Tag: bible

Imprinted by Faith

Image: Icon of the Resurrection by the Ukrainian icon writer Ivanka Demchuk. Unlike Western iconography of the resurrection, which portrays it as a Jesus-alone event, Orthodox iconography of the resurrection portrays Jesus raising Adam and Eve, symbolizing the general resurrection of the dead.

In her New York Times essay, The Prophetic, subtitled What American Literature’s Prophetic Voices Tell Us About Ourselves, the renowned writer Ayana Mathis in her first installment, titled Imprinted by Faith, recalls her childhood memories of growing up in a Black revivalist Christian tradition. She writes that:

the God of my revival childhood was all-powerful and relatively benevolent, but had a great many rules about what we should do  (go to church 3x a week, live by the Word of God, literally interpreted) and what we shouldn’t do (listen to secular music, play cards, watch movies, drink). These commitments and privations would be rewarded with God’s love, palpable, like a bird alighting on a shoulder.

She describes leaving this world behind with the memorable image of plunging into the world on the other side of the stained-glass window. Mathis views the beginnings of her adult journey as one of growing beyond her conservative Christian origins to become an artist. Her journey was a learning how to disbelieve while still being imprinted by belief.

How to disbelieve while remaining imprinted by belief struck a deep chord in me. Mathis asserts that American literature –and by extension mainstream American culture – remains imprinted by belief, freighted by ideas about morality, justice, and standards for living. Her assertion is that whatever the condition of our belief at the personal level – as in do we, or don’t we? – the cultural impact of belief remains imprinted on us. That, despite many manifold wrongs and derelictions, the literary and cultural landscape of America remains deeply imprinted by the nation’s historically Christian heritage.     

She notes that this Christian imprint has both good and not-so-beneficial consequences –in her phrase, it strikes a paradox. The Christian imprint on American society has often been used to perpetrate great evil. Christian Nationalism’s distortion of the Christian tradition is today still being used to justify racism’s doctrine of white supremacy, oppression of women and a multiplicity of other phobic responses to people of difference. Yet, at best, the Christian imprint continues to inspire decency and generosity, acting as a hedge against oversimplistic notions of society and the individual. Mathis’ assertion is that our Christian legacy asks us to truck in paradox, requiring us to wrangle with contradictory realities in mind and heart, discovering the sustenance and insight to be gained in the wrangling.

Bracketing her personal references to a revivalist upbringing, Mathis nevertheless speaks for many of us – I suspect- here in this church on this Easter morning. As good-aspiring, middle-class, over-educated, professionally successful, and predominantly white Episcopalians, few of us would pass the orthodox belief and devotional piety smell test. Yet here we are on Easter Day. Some among us may be a little surprised to find ourselves sitting in these pews. Yet, nevertheless, we’re here, despite being unable to give a full account for why we have been drawn here.

Perhaps we’re being drawn by memories of an earlier phase of family life as children or as parents of young children? Maybe it’s the influence of friends drawing us here? Perhaps – and this is the best reason of all – we’re drawn here by cultural tradition – tradition as the imprint of belief upon our personal struggle with disbelief? Deep down, being here reflects a questioning of certainties -once easily taken or rejected at face value, but alas no longer so. Many of us have lost confidence in the belief that Jesus being raised from the dead means all is right in our lives and our world.

We wrangle with disbelief while remaining mysteriously imprinted by belief as we reach for a fingerhold—to say a foothold here would be to overstate our confidence – on what it means to live well with a hope that, at times, aspires to the level of real courage – a tentative purchase on what it means to live well with a love demonstrated through generous concern for others. In short, we long for lives of generous toleration and concern for our neighbor while seeking to grasp after something ineffable.

If faith is an imprint we absorb from the shape of the culture around us, then belief is neither something we can possess nor something we can lose. It’s like ebb tide in the morning, only to return with evening’s flow. Belief is the expression not so much of objective faith in a collection of doctrinal propositions but a heartfelt experience of being deeply imprinted by a story capable of fostering meaning and purpose in our lives. A large and expansive narrative capable of adjusting our orientation to the world in all its evil as well as its glory. Faith is the practice of wrangling contradictory realities in mind and on heart and finding in the wrangling sustenance and insight for living well.

As an example of wrangling paradox, many today reject institutional Christianity for deeply Christian reasons. They reject the institutional Church for failing to live up to the expectations set out in Jesus’ teaching and the Christian culture it has spawned. Often citing the teachings of Jesus, secular humanism rightly judges the Church for its hypocrisy, its love of earthly power, and its manifold human abuses.

Wrangling with paradox is further illustrated in the debate between Tom Holland, a British historian of classical antiquity and author of Dominion: How the Crucifixion Shaped the Values of the Modern World, and AC Grayling, Master of the New College of Humanities in London and a well-known humanist philosopher.

The central contention between them relates to the origin of our contemporary definition of human dignity and personhood. AC Grayling, in his militant rejection of Christianity, contends that the values of modern humanism – ideas about human dignity, social justice and inclusive standards for living – emerge from the Enlightenment’s rejection of religion. There is a wonderful exchange where Holland challenges him, saying that the humanist values we cherish today are not simply remnants of pre-Christian classical antiquity, lying around neglected until rediscovered in the Enlightenment at the end of the 17th century. Our contemporary humanist values – aspiring to do good; valuing ethical action; protection of the individual especially the weak against the strong; the cherishing of vulnerability as a strength and not simply a weakness to be crushed by the powerful; the belief that might is not right – are all the direct product of the Christian revolution in the first centuries of the current era.  Holland – with the historical evidence to support him – asserts our contemporary definition of what it means to be a human being flows directly from the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. He contends that modern humanist values are nowhere to be found in classical antiquity – a world where might was always right, where the weak were fair game for the strong, and where the only individuals with any rights were freeborn men – everyone else existing within various degrees of servitude and enslavement – in societies imprinted by not by faith but the crude transactional practice of calculated cruelty.

On Palm Sunday at the beginning of Holy Week while exploring the clash of competing storylines intersecting with dire consequences for Jesus’ during his last week in Jerusalem, I predicted that we would eventually arrive at a new and more expansive storyline – that of God’s dream for the renewal of creation. As Christian believers, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ, the longed-for promised one who came to change everything. But whether we pass the belief smell test or not, at the very least we celebrate a story that revolutionized the ancient world and ushered in a new and vastly more compassionate understanding of what it means to be human.

This morning, I’m not interested in forensically deconstructing the evidence for or against the resurrection to ascertain in an arid attempt to prove it did or did not happen. All human meaning and purpose are narrative in origin—in other words, we only ever have the stories we construct to make sense of our experience in the world. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is a story that fundamentally changed our understanding of what being human looks like.

The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus introduced a new storyline in the collective consciousness of the West and among all who have come to the Christian faith—a more expansive story that continues to imprint itself upon our cultural experience regardless of whether we believe in its literal truth or not. In this sense, secular humanism is not the antidote to Christianity but its natural heir.

Despite many manifold wrongs and derelictions, the literary and cultural landscape of America remains deeply imprinted by the nation’s historically Christian heritage. This heritage struggles with a view of humanity shaped by Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection – forcing us, in Mathis’ words, to truck in paradox – requiring us to wrangle with contradictory realities in mind and heart, discovering the sustenance and insight to be gained in the wrangling.

The imprint of Christian faith shapes a cultural landscape where human dignity and Christian love, expressed as justice, are enshrined in the protections of the rule of law. The imprint of Christian faith, whether as cultural legacy or principled belief, empowers us to call out and resist the cyclic embrace of calculated cruelty as a transactional means to political ends – whether as remembered history or experienced within the flow of present-time current events.

