The Rev. Dr. Annie Lawson
St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Detroit
Feast of Pentecost

This is a message: A message of love

Love that moves from the inside out, Love that never grows tired

I come to you with strange fire

This sermon is indeed inspired by the words of Amy Ray from the Indigo Girls' first album in 1987.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them

Not tongues OF fire. Tongues "as of fire." Tongues that at first glance appear to be fire, but on further examination, are not of the same substance, but of a similar substance. Tongues that fall into that uncanny valley where they seem like fire, but are somehow off.

I come to you with strange fire

And strange fire is a scary thing.

In Leviticus, we read: Now Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, each took his censer, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered strange fire before the Lord, such as he had not commanded them And fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.

Holy Scripture is a record of humankind's wrestling with the divine, an account of our attempts to find meaning in the records of our existence. Nadab and Abihu made strange fire and offered it to God, and they were consumed by flame. And so humankind took the lesson to fear strange fire. 

When scary, brutal things happen in the world, we don't want to tell a story that they are mere chance. So those of us who interpret scripture told stories attributing their sudden death to an angry God. Because as dreadful as that is, imagining a wrathful God scared the storytellers less than a story in which the world was chaotic and God was not in control.

In this story, we are taught to fear that which was _like_ the holy, but uneasily dissimilar. To draw a sharp distinction between the holy and the profane; between the unclean and the clean. If the sin of Nadab and Abihu was to offer strange fire, the lesson humankind, led by those who would call themselves religious leaders -- the lesson we took away was to eschew strange fire. To cut off any expression that is like the canonical examples, and yet somehow eerily dissimilar. We mercenaries of the shrine, the ones who draw our pay by interpreting the divine record and teach God's people what they ought to do have seized upon this account to draw border lines between who is in and who is out. If your offering matches the canonical example, you are in. But to any who find themselves not quite in the proper box, our leaders have ordered them cast into the outer darkness, to protect the purity of the holy. Anathema to those whose offering is strange fire.

The Pentecost event is here to tell us that maybe we took away the wrong lesson.

In the third chapter of Exodus, the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. In the second chapter of the second of book the Kings, Elijah was taken up to heaven by a fire in the strange form of a chariot and horses of fire. And now on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples in the form of tongues somehow like and yet not like fire. Strange fire is not unholy, not unclean, not foreign to God. Strange fire burns with the motion of love. Strange fire is indeed of God.

But if strange fire is holy, why then were Nadab and Abihu condemned and consumed? If offering strange fire to God is not inherently wrong, if their sin was not improper worship that offended the divine by being like and yet not the same as the divinely appointed offering, what did they do wrong? This is no idle question, for we hope to avoid their fate.

The Pentecost event and the subsequent revelations in Acts are a redemption of strange fire in Acts 2, of unclean food in Acts 10, of those whose sexuality is rejected in Acts 8, if the category of "unclean" or "abomination" is categorically rejected when God tells Peter in the 10th chapter of Acts, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane."

But this is very much NOT a proclamation that anything goes. God's judgment is not removed. In Acts 5 we have spontaneous death meted out by the Lord just like in Leviticus 10. When Ananias and Sapphira sold a piece of property and kept back some of the proceeds, bringing only a part and laying it at the apostles' feet, claiming it to be the whole thing, they immediately fell down and died!

Perhaps what Nadab and Abihu did was the same as what Ananias and Sapphira did centuries later: they tried to hold power over God. Idolatry is not the worship of false gods, but rather trying to control the power of God. Not surrendering to the power of God, but rather trying to force God to accept our agenda. So many of the ancient rites involving incense and strange fire were idolatrous rituals that attempted to manipulate the divine, to dictate to God what the divine power must do, because humans cranked the handle, we expect God to jump up on cue like a mighty Jack-in-the-box to do our bidding. When Ananias and Sapphira retained money that they said they were offering to God, they claimed control over the divine agenda. This goes to the heart of idolatry: attempts by human kind to invoke divine power for our own ends.

Perhaps the Pentecost is to redirect our understanding of Nadab and Abihu. We ought not call offerings of strange fire unclean. Rather, attempts to manipulate the divine are wrong. But what cost has come to those whose offerings of strange fire have been rejected over the centuries? What damage have we gatekeepers done to those whose only offerings they could bring were *like* the canonical examples, but not the same as the canonical examples?

