority group in that capital city; in yesterday’s encounter, it was the “scribes,” the interpreters of Mosaic Law—the religious lawyers, in other words.

Mark’s Jesus has been arguing with these scribes about a wide range of issues and his patience has simply run out. Many Christians are familiar with Mark’s rendering of that moment, but probably not with an exasperated Jesus. While rich people drop big sums of money into the temple’s donation boxes, a poor widow contributes two small coins—all the money she has.

The lectionary compilers know quite well that late autumn is the time for fundraising campaigns in most churches—thus the readings about money at this time of year. But the temple story from Mark is far too often and too crudely used to guilt people into giving more money: If even a poor widow can give all she has to the Temple, then surely you can give a bit more to the church…

Mark would be horrified by using his story that way. The poor widow in this story is not the poster child for stewardship campaigns; she is, rather, the shining emblem of God’s own commitment to a world of justice. (Ched Myers provides an invaluable resource for interpreting Mark in the frames of social and economic justice; I am indebted to his analysis of this Markan story.)

As Mark’s Jesus continues his teaching in the temple, he issues a warning: “Beware of the scribes,” he says. Beware of the religious lawyers who tell you what the law means but then “devour” the houses of widows.

That rather strange phrase refers to a first-century legal practice regarding estate management. When the male head of a household died, his estate was given over to the religious scribes to administer because the widow, as a woman, was considered unfit to do so. (And by the way, lest we look down with smugness on that ancient practice, let us not forget that women in the United States were not allowed to have a credit card or take out a loan in their own name until 1974.)

Back in the first century, the scribes were compensated for their estate services by taking a percentage of the estate. As you might imagine, abuse was common in this system, forms of embezzlement to the point of impoverishing the widows—or as Mark’s Jesus puts it, the houses of widows were devoured.

“Beware of these religious scribes,” Jesus says, and then he sits down “opposite the treasury,” Mark says—a phrase we should read as not merely about geographical location but moral orientation: over and against it, as opposed to the temple treasury, where this social and economic abuse of widows is on display.

Quite honestly, after many decades of reading and hearing this story, I have consistently failed to see Mark’s point in telling it. The reason the widow is poor in this story is because the scribes have stolen her money—some of which they were putting in the offering plate, right in front of Jesus! These religious experts would have known that the Mosaic Law they claimed to interpret explicitly provided for the care of both widows and orphans; it was a divine commandment.

But right there, in the temple of God’s presence, the scribes no longer protect the poor but crush them, and then flaunt it. Right there in the outer court of the temple, economic oppression is on display and barely concealed with “long prayers,” as Mark puts it.

Jesus is outraged.

Despite all the pietistic sermons I have heard (and yes, preached) in the past about this impoverished woman giving all she has, Jesus is not commending the widow for her religious piety; he’s calling out the scribes for their religious hypocrisy. Jesus then leaves the temple in disgust, and, it turns out, for the last time before he is arrested and killed.

Among the four gospel writers, Mark is especially keen to address economic injustice as a vital component of the Gospel. Mark is also eager to point out how religion gets used to support the financial inequities of social systems—systems that are almost always designed to favor men.

When Mark’s Jesus insists that the poor widow has actually given more than all the rich people, he is not congratulating her or recommending this practice; he’s drawing attention to the injustice of a system in which the poor contribute proportionally far more to the system than those who are wealthy, a common dynamic in nearly every human society throughout human history—including the United States.

This kind of social and economic analysis can make most of us deeply uncomfortable, including me. But that is precisely the “discomfort zone” the Gospel calls us to inhabit, and I am fairly confident that this will increasingly be the case in the weeks and months to come.

Given the rocky road likely ahead of us, it’s worth remembering that the road to Jerusalem in Mark is the good road of the Gospel, the one that leads not only to the Cross but also the Empty Tomb. The good road of the Gospel marks a journey of costly discipleship for the sake of flourishing—for all. The good road of the Gospel is not easy to find, but just ask anyone on the margins of a wealthy and powerful world; they will have a map.

The many books of the Bible, written over many centuries by different communities, are remarkably consistent about this: care for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger is religiously non-negotiable; and resisting unjust systems of oppression is the very definition of discipleship—not because people on the margins deserve our pity (that tired old noblesse oblige of the wealthy West) but because the excluded and forgotten can usually show us the best road home.

