Uncategorized – Peculiar Faith

Shelter to Storm, Crown to Cross: On the Road in Holy Week

We begin a symbol-rich journey tomorrow morning on the first day of the holiest week on the Christian calendar. Much of Holy Week can feel like we’re engaged in a religious version of historical re-enactment—tracing and “performing” the events of the last week of the life of Jesus—but if so, it’s certainly not chronologically tidy.

Biblical accounts of the Gospel likewise resist theologically neatness, too, which makes it almost impossible to focus on what we might want to believe about whatever it is we happen to be doing on any given day of this week—if you observe a service of Tenebrae on Wednesday, for example, you’ll likely be reflecting on the Cross, even though we haven’t had the Maundy Thursday observance of the “last supper” yet.

In addition to the biblical, liturgical, and doctrinal complexity, we now face the cultural chaos of the wider world: bombs falling in the Middle East; “No Kings” rallies around the United States; a new Archbishop of Canterbury “enthroned” for the Anglican Communion; and planetary ecosystems devolving into climatic chaos faster (much faster) than scientists had predicted (and that’s a short list).

The title of that wonderful 2022 film notwithstanding, we can’t think of “everything everywhere all at once,” but we can take one step a time, with biblical stories in one hand and liturgical texts in the other—and especially with the deep breathing and gentle accompaniment of companions to travel with us along the road.

Even more, I’ve realized over the years that the Holy Week journey is made richer by choosing just one image or a single vignette or a narrative arc among the many stories we’ll hear and then letting that carry me through the week into Easter Day. This year, I’m intrigued by the image of a road, and a particular one at that: the one from the village of Bethany to the city of Jerusalem.

The lectionary this year has been giving us a series of stories from John’s account of the Gospel on these Lenten Sundays, and last week’s was one of my favorites: the raising of Lazarus from the dead (11:1-45).

The small village of Bethany—just about four miles or so from Jerusalem along a road that crosses the Mt. of Olives—was apparently a place of rest and renewal for Jesus in the home of Lazarus and his two sisters, Mary and Martha. That quiet spot was sufficiently removed from the urban hustle-and-bustle of Jerusalem (including all the religious intrigue and imperial adornments) that I can easily imagine Jesus relishing that spot as a place to take a deep breath and leave his worries behind, at least for a short while, whenever he spent time with that family of friends.

Having lived for many years in the metro-urban San Francisco Bay Area, moving five years ago to Michigan in the lakeshore resort of Saugatuck felt luxurious. This beautiful shoreline region certainly qualifies as a type of “Bethany” for me, and I am so grateful to be living and working in a place that offers both comfort and renewal in so many different ways, not least the trees, and dunes, and the lake itself.

Tomorrow morning, Palm Sunday, the lectionary Gospel narrative pivots away from the Bethany of renewal toward the Jerusalem of confrontation. This particular day on the liturgical calendar, the one that begins Holy Week, carries a rather awkward liturgical title: “The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday.” Well, which is it? Do we engage with the story of the suffering and death of Jesus (his “passion”) or his so-called “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem as people waved palm branches? Like so much else in Christian traditions, the answer is both.

Palm and Passion belong together, not as juxtaposed opposites but as mutually informing symbols—even though their convergence on a single is something of an historical accident. Back in the sixth century or so, when some Christians, especially in remote areas of the vast Roman Empire, could not attend Good Friday services, the story of the crucifixion was mashed together with the story of the palms on the Sunday before Easter, that way everyone could reflect on the death of Jesus before celebrating his resurrection.

Yes…and: the palm-strewn entry into Jerusalem is not really a victory lap, and the “triumph” is not removed or separate from the “torture” that soon follows. The historical “accident” of Palm Sunday is actually more closely attuned with the very heart of the Christian Gospel than it might at first appear: it speaks directly of God’s deep solidarity with us, not just in comfort but also in confrontation, not only in shelter but also the storm. (I love John August Swanson’s painting of this story, which he names only as the “entry” into Jerusalem, no “triumph,” which includes a stormy sky to greet him.)

“Entry into the City,” John August Swanson

As our liturgical calendar pivots this week from “shelter to storm,” leaving the safe harbor of Bethany behind and into the turbulent sea where religion and imperial politics mix, I’m particularly mindful of the importance of this shift for those of us (myself included) who live so comfortably, actually insulated from the wider world of pain.

As war continues and oil fields burn (on the far side of a vast ocean) and spring temperatures break all-time heat records (climate chaos all the way on the other side of this country) and the island nation of Cuba sits in the dark (still securely south of the U.S. border), very little of the world’s trouble seems even remotely close to the Blue Star Highway—the lovely two-lane road the marks a kind of border between this shoreline resort and the world “out there.”

Reflecting on that road—together with the one from Bethany to Jerusalem—the Sunday of the Passion is indeed Palm Sunday precisely because Jesus refuses earthly power of all kinds in favor of a costly solidarity with the most vulnerable—and in this case, those dominated and oppressed by imperial power; Cross displaces Crown.

I’ve actually walked much of that road between Bethany and Jerusalem myself, back when I was (much) younger and testing a career in archaeology. The terrain is hilly, the route curvy; when walking from Bethany, it’s not always easy to see the city around bends in the road or through scrubby olive trees, but one trusts the journey anyway.

We embark on the Holy Week journey knowing that Easter is just a week away—or rather, we know it’s on the calendar. Trusting the promise of Easter is another matter, and more difficult, and frequently fraught with all sorts of cultural and personal entanglements (I try to stay liturgically focused but can’t stop thinking about the canker sore on my tongue and an achy jaw from a long session in the dentist’s chair this past week).

“Kaleidescope Cross,” Kathy Manis Findley

I’m grateful for the liturgies of the Prayer Book at a time like this; I myself am not responsible for generating the words and gestures to evoke hope, much less joy—the stories and the rites bear that up, thank God.

But this much I must do, and not alone but with others: decide to walk the road, to leave Bethany’s shelter for Jerusalem’s storm. What will that ask of me and require of us, now, in these days? That’s the question to carry with us…

Legacy Language and Redeeming the Flesh

My allergy to “binary thinking” in a world of “either/or” choices began in early childhood, and then took root in adolescence when I was trying to grapple with the dawning awareness of being a gay man.

Looking back on those years, the whole world seemed organized with absolute distinctions, but I remember especially how the logic of Christian faith itself seemed to run on binary categories: Heaven and Earth; the saved and the lost; faith and doubt; and perhaps the quintessential instance of such distinctions, St. Paul’s rigid contrast between “flesh and spirit,” which shows up directly in his letters to the Galatians and the Romans.

Maybe no one back then liked bodies very much, or maybe they were told not to like them: It’s difficult to say which came first in my suburban religious subculture, bodily disdain or biblical blindness. Regardless of its origins, the deep suspicion of the “flesh” lurked everywhere. Quite apart from trying to deal with emergent gay desires in adolescence, everyone living through puberty—gay, straight, trans, or just generally unsure—likely struggled to figure out how in the world to live with a body that was apparently just “bad.”

When I finally did come out as a gay man in my senior year at Wheaton College (an adventure worthy of a book), I was presented with yet another binary choice: either embrace my sexual identity or my Christian faith, but not both. For reasons I cannot fully fathom (likely an effervescent mix of my mother’s German stubbornness and a healthy dose of divine grace), I refused to choose. I insisted instead on following a path of integration, of discerning how to live as fully human and gratefully Christian.

“The Valley of Dry Bones,” Gordon Miller

Part of that journey was finding alternative ways to read St. Paul, who almost certainly did not intend to denigrate human skin, bones, and organs—the very bodies God makes—when he cautioned his first-century Christians about the “flesh.” These Greek terms we translate as “flesh” and “spirit” instead stood as markers for ways of being in the world, realms of being or social structures that shape the decisions we make and the kind of character we cultivate. “Flesh” stands for a world marked by greed, hatred, envy, and sexual exploitation, among other things. “Spirit” marks the sphere of love, joy, peace, and self-control.

This coming weekend, on the fifth Sunday in Lent, we will hear that distinction from Paul’s letter to the Romans (8:6-11), a powerful example of what I would call “legacy language,” or ways of speaking that are so resilient in our collective consciousness that we can’t just talk ourselves free of them. I could, for example, devote my entire sermon on Sunday morning to a more lifegiving way to read Paul, but that wouldn’t matter one little bit for those who grew up hearing Paul declare (and their parents confirm) that “the flesh is death” and the “Spirit is life.”

That’s not the only bit of legacy language many of us live with, but that one certainly functions like a flashback portal to a world we had hoped to leave behind, or like a password that opens once again that chamber of revulsion in our brains toward our own bodies. Having spent time not only with my own ghosts of bodily shame but also with seminary classrooms of LGBT people, this is clear: that kind of painful flashback with legacy language is sadly common, even today.

In my wonderful little parish, we often use the First Nations Version (FNV) of the New Testament in the Lenten season. It’s a wonderful indigenous translation that helps many of us, myself included, read familiar biblical texts with fresh vision. This week was another reason to be grateful for that version as I was dreading having to deal with Paul’s Letter to the Romans. But then I read the FNV translation: “If we set our minds on the broken desires of our bodies, we will see only death. But if we look to the power of the Spirit, we will have life and walk the road of peace. … If the same Spirit that brought Creator Sets Free (Jesus) the Chosen One back from the dead lives in you, then that same Spirit will also bring your death-doomed bodies back to life again.”

I nearly wept when I read that translation, which felt like the next chapter of an ongoing story of liberation. To be sure, the language of “deadly desires of our bodies” carries the same potential risk of triggering shame as the more traditional language. But the emphasis has clearly shifted: it’s not my flesh that is the problem, but the desires that attach to it, which can come from a wide range of sources, including the social and political realities in which we live.

The dangerous desires themselves are not named in this passage, but we can quite easily think of some deadly ones today: the desire that fuels a consumerism sufficient to wreck Earth’s ecosystems; the desire to treat enemies with vengeance to the point of bombing children; the desire to dominate women that leads to trafficking girls; the desire to associate only with people exactly like us and exclude everyone else, with violence if necessary; and the list goes on. Again, the FNV translation makes clear that the flesh itself is not the problem but rather the shaping and forming of that flesh with the kind of desires that “doom our bodies to death.” As Paul then declares, the very same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead will likewise bring our “death-doomed bodies back to life again.”

The Lenten lectionary this week takes me still further along this path of rehabilitating the flesh with the story of raising the flesh of Lazarus from the dead. I love that story from John’s account of the Gospel for many reasons, not least is the family of friends—Mary, Martha, and their brother Lazarus—who apparently meant so much to Jesus. He loved that circle of intimates, not just the idea of them, or their enduring qualities, or the fuzzy feelings they inspired, but their actual bodies, and their physical house, and the village where he found relaxation and respite.

There are multiple ways to read this astonishing story of raising a dead friend back to life, including all the tricks of navigating literary tropes and sorting through possible metaphorical treasures. But St. Paul has me focused on the odor coming from the grave in that story. Martha voiced that worry: don’t open the tomb! It’s going to stink to high heaven! What Jesus rescues from the grave is not just death but the stench of fleshy life I lived with for far too long.

There are some days when I relish the intricate metaphorical readings of these ancient texts and finding all the religious symbols lurking around the details these ancient writers included for our spiritual enlightenment. And then there are days when I set all that aside, days when I need Jesus to yank his dear friend from that smelly tomb with the sound of his grief-torn voice. Of course John the Evangelist would be the one to give us this moment, the Gospel writer who launches his whole account of the Gospel by declaring that the divine Word became flesh.

If you’re struggling with the legacy language of bad religion, this story is for you, for the redemption of your very own flesh. And this Gospel writer is for you, the one whose inspiration was largely drawn from (of all things) an even older collection of erotic love poetry known as the Song of Songs—poetry that affirms without any hint of hesitation the strength of love itself: it is indeed strong, stronger than even death (8:6-7).

The Holy Week journey begins just a week from this Sunday, a journey for which I, for one, will need the strongest love there is, not only for the annual sojourn toward the cross but to face a crucified world of intolerable pain and anguish with any kind of hope for Easter.

That’s my prayer: that we might find our own raspy, grief-worn voices rising with praise once again for a love that is still, and will always remain, stronger than death.

“Reaching — The Raising of Lazarus,” Michael Cook

Called to Life, Tempted by Shame

Mythologies often tell the truth better than facts—at least about the stuff that matters most: who we are, how to live and love, why we exist.

The Bible is brimming with truer-than-fact stories, and many of us heard a classic one from the first book of the Bible yesterday, on the first Sunday in Lent, and it even featured the fabled forbidden fruit.

As I pondered why it should matter to tell stories like these when the world swirls with chaos and pain, I stumbled upon a wonderful retrospective essay on Toni Morrison and her socially transformative work—perfect for Black History Month!

Most people probably don’t think of Morrison as a Black activist; she was a novelist. What does storytelling have to do with changing the world?

Ah! That’s exactly the connection to notice: the best stories are always world-changing, even if the “world” is one’s own interior landscape.

The essayist noted, for example, that Morrison’s novel Beloved is deliberately “fragmented,” and that she invented a kind of narrative language to evoke the unspeakable horrors of slavery and its brutalities, but also the resilience, the courage, the beauty of those who had been enslaved. For Morrison, stories matter because, at least in part, they can contain what our minds cannot confront.

Stories, fables, and mythologies often tell the truest things about us, even when we don’t want to know them. We tell stories to navigate the world, to pass along vital information, and to create places of meaning and purpose for ourselves in the unfolding evolution of the Universe. We also tell stories when we just can’t bear reality any other way.

Among the most important (and nearly entirely caricatured) sets of such mission-critical stories sits nestled in the first three chapters of Genesis, brilliantly stitched together from a variety of ancient mythologies by an ancient storyteller who is wrestling with what it means to be human. As we heard in church yesterday (if we could manage not to hear what isn’t in that story and turn down the volume on all the messages most of us heard from childhood and 1970s television ), this biblical storyteller struggles with the human condition because of a key conviction: we are not yet embracing the kind of life for which God made us (Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7).

In the same way that Toni Morrison understood the power of stories to contain what our minds cannot confront, this biblical storyteller can help us face the agonizing aspects of human life and also the staggering beauty of living as a creature of the living God. The struggle and the beauty; the agony and the glory—not only stories, but visual art carries into those spaces where are linear modes of cognitive sorting fear to tread, as artist Edwin Lester reminds me so vividly.

That’s what makes these first three chapters of the Bible so foundational: not as a pseudo-scientific account of human origins (Darwin is not an enemy of faith!), but rather as a story about the human condition that can help us travel along the good road toward flourishing.

