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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.

A Re-enchanted Earth

And it was good.
And it was good.
And it was good.

This is of course the repeated refrain from the ancient story of creation in the very first chapter of the Bible—the Bible begins with goodness.

It’s worth noticing in this story that Creator God declares the light and the waters and the land and the beasts and fish and birds—all of it—as good long before humans ever appear.

Earth herself is good, quite apart from whether or not it is good for us.

Believing that Earth has its own intrinsic value would surely shift how most of us humans think about our place and our role in the wider world of God’s creation.

Devoting time and energy to such questions is one of the reasons I have grown to love The Season of Creation, a mini-liturgical season that has developed over the last thirty years or so and is now celebrated among Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and many others in the month of September.

This little season has its own three-year lectionary replete with weekly themes and images. The first Sunday of this year’s cycle, which we celebrated just yesterday here in Saugatuck, was devoted to Earth. to the goodness of Earth, which is paired closely with the goodness of God in the ancient story from Genesis; creation and creator together are good—full stop, no conditions, no caveats.

This emphasis on goodness matters, culturally and politically and not only religiously. Or perhaps a better way to say that: the religious significance of this story from Genesis appears most vividly in its cultural and political consequences.

Early Christian theologians, for example, used this story to destabilize the oppressive power of the Roman Empire, which is certainly a counter-intuitive use of a biblical text. The line of reasoning ran something like this: compared to the God who creates all there is out of nothing, Rome is certainly not eternal.

Equally intriguing is to notice where, when, and why this ancient story was first written. Most scholars date this story to the period of the Babylonian exile of ancient Israel, when Babylon invaded Judah, occupied Jerusalem, and took her people into captivity.

This was an unmitigated disaster for God’s people, and in that time of crisis, exiled from the land God had promised to give to them, it’s at least curious if not terribly odd to devote one’s energy to telling a creation story. The reasoning here ran like this: the Creator God who brings order out of turbulence will surely restore order to God’s people living in the chaos of exile.

Empires come and go, in other words, kingdoms rise and fall, and yet through all of that chaos—all of that “welter and waste” as Robert Alter’s translation would have it—Creator God brings forth order, harmony, and beauty.

Naming and living the significance of this story today presents a different kind of challenge, and in some ways for a much more severe crisis. We modern humans have, in effect, exiled ourselves from the goodness of Earth in the midst of an ecological crisis our ancestors never could have imagined.

Today’s crisis, the challenge of living in the spiral of a collapsing network of ecosystems, pushed me to pay closer attention to the lectionary choices yesterday—and I stumbled into an insight from those texts I hadn’t seen before.

For some years now, I have relished reading the first chapter of Genesis together with the first chapter of John’s account of the Gospel. As some scholars have suggested, John is basically early Christian commentary on Genesis—the first verse in both books is the same: “In the beginning…”

But here’s what I haven’t considered before: John seems to invite us into the inner life of Earth, where the creative Word of God shimmers with divine energy, that Word who was with God from all eternity, and who dwells with us in the flesh (John 1:1-14).

It occurred to me, in other words, that John might be inviting us to notice an “inside” and an “outside” to God’s creation. As strange as that sounds, we do sometimes speak that way about ourselves. Each of us has an inner life, most of which is usually known only to ourselves or perhaps an intimate partner, and also an outer, visible life seen by others.

The failure to think that way about the wider world of God’s creation, about this “inner life” for Earth, is likely at the root of today’s ecological crisis. Modern human societies have treated Earth mostly like a giant rock floating in an empty space—the “third rock from the sun”!—rather than a living organism, brimming with life itself, and with the very Word of God as her heart and soul.

Meanwhile, modern industry and the burning of fossil fuels have exacerbated what is actually an ancient problem. Yesterday’s lectionary described that problem in a passage from the first chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1:18-25): God’s invisible Spirit has been clearly shown through the visible things God has made, Paul says; but human beings have not honored that Spirit.

We’re using the First Nations Version of the Christian Testament of the Bible in this season, and in that version of Paul’s letter, the “failure” to give God proper thanks is referred to as an “empty way of thinking,” which has taken hold of our “foolish hearts”—a powerful reminder, it seems to me, of mind and heart intertwined, connecting what we think and how we feel for the way we act.

Reading from this version of the Christian Testament can remind us that our indigenous neighbors think and feel differently about Earth—about the land, other animals, about sea and sky. Much like St. Francis of Assisi, actually, indigenous communities treat everything around us as living beings. Francis famously sang the praises of “Brother Sun and Sister Moon,” of “Brother Wind and Sister Water,” and of course Mother Earth, who “sustains and governs us.”

This respectful posture of loving relationship—rooted in both indigenous and Christian traditions—certainly seems at odds with our frequent dredging, stripping, drilling, fracking, and burning of Earth, our mother.

In the late nineteenth century, the German ethicist Max Weber sounded a note of severe caution about Western society. He worried that certain strands of the Protestant Reformation had basically “evacuated God from Earth” to reside only in Heaven. This leaves Earth, as Weber put it, a “disenchanted place,” simply a giant warehouse of stuff for us to use however we wish.