Yesterday’s lectionary texts all confirm this—from the story in the Hebrew Bible about Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, a city of Gentiles and outsiders (1 Kings 17:8-16); or from the psalmist who praises God for giving justice to the oppressed, care to the stranger, and who sustains the orphan and widow (Ps. 146); and of course from Mark, whose story in the temple I now read quite differently than I ever have before: the poor widow embodies a fierce faithfulness, the persistence to live with the dignity God gave her while living with virtually nothing that the world should have given her.

Searching for appropriate visual images for worship this past week, I did a Google search for “poor widow,” and the usual suspects appeared immediately. But scrolling down the screen I stumbled on an odd match: “The Calla Lily Vendor,” by Alfredo Ramos Martinez. I still can’t figure out why Google included this one, but I’m glad for it. The “poor widow”—too often a frail old lady in my imagination—is just as likely a determined single mother doing whatever she must to care for her children as she is a demure recipient of social security checks.

“Calla Lily Vendor,” Alfredo Ramos Martinez (1929)

The stubborn faithfulness of widows—my own dear mother embodied this to the very day she died—showed up in all sorts of guises in recent days. A gay friend of mine posted on social media last Wednesday morning, the day after the election. He wrote about waking up disappointed and also afraid. “But then I realized,” he wrote, “that I woke up with the same two arms and the same two hands that I had yesterday. I realized that no election can take away my capacity for kindness, and love, and service.”

He noted that this election might very well take away his rights as a gay man; it might take away still more rights from women, who are already afraid for their safety. While this election might very well cause harm in countless ways, he wrote, “I will continue to choose kindness and love and service.”

That’s exactly the good road of the Gospel God always calls us to walk but especially right now. Mark’s story in the temple offered me a powerful reminder about how we learn to walk that Gospel road: in solidarity with the poor in a rich world; and with women in a patriarchal world; and therefore and also with LGBTQ people in a world of bullies.

Standing in solidarity with all those on the margins is a Gospel posture.

Walking with them is the way of discipleship.

Offering kindness and love to each other on the road is our service of healing.

This is always true, and that has always been how disciples of Jesus walk the Gospel road home, regardless of election outcomes.

Yes, and, I think it is especially true right now.

Who are “We” at the Table Now?

How could this happen? I am absolutely gobsmacked, not only that he won but even more that the vote wasn’t particularly close. Even those who support him are a bit surprised. What do we make of this? How did we get here? Who are “we”?

I’m not a political pundit, but I am invested in politics, as every religious leader should directly admit. “Politics,” a word deriving from the Greek polis, or “city,” refers to all the many different ways we structure our societies and negotiate with others for resources and strategize for ways (hopefully) to advance the common good. In that sense, religion is by definition thoroughly political (as all of the ancient Hebrew prophets and also the Christian Gospel writers demonstrate, as well as the liturgical texts in The Book of Common Prayer).

It’s from that perspective that I’m inviting the parish I am privileged to serve to reflect on this moment in American cultural and political history and how we should now live our faith in public. I would have likewise invited this reflection had Ms. Harris won the election, but the invitation now feels laced with urgency, especially as the “common good” seems alarmingly fragile.

Who are we? I keep returning to that question, in large measure because an individual does not a social movement or a political party make. This is often difficult to keep in mind concerning Donald J. Trump, whose sheer force of personality fills a room—or an arena. Quite honestly, I haven’t wanted to suppose that Mr. Trump represents anything other than himself, someone whose public statements and moral character—in all frankness—I find reprehensible.

Never could I have imagined a convicted felon and instigator of insurrection running for President of the United States (much less actually winning), a man who mocks disabled people, advocates violence, and sexually assaults women.

But no, putting my attention there, on one person’s moral failings is a mistake. The election wasn’t about him; it was and still is about our neighbors. Focusing entirely on him risks distracting us from the vital work ahead in a deeply divided country—I mean, the work of trying to understand our neighbors, and in this case, “neighbors” for me refers to those who voted for Mr. Trump.

The week before the election, the New York Times Magazine published an essay on the work of Robert Paxton, a leading historian of fascism, whose award-winning 1972 book on the French collaborators with Nazi Germany analyzed the emergence of Vichy France during World War II.

