Vacation over.
Pastors go from not working to working pretty quickly. All I could think was, I have to preach Sunday. I have to preach Sunday. I have to preach, and something really bad has happened and they are going to want me to say something about it. I wonder what the Gospel text assigned for this Sunday is? Matthew couldn’t remember.
We pulled up to the same San Diego hotel where we’d stayed before the cruise and got the kids into their swimsuits and sent them off to play in the pool. I then sat in the lobby on the computer looking up stories about the earthquake on the Internet. The pictures of loss and devastation were rolling in. Bloggers were working overtime and news outlets could hardly keep up. I was trying to take in every last bit, perhaps so that somewhere I’d find some kind of good news to preach.
Eventually I stumbled upon a story about televangelist Pat Robertson’s response to the earthquake. Robertson had crawled out from whatever kind of bottom-dwelling theological backwater hellhole he calls his ideological home to enlighten America about the reason the earthquake happened: Haiti had made a pact with the devil and so, really, they’d brought this upon themselves.
Thank you, Pat Robertson. Once again, you have made my job easier. Anything I preach is going to be less crazy that that.
I looked out the window to see Harper and Judah, who were eleven and nine at the time, in a water fight in the pool. I realized I probably only had a few more minutes before things degenerated between them, so I pried myself away from the news site to search for what text was assigned in the lectionary for the upcoming Sunday. My hope was that whatever the text was, it would help me figure out what to say, because the reality was, I am just as baffled and faithless as anyone else when faced with unspeakable tragedy.
Assigned text: the wedding at Cana, Jesus’ first miracle, turning water into wine. Great. Jesus at a big party making sure the wine flows freely. No one wants to hear that right now. Nobody wants to hear a quaint little miracle story about how generous God is when the poorest country in this hemisphere lays in even greater waste than it already did on Monday. Nobody wants to hear of an abundance of wine when people on the streets of Haiti are thirsty.
As I was reading the text, I got a call from a parishioner asking for prayer. Drew, our cantor, had a close friend, a young Lutheran seminary student, who was in Haiti building houses at the time of the quake and who died in a collapsed building. It was a preacher’s nightmare—who dares speak of a celebration with ever-flowing wine when Drew is mourning his friend Ben? When thousands of mothers are mourning their children?
The events of the earthquake in Haiti brought with them a lot of questions about God, and none of them has to do with parties. One atheist blog I read that week used the earthquake to make a case against believing in God at all. The writer implied that he could not believe in a God who would inflict such suffering on so many people, which made me admit that according to that definition I must be an atheist, too, because I don’t believe in that God either.
It would seem that Pat Robertson and the atheist were of one mind: God causes suffering. In Robertson’s case, God causes suffering so that God might punish all the people who Robertson dislikes. In the case of the atheist, since God allowed the earthquake and all the concomitant suffering to happen, God doesn’t deserve to be believed in. Either way, God is a heartless bastard standing in heaven like a maladjusted kid burning us like ants with his divine magnifying glass. I understand the impulse to see it that way. But as a preacher, I could hardly say it from the pulpit.
So during the next couple of days, I just kept reading the story of the wedding at Cana over again. I was hoping to discover something, I’m not even sure what, when suddenly, as though she had just sort of snuck into the story, I noticed Mary. Mary, the distraught mother of our Lord, might just be the key to seeing how the text spoke to our mourning and confusion.
The story of turning water into wine took place at a wedding where there was, what seems to me, a rather abrupt and somewhat awkward interaction between Jesus and his mother. They’re at a wedding when Mary looks to her son and tells him that the wine has run out.
“Woman,” Jesus says to his mother in a seemingly dismissive and perhaps even disrespectful tone, “my hour has not yet come.”
To which Mary is like, Oh yeah? Too bad. OK, she didn’t really say that, but she did simply turn to the servant and say, “Do whatever he tells you.”
I know it’s a little melodramatic in the context of wine, but in the wake of Haiti’s devastation, I started to imagine Mary tugging at the shirt of Jesus and saying, I will not keep silent. I will obey you and I will tell others to obey you but I will not keep silent. People are thirsty. In John’s Gospel, Mary is not the young virgin pondering sweet things in her heart. In John’s Gospel, Mary is not surrounded by singing angels. She is never even mentioned by name. She is simply “the mother of Jesus.”
So the week of the earthquake, I started to see Mary in a long line of prophets who have not kept silent. The prophet Mary stands and says, “Lord, we’ve run out of wine and people are thirsty.”
And Jesus hears her.
Mary only shows up twice in John’s Gospel, and both times her son calls her “woman.” Once is here at the wedding. The other is when she stands at the foot of the cross. She watches her son and her Lord hang innocent from a cross with the weight of the world’s suffering tearing at his very flesh.
So I tried, albeit clumsily, to link the wedding at Cana to the cross, since these are the only two times Mary appears. Perhaps it was a stretch. And perhaps I was trying to answer Pat Robertson and the atheist. But in a time when we were wondering where the hell God was, the only place I could find an answer from this otherwise seemingly irrelevant text was with Mary, gazing at the cross. At the cross, God enters into our human tragedy.
