Category: Theology

Salvation Aims Too Low: Christian Insights from a Multimedia World

What do LGBT Pride Day, the lectionary for Proper 7, and the New Media Consortium have in common? Probably more than just one thing, but at least this much: Salvation aims too low.

Of course “salvation” enjoys a rich and multilayered history. I have in mind here how so many U.S. Christian churches have obsessed over who is “in” and who is “out” – who, in other words, is saved?

To me, the Gospel answer to that question is resoundingly clear: everyone. By hook or by crook, God will ensure that no one – not a single one – is lost. (If you have trouble with that claim, I recommend reflecting on the gospel parables of the lost sheep in Matthew 18:12-14, the lost coin in Luke 15:8-10, and the pearl of great price in Matthew 13:45-46, among many others.)

I know there are multiple ways to read the meaning of “salvation” in Christian history. I draw on many of them for my own spiritual practice, my reading, writing, and teaching. I’m grateful for them all. But I truly believe that the divine salvation train is bigger than any of us can imagine. It’s bound for glory and everyone has a ticket.

So let’s stop worrying about that. In my experience, letting go of my anxiety about my personal and individual salvation has enabled me to focus on what matters just as much and often more: changing the world.

Everyone has a ticket for that train bound for glory. Period. Now, what do we do about the “station” and everything around that train?

All of this came to mind just recently when I attended a wonderful conference on educational technologies. No, it wasn’t just for “techno-geeks” (otherwise, I wouldn’t have attended). It was much broader than that, including some inspiring visions for what in the world “education” even means.

So here are the “dots” I want to connect moving forward. I don’t how to connect them yet in much detail. But I’ll post ongoing reflections on all of this:

  • LGBT Pride Month: So when did an annual occasion for insisting on common human dignity and civil rights become a moment for advertising vodka? Been to a “gay pride parade” recently? You’d think queer people are the poster children for Abercrombie and Fitch. The commodification of social justice is certainly not new to LGBT people (just ask any African-American, Asian-American, or Latino/a person about that!). But if “salvation” means I can buy a cocktail, acquire a cool wardrobe, or buy fancy gadgets with rainbow emblems then I’d say “salvation” is aiming far too low.
  • Lectionary Proper 7: This is obscure to most people but urgent for most preachers who follow the Revised Common Lectionary in their churches. The biblical texts for this Sunday, June 24, offer a familiar story (David slays Goliath) and a familiar miracle (Jesus calms a storm). But I’m particularly struck by the reading from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (6:1-13). To the Christians in Corinth at least, Paul had an urgent message: stop waiting for salvation; salvation is now. Right now.
  • The New Media Consortium: That sounds geeky. And it is. But that’s not all it is. I enjoyed being on a steep learning curve at the consortium’s annual summer conference last week. There I was spurred to reflect not on education (a static, pre-packaged product) but instead on learning (a dynamic, iterative process) and of course I couldn’t help but think about Christianity and salvation. Amazing speakers prompted me to consider that imparting information belonged to a bygone century and I was confronted at every turn with thinking about learning as a “social construction of knowledge” (faith) relying on a collaborative effort for “creative innovation” (social justice ministries), and still more on “open networks of divergent opinions” (church).

So how do I connect all these dots? Here’s one way: Get rid of products. We’re overloaded and bloated these days, not just with information but with a gazillion products. Do we really need spirituality, let alone salvation, added to that list? No more religious products. It’s time for religious and spiritual process.

(And yes, theology geeks out there, that’s not a new idea. But it’s high time we retrieved that ancient insight for today.)

The Apostle Paul wrote passionately to the Corinthians about his own “open heart,” a heart with no restrictions on affection. And he urged the Corinthians to “open your hearts wide also.”

That message sounds no less relevant today than it did nearly 2,000 years ago. For those uncertain about including LGBT people in all aspects of our civil and religious life, consider erring on the side of an “open heart,” with affections unrestricted. For educational institutions still rooted in a traditional university system – detached, isolated, exclusionary, and with protected domains – consider the “open heart” of social media networks, with free affiliations, collaborative problem-solving, and networked innovations for the benefit of all.

No, I didn’t drink the techno-Kool-Aid. I’m not naïve about the challenges LGBT people face nor the real tendency toward commodification in social networks. But I am hopeful. I’m hopeful about the prospects for LGBT people on nearly every front; and I’m hopeful about institutional Christianity, which has morphed and adapted continually for centuries; and I’m hopeful about theological learning in seminaries, where amazingly creative and thoughtful people can seize the moment and change the world.

Change the world? That sounds like “salvation” – the kind a whole lot of us would gladly seek.

Apocalypse Kind-of-Now: A Brown Green Season?

Ecological “issues” are an annoying interruption of the stuff that matters now. I don’t really believe that, but my blog posts would suggest otherwise.

I had a plan. Write about the war on women’s bodies in Lent and write about ecology in Easter – the new creation, totally tied to women’s bodies and gender. Lovely plan, but current events intervened.

And that is precisely the problem.

I totally support full marriage equality for all couples; the end to poverty and racism; full agency for women in decisions about their bodies. So why does the very framework that makes any of those possible in any way get such short shrift? I mean the planetary environment upon which each of relies for every breath.

