healing – Peculiar Faith

Standing at the Crossroads of Healing

Today, Ash Wednesday, Christians begin the annual Lenten journey toward the Cross. While always important to note, this year it seems especially vital and indispensable to say as clearly as possible that this journey does not glorify pain and suffering, nor does it imagine violence as saving.

To say the same thing but differently: crucifixion was a first-century tool of state-sponsored terror—it is quintessentially that from which we must be saved. The image of Jesus on that cross is the image of God in solidarity with us, all of us, on a path toward new life.

I stumbled upon yet one more way to say the same thing in a compelling blog post by Jon Paul Sydnor: crucifixion was a crime, and we must stop seeing this act of performative cruelty as salvific. For Sydnor, “The crucifixion is the wound; the resurrection is the balm.”

Those insights have a long way still to go before they sink fully into my bones and muscles. I grew up in an Evangelical Christian tradition that told me (in both overt and subtle ways) that I’m tainted, depraved, and mostly if not wholly bad—being a burgeoning gay boy didn’t help. The cross of Christ was our only hope at appeasing the wrath of the God who made us. (Don’t try to make sense of that sentence; it doesn’t make any sense at all.)

The struggle to embrace the “way of the cross” as none other than the “way of life and peace” (as the Book of Common Prayer would have us do in the Collect for Monday in Holy Week) is not particularly helped by the Sunday lectionary, which will give us a set of texts this week that can feel like a relapse into a religious addiction: the putative “fall” of Adam and Eve in Eden (Genesis 3:1-7) and St. Paul’s apparent framing of that story as the origins of “original sin” (Romans 5:12-19).

For these reasons and more, I’m so grateful for the “Crossroads of Healing” initiative here at All Saints’ Parish in Saugatuck, our shared effort to host gatherings and events at the intersection of the arts and spirituality. This initiative emerged from our commitment to name and address the wounds of race, gender, class, and sexuality in an ecological frame, and especially for the sake of healing toward thriving.

I’m particularly grateful for this initiative as we begin Lent and reflect on the multi-layered imagery of the Cross. Or, as we might note, Christian communities have especially appreciated the image of a cross at intersectional moments. Rather than just one meaning, the cross of Christ carries many modes of interpretation, including the reassuring hope of divine healing for the wounds of separation, isolation, and the violence of oppression.

This initiative has heightened my own awareness of how Christian faith and culture create various intersections as race and gender (especially in this patriarchal society of white supremacy, which describes the United States from its very founding) intertwine with the Cross, and all for the sake of interlaced liturgical rites and spiritual practices.

But really, what does all of that mean for the first Sunday in Lent and those trigger texts from the lectionary?

We spend nearly as much time on visual art in my parish as we do with Scripture and the Prayer Book. All three have been woven together in ways that prove remarkably insightful and life-giving. Preparing for this year’s Lenten journey, for example, I spent some time with the work of Nigerian artist Olamilekan Abatan; his mixed media piece “Adam and Eve” will certainly accompany me this year on the forty-day journey through Lent.

The complexity of Abatan’s painting echoes and magnifies the complexity of the story itself—for some, this painting could introduce complexity into a biblical story that is usually treated in rather simple (and therefore misleading) ways. The first and most obvious thing to notice, and in rather stark contrast to many visual depictions of Adam and Eve in Western art, these figures are Black, and clothed in ways that might suggest they are African. This makes contextual sense given that Abatan is himself Nigerian, but it also makes scientific sense given that our human species originated on the continent of Africa.

There are other layers to notice here. Adam and Eve are poised on the brink of eating the forbidden fruit. Look closely and you will see something unusual in Eve’s lap—a laptop computer made by Apple. It’s a wonderful double entendre evoking the longstanding cultural assumption that the “forbidden fruit” was an apple even though the kind of fruit is not mentioned in the biblical story.

Still more: might Abatan be inviting us to wonder whether modern technology is a kind of “forbidden fruit”? The biblical storyteller refers to that fruit as coming from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”; in that sense, do today’s technology devices give us too much access to knowledge? Or perhaps deceitful knowledge is the problem. Or maybe the technology itself—just like the fruit in the original story—is the problem because it creates a distraction from relationship as it pulls apart the intimate couple in this story. This echoes an important way to frame that third chapter in Genesis—as a rupture in intimacy, the breaking of relationship, and the dissolving of trust.

More than only these insights into that ancient story, the artist himself and his approach to the work provide intersectional touchstones—crossroads of healing, as it were—for just such a time as this. Abatan was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1997 and has emerged as a leading figure in what some have called the “hyperrealist” scene in contemporary African art; he blends Western sensibilities with elements of African visual culture, and he also mixes media (wax fabrics, charcoal and pencil, and acrylic paints, for example).

In addition, Abatan frequently places African figures in classical European poses, using the painting techniques of historical masters like Caravaggio, which tend to evoke Western art but with the “African human” moved to the center of the frame rather than the margins or unseen entirely. He sometimes replicates the style of a religious icon, as in the piece he calls “Black Lives Matter.” The pose, the gesture, and the clothes, not to mention the halo, all suggest an icon of Christ; the use of an African figure as well as the title of the piece can make that assessment a bit disorienting, but the Latin words on the open book held by this African man would seem to confirm the guess: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” One’s own cultural context and history make all the difference in how one reads this image—and what it evokes. Is a Black/African Jesus, for example, the “way to life” in a society trapped in the dynamics of white Christian nationalism?

Even this brief synopsis of Abatan’s life and work makes me wonder about my own reading of history, and the kind of engagement with Scripture I tend to favor, and the way I retrieve theological traditions for pastoral and priestly work: what have I consigned to the margins that might rightly belong at the center? Whom have I overlooked entirely in the texts or visual images of my theological education? More pointedly, how much of my Christian faith relies on having omitted key figures or moments or places (whether intentionally or accidentally)?

Questions like these are not about finding fault or assigning blame for anything; to the contrary, they seem more like assembling the pieces of a treasure map—what kind of riches have we never known in our own traditions because of the restricted views we have lived with for so long?

“The Beauty of the Cross,” Daniel Bonnell

That question alone always makes me glad to observe Black History Month (and all the entanglements and intersectional complexities that go with it); every year I learn something new to intertwine with my own perspectives, not only about Black history but also about my own story; and I appreciate something in fresh ways not only about other traditions, but also how communities of faith can interlace these multiple traditions for a truly rich and “mixed media” witness to a better world—surely these are the “crossroads of healing” toward which we might actually be glad to journey in this Lenten season.

The Word of the Lord?

“Just rip out those pages from your Bible!”

That was the advice given by one of my faculty colleagues to a seminarian some years ago. The student was a gay man who had been tormented for years by the so-called “clobber passages” about sexuality in the Bible, those verses that seemed to label him an “abomination,” or “unnatural,” certainly “immoral,” and by extension even “spawn of Satan.”

