First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

— Excerpt from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail

 

This letter has always been one of my scriptures: for the ways it makes me weep and holds a mirror to my face and invites me to gaze with love at our world.

Just as all good scriptures do.

I have beloveds who have lately said to me: “I want to be loving. I want to be compassionate. I want to transcend the lines that divide us–political, religious, ideological. But people keep disappointing me. They keep choosing compromise over me. They keep choosing religious doctrine over me. They keep choosing ‘peace’ over me.”

I invited our community to reflect this past weekend on where, how and with whom we are longing to “make room” for relationship. How our communal “womb” is invited to stretch and grow and be challenged for the sake of new life. I think it’s a good question: few of us can say we have learned to love others with perfect hospitality.

And yet: so many of us have already had to “make room.” To stand aside and let our relationships be more important than our pride, our dignity, our talents. We have already been making room for family members, colleagues, local governments, the wider culture to struggle with our sex or sexuality, our race, our age, our dreams and our visions. You name it, many of us have already learned to make room for it. Often, we have done it out of love. Often it is under duress and by force for the sake of survival.

I say “we” and “our” and yet am aware that Rev. King’s invitation is to me and folks like me: white, middle-class spiritual leaders. I weep when I read this letter, because that is the feeling of my womb being stretched. Room must be made in my mind, my actions, my energy, my body for the humanity and freedom of every single one of my sacred siblings.

Because we are accountable to our relationships. We (particularly people with power/privilege) can say or think or tweet or behave or vote or pray however we want, but we cannot do it without expecting some relational consequences. There is a line.

It need not divide us forever, it need not dismiss someone or banish them outside of a community or a circle or from our lives entirely. For what it’s worth, my theology, my Bible and my relationship with the Holy do not send folks to an afterlife hell.

But we must ask, expect and–when the time comes–require from our relationships speech, actions, and behavior that are loving, respectful and humanizing. And, dare I say, awe-filled. We are invited to be in awe of one another by the Spirit who dwells within each of us.

So, yeah, there’s a line.

Among the community that is becoming Story Dwelling, we have that kind of line. We expect justice-love from one another. We will not engage in debate about whether someone is fully human, fully beloved, fully justified (to use that oh-so-religious word). That means LGBTQ+ folx are not “them”–”they” are us. Leaders. Organizers. Collaborators. That means women and people of color and young people and immigrants and refugees are not “them”– “they” are us. We will not debate our marriages, our leadership, our giftedness. We may experience tension about how best to strategize; we may realize we have messed up and forgotten to invite someone to the table; we may struggle with our own feelings of guilt that come with privilege or feelings of inadequacy that come with oppression. We will struggle with those things. But we will not debate our worth or our liberation destiny. That is not what beloved community does. The same good reverend whose life we celebrate today teaches us that.

There is a line. It need not separate us. But it does need to be a loving boundary–a trustworthy, hospitable and strong-as-hell container–that allows for vulnerability and deep belonging and loving story-telling. We deserve that kind of womb, and our neighborhoods deserve faith communities that respond to that sense of belonging by working, pushing, conspiring– until all belong.

What if there are lots of ways of making meaning of the life of that first-century rabbi? What if we could explore the story and find the ways it has bearing our lives, especially on the eve of an election? Those are my thoughts as I walk the path. Special thanks to Smith Rock for the gorgeous backdrop.

The Bible can feel so…what’s the word I’m looking for? Wounding? Irrelevant? Unbelievable? Here’s my attempt at starting a conversation on how we can claim the Bible in its wisdom in ways that make us better lovers of neighbor and self.

This is the fourth in our series on disrupting, reclaiming and expanding parts of Christian language, tradition and ritual for our lives and experiences here and now.

You don’t get assassinated for preaching about love.
A Good Friday sermon in eight words.

But! It is the Easter season.
My technicolor hard-boiled eggs sit uneaten in the fridge (I’ll get to them…tomorrow) and our family has left town and I need to take a break from mimosas for a little while for reasons that should require no explanation.
It is the Easter season. Christ is risen.
It is the Easter season. Alleluias everywhere.

