I have sent this as an email to Dr. Dan Martin, president of SPU. I share it here to encourage others to reach out in support of Mr. Rinedahl and SPU’s LGBTQ community.

Dear Dr. (Dr. Dr.) Dan,

I hope you’ve been well through the chaos of this year.

I’m terrible at brief emails, so I apologize for that!

I’ve had a good few years, finishing my masters degree at Yale Divinity and starting the doctoral program of my dreams—working on gay literature and queer theory within a Christian theology program with some of my theological heroes for mentors. During my masters degree, I tried (and gradually succeeded at) broadening my repertoire from the wonderful close reading skills I learned from SPU’s English and U Scholars faculty into theory and theology, but the close reading I developed with the help of Drs. Reinsma, Chaney, and Thorpe and others remains at the heart of my work, making it interesting and (as I send off the proofs on my first article at a well-established journal) publishable. So, I remain grateful for my time at SPU and remember those years fondly, including all of my interactions with you.

When I left, I planned on doing a doctorate in English. Frankly, I was hoping to return to SPU’s English department some day to pour into students’ lives and help sharpen their minds, really, to open up possibilities within their lives as my horizons were expanded in college. When I came out at SPU, the faculty, staff, and my fellow students helped me make sense of faith anew, helping me to hold onto God as I and my faith grew and changed. On a very practical level, Dr. Keuss’s UScholars UFDN course introduced me to the Episcopal Church through St. Paul’s, Queen Anne, a re-homing that has served me well, as the denomination I grew up in, the Covenant, recently decided not to consider revisions of their own politics on sexuality.

Shifting to theology has been a natural progression, traceable back to my SPU honors thesis, and before that, my time at Oxford through BestSemester’s SCIO program. (I was invited to write a reflection some years ago on my wonderful time with SCIO for the CCCU’s magazine, so I wrote on the life-changing discovery of gay literature with Christian themes that the program facilitated, but it never saw the light of day, being perpetually delayed to the next issue. Anyway,) I was already thinking that getting a job as an out gay man writing on gay things would be a lot harder at an evangelical-adjacent Christian seminary or theology department than at an evangelical-adjacent English department when I saw the news about Jèaux Rinedahl and learned that gayness is a job liability even within nursing.

I don’t know who made that call or what that process looked like, and I understand that there are pressures related to donors and SPU’s Free Methodist affiliation. I also don’t think that changing everyone’s minds on the validity and holiness of gay sexuality and relationships is a likely path forward for SPU. But I do wonder why SPU’s generous ecumenism is extended to faculty across many lines of difference that are arguably more theologically central to the history of Christian life and thought and not across this particular line. My hunch is that, amongst the donors to whom everyone always directs the blame at moments like this, there is some fear of the culture SPU purports to engage and some distaste for elements of the world it empowers students to change, indeed, distaste for members of SPU’s own community—at least, that is what this news suggests. The famous mission commitment is thereby constricted. In the evangelical circles SPU runs in, it would be, admittedly, a bold move to abolish the statement of human sexuality or even to quietly but actually consider an openly gay person for full-time employment. But there are times when Christians should be bold, even if that means making decisions with difficult financial ramifications.

When I received the notification by mail in August of 2016 that I had been named one of SPU’s 125 Ones to Watch, I was incredibly heartened. The letter says that SPU is proud of me and that, in studying gay literature and Christianity, I’ve embraced its mission to engage the culture and change the world. You signed 125 of them, and I imagined that it must’ve given you hand cramps, but I’ve kept that letter in my desk drawer with other things that remind me that I am doing something right in the times when it feels like everything is going wrong. As the lesbian womanist theologian Dr. Emilie Townes said while visiting YDS some years ago, it is a mistake to depend on institutions for love and respect (a paraphrase). That is a lesson I have gradually learned.

This moment isn’t about me or my one-time dreams of employment there or anywhere—the academic job market is famously rough even at places that don’t discriminate against gay people. I write about myself because I felt accepted and was accepted at SPU, and as a student I established a rapport with various branches of the administration, a rapport that I hope meant something. I spent much time as a student volunteering to enthusiastically recommend the university to prospective students at admissions events and helping put on Let’s Talk About Sex, Faith, and Relationships, broadening the week’s discussion to include gay speakers. This letter comes from the resilience of my love for SPU’s faculty, students, alumni, and many of the staff members I got to know (including the lovely people in admissions).

