This coat I wear

I don't remember when I first got this coat. It must have been when I was very young, because I've had it for almost as long as I can remember. I've no idea how someone else might have enjoyed it; for my part, I have found it to be perfectly suitable for long and meandering walks.

It didn't mean much to me for the longest time. I wore it like I was expected to, but it wasn't until I was almost 17 that I really began to appreciate what having a coat like this means, and what it could mean for me personally.

For a while I ran with a crowd that wore coats like it, but they were a fairly unpleasant group: a little snobbish, very cliquish and carrying a huge chip on their collective shoulder. I took the coat off for a while, but discovered on the eve of college that it was worth more than I had realized. Over the next four years, I patched it up, made alterations and tried to get it to fit but it never did.

I realized eventually how bad a job I had done with it, and I took it to a tailor. He didn't say anything about the alterations I'd made to it, but he took them out and mended the coat properly so that it fit comfortably for the first time that I could remember.

Some years ago, I took a bad spill in the coat, right down the rocky side of a hill, all the way to the bottom. The coat was shredded on the way. The buttons came off, I lost one of the sleeves, and a few pockets ripped open. A few people thought I'd lost it for good.

Nothing doing. Some people don't like the way it looks, or think that their coats are better than mine, which is fine. I've found that the raggedy look suits me. It's certainly not too stiff and uncomfortable, and if I'm cold sometimes, at least I know why.

The coat's got me through a lot. All those tears, those holes, those stains and those missing pieces remind me of places I've been, experiences I've had, and even things that I didn't need after all. I've worn this coat for years, and I expect I'll wear it for many more.

See you on the trails.

Holy Week and Broken Community

 I heard today from my wife that the pastor of her church plans to invite me back to the church this Good Friday and Easter. Faith is best observed, best celebrated in community.

I get that. I agree with that view. Heck, I endorse it.

But please tell that to the people who broke the community, not to the people who kept getting hurt on the jagged edges where they broke it.

I was a part of Point Community Church for 16 years. For years I attended faithfully, pitched in when asked, and expressed an interest in becoming an elder, in leading a Bible study community group, in starting a drama ministry, in reaching out to the communities our church served. It wasn't I who turned a cold shoulder to those offers of time and talent.

When the church's lead and founding pastor left, I expressed an interest in joining the search effort and offered to contribute professional experience and knowledge to the search. I wasn't the one to ignore the offer without a word of explanation. That was the elders.

When I pointed out that the silence was rude, I wasn't the one who apologized for my feelings instead of the offensive behavior. That was Howie.

When I decided I was done with being ignored but wanted to follow the example of Christ in seeking a reconciliation by expressing the wrong done and inviting the elders into a dialogue so bridges could be repaired and they could avoid the same mistakes going forward, I wasn't the one to send a brush-off that showed zero interest in discussion, in reconciliation or mending what had been broken.

That was the elders again, in a one-line email sent and signed by Steve D.

Holy Week is here. It's a time of forgiveness, for reconciliation. 

You want forgiveness? To the extent it can be given without being sought and asked for, it's yours. Giving sixteen years to a church only to get ignored cuts deep. and wounds don't heal by leaving the knife in them. But I forgive you. I owe my soul that much.

But reconciliation? Mending the community? Talk to the people who tore it apart, not the one who'd had enough of it.

I didn't ignore people when they had ideas or offered to help with ministries where they had experience, knowledge and enthusiasm.

Lent: Celebrate

 A few weeks ago at a therapy workshop intensive I met Ron. Ron is about 25 years my senior, and he revealed that his wife is receiving chemotherapy in her fight against cancer. He discovered that I'm a cancer survivor, he asked me for tips on dealing with it.

"Beer," I said. "Lots of it." He laughed appreciatively. and I said more truthfully that I'd found it helpful to keep a sense of humor, even if it's a dark sort of gallows humor that other people don't get. He acknowledged the legitimacy of humor in rough times, we talked about his wife and how they've both been coping. and then break ended and we started talking more about psychodrama.

Two days later we explored Ron's situation in a psychodrama act, and I understood  how badly I'd failed him with my trite answer.

"I realized during the play that I misunderstood you," I said. "You weren't asking me how to deal with cancer. You were asking me how to deal with grief and loss. the answer is, you lean into it."

The fact is we're all mortal, but the sad truth is that we spend most of our life in denial. Coming face to face with death, whether it's by finding an unexpected lump during a mammogram, a near-miss, or a devastating injury or loss, is something that teaches us to number our days correctly.

You no longer put off that trip until next year. You go this weekend.

You stop waiting for a special occasion. Today is special.

You stop taking people granted. You say "I love you" every chance you can, you bury the hatchet and make peace before resentment sets in. You savor bedtime stories, phone calls and sunsets because they're fleeting and won't come back around for a second try.

You stop trying for the golden ring and you decide just to enjoy the carousel while it lasts. You live each day like it's your last because you never know. It just might.

It's Lent, and you are mortal.

Celebrate.

Lent: Spoken

I I wonder what it was like when God spoke to his people in the ancient times.

Was it like you see in revival services, when the preacher has the crowd so whipped up that you can see what is coming, coming a mile away? Amid the whooping and hollering there falls a sudden stillness as people gasp for breath like a goldfish at the top of the bowl. Eyes unprepared for the sight of glory roll back in people's heads. Men and women fall to the floor in a heavenly swoon as they are brushed with the wings of angels. Now there comes a loud cry like a woman giving birth, and in the silence that follows, a voice speaks.

"Hear, O hear, you rebellious and stiff-necked people, the word of the Lord."

