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“Beloved Community”: Not the Wine but the Wedding

Growing up in Evangelical America, the “Wedding at Cana” story (John 2:1-11) was almost always about the wine (we were convinced it was only grape juice) and hardly ever about the wedding (which always had erotic stuff lurking around the edges). Thanks to “queer theologians” and brave biblical scholars, I began reading that story differently, and found ways for it to shape a religiously Christian way to argue for same-sex marriage and—more broadly—to banish God’s angry dad reputation in favor of a Lover pining for the Beloved.

How to preach about all that when the lectionary takes us to Cana only once every three years, and then especially when that occasion falls on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend?

The key has to be that word beloved—and how divine love must be passionate enough to inspire risking everything for a world of justice and thriving for all.

Honestly, that’s too much for a single sermon. But here’s how I constructed at least an invitation to follow that particular path.

I began with something not in the lectionary at all, a tiny little book tucked away in the latter third the Hebrew Bible, a collection of erotic love poetry. It’s called “The Song of Solomon,” sometimes “The Song of Songs.”

While some of the imagery of that book gets lost in cultural translation, other portions still soar with rapturous delight:

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, …
   for love is strong as death,
   passion fierce as the grave. …
Many waters cannot quench love,
   neither can floods drown it” (8:6-7).

God is not mentioned in this biblical book, not even once, and yet these romantic passages steeped in desire have played an outsized role in both Jewish and Christian spirituality. One of the leading figures in ancient rabbinic Judaism even referred to this book as the very heart of Scripture, the “holy of holies.”

I was astonished some years ago to discover that this one biblical book was the one most often chosen for commentaries in ancient Christian communities, and the one text most often selected by preachers in the Middle Ages, and for many centuries the Song of Songs was considered just as important as the four accounts of the Gospel.

What modern Christians so often miss is precisely what drew ancient rabbis and Medieval Christians alike to this little collection of eccentric love poems: the enduring conviction that the best and only language suitable for talking about God is the language of desire, of deep and all-consuming love.

This is not merely “tolerance” or even genuine “kindness” but passionate love in a truly remarkable religious vision: our longing for God and God’s longing for us, together, is the energy animating the entire Universe.

The lectionary yesterday morning offered just a trace of that remarkable vision from the prophet Isaiah, who refers quite directly to God as the “bridegroom” and God’s people as the “bride” (62:5)—an image that appears in various ways in many of the prophets, all of them looping back to the Garden of Eden in Genesis, a story not only about God’s creative work but also of how love itself can fall into guilt and shame.

The image and significance of a garden shows up again, and is actually featured in the Song of Solomon, and is woven throughout Isaiah, and also the Gospel writers, as if to frame the whole Bible as a love story between God and God’s creation. (I’m indebted to David M. Carr’s work on these topics, especially his 2002 book The Erotic Word.)

That long history and those compelling images are all percolating in the classic story from John’s account of the Gospel about Jesus turning water into wine. That’s where most readers focus their attention in this story—on the wine—often forgetting that this miraculous transformation happens at a wedding.

The long religious history of divine love urges us to switch the emphasis: the transformation of water into wine is actually meant to draw our attention to what really does matter most in this story—the wedding.

John says that this moment, this miracle of transformation, was the first of the signs Jesus offered and with it he revealed his glory—but a sign of what, exactly? The wedding.

Thanks to Gerard Loughlin’s work, I started reading John’s gospel differently, especially this familiar story that early Christian communities actually read as a parable—not a parable told by Jesus but a parable about Jesus, a parable that is best read at the Eucharistic Table, just as it most likely was in that first-century community.

John’s purpose in telling this parable is rooted in that rich history of supposing that the word “God” can stand only for love, for the Lover longing for the Beloved. Not only this story of a wedding at Cana but every encounter in John’s account of the Gospel emerges from that singular conviction: the whole story of Jesus and the Spirit points toward the consummation of all things, that heavenly banquet prepared from the foundation of the world, when Creator God is fully in communion with God’s creation—a communion that can only be described with the language of passionate desire and romantic love.

In the very next chapter John the Baptist declares himself glad at hearing the voice of the bridegroom—and he’s referring to Jesus! Over the centuries since then, icons of the wedding in Cana seem to depict Jesus himself as the groom; a fifteenth-century image shows John the Baptist in flowered bridal garlands at the head of a wedding table with Jesus at his side, as his bridegroom.

Wait. What? How did gender-bending hippie nonsense creep into the Bible? The gloriously shocking truth of course is that Christian traditions are indeed wild, peculiar, and wonderful; they are full of extraordinary images and outlandish stories that short-circuit our brains for the sake of pointing us toward what we cannot fully grasp.

And that is precisely as it should be. After all, we’re dealing with the infinite mystery of the living God, who is from first to last, without any caveats or exceptions, pure and passionate love—the love that was praised by an ancient Hebrew song, which cannot be quenched by many waters, and is stronger than death and as fierce as the grave.

So, if we are made by love, and we dwell only in love, and we are ultimately destined for love alone, how then should we live? What kind of relationships should we cultivate and nurture? Can love make any real difference in a world constantly crushed by institutions of greed and woven together with hateful bigotries? The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would say yes, and do so vigorously with a vision for what King called the Beloved Community.

Any community worthy of that moniker must devote itself wholeheartedly to the strategies of non-violence. This was paramount for Dr. King’s vision. “The aftermath of nonviolence,” he wrote, “is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle’s over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.” We must not remain silent nor merely observe and certainly not “acquiesce” in the face of injustice—to do so, King, pointedly noted,“leads to moral and spiritual suicide.”

“The way of violence”—which King himself experienced throughout his life—“leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But, the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.” Love is the key to that entire transformation.

If we can weave a thread from an ancient collection of love poems to a wedding in Cana and into this present day, we might do so with the reminder frequently offered by Cornel West: justice is what love looks like in public.

May that world of justice become the wine that gladdens our hearts.

The Way of the Cross on the Road called Freedom

Religious symbols are complex by design. There are good reasons for this: religious traditions deal with complex topics, histories, and relationships, and none of this can be reduced to simple images. Religious symbols mark a whole world of meaning-making.

Religion’s complexity appears in the multiple layers religious symbols carry with them into our shared work of interpretation. We can’t deal with all of the layers in a given symbol all at once, but we should remember that there’s always more than one way to read them.

I reminded myself of all this as I tried (and failed) to write a sermon about “the meaning of the cross” on a Lenten Sunday when that symbol was directly in our line of vision. The cross is the most recognizable symbol of Christianity and arguably the central symbol of Christian faith. It’s also soaked in violence and suffering, and framed with betrayal and abandonment. Often forgotten, early Christian traditions also depicted the cross as a blossoming tree, a fruit-laden vine, and a shimmering object of divine glory.

“The Beauty of the Cross,” Daniel Bonnell

Poignant stories, striking visual art, rich musical settings—all of these contribute to a long history of engaging in various ways with this one symbol. That history has been both insightful and sometimes deeply troubling. Given that complex history, I’m convinced of at least this much: the need always to read the cross with the hope of new life.

The Lenten lectionary gave us a passage yesterday morning from Mark’s account of the Gospel in which Jesus predicts his own death (8:31-38). When Peter recoils from this, horrified, Jesus seems to suggest the divine necessity of this painful path—not only for himself but for any who would live as his follower.

As Mark’s Jesus urges his disciples to take up their own cross (8:34), we Christians need to stop foisting it on others. I mean, how that symbol shows up in ordinary, everyday speech. Or more severely, in cases of domestic abuse, when a woman is told that she must remain with her violent husband because, well, that’s just the “cross she has to bear.”

As friend of the poor and outcast, and champion of the oppressed, beloved Jesus would never say such a thing—not ever.

The profound damage wrought by otherwise well-meaning Christians needs to stop right now. So let’s be crystal clear: the God of abundant life whom we encounter in Jesus does not demand sacrifice for its own sake, does not demand sacrifice of any kind, and certainly not from those trapped in systems of abuse.

How then do we deal with this particular passage from Mark’s account of the Gospel? We might recall that first-century readers would know very well that crucifixion was the means by which the Roman Empire executed political dissidents, and kept slaves and the underclass under control by terrorizing people into submission. There were times in Palestine’s history as a Roman province when the road to Jerusalem was littered with crosses and crucified bodies—that’s an image Mark’s readers would recall only too well.

That’s not the only way to interpret the Cross of Christ, for sure, but it is a powerful way of framing the death of Jesus—the Jesus who disrupts imperial order, who disturbs the cultural peace, who overturns the tables of economic injustice. This is the Jesus who must be silenced, who must not be allowed to live.

But Mark won’t let us stop there. “If any want to become my followers,” Jesus says, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it,” he says, “and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (8:34-35).

As someone who grew up as (mostly) “the best little boy in the world,” and still lives (mostly) as a well-behaved adult—a respectable (mostly) member of the clergy, no less!—I have trouble imagining whatever “cross” it is I’m supposed to pick up and carry.

As I reflected on this classic exhortation from Marks’ Jesus, I thought once again of Nkululeku, the young bartender I met in Johannesburg on my recent trip to southern Africa. I wrote about him here a few weeks ago; his name in Zulu means Freedom.

In that encounter with a Black man, I felt my whiteness intensely. I don’t mean my own skin color or my latent racism—I mean the cultural system of Whiteness and Blackness that kept us separated from each other; a system that relies on erecting barriers of distrust between two people just because of our skin color; a system that thrives on suspicion. We did not create that system, but Nkululeku and I were nonetheless firmly stuck in it.

I realized something else in that moment: liberation from such a system is actually a painful process. Longstanding cultural systems make the world a familiar place; even when those systems function like prisons, staying trapped there can feel safer than venturing out into an unknown world of freedom. Healing from old wounds can feel risky, especially when the wounds are all we’ve ever known.

This is surely what Jesus means, at least in part, when he insists that losing our life is how we save it. Hearing that insistence on the last Sunday of Black History Month can frame the cost of discipleship quite distinctly. That cost can be measured in many different ways, but not least with this: by how much we disrupt the cultural systems that feel comfortable but actually cause painful and even violent divisions. Perhaps for those of us who benefit the most from the cultural systems of division, the Gospel “cross” to bear is the willingness to live as agitators for a new way of life.

That word “agitation” can take on many guises, too. I thought of this while watching the wonderful performance by Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs during this year’s Grammy Awards. They sang a duet of Chapman’s 1988 classic song “Fast Car.” One commentator urged us to notice that a black folk singer and a white country music singer “came together to sing a song about belonging. America is starved for connection across divides,” this commentator wrote, “and that performance shows how much music has the power to heal.”

Healing in this case meant Chapman and Combs appearing with each other on stage, defying the current cultural system—which seems to be gaining strength by the day—that insists on keeping black and white separate, even violently divided.

Reflecting on Mark’s Jesus, I couldn’t get Chapman’s “Fast Car” out of my head. It includes these lyrics: “And I—I had a feeling that I belonged / I, I had a feeling I could be someone / be someone / be someone.”

“Take up your cross,” Jesus says, “and follow me.”

Live like an irritant, Jesus says, a trouble-maker, a grave problem for any cultural system that makes hatred normal and violence common.

Be someone who causes “good trouble,” as John Lewis would say. Be someone who disturbs a wounded world with healing.

Be someone who insists on replacing suspicion with trust, even when the price is our own safety and comfort.

Actually, I can’t do that by myself. That’s something else I learned in my encounter with Nkululeku, and it’s something I want to bring with me to Christian worship. I really can’t “be someone” on my own; I need others to “be someone” with me, all of us together.

It seems to me that’s exactly what happens at the Eucharistic Table: we gather around a simple meal of bread and wine and we do indeed become someone—that meal makes us the Body of Christ.

Living as that “Someone” puts us on the road toward the Cross. Thanks to Nkululeku, I now know the name of that road—it’s Freedom.

“My Name Means Freedom”

Human experience rarely remains neatly contained in tidy boxes. Our emotions blur and bleed into each other, sometimes defying our ability to define them with any precision. I am often struck, for example, by the poignancy of beauty, as well as the luminous edges of pain. While tempted to separate and distinguish such things, I try to pay careful attention when beauty and pain seem inextricably bound together.

Emotional complexity punctuated nearly every moment on my recent trip to southern Africa, where I visited five countries over two weeks as I hoped to gain some fresh insights into the work of racial justice and ecological healing, especially how to integrate these modes of engagement more effectively. I could not have asked for a better encounter to begin that adventure than the one that capped the very first day.

After visiting the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, I was relaxing with a glass of wine at the hotel bar. The bartender was young, maybe in his late twenties, and his skin was a deep, beautiful black color, like midnight—actually, more like the deepest, darkest blue of Lake Michigan on a moonless night.

His name, he said, is Nkululeku, a Zulu word that means “freedom.” When he told me that—when he said “My name means freedom”—his face lit up, nearly shining, truly transfigured.

Perhaps you’ve seen this happen to a human face when someone speaks a clear and riveting truth, or because of the tender contours of the occasion, or perhaps the depth and richness of character in the encounter itself; a face can shine.

There I stood, a white man of European descent, whose ancestors had stolen so much of the freedom of that Black man’s ancestors, and not so terribly long ago.

My name means freedom, he said.

Just then, not only his face but the space between us and the air around us became radiant with what I can only call “divine glory.” I can’t possibly know whether any of this occurred to him, but I want to trust that for both of us that moment offered at least a glimpse, just a little taste of what it means to launch along a road toward healing and reconciliation after a long, traumatic history of injustice and violence.

“My name means freedom,” he said. And I nearly burst into tears.

Yesterday was the last Sunday after the Epiphany, which sits on the edge of Lent, and most churches always hear from one of the Gospel accounts of what’s called the “transfiguration” of Jesus. This is a pivot point in the gospel narratives, literally a “mountaintop experience” when Jesus radiates divine glory—the “appearance of his face changed,” Luke says (9:29), his face “shone like the sun,” Matthew says (17:2), and as many of us heard from Mark yesterday, his garments became radiant (9:3).

“The Transfiguration,” Augustin Kolawole Olayinka

This story is a pivot point for each of these gospel writers as each of them frames this moment with what Jesus will soon face in Jerusalem—betrayal, suffering, and death. Beauty and pain are bound together in this story, just as they are in the iconic story from the Hebrew Bible the lectionary also gave us yesterday—grief and glory intermingle as the prophet Elijah is caught up in a heavenly chariot of fire leaving behind his dear friend and protégé Elisha.

It’s a pivot point on the liturgical calendar as well. The story of transfiguration ushers us into the week with Ash Wednesday in it, and we recall this mountaintop glory at the beginning of the very same week when ashes will appear on our foreheads, reminding us that we will one day die.

