writing in the dust

A homily preached at Trinity Cathedral, Pittsburgh, on Holy Saturday 2024

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

In the famous story of Jesus walking, unrecognized, with two of his followers after his resurrection, there is a remarkably poignant, human moment. Jesus asks them what they are discussing as they walk away from Jerusalem, and after they recount the chaos and tragedy of the last few days, they say about Jesus (not knowing that they are talking to the Risen One himself), “We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.” That perfect tense — “we had hoped” — contains and conceals a world of grief.

We are all familiar with the crush and pain of dashed hopes. You can’t live much beyond childhood to feel it (and many taste it already in childhood). The friendship you thought would last forever ends in betrayal. The career you had set your sights on becomes impossible because of an incurable injury. The divorce papers are finally signed. The chemo and radiation treatments are discontinued, and all that is left to do is wait for death’s coming. The key is returned. The lid on the casket is lowered for the last time. We had hoped.

If you’re religious (as I assume you are — you’re here for a Holy Saturday service!), then you know this same pain in your life with God. The bewilderment and hurt of unanswered prayer. The ache of the lack of God’s experienced presence. The recurring sense that this is all just pious fantasizing. The secret fear that God has finally abandoned you. We had hoped.

One of the great teachers of spirituality from the last century once wrote that every Christian who prays (and not just the great mystics or hermits) sooner or later experiences “the dark night of the soul,” the time — sometimes a long time — when God’s presence can’t be discerned or enjoyed anymore:

The beginner is usually granted ‘sensible’ [sensory], tangible consolations by way of encouragement; his senses and intellectual powers rejoice in the discovery of divine meaning and divine presence in the words and events of Scripture. As he advances, these consolations are necessarily withdrawn from time to time and for indefinite periods, for God does not wish to be found on any other path than his Son’s dying and rising.

God, in other words, allows us to remain in darkness, grief, and unknowing for a purpose: so that we might not rely on shallow, false pictures of who God is and might instead discover God right in the midst of dying and death, on the cross and in the tomb.

The writer Joan Didion says that after her husband died suddenly in their living room one night while she was in the kitchen preparing dinner, “There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.” She calls this time of confusion her “year of magical thinking.” Her memoir with that title is the story of the slow recognition that the magic was false and that the reality was in fact irreversible: her husband really wasn’t coming back, and she now had to find a way to go on living without him.

That stripping away of illusions is what Holy Saturday is about. We thought we could ensure that Jesus and his Father were always available for our manipulation. We may have imagined that we could somehow use God to advance the agendas we prefer. We might have believed that we could forecast how God would always act and rely on him to meet our needs in the way we determine is best. But now we are faced with the cold, graying corpse in the tomb and the reality that we had it all wrong. We had hoped.

But Holy Saturday is also about waiting for a new hope on the far side of death — a hope that isn’t just a continuation of what we thought we wanted but a transformation of how we relate to God in faith and prayer. Christians usually picture Jesus descending into the nethermost caverns of hell on this day, and we might imagine him, as he dives downward, shedding all of the controls and expectations we try to clothe him in.

Holding that image in our minds, we might also imagine ourselves the way one of the church fathers pictured us in prayer: as ascending higher and higher on the crags of Mount Sinai with Moses and finding that the closer we get to God’s fiery presence, the darker and darker our vision becomes. God appears to us as cloudy, luminous darkness because only when we let go of what we think is light are we able to better approach the light that God is with humility and (true) hope.

As Jesus descends into darkness, we ascend into darkness, the one enabling the other — and our life with God as we know it dies so that it can rise again true and pure.

And so, in the words of one of our greatest Christian poets,

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

A homily on 2 Corinthians 5:21 preached on Ash Wednesday 2024 at Pillar Church, Holland, Michigan

A few years ago, a beloved friend and colleague told me that she was heading to see a doctor. She had noticed some strange, dark purple bruises on the tops of several of her toes. She couldn’t remember kicking something too hard or tripping over something. She was sure it was nothing, she told me.

Martha was my friend’s name. She was an Anglican priest, a professor of pastoral theology, and a sought-after preacher and speaker. Never married, she was a queen of hospitality. She cooked lavishly and masterfully. She sang loudly, operatically, often ensuring that the descants weren’t neglected in our seminary chapel services. She painted. She had two enormous standard poodles whom she adored. She was so full of life.

Within a matter of days, she had an explanation for the bruising on her toes. She was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a fast-growing cancer that starts in the bone marrow and then proceeds to the blood. All of us who knew Martha, who had been the grateful recipients of her joy and zest for life, were in shock.

This was at the end of 2013. By the time Ash Wednesday of 2014 came around, Martha had been through three rounds of chemotherapy and was then in the hospital. She asked if some of us would come to her room and give her ashes and pray the liturgy with her.

