Eucharist – Peculiar Faith

Harm Reduction: An Epiphany Pledge for 2026

I invite you to join me in making a pledge to reduce our harm and hurt, individually and collectively, in 2026. This is not an invitation to make a “new year’s resolution”; most of those fail before February. I find the binary “on/off” approach to behavior mostly unhelpful and even paralyzing. But even when we cannot remove all the hurt, we can reduce it, and we can also support others in similar efforts to create a growing network of those committed to reducing harm and cultivating healing.

In a world of so much hateful rhetoric, which fuels so many postures of aggression and hostility, and indeed entrenched violence, we must find ways not only to resist the harmful behaviors but also to disarm them, to apply healing balms to the myriad wounds, and likewise insist on creating spaces of abundant flourishing as a counter-witness to the culture of oppression and death that surrounds us. None of us can do this for the whole planet; but we can do it for our own households, for our neighborhoods, for our communities—we really can reduce the harm and hurt.

As a parish priest, I’m grateful for the liturgical texts that help to highlight our shared participation in a world of harm and the shared calling to contribute to a world of healing. The resources collected in Enriching Our Worship for The Episcopal Church include a confession of sin that not only acknowledges our own evil deeds but also the “evil done our behalf” (that list grows daily).

Similarly, this past September my parish here in Saugatuck used some of the texts developed by The Episcopal Church for the Season of Creation, including a confession of sin in which we noted our collective failure to claim our “kinship with all of God’s creatures,” and how we have “walked heavily on God’s earth, overused and wasted its resources,” and taken its abundance for granted. That text includes an expansive petition for forgiveness that includes the plea to “open our eyes to see God’s presence throughout the wonders of God’s creation, and to gladden our hearts” by encountering that divine reality—this alone would surely reduce harm and promote healing.

In that same collection of texts, we also gave thanks following Communion for the mysteries of “grain and grape, of earth and sky, and of body and blood,” divine gifts to inspire us to “renew the face of the earth,” praying that we might “join our efforts with God’s passion” to reflect God’s “healing glory in Creation.”

I’m also particularly mindful of the grating confluence on this day of The Epiphany, one of the great feasts of the church, which is also the anniversary of the U.S. capitol riot and violent attack on American democracy (today is the fifth anniversary of that horrible day). Not unlike celebrating the Feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus on August 6, which is also the anniversary of the atomic detonation over Hiroshima, Japan, the mashup of religious observances and civic occasions seems nearly blasphemous. But I think that might very well be the point of observing a religious calendar in the first place: it matters for how we live with others.

We might take note, for example, of how Eastern Orthodox Christians weave a liturgical thread from the Nativity (Jesus in a manger) to the Epiphany (the magi presenting extravagant gifts to the toddler Jesus) and into the waters of the River Jordan for the Baptism of the adult Jesus. Taken together, that arc is celebrated overall as The Theophany, the manifestation of God. More pointedly, God shows up right where we are, in the cribs of starving children, and the bombed-out houses where toddlers once played, and rivers now poisoned with toxic forever chemicals.

God manifests everywhere in the ordinarily beautiful (the playful romps of my Australian shepherd dog, the outstretched hand of a four-year old reaching for Communion, the ice shelf along the shoreline of a great lake) and also the extraordinarily disturbing (nearly every headline in the daily news). Religious faith doesn’t just float above all the messy flotsam of human culture but burrows into it, emerges from it, and offers radiant forms of transformative energy—it helps us reduce harm and promote healing.

My own Epiphany plan for Harm Reduction in 2026 includes three broad pathways. The image of a “path” matters because the most important changes never happen overnight, and we all need time to adjust to new ways of being in the world. My life today—how I think, the way I see the world, where I put my priorities—is remarkably different from when, for example, I was ordained way back in 1988, and I could not have lived back then as I do now. The most important journeys take time.

To that end, I hereby pledge to reduce harm and promote healing by following more carefully and fully these three pathways:

1. Listen More Carefully
This path has always been my greatest teacher. It took quite a few years in my life (beyond college) to appreciate my cognitive abilities (I never thought I was particularly smart); it took even longer to understand that only experience can make one wise, and that includes, by definition, the commitment to listen, especially to perspectives different from my own.

Social patterns and cultural customs in the United States today have retrenched the longstanding tendency in this country to speak first and ask questions later, which has contributed to the deepest divisions and moments of fragmentation I have ever experienced. I have never cast as many suspicious glances toward strangers in my life as I have over the last ten years. I have never doubted the good intentions of public figures the way I do today. I recognize a deep need to trust others again by re-learning how to listen (and that includes reading, noticing, pausing, waiting, and tending, none of which makes for an easy path in a 2026 world).

2. Diminish Patriarchal Whiteness
I know how “woke” this particular path sounds, but I’m trying to follow the brown-skinned, itinerant preacher in a first-century occupied province of the Roman Empire who paid more dignified attention to women and girls than one might otherwise expect and who (according to later writers) insisted that we stay awake (Mt. 24:42, Mk. 13:33). In simpler terms: I’m trying to deepen my awareness of how much privilege attaches to my maleness and my whiteness—it’s a lot, more than I can grasp, and it wreaks havoc everywhere.

To be clear: this path does not assume that white people are bad and men are evil. It does assume that modern Western society has been in the grips of a system (cultural, political, and religious) that favors white men over all others, a grip that has lasted for many centuries and has become especially entrenched today. This presumption of white male dominance shows up in religious texts, liturgical prayers, public policies, economic analysis, medical research, and nearly all forms of entertainment.

Again, I cannot change all that but I can reduce at least some of the harm caused by all that: I can tend carefully to the gendered language of public worship, and whom I choose to feature in my sermons, and what kind of visual art appears on our liturgy leaflets. I can also encourage my clergy colleagues to do the same and I can learn from them—especially the women, and especially the ministers of color—how to do this better. I want to be on this path more fully, so help me God.

3. Eat Plants, Care for Animals
I have been on a vegetarian path in my diet for some years now, and have more recently embarked on a road toward a fully vegan lifestyle. Do note the words “diet” and “lifestyle.” What I eat is mostly vegetarian (only very occasionally some fish) but how I want to live is with a much more robust respect toward the full dignity of every living being, which is not only about what I eat. (A great place to start thinking about this and also to be inspired is right here.)

There are multiple reasons for my conviction about this commitment: eating more plants is much healthier for human bodies; reducing meat in our diets is one of the most significant actions we can take for ecological healing and renewal; by refusing to eat animals, I reduce pain and suffering in the world exponentially with every meal.

This path can reduce harm in my own body, but I am much more concerned to reduce dramatically the harm and hurt that is foisted upon 10 billion land animals who are killed in factory farms in the United States every year. I hate doing the math, but here it is: in this country alone, that’s slightly over 27 million animals every day, or 1.1 million every single hour of every single day. Let’s be painfully clear: this is not a quiet death for all these animals; it is a cruel system of daily fear, pain, and torture among living beings who are sentient and self-aware (in the case of pigs, they possess roughly the same cognitive and emotional capacity as a human three-year old). Regardless of how “alike” other animals might be to humans, the point is to lessen the pain and suffering of another creature of the same God, to reduce the harm we cause just by what we eat.

Those are ambitious pathways and cannot be traveled in a single year; but the point is not necessarily to “arrive” as much as it is to keep traveling.

“I have come that they may have life,” John’s Jesus said, “and have it in abundance” (Jn. 10:10). For many years now, that one verse has been my yardstick for assessing my pastoral decisions, liturgical design, preaching and teaching, and my convictions about interpersonal relationships. The abundant life God intends for all will appear—on this Feast of the Epiphany, it will manifest—not all at once but in waves and spurts and moments and collaborations along the good road we take together toward reducing the harm and hurt we cause.

What pathways might you take to reduce harm in the world? Where do you see a path toward healing right where you live? Will you join me in taking an Epiphany pledge? I would love to hear from you…

“The Baptism of Christ, II,” Daniel Bonnell

We Don’t Know What’s Going On—Love Anyway

There’s a certain style in modern American visual art that always tugs on my holiday heartstrings. Examples include Currier and Ives lithographs and Norman Rockwell paintings. These easily summon fond childhood memories of Christmas, and I usually extend those memories outward into a kind of nostalgic reverie about American life more generally; as a child, I thought everyone in every country celebrated Christmas, and they did it just like we always did in the western suburbs of Chicago.

Those childhood memories conjure images of an American society that never really existed, a whole world in which everyone knew what was going on, how to behave, and looked happily toward a future of not only safety but also prosperity and comfort.

The world seems decidedly less safe today, even regularly violent. So much is unraveling, not only culturally and politically but also ecologically. I stay current with the daily news but quite often feel disoriented and have no idea what’s going on. Perhaps few, if any, ever know what’s really going on—not even scientists.

Not long ago, the James Webb Space Telescope revealed a set of surprisingly massive galaxies and black holes that would seem to demand a revision of standard theories about how the Universe emerged. That same telescope recently detected not just an unexpectedly massive black hole but one that appeared to be fleeing its own galaxy and leaving a trail of ejected stars in its wake, a trail approximately 200,000 light years long (that’s not supposed to happen).

Years ago, I used to think that being religious helps us to know what’s going on in the Universe. But not even with the most sophisticated instruments ever devised can tell us with any precision how stars dance through the galaxies. As English priest Martyn Percy has noted, the seasons of Advent and Christmas remind us that we simply cannot stretch our words far enough to explain or even grasp the mystery we call “God.”

Over time, I have come to realize that my faith as a Christian offers something much richer than knowledge. Religious traditions—all the stories and rituals and furniture and clothing and sanctuary spaces—religious traditions remind us that what we think is going on barely scratches the surface of reality. Beneath, within, entangled, and woven throughout the routines of our ordinary lives the divine light shines and beckons.

Yes, we have stories about angels delivering a message and about a heavenly chorus praising God during this mythical and magical Christmas season. But the point of these stories is not the extraordinary spectacle; the stories direct our attention instead to the working-class family with a pregnant teenager, and the migrant workers tending sheep, and the livestock gathered around a feeding trough.

