When Love Shows Up: Weekly Reflections about God's Presence

"So are

there other Republicans at the church?" he asked me. And I laughed.

I laughed

because it was a great question, asked directly, and without a hint of irony or

cynicism. My breakfast companion was sitting across from me at a local diner

when he asked this question. He is getting to know Church of the Redeemer, but he's

been an Episcopalian for his whole life - maybe longer. And as a Republican, he

knows the drill. There are, for the record, plenty of Republicans at Redeemer,

and in the Episcopal Church. 39% of Episcopalians, to be precise, identify as

Republican. Not a small number. But compared to, say evangelical Christians,

56% of which identify as Republican, Episcopal culture simply feels a little

more politically liberal. Plus, Cincinnati is a Democratic leaning city in a

Republican leaning state. So that skews our congregation's numbers a bit as

well.

I laughed

because, it was a lovely, vulnerable question. We live in such a heated and

politically divided time. And I won't even bemoan that. I think it makes sense

that things are heated and divided. I don't like it. But I think I get it. To

many people - myself included - it feels as if the soul of our country is currently

on the line, and how we navigate these next few years will be profoundly

decisive. At the same time, we are getting more and more accustomed to living

in self-selected bubbles based on common interest or affinity. So if he's

getting to know Redeemer, he wants to know if it's a bubble. And that is a

vulnerable question, because he's sitting there over his eggs benedict asking,

"Is there a place for me?" It takes courage to wonder that aloud, and it filled

my heart with love.

I laughed, because,

and I told him this immediately, not two minutes earlier, another Republican parishioner

had just texted me to congratulate me on my 8th anniversary of

ministry at Redeemer. "See?" I joked, "Republicans!"

Last week I insisted that, as a Christian who is American, I must understand myself as Christian first - that my Christian identity supersedes my Americanness. There are, of course, problems with this assertion.

The first problem might just be that it makes me sound like a radical. We are currently in a time when a sizable portion of American leaders are working to remake American culture in a way that devalues and endangers women, minorities, LGBTQ+ persons, and immigrants - and they're doing it in Jesus' name. Many of these leaders argue that this is a Christian nation, that it was founded on Christian ideals, and by Christian men. None of those things are actually true, but they have been repeated so regularly that they seem to have seeped into our collective consciousness as being self-evident.

Nevertheless, in Jesus' name, many Americans are seeking to force their understanding of Christian living on others. I believe this actively goes against who Jesus is and what he teaches. Every time Jesus gets angry in the stories we have of him, it's because he's witnessing leaders misuse their religious authority to harm others. Jesus is not a theocrat.

Some people believe that commandment about taking the Lord's name in vain means you shouldn't say "Oh my God" or exclaim "Jesus Christ." But the real blasphemy is harming others in Jesus' name, using God as the buttress upon which you reinforce your own political power and social standing.

I remember putting that flag up and thinking, "I'm home."

America was something about which I was religious. I wouldn't have said that at the time. I would not have acknowledged that. But I could not only not fathom being anything other than American - I could not imagine that any other country could be as good as mine. To love my country was not just about affection or allegiance. To love America was to consciously believe that it was the greatest country on earth, that there had never been a country and never would be a country as powerful as smart, as resourceful, as successful, as free - as Good as the USA. To love my country meant to know what was wrong with other countries. To love my country was to feel sorry for people who weren't American, who didn't know what it was like to be so free, to be so successful, to save the world so many times.

The line between patriotism and nationalism is sometimes razor thin, isn't it?

What does it look like to value our children?

How do we care for them? What is our responsibility to our children?

I have been thinking about this a lot. And I want to say this very clearly: I don't just mean my responsibility for the children I call mine. I also do not mean our responsibility to children because of what they will mean in the future when they are grown up. I mean our shared responsibility for the children among us right now. What is their value? What is their place in our community? And what is our responsibility to them? All of them, by the way. All of them.

I am a parent. I have three children, and I confess that much of my wondering about this has been based on my experience of raising them. More specifically, I am raising them in public schools in Cincinnati. And of course, that pushes me to think regularly about our city's commitment to children. In the aftermath of yet another school shooting, I wonder if we value their safety, their very lives.

And I confess, I wonder if my children were not in public schools, would I care so much? And if I didn't have children at all, would I care the way I care now?

Jesus didn't have children. Jesus didn't have a wife.

Aside from spilling beer down someone's back or getting an order wrong, when waiters screw up is when we forget our role: We can think it's our job to please everyone. We can think we are supposed to be the diner's best friend, or that people came to the restaurant to see us. Contrarily, we can treat the whole thing as transactional. We can get snippy and short with the kitchen. I would take myself too seriously and get self-righteous. One time the manager pulled me aside and sat me down because I yelled at him and the line cooks, "Well SOMEONE oughta care about the tables, and apparently it won't be any of YOU." That's right: I got put into time out for being too self-righteous.

Waiting tables for the Lord - has similar pitfalls. What I noticed when I went on sabbatical was just how much I was carrying. And some of that is just part of the job - there's a lot of emotional labor in the facilitating of relationships. But some of what I was carrying was because I was forgetting my role. Thinking I was supposed to please everyone, or that I was supposed to be everyone's best friend, or that I was the star of the show. I can treat my role as transactional too - not in the sense of trying to get you to tip me - but in the sense that I can think that I have to earn your approval by doing enough things just right. And in both the restaurant and the church I can get too serious and self-righteous.

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Sometimes I hear people say that they don't take their children to church because they don't want to indoctrinate them. They want their children to make up their own minds about religion when they get older. So I think this is the place for me to say that I want to indoctrinate my children. I believe indoctrination is normal and good, and I am done pretending otherwise.

I believe in indoctrinating my children. And I'm going to take it a step further and say that whether or not you even have children, you believe in indoctrinating children too.

If you insist that children go to school, you are indoctrinating them into the idea that education is important. If you insist they try hard, you are indoctrinating them into the idea that effort matters. If you ever stop a child from hitting someone and say something like, "We don't hit," that's indoctrination. Can you imagine a parent saying that a child should decide for themselves whether or not they want to learn?

So when we make our kids go to church, that is indoctrination. And when we stay home, that is also indoctrination.

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Did you know that our bones are constantly breaking themselves down and building themselves back up again? You probably did know that. Most of you are better at knowing scientific things than me - it's not my strong suit. But I learned this about bones as an adult and it really blew me away. In the simplest terms, you have these things called osteoclasts that are constantly dissolving your old bone tissue. Meanwhile you also have osteoblasts that spend their time building new bone tissue. This is happening inside you constantly. It's a very natural and normal thing - the breaking down and building up.

We all understand bones in terms of the stability and structure they bring to our bodies. So, at first for me it was counterintuitive to hear that part of their healthy process was that they were breaking down all the time. For most of my life, I have associated stability and structure with something like immobility. You want your house built on a strong foundation. And we often find great comfort in the idea of changelessness, of things remaining the same. When life deviates from our expectations, we seek to get back to normal, to something that resembles stasis because that feels safe. As the old hymn proclaims, "Like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved."

But it turns out I'm moving all the time. These little invisible things within my very body are moving, tearing my foundation down and building it back up again all day every day. These strong bones are anything but static and immovable, and my desire to understand that has helped me learn to accept that change is inevitable.

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I've just returned from my sabbatical - a nearly four-month break from work that was facilitated by the amazing people, clergy, and staff of Church of the Redeemer, and graciously funded by the Lilly Foundation - who awarded Church of the Redeemer with a Clergy Renewal Grant which enabled me to travel both by myself and with my family. The primary purpose of this sabbatical was simply to rest, which I'm glad to say happened. When I wasn't just resting, I was going places that connected me to conversion experiences and food - and the places where conversion and food meet.

So, what better place for me to take my family than Italy? It's famous for its food, it's rife with religious sites, and it was the location of my accidental conversion all those years ago. We spent a little less than a month in Italy, traveling all throughout the northern half of the country, and finishing our time there in Cinque Terre - the little patch of land on the hillside I keep talking about. I wanted to walk the trails of Cinque Terre again like I did all those years ago, and I wanted to take my family with me. I knew doing this would inevitably draw comparisons to the first time. How could it not?

And while I was quick to tell anyone listening that I had no expectations of another conversion experience, I could not help but wonder if just maybe I'd be knocked down and picked back up as thoroughly as I once had been.

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To explain this pouch, I should probably first say that some of my father's family were practicing Santeros. You may not be familiar with Santeria, or if you are you may see it as some kind of voodoo, but Santeria quite plainly is an African diasporic religion that arose in Cuba in the 19th century as a mix of traditional West African polytheistic Yoruba religion mixed with our very monotheistic Catholic form of Christianity. It is a form of spiritism, very animistic and to many Christians it's probably heretical, but here we are.

Growing up, my mom and dad enrolled me in catechism in our local Roman Catholic church. I became a very devout practitioner and took pride in my religious conviction. I was not modeling anyone at home since neither my parents nor grandparents attended church regularly.

All the while this "other" religion loomed in the background. My paternal grandfather hosted Santeria gatherings and my father would go, but we were not allowed to attend. To my mother, who could be paradoxically judgmental, all of this was nonsense. It didn't help that it was stigmatically seen by many as a religion of the poor and uneducated. Mom, who had her own rocky relationship with her faith and even more with my father, had no interest in introducing us to any of this. But, like many others, she was respectful of it, just in case...

When they divorced in my 8th year, shell-shock mixed with intrinsic curiosity would set me on a life-long search that would eventually include an education in theology and, of course, what was in that little pouch.

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I wrote in a recent blog post that historically I have been obsessed with numbers as a church leader. Many of us are. We talk about church growth, and we are almost always talking about literally increasing the number of people associated with our community. And I understand that. I can't totally disown it. If we believe that what we're doing matters, that it makes an impact, and that our community can transform people's lives, why would we not want to increase the number of people who experience that?

But this is not the growth we are talking about in baptism. In baptism, we are talking not about numerical growth, but about our maturity, our development, our spiritual growth alongside and towards one another as we see more clearly how to love like God loves. It is totally fine to love baptism because it means new members of our church. But I hope we can see past that as well and recognize that these babies, these nascent humans, these brand-new Christians, are pushing us to grow, to develop, to mature. God put them in our lives on purpose. How will we respond to that? How will we let them shape us? What will we learn from them about Jesus? How will we grow together?

We talk about growth in our Vision Statement. There's a whole bullet point dedicated to it, and we will be focusing on that bullet point throughout this program year. In it we say that we envision a church that is "Growing with people of every age, race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic situation, and political persuasion." We wrote that four years ago, and I will freely admit that when we wrote it, I was thinking about numbers. I was thinking about increasing the number of people that are connected to Church of the Redeemer. But the language we used pushes us beyond that. When we say we want to grow not only in number but in the type and age and experience and perspective of our membership, we are saying we want our understanding of who we are to grow. We are talking about the growth, development, and maturity of how and where we see love.Want to support our podcast?

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