Both biblically and liturgically the last Sunday after the Epiphany presents a peculiar confluence of beauty and pain—which is itself an epiphany. The intermingling of glory and suffering resides at the very heart of Christian faith, and the Gospel writers won’t let us avoid it, at least not for long. I don’t mean that we just happen to hear about the beauty of transfiguration and the pain of crucifixion on the same day, as if this were an accidental coincidence. More pointedly and more severely, the Christian Gospel presents these as inseparably linked.

Like many others, I have struggled for many years with the prominence of sacrifice and suffering in Christian faith, perhaps especially when these are framed with glory. And yet, for at least one, brief shining moment of encounter with Nkululeku—a young South African Black man whose name means freedom—I suddenly and rather surprisingly realized how deeply I longed for racial healing and then still more, how much I would gladly sacrifice for the sake of justice.

If this can be true for us, if mortal, finite human beings can long for new life, and be willing to give much, maybe even all, for the sake of abundant life, then surely this is true for the infinite mystery of Love we call God—the God of Jesus who would give anything and everything for healing and wholeness and flourishing life, and this is indeed glorious to ponder!

Poised as we now are on the brink of Lent once again, I feel some urgency to consider carefully how to spend my time, my energy, and my resources in this season. The world is desperate for more than just my usual half-hearted attempts to give up chocolate. To be clear, spiritual disciplines of relinquishment do offer great value, but not for the sake of sacrifice alone, as if sacrifice itself were a good thing. Surely spiritual disciplines matter most when they guide us toward that abundant life God intends for the whole creation.

Nkululeku inspired me to imagine what a Lenten season might look like if it were devoted to freedom—our own and for others. This would retrieve a compelling practice from the earliest Christian traditions that used “freedom” and “salvation” interchangeably, and it seems high time to resurrect that powerful practice (pun intended).

How, for example, can we more intentionally promote freedom from the economic hierarchies that turn living beings into commodities, whether as human slaves or poached ivory from elephants?

Where we do we still need freedom from colonial classification schemes that make the color of our skin, or whom we choose to love, or the species into which we just happen to be born the basis of our value?

What can we do to facilitate a deeper freedom from the dynamics of cultural shame that keep so many trapped in unseen prisons of loneliness and a relentless, quiet despair?

Ash Wednesday will remind us that we are made from dust and that we shall return to dust, so perhaps we can help each other likewise remember the precious freedom Jesus offers from the fear of death.

That fear—and all the anxiety that attaches to our own mortality—that fear expresses itself in so many destructive ways, both individually and socially, from an epidemic of opioid addiction to the relentless burning of fossil fuels.

As God’s own beloved, we are held and embraced by God forever. This matters more than I usually imagine or can bear to conceive. I don’t know why just yet, but this conviction of God’s embrace deepened dramatically as I stood on a southern African savannah with elephants and buffalo and zebras and giraffes. As tears streamed down my face as I watched the sun set behind rolling hills and African teak trees, I knew—I just knew with unshakable certainty—that we never have to fear death again, not ever.

Freedom from death’s terror gives us the freedom to live fully, and then to offer even our very lives for the sake of a world of peace with justice.

Every year the story of transfiguration launches us toward Lent. In this story, the Jesus who is about to suffer and die is also the Jesus who shines with divine glory. A voice comes from Heaven in this story and calls this Jesus “the Beloved.”

I understood this story better when a young South African man said to me, “My name means freedom.”

An Earthy Jesus for a Heavenly Christmas

Happy Feast of the Circumcision—for those who celebrate!

January 1 on the liturgical calendar is the eighth day of Christmas and thus the day the infant Jesus would have been circumcised and officially named. The gospel writer Luke mentions this moment explicitly (2:15-21), a rather bloody and painful reminder of the baby’s genuine humanity (which our modern calendars have tidied up considerably by referring to this day as the Feast of the Holy Name).

What seems even tidier still is the so-called “prologue” of John’s account of the Gospel (1:1-18), which many Christians heard during worship yesterday, on the first Sunday after Christmas. We might expect on such a day to hear a bit more about Mary and Joseph, or angels and shepherds, or the manger in Bethlehem. Most of us don’t expect metaphysical rhapsodies on a cosmic scale, but that’s exactly what passes for a “nativity story” in John—and I’m grateful we hear it every year in this season.

I have come to a deep appreciation of John’s Prologue over the years, mostly for how it helps me to break some visual habits and expand how I think about God and Jesus. Here are just three of those “expansions” and why I think they matter.

First, John’s Prologue leads me to question some of the longstanding spatial images of my Christian faith. I’m guessing everyone has ways of depicting and visualizing such things, and most of us probably and usually picture God residing above us in Heaven while we reside here below on Earth.

This distinctively vertical and hierarchical sense of our relationship with God is frequently depicted with a ladder—we’re on the bottom rung with all the earthy things while God is on the top rung with heavenly things.

Thinking vertically and up is not somehow “wrong” but it is quite limiting. I think John invites us to think horizontally and out: God as the very ground and foundation of life, of everything that exists, through whose Word all things come into being; we are at all times and everywhere supported and encompassed by the presence of God.

I’m especially fond of an image for this suggested by theologian Rita Nakashima Brock, which also works quite wonderfully along the shores of a great lake, where I presently live. Imagine gently rolling swells undulating across a vast body of water, always present, always moving; picture the breeze picking up and a white cap appearing on top of a large wave.

That wind is the Holy Spirit, and that whitecap is Jesus, who makes that mighty but quiet undercurrent of God’s presence visible.

That first “expansion” leads quickly to the second, especially when I’m tempted to think of Jesus as the member of a divine “committee” who gets sent down to Earth from Heaven. I wonder if anyone in the modern world has managed to escape that image—it’s very common, perpetuated by more than a few phrases in Christian liturgies and creeds, and also nowhere to be found in the Prologue to John’s gospel.

John draws our attention instead to what he calls the Logos, or the Word of God, which was with God from all time and forever, and this Word is the very means by which God creates everything there is.

This divine creative Word, John says, becomes flesh, fully united to the human person called Jesus. And here again I need to interrupt my own Marvel comic-book brain and resist thinking of Jesus as some kind of demi-god like Zeus or Thor stepping off his throne and coming down to Earth.

John’s Jesus is a fully human being of earth, and also full of grace and truth, fully united to the divine Logos, the creative Word of God.

All of this leads to the third expansion from John’s Prologue, which has been truly life-changing for me, and it takes a bit of Greek to get there.

When John declares that the Word of God dwelled or lived among us, he does not use the Greek word andros, for “man”; he does not even use the Greek word anthropos, which can be translated as “human.” Instead, John writes, the Word became sarx—the Greek word for “flesh.”

What sounds at first like a wild assertion—the Word in Flesh—finds some traction with modern anthropologists, who suggest that human language began with bodily postures and physical gestures. Speech came along later as a way to connect those postures and gestures together into sentences and paragraphs.

While I enjoy tending carefully to crafting an artful turn of phrase as a writer, our primary means of communication as human beings is actually with our bodies; and this is also true, as John seems to say, for God.

Theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid was fond of saying that when God wants to speak, when God really wants to be clear, God does so with bodies.

In a world of books (a world I love to dwell in, let me be quick to note) I must constantly remember that the Word of God does not become a concept, or a proposition, or an argument, or abstract rationality; the Word of God becomes flesh and dwells among us.

What matters about Jesus is not that he is a man, nor even that he is human, but that he is mortal flesh, just like us—just like the very first human made from dirt and breathed into life by the Spirit; just like every other creature of God made from the stuff of Earth and animated by the breath of God; just like dogs and cats, squirrels and seagulls, dolphins and whales.

