Resurrection – Peculiar Faith

Go to Galilee

Hollywood filmmakers turn often to the drama of crucifixion (most notably, Mel Gibson) but rarely to the resurrection. I wonder if an empty tomb is a bit…boring. Or maybe there are too many oddities to stitch together coherently, or strange moments of anticlimax.

This year’s lectionary cycle gave us Matthew’s version of the story as an option, a great example of Easter’s peculiar character.

“Go to Galilee.”

What an odd thing for the risen Jesus to say. Just then, at this first post-resurrection appearance, this profound moment of realizing God’s victory over death, Jesus says, “go to Galilee” (Mt. 28:10).

What would “Galilee” have meant to those women, those men, those first followers and disciples and dear friends of Jesus? What was “Galilee” to them?

Matthew drops hints about this throughout his account of the Gospel, hints about a place where I might imagine feeling completely at home and fully myself. That sets a fairly high bar, so I sometimes try to imagine a place where I can at least come close to feeling perfectly at home in my own body and gladly at home with other bodies.

If you can imagine such a place, that’s your “Galilee.” That’s your home base, your go-to, can’t-live-without place. And the risen Jesus says to his closest friends, “go to Galilee; I will meet you there.”

This homey image matters, it seems to me, especially when confronting the disorientations of Easter. Christmas, after all, is much easier to manage—what’s not to love about a newborn baby? But what in the world do we do with an empty tomb?

Believers and skeptics alike have answered that question in different ways. Throughout church history and today, there’s a whole range of ways to read and interpret the Easter story.

For some, Easter is a beautiful metaphor, evoking the cycle of life itself in the seasons of the year. What lies buried in the cold earth beneath layers of snow emerges in the warm daylight of spring, the green shoots of new life, and here in western Michigan, the carpets of lavender crocus everywhere.

For others, Easter offers reassurance that what was lost can be found, what has been damaged can be restored, what has grown old will be made new. Whatever has failed in our organizations and institutions, whatever has died in us—joy, perhaps, or intimacy, trust and tenderness—whatever has been marred by neglect or abuse or trauma, God can renew and restore and bring to life once again; that’s Easter!

Still others will of course embrace this morning’s celebration as the story of God raising Jesus bodily from death to new life. I don’t mean the resuscitation of a corpse and Jesus is not a ghost. Resurrection in this view instead marks something new and uncanny, and it is the first fruit and foretaste of our own resurrection-destiny.

Those are just a few of the options for embracing Easter, and my prayer is that Christian communities everywhere would welcome everyone, regardless of where they fall on that spectrum of options. The arc of our liturgical year, from Christmas to Easter, touches on the deepest mysteries of birth, death, and new life any of us can confront; I see no point in administering orthodox tests or quizzing anyone’s doctrinal acuity about such things.

Everyone—whether convinced, searching, certain, doubtful, agnostic, perplexed, wildly faithful or some combination of these depending on the day of the week or what they had for breakfast—everyone should find an Easter home, a place to be loved into healing and renewed by grace. We all need a Galilee.

Personally, I land in some fashion on all of the ways one might conceive and believe the Easter story; I see no reason to choose just one. In fact, all those various ways of believing mutually affect the others: of course God raised Jesus from the dead; look what happens in the spring! Of course this community can come back to life; look what God did on Easter!

In my (perhaps peculiar) view, nothing is too good to hope for. What biblical writers consistently urge us to consider has also been true in my own life many times: God usually surprises us with more than we expected, with far more than we thought possible.

Here’s something, however, that I do worry about: postponing resurrection life into such a distant future that it makes no impact on the present. That’s not the Easter story; that’s actually the story of Empire. The powers and principalities of imperial regimes will always try to divert our attention away from the needs of the poor, delay the call for justice, and mute the urgency of ecological renewal by insisting that our only hope resides in some far-away world beyond the grave.

Remember, Empire killed Jesus; and God raised Jesus right there, in Empire.

In contrast to imperial paralysis, and as my good friend Jim Mitulski likes to say, the point of an Easter faith is to practice resurrection now, every day, in our lives and personal relationships, in our organizations and institutions, and in the wider world around us.

Practice resurrection now—in this world of narrow-minded bigotry, and death dealing institutions, and casual acts of violence, and where we can’t even get sensible gun safety legislation passed in Congress when our children are dying.

Practice the transforming love of resurrection now in all the most familiar places, in the most ordinary communities, among the people you know best.

In other words, go to Galilee.

This anticlimax moment in Matthew’s version of the story should remind us that Easter is not some foreign, exotic, distant planet we’re invited to visit at some point in the far-off future—it’s in our own backyard right now.

Just last week, on Palm Sunday, we heard Matthew’s story about Jesus bringing crowds of people with him from Galilee to march on Jerusalem. They had heard him teach there in Galilee, watched him heal the sick, and share meals with prostitutes and tax collectors there, they got into boats with him and sat on hillsides with him and had finally found their place with him, there.

Go to Galilee, the risen Jesus says, the place where we met and where we were most at home together; that place where you learned how to fish as a young boy; where you climbed sycamore trees as a “tom girl”; where you dropped your fishing nets and left your orchards and followed me because you caught a glimpse of something new and powerful—the hope of healing and love and flourishing and finally and at last, beyond your wildest dreams, being fully at home and fully yourself.

“Go tell this to my brothers,” Jesus says to his closest women companions. These are not slaves or servants or even disciples; all of these are family; all of this happens at home.

“Galilee” is here and now; no need to travel, and we must not delay. Christian communities everywhere must practice resurrection today, together, because the world is desperate for Easter.

“All Saints’ Parish,” Saugatuck, Michigan

Bury Your Theology

What is your theology?

People have asked me that question in various ways over the years, in many different communities, and for more than one reason. Eventually, I started responding with some version of “it depends”—on the daily news, my mood, or what the lectionary appoints from the Bible for the coming Sunday.

I don’t mean to be dismissive of the question, but I am increasingly skeptical of providing an adequate answer. Or rather, the kind of answer modern Western sensibilities recognize as sufficient. Holy Week quite naturally provokes the question in all sorts of ways, entangling so many of us not only in liturgical complexities but prickly and often unwieldy theologies.

I have always loved Holy Saturday for the respite it offers in this holiest of weeks, not only from liturgical fussing but also the theological wrangling that sends me grasping after theories to explain what cannot even be named. It has been occurring to me recently to take this quiet day as an opportunity to review the systems and doctrines I’ve inherited and studied, the theological ideas that have both vexed and inspired me, and then just bury it—all of it.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, for example, I live some of my days as a Johannine Christian, relishing the Beethoven-like thickness of the phrases in John’s account of the Gospel. Not only thick but also obtuse, such as the image of Jesus as both shepherd and sheep-gate (10:7-9; 10:11-14), or more unnervingly as a serpent on a cross (3:14).

On more spritely days, with energy running high and wanting just to get on with the work at hand, I embrace a more Markan Christianity. The shortest and bare-bones account of the Gospel rarely pauses for reflection—“immediately” is Mark’s favorite word, and he concludes his account with women running away in fear.

When my gay self feels a bit queer around the edges, I’m oddly grateful for Paul’s letter to the Romans where he describes God’s inclusion of Gentiles in the Church as an “unnatural act” (11:24). If God can act contrary to nature, then surely I can? Or maybe nature itself is just much queerer than most of us can imagine, as Paul himself describes a universe filled with earthly bodies and heavenly bodies and angelic glories, all of it contained in a bare seed that is sown in the earth (1 Cor. 15:35-41).

How tempting (nearly irresistibly so) to suppose that we must choose which of all the biblical options is the “correct” one. But when I do resist that urge and take this rich panoply of biblical tropes into the history of theology’s development, I find myself not unlike a fickle lover, enamored by Dionysian ecstatic mysticism in the morning and turning fondly toward Augustine’s self-excoriating disciplines by noon.

So much of this, I have come to realize, depends on exactly what kind of question I’m asking, which is often not entirely apparent. To the standard Evangelical question—are you saved?—I must at first respond, from what? And then eventually, for what? And of course, how? Holy Week gathers all these questions, and more, those countless and often repetitive inquires that have been building all year long and stacks them, one on top of the other, a virtual mosh pit of symbols and rites.

In a society of increasing isolation and fragmentation, and having recently lived through the severe touch deprivation of a global pandemic, having one’s feet tenderly touched and washed on Maundy Thursday can feel salvific. I pause there gratefully, but then realize that the Cross still matters to me, or perhaps that it should matter to me more “salvifically” than it usually does.

I recall Rowan Williams’ arresting insight about the cross in his interpretation of the resurrection narratives: “salvation comes from our victims.” I began to grasp his meaning far better by reading M. Shawn Copeland’s racial analysis of it and her heart-stopping image of what the Gospel demands from us. She interrupts my romanticized images of table fellowship with the Gospel call to orient ourselves “before the lynched Jesus, whose shadow falls across the table of our sacramental meal.”

That sentence cannot mean the same thing to me and in the same way it does to Black Americans in this white supremacist society. That’s why Copeland resists making the cross our saving symbol but insists that we cannot be saved without it, precisely because the whole arc of betrayal, suffering, death, and resurrection demands from all of us the kind of life that reflects the deepest possible arc of solidarity with the poor and outcast.

Old ways of living—the ways of violence and violation—those ways must die with Christ in order for any of us to be raised with Christ to new life. This, Copeland says, is the “divine praxis of solidarity” that offers a new way of being in relation to God, to others, to self— salvation, in other words.

All of this (and more) swirls around all the ritual complexities of the week we have just traveled together as Christians, and on this Holy Saturday I cannot help but consider whether theology itself needs to die with Christ as well.

As Meister Eckhart, the great Dominican mystic of the thirteenth century once uttered, “I pray God to rid me of God.” After all, even the word “God” can only point to what none of us can ever fully comprehend; and it can easily get in the way of actually encountering what it so feebly evokes.

I don’t mean our thinking and speaking make no difference, or that our theological ideas have no consequences. To the contrary, the stakes are high in what we say and do—bad theology kills (as the contemporary aphorism urges us to note); and this, too: good theology brings life.

Yes, and still, as John’s Jesus reminds us, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” How could this not apply to our theologies as surely as it does to our own bodies?

So perhaps as gently and respectfully as we can, it’s time to bury our theology with all the nails that keep tidy systems pinned to institutional walls and let our wounds breathe some fresh air.

I need to bury much of my own theology, even the most cherished bits, the ones that “make sense” and feel cozy, those beloved propositions and religiously fine-tuned mechanisms; without my realizing it, they’re blocking my path.

Perhaps this could be a shared Holy Saturday exhortation: Bury your theology, and then let it rise with Jesus, unrecognizable but strangely alluring, oddly familiar but fresh and new.

Nevertheless: An Earth-Day Easter

I believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead for multiple reasons. Among those reasons: it reminds me and helps me to look everywhere around me and inside me for the God who perpetually brings forth new life from death and decay. Or put in another way, Easter urges me always to hold on to the hope of new life, especially when despair seems easier.

Biblical writers offered this reminder constantly and not only with reference to the first Easter. Nearly every story in the Bible turns on the “Great Nevertheless.” Joseph was left for dead and sold into slavery; nevertheless, he prospered in Pharaoh’s household and saved the land from famine. Abraham and Sarah were far too old to have children of their own; nevertheless, Sarah bore Isaac, the firstborn of a mighty nation; the people of Israel languished as slaves in Egypt; nevertheless, God raised up Moses to lead them into freedom; Jesus was crucified and killed by the Roman Empire; nevertheless, God raised him from the dead as the first fruits of an unimaginable process of renewal and new life for the whole creation.

That’s just a short list of the many biblical stories that invite us to hope when hope seems in desperately short supply. On this Earth Day which is also Easter, I confess to finding it difficult to hold on to hope for this dear planet of God’s wondrous creation. Nearly every day, it seems, a new report emerges about how much worse our climate change catastrophe actually is—faster temperature increases; worsening CO2 emissions; sea levels rising more quickly; still more species disappearing; extreme weather events as the new normal. Despair seems not only easier than hope but more reasonable.

