Politics – Peculiar Faith

Here’s Mud in Your Eye! Earth Healing for Lent

When the conditions on a racetrack are just right, and when one of the horses is clearly leading the others by at least a good body length or so, the hooves of that lead horse can kick up clumps of dirt and mud, which can land in the faces of the horses trailing behind.

That horse-racing image crept into American taverns in the late nineteenth century as a toast while clinking beer mugs and signaling victory for the speaker: “Here’s mud in your eye!”

Clouded or obscured vision tied to one’s standing in a race is one among many examples of physical sight as way to speak of knowledge or insight. “Oh, I see,” someone might say, referring to nothing in their physical line of sight but rather to their cognitive acuity.

This figure of speech and its many analogues are remarkably widespread, across nearly all cultures. Some have even suggested that eyesight—the physical act of seeing—is the primary way we gather information about the world around us.

(I have to say, I’m not entirely persuaded about the primacy of vision. American philosopher Richard Rorty was fond of pushing against such claims by wondering why seeing something should give us more knowledge about it than, say, rubbing up against it, or hearing it, or embracing it. The obsession with ranking lurks around these possibilities, too, as if we must always identify the best or the only way truly to know something for really real.)

The common contrast between dark and light, between shadow and illumination, likely plays a role here, too: what we truly know has come into the light of day. Nearly all of the world’s religious traditions embrace such contrasts to describe enlightenment and spiritual awareness, and the Lenten lectionary gave us a classic story about this just yesterday, the story from John’s account of the Gospel (9:1-41) about Jesus giving a man born blind the gift of sight.

“Healing of the Blind Man,” Anthony Falbo

Images of light paired with sight create the moment of divine encounter in this story when, as we like to say, “seeing is believing.” John notes directly the spiritual significance of this moment as it becomes entangled with religious regulations. While the gift Jesus offers surely counts as a reason to celebrate, the religious leaders of that man’s community are thoroughly skeptical and even resentful about it.

In fact, this long reading from John’s Gospel is mostly about religious resentment, about a near-comedic refusal of those first-century religious leaders to recognize a moment worthy of shared praise and celebration. John likewise uses images of sight for such religious folly with a reversal of fortune motif: the one born blind, now can see; the ones who should have seen, are now blind.

Full transparency: I’m a religious leader, too. I’m just as complicit in religious foolishness as those first-century figures. I know only too well how easy it is to get so caught up in the gears and gadgets of institutional religious life that we miss the very life-giving presence of God among us—we just can’t see it!

Religion can cloud our vision, but so can patriotism, and nationalism, and ethnicity, and money, and gender. Our social identities and strategies for navigating our relationships can act like blinders, rendering us oblivious to the wider world all around us.

“Wake up!” says the Pauline writer to the Ephesians—another great image for insight and awareness in yesterday’s lectionary texts (5:8-14). Waking up, of course, can happen in a number of ways, including opening one’s eyes and seeing, but also (as Rorty would remind us) touching, listening, showing up, paying attention, living bravely, forming communities of trust, standing in solidarity with the most vulnerable, to name just a few of the many ways we can awaken to God’s presence.

Two weeks ago, the Lenten lectionary gave us Nicodemus at night, under the cover of darkness; last week, the woman at the well in the bright light of day; and now sight for the man born blind: throughout John’s account of the Gospel, Jesus is waking people up, and showing them the truth, and inviting them to walk the good road toward abundant life.

John is also clear about this: traveling that road is risky, and not everyone is happy to see the truth come to light, and seeing truly may well cost us nothing less than everything—this Lenten road leads to the Cross, after all. And let’s not fail to notice that the gift of sight to the man born blind cost him his religious community, his home, his friends, and family.

To “wake up” and begin seeing even hints of the truth can cause us to question where we really belong, and with whom, and for what purpose, and to reject even religion if it offers anything less than thriving, authentic life.

I love the First Nations Version of this story, an indigenous translation our parish enjoys during Lent. In that version, the man born blind asked Jesus to tell him who the Chosen One might be, and Jesus said “look at me”—to the one born blind, he said look at me and see the One chosen to live as the “True Human Being”—woke, compassionate, devoted to healing.

Yes, and, all of that said, why the mud? Seriously, why mud?

Jesus encounters this man born blind, and his first impulse is to spit in the dirt, make mud, and smear it on the man’s eyes? Really? I’m surely not the only one who is just a bit too germ-phobic to relish the idea of having muddy spit on my eyes.

Why would John—supposedly the highly sophisticated, intricately philosophical Gospel writer—why would John include this literally dirty detail? Doesn’t this seem, well, rather primitive and crude, especially by modern Western standards?

Reading this story in the First Nations Version prompted me to reflect a bit more than I usually do on Jesus firmly planted in the land itself—on Jesus, in other words, as indigenous to the land of the Mediterranean basin. He was not only an itinerant preacher and teacher, but also a traditional healer. (A number of insightful thinkers continue to help me bridge my Western Christian convictions and indigenous practices, including Randy Woodley.)

Indigenous healers of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds around the world are typically attuned to what we modern people often call (sometimes dismissively) “natural remedies.” In that light, of course Jesus is rooted in the Earth, the land, and yes, the dirt as he makes mud for a healing salve.

Reading such stories from a gilt-edged, leather-bound book extracts these earthy stories from their natural habitat. We have so sterilized and sanitized and intellectualized these ancient texts that we have all but forgotten their fleshy origins in the land, in the dirt itself, which it turns out has healing properties.

The Latin word for soil is humus; that’s also at the root (as it were) of the word “human.” Dirt is not inert; it brings forth life, and not only our life—the soil itself teems with all sorts of life.

“When the Light Breaks Through,” Catherine Picard Gibbs

The failure to thrive that leads to death happens quickly when we tear apart the bond between human and humus, between creatures of Earth and the soil. That certainly describes today’s ecological crisis, and the deadly consequences of removing ourselves from Earth herself, where—along with the air and water—God’s own Spirit of life resides. (Yet another example of religious blindness is my constant struggle to suppose God resides somewhere “out there,” way beyond the sky, the stars, the edge of the Universe itself; the Spirit of Life, the Source of all living things is instead everywhere around us and in us–and I’m convinced that this conviction alone would change the world.)

