How was it that a Facebook post from Dolly Parton made it into my field of vision that Easter Day? I don’t know. I’m sure that up to that point I had “interpolated [her] through coastal biases about white trash and red states.” (Tressie McMillan Cottom, in the NYT, 8/27/26). Dolly Parton was not on my radar, not did I think she should be.

But that Easter Day, before singing an Easter Gospel song, this is what Dolly Parton said: “We don’t have to go to a building, to a church, to worship God. The kingdom of heaven is within.”

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I re-posted her video that Easter Day with my own comment at the top, “This little message from Dolly Parton makes me love her.” I did not know how significant was the gift of grace that was being given to me at the time; I see it now.

When I learned of her death, I remembered her pandemic Easter message and listened to it again, along with the song she sang - “He’s alive!” - and what I heard was the Gospel. I remember that her words and her music had the same affect on me on that trying Easter. I remembered that I heard the Gospel from Dolly Parton, and it made me love her.

The Gospel of Jesus - which is a message of hope, and of love, and of healing, and of life - the Gospel is a song that gets sung inside of you. Sometimes you hear music in the world singing along with that song of hope, and love, and healing, and life that God is singing inside of you. That’s what happened to me that Easter Day when I heard Dolly Parton, to whom I was prepared to pay exactly zero attention up until that point. If you are lucky (or blessed), you learn to sing the song of God’s hope, and love, and healing, and life, outside of yourself too: you get to put your own voice to the song of the Gospel. I have been given that blessing. Dolly Parton was given it too, in substantial measure.

It is not actually an entirely simple theological statement to declare, matter of factly, that “the kingdom of heaven is within.” But part of Dolly Parton’s gift was making that declaration with an assurance that carried a certain authority that comes I guess from nowhere but the song that’s been sung inside of her for her whole life. And on that Easter Day, it seemed plainly obvious that nothing could be better good news than to be reminded that the kingdom of heaven is within. From my exiled vantage point outside the church these days, the message brings me renewed assurance. And the fact that the source of the authority of that message - or at least the messenger - is Dolly Parton, makes it seem to me to be all the more likely to be true.

Deals, as a category, have become a prevailing paradigm of our time, in certain circles. Not only in business and international relations, but also in many other aspects of political and even cultural life we hear that making a deal is the highest and best outcome we can hope for. “Let’s make a deal’ seems like it’s something of an unofficial national motto all of a sudden. The deal - and the supposed art of making one - is held up as an unalloyed virtue in and of itself. And the possibility that some deals leave you with nothing but a Zonk is not much acknowledged in the current moment.

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Lest I veer toward commentary, when my specialty is supposed to be encouragement, I should, of course, hold up an alternative paradigm. As a child of God, raised in the church, and never far from the Jewish antecedents of my own religion, I have been shaped by the idea of a covenant as perhaps the most important paradigm for relationships. I greatly admire the concise way that Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has of describing the nature of a covenant, which is easily confused with a contract, which sounds a lot like a deal. Rabbi Sacks reminds us that in a contract, the overriding concern is what you get out of the deal, but in a covenant, the over-riding concern is what you give to the relationship.

In a covenant, two or more individuals, each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, come together in a bond of love and trust, to share their interests, sometimes even to share their lives, by pledging their faithfulness to one another, to do together what neither can achieve alone. A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘Us’. That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform. (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Morality, p. 63)

Jews and Christians have no more profound way of describing their relationship with God than in terms of a covenant, which informs every human relationship, as well, and provides the model for ideal social and inter-personal relationships, too.

The Economy of Giftedness is the term I use to describe an economics that’s born of a covenant of love: a relationship that begins and ends with giving on all sides. With such an economy almost anything is possible, since love is the output (and the input, for that matter). When the Economy of Giftedness is functioning as God intends, Zonks are never the result; only blessings flow. Everything we have is a gift from God, and the best things we will ever do in our lives involve the things that we give away. When the Economy of Giftedness is humming along on all cylinders, deals look like a shoddy way of doing things.

Almost all the patterns of giving in my life have been disrupted in the past two and a half years; but I have not ceased to be the recipient of enormous gifts of love and grace. None of the extravagant gifts of love I have been given in my life have ever come to me as part of a deal, and this is, in part, what makes them such remarkable and noticeable blessings. And for my part, I have not ceased wanting to define my life and the ways I love by what I have to give. None of which inclines me to find much interest in the invitation to make a deal, or to place much stock in the possibility that making a deal is anywhere near the best we can do.

In a biography of Wilson, Jesse Wegman writes:

The Scots came at things from a different perspective… deep poverty was within living memory. This prompted them to try to answer the vexing question of how a society progresses from poverty to wealth, from backwardness to civilization. …Scottish thinkers were consumed with what it meant to rise out of poverty, to improve as individuals and as a society - to adapt to the modern world. (Jesse Wegman, “The Lost Founder”, p. 22)

The progress from poverty to wealth, from backwardness to civilization, is a very American story, and it is, more or less, the story of my own family. Though my grandparents were really working class people, and a claim of poverty would be some kind of inverted stolen valor. The path my family took is well-worn in America, and significantly, it travels past hard work, education, and home-ownership on its way to greater progress.

Looking at the decadence of American society these days, it might be easy to conclude that, having successfully navigated the journey from poverty to wealth, from backwardness to civilization, there are fewer places left for us to go that don’t amount to just more decadence. But that would be a cynical way to look at things, and it would also represent a failure to notice that there are a great many people in this country who have not yet made the journey that so greatly improves their lot in life.

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One good reason to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American Independence is to remind ourselves of where we came from and why. My Irish, Italian, Hungarian, and Slovak forebears could tell you something about that. They could tell you about the importance of hard work, education, and home ownership. There’s a version of that story that also makes the most of military service (and the educational opportunities afforded by the G.I. Bill) but it’s a minor plot line in my own particular family.

James Wilson signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He was a justice of the Supreme Court. He was also something of a scoundrel when it came to his debts, it would seem. I feel connected to him in a special way because he was once rescued by the First City Troop from a crowd who suspected he held royalist sympathies. (He didn’t.). Wilson made a lot of money; he lost a lot too. But his wealth was a part of the success of his progress out of poverty in the new world.

Progress and hope for a better future are hallmarks of what I think of as the American way. I live a life that my grandparents might not have dreamed of. I have always believed that the American system is built for this purpose, for the benefit of ordinary people - quite in contrast to the old world so many of our grandparents and great-grandparents left behind. What I have read about James Wilson reminds me of where this animating feature of the American system comes from: from the desire to build a society whose systems work for all of us, because all of us are equals.

This nation has not reached a point of no return beyond which there is nothing but more decadence to be had. I know too many people - too many children - who live in need of a society that wants to see them progress from poverty to wealth, from backwardness to civilization. There are simply too many people still waiting - still yearning - for the chances America is supposed to offer. It has been my honor and joy to work to build small structures within American society that enable and empower such transformations (a school, a church community, perhaps a garden). I look above me and see national leaders who seem to know nothing about such work and such structures, (or even such people) and who seem to look backward, not forward, to define their goals, and this perplexes and irritates me greatly. But I read about a forgotten founder of this nation, and I am reminded that America was really only built to move in one direction: forward.

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I have bemoaned how seldom we hear ourselves even talked about as “citizens” these days, even by our leaders and our media. We are “consumers” and “residents”, possibly “voters”; we are Republicans and Democrats, and possibly independents; but when are we citizens? And what does my citizenship have in common with that of the recent immigrant from Central America, or with Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk?

In 1888 a short poem of Whitman’s was published in the New York Herald. It is succinct:

America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike, endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

Walt Whitman, 1888

I imagine that the restraint of this poem was difficult for Whitman; to restrict his description of the populace of this nation as nothing more and nothing less than “equal daughters, equal sons,” and then, immediately, to insist that we are “all, all alike”, cannot have been easy for him in its brevity. But he must have seen it as an important statement to make.

In the current moment, I am struck by the image of the nation as “a grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,” which can so easily imply a contrast to, say, a petty, lunatic, belittling, strutting patriarch. But I’m not saying that’s what Whitman had in mind; I’m just saying you might see the contrast too, as circumstances permit.

Dwell for a moment on the possibility of “equal daughters, equal sons,” who among other characteristics all get to enjoy being “rich”. I wonder what Whitman would make of the current moment, in which the rich in America so enthusiastically propel themselves far, far beyond the vast sea of fellow daughters and sons who make up this nation. Are we really all, all alike? Are we really all equal? What poetry of America is being written among the spectacularly wealthy of this nation?

There ought to be much about America on its 250th anniversary that would be unrecognizable to a poet from a century and a half ago. But as we celebrate 250 years of independence, I think we are looking for threads that tie us to our earliest memories of ourself as a nation, as well as the ways we have changed for the better over all these years. The call to equality provides both opportunities, since it is a constant thread of American aspiration, and also an elusive goal toward which we have always had to strive to do better. And the call to equality begs us to consider what kinds of poems we can write about our nation now, and what kind of poems we aspire to write about ourself in the future.

Here’s the pivotal paragraph:

… come and see what happens – in this hopeless world – when you put your disappointed heart in his hands. Come and see what happens when you give your illness and your injury to him. Come and see if the dead have no hope. Come and see if the poor are to be banished for ever to disappointment. Come and see what happens when we put our trust in God!

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And here’s the whole thing:

Baseball in Zion

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing. (Is. 35:1-10)


What can break Americans’ hearts like baseball can? The wounds of war are deeper, to be sure, but the betrayals of baseball sting with a certain sharpness. The release of the report on the use of performance enhancing drugs in major league baseball shows us how the boys of summer can strike us a blow even as winter sets in.

It has, of course, been dawning on us that the heroes of the great American pastime are not what they used to be. And those who think back to the Black Sox scandal of 1919 realize that they probably never were. Still, it stings to find that our dreams have been misplaced; that the icon for all that is good and pure in America is more or less a sham; that like everything else, baseball is a business; and its players are often not worthy of the adoration we would heap on them. And there is no point in pretending – let alone hoping - that it ain’t so.

What did we expect? Did we expect that because a man could swing a bat in a certain arc, with a certain force, that made him good? Did we expect that a stolen base was an accomplishment of justice? Did we expect that pitching a no-hitter was actually a virtue, pointing toward the possibility of Truth and Goodness in the world? Did we really think that a home run could really heal a sick child, listening to the World Series on the radio? And did we expect that in a society that happily uses Botox, liposuction, and all manner of nips and tucks to re-engineer our bodies (not to mention all the chemistry we use daily to re-engineer our moods), that somehow it would never occur to athletes to give steroids a whirl?

We are learning, in America, to be disappointed. We are learning how to be let down by our government, our schools, our churches, and even baseball. We often have to learn how to be disappointed by our parents, our children, our neighbors, our friends, as well. This is what it is to be human.

So it is no surprise that John the Baptist is wondering, when we catch up with him in today’s Gospel reading, about Jesus. “Are you he who is to come? Or shall we look for another?” Growing up, as he did, listening to the story of how he leapt in his mother’s womb when her cousin came to visit, and with the outlandish tale that his father was told what to name him by an angel, wasn’t John set up for disappointment from his earliest days? But his question today, is full of guarded hope. “Are you he who is to come? Or shall we look for another?”

The people who had listened to John’s somewhat fantastic preaching, they, too, are poised for disappointment. The kingdom of heaven is at hand!? What are the chances this is so? The possibility of disappointment hangs heavy in the air. John the Baptist may yet turn out to be John, the crazy guy in a camel’s hair shirt.

And Jesus… well, who’s to say that he isn’t less than he appears to be, that he isn’t pocketing the money from his collections, and fooling around with the emotionally needy women who are drawn to him while their own husbands (if they have one) are away all day doing men’s work?

Perhaps, John the Baptist is not what he appears to be. Perhaps Jesus isn’t what he appears to be either. It wouldn’t be the first time we were disappointed, and it won’t be the last. This is what it is to be human.

It is the voice of the prophet that prepares us not to be disappointed: “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom…”

The prophet knows what it is to be human. He knows that we would sell out, and that we have been sold. He could be counted on even to see baseball for what it is. He speaks to people whose hearts have been broken. And he has nothing more than his poetry and his voice to break through the veil of spin and repression, and chemistry that we have used to manage our disappointment: “Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, fear not! Behold, your God… will come and save you.’” He knows that we need to be saved, because he sees how we have been banished to disappointment, and sometimes even to despair.

And if baseball has broken our hearts, yet again, just imagine what our government has done to us over the decades; just imagine what the church has done to us these past years, let alone throughout the rest of history. Just imagine how shattered we are. It’s just that we can admit our disappointment in baseball and its players. Do we dare to admit (even to ourselves) how badly our hearts have been broken by all the rest? And do we dare to admit that we fear God will break our hearts, too? What do we expect?

Do we really expect that there is a Son of God whose gentle touch is a sign that he is good? Do we really expect that the invisible spirit of that Son can bring justice into this unjust world of ours? Do we really expect that the story of a man who was killed on a cross, so many thousands of years ago, has the power to point to the possibility of Truth and Goodness in the world – let alone something beyond this world!? Do we really expect there is someone who can give the blind their sight, make the lame to walk, the lepers whole, and the deaf to hear? Do we really expect the dead to be raised up? Do we expect the poor to receive good news – in this city?!

Of course not! We expect our hearts to be broken – even baseball teaches us this now! We expect to be cheated, lied to, left behind, to have to fend for ourselves, and to survive only if we prove to be the fittest. We expect market forces to determine the measure of comfort we will enjoy in retirement. We expect to be sold, one way or another, just like the mortgages on our homes, to the highest bidder. Most of the time we cannot admit any of this – and so we let our hearts be broken by baseball, because at least we believe that is a heartbreak that will mend.

But God knows that real heartbreak lurks around many corners. God knows how we flirt with disaster in this militarized nuclear age. God knows that a city where 25% of the people live in poverty (but that still claims to be a city of brotherly love) is a catastrophe that has already happened. God knows that even in a city with five medical schools hearts are broken around sickbeds every day. God knows that a church whose leaders can’t speak to one another without lawyers is in some trouble. God knows that we have had to learn to expect to be disappointed.

To his prophet he gave only a voice and a poem. But to his Son he gave real power: power to save everything that would be lost or stolen or cheated away, or withered, or held for ransom. God knows how low our expectations are, and he knows that we are often no more certain about Jesus than his cousin John was in those first days. Is this he who is to come? Or shall we wait for another?

If you think that there are precious few miracles, these days, to point to the hope that comes from Jesus, come and see what happens – in this hopeless world – when you put your disappointed heart in his hands. Come and see what happens when you give your illness and your injury to him. Come and see if the dead have no hope. Come and see if the poor are to be banished for ever to disappointment. Come and see what happens when we put our trust in God!

Come and see what it means to set our sights on a promised land – on Zion, that holy mountain where God prepares a feast for us and where the cups are overflowing. Come and see what it means to be free: ransomed from the power of disappointing heartbreak by the promise of hope! Come and see!

How is it that we live in a society that will give up on God before it gives up on baseball?

“And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” You and I – and anyone we can bring with us – are the ransomed of the Lord. We have been wandering in a wilderness of disappointment. But Zion lies ahead of us, and there is no other to wait for: the One who could unlock the gate has already gone ahead of us.

And all we have to do is try to decide if we will put our trust in him, and go wherever he calls us to go. Or would we could wait patiently through the winter for another baseball season to begin, and see if we aren’t disappointed.

The ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing… And is this Jesus the One who is to come, or shall we wait for another?

Come. And see!

Preached by Sean Mullen
16 December 2007
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street

When I gather up the nerve to cross Spring Garden Street to the north, I don’t regret it. (Lay aside the fact that Cafe Lift is just a couple of blocks east along Spring Garden, and that next to the restaurant there is, unrelatedly, a live poultry market. Yes, you read that correctly.). Back on 13th, once I get to Ridge Ave, it angles me over to Broad Street, taking me past Aldi to the Divine Lorraine, which I once imagined to be in the hinterlands. I now know it to be the place to go for excellent Neapolitan pizza at Sorellina, and I have yet to make it to the more refined Cicala in the same building, but I’ll get there. I could cross the street to get to Osteria, which I remember being fabulous when Marc Vetri was still involved there. I hear it is still pretty good. Heading down Broad Street with a marvelous view of City Hall, I might hear the hour chiming from what I think are restored bells in the old Philadelphia Inquirer building, which now houses police and municipal offices. And before I get back to 13th Street, I notice Honeysuckle, a very handsome looking Afro-centric restaurant whose prix fixe menu looks enticing!

On my own street again, I walk past the Prohibition Tap Room, which is less than a block from my building, and is close to perfect as a neighborhood joint. As I walk past the front door of 428 I am about to walk under the railway overpass that is part of Noble Street, and the beginning of the Rail Park. A neighbor in my building is working to keep the elevated section of Noble Street closed, as it has been for several years, and as a natural extension of and entrance to the park. I hope this effort is successful, as it is a terrific boon for our building! Another boon to the building will be the opening of a cafe (rumored to be Georgian) that will open in the space where Cafe Lift was originally located.

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The Vine Street expressway is the barrier I am on the wrong side of, and the reason I could afford so spacious an apartment so close to Center City. I have forded streams that required more (but not much more) effort to cross. On the other side, both sushi and dim sum readily available to me without leaving the street, but if I wander a few blocks down Race Street I will be in the center of Chinatown, which is a lot busier than I realized! Before you know it, I have walked beneath/past/through the Convention Center, and quickly notice Trader Joe’s to the west at Arch Street, and Reading Terminal Market to the east.

The Wanamaker Building is about a twelve minute walk from my front door, and so is, across the street from it, the Church of St. John the Evangelist, a Franciscan parish run by Capuchin friars, where I have gone to worship on Sundays since moving here. I have also tried the nearest Quaker meeting at the Friends Center. I find that receiving communion really matters to me. And I am happy to report that at St. John’s both the bread and the wine - the Body and Blood of Christ - are available to the people every Sunday. This morning’s Mass, which was the first Mass of a newly ordained priest, ended with the congregation joining in singing “How Great Thou Art.” The piano accompanist, who seems always to wear a hat, is probably too young to remember Liberace, but she knows where all 88 keys are, and she knows how to use ‘em! There is usually a healthy-sized congregation here, and this Sunday the church was especially full, including a lot of people who were clearly in town for the World Cup match between Ecuador and Ivory Coast today.

South of Market Street, 13th St. becomes a busy corridor of restaurants as you head toward the heart of the Gayborhood. The other day, I stopped in at the Little Gay Pub for a Negroni, even though gay bars are not really my milieu. I thought I should try. Eh. I’ve been around more than long enough to miss long-gone spots from. this street like the excellent Jamonera. But this little stretch still owes much to the wonderful couple Marcie Turner and Valerie Safran, who have established so many great places, especially one of the most reliably good places in town, Barbuzzo, which is where I learned about the benefit of massaging kale (What makes this kale salad (with roasted beets, goat cheese, and pistachio pesto) so good?!?”). I also remember when a place called Trust occupied the spot that has since been El Vez for many years. Trust was run by the superb Matt and Sonjia Spector, who moved from there to open Matyson on 19th St, which has been unsurpassed as a BYO in Center City. I still remember Sonia’s delectable coconut cream pie, and I remember being thrilled any time there were sweetbreads on the menu, because Matt just had a way with them.

The BYO that bested Matyson - and everything else - was Bibou, in South Philly, which has been closed for years now. But the chef-owner, Pierre Calmels, is now the chef at the Philadelphia Club, located at the corner of 13th and Walnut Streets. I have been a member there for nearly twenty years, and Pierre is the best thing to happen to the place by far in that time. That I count him and his wife Charlotte as good friends is a blessing, and I look forward to having them to dinner some time this summer, as I usually do in the summer time when the club is closed, and I assume that no one ever invites them over for dinner. I always tell Pierre that I am not trying to impress him: I lie. (I used to sometimes reflect on the difference between a church and a club. When, two years ago, the church initiated the process of my expulsion, I offered my resignation to the Philadelphia Club, but the board declined my offer. I still reflect on the difference between a church and a club, but the nature of my reflection has changed.)

Just a few blocks past the Philadelphia Club I’d turn left on Pine Street to walk a single block to get to the home of dear friends who have been marvelously kind and supportive of me during trying times, and who’s home has been a haven to me.

This journey down 13th Street of a mile and half covers a lot. I have left out a lot too, since I would have had to stray again to take you to the Trestle Inn, or to PAFA, or to Congregation Rodeph Shalom, or to the Philadelphia Ballet - all steps away from me. I have come to realize that the one thing I did in my life to prepare for this difficult period of transition was to walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela on various routes, various times. Doing so taught me a lesson I realized years ago: that my greatest ambition is to be a pilgrim, and that learning to be a pilgrim is all I need to do to be in right relationship with God and with my neighbors. And I decided that by my definition, a pilgrim is someone who knows that God has someplace for them to go. You could add dimension to that definition, but it is not necessary. I am still processing loss and sadness. But I learned long ago on the Camino that the pilgrim’s basic daily decision is whether or not to get up and keep walking on the way. You don’t have to; you could quit and go a different way; you could give up on the idea of pilgrimage or of God; you could lose faith in yourself, or God, or your neighbors. And you could convince yourself that it’s you that keeps you going, when actually, it’s God who keeps you going. What a wonderful gift I have been given to find a little way to walk on 13th Street - a caminito; a little road that leads me to so many places that I seem to wish to go.

It has been a project of a different kind of alchemy to try to turn those byproducts - fear and shame - into something better. And so we settled on pride. It’s a far better outcome to the discovery that your desire leads not to perversion, but to love.

The pride part of Pride Month does not come easily or naturally to me, but I have been working on it. Love does come easily to me, and yet the kind of love that hits you like a rocket and then burns slowly in your gut (in a good way) has been rare in my life. Still I’m glad I’ve known it once or twice.

Desire turns to love. Fear and shame turn to pride. It’s all about transformation; I suppose (I hope) there’s more in store for me. For Pride Month then, this year, a love poem.

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Among the stars is love begat, as we 
from stardust came to be.  Does that account 
for all that's unaccountable where love's 
concerned?  If love is in the stars, then why
could I not fall in love with shooting star,
or some betwinkling light found by the hour?
Instead, my loves have orbited the heavens
in periods counted by the century.
So love has been a comet: rare, intense,
and sparkling bright, (the emphasis on rare).
And me, left breathless as it zooms through space;
its flashy tail a banner, speaking love
to me.  It's made of ice but seems to burn;
I wonder if it ever will return.

SEM 
10 June 2026

When I moved into my condo last month, I was, for a while, overwhelmed by the boxes. Nearly 40 boxes of books were lined up against one wall. Every one of those books had lived in a built-in bookcase spread out over three floors in their previous home. I don’t own any bookcases. The mound of book boxes quickly became oppressive to me. (There was a mound of kitchen boxes nearby, too.) I am not ready to get rid of all my books, but I had no idea what to do with them. Fortunately my condo has an unusually large storage space under the elevated bedroom area; every one of those boxes of books (and quite a flew other things) now live out of sight in that storage space. Maybe I will deal with them some day soon, maybe not. The books can wait for another day.

But the fact of the matter is that I have too many things. Not only too many books. I have too many glasses, too many chairs, too many framed pictures. I am finding space for some of these things, but not all. I have made three drop-offs already at the Bargain Thrift Center in Germantown, next to Grumblethorpe. I have a pile of things destined for a young person I know who is moving into his own place. I may have a saddle or two to give to the Work to Ride program.

Still I have too many things. I remember my mother once shared a letter she’d received from an old neighbor who was moving after many years in the same house and could not comprehend how or why she had amassed so many cookie sheets. But her letter went on to reflect on how an over-supply of cookie sheets can provide a pretty wonderful reflection on your involvement in the lives of your children and their friends, who were the most likely beneficiaries of whatever was baked on those cookie sheets.

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I just found that I have a small plastic bucket full of old dog leashes and collars - mostly red and blue. Each of my Labradors has been assigned a color at the time I adopted them, and that is the color of collar and leash that I use for them for their entire lives. Baxter was red. Ozzie was blue. In a separate box I found their ashes. I know why I can’t get rid of their ashes, but why is it just as hard for me to dispose of their old leashes. That small bucket is now in the storage space too.

I could go on. As a priest I was in the remembering business, so to speak. I find the clergy these days are largely uncertain about what business they are in. But the sacramental life of the church demands that someone be in the remembering business - in the most complex and multivalent sense of the word. Just the other day I was called on to share reflections about the early days of the founding of St. James School, and I found myself able to speak urgently with faith and conviction and hope about those days. I told a friend afterward that I heard in my own voice the other day someone who sounded like “the old me.” This observation is, itself, a sign of re-membering. It is the work the church is supposed to be in. I could editorialize here, but it would be self-serving.

I don’t want to be controlled by things in my life; I want the relationships in my life to define the terms of my life, not the things. It’s a dangerous business to be a rememberer because it’s so easy to attach meaning to things, and this tendency can get out of hand (see: leashes, bucket full). Some of the things I could cast aside at this stage of life are reminders of loss, but I am reluctant to let go of them lest I do so in bitterness rather than gratitude. So I think I will not let myself throw much away out of bitterness.

I could have told you at any point since their deaths where the ashes of Baxter and Ozzie could be found - except for these past two years. It surprised me to come across them in a box I was unpacking. My dogs have been a profound source of comfort to me over the years, and I have nothing but gratitude for their place in my life. I will take it as a sign of God’s goodness and mercy and grace that I now know again where those ashes are located. I remember, and I am re-membering. Thanks be to God.

I was thinking of a minyan a week ago Sunday after a group of ten friends came to paint the condo I have just had the good fortune to move into in the Callowhill Industrial Historic District of Philadelphia, in a former hat factory. My place has 13-foot-high ceilings, and, by my calculation, about 1950 square feet of walls that needed to be painted. When the first of my friends to arrive that morning showed up, I confided that I was worried that I’d made a big mistake, and that we’d never get the place painted. Secretly, I feared I’d end up having to hire painters to finish a partially completed paint job. I had only one ladder tall enough to reach the high places, and one section of wall (behind the A/C duct) that I suspected we could not reach. I had no idea who exactly would show up. I wasn’t counting on a minyan.

As the day progressed, and the two Labradors managed not to track paint across the maple floors, it became clear that my anxieties were ill-founded. Long before the sun set, a first coat had been applied to almost every wall, and every single one of the edges had been cut-in. I was flabbergasted and overcome with gratitude for my friends, who had accomplished for me (with me) what I could never have accomplished on my own, and had doubted we could accomplish at all.

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My purchase of and move into this condo is, in fact, a testament to the value of relying on help. I would not be making this move without the encouragement of my sister, and could not have done it without the help of her and her husband, my parents, and the family in Philadelphia who have provided me with love and care and support over these past two-plus years as if I were their own kin. If my gratitude has any bounds, I don’t know how to describe them. I do know that I had been reluctant to accept help, when I was making my forced exit from the bosom of the church, thinking I should rely on my own fortitude, resourcefulness, and grit. How glad I am that I learned to do otherwise!

On reflection, the painting party I held on Sunday took on some characteristics of an act of worship - and maybe even sacrament, as it provided for me an outward and visible sign of remarkable gifts of grace being shared with me by people from various regions of my life. As such, it seems to me as though it was an occasion of worship, and those ten men comprised a minyan bearing brushes and rollers dipped in paint.

At the age of 58, I am a homeowner for the first time in my life, and it seems to me like an incomparable blessing to begin my time in this home with a minyan who showed me a substantial measure of God’s goodness.

President Obama was asked by historian Jon Meacham about where he found encouragement and inspiration when he has been feeling discouraged during his presidency. Obama mentioned that he would wander into the Lincoln Bedroom where a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address can be found. The former president mentioned that Lincoln had good penmanship, and the framed copy in the White House is not difficult to read. I wish I could check a transcript of what Obama said during his musings on this momentous document. But the note I wrote to myself, which was not an accurate quotation, but pretty close, is that he said this, or something very like it: “Unshackling those chains [of slavery] also freed the people who had put them on.” I shivered with the urgent poignancy of this observation, which implies, importantly during this 250th anniversary year of independence, that we can all be free.

Obama’s insight is rooted, I suspect in a deeply imbued religious sensibility that sometimes escapes him in flashes - like the extraordinary moment when he sang Amazing Grace at the funeral of Clementa Pinckney. It is a wisdom related to the one that was passed on to me by a monk who taught about reconciliation between enemies. When someone inflicts violence and suffering on a victim the perpetrator and the victim are bound to one another by chains that are locked fast; and the only thing that can unlock the chains that bind the victim to the oppressor and oppressor to victim is forgiveness. This is a deeply important insight for our nation, which has not yet managed to unlock all the chains that bind historical oppressor and oppressed, and has resulted in a fettered legacy that leads too many to despair, and squelches hope.

But Obama is accustomed to speaking in the vernacular of hope - we learned that about him a long time ago. It’s a lingo that is more likely to be picked up in church than anywhere else. And I have to tell you that it made my flesh tingle to hear a president speak authentically in the vernacular of hope again. “Unshackling those chains also freed the people who had put them on -” and that’s a good thing. We chain ourselves to one another in hatred and despair when we inflict violence on one another. And the only way we can unlock those chains is by the power of forgiveness.

We have lived in a world in which this lesson was already sorely needed. We can now see that we will require even deeper stores of forgiveness than we knew. But since grace is both free and also inexhaustible, there is sufficient forgiveness to be found, when we reach for it.

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Somewhat incongruously, another interviewee at the event was Nicole Kidman, whom I found entirely charming. Can you blame me? She talked about motherhood and daughterhood, and about work, and a few other things. And toward the end of her short session she told us all that she insisted that she give her children a two minute hug every day, and that she thinks everyone should get two minutes of hug every day from someone they love. I suspect this prescription is entirely idiosyncratic and unfounded in science or medicine, and I think it’s wonderful advice.

Forgiveness and hugs. We live in a society in which people sometimes call themselves “content creators;” I think we need more people creating that kind of content! And we need more and more reminders that we can all be free!

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It seems the man went for a walk near the woods during the recent fine weather we’ve had, and he heard the peeping of spring frogs. It’s been hard and cold winter this year, so the sound of the frogs announcing spring was especially welcome in his ears. He said with plain frankness that the noise of the frogs sounded to him like a choir of angels.

He pointed out that the weather forecasts call for warm weather over the next few days and nights. So, he said, if you happen to live near the woods, and you open your window, you might hear the spring frogs too.

Amen to that.

Eventually, most of us find ourselves in dire straits, one way or another: challenging conditions that threaten to leave us undone. Sometimes it is the will and force of an opposing power that has led us to such dire straits, sometimes it is the result of our own actions; it could be both. We find ourselves in dire straits, and it’s surprising how quickly everything falls apart.

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Generation after generation of humans in dire straits have been shaped in faith by the story of God - who is above and beyond the constriction of dire straits, unbound by any limit of strength or wisdom, or of space or time, or even by the trouble of a body, and who could navigate any obstacle without difficulty or effort - deciding of his own divine will to be straitened, just like any one of us, by sending his Son to be born like one of us, to live like one of us, and to die like one of us. The one, true, and living God - un-straitened for all eternity - allowed himself to be straitened in time and space for the singular purpose of epitomizing love as an act of self-giving.

At Easter we are shown what it looks like for God to un-straiten himself, having chosen to be straitlaced for a while. And we are promised that, just as God shared our straitlaced life for a while, at the end of our straitened lives, we will share something of his un-straitened life, too.

God-in-Christ has navigated the narrowest and most perilous of dire straits, including failure, humiliation, and death, sparing himself nothing; and in the power of resurrection, God (who could choose to straiten himself) now un-straitens himself, and bids us to believe that we shall be un-straitened too.

And the thing is that life will always present us with dire straits; God knows this. And God wants us to know that we will not meet our end in dire straits, even if we should founder on the rocks and perish there. The promise that we will be un-straitened is what we call hope. And we tell the story of God’s un-straitening because we know that the danger, and the anxiety and the fear of all the dire straits through which we must pass are real. Just as Christ’s betrayal, and arrest, and beating, and humiliation, and bloodshed, and death are real. God gives us a promise of un-straitening because the narratives of dire straits are frequent and near at hand. We need to be reminded.

Easter is God’s un-straitening, and it is the promise that un-straitening awaits us too, even if we are in dire straits just now. Such is the hope that has been planted in my heart and will not die.

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Love is susceptible to loss… and to betrayal. Even without cruelty, love can vaporize and dissipate into the air, and you are left wondering what happened to it. This isn’t the place to catalogue all the ways that love yields to loss, but it’s important that we accept both love’s fortitude and its fragility. And yes, it’s deliberately ironic that the hinge between love and loss on Maundy Thursday - the act of betrayal - is a kiss: love’s registered trademark.

So Maundy Thursday might be especially poignant for anyone who knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of betrayal or cruelty; or at least loss; or anyone who has seen love vaporize and dissipate into thin air (like energy, love can not be created or destroyed, I think).

But the story of love yielding to loss that begins tonight does not end here; it leads back to love’s triumph. So here’s the message that begins to emerge as Jesus shows his love to his disciples and tries to shape their love: love is susceptible to loss; love anyway.

Love anyway.

I have seen so much love turned to loss in the past couple of years; and yet I know that my heart is still full of love, and there is only one way to account for that: that love made me for love, for love’s sake. And if love made me for love, for love’s sake, then love made you for love, for love’s sake too.

Cruelty there is in the world, and so much is lost.

Love anyway.

Since December I have been attending a Quaker meeting most Sunday mornings. The idea of “worship” could not be more more different than the elaborate system of worship of which I was curator, practitioner, and beneficiary all my life. It’s a loss. In the meeting we sit in a plain room and attend to the Spirit in silence, until the silence is broken by anyone moved to speak. I prefer the silence to the speaking. There is no singing. I have needed this contrast from my lifetime’s pattern of worship in order to wend my way back into some gathering of God’s people on Sunday mornings - a way I have very much wanted to wend. It’s been good for me, even if it might not be where I land permanently.

The Quakers are advancing a peace-oriented movement, and the desire for peace is very much in the air at the meeting I attend. So that’s good.

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I was not expecting the next sermon on the list of those I am gradually posting to my other substack to have a pertinent word of encouragement, but I find it does. Here is a concise kernel of that sermon:

If there is to be peace in the world, if there is to be hope, if there is to be love – the fruits of God’s gifts - we will have to kindle these gifts of God in our hearts.

And will we become God’s kindling? Will we burn with the desire for peace, for hope, for love? It’s like we are waiting for God to light a fire, and we would be very happy to stand around it and bask in its glow, its warmth, its power.

But the gift of God is already in you and in me. Like accidental survivors we are carrying embers of God’s peace and love and hope, we are carrying the gift, given to us already. God has already lit the fire, when he formed each one of us with his own hand. Who is going to re-kindle the gift if we won’t?!

Well, what am I doing at a Quaker meeting if not trying to re-kindle the gift of God that is in me? I always said that I never preached a sermon that I wasn’t preaching to myself. This assertion seems still to be the case.

At the risk of sharing TMI, I’ll tell you that not long ago my therapist pointed out that for a significant portion of the last two years I was just trying to survive - I could not argue with this assessment. I can share this with you now, because I also agree with her assessment that I am no longer in survival mode. But the observation has left me prepared to hear the conclusion to my own sermon with fresh ears. I’ll save you the trouble of reading the whole thing; here’s the ending:

The instruction to kindle the gift of God that is within you is not a call to action; it is a revelation of our identity. It reminds us that faith is a gift, not a commodity. And it is a way to survive in this world, a way to live without having to spend our lives shivering, huddled in the dark. Re-kindling the gift of God is an injunction to claim power: the power of peace, of hope, and of love that God has given us. It reminds us that God did not give us a spirit of timidity or cowardice – though these days to look at Christians, you couldn’t be too sure.

God gave us a spirit of power and of love and of self-control. You and I are carrying these embers with us – not in a coconut shell or wrapped in a banana leaf. Maybe we don’t know where to find them, maybe we thought they had been lost, gone out, fizzled. Maybe we didn’t realize they would be so important to life on this earth – these embers of God’s gift. Maybe we thought we could survive without them.

And maybe we can. But it seems awfully cold and dark in the world when we try it on our own, without the fire of God.

That fire burns in you and me, waiting to be re-started, stirred up, roused, inflamed, lit up. It is a fire ready to give birth – not to a brood of rabbits or a kindle of kittens – but to the possibilities of peace and hope and love in our lives and in this world.

It is a fire that you and I are carrying somewhere deep inside. It can change your life and mine; it can change the world (it has done it before). But it must be re-kindled.

And when that gift of God is kindled we will discover that up until now we have only just barely been surviving, but with the gift of God burning brightly, we can finally live!

I find that I have needed to be reminded that I can do better than merely to survive, and that God intends me to do better than just to survive - and he intends for you to do better too! So I’m hoping that urging you to re-kindle the gift of God that is in you is as encouraging to you as it is to me!

Herzog explains that within the field of logic there is a solution to this problem, but it doesn’t really interest him. Instead he has Kaspar approach the challenge a different way, to determine whether the traveler comes from a land of truth or a land of lies by means of asking only a single question. “‘I would ask the traveler if he was a tree frog,’ Kaspar says. The wanderer from the village of truth would say no, but the liar would have to say yes, he was a tree frog, because he could only lie.” (Werner Herzog, “The Future of Truth”, Penguin Press, 2024, p 90-91)

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In our own day truth has stumbled badly in the public square, as the scriptures say, so this little story caught my eye. And I have long asserted that the most important question in the Bible is found on the lips of Pontius Pilate, when he asks “What is truth?” And I supposed that my interest in this little thought exercise was to be found in putting myself in Kaspar’s place: the person trying to evaluate whether or not the traveler at the fork in the road came from a position of truth or from a position of lies. I imagined that I must be the person trying to discern the truth. This is a righteous position to be in. And of curse the question seems like such a timely question.

But Kaspar’s predicament nagged at me in a way I couldn’t account for, until I cast myself in a different role in this little scene from a German film - a less righteous position. I started to see myself in the role of the traveler whom Kaspar meets at the fork in the road; the man who has to prove himself, as it were. What is gripping about the encounter is that one road leads to truth and the other road leads to lies; the stakes are high. And the traveler will be the only source of information about which way is which, and so the truthfulness of the traveler matters. The pathology of the person would matter, if he were pathological, as the traveler from the land of lies must be. It is important for Kaspar to know whether the traveler at the fork tells truth or speaks lies.

It is an uncomfortable position to be in - the position of the unknown traveler - knowing that you have only one chance to show where you come from, and therefore, who you are. And if you are a traveler who tells the truth, you care whether Kaspar knows he can trust you; it matters to you what conclusion Kaspar will reach.

And if I were the traveler at the fork in the road, and I knew how much it meant to Kaspar to know whether I tell the truth or lies, but I could provide him with the answer to only one question, I would be troubled about what question he might choose, for many questions might not produce a convincing answer, because Kaspar has no way of evaluating them.

But Kaspar knows the stakes are high for him, too. And Kaspar knows that he has to frame his question carefully, because this is a matter of discernment, and who knows what else might hinge on whether Kaspar can correctly discern which way leads to the truth.

What a relief it is to me, the traveler at the fork in the road, to hear the question Kaspar asks me - call it clever or call it wise - the question that the film-maker supplied Kaspar with at this crucial moment: “Are you a tree frog?”

Because it’s very hard for the truth-telling traveler to prove to Kaspar who he is and where he comes from. But with a little imagination and a little wisdom, Kaspar can discern the answer, even without being a master of logic. Kaspar can simply ask, “Are you a tree frog?”

The liar can only supply an answer that is impossible, absurd, and obviously untrue.

But the truth-teller can smile with a grateful heart for Kaspar’s cleverness and quick thinking, and he can reassure Kaspar when he tells him, “No, I am not a tree frog.”

This is not an answer to the most important question in the scriptures (What is truth?). But I feel it’s a help, all the same. And as a result, Kaspar will not be misguided.

No, I am not a tree frog.

P.S. If you care to have a look, I’ve posted a sermon about humility on my other substack.

But now I can’t tell if all that construction was made of limestone or Lego. And I look at my own inner life: what I believe, how I account for hope and fear and God, and what kind of truth there might have been planted within me, or from which I might have been made. Looking around in here now, I think that maybe my inner life was not built on pillars of stone, but consists rather of an embroidered linen veil, a kind of personalized Bayeux tapestry spelling out the myths (the truths) of my life and the world such as I can know it. And the linen veil was hung up along the walls inside my mind or heart or whatever, kind of between the columns.

Now I find that the linen veil has fallen, crumpled on the floor. It would be overly dramatic to say that the veil had been rent in two. It has merely come off its hooks and slumped onto the floor Here it is on the muddy floor of my soul. Its embroidery is rich: varied colors here and there; white-on-white stitching in some of the holiest places; some crisp red iconography, like good altar linens. There on the floor of my soul the embroidery is still in tact, still beautifully and colorfully stitched. Although it is not where it belongs, and is greatly diminished as a result, I can tell that the veil (there are several panels of it, on all sides of me as I look) could be ironed out and hung up again where I could see it, and contemplate, and maybe even pray, maybe even sing.

There is a place on the linen veil that is, by now, permanently stained by a smudge of ashes in the rough shape of a cross. I went to church today to receive the outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible smudge of ash that marks the linen veil that is my inner life. For years, I have been telling people what that smudge might mean, but now I can’t say for sure. And yet I am glad it is there, certain it has to do with humility, and repentance, which is the reversal of fortunes that comes with turning around and going another way.

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I remember when so much of my energy was spent trying to keep clear a spiritual space for those whose spiritual spaces had been sullied by thoughtlessness or cruelty or stupidity, or all of the above. I was a caretaker, it seemed to me, of a sacramental system that provided outward and visible cues to help people find the inward and invisible signs of grace that were already there in their inner lives. And if the ashes couldn’t help in that process, then what good could they possibly be? But I think they often did; they often do.

But now, I feel as if maybe I am building a new tabernacle for my inner life - or re-constructing one where God’s sacred Presence has been reserved in some secret pocket of my soul when even the Lego arches seemed to be coming apart.

Each of us has an inner life. It’s the conversation that take place within our heads or our hearts in which you or I are the only participants; a conversation with the self that may also include - deliberately or accidentally - room for God, who needs for us to make no extra room inside ourselves; God can always find room. An inner life might be part of a larger spiritual life, in which we deliberately cultivate spiritual resources, and which envelops those interior conversations with focused exterior discussion of matters that affect the spiritual aspects of our lives, which include community, family, worship, hope, and the shadow-sides of these aspects of our lives as well.

My entire spiritual life was built on a structure supplied by the church. It was a beautiful structure centered on a set of sacramental assumptions: that God uses outward and visible signs to convey truth about inner, invisible signs of grace, with the celebration of the Mass at the absolute center: a thrumming, heart-beating articulation of the love of God expressed through the sacrifice of Jesus. Such a construction of spiritual life has shaped the world in significant ways over the last two millennia, giving us works of insight, wisdom, and beauty, as well as some noticeable abuses and failures. It shaped me.

And now, there are more than ashes left. There is the linen veil. And all the embroidered stitches- whatever they say. But, yes, there are the ashes. And the humility. I see the sections of the veil, wrinkled on the floor. They need ironing, cleaning; I suppose they need to be re-hung. But here is a cross-shaped ashen smudge; let me live with this bit for a while.

Bad Bunny’s assertion that the only thing more powerful than hate is love is not a formula to be tested, it is an acclamation of hope, and an assertion that after the darkest night the sun still rises. The message is in line with the Psalmist’s assurance that “tears may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” It’s a proclamation of good news. I’m all in with Bad Bunny on this message.

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Twenty years ago, the historian of religion, Karen Armstrong argued that the Christian church had largely lost her ability to meaningfully proclaim a narrative of hope to the world (maybe through atrophy?). “If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role,” she wrote. (Karen Armstrong, 2006, “A Short History of Myth”). I took her argument as a challenge, and tried my best ever since to provide the kind of narrative that located powerful truth in the story of God’s love for his creation and salvation of the world. But I think she is correct to locate a certain priestly role that has been largely abdicated by the church to those more capable of instilling hope in people’s hearts.

Was anybody expecting a metanarrative of hope and love to come dressed as a mythic narrative amid the sugar cane of Puerto Rico? Can anything good come from Nazareth?

Speaking Spanish, Bad Bunny is informing us about an unexpected myth of American hope that many people have suspected is disappearing. And this is myth in the oldest sense of the concept - a story that is told because it expresses profound truth. That’s precisely the narrative that Bad Bunny was articulating when he held up a football on which were imprinted the words, “Together, we are America” and spiked it in the end zone. The myth that Bad Bunny unfolded for us at the Super Bowl halftime show stands in stark contrast to the dark dreams of world controlled only by raw power that we hear elsewhere in American leadership these days. This American dream begs to differ with these nightmares. I am all in with Bad Bunny.

Although sports provide powerful metaphors, perhaps it should not surprise us that it’s art that really conveys the power of myth. I’m not sure that anyone woke up today thinking the football game last night had taught us anything new about ourselves. But last year it was Kendrick Lamar, and this year it was Bad Bunny. These are two people whose music is generally not the type of. thing that stirs my soul. But, oh, am I grateful for the stories they are telling us about ourselves at moments when everyone is watching. We need to be reminded of these stories because they are true, as is the assurance that the only thing more powerful than hate is love.

For nearly thirty years, I saw my ministry in the church as work that was intended to keep light burning in the face of encroaching darkness, and to advance the mystical narrative of the light that shines in the darkness, but the darkness cannot overcome it. I was grateful that I’d been given gifts to keep the lamps burning (as the old spiritual puts it), during a time in the life of the church when it seemed a lot of lamps were growing dim. Although the church no longer wants any part of me, I still want to advance this gospel narrative; I still feel called to do so. I am hoping that I am becoming a yet more reliable narrator since I have seen and felt and known a more profound impingement of darkness in my own life. (Rejection and exile have well established places in both the Jewish and Christian narratives; I have some good company.)

One of the reasons we seek out stories is to find the ones that resonate with our own experience, but that are different enough to help us see our own lives more clearly. I was surprised recently to find my attention gripped by a discussion of the Frankenstein oeuvre, which has never especially spoken to me before, when I listened to an interview with the maker of the most recent Frankenstein film, Guillermo del Toro.

In this film version it becomes clear that the creature that Frankenstein has made is indestructible, he cannot be killed. But the creature’s invincibility brings him no peace; far from it. Speaking about this aspect of the film, del Toro talked about both life and death in what reads like an astonishing paragraph in the transcript of the interview, in which he also refers to the kidnapping of his father, who was once held for ransom for 72 days.

I'm a groupie for death. I think it's the metronome of our existence. And without rhythm, there is no melody, you know? It is the metronome of death that makes us value the compass of the beautiful music, you know? I'm going to say, this comes - when my father was taken, every day was torment, and I used to see the sun rising and resent it. And I said, the sun doesn't care about my pain. But then eventually, I realized it was my pain that didn't care about the sun and that I needed to change that, that I needed to accept it. I needed to understand that the rhythm of the cosmos is different than that of my little heart, you know? (Guillermo del Toro speaking to Terri Gross on “Fresh Air,” WHYY, 23 Oct 2025)

This is the voice of a man who has felt the eclipse of the light in his life by a threatening shadow; and it’s insightful in the way it places his personal darkness within the context of the cosmic reality of life and death. This is a religious perspective.

More to the point, he speaks to anyone who knows what he means when he says that he resented the rising sun, and thinks to himself, “the sun doesn’t care about my pain.” For this is exactly the kind of thing we tell ourselves when we are feeling sorry for ourselves. The sun rises in all its beauty and all its power, but we cannot feel, or do not notice its warmth and its light.

But… “then eventually I realized it was my pain that didn’t care about the sun.” Here is the crucial observation or discovery: it’s not that the sun has become indifferent to me, but that I have become indifferent to the sun. And I need to change! I realized that it was my pain that didn’t care about the sun.

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At the beginning of this year I had a small epiphany in which it occurred to me that for nearly two years I have been carrying with me a heavy load of sadness that has affected every day, every relationship, every interaction, every outlook of mine. I would not characterize this experience as depression - it has not been sufficiently clinical, if you ask me. The load I have been carrying has simply been one of sadness - which was a generally unfamiliar burden to me - brought on by all the loss, all the darkness I have experienced. And when I thought to myself, “I can’t continue to live like this,” I realized that I was wrong, that actually, I could continue to live while carrying a heavy burden of sadness with me everywhere I went. I needed to come to the realization that I don’t want to live like this. I need to change. I need to put the sadness down, and decide that I don’t want to carry it with me everywhere anymore.

The idea that death is the metronome of our existence is a metaphor that needs its own examination; I won’t try to address it here, but I didn’t want to unravel that remarkable paragraph of del Toro’s, and I think his insight about death is worth paying attention to.

But I want to underscore again his beautiful self-knowledge in recognizing that he could see the sun rising and resent it. In many ways, religion is intended to address this human experience, which we could probably call a tendency to provide the mechanisms of our own eclipses. Religion is meant to facilitate the transformation from suspecting that the sun doesn’t care about my pain to realizing that it’s my pain that doesn’t care about the sun, and then to turn me toward the healing light and the warmth of the sun.

Such is the gospel that I have preached for thirty years. And although I now know firsthand that religion frequently accomplishes, sometimes by design, the precise opposite of that life-giving journey, I have not stopped believing that God is always calling us to see that it’s not that the sun doesn’t care about our pain, it’s that our pain has given up on the sun. “The rhythm of the cosmos is different than that of my little heart, you know?”

It strikes me as profoundly good news to be wrenched from the sad suspicion that the sun doesn’t care about my pain into the hopeful recognition that my pain has not cared about the sun, because it is also a realization that the sun is still shining, and that light really will overcome darkness, because the sun is going to rise in the morning. I believe that this conviction is also a concise statement of the Gospel of Jesus, and I am counting on it being true. Faith remains true even when religion fails.

I was not expecting to find encouragement in the vicinity of Frankenstein’s creature, but there you have it. And I am still working on setting down my sadness; it gets easier when you realize that that’s your task. And I am remembering the promise that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

I revere George Washington and his memory, so it was especially painful during that meeting last week to hear the voices of people who do not hold his memory in such high regard. But I begin to understand why they feel that way. Did I learn when I was growing up that Washington took deliberate and somewhat cynical pains to keep enslaved people trapped in their slavery even while he led an army to fight for the cause of liberty? I don’t think I did. But I could discover some of the details just by visiting none other than Mount Vernon. The website explains:

When the national capital moved to Philadelphia in 1790, Washington realized that the eight enslaved workers in his presidential household might take advantage of Pennsylvania’s emancipation law, which allowed the slaves of visitors to claim their freedom after six months’ residence in the state….

To evade the statute, Washington sent the enslaved cook, waiters, and maids out of state every six months, instructing his secretary to move the slaves “in a way that will deceive both them and the public.” (www.mountvernon.org)

Last week was not the first time I have heard the lament in America that Black history is being erased; Black stories are being suppressed; Black narrative is being willfully forgotten, but it proved to be a particularly poignant expression of the lament that I was able to hear in a way I have not, heretofore. With that lament ringing in my ears and reverberating in my heart, I still revere George Washington for his many extraordinary gifts as a statesman and a man of significant but imperfect wisdom. Washington is not the only historical figure I know of who was possessed of notable but imperfect wisdom.

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History can teach us some very important lessons, if we are interested in learning them. History can teach us important lessons about freedom and about liberty - all the more so if we allow ourselves to pay attention to the narratives of slavery, even the narratives that cast George Washington in an unflattering light. Here’s what I thought I learned in that room last week, listening to people express their anger that their history is being systematically erased from the official American cultural record; real liberty turns out to be so much bigger than you think it is, bigger even than George Washington thought it was. Liberty turns out to be so much more powerful than even its most capable advocates expect.

This possibility was always part of the genius of the democratic experiment of America. Who knew where the unintended consequences of liberty would lead?! Great risk has the potential to yield great reward - and this is what happened with American liberty: it led the people of this nation to astonishing accomplishments and it led the community of the citizenry of this nation into an astounding and complex fellowship.

Liberty is not a zero sum game: my liberty need not come at the expense of yours. But this lesson has been a hard one to learn, and too often we Americans have betrayed our own promise and our own heritage of liberty as though it was a limited natural resource. We need to tell the stories of Black people and of Native Americans precisely because we have shown how woefully we can misuse the power that came with liberty - and how perversely we’ve denied that same gift to others. Writing about the slaves he brought to Pennsylvania, George Washington himself said that “...the idea of freedom might be too great a temptation for them to resist.” (GW to Tobias Lear, 12 April 1791). He was righter than he knew.

I keep reminding myself to focus on encouragement not commentary. The urge to comment on what is happening in this nation right now is sometimes very strong. We are on a dangerous path. The push to erase essential parts of our national memory is a clear indication of how dangerous that path is, and how serious are those who are steering us there. And I know personally the power of false narratives, especially when those narratives get built on kernels of facts that can be reoriented to serve the purposes of perverting the truth. But there are plenty of commentators out there, and not enough encouragement.

George Washington’s success for the cause of liberty was greater than his own hopes for it. The thing he fought for was bigger than he imagined - and that makes him no failure. There is tremendous value in learning, centuries later, that the gift Washington and others fought for turned out to be more expansive than he could have dreamed. As if to prove the point, one of his slaves [sic], Ona Judge, fled to freedom on 21 May 1796 as the Washingtons were preparing for a trip from Philadelphia back to Virginia. The liberty Washington fought for was bigger than he knew.

Liberty is more expansive than we imagine, too. And the reason the War for Independence became inevitable, I suppose, was that once the colonists began to dream of liberty, they began to understand that such a thing as liberty could never be achieved until power was wrested from the hands of a single man and placed into the hands of what our founding documents simply refer to as “the people.” Or, to put it differently, the revolutionary dreamers began to locate power in the will of the people rather than in the divine right, or even the constitutional right, of a king. They found power where they believed it truly lay, and they began to exercise it. History can teach us some very important lessons, if we are interested in learning them.

Also, I am still very much working through my own issues, which I do, in part, through writing in this space without trying to trouble you too much, and make sure that there’s still something in it for you. I want somehow to tell you about the power of false narratives, the ease with which they are told, and the near-impossibility of correcting them. But I seem to have a slight allergy to trying to justify myself in the narrative that has played out in my life over the last two years, which is full of falsities.

It’s rewarding though, to look back at work that is almost twenty years old, and find that it seems to have held up over time. In updating the archive of my sermons at Pilgrim Feet, I came across this sermon, which I’ll share with you now. The Rory Stewart references had a more immediate urgency when we were deep in military conflict in Afghanistan, but they still make sense to me. And my skin still crawls when I hear people talk about the “homeland,” a term I assume makes Woody Guthrie spin in his grave. I am mindful that we are just beginning the celebration of the 250th anniversary of independence in this nation - I think there’s a lot to celebrate, and I hope many subsequent generations will feel the same way.

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Homeland Security

“People who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore, God… has prepared a city for them.” (Heb. 11:15-16)


Almost six years ago a word entered common usage that had not previously been part of our everyday lexicon: we began speaking in America about the “homeland.” Before the terrorist attacks of 9-11 I think we would have been more prosaic, referring perhaps to things that happen “on US soil.” But from our national tragedy there sprung up (I guess) a need to define our space with an idea rather than an area: a home land; the home land. And, of course, the need for homeland security.

I have never been comfortable with this new-ish word, or with how quickly it became a part of our regular usage. I love this country, and I have seen a lot of it – from sea to shining sea – knowing something of its breadth and magnificence makes it all the more absurd to think of it as my homeland or yours. We are an extraordinarily blessed nation in all the beauty and resources that have been entrusted to us. But I have difficulty thinking about the vast region of this continent as a homeland. What could that mean?

For a long time I suspected that my dis-ease with the word “homeland” was basically political. It just sounds too right-wing to me, too paternalistic, too politically charged, too ready to be invoked as a cry to arms, too good a reason to want to stand up and declare yourself proud to be an American, too reminiscent of the dangerous nationalism of another time and place.

But now I realize that there is something in the word that I respond to as a Christian – something about the term that wants to appeal to a deeper longing in my heart. There is something about the idea of the homeland that seems to require a religious zeal – just as it requires protection at all costs and a federal Department to look after that protection.

And I hope I do not sound unpatriotic when I say that my heart resists the tugging of the strings of the homeland. My ears find the tones of its anthems (sung by security guards at airport x-ray machines) hollow and even annoying. I have a home in this land, and I pray that I will for as long as I live. But can this ever be the homeland for me or for you?

Somewhere in the heart of the Christian there is meant to be a journey; somewhere deeply rooted in our lives there is a sojourn through wilderness. Our story is a story of wanderings and wanderers who responded time and time again to the call from God to “Go” somewhere – often without knowing where. Our hope has been in a promise declared to generations. But long ago we stopped connecting that promise to a patch of land.

Instead, we have heard in God’s insistent call to go from here to there the rudiments of our faith. What is Christian faith if not the conviction that God has someplace for us to go and that he will lead us there no matter how unlikely it seems?

Faith has gotten a bad name these days. If you do something “by faith” you are a fool because you are doing it not only against all odds, but against reason. We are said to take “on faith” truths that no reasonable person would subscribe to and that science has disproved – like a literal biblical explanation for the creation of the universe. To be a person of faith is a sign of a weak intellect and quite possibly a mental deficiency. Faith is pre-scientific, pre-historic, and mostly the domain of previous generations.

But these are caricatures of faith: cartoon versions of a silly kind of faith that sounds like willful ignorance. Faith is actually something altogether different. It is the thread that has tied generation after generation of wanderers together, leading in a single, specific, and puposeful direction.

The writer of the biblical letter to the Hebrews sees it connecting the first children – Cain and Abel – to Noah and his clan in the ark. Then on to Abraham, the father of faith and to Sarah his once childless wife. The thread was not broken, as it seemed it might be, when Abraham led his son Isaac up to the mountain. From Isaac it passed to Jacob then to Joseph and into Egypt. In faith Moses took up the thread to lead Israel out of Egypt and across the red Sea and from there the story goes on: wandering, wandering through desert lands, clinging to a promise.

This is what faith looks like: you pack your bags and you get up and go somewhere. Faith is a journey of promise. And long ago we stopped connecting that promise to a patch of land.

Which brings me back to the homeland.

Because for now, it is clear that Christians have no homeland in this world. Our wanderings to a promised land ceased long ago to be connected to real estate and we fixed our hopes (when Jesus taught us) on the kingdom of heaven, where the true Christian homeland lies.

If we are, in the words of the writer of Hebrews, “thinking of that land from which [we] had gone out, [we]… have opportunity to return.” But maybe the awful fate of Lot’s wife (remember her), who was turned to a pillar of salt when she looked back toward Sodom, was meant as a sign after all: a warning against the desire to turn back. After all, Jesus tells his disciples that whoever puts his hand to the plow and then turns back is not fit for the kingdom.

And that is the challenge of faith in our own day and age, as it has ever been: to fix our hopes on citizenship in heaven, to desire a better country: one of God’s design.

The proof of our faith will never be found in the map of a homeland that stretches from Atlantic to Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. And in fact, when we adopt the idea of this kind of homeland in our hearts, we are, in a sense, looking back. We are crowding out the space that God has meant for faith to fill with a yearning for his promises. And we have been warned of the danger of looking back.

Here in this land, it might be that God asks us to express our faith not by constructing and alternative homeland, but by building small models of that better country that we believe he has prepared for us. This is why it is an act of faith to struggle for justice and to work for peace, to reach out to another in need, to visit the shut-in or the imprisoned, or to help out a child in need. These are little expeditions in faith when we journey beyond our present reality to live for a moment or two in the kind of country we imagine God has prepared for us.

In an excellent book the Scottish writer, Rory Stewart chronicles his own expedition: a walk across Afghanistan, just weeks after the American-led invasion and the fall of the Taliban. Afghanistan is a country that seems to constitutionally resist nationhood. There are many homelands in Afghanistan, but it is nobody’s homeland.

Stewart writes of a conversation he has as he asks for directions from and old Afghan who has probably never traveled more than a few kilometers from his own village.

“’Forget the road,’ he said, ‘because you don’t want to go [that way] at all… it will add two days to your journey at least.’

‘Have you walked this route,’ [Stewart] asked.

‘Not all of it, but I was told about it by my father.’

… ‘Can you give me the names of the big men in that valley?’” Stewart asks.

And the man and his friends begin to recite the names of men they have heard of in towns they have never been to and never will go, but which provide a useful map of village after village, that will save two days of walking.

“Mir Ali Hussein Beg is the greatest man in the Sar Jungal valley…. He is three days beyond Dualatyar. In a day you could get to Mukhtar, the place of Mizra Beg, and then to Charasiab, home of Abdul Rezak Khan…. Then Mir Ali Hussein Beg at Katlish…. Then Ghulam Haider Khan at Shahi Murri, …one day and then you are at Yakawlang.”

Stewart calls this kind of a map a song-of-the-places-in-between. It is precisely the same kind of map that the writer to the Hebrews is using when he traces the thread of faith from Cain and Abel to Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, to Moses, and then to Gideon and Samuel and David and the prophets and countless others who carried the thread of faith forward.

And it is the kind of map that is not much in use in these days of global positioning systems, and Homeland Security, and Google maps that can show you a satellite photo of almost anywhere you care to look and even let you zoom in.

The map of the places-in-between is an assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things unseen. And it can never outline the contours of a homeland.

And you and I, my brothers and sisters, have been given such a map in the story of our faith. Which means that we have been called by God to live, as our forebears did, in the places-in-between. God calls us, day after day to go out on expeditions of faith building models of that better country that he has promised us and looking for the dawning of the day when the kingdom shall be established in full-scale.

And God has given us a map that includes such points of interest as the place where Sarah laughed, and the spot where Abraham almost did in Isaac, the hard-to-see pillar of salt that once was Lot’s wife. But there are countless other markers on the map of the places-in-between: crazy Francis stripping down to his birthday suit, Patrick preaching about shamrocks, monks and kings and princesses and paupers; there is the dream of a preacher in Alabama, and the way my grandmother prayed her rosary. All of these full of meaning and direction on the map of places-in-between.

This is the map of our faith. Forget the road, because you don’t want to go that way at all, who knows how many days it will add to your journey.

And if you are thinking of that land from which we have been sent out – if you are thinking of the homeland, as though you should stand up and be proud about it – there is always the opportunity to return. But how will you ever know what you have missed? How will you ever know about those things that you have hoped for and about all the promises of God that are things yet unseen?

And how will we ever discover that better country, where God has prepared for us a city if we have fooled ourselves that the homeland is right here where we already are?

Preached by Sean Mullen
12 August 2007
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street