Lent – Peculiar Faith

Legacy Language and Redeeming the Flesh

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

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

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

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

“The Valley of Dry Bones,” Gordon Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Reaching — The Raising of Lazarus,” Michael Cook

Women’s Lib Comes to a Village in Samaria

A big shout out to lectionary “Year A” in the three-year cycle which gave us just yesterday the intrepid and resilient (though sadly nameless) “woman at the well” in John’s account of the Gospel (4:5-42). She herself was a fount of living water as we gathered for worship in this Lenten season, in these days when white patriarchy is running amok across the globe and an oily rain is falling on the people of Tehran—an unprecedented environmental catastrophe.

Rather than oil in the streets, and as if like Moses, we struck the rock in the wilderness in worship and out from ancient biblical texts streamed the kind of clear watery refreshment we hardly knew we needed so terribly much. How fortuitous and perhaps even divinely inspired that the lectionary landed on these biblical texts in Women’s History Month—a month that really should feature actual women (with names, damnit!) and not merely stereotypes.

It’s dismayingly difficult to keep women real given the long, the achingly long literary, religious, and political history of turning the stories of women into archetypes, symbols, and violent cliches. As we now know in some fresh and horrifying ways from Jeffrey Epstein’s island of misfit billionaires, women (and girls) are not merely tropes but objects to be traded, trafficked, bartered, enslaved, raped, tortured, and killed.

A Sunday lectionary hardly seems up to the task of unraveling and dismantling such an infernal misogyny, unless we pay attention, and unless we take ancient stories as contemporary beacons, and unless we insist that Scripture really can inspire and equip us—with the Holy Spirit’s charisms—to live as revolutionaries, just like Jesus.

So let’s be sure to notice when reading the story about that fierce woman at the well—and then notice again, and then still once more (because deeply ingrained patriarchal habits are insidiously hard to break)—that there’s absolutely nothing in this story about repentance and forgiveness; but there’s quite a lot in this Johannine story about cycles of patriarchal domination.

Let’s take a step back from that observation (which sounds like heresy in my Evangelically-shaped ears) and consider carefully the calcified cliches behind which women so often disappear. Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, on the first Sunday in Lent, the lectionary assigned the classic story from Genesis about the temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent.

Ah! But that’s not how most of us remember that story. Most of us have heard it referred to as the “temptation of Eve,” who then seduces Adam to make the same mistake she did.

That difference makes a significant difference: imagining only Eve present for the serpent’s temptation makes Eve a symbol of the original seductress who leads to the fall of man (both in the generic and particular sense)—and who does so again and again, from generation to generation, wearyingly repeated as stale caricature on a manly stage.

John’s story at a well in the desert has often been read in much the same way as that iconic story from Genesis. In fact, the literary figure of “Woman as Wicked Seductress” is so common—infusing the air we breathe and the water we drink—most of us don’t even have to know about it to read John’s story with that motif as our interpretive lens.

I grew up hearing this story as an encounter between Jesus and a sexually promiscuous woman—a woman who had led astray no fewer than six men—and how wonderful it is that God’s forgiveness can extend even to someone like her; but none of that is even hinted at in John’s telling.

The first-century context of the story offers alternative ways of reading that are much more plausible. Given the ancient mortality rate, this woman could have been widowed multiple times; cultural customs would have forced her to marry the brothers of her deceased husbands, one after another.

It’s even more likely that she was struggling because of religious marriage regulations in which only men could initiate divorce, and for any reason at all; the social and economic vulnerability of unmarried women might have forced this woman to remarry after multiple divorces just to survive—and perhaps that’s why she resorted to living with a man who was not her husband, a way just to put food on the table.

To repeat once more: Jesus says nothing at all to this woman about forgiveness, not even repentance; what startles and astonishes this woman is that Jesus apparently knew—he knew and he named—what she had been enduring and living through.

