UCC Seneca Valley
February 15, 2026

^{Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!’ When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Get up and do not be afraid.’ And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, ‘Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.’}

I’d like to begin this morning after first saying, Hello dear friends and thank you for inviting me and wanting to be together again. That makes my heart full in a year my heart has seldom felt full. I want to start us with prayer, and I want to pray in the words of Wendell Berry, patron saint of mad farmers, manifestos, liberation fronts: Join me if you will.

    Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
    vacation with pay. Want more
    of everything ready-made. Be afraid
    to know your neighbors and to die.
    And you will have a window in your head.
    Not even your future will be a mystery
    any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
    and shut away in a little drawer.
    When they want you to buy something
    they will call you. When they want you
    to die for profit they will let you know.
    So, friends, every day do something
    that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
    Love the world. Work for nothing.
    Take all that you have and be poor.
    Love someone who does not deserve it.

Amen.

We’re balanced today in the crossroads of a number of meaningful seasons and days this week, and their confluence feels like the stars and planets in the hands of a good astrological reading. We are in the last days of Epiphany, a time of revelation and realization that contains traces of the creche and journey and voodoo wisdom seekers (speaking of signs and star charts). Yesterday was Valentine’s, an anniversary of death superficially associated with chocolate and roses but with roots in persecution and civil disobedience. Today is Transfiguration Sunday on which I’ll argue for the next little while that all of discipleship rests or doesn’t rest, as it were. And on Wednesday, many will mark a Lenten period of repentance and preparation by smearing ash on our face and naming our own deaths to begin a season that culminates in Easter, an event of life (superficially associated with chocolate and flowers but steeped in persecution and civil disobedience).

I’m into how Taoist and circular all these seasons and days are, how like a river. I like how much every Christian season arguably also contains the meaning and symbolism and devotional of every other Christian season, like a ying yang. Like a fractal. I like bringing up astrology and Taoism because I reckon the truths of Christianity are not unique to Christianity nor even especially Christian. No offense. And the centrality of death and rebirth in Christian seasons and holy days and for the way of discipleship itself can’t be overemphasized. Hold that thought.

Today’s text in both scriptures centers on transfiguration and, speaking of microcosms: The gospel transfiguration may originally have been a poster-Easter sighting like the road to Emmaus or Houdini Jesus appearing to the disciples behind locked doors. It is filled with symbols from Jesus’ baptism at the Jordan, and with tropes of the Easter morning empty tomb. And it is built on the transfiguration story of Moses receiving the law of God after 40 days on God’s mountain. In both, Jesus’s and Moses’s face becomes the sun. In both God is a cloud and a voice speaking a holy name. Jesus’ clothes are dazzling white like the angels at the tomb. In the gospel, Moses appears along with Elijah in glory. The disciples and the Israelites are afraid and filled with dread.

The radiance in these stories is likely an impression or afterglow of God’s presence. God is often radiant as a burning bush, a fire descending on the mountain, a pillar of fire, the torch and the smoking fire-pot, chariots of fire, the rain of fire consuming Elijah’s wet wood and stones and lapping up the water in the trench. God is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. A city on a hill and a light outside of a bushel. Moses and Jesus (and Saul and other disciples) are transformed by encounters with God, by intimacy with God. In Exodus, the intimacy is so great that it describes Moses speaking to God face-to-face, as one speaks to a friend (33:7-11). Moses and Jesus receive God and God’s radiance unmediated, undiluted. It’s nuclear. It’s like Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the angel of God melts the faces of everyone who dares to look.

Undiluted God, uncut, raw, unadulterated God is stuff we talk about as the Other. These are descriptions for the patriarchs and prophets. Moses and Jesus have God’s shining face, not us. It’s treated almost as apostasy to think of ourselves on that mountain. That place is untouchable and God is untouchable. Raw, uncut, fully-caffeinated God is perfect and far away, heavenly, distant. It’s stuff we talk about as a metaphor or a nice idea. A paragon: parables and aphorisms, words that are only symbolic, that we have no intention of or capacity for doing, that we have even devised excuses and justifications for not doing. Commandments like, Give away everything you have to the poor. Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you. Submit yourself to everyone. Take the lowest seat. Invite losers to your dinners so that fancy society thinks you are also a loser. God’s mitzvot, gospel discipleship. These are all biblical, both testaments. And I think that’s the radiance, the atomic power that has Moses and Jesus shining like Chernobyl. That’s what the Israelites and the disciples with Jesus find so fearful and dreadful. Who can blame them? I think it’s what most of us are afraid of.

Most of us prefer diluted God. We want to drink our God with a little milk. We want a buffer between us and an undoctored God. That’s partly what the excuses and justifications we devise are about: Jesus didn’t really mean that. It’s not realistic. This poor person doesn’t need my stuff. I don’t want to be taken advantage of. I can’t help everyone. They are the ones being hateful. There isn’t enough to go around. My contribution won’t make a difference.

Most people don’t take those injunctions literally. Most people consider them completely unrealistic. But undiluted God isn’t popular. Undiluted God isn’t realistic. Undiluted God burns people’s eyes out of their skull. Undiluted God fills people with fear and dread.

I want to say, too, that I’m not sure Jesus was on the mountain for the sake of being elect. Others do; that’s cool. I don’t think of God as big on elevating people over others. God’s what undermines hierarchy and power-over, that inverts banquet seating charts and guest lists, that levels mountains and raises valleys, that pours out holy spirit on all flesh and makes the sun to shine on everyone alike. I figure Jesus is on the mountain because he didn’t water God down. Moses, too, though his struggles are better documented. Jesus lived the talk. Importantly, he died the talk. And we can discuss whether that was predicted and prophesied and predestined, and whether he was God uniquely incarnate somehow that we’re not, but this is the unquestionable truth: we are all called to follow. He didn’t do it once and for all. He didn’t do it for us. I feel a little blaspheme-y saying it, but that’s a lie we’ve been told by snake oil salesmen who want us to obey them, it’s a lie we’ve told ourselves to water down our responsibility and accountability, to ease the way for wet-bread theology and maybe what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” Easy. Risk-free. If church is only on Sunday, maybe we’re not doing it right. If church is only in church, we may not be doing it right. Whatever else Jesus is or wasn’t, Jesus reflected full-on, concentrated, uncut in-the-raw radioactive God. Jesus led the way. He told us to take up our cross and follow. He meant it, I think; he meant our literal, non-symbolic cross. Every day.

Yeah. I want a buffer from that. Most of us do.

Renee Good was shot and killed on a daylit street photographing immigration enforcement. I don’t think she thought she was going to die that day. I don’t imagine she made a choice that day, said, I’m going to go do a thing, I might die and not pick up my kids from school this afternoon. Probably not. She just went and did a thing and got shot.

Every person in Minneapolis who stepped onto the street to photograph immigration enforcement after Renee Good was shot did make that decision, is making that choice. In Minneapolis and wherever. They’re all thinking, I’m going to go do a thing, I might die today and never see my dad again, my girlfriend, my dog who won’t understand. I think Alex Pretti probably made that choice. I think this is our choice. I think that’s taking up our cross. And, I think that’s God.

Why are we here? What do you believe it means to take up a cross? What is happening around us and is so wrong that it’s dangerous to do something about? I think this our choice. Not just photographing immigration enforcement, it doesn’t have to be the same as Renee and Alex. Raw, unmitigated God has lots of pans in the fire. Not just ICE and not just stuff from this this year or last. Certainly this year and last, for me. But also every year of this country, every day. What white folks are calling encroaching autocracy and imminent fascism today, maybe Black folks on any day in this country ever call Tuesday, and that’s the tip of the iceberg.

It doesn’t have to be facing down ICE, but there is much to do there. Dahlia Lithwick said on Amicus podcast yesterday that immigration has always been hard, but now it’s hard with a side of Kafka. Kids are being detained and given food with worms and mold. People are being released states away from their homes, they’re driving people into the woods and out country roads and dropping them to find their own way even back to town. It doesn’t have to be the same thing as your partner or best friend. There are a thousand ways to be ready to risk, ready to die. I can think of climate, trans health access. There’s medical integrity and vaccine best practice, there are forty ways diversity and racial equity need to be protected this week. I think of stuff like speaking up when someone at work says some thing that normalizes sexual assault. Saying something when family at the dinner table tells a joke punching down. Taking up our cross doesn’t always mean dying, sometimes it means being unpopular. The one that can’t take a joke.

I keeping thinking of Bad Bunny, and maybe this is a stretch. But I think about the difference of course between the people refusing to watch his show and those who watched it. But I think also about the difference between those who watched it, even joyfully, who enjoyed it without understanding it and those who didn’t understand it and wanted to. Who watched it a few times and read commentaries. Who found translations and wanted to learned about cane crops and US colonialism, gentrification in Puerto Rico and Brooklyn, the power grid and neglect by the US after Hurricane Maria, and Puerto Rico as a US territory without sovereignty or voice in congress. Whatever people call it, Critical Race Theory or Colonial Studies, or History, hearing fun popular music and turning it into a kind of homework feels like good work, even God’s work. Disciples aren’t supposed to just enjoy music, I guess. Definitely we’re supposed to take all the fun out of football and spoil it for others, too. If you take anything from this sermon, it’s that.

Ha ha. But also, take a look again if you didn’t see this: As Benito leaves the field we see his body guard, we see their faces change, we see the shape of a bulletproof vest under his white shirt. We feel the danger to this man for being picked to sing to us, the risk he takes to do it in Spanish, to celebrate his culture and community.

Whatever we decide is our work to do, God as undiluted is its core. Peter, as usual the Keystone Kop of the disciples, suggests that they stay on the mountaintop forever. Just stay there with the dazzling white and Moses and Elijah and the angels in tents, he says, and we’ll have drones bring Pizza Hut and K Fry. Because not going down the mountain ever is safe, It’s righteous without risk. It means not confronting the empire, it means leaving violence unchecked, it means letting the racist joke go by, not rocking the boat.

Whatever we decide is our work to do, it’s God unveiled. Moses covered his shining face with a veil. That means probably a dozen things, but too often we cover and silence the sharpness of God. Someone makes a joke about prison rape or Asian food or angry Black women and it’s so tempting to just let this one slide, to pick our battles, say we can’t fight them all, pace ourselves, duck a few and not lean into every last one. Speaking and interrupting that stuff, even with friends and family (maybe especially with friends and family), is uncomfortable, discomfort feels intolerable. But that’s the cross, too. Sacrifice is costly, and God is unrealistic, and discomfort comes with the territory. Jesus told us this when he said he brought not peace but the sword, and he came to set family members against one another, and rejoice when you are persecuted for the sake of my name, and who is my mother and brother and sisters? Those who hear God’s word and do it.

Whatever we decide is our work to do, it is those who hear the word of God, and do it. And it’s time. It’s always time. Now is certainly time to be God Undiluted, to let that discomfiting, radiant, searing light transform us and radiate from us, unapologetic, unafraid. Or maybe afraid, but dogged. Persistent.

Each of us can decide what is our work to do. I’m naming things. You may have different things. In a culture that wants us to think of sacrifice as affordable and of taking up our crosses as painless, in a society that buys into hierarchy and power-over, that believes in capitalist fictions like meritocracy and prosperity gospel, in a world where we believe that sharing power and apologizing is weak, there is no end to the possibilities.

Nothing is only one thing. We don’t have to do everything. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth,

Whatever the work is for you, remember that I’m arguing Jesus wasn’t special for being special. That Jesus wasn’t elect for going up the mountain, but that he was Jesus for coming down the mountain. That’s the work. That’s the good news, and that we do it together.

Please pray with me again.

