It was an absolute joy to speak with Fr. , author of the stunning new book Vulnerable God: How Jesus Upends Our Assumptions About God--and Shows Us How to Be Human. This magnificent work reveals how Jesus, the "human God," teaches us to be human like he is human. This robust work of theology is deeply accessible and pastoral. I can't recommend it highly enough. You can purchase it where you buy your books. Seriously, get this book.

I hope you enjoy the conversation, friends!

“By what authority are you doing these things?” they asked. “And who gave you this authority?”1

In the middle of his teaching, some angry religious leaders interrupted Jesus and asked those two questions. Who, exactly, they wanted to know, gave Jesus his authority for teaching, healing, and all the rest of it? They were asking Jesus for some proof of who he was. They wanted to see behind him, as it were, to catch a glimpse of who was allowing him to do what he did and say what he said.

Thomas Torrance is famous for saying:

Torrance is addressing the dreadful tendency of some to think, ‘Well, Jesus is nice, and I like him…but eventually the mean guy behind him ’– the one (Lord, have mercy) people sometimes call ‘The God of the Old Testament’ (Christ, have mercy), – ‘He’ll come out and punish us.’ Torrence corrects this horrific thinking by reminding us that when we look at the face of Jesus, we are looking into the face of God, full stop. There is no God behind the back of Jesus.

In our text, the religious leaders are essentially trying to look behind the back of Jesus to see who’s really in charge. They simply can’t accept that Jesus is acting on his own authority, and so they want Jesus to prove himself to them. But as Robert Farrar Capon says,

Jesus’ exousía — his unique claim to an authority based on who he is, not on what he can prove himself to be — is not something he can justify to their satisfaction. He is asking them to believe in him; they, at best, are trying to decide whether they can find room for him in their minds.”^⁠2

So let’s talk authority. The question is this: What is God’s authority like? Since we can’t separate who God is from what God does, we could also ask this: What is God like?

I love that when this Gospel reading appears in the lectionary (Proper 21, Year A), the New Testament reading is the Christ Hymn in Philippians 2. For this hymn answers the question, “What is God, and God’s authority, like?”

Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death--
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
-Philippians 2:5-11

Don’t miss this: the one to whom every knee will bow and every tongue confess is the one who demonstrated what God is like by becoming human and living a cross-shaped life. Fr. reminds us:

“In confessing the divinity of Christ, we do not mean that we already know what God is like–omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, all the theistic omnis put together–and that Jesus is that. No. We do not know what God is like. We don’t begin with an abstract philosophical concept of God and then project it onto Jesus. Instead, we begin with Christ himself as the only way to know what God is truly like.”^⁠3

When we read that Christ Jesus humbled himself and took on the form of a slave, this does not mean that Jesus was now temporarily becoming something different than he truly was. He was powerful, but for 33 years he lived in a humble human state; but thankfully, now he’s powerful again. That is the sentiment we sometimes hear when well-meaning people say, ‘He came the first time as a Lamb, but he’s returning as a Lion!’ No. Jesus is the full demonstration of who God has always been. God is humble. God does not seek to be served, but to serve. That is what God is like.

What we read in Philippians is not the exception to who God is, but a description of what God is like, what God has always been like, and what the authority of God looks like. Again, many people think, ‘Poor Jesus! How wild that he had to set aside all of his power and become human.’ But this isn’t right; God becoming human shows us what the power and authority of God are like and have always been like. Bishop reminds us:

The incarnation is not a humiliation for God—it is not as if God finds it unbecoming to take humanity as his own! The incarnation is a humiliation for us, because God comes among us as one without beauty, without desirability or comeliness, making nonsense of every frame of reference, every standard of judgment, every order and scheme we have devised for ourselves as a means of giving our lives significance and stability.^⁠4

And this, friends, is what Jesus was doing to those who asked him to prove himself: making nonsense of their attempts to make their own lives significant through their own schemes and metrics.

Jesus then tells a parable to those who asked about his authority. ‘Two sons,’ he says, ‘are both asked by their father to go and work in the vineyard. One says he won’t, but changes his mind and gets to work. The other says he will, but, in the end, decides not to.’ Jesus asks the religious leaders this simple question: “Which of the two did the will of his father?” “The first,” they all say.

Notice, this isn't actually about work, but about doing the will of the Father. And what is the will of the Father? Jesus tells us in John:

For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.”
-John 6:40

That is the will that some, like the prostitutes and tax collectors, were accepting, and others, like the religious leaders, were rejecting. The Father’s will was simply to look at Jesus and accept him, but some kept looking away because they could not accept that God looked like a lowly, humble servant. That was too much for them because it was too little for them. Is it too much because it is too little for us?

This is the will of God: to look at Jesus – not behind his back, or anywhere else for our version of power and glory – but to look squarely at the humble, lowly Jesus “just standing there, and speaking there, and hanging there on the cross,”^⁠5 and to believe in him. For there is no authority behind the back of Jesus.

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“The prophet is a person, not a microphone. He is endowed with a mission, with the power of a word not his own that accounts for his greatness–but also with temperament, concern, character, and individuality. As there was no resisting the impact of divine inspiration, so at times there was no resisting the vortex of his own temperament. The word of God reverberated in the voice of man.”1

This is nowhere more true than with Elijah. His interior struggle is hard to miss.

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Growing up, Elijah’s victory at Carmel in 1 Kings 18 was a favorite text for preachers at youth gatherings. Yet there was a darkness looming in the shadow of this event. Elijah seems strong on the surface, demanding that the people stop wavering “between two opinions.”2 He is fiery. But his words betray him:

Then Elijah said to them, “I am the only one of the LORD’s prophets left, but Baal has four hundred and fifty prophets.^⁠”3

Elijah is fulfilling his vocational requirements, but underneath it all, he’s coming undone. “I am the only one...left.” It’s not true, of course – it rarely is – but the tank is empty, and he is beginning to isolate. When we turn the page, his isolation is even more palpable. He has fled to the wilderness and says out loud what he’s undoubtedly been feeling for a long time: “I have had enough, Lord.”^⁠4 And in his desperation, he asks God to take his life right before falling asleep. He hopes not to wake up. But even in this place of desperate isolation, he has not escaped the sight of God. And so an angel appears, touches Elijah, and tells him to eat and drink, for he has brought him water and fresh-baked bread. He eats a bit of the meal, but then turns over and falls back asleep in his depressive state. The angel touches him again, however, and says these stunning words:

I often think of these words when we come to the Lord’s Table. We, all of us, weary from the journey, are invited to partake of the meal that sustains us in a weary world.

Elijah partakes of the divine sustenance and makes the long journey to Horeb, the mountain of God.

This is another one of those texts preachers love. Not just youth speakers, either, but the contemplative types. This story about how God didn’t show up in the noise; didn’t show up the way God showed up for others. This is about the sound of sheer silence. There’s even a Nooma video about it. (If you know, you know). And yes, the above is true, and the silence is important. But there’s something else to notice too, something a little darker, and that’s that Elijah seems unmoved by the whole thing. As remarkable as the text is to us, it just didn’t seem to impact Elijah at all. He didn’t even bother to exit the cave as God asked him to. And when God repeats the question he asked Elijah before this remarkable event, Elijah responds verbatim what he said before:

“I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”
-1 Kings 19:10 and 1 Kings 19:14

Nothing has changed. Nothing. And notice this: he addresses God in the third person. Mark Chironna writes,

Although he recognizes the encounter, he answers God as though not realizing that it is he. Why does Elijah address God in the third person, saying, ‘I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts’ (1 Kgs 19.10)? This seems suggestive of some dissociation, perhaps indicating that his spiritual senses have been impacted by his psychological despair. Thus, he finds himself not only isolated relationally and geographically but internally, from God. This condition did not begin at Horeb but was evident at the broom tree, where Elijah asked God to take his life.^⁠6

Elijah is not alright. This is the third time that he has said: “I am the only one left.” He is unmoved by God’s display of power and love. He feels unknown. Unseen. It’s utterly heartbreaking. But God does see him, speaks to him, and sends him back the way he came with a threefold task: anoint Hazael as king over Aram,^⁠7 anoint Jehu as king over Israel,^⁠ and anoint Elisha as his successor.8 He never did anoint the two kings, but thank God, he made his way to Elisha.

At this point, our attention naturally shifts to Elisha. But let’s keep our eyes on Elijah a little longer. The two men are now together. Elijah, forever withdrawing, says to Elisha, “Stay here; the LORD has sent me to Bethel.”^⁠9 Elisha refuses the request:

“As surely as the LORD lives and as you live, I will not leave you.” So they went down to Bethel.^⁠10

Elijah withdrew to the wilderness. Withdrew to the cave at Horeb. Before Elisha was with him, he was found sitting “on top of a hill” by himself^⁠.11 But Elisha is the friend who refuses to leave.

Elijah eventually asks Elisha what he wants. Elisha responds that he wants a double portion of his anointing. This is where Pentecostal preaching really started to wind up – a double portion anointing! But don’t take your eyes off of Elijah here, for he responds,

“You have asked a difficult thing…yet if you see me when I am taken from you, it will be yours—otherwise, it will not.”^⁠12

I’m moved by this. The man who feels isolated, alone, and unseen is asking one thing, and one thing only, of Elisha: to be seen. It’s as if he finally has the courage to say what he needs – ‘Please, don’t let me depart this world like this. See me.’ And Elisha does. He refuses to leave him; refuses to take his eyes off him. That is the gift that Elisha brings. And what are the final words Elijah hears when he departs this world?

“My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel!”^⁠13

“My father! My Father!” Stunning.

In many ways, Elijah’s life was tragic. Powerful, yes, but also heartbreaking. But not his departure. And I’m convinced that we, like Elisha, are to keep our eyes on him and notice what God is doing for him as he departs. In giving him the task of anointing Elisha, God was giving him the gift of friendship, the gift of being seen, and the gift of being reminded, through the intimate words of affection – “My father! My father!” – that he was not alone. He never had been.

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David is the General Superintendent of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (the denomination in which I was raised), the Vice-Chair of the Pentecostal World Fellowship, and the Chair of the Christian Unity Commission for the Pentecostal World Fellowship.

The prophet Ezekiel, the one called in chapter 33 to be a watchman, tells the people to turn from their sin and offense and be healed. He is instructed to say the following to the house of Israel:

“Son of man, say to the house of Israel, ‘This is what you are saying: “Our offenses and sins weigh us down, and we are wasting away because of them. How then can we live?’” (Ezekiel 33:10)

God tells Ezekiel to say to the people: “This is what you are saying.” I find this moving. We might be tempted to gloss over or treat these words as unnecessary preamble. Not so. By echoing back the people’s own words, God is showing them that they are, in fact, heard. They, by their own testimony, are wasting away and drowning under their own weight. In moments like this, don’t we often feel completely unseen and unheard, even by God? Maybe especially by God? But God tells the prophet to begin with these words: “This is what you are saying.” God echoes their words back to them so that they know he has heard and felt the heaviness of what they’re saying. God is neither deaf nor aloof. God hears. God cares. God, to a people who feel alone and unseen, says, ‘This is what I hear you saying.’ There’s a tenderness to this.

Then:

Say to them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, house of Israel?’ (Ezekiel 33:11)

God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. None. Not in theirs or anyone else’s. My imagination took me almost immediately to the Egyptians being drowned in the Red Sea as the children of Israel escaped their slavery. Miriam danced. She and her friends grabbed their tambourines and went ham. And why shouldn’t they have? They were at last free from their long and bitter oppression. This is a moment for rejoicing, for the tyranny is over. Throughout her famous song, she notes that God has done this.

The LORD is a warrior;
the LORD is his name.
Pharaoh’s chariots and his army
he has hurled into the sea.
The best of Pharaoh’s officers
are drowned in the Red Sea.
Exodus 14:3-4

If we take Ezekiel seriously, though, God did not rejoice with Mariam and the people. As I read it, at least, God wept over the tragedy of the human situation then, as he does now. Pharaoh was cruel, but God is not. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, because God is not like that.

Contemplating our Lord, we can say more still.

I’m reading Kenneth Tanner’s stunning new book, Vulnerable God ( get it, friends! – out at the end of the month; you can pre-order here). Tanner quotes Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov, who writes:

“We can say that in…the fullness of Christ’s dying, the death of every human and of all humanity is included. If Christ redeems and raises every person, then it is only because he co-dies in every person and with every person. It therefore follows that now Christ, glorified and sitting at the right hand of the Father, even now suffers and dies with humanity whose collective suffering and death he once took upon himself and exhausted on Golgotha.”^⁠1

The implication here is not only that God doesn’t rejoice in the death of anyone, but greater still, God joins humanity, all of humanity, even the wicked, in their death in his dying. In Jesus’ death, he joined the horses and chariots of Egypt, along with the death of every other human being, in solidarity. So when we cry, “Our offenses and sins weigh us down, and we are wasting away because of them. How then can we live?” in Christ, we find that we live because Jesus has gone down with us, and even below us. “He descended to hell,” as we say each week. As Tanner so breathtakingly says:

“Jesus descends into all our hells. The descent of Jesus is not slowed until he is beneath the deepest falling human, descending right to the edges of nonexistence to rescue us. Any human who hits rock bottom lands on the body of Christ. There is no other place to land.”^⁠2

In Ezekiel, we find that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. In Jesus, we find more: God descends with the wicked, and with every last one of us, in death. And, thanks be to God, “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.”^⁠3

This is what God is like.

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The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9)
All Souls Church, July 5^th, 2026

Zechariah 9:9-12
Psalm 145:8-15
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

I. SIN IS A FORCE

It strikes me that the church often struggles to talk well about sin, and so we either talk about it poorly, avoid talking about it altogether, or become obsessed with it. Some grew up in the “holiness movement,” which just sounds like a party on wheels, doesn’t it? The holiness movement was not only obsessed with sin, but also with the appearance of sin. Others, however, grew up in environments that fostered a ‘do-whatever-you-want and stop stressing’ attitude. In the words of Sheryl Crow: “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad” (ignoring the next line, “if it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad”). Neither one of these is very helpful, though. On the one hand, cultures obsessed with sin produced a generation of anxiety-ridden, shame-filled people trying to appease an angry god. And let this not be lost on us: anxiety and shame are often fuel for addiction. On the other hand, a ‘none of this really matters’ doesn’t tend to provide that much help for people who, because their lives are falling apart, feel that it matters a great deal.

Sin is important to talk about because it is hurting many, many people. One of the things I think is important to say about sin is that, while it often involves a bad choice, it is not primarily a bad choice but rather an active power that is seeking our destruction. Notice that in our Romans reading, Paul speaks of sin as something distinct from himself.

As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.
-Romans 7:17

Sin is not him; it is in him. And yet, he also speaks of sin as something that he is involved with.

For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.
-Romans 7:15b

How can we understand this seeming paradox of “not I,” but I am doing it? Fleming Rutledge is helpful here when she writes:

“Sin is not so much a collection of individual misdeeds as it is an active, malevolent agency bent upon despoiling, imprisonment, and death — the utter undoing of God’s purposes. Misdeeds are signs of that agency at work; they are not the thing itself. It is “the thing itself” that is our cosmic Enemy.”1

Our misdeeds are not Capital S “Sin,” but a sign that that Sin, our cosmic enemy, is at work amongst us. Sin, then, is a force. It is an enemy.

About a couple of months ago, we were leaving church after our Sunday service, and just as we were about to get in the car, I saw a man climbing into our dumpster. I thought I should go and do something, though I wasn’t quite sure what. The man was looking around the dumpster, so I said, “Are you looking for something?” And he, half out of his mind, said, “Yeah. Meth.” And then he picked up a piece of chewed gum from the floor of our dumpster and then put it in his mouth. I told him there were people in the community who could help him get clean, and that I wanted to see this for him. He kind of mumbled, mocked me, and walked away. I got in the car and almost immediately had the thought: this is Sin. I didn’t think this in any self-righteous or judgy way, as in “What a sinner.” Not at all. Rather, my heart was broken for this man because Sin, our “cosmic enemy,” was trying to destroy him. You could see it at work.

Sin, sisters and brothers, is a force. We participate in it, but we are not it.

II. SIN IS A MYSTERY

If Sin is a force, the church has always held that it is something else, too: a mystery. The “Mystery of Iniquity” is not just a Lauren Hill song but a theological concept stemming from the Apostle Paul. He names this in 2 Thessalonians 2:7, but explains the feel of it here:

For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do…For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. [19] For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.
-Romans 7:15b, 18b-19

It is astounding that even when we know a choice will lead us to where we don’t want to go – will lead towards death and not life – we sometimes (maybe often) do it anyway. I was reading some of Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation as I was preparing to write this sermon, but while writing the sermon, the strange thought hit me: We can read all about the brain science and how to go in the right direction based on that research, and still choose not to. Why do we do this? Why, with the knowledge that Sin is Power seeking our destruction, can we turn around and still do the things we don’t want to do? The truth is, we don’t know. Sin is a mystery.

Francis Spufford, in his book Unapologetic, marvels at the human capacity to mess things up. I thought of this about the following passage when I was reading our Romans text:

Our appointment with realisation [of our potential to mess things up] often comes at one of the classic moments of adult failure: when a marriage ends, when a career stalls or crumbles, when a relationship fades away with a child seen only on Saturdays, when the supposedly recreational coke habit turns out to be exercising veto powers over every other hope and dream. It need not be dramatic, though. It can equally well just be the drifting into place of one more pleasant, indistinguishable little atom of wasted time, one more morning like all the others, which quietly discloses you to yourself. You’re lying in the bath and you notice that you’re thirty-nine and that the way you’re living bears scarcely any resemblance to what you think you’ve always wanted; yet you got here by choice, by a long series of choices for things which, at any one moment, temporarily outbid the things you say you wanted most. And as the water cools, and the light of Saturday morning in summer ripples heartlessly on the bathroom ceiling, you glimpse an unflattering vision of yourself as a being whose wants make no sense, don’t harmonise: whose desires, deep down, are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to, at the very same time.^⁠2

Why are we like this? We don’t know! This is the mystery of sin.

I’ll never forget something one of our bishops said to Marisa and me. We had to address a heartbreaking situation, and this bishop said:

There is deep wisdom here, and this wisdom is where Paul lands in Romans.

III. CHRIST IS A GREATER MYSTERY

At some point in life, the moment will hit you when you say, “How did I end up here?” What do you do when that moment comes?

If, when that moment comes, people say, “It’s not a big deal,” that is deeply unhelpful, because we know in our bones that it is. But there is another temptation for the church here, too. Fleming Rutledge warns,

“The church has always been tempted to recast the Christian story in terms of individual fault and guilt that can be overcome by a decision to repent. This undermines the gospel at its heart.”3

Perhaps these words shock some of you. But they wouldn’t have shocked the Apostle Paul. After describing the feel of the mystery of iniquity – of doing the things we don’t want, and not doing the things we do want – the very sign that the power of Sin is at work amongst us, Paul throws this question of desperation into the air:

What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
-Romans 7:24

What Paul doesn’t say is that my decision to repent will rescue me. He’s already established that our decisions seem to cave under the weight of the power of Sin. We are far less powerful than we think we are. But we are not without hope, for as Paul says:

Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
-Romans 7:25

This is the greater Mystery, sisters and brothers: Christ has overcome the power of Sin and Death, and can lead us deeper and deeper into life. In fact, he is doing so even now. Yes, we still sin, but this might change how we think about sin. Notice something shocking: Paul speaks about sin, but then immediately rejoices. He has a moment of desperation, but then says “Thanks be to God!”

