When Love Shows Up: Weekly Reflections about God's Presence: Recent Episodes
The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer
Welcome to When Love Shows Up: Weekly Reflections about God's Presence by the Rev. Philip DeVaul, Rector at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Last week I insisted that, as a Christian who is American, I must understand myself as Christian first - that my Christian identity supersedes my Americanness. There are, of course, problems with this assertion.
The first problem might just be that it makes me sound like a radical. We are currently in a time when a sizable portion of American leaders are working to remake American culture in a way that devalues and endangers women, minorities, LGBTQ+ persons, and immigrants - and they're doing it in Jesus' name. Many of these leaders argue that this is a Christian nation, that it was founded on Christian ideals, and by Christian men. None of those things are actually true, but they have been repeated so regularly that they seem to have seeped into our collective consciousness as being self-evident.
Nevertheless, in Jesus' name, many Americans are seeking to force their understanding of Christian living on others. I believe this actively goes against who Jesus is and what he teaches. Every time Jesus gets angry in the stories we have of him, it's because he's witnessing leaders misuse their religious authority to harm others. Jesus is not a theocrat.
Some people believe that commandment about taking the Lord's name in vain means you shouldn't say "Oh my God" or exclaim "Jesus Christ." But the real blasphemy is harming others in Jesus' name, using God as the buttress upon which you reinforce your own political power and social standing.
I remember putting that flag up and thinking, "I'm home."
America was something about which I was religious. I wouldn't have said that at the time. I would not have acknowledged that. But I could not only not fathom being anything other than American - I could not imagine that any other country could be as good as mine. To love my country was not just about affection or allegiance. To love America was to consciously believe that it was the greatest country on earth, that there had never been a country and never would be a country as powerful as smart, as resourceful, as successful, as free - as Good as the USA. To love my country meant to know what was wrong with other countries. To love my country was to feel sorry for people who weren't American, who didn't know what it was like to be so free, to be so successful, to save the world so many times.
The line between patriotism and nationalism is sometimes razor thin, isn't it?
What does it look like to value our children?
How do we care for them? What is our responsibility to our children?
I have been thinking about this a lot. And I want to say this very clearly: I don't just mean my responsibility for the children I call mine. I also do not mean our responsibility to children because of what they will mean in the future when they are grown up. I mean our shared responsibility for the children among us right now. What is their value? What is their place in our community? And what is our responsibility to them? All of them, by the way. All of them.
I am a parent. I have three children, and I confess that much of my wondering about this has been based on my experience of raising them. More specifically, I am raising them in public schools in Cincinnati. And of course, that pushes me to think regularly about our city's commitment to children. In the aftermath of yet another school shooting, I wonder if we value their safety, their very lives.
And I confess, I wonder if my children were not in public schools, would I care so much? And if I didn't have children at all, would I care the way I care now?
Jesus didn't have children. Jesus didn't have a wife.
Aside from spilling beer down someone's back or getting an order wrong, when waiters screw up is when we forget our role: We can think it's our job to please everyone. We can think we are supposed to be the diner's best friend, or that people came to the restaurant to see us. Contrarily, we can treat the whole thing as transactional. We can get snippy and short with the kitchen. I would take myself too seriously and get self-righteous. One time the manager pulled me aside and sat me down because I yelled at him and the line cooks, "Well SOMEONE oughta care about the tables, and apparently it won't be any of YOU." That's right: I got put into time out for being too self-righteous.
Waiting tables for the Lord - has similar pitfalls. What I noticed when I went on sabbatical was just how much I was carrying. And some of that is just part of the job - there's a lot of emotional labor in the facilitating of relationships. But some of what I was carrying was because I was forgetting my role. Thinking I was supposed to please everyone, or that I was supposed to be everyone's best friend, or that I was the star of the show. I can treat my role as transactional too - not in the sense of trying to get you to tip me - but in the sense that I can think that I have to earn your approval by doing enough things just right. And in both the restaurant and the church I can get too serious and self-righteous.
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Sometimes I hear people say that they don't take their children to church because they don't want to indoctrinate them. They want their children to make up their own minds about religion when they get older. So I think this is the place for me to say that I want to indoctrinate my children. I believe indoctrination is normal and good, and I am done pretending otherwise.
I believe in indoctrinating my children. And I'm going to take it a step further and say that whether or not you even have children, you believe in indoctrinating children too.
If you insist that children go to school, you are indoctrinating them into the idea that education is important. If you insist they try hard, you are indoctrinating them into the idea that effort matters. If you ever stop a child from hitting someone and say something like, "We don't hit," that's indoctrination. Can you imagine a parent saying that a child should decide for themselves whether or not they want to learn?
So when we make our kids go to church, that is indoctrination. And when we stay home, that is also indoctrination.
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Did you know that our bones are constantly breaking themselves down and building themselves back up again? You probably did know that. Most of you are better at knowing scientific things than me - it's not my strong suit. But I learned this about bones as an adult and it really blew me away. In the simplest terms, you have these things called osteoclasts that are constantly dissolving your old bone tissue. Meanwhile you also have osteoblasts that spend their time building new bone tissue. This is happening inside you constantly. It's a very natural and normal thing - the breaking down and building up.
We all understand bones in terms of the stability and structure they bring to our bodies. So, at first for me it was counterintuitive to hear that part of their healthy process was that they were breaking down all the time. For most of my life, I have associated stability and structure with something like immobility. You want your house built on a strong foundation. And we often find great comfort in the idea of changelessness, of things remaining the same. When life deviates from our expectations, we seek to get back to normal, to something that resembles stasis because that feels safe. As the old hymn proclaims, "Like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved."
But it turns out I'm moving all the time. These little invisible things within my very body are moving, tearing my foundation down and building it back up again all day every day. These strong bones are anything but static and immovable, and my desire to understand that has helped me learn to accept that change is inevitable.
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I've just returned from my sabbatical - a nearly four-month break from work that was facilitated by the amazing people, clergy, and staff of Church of the Redeemer, and graciously funded by the Lilly Foundation - who awarded Church of the Redeemer with a Clergy Renewal Grant which enabled me to travel both by myself and with my family. The primary purpose of this sabbatical was simply to rest, which I'm glad to say happened. When I wasn't just resting, I was going places that connected me to conversion experiences and food - and the places where conversion and food meet.
So, what better place for me to take my family than Italy? It's famous for its food, it's rife with religious sites, and it was the location of my accidental conversion all those years ago. We spent a little less than a month in Italy, traveling all throughout the northern half of the country, and finishing our time there in Cinque Terre - the little patch of land on the hillside I keep talking about. I wanted to walk the trails of Cinque Terre again like I did all those years ago, and I wanted to take my family with me. I knew doing this would inevitably draw comparisons to the first time. How could it not?
And while I was quick to tell anyone listening that I had no expectations of another conversion experience, I could not help but wonder if just maybe I'd be knocked down and picked back up as thoroughly as I once had been.
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To explain this pouch, I should probably first say that some of my father's family were practicing Santeros. You may not be familiar with Santeria, or if you are you may see it as some kind of voodoo, but Santeria quite plainly is an African diasporic religion that arose in Cuba in the 19th century as a mix of traditional West African polytheistic Yoruba religion mixed with our very monotheistic Catholic form of Christianity. It is a form of spiritism, very animistic and to many Christians it's probably heretical, but here we are.
Growing up, my mom and dad enrolled me in catechism in our local Roman Catholic church. I became a very devout practitioner and took pride in my religious conviction. I was not modeling anyone at home since neither my parents nor grandparents attended church regularly.
All the while this "other" religion loomed in the background. My paternal grandfather hosted Santeria gatherings and my father would go, but we were not allowed to attend. To my mother, who could be paradoxically judgmental, all of this was nonsense. It didn't help that it was stigmatically seen by many as a religion of the poor and uneducated. Mom, who had her own rocky relationship with her faith and even more with my father, had no interest in introducing us to any of this. But, like many others, she was respectful of it, just in case...
When they divorced in my 8th year, shell-shock mixed with intrinsic curiosity would set me on a life-long search that would eventually include an education in theology and, of course, what was in that little pouch.
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I wrote in a recent blog post that historically I have been obsessed with numbers as a church leader. Many of us are. We talk about church growth, and we are almost always talking about literally increasing the number of people associated with our community. And I understand that. I can't totally disown it. If we believe that what we're doing matters, that it makes an impact, and that our community can transform people's lives, why would we not want to increase the number of people who experience that?
But this is not the growth we are talking about in baptism. In baptism, we are talking not about numerical growth, but about our maturity, our development, our spiritual growth alongside and towards one another as we see more clearly how to love like God loves. It is totally fine to love baptism because it means new members of our church. But I hope we can see past that as well and recognize that these babies, these nascent humans, these brand-new Christians, are pushing us to grow, to develop, to mature. God put them in our lives on purpose. How will we respond to that? How will we let them shape us? What will we learn from them about Jesus? How will we grow together?
We talk about growth in our Vision Statement. There's a whole bullet point dedicated to it, and we will be focusing on that bullet point throughout this program year. In it we say that we envision a church that is "Growing with people of every age, race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic situation, and political persuasion." We wrote that four years ago, and I will freely admit that when we wrote it, I was thinking about numbers. I was thinking about increasing the number of people that are connected to Church of the Redeemer. But the language we used pushes us beyond that. When we say we want to grow not only in number but in the type and age and experience and perspective of our membership, we are saying we want our understanding of who we are to grow. We are talking about the growth, development, and maturity of how and where we see love.Want to support our podcast?
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Have you ever been transformed by love only after believing in it for a while?
I have.
Here's what I mean: Have you ever had an experience of transformation that is connected to a person, a belief, a moral idea that you have proclaimed for a time - months or years- and then suddenly in a clarifying moment you are, for lack of a better word, converted to the thing you already believe, or know, or have?
Maybe I should give an example. When my husband Andrew and I were trying to become parents we were chosen by a pregnant woman to adopt her child, as yet unborn. For prospective parents in an infant adoption process in the USA this is an incredibly exciting and fraught moment. Exciting because the months of waiting and wondering if we would ever actually be chosen to parent someone seem to be coming to a close. Fraught because no woman can actually choose to give up a child until that child is born. This is both practically and legally the case - a woman cannot relinquish a child until she has given birth. In most states there is a waiting period after signing papers where the mother can revoke her relinquishment.
This is a good thing. Giving up a baby should only happen if it must, and if the woman chooses. It's never a happy thing for a parent to lose their child.
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It was one of those mornings. In the labyrinthine hallways of the ministorage, where I was converted through the incredulous look and gentle words of Jamie, one of my dearest pals. I crutched around a corner with a pillow in my teeth to meet Jamie, who was returning to the unit for another load. He looked at me for a second with that look of surprise, and, then, with a measure of concern, said, "Jimmy, what are you doing." Through clenched teeth, I said, "I'm helping. I can still help." To which he responded something like, "if we need that kind of help from you right now, we are in real trouble."
I was good at helping. I was good at giving. I was good at being there for folks in need. I was and still am almost always game for showing. I was no good at receiving. I wasn't any good at letting others give me a bit of help or care along the way, and my unwillingness to ever be set to receive, rather than send, impeded my real ability to experience the kind of community that I had envisioned to build in this new venture. It was a block for me, and my dear friends stupefied gaze and matter of fact words caused me to turn around and see how The capital K Kingdom wouldn't work without a real measure of interdependence. How we can't just give, give, give. How something loving like giving can become absurd under certain circumstances. A grown man, on crutches, with a pillow in his teeth at 7:30 in the morning with a hive of people working around me.
My cousin had somehow convinced me that we could get away with smoking in my Granny's bathroom. I have no idea why I believed him. There wasn't a chance that we weren't going to get snared.
Later, when my mum questioned me, I knew that we were busted and there was no point trying to hide it. So I told her the truth. And -- as our conversation went on -- I told her the whole truth. It wasn't just the smoking. My friends and I had been stealing booze, getting drunk and putting ourselves in seriously dangerous situations. I knew I had screwed things up. I knew I had broken the rules. I knew I was in serious, serious trouble.
My mum, as you can imagine, was devastated. It was heartbreaking to come clean and see what I was putting her through. What scared me, however, was what would happen my dad found out. I begged her not to tell him but she wouldn't keep it from him. He was away for a couple of weeks so I lived in fear of what was to come.
When he came home, mum told him everything and he came straight to me. He told me to get in the car. Too afraid to ask any questions, I obeyed. I got in with no idea where we were going.
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Can we rest yet? Is it time? The dizzying, never-ending buzz, the exhausting, contentious election season, It feels like the answer is no, right? Because now we shift to our prayers and preoccupations over a peaceful transition of power, as well as our preparations for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and Winter.
Who's got time to rest with all that?
It's not a very glamorous story. And to be honest, it doesn't reflect well on me. But I'll tell it anyway.
About fifteen years ago, while working on being a more loving husband, (which, by the way, should be on the list of Official Spiritual Disciplines) I acted very impulsively and asked my wife how she would like to be loved. What could I do that would make her feel, really and truly appreciated?
"Unload the dishwasher. Every day. I hate doing it, so if you could, that would make me feel loved."
I foolishly believed she was going to ask for flowers. Or maybe a bracelet. Do women wear bracelets anymore? That's how out of touch I was (am). But, fine. The dishwasher thing was good. Simple, too. Not a problem.
So, for the first two weeks I unloaded the dishwasher without hesitation.
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My Dad told me he was gay when I was 13 years old and I made the decision in that moment to accept him for who he was. That is not to say I actually did accept him for who he was immediately. I meant to. I wanted to. I made the decision to. But the reality was I had no idea what that acceptance meant, and I had no idea how that acceptance would change who I am.
The teaching of the church in which I grew up was clear: Only heterosexual attraction was part of God's plan and anything else was sinful and unnatural. Any sexual attraction or activity that strayed from heterosexuality was abhorrent to God. And anyone who was gay was questionable at best - their orientation dubbed a "lifestyle", their very being called a choice and a bad one at that.
I believed all these things when I was 13. I was taught them as a matter of fact, so I did not question them any more than I questioned that 1+1=2.
And then my Dad told me he was gay.
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This podcast is about love, so let's talk about what the church preaches about love. We say that we should love others as Jesus first loved us. We say we should love our enemies. We say to should love generously, sacrificially even. But do we practice what we preach?
Yes, of course we do. Sometimes. I've seen extraordinary love inside the church, and from the church toward the world. I've spent most of my life working in the church, and I've seen a lot of exemplary love in those years. I've also seen us fall short plenty of times. After all, the church is made up of people, and we're all sinners. So the church will never be perfect, at least not until Jesus comes again to sort it all out.
For now, I wanted to celebrate a time I saw -- I felt -- the church practice what it preaches.
It all happened in 2022 when I almost died. I was passing through Singapore airport on my way to Vietnam for vacation. But my body had other ideas. My heart stopped. And when I collapsed from my heart stopping, I hit my head and received a pretty serious brain injury. After 59 minutes of CPR, I was rushed to a nearby hospital. It turns out that the hospital closest to Singapore airport is one of the best heart hospitals in the world.
I was in the hospital for two weeks, including several days of complete sedation so the swelling in my brain could go down. When I was discharged from the hospital, I was in a wheelchair. My brain wasn't quite working right, as it continued to heal. By then, Sherilyn, my spouse, had arrived. We couldn't go home until the doctors said my brain was well enough healed to travel by air. So we were stuck in Singapore for a few weeks.
I went to Italy for the first time in February of 2000. I was a 20-year-old Junior in college, and I was minoring in Italian. I had no Italian ancestry, and no cultural obsession with Italy or the Roman Empire. I was not in love with an Italian coed. I tell you this only because these are all the questions I get asked when I mention studying Italian.
My reasons for studying Italian were much more capricious. I had taken Spanish, German, and Japanese classes at different points growing up, and heading to college I decided I wanted to try a new language. I also decided that I should try to become fluent in whatever language I chose. I was 18 when I decided this. I did not expect to advance any specific career or spiritual goal. I just wanted to be able to watch the Godfather movies without subtitles, and to listen to Italian-American singer Louis Prima and know what he was singing half the time. This was the depth of my decision making.
During my sophomore year it became apparent that studying abroad for at least a semester was an expectation, so I set about looking at programs in Italy, and settled on one in the Northeastern city of Padova (we English speakers call it Padua) because all the classes were taught in Italian, and they had no lessons on Fridays, so students could have long weekends to travel.
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The only symptom of pre-eclampsia that I knew of was swollen ankles, and my ankles were fine. I was 25 weeks pregnant, and running late to my follow-up ultrasound appointment...late enough that I almost skipped it. I had figured that the headaches and occasional blurry vision I experienced were probably related to the stress of my first year of teaching. I didn't realize that those were signs of a problem with my pregnancy. My husband John had to work late that day, so I went to the doctor's appointment by myself. I figured that it would be routine. I was thinking about what I would make for dinner that night. I didn't notice until later that the ultrasound technician was far less talkative than he had been during my last appointment, 6 weeks prior.
By the time I opened the door afterward to return to the consult room, the technician had pulled my obstetrician from a delivery. The doctor was standing in the doorway in his blue surgical scrubs. He told me that the ultrasound showed that I had severe pre-eclampsia. He said that there was a 100 percent chance that my baby would be born premature. He said that I was in danger of having a stroke, and that the wait would be too long for an ambulance to take me to the hospital, so his nurse was going to drive me. Then he asked me to sit down so that he could check my blood pressure. It was...high.
For the next ten days, I was on monitored bed rest at the state teaching hospital. I underwent treatment to prevent a stroke, and received two rounds of a steroid to develop the baby's lungs. After ten days, when my blood pressure rose to a dangerous level and stayed there, and the baby was showing signs of distress, the doctors delivered her. Our daughter Katherine Grace was born at 27 weeks' gestation. She was twelve inches long. She weighed one pound, four ounces.
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I was 41, standing in my kitchen with my hand in a bowl full of flour and water and salt, and I did not hear God talk to me. I didn't hear much of anything, other than the same Ella Fitzgerald album on endless repeat from the speaker on the kitchen counter. I was about 5 months into leading our church in a pandemic. I felt isolated and stir crazy and very tired of my beautiful family. I was insecure about the future of our church, which felt small compared to the fact that I was scared for the future of our country. On top of that, In the last month our dog had died, and we had moved into a smaller house. I was confused and exhausted and heartbroken.For whatever reason, COVID-19 did not bring about a crisis of belief for me. That is not a brag, just a strange statement of fact. It had been 21 years since the moment on the hillside when I heard God's voice and realized I believed. 21 years later, and I was pretty sure I believed in God at least once a day every day. But I was in despair because I wasn't sure I believed in people anymore. I mean, I knew people existed, I just wasn't sure why, or what we were doing with this gift of life. A lot of despair there.And though I believed in God, I did not hear their voice. So, I did what many sensible White men did during the pandemic: I started making sourdough bread.A parishioner I love very much gave me some of his starter and a basic recipe and I went at it. If the sea made me realize how small I was when my feelings were too big, making bread somehow made me feel like I could actually do something when I felt powerless in so many other ways. There are many feelings from the pandemic we have not processed. We have no idea, for instance, how to grieve over a million people dead - we just don't have the cultural mechanisms in place to process the enormity of that. Likewise, I don't think we have really dealt with just how powerless we all felt for so long. How little we felt we could do to make things better.I was no different. I may have been in charge of a church, but I felt powerless and useless. I would work 40-50 hours a week and not feel like anything happened.And then I started making bread. I loved it immediately. Like the first time I heard Sgt. Pepper or the first time my wife and I made eye contact. That kind of love. And I know. I know how ridiculous that sounds. How dramatic. And I am not saying I'm great at making bread. I'm just telling you that in the middle of every single thing being terrible, Love showed up, and it looked like carbs.
I was 20 years old, walking a trail on the side of a hill in Northwestern Italy when I heard God speak to me. I was by myself, having walked far ahead of my traveling companions, and I was stuck in my head. These particular hills are right on the edge of the Ligurian Sea, and every single view is breathtaking, and I was paying attention to none of them. I was too busy being heartbroken. Throughout college I was mostly involved with one person, and our relationship ended and began again a couple times. This was one of the times it had ended.
I rounded a corner and looked up and outward despite myself. Water. So much water. And I remember thinking that this sea had been here so long before I was ever a person and would be here so long after I was gone. I was so small. My sadness was so small. There was so much more than me. Look, I know this was not the most profound or original thought, but I was a heartbroken 20-year-old in Italy. It was enough to shake me out of my doldrums and open me up to everything that was around me. And as I looked out on the sea, I heard God say, "You believe in me."
It was not a command so much as an observation. God was letting me know something that was true about me. And it mattered. As I have mentioned, I was not, in that exact moment, thinking about God. I was thinking about a girl. And I wasn't praying or meditating or anything like that. I was not seeking spiritual enlightenment or comfort. I had not invited God into my heart or into the conversation at all really. But there God was. Telling me I believed.
How hard can that be? Get some ketchup from the grocery store.
Problem was, there in front of me, staring at me like a Martian in a nightmare of inundation, were exactly fourteen different types of ketchup: classic, sugar free, spicy jalapeno, carrot ketchup, no-mato, restaurant style, chili-pepper ketchup, ketchup with a blend of veggies, curry ketchup, Tapatio, habanero, rainbow ketchup for kids, some fancy pants organic stuff in a glass jar, and the ever present Heinz 57.
I stood there looking at each one. The list just said "ketchup." So, which one do I choose?
I started reading nutrition labels and checking prices. I felt my heart rate increase steadily as I broke into a cold sweat.
Seven years later I returned to New Orleans. This time I was officiating the wedding. At the rehearsal dinner, the father of the bride found out I'd never had raw oysters. He told me tonight I'd be eating ten of them. So, I did. After the rehearsal dinner, I accompanied the wedding party down filthy funky Bourbon St. It was a Friday night, and I was in my clericals. Revelers and strippers threw beads at me and cheered the priest simply for being in their midst. What is this place and what am I doing here? As the gathering was winding down, I stopped by a nearby cigar shop and a group of guys from New Jersey celebrating their buddy's birthday told me I was their priest now and I was coming with them. I became their sober religious mascot for the rest of the evening. I still talk with some of them on Facebook. That wedding was one of my all-time favorites. The couple were natives to New Orleans, and their love and affection for each other, for their families, for their friends, for their city just poured out of them.
