Resistance is Spiritual Work

One year down.

That is all I really want to say about the first year of the Donald Trump administration. 

One year...one very long, difficult, sometimes demoralizing, quite often maddening year. Lies became rebranded "alternative facts." And they were abundant. One newspaper kept a tally and found that the president lied more than 2,000 times and that doesn't even count this past month. He lies when the truth really would be acceptable. His spokespeople...he has had three in the course of the year...rattled off one fairy tale and fib after another from the crowd size at his inauguration to whether or not this man, who expresses sympathy for Nazis and refers to Africa as a 'shithole,' is a racist. He's fickle. He's reckless. And his constant provocation of another loose canon leader, Kim Jong Un, leaves many of us concerned about the possibility of nuclear war. Hawaiians got a scare when a false alarm of an attack on the island state sent people scurrying to find shelter. We live in "interesting" times.

It would be easy to throw in the towel, or curl up in a fetal position as the things I hold dear get trampled on or destroyed. But I'm not about to do that. What keeps me going, and what makes me resist the temptation to give up is Love. 

Today, on this anniversary of this presidency, I chose not to rally at the state Capitol building, but instead to take with me a group of faithful Christians to the Episcopal diocese of Georgia's tent revival with our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry. (Yes: Episcopalians under a tent for a revival. Will wonders never cease, right?). I knew I needed to be there along the banks of Honey Creek more than anywhere else. I have been longing for how to express my faith in this work I am now engaged in with others "to hold fast to that which is good" and was created for good in this world. And our church leader provided the words:

"On a biblical level, the opposite of love isn't hate; in the New Testament, the opposite of love is self-centeredness. It is the mother of hate...Jesus was executed by an unholy alliance of religious, political, and economic establishments, oriented toward self-centeredness...Always be careful when religious, political, and economic interests come together.  It was trouble in the first century and it’s trouble today." - Bishop Michael Curry

This. THIS. The work of the resistance, those of us who are visiting our elected officials, writing post cards, sending emails, making phone calls, going to rallies, donating time, money, and sweat to campaigns for various candidates in an effort to stem the tide of backlash against the progress we've made since the 1960s is holy work. Self-centeredness is what makes politicians do the bidding of their corporate donors because they are allowing money to tell them what is good, right, and just rather than serving the needs of the people who are the least, the lost, and the disaffected. Self-centeredness is overshadowing the work of the spirit when Christians can look away from the horror of Roy Moore's behavior that gets him banned from the Gadsden Mall or shrug off an outrageous statement made about African nations and people from Central America and Haiti because the party or the person is more important to them than the greater good of God's creation. Self-centeredness is the key ingredient to the greed that is causing more painful disparities that affect people of all races and making the income gap greater and greater. This self-centeredness is the wages of sin. Resisting the temptation to serve self, and not others, is the holy work of the Resistance.

Now, most of the Resistance movement is areligious. Not necessarily anti-religious, although there is a lot of that, too. When you believe that religion is about bullying people or belittling anyone who doesn't measure up to some mythical idea of perfection, I wouldn't want to be part of that either. That's an entirely different blog entry and I've written on it on this blog (you can search my "faith journey" and get a sense of my Queer Christianity). Most people in the resistance don't see themselves as doing spiritual work. 

I do. I see how when one grounds their work in Love...whether they want to call that Love by the name of Jesus or not...it is still a work in Love. And when we do works that are grounded in that Source we are necessarily doing the work of what Bishop Curry calls the transformation of The Nightmare of this World into God's Dream. I have many times in my activism looked to the example of Jesus to give me the boost and the hope that I need when I find myself faced with what seems like an impossible and intractable opponent. I let myself go into that experience of his arrest on Maundy Thursday, and the chaos and the fear and confusion that must have been present in that moment and--as the old hymn says--"it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble."  I look at how Jesus, who had moments of private confession of his fear at knowing what was coming at him, and still he overcame his own concerns because his mission was not a self-centered one; it was for all humankind. Maybe my own struggles aren't quite that big and lofty, and yet taking a stand for justice and mercy for Dreamers, for my trans siblings, for people of color is plenty big. I visualize a future where we care about not leaving the planet in worse shape than when we were born. The way to make a country great is to educate children and to invest in improving the lives of women, especially women of color. This is what I believe the words "thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" are all about.  

Time to count resistance as a spiritual work.    

St. Thomas and The March for Science

I couldn't help myself this past Sunday.

Our deacon finished reading the assigned Gospel lesson from John, which is always the story of the apostle, Thomas, who insists that he must be able to see Jesus for himself and stick his fingers in his wounds in order to believe that Christ really had risen from the dead. I leaned over to one of my fellow choir members, a scientist, and whispered:

"Thomas just wanted peer review."

Joking aside, I think there's definitely an element of truth to that idea. All the other apostles had seen the resurrected Jesus, and were telling him all about it. But Thomas had his doubts about the veracity of their statements and wanted proof.

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’
 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ (John 20:24-29)

Whenever I hear people talk about this story, it's always presented as "doubting Thomas," as if there is something wrong with him. If Thomas had had more faith, then he wouldn't have needed this proof. And maybe it was just the juxtaposition of hearing this Gospel story after spending a few hours of my Saturday marching in Tallahassee along side scientists and science lovers that I gained a new insight into one of my favorite apostles. I've liked Thomas because of this moment of being so completely real to the way we are as humans and having our doubts about something we haven't seen for ourselves.

And, if we think about Thomas as if he really were a scientist requiring an extra study to prove this "fact" that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, then his doubt can be seen as a legitimate and necessary inquiry. Certainly, Jesus didn't seem to have a problem appearing again for Thomas' benefit, and even challenged him to follow through on the experiment he wanted to do of sticking his fingers and hand into his wounds. Thomas doesn't; the appearance alone was enough for him to say, "My Lord and my God!" Then Jesus gives him the nudge: "Oh, so now because you have seen me you believe. Blessed are the ones who haven't been so lucky and yet have come to believe."

In his sermon at our church (which happens to be St. Thomas Episcopal Church), Bishop Scott Benhase drew the distinction between having "belief" and having "faith." "Belief" is about having certainty and proof of a truth beyond a shadow of a doubt. "Faith" requires a trust in the movement of God's grace in our lives. Thinking of this moment again with Thomas...his need to experience the risen Jesus first-hand, and not just hear the stories from his fellow apostles...speaks to Thomas wanting a verifiable truth that would fit with his belief system. And you can imagine, he must have believed what made the most sense to him and to any rational person: there is no way Jesus defeated death because nobody does that. Thomas must have thought the rest of the apostles were high.

But the other part of faith, and definitely the way of Jesus, is to not fit into our rational idea of what constitutes "the way things are" because faith, and most definitely Jesus, doesn't adhere to those kinds of rules. As the prophet Isaiah said, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, says the Lord." The whole mission of Jesus is to turn our belief, that commitment to concrete answers and certitude, on its head and get us to give up on the mission to find "the truth" in favor of trusting in God's unending revelation of truth through faith. That's the work of grace.

This is where the sciences, and the scientists, come in. There's been such bad blood between those who make it their life's work to search out truth, in the universe or the earth or the seas or the mind, and those who are content to live into a hope that trusts God will unveil all things in God's time. I'm sorry there's been such a binary split between science and religion that people tend to pick sides and set up straw men that they can knock down to prove that they're right and the other side is wrong. Personally, I think God loves scientists as much as any other group and delights in their Thomas-like inquiry and demand for proof, and seeking out signs that point to a "truth." Scientists are the ones cracking the codes of the mysterious for us. They are helping us to find out more about our world, our ecosystems, and how to be the good stewards of this planet we were commanded to be. And, for me, rather than their discoveries proving there is no need for a belief in God, I think they're just taking us deeper into the mystery. It's like one of those Russian dolls where you open one, there's another one. And another one. And another one. It's endless! Once a hypothesis is tested, and tested again, and the "truth" remains elusive, the best scientists are the ones who eventually say, "We just don't know."

Here enters faith and the hope and trust that it's OK not to have all the answers. And this is the place where I believe God meets us to say, "You don't know it all. But keep going. Keep probing. Keep seeking. I'm here. And I delight in your curiosity!" Science is cool. So is God.

The Depths of God: Copernicus and Kepler

As the heavens declare your glory, O God, and the firmament shows your handiwork, we bless your Name for the gifts of knowledge and insight you bestowed upon Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler; and we pray that you would continue to advance our understanding of your cosmos, for our good and for your glory; through Jesus Christ, the firstborn of all creation, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

I was delighted today to discover that our 12:10 service would be celebrating the astronomers Nicholas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler.  And, admittedly, from the start of the Collect of the Day, printed above, to the readings, all I could think about was how foolish the church had been back in the 16th-17th Century to not see that their scientists of the day were not contradicting Scripture nor condemning God.  On the contrary, science then and now has the power to open our eyes further to the wonders of the created order.

Copernicus was the one who proferred that the earth is not the center of the universe; the sun is.  Kepler, writing about 60 years later, built upon the heliocentric work of Copernicus, and offered that the all the planets move in an elliptical orbit around the sun.  A morning hymn came to mind:

Christ, whose glory fills the skies,
Christ the true, the only Light,
Sun of Righteousness, arise!
Triumph o'er the shades of night:
Dayspring from on high, be near;
Daystar, in my heart appear.

Of course, as anyone who has studied church history can tell you, Copernicus and his heliocentric revolution challenged the Aristolean geocentric philosophy of the Renaissance church.   This would be even more evident when Galileo built his telescope, and saw for himself that the planets had moons and were moving around the sun and not the earth.  Copernicus, who was also a Catholic priest among many other things, had not originally caused a ruckus with his 1543 work documenting his theory, but as the Ancient Greek science was giving way to new discoveries, and forcing the Church to rethink, the Roman Catholic Church responded by saying that it was Copernicus' book, "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres," that was out of line.  Kepler, who subscribed to the heliocentric approach of Copernicus, argued that a sun-centered universe supported the existence of a creative God.  He said the cosmos was a reflection of God, with the Father as the Sun, the stellar sphere corresponded to the Son and the intervening space is the Holy Spirit.  Talk about a vast expanse of interstellar space to describe the Holy Trinity!

It seems silly, here in the 21st century, that these discoveries would cause anyone in the Church to have had angst, or to argue that what these men were saying was contrary to Scripture.  Especially in light of the readings heard today.  Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinithians, talks about the mysteries of God, hidden and secret, from human eyes, which would seem to bolster the work of all scientists:

‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
   nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him’— 
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.(1 Cor. 2:9-12)

We keep learning the new depths of God, thanks to our scientists today.  A few years ago, as scientists in Europe used the supercollider to search for the Higgs-Boson, they released a recording of the sounds inside as sub-atomic particles slammed around.  I was fascinated that the sounds they picked up had distinct notes, and, at times, mimicked some of the pieces I've heard on CDs played during massage therapy.  While some have said the discovery of Higgs-Boson casts doubt on the existence of God, I see it as the Spirit revealing more of who God is to us through the work of the scientists.  Thankfully, I haven't found any literature that says the physicist Dr. Peter Higgs has been brought up before some ecclesiastical court for his work in particle physics. 

Maybe we will one day stop this nonsensical war between science and religion and instead see them as opening the doors to more discovery and more mystery.