Doctrine – Page 2 – Peculiar Faith

Think like a Mountain

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

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

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

“Mt. Temple,” Brandy Saturley and Gisa Mayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How should we then live?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Whole Creation Groans,” Claudio Rossetti

Made to Set Others Free: The Image of God in the Community of Creation

Crown of creation or apex predator?
Endowed with dominion or called to service?
Forged in a divine image or descended from apes?

What is the human animal, anyway? Must we choose only one of the foregoing images? Some combination of those images? None of the above?

For millennia, poets and mystics, philosophers and scientists have struggled to articulate what it means to be human. Among the countless proposals, no consensus of any kind has emerged on this question, including among religious traditions and theologians. Even biblical writers do not answer this question directly, and one could construct multiple points of view about humanity using various biblical passages.

“Humanity” is the theme for the second Sunday of the Season of Creation in this year’s lectionary cycle, which we observed yesterday. And even though biblical books represent a wide array of perspectives, those books do seem to offer a singular note of caution about this theme: whatever it means to be human cannot be isolated from the rest of God’s creation.

This is a cautionary note because separating ourselves from the rest of God’s creation is precisely what makes us stumble into arrogance and fall into tragedy—we might recall that the so-called “fall” of humanity in the third chapter of Genesis is mostly a falling away from intimacy, and relationship, and communion.

Embracing the essential and non-negotiable social character of humanity has always been challenging for our species, but especially so in modern Western society. Nearly everything from public school curricula to advertising and popular entertainment trains us to aim always for self-sufficiency as one of our primary virtues—but this is entirely delusional. Every single breath we take relies on the trees growing from the soil and the algae blooming in the oceans to provide the oxygen for our breathing.

“Seven Days of Creation, II,” Sushobha Jenner

No one is self-sufficient, not one single creature of God in what Roman Catholic and feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson calls the “community of creation.” All life on this planet—all of it—is interdependent.

The lectionary last week featured the ancient story of creation from Genesis, except for the creation of humanity, which the lectionary assigns for this week (Genesis 1:26-28). I think that’s a helpful strategy, a way to underscore that the wider world of God’s creation is clearly good without us. But splitting up the story that way also comes with significant risk—we risk perpetuating a deadly isolation from the rest of God’s creation.

Let’s be sure to note that we humans don’t even have our own day in the creation story from Genesis; we’re created on the same day as all the other mammals—the “cattle and crawling things and wild beasts”—and I note this not to denigrate our humanity, as if threads of relationship diminish us; to the contrary, being woven into the vast web of creation with all other animals is a thing of startling beauty.

The beauty itself evokes, it seems to me, the deep communion for which we all yearn, even when we can’t quite name it that way. Biblical writers often evoke this sense of an ancient wound with which all of us live, and for which only communion can offer healing.

Author Kate Forster writes about all this in the frame of consolation, which she invites by paying attention to the wider world of animals—“consolation” because the notion that we reside at the top of the animal heap leaves us precariously alone.

“I think it’s a deep consolation,” Forster writes, “to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead.”

We aren’t speaking about “their life and our life,” she says, “nor your life and my life.” No, there is only “just one teetering and endless thread” of life, “and all of us are entangled with it as deep as entanglement goes.”

I love that phrase, and I think it summons a poignant beauty from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, also assigned for the second week of this season (2:1-8). “As deep as entanglement goes” is also where God has gone in Jesus, and where we still encounter that divine presence in all the entanglements of life itself.

Paul is apparently quoting from an ancient hymn of praise to Christ in this portion from his letter, a hymn of praise for the Jesus who lives a fully human life—going all the way to the cross and tomb, as “deep as entanglement goes”— and by doing so, shows us God with us.

Early in Christian traditions theologians argued that Jesus saves humanity by showing us what it means to be truly human. Hearing stories about Jesus, we catch a glimpse of what it means to act humanly, what it means to live in authentically human relationships, what it looks like for the fully human person to thrive and flourish—free at last from the shackles of bitter resentments and the cycles of violent retributions.

All four Gospel writers grapple with this notion of a divine humanity by using a title for Jesus that we usually see translated as the “Son of Man.” This strange title has a long history in the Hebrew Bible, where some prophets will refer to themselves as “Son of Man” as a way to underscore their own humanity, without any prestige, just an ordinary person like anyone else. For other biblical writers, it’s a title of divine authority, for one who is designated by God to represent who God is.

Both of those meanings merge in the indigenous translation of the Christian Testament, The First Nations Version. In the lectionary passages for this day, that version renders that ancient title as “The True Human Being.”

Mark’s Jesus (10:41-45) describes imperial rulers as those who “show their power over people and push them around.” But this will not be so for those who follow me, Jesus says, for those who live like “The True Human Being” in humble service.

