This won’t be published on a regular schedule (see above in exercises for inbox-sparing), but I’m going to use it as an intermittent clearinghouse for my writing, things which nourish joy, and a looking glass into liberative politics and theologies. Since I’m writing, it will skew heavy in queerness, naturalistic observation, wee ponderings, and the desire to treat our bodies and emotions as sources of truth.

If that’s not your thing, feel free to unsubscribe! I won’t be offended (much). But if you want to come along for the journey, I promise queeriosities curated with love and care.

feed the spirit

This month, I was honored to be published in the Trans Poetics Archive’s second annual anthology, For Someone You Know. I’ll reprint a poem below, but if you love poetry you should buy the anthology because a) it’s rad to support trans/nb poets in these days b) the book is full of stunning verse.

This poem began as a letter, penned to a planning board chairperson who pulled me aside after a meeting to say, “Listen, I Googled your name, and you need to repent.” He told me about how homosexuality was a sin, how I was a false prophet leading folks to hell, plus a variety of other things that I won’t print here because they’re boring and nothing you haven’t heard before! When I say art is political, I mean that it can form both a shield against what is soul destroying and a window that opens possibilities for a different world. “Returning hate for hate only multiplies hate,” but returning art for hate can maintain sanity when the world tries to drive you mad.

Catechism for a Planning Board

You told me to repent.
My brother, do you think I haven’t
Walked that road already?
all the nights of longing
to be anything but this

Do you imagine I did not look at my body
yearning to knit cells into different patterns?
tight stitched, seersucker prints
seamlessly blending.
did not yearn to replace tangled ends
my young fingers could not weave

Do you believe I did not spend
wild hours awash in tears?
Guzzling gallons
in ill-fated hope
that I would either quench this burning thirst
or drown myself quickly?

I confessed longings
into every echoing chamber
knees rubbed raw
fantasies stretched beneath me
like so many grains of rice
only burrowing deeper

No, my brother in Christ,
who yearns to put me upon your cross
I have already descended
I do not need the scourge you offer
My scars are now for healing
ridgepoles of a fresh roof
maps of land my soul won’t travel

For I have met the One you lie about
drunk from a chalice
you tried to fill with poison
and They said “Spit.”
Said They were the still small voice
that saved me from the lions
told me about Joseph and her technicolor dress
about Ruth pledging life to Naomi
about Jonathan stripping before David
“Take my breastplate, it will guard your peace.”

To repent is to turn back
and every time I stare into that well
The darkness whispers benediction
Crooked lines, radiantly alive
dancing in this moonlight

Buy the Anthology!

feed the mind

“When the coup happened, I remember people out on the street celebrating, hanging flags from their windows; it was a festive atmosphere. So here was a deep lesson to be learned: Anti-democratic coups tend to happen with the support of the middle class and large segments of the population.”

In my role as Director of Communications at Garrett Seminary, I have the joy of interviewing the school’s brilliant professors about their work. This month, I spoke with Dr. Nancy Bedford and Dr. Débora Junker—both of whom grew up under South American dictatorships—about what they feel people get wrong about authoritarian regimes, and how they’re thinking about the current political moment.

It was an illuminating interview for me, and I hope you’ll feel the same. Specifically, what chilled my blood was their observation that people often live for years under dictatorships without naming that reality. History books may mark 1976 as the coup that overthrew democracy in Argentina, but that clarity is often reserved for hindsight. Then as now, the unthinkable becomes normalized—doubling the necessity to retain moral clarity.

It’s why I’m quite moved by Dr. Bedford’s observation about the importance of reflection, faith, and contemplation in these days (to which I would add artistic creation). “Prayer and contemplation may sound weak, but they are central to everything that can help us resist in the way of Jesus,” she says. “Contemplative prayer is the exact opposite of what would-be dictators do with their time, energies, and attention. The attention economy wants to distract you; the dominant system wants to scare you. Prayer focuses us—it reminds us that love casts out fear.”

Click to Read More!

feed the flesh

Those who know me know I love to cook. Living communally with multiple people, I’m always figuring out recipes that can feed a crowd. Dinner parties are also my little way to seed connectedness against an alienating tide. So, I’m going to conclude this newsletter by featuring a recipe, focusing on fresh ingredients and hearty meals that scale up easy.

For me, summertime is a vinegar-based bean and vegetable salad. I love the way the rich beans push against that tangy acidity, a satisfying crunch paired to smoother textures that begs to be eaten outdoors. Plus, cold salads work great for meal prep if you’re short on time! I like to cook dry beans in water with garlic and olive oil for a little extra flavor, but canned beans work great too. Simply rough chop all the ingredients, mix them in a bowl, and add the dressing! Your taste buds (and friends) will thank you.

ingredients

solid:

1 lb dry beans (or 4 cans): I used Rancho Gordo’s Good Mother Stallard beans, but any hearty bean like a kidney or pinto will also work great!
2 stalks celery
1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved
1 can corn, drained
2 bell peppers (I used yellow and orange, for color)
1 red onion
8 cloves of garlic
1 bunch parsley
1 bunch basil

dressing:

3/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup molasses
1/8 cup granulated sugar
6 tablespoons olive oil
1.5 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
.5 teaspoons smoked paprika

This text features Jesus telling a parable about a man in similar freefall. This money manager, we are told, is summoned by his boss, who swiftly berates him. “You’re squandering my money,” the rich man says, and informs him that he will be fired. I’ve sat on that side of the desk, and like many of us who have found ourselves in those undesirable circumstances, the manager’s first thoughts turn inward. “What am I going to do? How will I live and provide for my family?” he asks himself. I also love the humor writ through his next line: “I am not strong enough to dig,” he confesses wryly—apparently money managers haven’t changed too much in the intervening two thousand years, but I digress.

What’s really interesting, however—and the reason Jesus tells this parable—is what this middle manager does next. Even though his concern is turned inward—he is worried about his own livelihood and survival—his hands turn outward. He resolves that the way he will ensure his safety is by strengthening his connections to wider community. One after another, he tells his employer’s debtors to dramatically slash what they owe. “Oh, you owe a hundred jugs of olive oil? Nah, let’s call that fifty.” It’s such a delightful, human parable, which Jesus concludes with this curious advice: “I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?”

Truly, a parable for our age. Jesus describes a person who finds themselves enmeshed in an unjust system, one that’s rapidly collapsing around him. We don’t get any information for exactly why the rich man is owed 100 jugs of olive oil, 100 bushels of wheat, but we do know that predatory economic systems existed every bit as much in antiquity as they do today. Much of the ruling Judean elite derived their power from their alignment with the Roman Empire, paid to collect oppressive taxes on Rome’s behalf, enriching themselves by wringing whatever they could from those who labored and worked the land. Then as now, the folks who were most economically precarious are those who directly produced what others need to live. Again, the money manager confesses “I am not strong enough to dig,” yet it has been his responsibility to maximize what he collects from laborers’ calloused hands to pad the pockets of the wealthy. He has no doubt made his peace with that exploitative order as simply doing what he must to survive, and he has perceived a stability in that role that does not actually exist. Suddenly, the ground beneath him opens, he learns that aligning himself with worldly power only offers a simulacrum of safety—in just one utterance from the rich man’s mouth, he is materially aligned to those who scrape a living at the margins.

In so many ways, we are living in this story’s mirror. We have been told about a social contract: In exchange for hard work and lawful obedience, we will receive safety, protection, and the means necessary to build a life. Millions upon millions signed that dotted line and faithfully served their half of the bargain only to watch the contract crumble into ash.

I’m thirty-five, and when I graduated college that so-called American dream was still hanging by a thread. I watched a generation of my peers enter the world with enthusiasm only for those hopes to be dashed upon the rocks. 37% of American families today can’t afford an unexpected $400 expense. 54% of renters who wish to buy a home believe they will never be able to purchase one. 67% of people surveyed last year said they simply don’t think homeownership is a realistic milestone for young people. An entire generation entered college on the promise that the cultural markers of adulthood and maturity awaited on the other side. By and large what we received instead was mountains of debt and a social fabric badly tattered at the seams. Is it any wonder that the general disposition of the generation that follows my own is largely marked by nihilism, ironic detachment, and a pervasive sense of despair? I’ve just been naming economic markers, I’m not even touching on the pressing ecological ruin that haunts any imagined future. I can’t tell you the number of conversations I’ve had with folks in their twenties who hesitate to even hope in the long-term because they cannot envision a middle-age that is not shaped by scarcity and wild instability.

And it’s not just their own circumstances. Like the biblical money manager, what folks are waking up to is that our entire economic system has always been predicated on the exploitation of people who are named and treated as disposable. That manifest destiny hinged on indigenous genocide, that the industrial revolution as we know and name it could not have existed without slavery, that the GI bill that enabled folks like my grandparents to buy their first home was inextricably tied to redlining and policies that shut out Black and brown homeowners from the same benefits. People are waking to the reality that even the “progress” of the latter twentieth century was in large part only enabled by shifting the category of disposable humans to international populations, new dumping grounds for toxic waste, new ethnic groups who could be forced to labor for starvation wages. We have all been spending dishonest wealth and that check is coming due. The authoritarian violence we see right now—silencing of free speech, sending the national guard as an occupying army into cities, the mass deportations—these are not an aberration from our history, they are its terrifying culmination. And they are enabled, in part, because our common life has been calamitously hollowed out, a once-vibrant social sphere has yielded to isolation, and this alienation breeds fear, suspicion, and anger.

This is the piece that has largely gone unnamed since Charlie Kirk’s killing. People are striving to fit his shooter’s motivation into neat and tidy stories—conservative disregard for gun regulation come home to roost or the end-product of leftist rhetoric. All this framing is wildly unconvincing because it treats this incident in isolation from the repeated acts of despair that have become tragically commonplace—the school shootings, the white supremacist massacres, all the other hate crimes and political assassinations, or just random acts of senseless violence. Yes, these actions may have different proximate motivations, but they share a common bedrock: If you reach a point where your own life ceases to matter, extremist ideologies or just the basest of passions become the final refuge in our search for meaning. When a shooter scrawls internet chatroom memes on his shell casings, that’s an existential cry, a testimony that we have left such a paltry cultural inheritance that too many people feel like the only rational response is the siren call to burn everything down.

Now I’m not going to stand up here and tell you that I know a magic spell that will swiftly reverse a hopelessness sewn across decades. But I am telling you that I think this parable from Luke suggests where we might begin. Like this money manager, we are all living amid powers far beyond our own making. He was not the architect for how Rome extracted money from its provinces. He was not responsible for the way the rich man slotted himself into that system, wielding its violence to exploit his neighbors. He simply found himself entrusted to oversee a tightly circumscribed sphere of influence at precisely the moment when all that stability and order began to collapse. And so he faces a choice: Will he dutifully discharge the remainder of his duties? Or will he use what is left of that authority to chart a new course?

He chooses a justice that reflects God’s grace and mercy. It’s a remarkable text because of how it makes palpably clear that God is not interested in fulfilling debts that should never have existed in the first place. When Jesus asks “if you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will trust you with the true riches?” that faithfulness is to God and neighbor, not the system which produced dishonest wealth in the first place. More than anything, in this parable Jesus is asking all of us to consider what power we do possess, and how we might use it to plant seeds for a different world.

Some of you may know that I live communally with my partner, my brother, my best friend, his partner. We also offer extremely low-cost housing to a rotating group of local queer folks—largely farmers—who otherwise could not afford to live in our area. I don’t bring this up to pat ourselves on the back or say that this is what every person should be doing, but simply as an example of one way our family looked around and considered how we could share dishonest wealth among other folks with whom we want to birth deeper relationship. It’s not an act of heroism: we happened to have some additional space, and we’re using it creatively to meet a need. Likewise, we regularly cook giant pots of food to share in community, partly for the joy of gathering but partly because it is a way to proclaim a future of God’s abundance through our own living.

These acts and more become the outline for different kinds of stories than the ones in which we have been told to place our trust. When our cultural narratives are collapsing, investing resources to try and prop them up is an exercise in futility. The center is not holding, and it will not hold any better if we desperately try to shove our fingers in a dyke that’s poised to burst.

Hope is found when we recognize that the margins are already God’s new center. The Holy Spirit does not need authorization from established power. She whispers and moves among every group of people who kindle new forms of belonging while the old forms crumble. That, in fact, the fall of Rome is an integral part of the world which comes after. “We cannot serve God and wealth” and we cannot serve an unjust order and the Kingdom. The money manager is told his position will no longer exist, he must decide what follows. We have all been given notice: our time is tenuous. How will we discharge our wealth and power in what remains?

I’m honored to belong to a congregation that is critically thinking through this question, one that deploys our material resources in ways that nurture abundance. But I also encourage us to accelerate that process, and particularly to invest in younger generations who have an unslaked thirst for meaning. Our justice and witness committee is currently exploring relationships with The Landing Place, Homeworthy’s youth services center in Rockland. In a year where the number of homeless young folks rose 18%, they are creating networks for support and belonging. There are opportunities to volunteer, to cook meals, to share a ministry of presence that tells folks the world has made vulnerable that they live in a community that cares about them, that they are worthy of a future. Organizations like OUTMaine, whose board I serve, create networks for queer youth that connect them to one another, and to adults who help illuminate the many gifts they already possess. Working with formal organizations is a great way to embody hope, but it’s also a calling for each of our personal lives. How are we creating space for thriving? How do we mentor younger folks around us, relinquishing our own power that we might invest in theirs? To whom can we say, “Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it half of what it was?”

Again, this is the brilliance of that money manager. He knows, deep in his bones, that not only his thriving but his very survival depends on the well-being of his neighbors. He is saved precisely because he rejects the seductive lie of individualism—that we, alone, are responsible for our fate. He bets big on that promise, you can trust he’s not getting another money manager job after this. But he turns his back on Rome and all the ways it has ordained power, aligning himself with those who—quite literally—are laboring for a different world. Faced with the kind of circumstances Didion describes, where “children were never taught and would now never learn the games that held society together,” he abandons the desire to reproduce those games, for they were only ever a gilded cage. God, it seems, is doing something different, heralding a world beyond the bars. Our job is to divest resources from the world as it is—withdrawing our time, talent, and treasure—to pour them into the world that’s struggling to be born. As cultural institutions like PBS, the Kennedy Center, and NPR are muzzled or shuttered, invest in art and truth wherever you find it. Cultivate beauty: Plant gardens, build a sauna with your friends, feed people, nurture laughter, stoke joy wherever it is found. And when authoritarian power tells you that you are alone, that the world is dangerous, knit your circles of belonging ever more intently, and invite other folks in. We do not know exactly what is coming, but we know that our resilience will be determined by the strength of our interpersonal bonds.

