Social Change – Peculiar Faith

Harm Reduction: An Epiphany Pledge for 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Baptism of Christ, II,” Daniel Bonnell

Turn Around and Build a World with God

Imagine Luke the Gospel writer as a filmmaker. In the snippet we heard from Luke this past Sunday (3:1-6), the camera is zooming way out for context: there we see the Roman Emperor Tiberius in the fifteenth year of his reign; zooming in a bit, we see that Pontius Pilate is the Roman governor of Judea (a province of the Empire) while Herod is the ruler over Galilee; this was the time when—zooming in further—Annas and Caiphas were the high priests of the temple in Jerusalem.

Time and place matter to Luke—they matter theologically and spiritually and not merely as scenery on the stage. The Gospel is “good news” precisely because of this: it deals directly with the material circumstances of human life and society—from the temple just down the street, to the governor on the hill, and all the way to the emperor on his throne.

To put this in another way, the Christian Gospel does not support a disembodied faith and it cannot be detached from messy entanglements with the wider world (as much as I would sometimes prefer it could be). To suppose that Christian faith is a matter of private and interior piety emerged only recently in Church history, mostly in the modern West, and among people who were perfectly comfortable with the way the world is.

But for people who believe the world must change, the Christian Gospel proclaims the God who is with us in that shared struggle for a better world—and the time is now to get to work.

That’s the good news Luke wants to tell as he launches the ministry of John the Baptist, which will prepare the way for the ministry of Jesus, and Luke frames this moment with the short glimpse into first-century geo-political realities and imperial rulers (along with a few clergy thrown in for good measure).

For Luke, “preparing the way” for Jesus stands in stark contrast to the way already charted by the likes of Herod, and Pontius Pilate, and Tiberius—and this is essentially why repentance is at the core of the message John the Baptist preaches.

Luke is the only gospel writer to give us substantial backstory for John—not only John’s familial connection to Jesus (they were something like second cousins), but also about John’s elderly mother, Elizabeth (who thought she would never have a child), and also his elderly father, Zechariah, who was a priest in the Jerusalem temple. John was born into a professional religious family, in other words, but oddly he did not follow in his father’s footsteps.

Or perhaps that’s not so odd—children of religious parents, especially clergy, tend to resist and even reject the religion of their youth. John did this rather dramatically: he didn’t just sidestep the temple; he fled Jerusalem entirely.

John goes out to the wilderness—Luke doesn’t say for how long, and he may have lived there with a community of religious radicals and social dropouts (think “hippie commune in the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco in the 1960s,” that kind of community)—he goes out to the wilderness, exactly where so many of the prophets of ancient Israel went to discern what God is calling God’s people to do at that time and in that place.

And that’s where the lectionary picks up the story this past Sunday. God calls John back from the wilderness to go to the towns and villages of Judea, to the river valley region referred to as “the Jordan”—which was, not just coincidentally, the seat of both religious and political power in that imperial province.

God calls John to preach repentance in those towns and villages—not out in the wilderness, but in the public square and in houses of worship.

I always find it helpful to recall that the Greek verb we usually see translated as “repentance” is not merely about remorse for having made a mistake. To “repent” means to change your mind and alter your course. You’ve been headed the wrong way—it’s time to turn around!

To “prepare the way of the Lord” means turning around when you’ve been following the way of Herod, Pontius Pilate, and Tiberius.

To “prepare the way of the Lord” means removing the mountains of social privilege for a few that block access to a life of thriving for all.

To “prepare the way of the Lord” means raising up the valleys of despair to make a path of companionship for the brokenhearted.

All of this is classic prophetic language, a plea to change course, and especially for the sake of the most vulnerable among us. And all four Gospel writers weave John into that long lineage of prophetic witness, especially Isaiah.

The collection of various writings in the one book we call Isaiah stretches across several centuries, from a time of warning about impending political disaster, through the catastrophe of Israel’s exile in Babylon, and to the return of God’s people to their homeland.

Anticipating that moment of joyful return is what the lectionary gave us from the prophet Baruch on Sunday (Baruch 5:1-9). Baruch was the scribe for the prophet Jeremiah—not an enviable position, needless to say. Jeremiah was constantly getting into trouble for denouncing both the religious and political establishment of his day, and Baruch had to write it all down.

But Baruch drafted his own prophetic texts as well, beautiful texts that encourage God’s people to live with joy, the kind toward which Jeremiah’s lamentations could only point.