These traces of traditional healing practices—and regardless of whether the Johannine writer intended this—evokes the indigenous bonds to the land which we need so desperately to recover today, and suggests what a twenty-first century Lenten practice really ought to entail: repairing our relationship with Earth.

It just so happens that we’re reading this story not only in Lent but also Women’s History Month. So let’s be sure to note how patriarchal systems associate Earth-based traditions with women (and are thus easily dismissed), while text-based traditions belong to men (who hold the power of interpretation and thus authority to decide what is true). More pointedly, feminizing Earth makes her suitable for male control, for ravaging, and for plundering, and for extracting resources whenever we please. This is exactly and literally and not merely metaphorically what Jeffrey Epstein was doing with girls and women on his Island of Misfit Billionaires.

Repairing, it seems to me, likewise means this: refusing to choose between Earth and Text, between healing and knowledge, or indeed between female and male.

Either/or, binary choices are part and parcel of the problem that wounds us, and they are far too limiting in the wonders of a world God has created, not for division and separation but for communion. John’s Jesus is, in every Johannine story, perfectly attuned to the energies of Earth and also to the presence of Creator God; his ministry (and most of the so-called “miracles”) quote often consisted in revealing and disclosing that deep harmony between Earth and Creator for the sake of healing and abundant Life.

That harmony (and the communion it creates) is the precious circle of light into which we are invited to step—or really, urged to step. There’s no time to waste: Let’s step fully into that light and shine as beacons of the Gospel in a grim and violent society, inviting others to wake up with us, not only to see with the heart, but to feel with the soul, and to hear with ears tuned to the rhythms of God’s presence thrumming and vibrating in the loamy soils of Earth.

Jesus spit into the dirt and made mud; Jesus made mud pies, and then he spread them on a blind man’s eyes for the gift of sight: returning to Earth—repairing and healing our relationship with Earth—this will make us shine, just like Jesus, as light for the world.

(And by the way, among the many things such light would illumine—to recall where this blog post began—is hope for horses to live a life free of entertaining humans. Severe suffering often results from their coerced performances, and sometimes dying in horrible pain because of it. The efforts to ban horse-drawn carriages in New York City continue for that reason as Mayor Mamdani indicated his commitment to ending the practice, but opposition to the ban has been fierce. It’s time to invite other species with us into that circle of Gospel light—free of saddles, free of harnesses, free of human domination.)

“Spirit of the Horse,” Gordon Henry (known as a “ledger artist” who used pages from commercial ledgers as “canvas” to create images of vitality of the very natural world that had been reduced to commodities on that paper.)

Women’s Lib Comes to a Village in Samaria

A big shout out to lectionary “Year A” in the three-year cycle which gave us just yesterday the intrepid and resilient (though sadly nameless) “woman at the well” in John’s account of the Gospel (4:5-42). She herself was a fount of living water as we gathered for worship in this Lenten season, in these days when white patriarchy is running amok across the globe and an oily rain is falling on the people of Tehran—an unprecedented environmental catastrophe.

Rather than oil in the streets, and as if like Moses, we struck the rock in the wilderness in worship and out from ancient biblical texts streamed the kind of clear watery refreshment we hardly knew we needed so terribly much. How fortuitous and perhaps even divinely inspired that the lectionary landed on these biblical texts in Women’s History Month—a month that really should feature actual women (with names, damnit!) and not merely stereotypes.

It’s dismayingly difficult to keep women real given the long, the achingly long literary, religious, and political history of turning the stories of women into archetypes, symbols, and violent cliches. As we now know in some fresh and horrifying ways from Jeffrey Epstein’s island of misfit billionaires, women (and girls) are not merely tropes but objects to be traded, trafficked, bartered, enslaved, raped, tortured, and killed.

A Sunday lectionary hardly seems up to the task of unraveling and dismantling such an infernal misogyny, unless we pay attention, and unless we take ancient stories as contemporary beacons, and unless we insist that Scripture really can inspire and equip us—with the Holy Spirit’s charisms—to live as revolutionaries, just like Jesus.

So let’s be sure to notice when reading the story about that fierce woman at the well—and then notice again, and then still once more (because deeply ingrained patriarchal habits are insidiously hard to break)—that there’s absolutely nothing in this story about repentance and forgiveness; but there’s quite a lot in this Johannine story about cycles of patriarchal domination.

Let’s take a step back from that observation (which sounds like heresy in my Evangelically-shaped ears) and consider carefully the calcified cliches behind which women so often disappear. Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, on the first Sunday in Lent, the lectionary assigned the classic story from Genesis about the temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent.

Ah! But that’s not how most of us remember that story. Most of us have heard it referred to as the “temptation of Eve,” who then seduces Adam to make the same mistake she did.

That difference makes a significant difference: imagining only Eve present for the serpent’s temptation makes Eve a symbol of the original seductress who leads to the fall of man (both in the generic and particular sense)—and who does so again and again, from generation to generation, wearyingly repeated as stale caricature on a manly stage.

John’s story at a well in the desert has often been read in much the same way as that iconic story from Genesis. In fact, the literary figure of “Woman as Wicked Seductress” is so common—infusing the air we breathe and the water we drink—most of us don’t even have to know about it to read John’s story with that motif as our interpretive lens.

I grew up hearing this story as an encounter between Jesus and a sexually promiscuous woman—a woman who had led astray no fewer than six men—and how wonderful it is that God’s forgiveness can extend even to someone like her; but none of that is even hinted at in John’s telling.

The first-century context of the story offers alternative ways of reading that are much more plausible. Given the ancient mortality rate, this woman could have been widowed multiple times; cultural customs would have forced her to marry the brothers of her deceased husbands, one after another.

It’s even more likely that she was struggling because of religious marriage regulations in which only men could initiate divorce, and for any reason at all; the social and economic vulnerability of unmarried women might have forced this woman to remarry after multiple divorces just to survive—and perhaps that’s why she resorted to living with a man who was not her husband, a way just to put food on the table.

To repeat once more: Jesus says nothing at all to this woman about forgiveness, not even repentance; what startles and astonishes this woman is that Jesus apparently knew—he knew and he named—what she had been enduring and living through.

Reading this story apart from the usual patriarchal assumptions about sexual morality can itself be quite liberating, and a way to notice a remarkable first-century embrace of a woman as student and disciple, as compelling witness and evangelist, and some would say one of the earliest apostles! A whole village follows Jesus because of her ministry!

But there’s more: John goes still further in his portrayal of Jesus as a divine social revolutionary with a story that isn’t about just any (anonymous) woman; this woman is from a village in Samaria, a region denigrated and despised by the religious elite in Judea. (It takes hardly any imagination at all to bring to mind today’s “Judeans” and “Samaritans”.)

Recall the biblical story (1 Kings 16—2 Kings 9) about Ahab, a corrupt ruler of the northern Kingdom of Israel, who made a political alliance by marrying a Phoenician woman by the name of Jezebel. Together, they set up their own capital city away from Jerusalem and in Samaria, where they established a temple for idolatrous worship.

Even when those details from the biblical story are unfamiliar, very few would fail to recognize the name “Jezebel”—yet another emblematic figure of the dangerous seductions of women in the affairs of men.

John the Evangelist may have been enamored with a misty-eyed neo-platonic mysticism (and I confess to finding wonderful insights when I read him that way), but right now, today, it matters even more to see in this one Johannine woman the embodiment of both the vexations of gender and the hostile rivalries of ethnicity.

I mean, what if John is writing this story not as a way to illustrate God’s gracious forgiveness of a “sexual sinner” (dare I repeat this? that is not in the story at all). What if he is instead writing a story of God’s own determination to liberate women from their patriarchal classifications, and to heal the wounds of ethnic rivalry and hatred? Sure, preach forgiveness, but not with this story; this one is about freedom.

Oh, how much richer this story becomes when it’s not merely and crudely about how many sexual partners a first-century woman may have had (honestly, who cares?) but rather how often women become trapped in cycles of male domination and control, illustrated by this one woman—an illustration embodied by a woman of undesirable ethnic heritage.

John may be rooted in thick and even convoluted theological speculation, but he is also (I am convinced) committed to taking otherwise simple and ordinary encounters and rendering them with a brilliant divine presence and transformative insight.

Consider the lectionary’s rich texts last week, for the first Sunday in Lent: not only the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation but also John’s story about Nicodemus, a member of the judicial counsel of the Judeans, coming to visit Jesus at night. The symbol of darkness can remind us of seeds planted in the soil of Earth, just as the body of Jesus himself is eventually planted in a dark tomb, from which will sprout an Easter life.

Yesterday, by contrast, John’s Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman drawing water at high noon, in broad daylight. Something important is being brought into view, being revealed and illuminated for us to see.

As I read this familiar story once again this year, I kept returning to the frame John seems keen to create for it: authentic worship. If “proper worship” divided Judeans and Samaritans, then John insists in the bright light of day to show us living water flowing like a crystal stream of healing between the Judean Jesus and the Samaritan woman—water that not only restores life to a parched land but also provides a balm for the ethnic violence that has scarred the land.

That violence is rooted in the ethnic and patriarchal hostilities that have marred human history for millennia. True and life-giving worship, in other words, will always lead us into relationships of healing and reconciliation for the sake of Beloved Community.

The day is coming, Jesus says, when the true worshippers of God are not tied to any one location or belong to only one chosen race or exhibit a favored gender but shall instead all worship together in spirit and in truth—both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, as the lectionary collect for the day declared.

As these lectionary texts lead toward the Eucharistic Table, it’s worth remembering that John is the only Gospel writer to include a rather grisly detail in the story of the crucifixion: both water and blood flowed from the pierced side of the crucified Jesus (19:34).

Now, it is certainly possible to read that moment as a forensic examiner: the Roman centurion’s spear likely pierced through the pericardial membrane around the heart of Jesus, releasing its watery fluid along with the blood.

Sure, but I don’t think John cares one little bit about that. I think John cares that human beings are physically born from their mothers in a mix of both blood and water, and here it flows from the Jesus who invites us all to be “born again.” The fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich imagined exactly this: the wound in the side of Jesus as the womb from which we are reborn into New Life—Jesus, she said, is our blessed mother.

Even if John only gestured toward the socially transformative power of authentic worship, it’s high time we take that conviction with us to the Eucharist Table. There we remember the death of Jesus and proclaim the hope of Easter—the intertwining of memory and hope creates true and genuine community, as Josiah Royce once noted, and leads to the formation of Beloved Community, as Martin Luther King, Jr., later preached, and which John the evangelist insists leads to rebirth.

Rebirth as mere “blank slate”? No, but being born again into a world where the life of a woman at a well in the wilderness can reassure us that God’s living water shall not fail to heal us and free us from the racially gendered systems of domination that wound us all.

The Freedom to Belong

“For freedom Christ has set us free.”

That wonderful declaration from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians (5:1) sounds like it was crafted precisely for this July Fourth holiday weekend—an ancient religious endorsement of Independence Day!

The lectionary assigned that text for the last Sunday in June, which for many is also LGBTQ Pride Sunday. Would Paul have endorsed that celebration, too?

“For freedom,” Paul says, “Christ has set us free. “

Whatever Paul meant by “freedom,” I doubt he was thinking about armed revolution against a monarch or living as sexual libertines. He certainly would not encourage us merely to do whatever we want; after all, always following the whims of a fickle desire is just another form of enslavement (as anyone recovering from substance abuse would quickly note).

I’m imagining Paul had a very particular kind of freedom in mind, the freedom God embodies in Jesus, which God likewise calls the Church to embody through the power of the Holy Spirit: it’s the freedom to love without fear; to embrace others without anxiety; to live with an abundance of grace, and laughter, and joy without ever worrying whether or not there will be enough.

Paul would not have imagined a life without constraint whatsoever and instead probably thought of “freedom” as more like a capacity, the ability to receive the abundant life that God intends for all. In that sense, spiritual practice is in large measure a process of decluttering, of clearing out space for that life, removing whatever stands in its way or blocks us from even seeing it. That’s the work of the Holy Spirit—freeing up room for God’s own life in us.

For that kind of freedom, Paul says, Christ has set us free.

