Why are they Worshipping Ashes?

A Reflection on Pentecost and Progressive Christianity

This essay is going to be a reflection on Pentecost. But before I get there I need to share a few background thoughts.

photo credit: sagarkphotography

Setting the Table and Clearing My Throat

I am getting a little bit tired of justifying progressive Christianity, queer-affirmation in the Church, and the phenomenon that is most frequently referred to as “deconstruction”¹. That is not to say that I think it isn’t important work or that I am going to stop engaging in it any time soon. It is more that I want to pay attention to what comes next. Among those of us who have “deconstructed from” conservative forms of Christianity there is often an initial impulse to engage directly in conversation with people who still hold doggedly to the forms of Christianity that we left. We want people to see the questions and lack of compelling answers—whether theological, praxeological, or ethical—that helped us to leave those structures. We who have deconstructed, experience deconstruction as freedom and as movement towards Truth (or at least away from UnTruth) and we want that for others.

As things progress we tend² to also begin to become aware of structural and theological injustices both in society and in the church. This dawning awareness often drives us to engage in political and theological activism of one form or another. And activism again frequently involves engaging with/against those with whom we disagree.

I think all of this is important. I do not want to denigrate any of it and I intend to continue engaging in it. And I want to also say that I am tired. The whole process is…combative even at the best of times when engagement is friendly and respectful. It is also definitionally backwards-facing; deconstruction is an experience of challenging and leaving. And, again, that is not a bad thing, leaving is often necessary and, while we are leaving, attention needs to be paid to the leaving process and the point of our departure. Now, though, I also want to look forward.

And I promise I absolutely will get to the part where I talk about Pentecost.

My Queer Faith

“How do you reconcile celebrating your queerness with your Christianity” is a question I am regularly confronted with. It’s a question that wants me to look backwards. It wants me to start from the assumption that Christianity is hostile to queerness and to then justify my contrary conclusions. That is…awkward for me these days. Granted I have written two essays (HERE & HERE) making Evangelical friendly arguments for why Christians ought to affirm same sex marriage; and I have written an essay, also friendly to Evangelical priors, that trans people ought to be affirmed in our gender identities (HERE); I know how to answer the question from the perspective it demands. The problem is that I no longer occupy that perspective. My own counter-question is rather how a person can reconcile homophobia, transphobia, or aphobia with their Christianity.

I have lived for years as a queer Christian and embracing my queerness has only enhanced my Christianity and the experience of my faith.

I have written about how my faith shaped my experience of coming out HERE but let me say a little more about it now. It is hard to have a full relationship with anyone so long as you are denying, hiding, or avoiding the fullness of who you are. I believe that the long term (the eternal) trajectory of all relationships is towards increased vulnerability and transparency. To be in relationship with someone is to always be getting to know them a little better. We are all persons of infinite complexity and depth and the project of learning to know one another is properly an endless joy. This is also true of God. One deep joy of knowing God is the fathomless depth of the Divine Persons; the Trinity is forever engaged in the delight of knowing (and therefore loving) Their Persons. And we are Known by God. That gaze that pierces all of our shrouds and masks of personae and false selves with absolute pitiless love is the ecstasy of being Known.

As a queer woman, being Known by God could never fit, it was something I couldn’t process until I learned to accept who I am. I sometimes say that, growing up, queerness was impossibly familiar to me. On the one hand queerness fit and described me. But the image of queerness I was given by Evangelicalism and purity culture was twisted. They told me that to be queer was to be selfish, to hate God, to deserve marginalization. I didn’t want to be selfish, I didn’t hate God, and I didn’t want to be marginalized so how could I possibly be queer. This parallels my experience of God prior to coming out. I did experience myself to be in relationship with God but I also experienced God as Knowing a transgender lesbian while I was convinced that I was a straight, cisgender man. Of course if I had been fully conscious of this—I am going to go ahead and call it spiritual dysphoria—then that alone could have cracked my egg³. Consciously I only experienced this as a sort of background sense that something was missing in my relationship with Jesus⁴. Sometimes I would try to identify some as-yet-unconfessed sin, other times I would just try to pray harder. And God is not proud. God did not require anything like perfection in the relationship. God was content to be Known as someone who knew* me for 35 years. My relationship with God was always real; its just that it was limited.

It is only in owning and allowing God to know and Love me in my queerness that that pebble in the shoe of my faith life was finally ejected. Today I can (and do) dance in the presence of God with abandon. Today my prayer life is one of mutual love without barriers, without shame, without telling God to hate what God has always loved and celebrated in me.

Photo credit: Molly Byrom A photo she took of me as a part of her LGBTQ Christian Stories Series

You can Worship the Ashes

At Pentecost the Holy Spirit descended on the followers of Jesus and they were indwelt by Her⁵. Jesus had promised to send “the Advocate” when he left and had told His followers to wait in Jerusalem after His ascension to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Despite the fact that it is one of the less hyped Christian holy days Pentecost is a Big Deal. Pentecost represents the moment that we now think of as the Church Universal began.

Jesus had promised that when his followers received the Holy Spirit; She would “guide [them] into all truth”. Contrary to what so many Christians seem to believe, the revelation of God continued in the work of the Holy Spirit after the ascension of Jesus Christ.

