When Love Shows Up: Weekly Reflections about God’s Presence

WLSU, Believing Now - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Soon people began to arrive for the 9 o'clock service, which is our largest. They piled into our parish hall, all smiles and grace and understanding and playfulness. I was overwhelmed. This day started in disaster and was met with grace by every single person involved. There were so many opportunities for panic, sadness, or frustration - and I'm sure those feelings were felt here and there, but the overriding sense was that we have got this, that we've got each other, that we know what's important.
And I know. I know we have insurance. I know what ended up happening was a tiny little thing: A pipe had burst. There was some water damage that was not catastrophic, that would be repaired, that would be covered. And it does not compare to the damage and disaster that has befallen our siblings in Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee after the recent hurricanes. It amounted to a minor inconvenience. We are safe and sound and will be back to normal so quickly. We are a fortunate group. Even in our misfortune. We are privileged by our resources and insurance.
At the same time, our response to the trouble we faced was revelatory to me. I say revelatory, though it's worth noting it didn't reveal anything to me I didn't already know about God. But we can forget so easily how love and grace work to transform our lives. I already knew how grateful I was to have the people of this church in my life, to be a part of theirs. I already knew that they are a good-hearted, flexible, loving, understanding, and resourceful bunch. None of this was new. But it was revealed to me all over again.
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WLSU, Your Voice, Your Place - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

That word enfranchised might seem out of place in a spiritual conversation. It's a word we find in the political realm. We sometimes forget that political matters have spiritual elements and spiritual matters affect our politics. Enfranchisement in our current context is mostly about voting, but the primary thrust of the word is that a person's presence and dignity is acknowledged as part of the larger community. They are not shut out. They are not kept quiet. This is what Jesus is doing in his healing. When he calls the woman daughter, he is publicly incorporating her into the shared life of her people. She is enfranchised, and that is spiritual and political at the same time.
I cannot unequivocally tell you that Jesus likes democracy. It never comes up in his teaching. What I can tell you is that Jesus is serious about leveling the playing field, about every person's life mattering. He is serious about giving voice and dignity to the people he meets. The values Jesus embodies are, I believe, consistent with what we value about democracy. Everyone has a voice. Everyone has a place in the conversation. Nobody left out.
I do not live in a democracy. I live in Ohio.
Ohio, a place I have come to love very much, is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. You're welcome to do a Google image search of our districts if you are a fan of visual comedy. But for context I will tell you this: Ohio is 42% Republican and 40% Democrat, with 18% stating no affiliation. If people all voted on party lines and that 18% miraculously all voted Republican, you might feasibly expect our representation to be 60% Republican, 40% Democrat. In reality, 75% of our representatives are Republican. 75%. Our districts - which have been ruled unconstitutional but somehow still stand - are intentionally designed to engineer a one party supermajority.
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WLSU, Unwelcome Beliefs - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

When we wrote that line, about 7 years ago, I thought I knew what we meant by "every". In my mind, I was thinking primarily about Republicans and Democrats, and a good mix of independents that included moderates, libertarian types, and some socialists for good measure. This was the scope of my thinking, and I thought that was pretty broad. That was everyone.
It feels naïve now. Sunny, even. It's not that I didn't realize other ideologies and perspectives existed - it's that I assumed the rest to be so extreme as not to need to be acknowledged or discussed. But in the intervening years, Christian Nationalism has emerged as an apparently acceptable perspective. Many legislators openly and comfortably proclaim themselves as Christian Nationalists. Shockingly, frighteningly, it is not a disqualifying proclamation.
It should be.
Christian Nationalism is antithetical both to America and to Christianity.
Christian Nationalism insists on creating legislation based on one particular interpretation of religious belief. That is patently unamerican. Our country has in its founding documents a refusal to establish a state religion. You will sometimes hear adherents to Christian Nationalism try to sidestep this by talking about "Christian values" as the backbone of America's creation. This is also patently false. For all its faults, our country's desire to exist as a place free from religious coercion is imaginative, noble, and courageous.
America is not a Christian nation. We were not founded by Christians, but by a mixture of Christians, Deists, Atheists, Agnostics, and Unitarians. Our founding documents are not Christian. While some of the values they promote may be compatible with Christian thought, they are not themselves inherently Christian. Pretending otherwise is just that: Make-believe.
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WLSU, Permission to Disagree - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

"So are
there other Republicans at the church?" he asked me. And I laughed.
I laughed
because it was a great question, asked directly, and without a hint of irony or
cynicism. My breakfast companion was sitting across from me at a local diner
when he asked this question. He is getting to know Church of the Redeemer, but he's
been an Episcopalian for his whole life - maybe longer. And as a Republican, he
knows the drill. There are, for the record, plenty of Republicans at Redeemer,
and in the Episcopal Church. 39% of Episcopalians, to be precise, identify as
Republican. Not a small number. But compared to, say evangelical Christians,
56% of which identify as Republican, Episcopal culture simply feels a little
more politically liberal. Plus, Cincinnati is a Democratic leaning city in a
Republican leaning state. So that skews our congregation's numbers a bit as
well.
I laughed
because, it was a lovely, vulnerable question. We live in such a heated and
politically divided time. And I won't even bemoan that. I think it makes sense
that things are heated and divided. I don't like it. But I think I get it. To
many people - myself included - it feels as if the soul of our country is currently
on the line, and how we navigate these next few years will be profoundly
decisive. At the same time, we are getting more and more accustomed to living
in self-selected bubbles based on common interest or affinity. So if he's
getting to know Redeemer, he wants to know if it's a bubble. And that is a
vulnerable question, because he's sitting there over his eggs benedict asking,
"Is there a place for me?" It takes courage to wonder that aloud, and it filled
my heart with love.
I laughed, because,
and I told him this immediately, not two minutes earlier, another Republican parishioner
had just texted me to congratulate me on my 8th anniversary of
ministry at Redeemer. "See?" I joked, "Republicans!"
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WLSU, Christian American - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Last week I insisted that, as a Christian who is American, I must understand myself as Christian first - that my Christian identity supersedes my Americanness. There are, of course, problems with this assertion.
The first problem might just be that it makes me sound like a radical. We are currently in a time when a sizable portion of American leaders are working to remake American culture in a way that devalues and endangers women, minorities, LGBTQ+ persons, and immigrants - and they're doing it in Jesus' name. Many of these leaders argue that this is a Christian nation, that it was founded on Christian ideals, and by Christian men. None of those things are actually true, but they have been repeated so regularly that they seem to have seeped into our collective consciousness as being self-evident.
Nevertheless, in Jesus' name, many Americans are seeking to force their understanding of Christian living on others. I believe this actively goes against who Jesus is and what he teaches. Every time Jesus gets angry in the stories we have of him, it's because he's witnessing leaders misuse their religious authority to harm others. Jesus is not a theocrat.
Some people believe that commandment about taking the Lord's name in vain means you shouldn't say "Oh my God" or exclaim "Jesus Christ." But the real blasphemy is harming others in Jesus' name, using God as the buttress upon which you reinforce your own political power and social standing.
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WLSU, I Love My Country - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I remember putting that flag up and thinking, "I'm home."
America was something about which I was religious. I wouldn't have said that at the time. I would not have acknowledged that. But I could not only not fathom being anything other than American - I could not imagine that any other country could be as good as mine. To love my country was not just about affection or allegiance. To love America was to consciously believe that it was the greatest country on earth, that there had never been a country and never would be a country as powerful as smart, as resourceful, as successful, as free - as Good as the USA. To love my country meant to know what was wrong with other countries. To love my country was to feel sorry for people who weren't American, who didn't know what it was like to be so free, to be so successful, to save the world so many times.
The line between patriotism and nationalism is sometimes razor thin, isn't it?

WLSU, Our Children - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

What does it look like to value our children?
How do we care for them? What is our responsibility to our children?
I have been thinking about this a lot. And I want to say this very clearly: I don't just mean my responsibility for the children I call mine. I also do not mean our responsibility to children because of what they will mean in the future when they are grown up. I mean our shared responsibility for the children among us right now. What is their value? What is their place in our community? And what is our responsibility to them? All of them, by the way. All of them.
I am a parent. I have three children, and I confess that much of my wondering about this has been based on my experience of raising them. More specifically, I am raising them in public schools in Cincinnati. And of course, that pushes me to think regularly about our city's commitment to children. In the aftermath of yet another school shooting, I wonder if we value their safety, their very lives.
And I confess, I wonder if my children were not in public schools, would I care so much? And if I didn't have children at all, would I care the way I care now?
Jesus didn't have children. Jesus didn't have a wife.
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WLSU, Waiting (Tables) for the Lord - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Aside from spilling beer down someone's back or getting an order wrong, when waiters screw up is when we forget our role: We can think it's our job to please everyone. We can think we are supposed to be the diner's best friend, or that people came to the restaurant to see us. Contrarily, we can treat the whole thing as transactional. We can get snippy and short with the kitchen. I would take myself too seriously and get self-righteous. One time the manager pulled me aside and sat me down because I yelled at him and the line cooks, "Well SOMEONE oughta care about the tables, and apparently it won't be any of YOU." That's right: I got put into time out for being too self-righteous.
Waiting tables for the Lord - has similar pitfalls. What I noticed when I went on sabbatical was just how much I was carrying. And some of that is just part of the job - there's a lot of emotional labor in the facilitating of relationships. But some of what I was carrying was because I was forgetting my role. Thinking I was supposed to please everyone, or that I was supposed to be everyone's best friend, or that I was the star of the show. I can treat my role as transactional too - not in the sense of trying to get you to tip me - but in the sense that I can think that I have to earn your approval by doing enough things just right. And in both the restaurant and the church I can get too serious and self-righteous.
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WLSU, Indoctrination - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Sometimes I hear people say that they don't take their children to church because they don't want to indoctrinate them. They want their children to make up their own minds about religion when they get older. So I think this is the place for me to say that I want to indoctrinate my children. I believe indoctrination is normal and good, and I am done pretending otherwise.
I believe in indoctrinating my children. And I'm going to take it a step further and say that whether or not you even have children, you believe in indoctrinating children too.
If you insist that children go to school, you are indoctrinating them into the idea that education is important. If you insist they try hard, you are indoctrinating them into the idea that effort matters. If you ever stop a child from hitting someone and say something like, "We don't hit," that's indoctrination. Can you imagine a parent saying that a child should decide for themselves whether or not they want to learn?
So when we make our kids go to church, that is indoctrination. And when we stay home, that is also indoctrination.
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WLSU, In My Bones - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Did you know that our bones are constantly breaking themselves down and building themselves back up again? You probably did know that. Most of you are better at knowing scientific things than me - it's not my strong suit. But I learned this about bones as an adult and it really blew me away. In the simplest terms, you have these things called osteoclasts that are constantly dissolving your old bone tissue. Meanwhile you also have osteoblasts that spend their time building new bone tissue. This is happening inside you constantly. It's a very natural and normal thing - the breaking down and building up.
We all understand bones in terms of the stability and structure they bring to our bodies. So, at first for me it was counterintuitive to hear that part of their healthy process was that they were breaking down all the time. For most of my life, I have associated stability and structure with something like immobility. You want your house built on a strong foundation. And we often find great comfort in the idea of changelessness, of things remaining the same. When life deviates from our expectations, we seek to get back to normal, to something that resembles stasis because that feels safe. As the old hymn proclaims, "Like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved."
But it turns out I'm moving all the time. These little invisible things within my very body are moving, tearing my foundation down and building it back up again all day every day. These strong bones are anything but static and immovable, and my desire to understand that has helped me learn to accept that change is inevitable.
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