Politics – Page 3 – Peculiar Faith

Think like a Mountain

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

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

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

“Mt. Temple,” Brandy Saturley and Gisa Mayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How should we then live?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Whole Creation Groans,” Claudio Rossetti

A Collective Mending Session

Not unlike the United States of America, first-century Palestine was marked by distinct regions—each with various languages and accents, some with bustling urban centers while others mostly dotted with livestock herds or farms, all of them a mix of different religious sensibilities and a variety of political affiliations.

These regional features can sometimes contribute directly to the theological substance of a given story. Many Christians heard from Mark’s account of the Gospel yesterday, a passage the lectionary compilers stitched together in some peculiar ways. Overall, the passage portrays Jesus and the disciples crisscrossing the Sea of Galilee (Mark 6:30-34, 53-56).

Depending on which shore they land, they could be in a town shaped by Greco-Roman culture, or one still firmly rooted in Judean traditions, or a peculiar blend of ethnic customs from many different parts of that ancient Mediterranean basin, from Egypt to Gaul.

Mark seems to fancy here some geographical depictions of how the Gospel crosses all these lines of difference, not to erase them but to weave them together into something new. The image of the boat, the singular inland sea—these stand as symbols of hope for a new world, not a world of scattered fragments but of a beautifully woven tapestry.

Mark is likewise sure to note something about the crowds Jesus encounters on these shorelines: they were like “sheep without a shepherd”—aimless, perhaps, or without a clearly defined purpose, or maybe in search of some sense of home, the safety of the corral, as it were. The growing diversity of that Galilee region, an occupied province of the Roman Empire, probably felt unsettling; the long-standing familiar had become very strange.

More pointedly, those crowds were like sheep without a good shepherd. This was Jeremiah’s complaint, which some chose to read from the lectionary yesterday as well. Ancient Israel had plenty of so-called “shepherds,” religious and political leaders of all kinds. But they were hardly “good”—they divided the herd and scattered the sheep, destroying the flock itself.

“Woe to you shepherds,” Jeremiah imagines God saying, “woe to you who have not tended carefully to my people.”

That’s another way our country today resembles ancient Palestine. By some accounts, we are more fragmented than we have ever been. Media commentators have been expressing deep concern about the recent gun violence at a presidential campaign rally coming at a time when our country is “already deeply polarized.”

Writing in the New York Times, Peter Baker noted that American society has “split, it often seems, into two countries, even two realities” if not more. The divisions have grown so stark that 47 percent of Americans now believe a second civil war is likely or very likely in their lifetimes—forty-seven percent.

That sobering statistic might shed some light on another detail from Mark’s storytelling: the particular location where Jesus offers a healing touch. The crowds were bringing all those who were sick, Mark says, and laying them out in the marketplace of each town.

Markets are of course places for buying and selling, but they also stand for much more. In western Michigan, where I live, and in many other parts of the country, too, farmers markets pop up regularly as gathering places, locations for vendors and artisans of all kinds, as well as shoppers and visitors of all kinds.

Both ancient and modern markets are often crossroads, places where travelers and visitors and residents all mingle together. You can get swept away by the energy of a mob, take delight in the peculiar mix of people, or maybe feel a bit lost in a sea of strangers, perhaps unsure of where you really fit and belong, if anywhere at all.

The crowds—the ones who were like “sheep without a shepherd”—they bring the sick, and probably the lonely, and surely the despairing, always the alienated and unwell into the marketplace. Right there, Jesus heals them—sometimes only because they were able simply to touch just a corner of his tunic, a gesture of reaching out to connect, to reunite, to come home.

Mark doesn’t say what kind of healing took place, but this was no private consultation with a physician. This seems to me like a moment of social healing, of mending the fabric of a torn community, these crowds who were like “sheep without a shepherd” coming together in the marketplace for healing.

For all the advances of modern western medicine, many of us have likely forgotten an ancient insight, captured Mark’s story: healing is mostly a communal endeavor, the mending of relationships, a restoration of community—is this even imaginable any more in the United States?

“Collective Mending,” Catherine Reinhart

In doing an image search for this past week’s liturgy leaflet, I stumbled upon a gorgeous photograph, which we used on the leaflet’s cover. It’s a photograph of a mended quilt. The textile artist, Catherine Reinhart, brings people together to mend worn-out, tattered, and torn fabrics.

