Mar 20 | “Change the damned narrative,” (Sermon, Lent 3 2022)

Scriptural citation:

Luke 13:1-9

Last Thursday, after I don’t even know how long, I received the sacrament of reconciliation. This is the Anglican version of the rite of confession (yes, we have it!) It’s different from how it looks in the Catholic Church, though – less formal, more conversational, with a bit of ritual at either end. If you’re interested in exploring it during Lent, I can offer it to you, or you can ask any of the other priests here at the Cathedral or in the wider diocese.

The first couple of times I did reconciliation, it was with random clergy I happened to connect with. This time, I managed to find someone outside the diocese who was willing to be a regular confessor. He’s a beautiful soul.

I sat in my office on the Zoom call and he guided me through the rite. When we’d read the first few prescribed lines, we got to the part where I have the opportunity to name my sins, and the confessor may offer “words of comfort and counsel.”

My confessor asked, “Do you recognize any patterns in the sins you named?”

I had, in a sense. The first couple of times I did this rite, my sins had mostly been directed toward myself. Lack of self-compassion, impatience, anger, shame. I did still have a bit of that, but after hard work my inner monologue has become more compassionate over the years. The sins that came up this time were things I don’t think I had the courage to name before: the spitefulness, impatience, and anger I’d felt toward others.

When my confessor asked me what had changed, I said I was maturing in my self-awareness. He agreed this was likely true, but added that it is only when we are able to feel compassion toward ourselves that we truly feel compassion and love toward others.

As humans, we’re story-makers, and we get into a groove, don’t we? We slip into a habit, and the habit becomes a narrative, and the groove gets deeper. The more we buy into the narrative, the more it reinforces itself. The wheels keep sinking into the ruts that are already there.

The work of choosing a new narrative takes time. It’s one thing to watch your wheels carefully and make sure they only roll outside the ruts. That takes real skill and concentration. And it’s a whole other thing to decide to just pick a different road altogether!

Jesus is speaking to a crowd. Just before the passage we heard, he says, “And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?” He goes on to make a rather radical statement: that instead of participating in their current justice system, those listening should work out their problems among themselves before ever getting to court. Judging on the context of the previous chapter, this is not merely an encouragement to be nice to one another. It’s a deeply prophetic posture he’s encouraging. Don’t depend on the mechanisms of this world for justice or wholeness. You won’t find them in those systems. Work it out together.

Choose a new narrative.

The very strange verses that follow make a bit more sense in that light. The people start to ask questions about divine justice. But Jesus heads them off at the pass. He doesn’t want them to accept that narrative either: the narrative of just-world theory, the notion that everything that happens is part of some divine plan and that all suffering is deserved. He pretty clearly shuts down that narrative.

But then he goes on to say, “You still have to repent, or the same thing will happen to you.”

That word repent has a lot of baggage – talk about a narrative! But even that word deserves the new story treatment. The Greek word for ‘repent’ is metaoneo, and it means changing one’s mind or purpose.

Change your mind – or you’ll die like them.

So…stuck in a narrative? You will make it happen, you will create it around you, because the more committed you are to it, the more you will interpret the world around you as fitting into it, and the more stubbornly you will cling to it. Anyone who drives into the same ruts as you will look normal. Anyone who drives outside of them will look like a complete weirdo.

It’s not a sin to be a story-maker. Not all ruts are bad! But some ruts just clog up your wheels and grind you down. If your narrative is poisoning you, making you question your beloved-ness and the beloved-ness of the world around you, change the damned narrative – literally, change the damned narrative.

Then Jesus tells a parable. The classic understanding would be that the owner of the vineyard is God, and Jesus is the gardener, and God comes over and says, “Oh this cheeky vine never produces fruit! It’s been three whole years and not a one! I’ma cut the whole thing down!” And Jesus saves us from that mean old vineyard owner. Isn’t it always the case that our buddy Jesus saves us from mean old God who only wants us to get what we deserve?

You’re smart folks. We can tell just from hearing it that that’s a simplistic understanding.

How does that narrative hold up when we learn the fact that fig trees don’t produce fruit until three to five years after being planted? And how does it hold up when the text is murky about who planted the tree? Both the English and the Greek suggest that the owner had the tree planted, and didn’t do it himself.

It’s therefore presumptuous to suggest that this owner, who may not have planted the tree and certainly doesn’t seem to understand how fig trees work, symbolizes God. And indeed, it’s presumptuous to think that the more patient gardener only stands in for Jesus. After all, humans were created in Genesis as gardeners.

So maybe Jesus is giving all of us a chance to disrupt this narrative. To drive out of the ruts, or even choose a whole different road.

And maybe I’ll make use of some wisdom Omid Safi, one of my Sufi teachers, taught me, and invite us to see each of these characters as different aspects of ourselves.

So…who is the owner: the part of us who oversees the earth of our hearts and judges the fruit and flowering of what is planted there; the part of us that parachutes in and criticizes, without having contributed to the planting and nurturing; the part of us that’s impatient even when what’s planted is behaving as it should, and wants to enjoy the fruit without the labour and the waiting; the part of us that wants to get the best use out of that heart-earth, and urges us to only make space for the most productive plants?

Who is the gardener: the part of us skilled in the art of planting and nurturing; who has seen many growing seasons and knows the language of earth and crop; who encourages patience and is willing to get their hands dirty; who still recognizes the futility of the sunk cost fallacy and understands that things which do not produce good fruit despite hard work should sometimes be cleared for more productive things?

And what is the tree: the part of us which needs time and nourishment from human and divine sources; which might be cared for deeply and skillfully but might be struggling in a dry season, or flooded, or beset by pests – none of which is our fault; the part of us that needs time to ripen; the part of us that, if the circumstances are right, will go from merely receiving nourishment to giving it back?

Take the time to think deep. Fill the ruts with soil and plant some stuff in there!

Then, when you and your trees are ready, in the words of Debie Thomas:

“Go fight for the justice you long to see.  Go confront evil where it needs confronting. Go learn the art of patient, hope-filled tending. Go cultivate beautiful things. Go look your own sin in the eye and repent of it while you can.

In short: imagine a deeper story. Ask a better question. Live a better answer. Time is running short. The season to bear fruit has come. Repent. Do it now.”

Mar 06 | “The Devil made me do it,” (Sermon, Lent 1 2022)

Scriptural citations:

Deuteronomy 26: 1-11

Luke 4: 1-13

When I was a little kid, my mum’s friend had a pile of comic strip compilations, and one of them was Garfield at Large.

In one strip, Garfield has pulled himself up onto the dining table and is playing with Jon’s soup – batting at it at first, but eventually putting his paws fully into it and splashing it around. When Jon sees the mess and shouts, Garfield responds, “The Devil made me do it.”

I was intrigued by the concept. I was only four or five years old and I was from a mainline Anglican home. We didn’t talk about the Devil much outside of reading about him in children’s Bible stories. It’s kind of amazing considering I grew up during the Satanic Panic.

Come to think of it, that joke might have been the first time I considered that the Devil could make you do something. Even at that age, I knew it was just an excuse. Garfield had already spent multiple pages scratching the furniture, beating up the hapless Odie, and stealing Jon’s lasagna. Garfield clearly liked doing these things. He didn’t need the Devil to make him do anything bad. That’s the joke!

And that was comedian Flip Wilson’s point when he invented it. I watched one of his old routines on the Ed Sullivan show. It was pretty funny – he tells a story about a minister and his wife, who claims that the Devil forced her to buy a new dress that they can’t afford, despite her best efforts. Actually, three new dresses in a week. Also, the Devil is the one who made her drive the car into the outer wall of the church by grabbing the steering wheel. When the minister asks her why she didn’t put her foot on the brake, well, she couldn’t because she was too busy trying to kick the Devil.

Not her fault. Not Garfield’s fault.

The Devil made them do it.

I think a lot of people still see the Devil this way, as a tempter who convinces us to do things we shouldn’t but really, secretly, want to do. For those of us who are uncreative in the work of malice, it’s little things, like taking the last cupcake or stealing a parking spot.

For the rest, though, it might be bigger things. Embezzlement. Abuse. War crimes.