But on Easter Day in 2025, you might want to ask, what about Jesus’s bodily resurrection? Well, there you have it—a curious paradox: Jesus died on the cross, but Christ was born in an empty tomb. To disbelieve while being imprinted by belief is the best description I can find for living with the paradox at the heart of our cultural landscape. Wrangling to disbelieve while still imprinted by faith, we should be careful not to rule anything out.

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Good Friday Meditation inspired by The Rose

The Rose, a song and lyrics by Bette Midler

Love hurts, and our hearts have an all too familiar affinity with suffering. Yet, if we dwell on our suffering, we are in danger of being little more than mere spectators of Jesus’ suffering on his way to the Cross.

It’s so easy to stand and watch from a safe distance, comforted by an image of Jesus as the noble hero valiantly traveling the route God has set for him, seemingly heedless of the costs because, after all, he knows ahead of time how things will end.

But we must go deeper than this if we are to move from spectators to participants in Jesus’ Passion. You see, if we are to be participants, then Jesus must be more like us than not. We are not noble heroes passing through the drama of our lives unscathed with complete foreknowledge. And so, if he is to be more like us, then neither is Jesus.

He treads his path, a path he chooses to accept – and like us, he knows little more than what is revealed as he takes each step, putting one foot in front of the other, one breath at a time. Jesus is no noble victim sacrificing his life for the sins of the world. If we just stop there, no matter how thankful we might feel, we fail to see that the way of the Cross is God’s invitation to become transformed not by suffering, but by the power of love. For Jesus’ chooses the way of love.

Some say love it is a river that drowns the tender reed, some say love it is a razor that leaves your soul to bleed, some say love it is a hunger an endless aching need. I say love, it is a flower, and you its only seed. ….

The Rose Verse 2

The Way of the Cross requires us nothing short of a transformation in our whole (moral, emotional, and spiritual) way of being. In Jesus, God’s hands get dirty as Jesus takes the initiative and leads us through example. Our acceptance, our entry into the way of love, involves risking as Jesus risked. Risk is the raw material for transformation for

It’s the heart afraid of breaking, that never learns to dance
It’s the dream afraid of waking, that never takes the chance
It’s the one who won’t be taking, who cannot seem to give
And the soul afraid of dying, that never learns to live …

Entering into the way of love leads us to challenge the status quo – taking risks and stepping out in faith rather than holding back in fear. As a community, it means uncovering and challenging the cosmic forces of dehumanization woven into the very DNA of our culture and its collective memory. In our confrontation with the forces of power and privilege that stand in opposition to the expectations of the Kingdom of God, we may often fail, but we cannot be defeated. Failure is a temporary setback, not an ultimate defeat of God’s purposes for us in the unfolding repair of the world.

Entering upon the way of love – above all else means accepting an invitation to become transformed into a new way of being, one step at a time – a transformation from timid and grateful children into collaborators with God in the vision of putting the world to rights.

From mere spectators to active participants with Jesus on the way to the cross is a movement through belonging into believing, a risking that moves us from fear into loving and trusting being loved.

This is not a hero’s path. Jesus shows us that it is a very human path. On Good Friday, God shows us the way of love, motivated not by an abhorrence of sin but by what is for God—the impossibility for God of not loving enough.

When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed, that with the sun’s love in the spring becomes the rose.

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Choosing the Right Storyline

All we have are the stories we construct to explain the world both to ourselves and to one another. The creation of narrative is the essential building block for discovering meaning and developing purpose. Any cursory Google or web search will reveal the considerable neuroscientific evidence in support of this assertion. For example – neuroscience researchers have repeatedly found that reader attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a narrative after exposure to fiction (Green & Brock, 2000; Prentice, Gerrig, & Bailis, 1997; Strange & Leung, 1999; Wheeler, Green, & Brock, 1999).

The current profusion of online disinformation and conspiracy theories proves that there is always more than one way to tell a story, and the way you tell it influences beliefs and behaviors. Our awareness of competing stories increases the accuracy of our experience—to use a current slogan—there are facts, and then there are alternative facts. It’s vital to be able to distinguish between restrictive and toxic stories that restrict our capacity for creative responses and expansive stories that encourage creativity in our encounters with the world around us. We develop accuracy of perception, clarity of meaning, and purpose as we select between competing narrative storylines because it’s vital to know which storyline we are participating in.

The power of a storyline rests on its capacity to attract our attention and command our allegiance. We may construct a storyline to make sense of the world as we experience it, but once we do so, that storyline has the power to own us. The question of the current moment is, among competing storylines available to us, which storyline will we choose to believe? From among a bewildering choice of possibilities, which stories will command our allegiance?

With the spread of online information, the question of which stories we allow to shape our perceptions of reality is the question of the moment. We might be surprised to learn that this is not only a modern problem.

Palm Sunday offers a snapshot of competing storylines from Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem before the Passover and his crucifixion. On Palm Sunday, we witness a clash of competing storylines that are particular to Jesus’ 1st-century setting yet are also universal – timeless.

There is the storyline of sacred violence as the storyline of empire – that is – the unrestrained exercise of power to dominate and subjugate. From Rome to Rule Britannia, from the European legacy of colonial violence to the revival of Putin’s dream of the Russian imperium – not to forget to mention here the legacy and current ugly resurgence of American manifest destiny – the storyline of empire repeats endlessly across time.

Then there is the storyline of populist nationalism with its blood-socked dreams of liberation. On Palm Sunday the waving of palms was a significant echo from Jewish-nationalist collective memory. For some 160 years before, the triumphant Judas Maccabeus, the last leader of a successful Jewish revolt against foreign domination, led his victorious partisans into the Temple – which the Hellenist tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes had defiled by placing his statue in the Holy of Holies. Using palm branches, the Maccabean partisans cleansed and rededicated the sanctuary after its defilement. On entering the sanctuary, they discovered miraculously the last light of the Menorah still burning – an event Jews, today, celebrate in the festival of Hanukkah.

On Palm Sunday, this more recent Jewish storyline of national liberation found a powerful amplification in Israel’s more ancient founding story of liberation—commemorated in the festival of the Passover.

Inhabiting the amplified storyline of national liberation, the crowds ecstatically welcome Jesus into the city. They have yet to discover that they have chosen the wrong storyline. But they will do so – and rather quickly, with the result that they will pivot from exuberance to disillusionment and anger over the course of days. Jesus may be the Messiah, but his messiahship is part of a third storyline—that of the dream of God’s salvation, not of Jewish national liberation.

Casting our mind’s eye over the competing storylines converging on Palm Sunday, we observe that at the same time as Jesus was entering the city from the east, a second triumphal entry procession wound its way into the city from the west. The Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate, at the head of a militia made up mostly of Samaritan mercenaries, had also come up to Jerusalem for the Passover.

As Prefect, Pilate was a vicious yet relatively low-level regional administrator who reported directly to Vitellius, governor of the Province of Syria. Each year at the Passover, Pilate came up to Jerusalem – forsaking the sea breezes of Caesarea Maritima— Herod the Great’s former capital and now the administrative center of the Roman occupation of Judea.

Pilate loathed and feared Jerusalem’s ancient rabbit warrens seething with civil and religious discontent. He most feared the pilgrim throngs crowding into the city for the Passover, swelling the city’s normal population of between 20-30,000 to over 150,000. The stability of Roman imperial rule required Pilate to come up to the city with a show of preemptive force to forestall any potential for insurrection.

Passover was Israel’s founding story of liberation from slavery. Pilate’s arrival was indeed a wise move, for the crowds hailing Jesus’ arrival were in insurrection mood. Being caught, as they would soon discover, in the wrong Messiah storyline—would have dire consequences for Jesus.

