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Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all you who love her; rejoice with her in joy, all you who mourn over her— that you may nurse and be satisfied from her consoling breast; that you may drink deeply with delight from her glorious bosom. -Isaiah 66:10-11
This is what happens when you choose a text to preach a week and a half early, before a family funeral, and without remembering the significance of the end of June (likely because of that funeral). And I mean, y’all can guess why I picked it: Jerusalem is the holy city, the very location of God on earth. The idea that God would locate Godself in such traditionally feminine imagery – in a breasted, lactating body – is such a departure from so much of the usual imagery… how does one not preach such a text when it comes up in the lectionary?
And then the world made it harder, in certain ways, to have the description of God embodied in the feminine; to be so overtly maternal, to have the imagery be so stereotypically female: the idealized female body as reproductive, inherently nurturing, silently one-dimensional. It all just reinforces the patriarchy that is so blatantly on display right now, in the Supreme Court and throughout the nation.
The Bible is a difficult series of texts, in this way: over the course of all of the books, women speak barely 10% of the time and are, unquestioningly, treated as the property of their male relatives by the majority of characters; an attitude which, by a deeply circular logic, ends us exactly where we are today. It ends us with a bible that, while it is not actually anti-abortion at any point, isn’t exactly a force for bodily autonomy either, at least, not from the perspective of the vast majority of the human characters.
But that’s the thing about the Bible, isn’t it? It’s a deeply meaningful series of texts in which we seek to know God – and often learn a great deal in the process – but it’s still a series of texts whose words and stories were chosen and written by and from the perspective of humans. And while the authorship of pieces is not always clear, it is absolutely safe to say that the biblical texts were written MOSTLY by men, if not entirely, a tradition which continued until recently in translation and interpretation. The choices of words and phrases that direct our understanding, that tell us who and what is important in a given passage (at least to those who held power over the course of centuries) was a process directed by men, and for their own particular purposes, whether or not they intended it that way.
This book of Isaiah is a good example: a quick reading of the English translations we’re most familiar with (the ones not from the last 20ish years) and the interpretations we still hear of them would seem to portray the antisemitic trope of the “wrathful God of the Old Testament” punishing the people for their sin… an interpretation, by the way, that lacks all the self awareness and self-reflection of the original audience, who never really did take Isaiah’s words to heart. But a closer reading, one that accounts for the context of the expansions of first the Assyrian, then the Babylonian empires, and the ways that the powerful leaders of Israel and Judah tried to position themselves to gain the most in that political scenario, calls into question a punishing God, speaking instead of one who points out the natural consequences of vying for self-aggrandizing power, instead of caring for one’s own neighbors. Because that’s Isaiah’s prophecy, time and again: that exploiting and marginalizing and refusing care to the vulnerable – feasting in palaces, for instance, while those who create the wealth of those feasting are hungry and unsheltered, and those who cannot participate in the economy starve – puts us in opposition to the world that God seeks for all of creation. The God of the Hebrew scriptures, every bit as much as the God of the second testament, stands on the side of those whom humans exclude, against those who would use, control, and exploit God’s creation for their own purposes.
Which means that this book of prophecy – written for a specific audience at a specific time, and calling them to account for specific actions and decisions – still has a lot to say to us today, as we inhabit a world in which the particulars may have changed but a lot of the patterns have not. It is still a world in which humans seek power for themselves through exploitation, and manipulation, and the refusal of self reflection or awareness. It is still the world in which the power of patriarchy, or of whiteness, or of capitalism – which stand us firmly on the side of our own self-interest and comfortable belief systems – rule the day, even while God continues to call us to a better way. And that better way exists, not in some far off afterlife, but in every choice we make and every act of violence we accept; it exists for us, even as it did for the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. And it exists very much in the places to which Isaiah continually directs our attention: to the presence of God in exploited, excluded, marginalized bodies.
Which yes, in this past week, includes women, who have just lost the right to autonomy over our own bodies; who have just become, essentially, the property of the state; whose use as incubators for the potential for children has become more important than our own needs, or even our own lives which are already being sacrificed at the altar of white Christian nationalism. But if this particular outcome is our sole focus, then we are still among those whom Isaiah calls in. We are still the ones who refuse the suffering that we ourselves do not experience. Because, as Amanda Doyle noted in this week’s We Can Do Hard Things podcast, the laser focus of so much of feminism has kept at bay the intersecting issues that might have shifted the outcomes of this week.
Her example was Mississippi, in 2011, which put two ballot initiatives to the voters: a personhood amendment and a voter ID law. One, of course, would have made abortion illegal at all, from the moment of conception, and pro choice groups poured money into defeating it. The other would have added a burden to voting, which would disproportionately disenfranchise poor black and latine voters, who would otherwise be the majority in the state. The personhood amendment was defeated, the voter ID bill was passed… but both were reproductive rights issues. Because the now-skewed electorate went on to elect a legislature that did not represent the population, and passed the abortion ban that was, this week, used to overturn Roe.
Election night, in 2011, mostly-white feminists were feasting, while black women – whose maternal mortality rate is far higher – found their access to the democratic process curtailed. And I wonder what Isaiah would have said to that?
Because racism is a reproductive rights issue; everything that happened to white women in the Handmaid’s Tale had already happened in reality to enslaved and segregated black women.
Poverty, housing, transportation are reproductive rights issues.
Voting is a reproductive rights issue.
Gerrymandering is a reproductive rights issue.
Disability justice is a reproductive rights issue.
Employer-based healthcare – which has now expanded to include employer-based abortion access, and is already being used as a bargaining chip in union negotiations – is a reproductive rights issue.
The penal system in this nation, which criminalizes poverty and maintains cycles of violence for the profit of those who own the prisons, and which disproportionately removes black and brown people from the democratic process – and black and brown babies from their families and cultures – is a reproductive rights issue.
Transphobia is a reproductive rights issue, because not all women have uteruses, and not everyone with a uterus is a woman. And because even now, this most recent ruling against bodily autonomy and privacy is being used to prop up calls for the outlawing of gender-affirming care, especially for minors.
The exploitation and harm perpetrated upon vulnerable bodies by the structures of our culture is often rendered invisible to those who are not harmed by those very structures. Patriarchy keeps the suffering of women and trans folk one dimensional, silenced but for simplified narratives, easily dismissed. White supremacy keeps the suffering of black, latine, and indigenous folk on the margins, twisted to create fear in those who might otherwise be moved to compassion and action on behalf of their neighbors. The same power structures that determined whose stories were told in scripture, or which actions were so normalized that it shocks us to hear that David raped Bathsheba? those remain with us, varied in form but retaining their hold on our ability to give the care we are called to give to those who remain in need around us
And still: the call is there. Our God is there. The same God who spoke through ancient prophets to make visible the exploitation, the harm, the inequities… our God speaks to us still, through prophets we seem to hear about as well as the ancient ones did. The call is there because our God remains, even when we struggle to see beyond our own needs or our own grief. Our God remains, even when the world seems to be crumbling around us, even when we want to set it all on fire, as indeed, Jerusalem crumbled and burned – sometimes from the inside – as the power plays of the elites of Judah led the people into devastation and exile. Our God remains, the same God who warned us of the consequences of our shortsightedness. Because our God is not a God who abandons us, or takes pleasure in our misfortune.
And ultimately, that makes today’s text a particularly poignant one: because God is still right where God has always been, in the same place from which our call has come throughout time.
For in an Israel where all has crumbled except the patriarchy (at least momentarily), God places Godself in one who would be no more than property, no more than the source of lineage for some man. God places Godself in a body which would have been valued by the world as a commodity, but which God saw as holy, as worthy, in itself. God places Godself in and among those whose very humanity is not a given, who have to cry out that their lives matter, even in the face of ridicule, even in the face of exploitation and violence. God places Godself in the bodies that our culture uses and discards, in the ones who are crucified for the sake of maintaining the power structures as they are. And God calls us, from those bodies, to Godself; to gather and be nourished, together. To be in communion and find comfort, together. To find the love that enables us to respond to God’s call, together.
God calls us beyond ourselves, as we have been called throughout time, into a world in which God’s creation is not used for the upholding of human power and status. God calls us into a world in which compassion and grace stretch us out across intersecting needs, into a world of justice and equity and bodily autonomy. God calls us into a world that embodies the image of the divine creative spirit, throughout all that God so loves.
In honor of Star Wars Day this week, I re-watched Rogue One. It’s a newer movie, a prequel to the original: the story of how they got the Death Star plans in the first place. And I have to say, it’s one of my favorite Star Wars movies because, unlike the originals, it contains clear reflections on what it was like to live in the Empire, in daily life. It shows the development of all the monuments to glory, with all their destructive power; the violence that is crucial to the imperial project, built upon bodies stripped of their humanity, used and discarded as the Empire desires. This movie shows the constant threat of oppression and annihilation as a means of maintaining order; indeed, in the opening scene of the movie the Imperial elite sent to kidnap and coerce a needed scientist calls the death star – the planet-destroying weapon – a means of bringing peace to the galaxy… to which the scientist suggests that Empire confuses peace with terror. And that is a truth that goes far beyond this one imaginary universe.
