Peculiar Faith

On the Good Road into the Heart of God

“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly.”

Those familiar words of course come from the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise in the very first chapter of Luke’s account of the Gospel.

Luke is the only one of the gospel writers to include this song from Mary, and he features it right up front, setting the tone for how he wants to tell the story of Jesus, especially to frame his telling with the dynamics of power.

Every human society, every community, all relationships exhibit in various ways those dynamics. The schools we attend, the money we make, where we live, the gender we manifest, whom we love, the color of our skin—all of these and more are infused with varying degrees of social and political, even religious power.

Modern Western society trains most of us to think of power as residing in just one place at a time. Many of us suppose that power is something like an object that passes from one location to another, like a football that gets passed from one team to the next so we know who the winners and the losers are in this game of life.

Power is obviously much more complex than that; it’s never merely a zero-sum game, as if when one person has power, everyone else has none.

Power is much more fluid, resembling a stream, or a river—always moving, always changing, sometimes showing up in the foaming cataracts of a waterfall and at others as a quiet eddy circling around a shallow bay.

Luke appreciates these complexities about power and repeatedly contrasts the power of empire and the power of God; he does this in nearly every encounter with Jesus, in nearly every parable Jesus tells, and in all of the relationships he chronicles.

Luke shows us how power can intimidate, control and dominate, even oppress entire communities with a coercive force. He also shows us another kind of power—the power to heal, to comfort and console, and perhaps especially the power to welcome and embrace, something we might call the “power of belonging.”

This power to welcome in a loving embrace hardly ever gets noticed like all the spectacular displays of coercive power. For Luke, “welcome” and “belonging” stand in stark contrast to imperial power—the kind that divides and fragments, the kind that creates categories of competition, rendering every encounter as a moment of exchange and potential aggression, even hostility.

I am always intrigued by the moment in Luke’s account of the passion when Luke rather casually mentions that the trial and torture of Jesus created a friendship between former rivals: Pilate and Herod—the Roman Governor and the Judean King (Luke 23:12).

Whenever we deal with Jesus, Luke seems to say—even when we stand opposed to him—an energy of “welcome” emerges, creating friends from enemies.

The holiest of weeks for Christians began just yesterday, with “The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday.” That awkward moniker signals just how odd the day itself is, actually one of the strangest on the Christian calendar. This mashup of what seem like competing liturgical goals creates significant religious whiplash as we shift rather jarringly from the so-called “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem to the abject suffering on the cross.

“Jesus Enters Jerusalem,” Patrick J. Murphy

How tempting to suppose that such a shift yanks us from a moment of celebratory power to a moment of power’s absence. But Luke urges us to suppose otherwise, with different kinds of power circulating through these moments.

In the story about the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem (Lk. 19:28-40)—the iconic “Palm Sunday” story—Luke doesn’t give us any palms. There are no palms in Luke’s version of Palm Sunday. We might recall in that Mediterranean society that palm branches were often used to celebrate a military victory, and in ancient Israel, they marked the royal power of King David.

As Jesus enters the “City of David,” Luke narrates that entry with the conspicuous absence of any symbols of royal power. And yet, as Luke says, the crowd of disciples joining him on that road were praising God for all the “deeds of power” that they had seen in Jesus—the power to heal, the power to console, the power to welcome.

Switching our liturgical gaze to the scene of execution, we don’t see a moment of complete powerlessness; Luke would have us to see something quite different (Lk. 23:1-49).

In his tortured weakness, Jesus nonetheless exercises his power to pardon—he asks God to forgive all his executioners, and that moment appears only in Luke.

Luke is also the only gospel writer to give us the touching exchange between Jesus and the thief who was crucified with him. Jesus is dying and in the kind of pain we can scarcely imagine; and still, he declares with confidence to the thief, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.”

There’s an old story about this Gospel moment, and it is told in various versions. The story goes like this: that thief showed up at the Pearly Gates and stood before St. Peter.

“So,” Peter says to the man, “did you earn a degree in theology to get here?”
“Oh no, sir, I never studied theology.”
“I see. But you do understand how atonement works for the sake of salvation.”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t know about such things.”
“Well, then you must have lived quite a virtuous life to be standing here.”
“No sir; I was a convicted thief.”
“Why then,” Peter says, “why are you here?”
“Because, the man on the middle cross said I could come.”

The power of “welcome” in the midst of weakness is at the very heart of God.

That’s where we’re headed on this road through the holiest of weeks on the Christian calendar: we’re going right into the very heart of God, where the power of love can change the world.

We speak often in the parish I’m privileged to serve about the importance, even the primacy of extending a bold hospitality as a vital component of our shared ministry. In our life together, we aim to welcome everyone, no exceptions whatsoever. And we do this because we are convinced of this: there is only love in the heart of God.

I was not raised to believe such a thing about God’s own heart; I fear very few were. The world would be a different place, nearly unrecognizable, if this were the “good news” of the Christian Church.

I’m grateful to Christian songwriter Zach Williams for that line from one of his songs, which captures with such elegant beauty what I have struggled for so many years to express and to live: There is only love at the heart of God—nothing else, only love—and the power of that love welcomes all, everyone, home.

The Devil’s a Liar!

The first Sunday in Lent always features Jesus in the wilderness tempted by Satan. Reading this familiar story again this year (Luke 4:1-13), it strikes me that those iconic temptations all spring from the ongoing and stubborn desire for certainty and security.

Imagine having the capacity to create food whenever you’re hungry, or to control the world’s wealth (all of it), or never to worry about physical harm ever again—to be certain of the capacity for even just one of those, let alone all three, would surely provide a sense of safety if not absolute security.

Personally, the chaos of our present world makes that desire for “certainty and security” sound pretty good. And that ancient story offers a timely invitation to consider exactly what I’m most tempted to do when the stakes are high in my life and when the consequences of my choices are potentially severe.

But this story is not merely about resisting temptation (as I have almost always taken it to mean), as if the point is to follow the lead of Jesus in exercising heroic willpower. The indigenous translation of this story we use during Lent at All Saints’ Parish refers to Satan in this story as the “evil trickster”—he’s a liar, in other words, the Great Deceiver, and he cannot make good on his promises; no one can. No one can give us perfect certainty or guaranteed security about anything—these are not possible for human life.

So much time and energy, even anguish, not to mention money, is devoted to obtaining these very things, these things we long for but cannot have—not because we’re unworthy of them or haven’t yet said the prayers properly, but because these things are not even compatible with being authentically human.

We cannot be perfectly certain and absolutely secure and still be human.

Living a genuinely human life is an ongoing journey of liberation, a theme all three of the biblical texts from the Lenten lectionary yesterday articulate directly and powerfully. In this case, being set free especially from all the stuff—material goods or a wealth of control—all the stuff we’re constantly told will keep us safe but actually keeps us afraid, always worried about scarcity, always terrified of loss.

Luke seems especially keen to help us travel this “freedom road,” and returns often to the Exodus of God’s people from slavery in Egypt as a favorite image. Jesus prepares for ministry just as Moses did—with forty days in the wilderness, exactly where the ancient Israelites wandered for forty years on their way to the Promised Land.

Even the particular temptations in Luke’s story harken back to that iconic moment. Almost immediately after their liberation from Egypt, the Israelites are hungry in that wilderness because they have no bread. It’s from that very story in Deuteronomy that Jesus quotes to fend off the devil—not just once, but for each of the three temptations.

by the Spirit into the Wilderness,” Stanley Spencer

Let’s also recall that the Spirit anoints Luke’s Jesus to let the oppressed go free, and as we heard last week, the transfigured Jesus is joined by none other than Moses, who discusses with Jesus his upcoming “departure,” which Luke calls his “exodus.”

Liberation from captivity and the freedom to flourish—this is the good road Luke invites us to travel our entire lives, urging us especially to let go of whatever we think will give us “certainty and security” along that road; these are not our provisions for the journey, no matter how often we’re told to pack them.

Always lingering in the background of Gospel texts is of course the Roman Empire. Regardless of whether it’s the first-century version of today’s Global Capitalism, imperial systems tempt us to acquire and accumulate more stuff, and always with the promise that still more stuff will finally make us safe—and that is an outright lie.

Sister Joan Chittister, a Roman Catholic nun and social justice advocate writes about the severe consequences of giving in to this imperial temptation. She describes what’s at stake in terms that are especially appropriate for this Women’s History Month.

“It is precisely women’s experience of God,” she writes, “that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the Creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion,” she says “does not know God the Spirit.”

Imperial religion has given us instead God the rule-maker, God the judge, and God the monarch in control of everything—and not just coincidentally, those are the roles men most often aspire to occupy and to use religion to advance their cause. That kind of religion, Chittister says, “has consumed Western spirituality and shriveled its heart.”

Luke’s Jesus shows us how to expand our hearts by letting go of imperial promises—those promises are in fact lies, and they keep us enslaved to a system in which there is never enough stuff, never enough money, never enough power; it’s a system that holds us captive to the demand for certainty and security—and it’s killing us while it kills the planet.

Indigenous peoples around the world, including in the Americas, have known these dynamics for a very long time. We must let go to live, and this is precisely why the First Nations Version of the New Testament refers to Jesus as “Creator Sets Free.”

The best Lenten disciplines really have nothing to do with chocolate or sugar or whatever else your indulgence of choice might be. Giving up treats for Lent will not keep us on the good road toward life, as if the point of our faith is self-denial for its own sake.

This season invites us instead to identify whatever it is that prevents us from thriving, and then to let it go, for good. Whatever still holds us captive as a community—longstanding resentments, perhaps, or entrenched bigotries, or inherited assumptions, or the economics of privilege—whatever holds us back from flourishing, now is the time to let it go.

The lectionary also gave us a beautiful passage from Deuteronomy yesterday (26:1-11), which sits right at the heart of the Torah, the law delivered by Moses. The great Christian mistake is to suppose the Torah is all about keeping rules; it’s not.

Remember, Moses says to the people, remember you were slaves in Egypt. God set you free, and now you must live as free people.

It’s high time we notice carefully what that passage indicates so clearly is the essence of living as God’s free people: it means living with a grateful generosity and welcoming the stranger.

Let that be our good road this Lenten season—for life.

“Consider the Lilies (Christ in the Wilderness Series),” Stanley Spencer

The Revolution is Now: The Blessing and Cost of Discipleship

I cannot imagine reading Luke’s version of the “Sermon on the Mount” (6:17-26) as a recipe for passive piety, not these days. That classic text struck me this past week as a manifesto, a revolutionary posture of solidarity in the face of imperial domination—do I mean in the first century or the twenty-first? Yes, both, because God erases no one, not ever.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is thoroughly political (though never partisan), and while I have been convinced of this for many years, it has rarely been clearer than it is today, in this age of erasing Black history, forgetting Indigenous trauma, and deleting (literally) transgender people. Now, right now, is the time for a Gospel revolution toward flourishing for all and not just a few.

The lectionary this past Sunday proclaimed this revolutionary moment with a manifesto from Luke’s Jesus. As I tried to suggest from the pulpit, noticing Luke’s distinctive treatment of that so-called “sermon” can help form us as God’s people to stand bravely at this time in American history with a fierce and transformative grace, a posture rooted in both memory and hope.

Luke introduces what turns out to be the “sermon on the plain” with images of healing, which Luke would have us understand as images of liberation. Just prior to this sermon, Luke’s Jesus declares that the Spirit anointed him to preach good news to the poor and to let the oppressed go free (4:18-19).

Detail from the Hunger Cloth at the Wernberg Monastery, Austria

It’s worth remembering in that regard that first-century society certainly had physicians and healers. They had what we might call today a “healthcare system.” But—and just like today—not everyone had equal access to those resources, and a whole multitude of them, Luke says, were coming to Jesus, presumably because they had nowhere else to go for healing.

These are the ones who were left out, forgotten, unable to find relief from whatever prevented them from thriving. Jesus heals all of them, Luke says, he sets them all free, and then he turns to his disciples—not just the “twelve apostles,” but a large crowd of disciples—and he says, look, what I’ve just done is what you must do as my disciples: dismantle injustice, stand with the poor, grieve with those who weep.

And you must understand this, he says: your discipleship will make some people hate you, and exclude you, and revile you “on account of the Son of Man.” That antique phrase usually trips us up, but he’s referring here to what happens to those who live as authentically human. That’s what that odd title “Son of Man” means: born of the truly human.

To be fully human with each other, we must look directly at how the world operates, name courageously what is broken, and identify the cause of our shared pain for the sake of healing and for a world of flourishing—for all.

Discipleship comes with a cost, in other words, and Luke is very clear about this. Throughout his account of the Gospel, Luke always writes with the context of an imperial regime in mind, a social system of oppressive power and control that robs people of their humanity, and thus their dignity as God’s own creation.

To live as disciples of Jesus—to follow the truly human one—is to stand opposed to powerful systems of domination that exploit the weak and crush the vulnerable.

We must also remember this about such “social systems” of oppression: they almost always include the collusion between religion and empire. All four accounts of the Gospel make that painful collaboration plain. Imperial Rome co-opted Judean religious leaders to keep the population passive. History shows us repeatedly how essential religion itself is for sustaining the power of empire; very few imperial regimes succeed without the cooperation of religious leaders.

All of this begs the question at the heart of Luke’s text: what does it really mean to be blessed?

One rather odd response to that question emerged over the last century or so, mostly in the United States, and often referred to as the “prosperity Gospel.” In this view of Christianity, those who are truly blessed by God enjoy material wealth and bodily comfort; those are the physical signs of divine favor.

Not vaguely or indirectly but with no room for doubt, Luke categorically rejects that view of Christian faith with his distinctive additions to this sermon from Jesus: woe to you who are rich, Luke’s Jesus says; woe to you who are always full and never hungry; woe to you who mistake material comfort for divine blessing.

But this is no simple binary opposition; Luke does not mean that “poverty is good” and “wealth is bad.” In a world divided by excessive wealth and deadly impoverishment, Luke wants us to see what discipleship looks like when we follow the one whose own mother praised God for bringing down the powerful and raising up the lowly.

The thriving of all—not just the few at the expense of the many, but of all—that’s the world of divine blessing we seek as disciples of Jesus.

The lectionary this past Sunday gave us a wonderful and organic image for such a world of blessing: a flourishing tree. For the prophet Jeremiah (17:5-10) and the psalmist (1:3), those devoted to the practice of justice are like trees planted by flowing water and bearing fruit in due season.

“Tree by Stream of Water,” Janice Larsen

The image of a tree of course enjoys a rich and complex history in both Jewish and Christian traditions. Standing in the Garden of Eden is the “Tree of Life,” which appears again at the end of the Bible, in the Revelation to John, where its life-giving leaves are for the healing of the nations.

We might recall that the cross on which Jesus was crucified is sometimes referred to as a “tree.” Quite remarkably, some early depictions show the cross as a budding tree, and by the sixth century, the cross is a tree in full flower.

In this Black History Month, we must also recall the horrifying practice of lynching Black people in trees—their broken bodies sometimes referred to as “strange fruit.” Kelly Brown Douglas, an Episcopal priest and womanist theologian, laments how often such lynching happened at church gatherings; she describes one such occasion that took place during a Methodist church picnic after Sunday morning worship.

That ghastly image shocks with its violence—and yet, Christians remember Christ crucified every single week in our Eucharistic fellowship. As another womanist theologian, M. Shawn Copeland, so poignantly reminds us: we Christians gather at the table over which the shadow of the lynched Jesus falls.

Copeland blends ancient and modern history with that image, reminding us that the collusion between religion and empire remains as a perpetual risk, and that we must always recall the execution of Jesus by the Roman Empire and the raising of Jesus to new life by God.

Memory and hope belong together at the Eucharistic Table, always—the memory of the crucified one and the hope of new life. We must keep these together not only concerning Jesus, but also concerning ourselves and the wider world.

Today’s world illustrates clearly and painfully the vital importance of memory. Black History Month has been taken off public calendars; residential boarding schools and programs of indigenous genocide are being removed from public school curricula (they were barely there to begin with); and transgender people have been deleted from the National Park Service website—even on the pages devoted to LGBT memorials.

We must remember—even the most painful memories of our shared history—we must remember for the sake of hope.

To that end, I made this vow to all the saints at All Saints’ Parish this past Sunday: so help me God, I said, we will not erase transgender people in this parish—not on my watch. And we will not forget the history of indigenous people as work for healing and reconciliation. And we will not remove Black History Month for our community calendar—not on our watch.

God erases no one.

So, blessed are you who hold difficult memories, even the unbearably painful ones.

Blessed are you who live with hope, even when it seems unreasonable.

Blessed are you who hold memory and hope together, for you shall be like a firmly planted tree, its roots stretching out to streams of living water, its branches bearing the fruit of new life, and its leaves for the healing of the nations.

Coming Out with God, Coming Out for Life

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

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

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

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

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

“Simeon Blessing the Christ Child,” Severino Blanco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Prophet Anna Greets the Christ,” Lester Yocum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple,” Kelly Latimore

“Beloved Community”: Not the Wine but the Wedding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Down by the Riverside: Divine Solidarity and Radical Hospitality

Wading into a river presents a range of bodily sensations: the water might be cool and crisp, it might quickly or only gently swirl around your calves, and the riverbed itself could be slippery clay or a sandy silt, or a combination of the two with some gravel thrown in.

Depending on its composition, standing on that riverbed might mean sinking into it—up to your ankles, or maybe a bit farther, and it might be challenging to lift your feet out of the muck.

These bodily sensations are important to recall when reflecting on the story about the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan. Most Christians always hear some version of this story on the first Sunday after the Epiphany each year, and many of us can’t help but think of neat and tidy sanctuaries with just a shallow dish of water tucked away somewhere for our baptismal rituals.

Back in the first century, by contrast, baptism would have been a full-bodied experience and likely with feet sinking into a muddy riverbed.

More than just historical context, the bodily imagery of a river matters theologically, spiritually, even socially and politically.

The imagery I mean includes this: When Jesus was baptized it was not merely a sprinkle but was an immersion experience, a plunge into the fragility and vulnerability of human existence as well as its beauty and tenderness and fierce resilience.

