Number in Series: Sixth

Love Is a Semicolon

I’d like to read our scripture first today. It’s a very short excerpt from Isaiah 43 that will launch us into today’s teaching, which focuses on the themes of this whole larger section of Isaiah.

Isaiah 43:18-19 (New Revised Standard Version)

18 Do not remember the former things,

    or consider the things of old.

19 I am about to do a new thing;

    now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness

    and rivers in the desert.

Today’s talk is called “Love is a semicolon.” I love semicolons so much I recently got one tattooed on my wrist. It’s right here. Today’s my shot to tell you why I did that, for me but for maybe for all of us too. 

I love semicolons for nerdy, English teacher reasons. The semicolon is one of the less common punctuation marks – looks like a period above a comma. For different reasons, they’re fun and useful to teach about. You can teach a lot of grammar and usage in the English language by talking about semicolons. 

They’re interesting to use too. The most common use of a semicolon is when you’ve got a sentence and you want to slap another sentence onto it without separating them and without adding any of those little connecting words like “and”, “so,” or “but.” And when you do that, the second part of the sentence, that part after the semicolon, really matters.

A semicolon indicates there is more to say. The thought isn’t over.

This is why the semicolon has become significant as a symbol amongst those who have faced or care about depression, suicide, addiction, or self-harm. The semicolon says that the past doesn’t tell our whole story. There’s always a future story yet to be told. 

The semicolon dares to hope about this future that the best is always yet to come.

I believe this is true, always, which is why love is a semicolon. 

The scripture I read to you is from the portion of Isaiah – chapters 40-55 – written to the Judean exiles living in Babylon. They were among the many ancient peoples who had seemed to face their end. I remember many years ago when Grace and I were in Xinjiang, far Northwest China, a Uyghur friend discreetly said to me, Look around. They are destroying our culture. In the future, will we even exist?

This was the fear of the Judean exiles. Like so many refugees today, they would have faced deaths in their families, other wartime traumas. They lived in a land where they mostly couldn’t speak the language, where they faced insults and discrimination on the regular, and where there was no route back to the better days of their past. 

This Babylonian exile looked like an end to these Judeans.

I haven’t faced war or exile in my life, but I’ve had times where I faced sad endings, smaller ones, but ones that mattered to me. One of those was about 19 years ago this month. I had a newborn child, and I had hit another professional dead end, and I was really scared.

See, when I was younger, I’d been in the classical music scene, and it’s a pretty niche field, but I had a lot of success early. Then, being young and naive and impressionable, I dumped all that to be a young college campus minister. I was underqualified, I was underpaid, and frankly, I kind of underperformed too. I had tried doing Christian ministry to college students because at the time it seemed like something that would make God proud of me or happy about my life or something.

But like I said, I wasn’t great at the work, and it was having a negative effect on my happiness, on my finances and my future, even on my marriage. So I quit, and after a long and awkward bit of spinning my wheels, working odd jobs, dropping out of a graduate school program, I eventually found a job as a public school teacher. And almost two years into that, I thought I had found not just a job, but a career, something I was good at, something I enjoyed, something that really helped other people, and something that over time would help support the family we were having, with this first baby child of ours. 

And then I was laid off. 

I wondered if I’d get my job back, or if this was yet another dead end.

I wondered if I’d be able to support my baby daughter and my wife who was trying to finish her graduate degree as a new mom.

And I was haunted by a fear that had deep roots in me, going back to childhood, that my life – as much potential as it once seemed to have – would end up being a failure. 

A lot of us have been facing what look like dead ends. In my circles, I know people who have faced the death of a loved one and can’t get through the grief. I know kids and their parents whose anxieties and depression and struggles are just relentless and not getting better. I know families that are torn apart over politics, over unhealed conflicts, over unaccountable, bad behavior. I know people whose marriages seem to have entirely run out of joy and intimacy. 

And I know people whose faith in God is hanging by a thread, mostly gone. 

I know you know these stories too. I know that some of you are living these stories. To all of us at what looks like the end of a sad story, what does God have to say to us? 

I look to this section of Isaiah not just because of the story of the exiles it addresses, but because for Chrisitans, Isaiah has been so important that it has sometimes been called the great prophet, or the fifth gospel. Another source of good news. Its poetry about God’s heart for Judeans in the ancient Near East seems to echo down through history with truth about God’s ways in all times and places.

So what does God have to say to us in our dead ends?

Well, Isaiah tells us:

Thus says the Lord,

    your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel:

 I am the Lord, your Holy One,

    the Creator of Israel, your King.

 Thus says the Lord,

    who makes a way in the sea,

a path in the mighty waters,

And then the bit we read at the start:

Do not remember the former things,

    or consider the things of old.

19 I am about to do a new thing;

 

Two things here.

God tells us that we can not go back to the past. The good and the bad – all of it – it’s gone, over. We can’t go back.

For me in my crisis 19 years ago, that meant I couldn’t remake the choices of my early and mid-20s. I couldn’t reach back and grab opportunities I’d passed on. They were gone. I couldn’t rewind my life to a time without financial responsibilities. I certainly couldn’t rewire my family’s story or the story of what was off base in my early years of faith in Jesus, and some of the other things that had set me up for this failure or fear of failure. I carried that with me.

The same with all our dead ends and blocks – we can’t go backwards. 

We can’t go just “back to normal” after two years of pandemic fear and caution. We’re different now.

We can’t go back to the naive faith of our childhood if we’ve lost that. That particular form of faith we lost for a reason.

We can’t go backwards on anything. 

So whether it’s a warm nostalgia for the past, like we see in the whole Make America Great Again movement, or whether it’s a painful fixation on the past, like those of us who live with ruminating regret, trying to recover or fix or return to the past is never going to work. It’s not going to have power to help us move forward. 

What God does tell us, though, is that there is always a hopeful future.

God says,

“I am about to do a new thing… a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert.” 

Everytime we start to write that period, that ending into our story, God invites us to try a semicolon instead. There’s always a next chapter.

A new thing. 

For me, this meant a new way of thinking about work and failure and my life mission. In my fears that I had somehow reached the end of my vocational and financial future at age 29, I was praying that spring and reading the prophets of exile as inspiration for prayer, and I felt like God was inviting me to think less about my job prospects and more about my identity, values, and aspirations in life. 

As I called to mind who I was and what I cared about most deeply, I remember a particular morning when I went out very early to pray. I awoke in the dark and rode to the ocean to pray at sunrise because I needed hope and vision and had a sense that God would find me with it there. And that sunrise along the ocean, it came to mind with great clarity, like a promise from God:

Steve, you know who you are. Your values, your best desires are clear, and your calling is just to pursue these things no matter what job you’re in. The job doesn’t matter. You are who you are, not what you do. And no matter what happens, no matter what you gain or lose, you will never be a failure. You are not a failure to me, and you never will be.

Friends, I can’t tell you how freeing that vision of my future was. That I am who I am, not what I do. It was time to let go of worrying so much about what job I had and how secure it was. It was time to fully be who God made me to be within any job I had or could find, and beyond jobs entirely too, and the rest would take care of itself. 

This was so freeing and empowering for me, a different way of embracing a very hopeful future.

For Israel too, their return from exile would be different. They weren’t getting their same temple back, their same set of lands, their same way of being in the world. History had moved on from all that. 

But they were getting a hopeful future. Their return from exile under Persian rule allowed them to resettle in and around the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, even while others lived in a diaspora that would continue spreading in the centuries to come. In this new future, things like the written word – what became the Jewish Bible, what Chrisitans call the Old Testament – would take on greater meaning.

Charismatic prophets would slowly take on a less central role in speaking for God, and people’s own lives of prayer would become more important. Israel’s faith that God always does good to the faithful and always does bad to the unfaithful would change and grow – take on more realism, more nuance – less about God’s punishment and rewards, more about God’s presence in all things. Their lives and faith would be less about their own tribe and people and more about their life among the nations, and their call to be blessed to be a blessing to the whole world.

This section of Isaiah and what comes beyond is gorgeous poetry because it is so full of vision and hope for what people who are loved by God and know God can be. And it starts with faith that God is always about to do a new thing, that just now, it is springing forth. Look for it. Perceive it.

I don’t know what it is, but I am confident that in whatever stalled places and dead end places you find in your lives, there too God is doing new things. There is invitation to make some peace with the unchangeable past, perhaps even to grieve and let go and move on. And there is invitation to pay attention to the new possibilities that are available.

Ask God. Search your hearts. Literally or metaphorically, pray by the ocean at sunrise, asking God to discern the hopeful future before us all. 

It is there for you, and for the people you love. I promise you.

The follower of Jesus has the audacity to believe this even in the face of death, that with a God who knows and loves us, and with a God of creative redemption, the best is always yet to come. 

Let’s close with just a couple more words about the pivot God makes with us, the shift God encourages us to make when we turn from the irretrievable past to God’s hopeful future. When we erase that period of finality and doom we feel and embrace how love is a semicolon. 

There are two things here – one maybe surprising and one review. 

The surprising one is this.

To embrace God’s new and beautiful thing, the word of God in Isaiah commands us to renounce idols. 

That took a strangely ancient, religious turn, didn’t it?

Renounce idols. What does that even mean?

Idols are anything other than the living God that we cling to in our insecurity to tell us who we are or make us feel 100% safe and secure. They can be secular or religious, ancient or modern. But we’re asking them to do things they can not do for us.

So to renounce idols is just to do what Isaiah does again and again. It’s to tell the truth about them. That we can’t trust them to take care of us, and we can’t trust them to love us and make meaning of our lives like God can. 

A couple examples:

Where God met me in my despair over my future 19 years ago, renouncing idols was saying that I am no longer what I do. I am who I am. My job title, pay, security, or success is not the measure of my meaning and worth. It’s not how I measure whether I’m a failure or not. And it’s not what ensures a good future for me. I am who I am – beloved child of God, made for love and purpose that goes beyond the particulars of any job. 

That’s the renunciation of an idol and an embrace of God.

When people say: you’re work won’t love you back, this is what they’re saying. Not that you can’t love your job or work hard, but that your job can’t define you or tell you your meaning or worth. That’s idolatry. 

When it comes to my despair over my children’s struggles, I’ve sometimes been confronted by God to let go of the idolatry of the so-called perfect child. Whatever my dream or vision is of a “perfect child” or whatever lies my culture or community have told me about all a kid needs to be to be happy and successful, I need to let that go in my heart and trust that God loves my kids.

God loves all kids, and God can give them a safe and happy future the same way God does with me – not by everything being successful and easy, but by always doing a new thing, and by charting paths or beauty and redemption even after and through every weakness and struggle.

This is true of faith deconstruction too. If your faith has changed, even if it has seemingly weakened, sometimes we’re called to renounce idols associated with our earlier, more certain faith. Maybe we need to let go of always thinking we’re right. Maybe we need to let go of thinking we can know all the answers. Maybe we need to let go of thinking we’re better than our friends or neighbors or enemies that do not follow Jesus. Sometimes letting go of things that aren’t ours to have helps open up what God can give us. 

What dream, what fantasy I might say, do you embrace of what will make you secure, what will tell you that you are safe and loved, that isn’t real, and that isn’t God? It might be time to let that go. To say to yourself:

I know this isn’t true. I want God to tell me I’m loved and safe. I want to build my future on what’s true. 

And then secondly, the review. To see and say yes to the new thing God is doing, we are called to embrace a novel future, to look for and wholeheartedly go after the best creative possibility that is available to us today, given where we’ve been, who we are, and what our circumstances are. 

God is always speaking hope to us, not vague sentiments of hope, but concrete, hopeful possibilities. Some might argue that this is the primary way God speaks – always luring us, always inviting us to the next best possibilities for ourselves, for our communities, for this earth, even for God. 

Embracing curiosity and attention for what those are, year by year, day by day, moment by moment is the life of hope and faith God has for us.

Friends, as we wrap up and pray, let me say that I am really excited for the spring season of Lent we have before us this year. This year’s Lent, the six weeks before Easter, is called Water of Life. It’ll be all about the vitality, the refreshment and rejuvenation, the healing and abundance, the life that God has for us all.

It begins in three weeks. Guide for personal and community group use will be available in about two weeks. It’s an invitation to vitality, to faith, to hope, to the water of life God has for it all. Pray for what God has for us in that season, and please plan on participating. More on that in the weeks to come. 

Friends, God’s best is yet to come. 

God says to us to today:

Do not remember the former things,

    or consider the things of old.

19 I am about to do a new thing;

    now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness

    and rivers in the desert.

Let’s pray. 

Bringing What We Need to the Table

For this week’s Events and Happenings, click “Download PDF.”

Luke 10:38-42

New Revised Standard Version 

38 Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home.

39 She had a sister named Mary, who sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to what he was saying.

40 But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”

41 But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things;

42 there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

 

Interpretations

The Christian churches, camps, and conferences that I grew up attending loved this story. If intimacy with God was our highest aspiration, which in these communities was often the case, this story confirmed our call: to sit at Jesus’ feet. To listen closely and to gaze adoringly. To be like Mary. As close as we could be to Jesus.

Here is Martha, busy and distracted, wanting Mary to come help her with the hosting tasks, and she pulls Jesus in to get him on her side. But Jesus admonishes Martha:

let your sister be. She’s sitting at my feet. She cares less about serving, more about connection . . . love, nearness, attention: she has chosen the better part.

Songs about Mary filled our gatherings. Even if I don’t read the story in the same way anymore, to this day, at least once a month, this song from my teenage years will pop into my head:

Let it be said of me, she chose the better part / let it be said of me she loved with all her heart.

I was asked recently to think about what I would want on my gravestone and immediately – she loved with all her heart – popped into my head. My quick second thought was that wouldn’t actually be what I want, but dang, that refrain “let it be said of me….” is a really sticky one for me!

For much of western, Eurocentric Christian history, this has been a common interpretation. My communities were revamping interpretations as old as those of Church leaders like Origen, an early theologian who wrote in the second century that this story represented two ways to approach a life of faith: the life of action, like Martha, or the life contemplation, like Mary.

Service or love. That which is temporary or that which is eternal. I have come to see some not great consequences of reading the story this way. For one, it reduces the two women in these stories to spiritual tropes about how to live in the world. Or, even when we see the sisters as full people, it pits them against each other to make a good woman/bad woman to teach people a lesson on right living—one who makes a good decision with her life and one who makes a bad one. And then there is this whole triangulation that happens . . . a reporting structure that draws in Jesus, which seems a bit weird and diminishing of the sisters’ relationship, too. Is there a more liberative story we can find in the words and actions of Mary, Martha, and Jesus?

Today, I wonder if we can reimagine some of the dynamics of the story, to understand a different way of coming around the table.

Choice & Need

A couple of years ago here at Reservoir, at the end of a service when folks were hanging out and talking, someone offered me an interpretation of this story that has been in my imagination since. This is among my favorite interactions in this church because it came out of nowhere –  we hadn’t been talking about the passage during the service or anything like that. After service, as I was walking back behind the sound desk, I bumped into a wonderful friend I look up to, who always has a good word. With no context and no greeting, she looked at me, eyes big and bright:

“Katie, about Mary and Martha. When Jesus says Mary has chosen the better part, it’s not about the better part, it’s not about what she was doing. It’s that she CHOSE! She made a choice!”

I was so caught by this. I was in a season of understanding what it meant to come into deeper choice. To exercise my agency, my authority…. and in the span of 20 seconds, this friend took a familiar story and gave me a whole new way to see it. It’s not that the better part was Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet. It’s that she chose what she needed.

This brings us into the heart of what we are talking about today. That the story of Mary, Martha, and Jesus is an invitation to consider what we need.

“You are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing,”

Jesus says. Few things are needed, and really only one. There is need of only one thing. Only one thing is needed.

And this is where I sense choice and need meeting each other. We get to choose to pay attention to what we most need. In these lives we live where so many of us are overextended and frayed and stressed beyond our means, where we are worried and distressed and distracted by so many things that it may feel like we need a million things. Could it be that what we need is as simple as one thing? Is it possible to choose what we need?

There is a powerful and simple question I have discovered to help in this process:

“What do you need today?”

It’s a question that invites us to quiet ourselves enough to ask the question of our self and another, to listen to another’s response, to respond our self.

I know two folks who are colleagues who ask this question of each other every day. Before they get to work, they look at each other and take a turn asking:

“What do you need today?”

They come into voice. They listen to their own self, what is arising within or around them, that they need for the day. They listen to each other. They listen to what the other needs. It is not so they can supply or provide what the other person needs, but to have a place to practice asking and naming what they need.

One of my loved ones and I ask each other this question a couple times a month. It takes a couple beats to quiet down, to sense what we may need. When the question first hits the air, I usually first think through my to do list for the day: I need to call this person, prep for this meeting, read this article, write this paper, check in with my parents, pack food before I go. But the question isn’t ‘What do I need to do today?’ It’s ‘What do I need today?’

I need focus for the work at hand, grace for the thing that I am nervous about. Sometimes when things are feeling really crammed and piled on, I sense I need spaciousness. Three really good meals and some snacks in between. Part of the quieting is that our needs are often felt in our body, in our spirit. In the midst of the chaos of our days, it’s so easy to live out of touch with our needs—but our bodies and spirits have a lot to say when we can pause to listen.

It’s meaningful to articulate what we need. Tapping into what we need may come naturally for some, but for others it is a challenging task. Perhaps, for reasons of race, gender, age, birth order, our family system of origin, or personality, we have been socialized to spend our days responding to the needs of others. Some have developed a hypersensitivity to other’s needs and are admired for having a gift of anticipating what others need. For folks who have a tendency to take care of the needs of others—coming into our own sense of what we need might be a challenging task. Others may be so focused on something external, that coming to the internal place of sensing your own need be unfamiliar.

What if Mary and Martha were able to sit at the table together and ask each other:

What do you need today?

What if they invited Jesus to join them at this table, and anyone else who was in the house that day.

What do you need today?

I like imagining that together, there at the table, they could trust an Abundance that could provide for each one’s needs. That they could bear witness to what the other was holding—needing—in love and care, without having to become the means to have that need met. What if they could creatively speak into each other’s lives, to imagine together how they could take care of what was needed to do, so everyone could have what they need? What if they encouraged each other to choose the thing they most needed? Because the demands of the world will always push up against what we need. Can we help each other choose what we need? How can we invite Jesus and each other to join us at this table?

