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A friend, priest, and mentor of mine once said, “I will tell you what draws me to Christianity.” She said this while leading a confirmation class that Andrew and I were taking, in 2005, the year we were confirmed as Episcopalians. “I will tell you what draws me to Christianity,” she said. “At the center of Christianity, right at the center, is a dead innocent.”
I will never forget this. She is so right, so dead-on, so undeniably correct about this. You and I may love Christianity for many reasons. We may love Anglican/Episcopal Christianity in particular for our gorgeous prayers, our lovely Nativity carols, our open-minded embrace of disagreement and creative tension, our global appeal as a profoundly inclusive, thoughtful, and innovative Communion. These are all good things. But we must never forget that at the very center of our faith is a dead innocent.
This of course is what upsets Peter and the other disciples in their conversation with Jesus that we hear today. He tells them that he will be killed, and he says so in the shadow of Caesarea Philippi, an imperial city, heightening the contrast between himself and the usual human ruler. At the center of our faith, then, we have a ruler, king, and savior who is innocent, but submits to the terrible death of a criminal.
We may share Peter’s resistance to this. But we may also see that our faith, with a dead innocent at the center, is exactly what this hard world needs. Twenty years after 9/11, a terrifying day in which the death of innocents was displayed in a literally spectacular way, we look around us today and we see countless thousands of other dead innocents: myriad victims of many wars; streams of refugees fleeing in terror from environmental devastation; refrigerator trucks parked behind morgues to store covid victims; grim press conferences following mass shootings.
If our faith is worth anything at all, then it needs to look directly into the truth of massive human suffering and death in our own time. It needs to look directly into that truth, and it needs to say something.
I spoke with a parent this week whose child is near adulthood now. This young woman is not shy about expressing her anger that the generations ahead of her are leaving the world in pretty bad shape. She recognizes clearly that many of our actions—and inactions—are threatening to make the air she breathes literally unbreathable by the time she is the age her mother is right now. I have nineteen nieces and nephews, four more on Andrew’s side, and two great nephews and a great niece: 26 human beings, with another great-someone on the way, due to be born next spring. My faith must speak to them. I have authentic hope that their future is bright, but I have to show them why that hope truly is authentic. Our faith does have a good answer. We do have something to say to our children.
We actually have three things to say.
First, God the Creator sees all this suffering, and is not merely present as a passive observer. God saw the suffering of the Israelite slaves in Egypt, and God acted powerfully to free them, and lead them home. Their story of liberation endures down the ages as a sharp critique of the worldly powers that hold innocent people in bondage. (That includes all worldly powers, including the U.S. government, and the modern Israeli government, too.) The deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt fired the imaginations of the 19th-century American slaves. Christians today share a calling with our contemporary Jewish and Muslim cousins: made in the image of God the Creator, all of us are called to see human suffering, understand its true causes, and confront injustice with courage.
Second, God the Spirit moves powerfully to join us one to another, and to send us out as agents of justice and peace in this world. The Spirit descended on the disciples at Pentecost, and that fire and that wind has never ceased. We are driven together as one Body. And we are then driven out to help solve these problems. The Spirit moves not only with a gentle breeze; She shines not only in our serene altar candles. She also rushes, She blazes, She drives us out. I see the Spirit’s power in many successful efforts to save lives. I see many good people making a real difference. The Spirit’s wind carries me close to you, and together we here at Grace join countless others in this global, universal work.
And finally, God the Son is found in the bodies of the innocent dead themselves. Every victim of climate-change chaos; every desperate child in Gaza and Afghanistan and Haiti and New Orleans; every Texan woman without access to reproductive healthcare; every intubated ICU patient; every single suffering human being reveals to us the face of Christ. Christ is our great Companion, raising us to life by going through suffering and death with us, not around or above it. We do not preach magic, telling our children that what they see falling apart around them will be okay, don’t worry, it’ll all work out somehow. And we do not preach escapism, telling our children that this world doesn’t matter and everything will be great in heaven. No. Those are heresies. We tell our children that Christ himself languishes in the wake of Hurricane Ida; Christ himself suffers the illness caused by vaccine resistance; Christ himself is injured and incarcerated, gunned down in the street, heartbroken by grief, paralyzed by fear, torn apart by violence and ignorance.
God the Son, embodied by all suffering people, is praised by Julian of Norwich, our sister in the faith who lived in the fourteenth century, when the bubonic plague raged across Europe. In that time of massive suffering and rampant fear (a time so unnervingly similar to our own) Julian sang, “All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.” She was not delirious or deluded. She understood that the power of Resurrection rises up first in the shattered bodies of the innocent dead. She understood where and how God is acting in this world.
Hear this Good News: Christ is risen; Christ is risen indeed, alleluia. All who die are held in God’s embrace, and whenever we break bread here to be strengthened, and whenever we go from here to rebuild this world, we join our beloved dead to proclaim Christ’s death and resurrection.
That same priest and mentor who told me how Christianity holds at its center a dead innocent: she also told us that years earlier, she had experienced the wrenching loss of a child. For me, this lends her theological perspective even more power. And that, finally, is one of my greatest sources of authentic hope, for hope in our faith, for hope for the future of the world, for hope in God: the Christians who teach us about innocent death and God’s redemptive re-creation of the world—they are often those among us who have seen devastating death firsthand. The first Christians watched Christ himself die, on the cross. And our calendar of saints is filled with others who know exactly what they’re talking about, because they too have seen the worst that this world has to offer.
They have experienced devastating loss, and they have been gripped with tremendous fear about their future. But they also have seen God’s power at work. Not magical wizardry, and not a castle in the sky: they have seen God’s power working among and within them to re-create this world.
Peter and the others, after their initial resistance, came to see Christ for who he is, took up his Cross, and bore it on their own shoulders. By the power of God the Creator, they saw and understood innocent suffering; by the power of the Holy Spirit, they acted with skill and confidence; and by the power of God the Son, they identified Christ himself in the innocent victims of injustice and oppression, and came to their aid.
They give us this hope, this authentic hope, this genuine faith that in Christ, death is swallowed up in victory. May we all take up this Cross alongside them, so that we too can sing to our children, with glad and glorious assurance, the song of today’s psalmist:
“Our God is full of compassion.
The Lord watches over the innocent;
I was brought low, and God saved me.
For you have rescued my life from death,
my eyes from tears, and my feet from stumbling;
I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.”
***
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 116:1-8
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38
Preached on the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 19B), September 12, 2021, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.