Here’s the truly astonishing thing: Baruch is writing to the exiles still in Babylon as if they are already returning to Jerusalem. “Take off the garment of sorrow,” he says. “Your people stand ready to rejoice at your return.”

Note this carefully: prophets have a very strange sense of time. They are not interested in predicting the future. As Baruch seems to suggest, we build the promised day to come by living it now.

We build the promised day to come by the way we live right now.

John the Baptist belongs to that long line of Hebrew prophets with precisely that posture, preaching preparation not prediction. The vital implication here is this: the future is actually wide open. Contrary to the religious formation of my youth, there is no cosmic blueprint with which world events are aligning; there is no heavenly timetable to which prophets have special access; there is no pre-determined plan unfolding in elections and markets and wars.

Quite honestly, I often think a detailed plan would make life a bit easier, especially when a radically open future feels scary. Facing an open future means we have some serious decisions to make about how we live, decisions that will shape the kind of world we will inhabit.

That word “world” can mean, as it did for biblical writers, both small and large realities—the world of one’s own faith community, or the world of the neighborhoods in which we reside, or one’s own country as a world, as well as this planetary world of many countries.

What kind of world do we want to inhabit?

That’s the urgent question prophets always ask. It’s the question religious traditions urgently pose, which they can help us answer, and then shape us to live that answer as a community of God’s people.

As I reflect on Advent this year, and the prophets, and the world in which we currently live, I am increasingly convinced about a crucial way to frame Christmas. It’s this: the coming of Jesus is God’s offer to collaborate with us on what the future will look like.

God has hopes and dreams for God’s own creation. God’s will is that all would thrive and flourish. And God is always calling and then equipping communities of faith to make these divine dreams a reality. It’s time, as John would say, to turn around and build a world with God.

John’s father Zechariah sang a song of praise for this world-building God, whose manner of arrival surprises every generation (Luke 1:68-79). That song—which Luke actually calls a “prophecy”—has since then become a Prayer Book canticle, and the lectionary invited us to recite it in worship on Sunday.

That prophetic song of praise is offered for this: God arrives not with military strength, not robed in royal majesty, and not armed with anything we might expect to be useful for a world-changing mission; God always arrives in “tender compassion.”

The “dawn from on high,” Zechariah sings—that light which will guide our feet along the way, along the good road we build together and with God—that dawning light is tenderness and compassion.

Advent invites us to live as if God has already arrived and is always arriving, not with doomsday predictions but to inspire us and to work with us to build a world to inhabit with joy—a world of peace, with justice, and thriving for all.

That work—that great work—begins with our own hearts, with our hearts being cracked open by the tender compassion of God.

Sing for a Change

“My soul proclaims the greatness of God.”

So sings Mary of Nazareth, a young woman (likely a young teenager), living in an occupied first-century province of the Roman Empire. She’s pregnant, and unmarried, and without many resources, and still she sings of the God who brings down the mighty from their thrones and raises up the lowly (Luke 1:47-55).

We recited her song—usually referred to as the Magnificat—in church yesterday, in place of a psalm, and we sang not one but two metrical versions of it during worship.

In this third week of Advent, the appointed texts are starting to sound like Christmas. But this classic song from a young girl made me wonder: Has the world really changed very much since she first sang it? Have there been any kings sitting on thrones in their kingdoms, any tyrants ruling their empires since then?

Yes, of course. And yet, composers have not stopped setting Mary’s song to music, in nearly every generation. Kingdoms rise and fall, and still the Magnificat is sung. Empires come and go; but right here in a twenty-first century world, we still sing Mary’s song of the God who shall not fail in freedom and mercy.

“My soul proclaims the greatness of God.”

So sings a small group of young Black women in the middle of Tennessee. I stumbled upon their story just recently, about a group of students at Fisk University in Nashville.

It was the summer of 1871 and these young women were making their way back to Nashville after singing together at a concert. Traveling in the South at that time was dangerous, especially for Black women. Sure enough, a mob of white men started to harass and threaten them as they walked to a train station.

Clustered together on the platform with no train yet in sight, surrounded by violent men, the young women began to sing a hymn. They likely sang one of the Negro spirituals from the plantations, with words about the tender mercy of precious Jesus.

Quite remarkably, as they sang, the mob of white men slowly began to disperse, one by one. As the train approached, only the mob’s leader remained; he stood there with tears streaming down his cheeks and he begged the women to sing the hymn again.