For such, indeed, was the Pax Romana, after all: the peace that was maintained by Imperial troops, a peace enforced by threats of violence and oppression. The infrastructure – the roads and aqueducts – for which Rome is now remembered and lauded were first and foremost for the sake of militarization and colonization. They served the assimilation of Mediterranean peoples into the Empire, stripped of their own local traditions and identities, their self determination and rule. For Rome also needed bodies to maintain and extend Empire: the bodies of soldiers, discarded in wars against external others or used to suppress anti-Rome uprisings, including among their own peoples. But also the bodies of the enemies, the “other” against whom Rome created a united identity: those who were tortured publicly for the entertainment of the elites and the controlling terror of the masses, either in the coliseum or hanging from crosses along those well-maintained roads.
This is the way of Empire, always: to create enough comfort to placate the people, giving them safety from battles among local threats, infrastructure and commerce to boost the economy. But Empire always comes at a deep physical cost: in soldiers and laborers, used and discarded and always under the threat of reprisal for ingratitude. It is the way of Empire to create a ritualized ideology that granted a common sense of identity, of citizenship within the Empire, while maintaining an inherent, invisible segregation of those whom the Empire was designed to maintain in power
and those upon whose bodies such power
was enacted and called peace.
It was against precisely such structures of Empire that Revelation was written, and circulated among seven Mediterranean churches serving poor, oppressed communities who had generally known more terror than peace. Revelation is deeply allegorical, with stylized metaphors and heightened imagery drawn from the apocalyptic books of the Hebrew Bible and used as a shield, a code, against any Roman authority into whose hands this writing might have fallen. The imagery is often hard for us – with millennia of distance, less frequent use of shared storytelling to communicate, and usually less familiarity with Daniel, Ezekiel, etc – but it is imagery that, upon examination, holds up a mirror to Empire in any form, and shows it for what it is, if we are willing to look beyond the infrastructure, the comfort we mistake for peace. Revelation shows forth the violence inherent in Empire: the violence necessary to maintain hierarchies of power, the scapegoating, the dehumanization, the use of bodies as material for the Imperial project. Revelation, in densely poetic language, asks us to choose: asks us if the ways of Empire are our ways, are the only ways. Revelation asks us if we like the image of ourselves that we see in its truth: the violence, the cruelty, the erasure upon which our lived realities are built?
And even as it holds up that mirror, and demands that we take a long, hard look, Revelation offers us an alternative. It offers a way we cannot fully imagine on our own, as entrenched as we are in systems not of our own design, systems that are all we have ever known. Revelation offers us a way that shifts us out of human, us/them lenses and reminds us that such exclusionary ways are not the ways to which we are called.
And so Revelation takes our desire for strength, for order. It holds up an image of a lion for us to admire and long for… then shines a light on all the things that strength and order mean, and lead to: hate, fear, anger. And then Revelation turns the lion we’d expected – heard about, hoped for – into a lamb: a lamb that understands the violence of Empire and refuses to engage it. Revelation turns all our notions of strength upside down and asks us to choose between the dehumanizing power of violence and the strength of our own commitments to community, to justice, to love. Revelation asks us to choose the strength that calls not only the powerful, the expected elite, to worship, but which calls all of those who have long been oppressed, long been violated, long been excluded. Because, Revelation reminds us, God calls the multitudes, no longer bodies to be exploited, no longer the others against whom we create our identity, but beloved community standing together on level ground, with no divisions among or between them. God calls the multitudes, centers their stories which have too often been erased, in a love that includes them all in the possibility of a world that yet could be.
Revelation reminds us (despite all the bloody language we’ve come to associate with atonement theology) that oppression, violence, dehumanization are the tools of Empire: NOT OF GOD. Oppression, violence, dehumanization are the tools of Empire, not just of the Romans – though that was the empire they knew best – the tools of all of the nations that use terror and call it peace, from the Coliseum to the Death Star… to the Supreme Court.
C. Wess Daniels, in his excellent commentary on Revelation, called the economics of Empire:
“that which benefits some at the expense of the many. Revelation reveals that imperial economics is an entire system of oppression. It is not just a matter of one person not giving enough wealth [or power (my addition)] away; it is a whole system bent on exploitation.
“Revelation reveals that poverty, slavery, and exploitation of the earth’s resources are not a sign of a broken system. The system is working just as it was designed. And this is the very thing that God threatens very harsh judgement upon.” (p. 27)
And this is exactly what we saw play out this week.
We, who are inheritors of the trauma that Rome inflicted, trauma which has passed through generations of exploitation, colonization, slavery, dehumanization, and violence, we carry Empire so deeply within our own flesh that we cannot see it in our own lives. It is so familiar that in the mirror of this text, we look and only see our culture, our lives, ourselves, even our own God, remade in our own image of hierarchy, and exclusion, and fear.
For this week, we saw a carefully- constructed system work exactly as it was designed to work: from the jurist quoted in the leaked SCOTUS decision – whose belief that white men owned women of any race, as fathers or as husbands or as owners outright, reigned in both British and American common law to the point where it was codified in the constitution’s erasure of both women and people of color as individuals with rights – to the culmination of a carefully crafted political strategy: the brainchild of Jerry Falwell and racist political strategists that exploited the question of abortion, not to care for children
but as a red herring to create a voting block propelled by fear and gruesome images specifically to maintain the power of those same white men endowed by the constitution with ultimate power. These are the men who ran political campaigns “on abortion” so as to gain the political power to maintain segregation academies, and racist homeowners associations, and private prisons incarcerating mostly black men, where their labor could be exploited and wealth could be made off of their dehumanized bodies.
It is the economics of Empire that drive the forces that would force a woman to use her body to nurture another, even against her will, because Empire uses the bodies of those who are not in power to maintain the authority of those for whom the system is designed in the first place. It is the logic of Empire that maintains misogyny, racism, ableism, classism; the oppressive structures that continue to exploit and dehumanize,
that call certain bodies – explicitly or implicitly – worthless and disposable because they do not serve the ideology of Empire, and that convince us by their very pervasiveness that the violence of the system is actually the peace we all seek, rather than the terror we choose not to see
And now we, who stand before the throne, who look upon, not a lion but a lamb: we are called to a new vision, to a new way. We are called to consider whom we expect to see before the throne of God, sealed for salvation? Is it the twelve tribes, in the utter perfection of square numbers multiplied? I suspect that of we answer honestly, this is indeed our expectation.
ow shall we react, when the multitude stand before us: the ones Empire used, discarded; stripped of their rights and told us to fear, and hate, until we were willing to shout “crucify” for the sake of keeping violence out of our own lives and homes?
How shall we react when we see the poor, the incarcerated, the unsheltered, the addicted – when we see the woman who had an abortion because she simply did not want to have a baby – united in the belovedness of a God who refuses the ways of violence and Empire?
For the mirror that Revelation holds is for us, every bit as much as it ever was for the oppressed churches of Rome. Their choice is ours, as well, and it is a choice that we must continually make – and strive to protect – even in the shadow of Empire.
Confession time: I have always found this one of the hardest Sundays to preach. For years, it was because of all the funerals I had done in a given year. I was always so aware of the grief present in the room with s. It felt almost cruel to talk about the miracle of the resurrection – of all of the grieving disciples getting their teacher back, when so many are still coming to terms with the inevitability, the irrevocability of death. And by that logic, in so many ways this one Easter should be the hardest: standing here with you, in this space, for the first time in two years. Two years that have brought death on a scale that our brains cannot fully comprehend, leaving us with a deep cultural trauma that we will not soon overcome; a grief that no amount of platitudes could ever assuage.
And yet, I find that this year is the year that Easter makes the most sense, the year that it slides so much more clearly into the context of the entire Gospel, and of the world as we know it. Because we have had years, now, of oscillating between Good Friday and Holy Saturday, watching and grieving as the Body of Christ is crucified over and over again. And so all of the easy explanations, all of the standard theologies, give way to the heartbreak we have lived and the promises we need to hear.
Because maybe, in this time of grief and trauma we can finally stop saying that God is responsible for death? I know that it can bring a sense of order when we are flailing to figure out a world that feels scary and chaotic, but if it were true, then I for one really struggle to understand why we would be sitting here worshiping someone capable of massacring humanity wholesale. That’s not the act of a loving God – a God who lives in faithful covenant with us throughout time. This is the sort of theology that is always around, that whole “God needed another angel” sort of platitude that we’ve all heard, but never more so that at Easter, when tradition tells us that God is not only responsible for death but that God is actively responsible for killing God’s own child.
And y’all: that is horrifying. That isn’t love. That isn’t grace. That isn’t mercy, or justice, or compassion. And therefore it isn’t God.
So let me just say this, once and for all: God did not kill Jesus. God did not sacrifice Jesus. God is not a murderer. And all of the substitutionary and penal atonement theologies that we’ve all heard – the ones that talk about blood being required as payment for sin?
All. of. that. is. garbage. Throw it all out. All of it.