Standing in that long line of Hebrew prophets, Gospel writers present Jesus as the truly human one who lives with divine authority. Just imagine what this might imply for the claim that we humans are created in the “image of God,” as the short but galvanizing portion from Genesis declares, an image that remains stubbornly undefined, not only in Genesis but in the rest of the Bible.

Isn’t time—way past time, actually—for us humans to stop assuming that the divine image grants us godlike power to dominate other humans and subjugate all other animals. And why is “godlike” even associated with “domination” at all? How might the world change if instead of a swaggering coercion, God’s image is instead a posture of humble service that sets God’s creatures free?

Quite honestly, that very possibility slapped me awake like a clap of heavenly thunder as I tried to preach on these texts. Reconfiguring the divine image would surely shift dramatically how that short portion from the very first chapter of the Bible is usually read, especially when Creator God gives humanity “dominion” over all the other animals.

The history of that little phrase is ghastly and horrific—which is putting the matter quite modestly—not least because that sense of dominion has too often applied to particular humans who are counted among those “other animals.”

Lurking around in that troubling word “dominion” is of course the Latin word for “lord”—dominus. Strikingly—and I mean this ought to jolt us all awake—the Gospel writers and Paul insist that that the “dominion of the dominus,” the power of the Lord Jesus, appears most vividly in humble service to others—to all other creatures of the same God.

Now is the time to define these powerful biblical words that have remained so despairingly vulnerable to distortion and even torturous manipulation; Earth herself is crying out for this religious intervention, and this is it: To “have dominion” is to serve others and to set them free; this is the very image of God, and the only definition that matters for what it means to be human.

A Re-enchanted Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking the Fourth Wall—for Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Days for a Lifetime

We’re smack in the middle of them at this very moment, these ten peculiar days on our liturgical calendar. These are the days between the Ascension of Jesus and Pentecost, between the departure (yet again) of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

These ten days make a bit more plain what is always true of this entire Easter season—there’s no neat or tidy conclusion to the Jesus story and Easter itself is full of complex emotions that are not easily named.

Early on in this season we might recall that the risen Jesus still bears the marks of crucifixion—not just subtle hints or merely a trace of scar tissue but grossly obvious marks. Thomas is invited to thrust his hand into the wounded torso of his beloved.

That’s a rather graphic reminder that Easter does not erase the past but invites instead a deeper integration of painful histories for the sake of healing and new life.

So here we are in these ten days—the wake of another absence without any palpable sense of presence.

I’ve come to think of these ten days as in some fashion emblematic of our entire lives as Christian people. We are continually confronting departures while also anticipating the unimagined gifts still to come. This is the story of our whole lives, a story of the inevitable intertwining of love with grief.

That’s not typically how we frame the Ascension of Jesus, of course. Our hymns and prayers for the feast are brimming with images of triumphant glory, of crowns upon crowns adorning the head of our mighty king who now resides in the heavenly realms.

I admit to loving those images and singing them with gusto. But they are woefully incomplete without the texture of loss and the scars that accrue on a long journey.

The lectionary didn’t give us any clear or direct references to the Ascension yesterday, but we did hear about departure and loss. We heard about the disciples lamenting the loss of Judas and the need to replace him with another (Acts 1:15-17, 21-26). We also heard from what is often called the “Farewell Discourse” in John’s account of the Gospel (17:6-19).

This is a touching moment as John’s Jesus prays for those whom he loves and who will miss him terribly when he leaves. These are complex emotions among the disciples and also for Jesus. He is giving himself over to events he cannot control, and he does it for love and with love, knowing all the while the loss that will come with it and thus the grief.

Remarkably, this emotional complexity is not only a key feature in the story of Jesus but also and therefore a vital component of God’s own life, what God feels and experiences, and who God is among us.

I realized some of these complexities in a new way while I was searching for a visual image for yesterday’s liturgy leaflet. My search term was “Ascension,” but one of the images that appeared came from an artist in Islamic traditions. She gave that image the title “The Blue God.”

I suddenly imagined the “blueness” of God who feels both pain and regret, who knows something of loss and of grief, and also the passion to find a path of thriving for the whole creation, no matter the cost.

What an astonishing image of God—of the Blue God—dwelling among us, longing just as we do for the flourishing of life. Perhaps this reorients the fantastical story of Jesus ascending, not up and away from us but up and deeper into the life of God—the God who dwells among us, especially in that most poignant confluence of love and grief, of presence and absence, of regret and yearning.

Modern psychotherapists, like Francis Weller, heartily endorse these emotional complexities. Weller urges us to travel toward wholeness by holding grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. Holding both equally cures our despair and cultivates compassion.

Or as poet and visual artist Khalil Gibran once wrote, “the deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can hold.” He doesn’t mean to glorify pain but rather to invite us below the mere surface of things and into the depths of mortal life; it’s exactly there where God chooses to meet us, those depths into which Jesus ascends.