Is that what it is like? Or is it more like the hushed and measured tones of a parent speaking to an exasperating child? "I am your mother," the voice says, "and I need you to listen to me."

It is spoken. 

When the Word of the Lord arrives, that's how it comes: directly from the lips and straight to the ears. The word is conceived, the word is spoken, and the word is heard. Listen, or you may miss it and have nothing left but the recollection of what others think they heard.

"Hear the Word of the Lord," the prophet begins, and that's our cue. Creation is not set on runes that God has carved  into the side of a mountain; it is brought into existence by the power of a word that is spoken. 

Rarely does Scripture contain the phrase "Write this down, O Son of Man," and when it does the words are set down for future generations to study. More typically the decision to write is taken at the initiative of the prophet, and surely even though the writing conveys some of the glory, think what it must be like actually to hear the words themselves.

"Let there be light." The words are spoken, and light separates from darkness; and there is evening, and there is morning, the first day.

"My spirit shall not contend with man forever, his days shall be 120 years." The words are spoken, and 120 years later, right on schedule, it starts to rain. Terror builds in the cities of the world as the rivers leave their banks, but the rains just keep coming.

"The spirit of the Lord is upon to me, to bring good news to the poor and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." 

The word is spoken.

The world begins to change.

Lent: Light

 When we think of light, we like to go big.

We think of the sun breaking over the mountains, painting their peaks with bright strokes of flaming orange and fiery red. We picture a blanket of snow at high noon on a cloudless day, when it's so bright that it hurts to open your eyes. Or maybe we imagine the big one, as God speaks into the void, and the universe explodes into existence as he speaks four simple words.

"Let there be light."

But sometimes the most important light isn't dramatic, but understated. It's not that big, overbearing moon that children treasure as they steal sweet minutes of extra reading time under the covers. It's the cheap flashlight with Duracell batteries. Sneak out to the beach late at night in Archaie, and it's not streetlights that show you the way home, but the twinkle-twinkle of little stars. And for hundreds of years European sailors navigated the Atlantic by the light of Venus, a candle so dimmed by the day that most modern sailors can't find it.

Even the tiniest light puts shadows to flight.

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it."

Ash Wednesday: Live it up

 I'm told Ash Wednesday is a somber occasion, marked by meditation on one's mortality. For centuries it's been the bottle we break to ceremoniously launch the Lenten vessel into penitent waters.

Fast, we're told. Give something up. This is a serious time, not a serious for frivolity. Godliness is marked by how grim your face is.

Bollocks, says Scripture. Christ is near, Joy manifests itself in laughter, not in pained expressions. Holiness is measured by caring for others, not by mortifying yourself.

(And if by chance you do mortify yourself, be sure to clean up properly afterward. Remember what mom always said about wearing clean underwear when you go out.)

As the preacher says, "If a man lives many years, let him rejoice in them all; but let him remember that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is vanity."

Eat, drink. Have sex. (It is Valentines Day.) Be merry. These are a gift of God, so enjoy them while you can.

But know the timer is running down.

Pride month asks us to take sides

I had this thing I used to do with teams of short-termers when they came to Haiti, called a lifeline.

I'd hand them a length of string and encourage them to tell their story as they wrapped the string around their hand. Tell the story that you want to tell, and tell it at your own pace. 

I brought the string out in 2010 when we brought our first team to Haiti from The Point, and at our first set of evening devotions, Jonathan Zila shared how he had come to faith. When it was her turn, Robin Nussbaumer told us about her childhood and some of her formative experiences.

And then one night it was Caroline's turn.

Caroline wasn't from The Point. In fact, they weren't even from New Jersey. They lived in Atlanta. Caroline had known me for about 10 years by this point, and after Jon and I had agreed the trip was strictly for members of The Point, and no one else would be invited, I'd called Caroline immediately to ask if they wanted to come with us. (Spoiler: They did.)

The team wouldn't have been complete without Caroline, but that night I knew how deeply out of place Caroline felt. They took the string, they held it, and they stared at it without saying anything.

"I can't," they finally said.

"You don't have to," I told them. "There's freedom here."

Caroline did share, later. I knew their secret, and I'd marveled the past several days as I'd watched them play the pronoun game, never referring to their ex by name or as "she," but always as "my ex" or "my significant other," sometimes coming close to the edge but always staying on the safe side of the precipice and never daring to say nor even daring to hint at the truth: "I am gay."

And when Caroline did share, it was safe, as I had been confident it would be. But they also shared something I have never forgotten: "I've always found more acceptance among the gay community for being a Christian than I have among Christians for being gay."

The words should shame us, because they are true, but they shouldn't be.

It's Pride Month, a time when gays, lesbians, bisexuals, the transgender and other queer-identifying folk celebrate their presence and survival in a society that keeps them on the margin. Every advancement in LGBTQ rights since Stonewall has been met with howls of outrage from conservative and religious leaders who want the right to discriminate.

Who don't want to recognize the emotional need to be loved and to express affection with a life partner.

Who think it's better for children to grow up without a family than to have two parents of the same sex.

Who think that "Mrs. Doubtfire," Monty Python, "La Cage aux Folles" and the plays of William Shakespeare pose a graver threat to children than a society awash with unregulated AR-15s.

It honestly disturbs me that so much of this fear, this hatred and this agitation is coming from the church. Look at the gospels and you'll see in Jesus a man who embraces the outcast, no matter who they are or what they've done.

"If he knew what sort of woman she is ..." his critics think.

Funny thing is, Jesus did know. He just didn't care. His heart belonged to the people whom religious folk were too good for. They poured expensive perfume on him, they washed his feet with their tears and then dried his feet with their hair. Jesus took it all in stride, and he got a reputation for eating and drinking with sinners.

That's what holiness does. It doesn't push people away. It doesn't tell people they're not good enough. Instead it pulls out a seat next to the campfire, tosses on another log and welcomes the newcomer to a meal and conversation, and it invites them to pitch a tent at the campsite.

And when someone makes a scene about the visitor's presence, it's not the visitor whom holiness encourages to find another place to camp.

In the past 52 years I've got to know a number of people in the LGBTQ community besides Caroline. I've seen them driven to the edge by family members, former friends and community leaders who justify mistreatment by moaning and howling like an open grave about choices, mental illness, protecting the children and a particularly toxic form of love that I never want anything to do with again.

Through it all they've taught me about resilience and forgiveness; the unexpected seas that friendship will sail through, and the islands of wonder one can visit along the journey; a long form of patience , and the integrity that draws the line that says, enough. I will take no more of this shit today, and tomorrow doesn't look good either. 

It's Pride Month. They're here, they're queer. They will not disappear.

Jesus is standing with them. Will you?

Getting the message right for Easter

 So many churches are going to preach the wrong message today at their Easter services.

They're going to talk about the gift of forgiveness, as though we're all crushed beneath the weight of overwhelming guilt. If that's you, that message is true and it's worth listening to. More power to you as you seek it.

But most of us are looking for something different.

We want people to stop shooting children.

We want people to stop telling lies about drag queens, about the transgender and about our gay friends. They're not a danger, and we know it.

We want everyone to have a seat at the table with equal say in the conversation. We want their stories heard and not hushed up because it makes the powerful uncomfortable to hear them.

We want debt wiped away, and we want inequity balanced out.

We want justice, not law and order.

We don't want to die.

This is the promise Jesus left his church with. He announced it  when he read from the scroll of Isaiah that shabbat service in Nazareth, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” 

It's a promise Jesus proclaimed with every healing he performed. He taught it in every line of the Beatitudes, and pushed it every time he reminded the wealthy to give to the poor. He wove it like a golden thread through his parables.

Jesus never said "wait until you go to heaven, and it'll work out then." His message was always "The kingdom of God has arrived, it is in your midst." It was this life Jesus focused on, not the next.

Empire exists by order. Jesus promises to pull down empire, to disrupt order and to promote justice. Jesus is a threat to those in power because they like to claim that God is on their side, and the way of Christ reminds them that he is not.

So they killed him.

And as a sign, God raised him from the dead.

Lent: Test

When I read that today's prompt was "test," my first thought was of school, and the grades I would get on Fridays in high school geometry when Miss Loughlin assessed how well we understood the week's material.

But we're called to test lots of things that have nothing to do with school. We test ideas to see if they're good or bad by trying them out  We can test ourselves, to see how we measure up to our own expectations and the demands others place on us. And of course we can test others, to measure them and their value. 

It always comes down to success or failure, though, doesn't it? The A you earn is worth its weight in gold, while the F is scarlet and hangs around your neck like an albatross.

It's not supposed to be like that. 

Grades, and the tests that generate them, don't reveal your worth. They measure other things. How well  you understood the material. (Looks like you need to review the properties of a rhombus.) How well the teacher taught you. (Maybe interpretive dance wasn't the right medium.) How well-suited the test was for you. (Maybe asking a turtle to climb a tree wasn't a fair assessment of its ability to hide from birds.)

Those are the measurements we're supposed to look at, not to see if we're any good, but to discover the areas where we can shine and what we have to offer.

That's the longest test there is, and it's the only one worth taking.

Lent: Wilderness

There's not much wilderness out my front door these days.

It was a different story four hundred years ago when the first waves of white settlers started arriving on these vaunted shores. In those days the Midatlantic region and the Northeast were covered in a forest, and settlers claim there were flocks of birds overhead so vast that it could take days for them to pass.

To visitors from Europe, where hills, valleys and moors had long been denuded of their ancient forests, it seemed like a goldmine. There were woods to be felled, land to be plowed, animals to be trapped for pelt or meat, and plenty more.

Not so much these days.

I've got a red oak growing on my property, and there are squirrels that run around the yard; but the birds I can hear at any time can be counted with one hand, not two. You can smell out a skunk at night sometimes, and hear the coyotes yipping in a nearby park. Once I saw a fox trit-trotting up the street like nobody's business, but the wildest this city gets is at the nightclub downtown on weekends.

Paradise has been torn to pieces, and we were the wolves that did it.

That's an idealized view of the wilderness as Eden. There's another, older view, that views the wilderness with caution if not outright fear. In the old days, people didn't go into the forest for a weekend of camping, it was something they avoided. If you had to go in, you went in quietly, to avoid being noticed, or you went in with a small army, to be ready.

The wilderness was a hostile place, without the creature comforts of home, like food, roads, cisterns, city walls and gates that closed at night. It was a liminal place filled with fairies, lawless humans, and wild beasts. The ancients believed it was filled with pagan gods, and as late as the 17th century the Puritans told stories about the Scratchman waiting in the forest outside town, willing to make deals with anyone who'd sign their name in the book he kept.

So take your pick. We tore down Paradise and in its place built a new wilderness of pavement and steel, and filled that wild place with monsters of our own creation; or we pushed the wilderness back, hedged it in and tamed it.