Against that grim backdrop is John’s luminous vision of God’s very own Word creating and animating the whole world, enchanting it with divine presence—and this, we might dare to suppose, this re-enchantment of Earth, might very well be a lifeline of hope.

Despair is easier, especially since it is now perfectly clear that we as a species and a global community lack the political will to address climate change effectively, Indeed, many environmental scientists are publishing plans for how we now need to re-orient our lives and adapt to what is now inevitable: seriously harsher living conditions on this planet because of a swiftly changing climate.

“Adaptation” sounds modest and doable; but the kind of adaptation we need to consider is actually quite dramatic and, as many scientists worry, our species may not be up to the task. I truly believe this is precisely what religious communities of vibrant spiritual practice are for. Adapting in the ways we now must, it seems to me, will be possible only if we embrace Earth herself as alive with the presence of God.

A re-enchanted Earth would re-shape what all of us think and how all of us feel for a different way to live.

And still more: a re-enchanted Earth would renew us with hope, perhaps even inspire us with joy, and move at least some of us to dance for the resilient goodness of Earth herself.

I would say yet more about Christian worship: a re-enchanted Earth is precisely why Christians should bother to gather around the Eucharistic Table every week, where God offers God’s own self to us in love, as bread and wine, with grain from the soil and grapes from the vine—this is my body, Jesus says, this is my blood: the very Word of God in the stuff of Earth.

And it was good.
And it was good.
And it is very good…

“Brother Francis and the Canticle of Creation,” Nancy Earle

That Nothing May be Lost

“Eucharist” is one of those arcane religious words I wish more people could embrace for their own healing and thriving, and in turn for a better world. The word comes from a Greek verb for “giving thanks,” and it refers to what is more commonly called “The Lord’s Supper” or “Holy Communion.” And I really do believe it can change the world.

I believe the Eucharist is at the very heart of the Gospel and is the very soul of the Christian Church for the sake of the world’s flourishing. The Eucharistic Table offers us God’s love and grace in Christ with tangible tokens of bread and wine—food for the journey into new life.

Given all that, I find it very strange indeed that the Gospel according to John has no Eucharistic narrative in it—or rather, nothing most Christians would immediately recognize as precisely that narrative.

What most Christians take “Eucharist” to mean is due in large measure to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Those other Gospel writers give us the “last supper” where Jesus talks about bread as his body and wine as his blood. That’s what most of us look for when we’re looking for Eucharist, and John doesn’t have it.

But this does not mean that there is no Eucharist in John.

Intriguingly, some scholars have suggested that the entire gospel according to John is one long, extended Eucharistic narrative. The reason we can’t find the Eucharist in John is because the entire Gospel of John itself is Eucharist. Some have also suggested that John was composed precisely for the purpose of reading it during early Christian celebrations of the Eucharist.

“The Feeding of the 5000,” Daniel Bonnell

Yesterday’s lectionary gave us John’s version of the miraculous feeding of the 5,000, which is one of John’s key Eucharistic stories (6:1-21). And the lectionary will continue to give us this image for the whole month of August, returning again and again to the image of bread and therefore to the Eucharist.

Rather than betrayal, suffering, and death (what most Christians associate with the “last supper” narratives), John frames the Eucharist with divine abundance and divine inclusion. And this matters far more than we usually imagine for a fragmented world in pain. I would say the stakes could not be higher in that regard when reading from this sixth chapter of John.

I find it helpful to remember that the disciples are never just the disciples in Gospel stories; they serve as types and symbols—sometimes for the realist, or the doubter, or the loyalist, or the betrayer.

First, then, we might note that in this iconic story from John the disciples stand for all those who worry about scarcity. Jesus looks out at the crowds who had been following him all around the Galilean shoreline, and he says, “these people are hungry.”

“Well, yeah,” the disciples say, “but where are we going to buy enough bread for all these people? What we have isn’t even enough for us!”

To be clear, the disciples were not wrong in what they said; they assessed the situation correctly—they did not have enough.

But where we see scarcity, John invites us to see God’s abundance.

Of course that’s a lot easier to say than it is to live. In fact, most economic systems in human history have been built on the fear of scarcity and the anxiety that there won’t be enough of what we need—not enough water, not enough bread, not enough love, not enough respect or dignity.

There will always be certain individuals and organizations who capitalize on that fear and anxiety, usually by dividing communities into groups—those who have supposedly earned what little there is, and others who haven’t. More severely, by demonizing others who threaten to take away what little is left. The fear of scarcity often turns violent.

John’s miraculous feeding of the 5,000 is a Eucharistic story of abundance. There is always more than enough love, more than enough grace, more than enough companionship at the Table to satisfy our deepest longings.

We might also remember that there are no random or insignificant details in these Gospel stories. After feeding the crowds with what little they had, there is more leftover. How much more? Not eleven, and not thirteen, but exactly twelve baskets of leftovers.

Just as there are twelve tribes of ancient Israel, and just as there are twelve disciples, so there are twelve baskets of leftovers.

“Gather up the fragments,” Jesus says, “so that nothing will be lost.”

Nothing? Not one single tribe? Not one single disciple, not even Judas?

In today’s world of zero-sum games, there must be losers in order to have any winners and our triumph rises up only from the wreckage of the tragedy of others. But that is not the world of John’s Gospel where Eucharistic abundance is so pervasive and so comprehensive that nothing, absolutely nothing and no one is left behind.