Hints of these complexities show up in biblical writers quite frequently. I’m so grateful to be using the First Nations Version of the New Testament in this Easter season, which has helped me notice some of those hints more directly. In the first letter of John, from which we also heard yesterday, the writer describes the kind of life Creator has gifted us in Jesus as a life “full of beauty and harmony (1 John 5:9-13).

That word beauty is too often mistaken, especially these days, for glamor and celebrity, for flawlessness, for cosmetic perfection. But for artists of all kinds, beauty nearly always shimmers with poignancy; compelling art seems regularly to retain a lingering shadow; or, we might say as Jesus “ascends,” glory carries with it a tint of blueness.

I am endlessly intrigued by this: mystics in all of the world’s religious traditions quite often experience divine presence as a turquoise, or aqua, or a sapphire blue light.

These ten little days carry quite a weighty glory indeed, with richer insights that I usually tend to imagine. These ten days invite us to see a truly fierce beauty when our exalted loves are wrapped in skins of grief.

Might we suppose that beauty itself is love saturated with grief? After all, we would not grieve as we do if we did not love so passionately. This must surely mark the road toward healing and wholeness: to harmonize these powerful energies in beautiful textures.

I cannot help but think of the Eucharist here, about the space created at the Table for living a life of beauty and harmony, a Eucharistic life of both memory and hope.

The wider world around us offers precious little space for any of us even to name our grief, let alone integrate it into our higher loves. But there’s space the Table. There’s space to hold the worst possible memories—betrayal by a friend, public torture, state execution. And there is also space to cultivate the best possible hopes—the love and grace of God in our rising to new life.

The beauty of the Table, just as the beauty of our lives, emerges as we harmonize such brutal memories with such vivid hopes.

These ten days are for just such a lifetime as that, because I’m increasingly convinced that there is no other path toward healing and wholeness than the one that harmonizes love with grief.

And that is a beautiful thing.

Seeing and Touching, Trusting and Healing

Lent always seems drenched with thick symbols (meals, foot-washing, the cross). The Easter season seems populated with big words, with words that carry with them a rich and complex history—words like “doubt” and “belief” and “trust”; words like “breath,” “spirit,” “forgiveness,” and “peace.”

I’m kind of obsessed with etymology, so a season so packed with richly-storied words becomes a treasure-trove. Those words I just noted, for example, punctuate key moments in what some scholars call the “mystical Gospel according to John.” The word “mystical” in this case I take to mean the endlessly mysterious presence of God in us, in other animals, in our shared creaturely flesh, in every ecosystem, in Earth herself—a presence that animates everything with divine life.

John and his community of believers could be described as a group of first-century Jewish mystics, deeply rooted in the traditions of ancient Israel, and who loved reading the wider world of God’s creation in the light of the risen Christ, and even more, always doing so while gathered around the Eucharistic Table.

This past Sunday—the second Sunday of Easter, which is always devoted to the familiar story of Thomas (John 20:19-31)—offered at least three “mystical moments” worth considering for a world in need of healing—and how a wordy history might help.

The first moment occurs in what can easily be overlooked as a random detail in the story. The risen Jesus appears to his closest friends, but of course Thomas wasn’t there at the time. He shows up again about “a week later”—or that’s what most of our translations indicate, about a “week.” The original Greek is much more specific: the risen Jesus appeared among them again eight days later.

For ancient Israelites, this is not a random detail. It evokes a way of thinking about the Sabbath, especially among the later Hebrew prophets, weary of war, longing for justice, laboring hard for peace. For them, the Sabbath is not merely for rest; the purpose of Sabbath is to inspire and anticipate that great day when all work will be finished at last and brought to its completion—that’s the “Eighth Day.”

John points toward that great hope with Jesus on the cross; he dies there, John says, on the day of Preparation for the Sabbath—and not just any Sabbath, but one of “great solemnity.” Anticipating that final Sabbath when all work shall at last be completed, John’s gospel is the only one in which Jesus dies by declaring “It is finished.”

John seems to underscore this point when Jesus blesses his friends with peace—not once, not twice, but three times in the Thomas story. Much more than only “peace,” the Hebrew word shalom means more richly wholeness, coming to fruition, completion.

The second mystical moment comes to us on a gentle breath of soft wind. The Greek word pneuma can mean both breath and spirit; that pun also works in Hebrew. The Spirit is the breath that God blows into the first human’s mouth in Genesis, giving life to that creature made from the mud of a garden.

In John, Jesus is buried and rises in a garden; he then breathes on his friends, not only with the Spirit of life but also of forgiveness.

I’m grateful to be using the First Nations Version of the New Testament in worship this Easter season. That indigenous translation renders the notion of sin as “bad hearts and broken ways.” In that sense, forgiveness is actually a path toward healing and wholeness, and not only for individuals but communities.

That path shed some surprising (for me) light on an otherwise familiar section of that passage from John. I’m accustomed to hearing the risen Jesus warn his friends about retaining the sins of others, because then they will be retained (20:23). Sins aren’t actually mentioned in that Greek phrase at all. The original Greek suggests instead that “whomever you hold, hold fast.” When you forgive someone, in other words, hold on to that person, keep them close in the community, where they and you belong together.

For the third mystical moment from this story, we might recall that the verbs for “seeing” and “knowing” are directly related in Hebrew. In the third chapter of Genesis, the serpent tempts Eve to see in order to know, and so she reaches out to take the forbidden fruit that looks so delightful.

In John’s account of the Gospel, Thomas demands to see the wounds of Jesus in order to believe. But John’s Jesus invites Thomas into an even greater intimacy. “Reach out and touch the wounds,” he says. Put your hand here—or as the Greek word more directly means, thrust your hand into my side, Jesus says, and then believe.

That old saying “seeing is believing” has its origins in this story about Thomas. More accurately, however, Thomas is invited to “reach out and touch to believe.”

“Doubting Thomas with Jesus,” Krishen Khanna

This is underscored more than once in what the lectionary provided from the first letter of John this past Sunday: We saw the risen Jesus with our own eyes, he says. Even more, we touched him with our own hands; we touched the One who is life—not just any life but the unending life of “beauty and harmony,” as the First Nations Version describes it (1 John 1:1-2).

These powerful words and images are addressed to John’s future readers, like us, the ones who were not in that upper room with the disciples. Just as Jesus urges Thomas to reach out and to touch, so also Christians gathered around the Eucharistic Table are invited to reach out, and to touch, and then still more, to take, and to eat—just like Adam and Eve did in the garden, but we do it for life, not death.

I love the story of Thomas. I love John’s account of the Gospel and John’s letters. I love these ancient texts because they show us it looks like and how it feels to live as a community of believers with some wonderfully rich words. Believing is the operative word in this case, which is not the same thing as knowing.

Faith is not knowledge, and certainly not certainty; faith is a posture of trust not only toward the infinite mystery of the living God, but also each other. And that’s what makes belief so invigorating and sometimes terrifying.

The verb “to believe” comes from an old Germanic phrase to indicate the “giving of one’s heart to another.” If I say, “I believe in you,” I don’t mean merely that I know something about you; I mean quite brashly and beautifully that I’m willing to give my heart to you in trust.

The figure of Thomas in John’s gospel stands not as a cautionary tale about doubt—all of the disciples doubted at some point and in some fashion. No, Thomas stands as a reliable spiritual guide, reassuring us that risks are worth taking for a life of trust; I may just need to get that tattooed on my body somewhere where I can read it every day. Trust has never been easy for me—and maybe it’s not ever easy for anyone.

Surely this is what makes John’s mystical Gospel a matter of some urgency in the world today, a world experiencing a profound crisis of trust on so many levels.

Would it matter in such a world for a community of believers to risk giving their hearts to each other, to show a world in pain what trust looks like? I believe so, not because the church does this perfectly or even well but because that’s the only path I can see—and touch—toward healing.

Easter—Thanks to Women

It was so wonderful to welcome back “Alleluia” to the liturgy after our Lenten journey without it. Hearing Mark’s account of the resurrection of Jesus yesterday morning, I was also reminded that our Easter Alleluia is possible at all because of women.

As I walked through the painful and poignant moments of Holy Week, anticipating the joy of Sunday morning, I realized in some fresh ways this year that we would gather on that glorious morning of Easter because of women.

All four accounts of the Gospel are very clear about this: women were the first witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and they were also responsible for telling others this good story—they were the very first apostles.

I had some more personal reasons for this kind of reflection as well: March 31 just happens to be the anniversary of my dear mother’s death, a woman who was faithfully a witness for me—from my earliest days, as far back as I can remember—she was a witness for me to the risen Christ by the way she lived and loved.

How she lived and loved—that’s what makes Easter “real,” how it changes our lives, and our relationships, and our communities.

Scientist and theologian Ilea Delio insists that “love lives in persons,” not ideas or doctrines. “Love is not a concept,” she writes, love is “a powerful, transforming energy that heals, reconciles, unites, and makes whole” (from her marvelous book, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being).

This transforming energy of love makes all things new, reminding us that whatever else “resurrection” may mean, it does not mean “resuscitation.”

The risen Jesus is not a corpse come back to life, nor is he a ghost. As St. Paul put it, the risen Jesus is the first fruits of a new creation (1 Cor. 15:20), a new way to live—and not just Jesus alone, but also the women, who were the first witnesses of the resurrection, they too, along with Jesus, were the first fruits of God’s new creation, a new way to live.

