Doctrine – Peculiar Faith

Living as Ikons of God

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

There are still four more instances of that declaration of goodness in the first account of God’s creation of the world in Genesis, and many Christians heard all seven of them this past weekend when we celebrated Trinity Sunday.

What does it mean to call something “good”? What makes something “good” and how can we discern when it is? And why would it matter so much to repeat this refrain of goodness so often in the story of creation?

I’m guessing that human beings have not changed so terribly much over the last few thousand years. Just like today, humans in the ancient Mediterranean world likely thought something was “good” when it was good for them; something’s good when we can use it, or sell it, or trade it for something else; we become the standard for what’s considered “good.” I cannot help but think of how often I called my dear dog Judah a good boy simply because he obeyed me!

So perhaps it’s time to notice again (or for the first time) that all but one of the declarations of goodness in the first chapter of Genesis occur before humans even existed. Six out of seven times, God’s creation is declared good without any reference to human beings.

The whole creation itself is thoroughly good—whether it’s useful to us or not.

Well, that’s rather rude, isn’t it? Don’t we count for anything? Yes, we do, and much more so than most of us have dared to imagine—and sometimes more than we want to believe. To be described as “very good”—as humans were in that story—comes with some responsibilities.

John of Damascus, a monk and theologian of the seventh century, was embroiled in what came to be known as the “iconoclast controversy.” This was a vigorous debate about whether it is appropriate to have icons, or visual images, in churches.

John was an ardent supporter of icons and actually cited a familiar verse from Genesis to support his case: “And God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image…”

John would have been reading the Greek version of that passage, and in Greek that phrase—“in the image of God”—reads as the icon of God.

The human face as an icon of God! Shouldn’t this take our breath away? My face, and your face, and every single human face we see, all of them, icons of the God who made us!

And so, John of Damascus says, if you degrade and denigrate and reject visual images, you offend the artist—and in this case, the artist is God.

I think a lot these days about the visual arts, living and working as I do on what many call the “arts coast” of Michigan. We Christians actually have a lot to say and to offer, from our own Christian traditions, about the importance of visual images, the spiritual depth of art as it connects us to Creator God, the very source of creativity itself.

We might also note, rather urgently, that the stakes are rather high in this shared artistic endeavor with God. John of Damascus goes on to note something else about that familiar passage in Genesis. We are created not only in the image but also the likeness of God.

Those are not the same words; in fact, in Greek the word “likeness” is not a noun but a process, not a state of being but a state of becoming.

We are created in God’s image, yes, but we’re still on the way toward God’s likeness.

To be human is to be engaged in a profound process of assimilating to God, of resembling the One who made us, of being constantly formed and transformed into the divine creatures God intended to make from the very beginning.

The choices we make in this life shape the course of that journey; that’s why the stakes are so high, and that’s why visual artists can help us.

Visual artists can help us see at least a bit more clearly the imprint of God not only in our own faces, but also in the faces of those who are different from us, even different species, and in Earth herself. And by seeing more clearly the presence of God all around us and among us and in us and in each other, hopefully we will act and live differently.

As we launch into June, LGBTQ Pride Month, we need to see just exactly how high the stakes are for the varieties of gendered sexualities in the human race. Beyond the usual platitudes—“love is love” or “we embrace diversity”—we need to see much more clearly that those who do not conform to the standards of White Patriarchy are increasingly at risk of serious physical harm, especially with easily accessible firearms.

This risk pertains no matter where we happen to live or work or play in this country, from shopping malls and suburban streets, to national parks and urban office buildings—and this risk continues for black and brown people, just as it always has been present for women.

And still, it was good.

Everything depends on the goodness of God’s creation, and therefore on the goodness of God—a divine goodness in which we are invited to participate ever more fully.

That’s a key word—participation—for a celebration of the Trinitarian character of God. Rather than some abstract metaphysical doctrine, affirming God as Trinity is meant to draw us ever deeper into the never-ending mystery of God’s own life of self-giving, reciprocal love.

Returning to John of Damascus for a moment, he used a mostly untranslatable Greek word to describe this Trinitarian mystery of God—the word is perichoresis.

Some scholars have noted that there is at least a trace of our word “choreography” in that Greek term. John apparently was inviting us to think about the Trinitarian relationships of God like a cosmic dance—and if you’ve ever been swept away by the alluring rhythms of a tango or the gracefulness of a waltz, the energy often spills off the dancefloor and you can feel it pulsating across your skin, rumbling in your muscles, your heartrate rising.

And that, John of Damascus said, is how God creates. The creative energy and fertile relationality of God’s own life just spills over, as it were, and the whole Universe comes into existence—the whole cosmos itself as an unimaginable dance of evolving, changing, glorious life.

That mutual and eternal exchange of divine energy among the divine persons makes it impossible to tell the dancers from the dance and the dance itself is endless, deathless love—that’s the Holy Trinity, a doctrine that could actually change the world!

The very source of creativity itself is swirling all around us and in us and among us—our very faces the ikons of Creator God as we journey into God’s own likeness, from one degree of glory to another—world without end!

Now…let’s live as if this were true.

Heaven and Earth are One

See the Conqueror mounts in triumph; see the King in royal state…

Those are the opening phrases of a hymn often used for the seventh Sunday of Easter, when many churches hear about the Ascension of Jesus, the story of the risen Christ being lifted up and taken by a cloud into Heaven.

We used a revised version of that hymn at my parish yesterday morning, with words that portray the rising Jesus not as the one who conquers but the one who saves; and to offer our praise, not for the glory of vanquished foes but of tender hearts.

I am convinced, perhaps more than ever, that such differences make a difference in today’s world—especially among those of us who are eager to make Christian worship matter for a world in pain.

The older and more typical images for the Ascension—images of conquest and of the totalizing power of monarchy—reflect particular cultural assumptions. The original version of the hymn I just noted, for example, was written by Christopher Wordsworth, a nineteenth-century English Bishop, who was writing at the height of the British Empire. The triumph of the risen Jesus, in other words, is the global triumph of Western civilization.

This blending of divine and imperial power offers a cautionary tale about religion itself: it’s never merely benign or neutral. Even well-intentioned people can mingle religious institutions and cultural customs in harmful ways. More severely, religious symbols can be appropriated for nefarious and violent purposes.