We might also note that churches committed to the three-year lectionary cycle are currently living in Year A, which just happens to be the foundational year for the sake of Christian formation, and we certainly had plenty of material to sort through yesterday for the beginning of Lent! The story from Genesis, and also St. Paul’s interpretation of that story in his letter to the Romans (5:12-19), and still more: Matthew’s version of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness (4:1-11).

Each of these texts separately and especially taken together reflect the ongoing and often deeply vexing struggle with it means to be human: in relation to each other, with the wider world of God’s creation, and in God. This struggle maps the entire Lenten journey—toward the Cross and into the Empty Tomb—and for many of us they are vexing texts, irritating, familiar enough to breed contempt, and almost always weaponized (as often happens with the best stories).

All of that vexation was certainly true for me, for many years, and then, as if flooded by divine illumination—probably because of a providential confluence of arguing with Christian fundamentalists about marriage equality and seeing a gay Jewish therapist about my own internalized homophobia—I suddenly read the Bible through an entirely different and luminous lens.

The following is the fresh path I’m still traveling through these texts, briefly charted (and if you want to read more about this, it’s at the heart of my book on thinking theological about sexual intimacy):

The first (and I would say most important and vital) thing to notice comes from the temptation in that ancient and iconic garden in Genesis. Quite honestly, my entire professional life, as well as my personal life, changed dramatically when I saw clearly what resided at the root of that temptation: shame.

Yes, it is also true that this story is about disobedience and guilt and the need for forgiveness; but those aspects are secondary, because they emerge first and foremost from the deadly dynamics of bodily shame—and they are indeed devilishly deadly. (I cannot recommend highly enough the work of Brene Brown on this; among here many videos and publications, you can start with this TED Talk on shame.)

I am thoroughly convinced that the vast preponderance of the world’s distress is rooted in unacknowledged and unaddressed shame. Notice carefully the character of the temptation itself. The wise serpent says to the first humans: “if you eat this fruit, you will be like God.”

Here’s the essence of that crafty invitation: to suppose that the way God made us isn’t good enough; being merely human is not enough—we have to be like gods.

That’s shame talking, not guilt, and the difference matters: Guilt attaches to something I’ve done; shame attaches to my sense of self. This ancient storyteller then shows us the deadly effects of shame: it separates us from each other, it separates us from the wider world of God’s creation, and it urges us to turn away from God.

Not just coincidentally, what follows immediately after this moment in the next chapter of Genesis is the story of fratricide, when Cain kills his brother Abel; shame often gets projected outward into violence—it’s in the daily news every single day.

The second thing to notice is how Matthew’s Jesus resists the deadly solutions to the problem of shame—even though they are very tempting.

Every year on the first Sunday in Lent, most Christians hear the story about Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. This year, I read that story as for the first time. Thanks to the lectionary pairings (like fine wines with a delicious meal of Mediterranean food?), it suddenly occurred to me that each of the temptations Jesus faced is just another version of what the serpent offered Adam and Eve in the garden: a way to reject human nature.

Oh, the trickster serpent says to Jesus, you’re hungry? A mere human couldn’t solve that problem; but if you really are the Son of God, why don’t you turn these stones into bread?

Oh, you’re afraid of heights? Mere humans usually are. But if you really are God’s chosen, jump off this high tower; God will surely save you.

Oh, you’re a bit short of money? That’s a classic source of human anxiety, poor thing. So just worship me, and I’ll give you all the riches of the world.

Jesus says No to each of these ways of rejecting his God-given humanity—he may be hungry, afraid, and poor, but his humanity is intact for the good road toward divine flourishing, toward the very purpose God intends, which is nothing less than abundant life, for all.

The story from Genesis presents that abundance, I would say, as a life made for communion—for deep intimacy with each other, an interlaced community with the wider world of God’s creation, and union with God.

Shame inevitably corrodes that purpose from the inside out, erupting into hateful speech, fragmenting families and communities, and maintaining deadly divisions among us with violence.

Among the many reasons Christian communities keep the Eucharist as the heart of their life of common prayer, surely this must be paramount: It is the Table of Communion: a visible and tangible reminder of the kind of life for which God makes us and toward which God wants to lead us.

Yes, gathered at that Table offers the vital assurance that we are forgiven; and perhaps today what we need even more urgently is that Table’s balm of love to heal our shame.

Standing at the Crossroads of Healing

Today, Ash Wednesday, Christians begin the annual Lenten journey toward the Cross. While always important to note, this year it seems especially vital and indispensable to say as clearly as possible that this journey does not glorify pain and suffering, nor does it imagine violence as saving.

To say the same thing but differently: crucifixion was a first-century tool of state-sponsored terror—it is quintessentially that from which we must be saved. The image of Jesus on that cross is the image of God in solidarity with us, all of us, on a path toward new life.

I stumbled upon yet one more way to say the same thing in a compelling blog post by Jon Paul Sydnor: crucifixion was a crime, and we must stop seeing this act of performative cruelty as salvific. For Sydnor, “The crucifixion is the wound; the resurrection is the balm.”

Those insights have a long way still to go before they sink fully into my bones and muscles. I grew up in an Evangelical Christian tradition that told me (in both overt and subtle ways) that I’m tainted, depraved, and mostly if not wholly bad—being a burgeoning gay boy didn’t help. The cross of Christ was our only hope at appeasing the wrath of the God who made us. (Don’t try to make sense of that sentence; it doesn’t make any sense at all.)

The struggle to embrace the “way of the cross” as none other than the “way of life and peace” (as the Book of Common Prayer would have us do in the Collect for Monday in Holy Week) is not particularly helped by the Sunday lectionary, which will give us a set of texts this week that can feel like a relapse into a religious addiction: the putative “fall” of Adam and Eve in Eden (Genesis 3:1-7) and St. Paul’s apparent framing of that story as the origins of “original sin” (Romans 5:12-19).

For these reasons and more, I’m so grateful for the “Crossroads of Healing” initiative here at All Saints’ Parish in Saugatuck, our shared effort to host gatherings and events at the intersection of the arts and spirituality. This initiative emerged from our commitment to name and address the wounds of race, gender, class, and sexuality in an ecological frame, and especially for the sake of healing toward thriving.

I’m particularly grateful for this initiative as we begin Lent and reflect on the multi-layered imagery of the Cross. Or, as we might note, Christian communities have especially appreciated the image of a cross at intersectional moments. Rather than just one meaning, the cross of Christ carries many modes of interpretation, including the reassuring hope of divine healing for the wounds of separation, isolation, and the violence of oppression.

This initiative has heightened my own awareness of how Christian faith and culture create various intersections as race and gender (especially in this patriarchal society of white supremacy, which describes the United States from its very founding) intertwine with the Cross, and all for the sake of interlaced liturgical rites and spiritual practices.

But really, what does all of that mean for the first Sunday in Lent and those trigger texts from the lectionary?

We spend nearly as much time on visual art in my parish as we do with Scripture and the Prayer Book. All three have been woven together in ways that prove remarkably insightful and life-giving. Preparing for this year’s Lenten journey, for example, I spent some time with the work of Nigerian artist Olamilekan Abatan; his mixed media piece “Adam and Eve” will certainly accompany me this year on the forty-day journey through Lent.

