Speaker: Ivy Anthony

God’s Constellation

Well, if you’ve been following along at all with the Artemis II mission, the voyage of the spaceship “Orion,” named “Integrity” by the crew, you know that the 10 day journey to the moon and beyond — came to a successful end on Friday. 

And I almost missed it. When they launched on April 1st, I was at community group and folks were talking excitedly about this mission. I had no idea it was even happening. And yet somehow in the span of nine days I’ve found myself completely captivated.

In part by the fundamental fact that human beings can leave this Earth, travel hundreds and thousands of miles into space, suspend themselves in space, trust every calculation, every movement, every person —  circle the moon, and arrive safely home….

I mean, the scale of it is incredible.

But this week, post-Easter, the pull I’ve been feeling hasn’t been entirely about the scale of this mission –– but about the grounding I feel in witnessing what collaboration at this scale opens up. Something about this mission, this team, situated in *this* moment feels like it represents something new:

There were sooo many firsts. The crew alone:

  • Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut to go to the moon.
  • Christina Koch, the first woman to travel to the Moon.
  • Jeremy Hansen, the first non-US citizen a Canadian astronaut to go to the moon.
  • And Reid Wiseman, the first oldest person to travel beyond low Earth orbit. I’m sure he loves that first next to his name!

This crew is the first to  achieve the greatest human distance from Earth, breaking Apollo 13’s record.

The first “free-return trajectory” around the Moon, (they use the Moon’s gravity to “slingshot” back to Earth rather than relying on its own engines (less energy, less pollution).

And yes, these firsts matter.
Not just for the history books (if we’ll still have them)… but for the widening of the story still being written, the story for all of humanity going forward.  Somewhere this crew reminded me that something new and good is still possible — when we come together.

Being here last Sunday on Easter felt a little like that  — close to 500 people filling this sanctuary. A room full of stories and voices, generations and laughter and singing and contemplation.  A vibrancy of color, and kid energy, something alive and good and real — new life. hope. breaking through — resurrection! 

And I also know that by Monday and definitely by Tuesday, in many ways I came back down to Earth pretty quickly. It’s April in Boston and on Tuesday it was snowing, and sideways wind-ing, and dark and stormy.

And yet maybe that’s where resurrection actually meets us, where something new begins.

Not just in the moments that take our breath away, but in what it asks of us the very next day.

In those first days after Jesus’ resurrection.
Herod was still king.
Caesar was still in Rome.
The chief priests were still chief priests.

The empire still ruled. 

Jesus rose, but the systems that crushed him still stood. 

And we too, today – are still living with the insanity of leadership that seeks to use power to churn chaos and wield death as a hobby, that threatens war and violence in the same breath as “God’s name”. . . 

We are still navigating a world that often feels like it is unraveling more than it is being made new. 

And I’ll admit, part of why I found myself following this Artemis mission wasn’t allll awe —- it was a kind of escape. What would it be like to just step off this world, and up into a new world — for a while? 

But the longer I stayed with it, a reminder I didn’t know I needed surfaced, that we are still living inside a beginning….and we are the ones who get to shape what comes next.  And I don’t want to miss it. 

This crew, as elite as they are in some ways, reminds me — of us. That we are still people who reach….who live for, believe for, long to do something beyond us… something new.

We’ve learned how to reach the Moon — and we are still learning how to live on the Earth. And maybe that’s the deeper tug here, not only to travel beyond this world, but to bring that same curiosity, that same courage and sense of possibility into how we live with God and with one another.  INTO the making of the kin-dom of God, here and now. Earth-side.

Over the last 50 years, since the last journey to the moon, we’ve learned how to get there again — and get there better with advances in technology and science. 

But maybe even more than that, we’ve learned how to go farther, together.

And we can’t lose sight of that. Because collaboration (although risky and vulnerable), is what keeps us alive. And for these astronauts it’s not for the mere prize of victory gain, or ego-driven status. It’s for the love of this Earth, for this humanity, for the curiosity and belief that there is more to be discovered, that there is life beyond what we identify as life that can propel us forward. That there is always something new even at the edges of where we imagine. 

And that’s what we are leaning into, together this spring. We’re beginning a new series today, called: “Something New.” 

Because we believe in a loving, life-giving, creative, God. A God who isn’t finished creating this world — or with us. A God who keeps inviting us to discover that the sky and the galaxy is not the limit – to what shared life with God and shared life with one another can become.   

So in these days after Easter , after the promise of resurrection has been proclaimed, after we in our best efforts echo the refrain,

“Christ is alive, Christ is risen indeed”

in these days, when we wake up in the same world. A world that bombards us with images and words and realities that tries to convince us that death still has the final world. That nothing really changes.  Let us give ourselves to the life and the way of Jesus. So that  together, we live like life is still possible, and make it so.

What I love about fixating on this Artemis mission is that what is underneath the amazing feats of precision and coordination — is a kind of artistry on display, a rare type of beauty. Not just in the images we’ve seen of the earth and the Moon — but in the risk and vulnerability of a group of people really working together, TRUSTING one another  to participate in whatever way possible to shape what CAN BE possible. Even before it’s defined.

And maybe it’s that tension — between what we can see and what is still unfolding — that the disciples were trying to navigate as well. And it’s hard to imagine what could be possible when you are tired, grieving, and confused, overwhelmed.

For many people in Jesus’ time they were holding onto a promise that God would send a Messiah, a king, a deliverer. One who would free them, restore their people and bring justice. And for many that was tied to what they would have called “the end of the age”  — this kind of apocalyptic end of the world as it currently was. And the beginning of God’s reign fully realized. So to believe that resurrection had happened would have meant believing that this new age had already begun. 

No wonder that the earliest disciples struggled to make sense of it. Jesus had risen, but no one else had… They were expecting in some ways a FULL/complete transformation, but they got jussst the beginning.

Jesus doesn’t really resolve the tension for them, but he does give them a way to live inside of that reality — he says, “follow me — and go and do likewise”! Ha! Not exactly a detailed plan… It’s unfinished and leaves room for them to make something — create a way of living together . In Jesus’ world, creativity wasn’t separate from life, it was how life — everyday life —  was made possible. Artists were craftspeople (tektons) — builders, weavers, potters, bakers — people who made things for communal life.

Recently I’ve been getting our bread from a little in-home bread-maker that I can walk to and I’m undone. Every Wednesday morning it is the highlight of my LIFE, to stroll up on his porch and get my warm fresh loaf.

And it’s such a small thing, but it’s also not. It’s someone choosing to make something that feeds other people.

A way of being together –and it makes me want more of that… 

  • More ways of living where we’re not so sealed off from each other.
  • More ways of making sure people are fed, literally and otherwise.
  • More ways of showing up, of sharing what we have, of building something together that helps us all stay alive.

And maybe we don’t always call it this, but this work of building lives and communities where people can belong and flourish, that’s creativity. It’s art.

Not just in studios or on stages, but in how we live.

And recently, I’ve been helped by the words of Pádraig Ó Tuama, theologian, poet, conflict mediator), because he gives language  to this kind of life we’re talking about, he says: 

“Creativity is not just confined to those who are painting, or dancing or making poems or music. It is also the making of a community: a health care system; an education; a way of keeping people sanitised; a way of keeping people sane.

Art is found in made things and in many made things — a transportation system in a city; a living wage for workers; negotiations to make border crossings safer; putting garlic in olives; sprinkling sea salt on fresh bread — and it is in the vulnerability and risk of cooperation that we find ourselves alive. I continue to hold to the idea that speaking words of beauty reminds us of the possibility of language. And especially in weeks when we hear the impoverishment of speech from many quarters, it is good to bask in something uplifting, to remind us of the power of language to do that most risky thing: to make something new.”

And when we look at the life of Jesus, we begin to see this kind of artistry as a thru-line. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of invitations in scripture to live a solo- life and carry it all on our own — but there’s a lot of invitations INTO this  kind of “making of community” way of life. A life that can create a world where bodies are cared for, people are fed, where people make a liveable wage, where dignity is upheld, where minds and spirits are tended,  where no one is left outside of the kin-dom of God. 

This is the art of the kin-dom of God.  It’s lived. It’s real life now as it is — unto something more.  

And when we look back at the life of Jesus, we see more than parables and miracles and teachings, right? 

Let’s look at scripture — we are going to move through a lot of scripture. So I’m not going to name every book, chapter and verse I’m referencing, but I want us to follow the movement of Jesus.

Because there’s a pattern within, 

That gives shape to a new kind of world that I think is always emerging ….even still… 

Jesus moves through villages, and people bring him the sick, the broken-hearted, the weary…
and he stops. He touches them, talks to them. Often their health is restored. But what we notice is that also their belonging and their place in community is restored. 

In one instance he tells a story about a man left for dead on the side of the road, many of you might know this as the Good Samaritan story. Where a stranger (an enemy even), stops, kneels down, binds his wounds, lifts him onto his own animal, and pays for his care.

And the invitation here isn’t just to be one good person in a hard moment. It’s not yours alone to notice, to fix, to fund, to carry. I think it’s an invitation to step into something we do together? It’s to become a people shaped by care. A way of life shaped by care.

As Martin Luther King Jr. once said,

“ yes we are called to be the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. . . . the deeper call is to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that people are no longer beaten and broken and robbed in the first place, along life’s highway.”

And that can only be communal work.

And there are countless stories of Jesus feeding and sharing food with lots of people — not just as a demonstrative act of Jesus’ miraculous power, but as an invitation to a different way of living. At one gathering, on a hillside  thousands of people are hungry–and the disciples that are with Jesus start to panic. The sheer numbers, the sheer need is overwhelming and they say,

“Send them away, Let them fend for themselves. Let them find their own snacks!””

And Jesus looks at them and says how about:

“You give them something to eat.”

I imagine that proposal landed for the disciples like Jesus was asking them to go to the moon. But that is the kind of imagination and creativity he invites them into — as he puts it in their hands.  

And as the disciples step into it, we see that no one is sent away. No one eats alone. There is enough. More than enough. A kind of abundance that feels like it miraculously appeared out of nowhere —- 

or maybe….it appeared…. from everyone.

And then there are the stories in scripture of those cast to the edges of society — isolated, suffering in body, mind and spirit. Pushed outside the boundaries of belonging. And Jesus doesn’t avoid them.

  • He doesn’t tell them to get tougher, try harder, to fix themselves.
  • He sits with them.
  • He draws near.

There is the man alone among the tombs, whom Jesus restores to himself and then sends

“back to his home.” 

The woman who had been bleeding and untouchable for years, Jesus calls

“daughter”

and is brought back into the community.  

Zacchaeus in the tree, a chief tax collector, welcomed down (by Jesus) and brought to the table.

A woman at a well, drawing shame and water by herself – becomes the one who gathers others.  

Over and over, those who were isolated are seen, touched, known and restored to belonging.

What can look like a series of individual stories or miracles — is actually something much larger…  Jesus isn’t just healing bodies.  –He is showing us how to live together, reweaving people back into community — reconstructing a way of life where care, belonging, and love are at the center.   

And you can hear it in the language he uses, 

“Love one another as I have loved you.”
“Feed my sheep.”
“Let your light shine..”
“Care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger…”

So many verbs – this is a way of life to practice.

And THIS, like Padraig O’Tuama says,

is how we keep one another sane.. Not by escaping, but by staying here together, held in the gravity of love. 

Jesus shows them this most clearly on the night before his death, when he kneels down, and washes his friends’ feet. And he says:

“this is what love looks like.”

A community where care is not beneath anyone. Where dignity is held in the bend of our hands.

And this is the kind of life resurrection makes possible. A refusal to accept the world as it is, as if it cannot change. Because every time we choose one another — every. single. time. — we are changing the world. Making something new. Together we become the change-agents within our ordinary orbit.

It can look like a text message you almost didn’t send — bringing in your neighbors trash cans — staying in a tenuous conversation, asking for help, showing up when you don’t want to — that is part of the work. 

And the thru-line in all of this  — is that this isn’t only something we do, it’s who we are! You and me — WE, are actually God’s living art in the world .


In the book of Ephesians, Chapter 2, verse 10 we read, 

 “We are God’s accomplishment, created in Christ Jesus to do good things. God planned for these good things to be the way that we live our lives.” 

In other translations it reads,

“We are God’s handiwork, masterpiece…

in Greek it means —

“We are his poiēma”

…it’s where we get the English word: Poem.

A unique, created expression of divine artistry meant to contribute to a better world.

We are God’s poem. God’s work of art.

From the very beginning we are told that humanity bears the image of God — the imago dei. God could have placed the image of God anywhere,  in the sky,  in the moon — but instead, God placed it in us. 

In our human bodies. In one another.

Which means,  we don’t just look up to find God.  We look to one another. 

Which means, the “good works” — of shaping a world of care and connection is already within us.  

I look around this room and I see so many of you making and making and making something new — simply by the way you are alive in this world. 

  • The way you care for neighbors, known and unknown.
  • The way you imagine new uses for space—turning hotels into homes for those without one.
  • The way you advocate for better schools, and show up for children—your own and others’.
  • The way you recognize that the work of justice belongs to all of us.
  • The way you show up for each other—here, and beyond Reservoir.

The work and the art of loving.
And we are all so familiar with how much we need that love  (personally and as a nation) — because there are ways of living in this world that can’t make something new. Hate can’t create. War can’t create. Lies can’t create.
They take and destroy.
They are not life.

It’s why belief in

“resurrection is an act of rebellion against the evil, corruption and oppression that can so easily swamp us” (Paula Gooder, cac.org),

make us feel less than human. But resurrection is an invitation to stay human to one another.

The crew of Artemis II — each and every one of them has captured at points for me what it means to be human. Not what it means to be an astronaut in space — but human.


Christina Koch said right before launch,

“There is one thing better than the fulfillment and meaning of working hard to achieve a dream: Loving people with all your heart.”


Victor Glover said in his “space sermon” —  

“As we continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries there on earth. And that’s love.”

Jeremy Hanson —

“Our purpose on the planet as humans is to find joy and to find the joy in lifting each other up by creating solutions together instead of destroying.”

 This crew, they are POETS — living poems.

There’s a tradition among astronauts where they bring something with them into space. A memento, a reminder of earth, a photo of someone that has inspired them.. 

This mission, Reid Wiseman — carried with him the name of someone he loved — his wife who died of cancer in 2020. The mother to their two daughters.

Her name was Carroll. She now has a newly named crater on the moon The crater straddles the boundary between the moon’s near and far sides, and can at times be seen from Earth.

And I heard someone say:

“There is now a place on the moon that is bright—  because someone was loved enough to be carried all the way there.” 

Love, carried farther than it has ever gone before. 

And most of us will never travel to the moon. But every one of us carries something just as powerful. We too, carry love. The deep, steady, creative love of Jesus that goes with us into every room, every conversation, every ordinary moment of our lives.

And when we start to notice it, we see it everywhere. In the vastness of space, in neighborhood interactions, in circles of grief and celebration — like the ones we shared here today. 

And maybe this is what it means that we are God’s living constellation, a people through whom love takes shape in the world.

I probably will still dream about what it might feel like at times to step off this world — but I know the invitation of Jesus is not to escape this Earth, but to learn how to live within it. With a love that keeps going — circling back, reaching outward — farther than we ever thought possible, together.

 

Land of the Living

Tomorrow February 2nd sun will set at 5:00pm (and the temperature will be above freezing!) — we have objectively made it through the darkest weeks of the year. 

We are in a series called Praying the Psalms that I’ve been enjoying over the last few weeks.  And honestly how timely (and timeless) are the Psalms? For me, I find their hyperbolic tendencies especially refreshing, as well as the invitation to join in the emotional journeys of so many people of faith who have gone before us. Those that have railed against God and those who have unfailingly loved God. … often the same person, in the same breath —

“God why have you left me and forgotten me forever?” 

TO  

“I love you with my whole life and heart, I will sing of your goodness forevermore.”

This emotional range — isn’t just a one-off, or accidental —most of the Psalms follow this movement and orientation. To me, it feels like human spiritual formation. It teaches us how to stay in relationship (with ourselves, one another, and God), even when things are broken.

The Psalms help us stay in this thing called life, and this thing called faith, which, in the Psalms, aren’t really separate. They offer us a way to match the fervor of our times. To not back down on what it means to be human. To allow our emotional states — all of our heightened energy (or lack thereof), and all of our sadness, and anger and vengeance and fear — to have an honest landing place. 

AND the Psalms allow us, with the same fervor TO NOT BACK DOWN from the GOODNESS of GOD. From the undeniable love of God that somehow we continue to reach for as a lifeline in a world that seems to be heckling us, daring us to give up on hope, and give up on kindness, and give up on one another. 

Lately, I’ve been describing how I feel during these times, as something akin to having a constant low-grade fever.

  • Heavy.
  • Exhausted.
  • Sad.
  • Sweaty.
  • Not sick enough to collapse, but not really LIVING fully.

And when life feels like that, the temptation is to curl up in a ball. (*I’ve done it. A lot!*)
But when it stretches on for so long, it can veer toward paralysis, numbing out, isolating. Shutting down altogether.  Where we disconnect from the goodness of God and that same goodness that is implanted in one another. 

So today, I want to talk about what it looks like to stand together in solidarity when injustice is rampant. What it looks like to stay human with one another in community. What it means to keep choosing life, this life, this faith, in what Psalm 116 calls

“the land of the living.”

Pray: Our God, who never gives up on us — help us to stay in this life with you –and with one another.

Last weekend I was in California — moving our middle kiddo into college — and simultaneously missing the big snowstorm here. San Diego does not have snow. It has beaches and palm trees and blooming flowers and lots and lots of sunshine. **some of my favorite things**

But I was very much keeping a close eye on the homefront! I was watching notifications from our front porch camera come through, and wondering how much snow we were going to get and how shoveling out was going to go. Both my husband in treatment and my son post-surgery are not in prime condition for a ton of shoveling.

As those notifications kept pinging my phone, I started seeing people show up.

People coming to help — and not just one person … but lots of neighbors. And not just for us, but for all the neighbors around. 

Neighbors came out and borrowed snowblowers from one another – and people shoveled and shoveled and shoveled.

One neighbor said,

“it’s just neighbors being neighbors.”

It’s what I love about a big snowstorm, even though I don’t like the cold! There’s a sense of ‘aliveness’, humanity, community that surfaces, even in the midst of a storm.