The photograph of that process which accompanied the mended quilt shows the gathered community in a circle engaged in shared mending. Reinhart calls this a “collective mending session,” and I cannot help but hear the Gospel in those words, and to see in that circle of careful menders a vision of mending a torn world—one square, one village, one region at a time.

A collective mending session facilitated by Catherine Reinhart

This particular mending resulted in creating something like a blood-red cross—yet another nexus point with the lectionary yesterday. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians includes a declaration of divine peace-making, with Jesus breaking down the dividing wall of hostility with the blood of his cross (Eph. 2:11-22).

All of Paul’s writings are rooted in his own experience of having been a violent persecutor of the early Jesus movement. Encountering the forgiveness and reconciliation of God in Christ—which, by the way, began with the healing of his vision—that encounter dramatically changed his life.

Whatever else salvation means, it certainly includes the healing of our divisions. For Paul, this meant the nearly unthinkable communion between Jews and Gentiles; the circumcised and uncircumcised; the religiously righteous and the ritually unclean. The Gospel creates, we might say, an ongoing collective mending session called “church.”

Whenever I despair over the state of American society—the vitriol, the hatred, the violent divisions—I try to imagine what in the world the Church can offer to such intractable problems. Catherine Reinhart has given me a new way of envisioning a solution: bearing witness to the God who heals and mends, offering a model of community not rooted in “sameness” but stitched and woven together with the threads of difference.

Surely this is why it matters for Christians to gather around the Eucharistic Table week by week, a Table to which God calls us not by merit but from grace, and only and always for love.

By such grace and love we might yet offer a collective mending session to a world in pain, and for the world’s healing.

Loving My Country by Rejecting Nationalism

The Fourth of July is, well, a bit complicated for Episcopalians. As Anglican Christians, we’re “in communion” with the Church of England, which still functions as a state church (King Charles III is officially the head of that church, but no, we American clergy do not owe allegiance to the British Crown).

Many of us try not to be smug about that whole Revolution thing as we take pride in the separation of church and state in the U.S., but then remember we have very little reason to be—the State of Oklahoma now requires teaching the Bible in public schools; the Ten Commandments must be displayed in Louisiana schools; the Speaker of the House of Representatives wants to use the Bible as the basis for legislating; and the hard-working staff at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State are likely sleep deprived and running out of room on their website’s homepage for listing all the flare-ups of theocracy appearing on the American landscape.

Honestly, just being any kind of committed (it’s hard not to say “real”) Christian today makes living in the United States not just a little complex and usually quite daunting if not horrifying. I want to love my country; I loved it uncritically in my youth, as many did back in the 1960s and even 1970s (I have enduringly fond memories of perching on my father’s shoulders as a small child and watching the flag-waving parade go back in my Midwestern home town). I do not want simply to scowl and scoff at anything remotely patriotic.

Sitting on the brink of the American Independence Day holiday, navigating a path between that rock and hard place will mean returning once again in my prayerful reflections to some ancient history.

Sixteen centuries before the current rise of Christian Nationalism in the United States, St. Augustine faced the imminent collapse of the Roman Empire. The collapse unfolded over many decades, but a common date used for the empire’s definitive demise is 476, when a Germanic king finally sacked Rome and deposed the emperor. Waves of Germanic barbarians had been attacking various outposts in the northern parts of the empire for quite some time before that, and some of those incursions put the city of Rome under threat on multiple occasions. This was deeply shocking to most of Rome’s citizens, who never imagined the “eternal city” would ever fall.

While Christianity had taken root as the “official religion” of the Roman Empire (a milestone set in motion by the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century), there were plenty of citizens who still practiced older or “pagan” forms of religious traditions. Many of them started to blame the Christians for Rome’s weakness and argued that the empire needed to return to its more ancient pagan roots. Even some Christians were deeply distressed by Rome’s instability given the widespread assumption that the promised and hoped-for “Kingdom of God” was nothing other than Rome itself.

In response to all this, St. Augustine wrote his now classic book The City of God, which appeared in the year 426. Augustine weaves together some complex arguments concerning a number of interrelated topics, but one of his key points is this: the collapse of Rome is not a failure of God’s promise because no earthly city can or ever will be the hoped-for heavenly city. In every time and place, he writes, what God calls the Church to do is always the same: create Eucharistic communities that bear witness to the transformative love of God, a love that transcends every civic border.