The indirectness, as it were, the obscurity of that first Easter morning, strikes me in very particular ways whenever we hear Mark’s account of it (16:1-8), which is the slimmest and thinnest description of whatever it means to say Jesus rises from the dead. All four Gospel writers treat the resurrection as utterly mysterious, but not the consequences. There is new life to be lived because of the resurrection of Jesus.

The heart of Easter is not only that Jesus is somehow alive, but also that we are, and that we live differently because of Easter. This is in large measure why, I think, Mark has the women run from the empty tomb in terror and amazement.

Of course these first witnesses to Easter are terrified, not only because God is so clearly at work in that empty tomb but also because of what it means for them and how they must and will live in a brand new way.

Preparing for Easter, I was reminded again of my trip earlier this year to southern Africa, where I met a young man in Johannesburg by the name of Nkululeku. His name in Zulu means freedom.

I devoted some energy this Lent to considering the various ways spiritual disciplines might foster a more vibrant and deeper freedom, and especially the precious freedom Jesus offers from the fear of death. Anxiety over death gets expressed in so many self-destructive habits and corrosive social patterns—from opioid addiction to environmental destruction.

“In the Spirit of Honoring Our Ancestors,” James Jacko

Still further richness for this notion is coming the First Nations Version of the New Testament that we’re using here at All Saints’ Parish this Easter Season, the indigenous translation that presents the Gospel as the “Good Story of Creator Sets Free.”

Weaving all of this together brought to mind my firm conviction about the gendered character of our collective distress as human beings. For many years now, I have been thoroughly convinced that homophobia is rooted in misogyny.

Less abstractly, whatever keeps us enslaved to violence, whether because of race or sexuality or class or even species, has its roots firmly planted in patriarchy, in cultural systems that favor men and masculinity while degrading women and reviling the feminine. Ask nearly any gay man who has experienced taunts, jeers, fists, or rejection—the violence springs from our failure to be “real men.”

It matters—so much more than most usually suppose—it matters in the first-century world of patriarchal domination that women are the first witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead; the first to see that Jesus himself had been set free from the tomb; the first to experience the exhilarating trepidation of brand new life.

To no small degree, the joy of Easter is in proportion to how clearly we can name the severity of institutional systems of patriarchal domination that hurt women, and children, and men, as well as other animals and whole ecosystems. Imperial patriarchy killed Jesus, after all, and women are the first witnesses to God’s vibrant new life in the world.

Mark’s Jesus most certainly sets us free from the fear of death. Mark makes equally clear that we also need the courage to live this new life free of patriarchal control, and to shape our communities with it, and to imagine entirely new ways to be human on this precious Earth.

That’s how I read that moment in Mark’s account when an angelic figure instructs those first apostles of Easter, those women at the tomb, to go to Galilee. That’s where the disciples of Jesus, including women, first encountered Jesus as “Creator Sets Free.”

And now you must go back there, the angel says, and learn how to live that Easter freedom in your own lives with a fierce courage and with an enduring commitment not merely to resist patriarchal systems but to dismantle them entirely.

The Lenten road of discipline does not end on Easter morning, but from here on, there is no map to follow, no sacred GPS to consult. Our own “Galilee” of new life beckons to us, for which we have no blueprint.

Yes, of course that’s more than a little scary, but we are not on this journey alone. The One who is God’s very own freedom incarnate, and who is divine love in the flesh, lives and travels with us, among us, and in us.

We can rely on this Easter declaration, we can trust it with our lives—because of women.

The Unbearable Nearness of God

I wouldn’t call myself a monarchist, but I do admit to a certain fascination with the regalia of royal courts. The peculiarities of Mark’s account of the Gospel help me to understand why this might be: monarchs can be kept safely at a distance (mostly) but God remains surprisingly and (often) uncomfortably close.

Palm Sunday—and/or “Sunday of the Passion”—is always rather jarring as we pivot quickly from the cheers of a jubilant crowd to the jeers of an angry mob. This year felt even more unsettling with Mark’s version of the stories.

“Palm Sunday Procession,” P. S. Solomon Raj

The so-called “triumphal entry into Jerusalem” isn’t very triumphant in Mark’s version (11:1-11). Shockingly, there aren’t any palms being waved about; Mark gives us just some leafy branches on a dusty road out in the countryside.

This little parade with Jesus doesn’t even happen in Jerusalem at all but near the tiny village of Bethany; he enters the big city almost as an afterthought and then turns around and goes back to Bethany.

Noticing this made me wonder what kind of insights Mark’s distinctive features might offer. I easily began with Mark’s emphasis on Bethany, a village around four miles outside of Jerusalem. For some time now I have appreciated what each of the Gospel writers suggests about Bethany: this was a haven for Jesus, where he could breathe. This is where Jesus could relax with some of his closest friends—the two sisters Mary and Martha together with their brother Lazarus lived there. This village, that house was a place of intimacy and tender care.

