How Should Pastors Preach about Caitlyn Jenner Sunday Morning?

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Every day, I have to  try to reset my psyche with a different combination.

• there is something not right with me – yes, indeed, I live in a fallen world that is marked by profound alienation on all levels: between God and humans; between humans with each other; between humans and nature; and yes, even between humans and their own bodies. We Christians call this reality “sin.” In this throb and ache that courses all through by back, I am experiencing the effects of this realit y. It is an experience that is harder than what many people in the world are going through right now, but also easier than what many in the world are going through.

• everything should be right with me – yes, indeed. That very sense of “should” tells us that we were made for an ultimate rightness, resolution, reconciliation of all that is alienated.  We can have small, temporary foretastes of that expectation ultimately fulfilled in this life: in a medical procedure that works, a prayer answered,  a hug, a momentary laughter. But they are all temporary this side of the Final Reconciliation that we long for.

• there must be something I can do to make it right – well, no. This is what the Gospel is: that Christ did what we cannot do. He endured the alienation on the cross: bereft of all others, broken of any bodily wholeness, even experiencing subjectively what it feels like to be spiritually alienated from his Father God – which given the deep unity of their relationship, must have felt like a psychic tear within his being.  He endured this in hope that even as he underwent alienation on every level, the love of his Father would not abandon him.  And his Resurrection and Ascension is his promise to us that such a hope is rewarded: he was not abandoned but has been reunited to his Father. The Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension is Christ’s promise to use: if we unite ourselves to him, we too will participate in the Final Reconciliation of all things.

There is a “fiddling of the dials” I have to do every day to reset in this different combination – it doesn’t happen naturally, easily, or without effort. Some days it doesn’t happen at all . But unlike the false version, there is a sense of things clicking into place, more and more in fact the more I practice it. There is a peace that pervades, enough that the pain can stay inside its proper boundaries and I can endure it.  The Son endured it for us, the Father is faithful in his love to all his children, the Spirit invites us to join in their divine love.  God himself suffered our deepest alienation, and overcame it – for us.

And when we end our services by saying “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit,” we are proclaiming that alienation does not have the last word. We are naming God’s promise that while we indeed suffer, we do not do so alone — and not forever. 

Well, that’s my word, I guess. I don’t have a pulpit these days, so this e-mail will have to serve as my congregation. There’s donuts in the lobby.