I speak today of those who would stand before God's altar and make a holy offering, an offering of love, an offering brought from the integrity of who God created them to be, who were turned away for so many centuries because they didn't perfectly match the canonical image the church held of what the offering and offerer should look like.

Of Simeon Bachos, the Ethiopian Eunuch who would have been cut off from the assembly of God's people because his body didn't match the canonical norms for gender presentation, and yet whom God commanded Philip to proclaim the Good News and baptize into the Church.

Of the Philadelphia Eleven, whose priestly ministry was rejected by so many because their bodies did not match canonical expectations about gender roles.

Of gay and lesbian people whose offering of love the church so long refused to bless because their bodies did not match canonical expectations about pairings.

Of trans folx today whose very existence is strange fire, so similar to the canonical examples, and yet in that uncanny valley that for so long we have been taught to suppress, to eschew as strange fire.

I come to you with strange fire 

I make an offering of love 

The incense of my soil is burned 

By the fire in my blood 

I come with a softer answer 

To the questions that lie in your path 

I want to harbor you from the anger 

Find a refuge from the wrath

For the Pentecost event tells us that strange fire is not unholy; rebelling against God is unholy. It is not in offering our strange fire, but in trying to suppress who God created us to be, that we commit the sin of Nadab and Abihu. Sin is not being our strange selves whom God created and proclaimed as very good. Sin is trying to control that strange fire and fit God into the box of normality. Sin is calling profane that spark of strange fire in ourselves that God has made clean.

When you learn to love yourself 

You will dissolve all the stones that are cast 

Now you will learn to burn the icing sky 

To melt the waxen mask 

I said to have the gift of true release 

This is a peace that will take you higher 

Oh I come to you with my offering 

I bring you strange fire

The Pentecost event shows us that while the attempt to control God is not holy, the strange fire that God continues to create is indeed very very good. The Pentecost event shows that indeed, God shows no partiality to those who perfectly match the canonical examples of holiness, but that in every people anyone who worships God and does justice is indeed acceptable. The Pentecost event shows us that even those of us whose offering must be strange fire, as long as we serve the Lord, are indeed agents of God's holiness in the world.

This is a message 

A message of love 

Love that moves from the inside out 

Love that never grows tired 

I come to you with strange fire

The Rev. Dr. Annie Lawson
St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Detroit
Feast of the Ascension

The Prayer Book lists Ascension Day second on the list of Principal Feasts of the Church. And yet it falls on a Thursday, so many churches around the world, including us this week, don't gather to celebrate this highest-importance feast on its actual date. But what's the big deal? What are we celebrating on Ascension Thursday? Why does this day matter?

There's a fundamental tension in Christianity. We believe in an incarnate God, who was born and dwelt among us. We believe in a bodily resurrection, where Jesus came back from the dead not as a spirit, specter, or ghost, but as an embodied soul, a living human being, with physical scars from his crucifixion and breath in his lungs, who ate and drank and embraced his followers. A living human being who can never die again, who can never become a disembodied spirit. If Christmas is about the incarnation and Easter about the resurrection, they both celebrate a world in which God, in the person of Jesus Christ, walks around us still wholly God yet also a human being with a physical body.

So where is Jesus? If incarnation and resurrection are at the core of our belief system, and they are indeed, then the incarnate, resurrected God should be here. Like Thomas, we should be able to touch his hands and his side, and embrace our Lord and God. We too should be able to walk by sight, and not by faith. Because if we can't, it rather puts a damper on this bodily-resurrected, incarnate God of ours, no?

Despite our faith in Christmas and Easter, we live in a Pentecost world, a world marked by God as Spirit. We walk by faith, and not by sight, and depend on the gifts of an unseen Holy Spirit to perform our ministry in the world. In this Pentecost world, we are called to see Christ in the least of us, and to be the hands of Christ to one another. This understanding of God is no less real, but more spiritualized -- the ordinary people, things, and institutions of the world are imbued with the Spirit of God to take on divine significance. In this Pentecost world, the Body of Christ less resembles a particular literal human body and becomes more elastic, more conceptual. The Body of Christ can be the Church, a consecrated loaf of bread, the poor, a particular person in need, a particular person doing God's will -- all at once, and in many places simultaneously. That's a different reality than seeing a person called Jesus standing on a particular hillside outside Jerusalem.