    So, friends, every day do something
    that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
    Love the world. Work for nothing.
    Take all that you have and be poor.
    Love someone who does not deserve it.
    Denounce the government and embrace
    the flag. Hope to live in that free
    republic for which it stands.
    Give your approval to all you cannot
    understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
    has not encountered he has not destroyed.
    Ask the questions that have no answers.
    Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
    Say that your main crop is the forest
    that you did not plant,
    that you will not live to harvest.
    Say that the leaves are harvested
    when they have rotted into the mold.
    Call that profit. Prophesy such returns… Amen.

Peace.

MCCNY
December 14, 2025

^{The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of our God, the majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God, who will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. Who will come and save you.” …For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the rebellious shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God’s people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransomed of God shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. Isaiah 35:1-4, 6b-10}

A Blue Christmas hymn, for a Longest Night service, says: “How can we sing a joyful song?
O God, our sorrows hem us in. When pain and grief seem all too strong, How can we sing a joyful hymn?”

I doubt I need to make a list with you, but I’m going to, to name the things weighting us and pulling us away from whatever joy is. Isaiah and Matthew today name and validate our fearful hearts. Everything feels a desert. John the Baptizer is locked up and – we all know this, Matthew’s first readers knew this – he is about to die. Matthew sees us.

Isaiah sees us. Isaiah talks about the oppressed and brokenhearted and captives, and we know that it is talking about the returned exiles coming home to a country that’s been ransacked, coming home to a wasted temple and a conquered nation that will not know self-rule again for millennia. We know the realities of those dominated and transported people are our realities, always and now especially for trans military and trans children and trans everyone, and people with disabilities and any Black federal employee regardless of how high a position he has achieved. For any woman who had a military command. For graduate nursing students, including nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, clinical nurse specialists, nurse anesthetists – most of whom are women and women and men of color, all medical providers in advanced practice roles critical to health services for rural poor communities. For people who will benefit from cancer research and vaccine research and development. Folks who need affordable groceries. Latine citizens living their lives, neighbors working through the process of legal documentation, refugee communities minding their business, all snatched up and caged and shipped to port-o-prisons, street vendors and landscapers and, now as much as ever, always for every Black adult and child ever to set foot in this county on any day in its’ history. Last week I learned that they have vandalized the official portrait of former Assistant Secretary of Health Admiral Rachel Levine. And this is before we even mention losing five and a half hours a day of sunlight. Before we even name USAID or national parks or the Department of Education or killing boatmen in international waters or AI deals, decommissioning of renewable energy infrastructure, or crypto and air jet bribes and pay to play pardons and visas. Before we even name the shootings and deaths at Brown University yesterday or the attack on an Australian Jewish community yesterday celebrating Hanukkah. We know Isaiah is talking to us, too, talking about our lives and hells, and a cold, wet, pitch black season.

“How can we sing a joyful song? O God, our sorrows hem us in. When pain and grief seem all too strong, How can we sing a joyful hymn?”

But Isaiah doesn’t stop at grief and fear. Strangely, foolishly, Isaiah also promises a crocus. This ridiculous text is aligned today with Gaudete in the Advent roster, this stupid hopeful crocus. Encouraging us to acknowledge and recognize and solemnize the complexity of our lives. To salute how joy and struggle are intermingled. To celebrate alternating hardship and relief. This ridiculous day. Gaudete. This foolish Advent third Sunday reminds us to rejoice. 

Certain questions feel inevitable: How do we rejoice? What does joy look like? Does it hurt? Do I have to smile? Do I have to be there?

Isaiah says this transformation from desert into wetland comes from the glory and majesty of good. That God, that good is present and powerful. Incongruous, inexplicable. Queer. And the glory of good is filled to bursting with life, even in the desert. Bananas, Isaiah, the barren, broken, addicted, lonely places contain fullness and a recipe for life: love, wellness, happiness. Even joy, whatever it is. God’s majesty, good’s majesty means nothing is impossible or too strange to be true. A green shoot springs from a dead stump. A river springs up from a desert. Life from no life. Wonderful. Marvelous. (Mighty nice. Paradise.) This is predicted and promised.

John, meanwhile, hundreds of years later but, through the magic of the printed word and oral history, John simultaneously today is locked up in prison. When he got wind of Jesus, he sent his own disciples to ask, “Are you the One we’ve been expecting, or are we still waiting?” Jesus told them, “Go back and tell John what’s going on: …Those of the earth who are in need learn that God is on their side. Is this what you were expecting? Then count yourselves most blessed!”

A while back, the DC paper had a story about some guy playing the violin in one of the metro stops. Nobody was really paying any attention to him. Some people tossed him money, but others just walked by without noticing. The reason it was such a big deal to the Washington Post was that this guy was the concert violinist Joshua Bell who had just sold out the Boston Symphony Hall a few days earlier, and his violin was a Stradivarius.

Are you the one we’re expecting, or are we still waiting? What are we waiting for. A fancy concert hall and an expensive ticket and satin and gold gilt seats and ceilings. Waiting to wear heels and a waistcoat and our shirt buttoned all the way up. Waiting to stand in line. When there is beautiful music there already, in the subway, free, in our jeans and sweatshirts, with a half-empty I-Heart-NY paper coffee cup balanced in one hand and twenty newly released photos of a child sex trafficker hobnobbing with political and Hollywood notables in the other.

What are we waiting for? It’s already here. Why are we waiting, when John and Jesus are already gathering a movement. When the crocus is already blooming.

Most of us know that MCC started with twelve people in some guy’s living room. Now we know his name is Rev. Elder Troy Perry. GMHC started with eighty gay men in some guy’s NY apartment, and their hotline was someone’s home answering machine. Now we know those guys were Larry Kramer and Rodger McFarlane. A group of college professors and writers gathered in a Massachusetts community center and created the Combahee River Collective statement and Kitchen Table Press and revolutionized publishing and justice frameworks across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class. We know their names now, Barbara Smith, Florynce Kennedy, Margaret Sloan-Hunter, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Hattie Gosett…

These folks were all just people, just regular folks, no-name, neighbors or professors or whatever we are. They were people like us. We know them now as prophets, as truth tellers and leaders who seemed fearless and unfazed. You are just like them.

When John’s disciples left to report, Jesus started talking to the crowd about John. “What did you expect when you went out to see him in the wild? A sheik in silk pajamas? Not by a long shot. What then? A prophet? That’s right, a prophet! The best prophet ever. No one in history surpasses John the Baptizer; but in the realm he prepared you for, the lowliest person is ahead of him.

That is who we are, each of us: June Jordan said it. We are the ones we are waiting for.

John asked, Are you the one who we are expecting? Are you going to bring about God-with-us? And Jesus answered, Those of the earth in need learn that God is on their side. If that is what you are waiting for, then celebrate. It is here!

It is here already. Justice is an abiding effort that thrives, that festers and propagates in community, maybe especially in fearful-heart times. Joy is an abiding whatever it is – spiritual happiness, existential hope – something that doesn’t rely on whether things are going well or going terribly. The stupid, stubborn crocus in the desert is the pilot light in the stove, still on when the stove is cold. And when it’s time to roast the turnips or bake the buckle, what the pilot light does warms the oven and the kitchen. It warms the kitchen and the house. It’s the fire banked in the stove for the night. It’s the ridiculous, persistent evergreen and the holly and the wintergreen berries buried in the snow that Almanzo Wilder and his sister Alice dug up from the south slope. It is enduring. It is nourishment. I don’t feel it. I don’t understand it. But I know it, I believe it. I think we must.

Joy needs hope. Harvey Milk is famous for saying, “My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you.” Harvey Milk is slightly less famous for saying, “We have to have hope.” Maybe hope and joy find and fuel one another, and maybe drive us to act and are also our reward: Rabindranath Tagore whispers,

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.

I awoke and saw that life was service.

I acted and behold, service was joy.

Something about that crocus makes it feel like a given, like a gift, like a miracle from God or good or salvation. And it is like salvation, as I understand salvation, always there and for everyone regardless of our actions. And also, though, it’s not. It’s also work, also hard work. We are responsible for joy (and salvation), we’re accountable through our attitudes and actions, our doing and not doing and undoing. The crocus is both an assurance and an exhortation. Mitzvot, commandments, are both laws and blessings.

There’s been a post-it note in my offices for fifteen years that says “emotions are habits.” It was my first tattoo, inked so that I can read it on my arm, to remind me that joy isn’t entirely a mystery, that peace isn’t a product of my circumstances that day, that lovingkindness isn’t necessarily something I feel. We don’t have to be at the mercy of our feelings. We can cultivate them, and at the risk of sounding like I’m telling anyone what to do, we probably should cultivate them. If we wait around until we actually feel like loving people, if we depend entirely on feeling peace or joy or patience or gentleness of self-control, we might be in trouble. I will be. They are gifts of the spirit, but like all ultimate gifts we get to participate and we probably must. God has no hands but ours, you know, no mouths but ours…

And that is actually pretty exciting; it is joy-as-subversion. It’s a practice that can tear down the empire of Rome, that can dismantle something that doesn’t value us or care about our welfare, that tries to dictate what’s – and *who is – important and what we should feel. We can create a new thing, a crocus, a road, (a Calibri type font) that all enjoy, that all can read and travel on. For pity’s sake. And it’s practice, like flashcards and music scales, it’s a discipline, a discipleship. It’s cultivating emotions and actions that transcend our circumstances and our fear.

Something about that crocus makes it seem to appear suddenly, immediately. And I think that’s possible, I think that’s what grace is sometimes. But grace is also slow and steady, plodding. Stupid. Stubborn. Habitual. I think of e. e. cumming’s spring, this thing he invokes that is alive and childlike, and pernicious and unselfconscious. This thing that is sensual and hopeful and joyful and what he also called “Yes.” He called it, Yes! and it’s everywhere in his work:

in just spring when the world is mud-licious and eddieandbill.

i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes.

O sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophers pinched and poked thee, thou answerest them only with spring.

I want to connect cummings’s spring and joyous yes and Isaiah’s desert crocus, connect it to a lifetime work and discipleship practice. A daily quiet work. I want to invoke the spring cummings writes of that that is unseen and unappreciated, like subway buskers, often unnoticed and unannounced but stubbornly practicing and laboring and organizing and collective creating and healing the sick and raising the dead and bringing good news and appearing to, or thought to materialize suddenly and dramatically in the sky at some future mysterious time, but always there, always giving life and saving life: cummings writes:

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.

How can we sing a joyful hymn? Absurdly, incomprehensively. Stupidly. Stubbornly. Daily. Daily. Together. We already do.

I love you. Peace.

Dickinson College Take Back The Night
April 9, 2025

I’m going to start with some lines from Dorothy Allison, a survivor and poor rural southerner and beloved poet novelist who died recently and whose work really mattered to me when I was trying to find my voice. She writes:

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make… the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand…

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is how long it takes to learn to love yourself, how long it took me, how much love I need now…

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me…

Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form…

I’m a queer and genderqueer survivor of childhood sexual abuse and physical violence. That’s not all I am, but those are what most give shape and texture to most of what I say and how I say it, and likely also to how and whether I’m heard. I was beat the shit out of most days growing up by just about every member of my immediate family, and that made all of my emotions go a little haywire, and in unique ways it affected my anger, gave it deep roots really early and fed and watered it in an environment where all I was learning from anyone to do with anger was hurt people. I’ve spent most of my life either consumed with anger or relearning how to be angry, as a tool rather than a weapon. How to do anger as communication, how to be angry as self-expression and art, how to be angry as protest, how to be angry maybe as joy, how to be angry as love.

