Mediant*
A couple weeks ago, when I got to the office, I noticed that the pride flag hanging on the porch had been unceremoniously torn down. It’s not really surprising per se—I think it’s the second or third time it’s happened since I came to Ascension just under two years ago. But it was discouraging.
Families are easily one of the greatest blessings about human life and simultaneously one of the greatest sources of grief and pain. Those of you who have heard my own story know that I am estranged from my birth family. Human sins like homophobia have wreaked havoc and driven a wedge between myself and the people I “ought” to have the closest ties to. And I know from conversations with many of you in moments of crisis, that alongside the hopeful joy which you experience with your loved ones, many of you also carry deep wounds inflicted by family.
If you’ve been around Ascension recently and heard me talk about my childhood, you’ve probably gleaned that I was an eccentric kid… sometimes intentionally so. So it kind of checks out that in about the 4th grade I declared that my favorite book was not one of the Harry Potter books my peers like, or even Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but The Silmarillion—the frankly too-dense-for-a-4th-grader anthology of myths that JRR Tolkien wrote as part of the backstory for his Middle Earth and The Lord of the Rings.
I am not naturally good at keeping promises. Like many alcoholics, I learned a pattern early on of looking out for myself, and only myself (despite my good intentions a lot of the time). It’s that tragically familiar pattern that lies behind so much of the strife and division in our world. I learned to over-promise and under-deliver—to set my well-being in a fake competition with the well-being of others. By God’s grace I’ve grown on this front, little by little. But it can still be hard for me to “get” the promises of God that our opening collect asks for today:
Okay, so: I’m a huge Star Trek fan. Growing up in a very Fundamentalist environment, I wasn’t allowed to watch a ton of TV growing up. But my parents were (inexplicably) major Trekkies. So Star Trek—particularly The Next Generation—played an enormous role in my childhood development.
“Man, Christianity is metal as f—!” I won’t finish that sentence here, but you get the gist. I laughed out loud when I got that text from my friend Jay. He meant it as a compliment. Jay didn’t grow up religious at all; so I was explaining Lent and Ash Wednesday to him and telling him about the reminder of our own sins and mortality that we gather today to mark our foreheads with. And he was a fan.
It’s somewhere between a grimace and a look of pity—the face people make when they learn that I grew up in churches that took pride in labels like ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘Evangelical.’ And it’s completely understandable given that the face of Christianity for many in America is the fire-and-brimstone Evangelical preacher proselytizing on street corners. There are some things I do actually value about my Evangelical childhood. I got to know the Bible really well and learned to pray off-the-cuff. But the Evangelical approach to “sharing the good news” was not one of those gifts.
“Are you free? Are you really free? How do you know?” It was a helluva way to start a college class. And when my professor opened the PoliSci seminar by basically asking us to define the concept of freedom, at first I braced myself for a heady lecture divorced from reality. But while the question may have been framed in big, sweeping terms, the discussion that followed actually revealed pretty quickly that freedom is far from some vague abstraction without any tangible meaning for our lives.