In the week leading to the celebration of Passover, we see with hindsight the lethal intersection of these three competing storylines – of imperial domination and political violence intersecting with populist resistance and longing for national liberation – both confronted by the next installment in the epic storyline of God’s love and vision for the world-through-Israel. This clash of storylines results in a chain of events that takes an unexpected turn – rapidly spiraling out of everyone’s control.

Emotionally and spiritually bloodied by our passage through the snapshots of Holy Week violence, we will eventually arrive at a different story – a new story – a bigger and better story – the unlikely story of Easter. Yet, on Palm Sunday, we’ve some way to travel before arriving there.

Holy Week is when we accompany Jesus on his journey to the cross. For some of us, this can be an intensely personal experience as our own experiences of loss and suffering – our passion – surface in identification with Jesus. For most of us, however, the nature of our Holy Week experience is less personal and more communal.

As liturgical Christians, we journey with Jesus as a community – each liturgical step along the way. Each snapshot is a prism refracting our own individual suffering and our identification with the overwhelming suffering of the wider world – an experience amplified by events in 2025.

Liturgy transports us together through sacred time. In sacred time, there is no past and no future, only the eternal now. Here, our individuality dissolves as we become participants in the events that engulf Jesus, erasing separation across time and then becoming now. As I’ve mentioned, we are no strangers to the storylines of sacred violence and national populist yearning for a messiah.

Choosing the right story to explain the world to ourselves is crucial. Choosing the wrong story leads only to disillusionment and rage.

Like the crowds praising Jesus as he entered the Holy City, we enthusiastically hail our next political savior until that is, – he or she no longer is.

We long to do the courageous thing – until that is, the moment when we don’t.

In sacred time, we become participants with Jesus—as if we were part of his band of disciples during this eventful last week. With them, we will share in the breaking of Jesus’ Passover bread and drink from his Passover cup. With them, we will accompany Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane, where we, too, will fight sleep to keep watch with him through the night and early hours of Friday morning. With them, we will follow Jesus on the way of his suffering to the cross. For like them – we will long do the courageous thing – until the moment when we we won’t.

History does not exactly repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.

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No Cheap Grace

The parable of the Prodigal Son occurs only in Luke. Among all Jesus’ parables in Luke this one captures the singular tone of Luke’s humanistic presentation of Jesus.

In 2013, in a sermon on this text titled A Punch to the Gut, I drew out the parallels between Luke’s parable of the prodigal and Hogarth’s 18th century series of drawings in  A Rake’s Progress – chronicling a young man’s unravelling from fashionable young buck- about-London-town – newly come into his inheritance – to that of a broken man – destitute and driven mad with syphilis he’s incarcerated in the famous Bedlam hospital where along with the other inmates he becomes an object of curiosity for the fashionable of the day who loved to gape at the inmates as if they were animals in a zoo.

A fun fact is that the first hospice for the mad was dedicated in 1267 as the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem at London’s Moorgate. During the reign of Henry VIII, the priory was dissolved and reestablished by royal charter as the Bethlem Royal Hospital – where I served as chaplain for 18 years. In the 17th century, the name Bedlam – a popular derivation of Bethlem became a synonym for chaos and madness and which today remains in common use.

In 2013 I focused on the destuctive narcissism of the young man as psychologically illustrative of the process Luke describes in his parable of the prodigal son. Then I wrote of the younger son seeing other people and situations as simply an extension of his own wants and desires. He cares little for his father, or brother, nor for the women he consorts with. They are simply the momentary extensions of his own wishes- needs, and to him have no life independent of what and who he needs them to fulfill his desires. At the lowest ebb of his life, is it the emergence of sorrow and repentance that reminds him of his father’s love, or is it his narcissistic expectation that his father will once again meet his needs regardless of his actions? Such a myopic psychological analysis seems a rather indulgent luxury when viewed from preaching demands in these more turbulant times.

Today I’m more conscious of the parable’s multilayered complexity. It’s a story as much about the elder son as the younger – as much about the father as either of the sons. Taking Luke’s parable as the parable of a loving father – provides a different starting point for my reflection on the text today.

Who among us does not know the experience of a wayward child? If that is too strong an expression at least many of us will know the pain and concern felt when our children begin to chart courses in life very different from the ones we had anticipated for them – making decisions we would have wished they made differently.

Luke sketches out the scene as Jesus leaves the synagogue where he’s been engaged in a long discussion with the Pharisees following the Shabbat service. As he comes out into the street, he’s mobbed by a crowd who had been loitering with intent to waylay the teacher outside the synagogue doors. In describing them as tax collectors and sinners, Luke is drawing our attention to the fact that these are the ritually unclean, those who would not have been allowed through the synagogue’s doors. Unable to listen to Jesus’ debate with the Pharisees inside, they are eager to hear him nevertheless. The Pharisees, following Jesus out into the street begin to grumble behind him about the shameful way Jesus is mixing with the ritually unclean. Clearly aware of their grumbling he begins to tell everyone this parable: There was a man who had two sons —. .

We can’t know with any certainty what ending the crowd outside the synagogue – both the virtuous pharisees and the ritually unclean expected from this parable. But we do know how subsequent interpretations have sought to reduce it to a rather simplistic morality tale about the wages of sin with strong patriarchal themes of judgment about sex with prostitutes, disobedience to fathers, and the wages of sin contrasted with the importance of duty. The younger son, in following his hedonistic desires, comes -predictably – to a sticky end. When hard times overwhelm him, he is forced to humiliate himself by going back home with his tail between his legs to beg his father’s forgiveness. You can hear the tut tutting down 2000 years of interpretation – be this a lesson for all you rebellious sons.

Both moralistic and psychological interpretations of the text focus on the motivation of the younger son, ignoring both the responses of his elder brother and his father.  What about the elder son’s reactions to his brother’s return? What about the father’s inexplicable pining for his profligate son’s return? Both challenge the traditional worldview of this parable as a morality tale.

This parable offends against the traditions that emphasize the virtues of obedience and duty to strict fatherly rule and the honoring of the firstborn over the younger. It challenges the virtues of blind filial duty. It skirts over being dutiful and hard working on the family estate seems to have bred in the elder son only a deep sense grievance – an envious resentment of his brother and a disparaging contempt for his father. In confronting his father, he refers to his brother not as my brother but as this son of yours – aptly articulating his anger towards both.

The traditional reading of this story is likewise conflicted on how to picture the father – whose indulgent generosity flies in the face of conventional inheritance custom. His willingness to take back his son – failing to hold him to account for his profligate ways smacks of more than a little moral weakness if not an indulgence dangerous to hierarchical moral order.

Reading this story through the filter of patriarchal relations has been one of the two main ways this parable is favoured by tradition.  The other has been to read it through the filter of antisemitism. The father is God. The elder son represents the Jews. and the younger son, the Christians. We can all see where this reading is headed.

But if Jesus were standing in this pulpit, orienting himself to our 21st century mindset he might ask so who do you identify with in this story? This is not simply a question for us as individuals – it has wider social-relation implications. As middle-class folk, dutiful, obedient, hardworking, and schooled in the virtues of delayed gratification, I imagine few of us identify with the headstrong younger son and his deeply narcissistic and self-destructive choices.

Reading the story through the lens of the prodigal son simply confirms our moral judgment of him as selfish and irresponsible – or a psychological interpretation of him as emotionally and psychologically immature. Both comfortably distance us from him and his choices. Reading the story through the lens of the elder son is likely to evoke more sympathy in us. We easily identify with his feelings and reactions – for who among us has not had an experience of being passed over in preference to another. However, it’s when we read this parable through the lens of the father – in other words, hearing the parable through the filter of his feelings and responses that we discover our disapproval of his indulgent, seemingly uncritical and nonjudgmental welcoming of his son’s return. He not only fails to call his son to account but throws caution and financial prudence to the winds – giving completely the wrong signal by appearing to reward bad behavior with a lavish party.