Nihilism is seductive precisely because it is easy. It requires nothing from us. We can look at the boat filling with water and say, “Gah, there’s no way we can bail this out in time.” Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. I don’t know. But the future belongs to those who have buckets in their hands.

Óscar Romero has been on my mind. If you’re unfamiliar with Romero—first of all please go read about him because a brief aside in this sermon could never do justice to his incredible life. But he was appointed the Archbishop of El Salvador in the final years before civil war ravaged the country. The child of wealthy parents, he was chosen to lead the church by the oligarchs who ruled El Salvador, in large part because they believed that he would wield his ecclesial power to support their continued exploitation of the El Salvadorian campesinos who worked their land. After Romero became Archbishop, however, he experienced a dramatic metamorphosis when the dictatorship murdered both a close friend of his, Father Rutillo Grande, and several Catholic nuns—all of whom had been organizing poor folks in the countryside to speak out against the government.

After their deaths, Óscar became almost a wholly different man. I had the opportunity while I was in seminary to travel across El Salvador and speak with people who worked beside him, and again and again I heard testimony of how he seemed to be seized by the Holy Spirit, shaken from his previous complicity, moved to cry out against the oppression of God’s people. Even his voice and the way he walked changed, they said, as if he had been transformed into the likeness of the One he was called to follow. He began to speak out vociferously against the government’s violence. He took to the radio, offering stirring weekly sermons that roused the spirit of the El Salvadorian people, despite repeated warnings and orders from those in power to stay silent. Three years after this stunning change, he was presiding over Mass when gunmen walked through the door of a little white chapel and shot him through the heart.

So why am I talking about Óscar Romero this morning? Why should I disturb the peace of this tranquil March Sunday in our seaside town to speak of dictatorships and assassinations? And what does any of this have to do with Jesus’ transfiguration, which we heard about in today’s gospel reading? I’ll confess that it’s, in part, because I need some help interpreting what exactly happened on that mountaintop. Even the disciples themselves seem confused: Peter and John are asleep, then they’re awake. Peter offers to set up three tents for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah while, and I quote, “not realizing what he was saying.” All of a sudden, they are taken up into a cloud, terrified, surrounded by the voice of God who proclaims that Jesus is God’s messiah. Then, they find themselves alone beside Jesus, and they keep their silence, telling no one about what they have seen, perhaps because they themselves do not fully understand what has happened. If the ones who stood with Jesus on that mountaintop find themselves shaken and perplexed by their experience, what hope do we have to interpret the holy mystery in these words?

And so, rather than simply sitting in reverent confusion at the foot of the mountain, my mind is drawn to a transfiguration I can touch—to streets I have walked, priests I spoke with, to that little white chapel where I prayed, where Romero’s own bloodstained vestments are still preserved as a holy relic. Because here is the truth, if you go to El Salvador, you will see that the people there do not just consider Romero to be someone who faithfully followed Jesus. He is treated as someone who, in powerful and mysterious ways, became Jesus in their midst. Dramatic murals of Romero grace countless walls, showing him seated at God’s right hand. His life is interpolated into stations of the cross, blending his own ministry and crucifixion with Jesus’. In life and in death, he is taken into that cloud beside Jesus, Moses, and Elijah—sanctified by his determination to live out the gospel call to defy violence, even to the point where it killed him.

Pay attention to who Jesus speaks with in that cloud! He is joined in the presence of God by Moses, who liberated God’s people from bondage, and by Elijah, who prophesied against the heresy of Israel’s King Ahab, who refused to worship God and instead built a temple to Baal. The messiah, it seems, comes to free God’s people from the external forces who would restrict our freedom, but also to shatter our own complicity to any unjust ruler. If we are to follow Jesus and be similarly transfigured, this is not a passive change, it is an active confrontation with any place where evil holds power. In case this message was in doubt, look to the first thing Jesus does when he descends from the mountaintop: He encounters a demon possessing a child, one that “mauls him,” and he casts that unclean spirit from the boy, liberating him for abundant life. Many of us are uncomfortable with talk about demonic possession—we explain it away: “oh the boy had epilepsy, that’s why he foamed at the mouth,” or “that was something ancient folks believed in, before we had science to explain what is happening.” But, as uncomfortable as it might be, this morning I’m going to insist that we take accounts of demonic possession seriously, that we treat them as Jesus and the ancient audience would treat them: as a direct conflict with how evil manifests in our collective life. Again, this is the very first act of the transfigured Christ: He encounters the source of potent suffering and rebukes it in God’s name.

