But I had no choice. Looking down at my tattoo of Mary Magdalene, the pastrix/patroness from whom I had received much strength and purpose and who herself was healed of demons, I knew I had to preach it. Because as I was studying the text I realized that what happens immediately after Jesus was baptized might have something important to say to Asher and me both.
And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ”
And the Word that had most recently come from the mouth of God was, “This is my beloved in whom I am well pleased.” Identity. It’s always God’s first move. Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God’s own. But almost immediately, other things try to tell us who we are and to whom we belong: capitalism, the weight-loss industrial complex, our parents, kids at school—they all have a go at telling us who we are. But only God can do that. Everything else is temptation. Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are. And maybe, just moments after Jesus’ baptism, when the devil says to him, “If you are the Son of God…” he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God.
So if God’s first move is to give us our identity, then the devil’s first move is to throw that identity into question. Identity is like the tip of a spool of thread, which when pulled, can unwind the whole thing.
For far too long, I believed that how the Church of Christ saw me, or how my family saw me, or how society saw me, was the same as how God saw me. But I began to realize something that is painfully obvious on the surface, but something that almost all of us are blind to: Our identity has nothing to do with how we are perceived by others. But it’s still tempting to believe. I mean, if Jesus was vulnerable to temptation, the rest of us certainly are, whether it be temptation to self-loathing or self-aggrandizement, depression or pride, self-destruction or self-indulgence. We are tempted to doubt our innate value precisely to the degree that we are insecure about our identity from, and our relationship to, God.
So I considered all the times when I had allowed the church or a boyfriend or my own delusions to tell me who I was. And then on that Sunday, as Asher was setting up a little shrine to himself as Mary, I prepared myself to preach about demons. When the moment came, I swallowed hard and then confessed to my congregation that while I in no way have any desire to believe in spiritual warfare, that in the last couple of years I’d quietly begun to change my mind. I now think that there are indeed forces that seek to defy God in the world and in our own lives. I’m uncertain where they come from (inside of us or from outside of us), and I am uncertain what form they take (actual demons or just human darkness itself), I just can no longer pretend they are not there.
The precision with which the devil or evil or darkness (whatever you want to call it) worms into our own lives is breathtaking. It’s like a tailor-made radioactive isotope calling into question our identity as children of God. And nowhere are we more prone to encroaching darkness than when we are stepping into the light: sudden discouragement in the midst of healthy decisions, a toxic thought or a particular temptation.
So, knowing these people in front of me, I made the following suggestion to my church: Take a note from Martin Luther’s playbook and defiantly shout back at this darkness, “I am baptized,” not I was but I am baptized. When Luther himself was holed up in a castle translating the Greek Bible into German so that for the very first time somewhat regular folks could read it for themselves, he struggled mightily with doubt and discouragement from what he understood to be the devil. Subsequently, Luther was known to not only throw the occasional inkpot at whatever was tormenting him and causing him to doubt God’s promises, but also while doing so he could be heard throughout the castle grounds shouting, “I am baptized!” This was true of Luther and it was true of Asher. And since the thing I love about baptism is that it is about God’s action upon us and not our decision to “choose” God, I believe that the promises spoken over us in baptism are promises that are for all of humanity. Every person, regardless of religion, is named and claimed—baptized—by the God who created her. When I became a Lutheran, I asked Ross Merkel to baptize me, and he said that despite what I may have believed when I was twelve years old and baptized in white sandals, an act of God cannot be undone or redone.
Lutheran theologian Craig Koester says that from an earthly perspective, evil can seem so pervasive as to be unstoppable. And watching the evening news would seem to support that idea. But he says that from a heavenly perspective, evil—darkness and the devil—rages on earth not because it is so powerful, but because it is so vulnerable. Koester says that Satan desperately rages on earth because he knows he has already lost.
As I looked out into the eyes of my congregation, many looking back at me as though I had lost my last mind, I extended to them an invitation to join me in this crazy practice of picturing our discouragement and doubt as a real force that wants to defy God, then to join me in picturing evil and darkness not as powerful and unstoppable but as desperate and vulnerable.
When the forces that seek to defy God whisper if in our ears—if God really loved me, I wouldn’t feel like this… If I really am beloved, then I should have everything I want… if I really belong to God, things in my life wouldn’t suck—to remember that God has named us and claimed us as God’s own. When what seems to be depression or compulsive eating or narcissism or despair or discouragement or resentment or isolation takes over, try picturing it as a vulnerable and desperate force seeking to defy God’s grace and mercy in your life. And then tell it to piss off and say defiantly to it, “I am baptized” or “I am God’s,” because nothing else gets to tell you who you are.
During open space, I saw Asher’s father weeping. I walked over and handed him a tissue. I can’t say for sure why he was crying. Perhaps he was mourning the “loss” of his daughter. Surely it was a mix of many things that are known only to him. But what I hoped he heard from me was that it doesn’t really matter which gender Asher identifies as. Any identity other than child of God is spiritually meaningless.