Either way, something else is true. Neglect a farm, a shopping mall or an entire city for long enough, and the wilderness creeps back in. Flowers grow in the cracks of a parking lot, then brush springs up in odd places. WIthin twenty years trees have appeared and ten years after that, the forest is back in business.

No matter how you look it, the wilderness returns. 

Lent: Consume

I was into stories about Thor long before Chris Hemsworth picked up the hammer and started wearing a cape for Marvel Studios.

The stories I knew were written in the 13th century by a man named Snorri Sturluson. In one story, Thor takes Loki on a trip to Jotunheim and Loki boasts that he can eat faster than anyone. He's soon put to the test: a wooden platter is laden with meat, and as Loki starts eating at one end, his opponent begins at the other.

They meet in the middle, but Loki loses because all he ate was the meat. His opponent ate meat, bone and platter alike, leaving nothing. It was all consumed.

Consumed.

There's something so final, so total about that word. A consuming desire is one that devours you, overthrowing wit, wisdom and any semblance of self-restraint. It brooks no distraction, permits no other recourse. It's as relentless as fire itself, and ultimately as destructive.

Years ago in church we sang a tune by Hillsong, "Inside Out," that expresses the longing that drives worship: "In my heart and my soul, Lord, I give you control. Consume me from the inside out." One can almost see the worshiper drawing closer to the Eternal Flame, until they are lit from within, and holy fire consumes them beginning in their chest and spreading outward until nothing is left but embers that soon are gone themselves.

In the end we're all consumed by something, but be comforted. The experience is only as glorious or as terrible as the consuming fire that we choose to be caught in.

Mardis Gras

Today is the last day before the 40 days of Lent.

Mardi Gras caps off a weeklong celebration known as Carnival. It's a period of revelry known for music, partying and alcohol that flows like water. Amid all the hoopla and pageantry of the floats in New Orleans it can be easy to forget that Mardi Gras in its roots is a religious celebration tied into Ash Wednesday tomorrow.

The cynic might look at the Mardi Gras celebration as an attempt by the faithful to squeeze in as much last-minute fun and debauchery as possible. After this, it's off to the confessional and time to put on an appropriately penitent show to satisfy the sad-sack priests during Lent.

This misses the point. While God surely does want us to keep ourselves free of wrongdoing, fun and pleasure were God's idea. It was God who showed humanity how to make wine and rum and their cousins. It was God who gave us music and friends. It was God who invented sex and made having it his first commandment.

People might overdo it getting drunk on Bourbon Street, but Mardi Gras falls into a grand tradition of festivals rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Celebrations of spring. Celebrations of fall. New Years celebrations. Private parties. National parties. "They tried to kill us, but we're still here and they're not" parties.

There are common threads running through all of them. Eat. Drink. Let your hair down. Jesus' first miracle involved giving people at a wedding better wine than anything they'd had so far. There's even an entire book of the Bible about the joys of sex.

Enjoy yourself, God tells us. Live a little.

Lent begins Wednesday. It's a 40-day period that leads up to the events of Good Friday, when Christians of all stripes traditionally mark the Crucifixion. It's a liturgical marker of the time between when first Jesus and then his disciples realized that things were not going to go the way they had first hoped, and when things got as absolutely bad as they possibly could.

Carnival is a time for wine and celebration, a season for living large and loving life for all that it gives us. Mardi Gras marks the end of that season.

Tonight is the night we celebrate. It is the last bottle, the last cup, the last drink we will have before we find that there are ashes in our wine.

The Feast of Sunday

 Today is Sunday.

In church we call this the Lord’s Day and celebrate it as the Christian sabbath. It’s meant to be holy, a sanctuary carved into time itself, a time when the most wretched of us can walk into the Presence and be welcomed not just by the Creator but by others as well.

The medieval church had more days set aside for fasting and penance than you could shake a stick at, but never Sunday. Sunday is always a feast day.

Sometimes the feast is hard.The liturgy may be clear of sour faces and there’s no vinegar scheduled for your corn flakes, but the liturgy doesn’t always match the weather. The sun will shine when it will shine, and dark clouds will block it out when a cold wind blows them in. It may be a feast day, but that doesn’t put food on the table or wine in your glass. The fiddlers may play but that doesn’t mean you want to dance.

Sometimes when you want sun, it just keeps raining. The night ends but instead of dawn, dusk comes again until the only light left is the last failing ember of a candle that has burned itself away. Joy becomes the friend who moved away with no forwarding address, who left no number to call. Holding onto her feels an impossible task.

There are times you feel so fundamentally alone that the only thing that makes sense is to yell at God and tell him off.

So go ahead and do it.

There are times life is so unjust that the only thing left is to let loose your inner Karen and complain to management that their customer service sucks.

Go ahead and complain.

It won’t make your life better. Your friends and family will still ignore you. You’ll still have lost the family home. Your goldfish will still have been eaten by the cat, and the cat will still have choked to death on the goldfish.

It will still be dark.

But you’ll have changed. You’ll have raged into the whirlwind, and while it probably won’t grant you the answer you wanted, still you’ll come away with a new appreciation for its power.

It’s Sunday. You don’t need to go anywhere. The sanctuary came to you, and it ushered you in.

Grace be with you all.

 

Copyright 2023 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Advent 2022: Rebuilding

Fort Jacques was a hillside encampment erected under the direction of Alexander Petion. Built a few miles south and uphill from Port-au-Prince, it included a storage room, a cistern, several cannons and an escape tunnel that led to nearby Fort Alexandra. Petion ordered it built after the successful Revolution of 1802 against the possible return of the French in the event Napoleon or one of his successors found the former slave colony too alluring to let it remain free.

Over the years after Petion's death, the march of time took its toll and the fort fell into disrepair. Farmers removed stones to mark boundaries. Winter chilled and summer warmed while rains pounded, and the tunnel collapsed. Cannons fell from their parapets and rolled downhill. By the mid-20th century, with this piece of Haiti's history in danger of disappearing completely, the United Nations funded a project to restore it.

By the time I visited it in 1993, it was more or less fully restored. The walls were at full height, and all the cannons that could be found had been returned. That tunnel was still collapsed, but the only major difference was the small chips of stone mixed into the mortar, a signal from UNESCO that the fort had been rebuilt. If someone hadn't told me the history, I doubt I would have been able to tell.

Things need to be rebuilt for lots of reasons. The edifice held up well, but the steady progression of days, like the march of a thousand tiny feet, slowly wore it down. The battlements met their purpose, but there were some attacks that pounded it too hard, and it came apart; or maybe an act of God shook the ground and the house, which provided shelter and sanctuary before just wasn't up to the task this time. Or -- my favorite -- someone took it apart to see how it works.

Whatever the reason -- benign neglect, acts of violence, violent acts, curiosity or something else -- it needs to rebuilt. The good news is that, having seen its weaknesses exposed, we can find a way to rebuild it, stronger.

Copyright © 2022 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Advent 2022: Faith

Years ago I asked my students to explain what they thought faith was.

It didn't take long before it became obvious that they were in over their heads. A few of them, misunderstanding the topic, explained what they believed. A couple talked about coming to faith. Mostly, though, they gave good examples of empericism and the scientific method at work.

I've known a few adults who don't understand faith either. They hold a name it and claim it theology that says if you just believe something hard enough, and don't admit to any doubt, miracles will happen. That's a cruel kind of faith, because whe we try to be stupider than we are, we usually succeed. People with this kind of faith often are the sort tell everyone that their cancer has been healed, and will find ways to ignore the growing mass right up to the moment the undertaker comes for them and the whisper campaign begins that their faith wasn't good enough.

"Faith," Priscilla tells us, " is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." It's not rooted in empirical evidence, but it doesn't fly in the face of it either. It rests in our ability to imagine an invisible word. We can't point to justice, or measure the weight of love. No one has heard trust jump into a pile of autumn leaves, or sat with friendship in the garden sipping lemonade and listening to the bananaquits. Like God, none of those things is real enough for that.

But as many of us do with God, we place our faith in those things and allow them to shape our lives with meaning.

Advent 2022: Grace

I once heard a campus minister define grace as God's Riches At Christ's Expense.

As backronyms go, this one excels because while it's not particularly insightful, it does manage to misportray one of the fundamental mysteries of the Christian faith. So while it's not theologically sound, is it at least clever? Also no.

I dislike this sermon in a bottle because it pushes the notion that grace is all about Christ stepping in and getting a divine whoopin' with God's righteous paddle that he had meant for us. Grace is so much more than that.

What is grace? 

To begin with, grace brings heaven down to earth so that it can join us in our dance halls, throw darts with us at the corner pub and celebrate all the joys and drudgery of being human. At the same time it lifts us to heaven so that we can walk through fields beyond the reach of angels. In this dance that she choreographs grace closes the distance that separates us from God and from one another.

So it is grace that comes in the darkness as everything falls apart, puts her hand on your shoulder, and says, "I'm here. It'll be okay." It's also grace that says "I'm really upset by what's happened, and I need to know if you're ready to talk about it yet, because we can't ignore it."

When your car breaks down on the highway at 11 p.m. on a summer night, it's grace that gets out of bed, drives through the darkness and comes to the rescue. Grace ihabits summer afternoons of simple delight, as you play in the creek chasing mudskippers or trying to build a dam; and she also lives in the silent meditation that comes with burning driftwood at night on a beach empty of all but you and Old Man Tide.

Grace lies in wait at the end of a long trail, in the cabin with a warm bed, a kettle of soup on the fire and a candle in the windowsill, egging you on one more mile, one last road, one final step. But she walks with you too, and she has been known to pick up and to carry hikers when they've gone as far as they can, have nothing left to give, and collapsed in the snow mere feet or entire leagues from their destination.

You don't earn grace; in fact sometimes it seems unreasonable or unfair when she lavishes her kindness on others who seem less deserving or less needy than ourselves.. Grace can even feel brutal. People who know her well speak of her cruelty when they meet her in the loss of loved ones, in the death of dreams and in pains so deep that they can be expressed only as an endless howl that comes from the soul.

I have found grace to a divine, golden thread that is woven through all the cloth of our life, ineffable, incomprehensible, impossible to explain but through metaphor, and yet powerful enough to transfigure any experience and every moment into a flash of lightning. In her hands a sow's ear becomes a silk purse, even as that purse remains the ear of a pig.

Grace is always free. Free for the asking, yes; but always freely given.

Copyright © 2022 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Advent 2022: Looking

Do we find Truth, or is it revealed to us? 

We used to argue about this a lot when I was in college. It seemed like the most important thing in the world at times. 

Eventually I realized that it doesn't make a bit of difference whether you discover something or someone goes to great lengths to show you where it is. You need to look at it and figure out what it's for.

A call for the church to be a safe place

Here we are again.

Over the weekend, a gunman entered a nightclub in Colorado and opened fire. Five people were killed, and another 17 were reported injured. The club appears to have been targeted specifically because it caters to the LGBTQ community.