John invites us to catch a glimpse of God’s own heart in this story, where no one is lost, and no one is left behind. The implications of this story for how we live and the kind of communities we create are actually quite staggering.

It’s nearly impossible to imagine a world where we no longer keep score; where constant contests give way to communion and “fairness” doesn’t matter nearly as much as inclusion; a world where there is no such thing as “acceptable losses” and “collateral damage” is a forgotten notion from a far distant past.

Many Gospel parables evoke exactly this unimaginable world, and John’s Jesus underscores that vision by remaking entirely what it means to “win”: it means not leaving any one behind—not a single one, not even the betrayer.

This vision is so difficult to trust that other parts of the New Testament—even other parts of John—seem to step back from it. And today, many centuries later, the Eucharist—or rather the last supper—continues to be a flashpoint for cultural controversy. The latest example just occurred at the summer Olympics in Paris where the opening ceremony included what appeared to be a parody of the last supper with drag queens.

A variety clergy and churches demanding an apology for that performance, I think we Christians should instead be thanking the performers. Not only is a drag queen last supper not offensive, it might actually illustrate John’s Eucharistic vision better than most Christian liturgies—not only is everyone invited to the Table, we are invited to leave no part of ourselves behind. All of us and our whole selves belong at the Table.

I love John for retaining and preserving at least this kernel, this seed of a truly radical Jesus who shows us a truly unbelievable God—the God for whom even one is an unacceptable loss. If God cannot tolerate losing even one, then even if it takes an eternity, God will find them.

So much is arrayed against that vision in a world built on scarcity and exclusion. That’s one of the primary reasons why I practice what is often called an “open table” policy in the parish where I’m privileged to serve as the rector.

At All Saints’ Parish in Saugatuck, Michigan, there are no preconditions for participating in the Eucharistic Communion. Everyone is welcome—no exceptions, no caveats, no kidding. Nothing is required to receive Communion at the All Saints’ Table other than one’s own desire for Communion—because God loves each and all of us without limit. Nothing we can do can make God love us more than God already does, who has given God’s own self to us already. And nothing we can do can make God stop loving us, not ever.

I am convinced that this kind of Table Fellowship can change the world; it offers healing to a world of hurt, and then still more. It offers a Eucharistic vision of a world remade by love and grace where no one is left out—not a single one.

“Gather up the fragments,” Jesus says, “so that nothing may be lost.”

…so that nothing will be lost.

“The Miracle of the Five Loaves and Two Fish,” Carol Bomer

Leather Daddies and Drag Queens: A Last Supper for Everyone

The phone, as the saying goes, was ringing off the hook. Media outlets were calling for a comment or to schedule an interview. LGBT activist organizations were also calling, wondering how we should manage the “damage control.”

Back in 2007, the annual Folsom Street Fair in San Franciso, billed as the “world’s largest and best loved” leather event, was about to get underway when I was the Programming Director at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion in Ministry in Berkeley, California. People of all sexual orientations and gender identities gather for this event organized around the vast diversity of leather-related sexualities, dinners, exhibits, and of course the daylong street fair.

The fact of the fair itself was not the issue; it was the marketing for the fair that put people into a panic. That year’s poster evoked an image of the Last Supper styled after da Vinci’s famous painting. But this depiction included leatherfolk as the disciples and a table replete with not only bread and wine but also sex toys and various leather paraphernalia. It featured a shirtless African American “Jesus” with an outrageous drag queen on his right and a harnessed leatherman on his left.

Plus ça change…as it were. And here we are again; it’s a different cast of characters but basically the same script.

This weekend’s opening of the summer Olympics in Paris has created a controversy just as vigorous as the Folsom fair, this time with a last supper of drag queens. Christian clergy of various churches are demanding an apology for what they believe mocks the final meal Jesus shared with his friends, which is of course the template for the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.

But an apology is precisely the wrong thing to ask for; we Christians should instead be grateful. Not only is a leather daddy or drag queen last supper not offensive, such images might actually illustrate particularly well a core conviction of the Christian Gospel: everyone is invited to the Table, and we’re invited to bring our whole selves with us.

(And by the way, the Last Supper done up in leather and in drag are not the only two contemporary re-imaginings of this iconic scene; Doug Blanchard is one of many contemporary queer artists who work with this material–and he’s one of my favorites. The plethora of creative re-appropriations of that Gospel story and that moment in the life of Jesus bears ongoing witness to the power of table fellowship, the intimacy of Jesus and his closest friends, and by extension, the self-offering of God to the world in ways we can scarcely conceptualize–of course there would an outpouring of creative energy for just such a divine encounter!)

“Last Supper (Passion of the Christ series),” Doug Blanchard

It just so happens that this morning’s Sunday lectionary gave us John’s version of the miraculous feeding of the multitude, which many scholars take as John’s favored image for Eucharist (John didn’t include a last supper narrative like the other three gospel writers did). The abundance in John’s story is underscored by the many baskets of leftovers after the meal, and also with the instruction from Jesus: “gather up the fragments…so that nothing may be lost.”

So nothing may be lost.