And today is April 4, 1968, and my call is calling me back to Good Friday.
(Except April 4, 1968, was a Thursday.
That’s okay: betrayal works too.)

You don’t get assassinated for preaching about love.

This is the conviction that lies underneath #whitechurchsilent. #whitechurchsilent is an online movement started in the wake of the 2016 election. It describes the phenomenon that occurs when pastors, leaders and congregations that are mostly white, that belong to mostly white denominations, that were started by white people, choose not to speak explicitly about the injustices and violence done to black and brown people in our neighborhoods and country.

Instead, we talk about love. Which is almost like not saying anything at all.
Which is why you don’t get assassinated for preaching about love.
Which is why I, and many of my pastor-preacher-minister-type colleagues are going to be just fine.

We’re safe.

We are safe when we are being called to be bold.
Like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated in Memphis on this day in 1968. For preaching about love–and how it cannot be decoupled from power and justice.
“We’ve worked hard to create a vision of King that is like a black Santa Claus,” says Charles McKinney, associate professor of history at Rhodes College. (I listened to his interview today on The Takeaway from WNYC; you can (and should) listen to it, too.) In other words, popular American culture memorializes Rev. King as someone who preached about love, and it has forgotten that he was called to Memphis to defend and affirm the lives of sanitation workers who were on strike, to challenge the city to give them a living wage. It was part of a campaign he was igniting to restructure the fabric of human life in the United States and to confront the reality of poverty.
You don’t get assassinated for preaching about love, remember?

Professor McKinney compares the popular culture version of Rev. King to Barney the Dinosaur singing “I love you, you love me”; he calls him “toothless.” He says we–and by “we” I mean corporate, political and religious forces who benefit (or at least remain safe) by promoting this sanitized version–have whittled Rev. King’s narrative down to one that is about love. The Hallmark kind. But the kind of love that King preached about was the kind of love that demanded we be in the streets; that demanded we work on behalf of and alongside the disinherited. It was the kind of love that got him killed.

So this is my commitment: to expand my imagination and my heart in ways that move me from safe to bold. To let you, my friends and neighbors, invite me into that transformation. It is not always easy to imagine what Rev. King’s work might look like in Central Oregon; at least three times a week someone tells me “how white” it is here. We can debate that informal (and changing) statistic, but the real question is: do we here in Oregon not still see the three main evils Rev. King was called to challenge?
Racism; militarism; poverty.
Those among us who are undocumented know these evils.
Those among us who are underemployed and unsafely housed know these evils.

How about #whitechurchbold?
How about #whitechurchlistening?
How about #whitechurchstandswith?

At Easter, I, alongside many others, celebrate the persistent life of the One who got assassinated for preaching about love that transforms the powers of the-world-as-it-is for the sake of justice on earth as it is in heaven.
May we listen to such bold calls and live by such bold examples.
Alleluia.
Everywhere.

– Erika

 

This is the third in our series on disrupting, reclaiming and expanding parts of Christian language, tradition and ritual for our lives and experiences here and now.

by Leigh DeVries

In my first couple years as a youth pastor I worked with and for a self-proclaimed “boy’s club” in the South. My fellow youth ministers all went to the same all-boys school in Nashville and then had gone off to big SEC schools for college. They loved football, beer, Jesus, and teenagers. And they did their best to love me.

We were required to memorize scripture as part of our job. One such verse was John 14:21, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he is the one who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my father, and I too will love him and reveal myself to him.”

Now… I don’t know if you were counting, but that’s five male pronouns and one male metaphor for God (Father), in one verse. I, as a woman, began to feel this twinge.

In response to the twinge, I looked up the verse in the original Greek (the language of the New Testament). In my endearing first attempt at understanding Biblical Greek, I understood that pronouns used were neuter, thus without gender (after having to take courses in Biblical Greek I realize I was mistaken, which is what happens when you use a free website for translation!).

So, I told my coworkers I would be using feminine pronouns. I was a woman, seeking to follow the commands of Jesus, and so I should use my own pronouns, just like they got to use theirs. And it wouldn’t be sacrilegious or ignoring the “authority” of the Christian Bible—it was simply a different interpretation.