Reading this story apart from the usual patriarchal assumptions about sexual morality can itself be quite liberating, and a way to notice a remarkable first-century embrace of a woman as student and disciple, as compelling witness and evangelist, and some would say one of the earliest apostles! A whole village follows Jesus because of her ministry!

But there’s more: John goes still further in his portrayal of Jesus as a divine social revolutionary with a story that isn’t about just any (anonymous) woman; this woman is from a village in Samaria, a region denigrated and despised by the religious elite in Judea. (It takes hardly any imagination at all to bring to mind today’s “Judeans” and “Samaritans”.)

Recall the biblical story (1 Kings 16—2 Kings 9) about Ahab, a corrupt ruler of the northern Kingdom of Israel, who made a political alliance by marrying a Phoenician woman by the name of Jezebel. Together, they set up their own capital city away from Jerusalem and in Samaria, where they established a temple for idolatrous worship.

Even when those details from the biblical story are unfamiliar, very few would fail to recognize the name “Jezebel”—yet another emblematic figure of the dangerous seductions of women in the affairs of men.

John the Evangelist may have been enamored with a misty-eyed neo-platonic mysticism (and I confess to finding wonderful insights when I read him that way), but right now, today, it matters even more to see in this one Johannine woman the embodiment of both the vexations of gender and the hostile rivalries of ethnicity.

I mean, what if John is writing this story not as a way to illustrate God’s gracious forgiveness of a “sexual sinner” (dare I repeat this? that is not in the story at all). What if he is instead writing a story of God’s own determination to liberate women from their patriarchal classifications, and to heal the wounds of ethnic rivalry and hatred? Sure, preach forgiveness, but not with this story; this one is about freedom.

Oh, how much richer this story becomes when it’s not merely and crudely about how many sexual partners a first-century woman may have had (honestly, who cares?) but rather how often women become trapped in cycles of male domination and control, illustrated by this one woman—an illustration embodied by a woman of undesirable ethnic heritage.

John may be rooted in thick and even convoluted theological speculation, but he is also (I am convinced) committed to taking otherwise simple and ordinary encounters and rendering them with a brilliant divine presence and transformative insight.

Consider the lectionary’s rich texts last week, for the first Sunday in Lent: not only the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation but also John’s story about Nicodemus, a member of the judicial counsel of the Judeans, coming to visit Jesus at night. The symbol of darkness can remind us of seeds planted in the soil of Earth, just as the body of Jesus himself is eventually planted in a dark tomb, from which will sprout an Easter life.

Yesterday, by contrast, John’s Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman drawing water at high noon, in broad daylight. Something important is being brought into view, being revealed and illuminated for us to see.

As I read this familiar story once again this year, I kept returning to the frame John seems keen to create for it: authentic worship. If “proper worship” divided Judeans and Samaritans, then John insists in the bright light of day to show us living water flowing like a crystal stream of healing between the Judean Jesus and the Samaritan woman—water that not only restores life to a parched land but also provides a balm for the ethnic violence that has scarred the land.

That violence is rooted in the ethnic and patriarchal hostilities that have marred human history for millennia. True and life-giving worship, in other words, will always lead us into relationships of healing and reconciliation for the sake of Beloved Community.

The day is coming, Jesus says, when the true worshippers of God are not tied to any one location or belong to only one chosen race or exhibit a favored gender but shall instead all worship together in spirit and in truth—both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, as the lectionary collect for the day declared.

As these lectionary texts lead toward the Eucharistic Table, it’s worth remembering that John is the only Gospel writer to include a rather grisly detail in the story of the crucifixion: both water and blood flowed from the pierced side of the crucified Jesus (19:34).

Now, it is certainly possible to read that moment as a forensic examiner: the Roman centurion’s spear likely pierced through the pericardial membrane around the heart of Jesus, releasing its watery fluid along with the blood.

Sure, but I don’t think John cares one little bit about that. I think John cares that human beings are physically born from their mothers in a mix of both blood and water, and here it flows from the Jesus who invites us all to be “born again.” The fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich imagined exactly this: the wound in the side of Jesus as the womb from which we are reborn into New Life—Jesus, she said, is our blessed mother.