What most people missed about that Folsom Street Fair poster is just how seriously leatherfolk take the very idea of spirituality and how their own sexual relationships and hyper-gendered displays of power qualify as spiritual practices. (Be sure to read the Fair’s mission statement, which includes decolonizing commitments, racial equity postures, and acknowledging stolen indigenous lands.)

Workshops on spirituality have been appearing at leather conferences and gatherings for years now. Many of those involved in these gatherings are also actively and generously involved in charitable work around poverty, hunger, and homelessness—work they understand as part and parcel of their leather spirituality.

Imagine what might change in the world if Christian churches had stepped up in Paris on that world stage and declared the Drag Queen Last Supper a beautiful and inspiring depiction of the radical welcome of the Gospel extended to all—no exceptions. So that nothing may be lost.

Leatherfolk and Drag Queen depictions alike—and the many other artistic re-imaginings of that final meal—proclaim what churches ought to be preaching rather than grumbling about concerning queer people (yet again): the Gospel welcomes everyone, just as we are, no exceptions. And that’s exactly what I see in these ostensibly “offensive” pieces of art: people who have put themselves on the table, leather gear, sex toys and all. It is at once a deeply human and deeply spiritual portrayal—exactly like the final meal Jesus shared with his closest friends.

Neither a Leather Daddy nor a Drag Queen at the Last Supper should cause anyone to worry about sacrilegious art. People of faith can instead thank the artists for reminding us that the radical welcome of God in Christ is actually supposed to be scandalous; if it isn’t, we need to try harder.

So, what did I tell the reporters asking for a comment back in 2007 about the Leather Last Supper? The same thing I would tell reporters today about the Drag Queen Last Supper at the Olympics: those images are preaching the Gospel better than most churches.

A Collective Mending Session

Not unlike the United States of America, first-century Palestine was marked by distinct regions—each with various languages and accents, some with bustling urban centers while others mostly dotted with livestock herds or farms, all of them a mix of different religious sensibilities and a variety of political affiliations.

These regional features can sometimes contribute directly to the theological substance of a given story. Many Christians heard from Mark’s account of the Gospel yesterday, a passage the lectionary compilers stitched together in some peculiar ways. Overall, the passage portrays Jesus and the disciples crisscrossing the Sea of Galilee (Mark 6:30-34, 53-56).

Depending on which shore they land, they could be in a town shaped by Greco-Roman culture, or one still firmly rooted in Judean traditions, or a peculiar blend of ethnic customs from many different parts of that ancient Mediterranean basin, from Egypt to Gaul.

Mark seems to fancy here some geographical depictions of how the Gospel crosses all these lines of difference, not to erase them but to weave them together into something new. The image of the boat, the singular inland sea—these stand as symbols of hope for a new world, not a world of scattered fragments but of a beautifully woven tapestry.

Mark is likewise sure to note something about the crowds Jesus encounters on these shorelines: they were like “sheep without a shepherd”—aimless, perhaps, or without a clearly defined purpose, or maybe in search of some sense of home, the safety of the corral, as it were. The growing diversity of that Galilee region, an occupied province of the Roman Empire, probably felt unsettling; the long-standing familiar had become very strange.

More pointedly, those crowds were like sheep without a good shepherd. This was Jeremiah’s complaint, which some chose to read from the lectionary yesterday as well. Ancient Israel had plenty of so-called “shepherds,” religious and political leaders of all kinds. But they were hardly “good”—they divided the herd and scattered the sheep, destroying the flock itself.

“Woe to you shepherds,” Jeremiah imagines God saying, “woe to you who have not tended carefully to my people.”

That’s another way our country today resembles ancient Palestine. By some accounts, we are more fragmented than we have ever been. Media commentators have been expressing deep concern about the recent gun violence at a presidential campaign rally coming at a time when our country is “already deeply polarized.”

Writing in the New York Times, Peter Baker noted that American society has “split, it often seems, into two countries, even two realities” if not more. The divisions have grown so stark that 47 percent of Americans now believe a second civil war is likely or very likely in their lifetimes—forty-seven percent.

That sobering statistic might shed some light on another detail from Mark’s storytelling: the particular location where Jesus offers a healing touch. The crowds were bringing all those who were sick, Mark says, and laying them out in the marketplace of each town.

Markets are of course places for buying and selling, but they also stand for much more. In western Michigan, where I live, and in many other parts of the country, too, farmers markets pop up regularly as gathering places, locations for vendors and artisans of all kinds, as well as shoppers and visitors of all kinds.

Both ancient and modern markets are often crossroads, places where travelers and visitors and residents all mingle together. You can get swept away by the energy of a mob, take delight in the peculiar mix of people, or maybe feel a bit lost in a sea of strangers, perhaps unsure of where you really fit and belong, if anywhere at all.

The crowds—the ones who were like “sheep without a shepherd”—they bring the sick, and probably the lonely, and surely the despairing, always the alienated and unwell into the marketplace. Right there, Jesus heals them—sometimes only because they were able simply to touch just a corner of his tunic, a gesture of reaching out to connect, to reunite, to come home.

Mark doesn’t say what kind of healing took place, but this was no private consultation with a physician. This seems to me like a moment of social healing, of mending the fabric of a torn community, these crowds who were like “sheep without a shepherd” coming together in the marketplace for healing.