I never really thought much about this Gospel moment other than how it serves as a kind of storytelling preface, a way to begin the ministry of Jesus with a ritual of initiation. In more recent years I’ve come to appreciate just how profound this moment is. On display here is nothing less than divine solidarity—I mean God’s own communion with creaturely life.

The humid air Jesus likely breathed on that riverbank, and the water of that river on his skin, and the silty mud into which his feet likely sank—this is an image of God’s own full-bodied experience of God’s own creation.

This year especially I have come to imagine the image of a river as equally important as the image of a manger to symbolize God’s bodily presence among us in Christ. Indeed, a river with its movement and depth enhances the significance of the manger itself: the union of God’s Word with Jesus is not merely superficial and not crudely transactional but fully immersive.

Baptism, especially in a river, evokes this astonishing sense of God’s full embrace of God’s own creation, to the muddy depths and sparkling gems of human existence, our mortality, our courage, our terror, the ecstasies and vexations—all of it.

For reasons I’m likely unable fully to name, it strikes me powerfully at this moment just how much Creation, Manger, and Baptism should be read together, and for the sake of the life-changing claim that God is fully with us—never against us, but always fully with us.

Yes, and that preposition “with” is probably not strong enough for this claim, which I started to realize when a seminary colleague back in Berkeley introduced me to the work of Danish theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen.

Gregersen retrieves an ancient theme in classical Christian traditions for what he calls in his work “deep incarnation.” He wants us to see God’s purpose in Jesus as nothing less than to give a future of thriving to a world now marked by decay and death.

This way of framing the incarnation as “deep” is meant to suggest that God enters the material conditions of all creaturely existence (the “flesh”), shares the fate of all biological life forms (as in the ubiquitous biblical images of the “grass” and “lilies” of the field), and also experiences the pains of all sensitive creatures (the Gospel “sparrows” and “foxes”), and God does all this from within—not on the surface, not only “alongside” but to the very depths and from within.

Gregersen pushes this even further: in Jesus, Creator God actually enters the very process of biological evolution on this planet, all the way down to the cellular level, for the sake of guiding the process forward with love and toward flourishing—imagine the mighty flow of life on this planet as river: God plunges into its depth.

That is certainly not how I was taught how to think about Christian faith as a child, and it’s probably not how most people think about God. I’m guessing most church-goers hear the stories of birth and baptism as mere prologue to what matters most—the saving work of Christ on the cross.

And of course death and resurrection—the cross and the empty tomb—are central to the Good News of the Gospel. Yes, and the Gospel writers would urge us to place “salvation” firmly in Christmas and Epiphany just as much as we do in Holy Week and Easter.

I am increasingly convinced that the transactional character of how the Church generally presents the saving work of Christ merely denigrates nearly everything about our bodily life together–we’re not saved from being human but rather for the sake of living a more fully human life. It’s high time the Church embraced a theological mashup: The religious symbols of Manger and River belong together with Cross and Empty Tomb for the fullness of God’s embrace of what God has made.

All four Gospel writers would likely endorse that mashup with vigor; each of them feature this baptismal story, including the bodily appearance of the Holy Spirit as a dove, as if the Spirit herself shows up to point dramatically at this watery moment and endorse its significance, to bathe this encounter down by the riverside with the light of the grand arc of God’s creating and redeeming work.

God comes to us in the flesh; joins with us in our creaturely existence; immerses God’s own self in the material rhythms of God’s own creation.

That key claim about God carries some concrete and practical consequences—liturgically, socially, and politically. Here at All Saints’ Parish in Saugatuck, for example, we have continued the Eucharistic practice that began during the COVID-19 pandemic: the ministers come down from the altar area to the head of the center aisle to distribute the Eucharistic elements.

We have continued that pattern even beyond the crisis of Covid for the sake of performing liturgically the good news of the Gospel: God comes to us.

Our Eucharistic worship reminds us every single week that Creator God does not remain sequestered in a far-off Heaven, not even on a mountaintop, and certainly not behind any walls or fences. The God of Jesus comes to us, right where we are; God comes in search of us, and wants to be in loving solidarity and gracious communion with us, and as far and as deep as our creaturely existence runs—all the way down to the riverbed and beyond.

The social and political consequences of worshipping this Eucharistic God extend well beyond church walls, perhaps especially in a world of alarming xenophobia, tribal segregation, threats of mass deportation, immigrant-blaming, and the relentless bodily shaming of basically everyone who isn’t white and male. Those Eucharistic consequences can actually take root in our sanctuaries: Our worship as Christians ought to form and shape us to live as a community devoted to bold hospitality.

How people are welcomed, whether people feel safe and embraced, the tenor and tone of our greetings and interactions are not incidental to Christian faith; especially in the world today, radical hospitality is likely the most important thing Christians can do to live as witnesses to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to embody the good news of the God who always and without fail comes to us with the promise of healing and the hope of flourishing, for all.

So, shall we gather at the river? Yes, please…

Peculiar Strangers as Divine Gifts

Strangers from the East presented extravagant gifts to the child Jesus (Matthew 2:1-12). This became known as “The Epiphany,” but I’m realizing these days that those strangers, the “Magi,” are the gifts to us—and not a moment too soon in a xenophobic world of rampant white supremacy.

Reading the Magi as themselves gifts is thanks of course to the Gospel writer known as Matthew, who is the only one of the four canonical gospelers to include the story. It’s worth pondering why that story mattered so much to Matthew, or more significantly, to Matthew’s community, and now also to us—on this very day when many Christians celebrate the Epiphany, just as my parish did yesterday in worship.

We might recall, first, that each of the four accounts of the Gospel emerged from its own particular community of faith, each with its own demographic profile, colorful characters, and distinctive perspectives on God and Jesus. These communities had access to a variety of stories and traditions about Jesus, and eventually someone in each of these communities—or perhaps a small group—decided to write it all down and create a “gospel.” These writers adapted and revised those stories to meet the needs of their respective communities, and this helps to explain the variations among the four canonical accounts.

Scholars generally agree, for example, that Matthew’s community consisted mostly of Jewish followers of Jesus. A classic indication of this is the “Sermon on the Mount”—just as Moses brought the covenant to the people on Mount Sinai, so Matthew’s Jesus preaches about the “new covenant” on a mountain. Luke’s Jesus does this instead on a level place, a “plain.”