The complexity of Abatan’s painting echoes and magnifies the complexity of the story itself—for some, this painting could introduce complexity into a biblical story that is usually treated in rather simple (and therefore misleading) ways. The first and most obvious thing to notice, and in rather stark contrast to many visual depictions of Adam and Eve in Western art, these figures are Black, and clothed in ways that might suggest they are African. This makes contextual sense given that Abatan is himself Nigerian, but it also makes scientific sense given that our human species originated on the continent of Africa.

There are other layers to notice here. Adam and Eve are poised on the brink of eating the forbidden fruit. Look closely and you will see something unusual in Eve’s lap—a laptop computer made by Apple. It’s a wonderful double entendre evoking the longstanding cultural assumption that the “forbidden fruit” was an apple even though the kind of fruit is not mentioned in the biblical story.

Still more: might Abatan be inviting us to wonder whether modern technology is a kind of “forbidden fruit”? The biblical storyteller refers to that fruit as coming from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”; in that sense, do today’s technology devices give us too much access to knowledge? Or perhaps deceitful knowledge is the problem. Or maybe the technology itself—just like the fruit in the original story—is the problem because it creates a distraction from relationship as it pulls apart the intimate couple in this story. This echoes an important way to frame that third chapter in Genesis—as a rupture in intimacy, the breaking of relationship, and the dissolving of trust.

More than only these insights into that ancient story, the artist himself and his approach to the work provide intersectional touchstones—crossroads of healing, as it were—for just such a time as this. Abatan was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1997 and has emerged as a leading figure in what some have called the “hyperrealist” scene in contemporary African art; he blends Western sensibilities with elements of African visual culture, and he also mixes media (wax fabrics, charcoal and pencil, and acrylic paints, for example).

In addition, Abatan frequently places African figures in classical European poses, using the painting techniques of historical masters like Caravaggio, which tend to evoke Western art but with the “African human” moved to the center of the frame rather than the margins or unseen entirely. He sometimes replicates the style of a religious icon, as in the piece he calls “Black Lives Matter.” The pose, the gesture, and the clothes, not to mention the halo, all suggest an icon of Christ; the use of an African figure as well as the title of the piece can make that assessment a bit disorienting, but the Latin words on the open book held by this African man would seem to confirm the guess: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” One’s own cultural context and history make all the difference in how one reads this image—and what it evokes. Is a Black/African Jesus, for example, the “way to life” in a society trapped in the dynamics of white Christian nationalism?

Even this brief synopsis of Abatan’s life and work makes me wonder about my own reading of history, and the kind of engagement with Scripture I tend to favor, and the way I retrieve theological traditions for pastoral and priestly work: what have I consigned to the margins that might rightly belong at the center? Whom have I overlooked entirely in the texts or visual images of my theological education? More pointedly, how much of my Christian faith relies on having omitted key figures or moments or places (whether intentionally or accidentally)?

Questions like these are not about finding fault or assigning blame for anything; to the contrary, they seem more like assembling the pieces of a treasure map—what kind of riches have we never known in our own traditions because of the restricted views we have lived with for so long?

“The Beauty of the Cross,” Daniel Bonnell

That question alone always makes me glad to observe Black History Month (and all the entanglements and intersectional complexities that go with it); every year I learn something new to intertwine with my own perspectives, not only about Black history but also about my own story; and I appreciate something in fresh ways not only about other traditions, but also how communities of faith can interlace these multiple traditions for a truly rich and “mixed media” witness to a better world—surely these are the “crossroads of healing” toward which we might actually be glad to journey in this Lenten season.

Harm Reduction: An Epiphany Pledge for 2026

I invite you to join me in making a pledge to reduce our harm and hurt, individually and collectively, in 2026. This is not an invitation to make a “new year’s resolution”; most of those fail before February. I find the binary “on/off” approach to behavior mostly unhelpful and even paralyzing. But even when we cannot remove all the hurt, we can reduce it, and we can also support others in similar efforts to create a growing network of those committed to reducing harm and cultivating healing.

In a world of so much hateful rhetoric, which fuels so many postures of aggression and hostility, and indeed entrenched violence, we must find ways not only to resist the harmful behaviors but also to disarm them, to apply healing balms to the myriad wounds, and likewise insist on creating spaces of abundant flourishing as a counter-witness to the culture of oppression and death that surrounds us. None of us can do this for the whole planet; but we can do it for our own households, for our neighborhoods, for our communities—we really can reduce the harm and hurt.

As a parish priest, I’m grateful for the liturgical texts that help to highlight our shared participation in a world of harm and the shared calling to contribute to a world of healing. The resources collected in Enriching Our Worship for The Episcopal Church include a confession of sin that not only acknowledges our own evil deeds but also the “evil done our behalf” (that list grows daily).

Similarly, this past September my parish here in Saugatuck used some of the texts developed by The Episcopal Church for the Season of Creation, including a confession of sin in which we noted our collective failure to claim our “kinship with all of God’s creatures,” and how we have “walked heavily on God’s earth, overused and wasted its resources,” and taken its abundance for granted. That text includes an expansive petition for forgiveness that includes the plea to “open our eyes to see God’s presence throughout the wonders of God’s creation, and to gladden our hearts” by encountering that divine reality—this alone would surely reduce harm and promote healing.

In that same collection of texts, we also gave thanks following Communion for the mysteries of “grain and grape, of earth and sky, and of body and blood,” divine gifts to inspire us to “renew the face of the earth,” praying that we might “join our efforts with God’s passion” to reflect God’s “healing glory in Creation.”

I’m also particularly mindful of the grating confluence on this day of The Epiphany, one of the great feasts of the church, which is also the anniversary of the U.S. capitol riot and violent attack on American democracy (today is the fifth anniversary of that horrible day). Not unlike celebrating the Feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus on August 6, which is also the anniversary of the atomic detonation over Hiroshima, Japan, the mashup of religious observances and civic occasions seems nearly blasphemous. But I think that might very well be the point of observing a religious calendar in the first place: it matters for how we live with others.

We might take note, for example, of how Eastern Orthodox Christians weave a liturgical thread from the Nativity (Jesus in a manger) to the Epiphany (the magi presenting extravagant gifts to the toddler Jesus) and into the waters of the River Jordan for the Baptism of the adult Jesus. Taken together, that arc is celebrated overall as The Theophany, the manifestation of God. More pointedly, God shows up right where we are, in the cribs of starving children, and the bombed-out houses where toddlers once played, and rivers now poisoned with toxic forever chemicals.

God manifests everywhere in the ordinarily beautiful (the playful romps of my Australian shepherd dog, the outstretched hand of a four-year old reaching for Communion, the ice shelf along the shoreline of a great lake) and also the extraordinarily disturbing (nearly every headline in the daily news). Religious faith doesn’t just float above all the messy flotsam of human culture but burrows into it, emerges from it, and offers radiant forms of transformative energy—it helps us reduce harm and promote healing.

My own Epiphany plan for Harm Reduction in 2026 includes three broad pathways. The image of a “path” matters because the most important changes never happen overnight, and we all need time to adjust to new ways of being in the world. My life today—how I think, the way I see the world, where I put my priorities—is remarkably different from when, for example, I was ordained way back in 1988, and I could not have lived back then as I do now. The most important journeys take time.

To that end, I hereby pledge to reduce harm and promote healing by following more carefully and fully these three pathways:

1. Listen More Carefully
This path has always been my greatest teacher. It took quite a few years in my life (beyond college) to appreciate my cognitive abilities (I never thought I was particularly smart); it took even longer to understand that only experience can make one wise, and that includes, by definition, the commitment to listen, especially to perspectives different from my own.