Even if John only gestured toward the socially transformative power of authentic worship, it’s high time we take that conviction with us to the Eucharist Table. There we remember the death of Jesus and proclaim the hope of Easter—the intertwining of memory and hope creates true and genuine community, as Josiah Royce once noted, and leads to the formation of Beloved Community, as Martin Luther King, Jr., later preached, and which John the evangelist insists leads to rebirth.

Rebirth as mere “blank slate”? No, but being born again into a world where the life of a woman at a well in the wilderness can reassure us that God’s living water shall not fail to heal us and free us from the racially gendered systems of domination that wound us all.

Called to Life, Tempted by Shame

Mythologies often tell the truth better than facts—at least about the stuff that matters most: who we are, how to live and love, why we exist.

The Bible is brimming with truer-than-fact stories, and many of us heard a classic one from the first book of the Bible yesterday, on the first Sunday in Lent, and it even featured the fabled forbidden fruit.

As I pondered why it should matter to tell stories like these when the world swirls with chaos and pain, I stumbled upon a wonderful retrospective essay on Toni Morrison and her socially transformative work—perfect for Black History Month!

Most people probably don’t think of Morrison as a Black activist; she was a novelist. What does storytelling have to do with changing the world?

Ah! That’s exactly the connection to notice: the best stories are always world-changing, even if the “world” is one’s own interior landscape.

The essayist noted, for example, that Morrison’s novel Beloved is deliberately “fragmented,” and that she invented a kind of narrative language to evoke the unspeakable horrors of slavery and its brutalities, but also the resilience, the courage, the beauty of those who had been enslaved. For Morrison, stories matter because, at least in part, they can contain what our minds cannot confront.

Stories, fables, and mythologies often tell the truest things about us, even when we don’t want to know them. We tell stories to navigate the world, to pass along vital information, and to create places of meaning and purpose for ourselves in the unfolding evolution of the Universe. We also tell stories when we just can’t bear reality any other way.

Among the most important (and nearly entirely caricatured) sets of such mission-critical stories sits nestled in the first three chapters of Genesis, brilliantly stitched together from a variety of ancient mythologies by an ancient storyteller who is wrestling with what it means to be human. As we heard in church yesterday (if we could manage not to hear what isn’t in that story and turn down the volume on all the messages most of us heard from childhood and 1970s television ), this biblical storyteller struggles with the human condition because of a key conviction: we are not yet embracing the kind of life for which God made us (Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7).

In the same way that Toni Morrison understood the power of stories to contain what our minds cannot confront, this biblical storyteller can help us face the agonizing aspects of human life and also the staggering beauty of living as a creature of the living God. The struggle and the beauty; the agony and the glory—not only stories, but visual art carries into those spaces where are linear modes of cognitive sorting fear to tread, as artist Edwin Lester reminds me so vividly.

That’s what makes these first three chapters of the Bible so foundational: not as a pseudo-scientific account of human origins (Darwin is not an enemy of faith!), but rather as a story about the human condition that can help us travel along the good road toward flourishing.

We might also note that churches committed to the three-year lectionary cycle are currently living in Year A, which just happens to be the foundational year for the sake of Christian formation, and we certainly had plenty of material to sort through yesterday for the beginning of Lent! The story from Genesis, and also St. Paul’s interpretation of that story in his letter to the Romans (5:12-19), and still more: Matthew’s version of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness (4:1-11).

Each of these texts separately and especially taken together reflect the ongoing and often deeply vexing struggle with it means to be human: in relation to each other, with the wider world of God’s creation, and in God. This struggle maps the entire Lenten journey—toward the Cross and into the Empty Tomb—and for many of us they are vexing texts, irritating, familiar enough to breed contempt, and almost always weaponized (as often happens with the best stories).

All of that vexation was certainly true for me, for many years, and then, as if flooded by divine illumination—probably because of a providential confluence of arguing with Christian fundamentalists about marriage equality and seeing a gay Jewish therapist about my own internalized homophobia—I suddenly read the Bible through an entirely different and luminous lens.

The following is the fresh path I’m still traveling through these texts, briefly charted (and if you want to read more about this, it’s at the heart of my book on thinking theological about sexual intimacy):

The first (and I would say most important and vital) thing to notice comes from the temptation in that ancient and iconic garden in Genesis. Quite honestly, my entire professional life, as well as my personal life, changed dramatically when I saw clearly what resided at the root of that temptation: shame.

Yes, it is also true that this story is about disobedience and guilt and the need for forgiveness; but those aspects are secondary, because they emerge first and foremost from the deadly dynamics of bodily shame—and they are indeed devilishly deadly. (I cannot recommend highly enough the work of Brene Brown on this; among here many videos and publications, you can start with this TED Talk on shame.)

I am thoroughly convinced that the vast preponderance of the world’s distress is rooted in unacknowledged and unaddressed shame. Notice carefully the character of the temptation itself. The wise serpent says to the first humans: “if you eat this fruit, you will be like God.”

Here’s the essence of that crafty invitation: to suppose that the way God made us isn’t good enough; being merely human is not enough—we have to be like gods.

That’s shame talking, not guilt, and the difference matters: Guilt attaches to something I’ve done; shame attaches to my sense of self. This ancient storyteller then shows us the deadly effects of shame: it separates us from each other, it separates us from the wider world of God’s creation, and it urges us to turn away from God.

Not just coincidentally, what follows immediately after this moment in the next chapter of Genesis is the story of fratricide, when Cain kills his brother Abel; shame often gets projected outward into violence—it’s in the daily news every single day.

The second thing to notice is how Matthew’s Jesus resists the deadly solutions to the problem of shame—even though they are very tempting.

Every year on the first Sunday in Lent, most Christians hear the story about Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. This year, I read that story as for the first time. Thanks to the lectionary pairings (like fine wines with a delicious meal of Mediterranean food?), it suddenly occurred to me that each of the temptations Jesus faced is just another version of what the serpent offered Adam and Eve in the garden: a way to reject human nature.

Oh, the trickster serpent says to Jesus, you’re hungry? A mere human couldn’t solve that problem; but if you really are the Son of God, why don’t you turn these stones into bread?

Oh, you’re afraid of heights? Mere humans usually are. But if you really are God’s chosen, jump off this high tower; God will surely save you.

Oh, you’re a bit short of money? That’s a classic source of human anxiety, poor thing. So just worship me, and I’ll give you all the riches of the world.

Jesus says No to each of these ways of rejecting his God-given humanity—he may be hungry, afraid, and poor, but his humanity is intact for the good road toward divine flourishing, toward the very purpose God intends, which is nothing less than abundant life, for all.

The story from Genesis presents that abundance, I would say, as a life made for communion—for deep intimacy with each other, an interlaced community with the wider world of God’s creation, and union with God.

Shame inevitably corrodes that purpose from the inside out, erupting into hateful speech, fragmenting families and communities, and maintaining deadly divisions among us with violence.

Among the many reasons Christian communities keep the Eucharist as the heart of their life of common prayer, surely this must be paramount: It is the Table of Communion: a visible and tangible reminder of the kind of life for which God makes us and toward which God wants to lead us.

Yes, gathered at that Table offers the vital assurance that we are forgiven; and perhaps today what we need even more urgently is that Table’s balm of love to heal our shame.

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 Devil’s a Liar!

The first Sunday in Lent always features Jesus in the wilderness tempted by Satan. Reading this familiar story again this year (Luke 4:1-13), it strikes me that those iconic temptations all spring from the ongoing and stubborn desire for certainty and security.

Imagine having the capacity to create food whenever you’re hungry, or to control the world’s wealth (all of it), or never to worry about physical harm ever again—to be certain of the capacity for even just one of those, let alone all three, would surely provide a sense of safety if not absolute security.

Personally, the chaos of our present world makes that desire for “certainty and security” sound pretty good. And that ancient story offers a timely invitation to consider exactly what I’m most tempted to do when the stakes are high in my life and when the consequences of my choices are potentially severe.

But this story is not merely about resisting temptation (as I have almost always taken it to mean), as if the point is to follow the lead of Jesus in exercising heroic willpower. The indigenous translation of this story we use during Lent at All Saints’ Parish refers to Satan in this story as the “evil trickster”—he’s a liar, in other words, the Great Deceiver, and he cannot make good on his promises; no one can. No one can give us perfect certainty or guaranteed security about anything—these are not possible for human life.

So much time and energy, even anguish, not to mention money, is devoted to obtaining these very things, these things we long for but cannot have—not because we’re unworthy of them or haven’t yet said the prayers properly, but because these things are not even compatible with being authentically human.

We cannot be perfectly certain and absolutely secure and still be human.

Living a genuinely human life is an ongoing journey of liberation, a theme all three of the biblical texts from the Lenten lectionary yesterday articulate directly and powerfully. In this case, being set free especially from all the stuff—material goods or a wealth of control—all the stuff we’re constantly told will keep us safe but actually keeps us afraid, always worried about scarcity, always terrified of loss.

Luke seems especially keen to help us travel this “freedom road,” and returns often to the Exodus of God’s people from slavery in Egypt as a favorite image. Jesus prepares for ministry just as Moses did—with forty days in the wilderness, exactly where the ancient Israelites wandered for forty years on their way to the Promised Land.

Even the particular temptations in Luke’s story harken back to that iconic moment. Almost immediately after their liberation from Egypt, the Israelites are hungry in that wilderness because they have no bread. It’s from that very story in Deuteronomy that Jesus quotes to fend off the devil—not just once, but for each of the three temptations.

by the Spirit into the Wilderness,” Stanley Spencer

Let’s also recall that the Spirit anoints Luke’s Jesus to let the oppressed go free, and as we heard last week, the transfigured Jesus is joined by none other than Moses, who discusses with Jesus his upcoming “departure,” which Luke calls his “exodus.”

Liberation from captivity and the freedom to flourish—this is the good road Luke invites us to travel our entire lives, urging us especially to let go of whatever we think will give us “certainty and security” along that road; these are not our provisions for the journey, no matter how often we’re told to pack them.

Always lingering in the background of Gospel texts is of course the Roman Empire. Regardless of whether it’s the first-century version of today’s Global Capitalism, imperial systems tempt us to acquire and accumulate more stuff, and always with the promise that still more stuff will finally make us safe—and that is an outright lie.

Sister Joan Chittister, a Roman Catholic nun and social justice advocate writes about the severe consequences of giving in to this imperial temptation. She describes what’s at stake in terms that are especially appropriate for this Women’s History Month.

“It is precisely women’s experience of God,” she writes, “that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the Creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion,” she says “does not know God the Spirit.”

Imperial religion has given us instead God the rule-maker, God the judge, and God the monarch in control of everything—and not just coincidentally, those are the roles men most often aspire to occupy and to use religion to advance their cause. That kind of religion, Chittister says, “has consumed Western spirituality and shriveled its heart.”

Luke’s Jesus shows us how to expand our hearts by letting go of imperial promises—those promises are in fact lies, and they keep us enslaved to a system in which there is never enough stuff, never enough money, never enough power; it’s a system that holds us captive to the demand for certainty and security—and it’s killing us while it kills the planet.

Indigenous peoples around the world, including in the Americas, have known these dynamics for a very long time. We must let go to live, and this is precisely why the First Nations Version of the New Testament refers to Jesus as “Creator Sets Free.”

The best Lenten disciplines really have nothing to do with chocolate or sugar or whatever else your indulgence of choice might be. Giving up treats for Lent will not keep us on the good road toward life, as if the point of our faith is self-denial for its own sake.

This season invites us instead to identify whatever it is that prevents us from thriving, and then to let it go, for good. Whatever still holds us captive as a community—longstanding resentments, perhaps, or entrenched bigotries, or inherited assumptions, or the economics of privilege—whatever holds us back from flourishing, now is the time to let it go.

The lectionary also gave us a beautiful passage from Deuteronomy yesterday (26:1-11), which sits right at the heart of the Torah, the law delivered by Moses. The great Christian mistake is to suppose the Torah is all about keeping rules; it’s not.

Remember, Moses says to the people, remember you were slaves in Egypt. God set you free, and now you must live as free people.

It’s high time we notice carefully what that passage indicates so clearly is the essence of living as God’s free people: it means living with a grateful generosity and welcoming the stranger.

Let that be our good road this Lenten season—for life.

“Consider the Lilies (Christ in the Wilderness Series),” Stanley Spencer

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.

Praying with Palimpsests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Way of the Cross on the Road called Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Penitent God of Promise

The annual Lenten journey toward Holy Week and Easter is marked by the dynamics of covenantal life—mostly God’s own life of covenantal promise, not ours.

Covenant is one of those religious words so easily mistaken for something else, for the familiar and comfortable world of contractual obligations on which we rely nearly every day—mortgages, credit card agreements, utilities, even ordering food in a restaurant where we are expected to pay the bill after enjoying a meal. All of these “contracts” involve at least two parties promising to do something, the failure of which comes with consequences. In that sense, contracts are fundamentally transactional—I will do this for you if you do that for me; and that is not a covenant.

Yesterday, on the first Sunday in Lent, the biblical texts from the lectionary invited a rather direct, even startling engagement with the character of covenantal relationship. That sounds quite uninspiring, frankly, and a bit dry, but I think it might very well be life-changing.

Consider the iconic story in Genesis about Noah and the flood—or rather, what many of us heard yesterday, the post-flood mountaintop experience Noah had with a penitent God.

After forty days and forty nights of rain, and still many more weeks for the waters to recede from the Earth, Noah once again stands on dry ground, surrounded by all the animals he had harbored on the ark.

Upon seeing this, God says, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind…nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (8:20–21).

This is a remarkable vow from Creator God. Remarkable and then startling when we hear the unmistakable tones of regret echoing in God’s voice, the God who doesn’t want to forget the promise (and presumably neither the regret, either) and creates a rainbow as a reminder.

Victoria Falls on the Livingstone side, Zambia (photo: the author)

I never heard of such a remorseful God growing up, or if I did, I quickly lost sight of that God who shares more with me and my human foibles than I have dared to imagine. I stumbled back upon that very God lurking around in the lectionary, where those verses from Genesis sounded like a baptismal covenant—I don’t mean ours but God’s.

The first Letter of Peter (3:18-22) frames that ancient flood endured by Noah and his family sacramentally, a story that “prefigured” the saving waters of baptism—the whole Earth becomes the baptismal font!

There are at least two astonishing things to notice when reading the story that way. First, the emphasis in the story falls on God’s covenantal promise never again to destroy the earth; Noah makes no promise whatsoever. There’s nothing transactional about this moment; the penitent God alone makes the vow for the sake of flourishing life.

The second astonishing thing is the mistake Peter makes; that ancient letter-writer got the math wrong. There were not just “eight persons” saved on that ark, as Peter writes, not just Noah and his family of humans—there were also all the other animals. That’s a pretty big oversight!

God makes a covenantal promise to the ground, the soil, the trees and plants, and to every living creature on Earth—to the whole creation. God makes this promise without asking for anything in return, not one thing. That’s what makes this a “covenant.”

This covenantal God is the one who drives Jesus into the wilderness, where he is tempted by Satan. Most Christians always hear this story on the first Lenten Sunday, and yesterday the lectionary gave us Mark’s version (1:9-15). Mark is the only one of the gospel writers who mentions that Jesus was accompanied by “wild beasts” in that desert.