Sin and joy aren’t two words that typically go together in revivalistic contexts. But for the Christian, the awakening to our sinfulness should, in fact, lead us to joy. Why? Because it is a sign that the grace of God is already at work. Rutledge again says:

It is not possible to have a grasp of one’s own involvement in sin without a prior or simultaneous awareness of God’s prevenient love…We need to recover that word “prevenient” because no other word or phrase captures so well the essential fact about grace: it prevenes (goes before), or precedes, recognition of sin, precedes confession of sin, precedes repentance for sin, and precedes forsaking of sin.4

We are very much called to confess, repent, and forsake sin, but this call itself is a sign that God’s grace is already at work in us.

Samuel Terrier says it succinctly:

Karl Barth, preaching to a group of inmates in Switzerland, used this common legend to help them understand, which I think might help us, too. He said:

You probably all know the legend of the rider who crossed the frozen Lake of Constance by night without knowing it. When he reached the opposite shore and was told whence he came, he broke down horrified. This is the human situation when the sky opens and the earth is bright, when we may hear: By grace you have been saved! In such a moment we are like that terrified rider. When we hear this word we involuntarily look back, do we not, asking ourselves: Where have I been? Over an abyss, in mortal danger! What did I do? The most foolish thing I ever attempted! What happened? I was doomed and miraculously escaped and now I am safe! You ask, Do we really live in such danger? Yes, we live on the brink of death. But we have been saved. Look at our Savior, and at our salvation! Look at Jesus Christ on the cross. . . . Do you know for whose sake he is hanging there? For our sake — because of our sin — sharing our captivity — burdened with our suffering! He nails our life to the cross. This is how God had to deal with us. From this darkness he has saved us. He who is not shattered after hearing this news may not yet have grasped the word of God: “By grace you have been saved!”^⁠6

CONCLUSION

Friends, when the knowledge of your sin hits you…When you are overwhelmed by the mystery and power of Sin, do not despair, for it is a sign that God is already at work in you. Yes, weep. Yes, repent. Yes, come clean and own your junk. Yes, go to confession (we offer this here!) Yes, do the work. Yes, seek a support group. Yes, find a therapist. Yes, make reparations and rebuild trust. All of this is necessary and good. But also, rejoice, for the knowledge of your sin is a sign that Christ has saved you and is saving you still. Lean into this mystery.

When we come awake to our misdeeds, however painful that might be, we don’t then need to figure out how to appease an angry God. Our awareness of the sin in us is the sign that God cares and has already acted. Our awareness itself is grace. And out of that grace we repent. And so while we do the hard and necessary work of confession and repentance, we should do so with these words in our hearts and on our lips:

Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Amen.

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Somewhere between my leaving the till and reaching the door, she quietly called out. I guess I heard her, but it didn’t register. Then she said it again, but a bit louder this time: “Father.” I turned around and smiled, making sure I heard right, and she motioned for me to come back. I figured I’d either forgotten to enter my PIN or there was some other problem with my transaction. Instead, she said, “Will you pray for me and my husband? We’re going through a really hard time.” She looked down towards her nametag, but then awkwardly realized she didn’t have it on and proceeded to tell me her name and her husband’s. “Do you want me to pray for you now?” I asked. “No, I won’t be able to hold it together. I’ll get too emotional.” I told her I would pray for her and her husband. As soon as I got to my car, I did. I’m still carrying them in prayer.

It is hubris to think we can see inside the mind or behind the heart of another person. I thought this woman was annoyed with me, or perhaps mad at what I represented. Little did I know that behind the blank stare was a woman trying to find the courage to ask for prayer from a priest she had never met. Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.

How often do we do this? How often do I do this? Pretend, in a split second, even subconsciously, that we know what is going on in the heart of a stranger? Or the heart of those closest to us, for that matter? And even if what we see is anger, do we really know the whole story?

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When my Dad was dying, someone didn’t see me backing out of a parking space and sped past me as I dramatically slammed my foot on the brake and laid on the horn and undoubtedly said a few choice words. Marisa very tenderly looked at me and said, “They don’t know what you’re going through.” After my rage subsided, her kind words softened me. I felt seen. But what did the people around me see, or think they saw? The people who didn’t know I was over my head in grief? To them, I was probably just another angry guy who “had issues.” But that wasn’t the whole story. And, if we have eyes to see it, it never is.

We don’t know what is behind the face of the other. Even when they are visibly angry, we can’t see that they may be at their breaking point or overwhelmed with grief of one kind or another. We just can’t. What appears to be anger or indifference may be nothing less than the summoning of courage to ask for help or prayer. And God knows, we could all use a little help and a little prayer.

*Image Credit: Bland Stare Painting by Lea Blake

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We often “accept cookies” without really pausing to think about what we are doing. Our data, of course, is being collected. More is known about us than ever before, and yet we feel increasingly unknown. We sense this dehumanizing reduction in our souls. Human beings are not data points and cannot truly be known by mere information. Yet this is what living in “the machine” requires of us, and what we in turn demand of others.^⁠1 It is the demand for humans to bear all until they become transparent, a thing to look through rather than behold.

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Hiddness, on the other hand, expands mystery, and veiling awakens curiosity. This is love’s game. Reflecting on this the other day, I was thinking about both Scripture and Jesus’ post-resurrection encounters. Regarding the hidden treasure in Scripture, St. Augustine wrote:

These things are covered as it were in figural garb…to exercise the pious inquirer’s senses, lest they appear cheap by lying bare and exposed. The same holds for things we have learned elsewhere, where they were spoken openly and plainly. When they are brought out of hiding, our discovery of them in some way renews them, so they taste sweet. Their being hidden in this manner represents no ill will toward those who wish to learn; rather, it adds further emphasis, so that one may desire them all the more ardently for their being withheld—so one may take even greater pleasure in finding what one longs for.^⁠2

The treasures in Scripture are hidden, or “covered…in figural garb.” Notice the way Augustine speaks of the obscenity, or cheapness, of something “lying bare and exposed.” We mustn’t reduce Scripture to this, for the Bible is not a book of mere facts or information, but a mysterious book where the mysteries are “covered…in figural garb.” Yet Augustine wants to be certain he is not misunderstood here. In speaking of this hiddenness, his point is not that God keeps people in the dark for ignorance’s sake, for this hiddenness “represents no ill will toward those who wish to learn.” Rather, the hiddenness is there to invite the search for that which is hidden, “so [that] one may take even greater pleasure in finding what one longs for.”

God’s hiddenness is like this, whether God is veiled in Scripture or elsewhere. This is perhaps nowhere more present than in Luke 24, where the veiling and unveiling3 happen at multiple levels.

*Image: Sylwia Perczak, The Road to Emmaus, 2025

Veiling 1

Some disciples are walking on the road to Emmaus. As they’re walking, they’re talking about their devastating disappointment in Jesus. They had truly thought that he was the Messiah, yet Jesus ended up the same way that the other false Messiahs did: dead on a cross.

[15] As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; [16] but they were kept from recognizing him.

This is the first instance of Jesus’ veiling. He is walking and talking with them, but “they were kept from recognizing him.” Kept by whom? By God. God is keeping them from recognizing God.

Unveiling 1

After some dialogue, we are told that Jesus began to speak to them about “Moses and the Prophets.” But notice carefully what he is doing here, he is unveiling the way that he was veiled in the text all along:

[27] And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

Jesus, still hidden from them physically, is removing the way he was veiled to them in Scripture. Later, reflecting on this, they say,

“Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (23)

The disciples here become like the lovesick young woman in the Song of Songs. After the young man puts his hand to the door, she says,

“My heart began to pound for him” (5:4)

But when she opens, he is gone, and love’s game continues.

Unveiling 2

Jesus, still hidden, is now at the table with these disciples. While at the table, “he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them” (30). This is the moment of physical unveiling.

“Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him…” (31a)

Veiling 2

It was also the moment of veiling:

“…and he disappeared from their sight.” (30b)

Unveiling 3

After this, they returned to Jerusalem and told “the Eleven and those with them” about their stunning encounter (33). But the story is not done.

While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” (36)

They can’t really believe it, so Jesus shows (unveils) his hands and feet to confirm that he is not a ghost but truly physically present.

Unveiling 4

They eat some fish. And then, Jesus does it again:

[44] He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” [45] Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.

Jesus, now physically unveiled, is once again unveiling the way that Scripture points to him.

Veiling 3

Luke ends with Jesus lifting up his hands and blessing his disciples. But then,

While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. (5)

All of this in one chapter!

We are blinded by a glut of information, and it is making us lonely and afraid. But the way of love is not the way of information, but the way of the burning heart. The veiling and unveiling are God’s way of enticing us towards the life and love that God is. This is the way of intimacy. And our hearts can burn too, not by knowing more facts or collecting more data, but by being lovers of God and searching for him everywhere, for he hides everywhere.

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I was recently praying Psalm 64, and this verse just jumped off the page at me and stopped me dead in my tracks. I just sat with these words, chewed on them, and considered the wounding arrow of God. Of God!

I’m working at a snail’s pace on a book about Mystery. While the book will deal primarily with the Mystery of the God (whom Pseudo-Dionysius calls “The Superunknowable”^⁠1 ) and our encounters with this God, one of the chapters I’ve not yet written will be about the mystery of sin (mysterium iniquitatis). This mystery seems to be what the psalmist is after, who says, “The human mind and heart are a mystery.” Indeed.

But who is prepared for the Psalmist’s next words: “But God will loose an arrow at them, and suddenly they will be wounded”? Two stories came to mind almost immediately upon reading these words. I’ll tell you one of them here.

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I’ve been loving Martin Shaw’s delightful book Liturgies of the Wild. In the introduction, he tells his conversion story, or whatever you wish to call it. I should say that what I’m about to write is only part of that story. I find this caveat important because his journey really spanned decades. I grew up in a tradition that focused on a “Come to Jesus right now!” kind of gospel. While I believe that Jesus is the crisis of the world, and that the gospel is often felt as an urgency in the heart of the recipient, upon reading more and more conversion narratives, I’ve also found that the moment of felt crisis is often preceded by the slow work of God over the decades of our lives. We look back, in other words, and see that God has been enticing us all along.

Shaw, near to his 50^th birthday, decided to spend 101 days walking the “Dartmoor forest and tell[ing] it a story.” Don’t you love him already? “What I was calling to,” he says, “I didn’t quite know.” On the final night of his journey, he set out “to the very centre of the forest, to an Iron Age hill fort, where…[he] would sit up all night in prayer.”^⁠2 Hours passed. Eventually, he did something which he said he never did in moments like these: he looked up. “And it was then,” he writes, “that I saw it.”^⁠3

It was a light rapidly falling to earth, the colours being similar to the aurora borealis–the northern lights. And when I say falling to earth I mean aimed directly at me. This all took place over a few seconds. My jaw dropped and is still dropped. I saw it change shape, so it became like an arrowhead moving at breathtaking, impossible speed. What I was seeing seemed an entry into the marvellous. As a wilderness rites-of-passage guide of twenty-five years, I’ve seen some things, but nothing like that. It was painfully beautiful, seemingly impossible. An arrow falling from the sky. I just couldn’t move. If this was the end, then it was a pretty bloody amazing way to go.

At the last moment—and this is the event that is both only a few seconds long but continually unfolding to me to this day—the arrow plunged directly into the trees just a few feet to my right. Utterly silent, these luminescent greens and pale whites seemed to be just sucked into the pitch dark of the pungent forest floor and disappear.

I sat up for the rest of the night, agape, ecstatic. I wasn’t frightened. I even danced.^⁠4

You might be tempted to think that the arrow that Shaw experienced wasn’t a wounding arrow. But don’t miss that he called it “painfully beautiful.” And as he goes on, he describes the dreams that began coming to him shortly after this experience in the forest.

One night I dreamt of a figure of light who simply brought me into itself for possibly twenty seconds. The love that emanated from this embrace was barely quantifiable in human terms. It was devastating; it doesn’t exist as far as I can tell in the usual human range of sense experience. It was every hug, every much-needed weep, every longed-for reunion happening all at once. It was high tide in the heart. Everything I’d ever loved was in this holding, and a whole lot more this bear of little brain had never experienced. I panicked, and immediately the intensity dropped to a slightly more manageable level.^⁠5

Notice, this love was “devastating” and caused Shaw to panic. It was not devastating because it harmed him, but rather because the love was too much. God never wounds to harm, only to heal. This truth is not only written in the pages of scripture, but on the very Body of Christ. When Christians gaze upon the wounds of Christ, they remember the words of Isaiah: “and by his wounds we are healed.”^⁠6

Undoubtedly, the wounds of God may at times feel painful at first. The arrow of God may pierce our hearts so that we feel sorrow for the ways we have engaged in harm, or even for a painful compassion for others. Peter felt God’s arrow wound his own heart when Jesus asked him, “Do you love me?” This was not a question meant to kill, but to heal. This was to Peter’s great benefit, however painful. The arrow was aimed at him with precision in order to enlarge his heart, not shrink it; to melt his heart, not shatter it. And later, Peter would preach, and the people would feel the arrow of God as they were “cut to the heart.”^⁠7 But the goal was the same: salvific healing love. Julian of Norwich reminds us that when we feel the pain from love, we should run like a child to our mother Jesus and say:

‘My kind mother, my gracious mother, my dearest mother, take pity on me. I have made myself dirty and unlike you, and I neither can nor may put this right except with your very own help and grace.’ And if we do not then feel ourselves helped straightaway, let us be sure that he is behaving like a wise mother; for if he sees that it would be more to our advantage for us to mourn and to weep, he allows that with pity and compassion until the right moment, out of love. And then he wants us to take on the characteristics of a child, who always naturally trusts in its mother’s love, whether in joy or in sorrow.^⁠8

It is God’s love which wounds us, not God’s anger. “For I saw no anger except on man’s part, and he forgives that in us,” as Julian says.^⁠9 And the wounds we receive from God are to be understood through God’s own healing wounds. Julian again:

The blessed wounds of our Saviour are open and rejoice to heal us; the sweet, gracious hands of our mother are ready and enfold us diligently; for in all this he performs the role of a kindly nurse who has nothing else to do but attend to the safety of her child. It is his role to save us, it is his glory to do this, and it is his wish that we know it; for he wants us to love him kindly and trust in him humbly and strongly. And he revealed this in these gracious words: ‘I am keeping you very safe.’^⁠10

The arrow aimed at Shaw ultimately transformed his life. He couldn’t stay the same. Oh, how difficult to stay the same after the overwhelming panic of love! And Julian, what to say about her? I love her, and I think she was perhaps a little crazy wanting to experience the passion of Christ. But maybe I’m the crazy one and she the sane, because whatever she experienced produced a profound emanation of love. I am not ready to pray as she prayed, but I will pray this:

Wound me, Lord, with your arrow of love. Let it loose, that I may be made whole.

Amen.

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What role does fiction play in the life of faith? In this episode, author Doug Worgul and I explore that question through the lens of his novels and their characters.

Doug has had a fascinating career as a newspaper journalist and editor of regional and national magazines. In this podcast, Doug and I talk about his two stunning novels, Thin Blue Smoke and the just-released sequel, The Night Office. I’m a huge fan of these books. You can read my review of Think Blue Smoke here.

Here is my review of The Night Office:

It was an immense joy to be back in the company of the beloved characters of Thin Blue Smoke in this captivating sequel. It was as if no time had passed; the way it always is with old friends. And yet, time has passed. While The Night Office is brilliant in its continuity with Thin Blue Smoke, it boldly, yet gently, leads us on a journey through the second half of the characters’ lives. And after reading, it felt like this book had to be written. More needed to be said, even though Thin Blue Smoke never once felt unfinished.

Good stories don’t just capture our attention; they open our hearts. Doug Worgul is a master storyteller, capturing both our attention and our hearts. His writing is careful. Nothing rushed. No detail extraneous; no detail missing. And while I couldn’t put this book down, I couldn’t speed through it either, for fear I might miss something — anything! —along the way. I both couldn’t wait to see where it was headed, but also didn’t want it to end.

Life, this novel reminds us, can grow heavy with time. But life can also grow “heavy with meaning,“ as Martin Buber said. This is the weight you feel while reading The Night Office. It is filled with meaning. And it’s filled with everything else you’ve come to expect, too: baseball, whisky, heartache, friendship, good music, and, of course, barbecue. And all of it — all of it! — is drenched with meaning and prayer.

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Acts 17:22-31
Psalm 66:8-20
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21

SPIRITUAL IN EVERY WAY

The Apostle Paul stood in front of the Athenians and said:

“People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.”
-Acts 17:22

In every way…very religious, he says. Religion is something that we humans can’t seem to shake. Even those who don’t consider themselves religious are caught up in systems that demand religious action and devotion from their adherents. We may not use the word “God” in our commitments, but they do take on a religious framework. Theologian Kathryn Tanner has a book titled Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism. You may already see from the title that she doesn’t treat capitalism merely as a static thing but as something with a spirit. She writes:

“Capitalism has cultural concomitants—beliefs, values, and norms—that direct conduct, that get people to do willingly what capitalism requires of them by encouraging them to see what they are doing—what they must do to get ahead—as meaningful, valuable, or simply inevitable.”1

Notice those three words – “beliefs, values, and norms.” This is the stuff of religion. Capitalism is held up by a set of beliefs and values, as well as norms, the way that those beliefs and values guide our lives.

To bring it down to the ground, we could talk about shopping. Philosopher James K. A. Smith famously talks about the shopping mall as a religious site. But in so doing, he wants us to know that he is not being cute with his language. He writes:

“I want to adamantly contend that describing the mall as a religious site is not merely a metaphor or an analogy…my goal is to try to make strange what is so familiar to us precisely in order to help us see what is at stake in formative practices that are part of the mall experience.”^⁠2

He goes on to talk about the cash register as the altar where people make their sacrifice, the assistants in the stores as “acolytes and other worship assistants who have helped us navigate our experience,” and the person behind the register as the “priest who presides over the consummating transaction.”3

Smith, who resides in Grand Rapids, wrote this book in 2009. I lived in Grand Rapids from 1999 to 2003. In 1999, the Rivertown Mall opened. This is the main mall in the Grand Rapids area, and I spent a lot of time there in my early 20s. It was a happening place.

Last October, Marisa and I were in the Grand Rapids area. We were both working at a café in the city, which closed earlier than we anticipated. We were to meet some friends for dinner, but had some time to kill. And so, we went to the mall of my youth; the main mall in the city where Smith wrote his famous mall as religious site, and shopping as liturgy. And you know what? It was depressing. Probably 30% of the stores were shut down, and it felt like a ghost town. My nostalgic (and perhaps consumeristic) heart was crushed.

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Months later, I was reflecting on this, and it struck me that the religious experience of the mall has not evaporated. Rather, the site has changed. Our religious site is now, largely, a digital site. A website. And this is shaping us to be a particular people. Yuval Noah Harari says that we have entered into what he terms “data religion.”^⁠4 And Norman Wirzba, reflecting on this, writes that we are now promised: “salvation through algorithms and engineers, rather than from priests and gods.”^⁠5

We are in every way very religious. I think it is important to recognize this in our time, for it has consequences on people’s lives.

GOD STANDS OUTSIDE THE WORLD

In engaging with the Athenians, Paul does an interesting thing: he draws attention to the fact that the God he is referencing stands outside the world.

