Doctrine – Peculiar Faith

Up, Up, and Away?

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to journey beyond Earth’s atmosphere and into outer space. He completed one orbit of Earth in 108 minutes and did this in 1961 (roughly five months before I was born). A quote famously and mistakenly attributed to him actually came from a speech by Nikita Khrushchev about the USSR’s anti-religion campaign: “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there.”

I have always loved that story, and I used it a lot in my seminary teaching to debunk the three-tiered universe of the ancient world: Heaven is not “up there” with Hell “down there” and Earth in-between the two. Yes, but then what about the exaltation of Jesus ascending into Heaven?

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Ascension. It’s a major feast day of the church comparable to Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, but it never falls directly on a Sunday. The event it commemorates occurred forty days after Easter Day—that’s when the gospel writer Luke indicates it happened, after a forty-day period of the risen Jesus appearing to his disciples and instructing them about the “kingdom of God.” (And by the way, Luke is the only one of the gospel writers to give us that story explicitly, which is found in Luke 24:50-53 and Acts 1:1-11).

What usually captures my attention straight away is just how unbelievable, quite literally, this story of the Ascension really is—an assessment with which Mr. Khruschev would likely agree wholeheartedly. As Luke tells it, the risen Jesus was “lifted up, and a cloud took him out of sight.” Two angels then appeared to the disciples—who were gazing toward heaven—to ask them why they were standing there looking up. They then returned to Jerusalem to wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus had promised to give.

Even the most devout Christians likely find this story difficult; it stretches our credulity to the breaking point. Where in the world is Jesus going in this story? Beyond the clouds? To outer space centuries before Yuri Gagarin? I remember how deeply my piety was offended back in my Evangelical youth when I first stumbled upon Salvador Dalí’s painting of the Ascension, which features the bottom of Jesus’ feet, as if portraying that moment from the viewpoint of the disciples on the ground. It seemed to me back then that the painting was a mockery or a caricature of the Gospel; much closer to the truth, I was probably chagrined at being confronted with the absurdity of the story itself—how could I possibly believe this?

By the time I went to seminary in my mid-twenties, I had come to appreciate the mythological character of gospel stories, which are not journalistic accounts of what happened, but visually dramatic invitations into a mystery. I recall fondly a celebration of the Ascension in the seminary chapel, which we offered with great solemnity and lots of incense. As we processed out of the chapel singing, all of us vested and seriously pious, our talented organist was playing that final hymn in the upper register but with his feet, and in subtle tones, he played “Up, Up, and Away in My Beautiful Balloon.” We all had a big grin on our faces as we sang and we had a good laugh back in the vesting area. I considered myself far too sophisticated to be offended by such good-hearted humor; besides, no one really believed that gospel story…right?

While more than a few biblical stories can render us incredulous, the Ascension of Jesus surely sits toward the top of that list. I try to make that incredulity a reminder of the symbolic character of all theological speech, including biblical stories. The infinite mystery of the living God is always beyond our direct comprehension, I say to myself, which is why we fantastical stories to awaken our imaginations to the presence of mystery at the very heart of the universe. After all, just because a story is mythological does not mean it is false; to the contrary, a myth might capture the truth far better than any journalistic reporting ever could. (And that’s a really good reason to stop using the word “myth” as a synonym for “untrue.”)

Now that I am no longer the pietistic Evangelical of my youth nor the clever sophisticate I fancied myself to be in seminary, I hope I am much more theologically humble as well as properly devout. I strive to live, in other words, as open as I can be to the presence of God all around me and in others and in my own life—a divine presence I can neither control nor manipulate and which is not at all reducible to propositional logic; music, poetry, and visual art are the best modes of engaging with that unfathomable mystery.

So how do I read Luke’s story of the Ascension today? In more than just one way, for sure, but at the very least with the conviction that the risen Jesus now dwells at the very heart of Creator God, and then also with the reassurance that where Jesus has led the way, we too shall follow.

Those convictions have helped me appreciate Dalí’s painting in fresh ways. As one commentator has noted, Dalí is fond of messing with our sense of conventional perspective. “Is the image of Christ rising? Is he traveling back into a distant vanishing point? Could he even be descending toward us? Our sense of space, and even time, gets a bit turned on its head here.” And I think that’s exactly what the gospel writers were likewise trying to do—to invite us to let go of our conventional perspectives and encounter the Mystery. (That observation came from an intriguing online web collective on art, which also quotes from another online source about the painting.)

Good-hearted humor can be part of all these convictions and assurances, too; I still smile when I think about the organist’s footwork in the seminary chapel. That musical moment helps me remember the essence of the story: up and up the risen Jesus goes, but not away. “Up” can more than only a vertical direction but could also mean “in, and close, and intimately.” The “heart of Creator God” abides not only above us but also around us and beneath us and in us, as well as in our relationships and communities and all the many ecosystems of this precious Earth in desperate need of the healing love of Easter.

Yes, and still in this Easter season, and on this eve of the Ascension, my heart is heavy. The daily news is filled with horrors and dismaying vignettes. Near the top of the items on that worrying list is Israel/Palestine. To be sure, the attack by Hamas on Israel in October 2023 was horrific and terrifyingly violent. And this is also true: the ongoing response by the State of Israel has been far worse—more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza; of these, 17,000 are children. These are conservative estimates; many more are missing and unaccounted for, and currently another heartbreaking 14,000 children are, right now, in danger of starving to death or dying from untreated wounds and injuries. As more than a few commentators have noted, we are witnessing genocide happening in real time—on our televisions and in our news feeds.

I am at a complete loss about what to do or how to think and preach about this. (I’m grateful for the Office of Government Relations of The Episcopal Church, which maintains an extensive list on its website with links for the latest news, updates from our partners in the region, and resources for donating money. I’m also grateful for organizations like Doctors without Borders, and their dedication to providing not only assistance but also accurate reporting on the ground. (They note, for example, that humanitarian aid is in fact not getting through Israeli barricades despite the official reports to the contrary from the State of Israel.)