Rather than dragging up all the historical-critical textual tools at our disposal as modern Christians to engage yet again with the insidiously deceptive practice of using sacred texts to justify cultural bias, my colleague (both exasperated by this student’s religious PTSD and also seeking to be kind) said, “oh, just rip those pages out and be done with it!”

As a gay man myself, and also a proud “liberal” (sometimes even an aspiring “progressive”), I empathized with that advice—and I was also appalled. Granted, the project of integrating religious faith and sexual orientation can feel terribly arduous, especially in a society with a well-established repugnance toward “non-straight” people. But integration at least implies some level of respect for both sides of the equation, in this both the human and the divine, and I can’t imagine physically shredding a sacred text.

On the other hand, preserving the “sanctity” of a text is often used as an excuse to maintain a cultural status quo rather than engaging with the much harder work of historical analysis, or communal confession, or the tasks of healing and reconciliation.

Consider, for example, the long and brutal history of Christian anti-Semitism. The Gospel according to John (among other texts) has been used frequently in Church history to both justify religious discrimination against Jews and, in some cases, to promote social and political violence. John refers to “the Jews” more than 60 times in his account of the Gospel (and no fewer than 19 times in John’s so-called “passion narrative” in which Jesus suffers and dies); these ancient texts continue to show up in contemporary contexts where “Christ-killers” still operates as a dangerous epithet for Jewish communities.

Some have suggested replacing “the Jews” with “religious leaders” in those particularly problematic passages. But this can easily obscure the underlying social dynamics of that powerful story in ways that drain the story itself of its human/divine drama. Equally troubling: in this harrowing time in U.S. society when our own government is erasing our own history—of transgender people, of Black people, of indigenous people, basically anyone who isn’t straight, white, and male—we must resist doing exactly the same thing with our sacred texts and our sacred history; erasing the problem won’t solve it and will likely make it worse.

Adding to these canonical conundrums, the progressive ire toward problematic texts is rarely applied evenly or consistently, and for some good reasons. The Bible has been used poorly and sometimes with horrific consequences concerning such a wide range of issues that no one person can keep track of them, whether with reference to race and ethnicity, or gender and sexuality, or economics and ecology. If “erasure” were generalized broadly—just remove, delete, ignore, or omit whatever troubles us, might cause harm, or doesn’t align with our preferred theological positions—we would not only have very few pages of the Bible left, we would surely eviscerate what it means to refer to a text as “sacred.”

But doing nothing about these religious vexations is not an option, either. I have spent too many years picking up the pieces of religiously ruined lives not to appreciate how damaging institutional religion can be, including these ancient texts that can sometimes be brutal, violent, and soul-killing.

So, what’s to be done and what can we do? I would propose taking three modest but nonetheless important steps.

The first step: stop calling the Bible “the word of the Lord” in public worship. That ritual declaration enjoys a long history and appears in most mainline Christian churches, and it’s time to retire it. Referring to texts from the Bible as God’s own “word” perpetuates the notion that even the vilest of biases originates with God and thus grants (religious) permission to act with (cultural) violence. “Don’t blame me,” misogynists like to say when treating women badly, “it’s in the Bible.”

No longer referring to a liturgical reading from the Bible as “the Word of the Lord” will sound to some people nearly as severe as my faculty colleague’s suggestion to rip pages from that book’s binding. But The Episcopal Church already approved that liturgical change back in 1997 (the “Enriching Our Worship” collection of supplemental liturgical texts). In the parish I’m privileged to serve here in Michigan we use those newer options more often than not: the lay reader usually concludes a reading by saying, “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”

I love the ambiguity, or perhaps “Anglican breadth,” in that liturgical statement. After all, the Spirit might want to encourage us to heed a biblical exhortation, or the Spirit might urge us to resist a given biblical writer’s point of view—there’s no way to predict in advance what the Spirit will be “saying” to God’s people concerning a particular text for a specific occasion. Even so, that liturgical invitation still affirms the inherent value in the Bible itself, reminding us that biblical texts can always prompt insight or provoke engagement.

Inviting people to hear what the Spirit is saying right now with a biblical text can also remind all of us that the Bible has been heard and read in many different ways in countless contexts over the course of many centuries; our job is not to figure out which one is “correct,” but to hear what the Spirit is saying—right now. (And this, by the way, is just one piece in the ongoing and urgent need to develop a robust “theology of Scripture,” which the late-biblical scholar Dale Martin passionately urged: if the Bible does not just contain “meaning” we’re supposed to “find,” what does it look like actively to make meaning today from those texts?)

And by the way, even the great Protestant Reformer Martin Luther insisted that the Bible is not the “Word of God.” But, Luther said, the Bible can become the Word of God when good news is preached with it. How we use the Bible matters, and the “good news” we might make from it will vary depending on the time and place in which we use it.

A second step, related to the first: clergy need to step up and shoulder their responsibilities not only as “pastors” but also “teachers” in their congregations (teaching should actually be considered part and parcel of providing pastoral care). If the lectionary assigns a particularly difficult or challenging text for a given occasion of public worship (and what counts as “difficult” will vary depending on the community and current events, among other factors) the ordained minister has a spiritual responsibility (and in some instances, an obligation) to name that problem explicitly. Even if the occasion does not afford sufficient time for a thorough treatment of the passage, it matters to have the challenge named.

Not long ago, I preached at a diaconal ordination on the Feast of St. Barnabas. The Gospel text appointed for that occasion came from Matthew (10:7-16) and included a reference to “Sodom and Gomorrah” and divine judgment. While I did not dwell on that portion of the text, I also did not ignore it.

“We just heard a reference to ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ in the passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel,” I said in that sermon. “And I can guarantee that every LGBT-identified person in this assembly today experienced stomach-churning anxiety, even if only for a moment, when they heard that reference.”

I then connected that anxiety to the ministry of a deacon, who is called to make the needs and concerns of the world known to the Church—and this includes, of course, the ongoing and shameful abuse of the Bible that traumatizes whole communities. Simply omitting that phrase from the proclamation of the Gospel in that liturgy would have been a form of religious denial and also a missed opportunity to illustrate how a religious text can shape the ministry of healing even when the wound itself came from that same religious text.

A third step, and perhaps the most important: remind ourselves regularly that the Bible was assembled by the institutional church for the sake of the church’s mission. The church does not exist to serve the Bible, in other words; the Bible exists for the sake of the Church. (As a priest in The Episcopal Church, I would say the same thing about the Prayer Book.)

Putting this point in a slightly different way: not everything in the Bible reflects something “true” about God; but every book of the Bible does reflect something vital about the person who wrote it or the community from which it emerged. And that matters—to me, it matters a lot. One of the many things I appreciate about the Bible is how it preserves stories of people and communities who struggled, sometimes mightily, in their efforts to know and love God, and to discern how they ought to live as God’s people in the world—exactly what I hope the church today is likewise trying to do.

