Easter – Peculiar Faith

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

A remarkable array of momentous conversations, epic arguments, and tender lovemaking happens around the dinner table—all those “kitchen table conversations,” as politicians like to call them, that bring families together in good times and crises alike.

The Table sits at the heart of biblical accounts of the Gospel and at the very center of Christian worship for all the obvious reasons that come quickly to mind, and also the subtle ones that shape all those moments of shared meals: food, in short, is necessary for life.

The story many of us heard yesterday from Luke, the story of encountering the risen Jesus as a stranger (24:13-35), comes with the added benefit of sounding terribly queer—I don’t mean it’s an LGBT-related story (necessarily), but that it scrambles expectations and refuses tidy conclusions (the risen Jesus, after all, vanishes from the dinner table before anyone can even gasp and he refuses to be contained). I used it for the preface of my book Peculiar Faith (from which the name of this blog site is derived) and it never fails to both console and unsettle me.

Reading and reflecting on that story again this year, I was suddenly reminded of the iconic 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Few probably imagine Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy as a Gospel-story tableau—least of all those actors themselves—but doing so brims with critical insights. Race, gender, and sexuality all appear so clearly intertwined by pushing Luke’s story into that film, and in ways that lend some much-needed cultural flesh, as it were, to an Easter hope.

Recalling the film’s plotline, Tracy and Hepburn are hosting a dinner party at the request of their daughter, who wants them to meet her fiancé. How lovely! But prior to that party they didn’t know that their daughter’s fiancé was Black. Their daughter also invited her fiancé’s parents—her future in-laws—to the same dinner party, and they didn’t know that she was white!

The movie portrays both families as socially liberal, generally speaking, and mostly supportive of tolerance and equality in that mid-twentieth-century middle class way. But then they must confront their own stubborn and deeply rooted biases when those social issues are suddenly part of their own family.

It’s remarkable, actually, that this film was even made at that time. It was released in the same year as the landmark Supreme Court ruling “Loving vs. Virginia,” a unanimous decision that overturned bans against “interracial marriage.” That was not terribly long ago—in 1967 I was six years old!—and prior to that ruling, it was illegal in sixteen states for a white person to marry a black person; you could go to prison for doing that.

These state statues were generally clustered together as “anti-miscegenation” laws (an arcane way to register one’s disgust at “mixing” otherwise pure races) and it’s important to note that these laws were not evenly enforced. It was considered much more scandalous for a Black man to marry a white woman than the other way around.

Why would that be? Back then (still today?), it was widely assumed that a husband exercises final authority over his wife, and it was culturally repugnant to suppose that a Black person could ever have that kind of authority over a white person.

These racially-gendered dynamics also help to explain why so many Black churches have been reluctant over the last few decades to embrace marriage equality for gay couples. That seems odd at first until one recalls the long history of using marriage as a tool for white supremacy, stretching all the way back to institutional slavery and into Jim Crow segregation.

Given that history, anything that even carries a hint of destabilizing the Black family is treated with suspicion by Black churches—and quite rightly so, and with that hint comes the poignant reminder of how inextricably interconnected race, gender, and sexuality are, and always have been.

When I first started delving into these forms of social analysis, I confess: I was impatient with them. It just seemed terribly convoluted, even unnecessarily complex—until I returned once again to the tools for biblical interpretation. Modern social dynamics are not any more complicated than the established rules for proper meal sharing in first-century Mediterranean societies, and indeed, those ancient patterns easily rival today’s expectations for dinner party etiquette in “polite society.”

It matters, in other words, when Christians gather to hear the wonderful story from Luke about the journey to Emmaus to recall that table fellowship was one of the ways to monitor and maintain social order in that first-century world—and Jesus was constantly disrupting that very order.

In that world, who is “allowed” to share food and fellowship at the same table was determined through a tightly orchestrated flowchart of cultural categories filtered through religious regulations and purity codes. Those determinations were rooted in biological family, of course, but much more: social and economic status, and also ethnicity and proper religious observance.

Traces of those many rules and regulations show up in the constant scandal Jesus caused by eating with prostitutes and tax collectors—and also the invitations he accepted from Pharisees and Sadducees—and also in the parables he told about wedding banquets and dinner parties, which included the anxiety about wearing the proper outfit and not messing up the seating arrangement at the head table!

So, guess who’s coming to dinner!

Someone who shows us a more excellent way of being human with each other, and of building thriving communities devoted to justice, and perhaps at the root all of that, of finding oneself loved fully, exactly as we are—no caveats, no conditions, no green card required, no proof of insurance necessary, no credit check, no references needed, no passport, no driver’s license, not even a baptismal certificate! you are embraced at the Table just as you are.

Guess who’s coming to dinner!

It’s a stranger, someone we don’t recognize, someone outside the standard social conventions and the rules of proper behavior; someone to break us free from whatever holds us back from abundant life—including our own resentments and insecurities.

The key to Luke’s story is hospitality—those disciples on the road to Emmaus decided to extend hospitality to a stranger, to invite him to dinner, urging him to spend the night with them at the inn. Hospitality breaks through the boundaries set by social norms, and that’s exactly when they recognize the risen Jesus: when he is at table and breaks bread with them.

While I often find myself distracted by the many tasks associated with genuine and effective hospitality, I need to remember always that hospitality in essence is a posture of love. Hospitality sometimes springs from love; sometimes hospitality creates new forms of love that weren’t there before; and sometimes hospitality renews a love that had grown old.

The God of love—the God who is love—welcomes each and all of us fully to the Table, so that we can in turn welcome others, without condition, in love and for love.

This is Peter’s point in the portion of his first letter assigned by the lectionary yesterday (1:17-23). Now that you have embraced the truth, he writes, the truth of God raising Jesus from the dead, be sure to live like it. You have been born again, so live like you mean it, he says, and practice mutual love—love each other, especially when it’s hard—love, love, love each other.

And lest that Petrine text sound dusty, Spencer Tracy’s character is basically channeling St. Peter in the final and impassioned monologue Tracy delivers at the end of that 1967 film.

As he reflects on having welcomed strangers into his home for dinner, the enduring love for his dear wife becomes even more vibrant (Hepburn has tears welling in her eyes), and the love for his precious daughter illumines everything, and he then declares that love is indeed stronger than any social bias.

Luke would heartily agree: Love put those disciples together on that road; and then love opened their hearts to hear the words of a stranger; and then love moved them to extend hospitality to that stranger, whose presence at the Table reveals once more that love itself is even stronger than death.

Luke’s story—and every queerly disorienting Gospel story about the risen Jesus—pushes me always to remember the very heart of Gospel proclamation: there is only love in the heart of God.

Declare and repeat, often; cross-stitch it, frame it, and post it above your computer if need be. It’s the truest thing in the Universe: There is only love in the heart of God; nothing else, absolutely nothing but love, and this love—poured out on the world in Beloved Jesus and the Abiding Spirit—this love inspires forgiveness, reconciliation, and the kind of healing that leads to new life.

And not even death can stop it.

Holy Harrowing

Icon in Chora Church, Istanbul, Christ Harrowing Hell

“O God, in Christ you have searched the depths we cannot fathom, and touched the dread we cannot bear to name: grant us the grace of patient stillness and the courage to sit with uncertainty, that we may wait in hope for your promised dawn of redemption; through Jesus Christ our Savior, by whose name even the gates of Hell cannot stand. Amen.”

This day is one of my favorites on the Christian calendar, the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. After a very full and busy liturgical week with intense religious fervor and a few logistical meltdowns, eveytyhing suddenly becomes still and quiet.

To be sure, items remain on the “to do” list, whether its polishing brass, rehearsing music, or finishing an Easter sermon (!) but the pace has slowed…except for Jesus.

Yes, this is obviously, in one respect, a day when the crucified Jesus is in the tomb, but there are certain strands of Christian traditions that suggest something a bit more active and even dramatic: Jesus harrows Hell on this day. Descending not only into death, in other words, but into the depths of Hell itself, Jesus launches a rescue mission by demolishing the gates of Hades and liberating everyone who is there.

Everyone, no exceptions.

The classic icons of this dramatic scene include (as illustrated above) the wonderful moment of yanking a startled Adam and Eve from their tombs and dragging them into new life.

I like to expand that vision even further to include the wider world of other-than-human creatures and places. On this day when God leaves no one behind, all animals, and plants, and rivers, and trees, and everything that is declared “good” and “very good” in the biblical book of Genesis is taken up into the new life of Easter.

Everything.

I know this universal vision of divine life make some people nervous and uncomfortable. But how could it be otherwise? How could Creator God, revealed in Beloved Jesus, ever bear to leave anyone or any thing out of the promise of new life?

Artist Doug Blanchard included a marvelous image in his “Passion of the Christ–a Gay Vision” series for this very day, this day of breaking down the prison walls of Hell for a breathtaking vision of Easter. I feel privileged and deeply honored to have this painting on my wall in the rectory; pairing it with the traditional icon above creates a synergy of spiritual insight, a rush of grateful hopefulness on this singular, remarkable day when God leaves no one and no thing behind.

May we live into that divine promise as a people of unshakable joy.

Legacy Language and Redeeming the Flesh

My allergy to “binary thinking” in a world of “either/or” choices began in early childhood, and then took root in adolescence when I was trying to grapple with the dawning awareness of being a gay man.

Looking back on those years, the whole world seemed organized with absolute distinctions, but I remember especially how the logic of Christian faith itself seemed to run on binary categories: Heaven and Earth; the saved and the lost; faith and doubt; and perhaps the quintessential instance of such distinctions, St. Paul’s rigid contrast between “flesh and spirit,” which shows up directly in his letters to the Galatians and the Romans.

Maybe no one back then liked bodies very much, or maybe they were told not to like them: It’s difficult to say which came first in my suburban religious subculture, bodily disdain or biblical blindness. Regardless of its origins, the deep suspicion of the “flesh” lurked everywhere. Quite apart from trying to deal with emergent gay desires in adolescence, everyone living through puberty—gay, straight, trans, or just generally unsure—likely struggled to figure out how in the world to live with a body that was apparently just “bad.”

When I finally did come out as a gay man in my senior year at Wheaton College (an adventure worthy of a book), I was presented with yet another binary choice: either embrace my sexual identity or my Christian faith, but not both. For reasons I cannot fully fathom (likely an effervescent mix of my mother’s German stubbornness and a healthy dose of divine grace), I refused to choose. I insisted instead on following a path of integration, of discerning how to live as fully human and gratefully Christian.

“The Valley of Dry Bones,” Gordon Miller

Part of that journey was finding alternative ways to read St. Paul, who almost certainly did not intend to denigrate human skin, bones, and organs—the very bodies God makes—when he cautioned his first-century Christians about the “flesh.” These Greek terms we translate as “flesh” and “spirit” instead stood as markers for ways of being in the world, realms of being or social structures that shape the decisions we make and the kind of character we cultivate. “Flesh” stands for a world marked by greed, hatred, envy, and sexual exploitation, among other things. “Spirit” marks the sphere of love, joy, peace, and self-control.

This coming weekend, on the fifth Sunday in Lent, we will hear that distinction from Paul’s letter to the Romans (8:6-11), a powerful example of what I would call “legacy language,” or ways of speaking that are so resilient in our collective consciousness that we can’t just talk ourselves free of them. I could, for example, devote my entire sermon on Sunday morning to a more lifegiving way to read Paul, but that wouldn’t matter one little bit for those who grew up hearing Paul declare (and their parents confirm) that “the flesh is death” and the “Spirit is life.”

That’s not the only bit of legacy language many of us live with, but that one certainly functions like a flashback portal to a world we had hoped to leave behind, or like a password that opens once again that chamber of revulsion in our brains toward our own bodies. Having spent time not only with my own ghosts of bodily shame but also with seminary classrooms of LGBT people, this is clear: that kind of painful flashback with legacy language is sadly common, even today.

In my wonderful little parish, we often use the First Nations Version (FNV) of the New Testament in the Lenten season. It’s a wonderful indigenous translation that helps many of us, myself included, read familiar biblical texts with fresh vision. This week was another reason to be grateful for that version as I was dreading having to deal with Paul’s Letter to the Romans. But then I read the FNV translation: “If we set our minds on the broken desires of our bodies, we will see only death. But if we look to the power of the Spirit, we will have life and walk the road of peace. … If the same Spirit that brought Creator Sets Free (Jesus) the Chosen One back from the dead lives in you, then that same Spirit will also bring your death-doomed bodies back to life again.”

I nearly wept when I read that translation, which felt like the next chapter of an ongoing story of liberation. To be sure, the language of “deadly desires of our bodies” carries the same potential risk of triggering shame as the more traditional language. But the emphasis has clearly shifted: it’s not my flesh that is the problem, but the desires that attach to it, which can come from a wide range of sources, including the social and political realities in which we live.

The dangerous desires themselves are not named in this passage, but we can quite easily think of some deadly ones today: the desire that fuels a consumerism sufficient to wreck Earth’s ecosystems; the desire to treat enemies with vengeance to the point of bombing children; the desire to dominate women that leads to trafficking girls; the desire to associate only with people exactly like us and exclude everyone else, with violence if necessary; and the list goes on. Again, the FNV translation makes clear that the flesh itself is not the problem but rather the shaping and forming of that flesh with the kind of desires that “doom our bodies to death.” As Paul then declares, the very same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead will likewise bring our “death-doomed bodies back to life again.”

The Lenten lectionary this week takes me still further along this path of rehabilitating the flesh with the story of raising the flesh of Lazarus from the dead. I love that story from John’s account of the Gospel for many reasons, not least is the family of friends—Mary, Martha, and their brother Lazarus—who apparently meant so much to Jesus. He loved that circle of intimates, not just the idea of them, or their enduring qualities, or the fuzzy feelings they inspired, but their actual bodies, and their physical house, and the village where he found relaxation and respite.

There are multiple ways to read this astonishing story of raising a dead friend back to life, including all the tricks of navigating literary tropes and sorting through possible metaphorical treasures. But St. Paul has me focused on the odor coming from the grave in that story. Martha voiced that worry: don’t open the tomb! It’s going to stink to high heaven! What Jesus rescues from the grave is not just death but the stench of fleshy life I lived with for far too long.

There are some days when I relish the intricate metaphorical readings of these ancient texts and finding all the religious symbols lurking around the details these ancient writers included for our spiritual enlightenment. And then there are days when I set all that aside, days when I need Jesus to yank his dear friend from that smelly tomb with the sound of his grief-torn voice. Of course John the Evangelist would be the one to give us this moment, the Gospel writer who launches his whole account of the Gospel by declaring that the divine Word became flesh.

If you’re struggling with the legacy language of bad religion, this story is for you, for the redemption of your very own flesh. And this Gospel writer is for you, the one whose inspiration was largely drawn from (of all things) an even older collection of erotic love poetry known as the Song of Songs—poetry that affirms without any hint of hesitation the strength of love itself: it is indeed strong, stronger than even death (8:6-7).

The Holy Week journey begins just a week from this Sunday, a journey for which I, for one, will need the strongest love there is, not only for the annual sojourn toward the cross but to face a crucified world of intolerable pain and anguish with any kind of hope for Easter.

That’s my prayer: that we might find our own raspy, grief-worn voices rising with praise once again for a love that is still, and will always remain, stronger than death.

“Reaching — The Raising of Lazarus,” Michael Cook

The Realm of Love has No King

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone who hears.
Anyone who is thirsty.

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

Let everyone who is thirsty come and drink.

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

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

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

Sing Alleluia and Practice Resurrection

“If for this life only,” St. Paul writes, “we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Many Christians heard that verse yesterday, on Easter Day. It comes from Paul’s great fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, his extended, full-throated defense of a robust embrace of resurrection, of Easter.

In the excerpt appointed for yesterday’s celebration (15:19-26), Paul seems to insist that the great “Alleluia” of Easter morning must have consequences for more than this present life alone; the risen Christ leads us beyond the grave into new life with God.

I give my heart, with Paul, to that very hope. And yet, and still…perhaps now more than ever the flip side of that coin demands equal attention: if only for the “next life” we trust in Easter’s hope, we have ceded God’s precious Earth to the cruel and torturous forces of death. As in the Incarnation of God’s Word in Jesus, so also the resurrection of Jesus from the dead: this is no religious escape hatch from earthly concerns but the deepest possible union of Heaven and Earth; the Church ought to live like this is actually true.

Just like every compelling word and concept, the great “Alleluia” of Easter comes with important context, especially when we read Luke’s account of the Gospel (24:1-12). Writing in an occupied province of the Roman Empire, Luke constantly urges his readers to note the contrast between imperial power and the power of God. The Easter “Alleluia” resounds with its clearest tones when proclaimed with a brave resistance to Empire.

Biblical scholar Walter Wink offered a helpful framework for what it means to speak of “imperial power,” and especially as a caution against supposing that such power remains consigned to ancient history; imperial power always remains a present possibility, and for what Wink calls the “domination system.”

Whenever a society creates a network of power characterized by unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, biased race relations, and patriarchal gender relations, and then uses violence to maintain this network, that’s a “domination system.”

The first-century Roman Empire was a domination system, so was the Babylonian Empire before that; particular empires come and go, but the system lingers—even today, even in our own backyard.

Consider how Wink might help us read that passage from St. Paul. The risen Jesus, Paul says, is the first fruits of an unimaginable harvest. On that Great Day, the risen Christ will defeat “every ruler and every authority and power”—that’s the cue for Wink, who would remind us that Paul would surely have in mind the imperial principalities of the domination system that rob so many of abundant life.

Paul goes on to imagine that Great Day when even death itself is among the principalities defeated by Christ. But just as our joyful “Alleluia” deserves some textured context, so does that word death, which can sound a bit abstract in tidy religious spaces; it also rarely means just one kind of thing, especially these days when death comes in so many forms.

We see it in the destruction of whole ecosystems that give life, the clear-cutting of old-growth forests, and intolerable extinction of countless species, both plant and animal. We hear it in anguished cries from women with problem pregnancies who are heartlessly refused lifesaving medical intervention; we must acknowledge it in the short-sighted defunding of HIV prevention programs and the discontinued distribution of AIDS drugs around the world—a decision that has already killed people; and death lurks around even the bureaucratic cruelty in erasing—quite literally—transgender people from public policies and government websites.

That’s a short list of death’s many guises in today’s world, and we Christians must realize that this list has nothing to do with partisan politics. It makes no difference whether we align ourselves with Republicans or Democrats or Independents, as followers of the risen Christ, as followers of the Lord of Life, Christians cannot stand idly by while public policies rend the very fabric of our ecological existence and political postures shred the very basis of the common good.

We may not be able to change the whole wide world, but we can and we must practice resurrection right here, and right now—the empty tomb compels us and the great “Alleluia” equips us.

I love that notion of “practicing resurrection” right here and now. I first heard it from my friend and ministry colleague Jim Mitulski, who always devotes the season of Lent to the various ways we can “practice resurrection,” to make Easter matter in a world of violence and death—and we do that by the way we live, now.

When first-century imperial religion did its worst and killed Jesus, God refused to give Empire the final word. And we must stand as bold witnesses to God’s own Yes to life. No matter the cost, we must “practice resurrection” today.

This is why Easter is not only the unswerving confidence for that Great Day still to come—and it will come!—but also the courage to live in the light of that Great Day now.

I believe Luke was so eager to inspire this courage that he entrusted the news of Easter to women. He makes sure to name them: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James. These and others were among the women who had been with Jesus in Galilee, Luke says. By some accounts, these women supported Jesus in many ways, making that first-century Jesus movement possible.

These women were the last ones at the cross, and the first ones at the empty tomb.

When men are the measure of what matters, when only men can give testimony that counts in courts of law, and when men own other living beings as property, that’s when God reveals to women a path to new life.

Let us not overlook this crucial point: Luke entrusts the message of Easter to women in the midst of a patriarchal society. There’s not one bit of subtlety about this: the women share the news, and it was men, Luke says, and disciples of Jesus no less, who thought this was just an “idle tale” (Lk. 24:11).

When men are the measure of what matters, when only men can give testimony that counts in courts of law, and when men own other living beings as property, that’s when God reveals to women a path to new life.

The great Easter Alleluia invites us to walk that path and to practice resurrection; to live as friends in a community of equals; to extend a bold hospitality to everyone, no exceptions; to strive for justice and peace among all people; and to respect the dignity of every living being—just as we promise to do in the Baptismal vows we make.

Easter points to that great dawn over the horizon, beyond which we cannot presently see; in its dawning light, we must live as an Easter people now.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

“The Women Come to the Empty Tomb,” Mary Stephen

A Day for Rest and Harrowing

After a midnight thunderstorm roused me from sleep—and my Australian shepherd companion River, too, with wild barks—this Holy Saturday morning dawned quietly and with thick clouds. Birds were singing, though in muted tones, as River and I walked through our shoreline neighborhood before most others were even stirring in their houses; a rabbit hopped across the sidewalk in front of us.

This is one of my favorite days on the Christian calendar, though I can’t quite articulate the reasons why with much precision. I’m tempted to suppose its restfulness appeals to me after a thick week of liturgical intensity—but I still haven’t finished my Easter sermon, and I need to rehearse some of the ancient chants for the morning, and of course the altar guild will be cleaning the sanctuary and arranging lilies around the Table and Font–perhaps accompanied by the organist’s own rehearsals with the choir–while the hospitality brigade bakes or shops for festive refreshments in the parish hall.

Likewise Jesus, who was also not truly “resting” on this day, at least according to some traditions, and even though he was ostensibly confined to a rock-hewn tomb. This is the day—between Crucifixion and Resurrection—when Jesus “harrows Hell.”

Western Christianity seems content to leave such matters to a single phrase in the Apostles’ Creed: after declaring that Jesus was “crucified, died and was buried,” the creed then notes that “he descended into hell.” Eastern Orthodox Christians pull out all the theatrical stops to make this point (and I’m glad they do); Jesus doesn’t merely “descend” into the nether realms but topples the gates of Satan’s domain, liberating all those who had been held captive there by “sin, death, and the devil,” that “unholy Trinity,” as Martin Luther called them.

One of my favorite icons is of this very moment, with Jesus portrayed as trampling those hellish gates underfoot and literally yanking Adam and Eve from their tombs. I take great delight in just how startled those first humans appear to be by this arrival of Life. I also appreciate the crushing of those gates: Jesus not only rescues those who had been there, no one will ever go there again, not a single one; the realm of “sin, death, and the devil” has been destroyed, forever.

Visual and literary artist Jan Richardson invites something similar in a Lenten poem, one that blesses God “in whom nothing is wasted.” Nothing is tossed aside or thrown away—every “remnant, scrap, and shred” returns to God.

Poet and Anglican priest Malcolm Guite, in his collection of sonnets for the Christian year, focuses his attention instead on the tender care of a dead body on this day, the anointing of “ruined flesh” and the “kissing of wounds.” I’m grateful for this reminder that rest still matters—this is the Sabbath day, after all—and even with Hell to harrow, there must be space for renewal. Even so, and especially so, Guite weaves with the same thread as Richardson, insisting that “Love is never lost,” even at the grave—“harrowing” is replaced with “sowing” in Guite’s vision and love is the seed that shall not fail to sprout.

Here, then, an offering for this Holy Saturday from Malcolm Guite:

Here at the centre everything is still,
Before the stir and movement of our grief
That bears its pain and rhythm, ritual,
Beautiful useless gestures of relief.
So they anoint the skin that cannot feel
And soothe his ruined flesh with tender care,
Kissing the wounds they know they cannot heal,
With incense scenting only empty air.
He blesses every love that weeps and grieves,
And makes our grief the pangs of a new birth.
The love that’s poured in silence at old graves,
Renewing flowers, tending the bare earth,
Is never lost. In him all love is found
And sown with him, a seed in the rich ground.

Seeing and Touching, Trusting and Healing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Doubting Thomas with Jesus,” Krishen Khanna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Heaven and Earth are One

See the Conqueror mounts in triumph; see the King in royal state…

Those are the opening phrases of a hymn often used for the seventh Sunday of Easter, when many churches hear about the Ascension of Jesus, the story of the risen Christ being lifted up and taken by a cloud into Heaven.

We used a revised version of that hymn at my parish yesterday morning, with words that portray the rising Jesus not as the one who conquers but the one who saves; and to offer our praise, not for the glory of vanquished foes but of tender hearts.

I am convinced, perhaps more than ever, that such differences make a difference in today’s world—especially among those of us who are eager to make Christian worship matter for a world in pain.

The older and more typical images for the Ascension—images of conquest and of the totalizing power of monarchy—reflect particular cultural assumptions. The original version of the hymn I just noted, for example, was written by Christopher Wordsworth, a nineteenth-century English Bishop, who was writing at the height of the British Empire. The triumph of the risen Jesus, in other words, is the global triumph of Western civilization.

This blending of divine and imperial power offers a cautionary tale about religion itself: it’s never merely benign or neutral. Even well-intentioned people can mingle religious institutions and cultural customs in harmful ways. More severely, religious symbols can be appropriated for nefarious and violent purposes.

Nearly every religious tradition has fallen prey to this kind of appropriation over the centuries. And it’s happening today, in this country and others, under the banner of “White Christian Nationalism.”

I am not referring to all forms of patriotic engagement with our civic institutions; I don’t mean “Christian” in the way all churches worship and serve; and I certainly don’t mean to imply that white people are inherently bad.

“White Christian Nationalism” describes a particular cultural movement rooted in authoritarian impulses, divisive and hateful rhetoric, and is increasingly violent. I urged my own parish yesterday morning to take up the vital work of resisting this burgeoning cultural movement, to denounce it, and then bear witness to the transformative love and healing grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

While it seems like a wild stretch to go from the first-century ascension of Jesus to twenty-first century nationalism, religious symbols have always been vulnerable to that kind of political manipulation.

It’s worth noting here some key features of symbols. Many years ago, when I first started to learn about metaphorical and symbolic speech in Christian theology, it troubled me. I worried that theological symbols made the world of Christian faith less “real” somehow—as many people often say, Oh, that’s just a symbol.

What I have realized about symbols since then is precisely the opposite. Symbolic speech points to a reality so real that our ordinary, everyday language fails us. Whatever we may be trying to consider, perhaps its intimacy is just too close, or the joy too ecstatic, or the grief just too unraveling—in any case, we cannot speak of it directly; we need a symbol.

Gospel writers do this frequently. Many churches heard from Luke’s Acts of the Apostles yesterday morning, for example, when the closest friends of Jesus encounter Easter itself embodied; the risen Jesus is standing before them, and they have no idea what to say (Acts 1:6-11).

All they can manage to do is to look backward, to what they knew in a time gone by—what glory used to be, what fullness of life felt like so long ago, and what happiness might yet be once again.

“So,” they ask Jesus, “is this when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

That question sounds like such a wild non-sequitur it’s almost funny! But this is exactly the kind of question most of us would ask in a moment like that. Human beings always interpret and understand the world based on our past experiences and expectations. That’s really all we have to go on. Especially in disorienting moments of divine encounter we naturally revert to old patterns and familiar rhythms.

So while there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the question these disciples ask the risen Jesus, it just sets the bar far too low for Easter.

When we finally realize that Easter has ushered in a new world, already unfolding before us, with a wider horizon than we could have imagined, a dawn lighted with a brighter sun, we suddenly need a symbol for this, a way to talk about what we cannot possibly comprehend—and so Luke gives us the Ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God in Heaven.

It’s a beautiful symbol and it makes perfect sense to frame it with triumph. But precisely because “triumphalism” presents a real and present danger in today’s cultural moment, we need alternative frameworks.

We might consider a wonderful line from poet Mary Oliver: “My work,” she says, “is loving the world.” And that means, as she describes it, “mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”

What might happen if we embraced the Ascension of Jesus, not with images of conquest and triumph, but with love and astonishment?

What if we were astounded not only by the spectacular pyro-technics usually associated with heavenly glory, but were also thoroughly amazed just by looking at each other, the nearly unspeakable glory of human faces? What if noticing iris blooming and dogs playing and babies taking their first steps actually took our breath away? Could we hear the wind in the springtime trees and the birds singing their own songs of praise in the early morning and the waves that come rolling up the ancient dunes along stunning shorelines and just stand still, astonished?

I don’t mean that we must choose between the heavenly glory of ascension and a down-to-earth God dwelling among us. To the contrary, the Ascension of Jesus invites us to embrace both and especially how they are inseparably intertwined. Right there is the good news of Luke’s dramatic symbol, of Jesus joining Heaven and Earth, revealing their intimate union.

Heaven is not far off, and Earth is not lost. They are joined, united, woven together in an unimaginable tapestry of divine beauty.

We must live into that vision of union and communion, or we risk abandoning Earth to those whose only desire is to “divide and conquer.”

God calls the Church to live as witnesses to flourishing life and gracious healing and the transformations that come only from love and laughter and all the things we can’t even dare yet to hope for—because Heaven and Earth are one.

And that’s what it means to live as Easter people, people who are loving and astonished.

Bodily Memory and Peculiar Hope

My beloved Australian shepherd dog Judah died suddenly one week ago today. Except for a short trip that I took not long after adopting him, he and I were together every single day for nine years; I honestly don’t know how to live without him.

I’ve been walking every day since then, along exactly the same routes Judah and I would walk every day. We walked at least three, sometimes four times a day. Judah had a map of downtown Saugatuck firmly in his head; he knew which shops and restaurants had treats for him. He was quite insistent about stopping at those places on our late afternoon walk.

So I’ve been walking those routes this week, stopping at each of those places, remembering so clearly his beautiful face and his determined gait. I’m doing this not just because the exercise is good for me (though it is). I’m walking those routes because memory is often quite physical and bodily.

Memories run deep in our bones muscles, they take up residence in our guts and hearts. That’s why grief can be such a bodily experience; it can physically hurt. I can still feel the touch of Judah’s forehead on my lips where I kissed him while he died; I can still smell his soft and earthy fur.

The Gospel writer Luke tells us about two disciples of Jesus walking along a road toward a village called Emmaus (24:13-35). Luke puts this village at seven miles from Jerusalem, so this is not a short stroll, especially through that hill country of Judea.