Meanwhile, tomorrow is still the Feast of the Ascension, and the Christian calendar invites me to reflect on that ancient story, not apart from the heartache of the present world, but in tandem with it. That’s where I land, as it were, even with a gaze fixed skyward: the risen Jesus dwells at the very heart of Creator God—and God’s heart is breaking in Gaza.

Daniel Bonnell’s art helps me in many ways, not least in recalling that God’s own heart always resides not only “above” us but at the depths of God’s own creation, which includes the suffering and pain of God’s creatures everywhere. Bonnell’s image of the baptism of Jesus, in a cruciform shape, including the Spirit-as-dove, invites me to connect and unite all the many aspects of the Jesus story into a singular proclamation: God is with us.

“The Baptism of Christ with Dove,” Daniel Bonnell

God is with us, in both heights and depths. May that great declaration of faith grant us the courage to do exactly what Jesus instructed his disciples to do as he “ascended”: to be his witnesses, in Jerusalem and to the ends of the Earth (Acts 1:8).

May we do precisely that, in every way we can, for however long we can, and for the sake of peace, with justice, and the healing of the world—everywhere.

Easter for Earth

Earth is being crucified. Is there an Easter for Earth, too, or just humans?

That question asks more than whether our pets “go to heaven” (thank you, Pope Francis, for reassuring us about that). By wondering about an Easter for Earth, I mean to wonder whether Earth can be our heavenly home. Biblical writers seemed to think so, and in ways that I never would have imagined in the Evangelical world of my youth. Realizing this shifts the frame of my faith so dramatically, it almost feels like a different religion.

“Streams in the Desert,” Jennifer McClellan

I’m not sure I would have grappled with such a question if I hadn’t wrestled for so long with religious attitudes concerning lesbian and gay people, which shaped a great deal of my scholarly life for many years. By delving into critical social theory as an academic, I have since then appreciated how helpful such theorizing is for my life as a parish priest—in my life as a “woke” priest, I suppose one might say these days.

“Queer theory,” it turns out, seems rather at home in religious spaces, and it offers handy tools for doing constructive theological work in Christian traditions—even pastoral care. The Easter season reinforces that supposition at nearly every turn: however we wish to think of the “risen Jesus,” he’s not a ghost nor a resuscitated corpse but continually defies tidy categorization—just as a queer theorist might hope.

It helps to recall the suspicion queer theorists harbor for binary categories, which nearly everyone uses quite regularly: day and night; young and old; black and white. That’s an extremely short list of examples, and they are considered “binary” in character because they are usually defined by means of opposition, with each term neatly separated from the other. Daytime is the opposite of nighttime, in other words, and to be young is not yet old, and whatever black looks like, it’s not at all white.

But upon further reflection, the lines and edges between such categories quickly start to blur. We have words for that, too: dusk when day starts shading toward night, and middle-aged when we are no longer young but still some years away from “old,” and of course the color palette offers many different shades of gray between “black” and “white.” (That palette certainly calls our racial categories into question just as the new Pope apparently does with some “creole” ancestry, which is a Caribbean mix of both European and African lineage.)

Taking all of that into religious institutions can feel a bit harrowing or at least unsettling. The Bible itself, for example, is typically divided between the Old and New Testaments. Are the terms “old” and “new” binary opposites? The older testament is surely not obsolete given how often the Gospel writers quote from the Hebrew Bible to describe the good news of Jesus.

And that brings us to Easter. If we dare condense the richness of the Easter proclamation, it might be this: God, the giver of life, is also the giver of new life.

But what exactly does that word “new” mean in that sentence? Is there any continuity between the “old life” that has passed and the “new life” that is given? Or does the hope for the “new” rely entirely on discontinuity in an absolute sense? (I’m indebted to British theologian and scientist David Wilkinson for framing the question in that way.)

The Gospel writers had an opinion on that question, which they offered by giving us a risen Jesus who still bears the scars of crucifixion—a risen Jesus, moreover, who is not at first recognizable until those scars are seen. “Old” and “New” blend and mix together in Easter stories in ways that defy tidy classification schemes—to which queer theorists would likely smile and nod their heads.

But what about Earth?

Modern Western Christianity has instilled in so many of us, in both subtle and explicit ways, a religious vision of the Christian Gospel as an “escape hatch” from Earth; the Christ event is framed mostly as a divine rescue mission, saving those who believe by transporting us to a far-off, distant place called Heaven.

I’m caricaturing that vision to make sure we notice how it lurks around the edges of even the most “progressive” congregations in the liberal Protestant world—and it’s literally killing the planet. The late-nineteenth century social theorist Max Weber voiced a deep concern that the Protestant Reformation had in effect evacuated God from Earth, leaving this planet a “disenchanted place,” basically a giant storehouse of stuff for us to use however we wish. All sorts of writers, activists, ministers, and scientists since then have been sounding the same alarm on this—and its clarion call needs to wake us up, now.

The stubborn separation of human life from planetary life has been inscribed not only on our liturgical texts and in our ecclesial patterns, but also—and largely because of this—on our electoral politics, public policies, and corporate business plans. The Roman Empire killed Jesus; the human empire is crucifying Earth—will she, like Jesus, enjoy an Easter?

Perhaps practicing a (queer) suspicion of binary categories should belong more directly among Christian spiritual disciplines, which might make the question of Easter for Earth a bit less peculiar and more obviously woven into Gospel proclamation.

It just so happens that tomorrow, on the Fifth Sunday of Easter, the lectionary will invite us to hear a passage from the Revelation to John (21:1-6) that rather dramatically features a classic binary construction. The passage includes a vision of a “new heaven and a new earth.” How do we think about that word “new” in relationship to God’s creation? Does it mean that the “old” is entirely set aside or even destroyed? Is God starting over with a blank slate? Couldn’t we and shouldn’t we find a much more fruitful and constructive way to imagine the relationship between “old” and “new”?

Maybe it’s the American obsession with “frontiers,” or maybe it’s the tech world’s obsession with “innovation,” or maybe it’s global capitalism’s reliance on the “latest shiny thing” to bolster profits—whatever the source, the modern notion of new in relation to Earth has been nothing short of a disaster. When Earth herself is considered ultimately disposable, it grants (religious) permission for environmental destruction and unthinkable ecological ruin.

How then do we live as an “Easter people” observing a season of new life in which the old has not entirely disappeared? The scarred but risen Jesus poses precisely that question, reminding us that something new has indeed emerged from death, not to erase the world death marred but to heal it and raise it up into the light of a new dawn.

Perhaps the passage from John’s account of the Gospel (13:31-35), which we will also hear tomorrow, offers the only possible answer to the question of Easter’s newness: “Love one another.”

It’s not queer theory, after all, that will save any of us, but only love. Only love can heal the wounds from our past we cannot even bear to name and then carry us into a future we barely dare to imagine.

So, love one another, John’s Jesus says. Love whatever remains from our older selves, and whatever is emerging as something new—just love one another. And let’s be clear, this is not optional. It is so mission-critical that John’s Jesus calls it a commandment.

We must love one another, everyone, no exceptions—and we must love Earth herself into healing and renewal. Love alone will render Earth into our heavenly home—the hopeful Eastertide for this precious Earth.

“St. Francis Mandela,” Giuliana Francesca

Queering the Lamb as Shepherd for a Mothering God

My theological education continually confronted me with the claim that theological language is symbolic and analogical. Not just some God-talk, but all of it. Everything we say and try to say about “God” is a symbol (it points toward a reality we cannot grasp directly) or an analogy (a comparison of two things that are not the same but sufficiently so to help us think and communicate).

Most people get this readily enough when they come across biblical texts with images that so clearly rely on common literary tropes: God as a “mother eagle,” for example, who hovers over her nest (Deut. 32:11-12), or describing God as a “fortress,” “rock,” “shield,” and “horn” (Psalm 18:2), or Jesus as the “vine” and his disciples as the “branches” (John 15:1). But the claim about symbolic language applies not only to the obvious examples, but as some theologians have noted, to all theological speech. Even when we declare that “God is love” our experiences of human love fall far short of what divine love is actually all about.

This coming Sunday, as it does every year on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, the lectionary gives us another image from the Gospel according to John. It comes from John’s tenth chapter about Jesus as the “good shepherd.” Also appointed for this very same day is a passage from the last book of the Bible, the Revelation to John (7:9-17), where Jesus is portrayed as the “lamb who was slain”—a lamb who is now not only alive but living at the center of heaven’s throne as a shepherd.

Tossing those two readings together on a single Sunday puts “theology-as-symbolic-speech” on steroids. The peculiar pairing of lamb-as-shepherd is just one of many illustrations of what drew me more than 20 years ago to the academic discipline known as “queer theory” in my theological work, and why I felt certain it could provide useful tools for Christian theology.

As queer theorists often want to note, the categorial classification schemes we devise for our identities and relationships—male and female, gay and straight, among so many others—simply fall short, and sometimes hideously short, of how people actually live and who they understand themselves to be. Those categories become tightly sealed boxes, restricting our movements and dictating our behaviors. In that sense, at least for some of these social theorists, to “queer” a category is to scramble its standard definitions, unravel its regulatory certainties, and liberate a whole new set of evocative possibilities from its conceptual prison. Surely this is what John the Divine intended (even if he didn’t think of it this way) when he queered the image of a lamb, the one who had been slain by the Roman Empire, and who now sits enthroned as a heavenly shepherd.

Dealing with the limits of language in texts where the symbols are obviously scrambled is one thing; it’s quite another to loosen one’s grip on religious terms that more truly have their grip on us, as it were. One of the most obvious and highly-charged examples of this is the language of God as “Father.”

That paternal image of God was so deeply embedded in my Christian faith for so many years, I could scarcely imagine a Christian life without it; therein lies the challenge of appreciating the symbolic character of not just some but all theological speech. I find it helpful in that regard to remember the long history of patriarchal societies from which most religious traditions emerged; in those societies, anyone who is “in charge,” or has power, or can make decisions, is almost assuredly male and probably a father. It’s a fairly short step from that social arrangement to configuring “Creator God” as a paternal figure.

But there’s another underlying assumption to notice carefully in that historical development: the analysis I just outlined relies on a notion of God that involves, by definition, someone “being in charge” and “in control.” Power itself needs to be “queered.”

So I have to wonder: could the annual observance of “Mother’s Day” falling on “Good Shepherd Sunday” in the Easter season help us navigate these quandaries in theological speech? Maybe. But just exchanging one word for another—God the Father is now Mother—won’t take us very far down that road if all the patriarchal power is still in place. What is “power,” anyway? Who wields it? Under what conditions and for what ends? I’m certainly glad my own mother ran our household—my dear old novelist-dad would have made a mess of it. Did power actually reside anywhere in that domestic arrangement, or did it continually circulate throughout our relationships in glimmering gyres of affection and Midwestern practicality?

I’m not paying nearly enough attention to my own power as a white man as I write this (what this blog post needs is a trans-woman of color at the helm), but I am trying to pay attention to the image of the “lamb as shepherd” even as I harbor lovely memories of my mother—as she writes the checks to pay the bills while dad sits at his desk in the basement writing his novels.

It’s at least a bit subversive to suppose that a lamb can function as a shepherd, and by putting a lamb on the heavenly throne at the pinnacle of divine glory John the Divine certainly invites a reassessment of our standard modes of describing divine authority—or rather, that those typical modes just don’t apply. And that’s when I need to get busy and sort out what my own gendered power and privilege.

In the end, we only begin to realize that our job is not somehow to “make sense” of our theological traditions (whatever that may mean) but instead to allow those traditions to invite us ever deeper into the mystery of divine life at the very heart of the Universe—a mystery not merely to marvel at but find ourselves undone by and then changed.

For now—or maybe for always—in this world of so much pain and sorrow, I turn to the queerness of theological speech for comfort. It might lead me still deeper into the heart of the Universe where a rather queer Creator God transcends yet also fulfills everything I had always hoped a “father” and a “mother” might offer: unfailing care and undying love.

