May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be aligned with you, our beloved God, you who are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Good morning, everyone. It’s such a joy to see all of your radiant faces here this morning. My name is Gabriela De Golia, and I am a deacon here at First Church of Christ in Middletown and a member of our Executive Committee.

It’s an honor to be offering the sermon today while our senior pastor, the Rev. Julia Burkey, is away on sabbatical. She will be back with us next week, and at this very moment, she is on retreat with one of the most incredible Christian teachers of our time, Father Richard Rohr, at his Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico. Fr. Rohr is a Franciscan father who fuses contemplative spirituality and social justice activism, and his teachings are centered on love, grace, and healing.

Today, I’d like to invite both Fr. Rohr and Julia into the space by sharing some of Fr. Rohr’s reflections on the scriptural story we heard earlier. My hope is that this will connect us to Rev. Julia and what she might be experiencing in Fr. Rohr’s presence. I also trust that by sharing the reflections of a prominent Christian teacher on today’s scripture, we will better understand what this story is trying to teach us about ourselves, God, and how God would have us move through the world. I hope the sermon nourishes you today.

First, a bit of contextualization. This story comes from the Gospel of Luke; in the words of Fr. Rohr, “[Luke’s] perspective might be called a theology of salvation”. Indeed, the Gospel of Luke is full of stories of salvation, including the one we heard this morning. This story is commonly known as that of the Prodigal Son — prodigal meaning “a person who spends money in a recklessly extravagant way.” Fr. Rohr goes so far as to call the story of the Prodigal Son “the most perfect Gospel [...] the most perfect story Jesus ever told.” I find this to be a bold statement for someone as well-versed in the Bible as Fr. Rohr. He continues, “this is surely a gospel that needs no sermon. Nothing further needs to be shared than what you just heard [through scripture].”

When I heard Fr. Rohr say those words, I jokingly told myself, “this makes my job easy on my assigned preaching day!” But you didn’t come to here this morning to hear someone preach nothing to you. And furthermore, given that Fr. Rohr has preached sermons on this passage, I believe that he, too, trusts that we can benefit from communal discernment about this story. Not because it’s an overly-complicated story, but because it is so simply revolutionary. This passage shares an understanding of God and relationality that is so far beyond most of our wildest dreams, so contrary to our reward-and-punishment-oriented norms, that I think we need time and guidance in learning how to properly integrate the teachings of the Prodigal Son into our minds, hearts, and bodies.

As we heard, the Prodigal Son spends a lot of money on getting it on and having a good time. Now, spending money on extravagances isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the son doesn’t spend just anyone’s money; it’s his father’s inheritance for him, which the son asked for before his father was even dead! A bold and arguably selfish request. Yet, the father, who is meant to be a reflection of God in this particular story, gives his son the inheritance money, likely knowing it will get used for questionable purposes.

This action by the father might seem irresponsible; by many conventional parenting standards, it arguably is. Yet, if we look at the father’s decision a little differently, we realize he gives his son exactly that which will ultimately lead the boy towards grace and transformation. This inheritance money is what will cause his child to hit rock bottom — which, for better or worse, is often what we need in order to realize we need to change — thus jumpstarting the boy’s path towards salvation.

In this story, we have a son who has messed up pretty bad and whom many would deem undeserving of forgiveness. Yet the father rejoices at his son’s decision to return home and to turn towards change. The father’s actions -- which, again, are meant to reflect how God loves us -- literally upend our very common understandings of deservedness, worthiness, goodness, and such things. As the Bible so often does, this story turns almost everything we’ve been taught about these concepts on their heads. Fr. Rohr states,

“Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son [is a wonderful illustration] of how Jesus turns a spirituality of climbing, achieving, and perfection upside down [into a spirituality in which those] who have done it wrong and are humble about it [...] are the ones who are forgiven, transformed, and rewarded. […] We thought we came to God by doing it right, and lo and behold, surprise of surprises, we come to God by doing it wrong—and growing because of it!”

Fr. Rohr continues,

“Worthiness is not the issue [...] We’re all saved by grace. We’re all being loved in spite of ourselves. [...] You’re absolutely worthy of love! Yet this has nothing to do with any earned worthiness on your part. God does not love you because you are good. God loves you because God is good!”

These words from Fr. Rohr, to me, are a holy proclamation. Rather than needing to be perfect in order to be saved or considered lovable, what Fr. Rohr and the story of the Prodigal Son are offering us is the idea that we are saved and loved simply because God is of the nature to love us no matter what. In this story, we see God running down the road to meet the Prodigal Son, loving him without reservation, even after he’s messed up pretty bad. The son doesn’t know how to process this grace; in this passage, he says twice that he doesn’t deserve to be his father’s son. What an accurate reflection of how many of us push away someone’s love simply because we can’t believe they could love us in all our imperfect fullness? I imagine most of us have, many times over.

Now, at the same time that the Prodigal Son is struggling to accept his father’s grace towards him — which, again, is meant to represent God’s grace — his brother, who I like to call the Perfect Son, is also struggling with his father’s love towards the Prodigal. Out of jealousy and a sense of unfairness, the Perfect Son literally refuses to go to the banquet his father organized. I’ll admit that I often feel and act like this Perfect Son: I regularly do things just the way I’m told to, and I get pissed as hell when those who don’t somehow make it through or, worse, are celebrated instead of me. Because where’s my special reward in that? Where’s the fairness there?

Luke’s vision of God’s love in this story is therefore not just a statement about love — it’s also a statement about justice. Again, in the words of Fr. Rohr,

“We often think that justice means getting what we deserve, but the Gospels point out that God’s justice always gives us more than we deserve. […][God] gives everyone all that they need in order to grow.”

Fr. Rohr continues by saying,

“We have a hard time with this kind of justice. We are capitalists, even in the spiritual life. We’re more comfortable with an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We don’t know what to do with a God who breaks that rule! […] All through Luke’s Gospel people are receiving what they don’t deserve. […] God’s justice is on the loose!

That kind of relentless generosity is hard for us to comprehend, much less practice. That kind of unconditional justice is beyond our human power. Yet Luke is showing that it is possible to be fully human and divinely just.”

So a question I’ve been asking myself while reflecting on these words by Fr. Rohr and the story of the Prodigal Son is, “what would our lives and our society look like if we lived out this Gospel’s understanding of love and the justice it asks of us?” I obviously can’t say for sure, but I imagine that parts of it might look something like this:

I imagine that if we let go of our notions worthiness-through-perfection and trust instead in the concept of worthiness-through-God’s-grace, we would forgive ourselves for the choices we now wish we hadn’t made. We’d view where we’re at today as the perfect starting point for our growth and healing.

I imagine that when anger towards someone is justified, we’d still trust in the possibility that they, like the Prodigal Son, could someday begin the road towards their own transformation. And should they choose to do so, we would make way for that to happen.

I imagine that our prisons would be centered on rehabilitation and hopefully helping inmates re-enter society, rather than viewing them as eternally unworthy and stripping them of access to future jobs, contact with their families, and their right to vote.

I imagine that white people would never question their own belovedness during conversations about racism, and that we’d know that when people -- especially people of color -- critique the ways white supremacy manifests in ourselves and in our institutions, that we would view such critiques as invitations for us to reclaim the parts of our humanity that racism has tried to take away from us.

I can imagine so many other ways we’d embody a theology of love that pushes us towards justice, like the Prodigal Son invites us to do.

To be clear, this passage isn’t license for doing harm, nor is it suggesting that we can’t hold people accountable when they’ve done wrong. Rather, this passage is centered on trusting that if one humbles themself enough to admit their wrongs, then they can begin the journey towards grace. Notice that the Prodigal Son could only fully receive the grace that God was always so willing to give him once he himself chose to make a change, once he himself started taking active steps towards his own liberation. So this story isn’t a get-of-jail-free card for being a jerk; it’s a reminder that if we put in the work of orienting ourselves towards transformation, the debris of our lives can begin to clear away, making way for us to receive the grace that God gives us willingly. In a sermon he preached on this passage, Fr. Rohr stated,

“Very often, it’s people who’ve hit the bottom who love God [...] when they realize that God is always and forever running down the road toward them.”

I don’t know if there’s a better definition of grace than that: God always and forever running down the road to meet us, always ready to love us.

As demonstrated through the story of the Prodigal Son, if we want to meet God and if we want to receive God’s grace, we better mess up. We make mistakes so we can then find the answers and learn from them; we better get it wrong so we can then get it right and be wiser for it; we better not be so perfect that we refuse the invitation to the holy banquet; we better get lost, precisely so we can be found, and then show other lost souls the way; we better screw things up bad so that instead of being able to save ourselves and becoming proud of ourselves, we can instead experience what it’s like to be saved by a power greater than ourselves. All of these experiences will yield a far deeper joy than we could ever achieve through our individual efforts at being perfect.

So to close, my wish for each of us is that we each mess up; that we each be humble about it; that we each make amends when needed; that we each trust that we are loved for no other reason than because God created us; and that we each receive this divine love with open arms and a grateful heart so we can offer such love to others in turn.

May all of this come to pass, and glory be to the God of Love. Amen.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be aligned with you, our Beloved God, you who are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Before I delve into musings about the Parable of the Sower, I’d like to contextualize it a bit within the larger Gospel of Matthew. This Gospel is the first in the New Testament, and its writer seeks to portray Jesus as a Jewish King and the Son of God who serves as a contemporary Moses figure offering a reinterpretation of Jewish Law in contrast to what spiritual authorities were espousing at that time. Jesus is working within a Jewish framework, and the use of parables which is so common in the Gospels is actually an element of Jewish tradition. In parables, Jesus uses classic imagery pulled from Jewish prophets such as Isaiah, to convey his message. Unfortunately, Jesus is portrayed in this Gospel as a largely misunderstood and rejected spiritual teacher. Rejection and misunderstanding are what largely lead him to begin using parables as a teaching and communication style.