The Devil made me do it.

This year, I set myself a goal of preaching more on the Hebrew Bible, what’s sometimes called the Old Testament, with help from a Jewish study Bible. And it’s especially interesting to take a look at Luke’s temptation account in light of who the ancient Jews thought Satan was.

Some of you might know that “Satan” is not a personal name but a title. In Hebrew, ha-satan means “the Accuser.” OG Satan was an angelic figure in the heavenly court, acting under God’s instructions. He’s, without irony, God’s prosecuting attorney. We might remember him from the story of poor Job. Please note that he is not named as the serpent in the actual text of Genesis. That is a much later addition.

Satan has a very specific duty in ancient Jewish tradition, which is not only to act as prosecuting attorney, but, in the words of Jewish biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine, “to test the righteous.” It makes perfect sense that he would show up in this story, as Jesus prepares for his Galilean ministry.

And what does he do? Well, there’s a standard laundry list of temptations he offers, ones we might be familiar with enough at this point that they lose some of their potency.

Here’s where it’s helpful to read the Deuteronomy passage alongside Luke. Now, if you’re anything like me, you were scratching your head hardcore when you heard that. What the heck do instructions about how to handle the first fruits of the land have to do with Satan or temptation OR LENT FOR THAT MATTER? (Happy Lent, by the way). But there’s some good stuff in here! Let’s dive in.

The Deuteronomy passage is part of a much longer list of legal requirements for the Israelites, and in fact is the linchpin for a pretty significant turning point in the text. Up until this point, the instructions have been rules for the people to follow in order to be in covenant with God. And we have this beautiful passage that begins with the command for the Israelites to remember where they came from, not just by naming themselves as former refugees and slaves, but by offering their bounty to the Levites and the “aliens” or “strangers” that reside among them. Offering first fruits is an act of humility, and humility is to be followed by an act of solidarity. This is underlined in the following verses which require a third-year tithing of one’s produce to the Levites, the aliens, the orphans, and the widows – not so that they can just scrape by but so that “they may eat their fill,” says the text – as well as making a verbal promise to God, a sacred vow, that nothing has been held back.

Again, solidarity.

So here we learn that the covenant between God and Their people, which is what Deuteronomy is concerned with laying out in exhaustive and transparent detail, involves a sort of reorientation. The former refugees and slaves have been given the land of promise. It is a gift. They did not earn it. They must therefore act in solidarity with the marginalized. The fact that the writers of Deuteronomy sometimes seem to get mixed up about this does not negate the power of this act of worship for us today. To paraphrase Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, “With the freedom and privilege offered in the Promised Land come obligations.”

If this connection with the Luke story seems fanciful, note that the biblical quotes Jesus gives here are mostly from Deuteronomy.

So while Satan’s status as a tester of the righteous means he might offer Jesus things Jesus might want, from basic needs like food to more complex desires like political or supernatural power, that’s not all he’s offering Jesus.

Satan’s offering a different orientation, one that’s in line with what the world expects of us, one counter to the more radical and honest story Jesus wants to live – I’m sure none of us knows what that feels like – one that encourages Jesus to look out for Number One rather than practicing solidarity with the poor working people among whom he has ‘pitched his tent,’ as John the Evangelist so lyrically puts it.

Here, at the pinnacle of the Temple, Satan even employs Scripture to his purposes, as the saying goes. And yet in quoting it he undermines the real truth of that passage, which is supposed to offer comfort during times of sorrow and oppression, the polar opposite of what he encourages here: reckless misuse of trust and privilege, in a sense.

Jesus doesn’t fall for it. He accomplishes the task and goes on to begin his ministry, and Satan departs until “an opportune time.” Insert spooky string section interlude here.

Okay but what does that mean for us, just inside the threshold of Lent 2022?

Well, maybe Satan was never the voice that told us to indulge in one more cupcake or put off calling Aunt Gertrude or insert whatever kindergarten sins here. Maybe Satan is that prosecutorial mindset – the one that assumes the worst of us, that tells us to say, “F you, I got mine,” that says, “There is no covenant so you better hustle or you’ll be in the gutter by Thursday,” that says, “God can’t stand the sight of you and none of those holy promises of love and salvation are for you.”

Maybe sometimes Satan says, “Why don’t you try being God?” And maybe sometimes he says, “You’re too despicable to even speak God’s name.”

And if that’s the case, maybe Lent isn’t about saying, “Dang, Satan, you’re right,” and crawling into a dung hill of sorrow.

Maybe Lent is about saying, “I am not God, but I am a beloved child of God, and there is a covenant, and it is for me, and the only terms are love and solidarity.”

And then doing those things.

Feb 27 | “The shining face of Moses,” (Sermon, Transfiguration Sunday 2022)

Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. ³⁰When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him. ³¹But Moses called to them; and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses spoke with them. ³²Afterwards all the Israelites came near, and he gave them in commandment all that the Lord had spoken with him on Mount Sinai. ³³When Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face; ³⁴but whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he would take the veil off, until he came out; and when he came out, and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, ³⁵the Israelites would see the face of Moses, that the skin of his face was shining; and Moses would put the veil on his face again, until he went in to speak with him.

Exodus 34:29-35

In January of 2021, I participated in a diocesan working group on antiracism. One of the goals I was able to accomplish was to only cite theologians, scholars, and writers of colour in my sermons for one whole year. It was a great exercise that introduced me to many new voices and the chance to share their work more broadly.

This year, I noticed that the eve of the Jewish festival of Passover will fall on Good Friday. This got me to thinking about the history of Christian violence toward Jewish people on Good Friday. Pogroms and mob violence were often perpetrated against Jewish people during Holy Week due to the false belief that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. While state and church-sanctioned acts of hate like these are not as widespread today, informal ones do still occur, as we come up on the third anniversary of the Poway Synagogue shooting in April and the fourth anniversary of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in October.

For a long time, I avoided preaching on the Hebrew Bible, what we sometimes call the Old Testament, altogether. A lot of rabbis I followed on social media shared how hurtful Christians could be in their ignorance of the Jewish faith and its history, and I didn’t want to contribute to that hurt. But I’ve since had many conversations with Christians who still split God into the God of the Old Testament, a mean and nasty abuser, and the God of the New Testament, a good and kind daddy. This is a dangerous undertaking that not only robs Jesus of his Jewishness, but drives a wedge between us and the Jewish faith.

So this year I’m going to preach more on the Hebrew Bible, with help from a Jewish study Bible. And what better way to start than today’s story from the book of Exodus.

Exodus is a foundational text for Jews and Christians. The Israelites are liberated from slavery and led through the wilderness into the Promised Land by God, the breaker of chains. After they cross the Red Sea, the Israelites are brought to Mount Sinai, where Moses receives the tablets of the Torah, the covenant between God and the people – not a burden but a sign of freedom, sharing the terms of right relationship with the divine freely and transparently.

Unfortunately, of course, while Moses is up on the mountain, the people become impatient and create the golden calf, which breaks one of the first rules of the covenant and angers God. After Moses runs interference for the people, God reiterates the terms, this time even more heavily underlining the whole ‘no cast idols’ thing. The false gold of their shattered calf is subsumed by the true gold of Moses’s shining face.

What a beautiful act of openness for Moses to leave his face uncovered while sharing the covenant with the people, offering them a direct line to God, before veiling it again, in a prefiguration of the veil that separates the Holy of Holies from worshipers in Solomon’s future temple.

The Israelites finally start to truly listen, and immediately after this story, they begin to construct the tabernacle for the tablets of the covenant according to God’s instructions.

Reading that really sparked me, because it gives a whole new context for Peter’s comment about dwellings on the mountain! It wasn’t about capturing a sacred moment in time, or making an idol of Jesus. It was fully in keeping with Peter’s ancestral faith! Moses’s shining face prefigures the tabernacle. It stands to reason that Jesus’s shining…everything would also necessitate the building of a tabernacle!

But then Luke adds this cryptic line: Peter makes the suggestion “not knowing what he said.”

So does Peter get it, or not?

Well, he does, but he doesn’t. That’s kinda Peter’s thing.

Again, the Israelites respond to the shining face of Moses by following to the letter God’s instructions for building a tabernacle. They do get it. The God that liberated them from Egypt is the one to whom they now direct their devotion. Having formed bonds through the shared pain of slavery and the amazement of the exodus, they are all in, even though they know it won’t all be sunshine and rainbows.

As Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg writes,

“What is being asked of the Israelites is huge, profound. Their lives will change drastically after they receive Torah. They’ll have to face all of the ways in which responsibility—covenant—can be uncomfortable, can push us, challenge us, force us to be accountable to the divine, to others, and to the best version of ourselves.” 

Moses and Elijah, two prophets who both met God on a mountain and were acquainted with holy fire, were also acquainted with standing up to Empire. Moses tangled with Pharaoh; Elijah tangled with Ahab and Jezebel. Both risked death while doing so, and yet it was only through those holy battles that God’s glory was revealed: in the plagues of Egypt and in the heavenly fire at Carmel.

So shall it be with Jesus, but while Moses and Elijah managed to avoid death at the hands of the Empire, Jesus walks right into it. And he warns Peter that that’s what he’s going to do.

This is not because he was braver than them. Moses and Elijah’s work was to prove God’s power over earthly empire by showing that when God goes up against Empire, Empire loses. This truth is foundational to the Jewish faith.Jesus’s work was to prove God’s power over earthly empire by showing that even when Empire wins, it doesn’t win. The worst thing Empire can do is kill someone – and in response to that God takes out Their red pen and writes, “Citation needed.”

This is our foundational truth as Christians.

And yet we, like Peter, often totally misunderstand it.

Now Peter has the excuse of being a worker in occupied territory who grew up on triumphalist stories of an avenging Messiah while walking under the shadow of thousands of crucified rebels on the side of the road. Not all of us have the full breadth of the Empire’s oppressive power in our faces like that on a daily basis – although I’ve met some who have, in their work and lives. Jesus had to show Peter that resistance to evil is worth more than life itself, a truth that grows quite organically out of his ancestral Jewish faith.So what’s our excuse for misunderstanding?

If the Church really understood and believed this truth, what would we look like as an institution?

Would we collude so rapidly and willingly with Empire – not just once with Constantine, but over and over again with many more, leaving devastation and genocide in our wake? Would we not instead find glory in servanthood to the poor and oppressed?

Would we support corporations that perpetrate environmental destruction, decimate communities, and deny living wages to their workers? Would we not seek to respect, sustain, and renew the life of the earth?

Would we defend and uphold institutions that perpetuate oppressions Jesus himself was subject to, like prisons and policing? Would we not champion other ways of sowing seeds of justice, seeds that bloom flowers of reconciliation rather than weeds of violence?

Would we protect the anonymity, employment, and power of those who abuse and those who enable cultures of abuse within our church while subjecting survivors of that abuse to bullying, gaslighting, and apathy? Would we not model ourselves after Jesus, our Good Shepherd, who would never let his sheep be snatched up by wolves?

If we had never done those things as an institution, what would the world look like today? Would our faces shine like Moses’s? Would we have to say to one another, “Know the Lord,” or would we all know God, from the least of us to the greatest?

Friends, if we all decided today to stop doing or enabling or hiding from those things, what kind of incredible tabernacle could we build?

I’m going to let Rabbi Danya have the last word:

“What God—what ultimate truth—demands is not always easy. In fact, it’s usually not easy. We might not want to have to rise to meet the obligations to live in truth and connection and service. …Saying yes to it might be the only thing that saves us.”

Dec 13 | “When Joy comes before hardship,” (Sermon, Advent 3 2021)

John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? ⁸Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. ⁹Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
10 And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” ¹¹In reply he said to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” ¹²Even tax-collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?” ¹³He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” ¹⁴Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”
15 As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, ¹⁶John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷His winnowing-fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
18 So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.

Luke 3:7-18

Oh Gaudete Sunday, that Sunday of the pink candle and stirring reading from Zephaniah, “Sing aloud, O daughter Zion!” Joy is the word of the day, joy and sweetness and delight in the midst of pre-Christmas chaos.

And then we get to that Gospel.

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

John the Baptizer? More like John the buzzkill!

We spent some time with John last week, when we talked about how he calls us to seek balance. Surely this week’s passage is just underlining that lesson. The instructions he gives here are not radical acts. Share, and if you have privilege, make use of it for the benefit of others. The end. Phew!

Hey let’s spend some time with Zephaniah, who often goes unheard except during this one week of Advent, maybe the Easter Vigil. He seems to be having a good time!

The Jewish Study Bible I consulted contained an outline of the structure of the book. Let’s take a look at it.

1. Announcement of doom

Um…okay.

1. Description of doom

Ooh.

1. The last chance to repent

Uh-huh?

1. Against the nations and their gods

Um…

1. Against the overbearing city

*sigh*

1. Joy to Jerusalem

OH COME ON.

The lectionary, which gives us the schedule of readings, often slices out a huge chunk of a passage in the middle, or leaves out a piece that totally changes the message of the portion that does get read.

I guess in this case I don’t really blame them. We’re supposed to be talking about joy. And at least Zephaniah gets all the bad news out of the way first, unlike John! John is baptizing everyone who comes to him, but then calls them all vipers and says that the one who comes after him will baptize them with fire! Is this good news or not?

Is joy really good news if it only comes before tribulation? It’s like sitting through one of those evangelical sales pitches. The only reward for listening to that hard sell is, “Hey, you might go to heaven!”

“If a remnant of Israel remains after the wrath to come, they’ll be doing real great!”

What kind of good news is that? 

When someone says, “I got good news and bad news,” you want the bad news first, right? Why would we want joy first and then warnings of the wrath and fire to come? How is the arrival of that Messiah good news?

Where else does joy come first and then hardship? Well, it happens a lot in life, I’m sure you know that. But why would we welcome it? When is that a good experience?

Birth comes to mind.

Advent 3 is often a day where we celebrate Mary, the Mother of our Lord, rather than giving two whole Sundays to John. We recite her Magnificat, the song she sings to her cousin Elizabeth, John’s mother, who gave birth to him well past the age of bearing children…in some ways almost a greater miracle than Mary’s mystical dance with the Holy Spirit.

As I think about the uneasy dance between joy and hardship, I’m also reminded of Seemi Ghazi, one of my dosts, which is sort of like the Sufi word for soul-friend. Seemi is an interfaith scholar, professor of classical Arabic, and an incredible poet. I first got to know that when she presented a gorgeous reflection on the birth of her daughter Aliya to a group of us clergy several years ago, a reflection plump and juicy with Islamic mysticism and theology, which is shared in full on the Contemplative Society website.

Seemi, who had already suffered two pregnancy losses by the time she became pregnant with Aliya, detailed the trials of her pregnancy, including a weeks-long bout of insomnia. She writes,

In the midst of this condition, I attended a celebration of the birth of the thirteenth-century poet and mystic Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi. There I asked Sherif Baba (a Turkish Rifa’i teacher whom we both follow) whether he could suggest a prayer or divine name to alleviate my condition. He laughed, “Don’t ask for sleep! The holy ones love the night. Perhaps the one within you is awakened. Bear with her. No frustration. Lie in bed peacefully and reflect upon whichever divine names and verses come into your heart.

This is standard Sufi wisdom. Rumi himself adjures, “If you want everlasting glory, don’t go back to sleep!” As painful and horrendous and unjust as hardship is, it is a side effect of being incarnate, being in the world, being present to love as well as pain. You can’t have one without the other! Don’t go back to sleep!

Seemi goes on to say that during one particularly mystical experience at a prayer service held by night before a beach bonfire, Mother Mary came to her side. In the Qur’an, Mary is mentored spiritually by Zechariah, John’s father, before John is born. Seemi writes,

Zakariyya offered Maryam a sanctuary and trusted her cultivation of her inner world. The physical sanctuary was Maryam’s prayer-niche (mihrab in Arabic) located within the Jerusalem Temple, but the literal signification of the Arabic term mihrab is “a place of struggle or battle.” Though we revere Maryam for her serenity, she engaged in a profound inward struggle without which her mihrab, as a site of inward battle, could not have become her mihrab as a site of sanctity and retreat. Through struggle Maryam became her own mihrab, “Maryam Full of Grace.”