Or as John the Divine will invite us to imagine for Good Shepherd Sunday:

“The Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,
guiding them to springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

“The Good Shepherd,” Jacinta Crowley-Long

The Word of the Lord?

“Just rip out those pages from your Bible!”

That was the advice given by one of my faculty colleagues to a seminarian some years ago. The student was a gay man who had been tormented for years by the so-called “clobber passages” about sexuality in the Bible, those verses that seemed to label him an “abomination,” or “unnatural,” certainly “immoral,” and by extension even “spawn of Satan.”

Rather than dragging up all the historical-critical textual tools at our disposal as modern Christians to engage yet again with the insidiously deceptive practice of using sacred texts to justify cultural bias, my colleague (both exasperated by this student’s religious PTSD and also seeking to be kind) said, “oh, just rip those pages out and be done with it!”

As a gay man myself, and also a proud “liberal” (sometimes even an aspiring “progressive”), I empathized with that advice—and I was also appalled. Granted, the project of integrating religious faith and sexual orientation can feel terribly arduous, especially in a society with a well-established repugnance toward “non-straight” people. But integration at least implies some level of respect for both sides of the equation, in this both the human and the divine, and I can’t imagine physically shredding a sacred text.

On the other hand, preserving the “sanctity” of a text is often used as an excuse to maintain a cultural status quo rather than engaging with the much harder work of historical analysis, or communal confession, or the tasks of healing and reconciliation.

Consider, for example, the long and brutal history of Christian anti-Semitism. The Gospel according to John (among other texts) has been used frequently in Church history to both justify religious discrimination against Jews and, in some cases, to promote social and political violence. John refers to “the Jews” more than 60 times in his account of the Gospel (and no fewer than 19 times in John’s so-called “passion narrative” in which Jesus suffers and dies); these ancient texts continue to show up in contemporary contexts where “Christ-killers” still operates as a dangerous epithet for Jewish communities.

Some have suggested replacing “the Jews” with “religious leaders” in those particularly problematic passages. But this can easily obscure the underlying social dynamics of that powerful story in ways that drain the story itself of its human/divine drama. Equally troubling: in this harrowing time in U.S. society when our own government is erasing our own history—of transgender people, of Black people, of indigenous people, basically anyone who isn’t straight, white, and male—we must resist doing exactly the same thing with our sacred texts and our sacred history; erasing the problem won’t solve it and will likely make it worse.

Adding to these canonical conundrums, the progressive ire toward problematic texts is rarely applied evenly or consistently, and for some good reasons. The Bible has been used poorly and sometimes with horrific consequences concerning such a wide range of issues that no one person can keep track of them, whether with reference to race and ethnicity, or gender and sexuality, or economics and ecology. If “erasure” were generalized broadly—just remove, delete, ignore, or omit whatever troubles us, might cause harm, or doesn’t align with our preferred theological positions—we would not only have very few pages of the Bible left, we would surely eviscerate what it means to refer to a text as “sacred.”

But doing nothing about these religious vexations is not an option, either. I have spent too many years picking up the pieces of religiously ruined lives not to appreciate how damaging institutional religion can be, including these ancient texts that can sometimes be brutal, violent, and soul-killing.

So, what’s to be done and what can we do? I would propose taking three modest but nonetheless important steps.

The first step: stop calling the Bible “the word of the Lord” in public worship. That ritual declaration enjoys a long history and appears in most mainline Christian churches, and it’s time to retire it. Referring to texts from the Bible as God’s own “word” perpetuates the notion that even the vilest of biases originates with God and thus grants (religious) permission to act with (cultural) violence. “Don’t blame me,” misogynists like to say when treating women badly, “it’s in the Bible.”

No longer referring to a liturgical reading from the Bible as “the Word of the Lord” will sound to some people nearly as severe as my faculty colleague’s suggestion to rip pages from that book’s binding. But The Episcopal Church already approved that liturgical change back in 1997 (the “Enriching Our Worship” collection of supplemental liturgical texts). In the parish I’m privileged to serve here in Michigan we use those newer options more often than not: the lay reader usually concludes a reading by saying, “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”

I love the ambiguity, or perhaps “Anglican breadth,” in that liturgical statement. After all, the Spirit might want to encourage us to heed a biblical exhortation, or the Spirit might urge us to resist a given biblical writer’s point of view—there’s no way to predict in advance what the Spirit will be “saying” to God’s people concerning a particular text for a specific occasion. Even so, that liturgical invitation still affirms the inherent value in the Bible itself, reminding us that biblical texts can always prompt insight or provoke engagement.

Inviting people to hear what the Spirit is saying right now with a biblical text can also remind all of us that the Bible has been heard and read in many different ways in countless contexts over the course of many centuries; our job is not to figure out which one is “correct,” but to hear what the Spirit is saying—right now. (And this, by the way, is just one piece in the ongoing and urgent need to develop a robust “theology of Scripture,” which the late-biblical scholar Dale Martin passionately urged: if the Bible does not just contain “meaning” we’re supposed to “find,” what does it look like actively to make meaning today from those texts?)

And by the way, even the great Protestant Reformer Martin Luther insisted that the Bible is not the “Word of God.” But, Luther said, the Bible can become the Word of God when good news is preached with it. How we use the Bible matters, and the “good news” we might make from it will vary depending on the time and place in which we use it.

A second step, related to the first: clergy need to step up and shoulder their responsibilities not only as “pastors” but also “teachers” in their congregations (teaching should actually be considered part and parcel of providing pastoral care). If the lectionary assigns a particularly difficult or challenging text for a given occasion of public worship (and what counts as “difficult” will vary depending on the community and current events, among other factors) the ordained minister has a spiritual responsibility (and in some instances, an obligation) to name that problem explicitly. Even if the occasion does not afford sufficient time for a thorough treatment of the passage, it matters to have the challenge named.

Not long ago, I preached at a diaconal ordination on the Feast of St. Barnabas. The Gospel text appointed for that occasion came from Matthew (10:7-16) and included a reference to “Sodom and Gomorrah” and divine judgment. While I did not dwell on that portion of the text, I also did not ignore it.