How do I know it’s garbage? Because this sort of theology makes God over in our image, rather than directing our attention to the image of God that is within us. This sort of theology takes Easter out of the context of the rest of Jesus’ life and ministry, of all of the ways that he tried to help us back into the covenant that God made with humanity… which never involved killing people. Even Jesus, who is equally covered by the sixth commandment.
Throughout the Gospels, we hear about how Jesus moves among us, shifting our focus from our own selves onto those whom we would rather exclude. Jesus shows us ways of living that fly in the face of all of our common sense. And so he doesn’t shame the 5000 hungry folk for not being prepared, for not having planned ahead: he feeds them – and feeds them well. He doesn’t blame the suffering for their lot, or the ill for their afflictions; he simply heals the blind man, the leper, the demon-possessed. He doesn’t punish the folks who caused harm by collaborating with the occupying forces; he gives them a chance to do better, to repent of the harms they have done. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus holds up a mirror to humanity, asks us to look closely, to acknowledge how our actions show forth our priorities and demonstrate more clearly than our words what it is that we worship. Do we let folks go hungry or unsheltered because we love strict rules more than we do the lives of human beings? Do we turn people away because we love our comfort more than their need for community? Do we dehumanize and use people as commodities, as object lessons, as the projection screen for all our fears and desires? Throughout the Gospels, Jesus asks us to examine whether we worship God or our own power, or our own comfort. Jesus asks us to consider whether the ways that we treat those we love the least reflect the way we would treat the incarnate God. Jesus asks us to reflect and then to choose how we will respond to what we see reflected back at us, in ourselves, in the world, in the dream that God has for all of Creation.
The story of the Gospels is not just the story of Jesus, after all; it’s not a biography of a long-past time. Rather, it is the story of how humanity responds to a human God, how humanity responds to the embodiment of love, throughout time.
And we all know how the story ends.
The theology that God sacrificed Jesus out of love for us all is a human conceit that allows us to hold the Gospels at arm’s length, that allows us to refuse the mirror that Jesus holds up to us. The theology that God murdered Jesus so that our sin would be forgiven sets God on our vengeful, self-interested level, such that we can then justify the tremendous cruelty that we are so good at. It allows us the idea that suffering brings salvation, so, for example, the violence done to native populations – colonization, removal to reservations, residential schools, genocide – can be named as salvific, rather than murderous. Likewise the maintenance of the poor in poverty, the exclusion of those struggling with mental illness and substance use, the punishment of bodies that do not fit into human-created parameters that we call “normal” or “good:” these are the toxic outgrowths of the idols we have created. These are the marks of an abusive, gaslighting god who is simply the reflection of human desire and fear, rather than the God who believes us capable of seeing beyond our own limited scope.
As my Methodist colleague, Rev Ben Cremer, wrote this week:
We want the warhorse. Jesus rides a donkey.
We want the eagle. The Holy Spirit descends as a dove.
We want to take up swords. Jesus takes up a cross.
We want the roaring lion. God comes to us as a lamb.
We keep trying to arm God. God keeps trying to disarm us.
God keeps trying to disarm us: to turn us away from violence, to show us the power of vulnerable love, which might make our hearts bleed but which is always more powerful than the violence we so often choose, which spills the blood of another.
Ultimately, the story of this week is not about how God killed Jesus: it’s about how we did. Because the mirror that he held before us – the relationships to which he called us, the love that he showed all around us – was too threatening. was too uncomfortable. was too overwhelming to our need for order, stability, hierarchy, and power. As much as we want to distance ourselves from this story – to make it for us, and not about us – these past two years show us inescapably the continuing crucifixion of the Body of Christ; the ways that we would rather justify acts of violence on the basis of race, of gender, of age, of immune status; the ways that we use bodies to prop up an unjust economy, to rehash all of our trauma, to hold onto our idols of control in the face of unimaginable loss.
The Gospels are not ancient stories that tell us about our past. They are the ongoing narrative of the human condition. They are the mirror that continues to reflect our present: our fears and our hopes, our belief that if we don’t care for ourselves first and foremost, no one else ever will. The Gospels remind us of the human reality that we are all, at varying points every. single. character in this terrible, violent drama of God incarnate inviting us to a new reality, and our ongoing need to make the decision, in every moment. We need to make the decision about whether we’re going to follow; whether we’re going to live into the disarmed, vulnerable, grace-filled love that marks the presence of God in this world.
Which makes Easter, after all, very easy to preach. It’s easy to talk about Easter when it’s not about violent acts resulting in salvation, or this one group of people who got really lucky and found out that death wasn’t actually final after all – unlike the rest of us.
Easter, it turns out, is far easier to preach when it is simply the end result of the fullness of the Gospel: the message and ministry of Jesus alongside the fears and anxieties of humanity, pushed to their most extreme end. Easter is easier to preach when we let go of wanting the triumph – the final vanquishing of the powers of hell, the once and done battle for salvation – and we embrace the knowledge that our humanity doesn’t exclude us from God’s love. Even if we weren’t the ones standing at the foot of the cross. Even if we weren’t the ones going up at dawn to anoint the body. Even if we’re hiding in an upper room. Even if we denied Jesus to save our own skins, or if we sold him out for a handful of silver.
Even then.
Because maybe, despite what orthodoxy and tradition tell us, the resurrection isn’t about a violent God whose traumatic death turns into haha just kidding nevermind, but rather about the fact that even our deepest fears and our most selfish, violent tendencies can’t break God’s abiding love for us. Maybe it’s about the fact that God is going to slip into our shame, our fear, our denial, our disbelief, and give us another chance to follow; another chance to love one another as God has loved us; another chance to inhabit the eternal life that begins, not after we die, but the minute we choose human complexity over rigid rules, curiosity over judgment, self-awareness over trauma responses, love over violence.
Because Jesus showed us that even pushed to its extreme, love will overcome violence; that the love that God has for us, individually and collectively, is such that there is nothing that we can do that can ever break it.
For God is with us. God is in the bodies of the crucified. God is in the love that bears witness to horror. God is in the courage that risks itself to care for victims.
and
God is the presence that calls us out of our fear. God is the compassion that calls us back to hope. God is the forgiveness that reminds us we are not the worst things we have done. God is the second chance. And the third. And the hundredth. God is the resurrection: the life that is always opening before us, if we are willing to perceive it.
And it turns out that’s not such a hard thing to preach, on Easter or any other time in our messy, grace-filled human lives.
This week… ugh. this week.
How does anyone preach on a week like this one has been? what could anyone possibly have to say? It’s the question that pastors around the nation faced, as we sat with events that seemed bigger than any words we could possibly find. Ultimately, of course, the response was the same one that we come to every time it feels as though we’ve finally reached the level of un-preachability: we preach the Gospel. We trust that the texts will have their message for us, even when we don’t have the words.
This week’s texts are timely, but I think most would be in this book whose focus lands so squarely on justice. John the Baptist stands in the wilderness, preahcing a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. In John’s preaching, repentance is necessary. But John’s repentance isn’t about going into a room to pray in solitude and ask God’s forgiveness. John calls the people to a public act, a deliberate act for which one has to leave the known places of their lives, and enter the wilderness. John calls the people, calls us, out of our comfort zones, out of the places we have created to protect ourselves and all that we love. Repentance calls us to a place of vulnerability, as we engage with discomfort within and around ourselves.
We talked last week about perfection not being required, or even desirable, as humans seek to interact with the divine. God does not need us to be perfect, but calls us continually to grow, and develop, and become more than what we were yesterday. And as good as it is to hear that God does not require us to be perfect, there is still a big difference between doing our work imperfectly and consciously committing acts of violence. If we define sin by its literal translation from the Greek – “missing the mark,” you can imagine an analogy in archery – there is still a big difference between not getting a bullseye and not even aiming for the target in the first place. Perfection may not be what God desires in us, but neither does God want grace to become a license for evil, whether that looks like acts of violence or it looks like the refusal to stand up against injustice. Grace is not our “get out of jail free” card: grace is what makes it worth our while to repent, to acknowledge where we’ve fallen short or screwed up and to commit ourselves to doing better.
And that’s just on God’s side.
In this story in the Gospel, both John and Jesus were equally aware that their calls to repentance were not simply about human relationships with the divine, but about human life in community with one another. John preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins in the full knowledge that true forgiveness – true reconciliation and healing – requires accountability, empathy, and remorse. And that a community that cannot commit to those principles will eventually collapse into violence.
There have been a lot of calls since the presidential election for unity and healing, for forgiveness and moving on. Indeed, even in the past few days I have encountered multiple instances of people who expect that Christian love means giving a pass to those who have done violence. I don’t know where or how Christianity substituted the seeking of justice with the concept of a niceness that doesn’t ruffle any feathers, but I do know that no one clued in either John the Baptist, or Jesus himself, about that shift. Because all those calls for unity and healing, without the simultaneous call for justice and repentance, stand in direct opposition to the Gospel which we profess to follow. It is worth noting that John got arrested–and killed– for his work, because the calls to repentance that he proclaimed loudly enough to bring crowds from Jerusalem to the Jordan would have completely overturned the balance of power at the time. His work ran so counter to the ideas of calm and niceness and comfort that those in authority needed to remove him, silence him… and any who might come after him. They needed to put the oppressed firmly in their place in order to maintain the status quo, in order to maintain their own power.
Because the faith which sent John out into the wilderness – the faith which with he called us all to repentance – is the faith that seeks truth over civility, vulnerability over power, justice over comfort. It is the faith that asks us to repent. It is the faith that comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable with the fallout of their actions and their silences. The faith to which John called us, the faith which we follow in the person of Jesus, is still the very faith that rejects the emptiness of unrepentant niceness and forgiveness without consequence.
In what has since become a statement of incredible irony, the author JK Rowling, in the Harry Potter series, noted that to commit acts of violence is to tear apart one’s soul. (Of course, she explicitly said that murder tears the soul, but since the books repeatedly lump the acts of murder, enslavement, and torture together as equally “unforgiveable” and meriting the same consequences, I’m going to go ahead and suggest that she meant that all acts of human violence are equally soul-tearing… did I mention irony?) And in this – unlike so much else she has recently said – I think she is right: the damage that we inflict upon others damages us, tears us apart, within our selves and from our communities. The only way, she notes, to repair that damage – the only way to heal a soul torn by its own violence – is to feel remorse, to feel the harm that we have done to another within our own selves. The only way to heal is to have compassion – literally, to feel with – the person we have harmed, a concept Rowling herself would do well to embody in her dealings with trans folk. She doesn’t use these exact words, but Rowling’s concept of healing is remarkably like the Gospel insistence upon repentance for the forgiveness of sins: a willingness to take responsibility, not only in words but to the core of ourselves, for the violence and harms we have caused, or even the ones we have allowed to happen before us; a willingness not only to take responsibility, but to repent before those whom we have harmed: to name, and feel, and own the deep and lasting damage that our violence, or our silence before it, have done to real people who are supposed to be our neighbors.
Because we cannot say that we didn’t know: only that we refused to see.
The acts of terror and violence this week happened on the day of Epiphany, and in that we must hear our call. The feast of the Epiphany marks the arrival of the Magi to honor the Christ child: it is a day, a season of illumination, of revelation, and letting ourselves see what is right before us. For we remember that the Magi expected to find the baby in Jerusalem and allowed their human understandings to send them off course. Their encounter with the child opened their hearts to the truths they had not understood: the power that Herod would not willingly give up, the violence he would be willing to commit in that process. Epiphany is that moment in our liturgical year when we set aside our understandings of the world as it is, and allow our experience of the Christ child, the reality of God-made-flesh, to break us open to all that we had refused to acknowledge before. This season of illumination throws the world around us into stark relief, changes our perspectives, holds up a mirror before us, and demands our accountability – demands that we take a good, long, honest, vulnerable look at ourselves, at our actions and our refusals to act, and all of the consequences of our deeds. The events of this week are a powerful mirror, setting before us the sins of this nation, of this society, and we are called, as surely as if John the Baptist’s voice rang among us, to go out into the wilderness – the places we are afraid to travel – to step willingly into our vulnerability, and to repent. Because the actions of those who committed violence out of fear of losing their power are a reflection of our unwillingness to believe what our marginalized neighbors have long been begging us to hear: that our nation has forever been one that upholds the power of whiteness, of maleness, of Christian nationalism with tremendous violence and utter impunity.
The events of this week show us, with a terrifying clarity, that white nationalists can plan and organize an insurrection (they had shirts printed, this wasn’t impromptu) with little to no resistance; can occupy the locations of power and authority in this nation and walk out again, most without even a scratch… and they know it. They flaunt it. Because they see, even if we refuse to, that this is indeed who we are. The events of this week force us to look at a nation that our neighbors of color have long described to us, have long begged us to acknowledge… and repent. Repent of the ways that we have refused to acknowledge racism. Repent of the excuses for police brutality. Repent of the silence that keeps us comfortable in our whiteness, in our gender or sexuality, in our citizenship, in our Christianity. The events of this week show us the stark reality that marginalized people cannot express their grief and pain at their oppression, cannot demand justice when they have been wronged, but that white people who simply do not want to share power – whose main purpose is to demonstrate to everyone watching just how much they can do and get away with, just how dangerous they are willing to be for the sake of their own power – can throw violent tantrums with minimal consequence. The events of this week show us who we are, even as our faith reminds us who we are called to be.
It will feel like a wilderness journey, as we venture out of the comforts of our known locations, out of the safety of our privileged experiences, and into the insecurity where so many of our neighbors are forced to live. It is a journey we must make with intention: willing to hear with remorse, and engage with responsibility, as we step closer to the baptismal waters to which we have been called. Because the Good News remains, even in the horrors of an insurrection, even in the wake of violence and terror: there is still the voice of one crying in the wilderness to prepare a way, even here, even now, for our God. And he may not be dressed in camel’s hair, her diet may not consist of sticky insects, but still they call, in the hopes that we will respond: proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Still they call: proclaiming a muddy, cold, uncomfortable accounting that will begin the process of mending the damage, the violence that white supremacist patriarchy has done to our souls, both individually and as a society. Still they call: proclaiming that the vows we made in our own water still hold us, still call us to be more than we are, still offer us the promises of grace in the face of sin.
The Good News is that the illumination of the Epiphany – the clarity we gain from our encounter with the incarnate God – remains before us, beckoning us to look closely, to look beyond our comfort, knowing that even in the unbearable clarity of revelation we are encouraged and held by the one in whom we find new understandings. The Good News is that there is a way to heal the soul-tearing damage of human violence, the rending of the Body of Christ and the bonds of our communal being, not through the niceness and civility that put a pretty façade on evil, but through the mountain-lowering, valley-smoothing, earth-shaking acts of repentance, of compassion, of justice that are possible by grace.
This week has shown us who we truly are, if we are willing to look, and see, and understand. It has offered us as well the opportunity to participate in healing, to repent of the damage we have done or have not prevented, and to seek in humility and love to carve a new path, to prepare a new way for our God. This has been a week that calls us anew into the wilderness, in confidence that there is a path forward, into the waters, that we may hear anew the voice that speaks grace as we emerge from the waters of repentance: the renewing promise that we are God’s beloved children in whom God is well pleased.
And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him… And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. –Mark 1: 10, 12-13
This story hits three major points in just a few verses: Jesus’ baptism, the wilderness and temptation, and the testimony that calls for repentance. Even in just 8 verses of Mark’s gospel, these still seem to be discreet stories; three separate movements of Jesus’ ministry. But together, these three provide a necessary schema: a paradigm for us all to follow in our own lived discipleship. In baptism, we remember that God knows us. In witnessing, we show that we know God. But that middle step, that wilderness time; that is crucial, for in it we come to know ourselves: the selves that God knows, and loves. Through that knowledge, we come to know better the God to whom we are called to witness.
Edward Hicks [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Mark tells us little, here; this gospel writer takes a couple sentences to tell the stories that other gospel writers spend paragraphs on. We are used to hearing more narrative around this wilderness time – details that Matthew and Luke provide in abundance. But I wonder if we don’t need Mark’s brevity, his lack of detail, in order to make this story resonate more clearly in our own lives? I wonder if it isn’t good for us, to be left wanting more, if the lack of detail doesn’t push us to imagine for ourselves what the temptation might have looked like? Does Mark’s bare narrative encourage us to imagine what it would be like to experience that solitude, that wilderness among the angels and the beasts; the love that the fears that inhabit us all?
When we are alone, when we are in wilderness times – when we are thrown into vulnerability and uncertainty – what prowls around, seeking to feed on us? What sustains us in nurture? And what are the temptations that pull at our hearts?
This week, as happens all too often, we are thrown again into the wilderness, into the desolation of despair as seventeen more lives were lost on a day when we as Christians were called to contemplate our own return to dust and ash. This week, we, too were placed among the wild beasts. We were placed as prey among predators: those who would pull us apart one little bite at a time. We were placed, all of us raw and wounded, before a prowling pack, and we found ourselves staring at the curved claws of anger, at the pointed teeth of violence, at the strong jaws of fear. We looked directly into the predatory eyes of a culture built on anger, and self-interest; on power and weaponized violence. And even we, who know ourselves beloved; even we, who understand God’s love and God’s grace for all of creation, felt the tempting pull of the fictitious safety that human power and weaponry promise. We felt the tempting pull of repaying violence with violence; of dehumanizing, of demonizing those of God’s beloved who commit acts of violence, those of God’s beloved whose response to the wilderness is not ours. Even we, who profess God’s love poured out upon us all feel, in times like this, the tempting pull of turning away from love in the name of individual freedom and security.
This week, as happens all too often, we who are God’s beloved have been put into this story of wilderness and temptation. We have found ourselves among beasts and angels. We have been face to face with the tempter, and in our responses, we have borne witness to the gods that we worship.
Jesus, cast out into the wilds beyond the Jordan – beyond even the wilderness where John was baptizing the people of Judea – came face to face with his own beasts: his own temptations about how to respond in the face of fear, in the face of possible violence. Jesus, in vulnerable solitude, likely heard the same tempting whispers that we ourselves have come to know: the ones that urged the security of the preemptive strike, the ones that suggested the safety of being the most powerful. Jesus, as human as any one of us, stood alone among the beasts, tempted. It is a story we find familiar, this week especially.