Have there been racists and episodes of violent bigotry and lynch mobs since then? Yes, of course. But the song of those women made a difference for that young man who wanted to hear it just one more time.

(Those women, by the way, became the award-winning, world-renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers, a choral organization still in existence today, at Fisk.)

“My soul proclaims the greatness of God.”

My own mother sang such divine praise when she became pregnant with me at the age of thirty-nine, at a time when that was considered too old for a safe pregnancy. She was convinced that she would never have children, and she was distraught about this.

She often said how much she identified with Hannah, the figure from the Hebrew Bible who was also without children. Hannah prayed and wept to God for a child—just as my mother said she herself did—and Hannah eventually gave birth to Samuel, the great prophet of ancient Israel and anointer of kings. The song of praise to God that Hannah sings eventually became the inspiration for the song Mary sings in Luke’s account of the Gospel (1 Samuel 2:1-10).

Imagine growing up as I did hearing from your mother about your own birth framed with the stories of Hannah and Samuel, and of Mary and Jesus! That’s more than just a little pressure! Who could possibly live up to such biblical expectations?

I certainly couldn’t live up to that, and I haven’t. But I have tried to pay attention to this over these many years: for both Jewish and Christian traditions, the stories of Hannah and of Mary are not only about these individual women; they are mostly about the communities they shaped with the faith they lived.

We do tell complex stories about ourselves and our communities, weaving our lives together with the dreams of our ancestors from centuries ago. And we do this as a way to keep us rooted in a history of faithfulness for the sake of a future of hopefulness.

The Gospel writer we call “Luke” did precisely this. He loved that song of Hannah (which he then gives to Mary to sing while pregnant), and Luke loved the opening verses we also heard in church yesterday from Isaiah (which he then gives to Jesus when Jesus launches his ministry of healing and liberation in Nazareth), and Luke also loved the prophet Joel, whose words he then uses to describe the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Luke told stories with ancient texts that were not his own, but they became part of him, and then part of the communities to which he wrote, and now they are part of us.

It matters that these stories constantly feature faith, and hope, and also love in a world where the word “success” usually matters more.

I’ve been reflecting recently on what exactly “successful” means, probably because my parish has been steeped in our annual fundraising campaign for 2024, just like many other congregations; ‘tis the season! As we track responses and tally the totals, I can’t help but wonder whether any biblical figure would qualify as “successful” by today’s standards.

Success in modern Western society is based on a set of recognizable and measureable metrics: more money, more cars, more land, and more acquisitions. The more we own, the more we control, the more we dominate, the more successful we are.

Success might be our collective problem in the world right now, not our solution. As environmental educator and activist David W. Orr has succinctly noted: The world does not need more “successful” people; the world desperately needs “more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds.”

What we need this very moment are more artists and musicians and bakers and gardeners and caretakers of dogs and cats and of all sorts of creatures who share this precious Earth with us, all of us working together to build communities of tender care and fierce justice—whether or not anyone thinks any of this is “successful.”

Mary of Nazareth didn’t sing for success; she sang her song from a broken heart, cracked open by the suffering of her people, and stubborn enough to believe that the God of her ancestors remains faithful to God’s own promises—even when it doesn’t look like “success.”

She sings her song in an occupied land, vulnerable to violence, and then vulnerable to the scandal of her pregnancy, and still she sings, not with certainty but with hopefulness. As the great biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has insisted, Gospel hope is not just some vague feeling that things will all just work out in the end; it’s actually quite evident that not everything will work out.

Hope is instead the conviction, against a great deal of data to the contrary, that God is tenacious in overcoming evil with good; that God insists on turning the world’s sadness into joy; that God shall not rest until at last a new realm has dawned where the lost are found, and the displaced brought home, and the dead raised to new life.

That’s the story we must tell, and the music we must compose, and the pictures we must paint, and the energy all of us must cultivate together for a world that can’t imagine trusting that story anymore but still longs to hear it. Just like that young man on a nineteenth-century train platform, with tears streaming down his face, who wanted to hear the hymn one more time—the world is desperate to hear Mary’s song once more, sung with conviction, sung by the way we live, sung for a change.

I suggested all this on a Sunday that marked the 35^th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. While I’m deeply grateful for the privilege to preside at the Eucharistic Table, what matters most is the community of God’s people gathered there.

Having returned to fulltime parish ministry nearly four years ago, this much has become quite clear: we need to help each other to hear Mary’s song anew, and then to learn how to sing it by the way we live.

This, too, is very clear these days: there’s no time to waste. So let’s sing…for a change.

Hope for Healing: Eucharistic Solidarity in the Domination System

I have been a bit surprised by where my routine of daily morning prayer has been leading me over the last two or three years. Reflecting on my own life, my friends and colleagues, the chaotic world around us, an unexpected phrase keeps surfacing: the need for healing.

flag_healing_jennifer_luxton — Image by Jennifer Luxton

I don’t often think much about healing, unless I’m knocked off my feet with the flu or a friend is facing a health crisis, and it hardly comes to mind at all when sorting through the jumble of American politics and social unrest—until recently. Now I can hardly think of anything else as my incredulity and consternation grow while reading the daily news.

The biblical texts many Christians heard in church yesterday inspired renewed attention to this theme that just won’t let me go, and for both personal and more widely social reasons. The more personal one: my Australian shepherd dog Judah has been suffering with a really nasty “hot spot,” a painful and terribly itchy skin infection on his butt. Dog people know what this means: Judah requires constant monitoring to get well.

I have been profoundly grateful to my two housemates, Todd and Miguel, who have been helping me and without whom I’m not sure how I would be managing to care for Judah. That alone, in a relatively small but still significant way, has reminded me that healing is far more social and communal than most of us likely appreciate.

And, conversely, the causes of dis-ease are more often rooted in complex social systems than most of us usually realize.

Back in the 1970s, the medical profession just assumed that corporate executives of major corporations were more likely than others to succumb to cardiovascular disease and heart attacks because of their high-stress positions. Later studies have shown that just the opposite is true: the lower one is on the social and economic hierarchy, the lower one’s life expectancy.

It turns out that social status is the most powerful determinant for health outcomes related to cardiovascular, pulmonary, psychiatric, and rheumatologic diseases and some types of cancer. People in countries with narrow wealth and income gaps, for example, enjoy a relatively high life expectancy compared to the United States, which has one of the lowest among industrialized nations.

More recent studies suggest that, all other factors being equal, race is even more detrimental to health outcomes than economic status; African Americans and Latinx people in the U.S. exhibit worse health outcomes than white people of the same class.

Race matters for many reasons, not least because of the constant hyper-vigilance people of color must sustain in order to survive in a society of white supremacy; such vigilance keeps blood pressure elevated (even while taking blood pressure medication) and metabolic systems depleted (even on a healthy diet with regular exercise).

Issues of personal and collective health kept running through my thoughts as I pondered those lectionary texts. Healing itself became the frame through which I read them as I prepared to preach on them.

Each one of those texts—from the prophet Jeremiah, the letter to the Ephesians, and the Gospel according to Mark—each comes from a distinctive time and place, addressing its own peculiar concerns, and yet each one evokes for me a profound social disease that we have been living with for a long time, a disease that has now become so painfully apparent as to be all but intolerable.

I mean the institutional mechanisms that relentlessly divide and fragment the human family—divisions wrought by fear and hatred, fragmentation expressed in hostility and violence, and then experienced as isolation and alienation.

“Woe to the shepherds,” Jeremiah writes (23:1-2), “who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” You shepherds of my people, God says, “it is you who have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and not attended to them.”

How remarkably fresh an ancient text can sound, and even more so with a bit of historical context thrown in! In the midst of regional instability with mighty kingdoms vying for power, Jeremiah is writing at a time when a powerful empire is threatening the very existence of the Kingdom of Judah from the outside while the kingdom’s own evil-doing leaders on the inside divide and fragment and scatter their people.

Still more consonant is the letter to the Ephesians (2:11-22), a letter obviously not written to the United States but to first-century Ephesians. And still, the diagnosis of the human predicament in that letter and its hope for healing again sound so remarkably fresh.

Think on today’s geo-political realities with these phrases from that ancient letter, phrases about those who were foreigners by birth, aliens to the commonwealth, strangers to the promise, separated by a dividing wall of hostility.

Think as well on these phrases of the hopeful promise in this same letter: the proclamation of peace to those who were far off and to those who were near, those who are no longer strangers and aliens but citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.

This bears repeating: that letter was not originally written for us. And yet, and still, can we not hear in the otherwise arcane religious parsing of that text a lament over divided, fragmented communities and the passionate yearning for wholeness?

I would invite listening for those same themes in the passage from Mark’s account of the gospel that so many heard yesterday (6:30-34, 53-56), and especially what Mark describes right toward the end of that text.