I’m thankful for Augustine even as patriotism is now more fraught for American Christians than ever before, and those complexities have been growing with the emergence of a robust movement of White Christian Nationalism. It behooves all of us, especially in this election year, to understand the twin threat posed by this movement to both our democratic institutions and the integrity of the Gospel.

A good place to start concerning White Christian Nationalism is with a recent CNN article, including the important caveat that “Evangelical Christianity” is now more brown than white and not at all nationalistic. Another helpful resource is an interview on the PBS Newshour with a former Christian Nationalist pastor. Where I currently live, in western Michigan, we’ve witnessed the direct results of this movement on county government, and with a helpful and hopeful coalition of clergy and Christian lay people actively opposing that nationalist takeover.

At a time when many Christians still think of patriotism as a Christian spiritual discipline, it’s worth returning to Augustine’s ancient insights. As Christians, our loyalty belongs not to any nation or empire but only to the Gospel and to the community of God’s people called “church.” Our true and lasting hope as Christian people, in other words, is not the ultimate triumph of any particular nation-state, not even the United States of America, but the transformation of every human society with the grace of God.

Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh (currently teaching at DePaul University in Chicago) has written extensively about these issues, including Augustine’s vision of the Church. His books on politics and the Eucharist have shaped a great deal of how I think about the significance of parish life and the difference faith communities can make and should make in the world.

Rather than adopting “American values” (whatever those might be) God calls us to promote Gospel values for the sake of God’s whole creation. Or as Cavanaugh puts it, “the task of the church is to interrupt the violent tragedy of the earthly city with the comedy of redemption” at the heart of the City of God. (A thirty minute presentation by Cavanaugh at a conference in France offers a good overview how he thinks about Eucharist and politics, not separately but always together.)

These days, just voicing critiques like these can earn one a great deal of disdain, even prompt physical threats, or at the very least make one vulnerable to being called “anti-American.” So let me be clear again: even though my Australian shepherd dog River and I will not be going to the local fireworks display this weekend, I do love my country, and I am grateful for the many gifts of this modern democracy.

“Every Tribe, Every Nation,” Marsha Vosburg

But the United States is not a Christian nation; there is no such thing as a “Christian Nation.” There are many nations on Earth and Christians reside in nearly every one of them, linked to each other by the sacramental bonds of unity called the Body of Christ.

Whatever freedoms and privileges American Christians might enjoy as Americans can best be used to strengthen that global network of Christian communities—not for the sake of the Church’s triumph, either, but for the sake of that abundant life Jesus said he came to give to all (John 10:10). Or as The Book of Common Prayer puts it, for the sake of “promoting justice, peace, and love”—regardless of anyone’s citizenship.

Breaking the Fourth Wall—for Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unbearable Nearness of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Land Knows, and the Land Remembers

The second Sunday of the Season of Creation invites us to reflect on the land—the soil beneath our feet and the landscapes we inhabit.

Many biblical writers imagined the land as much more than merely a stage, and landscapes as much more than props. A week ago, for example, the lectionary for this mini-season included the story from Genesis about God bringing forth a delightful forest from the land. The soil is where divine fruitfulness and abundance reside, bringing forth every tree that is lovely to see and suitable for food.

The situation changes quickly and dramatically in the third and fourth chapters of Gensis: one of God’s creatures is cursed; animosity appears in the garden of delight; intimate relationships are distorted by power and mapped to gender; the land itself is no longer apparently fertile and readily fruitful.

What happened?

The lectionary skips over the causes—a complex mix of lies and deception, of guilt and shame—and jumps ahead to the consequences, especially the way bodily shame can lead to an inward and downward spiral of isolation or it can turn outward, projected on to others as disdain and anger, or hatred and violence.

And here’s the key point for this season: the land knows all this, and the land remembers.

That is, admittedly, a rather strange way to put the matter, but perhaps you’ve experienced something similar about particular places, or buildings, or street corners, any physical location where something just doesn’t seem quite right. You feel a bit uneasy, perhaps a little anxious, and you’re constantly looking over your shoulder even though no one is there.

A mean spirit, the undercurrent of hatred, or threat of violence—we all know what it’s like to encounter these things in a person, or in a situation. It’s like riding through turbulence—you can’t see it but you can certainly feel it.

When those moments are sufficiently severe, they can leave a mark on us, a wound or a scar. For some, the experience lingers long after the situation has ended; we now call this “post-traumatic stress syndrome,” or PTSD.

More than a few biblical writers would have us notice exactly these same things about the land; the land knows, and the land remembers.

“Cain and Abel,” South African artist Margrit Prigge

The classic story about the land’s own memory comes from a passage of Scripture that we never hear on Sunday mornings from the ordinary lectionary; that might be why it sounded so shocking to hear it during worship this past Sunday as it was being read from the lectern. I mean the heart-rending story about Cain and Abel in Genesis 4.

These two are brothers, sons of the first humans. Abel is a shepherd, tending flocks; Cain, by contrast, is a farmer, trying to tend crops. Remember, by now in the story the land is no longer friendly to farming, and Cain is struggling. So he takes his brother Abel “out to the field,” out to where he has been trying to make things grow, to the ground that has already been cursed.

And there, in that field, Cain kills his brother.

When God confronts Cain about this, Cain tries to deny it, insisting that he knows nothing about it. Oh yes you do, God says, because “your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground”; the land remembers.

It matters that this early story of violence is a story of fratricide. It is not a story about protecting one’s self from outside invaders, from people you’ve never seen before; it is not a story of war between peoples or nations. This is a story of fratricide, in which violence takes root among siblings, not strangers. It’s a horrifying story precisely because the actors in it are as close to each other as they possibly can be; they are kin.

These opening chapters in Genesis present a gut-wrenching tale of how the first humans are gradually alienated from all their kin—not only from each other but also from the garden-like forest and its fruitful land, which are also their kin.

The land knows, and the land remembers.

All over the world, in every corner of every country, including right where I’m writing this in the U. S. state of Michigan, we live on land that carries horrific memories—much of it soaked in blood from the violence that turns kin into strangers.

This remains a vastly under-diagnosed condition of distress and disease among all those who treat the land as mere stage and landscapes as inert props. The land not only cradles the pools of human blood spilled in violence, but also retains the wounds and scars of the violence we continually inflict on the land itself—strip mining, flaying Earth of her skin, burning her with industrial farming, and then casually pouring toxins and acids into her open wounds like salt on skinned knees. Not only the ancient storyteller in Genesis but also the Hebrew prophets are shockingly clear: the land will not remain patient forever; one day (perhaps tomorrow), the land will simply stop yielding harvests of any kind.

I confess to having trouble finding where precisely any good news might be buried in this second week of the Season of Creation. But I think it emerged from both Cain and then Matthew.

The very same God who did not abandon Cain—Cain, the one who killed his own brother—that very same God has also not abandoned us but has given God’s own self to us in Jesus.

Let’s make that standard Christian trope a bit more pointed: God stands in solidarity with us as our own kin.

Some theologians have coined the term “deep incarnation” for this kinship with God. The union of God’s creative Word with Jesus is not just superficial or merely apparent; God is truly united with the human body of Jesus, all the way down, as it were, to the cellular level.

This is what makes the suffering and violent death of Jesus so profound: God’s kinship with us extends to the very depths of human mortality, and all for the sake of love.

Consider this: what if this divine incarnational passion extends also to the land?

What if the depth of God’s loving union with God’s own creation does not end with the human body but embraces the body of Earth herself?

What if we read and heard more regularly the Gospel in exactly those terms?

Week Two in the Season of Creation also gave us a rather strange passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel. There Jesus compares himself to Jonah, to that ancient prophet who spent three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish.

This is of course a foreshadowing of Jesus being laid in a tomb, but notice the phrase Matthew uses to describe the burial: in the “heart of the earth” (Mt 12:40).

God’s kinship with God’s own creation extends to the very heart of the earth herself, for love and healing and redemption.

I do believe this is good news indeed, but I couldn’t quite connect all these dots, especially how we ought to live in response, until I just happened upon a startling scene in the latest in the Star Trek franchise on television.

The second season of Star Trek: Picard features an episode in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard decides to engage in the tricky business of time travel, to go back in time. The situation was dire, so this dramatic step was needed. As Picard put it, “If we want to save the future, we have to repair the past.”

I nearly fell off my comfy couch when I heard that line so casually spoken. What a wonderful summary of the Gospel, of what God is committed to doing—has done and will do—to ensure a fruitful future!

And that’s exactly what God’s people everywhere are called to do in partnership with God: to repair the past, to heal so many broken lines of kinship.

Among the countless ways to do this, I was recently stumbled across a powerful example recently in the news from the upper Midwest, from a small slice of land in southwest Minnesota.

That small slice of land was the site of the short but often brutal U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. It was also the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history when 38 Dakota Sioux were all hanged at once that year by the U.S. army for participating in that war and after each had undergone a trial that lasted approximately five minutes.

In one of the precipitating events of that 1862 war, one of the Dakota bands was temporarily relocated to a federal facility, also on that same slice of land. Over the course of the subsequent winter months, they were all allowed to starve to death, most of them women and children.

Adding insult to profound injury—still more salt poured in the wound—that slice of land was later turned into state recreational parks with picnic tables, and trails for hiking and snowmobiling, and a river for boating. Local Dakota Sioux were then charged a fee every time they entered that park to visit the grave sites of their ancestors—to visit the ground where the blood of their ancestors cried out to God.

Sadly, little of this story caught my attention—it’s too painfully common in American history—until I read this: in 2021, the State of Minnesota returned more than 200 of those acres of land to the Dakota Sioux, and just this year, the governor and the state legislature returned another park as well.

These gestures of return of course come at a cost—the cost of public recreational facilities and picnic tables and visitor fees. But as President of the Lower Sioux reservation Robert Larson put it, the cost of that land was already paid for by the blood of those who died there.

There are many stories like this from all over the country and the world; we must learn them, and then tell them, for the sake of healing.

As God’s people, if we are indeed committed to a thriving future we must repair the past.

The land knows this; and the land remembers.

The Sword-Wielding Jesus at the Stonewall Rebellion

This past Sunday, many Christians heard a troubling portion of Matthew’s account of the Gospel (10:24-39). Jesus apparently disavows peace-making, takes up a sword, and promises to divide families.

Like so many others, I have struggled with this passage for many years. To be clear, wrestling with the texts and traditions of Christian faith can be a very good thing indeed, but Jesus is certainly pushing against the edges of our comfort zone in that particular text. He is, it seems to me, provoking us to consider seriously what it means to live authentically and openly, truthfully and with vulnerability—what is hidden, he says, will become known, and what is only whispered in the dark will be shouted from the rooftops.

In this last week of June, of this LGBTQ Pride Month, what Jesus describes and its consequences resonates in some startling ways with the Stonewall Rebellion.

Recall this: back in the 1960s that gay bars were secretive places, often unmarked, where respectable people should not be seen. These taverns were routinely raided by the police, their patrons arrested, and many careers and whole lives ruined as a result.

One of those bars, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, the Stonewall Inn, was a gathering spot for those on the margins of this marginalized population, like transgender youth.

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, those who had gathered at the Stonewall resisted arrest and fought back against the police—they were tired of hiding in the shadows and had grown weary of whispering in the dark. For their own self-respect and God-given dignity, they started shouting their lives from the rooftops. This led to several days of unrest on the streets of New York and energized a brand new chapter for LGBT civil rights; that’s why we have “Pride Month” in June.

Many of those on the streets that night had been rejected by their biological families; more than a few of them were homeless—and this still happens today. Out of necessity they created what many of us would later call “families of choice.” They had to re-learn how to care for each other, what it means to love each other, and to cultivate relationships that would redeem for them the very concept of family.

With still more biblical resonance with modern society, many of us also heard a heartbreaking story this past Sunday about redefining “family” in the ongoing saga of Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 21:8-21). The surprising birth of Isaac suddenly made their household a rather awkward place for Hagar, their servant, with whom Abraham had already sired a child, Ishmael.

Sarah insists that Hagar and her child be put out, cast off, and sent into exile. In that ancient Mediterranean society, Sarah was likely well within her rights to demand this—Hagar was their slave, and Ishmael would have been Isaac’s rival. Abraham and Sarah might have done these things believing they were cooperating with God’s own promise of blessing.

Even so, let us not fail to notice how God cares for Hagar and Ishmael nonetheless, sending an angel to ensure their survival in the wilderness. This is of course a recurring thread in biblical traditions: regardless of cultural norms, God cares for the cast-away and the abandoned ones—both the queer youth and the single mom alike.

