Politics – Peculiar Faith

Sighted and Woke

“Here is an astonishing thing!”

The man born blind says that in the iconic story from John’s account of the Gospel, which many Christians heard in church this week (John 9:1-41). Jesus grants that man sight and the man then exclaims his astonishment to a bunch of religious leaders who care more about the rules of their religion than the amazing gift he had just received.

The whole story is rather astonishing, actually: it addresses the connection between sin and health (there isn’t any); it raises the perennial puzzle about human suffering; and it prompts all sorts of questions about God’s action in the world. It’s an ancient story but it captures perfectly the impatience so many people today have with religion: why in the world would religious leaders refuse to see a miracle just because it violates their religious customs?

But we need to pause right there and name directly that this story has been used over the centuries as one of the tools for Christian anti-Semitism. There is a long and ugly history of that in the Church, and the deeper we travel into Lent and toward Holy Week, the more frequent these problematic texts surface in our lectionary.

As Good Friday approaches, Christians must never forget our own shameful history of calling Jews “Christ killers.” We must remain vigilant about this; it is far too easy to causally or inadvertently repeat violence in our worship. (A former colleague of mine, a priest and church historian, has done extensive work on this; this short piece of his is a good place to start thinking on these matters.)

The “religious leaders” I just noted above, for example, are of course Jewish leaders. And the story from John has been interpreted by some in the past, and still today, as a story about how these religious leaders were blinded to the very presence of God standing among them.

Now, it is likely true, as some biblical scholars have suggested, that John’s account of the Gospel emerged from an early Jewish-Christian community that had been expelled from its local synagogue. In many of these gospel stories we can see traces of that ancient conflict, of a religious sibling rivalry. The story of the man born blind and granted sight is a prime example of this—an early follower of Jesus is expelled from his synagogue!

Thankfully, there is more to be said about these texts. John himself and some later interpreters took these stories of religious conflict as occasions to reflect much more broadly on the human condition itself, and who God is among us, and what God is calling us to do for the sake of healing and to help our communities flourish.

We might wonder about blindness, for example, and what prevents us from seeing the presence of God at work in the world. How have we prioritized institutional structures at the expense of divine grace and creaturely flourishing?

As many interpreters of this story have noted over the centuries, those with physical sight often cannot see what truly matters; and those who are physically blind sometimes have the clearest vision. How might we distinguish between outward sight and interior illumination?

As John Chrysostom noted back in the fourth century, this story from John features Pharisees, the most prominent leaders of that first-century religious community. He does this, Chrysostom supposed, to underscore an uncomfortable truth about religion itself in every century: it provides no guaranteed access to spiritual awakening.

Surely this is a cautionary tale for every religious institution, and about human institutions of any kind, especially when their primary goal becomes merely survival rather than mission. When power and influence are threatened, institutions become defensive, isolated, even blind; and sometimes, willfully and intentionally blind.

A prime example of this is almost daily in the news: in the state of Florida today, textbook publishers are scrambling to comply with so-called “anti-woke legislation.” The writers of these textbooks are struggling, for example, to figure out how to write about Rosa Parks without mentioning race, or that she was Black, or why she was told to stand up on that bus when all she wanted to do was sit down.

This is ludicrous. Let’s remind ourselves and our neighbors that the term “woke” first appeared way back in the 1960s as street slang for being fully aware, for seeing the world as it actually is—to be aware of the need for racial healing and reconciliation; aware of the need for social and economic justice; and today, aware of the peril our planet faces from global climate chaos. (Not surprisingly, there are complexities attached to this word and it’s worth noting its more recent evolutions and convolutions.)

To “be woke” is “to see” as clearly as we can, and the lectionary for this fourth Sunday in Lent even paired John’s story with a first-century version of being “woke” from the letter to the Ephesians: “Live as children of light,” that letter-writer says, and expose unfruitful, shameful works. “Sleeper, awake, and rise from the dead!”

To see the world as it really is, in all its irreducible complexity—broken and beautiful, lively and wounded—to see this is like waking up from a very long dream, as if coming back to life.

I’m particularly intrigued by how often ancient interpreters of John’s story invite an earthy Christian faith—an item to add to the “woke” list for a planet in peril.

Consider the fourth-century deacon Ephrem of Edessa. The blind man’s eyes were opened with dust, he noted, the very stuff from which he was made at the beginning of creation. Remember that you are dust, we said at the beginning of this Lenten season; and perhaps we should add this: “with the dust of earth you will be healed.”

Caesarius of Arles in the sixth century proposed that the ground is law and saliva is grace. The law without grace is parched and arid land from which no life can come. “So,” Caesarius says, “let the saliva of Christ go down to the ground and gather together earth. Let the one who made earth remake it, and the one who created it recreate it.”

Ambrose of Milan, going back to the fourth century, urged us to notice that Jesus tells this blind man, whose face is now covered in mud, to go and wash in a pool of water; this is the font of Holy Baptism, where we are cleansed from the stains of sin, like washing mud from our face to see!

John seems to love earthy symbols to portray the mystery of God’s presence among us, and in us, and around us. In this story of the man born blind and sighted, the symbol is earth itself, the soil, and it becomes the symbol of God’s healing presence when mixed with water—and with our own human saliva!

(Fun fact to share at your next cocktail party: some centuries ago the Church decided that if emergency baptism were required, you could use your own spit.)

There are some things that once we see them, we can never “un-see” them; they change our lives and how we live. The whole season of Lent is supposed to be like that, every single year—ongoing, lifelong conversion to the Gospel, a process of seeing everything altered, new and fresh.

This iconic story from John really gives us far too many things to see, all at once: the Creator of light giving sight to the blind; the creature of dirt being healed with mud; the waters of baptism pooling in our own mouths.

Here’s what I hope to see better, and what we all need to see together: earth as healing and also the healing of Earth—with all her peoples and all her many creatures. This is the great work to which God is always calling us, now more than ever.

To see this truly, the world would look different, and we would live differently; it would be like waking up; it would feel like rising from the dead.

The Slap that Truly Matters Comes from Earth

I’ve enjoyed watching Will Smith in some of his movies; I’ve never really cared for Chris Rock’s humor. And that’s as much as I want to say about either of them.

I know there are other things that probably should be said after their recent performance during the televised Oscars ceremony—topics that include race, and white supremacy, and patriarchy, and celebrity culture, and toxic masculinity, and…the list goes on.

I have some opinions—even passionately held ones—about all of those topics. But here’s what I really care about right now: while white America debriefs the spectacle of two Black men in a fight (hardly ever mentioning race, let’s note), the planet is literally burning up and I’m wondering exactly when Earth’s slap across our collective face will finally wake us up.

Statistics rarely help but here are a few to ponder: the Western third of the United States has basically run out of water and it’s not coming back (the Washington Post says “the West is tapped out”); nearly 75% of Earth’s land area is already degraded on the way to desertification (please read that again: 75 per cent of this planet’s land is on the verge of becoming desert); according to the U.N., 27 of the 35 countries at greatest risk from climate change are already experiencing “extreme food insecurity”—food shortages are soon coming to an American grocery store near you if they haven’t already.