We can’t know how his 1st-century hearers, thronging the road outside the synagogue, expected this story to end. Yet for us today, the parable certainly carries a sting in its tail. We can be clear that Jesus is primarily painting a picture of God as a noncritical and non-judgmental father. God is recklessly generous, failing to discriminate between the worthy and unworthy as recipients of his love. God is a vigilant father whose is by his nature compelled to keep a watchful vigil in the hope of his wayward children’s return. Jesus paints a picture of God as a shockingly indulgent father who treats our return as the occasion for a wild celebration of new life – for his son who was as good as dead and has now come back to life – lost and now found..

The question remains, however, how does this picture of God leave us feeling? We may be happy to imagine ourselves as the recipients of such reckless generosity. But as a model for us to emulate towards anyone who has the power to hurt and disappoint us – we might feel some ambivalence.

Like all of Jesus’ parables, it operates at two levels. In the setting of its telling – the street outside the synagogue – the Pharisees can be depicted as the sincerely religious – men of real integrity and longing to know and love God more. Yet, their ability to be sincere in their spiritual quest is a product of their privileged social and economic status. In debate with Jesus, they are intrigued but remain cautious for being the privileged; they feel that they have much to lose. They want to know what the right path is before they commit to following it. Contrastingly, it’s those whose occupation or lack of one excludes them from among the company of the righteous – who have nothing to lose and who seem open to, and excited by, the invitation implicit in this parable.

We don’t know if the elder son did eventually swallow his hurt pride and join the feast – the parable leaves us with this possibility, for the father’s invitation is open-ended.

Although the parable does not have a clear concluding moral message, it nevertheless has a rub that chafes. The rub is – grace is never free. Oh, it’s offered freely by God and there is no pre-qualification required to receive its invitation. The offer is free, but the acceptance is costly. Identifying with the elder son – what would it cost us to relinquish our resentment and go into the feast? If we can identify with the younger son – what would it cost us to return home, humiliated?

The younger son knows that the grace of the father’s undying love is costly. Both the Pharisees and the tax collectors know that grace is costly. For the Pharisee, it’s costly to give up a presumption of righteousness. For the socially marginalized and religiously excluded, grace comes at the cost of lives of humiliation.

Like the father in this parable, who among us does not know the cost of unconditional, nonjudgmental love? Who among us has not suffered the pain of watching our children chart different life trajectories that either lead to painful and unsuccessful outcomes or hurt us in their rejection of our values and assumptions? We know that, like God’s grace, our love is not free; it exacts its own cost.

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2025

Becoming open to the new – now there’s a counter-cultural proposition if ever there was one. Landscapes change, challenging us to take our values, principles, and beliefs with us as we find our bearings in a new and unfamiliar landscape.

The story of the call of Moses, as we receive it in Exodus 3, is the work of the Deuteronomist scribes of the Babylonian captivity following Jerusalem’s fall and the Temple’s sacking in 586 BC. The seven decades of the Babylonian captivity confronted the Jewish exiles with the challenge of rebuilding a sense of national and religious identity in a dramatically changed landscape. Soul searching for the meaning of events that had befallen them required them to confront the painful question- had God abandoned them in their captivity? In search of an answer, the scribes returned to their stories of national and religious origin. The fruit of this exploration emerged as the book of Exodus. Returning to the stories of national origin, the Jews of the captivity found meaning in present-time events and imagined a new future in restoring national identity.

As we find in Exodus 3, the story of the call of Moses is a reassembling from the fragments of oral folk memory. Many Bible stories – particularly origin stories follow this method. Remembering has less to do with reviving an old tale than with forging a new one.

As we receive the story of the call of Moses, we note the relationship between the time in which the story is set, around 1500 BC, and the circumstances at the later period of composition between 586 and 539 BC. As I’ve just noted, projecting present-time themes back into the past is a tried-and-true method biblical writers used when it was not always safe to be transparent. It’s not only biblical writers who employ this method. Shakespeare’s history plays covering the period from 1399 – 1485 purport to chronicle the rulers and events between these years. Yet, what we see portrayed in his history plays is a picture of Elizabethan and Jacobean society’s politics, entertainment, and social situations, safely projected into the medieval period. In this way, Shakespeare commented on current events without risking losing his head – literally. The purpose of remembering has less to do with reviving an old story than with forging a new one.

The call of Moses is a multilayered story about the struggle to hold onto cultural identity during a period of national catastrophe. There is an overarching narrative linking later issues of exile with an earlier period of captivity. However, within the narrative, events become powerfully instructional. Within the story, we discover the importance of curiosity, the importance of paying attention to peripheral vision, the oscillation between forgetting and remembering, the location of divine encounter as in the place where God meets us, and the struggle to find the courage to respond to God’s call.

Curiosity and the importance of peripheral vision. The story opens with Moses shepherding his father-in-law’s sheep for fresh pasture. Walking along a familiar track, he should have focused on what lay directly ahead of him. However, he becomes distracted when his curiosity is aroused by something he sees flickering in his peripheral vision – glimpsed, as we might say, out of the corner of his eye.

Isn’t this often the way of things. It’s not what appears to be most evident that we need to pay attention to but what we glimpse – caught out of the corner of our eye. Don’t we love those detective stories in which a witness being questioned about the details of the crime remembers something crucial in solving the case? At first, they claim not to have seen anything important. Yet, through painstaking detective prompting – bit by bit, their memory is unlocked, revealing something recorded by their peripheral vision.

Moses detours from his beaten path to better view this fantastic sight of a bush burning without being consumed. As he approaches the burning bush, he hears a voice calling from the heart of the flames: Moses, remove your shoes, for you are about to enter holy ground. He does so and encounters that which will change the trajectory of his life – propelling him onto a new path toward his still-to-emerge life’s purpose.

Forgetting and remembering. Reading between the lines, we are surprised that Moses does not know the god who addressed him. In declaring that he is the God of his fathers, God jogs the collective memory fragments of Moses’ Hebrew identity. Remember, Moses was raised as an Egyptian. The reason he wanders around leading someone else’s sheep is because of the conflict between his Egyptian and Hebrew identities that eventually forces him into exile. Forgetting and remembering – the relationship of the past to the future – become the pivotal themes in the conversation between Moses and God.

God does not waste time after the introductions are over in declaring the purpose he has in mind for Moses. God is asking Moses to return to Egypt to remind the people that the god whom they have forgotten – has not forgotten them. For the hearers of the story in Babylon, this was a reminder that even as they were in danger of forgetting God, God would not forget them.

The place of encounter. Moses is leading his father-in-law’s flock through a landscape described as a place beyond the wilderness. The incurious among us might miss the significance of this description by simply picturing Moses walking through an arid desert landscape – in other words, a wilderness. But he’s not walking through a wilderness- he’s walking into a landscape beyond the wilderness – a description that implies entering a changed landscape – one beyond previous experience – devoid of recognizable signposts.

Moses is tasked with reintroducing God to the Hebrews and, in so doing, conveying a message of hope to them. As with all significant life-changing challenges – Moses is frightened and seeks to avoid the responsibility by playing down his fitness for the task. Even if I take your message to them, why should they believe me? I imagine many of us are similarly daunted by the task of reintroducing the God of the biblical record, the God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, to a culture held firmly in the grasp of a modern-day Pharaoh.