Leading up to the Parable of the Sower in Chapter 13, the Gospel of Matthew is devoid of parables. Before Chapter 13, Jesus delivers his teachings in mostly prose-like language. While those initial teachings were received well by many, they were rejected by the spiritual authorities and many others. In the chapter right before that of the Parable of the Sower, Jesus has intense conflicts with spiritual authorities over Sabbath and other matters, leading said authorities to decide they must eventually kill Jesus. It is at this point that Jesus switches from using more prosaic language to engaging in the more poetic language of parables.

The word “parable” derives from the Greek words meaning “to throw” and “alongside” which, by extension, has been used to convey analogy, comparison, and illustration. Parables are didactic stories that illustrate instructive lessons. They use imagery that is meant to make us draw comparisons between things. In Jesus’s case, his parables are used as tools to help listeners draw comparisons between the world as it is and what the Kindom of God might look like.

People often portray parables as a more accessible manner of getting information across because they employ imagery that would be familiar to many folks, such as farming metaphors. But that’s not entirely accurate. When Jesus starts using parables in his speeches, even the disciples ask him, “why are you teaching in these unclear ways?” So clearly, even those closest to him were confused by his communication strategy, and we can only assume Jesus’s parables went over many people’s heads. I would argue that this lack of clarity was actually intentional on Jesus’s part, and the timing of when he starts using parables speaks to this, for it is only after a knockdown fight with authorities that he switches to this mode of communication.

Emily Dickenson, the famous poet, once said, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” In other words, reveal the truth, but not in a straightforward manner. Indeed, throughout the Bible, for example, we witness God revealing Godself in very slanted ways: through burning bushes, smoke towers, God’s backside, and all sorts of other ways that don’t allow witnesses to see God clearly. Jesus, in using parables, is following in God’s footsteps, using “slanted” imagery to get at the teachings of God. I think there’s a psychological tactic to this.

It’s very obvious that most people most of the time don’t respond much to straightforward facts and information. If that were the case, we would have solved the climate crisis long ago, but instead, many are still debating whether or not climate change is a thing despite the obvious facts that it is. Oftentimes, what leads us to process and integrate information is not facts, but stories. Jesus’s use of parables is a tactic in bypassing the rationalizations and overly logical gateways in our minds and spirits that often prevent us from accessing deeper truths that go beyond the mere intellect. That doesn’t mean that everyone will understand or be receptive to the stories and their teachings -- in fact, many won’t open themselves up to them -- but such a tactic helps to lower people’s defenses and reach those who have not only a desire to intellectually understand of the Word but a willingness to be moved to their core by the Word. And parables also left those who were hostile to Jesus with less to accuse him of, because, after all, he was just “telling stories.” Jesus’s parables were thus a way of subverting oppressive power while still reaching those who would be most willing to join him in the task of building the Kindom of God, turning mere admirers into faithful followers.

So, what exactly does Jesus talk about in the Parable of the Sower? In this parable, Jesus portrays himself as a sower who is scattering seeds across various types of soil. This imagery relates to a well-known Jewish prophesy, that of Isaiah from the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. These seeds are the budding Kindom of God, namely the message of Christ that is seeking to take root in the hearts of people so the Kindom can spread far and wide. The four types of soil upon which the seeds are scattered are often interpreted as representing different categories of people. The first soil is conventionally seen as representing those who have no interest in furthering the Kindom or are actively hostile towards it. The second and third soils are usually depicted as representing those who show interest but then fail to truly believe and help build the Kindom. The fourth soil is regularly described as “good” and often interpreted as representing people who truly see, hear, and believe the Word, and who will help bear the fruit of the Kindom of God.

While helpful in some contexts, I usually take issue with this interpretation that categorizes individuals as belonging to one type of soil or the other. I think that makes it too easy to fall into the thinking that “only this type of person [namely, our understanding of what it means to be a Christian] is truly faithful.” This can result in us projecting our own lack of receptivity and spiritual insecurities onto others. While it’s easy to think of ourselves as the “good soil” because many of us are believe we are dedicated to the message of Christ and God, I think it’s more helpful to understand each soil as a state of being we each find ourselves in at various times. Sometimes we’re receptive to the message, and other times (like, 75% of the time, according to scripture) we’re not as open to the Word and helping to build the Kindom of God. I, for one, can attest to the fact that I am often disconnected from Christ and God due to anxieties, distractions, intellectualization, and lack of vulnerability, among other things. So a question that I have been holding within myself is how can I cultivate my inner landscape in such a way that the soil in my spirit can become more and more receptive to Christ’s message and the budding Kindom of God?

I think an understanding of land and farming can help to answer that question. When preparing the soil for sowing and planting, one must till it, meaning the land must be broken up and turned over. One also usually puts some form of manure or fertilizer on the soil before tiling to make it more amenable to growth. This means that “good” soil is actually broken, messy, and even stinky. Preparing our hearts and spirits to receive the Word is much like that, in that we have to allow ourselves to be broken, turned over, and covered in unappealing circumstances a lot of the time if we are to allow God to flow through our lives. We are instructed to allow ourselves to be moved, even broken, by change and circumstance, which can include feeling grief and other unpleasant emotions that we often try to avoid. This isn’t to say we should lend ourselves to harmful situations, but rather that we must allow ourselves to experience the unknowns, discomforts, and growth pains associated with change if we are to let God move us towards where God wants us to be. If we focus instead on remaining pristine and perfect and untouched by life’s circumstances, we’re actually closed off from God’s transformative grace. Just like sowing seeds, letting ourselves be transformed by God requires a letting go, not just letting go of the seeds, but letting go of the process and trusting in powers far beyond us (such as the rain, the sun, and God) to do their thing. Great transformations rarely happen through our own efforts alone; they usually happen because forces beyond us are also playing a role in the changes we are undergoing.

Notions of change and transformation are ones that we don’t often associate with Godself. We often think change is either entirely bad or that it is a positive result of God’s actions, but rarely do we think of change as God’s very self. We often think of God as immutable, unchanging, constant. While those portrayals can be reassuring at times, they can also contribute to us avoiding change when it’s necessary. Lately, though, I have been inspired by teachers who offer a different view of God, one that actually depicts change and transformation as inherent to the very nature of God. This idea is actually a core teaching from a modern-day rendering of the Biblical Parable of the Sower, that is, The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, who was a Black female science fiction writer. Science fiction and other forms of speculative literature are often similar to Biblical parables in that they draw a comparison between our current reality and another reality that is meant to inform us as to how we can move from where we are to where we want and ought to be. I have been particularly interested in the ways Black and Indigenous thinkers are envisioning possible, beautiful futures as a way to help me envision and work towards building the Kindom of God. In listening to the dreams Black and Indigenous folks have of the future, I think we become better poised to further Christ’s work and message because Jesus always centered those who were unjustly targeted by worldly authorities. In Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the core spiritual tenant put forth by the main character is as follows:

“All that you touch, you Change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”

I find this teaching particularly poignant during a moment in history such as this, when so many Black, Indigenous, and other people of color are demanding that we change the way things are so we can live in a more just society (one that I would argue is reflective of the Kindom of God). I think it’s an incredibly potent time to view God as change, as thinkers like Octavia Butler might argue.

Bringing these ideas even closer to home: a question I’m holding is how can I practice trusting that our congregation’s transition with the upcoming departure of Rev. Julia is itself a manifestation of God as change. Further reflecting on the aforementioned quote from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, how can I remind myself of and affirm the ways that Rev. Julia has shaped and changed me and our entire church. Furthermore, how can I reflect on the ways First Church has shaped and changed Rev. Julia, and how all of this interdependent shaping and change might be reflective of godly relationships of mutuality and connection? Even though we are undergoing a physical separation with Rev. Julia, thinking of God as change reminds me that even this change is a chance to further deepen a connection with God by relying on God’s guidance and grace throughout the transition.

With all of the change happening in our lives, our church, and the world, I pray that we allow our souls and the soul of the church to be tilled through these changes and become prepared for sowing so the seeds of the Word can take root within us and blossom into wholesome fruit. May we remember that God moves through change, that God is change, and that by trusting in that change, we are allowing God to flow through our lives.

Thank you for listening, and peace be with you. Amen.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts magnify you, oh God, our source and our salvation, our beginning and our end. Amen.

What does it take to prepare for something's arrival? To prepare for its unprecedented presence?

More pointedly, for Christians walking through Advent: what does it take to prepare for the infinite's birth? How do we ready ourselves for the immeasurable to fill our reality?

Relatedly: what’s happening in the lungs of a newborn just before they’re filled with their first God-breath?

An emptying, an emptiness.

I’m speaking here of the regurgitation of fluids that a newborn must experience in order to empty their lungs, such that God’s breath can flow into them and jumpstart their lives.

I’m speaking here of the need to make a hollow cavity that pulsates with potentiality for anything to come truly and deeply alive.

I’m speaking here of the space in the center of a flute which, when full, makes not a single sound, but when empty, makes a resounding song.

For Christians, such spaciousness is how we prepare to welcome the incarnate infinite that we call God in our midst.

This is because reality (and everything in it) isn’t animated into aliveness when it’s already full of itself. Reality is animated into aliveness when there’s enough space within it for God to be welcomed into reality.

This is so because God loves an empty, receptive vessel, and this is never more clear than during the season of Advent, when we anticipate the love-laced birth of Jesus.

Jesus, a poor, refugee, bastard child of a woman who could've been stoned for sexual infidelity!

God didn’t choose the body of just anybody in order to become embodied. God didn’t choose the body of somebody who already had everything in order to become embodied.

God chose the body of a nobody, of somebody who had nothing by the standards of this world in order to become embodied.

They chose the body of a helpless baby boy, from a family with empty pockets, no home but a stranger’s manger, and no stature of which to speak.

God took root in the body of somebody who knew that when the inner temple is clear of roadblocks to God, then by golly, God shows up there.

God can’t take root in our lives when we’re too full of ourselves, too full of possessions, too full of preconceptions, too crowded such that we crowd out God. There’s no space.

But God can and does show up in the empty space where there’s room for them to surprise us with their own self-emptying outbreaths, with the undeserved and grace-laced outpourings of their love lungs.

If our Maker empties themself into the empty spaces in us, out of love for us, to bring us more fully alive… then blessedly and begrudgingly, it only follows that we’re asked to do the same.

