Change and hope

 There’s a disturbing big number of questions that start with “I never used to want to __; I wonder why I’m starting to feel differently now” for which the answer is “oh, that was a response to gender dysphoria.” I guess the good news about the past is wow, I developed a lot of coping mechanisms and the good news about the present is being able to begin to imagine possibilities beyond them…

I've always understood myself as an introvert. But as I'm rediscovering myself, I'm realizing that gender dysphoria led me to just be uncomfortable in a lot of social settings because I felt like I was present as the *wrong person,* and as I'm trying to grow into my more authentic self, I'm surprised how much more comfortable I am in social settings. But also I have some sort of audio processing bug in my brain, so too many people talking at once does cause my brain to shut down.

Mark 9:38-50

Interesting to contemplate this coming Sunday's gospel in light of the concept of gender affirming surgery. Especially when we think of sin not as individual bad actions, but that which impairs our relationship with our creator. I can certainly testify to the experience that having the wrong body parts can cause one to live in a hell, where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched.

The reign of God

The reign of God is a way of living in love, in contrast with the way of this world, in which people either oppress others, themselves live under oppression, or most frequently, both. The good news is that there is a way to live in God’s reign of love, both now and eternally, that involves neither oppressing nor oppression. The task of the church – the only worthwhile task of the church – is to come together as the people of God and begin living this new reality here and now. Everything else is vanity, and a chasing after the wind.

Winslow [The sound of your own wheels]

Back in 1996, I vividly remember a conversation with a friend. In my understanding of the conversation, she was telling me about a woman singer-songwriter who sang a song from the perspective of the woman in Winslow, AZ in the Eagles' song Take It Easy. I spent years trying to track down this song, both in the days before internet search engines and in the days when they existed. This summer I gave up searching and decided to write the song. When I told my friend about this, she laughed and said I’d misunderstood her 28 years ago – the song didn’t exist, but she thought it would be cool if it did. So this song is dedicated to Jen!: Thanks for the writing prompt;

it only took me 28 years to figure it out.

I've |got an F1|50 with an |aftermarket |flatbed

The |brakes could use new |rotors and the |carburetor's |half dead

But |once you get her |started she moves |nice when you're not |slowing |down. | | |

I'm |wearing new red |lipstick and I |think I like it |unless 

There's |slightly too much |contrast with the |colors in my |sundress

I've |got eight long |gorgeous |nails but two are |short and| round | | |

The |sheep out on my |ranch are doing |fine; one just birthed |twins, so

I'm |driving into |town to pick up |medicine in |Winslow

My |family's raised |sheep on this |land for nearly |60 |years | | |

Keep|ing this old truck |going is my |thing but I've been |lazy

Some |bearing in the |rear left wheel makes |sound that makes me |crazy

This |truck's a sort of |lifeline; if it |breaks down I’ll be |left in |tears. | | |

I |fit in and I |don't; this place is |home but still it's |shitty 

What |social life I |have requires |trips to the big |city

But |when I'm there I |somehow seem to |miss this |desert |air | | |

The |local dating |scene is sparse on |queers; we can't be |purists

But |never did I |think I'd fall for |Mother Road-type |tourists

Still, |as I rolled |into |town, guess what |I saw |there? | | |

I've |not been the pos|sessive type, but |damn, I want to |own her

She's |standing on a |corner there in |Winslow Ari|zona

As |if she were a |line that came right |out of someone |else's |song | | |

I |can't parse her re|action when she |noticed that I'd |seen her 

I |kinda like my |odds; her belt has |got a cara|biner

As I |looked her over |not a single |thing about her |could be |wrong. | | |

This |guy steps in front |of her like he |thinks he's the pro|tag’nist 

There's |no way that this ends |well for him; he's |going on my |blacklist 

This |extra factor |makes my hopes of |meeting with her |start to |dim. | | |

So this |jackass tries to |cat call when he |sees me driving |real slow

He |tells me "don't say |maybe"; does he |realize he's a |hard "no"?

I'm |slowing down to |check out |her; I'm not |into |him. | | | 

He |moves out in the |street like he might |climb up into |my truck

She |rolls her eyes and |walks away. I |think I’ve run out |of luck

My |brakes need my at|tention as I’m trying not to |hit this |guy | | |

I |give a thumbs down |and I pass him; |he gives me a |dumb stare.

I |pull around the |corner and she’s |waiting for me |right there

I’m |hopeful this might |happen by the |way she looks me |in the |eye. | | |

We may lose, and we may win.

Either way I’ll be back here again.

I open up and she climbs in.

We take it easy…

Pentecost Sermon: Strange Fire

This is a message: A message of love

Love that moves from the inside out, Love that never grows tired

I come to you with strange fire

This sermon is indeed inspired by the words of Amy Ray from the Indigo Girls' first album in 1987.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them

Not tongues OF fire. Tongues "as of fire." Tongues that at first glance appear to be fire, but on further examination, are not of the same substance, but of a similar substance. Tongues that fall into that uncanny valley where they seem like fire, but are somehow off.

I come to you with strange fire

And strange fire is a scary thing.

In Leviticus, we read: Now Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, each took his censer, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered strange fire before the Lord, such as he had not commanded them And fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.