Notwithstanding the fact that my translation wasn’t accurate, the logic still stands for me—why shouldn’t I be able to use my pronouns? They boys got to use theirs, why not me? Did Jesus really care which pronoun I used? What about Galatians 3:28, which we also had to memorize? It reads, “There is no longer Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you all are one in Christ Jesus.” If we are all one then why is it only “he who will be loved?” and not she or they?

Their general reactions to my usage of feminine pronouns fell in the vicinity of shifty eyes, discomfort, and “uh, okay?”

We then took our high school seniors to a Passion, a conservative Christian conference in Atlanta that states their goal as “…uniting students in worship and prayer for spiritual awakening in this generation.” I remember sitting in the Georgia Dome, listening to the likes of Louie Giglio and John Piper, talking about the love of our Father God. Chris Tomlin and David Crowder leading us in songs about “how deep the Father’s love for us,” our savior, the king of kings, the prince of peace, oh how He love us.

I felt this twinge, this pinch, get bigger.

Coming back to Nashville, I heard our pastors using Trinitarian closing for prayers and blessings—“in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Ghost.” I realized that the Trinitarian litany was, at best, two men and some form of non-binary being.

There was no woman in the Trinity.

The men I worked with, they all planned on being fathers someday… they could get the epitaph Father that we so often give for God, whereas I could not. I would be a mother… and a Mother wasn’t what Christians called God. That was reserved for “Father.”

After life as a Christian since childhood, four years at a liberal arts college, and plenty of privileged world travel, I was struck by a deep sense of wrongness.

Feminist theologian Mary Daly once said, “If God is male, then male is God.” Through using only male pronouns for God and Jesus and the Spirit, we have deified the male gender. The language we use for God has been a participant and perpetuator of patriarchy, of hegemonic masculinity, and contributed to devaluing of any and all non-male bodies.

It would be like worshiping a redheaded God—imagine praying, “dear red-headed God, thank you for your strength and provision …” It stands to reason that the red-heads in the room might sit a little straighter, knowing they have a big thing something in common with the divine, whereas folks with all the other hair colors would begin to feel somehow less. The red-heads could think they were naturally strong, that they should be the providers, that they were more, better.

I felt like the Bible, the Church, the entire Christian community, were all telling me, overtly or not, that I was “less” because I was a woman. My “less-ness” had been blessed and made sacred by my faith, who saw me as less because of my sex and gender.

I couldn’t help but wonder at this point how the hell I was supposed to fit into this religion, this world view, when I staunchly refused to believe I was less because of my chromosomal makeup, my self-identification, my body.

I have spent years, particularly my years in seminary, trying to figure out if I can fit in this thing called “Christianity.” There have been times when I have wanted to leave my faith almost hourly, due in part to this specific issue, and the trickle-down effects I see patriarchy enacting in the world.

But God, like the bully She is, just won’t let me go. Jesus, in and beyond all of his problematic “maleness,” just won’t leave me alone and I, for some unknown reason, can’t seem to walk away from my Christian faith altogether.

And in those same seminary years, I was introduced to feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologies. I learned about the writings of women like Elizabeth Johnson, Kwok Pui-Lan, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Delores S. Williams, Emilie M. Townes, and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, women who saw God as more than a white man, even going so far as to identify God within their own experience—God as a black woman, as a chica joven in labor, as a mother bear, God as, a God who entered into my own and experience and saw it, saw me, as holy.

I learned about the necessity of viewing all things in context. Any reading of the Bible is a cross-cultural experience, meaning we will almost always misunderstand things because we are outside of the context in which it was written. The story of the good Samaritan really doesn’t mean much, until you learn that the Jews hated the Samaritans because of centuries of betrayal and cultural hatred. The story of Adam and Eve totally changes when you learn that adam can also mean “humankind” and that chavvah (translated Eve) means “life;” that when God makes adam a helper, an ezer, that same word ezer is most often used as a word for God, when God comes and saves the Israelites from various catastrophes. In other words, the “helper”—ezer—is sacred, potent, a part of God herself.

The greatest lesson that I keep returning to in terms of our language around God is that everything, every epitaph or curse or name, everything we ever call God is but a metaphor. No words can encompass who and what and how God is. Thus, I believe, we must be deeply intentional about our language for God, especially in church, and we must notice who and what is left out in our imaginings of God.