We must take unclean spirits seriously because boy do we have some in our midst. When rulers gut international aid, abandoning food distribution, AIDS interventions, and malaria programs that have saved millions of lives, that’s an unclean spirit. When the powerful use their authority to enrich themselves and their friends, twisting the justice system to escape prosecution, that’s an unclean spirit. When government experts and professionals are replaced with cronies whose only credentials are unwavering loyalty, that’s an unclean spirit. When words like “diversity, equity and inclusion” are treated as an enemy we must purge, when queer and trans people are told we don’t exist, that is an unclean spirit. When migrant families who have been our neighbors for decades are rounded up and deported, that is the work of evil in our midst. I’m not going to belabor any of this, because our days and weeks do enough of that already, but it’s important as Christians to understand these days not just as a political crisis but as a spiritual referendum on who we will become as the people of God. Will we follow Ahab as the King orders worship to an unholy order? Or will we follow Elijah and expose the moral bankruptcy of any movement who proclaims to follow Christ but violates the life and ministry of Jesus? Will we obey Pharoah out of deference to the rule of law, or will we be like Moses and break laws as we conspire for liberation?

Because the good news at the heart of our text is that, if we allow ourselves to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, brought into communion with the living God, we will be revealed as our truest selves. That’s the other piece that’s clear from Luke’s gospel: It is the experience of transfiguration that reveals Jesus to the world. Coming face to face with God, Jesus’ radiance is shown to all around him, for the first time the disciples understand the fullness of the one with whom they’ve traveled. That’s not just something that’s real for Jesus on a mountaintop two thousand years ago, it’s how God moves in our own communities. We live in an age of mendacity, inundated by lies about how we should regard one another. Again and again, powerful voices spin tales about violent immigrants, criminal Black folks, deviant queer people, lazy poor folks—all these tropes and the others that live in your head are intentionally manufactured because they make us suspicious of one another. Fascists and tyrants need our fear, it is the renewable resource that fuels authoritarian rule.

If we let the radiant love of God be the lens through which we see one another, however, these lies fall away. Love reveals the truth of our common purpose: our yearning and striving, our falling short and picking ourselves back up, our capacity for both harm and forgiveness, our shared desire to be known, to live in community, care for the Earth, and build a meaningful life. This small-t transfiguration may not reveal divinity like it does for Jesus, but it does the next best thing: It reveals humanity. And it is our very humanness that renders us fit to follow Jesus, Moses, and Elijah.

Once we begin to see each other as God sees us: fearfully and wonderfully made, we can build pockets of transformation, spaces shaped and held by that all-enveloping love. In these disturbing and frightening days, that is a radical act. On Friday, I danced with reckless abandon at OUTMaine’s annual Rainbow Gala. Does that erase the violence and discrimination our government is committing against queer people? No. But it shows that we belong to one another, that we will not simply cede our rights and safety without a fight. Again and again, this is a story we can live. Whether it’s our community food pantry that makes sure no one in our area goes hungry, Homeworthy, who finds affordable housing for folks in Knox county, people doing ecological justice work, folks building ethnic affinity spaces, or Niweskok the new Wabanaki community farm and heritage center that’s opening this month in Swanville, we can let transfiguration radiate outward, knitting us to our neighbors with love that won’t be torn apart.

There’s a prayer I often turn to in moments like this. Though it was written by a different Catholic Bishop, it’s often misattributed to Óscar Romero because of how frequently it’s said in El Salvador. Here’s the words:

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent
enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an
opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

If we have the courage to live transfigured lives, we may not see a full world rendered holy in the likeness to God, but I swear to you we will see and experience parts of it. And we sow seeds that hold legacies beyond our wildest longings.

I happened to be worshipping in Óscar Romero’s tomb on the day the Vatican announced he was beatified. When the news was shared, the air in the catacombs crackled electric. As mass let out, we walked into the streets and I watched the crowds rejoice, celebrating someone whose steadfast love transfigured him into the very likeness of God, bringing deliverance to people who needed it. I may not understand all the mysteries of what transpired on that mountaintop, but I believe in transfiguration. I believe we are changed when we surrender ourselves to God, and I believe that love can cast out the unclean spirits that plague God’s people. That’s enough good news to sustain a life.

I who have slept with a man
can do what you like
kept bringing pressure
The outcry so great
the angels urge “Hurry!“

hands don’t look back
don’t stop anywhere
Your kindness to this disaster

Look, the sun
risen over the land
dense smoke rising

God brought out of catastrophe
where Lot had lived

Affirming policies save lives. Let's listen to the kids—queer and cishet alike—who demand them:

"The evening’s most powerful testimony came from students themselves. One trans student named the stakes very clearly: 'Without the support of this district, specifically, I don’t think I would be here with all of you tonight,' they said."

That's real bravery. Absolute heroism from these kids exposing the cowardice of adults who use their political power to attack queer children.

But there's a moral from here in rural Maine, too:

"We do not have time to wait for the conversion of unwilling hearts. Instead, we must take power and wield it, so every queer person hears an unmistakable message: You are not alone. We will fight this, and we will win."

Click here to read the full article!

The future belongs to the dozens of folks who testified about the love that should shape our school. It belongs to the trans youth who stood up, sometimes with wavering voices, and said, “No matter what this board decides tonight, we are not going anywhere.” It will be shaped by the parents who stood beside them, embodying the nurture this board voted to withhold. That love is uprooting a culture of death, even as power reacts with futile fury—raging in its death throes.

This conviction does not, however, make last night’s decision less violent. It does not absolve people who—after receiving a signed petition from 110 students begging to keep the policy, after hearing teachers and social workers testify to the pressing need for this ordinance—disregarded their voices to satiate personal bigotry.

After I spoke about the harm this decision will cause, one of the board members walked over and gave me a hug. Later, that same man cast the deciding vote to kill the policy. I imagine he thought that hug was a kindness, but all I can think about is Judas kissing Jesus before enabling crucifixion. If you love queer people, vote for policies that protect us. If you care about trans children, hear what they are unequivocally demanding. Otherwise, that “love” is just a hatred that feels better in your mouth.

But we do not have to wait for the conversion of unwilling hearts. For me this month, Pride looks like hundreds of folks showing up in rural Maine to send trans kids an unmistakable message: You are not alone. We will fight this, and we will win.

As I was going to bed one night, my mind was racing and spilled into the poem below. I offer it as a testament to the fierce beauty of these young people, my hope that their love will shape the future we all inherit.

Ode to a Rainbow Ball

When a tree dies
And the giant finally falls
Forest celebrates with style
Fungi the atavistic vanguard
Mushrooms break a corpse
Return nutrients to soil
Cradle abundant life

That’s a weird way to tell you
this sea of faces—
It’s the closest thing to embodied hope

What do you do when fascists rise to power
but throw on a beautiful dress
and dance with wild abandon
An oversized jacket
for your best David Byrne
Bind your chest like armor
not the kind that protects you from the world
but a fucking proclamation
I am who I am
I grasp how this body yearns to feel
And I will not be scared
by what you name as contradiction
but I know as beauty

What do you do when those petty dictators
mandate toothpaste back inside its tube?
Man, they went from “a chicken for every home”
to “a closet for every homo”
faster than I can whistle Don’t Stop Me Now
But that jackboot door is wood, too, little buddy
and these mushrooms
They break it down
into a tidal force of too much glitter
pot luck dinner
meet me in the alley
top surgery Go Fund Me
A thousand different ways to scream
solidarity in ravishing hues

Cynicism is cheap and easy
We’ve all seen your Hunger Games
and frankly? Octavia Butler did it better
Because she knew
Authority is brittle
Hearts are tightly tethered
Laughter is a gateway drug to intimacy
Change is God
And death will always fall before
this new world being born

It’s not what I want to know
The contours of your death are harrowing
and familiar
I need the story of your life

What did you wear when you felt radiant?
What songs flew bursting from your heart?
When you felt unmoored in your body
as I’m adrift in mine
what rituals brought you home?

Hagiography is its own kind of erasure
hammering days into a halo
I wish you could be messy
Life bursting from the seams

Now your mother begs
“Please do not bully
us for our ignorance.”
Weeping at the foot of your cross
huddled by the tomb
a voice cries out
“They are not here,
but damn well should be.”

When I was ten I shoved my post-its 
in an overhead projector
Just a passing flatter, to see if they would burn

They did

Acrid little smoke, creeping up the aisles
Then silence 
and shouting that never stitched
itself at all toward mercy

New York? A shelter? Never
Forget Bob Dylan, he was out of his mind
A hive, perhaps
stacked unbreathably together
but sometimes palpably alone

How strange, then, to find myself so wrapped 
in arms and giggles on the Henry Hudson
swaddled by tenderness and smog filled air

The world didn’t offer softness
We took it anyway
drinking greedily the sap
from nests of braided laps
overflowing from this Camry

How wasteful with your little fingers!
Shells cascading on the earth.
Don’t you know?
You can’t root through trail mix for chocolate
spill the chaff and get the fruit.

I throw open the door
he jumps in alarm
and for a second
our eyes catch
a shiver, small and cold
why is he not worthy of an easy meal?

And in that moment I remember
sunflowers growing scraggly last spring
born from wasted remnants
cast off food made beauty
a mercy nourished life
reflecting back my own

Suddenly, the heavens swoon
All trumpets power and might
It kindles incandescent noon
Aborts the womb of night

Thunderous voice, it shakes her hard
Bends heart and ear and land
Commanding total, whole regard
From erstwhile busy hands

“Be not afraid,” the voice compels
With a thousand gleaming eyes
Good news to men, bad news for hell
And whomever we despise

“Rejoice, rejoice,” the shepherd speaks
Arising now to stand
“You’ve come and promised global peace
So help me save my lamb.”

“You do not understand,” he cries
On six wings, come so far,
His words they cleave the evening skies,
“God lies ‘neath yonder star.”

In soft sighs, she turns away
Pushing angels from her view
Her hands return to where they lay,
“God’s in this thicket, too.”

Merry Christmas, friends. Stay tender.