Two years later, I sat in a dive cafe eating gyros with Asher. We said goodbye as he prepared to leave for seminary. Like Saint Paul and Martin Luther before him, once Asher heard the Gospel—that Asher is loved and named by the one who created him and that this one, this God, is revealed in Jesus Christ, who became flesh and walked among us full of grace and truth and who is so for us and with us that he would go to the grave on our behalf—when Asher heard that there is nothing we can say, do, or believe that makes God’s Gospel any more real, and that it is all a gift… Well, when Asher heard this Gospel, he felt that he had no other choice but to devote his life to telling others the same story in hopes that they, too, can become free.
Asher looked dapper and happy in that cafe. He wore a tweed cap, a hipster T-shirt, and a smile. He looked free. “I never told you about the dream I had the night after my naming rite,” he said. “It was like so many other nights—a voice accusing me, damning me, scaring me. But this time I talked back,” he said proudly. “I said, ‘I am baptized, so fuck off,’ and when I woke up I was giddy. I called a friend, and we went to City Park and made snow angels.”
CHAPTER 14
Doormats and Wrinkled Vestments
Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”
—Matthew 18:21
Holding a neighborhood interfaith 9/11 prayer ser
vice on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks was a good idea, but it wasn’t mine. If it had been, I might have had the foresight to be sure my robes didn’t look like they’d been crumpled in the trunk of a hot car all summer. I didn’t do anything but accept the invitation of the spiritual leaders who came up with the idea and made it happen. The priests, an imam, and a rabbi asked me to participate because House for All Sinners and Saints worships in an Episcopal church in the neighborhood. Just moments before the service began, I was frantically ironing my alb in the church basement. I hadn’t realized how wrinkled it was until I took it out of the garment bag. Unlike the other clergy assembled upstairs greeting the worshipers, I almost never wear robes. On this day in particular, this felt unavoidably metaphorical.
The service was thoughtful, tasteful, and moving, but I mostly just stood up front with the others, a so-called spiritual leader in the community, guiding others through our remembrance and lament of the events from ten years ago. Part of the service included asking those in attendance—Christians, Muslims, and Jews—to write prayers and laments on brightly colored paper. As we filed out of the enormous Presbyterian church into the cool September sunlight, some members of my congregation were busy hanging the colored papers like makeshift prayer flags from twine strung between two oak trees. Only one caught my eye. A cheerful, yellow square on which was written: “I can’t forgive this. Can you?”
I then understood immediately that my problem with that day hadn’t been my wrinkled vestments or that I felt somewhat out of place wearing them in the company of other religious leaders who seemed to don them much more comfortably. The problem was that I understood the sentiment on that paper perfectly. I find forgiveness to be one of the trickier elements of the Christian faith since it can feel like forgiving something is the same as saying it’s OK.
Everyone over twenty has their 9/11 story, just as their parents have their Kennedy assassination stories, and their parents have their Pearl Harbor stories. My 9/11 happened when I was a young mother and is inextricably tied to cheese enchiladas.
I first heard the news in Ed’s Cantina, a Mexican restaurant in Estes Park, Colorado. I’m fairly certain I was the last person in the room to be aware of what was happening on the TV, engrossed as I was in a plate of enchiladas I didn’t have to prepare or pay for. At the time, Matthew and I were raising a two-year-old and ten-month-old on his associate pastor’s salary, so we jumped at his parents’ offer of a free vacation in the mountains. A vacation with Tom and Lois meant doubling the adult-to-toddler ratio, and at the time, when my life felt like a several-year-long Ironman competition, adding two adults to the childcare mix was all the vacation I needed.
Lost in my plate of cheese enchiladas as I was, it took me longer than most to notice that everyone in Ed’s Cantina was now quietly watching the TV above the bar. I hadn’t been aware there even was a TV until that moment, but now there seemed to be nothing else in the room. There was only falling buildings and hanging questions.
Later, at the cabin, when we were finally willing to let the mundane barge into the space created by the uncertain, I sat and nursed my ten-month-old son while Grammy Lois made tea. My son’s chubby hand patted my face, and I cried, wondering what world he was to live in now.
Holding the fluttering yellow square of paper in my hand ten years later, I was faced with having to preach about forgiveness to my church when the fact remained that I’m still mad as hell that my children don’t get to grow up in a country where planes don’t fly into towers. That is to say, I am angry that their lives might now be more like the lives of countless children in other terrorized countries.
The tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks fell on a Sunday. In the morning we were all at the interfaith service, but in the evening, House for All Sinners and Saints had our own weekly Eucharist, and the assigned texts in the lectionary were all about forgiveness. It suggested the following texts for September 11th, 2011: A reading from Genesis where Joseph forgives his brothers who had sold him into slavery, a text from Romans that challenges passing judgment on others, and a little story from Matthew where Peter asks Jesus how many times we should forgive those who sin against us. “Seven times?” Peter asks. “Nope,” Jesus says. “Seventy-seven times.”
