Transfiguration

 The Reign of God, that for which we pray for each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, always stands in contrast to the reign of the powers and principalities of this world. When we call Jesus King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Prince of Peace, we use titles that Caesar had claimed for himself. When the Angels proclaimed to the shepherds outside Bethlehem that they carried good tidings of great joy which shall be for all people, they drew on the formula used to announce the ascension of a new Roman Emperor. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday on a donkey and the people waved branches and threw their coats on the ground to make a path for him, shouting “Hosanna to the King of Kings,” the whole scene was a subversion of a Roman military procession that would have likely happened before passover each year.

The Pax Christi, the peace of Christ, stands in direct contrast to and subversion of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace carried out through the establishment of widespread fear across the known world of Rome’s ability to dish out death to any who dare to defy them. The Roman peace through strength and fear is the polar opposite of the peace of God which passes all understanding and operates not through the fear of death but through the life-giving power of self-sacrificial love. Jesus is precisely the anti-Caesar (which is very much to say that Caesar, and his imperial successors today, are the anti-Christ).

When Christians make the sign of the cross to mark our lives as being God’s, we subvert the greatest weapon in Caesar’s arsenal of terror, a dreaded instrument of torture unto death the mere threat of which could cower peoples into line with the Roman dictates. When we make the sign of the cross, we proclaim that love is stronger than death, that hope is stronger than fear, and that the worst the powers and principalities of this world can do to us cannot break us nor destroy us, because Christ has beaten down death by victory, and death’s sting is gone.

As you might realize by checking the calendar, though, today is neither Christmas nor Palm Sunday nor even Easter. So why, today of all days, am I emphasizing the contrast between Imperial Peace and Christian Peace?

The theological influences who most shaped my life so far have established August 6 as something of the moral axis about which the modern world revolves. Today is the feast of the Transfiguration, Jesus’s transformation in dazzling light into a glorious preview of the splendor of the Reign of God. But 78 years ago today, in dazzling brightness accompanied by a towering mushroom cloud that reached up to the heights of the heavens, the city of Hiroshima was transfigured to oblivion in a radiant display of the apex of humankind’s death-dealing powers.

From the days of Moses, God has called heaven and earth to witness that humankind has been offered life and death, blessings and curses, and invited us to choose life so that we and our descendants may live. Do we seek to thrive by increasing our grasp on the mechanisms that can deal out death to those we would seek to control (the essence of idolatry), or do we seek to thrive by emptying ourself and submitting to a life of humble service and even to death – death on a cross! – for the wellbeing of all God’s creation, even those who would call us enemies? Do we seek what Caesar calls “peace” through power over others, or do we seek the true peace of Christ through love and service? Does peace come from our capacity to nurture life, or from our capacity to dole out death?

From the theological perspective that shaped me, August 6 is where these two worldviews collide: from the moment of the Transfiguration onward, Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, toward the death on the cross that he knew was the destination ordained by the life of liberation he led, knowing that the powers and principalities of this world would not consent to coexist with his ministry that set the prisoner free and proclaimed good news to the poor. This feast marked Jesus’ pivot from the gathering phase of his ministry to the final showdown with the forces of death, a showdown that could only lead to the resurrection, but could also only lead there through immense suffering. August 6 marked Jesus embrace of the vulnerability that would lead to his ultimate triumph.

But also August 6, 1945 marked a milestone in humankind’s ability to kill one another, to transfigure our world into an uninhabitable hellscape of fire and brimstone beyond Dante’s imagination with the added feature of deadly radiation bring painful later death upon those who survived the first wave death or even visiting its deadliness upon the children of survivors, themselves warped by the deadly impact of the bomb’s radiation.

If Moses set before us the choice between life and death, the nuclear arms race marked humankind’s fullest embrace of the capacity to kill – to overkill with an arsenal whose lethal capacity numbers beyond the population of the world, with a nuclear arsenal that could kill each person on the planet multiple times over and still have more bombs in reserve.

Given that the wages of sin are death, the embrace of nuclear arms makes the modern era most firmly the fruit of the most capital of sins, the capacity to kill of not a single person, as Cain first did, bringing murder into the human story and God’s curse upon himself, but the capacity to kill all of humankind and render the earth uninhabitable.

Thus, I was shaped to believe that as sin is equated to dealing in death, nuclear war is the ultimate sin and the chiefest moral problem of our age.

What people in the generations that have come after me have known almost instinctually but it took me much longer to figure out is that humankind’s capacity to make choices that could render our world uninhabitable do not stop with the atom bomb. Climate change is the new atom bomb. Humanity’s collective ability to kill of so much of life on earth no longer relies on someone deciding to pull the trigger, to launch the missiles, to fail to reach the conclusion that when it comes to nuclear confrontation, the only winning move is not to play. Every day that goes by without dramatic action to reign in greenhouse gasses is taking a step toward the equivalent of a nuclear missile launch that will someday (but we do not know when) become irreversible.

I hadn’t seen it. I hadn’t seen how the moral urgency behind preventing nuclear war is the precursor to the same moral urgency behind preventing catastrophic climate change. And as individuals, we feel powerless in both struggles, able to shape neither national policy about nuclear weapons nor global policies that shape the emissions that could be destroying our livable world. But in each case, God calls us to faithful resistance to the powers and principalities of death. In both cases, God calls us, on this feast of the Transfiguration, to be transformed into glowing agents of God’s love and light, to resist the forces of death and denial that would deny our collective human descendants the chance to live in the glory for which God created us.