To bring ourselves, each other, but most especially God more fully alive in our lives, we too must empty our own love-lungs somehow, to make space for God to land in the world anew.

Not because God is here to rob us of what we need, but because God longs for the existential build up clogging our spiritual arteries to be washed and burned away in the rivers and on the threshing floors of our lives, that we may become clear flutes for God to make music through once more!

And what does all of this mean for ministers like us? It means that if we want to keep vibrant the house of God and the church of all ages, we and our churches must become empty…

Become empty of whatever we thought we were or thought we had or thought we needed or thought wanted, or thought God was or thought God had or thought God needed or thought God wanted, or thought Church was or thought Church had or thought Church needed or thought Church wanted.

Because lo! And behold! When we do that, we are guaranteed, as people of faith, to receive the most fulsome love and recompense, to become everything we could ever truly hope to be, and receive everything we could ever truly need.

By doing this, we just might get the Church of God’s dreams, dreams that make ours pale in comparison.

And let's be honest now: the Church as we know her is walking into her very own Good Friday. The Church Apocalypse is upon us. Churches and parishes across the globe and across denominations are being gutted of congregants, cash, and credibility.

The Church is on the brink of a crucifixion that, if trusted in well (rather than avoided), could become the resurrection through which the Church as we’ve known her would disappear… Only to reemerge from more miraculous than she’s ever been before, and also totally unrecognizable to those who knew her, even her most loyal members, like Christ who was unrecognizable to Mary Magdalene upon emerging from the tomb.

And how, my friends, do we prepare for this holy, frightening occurrence? The answer lies with John the Baptist, he who teaches us to clear the way for the Messiah, Jesus, to show up in our midst.

Jesus, he who will become the Christ, he who was tried and crucified by business-as-usual mentalities and religious ministers and armed state authorities, yet lived to tell the tale because he mastered death.

By “mastered death,” I don't mean that he got rid of death. I mean that he achieved resurrection because he mastered the craft of dying by virtue of how he lived: as an empty vessel, always and forever clear and available for God’s use, from start to finish.

Jesus the Messiah and John the Baptist have a messy message for us about what it means to prepare for aliveness. We prepare for aliveness by dying; by emptying ourselves of what we know; by trust-falling into God’s process; by attaching ourselves to every fiber of God’s being with every fiber of our own, such that whatever emerges on the other side of death is more alive, more holy, and more whole than whatever came before.

As ministers, John is signaling to us that the only way to keep Church alive is to let her be crucified… and, in so doing, let her be resurrected.

John is telling us that if we want to keep hearing God speak, we must unclog our ears and clean out the flutes of our churches.

John is telling us something about axes at the feet of trees located near a fire, and guess what? Our churches are those trees, on the brink of being cut down if they don't heed John's prophecy.

With his fearful, freeing imagery, John’s telling us to let go of anything and everything that doesn't help us praise and proclaim the infinitude of God with all of who we are by seeing God in all of this. In the dwindling attendance rates and the wobbly steeples and the shrinking budgets.

Because maybe, just maybe, this is the Church saying, “my God, into your infinite process, I commend my own.”

So, I ask you and myself:

Are we willing to practice collective withdrawal from the drug of church-business-as-usual?

Are we willing to weather the death rattle and the labor pangs that come with resurrecting anything, even the Church?

Are we willing to clear a space within us, within our sanctuaries, within our budgets, and most importantly within our imaginations, such that the emerging Church has an empty space in which to land?

Will we let the Church we’ve known and loved die, and grieve that loss together, and in that grief become hollow enough that the new Church has a chance at resurrection?

Are we ready to hallow that holier, more-whole Church that emerges on the other side of crucifixion?

And do we promise to love the Church even after she’s become totally unrecognizable to us post-resurrection?

I sure hope so. And I trust so. Because that’s what faith is. And we are a people of faith.

We have nothing to lose by dying, not even via crucifixion, and nor does our Church. We have everything and more to gain from it; we are reborn and enlivened through it, actually.

So, to close, I wish to offer my own playful rendition of John’s salvific-apocalyptic words as I imagine he’d offer them to us today. So, without further ado, here is Luke 3:7-18, the “GDG translation” you might say, remixed for the Church and her members, in anticipation of her rebirth:

“John said to the ministers that came to have their dying churches salvaged by him, "You misguided preachers! Who told you the death of church as you knew it could be avoided? Share a gospel worthy of being called "good news." Do not begin to say to yourselves, "We have legacies to keep up, endowments to maintain, unyielding congregants to appease!" for I tell you, God is able from the rubble of a fallen steeple to raise a new church worthy of our forebearer’s finest longings. Even now, the church buildings are shaky and tremble to the sound of a new tune. Every congregation therefore that does not learn to dance in accord with the Holy Spirit's renewed song will find itself crushed by the stomping feet of every wild weed that God has overrun the garden of their Kin-dom with."

And the ministers asked him, "What then shall we do?" In reply he said to them, "Whoever has too much emptiness in their sanctuary pews must ask those whom they avoid, "What feels like sanctuary to you?", and whoever has excessive crowding in their sanctuaries must hold their services wherever their congregants are too proud or afraid to go."

Even the church treasurers, money-theists that they are, came to have their budgets salvaged, and they asked him, "Teacher, what should we do?" In reply he said to them, "Collect what comes to you with ease from the Holy Spirit through simple means, and do not extract any more through subtle or grand marketing schemes."

Missionaries, proselytizers, religious nationalists and even those rowdy men with sandwich boards that proclaim "Hell is coming for the nonbelievers!" asked him, "And we, what do we do?" He said to them, "Do not delude yourself into false salvation by casting others into a hellscape that exists only within your heart. Learn to welcome God in the pits of your own despair, and watch as the gates of Heavens open themselves to you everywhere."

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, "I am but a humble janitor, a lowly groundskeeper, here to clear out and wash away whatever pollutes the soils of your lives and churches; but a gardener far more skilled than I is coming; I am not equipped to explain or illustrate the beauty of what he carries within himself and what will he sow within you and your churches.

He will ignite in you a passionate blaze, as the Sun does to the sprout. He will prepare your church to love God with unhindered fervency and compassionate abandon by removing with his winnowing fingers every last hesitation-inducing thing from your congregation, including even the buildings you worry about, the budgets you fret, the Sunday attendance rates you've been so devoted to.

All these things and all your worries about them will be made into fuel for the ovens of God's kitchen, just like the inedible chaft becomes kindling for the flames that bake the bread, such that nothing is wasted in God's process!

These fires and the foods they cook will spread so fast and so far that you yourselves will become as enlightening candles in God’s temple with flames dancing above your heads and your churches!

You will praise the God whose creative process fears not death, but is instead enlivened by the holy burial of outdated things. So lay to rest the Church as you’ve known her, that you may one day share a gospel worthy of being called “good news,”

exclaiming “Glory! Glory! Alleluia! Church crucified is risen, unrecognizably beautiful!”

So, with many other heartening words, he proclaimed the good news to the people."

May it be so! Amen!

The children’s minister delivers a message on navigating uncertainty and remaining tethered to ourselves and God in the midst of that, like a mother must do when pregnant. The liturgist then guides congregants in a contemplative practice, to honor Mother Mary, known for her contemplative nature (“treasuring all these things in her heart”). As part of that, they ask congregants to ponder the following questions: “How is God gestating in you? How are you being asked to support God’s (re)birth?” They then read the passage, but end right before the Song of Praise lyrics and make way for Gabriela to sing the words as she embodies Mother Mary while playing the Shruti Box drone instrument.

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior! For they have looked with favor on the lowly state of their servant. Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is Their name; indeed, their mercy’s for those  who marvel at them from generation  to generation. They have shown strength with their arm; they’ve scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. They’ve brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. They’ve come to the aid of their child Israel, in remembrance of their mercy, according to the promise they made to our ancestors, to Abraham and his descendants forever.”

Greetings, kindred ones. My name is MAR-(ee)-yaam. In your day, I hear that you call me “Mary.”

My name means many things. From the Hebrew, Egyptian, Aramaic & Semitic words mrr myr mor mara

My name means a wished fulfilled, one who is loved, one who loves, the sweetness of consumptive joy. 

My name also means bitterness. Bitter, as in unflinching aliveness for having passed through a crucible of grief into indestructible hope. That which is changed through breakage and breaks through into something wholly new, holy and whole.

My name means “their rebellion”, means stubbornness, a people’s rebellion against too-small-mindedness, re-belling / making reality beautiful again, even when it requires strength and stability that others may call stubbornness… For, God knows, that true beauty cowers to no mind nor person nor nation nor notion that cannot contain its vastness.

My name is itself vast like the sea, for my name also means the sea. The sea, with its salty waters, is like unending tears, like a womb that can hold the infinite. I am a sea, whose waves soothe and consume, create and destroy, whose waters are bitter and undrinkable yet give rise to everything. Bitter and medicinal is the sea.

… bitter and medicinal like the oils of the myrrh tree, the tree whose name is my own, whose oils in my day and in my land are that of the tabernacle ointment, whose scent in my culture signals the felicity of holy marriage, of holy consummation between God and what they love, the moment when God penetrates their way through the clouds of our consciousness and into the deepest parts of us, when they penetrate the Temple, shred the veil, create a cascade of ecstasy, an “oil of joy”. Bitter myrrh’s tears are the “oil of joy.”

My name, once again, means a wished fulfilled after the bitterness of a sea change that gives rise to unflinching aliveness and ecstatic joy.

Lots of words about me, but I wish to share some additional secrets. Not just about me. But also about you. About God.

The truth is… I am not exceptional, nor am I alone in what I have done, how I have failed, what I have accomplished, or what was asked of me and what I was invited into. I may be precious, but I am not solitary.

Nor are you. You are solitary, nor an exception that stands apart, devoid of bonds to other things. Nor is anything that ever was. Not even God. 

Nothing has ever existed purely on its own, as a solitary exception. Nothing, not even God. Even God had the deep as a companion before all other things, after all.

And that is magnificent, that nothing is a solitary exception. You want to know why?

Because it means all things get to build, collaboratively, with each other and God, something far more magnificent than anything alone ever could, than even the sum of our parts could ever amount to.

If we let it, our unexceptionalism can help us see that I, you, and God TOGETHER are PART of something special: that is, the creative mirror-dance of life in which the maker and the made (our God and us) remake, reshape, and rebirth each other throughout eternity, with neither a beginning nor an end to the infinite dance of creation. 

For, see: I was made by my God, and yet… God asked if I would be so loving, so available, as to help them be remade, to birth them anew in the world, through me! What kind of a God is that, but a God who loves in the most radical and intimate of ways? Who allows themselves to be utterly held and utterly changed by what they themselves have held, made, and changed? Do you see the mighty humility of this?

Isn’t that humility something? Something so much more vastly and infinitely exceptional than any individual, cultural, national, or notional exceptionalism could ever grant? Is not the humility of anything willing to admit that it cannot exist without anything else, that it can only be fashioned in the threads of a relational web, the truly exceptional thing?

And yet truly, I tell you: if I, a nobody from Nazareth, with no money, nor home, nor worldly stature, could be offered such an honor as to become God’s betrothed, then trust me, and trust God, and trust yourself when I say: you are always being offered such an honor, too, and you are always equipped to become a lover to God and a bearer of them. 

When I say, "My soul magnifies the Lord,”

I mean that God has chosen to want us, to need us, to love us such that they’re magnificence is ours, that our magnificence is their’s, that we are nothing but the bearers and the witness of each other. 

How magnificent is our God.

When I say “and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,”

I mean that the truest joy is the one that does not pretend to be self-made, but rather cherishes being made with God, by God, for God, for that is a holy of holies experience. 

How holy is our God.

When I say “for they have looked with favor on the lowly state of their servant,”

I mean that God is the most wondrous upside-down trickster lover, for they choose to share and enjoy and bereave the simple and excruciating intimacy of  the incarnate experience with us. Our God is no distant God; our God favors, meaning reveres our lowly state and exalts it so, for this messy realm is the only messianic place in which true intimacy is possible. 

How intimate and messy is our God.

When I say “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is their name,”

I mean once again that God is a lover beyond compare, for they would dare to bend down and get on their knees to meet us where we are, to ask us for the honor of our intimacy, our aliveness, our mortality. For is the vulnerability of the incarnate not astounding? Not worth living and dying for? Not worth casting aside distant aloofness and antisocial unchangeableness for? Is life relationally lived not worth the sacrifice of life solitarily endured? 

How relational is our God.

When I say, “indeed, their mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation,”

I mean… is the deepest holiest love not absolutely terrifying? Is our pride not shattered, our ego not obliterated, our sense of stature not annihilated by such a love, a love offered not because of our exceptionalism but precisely because of our un-exceptionalism? 

Is it not terrifying, the thought that God would want to be with us, like us, in us? What if they realize how messed up we are? What if they realize how inept we are, how unworthy we are, how poor or unintelligent or negligent we are? 

But what if… God wants all of that? Wants to be freed from their own exceptionalism, will ask any humble creature made clay to support them in trying incarnation, mortality, and finitude on for size?

This, I know: that God will thank and bless anyone who lets them do this even as that creature trembles in fear at the disarming nature of such a loving invitation.

God will thank and bless anyone who says yes to this most vulnerable request, even if we worry we can never pay God a proper recompense. 

God will thank and bless anyone who takes on such a debt, for truly I tell you, the debt God takes on in this exchange is actually far greater than our own. This they said to me, upon asking me to carry them to term in the incarnate world.

How generous is our God.

When I say, “They have shown strength with their arm; has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, has brought down the powerful from their thrones,”

I mean that God frees us of the burden of trying to be God almighty, to play God the great, to one-up God because humans always miss the mark and think that’s what’s asked of us, and isn’t that just the most exhausting of tasks? What a mercy it is when we are relieved of it. 

How merciful is our God.

When I say, “[they have] lifted up the lowly,”

I mean that God lifts the gazes of those who find themselves low, honoring them with the most pristine view of the infinite that they could ever hope for. For when we rest comfortably in our finitude, God is given a chance to enchant us with their infinitude, make us a part of it. 

How infinite is our God.

When I say, “they have filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”

I mean that God’s mercy looks like the filling of an empty space, like the filling of a womb. I mean that God’s mercy looks like the emptying of any overfilled space, like a very pregnant womb on the verge of birth finally beginning to labor. 

How compassionate is our God. 

When I say, “they have come to the aid of their child Israel, in remembrance of their mercy,”

I mean that God will always aid and seek out those who dare contend with them, who dare to see them fully and be seen fully by them, who dare to wrestle with the excruciating ecstasy of intimacy.

For “Israel” means nothing more and nothing less than “one who contends with God,” “God who contends with us.” Contend, meaning “to stretch with”, meaning “to become long with,” meaning to “belong with.”

Belonging, that deepest and truest of mercies, the hardest to remember. 

How daring is our God, to always piece our belonging back together, despite everything.

When I say, “according to the promise they made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to all descendants forever.”

I mean that in all the places within and outside of you where inner or outer nations can neither love nor comprehend you, God will cherish and fathom you. God will love you beyond reason in these very places, for God knows what it means to be un-adored, misunderstood, insulted for all that they are and betrayed for all they tried to do. God, the One who knows they will be born in a stranger’s manger soon, for no one can love me nor them yet. This One will always cherish the refugee in you, the stranger to yourself that you are. God and us will have each other, forever and ever, throughout all ages and all worlds without end, a covenant indestructible, exceptional and magnificent beyond compare.

How unbelievable is our God, yet utterly deserving of our belief in all the promises they have made to us and to themself, for all of these promises are true. This, I promise you.

So, now that you know me better and hopefully understand that I am not an exception to how God loves, I ask you to consider once more:

How is God gestating in you? 

How are you being asked to support God’s (re)birth?

And, to finally close, I ask you these final things:

Will you magnify God with me?

Will you bear God with me?

Will you birth God with me?

I pray you say YES, that we may respond to the angel and to God, together, by saying

“Here are we, the servants of the Lord; let it be with us according to your word.”

May it be so! Amen!ˆ

May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all of our hearts, be emanations of you, oh God, our source and our salvation, our beginning and our end. Amen.

Today’s passage and sermon are continuations from last week’s as we walk further into Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Last week we spoke of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, how there are many different kinds of gifts yet all emanate from one Spirit. We explored the relationship between unity and multiplicity, the link between distinction and uniformity, and we’re doing the same again today in a slightly different manner.

Paul, as he’s wont to do, is delving right into the heart of the Christian mystery here, jumping head first into that core place within our faith that I call a riddle. We’re dealing with seemingly opposite elements of God and of faith, only to realize they’re actually complementary facets of one another.

One Spirit, many gifts. One God, many parts. One body, many members. One, many. One, many. One, many. Christianity is always cycling between the one and the many.

This passage arrives to us from the lectionary at a good time. In a global context defined by much fractured-ness and much solidifying of socio-political allegiances, in an era defined by exhortations to come together against all odds and to cast those we don’t like outside the realm of belonging, we’re being challenged right now to discern what fracturedness and solidarity even mean, what togetherness and separateness even mean, what oneness and multiplicity even mean, what being apart (as in, separate) and being a part (as in, one part) even mean.

When things fall apart, it can be tempting to swing to extremes. We may band together hastily with other parts against a perceived common enemy, may even succumb to groupthink – a psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals desperate for a sense of cohesion (whether that be of a personal, social, political, cultural, or existential nature) join a group that promises such cohesion, but at the price of critical thought, requiring uniformity of opinions and a zero tolerance policy for disagreement. A cult mentality, if you will, light or extreme in scope, much more easily succumbed to than most of us realize. Or, conversely, in times of stress we may isolate ourselves, cut our losses by cutting ourselves off from the body of the world to prevent further injury, literal or figurative. We assume that being apart, rather than remaining a part of the larger whole, is the safest bet. Either option makes sense to a degree, but leads to desolate places in the end.

This passage, on the other hand, invites us into something more nuanced and complex than either of those extremes. Written to members of an early church community who were really struggling to come together and function as one unitive body, Paul isn’t telling folks to be excessively communal at the risk of groupthink or at the price of personal integrity; nor is he saying folks should forsake community out of self-preservation. Instead, he’s inviting the Corinthians, and us, to stay a/part in order to come together.

Let me repeat that:

Paul is asking us to stay a/part in order to come together.

As in, he’s asking us to remain one part amongst a body full of many other parts, in order to stay connected with a larger, unified and unifying level of reality.

When we’re aware of the specific (and relatively limited) part we play in a greater collective, we right-size ourselves in a manner that’s freeing because we know the unique role God’s given us and aren’t burdened by misaligned responsibilities.

When we get clear about the role God’s invited us to play in our communities, our families, our country, our reality, and when we actually stick to that without losing focus, we can often accomplish some truly useful things for ourselves and others because we aren’t distracted from what’s most helpful for us to do. We stop trying to be all things for all people (which usually ends up looking like we’re nothing helpful to anybody anyway). We get to be in community without jeopardizing our integrity, and the collective also isn’t jeopardized by our lack of integrity.

Some basic engineering principles might help us understand this: if one part of a building isn’t in integrity because it’s damaged or improperly installed, the entire structure is at risk of collapse. Relatedly, if any part of the building gets put in the wrong place or is used for the wrong purpose, the same risks show up. You wouldn’t, for example, use wooden siding to build a chimney. You wouldn’t use a PVC pipe in place of an iron beam. At least, I hope not. May God protect you and your house if you do!

My point is that, usually, when one part gets out of its designated lane and plays a role that isn’t reasonably theirs, things get risky and people get hurt. Don’t ask a hairstylist to perform neurosurgery; don’t ask a child to be responsible for adult matters; don’t ask an eye to replace a kidney.

The structural integrity of any system depends on each part honoring its unique capacities and limitations, depends on all parts letting other parts perform their specific task too (and not letting them deviate into our lane should they try).

If we’re regularly being asked to perform roles that aren’t ours to play, or if we’re asking that of others, or if someone is trying to take ownership of something that’s ours and we’re letting them, then we’re not practicing good relational hygiene, and it behooves us to get clear on what God has actually invited us or another to do, keep the focus on that, and let go of the rest by trusting that other parts within the infinite and eternal body of God will be pick up where we leave off, will do for the whole (or even for us) what we cannot do for the whole (or even for ourselves). God needs all of us in our integrity, lest their larger body collapse.

This is no easy task, to trust that we and everyone else serves a truly important purpose within the infinite body of God — even the lowliest parts, even those we think the lowliest thoughts of, even those who think the lowliest thoughts of us. It’s no easy task to trust that if we stop performing roles not meant for us that we or the larger body will survive.

Trusting in this way is radical, the same kind of radical trust Jesus showed when he served the first communion. Communion, that ritual during which Jesus broke a unified piece of bread — his body — into many parts, gave one to all his friends (including his future traitor), dismembered himself in order to be more fully remembered shortly thereafter.

“Do this in remembrance of me” is not an intellectual invitation to simply recollect the memory of God with our mind. “Remembrance” is first and foremost a somatic term, meaning the physical act of bringing parts back together. “Re-member” means “reunite separated members.”

In one fell swoop, communion ritualizes the practice of letting God and ourselves be broken a/part in a sanctified way, such that we can expand the notion of what it means to come together by virtue of the breakage. We break a/part to remember our part, to remember why we’re a part of all this, to remember why God gave us a chance to participate (part-icipate) in the miraculous process of their relational reality.

God brings themself more deeply together precisely by breaking themselves a/part at the proper moment, for a holy reason, in an anointed and anointing manner, which allows the breakage to be a blessing. We break a/part to be reminded of our part in all of this, and the whole is made stronger when all the parts are remembered to their deep purpose.

So, for us, as members of Christ’s infinite Body and God’s eternal Church, I pray that we may remember our part in all of this, that we may participate in reality from a place of integrity, because our integrity is integral to God’s own integrity.

I pray that we may grant others the dignity to pursue their own integrity and their God-given purpose. I pray that we may honor the role they play in the body of Christ, even when (or perhaps especially when) they rub against us.

I pray that we practice seeing God in all parts of reality, that we see just how far our God-filled vision can reach… And then reach beyond the bounds of that vision, experiment with how to extend our holy sight further and farther such that no part of reality remains apart from God in our sight, such that we understand that all parts of reality are manifestations of a unitive God whose multi-membered body needs every single part of itself in order to be whole, in order to remain holy.

May this all be so, and may our faith be a blessing upon all the parts of Christ’s body and God’s Church. Hosanna to our God, whose oneness is a multitude of which we are an integral part. Amen!

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be emanations of you, oh God, our source and our salvation, our beginning and our end. Amen.

Today’s passage, which we’re exploring in the context of a multi-week exploration of covenant, includes the hopeful, feel-good portion of the story about that time when God got mad at the world and decided to kill practically everything with a flood. Here, we’re witnessing God establish a post-flood covenant with every being that survived, and they do this by etching a rainbow in the sky.

If I didn’t know any better (and maybe I don’t), I’d say the rainbow was a lot like a dotted line similar to those at the bottom of a contractual agreement. Those lines where you sign your life away because of the fine print. And if the rainbow is indeed akin to such dotted lines, what’s wild is that it’s not us who are being asked or made to sign it. It’s God who’s signing their old life away. And they’re doing this willingly, for their own benefit. To quote,

“I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood [...] When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature.”

God didn’t draw a rainbow line to keep us in line. They did it to keep themselves in line, to keep themselves in integrity with a commitment to relate in a life-giving way. God admits they need a relational ethic, an externalized responsibility framework, to help them stay in integrity with how they show up in relationship.

How humble, how relatable, how relational is that?

God, in my view, is modeling a beautiful relationality here. Not because they’ve modeled perfect kindness in how they love (because, you know: they just committed mass murder). Rather, they’re modeling beautiful relationality here because they’re willing to change and be changed, to learn from their past, and to increase their present and future capacity for loving healthily. God demonstrates that they, like us, are always in a process of learning anew and again what it means to love well.

God and we are learning together, through a sacred-symbiotic process, what it means to love well.

What a wild honor this is for us and for God.

Much theology posits that God is unchanging, doesn't need our help when discerning or deciding anything, that their choices and process are beyond our reach and influence. But our scriptures say just the opposite. While we don’t control God’s choices, behaviors, and process (just like they don’t control ours by virtue of free will), God grants creation the holy honor of consensually-accompanying and mutually-counseling them in their relational process. God and we are learning together, through a sacred-symbiotic process, what it means to love well.

On multiple occasions, scripture reveals a God who’s actively learning how to be in relationship, thanks in part to their creation. This is obvious in the Old Testament, where God’s interactions with people clearly impact their decisions, like the conversation in which Moses changes God’s mind about killing all of his people by reminding God of the covenants. God’s is also guided towards holier relationality in the New Testament, like when the Syrophoenician woman, who, upon being called a dog by the Messiah (a common slur used against Syrophoenicians at the time), reminds him that even dogs receive care. For this, she’s blessed because she reminded the Messiah of his message and mission to love in the deepest way.

For better or for worse, it’s often others who help us realize we’re out of relational integrity. Apparently, it’s the same with God. Because God, on occasion, needs reminders, support, and counsel to be guided in their process (which is also our own process) towards healthy relationality. And thanks be to God, God wants this, is humble enough to receive those reminders, supports, and counsel, and thanks creation for them.

God is thankful for the inspiration creation grants them in their process of becoming and being relational. Just like we need God and others to learn how to love well, God needs and wants creation to help them learn how to love more beautifully. God and we are learning together, through a sacred-symbiotic process, what it means to love well.

That symbiotic love-process is what makes our God truly relational, truly intimate, truly wondrous.

God doesn’t have a perfect track record of preventing heartbreak, as evidenced by all the heartbreak in creation. But they do have a track record of showing up again and again, with a willingness to learn how to love more beautifully and deeply than they could yesterday. God has a track record of taking stock of what they’ve done, humbly making amends when needed, and showing up more fully and beautifully over time.

Clearly, God doesn’t expect perfection (theirs or ours). But they do seem committed to the process (which is shared between them and us and all creation) of deepening into love. And they’re always inviting us to consciously partake in that process with them (for all of our benefit) by taking stock, humbly mending frays, and showing up again as changed people, as truer versions of our relational selves. God does this not just for us, but to ensure their own integrity, wholeness, and holiness. Because it feels good to be in our relational integrity.

God models for us how to be in covenant, not by being perfect nor expecting that of others but by being available to witnessing the joys and the hurt that they (or we or others) have caused or endured, learning from that, and changing as a result, so we can love more beautifully than before.

So, when we’re devastated, disappointed, and displeased (especially with God), we not only have the right but the invitation to let God know, to offer a heartbroken and heartfelt share, such that this process by which God and us learn to love more deeply can be more deeply informed, can be more deeply strengthened.

Many are the stories of people who were emotionally raw in their interactions with God, and who were then blessed by God for this, because God is more invested in our authentic presence than half-honest praise. The Syrophoenician woman is one example. There’s also Job, who gave God a piece of his mind and even though God schooled him, God also lauded him for his honesty, and it was that authentic rawness which led God to restore Job’s life. There’s also Jacob, who had a fist fight with God and was blessed for this with the holy name “Israel” (which means “the one who contends with God”). And of course, there was Jesus, whose last statement on the cross was a bitter and bereaved question (“why have you forsaken me?”) right before God reunited with him in the deepest way.

True God appreciates true offerings, including our true courage with what we dare say to them. Even our protests, fist fights, and dignified quips with the holy have been shown to deepen the process by which holy intimacy is achieved, by which we covenant with God. There’s so much more to say about protest and faith, and you’ll hear more on that from Rev. Thew soon as we make our way into Lent. But for now, I’ll close by saying…

May we let God show us how to love more beautifully. May we, creation, show God how to love more beautifully. May the covenant become stronger for it, the waters calmer for it, and the rainbow brighter for it. May all of this be so. Hosanna to our God, an apprentice to the process of Love, just like us.

Amen!

The Bible is an oppositional text, and intentionally so. Any biblical scholar worth their weight in salt will state that the Bible is sourced from a cacophony of voices that cry out from many lands, eras, and existential orientations. Like an orchestra composed of many instruments, each of which play distinct (and sometimes clashing) parts of a symphony, the Bible is replete with passages that oppose each other. It’s even replete with passages that oppose themselves! Today’s reading is one such passage.

Jacob’s wrestling with a stranger in one of the most fascinating instances of opposites colliding in scripture. This is due in part to the Hebrew language in which it was written: Hebraic words don’t contain vowels and can therefore mean seemingly-opposite things, depending on how the interpreter fills in the vowel-voids between consonants. An entire Jewish interpretive tradition known as midrash flows from this, openly welcoming contrary understandings of scripture because Hebrew invites such interpretative vastness.

In our English translation, it’s written that Jacob “wrestled” with a “man.” But “wrestled” could also be translated as “raise dust from the ground” (which can happen while fighting, but also dancing and playing). Or, it could mean “to hold closely,” “to embrace.” Fascinating.

The word translated as “man” here can also mean many things, including “human.” Or “divine agent,” like an angel who’s required to sing God’s praises during the day and needs this scuffle to wrap up fast so they can get to it. Or, the word could mean “shadow spirit,” similar to a goblin or troll, explaining the concern about daylight in a different light. The stranger could also be God, given what Jacob exclaims before naming the place.

I could go on with the words that possess seemingly-contradictory meanings, but like the figure who wants out by dawn, we don’t want to be here until tomorrow’s daybreak.

So, I’ll stop talking about all the words that can mean contradictory things and simply ask, what are we to do with all this interpretive possibility? What are we to make of this passage that escapes static definition and stationary meaning?

Like Jacob, we’re invited to wrestle with the tensions in the text. Not to make them disappear, but to prepare ourselves for reconciliation and for a blessing (if we dare request one). Because blessings come from opposing things wrestling with each other in service of reconciliation. We wrestle to be reconciled.

To be clear: a blessing isn’t the receipt of something we already have; that’s accumulation. It isn’t the receipt of something we want; that’s gain, or a gift. It isn’t the removal of what we don’t want; that’s relief, or deliverance.

A blessing, rather, is the experience of previously disparate elements within ourselves, our lives, and the world being reconciled to each other through holy intervention. It’s an inner and outer reunion, after a separation that kept disparate parts incomplete unto themselves. A blessing makes the parties more complete unto themselves by virtue of a transfigured relationship between them. A blessing is a recognition that things are more complex and complementary than we previously knew them to be.

Again, we wrestle to be reconciled.

Jacob, here, is weathering his final night before meeting his older brother Esau, a daunting man in every way Jacob’s opposite. A man who may kill Jacob for robbing him of their father’s blessing through trickery.

And Jacob, for all his trickster smarts, is spooked, navigating a dark night of the soul. And in that dark night, he stands on the edge between opposing worlds: land and stream; day and night; humanity and divinity; fighting and embracing; betrayal and loyalty; injury and healing; living and dying. It’s there, on the razor’s edge that separates (and conjoins) opposite realms, that Jacob meets a figure who contradicts categories, a wild combination of opposing things. How apt.

And what does Jacob do with that walking contradictory, on the edge of opposing worlds? He remains, he reckons, and he wrestles without ceasing, without jumping to one side or the other, without claiming the easy (yet deceitful) comfort of certitude. He doesn’t defeat, nor is he defeated. He doesn’t run one way, nor the other. He stays with the trouble, to quote Donna Haraway, until the contradictory figure says (in so many words), “your time on the edge is complete; declare the purpose of your reckoning.”

And it’s then, after being polished through this reckoning like a gem made smooth with a sander, that Jacob is reconciled within himself and does what he couldn’t do honestly before. He demands a blessing, without flinching nor thieving nor lying. He claims what he wants, with no shame in his heart nor deception in his words.

And lo! Jacob gets the blessing. A miraculous quasi-repeat of getting the (stolen) familial blessing, a foreshadowing of the reconciliation he’ll soon have with his brother Esau, who actually never cared for his birthright in the first place (but was duped for a time into thinking he did due to culturally-induced pride).

Again, we wrestle to be reconciled.

On the razor’s edge between realities, social and cultural and familial norms and expectations that tell us what to want or what to do fall away, vestiges of old worlds we once inhabited. On that edge, there’s only what could truly enliven us… Or, put another way, what will forever torment us if we don’t claim our longing for them.

By asking for (and making himself available to receive) a blessing without deceit, Jacob lets himself experience what his post-robbery shame nearly robbed him of: an assurance that despite his second-son / second-class status, and despite his desperation-inspired deception to get his father’s blessing, he is cherished by God, the ultimate parent.

Not because he’s clean of wrongdoing! But because he wanted to be part of something greater than himself: a lineage. Because he dared to lock arms in a wrestle-dance with divinity. Because he repented, by asking for what he wanted without deceit.

Jacob gave himself a chance to see that this longing for a blessing wasn’t simply “his” longing; it was God's longing for him all along, coursing through him. Fancy that? Perhaps the line attributed to the Sufi poet Rumi is true: “what we seek, seeks us.”

So, I ask us now to contemplate: What do we desperately long for, but feel too ashamed or unworthy to request or possess? What have we claimed through deceit because certain norms suggested we couldn’t have it? And what might change if we entertain the very likely possibility that our longings aren’t simply “ours” but God’s for us, coursing through us?

What then? Are we willing to wrestle with our pride, our shame, our regrets, our grotesquely glorious desires for however long it takes? Until we hear a blessed and a blessing voice from beyond tell us that a new day is upon us? That it’s time to state what we’ve longed for without hesitation nor deception? To quote Chance the Rapper in his song Blessings, [singing in tune] “Are you ready for your blessings?”

We may not get our blessings in the way we want, and we may get bruised along the way. (Jacob got a major joint dislocated as part of his blessing, after all!) But we’d still come out more deeply alive from it, our former days paling in comparison to what lies ahead.

Do we dare embrace our previously-veiled longings, and make ourselves available for reconciliation with ourselves? With our kin and our comrades? With our God?

I trust we can. I know we can. Because faith makes us capable of this.

So, to close, I pray for the following:

May we cherish our longings. Every single one of them. May these longings reveal to us how cherished we are. And may God’s longings be fulfilled through our own, forever and forever, across every seemingly-contradictory world, through every age to come.

Amen!

Have you ever felt like being at a remove gave you a better sense of something? Like taking a few steps back in a museum to better appreciate the art? Or climbing to the top of something to get a better view of what was below? Or readily seeing the loop someone’s caught in precisely because you’re not caught in it? Maybe your friends or relatives or therapists see the loop you’re caught in better than you can precisely because they’re not caught in it? It’s that way for me; I trust I’m not alone.

All of this is to say, we often grasp something more clearly when we’re a bit removed from it. Ironically or aptly, being too close to something can cloud our sense of it. Pure objectivity is a myth because we can’t totally escape subjectivity, but a little remove helps us see things more clearly. A little space helps us make better choices when relating to things. Put another way: being healthily intimate requires a healthy dose of distance.

And in my view, Saul (also known as Paul) is an example par excellence of how a little distance can help us cultivate a lot of intimacy.

For those of you who don't know or need a refresher: Paul was an early Christ-follower and is traditionally called the “Apostle to the Gentiles” (meaning, the non-Jewish pagans of his era). Heavily influential to Martin Luther, his grace-laced theology formed the basis for the Protestant Reformation. And despite having been co-opted by the religious right for political and profit-generating purposes, Paul’s authentic writings (as opposed to those written posthumously in his name) are among the most radically liberating passages in the New Testament, all which contributed to massively his remarkable popularity while alive. And if you count all of the New Testament books attributed to Paul – including those written by him and those written in his name – half of the books in the New Testament are accredited to him. To state the obvious: Paul is the most influential figure in global Christianity besides Jesus. 

And, here’s the kicker: that’s true despite the fact that he never met Jesus! Indeed, Saul never clapped eyes on Jesus while he walked the earth! Not only that, in his pre-conversion role as a religious authority figure, Saul was infamous for persecuting the rogue Jews known as Christ-followers. Because of this, it took a long time for early Christ-followers to trust Paul, let alone take his teachings seriously; and there are many accounts describing the tensions between him and the 12 disciples who, frankly, didn’t like him.

It’s therefore natural to ask: how in God’s name did Paul get so good at preaching the good news in Christ’s name?

I’d argue that it’s precisely because Saul never met Jesus that he preached the good news so well.

It’s precisely because he was at a healthy remove from the person of Jesus that he could easily see, understand, and integrate the principles of grace and love in light of a sudden, mystical encounter with the ascended Christ!

It’s precisely because Paul never engaged with Jesus’s pre-Crucifixion personality that he was literally and figuratively blindsided upon meeting the distilled principle of God’s grace that we call Christ, such that he was utterly transfigured into an unrecognizable apostle who contradicted almost everything his former, persecuting, morally-righteous self stood for. 

Put simply: it was precisely because of Paul’s ability to place principles before personalities and grace before grandeur (better than anyone in the early Jesus movement) that he became the most effective minister the world has ever seen besides Jesus himself.

In the same way that God prioritized the principle of grace upon meeting with Saul (rather than judge the very imperfect personality of Saul), all throughout his ministry Paul placed principles before personalities and grace before grandeur in a manner quite unique amongst the early disciples, the inner circle of which he didn’t belong to. 

In fact, it was Paul’s lack of belonging to the original “12 Disciples Club” (mixed with his sin-riddled past) that granted him such profound authority amongst the Christ-curious folk of his day, especially Gentiles who worried they’d never be “good enough” for the God of the Jews.

Because, look at Paul! A sinner with a violent past who didn’t even know Jesus and committed grotesque crimes against God, yet was so beloved by this same God that, upon encountering them, he was so dumb struck and wide-eyed that the judgment-tinted contacts lenses he righteously judged the world through fell right out of his eyes. And he could finally see just how beloved he is, how loving God is, how beloved everything is — sinners and saints, Jews and Gentiles, enslaved and freed persons alike!

So, if even Paul was so beloved by God after all he did, who wouldn’t qualify for membership in God’s circle of belonging? Who wouldn’t want to be cared for by this God? Who wouldn’t be convinced of the beauty of God’s love after hearing of it from the likes of Paul?

Not many, as evidenced by history.

Compared to the 12 disciples, whose accounts often focus on the personality of Jesus and how close they were personally to him, Paul didn’t have the exclusive luxury of saying, “I’m a card-carrying member of the 12 Disciples Club! I ate meals with Jesus for years! I’m special, can’t you tell! And who are you, commoner?”

Compared to the 12 disciples, who were notorious for leveraging their proximity to Jesus in furtherance of personal ambition (such that Jesus rebuked them repeatedly for their pride and delusions of grandeur), Paul was relatable to the average person because the average person has never met Jesus and never will. But like Paul, the average person has a very good chance at encountering the distilled principle of grace called Christ on the road of our lives.

And how freeing it is, to encounter the unadulterated principle of grace on the road of our lives, rather than show off the exclusivity of our spirit club by proclaiming which famous personalities we know in it.

And how freeing it is, to abandon delusions of grandeur and forsake attempts to prove ourselves to anyone, such that we can simply enjoy the boundless bounty of God’s undeserved grace as the small, humble creatures that we are, loved profoundly in spite of ourselves.

And how freeing it is, to place principles before personalities and grace before grandeur, prioritizing the values of an infinite and eternal God of love before the ego-needs of finite and ephemeral personas.

And if anyone’s confused about the values of a God of love, the answer is simple (which doesn’t mean it’s without challenge): the answer is love, pure and simple. But not just any kind of love! Not a cheap, flimsy, defanged or demure love, but a rich, robust, merciful and powerful love. A love that refuses to neglect itself as fervently as it refuses to persecute others. A love that has the God of love as its beginning and its end, its center and its periphery, its top and its bottom, its everything and its anything, such that no matter what we’ve done or what anyone else has done, we will always be free enough in our hearts to proclaim, “God has met me on the road of my life and loves me beyond what I deserve. Never again shall I doubt God’s love for me, because I have felt it. And because I have felt it, never shall I doubt God’s love for anything and everything.”

So, to close, I pray the following:

May God meet us on the road of our life and blind us to the old roads that led us astray.

May we see with God’s eyes such that universal belovedness is revealed to us.

And may we place the principles of grace before the grandeurs of personalities such that our own personalities are transfigured by grace.

May all of this be so. Amen!

Have you ever washed dishes? By that, I mean, have you ever really washed dishes? By that, I mean, have you ever felt the wonder of being alive while washing dishes? And by that, I mean, have you ever had an ecstatic experience while washing dishes?

For many, the answer is “no,” followed by, “what are you even talking about?” Because some (including me) think there’s almost nothing more banal or bereft of meaning than dishwashing. It’s an unfortunate, unappealing facet of incarnate reality that’d be nice to do without.

And yet, how we wash dishes reveals how available we are to the mysterious presence undergirding reality (which, in the Christian tradition, is called God). In the words of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, “Washing the dishes is at the same time a means and an end – that is, not only do we do the dishes in order to have clean dishes, we also do the dishes just to do the dishes, to live fully in each moment while washing them.” 

And why would we do this? Why devote our full attention to the dishes while washing them?

Because when we wash dishes without splitting our focus across other tasks or topics, “there’s no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves” (end quote, by Thich Nhat Hanh). 

When we practice stilling our wandering minds while doing simple tasks like dishwashing, we practice tethering our focus to the miracle of existence, to God’s creative capacity. And if we can do this while washing dishes, we can learn to do it more easily with more complex things.

By training our attention to “never be moved” from God (shoutout to Psalm 15), we practice becoming free from one of – if not the – most insidious of prisons: the hellscape of a conscience that doesn’t know what is truly worthy of its focus.

And make no mistake: idols that distract us into that hellscape are everywhere, contributing to us feeling overwhelmed with responsibility, dizzy with doom-scrolling, and suffocated by circumstance. These idols are strong, and they are convincing. But they aren’t the mysterious God of love we’re asked to focus on, whose influence is infinite and whose existence is eternal.

The question of what’s worthy of focus is what today’s passages address. Yet the story of Mary and Martha has been interpreted in utterly perplexing ways. It’s as though many have been distracted while reading the text, leading them to miss an obvious point.

For example, despite the blatant critique of Martha, some argue that her example here is necessary, even laudable, claiming we must perform faithful works “just like Martha,” with Mary serving as the adjacent, complementary, and necessary example of prayer… As if action and contemplation were different things!

This take was especially hot during the Catholic Counterreformation, when the grace-focused theology of the Protestant Reformation came under attack for dismissing the importance of “works” by claiming we’re saved by “faith alone” (rather than through works or adherence to rules).

Conversely, often on the Protestant side, there are those who think poorly of Martha because she’s “too work-focused.” Worse yet, some critique her for doing housework. In this camp, only abstract notions of faith and prayer are considered important on the journey of faith – earthly needs and tasks be damned!

This line of thinking has been justifiable critiqued by feminists and others for its unjust denigration of earthly needs and labor, labor which is utterly necessary to the incarnate experience and often performed by women, the poor, and people of color. There’s therefore been a rallying around Martha by those seeking to reclaim the sanctity of earthly labor. 

And while such reclamations are well and good, they still don’t address the fact that Jesus is nevertheless critiquing Martha. Whenever that is addressed, folks in this camp often claim, quite bizarrely, that Jesus doesn’t value earthly labor.

To be clear: Jesus isn’t critiquing Martha for addressing earthen needs and performing earthly labors. He was a poor, working class carpenter who turned a humble meal into a core sacrament, after all. He’s not above these things, which is precisely why God became incarnate.

So the question remains: what is Jesus critiquing here?

Well, it’s obvious because it’s right in the text:

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted”.

You are worried and distracted.

Worried and distracted.

The problem isn’t what Martha was doing. It’s how she was doing it.

There was a lot Martha could worry about and be distracted by in those days. Oppression by the Romans, crackdowns on heresy by religious authorities, complexifying logistics of the growing heretical Jesus movement… Early Christ-followers were navigating a lot, and a lot of it involved a lot of risk. 

But in that sea of possible stress-monsters, Jesus repeatedly reminded folks to keep their eyes on the ultimate prize: the remembrance that nothing and no one ultimately governs them but God; that ultimately, they belong and respond to nothing less than God.

Jesus didn’t proclaim this to spiritually bypass the harsh reality of living under imperial rule, with the threat of death and religious ridicule pursuing him constantly. He proclaimed the ultimate nature of people’s belonging to God, who is pure love, because if people can’t remember that, they remain enslaved to lesser things forever. 

To claim we belong to God alone rebukes the assumption that someone can be enslaved by another person or institution (whether literally or figuratively through things like debt). Claiming that nothing governs us but God frees us from the idolatrous merry-go-round of partisan politics that chronically conflate presidents with prophets (no matter their party) and kings with gods. To say, “I seek the kin-dom of God” is another way of saying, “I don’t care for nationalist patriotism that pits me against people from other lands.”

The profundity of Christ’s ministry, in which marginalized and privileged folk alike were remembered to who they actually belonged to was unparalleled. His message outwitted oppressor methods that bank on people believing that any person, government, nation, or institution owns them in some way. Christ reminds us that ultimately, nothing and no one governs us but the God of love, and it is only that God to whom we ultimately belong and respond. 

Remembering this ultimate truth is freedom in the ultimate sense. And forgetting it is the most dangerous, damaging, and damning form of idolatry. And the world is full of such idolatry, especially now, in an era riddled with worry and distraction.

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted”.

Martha wasn’t washing dishes to encounter God in the dishes. She wasn’t praying through her work and couldn’t see God in her tasks.

Mary “chose the better part” because she maintained proper focus. She never moved her focus away from God, so everywhere she went and every task she performed became a portal into the kin-dom of God, into her ultimate freedom.

If we cannot dismiss the voices inside and outside of us saying, “there’s no time to gaze at God, there’s too much to do!” then we have lost the plot, and every finite event or task will eat us alive. This applies as much to daily tasks as it does to faith as it does to activism as it does to anything else (which are all of a piece, by the way!). 

So, can we move through our days without moving the focus of our conscience away from the God of love, the God who cannot and will not and does not die, no matter what an oppressor does?

If we’re to tell a good and holy story about how we navigated these times, the answer to this question must be “yes.” 

Because, ultimately, only God is worthy of our focus. And that’s because God, and only God, can ultimately get us free.

So, to close, I pray the following:

May we see dishwashing as prayer that we may see the kin-dom of God  glimmering in every task.

May our focus never be moved from God such that our own mortal movements become holy.

And may we choose the better part: an unwavering, ecstatic attention upon the God who ultimately liberates us.

May we remember that only God is ultimately worthy of our focus.

Hosanna to our God. Amen.

May the words of my mouth

And the meditations of all of our hearts

Be reflections of you, oh God,

Our source and our salvation,

Our beginning and our end.

Amen.

Have you ever failed to conform in some way? Broken the rules or failed to comply with the law (whether it be legal or cultural law)? 

Have you ever felt like you straddle binaries, a walking contradiction? Or like you belong to an entirely different category than the options presented to you?

Relatedly… Has something ever possessed you enough that you break free from the sanctioned categories, towards new horizons and into new possibilities? 

And have you ever seen the vast world that exists beyond simplistic dualisms like right/wrong, good/bad, worthy/unworthy, perfect/imperfect, pure/impure? 

I’ll stop with the questions and just say, I hope your answer to all of them is “yes.” And if not, I hope that changes soon! Because the refusal or inability to conform to binaries is key to our very aliveness, personal and communal. Breaking out of binaries and too-small categories is required for any lineage, species, tradition, and culture to survive the test of time.

To demonstrate this, allow me to give just one biological example of how non-conformity, binary and boundary-dissolution, and rule-breaking facilitates aliveness: enter, mitochondria and prokaryotes, two ancient microorganisms that, about two billion years ago, said, “to hell with the boundaries dividing us and the binary of you vs me; we wish to make love with one another!” And they fused together, despite cellular purists on each side of their divide screaming, “what are you doing, we don’t associate with the likes of them!?” 

Yet this rogue, unlawful union between previously distinct microorganisms is what made us possible. The very cells of our bodies are the product of a fusion between teeny tiny mitochondria and prokaryotes. All humans, animals, plants, fungi, seaweed, and many unicellular beings are the direct result of this defiant love-making. We are here because they (and countless other beings) dared to break from their version of convention to perpetuate life even further on its grotesquely glorious journey. 

Resonantly, on a more macroscopic level, non-conformity and rule-breaking is how any species, lineage, ecosystem, culture, or tradition remains alive and intact (even as it changes shape). That might sound ironic or oxymoronic, but think about it: it’s evolution, simply put; evolution is just one long case of genetic rule-breaking. And if we don’t break rules to break free from convention, metaphorically and literally, we eventually suffocate and go extinct from it, metaphorically and literally. 

Case in point: every longstanding culture or tradition we know of today was ignited by some sort of prophet or visionary; all prophets and visionaries worthy of their title broke the rules and refuse to abide by the limited and limiting conventions of their time and place. Culture and tradition are sustained because prophets and visionaries break from convention and save their people from that awful demise known as death-by-“we’ve always done it this way.”

Often to much dismay from those around them (and to much praise from those in other eras), visionaries reinvigorate the ancient flame of creativity by initiating entire artistic movements; they trigger scientific revolutions by shattering old paradigms and revealing deeper truths about the cosmos; and they even save religions and congregations from snuffing out into insignificance by transforming sanctuaries and liturgies into new devotional processes. In so doing, prophets and visionaries help lineages access the deeper essence of who we are, the essence that pulsates beneath the simplistic binaries and claustrophobic norms we grow accustomed to. 

And that, my friends, is what today’s passages speak to.

Here, Jesus models what it means to remember and keep whole the deepest tenors of his tradition, by dissolving the deadening logic of purist interpretations that long plagued said tradition. He divested from dualistic notions of what’s right/wrong to do on the Sabbath, reminding people of Sabbath’s fundamental essence: a time to rebalance the bodies of those so prone to internal and external disequilibrium.