Connections

I think of a friend who has made a decision to operate in new ways, sensing need for new directions. I think of the Beloved Community Fund here at Reservoir, where, for the last year, people have taken a moment of quiet and pause to sense their practical needs – for shelter, for therapy or spiritual direction – and shared what they need with the fund, which has been able to witness and offer connection and support. In these places, people are sensing the thing they need, bringing it to the table, and naming it to the ones they trust.

Needs are not distinct to individuals alone, but also for units of people, to communities. While we are asking the question “What do you need today?” can we get in the habit of also asking together:

What does our family need today? What does our household need in this season? What does our community group need? What does our work team need? What does our church need?

Systems have needs too, and if we can start listening to what our group body needs, what we need collectively, if we can discern this together, we might be able to come into more life-giving ways of being with each other, of choosing our movements forward and also our rest.

My hope for us is that our tables can be a place where we ask each other:

What do you need today? What does our table need today?

Where we can encourage each other to choose what we need. That we can sense the companionship of Mary, Martha, Jesus bearing their needs before each other. Priest and writer Henri Nouwen reflects that the table is a place of profound intimacy— it is a place we bring and bear ourselves, and naming our needs can be deeply intimate. And because of this very intimacy, the table can also can be a place of experience a profound absence of intimacy, when tension, disconnection, or loss is present.

So, for any whose tables feel like they don’t hold enough trust or enough connection or enough presence to ask and be asked “What do you need today?” I pray that Jesus would meet you at your table. I pray that Jesus would be preparing you a table in the presence of all that is painful, in the valley of the shadow of death, in the presence of your enemies, and that in time you would find a table – maybe at a community group, or among neighbors – where you can be present to each other’s needs.

I pray this for all of us. That we all find this place to share with others our needs. Not to fix them, or to solve them, but to participate in the human, divine act of naming what we need, and to practice and encourage each other to choose – to choose what we need. To sense Jesus near us, coming close to us in our need, perhaps even just the one or few things we need today.

Jesus, would you be with us today in what we need. May your spirit help us sense and tend to what we need. May we lovingly listen to one another’s needs – and may we trust the Abundance of your love to supply what we need.

 

“…Ascended into Heaven…”

For this week’s Events and Happenings, click “Download PDF.”

1980 years ago or so, a homeless son of a carpenter, an itinerant Jewish rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth was crucified as an enemy of the Roman state. And ever since the world hasn’t stopped talking about him. 

Here we are today, one of millions of churches in the world, doing the same.

This is strange, isn’t it? 

Why are we doing this, so many centuries later? Where has Jesus been all this time, and what has he been doing? Inside and outside of the Christan faith, this question of where Jesus went, what he’s been up to, and why it matters has been confusing.

So it’s the one we’re going to talk about today.

We’re six weeks deep today into this little nine-week summer preaching project of mine, to preach through the Apostles Creed, a 4th century, short summary of the Christian faith. I wrote about this on our blog last week.

But my goal has been to teach some of the central beliefs of faith in the God known to us through Jesus Christ, so that this faith can continue to ground and inspire us and promote wholeness, love, justice, and flourishing. Along the way, I’m also acknowledging many ways that the version of historic Christianity we’ve inherited hasn’t always served the purposes of a liberating, life-giving God, so here and there I’m suggesting ways to engage with this faith that help it align with good things the Spirit of God can be doing among us today. 

This week, we take a big chunk of the creed that talks about what happened to Jesus after he died and what he’s been up to since then. Let’s read, first the lines from the past five weeks and then this week’s. 

I believe in God the father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, 

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, 

Who Was Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary,

Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was Crucified, Dead and Buried. He descended into hell.

On the third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead.

The creed says Jesus lives again and remains alive. It says not only did Jesus rise from the dead, but he went to be where God lives, which we sometimes call heaven. And what is Jesus doing there? Well, at least in part, Jesus is sitting next to God’s throne, maybe with a big boy chair of his own, and that’s the spot where he’s judging us all – the dead and the living, or maybe he’s getting ready to come to judge us all, making plans, as it were. 

What might all this mean? How does it square with science and with our experience? And how can this idea inspire liberating, life-giving faith?

Let me tell you where I’m going with this, and then we’ll go there together. 

We’re going to take the resurrection part of this – how did Jesus come back to life – later. The final line of the creed, resurrection of the body, will also be my final sermon this summer, in a month or so. So we’ll talk then about what the gospels have to say about Jesus’ return to life, some ways we can think about that, and how that can inspire hope both in our current lives and beyond our death as well. 

For today, I’m just going to say I believe, along with almost all followers of Jesus these past couple thousand years, that death wasn’t the end of Jesus, and that he is still alive.

What we’ll focus on today is the “what has he been up to” side of things. Where is Jesus, what is he doing, and what does it mean that he is a judge? 

I think it means that Jesus is inviting all creation (you and me included) to participate as fully as possible in the Beloved Community, what he calls the kingdom, or the kindom, of God. Jesus is receiving, experiencing, all that happens in creation. He is assessing it, evaluating it, and then luring everyone who will collaborate to see ourselves, one another, and all creation as God sees it and embrace the next best possibility for wholeness, love, beauty, and justice. 

Let’s ask how Chrisitans historically thought Jesus was doing this.

And then talk about a way we can embrace this that squares a little better with our modern world.

So historically, Christians and a lot of other ancient people believed in a 3-tiered universe. That we and plants and animals and all that live on earth, that there’s a realm of the dead beneath the earth, and that way up high, above where the birds fly, is the heavens, where God and other spiritual beings live. 

Now telescopes, and satellites, and the ability to drill deep holes in the earth and all that – science – has changed the way we see the universe.

But the early followers of Jesus, when they believed Jesus ascended into heaven, what they thought was that literally. After Jesus rose, at some point, he floated up into the sky back to God’s throne, maybe a few miles up or so. Probably this throne was somewhere above Jerusalem, because God had always been really active in that part of the earth. And eventually, likely soon, Jesus would hop off the throne and come back to finish setting things right on earth.

The details of this obviously don’t sit too well with science any more. We’re also not sure what it means that Jesus would be judging the living and the dead from a heavenly throne, or coming back to earth to do that judgement. Centuries of bad theology and bad poetry and bad movies has given us the idea that some day, when we least expect it, God is going to swoop back onto earth in human form for some serious butt-kicking of all the evil people, living and dead. 

Which has always been exciting for the non-evil people and kind of scary for everyone who wonders which side of things they’re on. 

So there are ways of imagining Jesus living and reigning with God that don’t make a lot of sense to us. And there are ways of conceiving of Jesus as a judge that don’t seem to bear good fruit either. But what if this language in the creed was a pre-scientific way to conceptualize what is still true – that there is an ongoing life of Christ, who is engaged redemptively with you and me and the rest of this world, living and dead? I think this is the case. 

Let’s listen to something Jesus said that Jesus would be up to after the end of his time on earth.

John 16:12-13, 7-8 (Common English Bible)

12 “I have much more to say to you, but you can’t handle it now.

13 However, when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you in all truth. He won’t speak on his own, but will say whatever he hears and will proclaim to you what is to come.

So Jesus says, I will still be with you, but in a different way, through a spirit of truth, who will guide you. Just earlier, Jesus said this about the same spirit and guidance. 

7 I assure you that it is better for you that I go away. If I don’t go away, the Companion won’t come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.

8 When he comes, he will show the world it was wrong about sin, righteousness, and judgment.

Here Jesus gives the Spirit of Truth a name, the Companion. The Companion is one of many translations of this Greek word Paraclete – the one who comes alongside, the one Christians have normally called the Holy Spirit. Paraclete is a companion, an accompanier, a helper. Paraclete is able to speak for God. And Paraclete assesses us and highlights where we’ve been wrong, so we can know the truth and find our way. 

There are types of judgement Jesus resists: casting someone aside, viewing any person or group of people as beyond God’s loving care or worthy of our approach.

But here he says, when I go, the Spirit God sends to speak for me, the Companion will assess you and will guide you into truth.

This is a picture of judgement. 

Not long ago one of my kids was acting weird, avoiding something they had to do, being pretty irresponsible about it, complaining and creating distractions, probably lying too, best as I could tell. 

So what did I do? 

I brought down the hammer, right? 

No, of course not. 

If you love your kids, you don’t go around thinking of new ways to punish them. No, depending on their age, their habits, their past behavior, your relationship, the situation, and a million other things, you try to intervene in ways that will help them see the truth about themselves and their world, and move toward wholeness, love, goodness, and flourishing.

In this case, we realized my kid was avoiding something they were really scared of, and we could figure out how to address that and to encourage courage, not avoidance.

Jesus says God’s at least as good a parent as any of us are, so why would we think that God’s judgments would be more arbitrary and violent than ours. 

When you look at someone and say: This is my child, the one that I love, a lot of things come off the table. 

I got this line from a theologian named Tripp Fuller, who’s one of the people who influenced this series. It’s true.

God’s judgment isn’t about punishment and rewards. It’s about maintaining a communicative relationship in which God is always inviting us to see the truth and to move toward wholeness, love, justice, and flourishing. 

We need this kind of judgement. We need the Spirit of Truth, the Companion, to encourage us and also to show us when we’re wrong. 

Parents, educators, athletes, all of us really, know that growth only comes with honest assessment. 

We don’t know where Jesus is right now, like physically. It’s probably the wrong question to ask. Jesus remembers his only embodied experience as the son of a carpenter from Nazareth, but past his time on earth a couple of thousand years ago, he is surely now Spirit, as God has always been. 

But as Spirit, I think this is what Jesus is doing – receiving the experience of all creation, paying attention to it all, taking it in, feeling, reacting, assessing its value, and then through the Spirit of Truth, the Companion who comes alongside, communicating to all creation God’s next invitation toward wholeness, love, justice, and flourishing. 

Let me share two examples in my life of how this has been happening, how I’ve experienced Jesus’ assessing judgment and guidance, for the living and the dead.

The first is me in relationship with my long dead Aunt Ethel. My great Aunt Ethel lived a small, sad life. There are a lot of holes in what I know, but she was born in Brooklyn in the early 1900s, grew up, fell in love, had that love spurned. At some point, she developed severe mental illness, or at least was perceived to have.

Things got worse and worse, until she was institutionalized for quite some time. Residential mental health care in the mid-1900s was ran the whole gamut from humane people doing their best to pretty awful. I’m not sure of all of what happened, but I know my grandfather kept visiting, kept supporting her best he could, and eventually helped get her out into transition housing and work. And in my childhood, during that era, I would see her on holidays. She was the one visibly cognitively and mentally impaired person in my early childhood, and I mostly remember how often she would say: this is beautiful. So beautiful. You’re beautiful.

I don’t think anyone in my family would report that I was close to her or that she meant a lot to me. When she died when I was a teenager, neither me nor most others in my family traveled to her funeral, and we didn’t talk about her often after that either. 

But in the past decade, I’ve thought about her a lot more. Wondered about her back story, treasured her freedom and her sense of beauty in her later years. Appreciated her positive, loving vibe. Wished I had been closer. 

Thinking about her makes me more sensitive, more loving, more compassionate. Toward mental illness, toward cognitive limitations, toward rough lives. My memories of Aunt Ethel today shape me into a more curious and compassionate person toward myself and many others. I feel like she’s a part of me now, in a way that she never was when I was younger and she was still alive.

What’s going on here?

Well, my Aunt Ethel is dead. And childhood me is in a sense dead as well. Both my past and Aunt Ethel’s whole time on earth are part of the dead. We’re both gone, can’t be re-experienced or changed. But we – my Aunt and my past self – are both valued and assessed by God. We are both remembered, we both matter. We both still influence God. When I remember my younger self (less curious, less compassionate) and when I remember my Aunt Ethel, and all she saw as beautiful – I am shaped by the past, shaped by what’s dead. And I think this is happening because Jesus, through the Companion Spirit of Truth, keeps bringing this to my consciousness, keeps shaping the present and future me through Jesus’ value and memory and assessment of the dead. 

Everything and everyone that has ever been matters to God. No one and nothing is unseen, unloved, and unimportant. We all influence God. We all are part of what God assesses and part of the future possibilities that God shapes for us all. 

Here’s another story, among the living this time.

Last week, at the start of the week, I was stressed out and unfocused. I had way too many things and way too many problems on my mind. I had also had a couple of conflicts that didn’t resolve very well. In one of them, someone I respect had told me I had acted poorly and this was part of a pattern that hurt them. 

Two things happened. I had a call scheduled Monday with a person I’m honest with and is good at listening, and sometimes telling me the truth. Before that call, I had an instinct to sit alone in a quiet room for 15 minutes. While I did that, the Bible verse

Be still and know that I am God

came to mind, and I tried to sit there and meditate on that verse, just be still and know that God is God. Then I had my call, and shared how I was doing, and at one point, my friend wondered – hey, with all that’s going on, have you considered just sitting quietly and remembering the verse,

Be still and know that I am God. 

I laughed, told my friend what had happened right before the call, and then we sat together on the phone for a few minutes, silently, remembering that verse.

The next day, I was going about my business and the thought came to me, in that conflict the person was right. I was hurt. And what came to mind were a couple of things I could do next to not just say I was sorry, but to show I was sorry, and to begin to shift and make amends. I told God I would do this and asked for help, and so far it’s gone pretty well.

What was happening there? 

I think God was present in the Spirit of Truth, the Companion, to help me see the truth about myself and my world. And to guide me toward wholeness, love, justice, and flourishing.

The Christian words for what happened were judgement, confession, repentance, and restoration.

Not punishment/judgment, but judgement as assessment – Spirit of God nudging me to see the truth.

No priest was involved, but I told God and a friend and myself and a person I’d hurt the truth.

And then, with the help of God and friends, a path toward something better emerged, and in this case, I tried to take it, and that made all the difference. 

Friends, in little ways like this and in much bigger ways too, this is what I think Jesus is doing. 

Receiving all the world’s experiences, big and small, living and dead, feeling them, assessing their value, and then nudging us to know the truth, and offering to us ideas and pathways and options for the most loving, just, whole path forward for us all.

99% of this happens beneath our consciousness, but faith in a living, life-giving communicative God tells us it’s happening all the time still.

What we can do by faith is cooperate: we can trust God is still with us, and values and assesses all people and things, living and dead. We can trust that God is even more loving and wise than the most loving and wise parent in how God does that. 

And we can seek to know the truth about ourselves and the world, welcoming what seems most true from wherever it comes. And then with the help of God and friends, we can confess – we can tell the truth – and we can say yes with courage and grace to the most loving, just, whole, and flourishing paths forward in all things. This is God’s good will for us, and a path toward our joy and life. 

May it be. 

3 O’ Clock Prayer with the Spirit of God

For this week’s Events and Happenings, click “Download PDF”

Good morning everyone! I am Ivy. It’s a gorgeous day here in Milton, MA – I hope it is also wherever you are calling in from.  For those of you who enjoy celebrating Mother’s Day – and honoring the “motherly” influences in your life and within you, I hope today holds lots of opportunities for you to do that.  My sermon will not be a “mother’s day specific sermon”  – but we will explore the Spirit of God –  who I find to be quite motherly.

We are in a Sermon Series called, Listening to the Spirit of God with Freedom and Power.  This series was inspired by a conversation we had as a staff (I believe in February) wondering what this Spring would look like,  and what we might all need at this point?  

We hoped,  as it is, that this Spring would be a season of “promise.  O vaccines, reuniting with people, of travel, society re-opening. And we also thought we might not be out of the woods yet… We also learned, thanks to the wisdom of many health professionals and trauma specialists, that these “cusp” seasons where “promise” comes into real view, are also the times where the tiredness, the grief, anxiety – the trauma of all this last year- also come into view. It’s often when we start to process, and feel the impact of all of what we’ve endured.

And so we realize that this spring, while “yes” a hopeful season, is also an intense season.

And we wondered, what did the first followers of Jesus need in seasons like this – after Jesus’ death and resurrection? When everything was different and threats were still real and it was hard to imagine a way forward?  We found that what they needed was implanted – poured INTO THEM – the SPIRIT OF GOD – this accessible resource that grounded them and became the core of their faith and their beings.

This morning, I invite you to come face to face with the ground and core of your faith…

I invite you into a space of deep wisdom, and great knowing that goes beyond even the best things you’ve been taught about God – beyond the well crafted Bible Studies, prayer practices, and sermon “tips”(all amazing in their own right).

I invite you into the internal landscape of your soul, your heart, your mind, your body. Here it is, that we can access a wealth of “education”, knowing, and expertise – that goes beyond convention.

Where the raw materials of the spirit – the signs, and wonders, and miracles lay in waiting – wrapped in the DNA of God – and found in our own intuition and in our gut.

We’ll take a look at a couple of Jesus’s closest friends, Peter and John and see how the Spirit of God trains them for such love, in the midst of the complexities and realities of the world around them. 

Let me pray for us first!

Oh Spirit of God – this morning could you be our great teacher?  Could we listen to you as you draw us into deep love! A deep love of ourselves, each other, and GOD!  Enliven us – remind us that your love that you have poured into us is a resource that steadies us with courage and strength for the days ahead.

MY STORY:
As we enter the story in Acts, that we will read together in just a few minutes,   Jesus has left John and Peter, and all of us, his Spirit. Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr says that as a result we have an

indwelling Spirit as a permanent, strengthening gift.

God has implanted in us a true “homing device” that we can depend upon (in any season). We have been given a source for a true inner knowledge, which becomes a calm inner authority by which we know spiritual things for ourselves.” AND we have that resource – accessible – within us, always. 

And yet we have been, Rohr says,

“so afraid of this in most churches; most religious people have been told to look outside for such knowledge, instead of inside.”

Coupled with our society that is infused with a focus of accumulating knowledge, being “smart,” “articulate,” and “educated” as a way to gain status, maintain control, and establish hierarchy, this culture then permeates our spiritual contexts, our understanding of God (even though we regard love as boundless and God as mystical) and we still veer toward needing to be “experts of the subject of God.” 

The Spirit of God – mercifully and gently reminds us that we are not subjects to be studied or mastered, and neither is she.  

