04/02/2026
A poignant reflection from one of our guest presenters (from last fall).
Keats: I write these posts all the time and they usually aren’t something that hits close for me but this one hit a wound that has not yet healed and maybe is still being made.
Three years ago, I hardly had a weekend to myself. I preached nearly every Sunday for two years. I became a familiar face at several congregations as we began to talk about faith from the LGBTQ+ perspective, about what the church could do to be more inclusive, about ways to do the work rather than just talk about it.
Two years ago, as the last election cycle really began to ramp up and as I left my position in the bishop’s office everything changed. I preached a few times last year. If trends continue I’ll preach a few times this year. There are no longer any congregations that are expressing interest in being more inclusive or in having the tough conversations about allyship. No one reached out and said “hey, I just don’t have the social capital in this climate anymore….” They just all disappeared. People that I had considered friends and who I thought respected my work - gone without a word.
And these things happen but it’s especially biting as a trans person, as a trans pastor, in this political climate where rights are being stripped away and they’re now experimenting on trans prisoners. It ends up feeling like I’m surrounded by Judases who would happily sell me for thirty pieces of social capital, or if it came to it, people that would report me to save themselves.
Maybe you can imagine how lonely and abandoned and even endangered that might make a person feel. Maybe you can’t. I’m not even sure why I’m posting this besides that I can’t hold on to it quietly anymore and that I know there are others experiencing the same who deserve to know they aren’t actually alone.
"All of them deserted him and fled." - Mark 14:50
As Jesus is arrested, “they all deserted him and fled.” The moment is stark and unprotected—no loyal circle, no heroic resistance, just absence where there had been presence. Even Jesus knows what it is to be left, to stand in a moment that could easily become spectacle, reduced to something observed rather than accompanied. But this story refuses to turn abandonment into shame. It does not frame his aloneness as failure or something to perform for others. Instead, it names the truth plainly: sometimes people leave, even when love has been real. And still, the one abandoned is not made into an object, not stripped of dignity.
Desert Word: Even Jesus was abandoned.
Practice: Let yourself be incomplete.
Refrain: I am not a spectacle.