Being “set free” for the sake of “freedom” does seem a bit redundant—unless we are not yet free to follow freedom. Many years of trying to live faithfully as a Christian has shown me how certain cultural assumptions usually interrupt the divine flow of love and grace: assuming, for example, that I must earn abundant life by working at it; or insisting that the harder I work for it the more of it I deserve; or worrying that others might steal it; or imagining that I’m surrounded by rivals and thieves whose very existence poses a constant threat.

These common assumptions keep me shackled, holding me back from the freedom to live—for freedom I must be set free.

I noticed this a bit more clearly by pondering what else the lectionary assigned for that same Sunday from Luke’s account of the Gospel. It seems to me that the “cultural assumptions” I just named are lurking around that unsettling story from Luke (9:51-62).

Luke opens a tiny first-century window in that story on a longstanding ethnic hostility between Judeans and Samaritans. Those first-century characters usually framed their hostility as a religious conflict—Judeans were constantly critiquing the Samaritans for not worshiping properly; this was so irritating to the Samaritans that they apparently refused to receive Jesus in their village.

This moment qualifies as a bit more than mere “irritation”; two disciples of Jesus, James and John, actually want to call down fire from Heaven to consume that village!

As often happens, naming a conflict as “religious” usually masks something deeper—religious rivals often emerge from a stubborn anxiety about one’s own goodness and worthiness: I can’t feel good about myself unless I feel bad about you; to live with confidence as divinely favored, others must live as divine exclusions.

It takes a lot of work to sustain those distinctions. Eventually, the time and energy required to maintain a system of the “favored” and the “excluded” builds up, breaks down, or explodes.

Just such a moment happened quite dramatically on a late June night in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. It was a moment of protest that marked a turning point for what became known as “gay liberation.” When I first learned about that moment, I imagined people who look mostly like me carrying posters in a parade; that’s not what happened.

On that night fifty-six years ago drag queens of color and homeless gay youth fought back against the humiliating brutality of New York City police officers at a gay bar. The rage had been building for decades, and it finally blew up. Those brown and black drag queens actually ripped parking meters right out of the sidewalk and refused to be arrested yet one more time just because of who they were.

That’s a powerful image of being liberated from shame and embracing one’s own God-given dignity—and that’s why we now celebrate a whole month dedicated to Pride.

“For freedom,” Paul says, “Christ has set us free.”

Roughly five years ago, a gay activist by the name of Alexander Leon posted an observation on social media that very quickly went viral; it resonated so deeply with so many of us—thousands of people started reposting it.

Paraphrasing his insight, Leon noted that queer people “don’t grow up as ourselves.” We grow up playing a version of ourselves, a role on stage that sacrifices authenticity to reduce the risk of humiliation and violence. “The massive task of our adult lives,” Leon notes, “is to identify which parts of ourselves are truly us, and which parts we created for our own protection.”

Let’s be sure not to stumble over the word “queer” in Leon’s insight; that word does not refer only to those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. It can refer to anyone who recognizes a mismatch between inner-self and outer-world—hasn’t everyone felt that at least once? Some of us feel it every day.

LGBT people have illuminated these dynamics of modern life in which we try so hard to fit in that we scarcely even know who we really are. Conformity for the sake of safety is soul-killing—and this was James Baldwin’s point back in the 1960s when he referred to the notion of “double consciousness squared,” the complexities of not only living as a gay man in straight culture but also as a Black man in white America.

These complex dynamics take not only time to untangle but also a community of care in which to do it. For LGBT people, finding a safe religious space to do that work feels like a miracle—quite seriously, miraculous. Religion, after all, is what prompted so many of us to adopt safety mechanisms in the first place, just to survive.

So even though St. Paul would not have understood “Pride month,” he would surely endorse whatever it takes to liberate ourselves from merely surviving, even just “fitting in,” and instead living for the kind of freedom that makes room for the fruits of the Spirit.

Those fruits were also part of the passage from Paul’s letter to the Galatians on Pride Sunday, and they include what seems far too often overlooked in movements of social change: joy.

Everyone needs not only a community of care for the arduous and lifelong process of unlearning and truly embracing who we are, but also a community of joy. It’s actually impossible to be joyful when you’re trying to “fit in”; joy springs instead from belonging, from the conviction that one truly belongs for exactly who they are.

This, it seems to me, makes LGBTQ Pride Month much more than only “welcoming the formerly excluded.” Creating and sustaining a genuinely inclusive community of faith offers a compelling witness to the wider world of that crucial difference between “fitting in” and “belonging”—and thank you, Brene Brown, for that compelling distinction!

Most of us learn very early on what it takes to “fit in”—usually hiding aspects of ourselves that we think others won’t like, or that we’ve been told are unacceptable. Belonging, by contrast, is being loved for exactly who we are, and knowing it.

Belonging sets us free to show up as we are and to learn how to love others in the same way. Belonging to Christ Jesus, Paul says, enables us to live like that, fruitfully, in the Spirit, with love, joy, peace, kindness, and generosity.

Here’s what I think Pride Sunday urges: do not waste any more time, not one single minute, on trying to “fit in.” Life is far too short for that and we don’t have the time for it.

Instead, let’s pour that energy into creating a communities where all of us can learn how to belong to each other, with love and for joy; this alone would take us quite a long way down the road toward the world’s healing, and not a moment too soon.

So, stand firm, Paul says, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

For freedom Christ has set us free.

“There is Joy in the Presence of Jesus,” Rebecca Brogan

Flying the Flag of a Political Gospel

On this annual observance of “flag day” in the United States—which will also witness many dozens of “No Kings” protest marches around the country—the only banner I’m keen to hoist bears the symbol of the Cross for the sake of justice and love.

To be clear, I will indeed take part in a “No Kings” public gathering today (and I will wear my clergy collar), and that’s because of an unswerving conviction: the Christian Gospel is never partisan but is always political.

That is hardly a popular opinion, especially when one hears the Gospel preached in a way that rubs against the grain of one’s partisan commitments. It is precisely that discomfort that generated the longstanding advice to include politics along with religion and sex among the topics we should avoid discussing in polite company, especially at dinner parties. (I have always found that cautionary advice amusing—apart from religion, sex, and politics, what else is there to talk about?)

It is fairly common in modern Western society (especially among the economically comfortable, one should note) to hear people insist that “religion” should be free of “politics,” and they usually expect or at least hope that Sunday morning worship will provide a respite from political discourse. This is, in my view, and quite simply, impossible. If we were to remove every reference to anything “political” from the Bible, I doubt we would have even a single coherent paragraph remaining.

It’s worth remembering that the English word “politics” comes from the ancient Greek word polis, or “city-state” (think “metropolis”). The connection here is this: people in groups need to navigate and negotiate how they are going to live, work, play, and also pray together in some way that is good for all involved—and that’s the shared work of politics.

How do we get food from the farmer’s field to your table? Who pays the physician when she takes care of your sick child? Where can I let my dog run free and get exercise without disturbing others? What should we do with people who are violent or threaten the safety of our neighbors? All of these questions and many more like them are political questions, and people of faith quite rightly turn to religion for help in answering them—or they should.

Biblical writers are remarkably consistent about the political implications of religious faith. At this particular moment in American cultural history, there are two overall biblical postures that seem especially worth noting in that regard. The first is the constant biblical refrain to care for the “orphan, the widow, and the stranger.” From the Mosaic Law—“cursed is anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice” (Deut. 27:19)—to the prophets, who declare God’s judgment on those who oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, and the poor (Zech. 7:9-10, as one example among many), there is no biblical room for compromise on this; as people of faith, we are obligated to care for the most vulnerable among us, and that is by definition a political concern.

The second biblical posture likewise runs consistently throughout both the Hebrew and Christian texts of the Bible, but with a bit more subtlety: expanding the circle of God’s people outward to include ever more diversity. It feels much more comfortable, of course, to be in community with those who are just like us, and also safer in times of uncertainty. But ancient Hebrew prophets like Isaiah imagine all the nations streaming to God’s holy mountain (Is. 2:2, among others), and Christian writers like Paul insist that the Body of Christ consists of many diverse members (1 Cor. 12:12, as just one example). Diversifying the people of God is actually the work of God and a divine gift, and certainly not a “problem” or something to “manage.”

The hard part, of course, is taking those broad biblical convictions with us into the public square—and into the halls of Congress or just our local city council meeting. As people of faith from various backgrounds, we will quite naturally disagree with each about how to put our faith into practice, but our faith does demand that we struggle and wrestle with precisely that challenge.

This current moment in the history of the United States sharpens the political challenge among people of faith, and in some instances, quite severely. Many of us are deeply concerned about the erosion of our democratic institutions, the demonization of minority groups (whether because of race, country of origin, language, sexuality, or gender, or a combination of all of these), and what seems like the heavy hand of authoritarian power. The political stakes are extraordinarily high in these areas regardless of one’s partisan affiliation.

The Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, Sean Rowe, just issued a letter on precisely the challenges of this moment, noting directly the Christian responsibility to be engaged politically for the sake of the common good. Bishop Rowe frames the letter with that clear purpose in view as he reflects on “how we Episcopalians can respond to what is unfolding around us as followers of the Risen Christ whose first allegiance is to the kingdom of God, not to any nation or political party.”

Writing while the U.S. military was being deployed in Los Angeles, Bishop Rowe articulated more specifically how the Gospel should shape our political engagement: “The violence on television is not our only risk. We are also seeing federal budget proposals that would shift resources from the poor to the wealthy; due process being denied to immigrants; and the defunding of essential public health, social service, and foreign aid programs that have long fulfilled the Gospel mandate to care for the vulnerable, children, and those who are hungry and sick.”

He concludes the letter by noting ways that The Episcopal Church will be taking a stand against certain public policies for the sake of the Gospel. “In short,” he writes, “we are practicing institutional resistance rooted not in partisan allegiance, but in Christian conviction.”

That sense of “conviction” emerges not only from the Bible but also the Book of Common Prayer and our Eucharistic Table Fellowship. I strongly suspect that putting that faithful conviction into practice will grow more, not less challenging in the weeks and months ahead. All the more reason to recall explicitly and frequently not only the Baptismal promise to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being” (BCP, p. 305), but also the Pauline vision of living that promise with faith, and with hope, and most especially with love (1 Cor. 13:13).

I remain so grateful to be doing the work of a parish priest at this particular historical moment, and with a parish community eager to discern together how to chart a path forward for the sake of the thriving of all. I am convinced that the world’s religious traditions were created for just such a time as this.

The Realm of Love has No King

I fell in love with Arthurian legend as a child, and not long after that with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy—they both feature irresistible kings, and they manage (quite convincingly) to make many believe in the possibility of not merely benign but even benevolent monarchies. Those stories often lulled me into a peaceful sleep as I dreamed of dwelling in fairy-tale kingdoms, maybe even living as a knight myself.

I carried those images with me into my Christian imagination, substituting King Jesus for Arthur and Aragorn, embracing a full-throated apocalyptic vision of God’s coming “kingdom” to set things right at last (with plenty of knights on horseback).

But I just can’t do it anymore. It has always been challenging to thread that needle for the sake of a “good king,” and these days even more so while living in a patriarchal society currently shaped by the ascendancy of White Christian Nationalism. But even more than today’s cultural currents (though they are strong indeed), the biblical witness to a livelier —and indeed, lifegiving—image of God’s realm of love has shifted my vision dramatically.

More than only setting aside potentially “unhelpful” images (to put the matter mildly), I have come to appreciate that this is about ongoing conversion for me, a conversion to a genuinely different way of thinking, and conceiving, and imagining whatever we think the word “God” means and how Jesus manifests divine presence—and it’s not about “royal splendor.”

I realized all this in a fresh way this past week as I was preparing for the seventh and last Sunday of the Easter season, the Sunday after the Ascension. For reasons I couldn’t at first discern, I found the traditional liturgical texts for the day annoying, then abrasive, and suddenly directly at odds with what the lectionary seemed to invite.

We’ve been using the 1979 Prayer Book lectionary at my parish this Easter season as a way to include texts from the Hebrew Bible. Reading the portion assigned for yesterday from the first book of Samuel (12:19-24) felt at first jarring and then suddenly liberating.

The ancient Israelites made a serious mistake, with consequences that lasted for centuries. The portion assigned from that book captures the moment when they realize this. Prior to that moment, the people had lived in a loosely organized confederation of tribes. They enjoyed the leadership of those whom God appointed on occasion to serve as “judges,” as they were called, insightful and inspired leaders to help the people live more fully into their covenantal relationship with God.