By noticing how these gospel writers connected traditions about Jesus to the particular issues facing their own communities, we can do the same work today—and not just theologians, pastors, or preachers, but the whole community. The Church is a “community of interpretation” where all of the members prayerfully discern how to read our sacred texts for the shared ministry to which God is calling us today.

How, then, might we read the iconic story from Matthew about the so-called “wise men” from the East, the ones who followed a star to Bethlehem and presented gifts to the child Jesus?

The divine presence in Jesus is shown to these gift-bearing strangers who were probably something like astrologers or perhaps those who practiced what we might call today an “earth-based religion.” The Greek word for these “wise men” in Matthew is magoi and it’s related to a Persian word for “powerful” (it’s also at the root of our word “magic” and “magician”). Some have suggested that this might have been a title given to Zoroastrian priests, an ancient monotheistic religious tradition that emerged from present-day Iran and Iraq. That tradition was devoted to connecting cosmic powers to earthly affairs—thus the appearance of an unusual star in the sky would have caught their attention.

Matthew’s story is often interpreted as a depiction of the global significance of Jesus—the meaning of his humble birth extends beyond Judea, and will have influence beyond the people of Israel, and reaches beyond standard borders to the East, to outsiders and foreigners. That sounds rather benign, but recalling that this is Matthew’s story, and that Matthew was likely embedded in a Jewish-Christian community, this story of the Epiphany would have been startling and should be read as both encouraging and scandalous at the very same time.

To live as inheritors of ancient Israel’s traditions and as followers of Jesus, as Matthew’s community apparently attempted, was often a complex religious undertaking. It was not always clear to which kind of religious or social category one belonged, or where one should belong. In many ways, those first-century Jewish Christians were boundary crossers—just like the Magi.

Those foreign astrologers traveled a long way, probably crossing a number of geopolitical borders. They were not Judeans, not even Israelites, so they were crossing a religious boundary as well. And these religious outsiders are among the very first to encounter Jesus—and by doing so because of the appearance of an unusual star, perhaps Matthew is suggesting that God deliberately called foreigners as witnesses to this profound moment.

Outsiders with privileged access to God’s own self-revelation: that’s a scandal that turns out to be a comfort.

Imagine Matthew’s community of Jewish Christians hearing this story: If God can lead peculiar border-crossers to God’s own presence in the flesh, then perhaps our own shifting and jumbled religious borders can be a source of insight for us as well.

Matthew’s approach to the quandaries faced by his own community seems to me quite compelling for every human community. The story about the Magi encourages us to look for epiphanies in unlikely places and among unexpected people, maybe even other species. But Matthew takes that encouraging scandal even further.

The gifts these Magi present to Jesus are not just random but function as symbols for the way Matthew wants to tell the rest of the story: myrrh was an embalming oil, prefiguring the death of Jesus; frankincense—an aromatic incense derived from medicinal plants—evoking the priestly prayers Jesus offers for our healing and thriving; and gold, representing the sovereignty of the risen Jesus, who appears on a mountain once again at the end of Matthew’s account of the Gospel, where he claims “all authority in heaven and on earth.” That mountaintop moment uniting the skies above and the ground beneath is precisely the moment those Zoroastrian Magi had dared to hope for.

Set aside those particular symbols for a moment and notice Matthew’s story-telling strategy for his community of Jesus-following Judeans: foreigners can help us navigate our own and often disorienting history.

Right there, in that strategy, is where Matthew’s Magi become gifts to us. This is the insight they embody: we need strangers and outsiders to help us interpret our own story.

Matthew’s strategy is not easy to embrace, of course, and it challenges the all-too common human tendency to gather only with those who are just like us. This is actually a cautionary tale from Matthew, warning us about borders: the walls we build for “self-protection” can instead prevent the insights of strangers from reaching us for our thriving.

The journey of the Magi offers a wonderful image for embarking on a journey into 2025, and for at least two reasons. First, the Magi were brave, setting out with only the light of a star to guide them to an unknown destination. We cannot know what’s ahead in the coming weeks and months, but the Magi themselves would encourage us with the courage of companions, and to make the journey together, trusting in divine guidance.

The second reason fortifies the first: the journey of the Magi led them to a place, Matthew says, of overwhelming joy. Whatever the coming year might hold for us, it will certainly require from us some hard work, careful discernment, and courage. Yes, and the journey itself will lead us toward joy.

Perhaps now more than ever, we need the divine gift of peculiar strangers to inspire trust on a journey toward joy. I know how trite that sounds, and this even more so: Matthew’s story can guide us along this path, like a bright star in the night sky—trite perhaps, but also vital for what it means to be “church” in an age of anxiety. Our shared faith and our brave companionship is the starry light we need.

Turn Around and Build a World with God

Imagine Luke the Gospel writer as a filmmaker. In the snippet we heard from Luke this past Sunday (3:1-6), the camera is zooming way out for context: there we see the Roman Emperor Tiberius in the fifteenth year of his reign; zooming in a bit, we see that Pontius Pilate is the Roman governor of Judea (a province of the Empire) while Herod is the ruler over Galilee; this was the time when—zooming in further—Annas and Caiphas were the high priests of the temple in Jerusalem.

Time and place matter to Luke—they matter theologically and spiritually and not merely as scenery on the stage. The Gospel is “good news” precisely because of this: it deals directly with the material circumstances of human life and society—from the temple just down the street, to the governor on the hill, and all the way to the emperor on his throne.

To put this in another way, the Christian Gospel does not support a disembodied faith and it cannot be detached from messy entanglements with the wider world (as much as I would sometimes prefer it could be). To suppose that Christian faith is a matter of private and interior piety emerged only recently in Church history, mostly in the modern West, and among people who were perfectly comfortable with the way the world is.

But for people who believe the world must change, the Christian Gospel proclaims the God who is with us in that shared struggle for a better world—and the time is now to get to work.

That’s the good news Luke wants to tell as he launches the ministry of John the Baptist, which will prepare the way for the ministry of Jesus, and Luke frames this moment with the short glimpse into first-century geo-political realities and imperial rulers (along with a few clergy thrown in for good measure).