But Jesus saw what we so often neglect: the angels. Literally, these are the messengers of God, of the gospel – not necessarily the winged humans of renaissance paintings, but the presence of love, of grace, of humility, of compassion made tangible before him. Or before us.
We don’t know, from Mark’s account, what happened in that wilderness encounter when Jesus stood alone between the predators and the Good News of God. We don’t really know what Jesus saw, looking into the eyes of the beasts. We don’t really know what the temptations were, or about the specific nurture of God’s messengers in that moment. All we know is the response to that wilderness time was the witness to the imminence of God’s kin-dom, and the call to repent: to turn our hearts to the God whose love endures even wilderness predators.
What does our witness say of us? we, who are confronted with beasts; we, who hear the whispers of the tempter; we, who know the nurture of angels? What is our witness, as we emerge from this wilderness time, from our latest confrontation with violence, from our temptations to fear and human forms of security?
What is our witness as those who have been fully known, as those who have been called God’s beloved, as those who have been guided and kept by God’s Holy Spirit? What is our witness, to our friends and our families, on email and facebook and twitter? What is our witness to our senators and representatives? What is our witness, to our communities, to our teachers, to our children? Is it our acquiescence to the power of the predators? Is it the temptation of dominance, of fighting violence with violence, death with death?
Or shall we emerge from the wilderness sustained by angels, testifying and bearing witness to the good news that the kin-dom of God is near, if we but turn our hearts. The kin-dom of God is near, where predators will lose their power and prey their fear, where the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and seventeen children shall finally lead us.
No one was truly sure how it had happened. How do such things happen, anyway? And how long before they are noticed? It’s hard to tell. Yet so it was, in the little town on the hillside; the prosperous little town full of healthy, hardworking people. A happy town known for its hospitality and generosity in abundance.
Years later, when someone would ask, no one could say for certain when they’d noticed. It had been subtle at first, just barely perceptible in pants that felt loose, shirts that didn’t fit as well through the shoulders. Perhaps it was the very intimacy of these discoveries, the individuality of them, that kept people from noticing, right away. Perhaps it was the subtlety of the change: a pound gone here, another there, over the course of years. Slowly, though, the whispers began. First, about thelosses that others were enduring: parents in the schoolyard, talking in murmured euphemisms, of how their own parents seemed somehow to be fading; how, perhaps, have you noticed? the shop owner? the principal? the city councillor? is it just me, or…?
No one remembered how it started; no one remembered when. But they remembered the first time someone said it, during a town meeting. They remembered how the mayor had been reassuring, but unconsciously hitched up his own pants, just a bit. They remembered how the town doctors had gone to a conference in the valley, how they’d been relieved to know it wasn’t just their town, how they’d been reassured, when the doctors came back sure it was just an infection. These things happen, you know. Feed a cold, you’ll be fine.
They remembered how, at the town meeting called to hear the doctors’ report, a tiny girl had suddenly leapt almost out of her mother’s arms; had made the whole room laugh as she cried, “I FLY!”
The reassurances of that meeting, and the question of a virus that would disappear with rest and nourishment, had sparked a sudden bustle of recipes. They were exchanged in whispers, argued over, bragged about. Choice ingredients disappeared from the market, following one fad, and then another, only to be kept hidden in the back of pantries. Neighbors grew suspicious of one another, as they borrowed a cup of sugar and saw the pantry door, once thrown wide, was now kept half-closed. Community dinners, once lavish affairs, became more simple, as precious nourishment was kept within the family to try to stem the infection… or whatever it was, because no one could quite isolate it. And no meal, no expense, could stop what was, by this point, apparent: the town was getting thinner.
The terms used varied, depending on the person; the more politically savvy would say people were “leaner,” but everyone recognized that for the tact, the spin it was. The simple truth was that the adults in the town losing weight. Less so the kids, though the age varied: somewhere between eight and twelve, thereabouts – the age of maturity, the age of awareness. The town was getting thinner, and the wind that blew down the hill seemed sometimes as if it would blow them all clean away.
Meetings were called. Very soon the doctors’ findings treated with derision. Other specialists were called in: nutritionists, who called for a traditional diet; coaches, who recommended new workouts to hip music; consultants, who suggested treating the kids before they got it too… and not a few snake oil salesmen, as will happen, in situations like this. At every meeting, the townfolk became less convinced, and more skeptical – after all, nothing had ever worked, why should the new suggestions? And so the snake oil salesmen weren’t the only ones dismissed, after halfhearted attempts at working out to music that felt unfamiliar, or at treating kids for an ailment no one really understood anyway.
More than once, at a town meeting, the little girl had interrupted. Having soon grown too big for her newly-tiny mother, she would flap her arms and run up and down the aisles of the school auditorium where they all sat hunched up against the wind. The first time it had been cute; quickly, the adults, tense and anxious, asked her mother to remove her and not to bring her back, this little one who couldn’t understand the terrible gravity of the town’s problems.
But no one could remember how it began. Surely, something had changed? Some thought that perhaps, if they could just remember; just find the missing ingredient; the thing they’d had then, before the problems began… but as the years went on, the unity of the town began to splinter. Younger people, plagued with the same affliction, blamed their elders for not doing more, sooner. The elders blamed their children for not being more invested in finding a solution. They all blamed the wind, against which they struggled daily, wasting precious calories, having to fight to remain upright. Community dinners became tense affairs, with bland food in small dishes so there was hardly enough for those who brought the food, let alone for those who wandered in, hungry and tired, in need of hospitality. Indeed, it seemed that the whole town was collapsing inward: the stores closed, their owners weakened and tired. The roads cracked, potholes sank, street sweepers came less and less often. Volunteers kept up the flower beds, until their bodies grew too frail, and the wind rattled the weeds that sprang up in abundance.
The city council tried to step in, but dealing with a crisis like this was beyond anything they’d ever had to do, and they sat, looking at one another around the council table – at the gaunt, drawn faces, prominent collarbones showing under loose, ill-fitting clothes – debating for the twentieth time the same idea.
Town meetings were somber, bitter affairs by this time, lively only when they were antagonistic. On their way out, people were known to joke that they felt even thinner than when they’d gone in, and there might have been truth to that… but it was hard to tell. The children of the town were, by now, accustomed to adults who appeared almost skeletal, their eyes prominent above sharp cheekbones, their hands that seemed to be just a collection of bones wrapped tight in dry, leathery skin. Adults who leaned into the wind, struggling as though against an invisible assailant. And this sharp and brittle collection of people exchanged sharp, brittle words, as pointed as their elbows, seeking solutions and just as quickly picking apart the suggestions with bony fingers.
The little girl, not quite so little anymore, stood quietly beside her mother – old enough now to be allowed in the meetings; no longer flapping down the aisles after cutting her finger on the protruding hip bone of a former shopkeeper. She stood and listened to the wind, rattling among them through the old, leaky windows and the cold, hissing words. In a moment when the wind stilled, and silence hovered, she spoke her solution to the ever-present problem, her words still full and round and childish: “We could fly…”
Brittle, hard laughter crackled around the room until the mayor looked thoughtfully at the child. “Perhaps,” he mused, his voice tight, “it’s the one thing we haven’t tried.” The room, shocked into deathly silence, gaped at him. He shrugged, a gesture that seemed to put him in danger of collapse. “The wind is the one thing left to us, if we can harness it…” Each word fell from his thin, fleshless lips, as the crowd drew its collective breath.
It wasn’t that simple, of course, though it was not quite as hard as people would remember. No one wanted to leave the town. And between those who reluctantly began tearing down, convinced it was the end, and those who held on, certain it was their own bodies being torn apart, it was astonishing that it happened at all. Both sides were convinced that death was imminent. They saw it clearly in the walking skeletons who implemented tise final, desperate plan: the flying machine made of the schoolroom floors, the store counters, the mayor’s desk; nailed together with the accusations of precious materials held back and hidden safely away; sealed with the hopes born of desperation, that death might not come today; weighted down with the fears – on both sides – that this attempt, with everything at stake, would fail. For as the people grew lighter, as they grew to resemble walking bones, the possibility of flight weighed heavier among them until it seemed that even the strongest wind could not lift them from this place where they were rooted.
Finally, the flying machine was ready. Finally, the will of the people would be put to the test. Finally, the work of their hands would lift them out of the desolation that had once been a prosperous and happy town. And in the years to come, everyone would remember how it happened that the people – mere bones by that point -took their place within this creation of theirs, this product of their hopeful anxiety, their despairing dreams. In the years to come, everyone would remember how the wind came up and blew over them, rattled through them; how they shivered once and seemed to fall apart, how they could not move.
And then…
No one was truly sure how it had happened. How do such things happen, anyway? And how long before they are noticed? It’s hard to tell.
The little girl – the annoying one, the outspoken one, the bothersome one, with her crazy ideas about flying – was she among them, where they lay in the midst of all that was so precious? Was she still in the village? or up on the hill, looking upon them, her eyes full, spilling tears of grief, of compassion? No one could say, and no one would quite be able to remember, in the years to come, how long it was before the breeze stirred down the hill, through the village, around the flying machine; how the girl lifted her arms, leaned back, easily, gently, let the wind catch her lightness… let it catch her up as a parent lifts a beloved child to carry her to safety.