On this August 6, God has set before us life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that we and our descendants may live.

Thoughts on the Baptismal Covenant

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?

I will, with God’s help.

In this, God promises to invite us to specific acts to root us in the faith of the apostles.

The faith that Jesus taught his disciples and then sent them out as apostles to teach the rest of the world is the faith in which we must be anchored. To be rooted in the Good News of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we, like the early church, continue in that which has sustained the church throughout the centuries: we study what the apostles taught, in a program of ongoing formation throughout our earthly lives (and likely beyond!). We engage in fellowship with one another, encouraging and supporting one another along the journey of faith. On Sundays and feast days, we come together as the people of God to praise God and receive our Lord Jesus Christ in the breaking of the bread, the sacrament of Holy Eucharist. And we pray without ceasing, guided by the pattern of the Daily Office, the prayers of the Church structured throughout the day and the year to guide us through the Holy Scriptures and shape our lives in God’s prayer and praise.

—

Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

I will, with God’s help.

In this, God promises to invite us to specific acts of ongoing discernment and repentance.

God is good, and God is love. Evil is the negation of God’s love, which would seek to turn us against God and lead us to devalue and destroy God’s creation and use God’s beloved children as means and not ends. This portion of the baptismal covenant calls us to steadily discern where evil is at work in the world and to resist it, turning away from evil and embracing God’s love. When we find that we have become complacent with evil and fallen into sin, we are called to turn back to God. We are called to constant discernment in a cycle of varied depths to root out the evil with which we have become complicit. We have many opportunities to reflect on how sin has come into our lives and turned us away from love of God and love of neighbor: in the course of the prayers of confession in our daily prayers, in the confession prayers at mass on Sundays and feast days, in the special litanies that guide us in reflecting on sin in the liturgies for Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and in the sacrament of the reconciliation of a penitent in which we help and counsel, open our grief to a discreet and understanding priest to obtain help and counsel, absolution, and spiritual counsel and advice. This ongoing and varied process of discernment must be paired with a willingness to respond to its results: a readiness to repeatedly repent and make changes to our lives in response to that discernment.

—

Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?

I will, with God’s help.

In this, God promises to invite us to specific acts of evangelism.

The Good News of God in Christ is so good indeed that if we really receive it, we cannot but share it. To keep it to ourselves would be to deny the content of the gospel, which is good in part because it is inherently for all people. Spreading the good news by word and by example are sometimes wrongly put in conflict with each other; the call here is clearly to both, not one or the other. Using our creativity to proclaim the Good News is distinctly a part of the transformation the baptismal covenant calls us to here: art, music, dance, theatre, poetry, story telling, activities, clothing, and the very patterns of our daily lives can all be employed to proclaim to the world the good news of God’s salvific and transformative love for all humankind. As in the subsequent portions of the baptismal covenant, the good effects these actions have on others are not irrelevant to the point (as a people oriented toward love, these good effects should very much be something for which we long), our calling to proclaim the Good News of God in Christ (and to seek and serve and love, and to strive for justice, peace, and dignity) are prescribed not only for their effect on the recipients of their actions, but because of the transformation inherent in participating in the acts themselves. We are called to proclaim the Good News for the sake of the hearer, yes, but also so that we are transformed into proclaimers of the Good News. It is important both that the job be done and that we be transformed by its doing.

—

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

I will, with God’s help.

In this, God promises to invite us to specific acts of love and service.

The call to love neighbor as self is both universal and particular: no one is excluded from membership in the class of “neighbor”; no one’s needs are outside our mandate. And yet despite the breadth of neighborhood, at any moment, we respond to the particular needs of the particular neighbors whom we are at that time in the process of serving. Jesus promised that whatever we do to “the least of these who are members of his family” we do to Jesus. We thus have the opportunity to look for Jesus in the faces of all we meet, especially those most in need, and thus to encounter and serve Christ. This call to lives of service implores us to discern and attempt to meet the needs of those who suffer in body, mind, and spirit, and also to be transformed ourselves by the process of loving our neighbor as ourself. There is a tension in this portion of the baptismal covenant between a call to be active participants in discerning the face of Christ in all those we meet and a response in love to our neighbors that effectively meets their needs. While some degree of specialization can help us more effectively respond in love to the needs of those requiring help, part of the sanctification generated by this portion of the baptismal covenant comes from discerning Christ in the faces of those we meet, suggesting that everyone needs some front line exposure to those in need.

—

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? I will, with God’s help.

In this, God promises to invite us to specific acts of struggle for justice, peace, and dignity.

We are called to strive: to act; to struggle ceaselessly for a world that is just, a world that is peaceful, a world that respects the dignity of every human being. This struggle is prescribed for our transformation whether or not we expect we can in our lifetimes actually transform the world itself. Whether we can create the world we long for or not, we are enjoined to continue the struggle, because to give it up would alienate us from the kingdom of heaven, our eventual destination in which justice, peace, and dignity prevail. The vocation to strive for justice, peace, and dignity both complements and contrasts with the call to love neighbor as self. While the fourth portion of the covenant calls for us to effectively minister to the specific needs of our specific neighbors we encounter, the fifth calls for an orientation toward a struggle for justice and peace. In this process, it is the struggle itself for justice and peace, and not the effective obtainment thereof, that suffices to fill the human heart. The fifth portion of the covenant prescribes a faithful striving toward points on the horizon that are justice, peace, and dignity, whether or not we arrive there. The fourth portion of the covenant fills us with compassion for all of our neighbors; the fifth sets our hearts on the eventual arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Why celebrate all saints?