God’s new name. Up to this point in the story, God has identified as the God of memory – the God of your fathers. In answer to Moses’ understandable hesitancy, God instructs him to give the Hebrews his new name, symbolized by the Hebrew acronym YHWH – translated as I am who I am. God instructs Moses to tell the Hebrews that I am has sent me to you.

The Hebrew letters YHWH shimmer with ambiguity. The ambiguity of meaning is an outstanding characteristic of Hebrew, wholly lost in English translation. The Hebrew I am who I am, suggests a shimmering oscillation between I am who I have been, and I am who I will be.  A God identified with memory becomes a God of future possibility.  

The God of their fathers resurfaces into Hebrew consciousness – not as a God of distant memory but henceforth as Yahweh, a God of future hope and promise – a God whom they may have forgotten -but who has not forgotten them and who is inviting them into a changed landscape – into a place beyond the wilderness – a place of new beginning replacing the mourning for the past.

Today, rather like the Hebrews in Egypt and the Jews in Babylon, we find ourselves in a culture in which God, as revealed in the biblical record, has likewise become forgotten. Most Americans no longer share a common religious knowledge, allowing us to access a shared memory of God. The younger the generation, the worse it becomes. Outright rejection accompanies a general ignorance regarding the biblical stories through which God introduced God-self to former generations.

You might object that there is a vocal minority that loudly proclaims divinely mediated knowledge of God. However, this god is not recognizable as the God of Moses. The god of popular American Christian Nationalism is a god who no longer hears the cries of the poor and the oppressed, the voice of the stranger and the dispossessed, the plight of the victims of a cruel hatred for the LGBTQ+ community. This god is vociferously celebrated for his deafness, along with his whiteness and his maleness.

Today, we painfully awaken to the experience of finding ourselves in a changed landscape. Will we reach a place beyond the wilderness where new connections forge new possibilities to be grasped?

Receiving this story in 2025, we can’t avoid the question: are we willing to take our values, principles, and beliefs into a changed landscape – into an encounter with a God of future possibility? Or will we continue to mourn the loss of previous certainties – pretending that we don’t notice things have changed? In a changed landscape – a place beyond the wilderness God reintroduces God-self to us. No longer a God of fading or even of forgotten memory – but a God of vibrant present-time hope and future possibility – calling us to slough off the dead shell of yesterday and begin to live the life to which we are called. But this requires fortitude to resist being coopted into pharaoh’s camp. It will require finding the courage to confront a culture that seeks to make one man God so that all men become slaves. My goodness, if we do, then who might we become?

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Baptism?

A contributor to Sermons.com shares a humorous story about three pastors lamenting their shared problem: bats in the belfry. The first pastor tried scaring them away by shooting at them, but all he succeeded in doing was making holes in the roof. The second pastor captured the bats, transported them 50 miles away, and released them, only to find they returned to the church before he did. The third pastor stunned his colleagues by announcing he no longer had a bat problem. When asked how he achieved this, he replied, “I baptized them—and I’ve never seen them again.”

This amusing anecdote illustrates the saying, “Many a true word is spoken in jest.” It raises a serious question: What is the meaning and purpose of baptism?

William Temple, a revered Archbishop of Canterbury in the mid-20th century, once observed, “The Church is the only society that exists for those who are not its members.” This sentiment sheds light on the Anglican tradition’s unconventional view of boundaries. Becoming a member of the Episcopal Church often feels effortless—attending regularly can subtly integrate you into the community before you even notice.

This approach is unusual among contemporary American churches. The Episcopal Church’s open boundaries express Temple’s assertion. However, this openness creates challenges in distinguishing the Church from the world. Worship is open to all, but only the baptized are invited to communion—though no one is turned away.

To Christians from other traditions, this may seem inconsistent. Yet, it reflects a theology that regards baptism as entry into a saving community, nourished by Holy Communion. It also acknowledges that the altar rail is not the place to turn away those who approach with faith and good conscience.

In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus’ baptism is profoundly personal—his adoption as God’s Son is a secret known only to him and John the Baptist. By contrast, Luke’s account portrays Jesus’ baptism as a communal event:

“Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying…”

Mark presents Jesus stepping onto the world stage, becoming the Son of God through adoption at baptism. Luke, however, emphasizes that Jesus has always been the Son of God, with his baptism confirming this preexisting truth.

These differences reflect an ongoing theological debate: Are we saved through baptism, or is baptism a recognition of salvation already granted?

Evangelicals often view baptism as a personal act of faith—a believer’s conscious decision and a ticket to heaven. Anglicans, however, generally see baptism as a celebration of God’s grace, marking entry into a community where salvation is encountered and witnessed.

Returning to Temple’s statement, “The Church is the only society that exists for those who are not its members,” we recognize the Church often falls short, behaving as though it exists solely for its own benefit.

Protestants view the Church as a temporary gathering, existing only when believers come together. In contrast, Anglicans and Catholics see the Church as the mystical body of Christ, existing beyond any specific gathering. Accordingly, Protestants see baptism as entry into an individual relationship with Christ, while Anglicans and Catholics view it as entry into the communal life of the Church—a saving experience.

For Roman Catholics, salvation is bound within the Church, necessitating rigorous boundaries. Anglicans, however, see the Church as leaven in the loaf of the world. The Episcopal Church exists not to confine God’s salvation but to witness to its presence already at work.

Why does this matter? For me, it challenges the Calvinist preoccupation with personal salvation. I reject the idea that my salvation depends on choosing Jesus while my neighbor faces damnation. God loves us both without distinction. The real question is: How do we live out this truth?

Baptism is not a one-time event but a daily commitment to live out God’s purpose in the world. In the Episcopal Church, this commitment is articulated in the Baptismal Covenant, which includes five promises:

    1.   Faithfulness in community: Participate in the life of the Church, practicing faith daily.

    2.   Resistance to evil: Fight evil and return to the path of repentance when you fall short.

    3.   Proclamation of the Gospel: Share the good news that God has already saved the world in Christ.

    4.   Service to others: Love and serve your neighbor as yourself.

    5.   Justice and dignity: Strive for justice, peace, and the dignity of every human being.

As Episcopalians, we embrace fuzzy boundaries intentionally. Guided by Temple’s vision, we affirm that belonging precedes believing.

Through baptism, we join a community that witnesses to God’s salvation as a gift for all. Christians live in tension—balancing engagement with the world’s values and dedication to a life of service and witness shaped by the Baptismal Covenant.

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Remedy Against the Hardness of the Human Heart

In the current political climate women’s and children’s issues are spotlighted by an age-old paradox. On the one hand, the anti-choice political-religious agenda – with renewed energy seeks to impose a Kafkaesque level of government overreach into women’s reproductive lives threatening disastrous consequences for the integrity of medical professionals dedicated to women’s health. It’s ironic that this movement is championed by that part of our political and religious culture that has traditionally coined the slogan – keep the government out of our lives.

Yet, the paradox becomes more glaring when we note that the political and religious championing of the rights of the unborn is matched by a reluctance to legislate for the welfare and protection of the already born. Recent Republican refusal in the US Senate to extend the child credit is a sorry truth that for an electorate that practices a high degree of selective cognizance cannot be highlighted enough. Child-family credit is the single most effective instrument in dramatically reducing child poverty.

The political terrain of women’s and children’s welfare remains an area of fraught intersectionality. Anxieties about women’s reproductive rights meet head-on with accompanying white anxieties about race and class. The origin of American abortion prohibition has its roots in the murky history of white protestant racial anxieties in the face of late 19th-century immigration from southern and eastern Europe – anxieties that today find a voice in conspiracies of racial replacement.