These ordinary people with ordinary lives mark where the very presence of Creator God appears; and we must not treat those moments lightly. That’s exactly why we dress up, and sing carols, and adopt funny bodily postures in highly stylized buildings—and it’s also why Christians gather around a Table where everyone is welcome to receive physical tokens of God’s own life in the form of bread and wine—and in the wonderful parish where I am privileged to serve as a parish priest, when we say “everyone,” we mean it, no kidding. As I like to say, at All Saints’ Parish, “all” really does mean all.

Especially in the Christmas season—and in a world of festering suspicions and wary glances and divided communities—especially during Christmas, a season devoted to God’s own commitment to dwell among us in the most vulnerable flesh imaginable, this is the time to ensure that everyone, every single person, is made to feel welcome at God’s own Table.

That’s why religious faith communities must notice and name the wider cultural realities in which we live. Compelling and lifegiving forms of religion don’t just float above the fray of human communities; all the stuff of human interaction and conflict, of human joys and sorrows, of our entanglements with other animals and ecosystems—all of it is the material from which we spin the fabric of faith itself and where God is pleased to be woven into the threads of our bodily lives and relationships.

All of this is on display in the familiar story of the Nativity we hear each Christmas Eve from the Gospel according to Luke (2:1-20). The details in that story matter. Luke makes sure to tell us that the moment of nativity happened when Ceasar Augustus was the Emperor of the Roman Empire; and when Quirinius was the governor of Syria. We should note that Judea, where Bethlehem is located, was part of a larger imperial province called Syria-Palestina, and where a Roman governor supervised puppet kings like Herod. And these details can, at the very least, serve as a good reminder that our political lives as humans have always been complicated, fraught, and quite regularly terrifying—exactly where God shows up.

Just as we cannot possibly fathom what’s really going on in the “vast expanse of interstellar space,” our own lives and the lives of our neighbors are often just as perplexing. All of us live with concerns and convictions, we all harbor dreams and moments of dread, high hopes and crushing sadness about all sorts of things.

We sort through all those complexities as best we can, and we will not always agree with each other about how to sort them out, even about those things that are most vital and pressing—probably especially those. We don’t have to agree, but we must wrestle with such things together, trusting that the presence of God is with us in the struggle—out there in hilltop fields watching our sheep, or tending the livestock in a cave-like stable, or busily caring for guests in a sold-out inn, and all the while staying vigilant, not knowing when the weight of imperial Rome might come crashing down on our heads.

We don’t have to know exactly what’s going on, and we don’t have to understand perfectly how everything works before we decide to care for the needy and lonely, and to love each other fiercely and tenderly. To love each other just as God loves us, in the most ordinary stuff we can imagine in this mysteriously physical universe: the flesh of a newborn baby.

As American storyteller and former priest Brennan Manning once noted, “You could more easily catch a hurricane in a shrimp net than you can understand the wild, relentless, passionate, uncompromising, pursuing Love of God made present in a manger.”

Christmas is not the time for explanations, no matter how clever our philosophies or theological systems; we do not gather in worship and prayer at Christmas for greater understanding or more precision in our knowledge; the grand mysteries of time and space need no parsing at the manger; and the wonderful befuddlements of human life and relationships can simply remain gloriously tangled into knots.

Let all of that be just as it is, just for now, just for a moment. These Twelve Days of Christmas invite us to hear once again the message of angels delivered to shepherds in a field, and to see an anxious and exhausted couple caring for a newborn baby—and then to marvel, with full-throated praise, or with a single tear on our cheeks, at the presence of God dwelling gently among us.

The Art of Love in the Advent of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The King of Love for a Realm of Healing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pilate wants to know if Jesus is a king.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love is not weak.

Love is not merely sentiment or a cozy feeling.

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

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

Love is fierce and strong—stronger than even death.

Love incarnate stood before Pilate.

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

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

Who are “We” at the Table Now?

How could this happen? I am absolutely gobsmacked, not only that he won but even more that the vote wasn’t particularly close. Even those who support him are a bit surprised. What do we make of this? How did we get here? Who are “we”?

I’m not a political pundit, but I am invested in politics, as every religious leader should directly admit. “Politics,” a word deriving from the Greek polis, or “city,” refers to all the many different ways we structure our societies and negotiate with others for resources and strategize for ways (hopefully) to advance the common good. In that sense, religion is by definition thoroughly political (as all of the ancient Hebrew prophets and also the Christian Gospel writers demonstrate, as well as the liturgical texts in The Book of Common Prayer).

It’s from that perspective that I’m inviting the parish I am privileged to serve to reflect on this moment in American cultural and political history and how we should now live our faith in public. I would have likewise invited this reflection had Ms. Harris won the election, but the invitation now feels laced with urgency, especially as the “common good” seems alarmingly fragile.

Who are we? I keep returning to that question, in large measure because an individual does not a social movement or a political party make. This is often difficult to keep in mind concerning Donald J. Trump, whose sheer force of personality fills a room—or an arena. Quite honestly, I haven’t wanted to suppose that Mr. Trump represents anything other than himself, someone whose public statements and moral character—in all frankness—I find reprehensible.

Never could I have imagined a convicted felon and instigator of insurrection running for President of the United States (much less actually winning), a man who mocks disabled people, advocates violence, and sexually assaults women.

But no, putting my attention there, on one person’s moral failings is a mistake. The election wasn’t about him; it was and still is about our neighbors. Focusing entirely on him risks distracting us from the vital work ahead in a deeply divided country—I mean, the work of trying to understand our neighbors, and in this case, “neighbors” for me refers to those who voted for Mr. Trump.

The week before the election, the New York Times Magazine published an essay on the work of Robert Paxton, a leading historian of fascism, whose award-winning 1972 book on the French collaborators with Nazi Germany analyzed the emergence of Vichy France during World War II.

Paxton was at first reluctant to apply the term “fascism” to the MAGA movement in the Republican Party but now believes we should, though with caveats (the character of this moment in world history is not the same as it was in the 1930s, for example). Whatever else we want to say about “Trumpism,” Paxton said, we need to note carefully that this is a “mass phenomenon” from below, and the “leaders are running to keep ahead of it.” This isn’t really about Donald Trump at all—he’s mostly a convenient means to an end. Paxton’s point about this is quite startling (if not alarming): “Trumpism,” he notes, has a much more solid and broader base of support in the American electorate than either Hitler did in Germany or Mussolini did in Italy.

Paxton also cautions against thinking of fascism as an “ideology” or a kind of “party platform.” That approach obscures the action-oriented character of a movement that is not rooted in any coherent philosophy but instead fills the void in a cultural system that has broken down or failed. This is why, in part, Paxton is still somewhat hesitant about the fascist label, which implies more stability for a cultural moment than likely exists. This, it seems to me, is a large part of what makes understanding my neighbors so challenging: not everyone votes the way they do for the same reason.

While David Brooks urges us to see in this election a resounding No to “liberal elites”—and there is likely some truth to that analysis—I worry that this framing of the outcome reduces our social complexity to a single cause, or even worse, perpetuates what has been a long trend of American anti-intellectualism, as if “education” leads inevitably to tribal betrayal.

As Paxton would suggest, this moment is manifesting a multiplicity of convictions, grievances, aspirations, and motivations, some of which likely stand in opposition to the others even though they all inspired the same vote. The working poor in rural America may feel mostly abandoned by politicians but that’s hardly cause for common cause with high-tech billionaires who want to erase government regulations.

As I sort through all of this (and more) for my work as a parish priest, I keep returning to what has always been the focus of my vocation: the Eucharistic Table. While it’s important to keep saying that “all are welcome, no exceptions” (which I say every single Sunday at the beginning of worship), I now worry in ways I haven’t before about whether this invitation covers over the differences among those who gather at the Table—and some of the differences are clearly deep and profound.

I worry, in other words, about turning the Eucharist into a ritual of avoidance, a kind of shared denial about what keeps us separate and segregated. (This has of course always been the risk concerning racial differences in a white supremacist society as well as the differences of gendered sexuality in a patriarchal world.) If table fellowship amounts to merely a superficial unity, then “church” is not much more than a cultural cliché.

I certainly do not mean that how one votes matters for how we gather at the Table, but I do mean that how one lives matters after we leave the Table. And that’s why the difference between “partisan” and “political,” though subtle, remains so vital.

I believe Eucharistic formation shapes Christian people to stand in solidarity with the poor, advocate for the vulnerable, work for peace with justice, and commit to a lifelong path of ongoing conversion to the Gospel of Jesus Christ—whose body we ourselves become at that Table as Christian people. The Table also reassures us of divine forgiveness when we fail to live as Christian people, and also the never-failing love of God, which is always freely offered regardless of how we live.

More succinctly: Eucharist welcomes everyone and leaves no one unchanged.

Eucharistic fellowship is, apparently, just as complex as American electoral politics. This has likely always been true, but now, perhaps, we know it in a new way.

But who, exactly, are we?

That Nothing May be Lost

“Eucharist” is one of those arcane religious words I wish more people could embrace for their own healing and thriving, and in turn for a better world. The word comes from a Greek verb for “giving thanks,” and it refers to what is more commonly called “The Lord’s Supper” or “Holy Communion.” And I really do believe it can change the world.

I believe the Eucharist is at the very heart of the Gospel and is the very soul of the Christian Church for the sake of the world’s flourishing. The Eucharistic Table offers us God’s love and grace in Christ with tangible tokens of bread and wine—food for the journey into new life.

Given all that, I find it very strange indeed that the Gospel according to John has no Eucharistic narrative in it—or rather, nothing most Christians would immediately recognize as precisely that narrative.

What most Christians take “Eucharist” to mean is due in large measure to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Those other Gospel writers give us the “last supper” where Jesus talks about bread as his body and wine as his blood. That’s what most of us look for when we’re looking for Eucharist, and John doesn’t have it.

But this does not mean that there is no Eucharist in John.

Intriguingly, some scholars have suggested that the entire gospel according to John is one long, extended Eucharistic narrative. The reason we can’t find the Eucharist in John is because the entire Gospel of John itself is Eucharist. Some have also suggested that John was composed precisely for the purpose of reading it during early Christian celebrations of the Eucharist.

“The Feeding of the 5000,” Daniel Bonnell

Yesterday’s lectionary gave us John’s version of the miraculous feeding of the 5,000, which is one of John’s key Eucharistic stories (6:1-21). And the lectionary will continue to give us this image for the whole month of August, returning again and again to the image of bread and therefore to the Eucharist.