A sermon given on November 6, 2022 at St. Andrew's, Livonia

Readings:

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18 Psalm 149 Ephesians 1:11-23 Luke 6:20-31

So today we're here to celebrate All Saints' Day.

It was really on Tuesday. And we had a tiny, tiny little celebration of it on Tuesday, but the big celebration of it is today. Now, Wednesday, for those of you who were here, you know, we were out in the garden and we celebrated all the faithful departed. On Wednesday, we celebrated the feast, commonly known as All Souls' Day, which is our time to remember and pray for those whom we love and we see no longer. That was our business on Wednesday. And people gathered and we had a beautiful liturgy. And we prayed by name for everyone buried in the memorial garden and for all the intentions of the people who were gathered with us. And we prayed not by name for the intentions of all the people of this parish who have people that they're praying for. But we didn't know the names, of course, of the people that are on your hearts and minds. But we prayed for all the loved ones that we love and see no longer. All Souls' Day is a beautiful occasion for that.

It often gets sort of blended with All Saints' Day, and I think that's a shame because All Saints' Day is another beautiful thing to do, and it often gets lost in our important commemoration of those who we love who are no longer with us in body. On All Saints' Day, we get to celebrate all the examples that God has given us of just how many different ways holiness can look. On All Saints' Day, we give thanks for the life of the Saints, and we give thanks that God has given us so, so many abundant examples of what sanctity can look like.

Now some of those examples might be our lost loved ones, the people who we knew and see no longer. Those might be examples of what the holy life looks like. But it's okay if there's people that we love whom we wouldn't necessarily hold up as this is the role model,

I want to live my faith that it's okay to remember them and pray for them and love them and care for them. And that's what All Souls' Day is for.

But on All Saints' Day, what we celebrate is that we do not have to reinvent the wheel ourselves every single time. God has given us – it's not multiple choice, but we have a whole bunch of writing prompts to start our own essay. God has given us so, so many examples of what it could look like to have what Jesus says: life and have it abundantly. God desperately wants us to live connected to God. Jesus came so that we may have life and have it abundantly. And this is what sanctity truly looks like: Living with joy in the close presence of God. That's what God created us for. That is who we are.

A beautiful image that I love to think about when we're looking at All Saints is you often would think of it as a Christmas carol. It's not a Christmas carol. It just happens to be set the day after Christmas. And so we see it often at Christmas time, not so often in church.

It was written by an Anglican priest, and it's a poem that became a song called Good King Wenceslaus. And you've probably heard of it:

Good King Wenceslaus looked out on the Feast of Stephen. (It's the day after Christmas)

And the snow lay round about deep and crisp and even

Brightly shown the moon hat night, though the frost was cruel

When a poor man came inside gathering winter fuel.

Right. And so the king says, I see this poor man out there. I want to help him. And so he calls his page and he says to his page, Where does that guy live? And the page says, Oh, I know where you lived is over by the forest fence, up against up near the mountain by this fountain at all times.It works really well. Fountain Mountain, you know. So so they figure out where he lives and he sends the page to get food and drink so they can take it to this poor man and bring him a meal where they can all celebrate together.

And then they go out walking through the snow. And the king takes big footsteps as he walks through the snow. And he doesn't have any problem walking through the snow, but the page is really struggling to make it through this deep snow. And he says, Sire, I don't know how much longer I can go on. It's really cold and the snow is really deep. I'm not making it through.

And the king says I'm making footsteps follow in the path that I have broken through the snow. And the page does that and finds that suddenly it's a whole lot easier to go on when he doesn't have to break the snow himself every single step of the way.

I paraphrase here, the real thing rhymes, but it also uses a whole bunch of “hithers” and “thithers” and other words that we don't usually use. So it might make more sense, as I'm telling it now. You lose the rhyme, but you get a whole lot more meaning out of it, perhaps.

Okay, so what's my point here? The world is a snowy field and it can be very difficult to get through sometimes. But we don't have to break our own path through the snow. We have the examples of the Saints who have gone before us, who have broken some of the way through the snow.

Now, the beautiful thing about this is if we've got this giant field, there's not just one person that we have to follow every single step of the way. Maybe somebody broke a few steps this way. That's helpful to us. And somebody else was walking that way. And we can follow in their footsteps for a little bit of the way and maybe some of the steps we do have to make on our own through the deep snow. But because we have the examples of the lives of the saints, we don't have to invent our own way to holiness. We don't have to invent our own way to the near presence of God. This has been done before, and we can take inspiration and hope from the people who have gone before us. And that is a really joyful thing.

Some of these saints are on our calendar, and we have feasts assigned to them and we might even celebrate their feasts. Some of these things have been acknowledged by the church, but we don't have a day set aside for them, but we can still look to their example. Some of these things are people that you and I have met in our lifetimes, or people that people we know have told us about. Some of these things are known just to God. But we have this abundant example that there is not just one template for how to live a wholly life. There is not just one way to do it.

And there are saints who started from every imaginable starting point and ended up at holy life. I personally have found that these saints are really important. The lives of the saints help us to imagine a future in which we are living a holy life. A life that has life and has it abundantly.

The Saints help us to imagine a future in which we thrive. That ability to imagine a future in which we truly have a place is absolutely essential as an antidote to despair and hopelessness.

So. I have been somewhat obsessed for the last few years with the lives of the Saints, and I have been looking to them and studying them closely and trying to find examples of people who've found a way to live authentically in union with God.

