Dear Friends in Christ,

I happened to be watching a YouTube video of a podcast about the show Andor I mentioned a week or two ago.

YouTube enjoys serving up content it thinks you will enjoy, and since I’ve been searching for a couple of things about the show, this one came up. I actually was pleasantly surprised by this one in a way I did not expect.

One of the hosts seems to be transgender. I can’t say that with 100% certainty of course as it didn’t come up in the content but I’d say I was fairly certain. Their co-host did mention her wife at some point. So all in all I’d say this was a podcast geared toward a pretty progressive kind of audience.

The hosts were both pretty young and “hip” in that unhip way that is most hip these days! I got the impression also that the audience was a very online, pop culture plugged-in crowd.

None of this was surprising really, though. It’s all just background for what did surprise me.

Behind the first co-host an Episcopal Church flag proudly hung on the wall. With its prominent bright red cross and multiple smaller crosses, it was hard to miss.

There it was, quite obviously positioned on the wall in such a way as to always be in the frame of the camera. At some point the other co-host very casually mentioned going to a church service.

What I found refreshing was the casual confidence with which both the flag was displayed and church attendance was mentioned. I imagine that for some of the audience, this may be their only exposure to religious people. They got to see and hear a comfort with faith from folks who they trust.

They also got to see folks who might often be at the margins of some faith communities at home under the cross, and mentioning their faith life.

This was not a Bible-thumping display, and it was not a weird kind of “take” on pop culture designed to mask a religious agenda. There was no “If you all think Luke Skywalker is cool, let me tell you about someone who saves us from more than the Sarlacc pit…”

(For those with deeper wells of cultural content from which they draw—the Sarlacc pit is a giant sand worm type monster in the desert which swallows all manner of people and beasts.)

Anyhow. I was thinking of this in light of the bishop’s sermon on Saint Philip’s Day.

How do we ask others to come and see? What does our invitation look like?

What I loved about this podcast was that it was just two people living life, passionate in the nerdiest way about a TV show, showing that their faith sits right alongside the other things that make them human.

Someone once told me that the best evangelism was to let people know you go to church and not be a jerk. There’s something to that I think.

I wonder what small moments you might find to share your faith in a way that simply invites others to come and see something that gives you life and hope?

Where are the widows we can give for others to peek through and see some light where they might not expect it?

There are lots of folks out there who think that church or faith or religion isn’t for them. They may have good reason to believe that.

It’s easy to see where the Church fails. It’s easy to point to where we’ve gotten it wrong over the centuries.

That’s why it’s so important for us to name and claim what it does do right.

It’s important for us to create small on-ramps for people to decide to take a detour from the hurried, pressing, angriness of our days and find something more here—something loving and life-giving.

Life in Christ is, ultimately, about proclaiming that love for the world. How we do that is up to each and every one of us.

I’m sure that the host in that podcast debated about whether to put up that flag. Would it turn people off? Would it make some people angry to see? Would it be too much? But she decided to give people a chance to come and see.

So I’m going to look for some small ways to extend that invitation this week. We’ll see what it looks like, but I’m looking forward to it and to how the Spirit might surprise me in the work!

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert