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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.

Practicing the Politics of Sabbath

Yesterday we launched more fully into “ordinary time”—this long green season after Pentecost designed to order our lives in the Spirit—and we did so with a commandment: “Observe the sabbath day, and keep it holy” (Deuteronomy 5:12).

Not exactly a compelling launch, I have to say. And I should also note how easily I just ignore that particular commandment, as if it doesn’t really matter. I am also frequently perplexed by its prominence in biblical stories, including the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all use Sabbath observance as an occasion to describe the ministry of Jesus.

In what we heard from the lectionary yesterday (Mark 2:23-3:6), Mark puts the Sabbath right up front in his account of the Gospel, in the second chapter, where the tensions between Jesus and the religious establishment are already running high. Mark’s first chapter includes no fewer than four mentions of Jesus confronting demonic forces.

So there’s a power struggle emerging early on in Mark—not, we should quickly note, between Jesus and Judaism (the legacy of Christian anti-Semitism is always lurking around texts like these). No, the struggle is between the full flourishing of human life, on the one hand, and all the various forces hell-bent on destroying human life on the other.

Mark makes that power struggle explicit by framing it with a healing story—a moment when someone is brought back into thriving on the Sabbath. Mark also declares Jesus “Lord of the Sabbath”— the very essence of divine lordship, in other words, is cultivating abundance and healthy vitality.

But again, why use Sabbath observance to make this point?

The passage from Deuteronomy suggests an answer by relating the law directly to the Exodus from Egypt; the God who liberated God’s people from slavery is the God who commands Sabbath rest.

The Israelites, no longer trapped in a system that determines their worth based solely on what they produce, must now learn how to live as free people—a freedom in which they enjoy inherent value, regardless of what they produce.

One commentator makes this point quite nicely: after God’s people are taken out of slavery, Sabbath rest “takes the slavery out of the people.” And not just the Israelites alone, but all the people and even all other animals—old, young, rich, poor, citizen, foreigner, resident alien, stranger and outsider, oxen, donkeys, every herd of livestock, all of them creatures of the same God for whom the Sabbath was made!

Modern Western people certainly do not think of ourselves as “enslaved.” Yet how many of us nonetheless base our value on productivity? Along with the unemployment rate and the Consumer Price Index, labor productivity is one of the primary factors in judging the health of the U.S. economy.

In today’s economic system—no less than the system of slavery in ancient Egypt—the value of a human life is measured by how much it produces. This system in turn measures the value of Earth based on the material resources we can extract from it.

All of us, and Earth herself, need the Sabbath, and to adopt it as a spiritual discipline with social, economic, and political consequences. Jesus, not merely a teacher of Sabbath discipline but actually “Lord of the Sabbath,” liberates us from any system that would shackle our dignity or denigrate our inherent worth. This matters today, and rather urgently.

In this first week of LGBTQ pride month, I’ve been reflecting on more than forty years of being out as a gay man. Think about what the world was like in the early 1980s; that’s when I came out. Now, more than forty years later, still to this day, whenever I enter a new social situation of any kind, I always assess the risk of being out, and whether it’s worth it. Even where I currently live, supposedly an “LGBT resort town,” it doesn’t always feel safe to be out.

LGBT people need a Sabbath rest from that anxiety, and gay men really need to remember that most of the animosity toward us is actually rooted in misogyny, a deeply embedded cultural distrust and denigration of all things feminine, of women.

Every woman in nearly every part of the world today is very well familiar with this. Every single woman has experienced at least one moment, and likely more, of profound uneasiness and even fear in a public space just for being a woman; more than a few feel unsafe even at home.

Women need a Sabbath rest from that constant monitoring of their surroundings; it’s exhausting.

White gay men then need to remember (which I learned from my Black friends) one of the continuing mechanisms of white supremacy in the modern Western world: feminizing Black men—not only are they not white, they aren’t even manly.

Living not only in an LGBT resort town, but in a region that is 99.9% white, it’s painful to realize that my Black friends would not feel particularly comfortable visiting this lovely shoreline region. To be clear, I’m not actually worried that any of the people I know here would pose a physical threat to people of color. The point, rather, is that we live in a cultural system that trains us, all of us, not to trust those who are different from us.

We all need a Sabbath rest from these racial suspicions and ethnic divisions—they are tearing us apart.

And that’s the politics of the Sabbath we all need to practice. When we do, when we actually try to observe the Sabbath each week, we’re not just trying to follow a rule. We are rehearsing and preparing for the great Sabbath Day still to come.

In Christian traditions this is sometimes called the “Eighth Day,” not the first day of creation, as if we’re starting over with a blank slate, nor only the seventh day of temporary rest, but rather God’s own Sabbath Day, the very purpose for which God made the world to begin with.

That is the Great Day when no one is afraid; that day when everyone feels loved and safe; that day when no one has to be anxious for the future because it is God’s own Sabbath “without end,” as Augustine said many centuries ago.

We start to believe this, and we come to trust in it, and we find that Great Day shaping how we live and reordering our relationships and infusing our civic engagements with prophetic urgency when we practice Sabbath rest on a weekly basis.

That’s why God commanded it. That’s what it means to keep the Sabbath “holy.”

When we do this together, when we help each other practice Sabbath politics, we cultivate our shared hope for that great Eighth Day of Sabbath Joy still to come.

Breaking the Fourth Wall—for Life

In the world of theatrical productions—whether live theater, film, or television—there is a concept known as the “fourth wall.”

It’s probably easiest to grasp this concept in a traditional proscenium theater: the “fourth wall” is where the stage ends and the audience begins. The “proscenium” is the arched frame around that invisible line and it marks a boundary between the actors on stage (or screen) and the audience in their seats.

Most theatrical productions respect the integrity of that fourth wall as a matter of principle. Performers act as if the audience is not there and they resist addressing the audience directly. Some believe this separation—which makes the audience a collection of “observers”—creates the conditions for a more “realistic” performance, convincing audience members that they are witnessing something from “real life” and not just on a stage.

Breaking that fourth wall, by contrast, can feel disorienting or even rude, as if an unspoken contract had been violated. Audience members are suddenly no longer merely observers but in some way participants in the action—whether they like it or not.

Ancient Greek plays toyed with that wall with the convention of a “chorus,” that collection of voices that would sometimes narrate the action for the benefit of the audience. Shakespeare did this more directly (with Hamlet, for example, and also Puck in A Mid-Summer’s Night Dream).

Twentieth-century directors of both stage and film began breaking that fourth wall more intentionally and regularly as a way to invite viewers more deeply into an unfolding story, as if they themselves were characters in the plot. (The 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a classic example of this when Matthew Broderick’s character talks directly to the camera/audience. The more recent television sitcom Modern Family does this when one or more of the characters occasionally reflects on a plot point in a given episode by talking directly to the camera.)

Yesterday’s lectionary for Trinity Sunday gave us a classic story from Isaiah (6:1-8) that now strikes me as a wonderful example of God breaking the “fourth wall.” The story begins quite routinely, with Isaiah in the temple for worship. The temple—just like almost every church—is a carefully designed space; holy things are kept separate from most of the human beings in the configuration of all the religious furniture.

But on that one particular day, and much to Isaiah’s surprise, the invisible wall of separation crumbles. Suddenly the presence of God is filling the whole temple; Heaven itself is spilling over its banks, flooding past its borders. Angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim fill the skies, and their voices shake the very foundations of the Universe as they declare how God’s glory fills the whole Earth.

Needless to say, Isaiah is overwhelmed by this, and his first response is to feel unworthy even to be there. But when God asks whether anyone will step up and do what needs to be done—“who will go for us?”—Isaiah immediately volunteers. His “Yes” is enthusiastic even though he doesn’t even know what the mission is yet!

This vision of God is life-changing for Isaiah, which is not usually how most people think about worship. It’s much more common to imagine a “fourth wall” remaining firmly, if invisibly in place in our houses of worship, as if we are attending something like a formal concert: we watch, we listen, we observe from a safe distance.

Karl Marx once famously described religion as the “opiate of the people”; whatever he may have meant by that critique, it deserves careful scrutiny. Do religious practices merely keep us passive and acquiescent to the cultural status quo?

Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum analyzes a similar dynamic in politics. In her new book about the rise of authoritarian regimes, she suggests that dictators thrive on the apathy of their societies. In a world that is already as good as we can make it, there’s no point in agitating for change; apathy and cynicism are the cultivated virtues of controlled masses.

In rather stark contrast to sacred segregation and distant deities, John’s Jesus reveals the very essence of God as self-giving love. It’s so easy to take such words for granted, especially when they come from the overly-familiar third chapter of John’s account of the Gospel: “for God so loved the world that God gave…” (John 3:1-17).