Using feminine imagery for God has become a deeply healing experience for me. When I hear God referred to with feminine pronouns I am reminded that I am included, loved, seen by my God. I am reminded that I have been given much, that I have that “much-ness” in common with my Creator, and am called to now live in such a way as to love as God loves—radically, empathetically, strangely, beautifully. I am reminded that in truth all gender is false, merely a helpful (and harmful) categorization for people.

I am reminded that I exist within God, that God exists within me.

A translation of Acts 17:28 is this (as I now have taken Biblical Greek):

“For in Christ we live, and move, and have our being; for we, as the poets say, are children of God.”

We are children of God, expressions of our Creator, regardless of our chromosomal makeup or identifications—we all reflect our Creator, uniquely, especially, intentionally. And as such, we must talk about Her, about Him, about Them, with language and words that recall us to our inclusion, our belovedness, and the vastness of God.

 

This is the second in our series on disrupting, reclaiming and expanding parts of Christian language, tradition and ritual for our lives and experiences here and now. This gorgeous reflection comes to us from Leigh DeVries, associate director of the Bend Youth Collective, youth pastor at Nativity Lutheran Church and Bend Church, and a person who brings a generosity of spirit to all she does as minister, friend, colleague and partner.

 

 

 

I remember one evening when I was seven, sitting at the dinner table eating Sloppy Joes with my family, when my parents asked my brother, a sullen teenager preparing for confirmation, if he had the Lord’s Prayer memorized. He didn’t. I perked up: a chance to be smug. And so I recited that prayer aloud to my family and felt thoroughly holy.

That was one of the last times I felt “Christian enough.” Since then, things have gone downhill.
I have befriended, dated and been family to people who identify as atheists.
I do not hear many (really any) of the “bumper sticker” passages from the Bible as “good news.”
I have been mad since I was twelve that Jesus was born a man.

Could I go to church? Could I go to seminary? Could I pastor a community?
Would I be Christian enough?

Well: yes, yes, yes and probably; at least, enough for me to live my life dwelling deeply in the ongoing story of the Holy. Which is Christian enough.

And so it is very good and right and meant-to-be that I have landed in the Northwest, where we talk about what is gained and lost when we use words like “Christ,” “salvation,” “church,” “Lord.” We do not take anything for granted. It is all on the table, up for debate. What happens when we die, how we find healing and wholeness, what constitutes good and healthy relationship, how we are to respond to sorrow and terror in the world: these are the questions of our time (and perhaps every time). And words like “salvation,” recited in unison from our bulletins, do not offer me any comfort. Rather, I, and I’m not the only one, might prefer to gaze at the Three Sisters on a first-of-Spring day, like today. There is salvation there, but I might not call it that. I might not need to call it anything.

And that, my friends, is Christian enough. IMHO.

Is it just me, or is there something in the water that has led us to believe that there are benchmarks and litmus tests for what makes people Christian enough? This is a problem, because I–and lots of people–do not feel like we hit those marks. I also do not feel welcome in the popular U.S. American, white evangelical narrative of who a Christian is and what a Christian looks like and how a Christian believes. I do not feel welcome and I am also not particularly interested in conforming to it. You can’t fire me; I quit!

The thing is, it is because I am a Christian that I am a feminist. Not despite it.

It is because I am a Christian that I long for tables in our churches and our world that are big enough to hold everyone, forming bonds of relationship and love across differences in belief.

It is because I am a Christian that I want to stand in solidarity with the people Jesus stood with: children, women, the ones the dominant culture calls “the other,” whether on the basis of race, orientation, identity, documentation status or wealth.

I long for community that walks together as we cultivate new vocabulary, or reclaim old vocabulary (and maybe even creeds), to express how our relationships, experiences, sorrows, joys and transcendent experiences with the Holy intersect with the wisdom of sacred texts, ancient rituals, and the teachings of our ancestors.