This isn’t something I have talked or written about a ton, only sideways sometimes when I lightly cannibalize my own life for a sermon, which is not delicious. So you’re getting an early draft that may be too raw or maybe won’t be raw enough. Sorry about that.

I may swear during the next half hour, a good bit, fair warning, mostly because some stuff is just so fucked that other words don’t do it justice. Partly because swearing is cathartic for me, and liberating. But partly because of what I hope to land on pointedly tonight, for the reason that I do any of the authentic, irreverent, unorthodox, mostly-frowned-upon shit that I do: I don’t believe in good victims, I don’t believe in good plaintiffs, good queers. The rules about good victims and bad survivors and what’s polite or civilized are almost entirely made up, and usually hurt women and transes and queers and Black folks and neurodivergent folks and other folks already getting hurt. They mostly serve the comfort of folks already fairly comfortable. They are usually used to re-code the discomfort of so-called polite society as physical threat. These days they’re used to arrest and jail and deport, to silence and erase dissent and disagreement. They are almost always used in any political or social climate to undermine the voices and dismiss truths that feel too raw or wrong or real. We’re supposed to ask nicely. We’re supposed to smile. I’m shit at smiling. I’m not saying anything we don’t already know; we’ve been talking about tone policing and coddling privilege for decades; Audre Lorde gave her keynote on the Uses of Anger forty-four years ago.

I’ve been talking with survivors of power- and gender-based violence for a while. I’ve work in a couple states with crisis centers, with churches, with this state’s sexual assault coalition, with schools and universities. I’ve listened to folks as they tried to make sense of their sexual and physical trauma, who’ve tried to find lessons in it, who’ve tried to forget it. I’ve talked with folks who felt loved because they were being assaulted, and who still aren’t sure whether feeling special wasn’t worth it somehow.

Most of the people I worked with were kids and teens who’d been harmed almost always – I almost want to say always – by family, people they were supposed to trust, who were supposed to be taking care of them. Abused by people who were supposed to be in their house, who were supposed to be in their room. That’s not the outlier; that’s the norm. Most of the time that’s how it is, not just with kids. Most of the time for all of us its someone we know, work with, study with, live with, someone who is supposed to have our back. Someone we love. Someone who says they care about us.

That betrayal feels bone deep. If it’s the church pastor or vacation bible school teacher who talked us through a bad breakup. If they were the high school counselor or girls basketball coach who helped us with math homework and always had the best encouragement. If they were Aziz Ansari or Louie CK or Joss Whedon and Justin Baldoni, men who wrote and ran media addressing sexual violence, highlighting women’s experiences, grappling with masculinities, lauded as feminist, championing women and supporting women’s success. Maybe you don’t know these names. They were some of the good guys over the last twenty years or so, often beloved. I really loved a couple of them a lot. All have been accused of harassment, assault, coercion, gaslighting, defamation. The guy I felt I knew best couldn’t be left alone in a room with a 16-year-old cast member. The entire executive staff made sure she was never alone with him in a room.

Last month, all of the national sexual assault and domestic violence coalitions pulled their resources for trans survivors and Black survivors, without being asked. Nobody asked for it of any of them. There were of course shitty campaign ads, and shitty state bills framed up with shitty tropes, and then shitty Executive Orders saying hateful, undisguised biased, maybe unenforceable shit, but there was no directive. And the coalitions without being asked had their people search for and remove pages that talked about Black folks and trans folks and, because transphobia is weird, a bunch of gay stuff got wiped, too. Sorry about that, gays; transphobia is not smart or very focused. Most of them put it all back up, I think, and it didn’t take them long. At least one of them made an apology, and it was a really good apology. It was a good one. But I don’t accept it.

They know my name and my face, and that stings, but I didn’t think we were friends or anything. Every place I’ve worked in Pennsylvania is a hard place to work and be me, whatever that is. To be angry. Or to be genderqueer, or New York queer, or whatever. To take a knee, or think critically, or say when shit is insidious racist or when it’s anti-gay in sneakier, subtler ways. What really stung and what still stings and what they haven’t acknowledged or tried to repair is that they are, these coalitions are, our coalition is, these are the folks who teach us about the dynamics and politics of sexual violence, who create models of the socio-ecological framework of prevention and ending it. They’re the ones who teach that sexual abuse is about power, that it’s tied to all other oppressions, that we will not end sexual violence without ending racism and ableism and other systemic biases. They’re the ones who teach that; I learned it from them. They’re the folks who teach that some of us are targeted more because of our lack of power, because of animus against us, because we’re less likely to be believed and more easily threatened and that fewer people give a shit if we’re hurt, so that a bunch of us are made more vulnerable to violence and sexual violence and to victim blaming, and apathy, erasure.

Maybe someone else can make sense of it. Deleting the folks made most vulnerable to sexual violence to save your jobs to keep doing the work of what, of supporting who? How do you do the work by erasing people who need it and the resources we need? Who the hell is their victim? Their good victim. Who is the survivor that they think deserves the job they’re trying to save? Convince me they aren’t the oppressor. How are they different than white supremacist abuser, the Christian nationalist abuser, the transphobe abuser. They reproduced the violence that produces the violence they claim to fight. Tell me I’m wrong. Make an argument that makes any of this coherent.

And then we’ll talk about who makes up almost all of our dead on Transgender Day of Remembrance. About who is going to advocate for trans women transferred to men’s prisons, trans women hounded out of the military, trans kids bullied at school and forced off of medicines considered by doctors to be best practice, harmless, fully reversable. Then we’ll talk about the white house’s so-called sexual assault awareness and prevention month statement last week blaming immigrants for sexual assault and human trafficking, when we know that immigrants are among those more vulnerable to be targeted for these violences. Which we know because of the coalitions. Who is going to teach the interconnections of violence and sexual violence and dating violence and human trafficking when the teachers have joined the pig pile of trans, Black, and Latine erasure? Muslim erasure? I don’t accept their fucking apology. It was a good apology; I don’t care.

Dorothy Allison called herself a bad poet, and maybe you’d agree with her, but I’ve always felt seen and safer in her words. (I’d say I feel at home in them, but now you know that “at home” doesn’t work for me in an aphorism.) Her words and the writing of poets and mentors are like a touchstone, a polished rock in my hand or my head, like a smooth piece of glass in my pocket to grip and worry with my fingers to remind me that I am real and what I feel is shared and maybe life isn’t a fight, or not always a fight, or not only always a fight; but that fighting is worth it.

A while ago I gave a 12-year-old kid a touchstone for her testimony in court against her rapist who was in her own family. She picked it out herself from the half a dozen or so I had for that, so she could hold it in the box giving testimony and grip it and fidget with it and remember the stuff we talked about and the affirmations we talked into that rock. I think it helped; she said it did. And she still pissed herself on the stand. She still froze and shook and peed herself. Not everyone will get why I’m angry; maybe folks think I’m being rigid or petty. We’re going to be messy, with or without community. We’re going to pee our pants, either way, a lot of the time. Imagine, though, going without any support. Imagine going when your support abandons and betrays you.

People who don’t live this, live with it or near it, good people, good supportive well-meaning people who really do care, people who don’t know-know-it don’t always know it isn’t really a thing to tie up neatly. Even the people who say, “I don’t know how you do it, that’s so hard, I could never do that work,” even they usually want to tie it up neatly, want survivor support and healing and distributive justice to be something cleaner than I think it is.

The places we survive in a lot of times are spaces where the things assumed to be so can’t be assumed to be so, I want to poke at those tonight and fuck up some taken-for-granteds. Where love isn’t love, healing isn’t healing, where bodies aren’t clean and coalitions aren’t good. My body, our bodies, if you will, our bodies are sweat and puss, greasy hair and body odor, and piss. Good decisions. Bad decisions. No decisions. My healing, our healing, if you will, our love and our grace isn’t always, maybe isn’t ever, calm and organized but often flailing, torn nails, dripping sweat burning my eyes. My thoughts feel messy so goddamn much of the time. I feel grabby a lot. I feel too loud sometimes, and I still don’t have a handle on my adrenaline spikes.

I feel anger, and also lots of my other feelings initially feel like anger: it feels first like anger when it’s fear, anger when it’s hurt, when it’s brokenhearted, anger when it’s impatience or irritable, when it’s hunger (but they have commercials and portmanteau words about that, I know that’s not just me). It feels like anger first when it’s grief and betrayal. Anger and anger-adjacent feels messy and shameful to me, messy and embarrassing even when it stays mostly in my head, which it does more and more with mindfulness and sobriety. (Heyo to all you sober folks; I hope you’re holding up. I hope you’re checking in with your people.) I’ve been practicing mindful anger for years, doing shame sober a day at a time for years. But by south central Pennsylvania standards, by my home state eastern Iowa municipal standards, by middle class hetero good neighborhood standards even my good, more skillful, sober emotions usually aren’t well-enough behaved. Anger is an entitlement I seem not to be entitled to, and I’m supposed to smile more.

People are uncomfortable just with disagreement. Just with questions about Beyonce’s country album, whether it was country, whether it should’ve been Doechii’s first or Swift’s fifth. People are pathologically uncomfortable when our disagreement is painful, when our pain is visible and audible, especially for those of us who are also being whoever we are that people are already being uncomfortable about.

Even most Buddhist and mindfulness teachers I study talk about anger as something to overcome or transform. Sharon Salzberg, my favorite teacher and my first teacher, calls anger the emotion we reach for when we feel weak because we think it will make us strong. I disagree. I’m a little grumpy about it. She quotes a lama who says that healing is about moving through anger to that fundamental sadness and hurt that’s beneath the anger. I really do love Sharon Salzberg, but I don’t understand why fundamental sadness is a more-evolved healing emotion than anger. Why anger is a transitional, unruly emotion. Why is hurt a better, more equanimous feeling. Why do they assume I’m leveraging my anger and not my sadness, or my joy? (That was rhetorical, I don’t feel joy; but more on that later.)

Most of the survivors I talk with aren’t angry when I meet them. Mostly they start out talking about shame and embarrassment. Mostly they are blaming themselves, still bargaining with the universe, “What if I this,” or “If only I had that.” They very often, very, often when we meet are feeling guilty for causing this trouble, for getting someone they love into trouble, still loving and caring for and very often trying to protect the person who hurt them.

Most of the folks I talk with do start to feel stronger when they start to feel angry, because they begin to feel more whole.

You don’t have to be angry. I’m not pushing anger. Folks don’t have to be angry any more than everyone needs to be queer or trans, but I’m cool with it. I support it. It’s entirely fucking appropriate, and sensical. Anger is an emotion. Like happiness, grief, fear, sadness or whatever, it is not good or bad, it’s human. I think what’s unhealthy is not feeling or not expressing emotions. I think it’s morbid that I’m unwilling to cry when it’s called for. I think it’s weird that people conflate only some feelings with unhealthy behaviors. It’s not uncommon in this country, maybe especially in Philly, no shade, for people to celebrate by destroying cars and other property after their sports team wins a thing. For whatever reason, people seem able to distinguish between the emotion and the violence in those cases; I never hear anyone shooting down happiness or joy when that happens.

The mental health collective Decolonizing Therapy sums it up beautifully. They say about rage what I think is true of anger. It’s sacred and powerful. It protects your boundaries. It acknowledges the unseen and refuses to be silenced. It is self-love, defending your dignity. It is the spark that fuels revolution and transformation. It says fuck neutral and demands we take a stand. It isn’t a flaw or disorder but a sacred alarm that something is deeply wrong.