As it is, SPU’s practical, on-the-ground theology of community life is incoherent, and it will remain so until the university’s whimsical ethos of inclusion is met with the fair treatment and literal valuing of its LGBTQ community members like Mr. Rinedahl. Literal valuing because this homophobic discrimination is economic in fruit and perhaps at root. I still believe that SPU can be the place of welcome it wants to be, not because I believe that those with power will make the choice I think is right (although I hope you all will), but because the Holy Spirit does not start something without seeing it to completion, and the Holy Spirit is and has been seeping through the cracks between those bricks on Queen Anne Hill, through the hearts and labor of faithful professors who for decades have cared for their queer students, through the staff members who work against the weight of institutional prohibition to ensure that their LGBTQ students know that they are held by the loving arms of God even in the darkest nights, and through LGBTQ employees, few and now fewer though they may be.

So, please change SPU’s hiring policies relevant to positions in which religion is not taught and to positions in which it is (a distinction that oddly demarcates whose faithful living matters), remove the Statement on Human Sexuality (rather than replacing it, which would create far more committee time for faculty who I’m sure are already tired), and hire Mr. Rinedahl full-time (if that is something he still wants). I’ve seen the official statement regarding his lawsuit. I would urge the university to resist hiding behind the global church to enforce homophobic policies, if that part of the statement is any preview of the coming response. It is a common move. It ultimately distracts from one’s own choices by pushing the blame for homophobia onto Black and brown majority-world peoples, and it obscures the history of the church’s colonization of sexual cultures found here and around the world only to use them as a convenient alibi. I genuinely look forward to dispatches from the conversation to come.

I blogged my way through my coming out at SPU. I stopped that practice, but I’m going to share this letter on my old blog to encourage other alumni to write in support of Mr. Rinedahl and also to show love and support to SPU’s current LGBTQ students, who must also be hurting.

Hoping you, your family, and the SPU community are healthy.

all my best,
Sam Ernest

My Senior Sermon for Berkeley Divinity School’s Evening Eucharist on 4/4/18, preached at Marquand Chapel at Yale Divinity School.

Psalm 118:19–24
Acts 3:1–10
Luke 24:13–35

When Jesus rises from the dead, there is to be no forgetting. Holy Week has passed, for now, and you can read its passing—the joy, relief, exhaustion—on the faces and in the Twitter feeds of those who have been particularly involved in its liturgies, which includes many in this room. If you are one whose spirit is greatly affected by the changing of the liturgical seasons, if you managed to keep a Lenten practice that ultimately stirred up new life, if the stripping of the altar strips bare your soul before God so it might bloom with the lilies of Easter, or if you’re simply one who attends church services regularly, you know that the stone has been rolled away and that the tomb is empty, smelling strangely of resurrection. And if you’re one who needs to be reminded frequently: The Lord is Risen.

And though we proclaim with one voice and with joy and certainty that Jesus rises from the dead, there is to be no forgetting of the weeks that have recently passed, of the sadness and uncertainty of Holy Week—at least not if you’re on the road to Emmaus. Though we are now a few days past Easter Sunday, our lesson tonight from the gospel of Luke happens on the same day that Jesus’s body is found to be missing. The atmosphere is still one of grief, disbelief, and disorientation. Add to that the common observation of commentators that, besides knowing that they are walking the seven-mile road apparently to eat a meal and then go back, we aren’t really sure who Cleopas and his friend are or where this Emmaus is. Cyril of Alexandria says the two are part of the group of seventy disciples that are appointed by Jesus in Luke 10 to go “in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go” (Luke 10:1).

Cleopas and his friend aren’t really sure of some things either—namely who Jesus is. Because who they understand him to be is contingent on how they understand his crucifixion and the absence of his body and how they receive the message from Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, mother of God, and the other women—their message that “two men in dazzling clothes” told them, “‘He is not here, but has risen’” (24:5). The two have a lot right—when Jesus appears to them, they narrate to him the string of events with some detail—but conclusions aren’t coming easily. In a poem by Spencer Reece (poet, priest, and Berkeley grad) called “The Road to Emmaus,” the poem’s speaker describes a postcard on the wall at the office of his spiritual director. Through a humble ekphrasis, the poem portrays the postcard’s depiction of the story as follows:

There it hung, askew in its golden drugstore frame.

It was the scene from the end of Luke, the two disciples,

one named Cleopas, the other anonymous

forever mumbling Christ’s name, and with them,

the resurrected Christ masquerading as a stranger.

They were on their way to that town, Emmaus,

seven miles out from Jerusalem,

gossiping about the impress of Christ’s vanishing—

they argued about whether to believe what they had seen;

they were restless, back and forth the debate went—

where there is estrangement there is little peace.

The estrangement of Holy Week—of being in the lurch between what has been hoped for and what will yet transpire—is not suddenly peacefully resolved when Jesus rises from the dead. Not, at least, for his disciples. St. Augustine interprets the discussion between the two of them and then with the hidden Lord as evidence of their loss of faith and hope. “They were walking along, dead, with Christ alive,” he writes, “They were walking along, dead, with life itself. Life was walking along with them, but in their hearts life had not yet been restored” (Sermon 235.2-3). The glorious turbulence of Christ’s resurrection occurs in the spaces where one’s hope has been disturbed and life has ended: in the tomb and in the heart, yes, and in the spaces in which we exact evil on each other—on stolen land, in the streets, in backyards; in broad day light, at night, under surveillance, and in secrecy; and in elementary schools, high schools, universities, and churches. The glorious turbulence of Christ’s resurrection occurs in the spaces where one’s hope has been tried and disfigured to the point at which what is hoped for becomes unforeseeable and unrecognizable, even when you are looking it in the face. In these spaces, we say, The Lord is Risen.

The estrangement and confusion of Holy Week may not resolve swiftly, but they do not, in the end, remain the inevitable to which we resign ourselves. What are we to do? When they had revealed their lack of clarity to him, the risen Lord told his disciples to pick up their Scripture and try reading it again. When they had reached their destination and their Lord, the stranger, made to move as if he would just keep going, though they still did not recognize him, his disciples said, “‘Stay with us…’ So he went in to stay with them,” becoming the host of their own dinner (24:29). It is then, when they, on something of a hunch, invite the stranger to stay, and it is then, on his own time and in his own way that the risen Lord becomes recognizable, in the breaking of bread. Before vanishing.

If his vanishing at the moment of recognition seems cruel or at least slippery, it is also essential to learning what Christ’s body in life, death, and resurrection is. In an essay called, “The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ,” Anglican theologian and priest Graham Ward traces what he calls the various displacements or transpositions of Christ’s body—in incarnation and circumcision, it is the male-identified Jew; in transfiguration, the Second Adam; in the Eucharist, bread, in all of its genderless glory; in crucifixion, “mere flesh, a consumable, a dead, unwanted, discardable thing”; in resurrection, “the plenitude of God’s presence” in the emptiness of the tomb, the unrecognizable body of Christ in the post-resurrection appearances, and the Gospel narrative itself; and finally, in ascension, the Church. So, when Jesus blesses the bread, breaks it, gives it to Cleopas and the other disciple, and then vanishes, Jesus is demonstrating and enacting that what the disciples were understanding as his absence is in fact a sign of the mystery of the presence of his resurrected body, in bread and in them, together with all the Church. It is not presumed, I think, that Cleopas and the other disciple were in the room at the last supper in the first place, so their recognition of Christ in the breaking of the bread suggests that part of what happens in the Eucharist’s incorporation of the Body of Christ is a sharing of memory and knowledge; to participate in the breaking of the bread is to know Christ.

Though the Good News of Easter, Christ’s resurrection, is difficult to swallow, the mystery does not, ultimately, prohibit the church from doing the work Jesus has given it to do, which is to say, despite the limitations of human knowledge, the Body of Christ is the Body of Christ, witnessing to Christ’s resurrection in what we do and how we do it and what we say and how we say it. In the commissioning of the seventy disciples in Luke 10, this means going out into the neighboring towns, sharing peace; “eat[ing] what is set before you; cur[ing] the sick who are there, and say[ing] to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you’” or “‘The Kingdom of God is at hand’” (10:5–9). And if their witness to Christ in actions and words is rejected, they are to declare, “‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near’” (10:11–12).

Years ago, I heard it preached, based on the story of Christ’s resurrection appearance to Doubting Thomas, that in the wake of the disappearance of Jesus’ body, the disciples were lost and confused to the point of not knowing what to believe in some sort of permanent way, as if doubt were the defining characteristic of the earliest church. The point of saying this, I believe, was to comfort those of us today who have difficulty leaving Holy Week and its suspension of hope behind, because believing in resurrection is, admittedly, difficult. After, I spoke with a friend and professor of Christian scripture who was furious, saying if the earliest followers of Christ weren’t completely confident in the good news of Christ’s resurrection, none of them would have gone out to preach and heal, none of them would have been martyred. Without the resurrection, there is no (are no) Acts of the Apostles.