I am not the first nor the last to spill some virtual ink on this subject. But I want to do it, and I want to invite the people I love to do it with me. Because this is vulnerable for me–it is vulnerable to wear a collar and say I don’t know exactly what happens when we die; it is vulnerable to preach from the Bible and also feel repulsed by some of what the Bible says; it is vulnerable to occupy the liminal space between identifying with a label and yet rejecting the baggage that label carries–and I don’t think any of us want to do it alone.

So welcome to a series of writings, poems, videos, and whatever else our Creative can dream up, all with the hopes of dwelling deeply in ways that disrupt–or at least get intentional about–what it might mean to be “Christian enough” here and now. By which I mean, what it means to be imperfectly and beautifully human. What it might mean to go from the pew to the mountain, and from the mountain to beloved community. What it might mean for us to gaze with awe at the Sisters and into the faces of our siblings, friends, and neighbors in Love.

Gaze away.

– Erika

I have all the time in the world for you.
There is nothing more important than this.

I want to be the kind of pastor and friend who says this. I want to be the kind of neighbor and daughter and wife and colleague whom people know means it when she says it.

Someone said that phrase to me today in a training on suicide prevention, and she meant it.
“Everything else can wait. Put a pin in it. It’ll still be there,” she said.

Right now, we need to put a pin in it.
Whatever we are doing, it will still be there.
Seventeen people died in Parkland, Florida, yesterday, and, today at least, there is nothing more important than this.

I attended a suicide prevention training today. And I know suicide is different from homicide (suicide actually kills more people than homicide does), but the two have some common contributing factors: illness, isolation and access.

Oregon has one of the highest rates of suicide in the country. Nationally, suicide is the second-leading cause of death for young people (ages 25-34) and the third-leading cause of death for adolescents (ages 10-24). I am choked up just writing that.

And today at the training, I choked up listening to good people describe how so many of their [clients, students, patients, family members, children] couldn’t access mental health care because of long waiting lists. Illness.

I choked up listening to good, good people describe how so many folks, folks who haven’t yet reached experienced suicidal thoughts, simply need someone to talk to. Someone to listen. Isolation.

But I got angry at this statistic: Gun owners and their families suffer from suicide at a rate three times higher than those who don’t own guns. They are not sicker or more isolated. They have better access to lethal weapons. While we can debate whether guns cause suicides and homicides, we cannot debate that guns offer access. Guns are means to an end, and they are highly effective. There is little room for ambivalence or doubt with a gun. Access.

So I’m putting a pin in it. Rage can be productive, but it has its limits. I am in serious brainstorming mode about what moral people–spiritual people–of any background and persuasion can prioritize right now so that we can prevent more loss of life–more days of frustration and sorrow. Faithful response to the deaths of our fellow beloveds is necessary, political and spiritual.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Let your heart be broken by this. Every time. School and other mass shootings are now commonplace in the United States. That is not okay. We each carry the Holy within us; the Hebrew Scriptures tell us that God created humans in God’s very image. When we feel our hearts wanting to break, let’s let them. Then let’s use our sorrow as righteous fuel for what comes next.

Be in community. Listen to your neighbors. Create webs of belonging. Talk with other people about how to do that. We need one another when something hard happens: divorce, job loss, poverty & other forms of oppression, death. A national tragedy like a school shooting. I often take for granted that I have lots of people with whom to vent my shit. Not everyone has that. Put a pin in whatever you are doing. Tell someone that you have all the time in the world for them. This is how we can create resilient communities.

Get political about this. Not divisive. Not righteous. Speak truth to bullshit. Be public about the ways you are called to live into your [moral, spiritual, religious, parental, medical, etc.] identity. Jesus says: You are the salt of the earth, the light of the world. So be that. Find out your congressional representatives’ position on common-sense gun laws. If your congressional representatives refuse to act in response to these shootings, and that includes amping up mental health funding in local, state and federal settings, find out who is running against them and when. Research those people’s positions. Give them money and vote for them and knock on doors for them. For folks who, like me, live in Oregon’s 2nd congressional district, know that Greg Walden is among the top twenty lifetime recipients of money from the NRA. He’s up for reelection this year. Just sayin’.

Let me know what other ideas you might have. I know the list can grow long, but this is what is coming to the surface for me today.

And, of course, I hope it goes without saying:

I have all the time in the world for you.
There’s nothing more important than this.

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

1 “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. 2 “So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

5 “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

16 “And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 17 But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, 18 so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

 

“You are stardust and to stardust you shall return.”

These are the words I’ll say to whatever poor souls happen to ask me what I’m up to downtown today between 3 and 5:30 pm;

I’ll be poised, ready to give out “ashes to go,”

and Hershey kisses. And paper stars with inspirational words on them.

I’ll stick out like a sore thumb.

 

It will be the opposite of praying in secret.

 

Did I mention there will be glitter in these ashes?

I mixed them in as a sign of my intention to be an ally alongside the LGBTQ community,

mixed that glitter in in the tradition of other churches that have done so,

so that I might mark the bodies of my gay, lesbian, bi and trans friends with a sign of their mortality

but also a sign of their belovedness.

 

It will be the opposite of praying in secret.

In fact, most of what we do in our churches is the opposite of everything Jesus tells us in this Sermon on the Mount we ought not to do.

The robes, the confessional hymns, the big stewardship campaigns, the widely advertised classes on spiritual disciplines. If you are a church person, you do this, and you know what I’m talking about. We do this.

And we will all leave here today with a big ol’ ash cross on our foreheads, and we’ll go to work or the grocery store or, if you’re like me, you will go pick up a pepperoni heart-shaped pizza from Papa Murphy’s and just be the most obvious church-going Christian ever.

And then maybe someone will ask you what it means.

———

Maybe you’ll say it’s from church. Ash Wednesday. Have a nice day.

Maybe you’ll say it’s a sign of your mortality, of your sinfulness. Have a nice day?

Maybe you’ll say it’s a ritual you grew up with, and you don’t remember what it means.

There’s no judgment. That is usually the case with most of us.

No matter what you say, there’s a good chance that Jesus would call you a hypocrite.

Just sayin’.

You’re in decent company: I am literally going to be a standing on a street corner today, just like the scribes and the pharisees Jesus’ has so much contempt for.

The scribes and the pharisees were the “good Jews.” They followed the laws and codes of Judaism to a tee and had a sense that they were more blessed by God because of it. They thought themselves “more Jewish” than the rest.

And Jesus has a lot of contempt for this. He ministered with his disciples and those gathered on that mountain–folks desperate for a new way, a different reality, a true Messiah–and his mission was all about debunking the popular wisdom that the better you follow the rules the more blessed you are.

And yet we have gathered as good Christians, to do the public ritual that we hold dear. Something that makes us publicly announce our adherence to the codes. That separates us from everyone else with their clean faces.

I didn’t grow up with Ash Wednesday as a ritual, I grew up in a less-liturgical setting, but when I first stumbled upon the tradition it felt like yessssssssssss another thing I can do to be more Christian.

We will each reconcile our presence here, the ashes on our foreheads, in our own way.

I trust, and I choose to believe, that it is not all religious posturing. Not all hypocrisy.

———–

Here is how I will make meaning of this day:

Meister Eckhart, a 13th century Christian mystic, once wrote: To be full of things is to be empty of God; to be empty of things is to be full of God.

 

For me, Ash Wednesday is a day for such a paradox.

Not a day when I add one more thing to my list of piousness, but rather the one day of the year when I am really clear, in a public way, about how human I am.

 

A day to take things away rather than to add things on.

 

A day to be less Christian and more human:

more honest about the shame that lives deep in me; the fear that comes from thinking I will never be enough.

More honest about the jagged vulnerability within me, the way so many things, especially love, feels risky.

More honest about how I often fear the day, hopefully far in the future, my husband will die.

 

How I don’t usually give money to folks who ask me for it,

how I have made embarrassing assumptions in casual conversation about people of color,

how I have sometimes not believed women who tell me their stories.

How I am bound up in systems of injustice that are destroying our planet.

 

How I keep on keeping on, adding more things–activities, TV shows, friendships, Target runs, another glass of wine–hoping against hope that they will be enough to keep the truth at bay.

 

The truth that I am just human.

From dust I came and to dust I will return.