For Luke, “preparing the way” for Jesus stands in stark contrast to the way already charted by the likes of Herod, and Pontius Pilate, and Tiberius—and this is essentially why repentance is at the core of the message John the Baptist preaches.

Luke is the only gospel writer to give us substantial backstory for John—not only John’s familial connection to Jesus (they were something like second cousins), but also about John’s elderly mother, Elizabeth (who thought she would never have a child), and also his elderly father, Zechariah, who was a priest in the Jerusalem temple. John was born into a professional religious family, in other words, but oddly he did not follow in his father’s footsteps.

Or perhaps that’s not so odd—children of religious parents, especially clergy, tend to resist and even reject the religion of their youth. John did this rather dramatically: he didn’t just sidestep the temple; he fled Jerusalem entirely.

John goes out to the wilderness—Luke doesn’t say for how long, and he may have lived there with a community of religious radicals and social dropouts (think “hippie commune in the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco in the 1960s,” that kind of community)—he goes out to the wilderness, exactly where so many of the prophets of ancient Israel went to discern what God is calling God’s people to do at that time and in that place.

And that’s where the lectionary picks up the story this past Sunday. God calls John back from the wilderness to go to the towns and villages of Judea, to the river valley region referred to as “the Jordan”—which was, not just coincidentally, the seat of both religious and political power in that imperial province.

God calls John to preach repentance in those towns and villages—not out in the wilderness, but in the public square and in houses of worship.

I always find it helpful to recall that the Greek verb we usually see translated as “repentance” is not merely about remorse for having made a mistake. To “repent” means to change your mind and alter your course. You’ve been headed the wrong way—it’s time to turn around!

To “prepare the way of the Lord” means turning around when you’ve been following the way of Herod, Pontius Pilate, and Tiberius.

To “prepare the way of the Lord” means removing the mountains of social privilege for a few that block access to a life of thriving for all.

To “prepare the way of the Lord” means raising up the valleys of despair to make a path of companionship for the brokenhearted.

All of this is classic prophetic language, a plea to change course, and especially for the sake of the most vulnerable among us. And all four Gospel writers weave John into that long lineage of prophetic witness, especially Isaiah.

The collection of various writings in the one book we call Isaiah stretches across several centuries, from a time of warning about impending political disaster, through the catastrophe of Israel’s exile in Babylon, and to the return of God’s people to their homeland.

Anticipating that moment of joyful return is what the lectionary gave us from the prophet Baruch on Sunday (Baruch 5:1-9). Baruch was the scribe for the prophet Jeremiah—not an enviable position, needless to say. Jeremiah was constantly getting into trouble for denouncing both the religious and political establishment of his day, and Baruch had to write it all down.

But Baruch drafted his own prophetic texts as well, beautiful texts that encourage God’s people to live with joy, the kind toward which Jeremiah’s lamentations could only point.

Here’s the truly astonishing thing: Baruch is writing to the exiles still in Babylon as if they are already returning to Jerusalem. “Take off the garment of sorrow,” he says. “Your people stand ready to rejoice at your return.”

Note this carefully: prophets have a very strange sense of time. They are not interested in predicting the future. As Baruch seems to suggest, we build the promised day to come by living it now.

We build the promised day to come by the way we live right now.

John the Baptist belongs to that long line of Hebrew prophets with precisely that posture, preaching preparation not prediction. The vital implication here is this: the future is actually wide open. Contrary to the religious formation of my youth, there is no cosmic blueprint with which world events are aligning; there is no heavenly timetable to which prophets have special access; there is no pre-determined plan unfolding in elections and markets and wars.

Quite honestly, I often think a detailed plan would make life a bit easier, especially when a radically open future feels scary. Facing an open future means we have some serious decisions to make about how we live, decisions that will shape the kind of world we will inhabit.

That word “world” can mean, as it did for biblical writers, both small and large realities—the world of one’s own faith community, or the world of the neighborhoods in which we reside, or one’s own country as a world, as well as this planetary world of many countries.

What kind of world do we want to inhabit?

That’s the urgent question prophets always ask. It’s the question religious traditions urgently pose, which they can help us answer, and then shape us to live that answer as a community of God’s people.

As I reflect on Advent this year, and the prophets, and the world in which we currently live, I am increasingly convinced about a crucial way to frame Christmas. It’s this: the coming of Jesus is God’s offer to collaborate with us on what the future will look like.

God has hopes and dreams for God’s own creation. God’s will is that all would thrive and flourish. And God is always calling and then equipping communities of faith to make these divine dreams a reality. It’s time, as John would say, to turn around and build a world with God.

John’s father Zechariah sang a song of praise for this world-building God, whose manner of arrival surprises every generation (Luke 1:68-79). That song—which Luke actually calls a “prophecy”—has since then become a Prayer Book canticle, and the lectionary invited us to recite it in worship on Sunday.

That prophetic song of praise is offered for this: God arrives not with military strength, not robed in royal majesty, and not armed with anything we might expect to be useful for a world-changing mission; God always arrives in “tender compassion.”

The “dawn from on high,” Zechariah sings—that light which will guide our feet along the way, along the good road we build together and with God—that dawning light is tenderness and compassion.

Advent invites us to live as if God has already arrived and is always arriving, not with doomsday predictions but to inspire us and to work with us to build a world to inhabit with joy—a world of peace, with justice, and thriving for all.

That work—that great work—begins with our own hearts, with our hearts being cracked open by the tender compassion of God.

The Art of Love in the Advent of God

Disaster movies make a lot of money for Holly wood producers and movie studios. It’s also oddly the case that real-life disasters sell more newspapers and increase the ratings of television news channels.

Human curiosity is heightened and intrigue sharpened in moments of disaster, far more so than in situations of joy. Why is this? Researchers from various fields have noted that humans are generally fascinated by what can kill us, injure us, or even end the world, a fascination that occurs for a simple reason: evolution.

Those who pay attention to potential threats and prepare for them, especially those who cooperate with others to manage the threats, they are the ones most likely to survive actual disasters.

This evolutionary advantage, however, diminishes dramatically in what some researchers have called “apocalypse anxiety”—being so paralyzed with worry about disaster that we do nothing about it, except perhaps to engage in incessant “doomscrolling.”