[24] “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. [25] And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.
-Acts 17:24-25

And then he says this:

[29] “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill.
-Acts 17:29

If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you will know that one of the questions I frequently ask us to ponder is: What is God like? A very important theological question. But here, Paul is drawing our attention to what God isn’t like. God made everything in the world, but God is not from this world. God does not live in our temples, and he is not like anything in the universe, “like gold or silver or stone…”. God is different than us. But that is to put it too lightly, because God is not different from us the way that we are different from other creatures, or they are different from us. As Henk Schoot says:

“God differs differently.”^⁠
-Henk Schoot6

When we Christians use the word God, we mean nothing less than this. God is Mystery, and our minds cannot even begin to comprehend this God. In this sense, God is unknowable. And this is why it is so dangerous for the Christian faith to be reduced to an intellectual activity. The life of the mind is important and should never be bypassed in our spiritual lives, but neither should it be primary. We do not know God by understanding God.

Still, this unknowable God wants to reveal himself to us; wants us to know him. So how do we know this unknowable God?

HOW DO WE KNOW THE UNKNOWABLE GOD?

This is where things get interesting. On the one hand, Paul says to these people, ‘Look, the God I’m talking about isn’t from this world. Everything — absolutely everything — was made by this God, and is sustained by this same God.’ But God is not like anything in the world, which is why idolatry is so dangerous. This is the reduction of God to something we can craft, mold, grasp, and understand.

But we do well to note how Paul begins his speech. He says,

“People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. [23] For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
-Acts 17:22-23

On the one hand, Paul, throughout his speech, is pointing to the fact that God stands above the world. We can’t understand this God, and whenever we think we can, we can be certain we have created an idol. And yet, this unknowable God is not unknown to us. In fact, the God who stands outside of the world and outside of all created things has, from the beginning, been close to us. Look at what Paul says:

[26] From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. [27] God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. [28] ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
-Acts 17:26-28

God is not an idea – God is Mystery. And yet, this God who exists outside of the world longs for us to know him intimately. But we know this God in a particular way, and that is not by understanding God, but by being intimately connected to Him as our source. Look at what Jesus says in today’s Gospel:

[15] “If you love me, keep my commands. [16] And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— [17] the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.
-John 14:15-17

Notice what is going on here. Jesus says the world cannot accept the Spirit. Why? “Because it neither sees him nor knows him.” And yet, look at what Jesus says next:

But you know him! How? Not through unshakable arguments or intellectual certainty. Rather, you know him because he lives with you and is in you. Look at this language:

On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.
-John 14:20

We know God not by grasping God, understanding God, or bringing God into some manageable realm. We know God by being brought by God, into the very life of God. This is how we know Him – by responding to his Love which is forever drawing us near.

I COULDN’T THINK MY WAY OUT OF THIS

Earlier in this homily, I mentioned the Philosopher James K. A. Smith (the guy who wrote about the mall as a religious site). I’ve read a lot of his work through the years, and I just finished his most recent book titled Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing. I’ve been writing for some time on this very topic, and so I was eager to read his work.

I was moved by his writing about his own journey in the introduction. “When I answered the call to be a philosopher twenty-five years ago,” he said, “I imagined the world’s problems amounted to a failure of analysis.” He continued, “If only we could think more carefully, the truth would come out. Good arguments would save us. Grasping the world’s puzzles and problems with conceptual clarity would yield enlightenment, even a kind of salvation.”^⁠7

But then Smith entered his 40s and something changed.

What’s happening to me?, I wondered. Nothing in my external circumstances, I thought, should engender sadness or disappointment. To the contrary. My wife was devoted and forgiving; we had built a beautiful family and home; I enjoyed professional success and privilege. But why am I sobbing in the middle of the afternoon? Why am I either an angry monster or a lethargic shell? Why do my wife and children feel a million miles away, and why do I keep pushing them even further? I didn’t understand, and that in itself was an affront to my philosophical confidence.^⁠8

And then he writes this:

There in the dark night, Smith didn’t find new answers or certainties. Rather, over time, he found he had to let go of such things. And the truth is, none of us can think our way out of these places. But in his letting go, he came awake, more and more, to the God who was already there. In his letting go, he realized that he was held. That he was loved.

And so are you.

And so am I.

IN EVERY WAY SPIRITUAL

We live amongst a people who are deeply religious in every way. But oftentimes, they don’t know it. The reason why it’s important to understand this is that the religious commitments that things like capitalism demand end up hurting people. But I wonder if instead of merely trying to unveil or correct this unseen religious devotion, we also lean into the other things people are encountering but don’t yet have a name for.

I’ve mentioned Dale Allison Jr.’s book, Encountering Mystery, here before. One of the things that struck me when I read this book was his affirmation of people’s claim to be spiritual but not religious. So many times, Christians roll their eyes at such a claim. But I wonder if our response shouldn’t be something like this:

I can see that you are spiritual in every way.

Allison writes:

The phrase ‘spiritual but not religious’ is everywhere these days…

I know churchgoers who dismiss such folk as ‘New Agers.’ But to dismiss is not to understand.

What happens when someone unattracted to or alienated from organized religion—perhaps for understandable reasons—is nonetheless overcome by transcendent bliss, or meets God in an NDE [near-death experience], or beholds an angel, or enters via mystical rapture some world beyond this one? There are many such people. That they are spiritual but not religious makes perfect sense. Indeed, what else could they be?^⁠10

This, it strikes me, is what Paul is doing. He’s not trying to argue against the things that people are intuiting, but is leaning in.

Our mission is not to go around and teach everyone to think like us. It is certainly not to go around and try to get people to behave like us. It is rather, first, to understand, through the heart, that the God who stands outside of the world is drawing us into the Love that is God. We are being brought into the life of the Trinity, sisters and brothers. Oh mystery of mysteries! To open ourselves up to this is to know God. This is life.

But this same God is drawing people from all over the world to himself, for “he is not far from any of us.” Rather than dismiss what people intuit, perhaps we should learn to listen, acknowledge, and, when appropriate, speak the word “God.”

May we, sisters and brothers, learn to let go and open up our hearts to an encounter with the living God (or better, in the letting go, have our hearts opened by God). And may we bear faithful witness to Jesus when others find the love of God opening their hearts, too.

Indeed, he is not far from any one of us.

Amen.

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But Worgul understands not just the intricacies and traditions of barbecue, but the intricacies and varied traditions of the church, too, and draws us deep into their wonder. Remarkably, he writes knowledgeably about African American worship services (referencing the AME and COGIC, for example) as well as the Episcopal tradition. While aptly describing the exuberant joy and glory (and even the “shouting”) within the more charismatic traditions of the Black church, the book is also laced with the prayers and liturgies from the Book of Common Prayer. Worgul is able to bring the treasure of these traditions into a generous conversation with each other, while writing beautifully of the humor, irony, and glory of both. One of the main characters and patrons of LaVerne’s restaurant, “Smoke Meat,” is the washed-up whisky priest, Ferguson. Thin blue smoke, we come to find, is not just that which arises from LaVerne’s smoker, but from Ferguson’s censer. Both men are complicated and carry their own particular pains, but they also carry the smoke that touches the lives around them.

If Worgul gets barbecue and church, what he really gets is life itself. Between the smoke of the barbecue and the censur lies the glory of everything. Everything. Yes, the book is about whisky, barbecue, and church, but it’s also about the complications, joys, and pains of familial relationships. It’s about the rifts between fathers and sons, and the heartbreak that addiction and illness bring. It’s about the ordinary man made contemplative by the presence of a turtle. It’s about the surprise and gift of unlikely friendships, and the grace that wafts over our muddled lives like a thin blue smoke. Worgul takes the things of life which, like smoke, salt, and vinegar, by themselves remain bitter, and brings them together by tending to them through patient storytelling, thus unveiling the grace that doesn’t solve our confusion, but touches us in the midst of it. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

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Christmas
1984
Many thanks, Billy John, for your year as Senior Warden. Use this Prayer Book toward good spiritual health in Church and world–

On Christmas Day, my wife told me she still had a gift to give me that had not arrived. On December 27^th, it came. I have a pocket-sized BCP (Book of Common Prayer), but I have been looking for a regular-sized BCP with ribbons. Marisa found a beautiful, perfectly sized leather BCP with 6 ribbons. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.

Sometimes it’s nice to have something new, something no one has used before. Like a new car, I suppose. But sometimes it’s better to have something that’s already been broken in. It’s a bit boujee, but I generally like new books. I like and buy used books too, but I’m quite picky about them. They can’t be heavily marked, for example. And no one in their right mind would want one of my books second-hand. I highlight and notate like a man with a problem. But I feel differently about my lightly marked BCP. I’m glad it’s used, instead of new.

There is more going on in this life than we can imagine. Far more. I’m enough of a mystic to believe that prayer changes not just people, but the places prayed in, too. Henri Nouwen once wrote,

“I find it easier to pray in places where people have prayed long before, and harder to pray in places where seldom a prayer has been uttered.”^⁠1

Have you ever walked into a space and known, somehow, that you were on holy ground? Perhaps a church? Or a monastery? Or even the woods, or the coast? That the ground, or the pews, or the walls held something sacred and unseen? A place soaks up the prayers prayed there and holds the memory of encounter. Holds the longings felt, met, and expanded.

I don’t know who Billy John was, and, unfortunately, I can’t make out the signature of the person who gave him the BCP. But their instructions were solid: “Use this Prayer Book toward good spiritual health in Church and world.” Amen. While I can’t read the name, I at least know that the person giving the book to Billy John was a priest, as there is a cross following the signature. Presumably, this was the priest that Billy John served under for a year as Senior Warden.

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When Billy John received this BCP, I was six years old. I knew nothing of this book that would eventually shape my life. For decades, I would have no clue what a Book of Common Prayer was. At some point in my late 20s, however, I began to sense a need for my prayers to be shaped by the prayers of others. Somehow, I knew that my language and imagination needed to be expanded in the way of faithful prayer. I started with Phyllis Tickle’s prayer books and, eventually, made my way to the gift that is the Book of Common Prayer.

When you give a gift like a prayer book, you don’t know if the recipient will actually use it. Dear Priest of Billy John, he used it.

I know next to nothing about Billy John. But one thing I do know, thanks to the very few marks that he left in his BCP, now mine, is that he prayed. It seems he prayed both the Morning Office and Compline.

One of the first things I noticed, before more carefully reading the address to him by the priest, which revealed that he was a church warden (thus making my initial sleuthing efforts unnecessary), was that the word “you” had been crossed out by him in the absolution. I thought I was on to something. Only a priest or bishop says you, here. Instead, he penciled the word “us” above, and then he wrote “stand,” as if instructing himself. He took the postures seriously.

“The body ought to pray as well as the soul. Body and soul are both the better for it. Bless the body.” (C. S. Lewis)^⁠2

Billy John had his favorites. He liked the Jubilate (Ps. 100). My go-to is the Venite (Psalm 95:1-7). He liked Canticle 13, “A Song of Praise” (Benedictus es, Domine), a lovely choice. He preferred, as I do, the traditional version of the Lord’s prayer.

It strikes me, though, that even more than selecting favorites, his pencil marks, usually little checkmarks, were his way of learning to use this prayer book. He was making notes for ease of use. Under p. 127’s heading “An Order for Compline,” he penciled, all caps, “END OF DAY.”

I don’t know what happened to Billy John and why his BCP was sold online. Perhaps he is with the Lord. Perhaps not. I don’t know much about his life, as I said, but I know this: he took seriously the instructions of the priest who wrote, “Use this Prayer Book toward good spiritual health in Church and world.” This, whether Billy John ever saw it or not, is exactly what happened when he prayed. The Church and the world were changed in ways he could not understand. And now I have this book with prayer-saturated pages. It has been worked in with prayer.

When I pray, I feel like I am praying with Billy John. In fact, I am praying with Billy John. When I sit in the chair in my home office on these dark winter mornings and evenings, I am being shaped in prayer through the words of Scripture and Saints. I am joining my voice with “Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven.” And with Billy John, too.

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Some texts are hard to preach. Not hard as in ‘How do I exegete this text,’ but hard as in ‘Everyone already knows the punchline.’ This is one of those texts. But as I sat with it, I became increasingly troubled by the text, and I thought, ‘America is being schooled in the prayer of the Pharisee.’ America, we might say, is the Pharisee.

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Pharisees get a bad rap. I get it. We’ve oversimplified Pharisees. With that acknowledged, it’s also important to understand that there are both decent and compromised religious leaders in every age. Our Pharisee was in the latter category. He didn’t want to be touched by the commoners in his time, lest he be polluted by them. It’s a little like how at least some church “green rooms“ operate in our time. Regardless, he prays. Religious leaders are supposed to do this. But look at his prayer:

‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. (v. 11).

The immediate problem the preacher is faced with is that no one thinks this represents them. Some people may think this on a subconscious level, but no one says this outloud. Except they do. I’ve recently, and repeatedly, seen some form of this on Facebook. The straightforwardness is alarming:

We did not riot.
We did not loot.
We were peaceful.
We are not like them.

Sometimes I’ve seen these words: “We are not the same.” The same as them, of course. This is the prayer of the Pharisee made national. People are increasingly being discipled into this form of prayer; into this way of life.

WHY THE UPTICK IN CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA?

Around this time, I read an interesting article by David French in the New York Times titled “Something Is Stirring in Christian America, and It’s Making Me Nervous.”^⁠1 For years, many of us have heard about the troubling decline in worship attendance. Fewer and fewer people were attending church. Interestingly, there has been a rather sudden uptick in America. Trends can reverse for various reasons. In Canada, and in places like Toronto in particular, immigration plays a large role in the data regarding faith practices and religious service attendance. In their book, Millennial Mosaic, Reginald Bibby, Joel Theissen, and Monetta Bailey write:

Millennials born outside of Canada are considerably more conservative and devout in their faith and more likely than those born here to identify with a religion and attend services, as well as engage in private practices such as prayer, table grace, and Scripture reading…This is primarily because increasingly large numbers of immigrants in recent years have been coming from Asian and African countries where Christianity and Islam are thriving.^⁠2

Immigration is also having an effect in the opposite direction:

In understanding increasing religious diversity in Canada, it is also very important to note that immigration is having an important impact on the number of people with “no religion” inclinations. During the 2001–11…no less than some 450,000 new arrivals indicated they had “no religion,” particularly those of Chinese and Japanese origin.^⁠3

What about America? French writes,

“When I speak on college campuses, students seem more curious about faith than they were even five years ago. When I write about faith, I get a larger — and more personal — response than I get when I write about any other topic. My inbox fills with heartfelt personal testimonies, including stories about how people both found and lost God.”

He says that as a Christian, the increasing interest in Christianity and the pause of “the long lamented decline” should make him happy. But it doesn’t. It makes him nervous. Why? Because the uptick seems to be intimately tied with a deeply American partisan version of Christianity. He mentions the mass interest in, and viewership of, Charlie Kirk’s memorial as an example. The “memorial service,” he writes, “was one part worship service, one part political rally.”^⁠4 At the memorial, there was God-talk. But such talk was also mixed with Donald Trump speaking about how he hated those he deemed opponents, and “Stephen Miller, the president’s top domestic policy adviser, declared that his perceived political enemies were ‘nothing.’” “‘You are nothing,’ he said, ‘You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred.’”^⁠5

French asks an important question here:

“Is that what a revival looks like? And if our nation isn’t yet experiencing a genuine national revival — something like the Second Great Awakening, which swept through the United States in the early 19th century — then what is actually going on?”^⁠6

French acknowledges that there are some things that do look like revival, such as what happened at Asbury University. But what happened at Asbury marks a big difference from what we are seeing in many places and on many platforms in America. Regarding Asbury, French writes:

“This revival had filled the students there with zeal, but that zeal manifested itself in humility and compassion. It was inspiring. It made me search my own heart to see more clearly my own faults and failings.”

REVOLUTION OR REVIVAL?

French believes that what we are mainly seeing in America is a “Christian” revolution, not revival. He distinguishes the two as follows:

“Revival begins with the people proclaiming, by word and deed, ‘I have sinned.’

MAGA Christianity has a different message. It looks at American culture and declares, ‘You have sinned.’”7

There is an arrogance to the revolution that is stirring, and it’s deeply troubling. The other night, I watched a clip of Steve Bannon at a Turning Point USA rally talking about how America was a “Christian nation that got off the rails.” To stay on topic, I will avoid discussing why I believe this is a profound historical misunderstanding and instead focus on his proposed solution, which is to “re-Christianize this country.” To say these words trouble me is an understatement. Our job is not to “Christianize” anything other than, perhaps, the church. And anytime we hear people speaking about Christianizing a country, it is the church that has gone off the rails.

After Bannon said these words, he just looked back and forth at the cheering audience with a profound arrogance. His look was almost as troubling as his words. But arrogance is one of the key markers of this new so-called Christian revolution. The other, as French said, is the insistence on pointing out the sins of others. These others then become a common enemy for the revolutionaries to gather around. They are fuel for the movement. What can never happen within the revolution, however, is to acknowledge my sin, or our sin.

“Revolutionaries will conceal sin. They can’t permit any cracks in their righteous facade. Any weakness undermines their claim to the national throne. The other side is wicked. We are not. The revolutionary’s ferocious ideological purity can masquerade as religious devotion. But unless it’s tempered by mercy, the revolutionary spirit is a fundamentalist spirit — and heaven help the person who stands in the way.^⁠”8

What we don’t need is a counter-revolution, some liberal version of the same thing, but with different rallying points and enemies. No. What we need is a revival of humility. We are desperate for this. The world is desperate for this. Whenever we truly encounter the Divine, we cease to be at the center. In fact, such a thought seems preposterous! When we encounter the Love that is God we will beat our breast like the tax collector or, like Isaiah, confess:

“Woe to me…I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”^⁠9

Of course, Isaiah is not ruined. The only thing ruined in him, and ruined in any of us who truly encounter God, is the false self which insists on being at the center, including the center of America. This is the arrogant self; the enemy-making self. But in the presence of God, the soul cries out for Jesus, the Image of the humble God, to be the center. In the presence of God, we confess our sins, not theirs. We become small. But as David Brooks reminds us,

“Alice had to become small to enter wonderland.”^⁠10

The last thing — the very last thing! — that America needs is more grasping for power, more hateful rhetoric, more colonial talk of taking over, more enemy-makers, and more condemnation. If this is what is causing a sudden uptick in our church attendance, let our attendance shrink and, for God’s sake, let the revolution crumble.

To return to the Gospel, it’s important to notice that the self-righteous Pharisee entered the scene first. The self-righteous and revolutionaries always want to be first. But by the end of the parable, it is the humble Tax Collector, the one who acknowledged his own sin, who was listed first; the Pharisee is listed last. The story is a great reversal. And isn’t this what the church needs now? A great reversal which levels mountains but exalts valleys? A reversal which looks at every person standing apart — the Pharisee because of his self-sufficiency, and the Tax Collector because of his shame — and longs for them to be moved from their positions of isolation to a new location of love and embrace? Don’t we want this for all?

Friends, I’m troubled in my spirit. Deeply so. Many in the church are embracing a way that says, “Thank God we are not like them!” Many are being lured into the way of loud arrogance and enemy-making. But the point of this post is not to say, “Thank God I am not like them!” It is rather to pray that God would visit us all and grant us a revival of humility in which we are at last able to face and confess our own sins, rather than trying to mask them by pointing towards the sins of others.