Indeed, Muslims also believe that Maryam’s beautiful presence of prayer is what inspires Zechariah to return to the Temple to pray for a child.

Seemi continues,

Lying awake in my bedroom sanctuary, I began to meditate on silence and night. I knew that when Zakariyya had received word of the birth of Yahya (John) the angel Gabriel granted him a sign: that he should not speak to any human being for three layali, three nights, except in signs[.] In quiet solitude, I began to imagine nights that I called Layali Maryam, nights that Maryam had devoted to prayer, meditation, and fasting. I entered each Layla, each single Night: Layla of Mystery, Layla of Union, Moon Layla, Layla of Seventy Unveilings, Layla of Shining Constellations, and strangest of all, the Layla/Night when the Ruh, the Divine spirit, breathed into Maryam the baby Isa (Jesus), a child conceived like the first human being, Adam, of sheer Divine desire.

Here, on a day of joy flanked by hardship, all of us are being called to our own mihrab, our own sanctuary, both to give thanks and to ask for help in the birthing of something within. It doesn’t matter who you are or how your body has handled birthing; all of us are capable of bringing something amazing to birth. If not a child, then something else just as beautiful.

Compassion. Kindness. Hope. Vulnerability. A new way of looking at the world.

All of these things are needed to bring what Luke called the Kingdom of God to fruition on earth.

Perhaps, then, Zephaniah and John, in their complicated dancing between joy and hardship, are teaching us pre-natal care. Those who birth multiple children often know that the first one sends the new parents on a roller-coaster of anxiety, while those that follow tend not to be as frightening. It’s not just that a person gets used to it; it’s that we realize that even the smallest humans are more resilient than we think.

And so are you.

As we come ever closer to the solstice and the mystery of Christmas; truly the greatest night of joy and struggle until Holy Saturday, let’s lean into all of the feelings that rise up in us: anticipation, anxiety, annoyance, awe. They are gifts and messages and teachers.

This season is chaotic and full of worry, but your heart knows what to do, no matter who you are or what you have borne or failed to bear in the past.

May these very long winter nights, these Layali Maryam, provide additional succor in their length. We have time, beloved; time to pray, time to get to know whatever beautiful being has been breathed into you and is yearning to be born.

Dec 06 | “Balance promotes peace,” (Sermon, Advent 2 2021)

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, ²during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. ³He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, ⁴as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
   make his paths straight.
⁵ Every valley shall be filled,
   and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
   and the rough ways made smooth;
⁶ and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” ’

Luke 3:1-6

In January of 2017 I was privileged to travel to the Holy Land to take a course at St. George’s College in Jerusalem. We traveled to many places, including several that most tourists would not be allowed to go, like Nablus and Hebron.

One morning, we piled into our tour bus, ostensibly to visit the Jordan river to renew our baptismal vows, but first we were going to a place called the Wadi Qelt, a valley in the West Bank containing a long stream that flows all the way from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. It plays host to a variety of rare birds as well as home to several monasteries nestled into the limestone rock of the Judean mountains surrounding it.

We got off the bus and were greeted by Bedouin boys selling Chinese-made keffiyeh and jewelry. Our guide ushered us up to the top of a hill, where a tall wooden cross greeted us.

Staring out at the valley, this child of the wet coast would never have imagined that such an area could contain so much life. It was brown, barren, and deathly still, a significant departure from the crowded and sumptuous grandeur of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the intricate and colourful mosaics and stained glass of Al-Aqsa mosque. We spent some time in silence, pondering the beauty of the landscape, understanding completely why Jesus would have come here for his 40-day period of solitude and reflection. There was nothing to distract. Only the wind, caressing your face and picking up your hair. Only the mountains, holding you like cupped hands raised into the sky.

It is to places like this, says the writer of Luke, that the word of God comes. Not to the bustling streets of the Old City. Not to the glamorous seaside resort town of Caesarea Maritima, where the governors had their estates. Not even to the pillars and palaces of Rome. And certainly not to emperors, governors, or politicians with silver tongues and shining swords.

No, to the wilderness, and one wild-eyed lover with a couple of locust legs caught in his beard.

To a quiet place where life happens with few witnesses, and where the impatient and unskilled see no life at all.

The Rev. Debie Thomas, minister at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California writes,

“In Luke’s account, emperors, governors, rulers — the folks who wield power â€” don’t hear God, but the outsider from the wilderness does.  What is it about power that deafens us to the Word? Maybe Tiberius, Pilate, and Herod can’t receive a fresh revelation from God because they presume to hear and speak for God already. After all, they’re in power. Doesn’t that mean that they embody God’s will automatically? If not, well, who cares? They already have pomp, money, military might, and the weight of religious tradition at their disposal. They don’t need God.

But in the wilderness? In the wilderness, there’s no safety net. No Plan B. No savings account or National Guard. In the wilderness, life is raw and risky, and our illusions of self-sufficiency fall apart fast. To locate ourselves at the outskirts of power is to confess our vulnerability in the starkest terms. In the wilderness, we have no choice but to wait and watch as if our lives depend on God showing up. Because they do. And it’s into such an environment â€” an environment so far removed from power as to make power laughable â€” that the word of God comes.”

Standing on the hills overlooking the valleys and gorges, I was struck by how vulnerable I would have been if I was alone – if the friends I’d made who stood next to me wandered off into the distance, our bus drove away, and the Bedouin boys packed up their wares and trundled back to their camps, squalid places they were forced to inhabit by the state – sound familiar? Where I stood, there was no visible water source, just a few scraggly scraps of prickly vegetation. There were a few habitations visible from the top of the hill, but it would have taken a long time to get there. My phone had no signal. I don’t think I even had a bottle of water on me.

I’m not by any means an outdoorsy person, but if I were stuck in a Pacific Northwest forest I could at least make a lean-to, gathering cedar branches and old leaves to line the walls and stuff the cracks to keep me warm. I know a few local plants that are edible. I know how to orient myself – mountains north, ocean west.

Here? No trees. No branches. No water. The sun was hidden behind thick cloud cover that day so I couldn’t even orient myself that way. If it had been a clear day, I suppose I could have figured out which way was west…but what would that matter as it would surely only be an hour or two before I was lying on the ground in a dead faint from thirst?

Here, the land enforces humility. And indeed, the earth is beginning to enforce humility, as we are battered by winds and rain and fire. We are being called, prophetically, to learn our place in the order of things. Some knew it already, and will find vindication even as the powerful seek to silence and crush them, just as it attempted to silence John through beheading.

But God’s desire for us all, rich and poor, cruel and kind, powerful and forgotten, is balance.

The writer of Luke grounds John firmly within a long tradition of prophets, some of whom preached within the esteemed halls of power like Jeremiah and Isaiah, but many of whom preached, like John, from the margins, like Amos and Micah. Luke’s Gospel is often concerned with things being in balance; about God turning things upside-down in order to reveal something new. Nothing is ever as it seems in Luke. Not only does God come to and empower the most unlikely of places and people, but God enlists the help of all creation in the work of prophecy.

Like last week, we hear that the land itself, in its preparation for the coming of the Lord, will shift and change. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked shall be made straight, the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

In an era of climate disasters this might sound a little frightening, but this is about balance being restored, and all flesh, not just the chosen people of the covenant, seeing the salvation of God.

Again, from Debie Thomas,

“No one standing on a mountaintop wants the mountain to be flattened.  But when we’re wandering in the wilderness, and immense, barren landscapes stretch out before us in every direction, we’re able to see what privileged locations obscure.  Suddenly, we feel the rough places beneath our feet.  We experience what it’s like to struggle down twisty, crooked paths.  We glimpse arrogance in the mountains and desolation in the valleys, and we begin to dream God’s dream of a wholly reimagined landscape.  A landscape so smooth and straight, it enables “all flesh” to see the salvation of God.”

In the reading from Baruch the writer encourages Jerusalem to take off her garment of sorrow and affliction and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God; to put on her head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting. She can put on this beauty forever because she was once clothed with sorrow.