And the first miracle that the Holy Spirit performs is one that expands the scope of the Gospel allowing the Followers of Jesus to be understood by people from across the Roman Empire. And the Holy Spirit keeps showing up to perform that function. In fact throughout the book of Acts we regularly find the Holy Spirit “falling upon” various groups or manifesting in some other way in order to affirm the inclusion of some new class or category of person as members of this community of Followers of the Way⁶ of Jesus.

There is a saying often attributed to Gustav Mahler (though speculations seems to be that he was either quoting or paraphrasing someone else): “Tradition is the handing down of the flame and not the worshipping of ashes"; My Dad drew my attention to it the evening of Pentecost. I think this can be taken to represent so much of what is happening now and the story of the church as a whole.

Are we attending to the flame or are we worshipping the ashes? The tension between the two is real and the temptation to worship ashes is understandable. Ashes are the place where the flame once was⁷. If there never had been a flame there, there would not now be ashes. And we are so committed to sticking with what works. What works, the familiar, the place where we once found life and joy are safe, and secure. The problem is that eventually “the flame” moves on. The Holy Spirit, who showed Her presence as tongue of flame over the heads of the Followers of the Way at Pentecost, spreads; She pushes outward; she does not stay the same; she grows.

The Longest Johns wrote a song that hits the same theme—Ashes. I have no idea whether they wrote it after hearing Mahler’s aphorism or not but the theme is poignantly explored. I hope you will stop to listen to the song and spend some time thinking about the modern Evangelical Church. Here are the lyrics:

Watch that old fire as it flickers and dies
That once blessed the household and lit up our lives
It shone for the friends and the clinking of glasses
I'll tend to the flame, you can worship the ashes

Capture the wild things and bring them in line
And own what was never your right to confine
The lives and the loves and the songs are what matters
I'll tend to the flame, you can worship the ashes

Do you feel heavy? Your eyes drop with grief
Your spirit is wild and your suffering is brief
So never you buckle and bend to the masses
I'll tend to the flame, you can worship the ashes

Get round the fire with a glass of strong ale
And tell us a story from beyond the pale
Bury some seeds and expect some strong branches
I'll tend to the flame, you can worship the ashes

Now show me a man that can meet all his needs
For what we need most now is unity's seed
A common old song for all creeds and all classes
I'll tend to the flame, you can worship the ashes
I'll tend to the flame

What will we do when the world it is ending
And time it is halted for friend and for foe?
Try to hold on to the time as it passes
I'll tend to the flame, you can worship the ashes

I'll tend to the flame, you can worship the ashes
I'll tend to the flame, you can worship the ashes

We do not need to hate where we were before even now that we have been confronted by its inadequacies, its flaws, or even the damage it has done to others and to us. Neither do we have to valorize it. The past was the place where we found God. the question we need to be asking is actually about our present. Are we (a)tending to the flame of the Holy Spirit or are we worshipping the ashes of the place the Spirit once was?

The beauty of all this is that we don’t need to try to guess where the Spirit might lead us un the future; we only need to keep our eyes open to where the Spirit is moving now. And that brings me full circle. Those who denigrate “deconstruction”; those who insist that you cannot be Christian and affirm queer people, those who tell us loudly and with deep and booming voices where the Spirit can and cannot go, always seem to be unwilling to even consider what and where it is that the Holy Spirit might be moving right now. We invite them to come and be present to queer people worshipping. We ask them to witness the freedom of women, men, and non-binary people liberated from complementarian theology. We try to show them the living fruit of deconstruction as people heal from toxic and abusive church experiences but they will not tend to the flame.

I pray one day they will.

1. Deconstruction is a technically problematic term because it’s source lies in continental post-modern theory where the popular use of nearly any term of art is going to end up being a problematic misuse. Despite the efforts of both supporters and detractors of “the deconstruction movement” to make points about what it must, or cannot, entail the term is now widely used to reference the process of asking difficult questions about and rethinking one’s faith commitments.

2. My friend Tim Whitaker over at The New Evangelicals has said accurately that “Deconstruction is not a movement, it’s an explosion”. It would be a mistake to even try to characterize what deconstruction entails for every person since it is, definitionally, about a process which can lead to an infinite variety of outcomes. In this essay I will therefore be describing certain common characteristics of deconstruction. Please do not take them to be prescriptive or universal for people who are going through deconstruction.

3. In the transgender community we use the phrase “cracked my egg” to refer to the moment that we realized and/or accepted that we are trans.

4. For the first 30 or so years of my life I understood my relationship with God primarily as a relationship with Jesus of Nazareth, That is not to say that I discounted any of the other Persons of the Trinity but that my primary spiritual focus was on the Second Person of the Trinity.

5. It is my habit/practice to refer to the First Person of the Trinity using non-binary (usually “they/them”) pronouns, to the Second Person (Jesus of Nazareth) using he/him pronouns, and to the Third Person using she/her pronouns. I believe that all three of these choices are theologically justifiable.

6. Before Christians were known as Christians, we were called “Followers of the Way” (Acts 11:26)

7. It occurs to me as I type this that these musings could be misinterpreted in a way to suggest support of supersessionism. That could not be farther from the truth. In my understanding the shift from tending the flame to worshiping the ashes lies not in the Holy Spirit leaving or abandoning a group of people but in a group of people attending not to where the Spirit is but only to where the Spirit was once encountered.