In today’s lingo, Bethany was a place for framily—good friends who have become something like a family.

Skipping ahead to the “passion,” there’s another curious detail to notice from Mark. While many will recall “Simon,” a man from the city of Cyrene who carried the cross for Jesus, Mark tells us a tiny bit more about him: he was the father of “Alexander and Rufus.”

If those names don’t ring any bells, they shouldn’t. Today we have no idea who Alexander and Rufus were what became of them. But back then, Mark’s readers must surely have known those two brothers—you know, that guy from Cyrene, Rufus and Alex’s dad, that Simon carried the cross for Jesus.

When we know someone directly caught up in a drama, we feel caught up in it, too. That seems to be Mark’s point: this is not a story we can keep at a distance; we are all entangled together in it—including God.

By focusing on that tiny village called Bethany and telling us about Alexander and Rufus—you know, Simon’s boys—Mark invites us to see the nearness of God. What we mean by “God” is not restricted to remote mountaintops, in other words, or inaccessible temples. God is woven into the ordinary routines of everyday life.

Ordinarily, I’m happy and reassured to find God in the ordinary, but the “Sunday of the Passion” also directs my gaze to the violence lurking just beneath the surface of everyday routines. I used to think Palm/Passion Sunday overplayed its liturgical privilege with such a swift pivot toward the cross; but as Hannah Arendt would remind us, such evil is really quite banal indeed, and violence rather ordinary.

I wonder if this is why Mark seems so fond of God’s nearness—not only or even necessarily for the sake of hearing “comfortable words” but for the sake of finding God outside the ring of respectable relationships, even in scandalous encounters.

I’m sure Mark loved the figure of the Roman centurion for those very reasons. As Jesus dies on the cross, it’s not the religious insiders who see God hanging there; it’s the “unclean” outsider, the soldier, the colonizer and oppressor, the executioner who finally appreciates that Jesus somehow embodies the very presence, the nearness of God.

Mark appears to relish flipping “insider” and “outsider”—or I suppose it’s even better to say that Jesus relished this. The foundational elements by which human societies are almost always stratified—family, ethnicity, gender, wealth, geography, to name just a few—these are routinely cast aside at nearly every turn in Mark’s account of what Jesus said and did.

I thought about this five weeks ago, when Lent began with Jesus in the wilderness. Mark is the only Gospel writer who includes “beasts” with Jesus in that desert. Jesus is accompanied by those animals, Mark says, not attacked by them.

Not family, not ethnicity, not religion or status or power, not even species—none of these can dissolve the nearness of God. I’m glad for this—and then I wonder what it means for how I should live.

St. Paul’s letter to the Christians in Philippi is one of the earliest texts in the Christian Testament of the Bible. This letter to the Philippians includes a fragment of one of the very earliest Christian hymns, and we often hear it on Palm Sunday (2:5-11).

Early on in Christian traditions, what got Jesus killed is what Christians themselves tried to live, and that’s what that hymn is all about.

The Philippian hymn praises Jesus for refusing to exploit divine power and instead choosing to live as a humble servant. That’s the “mind of Christ,” Paul says, the posture toward social status that we ourselves must adopt.

Mark doesn’t give us a “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem; there are no palms, no emblems of royal power in Mark’s story. There are only leafy branches strewn about on a dusty road, apparently just recently cut by field hands—and that road leads to a cross.

All roads lead there eventually, toward death. But being on this road with Mark, during this week with the Church, and traveling toward that cross—I might actually live with the nearness of God.

Shameless Living and the Sign of the Serpent

John does something very strange in the otherwise very familiar third chapter of his account of the Gospel. What John does is so strange that most people just skip right over it on their way to what is likely the most well-known verse in the entire Bible—John 3:16 (which we can still see people holding up on placards in football stadiums).

For God does indeed love the world, as the sixteenth verse declares, and yet in the two verses before that one, John’s Jesus refers to his own death on a cross by comparing himself favorably to a serpent, and for the sake of life.

The research I did on this strange passage more than fifteen years ago turned out to be life-changing for me. It shaped my second book (Divine Communion: A Eucharistic Theology of Sexual Intimacy), and I am convinced that this passage holds the key to the kind of healing love the world today so desperately needs.

Some textual sleuthing is in order to get to the heart of the matter here, and that involves taking some steps back into the Hebrew Bible—back to the equally strange story of Moses in the desert that many Christians heard this past Sunday in concert with the passage from John. And then back further still to the Garden of Eden in Genesis.

That’s the textual trail I tried to map from the pulpit this past Sunday, the fourth in Lent. And the image that ties all of it together is of course the serpent.

