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.

I’m tired of white supremacy. Weary of death. Tired of injustice. Tired of witnessing sadness and loss and depletion and fear that our people carry from day to day. I’m tired of living my own. And it’s so easy to get lost in rage and resentment. To transform prophetic indignation into partisanship and retribution. To become poisoned by our principles, like Matthew today.

Folks often tell me that they don’t care for the Hebrew bible and its angry and violent and vindictive God. Folks tell me they prefer the Christian bible and the gospel stories filled with love and grace and gentle kindnesses. I have always replied, and I repeat now, that every word of violence found in Hebrew scripture is retold in the Greek, and that every word of forgiveness and justice spoken in the gospels was uttered first by Israel’s prophets and foreparents. Today’s scriptures are the object lesson.

Matthew is exposing a family fight today, and that gospel is willing to say that God rejects the cousins and kin who reject the Matthew community. The gospel is willing to say that God has destroyed their city and their temple. That God will do the same with any who are passing themselves off as genuine believers but are tares and goats, bad fish and children who say they will go out to the vineyard but do not. Matthew’s righteousness has soured and has become resentment, has turned and become a mirror of the hatefulness and exclusion that the Matthew community itself has suffered.

Obviously, I say this with a deep sense of sympathy and compassion for Matthew. I wouldn’t at all mind getting to decide who will be tossed out into outer darkness, chewing the inside of their own lip with their teeth. I’ve already started a list. I would like there to be consequences for mine enemies. Mine racist, transphobic, climate change denying, anti-vacc enemies.

But it’s important to know that Matthew’s oppressors are people who had more in common with them than were different. I have friends who are poverty activists and poverty scholars who defend Matthew and admire Matthew for its moral clarity and its urgency. Matthew is a justice activist. Matthew has incisive critique. Matthew is like any of us in many ways… but also any of us whose righteousness has been eclipsed by self-righteousness… so probably all of us at one time or another. Maybe one or two of us right now. (I’ve already admitted to having a list of mine enemies I’d like to send to hell if there were a hell.)

But I want to admit to you, as well, and this feels harder to say in many ways, that I cannot find a God of Love in the king of Matthew’s parable, or in this feast. Not in a king who sends troops to destroy his own citizens and cities who decline his invitation; who binds and casts out a diner (whom he oddly first calls “friend”) who did accept but didn’t have the right clothes?; who invites so-called “good and bad” alike only to shame and reject some of them. And I’m not able to understand Mercy and Justice in a feast that is conditional. I know that this passage is colored red in the did-Jesus-say-it color-coded bible, but this king is thinking how I think. And a sovereign deserving of all our heart, soul, strength, and mind probably won’t, and probably shouldn’t, use my playbook. Or Matthew’s. This king has my impulses. And Isaiah insists that its God isn’t like me, that its God’s thoughts are not my thoughts nor its God’s ways my ways. God is higher, Isaiah says. I imagine that means better at grace than me and Matthew. Better at patience and whatever it is that forgiveness is. I’d like to imagine that means not being vindictive, not being violent, not being a bully. That seems like a reasonable bar for a merciful, just, and loving God.

Maybe God doesn’t have to be all the things everyone thinks a God should be, maybe doesn’t have to satisfy all the images and all the roles and all of the human impulses for punishment and judgment and attrition. Maybe what we call God isn’t something that hurts us, ever, even righteously, even tough-lovingly, but is always the things that correct us and that comfort us and save us.

Maybe every God we hear about in the bible isn’t a God that we have to contort and bend to fit into our understanding of God. Maybe every God we hear about in the bible isn’t God? Maybe we don’t accept without question the stories of God as killing farmers, burning cities, smashing the heads of enemy babies against a rock, sending a bear to eat a bunch of boys who called Elisha “Baldhead,” or killing disciples for stealing money and lying about it.

That God is certainly not the pine-scented air. There is just no way that God is the pine-scented air.

And so, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, what if we replaced the king of Matthew’s parable with the Shepherd of Psalm 23? What if we scrap violence in all its forms, all its allegories? What if, instead of a feast preceded by murdered messengers and revenged merchants and burned homes, what if we instead have the divine meal of Psalm 23? Instead of death and retribution and rejection, what if we assume that whatever is divine is also provision, restoration, comfort, universal …

I’m not saying life is all cornflowers and honeybees. The psalmist knows that life is filled with loss. That we walk through a valley of deep shadow. That death surrounds us, discrimination and violence, sick family, addiction, living overwhelmed by need and responsibility and worry. The valley of death is the very center of the 23rd psalm, and its presence is assumed by the verses before and pervades the verses after it. There’s no denial, no erasure, no pretense.