Once upon a time, I was born. And at the time that I was born, the doctors looked at me and they looked at the body parts that I had, and they said, It's a boy. And anatomically, they were correct.

But they couldn't see my spirit. They couldn't see my soul. And to be perfectly honest, the gender that I was assigned when I was born,

while it matches the body that I have, doesn't particularly fit with the identity that I know myself to have. It doesn't particularly fit with how I relate to other people. And it definitely doesn't doesn't fit with who I would identify with as my tribe or who I would want to relate to as my closest friends and associates and that sort of thing.

That's been the source of a great deal of struggle and despair in my life. And looking to the lives of the Saints has been absolutely a lifeline. To see so many different examples of people who've started from all sorts of things and found a way to live authentically as children of God. People who didn't let their starting station preclude them from doing what God had set out for them to do. And that is a sign of incredibly great hope to me. A sign of incredibly great hope to me.

Now, I've mostly tried to seek out settings in my life where people don't segregate and limit their opportunities on the basis of the gender that they're assigned. And that was a big reason why I couldn't continue to worship in the church that I was born into, because they were very big into assigning ministry on the basis of people's gender. And only these people can do this and only these people can do this, and God forbid you approach the altar if you were a woman, because that was just unheard of and that sort of thing.

And I was grateful to find the Episcopal Church in which we seemed to at least take steps toward recognizing that the gender that somebody is assigned doesn't define the ministry that God calls them to. But even in the Episcopal Church, I've seen a great deal of ministry segregated by gender assignment. This is the women's prayer group. This is the men's fellowship. This is the men's retreat and so on. And, you know, this is the Brotherhood of St Andrew and the Episcopal Church women and so on. And the altar guild is for women, and the ushers are for men, and that’s just how it is.

Truth be told, if there's people going on a retreat and praying with each other, I'd rather be praying with the women than the men as friends of who I identify with and who I care about, what they have to talk about and pray about and that sort of thing. But okay, church does what it does.

I don't dislike my body. God gave me a perfectly lovely body. I don't love how society has responded to my body. It seems to be the basis for sorting me out of groups that I feel like I would connect to and piece that I most decidedly do not. But the lives of the saints are a lifeline.

The lives of the Saints have been something to cling to and see that people from every station find a way to make themselves in tune,

to not to make themselves, but to follow God's invitation, to be right with God and authentic to who God created them to be.

No matter where we find ourselves starting from, the lives of the saints are an assurance that there is a path from wherever we start to authentic integral holiness, no matter how diminished we find life to be. The lives of the saints are an assurance to us that with God, all things are indeed possible and that we ourselves – each and every one of us – were created to have life and to have it abundantly.

Now, we had this reading today from the Book of Daniel. I've always been kind of partial to the book of Daniel. I think it has a kind of nice name to it. As for me, Daniel, my spirit is troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrify me.

See what I just did there? I just changed the verb tense because I'm not talking about Daniel, who Barbara read so beautifully earlier.

I'm talking about me, Daniel.

We've got this election coming up this week and I am terrified. I am absolutely terrified. We've got people running for school board in various communities who really want to purge from the schools all the books about people who don't conform to the dominant racial narratives and gender and sexual orientation norms that many in the community would follow. And I am absolutely scared of what that will do to children who are looking for that lifeline to imagine hope for what a world could look like that they fit into. To identify that they can be the hero of a story. To identify that there is room for them to thrive in the world. I am absolutely terrified what purging this sort of thing from the curriculum would do.

This is like the lives of the saints here. These are these lifelines that we can do to imagine a world that we belong in. That's what creates hope. That's what creates hope.

We've got candidates running for state offices where they're looking at people who voted for, including people of whose gender doesn't match their biological sex and various activities. And they've looked at that. They've described people voting for that as something worthy of mockery and derision. Now I can tell you, I participated in a lot of sports when I was growing up, and I love being on the team, but I didn't love being on a team with a whole bunch of guys. It was always a very aggressively masculine environment and I'm thinking back to it and saying, Oh my God, how wholesome would have been to be on a softball team with a bunch of women? Now, I understand the competitive difference. I understand these are complex issues. I understand that this is not simple, but also it's important and life giving and it's certainly worthy of serious conversation and not simply playing a clown car soundtrack and treating it as something to be mocked as some of our political candidates seem to be doing. This is absolutely terrifying to me.

The Daniel reading talks about these beasts that would rise up out of the deep and rule over the world and says how they represent the kings that are to come and rule unjustly over God's people. When the beast that would rule over us asserts that our existence is a joke,

that our aspirations for life and joy are absurd and worthy of being mocked, and when they would move to deny even our right to exist, All Saints’ Day says no to the beast. All Saints’ Day holds up a beacon of hope that what God has in store for us is not the annihilation that the beast would do to us. What God has in store to us is life and life abundant. God promises that that despite what the beast would do, the beast will indeed rule the world for a time, but the Holy Ones of God shall receive the Kingdom and possess the kingdom forever, forever and ever.

My brothers and sisters and siblings in Christ: cling to that hope that the accounts of the saints give us each and every one of us were created in the image and the likeness of God. God did not create you or me or anyone else for despair. God did not create you or me or anyone else to be ridiculed and mocked and cast into oblivion. God created us to follow in the paths that the saints have trod and to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Forever and forever. Amen.

Can these bones testify? Church buildings and building the church

I have on more than one occasion begin the sermon with a sonnet. I do so again today except today's sonnet is not of my own composition, but rather that of Pierce Shelley, husband of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. 