But here’s at least one reason to pay close attention to familiar claims: rather than making us merely passive observers, encountering the self-giving God in worship should engage us, involve us, and change us.

So here’s the thing, strange as it may sound: I think the doctrine of the Holy Trinity emerged in Christian traditions for exactly that world-changing purpose. If that’s not how most people think of worship, they certainly don’t think of religious doctrine that way. But even though the purposes of doctrine are often obscured or distorted, it’s worth pondering why they might still matter.

Perhaps the doctrinal notion of God as Trinity matters like this: The self-giving God breaks the fourth wall, drawing us into God’s very own endless life of deathless love. This matters (sometimes dramatically) when we can no longer keep God isolated behind that protective “fourth wall” and when we ourselves are no longer merely observers of some distant divinity starring in a heavenly play.

The God of Isaiah and the God of Jesus is the God who is with us and among us, the God who is for us and also ahead of us, who is inviting us ever deeper into that great drama of creating and redeeming and sustaining the wonders of God’s whole wide world of life.

Clearly, this is not how most people speak in a Trinitarian way about God. Like most people, even lifelong Christians, I was surprised to learn some years ago that Christian traditions offer more than just one way to name the Trinitarian character of God. “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is the most familiar way to name the Trinity but there are others.

St. Augustine in the fifth century proposed a whole sheaf of ways to name God, including this: the “Lover, the Beloved, and Love itself.” In my own life of prayer and occasionally in the liturgy produced at All Saints’ Parish, I am fond of yet another way: God as “the Source of Life, the Incarnate Word, and the Abiding Spirit of Love.”

We could also draw more directly from the performing arts: the Holy Trinity as the divine dance of grace; the Trinitarian God as the sacred song of hope; the Triune God as a troupe of improvisers, who tell fantastical stories inspired by the wild and wooly creatures they relish making.

None of these ways of speaking about God is perfect, and each has its own problems. I mean, of course they do; we cannot possibly speak “correctly” about the infinite mystery of the living God. But let’s make sure our theological language is always wildly expansive and thoroughly inviting, recalling above all else that God is not a solo performer alone on stage. What we mean by the word “God” is always and forever an ensemble, urging, luring, and drawing us ever deeper into God’s own life.

Worship matters, as beloved Isaiah discovered, and the way we worship can make a difference in how we live, which is John’s point throughout his account of the Gospel. Our liturgical life is not a spectator sport; it’s supposed to change us so that we can change the world.

All of this is why I embrace life in the Church as a performance, but never with a “fourth wall.” The whole world is the stage, and we are performing together—with God—for a better world.

The world Christian worship invites us to imagine is a world in which every performance is directed by love, produced by grace, and every actor is committed to peace with justice for the flourishing of every creature of God.

Worship not only invites us to imagine such a world; worship equips us to build it.

A Joyful “Vision of Heaven” in a “Freak Imitation of Pentecost”

In the beginning, a wind from God swept over the chaos bringing forth the wonders of creation (Gen. 1:1). Creator God then breathed into the nostrils of a creature made from mud, bringing it to life (Gen. 2:7).

The psalmist reminds us that everyone dies without God’s breath, and likewise that God’s Spirit renews the very face of the earth (104:30-31).

John’s Jesus told Nicodemus that God’s Spirit is just like the wind—it blows wherever it wants to, untamable and uncontrollable (John 3:8). John later tells us that the risen Jesus breathed on his closest friends, inviting them to receive “Holy Spirit” for the work of forgiveness and to find peace.

These and other biblical writers relished making at least this one pun: in both Hebrew and Greek, the word usually translated as “spirit” can also mean “breath” or “wind.”

The Latin word anima is usually translated into English as “soul” but it can also mean “breath” and “vitality”; it comes from an ancient Indo-European verb meaning “to breathe.” In that sense, every single creature of God with the breath of life has a soul—humans, dogs, cats, birds, cattle, pigs, elephants (the list goes on).

The English word “inspiration” comes from a Latin verb that means “to breathe into.” When we are inspired, we are being filled with God’s own breath, the Holy Spirit.

Yesterday’s celebration of Pentecost marked a notably dramatic instance of that inspiration; as we most always do on Pentecost, we heard that story from the Acts of the Apostles (2:1-21). Fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus, a group of his followers heard the sound of rushing wind and what seemed like tongues of flame danced on all of their heads.

