Mediant*
I hesitated before striking the match.
I was standing by the firepit in a friends’ back yard. In the firepit there was an untidy pile of photos and journals and a few other flammable mementos from a particularly dark chapter in my life. The chapter had come to a close, but I still carried the remnants with me—both figuratively and literally. And as long as I held onto these physical reminders, they kept drawing my gaze back to the past.
I wasn’t looking for Jesus, when I first found myself in an Episcopal church. I wasn’t looking for my eyes to be opened or my outlook to be changed. At least, not consciously. My brother-in-law invited us to come along one Sunday while we were visiting. Really, I think I went mostly out of politeness. I was in early recovery. I had converted to Islam, and I was quite serious about it. And honestly, stepping foot in a church again for the first time since leaving behind my fundamentalist Evangelical upbringing—it was disorienting. But I went. And I’m glad I did. Because that day, I saw something marvelous.
The Bible is a messy story. And I don’t just mean in the ways that are inherent to ancient texts composed by numerous authors over hundreds of years: the ambiguous timelines, the conflicting narratives, the missing details. I mean that the Bible is a story of mess. Pretty uniquely among the sacred texts of the world’s religions, the Bible places the flaws of its characters front and center. Even the ones that play important roles as models of faithfulness, like Abraham last week or Moses this week, aren’t actually consistently admirable people, or even slightly-flawed human beings who are on a steady trajectory of moral improvement. They screw up—sometimes quite spectacularly—again and again.
On my drives between Stillwater and St. Paul, I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune. Early in the book, a new ruling family arrives to take control of the desert planet Arrakis, and in one of the courtyards, their son finds 20 date palms. Now, date palms have deep roots that burrow into the soil to sustain the tree and produce sweet fruit even in the desert. But there is no moisture on this fictional planet. So these trees—a symbol of power and pride—are kept alive by constant irrigation, each soaking up massive amounts of water. These trees could not survive without this pointless striving of humans watering them. No matter how far the trees stretched out their roots, they would wither in the harsh realities of their world, like the prophet Jeremiah’s desert shrub withering in the heat.
I regret to inform you that you are children of God.
I say that mostly tongue-in-cheek. But only mostly. Being children of God is indeed a beautiful thing. But we do ourselves and the world a great disservice if we turn it into a platitude—a self-congratulatory truism that papers over the distinctiveness of our vocation as Christians, replacing it with vague humanism and generic good feeling.
“So what?” I’m not sure how old I was—maybe 6?—but I was like a broken record in the Sunday School classroom that day. God bless the teacher, because I remember meeting every answer with the same response: “So what? So what? So what?” Looking back as an adult, I can only imagine how perplexing it mus have been. What on earth are you supposed to do with a kid who keeps hanging up the lesson by asking why it matters in the first place?
But it’s a question that continues to be relevant into adulthood, even if it isn’t usually asked with such childlike bluntness. So what? Why bother? Why bother with church and the Bible and Sacraments and pledge drives? Why does any of this matter? It matters because the Gospel offers what is really a pretty provocative idea: that there is hope.