The death toll isn't as high as at the Pulse nightcllub in 2016. Reports from Club Q indicate that a military veteran was at Club Q when the attack started, and with that combat experience, courage and help from other patrons, and some luck, they were able to stop the gunman.

As happens when these things do, there's the usual hand-wringing and the usual vapid offers of thoughts and prayers over the bloodshed. How could this happen? 

Really? Let me explain.

For the past several months, the nation has heard Republican politicians and conservative talking heads all over the country fret and fan the flames of moral panic over the transgender community, imagining unseen dangers in children attending going to the library for storytime with drag performers. It's a familiar political tactic from the Right. Create the sense that American values are under siege, so that riled-up voters turn out on Election Day. So Matt Walsh bemoans an imagined epidemic of genital mutilation. Jordan Peterson gnashes his teeth than Elliot Page, in the final stages of gender transition, had breast reduction surgery. Mixed with this pervasive outrage is misinformation that conflates gender care with gender transition, to spread the lie that children whose sex isn't being surgically reassigned are using litter boxes in the school bathroom because they think they're cats.

What's missing? Not a matter of perspective, but a matter of decency. People may claim that the conservative alarms are overblown but sincere, that there are legitimate concerns about the message being sent to children regarding sexuality and gender, and while "we may hate the sin, we certainly love the sinner."

You know what happens when we hate the sin but love the sinner? The "sinner" dies, that's what happens. They get beaten to death in Wyoming, they jump off a bridge in New Jersey to escape their tormentors, or they get gunned down while they're out having a good time with friends in one of the few public spaces where they feel free to be themselves unreservedly.

Do you want to worry about the message kids are getting? Worry about this one. For the past year especially gays and trans folk and their allies have been described as pedophiles and groomers, part of a satanic conspiracy out to convince innocent boys to change their sex just to play on the girls lacrosse team.

I for one am through entertaining such insanity with aguments based on science and medicine. It's past time for conservatives and especially conservative Christians to start answering for their bigotry. Teens who don't identify as the sex they were born as aren't sick. They aren't insane, possessed or even confused. But because of the culture war tactics conservative voices keep employing, those teens are at a heightened risk for bullying, depression, suicide and sexual assault. 

You want unnatural? You'll find it in places like Florida, where it's illegal for teachers to discuss gender identity or sexual orientation with teens who are struggling with being different and not measuring up to social expectations. You want sick? It's in the culture war politics of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who wants to fine or fire teachers who feel compassion for their lgbtq charges and try to help them. The message DeSantis and his GOP allies are sending? We don't want you to get help or express yourselves. We want you to be quiet, stay in your lane, and be who and what we say you are.  The inevitable end of this bullying? Dead teens.

In contrast with all this, the Bible presents us with a God who created Adam as nonbinary. It was only later that God removed the feminine aspect of his creation and gave her a life of her own as Eve. The Bible reveals a Creator who defies easy gender assignment. God creates both male and female in his image. He identifies as masculine throughout Scripture but in a stunningly beautiful image compares his relationship with his people to that of a mother nursing her child. 

The end result of the GOP campaign against the transgender ends in places like Club Q where people with easy access to guns, fed a diet of fear of paranoia, stand over the dead, believing the lie that somehow they have struck a blow for freedom and righteousness.

We serve a God who is holy and who commands us to be holy. He gave us an ethic to live by, a code of holiness that comes with a promise that if we follow it, then we will live and draw others to him. It's a line in the sand that he drew, and that line is clear: Love. When the bully comes for the weak, defend the weak. Take their part, hide them under your wings and face the bullies with the question every bully fears from someone with authority: "Is there a problem here?"

The church is on the wrong side of this fight. How will we stand before God when he calls us to account for our reckless and hateful language? Be thankful that God is merciful. If we repent, there may yet be time for us to be saved.

Healing touch

We don't even know his name.

Some of the people Jesus performed miracles for, we know their names. whom they were related to, or at least enough for a basic Twitter bio. Lazarus of Bethany, brother of Mary and Martha. Blind Bartimaeus. Tamar, daughter of Jairus, leader of the synagogue. The Syro-Phoenician woman.

This guy? We've got nothing. He was a vagrant. He had no name, no home, no family. His identity could be expressed in one word: leper.

If he were killed while resisting arrest, there probably wouldn't even be an inquest.

Leprosy is a relentless, unforgiving disease. It kills nerve endings so that those who have it feel no pain when they're injured. Burns don't burn. Cuts don't smart. And when you don’t know you’re hurt, your injuries get worse. Bruises blossom like flowers. Nicks and cyts fester snd become open wounds. As the disease runs its course, it disfigures its victims more and more.

In order to keep the disease from spreading, and (let’s be honest, to spare people the sight) many ancient societies -- and even modern ones -- would send lepers into colonies away from human habitation, where they posed no threat to the health and welfare of anyone else. If a leper came into town or even just met someone on the open road, people crossed the street to avoid them. If they got too close the people would even throw stones at them to drive them away. 

In biblical times, the lepers even had to ring a bell to warn people they were coming and to stay away. "Outcast!" they would shout. "Leper! Unclean!"

Our unnamed hero took a different approach. When he recognized the stranger on the road was Jesus, he cried out, probably with more than a little desperation, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean!"

Jesus, you see, had gained a reputation by this point. He was someone who could heal lepers, and did. But what he did with our hero was even bigger than that.

People have an innate and inescapable need to be touched. For infants, touch is an instinctive part of the bond they share with their mothers. Put a struggling newborn in skin-to-skin contact with her mother, and her temperature will stabilize, her racing pulse will slow, and she'll trade her agita for serenity.

