Peculiar Faith

Seeing and Touching, Trusting and Healing

Lent always seems drenched with thick symbols (meals, foot-washing, the cross). The Easter season seems populated with big words, with words that carry with them a rich and complex history—words like “doubt” and “belief” and “trust”; words like “breath,” “spirit,” “forgiveness,” and “peace.”

I’m kind of obsessed with etymology, so a season so packed with richly-storied words becomes a treasure-trove. Those words I just noted, for example, punctuate key moments in what some scholars call the “mystical Gospel according to John.” The word “mystical” in this case I take to mean the endlessly mysterious presence of God in us, in other animals, in our shared creaturely flesh, in every ecosystem, in Earth herself—a presence that animates everything with divine life.

John and his community of believers could be described as a group of first-century Jewish mystics, deeply rooted in the traditions of ancient Israel, and who loved reading the wider world of God’s creation in the light of the risen Christ, and even more, always doing so while gathered around the Eucharistic Table.

This past Sunday—the second Sunday of Easter, which is always devoted to the familiar story of Thomas (John 20:19-31)—offered at least three “mystical moments” worth considering for a world in need of healing—and how a wordy history might help.

The first moment occurs in what can easily be overlooked as a random detail in the story. The risen Jesus appears to his closest friends, but of course Thomas wasn’t there at the time. He shows up again about “a week later”—or that’s what most of our translations indicate, about a “week.” The original Greek is much more specific: the risen Jesus appeared among them again eight days later.

For ancient Israelites, this is not a random detail. It evokes a way of thinking about the Sabbath, especially among the later Hebrew prophets, weary of war, longing for justice, laboring hard for peace. For them, the Sabbath is not merely for rest; the purpose of Sabbath is to inspire and anticipate that great day when all work will be finished at last and brought to its completion—that’s the “Eighth Day.”

John points toward that great hope with Jesus on the cross; he dies there, John says, on the day of Preparation for the Sabbath—and not just any Sabbath, but one of “great solemnity.” Anticipating that final Sabbath when all work shall at last be completed, John’s gospel is the only one in which Jesus dies by declaring “It is finished.”

John seems to underscore this point when Jesus blesses his friends with peace—not once, not twice, but three times in the Thomas story. Much more than only “peace,” the Hebrew word shalom means more richly wholeness, coming to fruition, completion.

The second mystical moment comes to us on a gentle breath of soft wind. The Greek word pneuma can mean both breath and spirit; that pun also works in Hebrew. The Spirit is the breath that God blows into the first human’s mouth in Genesis, giving life to that creature made from the mud of a garden.

In John, Jesus is buried and rises in a garden; he then breathes on his friends, not only with the Spirit of life but also of forgiveness.

I’m grateful to be using the First Nations Version of the New Testament in worship this Easter season. That indigenous translation renders the notion of sin as “bad hearts and broken ways.” In that sense, forgiveness is actually a path toward healing and wholeness, and not only for individuals but communities.

That path shed some surprising (for me) light on an otherwise familiar section of that passage from John. I’m accustomed to hearing the risen Jesus warn his friends about retaining the sins of others, because then they will be retained (20:23). Sins aren’t actually mentioned in that Greek phrase at all. The original Greek suggests instead that “whomever you hold, hold fast.” When you forgive someone, in other words, hold on to that person, keep them close in the community, where they and you belong together.

For the third mystical moment from this story, we might recall that the verbs for “seeing” and “knowing” are directly related in Hebrew. In the third chapter of Genesis, the serpent tempts Eve to see in order to know, and so she reaches out to take the forbidden fruit that looks so delightful.

In John’s account of the Gospel, Thomas demands to see the wounds of Jesus in order to believe. But John’s Jesus invites Thomas into an even greater intimacy. “Reach out and touch the wounds,” he says. Put your hand here—or as the Greek word more directly means, thrust your hand into my side, Jesus says, and then believe.

That old saying “seeing is believing” has its origins in this story about Thomas. More accurately, however, Thomas is invited to “reach out and touch to believe.”