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[13] Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
[14] “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
-Luke 2:13-14

I want to tell you two brief stories. The first is of a Swiss writer named Otto F. Walter. He was being interviewed by Karl-Josef Kushnel, who asked him if “he went through a phase of atheistic critique of religion.”^⁠1 Walter’s response is fascinating. He said,

I do not believe that I am an atheist. Let me tell you of an experience I had. I was nineteen years old at the time, I guess. I was traveling by train to Lucerne; it was afternoon, the light and moving shadows were signaling a thunderstorm, sun and shadow played on the fields. I was alone in the car, I opened the window and just stared in amazement at this landscape. I was completely overcome and could have shouted for joy. I wept and had the feeling: This is God. That is what lives and what ought to be.^⁠2

Notice, he was looking at the sky, but suddenly he realized he was looking at more than the sky, and he “wept and had the feeling: This is God. That is what lives and what ought to be.”

The second story, one I’ve told here before, is from a Biblical scholar named Dale Allison, Jr. He recounts this moment from when he was 16 years old:

I was sitting by myself on my parents’ back porch, under the Kansas sky. What I was thinking about I fail to remember. I have not, however, forgotten the magical incident that redirected my life. In a moment, and seemingly without preparation on my part, the stars were not far away but close to hand. Having somehow forsaken the firmament, they were all around me. If not quite animate, they were also not wholly inanimate. These engulfing lights then announced, by what mechanism I know not, the arrival of an overwhelming, powerful presence. This presence was forbidding yet benevolent, affectionate yet enigmatic. It suffused me with a calm ecstasy, a sublime elation, “A genial holy fear” (Coleridge).^⁠3

Both of these men were looking at the sky when suddenly the sky transformed before their very eyes. Or perhaps, the sky didn’t transform at all. Perhaps the miracle wasn’t that the sky transformed before their eyes, but that their eyes transformed before the sky.

Each year, I love to read Frederick Buechner’s brilliant sermon, “The Birth.” He writes his own fictional telling of three stories surrounding the birth of Jesus: The Inkeeper, The Wiseman, and The Shepherd. The Shepherd, telling us his story of the angels filling the sky, says, “We saw everything that night, everything. Everything!”^⁠4

Don’t you get the sense when you hear Allison’s story of the stars coming close, and Walter’s story of looking at the sky and having “the feeling: This is God. That is what lives and what ought to be,” that they, too, saw “everything. Everything!?”

Buechner’s Shepherd says this:

That’s how it was this night, anyway. Like finally coming to—not things coming out of nowhere that had never been there before, but things just coming into focus that had been there always. And such things! The air wasn’t just emptiness anymore. It was alive. Brightness everywhere, dipping and wheeling like a flock of birds. And what you always thought was silence stopped being silent and turned into the beating of wings, thousands and thousands of them. Only not just wings, as you came to more, but voices—high, wild, like trumpets. The words I could never remember later, but something like what I’d yelled with my mouth full of bread. ‘By God, it’s good, brothers! The crust. The mud. Everything. Everything!4

When I was a kid, I could hardly sleep on Christmas Eve. I would fall asleep briefly and then wake up at 2 am. Then 2:37 am. Then 3:15 am. Then 3:53 am. On and on it went. There was just too much excitement to sleep. And I have the sense that if you and I had our eyes opened tonight, and truly caught a glimpse of what, even now, is filling the sky, and the bread and the wine, and even our very hearts, we might never sleep again. In fact, not even the sleep of death could keep us, or anyone, down.

Amen.

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A bit of background on where I’m coming from. First, I’ve always cared about multi-faith dialogue. You can read some of my reflections on Lesslie Newbigin’s helpful work on the topic if you’d like (start here). While I have always cared about multi-faith dialogue, I had the privilege of actually engaging such work up close when I worked as a chaplain for the Faith and Spirituality Centre at the University of Calgary for nearly five years (beginning in 2018). I formed many wonderful friendships and learned so much from people of other faith traditions during those years. These “rules,” therefore, have become more important to me than when I first wrote about them almost a decade ago. I hope you’ll reflect on them and perhaps put them into practice.

In Volf’s book, Flourishing, he explored, among other things, the ways that people of various religions can respect one another while remaining exclusivist (believing their religion is the one true way) in their beliefs. This is an important topic in such a time of religious volatility. Volf wrote briefly about four ways in which we can approach people of other religions with respect while not changing our beliefs in the process. Here they are with commentary of my own.

Most of us probably think, ‘No problem here – I’m certainly not out to burn religious sites or books.’ But it strikes me as quite common amongst certain religious people to insult the founders of other religions. Please note that Volf is not saying that we have to agree with doctrines that other religious leaders or founders espouse. Good dialogue always has disagreement, even sharp disagreement, but insult and disagreement are two different things.

Insult leads to hostility, never to peace. If we decide that a relationship with the “religious other” is a bridge worth burning, it is only a matter of time before we believe their books and sites are worth burning, too. But is it realistic to think that we could help preserve and protect their writings or site? John Ortberg, in his book Who Is This Man? writes that “Until the fourth century, the church was not in the book-burning business; only barbarians did that.” Not only were we not in the book-burning business, but we thought it important to save books that were religiously contrary to our view for cultural purposes. Ortberg again: “For many centuries, monasteries were the only institutions in Europe for the acquisition, preserving, and transmitting of knowledge. The single greatest preserver of pagan classical documents was followers of Jesus^⁠.”2 If we really believe what we confess, we don’t need to be afraid of other people’s beliefs, and if we love our neighbors as ourselves, we must not mock things that are important to them, even if we believe that they are wholeheartedly wrong.

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Again, most people would not confess to openly spreading false information about another religion. But there is a little thing called Facebook that might contradict our grand opinions of ourselves. I have, unfortunately, read many misleading or blatantly false posts, blogs, articles, etc., on Facebook about “those Muslims” in recent years. I’ve read, for example, shared posts about halal that made it seem as if Muslims are brutalizing animals during the halal process. The opposite is true. But of course, if I wanted to make you afraid of a people, I could easily do so by spreading false information about how they “brutally” slaughter animals. I read another article about 2 Muslim men who randomly threw acid on the face of an innocent woman. The article seemed suspect, so I did a 30-second search and quickly realized that it was false. I appeal to Christians to stop doing this.

Something that may seem more innocent is the grand claims we perpetuate without truly knowing if they are true. Many who have never studied Islam or read the Qur’an, for example, are happy to tell you all about the inexcusable baseline of all Muslim belief. This is to assume a posture of full-knowing, rather than “non understanding.” There is no room for curiosity or correction when we assume such a posture.

In other words, we don’t rush in and say “See! You’re actually just a Christian!” (“anonymous Christians” is the term Volf uses) or, on the other hand, fail to recognize any similarities that might exist (like the golden rule) because we want to prove that we are different. This is one of the things I appreciated about the Faith and Spirituality Centre where I worked. There was a refusal to flatten dialogue in either direction (such as ‘See, all roads lead to God. We’re pretty much the same,’ on the one hand, and “They are completely different from us,’ on the other). Such a flattening destroys curiosity and genuine dialogue.

This is the “rule” that stands out to me most. I sadly see this happening all the time.

I will never forget the long plane ride to Greece shortly after 9/11, where I sat next to a man of a different religion who drilled me the entire trip about my religion. He mocked the food I ate. He asked me to show him my passport and compared my practically stamp-less document with his well-inked version. He said I was young and ignorant. He insulted me when I told him that I couldn’t read the Bible in its original language. This annoyed me, but none of it rattled me and I kept my cool. Then, he insinuated that all Christians were like the priests who had been found out to be child molesters in the scandal within the Roman Catholic Church.

Generalizing all Christians based on this terrible stain (we have other stains, too!) in our history is what finally got under my skin. This is not to deny the problem he brought up, or even deny that it was widespread. Yet what he was doing was using the worst of my religion to belittle me, and Christianity as a whole, in the process. If I don’t like being seen through my religion’s worst lens, then I must also refuse to categorize people of other religions by the worst moments in their history, or view them through that lens as well. A humble posture will recognize the worst in my religion as a barrier that must be overcome, rather than seeking the worst in the other’s religion.

It’s interesting that some version of the Golden Rule is common to religions. Volf draws particular notice to Jesus’ words “in everything.” In Matthew 7:12 Jesus says,

“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”

I’ll add a fifth “rule” that I didn’t include in my original post.

The father of liberation theology, Gustavo Guitérrez, is said to have asked the following while wandering the streets of Lima:

“So you say you love the poor? Name them.”

It is easy to love the poor from a distance. To love the idea of the poor. Real love requires proximity. I have taken his poignant question and used it in the opposite direction:

“You want to talk about ’those Muslims?’ Name them.”

It is easy for all of us to talk about our ideas about people without actually having proximity to them. Sometimes I see people say, ‘There are a lot of Muslims where I live!’ I, too, lived in a place where there were a lot of Muslims. I didn’t know them, though. It wasn’t until I started spending hours with wonderful Muslim students that I really got to personally know actual Muslim people. When speaking of other religions, when at all possible, have a name and face that you actually know in front of your imagination.

Obviously, there are many other things that could be said here, but I hope this at least begins to scratch at the change in tone and posture needed surrounding these conversations. We can do better. All of us.

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“Watch out that you are not deceived. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’ and, ‘The time is near.’ Do not follow them.” (Luke 21:8)

After World War I, people began to rise in influence and made their “I am he” claims. Mussolini. Hitler. Stalin. People were losing faith in God; secularism and atheism were on the rise. And so 100 years ago, in 1925, Pope Pius XI instituted the feast of Christ the King to close out the year, thus reminding the people that however bleak things may seem, Jesus’ Kingdom would know no end. Jesus is the Lord over every throne, over every principality and power, and over history itself. And we, living in these dark days, must never forget that no matter how loud the political pundits are, no matter how much the church seems to be blowing apart its witness, and no matter what happens, Christ is King. “His Kingdom,” as the angel Gabriel reminded Mary, “will never end.”

Here is a link to today’s Christ the King sermon.