Yesterday, on the first Sunday of Advent—one of my favorite days on the church calendar—the lectionary assigned a portion from Luke’s account of the Gospel (21:25-36) where Jesus describes disaster preparedness: when disaster appears on the horizon, he says, “be on guard” so that it will not catch you unexpectedly, “like a trap.”

The lectionary always assigns apocalyptic and world-ending texts like this for the first Sunday of Advent—and that’s pretty weird. How odd to begin the new liturgical year with the “end”! But the apocalyptic character of this day is not just peculiar; it has always been deeply challenging, and for multiple reasons.

For certain types of Christians, passages like this one from Luke are treated as predictive timelines for world events—that’s how I grew up hearing them in the Evangelical tradition of my youth. This approach invites ways to map global politics to biblical prophecies, but of course this kind of “mapping” can easily treat our precious Earth as disposable, not to mention particular groups of humans.

Another problem with predictive timelines is the perpetually delayed “end” they seem to predict but which never arrives. We’ve been living with these apocalyptic texts for nearly 2,000 years now and I seriously doubt that this very moment, right now, is the culmination of biblical prophecies (even though Luke’s Jesus sure sounds like he’s describing the effects of global climate change in yesterday’s passage).

Other types of Christians have mostly dismissed these apocalyptic passages entirely as rather crude and ancient mythologies that more rational people have outgrown. Some early twentieth-century scholars tried to “demythologize” these texts and then psychologize them instead: the apocalyptic moment refers not to world events but to an individual’s moment of crisis, a moment of decision about whether to live a fully authentic life, for example.

This approach has its own set of problems, not least the tendency to detach Christian faith from the wider social world of political and economic concerns.

Those on both ends of this spectrum overlook something terribly important: world-ending moments actually happen quite regularly. Worlds of meaning and beauty and also tragedy and conflict—whole worlds come and go all the time.

The advent of AIDS in the 1980s made this pattern shockingly plain, which having World AIDS Day land on the first Sunday of Advent compellingly invites us to remember. To see young and otherwise healthy men, and then children, and also women waste away into death was a rude reminder—just like Polio had been, or bubonic plague, or more recently Covid-19—a rude reminder indeed of our mortality and what it looks like when worlds end.

The point of these apocalyptic texts is not how to predict when those world-ending moments will occur, but rather how to prepare ourselves to live in them; and to bear witness to faith, hope, and especially love while those moments unfold; and to proclaim by the way we live that God is with us—always.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus makes absolutely clear to his disciples that they must not try to predict when the end will occur. Jesus instead urges them to live with hopeful expectation—not for any unraveling, or ending, but for the coming of redemption.

Honestly, I rarely heard that note of hopefulness growing up in my thoroughly apocalyptic religious tradition—these texts are not proto-scripts for the latest Hollywood disaster movie; they are like textual vitamins to nurture a life of hope. Luke’s Jesus was especially clear about this yesterday: When you see all the shit going down, raise your heads! Your redemption is near!

Reading a recent essay on Thomas Mann’s classic German novel, The Magic Mountain made that apocalyptic hopefulness poignantly clear. That novel was published exactly 100 years ago last month; Mann had begun working on it in 1913 but then put it away during World War I.

The “mountain” in the title of that novel was in the Swiss Alps where Mann’s characters were convalescing in a tuberculosis sanatorium. For Mann, it was the kind of place where one learns things that only disease and death can teach you.

“The Hotel Schatzalp” (inspiration for Thomas Mann; photo, Jules and Bear)

But then, lost and isolated in a blizzard while skiing, the main character in this novel has, what was for him, a startling realization—and this occurs nearly in the precise middle of the novel, a pivot point for the whole story: the only thing that can stand up to death, the only thing strong enough, is love.

Needless to say, Mann was not a romantic sentimentalist. By “love,” Mann did not mean a “cozy feeling” but rather the arduous work of forging bonds with each other, not from a sense of shared doom, but with the enlivening conviction of our shared humanity.

This turn in the novel represents a dramatic shift for Mann himself. He was a German loyalist and a supporter of the Kaiser in the First World War. But his entire philosophy changed after that war (as it did for many). He was dismayed to see the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and he was stunned to see how quickly and how deeply that party was able to divide Germans against themselves, and to turn dear neighbors into monstrous enemies.

Witnessing this horrific turn of events in his homeland, Mann insisted that the only kind of love that can stand up against death is the love of an artist.

Living as I now do along the so-called “arts coast” of West Michigan, this caught my attention and it’s worth noting: for Thomas Mann, the kind of art that truly matters is the kind that excludes nothing that is truly human—all of our complexities and ambiguities, all of our moral failures and triumphs, each of our joys and sorrows alike—the artist must gather all of this and then bind all of it together with love.

The lectionary was kind enough to make this same point yesterday in a passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Christians in Thessalonica (1 Thess. 3:9-13). Those Thessalonians were terribly distressed that some of their friends had died—which they didn’t think would happen after they became Christians. That distress is what prompted Paul to write them a letter.

The cycle of life and death will indeed continue, Paul tells them, even as we wait for the glorious coming of Christ with all the saints. All the more reason, he says, for you to “increase and abound in love for one another and for all.”

I couldn’t help but tie all of these various texts together—from Luke and Mann to Paul—and imagine our worship at the Eucharistic Table yesterday as a gathering on the “Magic Mountain”—a place for healing and insight.

But like Mann’s characters, we don’t stay in that sanctuary. We are sent out from that Table—we go back down the mountain—fortified by the hope for the healing of the world.

This world of flourishing will emerge not from our own efforts alone but from changed hearts and minds, from making ourselves open (and vulnerable) to the transforming power of God’s love.

This is the God who comes not just once, centuries ago in Bethlehem, nor only for a second time, at the so-called “end of time,” but the God who is always arriving, always appearing, always as the God of Advent, always ready to remake us with love, and then always sending us out with that love for the healing of the world.

“Be on your guard,” Luke’s Jesus says, “so that your hearts are not weighed down…”

“Increase in love,” Paul says, “for one another and for all.”

The King of Love for a Realm of Healing

After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the House of Windsor has seemed to me less like a “royal family” and more like a group of related British celebrities. When I think “king” I don’t usually think “Charles.”

