Today’s Citation: Jeremiah 1:1-12
The season of Advent is a season of prophecy and anticipation, a season where we are called to look ahead to a new cosmos of justice, blessing, and unity. Here, we are welcomed into the story of Jeremiah, a prophet who suffered greatly for his brave actions in the royal court.
Prophets are plentiful in the Bible, but there are many differences between them. Elijah, Elisha, and Amos made their proclamations mainly among the poor, only occasionally having words with the royal class (and almost invariably bad ones), while Ezekiel and Jeremiah were of a higher class, and mixed with royal circles in the courts of the palaces.
This, however, did not determine favour or safety, and Jeremiah in particular found himself at the bottom of a well after uttering a prophecy that the king did not want to hear. Their loyalty was always first to be to God, king of kings, and this was not always the ideal in terms of networking or building bridges for your career!
In these opening lines, Jeremiah first receives his call from God. This passage is especially popular at ordinations, but the focus for us today is on Jeremiah’s “Moses moment,†the moment when he cries that he is only a boy. Moments like this are common in prophetic texts, but what’s important to our purposes is God’s response, which is full acceptance of the prophet as he is.
It’s unlikely that Jeremiah was literally only a child when he first received this commission, but it should be noted that God does not respond by denying Jeremiah’s assertion. God instead tells him not to say it – again, not because it isn’t true, but specifically because Jeremiah is being called to great work that only he can do. He is not only a boy, but a hero for the people and a warrior for God.
No child is only a child. We are so much more than the designations we are given by the state or society or our peers. We are signs in the world of something greater than ourselves, but only we can choose what the something greater will be. It is easier by far to be a sign of the system functioning as it should, either by wielding our power like a hammer or accepting our lowliness as inevitable and intractable.  It is more difficult, but far more sacred, to be a sign of God’s power over all things, a sign of God’s call to the universe to break free from patterns of death and embrace patterns of life and new birth.
In 2017 my best friend from my university days had a baby girl, and I became a godparent. Her parents are fairly private with photos and information, so to respect that, I’ll refer to her as “Spruitje,†a nickname I gave her which means “little sprout†in Dutch. This was a natural progression from my first nickname for her, which was “Boontje,†or “little bean.†The first time I ever met her, she was only two weeks old and often curled up, very like a wee bean. Perhaps when she is an adult I’ll switch to “Boomtje,†or “little tree,†although I suspect that despite my best efforts she will always be “Spruitje†to me.
My mother’s elder sister married a Dutch man, and so I knew some of the peculiarities of Dutch culture in a very peripheral sort of way before I met my friend. I marveled over my uncle’s wooden gardening clogs, learned the correct pronunciation of the name Marijke, and received many hand-knitted sweaters from my cousins’ Oma at Christmastime.
My best friend was born to a Dutch mother and an American father, and proudly taught me more Dutch traditions, including some lullabyes (“Slaap, kindtje, slaap!â€), the word for “rogue†(schurk), the joys of boterkoek and stroopwaffel, and finally the yearly celebration of Sinterklaas.
Sinterklaas is held on the Feast of St. Nicholas (today, if you’re wondering why I’m writing about this) and is a day of gift giving and festivities. The part my husband and I have been most privileged to enjoy so far has been the receiving of chocolate letters in the mail from my best friend, who now lives with her partner and Spruitje in Utrecht.
This will be Spruitje’s second Christmas. On a video call the other day, it seemed that she recognized me, giggling and pointing, and something happened inside me that has never happened before.
This little person, who came into my life at a time where I had barely managed to escape from an emotional abyss by the skin of my teeth; who was so small and fragile that no matter what happened I wanted to be there for her even across an ocean and a continent, to try in my own small ways to help her grow into something far beyond what I could ever hope to become…
This little person was now growing and would one day be able to say my name, to tell me about her day at school, to maybe ask me questions she doesn’t dare ask her mother, to grow from tiny boon to little spruit to towering boom (and her mother is 6 feet tall so you know she’ll truly be a boom), to seize the treasures of life on her very own having been raised up by everyone who loves her.