Whatever is out of balance, Sabbath is the time to rebalance it. That can look like fasting if we’re overfull to begin with; but if we’re undernourished, Sabbath invites us to replenish ourselves (even if it means laboring a little, to get a little nourishment). By reinterpreting the letter of the law anew, Jesus invited people back to the law’s whole-making spirit.

Because Jesus so thoroughly troubled conventional understandings of his day by dismantling various binaries (especially categories of right/wrong), he was repeatedly described by authorities (and even commoners) as unlawful, impure, and immoral. Resonantly, but also as a clap-back to that, in some contemporary theological circles, Jesus’s non-conformist message has been positively described as “queer” and “trans”. Not so much because he’s thought to have slept with men or been assigned female at birth, but because queerness and transness are non-conformist experiences par excellence.

If we stop thinking of queerness and transness simply as what genders we’re attracted to or aligned with despite our assigned sex, and realize instead that they encompass myriad ways of declaring, “I free myself, my body, and the love that grips me from the limited frameworks of my too-small culture,” well, isn’t that precisely what Jesus did through and through? 

Did he not defy the love-norms of his day by declaring all people worthy of love, even the most sinful and despised? 

Did he not transgress gendered norms by treating women as his equals, by welcoming children to him like a feminine mother, by weeping at his male friend’s tomb like a gay lover, and by undergoing multiple transitions (known as the trans-figuration and the resurrection) such that his closest kin didn’t even recognize him when he finally came out to them? 

Ain’t that the essence of queerness through and through? Ain’t that the essence of transness through and through? 

The God of Christian scripture is many things, including queer and trans, at the deepest, most subtle, and also most obvious levels. 

Friends, if we are to survive an era riddled with dualistic binaries and purist notions of what’s right and wrong, we must embrace the good news of queerness, transness, and non-conformist binary-breakage, so as to trans-figure ourselves and all of reality into the most surprising and radiant version of it all that it could possibly be. 

How many beings can we willingly fuse with, literally or metaphorically, to create the new, beautiful, complex life-forms of the future? What binaries can we dismantle within our minds and hearts, such that replenishment comes easier to all of us? What queer trans-figurations can we embody, no matter of our gender and sexuality, such that notions of “love” and “self” and “other” are further freed, so that we and each other become more deeply free at the very sight of us, even if they cannot recognize ourselves or each other? If queer and trans are verbs, how might we further queer and trans-figure the cosmos?

I’ll let you answer those questions however makes the most sense to you. But to close, I offer a prayer:

May we defy the categories that shackle us, whatever those might be. 

May this unshackling free not only us, but those around us, too.

May we find new beings to fuse with; not to erase ourselves, but to make possible a wondrous future.

May we break from convention, that the deep essence of tradition be remembered and kept holy, kept whole.

And may our participation in life’s mysterious process transfigure all of us and all of reality.

May it be so. A blessed Sabbath to you all. Amen!

Have you ever had to choose between doing what God requested of you, and doing what others expected of you?

Have you ever been called disloyal, disrespectful, or disgraceful as a direct result of following God’s call for your life?

In other words, have you ever been annunciated to by an angel?

And have you ever been brave (or mad) enough to say “yes” to that annunciation? Even if it risked ridicule and rejection?

If we’re to live by Mary’s example and be bearers of God, then our answer to these questions must be “yes.” Because while true annunciations are a holy honor, they come with major risks by definition. (They wouldn’t be acts of faith otherwise.) And if we’re people of faith, we’ve agreed to take such risks and defy the worldly commands we’re expected to obey.

Yet somehow, for centuries, Mary’s been portrayed as anything but the ecstatically defiant teen-rebel that she was. She’s been whitewashed into a “meek,” “obedient” “virgin” who unquestioningly complies with (excessively masculine) “authority.” She’s somehow become the poster child for how to obey your superiors, when in actuality, she was anything but that. 

Indeed, Mary is the most subversive figure in our scriptures besides Jesus, an antithesis of worldly obedience. And nowhere is that more clear than in her Annunciation and Magnificat song in which she praises not only God, but herself. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” and “all generations will call me blessed.” Right from the start, Mary’s humility about her lowly state is wondrously self-exalting.

Not only has the term “humility” been bizarrely applied to Mary, but so has the idea of “virginity.” Nowadays, you’d think sexual abstinence was the most important thing about her. But in her day (and in the millennia preceding her time), virginity wasn’t inherently related to sexual abstinence, especially in mythic narratives but also in human affairs. Ancient Greek and Hebrew words for “virgin” used in the Bible designated social rather than sexual status; the words encompassed the possibility of sexual abstinence, but didn’t require it, referring instead to unwed (and usually childless) women of childbearing age even if they’d already had sex. Many scholars thus describe ancient definitions of virginity in the vein of “she who is complete unto herself,” given that a “virgin” hadn’t yet split off from her original natal context into a new family with her husband.

Relatedly, the divine pantheons of the Ancient Near East repeatedly featured so-called “virgin” goddesses who took the quality of self-completeness to even higher levels. These goddesses exuded personal wholeness and holiness through their fierce sovereignty. What’s more, most of them were very sexually active. Examples of such sexually-active virgin goddesses worshipped in Mary’s time all around Israel include Artemis from Greece, Inanna from Sumer, and Isis from Egypt. 

These goddesses were bound to no authority except the most immovable cosmic laws which all deities, no matter their rank, had to abide by. And even when such goddesses had consorts and bore children, they maintained the title of virgin because they remained complete unto themselves in the ultimate sense: their self-integrity never diminished no matter what, and they never lost a sliver of sovereignty over their lives. To label these virgins as “meek” or “obedient” would’ve been considered profoundly ignorant or sacrilegiously humorous to those who worshiped them.

Mary, according to our tradition and scriptures, is not a virgin goddess per se, but her role as the Mother of God draws clear parallels to these ungovernable, complete-unto-themselves, not-meek and even disobedient virgin goddesses of yore. She’s one of, if not the, last mythic figures to embody virgin goddess qualities, and the parallels between Mary and these figures are palpable. 

For example, in an act of radical sovereignty, when Gabriel invites her to bear the Godchild, Mary asks no one (neither her father nor Joseph) for permission to consummate her and God’s love. She did this even though, by Jewish law, such insubordinate, out-of-wedlock pregnancies were grounds for execution. Saying, “Let it be according to your will,” was a divine, defiant and dangerous act of disloyalty against her future husband, her family of origin, and her wider culture, done without the approval of any man or any human besides herself.

The Magnificat also draws parallels to the ancient, ungovernable virgin goddesses' resounding proclamations about their own power; it uses the same structure as a goddess’s self-declaration, beginning with a celebration of one’s own power, speaking in herown voice, and in the first person. And like the virgin goddesses, Mary prophesied a smashing reversal of social order in favor of the oppressed and to reestablish cosmic balance. To top it all off, Mary declares her alignment with cosmic authority as the hinge of history around which these prophecies turn.

Now, I’m no psychologist, but I wouldn’t label any of this as normal behavior for a “meek” and “obedient” girl from backwater Nazareth. This is nothing less than a sovereign woman's speech; an ungovernable goddess’s speech. A speech that would likely be categorized as “delusions of grandeur” nowadays by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, constituting possible grounds for institutionalization. 

Even in her day, Mary was no stranger to social shaming, slander, and misdiagnoses. Many Bible verses hint at how she was plagued by accusations of sexual immorality, including in John’s account when a crowd rebukes Jesus with the retort, “We are not illegitimate children.” (Silent parentheses, “like you.”)

Jesus’s genealogy in Matthew’s Gospel also speaks to such accusations and defends Mary’s honor in a remarkable way. For one, Matthew’s genealogy includes women, which is almost unheard of in ancient Jewish genealogy. Not only that, he includes four very specific women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. The most likely reason for their inclusion, according to the renowned biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, is that all of these women were “involved [in] sexual activities that were viewed as scandalous by outsiders but that furthered the purposes of God.” These activities included sex work, adultery, and brazen taboo requests for marriage. Ehrman goes on to suggest that including these women in Jesus’s genealogy had to do with defending Mary’s honor, because, “she too was thought to have engaged in illicit sexual activity (and became pregnant out of wedlock). (...) Once again, God had used a potential sex scandal to further [their] plans”.

There’s no way around it, friends: our God is a scandalous god who repeatedly uses scandalous means (like out-of-wedlock pregnancies) and scandalous people (like the ecstatically-rebellious Mary) to pour their scandalously abundant love onto a disbelieving world. 

God isn’t born anew when we respect the rules of those seeking to own us, nor when we abide by pre-approved boxes built for us by worldly authority. 

God is born anew when we defy others’ expectations of us, when we care less about what others think of us and more about how God loves us, loves through us. God is born anew when we proclaim our belovedness, even when others ridicule or reject us out of ignorance, arrogance, or malice. God is born anew through our worldly defiance, not our meek obedience. 

So, if we are to participate in God’s process, let’s ask ourselves: What lovingly scandalous behavior can we risk to birth God? What unholy order can we overturn? What worldly authority can we defy? And how can we unapologetically proclaim our belovedness, such that God is magnified through our joyful self-exaltations?

Only you can answer these questions for yourself. But, to close, I offer two prayers, one a remix of the Beatitudes, followed by a remix of the Hail Mary:

“Blessed are you to defy those who lay claim to you, you who allow God’s longing to be your own, and you who break rules according to God’s purpose. You will be called bearers of God.

Blessed are you who are judged for how you bring children into the world, you who bear children out of wedlock, you who raise children while poor, and you who create unconventional families. Your families will be holy.

Blessed are you who are children of such circumstances; to you belongs the sacrality of an unending Nativity. 

And blessed are you whose choices are criticized idolatrously by the masses, and you who are divinely-inspired yet misunderstood for how God loves through you. Yours is the kin-dom of love.

Hail Mary, complete unto herself, the Lord is within thee.

Blessed are you amongst rebels, and blessed are the fruits of your defiance.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us, the annunciated, now in this hour of your becoming.

Hail Mary, full of God, the world is within thee.

Amen.”