It’s one of many stories about Jesus the healer. But I noticed something that I never thought about before: wherever Jesus went, Mark says, the people laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged Jesus for a healing touch.

I find that an odd but compelling image—they laid sick people in the marketplace.

I usually think of these healing stories as encounters between Jesus and an individual, often in private. But this one is between Jesus and a whole mass of sick people, so many that they are laid out in a public place, likely in the center of town, and not just any place, but a marketplace—a place of commerce and economic exchange.

I always try to remember that there are no random details in these stories; it mattered to Mark that these people were laid out in a “marketplace.”

I also try to remember the context of these stories and why it matters: they come from a people under siege by an imperial power, occupied by the might of Rome.

Reflecting on that context, I turn often to biblical scholar Walter Wink and his riveting description of what “empire” actually entails. He refers to this as “The Domination System”:

The system is characterized by unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, biased race relations, patriarchal gender relations, hierarchical power relations, and the use of violence to maintain them all…from the ancient Near Eastern states to the Pax Romana, to feudal Europe, to communist state capitalism, to modern market capitalism (from Wink, The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millennium).

Wink, among others, would urge us to read gospel stories of healing more directly in that context of imperial domination. Surely it is no mere coincidence that the symptoms Jesus often encounters among the sick and demon possessed mirror the effects of being colonized and taken over by an imperial power with economic and military force: irrational fears, dissociation, mania, psychosis, alienation from family and friends, isolation from the wider community, and all of this as a debilitating and disempowering trauma manifested in all manner of physical, psychological, and spiritual disease.

It mattered to Mark that the sick were laid out in a marketplace, a primary location for disenfranchising the poor, the outcast, and powerless. Let us also notice the means by which these people were healed—by reaching out merely to touch the garment Jesus was wearing.

I find this so moving, unraveling, bracing: Whatever else they hoped Jesus would heal, they were reaching out for connection, for belonging, for the restoration of relationship in the midst of alienation and fragmentation—in the midst of a marketplace.

Such a modest gesture, just reaching out for touch—but how vital in systems that oppress and isolate to hope once again for belonging.

Reading these biblical texts through that frame of a profound social disease quickly brought to mind the Eucharistic Table at the heart of Christian worship. What I have not often pondered about that Table suddenly appeared in bold relief: to approach it as a source of divine healing.

The Domination System wounds everyone, though clearly in varying degrees and with diverse effects. Empire will always train us to map our sense of self and self-worth to the color of our skin, how much money we make, the kind of work we do, whom we love, the genders we manifest, the number of degrees we’ve earned, if any.

Few of us have any idea who we even are apart from these classifying marks, all this “imperial branding.”

These wounds fester, often unnoticed, then suddenly appear whenever we treat those who are different from us with suspicion, or fear, or outright hostility.

Left untended, these wounds shape the institutions and organizations we create and populate, where the wounding continues from one generation to the next. Wounded people make broken and harmful systems.

We scarcely notice those cycles of transmitted wounds until God interrupts them, gently but surprisingly, by offering God’s own self to us. At that Table of self-offering, social status makes no difference whatsoever for the health outcomes of God’s grace and generosity—no birth certificate, passport, green card, driver’s license, paycheck stub, or insurance card required.

This healing gift of God’s own life matters, more than we might imagine. In a deeply divided and fragmented world, the Table invites what theologian M. Shawn Copeland calls “Eucharistic solidarity.”

We stand at that Table, Copeland writes, oriented toward “the lynched body of Jesus, whose shadow falls across the table of our sacramental meal.”

In his raised body—of which we are the members—God interrupts the structures of oppression and violence, offering us a new way of being in the world, “a new way of being in relation to God, to others, to self.”

I confess: in writing in this way about the Bible, about church and Eucharist, I frequently think I’m woefully naïve, a hopeful but mostly not terribly useful romantic.

And still, and yet, there must be a different way of being the world, there simply must be. And I’m not ready, not yet, to give up on the queer way Jesus modeled a wholly/holy way of living for the healing and flourishing of all.

Jesus modeled this most queerly, perhaps, at the Table. There the Domination System is not overthrown with retribution or violence (in ways some of his own disciples hoped he would lead). Instead, he offers hope that the System itself will be healed with the solidarity of love.

As Copeland concisely and so beautifully suggests, “the Eucharistic banquet re-orders us, re-members us, restores us, and makes us one.”

May it be so—for all its naïve hopefulness—may it be so.