These two disciples, these dear friends of Jesus, are walking with heavy hearts. Jesus had been horribly killed just three days prior. They are in shock, disoriented, probably afraid.

How do you go on after heartbreak, especially after trauma and violence? What do you do when it seems as if nothing will be the same ever again? How can you just walk to the village inn, just like you used to, as if nothing had happened?

Grief poses questions like these, repeatedly and painfully—things are not the way they were, and they will not be that way again. Significant loss will always change one’s life; this might be one of the earliest lessons everyone learns about life itself.

Those disciples knew that; that’s why they are so dejected and dismayed. Luke knew that, too, which is why he has the risen Jesus join the disciples on the road, but as a stranger, not even recognizable by his closest friends.

Easter does not put things back the way they were.

Nothing about the resurrection stories in accounts of the Gospel turns back the clock to how things used to be or how we wish they had been; that’s nostalgia, not resurrection.

Easter instead puts us on a road toward the fresh and startling, toward the unrecognizably new and vibrant.

It is also the case that this “stranger” on the road seems to lecture these disciples about the importance of the past, using the scriptures and quoting the ancient prophets. Later on, Luke tells us, these disciples marveled at how their hearts were burning within them, set ablaze by the compelling interpretations of Scripture they were hearing along the road.

This is not, however, a mere backward glance. We modern Western people tend to think that way, as if ancient texts remain roped off in a faraway, dusty history. To the contrary, shared memory, our texts and traditions, should help us understand who we are right now and how we got here, and therefore how to travel forward.

The “scriptures,” as Luke calls them, are meant to be a living tradition, speaking directly to the present moment for the sake of traveling faithfully toward an unknown horizon. This is why, in both Jewish and Christian communities, interpretations of ancient texts are always evolving, always brought to bear in fresh ways on current questions.

After all, Luke unfolds this story on a road; the disciples don’t even stay put at the village inn, not even for the night. They were—“in that same hour,” Luke says—back on the road. Luke portrays Christian communities on the move—shaped by sacred traditions but not enthralled by monuments or tethered to mere precedent; traditions are sacred when they keep our hearts open to the God who “makes all things new.”

This Emmaus-road story keeps Christian faith rooted equally in memory and hope, and especially how these intertwine in complex and compelling ways.

Both individuals and communities can sometimes become stuck in the past, perhaps paralyzed by painful histories or wistful about a fabled golden age; we can also become so enamored with “the next best thing” and constantly chasing after shiny objects that we become adrift, with no sense of where we are and with no compass to guide us forward.

Early in the twentieth century, philosopher and theologian Josiah Royce suggested that healthy communities must hold both memory and hope together; this can set us on a path to heal our wounds, repair our divisions, and unite us with love toward what Royce eventually called Beloved Community.

This made a profound impact on Martin Luther King, Jr., as he studied Royce in his doctoral program. The image of Beloved Community inspired King to reject any form of segregation or separatism in the Civil Rights Movement; he urged us instead to learn how to live with a shared memory of racial violence while also holding in common the hope of a future flourishing where all, no exceptions, live in peace with justice.

“Beloved Community” was Luke’s vision as well, especially in the aftermath of state-sponsored terror, a brutal execution, and a fragmented, scattered community of disciples and friends—a dismembered community. In the midst of this ghastly grief, Luke re–members the community around a table and during a shared meal.

In this story, Luke gives us all the elements of what Christians now recognize as Eucharist: our shared memory of what happened to Jesus; our shared hope of new life; the bread blessed, broken, and shared.

Blessing the bread reminds us that all things come from God and return to God.

In breaking the bread we see our own need for mending and healing.

By sharing the bread we embody a hopeful vision of wholeness and communion.

This is not only a bodily memory from the distant past but also a peculiar hope now and for the future. And I suspect that’s why Luke has Jesus suddenly and queerly disappear from that shared meal.

As Beloved Jesus vanishes from that table in Emmaus, Luke invites us to find him at all the other tables we set with hospitality, and where we welcome the stranger, and encounter the healing presence of the risen Christ—not to put things back the way they were, but to keep our hearts open to a future we cannot yet imagine.

In the meantime, I will keep walking the routes I once shared with Judah—because I miss him terribly and cherish the memories of walking with him. I will give thanks on those walks and along that road believing that the future of the risen Christ is not only my future but Judah’s, too.