I know, stats are mind-numbing, especially since Smith’s slap of Rock’s face this past Sunday evening has now garnered more social media views than all six IPCC assessment reports on global climate change combined. I have no hard data for that statistic, just the intuitive conviction that many, many more know what “The Academy Awards” is than what “IPCC” stands for (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change); here’s an analysis of that agency’s sixth assessment report.

I didn’t want to write a blog post about any of this because everything feels demoralizing these days and hardly anything seems particularly ripe with any hidden fruit of hopefulness. I prefer to find reasons for hope and write about those, especially when I can recommend promising action steps—of which I have precious few to propose. But then it occurred to me: maybe it’s worth writing about “anti-action steps,” about the things we should stop doing.

I’d say it’s time we stop having awards ceremonies of any kind—no more Oscars, Grammys, Tonys, or local Tulip Queen Crownings at the local 4H Club come May. Just stop giving out awards for anything on a planet that is dying right before our eyes. Glitzy gowns draping over red carpets under the glare of media lights? Honestly, as my dear mother would say, that’s just tasteless in the midst of so much wanton destruction.

I’d say it’s time we stop all televised sports, all collegiate sporting events, every single music concert, each and every art exhibit, and any other gathering for the sake of “culture.” This planet’s ecosystems have selected us for extinction—exactly what kind of cultural artifact would you like to make right now and who would be left to enjoy it?

I’d say it’s time to stop going to school and earning degrees and teaching classes—just as teenager Greta Thunberg did for two years—because let’s get real: on what part, exactly, of a burning planet with little water and shrinking arable land for farming would you like to use all that fancy education? More to the point, what kind of job do you hope to have when food shortages in this “wealthiest country in the history of the world” leave our grocery stores mostly empty?

Some climate scientists themselves have said it’s time to stop issuing reports on climate change because no one is reading them and no one is doing anything about them. It’s time instead to go on strike. Good Lord, these are scientists—can we please pay attention?

It’s time we stop doing all these things (and more) because it’s past time to stop settling for half-baked measures from politicians who pander to their “base” constituencies—on both the “right” and the “left” not to mention the useless “middle.” As George Tsakraklides persuasively (alas) argues, our elected politicians feed us just enough empty promises about climate action to keep us mostly well-behaved and unwilling to rock the (leaky) boat. It’s past time to write to our legislators; as Extinction Rebellion urges, it’s high time for civil disobedience, and we Christians need to be clear that such disobedience counts as spiritual activism and sacred work; there is no “Planet B.”

It’s time for every single one of us simply to stop, to stop everything, right now, and let the buses run idle and the bakery shelves stand empty and the dry cleaning go unfolded and the construction projects languish unfinished and the garbage rot uncollected and the livestock roam unslaughtered.

And then, in that pregnant pause, it’s time for all of us to stand in the streets, or on our front yards, or along the sidewalks of our cities, or at the edges of shopping-mall parking lots and gaze upon what we have wrought, what we have allowed, what continues day after day despite what we have known for many decades is our collective suicide.

It’s time for us to gaze upon all of that and then refuse to do anything more until someone steps up, or multiple such ones lead the way into a different future, a future away from mutually assured destruction and toward something like collaborative renewal and collective healing for the possibility of shared flourishing—if it’s not already too late.

I’m thinking and pondering all these things after watching what should have been an unremarkable moment of feuding between celebrities on live television go viral on social media as we Western Christians approach the waning days of Lent and Easter is teasing us over the horizon.

I had some high hopes for this Lenten season as we emerge gingerly from the Covid-19 pandemic but I have mostly failed to preach repentance persuasively in this parish I’m privileged to serve because I really don’t know how to repent myself—only that I should.

“Crucified Land,” Alexandre Hogue (1939)

I’d like to harbor high hopes for the Easter season when Spring here in the northern hemisphere underscores with natural italics the reassurances of the new life embedded in the liturgical cycle.

But my hope runs terribly thin that we’ll stop much of anything or pause for long, if at all, or pay any serious attention to what climate scientists have been warning us about since 1896. Everything we know today about climate change we knew in 1970—and we’ve done nothing. The biggest spike in greenhouse gas emissions has actually occurred in the last twenty years.

This is precisely the kind of moment the world’s religious traditions were invented to address, certainly Christianity, with its endemic apocalyptic flavors. Religion exists for the end of the world—to remind us of its end (its purpose) while also helping us navigate its other “end”—its demise.

So I’m modulating my posture these days, adopting what I call “radically modest hopes.” I’m hopeful that Christian faith communities can become sites of climate refuge and solace as we face storms, droughts, famines, and civil unrest (all of which will not get better but will only continue and worsen).

I’m hopeful that a renewed discipline of shared worship in our congregations can create communities of genuine care, islands of infectious compassion and rejuvenating tenderness in a sea of violent divisions and toxic self-absorption.

And I’m hopeful that playing with our companion animals and hiking in our forests and wandering along our beaches will soften a sufficient number of our hearts to fall back in love again with Earth.

Surely none of us is too old, ever, to remember what it’s like to fall in love: that heady rush of infatuation, surfing those tides of giddy daydreaming, and then that sudden realization that all you ever really want is the very best for your beloved. We cannot allow the modern Western forces of industrialization and the ongoing onslaught of global capitalism to keep rendering Earth an inert lump of coal for us to burn at will; we must love her back to health.

Sociologist William James Gibson calls this vital need a process of “re-enchantment” with Earth. Or as biologist and environmentalist Stephen J. Gould once urgently noted, “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight to save what we do not love.”

So, for the love of God—for the love of Earth—stop caring about that stupid celebrity slap and go take a hike.

A Transfigured (Black) Jesus and a Eucharistic Solidarity

As Black History Month draws to a close, Women’s History Month begins this week on March 1. This moment on the calendar invites deeper reflection on the potent intersection of race and gender, and how that kind of reflection might shape the season of Lent, which also begins in this coming week.

To do that work—especially as a white man—I’m particularly grateful for the insights of M. Shawn Copeland, an American womanist and Black Catholic theologian who taught for many years at Boston College. She helped me think differently about a foundational question in Christian theology: what does it mean to be human in relation to God? How one answers that question shapes so much else of Christian faith and practice.

For many centuries, the European (white) male was considered the “standard issue” human and thus the primary reference point for answering that key theological question. The whiteness of Jesus himself became a question in new ways during the 1960s, which Copeland writes about in relation to the (Black) Jesus of Detroit.

Among the many moments of Black American history that white people (among others!) should not forget, Copeland draws our attention to the “rebellion” of 1967 not far from where I currently live. The following is her synopsis of that moment and the blackness of Jesus that it surfaced (taken from her essay on the Black Jesus in the collection edited by George Yancy, Christology and Whiteness: What Would Jesus Do?):

“In the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, a routine police vice-squad raid on an after-hours drinking club in a predominantly black neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan, escalated into one of the most furious racial rebellions in modern times. Five days later 43 persons were dead, more than 450 injured, more than 7,200 arrested, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed.

“A little-known, yet highly symbolic, incident during those days involved a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the grounds of the major seminary of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. At the intersection of West Chicago Boulevard and Linwood Avenue, two blocks west of the site of the rebellion, stands a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which looked out on a then increasingly black neighborhood, even as the seminary faculty and students remained predominantly white.

