I am an Episcopal priest, liturgical creative, filmmaker, writer, musician, teacher and retreat leader. My itinerant ministry is devoted to religious imagination and holy wonder. My blog is a space where diverse ideas and perspectives - theology and culture, liturgy and spirituality, arts and religion - can meet and converse with one another.
“Where is the song when it’s been sung?” Tom Stoppard in 1974 (Attribution: Chris Ridley).
With the exit of Tom Stoppard, the world has lost a brilliant voice who, as King Charles III put it, “wore his genius lightly.” He was most widely known for his Oscar-winning screenplay, “Shakespeare in Love,” but the news of his death took me back to 1968, when I popped down to New York from seminary in Cambridge to catch the premiere run of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” on Broadway.
The innovative and philosophical play made an indelible impression on my twenty-something self. As in much of his subsequent work, Stoppard’s boundless wit was often tinged with an existential melancholy. His biographer Hermione Lee said of the people in his plays: “History comes at them … They turn up, they don’t know why they’re there, they don’t know whether they can get home again.”
In 2002 I had the immense pleasure of experiencing Stoppard’s dazzling 9-hour trilogy, “The Coast of Utopia,” in a single day at London’s National Theatre.” With its 70 historical characters embodying the intellectual and political ferment of pre-revolutionary Russia, the epic drama explores, as the “Guardian” noted at the time, “the mystery of existence, the anguish of the human heart and the strange fact that it is our apprehension of death that gives joy and intensity to life.”
In the trilogy’s key speech, Alexander Herzen addresses the challenge of accepting our temporal nature: “Because a child grows up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into every moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow—later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced.”
Stoppard was 88. This photo above was taken in July 1974 (the month I turned 30). The pastness of this image repeats Herzen’s questions in its own way.
Police clear demonstrators from a freeway during the right wing occupation of Los Angeles in June 2025.
Survivors of the twentieth century, we are all nostalgic for a time when we were not nostalgic. But there seems to be no way back. — Svetlana Boym
In the Second World War, Paris was spared the physical destruction suffered by so many other cities. It surrendered without a fight to the Germans, some of whom cherished fond memories of living there as students before the war. And the Nazi government, believing itself to be the future of Europe, had no desire to smash such a cultural icon into rubble. It coveted the prestige of the City of Light for itself.
Hitler’s entourage in Paris (June 28, 1940). He was gone the next day, and never saw the city again.
The example of a city physically unchanged while suffering the invasive presence of a hostile power may have something to teach Americans, whose own cities face threats of military occupation by the dictatorial regime in Washington, D.C.. When I read Ronald C. Rosbottom’s riveting study, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944, I could not help noticing some striking parallels to our own “les annes noires” (the dark years).
The radical right in the United States likes to dismiss any comparisons between Nazis and themselves as hyperbolic and slanderous, and it is fair to argue that their own movement may never go as far as the Nazis did. It’s too early to tell. But they’ve made a good start: terrorizing the vulnerable with the ICE-capades of masked thugs, demonizing and disappearing “aliens” and “enemies,” attacking the judicial system, vitiating the free press, purging opposition in the military and civil service, compelling the complicity of corporate leaders, seducing gullible and idolatrous evangelicals, and corrupting everything they touch. Fueling it all is their ceaseless stream of lies and propaganda. As Hannah Arendt warned in the aftermath of World War II:
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but, rather, that nobody believes anything any longer. And the people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such people, you can then do what you please.” [1]
Parisians tried to look the other way, but the invaders were everywhere (Photo by André Zucca for Signal, a German propoganda magazine).
Much more could be said about that, but for now our subject is the occupation of Paris. When the Germans entered the French capital in June, 1940, they encountered no resistance. Parisians were disheartened by the swift collapse of the French army and unhappy to see so many German soldiers and officials suddenly walking their streets and filling their cafés, but what could they do? Many fled Paris before the troops arrived, but most of those returned when they saw how “normal” things seemed. Daily life was not radically affected at first, and few thought the occupation would last such a long time. There was shame in defeat, certainly, and resentment of a foreign presence, but for a time passivity and resignation kept the anger of many Parisians’ turned inward.
German soldiers at the Arc de Triomphe. The Occupation produced an invasion of unwanted tourists (Photo by André Zucca for Signal, a German propoganda magazine).
There was a degree of make-believe on both sides. German soldiers were instructed to be polite. If someone drops a package on the sidewalk, pick it up for them. Parisians tried not to reciprocate any such acts of kindness, but to practice what they called Paris sans regard (“Paris without looking”). As much as possible, pretend the Germans don’t exist. Over time, this depersonalization would create a great sense of loneliness among the occupiers. As for Parisians, the make-believe minuet with the occupiers was both wearying and fragile. As one young man wrote in his journal,
“In spite of oneself, one dreams, laughs, and then falls back into reality, or even into excessive pessimism, making the situation more painful.” [2]
A month after the Germans arrived, “Tips for the Occupied,” a mimeographed flyer, began to appear in apartment mailboxes. “Don’t be fooled,” it warned. “They are not tourists … If one of them addresses you in German, act confused and continue on your way … Show an elegant indifference, but don’t let your anger diminish. It will eventually come in handy …” [3]
The sense of normality didn’t last. The restaurants, cabarets and cinemas remained crowded, but when audiences began to boo and jeer at Nazi newsreels, the houselights would be turned up. People lost their courage when they could be easily spotted. Parisians also learned to be careful about saying the wrong thing in a café. Neighbors began to denounce each other to the authorities. Singing “The Marseillaise” in public became a punishable crime.
As the Occupation dragged on, the sense of dépaysement (“not feeling at home”) began to wear on the soul. Historian Jean-Paul Cointet describes the condition in his 2001 study of wartime Paris:
“The Parisian now knows the condition of being ‘occupied’ in a city that does not belong to him anymore and that offers him the schizophrenic images of an environment suddenly foreign to his gaze. Constraints and humiliations, restrictions and punishments accompany this disorientation and the upending of daily routine.” [4]
Troops at a federal detention center in Los Angeles (Ted Soqui for Cal Matters, June 8, 2025).
The narrowing of space—both physical and psychological—became increasingly oppressive, as Rosbottom notes:
“Whether because of the sight of German uniforms, the closed-off streets, the insufficient nourishment, the cold winters, crowded transportation, long lines—or just the suffocating feeling of being suspicious of one’s acquaintances, neighbors, or even family—the city seemed to be contracting, closing in on Parisian lives, as the Occupation dragged on.” [5]
By the bitterly cold winter of 1941, life just got harder. Shortages of food and coal brought malnutrition and sickness, especially among the lower classes. French police, willing agents of Nazi oppression, started to raid neighborhoods known for Jewish or immigrant populations. At first, Parisians in uninvaded neighborhoods could close their eyes and swallow the lie that the authorities were simply trying to control immigration and prevent terrorism.
