June 7, 2026
/What is in an identity?
Last week, I asked you all to think about why we are here, what ways we feel liberated and renewed in a sense of new life in this place. What draws us here within this community, within the fullness of our faith journey? What is it that enlivens our spirit?
Today, I want to probe that same theme a bit deeper and in a little bit different of a way. And I want to think about what it means to have identities, to embrace and live our faith in the midst of the many identities that we own and encompass in the course of our lives.
I want to start in a rather strange place with a thought about boundaries. For the first three years that Julie and I lived in the region, in the DMV as it is called, we lived in Alexandria. And I would have told you at that time, when we went back to Arkansas, when we traveled to other places, that we lived in D.C., right? It was the kind of catchall term that located people in a general sense to where we were. But that was a more true statement than I realized because the apartment complex we lived in, the Braddock Lee Apartments at the corner of Van Dorn and King Streets, if any of you know Alexandria, was literally a quarter of a mile, if that, from the historic boundary marker for the District of Columbia.
Because when the district was first laid out in the 1790s, it was a perfect diamond, encompassing parts of Maryland and parts of Virginia.
But, as with so many identities, there was kind of a darker edge to the D.C. identity. For all of its goodness—and I guess sometimes we don't think about D.C. as being particularly good—there's a lot to embrace about the culture and history of the place. It was the progenitor of go-go music. It's the creator of the half-smoke. It was actually the origin of the football huddle, of all things.
But in the 1840s and 1850s, there was a significant number of people within the district who were passionate about the cause of abolition. And that rubbed up against the reality that the East Coast's largest slave market was in Alexandria within the district boundaries.
So, the very white, very powerful people in charge at the time decided to ease those tensions, to resolve that dissidence by ceding the Virginia part of the district back to Virginia so that the district could move forward with its plan for abolition and Alexandria could continue to prosper off the backs of so many enslaved people and troubled, sorrowful people.
There's a darkness to the reality of why the district is what it is today. And as much as the identity that we might claim as people in this place, as people of this thriving metropolis with all of its great cultural opportunities, there's a part of that identity that is complicated and complex and troubled.
We lived in Alexandria because I went to school at Virginia Theological Seminary, often considered today the preeminent seminary in the whole of the Anglican Communion. And even when I was there in the early 2010s, there was a narrative that we conveniently ceased operations and kind of put on pause the seminary during the Civil War years because, in point of fact, our seminary facilities were commandeered by the Union Army to create a hospital complex.
But what isn't talked about, what wasn't acknowledged, is that the seminary did not cease operations. No. They just moved south and continued in exile in Richmond. Because the majority of the faculty and seminarians at the outset of the war were Southern sympathizers.
And so this place, this institution with a profound impact on the life and vitality of the Anglican Communion, has its dark and troubled history itself.
So many times these identities are complex and layered. And I bring all that up today because identity kind of plays a leading role in the Gospel passage we hear from St. Matthew.
This passage, especially this leader of the synagogue with his ailing daughter, is found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But interestingly, in this rendering, Matthew and Jesus are the only two people who are named explicitly. Everyone else is kind of a categorical identity. You have the disciples. You have the tax collectors, the sinners. You have the Pharisees. The leader of the synagogue, unnamed. You have his daughter. You have this other daughter who is this ailing woman, a woman troubled by years of hemorrhages.
None of these people are given the dignity of a given name. Now, in Mark and Luke, we are told that the leader's name is Jairus, but we don't have that in this rendering. They're all identified by their identities, their location in society.
But there's a larger reality too, because June, in many ways, is often a month about identities.
Just yesterday, we honored an identity that is very quickly disappearing: the 82nd anniversary of D-Day. And there are very few of those who served, who fought, who landed on those beaches in Normandy who are still with us. The last vestiges of that greatest generation that was so much a prominent part of our mid-century identity as an industrious, powerful nation in those post-war years.
And then, on June 28, 1969, a group of folks with an amalgam of marginalized identities within what would become known as the LGBTQ community got fed up, got exhausted by the constant oppression and constant vitriol thrown their way and rose up in the streets of New York City outside the Stonewall Inn and said they weren't going to take it anymore.
And that was a catalyst, a significant catalyst, for the LGBTQ rights movement that would take off through the 1980s and 1990s into the modern era. And it's been so much a part of the leading front of our denominational identity as we proclaim boldly that every human deserves dignity, that all are welcome, that we have a place of belonging for all within God's diversity of human creation.
And so how do we bring all of this together?
Well, I want to suggest a couple of things today. Very often in my journey with you all, I talk about the kingdom of God and about us being kingdom people. That we are, in that beautiful language of Hebrews, foreigners by faith. That we do not stake our claim here, but in the coming kingdom of God.
And that's an important thing for us to constantly remember and orient our lives around. But that reality should not and does not flatten our many worldly identities that we take on.
St. Paul, in his many epistles, reflects powerfully and meaningfully on his ability to do the work he's doing by virtue of his Roman citizenship. There's this worldly identity that supports and invigorates and brings together the work of his ministry.
We and our many worldly identities have a place to use them fully and wholesomely in the deeper and more robust proclamation of the Gospel that we are on about.