Last week I had an interview with Oprah Daily – this new offering that Oprah is putting out in digital and print editions.  One of the writers was trying to connect with Steve, (our Senior Pastor), around a sermon he preached last fall, “An Attempt at a Sex Positive Sermon.” They found he was on sabbatical – and so ended up with me. 

We had a good chat about Christianity and Sex – and inparticular how church leaders have gone about this topic.

So much of this conversation centered the attempts of church leaders to convey their knowledge – and their “training/educating/teaching” on the ways of a good and holy sex ethic for followers of Jesus. And how most of these patriarchal voices rely on an external structure of testable – behavioral rules that will prove one’s holiness/purity. Versus surrendering their moral high ground and surrendering trust to the Spirit of God. 

This allows them to be experts on the matter, and speak from the vantage point of God – often offering statements that start with, “this is from God. ” What follows this statement is often not of love, but a set of behavioral rules to follow:

“This is from God” – you should not have sex before marriage.
“This is from God” – don’t look at yourself in the mirror too long, don’t masturbate, don’t trust your body, don’t be weak, don’t desire, don’t long for…

This knowledge then takes the form of doctrine.  As we’ve talked about many times before at Reservoir, this approach is not an educational program that leads folks into wholeness/integration of their full selves… but is one that is controllable, through separation.

It sets up hierarchies of holiness. “Insiders and outsiders” producing either arrogance (inside) or despair (outside). 

AND 

It separates us from ourselves. 

It separates us from our bodies.

It separates us from feeling.

It separates us from our own HUMANITY, which in turn separates us from the DIVINE within us – and then we lose our grounding with the spirit of God – our access to all training and education. 

The book of Acts, written by Luke, begins with the promise of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We then see Jesus’ closest friends and followers make their way without their Rabbi, teacher present – but with such a knowledge of the Indwelling Spirit that it creates the foundation of the “church” that will spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. And this “church” doesn’t depend upon an educated patriarchy and hierarchy to generate itself, (or measure itself), but depends on the Spirit of God which guides with freedom and power. 

Let’s read this story in Acts together:

Acts 3: 1-6

1Peter and John were going up to the temple at three o’clock in the afternoon, the established prayer time.

2 Meanwhile, a man who couldn’t walk  since birth was being carried in. Every day, people would place him at the temple gate known as the Beautiful Gate so he could ask for money from those entering the temple.

3 When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he began to ask them for a gift.

4 Peter and John stared at him. Peter said, “Look at us!”

5 So the man gazed at them, expecting to receive something from them.

6 Peter said, “I don’t have any money, but I will give you what I do have.”

So we’ll pause on the slides there – but the story goes on…

Peter then said,

“IN the name of Jesus get up and walk”

and the man does! He leaps, he jumps and praises God and then goes into the temple with them. 

And Peter starts to preach to the people in the temple about Jesus.

The priests, the chief of the Temple police, and some Sadducees are not happy about this. They arrested them and put them in jail for the night.

The next day there’s a meeting with the rulers, religious leaders, religious scholars, the Chief Priest, and they ask Peter and John

“Who put you in charge here? You are not qualified!  What power – authorized you to do this?”

And then we see this response  -again picking up on slides:

Acts 3 8- 13

8 Then Peter, inspired by the Holy Spirit, answered, “Leaders of the people and elders,

9 are we being examined today because something good was done for a sick person, a good deed that healed him?

10 If so, then you and all the people of Israel need to know that this man stands healthy before you because of the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene—whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead.

11 This Jesus is the stone you builders rejected; he has become the cornerstone!

12 Salvation can be found in no one else. Throughout the whole world, no other name has been given among humans through which we must be saved.”

13 The council was caught by surprise by the confidence with which Peter and John spoke.

After all, they understood that these apostles were uneducated and inexperienced. They also recognized that they had been followers of Jesus. 

The longing of John and Peter, as they’ve understood Jesus’ teaching – is for connection and integration, as a way of continued learning. 

They didn’t reject the Jewish religion.

They didn’t try to separate themselves from the Jewish community.

They still went to Temple and synagogues for worship and prayer. 

They saw Jesus’ message and resurrection as the fulfillment of everything they knew and believed of the Old Testament.  

And as they walk into the temple for  3 o’clock prayer they notice this man outside who can’t walk. And in that brief moment they listen to the Spirit of God, they listen to this man and they listen to their inner authority and trust that they know spiritual things for themselves – AND THEY THEN embody the very lessons – they hope to learn within the temple.

And here, the New Testament begins to be written. And what’s written, is that the law isn’t upheld by us…neglecting/separating, silencing and ignoring anyone who sits outside of the “formal temple.”

What’s written, is that we can fulfill and expand the law by, listening to, loving and healing anyone who sits anywhere, 

Peter and John have accumulated this deep knowing  by being with Jesus – walking with him, listening to him, watching him, questioning him, laughing with him, crying with him –  and this has been written as “LOVE” in John and Peter.  And the spirit of God in this passage is TEACHING them to harness that knowledge, that LIVED learning, and to not hesitate putting it into action.

As John, Peter, the spirit of God and this otherwise marginalized, silenced, neglected man interact we see the kindom of God come into being. Jumping out of the sacred texts that the religious elite have been studying and we see the kindom become real – in and through them.

Peter & John came to experience God in the Temple  – and yet they experience God in the temple of a human being who can’t walk.

They came to meet God at 3’oclock prayer – and yet they find the timelessness of prayer in the touch of a beggar’s right hand.

They came to study scripture – and they find themselves learning the scriptures by “loving their neighbor.”

They came to the temple to draw the attention of God and improve their “goodness”  – and yet they find the “goodness” of the Spirit of God already attending to them. 

They came to strengthen their spirit for the unknown days ahead  – and they find the same spirit strengthening weak ankle bones and feet.

They came to be TAUGHT, to be educated about God – and they find the endless lessons of God in the gaze of a man who longed to be seen.

To see, to be aware, to love – and to move with so much knowledge and confidence is what I hope the Scriptures, the verses that we continue writing in our day, are FULL of.

Because what John and Peter add to the scripture that we read – is that there is no “outside of the temple.” There is no “qualified” or “unqualified” or “expert trainer.” In fact these are all arbitrary labels that are assigned by patriarchy and hierarchy that is afraid of losing it’s footing inside the temple.

Yet with the spirit of God, everyone should be able to move in and out of the temple – sure-footed- just as this scripture shows us. 

However, as we see in this scripture, those in power, that hold the reigns, the credentials, those that love to say, “THIS IS FROM GOD,” to exert control don’t love to embrace the vibe of the spirit of God.   In fact these religious elite will silence John & Peter try to remove the name of God , the name of love from their tongues. But they can’t remove it from the core of their faith/their beings.

The spirit doesn’t operate in a linear way, she creates, empowers, flares, has no three part vision plan with pretty “slide decks” to sell us on her power.  The spirit doesn’t care about proving herself to some outside “system.”


And she doesn’t care about making you prove yourself, either.

This man that couldn’t walk – didn’t have to show John and Peter what he had tried and failed at, OR his three step self-improvement plan.  He just “looked up.” And as he did Peter and John came face to face with the ground and core of their faith – which is to say, “You are loved.” “You are loved.”

And it’s in this space of love – where we are and can be “saved.”  Saved not “from” the world but saved INTO the world of God’s abundance, INTO the spirit of love, and INTO ever-evolving knowing of such love within ourselves.

MY STORY PART 2

As I was finishing up my time with the journalist last week, she asked me, 

“So what’s your experience as a woman in your role right now?”

And I genuinely responded that it’s been pretty amazing!  And that it’s also not lost on me that it’s not the majority experience as we look at Christianity as a whole to have non-white-male voices fully incorporated.

The way in for my voice here at Reservoir, was very natural.  I walked into my first service many years ago and heard Val Snekvik preach (our guest preacher last week). And her voice was what brought me back for a second visit – and obviously many, many, more visits these 19 years later.  Her presence and other women who have been pastors here – paved the way for me.

AND I also know that just having “representation” of a woman’s voice, or a Person Of Color’s voice, or a transgender voice – doesn’t mean we all immediately UNLEARN the toxic ways of white supremacy and patriarchy that we’ve been steeped/schooled in. 

I have had folks come up to me after a service, within the last few years who have said:

“I have no idea what you just said, but I like your boots.” (eruption into great laughter.)

“Glad to have your voice, Ivy – but I sure hope we hire someone who actually has a degree in this stuff.”

I come to those comments with such mercy now.

Because I know they are not intentional, these folks were not consciously trying to tell me how unqualified they thought I was/am.

And I am working on not taking any heretical message of internalized misogyny as personal.

But it points to how much we have been inoculated by the system that values hierarchy, “formal” training, masculine dominated “teaching,” patriarchy, and whiteness as the gold standard of “knowing.”

It’s why it’s so compelling to see Peter and John naturally greet this man who can’t walk moving with the spirit of God that is now WITHIN them. Woven as part of their INTUITION, part of their DNA.  Inviting us all to see that we can access the ABUNDANCE of LOVE that the Spirit has poured out on us all. So that at any point when society/systems/structures tell us we are unqualified, try to strip us of our worth and dignity, we can face the core of our faith inside ourselves, and be reminded that the only three words that can follow, a statement like, “This is from God,” are… 

“YOU ARE LOVED,” “YOU ARE LOVED.”   

May this be our 3’oclock prayer with God as we enter the temple – and our “any o’clock” prayer with the spirit of God everywhere. 

I just finished spending the last couple of months with activist and public theologian Dr. Christena Cleveland, who offered an experience for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) and White folks called, “Liberating your mind, body and spirit from White Supremacy.”  And she says, that

“Whiteness is always doing push-ups in the basement of our hearts.”

Whiteness is always in training – trying to discredit us, hold us to external standards of perfection (which isn’t a real standard because perfection is a figment of the colonial imagination) and yet it strives to separate us from our true source of knowing. 

We need to continue the powerful training of surrendering to the spirit of God.

Peter & John were “uneducated,” “common”  they had no “formal training” in rhetoric or Jewish theology. They weren’t members of a privileged class that could afford higher education, or a religious class that would sit under a scholar. They were fishermen.

And Jesus, their Rabbi, didn’t have formal education either

Acts 2:22

“his credentials were/are through miracles, wonders, and signs.”

And yet they – along with this man who couldn’t walk outside of the temple  – school us in theology.  They teach us to revisit the ground and core of our faith, and not as a test, but as a great returning to ourselves  – where we find strength – and great courage to answer these questions by a lived way of being:

What is the nature of God? Love

What is the core of your faith? Love

What is the foundation of 3 o’clock prayer? Love

What binds you to your neighbor? Love

What can disrupt and then rebuild? Love

What connects and heals? Love

What does the spirit deposit in you? Love

What force can right injustices and free the oppressed? Love

What are the miracles, signs and wonders of our day? Love 

What does the Spirit of God say, “is from God’? Love

We would do well to revere, and honor this education implanted in us – lest we be left crippled by the weight of white supremacy and patriarchy.  

Spirit of God, we honor you.

Let me pray for us.

Wrestling to See

For this week’s Events and Happenings click “Download PDF.”

For this week’s spiritual practice led by Lydia Shiu, How is Your Heart, click HERE

To those of you here this morning, that identify as Asian, Asian American, Pacific Islander – SE Asian, please know that I grieve with you, we grieve with you. Know that our God, our helper is one who grieves with you too.   Is with you. Sees you. You are not alone.  If your grief is laced with rage – that is exactly as it should be.. .and if you are tired and afraid – take rest. And this morning, may the words of the prophet Habakkuk wash over you – in ways that resonate, affirm where you are at today – and may you be loved and held by God.

Today we’ll hear from the prophet Habakkuk. 

Habakkuk is a prophet that raises timeless questions –  about humanity and God –  in a very timely way. He is one who translates the chaos, the violence and un-ending suffering of his ancient time  – to ours – today.  And does so from a platform of faith that is real, fierce and disruptive to the status quo, the dominant culture. This is why Habakkuk and the other prophet’s voices that we’ve listened to this Lent have been so powerful to me – because they do not just offer us ways to treat the symptoms of injustice in our days, but they show us how to wrestle and uproot the foundation of them.  The prophets dismantle – and in doing so – they keep us grounded to the vision that God has for this world – and its people,  which is US. 

The whole book of Habakkuk is 3 chapters.

And it’s a dialogue between him and God.

An honest, emotion-filled, back-and-forth conversation that starts with Habakkuk’s cry and maybe universal question:
 “HOW LONG GOD?” HOW LONG?  Will I ask for help – and you will not listen?

Today I invite you to consider what it is you have been crying out to God for.. Keep this at the forefront of your heart – a heart that maybe is broken – weary from the years you’ve been crying out to God – with no God in sight.

And I invite you to re-up with God – as you listen to Habakkuk’s words.  To consider what is most important for you?   What it is you need to inspire, sustain, enliven faith?

These days – like Habakkuk’s – can feel bereft of a living, loving God – a God who is A REAL agent, who acts in this world for good? WHO addresses injustice and suffering – who does SOMETHING about evil and power and oppressors.

Habakkuk’s words are raw, charged, uncovered and red hot. Birthed from a heart situated in reality – and yet longing for the Divine One to show up – Habakkuk  as we’ll see, confronts God, and argues with God – and gets in God’s face and demands that God turn God’s  attention and eyes to him.  

“Let me see you, GOD! Show me that you are listening to me.
Show me that your eyes are open, that you see what’s going on here – and that you see me too!”

Habakkuk shows us how faith hinges on this necessary dynamic.  

Us and God seeing (and listening) to one another.   

And just how hard it is when so much of what we see –  resonates as evil.

Habakkuk like no other prophet – invites us to strip down any notions we have of God – and be energized with new vision for what we find there… and not be afraid of the wrestling it might take to get there. Let’s follow along as Habakkuk “wrestles to see” God. 

Through song, and scripture and the heart of our own stories – we are eager to be with you God, this morning. TO be refreshed in our spirits – that you are a God who speaks to us, cares for us and sees us. .. in all things, in all places. May it be so. Amen.

My Story

From the early days of Scott (my now husband) and I knowing one another – I always bugged him about making eye contact with me – when we were in conversation .. I come from a bustling, large family – and I often found the pace of conversation to be one that was a blur – happening often as we were in movement.  Moving from the table to the stack of books to study, or the coveted spot in front of the wood-burning stove  – or back to the car – one sibling leaving for practice, another returning. I think somewhere inside, I longed for steady connection (really)   – where we could have conversation, looking one another in the eye, and linger there a bit – SEE how that practice went, SEE how it felt to be dumped by that boyfriend (me!) – to listen to one another  – in whatever space we might be in…

You can ask Scott – when you see him again – how often I still do this to this day, ask him to repeat something he’s just said, (even if I’ve heard it just fine) and this time share it with me, while looking at me.  It’s sometimes annoying – or even unrealistic in the movement of life – but when it can happen, it’s connecting, it’s steadying, and there’s a deepening of listening.   It’s through the eye, that I often feel like I’m listened to, and where I can listen to another’s heart that’s speaking.

Scripture, is written from the point of view of those on the margins.  And unlike most prophets Habakkuk is speaking to God on the people’s behalf (in most cases prophets are speaking to the people on God’s behalf).   And he’s speaking to God of all this violence, all this injustice he sees around him -he’s speaking from the point of view, of those in society who were never looked in the eye. never listened to. Who’s lives have been trampled upon. Essentially erased. Invisible. 

So Habakkuk – at the front of scripture here (as you’ll see on a slide) is asking GOD TO SEE THEM!

Habakkuk 1:2 -4

  1:2 Lord, how long will I call for your help and you not listen? 

I cry out to you, “Violence!” but you don’t deliver us.

3 Why do you show me injustice and look at anguish

        so that devastation and violence are before me?

(look at all of this!) There is strife, and conflict abounds.

4         The Instruction (the law, the Torah), is ineffective….

            Justice does not endure

            because the wicked surround the righteous.

        Justice becomes warped.


Justice becomes warped.  Habakkuk stands in Jerusalem and looks at the unrecognizable state of his nation Judah. Everything that should undergird faith, society, humanity – is ravaged. Everything that one’s eyes and heart should be set on – justice, mercy, compassion is nowhere to be seen.

And so Habakkuk protests!  He goes directly to God.  Not to the King of the day – but God.

And he wrestles… which is appropriate – since at least some scholars believe his name means “wrestler.” The name of the river that Jacob crossed before wrestling with God: Jabbok, means “wrestling.” Habakkuk is another form of that Hebrew word. 

Habakkuk wrestles…

To see if and what God’s response will be to him….AND to figure out what he can see of God’s character – the God who he thinks cares about the fact that all of the “righteous are being swallowed by the wicked.” 

So he stands before God and He asks, this question that  Howard Thurman poses in his own commentary of Habakkuk,

“Why does the ‘evilness’ of evil seem to be more dynamic and ENERGIZING than the ‘goodness’ of good?”

This is a question within a question, a question to God, about God: Who are you God if  you don’t intervene here – or at least say something!

Because right now it appears that you are the  “God who sanctions or at least tolerates all of this injustice/violence.” 

 Is that who you are God?

In Habakkuk’s dissent, doubt, his crying out, his anger, he is expressing PAIN.

Are you a God who can handle pain?

To “know God “ at this time – was very contractual… IF you obeyed God – then you got God’s blessing.   And if you disobeyed God – then you suffered God’s wrath. 

In expressing his pain (and the pain of the people around him)- AND in his demands to be heard with this pain – Habakkuk is shifting the paradigm of how to see/know God. . He is cracking open something new in this compacted faith… and expanding more of God’s character, That God is not just someone you extend “faith to” , but someone you engage “Faith with,” THIS crack – formed by his own pain –  allows his faith to breathe, allows faith to be a live, living faith… one that responds to present day reality, and all that comes with it. 

Habakkuk – is wrestling and dismantling – this idea that destruction is all there is for society – for the earth – that this misery and injustice will win out. He is challenging that picture – and saying that HE CAN be an effective force in challenging it.

And he’s also dismantling the idea that this is all there is to see and know of God – a distant, removed, transactional God. 

And he shows us that all of this dismantling – starts with the groans and complaints and the crying out of his heart.

The question that still stands for him though – is God listening?

And soon enough we see God’s response to Habakkuk… that God has listened, and God says:

“Oh yes – I hear your complaint – and here’s my plan:” 

I am going to raise up the Babylonians, these cruel and violent people.

They will march across the world and conquer other lands.

And then he goes into detail, with a bunch of images like cheetahs, and eagles, and desert winds, and a bunch of devouring/conquering pictures, to really allow the visual of utter destruction to set up in Habakkuk’s mind. 

So God’s answer to Habakkuk is to deal with the injustice of his people – by an oncoming assault of the Babylonians – an immoral and pagan empire – who are more corrupt and more violent than what is already happening – this will be the instrument of God’s great plan.

Now, A prophet is someone who sees as God sees.

And Habakkuk is struggling to make sense of, to see the vision that God is detailing here.  He’s perplexed and so he goes back to God a second time and says, “Ummm, this is a bad plan.  A very, very bad plan.  It can’t be that you just want to wipe us out, right?”

… God?

And so to try to get a better view – to be as intent as possible in not misunderstanding what God might say in response, Habakkuk does this. 

Habakkuk 2:1

2:1 I will take my post;/ I’ll climb up this watchtower

        I will position myself on the fortress.

        I will keep watch to see what the Lord says to me

        and how God will respond to my complaint.

Habakkuk says, “oh I’m waiting  GOD – I am waiting for what your next big, fantastic plan is!”  I’m staying close to you.  I’m watching you.”

And this is an interesting posture.  Habakkuk’s intention was to be with God, as he waited for God’s reply. A good posture – because the vista he’d gain of the land around him, as he climbed into a physical watchtower, increases his sense of desolation – later in scripture it says that the

       fig tree doesn’t bloom,

            and there’s no produce on the vine;

        the olive crop withers,

            and the fields don’t provide food;

        the sheep are cut off from the pen,

            and there are no cattle in the stalls…

For as far as the eye can see…there is no evidence of truth, beauty or goodness – sprouting up on the horizon.  The earth itself appears absent of God – this great nothingness- barrenness.

And yet – being in the watchtower close to God, with God – in the vastness of all of this nothingness, Habakkuk discovers that there is something with God.

Let me circle back to this in a moment.

Going back to my great value and joy of being able to see Scott’s eyes (and/or any of your eyes really) when you are sharing something,  I’ve realized that in this pandemic, we’ve all had our hand forced a little to look into one another’s eyes a lot more.  Right?  We are wearing masks – and if we are really trying to listen to one another, really trying to understand and connect to one another, we are watching each other’s eyes in a more intense manner. To listen to what our hearts are saying, when our facial expressions can no longer convey it fully.

I went to visiting hours of someone who passed away this week.  I didn’t know the person who passed, but I know her son.  I had prayed with and listened to the son, on the phone in the weeks leading up to the death and I knew it was so hard- painful, and sad. Death is always a rupture – a violation.  And it was even harder to walk into a funeral home.  With masks on, and protocols, and lines – and there felt like a vastness/vista of sorrow – to traverse, and I was having a hard time trying to see/locate God.

Until I finally got to the son – behind this big rope and above his mask line, I found his eyes – saw his grieving heart – and I found God. 

So whether it’s being on a physical watchtower or in an intentional watchtower posture w/ God, in what is real – hard – pain and encompassing nothingness – you might discover a sacred nothingness. 

For Habakkuk there was nothing good left of humanity, nothing fruitful of the earth, and in the watchtower he found that there was nothing between him and God’s eyes. 

Everything is stripped away.  It’s just him and God.

Just you and God. In the watchtower. And it’s where you find what is most important again – a God who is with you.

When God looks into your spirit  (in that sacred nothingness) what God do you see?

At those visiting hours – I saw a God who grieved with this son who had just lost his mom.  I saw a God who was angry at death, I saw a God who was tender and got it – all the swirl of emotions, who was far from judging any of them and close to pain. 

Wrestling with God, perhaps allows us this perspective as if from a watchtower.  Somehow seeing the heart of God anew – and taking on the eyes of God.   It’s how we anchor ourselves from letting the “evilness of evil” to seep in and take over the  “goodness of good” within us.

We still doubt (humanity and God), we still wrestle – we still long and are passionate about all that we want to see better. We stay in our real lives – and by that we activate faith – we give it just enough oxygen to ignite.

Faith is a storehouse of reality.   It is the nexus by which we dream, doubt, rage, shout, wrestle and live with God on this earth – here and now – with everything this earth gives us.  Habakkuk shows us that faith is the co-partnering of us and God. Something that we can not craft on our own – and something that God cannot move within us – without our willingness and welcome.

Faith is born from where we are stripped down to eye-level with the ones around us and God – where we are asked not to deny what we see (not be separate or turn a blind-eye – even from the horrors, what most disturbs us ) – but to respond to what we see, to act on what we see – and to also believe – hope even, that all of what we see – is not the totality of the kin’dom of God here on earth… that it is not the end, the final word. 

Ida B. Wells an early leader in the civil rights movement – who battled sexism, racism, and violence her whole life says that

“Faith and doubt were bound together, with each a check against the other – doubt preventing faith from being too sure of itself and faith keeping doubt from going down into the pit of despair. With faith in one hand and doubt in the other – we can contend against the evil in our day.”

THIS IS HOW WE CONTINUE TO SEE and dream and vision as GOD does for the future of our lives – our world (The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone, 131).

A prophet is one who sees as God sees. One who can articulate God’s vision for a world still to come, a world as it should be – Habakkuk’s prophetic ministry is to nourish, nurture and evoke a consciousness – that is counter to the dominant culture of the day…  so that such a vision can be carried forth. 

And this is exactly how God responds to Habakkuk from his watchtower posture….God says

Habakkuk Scripture 2: 2-3

2:2 Write a vision, and make it plain upon a tablet

    so that a runner can read it.

3 There is still a vision for the appointed time;

            it testifies to the end;

                it does not deceive.

    If it delays, wait for it;

        for it is surely coming; it will not be late.

And then in a bunch of verses to follow – God goes on to just make sure it’s clear that plundering, murdering, the violence – the hoarding of wealth and corruption, and cutting down of forests.  The efforts for self stability and the idols that are formed and shaped, carved – are not where we find the vision of God. 

And then he ends it all by saying, 

20 the Lord is in God’s holy temple.

Let all the earth be silent before God.

So what’s the vision?  What does Habakkuk write down?  What do we write down and where? Where’s the holy temple?!

My guess is that the answer to those questions was different for Habakkuk than it is for us today.

But the beauty of prophets — IS that they speak to us today.. That they translate and reframe these same questions for us in our context now.

And my guess is that Habakkuk says….

“Your hearts are where you write this vision down”

“And the temple is the Spirit of God within you.”

THE VISION  – is for you to fill out – actively write – as you live.  As you call out injustice, as you see and listen and love your neighbor.    As you engage both the Spirit and your heart – then the imprint, the inscription of God’s vision will always be seen, visible to anyone passing by.

Can we embody this vision?

Ocean Vuong (vong)- this Vietnamese poet and professor at Umass Amherst – is one who has asked this question of me as well… I read his book this summer – the only book I read cover to cover in one sitting, it’s entitled “On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous”.. And in it there’s this line that keeps coming back to me, it says,

“the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. So much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing.”

This is the challenging and jolting reality.  How much of the world – the people that inhabit it – pass by our gaze – without recognition.  

Habakkuk says, “We are in a time in history where we need to listen to the prophetic hearts all around us – the marginalized, oppressed and one’s who have been kept silent.  They are speaking, continuing to cry out and asking to be seen.

As is our earth, our natural resource – it is groaning from our mistreatment;   

We are in a time in history – evident this week – where the LGBTQ community once once again is messaged that their lives are invalid.  

It is a time where black and brown people are continuing to die – pinned under the knee of white supremacy.

It’s a time where Asian siblings – like those named by Lydia at the top of this service – suffer and die from erasure, imperialism and immigration laws.

it is a time in history where the deadly impact of white supremacy overflows- and can no longer be unseen.

Unless this is the vista we want to see – barren of God’s image.

AND THIS  – this to Ocean Vuong’s point is where we must acknowledge that we HAVE seen. That we have seen, and seen, and seen, and seen  – the markers of racism, capitalism, and misogyny for so long –  and let it pass through our field of vision- without a blink of an eye.

Write this on your hearts – let this be a vision to you – that these people who die violently – those who suffer, who have been left unprotected by society.  They bear the burden of all the world’s actions (and inactions). They are prophets,  – in their crying out –  they seek to break the hold of injustice and open our eyes to see God in them.

We would do well to see and listen to what these prophets among us – speak to us today – even beyond the grave. 

It’s a lot. It’s too much sometimes. But as Habakkuk teaches –  don’t give up, hang in… continue to wrestle God into view.  Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly – with your heads up and eyes open. And may we be stripped down in our watchtowers with God, to what is most important – and what  Ocean Vuong reminds me, that

“I want to love more than death can harm.”

I want to love more than death can harm.

Prayer: God this morning, as we pause to listen and be with you – cast your loving gaze upon us – may it energize us for the stretch of days ahead. And may we feel it as known as the radiance of sunlight, as sweet as the birds calling outside right now – and hear it as clear as our neighbors, “hello.” – Amen

 

Inspiration & Resources

Walter Bruegemann, “The Prophetic Imagination”

Howard Thurmann – always

Megan McKenna, “Send My Roots Rain”

Ocean Vuong, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” and “The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation.”

Dealing with Privilege in the Beloved Community

For this week’s Events and Happenings at Reservoir, click “Download PDF.”

For this week’s spiritual practice led by Vernee Wilkerson, called “Shelter,” click HERE.

To view this week’s online worship service, click the YouTube link above.

 

The other week I got to talk with a man who knew my maternal grandfather. I called him Pop Pop, and he died in 1997, just a few months after dancing at my wedding. I knew he loved me and was proud of me, and I miss him still. And other than family, I hadn’t talked to anyone that knew him in a long time. It surprised me how much that meant to me. 

 

The story my family tells of Pop Pop is that he grew up poor in Brooklyn, during the Great Depression. He served his country in the navy, worked with his brother in construction, and then set out on his own as a home builder. He worked long and hard with his hands, building house after house, creating homes for others and a good living for himself. He spent little, saved and later invested wisely. Until by the time he died, he was one of those millionaires next store you never would have guessed. And he left not just a legacy of decency and sound advice and love to his daughter and three grandsons, but he left us each enough funds to buy a house and get a debt-free, home owning start in life.

 

That’s one story, one I was told, again and again, and it’s all true. But it’s not the whole story. 

 

Pop Pop may have been poor, but he had a brother who worked as a civil engineer on public works projects, a profession that was barred to people of color and even to many recent European immigrants. So in the navy, Pop Pop worked in construction and was shielded from the danger of the front lines. After the war, he bought his first home with a basically no-interest loan from the GI bill, which gave all kinds of government handouts to white veterans. He then built houses for white families in the suburbs of New York City, at the same time white families weren’t just having babies but were fleeing from cities in fear of their new neighbors of color. Pop Pop worked for himself, but he built houses quicker because he hired working class day laborers from the city next door to the suburb he had settled in, paying them a fair day’s wage, but never keeping them long enough to pay them more or give them benefits. And on it goes. 

 

This story’s true too. It doesn’t make my Pop Pop an evil man, but it does reveal his privilege, that he benefitted again and again from special opportunities, often barred from or afforded at the expense of Black Americans, as well as other people of color. This is some of the systemic racism in my family line, part of why my mother, my brothers, and I got the help we did in life. 

 

Today, I want to explore how the gospel, the good news of Jesus, speaks to all our stories of privilege, advantages we have through no merit of ours, as well as advantages that have been taken from us, through no failing of ours. It’s one sermon, so there will always be more to say, but I want to suggest at least one way we can respond to these stories in light of the good news of Jesus. 

 

Let me read an excerpt from the Bible’s little letter called Philippians, written by Paul of Tarsus to the house churches of the seaside port of Philippi in the mid-first century. I’ll read a bit from the third chapter.

 

Philippians 3:4b-9 (NRSV)

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8 More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.

 

Now this is interesting because Paul is a Jew living under the colonial Roman Empire. And he’s writing to a mixed Jewish-non Jewish audience. They all would have known that Jews like Paul were mocked constantly by Romans. Their religion, their culture, their customs were the butt of many jokes. They were scapegoated sometimes when problems occurred. Jews were expelled from Rome by one emperor around this time. So Paul could have written to Philippi and discussed his real grievances as a Jew, or as a Christian, under the empire. Paul was both of those things and at the time, being either Jewish or Christian in the Roman Empire gave you less privilege. And later in Philippians, Paul does speak to the spiritual power and perspective that help him navigate suffering. 

 

But privilege is intersectional. You can have more in some areas and less in others. And Paul’s aware that within his own community, his lineage, his family, his childhood, his training, and his way of life gave him access to all kinds of benefits others didn’t have. 

 

But now as a follower of Jesus, he questions those gains. In fact, not only does he question them, he sees them as losses. 

 

Paul’s accumulated privilege – whatever unearned benefits he had in life – he calls it all a pile of crap. Our Bibles usually translate this “rubbish”, sometimes politely “dung,” which is a word almost no one ever uses unless they’re at a cow farm. A “heap of crap” would catch the mood better.

 

Why is this? What difference has Jesus made in the way Paul sees his social location?

 

Well, he sees that the truly good life comes from a relationship with God in Christ. Having higher status than other people, having extra privilege others don’t can make you feel good about yourself, it can make you feel special in a way. But it can’t make you know that you are loved, that you have transcendent meaning and worth, that no matter what happens in life, you belong on this earth God made. Knowing Christ does all of that, though. It tells you that you are loved, you are worthy, you matter, your life has infinite dignity and meaning. 

 

And socially, we see throughout Paul’s letters, this is supposed to translate not just to belonging to God, but belonging to a community of radical equality before God. Where people who have all the privilege in the world belong, but no more than anyone else. And where people who are despised and rejected in the world’s hierarchies of privilege belong no less than anyone else. 

 

This is easy to talk about. It sounds beautiful to say radical equality, or beloved community, or everyone belongs, but it is way harder to do. 

 

Because the truth is, if you have relative privilege, you always feel you belong. And if you have a relative lack of privilege, you can see in a second all the places that are not making a home for you. 

 

If you have housing and a shower and clean clothes, talk to someone who doesn’t have those things. They know in a second when they enter a public place if they’re welcome or not. Almost always, not.

 

If you’re white, and you listen to the experience of a person of color about the neighborhoods and vacation spots where they feel safe or don’t, that highways they feel safe travelling on, well, it might be eye opening. It was for me, when after my marriage to Grace, who’s Chinese-American, we took our first trip to an all white, more homogenous pocket America and then realized based on our experiences as an interracial couple there, that most of this country’s geography wasn’t open to us, not on terms we’d want. This topic of where people of color can safely travel in America came up in our community group again this week. 

 

The flip side of this is true as well, for those of us with relative privilege. I learned this concept of white sprawl from the social psychologist Christena Cleveland, that white people – being taught we belong everywhere in this country – can have a tendency to go anywhere we want and not consider the well-being of other people who were there already. A few years back, I realized that was still true of me, when I showed up on a facebook page for thousands of Asian American Christians with a want ad for a position at Reservoir Church.

 

On the one hand, it worked out well. That’s where I met Lydia after all. On the other hand, though, people were like: yo, get out of this space. You (meaning me) rolled into someone else’s living room with a want ad, without asking if that was OK for you to do that here. 

 

Truthfully, I hadn’t thought to ask for permission. Obvious in retrospect. I felt bad about that and had to try to make amends. But I did it because my life in America hasn’t taught me I need permission. It’s like the modern, personalized version of Manifest Destiny. “This land is my land.”

 

Now what does all this have to with Paul, and the rubbish of his ethnic and religious privilege, and the importance of knowing Christ? Everything. Here’s why.

 

On religious terms, people of privilege are prone to pride – seeing ourselves or being seen by others as better or more important or more deserving than we really are. This is the pride of a mountain. I’m invulnerable. I’m worthy. I deserve my spot. Look how big I am.

 

And on religious terms, people without privilege are prone to abnegation – being negated – seeing ourselves or being seen by others as less important or less deserving than we really are. This is the negation of a valley. It is done to us by others. “Look how vulnerable you are. You’re unworthy.” Or those messages can become internalized and said to ourselves: “I deserve my lack of place. See how small I am.”

 

Pride and abnegation. The puffing up of a false mountain self, or the tearing down of a false valley self. 

 

Some theologians have called pride and abnegation the original sins. They both lie, they both keep us from God and our true selves, and they keep us from one another as well.

 

Pride tells us we’re less vulnerable than we are, abnegation – whether in our own eyes or others – tells us we’re more. Pride tells us we don’t need God, abnegation that we are defined by our neediness. Pride tells people they deserve it all, abnegation that they are undeserving. It’s all a lie, it’s all sin. Jesus wants to level it all.

 

Every valley lifted up, every mountain be made low. That the way of the Lord will be clear for us all. 

 

Paul saw this first hand. 

 

In Acts 16, when Paul travels to Philippi, the first woman he meets is named Lydia. She is a surprise.

 

See, Paul only went Northwest up to Philippi because he had a vision. He was having some struggles in Western Asia and had a vision of a Greek man, a Macdeonian man saying, Come and help us. So Paul did. But when he arrived in Philippi, in the heart of Macedonia, he looked for a Friday evening prayer meeting.   And in Paul’s faith and culture, you didn’t have a valid Friday evening prayer meeting without a certain number of men being present. But the book of Acts tells us that Paul found just women instead.

 

So Paul had to adapt his vision – it wasn’t a Macdeonian man at all with whom he’s going to start this church, it was a Macedonian woman who would be that faith community’s first leader. 

 

This was Lydia, likely like my grandfather, both a hard-working go getter, maybe in part a rags to riches story. But also a daughter of privilege. One who had advantages in that she was freeborn, she had access to some capital to start her business, she likely had networks among people of wealth, which helped her in her trading. 

 

The second woman Paul meets in Philippi isn’t really a woman at all, but a girl still, a girl who was a slave. The Roman empire had millions of slaves at the bottom of its pyramid of privilege. There were public slaves, like those that built public works or in the case of Philippi, worked the mines in the hills around the city. And there were private slaves, like this girl, who were used to support the whims and the economies of their owners.

 

Paul does the work of an abolitionist, helps free her, which gets him beaten and arrested and eventually driven out of the city.