I suppose we could have guessed this, but most of us didn’t: the Messiah we’ve needed all along is made from mud—just like every other mortal being of flesh. And Luke tries to make the same point with wounded genitals when the baby gets a name.

But does any of this matter? I mean, really matter? I think it does.

The world is feeling pretty wobbly these days, and quite a lot of it seems to be unraveling. Decades-long trends in American society have so distorted the Gospel that Christian faith seems hardly poised with any help at all for such a tenuous time as this.

So perhaps we need to add a new carol in our Christmas repertoire, and sing it like our lives depend on it (because I think they do).

Here’s your challenge, poets and composers, to make something singable from this: Christian faith is not an escape hatch from this world into some other world. The birth of Jesus is not a divine rescue mission; it’s a divine embrace, the Lover in full and intimate communion with the Beloved.

In that light, that great light of the Gospel, Christian faith invites us to live fully in this world, confident that God is dwelling with us—as the unshakable ground of our existence, animating us with a lively creativity, and loving us through the bodies of our companions, of all species.

Telling the Christmas story like that doesn’t matter for some finger-wagging morality about how we ought to live; I think I matters for how we truly want to live: as people fully-rooted in this precious Earth and building divinely-inspired communities of compassion, living and giving everything we’ve got for a world of peace, with justice.

Sing for a Change

“My soul proclaims the greatness of God.”

So sings Mary of Nazareth, a young woman (likely a young teenager), living in an occupied first-century province of the Roman Empire. She’s pregnant, and unmarried, and without many resources, and still she sings of the God who brings down the mighty from their thrones and raises up the lowly (Luke 1:47-55).

We recited her song—usually referred to as the Magnificat—in church yesterday, in place of a psalm, and we sang not one but two metrical versions of it during worship.

In this third week of Advent, the appointed texts are starting to sound like Christmas. But this classic song from a young girl made me wonder: Has the world really changed very much since she first sang it? Have there been any kings sitting on thrones in their kingdoms, any tyrants ruling their empires since then?

Yes, of course. And yet, composers have not stopped setting Mary’s song to music, in nearly every generation. Kingdoms rise and fall, and still the Magnificat is sung. Empires come and go; but right here in a twenty-first century world, we still sing Mary’s song of the God who shall not fail in freedom and mercy.

“My soul proclaims the greatness of God.”

So sings a small group of young Black women in the middle of Tennessee. I stumbled upon their story just recently, about a group of students at Fisk University in Nashville.

It was the summer of 1871 and these young women were making their way back to Nashville after singing together at a concert. Traveling in the South at that time was dangerous, especially for Black women. Sure enough, a mob of white men started to harass and threaten them as they walked to a train station.

Clustered together on the platform with no train yet in sight, surrounded by violent men, the young women began to sing a hymn. They likely sang one of the Negro spirituals from the plantations, with words about the tender mercy of precious Jesus.

Quite remarkably, as they sang, the mob of white men slowly began to disperse, one by one. As the train approached, only the mob’s leader remained; he stood there with tears streaming down his cheeks and he begged the women to sing the hymn again.

Have there been racists and episodes of violent bigotry and lynch mobs since then? Yes, of course. But the song of those women made a difference for that young man who wanted to hear it just one more time.

(Those women, by the way, became the award-winning, world-renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers, a choral organization still in existence today, at Fisk.)

“My soul proclaims the greatness of God.”

My own mother sang such divine praise when she became pregnant with me at the age of thirty-nine, at a time when that was considered too old for a safe pregnancy. She was convinced that she would never have children, and she was distraught about this.

She often said how much she identified with Hannah, the figure from the Hebrew Bible who was also without children. Hannah prayed and wept to God for a child—just as my mother said she herself did—and Hannah eventually gave birth to Samuel, the great prophet of ancient Israel and anointer of kings. The song of praise to God that Hannah sings eventually became the inspiration for the song Mary sings in Luke’s account of the Gospel (1 Samuel 2:1-10).

Imagine growing up as I did hearing from your mother about your own birth framed with the stories of Hannah and Samuel, and of Mary and Jesus! That’s more than just a little pressure! Who could possibly live up to such biblical expectations?

I certainly couldn’t live up to that, and I haven’t. But I have tried to pay attention to this over these many years: for both Jewish and Christian traditions, the stories of Hannah and of Mary are not only about these individual women; they are mostly about the communities they shaped with the faith they lived.

We do tell complex stories about ourselves and our communities, weaving our lives together with the dreams of our ancestors from centuries ago. And we do this as a way to keep us rooted in a history of faithfulness for the sake of a future of hopefulness.

The Gospel writer we call “Luke” did precisely this. He loved that song of Hannah (which he then gives to Mary to sing while pregnant), and Luke loved the opening verses we also heard in church yesterday from Isaiah (which he then gives to Jesus when Jesus launches his ministry of healing and liberation in Nazareth), and Luke also loved the prophet Joel, whose words he then uses to describe the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Luke told stories with ancient texts that were not his own, but they became part of him, and then part of the communities to which he wrote, and now they are part of us.

It matters that these stories constantly feature faith, and hope, and also love in a world where the word “success” usually matters more.

I’ve been reflecting recently on what exactly “successful” means, probably because my parish has been steeped in our annual fundraising campaign for 2024, just like many other congregations; ‘tis the season! As we track responses and tally the totals, I can’t help but wonder whether any biblical figure would qualify as “successful” by today’s standards.

Success in modern Western society is based on a set of recognizable and measureable metrics: more money, more cars, more land, and more acquisitions. The more we own, the more we control, the more we dominate, the more successful we are.

Success might be our collective problem in the world right now, not our solution. As environmental educator and activist David W. Orr has succinctly noted: The world does not need more “successful” people; the world desperately needs “more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds.”

What we need this very moment are more artists and musicians and bakers and gardeners and caretakers of dogs and cats and of all sorts of creatures who share this precious Earth with us, all of us working together to build communities of tender care and fierce justice—whether or not anyone thinks any of this is “successful.”

Mary of Nazareth didn’t sing for success; she sang her song from a broken heart, cracked open by the suffering of her people, and stubborn enough to believe that the God of her ancestors remains faithful to God’s own promises—even when it doesn’t look like “success.”

She sings her song in an occupied land, vulnerable to violence, and then vulnerable to the scandal of her pregnancy, and still she sings, not with certainty but with hopefulness. As the great biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has insisted, Gospel hope is not just some vague feeling that things will all just work out in the end; it’s actually quite evident that not everything will work out.

Hope is instead the conviction, against a great deal of data to the contrary, that God is tenacious in overcoming evil with good; that God insists on turning the world’s sadness into joy; that God shall not rest until at last a new realm has dawned where the lost are found, and the displaced brought home, and the dead raised to new life.

That’s the story we must tell, and the music we must compose, and the pictures we must paint, and the energy all of us must cultivate together for a world that can’t imagine trusting that story anymore but still longs to hear it. Just like that young man on a nineteenth-century train platform, with tears streaming down his face, who wanted to hear the hymn one more time—the world is desperate to hear Mary’s song once more, sung with conviction, sung by the way we live, sung for a change.

I suggested all this on a Sunday that marked the 35^th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. While I’m deeply grateful for the privilege to preside at the Eucharistic Table, what matters most is the community of God’s people gathered there.

Having returned to fulltime parish ministry nearly four years ago, this much has become quite clear: we need to help each other to hear Mary’s song anew, and then to learn how to sing it by the way we live.

This, too, is very clear these days: there’s no time to waste. So let’s sing…for a change.

For the New World Coming, Leave the Old One Behind

Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon recently gave me a visceral view of what an apocalyptic Advent looks like. Their recent Netflix film Leave the World Behind also starred Mahershala Ali and Myha’la, but Roberts, Hawke, and Bacon matter for the “old world,” which I’ll describe shortly.

But first I need to recall the kind of Christian tradition I grew up in, which relegated “conversion” to an interior matter of the heart. By confessing one’s sins and turning to Christ as Savior, one leaves the old self behind for a brand new life ahead. This turning away from the old to embrace the new, moreover, is meant to happen just once; conversion is a moment in time.

There are some biblical texts to support that view of the spiritual journey, but not many. The prophets of ancient Israel and the overall arc of the Christian Testament certainly affirm the importance of what the modern West calls “personal conversion,” but the emphasis falls squarely on the transformation of the world and not only the “heart.” Depending on the particular biblical book or writer, a changed heart might be a prerequisite for a changed world, or it might be a result, but they never remain in isolation from each other, at least not for long.

This notion of social change and a world transformed has been difficult to imagine for many of us in the “comfort class” of the modern West. As the modern world increasingly made life easier (especially for white people in the middle and upper classes), biblical denunciations of the “world” and equally bracing declarations of a new world coming sounded not only unlikely but a tad bit embarrassing. Transporting that transformation onto the interior landscape of each individual made the whole religious enterprise much more palatable—and far less biblical.

So along comes Sam Esmail’s film adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, Leave the World Behind, which is perhaps the best Advent movie ever made. When a privileged white couple physically leaves the metropolitan world of New York City for a remote getaway spot on Long Island, they quickly realize that have taken parts of their “old world” with them—not only their reliance on modern technology (which is oddly and increasingly crumbling over the course of the film) but also their own latent racism and class privilege, which no longer insulates and protects them (if it ever really did), and which they must let go, like so much technology baggage that no longer works, anyway.

I grew up enchanted with Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and My Best Friend’s Wedding, had a crush on Ethan Hawke in Dead Poets Society, and of course fell in love with Kevin Bacon in Footloose, the soundtrack of which one of my dearest friends and I listened to while we drove from Chicago to San Francisco for our Big Gay Adventure. That these three actors clearly show their age in the film is a perfect image of the old world being left behind, while Mahershala Ali and Myha’la—whose work I barely know but whose talent is breathtaking—embody beautifully a new world emerging.

I know I’m not the only one who has been feeling generally “off” for quite some time, often fighting back tears or struggling to grasp the world around me as if through gauzy filters. Yes, we’ve lived through a global pandemic, but that seems more like a symptom than a cause of some deeper malaise so many of us are shouldering and which we just can’t shake. Amanda Sanford, the Julia Roberts character in Leave the World Behind, delivers a somber, rather insightfully prickly, and spot-on speech to her younger companion-of-color roughly half through the film. Amanda is an advertising exec who doesn’t like people and hasn’t felt right about the world for decades—and yet she has kept on keeping on, and now…well, I won’t spoil the film for you.

I cannot help but hear the gorgeous opening notes of Handel’s Messiah, the text of which many Christians heard this past Sunday morning from Isaiah (40:1-11): “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.”

This God of comfort so many of us are longing to encounter—perhaps only because we at last hear the word “comfort” said out loud—this is the God whom Isaiah tells us to expect and make ready to meet: “Prepare the way for the Lord,” Isaiah says.

And out from the desert steps John the Baptist, whom the lectionary also gives us on the second Sunday of Advent (Mark 1:1-8).

Wait. That can’t be right! What kind of comfort is this that shows up in a wild figure wearing ludicrous clothing and eating a ridiculous diet? Divine relief looks rather unkempt, or maybe just scorched and frazzled, like the image by French artist Lynda Miller Baker.

That image of John can remind us just how out of place he is in the grand story of modern Western progress. Most Americans love that story in much the same way we love to narrate the success of our own lives—the success that comes under a rather pitiless scrutiny in Leave the World Behind.

Starting back in the eighteenth century, with the birth of liberal democracies and the industrial revolution and the invention of everything from electricity to antibiotics, the very notion of progress itself seemed to be woven into our shared destiny—a destiny ordained by God!

Speaking truthfully about modern Western history presents a very different and much messier story, one with enduring heartache, and considerable suffering, and ongoing violence. I want to promote healing for such a world, but I wonder now whether it all just needs to be left behind. Is that John’s message from the wilderness? Isaiah’s?

This much seems clear: the way forward for people of faith, the “good road,” or the highway for our God as Isaiah described it, is mapped with change and transformation, not with progress. That word “progress” comes saddled with the same baggage as the word “evolution.” Far too many people think both of those words mean that everything is constantly getting better. Evolutionary biologists would beg to differ, of course, and so would most historians.

Believing in “progress” usually requires practicing denial and refusing to see what must change—a whole world that needs to be left behind, or in the image of the second letter of Peter, burned up (3:8-15). True to classic Advent themes, the lectionary also gave us alarming apocalyptic images of all things passing away and even melting, and perhaps for reasons both Rumaan Alam and Sam Esmail would enthusiastically endorse.

We wait for “new heavens and a new earth,” Peter says, because we need a world where “justice is at home”—and this present world is not it, not without dramatic change.

This is the rude message of the prophets that come to us every year in Advent. As Carl Jung once insisted, “Every transformation demands, as its precondition, the ending of a world—the collapse of an old philosophy of life.” And that’s what Christian traditions mean by “conversion”; that’s why the prophets preach repentance; that’s why the new liturgical year begins with Advent, not Christmas.

Rather than a single moment, conversion is a lifelong journey of change, and rather than unfolding on an interior landscape only, it kindles a fire on the world around us. And this is exactly why paying attention is not only a banner for Advent but a primary discipline in nearly every one of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions.

Keep awake and pay attention—not to how your own story is “supposed” to go or the way a community ought to run or where we think God should show up, but pay attention to how things actually are, at this very moment, and pay attention to the voice of one crying out from the wilderness—repent, slow down, turn around, and change your course.

Or perhaps we need to say it as clearly as Alam and Esmail do: leave the old world behind.

If we do that—or rather, in all the many ways we do that—we declare along with Mark that this is just the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

“Gospel”—that’s good news. Neither Advent nor Mark will let us embrace its goodness until some things change; our hearts, yes, but also the world.

White supremacy, patriarchal domination, ecological destruction—those are just some of the pieces of an old world from which I have benefitted enormously as a white male, and the cost is unbearable.

That world needs to be left behind, and there’s no time to waste.

“Such is the Kingdom of God,” Daniel Bonnell

Stay Woke and Keep Awake

Like many other white people, I first heard the term “woke” roughly ten years ago after the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the killing of Michael Brown. The term quickly became associated with Black Lives Matter activism, and also with wider social concerns that included both gender and sexuality.

“Woke,” however, has much earlier origins. After the horrors of institutional slavery, the devastation of the American Civil War, and the rocky period known as “Reconstruction,” the early twentieth century held a great deal of promise and potential for racial healing, and a new chapter of economic prosperity for all racial groups.

But there were also notes of caution, coming mostly from Black musicians and visual artists in the 1920s and 1930s: “stay woke,” they said; pay attention and be vigilant; don’t take anything for granted.

