[FCS] "Letting Go of the Shore"

Letting Go of the Shore

[Audio recorded version available here.]

Our Scripture reading this morning comes from the Gospel according to Luke.

Luke’s is one of 4 different reports of the life and ministry of Jesus, and is often referred to as the one most favorable toward those on the margins -- women and the poor.

In Luke’s gospel, the birth of Jesus is announced first to poor shepherds working the night shift out in the dirty fields with smelly sheep. Some of the parables unique to Luke’s Gospel are the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal.

Our reading today comes about 2/3 of the way through the book -- Jesus has already begun turning toward Jerusalem, warning the disciples that the Child of Humanity will suffer, be killed, and rise again.

Listen now for what the Spirit is saying to the Church.

²⁵Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus; and Jesus turned and said to them, ²⁶“Whoever comes to me and does not hate parent, spouse, children, siblings, yes, and even life itself, is not able to be my disciple. ²⁷Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me is not able to be my disciple. ²⁸For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether you have enough to complete it? ²⁹Otherwise, when you have laid a foundation and are not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule you, ³⁰saying, ‘This person began to build and was not able to finish.’ ³¹Or what ruler, going out to wage war against another ruler, will not sit down first and consider whether they are able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against them with twenty thousand? ³²If they cannot, then, while the other is still far away, they send a delegation and ask for the terms of peace. ³³So therefore, none of you is able to become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

Luke 14:25-33 (NRSV, alt.)

(In the beginning was the Word. / And the Word was with God.)

Church, will you pray with me?

God, may the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts, keep us along the journey to Jerusalem, to the tomb, and into the Resurrection life. Amen.

The Luke passage assigned for today is arguably even more divisive than the one Henry preached on a few weeks ago -- today Jesus says, "Whoever comes to me and does not hate parent, spouse, children, siblings, yes, and even life itself, is not able to be my disciple. [...] therefore, none of you is able to become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."

I think we often get stuck on the "give up all your possessions" bit -- Matthew and Mark each have a whole story about a law-abiding rich young ruler who goes away from Jesus sad because "sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor" is too big of an ask for someone who has managed to obey all the Commandments. But this whole "hate your entire family and even your very life" is pretty intense.

Now, I don't think that Jesus wants us to literally hate our family members -- earlier in Luke, Jesus proclaimed:

“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. [...] If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.” (Luke 6:27-28 & 32, NRSV)

And Jesus certainly doesn’t want us to hate our own life -- I think Jesus weeps at suicidality, just as Jesus weeps at anything that makes people believe they would be better off dead.

On the passage that Henry preached on ("Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!"), black gay Episcopalian Broderick Greer Tweeted, "When good news is being announced and enacted at the margins, it often sounds bad news to the powers that be."

I think the message in this morning’s gospel passage is similar. Various commentators¹ have noted that in context, the Hebrew word translated “hate” means more like detachment, a choosing of one over the other -- like when Jesus later says that you cannot serve two masters, for surely you will love one and hate the other (Luke 16:13). Here, Jesus is saying, “This is a big deal. I am bringing about radical transformation of everything, and you have to be more committed to the transformed life than you are to any of even your closest interpersonal relationships or the life you currently have -- otherwise this literally just won’t work. You cannot learn to swim if you never let go of the shore.”

This weekend we celebrate Labor Day -- though many of us are used to celebrating it with barbecues and department store sales, rather than reflecting on the history of labor in the US.

According to a Jacobin article last year, “Although previous Septembers had seen small workers celebrations in many states observing the end of summer, the first federally protected Labor Day was marked in 1894 with an AFL [American Federation of Labor]-supported parade.”

So that sounds really good, right? Over a century ago, President Grover Cleveland declared a federal holiday recognizing the labor movement. Except that earlier that same year, Cleveland had brought in the US Army to suppress the Pullman Strike, and he made Labor Day a federal holiday to curry favor from workers who were understandably pissed about that.

I wonder if this is the kind of trying to have it both ways that Jesus rejects.

At the same time as President Cleveland was making Labor Day a federal holiday, many groups had been pushing for May 1st -- May Day -- to be an International Workers' Day, commemorating Chicago's 1886 Haymarket affair.

In May of 1886, folks were rallying in Haymarket Square in Chicago to support workers striking for an eight-hour work day and to protest the recent killings of workers by police. Sounds similar to contemporary #FightFor15 and #BlackLivesMatter protests. The police ordered folks to disperse and someone threw a homemade bomb in front of the police as they advanced on the protestors. Many were killed and wounded in the ensuing violence and, shockingly, accounts vary about whether protestors fired first, about whether police fired on folks who were fleeing, etc.

There was a harsh anti-union (and anti-immigrant) backlash after this incident (and a huge outpouring of support, including financial support, for the police). Lots of people only peripherally involved in the rally were arrested. Media stoked public opinion against anarchists for their violent tactics. This all may also sound familiar.

This is the kind of history we could recall on Labor Day. A reminder that we’re not in control of what will happen after -- whether someone will throw a pipe bomb in front of us, whether the police will shoot at us, whether our homes will be raided or public opinion will turn against us -- but we can control how we react, what choices we make.

And those choices are not always easy.

Would you have marched in Grover Cleveland’s Labor Day parade in 1894? Would you have refused, still bitter from his response to the Pullman strike earlier in the year? Would you have waited until an eight-hour workday was the norm, something that still hadn’t happened 8 years after the Haymarket protests?

I’m not here to tell you how a hypothetical you should have behaved over a century ago, but the various texts assigned for this Sunday all converge around this theme of the choices we make.

In the reading from the prophet Jeremiah, God talks about being like a potter, and while that’s lovely and all, Jeremiah speaks of a vision of God-the-potter with a clay vessel that was spoiled, and which God reworks into an entirely new vessel. God literally says (paraphrased), “house of Israel, you are like this clay in the potter’s hand, I can break down and destroy kingdoms, and I can plant and build up kingdoms” (Jeremiah 18:5-9). This is not a comfort but a threat -- “you think we have this special relationship, but I could destroy you and make a new Chosen People.”

The Republican nominee for President this year has been using the phrase "Make America Great Again," and the Democratic nominee has countered with "America Is Already Great" -- which, while politically understandable, is a response I'm uncomfortable with on account of how it elides the MANY MANY ways in which America is deeply flawed. Now, I don’t think God is about to smush us into a ball of clay and build up a new nation on this land -- but I also don’t think it’s the worst thing God could do, especially since we white folk already played God on this land, nearly destroying the nations who were already here (the Wampanoag locally, and I’m not even going to attempt to list the currently 566 federally recognized Indian Nations in what is now the US).