So it is good to have the story of the road to Emmaus paired with our reading from Acts. In it, we find that the Body of Christ is the Body of Christ. On the way to temple to pray in the afternoon, Peter and John see someone at the Beautiful Gate who was something of a permanent fixture—a man who is identified by his presence day-to-day-to-day, asking for alms. To be the Body of Christ means to see people who sink into their surroundings, to break through the sort of everyday rituals that turn people into objects of glazed-over glances, to offer what healing we can through God’s power, and in so doing, to witness to the reality of resurrection that already is. So this is what Peter and John do; they become willing vessels of Christ’s power. The healing of the man who is identified so closely with his begging “at the Beautiful Gate of the temple” does not sever him from the place in which he is known but rather allows him to move within it differently—he enters the temple, praising God.

In the story of the road to Emmaus and in the story of the man who jumps up to walk, the new life in Christ’s resurrection brings about movement and exclamation in those it touches. When you experience and witness new life and Christ, you tell somebody. The man’s newfound walk turns quickly into jumping and leaping and praising God in the company of “all the people.” Within an hour of their arriving at Emmaus, Cleopas and friend leave town again to schlep the seven miles back to Jerusalem to the eleven disciples and echo the eleven’s own jubilant proclamations in saying, The Lord is Risen.

My suspicion is that there are people here who have experienced healing by the power of Christ’s resurrection in ways we fear would make others uncomfortable. May we continue to learn how to receive the gospel as it is enfleshed in the bodies of others even as we continue to learn how to share it as it is in enfleshed in our own. I also suspect that, though we are in the season of Easter, there are people here who feel estranged from God and others in ways that seem hopeless. May we know ourselves to be joined with the resurrected body of Christ in the breaking of bread, and may that be sufficient for us today. Finally, I know that we are all witnesses of the relentless onslaught of the deathly and quotidian violences of racism, xenophobia, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and the manifold other ways humans devise to assert our domination at another’s expense. May God grant us grace and strength to bear witness to the resurrection in our bodies and words in spaces distorted by death and violence. And if we are not welcomed there, may our witness to the resurrection be a protest.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

for Morning Prayer at Berkeley Divinity School, 3/29/18

Psalm 102
1 Cor. 10:14-17; 11:27-32
Mark 14:12-25

“Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.’ They began to be distressed and to say to him one after another, ‘Surely, not I?’”

If you were one of Jesus’ disciples in the Gospel of Mark, like Pavlov’s dogs drooling at the sound of a bell, your ears would perk up when Jesus says, “Truly I tell you,” if you weren’t already listening intently. You would come to expect him to say something about the coming of the Kingdom or discipleship, or to say something to recognize the faithful gesture of someone you are used to overlooking—the poor widow who gives her two coins; the woman who anoints Jesus’ head with nard from an alabaster jar; when Jesus says, “Truly I tell you,” it is followed by something you won’t anticipate.

“One of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.” In response, the disciples each seem genuinely concerned about the possibility that they could be the one who in condemning Jesus condemns himself—“Surely, not I?” We know that the one who will betray Jesus is Judas Iscariot, but the disciples do not. We also know from the verses following this passage that not one but two disciples could be named: Jesus predicts that Peter’s firm resolve will melt when tried. But Mark says, “after giving thanks he gave [the cup] to them, and all of them drank from it.” Judas, Peter, all.

Although it reads seamlessly, the reading from 1 Corinthians omits a large chunk of text in which Paul warns against idolatry, laments women who pray without their head covering (and men with long hair), and parrots back reports he has heard about the church’s disunity. “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” is soon followed by “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons,” and “When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lords supper.” Because of these pitfalls, Paul bids the church to self-examination prior to participating in the bread and cup. Are you prepared?

The immediate context in which the Eucharist takes place is one of discord and confusion. Am I the one who betrays Jesus? Am I receiving the bread and cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner? These are questions we might sit with more often for the sake of ourselves, our communities, and our congregations, because they will point us to the fissures we have caused and point us to Christ. That the answers to these questions are all certainly “yes” for each of us does not negate the confusion and discomfort they may cause or the necessity of asking them. Holy Week offers jarring encounters in which the certainty of hope is suspended and comfort questioned, and we are left in the lurch. But even in the midst of this confusion, we are assured that we are one by the concrete presence of Jesus’ body and blood in our mouths and throats. That is our comfort.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Dear Reader,

The posts in these dated clouds—essays, notes, poems, etc.—represent my thought and deeds from the end of high school through the beginning of grad school. Thank you so much for reading, and to many of you, thank you for being a part of my story. I will continue to write, but not in this venue. Follow me on Twitter for updates.

tack så mycket ❤
sdje