But it’s no accident that when the psalm is most desperate, closest to the valley of shadow, that then is also the time it is closest to what is divine. Before and after, God is in the third person: God is my shepherd.  God makes me lie down. God leads me in just paths, as is befitting the name of God. But when the psalmist moves into the valley of deepest shadow, when the poet is surrounded by enemies, then God is at its most personal and most present: You are with me. Your rod and staff comfort me. You spread out a table. You anoint my head.

I don’t know about you, but this is what I need for my spirit and my faith. This Shepherd. The last thing I need is a king who hits me and binds me and throws me out. But, honestly, I don’t want a God who will do this to the people I hate, either, if I’m really honest with myself, because sometimes the only difference between me and mine enemies is twenty minutes. Am I so righteous, really? that I’m never the hypocrite, never hurt anyone, never deprived someone of their dignity or respect? No.

Speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world. What if the God we imagine doesn’t throw anybody out? Not people who come to a wedding without the wedding robe. Not people who reverse carbon emissions caps. Not people who voted differently from me. Maybe not even people who target trans folks and try to reverse marriage equality or hoard wealth.

Speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world. What if the perfect divine that we imagine doesn’t take sides between us? Doesn’t chose between Matthew versus Matthew’s cousins? Doesn’t choose between people who believe Black Lives Matter and people who love the flag? Between trans women of color and people made violent and transmisogynist by hegemonic gender values? Between me and the rest of mine enemies?

You prepare a table for me in the presence of mine enemies. Think about that: mine enemies are there, as well, at that table, at the feast. Isn’t the Shepherd preparing a table for them, then, too? Surely mine enemies aren’t just there to watch me eat. Speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, when my head is anointed with oil, when my cup overflows, what if this God anoints all the heads and overflows all the cups? Makes the sun to shine on the evil and the good, Matthew got that much right, makes the rain to fall on the so-called just and the so-called unjust. What if God doesn’t divide us into sheep and goats, into wheat and tares – into just and unjust?

What if God understands that not everything is either one thing or the other, one side or the other? That some people think Black Lives Matter and love the flag? That some people love and fight for trans women of color and still are trapped in and beguiled by hegemonic masculinity? What if God knows that the difference between me and everything and everyone I hate is sometimes only twenty minutes? This is a hard saying.

Of course this doesn’t mean that there is no right or wrong. I’m confident that racism is still God-damned, and poverty is God-forsaken, that a loving God takes sides against violence and sexual violence. Importantly, though, I’ll not say that God makes this feast for both Trayvon Martin and also his killer George Zimmerman, or for both the dozens of trans people killed this year so far and also their murderers, for both the Muslims and Sikhs and other brown people systematically detained at airports and dragged off planes and digitally strip searched and also the agents who degrade them and the politicians who create the unjust policies, for both the Israelis and Palestinians killing one another. I won’t speak for every harmed person; it’s not my place to decide, I don’t think, what that open table means for everyone, what universal cup filling and anointing means for communities I’m not a member of, or impose my interpretation of universal table-making on these families and survivors of hate and harm. I’ll speak just of me, sitting down to table with the people who have harmed me, and I will wonder for myself about the plentiful imagery of the world.

I’m not asking us to give up our longing for comfort when everything is awful and hard. Of course that is part of an impossible, divine spirit. I am, though, wondering about giving up our need for retribution against fellow humans who make things awful and hard. Maybe even if they did it on purpose. Maybe even if they aren’t sorry. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m just speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world.

I’m not asking for us to give up our ethics, our compunction for justice, or our anger at injustice. Of course that is part of an impossible, divine spirit. But I am, I think, hoping that in our zeal for fairness, we don’t require harm or death to balance the scale. I am hoping that we don’t deify our revenge by calling it God.

I’m asking us to speak of the plentiful imagery of the world, to imagine an ultimate reality whose mercy doesn’t make sense, which Paul called a skandal, an absurdity. I’m asking us to conceive of an impossible grace, a collective peace that is beyond our understanding.

Imagine power that is not corrupt. Imagine strength that is not violent. Imagine special treatment, for everyone.