———–

I was guilty of just such a flurry of activity recently. One of my very best friends in the world is having her first child, her long-awaited baby. She is due next month.

We celebrated her baby shower this past weekend, and amidst all the busyness of life, I had overcommitted myself to bringing a vegetable tray, buying the champagne, planning the games and making the party favors. I did not really have time for all of that. It was tempting, as I scrambled to wash and dry the onesies for the decorate-a-onesie station to think: gosh, it’s just a baby.

Which is true. Babies get born literally every minute of every day.

It’s tempting to think: it’s just a baby.

 

And yet: it’s a baby.

 

One of God’s great affirmations that what God created is good.

 

We are just human.

And yet: we are human.

 

Literally made of bits and pieces of stardust, magical debris from cosmic explosions billions of years ago that continues to float through the air and land on Earth: on our corn, on our wheat, on our coffee plants. We eat and drink it and it becomes a part of us. Over and over, until we die.

At which point our bones become a part of the earth, co-mingling with all that stardust, and becoming a part of the soil and the plants and bread and wine we eat today.

 

We are made of stardust.

We are also made of one another.

 

We are human.

What a beloved thing we have been created to be.

The God who wore skin to be close to us certainly seems to believe so.

————

That incarnate God seems to believe that following codes and laws, being good Christians or good Jews; that is not where our blessedness lies. God came to us as a stardust creature, a human, and so I cannot help but believe that, when everything else has been stripped away, our blessedness is in our humanness.

 

The things that divide us– our religion, our attitude, our fear of loving the other for fear it might disrupt our comfort, might change who we are. Well, that is all so irrelevant when you consider the stars.

 

The list of things that divide us is puny compared to that thing which unites us.

 

We are made of the same God-given stuff.

Living. Dying.

The same rotting bones.

The same stardust.

 

Stardust that walks around in skin to be one another’s neighbors, teachers, nurses.

Confidants, siblings; house-builders and taco-makers.

Messiah.

 

And all of a sudden, “us” and “them” has become “we.”

All of a sudden, we are a we.

A family of star specks.

 

We are so small.

So mortal. So human.

What very good news.

 

Remember: you are stardust and to stardust you shall return.

 

Amen.

 

Sermon at Madras United Methodist Church, January 28, 2018

Mark 1:21-28

21 They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. 22 They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. 23 Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, 24 and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” 25 But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” 26 And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. 27 They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” 28 At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.

 

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

 

The words of the late Leonard Cohen in his song “Anthem.”

 

Words of hope in a time of chaos.

Words of encouragement in a moment when it feels difficult to muster more energy.

 

At least, that is my situation.

 

I have been struggling with insomnia lately;

perhaps it’s my pillow,

or that I am known to check my email right before bed,

or that I carry excitement and anxiety in my body and my bones

as I and others begin to form a new spiritual community.

 

That is work that might keep one up at night.

 

And so Cohen’s words: that light comes from the hard, cracked places–

that feels like good news.

Cohen himself, a Jew from Canada,

said that that line was about resurrection.

 

And I dare say we have all known the cracked places:

the death of a parent,

the loss of a job,

the empty nest–

the everyday cracks and losses that accompany this human life,

and whose brokenness reveals some new grace to us.

 

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

———

 

Jesus’ first public act of ministry is in an encounter with man who,

coincidentally, ironically,

we today might call “cracked.”

 

The people said that he was inhabited by demons.

We might draw a dotted line between demonic forces then and

mental illness now.

We might best understand this man in today’s terms as one

who wrestles constantly with pure evil.

Mental illness,

addiction,

a binding force that will not let him be free.

 

And yet he is not really broken.

This illness, this force, has so seemlessly taken over this man

that those around him cannot tell where one stops and the other begins.

Where human stops and demon begins.

 

He is probably someone in the community who people write off by saying:

“Oh, him, yeah: he’s cracked.”

His affliction and his self are united;

the man’s voice, the demon’s,

the demon’s body, that of a man.

 

They are one in the same.

 

Not so far from the writing off we do when we say, well:

he’s a felon,

she’s an druggie;

he’s a bum,

she’s a welfare queen.

 

Affliction and self are united in

the world as it is.

No one is better than the worst thing they have done.