For all the advances of modern western medicine, many of us have likely forgotten an ancient insight, captured Mark’s story: healing is mostly a communal endeavor, the mending of relationships, a restoration of community—is this even imaginable any more in the United States?

“Collective Mending,” Catherine Reinhart

In doing an image search for this past week’s liturgy leaflet, I stumbled upon a gorgeous photograph, which we used on the leaflet’s cover. It’s a photograph of a mended quilt. The textile artist, Catherine Reinhart, brings people together to mend worn-out, tattered, and torn fabrics.

The photograph of that process which accompanied the mended quilt shows the gathered community in a circle engaged in shared mending. Reinhart calls this a “collective mending session,” and I cannot help but hear the Gospel in those words, and to see in that circle of careful menders a vision of mending a torn world—one square, one village, one region at a time.

A collective mending session facilitated by Catherine Reinhart

This particular mending resulted in creating something like a blood-red cross—yet another nexus point with the lectionary yesterday. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians includes a declaration of divine peace-making, with Jesus breaking down the dividing wall of hostility with the blood of his cross (Eph. 2:11-22).

All of Paul’s writings are rooted in his own experience of having been a violent persecutor of the early Jesus movement. Encountering the forgiveness and reconciliation of God in Christ—which, by the way, began with the healing of his vision—that encounter dramatically changed his life.

Whatever else salvation means, it certainly includes the healing of our divisions. For Paul, this meant the nearly unthinkable communion between Jews and Gentiles; the circumcised and uncircumcised; the religiously righteous and the ritually unclean. The Gospel creates, we might say, an ongoing collective mending session called “church.”

Whenever I despair over the state of American society—the vitriol, the hatred, the violent divisions—I try to imagine what in the world the Church can offer to such intractable problems. Catherine Reinhart has given me a new way of envisioning a solution: bearing witness to the God who heals and mends, offering a model of community not rooted in “sameness” but stitched and woven together with the threads of difference.

Surely this is why it matters for Christians to gather around the Eucharistic Table week by week, a Table to which God calls us not by merit but from grace, and only and always for love.

By such grace and love we might yet offer a collective mending session to a world in pain, and for the world’s healing.

Loving My Country by Rejecting Nationalism

The Fourth of July is, well, a bit complicated for Episcopalians. As Anglican Christians, we’re “in communion” with the Church of England, which still functions as a state church (King Charles III is officially the head of that church, but no, we American clergy do not owe allegiance to the British Crown).

Many of us try not to be smug about that whole Revolution thing as we take pride in the separation of church and state in the U.S., but then remember we have very little reason to be—the State of Oklahoma now requires teaching the Bible in public schools; the Ten Commandments must be displayed in Louisiana schools; the Speaker of the House of Representatives wants to use the Bible as the basis for legislating; and the hard-working staff at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State are likely sleep deprived and running out of room on their website’s homepage for listing all the flare-ups of theocracy appearing on the American landscape.

Honestly, just being any kind of committed (it’s hard not to say “real”) Christian today makes living in the United States not just a little complex and usually quite daunting if not horrifying. I want to love my country; I loved it uncritically in my youth, as many did back in the 1960s and even 1970s (I have enduringly fond memories of perching on my father’s shoulders as a small child and watching the flag-waving parade go back in my Midwestern home town). I do not want simply to scowl and scoff at anything remotely patriotic.

Sitting on the brink of the American Independence Day holiday, navigating a path between that rock and hard place will mean returning once again in my prayerful reflections to some ancient history.

Sixteen centuries before the current rise of Christian Nationalism in the United States, St. Augustine faced the imminent collapse of the Roman Empire. The collapse unfolded over many decades, but a common date used for the empire’s definitive demise is 476, when a Germanic king finally sacked Rome and deposed the emperor. Waves of Germanic barbarians had been attacking various outposts in the northern parts of the empire for quite some time before that, and some of those incursions put the city of Rome under threat on multiple occasions. This was deeply shocking to most of Rome’s citizens, who never imagined the “eternal city” would ever fall.

While Christianity had taken root as the “official religion” of the Roman Empire (a milestone set in motion by the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century), there were plenty of citizens who still practiced older or “pagan” forms of religious traditions. Many of them started to blame the Christians for Rome’s weakness and argued that the empire needed to return to its more ancient pagan roots. Even some Christians were deeply distressed by Rome’s instability given the widespread assumption that the promised and hoped-for “Kingdom of God” was nothing other than Rome itself.

In response to all this, St. Augustine wrote his now classic book The City of God, which appeared in the year 426. Augustine weaves together some complex arguments concerning a number of interrelated topics, but one of his key points is this: the collapse of Rome is not a failure of God’s promise because no earthly city can or ever will be the hoped-for heavenly city. In every time and place, he writes, what God calls the Church to do is always the same: create Eucharistic communities that bear witness to the transformative love of God, a love that transcends every civic border.

I’m thankful for Augustine even as patriotism is now more fraught for American Christians than ever before, and those complexities have been growing with the emergence of a robust movement of White Christian Nationalism. It behooves all of us, especially in this election year, to understand the twin threat posed by this movement to both our democratic institutions and the integrity of the Gospel.

A good place to start concerning White Christian Nationalism is with a recent CNN article, including the important caveat that “Evangelical Christianity” is now more brown than white and not at all nationalistic. Another helpful resource is an interview on the PBS Newshour with a former Christian Nationalist pastor. Where I currently live, in western Michigan, we’ve witnessed the direct results of this movement on county government, and with a helpful and hopeful coalition of clergy and Christian lay people actively opposing that nationalist takeover.

At a time when many Christians still think of patriotism as a Christian spiritual discipline, it’s worth returning to Augustine’s ancient insights. As Christians, our loyalty belongs not to any nation or empire but only to the Gospel and to the community of God’s people called “church.” Our true and lasting hope as Christian people, in other words, is not the ultimate triumph of any particular nation-state, not even the United States of America, but the transformation of every human society with the grace of God.

Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh (currently teaching at DePaul University in Chicago) has written extensively about these issues, including Augustine’s vision of the Church. His books on politics and the Eucharist have shaped a great deal of how I think about the significance of parish life and the difference faith communities can make and should make in the world.

Rather than adopting “American values” (whatever those might be) God calls us to promote Gospel values for the sake of God’s whole creation. Or as Cavanaugh puts it, “the task of the church is to interrupt the violent tragedy of the earthly city with the comedy of redemption” at the heart of the City of God. (A thirty minute presentation by Cavanaugh at a conference in France offers a good overview how he thinks about Eucharist and politics, not separately but always together.)

These days, just voicing critiques like these can earn one a great deal of disdain, even prompt physical threats, or at the very least make one vulnerable to being called “anti-American.” So let me be clear again: even though my Australian shepherd dog River and I will not be going to the local fireworks display this weekend, I do love my country, and I am grateful for the many gifts of this modern democracy.

“Every Tribe, Every Nation,” Marsha Vosburg

But the United States is not a Christian nation; there is no such thing as a “Christian Nation.” There are many nations on Earth and Christians reside in nearly every one of them, linked to each other by the sacramental bonds of unity called the Body of Christ.

Whatever freedoms and privileges American Christians might enjoy as Americans can best be used to strengthen that global network of Christian communities—not for the sake of the Church’s triumph, either, but for the sake of that abundant life Jesus said he came to give to all (John 10:10). Or as The Book of Common Prayer puts it, for the sake of “promoting justice, peace, and love”—regardless of anyone’s citizenship.

The Courage to Heal

Fire Island Pines is a small LGBT shoreline resort town in New York not unlike the one I currently live in along Lake Michigan. Not surprisingly, the town enjoyed a flurry of festive rainbow flags flying from homes and businesses for LGBTQ Pride Month. One of those flags honored Ritchie Torres, the first openly gay Afro-Latino member of Congress. But Mr. Torres is also a strong and vocal supporter of Israel, so some gay activists tore down his flag and replaced it with one honoring LGBT Palestinians. Not long after that, a gay filmmaker, known for his anti-Muslim remarks, tore down the Palestinian flag.

That tiny town with its competing flags illustrates in painful microcosm the complex wounds of our larger society, and by analogy, the fissures scarring nearly every country on Earth right now. These fractured communities need healing—we all do—but it’s increasingly difficult to imagine what kind of healing we need and where to find suitable salves.

While some people are wounded because of their sexuality, they might also live with the cultural markers of race, which often compels them to wrestle with an impossible decision about whether the color of their skin matters more than whom they choose to love. Others lament that speaking with an accent betrays their outsider status just as pointedly as their indeterminate gender—or maybe one because of the other.

These complexities are manifesting at a time in this country that many commentators are describing as just as grim and grave as the decade leading up to the Civil War era in the 1860s. The social media storm following last week’s CNN presidential debate made those divisions, and their accompanying dismay, all too evident.

Personally, I am so fed up with the vitriol and grandstanding and petty mean-spiritedness around every corner that I’m not sure I even want to heal from some of these wounds, not if it means giving up the resentments that feel like merit badges—I earned this bitterness and I aim to keep it!

And just like that, along comes the Sunday lectionary with a passage from Mark’s account of the Gospel, a passage that carries a timely reminder: it sometimes takes courage to heal.

The portion of Mark’s fifth chapter (5:21-43) assigned for yesterday includes two healing stories, and Mark interrupts one of these stories with the other one, a clue that these two stories should be interpreted together.

Mark is even more direct about weaving these stories into a single garment: in the first story, the daughter of Jairus is twelve years old; and in the second story, the nameless woman has been ill for twelve years. Mark seems to relish telling these two stories as one for a singular point: faith is mostly about overcoming fear for the sake of thriving; faith is the courage to seek healing.

In the first story, Mark presents Jairus as a leader of the local synagogue, a significant religious and civic position whose title Mark mentions not once, not twice, but four times in this short story. Jarius’ social prominence clearly matters for Mark’s purpose, most likely because the conflict between Jesus and the religious establishment keeps worsening with each successive encounter in this gospel. And here, a key leader of that establishment approaches Jesus in public, in the middle of a crowd, to ask for help. That takes courage.

