Aug 04 | “Your life is hidden,” (Sermon, August 4th, 2019)

“So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. ²Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, ³for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.
5 Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). ⁶On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. ⁷These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. ⁸But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. ⁹Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices ¹⁰and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. ¹¹In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!”

Colossians 3:1-11

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! The Great Oz has spoken!”

What an emblematic moment. It somehow manages through utter genius to simultaneously portray the willful curiosity of childhood and the healthy skepticism of adulthood. The curiosity is what saves it, though. An adult would be more likely, on hearing the exclamation, to laugh and walk away, shaking her head.

Only a child would be so recklessly brave as to open the curtain, like Dorothy did.

“For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

What a cryptic, wonderful statement! Scores of books and poems and hymns could be written on what this means. What does it mean for our life to be hidden with Christ?

What part of us is behind the curtain?

And how should we rejoice, knowing that Christ, behind the temple veil as our great high priest, still speaks to us from within that Holy of Holies, even if by the nature of our mortality we are not yet fully present with him?

Pay close attention to the one behind the curtain!

It’s appropriate to discuss curtains and hiddenness on Pride Sunday, where we celebrate the breaking down of closet doors and walls, and indeed celebrate something which the church has known for a long time: that family is so much more complicated and wonderful than blood and even legal commitments, that the human gift of thriving in connection is so strong that it transcends all boundaries and that that’s worth delighting in, and fighting for.

Last Monday, I was invited to a fundraiser for the advocacy group Rainbow Railroad. Rainbow Railroad is an organization that provides information, travel funds, and moral support to LGBTQ+ folks fleeing persecution in their countries of origin. There are 70 countries in the world that still criminalize same-sex intimacy, and Rainbow Railroad exists to help people escape and claim refugee status.

I had attended one of these fundraisers before, a couple of years ago, to hear the executive director, Kimahli Powell, speak. This year, though, Kimahli brought a guest speaker: Amin Dzabrailov, a Chechen who had been abducted and tortured by police for over two weeks in 2017. They wanted him to surrender the names of other gay men, which he refused to do. He was a thin, beautiful man who looked much younger than he was. His big brown eyes darted about the room, never settling, and he always clutched at something – his other hand, a denim jacket – probably to keep his hands from shaking. When we asked him how he had stayed so strong, he said quietly, “I thought I was going to die anyway, and I knew they would just do this to someone else if I gave names.”

When he was finally released, his brothers came to pick him up. Their car ride home was “just silence.”

With the help of a friend, deeply secret LGBTQ+ networks in Russia, and Rainbow Railroad, he was able to come to Canada as a refugee with several other Chechen men, who he says are now like a family.

After spending so long being hidden, he told us he could now wake up, go out the door, and be free. He said what was most healing was the ability to learn how to be himself.

It was that freedom which led him to be one of the first Chechen men to go on the record about his experience. He told his story to Time Magazine only a week or two ago.

“When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.”

It is not that we are calledto suffer needlessly, to run into the jaws of the dragon, to scourge ourselves seeking some elusive purity through pain and degradation. But in the words of Brian J. Walsh, the Christian ethic is a narrative ethic. This is about accepting an entirely new story as binding on our lives. This is about taking the pain that has been inflicted on us, or that we inflict on ourselves, and reclaiming the narrative.

It might look like facing your trauma full on and naming it, like Amin, for only in telling your story can you claim power over it, like Jesus naming demons.

Or it might look like reflecting on your past choices, and determining through gentle self-examination which ones led you astray through being made out of fear or pride. It might look like deciding on a totally new path, a totally new life.

It might look like playing peek-a-boo with God, who hides to be found by us, and takes delight in it, like a toddler who screeches with joy when she is discovered.

It does not mean we should be so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good. Again, we’re bound to a narrative ethic. We’re bound to a story of God coming out – heh – in human flesh, our own vestments, having chosen this body with great care in order to spread the most good in the time God chose. God went from being hidden, incorporeal, without bodily form, to being clothed in a body, revealed in the glory of an ordinary human life. We may argue that it was hardly ordinary, and of course that’s true, but in his own context, it was to a certain extent. There were lots of healers and exorcists and Messianic hopefuls in Jesus’s time. It was only after that body was reclaimed in resurrection – heh, another coming out – that everything was fully revealed, and indeed once ascension took place and the body vanished, the new hiddenness was not the same as the old hiddenness. For now we had something to hold onto, something new to anchor us in this world and its beauty, while also calling us forward to walk into a new reality beyond sight and time – already here, but not yet.

Our lives may be hidden until Christ’s coming, but are we not also called to live as though the kingdom is already here? Are we not called, like little children playing, to live as though in a world of reckless love and generosity, despite the best intentions of a society that glorifies men who hoard wealth and resources like the one in Jesus’s parable as minor gods? Are we too not called to come out of the tomb, to come out as those who love Jesus?

Are we not called to live like Amin, who reclaimed a narrative of pain and torture by pulling back the curtain, exposing it to light, inspiring further bravery, and perhaps saving countless others in the future?

Perhaps, to the world around us, our life is hidden; our life as beloved, prophetic, dragon-slaying children of God. Perhaps the power we have to heal and liberate is hidden to a world that says sick is sick and dead is dead.

But we know better, don’t we?

We who have witnessed healing and resurrection know that every end is a new beginning.

“When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.”

To paraphrase Martha, we know he will be revealed on the last day.

But is Christ not also being revealed every day when the oppressed are given the strength to refuse silence, when powerful and poor alike are called to choose the way of service and solidarity, however they can, and when all are called to elevate the voices of those who have good news to tell?

Perhaps, in the world we’re living in today, it is we who are called to participate in the revelation of Christ, for in that revelation, we too are revealed in glory, for we are co-creators of the beautiful new reality we are being called to embody with our very selves.

Our priest and bridegroom calls from behind the veil for us to join him at the wedding banquet.

Pay close attention to the one behind the curtain!