Nearly every religious tradition has fallen prey to this kind of appropriation over the centuries. And it’s happening today, in this country and others, under the banner of “White Christian Nationalism.”

I am not referring to all forms of patriotic engagement with our civic institutions; I don’t mean “Christian” in the way all churches worship and serve; and I certainly don’t mean to imply that white people are inherently bad.

“White Christian Nationalism” describes a particular cultural movement rooted in authoritarian impulses, divisive and hateful rhetoric, and is increasingly violent. I urged my own parish yesterday morning to take up the vital work of resisting this burgeoning cultural movement, to denounce it, and then bear witness to the transformative love and healing grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

While it seems like a wild stretch to go from the first-century ascension of Jesus to twenty-first century nationalism, religious symbols have always been vulnerable to that kind of political manipulation.

It’s worth noting here some key features of symbols. Many years ago, when I first started to learn about metaphorical and symbolic speech in Christian theology, it troubled me. I worried that theological symbols made the world of Christian faith less “real” somehow—as many people often say, Oh, that’s just a symbol.

What I have realized about symbols since then is precisely the opposite. Symbolic speech points to a reality so real that our ordinary, everyday language fails us. Whatever we may be trying to consider, perhaps its intimacy is just too close, or the joy too ecstatic, or the grief just too unraveling—in any case, we cannot speak of it directly; we need a symbol.

Gospel writers do this frequently. Many churches heard from Luke’s Acts of the Apostles yesterday morning, for example, when the closest friends of Jesus encounter Easter itself embodied; the risen Jesus is standing before them, and they have no idea what to say (Acts 1:6-11).

All they can manage to do is to look backward, to what they knew in a time gone by—what glory used to be, what fullness of life felt like so long ago, and what happiness might yet be once again.

“So,” they ask Jesus, “is this when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

That question sounds like such a wild non-sequitur it’s almost funny! But this is exactly the kind of question most of us would ask in a moment like that. Human beings always interpret and understand the world based on our past experiences and expectations. That’s really all we have to go on. Especially in disorienting moments of divine encounter we naturally revert to old patterns and familiar rhythms.

So while there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the question these disciples ask the risen Jesus, it just sets the bar far too low for Easter.

When we finally realize that Easter has ushered in a new world, already unfolding before us, with a wider horizon than we could have imagined, a dawn lighted with a brighter sun, we suddenly need a symbol for this, a way to talk about what we cannot possibly comprehend—and so Luke gives us the Ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God in Heaven.

It’s a beautiful symbol and it makes perfect sense to frame it with triumph. But precisely because “triumphalism” presents a real and present danger in today’s cultural moment, we need alternative frameworks.

We might consider a wonderful line from poet Mary Oliver: “My work,” she says, “is loving the world.” And that means, as she describes it, “mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”

What might happen if we embraced the Ascension of Jesus, not with images of conquest and triumph, but with love and astonishment?

What if we were astounded not only by the spectacular pyro-technics usually associated with heavenly glory, but were also thoroughly amazed just by looking at each other, the nearly unspeakable glory of human faces? What if noticing iris blooming and dogs playing and babies taking their first steps actually took our breath away? Could we hear the wind in the springtime trees and the birds singing their own songs of praise in the early morning and the waves that come rolling up the ancient dunes along stunning shorelines and just stand still, astonished?

I don’t mean that we must choose between the heavenly glory of ascension and a down-to-earth God dwelling among us. To the contrary, the Ascension of Jesus invites us to embrace both and especially how they are inseparably intertwined. Right there is the good news of Luke’s dramatic symbol, of Jesus joining Heaven and Earth, revealing their intimate union.

Heaven is not far off, and Earth is not lost. They are joined, united, woven together in an unimaginable tapestry of divine beauty.

We must live into that vision of union and communion, or we risk abandoning Earth to those whose only desire is to “divide and conquer.”

God calls the Church to live as witnesses to flourishing life and gracious healing and the transformations that come only from love and laughter and all the things we can’t even dare yet to hope for—because Heaven and Earth are one.

And that’s what it means to live as Easter people, people who are loving and astonished.

Thomas the Truth-Teller

The second Sunday of Easter is often referred to as “low Sunday”—after the intensity of Holy Week and Easter Day, both attendance and energy are a bit low by comparison. It’s also the day on which we always hear the story about “doubting Thomas,” but I never want to refer to him that way again.

Poor Thomas has been branded as the “doubter” for far too long, as if he were the only one who wanted to hear the voice of his beloved, as if he were the only who needed to see the risen Jesus in the flesh, and to touch him.

Contrary to how I usually read this story from John’s account of the Gospel (20:19-31), I no longer think doubt is the focus of this story at all, and it isn’t even mostly about Thomas. This story is about the healing of a fractured community—and the love Thomas has for Jesus becomes the occasion for that healing to happen.

John constructs this story, broadly speaking, in two parts—the first, when Thomas was not there, and the second when he was. How John stitches these parts together is where the insights simmer.

The first part is framed with fear. The closest friends and disciples of Jesus have gathered together on the very first Easter Day. They are afraid that what happened to Jesus might also happen to them. They’re meeting behind locked doors, John says, for “fear of the Judeans.”

Christian communities need to note carefully whom those first disciples feared. Among first-century Semitic peoples, the Judeans were the religious elite among the Israelites, and they had conspired with Roman authorities to execute Jesus.

So while John doesn’t tell us directly why Thomas wasn’t there, it seems rather plain: he was afraid. There’s the first insight: nothing will fracture a community more quickly than fear—fear of the “other,” fear of the self, fear of change, fear of honesty and vulnerability and even intimacy. Fear gathers to itself a whole herd of toxic energies.

Then suddenly, right there in midst of that toxic stew, Jesus appears—locked doors be damned! John is not writing about a clever magician’s trick with this remarkable appearance. This is instead a second insight we might note: fearful isolation dissolves in the light of love.

“Peace be with you,” Jesus says. He would have said this in Aramaic, echoing the Hebrew word “shalom.” This ancient and beautiful word means much more than merely the absence of conflict; it evokes wholeness, harmony, and completeness.