Anger is protest. It is a Columbia University sexual assault survivor carrying a 50-pound mattress for eight months when she felt unprotected. It’s an aging child sexual abuse survivor carrying signs for more than 20 years in front of the Vatican embassy in DC when he felt unprotected. It’s thousands of people, maybe 5.2 million, on their state capitol steps. Anger is giving up the films of the artists who signed the 2009 Roman Polanski petition. That’s almost a whole job. There was a woman I knew in Brooklyn who was groped on a crowded subway car, I don’t know if you know the name Maxine Wolfe out here, but she’s worth digging into a bit. She was one of the founders of the Lesbian Avengers, among other havoc. She was groped on a crowded train and she grabbed the man’s hand and held it in the air and said, “This hand was just groping my ass.” Everyone on that crowded train stared at her and she said, still holding the guy’s hand in the air, “Why are you looking at me? Look at him, he was groping my ass with this hand.” That’s anger, that’s fantastic. Anger has a voice. Anger makes a spectacle.

In Brooklyn, my girlfriend got catcalled every day several times a day walking from home to the train, walking from the train to work, coming back home. That was a day that ends in Y for her. Walking together one day we were arguing, I don’t remember why but it was her fault, and she went ahead of me mad and I dropped back mad because we couldn’t stand each other to even walk together, but I was looking up ahead as she approached the subway steps and I saw a man lean into her and say something I couldn’t hear. And I saw her whip around and say really loudly, “Fuck you.” And she’s a good girl, she’s an Iowa nice, good Lutheran lady who says fuck you quietly when she says it. All that anger at me was primed and ready to go at that moment with this beautiful outcome. His face was priceless. I have no illusions that she stopped him from harassing women on sidewalks forever, but I’d bet you money he left women alone for the rest of the day. Anger is fierce and beautiful.

I’ve been unlearning for a while that my feelings are a disgrace. It’s ongoing. Excavating how my body and my pleasure is personal and delicious and mine. How my body is remarkable and unremarkable. My feelings are understandable and sensical and not always clearly warranted, and mine and fine, not untethered, too much sometimes, but probably not unhinged. Unlearning that I’m shit. It’s ongoing. That I am like anyone else, unlike anyone else, skillful, messy, sometimes hurtful. Making apology, doing repair. And I and we belong in all the places. The church and the courthouse and the classroom. Exceptional, unexceptional and sometimes dull, but not monsters, not in a bad way. Proud.

Anger doesn’t make us unlikeable. Love isn’t one thing. There are people who have hurt me and others a lot, and I don’t allow them to have contact with me any more, and I love them. I’m fine if we don’t ever speak again, and my heart aches a little when I don’t answer their calls. I don’t think I’m alone with this, but we don’t always know how to talk about it with each other. Hallmark doesn’t make those Mother’s Day cards. Because of this I know that love is not necessarily tied to feeling safer or to trust. Because of this, I think love isn’t synonymous with happiness. Because of this I know that forgiveness, whatever that is, is closer to loving than to forgetting, that maybe forgiveness is as much grief as mercy. Because of this I know that when we talk about love, we’re talking about something confusing, that cannot be held by a single word.

Lately, especially, I’ve been thinking about joy and what that is and whether I have any. Mostly I’m being asked in group ice-breakers to name what gives me joy. I’m being told a lot by therapy and self-help and popular culture to spark joy, that joy outweighs pain, that joy is resistance. But, on some basic level, I am constitutionally suspicious of joy. Joy feels like one of those things, like forgiveness, that people talk about with a lot of certainty and confidence, like it’s inevitable, or fathomable; people telling us that we should have it and how it feels. And to smile more.

Joy is lovely, probably, of course, I’m not made of wood. I don’t want to spoil joy. But I don’t want to keep getting battered by it.

Because we are living in this terrible time where everything seems to touch on sexual violence and rape culture. People are being detained and put in camps without liberty or body autonomy, without adequate food or water. States are assigning kids to bathrooms according to genitals without thinking through how that will be enforced and by whom. The death rate for people in childbirth has increased for everyone but Black women, and still the mortality rate is most deadly for Black folks in childbirth. That’s not a coincidence. It’s not an accident. That’s the brutally logical result of racism and misogyny and the violence and weathering effect on every person who lives at that intersection. And the implications for reproductive access and sexual violence will crash into those folks’ bodies yet again.

It may still be possible to remain connected with joy while also sitting with and naming violences. It probably is; but is it, though? I worry about moving too quickly to optimism or positivity. I worry about skipping over the raging awful, of minimizing the magnitude of injustice, dismissing it by taking sides or with lemonade or with quick and over-simple platitudes that folks make about healing and tough love. As noted in some length, I worry about the demonization of anger and discomfort with grief. I worry about compartmentalization and dissociation. We are not really taught emotional vocabulary and how to use it or encouraged to express a full and complex emotional range of sadness and grief and rage and fear, let alone how also to feel something joyous or like joy. Something that smiles.

Now, though, I wonder whether we are challenged by survivors like Dorothy Allison, like Marge Piercy and June Jordan, Jordan who writes in Poem About My Rights “if after screams if/ after begging the bastard and if even after smashing/ a hammer to his head if even after that if he/ and his buddies fuck me after that/ then I consented and there was/ no rape because finally you understand finally/ they fucked me over because I was wrong I was/ wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong/ to be who I am …”

I wonder whether we are challenged and encouraged by these old-school folks and their legacy, writers, survivors, poets then and now to be untidy, to be loud on purpose. I wonder if that is itself joy, or like joy. Not for shock or to stand out but to be and celebrate being visible, queer, odd, unsavory, just. To be alive and known in the world just as we are. I wonder whether we are called or permitted or welcomed by our poets to be angry and messy and unappealing in order to bring about healing. In order to change people and perceptions. In order to give permission to and provide a trail map for our fellows and comrades still unlearning that messy and loud has no worth. Our poets, maybe, point to the pull and the awful joy, maybe, of healing, even in hard, awful times. That it is possible to be present for and patient with those of us struggling to hold our shit together. That we can be more gentle with ourselves when our grief and anger is not high-minded or well-mannered.

I didn’t know where to put this next paragraph. And several drafts of this talk left it out. But it seems, as long as I’m reframing anger and derailing monolithic joy a bit, it may be time to name revenge fantasy. Its ancestors are Roman Colosseam spectacles and other blood sport; but the thing I’m talking about is daydream or nightmare, imaginative release. Something like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2009 Noomi Rapace Swedish version. A Promising Young Woman. Working at crisis centers, with kids, with adults, with heinous violence done by family members, done by colleagues, it’s hard to process some of those feelings. The revenge fantasy we had when we didn’t know how to channel that anger and powerlessness and disgust was a plan involving two cars, a parking garage, and a couple baseball bats. It wasn’t real, it was never going to be real, it was just talk. I’m spiritually and politically non-violent, even for these offenders. The fantasy was cathartic. It was a satisfying way to work through what we were feeling. It seems dishonest not to name it as a tool. It seems to maybe belong here, talking about joy and anger, as almost a hybrid of the two, a chimera, at least for me. But, to some degree, we feel like it’s something we shouldn’t talk about in public, like I just did.

There’s a classic Buddhist story that the nun Pema Chodron writes about in When Things Fall Apart, but I’m pretty sure that I first heard it in a dharma talk in DC. It haunted me:

A man was determined to get rid of his unwanted emotions, like anger and fear. His teacher told him to stop struggling, but he didn’t understand. Finally his teacher sent him to a hut in the hills to meditate. He settled to practice and, when it got dark, he lit three candles. At midnight he heard a noise in the corner of the room, and in the darkness he saw a large king cobra, right in front of him, swaying. All night he sat frozen, unable to move, staring at the snake.

Just before dawn the last candle went out and he began to cry, not in despair but from tenderness and recognition of shared human alienation and struggle. He finally fully accepted that he was angry and afraid, that he resisted and struggled. He accepted also that he was precious. He felt such gratitude that he stood, walked to the snake, and bowed to it; then he was able to sleep.

We are ashamed of and repulsed by messy feelings and messy healing a hundred ways, others’ and our own. We package goodness and expect adherence to it. We judge anger and expect people to sublimate it or disguise it, and to dismiss those who don’t instead of listening to their truth and pain. We elevate forgiveness as a paragon, almost as an idol, of goodness or righteousness without any clear sense of what forgiveness means or is or does, or why those who have been traumatized and violated have to extend it.

We use these judgements as justifications before and after the fact for our unwillingness to listen and engage, and for our unwillingness to be rejected ourselves. To deem folks unsavory instead of making ourselves unliked with them and for them. To say instead, “See! See? I was right, they are so unseemly.” To say, “They are not worth my goodness, because they are not being good.”

I have spent the better part of my sobriety trying to find the guard rails and traffic paint between raw emotion and skillful, mindful anger. That’s ongoing. I think there is a line, but I think it’s farther south and west than most people believe. But I do not give two shakes whether or not people like me. That’s hilarious, I care a lot. I wish I didn’t. I do find that, in the crisis work and advocacy with others, by embracing and affirming their rawness and messiness, I can find some freedom for myself to be raw and messy. I don’t know which came first, but I tend to be rude to myself so probably others first.

There’s a post-it note I’ve moved into every office I’ve had for the last ten years or so that says “emotions are habits,” I have it tattooed on my arm, to remind me mostly what I’ve re-learned about anger, and maybe someday also shame, but also how I’m re-learning that joy isn’t a mandate, that peace isn’t only a product of my circumstances that day, that lovingkindness is almost never something I feel. Joking but maybe also not joking.

The most enduring impact of my trauma is shame. There are several – I shudder a lot when someone walks behind me. I have this annoying thing where it’s more upsetting than it should be when somebody moves my stuff from where I put it. But the deepest lasting harm of my abuse is shame, which I poetically describe as my demons and, more literally, characterize as telling myself stories that hurt my own feelings. I’ve stopped thinking about shame as something I’ll get to outlive; I may have stopped hoping for that. And I don’t think of any emotion as something any of us reaches or doesn’t reach for, they come and go more or less as they please. But what I do when I feel, whether it’s anger or joy or grief or existential fear, what I do doesn’t have to be decided by what I feel.

What I do is shaped by what I practice doing. Like sobriety and tai chi, mainly. Like distance running and long bikes rides. Like breathing from my belly and lowering my voice. Sometimes literally wringing my hands. Feeling the feelings as they come and go, trying not to grasp at the good ones or push away the bad. Recognizing in them my shared humanity, although those aren’t the words I use at the time. Accepting my anger and fear, accepting my desire for justice that sometimes looks like retribution, accepting that I am precious. That’s hilarious; I don’t accept that I’m precious, that’s a stretch, but accepting that I would say that to anyone else in my shoes. Not accepting shame but knowing sometimes that the shame I feel isn’t truth. Every day practicing like I’m the man in the dharma story, every day sitting frozen locking eyes with that fucking king cobra and breathing.

Thanks for letting me work through this out loud with you. Thanks for showing up for yourselves and others tonight. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. I wish you healing.

Peace.

MCC Rehoboth
February 9, 2025

^{Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon answered, ‘Teacher, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Boss, for I am a sinful man!’ For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.}

Teacher, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.

This gospel passage from Luke is strange and miraculous. What we read here probably sounds very familiar, very expected and unsurprising. But it is in fact magnificent: a chimera, an amalgam, a hermaphrodite. This passage stiches together bits of gospel staples that appear other places and stand alone. They are nowhere else gathered together like this into one. This reading is a mixture, a beautiful, beautiful monster. (Please remind me later to quote Angels in America.)