Paxton was at first reluctant to apply the term “fascism” to the MAGA movement in the Republican Party but now believes we should, though with caveats (the character of this moment in world history is not the same as it was in the 1930s, for example). Whatever else we want to say about “Trumpism,” Paxton said, we need to note carefully that this is a “mass phenomenon” from below, and the “leaders are running to keep ahead of it.” This isn’t really about Donald Trump at all—he’s mostly a convenient means to an end. Paxton’s point about this is quite startling (if not alarming): “Trumpism,” he notes, has a much more solid and broader base of support in the American electorate than either Hitler did in Germany or Mussolini did in Italy.

Paxton also cautions against thinking of fascism as an “ideology” or a kind of “party platform.” That approach obscures the action-oriented character of a movement that is not rooted in any coherent philosophy but instead fills the void in a cultural system that has broken down or failed. This is why, in part, Paxton is still somewhat hesitant about the fascist label, which implies more stability for a cultural moment than likely exists. This, it seems to me, is a large part of what makes understanding my neighbors so challenging: not everyone votes the way they do for the same reason.

While David Brooks urges us to see in this election a resounding No to “liberal elites”—and there is likely some truth to that analysis—I worry that this framing of the outcome reduces our social complexity to a single cause, or even worse, perpetuates what has been a long trend of American anti-intellectualism, as if “education” leads inevitably to tribal betrayal.

As Paxton would suggest, this moment is manifesting a multiplicity of convictions, grievances, aspirations, and motivations, some of which likely stand in opposition to the others even though they all inspired the same vote. The working poor in rural America may feel mostly abandoned by politicians but that’s hardly cause for common cause with high-tech billionaires who want to erase government regulations.

As I sort through all of this (and more) for my work as a parish priest, I keep returning to what has always been the focus of my vocation: the Eucharistic Table. While it’s important to keep saying that “all are welcome, no exceptions” (which I say every single Sunday at the beginning of worship), I now worry in ways I haven’t before about whether this invitation covers over the differences among those who gather at the Table—and some of the differences are clearly deep and profound.

I worry, in other words, about turning the Eucharist into a ritual of avoidance, a kind of shared denial about what keeps us separate and segregated. (This has of course always been the risk concerning racial differences in a white supremacist society as well as the differences of gendered sexuality in a patriarchal world.) If table fellowship amounts to merely a superficial unity, then “church” is not much more than a cultural cliché.

I certainly do not mean that how one votes matters for how we gather at the Table, but I do mean that how one lives matters after we leave the Table. And that’s why the difference between “partisan” and “political,” though subtle, remains so vital.

I believe Eucharistic formation shapes Christian people to stand in solidarity with the poor, advocate for the vulnerable, work for peace with justice, and commit to a lifelong path of ongoing conversion to the Gospel of Jesus Christ—whose body we ourselves become at that Table as Christian people. The Table also reassures us of divine forgiveness when we fail to live as Christian people, and also the never-failing love of God, which is always freely offered regardless of how we live.

More succinctly: Eucharist welcomes everyone and leaves no one unchanged.

Eucharistic fellowship is, apparently, just as complex as American electoral politics. This has likely always been true, but now, perhaps, we know it in a new way.

But who, exactly, are we?

Unbound and Unbinding

The energy and anticipation were palpable yesterday morning as the choir rehearsed and the liturgical ministers began to vest. We gathered on a hill overlooking the Kalamazoo River, that leads into Lake Michigan, that great inland sea. We gathered as All Saints’ Parish for the 156^th celebration of All Saints’ Day.

We celebrated a rich history of prayer and service on that shoreline hill, a legacy we prayerfully seek to honor by the way we live today and the witness we bear to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We have recently been using the image of the “good road” to describe this journey we are on together as a parish, and that road is both inspiring and challenging.

All Saints’ Day marks the beginning of Native American Heritage Month, for example, a November observance in this country that started back in 1990. Modern Western society needs to retrieve at least part of this truly rich heritage of indigenous peoples for the sake of ecological healing in a world of climate chaos and for a healthier relationship with the land.

At the same time, we have started recently to confront more directly another part of this heritage, both as a country and as The Episcopal Church. I mean the painful legacy of residential boarding schools for indigenous children—this isn’t only part of our distant past; some of these schools just closed in our lifetimes.

Stories from these schools were in the news just a week ago when President Biden formally apologized for the government’s role in creating them. The collusion between church and state represented by these schools—this collaboration to erase the cultural traditions of an entire people—this is a gut-wrenching chapter in American religious history, our history.