“Leave us in peace!” A German propaganda poster show Vichy France threatened by its perceived enemies: Freemasons, Jews, de Gaulle, and “lies.”
However, by mid-1942, rumors of the “final solution” began to reach Paris, and the mass roundups of Jews in France became impossible to ignore. “[Most Parisians] certainly did not know of the plans to deport them to their deaths,” writes Rosbottom, “but to their deaths they went: the last, sad convoy to carry children, three hundred of them, left Drancy for Auschwitz on July 31, 1944 … The final transport of adult deportees left on August 17, a week before Paris would be liberated.” [6]
Ernst Jünger, a cultured writer serving as a captain in the occupying Wehrmacht, kept a journal of the Occupation. In July 1942 he wrote:
“Yesterday some Jews were arrested here in order to be deported—first they separated parents from their children, so firmly that one could hear their distressed cries in the streets. At no moment must I forget that I am surrounded by unhappy people, humans experiencing the most profound suffering. If I forgot, what sort of man or soldier would I be?” [7]
Jünger may have shed a tear, but he continued to serve as a loyal employee of the Nazi death industry, whose business, as Hannah Arendt so bluntly noted, was “the mass production of corpses.” [8]
Hélène Berr also kept a diary, from Spring, 1942 until Spring, 1944. As a young Jewish woman, she tried to keep terror at bay by imagining herself in a Paris magically untouched by the darkness. A student at the Sorbonne, she copied out verses of Keats to calm her soul, and took refuge in her friendships. She made frequent walking tours of the city she loved, as if to reclaim possession of Paris from the occupiers who made her wear a yellow star, the mark of social exile.
In April of 1943, Hélène wrote:
“I’ve a mad desire to throw it all over. I am fed up with not being normal. I am fed up with no longer feeling free as air, as I did last year. It seems that I have become attached to something invisible and that I cannot move away from it as I wish to, and it makes me hate this thing and deform it … I am obliged to act a part … As time passes, the gulf between inside and outside grows ever deeper.” [9]
As Rosbottom notes, personal accounts of the period recall “the sound of police—French police—beating on the door” as their “most vivid aural memory.” [10] In March 1944, that percussive death knell sounded in the Berr’s apartment. Hélène, along with her parents, was arrested, but she managed to slip her journal to their cook before the police barged in. Three weeks later the Berrs were on a train to Auschwitz. They never returned. Hélène’s beloved Paris would be liberated five months later.
Illustration for a collection of French Resistance poetry.
There were many forms of active resistance to the Nazis in France, but the number of French patriots who risked their own lives was relatively small—less than 2% of the population. The threat of death and brutal reprisals was too daunting for most. For a visceral immersion in the anxious milieu of the French Resistance, watch Jean-Pierre Melville’s haunting film, Army of Shadows. Critic Amy Taubin’s summary of the film feels descriptive of wartime Paris: “Elegant, brutal, anxiety-provoking, and overwhelmingly sad.” [11] One resister recounted his experience in an interview decades after the war:
“Fear never abated; fear for oneself; fear of being denounced, fear of being followed without knowing it, fear that it will be ‘them’ when, at dawn, one hears, or thinks one hears, a door slam shut or someone coming up the stairs. Fear, too, for one’s family, from whom, having no address, we received no news and who perhaps had been betrayed and were taken hostage. Fear, finally, of being afraid and of not being able to surmount it.” [12]
A prewar fresco of modern martyrs who refused to bow to anyone but Christ (Église du Saint-Esprit, Paris, 1930s).
As I read Paris in the Dark, I had to wonder: Is this America’s future? For many of us (to borrow a line from Bob Dylan), “It’s not dark yet—but it’s getting there.” Daily life —for now, at least—goes on pretty much as usual. But for some of our neighbors, the darkness has definitely arrived. The military occupation of cities. The terrifying knock on the door. The roundups, disappearances, and concentration camps. The shamelessly gleeful cruelty. Demonization, bigotry and hate. The repression of customary freedoms. The criminalization of dissent. The collapse of legal safeguards. The willing complicity of the powerful with the enemies of life.
Citizens try to block an ICE roundup of immigrants at the Ambiance Apparel factory, downtown Los Angeles (J.W. Hendricks for CalMatters, June 6, 2025).
I am not without hope. Seven million protesters took to the streets on No Kings Day. Then large majorities voted against America’s reign of madness. And regardless of any political swings of the pendulum, I believe that resurrection continues to plant its seeds among the blind sufferings of history. But the oligarchs and fascists won’t go quietly. On the day after the recent election, the Episcopal Daily Office included this timely verse from the Book of Revelation:
Woe to the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you in a great rage, because he knows that his time is short. (Rev. 12:12)
The Beast and Satan rage, but their time is short (Apocalypse Tapestries, Angers, France, 1373-1382).
This Scripture feels ripped from the headlines. We know that satanic rage all too well. It has sickened our country, and we struggle to keep it out of our own hearts. May its time be short. In the meantime, the woes are not done. God’s friends have their work cut out for them. Believe. Resist. Endure.
And guard your heart against the demons of dejection and despair. After Trump’s election in 2016, I suggested seven spiritual practices for the time of trial: pray, fast, repent, prophesy, love, serve, hope. Click the link for the details. Nine years later, these practices are more necessary than ever, and I encourage you to share the link as a small act of resistance.
Pharoah sent his troops to round up the Israelites, but the forces of violence ended up sleeping with the fishes (13th-century window, Sainte-Chappelle, Paris).
Finally, don’t be in love with outcomes. Divine intention takes mysterious forms, and should not be confused with our own plans. Let us heed the counsel of two twentieth-century saints who were deeply committed to holy resistance and well acquainted with its challenges and ambiguities. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred in a Nazi prison in 1945, believed that we must always act with deep humility, shedding our presumptions about the part we play or the difference we make. Don’t fret about your success. Just be faithful to Love’s command:
“No one has the responsibility of turning the world into the kingdom of God … The task is not to turn the world upside down but in a given place to do what, from the perspective of reality, is necessary objectively, and to really carry it out.” [13]
And Thomas Merton, who forged a delicate balance between contemplation and activism, taught that right action is not a tactic but a persistent way of being, grounded in something deeper and more enduring than any of our consequences:
“The message of Christians is not that the kingdom ‘might come, that peace might be established, but that the kingdom is come, and that there will be peace for those who seek it.’” [14]
No Kings Day on Bainbridge Island, Washington (Photo by the author, October 18, 2025).
[1] Hannah Arendt, quoted in the PBS documentary, Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny (American Masters, 2025).
[2] Ronald C. Rosbottom, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944 (New York: Back Bay Books, 2014), 106.
[3] Ibid., 196-197. The flyer was produced by Jean Texcier.
[11] Amy Taubin, ”Out of the Shadows,” Criterion booklet for their 2010 Blu-ray release of Melville’s 1969 film.
[12] Rosbottom, 223, quoted from interviews with WWII resisters published in 2012.