Here’s the thing: “Apocalypse” is nigh; if not “now,” then soon, within my lifetime (if I’m lucky enough to live another 30 years). Hyperbole? Not really. Read just this one among many accounts of what we’re facing right now (here’s the lede of that story, which you shouldn’t read if you are prone to insomnia because of fretting: “The Earth is within decades of reaching an irreversible tipping point that could result in ‘planetary collapse’, scientists warned yesterday.”) Read yet another alarming account here.

Important digression: I adore my ten-year-old godson (oh, God, could he just say ten forever? No…not good. But he rocks my world right now). Okay, my point: Will he be able to live on this planet 30 years from now? Probably, but not likely in the same comfortable way that I am living on it now. That breaks my heart.

But let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that my adorable godson is not the only reason why any of us should care about the environment, and passionately, with urgency. So why should we?

In some Christian circles (very similar to the one in which I grew up), there is no reason. We actually don’t have to care. The theological logic goes basically like this: God created a good world; humans screwed it up; God sent Jesus (oh, after that Israel interlude, of course) to save us; those who believe all this will go to heaven, a literally disembodied, unearthly place where we don’t have to fret about things like nuclear power plants, plastic choking our oceans, massive extinction events, or potable water.

I’m really not making this up. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians of a certain type truly believe that Earth is disposable; God will create a new one.

Let me be clear: I have no desire to set up an “us versus them” scenario here in which us good liberal Christians save the planet while those fundamentalists destroy it. That would be easier to write about, frankly. More accurately, there are some Evangelical Christians who are far more passionate about the environment than many of the liberal, “progressive” Christians I know.

Now that’s peculiar. And I take a great deal of hope from it. Decades ago Lynn White, Jr., wrote a devastating essay about religion and its deleterious effects on the environment (read about it here, and yes this is a Wikipedia link). Taking his critique seriously means that we need compelling religious and theological reasons why priority #1 right now is the planet itself. Thankfully, those reasons are ready-to-hand. (Check out this, and this, and this.)

But we do have a problem: current events will always interrupt us. The latest sound bite, the latest outrage about women’s bodies, LGBT people, the economy, war….all of these will always interrupt what we need to do and say right now about where we live, right now.

I don’t have any solutions to the problem of compelling interruptions. I issue only a plea: Let us please figure out how this long “green season” in the Church year after Pentecost can inspire all of us finally to do something about a planet that is dying, right now – our planet, this “fragile earth, our island home” (The Book of Common Prayer, 1979, p. 370).

Come on. Let’s figure this out – for my beloved godson, your grandchild, your niece, your neighbor, the puppies your dog is about to have, the litter of cougar cubs that will be born this year, the salmon spawning in our rivers, just take your pick  – let’s figure this out for all of us, for all of them, for all.

Just Say Yes

It sounds so easy and so good. Indeed, so much seemed to hinge on what Nancy Reagan advised during the 1980s: Just Say No. She meant of course to say No to drugs.

Okay, sure. That’s good advice. But if all we ever do is say No, we are a sorry species.

One of my best friends ever (T. Michael Dempsey, a theater and philosophy and theology guru) helped me to see some years ago now that the best and most important thing human beings can do is to say “Yes.”

Mike is a genius in many respects, not least in his ability to teach improvisational theater. Among the many exercises he facilitates with his students is the “Yes Game.” This is disarmingly simple and profound. In this game, people take turns suggesting some activity that the whole group can do, like running around the room, or rolling around on the floor, or hopping on one foot while chanting “bacon, bacon, bacon.” It doesn’t matter what it is, when someone suggests something to do, everyone says, “Yes!” And then we all do it.

I cannot describe the profound effect this “simple” game can have. To say Yes to life, to people, to love, to opportunity, to risk, to relationship, to relaxation…to God. This is what we are made for.

Tomorrow on the Christian calendar is Trinity Sunday. Many Churches will be hearing from an ancient Hebrew prophet in their worship services. It will be a portion from Isaiah, the one in which the prophet has an astounding vision of God’s presence and glory (see chapter 6).

In the midst of that praise-filled vision, the divine voice speaks: “Who will go for us, and whom shall we send?”

It’s important to note here that Isaiah’s society at the time was in something of a mess. Isaiah’s account of this moment is signaled rather precisely in the first verse of that chapter, “In the year that King Uzziah died….”

His society was unraveling, in other words. And someone had to do something. Someone had to speak some hard truths. Something had to change. (Sound familiar?)

Caught up in that astounding moment of divine worship that Isaiah describes, when the divine voice speaks and seeks someone – anyone – to make a difference, Isaiah doesn’t hesitate: “Send me!”

Isaiah said yes. And that’s all that matters. Whatever comes next, whatever details need to be worked out, whatever plan needs to be negotiated and executed – all of that can come later, and indeed God provides all that stuff, as Isaiah later learned. The most important thing is that Isaiah said “Yes!”

I love Trinity Sunday and I am happily a Trinitarian Christian. That doesn’t mean that I “understand” the Trinity or that I think all other views of the divine life are somehow “wrong.” It means for me what I think it must have meant for Isaiah: the God who is above all things is also in all things; the God who is transcendent also dwells among us; the God who cannot be captured in doctrines nevertheless speaks: “Who will go for us?”