This fundamental need for touch continues throughout life. We gauge the trustworthiness of others with a handshake, thrill to the feathery touch of fingers on our arms, relish the intimacy of holding the hand of a loved one, relax amid a backscratch or massage, and draw strength from a hug. And sex is overwhelimingly about touch from the start of foreplay to the warm glow of aftercare as you lie wrapped in your partner and the two of you drift off together.

Deny someone the intimacy of touch, and you can watch them start to fidget and make up for the loss. They crack their knuckles, they hug themselves. They'll run fingers over their own hands and over their own arms. It's all an exercise in self-soothing, but it's a losing battle. People suffering from skin hunger often will slide into anxiety and depression, and are at an elevated risk of mental and physical illness.

This man was a leper. No one would touch him.

"Lord," he cried, desperate to get Jesus' attention. "If you are willing, you can heal me."

Jesus had all sorts of ways of healing people. Sometimes they were gross, like the time he spit in the dirt and smeared mud across the blind man's eyes. Sometimes he used his dramatic voice, like when he stood outside the tomb of his friend and called "Lazarus, come forth!" Other times he just gave the word, and healing was done. The gospels record that he even healed lepers this way.

Not this time.

"If I am willing?" he asked, disbelieving. "I'm willing. Be clean!"

With that, the evangelist writes, Jesus reached out and touched the man.

By that point, healing the leprosy would have been an afterthought.

Copyright 2022 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Reassessing the Woman at the Well and our Legacy of Misogyny

It was midday.

For most of the women in the village, the day had begun at least six hours earlier, before the morning sun had even appeared. Stirring in the cool darkness before dawn, they had lit fires from coals kept overnight. There had been breakfasts to fix, torn clothes to mend, bread to bake in the village ovens, and a thousand other chores demanding attention.

But most important of all was the early-morning trek to Jacob’ s Well, to fetch the day’s water.

It was an active time, but it was a lively and social time as well. While they waited with their jars, away from their husbands and their men, they were able to talk freely. As they fetched their water, the women shared their news: how sisters and grandmothers were doing, which merchants were coming to town with what wares, which girl had caught which boy’s eyes, who was pregnant. They shared advice: how to treat an illness, how to keep a man’s heart, how to avert a hand raised in anger.

They talked, and that could be bad enough; but when they stopped talking, that could be even worse. Fotoni had been at the well too many times when the voices fell silent and the whispers replaced them. She had felt the eyes of the other women linger on her as she walked past, and she had bled when haughty eyes and upturned chins had cut her deep.

Fotoni no longer went to Jacob’s Well in the morning to gather her water when the air was cool and comfortable. She went instead when it was noon and the air baked like the village oven. She went at noon when she could get water in peace, and she could be alone. There was never anyone else at the well at midday.

And then one day, there was.

* * *

Fotoni saw the man before he saw her. He was a Jew in his late 20s or early 30s, and he sat near the well by himself, doing nothing in particular. His face and his robe were coated in the dust of the road, and he looked tired enough that he posed no greater threat than the usual insults Jews and Samaritans hurled at one another. She could handle those; she already had endured far worse.

She stepped closer, and the man heard her. He turned, and to Fotoni’s shock, he spoke to her.

“Can I have a drink?” he asked, and with that simple request, Jesus began the longest recorded conversation in the gospel with a woman.

It was a conversation that would end with Fotoni returning to the village and telling everyone she could about the strange man she had met by the well. She told them how he had looked right through her as if he could peer into the deep parts of her soul, and she shared the strange conversion they had shared.

“He told me everything I had ever done,” she said.

And when she had finished talking and saw that they were as intrigued by her reports of this enigmatic man, Fotoni dropped the question that had been burning like a coal in her heart the entire time.

“Could he be the messiah?”

* * *

There’s a lot we don’t know about the Woman at the Well. The Orthodox Church canonizes her under the name Fotoni, but the Bible never even tells us that much. All we do know is what she and Jesus establish in their conversation; She’s Samaritan, she has had five husbands, and at the time the story takes place, she is living with a man she is not married to.

Into the silence of the biblical record, the church has whispered details that could have come from the village gossips and scolds. Married five times, and don’t you know that divorce is a sin? The man you are with now is not your husband. This is a brazen hussy, boys, a sinner who leaves one husband after another, and now shamelessly shacking up with a sixth man.

Loose, the tongues say at the Bible study.

A prostitute, preachers declare from the pulpit.

Bad character, everyone agrees. A lost sinner, in need of a savior.

Even the time she went to the well testifies against this woman. The evangelist specifies that the Samaritan woman went to draw water from the well at noon. “The sixth hour was when loose women went to the well,” I recall one college Bible study leader sharing.

I’ve no idea how normative my experiences are, but it seems that every time I’ve heard a sermon or read a commentary on the woman at the well, the preacher or the writer always wanted to make sure we understood what a wretched sinner the woman was. The message is that no matter how bad your sin, no matter how far you’ve fallen, you’re not beyond the reach of God’s love. Just make sure you appreciate what a sinner you are.

But what if that’s not the message of the story? There’s what the gospel says, after all; and there’s how we interpret it. Standing in the middle of the two is all the layers of narrative we’ve repeated so many times that we just take it for granted that it’s part of the text.

We do this all the time. It’s a problem we have with this story, but in truth it’s part of a larger problem in the church and how we read the Bible.