[13] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, q. in Christiane Tietz, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press), 121.
[14] Thomas Merton, Turning Toward the World: The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Four, 1960-1963 (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 188.
Cover of Bob Franke’s fifth album, 1991 (Photo: Susan Wilson)
And when all the stars and sentimental songs dissolved to day, There was nothing left to sing about but hard love.
— Bob Franke, “Hard Love”
Yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
— Burial Office, Episcopal Book of Common Prayer
“Bob Franke! Ten years ago, one of his songs literally saved my life.” That’s what a theology professor told me back in the nineties, when I was catching a ride with her to Salem from the Massachusetts coast. She taught at Harvard Divinity School and had offered to drop me at a friend’s house on her way to work. “What’s your friend’s name?” she asked. I told her, and I have never forgotten her heartfelt response. But I was not surprised by it. Bob’s songs have been a source of comfort and healing for many of us over the years.
I first met Bob in 1969, when he was a student and aspiring singer-songwriter at the University of Michigan, and I was a Cambridge seminarian visiting Ann Arbor during spring break. Bob was part of an impromptu band I helped put together for the Easter liturgy at Canterbury House, the Episcopal campus ministry coffeehouse renowned not only for its folk concerts (Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Richie Havens were on the bill that year), but also for its wonderfully creative alternative worship. On Easter morning, about 150 students and faculty descended into the gloomy basement “tomb,” until a clown in white face appeared to announce that “Christ is risen!” As the congregation exited the tomb into the light-filled hall above, our band played the opening hymn—“Mr. Tambourine Man.” Nothing like resurrection to make a “jingle-jangle morning.”
Bob Franke (seated on floor), Jim Friedrich, Ed Reynolds at Canterbury House Easter Sunday, 1969
Canterbury House was also the first place Bob sang his own songs on stage. In the previous year, the headline act—the unpredictable Ramblin’ Jack Elliott—had wandered away between sets to get ice cream in Detroit, 45 miles away. During his long absence, someone asked Bob to fill in until Jack returned. And a star was born.
Bob was a faithful friend of God, an Episcopalian by tradition. He attended my seminary in Massachusetts for a year, but it soon became clear that, in his words, “a guitar fit better around my neck than a clerical collar.” But his songs, and the way he would speak about them in concert, became a unique ministry of illumination, comfort and blessing which touched so many lives. Bob himself put it this way:
“Whenever I sing, I’m trying to create in my listeners an awareness of the beauty and sacredness of their own lives, both individually and together, as a community. A woman came up to me recently and said that my story and my song put her relationship with her dad in a new light, gave her insight into her dad’s love for her. That’s all I need to take home from a show.”
Some of his work engages biblical topics, such as his Nativity carol, “Straw Against the Chill,” or “We’re Walking in the Wilderness.” Some lyrics incorporate Scriptural references (“new streams in the desert, new hope for the poor”). But most of his songs, whatever the topic, touch on fundamentally religious questions: yearning, journey, justice, death, loss, mercy, gratitude, love.
But it was always more than the songs with Bob, whose own authenticity, depth, humility and warmth made every concert an event of the heart. As music programmer Alan Korolenko describes the Bob Franke experience:
“No matter the size of the audience, you’re going to get an intimate evening with Bob. He just pulls everybody in, which is the key. You’ll meet other artists, and they’re not the same as their work. That’s not the case with Bob. He appeals to folk fans and general audiences, because he knows how to create a full, emotional journey, and how to share that journey. By the end, you’ve laughed and thought and cared; you’ve gotten to know the guy. He’s a class act.”
In the folk world, Bob’s songwriting has long been held in high esteem. Peter, Paul and Mary, David Wilcox, John McCutcheon, Sally Rogers, Martin Simpson, Lui Collins, Garnet Rogers, June Tabor and countless others have all recorded from his songbook. Claudia Schmidt has a beautiful version of “Hard Love,” one of the most truthful and hard-earned songs ever written on the subject.
Yes, it’s hard love, but it’s love all the same Not the stuff of fantasy, but more than just a game And the only kind of miracle that’s worthy of the name For the love that heals our lives is mostly hard love
Bob’s melodies have a way of drawing you into a place of receptivity, where his words, so precise, truthful and unafraid, whisper their truth to your heart.
For the Lord’s cross might redeem us, but our own just wastes our time. (“Hard Love”)
There’s a hole in the middle of the prettiest life, so the lawyers and the prophets say … (“For Real”)
But there are ears to hear me in my softest voice, There are hands to hold and point the way … (“A Healing in This Night”)
Over the years, Bob’s songs have been woven like bright threads into the fabric of my own life. When my grandmother died three months short of a hundred, my folk-singing sister Marilyn wasn’t sure what to perform at her funeral. Then one of Bob’s songs arrived by chance (or grace) in the mail. A friend had just come across “Alleluia, the Great Storm is Over,” and thought Marilyn would like it. It proved the perfect choice, heaven-sent, to sing our dear Nana home.
Sweetness in the air, and justice on the wind, laughter in the house where the mourners had been. The deaf shall have music, the blind have new eyes, the standards of death taken down by surprise.
In a very low-def 2010 video of Bob and friends singing the song in a Massachusetts coffeehouse, you can hear the audience jumping in with the chorus before Bob even sings a word. His lyrics were so deeply planted in their hearts, they could not keep silent.
Bob wrote a cantata on Christ’s Passion, performing it with musician friends every Good Friday at his home parish, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Marblehead, Massachusetts. One of those songs, “Roll Away the Waters,” a rousing celebration of the Exodus, became a regular part of the storytelling portion of my creative Easter Vigils over the years. Here is Bob’s version.
And when we hear again the Annunciation story in Advent, it’s time for Bob’s “Say Yes,” an artfully succinct summary of spirituality’s essence: receptivity and consent. Here’s a version I did during the pandemic for one of my church’s worship streams:
The author performs Bob Franke’s “Say Yes.”
And whenever I need serious picking up, I’ll play “A Healing in This Night.” Here’s a fine version by Annie Patterson and Peter Blood:
“I always think of Bob as if Jefferson and Thoreau had picked up acoustic guitars and gotten into songwriting. There are touches of Mark Twain and Buddy Holly in there, too.” — Tom Paxton
Bob’s songs, and his spirit, are deeply rooted in American tradition—musically, culturally, politically. He sang on radio shows like Prairie Home Companion and A Mountain Stage, and traveled down many roads to perform in festivals, coffeehouses, churches and living rooms. His songs are imbued with the questions, dreams, struggles and shadows of American life. Even the hardest times are seen with a measure of possibility and redemption.
But in recent years he and his wife Joan saw the country they loved disintegrating into madness and rage. Feeling that the United States was becoming unsafe, and mindful of those who waited too long to exit Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Bob and Joan emigrated to Guatemala in September. They were barely into their second month in a new land when Bob was hit by a speeding motorcycle while crossing a road. Yesterday, October 16, a few days after surgery to repair the damage, he died in hospital of a heart attack. He was 78.