Only those who pass through the Red Sea reach the Promised Land.

God turns slaves into living sacred signs and scorned criminals into kings. God lifts up what is low and brings down what is high. God, beautiful and majestic beyond comprehension, seeks wildness and wilderness.

God seeks balance, because balance promotes peace.

In this second week of Advent, let our questions also be Debie Thomas’s:

“Where are we located during this Advent season?  How close are we to power, and how open are we to risking the wilderness to hear a word from God?”

Nov 28 | “When monuments fall,” (Sermon, Advent 1 2021)

‘There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. ²⁶People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. ²⁷Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in a cloud” with power and great glory. ²⁸Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.’
29 Then he told them a parable: ‘Look at the fig tree and all the trees; ³⁰as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. ³¹So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. ³²Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. ³³Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
34 â€˜Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, ³⁵like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. ³⁶Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.’

Luke 21:25-36

There is something so special about coming home to the west coast after a long trip. Whether the time away is two weeks or two years, to be greeted by the art of Bill Reid at the Vancouver airport; to drive home through rain or rare sunlight and drink in the vastness of the ocean, whispering cedar trees, moss carpeting old growth branches and forest floors, and the cobalt embrace of those mountains is powerful and comforting.

I think of the particular delight I felt many years ago after coming home from nine months living in the UK and seeing how big those trees were. Surrounded by the broads, marshes, and comparatively friendly woods of Norfolk, I’d forgotten how big trees could be. I’d forgotten the haunting chill at the base of my spine that accompanied the early morning call of a raven; the smell of the sea that sometimes met my nose six blocks from shore; the way a cloudy day could turn the landscape into a painting done entirely in shades of blue – a true Advent tapestry.

When I lived in England, the home that bore and nourished many of my ancestors, I felt tied to history through the landscape but also the architecture – public houses, town squares, churches, standing stones. Here, much of the ancestral architecture of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples has been lost to history or actively destroyed by settlers. Here, it’s elders that hold the stories, and the land itself. This is in keeping with God’s truth, for it is land that owns and keeps us, not the other way around. While so many of us believe that we are the supreme architects of civilization, the land silently builds us, cell by cell, until it is permitted through the grace of God to unbuild us, to repurpose us again.

On this day when we’re walking into Advent, the season of prophecy, and celebrating 45 years of women’s ordination in the Anglican Church of Canada, I share words from Bishop Yvette Flunder, pastor of the City of Refuge United Church of Christ in Oakland, in a 2017 sermon titled “From Monuments to Movements.” As she reflects on her life in California she says,

“The San Andreas Fault yawns and moves and stretches consistently and constantly because we are upon a living earth. We build dead buildings on a living earth. And our history tells us no matter how fabulous and magnificent we build our architectural renowned structures and monuments, they are dead structures on a living earth, and they can be utterly destroyed in seconds by a certain kind of seismic event. Even our monuments have to respect our movement.”

She goes on to briefly talk about how buildings in California are retrofitted for earthquakes, saying,

“We try to make a building act like living things act. Palm trees know what to do. When the earth shakes, the palm trees lay down and then they come back up, because they have roots, and because they are living in a place indigenously. Even with everything we do, with the multiple billions of dollars we spent in San Francisco, some of our buildings still fail because the earth is a mighty living thing. Those of us that are of the church and in whichever way we acknowledge and worship the divine, we must know the difference between being a monument and a movement.”

In today’s Gospel, in response to a crowd admiring the stonework of the Temple, Jesus says, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” Scholars of history know that this proved correct. The Temple was razed to the ground in 70 CE, Rome’s retaliation for the brave revolt of the Jewish people against imperial rule. Of course, what brought down that monument was not earth but Empire. The glory of Solomon, a beacon to Jews for five hundred years, a monument built to celebrate the incredible resilience of a movement, was reduced to rubble by the Romans, who stole the spoils of the temple, including its holy vessels and sacred menorah, to finance the building of the Colosseum in Rome.

The Gospel of Luke was composed after the destruction of the Temple, while conversations about why God would allow such a horrific act were getting heated. The infant church was beginning its long and painful split from Judaism, which poured love and work and scholarship into the movement that had always shored up the precious monument of the Temple. A monument is not an inherently bad thing, but a movement will always outlast a monument. In this prophecy of Jesus, the writer of Luke shows us a man who, like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel before him, confers a sacred meaning to tragedy. Movements can stand up to earth and Empire because they are led by prophets.

And indeed Jesus also says that the land itself will become a prophet. There will be signs in the heavenly bodies and the sea. He tells the crowd that just as they would look to fig trees to know the season – and they would have, as people of the land – so they can look to the world around them to predict what is to come. “When you see these things taking place,” he says, “you know that the Kingdom of God is near.”

And friends, latter-day children of Jesus’s message, what do we see?

Many who have come in the name of the Lord claiming to be our saviours, who only lead us astray.

Wars and insurrections.

Earthquakes, famines, and plagues.

Arrests and persecution of righteous seekers of justice. Corrupt court systems that punish them while allowing oppressors and murderers to go free.

Betrayal, splitting of families along political lines.

Cities and wilderness surrounded by armies, overrun with police who tear-gas and beat and abduct the citizens they’re meant to serve and protect.

Signs in the sun – heat domes, infernos, drought. The roaring of the sea – floods, tsunamis, and hurricanes.

The Jewish people could not by any means have stopped the juggernaut of the Roman Empire from shattering their beloved monument to God’s unending salvation.

Our earth, never a monument but a living thing, is now beginning to treat us, humanity, like a monument, shaking us, scorching us, flooding and drowning us, leaving us homeless, not in spite of us but specifically because of us and our actions, because we consistently refuse to turn aside from our monuments, monuments which, unlike the Temple, glorify greed rather than God. Empire shattered that monument, but Earth is shattering ours. A prophet can topple Empire. A handful of them can even topple something as monumental as a doctrine enshrining thousands of years’ worth of church-sanctioned sexism.

But there’s no toppling this planet. It’s our home.

Is there no good news to be had?

“Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Already there are people standing up and speaking out. Just as prophets within the church and in every time and place challenged Empires and authorities, the Indigenous peoples of the world and our children and grandchildren are leading us.

They are the living sign. Our redemption is drawing near.

There are as many ways to respond to the call to climate justice as there are people on this planet, and you know the ones to which you are called. If you don’t, pray. It will come to you. I trust you. I trust that God speaks to you, and will tell you what to do.

Bishop Yvette says, “Our history is filled with monuments. Thank God for earthquakes.”

In this season of Advent, we herald with hope everything that is to come: life, peace, joy, and love. When the procession passes by on its way to a new earth, led by prophets and children and gods who do ridiculous things like clothe themselves with precious human flesh, will we join in their song, and will we follow?

Nov 21 | “Embracing Fluidity” (Sermon, Reign of Christ/Transgender Day of Remembrance 2021)

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” ³⁴Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” ³⁵Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” ³⁶Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” ³⁷Pilate asked him, “˜So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

John 18:33-37

Somehow, once again, the wheel of the year is completing its revolution and we are heading into Advent, but not before our regularly scheduled stop at the weird junction of prophecy and fulfilment that is Reign of Christ Sunday, or Christ the King Sunday; the day where we celebrate a king or ruler who is anything but, a scorned desaparecido, a victim of state violence hung on an instrument of state violence; the day where we fix our gaze on that atrocity and say, “Yes, this is the one to whom we have given our hearts.” Yikes.

But it’s not just any Reign of Christ Sunday. Yesterday, people across the world gathered to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance. Transgender Day of Remembrance was begun in 1999 by Gwendolyn Ann Smith to honor the memory of Rita Hester, a trans woman murdered in 1998. The vigil commemorates transgender people lost to violence, often by reading the names of those reported murdered across the world. It always takes a long time. This year, in fact, has been one of the deadliest on record according to a study by the Human Rights Campaign, a queer and trans advocacy group.