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, a biracial man, recently got blasted by certain parts of White America for not standing during the national anthem before a football game.

In an interview with NFL Media, he said: "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

Earlier in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus opens public ministry by reading from the prophet Isaiah “The Spirit of God is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the jubilee year” (Luke 4:18-19, quoting Isaiah 61:1-2) and declaring “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” -- and then the hometown crowd tries to throw Jesus off a cliff. Now, one can certainly read the story as the people reacting to Jesus saying, “This thing that God promised to do? You have seen that promise fulfilled here and now in me” -- reacting to the equation of this peasant kid with God -- and certainly between the Scripture reading and the attempted murder, Jesus gives a little “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown” speech which seems aimed at pissing off the crowd. But I wonder if part of it was that they didn’t actually want that Scripture fulfilled -- because to do so would involve a radical re-ordering of the structure of their lives, their communities, their institutions, and they were not interested in that.

What if when Jesus said, “I have come to proclaim release to the captives,” Jesus meant, “That’s cool and all that you’ve started the slow process of shutting down the 13 federal private prisons, and you’ve declared that poor folks can’t be held in jail just because they can’t afford bail, but I am coming to abolish this whole system. I’m here to abolish Immigrant Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Department of Homeland Security, and the whole prison industrial complex.”

I can imagine many people hearing a call to dismantle our toxic policing system as an assertion that, “If you do not hate your parent, spouse, children, or siblings who are police officers, then you are not able to be my disciple.”

Later in Luke, Jesus will say, “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it” (Luke 17:33). Those who tie their identity to the structures of a fallen world will not be able to enter into the new life that is growing up all around us, but those who are able to empty their hands of all the preconceived notions we carry with us about how the world works will be able to receive new and unexpected gifts. You cannot learn to swim if you never let go of the shore.

In the text for today, Jesus uses the analogy of preparing for going to war -- cautioning that you not set yourself up for failure and embarrassment by getting into a war you can’t win. I don’t think Jesus supported war in the traditional military sense, but many in Jesus’ community expected the Messiah to be a Davidic king who would overthrow the occupying government. And I wonder if Jesus is saying in part, “You think we’re going to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house?³ Do you think you really have what it takes to defeat the Powers that are oppressing us, or are you going to find yourself outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned?”⁴

The Roman Empire was a powerful oppressor -- a military power that would literally leave people nailed up on crosses along the roadside dying slowly and painfully as a warning to anyone else who might try to oppose them. The Empire not only had vast amounts of military resources, but it also knew how to play games of intimidation and appeasement -- because the most effective way to police people is to get them to police themselves.

Jesus’ counter-intuitive way to win against the Powers is to not play their game. Jesus says, “If you do not give up all your possessions, you will not be able to become my disciple.” Your comfortable suburban home where all your neighbors look and vote like you. Your assurance that if you call the police, they will not shoot you or someone you love. Your comfort giving money to yet another film that casts a cisgender man as a transgender woman. Your insistence that people in pain from yet another microaggression be calm and gracious unpaid educators.

There are so many, many ways we shield ourselves from really entering into the pain experienced by marginalized people at the hands of the death-dealing Powers.

Theologian Laurel Schneider talks about “promiscuous incarnation,” asserting that “the narratives of Jesus of Nazareth suggest that the divinity which his flesh reveals is radically open to consorting with anyone. It follows no rules of respectability or governing morality in its pursuit of connection with others, many others, serially and synchronically, passionately and openly.”⁵

Earlier I used the analogy of needing to let go of the shore in order to be able to swim.

Letting go of the shore enables you to go on adventures, enables you to go deep. You can’t explore all the riches of the water from the shoreline. There is a whole world that is literally unavailable to you, that you literally cannot enter into.

In the reading for today from Deuteronomy, God says, "See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity." (30:15) God says (paraphrased), “Love me, stay close to me, obey my commandments, that you and your descendants may have life.” God wants so much for each and every one of us to be able to enjoy the fullest possible life. And that just isn’t possible while we’re cutting ourselves off from each other, shielding ourselves from necessary discomfort, continuing to be complicit in systemic oppression. It’s not that God wants us to be miserable, it’s that God knows transformation is hard.

Theologian Kathy Rudy asserts that in our culture’s emphasis on monogamy, “We are told that on the deepest level our allegiance and commitment belong not to our larger community but to our partner or nuclear family.”⁶

Is this perhaps what Jesus meant by saying we must hate our family to become Christ’s disciples?

We are called to open ourselves up to broader and deeper ways of being in relationship -- community conflict resolution that doesn’t call on the police or the carceral system, stories for our children about their futures that don’t presume their gender or sexuality, facing our history honestly and building new futures.

We do this by being vulnerable with each other and taking seriously people’s accounts of their lived experiences -- seeking out the words of autistic people, people with disabilities, people living with mental illness, currently and formerly incarcerated folks, indigenous folks and people of color... And I do mean people’s own lived experiences -- not people who have studied or worked with these populations; not tourists who tried out the experience of wearing hijab in public, asking for spare change on street corners, being a woman on the Internet, or whatever -- actual people’s own lived experiences in the world inhabiting their own identities.

This kind of relationship-building, this work of stretching our comfort and expanding our knowledge, doesn’t require waiting for a leader, it’s work we can do now, and must always keep doing as we continue growing into the Kindom.

Amen.

References (besides the ones already hyperlinked in the text)

1. On "hate" in this text:

• Fred B. Craddock, John H. Hayes, Carl R. Holladay, and Gene M. Tucker. Preaching Through the Christian Year C.
• Left Behind and Loving It (2013).
• Progressive Involvement (2010).

2. In addition to the Jacobin article cited, I also skimmed the Wikiedia articles on Labor Day, May Day, the Haymarket affair, and the eight-hour workday; as well as an IWW piece on the origins of May Day, a Slate article on Labor Day, and a CNN opinion piece on Labor Day.

3. Shout out to Audre Lorde.

4. I said I wasn't going to reference Hamilton ... and then it happened anyway.

5. Schneider, Laurel C. "Promiscuous Incarnation." Chapter 14 in The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity (Margaret D. Kamitsuka, ed.), 2010. Page 244.

6. Rudy, Kathy. "'Where Two or More Are Gathered': Using Gay Communities as a Model for Christian Sexual Ethics." Chapter 15 in Our Families, Our Values: Snapshots of Queer Kinship (Robert E. Goss & Amy Adams Squire Strongheart, eds.), 1997. Page 201.

[Children's Choice] alternative answers

As part of FCS' Living The Questions series, instead of a regular sermon yesterday, the pastors answered questions from the kids (questions the kids had generated in Sunday School in the preceding weeks, so the pastors had gotten to see and think about them in advance). [You can listen to the whole thing here.]