Rather than betrayal, suffering, and death (what most Christians associate with the “last supper” narratives), John frames the Eucharist with divine abundance and divine inclusion. And this matters far more than we usually imagine for a fragmented world in pain. I would say the stakes could not be higher in that regard when reading from this sixth chapter of John.

I find it helpful to remember that the disciples are never just the disciples in Gospel stories; they serve as types and symbols—sometimes for the realist, or the doubter, or the loyalist, or the betrayer.

First, then, we might note that in this iconic story from John the disciples stand for all those who worry about scarcity. Jesus looks out at the crowds who had been following him all around the Galilean shoreline, and he says, “these people are hungry.”

“Well, yeah,” the disciples say, “but where are we going to buy enough bread for all these people? What we have isn’t even enough for us!”

To be clear, the disciples were not wrong in what they said; they assessed the situation correctly—they did not have enough.

But where we see scarcity, John invites us to see God’s abundance.

Of course that’s a lot easier to say than it is to live. In fact, most economic systems in human history have been built on the fear of scarcity and the anxiety that there won’t be enough of what we need—not enough water, not enough bread, not enough love, not enough respect or dignity.

There will always be certain individuals and organizations who capitalize on that fear and anxiety, usually by dividing communities into groups—those who have supposedly earned what little there is, and others who haven’t. More severely, by demonizing others who threaten to take away what little is left. The fear of scarcity often turns violent.

John’s miraculous feeding of the 5,000 is a Eucharistic story of abundance. There is always more than enough love, more than enough grace, more than enough companionship at the Table to satisfy our deepest longings.

We might also remember that there are no random or insignificant details in these Gospel stories. After feeding the crowds with what little they had, there is more leftover. How much more? Not eleven, and not thirteen, but exactly twelve baskets of leftovers.

Just as there are twelve tribes of ancient Israel, and just as there are twelve disciples, so there are twelve baskets of leftovers.

“Gather up the fragments,” Jesus says, “so that nothing will be lost.”

Nothing? Not one single tribe? Not one single disciple, not even Judas?

In today’s world of zero-sum games, there must be losers in order to have any winners and our triumph rises up only from the wreckage of the tragedy of others. But that is not the world of John’s Gospel where Eucharistic abundance is so pervasive and so comprehensive that nothing, absolutely nothing and no one is left behind.

John invites us to catch a glimpse of God’s own heart in this story, where no one is lost, and no one is left behind. The implications of this story for how we live and the kind of communities we create are actually quite staggering.

It’s nearly impossible to imagine a world where we no longer keep score; where constant contests give way to communion and “fairness” doesn’t matter nearly as much as inclusion; a world where there is no such thing as “acceptable losses” and “collateral damage” is a forgotten notion from a far distant past.

Many Gospel parables evoke exactly this unimaginable world, and John’s Jesus underscores that vision by remaking entirely what it means to “win”: it means not leaving any one behind—not a single one, not even the betrayer.

This vision is so difficult to trust that other parts of the New Testament—even other parts of John—seem to step back from it. And today, many centuries later, the Eucharist—or rather the last supper—continues to be a flashpoint for cultural controversy. The latest example just occurred at the summer Olympics in Paris where the opening ceremony included what appeared to be a parody of the last supper with drag queens.

A variety clergy and churches demanding an apology for that performance, I think we Christians should instead be thanking the performers. Not only is a drag queen last supper not offensive, it might actually illustrate John’s Eucharistic vision better than most Christian liturgies—not only is everyone invited to the Table, we are invited to leave no part of ourselves behind. All of us and our whole selves belong at the Table.

I love John for retaining and preserving at least this kernel, this seed of a truly radical Jesus who shows us a truly unbelievable God—the God for whom even one is an unacceptable loss. If God cannot tolerate losing even one, then even if it takes an eternity, God will find them.

So much is arrayed against that vision in a world built on scarcity and exclusion. That’s one of the primary reasons why I practice what is often called an “open table” policy in the parish where I’m privileged to serve as the rector.

At All Saints’ Parish in Saugatuck, Michigan, there are no preconditions for participating in the Eucharistic Communion. Everyone is welcome—no exceptions, no caveats, no kidding. Nothing is required to receive Communion at the All Saints’ Table other than one’s own desire for Communion—because God loves each and all of us without limit. Nothing we can do can make God love us more than God already does, who has given God’s own self to us already. And nothing we can do can make God stop loving us, not ever.

I am convinced that this kind of Table Fellowship can change the world; it offers healing to a world of hurt, and then still more. It offers a Eucharistic vision of a world remade by love and grace where no one is left out—not a single one.

“Gather up the fragments,” Jesus says, “so that nothing may be lost.”

…so that nothing will be lost.

“The Miracle of the Five Loaves and Two Fish,” Carol Bomer

Leather Daddies and Drag Queens: A Last Supper for Everyone

The phone, as the saying goes, was ringing off the hook. Media outlets were calling for a comment or to schedule an interview. LGBT activist organizations were also calling, wondering how we should manage the “damage control.”

Back in 2007, the annual Folsom Street Fair in San Franciso, billed as the “world’s largest and best loved” leather event, was about to get underway when I was the Programming Director at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion in Ministry in Berkeley, California. People of all sexual orientations and gender identities gather for this event organized around the vast diversity of leather-related sexualities, dinners, exhibits, and of course the daylong street fair.

The fact of the fair itself was not the issue; it was the marketing for the fair that put people into a panic. That year’s poster evoked an image of the Last Supper styled after da Vinci’s famous painting. But this depiction included leatherfolk as the disciples and a table replete with not only bread and wine but also sex toys and various leather paraphernalia. It featured a shirtless African American “Jesus” with an outrageous drag queen on his right and a harnessed leatherman on his left.

Plus ça change…as it were. And here we are again; it’s a different cast of characters but basically the same script.

This weekend’s opening of the summer Olympics in Paris has created a controversy just as vigorous as the Folsom fair, this time with a last supper of drag queens. Christian clergy of various churches are demanding an apology for what they believe mocks the final meal Jesus shared with his friends, which is of course the template for the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.

But an apology is precisely the wrong thing to ask for; we Christians should instead be grateful. Not only is a leather daddy or drag queen last supper not offensive, such images might actually illustrate particularly well a core conviction of the Christian Gospel: everyone is invited to the Table, and we’re invited to bring our whole selves with us.

(And by the way, the Last Supper done up in leather and in drag are not the only two contemporary re-imaginings of this iconic scene; Doug Blanchard is one of many contemporary queer artists who work with this material–and he’s one of my favorites. The plethora of creative re-appropriations of that Gospel story and that moment in the life of Jesus bears ongoing witness to the power of table fellowship, the intimacy of Jesus and his closest friends, and by extension, the self-offering of God to the world in ways we can scarcely conceptualize–of course there would an outpouring of creative energy for just such a divine encounter!)

“Last Supper (Passion of the Christ series),” Doug Blanchard

It just so happens that this morning’s Sunday lectionary gave us John’s version of the miraculous feeding of the multitude, which many scholars take as John’s favored image for Eucharist (John didn’t include a last supper narrative like the other three gospel writers did). The abundance in John’s story is underscored by the many baskets of leftovers after the meal, and also with the instruction from Jesus: “gather up the fragments…so that nothing may be lost.”

So nothing may be lost.

What most people missed about that Folsom Street Fair poster is just how seriously leatherfolk take the very idea of spirituality and how their own sexual relationships and hyper-gendered displays of power qualify as spiritual practices. (Be sure to read the Fair’s mission statement, which includes decolonizing commitments, racial equity postures, and acknowledging stolen indigenous lands.)

Workshops on spirituality have been appearing at leather conferences and gatherings for years now. Many of those involved in these gatherings are also actively and generously involved in charitable work around poverty, hunger, and homelessness—work they understand as part and parcel of their leather spirituality.

Imagine what might change in the world if Christian churches had stepped up in Paris on that world stage and declared the Drag Queen Last Supper a beautiful and inspiring depiction of the radical welcome of the Gospel extended to all—no exceptions. So that nothing may be lost.

Leatherfolk and Drag Queen depictions alike—and the many other artistic re-imaginings of that final meal—proclaim what churches ought to be preaching rather than grumbling about concerning queer people (yet again): the Gospel welcomes everyone, just as we are, no exceptions. And that’s exactly what I see in these ostensibly “offensive” pieces of art: people who have put themselves on the table, leather gear, sex toys and all. It is at once a deeply human and deeply spiritual portrayal—exactly like the final meal Jesus shared with his closest friends.

Neither a Leather Daddy nor a Drag Queen at the Last Supper should cause anyone to worry about sacrilegious art. People of faith can instead thank the artists for reminding us that the radical welcome of God in Christ is actually supposed to be scandalous; if it isn’t, we need to try harder.

So, what did I tell the reporters asking for a comment back in 2007 about the Leather Last Supper? The same thing I would tell reporters today about the Drag Queen Last Supper at the Olympics: those images are preaching the Gospel better than most churches.

Loving My Country by Rejecting Nationalism

The Fourth of July is, well, a bit complicated for Episcopalians. As Anglican Christians, we’re “in communion” with the Church of England, which still functions as a state church (King Charles III is officially the head of that church, but no, we American clergy do not owe allegiance to the British Crown).

Many of us try not to be smug about that whole Revolution thing as we take pride in the separation of church and state in the U.S., but then remember we have very little reason to be—the State of Oklahoma now requires teaching the Bible in public schools; the Ten Commandments must be displayed in Louisiana schools; the Speaker of the House of Representatives wants to use the Bible as the basis for legislating; and the hard-working staff at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State are likely sleep deprived and running out of room on their website’s homepage for listing all the flare-ups of theocracy appearing on the American landscape.

Honestly, just being any kind of committed (it’s hard not to say “real”) Christian today makes living in the United States not just a little complex and usually quite daunting if not horrifying. I want to love my country; I loved it uncritically in my youth, as many did back in the 1960s and even 1970s (I have enduringly fond memories of perching on my father’s shoulders as a small child and watching the flag-waving parade go back in my Midwestern home town). I do not want simply to scowl and scoff at anything remotely patriotic.

Sitting on the brink of the American Independence Day holiday, navigating a path between that rock and hard place will mean returning once again in my prayerful reflections to some ancient history.