I’m just asking us to imagine a parable – and a paradigm – where a Shepherd provides a balm to the afflicted, provides green pastures, still waters, provides love and compassion, an overflowing cup to so-called friend and so-called enemy alike, as if those names are not opposites. As though we are enmeshed, interdependent, comingled. As though “our” salvation depends on “theirs.” As though love and comfort, kindness, mercy is what saves and redeems and atones.

LITANY, Billy Collins
You are the bread and the knife,
          The crystal goblet and the wine…
                -Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman’s tea cup.
But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and–somehow–the wine.

Peace.

Rehoboth MCC
November 27, 2022

But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Child, but only the Parent. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Human One. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Human One. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your God is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, they would have stayed awake and would not have let their house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Human One is coming at an unexpected hour.

There are a number of texts throughout the gospels, both the ones in our bible and outside of it, that have Jesus or sometimes John the Baptizer saying stuff about what’s going to happen at the end of the world. It usually sounds a little bit like the Left Behind stories, sometimes it sounds like Children of the Corn. Like today, Matthew talks about Noah and, frankly, I’ve never been so skeeved out by the Noah story; and it’s kind of a skeevy story to start with, if you know what I’m talking about. People are minding their own business doing harmless stuff together and suddenly one goes raptured. And some Psycho call’s coming from inside the house nightmare comes in the dark to steal your stuff and do God knows what else awful. This stuff always sounds scary. It never, ever sounds like good news.

It feels like a really wrong way to begin this season leading up to Christmas. Next week we’ll be talking about a lonely voice in the wilderness crying out for justice. The next week will be about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, freeing those in prison. And after that of course an angel will come to Joseph in a dream to encourage him to marry a pregnant child-woman instead of shaming her or stoning her. These passages coming up make tons of sense for what we believe Christmas to be and mean, maybe especially that one don’t throw rocks at the woman you love. They *feel Christmas-y, especially that take care of people’s needs one. But this thing today is definitely not like the others and seems absolutely out of place. I know a pastor who quit preaching the lectionary because he couldn’t deal with this apocalypse every year on the first Sunday of Advent. He didn’t think it sounded like good news. But he was Methodist, you know. (Teasing. Mostly. Some of my best friends are Methodist.)

The thing is, though, this is good news. I think it’s brilliant news. Apocalypse Advent is actually my favorite Sunday to preach all year, so thanks for having me. Also, blessings from the Council of Elders (I didn’t forget).

One thing about this, the end is not always the end. That is tricky to say, as a white, slim, able-bodied, Christian-adjacent person with a fair amount of privilege. I want to take care not to minimize the pain and loss that many folks feel at the end. Families that I encounter at the hospital emergency department, and the families of those five murdered in Colorado Springs and in the other six or more mass shootings last week. Tamir Rice’s family, who had to get through another anniversary of his murder this week. I don’t want to minimize what’s happening with the erosion of the Indian Child Welfare Act, or the 327 people named this year at the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

But I don’t want us to confuse violence and injustice or oppression with the end. Violence and injustice and oppression are bitter and broken, but they don’t have the last word. We learned that with the energy and organizing that came in the wake of the Boy Scouts versus James Dale decision and now with the Dobbs decision. The highest legal court in the land doesn’t get the final say. We learned it at Golgotha, too, which is a big deal to a lot of us. We have a bunch of different ways of thinking about what happened with the first disciples on that first Easter, but one way or another it’s arguably the whole point of our faith or faithfulness that *That end was not the end. I don’t want us to think of violence or death as the end. And I don’t want us to mistake the end and the beginning.

Where’s the beginning of a ring, for instance? Where’s the beginning of the day? Where’s the end of the earth’s seasons? The cold and dark dormancy of winter makes green spring buds possible, that leads to the summer’s flowers, that makes possible shedding curled up leaves and seeds, that leads to the dormant soil and germinating seed of winter… An old English folk song says, I gave my love a cherry that had no stone. I gave my love a chicken that had no bone. I gave my love a baby with no cryin. I told my love a story that had no dying. How can there be a cherry that has no stone? How can there be a chicken that has no bone? How can there be a baby with no cryin? How can there be a story that has no dying?

Does anyone know the answer to the riddle? A cherry when it’s blooming, it has no stone. A chicken when it’s pipping, it has no bone. A baby when it’s sleeping has no cryin. The story that I love you, it has no dying.