In our Scripture this morning, Mark is picking up the thread we heard in last week’s text from Isaiah. Invoking the prophet’s description about what God’s coming will look like—a future where mountains are flattened, the low places lifted up—the herald of this radical future is finally embodied. The big moment thousands of years of communal religious history has built toward is here. The harbinger of peace, ending years of cyclical violence—of conquering and being conquered—a millennia’s cumulative yearning has finally arrived, Mark is telling us. Isaiah’s grand messenger, the one who prepares the way for God. Here he comes! Clothed in camel hair. Eating bugs. Daring us to look behind him—perhaps there’s a more regal messenger waiting in the wings. Maybe John is the warm-up guy.

But no, it’s just John. What’s interesting, however, is that while a lot of preachers—clearly myself included—will play the strangeness of John’s attire for a chuckle, his appearance wouldn’t actually be strange to the folks who saw him. Camel hair was not some unknown fabric, it’s been a staple of Bedouin communities as long as people have domesticated camels. Similarly, the locusts are not a wild departure from a nomadic diet. When you live in the desert, sometimes you eat bugs. John doesn’t look unfamiliar, he just looks like a shepherd. A poor person. And that, for Mark, is what makes this messenger so remarkable: Not that he’s somehow unique but the fact that he is common. The revolutionary part is that God’s coming is proclaimed by a voice from the margins, when people have grown so accustomed to hearing God’s words from the empire’s mouth.

And that message in Mark is particularly potent because of what is happening in Israel’s collective religious life during the period of Jesus’ ministry. Before we go any further, a reminder that any frame seeking to set Jesus against the Pharisees, or suggesting Christ came to replace Judaism, is fundamentally antisemitic. You cannot understand who Jesus was, how God shows up at this point in history, without understanding that this is an intrareligious conversation. However, similarly, don’t let the fact that this was a disagreement inside Jewish community downplay the very real truth that—in this period—the conflict within Judaism was reaching a fever pitch—one that, forty years later, would culminate in a violent rebellion against the Roman Empire and the destruction of the second temple.

So, what’s going on? And what does it have to do with our new friend John? Obviously, it goes beyond the scope of any sermon to fully explain all the nuances. However, the fundamental tension bubbling over is that Rome, who occupied Israel and forced them to pay taxes to the empire, used the religious power concentrated in the temple and its officials to control the Jewish people. The territory of Judea is ruled by client kings, like Herod who shows up in our Christmas story. These rulers were Jewish, but were often raised in Rome, and their responsibility was to maintain Roman control of the province and keep taxes flowing. And one of the central forms of that collaboration was wedding Jewish religious practice to imperial power. So, for example, Herod puts a giant Roman Eagle on the entrance to the Temple. He replaces some of the priests with people loyal to him. “You can worship your God,” the Pax Romana said, “as long as you’re also swearing fealty to Rome.”

And there were a great many people who saw through this unholy marriage. Who resented the way their faith was being used to prop up a system that oppressed them. Who understood that you cannot worship God and Caesar. And into the middle of that simmering conflict strides John. Daring to speak on God’s behalf, far from the temple. And coming with a message that, in fact, those who use God’s name to defend Roman violence are speaking for Rome, not God. He brings the dangerous message that God is not moving in faith that has been corrupted by empire, but is alive in the wilderness.

John’s words and context are an eternal reminder to be suspicious of the ways that power distorts religion, the way that it can use God’s explicit and repeated desire for peace as means to justify violence. And it’s a prescient warning, because the history of Christianity and peacemaking has been a struggle between Christians who follow that voice from the wilderness and those who invoke God to justify war.

The Crusades are one of history’s more famous religious conflicts, in no small part because of how overt its advocates were in invoking God to defend its horrors. A heads up that throughout this sermon, I’ll be quoting some primary sources, because the language is grotesque. But I think it’s important to read, because part of learning to hear God is familiarizing ourselves with the lies that empire authors in God’s name.

In his call to invade the Holy Land, to kill Muslims, Pope Urban II promised, “All who die in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested. Destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends,” he commands. God wants Christians to have this land, he tells the people, and therefore God will give eternal paradise to anyone who kills the folks already living in it.

We know this story. We hear its echoes in the Doctrine of Discovery, the ways that Christians justified genocide—again and again—as a necessary evil to build God’s Kingdom. But we’re less familiar with the voices of Christians who dared to speak against the Holy Roman Empire. Folks like Jan Hus. Jan Hus was a Czech priest who was enraged by how the Church sold indulgences to pay for its wars, and even more enraged by the way that the Pope tried to sanctify this bloodshed—the Church’s message, in his words, “that we can give you the Holy Ghost or send you to hell.”

“Bonfires never yet removed a single sin from the hearts of men,” he wrote, “it is better for me to die than not to oppose such wickedness, which would make me a participant in their guilt and hell.” For his heresy, the Catholic Church burned him at the stake.

Again and again this dynamic plays out, dancing across history: Empire promising that killing is the only way to bring peace, moral justifications for bloodshed echoing through the corridors of power, while the heirs of John the Baptist dare to oppose that sinful consensus, often at great personal cost.

Consider the war in Vietnam. With the safe remove of history and clear consensus about the disastrous results of our barbarism, it’s easy to forget how many Christians vociferously endorsed that violence. To justify the war, Southern Baptist President H. Franklin Paschall wrote flatly, “If it takes ‘total victory,’ that is total destruction of North Vietnam to bring about negotiations for a just and honorable peace, then I am for it.” Writing in 1967, Billy Graham cautioned, “Do not believe that the Bible teaches pacifism…to preserve some things, love must destroy others.”

And, in the same year, a preacher took the pulpit at Riverside Church, and said, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government. For the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence,” Dr. King preached, “I cannot be silent.” Speaking on the suffering of the Vietnamese people, he mourned, “They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury.”

Again, the fame of that address can lead you to believe that it was received to rapturous applause. Nothing could be further from the truth. King was roundly condemned for betraying the war effort, for giving comfort to the enemy. His pacifism and theology of nonviolence was called naïve. Even folks who stood beside him in the fight against segregation told him that condemning the U.S. military was a bridge too far. One year to the day after making that speech, he was murdered on a balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.

And I know this struggle between God’s prophets and the religion of empire because I lived it in the aftermath of 9/11. In those days of harrowing grief, after I watched the horror of classmate’s parents dying, I learned about the accompanying horror of watching people demand a War on Terror, invoking God’s name in its defense. “This nation is in is a spiritual battle, a battle for our soul,” General William Boykin said, serving the Defense Department, “the enemy is a guy called Satan, Satan wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy our Christian army.” Never one to be outdone, Jerry Falwell wrote a viral essay simply titled, “God is pro-war,” invoking how, “God calls the Israelites to go to war against the Midianites and Philistines,” as the model for our response. “One of the primary purposes of the church,” he concludes, “is to stop the spread of evil.” We did not stop the spread of evil. We did stop the hearts of more than 400,000 civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In contrast, Representative Barabara Lee was the only vote in Congress against the war. On the floor of the House she spoke resolutely, even when her voice trembled with grief. “This unspeakable act on the United States has forced me to rely on my moral compass, my conscience and my God for direction,” she confessed, “Our deepest fears haunt us, but I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of terrorism. As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”

These two traditions stretch through history, and stretch out before us now: We can be chaplains to empire, or we can follow the God who promises to bring peace through vulnerability, not violence. We can attune our spirits to those who seek to make the temple speak for Rome, or we can answer John the Baptist knowing full well that to follow John means entering the wilderness.

Pacifism is not popular. There will always be people who offer very detailed explanations for why, this time, violence is necessary. Why, this time, the bombs are what will bring us toward peace. Empire has helpful terms like “collateral damage” to explain how intentionally dropping bombs on hospitals, schools or refugee camps doesn’t mean that we intend for civilians to die. To explain why dead children are a tragedy, but not a reason to stop.

Opposing war doesn’t just require defiance of any particular conflict, it calls us to reject the entire logic of violence upon which both our government and understanding of history are built. And pacifism is not passivity. It asks us to answer killing with courageous diplomacy. It asks us to see justice as a desire for reconciliation, not retribution. It asks us to stop glorifying conflicts like World War II as a victory and understand them as a collective failure to keep the world from coming to that point. It is profoundly countercultural. It will make people angry. But it is the only way that we escape the cyclical violence that otherwise will destroy us.

And the hope and comfort we receive in Advent is the reminder that, even when defying the war consensus feels like a lonely and vulnerable place—we are joined in that witness by the generations of faithful Christians who said, “No. I will not let God be turned into a sword.” When your voice wavers, feel strengthened by Jan Hus and every so-called heretic who chose to die before joining the Crusades. Hear the echo of Dr. King confess, “I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.” See the vision of Barbara Lee standing alone on the Congress floor but on the right side of history. Follow the footsteps of Jesuit brothers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan and the Plowshares 8, who broke into a nuclear weapons facility to beat a hammer against warhead nosecones and pour blood over missile plans. Who went to jail for God. Live in the legacy of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who would not tolerate apartheid but also insisted that the means of that revolution were what would dictate South Africa’s future.

Because that, ultimately, is where Advent calls us: the birth of a different world. And the truth is that empire’s logic of violence doesn’t only uphold warfare. It’s what gives corporations the “right” to pollute sacred indigenous rivers. It’s why we’re told safety comes from policing. It’s the beating heart of mass imprisonment and a carceral state. The same logic that says children unfortunately must die in order to bring peace is the same logic that says putting children in detention facilities prevents crime is the same logic that says no one is responsible for poisoning children in Flint, Michigan. We cannot escape the forces of degradation and desolation unless we disavow them entirely.

But when we do, John promises we will meet the one who baptizes the world in God’s spirit. When we reclaim peace and follow that radical pacifism, we will birth a world where all people can flourish. In severing the union between God and Rome, we create the circumstances for goodness and life to pour forth in abundance, like a tree freed from a choking vine. “We still have a choice today,” Dr. King said on that pulpit, “nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”

That decision is still before us, but the clock is ticking. God waits for what we choose.

This sermon was preached at Middle Church on Sunday, December 10, 2023.

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