I recall stepping into her room and into the light of her smile. Her arms were reddened with rashes, and she was wearing a handknit scarf over her shaved head. She was visibly weaker than I’d ever seen her, but I laughed at the 8” by 10” on her wall — a color photo from her visit to an antique store several weeks earlier at which she had donned an ancient Roman soldier’s helmet and brandished a broadsword, teeth clenched in mock rage. There was still plenty of fight left in her, I said, and she agreed.

And then we began to pray: “Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

Sean, the priest who was with us, then read these words from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians: “For our sake God made Christ to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Christ we might become the righteousness of God.”

And then Sean dipped his thumb in ashes and made the sign of the cross on Martha’s forehead. I remember thinking her skin looked too taut and unnaturally shiny. Sean said to Martha, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

There are probably as many different reasons you are here in church tonight as there are people in the room. But I suspect that almost all of us — to some degree, whether knowingly or unwittingly — are here because we want to hear good news. We want to believe that there is some hope for us and for those we love. And maybe you are wondering as you sit here, as I was wondering standing next to Martha’s hospital bed, how it is good news that we are dust and that we shall one day return to dust?

There are two ways — two separate but interrelated ways — of thinking about this. In the first place, there’s a sense in which the words you’re about to hear and the symbol you’re going to receive on your forehead are not “good news” in any straightforward sense. Frederick Buechner says that the Christian good news is a tragedy, a comedy, and a fairy tale, but before it is a comedy and a fairy tale, it is first a tragedy. The apostle Paul calls death an enemy to be defeated. It is not good that our lives are cut off by cancer, famine, war, despair, or any of the million other calamities that can end our days on earth. And before we can really take to heart the good news of Easter — “Death has been swallowed up in victory” — we need to face squarely the depth of the tragedy we’re in. Death was not God’s original good purpose for us. Death is a thief and a tyrant.

So the good news that we proclaim here on Ash Wednesday is not that death is somehow not as bad as it seems, that it’s maybe more of a friend than a foe. No, the good news is that, in spite of the tragedy of death, we have a Lord and Savior who has conquered death by dying. Christ Jesus came into the world to share our human plight, to take on his shoulders all our pain and sin, and to go all the way into our bleakest human experience — death — and to emerge triumphant from the tomb on the third day.

So it isn’t the fact that we’re going to die that is itself the good news. You already know that, and you don’t need to come to church to hear me tell you about it or receive ashes to inform you about something you weren’t aware of. It’s rather that the announcement about our dying is the tragic prelude to the best news we could hope to hear — that the unconditional Friend of sinners has triumphed over death, and he now says with outstretched arms to everyone who will receive him, “Peace be with you” and “Nothing will ever be able to separate you from my love.”

But I think we can turn this around and come at it from the other direction, so to speak. Christ the Lord has journeyed to us, to share our death as the human being who is God, and so overcome it. But that means that in some deep sense our dying can now become our movement toward Jesus, toward the God who formed us from the dust at first.

It is still true that death is an enemy — but not only an enemy. Listen to how the New Testament scholar Morna Hooker has made this point: “Because Christ is fully one with [humanity] in all [our] experiences, these [experiences] can now be understood in terms of life in Christ.” Our dying, in other words, isn’t only our sharing in the miserable condition of Adam. It is our sharing in Jesus’ experience of the condition of Adam. We don’t go to death by ourselves. Jesus has already gone there ahead of us, and when we die, we are with him.

Or listen to how George MacDonald says it: “The Son of God suffered unto death, not that [human beings] might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.” It isn’t that Jesus suffered death so that we don’t have to. We are still made of dust, and we will all of us return to dust. But Jesus’ dying means that when we return to dust in our caskets or in the crematorium, our dying isn’t just the final experience of solitary suffering we have to somehow find a way to endure. It is our joining Jesus in the suffering he underwent — our final “conformity” to him, as Paul describes it.

This is what that text from 2 Corinthians that we read in my friend Martha’s hospital room is all about: “For our sake God made Christ to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Christ we might become the righteousness of God.” It’s what Luther called the “great exchange.” Christ takes to himself the whole human condition and experience. He tastes every last drop of it. He goes all the way down into the fathomless darkness of death. And the outcome is that we, in our suffering and mortality, in our journey toward becoming dust, become in and through him God’s own beloved forever. Death is real, but it has lost its sting. It has been defanged. It is now our final passage into the arms of the God who loves us eternally.