Remembering in that way what the Bible is and the Bible’s proper role in the life of the Church does not in any way diminish its religious significance; it still counts as a “sacred text,” and I would say, even more so. After all, what could be more sacred than a tool to help God’s people participate in God’s own mission of healing, reconciling, and promoting a life of flourishing for all God’s creatures?

I can’t think of anything more “sacred” than that.

A Collective Mending Session

Not unlike the United States of America, first-century Palestine was marked by distinct regions—each with various languages and accents, some with bustling urban centers while others mostly dotted with livestock herds or farms, all of them a mix of different religious sensibilities and a variety of political affiliations.

These regional features can sometimes contribute directly to the theological substance of a given story. Many Christians heard from Mark’s account of the Gospel yesterday, a passage the lectionary compilers stitched together in some peculiar ways. Overall, the passage portrays Jesus and the disciples crisscrossing the Sea of Galilee (Mark 6:30-34, 53-56).

Depending on which shore they land, they could be in a town shaped by Greco-Roman culture, or one still firmly rooted in Judean traditions, or a peculiar blend of ethnic customs from many different parts of that ancient Mediterranean basin, from Egypt to Gaul.

Mark seems to fancy here some geographical depictions of how the Gospel crosses all these lines of difference, not to erase them but to weave them together into something new. The image of the boat, the singular inland sea—these stand as symbols of hope for a new world, not a world of scattered fragments but of a beautifully woven tapestry.

Mark is likewise sure to note something about the crowds Jesus encounters on these shorelines: they were like “sheep without a shepherd”—aimless, perhaps, or without a clearly defined purpose, or maybe in search of some sense of home, the safety of the corral, as it were. The growing diversity of that Galilee region, an occupied province of the Roman Empire, probably felt unsettling; the long-standing familiar had become very strange.

More pointedly, those crowds were like sheep without a good shepherd. This was Jeremiah’s complaint, which some chose to read from the lectionary yesterday as well. Ancient Israel had plenty of so-called “shepherds,” religious and political leaders of all kinds. But they were hardly “good”—they divided the herd and scattered the sheep, destroying the flock itself.

“Woe to you shepherds,” Jeremiah imagines God saying, “woe to you who have not tended carefully to my people.”

That’s another way our country today resembles ancient Palestine. By some accounts, we are more fragmented than we have ever been. Media commentators have been expressing deep concern about the recent gun violence at a presidential campaign rally coming at a time when our country is “already deeply polarized.”

Writing in the New York Times, Peter Baker noted that American society has “split, it often seems, into two countries, even two realities” if not more. The divisions have grown so stark that 47 percent of Americans now believe a second civil war is likely or very likely in their lifetimes—forty-seven percent.

That sobering statistic might shed some light on another detail from Mark’s storytelling: the particular location where Jesus offers a healing touch. The crowds were bringing all those who were sick, Mark says, and laying them out in the marketplace of each town.

Markets are of course places for buying and selling, but they also stand for much more. In western Michigan, where I live, and in many other parts of the country, too, farmers markets pop up regularly as gathering places, locations for vendors and artisans of all kinds, as well as shoppers and visitors of all kinds.

Both ancient and modern markets are often crossroads, places where travelers and visitors and residents all mingle together. You can get swept away by the energy of a mob, take delight in the peculiar mix of people, or maybe feel a bit lost in a sea of strangers, perhaps unsure of where you really fit and belong, if anywhere at all.

The crowds—the ones who were like “sheep without a shepherd”—they bring the sick, and probably the lonely, and surely the despairing, always the alienated and unwell into the marketplace. Right there, Jesus heals them—sometimes only because they were able simply to touch just a corner of his tunic, a gesture of reaching out to connect, to reunite, to come home.

Mark doesn’t say what kind of healing took place, but this was no private consultation with a physician. This seems to me like a moment of social healing, of mending the fabric of a torn community, these crowds who were like “sheep without a shepherd” coming together in the marketplace for healing.

For all the advances of modern western medicine, many of us have likely forgotten an ancient insight, captured Mark’s story: healing is mostly a communal endeavor, the mending of relationships, a restoration of community—is this even imaginable any more in the United States?

“Collective Mending,” Catherine Reinhart

In doing an image search for this past week’s liturgy leaflet, I stumbled upon a gorgeous photograph, which we used on the leaflet’s cover. It’s a photograph of a mended quilt. The textile artist, Catherine Reinhart, brings people together to mend worn-out, tattered, and torn fabrics.

The photograph of that process which accompanied the mended quilt shows the gathered community in a circle engaged in shared mending. Reinhart calls this a “collective mending session,” and I cannot help but hear the Gospel in those words, and to see in that circle of careful menders a vision of mending a torn world—one square, one village, one region at a time.

A collective mending session facilitated by Catherine Reinhart

This particular mending resulted in creating something like a blood-red cross—yet another nexus point with the lectionary yesterday. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians includes a declaration of divine peace-making, with Jesus breaking down the dividing wall of hostility with the blood of his cross (Eph. 2:11-22).

All of Paul’s writings are rooted in his own experience of having been a violent persecutor of the early Jesus movement. Encountering the forgiveness and reconciliation of God in Christ—which, by the way, began with the healing of his vision—that encounter dramatically changed his life.

Whatever else salvation means, it certainly includes the healing of our divisions. For Paul, this meant the nearly unthinkable communion between Jews and Gentiles; the circumcised and uncircumcised; the religiously righteous and the ritually unclean. The Gospel creates, we might say, an ongoing collective mending session called “church.”

Whenever I despair over the state of American society—the vitriol, the hatred, the violent divisions—I try to imagine what in the world the Church can offer to such intractable problems. Catherine Reinhart has given me a new way of envisioning a solution: bearing witness to the God who heals and mends, offering a model of community not rooted in “sameness” but stitched and woven together with the threads of difference.

Surely this is why it matters for Christians to gather around the Eucharistic Table week by week, a Table to which God calls us not by merit but from grace, and only and always for love.

By such grace and love we might yet offer a collective mending session to a world in pain, and for the world’s healing.

Ten Days for a Lifetime

We’re smack in the middle of them at this very moment, these ten peculiar days on our liturgical calendar. These are the days between the Ascension of Jesus and Pentecost, between the departure (yet again) of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

These ten days make a bit more plain what is always true of this entire Easter season—there’s no neat or tidy conclusion to the Jesus story and Easter itself is full of complex emotions that are not easily named.

Early on in this season we might recall that the risen Jesus still bears the marks of crucifixion—not just subtle hints or merely a trace of scar tissue but grossly obvious marks. Thomas is invited to thrust his hand into the wounded torso of his beloved.

That’s a rather graphic reminder that Easter does not erase the past but invites instead a deeper integration of painful histories for the sake of healing and new life.

So here we are in these ten days—the wake of another absence without any palpable sense of presence.

I’ve come to think of these ten days as in some fashion emblematic of our entire lives as Christian people. We are continually confronting departures while also anticipating the unimagined gifts still to come. This is the story of our whole lives, a story of the inevitable intertwining of love with grief.

That’s not typically how we frame the Ascension of Jesus, of course. Our hymns and prayers for the feast are brimming with images of triumphant glory, of crowns upon crowns adorning the head of our mighty king who now resides in the heavenly realms.

I admit to loving those images and singing them with gusto. But they are woefully incomplete without the texture of loss and the scars that accrue on a long journey.

The lectionary didn’t give us any clear or direct references to the Ascension yesterday, but we did hear about departure and loss. We heard about the disciples lamenting the loss of Judas and the need to replace him with another (Acts 1:15-17, 21-26). We also heard from what is often called the “Farewell Discourse” in John’s account of the Gospel (17:6-19).

This is a touching moment as John’s Jesus prays for those whom he loves and who will miss him terribly when he leaves. These are complex emotions among the disciples and also for Jesus. He is giving himself over to events he cannot control, and he does it for love and with love, knowing all the while the loss that will come with it and thus the grief.

Remarkably, this emotional complexity is not only a key feature in the story of Jesus but also and therefore a vital component of God’s own life, what God feels and experiences, and who God is among us.

I realized some of these complexities in a new way while I was searching for a visual image for yesterday’s liturgy leaflet. My search term was “Ascension,” but one of the images that appeared came from an artist in Islamic traditions. She gave that image the title “The Blue God.”

I suddenly imagined the “blueness” of God who feels both pain and regret, who knows something of loss and of grief, and also the passion to find a path of thriving for the whole creation, no matter the cost.

What an astonishing image of God—of the Blue God—dwelling among us, longing just as we do for the flourishing of life. Perhaps this reorients the fantastical story of Jesus ascending, not up and away from us but up and deeper into the life of God—the God who dwells among us, especially in that most poignant confluence of love and grief, of presence and absence, of regret and yearning.

Modern psychotherapists, like Francis Weller, heartily endorse these emotional complexities. Weller urges us to travel toward wholeness by holding grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. Holding both equally cures our despair and cultivates compassion.

Or as poet and visual artist Khalil Gibran once wrote, “the deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can hold.” He doesn’t mean to glorify pain but rather to invite us below the mere surface of things and into the depths of mortal life; it’s exactly there where God chooses to meet us, those depths into which Jesus ascends.

Hints of these complexities show up in biblical writers quite frequently. I’m so grateful to be using the First Nations Version of the New Testament in this Easter season, which has helped me notice some of those hints more directly. In the first letter of John, from which we also heard yesterday, the writer describes the kind of life Creator has gifted us in Jesus as a life “full of beauty and harmony (1 John 5:9-13).

That word beauty is too often mistaken, especially these days, for glamor and celebrity, for flawlessness, for cosmetic perfection. But for artists of all kinds, beauty nearly always shimmers with poignancy; compelling art seems regularly to retain a lingering shadow; or, we might say as Jesus “ascends,” glory carries with it a tint of blueness.

I am endlessly intrigued by this: mystics in all of the world’s religious traditions quite often experience divine presence as a turquoise, or aqua, or a sapphire blue light.

These ten little days carry quite a weighty glory indeed, with richer insights that I usually tend to imagine. These ten days invite us to see a truly fierce beauty when our exalted loves are wrapped in skins of grief.

Might we suppose that beauty itself is love saturated with grief? After all, we would not grieve as we do if we did not love so passionately. This must surely mark the road toward healing and wholeness: to harmonize these powerful energies in beautiful textures.

I cannot help but think of the Eucharist here, about the space created at the Table for living a life of beauty and harmony, a Eucharistic life of both memory and hope.

The wider world around us offers precious little space for any of us even to name our grief, let alone integrate it into our higher loves. But there’s space the Table. There’s space to hold the worst possible memories—betrayal by a friend, public torture, state execution. And there is also space to cultivate the best possible hopes—the love and grace of God in our rising to new life.

The beauty of the Table, just as the beauty of our lives, emerges as we harmonize such brutal memories with such vivid hopes.

These ten days are for just such a lifetime as that, because I’m increasingly convinced that there is no other path toward healing and wholeness than the one that harmonizes love with grief.

And that is a beautiful thing.

Shameless Living and the Sign of the Serpent

John does something very strange in the otherwise very familiar third chapter of his account of the Gospel. What John does is so strange that most people just skip right over it on their way to what is likely the most well-known verse in the entire Bible—John 3:16 (which we can still see people holding up on placards in football stadiums).

For God does indeed love the world, as the sixteenth verse declares, and yet in the two verses before that one, John’s Jesus refers to his own death on a cross by comparing himself favorably to a serpent, and for the sake of life.

The research I did on this strange passage more than fifteen years ago turned out to be life-changing for me. It shaped my second book (Divine Communion: A Eucharistic Theology of Sexual Intimacy), and I am convinced that this passage holds the key to the kind of healing love the world today so desperately needs.

Some textual sleuthing is in order to get to the heart of the matter here, and that involves taking some steps back into the Hebrew Bible—back to the equally strange story of Moses in the desert that many Christians heard this past Sunday in concert with the passage from John. And then back further still to the Garden of Eden in Genesis.

That’s the textual trail I tried to map from the pulpit this past Sunday, the fourth in Lent. And the image that ties all of it together is of course the serpent.

In ancient Mediterranean societies, the symbol of a serpent enjoyed multiple and interwoven meanings. A serpent sometimes symbolized eternity, with depictions of a snake eating its own tail to signal the circularity of infinite time. Serpents could also symbolize healing, as the shedding of a snake’s skin signified the promise of renewal.

These ancient societies also knew very well that snakes can be dangerous and deadly. That mix—whether of danger and healing, of both risk and renewal—that mix shows up in the old aphorism about how to soothe the effects of a hangover—what you need is a “hair from the dog that bit you.”

That insight also contributed to the development of modern vaccines. And the insight is just this: that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

That insight found its way into that rather strange story from the Book of Numbers (21:4-9) where the ancient Israelites are wandering through the desert and they stumble into a nest of poisonous snakes, the bites from which make many of them ill and some of them die. God instructs Moses to make a bronze image of a serpent and to lift it high upon a pole so everyone can see it. All those who looked at it were healed.

Some have suggested that this story from Numbers led to the familiar image we still see today of a snake wrapped around a pole as a symbol for the medical professions and healthcare; here again, the key insight remains: that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

Going back to the third chapter of Genesis, we encounter yet another serpent. That story of Adam and Eve in the garden is so familiar that most people miss exactly what that serpent said to Adam and Eve.

Standard readings of that chapter from Genesis frame it as a story about humanity’s guilt and our need to be forgiven for our sin. I embrace that way of reading the story, but it’s not the only way to read it. By focusing so much attention on sin and guilt, the modern Church has left virtually untouched the epidemic of shame and violence.

This was the life-changing insight for me years ago when I was researching these texts, to understand the difference between guilt and shame.

Guilt attaches to something I have done, a mistake or an offense which I can confess and for which I can seek forgiveness. Shame, by contrast, attaches to my sense of self and who I am, usually in quite physical and bodily ways.

Guilt says, “I did something bad”; shame says, “I am bad.”

Social psychologists and sociologists have been urging us to notice for quite some time now just how pervasive shame is and just how severe are its consequences. (Be sure to read Brene Brown on this and watch her videos.)

Shame can make us dangerous to ourselves (in patterns of isolation and alienation and addiction and self-harm) and also dangerous to others (when we project our own shame on those who are different from us, or whole communities, or other species, and then treat them with hostility and violence).

Take all of this back into that ancient story of a garden where a serpent persuades human beings to eat forbidden fruit. If you eat it, the serpent says, “you will be like gods.”

The essence of this temptation is to suppose that being human isn’t good enough; that how God made us is flawed; that who we are is fundamentally bad.

That’s a lie; it’s simply not true. The ancient storyteller in Genesis insists that what God makes is good, and is indeed very good (1:31).

When Adam and Eve believed the lie, they tumbled into the spiral of shame, with the results today’s psychologists would easily recognize: they hid from each other; they hid from the wider world of the garden; and they hid from God. And in the very next story, Cain kills his brother Abel.

Shame isolates and shame kills.

And so, John’s Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up for the sake of unending life.”

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent…

Why just like that?

Because, if being human is the cause of our distress, then the truly human one—and that’s what that title “Son of Man” means—then the Truly Human One will be the source of our healing. After all, that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

Here’s one of the key pivot points in my own theological development that these interlaced texts provoked: shame cannot be forgiven; it can only be healed. And in that moment of realization, I remembered the Australian aboriginal story about the rainbow serpent, who created the land and the humans to inhabit it.

The rainbow, the serpent, the associations with sex and sexuality, bodily shame, and growing up gay: I still have trouble threading all of this together with the words of a logical sequence. But somehow I came to know this: embracing that which caused my shame would be healing; it would save me.

The grace of God provides forgiveness when we’re guilty.

The love of God provides healing when we’re ashamed.

That’s likely enough, more than enough, to ponder. And still, I can’t stop thinking about that distorted desire and the tormented urge to “be like gods.”

Humanity’s godlike aspirations and ambitions have led to unspeakable pain: the dynamics of racism and white supremacy; misogyny and the denigration of women, which leads quickly to the oppression of LGBT people; stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and enough nuclear warheads to obliterate humanity many times over; the relentless decimation of ecosystems and plundering of the environments that give us life—all of this, I’m absolutely convinced, and an ancient story about a serpent in a garden illustrates, is rooted in the corrosive effects of bodily shame.

Our salvation as a species and for the sake of this precious Earth may very well depend on the most robust and fulsome reading possible of that one chapter from Genesis, and in concert with that famous chapter from John: being fully at home in our own bodies without shame; fully at home on Earth without any guilt; and fully at home with God without any fear.

The world can scarcely name what it so desperately needs from today’s churches: spaces where we are free to love fiercely and live shamelessly and for the sake of a world in pain.

That great work begins and returns often to what Jesus wanted Nicodemus to see: God so loves the world that God forgives our guilt and heals our shame.

The Courage to Be…Seen

The pain must have been debilitating. She had been living with it for a long time, at least twelve years. Gospel writers referred to her condition as a “hemorrhage”; they are likely describing frequent and uncontrollable menstrual periods, which would have made such a woman ritually unclean, and thus forbidden to appear in public.

Many Christians heard her story in church this past Sunday, from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (9:9-13, 18-26). The story features not only physical but also social pain—a woman who is isolated, without the comfort of friends and family. Both Mark and Luke, who also tell this story, note that she had spent all her money on multiple physicians, and no one had made her any better—so she is perhaps also a poor beggar.

And so this woman, who has run out of options, alone and dejected, reaches out as Jesus passes by, just to touch the fringe of his garments with a bit of ludicrous hope.

Consider what those details mean. She was probably crouched down by the side of the road; she wasn’t supposed to be seen and she certainly should not have approached a group of prominent men—not only Jesus and his disciples but also the leader of the synagogue and his companions.

And so she reaches out—in desperation, yes, but also with courage. Touching Jesus could have led to severe social consequences for her, and still she reaches out.

As many commentators have noted, the good news in this story is not only this woman’s physical healing but also and even more so the restoration of her dignity. Jesus made her visible with respect, brought her into the center of attention, not for shaming but to heal her shame. He does all this not merely tolerating her presence but actually praising her as an exemplar of faith.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, her story is paired with another poignant story—the one about the young girl who has died, the daughter of a religious leader in the community.

By pairing these two stories, these ancient writers show us something about faith. In each of the three versions of this story, Jesus says to the woman, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.”

Given what she has just done, the meaning of faith here is not “certainty” but rather bravery. “Daughter,” Jesus could have said, “your courage has made you well.”

It is a bit strange but no accident that Jesus refers to this woman as “daughter.” Remember, he’s on his way to the home of a religious leader whose daughter has just died—these stories are intentionally intermingled.

Recall how often Jesus is getting into trouble with the religious authorities—“eating with tax collectors and sinners.” Just like this woman who reaches out with courage for healing, so this religious leader, heartbroken over his daughter, breaks ranks with his colleagues and courageously begs Jesus for help.

Paul Tillich, the great mid-twentieth century theologian, urged us to see faith as a form of courage, what he called the “courage to be.” For Tillich, the life of faith is a life in which we accept our own acceptance by God and thus live boldly, defying all the “principalities and powers” that would rob God’s creatures of their dignity and respect. I would add this: faith is also the courage to be seen, especially when we are made invisible by others.

It matters to think about such things during this LGBTQ Pride Month. We should note carefully that the Human Rights Campaign has for the first time declared a “national state of emergency” for LGBTQ Americans.

We are witnessing today an unprecedented spike in anti-LGBTQ legislation in state houses all over the country; more than 75 such pieces of legislation have been signed into law this year alone, which is more than double the number from last year.

This frightening trend is unfolding right where I live, in my own backyard. A far-right takeover of Ottawa County government by Christian Nationalists is making both queer people and people of color more than a little nervous. And along this otherwise “progressive” shoreline in West Michigan, I just recently overheard a conversation among some business owners in Saugatuck—an LGBT resort town. One of them said to the others, “I’m glad they spend their money here; I just don’t want to see them.”

It is high time that Christian communities ramp up our commitment to deeper solidarity with those who are unseen and kept invisible, whether because of sexuality, or gender, or race, or economics; all of these social categories are intertwined with each other. To see those deep interconnections would in turn help us to read stories from the Bible as not merely about ancient Mediterranean societies but also about us, all of us.

St. Augustine wrote in the fourth century about the passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel. He invited us to see in the daughter of the religious leader a symbol of the ancient Israelites—who were being reborn and coming to life—while the woman with a hemorrhage stands for Gentiles, all those who are declared “unclean” on the margins of God’s people and who are now welcomed and embraced.

Gospel stories about healing are never just about the person being healed. They are also about the reader, about us. We are the ones who need to live right now with the courage to be in a world that is otherwise risky and frightening.

We are called to live this way not only for ourselves alone but also for all those who cannot imagine such courage for themselves—the gay teens who wonder whether suicide wouldn’t be better than a lonely life; women who live only as the objects of male scorn in a patriarchal society; people of color crushed under the weight of white supremacy.

Quite honestly, modern Western society has been in a “state of emergency” for centuries now unless you just happen to be a white, straight, cis-gender male.

Living courageously—living with faith—offers visible signs of hope to the unseen, coaxing them into a Gospel light.

This, I would venture, is a compelling way to read the story of Abraham’s calling in Genesis, which many Christians also heard this past Sunday morning. “I will bless you,” God says to Abraham, so that you will be a blessing to others (12:2).

Surely this is an enduring rationale for the existence of the Church—to receive God’s blessing for the sake of blessing others. And especially today, to be a place of compassion and safety where the invisible can be seen and loved. The time to do this is now.

Thomas the Truth-Teller

The second Sunday of Easter is often referred to as “low Sunday”—after the intensity of Holy Week and Easter Day, both attendance and energy are a bit low by comparison. It’s also the day on which we always hear the story about “doubting Thomas,” but I never want to refer to him that way again.

Poor Thomas has been branded as the “doubter” for far too long, as if he were the only one who wanted to hear the voice of his beloved, as if he were the only who needed to see the risen Jesus in the flesh, and to touch him.

Contrary to how I usually read this story from John’s account of the Gospel (20:19-31), I no longer think doubt is the focus of this story at all, and it isn’t even mostly about Thomas. This story is about the healing of a fractured community—and the love Thomas has for Jesus becomes the occasion for that healing to happen.

John constructs this story, broadly speaking, in two parts—the first, when Thomas was not there, and the second when he was. How John stitches these parts together is where the insights simmer.

The first part is framed with fear. The closest friends and disciples of Jesus have gathered together on the very first Easter Day. They are afraid that what happened to Jesus might also happen to them. They’re meeting behind locked doors, John says, for “fear of the Judeans.”

Christian communities need to note carefully whom those first disciples feared. Among first-century Semitic peoples, the Judeans were the religious elite among the Israelites, and they had conspired with Roman authorities to execute Jesus.

So while John doesn’t tell us directly why Thomas wasn’t there, it seems rather plain: he was afraid. There’s the first insight: nothing will fracture a community more quickly than fear—fear of the “other,” fear of the self, fear of change, fear of honesty and vulnerability and even intimacy. Fear gathers to itself a whole herd of toxic energies.

Then suddenly, right there in midst of that toxic stew, Jesus appears—locked doors be damned! John is not writing about a clever magician’s trick with this remarkable appearance. This is instead a second insight we might note: fearful isolation dissolves in the light of love.

“Peace be with you,” Jesus says. He would have said this in Aramaic, echoing the Hebrew word “shalom.” This ancient and beautiful word means much more than merely the absence of conflict; it evokes wholeness, harmony, and completeness.

Jesus blesses them with peace once again and then, John says, he “breathed on them.”

It’s worth considering how close you have to be to someone in order to breathe on them. We have certainly become accustomed to that calculation in this era of Covid. Interior “perimeter alarms” go off whenever somebody gets too close! In this story, the risen Jesus gets close to his friends, very close, close enough to breathe on them—a touching moment of tenderness and intimacy.

It’s also an ancient intimacy of life itself. John uses the very same verb here that the Greek version of the Old Testament uses in Genesis to describe the creation of humanity, that moment when God breathes life into the creature God has just made from the dust.

Into a dusty room of fear, John’s Jesus breathes life.

John could have stopped right there and we would have a lovely story. But this is only Part One, because Thomas isn’t there. You can’t have a story of wholeness, harmony, and completeness when someone is missing.

Part Two begins with the disciples gathering once again, a week later—the original Greek says, eight days later, and that’s not a random number. Returning again to Genesis, this gospel writer is reminding us that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh; the eighth day is for the new creation.

Eight days later and Thomas is there, symbolizing a restored community of friends and the healing of this household of companions—a new creation wrought from the wreckage of violence and grief. Thomas shows up on the Eighth Day, a symbol for our shared healing toward a brand new world.

I’m reminded of some words from Methodist minister and poet Steven Garnaas-Holmes: If you want to see resurrection, don’t trot out your success stories or your jubilations or your triumphant marches in front of defeated enemies. No, if you want to see resurrection, look at your wounds; look at those places in your life and in your communities that need healing, those places we try to cover over, repress, push aside, prefer to ignore, even find shameful.

Thomas knew all this, maybe better than all the rest of them. All this talk of resurrection, he says, is just a sham if we can’t talk about how we betrayed Jesus, and how we deserted him, and how all of us fled when our Beloved needed us most—well, all of us men did, I’m sure Thomas would be quick to add; the women actually remained, and at great risk to their own lives.

Rather than referring to Thomas ever again as the doubter in this story, let’s call him the truth-teller. “Fear of the Judeans” doesn’t hold a candle to the fear we harbor about ourselves, the fear of our own capacity for betrayal, the fear of our own spite and hostility, the fear of our self-destructive patterns that plunge us into isolation and violence.

Thomas will not let us off the hook for that; show me the wounds, he says. Show me that we’re being honest and transparent and real with each other—otherwise this whole resurrection business is worse than pointless; it’s delusional.

Denial and avoidance won’t save us—this is the (annoying) truth Thomas insists we confront. And John’s brilliant story-telling speaks directly to each of us many centuries later: be brave and look at your failures; reach out and touch your betrayals; put your hand out where so much has been lost, where the emptiness breaks your heart, and where your deepest wounds go deeper still.

Don’t be afraid—reach out and touch the healing.

Recalling that we can plausibly read every story in John as a Eucharistic story, a recent commentator suggests that John wrote this morning’s story for future believers, for us. John wrote this for all those who would gather around the Eucharistic Table, for the ones who would reach out their hands to touch the bread and the cup.

Don’t be afraid—reach out for healing.

Tabling the Ashes, and Other Religious Choreographies for an Insightful Pandemic

Are you pausing to learn or just trying to get through as fast you can? How much of what we used to call “normal” is worth trying to retrieve? What’s one big “take-away” insight from living in the midst of this pandemic that you might not have had otherwise?

Could we agree that we all just need to take a huge nap before trying to build a new world together and that it might be useful if we all took that nap at the same time?

I think I’m inching closer to a big take-away insight from all this, and I’ll share it below, but I’m intrigued by the intermediate steps to get there, the coping and fussing and experimenting and adjusting and canceling and scheduling and revising—all the time! (Did I mention a nap would be nice?)

I’m also intrigued, having returned to fulltime parish ministry, to find my capacity for innovation strengthened by turning frequently to my grounding in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Episcopal Church. This is not unlike the old aphorism about jazz piano—learn your scales first. I used to say something similar in the seminary classes I taught on systematic theology—know first how to operate the interlocking gears and gadgets of doctrinal claims before trying to spin off those whirling bits of novel God-talk.

As many clergy have been discovering (while others are actively denying it), there are some things we can no longer do that we once thought we simply must do for effective liturgy, or more severely, for a “valid” sacrament. I continue to be grateful for my formation in what many consider the “rigidities” of liturgical tradition precisely because they shaped my sense of why we do what we do—and therefore how to omit those things responsibly by either replacing them with something else or inviting people to pray through the gap.

I still have a lot of thinking and pondering to do on the implications of liturgical leadership during a pandemic, but I feel the strong need to write these things down, even when they’re not completely formed. I worry that our (understandable) eagerness to “get through” this pandemic will mean rushing past the many lessons to learn and even “gifts” (if we dare use that word just now) of this peculiar time unless we take the time, right now, to record some of it.

As we lurch into Lent (remember a year ago when we were looking forward to being back in church on Easter—I mean, last Easter?) I’m thinking especially about two broad, gestating insights that could inform how I “do liturgy” even when we begin to gather again in person.

First, don’t pretend everything’s fine when it isn’t.

And second, creed and confession are more entangled than I realized; I’m not sure yet what that means, except it has something to do with healing.

So here a few observations about both of these, and then a note or two about that bigger “take-away.” And I would love to hear from others, lay or ordained, about your experiences of church over this last year, either in conversation with these insights or others.

Everything is Not Okay and That’s Okay for Now
When I first arrived to Saugatuck, Michigan after driving across the country from Berkeley, California last summer, I kept wanting to create video productions for worship in my new parish that mimicked as closely as possible “real” church. After a few weeks of that labor-intensive effort, I began to wonder what in the world was “real” about church to begin with. I also started to realize that I was trying to pretend everything was still “normal,” except for being online.

Everything is not, of course, normal; hardly anything is, actually, and I stumbled into a space of liberation and relief by acknowledging that to myself and then saying it out loud to the other clergy and lay leaders in the parish. That freed up my energy to start noticing, prayerfully, just how not-normal things are and what this means for we pray and worship.

This past Ash Wednesday is a case in point. I considered, briefly, some of the clever and ingenious ways I was reading about from other clergy for how safely to impose ashes on foreheads, including sprinkling them on tops of heads instead. But I noticed again the hankering in my pondering for pretending that everything is normal when it isn’t. I also couldn’t imagine how anyone needed a reminder of their own mortality right now.

I decided to keep the ashes as part of the live-streamed liturgy that evening, but only in a crystal bowl that sat on the altar. They will sit there for the whole season of Lent, not as a reminder of our mortality but as a reminder of the promise God always makes at that Table: to bring new life out of death. We will then sprinkle those ashes around the parish memorial garden on Easter morning.

During the Ash Wednesday liturgy, I blessed the ashes in their little altar-bowl with these words, borrowed and adapted from the Scottish Episcopal Church:

Living God of renewal and hope,
in their life palms draw sustenance from the Earth
and give of their own vitality to the air we breathe,
and to the animals they host and shelter;
in the worship of this community,
they help us mark with joyful anticipation
the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem before his death:
Grant, O God, that these palms now reduced to ashes
may remind us of the mortality we share
with your whole creation,
and may also stand as a sign of your love,
which is stronger than death.
May we recognize that love at work in us even now,
replanting our lives in the sure and humble soil
of your grace and generosity.
We pray all this in the name of Jesus
in whom you have become one with us in our mortal flesh,
and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever. Amen.

Presiding this morning at our Eucharistic liturgy for the first Sunday in Lent, I was quite moved to see the little bowl of ashes on the Table as I prayed that we might all “prepare with joy for the paschal feast.”

Creedal Confessions for Healing
For reasons I cannot yet fully articulate, this pandemic has heightened my awareness of the intimate relationship between what I believe and my failure to live fully the consequences of those beliefs. This has caused me to reflect in new ways on what I learned many years ago in seminary: not only sins or faults but also beliefs are items we confess, and both types of confession might actually play a significant role in our healing, both individually and corporately. (That’s a dense sentence because I’m not sure yet what I really mean to say.)

Reflecting in this way prompted me to wonder whether connecting belief and failure more closely in our liturgical language might assist us in deepening our shared sense of trust in God’s presence among us, as the Creator, the incarnate Word, and animating Spirit. “Trust,” after all, is probably the best synonym for faith.

I’ve been working on such a “creedal confession” for some time, and I’m considering using the following draft for our midweek service of Evening Prayer:

I place my trust in the creative power of God,
   maker of all things, known and unknown,
   source and sustainer of life;
       and I confess my failure to respect the dignity
       of every creature God has made.
I place my trust in the Word of God incarnate,
   who gathers us as a mother cradles her children,
   as a father who binds up wounds,
   as a lover who mends broken hearts;
       and I confess my share in the patterns of violence
       that fragment, divide, and harm.
I place my trust in the Divine Spirit,
   who animates the whole creation
       with the breath of life,
   drawing together all creatures
       with the assurance of forgiveness,
     the promise of healing,
       and the hope of communion.
Receive my trust, O God of endless compassion,
and strengthen me for your service. Amen.

Those two insights will continue to evolve, no doubt, and they can stand on their own as “keepers.” But we also just concluded a weeknight adult education class here at the parish (via Zoom, of course) on Matthew Fox’s new book, Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic—and Beyond. I knew that Julian had lived during of bubonic plague in Medieval Europe; I had not realized that her entire life was spent encountering wave after wave of that disease.

And yes, I knew that Julian had a remarkably unswerving confidence in both the love of God and the goodness of creation in the midst of unspeakable bodily horrors. All shall be well—she didn’t merely hope this, she insisted it was true. Jesus told her so.

