Dear friends,
My heart is heavy with grief and exhaustion. But my job is to preach the Good News, the Gospel, God’s glad tidings of justice and peace.
I'll get to that, I promise. But we can’t just jump to the cheerful things. This is a profoundly frightening time. Many, many people are in danger as a result of our national election. And of course it’s not just the election. We are facing so many overlapping crises right now. We are worried for the safety of women, persons of color, and transgender persons. We watch with outrage as warfare kills innocent people. We can’t even trust that our kids are safe from deadly violence in the classroom. And of course, through all of this, we feel traumatic anxiety about climate change and extreme weather.
I sometimes feel like I’m suffocating under heavy blankets of fear, anger, and aching sadness. And not just today, not just last evening: I’ve awakened in the wee hours quite often, for many years now, worried about all that’s happening, all that could happen.
In times when I’m feeling deeply discouraged, I think about my mother, when she was dying of cancer, holding out hope for healing, for recovery, for the tumors to go down and the illness to go into remission. I remember her saying, several times, “Maybe I’m just whistling in the graveyard.” And yes, given that she did finally die of her illness, if she was only hoping for a physical cure, this was a false hope.
But I also remember that my mother did not die in despair. I remember that she did, finally, have a more nuanced and genuinely hopeful understanding of her illness, and her grim prognosis. She understood that healing and curing are not the same thing: that one can die of an illness with serenity, with peace, and with confidence.
My mother prayed fervently for healing, and healing came to her, even though a cancer cure did not. She wasn’t “whistling in the graveyard,” a cynical term to describe false hope. She was singing in the graveyard. Yes: this I believe; this I know.
Here’s where I start my own song in the graveyard of this troubled world: I think of our tweens and teenagers at St. Paul’s, serving as leaders in our Neighborhood Action ministry, asking intelligent questions, pointing the way to a collaborative, intergenerational community of faith. In a time and place where this may seem impossible, one of our youth has become the driver of church attendance in their household, so that they can serve yet again in our companionship ministry alongside our neighbors who seek safe shelter.
Another tween here at St. Paul’s is a lector and an actor, a curious soul with intelligent questions about God, about suffering, about the meaning of biblical parables. His smile lights up a whole room as he joins us in delightful, creative ministry. Know this truth: these young people have a community that nurtures and supports them, and makes them ready to enter, and improve, this world.
Then I think of their parents, and all parents at this parish we love. Most of these parents fight chronic exhaustion to do all they can for their kids, and at our church they find some relief — relief given to them by all the rest of us.
Then I think of our elders, full of years, discerning their shifting roles and identities as they gather here year by year to say their prayers. And then it all comes together, for me: I sing in the graveyard of our fears, the graveyard of our anger, the graveyard of our aching sadness: I sing with resurrection joy about the intergenerational community of faith God has given us. This is the source of authentic hope for me in these terrible times: God’s answer to a collapsing world is communities with people of all ages, working together, praying together, serving together, singing together.
It has always been like this. The first Christian communities lived in a shattering time of oppression and state-sanctioned violence. Most of the New Testament was written amid the ashes of Jerusalem, sacked by Rome without mercy. In the accounts and letters of our forebears, we see their worries about chaos and death. We hear their concern that Jesus wasn’t coming back as quickly as they expected, as the first and second generations were beginning to die. “Where is our hope?” I hear them saying — I hear them crying out.
Their hope comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth, and that hope comes alive in their intergenerational house churches, their fellowship, their breaking of the bread and their prayers. They eventually changed the world for the better, much better, simply by coming together and forming the world they wanted to live in. God’s answer to a collapsing world is a community of faith. And then another community of faith. And then another. And then another, until they circle the whole world.
But I need to say one more thing about our faith — about Christianity. The first Christians lived in a world where their faith was universally unknown. (It wasn’t even yet called “Christianity”!) They were a tiny sect in a backwater of the empire. But in our time, people cause great damage the world over by misappropriating Christianity for partisan political ends. They weaponize our faith, perversely using it to terrify and harass trans kids; to rationalize violence; to separate families and deport migrants; all while paying no heed to the devastation of the land, rivers, and seas. They call themselves Christians, but they ignore Jesus when he says, “Put your sword back into its sheath!” They ignore God when God reminds the people that they should welcome the stranger, for they themselves were strangers in the land of Egypt.
And so we have more than one mission. Our primary mission, given to us by God, is not to win elections, but to cultivate this intergenerational community of faith for the health of our members, and for the health of our neighbors. But a second mission is this: when we stand here, in this corner of God’s good world, and preach Christ crucified and Christ resurrected, we reveal to the world an authentic Christian community. We reveal to the world the Body of Christ as allies of all in harm’s way, as partners in action and contemplation. We reveal to the world a just and peaceful future, over and against the bitter disappointments of our stormy present. We reveal to the world the true meaning of the cross of Christ. In all we do here, together, we are evangelists: we proclaim truly Good News.
Paul, our patron, wrote more than once to the church in Corinth, in Greece. We have his writings collected in two letters. Paul is often impatient with the Corinthians, who found it all too easy to give in to the way of the world: in the world around them, the Corinthians saw injustice and inequality, and their own meal practices started to devolve. Wealthier, better connected people sat in better seats; a pecking order developed; they often lost sight of God’s mission to change and save the world, one community of justice at a time. Paul encourages them, but he also upbraids them, takes them to task. He reminds them that the mission is difficult, but it truly does transform the world. In his second letter to them, Paul writes this:
But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies [2 Cor 4:7-9].
You and I, we’re the clay jars Paul is talking about. We are mortal. We are vulnerable mammals on a planet that, against all odds, somehow supports life. But the treasure of God’s kingdom is stored inside us, between us, among us. And so, as we move forward into the fray, into the arena, we surely are afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down; but we are not crushed, not driven to despair, not forsaken, not destroyed.
“We carry around the death of Jesus,” Paul writes. That is, we are acquainted with death; we are companions of the dying; we are friends of the refugee; we are visitors of those on death row; we are often found comforting the sick in hospitals and sharing soup with unhoused campers. We Christians are well acquainted with death. In this sense, what happened yesterday does not come to us as a surprise. So goes the world.
But we also reveal the life of Jesus. Always with God’s help, we change this old world. We take our part in making it new. Oh, dear friends, how I love you. How deeply I want to embrace all of you, encourage you, buck you up, send you out. And there will be time for that. Feel your feelings today, drink water, breathe. But let’s keep coming back, okay? Come back to help our kids grow up with authentic hope. Come back to receive the wisdom of our elders. God is with us, and God gives us extraordinary power, visible in our bodies. And this — this gathered community of saints — this is our song of alleluia in the graveyard of this troubled world. May the Holy Three bless you and keep you.
Father Stephen