In the John gospel, the miraculous catch described here is a post-Easter resurrection story tacked later onto the finished gospel, and it’s part of my favorite eucharist: there is fish and bread on a campfire, at daybreak, at the edge of the lake. Jesus was dead and they cast their nets relentlessly and fruitlessly, casting and drawing, but then Jesus appeared super alive, alive as heck, and told them where all the fish were. In that John story, like here, Peter is dramatic and overzealous.

In the Matthew and Mark gospels, this fishers of people story is a simplified version, five verses only, of the call and the cost of discipleship: two sets of brothers are engaged in the ordinary business of the day, a family business, and are called by Jesus with no pomp nor promise, called specifically – listen please to this – they are called only to this one thing: to abnegate everything, everything, to walk away from nets and boats and father. They are invited to leave behind social and economic safety, and they accept. Both pairs of brothers renounce first their means of physical subsistence and then their means of physical and social subsistence.

There are other episodes in Matthew and Mark where Jesus is trying to give a TEDTalk on the beach, and everyone presses up on him and crowds him so he has to step into a boat and teach them from the water. In both of those stories where he preaches from a boat he tells the same parable, of the sower: there’s crusty soil and vultures, there’s rocks and thorns and scorching sun, there’s good dark rich dirt, and there’s a sower that offers seed to all the ground they met; they throw seed wantonly, recklessly, at all the dirt, all the rocks, all the thorns. You get seeds, crust! You get seeds, weeds! Everyone gets seeds! Both times told from a boat, from the limen, from a threshhold, from the water, the place of creation and procreation and chaos, change.

And don’t fear is repeated dozens of times throughout the bible canon. Again and again, don’t be afraid of sea and storms, don’t fear your worth or unworthiness, fear not those who can kill the body, don’t be afraid of disease and illness – or of being healed! Again and again the divine voice, divine breath repeats that encouragement through prophets and angels and Jesus: fear not. Fear not. Don’t be afraid.

This Frankenstein’s monster of a gospel reading couldn’t be more perfect for me right now and also ever. Right now and always. I feel and have felt so much of my life like I’m casting and casting and casting useless, ineffective nets catching nothing, catching waterweeds and plastic beach garbage. And I find myself grasping and grabbing, whether it was for marriage, or home ownership, or now as social security is threatened, as the departments of health and education, gender markers, so much of the material and social means of subsistence are being wrested away. And I’m so afraid right now.

It’s hard to talk about what I’m afraid of without sounding like I’m talking about partisan politics, but I want to be clear that I am not afraid of a political party or party affiliation. I’m afraid for folks seeking asylum and refuge from sexual and ethnic terror in their home states who are turned away with no resources. I’m afraid for the folks in U.S. states who have immigration police knocking door to door demanding ID and asking them to report their neighbors. I’m afraid for thousands and thousands of employees doing the work of government programs and administration unsure of their position or their salaries to buy gas and eggs and rent. I’m afraid for survivors of sexual and physical violence as funding to crisis centers is threatened again. I’m afraid that trans folks, me and my people, are being defined out of existence, again, and of what that means for trans elders, trans inmates, trans teens who’ve already started hormone blockers. I’m afraid for ministers who are attacked for asking for mercy.

I’m afraid for the humans who share my state and my country who aren’t afraid for these folks being targeted, or who are celebrating the actions and policies targeting them. I’m afraid of these neighbors and fellow citizens, afraid of those who ignorantly or willfully fail to understand the difference between free speech, a marketplace of ideas, and critical thinking. I spend most of most days feeling like there’s a rock on my chest. I spend most of most days trying to regulate my emotions. And I’m not an optimist. I’m not an Eeyore or anything, but I’m usually surprised to find any amount of beverage in any glass. I’m very very resistant out loud to silver linings or making lemonade.

A few years ago, the big craze in anti-violence non-profit ice breakers was to ask people what gave them joy, and I remember struggling to understand what they meant. Joy feels like one of those words, like forgiveness, that makes me feel lost and alone in the room whenever people talk about it. (I don’t want to get too sidetracked talking about joy right now but it’s different than happiness, right? Isn’t it different than laughter?) Lately, I’m finding that the hot new ice breaker question is what gives us hope, which also doesn’t resonate with me. What’s hope in the face of existential fear? What is hope that isn’t desire or expectation? I don’t hope that these policies will be rebutted and scuttled, I want them to be. We need them to be. I feel like the closest thing I have to something called hope is this sense that I can’t not do what I do.

Teacher, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet, if you say so, I will let down the nets.

The ongoing fruitless activity of the fishers today speaks to me. The pessimism, hopelessness, failure, futility. The pointlessness. I get it. I feel this way a thousand times a day, maybe every time I open my phone, again and again I feel helpless and ridiculous like these useless fishing nets. And that is an awful and a dangerous thing to feel. That is an awful and a dangerous thing to feel. It’s hard to imagine abundance in these places; it’s hard to experience the promised fullness of life. But it’s there, it is. Maybe that’s joy. Maybe it’s hope, knowing and continuing to practice and practice and practice remembering and reconnecting to the abundance that is possible.

It’s mindfulness, I think. It’s a head game, or a heart game: A thousand times a day I panic and freeze and then come back to a center, back to a balanced place, back to a site of connection and community and worthwhileness of myself and things. Because, for one thing, the fishing nets are only fruitless and pathetic if their only purpose is the harvest of fish. The act of casting a net and drawing it in, over and over again, is only useless and ridiculous if the only reward for it is the jackpot.

Every time we do the things we do, there’s this question hanging over it. Will this be the day someone becomes free? Will we win the right to file joint tax returns today? Will we be free to pee today? Will today be the end of racial profiling? Is the war over? Is today the day? No? Today then. No. Perhaps today. We never know if there will be a payoff. But we may be too invested in seeing the payoff. No shade, that’s basic human psychology, ask Corrine. Something about intermittent reward. The psychological tendency is to give up, or stop trying, or learn helplessness when the outcome is repeatedly not the desired outcome. But doing what we do, doing whatever work we do day in and day out for the future we imagine and not seeing the payoff, and not knowing whether there will be a payoff isn’t failure. It’s not hopeless and it isn’t pathetic. I want to argue that this Jesus, and this passage especially, especially this stitched-together gorgeous monstrous chimera version of this passage, says this is not failure but abundance.

The Luke gospel combines the fishing-all-night casting of nets over and over again story with its calling the first disciples. And so it tangibly and obviously and absolutely ties together how it defines discipleship to a parable that defines abundance. In every gospel, in the prophets and the laments, across the canon, discipleship costs everything. They left their nets and boats, their means of making subsistence, and they left their father, their social and religious safety and respectability. John lost his head, the prophets were hunted, Jesus and every disciple were executed. They relinquished all: this is the bottom line for Jesus. The bottom line is not love, not inclusion of the marginalized, not feeding the hungry, the bottom line is relinquishing and losing everything you are and have because of your love and inclusion of the marginalized and feeding the poor.

This bottom line is reinforced again and again in parables and sayings to give to everyone who asks, to lose everything and find life, to lay up our treasure above, to sell everything and give it all away to people who can’t pay us back, to not be afraid of who can kill our body. The John gospel’s miraculous catch of fish is a story of shared meal and community, it’s a eucharist story and a resurrection story, and so it is a story of dying, literally, for discipleship.

But that’s not a failure story. That is abundance. It’s a call to be freed from fear, freed from grasping for things that are being wrenched away. Discipleship is fearless and its path has been utterly cleared of obstacles.

Here’s a story: For now and at the pleasure of the universe I work at a university with sexual and physical abuse survivors, with women and others for student access and success, and with queer and trans students. Last fall, one trans student in my orbit had just started using feminine pronouns and, late in October, a friend made up her face for the first time. Throughout the summer, advertisements were mocking and threatening trans women and rally speeches were promising to eliminate non-binary gender options, but on the day after the election, this student came to school full femme, head to toe, a bright red dress, full nails, full face. And she walked in long strides, head high, grinning. Fearless. She seemed fearless. Absolutely strong. And I’d spent the night afraid and frozen, so when I saw her I thought to myself, So this is what we’re bringing? Well, alright then. Only there were swears in there, too, in my thought to myself, because I like to swear.

That’s abundance with no promise of jackpot.

A dozen or a hundred times a day, I freeze with fear and helplessness. Then I breathe. I remember that whatever I have isn’t really mine. Corrine and I keep writing checks, at least 10% of our income, to MCC, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Lambda Legal, The Bard Prison Project, The African American Policy Forum, The Abortion Conversation Project. I’m not proselytizing you to my justice concerns, you may not agree with my priorities, no judgment. And I’m not bragging about tithing, I just want to say that we’ve always done it, and it feels harder now than ever. We don’t know what’s happening with Social Security or the economy for working folks like us. It’s not easy now to give anything away, but it’s possible. It’s part of what we can’t not do. It may be all I have that resembles hope. And it’s a price of discipleship that moves me toward abundance. When I write those checks, even in fear, even with a tightness in my ribs and heaviness in my chest, I also feel abundance, bigness, enoughness. I feel free to love and include the marginalized and feed the hungry, even at cost to me.

It’s abundance with no promise of jackpot.

Teacher, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet, if you say so, I will let down the nets.

Doing the thing, whatever it is for each of us – the thing we think of as living our faith, as servanthood, as “doing good” – doing that thing as a practice, again and again, without reward is self-abnegating, ego-abnegating, it’s discipleship, and it is beautiful. It is a miracle. Thich Nhat Hahn noted that sometimes the miracle isn’t to walk on water but to walk mindfully on the earth. It is relentless and repetitive, like the breaking of waves on the shore, never ending. We cast the nets and risk everything again and again. But not alone. No calling of the disciples story is only one disciple, but two sets of two, and they are sent out in twos, and they are gathered in twelves, and in the tacked-on John lakeside story they are reunited with a resurrected Jesus, and they build a fire and eat together, fishes and bread at the side of the lake. It’s become my newest dedicated ministry, checking in with my people. It feeds me as much as anyone else. Telling my friends I love them. Asking the people I pass how they’re holding up? How is their heart? Listening to the answer. Gathering in rooms and group texts and on socials. Sharing my adventures and my fears and finding out what they’re doing. I don’t think I have the capacity to try to change anyone’s mind who aiming at us, so I’m focused on supporting folks who are in the crosshairs.

There are many beautiful things in nature and in art, and perhaps none are more beautiful than a sea of waves, never ending, breaking again and again upon the shore. Casting a net, or casting a fly fishing line again and again. This is our lives, our loving, interconnected, grounded, justice-seeking lives working and risking everything to put food on the table, food enough for everyone, and surplus for everyone.

I wanted to quote Angels in America, if you’ll stay with me for another minute. There’s a quote where Roy Cohn, who knew Ethel Rosenburg to be innocent but framed and executed her, and blocked protections for gay employees for years in Congress, and who was himself gay, asks Belize to describe what comes after death. Belize responds:

Belize: Like San Francisco.
…
Belize: Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.
…
Belize: Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths.
…
Belize: And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain’t there.
[When he finishes, Roy Cohn asks,]
Roy Cohn: And Heaven?
[Belize answers,]
Belize: That was Heaven, Roy.”

Teacher, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet, if you say so, I will let down the nets… When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

I love you. Peace.

MCCNY
June 9, 2024

Then he went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’ And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.’ And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, ‘How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered. ‘Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin’— for they had said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.’Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers and sisters* are outside, asking for you.’ And he replied, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’

I’m thinking about all the time stamps today for these texts, about Easter which just ended and is on some basic level about what is eternal, and Pentecost which just happened and which is how most of Christendom will count the next 20 or so weeks until Advent and is maybe essentially about what drives us. I’m thinking about Pride, of course, in the dozens of ways it’s relevant to Jesus’ queerness generally and especially maybe to a story of Jesus determining who his family is and is not. Also, Mother’s Day just happened, I think, and I think Father’s Day is coming right up, and these can be awful for some of us because our folks have died, or because we aren’t sure they love us or are proud of us, or both.