Jesus blesses them with peace once again and then, John says, he “breathed on them.”

It’s worth considering how close you have to be to someone in order to breathe on them. We have certainly become accustomed to that calculation in this era of Covid. Interior “perimeter alarms” go off whenever somebody gets too close! In this story, the risen Jesus gets close to his friends, very close, close enough to breathe on them—a touching moment of tenderness and intimacy.

It’s also an ancient intimacy of life itself. John uses the very same verb here that the Greek version of the Old Testament uses in Genesis to describe the creation of humanity, that moment when God breathes life into the creature God has just made from the dust.

Into a dusty room of fear, John’s Jesus breathes life.

John could have stopped right there and we would have a lovely story. But this is only Part One, because Thomas isn’t there. You can’t have a story of wholeness, harmony, and completeness when someone is missing.

Part Two begins with the disciples gathering once again, a week later—the original Greek says, eight days later, and that’s not a random number. Returning again to Genesis, this gospel writer is reminding us that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh; the eighth day is for the new creation.

Eight days later and Thomas is there, symbolizing a restored community of friends and the healing of this household of companions—a new creation wrought from the wreckage of violence and grief. Thomas shows up on the Eighth Day, a symbol for our shared healing toward a brand new world.

I’m reminded of some words from Methodist minister and poet Steven Garnaas-Holmes: If you want to see resurrection, don’t trot out your success stories or your jubilations or your triumphant marches in front of defeated enemies. No, if you want to see resurrection, look at your wounds; look at those places in your life and in your communities that need healing, those places we try to cover over, repress, push aside, prefer to ignore, even find shameful.

Thomas knew all this, maybe better than all the rest of them. All this talk of resurrection, he says, is just a sham if we can’t talk about how we betrayed Jesus, and how we deserted him, and how all of us fled when our Beloved needed us most—well, all of us men did, I’m sure Thomas would be quick to add; the women actually remained, and at great risk to their own lives.

Rather than referring to Thomas ever again as the doubter in this story, let’s call him the truth-teller. “Fear of the Judeans” doesn’t hold a candle to the fear we harbor about ourselves, the fear of our own capacity for betrayal, the fear of our own spite and hostility, the fear of our self-destructive patterns that plunge us into isolation and violence.

Thomas will not let us off the hook for that; show me the wounds, he says. Show me that we’re being honest and transparent and real with each other—otherwise this whole resurrection business is worse than pointless; it’s delusional.

Denial and avoidance won’t save us—this is the (annoying) truth Thomas insists we confront. And John’s brilliant story-telling speaks directly to each of us many centuries later: be brave and look at your failures; reach out and touch your betrayals; put your hand out where so much has been lost, where the emptiness breaks your heart, and where your deepest wounds go deeper still.

Don’t be afraid—reach out and touch the healing.

Recalling that we can plausibly read every story in John as a Eucharistic story, a recent commentator suggests that John wrote this morning’s story for future believers, for us. John wrote this for all those who would gather around the Eucharistic Table, for the ones who would reach out their hands to touch the bread and the cup.

Don’t be afraid—reach out for healing.

Go to Galilee

Hollywood filmmakers turn often to the drama of crucifixion (most notably, Mel Gibson) but rarely to the resurrection. I wonder if an empty tomb is a bit…boring. Or maybe there are too many oddities to stitch together coherently, or strange moments of anticlimax.

This year’s lectionary cycle gave us Matthew’s version of the story as an option, a great example of Easter’s peculiar character.

“Go to Galilee.”

What an odd thing for the risen Jesus to say. Just then, at this first post-resurrection appearance, this profound moment of realizing God’s victory over death, Jesus says, “go to Galilee” (Mt. 28:10).

What would “Galilee” have meant to those women, those men, those first followers and disciples and dear friends of Jesus? What was “Galilee” to them?

Matthew drops hints about this throughout his account of the Gospel, hints about a place where I might imagine feeling completely at home and fully myself. That sets a fairly high bar, so I sometimes try to imagine a place where I can at least come close to feeling perfectly at home in my own body and gladly at home with other bodies.

If you can imagine such a place, that’s your “Galilee.” That’s your home base, your go-to, can’t-live-without place. And the risen Jesus says to his closest friends, “go to Galilee; I will meet you there.”

This homey image matters, it seems to me, especially when confronting the disorientations of Easter. Christmas, after all, is much easier to manage—what’s not to love about a newborn baby? But what in the world do we do with an empty tomb?

Believers and skeptics alike have answered that question in different ways. Throughout church history and today, there’s a whole range of ways to read and interpret the Easter story.

For some, Easter is a beautiful metaphor, evoking the cycle of life itself in the seasons of the year. What lies buried in the cold earth beneath layers of snow emerges in the warm daylight of spring, the green shoots of new life, and here in western Michigan, the carpets of lavender crocus everywhere.

For others, Easter offers reassurance that what was lost can be found, what has been damaged can be restored, what has grown old will be made new. Whatever has failed in our organizations and institutions, whatever has died in us—joy, perhaps, or intimacy, trust and tenderness—whatever has been marred by neglect or abuse or trauma, God can renew and restore and bring to life once again; that’s Easter!

Still others will of course embrace this morning’s celebration as the story of God raising Jesus bodily from death to new life. I don’t mean the resuscitation of a corpse and Jesus is not a ghost. Resurrection in this view instead marks something new and uncanny, and it is the first fruit and foretaste of our own resurrection-destiny.

Those are just a few of the options for embracing Easter, and my prayer is that Christian communities everywhere would welcome everyone, regardless of where they fall on that spectrum of options. The arc of our liturgical year, from Christmas to Easter, touches on the deepest mysteries of birth, death, and new life any of us can confront; I see no point in administering orthodox tests or quizzing anyone’s doctrinal acuity about such things.

Everyone—whether convinced, searching, certain, doubtful, agnostic, perplexed, wildly faithful or some combination of these depending on the day of the week or what they had for breakfast—everyone should find an Easter home, a place to be loved into healing and renewed by grace. We all need a Galilee.