Not long after the Stonewall Rebellion, and not surprisingly, more than a few religious leaders started calling for a return to “biblical family values.” Quite honestly, I have to wonder whether any of them actually read the Bible.

Ancient Israel’s patriarchs often lived with more than one wife—or sired children with their slaves; the biblical story about wise King Solomon suggests that one of the reasons we know he was blessed by God is that he had over 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3).

In the Christian Testament of the Bible, Jesus himself is apparently unmarried and childless—a very unusual social status in that day for a religious teacher, a rabbi. St. Paul encourages the Corinthian Christians to remain single, just like he is; if you really have to get married, he says, that’s acceptable but certainly not ideal (1 Cor. 7:8-9).

So which of these family values in the Bible are we supposed to adopt today?

That’s entirely the wrong question to ask, of course. We should be asking today’s religious leaders directly what they mean by “biblical family values.” In my experience, that religious rhetoric is coded language for two interrelated things: rejecting gay and lesbian relationships, and keeping women in the home, where they are subservient to their husbands.

Let me underscore that these coded aims are interrelated. Resistance to gay and lesbian relationships has never been about whom human beings can love; the resistance has always been about gender, and especially maintaining (white) male privilege. Today, transgender people are bearing the brunt of this violent resistance rather acutely (75% of transgender youth, for example, feel unsafe at school). More succinctly put: homophobia has always been rooted in misogyny.

Rather than wondering how we might adopt so-called “family values” it’s high time the Church devote its entire attention to cultivating “Gospel values”—how we sustain a community of courage as we strive for peace with justice; a community of care by embracing the outcast and marginalized; and a community of compassion as we try to ensure that no one ever again needs to be afraid or alone on the streets of our towns and cities.

Without question, Matthew’s Jesus would applaud that list of Gospel values. But, he would also say urge us to notice that there’s something missing from that list: truth-telling.

Whatever is covered up, he says, must be uncovered; whatever secrets you harbor, must become known; and what I say to you in the dark, what is now only whispered, you must proclaim from the housetops.

Telling the truth about our lives, our communities, our politics, our economics—this is what will free us, and save us, and lead the whole planet toward healing and thriving.

Needless to say, truth-telling is challenging when denial feels easier in a society committed to superficial harmonies. Surely everyone knows what it’s like to keep the peace with polite avoidance. Matthew’s Jesus is clear this morning: he wants nothing to do with that kind of “peace.”

I have come, he says, to inspire the courage of truth-telling, which will feel like wielding a sword. Telling the truth, coming out, taking sides, standing in solidarity—these are risky endeavors, all of them, because they will cost us something. They might cost us some friends, our reputations, a few family members, our positions of comfort, our favorite seats at the restaurant, perhaps even our lives.

It really doesn’t matter if you’re straight, white, black, queer, trans, indigenous, lesbian, gay, bisexual, none of these or all of them depending on the day of the week—whoever you are, the sword-wielding Jesus at the Stonewall Rebellion is urging all of us along a path of courageous truth-telling in a society devoted to lies and deception.

To be sure, that path can be scary; that’s one of the many reasons I’m grateful for the Eucharistic Table, where Christians can gather with each other and find the grace and love and support we need to live the truth.

Yes of course this is scary; but also worthwhile. It might actually be worth absolutely everything, which seems to be the point of this deeply troubling and still hopeful passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel: when you lose your life by following Jesus, that’s when you find it.

“It was Beautiful (Stonewall),” Doug Blanchard

The Courage to Be…Seen

The pain must have been debilitating. She had been living with it for a long time, at least twelve years. Gospel writers referred to her condition as a “hemorrhage”; they are likely describing frequent and uncontrollable menstrual periods, which would have made such a woman ritually unclean, and thus forbidden to appear in public.

Many Christians heard her story in church this past Sunday, from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (9:9-13, 18-26). The story features not only physical but also social pain—a woman who is isolated, without the comfort of friends and family. Both Mark and Luke, who also tell this story, note that she had spent all her money on multiple physicians, and no one had made her any better—so she is perhaps also a poor beggar.

And so this woman, who has run out of options, alone and dejected, reaches out as Jesus passes by, just to touch the fringe of his garments with a bit of ludicrous hope.