Samuel was the last of these judges and the first of Israel’s prophets. This was at a time when the people had grown restless: they had mostly forgotten the charismatic leadership of Moses and Joshua, who had led them out of their slavery in Egypt, and they were increasingly unhappy with the judges God appointed.

The time has come, they said to Samuel, for us to have a king.

Oh, Samuel said, that’s a really bad idea. He tried to explain that having a king and living in a kingdom would change dramatically what it means for them to be a people and how they live in relationship with each other.

But no, the people insisted: we want to be like all the other nations; give us a king.

So Samuel prayed about it and then reluctantly gave them what they wanted; and it did not turn out well. Samuel had warned the people about this very thing—your familial, economic, political, and religious lives will change, and not for the good, he said, if you have a king; and of course he was right.

Monarchies by definition create hierarchical societies; everything is structured vertically, in relationship to the monarch. The monarch’s subjects are related to each other only because they are all subjected to the authority of the crown. This is always true, regardless of the character of a given monarch—whether benign, benevolent, or brutal. Samuel himself made quite persuasively made this argument in detail just a couple of chapters earlier (8:10-18).

So it was of course more than a bit unnerving to reflect on that passage and then prepare Sunday’s liturgy with the collect appointed for the day from the Prayer Book, a collect in which we name God as “the King of glory.” We then praise God in that same collect for exalting “Jesus Christ with great triumph to God’s kingdom in heaven.”

It is of course quite easy, and very common, and probably perfectly natural for most of us to think of images of royal triumph for the Eastertide Sunday after Ascension Day. Yes, and…how curious that on such a day the lectionary would assign a biblical story that calls into question the value of kingly power—even warning us against any attachment to thrones, of any kind.

Reading Samuel’s caution about royalty together with a passage from John’s account of the Gospel deepened the day’s dissonance for me—and in a good way. That pairing reminded me that John always scrambles the most typical assumptions about power.

Very early on in his account—in the second chapter—John’s Jesus overturns the moneychangers’ tables in the temple, and that image of “overturning” runs throughout John’s account and all the way to the end. At the “last supper” the master becomes the servant, washing the feet of those whom he now calls friends; and John even refers to the suffering of Jesus on a cross as the very “glory of God.”

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

For John, Jesus does rise but not with royal power; John doesn’t include any account of the “ascension” at all. For John, the glory of God is instead divine solidarity—the one who dwells among us as one of us, the one who washes our feet, the one who dies just like us is the risen Jesus, who takes our humanity right into the very heart of God.

That’s not what most people expect to hear about God. Indeed, it’s much easier to speak of the exaltation of Jesus with more familiar images of power and in ways that we might more commonly expect—with images of kingly splendor, for example, and with the language of “ascending” and “going up and high above.” I suspect our traditions use such language to inspire praise and worship. After all, kings and crowns are symbols easily understood across cultures to convey a sense of divine sovereignty and lordship.

But that familiarity and ubiquity is exactly the problem. From Samuel to John, and many others in between, the problem is this: the language of royal power obscures the power of love.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is “good news” precisely because it overturns our expectations about divine power—just like those tables in the temple are flipped. The Gospel scrambles what “Lordship” even means when speaking of God.

As John describes it, Creator God enters God’s own creation, takes on creaturely life itself, its joys and sorrows, even death—and then raises it up, raises up creaturely life into Creator God’s very own heart.

Let’s be clear: that’s not how a “proper god” ought to behave; this is nothing less than scandalous.

We know how kings and queens should behave—they reign over a realm, just like gods and goddesses dwell above their dominions. But that’s not how the God of Jesus behaves and that’s not where we should look to find Creator God. As the angels say to the post-ascension disciples (and I now hear their tone of voice as chiding), “why are you looking up?” (Acts 1:11)

God, the Source of Life and Creator of all things, is not “up there” but found in the very things God creates and loves so deeply—including us. This is the astonishing insight we heard from John’s Jesus yesterday (17:20-26). God bless John, but his convoluted language all but guarantees most will miss the life-changing claim in that passage.

Jesus envisions that we ourselves would enjoy the very same unity, the loving union, that he enjoys with God—the very same.

By entering into deep solidarity with us, God invites us into deep and loving solidarity with each other, and indeed with the whole of God’s creation.

That’s the textual bread-crumb trail that led me to wonder what possible difference any of this might make for the world today, which is devolving and unraveling all around us.

The daily news now chronicles a world increasingly divided into insiders and outsiders, a world divided into “acceptable people” and “dangerous people,” and as we enter into LGBTQ Pride Month, we should be sure to note this: all those divisions are inscribed on the most intimate and closely held aspects of who we are in our gendered, sexual, racial, ethnic, and relational selves—on all of us.

These heartbreaking divisions are created by systems of domination and sustained by imperial regimes, and I am more convinced than ever that the Church must be very careful not to attribute that kind of power to God; far too many already assume that God looks and acts just like that—as monarch, king, and even tyrant.

Or less severely, many grew up (as I did) loving the old standard hymns like “Crown Him with Many Crowns” and enjoying the old paintings of heavenly thrones and thrilling to the sound of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” with its stirring vision of the “King of kings and Lord of lords.”

Yes, and still, and yet in some of the equally significant strands of biblical and theological traditions these kingly assumptions are quite remarkably overturned—yes, flipped like those temple tables—and all for the sake of love. Many of us heard the sound of those tables flipping yesterday morning, from the very last chapter of the Bible.

In the Revelation to John (22:12-14,16-17,20-21), just as we might expect (and as Handel set to music), we do find images of royal power—and then precisely what most do not expect: even the vision of a heavenly throne has no king! That throne is occupied instead by a lamb who was slain, and the invitation issued from that throne is not to a coronation but to a wedding feast.

“The Spirit and the bride,” John writes, “say ‘Come.’
“Let everyone who hears say ‘Come.’
“Let everyone who is thirsty come.
“Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.”

Everyone who hears.
Anyone who is thirsty.

I do not hear any conditions, not a single caveat, not one exception in that invitation.

Let everyone who is thirsty come and drink.