It is imperative to mourn the monumental loss of these beloved children of God through public grief. And I also want to say that all too often, the only stories we hear about what it means to be trans or gender-nonconforming are stories of degradation and misery ending in violent death or suicide. Those stories are far too common, but if we focus on them to the exclusion of all else, it subtly tells us that this is the lot in life for all trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people, and therefore to be expected, even accepted, and that is not true. We live lives that contain joy and beauty and delight, and we deserve joy and beauty and delight just like anyone else, and joy is an act of resistance.

So now let me introduce you to one of my favourite nonbinary artists: Alok Menon, a writer, performer, mixed media artist, and public speaker. Like me, they use they/them pronouns. They also dazzle me daily on Instagram.

Alok is ethnically Indian and has a lot of body hair. They make a point of keeping it visible and unshaven, and have rocked sensational makeup with a full beard and a boat-neck dress, or an incredible patterned pantsuit with heels that raise them to heaven. They regularly explore, through lovely illustrated book reports, how the policing of gender cannot be untangled from colonial and racist mindsets. It’s a fascinating lost piece of history. Even hair removal in women only became seen as mandatory in the late 19^th century and was explicitly tied to white supremacy – because the hairier you were, the less evolved you were said to be. When the few models of what it means to look nonbinary are almost always willowy hairless androgynous types like David Bowie or Tilda Swinton, Alok, with their brown skin, fluorescent palette, flawless makeup, and five o’clock shadow magnificently shows us a fully realized paradise of gender freedom.

Alok’s look has received a lot of scorn and anger from bigots, but to a comment as predictable and unkind as “You are not a woman, bro. Man up,” Alok consistently responds with things like, “You mistake your armour as an identity and your pain as a personality. You are climbing a tree that bears no fruit. Ascending a ladder that goes nowhere. What you seek isn’t here with me. It’s within you. This isn’t about my freedom, it’s about your repression. You resent me because I live what you fear. I love you because I have no fear. I’m sorry you’ve been told you can’t express yourself. You can. I promise. Have a great day!”

Jesus, betrayed by his disciples and turned in by his own people, terrified of the Empire crashing down on them as they had before, is hauled before Pilate, governor of Judea, who’d come into Jerusalem from his resplendent seaside property to remind those gathered for the subversive festival of Passover, a celebration of liberation from another Empire, whose boot they were under. Pilate seems baffled, even amused, and clearly expects his presence will be enough to cow Jesus into blubbering submission.

But Jesus does not respond that way at all. The scene is heavy with irony. His tone is impossible to gauge. It’s easy to read contempt. But it could also be a tone similar to Alok’s, a calm refusal to be humiliated.

In a post titled “Grammar Lessons,” Alok writes, “My first word was irony. Growing up a boy, they called me too feminine. When I finally claimed femininity as my own, they called me a man. These are grammar lessons: some of us are only allowed to be thought, never to think.”

Jesus didn’t have worth in the eyes of Pilate or Empire. He was only allowed to be thought. And yet here, he proves that he can think. And to his credit, Pilate seems intrigued by this, asking, “What is truth?” although he doesn’t stick around to hear the answer. Instead, he becomes profoundly unsettled the more he learns about Jesus.

The refusal of oppressed peoples to be confined always does that to Empires. It happened before Pharaoh and now it’s happening before Pilate and will continue to happen until the world runs out of either Empires or humanity.

Alok writes, “Being nonbinary is about embracing my fluidity. My becoming. My journey without fixed destination.” Perhaps that’s one reason why trans and gender-nonconforming people are murdered constantly. To small-minded tyrants, that is the only way to deny us that fluidity, the only way to make us freeze in place.

How sadly mistaken they are, in light of the story of Jesus, for God through Jesus embodies the most sacred truth of what it means to be trans: the inability to be frozen in place. Jesus is born a boundary-breaker, divinity taking human form, and for his whole ministry, he broke down walls. Here, in the space between Pilate and Jesus, oppressor and oppressed, ruler and subject, bully and victim, God starts the work of breaking the boundaries between life and death.

And now the real work begins. Those of us who are trans have to be brave and live into the holiness of being trans-formers, radiating the beauty of in-betweenness. We have to love ourselves because as long as we exist, we embody a kaleidoscopic world of beauty and freedom, refuting all that refuses diversity as unkempt and uncontrollable. We prove God’s fullness. We are an outward sign of the inward grace of reconciliation.

There are lots of practical things allies can do like sharing and respecting pronouns, speaking out against transphobia and transmisogyny, and challenging unjust legislation that oppresses trans people. But you can also help us by doing what we’re doing: loving and leaning into the parts of yourself that defy convention. The more you shine, the brighter the whole world becomes.

And so we remember those taken from us, but we do so knowing that those who murder and abuse and oppress thought they were throwing rocks into a pond. Little did they know they were throwing stars into the sky. Little did they know that those who come after will use those stars to guide their way across oceans of their own seeking and struggle. Little would they have ever suspected that these deaths they hoped would intimidate only gave the rest of us a cloud of holy witnesses, a galaxy of saints.

Little do they know that in the aftermath of the Christ, death no longer freezes anything in place.

As Alok says, “What if this world was just one draft? What if everything could be rewritten? …There are ideas we haven’t considered yet. Feelings we haven’t encountered yet. Love we haven’t surrendered to yet. “Yet” is the most wondrous word ever built. Let’s live there together.”

Nov 08 | “A God who cries,” (Sermon, All Saints 2021)

When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ ³³When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. ³⁴He said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ ³⁵Jesus began to weep. ³⁶So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’ ³⁷But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’
38 Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. ³⁹Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days.’ ⁴⁰Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’ ⁴¹So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upwards and said, ‘Father, I thank you for having heard me. ⁴²I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.’ ⁴³When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ ⁴⁴The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’

John 11:32-44

Good evening, St. Brigid’s. Today is the feast of All Saints, and at this time of year, we talk about death. I just wanted to preface with that, in case you’re feeling raw. If you need to take a break, it’s okay.

Seven years ago, on a Wednesday in early April, my father got up, made coffee, went downstairs to warm up his wife’s car, and dropped dead of a massive heart attack. He was sixty-four years old.

It was about three weeks before I was scheduled to go to ACPO, where prospective candidates to ordained ministry are interviewed by ordained and lay members of the church. It was about five weeks before I was due to graduate with my Master of Divinity. The time passed in a whirlwind. I would have saved myself a lot of heartbreak if I’d taken time off to grieve, but I didn’t.

Hard-won wisdom.

In September of that year, I was sent to St. Philip’s in Dunbar Heights to begin a parish internship. Our current bishop, John Stephens, was rector there at the time, and we sat down to decide some of the duties I would be given. One of my first ones was to give the Gospel reading at a midweek service in November.

On that day, I went up to the front of the chapel and opened the Bible.

A passage from Matthew’s eighth chapter. I didn’t look at it ahead of time.

First mistake.

Everything was fine until I got to verse 21.

“Another of his disciples said to Jesus, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.’”

I lost it. Not copiously, but enough that everybody noticed and it felt super awkward. By the way, in case you’re wondering, our soon-to-be Bishop John hadn’t checked it either and he was mortified. So don’t send him any hate mail, he’s a good egg, I promise.

Now I find it funny – both the circumstance and the memory of John’s face. But at the time, it really wasn’t. Not only because it hit so close to home, but because it felt so effing cruel. Let the dead bury their own dead.

It felt like Jesus telling me I could be Clare Morgan, child of Moira and Richard, or Clare Elisabeth, Christian and would-be priest in God’s Church, and I had to choose. It felt like a total denial of the howling abyss of my loss. And we seem to constantly be called to deny the reality of death and loss, both by our wider society but also often in the church. It happens among a lot of evangelicals and Fundamentalists who act as though expressing grief is a denial of heaven and God’s plan. It also happens among the conspiracy theorists we see on the news and online – people who deny COVID, genocides, and climate crisis, who try to convince other people that terrible acts of terrorism like mass shootings are just “false flag” operations for…what purpose exactly? Who knows? So many of us don’t want to confront the depths of human depravity or even the far more mundane reality of mortality.