“We just heard a reference to ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ in the passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel,” I said in that sermon. “And I can guarantee that every LGBT-identified person in this assembly today experienced stomach-churning anxiety, even if only for a moment, when they heard that reference.”

I then connected that anxiety to the ministry of a deacon, who is called to make the needs and concerns of the world known to the Church—and this includes, of course, the ongoing and shameful abuse of the Bible that traumatizes whole communities. Simply omitting that phrase from the proclamation of the Gospel in that liturgy would have been a form of religious denial and also a missed opportunity to illustrate how a religious text can shape the ministry of healing even when the wound itself came from that same religious text.

A third step, and perhaps the most important: remind ourselves regularly that the Bible was assembled by the institutional church for the sake of the church’s mission. The church does not exist to serve the Bible, in other words; the Bible exists for the sake of the Church. (As a priest in The Episcopal Church, I would say the same thing about the Prayer Book.)

Putting this point in a slightly different way: not everything in the Bible reflects something “true” about God; but every book of the Bible does reflect something vital about the person who wrote it or the community from which it emerged. And that matters—to me, it matters a lot. One of the many things I appreciate about the Bible is how it preserves stories of people and communities who struggled, sometimes mightily, in their efforts to know and love God, and to discern how they ought to live as God’s people in the world—exactly what I hope the church today is likewise trying to do.

Remembering in that way what the Bible is and the Bible’s proper role in the life of the Church does not in any way diminish its religious significance; it still counts as a “sacred text,” and I would say, even more so. After all, what could be more sacred than a tool to help God’s people participate in God’s own mission of healing, reconciling, and promoting a life of flourishing for all God’s creatures?

I can’t think of anything more “sacred” than that.

On the Good Road into the Heart of God

“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly.”

Those familiar words of course come from the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise in the very first chapter of Luke’s account of the Gospel.

Luke is the only one of the gospel writers to include this song from Mary, and he features it right up front, setting the tone for how he wants to tell the story of Jesus, especially to frame his telling with the dynamics of power.

Every human society, every community, all relationships exhibit in various ways those dynamics. The schools we attend, the money we make, where we live, the gender we manifest, whom we love, the color of our skin—all of these and more are infused with varying degrees of social and political, even religious power.

Modern Western society trains most of us to think of power as residing in just one place at a time. Many of us suppose that power is something like an object that passes from one location to another, like a football that gets passed from one team to the next so we know who the winners and the losers are in this game of life.

Power is obviously much more complex than that; it’s never merely a zero-sum game, as if when one person has power, everyone else has none.

Power is much more fluid, resembling a stream, or a river—always moving, always changing, sometimes showing up in the foaming cataracts of a waterfall and at others as a quiet eddy circling around a shallow bay.

Luke appreciates these complexities about power and repeatedly contrasts the power of empire and the power of God; he does this in nearly every encounter with Jesus, in nearly every parable Jesus tells, and in all of the relationships he chronicles.

Luke shows us how power can intimidate, control and dominate, even oppress entire communities with a coercive force. He also shows us another kind of power—the power to heal, to comfort and console, and perhaps especially the power to welcome and embrace, something we might call the “power of belonging.”

This power to welcome in a loving embrace hardly ever gets noticed like all the spectacular displays of coercive power. For Luke, “welcome” and “belonging” stand in stark contrast to imperial power—the kind that divides and fragments, the kind that creates categories of competition, rendering every encounter as a moment of exchange and potential aggression, even hostility.

I am always intrigued by the moment in Luke’s account of the passion when Luke rather casually mentions that the trial and torture of Jesus created a friendship between former rivals: Pilate and Herod—the Roman Governor and the Judean King (Luke 23:12).

Whenever we deal with Jesus, Luke seems to say—even when we stand opposed to him—an energy of “welcome” emerges, creating friends from enemies.

The holiest of weeks for Christians began just yesterday, with “The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday.” That awkward moniker signals just how odd the day itself is, actually one of the strangest on the Christian calendar. This mashup of what seem like competing liturgical goals creates significant religious whiplash as we shift rather jarringly from the so-called “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem to the abject suffering on the cross.

“Jesus Enters Jerusalem,” Patrick J. Murphy

How tempting to suppose that such a shift yanks us from a moment of celebratory power to a moment of power’s absence. But Luke urges us to suppose otherwise, with different kinds of power circulating through these moments.

In the story about the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem (Lk. 19:28-40)—the iconic “Palm Sunday” story—Luke doesn’t give us any palms. There are no palms in Luke’s version of Palm Sunday. We might recall in that Mediterranean society that palm branches were often used to celebrate a military victory, and in ancient Israel, they marked the royal power of King David.

As Jesus enters the “City of David,” Luke narrates that entry with the conspicuous absence of any symbols of royal power. And yet, as Luke says, the crowd of disciples joining him on that road were praising God for all the “deeds of power” that they had seen in Jesus—the power to heal, the power to console, the power to welcome.

Switching our liturgical gaze to the scene of execution, we don’t see a moment of complete powerlessness; Luke would have us to see something quite different (Lk. 23:1-49).

In his tortured weakness, Jesus nonetheless exercises his power to pardon—he asks God to forgive all his executioners, and that moment appears only in Luke.

Luke is also the only gospel writer to give us the touching exchange between Jesus and the thief who was crucified with him. Jesus is dying and in the kind of pain we can scarcely imagine; and still, he declares with confidence to the thief, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.”

There’s an old story about this Gospel moment, and it is told in various versions. The story goes like this: that thief showed up at the Pearly Gates and stood before St. Peter.

“So,” Peter says to the man, “did you earn a degree in theology to get here?”
“Oh no, sir, I never studied theology.”
“I see. But you do understand how atonement works for the sake of salvation.”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t know about such things.”
“Well, then you must have lived quite a virtuous life to be standing here.”
“No sir; I was a convicted thief.”
“Why then,” Peter says, “why are you here?”
“Because, the man on the middle cross said I could come.”

The power of “welcome” in the midst of weakness is at the very heart of God.

That’s where we’re headed on this road through the holiest of weeks on the Christian calendar: we’re going right into the very heart of God, where the power of love can change the world.