Personally, I land in some fashion on all of the ways one might conceive and believe the Easter story; I see no reason to choose just one. In fact, all those various ways of believing mutually affect the others: of course God raised Jesus from the dead; look what happens in the spring! Of course this community can come back to life; look what God did on Easter!

In my (perhaps peculiar) view, nothing is too good to hope for. What biblical writers consistently urge us to consider has also been true in my own life many times: God usually surprises us with more than we expected, with far more than we thought possible.

Here’s something, however, that I do worry about: postponing resurrection life into such a distant future that it makes no impact on the present. That’s not the Easter story; that’s actually the story of Empire. The powers and principalities of imperial regimes will always try to divert our attention away from the needs of the poor, delay the call for justice, and mute the urgency of ecological renewal by insisting that our only hope resides in some far-away world beyond the grave.

Remember, Empire killed Jesus; and God raised Jesus right there, in Empire.

In contrast to imperial paralysis, and as my good friend Jim Mitulski likes to say, the point of an Easter faith is to practice resurrection now, every day, in our lives and personal relationships, in our organizations and institutions, and in the wider world around us.

Practice resurrection now—in this world of narrow-minded bigotry, and death dealing institutions, and casual acts of violence, and where we can’t even get sensible gun safety legislation passed in Congress when our children are dying.

Practice the transforming love of resurrection now in all the most familiar places, in the most ordinary communities, among the people you know best.

In other words, go to Galilee.

This anticlimax moment in Matthew’s version of the story should remind us that Easter is not some foreign, exotic, distant planet we’re invited to visit at some point in the far-off future—it’s in our own backyard right now.

Just last week, on Palm Sunday, we heard Matthew’s story about Jesus bringing crowds of people with him from Galilee to march on Jerusalem. They had heard him teach there in Galilee, watched him heal the sick, and share meals with prostitutes and tax collectors there, they got into boats with him and sat on hillsides with him and had finally found their place with him, there.

Go to Galilee, the risen Jesus says, the place where we met and where we were most at home together; that place where you learned how to fish as a young boy; where you climbed sycamore trees as a “tom girl”; where you dropped your fishing nets and left your orchards and followed me because you caught a glimpse of something new and powerful—the hope of healing and love and flourishing and finally and at last, beyond your wildest dreams, being fully at home and fully yourself.

“Go tell this to my brothers,” Jesus says to his closest women companions. These are not slaves or servants or even disciples; all of these are family; all of this happens at home.

“Galilee” is here and now; no need to travel, and we must not delay. Christian communities everywhere must practice resurrection today, together, because the world is desperate for Easter.

“All Saints’ Parish,” Saugatuck, Michigan

Bury Your Theology

What is your theology?

People have asked me that question in various ways over the years, in many different communities, and for more than one reason. Eventually, I started responding with some version of “it depends”—on the daily news, my mood, or what the lectionary appoints from the Bible for the coming Sunday.

I don’t mean to be dismissive of the question, but I am increasingly skeptical of providing an adequate answer. Or rather, the kind of answer modern Western sensibilities recognize as sufficient. Holy Week quite naturally provokes the question in all sorts of ways, entangling so many of us not only in liturgical complexities but prickly and often unwieldy theologies.

I have always loved Holy Saturday for the respite it offers in this holiest of weeks, not only from liturgical fussing but also the theological wrangling that sends me grasping after theories to explain what cannot even be named. It has been occurring to me recently to take this quiet day as an opportunity to review the systems and doctrines I’ve inherited and studied, the theological ideas that have both vexed and inspired me, and then just bury it—all of it.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, for example, I live some of my days as a Johannine Christian, relishing the Beethoven-like thickness of the phrases in John’s account of the Gospel. Not only thick but also obtuse, such as the image of Jesus as both shepherd and sheep-gate (10:7-9; 10:11-14), or more unnervingly as a serpent on a cross (3:14).

On more spritely days, with energy running high and wanting just to get on with the work at hand, I embrace a more Markan Christianity. The shortest and bare-bones account of the Gospel rarely pauses for reflection—“immediately” is Mark’s favorite word, and he concludes his account with women running away in fear.

When my gay self feels a bit queer around the edges, I’m oddly grateful for Paul’s letter to the Romans where he describes God’s inclusion of Gentiles in the Church as an “unnatural act” (11:24). If God can act contrary to nature, then surely I can? Or maybe nature itself is just much queerer than most of us can imagine, as Paul himself describes a universe filled with earthly bodies and heavenly bodies and angelic glories, all of it contained in a bare seed that is sown in the earth (1 Cor. 15:35-41).

How tempting (nearly irresistibly so) to suppose that we must choose which of all the biblical options is the “correct” one. But when I do resist that urge and take this rich panoply of biblical tropes into the history of theology’s development, I find myself not unlike a fickle lover, enamored by Dionysian ecstatic mysticism in the morning and turning fondly toward Augustine’s self-excoriating disciplines by noon.

So much of this, I have come to realize, depends on exactly what kind of question I’m asking, which is often not entirely apparent. To the standard Evangelical question—are you saved?—I must at first respond, from what? And then eventually, for what? And of course, how? Holy Week gathers all these questions, and more, those countless and often repetitive inquires that have been building all year long and stacks them, one on top of the other, a virtual mosh pit of symbols and rites.

In a society of increasing isolation and fragmentation, and having recently lived through the severe touch deprivation of a global pandemic, having one’s feet tenderly touched and washed on Maundy Thursday can feel salvific. I pause there gratefully, but then realize that the Cross still matters to me, or perhaps that it should matter to me more “salvifically” than it usually does.

I recall Rowan Williams’ arresting insight about the cross in his interpretation of the resurrection narratives: “salvation comes from our victims.” I began to grasp his meaning far better by reading M. Shawn Copeland’s racial analysis of it and her heart-stopping image of what the Gospel demands from us. She interrupts my romanticized images of table fellowship with the Gospel call to orient ourselves “before the lynched Jesus, whose shadow falls across the table of our sacramental meal.”

That sentence cannot mean the same thing to me and in the same way it does to Black Americans in this white supremacist society. That’s why Copeland resists making the cross our saving symbol but insists that we cannot be saved without it, precisely because the whole arc of betrayal, suffering, death, and resurrection demands from all of us the kind of life that reflects the deepest possible arc of solidarity with the poor and outcast.

Old ways of living—the ways of violence and violation—those ways must die with Christ in order for any of us to be raised with Christ to new life. This, Copeland says, is the “divine praxis of solidarity” that offers a new way of being in relation to God, to others, to self— salvation, in other words.

All of this (and more) swirls around all the ritual complexities of the week we have just traveled together as Christians, and on this Holy Saturday I cannot help but consider whether theology itself needs to die with Christ as well.

As Meister Eckhart, the great Dominican mystic of the thirteenth century once uttered, “I pray God to rid me of God.” After all, even the word “God” can only point to what none of us can ever fully comprehend; and it can easily get in the way of actually encountering what it so feebly evokes.

I don’t mean our thinking and speaking make no difference, or that our theological ideas have no consequences. To the contrary, the stakes are high in what we say and do—bad theology kills (as the contemporary aphorism urges us to note); and this, too: good theology brings life.

Yes, and still, as John’s Jesus reminds us, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” How could this not apply to our theologies as surely as it does to our own bodies?

So perhaps as gently and respectfully as we can, it’s time to bury our theology with all the nails that keep tidy systems pinned to institutional walls and let our wounds breathe some fresh air.

I need to bury much of my own theology, even the most cherished bits, the ones that “make sense” and feel cozy, those beloved propositions and religiously fine-tuned mechanisms; without my realizing it, they’re blocking my path.

Perhaps this could be a shared Holy Saturday exhortation: Bury your theology, and then let it rise with Jesus, unrecognizable but strangely alluring, oddly familiar but fresh and new.

Audienced

“Hosanna” is a shortened form of a Hebrew phrase, a plea that means “save us, deliver us!” Christians hears this word every year on Palm Sunday, and this year from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (Mt. 21:1-11).

Jesus has come from Galilee and has just crossed the border into Judea. He has brought a large crowd with him, and as they march into Jerusalem together, the crowds cry out: Hosanna! Save us! Deliver us!

How very strange to see these jubilant marchers become a hostile mob shouting “Crucify!” The jarring shift happens every year at the beginning of Holy Week; in Matthew’s account, these crowds were no longer marchers but bystanders (Mt. 27:11-66).

I remember hearing, many years ago now, an NPR commentary about the news coverage of O. J. Simpson’s infamous attempt to flee policy custody in a white Ford Bronco. The commentator linked the development of cable news shows to that June afternoon in 1994 as people lined Los Angeles streets and sat glued to their television sets.

“We are becoming,” that commentator said, “audienced.”

As if gathered in bleachers to watch the big game, or perhaps more comfortably at home, safe on our couches, we now view the world from a distance.

This all sounded a bit melodramatic to me back then. But the situation has only grown more severe: the Internet, the World Wide Web, smart phones, social media. We can watch acts of gendered violence or racial hatred on our phones, as if going to an afternoon matinee, and then head out to dinner. Migrants and refugees, shooters in schools, factory farms and ecosystem destruction—for all this and more, we are more surely bystanders; we have become “audienced.”

I thought of that analysis as I pondered Matthew’s stories for Palm Sunday. Rather than wondering how the crowd could turn so quickly from adulation to accusation, I suddenly realized instead that these were not the same people; these were different crowds.

Some of the people in each crowd probably overlapped, like a Venn diagram. But by and large, those marchers and those bystanders were not the same people. This startled me; it was like seeing a black-and-white movie rendered into brilliant Technicolor. It changes so much, nearly everything.

So who were these people who processed with palms into Jerusalem, who marched with defiance into the Holy City so long ago?

Once you start asking that question, Matthew readily supplies the answer: they were not the clergy, like me, the religious leaders who worried about proper piety and strict observance of religious standards; nope, they weren’t marching.

Neither were the wealthy merchants who worried about disrupting the business cycle and shrinking their profit margins. In the very next story, Matthew shows us the moneychangers who stayed in the temple; they weren’t marching.

The Romans were certainly not out there, not the soldiers or the imperial officials; they were worried about a riot and disturbing the peace.

All of these—or at least most of them—audienced themselves that day; they chose the sidelines; they decided to be bystanders, simply to “stand by” as the parade passed by.

Well, then, who exactly were these people who marched so audaciously with Jesus into Jerusalem?

Mathew’s pretty clear about this throughout his whole account of the Gospel: the marchers were most certainly the poor—or to be clearer, the ones with nothing left to lose. They ripped palms off the trees and tossed them in front of Jesus like a party had just come to town. And the working classes and day-laborers were out there with them; not today’s electricians or plumbers but the stable cleaners and fishnet-menders. Let’s not forget the prostitutes and sex workers (all those “dirty” people), and probably a good number of tax collectors, who usually didn’t have any friends—these were the ones shouting Hosanna!

“Save us!” they cried, as Jesus rode a donkey into the Holy City, as if he were a king.

These were the ones who had come with Jesus from Galilee, the ones who had shared meals with him (even though they weren’t supposed to); the ones who got into boats with him and sat on hillsides with him while he broke bread and multiplied fish and had finally found their place, with him.

Hosanna!

These parade-goers were the “outside agitators,” the trouble-makers who had nothing to lose if the empire fell, or the system collapsed, or the banks crashed; to the contrary, they had everything to gain from the coming Kingdom of God—and they had already tasted it around tables of shared meals.

Hosanna!

As I think back on every congregation I have been in over the years, including the one I am now privileged to serve as rector, all of us have quite a lot to lose; it’s unlikely any of us would have been in that parade. And this isn’t accidental.

There are powerful forces in this world—imperial, corporate, moneyed—forces that will not relent in trying to “audience” us, to make us passive, acquiescent, and comfortable. That’s how they make profits and secure their power—it really is as crude as that, and it always has been, which is why the Palm Sunday narrative is a classic.

I am now plagued by another question: who am I in the Gospel story? Or more importantly, who do I want to be? (Just being able to ask such questions is itself a pricey privilege.)

As most Christians around the world enter our holiest of weeks, do we want to be mere bystanders—audienced—in the Gospel? Or, do we want to be “discipled”?