It was a lot of fun, but there were definitely a couple of questions I would have answered slightly differently -- and why have a blog if you can't use it for "what I would have said said instead"?

***

Why wasn't Jesus a girl? (Izzy & Carmen)

Jesus might have been a girl. All the stories we have talk about Jesus like Jesus was a boy, but sometimes someone who we think looks like a boy might actually feel like they're a girl -- or might feel like they're neither a boy or a girl.

But let's say Jesus really was a boy, just like all the stories we've heard. At the time that Jesus first showed up on earth, people listened to men a lot more than they did to women, so I think that when God decided to show up in human form, God knew that God had to look like a boy, or else people wouldn't pay much attention.

But Jesus knew that women's voices were really important. You remember the story of how Jesus got killed and then came back from the dead, what we call resurrected? Mary Magdalene was the first person who Jesus showed up to after coming back from the dead. She told all of Jesus' friends what she had found out, and they didn't believe her because they hadn't seen it for themselves, so Jesus showed up to them, too, but Mary Magdalene was the very first person who saw the resurrected Jesus, which I think is pretty special.

And there's one other piece of that story that I think is really interesting -- when Mary first saw the resurrected Jesus, she didn't recognize Jesus, she thought Jesus was the gardener! And I wonder if that's because Jesus looked different from the way Mary remembered, maybe Jesus looked like a girl!

Eventually, Jesus went away again, but we can see a little bit of Jesus in every person we encounter, even if they don't look like we would expect Jesus to look ... they might be Black, or they might be a girl, or they might use a wheelchair....

(Molly's answer started with the "people didn't listen to boys back then" and moved to the idea of Jesus coming back many times in many forms, but not in a way that I felt was particularly comprehensible -- admittedly, the whole "whatever you did to the least of these you did to me" etc. is difficult to wrap one's head around, though I parsed her as saying that Jesus came back multiple times in more of the ~literal way we tend to think about it, which was extra-weird-to-me. To her credit, she did mention a 12th-century mystic referred to Jesus as mother and sister.)

***

Does God know my name? (Cole)

Yes, God does know your name -- all of your names, in fact.

God knows the name your parents gave you, and all the nicknames that people call you, and all the names that you might choose for yourself in the future.

(Jeff's answer elided the fact that the name your parents gave you is not always your forever-name.)

Why Words Matter 2013

Rev. Molly was invited to be a part of an ecumenical workshop called Why Words Matter: Expansive Language & Liturgical Leadership (on Friday, October 4). She was unable to participate, and I was among the people she suggested as alternates -- "a lay person in our congregation for whom these issues are very close to her heart (and she is very articulate about gender and God! She's been keeping me on a growing edge about God, gender and trans issues for some time now)." ♥

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but I was pleased to get to attend and participate.

I knew the audience would be somewhat wide-ranging, so I was expecting some conservative folks (I don't think there were any) but was surprised to encounter people who would likely have described themselves as good liberals who said things like that The New Century Hymnal "ruined" the Christmas hymns. Yeah ... my starting place for gender/language conversations is apparently different from other people's.

Near the end, one of the organizers commented that from her dropping in on various conversations throughout the afternoon, it was clear that there was a lot of energy for these conversations to continue. I would definitely be interested in attending additional stuff like this. I will have my expectations calibrated more accurately -- and also may be more assertive about bringing up my hobby-horses: non-binary gender, non-male Jesus, and cultivating a practice of volunteering names and pronouns. [Sidebar: Nametags with pronouns!]

---

Apparently the impetus for this event was that someone was cleaning out her basement and sent the Mass Council of Churches [MCC] a (mimeographed! typeset!) booklet ("Faith and Mission: An Ecumenical Women’s Liturgy Resource Book was originally prepared by the Task Force on Women of the Massachusetts Council of Churches in 1978," says their blogpost) and MCC posted a photo to their facebook and got a surprising number of comments -- including from many people who were on the task force that helped create it. This suggested to them that while we may often feel like we're sort of "over" the inclusive language conversation, that we've "solved" that problem, in fact there's still a lot of energy around that issue.

Rev. Laura Everett told a story of being a teenager in a church that did a carrying the cross Good Friday walk, and she wanted to be Jesus, and of course she wasn't allowed to be. (On reflection, I wish we had talked more about imaging Jesus as female, since even in progressive contexts we're usually insistent that of course Jesus was male, and imaging Jesus -- or even the risen Christ -- as other than male seems wholly off the table, in a way that imaging Jesus as for example any race/ethnicity isn't. Laura talked about how she was excluded/marginalized, but I don't think she or any of us really talked about embodying Jesus as female -- other than Stephen Burns reading a Christa poem by Nicola Slee.)

Stephen Burns (professor at EDS) talked some about the history that brought us to this point. He said that while people talk about the 1970s, he thinks the heyday of inclusive language was the 1990s:

• The UCC put out The New Century Hymnal (which edited the words to many traditional hymns as well as commissioning many new hymns) in 1995.
• The Episcopal church put out Enriching Our Worship (a liturgical supplement) in 1997.
• The Roman Catholic Church put out the ICEL [International Commission on English in the Liturgy] Psalter in 1995 -- which book was quickly quashed, 'cause oppressive Roman Catholic Church. (He said it's "like gold dust" -- that you can get it on eBay.)

Stephen Burns talked about the danger that expansive language can be co-opted, can be used to disguise a reality that is not as inclusive/liberative as the language might suggest, and so advised us to approach with a degree of suspicion and not naivete.

He talked about gesture -- which is one of his big things -- about how it's not enough for us for example to use non-hierarchical language if the way we structure all our liturgy and worship is still very hierarchical.

(One audience member I read as female talked about being mentored by Madeleine L'Engle who told her, "When you get ordained -- and you will -- don't become a little man.")

He also talked about context. He said he went to every feminist gathering in the north of England [he's originally from England] and removed all the Lord Father He etc. language from his vocabulary about God ... and then he became a father, and he needed to reclaim that language.

One attendee works primarily with a non-literate congregation, so she can't just hand out sheets of paper with alternate words. Also, as a well-educated financially comfortable white woman ... with a congregation of poor/homeless African-American men who use very traditional language ... she feels really uncomfortable telling them that their language for God is "wrong." Stephen Burns suggested that maybe that's not the fight to have in that congregation, that maybe in that congregation she needs to find ways to be on their side fighting poverty, racism, etc.

Another attendee brought up multi-lingual issues -- that in different languages, words can have very different connotations. She said that "Lord" in French has a "sweetness" to it, and even the tone the presider uses is different than when people say "Lord" in English liturgy.

People talked about The New Century Hymnal a lot. One woman said they "ruined" the Christmas hymns. Another woman said she has pastored 6 congregations in the past 16 years and there has been conflict about The New Century Hymnal in every one of them.

Wendy Miller Olapade talked about coming to the church through AA, having not grown up in the church, and getting out of seminary and into her first Call right around the time The New Century Hymnal came out and people were having lots of trouble with the new hymnal and she just didn't understand, because she thought the hymns were beautiful and these were the only versions she knew -- she reminded us that not everyone's coming from the same place, not everyone has the same history.

Inez Torres Davis talked about some of what she has learned in dealing with privilege. She said that she's learned that you need to acknowledge the pain that privilege experiences when it's .. she used some less strong word than "threatened," but I can't remember how she phrased it.
She said that privilege is fragile -- which she said neutrally and without any of the tone I would have inflected into that, but I totally loved it :)
She said that being uncomfortable is not the same as being unsafe.
She said that the purpose of the divine is healing, liberative.
She said that the Church, the Body of Christ, is suffering.

There was a little bit of conversation about referring to "expansive" vs. "inclusive" language.

+++

In the first breakout session, our prompt questions were on a handout that asks about your experiences of gendered language in liturgy, etc. Initially no one in my group said anything, so I opened with the fact that my experience is heavily influenced by the fact that my best friend is genderqueer -- so every time we say e.g. "male and female and a little bit of each" or "brothers and sisters," I wince because in that language my best friend is erased and told "you're not welcome here, you don't have a place here," even though of course I know that yes ze is welcome here.

One woman expressed concern that we go far that we're falling all over ourselves to be overly PC, and I chose not to respond. I wanted to respond to people's pushback, but I worried I would come off as defensive, and it felt more important to me to allow people to say their piece than for me to respond to every little piece of everything everyone said.

We talked some about language that would include my best friend -- like saying "brothers and sisters and siblings."

People talked about the concern of using the wrong language (in trying to be inclusive).

One of the women said that when you get to know people as people, then you'll know the right language -- because it will be language that you've learned being in relationship with that person, rather than just some abstract concept. She said that it's taking a risk, and you must be willing to fail -- that when people know you and know your intentions, they'll forgive you, and that you'll continue to have opportunities to try. (I think she was over-generalizing from her personal experience a bit, as I know people who would have felt excluded/offended in the examples she cited, and I don't think Good Intentions grant total absolution, but I did really appreciate her comments and felt it was more helpful for the gathered body for hers to be the last word on this than for me to pick it apart.)

+++

We had 2 themed breakout sessions -- you could choose from 4 topics (and there was a booklet with some reading material for each, which I wished we'd gotten in advance; it's up on their blog now):

• The Lord's Prayer/Our Father
• Trinitarian Idioms
• The Great Prayer of Thanksgiving/Eucharistic Prayer
• Texts and Contexts, Words and Actions

+

The first of the themed breakout sessions I went to was the Trinitarian Idioms one. We started with talking about what the Trinity is (because I was like, "I'm really bad at being a Trinitarian, and I know that any time I attempt to explain the Trinity to someone I'm using modalism or some other heresy, so I really have no idea how to go about using more expansive language without somehow being heretical" -- not that I necessarily personally have a problem with being heretical, but...) and the facilitator talked about inter-relationship and dance (she didn't say "perichoresis," but I thought it) and how one thing that Trinity indicates about God is that God is dynamic, not static. I said that was really interesting, because I feel like a lot of the pushback around changing Trinitarian language is that the inherited language is the language we have to use, that we can't change it, but there's a variety of Scriptural language for the Godhead -- including the Second Person of the Trinity: Jesus using "mother hen" language. One of the women at my table said that she taught her kids the "God is like a mother hen" song so they would have at least one alternative image of God in their minds as they grew up.

+

The second one I went to was the Eucharistic Prayer one, but I don't have much in the way of notes/commentary from that.

One participant offered the language:
hold bread: this is the broken body of Christ
look around: this is the Body of Christ made whole

Stephen Burns offered: "receive what you are: the Body of Christ; be what you see, become what you are"

+++

The person before me on the closing panel was a 58-year-old man who's been an ELCA pastor for like 30 years.

He talked about how using "traditional" language can be really powerful -- that he spent time in ministry with refugees from Communist Czechoslovakia, and they used very old-fashioned Slovak to pray the Lord's Prayer, and to pray in that language on the other side of the ocean was very powerful.

He talked about the importance of engaging in conversations, that you can't just impose things by fiat. (Which I suppose is equally true when you're a lay member with a fiat agenda :) )

+

One of the prep questions I was given for my part on the closing panel was: "What changes has your congregation made to gendered language in liturgy? How did you implement these changes to make language more expansive?"

I reached out to some folks who have been at FCS longer than I have, and I cribbed heavily from one person's response, so you get a c&p, which is more artful than my unrehearsed regurgitation was:

One shift we made during my time was adopting the New Century Hymnal [NCH], with its resolutely inclusive language. Prior to that we used the Pilgrim Hymnal, which had a lot of inclusive language but by no means always. For a while we kept both hymnals in the pews and sang some songs from each, and gradually phased out the old hymnal. But we still used the Pilgrim hymnal at Christmas, because many people found the inclusive language jarring in the very familiar Christmas carols. [...]

After we had used the NCH for a few years, [person] mentioned to me that she had attended a service at a different church where they were still using the Pilgrim Hymnal, and she was looking forward to singing the good old words. But, she reported, when they actually sang, it was jarring to hear He/Him/His all the time after getting used to inclusive language. Her consciousness had been raised, though she didn't say it that way.

[...]

As for LGBTQ [...] inclusive language, that really started with Molly. We became an ONA church years before Molly's tenure, but as is quite usual, he first few years after making the declaration, our ONA stayed on the down low. Some older members were very sensitive and anxious about it, and it didn't seem useful to pick fights with them. When Molly came, she "didn't know" how sensitive the issue was, and so "naively" flew a rainbow flag right away. Precipitating some pushback, and a compromise, but the tide had turned. Our prior settled pastors had mentioned LGBTQ…I people sympathetically but carefully; Molly was the first to talk about us casually, as if there were no controversy. And by being the change she wished to see in the world, the world (or at least, FCS) changed.

+

Katie Ernst, the final closing panelist, cautioned that we not perpetuate gender essentialism as we attempt to expand our language (e.g., only using She for gentle nurturing and He for fierce strong anger), which I can't say enough YES to. I do really appreciate that a lot of the ~contemporary hymnody that uses expansive language for God intentionally talks about e.g. fierce Mother God and nurturing Father God.

People had lots of positive feedback about the Welcome liturgy [also up on their blog], so Katie Ernst talked a bit about the process of shaping it. (It was like a very extended version of the Welcome we do at FCS.)

• you start with what parts of yourself do YOU need to have named/affirmed/welcomed?
• think about the people who will be in attendance, naming those diversities
• acknowledge darkness -- "you who are worn out... you who are grieving..."
• in the opening, acknowledge/honor those who have been in this space before us (including those who lived on this land before we colonized it)
• this is gonna be like 5-10 minutes long, and people aren't used to a Welcome being that long, so there will be some discomfort, but lean into that

[Advent 1: Hope]

Last night I read the d'var Torah that Velveteen Rabbi offered that morning at her shul on this week's parsha, "Vayishlach."

She talks about Jacob wrestling with the angel and says:

Having received a new name, Jacob bestows a new name: he names that place, that bend in the river, Peni'el, literally "the face of God," saying, "For I have seen God face-to-face, yet my life has been spared."

(which is really interesting in and of itself, given the multi-vocality of Scripture on seeing the face of God -- e.g., God to Moses in Exodus 33:20 "you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.") and then talks about Jacob's encounter with Esau, where he says:

No, please, if I have truly found favor in your sight, take the offering from my hand; for to see your face is like seeing the face of God.

She closes with the bit from the Talmud about each individual human being being created in the image of God but each of us are unique -- unlike identical imperial coins each stamped with the mark of the secular leader.

This all seemed quite a lovely connection to Molly's "Light Gets In" Advent theme. But then she closes the post with her 70 Faces Torah poem on this parsha, which ends with such a downer:

For one impossible moment Jacob reached out.
To see your face, he said, is like seeing
the face of God: brother, it is so good!

But when Esau replied, let us journey together
from this day forward as we have never done
and I will proceed at your pace, Jacob demurred.

The children are frail, and the flocks:
you go on ahead, he said, and I will follow
but he did not follow.

Once Esau headed out toward Seir
Jacob went the other way, to Shechem, where
his sons would slaughter an entire village.

And again the possibility
of inhabiting a different kind of story
vanished into the unforgiving air.

***

The theme for this year’s Advent is Light Gets In. No matter what walls we throw up, what boxes we climb in or that circumstances put us in—Light gets in. Light will have its way.

This Sunday in worship, I’ll be preaching on the walls humans throw up that block out Christ’s light. We’ll begin building an actual wall in the sanctuary, that will grow each week up until Christmas Eve, when the Light will get in. Will you bring cardboard boxes to church anytime you show up, and leave them on the chancel, and help us duct-tape them together to build our Babel-wall up toward heaven and obscure the cross?

-Molly in This Week at First Church

To my mind, Advent is about the light slowly breaking in (we light first one candle and then a second, and so on), so I don't love this theme.

+

Pre-service lectio divina happened in the Parlor, and as a result we could hear the pre-service choir rehearsal. I heard "Emmanuel, Expected Jesus," and fell into Advent.

...

We did Luke 1:5-25, and I was struck by Gabriel's statement, "I stand in the presence of God."

+

Before service, I picked up a hardcopy of Molly's Advent calendar.

December 2
First Sunday in Advent: Put on your sparkle cream. Glow.

+

Unison Prayer of Confession

Light-Bringer,

We offer you our repentance.
We replace holy days with holidays.
We hurry past opportunities to give the gifts of kindness and honesty.
We do not listen to angels in our dreams, forgive those dearest to us,
Or welcome into hearts and homes, the poor and the stranger.
If all sin is separation, forgive us for all the walls we throw up, and let your Light in.

-Maren Tirabassi, adapted

+

Jamie facilitated an Advent Devotional Workshop, which I attended.

I was starting to investigate the art supplies when the horde of kids who had been playing war or something all came in and decided to do art (well, Simon was like, "Guys, can't we go back to what we were doing before?" and got ignored by all the kids wrapped up in doing art, so he compromised by making pictures of e.g. ninjas) so I stepped back from the chaos and worked on poetry.

Sue D., to her husband, later: "I was looking for the kids, and I found a craft fair, so I sat down."

I think I definitely want to go back to Art Night.

***

I really liked the Call to Worship we used at CWM tonight:

[One] How shall we prepare God's house for the coming of the Promised One?
[Many] With fragrant branches of cedar, the tree of excellence and strength.
[One] How shall we prepare God's house for the Christ child?
[Many] With a stable and a manger where in the weeks to come, the mystery of the Advent story will be revealed and where the entire creation will welcome the Promised One.
[One] How shall we prepare God's house for Emmanuel, God with us?
[Many] With garlands of pine and fir, whose leaves are ever living, ever green -- symbols of our faith in the living God.
[One] How shall we prepare God's house for the prophet of Galilee?
[Many] With sprigs of holly and ivy, telling of Jesus' faithfulness, even unto death and resurrection.
[One] How shall we prepare our hearts for this revelation of God?
[Many] By hearing again the words of the prophets, the stories of the ancestors of Jesus, and the promises of God.
[One] For in the story of Jesus we see revealed the transforming power of God, and we are reminded anew of God's vision of wholeness, justice, and peace for all creation.
[Many] Thanks be to God!

...

Marla preached on Isaiah 11:1-9 and 1 Samuel 16:1-13. I was mostly meh, but she closed with talking about the fact that we ignore the parts of the Biblical stories that don't seem "proper" or "dignified" and inviting us to think about, if Jesus were to come as a baby a second time, what unexpected places that baby might show up in -- and her shocker suggestion was: born to a Wall Street executive (I thought of the Buddha).

disability and theology texts

I was really uncomfortable with Molly's sermon a week ago Sunday (for a take I like better, check out SarcasticLutheran's sermon).

Molly and I chatted on her porch on Friday, and we agreed to continue to engaging with the issue.

So I wanted to put up a list of the books on theology+disability that people recommended when I crowdsourced that Sunday (thanks to those who signal-boosted and/or responded).

• A Healing Homiletic: Preaching and Disability (Kathleen Black)
• This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies (ed. Hector Avalos).
• round-table discussion about disability & Biblical studies in Women in the Hebrew Bible (ed. Alice Bach).
• Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Sharon V. Betcher)
• The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nancy L. Eiesland)
• The Wounded Healer (Henri J.M. Nouwen)

I also went to my GoodReads to pull up the stuff I read 2-3 years ago (NB: not all of these texts explicitly deal with theology -- this is more to share some of the context that I have when I approach this issue):

• Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities (Deborah Beth Creamer)
• Deaf Liberation Theology (Hannah Lewis)
• Theology Without Words: Theology in the Deaf Community (Wayne Morris)
• The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (Susan Wendell)
• Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism & Other Difficult Positions (Lennard J. Davis)
• Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies (GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies #9.5)
• Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (Robert McRuer)

"Therefore we should have priests appropriately ready to recognize and accept the Son of God when he returns as a daughter."