Which is why the Feast of the Ascension isn't optional. This isn't something we can afford to skip. This is the bridge between the Pentecost reality we live and the Christmas and Easter faith we profess. At its core, Ascension is an acknowledgement of this juxtaposition: Jesus used to be a person who walked around on the earth like other human beings, and continues to really be present with us, but our experience of Jesus' presence isn't the same as the disciples' experience. Encountering Jesus after the Ascension is not the same experience as encountering him before the Ascension. He was with us then, he is with us now, but something is different.

And really, that's the heart of this feast. Artists have tried to capture the moment over the centuries, but the fact is, it's a mystery. We don't understand how Jesus "went away" while simultaneously remaining with us. All we know is that that the Body of Christ, to Mary, was a baby she gave birth to. The Body of Christ, to Joseph of Arimathea, was a dead human body he took down from the Cross and laid in a grave. The Body of Christ, to the women at the tomb on Easter morning, was missing from the grave, until they recognized that the man, alive, speaking to them, was, in fact, the Jesus they were seeking. To all of them, the Body of Christ referred to a particular human body. And the Body of Christ to us today is just as real as it was to them, but it's not one particular human body. It's a much more elastic concept. Something is different.

Living in this post-Ascension world, it would be easy to assume it was always this way, and in doing so, to deny the physical reality of the incarnation. Ascension is important as part of our creation story, part of our account of how the world came to be this way. Because once upon a time, before the ascension, Jesus had a human body like other human bodies. 

Given that today is June 1, the first day of the month in which we celebrate the uprising 56 years ago that marked such an important turning point in the liberation of queer people in this country and the world, I need to point out that part of the reason the incarnation is so important is because yes Jesus took on a human body, but he did it in a particularly queer way.

There is a strong tendency in human history to sacralize heteronormativity. In agricultural societies, reproduction is literally the source of wealth. The more offspring your plants and herds have, the richer you are. The more offspring your humans have, the bigger your armies. The processes by which plants, animals, and humans reproduce and make more plants, animals, and humans had elements very apparent to human observers and behind-the-scenes components that sometimes worked and sometimes did not that could easily be attributed to the divine. The success or failure of these reproductive processes determined the survival, wealth, and military strength of human civilizations. It is no wonder, given the economic importance of reproduction, the mystical ecstasies associated with it, and the mysterious and unpredictable processes that followed that sometimes did and sometimes did not lead to new life entering the world, that so many ancient societies practiced fertility cults, worshiping the acts of plant, animal, and human reproduction as the processes by which the gods granted wealth. Scripture attests disapprovingly to Hebrew and later Christian encounters with other religions practicing ritual sexual acts that often accompanied their worship of the gods, a practice in which the surrounding religions literally called heterosexual reproductive acts sacred.

Despite the centuries of heteronormativity creeping into Christianity, it is urgent, especially today, to point out that first Judaism and later Christianity is an explicit rejection of the fertility cults that culturally surrounded it. Judaism and Christianity condemned the surrounding fertility cults' sacral heteronormativity as idolatry. The fertility cults we reject are the clearest example of making that which is heterosexual not just the norm but the vehicle by which humankind access the blessings of the divine. When we proclaim that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary, Mary's virginity is not urgent because sexuality is icky, as later centuries of Christians have tried to assert, but in its cultural context, the virgin birth is urgent as a rejection of the fertility cults surrounding Jesus's birth's worship of heterosexuality and its link to wealth and power. Fertility cults assert that the heterosexual copulation of plants, animals, and humans are how humanity accesses the divinely bestowed wealth and power. Christianity is first and foremost a rejection of the worship of wealth and power, and the rejection of the worship of heteronormative sexuality is actually core to what made and makes Christianity countercultural. When heteronormativity creeps into Christianity, it is really a denial of Christ's good news, an apostasy akin to the so-called prosperity Gospel. In fact, heteronormativity, the prosperity gospel, and the fertility cults of old are fundamentally the same error. But we do not worship the powerful, nor do we worship the processes of accumulating wealth; we believe our incarnate God chose to live his earthly life among the poor, the downtrodden, the outcast. Christianity, at its heart, is a fundamentally queer religion, and to deny that is to miss the point of Jesus's incarnation. Anathema sit!