And how did it happen? How do such things happen, anyway? that the breeze brought her words back to stir among the bones of the people; words like the rush of summer wind:
“It is not the work of our own hands that we need. We cannot control the wind. It is not ours. But we can still fly.”
And the wind, soft, gentle, round and warm and full of promise, moved over those who had been reduced to their hardest parts. And the bones trembled with possibility, as they felt themselves take flight.
The hand of the Lord said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”
…he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. -John 4:3-4
There are just moments in scripture that make me feel bad for the disciples.
In John’s gospel, the disciples’ call story follows directly on Jesus’ baptism. Those first disciples are present, there at the Jordan, and they take John’s word for who Jesus is, and follow accordingly. From there, more join in, following the word of mouth invitation to “come and see.” And goodness, do they see! Those first experiences with Jesus were exhilarating: the wedding at Cana, where he turned water into wine must have felt like a joyful, easily appreciated sign. And even as Jesus, in Jerusalem for the Passover, drove out the money lenders and vendors from the Temple, it must have been fun to be behind him, watching this moment of purification. It seems like a moment that would be almost as intoxicating as the wine.
If what you knew of your teacher was wisdom, power and wine, it strikes me that it would be pretty easy to follow. And so I wonder if these new disciples didn’t relax a bit, as they traveled Judea and Galilee? I wonder if they didn’t get a bit lulled into ease and abundance?
And then they went home. Back to Galilee.
And Jesus had to go through Samaria.
It seems like a throwaway line in the Gospel; it’s not part of the lectionary text in this story, after all, how important could it be?
Samaria is the land between Judea and Galilee, home to those utterly despised by Judeans and Galileans alike. Contact with a Samaritan would render a Jew ritually unclean; travel through the region was therefore unsafe. Although the direct line to Galilee could go through Samaria, no practicing Jew at time would take that particular route, but would go up the far side of the Jordan, so as to avoid the Samaritans. So as to avoid contamination.
But Jesus had to go through Samaria
I wonder what the disciples thought of this. What did they think, as they approached Sychar and went to buy food from those whom they would have shunned, normally? What did they think, when they arrived back to find Jesus talking with a Samaritan – and not just a Samaritan, but a woman! A woman who had the audacity to look Jesus in the eye, to express her own opinions, to ask theological questions, to push and prod and examine him? We’re only in the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel, and the honeymoon is already over.
For us, here and now, this scene is not surprising. This is, after all, the Jesus we’ve come to expect: the one who doesn’t abide by social graces but lives in God’s grace, in every interaction. I think sometimes we forget that the disciples didn’t have the full picture. They didn’t know how the story would end. They didn’t entirely know what they had signed up for when they had been invited to “come and see.” They didn’t know the grace, the power, the resurrection, as we do. So they are far more shocked than we are to find Jesus hanging out with a Samaritan woman (not an immoral one, as tradition holds, but still a woman from a despised people). We are not surprised that Jesus’ first illustration of the words he spoke, just one chapter before, “God so loved the world that he sent his son…” should remind us that the world God loves includes Samaria. We are not surprised and how the story develops from there, and chuckle tolerantly at the surprise of the disciples for whom this is a startling development; who might be just starting to question who it is that they have chosen to follow.
We are not surprised when it happens to the original disciples, when it’s told in hindsight, when it’s a story. So why are we surprised when it happens to us?
That Jesus had to go through Samaria was as shocking to the disciples as it would be to us to find that he had to go through Syria, or Iran, or Sudan, or Somalia, or Libya, or Yemen, to find someone who would recognize the presence of God. I feel bad for those early disciples, shocked out of the joyous honeymoon phase, because I am a disciple myself who sometimes wishes that being church was all water into wine and turning the tables of corruption. I feel bad for them, because often enough, I don’t want to go through Samaria.
It’s a hard thing, to see the folks whom we’ve pushed to the margins as being beloved of God, as being part of the world God loves, as being able to make known to us the presence of God in ways we had not yet fully understood. It’s a hard thing, when those we follow call us to walk a path we’ve resisted all our lives, a path that feels unsafe and uncertain. It’s a hard thing, when discipleship calls us to question our assumptions, calls us to love those we have been taught to despise, calls us to choose compassion over sectarianism, calls us to risk our status in polite company – to choose the company of the “unclean”, uncomfortable, and often unwelcome. It’s a hard thing, when following Jesus takes us to the margins, to the place where we are called to see the humanity of those whom we may have long excluded, whom we have called dangerous, or unworthy, or simply “other.” It’s a hard thing when being the church that follows Jesus makes it feel like the honeymoon is over, and leads us through Samaria.
It was a hard thing for the disciples then, and it is hard for us now. The call into the places we fear and avoid is every bit as hard to discern for us as for the disciples. But we who chuckle at the discomfort of the disciples could learn a bit from them, as well: these people who followed, even when it meant going through Samaria; even when following took them into uncomfortable, unclean spaces. We could learn from those who were taught how to accept hospitality from the “other”, the despised and rejected. We could learn from those who, against all their instincts and learned prejudices, followed Jesus, whom they were still learning to trust.
Even into Samaria.
The Samarias of our world might not look as they did to the disciples, but they will still be the places that we have written off, or the people that we have rejected. Our own walks through Samaria will be the ones that call us to question our assumptions and check our privilege. And they might just make us as confused as the disciples; just as uncertain of our path, and those who lead us along it.
There will be times when we look at our leaders – our pastors and modern-day prophets – and say, “You’re going to make us go through Samaria?” And we will long for the simplicity of wisdom and wine, of sweetness and abundance, of truth spoken to external powers, rather than to our hearts. I hope, that when those moments come, we will remember that sometimes it is only in Samaria that we find the presence of God revealed, that we see the full extent of God’s love for this world.
Because it is when we allow ourselves to be led into Samaria, when we find that we have to walk that path, that the expansiveness of God’s grace is truly revealed. It is in the Samaritan woman that we remember that God’s love exceeds our human limitations, and includes those whose exclusion we justify. It is in the Samaritan woman that we remember that the Body of Christ, the world that God loves, cannot be contained by human borders or judgments, but that God is present among those on the margins, among those whom we consider irrevocably “other.” It is in the Samaritan woman that we see God as God, rather than as a reflection of ourselves, and we remember why, despite our discomfort, we had to go through Samaria.
My prayer for us all is that we will end up spending a lot of time in Samaria; a lot of time seeking God in places we have not dared to venture for a long time. My prayer is that we will trust in one another, and in the God who is beyond our understanding, and in so doing create anew a church in which grace abounds, in which love abides beyond all that we have experienced to this point, and that you will accept the hospitality to stay in the margins, the unexpected places where God is revealed.
Even if it means going into the places of uncertainty and discomfort.
Even if it means going to places you’d rather avoid.
Even if it means going through Samaria.
… he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. -John 3b-4
God so loved the world… That famous verse, John 3:16, the verse that folks put on signs at football games. I will admit: I don’t entirely get it. It’s a beautiful verse, yes, but there are a lot of beautiful verses, especially ones about God’s love. Why does this one get all the attention?
Reading Carol Howard Merritt’s new book, Healing Spiritual Wounds, gave me a hint. In the book, she tells a story from her time in conservative Christianity. She went to Bible College, and one of the assignments was to go out and convert people – to get them to say the sinner’s prayer along with the student, and thereby accept Jesus in their heart. The version she prints says:
Jesus, I know that I have done bad things. I want to change. Please forgive me. I invite you to come into my heart and live there for the rest of my life. Amen.
That’s it. A conversion could be done, as Carol attempted, at an airport, in the time between getting coffee and getting on the flight. Just these few words – this brief profession – could mean salvation from an eternity of fire. Just these few words, without any real context – no real preparation, no real follow through – are sufficient in order to be “born again,” in order to cross the line of belief.
I want to be clear: these words are fine, there is nothing wrong with them. These words could be very meaningful, in the right context – they could be just the words that a person needs to say as they step into a life of faith. But airport conversions, like John 3:16 signs, point to a thread in modern Christianity – and not just in the conservative parts of it – that hold belief as the most crucial element ; that hold an individual’s direct connection with God, or Jesus, as the clearest indication of their salvation. It’s the idea that God loved the world enough to save believers, the ones who had made a choice – in an airport, or on a street corner, or in church – to accept Jesus, to be born anew, to get right with God.
It’s a compelling idea that there is a formula, that there is a key, that there are a few words that can turn everything around. It’s a compelling idea that belief is all we need: belief in one who loves, belief in one who does not condemn. It’s a compelling idea, possibly because it’s an achievable idea; because professing belief doesn’t really require much of us except, perhaps, acknowledging our imperfection and inviting Jesus to love us anyway.
It’s almost a shame that John’s gospel doesn’t end right there, with this lovely verse.
But it doesn’t.