Seriously.
I thought it a bit ham-fisted of the RCL people to assign several texts on forgiveness for the week of September 11th. That is, until I realized that the lectionary was assembled in 1994. The fact that I was forced to preach on forgiveness texts on the tenth anniversary of September 11th was a coincidence. Or something. However it happened, the fact of the matter is this: Having to preach these texts made it feel like Jesus showed up ten years after the most unforgiveable, murderous event of my lifetime and started blabbing about forgiveness. And this made forgiveness feel less like a concept and more like a crucible.
Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” not forgive us but smite those bastards who hurt us.
When I was growing up, there was a house down the street that had slightly tattered window coverings, and the front lawn was like a graveyard of broken stuff. Posted on the fence was a NO TRESPASSING sign. I remember asking my mother what trespassing was so I could be certain not to do it to anyone who lived in that weird house. When she explained that it meant going into their yard uninvited, I thought, no problem.
Soon after that, when I first learned the Lord’s Prayer, I thought it was weird that out of all the things that Jesus would suggest we ask God to forgive, it would be trespassing. I pretty much made it a policy to stay out of strange yards, and no one seemed to wander into ours uninvited, so I thought I was covered. Only later did I realize that actual trespassing was only one of countless ways to trespass against others. And now I get it—kind of. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Jesus always seems to be pairing God’s forgiveness of us with our forgiveness of others.
But why? Growing up, I thought it was a way of guilting us into forgiving others, like Jesus was saying, Hey, I died for you and you can’t even be nice to your little brother? As though God can get us to do the right thing if God can just make us feel bad about how much we owe God. But that is not the God I see in Jesus Christ. That is a manipulative mother.
Forgiveness is a big deal to Jesus, and like that guy in high school with a garage band, he talks about it, like, all the time. It’s embarrassing. So much talk about forgiveness can make this following Jesus thing feel like a Pansies Anonymous meeting. Slogan: Treat us like shit, we’ll totally forgive you; but doesn’t forgiving a sin against us, or an evil done to many, come perilously to just that? Isn’t forgiving over and over just the thing that keeps battered women battered?
This is where it can suck to be a preacher. Especially when the ten-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks falls on a Sunday. I just can’t preach something I don’t believe. Actually, that’s not true; I can preach something I hope to be true, even something I dare to be true. What I can’t bear, though, is the thought of preaching something I suspect might not be true. And on Sunday, September 11, 2011, I suspected that it might not be true that we should forgive evil, because when faced with evil, Jesus wants us to be holy doormats and say it’s OK. And I most certainly did not believe the other popular message preached from many an American pulpit that day: The United States has most-favored-nation status in the eyes of the Almighty, and God will vindicate the evil done to us and it is in that God we trust.
Somewhere along the way I was taught that evil is fought through justice and might. The way we combat evil is by making sure that people get what they have coming to them. An eye for an eye. You attack me and I’ll attack you. Fair is fair. And there were times in my own life when I’ve been so hurt that I was sure retaliation would make me feel better. But inevitably, when I can’t harm the people who harmed me, I just end up harming the people who love me. So maybe retaliation or holding on to anger about
the harm done to me doesn’t actually combat evil. Maybe it feeds it.
In the end, if we’re not careful, we can actually absorb the worst of our enemy and on some level even become them. It would seem that when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm, we are in some way linked to that sin, connected to that mistreatment like a chain. And our anger, fear, or resentment doesn’t free us at all. It just keeps us chained.
What if forgiveness, rather than being a pansy way of saying it’s OK, is actually a way of wielding bolt cutters and snapping the chain that links us? In all fairness, I should say that this is just the kind of thing that got Jesus killed. He was going around telling people they were forgiven. He went about freeing people, cutting them loose. And that kind of freedom is always threatening.
Just ask my friend Don, the Lutheran pastor who had to leave his job after doing Dylan Klebold’s funeral. Dylan Klebold was one of the Columbine shooters, and Don had the gall to think that the promises given to Dylan by God at his baptism were more powerful than the acts of evil he committed. It helps me to think about Don because I realize that he wasn’t saying what Dylan Klebold did was OK. He was defiantly proclaiming that evil is simply not more powerful than good, and that there really is a light that shines in the darkness and that the darkness can not, will not, shall not overcome it.
I often wonder what Don was feeling when he did that funeral. Had he so quickly moved to forgiveness or, more likely, was he just acting in accordance to what he believed? That’s the life of faith, at least for me. As the great American writer Flannery O’Connor said, “Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.” My heart may be dark, but I choose to try to act according to what I believe, not what I feel. What happened on 9/11 was not OK. That’s why I need to forgive. Because I can’t be bound to that kind of evil. Lest it infect the evil in my own heart and metastasize it.
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