The third time I went to New Orleans I had a steak so good I didn't eat red meat again for a month. That is not hyperbole. It was the literal best meal I have ever had, and like visiting the grave of Jesus, I don't like saying much about it because I don't want to sully something so meaningful with my pitiful words.
New Orleans. It is both otherworldly and perfectly grounded. Magical and real. Gorgeous and grimy. Warm and scary. Joyous and dangerous. Poverty and wealth and theft and murder and marriage and joy and death and life and, dear God above, food and music and food and music!
For all I've said here, I don't feel like I have a right to talk about New Orleans. It doesn't belong to me. The people I've since met who are from there, maybe it doesn't even belong to them so much as they belong to it. In some ways, my experience of New Orleans was not unlike my trip to the Holy Land of Palestine and Israel. Before I went, I had no experience and knew exactly what I thought. After going, I knew so much less and loved so much more. These places and these people - they don't need my opinions and they don't need me. There is so much life to be lived if I can love without judgment, if I can just go and see.
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My guest today is the Reverend Dr. Herschel Wade. Herschel is the Associate for Discipleship here at the Church of the Redeemer, and I am so grateful for him. He has been with us for just a few short months in this job and he's still relatively new to the priesthood, but he brings so much to the table, so much passion, so much energy, so much joy and laughter, and so much thoughtfulness.
When he opens his mouth you are going to laugh and you're going to think that is going to happen. I'm so grateful for that. His sermons remind me daily. Every time I hear him preach, I am reminded of the importance of prayer. Obedience to Christ following Jesus no matter what. And he's lived that in his own life. He's lived out and he continues to live out the desire to follow Jesus. No matter what this position associate for discipleship is new at church of the Redeemer, but it's important for us. To focus as we move forward into the next chapter of our church's life, to focus on our following our discipleship, our decision to pick up our crosses and follow Jesus for our entire lives. And I believe Herschel is just the person to help us understand how to do that. I'm so grateful for him and grateful for him contributing to the podcast today. I hope you'll enjoy it.While growing up, my life at home was never peaceful or stable. My father ran the streets and slept around with other women. He spent little time at home. When he was at home, he physically, emotionally, and psychologically abused my mother and beat us regularly at the drop of a dime. My mother turned full-alcoholic and gave up on everything except trying to keep my father from leaving for good. The long fight to keep him and endure the abuse would effectively break her spirit and strip her of her remaining dignity. She never seemed to recover.
Somehow through the beatings, I hit a breaking point. I grew tired of watching him beat my mother while courting and pampering other women, who could not have loved my father as much as my mother did. One night stands out in my mind. Like a crazy fool, I attempted to stop one of my father's attacks on my mother. He was beating her on our front porch for the world to see, again. "Leave my mama alone Goddammit. Leave my mother alone!" My father chased me down the street. You damn right to assume he did not catch me. Had he caught me, the chance of me being able to retell this story would be less zero! The effects were no less devastating. My father kicked me out of the house; my mother packed my bags. Sadly, my actions that night would have long lasting effects on my younger sister. She, too, caught the "I don't give a damn bug" and cussed my father out minutes after my departure. She would depart in the same way I did that night. She was twelve and would not return for years--yes, years.
My relationship with silence is complicated. I know silence is important. I know it's healthy. I know silence is conducive to prayer and meditation, to peace and reflection. I also just really like noise of all kinds. I like the sound of things happening, I like hearing people talking. Even when they're not talking to me: I like to go places where people are talking to each other and just hear different voices and snippets of different conversations. I love all accents - even the ones you think are ugly.
Mostly I love music. It is playing most of the time I am awake, and even when at bedtime I often play music very quietly. My entire sophomore year of college my roommate and I fell asleep to the same album every night. It was Bob Dylan's World Gone Wrong.
I would not say I'm afraid of silence - at least I don't think I am. I even enjoy it sometimes. But I forget about it. I forget silence is an option.
I think I'm about to remember. As you are reading this I am on sabbatical. Don't worry: I'm not working. I wrote this before I left. But the very first thing I'm doing during this sabbatical is going on a 4-day silent retreat. Four whole days without talking to anyone or listening to anyone. No kids around. No spouse. No work. No music. I will be at a monastery and retreat center in Kentucky called The Abbey of Gethsemani. It is run by Cistercian monks who are apparently very serious about their silence. It's going to be very quiet.
Maybe I am actually a little afraid.
If you had asked me growing up if meals were a big deal in my house, I would have shrugged my shoulders. My parents didn't look me in the eye and say, "This matters!" And I ate in front of the TV as often as they would let me. But looking back, I see it differently. My father loved to cook. And for the first 13 years of my life, when my parents were still together and especially before my older brothers moved out, Dad would try to get us around the table when he was home. Throughout much of the 80's he was away on business, sometimes half of each month. But when he was home, he would cook as often as possible, and we would all sit together around the kitchen table and eat. He would insist I take my hat off, no matter what kind of rat's nest was hiding underneath.
I always thought he was doing that just for himself, that he loved to cook. And he did. But I'm Dad now, and I have a demanding job too. And now I know that part of loving to cook is the fact that I am feeding people I love, that I am potentially making something they will actually enjoy, and that I am nourishing them and caring for them in a real and practical way. I don't always feel it in the moment, and I don't say it every time. And my kids would love to eat in front of the TV as often as possible. But when I have the energy, I gather them around the table, and hats come off, and we hold hands, and someone prays. And sometimes they like it and sometimes they don't. But it's always I love you. I see that now.
As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this podcast which was originally posted on May 12, 2023
Where is God when things are terrible? Where is God when I pray for the healing of a loved one and they get sicker? Where is God when I pray for their healing and they die instead? Where is God when people are being torn apart by AR-15 bullets?
Where is God?
I ask this question a lot, and I get asked it a lot. A friend who is really going through it recently asked me, and followed up by saying they were not asking rhetorically. It's not a new question. Some biblical scholars believe that the Book of Job is the earliest story in our Scriptures. Which means not only is "Where is God?" not a new question - it might be the oldest question anyone who believed in God ever asked. And it's important to remember that "Where is God?" is asked most frequently by people who believe in God, because we often think it's a question rooted either in faithlessness or cynicism. But in my experience it is one of the most faithful questions anyone can ask.
Where is God?
I need to tell you that I will not answer this question in anything like a satisfactory way. So please know that going forward. Just the same, my first answer is that God is with us. This is the stated belief of the Christian - even when we don't understand, even when we question, even when we doubt, even when we are furious with God. God is with us. When I was growing up, the spectacular Bette Midler sang, "God is watching us from a distance." It was beautiful and it was believable, but it was also not true - at least not according to the Christian narrative. We say that God is here right now.
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Jesus goes to work, and he heals people. He helps people. He saves people. Then he heads to Jerusalem, the political, cultural, religious, social center of his people, and he goes there during Passover, when every one of these oppressed Israelites has Egypt and the Exodus and liberation on the brain. And he symbolizes for so many of them the possibility of deliverance - of salvation - not just from some abstract afterlife Hell, but from the things that are harming them here and now. Hosanna! Help us!
This is a promising moment. It quickly disintegrates. After several days of teaching and fierce verbal confrontations with religious leaders and cultural influencers, Jesus is arrested, put on trial, and publicly executed. Among those who advocated so strongly for his death were the people who had cried Hosanna the loudest. The week between Palm Sunday and Easter is the grotesque illustration of what happens when we don't like how God wants to help us.
What Jesus does is he reminds each person that they need saving not just from some governing power or corrupt system - they also need saving from themselves, from their own ability to sabotage their lives, their own resistance to God's love and justice, their own complicity in the things that push them further from God. And he's not speaking to them from on high, from above the fray, from a place of privilege. Like all good prophets, he's speaking to them as one of them.
As you may recall, it does not go well.
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Conversion cannot be confined to the times and place I expect. I look forward to wherever it may be next. At the back end of the pandemic, we tiptoed back into real life. At Church of the Redeemer the very first gathering we had outside of masked worship was on the front porch of our church. We had a taco truck parked out front and we invited everyone. I will never my whole life forget that night. A hundred people showed up and ate tacos and just smiled at each other. "Look at us. We're sharing space. We're together. We're eating." It's all so simple isn't it? I don't ever want to take it for granted again, the being together.
I was angry a lot during the pandemic. I may have believed in God but I wasn't so sure I believed in people anymore. I had hoped that this health crisis would be an opportunity for people to unclench our fists and look out for one another - to cross political lines, to take seriously the danger and uncertainty before us, to love one another in practical ways. I did not see that happening, and I found myself succumbing to my own judgmental nature and cynicism.
The taco truck reminded me how much I love people.
There's a moment in The Lord of the Rings where a character stops to consider how he feels, and then describes himself as "stretched thin - like butter scraped over too much bread." That's it. That's what I feel like. It's not quite burnout. I'm not looking out the window for something else to do. Rather, my body and spirit are tired, and have been and keep being, and I am looking for rest and renewal.
One thing I can tell you about being butter scraped over too much bread is that sometimes when everything is going well, you're not able to feel the joy and excitement of it. You can intellectually recognize that things are great, but not have the capacity to appreciate that reality.
Another thing that happens is a bandwidth problem. During the height (or depth) of the pandemic, there was a point when both my wife and I were working from home, and all three kids were home with us. The oldest two were attending school remotely on their computers, and the youngest was too young even for school and spent a lot of time on a screen. I'm not going to bother trying to explain or defend that. Anyway, when we were all online at the same time, we would sometimes have a bandwidth issue - our internet would be overloaded and everything would slow down. Since the pandemic, I have noticed myself having bandwidth issues. My internal processing is overwhelmed and everything slows down. If you've been around me, maybe you've noticed that and maybe you haven't. I notice it. Butter over too much bread.
I sometimes have difficulty admitting that I feel this way. First, it's never fun to acknowledge you're not operating at 100%. We're programmed to think of that as weakness, and to think of weakness as bad. But also, I worry that the people in my church community - the people with whom I share much of my life - will think I'm saying I'm not happy doing the work. And I'm definitely not saying that.Want to support our podcast?Give Here https://redeemercincy.tpsdb.com/Give/podcast
Today at the gym I overheard a conversation. I did not mean to. I was not eavesdropping. Well not at first anyway. In my defense the person working out next to me was talking at normal volume on their phone. She was not using, as it's called in elementary school, her inside voice. And because I had misplaced my headphones, I could only mind my own business for so long. Even without knowing the context of the conversation, I heard pain. Then I heard her say these words to the person on the other end of the line:
"Are you willing just to acknowledge your part in what went wrong, to be accountable and then move on?"
I was taken aback by the direct and simple nature of the question. We don't often hear people speak this plainly. I actually stopped listening at that point, both because I was trying to lift a very heavy thing, and also because this stranger's question sent me deep within myself. It was as if she had asked me the question just as directly and simply. Phil, are you willing just to acknowledge your part in what went wrong, to be accountable and then move on?
I delicately put the heavy thing on the ground, and then silently prayed for this person on her phone. I'm very religious, after all. I prayed with thanksgiving for her courage - because saying that to anyone takes courage. Then I prayed for, I guess you'd call it a happy ending, a resolution or reconciliation or whatever those two needed. I put the weights back on the rack, walked off and finished my workout. But that question stuck with me.
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This canceling business is not uncontroversial. It's also not new, even if the lingo is.
I remember back in 2003 when the Country music trio then-named The Dixie Chicks responded to the US invasion of Iraq by telling a London audience, they were ashamed that our President was from their home state of Texas. The backlash was intense and immediate - with radio stations refusing to play their music and their music sales dropping dramatically. They even received death threats.
So did the Beatles, of course, back in 1966, when during an interview John Lennon remarked that his band was currently more popular than Jesus. Aside from the death threats, some Christian groups organized public bonfires of Beatles records and paraphernalia. The Beatles considered ending their US tour early for their own safety.
And then there was St. Paul, and even Jesus. Jesus, in describing conflict resolution at one point instructs his followers that if someone inside the community sins egregiously and is unwilling to apologize and atone, they should be treated like "a Gentile or a tax collector". Which is to say they should be treated as outsiders.
Maybe Jesus was an early proponent of cancel culture.
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My preference would be to see evidence of God's presence when things are going my way, and evidence of God's absence when things are not. And I know I am not alone in this: Many people find themselves questioning the existence (or at least the efficacy) of God specifically when they see the mess we are in as a planet. The reasoning seems to go, "What kind of a God would allow all of this?" And when things are going right? "Oh, God is blessing me."
It's worth remembering that all of Jesus' disciples died horrible deaths; that St. Paul was jailed repeatedly, stoned, and executed; that Job, who is most famous for his faithfulness, lost every one of his children, his home, and all his livestock in one day; that Moses died in the wilderness, never setting foot in the Promised Land. It's also worth remembering that none of these stories are told as tragedies: Every life is described as part of a larger redemptive reality at work in the world, played out in both the prosperity and the adversity of the faithful.
The truth is that pretty much every single book of the Bible was written for, by, and about people who were in tough situations - living in exile, surviving under oppressive rule, being persecuted, their lives threatened, their religion made illegal, their lifespans brief and rife with danger, famine, and pestilence.
Sometimes - especially when I'm in my head - I see things going wrong as evidence that there is no God; or that if there is a God, maybe they're impotent, or uncaring. Yet the words of hope that have most shaped my life come from people whose lives were objectively much worse, much more difficult than mine has ever been. Faith, it seems, may be more fertile in suffering than prosperity.
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We Christians believe in eternal life. Yet we still manage so often to think and speak of those who have died in the past tense. But Jim is a poet. And though he wasn't reading a poem here, it takes a poet's heart to lay bare the beautiful forgotten truth in such simple terms. A man standing mere feet from the ashes of his friend's body and speaking of him in the present tense.
The words for what I came to understand that day did now show up immediately. But now I have them. When someone dies we do not stop loving them. Our love is not past tense. And it's not just grief or nostalgia or sentimental memories. It is love in the present tense. It is love that still manages to shape us. We continue to be transformed by love after their death. And I believe I know why. Our loved ones who died are still loving us. They are in eternal life. Right now. They are alive in Christ - not as a metaphor, but as a bare fact. They are in the present tense. Their love is in the present tense. And so is ours.
Our love remains. And when I say our love remains, I am not saying it remains as a stubborn insistence to hold onto what was. No, our love remains because it is alive and active and we continue to share it with the dead who live in the present tense.
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In my first parish job, my rector told me it takes audacity and humility to be a priest. He said it take audacity to actually believe that the God who made all things has called you to preach and administer sacraments, to speak in God's name. Who do we think we are? And it takes humility, he continued, because once you're called you have to get out of the way of the Holy Spirit. 13 years into this work and I think he was right. I also think that this combination of audacity and humility is not something that is confined to priesthood. It seems to me that it takes audacity and humility simply to be Christian. It takes audacity to believe that there is a God who made every single thing in all of the history of the vast creation and that this God knows and loves you. It also takes humility to be a Christian, because you are admitting that you cannot do this life all on your own, that you need help, that there is something out there that is bigger and stronger and smarter than you, that you may be beloved, but so is everyone else. The audacity and humility of a Christian life.
What I did not know, and could not know early on in my ministry, is that this tension between audacity and humility would be messy and uncertain, and that it would reveal itself in all aspects of the work. I thought, for instance, that I would spend my entire ministry above the fray of politics.
For most of my priesthood I have not considered myself a political preacher. We all know preachers with that label. In the Episcopal Church we usually code them as social justice preachers, but we know what we mean: We mean people who bring a political perspective to the pulpit. I actively sought to avoid politics in my preaching and teaching until just a few years ago.
Jesus changed my mind.
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Kindness is not a Hallmark card. It is not a cloying call for a so-called return to the civility of the good old days that never really existed. Kindness is ferocious and powerful. Kindness is salvation.
To devote myself to kindness is to recognize the beauty and belonging of every person on this earth. Kindness is the practical application of acknowledging that each person is made in the image of God. Kindness is what it means to love my neighbor as myself.
Sometimes I forget the truth, and I start to think that kindness is weak. But kindness is strength, because kindness insists that the person to whom I am speaking carries holiness within them, bears the image of God. And to believe this is true takes strength and to act like it's true takes courage. Because if I'm honest, I don't always think someone has the image of God within them. I don't always believe that a person is connected to God. I can believe in monsters just like anybody.
Hatred, spite, and demonization is dehumanization - the misguided belief that someone does not belong to God, was not made by God, is not magnificently loved by God. To let hatred have a voice is a direct decision to give in to the darkness of the powers that seek to corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.
The skeptic in me immediately points to the times Jesus says things that I see as harsh or brash. I can then say Jesus isn't always kind, so why should I be? But when I pay attention to the words of Jesus, I see that every single one of them insists that the person to whom he is speaking belongs to God. Jesus' words, even the rough ones, are kind because they acknowledge the inherent humanity and dignity of their recipients. Jesus does not think of anyone or speak of anyone as trash - not even his enemies. When Jesus critiques, when Jesus stands up and speaks out, when Jesus is angry, it comes from his conviction that the person in front of him is fully human. Jesus carries within him a deep yearning for even his enemy to see their own humanity and live into it.
I cannot blame Jesus for the times I don't want to be kind.
In November of 1984 my parents threw an Election Night party. I still remember the little elephants on the cocktail napkins. I was five years old and understood nothing about politics, but I knew that Ronald Reagan was president, that he was about to be for four more years, and that this was both inevitable and very good. It is odd now to think of the outcome of a presidential election being a foregone conclusion, but it was. In 1984, Reagan carried all but one state and the District of Columbia in what is still the largest electoral landslide in modern history.
Moments like this implanted within me not only a strong political identity, but also a sense of clarity and certainty: My family's guy was the good guy, he led the right team, he would win obviously and convincingly, and we would celebrate.
When my dad came out of the closet as gay in 1992, he remained a Republican - as he would until his death in 2006. When questioned over the years about his political loyalty he would point out, correctly, that neither major party had at the time a pro-gay platform, that it was Democrat Bill Clinton who signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask Don't Tell policies, and that since he wasn't going to get any real recognition from either party, he might as well vote for the candidate that best represented his other beliefs.
His gay friends in particular were not persuaded by this argument. For what it was worth, neither was I. I was not interested in complexity - or compromise. I have always been a more difficult and idealistic person than he was. So I was excited in high school when my likewise contrarian brother introduced me to libertarianism.Want to support our podcast?Give Here https://redeemercincy.tpsdb.com/Give/podcast
This is where the prophet comes in. The prophet, you see, is like a voice in the wilderness of complacency, greed, and vanity who tells us what God sees when looking at the world we're building. Put in those terms, maybe we're not a nation of priests these days. Maybe we're a nation of prophets: A culture of people who feel as if God is compelling each and every one of us to speak our minds at all costs. The advent of social media has created not just the opportunity, but the pressure to make sure we have opinions and that we share them widely. At least in this country, there is far more emphasis on stating your values than on embodying them. I don't say this to demonize social media: It can be such a powerful connector and community builder, and the relationships we build there are not fake. They are real and they matter. But it is a radical change in the way we communicate and we are just at the beginning of understanding how it is changing us. The same platform that allows us to share photos and memories with distant loved ones also supplies us with false conspiracy theories and helps us to organize insurrections. That's a lot for us to digest. Likewise, I don't mean to denigrate the prophetic voice. We need people in our lives who will speak hard truths, who will point both to our failings and to the hope of our shared future. But the prophet's lone responsibility is to tell the truth. The prophet does not have stick around and make the change happen. A nation of prophets may write trenchant and forceful words.Sometimes we may even predict the future. But if we're not intentional, we may find our focus shifting to people knowing what we believe, where we stand, what we think or know about any given issue.Want to support our podcast?Give Here https://redeemercincy.tpsdb.com/Give/podcast
Growing up, I was not tall, or athletic, or particularly handsome. But I was quick: I thought quickly and I spoke quickly. And I remember actually thinking I may not be the fastest or the strongest but I can outtalk these people. Yes I understand how arrogant that sounds. I was a bit of an arrogant kid. Or at least I was a kid who tried to appear confident and tried to find confidence wherever I could, and that ended up looking a lot like arrogance from time to time.
I remember how important a witty comeback was to me. Or how important it was to win an argument. To be right. This was how I could be strong, I thought. I could say the clever thing, the cutting thing. I could say the smart thing - which I would often confuse with saying the right thing or the good thing.
I have always been unspeakably drawn to being clever and sounding witty, even when it wasn't kind. In my childhood home, you could get away with saying mean things if they were funny enough. And I have always wanted to be right. Once as a teenager I was arguing with my dad, because of course I was, and he said, "Philip at some point you'll have to decide, do I want to be right or do I want to be happy?" To which I shot back, "Both. I want to be happy about being right." Another clever comeback: It emerged from my mouth so quickly that, I realize now, I had no actual time to contemplate his point, to digest it to possibly be transformed by it.
I want to tell you that it took me a long time to learn to hold my tongue, but that would imply that I've learned it. It's closer to reality to say I am still learning.
Here we all are, emotionally hungover from the beautiful haze of the holiday season. So much planning and traveling and visiting and hosting and partying and wrapping and gift giving. So many expectations - some met, and some frustrated. We're wondering if we're really supposed to get back to life and work as usual. As I write these words, I am surrounded by decorations still needing to be boxed up, and a tree that in a few days will be stripped of its ornaments and hauled to the curb. But right now I've got to do all the normal work things. All those people to whom I said, "Let's check in after the New Year," well, it's the New Year, and it's time to check in.
My kids were not at all interested in going back to school. My daughter, in particular, was livid because they scheduled the first day back to cruelly coincide with her birthday. She thought maybe it was a conspiracy.
She doesn't hate school, and you probably don't hate your work, your commitments, your normal routine. But the dread of returning to it, of putting back on real pants, and eating reasonably, and basically just acting like a civilized human in this world again, sometimes just feels like too much.
And what I think I want to tell you today is not just that that's normal or that it's ok, but that it might even be a little holy.