Jesus tells Nicodemus, this learned religious man, about God’s profound love for this world, about God’s promised kingdom and our place within it. Jesus tells Nicodemus that God so loves the world that God’s own flesh will bring rebirth, renewal, salvation.
And then it goes on.
And then it goes on through Samaria.
We are told that Jesus, returning to Galilee from Jerusalem, had to go through Samaria. But that’s not geographically true. Really, no practicing Jew would have willingly gone through Samaria, would have risked encountering the enemy, or becoming ritually unclean, when it was just as easy to go up far side of Jordan River and into Galilee that way. But Jesus had to go through Samaria because no one loved Samaria. Jesus had to go through Samaria because everyone knew God loved Judeans and Galileans best, these ones who worshiped correctly, in Jerusalem. Jesus had to go through Samaria, not because of geography, but because of theology. Jesus had to go through Samaria, this land the despised and demeaned, to remind us that it’s not all about us, to remind us that belief is just the first step. Jesus had to go through Samaria because God so loved the world, not just our little corners of it.
These early verses in John 4 are a needed corrective, then as now, to the desire for a simple faith, to the desire to think that God loves us, took on flesh for us, and that our acquiescence – our acknowledgement of that – is sufficient. These early verses in John 4 are a needed corrective that points us from what Dietrich Bonhoeffer termed “cheap grace” (or, perhaps in John’s parlance, cheap love) which is that grace, that love which allows us our weaknesses, our prejudices, our failures, our animosity. Cheap grace tells Nicodemus it’s okay to despise Samaritans because God will forgive him. Cheap grace tells us that it’s okay to prioritize convenience over justice, because God will forgive us. Cheap grace justifies our actions, our human weakness, by telling us God understands – God was human too, once! – so we can just keep on keepin’ on. Cheap grace holds up the sign for John 3:16, but doesn’t move on to verse 17, and certainly doesn’t feel the need to go through Samaria.
Cheap grace doesn’t follow Jesus, once we know he loves us.
The grace that follows, that takes us beyond those stadium signs, is costly. The grace that speaks the words of the Sinner’s Prayer from the heart: that invites God’s love to come through us, as through Samaria, is going to ask something of us in return.
It is not uncommon, in reading this passage, to be a little condescending to poor Nicodemus: to think he doesn’t get it – of course Jesus isn’t talking actual rebirth! – to watch him walk away from the faith that we profess so easily on any given Sunday. But I wonder if that’s fair. I wonder if maybe he didn’t understand quite well what was being asked of him, the cost of the love that was being offered. I wonder if, perhaps, Nicodemus didn’t see the breadth of the world he was being asked to love, the need to expand his heart and change his perspective entirely? I wonder if Nicodemus didn’t understand that belief in one individual heart is a great starting place, but that it will necessarily compel us away from individuality, into relationship, into community, into the world? Maybe Nicodemus walked away because he understood better than we do that belief in a God who loves the world will make us go through Samaria, will make us love those we have been taught to despise, will make us choose compassion over sectarianism, will make us risk our status in polite company, will render us “unclean”, uncomfortable, and often unwelcome.
Belief in God is not for the faint of heart. Because believing in God, and the only begotten Son leads us out into the world that God loves… even into Samaria, even into Syria, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, even into the neighborhoods in our own nation where we drive with doors locked and windows up, even into cheap motels and encampments of our own city – these shelters of last resort, these unshelters of no resort. Belief in God and the only begotten Son leads us to see God’s love for the world reflected in those we despise, in those we fear, in those we shunt to the margins and exclude from “polite company.” Belief in God demands our hearts be broken, demands that our failings not become our excuses. Belief in God requires that that Sinner’s prayer become, not the words of our lips, but the deepest desire of our hearts, the one that impels us out into this beloved world. Belief in God calls us to salvation, but we have to go through Samaria.
This is the grace that will cost us, that will change us entirely, that will plunge us, not once but over and over into the waters of rebirth, into the spirit of renewal. This is the love of God for the entire world that will call us, again and again, from a faith we profess to a faith we live and to a belief that lives through us. This is the faith that will call us out into the Samarias of our world where Christ is present, if we have eyes to see. This is the faith that reaches deeper than stadium signs and airport conversions. This is the belief that reaches into our hearts and pulls us outward into the kingdom that awaits.
We just have to go through Samaria
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. -Matthew 4:1
The devil takes a while to get to the scene of temptation.
Did you ever wonder why?
The common understanding is that the devil waited until Jesus was weakest. That makes sense, anyway – why not wait until your adversary is most likely to be defeated?
Perhaps that is the reason.
I wonder.
I remember, a little too clearly, what I was like in college: a white girl from a privileged Boston suburb, attending a city school, the University of Pittsburgh. I remember watching my black classmates sit together at dinner, and wondering why I found it so hard to break in to their circle. I remember participating in specifically feminist activities and events on campus, all the while being very proud of myself for not “needing” to attend a women’s college. I remember being sure, somewhere inside myself, that if God loved all of us, and if we were to love each other, we needed to spend time together. And not in segregated spaces. This, it seemed, was the point of discipleship: hadn’t Jesus called people from all over, from all walks of life, to be together in the Kin-dom? Hadn’t Paul called us members of one Body, and reminded us to eat together, to worship together, to shelter and feed each other?
When I was in college, I strove to be colorblind, to learn to compete and achieve in a man’s world. When I was in college, I believed in a meritocracy, and grounded that belief in God.
Jesus goes out to the Jordan to be baptized by John – his cousin, according to some accounts – who had been preaching prophetically, out there beyond the cities, in his own wilderness. John preached, calling out hypocrisy, reminding us of our need for repentance, which is more than just saying we are sorry, but but changing, within our hearts, in irreversible ways. This prophet knows Jesus, in a very profound way; knows not only the man, but the spirit that is within him. Perhaps it is in the face of this Spirit, that he tries to decline, tries to convince Jesus he doesn’t need this water baptism, doesn’t need to be made new, doesn’t need to know God’s grace. But Jesus insists. Jesus, fully human, needs the rebirth of baptism. And then: perhaps, only then, can he follow the Spirit.
It strikes me, reading this text, that we need to feel the need to change before the wilderness is going to do us any good at all. We need to be aware of our need for repentance before we start the fast, before we seek after grace, before we go toe to toe with the devil.
It is human nature to filter our understandings of the world through our own experiences. It is human nature for people to not see or understand what they have not themselves experienced, to assume that others experience the world as they do, and that that way is “normal.” It’s why I didn’t understand the need for the black students at Pitt to find community in common experience. It’s why I didn’t truly get the power and potential of a women’s college for finding a voice that is too often silenced. It’s why so many of us don’t fully get the outrage at young black men, disproportionately stopped, arrested, and imprisoned. It’s why so many of us don’t quite understand the need for marginalized groups to be with those who don’t need to be educated, those who aren’t going to speak in well-meaning micro-aggressions. It’s human nature to see our lives as “normal” and therefore discount the experiences of others.
And human nature is hard to overcome.
It takes real acts of grace, in the face of our dismissiveness. It takes real acts of repentance and renewal to even begin, especially when we’ve been used to seeing our human nature as God’s will.
And although human nature is hardly washed away in the waters of baptism, that seems like a pretty good place to start, if one is preparing to walk along the path that God has laid before us. Even if you’re Jesus. Because it’s not only at Christmas that we need to take the incarnation seriously: the reminder that the divine came to reside within humanity in all of its messiness. And if we do take the incarnation seriously, we need to remember that Jesus was human, with all the biases and struggles that entails; with all the need for repentance, and wilderness, and grace.
Because listening for the call of God is pretty easy, when God says what we want to hear; when we hear God speaking in our own voice – the voice of good intentions.
It took me a long time to see beyond my own privileged experiences. It took a lot of arguments before I learned to shut my mouth and listen; to recognize my own biases, my need for repentance. It took a lot of grace, from those willing to challenge my hubris. It took a long time before I was prepared even for that first step, that plunge into the water, let alone to take those first steps into the wilderness, that place of introspection and self-awareness, that place where we remember that the voice of God isn’t always calling us in ways that echo human nature. It takes a long time for human beings to recognize the particularity of our experience, especially when it’s considered “normal.” It takes a long time for humans – incarnate beings – to see our privilege: the things we can take for granted, the things that are handed to us, whether or not we deserve them. I t takes a long time to recognize the grace that we so often don’t deserve; to feel, in that grace, the need to change our hearts, our perspectives, in irreversible ways; to come face to face with the temptations this world pushes on us and recognize them for what they are.
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. But the devil took a while to get there; or at least, to be recognized as such. Time enough for Jesus to take a good hard look at the world around him, in which he’d been raised, at the biases of his own human heart. Until finally, one day, in his hunger he looked at the rock and knew that he could use his power for his own benefit, but that true nourishment lies in community, not in isolation.
And that day he knew that he could leap from the highest point imaginable and not be hurt, but that true devotion was not making God fly to him, but standing with God at the margins to support those who fell easily off of pebbles. That day, he saw clearly the trappings of power, of privilege, wielded for their own sake – even with the best of intentions – served as tools of oppression, and that the true power was held in open hands, given freely and without counting the cost.
It takes time, for us to approach the Jordan.