It reminded me of something MY meteorologist Dave Epstein once said after the ‘great snow of 2015’ — which if you don’t know, the greater Boston area got 110 inches of snow that season — it was monumental! It was truly all anyone could talk about and Dave Epstein said this: 

“all of us have our own way of existing during this historical period of weather. You might not be fazed by the winter onslaught, perhaps you even enjoy it. Maybe you would do anything to be anywhere else, but no matter what your feelings about it, we’re all living it.” 

“We are all living it.”

Different stories, different experiences, but same stormy, ICE-laden world.
And I think Psalm 116 is one of those that gives us a look at someone who lives in a world like this and still reaches for God and one another. 

Psalm 116 (NIV)
1 I love the Lord, for God heard my voice;
    God heard my cry for mercy.

2 Because GOD turned God’s ear to me,
    I will call on God as long as I live.

3 The cords of death entangled me,
    the anguish of the grave came over me;
    I was overcome by distress and sorrow.

4 Then I called on the name of the Lord:
    “Lord, save me!”

5 The Lord is gracious and righteous;
    our God is full of compassion.

6 The Lord protects the unwary;
    when I was brought low, God saved me.

7 Return to your rest, my soul,
    for the Lord has been good to you.

8 For you, Lord, have delivered me from death,
    my eyes from tears,
    my feet from stumbling,

9 that I may walk before the Lord
    in the land of the living.

10 I trusted in the Lord when I said,
    “I am greatly afflicted”;

11 in my alarm I said,
    “Everyone is a liar.”

12 What shall I return to the Lord
    for all God’s goodness to me?

13 I will lift up the cup of salvation
    and call on the name of the Lord.

14 I will fulfill my vows to the Lord
    in the presence of all his people.

15 Precious in the sight of the Lord
    is the death of his faithful servants.

16 Truly I am your servant, Lord;
    I serve you just as my mother did;
    you have freed me from my chains.

17 I will sacrifice a thank offering to you
    and call on the name of the Lord.

18 I will fulfill my vows to the Lord
    in the presence of all his people,

19 in the courts of the house of the Lord,
    in your midst, Jerusalem.

    Praise the Lord. 

Like many Psalms, this one doesn’t just offer us one steady emotional plane. It feels a bit frenetic to me when I read it — it moves a lot.

  • There are moments of love, “I love you, God.”
  • Moments of desperation,  “I’m in distress.”  “Save me.”
  • Moments of relief, “You have saved me.”  “You are gracious.”
  • Moments of self-talk,  “Okay, soul… calm down. Rest.”
  • And then,  almost out of nowhere,  “I’m greatly afflicted.”  “Everyone is a liar.”

It’s a little scattered and a lot real! And I love that! Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says that the Psalms tend to move through three broad movements: orientation, disorientation and reorientation.

Times when life makes sense.

Times when things fall apart, and times when somehow we reimagine, reshape a new way forward.

Psalm 116 isn’t a great example of that at least not in a neat, linear order. It sort of weaves all of those movements together. Kind of like what real life does. We trust, we panic, we talk calmly to ourselves, we remember God’s goodness, and then we can feel like there is no truth to be had anywhere! 

Having said that, as I’ve been sitting with Psalm 116, three phrases keep rising to the surface for me:

“God turns an ear.”

“Return to your rest.”

and

“Walk in the land of the living.”

One of them is right near the beginning;

Verse 1 & 2 say:
I love the Lord, for God heard my voice;
    God heard my cry for mercy.
Because GOD turned God’s ear to me,  

 It’s poignant that this Psalm starts with a God who listens.
Thank goodness. 

This seems like a good starting point.

A given. 

An obvious claim.

One I would make myself. 

AND also one I keep holding up against the world as it is.

Let me explain a little bit. .  .

**When I get into a song  — either because I like it or because I’m intrigued by it, I play it over and over and over again.(much to the disdain of my family)…  And even before I knew I’d preach on this Psalm — I was listening to the actual song version of Psalm 116… ON REPEAT.

And every time the song got to this lyric:

“I will bless You  Lord, for You heard my plea, and the God of Heaven turned His ear to me.”

I would sing it as,

“And the God of Heaven turned HIS BACK TO ME!”

Everytime.
And I’d be like, “oh, shoot — wrong lyrics!! I’ll get them right next time.”
Except I wouldn’t. It just kept coming out of me the same way.

And I wondered, “Huh, maybe the Psalm itself is inviting me to wrestle with the truth of a statement that didn’t ring true in my body. I mean after all scripture is regarded as the “living word”, right —   I’m getting some feedback in real time. 

Part of me isn’t convinced that God is turning an ear right now…not in the way I would like it to translate at least!

Part of me thinks, “Whoa! Have you seen what’s going on?”

And it seems the Psalmist knows this feeling — even with the declaration that God is one who listens, the manifestation isn’t immediate calmness or unwavering confidence in the Psalmist’s body …. There isn’t a neat arrival at peace….

Instead, what we see is a very human  oscillation.

First the Psalmist has to pause. And then they talk to themselves.
In verse 7, the Psalmist says to themselves: 

“Return to your rest, my soul,
 for the Lord has been good to you.”

This is a nervous-system-aware Psalm.

Noticing their internal state and offering themselves a gentle intervention.
Which I appreciate very much — because it’s not harmful, intrusive self-talk… 

Not,

“Get it together!” 

But,

“Come back to yourself. Come back to rest. Remember what/who has carried you before.”

This is some way to regulate in the midst of potential chaos, showing us how to keep breathing.

But yet as the Psalmist goes on — we are jarred again! 

Because they say,

“In my alarm I said, everyone is a liar!” 

Which tells me the self-talk didn’t magically fix everything. Again fear & distrust don’t always immediately resolve. 

And in some ways, there it is. The inside of faith exposed, right? When the world feels untrustworthy — in every corner —  we *not shockingly* feel uncertain!  

And yet, I also know that uncertainty can induce a sense of panic, especially when we feel alone! It can cast an ‘absolute’ frame around everything. Around everyone — even God. 

And the truth is — 

There are real lies, lacing the air we breathe… . There is real corruption. Real manipulation. Real systems built on distortion and greed. Real violence. 

But scripture is not surprised by this.

The Bible is full of false kings, and corrupt rulers, and prophets screaming, truth-to- power…  

Our hope is not in the moral goodness of leaders.

Psalm 116 begins:

“I love the Lord, because God heard my voice.”

The Psalmist doesn’t say,  “I love the king because he told the truth.” or  “I love the empire because it’s just.”

Hope isn’t often anchored in rulers. Hope is rooted in a God who turns an ear toward us (wherever we are at). Scripture doesn’t seem to ask us to pretend rulers are trustworthy.

But Scripture does invite us to decide whether God is trustworthy. And to move from that real/honest place. 

I think this is why it matters that this Psalm has been prayed for generations. Psalm 116 has long been prayed at Jewish tables during Passover. It is recited near the end of the meal with celebratory wine. Passover, tells the Exodus story.

One that feels all too familiar– a ruler’s power is threatened by the growth of those he oppresses. A story of danger, domination, resistance and deliverance. A story of God being with those being trampled. But Passover is not only about remembering an ancient story. It’s also about telling current stories — stories of the people who are gathered around tables — OR AROUND SNOWBANKS. About naming the world we are living in now. Stories about current issues of injustice, a communal remembering (yes), and a communal witnessing.  

This feels appropriate because Psalm 116 isn’t particularly tidy. It reads like a story of someone trying to live, trying to keep going.

We do not know exactly what happened to the psalmist because so much of the language here can be interpreted as poetic — we can think,

“Really? Was it really “cords of death entangled you?”  “The anguish of Sheol laid hold on you?” . . . 

But maybe they did. 

When we read Psalms like these, we may feel tempted to write them off — too dramatic — too all over the place… But maybe it’s not exaggerated at all. Right? Because all around us, people are experiencing their versions of hell. 

People trapped in systems that are rigged/ inescapable.

People whose nervous systems are shot.

People who are shot.

And we ourselves may feel like the “snares of death” encompass us. So what would happen if we took this part of the Psalm seriously? What could we be encouraged to do if we believed folks about their own testimonies, stories? If we turned our ears toward each other…. Just as God

“turned God’s ear toward us?”

“What if we did indeed believe the evidence of our eyes and ears?”

Maybe that is in part what it means to live in the LAND OF THE LIVING — learning how to turn our ears (not our backs) toward one another, too. 

The land of the living is what happens when people refuse to abandon one another in a world that keeps training us to go numb.  

“Land of the Living” 

This phrase —

“I will walk in the land of the living”

— is probably one of my favorite bits of scripture right now — it is one of my deepest prayers:

“God, please help me to keep walking in the LAND OF THE LIVING… keep convincing me however you can that we still have heartbeats that care for one another. Keep my heart beating.”

Because, “the land of the living” — isn’t just a destination to me, it’s a practice. A way of staying in this life together..

It makes me think of something James Baldwin wrote in “Nothing Personal,” as he spoke of dehumanization and its cost:

He said,

‘if a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. …..and what we then are struggling against is death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live.” (Nothing Personal, James Baldwin, 1964).

And while Baldwin is speaking in the context of racialized violence and the brutal realities of anti-Blackness in America, I hear in his words a truth that keeps showing up across time and place.

“Death of the heart” – – the slow erosion of our capacity to care for one another.
Kind of the opposite of the land of the living. 

At community group a week ago, I learned the phrase, *that maybe is obvious*: “poly-crisis.”

We are living inside what social scientists call a poly-crisis. Overlapping crises —political, economic, environmental, relational and public health — a crisis of democracy, a crisis of trust — and it makes sense that many of us feel like we are living with a “LOW GRADE FEVER”  – stuck, tired, unable to imagine a future where we are well. 

I offer this — because it isn’t personal failure to some days feel paralyzed — it’s a very human response to such layered and sustained pressure. 

Which is why it’s comforting to see, across the arc of scripture that we are not commanded to simply “try harder!” — we are invited to stay human with one another:

Scripture says:

“Love your neighbor.”

“Defend the dignity of the foreigner.”

“Love the stranger, provide them food and clothing.” 

“Care for the widow, for the orphan — care for the vulnerable.”

Omid Safi, a Duke professor of Islamic studies, says that being close to God — real closeness, lived closeness — reshapes how we see. It trains us to recognize the movement of God and the movement of our lives as deeply intertwined — beyond political decrees, external circumstances or dominant opinions that try to inject fear.

With a real, good and living God close to us, the passion for justice and care for all of humanity – becomes a non-negotiable — because God stands with us in the threats, in suffering, in our lives.

Safi says the

“love we recognize in other people — people who love their babies and their community —  is the same love that we love our babies and our community with…” 

AND when we recognize that shared love, we will not stand for something happening to other people’s babies or communities that we would not accept happening to our own.   

That is simply what we call justice —
Justice is not born primarily out of rage.

Justice is born out of a heart that still knows how to love.

A heart that still knows how to recognize itself in another.

That’s the land of the living.

A nation that refuses to become loveless.

Which means we don’t stay alive alone.

We stay alive together. 

Where we — I guess — do actually have to try hard to stay in relationship.

To keep our hearts soft, and our ears open . . ..

The land of the living is communal.

My meteorologist that I mentioned earlier — Dave Epstein — is often referred to as a kind of, “meteorologist Mr. Rogers.” I think in part because he isn’t just disseminating information about the weather — he really cares about helping us orient inside of it. And he reminds us not to panic, to be prepared and to remember that we are all in it together. 

In that crazy year of 2015, he wrote:  

“As the streets continue to narrow and our tolerance and patience for the transformed world we live grows short, think about the collective experience all of us are sharing. No one is immune from these storms;  Everyone has a story about the snow or what the snow is doing….. 

I know that this week, I have heard stories of ice dams turning a driveway into a skating rink,  . Stories about snowbanks so high, people (like me!), get nervous for high schoolers driving to school. Stories of extensive, front-yard snow tunnels and caves. Stories of a snow bench carved into a bank — perfect for whiskey sipping and meeting new friends.  

“Whatever your personal take on this, everyone is connected, because most of us can’t escape” . .. . the weather, or the world! We often use the term “hardy” as a way for New Englanders to describe ourselves. We are agile and nimble, smart and innovative, we will keep on shoveling and pushing through.” (Dave Epstein). 

We keep figuring it out. As frenetic as it might seem!

And this is exactly what autocratic regimes hope we won’t keep doing –– figuring it out. They hope we won’t care for each other, that we’ll turn on each other. That we’ll settle for the way things are, that we won’t trust each other, or name what we sense is wrong.

But when institutions lie — we look for people – – yes, the helpers, but also the healers,  and those telling the truth with their lives…

  • We look for meteorologists. 
  • We look for neighbors.
  • Organizers.
  • Teachers.
  • Nurses.
  • Therapists.
  • Parents.
  • Volunteers.
  • Mutual aid workers.
  • Church communities. 

We look for ordinary pockets of honesty and we connect and build there.

We’ve seen this in places like Minneapolis (and all over the country), right? Ordinary people saying,

“No, no, no. We won’t stand for this.”

Ordinary people organizing food, safety, and care. Utilizing whistles and cell phones for resistance. Affirming that we will stand in the land of the living. Fellow citizens being human, showing that we are made of potent stuff, that

“good stuff within us comes through.”

The land of the living certainly isn’t a utopia. But it is what it looks like when people refuse to abandon one another. And solidarity is that refusal. Solidarity says — even if people in power lie, we will not lie to one another about what we are facing, and we will not lie about our need for one another.  

The arc of justice might be long — but it bends with pressure. The pressure of people who love one another and refuse to give up on being real, and refuse to give up on the goodness of God. 

And maybe this is why the Psalm ends the way it does.

“ I will fulfill my vows to the Lord
    in the presence of all God’s people,” (v. 14 and v. 18)

The fulfillment of our vows to God — is to be human with one another, seeking a good, and just and living God in our midst.  

Reservoir Church is sometimes called a “unicorn” of a church … and I love that.
But what we have here isn’t magic… and maybe if I’m honest, shouldn’t be that special.

I mean if anything, I think we are just stubborn. (in the best way).

We are stubborn and imperfect. .. but we are steady in our VOWS to be human with one another. 

And in our refusal to stop seeking the image of God in each other.

So may we continue to situate ourselves in our ordinary lives, *in these EXTRA-ordinary times* and may we turn to one another — and to the God who turns an ear toward us — in the land of the living, that we won’t give up on.

Amen.

RESOURCES
https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/jan/14/new-year-polycrisis-psychology-feeling-trapped

https://www.boston.com/weather/weather/2015/02/10/the_great_snow_of_2015/?utm_campaign=23369841-boston+sunday&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2anqtz-81gars7mz_lc3n4kukeqxboc6qbgkbh03_zidadd0taazeq9e-hh-6_uk6gcn_0vco6ot7biy72o_t6ynno_ohdmg8bb17nzs_nesakhiovzrqcie&_hsmi=400246725&utm_content=400246725&utm_source=hs_email

At the Edge of Ourselves With Vengeance & Love

We are in a Sunday series, exploring the practice of Praying the Psalms. If you aren’t familiar with the Psalms — they kind of serve as a communal prayer book within the Hebrew scriptures. And *fun fact*: if you were to take a physical Bible – and open it to the middle, you’d land in the Psalms. 

What I love about the Psalms is they were written and gathered across centuries — across a swath of human experience. They were prayed by people in exile and in illness, in war and in childbirth, in seasons of hope and loss. They were prayed by people in real time who didn’t know how their stories would go … prayed by people who believed and hoped for “good,” for “life” to win out and for God to be their partner along their journeys. So when we pray the Psalms I like to think that we step into this long, ongoing human conversation — we bring our experiences and our voice — to what it means to be human in our days. 

We have visited the Psalms with some regularity as a church (Steve has written Bible guides to the Psalms, I’ve written a mini-6-week community group content around the psalms).
I find these psalms so helpful in so many ways, but especially when we are at a loss for our own words, when we are so disoriented by life, when we look around at moments and say,

“what the-actual-heck is going on here?”

Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann whose work on the Psalms I’ll reference today, suggests that most of the Psalms can only be appropriately prayed

“by people who are living at the edge of their lives, sensitive to the raw hurts, deep passions, and fragile joys of life.” 

And he says the work of prayer (not reading the psalms), is to bring the boldness of the Psalms and the edge of our lived experience together… to let them interact and illuminate each other.. . .even transform each other.

When we can pray in this way —  when our real lives meet these ancient prayers, I think we can discover that prayer is not an escape from reality, but a way of staying human inside of it.   

And it’s this phrase though, “At the edge of our lives,”
“At the edge of ourselves” — that catches in my throat . . .

Does anyone here feel like that? At the edge?
Already,  just 11 days into the new year — I feel this way in my body.

But the Psalms, like no other, help us explore the full gamut of human emotion at the edge of ourselves — outrage, protest, grief. . . They refuse to flatten us or rush us past what we actually feel. They invite us even sometimes to the more intense parts of ourselves that we can’t fully face sometimes – but would actually serve us well if we did. The Psalms

“know how to defeat  our tendencies to try to be holy without being human first.” Kathleen Norris The Cloister Walk (Riverhead Books: 1996), 92-94, 96

So, today I want to talk about being human, about rage.
And specifically about vengeance, and what the unfiltered Psalms offer us when those feelings are undeniable. 

Prayer:
Our ever-present and loving God — we come to you today as we are —
Some of us steady, some of us at the edge of ourselves.
You know what we carry —
You know what we feel —
You know what we need —

Meet us this morning — as people you so deeply love — where our honest words, and unfinished ones — and our formed emotions and our untethered ones — matter to you. . . .and come to you as sacred prayer.

Amen.

Early on in this community (like 21 years ago!) there was a scary season that some of us might remember. The pastors who helped plant this community — Dave & Grace Schmelzer’s newborn baby girl at around four months of age became critically ill —  like one of the sickest babies at Children’s hospital — her heart and other organs were failing, the kind of situation where the stakes are measured minute by minute. For months she remained in critical condition. 

One of the ways we as a church community responded was by praying the Psalms together. There was a schedule, a sign-up of sorts where you could take a swath of time, whatever you could manage — and around the clock people were praying these ancient prayers for this tiny, fragile life.   

We did this as a community, together. Not as a solo effort. Connected in the complexity of life. So scared, but hoping and crying and reminding each other that we love and pray for each other’s babies, as we would our own.

I didn’t have language for it then — but I think some of what I felt at that time wasn’t just fear, it was outrage. That something so tiny, so good, such fresh life — could be threatened and wiped out. 

That feeling sharpened what I loved. This baby – yes. This community – yes. But that there’s this sacredness to all of life- – that we are all connected TO and BY —  that shouldn’t be violated. 

And she beat the odds — she’s a healthy young adult now, recently graduated from college.   

And that could be the end of the story. 

The power of prayer. Community matters. Life wins! 

And ‘yes’ all of that is true in part, and perhaps in whole. And I also know, and I know you know this too — that there are many times we pray and the story doesn’t end like that. Sometimes the ending is devastating. Sometimes the story keeps going, and it keeps being hard.

I was pregnant with our first baby, when all of this was happening. And I was just coming through a long season of debilitating anxiety. I was finding my grounding, in this community, in this evolving faith journey — and I finally felt like I had some things under control. 

And then this happened.

And it undid me.

And yet I found the Praying the Psalms was surprisingly, incredibly helpful, because they offered me speech that I hadn’t engaged in before. Language for when life moves beyond our frail efforts of understanding and of control.

And it was the language of the Psalms that helped me inspect some of the questions that were surfacing for me, like:  

  • What does it look like to give unbearable fear to God, without acting it out or being consumed by it?
  • What does it look like when something precious is violated (again and again and again)?  
  • And what do we do, when we are angry — enraged —
    When we want vengeance, but have nowhere for it to land?
    When we are at the edge of ourselves?

It turns out the Psalms say, the edge of ourselves is actually one of the most honest places to be. 

Because the edge refuses censored prayers. *And I don’t know if prior to this time, I had really prayed uncensored prayers* — BUT the Psalms kind of gave me that permission to really lay it out there — because they insist that what is raw and unresolved be hashed out with God. The Psalms do not tolerate a domesticated spirituality. This Psalm 109 that we are about to read is written from the edge.

The edge of betrayal. The edge of injustice. The edge of being misunderstood/wounded.

This Psalm is believed to be written by David but others also think it could be “of” David, or “to David”  — perhaps it’s a collection of voices. Regardless the speakers seem to know what life at the edge is like and what is explicitly named here is the want of VENGEANCE  

Let’s read it together:

Psalm 109 | To the leader. Of David. A psalm.

1 God of my praise, don’t keep quiet,

2  because the mouths of wicked liars
    have opened up against me,
    talking about me with lying tongues.

3 Hateful words surround me;
    they attack me for no reason.

4 Instead of returning my love, they accuse me—
    but I am at prayer.

5 They repay me evil for good,
    hatred in return for my love.

6 “Appoint a wicked person to be against this person,” they say,
    “an accuser to stand right next to him.

7 When the sentence is passed, let him be found guilty—
    let his prayer be found sinful!

8 Let his days be few;
    let someone else assume his position.

9 Let his children become orphans;
    let his wife turn into a widow.

10 Let his children wander aimlessly, begging,
    driven out of their ruined homes.

11 Let a creditor seize everything he owns;
    let strangers plunder his wealth.

12 Let no one extend faithful love to him;
    let no one have mercy on his orphans.

13 Let his descendants be eliminated;
    let their names be wiped out in just one generation!

14 Let his father’s wrongdoing be remembered before the Lord;
    let his mother’s sin never be wiped out.

15 Let them be before the Lord always,
    and let God eliminate the very memory of them from the land.

16 All because this person didn’t remember to demonstrate faithful love,
    but chased after the poor and needy—
    even the brokenhearted—with deadly intent!

17 Since he loved to curse,
    let it come back on him!
Since he didn’t care much for blessing,
    let it be far away from him!

18 Since he wore curses like a coat,
    let them seep inside him like water,
    seep into his bones like oil!

19 Let them be like the clothes he wears,
    like a belt that is always around him.”

20 But let all that be the reward my accusers get from the Lord,
    the reward for those who speak evil against me!

*I’m going to pause there* — 

Vengeance:

Woo! Now that’s SOME PRAYING RIGHT THERE!! I mean, wow! I’m out of breath after reading just half of this psalm —  It says All. The. Things. It’s soooo comprehensive!

Which is exactly why I didn’t start this sermon — with my own stories of wanting vengeance… because once you open that door, it’s hard to close it again.
I very intentionally did not:

1) Tell you the story of the medical professional who checked me in for a procedure recently, who never looked up, never asked my name , and just said, “Phone number.”

2) Or the story of the person in high school who burned a picture of me from the newspaper in the hallway.

3) Or the STORIES of the person who currently “runs” and is President of our country. . .  because… Enough said.

I’m all for transparency, but I don’t think you need all the venom in vivid mental images of me acting out those feelings of vengeance for these people… If you’re curious, we can always talk about it over coffee, if you want!

And even so, as creative as my imaginings of vengeance can be — this Psalm still really expanded my horizons. I never thought to curse fathers and mothers and children or the next generation  — or bring in creditor sharks — woo! But now that I’ve seen it, I’m like “Heck yeah” throw them all in too.

But the Psalm isn’t just offering us drama, right? It’s naming something real in us…. And I think  it’s worth naming a couple words that swim in this conversation  — that might be helpful:

  • Justice seeks accountability and restoration, underpinned by LOVE. (Cornel West says, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” In other words, justice is love showing up in systems, in communities, in the way we organize our life together.)
  • Rage names an emotional response to harm.
  • Vengeance moves from emotion to punitive desire — this sentiment of “they must pay.” 

And it asserts authority for payback rather than restoration.

  • Mercy: Looks squarely at harm and insists love still have a place in it.

    For years, when something horrific would happen, my instinctive prayer was,
     “Oh God… have mercy.” Have mercy. Have mercy.

And I meant it.

But sometimes what was burning underneath that prayer wasn’t just mercy, *I’m realizing*
it was vengeance. But it’s a little startling if someone is sharing something devastating with you, and you look at them and say, “VENGEANCE!”

Anyway I say that because, mercy and vengeance aren’t always opposites.  Sometimes they’re two sides of the same coin. Both rise up when something sacred has been violated.

So when a prayer finally tells the truth about what we’re carrying — and the truth just keeps coming out of us —  without censoring or cleaning it up — it is soooo satisfying!

There is nothing sanitized about this Psalm — it is all raw impulse — it is soooooo profoundly human. And in this Psalm, we are reminded that the yearning for vengeance is not only

“present here in the psalms, it is here in the human heart and in the human community as well — it is among us and within us and with real power.” (Brueggemann 64)

We wish for vengeance and retaliation, and for me it’s helpful to be met in the psalms with this.  

In this Psalm, it honestly feels like I’m reading someone’s journal that I shouldn’t be reading. It’s that real and honest. But here’s the thing — in praying this Psalm, what would be dangerous if acted out becomes transformative when prayed.

When we can pray like this, we aren’t pretending injustice doesn’t exist or denying rage or fear. We’re telling the truth about them, about how they live in our bodies —  and we’re doing that with a LIVING God.

And in my experience, speech before God is safer than silence that erupts elsewhere.
Because unprayed rage doesn’t usually stay quiet, it finds another outlet.
Often sideways. Often harmful.

And that’s why reading the rest of this Psalm 109 is helpful,
After twenty verses of raw, unfiltered honesty…
We get this from the Psalmist…..they say,

21 But you, Lord, my Lord!—
    act on my behalf for the sake of your name;
    deliver me because your faithful love is so good;

22 because I am poor and needy,
    and my heart is broken.

23 Like a lengthening shadow, I’m passing away;
    I’m shaken off, like some locust.

24 My legs are weak from fasting;
    my body is skin and bones.

25 I’ve become a joke to my accusers;
    when they see me, they just shake their heads.

26 Help me, Lord my God!
    Save me according to your faithful love!

27 And let them know that this is by your hand—
    that you have done it, Lord!

28 Let them curse—but you, bless me!
    If they rise up, let them be disgraced,
        but let your servant celebrate!

29 Let my accusers be dressed in shame;
    let them wear their disgrace like a coat.

30 But I will give great thanks to the Lord with my mouth;
    among a great crowd I will praise God!

31 Because God stands right next to the needy,
    to save them from any who would condemn them.


This is a little bit of a tonal shift, right? There’s this handing over, yielding to God that happens, where the speaker says two simple words,

“But you….”

But you, my Lord!—
    act on my behalf for the sake of your name;
    deliver me because your faithful love is so good;

Let them curse—but you, bless me!

The rage, the bitterness, the venom that has been named and owned and

“filled out quite stupendously”

in the previous 20 verses is yielded to God’s wisdom and care. 

And here’s the thing: “the yielding to God, cannot be full and free unless the articulation and owning of the yearning for vengeance is first full and freed. Told right straight to God’s face.

We can’t really skip that part.
*If we do, it’s kind of just spiritual bypassing.*

The Psalmist here, seems to no longer be trying to prove they are right, or justify their strong emotions  — but they are trusting God with what they’ve told the truth about.  And they trust that God will take seriously what they’ve spoken, and they trust that God will hold what they don’t want to carry alone. By the end of this Psalm, the cry for vengeance is not resolved. The rage isn’t removed even… but it has been transformed by owning fully those emotions and yielding to God. 

Now, a question in all of this might come up for you  — because up to now, we’ve been talking about our vengeance — right? But in handing it over to God, it raises a deeper question about God like,

“What kind of God are we actually handing this over to? Is God just a vengeful, wrath-filled God? I had sort of hoped God was a loving, life-giving kind of God.” 

I think Walter Brueggemann helps here. He says that in the Psalms,

God’s vengeance is not indiscriminate anger.

It’s not God flying off the handle.

In fact the day of God’s vengeance is described as a day of reversals. God reversing the script… lifting the poor, the vulnerable, the oppressed. God confronting systems that crush people — and refusing to let injustice be the final word. 

In other words, God’s “vengeance” is really God’s zeal for justice and liberation.
God will not quit on those purposes, even as the world actively resists them.

So when the Psalmists hand vengeance over to God, they’re not endorsing punishment.
They’re trusting that God’s way of setting things right is ultimately oriented toward life, intervening in such a way that refuses to leave the world as it is.

And it’s hard — I find it hard — that movement from full honesty to deliberate hand off to God. There’s something so satisfying about just clutching the emotions, about “nursing affronts” (as Brueggemann says), TO SHIFT THAT — is something that I have to intentionally practice.
And I didn’t just learn this from a Psalm, I had to practice it in my own body — especially this past year.

At a member’s meeting *almost exactly a year ago* I shared with many of you about my husband Scott’s cancer diagnosis. And I also said something that might have felt like a stiff arm — that while it meant a lot to us to know you were praying for us, I didn’t want people coming up to pray with me/for me/ in the moment. 

Yes that boundary was, in part, self-protection — but it wasn’t selfish.
The boundary allowed me to protect my spiritual integrity and my privacy.  

Right?

“A private life is not the opposite of a public life — it is its condition” (Hannah Arendt). 

And I knew I needed time and space to honestly talk with God and with myself about what I was feeling — and I didn’t really know the full extent of what I was feeling. It just felt like A LOT.  

With God we don’t need to postpone our feelings in the name of keeping something together, or keeping the peace, or being the regulated one — or strong — or whatever adjective.

Praying the Psalms gives us an outlet, a place to release what we’re carrying, so we can stay close to ourselves and close to God. This is what I knew I needed, in order to make my way through what I knew was going to be hard, without hardening.

It wasn’t the first time, but I was kind of surprised again at the special kind of disorientation that happens when your rage has no clear target. When the enemy isn’t a person — but a disease, or a system, or a history —  or a reality that you can’t quite punch in the throat.

I was outraged that Scott had cancer and that target felt nebulous, everywhere…and also nowhere. And I realized I needed to rage with God. Because I knew that somewhere in the anger there was my deep refusal to give up on what I love — and I wanted to make sure that wasn’t lost — and I knew it would take some energy and some time to keep that and God in view . 

And I had felt that before… 

The feelings I had when we prayed for this baby 21 years ago — mirror the language of this imprecatory (cursing!) Psalm. And they are the same emotions I feel when I still pray for Scott as he faces cancer, and when I pray for so many of you who are dealing with injustices…  

My prayers sound extreme. They can feel overstated, hyperbolic.
But at the core there is this simple refusal to accept that goodness should be violated.

That love should be lost.

A refusal that innocence can be twisted to horror.

A refusal that murder, kidnapping, terrorizing, or caging anything that is good, true and sacred whether in name and ESPECIALLY human lives should be happening — as it is in our country right now.

It is with this same fervor I prayed this week for Renee Nicole Good and her family. A mother, a partner, an artist, a poet, a beloved human being, a child of God, whose life mattered. 

Many of us are carrying names like this in our hearts right now.

It’s why the  language of THIS Psalm isn’t about us becoming callous, it’s about keeping love alive with us — right at the edge of ourselves. Where vengeance is transferred from our heart to the heart of God. It’s about not letting fear or anger colonize our souls.

Somehow, in this way praying the Psalms builds our capacity for the complexities of life — especially the unfair ones. They train us to hold tension — without losing ourselves, even when we are right at the edge.

I think this kind of formation is not theoretical. It’s evidenced by the long, real history of people associated with these Psalms — where fear and violence were not abstract ideas, but daily realities. And I want to close with a story of a woman who I just recently learned about, a young Dutch Jewish woman named Esther “Etty” Hillesum.

Etty lived during World War II, in occupied Amsterdam. She lived at the edge of terror, the edge of violence, as Jews were being rounded up and deported by the Nazis. During this time she refused to choose her own safety over that of her people and took on an administrative role in a Transit Camp. Where she herself would later be deported to Auschwitz and murdered.

I can imagine that living in that kind of terror — that kind of systematic violence – would cause the human spirit to throw itself fully into vengeance. And I don’t know the details of Etty’s inner life — but I wonder if she carried the Psalms in her bones, if she prayed words like these when rage and fear rose up. 

Because in the diary entries that have been posthumously published in her book, “The Interrupted Life”, Etty says,

“Life is beautiful. And I believe in God. And I want to be right in the thick of what people call ‘horror’ and still be able to say, ‘life is beautiful.’

And I don’t tell you her story because I think she just persevered and endured better than the rest of us, or was immune to rage or despair — but I do think somewhere along the way she learned to tend her inner life with God.

She wrote that her

“main responsibility was to guard little pieces of God inside of [her]self”.

I don’t hear some abstract spiritual discipline here. I hear Etty refusing to let the horrors of her day define who she was, or exhaust the meaning of life. I wonder if that kind of noticing, that guarding of these little pieces of God, crying out to God in rage  — is exactly what praying the Psalms offers us.

And maybe the work isn’t to rid ourselves of rage, but to let it continue to show us what we love. 
Because to love is to be human.

And to love is to be at the edge of ourselves (almost always), it’s vulnerable, it’s risky, 

And it’s love that keeps us from accepting a world where cruelty reigns.

In God’s mercy and love,

Amen.

References: 

Brueggemann, Walter. Praying the Psalms, Second Edition: Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit, 2007

 

Especially In the Darkness

Good morning friends of all ages and friends streaming online! It’s so good to be with you – I’m Ivy, a pastor here. I hope your Thanksgivings however you spent them were good and thanks/gratitude found you somewhere in the mix. Before I get going today, I want to take a little poll related to Thanksgiving, related to Thanksgiving food!  I’m actually going to ask you three interactive questions about what you love today, sprinkled throughout the sermon — so here’s the first — answer out loud, and type in the chat if you’d like:

First question: “What’s one Thanksgiving dish that you love?”

All that shared goodness is actually a perfect way to enter Advent…
Today begins the season of Advent,  a part of the church year that, if you didn’t grow up with it (like me), is all about preparing for and anticipating Jesus’ arrival long ago and still today. This Advent we are inviting you to pay attention to Christ’s love showing up in  all people, all creation, and all of life — everywhere.

In 2022, we launched a four year Advent project, to explore four different ways God shows up in the world through Christ. And here we are, in our final year. This Advent  our theological focus is what’s called cosmic Christology. Which, simply put, is God’s delight to be in loving relationship with everything and everyone God has made — and God’s invitation for us to participate in this ongoing creation and vision for the world —  each and every one of us.  

And to that end — we’ve titled this Advent: “All of Us.”
And we are going to explore that more today — by listening to scripture, and a couple of stories, sitting in some wisdom from Father Richard Rohr, and  a whole lot of the Spirit of God — that thankfully communicates to us FAR MORE than a sermon could ever outline!

 Prayer

God of wonder and hope and light and darkness, 

God that lives in all of creation,
Draw us into your deep love today.
Help us to lean toward you with curiosity,
in all people,
all creatures,
all places, even the ones that feel dim or uncertain or hidden.

Stretch us to see you woven among, between and within all of us.

Amen.

Alright, here’s my second question:  “What is an animal that you love?”

Unless I missed it, I don’t think anyone said that they love opposums!

A couple of years ago *right around this time of year* my kids found an opossum in our backyard.  I remember hearing one of my kids excitedly calling me to come outside to see something,  that urgent “Mom, you have to see this!” vibe..  And she was just pointing and screaming at our garbage can outside. And as I peered over the edge of the deep can — there it was, this opossum –  just sitting on the bottom — staring up at us with all that “OPPOSUM GLORY”

with its beautiful little beady eyes, sharp teeth, and delicious tail,

And I was like,

“WoW! That is God’s gorgeous creature!”

Of course this opossum held the interest of my kids and despite me saying,

“hey lets leave it alone it will go away at night”

this opossum was still there morning after morning, after morning. I would go take an at-arms-length peek each morning and some mornings And many a morning when it WAS STILL THERE — I’d be convinced it was dead (I mean they are known for that area of specialty)! — not moving, eyes open — one morning its eye was open and there was a fly sitting right on its eyeball and I’m like that’s it — it’s definitely dead. … and then it blinked! I was bewildered that it was still there –

– “Don’t you love the darkness? Don’t you love the night time — go, go, go! PLEASE go!”

Come to find out my kids were feeding this opossum – a little bit of their morning toast, with HONEY and butter on it– some berries —  just dropping them right into the can like some sort of animal AirBNB. The possum was like, ‘this is actually awesome.’

And at this time of year, as darkness and coldness close in — as the markers of warmth and light and summer days disappear, and the beautiful fall colors fall to the ground, as the sun itself falls at 4:13pm today — I can feel everything  in me brace for the season ahead.

And I actually think, maybe this opossum was on to something….  It is a creature built for night, its rhythms, its instincts, its comfort are in the dark.

I am…not.

I don’t slip into darkness naturally, I don’t warm up to it, I don’t come alive in this season.

But maybe if I could have a cozy little container, where cute kids just say “hi” to me from above — and food just gets dropped on my face — maybe the darkness wouldn’t feel so empty after all. Maybe I could realize that what feels void to me is often a habitat for something else…for life that I don’t have eyes for yet. 

And this is really the invitation of Advent, to stretch our night-vision for God, to discover that the dark has things to show us too. 

ADVENT

Advent is a disruption of knowing – it is an invitation into darkness.
And an invitation to regard darkness as a new way of knowing.

Advent embraces darkness, and asks us to not just endure it, or to wait it out until it passes – but to mine the dark  – to see, to look, to perceive God with NEWNESS.  To ACTIVELY engage the dark as the setting by which we (re)discover the expanse of God in Christ.

A darkness that is sacred. A darkness that is freedom. A darkness that has always EXISTED since the beginning of time (maybe before time) …  A darkness that is the original language of God and the birthplace of everything and everyone – even before the birth of Jesus.

Kids Church Story
When my kids found that opossum in the trash can — they didn’t find it as a creepy, unwanted creature. They actually saw it as something worthy of love *and … cute!  Their impulse was

“oh my gosh, it’s so sweet — let’s care for it, let’s help it…” 

Kids tend to assume everything belongs.
That everything, all things have a place in God’s story.
Which, honestly, is cosmic Christology in its simplest form:  Christ in all things, and all things held in Christ.

If you ever want to listen to a phenomenal sermon you should volunteer in kids church. The stories of God told and the responses kids have ….Never-Ever-disappoints.

For years I volunteered in the Zebras room, which is the three-year old room. Each class involved free time, and snack time  – story-telling time.  And the story telling rests on a curriculum called Godly Play.  It highlights wondering questions – as a way to know God – versus “teaching a set of “known beliefs” about God (who God is).  

So at the end of each story-telling session – involving simple, tangible wooden and felt components – I would ask one or two of these wondering questions: 

“I wonder where you noticed God in this story?”
“I wonder where you are in this story?”

And often there’d be a great pause – and there would be an array of responses….like this: 
      – some that relayed details of the story told, like

“God is in the desert”

or

“God was with Mary.”

And other responses like —

“God smells like my mom’s perfume.”

Or

“I miss my cat who died.”

Or a classic response in one particular class was, 

“It’s my birthday!”

–  immediately followed by every other kid chiming in and saying,

“It’s my birthday too!”

…and naturally we end our story time by singing “happy birthday”… to everyone (and kind of to no one) :).

These Zebras responded as if all of life already belongs and lives in God’s presence and relationship.

One of the reasons I stayed volunteering long after my kid moved out of that class was because I took those responses of these 3 year olds seriously. I mean I laughed and sometimes thought,

“really? wow that’s wild!”

But I took their responses in as scripture. I sat with these verses and chapters of the Bible – that were spoken out of the mouth of babes… and I let it stretch my preconceived knowing & awareness of God.
 

Kids know how to engage the expanse of God (beyond form, name, or words) – when to us it looks like they have nothing to work with…

“Wait – you haven’t memorized scripture. You haven’t understood yet the historical context of this story of Jesus, or studied kenotic  or cosmic Christology.”

Kids are like hold on, let me just reach into my real life here…

“Here you go, my mom’s perfume (love it, and love her), my cat died (that was sad, and I loved her), and my birthday (love that!) & cake!”

And somehow in these exquisite responses they perceive and name the pattern of life and God…. which involves ALL OF Life and love, death & love, and life and love again.  Such great, great love – and such suffering. Seems like even a thoughtful, generous question of

“I wonder where God is in this story?”

is too small a question for the Christ that these kids point us to. 

Because they seem to intuit what many mystics have spent centuries trying to teach, that Christ isn’t just Jesus’ last name,
but the name for the immense spaciousness of all true Love.

Writers [like Teilhard de Chardin] and early mystics like Meister Eckhart say it this way,

Christ is “the blueprint of creation,” the “Love at the heart of everything.”

And kids… somehow… already know that.

God in Christ 

God in Christ is the indwelling presence in everyone and everything since the beginning of time as we know it.  That’s big. . . like cosmic big. 

And Christ competes with and excludes no one *not even opossums*, *excludes no response – no description or name for God* – but includes everyone and everything. 

In fact the only thing that Christ excludes is exclusion itself.

In Colossians 1:15-17 we read:

Christ is the image of the invisible God

And the firstborn of all creation 

For in God all things were created

All things in heaven and all things on earth

All things visible and all things invisible,

Whether thrones,  or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created through Christ and for Christ. 

Before all things were created, Christ existed,

        and all things are held together in Christ.

The refrain here,…all things, all things, all things, all things in heaven and on earth – all things are held together in Christ – before anything was created. 

It’s so beautiful and poetic.. but..really all things? I used to get nerve-y around this idea of God being so limitless. The faith context that I grew up in talked about God as love – but it was digestible …. a fairly definable God, and a fairly controlling LOVE –  and THAT God and THAT love were for an (un)fairly  limited amount of people. Not one of mystery and discovery and ongoing becoming.

But back at the beginning in Genesis where it says,

“And God said, “let there be light” and there was light… (Genesis 1:3)…it seems that here, God joined in unity with the physical universe and became the light inside of everything (Rohr)…

And this is helpful because Christ is the light that allows ALL OF US  to see things in their fullness – to perceive Christ everywhere and in everyone – and as Father Richard Rohr puts it, 

“when we consider the world around us as both the hiding place and the revelation of God, we can no longer make a distinction between the natural and the supernatural, between the holy and the profane.” 

There are no lines.

And we can look at the arc of history – and see how the mystery of God was engaged.

It’s how the Jewish people historically experienced God’s nature through light. They saw the glory of God known as the Shechinah, which means “dwelling of God.” Moses saw God’s light in the bush; the Jewish people were led by light in a pillar of fire that guided them in the desert. The Light also appeared in the tabernacle and the temple.

It is the light that shone round about the angels as they said to the shepherds,

“Don’t be afraid! Look! I bring good news to you, wonderful, joyous news for ALL PEOPLE. Your savior is born today in David’s city. He is Christ the Lord.”

Christ is the light of God’s glory and the imprint of God’s being – one that existed at the beginning – sustains the universe and is good NEWS FOR ALL PEOPLE NOW, today.

 It is the universal light – steady throughout time.


Now Jesus brings the message home in a personal way over thirteen billion years later! In Jesus, God’s presence became more obvious and believable in the world.  The formless took on form in someone we could

“hear, see, and touch” (1 John 1:1), making God easier to love. (Rohr) 

And so as we put together Jesus and Christ it gives us a God who is both personal and universal. A healthy expression… Because if we only had

“a “personal God,” our faith could easily become tribal or sentimental—shaped and limited by our own culture, nationalism, or even Christianity’s historic captivity to a white, Eurocentric worldview. But if God were only universal, then God would stay abstract—just an idea or a philosophy floating above our lives — not a relationship.” (adapted 19)

But it is also how we remember with humility, when we try to shrink Christ –  that Christ is always larger than any one era, culture, *any voting pattern*, empire or religion. Always surprising – growing in the margins where we least expect, exemplified in the most barren, seemingly desolate, looked over — shadowed — areas.

How much of Jesus Christ is a mystery, and how much of our lives are messy and hard and require a God that does not give up on us. A God that is both Intimate and Infinite enough to find us and hold us when we hurt. 

“All things are held together in Christ.”

We need such great love to hold us through such great suffering—
 a God who keeps pouring out love,
 even when life threatens to sweep us away.

And so we hear the extent of this promise in Romans:

Romans 8:35 – 36 (Common English Bible)
35 Who will separate us from Christ’s love? Will we be separated by trouble, or distress, or harassment, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 

36 As it is written,

We are being put to death all day long for your sake.

    We are treated like sheep for slaughter.

Now before we continue with the last three verses  –  I want to pause here… because this last verse I read –  is referencing a different scripture –  Psalm 44.  

Where God’s people are having a real moment with God. That resonates strongly with me.

Where God’s people are saying –

“Guess who will feel separated from Christ’s love in times of trouble and distress? US!  Guess who feels like we are dying as danger and sword come our way??? US!!!!  We, we feel separated from your love.  

 Where are you God? We haven’t forgotten you – or broken your covenant?  Or turned our hearts away!  Yet you are not here.

Psalm 44: 23-26 (Common English Bible)

It says in verse 23 and onward, 

23 Wake up! Why are you sleeping, Lord?

    Get up! Don’t reject us forever!

24 Why are you hiding your face,

    forgetting our suffering and oppression?

25 Look: we’re going down to the dust;

    our stomachs are flat on the ground!

26 Stand up! Help us!

    Save us for the sake of your faithful love.

 WAKE UP! STAND UP! GET UP! HELP US! SAVE US!

If this world is truly Christ-soaked *down to its matter * —  then where are you?

I don’t know about you – but I definitely feel like this when I’m getting no indication that God is with me — in ways that I can perceive — when God feels literally light years away.

Is it true God that you can really be for us?  When life seems SOOOO against us?

Help us God!    

It’s interesting because in the preceding verses in Psalm 44 – the people remember that God had been kind to their ancestors… 

“planted their ancestors – given them roots…” 

Set their ancestors free – and it was the light of Christ’s face that saved them.  

It is hard, hard, hard to imagine that there is anything but nothingness around us when we are struggling. Why can’t God just show God’s face when we need it most?

I don’t know.

But I do know that wherever and whenever and in whomever we have felt goodness, experienced love in those times – help, comfort, reprieve, rest, a snack… whatever is good and true and beautiful, that HAS been — and WILL ALWAYS BE, Christ. Even if we have never ascribed the name “God” to it before. 

Because wherever love has reached us, Christ has reached us.

With that in mind,  last question: “Who is someone you love?”

That question takes me back to a moment from when my son first started preschool…

PRESCHOOL STORY

Right around the time my son started in the Kids programming across the way – he also started preschool in our town.  And two afternoons a week, I’d go to pick him up at preschool and he would come running to me – yelling

“mommy, mommy you’re here!”

That winter though, a little boy in his class also started running to me at pick-up and calling me “Mommy….” 

It was a heart-wrenching move – because his mom had recently died.

Something about me – held the likeness of his own mom in his eyes. .. 

*And for split seconds I would think,  “oooh noooo, I don’t know if this is the best thing for this little guy – … psychologically  – for the process of grief – for attachment issues in the long run….?”

But in real-time I would just let him wrap his arms around my knees, and rub his little back a few times.

And then he’d toddle off to the playground.

Of course, no one corrected him – not the Director of the preschool, or the teacher, or me, or my kid.  No one said, “that’s not your mommy!”

Because somehow in those moments we know – we can’t define or limit God by a word/or even a name. From the beginning YHWH (Yahweh) let the Jewish people know that no right word would ever contain God’s infinite mystery. 

Any kind of real experience of God will usually feel like love.

It will connect you – at new depths and heights and dimensions – Richard Rohr says,

“In God you do not include less and less; you always see/perceive and love more and more. Anything that draws you out of yourself in a positive way – for all practical purposes – is operating as God for you at that moment –  goodness, truth, beauty.” (52)

Your mom’s perfume, your pet’s death, the flowers on your birthday, maybe even that possum… are as much God  – as the God we hope to encounter in church. And God celebrates this – God is not threatened, because God is free, not a God of control.  

And in the moments that feel darkest to us – absent of God… God stands up, gets up,  – wakes US up and nudges our hearts, our bodies, our minds, unto greater attention. It’s like it is to fumble and squint in the dark – until our eyes eventually adjust … so too, can our spirits adjust to the love of God that is the very essence of our DNA and in the very matter of everyone and everything we touch.

“Scientists have discovered that what looks like darkness to the human eye is actually filled with tiny particles called “neutrinos” slivers of light that pass through the entire universe. Apparently there is no such thing as total darkness anywhere, even though the human eye thinks there is.  Knowing that the inner light of things cannot be eliminated or destroyed is deeply hopeful.” (Rohr)

We can think darkness is empty,  like a deep trash can with something lifeless at the bottom, but then it blinks. The universe blinks. Our spirits blink awake. Christ blinks in the dark. 

And somehow if my knees were a flicker of light for this little boy who lost his mom – or to his Dad who was always standing nearby at pick-up, so be it.   

I’m not saying I was CHRIST in this scenario –  not at all.

“I’m saying that Christ is everywhere; and that in Christ every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life.” (3)

And this is as constant as the light that fills the universe.

The last 3 verses *to end*, of the Romans passage say:

(Romans 8: 37-39)

“But in all these things we win a sweeping victory through the one who loved us.  I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels nor rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created.

BECAUSE THE height and the depth and the width of Christ’s love adds cosmic-sized-dimensions that we can’t ever fully describe, measure or define…. I don’t know what kind of space you are in today, friends.

  • Maybe you’re in grief.
  • Maybe your throat is hoarse from shouting, “Stand up, God! Wake up, God!”
  • Maybe Advent finds you tired from waiting for things you’ve been longing for, for far too long.
  • Or maybe you’re finding small comforts, a new shirt, lighting a candle, a stranger’s kindness, a poem, a bird, a tree at the end of your street.

Wherever you find yourself, may you trust that this too is where the love of God meets you—the “illuminating light that enlightens all things.” And remember: when Christ calls God’s self the

Light of the World” (John 8:12),

he isn’t asking us to look only at God, but to look out at all of life. To see that the same love and glory of Christ that shone around the shepherds, that visited Mary in that quiet room, that spoke to Zechariah, that laced the very matter of creation since the beginning of time…

All we can do is live it. Fully awake.  

In a world where empire, intense political and militaristic landscapes and the killings of innocents are rampant… Jesus is born. A birth story that involves a sky, a star, AND astrologers that read the sky for God’s divine presence, and sheep and cows, and a donkey –  all of creation  – every creature somehow a part of the Good news, the ADVENT of love. . . And Jesus Christ is still being born – a love and a light that still compels us to discover God in new, stretching ways  – today,

is here too.
and is still coming.
And is still unfolding—in us and with
ALL OF US.

Prayer to End:

Dear God, we know that if we were to ask you what you love, you would say, everything, everyone.  “All of us.” 

And you would name each of us by name. 

Thank you for holding us together — here —  today,
Thank you for holding this aching world in your very hands, in your steady light…. 
The light that streams through galaxies —  as well as our hearts.

Amen.

 

 

Resource:

Book: The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe, by Richard Rohr

 

GOOD GRIEF: Let your heart break so your spirit doesn’t

Good morning! I am Ivy, a pastor here.

Today we are entering into a participatory liturgy service, called, “Good Grief: Let your heart break, so your spirit doesn’t.” If you haven’t been with us for one of these participatory liturgies – welcome! It’s a little different than our usual Sunday morning service (but we do these only about 2x a year – so hang in there!). 

The title comes from the late poet Andrea Gibson, who died earlier this year. Their work often holds space for both ache and aliveness, reminding us that heartbreak and hope often live side by side. In a way, that’s what all of our services aim to do: to tell the truth about what it means to be human, to feel pain, loss, and uncertainty, and also to remember what it means to be human with Jesus. To keep engaging our spirits toward hope, mercy, and grace, even when our hearts are breaking.

This season we have been exploring The Way of Jesus and Jesus’ healing ministry. Acknowledging in part that many of us are enduring heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak in constant succession — with little to no opportunity to heal.

It can feel, as Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians, that we are

“pressed on every side, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down.”

And yet, even in the breaking, light still finds a way through. Every traditional service we hold and every special liturgy we create holds in tension this truth: to be human is to experience heartbreak. And to follow Jesus is to trust that God’s creative power is still at work in the very places we feel undone, that when something breaks  — it can break open — making room for the Spirit to fill.  

And so that is the spirit with which this liturgy has been framed. The slight difference is that there is no central sermon from the front —  the service is set-up to invite your collective participation, which is central to this service. And with it, I’m excited to see what unfolds together.

Along the way, you’ll hear the voice and wisdom of the late Vincent Harding, a civil rights leader, theologian and speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Though he spent much of his later life teaching in Denver, his roots included time here in Boston, where he connected with King’s circle and the early justice movements that shaped this city. Please let his voice accompany you this morning as well. 

And one last bit before we begin: throughout our time together, you’ll hear and be invited to speak a simple refrain: “Let there be…”, echoing the words spoken at creation. May these words become a prayer that moves in you as we make our way this morning:

  • Let there be… Jesus in your heartbreak,
  • Let there be… light in your breaking,
  • Let there be good grief … the kind that lets your heart break, so your spirit doesn’t.

*Each part of this service is an invitation, not a requirement. Embrace it with freedom. Bring all that you can, and trust that it is enough. Remember, you are not alone in this space. This is why we gather —  to acknowledge the power of the presence of others beside us, surrounding us, joining with the presence of a God who is already here, always here, already creating something new and possible among us.*

 Prayer

Oh Jesus — one of heart and spirit, would you tend to our hurts and hearts this morning? For those of us who have become accustomed, expectant even of heartbreak — could you return us to your deep and ever-abiding love? A love that raised you from the dead, a love that casts out fear and demon-esque pain, a love that roots for our participation in this life, that roots for our thriving, that roots for us to embrace the belief that with your help, we can create beautiful things — even those we can not yet imagine. Amen.

Part #1 | Heartbreak

 You’ll now hear the words of Vincent Harding from an interview in 2012.

 “I am. You are. A citizen of a country that does not yet exist —and that badly needs to exist.”

Harding spoke those words as a Black man in America, carrying the heartbreak of knowing how far we are from that dream. His words often blurred the line between history, prophecy, and invitation. And oh, did he carry heartbreak. Heartbreak for the gap between the America that is and the America that could be… and yet he believed that facing the pain of the world was part OF LOVING IT IN TO BEING. He invites us to consider that to love a place, or a people, is to hold both the beauty and the brokenness at once.

WRITE
As we sit with Harding’s words, I invite you to take a moment to name your own heartbreaks, the gaps you feel between what is and what could be.
Maybe it’s a heartbreak for our country, or our world, or for something closer in: a relationship, a loss, your school, your career… 

Whatever it is, this is a space to name what aches.

On your plate in front of you, write as many heartbreaks that come to mind.
On-line folks I invite you to share with one another in the chat.

SHARING
In groups of six or so, you are invited to share what you would like from your plate with those in your group. You don’t have to share everything and you don’t have to explain anything. Just read what you prefer and are comfortable with.

Let this be an act of love and prayer, to see clearly, and name truly what breaks your heart.

Guiding principles: Freedom & Listen
Freedom — share what you’d like or pass.

Listen — if you are not speaking, your job is to actively and compassionately listen. Fixing, advising or additional questions is not the name of the game here today.

Communal response: “Let there be God in your heartbreak.”

2 Corinthians 4:7-9, 16 & Good Grief 

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. I am hard pressed on every side, but I am not crushed; I am perplexed, but I am not in despair; I am persecuted, but I am not abandoned; I am struck down, but I am not destroyed.”

Good Grief!

Let your heart break

So your spirit doesn’t (Andrea Gibson)

v16 Therefore we do not lose heart. 


(IVY) We do feel pressed on every side,  perplexed, persecuted, struck down. But sometimes, what our spirits need most is not to hold it together — not to RUSH to hope or healing —  but to let something break.

This morning you are going to be invited to break the plate that you just wrote your heartbreaks on. You are invited to put it inside your canvas bag, pull the drawstring, and as a table (group of six or so at a time), go to one of the six breaking stations. (two at the front, two at the back and two in the Dome Gallery). 

As you move toward the breaking station, you’re invited to break your plate as an act of release — not of destruction for its own sake, but a small symbol of trust that even in the breaking, God is creating. That the fragments of our heartbreak can become part of something sacred and shared — even if we cannot yet see it.

As you approach the breaking station, your group will also be offered the chance to receive communion together, if you would like.

As Jesus gathered with his friends for a final meal, on the night before his death he knew heartbreak intimately — the kind that comes from love. He knew what was coming: betrayal, loss, and the shattering of what they thought would last forever. Still, he took bread, blessed it, broke it, and said,

“This is my body, given for you.”

In that moment, the breaking of the bread became more than sorrow — it became communion. The table became a place where heartbreak and hope sat side by side, where love took on flesh even in the face of loss.

As we take part in this ancient practice today,, may we remember that Jesus meets us not beyond our heartbreak, but right in the middle of it. All of you are welcome to receive the gluten-free cracker and the grape juice, as you do may you hear and hold this prayer:

“Let there be light in your breaking.”

A Couple of Guardrails:
There will be ‘breaking station’ attendants. They’ll give you safety eyewear, show you how to place your plate face down, and invite you to give it one firm, healthy strike with the hammer. 

  • Be careful, move slowly.

IVY: “As you find yourself back at your seats you can let the phrase,

“Let there be light in your breaking”

— be a prayer for yourself, and those still breaking.

PART #2 | Oath & Spirit 

IVY:

“We won’t back down”

might seem like a tall order when our hearts are shattered. And yet, maybe it’s a reminder of the stubborn hope of our spirits —hope held in community, held in love,

and held by the belief that we can still help shape the world as it could be, as it should be.

Here are the words of Vincent Harding again, video & audio.

Reading | 2 Corinthians 4:7-9, 16 & Good Grief 

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but we are not crushed; we are perplexed, but we are not in despair; we are persecuted, but we are not abandoned; we are struck down, but we are not destroyed.”

Good Grief is to let your heart break, so your spirit doesn’t (Andrea Gibson)

v16 Therefore we do not lose heart. 

Therefore we do not lose heart. 

We might not be used to language like ‘making an oath’. But it seems worth remembering that, as followers of Jesus, we’ve already made one, by the way we live our lives out. Our oath is to believe and embody that we love and serve a living God, a God who is very much alive and involved in our lives.

One who desires that we, too, be fully alive.
Alive! Not shredded by the shards of our broken hearts.
To take an oath, then, is to say something like,

“I deeply feel the heartbreak — and I will not give up….”

It is good grief to let our hearts break, so our spirits don’t.

So maybe even now, we can say oaths like:
I will not give up on love.
I will not give up on healing.
I will not give up for myself, for my kids, my neighbors, for this world God so loves.

With that we turn now to the words of Scripture again. You have on a card in front of you the words of 2 Corinthians. Take a second to sit with the version that uses the pronoun “I”.

And when you are ready at your table, say the phrase that most resonates with you this morning:  

Example:

“I am hard pressed on every side, but I am not crushed…”

Communal Response:

“Let there be mercy.”

It is so good to acknowledge what we, individually feel and how we can orient to God as our heartbreaks. And it is good to know that we are not alone. That we, as a community, are holding one another. 

As you are ready let us read the 2 Corinthians version with “we” as the pronoun together:

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that
this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.

We are hard pressed on every side, but

  • We are not crushed;
  • We are perplexed, but
  • We are not in despair;
  • We are persecuted, but
  • We are not abandoned;
  • We are struck down, but
  • We are not destroyed.

Therefore we do not lose heart.

One last time, I invite you to listen to Vincent Harding’s words .

 “You will be what you could be. You will be what you should be.”

Those words might feel big, maybe even impossible, especially when our hearts still feel so fragile. But maybe that’s exactly where God begins.

We cannot rush healing.
But we can keep moving.
We can refuse to give up.
We can choose not to let our spirits break, trusting that even now, God is creating something beautiful out of all that’s been broken.

When our heartbreak feels too sharp to hold alone, when the pieces cut too deep, we need others to hold the weight of our heartbreak with us, to remind us that love can hold what we cannot.

In just a moment I’m going to invite you to move to the walls and take two things with you,
1) your marker and 2) your heartbreak bag (by the drawstrings!)

  1. You are going to pour the contents of your bag,  the fragments of your broken plate, into the communal bowl at each panel of the wall.
  2. And then you are going to write a “let there be…” word/short phrase on one of the empty plates on the wall. A prayer — of “let there be…” for the world that could be, should be… 

 

 

 

 

 

Let There Be… Healing

This past week, I was in hospital waiting rooms for a few different reasons. And I realized that hospitals are really hard places for me. They don’t initially register as places of healing or help — they register as loss and unease. Hospitals, for me, have been marked by tragic accidents, deaths, mysterious illnesses ….I even remember, as a kid, eating handfuls of poisonous berries and the chaos that followed in the ER. The fear, the rush, the urgency in my mom’s voice. It was supposed to be this place of comfort and aid, but in my body it felt like panic, like danger.

Maybe you know this feeling, too? The way chaos and fear write themselves into our bodies, shifting our foundations of safety, dignity, and belonging. That kind of chaos doesn’t just reside within us — it reflects the world we move through. Sometimes it comes from the very systems meant to keep us safe — the ones built to heal, protect, or serve, yet can be so often shaped by the same forces that wound. These structures that promise care can also carry legacies of harm. That’s in some ways what we mean when we say “trauma.” It’s a big word, and I’ll break it down a little bit more later. But for now, I think I’m learning that healing is not the absence of chaos — it’s God’s presence in the midst of it.

And it’s not mine alone. Healing is something we experience together — restoring one another to safety, dignity, and belonging, so that love can take flesh in us, and through us, unto the just world we long for. There’s a writer, activist and therapist, Prentis Hemphill (whose work I leaned a lot for today’s sermon) who says,

“healing helps us fight in the places we need to, but love in the places we long to.”

Healing orients us toward what’s worth fighting for and what’s worth dreaming toward. It steadies us to engage the world as it is, while still imagining what it could be.

We are in a new multi-week series, The Way of Jesus exploring Jesus’ healing ministry  — which I think asks us in part,

  • What will it take for us to heal?
  • And how do we heal in the chaos of still being hurt?
  • What does it take for us to reckon with the truth that we all hold the capacity to love and to hate, to turn toward one another or to turn away — And yet, even with that tension in us, still move toward change?

But there’s good news in here — and it’s not a new story — where the Bible itself begins, offers us the pattern of healing in the midst of chaos which is as as old as creation itself. In Genesis it says,

“the earth was formless and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep.”

Creation itself starts in chaos — and into that void, God speaks: 

“Let there be light.… 

….and there was light.”

This pattern — something new being born out of darkness and chaos — weaves its way through the whole story of Scripture. From creation to resurrection, God keeps bringing life out of places that feel undone. And that same pattern runs through Jesus’ ministry of healing.  Healing again and again seems to unfold in the midst of chaos — within unjust systems, among people pushed to the margins, carrying wounds both visible and invisible. Yet what Jesus gives them is not only restoration, but also the courage to resist letting that chaos take up residence in them. They become agents of new patterns — creators, visionaries, dreamers  – ones who say with their own lives the refrain of Genesis:

let there be hope, let there be mercy, let there be healing.

Mary Magdalene is a woman in scripture that gives me an embodied story of the journey of healing. Her story doesn’t come to us all at once. It unfolds in bits —  a woman who has survived much, a weeping disciple, a witness at the tomb of Jesus.

But each glimpse shows another layer of what healing can look like. This morning, I want to invite you to sit in her story with me, to pay attention to what stirs, resonates, what it makes you feel. 

Let’s begin with the Gospel of Luke chapter 8:

 Luke 8: 1-3 (Common English Bible)  

Soon afterward, Jesus traveled through the cities and villages, preaching and proclaiming the good news of God’s kingdom. The Twelve were with him, along with some women who had been healed of evil spirits and sicknesses. Among them were Mary Magdalene (from whom seven demons had been thrown out), Joanna (the wife of Herod’s servant Chuza), Susanna, and many others who provided for them out of their resources.

Ok, so our initial blush with Mary Magdalene doesn’t seem to offer a ton of information (there isn’t a long narrative here),  but it does invite us to use our divine imagination. And I love it — because don’t all of our stories require the same?

What we know here is that Mary Magdalene has been healed of seven demons. Which actually is not that insignificant of a story to carry. There’s lots of scholarly conversation about what these demons could have been. 

And without getting in the weeds of those opinions, I wonder if, at a baseline, we can imagine that to have seven demons — or even demon-esque thoughts afflicting you is pretty chaotic and traumatic.

Maybe you can also imagine that the intrusion of multiple demons on a human life — actually leaves little room for life at all — we can imagine that Mary has little to nothing left of herself, her worth, her belonging, her dignity. Seven — meaning “complete” can also mean overwhelming — a fullness of suffering.

I find it illuminating to imagine that “seven” could refer to Rome and its seven hills, meaning Mary carried the weight of imperial oppression in her body. Carrying the burden of empire — poverty, violence, domination, gendered oppression, fear, etc.. these could have been the demons that haunted her her whole life.

Prentis Hemphill’s recent work that I mentioned at the beginning is a book called, What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World, and they describe

“healing as the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma.’”

The casting out of Mary Magdalene’s demons didn’t stop the chaos of the Roman Empire. However, it does seem to afford her the ability to find some sense of safety and belonging alongside a company of women/community who had also endured and survived, a taste of healing that let her stand in dignity again. A redux of this Genesis-truth that you can be in the chaos without being chaotic — that, in part, is also healing.  

And in that sense, Mary’s restoration becomes a symbol of what Jesus’ healing power really does: it frees people not only from personal suffering but from the dehumanizing grip of empire. Because the empire doesn’t just exist “out there” in systems; it takes up residence in us — in our fears, our defenses, our diminished sense of worth.

Trauma doesn’t only wound — it constricts. It locks us into survival mode, narrowing our capacity to long, to imagine, to dream. It keeps us tethered to the past, and scanning, hypervigilant in the present to danger and threat, leaving little room to believe in the possibility of the future.

So can you imagine what opened up for Mary as these demons were thrown out of her? After years of being reduced to nothing — worth, love, and dignity flooding back into her being? Healing gave her the capacity to feel, to long again — and the courage to dream past the barriers. As Prentis Hemphill reminds us,

“visions are rooted in longing; we tend to long for what our bodies need in order to be whole and heal.”

And that’s what Jesus wanted for Mary and for us — not just to survive, but to live with the spaciousness to imagine again, to sense — even when the world feels formless and confusing (& BANANAS!) — that God’s Spirit still hovers and breathes possibility.

And that’s exactly why trauma is so devastating. Trauma interrupts belonging. And tells us that we and the world are not good. It convinces us that the world is unsafe, that we are unsafe, and that hope is out of reach.

And before we hear more of Mary’s story, I want to say a couple more things about trauma in our own day, in our society, in our bodies.

In some ways it may feel like what is the point really of looking closely at something that is everywhere? I mean trauma truly is everywhere. Whether we try to categorize it as capital “T” trauma or little “t” trauma, it speaks to the condition of the human experience. Trauma is the accumulation  in our nervous system that creates a sense of chronic overwhelm and dissociation. Trauma

“breaks apart our capacity to experience safety, belonging, and dignity — the very core needs that let us grow, create, and engage with one another and the world. (Prentiss Hemphill).

Safety is what allows our nervous systems to quiet so imagination and expression can emerge. Belonging is what roots us in community, though trauma can twist it into isolation or supremacy (an overcorrection of belonging where we assert dominance or control). And dignity — the seat of our agency and choice — is eroded when we feel our very existence has no worth.

And that’s the state in which so much of our collective life takes place. We are, most of us, trying to repair the world even as we are still healing from it — building systems of care while carrying trauma in our own bodies. Our politics, our relationships, our families, our capacity to dream — are all shaped by this paradox. 

And yet, as Hemphill reminds us, most of us come to the work of making the world new precisely because of the pain this one has caused us.  Our wounds can give us the initial surge to fight back, though this energy is often still fueled by our most frightened, defended, adrenalized selves — which is not sustainable. But we can learn, in our very bodies, where the threats and fears live — and where there is also room for grief, for longing, and for vision. As Hemphill writes,

“our energy is most potent when we make room for our grief and anger, when we allow ourselves to feel, our direction becomes clearer.”

But it’s hard to do, to be honest.

“Our society has gone through too many traumas while commanding that we deny our grief and our compassion. Our feeling of it all. (67) Somewhere along the way we were taught to stop feeling instead of being taught to stop what harms us, as though the feeling were the enemy. To move forward and address the harm, we have to feel.”(68)

That’s why the work of healing can’t be only personal. The harm we feel in our bodies is connected to the harm embedded in our systems and our story together. As Prentis Hemphill reminds us,

“we can’t change the world if we do not heal what has become embodied in us — and we cannot truly heal if the conditions that break and isolate us don’t change, too.”

If we follow Mary Magdalene’s story, I think it helps us understand how attending to feeling, embodying grief and love can be part of the healing, even in the midst of a society that had named and condemned her as a “sinner” and had written trauma into her life.

A brief note about Mary Magdalene before we read the scripture. The thing about Mary Magdalene is that she’s surrounded by controversy and ambiguity in the scope of Christian commentary. She’s tangled up with at least six different women named Mary in the gospels, which leaves a lot of debate about which threads really belong to her story and which don’t. (New Yorker) Still, I’m inclined to see the woman in this story as Mary Magdalene.
So with that complexity in mind, let’s hear the story as Luke tells it:

Luke 7:36–39, 44-50 (Common English Bible)
36 One of the Pharisees invited Jesus to eat with him. After he entered the Pharisee’s home, he took his place at the table.

37 Meanwhile, a woman from the city, a sinner, discovered that Jesus was dining in the Pharisee’s house. She brought perfumed oil in a vase made of alabaster.

38 Standing behind him at his feet and crying, she began to wet his feet with her tears. She wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and poured the oil on them.

39 When the Pharisee who had invited Jesus saw what was happening, he said to himself, If this man were a prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him. He would know that she is a sinner. *

*44 Jesus turned to the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? When I entered your home, you didn’t give me water for my feet, but she wet my feet with tears and wiped them with her hair.

45 You didn’t greet me with a kiss, but she hasn’t stopped kissing my feet since I came in.

46 You didn’t anoint my head with oil, but she has poured perfumed oil on my feet.

47 This is why I tell you that her many sins have been forgiven; so she has shown great love. The one who is forgiven little loves little.”

48 Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”

49 The other table guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this person that even forgives sins?”

50 Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”
 

Now there are ways that you might imagine this setting would have been excruciating for Mary Magdalene. She walks into a Pharisee’s house — a space where she decidedly does not belong, where she is already branded a ‘sinner.’ Where everyone is watching her hypervigilantly for failure, for any opportunity to heap shame. It could have been a crushing trigger if Mary hadn’t already been freed from the chaos of those systemic demons. Instead of coming in carrying the weight of empire — she comes carrying oil and her tears.  She carries grief, too — the ache of knowing that Jesus’ own path is leading toward suffering. But she doesn’t hide it. She doesn’t edit or contain her emotion to make others comfortable. She lets it all pour out — her love, her lament — in FULL VIEW of those who have demanded her invisibility. Mary lives out what Prentis Hemphill calls the risk of healing —

“when we are able to tolerate, feel, and express something in our relationships that before was out of our reach, reinstating our abilities to choose something other than what our fear dictates.”

And the continued healing here is that Jesus doesn’t just “permit” her to enter the house or his  presence — he welcomes her in fully — he sees her in all her fullness. She is not saved here by erasure, or being shushed — but by recognition.

She is named a “sinner”, but Jesus looks at her and says to Simon:

‘Do you see this woman?’

And then names her actions, her tears, her kisses, her oil — as love. And he says,

‘Your sins are forgiven.’

Not to mark her with shame, as so many have read it, but to free her from the story that shame/trauma has told. Here forgiveness is release. It is healing from the story others have written about her. Forgiveness here is not about tallying up a record of wrongs; it is continued healing — restoration of that dignity, safety and belonging.

Prentis Hemphill puts it this way:

‘Forgiveness and grace are not weak, pitiful emotions… they are the generous gift of people who know their worth cannot be diminished. When we offer forgiveness, we invite one another back into our highest selves, back into our commitments. We acknowledge the hurt, but we extend the possibility of [a new way forward].”

That is exactly what Jesus does in this moment. He doesn’t deny that she has been hurt, or that she has done things out of her hurt. But he restores her to herself. He refuses the false story that her worth could ever be diminished. And then he tells her:

‘Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.’

Words that indicate not the end of her healing, but the beginning  — words that give her a future.

The church has unfortunately often sided with the Pharisees — centuries later, Pope Gregory would label Mary Magdalene a prostitute — collapsing her into a caricature of ‘sin’  — a distortion that marginalized women in the Church for the next 1400 years. This is what happens when we make sin only about individual failings: we scapegoat the vulnerable instead of naming the systems that deal the deeper wounds. If we are going to call someone a sinner, then we must also tell the story of the sin they live within  — the systems and powers that convince us — or even force us — to be less than who God created us to be.  

  • Patriarchy. Oppression. Whiteness. Poverty. Violence.

These aren’t just external; they get inside us. They write false, harmful, wounding stories about our worth. Demanding we

“adjust ourselves to unjust conditions, or shrink to fit inside containers someone else has created for us (42).”

Stories that pull us back toward chaos, toward the undoing of what God at the very beginning called “good.” 

Jesus wants Mary to reckon with the powerful possibility that she – her life – is of worth. And not for

“some distant redeemed potential  — but for NOW, for what is, for what is in the ordinary sacrament and potential of today.” (162, O’Tuama). 

And that’s the hope in healing: not just that harm is removed or that we return to ‘normal,’ but that a new way forward is carved.

“It’s often a risk to stretch beyond the norm, beyond the visions that others have handed us. The visions we inherit, the visions others impose on us, can only re-create the world as it is.” (19)

Within those limits, our capacity to heal and to love is stunted. Jesus knew Mary needed something bigger, wider, more connected — the kind of vision that could carry the love of the resurrection to others —  long before Mary would be the one to see it first.

And she practiced it — she had to. Traveling with her posse of women, Joanna, Susanna, others who had also been healed, pooling their resources and their lives together. Grieving and laughing and naming what scared them, angered them. In community is where vision grows — because to repair what has been broken, we have to dream something together that is whole — a world where safety, belonging, and dignity are not luxuries, but the foundation of life itself.

And it’s from that shared ground that courage rises.

Which is why mainstream healing so often falls short — it puts the pressure on the individual to ‘get well,’ when the very systems we live within are the source of the wound.  

Healing itself is courageous — and courage, in turn, is what sustains healing. Prentis Hemphill writes,

“It’s courage when we insist on being ourselves in a world set against us. And it’s through courage that we become ourselves.”

Healing invites us, like Mary with her alabaster jar, to so deeply feel that we are brimming over with emotion and pour out what has been held inside — all of it. It is a risk to pour ourselves out in a world that has hurt and still hurts us, yet that very act becomes the first step toward reclaiming our agency.

Courage, in its truest form, asks us to risk again — to place our safety, belonging, and dignity in service of something larger: a vision of wholeness, of justice, of love made flesh in community. It is love at work in motion, refusing to give up on what could be made new.

And that’s what Jesus sees in Mary — love made courageous.
Jesus saves us with love, and he tells this woman that her faith saves. So what if courage looks like that? What if the way we live — our willingness to pour ourselves out in love — could inspire others to act as though their lives are worth saving, too?

And that courage carries her forward.

The last time we hear of Mary Magdalene in Scripture, it is — fittingly — at the resurrection.
And maybe that’s why it’s her — not Peter, not John — who is the first to witness it. Because she herself has already lived a resurrected life. She has known what it means for life to return where there was once only emptiness. Her life becomes its own resurrection story — a living echo of creation’s first dawn.

When Mary runs to the disciples and says,

“I’ve seen the Lord,”

she is speaking the language of creation. In Genesis, God spoke into the void —

“Let there be light”

— and the world took shape. At the tomb, Mary speaks into the chaos of death and grief and says,

“I’ve seen the Lord.”

And in those words, a new way forward, a new world opens..

Maybe that’s where resurrection still meets us — in the places that don’t yet feel like healing. In the hospital ERs and waiting rooms that still smell like antiseptic and old memories; in spaces where fear and loss seem to have had the last word. Even there, the Spirit hovers. Where there can still be the refrain of

“let there be….”

“let there be something I cannot yet see …..”

The good news is that Jesus keeps showing up —- the same way he showed up for Mary — with her demons, her tears and her steadfast love…. 

Not to erase chaos, but to be with us in it. 

So every time we take Mary’s words on our own lips —

“I have seen the Lord” — ,

we join that same creative pattern — speaking into the chaos of our time. And we become participants in God’s ongoing creation — voices that echo through the void and say:  

Let there be light.
Let there be mercy.
Let there be grace.
Let there be healing.

Amen.

Source: Prentis Hemphill’s book What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World (2024).

 

Prayer Words | Communion | Music

The Gift of Community

My husband and I have slowly been watching the series, The Bear — which if you aren’t familiar — is a whopper of a show!

The premise: a gifted fine dining chef, Carmy Berzatto, returns home to Chicago to take over his late brother, Michael’s struggling sandwich shop called The Beef. As Carmy tries to transform The Beef into a more elite restaurant called “THE BEAR” – we are also rooting for Carmy’s own transformation. We are invited to see the story lines of grief, family dysfunction, and the pressures of perfection, implications of unhealed hurt — and we see how they show up in his relationships, his work place, in his own self.

Part of what makes this show so compelling is its frenetic intensity — the way it pulls you right to the precipice — adrenaline coursing through your body. The camera work, the pacing play into all of this. But the universal aspects of the real stories and the stakes of those stories –is what heightens my nervous system and ushers in the feeling that everything could implode in a flash.   

And yet, woven into that chaos are moments of beauty and heart — glimpses of what it means to create something meaningful in the midst of the mess.

My husband used to be a professional chef and watching him watch this show is its own drama. I can see him taking in  — the creativity, the skill, the chaos, the combustibility, the deliciousness, the crunch of time and paralysis of perfection — he’s taking it in through his body, viscerally through his past experiences.  

And I watch this from a relational/emotional perspective. ALL of the personalities — all these people intersecting in life in real time — with thousands of threads of love, and grief, and missteps and joy, and care and pain running right alongside and through them — and I think

“how can this go well? How do we do this thing called being human on a daily basis?”  

And so Scott and I, we both watch this show — sideways. We need to take big breaks after each episode.

It’s not just about food or running a restaurant. The show digs into what it means to be human — to belong, to be seen, to hold and to be held by others. To bear witness to one another’s lives — in times when the service runs as smoooooth as expected/planned and when life is in chaos.

Being human is never a solo act. Times of weeping and times of joy — these inevitable ingredients of life offer us an unexpected gift: that we don’t have to navigate any of it alone.

And that, in itself, might be the greatest gift: that there is always a table, there are always people, in our midst all the time — this gift of community.

The catch — if you can call it that — is that we can’t really curate community — the gift encompasses all of it, everything, everyone. Even the people you might never willingly invite or WANT in your life. (*sparing of course violent/abusive boundary necessary people).

I want to share with you a clip from the recent season that I think gives us a potent picture of this. It’s at a wedding reception where we see a young girl hiding under a table — she is the daughter of the bride. She’s scared of dancing with her now-new-step-dad… and what unfolds under that little reception table becomes a window into what real community can look like.

Before we unpack this scene a bit — I wanted to remind us that we are in a short series called “We Are Reservoir,” where we are breaking open our mission statement that we say at the top of every service… that we invite people to discover the love of God, the gift of community and the joy of living.

I love this mission statement. I mean I want to be a part of a community of people of faith that embodies this statement. It gives me comfort to know this encircles Reservoir. And I also know that a mission statement isn’t just words for us to recite. It’s meant to empower us for the work of LIVING in this big, messy community of humanity — the whole wide swath of it. That’s why our mission is rooted in our guiding values — connection, humility, action, freedom, and everyone.

In the scene we just watched unfold you see this range of people — straight up enemies, people that are meeting for the first time, exes (romantic and friends), “plus-1’s”, biological family, work relationships, chosen-family, and a kid, all crammed together in an improbable space.

A multitude.

“Some theologies say it is not an individual but a collective people who bear the image of God. Suggesting that we need a diversity of people to reflect God more fully. Anything less and the image of God becomes pixelated and grainy, still beautiful but lacking clarity. If God really is three parts in one, it means that God’s wholeness is in a multitude.” — Cole Arthur Riley.

Not just our chosen multitude.

 But rarely do we embrace the multitude fully. Because it’s hard. Community is not for the faint of heart. It is not a sweet sentimental slogan — it’s the work of making room. It requires an unfathomably large table. One that we couldn’t quite imagine – one that could in some ways only supernaturally stretch. I wonder if that’s what God offers us in the gift of community — that our hearts actually stretch beyond where we want sometimes.

In this scene 16 people fit fully sitting upright under this little table. Just before this moment, the camera shows the table as only big enough for one frightened little girl to hide beneath. Then her dad joins her, so cramped that his legs stick out from under the tablecloth. And yet, somehow, the table stretches…

How could the table be this big? How does it not feel too crowded, or like anyone is being lost in the shuffle?

Maybe it’s because at the center of that table is something more than space — it’s something living , active — it’s care. It’s love. It’s God, making room.

What begins as care for this little girl, unfolds into a whole community sharing the moment together — not fixing her fear, but bearing witness to it. And in that act of witness, they discover a common thread: the simple truth that we all know and have fear, and that God’s image is revealed not in our perfection, but in our presence with one another. One theologian even suggests we call this

not just bearing witness but bearing ‘WITHness’ (Christena Cleveland)

— a reminder that in true community we are not distant observers of one another’s lives. We are with each other, alongside, companions on the same journey.

And that’s where I want us to pause, and to practice. To join the multitude, not just in theory — we could talk about community forever, but I want to invite us into the real sharing of our own lives. So could you circle up with some folks near you — five or six folks — and share out of this same question,  “What is it you are afraid of?”

And two things before we share: 

— Freedom.

— Listen.

Freedom — share from where you feel comfortable. Trust that whatever you offer is to be cherished as a gift. “Spiders, failure, the collapse of democracy, math” — it’s all part of the multitude. — you don’t need to expound.

Listen — your job is not to fix. To offer feedback.

The communal response after each sharing is:
Amen. You are not alone.

Sharing:
What is it that you fear?

Communal response:

Amen. You are not alone.


SCRIPTURE 

Thank you for being willing to share. Fear is something we all carry — and Jesus knew this too. In fact, when he told stories about creating God’s kin-dom, he often named the fears that keep us from the table. Let’s hear one of those stories now from the Gospel of Luke.

Luke 14:15-24 (Common English Bible)

15 When one of the dinner guests heard Jesus’ remarks, he said to Jesus, “Happy are those who will feast in God’s kingdom.”

16 Jesus replied, “A certain man hosted a large dinner and invited many people.

17  When it was time for the dinner to begin, he sent his servant to tell the invited guests, ‘Come! The dinner is now ready.’

18 One by one, they all began to make excuses. The first one told him, ‘I bought a farm and must go and see it. Please excuse me.’

19 Another said, ‘I bought five teams of oxen, and I’m going to check on them. Please excuse me.’

20 Another said, ‘I just got married, so I can’t come.’

21  When he returned, the servant reported these excuses to his master. The master of the house became angry and said to his servant, ‘Go quickly to the city’s streets, the busy ones and the side streets, and bring the poor, crippled, blind, and lame.’

22 The servant said, ‘Master, your instructions have been followed and there is still room.’

23 The master said to the servant, ‘Go to the highways and back alleys and urge people to come in so that my house will be filled.

24 I tell you, not one of those who were invited will taste my dinner.’”

Often, when we read this scripture, we imagine two groups.

First, there are the guests on the original invite list — the more privileged ones. The ones who own land and animals — are partnered, have status. People who, in some fashion, might be afraid of disruption, of losing comfort, of known routine, afraid of losing status.

Then, there are those society disregards — the people society leaves in the bushes, the ones pushed aside, not considered worthy of a seat at the table.

And there is so much good in reading it that way. It helps us see God’s expanse of radical welcome at work in community.

But this morning, I want to press us a little further. Because maybe it’s not that there are only two groups here —  but maybe the ‘poor, the blind, the lame’ represent parts of ourselves. The parts we are afraid to let be seen. The parts we think are unworthy, too much, wounded, ashamed, that we want to keep hidden.  

Audre Lorde (a Black, queer, poet, and activist) once said,

“Without community there is no liberation.”

There is no promised land without the multitude — even the multitudes you contain. In some way these original guests think  they can create the kin-dom of God on their own, maybe on their own terms — and maybe (according to themselves), they do. …. But what will become of the promise when it is collapsed by loneliness? Who is going to drink all the milk and honey with them? (adapted from Cole Arthur Riley).  

As the host says in this scripture/parable,

“not one of them will taste my dinner.”

And maybe that’s the caution embedded here — thinking we can feast alone — but discovering that the gift of the kin-dom of God only comes with our wholeselves present, and in community.

And isn’t that what we saw in The Bear? This scared little girl hiding under the table —  unsure if she belonged in this new expression of family before her…and yet she didn’t have to climb out on her own. Others chose to join her, to bear witness, to sit with her. And because of that, she was able to taste the goodness of love surrounding her — enough to rejoin the party.

That’s the gift of community. That’s the liberation Audre Lorde names. Not fixing, not striving, not going it alone — and not as she expands,

“shedding our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist,”

but practicing the kind of belonging that makes us more whole, and helps us co-create the kin-dom of God, even in the midst of mess.

 So let me ask you this last time to turn to share in your groups (or in the chat on-line) Where is God in relation to your fear?

And when someone shares, our communal response will be: Amen. You are not alone.

Again let ‘freedom and listening’ be your guides.

PRACTICE

Thanks for sharing again — that’s the last time for today! I want to say as we close though, that community doesn’t just happen. We have to practice it.

  • We practice showing up when it’s easier to stay home.
  • We practice listening when we’d rather speak.
  • We practice bearing witness instead of rushing to fix.
  • And we practice it not just with the people we like, or agree with, but with the whole swath of humanity.

And the beauty is — as we practice, God actually transforms us a bit — shapes us into people who reflect God’s love more clearly.

Our community groups are a way of  “practicing community” — not just — responding to a prompt/or answering a question. We are practicing what it means to belong to one another. We are practicing trust. We are practicing love.

It takes practice to trust that our own stories — even the parts we’re afraid of, or the things we are afraid of  in others — can not only be held, but can become the essential ingredients that expand our view of God — beyond what we could have scope for.

What a gift to be part of a place where you can share exactly where you are at, each time. Community Groups don’t force intimacy, they invite us into it. They give us space to learn how to cherish vulnerability — our own, and one another’s — as a gift.

We need more places to be human.

Held by care and love that is unending. The love of God. A love that is uncontrolling, non-judgemental, not rushing to fix.

We all need help. We are all afraid. 

We need more options than dysregulation and escapism.

We need beloved community, more than ever. 

Because these truths don’t become real in isolation — they only take flesh when they are shared. 

 Connection can only affirm itself in another person.

Humility can only affirm itself in another person.

Action can only affirm itself in another person.

Freedom can only affirm itself in another person.

And everyone — everyone — carries a piece of God’s image, and only together, in community, do we see it whole.

  And this is the gift of community.

Prayer: The holy prayers have already been spoken in this room. And for those that remain unspoken I say, “Amen. You are not alone.” 

Breathlaughter & Truthquake

Good morning everyone — and happy July, I hope you enjoyed last Sunday doing whatever it is you find yourself doing instead of being in this Sanctuary! I often forget how full the month of June is here at Reservoir. We had Pride Service and Juneteenth service and appreciation parties for volunteers and the last week of June was of course A FULL week of SOCCER NIGHTS! This is our 17th year of being a part of Soccer Nights — a free soccer camp for 1st – 8th graders in the community. One of the sure fire ways over the years that I’ve experienced the love of God, the gift of community and the joy of living…a week of Beloved Community visible across soccer fields. 

June for me on a personal note was also very full of good celebratory things — our daughter Mae, graduated high school — wooo!  Our son, Reed turned 17. We got to be a part of our niece’s wedding in Virginia — and right in the middle of June my husband Scott finished his last round of scheduled chemo for now. — Wooo! (*thanks for all your prayers, food, hugs, texts and memes — I’ve gotten to know so many of you on a deeper level because of the memes you’ve sent!).

June felt like a culmination of an intense season of holding and carrying and trying to remember to breathe and those celebratory markers offered to me the permission to feel:  You’re here. It’s done, for now.

So naturally, I thought:

“Well, I should definitely volunteer for Soccer Nights, then!”

And I did, admittedly at the very last minute. I checked off the box, “I would like to volunteer for ‘logistics’ (that felt like the appropriate amount of energy I could put out) and my assignment came through that evening as Head Coach (!) — this felt like a slightly different lift of energy.

Nevertheless, with Coach Makayla’s assistance, we “coached” 8, 1st and 2nd graders. Which mostly consisted of me constantly counting to make sure everyone was actually on the field. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. Every few seconds I would  say to Coach Makayla,

“where is Solyanna? Where is Ebenezer? Where is Omaid?”

Now the beauty of this chaos — was that it kept my head up — scanning the field, the stands, the sidelines for our 3 little wanderers who have the same color shirt on as 300 other players… 

And to be able to take in this vista of an abundance of humanity — 29 countries of origin, many religions, races, and socioeconomic levels — all playing soccer, running wildly, families sharing meals on blankets and tea. Tiny little siblings toddling out in the midst of scrimmages (!) — it was all an abundance of goodness to my Spirit. Like a FULL, LONG breath of Goodness that I hadn’t taken in for awhile. There’s that verse in Hebrews that says something like,

‘and when everything is shaken through only truth and goodness remain.’ 

That’s what it felt like. 

And after months of feeling kind of like being in a stormy season, it felt like laughter was just rumbling and echoing around the field and through my body and just could go on and on and on..  (along with sweat of course — lots and lots of sweat, my gosh it was so hot!)) 

Joy — kind of unceasing….

It reminded me of something I once heard the writer Jason Reynolds say…

Which we’ll get to in just a moment after we pray together, join me:

Prayer

Oh Steady God, cultivate within us attentive tenderness. Guide our attention spans to land on what is honest, and good and true of you. Align us, O God, that we might embody what truly sustains our hearts and souls for this thing called life. Come Spirit of God and bless our love for one another, and bless us with the abundant love you have for us — love that never runs out.

Jason Reynolds and “Breathlaughter” (Source: onbeing.org)

Jason Reynolds is a poet and a writer of young adult novels. He’s written Ghost and Long Way Down. And at the invitation of Ibram X. Kendi wrote the YA companion to Stamped from the Beginning. He’s known for his belief in kids. In never talking down to them, but regarding them as whole, complex individuals, not “half-formed beings.”

Jason Reynolds talks about the alchemy of language –how words lined up just so can spark something new. And so he’s in the habit of creating new words, made-up words. He does this with kids — invites them to create synonyms for words they have heard many times to help them navigate identity and grief. 

He says if you think of something like freedom. What are the synonyms that come to mind?   He thinks of “breath” and “laughter.” And so he puts them together,  BREATHLAUGHTER.  When he thinks of breath, he thinks of life — and of how it doesn’t stop. Of how when you exhale, what comes out of your mouth spreads and spreads and spreads. It goes and goes and goes and goes. Of how when we breathe out or breathe in —  it’s a constant recycling of energy.  

And so he says,

“what if laughter could also be recycled in that way? What if it could just go? And ‘what if freedom was like that?’….That is freedom, to me, if it could just go and go and go and go and go — if it could be the ripple in the water. To me, that feels free.”

Breathlaughter – even when it’s hard, even when you’re tired, even when the world remains tumultuous, dangerous and inequitable.

That word, breathlaughter stuck with me. It feels like a Spirit-filled- authored- action.  In some ways like prayer. Prayer made flesh/embodied.  It’s what I experienced at Soccer Nights – breathlaughter —a living prayer in motion — for goodness and joy to ripple through without ceasing, through each meaningful, small moment of connection.

Embodied prayer. 

And not surprisingly Jason Reynolds also has some thoughts on prayer — how do we open up that word PRAYER to hold MORE than we might often regard it to.  How is it alchemized, how does it spark something that we’ve forgotten or laid by the side — in the way we speak of it, regard prayer, engage prayer, LIVE OUT prayer.

And the way he explains it — especially through the story of caring for his mother  — is moving to me. So I want to show you a short video clip where he shares this in his own words.

CLIP  (1:15)

Prayer can’t just be asking.
I mean it can be asking — but it can be more than asking!
There has to be embodiment — a turning toward each other, with attentiveness,  with dignity, with care. Not out of obligation, but out of love. And yes, that love may cost us something — our sense of “security”, certainty, comfort..it might be messy.

But it situates US as part of the prayer. Saying,

“here I am. Let me be a living part of this prayer – flesh embodied.”

Here in our body, is where the Spirit begins to stir. Right? It’s where we get a twinge if something feels honoring and true, and moving and powerful — and we also get feedback from the Spirit if something doesn’t feel right, feels unjust… Our bodies are the dwelling place of the Spirit’s presence, guiding us toward truth and love.

“If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.”

So I want to invite you to listen to Jesus’ words this morning — to listen beyond the words that maybe you’ve heard many times, beyond a sense of moral platitudes — but unto a bold call to live counterculturally, to consider what it means from your social location to be a living prayer in a world that desperately needs embodied justice and healing.

Luke 6:20-26 (New International Version)

20 Looking at his disciples, he said:

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.


21 Blessed are you who hunger now,
    for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

22 Blessed are you when people hate you,
    when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.

23 “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.

24 “But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have already received your comfort.


25 Woe to you who are well fed now,
    for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
    for you will mourn and weep.


26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
    for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.

Now this passage is known as Jesus’s “Sermon on the Plain.”  Jesus has just chosen his 12 apostles and he steps down to a level place amid a large, diverse crowd—and it is the first major, public time where Jesus exposes the values of God’s Kindom and challenges by not just teaching, but inviting people to follow Jesus, and LIVE and HEAL alongside one another.

“Now the first century Jewish understanding of the word ‘blessed’ referred to God’s special favor. It was a way of saying “God’s on your side.” Of course, Jesus loves everybody. That’s one of the reasons he’s so great. But when he has the opportunity to announce who God favors he doesn’t say “You’re all blessed.” Jesus only announces God’s favor to the poor, hungry, weeping, hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed communities.

The way Jesus used the word ‘poor’ is also different from how it’s commonly used today. Biblical scholar Bruce J. Malina explains that, from the ancient Mediterranean perspective, the poor are those

“who cannot maintain their inherited status due to circumstances that befall them and their family, such as debt, LOSS OF WORK, being in a foreign land, sickness, death (widow), or some personal physical accident. Rather than a fixed social class, poverty functioned as “a sort of revolving class” — a shifting experience marked by vulnerability and instability. Malina further clarifies that day laborers, landless peasants, and beggars were not considered poor simply because of a lack of money, but because of “the precariousness of such a person’s social position.” In other words, to be poor was to be at risk — socially, economically, communally. (Source: enfleshed.com)

*The stories we heard in our collective, public prayer time —the real, vulnerable, raw experiences of people’s lives — people that are sitting next to you right now. Those stories that hold loss and injustice aren’t far away; they are here, close to us, part of our community.

And maybe that’s part of the point of Jesus’ radical blessings — to awaken us to what Beloved Community really is.

During the lifetime of Jesus and those that heard his words the church was not yet an institution or structural grouping of common practices and beliefs. The church was a living organism that communicated the good news of Jesus, through relationships. (Richard Rohr) 

“In the same vein Jesus also used the word ‘rich’ differently from how we commonly do. In the ancient Mediterranean context, the “rich” were not simply those with wealth but those who had gained it through exploitation. Malina explains that wealth was assumed to have been amassed by “depriving others; defrauding and eliminating others; prospering by having others become wretched, pitiable, ill, blind, and naked.” The rich, then, were grouped alongside those who wielded power for vainglory, like kings and generals, and those who overstepped social boundaries. The “rich” are not just the wealthy, but those whose comfort comes at the cost of others. (Source: enfleshed.com)

Jesus offers a radical reordering of everything we think we know about who matters and why.

It is why as a church we seek to embody these values as well.  Freedom — breathlaugher —  is only achieved through prioritizing the needs of the poor and oppressed. We are all set free when the oppressed are free. From this perspective we don’t “bless the poor” by giving them what they need. We give the poor what they need because they are blessed. (enfleshed.com)

When Jesus blesses those who are marginalized, he’s inviting us into a prayer that is active and incarnational — a prayer that refuses to separate faith from action, from tangible love. It’s the kind of prayer that shows up in the thru-line of HOW WE LIVE.  The meals shared with neighbors, the hands that hold each other through grief, the voices that stand up when dignity is denied. This prayer lives in the messy, beautiful reality of human life —  It isn’t just a list of who’s blessed. It’s a seismic reversal — a quake of sorts…  

Jesus didn’t speak these words from a distance. He was surrounded by crowds desperate not only for teaching but for healing — for touch, for restoration, for wholeness.

Healing for Jesus was and IS deeply relational, a subversion of the systems that exclude and divide. It wasn’t/it isn’t only about curing physical bodies but about restoring people to community, repairing the fractures in society — being, as the prophet Isaiah put it, “repairers of the breach,” loosing the bands of wickedness, undoing the yoke of oppression.

I heard Reverend William Barber speak a few years ago in Jamaica Plain and he said,

“The Spirit does not just come to comfort. The Spirit comes to quarrel with every injustice…. 

Sometimes the Spirit stirs in us a holy unrest.
That homing device within us — the Spirit of God goes off when something isn’t right when injustice is prowling.

The truth that lives within us at our core —  quakes when in the face of injustice. We can feel it. It’s a refusal to accept any diminishment of human dignity. 

And that quarrel, that divine discontent, is part of our healing too.

Because when we participate in the Spirit’s quarrel — when we stand alongside the oppressed, when we mend what’s been torn — we’re not just offering healing to others. We too are being healed. We become living prayers, breathing agents of God’s justice and love in the world that hopefully can go on and on and on and on. .. . .

I’ve been trying to give language to this feeling — this inner shift when the Spirit quarrels with injustice. Trying, as Jason Reynolds models, to do a little word alchemy — to shape a word big enough to hold that sacred, holy ache.
Because I’ve felt it, you know? Maybe you have too —
personally, familially, collectively, organizationally, nationally, globally.

And the word I’ve come to is:
Truthquake.

The two summers before my grandmother died of MS, I stayed with her –so she wouldn’t be alone at night. From my earliest memory she was in a wheelchair. And I would unplug the toaster at night, and lock the doors, and get her water. 

I got to know her more those two years  — her humor in the face of such suffering and constraint. Her joy at sitting in the sun. Asking me to put lotion on her legs that had long lost feeling and function. If I had had the word then — “breathlaughter” would have felt like an accurate descriptor of our times together — a freedom of spirit that she invited me into — that still stays in my lungs (especially in tough moments today).

Being close to her, caring for her — I also saw how systems were failing her. Systems meant to support her were not holding her. 

Her aging body. 

Her fragile health. 

The bureaucracy she had to navigate just to access basic care.

The way our society regards the elderly, the disabled, the ones who no longer “produce.”

There’s the truthquake.
The Spirit stirred in me, saying: This is so messed up. This isn’t good and true.
And the best I could do at the time was care for her, honor her dignity, — hand her her clip on earrings and put sunscreen on her legs… bridge the gap….

That truthquake isn’t just private—it trembles in all the systems that fail the marginalized and the vulnerable. 

It echoes in the loss of healthcare for millions,

Through the rolling back of civil rights, reproductive rights, trans rights —

When ICE shows up at someone’s home, in the streets, at their workplace — and detains them without reason.

The truthquake is communal.

The Spirit quarrels and tries to shake up the world to bring truth and justice. 

And the Spirit shakes within us.

The spirit is not neutral.

The gospel is not indifferent.

And asks us not to be either.

I want to close today with a story from the Gospel of John, Chapter 6, I’m not going to put the whole chapter on the screens, but it may be familiar to you.

In fact, we often hear this chapter as two separate stories — the feeding of the five thousand, and the storm on the sea — but it’s actually one continuous account. One day in the life of being human. One day in the life of following Jesus.

The first part of the story takes place on a hillside, with thousands of people. Many of them hungry. A small boy offers a few loaves and fishes and Jesus blesses, breaks, and shares. And everyone is fed. Full. With baskets of leftovers to spare. There’s laughter. I imagine it as a sunny day, the disciples bearing witness to a Spirit of freedom. Abundance. Provision.

The sun sets, the crowds leave, and the disciples descend from the hillside into the dark to the shore.

They get into a boat — something familiar (for many of them fisherman) — but the waters turn. The storm rolls in. The wind rises. And they are terrified. And they feel alone.

The same disciples who had just handed out basket after basket of abundance — with Jesus, now can’t even see what’s ahead of them. Everything once steady is now unsettled, unmoored. They cannot locate Jesus…. 

The very definition of injustice for me is an inability to locate Jesus. Where there is an absence , a betrayal of the Beatitudes — the radical values Jesus affirmed…… a toxic microclimate threatening to overtake Beloved Community, the kindom of God within our reach. 

Sometimes life is like that, isn’t it?

Abundance and injustice. Joy and weeping.

Breathlaughter and truthquake — in a single day.

Moments of joy that leave us full, followed by waves that leave us feeling sick and empty….wondering if goodness and truth really do remain or not?

Jesus, though, does come into view for those disciples and he says, “It is I.”

NOT always that clearly —  like an audible voice saying, “It is I”….

But sometimes I sense that presence when I ASK in prayer.

And sometimes I get a sense of that when I ACT in prayer.

Sometimes I hear it in the belly-laughter of five-year-old year old running across the soccer nights field (or on my street),

And sometimes I hear it in the outraged voices that say, “this. is. not. Fair.”

Sometimes I feel it when I see a hummingbird.

And sometimes I hear it in the echo of a chemo bell traveling down the hallway….

Sometimes God’s presence feels familiar and warm and close and embodied.

And sometimes it feels ghost-like.

And yet like breath, like laughter, like truth, like quaking the presence of God ripples throughout all of our days and goes and goes and goes and goes through us, and with us and among us and even in spite of us. 

May your days this summer embody both breathlaughter and truthquake. An outpouring of joy with a rumble of justice – the most holy of prayers.

 

Resurrection Bearers

Hello everyone — I’m Ivy, a pastor here. I use she/her pronouns. Last Sunday we celebrated Easter together. It was joyous, and celebratory — we had a choir, and baptisms, and an abundance of bao from Chinatown and a meaningful sermon and an egg hunt. 

It was a good day.

And as best we could, we joined in the ancient refrain:

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen indeed!

We leaned into the joy of that refrain, and the promise it holds for our real, everyday lives.
And now, here we are a week later — recognizing that resurrection doesn’t change reality overnight.

Resurrection is real and the roads of our days are long and often unclear.

For Jesus’ followers Easter morning came, and with it Herod was still king. Caesar was still in Rome, the chief priests were still chief priests. The empire still ruled. Jesus rose—but the systems that crushed him still stood. And in our lives too—resurrection has happened, and still, we face grief, injustice, sickness, and confusion.

And so the question isn’t ‘did resurrection happen’?
The question is: how do we live now that it has?

Resurrection isn’t a tidy ending… it is a beginning. 
And the disciples — didn’t get a roadmap or step-by-step plan for the road of faith ahead. 
They got something more vulnerable, more mysterious and more impactful:
They got Jesus.
Alive. Lovingly present. Walking beside them. Calling their names. 

And so do we.

And so this morning, we begin not at the cross, but in the mystery just after—with Mary Magdalene. One of the first to not only witness resurrection…but to become a bearer of it.  

And the question at the heart of her story—and maybe all of ours — is what our next 4-week series will be about: How do we carry our faith when the road isn’t clear?

PRAYER: THANK You JESUS – that you are relentless in your love for us. That you deposit yourself in the most familiar of ways to us and also the most surprising. This morning, God may you enliven our senses — surround us with your presence unto hope and fullness of life. – Amen. 

This time of year reminds me of Fenway Park. Growing up in Maine — the big April school vacation trip would be a trip to a Red Sox game.  Just my mom would take the five of us and we would park at the end of the blue line at Wonderland station and connect to the green line at Government Center and then take it out to Fenway.

My mom always dressed my FOUR brothers in identical t-shirts to be able to spot and count them quickly in the crowds.

And I remember the last time I went I was in high school. I was dating a guy who also came along for that trip. As well as a friend of my mom’s and her son.. So it was a big group of us!

Despite being an avid sports fan — I don’t really remember much about those games. More the atmosphere, the cracker jacks box, the spectacle that many Red Sox fans can be. It was lively, gritty, busy, people-y — I loved it. In fact those games helped me fall in love with Boston — and were a primary reason I went to college here, and why I’ve stayed since 1995. 

When the game ended that day — we all made our way at rush hour back to the T.. Switching trains at government center was a mad dash to smoosh ourselves into the subway car just as the doors were closing, But we made it. 

About two stops away from Government Center — my mom asked me, “hey did you see Ian on the train?”  I was with my boyfriend so I wanted to seem cool and chill — and I rolled my eyes and was like, “yah — I saw him, he’s on.” 

When we got to Wonderland about 40 minutes later — we realized in fact Ian was not on the train. 

He was somewhere back at government center .

This of course was 30 years ago, in the days of no cell phones, no drop a pin for your location. 

I remember my mom, racing to talk to a MBTA Staff — and praying that he would just stay put — not move. 

That even though he might feel lost, confused, overwhelmed and scared… even though he would be looking for the ones he loved but couldn’t see — that he would just stay. Put.  

In the Gospel of John we find a similar kind of moment — the passage we’re about to read picks up just after the chaos and wonder of Easter morning.

Mary Magdalene went to the tomb early and found it empty. She’s already run to tell Peter and another disciple, and they’ve come and gone—perplexed, unsure of what to make of it.

But Mary stays — she  lingers.

I invite you to follow along with me: 

 Scripture | John 20: 11-18 Common English Bible)

Mary stood outside near the tomb, crying. As she cried, she bent down to look into the tomb. She saw two angels dressed in white, seated where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head and one at the foot. The angels asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

She replied, “They have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they’ve put him.” As soon as she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she didn’t know it was Jesus.

Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who are you looking for?”

Thinking he was the gardener, she replied, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him and I will get him.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary.”

She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabbouni” (which means Teacher).

Jesus said to her, “Don’t hold on to me, for I haven’t yet gone up to my Father. Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them, ‘I’m going up to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Mary Magdalene left and announced to the disciples, “I’ve seen the Lord.” 

We’ll return to this scripture and story in a moment—because Mary’s encounter is so rich. But what’s striking is that she’s not alone. She’s not alone in the garden — but she’s also not alone in the long history of Jesus followers…

It turns out that her moment of not recognizing Jesus at first… is actually part of a larger pattern — and more the norm than the exception.

  1. Other stories:

Yes — Mary thinks that Jesus was the gardener.
The Emmaus disciples thought he was a stranger along the road.
Thomas needed to see the wounds.
Peter didn’t realize it was Jesus until the nets overflowed with fish.
Paul was actually blinded by light before he could see who Jesus truly was.
The disciples in the boat were scared in the storm and asked, “Who is this?”
People couldn’t believe Joseph’s boy could be the Messiah.
John the Baptist, even from prison, still had to ask: “Are you the one?”
Peter called him Messiah — and then tried to talk him out of the cross.
A woman at a well thought he was just another thirsty traveler.

— and so on — 

With faith, with Jesus —things certainly don’t always look or unfold the way we always expect.

Maybe today — you aren’t sure where Jesus is—
Maybe you are confused, doubting, tired, or afraid—
maybe  you thought he’d be somewhere or show up some way—

Let it be known — you are in very good company.

“Christ is risen indeed!” — is sometimes easier to say than to believe. 

Spiritual Practice:

This helped me this week. Somehow, I didn’t feel as alone knowing that the followers of Jesus and the saints before me have walked this same path too. Walking into the post-Easter days that ask us to carry resurrection in a world that hasn’t changed overnight. These days hold an odd combination—so many things are familiar and known—my surroundings; home, work, rhythms and schedules….And yet, underneath it all, there’s an undercurrent of uncertainty.

The world feels increasingly unfamiliar, unsettling, and disorienting. And I find myself reaching to see Jesus wherever I can—finding Him sometimes in the ways I’m used to, the familiar ways — and also stretching to encounter Him in spots where I never realized he’s been. 

I believe these days are asking us to seek and find Jesus in new ways.  Not because he’s not where He’s always been – but because we will need him to BE IN ALL THE places we haven’t yet found him to be, as well.

And that’s what I love about the story we just read of Mary Magdalene. Mary goes looking for Jesus—but doesn’t recognize him at first.
She’s grieving, confused, overwhelmed… and then what breaks through?
Her name. He says her name.
And everything changes.

Mary’s encounter is so human. So honest. 

She thought he’d be in the tomb. He wasn’t.
She thought he was the gardener. He wasn’t.
She didn’t know it was Jesus—until love spoke her name.

I believe this is how Jesus still comes to us.
Not always in the places we expect, or the prayers we’ve prayed non-stop, or the scriptures we’ve memorized.

 Not always when we feel prepared.

 But always—lovingly.
 Always—by name.

We, like Mary, are being asked to live into resurrection before everything around us looks different. Before the systems change. Before the grief lifts.

Before the road is clear.

And so the story of the resurrection goes… as I read it.  It’s mystery and life and hope and it starts and ends with Mary loving Jesus. (And Jesus loving Mary)
And Every. Moment. In-Between. Is of course an expression of this deep love. 
The moments, like us when we rush to find Jesus in our despair, where we go to find him where he should be, where we last knew him to be. 

But we can’t find him!  When we are perplexed. WHERE we fall to our knees in exhaustion. Where we cry, huge heaping sobs, and say “this is tooooo hard!” And where we ask bold, true questions like “where are you JESUS?” Where we shout,  “YOU SHOULD BE HERE!”  Mary’s story is our story too, a

“human account of being wounded and resurrected at the same time.” (Richard Rohr).