Telling the truth and hearing the truth about this history is the only way to begin healing the trauma of that history. That kind of truth-telling is part of what it means to travel together on “Creator’s good road,” especially with the healing power of love.

Speaking the truth in love has always been the saintly work of God’s people. In John’s Gospel alone, this vital significance of the truth is mentioned no fewer than twenty-one times. Jesus is the “Word made flesh,” John says, “full of grace and truth” (1:14).

John’s Jesus himself declares that he is the “way, the truth, and the life” (14:6) and promises to send the “Spirit of truth” who will guide us into all truth (16:13) Because, John’s Jesus says, when you know the truth, the “truth will make you free” (8:32).

This healing and liberating power of God is on dramatic display in the familiar story from John assigned for the celebration of All Saints’ Day (11:32-44). Lazarus, a dear friend of Jesus, has died. Lazarus may well have been the closest friend Jesus had, and he was part of an intimate circle of friends that included the sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha, and a wider circle still of the village of Bethany, where they lived, just outside of Jerusalem.

So this family of friends, this village, gathers to grieve the loss of Lazarus. Jesus himself is so deeply moved that he begins to weep. Mary speaks some hard truth: If you had been here, she says to Jesus, Lazarus would not have died.

As many will recall, Jesus responded by raising Lazarus from the dead. But what many of us don’t often remember is that this moment is not the end of the story, perhaps not even the climax; notice what happens next. The dead man came out of the tomb, John says, and his hands and feet were bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus then said to them—to that family of friends, to that village—“Unbind him, and let him go.”

What a strange moment in this already dramatic story! It’s as if being raised from the dead is not enough, somehow not sufficient for embracing new life. Indeed, as he is walking out of his own tomb, John still refers to him as “the dead man.”

Unbind him, Jesus says, and let him go.

Lazarus is wrapped in a burial shroud—tightly wrapped. That’s how they embalmed a dead body in that society, securely bound by heavily spiced linens soaked in aromatic ointments.

I think John is imagining more here than only the burial shroud of a first-century Judean. John is likely urging his readers to consider that we—all of us—might still be clinging to death even in the midst of life; that we—all of us—might still be in death’s enchanting thrall even as we hope for life; that we human beings have trouble, often deadly trouble in letting go of death.

Whatever keeps us attached to a violent system, whatever binds us to hateful speech or traps us in spirals of bodily shame, whenever we are entangled or enticed by bitter resentments—even a burial shroud can seem appealing when soaked in sweet-smelling herbs—whatever prevents us from the fullness of life needs to fall away.

Unbind him, Jesus says, and let him go.

That is the moment of love’s healing power in this story, and that’s always the work of all the saints, to unbind—to release and to liberate, to let the captives go free from whatever form of death shackles them to the past.

“See,” God says, “I am making all things new.”

That’s a powerful declaration from the Revelation to John, which the lectionary assigned as well for our saintly celebration (21:1-6a). And it’s tempting to hear it as a moment of erasure, of wiping the slate clean, as if God is simply starting over and beginning entirely from scratch.

But no, our history matters. Our history that made us who we are and shaped our families and built our communities matters, and it’s not just simply thrown away.

And the indigenous history of the people we tried to erase on this continent—that history matters just as much as ours. Our shared history with them is not erased in John’s vision—it is remade with the healing power of God’s love.

That’s the good road to travel as God’s people, and yes, this road includes difficult, even heartbreaking moments of truth-telling. But this is not the road to nowhere; it actually does go somewhere, and the selection from the prophet Isaiah for All Saints’ Day says where exactly it leads (25:6-9).

The road leads, Isaiah says, to God’s “holy mountain,” a mountain where the burial shroud cast over all people is lifted, and where God—God!—wipes away the tears from every face—including, surely, the tears from the face of Jesus himself when he wept for his friend Lazarus.

Both Isaiah and John offer a remarkable vision of ever-widening circles of who counts as “God’s people”—an ever-expanding “Communion of Saints.” For both of these ancient writers, tears are wiped from all faces; no one is left out.

Personally, I needed that biblical reassurance this week, especially as the anxiety is running high about the election tomorrow. But here’s the thing: regardless of what happens, no matter who wins and what kind of future we think we might be facing in this country, the shared ministry of God’s people remains the same. As the Book of Common Prayer succinctly frames it, our work is always to promote justice, peace, and love—and that will not change.