We might also notice how unusual it is for Mark to give this character a name—Jairus. Nearly all the other encounters in this Gospel are anonymous, which some have supposed helps to ensure that the stories remain relevant far beyond any particular first-century person. Mark intends these stories to enjoy a much broader appeal, across time and place.

But Jairus is named and his title repeated, perhaps to encourage people with power and position and privilege—people, that is, with a name—to recognize their own need for courage, and especially where and from whom we can learn such bravery: a nameless woman, sick for years, exploited by physicians, poor and desperate for relief.

This woman takes the initiative for her own healing by reaching out—a risky move indeed. She had no authorized access to Jesus; she wasn’t in his inner circle; her long illness had excluded her from temple worship for all those years—she was ritually unclean.

Mark places her not only at the center of this story but, as one commentator noted (thank you, Andrew McGowan!), this nameless woman is the first character in Mark’s account to be given an interior life; Mark lets us eavesdrop on her own inner dialogue, a dialogue that exhibits a remarkable faith. For Mark, this woman, this courageous, nameless woman, lives as a model of faith: “if only,” she says to herself, “I could touch his clothes.”

Sometimes it takes courage to seek healing. Sometimes it’s easier to stay sick, or remain troubled, or harbor resentments, or simply resign oneself to the misfortunes of fate. Sometimes it’s just easier to stay stuck, even when it’s uncomfortable—at least it’s familiar.

But Jairus and this nameless woman in Mark can inspire us to seek healing, even when it seems foolish, unreasonable, and pointless—especially then, actually, when courage is most needed.

There are others in Christian history who inspire this, too. And it seemed important enough to make this point that I replaced the epistle passage assigned by the lectionary yesterday with an excerpt from the “Showings” of Julian of Norwich.

Julian, a fifteenth-century English mystic, seemed quite untethered to what we today would call “the binary gender system.” She writes about Christ as our mother while also referring to the wound in the side of Christ as the “womb” from which we are born. These odd but compelling slippages in ostensibly appropriate gendering is actually quite common among the mystics, in nearly every religious tradition. And this matters today—it’s actually a matter of life and death.

For some years now most of the targeted violence against LGBT-people has landed squarely on the “T,” on those who push against the edges and boundaries of gender. If any in this Pride Month stand in need of healing and soothing balms for their wounds, it’s anyone mis-gendered, un-gendered, violently-gendered, dis-gendered, or merely beaten to a bloody pulp by someone deep in the throes of gender panic.

It matters that Christians say this. It matters that religious leaders stand up boldly and say this. It matters that we all hear this in churches and create safe religious spaces for the many genders gracing God’s creation. And it matters that we do all this not in spite of the Bible or our theological traditions as Christians but because of them.

Given the horrible track record of religious institutions and communities on nearly every issue related to sex and sexuality, and especially gender, it matters that we can retrieve resources from our very own theological traditions for this vital work of healing—and that’s why we heard from Julian in my parish yesterday rather than Paul.

It’s a scary world and seemingly getting scarier, for all sorts of people. I would say transgender and gender-fluid and gender-queer people are very much today’s “canaries in the coal mine”—if they can’t survive and thrive, then we are all in very serious trouble.

While we have reasons to lament a world like this, many Christians also heard from the biblical book of Lamentations yesterday, which offered a potent reminder: lament is not despair.

In that book devoted to the lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah there is a bold declaration of God’s mercies and of an endless divine faithfulness (3:21-25). All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, in other words, God remains faithful.

Julian herself insisted on this, even in the midst of bubonic plague that had decimated Medieval Europe for many decades. With signs of disease and death all around her, she could nonetheless declare that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Embracing that declaration is itself a moment of healing for many of our weary hearts. To find the courage for healing is itself a vital part of our healing.

I can scarcely think of a better reason for working hard to sustain religious communities of faith where we can inspire each other with these stories of courage—we need each other, we all do, to inspire our courage.

Together we can learn, over time, to trust the astonishing words Mark’s Jesus spoke to Jairus when Jairus was told that his daughter had died: “don’t be afraid.”

Don’t be afraid.

Healing the Storm

Storms come in a rather wide range of shapes and intensities, and they aren’t always about the weather. Stormy moments in our lives can tear up our psyches by the roots and whirl through our hearts like a raging tempest—anger, rage, grief, sadness, bitter resentments and panic attacks can all howl and blow with remarkable force.

Most of us surely know people whose own interior storms shape their relationships and whole neighborhoods, just like the weather. We can feel the barometer drop whenever they enter a room or join a meeting or sit down at a table with us. Entire communities can exhibit collective weather patterns that feel like ongoing atmospheric disturbances; this U. S. election year might as well be one long storm front.

Storms need healing, which is a rather odd way to think about the weather. But perhaps not so out of place in Mark’s account of the Gospel. The passages from Mark in the lectionary over that last few weeks have been highlighting the vital significance of healing for Mark’s portrayal of Jesus, and in what we heard this past week, with images of a storm-tossed sea (4:35-41).

The familiar story of Jesus calming a storm seems a bit out of synch with the other stories and encounters we’ve been hearing from Mark, but that’s mostly because the lectionary slices up these ancient texts into small, supposedly “digestible” bites for Sunday worship. It’s easy to miss the way Mark is stitching his stories together and the connections he seems keen to make among them.