These are the “beasts” God promised never again to destroy. But these beasts could, presumably, destroy Jesus if they chose to. That risk makes this story something like the classic “hero’s journey” found in so many of the world’s literary traditions: Jesus not only bravely resists the devil but faces the fearsome specter of untamable beasts.

I had just a tiny glimpse of this on my recent trip to southern Africa, when I discovered what it’s like to be in the wilderness with wild animals. Standing in the middle of a broad, wide-open savannah—buffalo herds on the horizon, the sound of baboon alarms warning of possible lions, the cackling of nearby jackals and a few hyenas, lumbering clusters of elephants—I suddenly felt smaller than ever before; I finally understood, viscerally, what the word “vulnerable” really means; I wondered why anyone ever thought “dominion” was the word to use for our role on a planet that has never been under our control, not for one single minute.

Placing ourselves at the apex of all the animal kingdoms on Earth is at best delusional, and it’s often a desperate ploy to boost fragile egos. Choosing a path of domination and violence just to feel good about ourselves leaves unspeakable destruction in its wake, and the results are now visible nearly everywhere on this precious Earth today.

We know, of course, how the rest of the Gospel story turns out, and that makes the account of Jesus in the wilderness a different kind of “hero’s journey” entirely. Religion scholar Paul Weinfield reminded me of this rather pointedly just recently. We’ve been taught, he says, to imagine heroes overcoming their fears, slaying the dragon, and winning a world-wide audience on social media.

But in the journeys that truly matter, Weinfield says, the dragon slays you—your tidy plans for success unravel; the image of yourself you had hoped to cultivate crumbles; you return to your village shattered, but you do return, and you are humbled, unmade and ready to be remade.

That’s the journey of Lent toward Easter, and something like this happened to me in southern Africa. When I left for that trip, I was like a child, picking up a pebble from a beach and thinking I knew the ocean; when we look up and notice the vastness of the sea, in that humbling moment we’re on the path toward what poet Mary Oliver calls our “place in the family of things.”

Knowing our place and residing there, living in what Christian traditions call communion, this is the source of our healing and our thriving, and not only for us, but for all the other creatures with whom we share this precious Earth.

As the season of Lent begins once more, now is the time to recall that this life of communion comes with a cost, which we learn by following Jesus into the wilderness. We learn along that desert path what must be left behind: money, property, status, privilege. We leave these behind not merely because they aren’t “useful” anymore but because everything we use to protect ourselves from vulnerability, all those things we suppose will keep us safe, actually betray us in the end and keep us afraid.

We live with that tragic irony nearly every day: all things we do for the sake of security—building walls around gated communities, and erecting fences along borders, and fortifying all sorts of boundaries—this quite literally creates lifeless islands of isolation.

Lent invites us to entertain the great paradox of Christian faith. When we let go of what we thought would keep us safe, we are then free to pursue the only thing that can: intimate communion with God and each other.

Like anything worth pursuing, this life of communion comes with risk and it’s scary; but when we follow Jesus into the wilderness, the penitent God of promise is with us—the covenantal God who promises life, even in the desert.

“Christ in the Wilderness,” Stanley Spencer

Repairing the Breach and Bridging the Gap

Ash Wednesday is one of those religious days that can prompt even non-religious people to think about religion—probably not for very long (especially when it falls on Valentine’s Day), but at least long enough to notice people with smudgy foreheads attending midweek church services.

More than this, Ash Wednesday also carries with it some language that sounds extremely and uncomfortably religious with words like “sin” and “repentance.” The liturgy in The Book of Common Prayer even uses some old-fashioned words like “wickedness” and “wretchedness.”

More than a few people find the language and the ritual of a day like Ash Wednesday at least off-putting if not distasteful. This is likely another reason for the profound disconnect in Western society today between the religious language of churches and the hopes and dreams of the wider world.

