Peculiar Faith

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

We Have Nothing to Fear

Eighty years ago this week, an atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima, Japan, a city of around 300,000 civilians.

That type of weapon is detonated in the skies above its target. In addition to the unimaginable destruction of both structures and lives, the intense flash of light from that detonation blinded anyone who looked at it directly, up to twenty miles away. The blindness could last a few minutes to several hours, and for some, it was permanent as the light burned their retinas.

Needless to say, that one bomb transformed not just that one Japanese city but the whole planet as we lurched into the so-called “Atomic Age.”

A nighttime view of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, featuring the iconic A-Bomb Dome through a curved memorial structure surrounded by flowers and greenery. — Hiroshima Peace Memorial

Christians try and hope to focus on a different kind of light: the divine light of Christ illuminating the path toward lifegiving transformation.

We sang a wonderful Charles Wesley hymn yesterday morning in church, which brought that different kind of light to mind: “Christ, whose glory fills the skies, / Christ, the true, the only Light, / Sun of Righteousness arise!”

That glory of Christ filling the skies stands in stark contrast to the destructive light of in the skies above Hiroshima. And that’s a really good reason to note the unsettling confluence of dates this week: Wednesday, August 6, is not only the 80^th anniversary of the Hiroshima detonation; it is also the Feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the church calendar—a commemoration of that moment when Jesus was transfigured by the brightness of divine glory.

An abstract painting featuring a bright light at the center, surrounded by warm hues of orange, yellow, and deep blues, evoking a sense of divine illumination and transformation. — “Transfiguration,” Lewis Bowman

An unsettling confluence, yes, but a potentially felicitous one as well if it prompts reflection on the character of transformation itself: what is it, and how does it happen, and to what end?

It’s rather common to suppose that violence is the most powerful agent of change, and this seems even obvious with the explosive violence of modern weapons. But that supposition is simply not true; the most powerful source of change and transformation in the whole universe is unconditional love infused with grace.

The Word of God is that powerful source, which not only created all that is—including the atoms we have now learned how to split—but also lived in the very flesh of God’s own creation, living lovingly among us as Beloved Jesus. That claim inspired all the lofty language the lectionary has been assigning for the last few Sundays from the letter to the Colossians (contrary to most biblical scholars, I think Paul wrote it…but I digress).

Christ, Paul writes in the third chapter, is “the image of the invisible God, in whom all things in heaven and on earth were created, the firstborn from the dead, and in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”

And on and on the lofty language continues until Paul makes a stunning declaration: your life, he declares, is “hidden with Christ in God” (3:3).

That image always makes me pause, often takes my breath away. In the vast and inconceivable cosmic Christ whom Paul wishes to praise, exactly there, our lives are tucked away, in the very heart of Creator God. Contrary to how I usually think about that wonderful image, being “hidden” is not the same thing as “hiding away.” If I am truly safe and secure in Christ, then I can live outrageously and boldy and audaciously. In a political climate of terror, perhaps I can even live bravely.

Or to put this a bit more simply and directly: we have nothing to fear.

I know that sounds unreasonable and even delusional; the list of fearful things is quite long these days, from scary medical diagnoses to ecological collapse and even nuclear sword rattling. But that’s what makes that little first-century letter to the Christians in Colossae so astonishing: nothing, not one thing, can ever separate us from the Source of Life and the Fullness of Love and the Depth of Grace—not even death.

If our lives truly are so remarkably hidden with Christ in God—if it really is true that we have nothing to fear—well, how should we then live?

Luke offers an answer to that question in the passage many heard yesterday morning (12:13-21). Luke’s answer to the question of how we should live is simply this: with generosity.

Luke offers that answer in a parable about wealth and greed, a familiar parable about a wealthy man with an abundant crop and a barn too small to hold it all; he builds bigger barns and sits back to enjoy all his stuff—and then he dies.

Unlike many Gospel parables, there’s no arcane mystery to decipher here; you don’t need an advanced theology degree to see the point in a story about a rich man who takes ultimate pleasure in his possessions and apparently forgets entirely about his own mortality.

This parable does become a bit richer, so to speak, by noting Luke’s context and especially his audience. Luke addresses his account of the Gospel to the “most excellent Theophilus,” a wealthy patron of apparently significant social status; Luke himself was referred to as a “physician” and thus likewise someone of means and elevated status. In addition, though we don’t notice this in our English translations, Luke wrote in a fairly sophisticated form of ancient Greek, with the kind of stylized language used mostly among the highly educated classes.

Luke writes, in other words, from within a community of cultural elites, which includes himself. Quite remarkably, given that context, there are more mentions of the poor and of poverty in Luke than in any of the other Gospels; there are also far more stories in Luke about the dangers of wealth.

(That passage from the letter to the Colossians includes a powerful little parenthetical notation that makes those dangers plain: greed is at root idolatry. Like that man with his barns, relying on our “stuff” replaces reliance on God.)

Luke is the only one to include this little parable we heard this morning about the foolish rich man with his big barns to hold all his stuff, the man whose smug decision simply to “eat, drink, and be merry” has since then become a byword of caution.

The caution here is what those who are greedy always fail to understand, whether or not they are wealthy: our possessions do not give us control over our lives

That bears repeating (because I too often forget it): we do not gain more control over our lives by buying more stuff. This matters to just about everyone because almost everyone I know fears losing control—and we all fear that loss quite pointedly; but our possessions won’t help us. We might also fear losing our own lives, of course, but they don’t even belong to us—they belong to God.

Once we realize this, even just glimpse how little difference our possessions make, our lives change; what matters most to us changes.

When we split open an atom, a blinding light explodes into the surrounding space, transforming it violently. Luke would have us consider what happens when we split open human greed—and especially the fear that drives it. Split open that greed, Luke might say, and the divine light of generosity suddenly transforms everything around it.

Find Heaven on Earth…then share it.

When I first read this passage from Luke for yesterday’s liturgy, I expected Luke’s Jesus to say what Matthew’s Jesus says as part of his “Sermon on the Mount.” There Matthew warns his hearers not to “store up treasures on earth” but instead to “store up treasures in heaven” (6:19-20).

Luke, however, says nothing about heaven in this passage; Luke’s Jesus instead warns those who store up treasures for themselves and are not rich toward God. The contrast for Luke is not between “earth and heaven,” but between “greed and generosity.”

Luke wants us to find heaven on earth…and then share it.

Some of my friends were visiting from out of town last week, making their annual summer pilgrimage to Saugatuck. During their visit, we made an afternoon trip to a local orchard and picked peaches—and that was just about the easiest labor I’ve ever done for the most delicious food. Every single tree was bending with the weight of its abundant fruit; even the ground was littered with the peaches that had dropped from the branches.

That image of abundance could offer healing for this current age of anxiety—this age of fear over so many things. This rich and fertile Earth is easily capable of providing more than enough food for every single human on this planet. With virtually no strain or struggle, Earth can feed every single one of the 7 billion of us on this planet.

Our problem today is not scarcity; it’s greed, especially the greed born of fear.

Our lives are hidden with Christ in God—we have nothing to fear.

A close-up view of a peach tree branch laden with ripe, fuzzy peaches surrounded by vibrant green leaves. — Crane Orchards (Fennville, MI)

The Freedom to Belong

“For freedom Christ has set us free.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For freedom Christ has set us free.

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

Flying the Flag of a Political Gospel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gift of Confusion

No one wants to be confused, and I would certainly not want to create confusing situations. I do mostly think of confusion itself as a bad thing, a problem to resolve or some kind of trouble to fix—but sometimes confusion might show up as a gift that leads us toward new life.

That’s what I started to realize from working with a wonderful doctoral student back in Berkeley. Erika Katske identifies as a “queer Jew, married to a transgender rabbi,” and her work as a community organizer and advocate for economic justice is informed by her religious faith (including but not limited to Judaism). That work framed her longstanding fascination with the ancient and iconic story from Genesis about the Tower of Babel (Gen. 1:1-11).