It’s ironic that the strident claims of the religious right’s assertion that God and the Christian tradition abhors abortion find no support or evidence in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures which remain completely silent on the issue of abortion. In contrast, the diverse voices heard in the Scriptures are resoundingly loud and clear on issues of women’s and children’s welfare. They are similarly loud and clear about the obligation to welcome and protect the stranger. But the latter point is worthy of its own sermon.

As a case on point – Jesus’ teaching in Mark 10 should make us all wriggle with discomfort. How can we continue to claim to know the mind of God on contemporary reproductive issues about which Scripture remains consistently silent while ignoring the clearly articulated mind of God on the nature of the human relationship within marriage?

If Scripture is silent on contemporary issues of reproductive rights – justifying male control of female bodies – a general attitude nevertheless can be discerned hidden within Jesus’ debate with the Pharisees and his teaching to his disciples on divorce in Mark 10.

It’s not surprising that the debate about divorce centers on female adultery. Female adultery represents an attack on male control over female reproduction – because a wife’s adultery muddies the waters of legitimacy. A man needs to know that the children his wife bears are his and not someone else’s. Anxiety about legitimacy is code for the legal protection of intergenerational transmission of property rights – a cornerstone of patriarchal order.

Confronting this very male anxiety, Jesus messages in Mark 10 that adultery cuts both ways. It’s not just the wife’s adultery that counts for divorce, but the husband’s does as well. This is shocking news for both his Pharisee interlocutors and his faithful disciples. This is not what they want to hear.

Of interest to us is Jesus’ thoughts on the Mosaic writ of divorce as an accommodation for the hardness of the human heart. What does he mean by this? One reading of the writ is to see it as a recognition that men have a right to do what men want to do concerning their wives and children. But I think a better reading of what Jesus is getting at here is to recognize the Mosaic writ less as a permission for male bad behavior but as a protection for a woman by requiring her husband to publicly demonstrate the grounds for divorcing her. The writ protects what little rights a Hebrew wife might claim in the face of an unscrupulous husband’s attempt to cast her aside.

Mark is always in a hurry – he thinks nothing of abrupt and unexpected jumps in the narrative. One moment Jesus is addressing the question of divorce and then suddenly he’s talking about the welcome and protection of children. Although we note a rather abrupt and unskillful transition – Mark is showing his readers that the point to which Jesus is driving his argument firstly with the Pharisees and then with his disciples – is towards the recognition in a society where women and children had few rights and were easily the subjects of male abuse – that the protection and care for women and children is one of God’s primary concerns.

In his teaching on divorce, Jesus asserts the relationship between husband and wife is one of equals. Reflecting God’s covenant with humanity, Jesus asserts that marriage as a relationship of equals was God’s original intention for men and women in creation. When Jesus says: what God has joined together let no one separate, he is saying that God’s intention and the practice of divorce conflict. The Pharisees go away muttering to themselves, the disciples are rendered speechless, and Christians have squirmed on the hook of this teaching for nearly 2000 years.

Jesus understands the difference between divine intention and human experience. He is fully aware that God’s original intention for creation is continually frustrated by human failure. In this light, he sees the Mosaic writ of divorce as a pastoral and compassionate response to the reality of human failure. What he is not prepared to accept is the ossification of the Mosaic writ into a cruel legalism that favored husbands over wives – and was indeed an expression of hardness of heart. Jesus moves the conversation away from the legalistic debate among men concerning the justifiable grounds for divorcing their wives, into a different conversation – one that recognizes the tension between human fallibility and God’s intention for marriage as a partnership of equals – a reflection of God’s love for us in creation which as in all other areas of human response is found wanting.

So today, in the Episcopal Church, where do we find our theology of marriage and divorce? After a long debate in the 20th century, Anglican theology groped towards a position that seeks to hold in tension the original divine intention for marriage and the reality of human failure. In our tradition, the solution we arrived at after much soul searching is to reserve a right to remarriage in church after civil divorce to the bishop’s prerogative. In nearly all cases the decision of the bishop depends on the advice of the priest preparing the couple for remarriage.

In marriage preparation, Linda+ and I invite the divorced person (s) seeking remarriage to share their perception of the failure of a previous marriage. In their story, we listen for the echoes of sorrow. We hope to hear in their story a sense of loss – a loss of innocence – to hear the echo of the pain and disillusionment at finding failure where they had hoped for fulfillment and joy. It seems to me that no one who has been through a divorce emerges unscathed by the loss of their once innocent belief that when you make sacred promises everything should work out, and people should live happily thereafter.

Our question to the divorced person or persons is – in this process how has this experience of loss of innocence deepened your self-awareness to better equip you to have a more mature expectation of yourself to sustain your hopes for this new marriage relationship? This is a pastoral inquiry and on the strength of the response we request episcopal permission to remarry the couple into a new beginning. When the religious tradition prohibits divorce denying it as a potentially life-giving opportunity for new beginnings -the Church continues a legalistic-pharisaic hardness of heart that perpetuates trauma in family life – with historically speaking, women and children – the primary causalities.

As Anglican Christians in the Episcopal Church, we live in the tension where a fixed interpretation of Scripture and Tradition meets the changing reality of the lives we are actually living. This place of tension is where we expect to encounter God, meeting us not only in our successes but particularly in our failures. Into this tension – God comes looking for us.

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Fathers, Prophets, & Kings

Two weeks ago, Linda+ preached on the call of Samuel in which a key line reads – in those days the voice of the Lord was not often heard. This is a recognition by the Deuteronomist scribes – the collators and editors of the Samuel story – that in hearing God’s call Samuel becomes the first person since Moses to whom the Lord speaks directly. Samuel is a crucial transitional figure – presiding over an age of national transition in the Israelite evolution from a loose tribal confederation – where political power is highly devolved -towards a centralization of political power in a monarchical system.

Samuel is a figure linking the past but also prefiguring the future. He’s the priestly successor to Eli – custodian of the shrine at Shiloh. He is the last of the great Judges who since the days of Joshua had guided the Israelites in times of crisis. He is also the first of a new breed of prophets. After Samuel the office of prophet will become the significant counter – the Lord’s loyal opposition to the centralization of political power under the monarchy.

The story so far is -responding to the people’s clamor for a king, and with the Lord seemingly giving the green light to their request, Samuel has anointed Saul as the first king in Israel. But Saul is arrogant and easily gets above himself in the Lord’s eyes. On the pretext that Samuel had not arrived within the appointed time to perform an important sacrifice after a battle with the Philistines – Saul usurps the priestly role and offers the sacrifice himself. This is a serious trespass. Samuel arrives and in shock cries out to Saul – what have you done? The Lord is also not pleased and in rejecting Saul as unfit to continue to rule sends Samuel in search of a man after the Lord’s own heart to be king in Saul’s place.

Poor Samuel. Although originally opposed to the consecration of a king, he seems to have grown both fond of Saul and at the same time fearful of him. The OT reading for today finds Samuel moping. The Lord tells him to snap out of it and get on with the job.

Understandably, Samuel had been swayed in his original selection of Saul by Saul’s impressive warrior-like appearance – tall, handsome, dark-haired, and bearded, with shoulders and thighs of death. But Saul has a fragile ego. He’s a classic narcissist. Easily threatend and vindictive in response. Standing before the parade of Jesse’s sons – Samuel’s tastes in men have not changed as he ponders an acceptable Saul lookalike to replace him.

As Jesse’s sons’ parade before him – Samuel is constantly distracted by the Lord whispering in his ear – no, not this one, no not that one. After the seventh in the lineup had passed by and been rejected by the Lord, Samuel – somewhat at a loss turns to Jesse and asks if there is another son somewhere? Jesse says he has another son, but he is just a boy – out minding the sheep. David is brought before Samuel who finds the boy rather effeminate in appearance with a fresh, hairless, ruddy complexion, androgynously handsome with beautiful eyes – hardly king material in Samuel’s eyes.