Sixteen centuries before the current rise of Christian Nationalism in the United States, St. Augustine faced the imminent collapse of the Roman Empire. The collapse unfolded over many decades, but a common date used for the empire’s definitive demise is 476, when a Germanic king finally sacked Rome and deposed the emperor. Waves of Germanic barbarians had been attacking various outposts in the northern parts of the empire for quite some time before that, and some of those incursions put the city of Rome under threat on multiple occasions. This was deeply shocking to most of Rome’s citizens, who never imagined the “eternal city” would ever fall.

While Christianity had taken root as the “official religion” of the Roman Empire (a milestone set in motion by the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century), there were plenty of citizens who still practiced older or “pagan” forms of religious traditions. Many of them started to blame the Christians for Rome’s weakness and argued that the empire needed to return to its more ancient pagan roots. Even some Christians were deeply distressed by Rome’s instability given the widespread assumption that the promised and hoped-for “Kingdom of God” was nothing other than Rome itself.

In response to all this, St. Augustine wrote his now classic book The City of God, which appeared in the year 426. Augustine weaves together some complex arguments concerning a number of interrelated topics, but one of his key points is this: the collapse of Rome is not a failure of God’s promise because no earthly city can or ever will be the hoped-for heavenly city. In every time and place, he writes, what God calls the Church to do is always the same: create Eucharistic communities that bear witness to the transformative love of God, a love that transcends every civic border.

I’m thankful for Augustine even as patriotism is now more fraught for American Christians than ever before, and those complexities have been growing with the emergence of a robust movement of White Christian Nationalism. It behooves all of us, especially in this election year, to understand the twin threat posed by this movement to both our democratic institutions and the integrity of the Gospel.

A good place to start concerning White Christian Nationalism is with a recent CNN article, including the important caveat that “Evangelical Christianity” is now more brown than white and not at all nationalistic. Another helpful resource is an interview on the PBS Newshour with a former Christian Nationalist pastor. Where I currently live, in western Michigan, we’ve witnessed the direct results of this movement on county government, and with a helpful and hopeful coalition of clergy and Christian lay people actively opposing that nationalist takeover.

At a time when many Christians still think of patriotism as a Christian spiritual discipline, it’s worth returning to Augustine’s ancient insights. As Christians, our loyalty belongs not to any nation or empire but only to the Gospel and to the community of God’s people called “church.” Our true and lasting hope as Christian people, in other words, is not the ultimate triumph of any particular nation-state, not even the United States of America, but the transformation of every human society with the grace of God.

Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh (currently teaching at DePaul University in Chicago) has written extensively about these issues, including Augustine’s vision of the Church. His books on politics and the Eucharist have shaped a great deal of how I think about the significance of parish life and the difference faith communities can make and should make in the world.

Rather than adopting “American values” (whatever those might be) God calls us to promote Gospel values for the sake of God’s whole creation. Or as Cavanaugh puts it, “the task of the church is to interrupt the violent tragedy of the earthly city with the comedy of redemption” at the heart of the City of God. (A thirty minute presentation by Cavanaugh at a conference in France offers a good overview how he thinks about Eucharist and politics, not separately but always together.)

These days, just voicing critiques like these can earn one a great deal of disdain, even prompt physical threats, or at the very least make one vulnerable to being called “anti-American.” So let me be clear again: even though my Australian shepherd dog River and I will not be going to the local fireworks display this weekend, I do love my country, and I am grateful for the many gifts of this modern democracy.

“Every Tribe, Every Nation,” Marsha Vosburg

But the United States is not a Christian nation; there is no such thing as a “Christian Nation.” There are many nations on Earth and Christians reside in nearly every one of them, linked to each other by the sacramental bonds of unity called the Body of Christ.

Whatever freedoms and privileges American Christians might enjoy as Americans can best be used to strengthen that global network of Christian communities—not for the sake of the Church’s triumph, either, but for the sake of that abundant life Jesus said he came to give to all (John 10:10). Or as The Book of Common Prayer puts it, for the sake of “promoting justice, peace, and love”—regardless of anyone’s citizenship.

Healing the Storm

Storms come in a rather wide range of shapes and intensities, and they aren’t always about the weather. Stormy moments in our lives can tear up our psyches by the roots and whirl through our hearts like a raging tempest—anger, rage, grief, sadness, bitter resentments and panic attacks can all howl and blow with remarkable force.

Most of us surely know people whose own interior storms shape their relationships and whole neighborhoods, just like the weather. We can feel the barometer drop whenever they enter a room or join a meeting or sit down at a table with us. Entire communities can exhibit collective weather patterns that feel like ongoing atmospheric disturbances; this U. S. election year might as well be one long storm front.

Storms need healing, which is a rather odd way to think about the weather. But perhaps not so out of place in Mark’s account of the Gospel. The passages from Mark in the lectionary over that last few weeks have been highlighting the vital significance of healing for Mark’s portrayal of Jesus, and in what we heard this past week, with images of a storm-tossed sea (4:35-41).

The familiar story of Jesus calming a storm seems a bit out of synch with the other stories and encounters we’ve been hearing from Mark, but that’s mostly because the lectionary slices up these ancient texts into small, supposedly “digestible” bites for Sunday worship. It’s easy to miss the way Mark is stitching his stories together and the connections he seems keen to make among them.