The time is now for all of us to say “Send me!” And I truly believe that worship can help each of us say that kind of Yes, just as it helped Isaiah.

That might be the most peculiar thing of all about Christian faith and life today: worship matters. In an age when “spirituality” trumps “religion,” I believe there is still much to be said for the religious rites of worship. Both Jewish and Christian ancestors attest to the life-changing, world-transforming character of worship. Praising God with others can actually change the world. I believe this. I’ve seen it. And I want to find ever new ways to say “Yes!” to it.

Let us therefore worship the unfathomable mystery of God tomorrow, and may our worship help us to say Yes to the divine call. Our world is in desperate need. Now is not the time to say No. Now is the time to say Yes to that Mystery no one can comprehend but which calls to each of us nonetheless: Will you go? Will you do it? Will you change the world?

May our worship inspire us anew to say YES!

Stop Making Sense

Ever talk so crazy that people thought you were drunk? Ever babble out a fantastic idea so quickly that it sounded like gibberish and your friends thought about calling for an ambulance? Ever said something or done something while you were so terrified to do it that you thought you might be crazy?

Hold that thought for a moment and think about politics and social policy. Democrats generally think Paul Ryan’s budget proposals are just plain nuts. Republicans generally think that President Obama’s approach to health care is certifiably loony. But Rep. Ryan thinks his budget makes perfect sense; President Obama believes the Affordable Care Act is at least a step in the right, sensible, sane direction.

Most of our political, economic, and social policy debates transpire with the assumption that the most rational, sensible, and logical position should win the day. For many, that is clearly not true. For some it is. I can scarcely believe that western civilization now needs to debate what “reasonable” or “sensible” or “logical” actually means. But here we are.

So, unless we’re ready to spend the time, energy, and expense to recalibrate an entire country’s understanding of what a sensible analysis of the facts might actually look like (and I can’t imagine what that even means), then I say it’s time to stop making sense entirely. (And yes, I’m inspired here by a great song by that wonderfully quirky band, The Talking Heads.)

It seems to me that Christians might have something to offer to all this political brouhaha about the eminently sensible adoption of the genuinely nonsensical. It seems to me that Christians might have something to say about the abundant life that issues from claims that sound so terribly irrational. It seems to me that Christians might actually bear witness to the transforming power of visions for a radically different kind of world – even if, and especially if those visions just don’t make any sense.

It seems to me that when Christians talk so crazy that people think they’re drunk, well, something like the Spirit might be at work. Something like that happened to the earliest Christians during a moment that Christians will celebrate tomorrow: Pentecost. I think it’s high time for some more of that outrageous crazy-talk from Christians and Christian communities. It’s time to turn the world upside down (that’s how the biblical writer of Acts described what the early Christian community did – 17:6). It’s time to stop making sense.

If you don’t think the world today needs overturning, here’s a short list of a world gone off the rails: an unprecedented gap between the filthy rich and the dying poor in the U.S. and around the world; legislation everywhere limiting a woman’s choices over nearly everything about her own body; “fracking” this planet for natural resources with earthquakes as the “cost of doing business,” not to mention polluted drinking water that you can actually ignite with a match; obscene displays of white supremacy among politicians, religious leaders, neighbors, a resurgent KKK; LGBT teenagers killing themselves because of self-righteous clergy who prefer worshipping the sanctity of maleness rather than God. Oh, the list goes on and on.

It is way past time to stop making sense. It is way past time to reject all these sensible proposals for economic stability. It is way past time to interrupt rational discourse with visions.

We need Christians who talk so crazy that people think they might be drunk. We need Christians who live so crazy that their friends and families suggest psychotropic drugs. We need Christian communities with such crazy visions that the news media call them for interviews, and city councils worry about what happens in church buildings on Sunday mornings, and the Department of Homeland Security opens a file on them for fear of sedition.

If you think any or all of this sounds just plain nuts, read the biblical “Acts of the Apostles.” Want a blueprint for a Christian revolution? Ever wonder what the Christian “gay agenda” looks like? Read Acts.

I recently read this wonderful description of Pentecost from Richard Rohr:

We have been waiting for what will come… It is the day we are always waiting for but are never prepared for… It is that day when we can speak and be understood at last, the day when we can babble incoherently and people do not laugh, when it is okay to love God without apology or fear, when we know that all of the parts are different and yet all of the parts are enjoying one another.

That’s one of the best summaries of Pentecost I’ve ever read – and it’s totally bonkers. And I think it’s high time Christian communities today articulated something – anything — with the same visionary power.

Of course, this is hard work. There’s lots of practical stuff we need to address here, lots of strategizing to be done, lots of rational, common sense, logical planning. But I firmly believe that even the best strategy will stumble and fail if there’s no vision animating it.

So, what’s your vision for the world? What’s your vision for your city? What’s your vision for your family, your life? Can we finally stop talking about “sensible” budgets, policies, and rules and finally start talking about the kind of world we want to live in? Can we finally start speaking out loud our visions for the world we want, no matter if it sounds crazy?

Paraphrasing Forrest Gump here, crazy is as crazy does; so let’s get crazy.

Happy Pentecost!

Faithfully Out of Synch: Holy Liminality, Part 2

Now you see him, now you don’t. He’s just a flip-flopper. Back again (yay!); gone again (boo!). Or to quote (Saint) Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, “My, but people come and go here so quickly!”

I could be referring to our crazy-making political climate of late, but I have in mind instead some religious trivia. I actually believe the two go together, or they ought to do so, and rather urgently.

This weekend is a bit religiously messy, chronologically speaking. This past Thursday, Christians celebrated “The Feast of the Ascension.” This marks the moment when the resurrected Jesus “ascends” to heaven (see Luke 24:50-53 and/or Acts 1:6-11, both seem to tell the same story but in significantly different ways).

Okay, so the risen Jesus is now “gone.” But tomorrow is the seventh Sunday of Easter on the Christian calendar. Weirdly, many Christians will hear in church a portion of John’s gospel in which the pre-crucified Jesus is saying farewell to his disciples before he dies (John 17:6-19).

So is Jesus “here,” “there,” or “in between”?

We’re smack dab in the midst of yet another potent time on the Christian calendar, that peculiar liminal time between the ascension and the particular manifestation of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost just a week from now. I wrote a bit about the holiness of liminality roughly seven weeks ago, on Holy Saturday. I love that day, that peculiar day when Jesus is dead, but not yet risen, yet wonderfully busy harrowing Hell. Not least among his glorious tasks is dragging Adam and Eve of their graves (as one particular fresco that I love depicts it).

I truly believe that such religious arcana actually matters for how Christians think about how we live in a world that’s so clearly gone crazy. (Surely I don’t need to catalogue the myriad ways our world has recently gone off the rails.)

To navigate the madness, I seek faithfully to live out of synch with it by taking John’s Jesus to heart when he prays this about his disciples, both then and now: “They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world (John 17:16).”

Too many Christians, in my view, have read that verse as a kind of divine permission to absent themselves from “worldly concerns.” To the contrary: I read the Johannine Jesus as urging his disciples to live out of synch with the world’s standards of reasonable, proper, efficient, and respectable proposals for sustaining the way things are.

Among the many ways to read the gospel texts, for example, taking them as testimony to “business as usual” would seem quite a stretch. I cannot imagine any of Jesus’ disciples thinking of themselves as champions of the status quo. Jesus instead seems at nearly every turn to lead his disciples into troubling both the religious and civic order of things. In today’s courts of law they would qualify as “disturbers of the peace” or stand guilty of “disorderly conduct.”

Shouldn’t these pioneers of Christian faith set the standard for the (dis)orderly life of God’s people today? Shouldn’t the Gospel lead all of us who claim to follow it into profound acts of disturbing the cultural peace?

Along with many others, I’ve been noticing just how much religion and politics have been blending of late in our public discourse: whether women actually have any rights over their own bodies; whether couples of the same gender can get married; whether economics ought to have anything to do with the “least among us.” The list goes on and on.

There are many ways to analyze all these confluences of religion and politics. Here’s just one: In an age of profound change and anxiety, the default position is certainty, dogmatism, and safety. The final cry of any civil or religious institution in the throes of fear is, of course, “But we’ve never done it that way before!”

Quite remarkably, that posture is precisely what the Gospel urges Christians to avoid. So what it would it mean to live out of synch with both religious and cultural trends? I don’t know precisely. But I’ll venture this: The dry, institutional certainties of the past (whether civil or religious) won’t save us. Only the scary vagaries of a future we cannot see and for which we risk everything will bring us into the orbit of the risen and ascended Christ.

I’m thinking a great deal about that claim this weekend in my own life. And I’m wondering how it might translate into our public discourse about social policy.

The risen Jesus won’t be tied down and domesticated. Certainty is not a theological virtue. But faith is. And so is hope. And love most especially is. Could we imagine, in this liminal season as we await the Spirit’s manifestation, a politics of risk that privileges love above all else?

That’s precisely what the Apostle Paul urged (1 Corinthians 13:13) – love matters above everything else.

How clichéd can we get? I mean, really. Isn’t that just a Hallmark greeting card we toss into the recycling bin?

But how about this: What if love is what we do in all those in-between times when we can’t figure out what’s really going on? What if love isn’t about certainty or dogmatism or safety or anything else we try to confect to soothe our wounds of anxiety? What if love is mostly about risk without any guarantees?

What if those are the very questions those first disciples of the risen Jesus asked as they watched him disappear into heaven?

Let’s answer those peculiar questions and change the world.

Memo to PBS: Jesus Supports Marriage Equality

“See, I am making all things new!” That’s a great biblical exclamation for this Easter season (Rev. 21:5). But apparently the news media didn’t get the memo. That’s not terribly surprising, but I did expect more from PBS.

I have come to expect that both Fanatically Xenophobic (FOX News) and the Moderately Socialist News Broadcasting Company (MSNBC) to play the tired old religion-hates-gay-people card. It makes for great ratings. But the PBS News Hour?

The News Hour led their broadcast today with the great news that President Obama has declared his support for civil marriage equality for lesbian and gay couples. The story then shifted to the analysis part. And upon whom did PBS call to discuss “both sides” of this issue? Evan Wolfson, of Freedom to Marry, and the Rev. Harry Jackson of Hope Christian Church, who is opposed to marriage equality. (Here’s the clip.)