FCS's Advent theme this year is "misrule" -- about holy upside-downings, "turning our ideas about power and privilege upside down," to quote from Molly's Advent and Christmas 2011 letter.

One of the themes of Advent is that Christ doesn't come in the way we expect.

I've told just about everyone about my best friend's lesbian Christology, but I was definitely pleasantly surprised to encounter something like it in my Pauli Murray reading.

Back in 1973, in my first interview with the suffragan bishop of Massachusetts. the Rt. Rev. Morris F. Anderson (known as "Ben"), in charge of candidates for Holy Orders, made a comment to me, and he repeated this comment at the time of his retirement in his reflections "On Being a Bishop" (Massachusetts Episcopal Times, November 1981, 7). He writes:

At New Orleans I made my first speech in the House of Bishops. I followed [Bishop] Kim Meyers [who has died since then], who was at the time speaking against the ordination of women. I said just as I envisioned the Second Coming of Christ in terms of a person of a different race, in order to proclaim the fullness of God and his love, I could envision the Second Coming of Christ as a member of a different sex. Therefore we should have priests appropriately ready to recognize and accept the Son of God when he returns as a daughter. This is a bit radical for the House of Bishops in those days.

-p. 49 of Pauli Murray: Selected Sermons and Writings, selected and edited by Anthony B. Pinn; from a sermon Pauli Murray preached on September 12, 1982, at the Church of the Holy Nativity in Baltimore, Maryland (located in the Pauli Murray Papers, box 65, folder 1106, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University)

"People they come together / People they fall apart"

So, Molly started a blog for her journey with cancer.

I was really struck by her entry "How You Can Pray for Me."  Excerpt:

So, every cancer patient needs a way of thinking about healing, and curing, their cancer. I read a great book many years ago, Love, Medicine and Miracles, written by a doctor who started a program in the 80s for “Exceptional Cancer Patients.” He found that the patients who were not just ‘positive’ but really had a deep imagination for curing their cancer, had much better outcomes—not all of them lived, but they had less pain, lived a lot longer, and many of them did survive.

[...]

For a lot of people, fighting imagery works—they imagine a little shoot-em-up video game inside their bloodstream, their affected organs. I’m so glad this works for them. It’s saved countless lives, given courage and confidence and faith where it was needed most.

But this is not very me. I claim to be a pacifist—well, I’d like to be. My family, on the front lines of my irritation and anger, when I get irritated and angry, know otherwise. But, I can’t personally invest in violent imagery to cure my cancer. I don’t think this cancer is evil, it’s an anomaly in my body, but it’s its own thing, maybe even good in itself—just misguided, misdirected, it’s something that’s where it doesn’t belong. It’s lost.

There are 3 or 4 or 5 ways things get out of the body (this is where it becomes apparent that I have not taken much science since 9th grade biology). Perspiration, excretion, and respiration come to mind. For the cancer to get out, it needs an exit point.

This is where the Holy Spirit Portal comes in. This is how I am praying the cancer out of my body, and how you can join me, if you wish.

First, you know (or maybe you don’t) that the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity (Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit). Jeff Von Wald and the re/New team led an amazing worship at church last weekend all about the Holy Spirit, Hebrew name Ru’ach, Greek name Pneumos—the ancient word that means wind or breath. Maybe I can get Jeff to post some of the quotes they read aloud at re/New to describe the HS. Or maybe you’d like to post your own description below—please do!

Now, this is the prayer. Take a deep, deep breath. What you are breathing in is pure Holy Spirit. Doesn’t matter if you’re in traffic on Storrow, on the T at the end of a humid Boston day at rush hour with all kinds of interesting smells in the air, or in a dewy meadow in the early morning of Vermont. Underneath the human and industrial muck is God’s own breath. Breathe it in. Imagine it going all the way down to your toes.

Now as you get ready to exhale, imagine it as a vacuum, sucking out one or two or perhaps ten of my free-floating cancer cells. Let your exhale accelerate, and WHOOSH! Set the cells free. Send them away, tell them there is a place for them, where they do belong—not in any other human or animal body, perhaps in deep space. God has a place for them. Because Ewing’s cells are called “blue cells” I have been (smile) imagining that they are flying off to a distant galaxy to start a superrace of humanoids called the Na’avi, a peaceful people.

Do this breath three times. Hopefully it’ll help you, too—you don’t have to be a yogi to know how cleansing and grounding and healing it is to stop what you’re doing and breathe.

The good thing about a prayer like this, is that it doesn’t take long to do, and it feels complete. You don’t have to worry that it was “enough.” God knows, we all have enough we are worrying about already.

The part that made me cry, though, (for reasons unrelated to Molly) is from her post "The Best Part":

Here’s my takeaway—at least, the first of many takeaways from this whole experience:  I was ashamed to want surgery, to want relief. I felt like it was a personal failure to ask for it. But if I hadn’t, it would have taken many more months to discover and diagnose my Ewing’s. How’s that for a holy spirit portal?

[Explanation of why she began calling it a "Holy Spirit Portal" here.]

Yes, I have become this person.

FCS-Ian added a whole bunch of hymns to the rotation for Lenten morning prayer service, which I was stoked about. Peter (husband of Rev.Molly, so has been at First Church UCC for over 7 years and probably in the UCC for longer, but grew up Episcopalian) mentioned that he didn't know some of the ones that had been added. I was surprised because I'd thumbed through and had been stoked that I knew all of them (in contrast to hymn selections there often). So FCS-Ian and I sang through the ones that Peter (and/or Althea) didn't know. "Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded" I realized I was sight-reading, but I "knew" it sufficient that when I saw it in the folder I was like, "Seriously?!"

So we got to talking about Good Friday hymns/theology. (Yes, I was ~10 minutes late to work because I was in the church kitchen consuming !Communion bread and grape juice and arguing discussing theology.)

As we wrapped up the conversation so that we could all get to work, Peter said to me: "You have a very full Protestant theology, is what it boils down to." (Whereas I had been thinking that I was so echoing CWM/Borg&co. when I was talking about an emphasis on Easter rather than an emphasis on Good Friday, and Jesus' death being as a result of undermining the domination system rather than a requirement for us to be reconciled to God, etc. -- but on later reflection, I think part of what he was reacting to was what I said I hear when I hear hymns like "The Old Rugged Cross.")