“Descent of the Holy Spirit,” Joseph Matar

I think we should be really clear about this: “all” of their heads does not mean just twelve men, even though that’s how this scene is often depicted, with a grand total of twelve men receiving the Spirit.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on this, depicting Pentecost in that way actually serves an institutional purpose—to restrict the gift of the Holy Spirit to the first twelve male “apostles” defines who can become “bishops.”

But there’s another way to read this story. The evangelist Luke, who also wrote Acts, notes that there weren’t just twelve people gathered on that day; there were at least 120, and not all of them men.

That’s probably why Peter feels compelled to quote from the ancient Hebrew prophet Joel for that occasion, who wrote about the Spirit being poured out on all flesh—not just twelve people, not only men, and probably not just human beings, but all flesh.

When “all” really does mean all, communities become seriously diverse. And I confess: I sometimes find such diversity uncomfortably messy. I can’t be the only one who still thinks it would have been much more efficient and orderly if all those foreign visitors to Jerusalem on that day had suddenly understood a single language, but that’s not what happened.

Luke tells us that each of those visitors understood the Gospel in their own native language, in their own cultural idioms, and with their own ethnic sensibilities in place.

The indigenous translation we used at my parish yesterday morning makes very clear that many of the places from which those visitors came were considered “outsider nations,” at the very least treated with suspicion by Jerusalem’s “insiders.”

The Spirit breaks down those barriers between groups, not by making everyone the same, but by forging a much stronger unity than mere sameness ever could—forged from previously unnamed shared hopes, the drafting of common dreams, discovering a surprising confluence of desires and yearnings.

For some years now on Pentecost, I reflect on a wonderful story about what can actually happen when a community embraces this broader Pentecostal vision of being church together. Here’s just a brief version:

Back in the early 1900s, African American preacher William J. Seymour and his wife Jennie opened a small mission in an abandoned stable in what was known as the “Black ghetto” of Los Angeles.

As the story goes, God poured out the Spirit there on Azusa Street, drawing dozens of people to Seymour’s preaching and Jennie’s teaching. Soon hundreds were coming, not only for the preaching and teaching but for the ecstatic trances, the speaking in tongues, and the miraculous healings.

The Azusa Street Revival began in 1906 and lasted, quite remarkably, until roughly 1915. This astonishing moment in a rickety building on a neglected street corner launched the world-wide Pentecostal movement, still the fastest growing branch of Christianity.

At the time, it was also the most scandalous. Erupting in the midst of Jim Crow segregation, this revival attracted white, Black, Latino, and Asian converts, all of them “intermingling,” as one commentator complained at the time.

Even more: fourteen years before women could even vote in the United States, the Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street encouraged women in positions of leadership. This alone caused some to dismiss that revival as “outrageous” and even “blasphemous.” One local minister called it “a freak imitation of Pentecost,” and a “horrible, awful shame.” (See Jack Hayford and David Moore’s account of this in their book The Charismatic Century:)

Breaking down racial barriers and rejecting gendered privilege enraged both secular and religious observers alike. Azusa’s participants, by contrast, called those social disruptions nothing less than a vision of heaven, and a taste of salvation.

Maybe because I still draw from the insights of my Evangelical past, and love my Pentecostal colleagues, and have been shaped by Catholic traditions in my weirdly EvanPenteCatholian life, but I think it’s high time for Azusa Street moment today. I mean something like a revival worthy of today’s challenges, for a renewal of Pentecost in the twenty-first century, for an outrageous and scandalous vision of what Gospel transformation looks like in a broken and fragmented world.

We cannot, of course, manufacture such moments ourselves but they can happen when we cultivate a joyful spirituality.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, reminded that the vestry of the parish I now serve identified “joyful spirituality” as one of the aspirational values we seek to embrace as a parish, and it needs much more attention. Joy, after all, is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

I don’t mean happiness, which is almost always associated with how we happen to feel, with our material possessions, with our social and economic status. Joy has nothing to do with any of those things.

Joy, it seems to me, is resilient gladness, completely independent of one’s circumstances—in times of scarcity and abundance, in times of suffering and hope, in times of consternation and confusion, the Spirit’s gift of joy remains.

A community gifted by the Holy Spirit with such resilient gladness will not merely grow—it will deepen its diversity, it will find healing in hospitality, it will, as the prophet Joel declared, see visions and dream dreams never before imagined.

We’re overdue. The need is real. The time is now.

Come, Holy Spirit, come.