I’ve written about suffering already in this book, and I’ll write about it again, because addressing pain and tragedy is one of my main responsibilities as a pastor. I’m asked to find God in suffering. And every time I go looking for God amidst sorrow, I always find Jesus at the cross. In death and resurrection.
This is our God. Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps. A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us. Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross. Therefore what can I do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering. This is a God who bears suffering. I need to believe that God does not initiate suffering; God transforms it.
That passage in John reads like this:
Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said, “I am thirsty.”
“I am thirsty,” he says. “I am not watching this from a distant heaven. I too am thirsty.”
I asked my congregation that Sunday if perhaps, as we heard the cry of our Haitian brothers and sisters, we could also discern other voices with them: that of Mary saying, they are thirsty. And that of Christ saying, “I am thirsty.”
Preaching can feel like an unleashing. Once it’s entered the ears of the people, there’s no telling what it will create or destroy, and sometimes there’s an incubation period. But despite what I may wish, sometimes (most times, really) a sermon just can’t do it all.
Months earlier, my friend Sara had showed me a photo from Abu Ghraib of a naked detainee with a hood on his head, kneeling on the ground and looking like he was trying to protect both his genitals and his humanity. Sara had looked at me meaningfully and recited one of the stations. “Jesus falls for the first time,” she said.
This gave me an idea. “What if, in the wake of the tragedy, we make a set of the stations of the cross out of news photos this year?” I asked our liturgy guild in a meeting a couple days before the ser
vice, when I had finally realized that I would be preaching about the cross. We were trying to plan out our liturgies for Lent, and knowing that my sermon alone wouldn’t be enough to salve the wound of this tragedy, I was trying to come up with something supplemental that could be cathartic and help bring our hearts and minds back to the cross.
The stations of the cross are a traditional form of prayer in which the observer walks a path or around a room, meditating on fourteen simplified images of Jesus’ suffering and death, from when he was condemned until when he was laid in the tomb.
So that Sunday, we had set out Time, Newsweek, The Economist, and other news sources for parishioners. And after the sermon, during open space, a time when we normally observe a ten-minute period of prayer and response, the quiet sound of magazine pages being turned was punctuated by scissors cutting thin, shiny paper. In the end, all fourteen of the stations of the cross we created for that Lent were from news photos from the earthquake in Haiti.
1. Jesus Is Condemned: A finger points to a block of darkened lines left by a quickly moving seismographic needle.
2. Jesus Carries His Cross: A man wearing a medical mask helps carry a pine box.
3. Jesus Falls For The First Time: The aerial view of an entire city block’s worth of collapsed buildings.
4. Jesus Meets His Mother: An older Haitian woman in a white headscarf kneels with her arms wide, a look of grief on her face. A crowd stands behind her.
5. Simon Helps Carry the Cross: Two men carry a pine coffin.
6. Veronica Wipes Jesus’ Face: A woman in a red shirt bends over to touch the head of a stunned elderly woman who is sitting.
7. Jesus Falls For The Second Time: Lying on the ground, the wounded or dead literally bleed into the street.
8. Jesus Meets The Women: With prayer beads in hand, three women embrace each other. In the foreground a woman dressed in white lifts her hand in prayer, eyes closed.
9. Jesus Falls For The Third Time: Another aerial view of another city block of completely collapsed buildings.
10. Jesus Is Stripped: A pile of nearly naked bodies in the distance.
11. Jesus Is Nailed To The Cross: A woman lies on the ground, her hands stretched out completely to her sides. Head lifted, she wails.
12. Jesus Dies: Bodies covered in homemade quilts and coats line a block, while in the distance three men carry a coffin.
13. Jesus Is Taken Down From The Cross: The body of a man is lowered from a building on a piece of steel.
14. Jesus Is Buried: A dust-covered body buried under the rubble of a collapsed building.
We choose to believe Jesus was there in Haiti. We know he was there. We hope he was there. We needed him to have been there. He was there. He was there. We will not keep silent. Pat Robertson was wrong.
CHAPTER 13
Demons and Snow Angels
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from [his baptism in] the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”
—Luke 4:1-3
The Sunday we helped rename Asher, he had set up a small shrine to himself as a girl: a table holding two pictures of him as a young female wearing dresses and ribbons in her long hair. Very lovingly, the name Mary Christine Callahan was inscribed across a paper scroll in front of the pictures; the flame of a single white candle caused the name to move and change hue. There was such affection in his shrine to his former girl-self.
We had come up with the idea earlier that month, when Mary had said she was going to start transitioning from female to male, from Mary to Asher.
“Honey, what can we do for you?” was about the only thing I could think to say that wouldn’t be naïve or idiotic. And we decided that at Baptism of our Lord Sunday, we would include within the liturgy a naming rite. Mary would become Asher in the midst of a liturgy where Jesus was named “Son” and “Beloved.”
Asher was raised in the Church of Christ like me, a fact that bonded him to me immediately, not unlike when soldiers who survived the same bloody battle meet. Asher has a strong jaw, a fierce intellect, a tortured soul, and an uncontrollable laugh. He once told me that when he started questioning his sexuality, a well-meaning but profoundly misguided Christian therapist suggested he wear a rubber band around his wrist and to snap the band every time he had homosexual thoughts. This was, of course, not a helpful suggestion.
Asher reminded me of a twenty-first-century transgender version of the apostle Paul or Martin Luther. He shared with these two shapers of Christianity a fervent desire to be good, to be “right with God.” Saul of Tarsus was the most devout of Jews and a persecutor of Christians. Then, on the road to a town where he was going to go kill off a few more of Jesus’ followers he saw a vision of Christ. Jesus was like, Dude, you’re killing me with this. Knock it off. And then he went from Saul to Paul, from being the best at being a Jew to being the best at being a Christian. Only, at some point he realized that no one could really pull that off. That’s when Paul finally understood grace. Paul finally understood that God’s ability to name and love us is always greater than our ability to make ourselves worthy of either thing.
Similarly, fifteen-hundred-some-odd-years later, Martin Luther had a bit of a rough encounter with God—also on a road. Luther was an Augustinian monk who took being good so seriously that his father confessor worried he was going too far, which for Augustinian monks is really saying something. Luther was tortured by the possibility that even if he thought he was confessing all his sins he might forget one or maybe sin again before being able to confess again. And for this, he suffered. That is, until one day in 1517, when Luther was reading Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. Luther read that we are saved by grace and not through our “works,” and when he read that he realized he had been lied to. He had been told that the only way to be “right with God” was for the Roman Catholic Church to make you that way. The church told him just what he had to do: confess to a priest, do penance in the form of prayer, give money to build fancy churches, and loads of other made-up stuff. If you want to know what sparked the Protestant reformation, it was the fact that Martin Luther stopped buying lies about God and the church.
When Luther finally understood grace, there was no going back.
Five hundred years later, Mary Callahan was also tortured by wanting to be good. Based on what she had learned about an angry, vengeful God from her church, she tried to confess her sins to God, to not be queer, not be a boy, pray hard, and when needed, snap a rubber band around her wrist. As a child she would be kept awake at night with the anxiety about her own salvation: Could she ever be good enough to be loved by God? Did she do enough to be worthy of being saved? Could she maybe just try harder? She would often dream of being damned, a voice telling her she was condemned.
In college, despite her deep piety and striving, Mary would be cast out of her college ministry for being gay. Gayness broke the rules for what she had to do to get God to love her.
So a few years later, when Mary came to House for All Sinners and Saints and experienced us trying to live the truth—that God’s grace is free and for all and that we are all beloved children of God and that there is nothing we can do to make God love us any more or any less—Mary, like Paul and Martin Luther before her, believed it to be true. And that changed everything. Mary thought it might finally be safe to be herself, perhaps for the first time. And being herself meant living and identifying as a man.
At the time of Asher’s naming rite, I, too, was struggling with my own identity issues. I had overidentified with House for All, and my feelings of self-worth had become too heavily tied to the success or failure of the church. My ability to do my work became burdened by feelings of futility. In the shower and on walks and in my sleep I would fight very particular thoughts of discouragement. Like the tor
ture method used on prisoners of war, the same “song” would play over and over in my head. The lyrics went something like:
Most new churches fail in the first eighteen months.
Get ready for public humiliation.
You are not cut out for this. Get ready for everyone else to find that out.
The bishop’s office doesn’t have your back. Get ready to be betrayed by bureaucrats.
You’ve had a good run writing sermons, but now it’s over. Get ready to fail.
None of them are snappy, but these “lyrics” got stuck in my head like a demonic pop song. And the week I had to write a sermon for Baptism of our Lord Sunday, the week Asher’s name would change from Mary, I couldn’t stop these same lyrics from boring into my skull like drill bits. I decided to try to shut off the evil musical theater production in my head and buckle down to write a sermon about how Jesus was named “son” and “beloved” at his baptism. But I just couldn’t.
I considered that I might be fighting demons, that something outside of myself was trying to discourage me, which is embarrassing since I’m pretty sure I don’t really even believe in demons. But it felt like something was trying to get me. I have very little predilection for thinking about demons or the devil or that whole “powers and principalities” thing. Like a good middle-class, mainline Protestant, I tend to arrogantly look down my theological nose at all of it as superstitious snake handling nonsense, as though it’s all the embarrassing spiritual equivalent of a monster truck rally. At best I think the talk about demonic forces I hear in some parts of Christianity is no more than a result of ignorance and lack of education; at worse it’s just a way to externalize our own sin. Because if the devil made me do it, then I don’t have to face the reality that perhaps I made me do it. It’s all so ripe for abuse, and some of my parishioners, Asher included, had fallen victim to other Christians trying to cast out the so-called demon of homosexuality, as though spiritual warfare and culture wars are one in the same. So when I felt like I might need to talk about demonic forces the Sunday of Asher’s naming, it made me uncomfortable.
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