In the historic carpenter gothic sanctuary on the corner of Grand and Hoffman Streets in Saugatuck, Michigan, we will continue that holy work and we will extend our Eucharistic fellowship outward, in ever-widening circles of God’s healing love.

And we will keep on doing this work together for another 156 years—or for however long God calls us to do it along this good road.

And what a wonderful day it was yesterday—to recall with song and flowers and food—that we are not alone on that road but accompanied by a vast communion of companion saints.

Think like a Mountain

Mid-twentieth century French novelist René Daumal imagined mountains as bridges between the profane and the sacred. In the world’s great mythological stories, he noted, a mountain creates a bond between Earth and Sky; its summit stretches toward eternity and its base spreads out among the foothills in the world of mortals.

In nearly every religious tradition, mountains have become symbols of divine presence. It matters that we have to exert energy to climb a mountain. It matters that we can fall off a mountain and die. And it matters that so many people today still refer to intense spiritual moments as “mountaintop experiences.”

The image of a mountain is never a neat and tidy religious symbol. It stands for all the messy entanglements of the divine and the human in our endlessly complex lives, and the rich texture of life itself, including the mysteries of death.

“Mt. Temple,” Brandy Saturley and Gisa Mayer

For all of these reasons, the Season of Creation featured this image this past Sunday and also assigned an astonishing reading from the prophet Isaiah (65:17-25), a reading in which we learn something about God by learning something about God’s holy mountain.

In Isaiah’s vision, humans treat each other unfairly and even violently because that’s how humans treat the wider world of God’s creation. On God’s Holy Mountain, the injustice among humans will be remedied because the injustice we inflict on the world of nature will be remedied—one because of the other.

This profound and unsettling connection between the world of humans and the world of other animals occurs multiple times in Isaiah, and always on God’s Holy Mountain: there, peace with justice among human beings will appear first among wolves and lambs, and among lions and cattle, and also between the calf and the bear. And a little child, Isaiah says, shall lead all of them into God’s own realm of thriving life.

I am sorely tempted to embrace this prophetic passage with every ounce of sentimentality I’ve got, and that would be a big mistake. This is not a sentimental image from Isaiah, and it should not feel cozy. Isaiah’s vision is one of profound transformation that leaves nothing untouched—even the most basic elements of how we expect the world to work will change.

Walter Brueggemann, one of the leading modern scholars of the Hebrew Bible, admits that Isaiah’s vision of God’s Holy Mountain is so “overwhelming” that even he is “at a loss to know how to interpret adequately [this] majestic scenario.”

The astonishing vision of this ancient prophet continues to pose an urgent question today, as it does for every generation: How should we then live if Isaiah’s vision is what God intends for God’s own creation?

A question like that is a reminder that prophets are not particularly interested in predicting a far-off future; they are far more concerned with how we live in the present. How the world will one day be, in other words, ought to shape the way we live now.

That reminder might help us read the longer version of the final chapter in Mark’s Gospel (16:14-18), which this season also assigned for “Mountain Sunday.” Most biblical scholars treat this extended account of the resurrection of Jesus as a later addition to Mark; for some, that’s reason enough to ignore it. But what shame that would be! If we just skip over these verses as just not “originalist” enough, we might miss a key insight about early Christianity.

We could recall, after all, that all four accounts of the Gospel blend stories and sayings and traditions about Jesus, each of them a kind of mashup of various sources, including first-century Judaism. The Judeans at that time held closely to an image of what some have called “the cosmic mountain” to which all nations would one day be drawn and where God would remake the heavens and the earth—and this was especially compelling after the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem.

Early Christians adopted and adapted that image, which is still lingering around the scene from Mark in which the risen Jesus—the one the Romans had crucified, the one God then raised from the dead—when that Jesus instructs his closest friends to preach good news to the “whole creation.”

That phrase in Greek could be translated as preaching to “every creature” or even “every created thing.” So we have here a trace from the first century of Christian faith of a remarkably expansive vision, a claim about just how far God’s new life will reach—and it’s nothing short of everywhere, and among all creatures, and for all created things.

How then should we live in the light of this “good news”? What does it mean for us to live as messengers of this new life for this entire, precious Earth?

How should we then live?

To live as Gospel messengers, we must “think like a mountain”—that’s a wonderful phrase from Aldo Leopold, who propelled modern environmentalism into a new chapter with his 1949 book: A Sand County Almanac. That book inspired a whole generation to think differently about the land, and the importance of cultivating what Leopold called a “land ethic.” (A short overview of Leopold’s “land ethic” can be found on YouTube here, and you can also go here for more on his “thinking like a mountain.”)