Right there is at least one reason to keep telling the Easter story year after year: in a world where despair seems the most reasonable course, we need to remember that God has entered the story with us, showing up among the most familiar characters, plunging into the classic plotlines as one of us, and healing our despair with a love that is stronger than death.

On this Earth Day Easter, I choose to give my heart to that story (the original meaning of that ancient Germanic verb “to believe””) and to look for Easter hope in a world of despair. Here are just three places to find that hope. There are many more! Let’s spend these great fifty days of the Easter season sharing these stories with each other and renewing our Easter commitment to Earth.

Plastic
I began the season of Lent trying to come to grips with the problem of single-use plastic. And it’s a huge problem. We simply must stop using it and making it. The good news: cleanup is possible, as a remarkable story from an Indian beach can remind us.

easter_versova__beach_cleanup — Before and After: Versova Beach in Mumbai

Deforestation
Forests have been disappearing at an alarming rate on this planet, at exactly a time when we need more forests to scrub the air and deal with increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The good news: reforestation is possible! The story of New England’s once decimated forests, now nearly restored after 150 years, is a great story of Easter hope.

easter_newengland_forests — Before and After: Deforestation and Reforestation in New England

Species Extinction
I was shocked and dismayed last year to realize that we are losing between 150 and 200 species every day on this planet, which is a rate much higher than would be true if our species weren’t around. The good news: intentional care and action can bring a species back from the brink and into thriving.

easter_humpback_whale — Humpback Whales have made a comeback from the edge of extinction.

Our current climate change crisis is indeed a planetary emergency; we must treat it as such and act accordingly. And on this Easter Day devoted to the Great Nevertheless, let us act with joyful hope. God is with us in this story, and Christ is risen.

Alleluia!

cross_light

Beyond Bunnies: Unleashing the Wildness of God

Easter is no less commercialized than Christmas. I thought about this today and posted a pithy note on Facebook about it: “Global capitalism illustrated: moving effortlessly from the Harrowing of Hell to the Easter Bunny.” I’m not sure what I meant by that and I’m wrestling with it on this Holy Saturday evening.

I think was trying to say something about how markets rely on domestication for the sake of creating a commodity suitable for mass marketing and profit-making; an empty tomb becomes a Hallmark card. I’m not sure about the economics of all this, and I might be even less sure of the theology. Here’s what I’m wrestling with:

Among the many ways of journeying through this Holy Week, I try to pay attention to a story of resistance against the forces of religion-inflected empire, forces that brutalize whole populations; and a story of an instance of that resistance being met with heavy-handed law enforcement and mockeries of justice, agonizing physical torture, and a summary public execution; and a story of betrayal, abandonment, and risky tender care of the executed by terrorized friends.

christ_medieval_cross2

It’s a story not of tidy endings but of gut-wrenching perplexity, discounted testimony (from women), fear-drenched cohorts of erstwhile revolutionaries, and encounters with a stranger who upends the most basic boundaries on which we still rely for defining what life itself is, and what it means when it ends. At least one first-century gospel writer imagined burial cloths neatly folded in an empty tomb, as if Jesus had been napping and slapped gently awake by a watchful parent.

Perhaps. But if death is woven into the very fabric of biological evolution and the harmonies of ecosystems and the finalities of bereavement and grief, and if particular kinds of death stain its finality with outrage and despair—being shot eight times in the back by police officers in your family’s backyard while carrying a cellphone—then I imagine a rather different kind of God, wild and unleashed, the one dragging life out of the waters of untamable chaos at the dawn of time, a God tearing down the pillars of Death’s Dominion and yanking a lifeless body into a crack of all that rubble where light feebly shines.

A paltry analogy comes to mind. My Australian shepherd dog Judah loves to chase sea birds along a low-tide beach, where he inevitably gets mired in muck. I cannot merely call to him, shout out his name from the slightly more stable shore to release him from his muddy entombment. I must slosh through the muck, my feet and ankles and shin bones layered in stinky slime, and there lift his sixty-pound canine body out of the sea bed, one sloshy, painstaking step at a time. I heave. I pull. I yank. I do a big heavy-lift. I do this over vast distances.