“Doubting Thomas with Jesus,” Krishen Khanna

This is underscored more than once in what the lectionary provided from the first letter of John this past Sunday: We saw the risen Jesus with our own eyes, he says. Even more, we touched him with our own hands; we touched the One who is life—not just any life but the unending life of “beauty and harmony,” as the First Nations Version describes it (1 John 1:1-2).

These powerful words and images are addressed to John’s future readers, like us, the ones who were not in that upper room with the disciples. Just as Jesus urges Thomas to reach out and to touch, so also Christians gathered around the Eucharistic Table are invited to reach out, and to touch, and then still more, to take, and to eat—just like Adam and Eve did in the garden, but we do it for life, not death.

I love the story of Thomas. I love John’s account of the Gospel and John’s letters. I love these ancient texts because they show us it looks like and how it feels to live as a community of believers with some wonderfully rich words. Believing is the operative word in this case, which is not the same thing as knowing.

Faith is not knowledge, and certainly not certainty; faith is a posture of trust not only toward the infinite mystery of the living God, but also each other. And that’s what makes belief so invigorating and sometimes terrifying.

The verb “to believe” comes from an old Germanic phrase to indicate the “giving of one’s heart to another.” If I say, “I believe in you,” I don’t mean merely that I know something about you; I mean quite brashly and beautifully that I’m willing to give my heart to you in trust.

The figure of Thomas in John’s gospel stands not as a cautionary tale about doubt—all of the disciples doubted at some point and in some fashion. No, Thomas stands as a reliable spiritual guide, reassuring us that risks are worth taking for a life of trust; I may just need to get that tattooed on my body somewhere where I can read it every day. Trust has never been easy for me—and maybe it’s not ever easy for anyone.

Surely this is what makes John’s mystical Gospel a matter of some urgency in the world today, a world experiencing a profound crisis of trust on so many levels.

Would it matter in such a world for a community of believers to risk giving their hearts to each other, to show a world in pain what trust looks like? I believe so, not because the church does this perfectly or even well but because that’s the only path I can see—and touch—toward healing.

Easter—Thanks to Women

It was so wonderful to welcome back “Alleluia” to the liturgy after our Lenten journey without it. Hearing Mark’s account of the resurrection of Jesus yesterday morning, I was also reminded that our Easter Alleluia is possible at all because of women.

As I walked through the painful and poignant moments of Holy Week, anticipating the joy of Sunday morning, I realized in some fresh ways this year that we would gather on that glorious morning of Easter because of women.

All four accounts of the Gospel are very clear about this: women were the first witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and they were also responsible for telling others this good story—they were the very first apostles.

I had some more personal reasons for this kind of reflection as well: March 31 just happens to be the anniversary of my dear mother’s death, a woman who was faithfully a witness for me—from my earliest days, as far back as I can remember—she was a witness for me to the risen Christ by the way she lived and loved.

How she lived and loved—that’s what makes Easter “real,” how it changes our lives, and our relationships, and our communities.

Scientist and theologian Ilea Delio insists that “love lives in persons,” not ideas or doctrines. “Love is not a concept,” she writes, love is “a powerful, transforming energy that heals, reconciles, unites, and makes whole” (from her marvelous book, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being).

This transforming energy of love makes all things new, reminding us that whatever else “resurrection” may mean, it does not mean “resuscitation.”

The risen Jesus is not a corpse come back to life, nor is he a ghost. As St. Paul put it, the risen Jesus is the first fruits of a new creation (1 Cor. 15:20), a new way to live—and not just Jesus alone, but also the women, who were the first witnesses of the resurrection, they too, along with Jesus, were the first fruits of God’s new creation, a new way to live.

The indirectness, as it were, the obscurity of that first Easter morning, strikes me in very particular ways whenever we hear Mark’s account of it (16:1-8), which is the slimmest and thinnest description of whatever it means to say Jesus rises from the dead. All four Gospel writers treat the resurrection as utterly mysterious, but not the consequences. There is new life to be lived because of the resurrection of Jesus.

The heart of Easter is not only that Jesus is somehow alive, but also that we are, and that we live differently because of Easter. This is in large measure why, I think, Mark has the women run from the empty tomb in terror and amazement.

Of course these first witnesses to Easter are terrified, not only because God is so clearly at work in that empty tomb but also because of what it means for them and how they must and will live in a brand new way.

Preparing for Easter, I was reminded again of my trip earlier this year to southern Africa, where I met a young man in Johannesburg by the name of Nkululeku. His name in Zulu means freedom.

I devoted some energy this Lent to considering the various ways spiritual disciplines might foster a more vibrant and deeper freedom, and especially the precious freedom Jesus offers from the fear of death. Anxiety over death gets expressed in so many self-destructive habits and corrosive social patterns—from opioid addiction to environmental destruction.

“In the Spirit of Honoring Our Ancestors,” James Jacko

Still further richness for this notion is coming the First Nations Version of the New Testament that we’re using here at All Saints’ Parish this Easter Season, the indigenous translation that presents the Gospel as the “Good Story of Creator Sets Free.”

Weaving all of this together brought to mind my firm conviction about the gendered character of our collective distress as human beings. For many years now, I have been thoroughly convinced that homophobia is rooted in misogyny.

Less abstractly, whatever keeps us enslaved to violence, whether because of race or sexuality or class or even species, has its roots firmly planted in patriarchy, in cultural systems that favor men and masculinity while degrading women and reviling the feminine. Ask nearly any gay man who has experienced taunts, jeers, fists, or rejection—the violence springs from our failure to be “real men.”

It matters—so much more than most usually suppose—it matters in the first-century world of patriarchal domination that women are the first witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead; the first to see that Jesus himself had been set free from the tomb; the first to experience the exhilarating trepidation of brand new life.

To no small degree, the joy of Easter is in proportion to how clearly we can name the severity of institutional systems of patriarchal domination that hurt women, and children, and men, as well as other animals and whole ecosystems. Imperial patriarchy killed Jesus, after all, and women are the first witnesses to God’s vibrant new life in the world.

Mark’s Jesus most certainly sets us free from the fear of death. Mark makes equally clear that we also need the courage to live this new life free of patriarchal control, and to shape our communities with it, and to imagine entirely new ways to be human on this precious Earth.

That’s how I read that moment in Mark’s account when an angelic figure instructs those first apostles of Easter, those women at the tomb, to go to Galilee. That’s where the disciples of Jesus, including women, first encountered Jesus as “Creator Sets Free.”

And now you must go back there, the angel says, and learn how to live that Easter freedom in your own lives with a fierce courage and with an enduring commitment not merely to resist patriarchal systems but to dismantle them entirely.

The Lenten road of discipline does not end on Easter morning, but from here on, there is no map to follow, no sacred GPS to consult. Our own “Galilee” of new life beckons to us, for which we have no blueprint.

Yes, of course that’s more than a little scary, but we are not on this journey alone. The One who is God’s very own freedom incarnate, and who is divine love in the flesh, lives and travels with us, among us, and in us.

We can rely on this Easter declaration, we can trust it with our lives—because of women.

The Unbearable Nearness of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shameless Living and the Sign of the Serpent

John does something very strange in the otherwise very familiar third chapter of his account of the Gospel. What John does is so strange that most people just skip right over it on their way to what is likely the most well-known verse in the entire Bible—John 3:16 (which we can still see people holding up on placards in football stadiums).

For God does indeed love the world, as the sixteenth verse declares, and yet in the two verses before that one, John’s Jesus refers to his own death on a cross by comparing himself favorably to a serpent, and for the sake of life.

The research I did on this strange passage more than fifteen years ago turned out to be life-changing for me. It shaped my second book (Divine Communion: A Eucharistic Theology of Sexual Intimacy), and I am convinced that this passage holds the key to the kind of healing love the world today so desperately needs.

Some textual sleuthing is in order to get to the heart of the matter here, and that involves taking some steps back into the Hebrew Bible—back to the equally strange story of Moses in the desert that many Christians heard this past Sunday in concert with the passage from John. And then back further still to the Garden of Eden in Genesis.

That’s the textual trail I tried to map from the pulpit this past Sunday, the fourth in Lent. And the image that ties all of it together is of course the serpent.

In ancient Mediterranean societies, the symbol of a serpent enjoyed multiple and interwoven meanings. A serpent sometimes symbolized eternity, with depictions of a snake eating its own tail to signal the circularity of infinite time. Serpents could also symbolize healing, as the shedding of a snake’s skin signified the promise of renewal.

These ancient societies also knew very well that snakes can be dangerous and deadly. That mix—whether of danger and healing, of both risk and renewal—that mix shows up in the old aphorism about how to soothe the effects of a hangover—what you need is a “hair from the dog that bit you.”

That insight also contributed to the development of modern vaccines. And the insight is just this: that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

That insight found its way into that rather strange story from the Book of Numbers (21:4-9) where the ancient Israelites are wandering through the desert and they stumble into a nest of poisonous snakes, the bites from which make many of them ill and some of them die. God instructs Moses to make a bronze image of a serpent and to lift it high upon a pole so everyone can see it. All those who looked at it were healed.

Some have suggested that this story from Numbers led to the familiar image we still see today of a snake wrapped around a pole as a symbol for the medical professions and healthcare; here again, the key insight remains: that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

Going back to the third chapter of Genesis, we encounter yet another serpent. That story of Adam and Eve in the garden is so familiar that most people miss exactly what that serpent said to Adam and Eve.

Standard readings of that chapter from Genesis frame it as a story about humanity’s guilt and our need to be forgiven for our sin. I embrace that way of reading the story, but it’s not the only way to read it. By focusing so much attention on sin and guilt, the modern Church has left virtually untouched the epidemic of shame and violence.

This was the life-changing insight for me years ago when I was researching these texts, to understand the difference between guilt and shame.

Guilt attaches to something I have done, a mistake or an offense which I can confess and for which I can seek forgiveness. Shame, by contrast, attaches to my sense of self and who I am, usually in quite physical and bodily ways.

Guilt says, “I did something bad”; shame says, “I am bad.”

Social psychologists and sociologists have been urging us to notice for quite some time now just how pervasive shame is and just how severe are its consequences. (Be sure to read Brene Brown on this and watch her videos.)

Shame can make us dangerous to ourselves (in patterns of isolation and alienation and addiction and self-harm) and also dangerous to others (when we project our own shame on those who are different from us, or whole communities, or other species, and then treat them with hostility and violence).

Take all of this back into that ancient story of a garden where a serpent persuades human beings to eat forbidden fruit. If you eat it, the serpent says, “you will be like gods.”

The essence of this temptation is to suppose that being human isn’t good enough; that how God made us is flawed; that who we are is fundamentally bad.

That’s a lie; it’s simply not true. The ancient storyteller in Genesis insists that what God makes is good, and is indeed very good (1:31).

When Adam and Eve believed the lie, they tumbled into the spiral of shame, with the results today’s psychologists would easily recognize: they hid from each other; they hid from the wider world of the garden; and they hid from God. And in the very next story, Cain kills his brother Abel.

Shame isolates and shame kills.

And so, John’s Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up for the sake of unending life.”

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent…

Why just like that?

Because, if being human is the cause of our distress, then the truly human one—and that’s what that title “Son of Man” means—then the Truly Human One will be the source of our healing. After all, that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

Here’s one of the key pivot points in my own theological development that these interlaced texts provoked: shame cannot be forgiven; it can only be healed. And in that moment of realization, I remembered the Australian aboriginal story about the rainbow serpent, who created the land and the humans to inhabit it.

The rainbow, the serpent, the associations with sex and sexuality, bodily shame, and growing up gay: I still have trouble threading all of this together with the words of a logical sequence. But somehow I came to know this: embracing that which caused my shame would be healing; it would save me.

The grace of God provides forgiveness when we’re guilty.

The love of God provides healing when we’re ashamed.

That’s likely enough, more than enough, to ponder. And still, I can’t stop thinking about that distorted desire and the tormented urge to “be like gods.”

Humanity’s godlike aspirations and ambitions have led to unspeakable pain: the dynamics of racism and white supremacy; misogyny and the denigration of women, which leads quickly to the oppression of LGBT people; stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and enough nuclear warheads to obliterate humanity many times over; the relentless decimation of ecosystems and plundering of the environments that give us life—all of this, I’m absolutely convinced, and an ancient story about a serpent in a garden illustrates, is rooted in the corrosive effects of bodily shame.

Our salvation as a species and for the sake of this precious Earth may very well depend on the most robust and fulsome reading possible of that one chapter from Genesis, and in concert with that famous chapter from John: being fully at home in our own bodies without shame; fully at home on Earth without any guilt; and fully at home with God without any fear.

The world can scarcely name what it so desperately needs from today’s churches: spaces where we are free to love fiercely and live shamelessly and for the sake of a world in pain.

That great work begins and returns often to what Jesus wanted Nicodemus to see: God so loves the world that God forgives our guilt and heals our shame.

Praying with Palimpsests

In the ancient Mediterranean world and also in many parts of Medieval Europe, finding suitable writing materials—animal skins, tree bark, and parchment—was often challenging. When none were readily at hand, writers would sometimes scrape or scrub the writing off old manuscripts and write on top of those newly scrubbed spaces. Traces of the old writing sometimes remained under the new, and a document like this with multiple layers of writing and images is called a “palimpsest” (from two Greek words meaning “rubbed smooth again”).

One notable example of such a document is the so-called “Archimedes Palimpsest” (a detail of which is pictured below, courtesy of the John Hopkins University). The history of this document sounds like a sequel to Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. Archimedes lived a few centuries before Jesus and is regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world. A copy of one of his scrolls was used centuries later by a Greek monk, in the thirteenth century, who wrote Christian prayers on top of those ancient essays about mathematics.

The monastery prayed with this palimpsest for many years before it was stored away in the vault of a large church in Constantinople and then bought by a French antique dealer in the 1930s. Scholars later realized the ancient history of the parchment when it was taken for appraisal, and since the late 1990s it has been undergoing careful computer-assisted analysis to decipher as much of the underlying text by Archimedes as possible.

One of my theological mentors in graduate school was fond of thinking about the history of Christian traditions like a palimpsest, a long history of multiple layers, not all of which are clearly visible or fully distinguishable from the later additions. Rather than supposing that the earliest layers are somehow “better” (truer or more meaningful) than the later ones, the richness of Christian history instead appears in their complex intermingling. We might even think of our own lives as an extended palimpsest with many centuries of genetic mixing and cultural layering and ethnic intermingling to create who each of us is today.

I was reminded of all this after reading the lectionary texts for this coming Sunday, the fourth in Lent; the collection of texts, together with Eucharistic liturgies, strike me as a kind of biblical and doctrinal “palimpsest.”

We will hear John’s Jesus refer to his own death by recalling an ancient story from the Hebrew Bible about Moses in the desert lifting up a serpent on a pole; that story in turn evokes the potent image of the serpent in the Garden of Eden (which we won’t hear but I, for one, can’t help but think of it), and a number of commentators have suggested that John’s account of the Gospel could be read as ancient Christian commentary on Genesis, which we are now reading today after many centuries of Christian reflection on the meaning of crucifixion. That’s quite a complex textual and theological history for interpreting the Cross of Christ!

As we approach not only the texts and images for this coming Sunday but also as the complexities of Holy Week and Easter rapidly approach later this month, I find it helpful to realize and also appreciate that we are praying with palimpsests.

I know that sounds rather arcane and a bit religiously nerdy, but perhaps both helpful and vital when put in conversation with Black History Month (just concluded) and now Women’s History Month. These occasions bring to mind some of the troubling aspects of what we might call “cultural palimpsests.” Some state legislatures, for example, are actively trying to erase Black history, scrub it clean from our history books, and “whitewash” it—which is at least one very good reason to make sure that churches and also public spaces in the United States include images of Jesus that are Black and Brown and not merely white and terribly European.

More than this, and as I was searching for an image of the Archimedes Palimpsest, I stumbled upon an artist who inspired me to think about how one palimpsest might overwrite another. Perhaps that’s more complex than it needs to be—or at least that’s what I thought until I saw the images from Coral Woodbury.

Woodbury has paid careful attention to the erasure of women in patriarchal societies, or the way the significance of women is “overwritten” by the contributions of men. She is especially committed to reinterpreting Western art history from a feminist perspective, especially for the recognition of women artists who have been “scrubbed” from that history.

One of her recent exhibits is (appropriately enough) called “Palimpsest” (one of the pieces in that exhibit is reproduced at right, the image of a woman superimposed over the text from a history book about ancient Babylon). Books are a recurring theme in her work, a way to “connect humans across time,” which is exactly what a palimpsest does or can do. For Woodbury, books function as a kind of metaphor for human lives and communities: the spine of the book holds the pages together just as our own spines hold our skeletons together.

Multi-layered texts and bound books—I can’t help but think about one of the sources of our word “religion,” from the Latin verb religare, to “bind together,” like ligaments manage to do for our bones.

In a world that feels fragile, as if unraveling, perhaps falling apart in slow motion (or rapidly in Ukraine and Gaza, not to mention the Antarctic), something about the dense complexity of human societies, how they are held together over time, gives an odd sense of comfort.

There have been times when I have wished for a bit less complexity in my life and a few more clearer edges, but the “thickness” of the Lenten lectionary invites me to reflect a bit differently this week. After all, palimpsests can evince both a layered richness and an occluding varnish at the very same time. I might even cling more fervently to the “old rugged cross” this Sunday. We’ll be singing that classic as our closing hymn, and in palimpsest-like fashion, I might relish how early Christians imagined that cross as a budding tree, planted perhaps on our Lenten road toward Easter.

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.

The Penitent God of Promise

The annual Lenten journey toward Holy Week and Easter is marked by the dynamics of covenantal life—mostly God’s own life of covenantal promise, not ours.

Covenant is one of those religious words so easily mistaken for something else, for the familiar and comfortable world of contractual obligations on which we rely nearly every day—mortgages, credit card agreements, utilities, even ordering food in a restaurant where we are expected to pay the bill after enjoying a meal. All of these “contracts” involve at least two parties promising to do something, the failure of which comes with consequences. In that sense, contracts are fundamentally transactional—I will do this for you if you do that for me; and that is not a covenant.

Yesterday, on the first Sunday in Lent, the biblical texts from the lectionary invited a rather direct, even startling engagement with the character of covenantal relationship. That sounds quite uninspiring, frankly, and a bit dry, but I think it might very well be life-changing.

Consider the iconic story in Genesis about Noah and the flood—or rather, what many of us heard yesterday, the post-flood mountaintop experience Noah had with a penitent God.

After forty days and forty nights of rain, and still many more weeks for the waters to recede from the Earth, Noah once again stands on dry ground, surrounded by all the animals he had harbored on the ark.

Upon seeing this, God says, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind…nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (8:20–21).

This is a remarkable vow from Creator God. Remarkable and then startling when we hear the unmistakable tones of regret echoing in God’s voice, the God who doesn’t want to forget the promise (and presumably neither the regret, either) and creates a rainbow as a reminder.

Victoria Falls on the Livingstone side, Zambia (photo: the author)

I never heard of such a remorseful God growing up, or if I did, I quickly lost sight of that God who shares more with me and my human foibles than I have dared to imagine. I stumbled back upon that very God lurking around in the lectionary, where those verses from Genesis sounded like a baptismal covenant—I don’t mean ours but God’s.

The first Letter of Peter (3:18-22) frames that ancient flood endured by Noah and his family sacramentally, a story that “prefigured” the saving waters of baptism—the whole Earth becomes the baptismal font!

There are at least two astonishing things to notice when reading the story that way. First, the emphasis in the story falls on God’s covenantal promise never again to destroy the earth; Noah makes no promise whatsoever. There’s nothing transactional about this moment; the penitent God alone makes the vow for the sake of flourishing life.

The second astonishing thing is the mistake Peter makes; that ancient letter-writer got the math wrong. There were not just “eight persons” saved on that ark, as Peter writes, not just Noah and his family of humans—there were also all the other animals. That’s a pretty big oversight!

God makes a covenantal promise to the ground, the soil, the trees and plants, and to every living creature on Earth—to the whole creation. God makes this promise without asking for anything in return, not one thing. That’s what makes this a “covenant.”

This covenantal God is the one who drives Jesus into the wilderness, where he is tempted by Satan. Most Christians always hear this story on the first Lenten Sunday, and yesterday the lectionary gave us Mark’s version (1:9-15). Mark is the only one of the gospel writers who mentions that Jesus was accompanied by “wild beasts” in that desert.

These are the “beasts” God promised never again to destroy. But these beasts could, presumably, destroy Jesus if they chose to. That risk makes this story something like the classic “hero’s journey” found in so many of the world’s literary traditions: Jesus not only bravely resists the devil but faces the fearsome specter of untamable beasts.

I had just a tiny glimpse of this on my recent trip to southern Africa, when I discovered what it’s like to be in the wilderness with wild animals. Standing in the middle of a broad, wide-open savannah—buffalo herds on the horizon, the sound of baboon alarms warning of possible lions, the cackling of nearby jackals and a few hyenas, lumbering clusters of elephants—I suddenly felt smaller than ever before; I finally understood, viscerally, what the word “vulnerable” really means; I wondered why anyone ever thought “dominion” was the word to use for our role on a planet that has never been under our control, not for one single minute.

Placing ourselves at the apex of all the animal kingdoms on Earth is at best delusional, and it’s often a desperate ploy to boost fragile egos. Choosing a path of domination and violence just to feel good about ourselves leaves unspeakable destruction in its wake, and the results are now visible nearly everywhere on this precious Earth today.

We know, of course, how the rest of the Gospel story turns out, and that makes the account of Jesus in the wilderness a different kind of “hero’s journey” entirely. Religion scholar Paul Weinfield reminded me of this rather pointedly just recently. We’ve been taught, he says, to imagine heroes overcoming their fears, slaying the dragon, and winning a world-wide audience on social media.

But in the journeys that truly matter, Weinfield says, the dragon slays you—your tidy plans for success unravel; the image of yourself you had hoped to cultivate crumbles; you return to your village shattered, but you do return, and you are humbled, unmade and ready to be remade.

That’s the journey of Lent toward Easter, and something like this happened to me in southern Africa. When I left for that trip, I was like a child, picking up a pebble from a beach and thinking I knew the ocean; when we look up and notice the vastness of the sea, in that humbling moment we’re on the path toward what poet Mary Oliver calls our “place in the family of things.”

Knowing our place and residing there, living in what Christian traditions call communion, this is the source of our healing and our thriving, and not only for us, but for all the other creatures with whom we share this precious Earth.

As the season of Lent begins once more, now is the time to recall that this life of communion comes with a cost, which we learn by following Jesus into the wilderness. We learn along that desert path what must be left behind: money, property, status, privilege. We leave these behind not merely because they aren’t “useful” anymore but because everything we use to protect ourselves from vulnerability, all those things we suppose will keep us safe, actually betray us in the end and keep us afraid.

We live with that tragic irony nearly every day: all things we do for the sake of security—building walls around gated communities, and erecting fences along borders, and fortifying all sorts of boundaries—this quite literally creates lifeless islands of isolation.

Lent invites us to entertain the great paradox of Christian faith. When we let go of what we thought would keep us safe, we are then free to pursue the only thing that can: intimate communion with God and each other.

Like anything worth pursuing, this life of communion comes with risk and it’s scary; but when we follow Jesus into the wilderness, the penitent God of promise is with us—the covenantal God who promises life, even in the desert.

“Christ in the Wilderness,” Stanley Spencer

Repairing the Breach and Bridging the Gap

Ash Wednesday is one of those religious days that can prompt even non-religious people to think about religion—probably not for very long (especially when it falls on Valentine’s Day), but at least long enough to notice people with smudgy foreheads attending midweek church services.

More than this, Ash Wednesday also carries with it some language that sounds extremely and uncomfortably religious with words like “sin” and “repentance.” The liturgy in The Book of Common Prayer even uses some old-fashioned words like “wickedness” and “wretchedness.”