“On the second day of the disturbance, an African American housepainter reportedly applied black paint to the hands, feet, and face of the statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. At least twice, the color was removed, but black paint prevailed and, over the past four decades, the seminary has kept it fresh. In an interview during a 40th anniversary commemoration of the rebellion, the Assistant Dean of Sacred Heart Seminary’s Institute for Ministry, John Lajiness, said, ‘the City really has no other positive visible symbol like it. The painted statue speaks less of violence and more of the internal struggle for identity and the human tension which, intentionally or not, bled into making this statue an icon.’”

“Black Jesus” at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit

If a white man cannot represent the sacred heart of Jesus (much less in marble), then the European male certainly cannot stand as the only, or even the primary answer to the question of what it means to be human. The (brown and Middle Eastern) body of Jesus resides at the center of the Gospel, Copeland reminds us, a body that was tortured and killed by the Roman Empire and raised to new life by God. To understand and embrace such a Gospel, especially given the social, economic, and political history of Western society, Copeland argues that women of color belong at the center of our theological work.

I’m not entirely sure what the consequences of that claim are for how I live, but I am convinced of how crucial it is that I keep reflecting on it and shaping my life because of it. Her book—Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being—helped convince me of this, and as Lent begins, I’m especially mindful of her work on the Eucharist.

Copeland recalls the gruesome history of lynching in the United States and how it prompted the same kind of terror as crucifixion did in the first century. Rather than avoiding that painful history, or feeling a vague sense of guilt about it (especially as white people), Copeland urges a practice of “divine solidarity.” To stand with and for those who are poor, outcast, and oppressed is to bear witness to the Gospel hope for a new world, a hope that shapes Eucharistic worship in Christian communities. Copeland expresses this in a powerful way:

“A Christian practice of solidarity denotes the humble and complete orientation of ourselves before the lynched Jesus, whose shadow falls across the table of our sacramental meal. In his raised body, a compassionate God interrupts the structures of death and sin, of violation and oppression. A divine practice of solidarity sets the dynamics of love against the dynamics of domination—recreating and regenerating the world, offering us a new way of being in relation to God, to others, to self” (Enfleshing Freedom, p. 126).

Perhaps one of the ways I can take Copeland’s urgent call for solidarity to heart is to resist how I usually imagine the transfigured Jesus—with a shiny white face. As I prepare to preach tomorrow on the Transfiguration, a story often told on the last Sunday after the Epiphany, I’ll keep that Black Jesus of Detroit in mind instead, and even more as we move into the season of Lent.

Following Jesus on the road toward the Cross can itself be an act of solidarity if, as Copeland would urge, we see in him all the countless women of color strewn through so many forgotten stories of American history. Remembering them, even though we cannot now know their names, could contribute to how a “compassionate God interrupts the structures of death and sin.”

May that be the hope that breaks open an Easter dawn.

Divine Vulnerability

The Gospel according to John has a nativity story, just like Matthew and Luke have one, but I can’t quite imagine making a children’s Christmas pageant from those opening verses of John.

John’s “nativity story” is cosmic in scope, rich in metaphysics, and conceptually dense in its prose. Countless philosophers have spent a great deal of time pondering the very first verse: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

That lofty language, stretching back to the dawn of time, sets the stage for an equally mind-bending claim in the fourteenth verse: the Word that was with God from the beginning, that Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Not everything about this “prologue” to John’s account of the Gospel, however, is quite so abstract. John writes of a divine advent, a coming into the world that is marked by very human, down-to-earth realities—feeling out of place, like a stranger in one’s own land, even outright rejection.

This Word-made-flesh that John extols with such lofty language actually seems quite precarious. So whatever John means by “nativity,” that sense of vulnerability—the notion that God shares vulnerability with us—that is what makes John’s version of the story not just astonishing but also life-changing.

Notice where John begins, with three simple words: in the beginning. These are of course the first three words of the Hebrew Bible, the very first chapter of Genesis: in the beginning.

This is, in part, why some scholars treat John’s gospel as early Christian commentary on Genesis. The refrain in that first chapter of the Bible about the goodness of God’s creation runs throughout John’s gospel as well.

Goodness stumbles, of course, with the so-called “fall” of humanity in the third chapter of Genesis. And “stumbles” would be too mildly phrased for some. That “fall” has led far too many Christians to suppose that just being human is a problem that we must overcome; for others, God’s creation more generally is therefore suspect, or tainted, or even irredeemably spoiled, and Earth itself is disposable.

But that’s not John’s gospel at all.

To the contrary, John frames his account of the Good News by reminding us that the very Word of God is intimately involved in the creation of the whole world, in every aspect of it, from the very beginning. The universe, all that exists, has always been and remains God’s own handiwork; the imprint of God’s own hand is on everything.

This declaration, by the way, has direct bearing on our current climate catastrophe. Among the many reasons why ecological collapse is so distressing, theologian Elizabeth Johnson pointedly reminds us that our wanton destruction of ecosystems and habitats and countless species of plant and animal amounts to an act of blasphemy.

She can say this, without reservation or hesitation, precisely because of John’s close intertwining of God’s own creative Word with God’s creation.

This cosmic framing of John’s Gospel sheds further light on that pivotal fourteenth verse, what we might call the “Christmas verse” in John—the divine Word, with God from the beginning, and through whom all things were made, that Word becomes flesh.

Let’s pause here for a short lesson in ancient Greek. John had some choices in how to express this pivotal claim about God dwelling among us. He could have said that the Word became a person—prosopon. Or, he could have chosen to say that the Word more generally became human—anthropos.

Either of those two words is how most people likely hear that key claim from John, that the Word became a person or a human. But John didn’t choose either one of those options. John chose this instead: the Word, he wrote, became sarx—and that’s the Greek word for “flesh.”

And with that word—flesh—John signals how God chooses to be among us, not in garments of splendor or cloaked in military power or with superhero strength but in simple, frail, vulnerable flesh.

This prologue to John’s Gospel is not about the birth of Superman or Captain America or Wonder Woman; Christmas is not the story of a divine superhero coming down from the sky to save us. The story of this season is far more astonishing than anything Marvel Comics has dreamed up: Christmas celebrates the Creator God choosing to accompany the creation—as part of it.

Consider what this means: Our vulnerability as fleshy creations of God is not a problem to overcome or a condition from which we need rescue or in any way cause for shame. No, our shared vulnerability as God’s creation is precisely where the Word of God meets us as one of us, in the flesh.

Surely in this time of ongoing pandemic and ecological fragility, we don’t need any further reminders of our own vulnerability or the weakness of our fleshy bodies and of the body of Earth itself; we know all this only too well.

Perhaps what we do need—what the whole wide world needs and what God is calling Christians to manifest with boldness in the world—is the reminder we hear from John: Christmas celebrates the God who meets us in our vulnerability by becoming as vulnerable as we are.

That’s what it means, John says elsewhere, to speak of God as love.

LGBTQ Pride Month: Praying at the Intersections

Same-sex sexual acts have been legal nationwide in the United States only since 2003. Read that sentence again—I identify as a gay man and even I am shocked by how recent that is. That moment came as the result of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas.

As LGBTQ Pride Month launches today, it might be helpful to recall why that case in 2003 mattered so much and also why it’s still important that faith communities pay attention to this history. Not only to the history but also to the crucial intersections this month invites for our commitments concerning racial justice and gendered equity, and still more, for ecological renewal.