But to Samuel’s astonishment, the Lord confirms this is the one. When Samuel takes a moment to make sure he has not misheard – the Lord becomes impatient. He commands Samuel to – rise and anoint him; for this is the one! Samuel takes the horn of oil and anoints David as king in the presence of his brothers. We are told the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward – which is propaganda code for the Deuteronomists’ approval of David – who in their eyes becomes the template for the good king -a man after the Lord’s own heart -. a template of kingship against which all subsequent kings will find approval but mostly be found wanting.

It’s a tricky situation that Samuel now finds himself in. No one outside David’s family knows that David has replaced Saul – certainly, Saul has no inkling and will not have for some time to come. Worried about blowback -Samuel thinks it wise to step out of the limelight for a while and retreats to his home at Ramah where he has founded a school for budding prophets.

There’s a deep irony running through Samuel’s story. He succeeds Eli as the priest at Shiloh because Eli‘s dynastic ambition has corrupted him to appoint his sons Hophni and Phineas – spoiled bad boys if ever there were. Here lies the tragic irony. Like Eli before him – Samuel – distracted by his own dynastic ambitions loses his moral compass in naming his own bad boy sons to succeed him. It’s important to note this in the mix of Samuel’s emotions when confronted with the people’s demand to sideline his sons and anoint a king instead to rule in their place.

Samuel is a good leader until he isn’t, which is how Nanette Sawyer puts it in writing in the recent edition of The Christian Century. She writes:

Samuel’s decision to appoint his sons as leaders and judges shines a light on his human fallibility. The people see it too, and they want out of this system of leadership based on judges who appoint their own greedy children to take over. When they got Samuel instead of Hophni and Phineas, maybe they thought they were done with that problem. But here it is, happening again.

Fatherhood is often a painful experience. For Samuel, his biological sons are not his only disappointment. As father to the nation, the people likewise disappoint him in wanting to replace the system he embodies with a king.

Oh, what a curse it is to be the son of a great father.  The saga of the great man and his disappointing sons still has the power to grip our contemporary attention – as attested to by the Hunter Biden tragedy.  As the sons of both the presidential contenders for 2024 demonstrate – though in very different ways – it’s a short trip from privilege to corruption for the children growing up in the shadow of the larger-than-life father.

Let we who have ears to hear listen closely! As in our own time, in the time of Samuel, the Israelites feel locked into a political system designed to resist change. Like us, they express a growing concern about the capacity of a devolved system of authority held together by a common rule of law to safeguard their future. Like us, in the face of multiple challenges to national life, they paradoxically demand to have a king who they fantasize will solve all their problems. The Israelites offer us a salutary warning against trading one set of problems for another – out of the frying pan into the fire as the old saying goes.

Samuel warns them of the cost of kingship to be paid in the indentured service of their sons and daughters; through the taxation of land and first fruits; in the arbitrary confiscation of land and the levying of a military draft. But the greatest cost will be paid in elevating a leader who like a contemporary Supreme Court Justice will enjoy complete unaccountability.

My throwaway comment about Supreme Court Justices’ unaccountability reminds us that the echoes of Samuel’s story and its political context reverberate through our own constitutional halls. And like the ancient Israelites, facing the challenges of uncertainty and change – we too seem to hanker for a strong charismatic leader – harboring the mistaken expectation that such a leader will care about us.  The Israelites cry give us a king to make us great again. But the story of kings is that they make only themselves and their sycophants great at the expense of those they are raised over to serve. The historian Timothy Snyder with a reference to Putin’s Russia notes that the people do not flourish under a king. Only the king and the king’s loyalists flourish, and then only as long as they also benefit the king and the king’s power. Let we who have ears to hear listen closely!

Samuel at first bitterly opposes the request and complains to the Lord about how the people disrespect the Lord in even wanting a king to rule over them. Perhaps realizing that Samuel is more anxious for his own authority than the Lord’s – the Lord simply tells Samuel to do as the people ask. It seems even the Lord is not always right.

At the end of her article, Sawyer wryly comments: God’s story, our story, is a long one, and we are only in the middle of it. Now is a time to heed Samuel’s warnings. Now is a time to utilize all of our resources—our energy, intelligence, imagination, and love—to work toward God’s dreams for our world. That will be a world in which wealth is shared, justice is done, accountability is maintained, and the abundance and beauty of God’s creation are honored. 

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It’s Blowin’ in the Wind

Image by Jennifer Allison

Everything is connected to everything else. The butterfly beats its wings in the New England woods provoking an invisible chain reaction resulting in a typhoon battering the Japanese coast. The magnitude of interconnection is truly mind-blowing. How so?

All that is ever seen is what Spirit causes, motivates, inspires, encourages, impels, triggers, stirs, provokes, stimulates, influences, or activates.

In his song Blowin’ in the Wind, the great Bob Dylan once more with a direct simplicity comes closest to articulating the mystery of Spirit: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpD26IoRLvA 1:27 -end)

Dylan asks

Yes, and how many years must a mountain exist
Before it is washed to the sea?
And how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

In this vein, let me try to give some descriptive theological shape to the Day of Pentecost – the arrival of which brings to a close the long biblical narrative that has been unfolding since Christmas, through Easter, ending here at Pentecost.

Pentecost – is Greek for the 50th day after Easter. On the Day of Pentecost the Spirit of the risen and ascended Christ – the Holy Spirit entered material time and space as a crucial participant in the on-going life of the creation.

John hints at Jesus’ gift of his spirit to his disciples in his farewell discourses – where in today’s gospel he tells them – If I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send it to you …. for when the Spirit of Truth comes, it will guide you into all truth.

It’s Luke, of course, who offers the graphic description of the event that overwhelmed Jesus’ followers on the Day of Pentecost. Luke’s chronological arrangement of the life and times of Jesus from birth to resurrection ends with his Ascension. In the sequel to his gospel, the Acts of the Apostles, Luke chronicles the life and times of the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Beginning with the event that transformed them from a dispirited rag-tag band of the dejected and the lost into an empowered, pneumatic community inflated by the power of the Spirit. Luke goes on to record in Acts how empowered by the Holy Spirit this pneumatic community begins to forge a distinctively revolutionary way of living. Pentecost marks the transfer of power from what had been the ministry of Jesus to the ministry of those who became initially known as the followers of The Way.

Being faithful Jews, these first followers of Jesus had gathered in Jerusalem for Shavuot – the other great pilgrim festival at which every Jew – especially those of the male variety was encouraged to come up to Jerusalem on the 50th day following Passover to commemorate the giving of the Torah by God to Moses. Luke paints a vivid technicolor picture of the events that overtook Jesus’ followers who were visited by a pyrotechnic eruption of wind, fire, and ecstatic utterance marking their pneumatic inflation with the Holy Spirit.

Among the multitude of pilgrims gathered for Shavuot from across the Jewish diaspora were Jews from Media, Elam, and as far away as Mesopotamia – from Cappadocia and a host of other cities in Asia Minor together with Egyptian, Libyan, and Arabian Jews, alongside local Judeans. All witnessed the clamor among a band of unruly Galilean peasants – hearing them shouting out in their own tongues while others of a more cynical mindset dismissed the rabble-rousers as drunk – not simply drunk, but drunk at nine o’clock in the morning. After all, what could you expect from a bunch of Galileans?