Editor's note: As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this blog post which was originally posted on October 28, 2022.For his entire career, Bob Dylan has sought to present himself as he currently is. And that simple reality frustrates people. Because they compare him to himself. They compare him to what he used to be. They compare him to their own memory of him. And they leave scratching their heads.And how guilty are we of this? Not with Bob Dylan - but with life! Comparing our life now to what it used to be and then being disappointed that it has changed, even though changed is all it has ever been. Growth, aging, transformation, weathering, breaking down, building back up, being affected by your own life, showing your wrinkles. Your voice changes, your heart and your mind and your beliefs and your ideals and your faith all shift. But then you compare you now to you a few years ago. You scratch your head and say why. You just aren't like you used to be.Life keeps happening. And, to be honest, that's what scares us. We want that singer to sound like he sounded 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago - like he sounded in our memories. We find some strange solace in that kind of comparison. How much ink has been spilled comparing our country now to what we once were?The church is far from immune to this comparison. Here is how I remember church: why can't it be like that?Want to support our podcast? Give Here
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Speaking as a Christian, I don't say Christmas is everyone's birthday for the sake of quaint comparison. I believe the birth of Jesus changes every person for all time. Because of Jesus, every single person on this planet is deeply connected to the God who made them. Every single person. It doesn't matter where they were born, what they believe or don't believe, how they vote, if they pray or not. In Jesus, God has chosen to hold onto every single one of us forever, to redeem every single one of our lives. God has said yes to us, and indeed to all of creation. We all belong utterly to God without condition.
So Christmas is the celebration of Jesus, yes. But through Jesus, Christmas is a celebration of each and every one of us. It's a celebration of our lives, of our belonging. If we are serious about recognizing who Jesus is and celebrating what God has done, then this season, this holy day, is best spent celebrating our humanity and the beautiful humanity of those around us. Because on this day we remember that God blesses our humanity.
The things we want for children on their birthday - to feel special, to feel loved, to have a wonderful day in which they can really experience a sense of what a blessing it is that they exist, what a blessing they are to those of us who know them - this is a list of what God wants for us on Christmas.
But let's be realistic: There will still be stress and anxiety because of our expectations. There is no way around this I suppose. I want to stay honest about that.
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How is the buildup to Christmas going for you? Are you experiencing hope and joy and all that? Are you being festive enough? Are you feeling all the correct feelings? I want to take this opportunity to remind you that there is no one right way to experience Christmas. Our feelings and expectations surrounding Christmas are endlessly complicated and there's no reason for us to pretend otherwise.
In the church we call the post-Thanksgiving pre-Christmas season Advent: It's a word which, aptly, means "coming" - as in, "Oh no Christmas is coming and we are not ready." Funny enough, most of the Bible readings assigned for Advent aren't about the joy of Christmas - they are about the surprise, dread, hope, fear, and expectation that accompanies Jesus showing up. As in, "Oh no, Jesus is coming and we are not ready."
There is no perfect Christmas. There is no way to get it all right. There is no way to win. And yet we fret every year as if our worrying will bring about perfection.
I have never had a perfect Christmas. But I love this season so much. I love it in its ridiculousness and tension. I love the songs and early dark and the lights. I'm 44 and I'm realizing I don't care at all what my presents are (so long as I get some). I wouldn't mind a Toblerone in my stocking. Mostly I just want it to snow, I want to sing Christmas carols at church, and I want to watch Christmas Vacation.
But I know. I know even though I make it sound like I'm easy to please, that I am no different than you. I too am carrying complicated feelings and hopes into the next few days.
So the heater didn't get fixed last spring. And we forgot about it because it was getting warmer. And now here we were in Late November, with a few freezing nights under our belt, and my wife's office is generally too cold. She had been using a space heater, but we knew that could not be the solution for the next few months: That would blow up our electric bill, and of course space heaters can be dangerous. After dragging our feet for a couple weeks, my wife finally called an HVAC technician with whom we'd worked last year. Almost as an afterthought, she asked him to just check on our furnace too while he's at our house.
The technician shows up and takes a look at our radiant heater. And it's working. As in, nothing is wrong with it. There was no reason for us to call. It just works. It was not working before. Now it is. He shrugs and goes off to the furnace. He runs some tests, comes back upstairs and says the heat exchange is cracked on our furnace and it is blowing carbon monoxide all over the place. He says he thinks it's just blowing outside through the exhaust, have we noticed anything inside?
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A couple weeks ago I spoke/wrote about growing up, about maturing. And now we're talking about playing Nintendo. But I've been thinking about the things that shaped us in our youth, about what we did with them as we grew up. In one of Paul's letters to a church he (somewhat passive aggressively) tells them that when he was a child he did childish things, but when he grew up it was time to put childish things away. What did you put away when you grew up? What did you let go of?
Some people put away Christianity when they grow up. And I can't say I blame them much of the time. I do not believe God is a fairy tale. I do believe much of the way we have experienced Christianity is childish. As a teacher of mine used to say, the church in America is structured for spiritual infancy. What he meant was that Christianity as we know it is often does not push us to grow. And when we do grow, our churches don't know how to grow with us. So we abandon Christianity. Or, what's worse, we hold onto a version of Christianity that doesn't grow and mature even as we do.
I am fully capable of spiritual immaturity.
I am thinking today about gratitude. I am thinking about what it means to be thankful. It is not possible to be thankful all the time. I can't feel any one feeling all the time. Sometimes I think I'm supposed to always feel good, or happy, or confident - and that is an unreasonable expectation to place on myself. But I can seek to focus on gratitude for this life.
Quite often God is in my presence, showing me attention and care, sharing this life with me. But I get distracted. I say I'm multitasking, but really, I'm choosing to focus on something else. Probably my phone. I'm juggling a lot, and not all of it is good. Not all of it is good. I want to say that out loud, because toxic positivity and delusional gratitude are real: The fanatical push to make everything ok is tempting in religious circles. Not everything is ok. Nobody knows that better than God.
But where will I place my focus? With which eyes will I look at this moment?
Thanksgiving is underrated. It used to signal the beginning of the Holiday Season
I have a confession to make. I love being an adult. I get to stay up past my bedtime. I get to drive a car. I have to work, sure, but I also get to work - get to do something I love and learn how to get better at it. I will never have to take another math test, never get another detention. Sure, I went bald, but now I don't get hat hair. I get to have a beard. I watch R-Rated movies. I eat my kids' Halloween candy after they go to bed. I have two dogs! I had one and wanted another one, so I got another one! It was a terrible idea, but it was my terrible idea and all I had to do was be willing to live with the consequences!
I didn't much like being a kid, to be honest. It's not like I had a bad childhood. I wasn't trying to escape. But from a very young age, I believed that I would enjoy being an adult so much more. And then I grew up and I was right. This is what I've been waiting for. All the stressors I described before are still true. It's very very difficult, this adulting. But I love it. I love being grown-up.
It's painful and it's scary. I both laugh and cry more readily than I ever did as a child. It's all more terrible and beautiful than I ever could have imagined.
I know our culture is obsessed with youth; that we are programmed to look backward and yearn for an idealized version of who we once were, to long for younger bodies and simpler times. I do it too. Some of it is about being scared of death. Some of it is wishing we could have had the ability to comprehend back then just how precious time was when everything seemed endless and ageless and eternal. And some of it is the legitimate annoyance that if I sleep wrong tonight, I will be sore for three days.
Every time Jesus interacts with a woman in the Gospel narratives, she leaves with her humanity, her dignity affirmed. Every time. So, it makes sense that Christians should actively support the full humanity, dignity, and autonomy of women. This should not be controversial. Supporting abortion rights is not contrary to following Jesus. Supporting abortion rights, at its core, is about trusting people who are pregnant to make decisions for what is happening within their body. It is their body.
I used to think it was my job to protect the life that was growing inside other people. That belief was rooted in the idea that I knew what was right for others, for their bodies. I believed that I should have a say. I believed that it was a woman's job to do whatever she had to do in order to protect that life no matter what, even if that meant being forced to do so. I believed I was standing up for the dignity of the unborn, but in doing so, I put myself in the position of undermining and even ignoring the dignity of the woman. I am short-circuiting her autonomy instead of affirming and supporting it. I can no longer do that. Jesus won't let me.
There is a famous moment in the Gospel stories when Jesus calls out the religious leaders of his time, saying, "You are placing burdens on people they can never bear!" Jesus was talking to me. He was talking to all of us who believe we know what is right for others, and especially those of us who use laws to place unbearable burdens on others.
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This week the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital in Gaza was hit with a missile and over 400 people died. The hospital is a ministry of the Anglican Church in Jerusalem - with much of its funding coming directly from Episcopalians in America. The bishop who oversees this hospital is a dear friend, and a peaceful man. You have heard of this horrific missile strike. How did you feel when it was reported as an Israeli missile? How did you feel when you then heard reports that it was a Palestinian missile? Did one sound better to you than the other? Which culprit was preferable for the story you are telling about what is happening? I know what my preference was.
I wonder if the children who were killed care who was responsible.
Our need to have a clear cut take on what is happening unites us with Job's friends. It somehow feels safer if we can unabashedly Stand with Israel or Free Palestine. We can choose our story and roll our eyes at the obviousness of it all. We can avoid our grief and focus on our outrage.
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I have lived a few places now: several rounds in Southern California - both in Orange County and Los Angeles, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, North Carolina, Virginia, and now Cincinnati Ohio. Most of these places have felt like home at one point or another. I am always happy to go back to any of these places to visit. At the same time, it's just that: A visit. I need to consult Google maps to get places I used to know by memory. I imagine alternate realities where I never left California in the first place, or where I never left New England, or where I settled down in Charlotte. So many things I was, and so many I could've been. There's beauty in that, and also some grief.
Grief is different than regret. I do not wish I had made different decisions, that my life was different. It's not that. It's just an acknowledgment of all the loss that life brings.
We have a desire to demonize grief, to minimize it or stifle it completely if possible. And when experiencing grief there is some part of us that feels guilty, like we should not be feeling this, like it's maudlin or overly sensitive. Our goal seems to be to get through grief as quickly as we can. I wonder why that is. Christians can be particularly problematic. We will often try to short-circuit grief by pointing to God's plan or the promise of Heaven. As if our belief that everything is going to be ok means that we should not experience grief.
But grief is not evil. Grief is a gift, because it is honest about the things that we have lost.
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I remember recently witnessing a friend of mine being painfully misunderstood, and I remember thinking if only the people who misunderstood her really knew her, they would love her too. How could they not?
It's interesting though, this idea that loving someone is meant as a compliment. Love as seal of approval. As if the love we give someone is a sign that they are worth loving, that they have earned it, that their character has somehow merited our love. Even though that's almost never been our experience of love. People may earn our trust. People may earn our respect, our esteem, our appreciation. But our love works differently and we know it. It wasn't my trust the Beatles won over that day in the booth of that vaguely Hawaiian-themed restaurant.
The phrase is to know them is to love them. But I think I've begun to believe the opposite. I think I believe now that to love someone is to know them.
It is the Christian belief that God is love.
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I was a runner once about 12 years ago. I don't just mean that I ran once. I mean I became a runner. I had jogged now and again growing up, but was never a runner. Then one day I thought to myself, I'm gonna run a half-marathon. I cannot tell you exactly why, other than I was 31 and at the beginning of my marriage and the beginning of my career, and was about to have a child and was still very much of the mindset that I had something to prove. Is there such a thing as a 1/3rd life crisis?
I'm not so sure I don't still have something to prove.
Anyway, I decided to run a half-marathon because I wanted to prove I could. That was it. Can a short stubby out-of-shape guy in his 30's run a long way very slowly? It turns out I could. I had a friend who was a runner, and I asked her to train me. And she did. I trained. I followed her schedule. I got running shorts, and running shoes, and BodyGlide - which is what they call an anti-chafing balm, and a little water bottle I could attach to my hand. I ran long distances and listened to podcasts and took ice baths. I ran two half-marathons before a combination of shin splints and a new baby sidelined my burgeoning career and I hung up my Brooks sneakers.
But here's my question: When did I become a runner?
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What is your prayer when you know someone is going to die? So many of my prayers for the sick and dying are centered around their return to health, for a cure, for an end to the disease, for a reversal of fortunes. Sometimes a prayer for healing is a reasonable request. Other times I pray for a miracle. To be clear whether healing seems reasonable or realistic or not, I should pray for it if it is what I hope and wish for. Sometimes it's exactly the thing I need to pray. Sometimes "heal them" is the only thing that makes sense to me.
I remember kneeling in front of the bed and praying for my dad to be healed while paramedics were working on his body in the hallway around the corner. He was already dead, had been dead when they showed up, but there I was praying for healing. I don't judge myself for that prayer. It's what I wanted. I asked for what I wanted. And I don't judge God for not making it so. There is so little I understand about life and death and how it all rests in the heart of the God who made us. God, my dad, me - we all did our part in that moment.
Death shows up. What is our prayer?
One of the great gifts of my job is the sheer number of times it puts me in close contact with death. I am invited into the room where a person will die, invited to pray over them, to thank God for their life. To witness the tears of their loved ones, to shed my own tears. There is heaviness there. It is not a joy. It takes a piece out of me. And also, I have come to see it as a gift. Death carries with it a sort of holiness. An ending that is shared by every living thing. We hold it in common. I have stumbled into the practice of praying for a holy death when I find out someone is dying. I have learned to pray this without flinching. Because I believe there is such a thing as holy dying.
" I had been taught Evil was about satanic rituals and Ouija boards and heavy metal music and people loving someone they shouldn't. This priest changed my understanding in one fell swoop. And then she spoke passionately of Jesus. In Los Angeles. To Episcopalians. She spoke about Jesus' clear and consistent advocacy for the love, the humanization, the belonging of all people. And she spoke of how, while she lay in the hospital healing from her wounds, Jesus healed her heart and allowed her to choose love instead of hate as she persisted in the holy work for justice and equity.
That night I sat in this space where this Christian woman connected the spiritual and the practical with articulation, where she connected the actual issues of love and mercy and equality and violence and hatred and fear with the story of how God is working in the world and where Jesus shows up.
That Sunday I showed up. I worshiped with them for the first time."
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Do you believe you can be yourself at church? Do you think you can be yourself in front of God? I don't like admitting that I've had problems with this my whole life. I remember during the years when I was unaffiliated with church and was actively questioning if I even believed in anything. I could never bring myself to say I wasn't Christian, because what if I died in that moment and went to Hell? What is that other than the belief that you can't be your whole self in front of God? That night I was at a table with people who all believed different things and said that aloud. A couple of lifelong Episcopalians who never had serious doubts. A gay Christian who loved Jesus and felt safe being himself at this church. One guy who said he wasn't sure he bought any of it but was there to sort things out. And me - a former fundamentalist turned spiritual-but-not-religious agnostic conservative liberal Jesus lover who'd had a recent conversion experience and was just trying to understand how to be Christian again. And we were all together. It was such a mess. Thank God. The third thing I remember is the cookies.
Shortly thereafter I moved to Los Angeles, which was about an hour from where I grew up, and started going to the farmer's market on Sundays. I wanted to be a Christian, but I didn't know how. Some people say you can be Christian on your own terms and all by yourself. Maybe they're right. My experience has been otherwise. Community is central to this faith. It would be like saying you can be married on your own terms and all by yourself. It became clear to me that I wasn't going to believe in Jesus all by myself. I was going to have to try to find a church that I could stand and that could stand me. I wanted my life to look like I meant it.
I decided to give the farmer's market a break and go to church. But the idea of finding a new church was overwhelming. So I just started driving back to my hometown and taking my Grandma to our old church. The one I had left. The one I didn't know what to do with. I knew the first Sunday that it wasn't my place anymore. But I kept going for a couple months. I still loved the pastor there very much. And I loved my Grandma. Sometimes I'd come down the night before and do my laundry at her house. Then my clean clothes would smell like her cigarettes for a week. We'd sit in the same pew as when I was growing up. The people who remembered me seemed happy to see me. When the offering plate came around, my Grandma would slip me a $5 bill so I wouldn't be empty-handed. She always did it without making eye contact, like we were dealing in contraband.
It wasn't my church anymore. It wasn't going to be. I wasn't angry or bitter. I just didn't belong there anymore. And one Sunday I skipped. I slept in. And I called up my buddies to see who was going to the farmer's market. They were all sleeping in that day and I was definitely not going to go by myself. I resigned myself to a quiet morning. A few minutes later, my roommate peaked his head into my room. He and I were friendly enough but not really friends. We rarely hung out. We certainly didn't go places together. He said, "Hey I'm thinking of going to the farmer's market. You wanna go?"
Do you remember the bowls you used for your breakfast cereal as a child? I do. We had these light blue hard plastic bowls with rims on them. I ate cereal every morning without fail. Somehow my kids have managed to get us to make them eggs or pancakes or waffles from time to time. When I was growing up, if we had eggs or pancakes for breakfast it was probably a holiday. Waffles were for brunch buffets. Day in and day out I ate cereal out of one of those blue bowls.
Maybe it wasn't cereal bowls for you. Maybe you can close your eyes and immediately picture the plates and flatware you used at the dinner table, or the glass you used for juice. What is it for you? Can you see it?
These things were not, in themselves, spectacular. They were simply there every day. They did not need to prove themselves as flawlessly designed. We don't remember them for being particularly beautiful. We remember them because we used them over and over again for years. I can still remember placing the bowl on the coffee table in the family room then sliding down the couch onto the floor - because if I sat on the couch itself, the bowl would be too low. So I'd sit criss-cross on the floor and that blue bowl overstuffed with cereal and milk would be just below my chin, and that way I wouldn't spill and maybe my mom wouldn't notice I hadn't used a placemat. I realize now I loved it there.
I was talking to a friend recently who is a pilot, and he told me that 30% of his flight training focused on emergency landing and crashing. For all the complexity of plane mechanics, navigation, the physics of flight, and the proper technique for taking off and landing, a full third of the lessons are devoted to catastrophic events.
And that makes sense. If you're sending someone up in the air, you don't just want them to know how things work when everything is going well, you want them to have a clear picture of what it looks like when things go wrong, so they can handle the stress of the situation. I had heard about this emergency preparedness for pilots before, funny enough, in a book about churches navigating tumultuous and changing times. The author had been having a similar conversation with a flight instructor and had asked why so much time was dedicated to emergency situations. The instructor responded, we tend to believe that in high pressure situations people have a tendency to rise to the occasion - but in reality, in moments of crisis, people revert to their training. That really knocked me over. When the chips are down, people don't tend to become superhuman. We tend to be ourselves. This is not a negative judgment of people, just an observation. I myself like to imagine how I would respond in an emergency. I have very little interest, however, in training for an emergency.
I could drop a loaf of bread off on your doorstep and ring your doorbell, and see you smile through a window, or from a bit of a distance and we could have little awkward conversations that meant I love you even when we didn't say it. My job is to facilitate a community that is founded on love. And most of the ways we knew how to share that love were just gone for a devastating amount of time. We are nourished by love and for a time there, many of us felt like we were starving. I began to pray while mixing the dough together. I would say a prayer for the specific people for whom I delivered the bread. I would think of them as I removed the lid from the piping hot Dutch oven and saw how the bread had risen. I did not wait around to watch them eat it; I did not sit by my phone waiting for thank you texts. I'm not saying I didn't care if they liked it or not. I always hoped they did of course. But I was not fed by gratitude. I was nourished by the giving. The feeling of being able to do something for someone else is deeply fulfilling, and that is no accident. It is built into us.
A few weeks ago, a woman from out of state was visiting her daughter here in Cincinnati and they both came to church. It was very obviously the mom's idea, but the daughter was game. I was talking with them after the service and the local daughter just asked me point blank, "So why should I come to your church?" I just laughed. Why can't everyone be this direct? "Oh, wow," I said, "I don't know if you should. I can't pretend it's for everyone." She appreciated that, and I asked her if she knew about The Episcopal Church and she said yes, and that she'd even checked out our website before showing up and that she liked what she saw. But she had still asked the question.
Well, I said, because we humans are built for community. We are literally made for one another. We are not meant to be alone. And we're lonely. And we need community. And this place, I said, this place is a community that is founded on unconditional love. You can find a community that is founded on all sorts of things, on your wealth or status, on the color of your skin or your last name. You can find communities based on shared interests or neighborhoods, and all these things can combat loneliness in one way or another. But what your community is based on matters. And this place, this community is founded on the premise that you are completely and fully loved and that you belong in community just as you are.
That's the trick with nourishment: It is not permanent. It is not one-time only. Our need is ongoing. We must be fed again and again. This is not because we are broken or faulty - this is how we were made. Our bodies are built in such a way that they use the nourishment we are given and then need more. It's perpetual, and in fact is a sign that we are alive and thriving.
I tell my kids I love them every day. I have one child who, when I call him over to tell him something, says, "You're gonna say you love me." And he's right. I am. Every time. Because I do. And also because I do not believe once is enough. I've heard people say, "Well so-and-so never says it, but I know they love me." That is not going to be the case for the people around me. I try to tell people that I love them regularly, because I do, and because I believe hearing it repeatedly matters. I don't often think of myself as a disciplined person, but telling people I love them is one of my disciplines.
And I know words aren't everything. I know it. "I love you" can ring hollow if not backed up by action. The words can be misused, abused, twisted. If rule number one is tell them you love them, the second rule is act like it's true. But the act of loving people cannot be a one-time event. It cannot be. Because our Gospel belief is that we are made by the God of Love, that we are made out of the abundance of God's love, and that we are made for loving and being loved. It is the most fundamental truth of our being. And that means we need to be nourished by love. We need it again and again, day in day out.
Sometime in my 30's I drove by the school for the first time in what must have been a decade, and I was so excited to feel that feeling again, or some nostalgic version of it. I almost drove right past the building. It was like they had replaced it with a half-sized replica. I kept looking for it even as I was looking right at it. And then I realized that it was right in front of me, with those tiny steps up to some simple looking doors and the quaint edifice that was definitely lovely, but certainly not imposing. I'm sure you've had this experience at some point: Some thing or place changing so dramatically over time from how you remember it - changing in size, in magnitude, in meaning. It used to tower over you, and now, well, it doesn't. And you have to adjust. I turned 44 last week, which is a pretty inconsequential age to be, as ages go. Just good ol' mid-forties. Middle-aged. I'm not going to take this opportunity to wax poetic on the aging process, as I know that about half of you who read this are 20, 30, 40 years older than me, and you don't need to hear my version of the thing you've been dealing with for a while. It's strange though, when I am doing Premarital Counseling with a couple and I begin to talk about "our age" and then realize we are, in fact, very different ages. I was listening to the Beatles the other day, and I realized they were in their 20's the entire time they were together. They were kids. Remember the Sgt. Pepper era when the Beatles all had terrible facial hair? Well of course they did: they were in their 20s! That's when you do that! I am 4 years older than John Lennon was when he died. The Beatles, the bride and the groom, the elementary school, they haven't changed, but you change in your relation to them.