Turns out, those were important cautions; the era of Jim Crow segregation and lynch mobs soon followed.

The Gospel writer known as “Mark” composed his account of the Gospel not long after a turbulent and violent period in first-century Judea. “The Jewish War,” as it is sometimes called, occurred right around the year 70 when Judeans rose up against their Roman occupiers; Rome destroyed much of Jerusalem during that war, including the Temple. This came right after decades of severe economic hardship among those we would call the “working poor” during the reign of King Herod.

Many of us heard that time of upheaval referenced in church yesterday, on the first Sunday of Advent. The opening verse of the Gospel passage—“after that suffering”—probably refers to those unsettling events (Mark 13:24-37). Mark’s Jesus, in other words, is trying to prepare his listeners for a time of significant social unrest and political violence. “Keep awake,” he says; pay attention and be vigilant; don’t take anything for granted.

“Stay woke” and “keep awake” come from two very different cultural and historical eras, yet the message of vigilance seems remarkably similar. The key question they pose is this: to what should we be paying such close attention? World events? Our own anxieties? Portents of doom in sea and sky?

The Gospel passage assigned for the first day of the new liturgical year (one of my favorites on the calendar) comes from a chapter sometimes referred to as the “mini-apocalypse” in Mark’s account of the Gospel. It’s striking that this chapter is the longest speech of Mark’s Jesus (in Mark, Jesus is mostly an action figure and doesn’t actually say very much), and it’s also striking that this longest speech is steeped in apocalyptic images.

Christians have interpreted this passage in many different ways over the centuries—from the fall of Rome, when it was sacked by barbarians in the fifth century, to the nineteenth-century reframing of the Second Coming of Christ as that sense of inner peace that passes all understanding.

Regardless of the interpretive framing of such texts, Advent will always provoke, stymie, and vex. How could it not when Mark’s Jesus warns us that the sun and moon will refuse to give their light, and all the stars will fall from the sky?

I know there are some Christians who truly do expect that kind of fundamental realignment in our solar system and an unraveling of our galaxy. I don’t—and I don’t think even Mark thought such events were likely, not in his lifetime and probably not ever.

If astronomical chaos is unlikely to happen any time soon, perhaps Mark is inviting us to wonder what is likely to happen in a world that seems to be careening toward catastrophe on nearly every front.

Ethnic cleansings, hospital bombings, ecological collapse, mass extinctions—how do we read those signs of these times today? If we stay awake and pay attention, will we find God’s presence in such moments of distress? What kind of hope—I mean, real and tangible hope—does the Church offer to a world in pain?

The whole season of Advent poses that question of hope with urgency, and we cannot squirm our way out of it, and we dare not try, either.

This urgency of hope shaped the insights of Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. She studied carefully the rise of totalitarian regimes, including in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. One of her main takeaway points is rather startling. A momentous difference between the modern Western world compared to all the centuries that came before, she argued, and which makes authoritarianism possible, is the loss of any expected Final Judgment.

That’s not just a startling but also rather peculiar thing to note about the modern world, except that it sounds as if she could have written that cautionary tale today. Losing any sense of divine judgment has meant, she noted, that the worst people among us no longer fear accountability, of any kind, and the most oppressed among us have lost nearly all their hope.

To fill that intolerable gap, the modern world tries to fabricate the paradise we long for, but ends up creating the hell we dread (German concentration camps in the 1940s, she observed, resemble nothing so much as Medieval visions of Hell).

That’s one hell of a quandary, and I’m grateful for the multiple ways we might engage with the question of hope posed by Advent.

Theologian Daniel Day Williams, for example, suggests that the classic and fantastical images of Advent—the Second Coming of Christ, the Final Judgement, and the End of Time—that these are symbols residing on the boundary of knowledge; they perch there, like sentinels, marking that line beyond which, they declare, our reason and experience will fail us.

That doesn’t make all those notions irrelevant or disposable. To the contrary, these symbols on the very edge of what we can know invite our trust. Life takes us up to the very edge of the map, where the road abruptly ends, beyond which we must choose whether we can trust that God is with us, that God will accompany us, and that God will provide what we need.

When the world is falling apart—either on a global stage or in our own living rooms—we yearn for something more than scolding from our sacred texts (we should have known better!); and we need something far more than mere moralizing from our religious traditions (shape up or things will get worse!). We must instead dare to find the very presence of God in the midst of our terror, and then help others do the same.

Let the fig tree be your parable for this, Jesus says (Mark 13:28). When the tree starts to put forth its leaves, you can trust that summer and its fruits are coming. Pay attention like that, Jesus says, for the sake of trust.

The symbols on the edge of our knowing—and the fig tree itself is one of them—these symbols can stretch our imagination toward the God who is always coming to meet us, always already appearing among us, always bidding us still onward toward that horizon over which we cannot presently see—and thus we must travel with trust.

This is why, by the way, my little parish along the “arts coast” of west Michigan devotes so much time to visual art. There is always a featured image on our liturgy leaflets, and in our weekly ad we place in the local newspaper, and we place nan image prominently in our weekly email newsletter (you, too, could subscribe to that!).

Art of all kinds can help us expand our imaginations, liberate us when we get stuck, and enhance our willingness to reach beyond the edge of what we can know with something like courageous trust.

In a world brimming with pain, God is not calling any of us to perfect knowledge or flawless solutions—these are far beyond us. But we must not therefore remain idle or merely sleepwalk our way through a disaster.

God is calling God’s people to live as a community of storytellers, and divine artists, and hospitable hosts, and players of musical instruments, and bakers of heavenly pastries, and tenders of gardens, caregivers to other animals, and funders of budgets, and still much more as all of us together offer healing to a wounded world with images of peace, as champions of justice, and lovers of beauty.

There’s really no time to waste; and we have got to stay woke and keep awake.

Make God Visible

Samhain. All Hallows’ Eve. Dia de los Muertos.

These are just a few of the religious/cultural observances dotting the planet at this time of year. Here in the northern hemisphere, they mark harvests, the turning of the seasons, and the shortening days as summer gives way to autumn, and autumn brings hints of winter.

In multiple ways, these various festivals and rituals mark liminal moments, whether between light and dark or the living and the dead. Some would say that the “veil” between this world and the next is the thinnest right now, on this very day and especially tonight. What usually remains unseen might actually appear, show up, or even pay a visit.

A decorated graveyard in Mexico for The Day of the Dead (Getty images)

I started thinking about what counts as “observable” and “tangible” after reading an opinion piece in the New York Times by Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli. He recounted some of the most profound mysteries of the Universe that seem to reside stubbornly beyond our understanding, like so-called “black holes”; these gravity wells scattered throughout the Universe consume both light and matter, defying some of the key laws of physics on which so much modern science actually depends.

What kind of account do we give of things we cannot see? How, Rovelli asks, do we learn about the parts of the Universe we cannot observe?

These sound like theological questions, all those religious quandaries human beings have faced for millennia. What can we know and how do we speak about the God we cannot see?

I certainly won’t pretend to answer a question like that in any definitive way, but I have become convinced of at least this much: we make the profound mystery of God visible with love.

I know how quaint that sounds, even rather pedestrian. But I am increasingly persuaded of just how crucial and urgent it is for people of faith all over the world to remember and live such truth: we make the presence of God visible with love.

This is surely why love itself is the “great commandment”—in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, nearly every one of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions.