First, let’s recall this: prior to 1962 in the United States, same-sex sexual activity was illegal in all 50 states and punishable by fine or imprisonment or coerced psychiatric hospitalization and electroshock therapy. (The term “homosexuality” itself was invented by nineteenth-century medical researchers and carried with it the stigma of pathology that could in theory be “cured” or reversed.)

In the 1950s and 1960s, the police routinely raided gay bars and lesbian clubs and arrested patrons merely for gathering there. These laws changed slowly, state-by-state, until a series of rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court between 1996 and 2015 finally decriminalized “homosexuality” nationwide and granted same-sex couples full marriage equality.

A turning point in that history came on June 28, 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City fought back when the police raided that bar. The “Stonewall Riots” launched the modern gay liberation movement in the United States in new ways. Anniversary marches began the very next year, and by 1971 more than a dozen cities in the U.S. and Europe remembered that watershed moment with “Pride Parades.” Today, those celebrations and rallies occur all around the world and in nearly every town and city in the United States. Embracing these public expressions of sexual identity with pride is an attempt to reclaim human dignity after decades of being shamed or coerced into silence.

Rather than supposing that “pride” is a “deadly sin,” as many religious communities have long taught, some embrace pride as a path toward flourishing; in contexts where self-denigration and violence are expected, pride is actually lifesaving. This has also been true in various ways for communities of color struggling against structural racism and for women grappling with patriarchal structures of oppression.

While gender, race, and sexuality are distinct aspects of everyone’s identity, they also overlap and intersect in some complex ways. Indeed, those “intersections” can help all of us appreciate our own multiple layers of identity and how labels simply fail to express fully the richness of human life and relationships.

Anne Sisson Runyan helpfully reminds us that paying attention to the “intersections” isn’t just about adding layers of identity, one on top of the other, like a big stack of labels. As she notes, “women of color actually experience a different form of racism from men of color, just as they experience a different form of sexism from white women. In this sense, gender is always ‘raced’ and race is always gendered.”

As a white man (albeit a gay one), I had a lot of trouble appreciating that sense of racialized gender when I first encountered it; but of course, people of color get it right away. As Runyan explains, “racialized sexist stereotypes of white women portray them, under the still-prevailing legacy of the Victorian age, as passive, physically weak, undersexed, and needful and deserving of protection. In contrast, racialized sexist stereotypes of black women…under the still-prevailing legacy of slavery and colonization, construct them as aggressive, physically strong, oversexed, and undeserving of protection.”

Attending carefully to the rich diversity of human experience eventually expanded “gay liberation” to include “lesbians,” and then “bisexuals,” and more recently “transgender people” in cultural and religious efforts for justice and inclusion. These labels, however, don’t work for everyone. Many African Americans, for example, adopted “same-gender loving” or “SGL” in the 1990s as a way to distinguish themselves from primarily white notions of “gay and lesbian.” There is also a long history among indigenous peoples in the Americas of using the term “two-spirit” as a way to name how gender and sexuality don’t fit into the neat binary boxes that often accompany European ways of describing the world. And still others prefer the word “queer” as a way to name their experience of not “fitting in” with any modern categories and expectations.

The complexity (and the richness) of these intersections grow when we expand this kind of analysis to include other species and the wider worlds of intertwining ecosystems. Leah Thomas is the founder of the online resource hub for Intersectional Environmentalism and writes compellingly about the urgent need to foreground the lives, experiences, and voices of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous People of Color) in movements of ecological renewal.

“Innocent Black and brown people are the most impacted by climate change,” Thomas writes, “but those same people are not present in environmental policy.” Just as race and gender are often co-constructed, environmental activism is typically populated with white people and actions are directed toward locations where predominantly white communities are affected. As Thomas notes, the health and vibrancy of BIPOC communities around the world are the only adequate standard by which to assess our progress on ecological renewal as well as the degradations we’re inflicting on ecosystems.

Given the history of religious condemnation of LGBT people, communities of faith bear a particular responsibility to promote social justice and to respect the full dignity of every human being, and indeed, of all creatures of the same God. “Pride Month” is an opportunity to make that commitment visible and intentional in every way we can and at as many intersections as we can name.

All Saints’ Parish, where I have the privilege to serve as the rector in Saugatuck, Michigan, will be “praying at the intersections” of human identities this month and endeavoring to appreciate in deeper ways the rich diversity of God’s creation, especially when gender, race, sexuality, and ecological renewal all coincide and overlap and intersect.

We will also be posting profiles on our Facebook page of LGBTQ pioneers in the Episcopal Church as well as artists who come from “two-spirit” indigenous communities in the United States. I hope and pray that these posts can elicit the complex beauty that arises from the intersections, those potent locations where God’s handiwork shines brightest when the fullness of our diversity is embraced and cherished.

Easter and Eucharist for Earth

The religious training of my youth was steeped in what I call “escape hatch Christianity.” The subtle and sometimes explicit message from sermons and educational programs and just the ambient spiritual culture of those Western suburbs of Chicago shaped my impression of the Christian Gospel as the means by which we eventually escape Earth for a disembodied place called Heaven.

One can, of course, simply leave such religious images behind, as I did, but they also linger in public policies and in civic organizations and in how communities of all sorts treat Earth and her many ecosystems. If “heaven” is elsewhere, in other words, we can quite literally let this planet go to hell. More than a few books and scholarly articles argue persuasively for precisely those links over the last two or three centuries.

What if, instead, we pray as Jesus taught us, that God’s will might be done “on earth as it is in heaven” and then live accordingly? That has been a guiding question in (among other places) the social media presence we’ve been cultivating at All Saints’ Parish in Saugatuck, Michigan.

We observed and celebrated Black History Month in February, followed by Women’s History in March. Each stands on its own with its own integrity and significance. Taken together, however, they also frame in vital ways the month of April, which includes Earth Day on April 22–an important opportunity to provide a compelling religious alternative to “escape hatch Christianity.”

To that end, I’m inviting the parish to observe April as “Mother Earth Month,” for which both Black history and women’s history offer important insights. The history of the United States, for example, is marked throughout with the painful white/black divide and the sometimes violent segregation of Black people; this is not unlike the various ways in which modern Western culture has segregated itself from the vibrant ecosystems of the planet, setting humanity apart from and above all other animals.

Likewise, patriarchal societies perpetuate male dominance by subjugating women in both overt and subtle ways (just one among many of these ways in the U.S. is through income inequality; today, women make just 82 cents for every dollar a man makes). These patriarchal dynamics are replicated in humanity’s relationship to Earth, especially in modern Western culture in which the planet is objectified (just as women’s bodies are by men) and Earth’s natural resources are decimated.

April also marks, of course, the season of Easter as Christian communities celebrate with great joy the raising of Jesus from the dead and the assurance this provides that divine love is stronger than death itself. How might this Easter promise provide an occasion for considering the role played by ecological healing and renewal in Christian faith and in our celebration of new life? As part of that intention, we will celebrate Earth Day as a parish on Sunday, April 25^th, the Fourth Sunday of Easter.

In social media, especially on Facebook, we will also feature Native American artists each week and their portrayals of humanity’s relationship to the beautiful web of ecosystems on this planet. As a primarily white congregation here in Saugatuck, we want to avoid romanticizing indigenous communities and also resist treating them as exotic “others.” At the same time, many Native American tribes have historically lived in greater harmony with Earth and other-than-human animals in ways that have much to offer to the wider world. We pray such offerings might be received gratefully so that all God’s creatures might thrive and flourish on this “fragile earth our island home.”

May we find over the course of this month that Christian hope has nothing to do with escaping from this planet to a disembodied place called “heaven” but rather inspires the longing for that day when Earth will become fully the heaven of new life God has promised by raising Jesus from the dead.

Jehovah Jireh! God Will Provide a Different Way to Live

These are strange days, an unsettled time of deep anxiety, and yet also, perhaps, a time of emerging potential for a different way to live on this planet, and with each other, and with so many other creatures of the same God.

I have in mind of course this frightening coronavirus pandemic—which is far from over—and the ongoing ecological crisis that threatens countless species (including our own), and also the renewed urgency to address the longstanding pain and trauma of systemic racism fueled by white supremacy in this country. Still more, we are near the end of Pride Month, and today, June 28^th, is the 51^st anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, which many mark as the beginning of the gay and lesbian liberation movement.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to notice how the biblical texts many Christians heard today from the lectionary might stitch together these various markers of this current moment. I’ll begin with where I want to end, with the wonderful phrase from the story in Genesis: “The Lord will provide.”

Abraham said that, and it’s the name he gave to the mountain where he was preparing to sacrifice Isaac, his only son. At the very last minute, God provides a ram for Abraham to offer instead of his son (Genesis 22:1-14).

sacrifice_isaac_caravaggio_1602 — “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” Caravaggio (1602)

I’ll return to that story, but first do notice some things about the other two texts for today, beginning with the passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Frankly, hearing a passage from Paul during Pride month, especially from his Letter to the Romans, is a bit like pouring a diabolical salt in a religious wound. As you may know, the first chapter of this letter has been a source of great pain and anguish for gay and lesbian people; it has often been cited by those who wish to condemn and exclude LGBT people.

I strongly suspect Paul himself would be truly horrified by such a hateful use of his letter; at the very least, using it that way is a bit ironic given that one of Paul’s purposes in writing this letter is to critique the self-righteousness of the gentile Christians in Rome, and an overarching theme of the whole letter is to praise the God who shows us a wildly extravagant grace and divine generosity in Christ.

So I’m wondering if we might take that stress on grace and map it to what we heard from Matthew’s gospel about a hospitable welcome. It’s a deceptively simple little passage, and also a powerful one about mission, which is something Matthew seems to care quite a lot about.

Matthew’s Jesus is sending out his disciples to do the work of ministry and what we just heard is part of the instructions he gave them. Anyone who welcomes you, he says, welcomes me, and those who welcome me, welcome the one who sent me (Matthew 10:40-42)

This posture of welcome—and I can’t help but use this image—this daisy-chain of welcome sounds infectious. I’m sure you’ve experienced something like this when the energy of a welcoming hospitality feels contagious and it spreads in the community—but here it is for life, not death, for breathing not suffocating.

Welcome, hospitality, grace, generosity—these infectious characteristics of a faith community are so important in a society like ours today where so many have experienced religion as hurtful, damaging, and even lethal. Here, in this passage, Matthew frames ministry itself with the hospitable embrace of God, a welcome that is encountered in the unconditional welcome offered by God’s ministers.

This sense of divine grace and generosity offers a much-needed framing for the story about Abraham and Isaac from Genesis. It really is a troubling story. Does God really demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac, his only son, the son he loves so much?

No, it turns out, God does not demand it. Set aside all the troubling bits for a moment about God testing Abraham in this story. Please, do not fail to notice that God interrupts that act of sacrifice and provides a ram instead. That’s why Abraham calls the mountain where this happened, “The Lord will provide,” or as I heard that phrase growing up in my Evangelical Christian home, Jehovah jireh!

That’s a rough, Anglicized vocalization of the Hebrew phrase in this story. In Hebrew, what we see translated as “The Lord will provide,” is just two words. The first is what’s known as the Tetragrammaton, or the very name of God revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai; to this day, Jews generally don’t try to pronounce that name—it’s not entirely clear how one would pronounce it, actually, but they don’t try mostly out of a sense of piety, of deep respect for the Name itself. So instead they substitute “The Lord” wherever God’s name appears in the text, which many English translations today also do.

The second word, yireh, actually means “to see.”
God sees.
God will see to it.
The Lord will provide.
Jehovah jireh.

This phrase became much more important to me than I ever imagined it would when I came out as a gay man as a young adult. That same Evangelical tradition made clear that I was faced with a significant choice: either sacrifice my sexuality for my faith, or sacrifice my faith for my sexuality, but I couldn’t have both.

No, that’s not true. Jehovah jireh. God will provide another way.

Remarkably, I believed this as a young adult—and thank God I believed it because many who don’t end up taking their own lives, even to this day.

I believed God would provide another way to live, a life in which I could love Jesus and still be gay. Lo and behold, God’s grace is even more wildly generous as I managed to live a life far richer than even that; I became a better Christian because I’m gay, and that has shaped a wonderful fruitful life of writing, teaching, preaching, and activism.

So whenever religious leaders and faith communities insist on sacrificing their own LGBT children for the sake of doctrinal purity, we can say No. Jehovah jireh—God will provide another way.
Whenever politicians insist that our elders and grandparents must be sacrificed for the sake of the economy—remember calls for exactly that at the beginning of this coronavirus pandemic? Whenever we hear that we can and must say No. Jehovah jireh—God will provide another way.
Whenever multinational corporations insist on sacrificing entire ecosystems to ensure profits shareholder value, we can say No. Jehovah jireh—God will provide another way.
Whenever the institutions rooted in systemic racism insist on sacrificing black and brown bodies we must rise up and say No! Jehovah jireh—God will provide another way for us to live together in peace and with justice.

It turns out that God provides another way by inspiring white people to do our homework and become better allies for our siblings of color; and by inspiring economists to come up with different models for sustaining our common life; and by inspiring whole communities to rally around their most vulnerable members to protect them from viral infection; and by inspiring straight, cisgender people to march with us queer folk in pride parades, and accompany us to wedding banquets, and to honor whatever gender anyone wishes to manifest in the world.

Jehovah jireh—God provides all these other ways to live, and more, for the sake of thriving, flourishing life, and not just for some but for all.

The world is hungry for that reassurance, for that good news, for even just the possibility that religious traditions are up to the challenge of this present moment. Indeed, people are desperate to learn how to tap into the deep wells of faith, hope, and love.

Let us encourage each other as people of faith with those words of an ancient faith: we may not know what the future holds, and indeed, we have no idea what the future will bring. But somehow, someway, God will provide.

welcome_rainbow_church

Hearing a Dog, Seeing a Human: Crossing a Border with Jesus

“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped…”

I kept returning to those words from Isaiah (35:6) as I prepared to preach on a set of challenging biblical texts this week.

Reflecting on that prophetic promise, it occurred to me that there are some things we actually do not want to hear very clearly or that we wish he had never seen at all.

It has been troubling, to say the least, to hear overt forms of racism in this country the last eighteen months, both on our city streets and at the highest levels of government. Even more distressing in some respects is to see with greater clarity how those eruptions of ire tap into a long tradition of racial bias, a corrosive thread running throughout American history.

white_nationalist_charlottesville — White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, VA, 2017

A hair-raising account of this appeared just recently in the New York Times. There I learned about Charles Henry Pearson, an Australian academic of the late nineteenth century, who warned that white men would soon be thrust aside by black and yellow races. He urged a concerted effort to defend particular parts of the world against such encroachments so that the “higher races” can live and increase freely, for the sake of their “higher civilization.”

I was dismayed to learn that Theodore Roosevelt was rather fond of Pearson’s work, and was actually in communication with Pearson, assuring him of the “great effect” Pearson’s defense of the white race was having on “all our men here in Washington.”

Dismayed and then disgusted by the reminder of Woodrow Wilson’s commitment to preserve “white civilization and its domination of the planet,” a posture that led W. E. B. DuBois, in those early decades of the twentieth century, to describe the emergence of what he called “the new religion of whiteness.”

I read that piece from the Times while thinking about the passage many Christians heard this week from the letter of James (2:1-17). Quite frankly, I’ve been never been a fan of that biblical letter, and I often agree with Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer who apparently wanted to rip James out of the Bible entirely. But I read James differently this past week, perhaps like I’ve never read him before.

As you may know, those who have trouble with the Letter of James usually complain about not finding any grace in it. That was Luther’s objection, or what’s called “works righteousness,” the idea that we can earn our salvation through good works. But I don’t think James had anything like that in mind.

To the contrary, James is not the one denying divine grace in this letter; it’s those he writes about, the ones who treat the rich and powerful as if they are better than the poor and weak—they are the ones who deny grace. Those who play favorites, make distinctions, show partiality—they are the ones who fail to live their faith. Your faith might as well be dead, James writes, if you don’t treat everyone as equally graced by God, equally loved.

James pushed me this week to ponder favoritism itself, its corrosive, even violent effects, and how it manifests in the notion of “higher races.”

Why do human beings do this? Not all of us make such gross distinctions, of course, at least not publicly, but many do and it would seem many more are increasingly willing to do so openly. But why? Why classify and categorize and make such harmful distinctions?

At least one among many possible reasons occurs to me: we don’t really believe in grace.

Deep down many are convinced—because most of us were taught—that love and affection, even dignity and self-worth must be earned, and earned, and earned yet again.

For some, the fear of not measuring up can make the idea of a superior race seem quite attractive indeed—especially if you yourself could belong to that superior race, just by being born.

I am not proposing a singular origin for racism, nor a simple cause-and-effect mechanism for the complexities of white supremacy. I am, however, urging Christians to consider these cultural dynamics in the context of our faith. Just as James, I believe, would urge us to do.

In a world that is constantly forming us in the fear of unworthiness, shaping us with the anxiety over inferiority, dividing us—often violently—between the chosen and the damned, we need continually to be re-formed by love, nourished by a feast of divine grace.

Perhaps Mark’s Jesus can help (Mk 7:24-37). I mean, the Jesus who called a foreign woman a “dog.”

Let me quickly note that I, personally, do not consider it an insult to be compared with a canine. Given the types of human behavior we see displayed daily in the news, I would be quite happy to be thought of as dog-like.

That said, the current occupant of the White House has made clear on Twitter that “dog” is definitely not a compliment, especially when applied to women of color. The same could and should be noted about this nameless Syrophoenician woman in Mark who begs Jesus to heal her likewise nameless daughter, a woman who is compared to a dog begging for scraps of food.

Note the details with which Mark describes this scene. It takes place in the region near Tyre, a city well north of Jerusalem, farther north than the Galilee, definitely not a purely Jewish city, but one with deep Hellenistic influences. “Phoenician” names that region more particularly, and the “Syro-” marks the even larger region of Syria.

Mark is evoking a long history of land being carved up by various empires and kings, a history marked with border disputes, conquest, animosity, and violence.

syrophoenician_woman And then—as if this were not obvious—Mark notes that this Syrophoenician woman was a “Gentile,” or a better translation might be simply “Greek.” Not Jewish, in other words.

Sounds to me like a postmodern hybridized identity forged in the crucible of an occupying imperial force residing on contested borders with all sorts of socio-political intrigue and religious anxiety. This ancient text could have been ripped from the pages of the New York Times!

Even more so if we add a bit of economic class to this mix. Typical portrayals of this woman resemble a peasant, or someone at least lower in socio-economic status than Jesus. One biblical commentator, however, has argued against that usual grain of interpretation, suggesting instead that this unnamed woman could have been of significant means.

The combination of the proximity to Tyre and her Syrophoenician ancestry recalls the story of Ahab, Jezebel, and Elijah in the first book of Kings. There we read about Jezebel, a Phoenician princess condemned to be eaten by dogs—which puts a rather unsavory spin on those scraps falling from the master’s table.

In short, Jesus and this woman occupied vastly different spheres, worlds apart, and this difference was laden with value. Mark makes this clear by tossing in that reference to dogs—the difference between Jesus and this woman is as vast as that between species.

We can recognize these dynamics quite easily by looking to the U.S. border with Mexico, where children of asylum seekers are housed in cages.

Perhaps the point is made best by noting that this woman doesn’t even have a name; she’s a geopolitical marker, an ethnic designation, a gendered manifestation of religious rivalry.

Borders convert human beings into categories—silenced and invisible.

Even Jesus needed some time to hear this woman clearly, to hear and see the human behind the border.

But he did hear her, eventually, and her daughter was healed.

It’s not just accidental, a bit of random chronology that leads Mark to place another story of healing right after this story of a nameless, foreign woman. Whatever divides us, fragments us, keeps us from hearing the grace of God—all of this wounds us, individually and collectively. And we, just like the man Jesus encountered, need healing.

Blinded by ancient prejudice, unable to hear beyond the walls of hatred, the voices of oppression muted by socio-political forces hell-bent on dividing us—we need to hear again, and then again, and still more the good news of the Gospel: God’s grace extends to all, no birth certificate or passport or green card or bank account or pedigree required.

Christian worship matters in a world carved up with borders, a world of nameless humans seeking to be heard and seen, a world where dogs become ciphers for human disdain and derogatory rhetoric.

friendship_park_communion1 — Eucharist at the California border with Mexico.

Christian worship matters in such a world when we gather around the Eucharistic table, and for a deceptively simple reason:

When we eat well, we see and hear better.

When we gather at the Table of divine grace, we see ourselves and each other better.

When we feast on grace and love, we see ourselves and each other better, though this can be difficult, especially when we hear the voices of our own racial bias and see our own complicity with forms of discrimination.

And that’s exactly the point of grace and love—to notice all those hateful borders that divide us, and then work together to tear them down.

And that’s the work, James would say, that makes our faith lively.

“That Nothing May be Lost”: The Hope of Anglican Queerness in a Fragmented World

Anglican Christianity qualifies as an inherently queer religious tradition. I find this hopeful for a deeply fragmented world in a great deal of pain.

By “queer,” I mean more than welcoming spaces for LGBT people. I’m thinking especially of queer theory’s critique of binary oppositions and a persistent (often contested) rejection of purity in Anglican DNA. And I’m pondering these things under a ludicrously big ecclesial “tent” made from rainbow canvas.

