"Comforting, Not Comfortable" | Liz Harlan-Ferlo | November 2, 2025

High school students are suspicious of religion. To be fair, high school students are suspicious of most things that adults care about, which is kind of endearing—if occasionally annoying when you are the adult in the room. My job used to be teaching high school students about religion. Over the course of 10 years, I taught Hinduism, Judaism, philosophy of religion, ethics. I taught about how religions use story, how religion and social justice intertwine. I taught all of this in the context of a school that had a religious affiliation. But for many of my students, that aspect of the school was an afterthought, something that they had to abide to get a fancy diploma.

By and large, my students had very little firsthand experience of religion and religious practice. The ones who did were usually Jewish, Hindu, or Muslim, not Christian. But most students were multiple generations removed from their immigrant, enslaved, and native ancestors who were likely more religious than they. So, most of what they knew about religion—or thought they knew—was from TV or movies or, God help us, the internet. They entered my classroom with some big assumptions.

Assumption one: religion is for comfort. For comfort. Religion is for self-care. Religion is to reassure yourself. It is the place that you go to confirm that you are right.

Second assumption: religion is for self-improvement. It is an optimization system for individual souls. The point of participating in a religion is to become better. In my students’ understanding, you should gauge religion's effectiveness with the usual metrics. Do you, as a result of your religion, have more money or better health? Are you going to live longer and be happier? And my students thought if your religion doesn't provide those things, well, it's not worth it to get up every Sunday morning or to keep kosher laws or to bother praying five times a day. If the vibes are off, why stick around? Just find a better religion.

Now, the idea that an individual can just walk away from their religion is pretty laughable to the majority of people in the world. For most humans, religion and spirituality are entwined with ethnicity and culture and identity. They are part of your heritage along with the tint of your skin and the language your grandparents and great-grandparents spoke. For some believers, it is deeply connected to the land on which they or their ancestors lived. For example, in ancient Hindu belief, to leave the Indian Peninsula by sea was to risk impurity beyond the scope of imagining.

Maybe for some of us, the fear of leaving a religious tradition is less about extended family history, but about what we were threatened with as children. Some of us might have been drawn to the Episcopal community of the church because it seemed less strict, less doctrine-bound. We were told, maybe, that here we could believe anything we wanted. We can behave whatever way we think is best for us. Well, sort of. The Episcopal Church is centered around baptism. And baptism is all about promises.

Today, before we baptize Coloulton and Dylan—and there are more baptisms over in Kempton Hall—all of us will say the baptismal covenant together. We're going to stand up, and we're going to make some promises. And you thought you were just here for the music.

The baptismal covenant is based on the Apostles’ Creed, one of the oldest prayers of Christianity. We'll talk about it for a minute here, and if you want, you can follow along. It's on page 304 of the Book of Common Prayer, that red book. It starts out pretty straightforward: I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. Okay. The second part covers Jesus, a brief overview of the narrative of his life, death, and resurrection. The third section, though—the one that starts with the Holy Spirit—really levels it up: I believe in God the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Okay?

Now, if you look at that page, you will notice that the word Church is capitalized, but not the word catholic. Here, catholic is used in its traditional sense, meaning universal. What we proclaim, then, is that God's Church is wide enough to contain multitudes of experiences, and furthermore, that the collective of the Church transcends place, culture, and time. Now, the vehicle for that transcendence of God across time is the communion of saints. The communion of saints is the spiritual union of all Christians, back and forward through the ages. Every single baptized person is included. Everybody—even those who are maybe a little weird. That honestly probably includes most of the official saints across place, culture, and time.

Even through death, baptism and faithful practice tie us to each other. Those ties are golden ribbons. Those ties are winding sheets. See, unlike other faith traditions, no one is born a Christian. Entry to this faith is not limited to those who come from a particular land or to speakers of a particular language. Because of that, Christians are more different than we are the same. Christianity means that the houseless and the wealthy, the able-bodied and the physically challenged, the child and the elder—all of us—are in the communion of saints together.

Which makes church a little complicated, because as brain scientists have discovered, humans draw toward those who are similar to them, and we have an unconscious bias against those who seem different. Some believe that this bias is a vestige that served us well in our more survival-driven times. And now, still, our tendency towards sameness can be easily manipulated, and we have to actively work to overcome it. Our church communities certainly demonstrate this preference. In 1960, Dr. King said about Sunday mornings, “The 11:00 hour is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hour, in Christian America.”

Even so, church offers us something unique: a chance to be in relationship with people who are different from us. Among us gathered here today: some of us typed our college assignments on typewriters, and others learned as toddlers how to use touchscreens. Some of us have mortgages, and some of us are on the edge of eviction. Some of us regularly dine at new restaurants, and others live in fear of losing SNAP benefits. Some of us are raising children. Some of us are praying to conceive children. Some of us are grieving adult children lost. Some of us are married, others divorced. Some stuck inside relationships we would rather escape. Some of us are happily solo, and some are desperately lonely.

A community is different from a communion. In a community, people share a common interest, or an attitude, or a goal. Here, we are joined not just in community, but in a communion—the heart of which is the story of resurrection. We claim our connection to each other not just through our similarities, but through God's grace. A God who defies common sense and shows us life beyond our own capacity. Our shared hope for the future runs on the engine of God's love. That is the first attribute of the community—communion—of saints: our shared connection to a saving, loving God. The other attribute is our connection to each other.

Our Episcopal catechism—there is one; it's on page 862, if you're still in the prayer book—describes it beautifully. The communion of saints, it says, is “the whole family of God, the living and the dead, those whom we love and those whom we hurt, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer, and praise,” those whom we love, and those whom we hurt.

Before I finish, I want to respond to my high school students. A bit late, of course. Yes, religion can give you comfort, and it can make you better. And I'll just speak for Christian people now. Yes, we are held accountable, but not by a God who sees you only as an individual sinner. We are held to account by a great communion of saints, living and dead. They cheer us on, but they also demand that we do what we have promised to do.

Some of us in this room regularly face physical danger because of our gender presentation or skin color or physical or mental ability. Remember, we are a group made of difference. But I want to speak to those of us for just a moment who rarely face that kind of trouble, if only because of the body that we happen to be born into. As dangerous situations seem to draw closer and closer to those of us in that group, of which I count myself one, we must understand our fears about our safety through our membership in the communion of saints. If we insist on prioritizing our individual feelings of comfort, we can sacrifice the very promises we make today in the baptismal covenant. Church may be comforting, but it might not be comfortable.

In a moment, when we recite the baptismal covenant, we will hear tools for not letting our fear override our promises. Perhaps we can choose to listen first, where we, the bold, are used to muscling in to help. Perhaps we can choose to put our normal bodies in places where they can incur public ridicule. Perhaps we recommit our strength to holding taut the net that will catch our siblings when they are cast out.

In times such as these, all of us need God, and we need each other: those among us in the flesh, those before us in the spirit, and those after us—the ones we have only just begun to imagine. Come, let us welcome the soon-to-be baptized. Then we can celebrate together the great communion that we share.

Let us pray. Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that together we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.