There is something special about this little person connected to me not by blood or marriage but love alone. The notion that what I feel for her is merely a biological imperative to protect is so much straw and feathers in the face of the love I felt last summer, staring together down a slowly darkening forest path out beyond her grandparents’ house as we were caressed by an evening breeze and (tipsily emotional), I whispered, “Everything around you is alive. Everything around you is your family. You are a part of all things.â€
In the season of Advent, we are called to contemplate the return of the Messiah, who will wake us from our sleep and invite us into a restored world of justice and peace. St. Nicholas, heavily sanitized in secular culture, was actually a saviour of children and young women, rescuing them from abuse and degradation in countless stories. He is also the patron saint of seafarers, those who sail into the unknown seeking adventure, and those who brave wind and waves to bring those of us on the shore the things we need every day to survive.
This little person with whom I share only love is surely the only gift worth thanking St. Nicholas and God for on this Sinterklaas feast and in this season of Advent as I look ahead to an unknown future which can surely not be without hope, having such a child (and indeed, so many children) in it.
Woorden kunnen mijn liefde voor jou niet omschrijven, Spruitje. Prettige sinterklaas!
Today’s Citation: Luke 1:46-56
The familiar tune echoed in my brain and bones as we stood outside the courtroom, enveloped in the smell of sage and the heartbeat of drums: the women’s warrior song.
A gift to the people from Martina Pierre of the Lil’wat nation, I’d heard it many times before I was invited to sing it with many others by Audrey Siegl of the Musqueam nation at an event to mourn victims of the opioid crisis at Christ Church Cathedral in May of 2017. I still remember the look of delight that crossed her face when I told her it was my first time singing it instead of just listening. “Oh!†she cried. “Let me hug you!â€
Now, outside the Supreme Court at 800 Smithe Street in Vancouver, we sang it for two friends of mine who were about to be sentenced for their actions as land and water protectors on Burnaby Mountain.
Thousands of years ago, Mary sang with her cousin Elizabeth of a world where justice truly reigns, and righteousness embraces peace.
Luke’s is the only Gospel that includes this song (and many others). While Matthew tells the story from Joseph’s perspective (and John and Mark remain conspicuously silent on birth narratives save the most abstract references to beginnings), Luke grounds the story of Jesus’ birth in the muddy honesty of unplanned pregnancy and oppression. But once grounded, Mary shoots up from the earth as a trumpet lily, telling her story of liberation and God’s overturning of the old order of slavery.
The story of Mary is also, in some ways, deeply queer. This was explored at length in Guest, Goss, and West’s fanciful Queer Bible Commentary. While not the most scholarly of sources in some ways, it does provide creative reframing of biblical stories in a way that challenges the heteronormativity and formality of past hermeneutics.
In the section on Luke, the story of Mary is one in which Mary is compelled to participate in the work of God through full and enthusiastic consent, and is thereby made pregnant by a force beyond gender and biology, a force in which there could therefore be none of the baggage of oppression and communicative breakdown that so easily exists in any sexual encounter, particularly one in which a child is the result.
Mary is singular, literally, a woman whose sexuality in this instance is fully her own. She welcomes the mystical encounter and its consequences, which are spoken only to her, and is then given complete control of the narrative that follows. Young, brown, living in occupied territory, truly the lowest of the low in her own society, Mary is treated with the utmost respect by God’s sacred agent, and is given complete control. Filled with the Holy Spirit, she becomes a prophet of a new era, an unknowable era in which women and indeed all of creation will be given the freedom to be themselves and offer themselves up as instruments for the continuation of that peace, however that might be made manifest.
Hi, everyone!
Just a quick post to let y’all know that my Advent devotional album, “Come Like Frost,” drops its first track this Sunday!
Every year since 2015 I’ve produced an album for both Lent and Advent, with the bulk of the material being original devotional compositions. I make these albums myself on my laptop with Reaper, at home with my instruments.
This is my third Advent album, after “Sancta Viscera” in 2017 and “Wild Star” in 2016. “Come Like Frost” includes two traditional pieces and six originals, some of which have not yet been performed in public.
Tracks are posted week by week for free on Soundcloud, and I can make physical copies available on request for $10. You can also ask for “Synaxis,” a double pack which includes “Come Like Frost” as well as this year’s Lenten devotional, “Holding Fast,” for $20.
100% of proceeds from CDs sold are given to a ministry in which I am currently serving. This year’s will benefit Hineni House, the intentional community where I serve as community director and chaplain.
Tracks will drop Saturday nights and Sunday evenings. I’ll cross-post them here and on Facebook.
I hope you enjoy the music as much as I enjoyed producing it!
I tried on the grey waistcoat with three or four different shirts before I settled on the gloriously soft Banana Republic sweater and added my grey trousers.