My friend Martha died eleven months after her cancer diagnosis. When she first received the diagnosis, she was adamant that she would beat the leukemia. “God has more work for me to do here,” she said firmly. “Pray for my healing, don’t pray for a good dying.” But by the end, she had faced with hard-won honesty and humility and a beautiful Christian hope the fact that she was dust and was now returning to dust. And she said, with the martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “This is the end — for me the beginning of life.”

A homily on Mark 7:31-37 preached on the Friday after the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany at Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan

Some of you who are around my age, who went through your deconstruction experience a couple of decades ago or more, may remember a blog called Jesus Needs New P.R. Even if you didn’t read it closely, the title was a catchy summary of how you might have felt: Jesus has a public relations problem. He’s compelling and interesting and compassionate and inspiring, but His representatives — the church bureaucrats who pontificate about Him from pulpits, the politicians and pundits who use His name to promote their odious causes, the bigots who claim to follow Him but leave a trail of hurting people in their wake — are the problem.

Even if your politics differ from mine, each one of us can identify with these sentiments, at least some of the time. Have you ever winced when you saw a picture of Jesus draped in an American flag? Have you ever felt tempted to take “Christian” off your social media profile when someone invokes Jesus to support some movement or cause that you find abhorrent? An Australian New Testament scholar, Constantine Campbell, recently published a book called Jesus v. Evangelicals in which he voiced what a lot of us intuit: “The evangelical movement must be refashioned in Jesus’ image, rather than cast Jesus in its image.”

It's this propensity to cast Jesus in the image we want that explains a strange feature of our Gospel reading this morning. Jesus is in region of the Decapolis, and even in this faraway place, word has spread that he is a healer, a wonder-worker. So a group of people bring a friend of theirs whose hearing and speech are impaired. They want a miracle, and Jesus obliges. He ushers the man away from the crowd, so that it’s just he and Jesus. (Maybe Jesus is offering dignity to the man with this privacy, refusing to make him a spectacle.) In any case, He puts His fingers in the man’s ears, and He spits and touches the man’s tongue. He lifts his eyes up to heaven and sighs and says in Aramaic, “Ephphatha,” which means, “Be opened.” “And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.” And then comes the strange aspect of the story: “Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one.”

This happens again and again in Mark’s Gospel: Jesus charges His followers — and even demonic spirits — not to talk about His miracles, not to talk about what He does and who He is. Scholars usually refer to this as the motif of the “messianic secret” and then try to offer some sort of interpretation of it. Why would Jesus not want the good news about Him to be talked about? Why would He not want His fame to spread, so that more and more people could put their faith in Him?

One German scholar referred once to the Gospel of Mark as essentially a passion story, with a long introduction. And I think that’s our clue to the meaning of Jesus’ secrecy. Mark is telling a passion story — a story of Jesus’ gruesome execution and mysterious resurrection, which Jesus interprets as His gift of Himself to the world. And Mark knows that there is potential for misunderstanding Jesus at every turn. We may hear about one of His miracles and decide that He is basically a genie who can grant our wishes. We may hear about Him performing exorcisms and decide that He is available to fight our favorite enemies. And Mark’s point is that if we do that, we fundamentally misunderstand who Jesus is and what He aimed to achieve. Mark’s claim is that Jesus came for one overriding purpose: not to conform to our agendas and expectations but to give His life as a ransom for us, to rescue us from our self-absorption, our cruelty, our enslavement to sin and death. He came for love. He came to lay down His life for His enemies, to make His enemies His friends, and friends to one another.

And this is why, I think, Mark has Jesus refusing the boxes we want to put Him in. “Don’t domesticate Me like that,” Jesus seems to say. “Don’t use Me for your pet projects, your private theological agendas, your political ambitions.” As the Anglican priest and scholar Austin Farrer writes, “Christ does not encourage the spreading of ready-made formulae divided from living act, whether in the form of rumour or doctrine… Messiahship is not taught even to the initiate as a thing by itself, but as that which death and resurrection will express.” We understand the messiahship of Jesus, and the miracles and teachings and aims of Jesus, only when we follow Him all the way to the cross and to the grave and then hear the mysterious young man at His empty tomb telling us that He has gone on ahead of us.

Friends, we are about to enter the season of Lent, which is a time when Christians try to clear away some of the clutter that keeps us from seeing Jesus and being surprised by Him. By quieting ourselves and voluntarily letting go of some of our usual methods of coping with stress and anxiety, we try to see past the P.R. about Jesus. We open ourselves to considering whether we have a distorted picture of who Jesus is and what He wants with us and from us and for us. And perhaps we also keep quiet about Him for a bit. We don’t rush in to offer our preferred picture of who He is. Instead we listen, we watch, we wait. And we try to prepare our hearts for that great and holiest of weeks when we will keep vigil with Jesus as He goes to the cross and triumphs over death. Only then may we dare to speak about who He is for us.