We speak often in the parish I’m privileged to serve about the importance, even the primacy of extending a bold hospitality as a vital component of our shared ministry. In our life together, we aim to welcome everyone, no exceptions whatsoever. And we do this because we are convinced of this: there is only love in the heart of God.

I was not raised to believe such a thing about God’s own heart; I fear very few were. The world would be a different place, nearly unrecognizable, if this were the “good news” of the Christian Church.

I’m grateful to Christian songwriter Zach Williams for that line from one of his songs, which captures with such elegant beauty what I have struggled for so many years to express and to live: There is only love at the heart of God—nothing else, only love—and the power of that love welcomes all, everyone, home.

The Devil’s a Liar!

The first Sunday in Lent always features Jesus in the wilderness tempted by Satan. Reading this familiar story again this year (Luke 4:1-13), it strikes me that those iconic temptations all spring from the ongoing and stubborn desire for certainty and security.

Imagine having the capacity to create food whenever you’re hungry, or to control the world’s wealth (all of it), or never to worry about physical harm ever again—to be certain of the capacity for even just one of those, let alone all three, would surely provide a sense of safety if not absolute security.

Personally, the chaos of our present world makes that desire for “certainty and security” sound pretty good. And that ancient story offers a timely invitation to consider exactly what I’m most tempted to do when the stakes are high in my life and when the consequences of my choices are potentially severe.

But this story is not merely about resisting temptation (as I have almost always taken it to mean), as if the point is to follow the lead of Jesus in exercising heroic willpower. The indigenous translation of this story we use during Lent at All Saints’ Parish refers to Satan in this story as the “evil trickster”—he’s a liar, in other words, the Great Deceiver, and he cannot make good on his promises; no one can. No one can give us perfect certainty or guaranteed security about anything—these are not possible for human life.

So much time and energy, even anguish, not to mention money, is devoted to obtaining these very things, these things we long for but cannot have—not because we’re unworthy of them or haven’t yet said the prayers properly, but because these things are not even compatible with being authentically human.

We cannot be perfectly certain and absolutely secure and still be human.

Living a genuinely human life is an ongoing journey of liberation, a theme all three of the biblical texts from the Lenten lectionary yesterday articulate directly and powerfully. In this case, being set free especially from all the stuff—material goods or a wealth of control—all the stuff we’re constantly told will keep us safe but actually keeps us afraid, always worried about scarcity, always terrified of loss.

Luke seems especially keen to help us travel this “freedom road,” and returns often to the Exodus of God’s people from slavery in Egypt as a favorite image. Jesus prepares for ministry just as Moses did—with forty days in the wilderness, exactly where the ancient Israelites wandered for forty years on their way to the Promised Land.

Even the particular temptations in Luke’s story harken back to that iconic moment. Almost immediately after their liberation from Egypt, the Israelites are hungry in that wilderness because they have no bread. It’s from that very story in Deuteronomy that Jesus quotes to fend off the devil—not just once, but for each of the three temptations.

by the Spirit into the Wilderness,” Stanley Spencer

Let’s also recall that the Spirit anoints Luke’s Jesus to let the oppressed go free, and as we heard last week, the transfigured Jesus is joined by none other than Moses, who discusses with Jesus his upcoming “departure,” which Luke calls his “exodus.”

Liberation from captivity and the freedom to flourish—this is the good road Luke invites us to travel our entire lives, urging us especially to let go of whatever we think will give us “certainty and security” along that road; these are not our provisions for the journey, no matter how often we’re told to pack them.

Always lingering in the background of Gospel texts is of course the Roman Empire. Regardless of whether it’s the first-century version of today’s Global Capitalism, imperial systems tempt us to acquire and accumulate more stuff, and always with the promise that still more stuff will finally make us safe—and that is an outright lie.

Sister Joan Chittister, a Roman Catholic nun and social justice advocate writes about the severe consequences of giving in to this imperial temptation. She describes what’s at stake in terms that are especially appropriate for this Women’s History Month.

“It is precisely women’s experience of God,” she writes, “that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the Creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion,” she says “does not know God the Spirit.”

Imperial religion has given us instead God the rule-maker, God the judge, and God the monarch in control of everything—and not just coincidentally, those are the roles men most often aspire to occupy and to use religion to advance their cause. That kind of religion, Chittister says, “has consumed Western spirituality and shriveled its heart.”

Luke’s Jesus shows us how to expand our hearts by letting go of imperial promises—those promises are in fact lies, and they keep us enslaved to a system in which there is never enough stuff, never enough money, never enough power; it’s a system that holds us captive to the demand for certainty and security—and it’s killing us while it kills the planet.

Indigenous peoples around the world, including in the Americas, have known these dynamics for a very long time. We must let go to live, and this is precisely why the First Nations Version of the New Testament refers to Jesus as “Creator Sets Free.”

The best Lenten disciplines really have nothing to do with chocolate or sugar or whatever else your indulgence of choice might be. Giving up treats for Lent will not keep us on the good road toward life, as if the point of our faith is self-denial for its own sake.

This season invites us instead to identify whatever it is that prevents us from thriving, and then to let it go, for good. Whatever still holds us captive as a community—longstanding resentments, perhaps, or entrenched bigotries, or inherited assumptions, or the economics of privilege—whatever holds us back from flourishing, now is the time to let it go.

The lectionary also gave us a beautiful passage from Deuteronomy yesterday (26:1-11), which sits right at the heart of the Torah, the law delivered by Moses. The great Christian mistake is to suppose the Torah is all about keeping rules; it’s not.

Remember, Moses says to the people, remember you were slaves in Egypt. God set you free, and now you must live as free people.

It’s high time we notice carefully what that passage indicates so clearly is the essence of living as God’s free people: it means living with a grateful generosity and welcoming the stranger.

Let that be our good road this Lenten season—for life.

“Consider the Lilies (Christ in the Wilderness Series),” Stanley Spencer

Down by the Riverside: Divine Solidarity and Radical Hospitality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The King of Love for a Realm of Healing

After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the House of Windsor has seemed to me less like a “royal family” and more like a group of related British celebrities. When I think “king” I don’t usually think “Charles.”

