Black History Month – Peculiar Faith

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

Praying with Palimpsests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Way of the Cross on the Road called Freedom

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

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

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

“The Beauty of the Cross,” Daniel Bonnell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Terrifying Freedom, Liberating Service

Freedom—the word and the concept—has been showing up lately on social media, in court cases and congressional hearings, and randomly scattered through presidential tweets. Freedom has been showing up and getting tossed around as if its meaning is perfectly obvious or self-evident. I think it’s much more complex than most people imagine. I also think absolute freedom would be absolutely terrifying.

That is a rather odd thing to say in the United States of America, a country steeped in the language of liberty and individual freedoms as God-given rights. These words need and demand some context.

Especially in Black History month, we must be crystal clear that freedom from slavery is an unqualified good (tour guides on plantation museums still have to say this explicitly to tourists). Let us also be just as clear—as writer and civil rights activist Michelle Alexander keeps reminding us—slavery may have ended, but the racial caste system in this country has not. From Reconstruction to Jim Crow and mass incarceration, freedom is still only a dream for far too many in this country.

We might also ponder what “free” means in “free-market” capitalism when the whole system is chained to corporate shareholders demanding ever-higher profits and whether we ourselves have nearly as much “freedom” in this economic system as advertising executives would like us to believe we do.

The concept of freedom itself is indeed complex; but why would absolute freedom qualify as “terrifying”?

Just one reason among many: freedom can quickly turn into isolation and alienation, an experience of the world where the only reference point is the self. I was reminded of this a few years ago when I was hiking in area of the Sierra Nevada Mountains called the “Emigrant Wilderness,” in terrain similar to the kind that trapped the Donner Party back in the 1840s. I knew the area fairly well but wasn’t paying the kind of attention one should when hiking in a wilderness area; I got turned around, lost my sense of direction, had no map, and could see no trail. I was in a sense utterly free and also thoroughly terrified.

emigrant_wilderness — Emigrant Wildnerness, Sierra Nevada Mountains

Putting this in more positive terms, we humans are creatures who thrive on attachment, on a sense of place and community to provide an anchor in an otherwise tumultuous world; creatures who flourish, not alone, but in networks of relational loyalties and responsibilities. And let me quickly add: such networks cannot be fully duplicated online; the realm of Internet engagement is called virtual reality for a reason. (Some would argue for an important distinction between social media and online communities, but I’m not entirely persuaded by this.)

I worry that the kind of freedom praised in certain segments of American society idealizes a life without any constraint or duty; this romanticized notion of an untamed life of liberty stands in stark contrast to genuine freedom, the kind that enables us to live within proper parameters where we come most fully alive—alive to the self that is in vital relation to others and the land we all share for life.

All of this came to mind as I reflected on what many Christians heard in Church this past weekend from Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Bible (Deut. 30:15-20), a book second only to Leviticus in the minds of many as an example of “legalistic religion,” or faithfulness as mere regulatory control, the Bible itself as the textual chains of constraint chafing against a glorious life of freedom.

It is truly unfortunate that the so-called “Old Testament” in the Bible has been so closely associated in the minds of many Christians with a rigid moralism and, even more sadly, with an image of an angry God. The Hebrew Bible actually offers some of the most tender images of God, the God whose heart breaks over injustice, who lures and woos the creation into loving relationship, who longs for intimacy and communion.

We might recall the context of that passage from Deuteronomy: God has liberated the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt and guided them through the wilderness for many years, and has now brought them to the brink of the “promised land.” Right there, on that brink, God gives them the law through Moses.

Notice that freedom from their life of bondage in Egypt does not mean the freedom to do whatever they please; it means instead the freedom to be in covenant with God.

The stakes are high at this juncture in the story of ancient Israel; the people have a choice to make, the choice is between blessings and curses, between life and death. “Choose life” is the repeated exhortation in this passage, where full, thriving, flourishing life is intertwined with a conscientious observance of the Torah, of the law—an observance that binds us to each other and, as this text also makes clear, to the land itself, apart from which we simply cannot live.

Absolute freedom can indeed be absolutely terrifying, in part because we cannot know who we are apart from the others with whom we share an identity, the ones who make us who we are. And that is exactly what ancient Israel’s covenant with God was meant to foster—we cannot be who we are alone.

As Martin Luther King, Jr., declared more than fifty years ago, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” It is no mere coincidence, then, that the rhetoric of absolute freedom is accompanied by an epidemic of loneliness and despair, increasingly self-medicated with opioids or suicide. Untethered from others, from community, from the land itself, we die. mlk_beloved_community

The stakes are just as high for the gospel writer called Matthew, from which Christians also heard on Sunday (Mt. 5:21-37). Perhaps more than the other three gospelers, Matthew will not let us separate Jesus from the religious observance of Israel.

As inheritors of the Protestant Reformation, especially as Martin Luther framed it, many Christians think of Christian faith as a contrast between “law” and “Gospel,” or between “works righteousness” and “grace.” These contrasts aren’t wrong, but a bit too stark. Matthew’s Jesus interrupts those refrains with a bracing refrain of his own, one that should give us pause: “You have heard it said…but I say to you.”

That’s a really important “but” and it is not a repudiation of the law. To the contrary, each time Matthew’s Jesus offers that pairing, observing Torah suddenly becomes more difficult not less. Paraphrasing Matthew’s challenge might sound like this:

Do not suppose you are free of social obligations simply because you haven’t killed anyone, as if that suffices to build community—embrace instead a much deeper duty, the kind that heals anger and forgives faults.
Do not suppose you are living in a healthy marriage just because you haven’t had sexual intercourse with anyone other than your spouse—recognize instead what lust actually is, the urge to own and control another human being like a commodity.
Do not suppose that justifying a divorce with the letter of the law releases you from caring about the welfare of your divorced partner—especially if that person is a woman in a patriarchal society.

Absolute freedom can be absolutely terrifying because we truly do belong to each other—not only contractually or legally but, as it were, organically, like branches that cannot live without the vine.

I think of this whenever I gather around the Eucharistic table. Just like the Exodus from Egypt, Eucharist is about salvation and also covenant; it’s about liberation for sure, and still also obligation; it is certainly about freedom, and therefore, it is also about belonging—to God and to each other—and not just the others we like, but the ones we don’t understand, who irritate us, even those who try to thwart on our own thriving. We all belong to each other.

Quite early in Christian traditions, in the first couple of centuries, theologians wrote about salvation in terms of freedom. What God accomplishes for us in Christ, they wrote, is freedom from sin, death, and the devil—not so that we can then do whatever we please without constraint, but rather so that we can be free to serve Christ as living members of his Body.

The contrast worth pursuing here is not between “law” and “gospel,” but between a terrifying freedom and a liberating service, the kind that frees us from competition, revenge, and the corrosive effects of hate—which I take as helpful synonyms for “sin, death, and the devil.”

Table fellowship becomes ever more important in a world of increasing fragmentation—tragically disguised as “freedom”—and violent forms of tribalism—mistaken embraced as “liberty.” Eucharist instead bears witness to the hope of genuine, life-giving freedom, the kind that unites us to God-in-Christ, binds us to each other, and secures our service to this precious Earth.

table_fellowshipo_latin_america