In ancient Mediterranean societies, the symbol of a serpent enjoyed multiple and interwoven meanings. A serpent sometimes symbolized eternity, with depictions of a snake eating its own tail to signal the circularity of infinite time. Serpents could also symbolize healing, as the shedding of a snake’s skin signified the promise of renewal.

These ancient societies also knew very well that snakes can be dangerous and deadly. That mix—whether of danger and healing, of both risk and renewal—that mix shows up in the old aphorism about how to soothe the effects of a hangover—what you need is a “hair from the dog that bit you.”

That insight also contributed to the development of modern vaccines. And the insight is just this: that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

That insight found its way into that rather strange story from the Book of Numbers (21:4-9) where the ancient Israelites are wandering through the desert and they stumble into a nest of poisonous snakes, the bites from which make many of them ill and some of them die. God instructs Moses to make a bronze image of a serpent and to lift it high upon a pole so everyone can see it. All those who looked at it were healed.

Some have suggested that this story from Numbers led to the familiar image we still see today of a snake wrapped around a pole as a symbol for the medical professions and healthcare; here again, the key insight remains: that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

Going back to the third chapter of Genesis, we encounter yet another serpent. That story of Adam and Eve in the garden is so familiar that most people miss exactly what that serpent said to Adam and Eve.

Standard readings of that chapter from Genesis frame it as a story about humanity’s guilt and our need to be forgiven for our sin. I embrace that way of reading the story, but it’s not the only way to read it. By focusing so much attention on sin and guilt, the modern Church has left virtually untouched the epidemic of shame and violence.

This was the life-changing insight for me years ago when I was researching these texts, to understand the difference between guilt and shame.

Guilt attaches to something I have done, a mistake or an offense which I can confess and for which I can seek forgiveness. Shame, by contrast, attaches to my sense of self and who I am, usually in quite physical and bodily ways.

Guilt says, “I did something bad”; shame says, “I am bad.”

Social psychologists and sociologists have been urging us to notice for quite some time now just how pervasive shame is and just how severe are its consequences. (Be sure to read Brene Brown on this and watch her videos.)

Shame can make us dangerous to ourselves (in patterns of isolation and alienation and addiction and self-harm) and also dangerous to others (when we project our own shame on those who are different from us, or whole communities, or other species, and then treat them with hostility and violence).

Take all of this back into that ancient story of a garden where a serpent persuades human beings to eat forbidden fruit. If you eat it, the serpent says, “you will be like gods.”

The essence of this temptation is to suppose that being human isn’t good enough; that how God made us is flawed; that who we are is fundamentally bad.

That’s a lie; it’s simply not true. The ancient storyteller in Genesis insists that what God makes is good, and is indeed very good (1:31).

When Adam and Eve believed the lie, they tumbled into the spiral of shame, with the results today’s psychologists would easily recognize: they hid from each other; they hid from the wider world of the garden; and they hid from God. And in the very next story, Cain kills his brother Abel.

Shame isolates and shame kills.

And so, John’s Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up for the sake of unending life.”

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent…

Why just like that?

Because, if being human is the cause of our distress, then the truly human one—and that’s what that title “Son of Man” means—then the Truly Human One will be the source of our healing. After all, that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

Here’s one of the key pivot points in my own theological development that these interlaced texts provoked: shame cannot be forgiven; it can only be healed. And in that moment of realization, I remembered the Australian aboriginal story about the rainbow serpent, who created the land and the humans to inhabit it.

The rainbow, the serpent, the associations with sex and sexuality, bodily shame, and growing up gay: I still have trouble threading all of this together with the words of a logical sequence. But somehow I came to know this: embracing that which caused my shame would be healing; it would save me.

The grace of God provides forgiveness when we’re guilty.

The love of God provides healing when we’re ashamed.

That’s likely enough, more than enough, to ponder. And still, I can’t stop thinking about that distorted desire and the tormented urge to “be like gods.”

Humanity’s godlike aspirations and ambitions have led to unspeakable pain: the dynamics of racism and white supremacy; misogyny and the denigration of women, which leads quickly to the oppression of LGBT people; stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and enough nuclear warheads to obliterate humanity many times over; the relentless decimation of ecosystems and plundering of the environments that give us life—all of this, I’m absolutely convinced, and an ancient story about a serpent in a garden illustrates, is rooted in the corrosive effects of bodily shame.

Our salvation as a species and for the sake of this precious Earth may very well depend on the most robust and fulsome reading possible of that one chapter from Genesis, and in concert with that famous chapter from John: being fully at home in our own bodies without shame; fully at home on Earth without any guilt; and fully at home with God without any fear.

The world can scarcely name what it so desperately needs from today’s churches: spaces where we are free to love fiercely and live shamelessly and for the sake of a world in pain.

That great work begins and returns often to what Jesus wanted Nicodemus to see: God so loves the world that God forgives our guilt and heals our shame.

