Beloved Community – Peculiar Faith

For the Healing of the Nations

Patriotism is not a Christian virtue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

MLK: Minister of the Gospel

Images and reflections on Martin Luther King, Jr., are of course flooding our social media feeds today. While I’m grateful to see him referred to often as Doctor King, I am dismayed by how many stories omit the Reverend part.

King was an ordained minister of the Christian Gospel. This was not somehow incidental or accidental to his world-changing activism; what he did and inspired is rooted in the socially transformative power of the Gospel itself.

Thirty-three years into a life of ordained ministry, and I’m still trying hard to learn the lessons King can teach about what a friend of mine years ago called “spiritual activism.” After serving as a full-time parish priest for my first three years out of seminary, I decided to go back to school for doctoral work. I did this because I realized even more profoundly in my pastoral work that theology matters. How we interpret the world and view ourselves in it—which is one way to understand what theology is all about—makes a significant difference in how we live in the world and the kinds of communities we create.

That conviction eventually led me to study some of the key figures in the emergence of American pragmatism, a distinctly American approach to philosophy that stresses the practical consequences of our ideas. The meaning of an idea or concept, in other words, is defined by the way it shapes our behaviors. I appreciate this approach to theology because it embraces the importance of both ideas and action; one without the other is sorely inadequate even for just daily life let alone for the living of Christian faith.

Among those key American figures was philosopher of religion Josiah Royce, who was convinced that the character of the whole universe is social and communal. For Royce this meant that evil most often takes the form of separation, fragmentation, and isolation, which then calls for the healing work of atonement, of re-uniting what has been torn apart. That healing work, Royce argued, is directed toward what he called “The Beloved Community.”

I was delighted to discover during my studies that Martin Luther King, Jr., also did doctoral work after seminary and that Josiah Royce had a profound influence on how King envisioned the trajectory of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. In short, Royce’s notion of the Beloved Community convinced King of the vital importance of bringing everyone to the table of healing, reconciliation, and justice.

That foundation later energized King to address even more directly the corrupting effects of militarism on the Western world (most notably at the time, the Viet Nam War) and the debilitating patterns of a global capitalism that consigned vast segments of the world’s population to permanent poverty.

In today’s world of entrenched animosity and hatred, I am reminding myself almost daily of King’s insistence that hatred cannot drive out hatred; only love can do that. Christian love, he argued, “makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it’s directed toward both…seeking to preserve and create community. While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community.” I am astonished by that inclusive posture, which continually prods me beyond my own petty resentments.

King also practiced what he preached by building a community of organizers, preachers, artists, and musicians to collaborate on the strategies and postures of the Civil Rights Movement. This is often overlooked by (white male) commentators who apparently imagine King as single-handedly steering that movement as if he were a solitary captain at the ship’s wheel.

Just one among many counter-examples is the great Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who not only performed at many of the marches and rallies in the 1960s, not only advised King and others on strategy, but actually prompted King to “talk about the dream” during his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963.

Royce described the galvanizing power of what he called the “Spirit” of the Beloved Community, a spirit that so clearly infused Martin Luther King, Jr., and equipped his many companions for the work of social transformation, the work of peace with justice, the work of deep healing and reconciliation.

And that is the work of Christian ministry.

Mahalia Jackson, March on Washington (1963)

“That Nothing May be Lost”: The Hope of Anglican Queerness in a Fragmented World

Anglican Christianity qualifies as an inherently queer religious tradition. I find this hopeful for a deeply fragmented world in a great deal of pain.

By “queer,” I mean more than welcoming spaces for LGBT people. I’m thinking especially of queer theory’s critique of binary oppositions and a persistent (often contested) rejection of purity in Anglican DNA. And I’m pondering these things under a ludicrously big ecclesial “tent” made from rainbow canvas.

Can Anglican queerness offer any hope for a world that seems to be unraveling? I think so, especially as polarized oppositions and purity codes confront us throughout all the world’s broken pieces. grace_cathedral_2

“Queer theory” has accrued nearly as many definitions as “Anglican” over the last thirty years. In that jumbled mix, I find two interrelated features of queer theorizing particularly helpful: 1) a posture of resistance to regulated regimes of the normal; and 2) a critique of binary oppositions. The interrelation of these features matters as much as each of the features. Regulated regimes of the normal, in other words, are perpetuated and policed by means of binary oppositions.

Consider, for example, the constant refrain (spoken as if self-evident) that men and women naturally occupy categorically distinct spheres. Men are public, dominant, and insertive; women are private, submissive, and penetrated.

If that sounds terribly old fashioned, we might review any number of today’s policy initiatives, legislative agendas, or just town hall meetings and PTA gatherings—or the flood of #MeToo moments and the still (annoyingly) ubiquitous question about which of the two men in a gay relationship plays the “woman’s part” (i.e., the passive and dominated one). These regulated regimes of the normal, queer theorists say, are policed by means of the binary gender system.

Queer theory’s exposure and critique of these dynamics frames the messy history of Anglican Christianity. Very little seems “normal” about a church that refuses to land in a clearly defined ecclesial space. The sixteenth century English Reformation apparently wanted to have its scones and eat them too, embracing a Catholic heritage with Protestant verve.

Anglican polity swerves toward centralized decrees (where exactly is our English Vatican?) only to find congregational objections yanking us back toward compromises and local “exceptions.” Anglican prayer books are rooted in Catholic rites but always modulated with Protestant rebuttals. Episcopalians recently celebrated the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15^th without ever mentioning, directly, the Assumption.

These peculiar Anglican spaces emerge from a persistent (and usually vexing) rejection of binary options: we are neither Catholic nor Protestant and still live somehow as both.

An invigorating and challenging posture sits at the heart of these religiously messy traditions: resisting puritanism. The emergent Church of England, we might recall, was rocked at its founding by Puritans (the ones who boarded the Mayflower and landed in “Massachusetts”), who insisted on “purifying” the church of all its papal remnants. These pious colonists longed to “drain the swamp.”

Right there, queer theory’s unrelenting interrogation of regulated normality meets deep Anglican commitments. The result is a catalyzing and healing vision for today’s seemingly intractable contestations and severely wounded communities. I mean this: the queerly Anglican refusal to be pure. We ourselves live in the “swamp.”

This queerness matters in more ways than even most Anglicans usually surmise. I’m thinking of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who fueled a world-changing socio-political movement with an image of the Beloved Community. The community he envisioned as beloved does not consist of people who agree with each other about everything, nor of people who look or act the same, nor of people who want to socialize with each other at cocktails parties—no, a truly beloved community brings a shockingly diverse collection of people together because of their shared destiny.

mlk_beloved_community
The destiny we share as humans on a planet with many other creatures of God cannot be a “regulated normalcy,” nor a neatly classified society divided into distinct camps and parties, nor a singular community defined by the purity of its ideology or its membership. King’s insistence on a shared destiny runs far deeper—and therefore more challenging and upsetting and lifegiving—than conformity to rubrics or legislative agendas or parsed with skin color or economic class or the gender of a spouse.

That’s why, in part, I persist in casting my lot with Anglican Christianity. Not because it defines me in opposition to other Christians, much less to other humans or other animals, but because its queer sensibilities break me open to find love and purpose among all those many “others,” no purity required.

Indeed, no purity actually possible—we are all untidy, messy, conflicted, and multiple. Queer theorists insist on this and I encountered it first by plunging into Anglican traditions, which seem perpetually on the brink of falling apart for their whacky and wonderful multiplicity.

The “big tent” of Anglican Christianity is not a perfect space; it is deeply flawed in many respects. That’s another reason why I pitch my own little tent under its rainbow canvas. I can’t manage to be pure; no one can. Even when some of my fellow Anglicans insist we should be, the attempts always fizzle, thankfully. (If purity is your standard, you might want to avoid the Gospels and stay away from church conventions.)

Many years ago, when I worried and fretted over my own religious and sexual purity (one because of the other) a seminary professor said, “we’re not saved by being right; we’re saved by grace.” That’s not an excuse for either doctrinal sloppiness or moral laxity; but it is a reason for generosity and hospitality. That just might be a path toward healing, toward a shared destiny, toward—dare I say—salvation.

American society today faces a severe threat to one of its founding suppositions: e pluribus unum (out of many, one). Christians face this quandary constantly, not least by wondering what in the world to do with John’s Jesus when he prays that we all “might be one” (was even his prayer ineffectual?) or how to mark the week of “Prayer for Christian Unity” every January without blushing and mumbling platitudes.

Queer theorists urge us to suppose that “oneness” has nothing to do with uniformity; even more, that uniformity is the great enemy of a flourishing community. As I struggle with all of this, I’m grateful for the Anglican witness to multiple answers to key questions, even when we’re troubled by our own responses.

Oddly, queerly, I return to the Apostle Paul in those moments of consternation. I have grown to love that vexing pioneer of Christian faith and his convoluted self, the one who insisted that the “body of Christ” consists of many diverse members. That conflicted champion of incorporating Gentiles into a Jewish movement, that “least among the apostles” who, like all of us, made claims he himself had trouble putting into practice.

A world fragmented by zero-sum games of planetary proportions is eager and desperate for some reassurance that there is indeed a destiny of thriving life that all of us—quite improbably, quite queerly—share.

Many Christians heard a version of this hope for a month of Sundays this summer as the lectionary led us through the sixth chapter of John’s account of the Gospel. After feeding a multitude of people, Jesus says this: “gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost” (6:12).

John’s Jesus queerly spoke what Dr. King queerly tried to live, and this is still our queer hope today: a shared destiny.

feeding_5000_leftovers