In 2007, an incredible documentary was released called For the Bible Tells Me So. And at least to my memory—and some of you may offer alternative experiences in your own life—it was one of the first major moments where there was some kind of national publication, in this form a documentary film, that showed how one can be both an out and proud LGBTQ person and a deeply faithful Christian.
Those two identities are not diametrically opposed to one another, but can have a fulsomeness, a wholeness to them.
And there are many ways in which we find that similar reality, where our identities—and sometimes they are messy identities, complex and troubled identities—nevertheless have a place of meaning and value and robustness to them that we should not obfuscate and cannot deny.
One of Julia's and my very close friends, as a young college student, served as a missionary within his evangelical denomination. I remember him reflecting on how one of the first cracks in his theological lens was going to the Philippines on a mission trip and realizing that this particular effort was in as much an effort to turn these isolated, remote Filipino communities into little vestiges of Southern U.S. culture as they were about proclaiming the Gospel of Christ, offering the transformed new life that is the reality of our faith.
And so often, as I talked about last week with the complicated and messy legacy of missional work within our faith, we have very often obfuscated or layered those identities in ways that are hurtful and harmful because we haven't been honest about what those identities are and how they integrate into our faith.
It is not an either-or, but it is an integrated whole. In being true and honest about who we are, we can be more fulsomely true and honest to the faith and the transformed life that God is calling us into.
And so, in reflecting on that, and as we journey through this particular season of Ordinary Time this year, my fifth year with you all, we're going to do something new: a kind of fulsome engagement of who we are as a people of faith within the Episcopal tradition.
For this season of Ordinary Time, we are going to utilize Eucharistic Prayer C.
And I have avoided it. I generally, to be completely transparent with you all, avoid it—not just here, but in my other previous calls as well—because there's a very troubling part to it in the preface that we hear at the very beginning of the Eucharistic prayer.
And yet, inasmuch as that's true, this is very much a part of our tradition. And it's a prayer that, for its faults, also has this incredible robustness about the cosmic implications of our faith. That this is not just a lived experience for who we are as a people on this human planet, but who we are in the universal created order, who we are in the location of the full cosmos, everything that God has created.
But at the very beginning of this Eucharistic prayer, one of the first lines we hear is:
"From the primal elements you have brought forth the human race, and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You have made us the rulers of creation; but we turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one another."
Many of you, myself included, maybe have encountered this Eucharistic prayer for years, for decades, and this statement goes in one ear and out the other. But if we're careful in paying attention, the implicit suggestion in this stanza is that what makes us human is our memory, reason, and skill, and our ability to rule over creation.
And I hope that if you spend just a few seconds thinking about that, you'll immediately begin seeing some of the problems within that frame.
How many of us have had loved ones whose memory has been compromised? Who have what society would deem a compromised level of reasoning? Or through injury, or age, or bodily diversity, had a lack of what society would deem skill?
And yet we wouldn't for a moment say to anyone in any of those categories that they lack human dignity, lack human worth. And yet that seems to be the suggestion here.
And that is not to say anything of this kind of implicit suggestion of what has become known as dominion theology: that we, as humans, dominate, have dominion over the world as rulers of creation instead of companions and partners of creation, that we are a part of the whole of the created order.
And yet there is some redemptive quality in this prayer too. As I say, its cosmic elements, its universalizing lens, help really put the fullness of our experience in the fullness of God's created order. It helps us to see our location within the whole of reality.
And so, inasmuch as I really grate at and struggle with the language at the very beginning of this prayer, it has its redemptive elements too.
And isn't that a metaphor for the church as a whole?
Because in the language of the modern Roman Catholic Catechism, we are a pilgrimage experience. The church is not pure in its essence today. Even as we are the body of Christ, we are the broken body of Christ, which is journeying toward its ultimate unity and the ultimate reality of God's enfolding and developing work of salvation in the world around us.
And in that journeying, we still have places of shortcoming. Still have places where we don't quite hit the mark. Where we're compromised. Where we don't do as we should.
And yet even in that, again, we have places of redemption.
And I go back to where I began. Alexandria was one of the largest slave markets on the entirety of the East Coast. And the exact location of the slave market itself, the slave market stone, the auction block, sits underneath the altar of Meade Memorial Episcopal Church in Alexandria, a historic and prominent African American Episcopal church in the whole of the United States.
This thing, which was a dark and troubled reality, a place of pain, of death, of sorrow, has a redemptive and new life in the life of a community who preaches the transformed love of a transforming God.
And so today, friends, as we encounter this journey that we are setting out on in Ordinary Time, as we encounter our diversity of identities that we bring into the complexity of our life as individuals, as the community of St. Anne's, I invite us to be honest and to lift up and to celebrate the goodness of those diverse identities.
And as much as we continue to proclaim the ultimate reality of our location as a kingdom people, proclaiming the transformed kingdom of God that is coming and is now and enlivens us in those diversities, may we wholesomely and fully proclaim the joy and goodness of our God who speaks to each and every one of us and folds all of us in all of those diversities into the greater work of the coming kingdom.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.