We must stop thinking of the land, he wrote, as a commodity we own and instead think of the land as a community to which we belong. We must “think like a mountain”— never for short-term gain, the cost of which is almost always destruction and death, but instead for the longest term possible, for the lifespan of a mountain, for the sake of life.

Leopold lost a lot of friends and colleagues because of his “land ethic.” As he noted rather poignantly in the early 1940s, “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”

This, it seems to me, is also the risk of theological education. Gospel witness can be lonely; sometimes our religious commitments will put us in conflict with our neighbors, and with friends and family. Sometimes our vital convictions call into question what the wider society around us just takes for granted—we might be viewed as odd, eccentric, or even a threat.

I think this tension will become increasingly evident as Christians draw from images like Isaiah’s for our shared work of ecological healing. Promoting the kind of transformation the human world now needs so that the world of God’s creation can thrive will certainly not make us popular, and likely all the more alone in a world of wounds.

This is one of the best reasons to keep gathering with others for table fellowship every Sunday morning. This quirky passage from “late Mark” includes a reference to this as well, to a shared meal, which is yet another significant feature of first-century Christian faith. Very early in church history, Christians expected to encounter the risen Christ at the Table, whose Easter life with them would shape their life together.

At the Table, we join a community devoted to the God of life, we gather with people who are trying their best to follow the God of new life, and we’re hoping to catch a glimpse once again of God’s Holy Mountain—a vision of transformed life to inspire and sustain us.

And when this work becomes more challenging and grows more costly, we can return again to the great eighth chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, another rich passage for “Mountain Sunday.”

I, for one, need to hold fast to Paul’s astonishing confidence in that chapter: nothing, absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of God, not ever. And this is the very same chapter in which he describes the “groaning of God’s creation.”

This counts as astonishing, too: the whole wide world of God’s amazing creation actually groans in eager anticipation, waiting for our transformation, for our liberation, for our conversion to life at last.

It won’t make us popular, but God is calling us to live as witnesses to that new life now—and there are plenty of other-than-human creatures who would be terribly grateful if we did that today.

“The Whole Creation Groans,” Claudio Rossetti

Red Sky at Morning

The wider world of God’s creation isn’t always a cozy place. The biblical texts assigned for the third week in the Season of Creation offer a stark reminder that we’re dealing with a bit more in this season than just a soothing tableau of endearing animals or even a beautiful painting of a static landscape we can admire from a distance.

We are embedded in this world, a world alive with the presence of God—a world to which we can, and must pay very close attention.

Crewing a tall ship on my days off I’ve learned from the ship’s captain what it means to attend carefully to one’s surroundings, not only what’s happening on deck, among the passengers, or with the sails, but also out on the distant horizon where storm clouds might suddenly sprout. On the Great Lakes, storms can form quickly and move rapidly and take careless sailors by surprise.

The third Sunday of the Season of Creation features the sky, and everything in it—sun, moon, and stars, as well as the clouds, which can sometimes paint the sky with multi-colored cotton balls and sometimes darken the sky with portents of disaster.

The old maritime adage would serve us well this week: red sky at night, sailors’ delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning. Matthew’s Jesus actually quotes that old adage (Mt 16:2), and he does so to berate his own religious leaders for failing to read the signs of the times properly. James Gustave Speth urged modern readers to do that very thing back in 1980, and even more directly concerning the signs of the environmental times. His book—Red Sky at Morning: American and the Crisis of the Global Environment—was Speth’s attempt to ring the collective alarm bell about climate change. He also was a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and his warnings have gone mostly unheeded.

In this world alive with the presence of Creator God, the skies, the land and sea, humans, and all the other animals are all interconnected, all of them offering signs that we must learn how to read.

To modern Western ears, paying that kind of careful attention to the world of nature can sound rather unsophisticated, certainly not very “scientific.” And yet, many environmental scientists today—stretching back to Speth’s work and earlier—sound very much like biblical writers from many centuries ago as they urge us to wake up and pay attention to the living world around us, a world in which we are inextricably ensconced. It’s from Earth that we learn the most about divine blessings as well as judgment.