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It was a joy to interview my friend, , for the Theomagination Podcast (you can also listen and subscribe to the Theomagination podcast on all podcast platforms).

Joash is an author, a sought after speaker, and a global advocate for liberation. In this interview, Joash and I talk about his wonderful and important new book, The Justice of Jesus (here’s the Canadian link). I hope you enjoy the conversation!

To learning more about Joash’s work, check out his Substack, Instagram and Website.

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Admittedly, I have listened to Cello Suite No. 1 in G major the most. It’s not only the opening movement, but musically my favorite. and I were recently geeking out on a podcast about the Prélude in G major. There’s glory in it! But of course, the first disc tends to get the most attention regardless. Yesterday after church, however, I wanted to intentionally take things slow. I decided to cook a pot roast which, of course, takes about 5 hours or so. I decided to work in silence for a while because it’s an easy habit to put music on in order to dull the silence. I need silence and am becoming increasingly aware of this fact. But eventually I felt like putting the record on. No one was at the house so I turned the music up loud enough to get me evicted from an apartment if I were leasing one. As I mentioned, Bach’s Cello Suites are “Six Evolutions,” or movements. They are as follows:

What caught me off guard and nearly took my breath away last night was the sixth movement. I have, of course, heard it before, but I never noticed just how gentle, how light it was. You would think that after the “Struggle for hope” there would be a sense of triumphal conquering to follow; a victory cry after winning the battle, or conquering the mountain. The Epiphany is not that. And this, if we have ears to hear it, is good news.

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On the cover of Ma’s recording is a picture of him playing Cello surrounded by 6 ghost-like figures dancing. I had forgotten this. I don’t know what dance Bach was picturing when he wrote the sixth movement, but I pictured a grandfather dancing with his granddaughter. The grandfather I pictured was me. This is such a different picture than winning a battle. Some of us are obsessed with leaving a legacy.1 We want the legacy to be in the book, or the conference tours, or the crowds, or the accumulated wealth. What if that legacy is a move backwards instead of forwards? A move away from maturity? What if the legacy after the struggle is supposed to be gentleness, playfulness, laughter and lightness? What if almost no one reads our Substack, but those we love most said we became more gentle as the years passed? I listened and thought of an unexpected snowfall on a bright and mild day. Have you ever experienced this? The sudden burst of snow on a day when you say to yourself, ‘is it even cold enough to be snowing?’ This kind of snow never accumulates. This snow is the snow of surprise, not accumulation. Its presence is known and welcomed, but it is not there to do anything other than open your heart to the wonder of it all. I thought of this when I listened to the sixth movement.

Today was strange. It snowed off and on. In November. In Tennessee. It was unusual. I was playing the 6^th movement again and my son Spencer said, ‘Look! The weather is doing what the song is doing!’ Indeed it was. The multi-colored autumn forest was the backdrop, the sun was shining, and a gentle snow was blowing steadily. Hallelujah.

There’s a way in which musicians like Bach do what apophaticism is after. His work is theological, his negation is his wordlessness. This wordless explication ends with wonder at the Ineffable. The sixth movement was a negation of any kind of Almighty-ism.^⁠2 Don’t mistake me, there is a heartbreaking beauty and awe here that could make you fall prostrate before the Creator. But the overwhelm is in the Still Small Voice, not the hurricane. I’m not naming any of this well. Perhaps I can only really say that I was caught up with what this movement wasn’t. It wasn’t life as performance. It wasn’t life as conquering. It wasn’t life as accumulation or largeness. It was the negation of all of these things. Perhaps to be able to name it is to betray it. As I listened to the movement I thought of the brilliant fourth line of the song which Rich Mullins and David Strasser (aka Beaker) wrote, “Sometimes by Step”:

Sometimes the night was beautiful
Sometimes the sky was so far away
Sometimes it seemed to stoop so close
You could touch it but your heart would break…

I listened to this movement and thought, this is what it is like to at last be at home with yourself and God. I want this! How fitting, then, that the song ends on the one. Most songs end on one, of course, but this song ends on the one single breathtaking note which, in musical language, also happens to be the one rhythmically (beat one) and melodically (the root note). In the end there is a singularity in the single (one) note which is further represented by also being the one (first note) in the scale and the first beat (the one) in the measure. But then I realized that while the final movement ended on a singular one, there was even more going on. Glory! The sixth movement is in D major. I was in the car listening when this hit me and I thought, “it can’t be?!” I waited and looked back and yes, sure enough, the first movement is in G major. You don’t need to fully understand music to get this, but you can take my word that a basic principle of music is that the fifth chord in the major scale typically calls for a return to the one. The fifth note in the key of D major (the key of the final movement) is G (the key of the first movement). If all of this is lost on you, I’m saying that there are perhaps two things going on here. First, the movement ends in simple but stunning singularity. It ends with a sense of home. But it’s also possible that this completion may also signal a return to where it came from (back to G, the opening key, in this case). In the end, then, the closure is not a finality into nothingness, but a return to the home it has been longing for all along; the home it came from. The city whose builder and make is God.^⁠3

Hallelujah.

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The other night I was reading Andrew Root’s fascinating book The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticism,^⁠1 and was quite struck by his brief but potent explication of the brilliant Byung-Chul Han’s work on smell.^⁠2 Everything I write here has come from a mere two pages in Root’s book (I will soon read Han’s relevant work, and have found his other work deeply fruitful). Root writes:

“The internet has proliferating images but no (zero) smells.”^⁠3

Think about that for a minute. You can answer almost every rational question you can think of with the help of the internet. AI could write this post — or more accurately, a post like this post (never this post) — for me if I fed it the right cues. The internet has everything except, but no smell. Root, again:

“You can accelerate images and sounds, but not smells. You can intensify a smell (by never washing your workout clothes), but you can’t accelerate a smell. You can speed up the consumption of images, double-time the pace of the sound of a podcast, but you cannot hurry smell.”^⁠4

This is not something we think about, or at least not often. What could it mean that the internet is a place (or a no-place) devoid of smell?

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While we search for things on the internet, the search isn’t mysterious. It’s equation. The more straightforward my words in the search, the more straightforward the answer. There is no mystery, no waiting, no hide-and-seek. The internet exists for very straight forward questions and emotionless answers. But smell works differently.

“What we smell is veiled, it is hidden, it must be searched for to be discovered. Smell hits us, but we might search for what or where it comes from. Smell is not ready at hand like an image; smell is not transparent. It is not a click away.”^⁠5

“What is that smell?”^⁠6 we often ask. It could be a good or terrible smell, but often we wonder what on earth it is and where on earth it is coming from. It incites search. Not the depersonalized search engine, but the actual search for its location and origin.

FOG MACHINES OR INCENSE?

Here’s an interesting question to ponder: What is the difference between the smoke machine in some churches and the incense in others? There’s a lot we could say, but what if the difference, the real difference, is the smell. The smoke machine is interested in vibe, incense in contemplation. Something about fragrance moves us to experience time differently; meditatively. We are told to “stop and smell the roses,” for example. Fragrance calls us towards consideration and contemplation. Fog machines are the internet. They exists primarily to catch beams of light yet emit no fragrance; they highlight the visual but don’t beckon us to “stop and smell.” In stopping and smelling, we experience something here, in this place rather than in a generic site.^⁠7 I can search for my dream kitchen online, but I can’t walk through the door of the internet, so to speak, and be hit with the aroma of home from what’s cooking there. And what good is an immaculate kitchen that never has food cooked in it?

“The internet has many sites but no heres in which to be. It has many (exponential) places or sites to visit but few to encounter.”^⁠8

Smell reminds us that we have stepped into a particular place. It gathers up our memories, like a hen gathers her chicks under her wing. This, of course, can work negatively as well. If a church contained toxic memories, the smell of incense might trigger awful memories. The fog machine won’t trigger anything, negative or positive, in terms of memory. Its intent is not memory, only feel. I don’t care all that much if you have a smoke machine or not, for the record. I know some great churches that have smoke machines. I’m also not trying to get anyone to start using incense. I’m simply interested in exploring overlooked questions of meaning. Part of my point is that smell itself is a trigger for interpretation (what is that smell?).

“As Han explains in The Scent of Time, smell often demands some contemplation, some hermeneutical interpretation. When we smell something good or bad, we are often drawn into hermeneutics, into contemplation, aware of our being in a place. We ask, ‘What is that smell?’”^⁠9

THE FRAGRANCE OF CHRIST

Thinking about smell necessitating interpretation, we might contemplate what it means when Paul writes in 2 Corinthians:

[14] But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. [15] For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. [16] To the one we are an aroma that brings death; to the other, an aroma that brings life. (2 Corinthians 2:14-16)

What would it mean, given everything said previously, to look at witness through the lens of fragrance? One of the first things I’m drawn to is the idea of smell needing interpretation. As I say perhaps too frequently these days, there is a world of difference between witnessing and bearing witness. The one is an event, regardless of the form. Bearing witness, on the other hand, is more like fragrance which demands interpretation. The power should reside in the person smelling the fragrance and we are there to help guide them, when asked, in the interpretive process. Fragrance, we must remember, takes time. We need to be a people who learn how to “stop” with others, “and smell.” We are not there primarily to answer difficult philosophical questions, but rather to walk with, in this moment and place (here), towards the source of the fragrance. Even if we know that we emit the aroma of Christ, we cannot fully understand how others are interpreting that smell. Read the above text closely. Some will smell something beautiful coming from us, but others will smell something like “an aroma that brings death.” We must be very cautious, then, to not presume to know what others are experiencing. Bearing witness is no equation but an invitation for all to step into the mystery together. Why does this smell good? Or, Why does this smell like death? Even the death smell has meaning that we can prayerfully explore with others.

To be the “aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere,” and to explore the aroma that we are with others, then, requires place, a meditative pace, and a willingness to enter humbly into interpretation with others, trusting that God will lead them, and us, back to the source of the aroma.

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