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. The irony in Shelley's poem has long spoken to me. The mighty king intended for future onlookers to despair because they could never attain his greatness – that the grandiosity of his monument would humble them in comparison. And his monument indeed would elicit despair from the mighty hoping to leave their own legacy, albeit not for the reasons Ozymandius intended. The fact that his monument lie in ruins and was not the imposing statue it was intended to be would cause contemporary mighty ones looking upon it to despair that their own attempts to attain immortality through their legacy were similarly doomed.

Edifices indeed can testify over a long period of time, but without a cadre of generations and generations of tenders to hold them together, they testify as ruins and not in their original functioning form.

Impressive ruins create a sort of conundrum to understand: for grand ruins to exist, the people that created needs to have been strong enough to have created the great work, yet fragile enough to not be able to maintain it. The very existence of a great ruin speaks to the transience of greatness.

The people of ancient Israel would have encountered the oldest great ruins we know of today: the temple towers called ziggurats built by the first civilization, the Sumerians. They surely pondered both how these great works came to be, but even more what happened that they now found such great structures lying in ruins.

Our first lesson attempts to explain exactly that. It is about the building of a ziggurat temple: a tower with its top in the heavens. Humankind came together to create a monument to themselves: look how great this generation was that it could leave behind so grand a tower! It reaches so high that surely these builders rival the gods themselves! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Centuries later, when the people of Israel encountered these ziggurats, they lie in ruins. What could possibly cause people to build so great a temple and then walk away from it? God surely must have scattered and divided them upon seeing the ambition of their construction project. 

So our first lesson talks about humanity collaborating to construct a church building really as a monument to human achievement, and God dividing their language and scattering them.

Our second lesson is precisely the opposite: God forms a church by enabling the disciples to speak about God's deeds of power to people of many tongues, all of who can understand what the disciples are saying. In the first lesson, we have the creation of a building, which results in human tongues being divided. In the second lesson, we have the creation of a movement, which results in human tongues being brought together. In the first lesson, we have a monument to human power. In the second lesson, we are speaking about God's deeds of power.

And that brings us to one of the fundamental truths of the Pentecost moment in the church: we can put our energy into church buildings, or we can put our energy into building the church.

Many of you know that I just got back from a trip to Ireland. I visited many holy sites, and was shocked at how few of them were still in use today by the Church! It was simultaneously sad and helpful to see so so many examples on my trip that we are far from alone in our age in building structures whose size and grandeur outlasts the size and grandeur of the congregation that had them built.

If my observations in the past week are it indication, humanity seems to be better at building walls that endure than roofs and better at building roofs than congregations that endure from generation to generation. 

So so many abbeys and parish churches, priories and friaries – even cathedrals that now stand roofless, congregation-less, and massless, protected by the historic preservation registry but long out of use to house people singing praises to God, testifying to the architectural brilliance of their builders, but mute in the testimony to God's power for which they were allegedly built. 

But then too, I often found historic churches in a state of ruin with a contemporary church nearby. When the historic building no longer served its original function the Church moved on, leaving behind the beautiful historic building for a structure that actually empowered the mission of the church in the generation that needed it.

One of the few examples of a historic building in continuous use, St. Nicholas parish in Galway, where I worshipped last Sunday, was particularly instructive. The building has been in continuous use for 702 years. The walls certainly look old. But looking at the interior, it looks rather contemporary. They just installed a new sound system this year, and last year installed cameras and screens so they could worship both in person and over zoom, and the building, while surrounded by stone that have stood for seven centuries, was a constantly evolving living space, and not a museum.

Kylemore Abbey was an even clearer example of this adaptation. The congregation of Benedictine nuns moved into the former country manor house at Kylemore when their abbey in Belgium was destroyed by World War I. They lived and ran a school in the palatial estate. And then they realized it no longer served their current needs. The ground floor of the manor house is now a museum and source of steady tourist dollars, the school wing rented to an American university, and the nuns are in the process of building a new abbey on the grounds to live and pray in, leaving behind the old palace and chapel for something that can better accommodate both retreatants and older nuns in wheelchairs. They can do this because their focus is on building the church, and not on church buildings.

Ultimately, great ruins are not necessarily a cause for despair. The church’s mission is not to preserve historic buildings. The church’s mission is to spread God’s good news to all the peoples of the earth, in each community, making disciples and baptizing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. When the high king of Ireland granted St. Patrick’s Rock of Cashel to the Church, it made sense for a time to govern the Church in Ireland from that high rock. Two beautiful churches, a dormitory for the choir, and a stone apartment tower for the Archbishop of Ireland and his household all were erected over the centuries atop the high rock. And then, in the 1700s, the Church realized that while Cashel was dramatic and a historic seat of power, it did not advance the mission of the Church to lead the Church in Ireland from atop a rock in the countryside. The archbishop's throne, and household, and governing bodies were moved to a cathedral in the city of Dublin, and Cashel was left behind. When Viking raiders killing your monks and plundering your altarware is the major threat the church faces, a mountaintop fortress makes sense for your cathedral and chancery; you can do that when religiosity is a given but physical safety is not. But in an age when the current challenge is not physical security but rather engaging people in the course of their lives, a fortress becomes not an asset but a liability, a sign of the church's removal and potential irrelevance to the people of God. The church ruins at Cashel are not a sign of the church’s failure, but of its success. The fact that the church was able to walk away from the tower with its top in the heavens, and go into the city to proclaim the Good News to people of every tongue – this is what we have always been called to do. The church is not a museum to the greatness of the way things have been done in the past, as much as I am glad such museums exist (and I spent a lot of time in such museums in my time in Ireland). No, the Church is called to be set ablaze and be a people who go out into the world proclaiming the Good News. We need whatever headquarters serves that mission.