So there’s some urgency on these explicitly religious days, perhaps especially for whole seasons, like Lent, to pay close attention to the rift so many live with between “inner” and “outer,” or to the lively connections between our interior spiritual lives and our outward actions. This is the vital connection so often missing and lost between our religious communities and the wider world that is so desperate for the insight and transformation that can come with religious practice.

This is not just a profound gap, but also a tragic one. I remain convinced that the world’s religious traditions are needed today more than ever for the crises and challenges we currently face. More than this, for the compelling visions our religious traditions offer of what flourishing life can look like on this precious Earth.

There’s nothing new or modern about this challenge, by the way. Many Christians who ventured into church yesterday heard from the ancient Hebrew prophet Isaiah, who was excoriating his community precisely for this failure to connect “inner” and “outer”: look how you engage in your religious fasting, he says, and yet oppress all your workers; you fast, yes, but then only quarrel and fight with each other!

You think groveling in ashes will suffice to get God’s attention, Isaiah says, yet this is the fast God prefers: to loose the bonds of injustice, to let the oppressed go free, to feed the hungry, and house the homeless, and clothe the naked (Isaiah 58:1-12).

The temptation of course is to suppose that we can choose either the inner or the outer dimension of our lives, or that one is somehow better than the other. Whatever “breach” Isaiah imagined covenant faithfulness would repair (58:12), surely the common gap between our religious practice and social action qualifies as part of it. Black History Month might actually present some reminders about why such repair really does matter.

“Becoming Beloved Community,” Michell Halley

In a world of racial bias, some argue for a color-blind society, as it’s sometimes called, a society where we pay attention to the inner workings of the heart rather than the outer appearance of the body. Some will quote Martin Luther King, Jr., on this who famously noted in his 1963 March on Washington speech that he longed for the day when people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

Yes, and that great day will not arrive by pretending to ignore skin color, as if that’s even possible. To the contrary, we create Beloved Community—as King himself often noted—not in spite of our many racial, or sexual, or gendered differences but because of them. Diversity is not, after all, a problem to be managed but a divine gift to be embraced, a gift God’s own creativity without which our lives would be greatly impoverished.

To do that challenging work of inclusion outwardly demands that we do significant work inwardly—and that’s exactly the purpose of religious practices and spiritual disciplines.

Even so, I freely admit how much I still struggle with the concept of repentance: it’s hard for me to hear the word “repent” and not think of a scolding parent or a biting rebuke or an encounter framed with anger. (Images from childhood, especially “religious” ones, are never just shrugged off casually.)

But here’s what I try to remember nearly every single day, especially during Lent: the image of a scolding parent has nothing to do with the God of Jesus Christ or the good news of the Christian Gospel.

The God who is the very Source of life, the God whose Word brings forth the astonishing diversity of creation and the abundance of Earth, that Word becoming flesh and dwelling in loving companionship among us—this is not the God who comes to us in anger but with kindness and compassion, the God who wants above all to see every creature thrive and flourish—every single one, no exceptions.

Of course the stubborn fact remains that our lives do not always align with that gracious will of Creator God. And so we pause on occasion, as many Christians do on days like Ash Wednesday, so that we can notice that misalignment and to change course and to ask God to help us travel the good road toward abundant life—and that’s a much better meaning for repentance itself.

There’s just one other bit to notice carefully: we do all this remembering that we are in fact mortal, that we will one day die, and actually much sooner than any of us expect (or would prefer).

I suspect that’s why Ash Wednesday liturgies often include the portion many heard yesterday from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (6:1-6, 16-20). There Jesus urges us not to store up for ourselves “treasures on earth”—we just don’t have time for that. Besides, moth and rust will not only consume those treasures but that thief called “Death” will steal them away soon enough.

“Heavenly treasures” are the ones that make a true and lasting difference here on Earth—the ones Isaiah insisted would break the bonds of injustice and let the oppressed go free.

Those are the treasures truly worthy of our time.