During lunchtime phonecall today, I told Ari briefly about my morning, and of course I mentioned "The Old Rugged Cross," because even though I block it out such that I couldn't actually sing it for you from memory if I tried, it's totally my go-to example for classic blood atonement theology hymn (which is maybe unfair of me). She has a lot of positive associations with the hymn, but she has problems with the parts like "exchange it some day for a crown," and so we got talking about kingdom language/theology.

I've recently started reading Borg and Crossan's The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus's Final Week in Jerusalem (for CHPC adult ed), and so I talked some about what I learned from the first chapter of that book about Jerusalem and the Temple in Jesus' time and the peasants who were Jesus' audience.

I knew from other books that Borg purposely uses "kingdom," knowing that many of his progressive compatriots dislike it. In one paragraph in The Last Week, the authors pointedly state that Jesus used the term "kingdom of God" on purpose -- that "Jesus could have spoken of the family of God, the community of God, or the people of God, but, according to Mark, [Jesus] spoke of the kingdom of God" (p. 25, emphasis in original) specifically because it was a political as well as a religious metaphor: "To [Jesus'] hearers, it would have suggested a kingdom very different from the kingdoms they knew, very different from the domination systems that ruled their lives" (p. 25).

I said that I understand this but that I don't think it necessarily makes a strong case for us continuing to use kingdom language, because we don't hear that tension when we hear "kingdom." I said that we (middle-class white folks) hear "kingdom" and think happy shiny King Arthur.

Ari recommended that I read Horsley's Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder.

After she got back to her desk, she emailed me: "We should do a book study together. You know, since we have so many silent hours together that we need to fill." ♥

"Great Gathering Sunday"

I was catching up on FCS sermons online, and I loved the "Great Gathering Sunday" one -- which Molly and Laura Ruth co-preached, Molly's first Sunday back from a three-month sabbatical.

Molly talked about a church camp she attended one week during her sabbatical.

The conference was called “Running the Good Race,” and took as its heart the very scripture we are breaking open today. Naturally, the youth who signed up for it were all very athletic, and expected that they would be spending plenty of time outside, running relays, leaping tall buildings, choosing sides for teams, sweating and burning carbs. The problem is, they got me for a leader. The city girl. Gym in my high school consisted of walking the halls in shorts and combat boots. What crazy person named this conference Running the Good Race? Well, I did actually. I didn’t think they would take me so literally.

I had intended for the conference to be about competition and cooperation as elements of the Christian spiritual life. Does God want us to ‘be our best’? What does Jesus think about cliques and competition, about turning the world into winners and losers? I wanted to explore this with them, because I well remembered what it was like to be 12 or 13 myself—painfully so—and wanted the kids to learn that God had a plan for them, and that God and Jesus evaluate their progress by very different criteria than their peers do, or their coaches, or even their parents and teachers.

I wanted to set them up to get out of the race entirely, so to speak. But this group of kids changed the game on me—when we began to talk about the scripture, they quickly noticed that it didn’t say you should win the race, and it also doesn’t say you should get out of it—it says, what? You should FINISH the race. Just this week I heard about a woman in our church who was on her high school track team. She came in last, every event, every week. And she didn’t care. She didn’t play to compete with others. She played to beat her own time. And often she did. She knew intuitively what Paul meant, when he said he has finished the race.

Molly went on to talk about how one of her goals for sabbatical was to learn how to swim, and with the help of a personal trainer, she did. And then she went to church camp. And there was swim-time every day. And she expected the kids to keep to their cliques, because that's what middle schoolers do. Only they didn't.

Everyone piled into the water, and I started doing my laps, freestyle, breast stroke, back stroke, freestyle. And the kids, who had been in twos and threes, began to come together into fours and fives, and into eights and nines, and finally, finally, all 23 middle-school youth were in the shallow end, together, playing a game of volleyball, every single one of them. Perfect participation. It was only Monday, and already they had figured out how everybody could win.

So may all your people, from all the ends of earth, be gathered into one in You.

My son Rafe and I were the only ones who were not playing with the youth. I was doing my laps, and Rafe was being Rafe in the deep end, until he decided he’d rather be Rafe in the shallow end, and since I was his buddy I had to go with him. I walked down the dock past the volleyball game, agog at this miraculous display of unity and cooperation that had not in any way been mandated by adults; I stared at the girls I’d thought were snobby and the overweight boy, the cool kids and the bookworms, marveling, and then something even more remarkable happened.

They asked me to play with them.

I murmured the automatic response, “Oh no, you don’t want me, I’m terrible, a definite liability.” And they wouldn’t let me be, until I stepped into the game. They made me serve, a lot. And when the ball made it over the imaginary center line, they all cheered, and slapped me on the back, and when I accidentally spiked it into the head of a girl in front of me, they commiserated, and gave me a second try, and no one kept score. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. The minister shall be ministered to, and the snob and the nerd shall play volleyball together.

It was holy. And it was FUN.

How often do we hold ourselves outside of things, because we’re afraid if we get into the middle, we’ll be the weak link? We’ll be the reason why it fails? Isn’t it just better to avoid any risk of failure, even if it means withholding from ourselves the joy of belonging?

A few days later, we did an exercise in deep sharing with the youth. Each person in the circle told of a time when they’d been excluded. They told heartbreaking stories of family trauma, of feuds with best friend. And when it was my turn, I was all set to tell my standard story of the gorgeous, popular girl in junior high making me miserable with her bullying. And instead, God said to me, “don’t tell that one. You don’t need to tell that one this time. Tell them instead about how you excluded yourself, for so many years. Tell them how you told yourself for 3 decades that you weren’t an athlete. Then tell them what they have done to change that, by their kindness and their love.” So I told them.

We cast ourselves into roles, sometimes when we are very very young, and then find it darned hard to get out of them. We are the deciders in our own lives, and we decide ourselves into a corner. But God keeps giving us a way out of that corner. God puts the right person into our path, the right volleyball game, and before we know it, we are playing. The indwelling Christ, who has been living in our hearts all along, sees the opening, and takes it.

Even if it’s taken you 30 years to do it: you can change the game, you can rewrite the rules of the race; you can get off the bench and into the running, not to compete, but to feel the exhilaration of being part of something bigger and beautiful, to live up to not just our human potential but our Godly potential. God is waiting to set us free, because we are meant for freedom. One day, as Rafe and I were walking up from Davis Square, I suddenly started to run, out of sheer giddiness. My son, not used to displays of spontaneous exertion from me, started jogging along beside me, his face filled with light. “Mom!” he panted. “Mom! Why…are…we…running? Why…are…we…running, Mom? Is…it…for…the…feeling…of…freedom?”

What a terrible thing, to live your whole life without that feeling of freedom.