More than all of that, Julian-via-Fox has done something to my thinking right now that feels, if not “new,” then fresh. It’s this: the imperative to notice and address the links between and among climate change, this current pandemic, racism, sexism, misogyny, matricide, and patriarchy, all in a single “mystic-prophetic” posture.

I do believe the world’s religious traditions were made for just such a time as this—for just such a time, that is, for rooting ourselves sufficiently in those traditions to innovate.

Now, about that nap…

A Contagious Hope in Times of Peril

We’ve been fussing and tinkering the last few days at Good Shepherd, the congregation where I serve in Berkeley. Fussing with how best we might offer an opportunity for prayer and worship without meeting together in person. We tinkered, too, because we wanted to get this right, or at least do the best we can with online worship because we’ve been realizing of late, as so many others have as well, that spiritual practice and religious traditions really do make a profound difference in our shared sense of wellbeing.

At its best, religious practice binds us together as a community—to shape us, challenge us, admonish us, and also to reassure us and comfort us in moments of distress and peril. For all of these reasons and more, we were committed to connecting in some fashion, to be encouraged and fortified by the sense of being woven together, even online, as a single Body with many members—to evoke one of St. Paul’s favorite images.

In this time of pervasive anxiety and unnerving uncertainty, the lectionary—one of our religious tools as Christians—the lectionary gave us some rich biblical texts for worship this morning.

From the Hebrew Bible, we heard the story of how David was chosen over and above his much more likely brothers to be Israel’s king (1 Samuel 16:1-13). The storyteller quite directly tells us what we should learn from that moment of divine selection: do not judge by size or outward appearance alone.

Here’s just one of many ways to take that lesson to heart: let’s notice how astonishing it is that something microscopically small is right now bringing nation-states to their knees; how a virus, invisible to the naked eye, is toppling a global economic system.

What we humans build and construct, even what looks sturdy and seems permanent, is actually quite fragile and temporary. This moment seems ripe, in other words, to ponder anew where we ought to place our hope and trust.

Let’s be very clear about where, at least in part, our hope just now belongs: science.

A recent op-ed in the Washington Post by retired Navy Seal and Admiral William McRaven offered some powerful words of reassurance in that regard, a reminder that some of the smartest scientific minds on the planet are working on a vaccine, on treatments, and a cure for COVID-19; that some of the most experienced people in epidemiology and public health are mobilizing at all levels; healthcare providers are courageously and heroically tending to the sick. These are indeed hopeful signs for what are surely very troubling days ahead.

In addition to that great list, let me also note where I hear hope from the story about David: it’s a reminder that God often chooses the least likely tools, the most unexpected methods, and the usually overlooked people to accomplish what God intends in the world. Put in another way: hope appears precisely at that moment when it seems the most unwarranted.

Or as Admiral McRaven put it, “because the only thing more contagious than a virus is hope.”

Hope where there seemed to be none at all takes on flesh in the story from John’s account of the gospel that was also appointed for today (John 9:1-41). As some early Christian commentators have noted about this story of giving sight to a man born blind, Jesus is the one who seeks him out, not the other way around.

jesus_heals_blind_edy-legrand — Jesus offers sight to a man born blind.

This is what God is like, those commentators suggest, always pursuing us with more gifts than we even thought possible to ask for.

John tells a rather complex story about this man born blind, about his parents and the wider community to which they all belong. The complexity of this story, it seems to me, reflects the complexity of life itself and the very real perplexities we encounter in our relationships with God and each other.

Even the notion of healing is multilayered, both in this story and in our own lives. Of course, we stand in need of healing from this new coronavirus; and we also need a healing balm for our collective anxiety; and we also need healing for the deep social and political divisions in our society; and still more, we need to heal and revitalize our relationship to Earth, with her many interconnected ecosystems and habitats and species, “this fragile Earth,” as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, “our island home.”

Yet one more layer from this story deserves attention: the perennial human response to suffering by asking why. The frequent assumption humans so often make in such moments is captured perfectly in this story, an assumption continues in some quarters to this day. It is the assumption, in the face of suffering, that someone must have sinned.

Typical for John’s Jesus, he does not respond in any neat or tidy way to this question, except to say that sin has nothing to do with the man’s blindness.

John’s Jesus is crystal clear about this and it deserves repeating: Neither that man nor his parents sinned to cause his blindness.

Hope where there seemed to be none.
Hope in the flesh, seeking us out.
Hope for more than we could think to ask.

These reminders about hope were beautifully framed this morning with the familiar words from the 23^rd Psalm, which was itself a balm to hear in the congregation of the Good Shepherd.

As we confront still more difficult days ahead, let us hold fast to the assurance offered by the psalmist: God is with us. God is actually our shepherd, leading us to places of unexpected refreshment and renewal—green pastures and still waters.

And still more: God accompanies us through even the darkest valley, reassuring us that not even death can separate us from the shepherd’s care.

In the days and weeks ahead, may hope itself become the unstoppable contagion we spread for each other’s comfort and consolation…

good_shepherd_kelly_latimore — “The Good Shepherd,” Kelly Latimore

Manger Matters: Shedding Light on the Shadow of Shame

In the Christian tradition of my youth, Christmas always anticipated Good Friday and Easter. Jesus was born in order that he might die for our sins; the manger mattered, in other words, merely as a means to a greater end—the cross.

Stressing the significance of the cross is certainly not “wrong,” but I have become convinced how inadequate that one symbol is to meet the multivalent challenges of being human. The manger matters all on its own, a vital symbol of the hope we now need for the flesh—our flesh as humans, the flesh of all other animals, and the fleshy body of Earth.

Ancient storytellers remind me of this, especially in the multiple ways one can read the so-called “fall” of humanity in the opening chapters of the Bible. That classic story is not only about guilt, but just as much about bodily shame—“who told you that you were naked?” (Gen. 3:11) How one reads that ancient story shapes how one celebrates Christmas. Atonement, for example, cannot heal our bodily shame; perhaps the only thing that comes close is Incarnation, the divine embrace of the flesh that so many of us treat so casually, at best, or worse, hatefully and violently. (I wrote about this in my 2013 book, Divine Communion. I offered some Christmas reflections based on that book when it was first published.)

John’s account of the Gospel makes incarnational hope explicit, declaring that the divine Word became flesh (1:14). I’ve been wondering recently how else that particular account can become a source of healing for our shame, an assurance of God’s own solidarity with us in the flesh. John is certainly not shy about multiplying the metaphors we might use to invite bodily encounters with God; how might such an invitation shape your Christmas celebration?

For these Twelve Days of Christmas, I offer here a canticle based on the full arc of John’s account of the Word dwelling among us. I offer it with hope for the world’s healing, with prayers for divine blessings on all of God’s creatures, and as a reminder of the dearness of flesh itself, which God so tenderly cradled in a manger.

Light of the World

nativity_blue_star