This past Sunday, many Christians heard from Matthew’s account of the Gospel when religious leaders tried to test Jesus with this very question of which religious commandment is the greatest. Matthew’s Jesus responds with the classic answer from his own tradition: to love God and to love our neighbors (Matthew 22:35-40).

My Midwestern DNA always tempts me to suppose that this “great” commandment means being nice or polite. Of course the world would be a better place if more people were committed to standard niceties and politeness, but that’s not the love of the Gospel.

When Luke narrates this same summary of the law—loving God and loving our neighbors—Luke’s Jesus immediately tells the parable of the “good Samaritan.” He does this to clarify exactly who counts as a “neighbor.”

That parable carries a punch only by remembering that Judeans never would have referred to Samaritans as “good.” They were marginalized, despised, and treated as outcasts. And yet, the Samaritan in that parable is the only one who acts like a “good neighbor” should—with compassion, and empathy, and love.

When Jesus talks about love, I try to set aside whatever I think being nice looks like and focus instead on what love looks like for those who are the most different from me. Just as important (as the parable from Luke’s Jesus makes plain): what it means to receive love from those who are most different from me—whoever those “Samaritans” might be.

That kind of love—the unexpected and even scandalous—is the kind of love that makes God’s presence visible; it’s the kind of love that remakes this world of hatred and violence into a world of peace with justice and thriving for all.

This is the road Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has been urging The Episcopal Church to travel for some time now—not the road of standard-issue tolerance or civility (as welcome as those might be) but rather the road of love.

This is not an easy road to travel; Jesus traveled it at the cost of nothing less than everything. Loving people into healing and wholeness; loving enemies into friends; loving strangers into family—these are costly endeavors as they disrupt and interrupt social systems of power and domination.

More bluntly put, there are powerful institutional forces in this world that aim to keep us from making God visible in the way we love, which makes this road of love all the more vital for our shared traveling.

Biblical writers turned often to that image of a road to describe love itself as a movement of transformation. Over the last few months, the Sunday lectionary in many of our churches gave us, for example, the classic stories that frame ancient Israel’s history: Abraham traveling to a new land, the sojourn of the Israelites as slaves in Egypt, their liberation from slavery, and of course their pilgrimage toward the Promised Land.

This past Sunday, we heard a particularly poignant moment from those stories. God takes Moses up a mountain once again but this time to show him the land that he will not be entering (Deuteronomy 34:1-12).

This is the Moses called by God when he was still an infant; protected by God in the Nile River; tutored by God as he grew up in Pharaoh’s own household; the same Moses purged and purified in the wilderness, the same Moses who leads God’s people out of slavery and to whom God delivers the law.

This is the Moses who will not cross over into the Promised Land.

Back in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., borrowed from this poignant story to talk about his own life and the movement toward freedom he had been helping to lead.

While speaking in Memphis that year, knowing that his life was in serious danger, and on the very night before he was killed, King said this: “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But I’ve been to the mountaintop.

“God has allowed me to go up to the mountain,” he said. “And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight,” he said, “that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”

I find both of these stories, about Moses and about King, not only poignant but also deeply reassuring. God is not calling any of us to finish the Great Work of repairing the world (we can’t) but only to remain faithful on the healing road, and to do so with love.

Episcopalians began worship this past Sunday by praying that God would increase in us the gifts of “faith, hope, and charity”—that Prayer Book language of charity is what St. Paul meant by “love,” especially in the thirteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians.

If I speak in languages I’ve never studied, he says, that’s never as interesting as love. If I have the powers of a prophet and extraordinary knowledge, love is actually far more powerful. Even moving mountains, Paul says, is not nearly as impressive as love.

Faith and hope are vital, of course, Paul says, but love matters above all else because it makes the very presence of God tangible, touchable, and visible. As King famously observed (and more relevant today than ever), “hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

A world of unrelenting violence cannot see God; so let’s make the God of peace visible with love.

A world of debilitating hatred cannot see God; so let’s make the God of justice visible with love.

A wounded world has so much trouble seeing God; so let’s make the God of healing visible with love.

God is not asking any of us to mend the world; we can’t do that, not fully.

But we can make the mending presence of God visible with love, and God is calling us to do that.

There’s no time to waste.

It’s Not Complicated

To a fault (I’ve been told), I try to see most situations and controversies from as many perspectives as possible. Perhaps it’s my fate as an astrological Libra—I always seek some kind of balance between extremes.

When I invite others into this peculiar space of multiple viewpoints, I will often say, “Well, you know, it’s complicated.” I adopted complexity as my preferred mode of dealing with difficult moments after growing up in a Christian tradition that favored simple and even “easy” answers to almost everything. “Because the Bible says so” never sat well with me, not even as a child.

I still prefer seeing complexities and noting multiplicities rather than landing on simple narratives or singular theories. But right now, on this day, I cannot see anything else but a fencepost on a lonely patch of a near-desert landscape.

Twenty-five years ago today, Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten and tied to a fence post in rural Wyoming. He was left there to die, and he did die, six days later. Matthew was a gay man, an Episcopalian (even serving as an acolyte at his local parish), a college student (majoring in political science), and was active in the University’s environmental council in Laramie.

Many LGBT activists focus on only one item in that list that describes (inadequately) Matthew Shepard: he was gay. The fact that he was picked up by his murderers at a gay bar and beaten so savagely suggested to many at the time that he was killed because he was gay. Matthew has certainly been an icon for me in the efforts I have supported to resist “gay bashing” and to champion the civil rights of LGBT people. And still, for some, Matthew’s life and the story of his death are a bit more “complicated.”

Some have suggested that Matthew’s death was a simple robbery gone “bad” (violent). Others recount stories of Matthew’s possible use of illegal drugs. Still others have suggested that Matthew himself sought out dangerous situations for the “thrill of it.” These are indeed complicated narratives (most of them hardly believable).

But this, at least, is not complicated: no one deserves to be beaten, tortured, and abandoned while tied to a fence on a deserted prairie.

The fence outside Laramie, Wyoming, where Matthew Shepard was left to die.

Matthew suffered multiple fractures to the back of his head that resulted in brainstem damage (he could not regulate his bodily functions, including heart rate). There were at least a dozen lacerations around his head, face, and neck. Given these injuries, and that he had been left in near-freezing temperatures on that fence for eighteen hours, his medical team decided not to operate; Matthew never regained consciousness.

Here’s another thing that’s not complicated: every human being deserves the dignity of a proper burial, which Matthew was denied by the presence of anti-gay protestors at his funeral, “religious folk” who appeared to relish in the death of a “faggot.” They carried large posters that read “Matt in Hell” and “God Hates Fags” and “No Queers in Heaven.”

Here’s yet one more thing that’s not complicated: the unconditional and undying love of Matthew’s parents, Judy and Dennis Shepard. Their unflinching and indefatigable support for LGBT people inspired them to start the Matthew Shepard Foundation. Their work, along with many organizations and activists, led eventually (though it took far too long) to the passing of the Matthew Shepard Act in 2009 to help prevent hate crimes.

(I had the great privilege of meeting Judy Shepard, briefly, while I worked on a national campaign for marriage equality in the early 2000s. I have never met such a poised and gracious human being who has also endured so much vitriol and heartache.)

The circuitous path and unfathomably convoluted political maneuverings required to expand hate crimes legislation illustrate an ongoing and absolutely vital aspect of today’s poignant anniversary. While many people have at least heard of Matthew Shepard, I wonder how many recognize the name James Byrd. In the very same year that Matthew was killed, James Byrd was killed for being Black in Texas; he was dragged behind a pickup truck by three white men (two of whom were avowed white supremacists) until James was at last decapitated.

Ongoing engagements with race, gender, sexuality, and economics (not to mention ecology) are not isolated, one from the other. They are all deeply intertwined.

So I am thinking about Matthew today and how his life and his death have shaped so much of my professional and vocational life. I returned to fulltime parish ministry just a little more than three years ago, convinced that Christian communities really can make a difference for a better world. Regardless of how anyone tells the story of Matthew’s life and his death, it is so very clear to me that religious language matters, and that the way Christians talk matters, and the how the Church worships matters.

I try my very best to pay attention to the significance of “God-talk” as I lead a community of faith in prayer and in projects of shared ministry. How we pray will make a difference in how we live—for women in a patriarchal society; for people of color in a white supremacist society; and for queer people in a society that makes love way too complicated.

Just over twenty years after his death, Matthew’s ashes were interred at Washington National Cathedral, in 2018. Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay and partnered bishop in the Episcopal Church, presided at the liturgy. I would be surprised if there were any dry eyes in that house on that day.

There is just one last thing Matthew himself would likely urge us to embrace in all its glorious simplicity: love is stronger than hate. To which I would add this: love is also stronger than even death. And this is the witness to the Gospel that I believe Matthew would have us take up with renewed vigor.

Rest in peace, dear Matthew, knowing that you have been rising in power already, for years now, in all the lives of many activists, clergy, and politicians who have been inspired to make the world a better place because of you.

And the tears on my cheeks as I write this are not complicated.

Matthew Shepard’s Ashes Carried into Washington National Cathedral by Bishop Gene Robinson in 2018

Daily and Deliberate Acts of Kindness

This past Sunday I realized that the wonderfully rich Season of Creation we’ve been observing for the last few weeks was missing something, something vital and crucial. As we celebrated St. Francis’ Day, I realized how much I have been missing all the other animals with whom we share this precious Earth.

“St. Francis of Assisi,” Jennifer Wojtowicz

Feeling the absence of animals in this season can help us name a bit more directly their absence in our lives more generally. As modern Western people, we don’t interact with other animals very much, unless we live on a farm or have to remove raccoons from our attic.

There are some good reasons for our distance from some animals, which the domesticated variety often obscure: the wider world of God’s creation is actually quite wild and feral, and even dangerous. Much to our chagrin, we don’t have full control of this planet, and a great deal of it remains far beyond our understanding. The passage assigned from the biblical book of Job for the Feast of St. Francis is meant to convey precisely that sense of an untamable world (Job 39:1-8).

Mountain goats at birthing time “burst forth” with their babes (v. 3). That verb in Hebrew means quite literally “split open” in the act of birth—a rather violent description. And do you really suppose that you are harnessing the full strength of an ox with a yoke? Oxen serve us at their pleasure, not ours (v. 9-12). And while the original Hebrew about the ostrich is mostly untranslatable (v. 13-17), the point seems to be how miraculous it is that they even survive given how thoroughly they neglect their own young.

The world remains untamable and far beyond the reach of our understanding—not unlike God, actually. And that’s what Job wants to say rather emphatically.

Earlier in this book, Job runs out of patience with his terribly pious and self-righteous friends, who are trying to explain Job’s suffering to him. They want it to make sense (mostly, we should note, by blaming Job himself for it).

So Job urges his friends to “ask the beasts” (12:7), and they will teach you. Talk to the birds of the air and the fish of the sea; they will tell you. Speak to the earth and it will enlighten you, Job says. The God who made all of us, the beasts will say, is the same God who cannot be squeezed into your neat and tidy systems.

St. Francis’ Day at All Saints’ Parish 2020

I truly love the custom of “blessing” animals during worship on St. Francis’ Day. The weather was perfect for this here in Saugatuck on Sunday, and we welcomed some of those “beasts” into our outdoor sanctuary to worship with us, the ones we embrace as our companions. That we enjoyed their company with us while we gathered at the Eucharistic Table on Sunday was also a moving reminder that the word “companion” means “the one with whom we break bread.” This alone is a remarkable and beautiful thing: in a wild and feral world where so many other animals remain entirely beyond our grasp, we live with some of them as our companions.

I am constantly astonished by how much we do not know about this planet on which we live. We have, to date, identified and named at best only 25% of the species on Earth; more likely only around 10%! Many of these—we can’t know for sure how many—are now extinct because of climate change and we will never know what they were. That should be cause for our deep lament.

In a world of mass extinction and human violence, it matters that we treat these beloved creatures gently and kindly. We humans have not always done so. In fact, and to our shame, we continue to use dogs in laboratory experiments (usually beagles), and we still test beauty products and cosmetics on rabbits; from petrochemical companies to military installations, fish, monkeys, cats, owls, and pigs are all pressed into laboratory service against their wills and under tortuous conditions. (Faunalytics is a good source for learning more about animal testing and how to advocate for ending it.)

Beyond mere sentimentality, treating other-than-human animals with kindness is actually an act of repentance, and also a gesture of hopefulness for a better world. Yet one more added benefit: it might encourage us to treat other humans with the same kindness.

“Come to me,” Jesus said, “all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you…for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

That Gospel passage is also assigned for St. Francis’ Day (Matthew 11:25-30). While most of us hear Jesus addressing humans in that verse, let’s notice that he uses the image of a “yoke”—in case you haven’t seen one recently, a yoke is a wooden frame or collar that joins two oxen together at their necks as they plow or haul a load.

It turns out that yokes have also been used, in ancient and modern societies, on human slaves during transport, to keep them from running away—a chilling reminder that how we treat other animals often gives us permission to treat other humans just as badly.

Come to me, Jesus says, all you heavily-burdened humans, all you tortured creatures, every weary species and I will give you rest.

If you find yourself moved when you see an act of kindness, you are touching the very heart of God. As theologian Robert Neville says, this is the God who treats us with kindness in Christ.

That’s not usually how most people hear the Gospel described. But let’s recall that the root of that word kind is kin. When we treat someone with kindness, we are treating them as kin, with kinship, as if they are members of our own family. That is the good news of the Gospel—by treating us kindly in Christ, God is treating us members of God’s own family; we are loved as God’s own kin, and we are called to love all others in the same way.

Indigenous communities made these vital connections a very long time ago, including the practice of referring to all other beings on this planet as our “relatives.” Surely our engagement with climate change and the need for ecological renewal and healing would deepen significantly if we thought of ourselves and all other creatures of the same God as members of a single family.

St Francis’ Day at All Saints’ Parish 2023

How we speak about these things matters, because the way we speak shapes our behavior. I learned just recently, for example, that in the traditional Hawaiian language you don’t refer to yourself as the “owner” of a pet. The word instead is “kahu,” and it has multiple meanings: “guardian, protector, steward, and beloved attendant.”

A kahu is someone entrusted with the safekeeping of something precious, something cherished. What a kahu protects is not their property; what they protect is part of their soul.

Many centuries ago, St. Francis urged us to think and pray in exactly this way, and even more expansively still: not only did he refer to other animals as his siblings, but also the many other features of God’s creation—like “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon.”

Perhaps just a single day devoted to Francis is not enough, not in this age of climate chaos and ecological disaster. Perhaps we need to be remembering him every single day as we seek to live ever more gratefully for all of our relatives, and as we seek to live ever more gently on this precious Earth.

This ecological commitment begins, perhaps, not with “random” acts of kindness, as the old aphorism would have it, but with deliberate ones.

Every single day.