What “Jesus” is describing here (and let’s just note that I threw up some finger quotation marks around Jesus; we’ll come back to that in a minute), what “Jesus” is describing is not a catastrophic end but a beginning. Jesus is telling people, them, us, that something monumental is coming – the Human One, or the Son of Man, the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Christ – choose your title. A new world order is on the horizon, and the end of this world is here. It’s not scary, no matter what we’ve been told the Book of Revelation means, or Daniel, or Mark 13. The end of this world is not scary but spectacular, and exhilarating.

The new world order is precisely all the stuff coming up in the lectionary the next few weeks, especially people getting fed and clothed and cared for and loved and brought in. Especially people not being shamed or hit with rocks to death. The new world order is built into the nativity parable, it’s low-life scuzzy shepherds becoming the central figures and first responders to love and justice. It’s is freaky foreign eunuchs becoming astrological co-conspirators and colluders in salvation. The new world order is an immigration and refugee policy that sounds more like Emma Lazarus, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” than like nativist xenophobia. It’s when the United States gives up its role as the world’s leading jailor. It’s when all people living with HIV and AIDS have access to life-saving medication and prophylactics, whether they live in sub-Saharan Africa or in SoHo. It’s when Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi, and the places we don’t know about yet have actually clean water, and cities and towns stop doing as little as they can get away with for poor and working class city infrastructure, for Black and other neighborhoods of color. The coming of the new world order is the apocalyptic question: To whom does the sovereignty of the world belong? And that question is answered with the words: It belongs to good, to God. To love. To justice. To everyone having enough.

Today’s reading isn’t about the end. It isn’t scary. This is the beginning of the good news that *That world is coming, that new, good world where wealth and power is distributed evenly. Huzzah.

I’ve been putting Jesus in air quotes because Jesus probably didn’t say this stuff, at least not this way. It’s probably definitely the gospel writer folks saying that mean-God punished Noah’s generation, because I’m pretty sure that real Jesus, non-quotation marks Jesus, talked about God as love and provision, not as anger and judgement. Also, Jesus almost certainly didn’t talk this much. He stood somewhere on a hill or sat in a boat and shouted stuff at the crowds, and it probably was short and sweet. It was probably really funny ha ha or funny absurd, so they would remember it, like having a log sticking out of your head while you poke around in your neighbor’s eyeball for a speck. Something like congratulations, gross poor people, you win all the best prizes! Like love the people you hate; like give it away for a rainy day.

People are asking “Jesus,” When will this world come, already? Because we’ve been waiting and waiting for it. We thought that the Maccabees were going to make it happen, they say. Then we thought Judas in Galilee or Simon in Perea or John at the Jordan River were going to make it happen. Then we thought you were going to make it happen, once and for all, with a swift and mighty hand like in the old days when Moses could make the mountains quake. But the Maccabees didn’t do it and Judas and Simon and John didn’t do it. And non-quotation marks Jesus didn’t overturn Rome and return the land and authority to the Jewish people, but only overturned temple tables and died violently and humiliated. The community of Matthew’s gospel has been waiting and waiting. And our communities – queer, genderqueer, grandchildren of kidnapped and enslaved Black elders and First Nations and Chicano y latine and immigrants – our communities have been waiting and waiting. When will this world come that we long for, this world that will save us and free us, with just and fair laws and policy, and an end to hunger and war?

And Matthew’s “Jesus” says, Here’s the sign: You’ll know because people will be eating and drinking and marrying. People will be planting crops and grinding meal. That’s how you’ll know it is the beginning. And that’s how you’ll know that it’s time for that good and just new world.

The new world order isn’t a cataclysmic event that a God is sitting around waiting for the right moment to spring on us. (Surprise!) Every moment is right for love and justice. Every moment is right for feeding and healing. A sinister God isn’t lurking and hiding, waiting to catch us out. (Jesus is coming! Everyone, look busy!) God isn’t a thief sneaking at night into your house when you’re asleep. For pity’s sake, goodness knows that we sleep at night and wants us to get a good night’s sleep.

I’m not a fan of scary God. People act like fear is a great motivator. Religious people for forever have been trying to scare us with the end of the world and a terrible God’s surprising sudden arrival and Judgment Day and missing the top secret heaven train because we were sleeping or distracted or ran out of oil. These folks think they can shame us or frighten us into being good. But what does anything good want with our shame? What does anything good want with fear? We are not created in the image of fear. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will not fear. Fear not, the angels said. Do not be afraid, post-Easter Houdini “Jesus” said as he passed through locked doors.