 

All to say, though, Paul knew first hand what children of privilege looked like. In some ways, he was one himself. He saw how people of privilege could use their power for good and for justice in the world. He too did that. But he saw the spiritual danger of privilege as well – how it could give us an illusion of independence, of invulnerability, of not needing God and neighbor, how it can make us untender, ungenerous, and so not resilient when hard times come. 

 

And Paul knew first hand what children of suffering looked like. How they or their ancestors were robbed, used, their bodies or dignity or possessions stolen again and again. He saw the ways that can tear people down in other’s eyes, and sometimes be so internalized that we are self-abnegated, torn down, unworthy in our own eyes. 

 

And for all of us, Paul’s gospel invitation, his good news in Jesus was toward freedom. 

 

What does it mean to not be defined by the ways that this life and our history have laid us low, called us lesser or unworthy? And what does it mean where we have privilege, to treat it like the heap of crap, like the rubbish that it is? To shed ourselves of the accumulated toxins in our place in the world, to let go of that which be-fowls us, which weighs down and needs expelling? 

 

There’s a lot we can do, but it starts by telling the truth about ourselves and one another. 

 

If we lie about ourselves, or believe unexamined the lies that have been told about us, we don’t make room for an honest relationship with God and we cut ourselves off from honest connections with others too.

 

If I see myself as a child of merit alone, then I’ll look down on the people who haven’t got what I got. 

 

Truthful stories about ourselves and others, stories that admit that none of us succeeds or fails alone, that we are all tied up in generational and societal fabrics of blessing and curse, of unmerited privilege and undeserved suffering – truthful eyes that see all this let us all be people of grace. This lets us all be people who see that none of us are above needing God and one another, just as none of us are less loved or blessed by God either. 

 

The good news says God loves you in Christ. None of you higher or lower than the other. And with his own example, Paul tells the children of privilege that their gains are rubbish. They ought to humble themselves, tell the truth, be content with less, and use what they have to empower and liberate others. And he tells the children of suffering: God loves you in Christ as well. Rise, shine, for your light has come. Let’s tell the truth about your dignity together as well. Be free.

 

This fall, our community groups have been sharing a lot of stories about where we come from in an effort to tell honest stories about ourselves and to hear honest stories about one another. I hope we keep doing this as we make our way toward beloved community. 

 

I’m going to encourage us to pray honest prayers we well, and we’ll end with one that appeared at the end of a recent letter from Pope Francis. 

Join me in praying if you’re willing.

 

O God, Trinity of love,

from the profound communion of your divine life,

pour out upon us a torrent of fraternal love.

Grant us the love reflected in the actions of Jesus,

in his family of Nazareth, 

and in the early Christian community.

Grant that we Christians may live the Gospel,

discovering Christ in each human being,

recognizing him crucified

in the sufferings of the abandoned

and forgotten of our world,

and risen in each sibling, each human,

who makes a new start.

Come, Holy Spirit, show us your beauty,

reflected in all the peoples of the earth,

so that we may discover anew 

that all are important and all are necessary,

different faces of the one humanity 

that God so loves. Amen.

 

The Good News Faith God is Always Rebeginning

Click “Download PDF” for this week’s events at Reservoir!

Click the YouTube link to watch video of our July 26 “Virch” worship service.

Click HERE for our Spiritual Practice, led by Pastor Lydia Shiu.

Hey, Friends, I don’t know about you, but one of the big novelties for me over the past month or two has been the occasional face to face conversation with someone who’s not one of my housemates. I don’t have nearly enough of these still. I’m hugely committed to this whole public love of neighbor through COVID caution, even as these days drag on far longer than we’d hoped. But, at a good distance, almost always masked, I’ve had the chance to talk face to face with a few folks, which has been great.  

One of these chats, a friend and I ended up in a more of a downer moment of conversation, though, when we wondered if these days, we’re watching the death of the American church.

Maybe you’ve heard that churches have sometimes been super-spreaders of the COVID virus. It’s true. Not believing in science, or more concerned with carrying on their religious zeal than loving their neighbor, churches have sometimes been a significant part of the problem in our health pandemic. You likely know well that in the long story of America’s pandemic of racism and racial violence, churches have been major perpetrators and if not that, then bystanders. And in the parts of the church that line up unquestioning behind every race-bating comment of our president, or every anti-Black, anti-immigrant posture and policy of his, that continues. 

My friend and I wondered, if ten years ago, the average young American thought Christians were close-minded, anti-science, anti-gay, untrustworthy, hypocritical, where are we today? Where will we be a decade from now? 

Part of me wonders why I care. There is so much in American religious life that we’d be better off without, so much in American Chrisitanity in particular that needs to die. 

But while that’s true, I’m sad too. Because the community of church has had an amazing impact in my life. I know that the God Jesus taught about loves and accepts me, partly because people who’ve loved that God have loved and accepted me so much. Most of what I’ve discovered about healing, about justice, about joy, about the good life really, I’ve discovered alongside people of faith. 

I know the same is true for the friend I was talking to in his backyard about the future of the American church. 

I know that’s true for many of you too. We gathered our new and returning Reservoir Board members for our first meeting online. And as we shared about our personal faith history and our history with this church over our time here, we heard stories about people’s profound experiences of love and acceptance and transformation in this community. 

And I want more of that for more people. So I care about the future of the church – this one, Reservoir Church – and other good ones too. And I’ve wondered if there’s cause for hope.

Which takes me to the Bible passage I’d like to read and ground us in today. This spring and this summer, when life has been hard, I’ve again and again been drawn to this little letter called Philippians. I’ve been wanting to share with you a few things I’ve seen there. I’m going to read part of the first chapter of the letter, from a contemporary translation called The Message.

 

Philippians 1:3-11 (The Message)

3-6 Every time you cross my mind, I break out in exclamations of thanks to God. Each exclamation is a trigger to prayer. I find myself praying for you with a glad heart. I am so pleased that you have continued on in this with us, believing and proclaiming God’s Message, from the day you heard it right up to the present. There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears.

7-8 It’s not at all fanciful for me to think this way about you. My prayers and hopes have deep roots in reality. You have, after all, stuck with me all the way from the time I was thrown in jail, put on trial, and came out of it in one piece. All along you have experienced with me the most generous help from God. He knows how much I love and miss you these days. Sometimes I think I feel as strongly about you as Christ does!

9-11 So this is my prayer: that your love will flourish and that you will not only love much but well. Learn to love appropriately. You need to use your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere and intelligent, not sentimental gush. Live a lover’s life, circumspect and exemplary, a life Jesus will be proud of: bountiful in fruits from the soul, making Jesus Christ attractive to all, getting everyone involved in the glory and praise of God.

Friends, for what it’s worth, this is what it’s like for me to pray for you all. I spent much of Thursday walking and praying. I was praying that our legislators do good work on police reform and immigrant rights. Praying for ou church and praying for the city of Cambridge in particular, as I walked around its perimeter. I’m going to do the same in Somerville next, then some other communities where many of you live. But last week, each time one of you came to mind, or each time I prayed for one of you who is a Cambridge resident and sent me your prayers, I felt like Paul here – so thankful for you, my sweatier and sweatier self smiling as I thought of you. (It turns out you do sweat a lot, by the way, when you walk 10 or 15 miles in Cambridge in July. When I got home, my family banned me from their presence until I showered. God protect us all in this torrid heat wave.) 

But anyway, like Paul, those smiles, that thanksgiving for you and for this community of beautiful people was a trigger to prayer. So I prayed more or less as Paul did, that your love will flourish, that you will love deeply and well. That we all will keep finding our way toward lives that Jesus will be proud of… (not because Jesus is super-hard to please, but because this is what it means to be connected with Jesus… to be increasingly aware that you are abundantly loved, and to be increasingly empowered to love with abundance… To love deeply and well, to love justly and to love with mercy, and to walk humbly – to not take yourself too seriously. All this does make Jesus proud! So I pray that for us all.)

But there’s this other line here I want to mention, just one line, that captures some of the big picture that was going on with Paul and the little Philippian house churches, a line that in this context, gives me hope as well for the future of Jesus-centered faith in our time and place. That “God who started this great work in you will keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish.” The God who began a good work in you will bring it to completion. 

I first encountered this verse as a personal promise, that anything God seems to have started in my life that is good, God will finish. Which I think is true, even if what I think God is doing and what God actually is doing aren’t always the same thing. 

But, here the “you,” as it almost always is in the New Testament, is plural. It’s you all – it’s the community. Reading the Bible, or trying to relate to God, like it’s always all about me, that takes us weird places sometimes. The main thing that is being said here includes you and me, but it’s bigger than just you and me. It’s talking about what God is doing in the whole community. The good God is doing among you all won’t be stopped. God will see it through to flourishing. 

Now in Philippi, there was religious life that Paul wanted to die. In the first century, religion had a lot of ugly too, just like in our times. Roman religion was often used to justify the status quo, to maintain an unjust order. The Roman gods and temples and religion were another way of asserting the whole Roman imperial dominance throughout the empire. The Jewish faith in which Paul was raised was kind of a corrective to that, asserting a smaller group’s distinctive value and culture, against this enormous imperial threat. But in Paul’s time, he had colleagues who wanted to assert a kind of Hebrew privilege or superiority – you’re not good enough until you join God’s chosen people and assimilate to their ways. And Paul fought all this – let bad religion die, he’d say.

But Paul and his friends also saw something really different that God was doing, something that needed to grow and flourish. Read Philippians, and the other early letters of Paul, and you come to understand that:

Unlike the ways of the Roman Empire, the good news communities of Jesus weren’t going to have privileged and marginal people. God was going to grow beloved communities where all belong on equal footing, and where the unjust ways of the world weren’t defended but challenged.

The good news of Jesus wasn’t that God was powerful, aligning with the interests of the dominant among us. The good news is that in Jesus, we see God as a servant – what Philippians calls God as slave – experiencing human life from the bottom of the status pyramid. In Christ, God is an undocumented clearning woman. God is a young black man unjustly harassed by police. God is a homeless refugee on the outskirts of some war-torn community in the Middle East. God is a poor, urban slum dweller in New Delhi. In Christ, God knows suffering and shame and humiliation and lack from the inside out. 

The good news of Jesus isn’t a big cosmic fix-it, it’s not an immediate end to pain and difficulty, but an invitation to experience God’s friendship and support and kindness in the middle of every pain and difficulty.

The good news of Jesus isn’t that me and mine are justified or better or special. The good news of Jesus is the creation and sustaining of radically inclusive and equitable communities, where our human divisions are overcome, and our human privileges and status are undone in the name of love and justice. 

The good news of Jesus isn’t a defending of the state of our lives and our world as they are. But the good news of Jesus is the personal and social transformation of our lives, until they are colored by humility and love, permeated with peace and justice, through and through. 

Philippians tells us this, and this is what Paul is talking about when he says that God won’t give up on what God started, that God will see it through to flourishing. He’s saying that God’s beloved community, God’s transforming and transformative community will be made manifest among you. 

God won’t give up on making your church, and perhaps in time, your city and your world, what it was meant to be. 

Now this good news of course does not sound much like the brand of American Christianity my friend and I are watching die out. American Christianity, and by that I really mean White American Christianity, is a descendant of the Roman Imperial faith that in the fourth century co-opted the Jesus movement to justify its wars. 

And so the American church, like the colonial church, is a tool of state violence and warfare. Has been since the beginning. 

White American Christiaity is a descendant of the European colonial faith that saw difference as a threat to be tamed and a people to be converted, and so burned so-called witches and heretics, slaughtered Muslims and Jews, brought bibles and crosses on the same boats that brought genocide to the Americas. So if you’re Christian in America today, you’re more likely to fear immigrants and want them kept out than if you’re not Chrisitan. If you’re Christian in America today, you’re more likely to blame a person for their own poverty, more likely to scapegoat all kinds of vulnerable people, as if they are a threat.

And White American Chrisitanity is a descendant of the religious movement that justified slavery with White supremacy, that terrorized Black Americans once they were free, and that faught the civil rights movement tooth and nail, or sat it out on the sidelines. So if you’re Christian in America today, it’s more likely that you resisted integration in the 60s and 70s, and more likely that you’d be susceptible to a race-bating, make America so-called great again populist movement. 

This kind of faith and religion needs to die. To that extent that White Christianity’s leaders continue to be exposed as frauds, that their institutions shrink and suffer and die, I don’t shed a tear. 

But that’s not the whole Christian witness in America, and it is not what God is growing and doing. There have always been followers of Jesus in this land who practiced the beloved community, who believed in a God who is first among those who suffer, who nurture healing and justice in and through the church. Parts of the Black church in America, for instance, have always carried this good news and do still. 

And here’s my hope. That where God is doing this good news, where God is growing the Beloved community – the place of love and belonging and equity for all people. The place where God is working healing and justice, where God is humbling the exalted and exalting the humble. The work God is doing to equip people to face suffering and pain with courage, hope, and love. God will not let that work and witness end. God will bring it to a flourishing completion. 

I believe Reservoir is meant to be part of this story, to be part of the good news faith in Jesus that survives in our future. 

I love this church and like many of you, I think God is doing something special here. 15 years ago my family was looking for a church and we landed and stayed here because it was spiritually vibrant, because we could experience and grow faith that mattered, because it was easy to get to know all kinds of honest, authentic people. And it also didn’t hurt that were lots of interracial families like ours. 

Nearly eight years ago, when some of you asked me to think about being this church’s second senior pastor, that was so far outside of my plans for my life. I didn’t particularly want to be a pastor at the time, but it became clear to me that for this church, for this one church, I do. It seemed like we had a chance to keep growing a community of healthy faith that would make sense in our times, that wouldn’t exclude people, that would teach and practice a faith that wasn’t all about the tired, toxic ideas and practices that make for so much dying religious life. 

Four or five years ago, we had done a fair bit of work to become a church that was more inclusive, that was closer to the Beloved community. But as I looked around our church, which we all celebrated as a very diverse community, I noticed that our leadership was whiter than our membership as a whole. And I thought about the long track record in American Christianity of centering white people and white voices and white concerns, and wondered if we were immune to that in our beloved church. I wondered if we didn’t have some more important work to do.

So with the help of a fellow Board member with experience in this area, I led our Board through a discussion on what kind of diverse church we were. Had we yet seen all we could see in the kind of community of healing and justice we hoped to be? Had we yet become the Beloved community of Jesus, or was there more good work God had to flourish in us?

We looked at a spectrum for churches, where on one end was the White supremacist church, where White leaders may say all people are welcome but where White people and white culture run the show, in the long tradition of white Christianity. And on the other side of the spectrum was a truly anti-racist church, where all diversity in the church experienced true, equitable belonging and voice, and where the church’s community of healing and voice for justice was transformative, inside the church and outside in the broader community.

And we honestly acknowledged that we were in the middle. We were a multicultural church, to be sure, much more diverse than the average American church. And we tried to be welcoming and inclusive to all the diversity in our community – people who are valued and treasured, made in God’s image, after all. But we saw we had work to do. 

We had work to do in who was leading and in how we lead. We had work to do in how people of color experience all our worship services, and all our community groups, and all our ministries and programs. 

We named a goal of becoming a true community of healing and justice, a not just diverse but fully inclusive church, of becoming the kind of church that could be a light in our members’ lives and a light to our city in this regard. 

And you what happened…four or five years ago… not enough. Seeing God complete this good work didn’t take on enough urgency for me, I’ll admit. It’s too easy for a White person, for a White leader to settle into a slow pace of change. There were times where I heard what it was like for a Black member of our community to not have their experience or voice or culture centered in our worship services very often. Or I heard an Asian-American member of our community having an unsafe experience of being diminished in a community group. And I’d respond, of course, but not enough.

This struck me last fall, when I realized that 27 years into my own serious work to not just see the world through white eyes, I still had work to do. And that our church can’t rest until we achieve true Beloved community in our midst, for everybody. Until the 30 or 40 % of us that are people of color see and feel that every aspect of this church’s community and programs and culture and ministry is for them just as much as it is for anyone else. Until all God’s children in our community experience that everything here is for them just as much as it is for anyone else. 

It’s been humbling, sobering, to me this year to be in repentance for my too slow pace and not urgent enough attention to this flourishing. And so when I pursue, along with our whole team, specific, real progress toward this church truly becoming a community of healing and justice, a beloved, anti-racist, good news community in our city, I am not just on a post-George Floyd trend, I am aligning myself, inviting us all to align ourselves with God who insists that God will complete what God has began in this community.

That God will make this church a beacon of healing and joy and delight for people of color throughout our city and region, as much as for any white person. And that we will worship and love and follow the God who is first known on earth in the margins, not in the center of power or privilege. 

Friends, could you join me in praying for Reservoir? That the good work God began here will continue to its full flourishing. That the voice and experience and needs of people who have felt marginal at different times – working class folks, queer folks, disabled folks, to name a few – would be included at the center. And that a White-dominant, White-centered way of being church in America would die here, that our church will be a truly safe, empowering, celebrating community of every person of color in our midst – now and in the future – for the sake of all our healing, and for the sake of the gospel. 

And join me please in praying for us all – inside and outside the church – in this time, that in a time of so much change, so many threats, so much anxiety and weariness, that we’d all have the courage to stay engaged in discovering and being part of the renewing, redemptive work that God is doing in this season. 

When COVID pandemic physically separates us, we could emotionally, relationally separate too, or we could keep binding together in mutual love and support. And when cries for racial justice are loud among us, those of us who are White in particular, or who are newer to reflection on racial injustice, could close our ears or shut down in fear, or we could welcome the work of Beloved community God can do through this, and humbly, but persistently, seek to see it into being. 

Let’s pray. 

God of Un-Consuming Fire

For this week’s events CLICK “DOWNLOAD PDF.”

 

Before I speak, I’m going to lead us in a moment of prayer and remembrance over some of our griefs in this season. If you have suffered the loss of a loved one this year, I’d love to hear from you in the weeks to come, so we can include you in our prayers as well.

 

We have had much to grieve already this year, losses of many types. But today, we grieve together the loss of sacred human life, remembering those in our community who have died so far this year. 

 

-We remember community leader, and friend of our church, Justice Ismail Laher, who died on May 8th, as well as his wife Zuleika who died in February. 