Holy Scripture is a record of humankind's wrestling with the divine, an account of our attempts to find meaning in the records of our existence. Nadab and Abihu made strange fire and offered it to God, and they were consumed by flame. And so humankind took the lesson to fear strange fire. To fear that which was *like* the holy, but uneasily dissimilar. To draw a sharp distinction between the holy and the profane; between the unclean and the clean. If the sin of Nadab and Abihu was to offer strange fire, the lesson humankind, led by those who would call themselves religious leaders -- the lesson we took away was to eschew strange fire. To cut off any expression that is like the canonical examples, and yet somehow eerily dissimilar. We mercenaries of the shrine, the ones who draw our pay by interpreting the divine record and teach God's people what they ought to do have seized upon this account to draw border lines between who is in and who is out. If your offering matches the canonical example, you are in. But to any who find themselves not quite in the proper box, our leaders have ordered them cast into the outer darkness, to protect the purity of the holy. Anathema to those whose offering is strange fire.

The Pentecost event is here to tell us that maybe we took away the wrong lesson.

In the third chapter of Exodus, the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. In the second chapter of the second of book the Kings, Elijah was taken up to heaven by a fire in the strange form of a chariot and horses of fire. And now on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples in the form of tongues somehow like and yet not like fire. Strange fire is not unholy, not unclean, not foreign to God. Strange fire burns with the motion of love. Strange fire is indeed of God.

But if strange fire is holy, why then were Nadab and Abihu condemned and consumed? If offering strange fire to God is not inherently wrong, if their sin was not improper worship that offended the divine by being like and yet not the same as the divinely appointed offering, what did they do wrong? This is no idle question, for we hope to avoid their fate.

The Pentecost event and the subsequent revelations in Acts are a redemption of strange fire in Acts 2, of unclean food in Acts 10, of those whose sexuality is rejected in Acts 8, if the category of "unclean" or "abomination" is categorically rejected when God tells Peter in the 10th chapter of Acts, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane."

But this is very much NOT a proclamation that anything goes. God's judgment is not removed. In Acts 5 we have spontaneous death meted out by the Lord just like in Leviticus 10. When Ananias and Sapphira sold a piece of property and kept back some of the proceeds, bringing only a part and laying it at the apostles' feet, claiming it to be the whole thing, they immediately fell down and died!

Perhaps what Nadab and Abihu did was the same as what Ananias and Sapphira did centuries later: they tried to hold power over God. Idolatry is not the worship of false gods, but rather trying to control the power of God. Not surrendering to the power of God, but rather trying to force God to accept our agenda. So many of the ancient rites involving incense and strange fire were idolatrous rituals that attempted to manipulate the divine, to dictate to God what the divine power must do, because humans cranked the handle, we expect God to jump up on cue like a mighty Jack-in-the-box to do our bidding. When Ananias and Sapphira retained money that they said they were offering to God, they claimed control over the divine agenda. This goes to the heart of idolatry: attempts by human kind to invoke divine power for our own ends.

Perhaps the Pentecost is to redirect our understanding of Nadab and Abihu. We ought not call offerings of strange fire unclean. Rather, attempts to manipulate the divine are wrong. But what cost has come to those whose offerings of strange fire have been rejected over the centuries? What damage have we gatekeepers done to those whose only offerings they could bring were *like* the canonical examples, but not the same as the canonical examples?

I speak today of those who would stand before God's altar and make a holy offering, an offering of love, an offering brought from the integrity of who God created them to be, who were turned away for so many centuries because they didn't perfectly match the canonical image the church held of what the offering and offerer should look like.

Of Simeon Bachos, the Ethiopian Eunuch who would have been cut off from the assembly of God's people because his body didn't match the canonical norms for gender presentation, and yet whom God commanded Philip to proclaim the Good News and baptize into the Church.

Of the Philadelphia Eleven, whose priestly ministry was rejected by so many because their bodies did not match canonical expectations about gender roles.

Of gay and lesbian people whose offering of love the church so long refused to bless because their bodies did not match canonical expectations about pairings.

Of trans folx today whose very existence is strange fire, so similar to the canonical examples, and yet in that uncanny valley that for so long we have been taught to suppress, to eschew as strange fire.

I come to you with strange fire 

I make an offering of love 

The incense of my soil is burned 

By the fire in my blood 

I come with a softer answer 

To the questions that lie in your path 

I want to harbor you from the anger 

Find a refuge from the wrath

For the Pentecost event tells us that strange fire is not unholy; rebelling against God is unholy. It is not in offering our strange fire, but in trying to suppress who God created us to be, that we commit the sin of Nadab and Abihu. Sin is not being our strange selves whom God created and proclaimed as very good. Sin is trying to control that strange fire and fit God into the box of normality. Sin is calling profane that spark of strange fire in ourselves that God has made clean.

When you learn to love yourself 

You will dissolve all the stones that are cast 

Now you will learn to burn the icing sky 

To melt the waxen mask 

I said to have the gift of true release 

This is a peace that will take you higher 

Oh I come to you with my offering 

I bring you strange fire

The Pentecost event shows us that while the attempt to control God is not holy, the strange fire that God continues to create is indeed very very good. The Pentecost event shows that indeed, God shows no partiality to those who perfectly match the canonical examples of holiness, but that in every people anyone who worships God and does justice is indeed acceptable. The Pentecost event shows us that even those of us whose offering must be strange fire, as long as we serve the Lord, are indeed agents of God's holiness in the world.

This is a message 

A message of love 

Love that moves from the inside out 

Love that never grows tired 

I come to you with strange fire

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.