I’m thinking about this gospel passage being, as many gospel passage are, a kind of summary, a haiku of all the gospels, a gospel fractal that includes rejection and compulsory social norms that reify dominance, and Jesus interrupting that and inverting it and calling us to do the same. I think this passage contains the questions folks keep asking here, Who was Jesus? Why did he die? What should I do? Rev. Pat says, What’s the good news? I usually translate that as something like, What does any of this have to do with me?

What does it have to do with us, with our community, whether that’s New York City or south central Pennsylvania, whether it’s queer or otherwise? I’m thinking about MCCNY and some of our other churches, where we’re pretty good about making space for political and moral and spiritual differences. What does a gospel haiku mean for a space where we come together as people influenced by Buddhism and Wicca, as traditional Christians and atheists and humanists and Jews, across the partisan spectrum, across social norms? Family figures prominently this morning, and I’m thinking about what family means here, certainly – good grief, it’s such a core question for so many of us – but what does the will of God mean in a place like us? Is there some fundamental meaning that endures for all of us (and what is it?), or does God’s will become relative and meaningless without the unwavering, uncompromising details?

I’m thinking about how we queer-police and trans-police ourselves internally. How we look at each other and impose our own definitions and put bouncers at our doors. This is a super old example, but I still think sometimes about Maria Maggenti, who directed The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls In Love a hundred years ago, about the uproar over whether she could call herself a lesbian since she was in a relationship with a man, or whether she had to say she was straight or bi. We’re not going to vote, by the way, so put your hands down. There is an old old ongoing slow boil about who can identify as trans – whether hormone treatment and surgery is necessary – and this beautiful, big-umbrella word is being declined by tons of young non-binary and genderqueer folks. I think about the tension over words like dyke and queer and how folks who have been hurt by them sometimes want to keep any of us from using them for ourselves. That’s a tricky thing. How do I respect the pain of folks who were stabbed when I love to play with those knives?

Of course all of this keeps shifting and sliding. Really, all of it. Pretending that Pentecost or salvation or family or queer or knife always means the same thing is like acting as if marriage means one thing, as though there is a biblical model for marriage, as if it is between one man and one woman. As if, say, Jacob and Solomon were monogamous, for example, just off the top of my head. We’ll get to David and Jonathan in a minute. We’ll get to Ruth and Naomi in a minute.

Part of this is about whether things have to mean the same thing to everyone. About how words and principles, like “lesbian” or “resurrection,” that mean something very important, very dear, to some of us can mean something completely different and irreconcilable to someone else without feeling like we’ve lost an argument we’re trying to win. And part of it is about when do we need to win? Why do we? When and why is it truly imperative to argue and vanquish: what can we live and let live with, agree to disagree about, and what we need to proselytize on, convert, persuade, hold others accountable to? What can we just reject with a shrug, a laugh, a raised eyebrow, and what do we call Satan and try to lock up?

Everything, in my opinion, all of it is subject to these questions, including what folks call scripture. We know the canon isn’t consistent. I know you know this, in part because I go on about it every time I’m here or anywhere talking about the bible ever. Exodus says free your slaves in the seventh year, and send them out as they came to you: with nothing if they had nothing. Deuteronomy says do not send them away empty like a jerk; give them liberally from your flock and your threshing floor and your winepress, for pete’s sake. Give them a chance to succeed and not be forced to return to servitude; give them the means to get started; remember that you were once slaves in Egypt. Compare Isaiah and Joel on whether we should have plows or swords. Read how God said kill your kid and then said I never any such thing told you to kill your kid or even thought it. Look at the differences between what Ruth, Psalms, Proverbs, Ezekiel, Isaiah, or Jeremiah say about how to treat foreigners.

Queers didn’t invent infighting, contrary to, I don’t know, everyone. Christianity didn’t invent religious inflexibility, though it has probably taken it to a new level. Jesus was part of an existing long rich history of counter-hegemonic reading and interpreting. He knew the law and prophets, and of course we know he tended to interpret them more or less what we call progressively, he was maybe a hard left, maybe he was a left bottom soft dom. We’re pretty sure he legit broke rules about fasting, ritual washing, plucking and other sabbath healing. We know for real he befriended tax collectors and sexual suspects and poor and sick people and also dead people and touched them. I like to think of him as a rule-breaker, a rabble rouser, a social activist, though not everyone does. Just as importantly, I think of him as a loser, a nobody. Not a king. Not a god. (Here I feel like I should add that the views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of any entities I represent. Grin.) I don’t mean to upset anyone; I know this isn’t the typical picture, and it’s important to think about how we tend to align with empire. We tend to side with power, which is very much under scrutiny in today’s passage. I think of him as a literal peasant whose mother got pregnant with him outside of marriage, maybe raped, maybe raped by a soldier. I think of him like Matthew describes his lineage: through Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba although Matthew can’t bring itself to say her name. I think of Jesus as a product, literally and metaphorically, of women who were foreigners, outsiders, women associated with sexual deviance: incest, prostitution, adultery, arguably at least one lesbian.

I don’t know if Ruth was queer; I don’t think I care. I’m with Nancy Wilson, though, why not? Why do we have to do all the work all the time? Prove she wasn’t. Ruth probably didn’t exist outside of this book-length parable, anyway. I do know the words attributed to her have been described as “one of the greatest pledges of love that has ever been made by one human being to another,” and one of the most popular biblical quotes to be read at straight weddings. Hahahahaha. One of Rev. Pat’s favorite Pride month jokes is about how many straight couples are promising to love each other like lesbians.

As much as I’m thinking, pleasantly, about her intimate relationships with other women, though, I’m thinking about her other queer status as an outsider. Moabites were detested and despised people by ancient Israelite, who called them idol worshippers and made up incest stories about them. The book of Ruth might be a kind of Hatfield/McCoy story, or Montague/Capulet, which I’m very up for. It’s definitely probably an extended Good Samaritan parable about chesed, unfailing love. About, “but who is my neighbor?” The only time “love” is mentioned in the book of Ruth it refers to Ruth’s love for Naomi. Ruth had no responsibility or obligation to Naomi and, in many ways, lots of reasons for resentment and bitterness, and yet she leaves her home for Naomi, not unlike what wives do in the bible; and she obeys Naomi’s instructions, like good wives in Proverbs do; and she gives Naomi a son, you know, like women give their husbands sons. Look how I’m doing the work after all! Ruth and Naomi were dykes; prove me wrong.

I’m thinking about another layer to this, whether or not they were ancient Israelite-Moabite enemies, and whether or not Ruth and Naomi were “touching tofu,” as our Singaporean friend, Mun, used to euphemistically call lesbian sex, I think with distaste. (He was the kind of gay man who didn’t like to even imagine vulvas, bless his heart.) This other layer is one of my favorite things about most of the homo bible characters: and it’s about how so many of them, maybe all of them? were family to each other, and often in deep and traditional and social-religious ways. Jonathan and David didn’t just choose each other to the shame of his mother’s nakedness, as magnificent as that is, they also covenanted to care for and raise one another’s children after death. Ruth left her own home and her so-called own people to follow Naomi and assume all of hers; to go and lodge and die and be buried where Naomi does. The Roman centurian begs for the life of his, what, manservant in the way that only fathers and sons-in-law and other family in the bibles ask for healing for their kin. I think maybe the first healing story in the gospels is of Peter’s mother-in-law.

Whether or not they were queer, they were queer, you know? Whether or not it was a sexual thing, which I assume that it was in all cases unless demonstrated otherwise with footnotes, who they were and what they did was regardless a thing that queerness and other sexual inversion brings to the table: which is re-creating and inverting and counter-forging things that are assigned and patrolled: marriage, love, household, kin, community. Justness. Fairness. Whether we’re talking about topping and bottoming or about division of household and emotional labor. Whether we’re talking about legal marriage access or about nursing a generation of our brothers through the early AIDS epidemic. Whether we’re discovering the delightful sexual side effects of VHS head cleaner or deciding who will be our emergency contact – based less on who was at grandma’s funeral and more on who has our 6 again and again, even when they think we maybe could have made better choices. Hypothetically speaking, asking for a friend.

Jesus is so queer, in so many ways, whether or not he was bedding disciples. (Happy Pride, though.) He counter-interpreted so much, so often, and in the favor of social and political nobodies, that it left him estranged from most or all pre-existing social and other structures of support. It left him with no established home to call home. He is coming “home” literally and metaphorically from a ministry on the edges and the border regions. And when he comes “home,” his family calls him insane and tries to take hold of him, the same verb used for his later arrest and John the Baptizer’s. No wonder he says, “Mother sisters brothers? I don’t know her.” No wonder he says he’s here to set kids against parents and in-laws against each other. No wonder he thinks disciples should leave behind their dad’s businesses and funerals. One of the things I love about Mark is how it’s free of most embellishments. This is the first time we are meeting the Fockers, since this gospel has no hagiographic nativity or supernatural infancy, and we can only assume that Mary is leading the pack of family jackals here, ready to lock him up for his own good.

When the authorities call him evil and demonic, in league with satan, you probably recognize that as a page from the modern playbook, too, for isolating and discrediting people across the social and political spectrum. At Lambda Legal, attorney David Buckle (rest in power; may his memory be for a blessing) David was the one who summarized to me the hegemonic framework against us that rested on law, traditional church, and the American Psychological Association’s DSM as “immoral, illegal, insane.”

And I’m thinking about all of these questions we come together around in harmony and dissonance to various scale. Pride committees that make rules about chaps and body paint, and using words like “family-friendly” instead of kid-friendly, and subtly but still maybe deliberately and narrowly defining what a family is, and what is friendly for other people’s kids. Questions in MCC about who can be baptized, distinctions between members and friends based on what answers give about who was Jesus, why did he die, what should I do? Massive, infrastructural, Sanhedrin- and Rome-sized questions about racism and misogy and other poisonous values sewn so deeply into our social and political fabrics that the loom itself is rotten. Questions about Israel and Hamas and Palestinians, about rape and genocide, about asylum-seekers at the Mexican border.

In the end, these questions and so many questions boil down for this Jesus to who is my mother and sister and brothers, which I’ll come back to in a minute.

First, though, I think they come down a little bit to Who is my God. What is doing the will of God? What do I have to do to be called insane by family and called satanic by the church and state, but the way Jesus is in the passage this morning. I mean, what is queer as opposed to just selfish? What’s righteous and not self-righteous? What really is complicated and not a dodge? I think we’re supposed to ask ourselves these questions. What is the side of the angels? What is satan, or insanity, or both?

And I think the answer is probably another question, and not a perfect, static question. I think finding the side of Right is something along the lines of asking, Who is being starved to death? Who is being denied humanitarian aid? What is an acceptable number of dead children? Finding God’s will is somewhere in the neighborhood of asking, Who has the least power and nothing to offer in return? Whose Will will leave you with no established home to call home? And I think maybe, maybe every time, the will of God is less about winning and more about who we choose to lose with.

Because the questions of God’s will boil down to who is my mother and sister and brothers. Mark’s Jesus doesn’t say just, Do the will of God. Mark’s Jesus says, My mother and brother and sisters do God’s will. Mark’s queer Jesus is saying that family is a political construct. Family is a political construct, then and now. Queer righteous Jesus reclaims family, declares that family is not in any way part of the system of empire, that family is solely who you align yourself with. In every case both then and now. And Jesus’s family puts its collective and mortal bodies in the path of empire and breaks the cogs of the military machine.