Honestly, I believe with all my heart that this simple invitation would change the world. The world is not interested, not one bit, in yet one more king sitting on a royal throne in some distant heaven dividing the world into yet one more time in “haves” and “have-nots.”

What does interest the world, and indeed what the world is desperate to know is whether all the thirsty will ever find drink, and whether anyone who is hungry will ever find food, and whether every single lonely heart will at last know the love that is freely given, with more that enough to spare, like living water in the deserts of a barren land.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is precisely that good news, the proclamation of exactly that Realm of Love—which has no king.

For the Healing of the Nations

Patriotism is not a Christian virtue.

To be clear, I find nothing inherently wrong with patriotic ardor. Indeed, I grew up loving my country and still do. I want to see the United States thrive and to live more fully into its founding ideals. But Christian discipleship—living as a disciple of Jesus Christ—is not attached to any one country or confined to any national borders (and let’s also note that discipleship might, on occasion, demand actions that run counter to national interests).

The timing of the Eastertide lectionary this year reinforced those convictions just yesterday about “God and country” and did so quite directly. On this Memorial Day weekend, we heard a poignant and beautiful image from the Revelation to John (21:10, 22-22:5), an image of the “Tree of Life,” whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

I have never been particularly fond of observing national holidays in a Sunday morning liturgy, but that passage from a complicated biblical book suggests a powerful way to frame our shared ministry as Christian people—not patriotically but for the sake of shared endeavor. More particularly on Memorial Day, the best way to honor those who gave their lives in service to this country is to work for peace, with justice, and the healing of all the nations.

That’s a tall order for any faith community, and certainly for the small parish I am privileged to serve in a lakeside resort town in the American Midwest. And yet, the way we shape our lives together in a community of prayer and service really does matter and does make a difference for the wider world.

Hearing also from John’s account of the Gospel yesterday presented some rich images for this kind of reflection and commitment (John 14:23-29). That passage features the promise Jesus made to send the Holy Spirit—a reminder that the Feast of Pentecost is just two weeks away. That gift is mission-critical for the Gospel because the Spirit creates, not a nation-state, but Beloved Community.

That image originated with Josiah Royce, a late-nineteenth-century American philosopher of religion whose work shaped the world-changing efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Civil Rights Movement. Royce seems particularly insightful just now, especially as an inspiring guide for Christian communities trying to navigate the perplexities and anxieties of this cultural moment.

We might recall that the lectionary portion of John’s Gospel yesterday comes from what is often referred to as the “farewell discourse.” Setting aside all the convolutions of those chapters in John, overall Jesus is trying to prepare his closest friends for his death, and to reassure them about his impending departure. “Don’t let your hearts be troubled,” he says. They don’t fully understand what is about to happen, but they certainly understand enough to be terribly sad.

Royce would have us notice in this passage what he called the religious mission of sorrow. Few of us likely think of sadness as having any kind of a purpose; it just is, and we either accept it or deny it. But Royce—who was well acquainted with very deep sorrow and grief in his own life and family—Royce urged us to consider that sorrow carries potential for insight; sorrow itself, he said, is a source of religious insight.

For this to be so we must look at the world courageously, not as we wish it to be or with any filters of denial, but as it really is right now—a world of injustice, and pain, and violence. Royce would have us see the world as it really is so that we can meet that world as bearers of light, workers for peace, and agents of healing.

This is what Royce means by the “religious mission of sorrow”—and I freely admit that this often sounds to me like a fool’s errand. The much more prudent path would surely lead instead toward self-protection, and the securities of privilege, and the isolating walls of safety so that we don’t have to see the wounded, the fearful, or the lonely.

But we don’t follow a “prudent path” when we follow Jesus. As the approaching Feast of Pentecost reminds us, we go where the Spirit leads—we go, as Royce put it, to the “homeland of the Spirit” to build Beloved Community.

I love Royce’s use of “homeland” for this, which is not in this case about finding a place of cozy rest but to situate the hard work of forging the bonds of lifegiving—and for Royce, that means “atoning” and “saving”—community. “Hard work,” because for Royce, the Spirit is always, without fail, what he called the “Spirit of Interpretation.”

“To interpret” in a Roycean sense is to make meaning from a particular moment or an event so that the world becomes a better place—not a perfect place (we can’t do that), but a better place than it was—and with the Spirit’s energy and guidance, we can do that!

The “event” Royce would have a Christian community constantly interpret, and not only in the Easter season but always, is the death and resurrection of Jesus—the one who was killed by imperial violence and raised by the God of new life.

What does this mean for us, right now, today?
How do we then live, in our neighborhoods and in the public square?
What should we do with what we have been given?

These are the questions we ask together in the “homeland of the Spirit” as we seek to build “Beloved Community” together.

John the Divine, the scribe for all the fantastical visions and wild prophecies in that final book of the Bible—John shows us what such a community entails. First and foremost, it’s about healing.

His vision of the heavenly Jerusalem—a classic and ancient symbol for “beloved community”—features a river flowing from the very throne of God, a river of the water of life. Planted on the banks of that river is the “Tree of Life,” which not only produces an abundant harvest of fruit, but also leaves that are for the “healing of the nations.”

Untitled (“For the Healing of the Nations”), Doug Himes

That word, “nations,” is a rough Greek equivalent of the ancient Hebrew word more simply meaning “gentiles,” or “non-Israelites,” basically all those who are not Jewish. Or in contemporary parlance, all the others, whether those “others” are on the other side of the world or just the other side of town. And hearing also from the Hebrew prophet Joel yesterday (2:21-27), those “others” are also not-human—the soil, the grasses, the trees, the vines, all other animals.

That’s a common English translation of that phrase, but not very helpful if it evokes only the modern Western concept of a “nation-state.” John did not have anything like the United Nations or the European Union in mind but something much closer to home, indeed we might even say he had something more “homey” in view.

What John seems to describe, in other words, is God’s own heart for making a home among us, and not only from our biological kin or with our closest friends, but all those “others,” the ones who are different from us—sometimes just a little “not-like-us” and sometimes very different in skin color, and accent, and language, and custom, and even species.

And that’s precisely why the leaves of the Tree of Life are for healing.