My dad was not my hero. He was not perfect, invincible, unassailable or saintly to me. I had a list of complaints for this very human guy. None of that mattered in that moment. I believed the story he told me. I believed him. When I say that I chose to accept him what I actually mean is that I chose to listen to him and to believe his experience as valid and true. That he had been gay as long as he could remember. That he had tried not to be. That he had prayed endlessly, tried to be straight, tried to be what he considered faithful, and that none of it had worked. That he was done trying to be anything other than who he was. And that even though he was scared of my rejection, he was going to be himself and invite me to see the truth of that.Looking back on it, I shake my head to think of how often Christians have made telling the truth a difficult and scary prospect. How judgmental we can be, how condemning. How sure we are of what others' lives are supposed to look like, of what their identities should be, of who and how they should love. When I am feeling idealistic, I like to imagine a world in which Christians have earned a reputation for being gracious and loving, open and thoughtful. You know, like Jesus.
I don't like that the church has become political. But then, when was the church not political? We see Jesus as one who founded a spiritual movement rather than a political one. And indeed he intentionally eschewed the partisan binaries of his time. And the language of his teachings didn't fit neatly within the political paradigms. But to take his teachings seriously required people to reorder their whole lives, their relationship to one another, their relationship to their communities and cities, their relationship to power, and therefore their relationship to government. We saw this in the first generation of Christians. This is why they were systematically persecuted, arrested, tortured, marginalized and killed. Their beliefs were seen as threatening to the status quo. Under a government that insisted Caesar was Lord, they proclaimed Jesus is Lord. In a culture where patriotism was reserved for Rome, Paul insisted our primary citizenship is Heaven. How can we pretend that wasn't political?I used to take pride in the fact that the Episcopal Church was one of the few American denominations that didn't split over the issue of slavery. I thought it was really beautiful that we found a way to call ourselves united despite differences. It was lost on me that our church accomplished this by not taking a stand against slavery. We prized the appearance of unity and the enforcement of the status quo over the proclamation of God's liberation of all people in Jesus Christ. This does not mean we weren't political, by the way. It means we chose the politics of status quo even when it was evil.Because there is no such thing as an apolitical church. It does not exist. It has never existed. The decision not to teach and preach and think and talk together about what is actually happening in our community, in our world is itself a political decision.
I want to be honest and tell you that I had no real way to process my friend's transition. I was not mad or sad. But, at least at the moment, I was not happy either. I literally did not know how I felt. I did not have the tools to process this. Well, I suppose that is not entirely true. I did have a few things that helped me when I didn't know what to think. I knew that I cared about my friend. I knew that I respected him. I knew that he was smart and thoughtful. And I knew that such a major medical decision must not have been made lightly. I didn't know what I thought about his decision, but I knew what I thought about him. When you are not sure what you think or how to react to something, choosing love and respect is, in fact, a practical tool you can use. So, I congratulated him. And, at least for the time being, I kept my questions to myself. It didn't feel right to pepper him with curiosity that might be read as skepticism. In the meantime, he looked and sounded happy. Genuinely happy. And I liked that. As I look back on all this I am fascinated by how interconnected understanding and language were. I did not have the language to describe my friend's situation, and I did not have understanding either. I had not thought of gender and sexuality as separate.
I knew that sign would be more polarizing than a candidate endorsement. I also knew I believed Black Lives Matter. Maybe more than anything, I was impressed with my daughter's audacity, and convicted by the simplicity with which she suggested it. Because I must admit I did not have the courage to imagine putting that sign in our yard. I wondered if it would cause problems with any of my parishioners. I wondered if it would bother any of my neighbors. I wondered if they'd think things about me that weren't true. I wondered if they'd find out things about me that were true. I wondered if a sign like that would be defaced. But I was proud of my daughter. So, I said OK. Well, that's not true. I said let me talk to your mom about it, but in my heart, I had already said OK. And my wife agreed. I still wondered all those things, and so did she. But we got the sign and we put it up right in our front yard.
Nobody has defaced it. Nobody has even commented on it, to be honest, except one guy at a nursery my wife went to. She was showing him a picture of the front of our house asking him for advice on what kinds of bushes to buy and he gave her grief about the sign, saying she was getting political by showing him the picture. My wife hates confrontation and hates signs more than I do, and here she was hearing about it from a stranger at the nursery. She was courteously resolute in her response to him, which made him feel embarrassed. She chose boxwoods and he put them in the car for her.
Now it's been nearly 3 years. And the sign isn't looking so good. All the other signs in the neighborhood have gone away - most of them shortly after November 2020. And here we are with our Black Lives Matter sign, a White family in a White house in a White neighborhood. And I have to make a decision. Do we take it down?
Of course, I'm not an actor. I'm a priest. But Nicholson had a profound influence on my life. I mean, I was a good little fundamentalist Christian, so his fast-living reputation was not really for me growing up. But he had this way about him that just bowled me over. He seemed always to be utterly himself in whatever he did - even while convincingly playing fantastic characters. He was the Joker, or McMurphy, or J.J. Gittes, or Col. Jessup, or Melvin Udall, but at the same time he was Jack! And I loved that. When I was in college, my buddy Wes and I visited Hollywood and made our film lover's pilgrimage to Grauman's Chinese Theater. This is the spot where many famous actors have put their hand and foot prints into the cement. I got down on my knees in front of Jack's signature and placed my hands in his handprints. They fit perfectly. Wes' hands fit in James Stewart's. We floated away.
It's a strange thing to call someone your inspiration when you haven't actually followed in their footsteps. A few years back I was at a concert and I ran into a comedian named Emo Phillips. He is not terribly famous, but when I was younger I had seen a stand-up special of his that was so absurd and outlandish that it had turned my idea of comedy upside down. I walked up to him that night and introduced myself. He was very gracious. I told him that he had been a big inspiration to me growing up. "Is that so?" he asked, "what do you do?" I said I was a priest, and without missing a beat he said, "Well obviously."
Where is God when things are terrible? Where is God when I pray for the healing of a loved one and they get sicker? Where is God when I pray for their healing and they die instead? Where is God when people are being torn apart by AR-15 bullets?
Where is God?I ask this question a lot, and I get asked it a lot. A friend who is really going through it recently asked me, and followed up by saying they were not asking rhetorically. It's not a new question. Some biblical scholars believe that the Book of Job is the earliest story in our Scriptures. Which means not only is "Where is God?" not a new question - it might be the oldest question anyone who believed in God ever asked. And it's important to remember that "Where is God?" is asked most frequently by people who believe in God, because we often think it's a question rooted either in faithlessness or cynicism. But in my experience it is one of the most faithful questions anyone can ask. Where is God?I need to tell you that I will not answer this question in anything like a satisfactory way. So please know that going forward. Just the same, my first answer is that God is with us. This is the stated belief of the Christian - even when we don't understand, even when we question, even when we doubt, even when we are furious with God. God is with us. When I was growing up, the spectacular Bette Midler sang, "God is watching us from a distance." It was beautiful and it was believable, but it was also not true - at least not according to the Christian narrative. We say that God is here right now.
The stated purpose of building this space was we had a desire to bless this neighborhood, to bring people into the space to bless it, a clarity of purpose that we would build a space that people could come in and know that they are belonging, know that they are loved, and know that they have a place in this world.
Who's it for? Anyone who wants it? A clarity of purpose. This place was built for blessing. That's what it's for. It was built for blessing a long time ago. It was built again for blessing, and even now we see that to be true. This place hosts gatherings. It hosts 12-step meetings. It hosts worship. Hundreds of people are blessed by this building.
Every single week we've got Clark students who show up on our front porch by the dozens, hang out on the porch, hang out with our people, come on in, study, get picked up by their parents, or wait for the school bus, and this is a place where they feel safe. We are blessing people and we keep doing that.
That is the work. It's the purpose for our existence. We're built for blessing.
The first time I ever got kicked out of class was for arguing with my teacher. I was in 5th grade and Mr. Ahlers said that dinosaurs never existed. This was actually not the point of whatever he was teaching - it just came out while he was talking about something else: A very casual denial of dinosaurs. I raised my hand. He called on me. "I'm sorry, did you say there were no dinosaurs?" That's right, he said, and when I asked him why he said that he said they weren't in the Bible.
I attended a private Christian school, so Mr. Ahlers was allowed to say this, but I had never actually heard it before. I didn't know one could just believe there were no dinosaurs. You should know at this point that I was not a science-oriented kid. I did not like educational programming - and to this day I still try not to learn anything while watching TV if I can help it. I have a son who memorizes animal and dinosaur facts and I love that about him, but that has never been me. But still, as a ten-year-old I had heard of dinosaur fossils and bones. Which is why I immediately asked him what about the fossils and bones.
Mr. Ahlers said that God had put those in the ground. I asked why God would do that and he said in order to test our faith. I expressed incredulity. He doubled down, "What? Don't you think God could create fossils and bones and put them in the ground to test us?" To which I responded, "Of course I think he could do that, I just don't think God would be such a jerk." And that, my friends, was when I was kicked out of class.
First a word on anger: Anger is not anti-love. And it is a misguided understanding of love that makes us equate anger with hatred. As I wrote last year, God gets angry. And God is Love. Our Scriptures paint a consistent picture of a God who gets angry when they see people in positions of power marginalize and oppress the powerless in God's name. God's anger is not arbitrary but is inflamed by injustice and inhumanity. And God's anger is not hate. It is an extension of love. My parishioner's expression of anger was an expression of love and an act of courage. And it reminded me of all the times I had sat on my thumbs and kept myself from confronting friends or family when they dehumanized others, because I didn't want to rock the boat. I didn't want to be unpleasant myself.
When we deny ourselves the natural emotion of anger as a response to injustice, marginalization, or dehumanization, we are denying the voice of God that stirs within us. And when I deem a woman's anger unattractive, unseemly, undesired, I am denying the presence of that same God that dwells within them.
I have a dear friend from college who belongs to a different religious tradition. Though we believe different things and practice different religions, we've always liked each other, in part I think, because we respected that the other took their faith seriously. It's been over 20 years and we are still talking about our faith with each other, and recently we were talking about the difficulty of being faithful in this hard world. He asked me if there was anything that kept me coming back, and I said, "Well, I mean, I heard God speak." His response was similar: I love that that happened to you. I wish it would happen to me.I don't know why these things have happened to me, and not everyone else. Those who have confessed to similar experiences have been comforting in the moment, but it's the people who have not had them that rattle me. Because I know these people and I am not better or smarter or stronger or more faithful than them. What's more, it's this sort of inconsistency to which skeptics point when they are saying why they don't believe: Any person can add 1 to 1 and get 2. Anyone can put water in a freezer and make it into ice. Anyone can recognize life is life and death is death. These things are consistent and reproducible. But you say God spoke to you and nobody else heard it? And you can't make God speak again by going the same place and doing the same thing? Unprovable. You say you spoke with a deceased relative in a dream? Unreasonable.It is strange what we feel the need to prove.When we think about why someone loves us, we feel the need to prove we've earned it. We haven't. You can't earn love. But we want to prove it just the same.
When I woke up I felt peace. And then I never told anyone this happened. Because I was not interested in sounding unhinged. And I'm still not interested in that, so I still rarely share this story, and certainly am not sure how I feel about telling you here. I feel compelled to tell you that I do not normally hear voices, claim clairvoyance, or converse with the dead - though I'm not opposed to any of these things. My dad was also neither the first nor the last person I loved who died - though he's certainly the one to whom I'm the closest. He's the one I know and love the best.
I find it interesting that there are multiple occasions in Scriptures when mystical, divine things happen in the midst of dreams. It's like God is deliberately leaving room for plausible deniability. Did Joseph really have those visions of himself as ruler, or was he just being cocky? Did Abraham really enter into a covenant with the Almighty, or was that just a story he told to justify his far-fetched hopes? Did Jacob really wrestle with God or was that just a metaphor for psychological struggle? Did Phil's dad really call him on that dream phone to say goodbye, or was this just a way to cope with unspeakable grief?
Everyone outside of the dream is free to believe it is a flight of fancy. But in the sacred stories, the dreamer wakes up transformed and convicted.
We don't get to conjure or control the manner in which God shows up. God is not a parlor trick. God has agency. God has a say. And whether we understand that or not says more about us than it does about God.None of this is meant cynically or hopelessly. Quite the opposite. I believe we are made for relationship with God. And healthy relationships aren't one-sided. In a good relationship, I don't get to just decide when and in what manner my friend shows up. In a good relationship, I am pushed to recognize the otherness of the person about whom I care - and to respect it. Why would this not be true about God? Why do I think God has to be here for me in exactly the way that makes me comfortable? In what world is that a healthy relationship? We Christians often seem obsessed with proving God's existence. But if the God in whom we believe actually exists, they don't seem terribly obsessed with proving their own existence. God seems content to show up in inexplicable ways and places, and then just as content as a silent observer.
I know there are some Christians that think pop culture is bad, evil, maybe even demonic, and I know that they are very vocal, but most of the Christians I have known in my life have been more open. They are able to see the value of the secular alongside the spiritual. Me, I think I'm more on the radical side of things. I don't believe anything is secular. I see Jesus all over the place. Speaking of the Beatles, I remember when my dad slipped into a coma and I thought he was going to die. I was in California and he was in Maine, and it would be at least 24 hours before I'd be able to get to him. The only comfort I could get that day was in the George Harrison-penned Beatles song "Within You Without You." It had long been my least favorite song on that album, but for some reason it popped up now and wouldn't let go. It was so simple and emotionless, and I heard George intone, "You're really only very small and life goes on within you and without you." Should that have comforted me? I don't know, but it did. I heard Jesus in that song that day. I got back to Maine, and he stayed in that coma for a couple more days. Windchill made it 30 degrees below zero, and I was driving back and forth from his house to the hospital, and it was George Harrison again, this time singing, "All Things Must Pass." I did not know if my Dad was going to live or die, but I heard this long-haired British Hindu Hippie tell me this is the way of things and I believed him. And I heard Jesus that day.
I was 41, standing in my kitchen with my hand in a bowl full of flour and water and salt, and I did not hear God talk to me. I didn't hear much of anything, other than the same Ella Fitzgerald album on endless repeat from the speaker on the kitchen counter. I was about 5 months into leading our church in a pandemic. I felt isolated and stir crazy and very tired of my beautiful family. I was insecure about the future of our church, which felt small compared to the fact that I was scared for the future of our country. On top of that, In the last month our dog had died, and we had moved into a smaller house. I was confused and exhausted and heartbroken.For whatever reason, COVID-19 did not bring about a crisis of belief for me. That is not a brag, just a strange statement of fact. It had been 21 years since the moment on the hillside when I heard God's voice and realized I believed. 21 years later, and I was pretty sure I believed in God at least once a day every day. But I was in despair because I wasn't sure I believed in people anymore. I mean, I knew people existed, I just wasn't sure why, or what we were doing with this gift of life. A lot of despair there.And though I believed in God, I did not hear their voice. So, I did what many sensible White men did during the pandemic: I started making sourdough bread.
I had been raised Christian but had left my church as a teenager with no intention of returning to organized religion. I had not been traumatized and did not leave angrily. But I increasingly did not see a place for myself in it. In the intervening time, I self-described as Christian, but spent a lot of time really wondering if I believed God was real at all. It really bothered me that I couldn't prove God's existence. I mean, really bothered me. Somehow, in my childhood, I had assumed God was obvious, and when God became anything but obvious, and the church could no longer guilt or scare me into saying I believed, God shifted to an idea or a concept more than a divine being. I was even slightly embarrassed that any of the God stuff mattered to me. It did not seem very cool to care. But I did. I always did. I had no idea what to do with God. And then God spoke.
Earlier this week, I looked dozens of people in the eyes and told them they were going to die. And nobody got mad at me for it. Some of them even said Amen. It's a day in the life of the church we call Ash Wednesday. It marks the beginning of Lent - a Christian season of fasting and penitence that leads up to Easter. The whole focus of the day is our mortality, and we spend our time together reflecting on the part death plays in our understanding of life. Halfway through the service, people come forward and kneel at the altar rail. This is the place where we usually give them communion - that spiritual food and drink that connects them to their eternal life with God. But on this strange day, as they kneel at that same rail, I dip my thumb into a little jar and coat it with ashes, then smudge those ashes in the sign of a cross in the middle of their foreheads. While I do it, I say directly to them, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." I do it over and over again. I get good at it - good at getting the right amount of ash on my thumb, on not getting ash all over my vestments, on saying the words as if I mean them, on making eye contact with those who want it. It becomes automatic. But one thing I am realizing each year I do this: It is not getting easier.
Some of my beliefs stayed put, some shifted. But my notion of the Democrat as enemy or misguided bleeding heart was forever obliterated. More assumptions shattered. More certainty undermined. I knew less and less what I believed about these people. I was too busy loving them. Perhaps the best way to maintain strong opinions about people is by not engaging with them. If we can just keep them at a distance, we will know exactly what we think about them. We will not have to question our knowledge. All the things we do not see will keep us safe. Our lives are mostly set up to reinforce our assumptions and buttress our prejudices. We know what we know first and then create little worlds that support that knowledge. We try to keep the people and things that will make us understand more and know less as far out of sight as possible. Think for a moment about who is not in your neighborhood, who you do not see in your day-to-day life. How does that construct your understanding of what is normal, what is lovely, what is good? Think for a moment about whom your church is set up to serve. Who is left out of that vision? Whose presence would be too inconvenient to the way you understand your faith?
When I was a bully, I didn't think of myself as a bully. I was just a kid. I was not tall or physically imposing. I did not threaten the boy in any traditional sense. I did not touch his things or steal from him, gaslight or hit him. I was just mean. He showed up to my school in 7th grade and we were together for two years and I was just pointlessly, relentlessly unkind.
I was 12 and I didn't like him. And I could tell you that I was trying to survive the disintegration of my parents' marriage, the sale of my childhood home, an alcoholic family system, and my own adolescent hormones and feelings. And all those things would be true. But it didn't change the fact that I wasn't kind. That I made some other kid's life immeasurably worse instead of better.I was a good kid too, by almost anyone's standards. I didn't break rules, smoke, drink, or do drugs. I was on Student Council and Honor Roll. I went to church every Sunday, and was deeply involved in Youth Group. I told jokes and had friends and got along with my teachers - most of whom I genuinely liked. I was honest. If you asked me if I was unkind, I wouldn't have denied it. I would've said, well yeah to people who deserve it - but I'm not hurting anyone, just putting them in their place, knocking 'em down a peg. Plus if it's a joke and people are laughing, everyone should just lighten up, right? So I would say withering, mean things to some kid I didn't like and I would say them directly to his face and people would laugh and I would think it was justified and that I wasn't really hurting him because it was just words. Just words!
When we differentiate, we are furthering the idea either that there really are two Gods, or that the one God had some sort of identity crisis or change of heart. Christians do not believe there are two Gods, and we do not believe that somewhere between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New, God had a midlife crisis, had a kid named Jesus, got a therapist, bought a sports car and got a new outlook on life. In fact, one of the major recurring themes of the New Testament is the emphasis on continuity - how Jesus serves as a fulfillment of the hopes, dreams, and plans of God. Jesus is not seen as a course corrective or a constitutional amendment to God's plan but as the human embodiment of the same God we have come to know in what we call the Old Testament.The term "The God of the Old Testament" is antisemitic. I understand that is strong language and that if you've used the term before you probably had no intention of being antisemitic. So I'm not saying this to shame you - I'm saying it to help solidify in your mind the damage this language causes and help you move past it so that we can begin to adopt new language and with it a better understanding of the God in whom we say we believe.
One of the best things about New Year's resolutions is when you give up on them. I don't mean when you miss a day, or start to slack: I mean when you just throw in the towel and say, ok this isn't happening in 2023. 2024 will be my year.I am ready to do that today. You might remember in a previous blog I said that I was not going to try to be a better person this year. New Year Same Me, I said. That was essentially my New Year's resolution: to be myself and not try to get better. But I keep wanting to try to be a better person anyway. I keep slacking and accidentally wanting to be less terrible. Friends, how do I win the fight against self-improvement? I think I'm throwing in the towel. I think I want to be better, whether I like it or not. Each year, on or around Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I re-read King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. This is a letter he wrote while incarcerated for marching against racial segregation in Alabama in 1963. I read to be inspired and challenged of course - but also to be convicted. Let me explain.
Dumpuary is a term coined by the now defunct pop-culture website Grantland. This movie season runs through January and February, basically post-holiday, pre-Oscar time. It's during this time that studios dump the movies they wonder why they made, their least promising works. It's a strange mix of smaller, cheaper movies that might just make some money during a dry moviegoing season, and larger movies that should've been a big deal but turned out poorly, and the studio has to release them anyway. Hence Dumpuary. It is just an awful time to go to the movies.In case you were wondering if we are currently in Dumpuary, the movies that are being released in theaters this week look like this: The Devil Conspiracy, in which a biotech company made up of secret satanists uses the Shroud of Turin to try to clone Jesus and offer him up to the Devil. No, I am not kidding. Also opening is a reboot of the 90's hip-hop comedy House Party, and an action movie about a plane called, well, "Plane." This, my friends is Dumpuary. But I'm a priest, not a movie critic, so we should talk about Jesus - and not the cloned one from that Devil Conspiracy movie.
This is a good time to say that Christmas cards are not for everyone, and they are not a status symbol or a sign of particular popularity. It's like some odd club one gets into. Maybe you decide you're going to send out cards just this one year. But it's like the mafia - there's no escape. Just when you think you're out, they pull you back in. Mostly we send cards specifically to the people who have sent cards to us. And for the people in our little Christmas card cult, sometimes that's the only time we all check in with each other all year. If you don't get a Christmas card from me and you want one, just tell me. That's how you get on the list.Anyway, 8 days later we returned home to a big stack of new cards. And it hit me: It was not that a large group of friends had written us off, it's that this year they just happened to be as overwhelmed and behind as we usually are!And I have to tell you this was a great comfort to me. There is such joy in finding out I'm not the only mess I know.Every time the calendar flips from December to January, I hear the refrain "New Year New Me." This is what follows Christmas. I am supposed to conclude my celebration of hope and salvation by deciding to become a different person, or failing that, a marginally better person. New Year New You. The assumption being that you are constantly in need of improvement. And, hey, maybe you are. But I keep thinking about the ways we measure ourselves and the ways we fall short of our own expectations.