A homily on Isaiah 64:1 preached on the First Sunday of Advent 2023 at the Episcopal Church of St. Michael and St. George, St. Louis, Missouri

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.”

May I speak to you in the Name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the ways people talk about religion and spirituality goes something like this: I feel something is missing from my life. I want more inner peace and fulfillment. I should explore some spiritual practices to try to get in touch with the Divine.

In our more desperate and honest moments, though, we know this isn’t quite right. Because our hunger seems larger than this. Yes, we want peace and a sense of fulfillment, but we want more than that. We want an intervention. We want not so much to be climbing the ladder to heaven as to have God reach down and rescue us when we’ve fallen off the ladder, when we’ve reached the end of our rope. We want not just our individual interior lives to be healed. We want our broken relationships restored. We want our financial insecurity to be resolved. We want illness and disease not to be able always to have the upper hand. We want the whole world to be different.

Right after the end of World War II, a French Catholic theologian and priest named Henri de Lubac published a book that has become a classic, titled Catholicism. He opens the book with a quotation that emphasizes the individualistic nature of so much of our spirituality: “The joy of Jesus can be personal. It can belong to a single [person] and [she or he] is saved… In his [or her] blessedness he passes through the battlefields with a rose in his hand.” The individual believer is serenely detached and untouched by the tumult, content with her own personal joy and beauty. But the quotation goes on. When disaster strikes, when suffering pulls the rug out from under our feet, then we realize our solidarity with all the other wounded lying on the battlefield: “My joy will not be lasting unless it is the joy of all. I will not pass through the battlefields with a rose in my hand.”

This is the sentiment that we heard a few moments ago in our reading from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah. Crying out to God, the prophet says, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” It’s a striking image: the prophet looking up to the sky, screaming at God to show Himself — to pull back the curtain and come off His throne and come down into our human misery. It’s a far cry from an individualistic spirituality of interior, psychological ascent into realms of tranquility. It’s a plea for God to show up in the mire and muck of social, material human existence. It’s a call for God to act in history, in community, in cities and families and hospitals and businesses.

The verb the prophet uses — “O that you would tear open the heavens” — is, in the Greek translation, the word schizō. It means to rend or split apart. We get the word schism, a tear in social bonds, from it, and also the word schizophrenia. The prophet is begging God to split apart the sky and come out from hiding and intervene in the world.

And does God answer the prophet’s prayer? Does God answer our prayer?

In the first of the Gospels to be written, the Gospel of Mark, the evangelist uses that word schizō in two significant places in his story. The first is when Jesus is baptized in the Jordan river by John: “And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him.” John had been splashing water on Judeans who were sorry for their injustice and immorality: “the whole Judean region and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to [John] and were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins.”

According to the witness of the New Testament, Jesus had no sins to confess. He lived at every moment with perfect love for God and His fellow human beings. And yet He went into the river along with all the penitents. Why? Because He knew that the healing we need could only come about through His sharing with us entirely in all our guilt and grief. What He was unwilling to put on His shoulders could not be healed in us. And so, even though He Himself was entirely innocent, He went down into the waters of baptism with us and for us.

And the Gospel of Mark says that that was the moment when Isaiah’s prayer was heard and answered. God tore open the heavens and came down. God ripped apart the curtain that He was hiding behind and showed up in our history, taking our failures and evils on Himself and taking them away.

The other place in the Gospel of Mark where that word schizō is used comes at the end of the narrative, when Jesus is hanging on the cross: “Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” There was a heavy, ornate curtain that separated the Most Holy Place, the Holy of Holies, from the rest of the temple and the world. It concealed and guarded the Presence of God, and only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, would the high priest enter in behind the curtain to offer sacrifice. Otherwise the curtain guarded the people from the devouring fire of God’s holiness. But now, at the moment of Jesus’ death, the curtain in the temple is torn apart — and it is not torn from the bottom up, from human beings’ attempt to access God’s presence. Instead it is torn from top to bottom, as Jesus’ death unleashes God’s presence into the world, not for conflagration but for salvation and new access and the ultimate restoration of all creation.

Many readers of these stories over the centuries have pointed out that once you violently rip something apart, it can’t be sewn back together very easily. Once the heavens are torn open, once the temple curtain has been rent from top to bottom, they can’t be closed up again.

And yet I, and I suspect you, often feel that they the tatters have been knit back together so that we can’t discern the presence of God and His salvation anymore. The world, and our lives, don’t look very saved right now. And that is why, during Advent, we look ahead to another great tearing apart of the heavens. St. Paul tells us by a word of the Lord that at the end, “the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise.” There will be yet one more splitting apart of the skies, another ripping of the curtain. And the dead will be raised, and all things will be made new.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus.