Author Archives: Ophelia

But Scripture and examples from around the world show that grieving is not faithlessness. We can be emotionally honest about what it means to be human and still faithfully love our Creator and neighbor. And grieving is not ingratitude. We can be grateful for what we have and still grieve what we have lost.

The word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek word “apokaluptein,” which means “to uncover or reveal.” And whether we’re ready to accept what we find, these days have uncovered and revealed us.

It’s easy for us to believe that God wants us to suffer if we learned that the suffering we experienced was for our own good. Especially if our own suffering came at the hands of those who instilled our morals in us: our family, our religious leaders, or our government, for example.

Even in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, queer love is steeped in high drama. We can never just get a queer fairy tale or rom com, can we? But such are most of our holy books, a collection of tellings and writings about peoples in unexpected, queer, transgressive, courageous relationship with the Divine.

In this time when we are both afraid and courageous, both closer to death and acutely alive, the choice about how we are going to respond – how we are going to face this specter together – is in our hands. Are we going to uphold the status quo and give in to despair? Or are we going to live like Jesus, establishing community in radical ways, bringing hope, and being Christ today in the hour of our need?

Penal substitutionary atonement says that the violent way that Jesus died was not only unavoidable but necessary because it was God’s plan to absolve us. It ignores the context in which Jesus was killed, because it’s about what God ordained. It ignores the fact that he was tortured and murdered by an empire with seemingly endless power. It was God’s will, so it’s all fine – it’s fair. And why should we fault the empire for carrying out God’s will?

The notion of depravity says that people are like mud – not worth much except for the stray diamond that may or may not be in it. But the belief that we are all made in the image of God says that people are like riverbeds – mixed up together with gold, lined with stones that are beautiful, with water running over us, changing us, shaping us.

The great thing is that none of us fully know God in God’s entirety, but in relationship with each other, we can exchange whispers of the God we’ve spied along the way, kind of like kids carrying notes to each other about something great to come, or like travelers on a long journey, stopping along the way to talk about the foods they’ve eaten or the spices they’ve smelled or the wind they’ve felt at their backs.

We in New England are not people of a low tide. We are not a people stretched too thin. By nature of who we are, by nature of where we’ve been: what we do sends a strong message to the connection: what we do, even more than what we say. 

We don’t rejoice because things have been easy. We don’t rejoice because everything’s fine. In the time of Herod, it is not a recommendation to be joyful – to rejoice. It’s a necessity.