As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this podcast which was originally posted on August 25, 2022
Of course, I loved music, but somehow the number, the size of the CD collection became just as important as actually listening and enjoying the music. I assumed CDs, which supplanted both vinyl records and cassette tapes, would last forever, and that my collection would grow along with me and last me a lifetime. And then, of course, the iPod happened. And then streaming services, and everything changed. Up until very recently I was incredibly resistant to the new ways of listening to music. I still have a CD player in my car - and I still use it! I still love CDs to an unreasonable degree. And my daughter recently got a Discman (I have no idea how) and has been dipping into my collection.
But something has shifted in me in the last couple years. I don't think about the numbers anymore. I don't think about collecting. I just listen. In some ways this digital development has freed me to be obsessed not with CDs, but with music itself. As a result, my palate has expanded, and I'm branching out and trying new things - allowing new kinds of music into my ears and heart. I find myself appreciating genres and artists I wouldn't have given a chance before.
There's a book on my shelf that says on the cover, "The more you love music, the more music you love." I have found that to be truer and truer since letting go of the numbers game.
As you are reading this, Christmas is about to happen. And you are probably anxious about at least one thing, probably several. Some of your anxiety is obvious and conscious and articulable: You still have shopping to do, your house is a mess, people are coming over, what will you wear, how will you cook everything and wrap everything? Some of what you're feeling is inexpressible but just as palpable: Sheer anxiety shooting through your subconscious, silently running the numbers on all the ways things could go wrong.I wish you could see the cards hanging in my Dining Room. I wish you could hold in your heart just how beautiful things can be on the day that things go wrong, when they are chaotic beyond imagination.I am giving you permission to screw up this Christmas. I am giving you permission to overcook something. Or undercook it. Or both. Break a plate. Stain something irreparably. Bring up politics even though everyone knows you should NOT BRING UP POLITICS. You can be too cranky or get the wrong gift. You can disappoint yourself, and you can even disappoint someone else. I know you don't want any of these things. I know this. It's not like you're trying to screw up. You want to get it right and I want you to get it right. And also, even if you do all the wrong things, God is showing up.I want to invite you to make love the center of your Christmas. Not flawlessness: Love. Not met expectations: Love. Not simplicity: Love. Not idealism: Love.
Do I always know what I believe or why? No. No I don't. I have made a decision to be a religious Christian. Sometimes it makes sense to me and sometimes it doesn't. For me, religion is similar to marriage in that, I don't get to be all in only when it makes sense to me or when I feel like it. One day a long time ago I realized I believed in God and that I needed to take that seriously, and I have spent much of my life since then trying to do just that, however imperfectly. And here we are.I remember one skeptical ex-Christian friend of mine asking me, "But how do you know for sure that you're right?" And I surprised him by quickly answering, "Oh, I'm not sure at all." I could be wrong about Jesus. I could be wrong about all of this. But I have decided and am still deciding to try to live my life as if there is a God and that God is Love and that Love has something to do with me. This is the best I can do.
I feel like I'm missing some deep sense of certainty. I mentioned this last week, as I opined about how I wish God had given us more certainty. I expressed annoyance that faith, by definition, apparently requires uncertainty - otherwise it wouldn't be faith. When I was writing that I was thinking mostly about my frustration with God for not making things more obvious.
And, hey, it's all well and good to blame God for things. But I often find that when I am blaming others or feeling resentful, I'm really just deflecting feelings about my own shortcomings. And I probably do that with God. So today I want to give God a break and turn attention toward myself and my own faith inferiority complex. Which is to say, somehow when the conversation comes to faith, I think I can be doing better. But I don't really know what better looks like.
Maybe you experience this: the feeling that somehow, you're supposed to be doing something you're not, or you're supposed to be "better" at something without actually knowing what "better" is. That nebulous ideal, better.
There's a line in Scriptures that says faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. I just cannot tell you how much I don't want this to be true. I don't want to hope for things, and I don't want to have conviction in unseen things. For many years this was a big stumbling block for any kind of religious pursuit for me. I believed in God, but I didn't want to believe in God: I wanted to prove God's existence and get it over with. At that time it seemed pretty clear to me that loving my enemy and praying for those who persecute me and turning the other cheek and giving money away without any desire for reimbursement, and forgiving without reservation and loving without condition would all be much more doable if I knew without a doubt that there was a God and that God unquestionably wanted me to do these things. I was prepared to be obedient if God was prepared to convince me.
Let's get the obvious reason out on the table first: I am religious because I grew up religious and it feels very natural to me. I left church for a while and stopped being religious. This happened when I decided I could not be part of an organization that wasn't gay-friendly (which is the language we used at the time). But when I recommitted myself to the Christian faith and found a church compatible with my values, becoming religious again seemed very natural. I was raised with the understanding that believing in God meant making specific and regular time for that relationship a basic part of my life. It was easy not to be religious when I wasn't sure I believed in God, but once, as an adult, I realized I believed - finding practical ways to practice that belief just made sense to me.
I want to be clear that this is not the same as saying religion is comforting. I hear people say that religion is comforting, and I guess if your goal is to have something that reinforces the notion of life after death and a benevolent force in the universe, then yes that is comforting. It actually is. But my experience of being religious has often been very inconvenient. It is demanding. Being religious has forced me to confront ideas that challenge and upset me, that push and confuse me. Religion means having to deal with and be invested in other people even when I don't want to.
Another reason I am religious is that I cannot always be spiritual. As I said, I used to be spiritual but not religious. I had a spiritual awakening in my younger days, and it was not in a church - it was on a cliffside trail overlooking a beautiful body of water and it was deeply mystical and a moment of deep spiritual awe.
I want to begin with the easiest, most obvious, truth about my belief in Jesus - and it's also the one that is the easiest to dismiss. I was raised Christian. My parents were Christians who baptized me as an infant and raised me in a church community. I don't remember a time in my life when God wasn't part of the equation. And I don't remember a time when I took seriously the possibility of being another religion. I think it's better to be honest about that. I know saying it out loud opens me up to the observation that if I'd been raised Muslim I'd be a Muslim, if I'd been raised Sikh I'd be Sikh, if I'd been raised Jewish I'd be Jewish, and so on. And that is very likely. It would be really impressive if I could say I studied every single religion in depth and then chose Christianity, but that is not what happened. I did not choose Christianity. I did not find Jesus. Christianity chose me. Jesus found me. This is indefensible, and I believe it. Jesus found me. This, by the way, is called indoctrination. I would like to write more about indoctrination in the future - I think it is misunderstood and gets a bad rap. But for now I'll just say, I don't believe it's possible not to indoctrinate our children. The question is into what shall we indoctrinate them? I am choosing love. Specifically, I am choosing the magnificent, faithful, gracious, sacrificial love of God that I see present in Jesus. If I was ever going to be anything other than Christian, I would have been an atheist. For much of my life I have been tempted by atheism. Because many times God seems so implausible. But instead of ever really being an atheist, I keep believing in Jesus...
Let me say the hardest thing first, so that you can check out early if you want to: I don't believe God is weak or powerless. And that means I believe God allows terrible things to happen. And I believe that I will never fully understand this reality. That may seem like a copout to you, and if so, that's fair enough. But let me say this: I find it odd that we think that we should be able to understand God, God's decisions, and God's actions fully in order to believe in God. I don't understand my wife and I sure believe in her. I don't even understand myself most of the time, but I believe in me too.We say we're made in God's image, and I've come to believe our unfailing inscrutability is one of the things that makes us like God. To say God is mysterious may sound trite, but I still believe it. Because I believe life and love are endlessly mysterious, and God is Love, and God made life. We want God to be the answer of so many things, but so often God is the question. The second thing I want to say is that I believe God plays the long game. This may actually be my least favorite thing about God. But it's also one of those areas where both Scripture and my personal experience are so consistent, that I have no choice but to believe it. I am writing this in the aftermath of another Election Day - a day that seemed to have enough disappointment in it for everyone. And I notice the yearning that bubbles up within myself each Election Day. Every time, regardless of previous experience, I feel myself wanting the outcome to be clear and definitive. I want justice in one fell swoop. I don't just want my team to win - I want it to be 100%, as if we could all wake up one day on the same page. I don't want to hear that line about the arc of the moral universe anymore. I'm tired of it. I want things to be made right - right now.
As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this blog post which was originally posted on October 7, 2020
Maybe you tend towards a liberal or progressive worldview. Maybe you have more of a conservative understanding of things. How is Jesus influencing you? How are you allowing yourself to be influenced and shaped by the one to whom you're tied for all eternity? I don't mean to suggest that a real Christian can't be either conservative or liberal: we can. I also don't mean to suggest a false equivalency, saying, "It doesn't matter how you vote, so long as you go to church!" There are real issues before our country right now: How we get through this pandemic, how we address inequity, how we work for racial justice, just to name three that are already on your mind.
We are called the Body of Christ. This means that when we vote Jesus isn't just in the booth with us looking over our shoulder: When we vote, we are representing Jesus in this world. If that makes you uncomfortable, good. Me too. We want to recognize this responsibility. We want to recognize our Christian identity fully in our words and in our deeds - and in our votes.
For his entire career, Bob Dylan has sought to present himself as he currently is. And that simple reality frustrates people. Because they compare him to himself. They compare him to what he used to be. They compare him to their own memory of him. And they leave scratching their heads.And how guilty are we of this? Not with Bob Dylan - but with life! Comparing our life now to what it used to be and then being disappointed that it has changed, even though changed is all it has ever been. Growth, aging, transformation, weathering, breaking down, building back up, being affected by your own life, showing your wrinkles. Your voice changes, your heart and your mind and your beliefs and your ideals and your faith all shift. But then you compare you now to you a few years ago. You scratch your head and say why. You just aren't like you used to be.Life keeps happening. And, to be honest, that's what scares us. We want that singer to sound like he sounded 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago - like he sounded in our memories. We find some strange solace in that kind of comparison. How much ink has been spilled comparing our country now to what we once were?The church is far from immune to this comparison. Here is how I remember church: why can't it be like that?
...for many people - myself included, 10% has always felt nearly impossible. If we are seeking some respite from such a high percentage, the New Testament is no help: It turns out all the first Christians held their possessions in common and shared all their resources equally among one another. There's a word for that and we American Christians don't like it. So, what are we to do?
As an adult, I have pledged 10% not knowing how I'd make that work, and then had some miracle money fall in my lap to pay that. It's pretty exciting once, but it's no way to structure your life. I've made pledges and had to double back and decrease the amount or ask for forgiveness. These have been painful experiences that did not leave me feeling closer to God or closer to my worshiping community: Mostly I felt like a bad Christian for not getting it right, and a worse Christian for not being cheerful in giving because I was living in a scarcity mindset and was not sure how it would all work.
In every situation I'm describing to you, I always loved my church. I've always wanted to get it right.
As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this blog post which was originally posted on July 22, 2020.
"What happens when, instead of asking, "What would Jesus do?" you ask the question, "What is Jesus doing?" or "Where do I see Jesus in this?" The emphasis shifts dramatically. "What would Jesus do?" is like a game of make believe - treating Jesus' presence as hypothetical. "What is Jesus doing?" pushes you to see Jesus working in your life. "Where do I see Jesus in this?" forces you to recognize there is no part of your life where Jesus isn't Lord, where the life and love and peace and mercy of God aren't meant to be expressed."
If you are reading this, it matters that you understand you are essential to the life and vitality of your church. You may not even be a member of Redeemer, maybe you're in a different state, a different denomination, maybe you belong to a synagogue or a mosque. But if you are part of a faith community, your presence and involvement in ministry matters, your heart and soul matter, and your financial commitment matters. It is a very practical way for you to support ministries that change lives. And this is a year where your gift will be especially important, as faith communities everywhere seek to account for the significant increase in cost-of-living and inflation.Your financial commitment talks. It is a statement. And I want to be clear about this: I don't mean it's your way of voicing approval or disapproval. I'm not saying if you think things are going well, increase your gift, and if you're annoyed it's not like you'd hoped it would be, decrease your gift.
We are told we are unworthy of God's love - that we are no good. We are told that God loves us even though we are no good, and that what God really wants for us is to become better people. And, lucky for us, if we do exactly what God asks us to do - which is impossible - we can actually become better people. We are even told it is impossible! But if we just believe the right things about Jesus, we can basically trick God into liking us just enough until we actually become good enough to love.
This is garbage theology and many of us accept it as Christian doctrine without batting an eye.
These traits we attribute to God, we recognize them as abusive in human relationships. We know it in our bones. And the idea of our loved ones thinking they are unworthy of love is horrific to us, yet we often believe this to be true about ourselves
The people of God made a decision, God can call themselves whatever God wants. As for us, we'll agree that there are some things we just can't say.
We have trouble with that today - this idea that there are things we cannot say. I am a straight cisgender White Christian man in America, and my group of people in particular gets really bent out of shape about the possibility that there are things we cannot say. I have heard many of us complain that we can't joke about things like we used to. And we have to be careful about how we talk about race and gender and sexuality. We get nervous and frustrated. We don't like being in trouble. And, if we're honest, we're pretty anxious about being held accountable.But what really seems to upset us is when other people can say words that we cannot.
...mission is messy because it doesn't get to be abstract - it is something that has to live in the real world and it has to draw us outside of ourselves and push us not only to think about our faith but live it - to live as if Jesus is real, as if his life and words apply directly to ours.And, honestly, it's been hard to try to understand our mission and to live into it during the first couple years of this pandemic. For a large chunk of time, we were told to refrain from all the typical ways we seek to impact peoples' lives. Our sense of mission as a church has been experiencing an existential dilemma.As we get back on our feet and begin to rebuild our life together, now is a good time for us to place questions about our mission right at the forefront of our minds...Mission is not about making us better people, and it should never be about us trying to make other people the right kind of people. That's not love, that's colonization. Mission isn't about centering ourselves as saviors - we have a savior already and Jesus is doing just fine. Mission is about our sharing love in this world, participating in the transformation that springs from that love.
We talk about growth in our Vision Statement. There's a whole bullet point dedicated to it, and we will be focusing on that bullet point throughout this program year. In it we say that we envision a church that is "Growing with people of every age, race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic situation, and political persuasion." We wrote that four years ago, and I will freely admit that when we wrote it, I was thinking about numbers. I was thinking about increasing the number of people that are connected to Church of the Redeemer. But the language we used pushes us beyond that. When we say we want to grow not only in number but in the type and age and experience and perspective of our membership, we are saying we want our understanding of who we are to grow. We are talking about the growth, development, and maturity of how and where we see love.Communities are generally built around similarity: Similar interests, similar life experiences, similar histories, similar bloodlines and perspectives. Historically, human cultures have not encouraged people to seek connection and relationship outside of their prescribed circle. Church is meant to counter this. We don't always get it right, but this is what church is supposed to be about.
This year Church of the Redeemer is doing some work to think through how we worship - assessing our liturgies, and naming our core values as a worshiping community. In August parishioners and clergy alike responded to a worship-related survey, then gathered one weekend to begin that process with a liturgy workshop. Today on When Love Shows Up, I have invited our Minister for Liturgy Anny Stevens-Gleason to share with you some of the results of the survey, and some of the things we've gleaned from our shared work, as well as what's next for our community and the importance of worship to each and every one of us.
We lived about one block from the church, and I thought, "I could make it home and back!" The sermon had just started. I scooted down the pew to exit out the side door, quietly tip toed down the stairwell and snuck out the door. Once my feet touched the parking lot gravel, I was off. Full cassock and cotta, I began to run. I did unbutton the cassock for some mobility, but in my platform suede slide sandals, I ran home. I'd be curious who saw me that day - and if you were wondering, the iron was off. But that Sunday didn't seem out of the ordinary, my life was intertwined with the church even at that point of my life. So, to run home made sense. We attended regularly and I served often, and typically during more than one service. This is not to boast, but to say that worship has been a common variable for my entire life. It is the one constant whether at college, studying abroad, or away from home, worship is grounding for me. It is foundational.
And worship is grounding for us all because we keep showing up. For some reason we keep coming back, week after week. It matters deeply. It is sacred. It reminds us of something greater than ourselves. We attend desiring a connection with God and then making connections with each other, communally, together. As humans we are wired for connection.
There's a book on my shelf that says on the cover, "The more you love music, the more music you love." I have found that to be truer and truer since letting go of the numbers game.
Since becoming a parish priest, I have been obsessed with church growth. I have been obsessed with attendance numbers, with membership numbers, with pledge numbers. These have historically been the markers of "success" for a congregation and I, of course, want to be successful. And our church - Church of the Redeemer - wants to be successful too. We want to grow.
We even put it in our Vision Statement! And to our credit, for what it's worth, we were growing in the years leading up to the pandemic: In attendance, membership, and giving, we were growing. We were successful.
And then the pandemic.
I want to grow in Love. I want to make my life about Love. I want Love to be the end and the beginning of me.I hear a lot about the failure of love. That love isn't enough. That love is only capable of so much. That love only works in ideal situations. That love is all well and good to hope for or think about, and maybe even to try from time to time: But to make love the centerpiece of your life is just fanciful, idealistic, not to mention naïve.I was about to argue with that, but I don't know - maybe centering your life on love is fanciful and idealistic and naïve. On the other hand, what else is worth worshiping? If you're going to put something at the center of you, what other than Love could it be? Is there something better to give your life to than Love?There are many objections to making Love central to your life, but so many of the ones I've heard seem to take a limited view of Love. Love is sometimes substituted with pleasantness or good manners, or attraction or romance. I have heard people describe Love as essentially being nice. And if Love is just these things, then it isn't God, and it doesn't deserve our faith, our commitment.
I am a Christian who is scared of death.And back in 2009 I thought maybe seeing an autopsy would help. When I gave my explanation, two other chaplains raised their hands and said, "Actually, that makes sense. We would like to do this too if possible." Our supervisor rolled her eyes, and reluctantly gave us permission to ask. My friend Wiley took on the responsibility of setting it up. I remember this because of what the morgue workers said when he spoke with them. They said they'd arrange for this to happen on one condition. "What's that?" Wiley asked. "Pray for us," these bastions of modern medical science requested. "Well of course we'll pray for you, but why?" Wiley asked. "Because we're all alone down here. We're the morgue. Nobody wants to be around us or interact with us." That blew us away. Even in the hospital, among professionals, the ones closest to death are avoided like death itself. We prayed for them every day. They told my friend they'd call us when a viewing was allowed. Several weeks passed, and I all but forgot the request. On my 30th birthday the call came, and down to the morgue we went.
It's a tale of two churches.
One is grieving. The church they knew and loved is gone. The building is there, as beautiful as it has ever been, and many of the people are still engaged, and relationships of deep connection, prayer and support have stood the test of the pandemic. But whenever they worship, they are reminded of just how different things are. Sometimes they are required to wear masks when they gather. For months they were not allowed to sing. This is after over a year of not being able to worship in their beloved space at all - having to watch it on a screen in their family room or, if the weather was allowing, maybe worshiping outside in a park. They've shown back up, but many of their friends haven't. Some of their beloved pewmates have died. Others haven't shown back up yet, out of caution, or because their priorities have shifted, or because they simply haven't gotten back into the habit. Still others have found watching worship online in their pajamas a comfort rather than a letdown - especially since the church chose to change the time or location - or both - of their preferred service.It's not like it used to be - and that's not just stodgy grumbling. It was something special, this church as they knew it. It was growing and thriving and joyful, and without any kind of warning the doors were closed. When they were all scared, confused, lonely, one of the main ways they knew how to find strength, direction, and connection was gone. Yes, there were digital offerings, and remote Bible studies, and neighborhood groups checking in and creative ways to be church. It was admirable and loving. But it didn't change the fact that they never got the chance to say goodbye to what was - not really. And now the doors are open and it's not the same and they are grieving.
I'm not trying to sidestep the issue of declining church attendance. Christians have a lot to reflect on as fewer and fewer people see our presence in the world as particularly positive or meaningful. We should not shy away from this conversation. Nor do I want to minimize the feelings of grief and anxiety many of us have as our experience of church shifts. We don't need to act like we're too cool to feel feelings, too smart to worry. We're humans. And we're humans who are living through a time of protracted radical culture change. Amidst the uncertainty and trauma, it would be odd if we were not expressing some fear and worry.We should not hide from all this. But we also should not pretend it's the whole story of the church. And we should not pretend that the impending death of church as we know it is equivalent to the death of Christ's work in the world. Jesus himself called the church into being, gathering those who believed in him into a community for the purpose of practicing unconditional love in God's name. The world's need to be united in Love is not dying.
Editor's note: As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this blog post which was originally posted on March 18, 2022.
Six months later I found out my parents were getting a divorce. My mom came into my room and, with an unusually delicate gravity, said we needed to talk. "Did someone die?" I asked. "No," she said. I followed that immediately with, "Are you and Dad getting a divorce?" "Yes." She was sort of surprised and relieved that I said it before she had to. I was grateful for her bluntness. But the thing I remember the most about that moment was that I had guessed it. You know what that means? It means I knew it was coming. It means that even though I wanted to be a perfect kid with a perfect family and a perfect life, not too far under the surface I knew things were a mess. My parents weren't separated. They had never mentioned splitting up in front of me. We were all trying so hard to be ok and to seem ok. We weren't. None of us were. I had no idea how to admit that, much less articulate it. I couldn't ask for help because I didn't even know I needed help.
We might think we grow out of this, that I'm just describing adolescence, but I wonder if that's true. Do we really grow out of not admitting we're not ok? Do we really grow out of not knowing we need help? The most significant growth and maturity I have experienced has not come simply with age - it's come through practice and intention. So if we do not practice the ownership of our broken feelings, how do we think we will ever actually get good at being honest with ourselves? If we only practice putting on the best face possible and moving forward as if things are ok, aren't we just getting better and better at denial?