It takes time, for us to hear the Spirit’s pull into the wilderness.
It takes time, before we are ready to grapple with the tempter.
It takes time. Sometimes, it takes 40 days, often it takes more, to make the real, irreversible changes, to bring about repentance in the face of God’s grace that calls and accompanies us throughout our preparation for discipleship.
It takes time, but at the end, we walk out of the wilderness. At the end, we walk away from temptation, into the resurrection, and the kin-dom life of God’s eternal promises.
When I met Jeannie, she was about 22, recently graduated from college, and working as an intern in my company. She had been assigned to a project with some colleagues of mine, so I didn’t work directly with her; I saw her mostly in meetings, and noticed her because she was particularly quiet and attentive.
It took me a while to realize she was deaf; she had left stuff on copier, and I brought it to her desk, approaching from behind her, talking and assuming she could hear. She jumped, obviously; she hadn’t known I was there. I apologized, but was fascinated: I had never really known a deaf person! As I gave her the papers, I watched as she read my lips. She signed and said Thank you, her voice thick and imprecise.
Back at my desk, I emailed Jeannie to apologize again for startling her. She answered graciously, with some suggestions for how to approach her next time, so that she would be aware of my presence. I wrote right back – fascinated, curious. I asked questions about her life, her disability… the conversation was wonderful and exciting. Over email, I almost forgot she was deaf: she was bright and funny and articulate, telling me all of the ways she dealt with the world in college and in the workplace. She talked about her dreams for a future in engineering, although I was a little startled at the reason; I’d imagined it would be to create a better hearing aid or implant, but she was interested in cheaper, eco-friendly building materials to build low-income housing.
We hadn’t been friends for long when I thought about the healing service at my church. We hold it once a year, hosting a preacher who tours the country. He’s a really big deal and very expensive, but he went to school with our pastor so he includes us on the tour. Every year, we rent out the high school gymnasium and people come from all over. It’s an all-day thing, with local preaching and bands and prayer groups; at the end of the day, the famous preacher comes out and preaches, gets us all fired up with the Spirit, and ends by bringing a few people forward and healing them. I’ve seen people get over cancer; people in wheelchairs get up and walk. I know – I didn’t believe it either! but I’ve seen it!
And I wanted Jeannie to go.
She was such a nice girl. I wanted her to be healed, to be able to lead a fulfilling life.
I didn’t totally know how to ask her, so I just started casually mentioning my church while we were emailing, one day. When she expressed some interest, I asked her to come with me, and arranged to pick her up on Sunday morning.
When we got to church, I started to sit in my regular spot, sorta halfway back. But Jeannie gestured, and led us forward, so I followed, asking her why… forgetting she couldn’t hear me. I waited until she looked at me, and asked again why we had to sit at the front.
“To read lips,” she said. I’d forgotten how hard it was to understand her when she spoke aloud. Still, I nodded, and made the sign for “yes”; I’d learned a few basic signs, thinking that she’d be pleased. But she just smiled briefly and began looking around at the church. She seemed to follow service pretty well, and enjoy it; afterwards, I took her downstairs to get coffee and cookies. Another church member needed to talk to me, as often happens, so I introduced Jeannie to youth director and left them chatting.
It was about twenty minutes before I could come back to get her. Although alone in that moment, she seemed happy, and as we left it seemed to me she was glad she’d come.
During the week, I followed up with her over email, told her I’d pick her up again on Sunday. But she told me she’d take the bus, for the youth director had asked her to come early to help with programming. Sure enough, when I walked in for service, there she was, right up front. The music was particularly good that day, and I found myself both sorry that Jeannie couldn’t enjoy it and glad she was coming to the church; she was on the path to healing, even though she didn’t know it yet. She didn’t know that she too would get to enjoy music…
In the weeks to come, Jeannie got more and more involved. She worked in the Sunday School, to the point where I nearly never saw her at coffee hour that she didn’t have a kid attached. And she volunteered with our mission projects, helping to build houses, working with the homeless. Actually, she was the one who pushed to have a washing machine put in at the church for the homeless, and she single-handedly organized a sleeping-bag drive for them, too.
Of course, through Jeannie, our church started working with the disabled. Soon, more and more of them started coming to our church. Some folks grumbled, but I was thrilled! I’d invited Jeannie so she could be healed; now all these other new folks could be too!
There really was something about Jeannie, though… she brought a new life, a new energy to the church. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there was a difference. Maybe I was just paying more attention? But it seemed like the church was filled with renewed life, added zeal; that the noise at coffee hour was up just a bit; that people were more animated – talking with their hands, kids running around, pushing the little girl who came in wheelchair, while taking care not to hit the blind man. Whatever it was, it was nice to watch… and nicer still to imagine what was in store for them.
The healing service happened on a Saturday.
We’d advertised for weeks leading up to it: talked about it in church, sent out emails and letters, posted on Facebook and Instagram. I arrived early to help set up, but felt continually distracted. I kept scanning for Jeannie, for the new people from church, unable to contain my excitement at the miracles I’d be seeing for people from my own church!
People began to arrive, the room began to fill; I was kept so busy I couldn’t watch as I would have liked for my own church members. As the event began I stood towards the back of the auditorium with the overflow – it was standing room only! – looking all around for a familiar head in the crowd. With the stage lights up and the house lights down, it was impossible to recognize any but those people right around me, and I finally resigned myself to simply enjoying the day, figuring I’d at least see them at the end, when the preacher called them up.
He was on fire, it was without a doubt the best preaching I’d ever heard. Dozens went forward to be healed at the end of the service, and I stood on my toes, craning my neck to see…
Jeannie was not among them.
No one I recognized was.
The next day I found Jeannie right in the front row at church, as usual. I stood right in front of her, hurt and angry, and looked directly into her face. “Why weren’t you there yesterday?” She gazed at me, steadily, calmly, then held out her bulletin. I glanced down: it was the day of the children’s program. I was stunned. I knew she was involved, but… “You chose that over…” I sputtered. But she wasn’t looking at me anymore.
I took my seat – the one where I’d sat with Jeannie for weeks – still fuming.I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t understand.
Lost in my anger, I didn’t see the children come in, didn’t see that church was beginning until the pastor got up to welcome us… and one of the kids was beside him, signing. Translating. He was one of the new kids, so I didn’t think much of it. But then another kid took his place, one who had been part of the church forever. There he was, signing the Call to Worship, grinning. Delighted in his newfound skill he was signing joy! Praise to God!
I couldn’t help but smile at him, too.
When we stood to sing, all the children gathered at the front of the church, the sighted ones gently leading their blind friends. Children with crutches, with wheelchairs came to the front, every child in the church dancing to the music, each moving as the Spirit led them. Each one radiant, purely happy. Over to the side, Jeannie and the youth director were dancing as well; Jeannie had a good sense of rhythm, I realized.
Throughout the service, the kids took turns signing; during the prayer time, it was actually the kid who was signing who stood in the pulpit, as the interpreter stood to the side, translating into speech the prayers of the children: for food and shelter for our neighbors, for the earth, for an end to violence, in thanksgiving for a community that was truly welcoming.
When I looked around, to see the reaction, everyone was smiling and very few eyes were dry, my own included. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such a joyful worship service: whether it was the delight of the children in participating and making the service accessible to everyone; whether it was the pride of the adults and the care and thoughtfulness of the children and their teachers… maybe that’s what filled my heart. But mostly, I think, it was the little boy, maybe 8 years old, who danced during the last song, slightly apart so that his crutches wouldn’t land accidentally on the feet of his friends; just to the side of the main group, he lost himself in the music, in the moment. When the song ended, he opened his eyes, looked right at his father, and into the momentary silence exclaimed “I danced!”
I caught up with Jeannie after the service – it took a while, everyone wanted to talk to her.
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded
“But why…?” The words trailed off as she took me by the shoulders, looked right into my eyes, then firmly turned me to look at the people gathered, drinking coffee in my church.
And I looked. And I saw.
Those gathered were, many of them, not just talking with their hands: they were signing. Awkwardly, in most cases; they were clearly still learning… but just as clearly, trying; laughing at their own ineptitude. I saw people guiding those whose vision was restricted; I realized the food tables now low enough for the folks in wheelchairs. How had I not noticed this before?
Jeannie tapped my arm. I turned; she handed me the morning’s bulletin, smiled, and walked away. On it, she had written, You thought you knew what healing looked like…and who needed it.
I read her message several times, then looked around the room at the life, at the palpable joy. I walked slowly over to the little boy who had danced, and sat beside him, noticing his crutches resting by his side. “You danced well.”
He looked over at me, his face entirely lit up in a smile. “I never thought anyone would ask me to dance, especially in church!”
“Are you learning sign language, too?”
“We’ve all been learning from Miss Jeannie for weeks!” He bounced a little in his seat, excited, joyful
Hesitantly, I asked him, “Will you teach me?”
His face grew serious, but for the shining light in his eyes, as he took my hand, fingers splayed, then folded the middle two down to rest my fingertips against my palm.
“This is how you say, ‘I love you.’”
Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened; and the ears of the deaf unstopped… everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
sermonizing 