So does God on Easter morning.

That story—its brutality and tenderness, its untamable effervescence—that story, I worry, is now offered by referring to the reliable turning of the seasons, with appreciable nods to a pear tree finally blossoming after a winter of bare twigs (which I myself have said in years past from an Easter-lily drenched pulpit), or the cuddly softness of bunnies newly born in a cozy nest as tulips begin to bud. Hallmark cards and multi-colored plastic grass and baskets of plastic eggs filled with chocolate rabbits—the familiars of my own childhood, which I have no desire to denigrate or dismiss (except for the plastic; we have to stop using plastic).

My fretting focuses not there but on mistaking the undeniable and spirit-soaring brilliance of winter morphing into spring for the tenacious God of life, the God who anoints a suffering servant to stand against the crush of imperial oppression armed only with compassion and loving intimacy, that same, wild God of irrepressible life who insists on interrupting our reasonable stories with a universe that is not only queerer than we imagine but queerer than we can imagine; the most familiar friend is the unrecognizable stranger. This is not just Spring; it is the Spring we recognize at once even though we have never before seen it, have never even dared to imagine it.

A wild God appears on our horizon, the One who will always find a domesticated shrine in the religious institutions that gravitate toward the comfortable rhythms of state power and all the benefits such power bestows on white men like me.

Perhaps I wrote that pithy Facebook post to myself—Easter as a hallowed space of comfort has yet to harrow my own collusion with the imperial forces of death.

Easter Day inaugurates a fifty-day season, every year. Thank God. This is by far more harrowing than Lent. Or it should be, or so I am supposing after a long week of wondering what the hell all these religious rites are really all about.

Hell. Back to that.

On this night, as tradition has it, Jesus harrowed Hell. I cannot imagine Hell was pleased.

May the morning’s dawn unsettle all of us with the wild, undomesticated life of God.

chora_anastasis2 — The Harrowing of Hell as Adam and Eve are Raised by Christ

Arise, My Love

In the end, we are raised in love, just as in the beginning we are made from love.

And love is strong, stronger than most of us can imagine. As the ancient poet once wrote:

for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it (Song of Solomon 8:6-7).

Today, apparently, we need even more to remember that love is stronger than hate. From one end to the other, the world seems awash in fear and terror as so many thrash about with a violence fueled by a relentless suspicion if not a deep loathing.

I cannot imagine how to solve any of this, yet on this Easter Day, the Feast of the Resurrection, I try to remember this: love is strong, stronger than fear and terror, stronger than violence and hatred.

I try to remember that, and then I wonder how the world might change if Christian churches everywhere preached and lived love, and only that.

Imagine Christian congregations organizing all of their worship, business practices, and pastoral care to ensure that you and everyone else feels unmistakably wanted, desired, and loved — that you know yourself as desirable and lovable, without any question or doubt.

Imagine returning week-by-week to a place where you catch an invaluable glimpse of what it looks like to live without any shame, being free of guilt, and having no fear – a glimpse of love’s amazing strength.

Imagine a lifetime of catching that glimpse and hearing that declaration of love and how it would shape and form you. Imagine coming to the end of your mortal existence when you are laid lovingly in Earth by the community who cherished you. Imagine at that moment realizing with considerable astonishment that the arc of your life has only just begun, a moment when you hear once again the voice of the One who made you:

Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away. . .
Let me see your face,
let me hear your voice;
for your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely (Song of Solomon, 2:13b, 14b).

That is the voice of Easter.

Listen for it; let it remake you; and then ensure that everyone else hears it, too, no exceptions.

The Slow-Motion Shipwreck of Theological Education

Both the Apostle Paul and Jonah have been appearing recently in the daily office lectionary of the Episcopal Church. Both stories feature shipwrecks: the one Jonah averted by having himself tossed overboard (Jonah 1:11-12) and the one that destroyed the ship Paul was on but with no lives lost (Acts 27:21-26).

Both stories suggest a way of thinking about what’s happening in graduate-level theological education today. Both stories offer assurances of God’s presence in the midst of disaster. Both stories make me wonder: Does the ship really matter?