And Easter is an invitation to not only celebrate the resurrection of Jesus  — but to realize that every message of Jesus is also a message about all of us — humanity. Mary shows us this, she wasn’t just a bystander to the resurrection of Jesus, but she herself becomes an active bearer of the resurrection. 

The luster, the shine to resurrection, is that we are invited to find Jesus in the parts of our lives, where we haven’t recognized him before… Resurrection asks us to keep looking for life, to keep showing up again and again and to trust that loving Jesus—a Jesus who some days we can’t seem to recognize —is still worth it.

To trust that in that love, Jesus will keep greeting us again and again.

Because that’s what he’s always done.

He meets people right where they are—at the edge of grief, in the midst of fear, in the ordinariness of their lives.
He walks beside them on long roads.
He shows up behind locked doors and says, “Peace be with you.”
He stands on shorelines, calling friends to breakfast.
He stretches out his hands and invites the doubters closer.
He breaks bread—and opens eyes as well as hearts.
He calls them by name in garden places.
He calls us by name. . . over and over again.

The MBTA staff had been announcing Ian’s name for a good 30 minutes over the platform speakers. “Ian Hanson please come to the MBTA  booth.”  Ian didn’t hear this announcement — it was lost in the shuffle and movement and noise of life. Of people rushing past, hundreds of lives going by him.

An hour and a half later, my mom made it back to the station. She spotted his neon green t-shirt from the length of the platform.

And she called his name.

Not over the intercom. Not through a microphone.
She just called out: “Ian!”

And he looked up.  Immediately. That one word sliced through all the noise, the crowd, the fear.

That voice that carried love, that he knew above all else. 

Faith, sometimes, is like that.

Not about racing ahead, but staying where you are—confused, overwhelmed, unsure—and still trusting that Love will call your name.

To keep loving Jesus from the same spot on the platform of life that we are in — again and again — day after day…..  To notice. To show up. 

This is what it means to be resurrection bearers.  To be invited into an upending, disruptive, shaking story – one that calls each of us as if by NAME to declare that yes,

“we have seen the Lord,”

that Jesus is here.

 So how do we hold onto that truth—how do we live into resurrection before the road is clear? One way is to practice — to familiarize yourselves to God’s voice — personal, tender– calling us  by name. Here’s a simple way to do just that.

YOUR FULL NAME || PRACTICE
Here’s a quick practice to fully embrace your “inner Mary Magdalene” – your FULL NAME as a resurrection bearer.  I’ll walk us through how to build our FULL NAMES.  Use this as a way to remember your name, that Jesus calls again and again in the most familiar ways and the most surprising ones. (take a moment to close your eyes — to be with Jesus)

  1. Say your first name, “Ivy.”
  2. Bring to mind an encounter with God you had this week (recently).
    What did God give to you in this encounter? Try to get it to one word, or a short phrase.
    (Examples: courage, compassion, breath, joy, comfort, rest, relief, etc…”)

    1. Use this word as the prefix to your name. So now you have,  “Rest, Ivy.”
  3. Lastly, remember the declaration of resurrection Mary Magdalene made, “I have seen the Lord” and Jesus’ resurrection promise that He declares to us each day, “I AM here.”
    1. Use this phrase, “I AM here”,  as your last name.
  4. Put your full name together:  “Courage, Ivy. I AM here.”
  5. Repeat as necessary, to remember that you hold the power of the resurrection within you, every time you encounter Jesus and embrace what He gives you.

May this be your resurrection bearer NAME.  Hold it close.
Let it remind you: Jesus still calls us by name.
Not with explanation or instruction,
but with presence,  with love,  with a voice that knows you deeply.

When Mary didn’t recognize Jesus, he didn’t give her a theology.
He didn’t correct her or explain himself.
He simply said her name: “Mary.”

Your name is not just what others call you. It’s what God calls out of you.

We live in a world where Good Friday shadows still linger. But we rise to Easter morning again and again. Every day we get to choose:

To carry fear or to carry faith.
To give in to despair, or to reveal life.

This is the work of resurrection bearers:
To keep showing up.
To keep walking.
To keep weeping and wondering and whispering, “I have seen the Lord.”

So go today with your resurrection name.

Carry it into the known and unknown places of your day.

Into the places that ache. Into the places that wait.

And know this: You are not alone. You are not lost.

You are named, and loved..

You are a resurrection bearer.

The Kin-dom of God is like….

We are four weeks into Lent, a season observed by many Christian traditions and rooted in  Jesus’ time in the wilderness. This season invites us to reflect on our own spiritual journeys, as much as it does Jesus’ experience of fasting and facing temptation. The wilderness was a period marked by chaos, uncertainty and also growth. Jesus was tempted by a vision of a kingdom built on power, wealth, and authority—values that contrasted the way of Jesus –and the kin-dom of God that he was trying to unfold. Instead of giving in to these temptations, Jesus drew close to God, to the wind, the Spirit, and the air— invisible forces that surrounded him in the wilderness and sustained him in desolate times. 

 This Lent, our theme has been Air—an ever-present force that shapes and sustains life in all its complexities. Just as air is essential for our breath, the Spirit, too, is essential for our spiritual well-being — wherever we might be at — and however we might be feeling. I love that Lent doesn’t shy away from the realities – the wildness– of our days. In fact, its boldness invites us to sit right in the gap—the “in-between” space—between the “now” of our lived experience here on this earth and the “not yet” of God’s dreams and our shared hopes for a world transformed by God’s Kin-dom.

Lent, in its stripped-down, unassuming bareness, invites us to pay attention to and carry the smallest of things —  hope, wonder, awe, compassion —  as much as we carry grief and fear.   

Today, I want to invite us to not only get curious about where God is at work among us, but also to ask where we can get to work with God, who IS ALREADY among us. And I want to ask not just what our best chances at ‘heaven on earth’ are, but how we can leave nothing to chance and actively participate in shaping heaven on earth—here and now. Even when the air feels still, when change seems impossible, when it feels like the Spirit has gone silent. 

In desolate times, how can we remember the truth that the Kin-dom is never far? How can we remember that it is around us, within us  — never separate, always close? 

I’ll invite you to hold these questions as we turn to the words of Romans 8 as a prayer this morning: 

35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?

36 As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long;
    we are considered/treated as sheep to be slaughtered.”

37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,

39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:35-39 (New International Version)

Amen.

This week I read Suleika Jaouad’s memoir (soo-lay-ka jew-wad), her husband is Jon Batiste. The title of her book is, “Between 2 Kingdoms — a Memoir of a Life Interrupted.” She reflects on living between the worlds of health and illness, navigating the emotional landscapes of two “kingdoms.” One kingdom is defined by normalcy, vibrancy, and health, while the other is shaped by survival, trauma, and the constant presence of sickness.

Throughout the memoir, Jaouad reflects on her experience and the tension she feels between these two worlds— In the midst of this, a friend shared a perspective that stuck with her, actually about travel, he said:

“When we travel, we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you’re actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember.  The key is to be present wherever you are right now.”  

“Present to ‘what is’— It is a beautiful sentiment and also a challenging posture, especially when we hold within us the promise of heaven on Earth, but find ourselves in a reality that often feels and looks a lot more like hell.

As many of you know, cancer is part of my family’s and my story now as well. My husband, Scott, was recently diagnosed, but let me say the

“prognosis is good — the treatment plan is in action and after just 2 treatments, Scott’s feeling better than he has in years!” 

There are likely lots of public speaking courses that would advise me to not talk about something so live, so raw, specific and personal like a cancer journey — but maybe it’s obvious — I haven’t taken any public speaking classes.
And the reality is – is that illness, in whatever form we encounter it—whether personal illness, the illness of a nation, or global—is a deeply universal experience. 

A writer I admire, Susan Sontag, says,

‘Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship—in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick.’

Though we all prefer to carry the ‘good passport,’ sooner or later, we all find ourselves identifying with the other place. And now, with months of treatment ahead, Scott and I find ourselves holding that dual citizenship.

Throughout Lent we have been guided by a single line from a prayer written for times of great rupture and uncertainty:

“Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10)

At community group a couple of weeks ago — we talked about ‘stillness’ —

“what is stillness to you? When have you been Still — what did it feel like? What did you encounter?”

I thought about those questions, and my experience in the cancer infusion clinic — discovering in part what stillness is not:  

Stillness is not necessarily sitting, or achieving silence or free of discomfort.
Stillness is being present to what is — in between two kingdoms — perhaps even OPENING to the fullness of the tension that exists there.

And Stillness is in part about cultivating space within, space where even the smallest things can take root and create change. FOR ME, change comes in the tiniest shifts of perspective – enough so, to pivot away from the temptation of cynicism and despair,  enough to not let heartbreak hijack my entire scope… small, small, shifts.  Sure I’d love a BIG , efficient fix — half the time in the clinic, half the treatments — or how about no cancer at all… !

But the reality is — is that this is not our “now” —
Our “now” holds infusions of a chemo drug that in medical speak is called “the red devil” — AND it also holds an oven-like contraption that is full of stacks and stacks of warm blankets to use at our whim, views of Costco from the clinic window (which is literally Scott’s version of heaven on earth), fig newtons at the bottomless nurses snack station — perfect little ice cubes…   is saturated with the littlest sparks of the presence and work of God. 

I’ve had times where I thought “I should be still” —  I was on a retreat in the Fall and I couldn’t quiet my racing heart. By day #2 my heart rate had actually climbed like waaayyy higher than it should be… And I was like,

“come on — you know how to do this retreat thing, this STILLNESS thing — CALM DOWN, just Breathe. . . just breathe.” 

And yet my body didn’t respond in form — because my body was actually messaging something important to me — that the season of  life leading up to that retreat was furious, fast  and hard — and rather than “shushing” it into stillness — what my body actually needed was for me to give credence to where it was at. Health practitioners in that moment and since, have said the best thing to do is get in a cold shower,  or do a plank for 1 minute. Your body needs to have the intensity be “seen and heard and met — acknowledged,”  and then it can downshift a little bit. Meeting yourself in that tension—of longing to be in the serene/wellness/the kin-dom of God —  while feeling the hard stuff—that too is stillness.  

Sitting in a chemo room for 11 hours — isn’t a space to pretend “all is well.” It is an invitation to turn and face “what is.”   Not turn away from it. To sit squarely in the ‘inbetween’ — “I wish this wasn’t what this is..” and also “I’m not alone — there are many, many people picking fig newtons from that snack bar too — and yes these seats are uncomfortable, but there is life and dignity here — and it’s there I can find and “know that God is God,” giving air to my own spirit — keeping me breathing in the GAP between the “now” and the “not yet.”

SCRIPTURE

Thankfully Jesus had a lot more to say about life on Earth than he did about theology. Rather than talking about loft ideas — which totally would have missed where most people were at — he talked about everyday things. There is hardly a divine truth that doesn’t take some shape on Earth. And most of us, I think, get what it is to live this real life on Earth. 

Jesus’ parables reflect real life – and speak on multiple levels to multiple groups with the same words. Religious leaders, ordinary people, farmers, disciples — through them he invited people to begin imagining what the Kin-dom of Heaven could look like in their everyday lives – through the simple, the familiar, the tangible.

In the telling of parables Jesus says the Kin-dom of God is like a whole lot of things — wheat & weeds, yeast in dough, a hidden pearl, a seed — and seems to suggest that it is about right relationship, creating a community where all are seen as kin and kith. It’s a KIN-dom (rather than a KING-dom), growing from the smallest, least likely things into something inclusive and expansive.

Take, for example, the parable of the mustard seed: 

Matthew 13:31-32
He told another parable to them: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and planted in his field.  It’s the smallest of all seeds. But when it’s grown, it’s the largest of all vegetable plants. It becomes a tree so that the birds in the sky come and nest in its branches.”

Maybe there’s not a whole lot new to say here — it’s pretty straightforward — something tiny can become something big. Big outcomes, transformation, big goals accomplished, big growth — a big KINGDOM …

And I think, while it’s tempting to focus on that lesson of the parable specifically, perhaps the deeper invitation is to recognize the growth and evolution that happens in the “gap” between. The cultivation and partnership — and the hardship — that happens before it becomes something big. This isn’t just about size; it’s about the life and flourishing that emerge through those small steps, the unseen process, and the shared work that occurs from many actors along the way. The Kin-dom of God isn’t simply about the end result but about the ongoing unfolding of love and life and relationships in our midst. 

 Ezekiel

We can see this same theme echoed in the Hebrew Scriptures, long before Jesus spoke his parables. In Ezekiel we see God’s kindom described not as the towering, imposing force many would expect, but as a tender shoot growing into something that offers shelter and life to many, something life-giving:

Ezekiel 17:22-24 (New International Version):

God says: I myself will take a shoot from the very top of a cedar and plant it; I will break off a tender sprig from its topmost shoots and plant it on a high and lofty mountain. On the mountain heights of Israel I will plant it; it will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar. Birds of every kind will rest in the shade of its branches. All the trees of the forest will know that I the Lord bring down the tall tree and make the low tree grow tall. I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. 

The Israelites here were in exile, far from the land of promise. Jerusalem and the Temple had been destroyed, leaving the people disillusioned and in grief. And the hope nestled in these verses details a dramatic reversal of the natural order: God brings down the mighty, proud kingdoms and causes the lowly to rise. Subverting and disrupting oppressive structures that appear unshakable and dominant, challenging the power dynamics that the world clings to.

God’s promise wasn’t for an earthly kingdom of power, ego, and success— but a kin-dom where new life could emerge from what seemed broken, bringing flourishing not just to Israel, but to all people. This is the kin-dom that Jesus came to proclaim: a kin-dom that grows even in the midst of hardship and pain.

The virtue for living in these “in-between” times is what Jesus calls “faith.” It’s about having the grace and freedom to live God’s dream for the world now, while not turning away from the world as it is. The secret of this Kin-dom life is learning to live in both worlds simultaneously.
(Richard Rohr 2020).

In light of this, I’m grateful for how Jesus gives us these simple, ordinary pictures of the kin-dom—seeds, trees, birds, and shoots –things the world often overlooks in favor of big goals and measurable success. Yet in the kin-dom, growth isn’t about mass or numbers — but about furthering life. Creating life, hosting life, holding life. For even just one bird, the tree becomes a source of hospitality, home, and sanctuary. This is what the kin-dom is like.

It can be hard for us to value that which depends on others for life and growth, and that which is not about controlling or dominating. But this is the kin-dom that Jesus invites us to help shape. It’s not something we’ll experience only someday, if we work hard enough and the evils of this day are overcome….It’s here in the middle of our ordinary lives — connected to other ordinary lives. A resource I love called “Enfleshed,” puts it this way, “The kin-dom is better thought of as the meal that feeds the weeping in the midst of grief”, rather than in an entirely different world. Jesus’ ordinary examples offer us hope now — for such a time as this.   

Part of this Lent guide is meant to bring the ordinary to your experience as well. The accompanying imagery chosen of birds and feathers wasn’t just done so on a whim. I curated this guide sitting in MGH waiting rooms (I’m not trying to be a martyr here — they are called waiting rooms for a reason). But I sat with the words that Steve wrote in this guide, and the theme of AIR — and the reality of being in a hospital waiting room — we’ve all been there, right? Listening to snippets of stories, and diagnosis, and witnessing frustrations, and parking garage validations, phone calls to loved ones, and tender hand holding, and tears being blinked away — all of life, trying to unfold in that in-between space — Floating perhaps to transform, as Emily Dickinson said into “Hope” – the thing with feathers – that perches in our soul.

Birds — those who fly freely between the worlds — the heavens and this earth —  remind us that the kind-om isn’t out of reach. Our vision is often limited by life’s harshness, tempting us, like Jesus in the wilderness, to seek control and quick fixes. But the bird’s-eye view offers a freer, broader perspective (John O’Donohue). These ordinary creatures remind us that the kin-dom is like a seed in our hand—its potential, right at our fingertips.

Emergent strategy

As we continue the work of creating and growing the kin-dom of God, it’s clear that SIGNIFICANT change is needed here and now. Adrienne Maree Brown’s work on Emergent Strategy (and her book by the same name), has been so helpful to me. While big movements and systemic changes are vital, what stands out in emergent strategy is the recognition that the powerful shifts we hope to see are made up of small, intentional, strategic actions that deviate from the dominant patterns of our times. Brown emphasizes that meaningful change doesn’t solely come from grand gestures or monumental shifts. It begins with small, deliberate acts—practices that align with our values and yet radically challenge and veer from the systems that govern us. The culture of emergent strategy critiques the capitalist, colonial legacies of our world.

Brown insists that we must begin to “shape change” rather than seeing ourselves as victims of change. Just this week we heard Senator Cory Booker say,

“I’m not going to allow my inability to do everything undermine my ability to do something.”

and then he fasted and spoke for 25 hours — (ok, maybe that’s not the best example of a small thing — because that’s pretty impressive), but just think of all the “small somethings” we can do together.

Amidst the challenges, there is a profound truth: the smallest sparks of hope can grow exponentially—planting seeds that inspire us to take action. We — you and me –“WE” — are very small actors in a world rife with COLOSSAL problems, spinning within a vast galaxy. But We the People carry the seeds for change and transformation. In this very moment, We the People are called to bring the Kin-dom of God to earth, nurturing a more perfect union, establishing justice, and promoting the general welfare, right where we are.

Brown says this

“is the central work of each generation: to SEED and expand the fields of possibility for those to come, weaving together the best practices and lessons from the generations that came before. In the face of narrowing options for human survival, it is our purpose to create more possibilities. Many of which will come from an evolution of how we are in relationship with each other and from an evolution of spirit.

Octavia Butler said,

“kindness eases change,”

OUR kindness to others in the gap of the “now” and the “not yet”, creates more possibilities for us to move forward together.

Jesus showed us how to live in that gap, over and over again. He embodied healing, sat with and spoke truth to, and lived among hurting people, broken cities, and oppressive systems—and STILL He saw the possibility for wholeness. What a wonder, what compassion.

To allow our astonishment, our wonder, and our compassion to fade is a privilege we cannot afford. (For many of us), it is a privilege to give in to despair, to abandon hope, to resign ourselves to the idea that the kin-dom of God will come—someday—when it is ours to shape today. The kindom of God’s love is here — around us, within us, between us – just waiting for our participation. Again, as

Romans 8 reminds us: 

35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?

37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,

39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.



Prayer:
May the Spirit of God, like the air we breathe, continue to move us forward, helping us to live in the “now” and the “not yet”—toward a kin-dom that is already here and still to come.

 

Resources: 

enfleshed.com 

July 2020

 

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds  

by adrienne maree brown

 

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad  | Mar 1, 2022