To live the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to follow a road toward the Cross, not merely to watch from the curb. It’s not an easy road to travel, not at all (even though it’s carved by an unimaginable grace). We can’t take very much with us on this road and we have to leave a lot behind; it’s pretty scary.

And I’ve come to see (far too slowly over the years) that the only way to travel this road is to do so with others, with companions—a lovely word that refers to those with whom we break bread.

Of all weeks, this one just now beginning is the time to resist that worn-out and utterly toxic supposition of modern Western society that we must always fend for ourselves, buck up and undertake arduous journeys on our own strength.

Traveling with others not only—as the old cliché has it—makes the burden lighter, it’s also how we learn why love is worth the truly hard work and also just how much we’re willing to risk for it (the answer is everything).

Yes, this road to the Cross is a hard one, and it’s scary. This also is true: it’s the only road that leads to Easter.

So let’s walk it together.

Holy Week: A Hopeful Unforgetting

The history of North American land is also the history of residential boarding schools. I would not have understood that sentence apart from the books I have been reading lately by Native American writers, or the apology issued by Pope Francis to Native Americans one year ago yesterday, or the resolution passed by the General Convention of The Episcopal Church last summer that established a fact-finding commission to study the role played by Episcopalians in running those boarding schools.

The schools were established in the early nineteenth century as a program of “assimilation” for indigenous children; the schools continued (shockingly and horrifically) well past the middle of the twentieth century and contributed significantly not only to the dissolution of indigenous culture and the disintegration of Native families, but also to the acquisition of indigenous land by white people.

Learning about this painful history is a vital part of a healing process. In her book Becoming Kin, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec calls this process “unforgetting the past” toward “reimagining our future.” That’s also a compelling way to think about our lives of common prayer and worship as Christians, especially as we launch into Holy Week toward Easter. Every celebration of the Eucharist invites an integration of memory and hope; we remember the death of Jesus as we proclaim our hope in resurrection—especially in this week just now starting.

This approach to memory and hope was given a particular shape at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century in the hands of an American philosopher and theologian by the name of Josiah Royce.

For Royce, the broad notion of “community” became the central image for what it means to be human. He didn’t mean just any kind of gathering or club, he meant that when people hold both memory and hope together in common they can find a path that heals wounds, repairs division, and unites with love in what he eventually called Beloved Community. (And this of course made a huge impact on Martin Luther King, Jr., during his doctoral program at the University of Boston School of Theology, and which shaped so much of his leadership in the Civil Rights Movement.)

As the Christian Holy Week begins, I want to thread all of these pieces together into a beautiful quilt, but I need to pause and note my anxiety. I worry about replicating the patterns of settler colonization that Krawec so powerfully names and critiques when I borrow such her own compelling phrases. Perhaps that gesture is unavoidable.

And yet, if Christians (especially white, European Christians), inspired by that wonderful phrase, can engage with our own liturgical patterns for the sake of healing and for justice and to live in new ways for the thriving for all, then perhaps something beyond that colonizing posture can emerge. This is my hope.

And that’s why the kind of memory involved in the Christian celebration of Eucharist (especially during Holy Week) matters. Eucharistic memory is not nostalgia, which usually fabricates an image of the past we wish had happened but didn’t (such as the romanticized scenes of peaceful meal sharing between pilgrims and Native Americans we see every year in late November). Nostalgia also tends to cover over or repress the unpleasant bits of history for the sake of more comforting memories—most of us actually do this in our own person lives, but doing so with whole societies easily wreaks havoc.

There’s a Greek word often used by liturgical theologians to describe our shared work of memory at the Eucharistic Table. It’s anamnesis. Most will recognize the direct opposite of that Greek word in our English word amnesia, which means “forgetfulness.” That makes Krawec’s phrase all the more compelling for the central act of Christian worship: “unforgetting the past.”

A very full week starts tomorrow, with Palm Sunday—full and also emotionally challenging. Honoring the ancient stories and later symbols they created during this Holy Week, while also minding carefully our own more recent history, can make a truly transformative journey toward the Cross and an empty tomb. It might also help foster the courage we need to face an American history of racial violence as a path toward a future of flourishing. That is, after all, the profound promise of the holiest week on the Christian calendar: by remembering the betrayal, suffering, and death of Jesus, we find our hope restored in the God of life.

I’m astonished by how these old stories seem fresh each year. May they be for us, for all of us, a fresh source of healing and renewal.

Death is Easier

“Alleluia! Christ is risen!”

We can make that joyous declaration because women were the first witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Women were the very first apostles of an Easter faith, and we must not take this for granted.

The first-century Mediterranean world was a thoroughly patriarchal society: poor women had no legal rights whatsoever; they were never taught to read or write; and they were considered the property of their husbands.

Even wealthy women—who had only just a tad more freedom—even they could not vote, could not stand for political office, had no formal role in public life, and their testimony could not be admitted into a court of law.

Let us, therefore, note this very carefully: in that thoroughly patriarchal society, all four Gospel writers—most assuredly all of them men—make perfectly clear that women were the very first witnesses of Easter!

Luke takes this storyline still further (24:1-12) by noting rather painfully that the men to whom those women delivered the glorious news did not believe the women, and these men were some of the closest friends of Jesus.

This centering of women in what I would certainly consider the core story of Christian faith is not merely remarkable; it’s a miracle.

I think these Gospel writers are making a theological point by putting women on center-stage in the Easter story. And the point is this: the death-dealing world of patriarchal domination is over. There are lingering effects of that long history of domination, to be sure, some of them quite painful and long-lived, even traumatic. But that world of patriarchal violence will never have the final word; and indeed, concerning new life, women have the very first word.

Still, I have to wonder: why did those male disciples refuse to believe the women? This should have been the happiest news they had ever heard. Why, in Luke’s words, did it seem to them merely an “idle tale”?

Luke suggests a reason with the question posed to those apostolic women by angels at the empty tomb: Why are you looking for the living among the dead? That’s an important question all of us should be asking ourselves quite regularly: why do we keep returning to worn-out patterns and toxic relationships and lifeless institutions?

Here’s an answer I’ve been sitting with for a while: because death is easier than new life.

Winter’s reluctance to yield to spring here in western Michigan this year reminded me of those cold wintry mornings over the last few months when the alarm goes off and the wind is howling and the snow is blowing and it’s dark outside.

On mornings like that, my Australian shepherd dog Judah and I both agree that it is far easier to pull up the covers and stay cozy and warm in bed.

Death is easier like that because life requires something of us. Life requires that we actually throw back the covers, get up, get dressed, and go out to engage with the world.

We seek the living among the dead because that’s what we’ve been taught and it feels natural; we already know how to nurse grudges and cultivate resentments and sow hatred and start wars…it’s actually quite easy.

We seek the living among the dead because it’s just easier to live conveniently and for our own comfort and among our own kind…even when we’re fomenting violence and killing the planet in the process.

We seek the living among the dead because death, in all its many forms, is so close at hand and so easy to find—in our communities, in our politics, and in our institutions.

And still, and yet, God is with us even there.

“Mary Magdalene on Easter Morning,” Sieger Koder

We can choose the familiarity of death and God will still be with us. God will never abandon us; not ever.

That’s good news, and there is even better news: The God who made us wants still more life for us, in abundance, the kind of vibrant life that we can scarcely imagine.

God has a dream; and especially in these Great Fifty Days of Easter, God dreams of a richer life for us, for all of us, for the whole of God’s creation. And God has turned this dream into a promise by raising Jesus from the dead, and God seals this promise with the testimony of women in a patriarchal society.

Yesterday morning in my little parish here in (snowy) Saugatuck, Michigan, we baptized a baby as part of our Easter Day jubilations. His name is George Alexander River Burt, and how wonderful that one of his names is “River”! Into that glorious river of new life that flows from an empty tomb, we baptized that dear baby in endless Alleluias and with a gladness that shall never die.

We also made some promises to George. We promised to do all that we can to ensure he never, ever hears anything about God that isn’t loving, graceful, and full of life. We promised to help him know that he is a cherished child of God, that he himself gives God endless delight.

I led the gathered faithful in those promises with tears in my eyes because many of us didn’t grow up that way, with all those reassurances and with such fortifying confidence in God’s love for us. That’s exactly why we renew those promises for ourselves whenever we make them for someone else. And on Easter Day in particular, we also ask God to lead all of us out of our various tombs, whatever they may be, and into the shocking brightness of a new day.

Shocking, because God will be with us regardless of the choices we make.

And this is also true: God still longs for us to choose life, abundant life.

So let’s do it.

“Art of the Redemption 3: Resurrection,” Josef Zacek

Harrow My Heart

Every human community has threads of resentment running through it and chunky grudges clogging up its communal arteries. This is certainly true—sometimes it seems especially true—in religious communities and in our churches. This is especially discouraging as well since many of us harbor rather high standards for faith communities, or at least some high hopes.

Since returning to full-time congregational ministry two years ago, I’ve been reminded of the sacred ground we all tread in parish life. Traces of heartbreak and the wounds of grief punctuate so many conversations, just as glimpses of joy and spiritual insight hover over our committees and circulate through our worship. I wake up every single Sunday morning astonished at the privilege of doing this work.

I have also learned in fresh ways some perennial truths about life in community: resentment is far more contagious than joy, and the infection can linger for far longer than our memory of when we were first exposed. Still more: bitterness takes no work at all (though it is exhausting) and gladness requires effort (even though it is thoroughly refreshing).

These are the peculiar landscapes of human relationships, manifesting the often complex contours of the human heart. All of this is on my mind today, on this Holy Saturday. It’s one of my favorite days on the church calendar because it marks one of my favorite religious notions—Jesus harrowing Hell.

A few scant biblical references and a single phrase in the Apostles’ Creed—Jesus “descended to the dead”—eventually blossomed in Christian traditions into a full-blown harrowing of Hell itself, smashing its gates, and releasing its captives. All of this on the day in between crucifixion and resurrection—a busy day for Jesus and not only for altar guild members readying sanctuaries for Easter morning.

I truly love the image of Jesus fetching our ancestors from whatever limbo they’ve been trapped in for however long, but right now I need Jesus to harrow the rocky soil of my heart. “Soil” is the perfect image for this day, and for more than one reason. “Harrowing,” of course, most commonly appears among farmers and gardeners; we “harrow” the soil by plowing it and breaking up the hardened clods. And according to the Johannine account of the Gospel, the dead Jesus was buried in a garden tomb.

Those images occurred to me in the shower this morning as I reflected on how easily my petty grievances can harden my heart, parch my soul, and threaten to desiccate all that fertile soil, that interior field where I would much prefer to plant the seeds of faith, hope, and especially love.

I don’t know that I want the “three-person’d God” to “batter my heart,” as John Donne imagined, but I do think its earthy fields could use some plowing, some gentle rains of grace, and the warm sunlight of compassion.

On that first Easter morning, according to John, Mary Magdalene supposed that the risen Jesus was a gardener. We sometimes say that she “mistook” him for a gardener. But I don’t think that was a mistake at all. New life sometimes—likely often, perhaps always—needs some harrowing.

Pixelating Christ: A Hopeful Communion in Hybrid Spaces

The Covid-19 pandemic may or may not be winding down, but what’s heating up are the assessments of “online worship” and what we think we have been learning as we enter the third year of this pandemic.

Among the many recent essays in that vein, two have seized a sizable share of social media buzz. Just yesterday, New York Times opinion writer and Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren declared that it’s time to stop online worship services entirely. On the flip side of that coin, Church of England priest and theologian Richard Burridge argues in a new book that Holy Communion via online platforms (like Zoom) is “valid and effective.”

I’ll toss my hat into that ring by referencing an essay of my own that was published last year in Concilium about what I called “Eucharistic cyborgs” and the conundrums Christian congregations face when nearly all of the activities we call “worship” become vectors for a deadly infection. (That issue of Concilium, by the way, is well worth exploring for its theological and spiritual framing of the “post-human” in a digital world.)

We will likely be living for quite some time with a patchwork quilt of ecclesial policies and liturgical postures around these issues, and it’s far too early for definitive conclusions. We are, after all, evaluating innovations we had not planned on making, and using theological principles we are not sure directly apply, while quite a few of us are finding ourselves (surprisingly) grateful for a new set of tools and skills to use in this challenging era of religion’s putative decline.