For some years now (decades?) we’ve been witnessing what amounts to a slow-motion shipwreck of seminary education. The current turmoil at the General Theological Seminary is only the latest example (read more about that here), as is the similar but less public uncertainty at Episcopal Divinity School, not to mention the closing of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary as a residential school for the Master of Divinity degree in 2008.

Those examples come from my own denominational home, but similar moments are unfolding nearly everywhere in higher education. If you work for a divinity school attached to a university – especially if it’s Harvard or Yale – you may have no direct experience of all this, but everyone else in the theological world does.

Each school, of course, must deal with its own particularities (and they can be quite complex, if not confounding and infuriating, as the Crusty Old Dean reminds us). Yet I am convinced that the current upheaval of seminary education mirrors a broader tectonic shift in institutional Christianity itself, at least in Europe and the U.S. Others have noticed this long before I did, including all those involved in “emergent Christianity.” But here’s the obvious question that no one (yet) can answer very well: what exactly is emerging from all this?

To suppose that something is emerging at all sounds rather hopeful. But let’s be clear: the whole thing is a shipwreck of epic (biblical?) proportions. And still, I am profoundly hopeful.

I have no fix-it plan for the future of theological education on which to base my hope. But I do take solace in remembering that ours is not the first generation to face moments of uncertainty and crisis. That rich history reminds me that every ship eventually wears out, or simply splinters in the throes of storm-tossed seas. Perhaps that’s the point: the ship matters far less than where we’re going, even when we can’t see over the horizon.

Getting to that unfamiliar shore will mean swimming for our lives away from the shipwreck, and prior even to that, recognizing that the ship is a wreck. If we do that, as Paul insisted, everyone gets out alive and actually thrives. Or, as Jonah ruefully realized, repentance matters.

In no particular order, here are three of my current observations about the sinking ship and the new shore that beckons:

Good Mental Health Resists Binaries and Extremes

My therapist urges me regularly to avoid binary extremes. That seems like sound advice for Christian churches and seminaries. Most Christian churches, for example, live and operate today as if the twentieth century never happened. Seminaries have followed along that same path, forming church leaders using a model developed in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. That model was helpful then, not so helpful now. Or as my therapist also likes to say, that was a good coping mechanism when you were growing up, but it’s not useful as an adult. The ship carried Paul to Malta – where it was time to abandon it.

I’m actually very grateful for the deep formation I received in the Anglo-Catholic tradition from my Episcopal seminary back in the 1980s. It was spiritually nourishing, theologically inspiring, and intellectually stimulating community. Indeed, I was so deeply formed in that seminary community that I really didn’t want to leave – perhaps Jonah felt the same way in the belly of a fish. Trying to replicate that seminary pattern of life as a priest in a suburban Chicago parish was perhaps not disastrous but certainly less than helpful.

What then do we do with the rich legacy of our traditions in a world our ancestors never could have imagined? That question need not and should not rely on binary choices. “Formation” is not necessarily bad; the “tradition” is not irrelevant; leading and sustaining communities of counter-cultural Gospel witness is imperative. Yes, and still, we can’t keep repeating how Christians were formed in the tradition a century ago just because we don’t want to reinvent the whole thing from scratch. Mental and spiritual health will resist extremes, even when the middle way (remember that?) seems unclear or muddled.

Karl Barth Won

Some years ago a colleague from another seminary made some arresting observations about contemporary theological education that have stuck with me, not least this: Barthian Neo-Orthodoxy won the day in the 1960s and 1970s. Evidence of this victory infuses nearly every seminary curriculum for the Master of Divinity degree, regardless of where the school falls on the conservative/liberal spectrum. Those curricula begin with Bible, then move into Church History, and then tie them together with Systematic Theology – those are the three sources, in that order, that Barth insisted constituted the only sources for revelation.

I can hear the howls of protest now, mostly from my liberal and “progressive” seminary colleagues. To which I would gently ask, why then do so many seminaries persist in that pattern? What if we began the M.Div. degree instead by taking field trips to art museums, city council meetings, and economic development organizations as if these were also sources of revelation? (I mean, aren’t they?) Following each excursion, students and faculty could engage in shared theological reflection, regardless of how biblically, historically, or systematically sound the reflection is. The academic disciplines come later, as tools for honing and refining our reflection.

Useful? Naïve? Not academic enough? I don’t know, but does Barth continue to win?

I actually appreciate many of Barth’s insights but continue to worry about the patriarchal and paternalistic (if not actually infantilizing) patterns of formation that so often attend that Barthian approach to theology. (Here’s just one exhortation to remember that seminarians are actually adults.) Seminary “formation” matters as we often get in our churches what our seminaries model in their pedagogical styles (and believe me, that can and does keep me up at night).

We might try reshaping seminary education for collaboration and mutual goal-setting. We could do this by resetting learning outcomes every year based on the particularities of each incoming class rather than the standards set by an academy (let alone accreditation agencies) that may have little if anything to do with what Christian congregations need today. That would be scary but maybe also liberating. To be both we need constantly to ask whom we (denominations and seminaries) are trying to please and appease, and why, in the standards we set.

More pointedly: Do seminaries serve accrediting agencies or academic journals or the Church? I no longer believe we can just assume to answer “all three” without caveat or qualification.

The Gospel (Still) Matters

Whatever “Gospel” means remains contested, and rightly so. The stakes are high. At the same time, I am struck by how many seminarians struggle to integrate their faith (including the “mystical experiences” that many of them are too chagrined even to mention) with their academic work.

I know, I know: we theological academics insist that scholarly work is part and parcel of “spiritual” experience. And yes, “deconstruction” is a necessary prerequisite for a “constructive” approach to a mature faith. Yes…and, students still struggle. And then they graduate, get ordained, and lead congregations filled with people just as hungry as they are to figure out whether and how the Gospel still matters in a broken world.

In particular, I worry that too many Euro-American Christians focus on the shipwreck and never ponder the island. More traditionally, the central proclamation of the Christian Testament has virtually disappeared from center stage: resurrection from death. In part, this kind of reticence about the Gospel reflects a fatal flaw in the model of theological education derived from the 19^th century, when “resurrection” got lumped in with all the other “mythological” stuff that belongs to a pre-enlightened age.

This fatal flaw appears in liberal circles whenever we insist that human beings always have the ability to build something new out of the wreckage of disaster. We don’t have to trot out Pelagius (yet again) to worry about that kind of “lift yourself up by your own bootstraps” theology. For conservatives, the fatal flaw appears whenever Christian communities fixate on a better life beyond the grave to the exclusion of all else. That seems like a sure and certain recipe for denigrating this planetary arena of God’s creative work. Climate change, anyone?

Neither of these approaches seems convincing enough to abandon the shipwreck and swim for an unknown shore. Both of those views tend to evacuate God from the messy, joyous, invigorating, exasperating, triumphant moments of daily life. That’s precisely where most people going to church today want to find God. Do they?

I do believe something is “emerging” from the detritus of modern Western Christianity. Perhaps we could still call it “Gospel” if it features Jesus rising from the dead – the central proclamation of the earliest Christians. What in the world could this mean?

It could mean a new world rising from the malaise of a dead economy, one tailored for the wealthy at the expense of the poor; it could mean rising from a dying planet in a new vision of ecological relation; it could mean rising from the constant death knell of racial injustice and violence into a world where diversity is embraced as a gift; and yes, I do believe it means rising from the death of our mortal bodies into the incomprehensible, eternal life of God. (Naturally, I have more to say about that, which you can find in chapter 7 of Peculiar Faith: Queer Theology for Christian Witness.)

To see all of those moments woven into a single garment of effective theological education will mean attending carefully to both Paul and Jonah. As Paul’s ship fell apart, those who were able swam to shore; those who couldn’t swim grabbed pieces of the crumbling ship on which to float ashore (Acts 27:43-44). We need the pioneers who just jump in and swim. We also need those who see valuable pieces in the flotsam to save and preserve.

Jonah, of course, resisted nearly every moment of God’s gracious renewals. He was even resentful of God’s grace to the penitent! But he nonetheless stands for a remarkable act of courage. Throw me overboard, he tells the floundering ship’s crew, and you will be saved. They did, and they were.