What can you do with your days but work and hope, Let your dreams bind your work to your play. What can you do with each moment of your life But love till you’ve loved it away?
When the news of Bob’s death reached me around midnight, it hit hard. I lit a candle before an icon of the Theotokos, and picked up my guitar: “Thanksgiving Eve,” of course, “Alleluia, the Great Storm is Over,” and “A Healing in This Night.” I imagined people far and wide were doing the same—joining our voices withthe whole company of heaven, as we say at mass.
Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.
As for the song which saved that Harvard theologian’s life years ago, let Bob have the last word:
A perplexed man in the cloister of Saint Trophime, Arles, France (12th century)
In the liturgical churches, we don’t get to choose the Scripture for our homilies. We have to take what the Lectionary gives us. I’ve been preaching for a long time, but I’ve always been lucky enough to miss the Sundays when the Parable of the Unjust Steward turns up. Until now. Some scholars have labeled it the hardest parable. I prefer to call it the “terrible parable.” But I made a stab at it, and pass on the results here.
A parable functions a little like a Zen koan. What is the sound of one hand clapping? What is your original face before you were born? Such imaginative constructions of language are meant to disrupt habitual ways of thinking and open us to new perspectives. Just so, when a prodigal son is welcomed home with open arms, or the laborers who work the fewest hours are paid the same wages as the ones who work all day, we are forced, or at least invited, to question our presuppositions and prejudices about how life works, or how God desires life to work.
That said, let’s consider the Parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1- 8). It’s not an easy one to interpret. Nor is it easy to like. There have been many efforts to explain what this story about a dishonest steward tricking his boss is even doing in Luke’s gospel, set down in the midst of far more memorable teachings and far more beloved parables. But most of those explanations fail in one way or another, either making assumptions not justified by the text or reducing its meanings to something of little value to preacher or disciple.
So what shall we make of the “terrible parable” this time around?
Let’s review what happens. A rich man, presumably an absentee landowner, discovers his property manager has been “squandering” his property, whether by mismanagement or financial monkey business we aren’t told. But he’s put on notice that he’s about to be fired.
Now the steward considers himself either too old or too scrawny for manual labor, and he’s too proud to beg, so he’s desperate for a way to avoid utter destitution. What does he do? He summons all his master’s debtors and offers to write down their debts to an affordable level. By so doing, he earns the good will of those debtors.
Maybe someday, when he’s out of work and looking for help, they’ll return the favor. And, by collecting at least some return from all those past due accounts for his master, maybe he can get back in the master’s good graces. In the end, we are told, the rich man “commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.” The odds of the steward keeping his job are looking up, but the story stops before we find out about that.
At first glance, it’s hard to find anyone to identify with in this parable. In the Bible, rich men are rarely liked, since economic inequality in biblical times was even worse than it is today. When a story begins, “There was a rich man,” you might imagine the immediate boos and hisses from Jesus’ audience, which hopes it’s going to be a story about his comeuppance. But as soon as the steward is introduced, his own character is dragged through the mud, and the rich man gains a bit of sympathy for having been cheated.
The steward stands accused of squandering his master’s property—whether through incompetence or dishonesty is not quite clear, but his actions later, cooking the books to write down the debts owed to his master, tag him as “unjust” or “dishonest”—terms which can connote either shaky bookkeeping or outright fraud. In any case, he plays fast and loose with the numbers. And, to our surprise, he is praised for doing so. This commendation may reflect the master’s relief in recovering at least some of his bad loans. It also may indicate his delight in discovering how clever his steward is. If such a man can get things done, who cares if his methods are not always on the up and up?
Some commentators have discerned a Christ figure in the rule-breaking steward. Hoping for a different kind of future, Jesus subverts the rules of the old world, where the rich get everything and the system punishes the poor, so that the rich man gets less and the debtors finally get a break. The unjust system may consider his actions to be improper, but in God’s eyes he’s an agent of economic justice, constructing a fairer and kinder form of human community.
At the same time, the steward’s actions transform relationships. The debtors, for whom the steward might have seemed an enforcer of unpayable obligations, turns out to be a forgiver of debts. And the rich man, tricked into generosity by his steward’s unorthodox moves, is given the opportunity to forego domination and greed in his own relationships with others.
That’s the story. But then the storyteller, who is Jesus, tacks a puzzling moral onto the end of his tale. He says the steward’s ingenuity, and the praise he receives for it, demonstrates that “the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.”
What could this mean? Of course, to reduce a parable to a single meaning implies that you can throw out the story and just keep the meaning. That’s like Woody Allen’s joke about reading War and Peace in an hour after taking a speed-reading course. When someone asked him what the novel was about, he said, “It’s about Russia.”
His joke mocks the idea that the experience of full immersion in Tolstoy’s thousand-page epic can be replaced by a brief summary. It’s the same with Jesus’ parables. Don’t reduce them to a single meaning. Experience them, begin to wonder about them, and then—just keep on wondering.
So instead of offering the best interpretation of today’s parable—there is no best interpretation, just a story which continues to puzzle us—I will simply try out some observations with no presumption of giving you the definitive last word about it.
The “children of light” is a New Testament term for the early Christians, the followers of the Way of Jesus, who belong not to “this age” but to the age to come, the future which God is in the process of bringing about. The steward’s ability to game the system of this age, operating successfully within its parameters with improvisation, cleverness and flexibility, should make the followers of Jesus ask themselves,
“Am I operating within the parameters of the age to come—the kingdom of God—with the same creativity and resourcefulness as the steward displays within the parameters of his story? Are my actions and choices in line with the world that is dying, or with the world that is being born?”
In living out the Christian life, which is rooted not in this age but in the age to come, we should embody the Kingdom’s precepts and pursue its goals with the same single-mindedness, the same commitment, the same shrewdness that the steward in the parable employs to navigate the crisis described in his story. His world is about to come crashing down, he’s about to lose everything, but he survives through the actions he takes and the relationships he cultivates. He doesn’t cling to the old world and its old rules to suffer its predetermined outcomes. He discovers a way to be part of what is about to happen next. He discovers a way to have a future.
Now if we are indeed the children of light, claiming allegiance to the divine future which is being born amidst the ruins of our fallen world, do we possess a comparable level of creativity and resourcefulness to survive the collapse of the old and join ourselves wholeheartedly to the emergence of the new? Can we be as good as that steward was in slipping through the present time of crisis into a future of divine intent and human flourishing?
That’s the question I hear the parable asking us today. That’s the question I leave you with today. Let me say it one more time:
If we are indeed the children of light, claiming allegiance to the divine future which is being born amidst the ruins of our fallen world, do we possess a comparable level of creativity and resourcefulness to survive the collapse of the old and join ourselves wholeheartedly to the emergence of the new?
Can we be as good as that steward was in slipping through the present time of crisis into a future of divine intent and human flourishing?
In all my years as a priest, I had never preached on the apocalyptic imagery of Luke 17:26-37, where people disappear without warning and Jesus concludes with an unnerving proverb: “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” This is not ideal preaching material, but with the help of the Epistle reading, Hebrews 11:29—12:2, I gave it a try last Sunday.
Today’s gospel [i] has quite a punchline: “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” It’s got to be pretty low on the list of favorite Jesus quotes, but it certainly gets our attention.
A couple of weeks ago I was at a raptor show at the High Desert Museum in eastern Oregon. A variety of hawks, owls and vultures flew swiftly among the seated spectators, who were warned to stay very still lest we be mistaken for prey. I did my best not to be a target, but a turkey vulture came close enough to brush my head with its wing. Perhaps it was preparing me for this strange gospel verse.
Some scholars say Jesus was simply using a common folk expression in response to a question about discerning the times, meaning something like “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Such expressions have nothing to do with smoke or fire or vultures or corpses. They’re just colorful ways of making a point. Still, Jesus’ choice of such a grim illustration puts a sharp edge on his message. It certainly gets our attention. And where the enigmatic text is, there the scholars will gather.
Who is the corpse? they wonder. Who are the vultures? One interpretation suggests the corpse could represent ancient Palestine, with the rapacious vultures being the occupying army of Rome. The Book of Revelation, perhaps inspired by the vultures in the gospel text, imagined the raptors of midheaven being summoned to feast on the remains of the proud powers struck down by divine judgment. An even more fantastical interpretation identifies the sharp-eyed buzzards, who in fact can spot carrion from 3 miles away, as those perceptive disciples who gather to consume the Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ given to feed our deepest hunger.
Well, none of these images is going to qualify for a stained glass window. And the vulture verse is perhaps profitless for the preacher.
And yet, it leaves a haunting impression. It’s unlike anything else Jesus ever said, and its gruesome tone puts an exclamation point on his discourse of crisis. A world is dying, he says. Just as a world died in the days of Noah, or in the days of Lot—names which recall destructive narratives of flood and fire—so it is happening now. The times are in no way normal, Jesus warns his listeners. Anyone who pretends that is not true, who thinks we can just go on about our business as usual—eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building—well, they are in for a surprise.
Come gather ’round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You’ll be drenched to the bone If your time to you is worth savin’ You better start swimmin’ Or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’ [ii]
When we sang that song 60 years ago, we thought the times were changing for the better. And that was true in many ways. But the flood of changes washing over us today do not feel like something better. When Jesus speaks of people being snatched up and disappeared without warning, he could be describing what’s happening right now in “the land of the free.” To paraphrase Jesus’ metaphor, “As it was in the days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—in 1930s Germany—so shall it be in our own time.”
I pray that this will not be our fate, but the fact that such an outcome is even conceivable is a measure of the times. It can happen here. So what are the friends of God to do? How do we start swimming so we don’t sink like a stone?
We are not the first believers to suffer the worst of times. The Epistle to the Hebrews is clear about that. History isn’t always about the lilies of the field. It has its corpses and vultures as well.
But as the author of Hebrews insists, the faithful believe in the victory of God, and they act out that faith with their bodies. Some of God’s friends have “received the test of mocking and whipping and even chains and prison. They were stoned, cut apart in a slaughter; they died upon a sword. They traveled around in ragged clothing, impoverished, oppressed, afflicted.” But for all they suffered, those who kept the faith “subdued monarchies, did the work of justice … shut the mouths of lions, quenched mighty fires …” (Hebrews 11:29-12:2)
As people baptized into the Paschal Mystery, we understand that dying and rising, defeat and victory, are deeply intertwined. You can’t have one without the other.
When certain medieval women mystics contemplated the cross in prayer and vision, they saw not the triumph of death, but a kind of birth. For them the crucified Jesus was like a woman in labor, enduring pain and travail in order to bring us all to birth:
Ah! Sweet Lord Jesus Christ, who ever saw a mother suffer such a birth! For when the hour of your delivery came you were placed on the hard bed of the cross and … in one day you gave birth to the whole world.”[iii]
To behold the death of Christ and call it birth is the central act of Christian imagination. It is why we declare victory at the cross. We don’t wait for Easter Sunday. We declare victory at the cross because the Passion isn’t just a story about the violent powers that always trample the weak and kill the prophets. It’s also a story about the Realm of God, where dry bones breathe and lost hopes dance, where the prodigal is welcomed home and the tears are wiped from every eye.
The Love that creates such a realm was nailed to a cross, but the cross did not consume it. Yes, death did what death does, but then God did what God does. And Love won. This is the story we belong to, and on the outcome of that story, we stake everything.
That is why we are here this morning. That is why we refuse to retreat to our private worlds, why we continue to gather in community at our Savior’s table: to nurture hope, shelter love’s flame, encourage one another, strengthen our hearts for service, eat the bread of life, pray without ceasing, sing our Alleluias and grow ever more fully into the visible, tangible body of Christ.
We are not alone in this journey. We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, all those ancestors in the faith, from Abraham and Sarah and Mary and Luke right on down to the wise and loving mentors we’ve known in our own lives, who have taught us how to walk in the Way of life and peace.
I once heard a preacher describe the cloud of witnesses as “the balcony people” who are looking down and cheering us on as we run the race that is set before us. It’s a wonderful and resonant image. I’m sure that each of you has some very special people in that balcony, shouting their encouragement. Listen. You can hear their voices echoing through the years.
St. Luke, pray for us … St. Mary, pray for us … St. Francis, pray for us … Oscar Romero, pray for us … Dorothy Day, pray for us … Mom and Dad, pray for us.
Last Sunday I was in Eugene for the National Track & Field Championships, and in the men’s 800 meters I witnessed one of the most stunning moments in the history of middle-distance racing. A 16-year-old high school sophomore named Cooper Lutkenhaus had qualified for the elite competition by breaking the 29-year-old high school record, running the distance in 1:45. And after stumbling and almost falling in his first race at the championships, he managed to survive the first two rounds.
Much to his surprise, he had made the final. But with some of the world’s top 800 meter runners in the race, no one expected him to be anywhere close to the top three who would earn a trip to the World Championships in September.
Rounding the last turn, Cooper was doing really well for a 16-year-old, in sixth place out of nine racers, 10 meters behind the leader. Then, in the last 100 meters, he passed one runner, and another, and another, and another, to cross the line in second place. His time was 1:42.27, not only a personal best by an unbelievable 3 seconds, but the 18th-best all-time and the fourth-best ever by an American.
Donavan Brazier, Cooper Lutkenhaus, and Bryce Hoppel finish 1-2-3 in the 2025 U.S. Track & Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon.
Now I’ve been at a noisy NBA final with Kareem and Magic and Larry Bird. I’ve been deafened by the 12th man [iv] at a Seahawks game. But the sound of the crowd cheering on young Cooper Lutkenhaus blew my ears off. The cloud of witnesses.
When we run the race that is set before us, there will be times when our lungs burn and our legs scream with lactic acid. There will be the races that disappoint, and workouts that feel listless or discouraging. We may even stumble and fall, more than once.
But always, always, the cloud of witnesses is cheering us on. They know from their own experience what the race is like. They all had their own moments of weakness and doubt. They became acquainted with suffering by training hard every day. They all had to learn how to get up after every fall, lay aside every weight, gulp the breath of the Spirit, and accept pain as the runner’s companion.
I’ve done my own share of racing, and when the pain comes, I try to greet it as a friend. “Hello, brother pain. I knew you’d show up. Well, here we go. I know you’re not going to kill me, right?. We’ll just take it step by step.”
“Even the fittest may stumble and fall (Isaiah 40:31). As Roisin Willis and Maggi Congdon finish 1-2 in the women’s 800 meters at the U.S. Championships, Sage Hurta-Klecker dives for the third and final spot on the World Championship team. In previous years, she had missed out on a championship podium twice due to falls, but this time her fall was a triumph. She made the team.
The perpetual contest between weariness and perseverance is familiar to every athlete—and every saint. You’re going to get tired. You’re going to get discouraged. You may faint and fall. But keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. On both good days and bad, you’ve got to put in the work, “lay aside every weight,” surrender to a power and a strength that is not your own, and stay in the flow.
I began with a raptor image, so let me close with another. This time it’s not a vulture, but an eagle, in a beautiful passage from the prophet Isaiah:
Even the youthful may faint and grow weary, even the fittest may stumble and fall, but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and never grow tired. [v]
Francesco Scaramuzza, Dante and the Eagle (c. 1860). The sleeping Dante dreamed he was carried by an eagle, but it was really St. Lucy who helped the poet on his upward journey toward heaven’s light (Purgatorio ix).
This homily was preached at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Renton, WA, on the 9th Sunday after Pentecost, 2025.
Race photo and video by the author.
[i] The texts for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost are in Wilda C. Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year C, which differs significantly for the Revised Common Lectionary used by most liturgical churches.
[ii] Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1964).
[iv] The loudest crowd in professional football is in Seattle, where the fans are called “the 12th man” for their ability to influence the game by making it hard for the other team to hear their quarterback’s signals.
Eugène Delacroix, LIberty Leading the People (1830).
“Nothing collapses more quickly than civilization during crises like this one [the French Revolution of June 1848]; lost in three weeks is the accomplishment of centuries. Civilization, life itself, is something learned and invented … After several years of peace men forget it all too easily. They come to believe that culture is innate, that it is identical with nature. But savagery is always lurking two steps away, and it regains a foothold as soon as one stumbles.”
When an inflamed crowd of Parisian citizens stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the obsolete medieval fortress had long outlived its usefulness as an instrument of royal tyranny. It was destined for demolition, and a mere seven prisoners inhabited its dungeons when the crowd broke through the gates. A year later, Lafayette presented the key for the Bastille to President George Washington, honoring the quest for liberty by both countries. The key still resides at Washington’s Mount Vernon home.
Historians have suggested that the king’s capitulation to the political power of commoners (the ‘Third Estate’) on July 9 marks the true beginning of the French Revolution, but the bloody drama of Bastille Day proved a more potent symbol than the parliamentary negotiations being conducted at the king’s palace of Versailles. In any case, the once unthinkable destruction of the Ancien Régime had been decades in the making.
In The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, American historian Robert Darnton traces the growth of revolutionary sentiment as it was expressed in the Paris street: café conversations (often transcribed by police spies), underground gazettes and pamphlets, street songs, sidewalk speeches, public demonstrations and processions, and personal diaries. Eighteenth-century Paris had its own version of an information society, where “the ebb and flow of information among ordinary Parisians” was shared widely in cafés, marketplaces, wineshops, street corners and salons. [ii]
When the 72-year reign of Louis XIV ended in 1715, it was hard to imagine an alternative to absolute monarchy. His successor, Louis XV, would still be claiming dictatorial authority as late as 1766:
“In my person alone resides the sovereign power: from me alone my courts derive their existence and their authority, without any dependence and any division.” [iii]
In 1781, Louis XVI would tell his judiciary, “It is legal because I want it.” [iv] That’s the authoritarian creed. But by then, the game was up, and he was just whistling in the dark. A record of financial mismanagement, economic hardship, abuse of power, political corruption, and the ravages of poverty and hunger had by then called into question not only the effectiveness of the king and his government, but the legitimacy of the monarchy itself. Murmures (vocal grumbling about the regime) became part of daily life in Paris, and fed the printed complaints of the pamphleteers.
“Although the words were printed on paper, the messages of pamphlets flew through the air and mixed in the cacophony known as bruits publics [‘public rumors’]. Pamphlets were bruited about. They were read aloud, performed, applauded, rebutted, and assimilated in the talk that filled lieux publics [“public places”]. Readers also pondered tracts in the quiet of their studies, but when they went outside they encountered other Parisians, in marketplaces, along the quais, in the courtyard of the Louvre, on benches in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, the Tuileries, and the Luxembourg palace. Like smoke from thousands of chimneys gathering over the city, a climate of opinion gradually took shape.” [v]
It took half of the eighteenth-century to produce such a climate of opinion in France, a ”revolutionary temper” which was perfected, like tempered steel, through repeated heating and cooling. People would complain about this tax or that scandal, this outrage or that cruelty, but the tectonic shift from specific complaints to general discontent and clamor for change was a process of decades. Only when the climate of opinion attained sufficient density was it possible to imagine the impossible. Once revolution became conceivable, the leaps from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy to no monarchy at all were breathtakingly swift.
Revolution doesn’t necessarily require the refinements of political theory. By 1788, the high cost of bread by itself (like our egg or gas prices) was enough to elicit calls for radical change. One angry woman in a boulangerie was heard to say, “They should march on Versailles and burn the place down.” [vi] She was not alone, and by then the people of Paris were beginning to conceive of themselves as part of a movement, and act accordingly.
“Whether or not they followed the arguments of the theoreticians, Parisians were swept up in the conviction of becoming a nation, a sovereign body that would defy privileged orders and take charge of its own destiny. This way of constructing reality—the drawing of lines, the identification of a common enemy, the creation of a collective self-awareness—can be understood as a process of radical simplification. Although it had origins that went far back in the past, it came together with unprecedented force in 1788 and underlay a revolutionary view of the world: us against them, the people against the grands, the nation against the aristocracy.” [vii]
I could not read Darnton’s illuminating account without thinking of my own deeply troubled country. Although there are of course countless dissimilarities between 18th-century France and 21st-century America, some parallels got me thinking.