I say stuff like this every time I’m here as much for myself as anyone else. I worry that I don’t but my bones in the cogs of the machine enough. I worry that I don’t risk enough. I worry that, as much as I’m alienating everyone, I’m not alienating enough of the empire and its systems. I worry that I’m not endangering my home the way I should. I think Jesus said this with his history mouth, and I think he meant it. And I think its true and righteous. And if we’re very comfortable and very safe, we may not be doing it right.

We need to ask who is being starved to death. We need to ask what are and how do we leverage Biden to use “every nonmilitary tool at [our] disposal to pressure both Hamas and Israel to pursue an immediate ceasefire, the full release of all hostages, and whatever humanitarian assistance is now needed”? (Liz Theoharis, Kairos Center at Union). We need to ask, I think, who will I lose with today? How shall I take up my cross, come and die?

It’s never really a feel-good message from Jesus about what to do. If who he is and why he died feels good, we might be doing it wrong. But if it helps, and I think it does, who he is and why he died feels queer. Happy Pride! Peace.

February 25, 2024
MCCNY

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.’ So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt-offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.’ Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘Father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ He said, ‘The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?’ Abraham said, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son.’ So the two of them walked on together. When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’ (And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt-offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place ‘The Lord will provide’; as it is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.’)

Greetings and blessing from the Council of Elders. One last time.

There’s a passage twice in Jeremiah, about a dozen chapters apart, where God is upset with the people of Israel for various things, including burning their children and sacrificing their children, and twice God says in that book, each time, God says, “I’m disgusted with you for burning and sacrificing your children. I never asked for that nonsense, I didn’t so much as ever think it.”

So. You know. There’s a chapter in Genesis, we just read a bunch of it. God not only did think it, and also commanded it, but also gave some fairly specific instructions about when and where in the land of Moriah. God even clarified which child, not just any old child, but “the one you love.” Here the child is named, Isaac, but in the Qur’an the child is not named; Muslims largely understand this to be Ishmael. Although at an earlier point in his life Abraham took pains to argue with God for the lives of the men of Sodom, even to save the rapers and hospitality-breakers along with any righteous that didn’t seem to exist, now Abraham is ready to kill his son on God’s say-so without so much an Iowan “Are you sure?”

Imagine what this did to Abraham. He carries his secret for three days from his son and his servants, and then he keeps it for another whatever number of days to walk that remaining “afar off” after leaving behind the servants. Those last days, while Abraham carried the burden of his secret, Isaac carried the wood for his own murder; maybe a Buddhist koan or a mystic could ask, Which was heavier?

Imagine what this did to Isaac. At some point he clues in and notices there is no animal for the sacrifice; at what point did he suspect what his role would be? Imagine what it would be like to watch your father build an altar and lay a fire, imagine your father tying you, imagine him laying you on the firewood. Imagine your father reaching out and taking up a knife – only then hearing God say, “Hold up; wait. No.”

I wonder what that did to Abraham’s relationship with God. I wonder what that did to Isaac’s relationship to God. To his relationship with Abraham. Later in Genesis 31, God is called the God of Abraham and the PAHhahd, the *terror of Isaac. Maybe that’s about awe and respect and reverence; maybe not. Maybe it’s pure fear.

Heading up the mountain twice (you can look there if you want in the bulletin), twice it says that Abraham and Isaac the two of them walked on together; but coming down the mountain, and you can’t see it because we stopped at verse 12 but coming down from the mountain Abraham comes down alone, and he rejoins his servants alone. Abraham and Isaac do not ever speak again or interact; the next time they are both of them together, Isaac is burying his father. I wonder if this broke them. How do you say “Sorry, Son” after this? How do you say, “I love you, Son”? What could you ever talk about again as a father to the child you almost killed? Homework? How do you ever again feel safe as a child with that parent?

But I can’t help but wonder, too, about stories and the nature of storytelling. I wonder if there’s a version of this story as a story where Isaac never comes down the mountain. Where the God of Genesis 22 who does think about killing kids and commands it does not intervene. Where Abraham’s obedience to that God brought him down the mountain alone, and left him utterly alone. His wife is silent and even absent from this chapter though she fills the chapter before it, fills it, with laughter and fecundity and pride and envy. This chapter is devoid of her, and in the first two verses of the next chapter she is dead. What did this trip up the mountain do to this family? What did this man’s obedience to this God do to him and his family? It may have destroyed them.

Do you know that there are two names for God in this chapter? The first, Elohim, is the name used for God at the beginning, through the narrative up the mountain. Elohim puts Abraham to the test, Elohim gives the order and the instructions. This is God’s name in Genesis 1, when God breaths and forms and speaks and makes and divides. Midstory on the mountain, at the climax of geography and the climax of time, God’s second name is introduced. It is haShem, the tetragram YHWH, the unpronounceable name is used at the moment of intervention and then after. The one who stops Abraham and spares Isaac is the name of the God of Genesis 2 and 3, that God who plants a garden and walks with the human and creates relationship and community and engages in the drama of living.

Scholars say things about the Elohist and Yahwist writing and what they mean historically and theologically, and they provide some coherent organizing principles for these names for God and God’s behavior toward people and our relationship to those names and that God. And it’s been a long, cold minute since I studied that stuff, but. There are two names used for God in this chapter, and one asks Abraham to kill his son, to give up his future and destroy his legacy, to murder the son he loves. And the other says “Hold up; wait. No.” At least in this version of the telling. And it happens that the name of God in Jeremiah, when God says You disgust me! I never asked for this! I never even thought it!? that God that denies wanting or thinking of it in Jeremiah has the same name as the God who stopped it now in Genesis. That’s worth knowing.

The thing is, I think we still, lots of us even here, some of us against our better judgement, perhaps carefully and thoughtfully, but maybe some of us a bit mindlessly, I think we still believe on some level that Abraham is doing the right thing, the righteous thing, the better, higher, whatever thing by obeying God, even to the point of killing his son. That sacrificing a beloved son is a worthy and wonderful, a selfless and loving thing, even that it is redemptive. Even that it is salvific.

And we are people who would not kill our child. My God, we are the child. We have been the child. We have been Isaac, or Ishmael, the one terrorized or abandoned in the name of God, by the voice of God. We are righteous people, I think, and we are actually uniquely inclined in fact to *invert tests of righteousness: to show our love to others by rejecting a God who asks us to harm them.

But our ideals, or our organizing principles, or the rules that we set don’t always allow us to fully engage with one another’s humanity.

Both of these are true:

I believe that we are a people who are inclined to turn tests of divine obedience on their head, and to show love for people by disobeying a God who asks us to do harm.

I believe that we are, broadly, a people who understand salvation on some level to be directly tied to a father demonstrating love and righteousness by killing his precious, beloved son.

This is a conundrum. And its tension is the space in which we always live. A Buddhist koan or maybe a mystic could ask, “How much does love weigh?” Or “Which breaks more glass, rightness or wrongness?”

Keeping families together is a good thing, and more resources should be used to support them. And there are pastors who tell women to return to their abuser because they prioritize family cohesion and her place in it; they have literally said she must be like Job and Jesus, who suffered willingly for God’s will. Our bodies are perfect, perfectly made, our skin, our disabilities, our fat bodies are perfect, our genitals just as they are – bodies are not gender! And trans people are increasingly denied access to medicine and treatments and our people are dying because they cannot see in the mirror what they know in themselves. There are political and historical truths about Gaza and the fight there for land. Capitalism at core, extraction, economics. And the hatred of these people and genocide and slander crosses their religious and national differences.

There’s is rightness that is certain, that is worth sacrificing for and holding to even when it is difficult. And it isn’t possible to apply truths or certainties to our lives without impacting our siblings, our children, each other.

Even those of us who want answers that are fresh and subversive answers, we still often want them to be truisms that we can hold on to and use again. I do. Complexity is draining, it’s exhausting. And it is unavoidable. There’s a comic drawing by David Hayward where a Jesus-looking person is facing a bunch of modern-looking people holding Holy Bibles, and the caption says, You use scripture to determine what love means, and I use love to determine what scripture means – and it almost got me. I almost thought that was the thing I could hang my hat on. But whenever Jesus would say something so perfectly true, like “Love your neighbor,” people would respond, “Define neighbor.” And it’s a messed up question, but it’s fair. I can say that I use only love to understand scripture, but that’s still just my definition of what love is or how it acts. Discipline and accountability can be love. Tough love has the word love in it. Abraham’s test on the mountain is a testament to how slippery it can be to define love.

There is a goodness or righteousness that surpasses my personal comfort, that is worth more than my safety or even my life. That is for me the best and most compelling understanding of why Jesus was executed: knowing that he would be punished, he still would not stop drawing attention to injustice, he wouldn’t stop mobilizing people to speak and act for there to be enough food and wealth and access to health and fair judges. On that level of obedience to something huge and enduring, Abraham’s obedience is a pure and selfless, an incredible act of righteousness.

But I think it’s not a thing to get too comfortable with or confident about. There’s a tension, a conundrum, in understanding the importance of Abraham’s and our obedience to a higher, better, more lasting sense of good on the one hand, and the danger of losing touch with Isaac’s (or Ishmael’s) humanity, his personhood. His vulnerability and terror.

I think that’s what Amos and the others mean when he says feasts and sacrifices aren’t effective or any good at all without caring for people who need care and treating people fairly who can’t buy fair treatment. It’s at the heart of Jesus saying the law wasn’t made for its own sake but to help people. And it is the at the heart of Levitical law that reads “Love your neighbor as yourself; I am God.”

There is a Buddhist story about rightness and wrongness: When Bankei held his seclusion-weeks of meditation, pupils from many parts of Japan came to attend. During one of these gatherings a pupil was caught stealing. The matter was reported to Bankei with the request that the culprit be expelled. Bankei ignored the case. Later the pupil was caught stealing again, and again Bankei disregarded the matter. This angered the other pupils, who drew up a petition demanding the dismissal of the thief, or they would leave altogether in one body. Bankei called everyone together and said “You are wise brothers, you know what is right and what is not right. Another school will take you in gladly, but this brother does not even know right from wrong. Who will teach him if I do not? I am going to keep him here even if the rest of you leave.”

There are good rules, pure ideals, there is correct practice. But their full value is intrinsically connected to the lives and realities of the people they affect. This story, this paragon of Abraham’s righteousness, may have destroyed him and his family, and I think we need to hold that hand in hand with our praise for Abraham’s staggering obedience. Isaac, or Ishmael, cannot be a simple foil to Abraham’s test, cannot be just a prop that represents the difficulty of his choice. That child has to remain human to us, not just parable or collateral, but flesh and blood, living beings. Walking together, engaged in the drama of living.

I know we work on this, and it’s ongoing, that we’re good people with good hearts, mucking through. I know we need rest, and that so much is hard and getting harder. I know that, if we go to the bible, we so often go to it needing to find answers instead of more questions, more koans, more complexity. And, as we move together through Lent, as we reflect and peel away the barriers that interfere with our tie to what is lasting, our tie to what is truly good, I hope for us that in our search for God’s voice, in our search for God’s name, we will not disconnect from one other’s.

Peace.

MCCNY
November 5, 2023

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the commonwealth of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they are comforted.
Blessed are the gentle, they have inherited the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they are filled.
Blessed are the merciful, they receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, they see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, they are called the children of God.
Blessed are those who are chased and rejected for righteousness’ sake, theirs is the divine reign.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your divine reward is great; in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Greetings and blessings from the council of elders.