The curmudgeons among us (and I can certainly fit that bill at times) still have something to offer to this moment, even if it’s only the courage to let God have God’s way, as Jonah (resentfully) did. That, too, counts as profound witness.

Courage will, of course, mean change. It will mean changing how I teach. It will mean changing how student success is evaluated. It will mean changing seminary curricula. It will mean changing the governance structure of our schools and our congregations/denominations. It will mean changing how Christians live in the world. It means all this and more because the Gospel changes everything. It always has and always should, if it’s Gospel.

I’m not prepared for those changes. No one is. And that’s the point. As Rowan Williams once observed some years ago, “The Gospel cannot be both palatable and transformative at the same time.” Paul had the same insight when he was knocked off his feet on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-5), as did Jonah, when he had himself cast into a turbulent sea.

If the Gospel is (re)emerging from today’s tumult, it will not be comfortable. But it will be life-giving.

May we be gentle with each other as we swim to shore or, as the case may be, as we are vomited up on a beach. Who knows? Perhaps someone waits for us there, cooking breakfast (John 21:4-14).

The Morning After

Christ is risen – but the clergy are dead tired.

That’s one version of an old joke about the grueling schedule of Holy Week services leading up to Easter morning. Not just clergy, of course, but choir members, flower arrangers, brass polishers, administrative assistants – just about everyone dealing with Easter preparations can feel a holy hangover coming on the morning after.

In the wake of all the liturgical fuss – and I do love the fuss – I start to reflect on what everyone was thinking. Kind of like hoping everyone liked the New Year’s Eve party while you throw out the empty champagne bottles. How many different views of resurrection, we might wonder, resided in our various congregations this Easter Sunday? Did they believe “it” – I mean, really?

I, for one, can believe nearly anything in a beautifully decorated church with an angelic choir providing a divine soundtrack to an inspiring sermon. But what do I really believe in the still, quiet aftermath?

Resurrection is difficult, much more so, it seems to me, than incarnation. Proclaiming “God with us” at Christmas feels good, especially with a cuddly baby as a prop. A battered, tortured body that won’t stay put in the grave where we put it feels, well, unsettling.

Other than the inevitability of taxes, Easter breaks the one rule everyone is taught to accept as inviolable: the finality of death. Few find that rule pleasant, but at least it maps out the playing field with tidy boundaries. Human life stretches from cradle to grave; that’s it. For the fortunate among us, the span between those two borderlines is long and full. But blur those boundaries, even just a little bit, and the queerness of Christian faith starts to shimmer.

For me, the queerly good news of Easter is just this: it dissolves certainty.

If we really can’t count on death like we used to, then the playing field expands toward a new horizon over which none of us can presently see. For me, that’s unnerving and exhilarating at the same time.

Among the queerest of the queer biblical stories are the ones about Easter. Consider the account in Luke 24. There we read about two grieving disciples who encounter a stranger as they travel to a village called Emmaus. After inviting the stranger to share a meal with them, they finally recognize him as none other than the risen Jesus; and in that very moment, he vanishes.

No reunion hug. No war-story swapping. No debriefing of all those betrayal moments. No orchestral swell of music for the Hollywood ending. Jesus instead slips through their fingers. There’s no “there” there. Nothing to hold on to.

And that, it seems to me, is queerly good news.

If we know something with absolute certainty, we can be tempted to take it for granted; ask no more questions; set it aside; move on to something else. We might believe that we can control and manipulate it; use it; own it.

The risen Jesus will have none of that – no shrines, no monuments, no treatises, no creeds, no liturgies, no institutional gate-keeping. The risen Jesus instead starts sprinting away from us over that inscrutable horizon, egging us on to follow, giving us no compass points to do so.

I’m a full-throated Easter Christian – I believe death was not the final word for Jesus. And because I believe that, I believe that death is not the final word for any of us. But I have no idea what that means or what it looks like. That faith (which is not certainty) expands my playing field well beyond a game and into something like an adventure, where the next chapter is always waiting to be written – always.

That’s not a hangover you’re feeling; that’s the tug of morning-after energy. It’s urging you to step into life. New life.