The week before last, for example, we heard about the soil and the seeds, but we did not hear that Jesus offered that teaching to crowds who were standing on a beach while Jesus stood in a boat.

These are not merely props or backdrop; the stage matters for Mark’s point nearly as much as the words and the action. Beaches are liminal places, those locations where land meets water and the ground itself feels unstable. It’s a place of change and transition, and therefore of uncertainty and anxiety.

Mark’s Jesus called his disciples along a shoreline; he teaches on a beach; and he invites an excursion across the lake. This seashore moment is a vital component for the disciples in their process of formation, just as vital as hearing and engaging with the parables.

In fact, we could easily read this story of a storm on a sea as if the story itself were a parable: the boat stands for the life of faith that takes us on a journey full of risk with a Jesus we cannot fully understand or control.

Mark underscores this challenging formation in discipleship not only with a fearful storm but an unsettled community of friends. The disciples are at least perplexed if not annoyed with Jesus, who is not exactly a soothing presence in this story; he doesn’t calm the wind, he rebukes it, just as he did the demons in the first chapter of this Gospel.

God’s creatures are meant to live in harmony, with each other and with the rest of God’s creation. So Mark’s Jesus shows up and then stands up wherever that harmony is distorted or destabilized—whether in the misuse of power (represented by demons), or in corrupt institutions (represented by the hypocrisy of religious leaders), or in the alienation from life-giving ecosystems (represented by the fury of wind and waves).

Mark’s Jesus stands up and, when necessary, rebukes all of these forces arrayed against the full flourishing of God’s own precious creation.

Yes, but I think Mark would caution us about finding relief too quickly. Mark is not just singing a Bobby McFerrin song—don’t worry, be happy—as if Jesus will just fix everything according to our liking. After all, Jesus is asleep during the storm and the disciples are incredulous: “are you kidding? don’t you care that we’re dying here?” Mark more often sounds like the Gospel according to the Rolling Stones: you can’t always get what you want.

Mark’s view of discipleship involves a serious recalibration of what we expect from God and from God’s presence among us. And that certainly sounds like the experience of Job, part of whose story the lectionary also assigned this past Sunday.

It’s worth noting (and recalling frequently) that Job had every right to expect divine blessings in return for living a righteous life—that’s just how a religious life ought to work. But that’s not what happened for Job, precisely the opposite. And most of that ancient book from the Hebrew Bible is devoted to trying to figure out what went wrong.

Let’s also recall that Job’s “friends” are keen to ‘splain exactly why Job’s life ran off the rails as they offer all sorts of religious theories to explain the inexplicable God. In what the lectionary assigned on Sunday (38:1-11), it’s God’s turn to speak, and God speaks to Job from a whirlwind. The very presence of God is itself a storm.

“Where you there,” God asks, “when I laid the foundations of the world? Who was it who measured the pillars on which the Earth itself stands? Did you hear the morning stars sing at the birth of creation? Who was it that shut the sea with doors and made clouds its garment? Was it you?”

Hearing those rhetorical questions while sitting in a religious space, and especially while wearing fancy religious clothes, makes me uncomfortable (to put the matter mildly). The point in that ancient encounter is unnervingly clear: be careful about what you presume of God.

This seems to be Mark’s point as well. Mark does emphasize healing throughout his account of the Gospel, but he keeps inviting us to re-think what “healing” even means, that it doesn’t always require a “cure,” and that “restoration” and “renewal” are not the same—our Gospel hope is not about restoring the past but facing a future we cannot yet imagine.

That future is on the other side of the lake, where Jesus invites us to travel with him, and whose sometimes (annoyingly) sleepy presence we have to learn somehow to trust.

That’s likely the other uncomfortable moment in these texts: When Jesus rebukes the wind and says to the sea, “Peace, be still,” he must surely be speaking as much to the complaining disciples as he is to the storm.

Making that connection between stormy disciples and the storm on the sea testifies to an ancient spiritual insight that runs through nearly every religious tradition: there is a deep link between the outer world around us and the inner world of our thoughts and emotions.

But let’s be super clear about that connection: it does not mean that we ourselves cause all the suffering in the world; we’ve had enough victim-blaming in the modern West to last for many generations.

No, the more urgent point of making that key link between inner and outer worlds is this: in a world of violence, be the peace you long to see; in a world of hate, be the love that heals the wounded; in a world of chaotic communities and disordered institutions, be the gracious calm that stays focused on the distant shore—a future of flourishing.

Of course, we ourselves cannot generate the peace, the love, or the calm that the world so desperately needs. That’s why church matters, why worship matters, why gathering around the Eucharistic Table truly matters.

At the Table, the God of the whirlwind is our unspeakable peace beyond all understanding.

The God of Jesus Christ is the only love to soothe our troubled hearts.

The God whom we call the “Holy Spirit” is our gracious calm for fearful souls.

“Jesus Calming the Storm,” James Janknegt

And this unfathomable God gives herself to us in all those ways for our healing.

And then still more: as we climb out of the boat on that distant shore, we remember that our healing is never for ourselves alone but for a storm-tossed, turbulent world.

Peace. Be still.

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.