No one is more whole than the most broken parts of them.

 

So many have accused the young women who stepped forward to

tell their stories of abuse as gymnasts at the hands of their doctor–

accused them of being in it for the money and the publicity.

 

And yet they have run the risk that whenever they

perform,

give an interview,

plan a playdate for their child–

 

“Oh yeah, she’s one of those victims.”

 

In the world as it is,

we are not able to discern where human stops

and affliction begins.

———-

 

In the world as it was, in the cultural-political situation of

Caperneaum and the entire peninsula

where Jesus lived and did his ministry,

people may have been like us: not able to discern where human stopped

and affliction began.

 

But the original hearers, those huddled around the table,

listening to this new story, the Gospel of Jesus Christ According to Mark,

were able to discern something else:

where human stopped and occupier began.

 

These are working-class and poor folks,

both Jewish and Gentile,

who knew well what it meant to be occupied.

They lived under the thumb of Caesar,

subject to high taxes and a life of hard physical work.

Their land was not their own.

 

They know what it is to be occupied by military forces.

So when they hear this story–

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?”–

they hear military language.

They will hear it again several stories later when Jesus heals another man afflicted by demons.

The demons will call themselves “legion.”

What might be a personal story about the desolation of mental illness,

might also be a very political story about the desolation caused by military occupancy and

economic oppression.

 

Which may not be so different from mental illness after all.

We know that undocumented people in this country suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts more than others.

We know survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts more than others.

 

Fear makes us sick.

 

And, if I’m being honest, it makes us all sick,

whether we are safe and secure

or we fear each new day;

we are not all okay until we are all okay.

 

Both occupier and occupied suffer under systems

that do not let us see where

human stops and affliction begins.

———–

 

There is a crack in everything–that’s how the light gets in.

And if there isn’t a crack there:

someone needs to make it.

 

We are reminded of this over and over again in Scripture:

as Jesus is being baptized, the heavens are “torn apart”;

as Jesus dies, the curtain to the temple is torn in two.

 

The Prophet Isaiah prays to God:

“oh that you would rend the heavens and come down,

that the mountains would tremble before you.”

 

There is a crack in everything–that’s how the light gets in.

And if there isn’t a crack there:

someone needs to make it.

 

You see, Jesus has come to do a new thing.

In the One wearing flesh, God making all things new.

Putting a crack in the system

that separates us from one another,

breaking open the system that makes us call one another names

rather than calling one another “beloved.”

 

God knows: that’s how the light gets in.

 

To the relational God–

the One who creates and calls us,

the One who heals and sustains us–

you are absolutely better and more beautiful than the worst thing you have done.

You are, without a doubt, more whole than the most broken part of you.

Jesus makes holy trouble in that temple–

puts cracks in the system–

for the sake of us all seeing that we are children of God,

when we are afflicted, and when we are at peace.

 

Your demons are but temporary.

Whether they occupy your body,

your mind,

your freedom.

They say nothing about who and whose you are.

 

Your belovedness cannot be put into question.

———-

 

The belovedness of that possessed man–

for Jesus, there was no doubt.

 

And so his act of healing was an act of

breaking.

Breaking the lie that says we are how we act,

we are what ails us,

we are mere canvases on which unjust systems can paint

the identity they wish us to have: felon, druggie; victim, illegal.

 

Jesus’ healing act

was an act of breaking.

The man was shaken.

 

This is what “exorcism” can look like: for individuals and for communities.

What withdrawal from drugs can look like.

What hard years of therapy can look like,

what the back-breaking work of revitalizing a town can look like.

What it can look like for a community to reclaim its identity after the occupiers leave.

 

We are shaken to the core,

weak and weeping,

broken.

Cracked.

 

God storms in to those places

that are desperate for it.

That need to be splintered, shattered, burst.

God goes into those places in our lives

that are desperate for the light.

 

So that we might know that we are made to be beloved,

and that there is no affliction–

personal or societal–

that can take that away.

 

God charges in to do the terrifying work of

healing us and our world,

over and over again.

 

So, there will be cracks.

Thanks be to God.

Because that’s how the light gets in.

I’m just going to leave this right here.