“Kingship” always taps my childhood fascination with Arthurian legend, and my ongoing love for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I used to daydream of living as one of Arthur’s knights at his round table, or following Aragorn to this throne in the restored kingdom of Gondor. Those parts of me love the Feast of Christ the King.

The last Sunday after Pentecost—the very last Sunday of the liturgical year—is often celebrated with the image of Christ as “king,” an image for Jesus that has deep roots in Christian traditions even if the liturgical feast itself is mostly modern.

The lectionary continues its apocalyptic tenor for this feast and with some startling biblical texts, like the one from the Hebrew prophet Daniel (7:9-14), which includes a vision of the One who will come with the “clouds of heaven,” and who is given dominion and glory and kingship. Those heavenly clouds appear again in a vision from the Revelation to John (1:4-8), a vision of One whose coming every eye will see, and who is the ruler of all the kings of earth.

These are certainly the kinds of texts we might expect for a celebration of royal power. But something a bit deeper seems to be lingering beneath these splashy images of kingship. There’s an ancient desire percolating in all of this, a deep-rooted ache that stretches across both time and culture—the yearning to see wrongs made right, to restore wholeness in a world of fragments: the lost, found; the forgotten, remembered; the wounded, healed.

The Prayer Book collect for yesterday’s feast named that desire. In a world divided and enslaved by sin, that prayer affirms God’s will to restore all things.

That notion of “divine restoration” reminds me one of my favorite Greek words: apokatastasis. I actually devoted an entire qualifying exam in my doctoral program to that one word, and to the ongoing role it has played in Christian traditions—and that word has had quite a colorful career indeed.

The word itself appears only once in the Bible, in the Acts of the Apostles (3:21). Peter is preaching in Jerusalem about the resurrection of Jesus, the crucified but risen Lord who will come again, he says, at the time of “universal restoration.” That’s usually how apokatastasis is translated, and it captured the imagination of Origen, a second-century Greek theologian.

Origen argued that God will one day bring all beings back to their source, where they will be restored to union with God—not only all people but even the Devil and all his fallen angels! That is the day when God will be “all in all,” as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians.

That’s a startling declaration: God will not cease loving God’s creation, not ever, and God shall not fail in uniting all things in a gloriously divine communion of love—every single being, no exceptions.

Apokatastasis is in that sense not only startling but also apocalyptic—which is to say, a deeply revelatory word. The Feast of Christ the “King” reveals the underlying meaning of the whole liturgical year, that grand arc from Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, through Lent, Easter, and Pentecost—all of it reveals the unwavering purpose of God to restore, renew, and heal with love.

As I do every week, I spent some time searching online for visual images that might capture these complex desires and hopes. After entering the words “restore all things” in the Google search engine, images began popping up of the painstaking process involved when museums try to restore old paintings.

I actually find such work both fascinating and beautiful, but those images made me realize just how precarious the notion of restoration really is, maybe even spiritually dangerous: Was there ever a time when all peoples were unified? Can any of us name a distinct moment in the past when everyone flourished? Are we really pining for a perfect world that we somehow lost long ago and now we want to recover and restore it?

No—that’s going backward; we need to travel forward. The disciples asked the risen Jesus about this very thing in the first chapter of Acts (1:6): Is now the time you will restore the kingdom to Israel?

No—resurrection does not return to how things were but moves forward to God’s own vision of how they should be.

As I sorted through the online search result (without much to inspire me), I decided to use one of my favorite icons, one that depicts Jesus harrowing Hell between Good Friday and Easter morning. Part of what I love about that image is the effort Jesus seems to be making to yank Adam and Eve out of their tombs on that day. The past matters in this dramatic moment, and nothing and no one is left behind. But the momentum here is definitely forward, not backward.

The Harrowing of Hell (apse in the Chora Church, Istanbul)

Adam and Eve signal that momentum for us in their apparent reluctance, as if they are thoroughly disoriented by the whole prospect of an Easter Jesus. This is not a moment of restoration, of returning to a known past—Jesus is not putting them back in the Garden of Eden; he’s raising them to new life.

That’s the paradox of all theological symbols—they are rooted in the known to help us imagine and anticipate the unknown.

The familiar, well-known symbol of Christ as “King” must point beyond what we now know of kingship and toward something new. And that’s why it’s so important that the lectionary included a poignant moment for yesterday’s feast from John’s account of the Gospel (18:33-37).

This moment in John is not one of splashy glory or heavenly pyrotechnics. To the contrary, Jesus is standing before the Roman Governor Pilate, a vignette that disrupts our usual assumptions about royal power.

“King of Glory: By Water and by Blood,” Carol Grace Bomer

The contrast between these two figures could not be more stark—Pilate robed in imperial power; Jesus with no power at all over his own fate and on trial for his life.

Pilate wants to know if Jesus is a king.

“My Kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus replies.

While some have taken this response to mean that Jesus is concerned only with some far-off heavenly realm that has nothing to do with Earth, that’s not the substance of John’s Gospel at all. “For God so loved the world,” John famously wrote, not to condemn it but to save it.

Moreover, the encounter with Pilate is but the culmination of a whole series of encounters in John, moments of contrasting the power of “this world” to destroy Earth and the power of God to heal and renew Earth.

“My Kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus says, “if it were, my followers would fight.”

Heavenly power on earth will never be established with weapons and violence but only with the truth. This is why I was born, Jesus says, this is why I have come, to “testify to the truth.”

In a world of coercive deceptions and brutal violence, the truth of the Gospel is just this: only and nothing else but love will save us.

Love is not weak.

Love is not merely sentiment or a cozy feeling.

Love is not a last-ditch, stop-gap measure by liberal snowflakes when otherwise real-world practical strategies fail.

Love is brave, risking all for what matters most, willing to lose everything to gain what cannot be lost.

Love is fierce and strong—stronger than even death.

Love incarnate stood before Pilate.

And so we Christians celebrate that embodied moment of “known royalty” for a realm still unimaginable. Most of us do so at the Eucharistic Table—where we move from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the strange, from memory to hope.