The week before last, for example, we heard about the soil and the seeds, but we did not hear that Jesus offered that teaching to crowds who were standing on a beach while Jesus stood in a boat.

These are not merely props or backdrop; the stage matters for Mark’s point nearly as much as the words and the action. Beaches are liminal places, those locations where land meets water and the ground itself feels unstable. It’s a place of change and transition, and therefore of uncertainty and anxiety.

Mark’s Jesus called his disciples along a shoreline; he teaches on a beach; and he invites an excursion across the lake. This seashore moment is a vital component for the disciples in their process of formation, just as vital as hearing and engaging with the parables.

In fact, we could easily read this story of a storm on a sea as if the story itself were a parable: the boat stands for the life of faith that takes us on a journey full of risk with a Jesus we cannot fully understand or control.

Mark underscores this challenging formation in discipleship not only with a fearful storm but an unsettled community of friends. The disciples are at least perplexed if not annoyed with Jesus, who is not exactly a soothing presence in this story; he doesn’t calm the wind, he rebukes it, just as he did the demons in the first chapter of this Gospel.

God’s creatures are meant to live in harmony, with each other and with the rest of God’s creation. So Mark’s Jesus shows up and then stands up wherever that harmony is distorted or destabilized—whether in the misuse of power (represented by demons), or in corrupt institutions (represented by the hypocrisy of religious leaders), or in the alienation from life-giving ecosystems (represented by the fury of wind and waves).

Mark’s Jesus stands up and, when necessary, rebukes all of these forces arrayed against the full flourishing of God’s own precious creation.

Yes, but I think Mark would caution us about finding relief too quickly. Mark is not just singing a Bobby McFerrin song—don’t worry, be happy—as if Jesus will just fix everything according to our liking. After all, Jesus is asleep during the storm and the disciples are incredulous: “are you kidding? don’t you care that we’re dying here?” Mark more often sounds like the Gospel according to the Rolling Stones: you can’t always get what you want.

Mark’s view of discipleship involves a serious recalibration of what we expect from God and from God’s presence among us. And that certainly sounds like the experience of Job, part of whose story the lectionary also assigned this past Sunday.

It’s worth noting (and recalling frequently) that Job had every right to expect divine blessings in return for living a righteous life—that’s just how a religious life ought to work. But that’s not what happened for Job, precisely the opposite. And most of that ancient book from the Hebrew Bible is devoted to trying to figure out what went wrong.

Let’s also recall that Job’s “friends” are keen to ‘splain exactly why Job’s life ran off the rails as they offer all sorts of religious theories to explain the inexplicable God. In what the lectionary assigned on Sunday (38:1-11), it’s God’s turn to speak, and God speaks to Job from a whirlwind. The very presence of God is itself a storm.

“Where you there,” God asks, “when I laid the foundations of the world? Who was it who measured the pillars on which the Earth itself stands? Did you hear the morning stars sing at the birth of creation? Who was it that shut the sea with doors and made clouds its garment? Was it you?”

Hearing those rhetorical questions while sitting in a religious space, and especially while wearing fancy religious clothes, makes me uncomfortable (to put the matter mildly). The point in that ancient encounter is unnervingly clear: be careful about what you presume of God.

This seems to be Mark’s point as well. Mark does emphasize healing throughout his account of the Gospel, but he keeps inviting us to re-think what “healing” even means, that it doesn’t always require a “cure,” and that “restoration” and “renewal” are not the same—our Gospel hope is not about restoring the past but facing a future we cannot yet imagine.

That future is on the other side of the lake, where Jesus invites us to travel with him, and whose sometimes (annoyingly) sleepy presence we have to learn somehow to trust.

That’s likely the other uncomfortable moment in these texts: When Jesus rebukes the wind and says to the sea, “Peace, be still,” he must surely be speaking as much to the complaining disciples as he is to the storm.

Making that connection between stormy disciples and the storm on the sea testifies to an ancient spiritual insight that runs through nearly every religious tradition: there is a deep link between the outer world around us and the inner world of our thoughts and emotions.

But let’s be super clear about that connection: it does not mean that we ourselves cause all the suffering in the world; we’ve had enough victim-blaming in the modern West to last for many generations.

No, the more urgent point of making that key link between inner and outer worlds is this: in a world of violence, be the peace you long to see; in a world of hate, be the love that heals the wounded; in a world of chaotic communities and disordered institutions, be the gracious calm that stays focused on the distant shore—a future of flourishing.

Of course, we ourselves cannot generate the peace, the love, or the calm that the world so desperately needs. That’s why church matters, why worship matters, why gathering around the Eucharistic Table truly matters.

At the Table, the God of the whirlwind is our unspeakable peace beyond all understanding.

The God of Jesus Christ is the only love to soothe our troubled hearts.

The God whom we call the “Holy Spirit” is our gracious calm for fearful souls.

“Jesus Calming the Storm,” James Janknegt

And this unfathomable God gives herself to us in all those ways for our healing.

And then still more: as we climb out of the boat on that distant shore, we remember that our healing is never for ourselves alone but for a storm-tossed, turbulent world.

Peace. Be still.