As a parish priest in the Episcopal Church, I facilitate and lead worship in a hybrid space, with masked, in-person worshippers receiving the Eucharistic bread while offering a prayer for “spiritual communion” for those joining us online. The tension between these two forms of “communion” can, I hope, provoke fresh engagements with what communion itself means and why it matters in a world of pain and for the sake of healing.

Like most hybrid spaces, this one is not always comfortable and includes awkward moments. Naming that discomfort, pondering why such worship can feel awkward, is important for our ongoing discernment about why Church still matters for exactly such a time as this.

Do note the distinction between the broader category of “online worship” and the more sacramentally peculiar question of the Eucharist in that broad category. Personally, I endorse what the Episcopal Church seems to have adopted: embrace online worship but refrain from what has become known as “remote consecration” of bread and wine.

That distinction blurs when reading the two essays I noted above, and I find compelling arguments in both—on the one hand, I heartily endorse Warren’s reliance on physical proximity as paramount in a religion of incarnation and, on the other hand, I tend to agree with Burridge’s insistence that the cyber-distance between a presiding priest at the Eucharistic Table and an online worshipper should make no difference in the ability of the Holy Spirit to bless and, yes, consecrate bread and wine remotely.

Compelling arguments from both, but I am not fully persuaded by either author. I find Warren’s categorical dismissal of online worship not only hasty (watching someone die from Covid-related causes should quickly disabuse anyone of the notion that we can safely manage Covid infections); but she also seems insufficiently attuned to the pastoral benefits of reaching people unable to attend worship in person (just because the Church has found ways to do so in the past without computer technology does not mean we should eschew such technology today). In my own congregation, we have also appreciated the evangelistic reach of our streamed worship—we have been welcoming new members to our physical sanctuary on Sunday mornings who worshipped with us first online.

Concerning Burridge, I would (ironically) cite Warren’s arguments about embodiment as a rebuttal to his apparent disregard for the significance of being physically distant while only visually and audibly present online. I think Warren rightly worries that online worship makes embodied presence optional for too many people, or akin to a “consumer preference,” rather than essential and vital to sacramental efficacy. She likewise proposes that bodily risk itself is inherent to the story of God’s Word becoming flesh and that our avoidance of all risk (which is never actually possible) amounts to a form of resistance to divine embodiment.

Reading those two writers side-by-side, I realize and I freely admit that my embrace of worship online but not consecration online is probably incoherent. But I still think it matters, theologically, that the Church has always insisted that the priest must touch the bread and wine to consecrate it, and I cannot do that for the bread and wine that people have at home while they watch me on a screen.

I suppose one could argue (and some have, like Burridge) that the Holy Spirit can just as easily bless the bread I touch as the bread people themselves hold at home. Perhaps, but I certainly wonder whether inviting people to treat “cyber touch” the same as we would “physical touch” underestimates just how physically touch-deprived so many have become during these last two years of social distancing in a pandemic; I am so grateful to see my friends on a screen, and yet for months I have longed finally to hug them once again. That longing is the very foundation of the liturgical insistence on touching the bread.

These conundrums seemed utterly novel and to appear quite suddenly in the spring of 2020, but the Church has actually wrestled with the liturgical theology at the root of such questions for centuries, including during times when Eucharist was interrupted or not permitted. Christians have always found ways of “being Church” nonetheless, and we are in one of those moments once again—a “moment,” by the way, that certainly deserves a healthy dose of patience and generosity toward each other as we sort this out.

Like many others, I had to grapple with all these issues in “real time” wrestling simultaneously with how to stream anything online and what it means liturgically to do so. I offered no conclusions about such matters in my essay for Concilium but I did land on some questions that I continue to find theologically stimulating and pastorally compelling; in various ways, I keep inviting the congregation here in Saugatuck to land there with me.

For example, are we human online? That question is not quite as ridiculous as it seems. Having now clocked hundreds of “Zoom hours” in committee meetings and worship gatherings alike, I wonder what physicality and proximity actually mean in relation to bodies. Just how close exactly do we have to be to one another to be “in proximity”? And what does it mean to be “physically present”? Do we suddenly become immaterial when we enter a Zoom room? As a theologian who appreciates the concept of “deep incarnation”—supposing that God’s Word incarnates all the way down to the microscopic, cellular level—I cannot help but wonder why I resist the notion of God’s Word showing up in a pixel.

On the brink of Black History Month, I’m also reminded of womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland’s concise declaration that the “body provokes theology.” She offers that declaration with the Eucharist clearly in view, insisting that the Table has material significance for how we treat racialized and gendered bodies. This is especially so because of the bodily communion the Eucharistic Table performs and what Copeland insists must be our Eucharistic solidarity with the oppressed, forgotten, tortured, maimed, and lost.

Do virtual bodies provoke theology in the same way that Copeland so persuasively argues that physical bodies do? Or does that question assume that our electronic digitization makes us substantially (note that word!) less human?

Another womanist theologian, Kelly Brown Douglas, has argued why we should even care about such questions. The carnal or fleshy character of Christian faith matters, she argues, for how we address a misogynistic society of white supremacy. Sexism and racism flourish, in other words, in contexts where our bodily lives are not honored with profound respect. So it’s at least worth wondering whether online gatherings can sustain bodily engagements sufficiently to promote social justice.

All of these questions strike at the very heart of our shared distress in a world of runaway climate chaos, unrelenting racialized violence, and gendered oppressions. These are material, bodily concerns for which Eucharistic worship provides vital framing and shaping. For that reason (among others) the parish that I’m privileged to serve as rector will continue to stream our worship services online and we will continue to refrain from “remote consecration” of the Eucharistic bread and wine.

I believe and I hope that such an approach to worship is a coherent balance to strike for the sake of refreshing our shared engagement with what communion itself actually means at a time when we are more desperate for its depths than we likely realize. I mean “communion” in the widest sense—communion with each other as humans; communion with other species; communion with the ecosystems of Earth; and therefore communion with God-in-Christ.