Nirvana's music, that grunge, that angry beautiful wall of sound, tapped into the part of me that was not ok and gave me something I couldn't even ask for: It made it ok for me not to be ok. It made anger beautiful. It gave melody to my fears. We're all so afraid of being alone. They made me less alone.
Editor's note: As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this blog post which was originally posted on September 30 2021.
"I could not see past my own life, my own comfort. And there were a lot of things happening around me that I chose not to see. The word "privilege" is another word that is politically loaded right now, but it is a fitting description of me: I was allowed to not pay attention to people's lives that were worse than mine. I was able to focus on what was working for me and could filter out the pain and strife of others...
I'm paying attention now. To the degree that I can. I bet you are too. The need for hope is so obvious to everyone I meet, and I'm sure that includes you.
Hope doesn't thrive well in privilege. Hope requires acknowledgement of need. Hope is born in the midst of sorrow and strife. Hope is the purple sky that accompanies the sunrise and is so beautiful because it signals the end of the sleepless night."
Editor's note: As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this blog post which was originally posted on December 1, 2021.
"Christians often refer to Jesus as the Prince of Peace. Paul simply calls Jesus himself Peace - the way John calls God Love. And yet Jesus rarely makes people like us comfortable or unbothered. Jesus doesn't strive to create a happy and content middle, but heads to the margins of our lives and communities in order to reveal God's presence and blessing in the places most unlike us.
"Blessed are the peacemakers," Jesus declares, and then lives the rest of his life as an exclamation point to that declaration. Jesus makes peace, and he doesn't do it by creating false binaries or forcing others into his way of seeing things. Jesus shows up. Jesus makes himself present. Jesus listens. Jesus recognizes faith and beauty and holiness and humanity in lives that look nothing like his own."
Editor's note: As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this blog post which was originally posted on May 20, 2022.
The prevailing narrative in our country is that Christianity and abortion rights are incompatible with each other. This narrative exists despite the fact that, outside of White evangelical protestants, the majority of Christians in America support a person's right to terminate a pregnancy. This also despite the fact that the majority of people who terminate a pregnancy identify as Christian. But the narrative persists that Christians oppose abortion. And it persists so strongly that many Christians who believe in reproductive rights end up thinking that their beliefs are inherently at odds with their religion - even when they are not. And there's a reason this false narrative continues.
We don't talk about abortion.
We Christians who support reproductive rights are mostly silent. We may not be silent individually. Some of us may work at Planned Parenthood. Some of us may vote for candidates and resolutions in favor of reproductive rights. Some of us may attend rallies. But as Christian communities, we are mostly silent. Some of us may stand up and speak out for abortion rights, but we don't do it in Jesus' name.
And we should.
Editor's note: As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this blog post which was originally posted on November 18, 2020.Since Biblical times, when we find ourselves in a culture that seeks for us anything other than the Love for which we were made, resistance to that is an act of faithful obedience to God. Tempted as we are in our current paradigm to demonize those with whom we disagree, seeking to love our enemies is an act of resistance. Entrenched as we are in a zero-sum mindset that celebrates winners and mocks so-called losers, the decision to seek and serve Christ in all persons is an act of resistance. Saturated as we are by a climate of racial and economic inequality, the decision to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly is an act of resistance.Likewise, we take an honest look at our culture and realize that we are conditioned to believe that rest is something to be earned. This is counter to the commandment of God. God literally commands that we build regular rest into our lives, not as a reward for work well done, but as a source of strength and centering on God's presence. And "earned" rest is counter to the Gospel that our belovedness and belonging are a gift from God, given with grace and adoration. Our decision to rest is an act of faithful resistance against the temptation to believe our worth is found in our work.
I have experienced both financial stability and instability. But you never really get over the instability. I'm in a stable place now, but I've seen the bottom fall out before. You get what I mean. Security doesn't linger in my psyche quite the way insecurity does. I have experienced both, and of course I strongly prefer stability and security - however tenuous it can feel. That being said, it occurs to me that when I am in a state of financial insecurity, when I am wondering if I'll be ok next month, I am much closer to the experience of the vast majority of humans past and present on this planet. My childhood was the outlier.Of all the teachings of Jesus, there is one that is the most challenging, the most perplexing, and the most tempting to reject. It is not the command to love your enemies, or to turn the other cheek. It is not when he tells lustful men to pluck out their eyes. It's not even when he tells people to eat his body and drink his blood: No, the most difficult, impossible lesson in Jesus' repertoire is, "Do not worry.""Do not worry," Jesus says, and I nod my head out of respect and deference and all the while I don't believe him. Or at least I find myself tempted to think Jesus is just being idealistic or simplistic or impossible. But this is Jesus talking, so I keep listening anyway. Here's what he says.He says, "I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
Understanding that conversion is ongoing is a game changer. It undercuts any unspoken belief in an easy answer, a quick fix, instant solution. You and I were born to love and be loved. And at the same time, our lives are filled with obstacles and barriers - things that keep us from living into that beloved reality. So we yearn for a moment, an instant, a blink of an eye where the obstacles just disappear. Many Christians have been sold the snake oil that if we just believe the right thing, pray the right prayer, act the right way - if we just "convert" or "get saved" - the barriers to belovedness will be banished.
This is not real. And when we acknowledge that our conversion - the opening of our hearts to the presence saving love of God in the world - is a lifelong process, we begin to embrace the reality of Christianity as a practice rather than a set of magical escapist beliefs.
When I got to this church, there was an old man here named Chet. Many of you knew him well. He was a leader, a rabble rouser, a prayer warrior, a seeker, a smart-ass, and a true patriarch of our community. I loved him instantly, and I was not alone in that. One Sunday, when I walked into the room for our Adult Education hour, he barked, "Hey, there's that guy who talks about love all the time!" I said, "That's me!"
"When are you gonna talk about something else?" Chet asked, and I said, "When you all actually start believing that you're loved no matter what, I will start talking about something else."
Hey, friends, I am still recovering from COVID, and am in need of rest, so I do not have a new blog/podcast for you this week. That being said, we are at the beginning of Pride month, and I did not want to let this week go by without stating clearly and unequivocally that the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer - its clergy, staff, and lay leaders - stand in full support, love, and affirmation of LGBTQ+ persons, all of whom are made beautifully and powerfully in God's image. This week I am re-running the first in a series of blog/podcasts I wrote/recorded on Pride in 2019, and on the blog page you will find a link to the Pride series for your continued reading/listening.
I invite you this month to support your local Pride festivities, and then to do your part in Jesus' name to make sure that LGBTQ+ persons are more fully loved, heard, empowered, supported, and cared for in your community. Each of us has a part to play in making our world truly inclusive, and this work is central to our understanding of the Gospel of God's love in Jesus Christ.
"We believe that the God that created you made you as you are on purpose. You are not a mistake. Your sexuality is not a mistake, a sin, or something to be cured, fixed, or healed. You are a blessing. Your journey to self-understanding is essential to the healing of this world. You matter tremendously to God and to the people around you. Your expression of love is even now teaching this world a deeper understanding of what love really is. When you are part of the Church community, the church is more of who God means it to be. When you are empowered, the Spirit is revealed. When you lead, we see Jesus."
This blog is about Buffalo, New York. This blog is about Uvalde, Texas.Each event on its own is catastrophically tragic. Taken together, along with the countless mass shootings about which we've already forgotten, we can no longer call them unthinkable. They are not unthinkable, inconceivable, or unexplainable. They are every day. They are a part of us. When we bury the rag deep in our face, it is not for one isolated incident, however awful it may be. The tears we shed are a collection of years of sorrow and rage brought on by our complete unwillingness to be transformed. We want these shootings to stop. We want to change nothing about our lives, our culture, our laws in order to make them stop. We throw up our hands. What can be done? This is who we are.There is a tendency for us to treat Jesus' crucifixion as if it is uniquely gruesome. But the stripping and beating and hanging of Jesus is no more gruesome than the endless AR-15 slaughter of innocents that makes up the fabric of modern American life. How is Golgotha worse than Uvalde? How is Calvary different from Buffalo?
We Christians who support reproductive rights are mostly silent. We may not be silent individually. Some of us may work at Planned Parenthood. Some of us may vote for candidates and resolutions in favor of reproductive rights. Some of us may attend rallies. But as Christian communities, we are mostly silent. Some of us may stand up and speak out for abortion rights, but we don't do it in Jesus' name.And we should. We who belong to Christian communities and support abortion rights should be speaking up in Jesus' name. But instead, we choose not to talk about abortion. In part, this is because of how you felt when you read(heard) the word abortion on a church blog(podcast) just now. Many of us try to avoid making people feel that way. We often steer clear of hot button topics, and there is no hotter button in American culture than abortion. During particularly polarizing times such as these, there is something attractive about creating spaces that do not broach sensitive topics. Having a church that doesn't talk about controversial issues gives some of us a sense of respite from the endless cacophony of opinion out there in the real world. Some of us may think to ourselves that we need a community that acts as a timeout, an escape from those things that keep us up at night.
"I have to admit that my friend's abortion began a shift in me even if I did not see it or understand it at the time. The shift that occurred was simple, and it came in the form of a question I asked myself. Did I think she was a murderer? I had been taught she was. But did I believe it? No. No, I did not believe that. It did not make sense. It did not fit. I did not know what to do with this incongruity, any more than I knew what to do with my own hypocrisy - which I could not see or accept.A few years later I was working as a waiter. One of my coworkers got pregnant, and she was contemplating an abortion. She was a faithful Christian, and she knew me as a Christian too and wanted to talk with me about it. This was the first real discussion I ever actually had about abortion. It was not about laws. It was not about rights. It was about her and what was happening to her and within her. She decided to terminate the pregnancy.It was the first time I remember not knowing what to think.In full disclosure to you, I told her I didn't think she should get an abortion. And then, before I knew what was happening, I heard the words come out of my mouth, "But if you need a ride, or you need someone to wait for you or pick you up afterward, I can do that."So, what did I really believe?"
We believe that access to a safe, legal abortion is healthcare, and treating it otherwise serves to diminish the fullness of your humanity and weaponize your own bodies against you.We believe you don't need us to explain to you the complexity of carrying life within you, and the decision to terminate that life. We believe that Christians can in good conscience disagree with one another about abortion without taking it out on you. We believe that choosing abortion does not make you less faithful, less loved, less of anything.We believe God knows this better than we do.We believe God Is compassionate and understanding, and will never abandon or forsake you.We believe that the church should not be a source of judgment and shame, but a community of love and support that stands with you unflinchingly.We believe you.
Weddings are endlessly fascinating. They carry with them immense baggage - not just the hope of perfection, but the expectation of it. Unmitigated joy is assumed as the default feeling at a wedding even though no such thing has ever happened. We have never in our adult lives felt uncomplicated happiness, and yet we saddle weddings with this burden.I had a mentor who would say that, as a pastor, funerals were easier than weddings. He said that at funerals people were allowed to feel anything, were allowed to have complicated, strange, hard, sad feelings, were allowed to laugh and cry and love and mourn and grieve and hope all at once. And I remember him saying at a funeral there is usually a coffin or an urn or a picture where we can focus all the complexity of our emotions in that moment.But, he said, at a wedding, everyone was supposed only to be happy. Never mind if they'd recently been divorced or widowed, if they'd loved and lost, or if they wanted to be married but weren't. Never mind if they couldn't find clothes that fit, or if they weren't sure what they thought about the institution of marriage or if they were uncomfortable in this church: Pure happiness is what they should feel
Editor's note: This blog is part of our Throwback Series and was originally posted on December 17, 2021.
"We talk about wanting peace a lot. We talk about our hope for a peaceful future, with peaceful relationships, a peaceful nation, a peaceful planet. But it seems like every version of peace we imagine requires everyone else to see things the way we see them. During the height of the Roman Empire, there was a time commonly known as the Pax Romana, or Roman Peace. It was known as such because of the relative lack of war and bloodshed that was being experienced in the major areas of the Empire. But throughout this Peace, Rome was in a state of constant battle and conquest on the margins of its empire, always fighting, always conquering, always subduing others and bringing them under Roman rule. And the internal peace and stability came under threat of great violence. That's the kind of peace most of us understand: A peace that is achieved by constant violence and threats. So long as that violence is kept far enough away, we feel safe.
Do we really hope for peace? Or is our hope just to feel comfortable and unbothered?"
I have failed at another Lent. It has become my new tradition, failing at Lent. I cannot seem to get it together for this season of penitence, fasting, and devotion. I have not been able to consistently give something up for years, I am literally eating a sleeve of Thin Mints while I write this blog - a blog that I was supposed to write a week ago. It's fair to say I did not become a better Christian in the 6 weeks. Really, nothing makes me feel like more of a failure as a Christian than Lent - which is funny since I am terrible at turning the other cheek, loving my enemy, praying for those who persecute me, refraining from judging others - all explicit directives of Jesus himself. My failure at these just makes me shrug and say, "nobody's perfect." But my inability to achieve a productive Lent, that 40-day feat of faithfulness - the one that Jesus had never heard of - somehow makes me feel guilty.This happens, of course, because I keep thinking Lent is about being better, about self-improvement. But it's not. Lent is about Jesus.
Editor's note: This blog is part of our Throwback Series. This blog post was originally posted on March 17, 2021. Proclaiming the blessing of LGBTQ+ people in this world will change us as Christians. It will change our church. It will change how we understand God. It will change how we understand one another. Every time we see blessing in someone, our experience of God's presence is expanded and deepened. God's magnificent Love becomes more obvious, more powerful, more clear in our lives when we see it in places we hadn't before. And we are transformed in a way that glorifies God.
" I have been Christian my whole life, which means I've been saying, hearing, reading this prayer my whole life, and it wasn't until a few years ago that I actually paid any attention at all to that first petition, to what it means. Plainly speaking, we are asking that God make this life, this place just like Heaven. That's what we're asking. And I don't think Jesus was being hyperbolic, parabolic, symbolic, or idealistic. I think Jesus meant it, and I think Jesus wants us to mean it.
That this world be heavenly should be something we actively seek and desire.
The Episcopal Church is explicitly meant to be a visionary and driven body. Our catechism states that our mission is to restore all people to unity with God through Jesus Christ, and that we do this by praying, worshiping, proclaiming the Gospel, and promoting justice, peace, and love. At Church of the Redeemer we have our own Vision Statement that is likewise driven, and it seeks to focus us on how we live into that mission. It is worth recognizing that what we are really doing is trying to help our own petition to God come true. We are saying, "God we want Earth look more like Heaven, and we want to help make it happen."
As we turned from the presentation towards the people at our table for a small group breakout discussion, one of our brilliant, beloved, thoughtful parishioners spoke up. "Well, I'll just say it, and I guess I should be sorry, but I love our liturgy." I love her. I love that she said this. This was exactly the right thing for her to say and exactly the right place for her to say it. And my immediate response was, "I love it too, and I don't think you need to be sorry." Because the point of the work of Becoming Beloved Community isn't to make you feel bad or shame you for loving something that has shaped your relationship with God. The work is meant to open us up to the fact that, however beautiful our experience of God has been, it is incomplete because we have not allowed ourselves to be influenced by people who don't look like us. The liturgy isn't bad. It's incomplete.
However beautiful our lives have been, they are incomplete because we have not allowed ourselves to be influenced, led, taught, pastored, challenged, pushed, transformed, forgiven and loved by people who don't look like us. We are not bad people, finally learning to be good. We are incomplete people searching for the wholeness of God, and the wholeness of God's creation as seen in the people we have historically ignored and marginalized.
"... Do we really grow out of not admitting we're not ok? Do we really grow out of not knowing we need help? The most significant growth and maturity I have experienced has not come simply with age - it's come through practice and intention. So if we do not practice the ownership of our broken feelings, how do we think we will ever actually get good at being honest with ourselves? If we only practice putting on the best face possible and moving forward as if things are ok, aren't we just getting better and better at denialNirvana's music, that grunge, that angry beautiful wall of sound, tapped into the part of me that was not ok and gave me something I couldn't even ask for: It made it ok for me not to be ok. It made anger beautiful. It gave melody to my fears. We're all so afraid of being alone. They made me less alone.Our culture's collective mastery of denial has been made manifest during the last two years. We have made a practice of denying the seriousness of the virus, denying its magnitude, denying its impact. We have many times chosen denial of the obvious ways to stop the spread, denial of simple ways to save lives, denial of the fact that all this uncertainty and death has taken its toll on us."
If you had not thought about that before, please take a moment simply to sit with it. Attainment of God's promise is not found in the central narrative of God's people. The bulk of the story is located in the wilderness - wandering, wrestling, and wrangling.In this moment, it might be tempting for us as Christians to differentiate ourselves from the Israelites. But we'd be kidding ourselves. Even if we ignore for a moment the centrality of the Torah in Jesus' life, we'd have to admit that our New Testament leaves us here on earth waiting on a promise. No, this Torah is our story, and we would be wise to locate ourselves within it.We would be doubly wise to find ourselves in the wilderness alongside the Israelites, because it is in that wilderness that God's people most consistently recognize God's presence and power. While they, like us, are attracted to stability and seduced by certainty, they cannot deny that their most potent experience of God's loving kindness comes to them in the wilderness of struggle and uncertainty. To take the narrative of the Torah seriously is to recognize where God shows up - and it's not in the perfect places. Far from it.Your life is not defined by the attainment of all your dreams. Your life is not shaped by the consummation of all your desires. Your life is composed of uncertainty and struggle.
I have been married for almost 14 years. I didn't get married because I wanted to change. I didn't get married because I wanted to become a different kind of person. I got married because I loved this woman named Krista and I wanted to be around her as much as possible. That, and I come from a tradition that says when you find someone you want to be around as much as possible, you probably should marry them. So I got married. It will not surprise you to hear that marriage has changed me a lot in the intervening years. It doesn't matter that that was not my goal. My goal was to follow love. Transformation happened...
We commit to things that will transform us when we are drawn towards them despite the work involved: when we feel a sense of love and excitement. So it goes for the Church, I think. We exist for Love. It's why we are here.
We are entering into a time of hope. I'm not talking about the religious season of Lent, though that is wonderful: I'm talking about this time in our church in relation to COVID-19. Transmission of the virus is dropping dramatically in our area, and vaccinations continue to increase. We are all hopeful that we are seeing the end of the pandemic. Of course, we know that this does not mean the end of COVID-19, which will likely be with us for the rest of our lives. But, understanding that, we are seeing a shift from pandemic to endemic, we are shifting slowly out of crisis mode, and beginning the work of creating our new normal. This is quite a gift.
I am very excited that the recent case surge is coming to such a rapid end. With current case numbers finally dropping from "High Transmission" to "Substantial Transmission" for the first time in months. We are excited to reintroduce congregational singing to our worship, and to allow eating indoors again: These developments are life-giving for our community, and they are a sign of things to come!.. At present, we are on the downslope of the Omicron surge, which you know. What you may not be aware of is that during this surge, children aged 0-4 were being hospitalized for COVID-19 at 4 times the rate they had been during any other time in the pandemic. This recent surge has, in plain terms, been the most potentially dangerous for the youngest members of our church and school community - who are not yet able to be vaccinated, and we have taken that very seriously.In casual conversation, many people have referred to the Omicron variant as not dangerous or not that bad. It's true that it has been generally less vicious than Delta. But our hospitals have been full during this surge, our healthcare workers have been overtaxed to the breaking point, and deaths have been astronomical. We are tired. I know it. And we want this thing to be over. But we want to be careful in our fatigue about how we understand the severity of recent events.
Hey, friends, welcome to my podcast, When Love Shows Up. This week we're going to rerun an episode from last year because I find it has held its relevance in terms of our community response to COVID-19. While some of our guidelines have changed, since this was written/recorded, our guiding principles and philosophy are the same. Our Christian beliefs put our care for each other at the forefront of our priorities, and this can sometimes put us out of step with the world around us. With COVID cases dropping dramatically, and vaccinations on the rise, we believe we will be seeing some big changes in the next few weeks. I am meeting with Redeemer's COVID Advisory Response Expert Team regularly as things unfold, and we continue to make decisions based on the data, and on the best practices available to us. Assuming a continued downward trend in case numbers, we are expecting to loosen some of the restrictions we've placed on our gathering - as it is safe to do so. In all this, I welcome your questions and feedback, and I ask for your prayers for sound and loving decision-making.
"You know what we do is odd, right? We who worship God in the church. One of the things we've missed the most these last months is one of the things that makes us odd: the weekly gathering for the purpose of honoring an invisible God and asking that God to care for us, to heal and reconcile us, to give us all that we need. It's not really comparable to anything else"
As I write this, many of you have not yet returned to worship in the physical space of your church. Many of you have come back, but have not made it a regular practice again, as it was for you prior to the pandemic. Every single one of you has your reasons, and I have no interest in judging them...We are a church: A people who belong to one another in Jesus' name. Your presence transforms us, and it transforms you...If you are a part of Church of the Redeemer, you have memories of this space - of what it has meant to you. Perhaps you love it because of those memories. Perhaps you love it because of what it has meant to you.I am interested in what the Church of the Redeemer's sanctuary will mean to you going forward. I am interested in your continued presence and pilgrimage. I am interested in making Church of the Redeemer holy again and again. I am interested in this place helping to shape your future, as you help to shape its future. This happens when we are together, under whatever circumstance.
"Cincinnatians are often curious about me moving here. They ask me why I, a Californian, would live here instead of, well, California. I like to ask them what they love about Cincinnati. They unfailingly have a list ready to go, their passion and pride clear and unabashed. And they usually list several things I love too. And then I ask, "Well, why wouldn't I love those things too?" Sometimes they believe me. Sometimes they are flattered, or appreciative. But oftentimes, a lifelong Cincinnatian with a deep sense of loyalty for their beloved town will just shake their head and say, "I don't know, though...you came from California..." and then immediately complain about Cincinnati weather and the sports teams. Cincinnatians love their city in a way that I find really beautiful. ...But then there's Cincinnati sports. I have not seen anything in my time here that contains the pride, frustration, hope, and misery of a people quite like their relationship with sports. Inviting me, challenging me to root for Cincinnati sports teams was a crucible. It was as if they were saying to me, "You don't get to love us if you're not going to suffer alongside us." And that makes sense to me. That's always been my favorite part about Jesus: That he's all in on us, and not just here for the good parts."