The ancient Hebrew prophets repeatedly exhorted their readers to notice what Earth and sky might be telling them about how they were living, and especially about the judgment they were bringing on themselves by their own misguided actions.

The seasonal lectionary this past Sunday gave us a startling passage along those very lines from Jeremiah, a passage not only bleak but brutal (4:23-28). After the people of Judea, in stubborn arrogance, refused to heed his warnings about impending war and an invading army, Jeremiah writes as if he is the sole survivor of a catastrophe, the devastating effects of which are inscribed on the land itself.

He describes the shocking extent of this devastation as mountains quake, and hills are torn apart, and farmland turns into desert.

“I saw the earth,” he writes, “and, look, welter and waste…”

That’s the very same Hebrew phrase (from Robert Alter’s translation) that lectionary gave us two weeks ago in the first verse of Genesis, when God created the heavens and the earth. Jeremiah quotes that story verbatim twice more in this week’s short passage, suggesting a terrifying reversal of God’s creative work—the creation itself is unraveling, reverting back to its original chaos.

In Genesis, God looks on each day of creation and calls it good.
Jeremiah looks on each stage of earth’s destruction with horror.

Jeremiah is not enumerating only metaphorical devastations. The intensity of human violence and warfare always and quite literally disfigures the heavens—just as the intensity of human violence against the planet renders the air unbreathable. Thick smoke obscures the skies, the stench of spilled blood and death chokes all those still living, and even all the birds of the air flee.

Silence accompanies the darkness in a bird-less sky, as Jeremiah portrays the desolation of earth, as if the sky is speechless with grief over the wreckage wrought by human violence—just as Mark also portrays a bleak and somber sky as Jesus dies in that portion of the Gospel for this past Sunday (15:33-39).

The descent of darkness in Mark’s account of the crucifixion frames dramatically the heartbreaking journey Jesus is taking into every greater isolation—his own religious leaders condemn him; his closest friends abandon him; imperial forces torture him; even God seems tragically absent—and the skies refuse to give any light as the heavens enter a time of celestial grief.

Like Matthew and Luke, Mark includes another curious detail in this story: the curtain in the temple, the temple veil is torn in two at the moment when Jesus dies.

We might recall that the tearing or rending of garments was a sign of deep grief and mourning in that society, and still today for many. Pair this with what we can learn from first-century historian Josephus: the temple veil, or the temple’s own garment, as it were, was woven with four distinct colors to represent the four foundational elements of the Universe. God’s creation tore its own holy garment in grief over the death of Jesus.

Yes, these are grim readings. But if we pay attention to the Earth, and especially to the sky, as these same readings note, we can still find a thread of hope. In Psalm 19, also read for this week, the psalmist depicts the skies as having their very own voice. The movement from night to day, the changing of darkness to light is a form of speech. Their voice is not heard in words and yet they speak, and they praise God their maker.

Just as many others in the ancient Mediterranean world imagined the movement of planets and stars creating their own music, the psalmist sings about the skies declaring the very glory of God.

More than this, the psalmist then makes a connection between the divine glory of the skies and the divine glory of the law, the ordinances of God for righteous living, for reviving the faint of heart and giving wisdom with vision—more desirable are these ordinances than fine gold and sweeter by far than honey, the very color of the shining sun.

God’s law for life, for the very sake of life itself, is written into the fabric of God’s creation, and this alone is reason enough for our gladness and joy—even in times of deep distress and debilitating darkness.

This is what Paul is writing about in the portion assigned from his letter to the Philippians (2:14-18). Paul is in prison as he writes this letter, and the Philippians themselves have been suffering and undergoing persecution. Even so, he says, hold out the words of life to a world that has lost its way. Live like shining stars, he says, in the darkest of nights.

Do this remembering that God is faithful. Even Jeremiah holds out hope that God’s faithfulness will not permit the utter destruction of Earth. Only by holding fast to this hope can we act for the sake of life, holding out believable words of life for a world that has lost its way.

God is faithful. That’s the only reason Jeremiah would even bother to prophesy at all. Bleak and brutal as his text can be, he rants precisely because the people have forgotten what will not change: divine faithfulness. And this is likewise the only reason Paul would ever bother to embrace a life of gladness and joy.

God is faithful. The Church must declare this like we believe it; and then live it as if it matters—because it does, now more than ever.

In our believing and from our living we must offer the words of life for the healing of the world, for a world that has lost its way. Then we will shine like the stars at night.