Social patterns and cultural customs in the United States today have retrenched the longstanding tendency in this country to speak first and ask questions later, which has contributed to the deepest divisions and moments of fragmentation I have ever experienced. I have never cast as many suspicious glances toward strangers in my life as I have over the last ten years. I have never doubted the good intentions of public figures the way I do today. I recognize a deep need to trust others again by re-learning how to listen (and that includes reading, noticing, pausing, waiting, and tending, none of which makes for an easy path in a 2026 world).

2. Diminish Patriarchal Whiteness
I know how “woke” this particular path sounds, but I’m trying to follow the brown-skinned, itinerant preacher in a first-century occupied province of the Roman Empire who paid more dignified attention to women and girls than one might otherwise expect and who (according to later writers) insisted that we stay awake (Mt. 24:42, Mk. 13:33). In simpler terms: I’m trying to deepen my awareness of how much privilege attaches to my maleness and my whiteness—it’s a lot, more than I can grasp, and it wreaks havoc everywhere.

To be clear: this path does not assume that white people are bad and men are evil. It does assume that modern Western society has been in the grips of a system (cultural, political, and religious) that favors white men over all others, a grip that has lasted for many centuries and has become especially entrenched today. This presumption of white male dominance shows up in religious texts, liturgical prayers, public policies, economic analysis, medical research, and nearly all forms of entertainment.

Again, I cannot change all that but I can reduce at least some of the harm caused by all that: I can tend carefully to the gendered language of public worship, and whom I choose to feature in my sermons, and what kind of visual art appears on our liturgy leaflets. I can also encourage my clergy colleagues to do the same and I can learn from them—especially the women, and especially the ministers of color—how to do this better. I want to be on this path more fully, so help me God.

3. Eat Plants, Care for Animals
I have been on a vegetarian path in my diet for some years now, and have more recently embarked on a road toward a fully vegan lifestyle. Do note the words “diet” and “lifestyle.” What I eat is mostly vegetarian (only very occasionally some fish) but how I want to live is with a much more robust respect toward the full dignity of every living being, which is not only about what I eat. (A great place to start thinking about this and also to be inspired is right here.)

There are multiple reasons for my conviction about this commitment: eating more plants is much healthier for human bodies; reducing meat in our diets is one of the most significant actions we can take for ecological healing and renewal; by refusing to eat animals, I reduce pain and suffering in the world exponentially with every meal.

This path can reduce harm in my own body, but I am much more concerned to reduce dramatically the harm and hurt that is foisted upon 10 billion land animals who are killed in factory farms in the United States every year. I hate doing the math, but here it is: in this country alone, that’s slightly over 27 million animals every day, or 1.1 million every single hour of every single day. Let’s be painfully clear: this is not a quiet death for all these animals; it is a cruel system of daily fear, pain, and torture among living beings who are sentient and self-aware (in the case of pigs, they possess roughly the same cognitive and emotional capacity as a human three-year old). Regardless of how “alike” other animals might be to humans, the point is to lessen the pain and suffering of another creature of the same God, to reduce the harm we cause just by what we eat.

Those are ambitious pathways and cannot be traveled in a single year; but the point is not necessarily to “arrive” as much as it is to keep traveling.

“I have come that they may have life,” John’s Jesus said, “and have it in abundance” (Jn. 10:10). For many years now, that one verse has been my yardstick for assessing my pastoral decisions, liturgical design, preaching and teaching, and my convictions about interpersonal relationships. The abundant life God intends for all will appear—on this Feast of the Epiphany, it will manifest—not all at once but in waves and spurts and moments and collaborations along the good road we take together toward reducing the harm and hurt we cause.

What pathways might you take to reduce harm in the world? Where do you see a path toward healing right where you live? Will you join me in taking an Epiphany pledge? I would love to hear from you…

“The Baptism of Christ, II,” Daniel Bonnell

We Don’t Know What’s Going On—Love Anyway

There’s a certain style in modern American visual art that always tugs on my holiday heartstrings. Examples include Currier and Ives lithographs and Norman Rockwell paintings. These easily summon fond childhood memories of Christmas, and I usually extend those memories outward into a kind of nostalgic reverie about American life more generally; as a child, I thought everyone in every country celebrated Christmas, and they did it just like we always did in the western suburbs of Chicago.

Those childhood memories conjure images of an American society that never really existed, a whole world in which everyone knew what was going on, how to behave, and looked happily toward a future of not only safety but also prosperity and comfort.

The world seems decidedly less safe today, even regularly violent. So much is unraveling, not only culturally and politically but also ecologically. I stay current with the daily news but quite often feel disoriented and have no idea what’s going on. Perhaps few, if any, ever know what’s really going on—not even scientists.

Not long ago, the James Webb Space Telescope revealed a set of surprisingly massive galaxies and black holes that would seem to demand a revision of standard theories about how the Universe emerged. That same telescope recently detected not just an unexpectedly massive black hole but one that appeared to be fleeing its own galaxy and leaving a trail of ejected stars in its wake, a trail approximately 200,000 light years long (that’s not supposed to happen).

Years ago, I used to think that being religious helps us to know what’s going on in the Universe. But not even with the most sophisticated instruments ever devised can tell us with any precision how stars dance through the galaxies. As English priest Martyn Percy has noted, the seasons of Advent and Christmas remind us that we simply cannot stretch our words far enough to explain or even grasp the mystery we call “God.”

Over time, I have come to realize that my faith as a Christian offers something much richer than knowledge. Religious traditions—all the stories and rituals and furniture and clothing and sanctuary spaces—religious traditions remind us that what we think is going on barely scratches the surface of reality. Beneath, within, entangled, and woven throughout the routines of our ordinary lives the divine light shines and beckons.

Yes, we have stories about angels delivering a message and about a heavenly chorus praising God during this mythical and magical Christmas season. But the point of these stories is not the extraordinary spectacle; the stories direct our attention instead to the working-class family with a pregnant teenager, and the migrant workers tending sheep, and the livestock gathered around a feeding trough.

These ordinary people with ordinary lives mark where the very presence of Creator God appears; and we must not treat those moments lightly. That’s exactly why we dress up, and sing carols, and adopt funny bodily postures in highly stylized buildings—and it’s also why Christians gather around a Table where everyone is welcome to receive physical tokens of God’s own life in the form of bread and wine—and in the wonderful parish where I am privileged to serve as a parish priest, when we say “everyone,” we mean it, no kidding. As I like to say, at All Saints’ Parish, “all” really does mean all.

Especially in the Christmas season—and in a world of festering suspicions and wary glances and divided communities—especially during Christmas, a season devoted to God’s own commitment to dwell among us in the most vulnerable flesh imaginable, this is the time to ensure that everyone, every single person, is made to feel welcome at God’s own Table.

That’s why religious faith communities must notice and name the wider cultural realities in which we live. Compelling and lifegiving forms of religion don’t just float above the fray of human communities; all the stuff of human interaction and conflict, of human joys and sorrows, of our entanglements with other animals and ecosystems—all of it is the material from which we spin the fabric of faith itself and where God is pleased to be woven into the threads of our bodily lives and relationships.

All of this is on display in the familiar story of the Nativity we hear each Christmas Eve from the Gospel according to Luke (2:1-20). The details in that story matter. Luke makes sure to tell us that the moment of nativity happened when Ceasar Augustus was the Emperor of the Roman Empire; and when Quirinius was the governor of Syria. We should note that Judea, where Bethlehem is located, was part of a larger imperial province called Syria-Palestina, and where a Roman governor supervised puppet kings like Herod. And these details can, at the very least, serve as a good reminder that our political lives as humans have always been complicated, fraught, and quite regularly terrifying—exactly where God shows up.

Just as we cannot possibly fathom what’s really going on in the “vast expanse of interstellar space,” our own lives and the lives of our neighbors are often just as perplexing. All of us live with concerns and convictions, we all harbor dreams and moments of dread, high hopes and crushing sadness about all sorts of things.

We sort through all those complexities as best we can, and we will not always agree with each other about how to sort them out, even about those things that are most vital and pressing—probably especially those. We don’t have to agree, but we must wrestle with such things together, trusting that the presence of God is with us in the struggle—out there in hilltop fields watching our sheep, or tending the livestock in a cave-like stable, or busily caring for guests in a sold-out inn, and all the while staying vigilant, not knowing when the weight of imperial Rome might come crashing down on our heads.

We don’t have to know exactly what’s going on, and we don’t have to understand perfectly how everything works before we decide to care for the needy and lonely, and to love each other fiercely and tenderly. To love each other just as God loves us, in the most ordinary stuff we can imagine in this mysteriously physical universe: the flesh of a newborn baby.

As American storyteller and former priest Brennan Manning once noted, “You could more easily catch a hurricane in a shrimp net than you can understand the wild, relentless, passionate, uncompromising, pursuing Love of God made present in a manger.”

Christmas is not the time for explanations, no matter how clever our philosophies or theological systems; we do not gather in worship and prayer at Christmas for greater understanding or more precision in our knowledge; the grand mysteries of time and space need no parsing at the manger; and the wonderful befuddlements of human life and relationships can simply remain gloriously tangled into knots.

Let all of that be just as it is, just for now, just for a moment. These Twelve Days of Christmas invite us to hear once again the message of angels delivered to shepherds in a field, and to see an anxious and exhausted couple caring for a newborn baby—and then to marvel, with full-throated praise, or with a single tear on our cheeks, at the presence of God dwelling gently among us.

Advent, Apocalypse, and AIDS

Many of us heard a portion from Matthew’s account of the Gospel yesterday morning in church, on the first Sunday of Advent. Matthew’s Jesus is talking about the so-called “end of the world,” the day and hour of which no one knows (not even him). But its arrival will be dramatic and dismaying: “Then two will be in the field,” he says; “one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding grain together; one will be taken and one will be left” (Mt. 24:40-41).

It’s fairly easy to dismiss those traces of an ancient apocalyptic scenario, but I can tell you firsthand what it feels like.

Around 1983, the year I graduated from college, people began to disappear. I started paying attention to this strange phenomenon two years later, my first year in seminary.

I knew a couple, Terry and Francis, who lived in New York. Each of them worked for the same advertising and marketing company, sharing ideas and strategies both inside and outside of the office. With hardly any warning, Francis was struggling to manage work and home life without Terry, as if Terry had suddenly been snatched away by aliens from outer space.

A seminary classmate told me about some friends of his back in San Francisco, David and Brad. They had moved there as roommates a few years earlier from the Midwest. They might as well have been a couple as they spent nearly all their spare time together exploring the city, taking trips to Napa Valley for wine tasting, or sailing on the Bay. Just as suddenly as Francis had, David found himself alone, without Brad by his side.

Before long, we knew more about the aliens who had been snatching these people away. They were given names like pneumocystis pneumonia and carposi sarcoma. A seminary professor started referring to this phenomenon like a thunderstorm—you just didn’t know where the lightning would strike next.

The storm was called HIV and AIDS, and we had no idea what the next ten years had in store for so many. Even if we did, no one could have prepared adequately for that kind of assault. Back then, young men who were perfectly healthy one day were admitted to the hospital the next, never to be discharged—just as Matthew’s Jesus described, one was taken, another left.

Sometimes more than one, far more. I heard of someone who lost more than 250 friends and acquaintances to this disease. I’m not sure I can believe that. Perhaps he was exaggerating. Or perhaps my mind’s gatekeeper refuses to let that information in, for fear of what it would do to my sanity. I did sometimes wonder how he, the one who had lost so many, had kept himself from going completely mad, running into the streets and screaming incoherently. Perhaps he eventually did, and I, for one, certainly wouldn’t blame him.

A dear friend of mine, Jim Mitulski, was the pastor of the gay-positive Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco at exactly that time of apocalyptic dismay. For longer than I can begin to fathom, Jim was conducting at least one funeral every weekend in his congregation, sometimes more than one; that he kept anything like his sanity is a miracle of God’s grace.

I consider Jim a powerful minister of the Gospel and a prophet of divine justice, who continues that ministry today as one of the best preachers I know. It’s also extremely important that this history is remembered, and now, thanks to a wonderful podcast project called When We All Get to Heaven, this slice of history is available to many more.

This is a remarkable documentary project telling the story of that church based on an archive of 1200 cassette tapes recorded during the height of the AIDS epidemic (many of them are Jim’s sermons). I cannot recommend this podcast more highly.

The importance of memory for activism also appeared in 1988, when the United States and many other countries began observing World AIDS Day each year on December 1. This became an important moment on the calendar for remembering—all those who were sick, those who had died, the many instances of truly heroic caregiving and tender accompaniment of so many thousands. It was also an important observance for the sake of public health; we cannot combat a deadly disease without being made aware of it, knowing its causes, and taking action for prevention and treatment.

AIDS Ribbon Collage, Arum Studios, South Africa

For the first time since 1988, the United States government will not be observing World AIDS Day today. This decision is a departure from a decades-long tradition observed by both Republican and Democratic administrations; many public health experts and medical professionals are denouncing this decision as “shameful and dangerous,” and even reminiscent of the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic when the government largely ignored this disease. Just like the policy decision earlier this year to end USAID grants for HIV prevention and treatment worldwide, the decision not to observe World AIDS Day has profound social consequences for public health—people will die.

And so Advent begins, as it always does, with a healthy dose of apocalyptic Christianity. Quite honestly, I happen to like Advent’s apocalyptic character; it faces the hard realities of the world directly and then invites, even begs us to summon hope from our traditions.

That combination of memory and hope—and the world-changing activism it can inspire—appeared vividly to me shortly after moving to Berkeley in the early 1990s. I saw a T-shirt while strolling through the Castro district in San Francisco; in simple poignancy were these words on the shirt: All I want is a cure and my friends back.

I can’t think of a better one-line summary of the character of Advent. For all its liturgical complexities and religious patina, let’s not miss that poignancy, especially on this day, when our own government is yet again trying to erase so many of us.

And let every community of faith boldly proclaim the heart of the Gospel on this very day: God Erases No One.

Apocalypse: Then and Now

Macabre fascination or teenage PTSD? Full-throated world-ending transformation or the blossoming of God’s own realm of peace with justice?

Rather than choosing among those modes and moods, a combination of all of them (and more) bounces around my religious imagination as the season of Advent approaches—this very weekend! This seems especially the case as the first Sunday of Advent is upon us, which launches what I have come to call, rather affectionately, “National Eschaton Week.” The lectionary and prayers always set an apocalyptic tone for what many assume is just prep time for gift wrapping and soaking fruitcake in more rum.

I sound flippant, and part of me is, which is likely a survival mechanism). I grew up in an Evangelical subculture resting on the edge of Christian fundamentalism—let’s just call it “Fundagelical Christianity”— in which “apocalypse” meant only one kind of thing: the second coming of Christ, the rapture of believers, and the terror (especially as a teenager) at the prospect of being “left behind” (no, I have never read those novels and never will). And still, and yet: I have come to love Advent, even the first Sunday, which is quite likely my favorite Sunday on the church calendar.

I stumbled upon a poem just recently by Steven Charleston—an indigenous elder of the Choctaw nation and a bishop in The Episcopal Church. It does not at first seem related in any way to Advent, at least not the kind of Advent brimming with the apocalyptic undertones of my childhood. But I find it exactly the thing for the season now upon us:

Come sit with me beside a pool of wonder.
Take time to watch still water.
See how deep your mind can go,
when you drop it like a stone,
into hidden depths of the heart,
where even reason cannot follow.
We will never know every answer.
Our task is to be stewards of the mysteries of God,
in awe of what we have yet to learn,
mystics beside the pool of living water,
where shadows
are as welcome as the sun.

Those words (from Charleston’s book Hope as Old as Fire: A Spiritual Diary) invite me to frame Advent as a season of stillness and reflection, a time of embracing a raw hopefulness as we “steward” the profound mysteries of God. This kind of introspection, laced with a quiet anticipation, can feel quite counter-cultural while holiday music blares from sidewalk speakers along streets lined with brightly lighted trees and a sense of holiday bustle shimmers around nearly every corner. (Even in the cute, nearly Norman Rockwellian resort town where I now live, a local restaurant was blasting heavy-metal versions of Christmas carols through their outdoor speakers at such a volume this past week that I was tempted to eschew my longstanding commitment to pacifism.)

Charleston’s invitation to find stillness stands in contrast not only to the wider culture at this time of year but also to the biblical texts assigned by the lectionary for this coming Sunday. We don’t even have any hints about the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem on the first Sunday of Advent; the lectionary will instead, as it always does, present us with images of the end of the world itself—at least, that’s what I used to think those texts signaled.

The Greek verb from which we get our word apocalypse simply means “to reveal” or unveil. While most of us (myself included) usually use the word “apocalyptic” to refer to something horrific or for some kind of disaster, there’s nothing about the word itself that demands that kind of meaning. We will hear a wonderful passage from the ancient Hebrew prophet Isaiah on Sunday (2:1-5) that invites us to embrace a hidden trajectory of hopefulness in Earth herself, a divine commitment to life revealed and unveiled in ways which we might miss if we aren’t paying attention.

The character of “unveiling” in such texts seems to invite not a “conclusion” to the world but that sense of an ending that means something more like “goal” or “purpose.” And that helps me read Paul’s letter to the Romans quite differently than I might otherwise. The portion assigned from that letter for Sunday (13:11-14) has Paul urging the Romans to stay awake. He doesn’t mean we ought to prepare for a day of doom (even if circumstances might become dire), but rather to stay awake to the presence of God’s life-giving Spirit in the world around us, and to take note of its shimmering emergence and gentle blossoming in places we may not have expected.

This might well be why I have come to love Advent so much, even the first Sunday of this odd season. The commotion and chaos of the wider world, both in the first century and today, can easily prevent us from seeing the tender flow of divine grace running through our own lives, and in our relationships, and throughout our communities, as well as the ecosystems of this precious Earth; Advent invites us to notice.

Here in the northern hemisphere, Advent always begins as Earth is tilting toward the darkest time of year, when the deep stillness of winter does not signal death but rather the quiet preparation for the renewal of life in the spring. The planet’s tilt and the seasonal lectionary, as well as our liturgical prayers and hymns all invite us into that same kind of interior space.

These rich textures for Advent seem especially important when the wider world around us appears hellbent toward disaster and destruction. In such a time of anxiety, whether in the first century or today, I actually relish Advent’s robust apocalyptic tone. As Bishop Charleston would say, the texts for this season invite us to dip into hidden pools of living water, hopeful and confident of a much deeper unveiling of life still to come.

My reasons for loving Advent seem to grow and shift every year. Mostly I embrace the somewhat rude and jolting textual images for the season as a powerful reminder about why Christmas itself matters: God remains in solidarity with us and with the whole world of God’s creation.

Advent’s seeds of hopefulness, planted in the winter soil of a wounded world, shall not fail to take root and blossom into new life at the hands of the God who remains forever faithful.

That outrageous assurance is why I love Advent.

“When the Light Breaks Through,” Catherine Picard Gibbs

A Day for Rest and Harrowing

After a midnight thunderstorm roused me from sleep—and my Australian shepherd companion River, too, with wild barks—this Holy Saturday morning dawned quietly and with thick clouds. Birds were singing, though in muted tones, as River and I walked through our shoreline neighborhood before most others were even stirring in their houses; a rabbit hopped across the sidewalk in front of us.

This is one of my favorite days on the Christian calendar, though I can’t quite articulate the reasons why with much precision. I’m tempted to suppose its restfulness appeals to me after a thick week of liturgical intensity—but I still haven’t finished my Easter sermon, and I need to rehearse some of the ancient chants for the morning, and of course the altar guild will be cleaning the sanctuary and arranging lilies around the Table and Font–perhaps accompanied by the organist’s own rehearsals with the choir–while the hospitality brigade bakes or shops for festive refreshments in the parish hall.

Likewise Jesus, who was also not truly “resting” on this day, at least according to some traditions, and even though he was ostensibly confined to a rock-hewn tomb. This is the day—between Crucifixion and Resurrection—when Jesus “harrows Hell.”

Western Christianity seems content to leave such matters to a single phrase in the Apostles’ Creed: after declaring that Jesus was “crucified, died and was buried,” the creed then notes that “he descended into hell.” Eastern Orthodox Christians pull out all the theatrical stops to make this point (and I’m glad they do); Jesus doesn’t merely “descend” into the nether realms but topples the gates of Satan’s domain, liberating all those who had been held captive there by “sin, death, and the devil,” that “unholy Trinity,” as Martin Luther called them.

One of my favorite icons is of this very moment, with Jesus portrayed as trampling those hellish gates underfoot and literally yanking Adam and Eve from their tombs. I take great delight in just how startled those first humans appear to be by this arrival of Life. I also appreciate the crushing of those gates: Jesus not only rescues those who had been there, no one will ever go there again, not a single one; the realm of “sin, death, and the devil” has been destroyed, forever.

Visual and literary artist Jan Richardson invites something similar in a Lenten poem, one that blesses God “in whom nothing is wasted.” Nothing is tossed aside or thrown away—every “remnant, scrap, and shred” returns to God.

Poet and Anglican priest Malcolm Guite, in his collection of sonnets for the Christian year, focuses his attention instead on the tender care of a dead body on this day, the anointing of “ruined flesh” and the “kissing of wounds.” I’m grateful for this reminder that rest still matters—this is the Sabbath day, after all—and even with Hell to harrow, there must be space for renewal. Even so, and especially so, Guite weaves with the same thread as Richardson, insisting that “Love is never lost,” even at the grave—“harrowing” is replaced with “sowing” in Guite’s vision and love is the seed that shall not fail to sprout.

Here, then, an offering for this Holy Saturday from Malcolm Guite:

Here at the centre everything is still,
Before the stir and movement of our grief
That bears its pain and rhythm, ritual,
Beautiful useless gestures of relief.
So they anoint the skin that cannot feel
And soothe his ruined flesh with tender care,
Kissing the wounds they know they cannot heal,
With incense scenting only empty air.
He blesses every love that weeps and grieves,
And makes our grief the pangs of a new birth.
The love that’s poured in silence at old graves,
Renewing flowers, tending the bare earth,
Is never lost. In him all love is found
And sown with him, a seed in the rich ground.

Coming Out with God, Coming Out for Life

We don’t often get to celebrate the Feast of the Presentation on a Sunday, just once every six or seven years. That’s a shame, really, because it’s a celebration of God coming out.

Needless to say, that’s not how I grew up reading the wonderful story from Luke’s account of the Gospel (2:22-40). But it’s high time to do so now, and then come out with God. To get there, it helps, I think, to remember that numbers are sometimes of particular significance in the Bible.

Consider the number forty: the ancient Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years on their way to the Promised Land; Noah’s ark was built to survive forty days and forty nights of rain; Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days before beginning his ministry, and his Ascension into God’s own life happened forty days after his resurrection from the dead.

Luke reminds us of another example, when women in ancient Israel underwent a ritual of purification forty days after childbirth; if they did so on the occasion of their firstborn, they also had to redeem that child, basically buy the child back from God—usually with an animal sacrifice or sometimes a payment of money.

Mary and Joseph, devout in their religious faith, observe that ritual with Jesus, a story commemorated on what is now called “The Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple.” It used to be more widely called something else, and in some churches, it is still known as “The Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

“Simeon Blessing the Christ Child,” Severino Blanco

That old-fashioned religious language about “purity” deserves attention, especially since some people of faith think sexual intercourse or even just sexual desire can make someone dirty. Since the 1990s, so-called “purity rings” have been popular in some Evangelical Christian communities; teenagers wear these rings after taking a “virginity pledge,” a promise to keep themselves “unstained” by sex before marriage. Both girls and boys do this, but by far it’s mostly girls—women are always more accountable for purity than men.

Growing up gay before I even knew what “gay” meant,” sex always had a dirty patina. Still today, it’s fairly common to see religious protestors at Gay Pride parades holding big signs that refer to “filthy sinners”—not just “sinners” but filthy ones, as if an LGBT identity is a blemish or blotch, a stain on God’s handiwork in need of purifying.

There’s an even longer history of using notions of “purity” as a religious disguise for ethnic bigotry. Muslims migrating to Medieval Europe were considered dirty criminals; in the 1930s, the German Nazi party promised to preserve the purity of the Aryan race; and in Black History Month, we need to recall how enslaved Africans in this country were sometimes denigrated for their “dirty skin” (and in a culture of white supremacy, that’s still a presumption among many).

Not much to celebrate in that litany of purification. Thankfully, ancient Israel’s purity rites more often marked moments of liminality and profound transition—certainly not anything like “ethnic cleansing.”

Recalling the high rate of infant mortality and the risks for women associated with childbirth in the ancient world, surviving childbirth with a healthy infant was nearly miraculous. It was like returning from the borderlands, that mysterious boundary between life and death—and that’s what you mark in the Temple as you redeem the child back from God.

Take all that and remember the number forty—a number to signal a hopeful journey to the land of Promise; a reminder of safety during a flood; preparation for a ministry of liberation, and returning from death while rising into life.

That’s where Luke places his focus, on the arrival of Jesus in the Temple forty days after his birth—the presentation of the one who is not redeemed by the ritual but is himself the Redeemer; and that insight is made clear in the joyful praises and prophetic utterances of Simeon and Anna.

I truly love these two Lucan figures. These religious elders devoted many years to the spiritual discipline of hope. They embody that very insight, that hope itself demands the discipline of a spiritual practice. And age makes no difference at all in this vital ministry of cultivating hopefulness.

As Luke notes, Simeon had been assured by God that he would not die before seeing God’s promised Messiah—and we need to imagine Simeon in this story shouting and exclaiming ecstatic praise upon seeing Jesus. Anna, herself a prophet, had been praying and fasting daily for decades in anticipation of “the redemption of Jerusalem,” as Luke puts it, and she ensures that the whole community knows that it has arrived in the flesh!

Luke features the Holy Spirit at nearly every turn in his account of the Gospel—and in this brief vignette in the Temple, Luke mentions the Spirit no fewer than three times in these eighteen verses. As Luke proposes when Jesus launches his ministry in Nazareth, we will know the Spirit is present and active when the poor hear good news, and captives are released, and the oppressed go free (4:18-19).

“The Prophet Anna Greets the Christ,” Lester Yocum

For exactly those reasons, the Spirit of God presents Jesus in the Temple.

This story in Luke took on yet another layer of significance for me last week during a rally in Lansing, Michigan. A few of us from the parish here in Saugatuck joined at least 150 other people in front of the state capitol building to express our solidarity with transgender people. Similar rallies happened in other parts of the country last Thursday, sponsored by the Transgender Unity Coalition, and it mattered to have visible religious support in those gatherings.

We listened as a long line of people waited for their turn at the microphone to tell their stories about coming out, stories about making themselves visible as differently gendered people. Many of them talked about how life-giving and even joyful it was to embrace more openly this vital component of who they are.

That’s the moment, while listening to those compelling stories, that’s when it suddenly occurred to me that Jesus being presented in the Temple is God’s own coming out story. Simeon and Anna’s joy at that moment underscores why this matters—it’s a story of God making God’s presence visible for the sake of abundant life.

Equally important to note were the stories we heard at that rally about the pain attached to this journey. In a society built on a strict binary gender system, it can be risky to come out in ways that do not conform to that system. Many transgender people are rejected by their families, they might experience violence in public places, even lose their jobs.

Hearing some of that anguish, I couldn’t help but think of Simeon in Luke’s story, who says to Mary, the mother of Jesus: “a sword will pierce your own soul also.” Even in that moment of joyful manifestation, Simeon intuited just how risky coming out can be.

In social systems of violence and hate, there is always a price to pay when we live for peace with justice and for love—always.

It seems increasingly clear that the weeks and months to come will present significant moments of decision for people of faith in the United States. We will need to decide how visible we wish to be about racial justice, and for gendered equality, and to protect the integrity of our ecosystems and the vitality of our environments.

It’s also fairly clear that acting on our convictions will come with a cost. Realizing the price we might have to pay for Gospel witness is one of the best reasons to gather every week at the Eucharistic table.

At that Table, God presents God’s own life to us; God strengthens us at the Table with the body and blood of Jesus; gathered around that Table, God inspires us and equips us with the Spirit, emboldened with courage to stand in solidarity with the vulnerable, the frightened, and all those who bravely refuse to conform to systems to domination and oppression.

It’s time, high time, for God’s people to come out, more fully and boldly.

It’s time to declare clearly and bravely exactly who we are: God’s beloved, the ones God is calling to make God’s glory manifest in the world.

We don’t all have to do that in exactly the same way—don’t ever forget the long and vital ministries of Simeon and Anna as they cultivated hopefulness, reminding everyone by the way they lived of the promises of God.

There are many ways to bear witness to the Gospel, and all of them are grounded in the promises of our Baptismal Covenant in the Book of Common Prayer. Chief among those promises as we look at the road before us are these: to strive for justice among all people, and to respect the dignity of every living being.

Doing that makes the very glory of God visibly present in the world. So let’s do it. Let’s come out with God and let’s come out for life.