The authors of the ancient hymn the "Te Deum" understood this. The hymn contains the lines "When you became man to set us free / you did not shun the Virgin's womb." In the expectation of anyone that associates reproduction with the source of wealth and power, which is to say, any agriculturalist, a Virgin's womb is an unclean, improper place to look for reproduction. Heifer cattle neither give milk nor increase the size of one's flocks. Human virgins are similarly un-reproductive -- which is to say, without economic (and military) value. But Jesus willingly took human form outside the heteronormative source of reproduction -- the source of wealth and power. In rejection of fertility cults' embrace of the heteronormative process of wealth, the incarnation is a fundamentally queer phenomenon. Ascension Day is urgent because it affirms the incarnation while acknowledging we live in a world that doesn't have that incarnate God walking around the way the world once saw God walk around.

Our lessons for Ascension Thursday give us not one but two accounts of the Ascension event. These two accounts, like many accounts in the Bible, conflict with each other. But these particular accounts' conflict is especially jarring because they are attributed to the same author. The Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles both come from the same writer or school of writers. The central message of the stories is the same in both accounts: Jesus was "there," and then, rather abruptly, he wasn't "there" in the same way anymore. One might even be tempted to say he was gone. On that fundamental, the stories agree. But why would Luke tell two different accounts of the story?

In the gospel account, this is a happy ending. The disciples get it. Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures. They walked out of Jerusalem with him, he blessed them, he disappeared, they praised God and worshipped Jesus, then went back into the city with great joy, continually blessing God in the temple. And they lived happily ever after. What a spectacular finish to the Good News according to St. Luke.

And then there's the Acts account. The author of the Acts account claims to be the same author of the gospel account, but in Acts they retell the story with some key differences. Again, the disciples gather with Jesus, but this time, rather than having divinely granted understanding of scripture, they show Jesus they clearly don't get the meaning of scripture. After everything: all Jesus' preaching, and healings, and passion, and resurrection, they still don't get what it's all about. They ask, "Now is it time to restore the kingdom to Israel?" Jesus' exasperation must have known no limits at that point. After all they'd seen and been through, they still expected he was about to build a royal palace. That the Kingdom of God would look like the Kingdom of David. And then, Jesus ascends. In the Acts account, the disciples respond not with joy, but with confusion. It takes some angelic explanation so they can figure out not to just stand there staring at the sky wondering where Jesus went, and the angels assure them that Jesus is coming back.

The thing about these two stories is that despite the fact that they say different things, they could both be true. The Ascension story occupies a liminal place in Luke's account of Christian ministry. It falls at the end of the Gospel. It is also the first story in Acts. This story is the end of something, and the beginning of something else. It marks a fulfillment of one kind of presence of Jesus, and the beginning of another. And yes, it is the source of both consolation and confusion.

If the two accounts emphasize different reactions by the disciples, it is perhaps because both are true. The disciples simultaneously "got it" and were completely baffled. The disciples rejoiced at the fulfillment of Jesus' earthly ministry and were utterly in awe and confusion about what _they_ were to do next. It's not unlike other liminal moments in life: graduation, the birth of a child, getting a job. There's joy and fulfillment and celebration that at last, things have come together and finally make sense. And then, the bewildered realization that now you have to live in that different new world. Now you have to find what comes next after graduation! Now you have to actually take care of this new baby! Now that you've got a job, you actually have to figure out how to do it! Now that Jesus has ascended, he isn't standing there talking to you any more! What comes next beyond the comfortable world you knew? The disciples praised God at the conclusion of the Gospel, and stared into space, lost, at the beginning of Acts. Because this transition from the Christmas/Easter world to the Pentecost one is both awe-inspiring and terrifying.

And so, with great rejoicing and great bewilderment, we celebrate the Feast of the Ascension. We mark the transition from the obvious certainty of a physical person Jesus in the presence of the disciples to a presence that requires a leap to faith to find. We celebrate the fact that Jesus is no longer confined to a hillside in Palestine, but is with us everywhere, even to the ends of the earth. And we wait, with the assurance that again the day will come when we, with our physical bodies, will see the physical person Jesus at the resurrection of the dead. Even so, Lord Jesus quickly come! Amen.