“The Tower of Babel,” Abigail Lee Goldberger

The lectionary assigns that story as an optional reading for the Day of Pentecost, this coming Sunday, and for an obvious reason: God interrupts the construction of the Tower of Babel by “confusing” the speech of those constructing it. Rather than a single language spoken by all, people could no longer understand what others were saying. Contrast that moment of confusion with the story from the Acts of the Apostles (2:1-21), where the sudden outpouring of the Holy Spirit enables people to comprehend different languages. Pentecost, in other words, “heals” Babel—or that what I used to think until reading Erika’s work.

I certainly won’t try to summarize a whole dissertation on this topic of nearly 300 pages, but here’s what caught my attention about Erika’s re-reading of the Babel story: the “confusion of languages” and the “scattering” of the people throughout the earth was not punishment from an angry God; to the contrary, it was a divine gift offered from love.

I was astonished when Erika and I first met to discuss her project and she pointed out that nothing in the Hebrew text of that ancient story suggests that God was “angry” about the Tower. To the contrary, God seems instead concerned about the singular focus of the people, the devotion of all their time and resources to just one project, and the dense concentration of their dwellings in just one valley. None of this would help those humans thrive—staying on that course would actually prevent their flourishing.

God’s response was the gift of confused languages and the scattering of their habitations in a much wider region. The effort required after that to cooperate generated new forms of community and social bonds, exactly what was needed for their thriving. (The point of Erika’s dissertation was to extend that analysis of the biblical story into the dynamics of global capitalism, which exhibits all of the problems of that ancient story but now on a planetary scale.)

Combining what I learned from Erika about Babel with the work I’ve done for many years on the disparate forms of human sexuality, gender expression, and family configurations inspired me to think in some fresh ways about Pentecost. The gift of the Holy Spirit on that day was not the return to a single language for everyone; the gift of the Holy Spirit was instead the capacity to understand multiple languages and, by extension, all the other kinds of multiplicity that accompany a “language”—various points of view, diverse cultures, different ethnicities, strange customs, odd ways to dress, unusual patterns of affection, and so on.

“I will Pour Out My Spirit,” Sieger Koder

Clearly, this kind of community-building takes hard work, even though it is prompted by the gift of the Holy Spirit. In fact, in the portion from John’s account of the Gospel assigned for Sunday, the Spirit is referred to by a Greek word that resists easy translation (ironically, as Andrew McGowan helpfully points out, for a day devoted to understanding strange languages). That word is “paraclete,” and was often used to describe a lawyer who accompanies someone facing judicial scrutiny (thus the typical English translation as “advocate”). But the more direct meaning of that term is “one-who-stands-with,” especially in the midst of struggle.

Standing with others these days—whether in congregations, cities, or as a nation—certainly involves serious struggle and not a little confusion. I often wish for something “easier” or “simpler,” but both Babel and Pentecost seem to invite us instead to engage the harder and thus more rewarding work of wrestling with our differences for the sake not only of the “common” good but the greater good. As John’s Jesus suggests, we will inevitably struggle with what it means to speak the truth, how to live with love, and ways to celebrate difference rather than merely to cluster in affinity groups for a sense of safety.

Even in the parish I am privileged to serve here in Michigan, we gather as a community of people who are very much alike in many respects yet still find ourselves struggling with speaking truth, living love, and embracing difference. Extending those efforts outward into communities with much greater diversity, the struggle only multiplies. This might well be the point of gathering every week around the Eucharistic Table, a religious sanctuary that offers a “rehearsal space” or “testing ground” for the kind of love God calls us to offer to the wider world.

Thankfully, we don’t even try to do this work alone. God gives the Holy Spirit as divine companion, comforter, counselor, and advocate. The one standing with us in the struggle is God’s gift, and the struggle itself is reason for gratitude.

The Realm of Love has No King

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone who hears.
Anyone who is thirsty.

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

Let everyone who is thirsty come and drink.

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

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

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

For the Healing of the Nations

Patriotism is not a Christian virtue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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