At the Table, we try as best we can to put Gospel truth into practice, bearing witness to a world where all welcome, no one is forgotten, and everyone is healed by love—everyone, no exceptions.

Pierced by Beauty

Contrary to most pop culture depictions, Francis of Assisi was not primarily interested in cultivating cozy relationships with other animals. There’s nothing wrong with those relationships—I enjoy one right now with an Australian shepherd dog named River. But Francis devoted his attention to the larger horizon on which such wonderful creatures of God reside.

What the world needs from the church today is mostly what the twelfth-century world of Francis also needed: a voice for the voiceless; solidarity with the abandoned; healing among the wounded; and justice for the oppressed and exploited.

Of course, the voiceless, abandoned, wounded, and exploited ones include not only other humans but also other-than-human animals. As Francis would also tell us, sometimes the only way to understand what this world needs is by paying attention to the other species with whom we share this planet.

“St. Francis of Assisi,” Kevin Pawlowkski

The complexity and also challenge Francis presents today came vividly to light when I stumbled upon a beautiful though also rather haunting image of Francis by visual artist Kevin Pawlowski. Notice the bird on his shoulder, near his ear (signifying a posture of listening to creation), and the dog in his arms (symbolizing loyalty between different species), and also the stone wall, the cross, and the subtle marks of crucifixion on the hands of Francis himself.

This is not the typical symbol set most people associate with Francis of Assisi, so a few notes about his life might bear rehearsing. We might recall that Francis was born into a very wealthy family in medieval Italy—his father was a silk merchant and his mother was from French nobility.

Francis was never entirely comfortable being comfortable; over the course of his life he grew increasingly unable to reconcile the wealth of some with the abject poverty of so many others. A familiar story from his life illustrates this very point: when he happened upon a beggar in the street, he was moved with such pity that Francis gave him all the money he had with him and even the cloak on his back.

Gestures like that enraged his wealthy father, of course, until finally Francis simply renounced his family’s wealth, his family’s estate, even the family name. He did this rather dramatically, in the middle of the town square where he stripped naked. From that day on, as he would say, he was married to “Lady Poverty.”

Disgusted equally with the opulence of the parish church in Assisi, Francis hiked out to the countryside, to a dilapidated and crumbling chapel in San Damiano. There, as the story goes, a crucifix with the suffering Christ on it, spoke to him. “Francis,” the voice said, “Francis, repair my church!”

So, Francis began dutifully rebuilding that chapel, by hand, one stone at a time, while also preaching to the peasants living in that valley (the “working poor,” as we would call them today, a population that the institutional church at that time had simply abandoned). He also began ministering and eventually living among those with leprosy—shockingly, both then and today, he not only embraced but also kissed many of those lepers as symbols of that same suffering Jesus who had spoken to him from the cross.

How in the world did someone born into such privilege and comfort decide to set all of that aside? Stories of his life offer a number of possible reasons for this, including suffering from a severe illness, engaging in disturbing service in the military, and having more than one vision in a powerful dream.

Here’s what I think, which of course occurred to along the “arts coast” of Michigan, where I currently live: I think heart-rending beauty changed the course of his life.

As strange as that may sound, there is a subtle thread of this running in the Bible and historical Christian traditions, this sense of the life-changing ache in beauty.

I’m not talking about beauty as merely “decoration” or “adornment.” I mean the kind of enticing beauty shimmering throughout what God creates—from mountains and rivers to birds and bears, sky and forests—a beauty the mystics would say awakens our yearning for communion and consummation…or whatever better words we might find for this longing that mostly defies our ability to speak.

“Ache” and “yearning” work for this, the mystics would say, because this kind of beauty feels like the absence of a lover.

Back in the second century, a Greek theologian by the name of Origen described the human soul as being naturally attracted to divine splendor; the soul is drawn to such heavenly beauty and then falls in love, receiving what he called the dart or wound of love.

Origen seems to suggest a piercing quality in divine beauty, piercing us with a longing for what will finally satisfy what we cannot name. Francis was keenly aware of this elusive desire, and even more keen to denounce our fruitless scramble to acquire all the things and stuff and wealth that have nothing whatsoever to do with it. The pierce of Beauty urges us ever onward—not superficially, or temporarily, or greedily—but genuinely and fully toward whatever “it” is that will satisfy our deepest yearning.

Right there, that’s what the world truly needs: hearts broken open by compassion and empathy; hearts capable of seeing and attending to the pain of others; hearts with the capacity to give nothing less than everything for the sake of life, for thriving, flourishing life—all this would be an offering for the truly beautiful, an offering which is Beauty itself.

And that is what Francis heard in the voice from the cross and also toward the end of his own life. Much like St. Paul wrote about in his letter to the Galatians (a passage that some lectionaries assign for the Feast of St. Francis) apparently Francis received his own set of bodily “marks,” the wounds of that cross on his own body, on his hands and feet and even his torso.

The pierced body of Jesus was for Francis the image of God’s own pierced heart, broken open by the beauty of the world and for the sake of life.

“Repair my church, Francis.”

That voice was not referring to a building, and Francis eventually realized his mistake. Rather than a building, that voice was referring to the purpose of the church in need of repair—the Church is not meant to accrue wealth to itself but to give itself away, for love, for life, for beauty.

I love welcoming companions of other species into worship with humans when we celebrate Francis. And Francis himself would whole-heartedly endorse the presence of other-than-human companions in the sanctuary—especially if the beauty of their intimacy with us breaks open our hearts, pushes the boundaries of our hearts ever outward, extending the reach of our compassion still further toward the despairing and the lost and forgotten.

In the parish where I am privileged to serve as the rector, we practice an “open table” posture toward the Eucharist: everyone is welcome at the Table, no exceptions. And I believe Francis, who was thoroughly devoted to the Eucharist, would remind us that such an invitation is only a foretaste of what is yet to come.

His Eucharistic devotion invites all of us to imagine a world where not a single living being is excluded from the blessings of divine life, not a single one, no exceptions—and that’s a beautiful thing.

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.