But no matter how hard we try, we can’t deny death. You have known it in your own life, surely. I’ve buried many of Christ’s beloved as a priest, and in May of 2014 my stepmother and I set free my father’s ashes in the mountains of Squamish. I watched them blowing up the side of those mountains and knew he was not coming back, ever. He may endure in the winds and the trees there, and I’ve felt his presence keenly, but it was not in any way I had known it before. He had occupied a space in time with a body. Now, that body, which I loved, which had a smell and a physical solidity, no longer exists. The living are the only ones who can bury the dead.

In the beautiful book Out of Darkness into Light: Spiritual Guidance in the Qur’an with Reflections from Jewish and Christian Sources, the former Episcopal priest Anne Holmes Redding writes:

“God alone is timeless, without beginning or end. …The rest of us must deal with time and the confines it imposes, the most dramatic and mysterious of which is death. Death appears in many guises and at several levels of existence: for individual beings; for relationships; for societies and other groups; and eventually, according to the scriptures of the Abrahamic traditions, for the cosmos itself.”

Jesus, far too late, comes back to Bethany, and meets Martha and Mary, grieving the loss of their brother, Lazarus, whom Jesus loved. Martha manages a profession of faith when she sees Jesus, but not Mary. All she can say is, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

This is true. And now it’s too late.

We don’t get any sense of tone here, of course, but we are told that Jesus becomes disturbed. There are actually many arguments about what is the cause of his disturbance and his tears. Dr. Harry Maier, my New Testament professor in seminary, argues that what makes Jesus disturbed is actually the unbelief and misunderstanding of those around him, rather than the death itself – particularly the crowd’s use of the theologically loaded phrase, “Come and see,” a phrase Jesus uses to welcome people into new life which is repurposed here to lead him to the dead. Why would Jesus be sad when he knows what he is going to do, even before he got to Bethany at all? It doesn’t make sense.

This is a solid and scholarly argument, and honestly, between you and me, it used to be very important to me, as a scholar of John.

But now? Not so much.

I just want a God who sees those who mourn, and cries.

After losing my dad, I want a God who cries.

After nearly two years and 5 million deaths from COVID, I want a God who cries.

And then, I want a God who, in the face of that slammed door, in the face of, “Where were you?” in the face of, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days,” says, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God? Remember what I told you. Remember what I showed you.”

And then shows us nurse logs; the depth of solstice followed by springtime, year after year; stars exploding outward to create more nebulae, more worlds, more galaxies, on and on until time has no more meaning than a baby’s babbling; shows us the oppressed rising up, refusing to be silent, refusing to stay wrapped up in their shrouds, refusing to ignore the call, “Lazarus, come out!”; shows us resurrection.

Continuing her reflection, Anne Holmes Redding, who is African-American, writes,

“On a pilgrimage in 2006, I had a lesson about this mysterious interrelationship of death, sacrifice, and new life. Our group was in a little boat on a rainy day, returning from Skellig Michael, a stony island off the west coast of Ireland, where medieval monks had built a monastery high on a cliff. As I sat thinking about my ancestors who had crossed the North Atlantic Ocean centuries ago never to return to their African homeland, the air seemed full of a presence. I had always had great respect for those enslaved Africans who had jumped overboard rather than continue on the ocean journey of oppression. But that day I heard a chorus of voices telling me, “Daughter, we are the ones who did not jump overboard. And you are the reason we didn’t.”’

Subsumed with joy, Anne writes, “I felt resurrected.”

God calls to us – calls us to burst forth from tombs of self-loathing, suffering, and death, calls us to come out (yeah, children, hear that call), but does not deny the reality of what we risk to come out of these tombs, does not deny that we don’t always choose them, and we can’t always skip forth as easily as Lazarus did, and cries.

And when we do burst forth, God turns to those who witness our exodus, and gruffly says, “Unbind them and let them go.”

Nov 02 | “No God but Love,” (Sermon, October 31st 2021)

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ ²⁹Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; ³⁰you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” ³¹The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ ³²Then the scribe said to him, ‘You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that “he is one, and besides him there is no other”; ³³and “to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength”, and “to love one’s neighbour as oneself”,—this is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.’ ³⁴When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ After that no one dared to ask him any question.

Mark 12:28-34

On this day, one year ago, my husband and I went to visit our friends – the last time we were allowed to do so in person before we went back into lockdown. We always visit these friends on Halloween, because while we live in an apartment building, they live in a detached house, and we like to share their trick-or-treaters.

Mindful of COVID-19, our friends had meticulously constructed a candy zipline. At the top, on their front porch, we sat on their deck furniture with cocktails and a selection of pre-packaged bags of treats, topped with flickering LED rings and little hooks. Trick-or-treaters came to the foot of the stairs below and were instructed to stand next to a large inflatable ghost. When they were ready, the little bags were attached to the zipline, and sent down to them, and if you did it just right, they would land in the arms of the ghost, although occasionally they came in too hot and went flying into the bushes nearby. That’s what the flickering LED rings were for!

The first trick-or-treater was their four-year-old neighbour – a mystic of the highest order. For when he received his treat bag and was prompted by his mother’s gentle, “What do we say?” he responded not with “Thank you” but a wordless shriek of pure delight.

Yes, I thought, as we all bent in half with laughter. That is what we say. That is what we say when we realize that human beings, who can be so very innovative in cruelty, will also occasionally sit down together to plan and experiment and spare no expense to make sure that Halloween still works in a global pandemic, because we will be damned if children in our community have to miss such a magical night.

That is what we say at the beginning of life, when the relationship with the mystical is much simpler, because magic infuses every part of our lives and all things, both good and bad, are possible – from Santa to monsters under the bed. It’s only as we age that our minds and hearts fill up with words and rhetorical equations, and while in so many situations this is quite useful and fun and indeed very precious to God it also does not function to impress or flummox or fool the Beloved, who will love us no more or less for how poetic or intellectually adept we can be.

We are allowed, we are free, to be as children.

That’s why I love this prayer which my Sufi Muslim friends say: “La illahah illallah.” “There is no God but God.” God is our Source and our End, Alpha and Omega, Beloved and Lover, and many principalities and powers will attempt to jostle for position but nothing can replace God.

As the 12th century Persian poet Attar of Nishapur says,

“Look carefully!

This world, that world, are all God!  

There is nothing other than God,

and if there was, even that is also God!”  

“La illahah illallah.”

God is God, and God is Love. And if God is Love, then of course there is no God but Love, and that is the closest we adults can come to remembering the wisdom of children.

And oh wasn’t it wonderful to be so close, so intimate: welcoming children right up to our doorsteps, laughing barefaced across a table, singing shoulder to shoulder with those known and unknown to us, or being buried within one another’s arms?

Wasn’t it wonderful to love like a child shrieking wordlessly, throwing herself into a hug with abandon, rather than in this still somewhat abstract manner – in the way my hairstylist, who once ended our appointments with a hug, now stands before me and hugs herself instead; in the way we still press our palms together to offer peace, rather than touching; in the way we murmur “I love you” into the phone or a Zoom window, rather than into someone’s ear as we embrace?

Isn’t it wonderful when Love is so concrete?

Some days, I am filled entirely with “La illahah illallah,” filled entirely with wordless Love which is one and besides which is no other.

And some days I resonate more with the words of Chinese-Canadian writer Kai Cheng Thom, who includes the following poem in her beautiful book I Hope We Choose Love:  

what does it mean to be loved by a thing that cannot see you?

how does it feel to love a thing that you cannot see?  

Most of the time I’d say the human struggle of faith is with the latter half of the poem: How does it feel to love a thing that you cannot see? But over the last year and a half, I think a lot of people have been asking, “What does it mean to be loved by a thing that does not seem to see us here, suffering? For surely if it could see us, it would put a stop to all of this.”

Jesus and the disciples are in Jerusalem, so close to his own grand and wordless revelation of Love and, on the Cross, his own confrontation of this lonelier truth of Kai’s poem. And weaving his way through the high-minded debates and exchanges with scholars and sages and rank on rank the host of elitist clergy, he finds a scribe who asks a deceptively simple question – and perhaps indeed that question itself is also Kai’s question, slightly re-worded. What does it mean to be loved by a thing that we cannot see?

Here, in the holy city, before betrayal and denial and torture and abandonment, Jesus says to this young scribe, “To be loved by a thing that we cannot see is to admit that we do not exist outside of it – indeed, nothing exists outside of it. And if nothing exists outside of it, then we should act entirely within that orientation. And so if God is Love, we must love, for we are all one.”

As adults we often yearn for the so-called simplicity of childhood. But childhood is still deeply confusing, and likewise Love has always been this confusing, and the Truth is often this elusive, and there are as many ways to live the commandment of Love as there are those of us who live on this planet. While everything has been mostly upside-down over the last nineteen months, perhaps that part actually did stay constant: that divine Love at times feels alternately as heavy and warm as the winter woolen blanket on my bed, and at other times as high and cold and thin as mountain air. And for many of us, and especially transwomen of colour like Kai Cheng Thom, human love and safety feel just as uncertain as health has felt for us over the course of the last year and a half.

what does it mean to be loved by a thing that cannot see you?

Sometimes divine Love feels like the only thing we can really count on, and sometimes we feel foolish even thinking that.

how does it feel to love a thing that you cannot see?

I have sung songs of praise and whirled and embraced and danced alongside my friends and thought I would split like a ripe tomato with the juicy abundance of God’s love…and I have scrabbled about with ragged fingernails in the dark trying to find the smallest crumb of God to hold up to the light as an act of silent worship, and have ended up only with filthy palms and an aching jaw from the gnashing of my teeth.

We all have.

And yet.

Love is greater.

Greater than fear, greater than hate, greater than optimism, greater than cynicism, greater than confusion, greater even than hope.

Love is a wordless shriek of delight. Love is a sigh too deep for words.

“La illahah illallah.”

There is no God but God, and there is no commandment but Love, and Love is God and that is why the two clauses are wed.

As Kai Cheng Thom says, “It may be hard to believe in. It will be harder to live. I hope we choose it anyway.” 

Oct 25 | “Bearing an untold story,” (Sermon, October 24th 2021)

They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. ⁴⁷When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” ⁴⁸Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” ⁴⁹Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” ⁵⁰So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. ⁵¹Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” ⁵²Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.

Mark 10:46-52

Maya Angelou once said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

These Gospel healing stories are complicated. For their ancient audience, they were evidence of Jesus’s great power, but also signs of the new community Jesus was building, because disabled people were seen as unclean or broken. To be “liberated” from disability was to be lifted out of poverty and scorn and brought into community. They were stories of hope and reintegration.

But as we seek to build a better and kinder world, we should recognize that the way we still talk about disability is pretty problematic. Often we hold onto that ancient framing of disability as brokenness that needs fixing, but a lot of disabled people, particularly those disabled from birth, have said clearly that they don’t feel broken. Most of them are just as glad to be alive as the rest of us, aside from the difficulties of managing in a world that’s often hostile or indifferent to their needs and voices. Many have said that the only time they actually feel in need of fixing is when they run up against the roadblocks of an ableist society. This is why many people within that community are reclaiming the word disabled, because it is society that disables them, not their bodies.

Abled people also often frame disability as something that needs to be heroically overcome, loudly and publicly. We want to see those born with disabilities win medals at the Special Olympics, or become motivational speakers who tell all of us to reach for the stars. Obviously if disabled folks want to win medals or become motivational speakers, they should. But all too often, these are the only narratives that abled people are willing to celebrate or acknowledge. When disabled people are struggling or telling us about their struggles, we often shower them with platitudes and toxic positivity. We ask them if they’ve tried some herb or supplement or alternative treatment. We see their cultures and tools as things to be transcended rather than celebrated and preserved, like what often happens with the Deaf community and sign language, or with wheelchairs, which many disabled people say they do not feel “confined” or “bound” to; they are tools that impart freedom of movement. We may feel suspicious when we see someone who doesn’t “look” disabled making use of accessibility tools, and wonder if they’re “faking” it. We complain about political correctness when we’re told that slurs like “dumb” and “idiot” and “crippled” and phrases like “willfully blind” and “turn a deaf ear” are hurtful. We often touch disabled people and their wheelchairs without permission. We frame autism, Down’s syndrome, and other neurodivergences as a “burden” for parents to bear or a “problem” for society to solve. Some of us even say outright that we’d rather be dead than live a life requiring help from other people, implying that a life which requires such help is worthless.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

There are stories that go untold, and stories that go unheard. Either way grieves God’s heart.

And now to Bartimaeus’s story; talk about untold stories. It’s clear that at one point, he could see, but that’s all we know. We don’t know how he lost his sight, or how long he’s been without it. We don’t know what life was like before he lost it. All we know is he is a blind beggar, and his name is “Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus,” which is redundant because Bartimaeus means son of Timaeus.

Oh there’s a clue here. And it’s not the only one. The words Mark uses are so rich. Let’s look at a few.

The name Timaeus means “honour.” Don’t be fooled by social convention when you see the blind guy doing his best to survive with the only form of employment he could access in this society. He’s a son of honour.

And the word for “blind” that Mark uses is τυφλός , which comes up in the other Gospels but almost incessantly in Matthew, who loves to talk about hypocrisy. Like in English, it can signify the physical disability or ignorance, refusal to see. It can also signify dimness, or opacity. And it has a fascinating double meaning. The same word signifies someone “raising a smoke,” or something “smouldering,” which makes sense, because it’s hard to see in a room full of smoke.

Or a room full of incense.

Incense fills the temple to remind us that holiness has a smell, and God desires us so deeply that They want to fill our senses, to crowd out everything that distracts from Them; to remind us of a bush burning, smouldering, a sign of future liberation; to remind us of the cloud veiling Sinai, which obscured the vision of the Israelites not to oppress but to protect, a sign of the covenant which was to come down the mountain on stone tablets and on the shining face of Moses.

If Bartimaeus’s eyes are veiled with smoke, as this word suggests, well, maybe the smoke was coming from his own burning unconsumed heart, a heart yearning to be seen, burning with holy fire.

Again, the Greek bears this out beautifully. The word translated “cry out” came with this amazing definition from the lexicon I consulted: “cry out,” κράζω, inarticulate shouts that express deep emotion.”

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

Bartimaeus is out there in the desert of Jericho’s apathy, unseeing and unseen, smouldering, and he cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Here he proves, unequivocally, that he understands who Jesus is when no one else does. “˜Son of David” is a confessional title. The disciples, sighted, do not see Jesus for who he is. Bartimaeus, unsighted, does.

He cries out, “Have mercy on me!” Sounds like a hierarchical call from a groveling servant to a master, like an admission of guilt, and of course this is how the people around him would have heard it, because in those days they linked physical disability to sin. But no, it’s so much more wonderful than this. Historically, ceremonially, this pronouncement is a reminder of the Covenant, the bond between humanity and God. Bartimaeus knows Jesus not only as the Messiah, but as a physical manifestation of God’s promises to humanity.

So it’s not, “Save me from my disability!” It’s “I belong to you!”

No wonder people told him to be quiet. They don’t want to be reminded that despite their exclusion, he is part of the covenant.

And we know how Jesus responds.

Not only does he enlist the community to help Bartimaeus make his way over; we know Jesus is all about mutual aid. And then, most beautifully of all, he does not make any assumptions about what Bartimaeus wants.

HE ASKS HIM.

Bartimaeus, having spent much of his life sighted and wanting to regain that, asks for sight. And Jesus grants this request, which is well within his power, at no cost.

And what does Bartimaeus do in response?

He doesn’t go back to the community that excluded him and sought to shush him, the community that will now surely use his story as inspirational fodder to absolve themselves of that sin of exclusion, and indeed any further responsibility toward him.

He follows Jesus to Jerusalem.

Strangely, he disappears after this. We never hear of him again in the Gospel.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

I like to think that Bartimaeus, with his strong voice and his strong faith, led the cheering and hymns at Jesus’s fantastic performance art entrance into Jerusalem. And then I like to think maybe he was swept up in the magic of Passover at the holy city, and finding a place to start anew there. I like to think of him resting in the peace of knowing he belonged to God, still burning but no longer smouldering: burning clean, because his story is no longer untold.

And I can only pray that when I next walk by him on the street, I see him.