More than a few people find the language and the ritual of a day like Ash Wednesday at least off-putting if not distasteful. This is likely another reason for the profound disconnect in Western society today between the religious language of churches and the hopes and dreams of the wider world.

So there’s some urgency on these explicitly religious days, perhaps especially for whole seasons, like Lent, to pay close attention to the rift so many live with between “inner” and “outer,” or to the lively connections between our interior spiritual lives and our outward actions. This is the vital connection so often missing and lost between our religious communities and the wider world that is so desperate for the insight and transformation that can come with religious practice.

This is not just a profound gap, but also a tragic one. I remain convinced that the world’s religious traditions are needed today more than ever for the crises and challenges we currently face. More than this, for the compelling visions our religious traditions offer of what flourishing life can look like on this precious Earth.

There’s nothing new or modern about this challenge, by the way. Many Christians who ventured into church yesterday heard from the ancient Hebrew prophet Isaiah, who was excoriating his community precisely for this failure to connect “inner” and “outer”: look how you engage in your religious fasting, he says, and yet oppress all your workers; you fast, yes, but then only quarrel and fight with each other!

You think groveling in ashes will suffice to get God’s attention, Isaiah says, yet this is the fast God prefers: to loose the bonds of injustice, to let the oppressed go free, to feed the hungry, and house the homeless, and clothe the naked (Isaiah 58:1-12).

The temptation of course is to suppose that we can choose either the inner or the outer dimension of our lives, or that one is somehow better than the other. Whatever “breach” Isaiah imagined covenant faithfulness would repair (58:12), surely the common gap between our religious practice and social action qualifies as part of it. Black History Month might actually present some reminders about why such repair really does matter.

“Becoming Beloved Community,” Michell Halley

In a world of racial bias, some argue for a color-blind society, as it’s sometimes called, a society where we pay attention to the inner workings of the heart rather than the outer appearance of the body. Some will quote Martin Luther King, Jr., on this who famously noted in his 1963 March on Washington speech that he longed for the day when people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

Yes, and that great day will not arrive by pretending to ignore skin color, as if that’s even possible. To the contrary, we create Beloved Community—as King himself often noted—not in spite of our many racial, or sexual, or gendered differences but because of them. Diversity is not, after all, a problem to be managed but a divine gift to be embraced, a gift God’s own creativity without which our lives would be greatly impoverished.

To do that challenging work of inclusion outwardly demands that we do significant work inwardly—and that’s exactly the purpose of religious practices and spiritual disciplines.

Even so, I freely admit how much I still struggle with the concept of repentance: it’s hard for me to hear the word “repent” and not think of a scolding parent or a biting rebuke or an encounter framed with anger. (Images from childhood, especially “religious” ones, are never just shrugged off casually.)

But here’s what I try to remember nearly every single day, especially during Lent: the image of a scolding parent has nothing to do with the God of Jesus Christ or the good news of the Christian Gospel.

The God who is the very Source of life, the God whose Word brings forth the astonishing diversity of creation and the abundance of Earth, that Word becoming flesh and dwelling in loving companionship among us—this is not the God who comes to us in anger but with kindness and compassion, the God who wants above all to see every creature thrive and flourish—every single one, no exceptions.

Of course the stubborn fact remains that our lives do not always align with that gracious will of Creator God. And so we pause on occasion, as many Christians do on days like Ash Wednesday, so that we can notice that misalignment and to change course and to ask God to help us travel the good road toward abundant life—and that’s a much better meaning for repentance itself.

There’s just one other bit to notice carefully: we do all this remembering that we are in fact mortal, that we will one day die, and actually much sooner than any of us expect (or would prefer).

I suspect that’s why Ash Wednesday liturgies often include the portion many heard yesterday from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (6:1-6, 16-20). There Jesus urges us not to store up for ourselves “treasures on earth”—we just don’t have time for that. Besides, moth and rust will not only consume those treasures but that thief called “Death” will steal them away soon enough.

“Heavenly treasures” are the ones that make a true and lasting difference here on Earth—the ones Isaiah insisted would break the bonds of injustice and let the oppressed go free.

Those are the treasures truly worthy of our time.

“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.