-We remember Manny Nicolas’ cousin William Joseph, who died on April 25th.

-We remember Robert Lenkauskas’s wife, Georgette, who died in North Cambridge on Monday, April 20th.

-We remember Cloie Andrysiak’s cousin Rachel Emond, who died on April 17th, and Cloie’s father Donald Harnois, who died on March 27th. 

-We remember John Porco’s sister Jody Porco, who died on April 7th.

-We remember Caroline Beal’s father Matt Beal, who died on March 6th. 

-We remember Malik Latif’s wife Abida, who died on March 4th. 

-And we remember Laidy and Eduardo’s dear friends Mr. Li and Cesar Velasquez, who died recently as well. 

 

We also remember the names and lives of some of the Black Americans who have been killed by citizen or state white supremacist violence. They may not be part of our local community, but their deaths remind us of the work we have to do in ridding our nation of the old and grave sin of white supremacy that lives on and chokes us still. Today… 

We remember Ahmaud Arbery, killed on February 23rd.

We remember Breona Taylor, killed on March 13th.

We remember Sean Reed, killed on May 6th. 

We decry the injustice of their deaths and lament the racism and violence in our nation that contributes to the degrading and loss of sacred human life.

 

For all these, beloved by God and remembered by us, we pray. Friends, I invite you to hold before you the names and memory of those we have lost and those in our community who mourn as we pray.

 

God of life, Source of our life and breath, God who creates and protects nourishes all life,

We hold our grief at death before you today.

We celebrate the lives and memory of these sisters and brothers and siblings we have lost, thanking you for their lives and legacy.

God of Resurrection, who has conquered death, and who brings life out of death still,

We remember those we have lost and ask you to welcome them into your eternal embrace.

May your light forever shine upon them, and may you give us the blessing of reunion on the day of resurrection.

And God of comfort and hope, be present with kindness and grace to all those of us who mourn, 

That we can carry on in hope and strength, That we can remember and honor those we have lost, 

And That their legacy will remain in our hearts and in our minds and in our action for a better world.

This we pray in Jesus’ name,

Amen.

 

Signs of Life: God of Un-Consuming Fire (Or, How is it that God is Powerful?)

 

So one of the questions we’re asking a lot these days is where is God when things are hard? If God is the one who controls and guides all events in history, then … let’s be honest, on those terms, God is doing a really bad job this year. And this century. 

 

Even in a time in history when we can explain so many things without God, we still blame God a lot when things go wrong. Or if we don’t, then judging by the amount of racism and hate crimes in this country, and the foolish scapegoating garbage some people keep saying, we still like to blame things on people we imagine to be our enemies, or even God’s enemies.

 

But as people of faith – people interested in walking in the world with the hope and experience that God is with us, and that God matters, we have got to step back instead and ask: where is God in all this? And specifically, what does it mean that God is with us and is in some way powerful?

 

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of the writing of the psychologist Richard Back, who’s been writing a lot about the thinking of a Chrisitan theologian named Katherine Sonderegger. They’ll be our guides a bit today. 

 

But before them, we’ll start with the mystical experience Moses has in the wilderness that really kicks off the great liberation narrative of the Exodus. 

 

Here’s our scripture reading from Exodus, which will help us think about God with us, and what God’s power is and isn’t like. 

 

Exodus 3:1-7 (NRSV)

 

3 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

Our narrator presents this story here so innocently. A guy named Moses is out in the desert, taking care of his sheep or his goats, working in his very religious father-in-the law’s family business, when God appears and speaks to him.

 

There’s more of course. Moses isn’t just an ordinary guy. He’s been on this extraordinary midlife journey of ethnic identity. A Jew, a child of slaves, raised in the ruling class, majority, privileged Egyptian culture, Moses has started to ask: who am I? And how am I to be in the world? Like most immigrants or children of immigrants or people of color tend to ask in the US: what does it mean to be resident or citizen of this land and culture which persists in casting me as less or other? 

 

There are questions of identity:

How am I to be? Do I accept or conform to that image? Do I align with my own people or do I assimilate to the ways of others? Where can I be safe? Where will I belong? Moses was still asking all these questions.

 

And questions of purpose:

Do I withdraw or flee for my own safety? Just take care of me and mine? Or is there a part for me to play in the transformation of this place? What is my work to do in this world?

 

And while he hadn’t fled a pandemic, Moses had fled a crisis, with none of these questions resolved. 

 

And there in the wilderness, Moses is confronted by a God that at turns seems stunningly powerful and active, while also kind of weak and passive. A God who is present in the world in power, but whose direct impact is hard to see. A God who is powerful, but not in the ways we normally think about power.

 

See, when we think about God’s power, we normally work our way backwards to God. We think about powerful bosses or parents or forces, and we sort of widen out that scope of power and try to make it nicer or wiser too, and then bam, that must be what God is like. Even the metaphors of the Bible do this.

 

God is kind of like a king – in charge, laying down the law, but doing it for everyone’s good.

 

Or God is kind of like a father – laying down the rules for the household.

 

Or like a shepherd – a boss of the sheep, guiding them to what’s best and whacking them on the head with his staff when they stray off.

 

And metaphors are fine for what they’re worth, but all metaphors break down. They’re limited. When we take these metaphors too literally, we end up with what the Bible calls idolatry – believing in a God that we made in our image, instead of relating to a God that made all of us in God’s image.

 

What Katherine Sonderegger and other really great thinkers about God helps us do is see where some of our ideas about God have broken down and see where encounters like this one at the burning bush point us toward truer and more helpful, more life-giving conceptions of God.

 

If we think about God’s power as God being in control, then when we have a pandemic, or when that pandemic further reveals all kinds of awful injustice and pain in the world, or when we see a brutal hate crime, or when our kids or our friends or our very own lives go off track, then we have some hard choices.

 

We can say:

-God, you suck at being in control. You’re either mean, or you’re a failure, or you are bad at your job.

-Or we can think God might be nice, but God’s not actually powerful at all. Or maybe God was powerful enough to make this whole world, but God’s not all that engaged any more. “God is watching us, from a distance.” Which is supposed to be comforting, but really isn’t.

-Or we can lose faith entirely. We can slowly drift toward thinking God isn’t real, that God doesn’t exist, or that God may exist but isn’t good or doesn’t matter.

 

Unless, unless God comes to us in the burning bush, and we can start to relate to a God that is powerful on very different terms. Three things to tease out here today, before I close with an invitation.

 

1) At the burning bush, we find a God whose power is kind of like the sun. 

The sun is super-powerful: hotter than hell, the source of all life, sustainer of everything. But it’s not like we experience the sun as dominating us, causing any immediate change or action, taking over anything’s will. 

 

Richard Beck here, writing about the burning bush through the theology of Katherine Sonderegger.

 

The bush burns with divine Fire, but the bush is not consumed. God’s power doesn’t displace, override, meddle, or interfere with the natural life and creaturely integrity of the bush. A botanist, as a botanist, wouldn’t find anything strange going on with the bush as a plant. And yet, God’s Power is Present in and flashes forth from the bush.

 

In a similar way, for Sonderegger, all of creation is like the burning bush. God’s Power is everywhere present in creation, a power, like with the burning bush, that flashes out and becomes visible at times. God’s power isn’t like a Cosmic CEO who dips in and out of creation to interfere with the causal flux. God is, rather, that Hidden Presence and Fire that burns everywhere, yet doesn’t consume or displace creation.   

 

God is real, God is present, God is the source and sustainer of life. God is at work for good, for healing, for beauty. But God’s not doing that by overriding anyone or anything’s will. God’s not dominating or controling. God is shining.

 

All the bad that we see in the world isn’t God’s fault at all. It’s our fault. And it’s someone else’s fault. A lot of someone else’s faults. And it’s disordered atoms and disordered weather systems’ fault. And it’s evolution gone off track’s fault. And it’s the fault of systems and culture we’ve set in motion and that seem too powerful and broken to change’s fault. God is too loving to dominate or control this all into order with a snap of God’s finger. God can’t do that. God isn’t like that. 

 

God is real and present as a sustainer of life and a force for good and for truth, for healing and for beauty. God will help get us where we need to go together, but we won’t get there with only God doing the work.

 

2) Secondly, God’s not just like the sun. God is fire, but God is fire that does not consume. Moses would have been used to seeing a brush fire in the desert, I expect. Hot days, cold nights, lots of dry vegetation. Moses knew fires; he’d have set many himself at the end of a long day.

 

But this caught his eye, because this fire burned hot and bright and beautiful but it did not consume. 

 

Katherine Songeregger again:, God’s power isn’t hands off or distant. Here is God burning with fire and speaking to Moses. God is present. God is in personal relationship. And yet, God does not violate or coerce. God doesn’t do things against anyone’s will. 

 

This paradox continues through the whole Exodus account, as the ancient writers aren’t always sure how to describe who is doing what. 

 

Right after the six verses I read today, God says: I have observed the  misery of my people. I have heard their cry. I am going to deliver them, to lead them out of oppression and violence and into a good and peaceful place. I will do it, God says. But then God says: Moses, I need you to lead the people. Moses, go do it, and I’ll be with you. 

 

Which is it? Is it God who will do it, or is it Moses?  It’s both. Because God is real. God is powerful. God is a fire. But God is a fire that does not consume. God won’t coerce or violate, won’t control or override anyone’s will.

 

Which takes me to the third and final thought today about God’s power, which is that:

 

3) At the burning bush, we learn of a God who is a partner, but usually only if we let God be. There’s that beautiful line in this story, so quick it’s easy to miss, that God is burning in the bush, but not consuming it, and that God only starts to speak to Moses after Moses notices. Moses says: woah, this beautiful and unusual burning bush. And God thinks: here is someone who is paying attention. And then God calls his name, and Moses answers, and the sandals come off on this holy ground, and off we go from there.

 

The point is that God doesn’t force our attention, but God welcomes it. God doesn’t dominate or coerce, God calls. Sonderegger says: We come because we are drawn. 

 

Here’s where this leaves me today.

 

We are in hard times, but they are not hard times that God has caused or let happen. Disordered creation has done this, and here we are. But a powerful God is with us still.

 

My friends, God is real and powerful and is very much with us. God is beautiful and strong as the sun, fierce and bright like fire. But God is not about to single-handedly consume or change anything without human partners in the work. 

 

But my friends, sisters and brothers and siblings, we can do hard things. With the help of God and friends, we too can burn with creative, loving force in the world. We can partner with God to love and nurture. We can partner together, with the inner strength and the inspiration of God, to heal and to do justice, and to remake and transform things and times and cultures and systems for good. 

 

With the help of God and friends, we can do it. For the next several weeks, starting tomorrow, in my weekly Word of the Day on our youtube channel and social media, I’ll be sharing thoughts about a Rule of Life, about a creative, life-giving, God-seeing way in the world we can be rediscovering together. Join me in paying attention to an opportunity of this season. We can do it. 

 

But for today, let me end by praying with us. Katherine Sonderegger ends her meditation on God as unconsuming fire with these beautiful words:

 

God descends down through the individuals and kinds He has made with His own Life, His own Vitality and Truth, so that they catch Fire, they combust with the Life that is Divine–yet remain their own kind, the bush not consumed. 

Let’s pray.

The Brittle Story of Victimization

Last in the Series, Seven Stories: Jesus’ Big Story, and the Other Stories by Which We Live

Welcome everyone!  I’m Ivy, Cate mentioned. It’s so great to be with you this morning – so lovely to have a room full with the texture of many of you who regard yourselves as young at heart – and many of you who are just, well – young…. Our kid’s programming takes a break once and awhile – and this Sunday is one of them – so welcome all you toddlers and kids! It’s a joy to have you, and your voices and energy in the room this morning!

Next week we will enter the season of Lent, these few weeks leading up to Easter.   We’ll spend these weeks as a community considering the centrality of the cross – and we’ll explore this through a myriad of ways; a daily reflection guide – (that includes Bible and poetry), some thoughts on our blog around “Why did Jesus Die?”, authored by Pastor Steve , sermons of course, special services, Ash Wednesday 2/26, a participatory liturgy, and Good Friday service.   It is a rich season which I’m looking forward to pressing into with all of you – and if you are looking to explore this season with others, beyond a Sunday morning experience – it’s also a great time to consider joining a community group (booklets in lobby, me, website). 

Today though, we are wrapping up our winter series, Seven Stories. We’ve spent the last few weeks exploring 5 primary stories that authors Brian McLaren and Gareth Higgins suggest we’ve been telling and listening to for far too long – stories that don’t seem to usher in connection, liberation, creativity or peace for us all.  We’ve looked at the stories of domination, redemptive violence, isolation, purification and accumulation. We’ve told stories, and read scripture, posed reflective questions and gave helpful spiritual practice tips to help us pause and consider just how these stories are woven into our beings. Not just stories we can witness or identify – somewhere OUT there – but WHERE, IN US these stories live… and WHY…. And how on earth, these stories are told with our words and lips and bodies – and HOW we go about the work of unearthing them, shifting them, and yes, (changing direction), repenting from the ways we perpetuate these stories.

Today – as is true every time I stand here – I  preach to myself first. . .. because I am still WAKING up to some of these stories , still acknowledging and owning responsibility for where I participate in telling them,  and I’m still trying to do the work and effort it takes to change them. I’m finding that these stories, (maybe not so surprisingly), DEMAND our trust in the extraordinary, supernatural story of Jesus to shake our constitutions again – to bring us to our knees with the belief in the  power of the miraculous spirit of love , “to see that the movement of the Spirit of God  – often call us to act against the spirit of our times, [these prominent stories of our days], with wisdom, humility, and courage ….” (Howard Thurman).

And to “learn once again  – as Howard Thurman says, how to put at the disposal of the limitless demands of our [painful experiences]- the boundless resources of God – to see that instead of just enduring [being a victim to] this life,  that we can float it.” (Thurman, 173).

The story of victimization, which I’ll talk more about today – tells the truth of the pain we incur in this life and also the lie that life is nothing more than pain…. (and that we are powerless to it). 

Now where we move from being a real victim of injustice, to a mentality of victimhood – that holds us prisoner to our pain – is sometimes hard to parse out.  How much time must go by? A month? 1 year? 5 years? 10 years? I guess the question is less about time and more about what we do with the pain we all experience as humans. Do we tell the truth about this pain – and let it transform us? Or do we as Richard Rohr is known for saying, “transmit the pain” out into the world through defensiveness, anger, fear.  This is a big question, particularly for those of us – like myself, who are white – and enjoy high status, high pay, high privilege, power and authority.  So I invite you to let this question roll around throughout the sermon toda,y and see if it is relevant to you. 

The story of victimization is a story woven in, and a product of all the other stories, I mentioned earlier.  It’s a tangle of knots and harm and lies – of structures, and people’s actual lives, our children, and institutions and  dreams and nightmares – all contorted to fit into boxes of “us v. them”, upon which we’ve built a world, a way of being.  

“Us versus them.

Us versus some of us.

Us in spite of them.

Us away from them.

Us competing with them to get more “stuff”.” (McLaren & Higgins)

We can not untie one story from the other – without being willing to look and face the full entirety of it’s mess.   This is why it’s so daunting to start. What thread do we pull first? What’s the entry point?

Humanity has never known what to do with unjust suffering – yet is our universal experience on this earth.  We are all wounded. We have wounded, and we have been wounded. Wounder/woundee. And to be wounded, harmed, to suffer – all of it is unjust, and to be a victim is to endure unjust suffering.  “Spiritual masters teach us that it is not what happens that causes us to suffer, but the stories we tell about it” (McLaren & Higgins, 133).   So maybe the starting line  – the way into these complex network of stories, is the locus within ourselves that holds ‘yes’ the pain – but also the possibility for transformation of that pain, Jesus’ deep, powerful love. 

Today, I invite you to start with yourself.  To consider what pain you might be in and where that pain resides right now? What have you done with it? Where have you placed it? What are the challenges the barriers? What story are you telling about this pain?

Prayer:  Jesus we/I plead for your help. Where answers are so scarce – We ask for your mercy – as we stumble to create them –  could you listen to us? Could you guide us to our hearts, where our pain is lodged, and also where your love resides. 

MY STORY:  A couple of weeks ago I spoke about the story of isolation and in that I shared more than I ever have about the particulars of growing up in a small mill town in Maine.  I shared that the ethic of this town was built around this paper mill culture – where generational pride and loyalty spun out of working really hard and making an honest living – and held the nexus of where people formed their identities and found belonging.  (the lore is that many people who graduated from the local high school say on a Thursday – would work their first shift at the mill on a Friday – this is how deeply the mill’s story was entrenched into “who people were”). 

The suffering that people endured however, due to poisons and toxins from these mills – found in the erosion of their land, water, air and decaying, cancer-ridde-bodies – – was not acknowledged even as attention to this link grew greater.    Even as the EFFECTS of this suffering and pain was impactful and noticeable in their real lives. 

People lost their jobs.

Healthcare coverage.

Houses.

Land.

Families.

Businesses closed.

Schools closed.

People moved away.

Depression and deaths of despair grew:

Opioid related deaths.

Suicide.

Harm, pain and suffering grew.

People were hurt….. And people were victims of injustice at the hands of this great, powerful institution the paper mill.   Which continued to spill out evil with threats of slashing healthcare coverage, over-time on Sundays and all holidays, even as people were dying of mill-related diseases.

 

Not knowing really what to do with all this pain, 

People isolated, because they didn’t want to be hurt again in that way…   And they turned to each other in these bunkers for protection and safety, and they asked the questions of PAIN; “Why me?”  “How could my livelihood be so disrupted?” “How could my dreams for my family and my life – be so sidelined?” “I’ve worked so hard.” “I’ve been so good!” 

This was a strong thru-line in my town – and perhaps nationally – that  bad things couldn’t happen to good, hard-working, people.”

Such valid questions, and feelings… 

People were looking for a meaning for their suffering. 

An answer that could provide:

A release valve, something to inoculate the pain. 

A place to deposit the tears, the outrage, the fear.  

An answer that would be a remedy to the exhausting plight of poverty that echoed in their bones.  

Pain charges and fires all of the receptors in our bodies and it communicates to our brains, “I am being dealt with in a manner that is ruthless because this suffering ignores my private world of concerns!” (Thurman 171). 

There wasn’t an answer, or for that matter much redemption on the horizon for folks in this mill town.  And where there is an alarming deficit of good/hope/joy people tend to give up on life, and each other. This hopelessness manifests often in cynicism, bitterness, negativity and blaming as a substitute to looking squarely at the pain – and it’s not a bad approach because it provides immediate satisfaction.

With the amped tensions and fears in my town  – and with no direct acknowledgement of pain, victim- mentality set up strong and ran deep.  People felt as though suffering would and could only be the only story in their lives – there was no way out  – and they felt powerless in this.  This is a scary place to be with little resources, with shame and failure, as new, thick words in your vocabulary.

Our primal instincts kick in when we are in pain – and they cause us to fight or flight.  Many people in my home town (and surrounding towns), enacted the “flight” mode – isolating – separating themselves.

But many others also chose to FIGHT.  The first step in fighting – is to identify the enemy, the bad guy, the source of harm –  who will I blame for the pain? We create the scapegoat.

“Philosopher René Girard sees this tendency to scapegoat others as the central story line of human history. Why? Because it works. The scapegoat mechanism was almost perfectly ritualized by the Israelites. They enacted placing their sins on a poor goat and sending it off into the wilderness to die, thus the name, scapegoat”. (Richard Rohr). 

When we can find our scapegoat  – it acts as a relief valve initially, it brings about a sense of justified peace – and gives us a sense of satisfaction.  And for those of us who are used to holding power – the satisfaction allows us to have that familiar scent of power again, to be in control again –  and we get to deposit our fear, our hate, our frustration on SOMEONE else.

Many mill workers stood up to the institution that brought harm to so many.  1200 mill employees decided to strike to bring truth to power for the ways the mill continued to pump pain into people’s lives.    The mill responded with fear and defensiveness and fired all of these workers.     

The mill also replaced all of these workers with new workers.  Many, as it turns out were family members, friends, neighbors of those who originally struck.  Folks in town were desperate to make ends meet, the mill paid well above the hourly wage, and many jumped at the chance to get in at the mill, even if temporarily while the strike was active.   The strike lasted 16 months and when it was over not one of the original strikers got their jobs back. The replacement workers were permanent.

This, created new schisms, fractures, new enemies – and fresh scapegoats. Life was bleaker, more pained, and now riddled with a deeper story-line of victimization for many.    Not only had the town quickly divided over that stretch of time – they had also VERY quickly, “accepted violence as a natural expression of pain”.  Epithets, rocks, ball bearings fired from sling-shots were hurled at strikers…   And those who did not support the strike were taunted with curses, and men whose closest brush with the law had been no more than a parking ticket started carrying guns and baseball bats in their vehicles.   Kids in my classes at school – faced bullying at the power of teachers – who may have had relatives or friends – that were on the other side of the strike line. It became a tangle of these primary stories. 

Playing the victim is a way to deal with pain indirectly. “You blame someone else, and your pain becomes your personal ticket to power and control. …because it gives you a false sense of moral superiority and of having been offended”(Rohr).  But it doesn’t catalyze anything except more fear, more pain, more defensiveness and a brittleness of always being on edge.

It also creates a very fragile system of people.  Because now – not only is the institution the source of your personal pain – but the possibility that your  neighbor, friend, family member is now also on the table – there’s no one to trust. We are always the victim.  

With this posture, the side-eye that someone gives you in the check-out line, the push that someone gives you on the soccer field, the fact that someone didn’t pick up your phone call -or email you right back, or the feedback you got at that meeting, or the feedback you didn’t get at that meeting – it all lands personally, as an attack, and your wound stays fresh. 

Richard Rohr says, “We are all tempted to project our problems on someone or something else rather than dealing with it in ourselves….because it takes away our inner shame and anxiety and gives us a false sense of innocence.” 

But he says it “doesn’t ask us to grow, or to change, or transform.  You don’t have to grow up, you don’t have to pray, you don’t have to let go, you don’t have to forgive or surrender—you just have to accuse someone else of being worse than you are. And sadly that becomes our very fragile identity, which always needs more reinforcement.”

Again – here’s a snippet of my small-mill-town-story, and if it doesn’t resonate or feel relevant to you – than so be it… But I think it points to the greater patterns we enter into – when we take on a victim mentality, when we scapegoat and perpetuate harm.  And it’s how we get into loops of conversation that I hear so often, “my pain is greater than your pain”, or “I’m a victim too”, or “oh, I haven’t oppressed you”, and this is all symptomatic of evading our pain. Which actually leads to deepening the trenches of our own wounds –  keeping them raw and bleeding – far away from healing. 

All throughout the Bible we see this play out  – people in pain – threatened – stressed – wounded – and Jesus gives us countless models of how to transform our pain – How to not just be wounded – but to maybe be wounded and healers at the same time.. These models often incorporate an invitation to reorient to Him – the source of abundant love, healing and good news for everyone.

So I’d love for us to look at the scripture on your program, which gives us some texture in this regard:

Matthew 15:21-28 (NLT)

21 Then Jesus left Galilee and went north to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A Gentile woman who lived there came to him, pleading, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David! For my daughter is possessed by a demon that torments her severely.”

23 But Jesus gave her no reply, not even a word. Then his disciples urged him to send her away. “Tell her to go away,” they said. “She is bothering us with all her begging.”

24 Then Jesus said to the woman, “I was sent only to help God’s lost sheep—the people of Israel.”

25 But she came and worshiped him, pleading again, “Lord, help me!”

26 Jesus responded, “It isn’t right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs.”

27 She replied, “That’s true, Lord, but even dogs are allowed to eat the scraps, the crumbs, that fall beneath their masters’ table.”

28 “Dear woman,” Jesus said to her, “your faith is great. Your request is granted.” And her daughter was instantly healed.

OOOOF – Jesus.  Challenging picture here.

Again the message that I know of the good news of Jesus  – is that He is the central source from which we have hope to transform our pain, to heal, to feel comfort when we are victims of injustice…at our most vulnerable.  It’s a message that says Jesus is good, loving .. always. Always. always. Except, here,  when he’s not?  When he’s insulting and mean?

I am absolutely not going to make sense of all the possible interpretations of this passage, there are so many… but I’ll offer some perspective, which is not to be taken as the RIGHT way of interpreting what’s going on here – but as a possible lens through which you could explore for yourself, one that might open up something you hadn’t seen, or read or heard. 

At a baseline I think there are some power dynamics going on here… that this story invites us to consider in our own lives  – 

This woman is from a Gentile region, so Jesus and the disciples moved into areas that most Jews would have considered unclean. This region, in particular has a long history of paganism and opposition to the Jews.  In addition, this woman herself is regarded as unclean because of her demon possessed daughter. So she is facing, “ xenophobia, sexism, classism and social discrimination”, as her daily existance. (Gonzalez, 125).

Jesus comes into this region not with tremendous power – he’s a working class Israelite under Roman occupation – from a town of lower status – BUT  – he still holds a fair amount of social power as it relates particularly to this woman. He is an able-bodied man, he is an Israelite with Israelite lands – he’s known as a respected teacher.   And yet, what this woman seems most interested in – is not necessarily the power represented in those social strati – but the power he has access to, the power that she’s heard of from afar, that’s traveled over the lands and into her town – the power that she’s so compelled to find, despite her barriers – and this is the power to heal – the power that Jesus holds, to free this woman’s daughter or not, as he chooses.  

He is part of a religious system that holds this power, as far as she’s concerned – and she needs it, she is suffering. 

And here is the set up for humanity, right?  

Power held by some, and needed by so many. 

Howard Thurman says that, “there is something about such suffering that seems to be degrading, that seems to insult the human spirit.  There is something about it that is unclean and demonic (171)” .

Suffering in and of itself – is already isolating, degrading, and insulting.  And this woman is pushing through that suffering, oppression, marginalization –  laying herself flat – desperate – crying out, on her knees… for HELP , JESUS!

And we see her rush to engage with Jesus – a source that could offer her relief, and healing…  and what happens? He seems to add to the rejection, heap on degradation and injure with insult.

 This religious system – that she thought might hold something different than all the other systems she’s been prey to – that might hold in it a healing power to expel the demonic and ravaging forces of suffering that her daughter and herself have endured – seems to offer nothing different, as she is also held victim to the words and actions of Jesus…..

This confirms for her, that his power is bound by the religious institution he is part of – his complicity with it.

Here is where I would have jumped right into a victim mentality… I would have thought, “this is enough – there’s nothing else.  There’s no power that I can have access to, touch – if it’s not found in you, Jesus”… “I”m powerless, all of life will only be this suffering.”

And I do, do this often.   

Just recently I had my brother and my sister-in-laws’ four kids, (all under the age of 10), for a few days in December – while they went on a trip.

Mercifully they let me use their van to transport our collective 7 children around.  And the first day the kids were here – we all filed into the van, and I clicked a zillion seatbelts and carseats into place – and off we went to drop off one of my kids at practice.

On our way home we stopped at a beach on the south shore – where I enlisted all of them to collect and transport 100’s of rocks for an element in our Advent participatory liturgy service that we had in December.

(Surprisingly small children LOVE picking up rocks!)

Things were going so well, I thought I’ll stop at Dunkin’ Donuts and get everyone a treat :). 

So we did, and as we drove out of the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot,  with a munchkin in each hand – I thought about how sweet life is. How thankful I am to be trusted with watching these little guys – and what a real delight it is for me, even though it was in the midst of a really busy season for me.

And then I feel something funny – at the back of the van – feels like the back end is sliding a bit –  I ask the 10 yr old if she notices anything. She’s says, “Eh, this van is on it’s 3rd leg – it’s so broken down – everything sounds and feels funny all the time.”

And I thought, “Solid point”.  Most of that van had things that were patched together to make do… gas tank, glove compartment…

But the sound and the feeling gets more pronounced and I decide to stop about ½ way home at a gas station.
Intending to top off the tires with some air.

I get outside and the back rear tire is FLAT to the ground, I mean on the rim!

I go to look for the spare tire – but we have 100’s of ROCKS covering the vestibule where it lives… 

  • And instantly I’m like, “You know what? Life is really crappy!” 

And the monologue just continues: 

“Everytime I try to do something nice – BAM! something bad happens.

Life is soooo tiring – and – exhausting – unforgiving.

Life is never just smooth, easy , free of “tragic events.”

I work so hard and never get recognized for it. 

Never get any accolades.

Life just keeps giving it’s crappy  – crap – crap – storyline to me over and over again.”

And there it is – it’s this old mill town story-line playing out in my life. The victim hood mentality that rears it’s head – that I can’t quite shake fully from my being.  IN fact I really need to pay attention when I start telling that story to even realize that’s the story I’m writing. The story that says, “there’s no God here, I have no access to power, I’m powerless.”


The beauty of this scripture is that this woman doesn’t  play the victim – or pull out the blame card – and she has every good reason to – but she did neither!  She, “wouldn’t allow the events of her life to make her their prisoner.” (Thurman 179)  And she stands firmly, strongly in front of Jesus. She doesn’t shame or yell or hurl insults back.   

But she challenges him, I think, “Jesus what exactly are you trying to communicate here?”

“I hear of these great stories of healing that you’ve done – even of Gentiles and women (!)  That seems greater than any power I’ve witnessed of a system! So how is it that the stories you tell through your lips and your hands communicate equality and healing – but you can be a part of a religious institution that systematically doles out elitism and exclusion?”


“And how is it I stand in front of you today pleading for mercy, healing and help –  and you call me a dog?” (Which by the way in English, Greek or Aramaic calling a woman a dog is not a term of endearment – it’s an insult – a slur). 

“How is it that your lips and your actions communicate harshness, and prejudice – but are supposed to build, with power,  a KIN-DOM full of acceptance, freedom, wholeness, justice?”

I don’t get it – Jesus, where’s that picture of power – that everyone I’ve heard of is telling is so compelling ? the power of love?  It seems like in either case you are throwing it away.

Don’t’ you see, that even the crumbs – Jesus – even the crumbs of love, could feed a dog like me.   I followed those crumbs, here to you – today.  That’s how powerful they are…..”

This woman speaks directly to Jesus and upholds his dignity,  calls OUT his divinity – by naming him Lord all throughout the exchange…  AND she also sees him as human.
And I think this is where we might stumble with this passage – it’s where we forget that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine. 

But I think if we see his humanness here, we can be helped in our own.

What if fully human Jesus is a product of his system the way all humans are, and a fully DIVINE Jesus teaches us how to overcome those systems? 

I think he does both here.

I do think he learned about his own prejudices from this woman. 

And I do think he learned that he can perpetuate these prejudices, this harm that resides in the religious system he’s a part of – EVEN when He’s trying to build upon and fill out that very system with love and acceptance.

It is important to me that Matthew (and Mark) include the words that Jesus says – as much as they discomfort and challenge our picture of a loving Jesus.   It shows how strong, and how insidious the tug of power is – of how privilege, even when enacted OFTEN in a compassionate manner – still has the propensity to continue the story lines of oppression and pain.

As much as blowing the tire out on my brother’s van,  really stunk that day. The gas station that I drove up to – was thankfully also an auto mechanic garage… and the mechanic mercifully took me in immediately, just 10 minutes before they closed.  He plugged the tire, charged me $25 – and my 6 children, were happy to take turns spinning each other around in an office chair – in the tiny vestibule at the side of the garage.  

Hurray ! Glorious ending!
Hurray! Glorious ending – as a result of my whiteness and my privilege.

As much as I was a victim of this car breaking.  And as much as I was a victim of poverty many years ago – I  have to acknowledge and see that doors were opened for me – (literally that day) as a beneficiary of the system of racism – where doors were closed to two other people of color who came into have their cars serviced just a smidge after me –  were turned away. 

It feels relevant to me to think about how Jesus invites me to consider the reality that  I’m not just a “representative” of systems of oppression – but how I am an active part of it… even if I don’t believe in racism or promote ideologies, the systems built on whiteness  still perpetuate racist outcomes. 

I think this is the use of power that Jesus might show us in this passage.   That we have other options than to fight or flight. We don’t need to exclude or find a scapegoat, or play the victim. OUR energy trying to convince people that “I’m a victim too” – or that “I’m not racist” – is damaging to others and creates brittle inner landscapes, avoids responsibility and effects no change.  Furthermore – it doesn’t get to this woman’s main desire – AND perhaps what we all come to Jesus to find; the power of love, the hope of healing, of transforming our pain. Where is it found, how can I access it? I think Jesus is showing us that we can’t get there unless we take steps at unharming – where we have harmed. 

This poet I love, Nayyirah Waheed wrote these few lines (on your program):

unharm someone

by

telling the truth you could not face

when you

struck instead of tended.

– put the fire out (unburn)


Healing it seems – can only come from telling the truth. The truth about our pain – our sense of self – our worth – …   The truth of stepping out of the victimization story – uncentering ourselves – and owning where we have harmed.  Jesus shows us how to do this. 

This is the mercy for us, that Jesus shows us his very humn moments in this story.  He’s ignoring, he’s defensive, he doesn’t want to take time for this woman – he doesn’t want to be interrupted, he wants to find somewhere quiet… he tries his hardest to reject her,  with exclusion and slurs – AND he uses his power for harm, instead of healing…

This woman helps him orient back to the true source of His power – not dictated in this religious system, but imparted to him by God. 

This is divine power.  (She is divine).

The divine power that helps him listen, reflect and repent.

This is the divine power of Jesus not only found in the healing of the daughter at the end of this story… 

BUT found in Jesus’ repentance.

Now the word “repentance”, can make some of us bristle – it’s been twisted and used as a weapon – but like the words Steve spoke on a few weeks ago of “covenant” and “sacrament” – I think it is a religious word , that just might be worth recovering. 


“The Greek word for repentance, translated to English is metanoia. Meta means “beyond” and noia means “thought” or “mind” .. together it means to change your thoughts or your mind, to turn in a new direction, to reverse a direction and go a different way.” (O’Tuama 200). 

Jesus shows us here how to repent – when we’ve wielded our power in hurtful ways.  He shows us how to grow up. To take responsibility – repent of the things that we can, to start the process of unharming, to be healers.

“To be open to the possibility of repentance is a sign of the goodness of humanity.”  (O’Tuama 200).

Jesus showed us his change of direction – his mind opening to the resistance of this woman AND not in the privacy of a quiet meeting, but in the public field… where his power mattered.   

Where he could show that his power really wasfor people, rather than over  them… 

Here, he showed us how to take steps to “unharm”. 

To listen.

To receive feedback without defensiveness and brittleness.

Here in the public sphere  is where the story of this woman will continue to be told, the one who bested Jesus in a conversation – not to make him look foolish or to compromise his following (as others in power tried), but to help him be better and healthier, and more divine.  

Here in the public sphere is where stories of her daughter, liberated from the possession of a demonic spirit would be told… and where lines of logic and heart will follow -to see that pain was no longer transmitted into her lineage.

To tell the story that freedom is the fruit and product of systems of faith that are built on love, healing, listening, justice and repentance – and it’s how the demonic spirits of violence, dominance, isolation, purification, accumulation and victimization will be loosed.

Spiritual Practice for Whole Life Flourishing:
Read the scripture with an imaginative spirit this week:

Who are you in this story? The one wounded, oppressed and marginalized? The one who holds authority and power? The one who watches from the crowd? 
Ask Jesus to direct your speaking up and/or your stepping back to listen, repent and aid in healing.


Read this poem this week:

unharm someone

by

telling the truth you could not face

when you

struck instead of tended.

– put the fire out (unburn)

— Nayyirah Waheed, Salt. (2013)


Who have you harmed? What truth have you not spoken yet? Or faced? Take steps to acknowledge, repent and aid in healing.

Prayer:

I need to repent in front of God and all of you here today,  of the ways that I’ve knowingly and unknowingly benefited from my whiteness – where I’ve used my privilege to see – and not see – act and not act… And even more than that I need to ask for transformation  – of my heart – and my words and my actions. 

Sources: 

Brian McLaren and Gareth Higgins. Seven Stories, E-book.  

Padraig O’Tuama. “In The Shelter”, 200.

Karen Gonzalez. “The God Who Sees, Immigrants, the Bible, and the Journey to Belong,” 125. 

Richard Rohr On Transformation (Franciscan Media: 1997), disc 1, (adapted from ).

Richard Rohr with John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety (St. Anthony Messenger Press: 2001), 19-20, 22-24.

Howard Thurman.“The Growing Edge.”171, 173, 179.

Nayyirah Waheed, “Salt”, 2013. 

Two Religious Words Worth Saving: Covenant and Sacrament

So in many ways the project of Reservoir Church – or at least the preaching of Reservoir – is to communicate profound spiritual perspective and truth and stories in practical language that’s at home in our culture. We used to have a little marketing tagline – Practical. Spiritual. Fun. And we used to belong to a group of churches in this country that liked to use the phrase “naturally supernatural.” Connected to the divine, experiencing God and transcendence and the mystical and all that without being freakishly out of this world or something. This church makes a promise to our members and our community to be resolutely Jesus-centered and spiritually vibrant in ways that are really accessible to our not very churchgoing, not very religious city. And this means a lot of things, including not using super-preachy, old school religious language in our teaching. Even for those of us like me that have been churchgoers now for decades, this has been fresh and helpful. And we plan on keeping up with this habit.

The thing is, though, to be spiritual, to try to connect more and more with an unseen God is these days a little weird. And to talk about that experience sometimes requires ideas and words we don’t use a lot anymore. The journalist Jonathan Merritt published a book about this a couple of years ago. It’s called Learning to Speak God from Scratch. It’s about how a lot of religious language in the Christian tradition has become out of date or even kind of toxic. So a word like “gospel” is kind of unknown culturally and other words like “sin” are laden with a lot of distracting and frankly off-putting associations. And Merritt wonders, like I do, what words need keeping and what ideas can find expression in new words. Another author I like, sadly dead now, tried this out a bit. His name was Frederick Beuchner, and in the 70s, he wrote a book where he muses on important, old words to do with God and the spiritual life. He wrote: “All the great religious words point to ways in which we variously experience the Holy – such as faith and grace – or hold it at arms’ length – such as sin. These words … have grown musty and shopworn over the centuries, but the experiences to which they point are as basic to the human condition as they ever were.”

I like that. And in that spirit, I want today to end our Christmas season talking about an experience that is basic to the human condition – how we find and remain in a sense of God in the world, a sense of God with us. And to help us out today, I’m going to do that by talking about two very religious words in our tradition that we don’t use a lot these days. Those words being “covenant” and “sacrament.” 

Next week we’ll go back to normal, using our everyday language to get at deep and important things. I’ll start a winter series where we’ll look at six of the not so great stories we use to organize our lives and world and thinking and with each, ask how Jesus’ story of reconciliation and liberation can be really good news. But today, we’ll look at these two old-school religious words that I think are worth saving. 

We’ll be in the beginning and end of the New Testament’s first book, the good news of Jesus according to Matthew. And these two words – covenant and sacrament – help us understand some of what’s going on in this little book, and some of how it can help us connect with and experience a living God. 

Matthew starts with a family history, a genealogy. Which is pretty boring for most of us, except when it isn’t, like here. It starts:

Matthew 1:1, 5-6  (CEB)

1 A record of the ancestors of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham:

And then in the middle of the list, there’s this really important and surprising bit:

5 Salmon was the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab.

Boaz was the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth.

Obed was the father of Jesse.

6 Jesse was the father of David the king.

David was the father of Solomon,

whose mother had been the wife of Uriah.

So Matthew is positioning Jesus as the peak of ancient Judaism, the culmination of that culture and that faith’s story to that point in time. There was Abraham and then David and then Jesus. And just as he’s getting to the really important part in the family history – the part around the great king David – these three women are mentioned: Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba (here not mentioned by name but called the ex-wife of Uriah.) Lots that’s interesting here. All three of these women are to some degree associated with questionable sexual behavior – by them, or more likely, by men with them. And in a culture that associated questionable sexual history – particularly women’s questionable sexual history – with shame or disgrace, Matthew centering these women is really radical stuff. No matter what your parents say, no matter what your culture says, there is nothing in any of your lives, or in any of your pasts, that disqualifies you from a big and beautiful part in God’s story. 

But it’s not just that. More to our point today, in the middle of this very male, very Jewish family history, these three women aren’t just men, they also aren’t Jewish. They’re all outsiders. 

It’s like Matthew is committed to telling this family history, but he can’t help but start hinting from the very beginning that the story is bigger than this family. To use one of our big words of the day, Jesus is the center of a particular covenant, which I’ll define more in a minute, but at the same time, there’s also a bigger covenant going on. 

This continues in the next chapter when we meet the Magi, who we usually call the three wise men, even though in Matthew, they’re not called wise or men, and there may have been more than three. Whatever. 

In the traditional church calendar, this Sunday is called Epiphany – the revelation of God in Christ to the Gentiles. In many Latino cultures, it’s Three Kings Day. And we’re encouraged to remember the story of these Magi, these Persian astrologers who visit the baby or toddler Jesus and bring gifts. One little excerpt from that bit:

Matthew 2:1-2,10-11  (CEB)

2 After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the territory of Judea during the rule of King Herod, magi came from the east to Jerusalem. 2 They asked, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We’ve seen his star in the east, and we’ve come to honor him.”

10 When they saw the star, they were filled with joy. 11 They entered the house and saw the child with Mary his mother. Falling to their knees, they honored him. Then they opened their treasure chests and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Same thing going on here. It’s a story about the king of the Jews. And yet these non-Jews are here to celebrate and worship. The Magi aren’t just outsiders to this story, you could argue they represent enemies. Then and in our context, now. They’re Persian – that’s modern day Iran and the border areas of Iraq and Iran. This is a region which for decades in American politics and it looks like now for decades more to come has been defined by our hostility to them, and them to us. In the Jesus story, though, it’s a region defined by friendship, by shared humanity. Please keep that in your minds and prayers. 

In the Bible’s backstory, there’s a mixed record. On the one hand, a Persian king had given Jews blessing to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple. It’s a story of religious tolerance, religious pluralism in the Bible. But Magi in particular are kind of reminiscent of these characters in the Bible’s book of Daniel – the Persian court magicians and bureaucrats who were hostile to the Jewish heroes of the story. 

But here the Magi come to worship, to be part of the story of Jesus, the newborn king of the Jews, as they call him. 

Here’s what I see going on? 

Matthew celebrates what he sees as a covenant between God and the Jewish people. But other people are getting in on the story, because it’s actually a covenant between God and all people, in disguise. 

What’s this word covenant I keep using?

A covenant is like a contract, but deeper and less legal, more personal. A promise is made, and the other party welcomes it or not, doesn’t really negotiate it. If you hear this word still, it might be in contract law. A landlord promises to make repairs – this might be called a covenant the landlord makes. More commonly, though, you hear this at a wedding. I officiated a wedding most recently last month. It was a Christmas wedding, in all the ways. Lots of red, a big Christmas tree behind us, the newly wed couple being taken away in a sleigh. Really fun.

And the old school word we used in the ceremony to describe what was happening was covenant. A set of promises were being made by each person to the other. They weren’t negotiating the terms. They were promising love and faithfulness, no matter what. Making a covenant. 

And I think that to experience and connect with God in the world, it helps to consider the covenant we might be part of. 

The story in the Bible begins with God in covenant to all people. God makes a good earth for us, with more than enough for everyone. God makes this world with more than enough food, with people to be in relationship with. God makes a world that has room for good, hard, satisfying work, and for delightful, restorative rest. There’s this sense that people are made for relationship and for work and for rest and for worship, and this earth has everything we need for all of this. God says the earth will do what it’s supposed to. God makes people — all people — in God’s image. 

And God says, you’re part of the deal, your responsibility in this covenant is to live as if you’re all made in God’s image. Love and honor the God you look like. Treat each other well – don’t hurt each other. And take care of this earth. Cultivate it, fill it up. Enjoy it and treat the earth well too. 

The Bible says that’s the covenant we’re all under. All people. We’re all children of this promise, this relationship, this covenant. And to be honest, this is the covenant that’s sort of most important to us. It’s the first one. That we’re all part of one human family. We’re all related. Prisoners, free. Iranians, Americans. Documented, not. Straight, gay, other. Professor, custodian, CEO, security guard. Or as the Bible puts it – Jew, Gentile, man, woman, slave, free. There’s no less valuable person, or class of people. And good work, good relationships, good rest, good worship is everyone’s birthright. There’s a lifetime to keep finding all this. And the earth is ours to cultivate and fill, but also to take care of – a message our generation better take seriously. 

These are God’s promises and responsibilities for all of us in the human family.

But then in Matthew, and in the whole New Testament, there’s a particular covenant we can be part of as well. It’s what Jesus calls the new covenant, in which the human family is invited into a particular relationship with God and with one another, a relationship that is mediated, that is brought together through Jesus Christ. 

This covenant, this promise from God, is more particular than the covenant with the whole human family. In this new covenant, we’re promised much by God. We’re promised the unconditional acceptance Jesus offered people. We’re promised the forgiveness that Jesus announced to people – our worst qualities and worst actions not defining us, not disqualifying us. We’re promised the personal presence of God with us – in all times, in all places. We’re promised that the life and vitality of God will become part of us, in this life and for new life beyond our deaths. And in all this kindness, all this grace, we’re asked to shape our lives according to the teaching and life of Jesus – radical non-violence, radical love and inclusion, radical trust in God, radical hospitality and peace and generosity. 

I mentioned that God’s covenant with the whole human family is in some ways the most important thing we teach and practice at Reservoir. But I rather like this particular covenant with God in Christ. It’s been good news to me, and it’s at the heart of who we are and what we teach here too. 

I was explaining the other day to a friend of mine. 

I worked out all last year at a tiny little gym, where you spend a lot of time on these rowing machines. A guy that went to my high school owns the place, and it’s that connection – and how I appreciate so much of what he’s about – that was why I was working out there.

And one day last month, it was just the two of us, and knowing I was involved with this church as a pastor, my friend asked me more about this place, which got us talking about what we think about faith and religion.

And we were talking about people like my friend that don’t really practice any particular faith tradition, but just try to live well and to cultivate a respect for all human diversity.

And my friend was like: you could do worse than that, couldn’t you? And I was like absolutely. This is that big covenant with God and the whole human family I was talking about. And we should always respect people and communities trying to live well by that covenant. 

But I told him, yeah, that would be good enough for me, but I love Jesus too much. The teaching and practice of Jesus has reshaped my life. It’s made me a bigger hearted and better and happier person. So I pastor a church that’s not just about God or the good life in general but about Jesus in particular. 

And he asked, where did that start for you? 

And I’m pulling on the erg in my workout, going harder and harder, and so I’m breathing heavier and thinking: where do I start this story? 

Because I’m thinking about the church my parents were going to that I skipped to watch TV and drink sodas with my nana and popop, but where a pastor led a class for high school kids and convinced me smart people could believe in God. 

And I’m thinking about the story I told you all a few weeks ago when I did this horrible thing to a friend of mine, and my friend called me out on it, but with this crazy acceptance and forgiveness I was not expecting, and how I knew that’s what Jesus was like and that’s the kind of God I wanted to know, and that’s the kind of person I wanted to be. 

Then I’m thinking about this hoaky, older couple that taught a middle school Sunday school class my parents made me go to for a while. And how I didn’t like the other kids, and I thought the songs they sang were horribly corny. But I remembered them saying every week that if you invite Jesus into your life, Jesus will always accept you and always love you and always be with you.

I was terribly lonely as a young teenager, and ashamed of myself a lot of the time. And I was broken up inside, and I was thinking about how if God wanted to love me and like me and be with me, that seemed like really, really good news.

All of this was important enough to me that I asked to be baptized when my church was offering it. I stood in front of the whole church on a Sunday morning during worship, a pastor poured water over my head, and I said I welcome this washing, and I welcome this presence of Jesus with me by the Holy Spirit being poured over and into me like this water. And I welcome a life in this covenant God has with people in Jesus. 

And I’m thinking about how I didn’t really know what to do next, but I was told that I could read the Bible and pray every day and that would help me follow Jesus. And so every night before I went to bed, I listened to the high five at 9 on the pop station on the radio – the top five songs of the day. And around 9:30 or so, when that was over, I’d read a chapter or two of the Bible and say a few things to God. And that was kind of confusing, but pretty interesting too. 

And I’m thinking about this one night in room, after I’d watched the third Indiana Jones movie that came out when I was a teenager. And there was this scene where the agnostic Indiana Jones has to make a literal leap of faith across this canyon, and he remembers his devout, God-loving father’s words about walking by faith, not by sight, and he closes his eyes, and trusts God, and then things are miraculously OK. And something about that scene got to me, and I wanted to live that way – less afraid, more trusting – and so one night in my prayer time, I stood up and closed my eyes and started walking across the room, telling God I wanted to learn to trust God in everything. And I didn’t really know what I was talking about, but it felt like something important was happening. Like I was making an important promise to God, and it seemed kind of intense, and it seemed like God was with me, and was always going to be with me, and that was going to matter. 

I know I didn’t tell my friend all these things because I was rowing and out of breath, and there wasn’t time, but I told him a little bit of this. And I said, sorry, it’s weird and it probably sounds corny.

And he was like: don’t worry about it. You’re talking to someone who sold all his possessions to start a rowing gym. That’s pretty corny. Corny and weird I can appreciate. 

That felt good to hear. I guess most of the things in life that are really big and important, that involve our whole selves, that are whole-hearted – most of those things  have something weird, something corny about them. 

I guess what all that story of my teenage years adds up to for me, though, is that I found my way into not just a general approach to being a more spiritual person and living a better life – part of the whole human family. Which would’ve been great.

But I found myself into a more particular version of that, into the family of Christ, into the new covenant, God’s connection with people in and through Jesus Christ. All the particulars of that are what spoke to me, and what speak to me still. 

More and more, Jesus seems to me the wisest and most beautiful and most compelling person who ever lived, a person I want to know and want to be like. 

And more and more, Jesus shows to me a more beautiful and more compelling picture of God than anything I hear about or can imagine, and that’s one that seems to draw something out of me, seems to keep tugging at me. 

This is kind of what it means to be part of a covenant community with God in Christ – it’s a really beautiful thing.

And the way we find our way into that covenant, and the way we keep it going, that it stays potent and fresh for us is through something called sacrament. Sacrament us our second word of the day. 

A sacrament is a sign or symbol that points us to something sacred. It’s an embodied, physical experience that speaks to something profoundly spiritual. A visible form of an invisible spiritual experience. An outward sign of an inward grace. 

Sacraments are part of the way in to a covenantal life with God, and they are part of the way to keep going in that life as well. 

Some people say there are seven sacraments, other people just two, other people say these two, or these seven are just the beginnings of experiencing all of our physical life as sacrament. 

But everyone agrees on the first two. Baptism as an experience where water is poured on you or where you’re immersed in water, as a sign of union with Jesus, and the pouring out of God’s love and presence into you. And communion – the little meal of bread and wine that represents Jesus’ body and blood, and is an opportunity to come to God as we are and be filled with God as God is. 

Both of these sacraments are important in Matthew. Jesus announces the new covenant during the communion meal before his death, and when he’s saying goodbye to his closest students, he commissions them to help others be part of the Jesus covenant, and to baptize them as a way of welcoming them in.

Matthew 28:18-20  (CEB)

18 Jesus came near and spoke to them, “I’ve received all authority in heaven and on earth. 19 Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you. Look, I myself will be with you every day until the end of this present age.”

Teach other people to be my students, Jesus says. Baptize them into this covenant God has for them. Teach them to do what I’ve said. And I’ll always be with y’all. 

The baptism is a central way, maybe the central way that people from the human family will join into this particular covenant family God has in Christ. 

That was true for me. Baptism was part of that season where I got started with Jesus – intrigued by Jesus, wanting to be like Jesus, thinking Jesus showed me who God is, trying to learn to do what Jesus says and see how good that could be. The pouring of the waters on me, the profession of faith I made was part of how I became part of this community of promise. 

But it didn’t end there. Things like baptism and communion pointed me to other ways to see and experience the invisible Christ in the world as well. I saw the invisible Jesus in the face of my friend’s love and grief and forgiveness. I saw Jesus in the pages of my Bible as I read the gospels and the letters that talk about Jesus. I started to hear and see and feel things that seemed like Jesus all over the place, and even inside myself. 

Holiness, presence of God, images of Jesus Christ everywhere. The whole world becoming sign and symbol that points to the sacred. Spiritual experience, outward signs of invisible grace all over the place. 

So we can look back and see the prostitute Rahab – great, great, great, great grandmother of Jesus made sacrament when she welcomed the Hebrew spies into her home and her homeland. The Magi made sacrament when they gave their gifts to Jesus, who never treasured money or wealth, but saw these kind of gifts when he grew up as marks of people’s beautiful faith – outward signs of inward works of God. Holy and beautiful gestures everywhere. 

I’m saying a whole bunch of things in this sermon, so let me make just a few of them specific. 

One is to look for:

Invitations to Whole Life Flourishing

Covenant and sacrament – sacred promises and sacred symbols: honor them wherever you find them, and watch life grow deeper. 

Notice ordinary things that move you, that evoke something holy like God’s presence. Notice the people and places and practices that stir that in you. Notice, honor covenants – generous promises made in good faith. And keep them, honor them. 

One that’s not in the program is be aware that God has extended to all of us this amazing opportunity to be part of a covenant in Christ – to know God in and through the person of Jesus, and be part of all the amazing stuff that comes with that. And if that’s for you, treasure this community that is your covenant community home. Give yourself to it. And give yourself to the faith. Learn to do all the things that Jesus says. Say I will follow Jesus whole-heartedly this year.

But know that’s also not God’s only covenant. Respect all your friends and neighbors – near and far – that aren’t part of the Christ-centered covenant but are part of God’s covenantal family of all people. Respect friends and neighbors who are part of other religious traditions. Honor their dignity and their faith and their rights. Respect, pray for, love your Iranian cousins in the family of God who you have never met, the whole human family.

And one more thing:

Spiritual Practice of the Week

Take communion and remember your baptism each week. Let a pastor know if you haven’t been baptized and would like to consider it. 

Communion is this amazing weekly opportunity to remember your connection to Jesus Christ – God’s love poured out to you in Jesus and your part of the family learning to follow Jesus. 

And we’ll be offering baptisms this spring likely just after Easter – to both children and adults. More info to come on that this winter, but it’s never too soon to late a one of us know you’re interested.