First of all, I found the accounts of a Paris alive with ardent conversations about public life to be inspirational. There was an urgency and a passion which feels lacking in America’s current collective consciousness. “Everyone writes, everyone reads,” said one of those pre-revolutionary Parisians. “Even the coachman reads the latest work on his perch,” said another. “Every person down to domestic servants and water carriers is involved in the debating.” [viii] But in America, 2025, while we may consume volumes of news in private, most of us carry on as if life is pretty much normal, even as our would-be dictator dispatches masked thugs to terrorize our communities, trains the military to act as his personal army, and builds concentration camps to torture and disappear his “enemies.”
Like 18th-century Paris, we need to converse with one another in earnest, employing a reliable flow of factual information and strategic thought to shape a collective consciousness for the common good. The forces of tyranny and greed have worked for decades to create its opposite, a seductive web of lies and rage to poison and incapacitate the consciences of millions of Americans. Those who care about the common good are still, I believe, in the majority, but that means nothing if we lack the means and the will to be connected with one another in public truth-telling, mutual encouragement, and collective action. As long as we feel isolated, alone and discouraged, tyranny will flourish.
I was also struck by the importance of imagining alternatives to consensus reality in our public life. A sense of inevitability is the mother of inaction. In France under Louis XIV, the monarchy seemed inevitable—until it didn’t. In America, at least until Trump, democracy and the rule of law were assumed to be inevitable. And while many of us have come to realize how fragile and conditional our democracy actually is, the press, along with many Democratic politicians, continue to play the game of “Let’s Pretend.”
Let’s pretend that everyone is playing by the same rules. Let’s pretend the president is not fascist, childish, ignorant, cruel, and increasingly incoherent and nonsensical. Let’s pretend that normal protocols are the best way to engage with him. Let’s pretend we don’t have an American gestapo, or a White House dominated by racists, white nationalists and shameless liars. Let’s pretend our government isn’t supporting genocide in Gaza, or robbing millions of their health care. Let’s pretend that climate change is nothing to worry about. Let’s pretend it’s all just politics as usual and both sides do the same thing, so there’s no cause for alarm.
Finally, I was intrigued by the theatricality of what the French called emotions populaires [mass protests]. Straw effigies of unpopular or disgraced officials were mocked, paraded through the streets, and forced to kneel before statues of honored officials and beg divine pardon. On one occasion, the crowd seized a passing priest, demanding that he hear the dummy’s confession. Eyed with suspicion as a symbol of the Ancien Régime, the priest was careful not to anger the crowd by refusing to play. He put his ear to the effigy’s mouth for a few moments, then declared to all that it had so many sins to confess that it would take all night! The people laughed, applauded the priest’s wit, and let him go. As for the dummy official, he “was pitched into a giant feu de foie [‘fire of joy’].” [ix]
I suspect that setting fire to effigies of our American tyrants would not be a safe practice these days, and I am aware that the emotions populaires in revolutionary Paris often led to serious violence. But I wonder if there might be, in our own acts of resistance and witness, creative theatrical ways to engage with flanks of armed soldiers or gangs of ICE agents using guerilla theater, humor, song, ritual, and even clowning and mime—anything to subvert, disarm, or transcend the deadly Punch and Judy face-off of venomous gazes. Is there any way to make the other laugh, or wonder, or think, if only for a moment? Send in the clowns! Could you still want to shoot someone who made you laugh—or cry?
You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not (I hope) the only one.
[i] Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), a French literary critic, is quoted by George Eliot in Impressions of Theophrastus Such; cited in Frederick Brown, The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914-1940 (New York: Anchor Books, 2014), 3.
[ii] Robert Darnton, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024), xix.
A century ago, American poet Vachel LIndsay’s poem put it perfectly:
This is the sin against the Holy Ghost: — To speak of bloody power as right divine, And call on God to guard each vile chief’s house, And for such chiefs, turn men to wolves and swine:—
To go forth killing in White Mercy’s name, Making the trenches stink with spattered brains, Tearing the nerves and arteries apart, Sowing with flesh the unreaped golden plains.
In any Church’s name, to sack fair towns, And turn each home into a screaming sty, To make the little children fugitive, And have their mothers for a quick death cry,—
This is the sin against the Holy Ghost: This is the sin no purging can atone:— To send forth rapine in the name of Christ:— To set the face, and make the heart a stone.
In 1776, the fourth of July became “No Kings Day.” In my lifetime, that central meaning has been largely ceremonial and festive, but in the annus horribilis of 2025 it has become profoundly existential. The crisis which provoked the Declaration of Independence is back with a vengeance. But the abuses of King George can’t hold a candle to the malignant and murderous cruelty of our current tyrants.
In the Episcopal lectionary for daily prayer, we are currently following the saga of early Israel from the First Book of Samuel, where the whole idea of kingship is up for debate. As my country rushes headlong toward the extinction of the common good, these biblical texts have felt quite timely. I am particularly struck by the eighth chapter of I Samuel as a parable of our own collective folly. [i]
In the biblical narrative, Israel’s early days in the “Promised Land” were marked by political instability. Leadership was provided by a series of charismatic figures who governed with varying degrees of cunning and force. In the ideal, the leader would be touched by the spirit of the Lord, giving the “judge” an aura of power and purpose the people could not fail to recognize. In practice, such a system of leadership was often sustained through bloodshed. As Robert Alter points out, “survival through violence, without a coherent and stable political framework, cannot be sustained, and runs the danger of turning into sheer destruction.” [ii] Indeed, the disheartening Book of Judges ends in civil war and anarchy:
In those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25).
When I Samuel, the next book after Judges in the Hebrew Bible, takes up the narrative, the prophet Samuel is born and raised as a divinely chosen instrument for the guidance of God’s people. As it turns out, he is far from perfect, prone to anger, rigidity and ambition. But his dream of creating a prophetic dynasty out of his descendants is thwarted by the blatant corruption of his sons, who “took bribes and twisted justice” (I Samuel 8:3).
So when Samuel’s old age raises questions about succession, the elders of Israel demand a new kind of governance. “Give us a king to rule over us, just like all the other nations.” But Samuel resists their plea. No doubt he dislikes the idea of surrendering his own authority, or admitting his dream of a prophetic dynasty is doomed. But he is also clinging to the venerable idea that ancient Israel is not like any other nation. Its only king, its only absolute ruler, is God, who rules through the direct inspiration of human agents.
Then Samuel prays, laying his dilemma before the Holy One, whose answer is surprising. “Listen to the voice of the people,” God says. “And don’t take it personally. It’s my governance they are rejecting, not yours. They’ve been rejecting and ignoring me from the very first day I delivered them from Egypt.” But even while expressing disappointment over human waywardness, God seems to accept the historical situation. Forgetting the Holy One, their Creator and Savior, is what humans do. “So give them what they ask for,” God tells Samuel. “But be sure to make it clear what they’ll be getting. Remind them what kings do: abuse power, rule with violence, steal your wealth, and turn you into slaves.”
When Samuel delivers God’s warning, he adds a dismal prophecy of the endgame: “The day will come when you will cry out before your king whom you chose for yourselves; and on that day the Lord will not answer you.”
But the people refuse to heed Samuel’s voice. “WE DON’T CARE!” they cry. “We want a king to rule us!”
When Samuel returns to his prayers to report the people’s response, God replies, perhaps with a sigh of resignation, “Heed their voice and make them a king.” And so it goes.
That’s how the conversation concludes. But I can’t help imagining God adding one more thing to the biblical text as it speaks to us across the centuries:
“Let them see for themselves what kings are like. FAFO.”
[i] I use the word “parable” here not to deny the foundation of the text in historical events, but to highlight a significance for us that does not depend on our knowing exactly how things happened in the murky past. The text of Samuel is a creative fusion of diverse sources. As Robert Alter notes in his translation of the Hebrew Bible, “What matters is that the anonymous Hebrew writer, drawing on what he knew or thought he knew of the portentous historical events, has created this most searching story of men and women in the rapid and dangerous current of history that still speaks to us, floundering in history and the dilemmas of political life, three thousand years later.” Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary—Volume Two: Prophets (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 176.
18th-century altarpiece (detail), San Martin Pinario, Santiago, Spain.
“I implore you—be calmer.” — Goethe
I know the world is a hot mess at the moment, but I’m taking the rest of the day off to welcome summer. I’m not even going to compose a long-overdue new post (more of those soon). Instead, before I retire to the garden with a pleasurable book, I’ll do the lazy thing and share a few paragraphs from something I wrote years ago, after my first journey to Greece. I posted the following words on the Summer Solstice in 2001. A few months later, the world as we knew it would come to an end. But the lesson I learned in Greece still speaks to my heart, even in (or especially in) our fractious and fallen present condition.
The author on Naxos, Greece.
After a few weeks of history, culture and religion on the mainland, I boarded a ferry for the Greek islands, only to be put off by the scene on the sun-drenched deck. Everyone was a tourist, slathered with sun block; the Greeks had vanished. We were like an occupying army, obliterating the local culture with our foreign speech, our alien ways, our crass desires. But there was something else that bothered me. We lacked seriousness. We were a ship of fools.
During the first half of my journey, I had contemplated the noble remnants of classical culture, walked in the footsteps of Socrates and Paul, hiked to Byzantine monasteries scattered along the summits of towering rock formations, breathed the incense of exotic rituals, conversed passionately about ideas late into the night. It had felt something like pilgrimage. But now the only quest was for the perfect tan, the languorous cafe, the idle beach. I feared a loss of purpose. Had I come all this way to fall into a resort mentality, and forget the Greece of myth and history, liturgy and philosophy?
In the end, my Puritan rigor succumbed to the regime of pleasure. I rediscovered summer mind. Time to be, not do. Sink down into the deep pool of the moment. Enjoy the sun-dazzled days and fairy tale nights without anxiety, as though they will last forever. I am not perfect at this. At times I am likely to rush from place to place, acquiring experiences greedily, not wanting to miss anything. But a brisk pace is fatal to deeper forms of attention.
On my first day hike on Naxos, the greenest isle in the Cyclades, I took a quick look inside one of the little Byzantine churches that frequent its charming hills and valleys. I saw only bare stones inside, not too interesting. I soon returned into the sunlight, where I heard a voice calling to me. It was a German hiker, looking for the entrance into the churchyard. I showed her the way in.
“Look at these wonderful old frescoes!” she said. “What frescoes?” I thought to myself as I peered into the shadows. Once I had given my sun-blinded eyes time to adjust, I began to see what I had missed in my hasty first glances—the faint images of saints. Some of the figures were clearly defined, while others had weathered into dreamlike blurs, like background figures in a Munch painting.
Sixth-century fresco in a Naxos church.
Early in that journey, I had read these words by Thomas Merton in the shaded balcony of a clifftop monastery: “In prayer we discover what we already have. You start where you are and you deepen what you already have. And you realize that you are already there … All we need to do is experience what we already possess. The trouble is, we aren’t taking the time.”
Now welcome summer. Let the heavy fragrance of its green world release you from obligations. Let it be enough for now to wander aimlessly around the neighborhood, linger over relaxed conversations, or lie in the hammock and wait for falling stars. Idleness is the incense we offer the gods of summer.
Crucified Christ (northern France, late 12th century).
Isaiah 53:5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
Was it really necessary for Jesus to be pierced and crushed? And how exactly did his suffering and death make us whole? There has never been a conclusive single answer, because any attempt to “solve” the Paschal Mystery with a reductive formula is missing the point. The cross is an experience to enter, not an idea to be explained. “I wonder as I wander out under the sky,” says the old Nativity carol, “why Jesus our Savior did come for to die / for poor ornery people like you and like I. . .” And now, this Holy Week, we come again to the foot of the cross, and we wonder.
Antonello da Messina, The Antwerp Crucifixion (1475).
Let us discard any crude notions of the cross as a transaction, as if somebody had to pay for all the damage wrought by human sin, so Jesus stepped up like a big spender to declare, “This one’s on me.” Such “substitution” theology either trivializes the cost of sin (can Auschwitz or Gaza be so lightly dismissed?) or risks masochism by stressing the pain of the Passion, as Mel Gibson did in his notorious movie. The sacredness of God’s Friday is not in the violence or the blood, but in the Love that rewrites the darkest story.
Lippo Memmi, Christ carrying the cross, Duomo di San Gimignano, Tuscany (1335-1345).
And let us not reduce the salvific death of Jesus to a simple case of human cruelty claiming one more victim. Something more than human tyranny and human tragedy—something divine—was at work in the cross. But the divine presence on Calvary’s hill was not in the form of any punishment dished out by an angry God. God was there in the vulnerable, suffering body of Jesus, the Incarnate Word of self-diffusive love, who chose to share the human condition in all its forms—even the bleakest and most wretched. Jesus didn’t suffer instead of us. Jesus suffered with us. And through the humanity of Jesus, our own experience of alienation and affliction has been absorbed into the trinitarian life of God, where it is held in love’s eternal embrace and drained of its toxicity. As the prophet said, By his wounds we are healed.
Jacopo Pontormo, Deposition from the Cross, Santa Felicita, Florence (1525-1528).
Or as theologian Paul Fiddes put it, “Far from simply forgetting about the sins of the world, [God] journeys deeply into the heart of [the human] condition. . . God participates in our brokenness, to win us to the offer of healing.” In our own evil time, when hate and cruelty are running wild, sometimes we feel overwhelmed, discouraged, or powerless. But that’s exactly where Jesus comes to join us, not simply to keep us company on the countless crosses of this world, but to transform our sufferings into the seeds of resurrection.
Anonymous “Master of St. Bartholomew,” The Descent from the Cross, Cologne, c. 1480-1510 (detail).
The title is from a hymn by W. H. Vanstone, “Morning Glory, Starlit Sky” (585 in the Episcopal Hymnal 1982)
The religious imagineer 