Can Anglican queerness offer any hope for a world that seems to be unraveling? I think so, especially as polarized oppositions and purity codes confront us throughout all the world’s broken pieces. grace_cathedral_2

“Queer theory” has accrued nearly as many definitions as “Anglican” over the last thirty years. In that jumbled mix, I find two interrelated features of queer theorizing particularly helpful: 1) a posture of resistance to regulated regimes of the normal; and 2) a critique of binary oppositions. The interrelation of these features matters as much as each of the features. Regulated regimes of the normal, in other words, are perpetuated and policed by means of binary oppositions.

Consider, for example, the constant refrain (spoken as if self-evident) that men and women naturally occupy categorically distinct spheres. Men are public, dominant, and insertive; women are private, submissive, and penetrated.

If that sounds terribly old fashioned, we might review any number of today’s policy initiatives, legislative agendas, or just town hall meetings and PTA gatherings—or the flood of #MeToo moments and the still (annoyingly) ubiquitous question about which of the two men in a gay relationship plays the “woman’s part” (i.e., the passive and dominated one). These regulated regimes of the normal, queer theorists say, are policed by means of the binary gender system.

Queer theory’s exposure and critique of these dynamics frames the messy history of Anglican Christianity. Very little seems “normal” about a church that refuses to land in a clearly defined ecclesial space. The sixteenth century English Reformation apparently wanted to have its scones and eat them too, embracing a Catholic heritage with Protestant verve.

Anglican polity swerves toward centralized decrees (where exactly is our English Vatican?) only to find congregational objections yanking us back toward compromises and local “exceptions.” Anglican prayer books are rooted in Catholic rites but always modulated with Protestant rebuttals. Episcopalians recently celebrated the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15^th without ever mentioning, directly, the Assumption.

These peculiar Anglican spaces emerge from a persistent (and usually vexing) rejection of binary options: we are neither Catholic nor Protestant and still live somehow as both.

An invigorating and challenging posture sits at the heart of these religiously messy traditions: resisting puritanism. The emergent Church of England, we might recall, was rocked at its founding by Puritans (the ones who boarded the Mayflower and landed in “Massachusetts”), who insisted on “purifying” the church of all its papal remnants. These pious colonists longed to “drain the swamp.”

Right there, queer theory’s unrelenting interrogation of regulated normality meets deep Anglican commitments. The result is a catalyzing and healing vision for today’s seemingly intractable contestations and severely wounded communities. I mean this: the queerly Anglican refusal to be pure. We ourselves live in the “swamp.”

This queerness matters in more ways than even most Anglicans usually surmise. I’m thinking of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who fueled a world-changing socio-political movement with an image of the Beloved Community. The community he envisioned as beloved does not consist of people who agree with each other about everything, nor of people who look or act the same, nor of people who want to socialize with each other at cocktails parties—no, a truly beloved community brings a shockingly diverse collection of people together because of their shared destiny.

mlk_beloved_community
The destiny we share as humans on a planet with many other creatures of God cannot be a “regulated normalcy,” nor a neatly classified society divided into distinct camps and parties, nor a singular community defined by the purity of its ideology or its membership. King’s insistence on a shared destiny runs far deeper—and therefore more challenging and upsetting and lifegiving—than conformity to rubrics or legislative agendas or parsed with skin color or economic class or the gender of a spouse.

That’s why, in part, I persist in casting my lot with Anglican Christianity. Not because it defines me in opposition to other Christians, much less to other humans or other animals, but because its queer sensibilities break me open to find love and purpose among all those many “others,” no purity required.

Indeed, no purity actually possible—we are all untidy, messy, conflicted, and multiple. Queer theorists insist on this and I encountered it first by plunging into Anglican traditions, which seem perpetually on the brink of falling apart for their whacky and wonderful multiplicity.

The “big tent” of Anglican Christianity is not a perfect space; it is deeply flawed in many respects. That’s another reason why I pitch my own little tent under its rainbow canvas. I can’t manage to be pure; no one can. Even when some of my fellow Anglicans insist we should be, the attempts always fizzle, thankfully. (If purity is your standard, you might want to avoid the Gospels and stay away from church conventions.)

Many years ago, when I worried and fretted over my own religious and sexual purity (one because of the other) a seminary professor said, “we’re not saved by being right; we’re saved by grace.” That’s not an excuse for either doctrinal sloppiness or moral laxity; but it is a reason for generosity and hospitality. That just might be a path toward healing, toward a shared destiny, toward—dare I say—salvation.

American society today faces a severe threat to one of its founding suppositions: e pluribus unum (out of many, one). Christians face this quandary constantly, not least by wondering what in the world to do with John’s Jesus when he prays that we all “might be one” (was even his prayer ineffectual?) or how to mark the week of “Prayer for Christian Unity” every January without blushing and mumbling platitudes.

Queer theorists urge us to suppose that “oneness” has nothing to do with uniformity; even more, that uniformity is the great enemy of a flourishing community. As I struggle with all of this, I’m grateful for the Anglican witness to multiple answers to key questions, even when we’re troubled by our own responses.

Oddly, queerly, I return to the Apostle Paul in those moments of consternation. I have grown to love that vexing pioneer of Christian faith and his convoluted self, the one who insisted that the “body of Christ” consists of many diverse members. That conflicted champion of incorporating Gentiles into a Jewish movement, that “least among the apostles” who, like all of us, made claims he himself had trouble putting into practice.

A world fragmented by zero-sum games of planetary proportions is eager and desperate for some reassurance that there is indeed a destiny of thriving life that all of us—quite improbably, quite queerly—share.

Many Christians heard a version of this hope for a month of Sundays this summer as the lectionary led us through the sixth chapter of John’s account of the Gospel. After feeding a multitude of people, Jesus says this: “gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost” (6:12).

John’s Jesus queerly spoke what Dr. King queerly tried to live, and this is still our queer hope today: a shared destiny.

feeding_5000_leftovers

Hope for Healing: Eucharistic Solidarity in the Domination System

I have been a bit surprised by where my routine of daily morning prayer has been leading me over the last two or three years. Reflecting on my own life, my friends and colleagues, the chaotic world around us, an unexpected phrase keeps surfacing: the need for healing.

flag_healing_jennifer_luxton — Image by Jennifer Luxton

I don’t often think much about healing, unless I’m knocked off my feet with the flu or a friend is facing a health crisis, and it hardly comes to mind at all when sorting through the jumble of American politics and social unrest—until recently. Now I can hardly think of anything else as my incredulity and consternation grow while reading the daily news.

The biblical texts many Christians heard in church yesterday inspired renewed attention to this theme that just won’t let me go, and for both personal and more widely social reasons. The more personal one: my Australian shepherd dog Judah has been suffering with a really nasty “hot spot,” a painful and terribly itchy skin infection on his butt. Dog people know what this means: Judah requires constant monitoring to get well.

I have been profoundly grateful to my two housemates, Todd and Miguel, who have been helping me and without whom I’m not sure how I would be managing to care for Judah. That alone, in a relatively small but still significant way, has reminded me that healing is far more social and communal than most of us likely appreciate.

And, conversely, the causes of dis-ease are more often rooted in complex social systems than most of us usually realize.

Back in the 1970s, the medical profession just assumed that corporate executives of major corporations were more likely than others to succumb to cardiovascular disease and heart attacks because of their high-stress positions. Later studies have shown that just the opposite is true: the lower one is on the social and economic hierarchy, the lower one’s life expectancy.