“Kingship” always taps my childhood fascination with Arthurian legend, and my ongoing love for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I used to daydream of living as one of Arthur’s knights at his round table, or following Aragorn to this throne in the restored kingdom of Gondor. Those parts of me love the Feast of Christ the King.

The last Sunday after Pentecost—the very last Sunday of the liturgical year—is often celebrated with the image of Christ as “king,” an image for Jesus that has deep roots in Christian traditions even if the liturgical feast itself is mostly modern.

The lectionary continues its apocalyptic tenor for this feast and with some startling biblical texts, like the one from the Hebrew prophet Daniel (7:9-14), which includes a vision of the One who will come with the “clouds of heaven,” and who is given dominion and glory and kingship. Those heavenly clouds appear again in a vision from the Revelation to John (1:4-8), a vision of One whose coming every eye will see, and who is the ruler of all the kings of earth.

These are certainly the kinds of texts we might expect for a celebration of royal power. But something a bit deeper seems to be lingering beneath these splashy images of kingship. There’s an ancient desire percolating in all of this, a deep-rooted ache that stretches across both time and culture—the yearning to see wrongs made right, to restore wholeness in a world of fragments: the lost, found; the forgotten, remembered; the wounded, healed.

The Prayer Book collect for yesterday’s feast named that desire. In a world divided and enslaved by sin, that prayer affirms God’s will to restore all things.

That notion of “divine restoration” reminds me one of my favorite Greek words: apokatastasis. I actually devoted an entire qualifying exam in my doctoral program to that one word, and to the ongoing role it has played in Christian traditions—and that word has had quite a colorful career indeed.

The word itself appears only once in the Bible, in the Acts of the Apostles (3:21). Peter is preaching in Jerusalem about the resurrection of Jesus, the crucified but risen Lord who will come again, he says, at the time of “universal restoration.” That’s usually how apokatastasis is translated, and it captured the imagination of Origen, a second-century Greek theologian.

Origen argued that God will one day bring all beings back to their source, where they will be restored to union with God—not only all people but even the Devil and all his fallen angels! That is the day when God will be “all in all,” as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians.

That’s a startling declaration: God will not cease loving God’s creation, not ever, and God shall not fail in uniting all things in a gloriously divine communion of love—every single being, no exceptions.

Apokatastasis is in that sense not only startling but also apocalyptic—which is to say, a deeply revelatory word. The Feast of Christ the “King” reveals the underlying meaning of the whole liturgical year, that grand arc from Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, through Lent, Easter, and Pentecost—all of it reveals the unwavering purpose of God to restore, renew, and heal with love.

As I do every week, I spent some time searching online for visual images that might capture these complex desires and hopes. After entering the words “restore all things” in the Google search engine, images began popping up of the painstaking process involved when museums try to restore old paintings.

I actually find such work both fascinating and beautiful, but those images made me realize just how precarious the notion of restoration really is, maybe even spiritually dangerous: Was there ever a time when all peoples were unified? Can any of us name a distinct moment in the past when everyone flourished? Are we really pining for a perfect world that we somehow lost long ago and now we want to recover and restore it?

No—that’s going backward; we need to travel forward. The disciples asked the risen Jesus about this very thing in the first chapter of Acts (1:6): Is now the time you will restore the kingdom to Israel?

No—resurrection does not return to how things were but moves forward to God’s own vision of how they should be.

As I sorted through the online search result (without much to inspire me), I decided to use one of my favorite icons, one that depicts Jesus harrowing Hell between Good Friday and Easter morning. Part of what I love about that image is the effort Jesus seems to be making to yank Adam and Eve out of their tombs on that day. The past matters in this dramatic moment, and nothing and no one is left behind. But the momentum here is definitely forward, not backward.

The Harrowing of Hell (apse in the Chora Church, Istanbul)

Adam and Eve signal that momentum for us in their apparent reluctance, as if they are thoroughly disoriented by the whole prospect of an Easter Jesus. This is not a moment of restoration, of returning to a known past—Jesus is not putting them back in the Garden of Eden; he’s raising them to new life.

That’s the paradox of all theological symbols—they are rooted in the known to help us imagine and anticipate the unknown.

The familiar, well-known symbol of Christ as “King” must point beyond what we now know of kingship and toward something new. And that’s why it’s so important that the lectionary included a poignant moment for yesterday’s feast from John’s account of the Gospel (18:33-37).

This moment in John is not one of splashy glory or heavenly pyrotechnics. To the contrary, Jesus is standing before the Roman Governor Pilate, a vignette that disrupts our usual assumptions about royal power.

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

The contrast between these two figures could not be more stark—Pilate robed in imperial power; Jesus with no power at all over his own fate and on trial for his life.

Pilate wants to know if Jesus is a king.

“My Kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus replies.

While some have taken this response to mean that Jesus is concerned only with some far-off heavenly realm that has nothing to do with Earth, that’s not the substance of John’s Gospel at all. “For God so loved the world,” John famously wrote, not to condemn it but to save it.

Moreover, the encounter with Pilate is but the culmination of a whole series of encounters in John, moments of contrasting the power of “this world” to destroy Earth and the power of God to heal and renew Earth.

“My Kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus says, “if it were, my followers would fight.”

Heavenly power on earth will never be established with weapons and violence but only with the truth. This is why I was born, Jesus says, this is why I have come, to “testify to the truth.”

In a world of coercive deceptions and brutal violence, the truth of the Gospel is just this: only and nothing else but love will save us.

Love is not weak.

Love is not merely sentiment or a cozy feeling.

Love is not a last-ditch, stop-gap measure by liberal snowflakes when otherwise real-world practical strategies fail.

Love is brave, risking all for what matters most, willing to lose everything to gain what cannot be lost.

Love is fierce and strong—stronger than even death.

Love incarnate stood before Pilate.

And so we Christians celebrate that embodied moment of “known royalty” for a realm still unimaginable. Most of us do so at the Eucharistic Table—where we move from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the strange, from memory to hope.

At the Table, we try as best we can to put Gospel truth into practice, bearing witness to a world where all welcome, no one is forgotten, and everyone is healed by love—everyone, no exceptions.