I don’t think Matthew’s “Jesus” or any Jesus wants us scared; but I think he wants us getting to it, he wants us to begin. Jesus is saying, This is a good day for it; it’s always a good day for it. He doesn’t want people thinking, How long can I put it off? When do I absolutely have to get on board? How long can I keep hating people I hate and hording my stuff and ignoring anti-trans violence and the racial wealth gap before I have to repent and act? How long can I be complacent about harm to immigrants and Muslims and broken binding treaties with sovereign first nations? Does it have to be today? I don’t want to miss out on the reward, but I’d like to enjoy my privilege and comfort for as long as possible. I don’t want to be left behind, but I don’t want to stick my neck out too soon. So what are the signs of the times?

And Jesus says, You don’t get it. There’s no deadline. The deadline is always. The time is ripe and always has been. Get to it, now, like it’s your own idea, like you love it.

The end of the world isn’t a train we catch or a bus we miss. “Jesus” is talking about a day and an hour that nobody knows, not even the angels, but not because it’s a secret. It’s the opposite of a secret: there’s not a day or hour to know. It’s every day. It’s every hour. It’s whenever people are eating and drinking and marrying, whenever people are planting crops or grinding meal. It’s not going to happen upon us or happen to us suddenly, because it isn’t going to happen *to us at all. It’s going to happen because of us. It’s going to happen through us. *We are the new buds pushing the old growth off the trees. We’re going to make it so, because we’re going to be doing it, building it, growing it.

The new world order isn’t going to happen without us, and now we know that’s why it’s scary.

Turns out it is scary, after all, because no God is doing it for us. *We have to do it, and it’s going to cost us. It’s going to hurt. If it isn’t awful, if we aren’t scared, we may not be doing it right. Some of us will have to interrupt our white privilege. Some of us will be expected to cough up some of the wealth we have been hoarding with the help of redlining and bank loan advantages. It is scary. But if we weren’t scared already, then maybe we haven’t been paying attention. Folks are going to the grocery store and being shot down in the aisles. Folks are dying in our clubs. Folks are being shot in church, in synagogue. Folks aren’t surviving the school day. Folks are being hunted down and shot during their morning run. Folks are dying shopping for a BB gun at Wal-Mart in an open carry state. Folks are dying all around us for living their Black lives and queer and genderqueer lives and Jewish lives.

These times call for frightening boldness, terrifying audacity. Scary. It means we stick our neck out, call attention to ourselves, make trouble, get in trouble. (Good Trouble, rest in power Representative Lewis.) Maybe it means we risk the dogs and the water hoses, risk arrest, risk our surplus, our stockpile, risk getting on bad terms with the bosses, risk upsetting the family at dinner. It means we will and must say unpopular things and be criticized sometimes and unthanked, sometimes unthanked by the people we think we’re supporting, sometimes criticized by those folks we thought we were helping. That’s hard. That’s hard, take a breath; that may be its own kind of discipleship. And all this is legit scary because we know that every disciple of no-quotation marks Jesus died a martyr. It’s scary because we’re told again and again throughout the gospels to take up our own cross and follow. It wasn’t done once and for all for us, no matter what we were told; he was showing us the way. He was showing us the way. So maybe that’s where the guy in the field disappeared to; maybe that raptured women grinding meal got raptured to taking up her cross. Maybe that’s what we’re heading toward.

And that feels scary. But if we aren’t scared already, then we haven’t been paying attention.

I always feel awkward trying to pawn this off to folks as good news. Jesus bids you come and die! Happy day! That’s weird. That’s a hard sell. And it is good news. It is *the good news, no matter what we’ve been told. And it’s what we do, what we’re supposed to do, here, everywhere. It’s what we create community for, how we come together, and for whom. This is our reason for being, going at least back to the Mark gospel, probably more; it’s our bread and butter. Like breathing in. Like marrying and planting and grinding meal. Like life; like the kitchen table. I don’t know that it will ever stop being scary; but I do know that it’s the best and most good news we are.

Perhaps the World Ends Here…
Wars have begun and ended at this table
It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror
A place to celebrate the terrible victory
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite. (from Joy Harjo)

Peace.