What does it mean to feel blessed, to be blessed. Someone sneezes, we say bless you: and maybe we mean I notice you, feel better, I’m with you. Some of us say a blessing at dinner: and maybe it’s some version of dear food, dear hands that brought it to the table, thank you; I’m grateful for you. I notice you. We say saints are blessed, some of us pray, Blessed Mary, and maybe we still, even to this revered person, still maybe mean I notice you, I’m with you.

I’ve been mad for many years at the Matthew beatitudes for adding abstract spiritualized etherea to what is a real and lived and excruciating wealth discrepancy, then and now, in first-century Roman Palestine and in twenty-first-century end-stage capitalism. Matthew’s Jesus adds, for example, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice instead of just Luke’s Jesus’s blessed are those who hunger and thirst. Those who are hungry and thirsty are real people in real circumstances, people in flesh. I felt so strongly grumpy for years and years about Matthew’s Jesus adding blessed are the poor in spirit instead of just blessed are the poor, blessed are the destitute. It’s always felt like taking something real and lived and making it abstract and theoretical. Like forgiving trespasses instead of debts. Like accepting Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior instead of taking the lowest seat and loving both our enemy and our neighbor and freeing prisoners and ending money bail and taking up our cross to die.

What does it even mean to be poor in spirit. What’s a poor in spirit?

There’s a layer to this Matthew beatitudinal, though, that I have discovered very recently and which I don’t hate, which is an exhortation, or a manual for how to be a disciple. These beatitudes, framed this way, can turn out to be blessings for those who respond to a call to action. They might tell us how to be in right relationship, how to be in community grounded in The Way of this prophet, this anointed one. They instruct us how to follow, how to take up our cross and follow. Today’s passage is followed by “you are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor how will it be salted,” which can probably also support this. Be salty! Be meek! This works, if it works, for questions like, Do I hunger and thirst for righteousness – or do I keep my head down and look away? Am I gentle, am I pure in heart, merciful, a peacemaker – or am I violent and vengeful? Be merciful, maybe it says, and be blessed. Be a peacemaker, find favor. They work less well, though, if they work, for questions like, Am I poor in spirit? Do I mourn? As you know already, I’m struggling with what poor in spirit means. Do I want to be poor in spirit? Is that something to aspire to? I can’t imagine a prophet or his God who wants me to mourn in order to receive favor.

I think, too, though, that my favorite blessings are unconditional. I mess up so often, and so do we all. I’m not always patient or generous (no, really); neither are we all. And I want to be loved all the time; I’m not even joking about that. I want that for you, too, always, to be deeply and always blessed and loved. So a blessing, a status of favor that is granted or withheld on the basis of our discipleship, based on our meekness, or mercy, or pureness of heart, feels insufficient. It feels ungodlike. It feels like the world I live in now.

For years I’ve loved thinking of these beatitudes in the way the Jesus Seminar and Historical Jesus people talked about them, as aphorisms surely spoken by the Jesus who lived in the first century and was executed by Rome. Congratulations!, poors! Congratulations!, people frozen in grief! The words blessed mean congratulations, and Luke’s Jesus they say was using them strategically, paradoxically. My boyfriend John Dominic Crossan and his lot think it was likely that Jesus spoke like this, using memorable turns of phrases that cut across the social and religious grain. To make a point with surprise and shock; to call for a reversal of roles or to upend, frustrate ordinary expectations.

And I was so moved by the notion of reversal that I stopped with it there in my tracks. I fell in love with the ideas being opened to me, that there was a way of reading the bible outside of the track that was sanctioned by my childhood church and traditional theology and the cisheteronormative dominant social and power system. And I needed that reading and have been transformed by it, and my life is different and more mine than it ever was, and my ethics is closer, I think, to the original prophet and teacher than it ever was. But I fell in love with those ideas as though surprise and shock was righteous of itself. As though Jesus was there to perform magic tricks with turns of phrases, to amaze and charm me, to entertain me with his cleverness and wit. I turned Jesus into Dorothy Parker, or Fran Liebowitz. It’s not enough, I don’t think; it’s not justice. Paradox doesn’t transform or save the world; paradox is only a driving force that brings us to an awareness of what needs change. It is a really lovely, exciting impetus, a catalyst. But, still, I realize that this was my own playing at Matthew, my own version of turning something real and painful and lived into abstract rhetorical etherea. Oscar Wilde doesn’t save us, Audre Lorde does. Dorothy Allison. Kiese Laymon.

Related to nothing here, I have never been more in love with John Dominic Crossan than I was this week researching the beatitudes to prep for this sermon and discovering how very many fundamentalist Christians dislike him and mock him. This delights me; more for me. More Crossan for me.

Let’s agree on principle, then, that these are not blessings-as-floor show, turning people who are hunted and starving into props for an intellectual inversion. Although we do love us a good inversion. And let’s agree for the sake of argument, at least for now, that they are not conditional blessings to would-be disciples. Disciples are instructed a number of times throughout the gospels and I think the teacher speaks best about how to follow him when he is most direct and most honest about it: take no money, take no second tunic, take the last seat, take up your cross. Our reward is to die, folks. Sorry, not sorry. We are the ones to come after the prophets who came before us. Our reward for discipleship probably is to die with integrity; which honestly is probably why so many Christians are so bad at being Christian.

Let’s say that the blessing of Matthew’s Jesus is, indeed, a congratulations, but not ironic, and not just a rhetorical surprise. Let’s assume that Matthew’s Jesus is in earnest, truly congratulating those in the worst straights for being favored. Not people who hunger and thirst to do justice, but who ache to receive it, who are being starved of it. A hunger and a blinding thirst to receive an egg instead of a scorpion. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst to obtain justice long withheld: homos and queers and transes under W, under Trump, in DeSantis’s Florida and anyone’s Texas before or after Ann Richards. Black folks jogging on the street or eating ice cream on their couch in any state in this county since ever. Starving for justice. Starving and longing and aching to receive righteousness.

Jesus is congratulating not people who will *become non-violent, or will *do mercy and broker peace but is congratulating those who are already living these counter-dominant practices at cost, who are already being slapped on both cheeks, being taken for both cloak and tunic, who are made to walk both the first required, expected, so-called legal compelled mile and then also an additional, additionally abusive mile. He is not asking us to aspire to be harmed and neglected but is blessing those who are already frozen in grief, those who are already hunted and rejected, those who are vilified and demonized.

But I don’t think it’s a blessing for a future promise. I don’t think these blessings look ahead to a time not yet, a dream still to be realized. This speech names a present reality: people are mourning, people are grieving. People are frightened for our lives, for our friends’ lives, for our communities’ lives. It seems to name also an alternative reality, and I think we want it to: a liberation yet to come where people will be comforted, people will be fed, people will find justice. That hope resonates with many of us, I think. We pray for it. *We mourn and want to be comforted. We long and ache to receive justice – and we want it firm and fast, not threatened at every election cycle, not free at last, free at last as only words repeated in February and then shoved in a drawer.

Promises of a future reward, or aspirational righteousness, or even some great reckoning where all will be set aright Some Day are so deeply insufficient. They leave much of the present reality intact. In some ways they serve as a sedative, a seductive kind of narcotic comfort care that asks the oppressed to stay calm and allows injustice to carry on.

It does give comfort, though, and that’s not on us. I don’t mean to criticize those of us who hope for equity and repair. It is soul soothing to imagine soft places to land. This idea of “someday they’ll get theirs.” “Someday I’ll receive my fair recompense, the wages for my labor, the respect and honor that I deserve” (that we all deserve), some sweet future day. We are desperate to believe in and hope for an accounting where, in the end, the truth will out. And – and, not but – but probably a bit of but, that future framing of justice lays a lot of cover to maintain and reproduce the status quo.

I don’t think that’s what Matthew’s Jesus is saying. The list of blessings is in the indicative mode, not the imperative. They are a description, not prescription; they describe what is already. Matthew’s Jesus is in earnest, congratulating those in the worst straights for their divine favor, and they are both literally already poor and demoralized, aching to receive due process, hunted and discarded, *and they are already blessed.

In these verses and in Jesus’s cosmology, it is the broken and reviled who are favored. It’s a rearrangement of status and strata. It is that terrifically surprising inversion that moves me so much and excites me, but not for its own sake. It works rhetorically like an apocalypse, but it is literal: an *actual tearing and upending of the way things work, and a concrete rearrangement of our values and assumptions. I think it’s another way of saying the last are first – and living it. Let children come to me, for such is heaven – and living it. Invite nobodies to your weddings and feasts – and inviting them. I think it’s another way of saying be born again, from above. Be baptized, in spirit and in truth. Open your senses and be awakened, be enlightened, come to this full and perfect realization – and live it.

Luke’s Mary says almost the same thing in her great speech: You have looked with favor on my lowliness and now everyone for all time calls me blessed. It’s not about Mary, though. It’s not just about Mary. It’s not just about this particular mother. It’s about Black people dying during childbirth at nearly three times the rate of others. Overturning Roe impairs every pregnant or potentially pregnant person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and Black folks as ever disproportionately bear the brunt. It’s about for the first time in twenty years the infant mortality rate went up in 2022, especially for those born to Native American, Alaskan Native, and white parents. Only for Black infants did the mortality rate not increase, and still Black infants have by far the highest death numbers. It’s about trans people targeted for sexual assault at four times the rate of non-trans people, and a study in Denmark that has us at nearly 8 times the suicide rates. I could go on with details about who is dying in what horrifying numbers. But we know about this country’s entrenched racism and economic exploitation and manipulation of power and public fear. We know already. And what we don’t know is part of the problem.

In a world where Black folks are favored and blessed, death rates of infants and parents during childbirth don’t have this sinister racial spike. In a world where transes are favored and blessed, we aren’t killing ourselves and being assaulted and being killed at exponential rates. In that world, Black folks and trans folks are favored and blessed, enjoying life and liberty and pursuing happiness. And that world isn’t aspirational or a sedative or a temporary reality from one federal administration to the next. It is something real and is created by us, all of us together, and it happens and is happening now everywhere, everywhere, every day, and this passage is, after all, also an exhortation to us as disciples or followers or whatever we call ourselves. People who say that justice matters. This passage is also, after all, a call for us all to value and favor and notice and be with and attend to the needs of the people who have needs and to meet those needs and make real the blessing and make “on earth” the “as it is in heaven.” The blessings aren’t for us to attain as our special reward for doing righteousness or peacemaking and whatnot, heaven isn’t a prize. Heaven isn’t an inverted exclusive cocktail party. As much as we like a good inversion. But the blessings are for us in all the ways that everyone benefits when all people and all infants and all transes have access to good reproductive and gender-affirming and general healthcare. And so on. We all benefit. It’s a world where everyone is comforted and fed and shown mercy. A world defined by mercy and ceasefire. It’s a world where everyone is first, and where *everyone is last, first because everyone has wellness and enough and surplus for leisure, and last because *everyone is watching out for and attending to and affirming one another.

Matthew’s Jesus says again and again (I think all the Jesuses do) that this world, this kingdom, or empire, or country of God, God’s Presidency, this way of living together in community is already here. He keeps saying it is near, it is nigh. He says it again and again: it is already ours. I feel more cynical and pessimistic than Jesus, though, which is probably one of the many reasons no one is calling me the messiah. But I do believe in us. I do have faith in us and in this, and there are many of us who recognize that our hope and wellness is tied to one another. We create and experience this Jesus world all around us, this world of The Way, and we recognize the people named here in this list, and recognize them as blessed, and we know them to be saints, and we are citizens of that realm. We enlist in that world. We pledge our allegiance to it. We pledge our allegiance to *that.

I love you; rock the blessing.

Peace.