Praying with Palimpsests

In the ancient Mediterranean world and also in many parts of Medieval Europe, finding suitable writing materials—animal skins, tree bark, and parchment—was often challenging. When none were readily at hand, writers would sometimes scrape or scrub the writing off old manuscripts and write on top of those newly scrubbed spaces. Traces of the old writing sometimes remained under the new, and a document like this with multiple layers of writing and images is called a “palimpsest” (from two Greek words meaning “rubbed smooth again”).

One notable example of such a document is the so-called “Archimedes Palimpsest” (a detail of which is pictured below, courtesy of the John Hopkins University). The history of this document sounds like a sequel to Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. Archimedes lived a few centuries before Jesus and is regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world. A copy of one of his scrolls was used centuries later by a Greek monk, in the thirteenth century, who wrote Christian prayers on top of those ancient essays about mathematics.

The monastery prayed with this palimpsest for many years before it was stored away in the vault of a large church in Constantinople and then bought by a French antique dealer in the 1930s. Scholars later realized the ancient history of the parchment when it was taken for appraisal, and since the late 1990s it has been undergoing careful computer-assisted analysis to decipher as much of the underlying text by Archimedes as possible.

One of my theological mentors in graduate school was fond of thinking about the history of Christian traditions like a palimpsest, a long history of multiple layers, not all of which are clearly visible or fully distinguishable from the later additions. Rather than supposing that the earliest layers are somehow “better” (truer or more meaningful) than the later ones, the richness of Christian history instead appears in their complex intermingling. We might even think of our own lives as an extended palimpsest with many centuries of genetic mixing and cultural layering and ethnic intermingling to create who each of us is today.

I was reminded of all this after reading the lectionary texts for this coming Sunday, the fourth in Lent; the collection of texts, together with Eucharistic liturgies, strike me as a kind of biblical and doctrinal “palimpsest.”

We will hear John’s Jesus refer to his own death by recalling an ancient story from the Hebrew Bible about Moses in the desert lifting up a serpent on a pole; that story in turn evokes the potent image of the serpent in the Garden of Eden (which we won’t hear but I, for one, can’t help but think of it), and a number of commentators have suggested that John’s account of the Gospel could be read as ancient Christian commentary on Genesis, which we are now reading today after many centuries of Christian reflection on the meaning of crucifixion. That’s quite a complex textual and theological history for interpreting the Cross of Christ!

As we approach not only the texts and images for this coming Sunday but also as the complexities of Holy Week and Easter rapidly approach later this month, I find it helpful to realize and also appreciate that we are praying with palimpsests.

I know that sounds rather arcane and a bit religiously nerdy, but perhaps both helpful and vital when put in conversation with Black History Month (just concluded) and now Women’s History Month. These occasions bring to mind some of the troubling aspects of what we might call “cultural palimpsests.” Some state legislatures, for example, are actively trying to erase Black history, scrub it clean from our history books, and “whitewash” it—which is at least one very good reason to make sure that churches and also public spaces in the United States include images of Jesus that are Black and Brown and not merely white and terribly European.

More than this, and as I was searching for an image of the Archimedes Palimpsest, I stumbled upon an artist who inspired me to think about how one palimpsest might overwrite another. Perhaps that’s more complex than it needs to be—or at least that’s what I thought until I saw the images from Coral Woodbury.

Woodbury has paid careful attention to the erasure of women in patriarchal societies, or the way the significance of women is “overwritten” by the contributions of men. She is especially committed to reinterpreting Western art history from a feminist perspective, especially for the recognition of women artists who have been “scrubbed” from that history.

One of her recent exhibits is (appropriately enough) called “Palimpsest” (one of the pieces in that exhibit is reproduced at right, the image of a woman superimposed over the text from a history book about ancient Babylon). Books are a recurring theme in her work, a way to “connect humans across time,” which is exactly what a palimpsest does or can do. For Woodbury, books function as a kind of metaphor for human lives and communities: the spine of the book holds the pages together just as our own spines hold our skeletons together.

Multi-layered texts and bound books—I can’t help but think about one of the sources of our word “religion,” from the Latin verb religare, to “bind together,” like ligaments manage to do for our bones.

In a world that feels fragile, as if unraveling, perhaps falling apart in slow motion (or rapidly in Ukraine and Gaza, not to mention the Antarctic), something about the dense complexity of human societies, how they are held together over time, gives an odd sense of comfort.

There have been times when I have wished for a bit less complexity in my life and a few more clearer edges, but the “thickness” of the Lenten lectionary invites me to reflect a bit differently this week. After all, palimpsests can evince both a layered richness and an occluding varnish at the very same time. I might even cling more fervently to the “old rugged cross” this Sunday. We’ll be singing that classic as our closing hymn, and in palimpsest-like fashion, I might relish how early Christians imagined that cross as a budding tree, planted perhaps on our Lenten road toward Easter.