Consider what those details mean. She was probably crouched down by the side of the road; she wasn’t supposed to be seen and she certainly should not have approached a group of prominent men—not only Jesus and his disciples but also the leader of the synagogue and his companions.

And so she reaches out—in desperation, yes, but also with courage. Touching Jesus could have led to severe social consequences for her, and still she reaches out.

As many commentators have noted, the good news in this story is not only this woman’s physical healing but also and even more so the restoration of her dignity. Jesus made her visible with respect, brought her into the center of attention, not for shaming but to heal her shame. He does all this not merely tolerating her presence but actually praising her as an exemplar of faith.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, her story is paired with another poignant story—the one about the young girl who has died, the daughter of a religious leader in the community.

By pairing these two stories, these ancient writers show us something about faith. In each of the three versions of this story, Jesus says to the woman, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.”

Given what she has just done, the meaning of faith here is not “certainty” but rather bravery. “Daughter,” Jesus could have said, “your courage has made you well.”

It is a bit strange but no accident that Jesus refers to this woman as “daughter.” Remember, he’s on his way to the home of a religious leader whose daughter has just died—these stories are intentionally intermingled.

Recall how often Jesus is getting into trouble with the religious authorities—“eating with tax collectors and sinners.” Just like this woman who reaches out with courage for healing, so this religious leader, heartbroken over his daughter, breaks ranks with his colleagues and courageously begs Jesus for help.

Paul Tillich, the great mid-twentieth century theologian, urged us to see faith as a form of courage, what he called the “courage to be.” For Tillich, the life of faith is a life in which we accept our own acceptance by God and thus live boldly, defying all the “principalities and powers” that would rob God’s creatures of their dignity and respect. I would add this: faith is also the courage to be seen, especially when we are made invisible by others.

It matters to think about such things during this LGBTQ Pride Month. We should note carefully that the Human Rights Campaign has for the first time declared a “national state of emergency” for LGBTQ Americans.

We are witnessing today an unprecedented spike in anti-LGBTQ legislation in state houses all over the country; more than 75 such pieces of legislation have been signed into law this year alone, which is more than double the number from last year.

This frightening trend is unfolding right where I live, in my own backyard. A far-right takeover of Ottawa County government by Christian Nationalists is making both queer people and people of color more than a little nervous. And along this otherwise “progressive” shoreline in West Michigan, I just recently overheard a conversation among some business owners in Saugatuck—an LGBT resort town. One of them said to the others, “I’m glad they spend their money here; I just don’t want to see them.”

It is high time that Christian communities ramp up our commitment to deeper solidarity with those who are unseen and kept invisible, whether because of sexuality, or gender, or race, or economics; all of these social categories are intertwined with each other. To see those deep interconnections would in turn help us to read stories from the Bible as not merely about ancient Mediterranean societies but also about us, all of us.

St. Augustine wrote in the fourth century about the passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel. He invited us to see in the daughter of the religious leader a symbol of the ancient Israelites—who were being reborn and coming to life—while the woman with a hemorrhage stands for Gentiles, all those who are declared “unclean” on the margins of God’s people and who are now welcomed and embraced.

Gospel stories about healing are never just about the person being healed. They are also about the reader, about us. We are the ones who need to live right now with the courage to be in a world that is otherwise risky and frightening.

We are called to live this way not only for ourselves alone but also for all those who cannot imagine such courage for themselves—the gay teens who wonder whether suicide wouldn’t be better than a lonely life; women who live only as the objects of male scorn in a patriarchal society; people of color crushed under the weight of white supremacy.

Quite honestly, modern Western society has been in a “state of emergency” for centuries now unless you just happen to be a white, straight, cis-gender male.

Living courageously—living with faith—offers visible signs of hope to the unseen, coaxing them into a Gospel light.

This, I would venture, is a compelling way to read the story of Abraham’s calling in Genesis, which many Christians also heard this past Sunday morning. “I will bless you,” God says to Abraham, so that you will be a blessing to others (12:2).

Surely this is an enduring rationale for the existence of the Church—to receive God’s blessing for the sake of blessing others. And especially today, to be a place of compassion and safety where the invisible can be seen and loved. The time to do this is now.

Heaven and Earth are One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Broken Symbol for a Tattered World

I fell in love with the foot-washing ritual when I first saw it as an undergraduate (many years ago now). I then resisted it, and actually rejected it for quite a long time. In recent years, I have fallen back in love with it, have found myself re-enamored with its tender arc.

That’s a rather volatile history with a liturgical rite, but not terribly unusual for that particular rite. I’ve never met a liturgically-minded Christian who stays neutral about washing feet on Maundy Thursday. Some belong to the Necessity Camp (“I can’t imagine Holy Week without it”) while others roll their eyes at the mere thought of it (“oh please, no more manicure parades”).

My resistance to this rite over the years stemmed not so much from the awkward logistics of taking off shoes and socks, and the sudden exposure to public intimacy such a moment carries—religion, after all, shouldn’t always feel comfortable and cozy. My hesitation about the rite was instead rooted in how religious symbols function.

This topic is of course hotly debated among religion scholars, and there is certainly more than one way to conceive of how a religious symbol “works.” This holiest of weeks on the Christian calendar invites precisely this kind of reflection, a week brimming with a whole panoply of rich and interlocking symbols.

On Maundy Thursday, for example, we remember the final meal Jesus shared with his closest friends. The liturgy on this day qualifies as among the most complex of the entire Christian calendar: we remember not only the institution of the “Lord’s Supper,” or Holy Eucharist, we also remember the provocative and tender act Jesus offered in washing the feet of his friends—something a teacher or “master” should never do for disciples. We remember still more: the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, the poignant prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the arrest of Jesus in that garden by soldiers; the altar is stripped at the liturgy’s conclusion as a sign of desolation.

Sorting through that now-classic narrative and embodying its key moments in liturgical gestures illustrates especially well an approach to religious symbols that I find helpful. The most effective symbols draw from the common, ordinary stuff of life as a way to convey divine presence. In Christian theology, we might note that Jesus himself is this kind of symbol par excellence—a fully human life as the means to encounter God’s loving grace.

This approach to religious practice suggests why the Eucharist continues to be an effective symbol of the communion into which God invites us—we readily recognize what a shared meal is around a common table; no further explanation is needed about what a “meal” is or a “shared table.” And that right there is why I resisted the foot washing ritual for so many years: we don’t actually wash each other’s feet in our modern Western world.

The dusty roads of first-century Mediterranean societies populated by people with sandaled feet made foot-washing both an ordinary, quotidian practice and also one that made the social dynamics of cultural power more visible (whether because of rank or gender or both). We see a trace of those dynamics in the shock expressed by his disciples when Jesus started to wash their feet (Peter exclaims, “you will never wash my feet!”).

The astonishment Jesus provoked had mostly to do with the inversion of cultural power in his actions, which his disciples recognized immediately. No further explanation was needed about the kind of love Jesus wanted them to model; all he had to do was wash their feet.

For all these reasons, I consider the liturgical rite of foot washing a “broken symbol.” It rarely conveys what it was originally meant to inspire as the cultural chain of meaning-making has been cut over time (not least because of the invention of fully enclosed shoes!).

In recent years, however, I have wondered in some fresh ways whether the fumbling awkwardness of the rite and even its broken character as a religious symbol might be exactly what our fragmented world needs. Modern Western society may keep its feet covered but it still lives with the wounds of powerful social hierarchies. Race, gender, sexuality, class—all these and more fragment our world and sustain painful alienations and isolations.

Maybe what we need in our religious spaces is more awkwardness, not less. Maybe our liturgical rites and religious symbols ought to reflect more directly our fumbling attempts to figure out how to be human with each other and live more peaceably and sustainably on Earth. Maybe blundering our way through a cumbersome rite, the meaning of which seems fraught and obscure, can highlight the frayed seams of our social institutions in need of healing.

When a religious symbol just doesn’t seem to “work,” it might help us see and name how severely the world around us no longer works the way it should—if it ever really did.

We could start rather modestly: if we can practice at least a moment of bodily tenderness with each other (shyly, awkwardly, no manicures needed), even just briefly and simply through a religious symbol, we might stand a better chance of doing so in the public square.

Flawless religious practice isn’t possible or even desirable. Flawed religion, replete with broken symbols, can invite us into a space where healing can happen. And I think that’s one of the reasons why religion was invented in the first place.