So here we are in Livonia in 2022. We don’t have a palace or a seven century old building. Nevertheless, in the time I’ve been with you, the overwhelming majority of my time and energy, and of so so many of our most active members, has been focused on this building. Buildings indeed can facilitate the mission of the church. But what we have done in the past seven-plus months cannot be the sustainable way forward. If we are to thrive, if this congregation is to survive, we have to get to a point, and very very soon, that our attention is focused not on the church building, but on building the church. We have to find a way to make whatever building space we use a thing in the background, so our energy, our passion, our being set ablaze by the fire of the Holy Spirit can focus on bringing the good news to the people of Livonia, starting with the transformation of each of us sitting in these pews and spreading like a mighty flame throughout this community, that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Amen, Alleluia!

Jesus is calling. Will we answer?

 Many of us, at some point in our moral development, have held an image of God as some sort of divine scorekeeper. Constantly surveying the action on the field of life, this scorekeeper is marking down our every infraction – whether the scorekeeper relishes finding our misdoings or weeps at them depends on the telling of this story. Each of our wrongs, whether in thought, word, or deed, things done or things left undone, is recorded, and likely assigned a point value as to just how much it counts against us.

If we are lucky, the scorekeeper is recording our positive points too: maybe by doing enough good deeds, acts of service, acts of devotion, we can offset the demerits on our record with credits. Maybe we can put just enough money in the offering plate to cancel out the time we swore when someone cut us off in traffic. Maybe participating in the Easter basket drive will be enough of a credit to us that at the day of judgment, it will cancel out the time someone asked us for help and we said no because we didn't want to help. Maybe if we attend enough Wednesday night evensongs, it will cancel out the Sundays that we've missed church. Maybe the recorder of our misdeeds will also record enough good works to our cosmic account that we can earn a place in the kingdom of heaven.

This image of God as divine scorekeeper certainly has some scriptural basis, but it is far from complete, and this worldview leads both to inevitable guilt and shame because of our many sins and simultaneously to a dangerous works righteousness that can never truly earn our way into the Kingdom of Heaven but can also lead us to sit in judgment ourselves against those whom we deem to do fewer good works than we do. All of this is spiritually toxic.

Sometimes people respond to this toxic worldview by swinging to the other extreme: to deny the possibility of hell and judgment and moral consequence. But this too is spiritually dangerous, leaving us unprepared for the Kingdom of Heaven. As a countermeasure to both of these spiritual toxins, I want to reflect on two images from today's reading from the revelation to St John.

"In the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day--and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life."

Let's focus on these two images: "nothing unclean will enter it", but also "its gates will never be shut."

In this model, God isn't some divine gatekeeper saying "you can come in, and you can't." Indeed, Jesus did not say he is the gatekeeper; Jesus said he is the gate!

If the gates are always open, why are the practitioners of abomination and falsehood left outside? If no gatekeeper excludes them, why are they not in the new Jerusalem?

And the answer here is far more terrifying than a divine vindictive judge delighting in casting us into the outer darkness for our misdeeds. Those excluded from the New Jerusalem, those in the outer darkness for all eternity, are the ones who refuse to come in from the cold to the warm place of safety. The real danger is that we cast ourselves into the outer darkness because we prefer darkness to light. As the orthodox say, he gates of hell are locked from the inside.

The real danger is not that God, the lover of our soul, will reject us.  The true threat of Hell is that God will embrace us but we will turn away from God's love.

There's a beautiful hymn from the late nineteenth century written by Will Thompson that describes God's relationship with us:

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling

Calling for you and for me

See on the portals He's waiting and watching

Watching for you and for me

Come home, come home

Ye who are weary come home

Earnestly, tenderly Jesus is calling

Calling, "O sinner come home"

But here's the thing: inside that New Jerusalem, there's no score keeping. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Stop keeping score with us as we stop keeping score with others. But some of us have a hard time letting go of keeping score. 

Some of us cling to our positive score points. Some of us cling to other people's negative points. When God offers to clear the scores away, which is the only way we can enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, too many of us cling to our merits or the demerits of others and refuse to accept God's setting things afresh.

Earlier this year, we heard the story of the Prodigal son. The younger son took his share of the inheritance and squandered it in dissolute living, while the older son dutifully toiled away.  The younger son came to his senses and returned, planning to ask his father to treat him as a hired hand, but the father rejoiced at his son's return and threw a feast. The older son refused to come in to the feast because he was sure the younger son didn't deserve it. And that is our spiritual danger. Do we refuse to come in to God's feast because we find God's love extended to those we consider unworthy to be unpalatable?

In the New Jerusalem, there are two deep rules that describe the way of life: love the Lord God with all your heart and strength and mind, and Love your neighbor as yourself. In the New Jerusalem, when we see someone suffering, we ask "how can I help," and not "do they deserve help" or "is it my obligation to help."

How we respond to Jesus invitation is a function not of what we have done, but who we are. However, the things we do very much help to shape who we are. The works of love that we practice in our lives are vitally important not because they earn us a place in the new Jerusalem, but because they transform us into people who would seek out the new Jerusalem. Do we long for a world where people don't keep score, and the mere existence of anyone in need is a call to everyone who _can_ help _to_ help, regardless of any notions of merit or particular obligation? Or are we put off by it, and turn up our nose an the idea of living in a Kingdom where we don't keep moral score? Do we cling to our credits and to others' wrongs so we are unable to enter the Gate that God throws open for us?

When we talk about salvation, there's two words that get thrown around: Justification, and sanctification. Justification means that our sins are forgiven. Sanctification means that sin no longer has power over us. Justification means that we are welcome in the kingdom of heaven. Sanctification means that we would welcome the kingdom of heaven. Justification means that Jesus is calling us to come home. Sanctification means that we are transformed into people who respond to that call and say yes.

God is not a vindictive judge looking for the slightest reason to damn us to hell. But to the extent that we sit as vindictive judges of others, we find God's forgiveness and the laws of the new Jerusalem to be utterly repugnant, and we refuse to enter in to the heavenly banquet.

The gates are open. Do we respond to God's tender call and go into the kingdom prepared for us, or are we holding out for some better kingdom reserve for the worthy that we deem ourselves to be, despite the fact that no such better kingdom exists, and by refusing to enter in to God's abundant mercy, we cast ourselves into the outer darkness?

We don't do good works in order to be credited for them. We do good works in order to rehearse them. We do the acts prescribed in the baptismal covenant not because we get a reward for them, meriting for us a place in the kingdom of heaven, but because we are transformed by them, into people who would rejoice in living in a kingdom where such acts are the norm. Worshiping, tithing, singing praise to God, sharing the good news, serving those in need, striving for justice – these are not ways we earn cosmic credit, but they are the things that transform us into people who when Jesus calls, we are inclined to say yes.

The day of judgment is very real, but in a sense, we ourselves are the ones who sit as judge: The gates are open; do we judge the kingdom of heaven to be a place that we choose to go in? Jesus is calling. Will we answer? Do we truly long to live in a kingdom ruled by the law of love? Who we form ourselves to be today shapes our answer to this question.

Toward a state-based moral calculus

(In progress; I intend to edit later; includes sentence fragments that trail off)

A moral aphorism often encountered is the notion that “actions have consequences.” While some actions do indeed have consequences, I argue that the consequences of actions is not the primary building block for understanding moral obligation. In response to the proposed framework that actions have consequences, I suggest a more constructive framework is “States have implications, and actions may or may not contribute to a change of state.”

Our moral obligations are entirely a product of our state of being, and not of the path that lead to that state. Countervailing against that however, our habits are very very much an integral part of our state of being, and our actions do contribute to those habits.

On the one hand, I really am arguing that our actions have no direct moral consequences. On the other hand, our actions have immense indirect moral consequences, because our actions create habits, attitudes, abilities, and so forth, which have superlative moral consequence.

From a moral perspective, I honestly think the question “what have you done?” is all but irrelevant, except to the extent that it impacts the answer to the question “what do you do?”

Path-based morality says that you acquire certain particular moral obligations to specific people by the details of your birth, and that various other actions over the course of a lifetime create other particular moral obligations. Additionally, if you wrong someone, you have a moral obligation to make it right, and our moral obligations are prioritized based on the claims they each have on us because of our past conduct. State-based morality says that if you have the capacity to improve the state of the world, you have a moral obligation to improve it. Our moral obligations are prioritized based on the need for the improvement and how particularly we are situated to be uniquely able to offer that improvement, where improvement is, as always, defined as progress toward a state of universal thriving ("life, and have it abundantly").

Creatures who are capable of actions that can change the state of the world for the better have an obligation to do so

I am less interested in “whose actions caused the state of the universe to be as it is” and more interested in “who has the capacity now to make the universe better?”

I believe our obligations to act to better the state of the universe are not the consequences of our past actions, but rather the result of our capacity to do good. 

According to the “actions have consequences” framework, past actions create a hierarchy of whose thriving is morally prioritized. Those who act virtuously deserve to thrive, and their virtuous conduct creates a moral responsibility to others to act for their thriving. Those who act unvirtuously do not deserve to thrive, and actions to promote their thriving are deprioritized, or even morally prohibited. In this realm, justice involves people getting the outcomes they deserve. Justice is the process of calling people to account for their moral responsibilities.

Now I would agree that justice is indeed when creatures are called to account for meeting their moral responsibilities. But rather than believing that past actions create moral responsibilities, I believe that current states of being create moral responsibilities.

Your moral responsibility is to do the most good, given the state in which you find yourself. 

The past cannot be changed, so moral responsibility always begins anew from the current state and always points from the current hellish conditions toward apocatastasis 

Our habits are a big part of our current state

God’s will is for the restoration of all creatures to a state of thriving.

None of our actions can change God’s desire for our thriving. Thus, no one can forfeit a place in that end state of thriving.

The problem with “actions have consequences” is that it suggests that because of our actions, some creatures deserve to thrive and others do not. Or at least that some creatures’ thriving is prioritized over other creatures’ thriving. But the divine expectation is apocatastasis, which leaves no room for exclusion: we do not have divine authorization to write off anyone as being undeserving of restoration to a state of thriving.

But states have consequences: if the current state of creation is hellish, such that many creatures are not thriving, all creatures have a moral responsibility to act to change the state of creation so that mutual thriving can happen. And if a creature, in its current state, has the tendency to prevent other creatures from thriving, that must be changed. Any creature’s actions cannot put said creature outside the plan of restoration, but many many actions make that process of restoration much longer and more difficult! This apocatastasis is not a universalism of “I’m okay; you’re okay.” I am most certainly not okay in my current state, and neither are you. And to the extent that I in my current state and you in your current state are apt to engage in actions that inhibit the thriving of other creatures, we are not fit to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven in our current state, and must be transformed in order to have a place in the new creation.