Last week I drew the metaphor of a conduit – a two-way traffic highway connecting the dimension of time and space with the spiritual dimension – each a dimension arranged in parallel. With the Ascension of Jesus, the direction of traffic moves from time and space to spiritual space as Jesus is received by God and reunited within the divine nature – not simply as a divine being but now clothed in the fulness of his humanity.

Following the reception of the humanity of Jesus- now perfected through suffering – into the divine nature, the traffic flow reverses as the divine spirit of Jesus is released to reenter time and space – becoming known as the Holy Spirit – who in the words of the Nicene Creed proceeds from the Father through the Son.

All that is ever seen is what Spirit causes, motivates, inspires, encourages, impels, triggers, stirs, provokes, stimulates, influences, or activates.

On the Day of Pentecost, the disciples of Jesus were set blaze – enraptured –hearts and minds ignited with passion. Drawing a more contemporary analogy, in his song, I’m on Fire Bruce Springsteen captures such a moment when he sings:  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VxFS5-klfk 1.24 -end)

At night, I wake up with the sheets soakin’ wet and a freight train runnin’ through the middle of my head, only you - can cool my desire, oh,oh,oh, I’m on fire!

The Holy Spirit is the manifestation of God as the primal force animating from within and spanning between everything – an echo of the Genesis vision of the divine wind moving across the face of the void – calling structure and order out of chaos.

The Apostle Paul in chapter 8 of his letter to the Romans recaptures the grandeur of the Genesis vision – leading him to his arresting association of the Holy Spirit as the midwife of the Creation. He writes:

Know this, that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, as part of the redemption of Creation.

Paul offers this extraordinary image of the Spirit birthing us in our weakness; like pre-linguistic newborns, the Spirit speaks for us in sighs too deep for words.

St Martin’s is a Spirit-filled community. This is not the way we normally think of ourselves for we are shaped by a cooler Anglican ethos that has traditionally been highly suspicious of too much enthusiasm. Our Spirit-fullness is revealed through our synergy of traditional Anglican worship with radical theological and social messaging – allowing us to explore, fashion, and present fresh perspectives on traditional articulations of theology and faith practice. In this we capture the revolutionary effect of the Spirit – directly addressing head-on, the challenges faced by us in the lives we are actually living. This can be a testing experience and gives the lie to the accusation that our Anglican way is an easy religion.

Following this liturgy – we will celebrate our Spirit-filled, magnetic community – a community drawing others to us. We are an attractive, warm, and welcoming community. We express a quiet spiritual empowerment. We exhibit revolutionary courage – confronting challenges to faith in a modern context while also risking new opportunities – as together we reach out for God’s invitation to work tirelessly for the healing of the world.

All that is ever seen is what Spirit causes, motivates, inspires, encourages, impels, triggers, stirs, provokes, stimulates, influences, or activates.

Or as Bob Dylan tells it –The answer my friends – is blowing in the wind – the answer is blowing in the wind. The life of Spirit is not subject to our manipulation or control – it’s not comprehensible to our grasping minds. The Spirit makes itself known through us when we allow ourselves to become available to its prompting to act under the furtherance of the divine plan for creation which always begins with a revolutionary refusal to accept that the way things are in the world is the way things have to be.

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So What’s Next?

Picture: Chapel of the Ascension, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, Norfolk, England

There is a rather ugly 1960s chapel at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham – deep in the rural countryside of the county of Norfolk dedicated to the Ascension of our Lord. On entering the Chapel of the Ascension, one is greeted with a surreal experience. For in the center of the low ceiling is a gilded cloud ring plaster rosette from the center of which hang two bare feet – suspended in the air. Ostensibly belonging to Jesus with the rest of his body having already burst through the ceiling.

The celebration of the Ascension always occurs on a Thursday – the 40th day after the resurrection. Because Episcopalians rarely venture to church except on Sundays – the current custom is to celebrate the Ascension of the Lord on the Sunday following – which in 2024 also incongruously happens to be Mother’s Day.

Incidentally, I heard a funny quip recently referring to the Southern Baptist church calendar which comprises only four commemorations: Christmas, Easter, the 4th of July, and Mother’s Day. It goes without saying that while we shouldn’t pass up any opportunity to celebrate the importance of mothers and mothering in our lives, in the Episcopal Church, Mother’s Day is not part of the liturgical calendar.

Constructing stories and weaving narratives are the way we make sense of our experience of the world. The perennial question concerns the relationship between story and material experience – in other words, does weaving narratives – telling stories interpret and explain our material experience, or does the power of narrative –  in the words of the French deconstructionist philosopher Michel Foucault – construct our experience – as in language creating the objects and meaning of which it speaks.

This tension surrounding the function and power of language is especially pertinent when it comes to religious-spiritual stories. Narrative Theology asserts that spiritual meaning lies not in the literal veracity of the events depicted – did they happen or not – but in the function of story by itself to construct and convey purposeful meaning across time. The question is not whether or not Bible stories depict actual happenings – but how they construct meaning and purpose that can be trusted to shape our living?

Spiritual stories recycle human imaginative memory. Clearly, Luke’s graphic account of Jesus’ Ascension borrows extensively from Elijah’s ascension recorded in the 2nd book of Kings. In like manner – as the mantle of Elijah fell upon the shoulders of Elisha – giving him a double portion of his master’s spirit, the double portion of Jesus’ Spirit clothes the disciples. The resonance is unmistakable.  

In Luke’s chronology of events from Calvary to Pentecost, his story of the Ascension of Jesus forms a transition point bringing the earthly ministry of Jesus to a close to empower his followers with his spirit to become a community equipped to continue his work. The question underlying the Ascension event is not how, when, or if it happened, but what light does it shed on the question of what’s next?

The question of what’s next throws into sharp focus the choices to be made, the actions to be taken, and the directions to be followed.

In her sermon last week, Linda+ noted that love is not just about how we are to feel. It is about who we are called to be. Rather than asking: What does it mean to believe in God’s love – she posed the more significant question do we trust God’s love, do we surrender to it, will we let love transform us? 

So here’s a question. How can we trust the meaning inherent in the story of the Ascension of Jesus even though most of us believe it as an event to be simply a construction of imagination?

One response is to substitute the traditional spatial metaphor of up and down for heaven and earth with a metaphor more suited to contemporary imagination – that of heaven and earth as side by side. The Ascension becomes the conduit connecting parallel dimensions. Through this conduit a two-way traffic flows between what we might call our space and God space.

The image of the Ascension of Jesus as a conduit for two-way traffic communicates two important insights. In his return to the God space, Jesus does not jettison his humanity like a suit of worn-out clothes – but carries the fullness of his humanity – perfected through suffering -to be received by God into the divine community. The words of the first collect for the Ascension capture this: that as we believe your only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into heaven, so we may also in heart and mind there ascend, and with him continually dwell. The we here is not us individually, but the entirety of our humanity which now constitutes an element within the divine nature.  

In receiving the fullness of Jesus humanity into the divine nature, God releases the divine spirit of Jesus to make the return journey back into our space. This image is captured in the words of the second collect for the Ascension:  our Savior Jesus Christ ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things and to abide in his church until the end of time. The Ascension is the point where we, Christ’s mystical body on earth are prepared to become empowered to continue the work Jesus began.

The Ascended Christ bearing our perfected humanity is received into the heart of God – so that – as the book of Revelation poetically phrases it – the home of God now dwells among mortals. Now we come to the most extraordinary assertion of Christian faith – that from henceforth to be most fully human is to be most like God.

The Ascension of Jesus opens us to contemplate our participation in the what’s next in God’s work of renewing the creation -throwing into sharp focus the choices to be made, the actions to be taken, and the directions to be followed – when we tire of gazing heavenwards – that is.

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