Popular view in the church makes Eve responsible for the Fall of Humanity, even though Scripture teaches otherwise. The Apostle Paul puts responsibility for the Fall on Adam, telling us that “death entered the world through sin, and sin entered the world through one man” (Romans 5:12). To make it absolutely clear, Paul explains that Eve was deceived, but Adam flat-out disobeyed (1 Timothy 2:14).

The Bible tells us that David abused his royal position to summon Bathsheba to the royal palace and have sex with her. The incident gets so bad that it ultimately destabilizes the throne, and the Bible lists it as David’s one major failing (1 Kings 15:5). Look around and you’ll find no shortage of apologists looking to excuse David of sexual assault and instead accuse Bathsheba of laying a trap to lure him into adultery.

The gospels describe Mary Magdalene as someone from whom Jesus once cast seven demons (Luke 8:2), and suggest she was a wealthy and important woman. Meanwhile, the most popular detail people know to share about her is that she was a prostitute – a slander first told in the sixth century during a sermon by Pope Gregory, who identified her seven demons with the Seven Deadly sins.

And the Woman at the Well, whatever her name is, gets caught in this same net of shaming and is dragged through the mud.

What do we know about her? She was married five times. Was she widowed? Was she divorced? The Bible doesn’t say, leaving us to make our best guess. But as a Samaritan woman in the first century, Fotoni would have had little say in either situation.

The first century was a bloody period in Samaria, Galilee and Judea, and it was all too common for men to die at the end of a Roman sword or spear. The death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE led to an uprising against Roman rule that saw the city of Sepphoris burned and hundreds of men crucified to enforce obedience to Roman law. Before his term as governor ended, Pontius Pilate would bring a bloody end to another uprising in Samaria itself in 36 CE.

If any of Fotoni’s husbands died at Roman hands, from illness, or from simple bad fortune, she would have been left bereft and dependent upon customs like the kinsman redeemer to see that she was provided for. Each partner she had lowered her value to potential suitors, like a steak another person had taken a bite of.

Was she a multiple divorcee? That likewise was outside her control. A woman had no recourse in first-century Samaria to demand release from a toxic marriage, but her husband could send her away for any reason he wanted. Jealousy? That was his call. Bad cook? Fair enough. Ugly? Who could blame him? No children? You are divorced, divorced, divorced.

Five husbands in, no matter her age, Fotoni would have been in a desperate spot. That sixth man wouldn’t take her as his wife. He wouldn’t hide her shame. But if she gave him sex, he’d give her a place to sleep. He’d give her food. He’d let her survive.

Fotoni wasn’t a reprobate. She was alone and in a desperate situation, doing what she needed to do to survive. Her day was spent existing, trying to find what scraps of dignity and life she could find, under whatever stone they were hidden; while she tried to avoid the notice of others so she could forget the humiliation life had given her.

And then she met Jesus down by the well.

***

Wells play a prominent place in courtship in the Hebrew Scriptures. When Abraham sent his servant Eliezer to find a wife for his son Isaac, Eliezer found Rebekah at the well. She agreed to marry Isaac, and returned to Canaan with Eliezer. When Moses fled Egypt, he met Zipporah at the well. They later married, and she joins him on his return to Egypt to free Israel.

And now here we have Jesus, sitting by a well, and asking Fotoni for a drink.

Jesus wasn’t there by chance. He knew what time it was. He knew the mores of the day, and he knew who would go to the well to fetch water in the heat of the day.

Not prostitutes.

Not sinners.

Outcasts.

Jesus went to the well at noon because the only people he would meet there would be of no account, someone whom no man would respect and whom no woman would either, not because of anything they had done but because society is cruel. When Jesus stopped Fotoni and asked her for a drink, he invited the scorn of anyone who saw him talking to her but he also elevated her to the role of a benefactor

And then he went further, and initiated a discussion with her about God, about salvation, about Torah and worship, and treated her like she was a learned elder. In a few short minutes, Jesus showed Fotoni more respect than she’d had in years and restored the dignity and self-worth she’d always known she deserved.

Jesus saw how weary she was from her life of labor and isolation, and offered her living water, a symbol she picks up on immediately. And then, in a final flourish, he revealed himself to her, and made Fotoni the first Samaritan entrusted with his revelation, and sent her, spirit soaring, back to her village where her status was raised from “that woman” to chosen emissary of the messiah.

The men who tell the story of Fotoni today – and let’s be honest, it’s usually men – love the story to have its little embellishments about her supposed moral lapses. It’s a cruel and pernicious sexism that wants to imprison women for faults real and imagined, to keep them silent and in their place, and to remind them to be grateful for the bare minimum.

We tell victims of sexual harassment and sexual abuse to be silent, and when they demand justice instead, we complain that they’re hurting God’s work. When they’re in abusive marriages, we tell them to remain in submission; and when they don’t, we shun them and rally around the abusers they’ve left behind.

That’s because we don’t understand what holiness is. We think of sin as a violation of a legal code, one that requires condemnation, but that they’ll be spared because they have received all the right beliefs and doctrines. It’s an old and Gnostic heresy that says that that holiness can’t abide the presence of sin.

The gospels come from a culture built on honor and shame. A woman like Fotoni was shamed, and shame drives us away from one another. Holiness, as revealed throughout the Hebrew Scriptures and through the life of Jesus, scours the countryside looking for a sheep the rest of the flock abandoned. It turns the room upside-down to find a coin missing through no fault of its own, and when it sees someone who’s been broken down, abused and turned away, holiness doesn’t tell them they deserve what’s happened to them.

Instead it sits and waits for them, and when the moment comes, it acts as natural as can be and invites them into a conversation.

“Can you get me a drink?”