Really, PBS? Did you just again trot out that silly old trope about religion never really catching up to the real world? Really?

So, PBS News Hour, you chose today, when the President of the United States – a man of deep faith – declared his support for marriage equality (and even cited religious reasons for it!) as the occasion to perpetuate the tired old cliché that religion is the opponent of fairness and equality? Really?

So, PBS News Hour, please consider that people of religious faith who fully and actively support full civil rights for LGBT people are not an anomaly, an aberration, or statistically insignificant. We’ve been raising our voices as best we can for quite a while now. Seriously, please do let us know what more we can do to get your attention. Seriously.

For now, PBS New Hour, please consider this, just from my little corner of the world:

The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Pacific School of Religion (a seminary!), where I have worked since 2003, has been striving tirelessly for full marriage equality for all people. We’ve done this by joining our efforts with many other religious organizations, faith communities, clergy, and congregations all across the country. In the San Francisco Bay Area alone, the Center’s Coalition of Welcoming Congregations (more than 200 congregations) has spoken loudly and clearly about its support for civil marriage equality. (Read the Center’s statement issued today about the President’s support of marriage equality.)

The Episcopal Church, in which I am an ordained priest, will this summer consider a variety of materials for the blessing of same-gender relationships. Moreover, the United Church of Christ, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism (among many other religious bodies) all support civil marriage equality for same-gender couples.

So, PBS, why am I picking on you? Because I’ve come to expect more from you than all those other television hacks trying to pass as journalists and who care only about ratings and advertisers.

Why am I picking on you? Because what you did today illustrates a much wider problem about religion reporting in the United States, a problem that has profound consequences not just for LGBT people but for immigration policy, international relations, and economics.

Why am I picking on you? Because LGBT teenagers are killing themselves, humans are destroying the planet, the gap between rich and poor grows wider every day, and we’re drowning in health care costs – and progressive people of religious faith actually have something to contribute to all of this! Would anyone know this by watching your newscast?

My peculiar faith as a Christian, an Episcopal priest, and a gay man convinces me wholeheartedly that Jesus supports full marriage equality for all people. And that’s just the tip of the religious iceberg of what I and so many other Christians believe Jesus would support in the effort to create a society in which all people thrive and flourish.

I’m more than happy to redouble my efforts to get the word out about the socially and politically good news of the Christian Gospel and to mobilize as best I can my friends, colleagues, and the hundreds of thousands of other Christian companions in this country who believe likewise.

That’s what I’ll do. Now, PBS News Hour, what will you do?

“Enchanté, Madame”: Why Good Policy Alone Won’t Save Us

Christ is risen and we’re killing the planet. I know – you’ve heard something similar countless times. Another species extinct. Another ecosystem threatened. Global climate change. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Maybe you haven’t heard this one quite so often: If it’s okay to rape women, it’s okay to rape the planet.

That grisly connection is, alas, being performed right now on legislative stages in Washington, D.C. and in far too many states. The link between the current war on women and the war on the planet (the former talked about incessantly these days and the latter, not so much), is subtle but vitally important.

I firmly believe that the many complex “issues” we face today are woven together in complex, lovely, troubling, spiritual ways. I want to try to evoke that here, if only as a preface to the great work our species must now confront. So let’s consider just a few of the dots that need connecting at the moment:

  • First, access to birth control and abortion (which is still technically legal in this country) is under attack. If only this were old news. I appreciate the moral quandaries faced by people of good faith about abortion, but now we’re seeing restrictions appearing even when the health of the mother is at stake, and even in cases of rape and incest. So, is it really okay to rape women? (For more on access issues, read here, which is wonky and policy-heavy, but important; or Rachel Maddow’s take on it here.)
  • Second, access to clean water, clean air, and a safe food supply is equally under attack. This doesn’t appear often enough in the headlines. According to some, the current Congress is the most anti-environment Congress in U.S. history. (Read more about that here; though this is a partisan source, it nonetheless provides helpful links to actual legislation, and it’s disturbing.)
  • Third, access to the truth requires tedious knowledge of legislative riders, appropriations bills, and countless other political arcana that make most people reach for a cocktail instead. The U.S. House, for example, recently passed a much needed piece of legislation for student loans, but paid for it by reducing health care funding that might affect women the most. (The word “might” is important there and I recommend Ezra Klein’s take on this here.)

These are not sexy dots to connect. But connect them we must. Consider this recent pithy observation about environmental responsibility from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams: the world is “not just a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.” (Read a great essay on this here.)

I can’t help but wonder if far too many men think the same way about women – women’s bodies as warehouses, incubators, resources, objects. We’ve had a few decades now of insightful analysis about the link between male privilege and ecological degradation – men can control “mother” nature just like they (try to) control women. But I’m not at all convinced that such a link has sunk into our collective consciousness. (Even less likely to have sunk in are the connections between misogyny, homophobia, and global climate change…but I digress.)

So I wonder: How might all of us think differently about our own bodies, the bodies of others, the bodies of non-human animals, and the body of this planet? Would thinking differently make a difference in how we live, the social policies we support, the politicians we elect? I hope so. But what does “thinking differently” mean?

What about “enchantment”?

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a book that proposed precisely that and I’m still trying to tease out its implications. The book is by James William Gibson, called A Re-enchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature. It’s an insightful, heartbreaking, hopeful, and lovely book. I also believe Gibson captured something critical and essential: arguing about environmental policy won’t solve any of our problems unless we rekindle our nearly forgotten enchantment with nature.

By “enchantment,” Gibson means many things at once: nature isn’t anyone’s private property; it isn’t just a “resource”; it has its own life and value and beauty quite apart from humanity; and it’s uncanny, uncontrollable, lovely, grotesque, compelling, beyond categories of human meaning making. It is, in a word, enchanting.

I really want to think more and write more about this, and I will. But for now, in the midst of these Great Fifty Days of Easter (Easter is a season, longer than Lent), I frequently find my spiritual attention gravitating toward the image of the “new creation.” The resurrection of Jesus wasn’t just for him, and it wasn’t just for every other human. In some way, Easter proclaims God’s stubborn commitment to life for everything, without exception. Now that is surely peculiar, thankfully.

So, could that great Gospel proclamation lead us to a re-enchantment with the world and all its many wondrously uncanny and glorious bodies? Could it, at long last, dismantle the utilitarian and objectifying posture toward women’s bodies that so many politicians, not to mention religious leaders, seem to adopt? Could Easter move us to find each other and the world around us enchanting?

I believe it could. And not a moment too soon.

Radical Nuns Take Over the U.N. — World Peace Declared and the Church Objects!

That is, of course, a ludicrous headline, worthy of “The Onion.” That said, and given some of my past experience with Roman Catholic women religious, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if they made the attempt.

Moreover, given the latest absurdities from the Vatican concerning apparently “rogue nuns,” I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the Church objected to world peace if it didn’t conform to orthodox doctrinal standards. I wish I were making that up. Alas, the Vatican recently voiced its objection to the compelling and effective social justice ministries of The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, even though those ministries are perfectly aligned with more than a century of Catholic social teaching. (Don’t try to make sense of institutional Christianity; it will make you crazy and drive you to drink. I’m here to testify.)

So let’s pause here. Take a deep breath. Perhaps we can frame these absurdities with the peculiarities of Christian faith. Sure, radical nuns taking over the United Nations is ludicrous. But consider the following story. Is it any less ludicrous?

Two friends are walking down a dusty, deserted road. They are sad and grieving over the death of a friend. As they talk about their lives and the state of the world and their grief, a stranger joins them on the road. This stranger has truly mind-blowing things to say about the meaning of life and those two friends are spellbound.

They invite the stranger to join them for supper. As they sit down to table, they finally recognize this stranger as their dear friend who had died. In that very moment, the stranger disappears.

That’s a rough paraphrase of a classic Easter season story from Luke’s gospel (24:13-35), often referred to as the “Emmaus Road story.” It’s one of my favorites. I like to pair it with the story about “doubting Thomas” that so many Christians heard this past Sunday. I like to pair those stories because both of them diffuse our obsession with certainty. Both of them dethrone human hubris. Both of them elevate doubt and humility to spiritual virtues.

I take both stories as cautionary tales for theologians (like me) and institutional Christianity more generally. Any attempt to make absolute statements about God, Christian faith, or spiritual practice will always fail. Always. Like the risen Christ in the story from Luke, God will always slip through our fingers in that very moment when we think we have it all figured out – or more pointedly, all nailed down, understood, captured, and controlled.

The truth of any religious tradition or spiritual practice does not reside in how well we talk about it or parse its doctrines or ensure its systematic coherence. No, the truth of any religion resides in how we live it, and how our living promotes liberation from oppression, social justice, human flourishing, and planetary thriving. If that kind of effective spiritual living runs counter to doctrinal articulation, it’s high time to adjust the doctrine. The entire history of Christianity bears painful witness to this.

To be clear, I’m not promoting intellectual laxity, moral libertinism, or “laissez-faire spirituality.” I believe Christians ought to make bold claims, strike outrageous social postures, and preach like our lives depend on it (because they actually do). But I also believe that we should infuse all of it with a healthy dose of humility. After all, we could be wrong; we have been wrong in the past; we will be wrong again.

Alas, institutional Christianity’s besetting sin is not boldness but safety; not risk for the sake of life but the status quo for the sake of survival; not reckless creativity but staid conformity, and mostly for the sake of power and privilege. And by “institutional Christianity,” I do not mean only Roman Catholicism.

So here’s a modest proposal for this Easter season. If even the most wonderful news of all time – the resurrection of Jesus – can slip through our fingers in the blink of an eye, then we might want to handle our doctrinal positions a bit more lightly.

Here’s the more pointed version: If the Church can’t control the risen Christ, then maybe it shouldn’t try to control radical nuns who are actually living the Resurrection in their work of social justice and human flourishing.

Is doctrinal adjustment too high a price to pay for new life? Really?

Harrowing Hell & Holy Liminality

Betwixt and between. Neither here nor there. Departed but not arrived.

Justice proclaimed but not yet fully practiced. Equality enacted but repeatedly denied. New life promised in the midst of death.

These are profound but often difficult moments. Some decades ago now, anthropologist Victor Turner analyzed moments of transition when someone has started to leave one phase of life but hasn’t yet moved fully into the next. Think adolescence, that awkward slice of life when one is no longer a child but not yet an adult. Turner referred to these as “liminal” moments, taken from the Latin word “limen,” for threshold.

The fecundity of these in-between states dates much further back than Turner, to ancient mythology. “Liminal deities” preside over thresholds, gates, and doorways, lending spiritual significance to border crossings. In Greco-Roman mythology, Hermes/Mercury was the messenger of the gods and guide of the dead, just as Janus became the god of doorways, of beginnings and endings. Janus, the god with one face looking forward and another looking back, is often associated with New Year’s Day, January 1.

Liminal moments can be challenging and disconcerting; just ask any teenager. My own constitutional impatience makes it difficult to rest after finishing a project; I’m eager to start the next one. Communities and institutions in transition frequently want to skip over all the unsettling liminal bits, those untidy passages where the past still haunts and the future remains unclear. Sloughing of the past too quickly risks losing what we might need to make a leap forward.

But there are other kinds of liminality, too. Moments of getting stuck between a past that we won’t relinquish and a future we’re unwilling to embrace.

The Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) heralded a long overdue transition toward racial equality in the U.S. Not only is a racially just society still woefully elusive, current legislative initiatives would drag us back to the “Mad Men” era if not a virtual Jim Crow. A woman’s right to make decisions about her own body should have been settled decades ago even as contraception is once again on the legislative table. The Supreme Court overturned state sodomy laws in 2003; lesbian and gay couples can now have sex without fear of prosecution but they can’t get married.

There is much work to do, and neither nostalgia nor utopia will help us. Navigating the liminal “betwixt and between” thus proves both rich and challenging. The past is familiar but sometimes painful; the future is hopeful but unknown. Today, on the Christian calendar, I’m reminded that Jesus hallows the liminal by harrowing hell.

The day between Good Friday and Easter, “Holy Saturday,” is a truly peculiar day. Suspended between the Cross and an empty tomb, Christian communities and clergy busy themselves with Sunday preparations.

Christian tradition has Jesus doing something on this day as well – descending into the underworld to rescue all those held captive by the Devil. This is the sacred version of “no child left behind.” In Janus-like fashion, the crucified Jesus refuses to forget the past even as he looks forward to a promised future.

One of my favorite depictions of this Holy Liminality is in the Byzantine Church of the Savior in Chora, Istanbul, where a gorgeous fresco covers the apse. It depicts Jesus, standing on the gates of hell that he has just smashed, raising Adam and Eve from their graves. Actually, he’s dragging them out from death. I can’t help but see both astonishment and a touch of reluctance in their postures: “Really? You remembered us? But where are we are going? What lies ahead?”

On this day, this Holy Saturday, in the midst of busy preparations for the Feast of Resurrection, let us pause, even for a moment, to remember what we marked yesterday: the lengths to which imperial forces will go to maintain the status quo. Let us remember as well all those who came before us, the pioneers and visionaries who carved an arduous path toward a better world. Let us remember all those who did not live to see that promise fulfilled. And let us remember all this to fuel the hope we need for the work still to do — a profound hope indeed, which, as tomorrow’s feast reminds us, was first announced by women.

The promise of tomorrow cannot be won by forgetting yesterday. That makes this particular Saturday not only peculiar but also, and therefore, holy.

Holy Fools for a Holy Week

Carrying his cross on the way to his death, Jesus said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me but weep for yourselves and for your children” (Luke 23:28). Indeed.

I’m sure Trayvon Martin’s mother has been weeping of late (read more). So has the mother of Dalton Lee Walker, a twelve-year old boy who took his own life a few days ago because of bullying, and on the very same day the documentary film Bullying opened nationwide (read more about that here). If she could, Shaima al Awadi would be weeping, not only for herself but for her four children. But she can’t. She was beaten to death in her San Diego home with something like a tire iron this past week. Why? She’s Iraqi and Muslim (read more here).

I’ve been reflecting this Lent on the powerful and poisonous confluence of male privilege and white supremacy – what it looks like, its effects, and what it will take to dismantle it for the full thriving of women and therefore also of the planet.

Now that we have arrived to Holy Week, I believe those reflections have been rather foolish. Isn’t it just a fool’s errand to dismantle centuries of white male privilege? Yes, it is. And I am happily a fool to try.

Palm Sunday this year, the beginning of Holy Week, is also April Fools’ Day. What a great coincidence for reflecting on the absurdity of marking with elaborate rituals these ancient, first-century stories – as if they mattered, is if they still speak today, as if they might actually change the world.

I think the best way to journey through this holy week is to don a jester’s cap and embrace the foolishness of the whole thing. Here let me offer two reasons why.

1. Religion is always vulnerable to being co-opted by empire.

In some ways, this is obvious, but far too often, not obvious enough. First century Palestine was an occupied province of the Roman Empire. Those political dynamics are reverberating throughout the gospel texts in ways most readers usually don’t notice.

I worry, for example, that talking about the “triumphal entry” of Jesus into Jerusalem (as most Christians do on Palm Sunday) is terribly misleading. I was reminded recently that on the Jewish feast of Passover, the Romans typically staged a military parade in Jerusalem to underscore their control and power. A leading military figure would ride at the head of the parade on a horse followed by the armored might of centurions and soldiers. (Read this provocative and insightful post about all this here.)

Put the story of Jesus into that context: He climbs on to a donkey, not a horse, and basically waddles into the city, not followed by soldiers but by the people. This is a moment of deep political mockery worthy of a 1990s-style ACT UP protest. The donkey didn’t even belong to Jesus – he had to borrow it. And the only armor his followers had were the branches of palm trees.

If ever there was a biblical precedent for April Fools’ Day, this is it. Jesus was making a profound joke, but with a point: Don’t take Rome so damned seriously.

Of course, and to put it mildly, one mocks imperial power at one’s own peril, especially when the very next thing you do is wreak havoc in the local IRS office, which is exactly what Jesus did with those money-changers’ tables in the temple – the prime location for religion’s co-optation by empire.

Now here’s something interesting: early Christians took this resistance to empire as an essential part of their faith. Just one example comes from a remarkable critique of the Roman household. Some early Christian writers critiqued the hierarchical ordering of the Roman household, which should be a microcosm of the Church, as the body of Christ, not the empire. (I blogged about this recently; read more here.)

This was an amazing leap forward for the liberation of women in the midst of a deeply patriarchal society – and not surprisingly, Rome did not look kindly on disrupting the configuration of the imperial household. Empires never look kindly on such things – not then, and not today.

Sadly, that kind of religious critique nearly disappeared in the fourth century, when the emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the empire.

So as we walk through Holy Week, we would do well to note that the State will always rely on religion to support its imperial power. At the very least, to follow Jesus into Jerusalem means that we must not remain silent about what happened to Trayvon Martin, Shaima al Awadi, and Dalton Lee Walker.

2. The Cross is Foolish

Let me count the ways. St. Paul, no less, wrote that the cross of Christ is just foolish, a stumbling block, silly – and therefore the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:18-25). I won’t pretend to know what Paul really meant by that or to understand it. But there’s a huge elephant sitting in most “liberal” or “progressive” Christian living rooms – the doctrine of atonement. And that doctrine is lurking around every corner of the rites and stories of Holy Week.

I read recently that one of the key reasons why younger generations stay away from Christian churches is the trouble they have with that doctrine. I have trouble with it, too! But I’m troubled mostly by how just one view of it has dominated American culture. Especially during this week, I think it’s important to remember that there is not just one such doctrine of atonement in Christian history or even in the Bible; there are many. And there are also many other ways to reflect on the significance of the Cross quite apart from notions of atonement.

That said, I believe reflecting on judgment, atonement, and forgiveness is essential for our 21st century life, but those topics have been so twisted and distorted as to make that task nearly impossible. Let’s set that aside for a moment and consider something equally foolish.

I find it helpful to think about Jesus in this holy week as the radical companion. In that way I believe Jesus reveals something truly astonishing about God – the God of solidarity.

If you want to find God you could, of course, look anywhere, but you might want especially to look among the poor, the misplaced, the homeless, the suffering, and the grieving. You might especially look among all the victims of imperial power. That’s how I read the Bible.

Earlier in Luke’s gospel, in the Transfiguration story, the disciples of Jesus are discussing the “departure” that Jesus must undergo in Jerusalem. That word translated from the Greek as “departure” is εξοδον. That’s the very same word that Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible used to refer to the exodus of the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt – yet another empire. I cannot believe this is just a linguistic coincidence.

Remember, Moses fled Egypt only to return in a decision to engage in radical solidarity with his people, to set them free. Here I believe Luke is inviting us to see in Moses and now also in Jesus that the same passion for solidarity belongs first and foremost to God.

Jesus models this with the choice he made about his own life. He could have, for example, chosen the path of a Levitical warrior to liberate his people by force from Roman occupation. I say “Levitical” warrior because the culture of tribal warfare from which that biblical book arose was constructed on an economics of patriarchal masculinity in which topping one’s enemies – with violence, if necessary – demonstrated covenantal faithfulness.

But Jesus chose instead to follow the path articulated by the prophet Isaiah. In that book, the Levitical warrior becomes the “suffering servant,” and rather than topping one’s enemies, that servant leads all the nations instead to God’s holy mountain where they learn war no more and beat their swords into ploughshares (Isaiah 2:4).

Indeed, Luke has Jesus quote not from Leviticus but from Isaiah at the beginning of his ministry: “God has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, and freedom for the oppressed” (Luke 4:18-19).

Both Moses and Jesus chose the path of radical solidarity, not for the sake of suffering but for the sake of freedom. The God who enters our struggle with us does so to lead us out – from death to life.

I believe that’s exactly what Luke’s Jesus meant when he said this incredibly foolish thing: “Take up your cross daily and follow me.” If we live for ourselves alone, we will die; if we live in solidarity with others, especially the vulnerable, the poor, the fearful, the oppressed, and the suffering, we will live – both in this life and the life to come.

That’s the remarkable path Jesus blazed for us to follow – surely for the sake of Trayvon, Shaima, and Dalton Lee, among so many others.

But do note: That path is costly. It comes with great risk. It is thoroughly foolish, not least because we will have to give up much to do it. But if we do, that path leads to unimaginable life.

May this week change all us so that we can, with God’s amazing grace, change the world. I know. That’s just foolishness…..and thank God for it.