Though sources differ on just when the split occurred, the Jews and the Samaritans came from the same family. Even the fact that there are different versions and understandings of the fracture sounds like family, doesn't it? The Samaritans, like the Jews, were colonized and subjugated by the Romans, and just like their Jewish siblings, they were waiting for a messiah at the time of Jesus' arrival. Knowing how close they were, how much they shared, how slight were their differences, their rivalry makes more sense to me - not less. Nobody can push your buttons like those to whom you are closest. The strength of their anger testifies to the depth of their connection.The first Christians were Jews. I wrote about this last week, but it bears repeating, that the first Christians were in fact Jews that followed Jesus, who is Jewish.And yet no group of people in the history of the world have been as destructive to Jews as Christians have. There's no escaping this fact. Christians have othered and marginalized and oppressed and murdered Jews on a level that would horrify the Pharoah of Exodus - and we've done it in Jesus' name.
"I have learned that I have not listened to marginalized voices enough. I have learned that I have been conditioned to decide what racism is rather than deferring to People of Color on the matter, that I have been conditioned to decide what sexism is, rather than deferring to women on the matter, and so on. I am learning to listen, to defer to the expertise of others, to allow myself to be transformed by listening.
For the non-Jew, this kind of listening absolutely must extend to our Jewish siblings. We have to listen to them. They are telling us they experience antisemitism with stunning regularity. They are telling us they are scared simply to be themselves. They are telling us they don't enter a synagogue without searching out the nearest exit just in case. They are telling us they feel the need to defend their very right to exist."
"I see our treatment of our children and their educators as something that speaks directly to our larger dysfunction as a people: We want the appearance of caring deeply for something, but we do not want to structure our shared life as if we actually believe it.
What's more, we don't want to acknowledge that this pandemic has actually shaped and transformed our shared life, and this bears itself out in our desire to do everything we can to make school "like it was before" at all costs. Our lives are not like they were before, any more than our lives were the same after 9/11, or after JFK's assassination, or after World War II, or after the Spanish Flu pandemic. We are being transformed. The Corinthians wanted to say Jesus is Lord, but then not allow their daily lives to be transformed by that event. It didn't work like that then, and it doesn't work like that now. I see hope though. I see tremendous hope."
Editor's note: As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this blog post which was originally posted on October 7, 2021. The first time I really noticed this effect was while watching live bluegrass at a little bar in Nashville called the Station Inn. It was the Spring of 2001, and this band I'd never heard of stood in a half circle up on a bare little stage - two guitars, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and bass - ripping through a beautiful song I'd never heard but felt like I'd known forever. As the song progressed, each musician stepped forward to solo. Everyone was a soulful virtuoso, but I was amazed by the discipline of their offerings - no matter how good each performer was, they confined their solo to the melody, then stepped back into the half-circle and disappeared into the sound of the whole...Each piece mattered, by the way. Every instrument. Every voice. They worked together in service of the song and carried it along while the melody carried them. I'm getting too fanciful about this, and I'm sorry about that but music is one of the things that helps me understand what I believe and feel about life. And this idea of these powerful, brilliant, dynamic musicians bringing their talents together to serve something bigger than themselves continues to speak to me after all these years.
Editor's note: As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this blog post which was originally posted on September 9, 2021.
"God means for us to share this life, and to get through it together. When you think this life is something you are supposed to do in the singular - on your own, to be tested and proven individually, you are placing a burden upon yourself that is too great to bear. Your inability to grasp all that is happening to you is not a sign of weakness. The world God has given us is inherently overwhelming. We cannot bear it all and we were never going to be able to. And I have to admit I find grace in this. I do. Because if the world was going to be overwhelming no matter what it makes no sense to judge ourselves for being overwhelmed. It was never going to be easy, or even uniformly manageable. We were always going to need help, need rest, need redemption, need healing, need God, need each other."
I'm a talker but I am trying to listen more. I love Jesus. And I believe that Jesus is present in you. I'd like to spend more time seeking out his presence in you and learning from that. When I think of the places where my faith has grown the most, it's not when I convinced others of anything, but when I listened. So, if you want to talk about Jesus, I am up for it. He is my favorite, and I seek to give my life to him. But that conversation will not be about conversion.For all my talking, there is something else I do not do: I do not tell you about the tenderest things. There is a moment in the story of Jesus' birth that resonates for me: the shepherds have shown up and are paying homage to this little baby. They're telling Mary and Joseph about the chorus of angels that appeared in the sky and notified them of Jesus' birth and of all that it meant for them. They abandoned their sheep and ran to Mary and told her of this thing that she already knew in her bones. And in that moment the author simply says, "Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart."
"Christians often refer to Jesus as the Prince of Peace. Paul simply calls Jesus himself Peace - the way John calls God Love. And yet Jesus rarely makes people like us comfortable or unbothered. Jesus doesn't strive to create a happy and content middle, but heads to the margins of our lives and communities in order to reveal God's presence and blessing in the places most unlike us."Blessed are the peacemakers," Jesus declares, and then lives the rest of his life as an exclamation point to that declaration. Jesus makes peace, and he doesn't do it by creating false binaries or forcing others into his way of seeing things. Jesus shows up. Jesus makes himself present. Jesus listens. Jesus recognizes faith and beauty and holiness and humanity in lives that look nothing like his own."
"We humans are built for relationship and connection, and not just with one or two people. Our bodies and souls actually want to feel the sense of sharing life with a host of people. But for many of us - myself included - it took a pandemic and months of isolation to realize just how deeply we needed simply to be among people, how important it was for us on a daily basis that we weren't really alone. I took so much for granted. I definitely did not realize how connected to community I was. I thought I was alone a lot while surrounded by beautiful people living connected, intersecting, and interweaving lives.It occurs to me that I have spent the majority of my life thinking similarly about faith. I long believed that Christianity was about me and my beliefs and my faith - my relationship with God and what I would need to think or do or believe so that I could be the right kind of person and go to the right place when I die. I did not understand that faith is something shared with others, that belief is something we live into together. For God and the saints, eternity is happening right here and right now - I don't have to wait until I die - I am already participating in eternal life now, already experiencing the company of Heaven."
"Perhaps the sadness and yearning I hear articulated the most by others in my life and in my job is how badly we wish things could get back to normal. But what are we really asking for? I wonder. I think I know some piece of this: I think, in the case of the church, people can't wait until we can safely take off our masks, hug one another, sing loudly and just be together in ways that have made sense to us for most of our lives. I will not criticize that or disagree with it. I want that too. But I don't think we're actually saying we want normal. We're scratching at the surface of something deeper.In the church we call this season Advent. It is a time of preparation for Christmas. Jesus' birth. We acknowledge our desire for the deliverance that is found in the coming of Jesus. Are we really just hoping Jesus will come back and restore normality? Is that our goal? Do we think salvation looks like getting back to the way things were?I'm going to go out on a limb here. The things I listed above - the connectedness, the physical closeness, the singing and hand-holding and hugging and gathering in shared love and respect - I don't think these things were ever normal. These were and are the transcendent things. We don't miss normal. We miss the things that help us transcend beyond the normal and see the true presence of divine Love active in our midst."
"...I am really glad I exist. I love that I get to be a person. I am profoundly grateful for my life. I don't do too well with people parsing out what is God's plan and what is not. There are some things that are too tender to be categorized.
Maybe this is part of why I'm so reticent to specifically not thank God for certain things: It's not that I think my kids are wrong - I think they are right, their prayer is real and honest, and this pandemic is truly awful. I'm not thankful for it. And also, I'm thankful for the closeness they've developed during this time of forced togetherness. I'm thankful for their ability to tell God the truth. I'm thankful for our exhausting, painful, maddening, seemingly endless but ridiculously precious time together. Both are true.
The grief and the gratitude are allowed to coexist. One does not erase the other. God's blessing does not dwell in ideal spaces. God's blessing hallows the tender complicated mess of our shared life. The things that are terrible are still terrible. And somehow grace abounds. This is the mystery of the cross. This is one of the truest truths of our faith."
"When the great Flood came, it was immediate and incomprehensible. There was no way to prepare for it, no way to avoid or deflect it. The water burst forth from below and above, and all in a moment everything changed. It didn't matter what you believed about God or yourself, it didn't matter how you voted or if you acknowledged it was happening or not - in a moment the world changed. In a moment life, or at least life as anyone understood it, was gone forever.We tend to judge ourselves for not fully grasping what is currently happening to us. We are reticent simply to acknowledge the relentlessly overwhelming reality of our times. We have an unspoken belief that if we would just keep on the sunny side of life, we might wake up tomorrow to find it was all just a figment, and we could get back to whatever normal was. Or maybe if we just read enough think-pieces or listened to enough podcasts we could understand our way out of this moment. You cannot understand your way out of this moment. This powerful, painful time is part of your story now, part of our shared story, and we cannot outsmart it anymore than Noah could outsmart the flood. Sure, he built a boat, but he still had to make it through the months of the flood, and he did not emerge from the ark the same as when he went in."
As part of our When Love Shows Up Fall Throwback Series we are re-posting this blog post which was originally posted on October 14, 2020.
"We're all lonely. And I don't think that's just a COVID thing: Loneliness is a natural part of being human. The wondering if you are the only person who sees things the way you see them, the solitude that you experience surrounded by people - this has always been a part of our humanity. It's just been exacerbated by this pandemic - but it's a part of us, this lonelinessJesus was profoundly lonely. It's so obvious when you read the stories about him. Constantly misunderstood, oscillating between seeking connection and trying to find alone time. So many of his parables and teachings are about being misunderstood. Friends, loneliness is not bad or shameful. And it's not all about being physically isolated - although many of us are that right now."
As part of our When Love Shows Up Fall Throwback Series we are re-posting this blog post which was originally posted on July 22, 2020.
"What happens when, instead of asking, "What would Jesus do?" you ask the question, "What is Jesus doing?" or "Where do I see Jesus in this?" The emphasis shifts dramatically. "What would Jesus do?" is like a game of make believe - treating Jesus' presence as hypothetical. "What is Jesus doing?" pushes you to see Jesus working in your life. "Where do I see Jesus in this?" forces you to recognize there is no part of your life where Jesus isn't Lord, where the life and love and peace and mercy of God aren't meant to be expressed."
To be as clear as possible, I am not complaining at all. How else could it be? What gift does not require work? If someone gives you a wonderful book, you have to actually read it. Children are a gift. And also more work than is conceivable. Come to think of it, every relationship that is truly meaningful and transformative is a great gift and requires work on your part if you're to really appreciate it.
There is something deep within us, some unspoken default setting, that seeks neat and tidy solutions. We like to check boxes, measure progress, eliminate problems. It's as if we think we can cross something off the list and not look back. Replace the dead tree and call it a day. We crave this on a spiritual level. We think that, with God's help, we should just be able to get past some fault of ours, and never worry about it again. On a practical level, this has worked for us approximately zero times - but we keep believing that's how God works.
Friends, this was simply a magical night. And the food was a big part of it, but honestly, I was overwhelmed with joy just for the opportunity to be together. I saw longtime parishioners next to people who have just shown up in the last couple months, friends and family, some who walked over, and others who came from West Chester and Evendale all, together. The feeling of love and affection was palpable across the front porch, into the narthex and through the cloister garden, as I watched people remember what it meant just to be church together.
As we emerge out of the isolation we have experienced, this portion of our Vision Statement reminds us that we are not simply trying to get back into the world or "back" to church - but that we move with purpose in the world. We are sent to love and serve the world God has redeemed. We have gotten through such difficulty together. We are moving forward together. We are building something; rooted and grounded in the love of Jesus...Last year many of you made a commitment to Church of the Redeemer in the midst of the pandemic, unsure of how long it would last, unsure of what our programming would look like in 2021, unsure of when we'd be back together in person. But you made that commitment because you believed in Church of the Redeemer. During an impossible time, you saw your community rally to provide safe and meaningful pastoral care, consistent connection, engaging education, and dynamic, Spirit-filled worship.
The first time I really noticed this effect was while watching live bluegrass at a little bar in Nashville called the Station Inn. It was the Spring of 2001, and this band I'd never heard of stood in a half circle up on a bare little stage - two guitars, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and bass - ripping through a beautiful song I'd never heard but felt like I'd known forever. As the song progressed, each musician stepped forward to solo. Everyone was a soulful virtuoso, but I was amazed by the discipline of their offerings - no matter how good each performer was, they confined their solo to the melody, then stepped back into the half-circle and disappeared into the sound of the whole...Each piece mattered, by the way. Every instrument. Every voice. They worked together in service of the song and carried it along while the melody carried them. I'm getting too fanciful about this, and I'm sorry about that but music is one of the things that helps me understand what I believe and feel about life. And this idea of these powerful, brilliant, dynamic musicians bringing their talents together to serve something bigger than themselves continues to speak to me after all these years.
"I could not see past my own life, my own comfort. And there were a lot of things happening around me that I chose not to see. The word "privilege" is another word that is politically loaded right now, but it is a fitting description of me: I was allowed to not pay attention to people's lives that were worse than mine. I was able to focus on what was working for me and could filter out the pain and strife of others... I'm paying attention now. To the degree that I can. I bet you are too. The need for hope is so obvious to everyone I meet, and I'm sure that includes you. Hope doesn't thrive well in privilege. Hope requires acknowledgement of need. Hope is born in the midst of sorrow and strife. Hope is the purple sky that accompanies the sunrise and is so beautiful because it signals the end of the sleepless night."
"This is an in-between time, and it is making us really uncomfortable. We want our faith to make everything better, we want Jesus' salvation to be immediate and to take away our suffering. That's not how salvation works, of course. It's not how salvation has ever worked, but we keep dreaming of it. And, I don't really blame us: We are in the midst of radical change and uncertainty, and it's scary and painful. We are still sorting through the trauma of the last 18 months, and contrary to what some would have us believe, the pandemic isn't over. The pandemic isn't over. The pandemic isn't over. We know it will be someday, but we don't know who we will be or what our lives will look like in that time...None of this looks the way we thought it would. But has it ever? If we wait for Jesus to make it all better before we step out in Love, we will never step out in Love. If we wait for the Church to "get back to normal" before we commit ourselves to it again, we will never commit."
" Do you think your existence is an accident? Are you here by coincidence? Do you just happen to exist, and now you've decided to cobble together something that vaguely resembles purpose or meaning?... Please take a moment and dwell on the radical claim that is being made: Every single person you meet has a mission in life. That includes that man with the sign at the freeway offramp. That includes the person you can't stand. That includes you... You and I exist as living expressions of God's Love. And Love does not exist for itself. Love moves outward. Love brims with abundance uncontainable, spilling over the edges and boundaries of our comfort and convenience, drawing us into lives of interdependence and mutual care. Say what you will about Love, but it is not without purpose. So how do you think you, who are made from Love and made for Love could possibly be here by accident, responsible for coming up with your own reason and meaning?"
" God means for us to share this life, and to get through it together. When you think this life is something you are supposed to do in the singular - on your own, to be tested and proven individually, you are placing a burden upon yourself that is too great to bear. Your inability to grasp all that is happening to you is not a sign of weakness. The world God has given us is inherently overwhelming. We cannot bear it all and we were never going to be able to. And I have to admit I find grace in this. I do. Because if the world was going to be overwhelming no matter what it makes no sense to judge ourselves for being overwhelmed. It was never going to be easy, or even uniformly manageable. We were always going to need help, need rest, need redemption, need healing, need God, need each other."
"Our lives are changing so much right now. Our church is changing so much right now. It's inconvenient. Period. Doubly so if we were looking forward to things getting back to normal after the pandemic. First because we don't even know when the end of the pandemic will be, and second because we are seeing more clearly that there will be no going back to normal. We are forging a new normal. We are moving forward into the dark that comes right before the dawn not knowing what the new day will bring. Knowing only that whatever comes our way, we will have God and we will have each other."
"This prayer shook me on Sunday. Not only am I being transformed, but God is in that transformation. Together we uttered the words, "O God, in renaming your servants Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Peter, and Paul, you gave them new lives and new tasks, new love and new hope." New lives, new tasks, new love, and new hope. This is where God is right now."
"A very wise member of my previous church once taught me that all change - even good change - brings loss. Loss of what was. And this is painful even when it is right. And also, you may be right: Some of these things may not work. The leadership of this church believes this will all work beautifully, but we could be wrong. We will find out together. We will listen to each other, and we will listen to the Holy Spirit."
You and I were baptized into a life of care for one another and service to our neighbor. Paul says this loving care is how we imitate God. With Christ at our center, with love as our guide, with unity in faith and justice our goal, we grow into the realization of our purpose for being here at all.We were made for these times; you and I. God has chosen us to love this world here and now.
Note: As part of our When Love Shows Up Summer Throwback Series we are re-posting this podcast which was originally posted on August 5, 2020.
But in the end, my reason for preaching and teaching the social and political implications of the Gospel is simple: If you are a Christian, Jesus is Lord of every part of your life. No part of you is exempt from belonging to God. No aspect of your existence is separate from your experience of Jesus. If God has incorporated you into the very Body of Christ and you are a member of that Body, you don't get to tell God to look the other direction while you vote, and you don't get to pretend that Jesus was going to save your soul without actually effecting the way you think and move and participate in society.
Note: As part of our When Love Shows Up Summer Throwback Series we are re-posting this podcast which was originally posted on November 25, 2020.
Naming gratitude is important because you are actively naming things that have nothing to do with what you have earned or achieved. Think about it. You don't thank people for giving you things you earned. You thank people when they do things that make you forget about earning. You give thanks for beauty and generosity and forgiveness and kindness and friendship and honesty and faithfulness. That right there is a list of things that you cannot earn or achieve. They are living embodiments of Grace: Gifts of God for the people of God. Gratitude is the antidote to the culture of earning. Gratitude is a recognition of just how much of your daily life is a gift. Gratitude is an acknowledgment of your belonging to God.
Note: As part of our When Love Shows Up Summer Throwback Series we are re-posting this podcast which was originally posted on September 30, 2020.
"We know that there is a need in the aftermath of trauma to assert our blessedness, there is a need in the midst of our pain and suffering to proclaim that we are not forgotten by God, right? Well, we have not gotten over the trauma of slavery and the racism that was baked into the founding of this country we love so much. It's still with us. It still haunts us. We are not free of it - not yet. It's not just something some people need to get over. It's something we need to address with honesty and love."
Note: As part of our When Love Shows Up Summer Throwback Series we are re-posting this podcast which was originally posted on January 27, 2021.
"The Christian striving for unity is, in fact, not a striving for something abstract, strange, and unusual: it is a striving to live into what is already true, to live into reality. The Christian life is a life learning how to accept our mutual belonging. We are not trying to create a future unity, but to recognize and accept our current unity - we are already members of the same body. Now we have to act like it."
"Pride, in this context, is a stunning, glorious refusal to believe the lies the world tells about you. Pride is the claiming of your belonging in this world as you are, not as I tell you you should be. This Pride, this celebration of who God made you to be, is a rejection of shame, and an embracing of joy; a rejection of hatred and an embracing of love. This Pride is an act of grace. It's a Christian virtue."
"The first time someone I loved ever came out to me, it was the Jesus I encountered in Scriptures that taught me how to see them for who they really were, and to love them just as they were. In the years since that day, I keep coming back to the Jesus I find in the Bible. Every time I do, I'm reintroduced to the God who gives me new eyes to see Love in ways and places and people I could not previously have imagined."
"How can the Church fail time and again to recognize the prophetic nature of the LGBTQ+ witness? LGBTQ+ persons live their truth in the face of great societal pressures. Their experience of love is profound, and yet they often find themselves at odds with the normative culture. They see the truth of themselves, and they understand the magnificence of love in unique and powerful ways. And in this time and place they are standing up and speaking out at great personal expense. Will the Church listen? Will the Church acknowledge the powerful presence of God here?"
"We believe that the God that created you made you as you are on purpose. You are not a mistake. Your sexuality is not a mistake, a sin, or something to be cured, fixed, or healed. You are a blessing. Your journey to self-understanding is essential to the healing of this world. You matter tremendously to God and to the people around you. Your expression of love is even now teaching this world a deeper understanding of what love really is. When you are part of the Church community, the church is more of who God means it to be. When you are empowered, the Spirit is revealed. When you lead, we see Jesus."
"So, it's necessary to step back from time to time and say to God, "It's your church, Lord. I'm going to bed." Honestly, I should be doing it every night. And you, what would your life look like if, before going to bed each night you took note of the truth that your church, your work, your life, your love, all of it belongs utterly to God? Would you sleep better?"
And now you are emerging. Bursting forth 14 months later, rather than 17 years, you are emerging. You are in such a tender place. As ready as you are for the next chapter to begin, there is uncertainty. Your grip can feel tenuous. But the powerful inevitability of the new life God has brought forth is palpable. Joyce asks "What changes have we adopted during this past year that have been truly beneficial, life enriching? What do we want to keep?" And I know you are asking yourself these questions too. You are not saying, "Should I change? Should I make things new?" You are asking, "What changes should I cherish? What do I do with my new reality?"
You know what we do is odd, right? We who worship God in the church. One of the things we've missed the most these last months is one of the things that makes us odd: the weekly gathering for the purpose of honoring an invisible God and asking that God to care for us, to heal and reconcile us, to give us all that we need. It's not really comparable to anything else
This Sunday at 9am we will participate in Holy Eucharist inside our sanctuary for the first time since March of 2020. Registration is necessary. Seating will be limited. Distancing and masking will be required. Childcare will be available as will assistance for those with mobility issues. This 9am service will continue to be livestreamed for those who are not able to attend in person. We will continue to offer Pop-Up Church in Ault Park at 11:15, weather permitting, through the end of May.
I am pleased to be able to tell you that the Church of the Redeemer will resume worship indoors on May 16th. I want to devote the rest of this episode, and likely next week's as well, describing to you how we came to that decision and what it will look like for us to be able to do this. But before we do that, I just want to pause and sit in the realization that, after 14 months of worship that has been either remote or outdoors, we will once again have the opportunity to gather in our sanctuary and worship God together in person.
This is an overwhelming and joyous reality.
The Gospel is that Jesus Christ has made us One. Not that we should try to become One, or that, with enough hard work, we could maybe become One someday: No - we are One. That has happened. This fundamental unity, this holy interdependence is foundational to understanding Christianity. When we shift our understanding away from thinking Christianity is about what happens to my soul when I die, and towards an understanding of Christianity about our shared eternal life that is already happening here and now - we are turned outside of ourselves and we are made to recognize that participating in our own salvation is a group project.
"Because of Jesus, God experiences our death. And also because of Jesus, we experience God's life - which is eternal, unending, and abounding in steadfast love. This means that suffering and death are not the final story of us. Humanity is drawn up into a life that lives beyond death. Those who have died are not simply memories or ideas: They are alive with God. The author goes on to list a litany of people who preceded us in life and death. Many of them died violent, untimely deaths. All of them, the author says, are alive now with God. They are witnesses. They have witnessed the worst and best of humanity. And they have witnessed the powerful truth of God's Love. They are witnesses of what God is doing in this world right now. And they are witnesses of how you and I are responding to God. They see us like God sees us. They see our beauty and frailty. They see our fear and belonging. They see it all."
"The CARE Team is a great example of this. As a ministry that emerged from our parishioner's desire to make a difference in the midst of this pandemic, and as one that draws on the expertise of the amazing people in our church, the CARE Team embodies the essence of how we live into being Church. And as a ministry that calls for the expertise of nurses, physicians, and public health experts it transforms our understanding of what being Church even means for us."
It is the Christian belief that when we go into the world in Jesus' name, the world will be transformed by our presence. Of course, sometimes we get this terribly, horribly wrong. Sometimes we think it's our job to force "belief in Jesus" on others, to convince, cajole, or - even worse - enforce "Christianity" upon those we meet. This is no gift, but a gross misunderstanding of the Love of God that is manifest in Christ Jesus. So, I get why some Christians ignore Jesus' command to Go - but Jesus does indeed command it.
In Jesus we see the suffering of both God and humanity when God's desire for closeness is frustrated. In Holy Week we see that God's Love can live in the tension of desire and suffering.
Remember: We are trained by the world to believe that love is conditional and binary. So, if we are good to God, God will love us, and if we are bad to God, God will hate us. If we make Jesus suffer, then how can he still desire us? If we do not act lovable, how can we be loved? In this mindset, Jesus' passion seems impossible to us. We stand before the cross stupefied by the idea that anyone could call this Friday "Good".
While we are waiting for things to get back to normal, our church is making new connection and finding new ways to know God, to know Love, to know each other. I can hear Christ saying, "See I am making all things new!"
Proclaiming the blessing of LGBTQ+ people in this world will change us as Christians. It will change our church. It will change how we understand God. It will change how we understand one another. Every time we see blessing in someone, our experience of God's presence is expanded and deepened. God's magnificent Love becomes more obvious, more powerful, more clear in our lives when we see it in places we hadn't before. And we are transformed in a way that glorifies God.
When I sat down to write to you this week, I was considering talking about March 8th as the last time we were all together on a Sunday in the sanctuary. But I realized that was not true: By that point, many of our parishioners living in retirement communities had already gone on indefinite lockdown. We were not "all together" without them. I remember the week before that even, as people were leaving from worship and one faithful friend said to me, "You won't be seeing us for a while," and I just was not ready to hear that or understand it. He saw what I did not.
I think this is the way of things: Listening can bring comfort, to have someone else sing or say the things that are alive in your heart is a great gift. But stepping into the role of the singing or saying or playing presents a challenge and a frustration: Can I do justice to the truth of things? Can I accurately present the music I hear or the Gospel that I know?
The goal is for us to have a deeper, fuller sense of the whole human experience. In Jesus, the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us. This was an act of honoring and loving humanity in its fullness. God did not merely dress up in human disguise or manifest as a human for a day or two. In Jesus we see God living a human life, which means we see divinity in the broad spectrum of our feelings, in our suffering and joy, in our exuberance and annoyance.
Pandemic or no, we as a church can allow times and seasons and years to blend together. We can forget why we exist, forget that church isn't just a thing that we do or even just a group to which we belong. God gathered us together. God forged this community. God put you and I - all of us - together, and God did this with great purpose. We exist to know Jesus and grow in love. We are united in order that we might grow, be inspired, and then sent into our neighbor's lives - rolling up our sleeves and participating with God in the healing and reparation of the world.
The truth of the Gospel is that we are loved as we are right now. And we don't believe this. And we don't act like it. During Lent we set aside a time to examine and be honest about the disconnect between what we proclaim in our church and how we live our day to day lives. But the point of repentance is not shame. The point of repentance is to turn towards the God who loves us so we can remember ourselves. Lent is not about feeling bad or indulging in shame. Lent is about moving away from the things that keep us from knowing Jesus and growing in Love. At Church of the Redeemer, Lent is about moving towards the vision we have of Becoming Beloved Community.
I pray our shared hardship will forge a fresh tenderness and sense of interdependence. I pray we will see each other with new eyes and take nothing about our belongingness for granted. I pray we will repent of our inability to face death and learn how to grieve in real and healthy ways. I pray we will have a clearer picture of God's presence in this world, and a deeper conviction of our role as reconcilers, participating with Jesus in the holy work of loving the world into new life.
The Christian striving for unity is, in fact, not a striving for something abstract, strange, and unusual: it is a striving to live into what is already true, to live into reality. The Christian life is a life learning how to accept our mutual belonging. We are not trying to create a future unity, but to recognize and accept our current unity - we are already members of the same body. Now we have to act like it.
A couple days ago I was watching some of the footage from inside the Capitol Building during the siege of January 6th. When the insurrectionists entered the Senate Chamber and stood like a desolating sacrilege at the dais, they began to thank Jesus for this moment. I was horrified. My stomach turned to see Jesus' name invoked triumphantly as a part of the chaos and violence. And I can tell you with all my heart that I do not believe Jesus condones or inspires the ugliness we saw. It was, to my mind, anti-Christ. But I cannot tell you those men aren't Christians. I don't get to say that. And I don't get to shirk off either my connection to the Christians I don't understand or my share of responsibility for a faith that still hurts people in Jesus' name.
Like the citizens of ancient Israel, we Christians in America know in our hearts that we are not blameless when it comes to our unhappy divisions. And I'm not just saying that we've been mean to each other - though we have. We need to repent because we have allowed the church to be divided on issues like slavery and segregation, voting rights, and the basic human dignity of women, LGBTQ+ persons, and people of color.
What is your vocation in this world? You have one. The God of Love created you on purpose, and for a purpose. You are no accident. You were put on this earth to receive and to give Love. Your vocation is the thing that helps make that more real, that carries you into a deeper understanding of your belongingness in this world. Now, what influences your vocation? What helps you see God? What reveals more of you to you? That's where Jesus lives.
We can plan and prepare, and still a good portion of our work leading up to Christmas, leading up to a birth, is just to wait and wonder. And where there's waiting and wondering, there is almost always a little worry and fret. It's part of the deal.
"In the church we say Rest in Peace and Rise in Glory, as we turn our attention towards the time when we will experience, unfiltered, the Love for which we all were made. And while I believe that in death we will know eternal life, and we will be able to rest from the pain and (often self-inflicted) strife we find on Earth, I do not believe that we have to die before we ever know what it means to rest, to let go, to say I love you and talk about what has been and what's coming - to hold hands and remember our belonging."
But there is another side to our relationships with disorders and diseases. When we step away from what we wish were true and sit in the acceptance of what actually is, we are revealed so much about who we are. There is revelation and understanding that emerges from within the dysfunction - and it's not just some trite generality like, "everyone has weaknesses".
Naming gratitude is important because you are actively naming things that have nothing to do with what you have earned or achieved. Think about it. You don't thank people for giving you things you earned. You thank people when they do things that make you forget about earning. You give thanks for beauty and generosity and forgiveness and kindness and friendship and honesty and faithfulness. That right there is a list of things that you cannot earn or achieve. They are living embodiments of Grace: Gifts of God for the people of God. Gratitude is the antidote to the culture of earning. Gratitude is a recognition of just how much of your daily life is a gift. Gratitude is an acknowledgment of your belonging to God.
Likewise, we take an honest look at our culture and realize that we are conditioned to believe that rest is something to be earned. This is counter to the commandment of God. God literally commands that we build regular rest into our lives, not as a reward for work well done, but as a source of strength and centering on God's presence. And "earned" rest is counter to the Gospel that our belovedness and belonging are a gift from God, given with grace and adoration. Our decision to rest is an act of faithful resistance against the temptation to believe our worth is found in our work.
"If we are attentive to how Jesus operates then we must acknowledge that we should be responsive to what we all need and not what we all have earned. We must resist the need to prove. We must rest, and we must create spaces for others to rest."
"I don't want to pile onto that stress by asking you your plan for being Christian. So, let's look at it from a different angle. My friend Jimmy likes to remind me that we are in the hands of a competent God. Your life is in the hands of a competent God, and you need to hear that during a time such as this. So, really the question is, what can you put into place in order to ground yourself in the competence of the God who loves you?"
"Jesus was profoundly lonely. It's so obvious when you read the stories about him. Constantly misunderstood, oscillating between seeking connection and trying to find alone time. So many of his parables and teachings are about being misunderstood. Friends, loneliness is not bad or shameful. And it's not all about being physically isolated - although many of us are that right now."
"We are called the Body of Christ. This means that when we vote Jesus isn't just in the booth with us looking over our shoulder: When we vote, we are representing Jesus in this world. If that makes you uncomfortable, good. Me too. We want to recognize this responsibility. We want to recognize our Christian identity fully in our words and in our deeds - and in our votes."
"As The Church of the Redeemer continues its commitment to racial justice, healing, and reconciliation in Jesus' name, it makes sense for us to work carefully to develop a shared language and to continue to orient our understanding of this commitment in God. It's especially important when it comes to doing work that is connected to current events, because we want to be very clear about how the work we do is rooted in our Baptismal covenant rather than our desire to appear relevant, urbane, or woke.
It is in this spirit that I say we have a responsibility as Christians to say Black Lives Matter."
"We don't know what next year will bring, but we do know that Church of the Redeemer will be here to walk alongside you and guide you into deeper connection with God and your neighbor. And we know we will need your help for this to happen. Your giving equips us for the work God is giving us to do."
"If you want to follow Jesus, if you want to share life with your community, if you want to remember that you are not alone, and if you want to spread love and make a difference in your neighborhood, that is to say, if you are interested in your own discipleship and growth - you will find a number of paths at Church of the Redeemer."
'We have a problem in a lot of our churches. Many of us have been taught - and many of us have repeated - the idea that politics don't belong in church. We've been told that our relationship with Jesus is spiritual and it shouldn't be sullied by partisanship or engagement with current events. And I get that sentiment. Or at least I think I do. In our gut we know that Jesus of Nazareth wasn't a Republican or a Democrat - that his work in the world transcended the boundaries we keep creating. And we know that God loves all of us even amidst our difference, so in a culture as divisive as ours, we want to find comfort in our shared belovedness and say we've found a place where we can belong even though we're not on the same page about everything.
This is a good desire. And also, there's something wrong with it in practice."
"When I talk about relationships at Church of the Redeemer, this is what I'm talking about. It's not abstract or hypothetical for me. I am changed by the people with whom I share community. They help me see Jesus. They help me see myself. They help me recognize my belovedness, my belonging, my beauty. They give me eyes for the Kingdom so that God's presence is manifest, is obvious in this world."
"We know that communion extends beyond the moment we receive the sacrament. We know that communion is a state of being, a spiritual reality that is not exclusive to our liturgy but extends deep into our whole lives and is meant to inform every relationship. We know this. We know that we exist even when we are not participating in this ritual. So, we might be tempted in our inability to celebrate the eucharist to pretend it's just a symbol of something larger.
But to our church, to you and me, it is not simply a symbol. It is not just a signifier of something deeper: It is the participation in that depth. Holy Communion - what we call the Eucharist - is not a reminder that God is with us and we are with God: It is the experience of God's presence and our belonging: Our participation in the Eucharistic feast is not a reminiscence of an abstract God, but a reckless, headlong leap into the deepest relationship of all - it is God feeding us in and with Love, and it is our supping and sharing in that Love."
"I was not prepared to be challenged by a priest when I said I missed communion. But that was what was happening. I wanted him to say, "Yeah, me too." Or "Well, let's start taking communion right away." He didn't say these things. He just asked me what about it I missed."
"The way of Love has never been easy, has never been uncomplicated. Throughout our history, joy and sadness have sat side by side in the Christian heart like two faithful people sharing a pew. The God of Love is big enough to hold us in the complexity of our feelings about our current context. After all, as James Baldwin wrote, "Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle; love is a war; love is a growing up." Just as this church built in Love holds us in the complexity of our growing up into Christ, we are meant to hold and behold our own complexity with steadfast tenderness and loving honesty."
"In short, for the Christian, nothing is secular. Everything is connected to God. Our faith is not an extra-curricular activity - it's at the core of our being."
"I cannot stress this point enough, because I have talked with enough of you for whom the process of deciding what to give to your church has been a source of shame, embarrassment, pain, or uncertainty. I get that feeling. I am talking about this because my relationship to giving is itself a process."
"What happens when, instead of asking, "What would Jesus do?" you ask the question, "What is Jesus doing?" or "Where do I see Jesus in this?" The emphasis shifts dramatically. "What would Jesus do?" is like a game of make believe - treating Jesus' presence as hypothetical. "What is Jesus doing?" pushes you to see Jesus working in your life. "Where do I see Jesus in this?" forces you to recognize there is no part of your life where Jesus isn't Lord, where the life and love and peace and mercy of God aren't meant to be expressed."
"A budget is a moral document. A person's budget reflects their real priorities. If we want our priorities to shift towards a deeper response to Jesus, we have to make changes in our budget. These things are not separate. And I can no longer lead this Church with any kind of integrity if my budget does not prioritize giving. The great news is the decisions we've made in the last year are making our values come to life: they are no longer ideals sitting on a shelf to point at or aspire to. We are making commitments that are drawing us into deeper unity with Redeemer and with our neighborhood. This is a source of great joy. This is a new kind of peace for us. We are excited to live into this."
"I know we want to be together. I know we miss sharing Communion. I encourage us to use our imagination in order to see how God is working in our midst during this time. How are you being transformed? What have you begun to see differently? How will you allow this time to change the rest of your life?"
"We see the writing on the wall. We hear the voice of Jesus Christ. We are a predominantly White congregation with a stated desire to make an impact on our city. We are on a mission to promote justice, peace, and love for the purpose of healing and restoration. We work for and with and alongside the God of real and true Love, Mercy, and Justice. This means that work for racial healing must be an intentional part of what we do next."
"The need to fight systemic racism and dismantle white supremacy in America should not be a partisan issue for Christians. To follow Jesus in this time and in this country is to pursue real, measurable justice and equity for people of every race. And in this particular time, we are seeing an obvious need to seek justice and equity for our Black siblings. If Christian Republicans and Democrats are going to argue about this, they should be arguing about the best ways to destroy racism - not whether or not it exists. They should be debating the government's role in dismantling a system of white supremacy - not quibbling over whether or not white supremacy is real."
"You don't have to opt into being loved, and you can't screw it up. It's just something that's true about you. Zero requirements.Now look around at your world. This is also true about every other person you see. Literally every single person you know, every person you are thinking of right now is passionately loved by and essentially belonging to God. Are they being treated as if that is true? Does this culture value them the way it values you? Does our legal system protect them and serve them the way it protects and serves you? Do they have the same protection from COVID-19 that you do?"
"The violent anguish of our country right now is nothing less than a full-throated indictment of the chasm between our words and our deeds. We, who love freedom, have the largest prison population in the world. African Americans, who make up a little over 12% of our country, comprise 38% of all incarcerated Americans. We, who trumpet equality, participate in a system in which the median Black household has a mere 1/10th of the wealth of the median White household. Even the distribution of devastation from the corona virus pandemic reveals our society's inequity - as 33% of all COVID related hospitalizations are African American.
Our words do not match our deeds. Our ways are not like God's ways. God's breath gives life, but our way of life takes away the breath of our Black siblings. We can't keep on like this. So says the Lord."
God commanded Israel to build rest into their lives, to cherish rest, and honor it even in the midst of crisis. And the change God had wrought in their life created a crisis. Of course, it was a good change, of course it was a liberating, life-giving change, but it was still a crisis. It still had a catastrophic feeling about it. And it very much required something from them. No, not something: Everything. This change required everything. Not one aspect of their lives was left unaffected. Even though change was freeing, even though it led to their salvation, it was scary and inconvenient. They had to have faith, not just as an idea or a concept, but faith was how they had to live. And they had to work - to constantly be on the move, constantly respond to God, constantly seek a way forward.
"Paul's letters to churches are particularly helpful in trying to understand how the first Christians believed they were meant to walk the Way of Love. They are helpful because Paul is so single minded. His approach shifts, sometimes wooing sometimes rebuking. His mood swings, from jubilant to exasperated, from smitten to smiting. But he is always about the same thing: how a community lives in response to the truth of Jesus in their lives. The only obedient response to Jesus is love for one another. The only freedom we have is in serving one other."
You are a blessing. Your very being in this world is a blessing that helps make the world more of what it is meant to be.
This is not true only sometimes, when you are at your best, or when you are living the "right" way. This is not only true when you are believing the right thing, or acting the way you're supposed to. It's especially not only true when you are being productive, useful, or competent. Your being a blessing is not based on something you are doing or have done. How can I say this with such confidence? Because the fact of your blessedness is about who God is and how God sees you.
God looks upon you with love. This is the Gospel. This is why church exists, why you and I even know each other - so that we can remember the basic reality that God is looking upon you, upon me, upon us, with love. To be looked upon with love is to be blessed. So our foundation, our genesis, the beginning of our self-understanding must be that we are in our very being blessed by God.
Communion is so personal. You may be standing in a line with a bunch of people, then kneeling next to a bunch of people, then sitting back down in your seat surrounded by a bunch of people, but when it comes your time to receive the sacrament, it's you. Your time. You and Jesus. In that moment, you are the person who is experiencing communion with God, you are the one receiving grace, you are the one being fed spiritual food for your journey, your faith, your life. It is the height of intimacy.
Communion is also so corporate. You stand in line with a bunch of people. You kneel next to a bunch of people, you sit back down surrounded by a bunch of people. Even as you're preparing for your moment to receive the sacrament, you can't help but notice how very not alone you are.
Throughout Easter, my blogs and our podcast, Interrupting Grace, are exploring The Way of Love - a Jesus centered rule of life composed of a set of practices that help to define the Episcopal approach to faith. The 7 practices meant for daily use are Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, Rest. This week we are focusing on Pray. I have written to you about prayer before, and I always feel like I'm trying to convince you something about why prayer matters, or why you should do it, or how Episcopalians pray. It always feels forced to me. So today, instead of talking to you about prayer, I decided just to pray to God and let you see it. What follows is my prayer.
Isn't this what we all want? To be remarkable: To avoid the commonplace. To excel in everything we do and in all that we touch. [...]
But how does one excel at quarantine? How can I remarkably stay home? How can I eschew mediocrity while sheltering in place?
The eschewing of mediocrity has done a lot for us as a people, but it has not prepared us to be alone with ourselves. It has not prepared us to accept who we currently are, and right now, sheltering in place, who we currently are is one of the most real things we are experiencing. Living with who I actually am right now - not who I want to be or who I will become - but who I am in this moment is perhaps one of the most tangible aspects of this quarantine. How will I love myself and receive the love I need right now if I am not remarkable, if I am often quite mediocre, if I cannot achieve or perform, if I cannot eschew the norm, but would - given the chance - run with reckless abandon to wildly embrace something resembling normal?
"Right now, in this moment, you are loved, magnificently loved, extravagantly loved by the God who made you. You are of great value to the Creator of the world. Your heart and your life are precious. And right now, in this moment, you have the capacity to forget that. Just as sure as you're tempted to make everything about right now "significant", you're also tempted to think that you're inessential or useless - that you're forgotten, that you're insignificant. For you, for us, repentance is turning towards the truth of your belovedness, your utter belonging to God in Jesus Christ."
"If you ask me if I believe in the Resurrection, I say, 'I don't believe in the Resurrection when I don't love my enemies. I don't believe in the Resurrection when I don't pray for those who persecute me. I don't believe in the Resurrection when I disregard the poor and the marginalized.'" - Christian philosopher, Peter Rollins.
Rollins' words changed me. They shifted my understanding of belief away from simply stating things I thought were true to a more bodily experienced reality. They forced upon me the question, "What does it look like to actually believe in the Resurrection?" Rollins insisted that loving your enemies is what it looks like to believe in the Resurrection. Belief can't just be something we think. Belief is shown forth in how we live. Belief cannot live alone and isolated in the life of our minds. That is not belief. That is ideology. We breathe into and out of our beliefs as we walk in this world. Our actions are the embodiment of what we really believe.
"God's passion in Jesus Christ is Good. Profoundly Good. Utterly Good. It's good because it shatters our insistent belief in conditionality - and forces us to reorient our very understanding of Love around the life-giving sacrificial desire of God embodied in Jesus complete and total solidarity with humanity at all costs.
Jesus' passion is also essentially good because it makes clear the reality that desire and suffering can exist side by side - that love can live wholeheartedly in that tension. I need to hear that right now. I need to know that Love can live in the midst of my suffering, in the midst of this isolation. I need even to remember that much of my suffering is just a result of the depth of my heart's yearning for relationship."
"I don't want to be Christian any time other than right now. I don't want to be church any time but right now, because right now is the time when we see Jesus at work in the world more powerfully than ever.
It's right now that we're recognizing just how important we are to each other. It's right now that we are choosing, like the Samaritan on the Jericho road, to save stranger's lives. It's right now that we are holding each other so fervently in prayer. It's right now that we are acknowledging the fullness of each other's humanity and being bound together in common purpose for the Love of God's creation. It's right now that we can identify most fully both with Jesus' loneliness and his eternal abiding connection to the God of all things."
"We don't get to decide when Love shows up. And we don't get to decide what it looks like.
Throughout this season of Lent, the church is reading a lot from the Gospel according to John. These readings focus on something very specific and, it turns out, very timely. In John's Gospel God is Love, and Love shows up in Jesus and by and large people have no idea what to do with him, with Jesus, with Love, with God. And the reason they don't know what to do with Love when it's right in front of them? Because it doesn't look the way they expected."