Which earrings, I fretted. The oddly reserved side of me that only came out in front of the mirror said I should choose the sedate violet drops I had made – one of my first pieces, in fact.
The other part, the one that comes out on nights where I haunt the Red Room downtown with Vancouver’s Goth population, said, “Hell no! Scale maille all the way!†And so I choose the chain maille Aura 2 units with the stainless steel scales attached. I’m all monochrome today, we need some sparkle up in here.
Now, the hair. Last night, I slicked it up with product and raked it back along the crown of my head with a comb. I quickly discovered that it wouldn’t stay in place, and laughed remembering my bit part in a production of Grease years ago, how the guys always kept their combs in their pockets and it became a running joke that they would whip them out and use them whenever something embarrassing happened.
I was going to have to pocket the damn thing now!
This time, I don’t want to add product, but I do want that swept back look. I fiddle for ages before combing it back and then braiding it. Having a Chelsea means there’s nothing to hold a clip or claw in place, so that’s out.
I check myself over again. Is this really appropriate? I think, as usual. I mean, this is a family lunch.
Quite practically speaking, most people could give a crap what you’re wearing in my family. Plus I always overthink this kind of stuff. I’m balancing somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Waistcoat adds butch, but the powdery grey soft sweater adds femme.
Today’s ensemble…at least from the neck up!
I’m still me, I think. This is not inauthentic. It’s not a disguise or a compromise. That’s what matters.
Like anyone I slip into a particular role depending on what group I’m with. On my mother’s side of the family, the role is comfortable. I’m myself, for the most part. Topics of conversation are more muted than the ones I have with my friends, and I’m not exactly what you’d call “out.â€
Social media has changed the landscape so that I can make proclamations without having to deal with reactions in real time. Although I’ve never written a terribly explicit post about who I am (“You might not know this, but I’m bi and nonbinary…â€), I have made reference to these identities as belonging to me while sharing articles about relevant topics. Most of my cousins also know, and I know that some of the older generation knows from being told by them, which I don’t mind as my family is pretty safe about that kind of stuff.
I have been more or less out as bisexual for most of my adult life, but it’s been a much more tentative journey since I’ve begun untangling my sense of gender.
I’m out to my friends, and I’m mostly out at work. But I’m not out to my mother or my stepfather, and while I’m out on social media I have no sense of who really understands what this means, as I don’t insist on my pronouns. As I’ve stated in an earlier post, mostly this is to avoid emotional labour on my part, but it means that things sometimes feel a bit illicit.
For example: Last weekend, I bit the bullet and took advantage of several sales online to purchase some clothes from Haute Butch. Like claiming my pronouns, it felt both liberating and a little frightening.
On the one hand, while women who fully claim a butch identity can come up against harassment, it definitely doesn’t come close to the rage that erupts when bigots see a masculine person wearing stereotypically feminine attire.
On the other hand, “full-bodied†folks like me, who have stereotypically feminine bodies (and in my case, almost archetypally feminine!), can find it difficult to fully embody this look in a way that feels beautiful.
I always walk a weird line between feeling butch and femme. I slide up and down the scale, but most often tend to rest in a place like the one I’m in now, which is why I think I love this waistcoat so much. While it’s cut to accentuate my curves, to me it still adds a pinch of genderfuck to any outfit. I’ve layered it over collared shirts and Tshirts and tank tops depending on whether I’m feeling more demi or more girl.
I noticed that I am increasing stepping away from my dresses and skirts again, although I don’t want to get rid of them. A night out with my spouse nearly always elicits a more femme look, because I enjoy making myself attractive to him and he’s straight. But on my own, and more and more at work, I find myself occupying this new role, the one I chose myself rather than the one that society allowed me to play within.
Fashion has become a playground for me to experiment with feelings I am still learning to fully articulate.
Thank God for this waistcoat.
Today’s Citation: John 18:28-38
Studying the Gospel of John is a difficult task, for few works of literature can claim such beauty and such terror. John, one of the masterpieces of any language, is also a work of staggering bitterness, and has been cited by many theologians over the years as license to murder, maim, and massacre the Jewish people. Never mind the fact that the church was not as of yet a faith wholly separate from Judaism when this astonishing text was written. It was enough that the writer used the phrase “the Jews†to set the followers of Jesus against the established religious authorities and thereby set the stage for generations of torment. We have much to atone for.
This is important to mention because the encounter described (in part) in this passage is laden with problematic editorial decisions on the part of the writer, most especially the glaring hypocrisy of the crowd in their chanting of “We have no king but Caesar,†something that no self-respecting Jewish person of that era would dare to have uttered. Likewise the very fact that John’s Pilate unwittingly understands far more about Jesus than Jesus’ own people shows us that John has consigned the crowd to “the darkness,†a fate worse than hell itself.
As responsible theologians of a resistance lectionary, we cannot neglect to name these issues.
But, as stated above, alongside the seeds of bitterness grow blossoms of extraordinary beauty and defiance.
Source: Wikipedia
The encounter between Pilate and Jesus, as problematic as it is, is stunning as a work of art. There’s drama and subtext. There’s confusion and mystery. And there’s Jesus, standing before the hammer of empire like a clenched fist held aloft.
He is so beyond the quibbling of this despot, so beyond the attempts to box him in. There is no fear, no groveling, no capitulation.
I have seen the same steely resolve on the faces of land and water protectors, on the front lines and in court. I have seen it on the faces of Black Lives Matter activists and protestors shouting, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!†and “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?†I have seen it on the faces of Idle No More and Standing Rock warriors, demanding justice for their people and the earth itself.
Inside all of us is this spirit of resolve, and it can be co-opted just as easily as any tool.
All of us could stand to use it more often…and all of us are called to discern deeply what merits its use.
I work in an urban parish in East Vancouver. It’s a bit of a change from my last charge, a nearly suburban parish in the once working-class now posh Dunbar Heights.
Despite both neighbourhoods being quite safe, there is a more explicit poverty here, and the problems connected to it are more visible.
This summer, just before the return of the rector from sabbatical, we discovered a cache of clothes and other items, including human waste and a few needles, strewn about the south outer wall, which is partially hidden from the sidewalk by a low hedge. This was later accompanied by rambling, nonsensical graffiti. A former parish lay leader was appalled, and phoned me shortly after phoning the police. The graffiti was especially distressing to this lay leader, who felt that it demonstrated a complete lack of respect for a place of faith.
The depth of this leader’s anger was surprising to me. Of course vandalism indicates a lack of respect, but the fear beneath the rage was difficult for me to understand, and frankly, it rather annoyed me.
I couldn’t put my finger on why until months later. Sitting at my computer in this very parish, I found an email from a mailing list out of a local synagogue with a message of comfort and solidarity after the horrific synagogue attack in Pittsburgh.
Included in this email were different suggestions for actions the community could take. One heading said, “Security,†and the text beneath read as follows:
“Well before this most recent attack, [Temple] conducted an audit of our current security measures. …The technology exists to address these vulnerabilities and to ensure that no one need ever worry about their safety in our Temple.â€
Further down was an encouragement for parishioners to take volunteer security training.
This brought up a number of feelings for me. My home parish, which is downtown, has had its share of angry folks who have taken issue with its progressive theology, and it’s also had trouble with folks looking for unattended money or other valuables to take. But as far as I’m aware, we’ve never had a bomb threat, significant vandalism, or arson attempts, and certainly there has never been a mass shooting.
Meanwhile, mosques regularly find the severed heads of pigs on their doorsteps, and similar things occur at Jewish synagogues. I’m sure there are incidents at houses of prayer for other faiths as well.
I have the incredible privilege of never having felt unsafe in a church before.
I can close my eyes and remember the odd feeling that filled me as I walked through the streets of Hebron in the Holy Land, that feeling that live wires were running a low current of electricity through my veins. It was not a safe place, and one had to be on alert at all times.
I imagine having that feeling every single time I go to church, and wince just thinking about it.
To imagine that Christianity’s loss of privilege is a terrible sin is laughable, but it’s even more laughable to imagine that Christianity is now on the same level as any other faith in the West. We will always be the more privileged.
I have heard too many people, both progressive and conservative, complain that “no-one respects the church†anymore.
Did Jesus die for us to have respect as a faith?
I don’t think so.
He died shamed, nailed to a cross like a common thief.
While we complain about graffiti and “Happy Holidays†and no more prayer in schools, our Jewish and Muslim families are paying out-of-pocket for their own security, their own clean-up crews, their own peace.
I’m not saying that any of us deserve or should expect and welcome graffiti or vandalism or violence in our houses of faith.
But I will say that maybe we should consider that if we as Christians aren’t being thrown into the arena anymore, we’re still doing pretty well for ourselves, and a little spray-paint isn’t going to change that.
Maybe we should try standing up for those who are experiencing true persecution, both here at home and abroad.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.â€
Matthew 5:10