Differences and animosities and hostilities—whether inflicted on those who are far away or by those who are across the street or unfold in the mini-ecosystems of our own backyards—all such differences create wounds, and some of them are very deep, and last for a very long time, making all of us terribly sad and sorrowful.

Now is the time—or as Royce would say, every moment is always the perfect time—to embrace the religious mission of sorrow and to interpret across our differences in postures of healing, toward thriving, and for the sake of the home God envisions for all.

“Tree of Life for the Healing of the Nations,” Kelly Schumacher

Those who gave their lives for this country—for the sake of the democratic life and abundant liberty for which this nation ostensibly stands—they would surely urge us along this path and toward that Homeland of the Spirit.

Building Beloved Community together in that homeland, interpreting this present moment across our differences, would certainly be a legacy worthy of their memory.

Up, Up, and Away?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Baptism of Christ with Dove,” Daniel Bonnell

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

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

Easter for Earth

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

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

“Streams in the Desert,” Jennifer McClellan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what about Earth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“St. Francis Mandela,” Giuliana Francesca

The Word of the Lord?

“Just rip out those pages from your Bible!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sing Alleluia and Practice Resurrection

“If for this life only,” St. Paul writes, “we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Many Christians heard that verse yesterday, on Easter Day. It comes from Paul’s great fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, his extended, full-throated defense of a robust embrace of resurrection, of Easter.

In the excerpt appointed for yesterday’s celebration (15:19-26), Paul seems to insist that the great “Alleluia” of Easter morning must have consequences for more than this present life alone; the risen Christ leads us beyond the grave into new life with God.

I give my heart, with Paul, to that very hope. And yet, and still…perhaps now more than ever the flip side of that coin demands equal attention: if only for the “next life” we trust in Easter’s hope, we have ceded God’s precious Earth to the cruel and torturous forces of death. As in the Incarnation of God’s Word in Jesus, so also the resurrection of Jesus from the dead: this is no religious escape hatch from earthly concerns but the deepest possible union of Heaven and Earth; the Church ought to live like this is actually true.

Just like every compelling word and concept, the great “Alleluia” of Easter comes with important context, especially when we read Luke’s account of the Gospel (24:1-12). Writing in an occupied province of the Roman Empire, Luke constantly urges his readers to note the contrast between imperial power and the power of God. The Easter “Alleluia” resounds with its clearest tones when proclaimed with a brave resistance to Empire.

Biblical scholar Walter Wink offered a helpful framework for what it means to speak of “imperial power,” and especially as a caution against supposing that such power remains consigned to ancient history; imperial power always remains a present possibility, and for what Wink calls the “domination system.”

Whenever a society creates a network of power characterized by unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, biased race relations, and patriarchal gender relations, and then uses violence to maintain this network, that’s a “domination system.”

The first-century Roman Empire was a domination system, so was the Babylonian Empire before that; particular empires come and go, but the system lingers—even today, even in our own backyard.

Consider how Wink might help us read that passage from St. Paul. The risen Jesus, Paul says, is the first fruits of an unimaginable harvest. On that Great Day, the risen Christ will defeat “every ruler and every authority and power”—that’s the cue for Wink, who would remind us that Paul would surely have in mind the imperial principalities of the domination system that rob so many of abundant life.

Paul goes on to imagine that Great Day when even death itself is among the principalities defeated by Christ. But just as our joyful “Alleluia” deserves some textured context, so does that word death, which can sound a bit abstract in tidy religious spaces; it also rarely means just one kind of thing, especially these days when death comes in so many forms.

We see it in the destruction of whole ecosystems that give life, the clear-cutting of old-growth forests, and intolerable extinction of countless species, both plant and animal. We hear it in anguished cries from women with problem pregnancies who are heartlessly refused lifesaving medical intervention; we must acknowledge it in the short-sighted defunding of HIV prevention programs and the discontinued distribution of AIDS drugs around the world—a decision that has already killed people; and death lurks around even the bureaucratic cruelty in erasing—quite literally—transgender people from public policies and government websites.

That’s a short list of death’s many guises in today’s world, and we Christians must realize that this list has nothing to do with partisan politics. It makes no difference whether we align ourselves with Republicans or Democrats or Independents, as followers of the risen Christ, as followers of the Lord of Life, Christians cannot stand idly by while public policies rend the very fabric of our ecological existence and political postures shred the very basis of the common good.

We may not be able to change the whole wide world, but we can and we must practice resurrection right here, and right now—the empty tomb compels us and the great “Alleluia” equips us.

I love that notion of “practicing resurrection” right here and now. I first heard it from my friend and ministry colleague Jim Mitulski, who always devotes the season of Lent to the various ways we can “practice resurrection,” to make Easter matter in a world of violence and death—and we do that by the way we live, now.

When first-century imperial religion did its worst and killed Jesus, God refused to give Empire the final word. And we must stand as bold witnesses to God’s own Yes to life. No matter the cost, we must “practice resurrection” today.

This is why Easter is not only the unswerving confidence for that Great Day still to come—and it will come!—but also the courage to live in the light of that Great Day now.

I believe Luke was so eager to inspire this courage that he entrusted the news of Easter to women. He makes sure to name them: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James. These and others were among the women who had been with Jesus in Galilee, Luke says. By some accounts, these women supported Jesus in many ways, making that first-century Jesus movement possible.

These women were the last ones at the cross, and the first ones at the empty tomb.

When men are the measure of what matters, when only men can give testimony that counts in courts of law, and when men own other living beings as property, that’s when God reveals to women a path to new life.

Let us not overlook this crucial point: Luke entrusts the message of Easter to women in the midst of a patriarchal society. There’s not one bit of subtlety about this: the women share the news, and it was men, Luke says, and disciples of Jesus no less, who thought this was just an “idle tale” (Lk. 24:11).

When men are the measure of what matters, when only men can give testimony that counts in courts of law, and when men own other living beings as property, that’s when God reveals to women a path to new life.

The great Easter Alleluia invites us to walk that path and to practice resurrection; to live as friends in a community of equals; to extend a bold hospitality to everyone, no exceptions; to strive for justice and peace among all people; and to respect the dignity of every living being—just as we promise to do in the Baptismal vows we make.

Easter points to that great dawn over the horizon, beyond which we cannot presently see; in its dawning light, we must live as an Easter people now.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!