—

The Kingdom of Heaven is a state of paradise: a state of mutual thriving for all creatures. God’s will is for apocatastasis: the restoration of all creatures to that state of mutual thriving. Our current hellish state is one in which many creatures are apt to act in ways that prevent the thriving of other creatures. God’s will is to bring about a new creation, a new state of being in which the creatures of the old creation all participate but restored to right order, such that they contribute to rather than prevent each other’s abundant life. Because God’s will is for the restoration of all creatures to a state of thriving, none of our actions can change God’s desire for our thriving. Thus, no one can forfeit a place in that end state of paradise.

The problem with a paradigm that proclaims that “actions have consequences” is that it suggests that because of our actions, some creatures deserve to thrive and others do not, or at least that some creatures’ thriving is prioritized over other creatures’ thriving on the basis of their past actions. But the divine expectation is apocatastasis, which leaves no room for exclusion: we do not have divine authorization to write off anyone as being undeserving of restoration to a state of thriving.

But states have consequences: if the current state of creation is hellish, such that many creatures are not thriving, all creatures have a moral responsibility to act to change the state of creation so that mutual thriving can happen. And if a creature, in its current state, has the tendency to prevent other creatures from thriving, that must be changed. Any creature’s actions cannot put said creature outside the plan of restoration, but many many actions make that process of restoration much longer and more difficult! This apocatastasis is not a universalism of “I’m okay; you’re okay.” I am most certainly not okay in my current state, and neither are you. And to the extent that I in my current state and you in your current state are apt to engage in actions that inhibit the thriving of other creatures, we are not fit to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven in our current state, and must be transformed in order to have a place in the new creation.

In a non-apocatastasis-based ethic, justice seems to involve the consequences of one’s actions, such that 

Someone's propensity for bad conduct give us a moral obligation to disempower such a person, but in no way lessens our mora obligation to seek such a person's wellbeing 

Saints and fan crushes

My visual artwork of late has been rather intensely focused on the lives of the saints, both those canonized by some official church body and also those who haven’t made any official list but whose lives deeply speak to not just holiness in general, but the particular path to which I understand myself to be called. At the same time, I've been trying to make sense in my life of why does it feel like I have crushes on twenty gazillion people when I'm not even sure whether I experience romantic attraction? Saints and fan crushes. You’d think they’re totally separate things. And yet…

And it hit me. I get this warm fuzzy euphoric feeling at the thought of being around certain people because something in their way of being gives me hope that it’s possible to be the kind of person I want to be in the world. I see in some aspect of their lives of way of being a suggestion of the me I long to be. The euphoria comes from the sense that if I can be around them, maybe I can emulate not all of them, because they, as a whole, are a different person than my authentic self, but the aspects of the authentic me that I see modeled in them.

What do I want to be when I grow up? Who do I want to be when I grow up? Finding traces of my authentic self in others gives me joy in the hope that it might become slightly easier to make my way through the world because their example is like King Wenceslaus’s footsteps through the snow.

It all clicked. Celebrities and artists and authors that I wished could be my friends and neighbors, relatives and family friends that I really looked forward to seeing at the holidays, historic figures I wished I could meet, teachers I found especially inspiring, and people I meet that I feel like I have some sort of crush on despite not even quite knowing what to do with the concept of romance… it’s the same warm fuzzy glow I get from being around all of them. And it’s a joy of being in the presence of something I want to emulate, not to become a copy of them (indeed, everyone is broken in their own way, and the brokenness isn’t what I want to copy; I have plenty of my own), but because some aspect of them models the me that I long to be. And seeing that the way of being I long to instantiate can be real produces an authentic joy, which only intensifies when I can be in a presence that helps me grow into it.

Now there are plenty of people I admire but don’t see in them a path to grow into who I long to be. There are people whose company I enjoy because they’re awesome, but I don’t get that glow because their awesomeness is great but I don’t see in it a model of the particular form of awesomeness I feel drawn to live out. I don’t get that warm fuzzy glow from people who are awesome but their awesomeness doesn’t show me a path to live out the authentic me I long to live out. I deeply appreciate them, but they’re not who I’m talking about here.

The people that make me glow – living celebrities like Stephen Colbert or others, some of whom I'm astonishingly actually Facebook friends with – or people who have left this world like Dorothy Day or Thomas Merton or Daniel Berrigan or Martin Luther King Jr.– or people in my “real” life that I get this warm glow when I get the chance to be around them – or the people I only encounter on social media and then wish I could spend time with in daily life – what they have in common is that something about the way that each of them are them in the world gives me hope that I can grow into the me that I most deeply aspire to be, and I want to be around them because I long for some of their them-ness to rub off on me, not so I can copy them (one of them is enough), but so I can grow into the me that I so deeply long to grow into.

I’m looking for the footsteps through the snow that happen to fall along my path to help me make my way through the drifts. And I’m writing this and sharing it in case it might leave any helpful steps for others on their unique journeys, because just like other people leave footsteps as they make their way through the world, so do I, and maybe my footsteps could fall for a few steps along someone else’s path, and they could benefit from the snow I’ve managed to pack down.

Praise God for those in every generation in whom Christ has been honored. Pray that we may have grace to glorify Christ in our own day.