It turns out that social status is the most powerful determinant for health outcomes related to cardiovascular, pulmonary, psychiatric, and rheumatologic diseases and some types of cancer. People in countries with narrow wealth and income gaps, for example, enjoy a relatively high life expectancy compared to the United States, which has one of the lowest among industrialized nations.

More recent studies suggest that, all other factors being equal, race is even more detrimental to health outcomes than economic status; African Americans and Latinx people in the U.S. exhibit worse health outcomes than white people of the same class.

Race matters for many reasons, not least because of the constant hyper-vigilance people of color must sustain in order to survive in a society of white supremacy; such vigilance keeps blood pressure elevated (even while taking blood pressure medication) and metabolic systems depleted (even on a healthy diet with regular exercise).

Issues of personal and collective health kept running through my thoughts as I pondered those lectionary texts. Healing itself became the frame through which I read them as I prepared to preach on them.

Each one of those texts—from the prophet Jeremiah, the letter to the Ephesians, and the Gospel according to Mark—each comes from a distinctive time and place, addressing its own peculiar concerns, and yet each one evokes for me a profound social disease that we have been living with for a long time, a disease that has now become so painfully apparent as to be all but intolerable.

I mean the institutional mechanisms that relentlessly divide and fragment the human family—divisions wrought by fear and hatred, fragmentation expressed in hostility and violence, and then experienced as isolation and alienation.

“Woe to the shepherds,” Jeremiah writes (23:1-2), “who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” You shepherds of my people, God says, “it is you who have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and not attended to them.”

How remarkably fresh an ancient text can sound, and even more so with a bit of historical context thrown in! In the midst of regional instability with mighty kingdoms vying for power, Jeremiah is writing at a time when a powerful empire is threatening the very existence of the Kingdom of Judah from the outside while the kingdom’s own evil-doing leaders on the inside divide and fragment and scatter their people.

Still more consonant is the letter to the Ephesians (2:11-22), a letter obviously not written to the United States but to first-century Ephesians. And still, the diagnosis of the human predicament in that letter and its hope for healing again sound so remarkably fresh.

Think on today’s geo-political realities with these phrases from that ancient letter, phrases about those who were foreigners by birth, aliens to the commonwealth, strangers to the promise, separated by a dividing wall of hostility.

Think as well on these phrases of the hopeful promise in this same letter: the proclamation of peace to those who were far off and to those who were near, those who are no longer strangers and aliens but citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.

This bears repeating: that letter was not originally written for us. And yet, and still, can we not hear in the otherwise arcane religious parsing of that text a lament over divided, fragmented communities and the passionate yearning for wholeness?

I would invite listening for those same themes in the passage from Mark’s account of the gospel that so many heard yesterday (6:30-34, 53-56), and especially what Mark describes right toward the end of that text.

It’s one of many stories about Jesus the healer. But I noticed something that I never thought about before: wherever Jesus went, Mark says, the people laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged Jesus for a healing touch.

I find that an odd but compelling image—they laid sick people in the marketplace.

I usually think of these healing stories as encounters between Jesus and an individual, often in private. But this one is between Jesus and a whole mass of sick people, so many that they are laid out in a public place, likely in the center of town, and not just any place, but a marketplace—a place of commerce and economic exchange.

I always try to remember that there are no random details in these stories; it mattered to Mark that these people were laid out in a “marketplace.”

I also try to remember the context of these stories and why it matters: they come from a people under siege by an imperial power, occupied by the might of Rome.

Reflecting on that context, I turn often to biblical scholar Walter Wink and his riveting description of what “empire” actually entails. He refers to this as “The Domination System”:

The system is characterized by unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, biased race relations, patriarchal gender relations, hierarchical power relations, and the use of violence to maintain them all…from the ancient Near Eastern states to the Pax Romana, to feudal Europe, to communist state capitalism, to modern market capitalism (from Wink, The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millennium).

Wink, among others, would urge us to read gospel stories of healing more directly in that context of imperial domination. Surely it is no mere coincidence that the symptoms Jesus often encounters among the sick and demon possessed mirror the effects of being colonized and taken over by an imperial power with economic and military force: irrational fears, dissociation, mania, psychosis, alienation from family and friends, isolation from the wider community, and all of this as a debilitating and disempowering trauma manifested in all manner of physical, psychological, and spiritual disease.

It mattered to Mark that the sick were laid out in a marketplace, a primary location for disenfranchising the poor, the outcast, and powerless. Let us also notice the means by which these people were healed—by reaching out merely to touch the garment Jesus was wearing.

I find this so moving, unraveling, bracing: Whatever else they hoped Jesus would heal, they were reaching out for connection, for belonging, for the restoration of relationship in the midst of alienation and fragmentation—in the midst of a marketplace.

Such a modest gesture, just reaching out for touch—but how vital in systems that oppress and isolate to hope once again for belonging.

Reading these biblical texts through that frame of a profound social disease quickly brought to mind the Eucharistic Table at the heart of Christian worship. What I have not often pondered about that Table suddenly appeared in bold relief: to approach it as a source of divine healing.

The Domination System wounds everyone, though clearly in varying degrees and with diverse effects. Empire will always train us to map our sense of self and self-worth to the color of our skin, how much money we make, the kind of work we do, whom we love, the genders we manifest, the number of degrees we’ve earned, if any.

Few of us have any idea who we even are apart from these classifying marks, all this “imperial branding.”

These wounds fester, often unnoticed, then suddenly appear whenever we treat those who are different from us with suspicion, or fear, or outright hostility.

Left untended, these wounds shape the institutions and organizations we create and populate, where the wounding continues from one generation to the next. Wounded people make broken and harmful systems.

We scarcely notice those cycles of transmitted wounds until God interrupts them, gently but surprisingly, by offering God’s own self to us. At that Table of self-offering, social status makes no difference whatsoever for the health outcomes of God’s grace and generosity—no birth certificate, passport, green card, driver’s license, paycheck stub, or insurance card required.

This healing gift of God’s own life matters, more than we might imagine. In a deeply divided and fragmented world, the Table invites what theologian M. Shawn Copeland calls “Eucharistic solidarity.”

We stand at that Table, Copeland writes, oriented toward “the lynched body of Jesus, whose shadow falls across the table of our sacramental meal.”

In his raised body—of which we are the members—God interrupts the structures of oppression and violence, offering us a new way of being in the world, “a new way of being in relation to God, to others, to self.”

I confess: in writing in this way about the Bible, about church and Eucharist, I frequently think I’m woefully naïve, a hopeful but mostly not terribly useful romantic.

And still, and yet, there must be a different way of being the world, there simply must be. And I’m not ready, not yet, to give up on the queer way Jesus modeled a wholly/holy way of living for the healing and flourishing of all.

Jesus modeled this most queerly, perhaps, at the Table. There the Domination System is not overthrown with retribution or violence (in ways some of his own disciples hoped he would lead). Instead, he offers hope that the System itself will be healed with the solidarity of love.

As Copeland concisely and so beautifully suggests, “the Eucharistic banquet re-orders us, re-members us, restores us, and makes us one.”

May it be so—for all its naïve hopefulness—may it be so.