The good news is, you are not the person you think you are. You are the person God thinks you are.

She closed with reflecting on the phrase, "I have fought the good fight."

So I have finished the race, and you have kept the faith. There is one more phrase here that God is turning our minds to, the first one: I have fought the good fight. What is the good fight? How is it even appropriate for Christians to talk about a fight, we who are supposed to be people of peace?

Whenever I am stumped about what some part of the Bible might be trying to say, I go right back to the Gospels to see what Jesus was actually doing, and how it might shed light on the rest of the Bible. In this case, I think about the fights that Jesus fought. Every one of the fights that he fought were for somebody else. When there was a fight about him, he didn’t fight—he’d change the subject, or he’d disappear from their midst, or even allow himself to be crucified, rather than fight.

Laura Ruth: But he fought plenty of fights on behalf of others, people in no position to fight for themselves. He fought for the blind, the lame, the poor, for those in prison. He fought for women and he fought for children, he fought for the chronically ill and the mentally ill, and he fought for immigrants from other countries. He fought to keep some things sacred, like the Temple, so that God wouldn’t die on the altar of capitalism.

Molly: The race we race is fundamentally for ourselves. We do it to develop endurance, to build muscle, to feel the feeling of freedom and belonging. But it has a higher purpose. The muscle it builds, God means us to use in the service of others. Because of the gift of sabbatical and the people who were in it, I am now a swimmer who can perhaps save my own life, and, more importantly, may be called upon someday to save someone else’s.

Laura Ruth: The good fight is a fight to be fought for others. Church, it is fall, a time of fresh energy and commitments. What will we do this year? What fights will we fight so that others may be free? We can’t fight every good fight, but what if we fought a couple fights, really well? Can you imagine, if this year every single person in this sanctuary committed their spiritual strength to fight ONE fight that Jesus would have fought? What kind of power will we unleash, if we have perfect commitment, perfect participation, in unleashing the reign of God in this world?

---

How often do we hold ourselves outside of things, because we’re afraid if we get into the middle, we’ll be the weak link? We’ll be the reason why it fails? Isn’t it just better to avoid any risk of failure, even if it means withholding from ourselves the joy of belonging?

This resonated with me a lot. I recurrently get really avoidant -- not wanting to do any of the things I'm supposed to be doing -- and it's been worse this year than usual, and I was telling my best friend earlier this week ('cause I was really feeling it on Monday) that part of that is a fear of doing it wrong, of upsetting/disappointing people, of failing to live up to expectations, of showing people that I'm not actually as awesome as they think I am/I would like to be.

(I am also a really risk-averse person and want Molly's personal trainer to teach me to swim.)

The good news is, you are not the person you think you are. You are the person God thinks you are.

I talk a lot about how each one of us is a bright, brilliant, beloved child of God (and you are beautiful to behold), but I'm not so good at TRUSTING in God (see above re: risk-averse). "Stubborn, independent baby -- I can do it myself, maybe," to quote a poem my mother wrote about me when I was small. I freely admit that believe in a benevolent Creator because I want that to be true, that I want someone I can hand all of my prayers over to -- but I still hold so very fast to controlling my own life.

I appreciate the reminder that God loves us and wants us to be free.

I also really like the emphasis on the fact that we are called to be strong for those who cannot be strong for themselves.

The muscle it builds, God means us to use in the service of others.

ris'n with healing in his wings

I was catching up on Saint Nicholas Is In Hull on my GoogleReader the other day, and a section of one entry jumped out at me:

Then she asked me, "I am... have you ever even healed anyone?"

[...]

My response was, "Well... I can't say that I have."

I kind of blinked.

I feel like my response would be, "Well not in the sense that a doctor does... but I have sat with people in pain, I have provided a safe place for people in crisis..."

I believe I have mentioned before that I love Julia Kasdorf's poem "What I Learned from My Mother."

Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

***

Today, I was catching up on sermons at First Church.

In her July 5 sermon "Healing...on One Foot" (Mark 6:1-13), Kerrie Harthan posited that we are all healers, and I was so glad to hear that after reading that blog entry.

She also said, "our gospel message isn't about escaping, it's about being liberated -- it's about engaging."

She also shared an interesting thought from her spouse, Gloria, about being inspired by movements rather than individuals -- at least not until they are dead, so we can be sure they will not betray us. And also, "sometimes when a leader goes away, so does the teaching."

***

How To Practice
(Mark 6:30-34) Rev Laura Ruth Jarrett preaching, July 19, 2009

There's some stuff here I want to come back to again and again.

I wonder, how did Jesus came to belief. Did he believe in God, or Judaism out of the shoot because, well, he was God? Did he believe in himself? But how did he learn how to marshall his energies, when to rest and retreat? When he was healing folks, how did he learn to let out the right amout of power so that folks were healed but not raptured or slain? How did he know when to raise someone from the dead (if we believe he did) and when to let folks lie moldering. How did he know or handle the fact that folks thought he was the Messiah? How do you learn how to do that, be the Messiah?

[...]

Another practice that maybe you thought was a commandment: you shall not commit adultery. Not committing adultery is hard! It takes spiritual practice not to step out on your partner! Some of us prefer the thrill of indiscretion to the centered, patient, kind, sometimes painful, sometimes dull, working out of relationship, or the careful dissolution of relationship that no longer works. What we learn from relationships, we learn about ourselves and about our relationship with God. So, practice fidelity in relationships, a kind of fidelity you and your partner work out. It takes practice.

[...]

Don’t lie. Figuring out how to tell the truth takes a lot of practice, telling truth not as a weapon, but as a means of being in relationship – letting your yes be yes and your no be no. Hard, work! Not a thing done perfectly, or instantly. It takes a lot of practicing. Once we stop being attached to telling what we wish were true, we can become free. This is what Jesus teaches, the truth will set us free.

[...]

But also spiritual practice leads us into belief, belief that little by little, or maybe very quickly, causes us to understand truths too large to be contained by our puny, valiant, striving, resilient, market saturated spirits, truths that attempt to be explained by the metaphor of Trinity, or virgin birth, life that does not end. Here is a spiritual practice. Try not to limit the work of God. Try not to make the vast mystery of God small. Try not to get tripped up by other people’s metaphors. Have patience and let God be revealed to you, allow yourselves to be opened. This is my prayer for you.

***

Catching up on TransEpiscopal blog, I read (emphasis mine)

And obviously, if you have been following this blog, by now you know that at this Convention we made stunning progress on transgender issues. As we look back on the work of this Convention, I think it will be important to see this progress in the larger context of the forward movement via D025 and C056. But I also think our progress was part of the spirit of openness and relationality, and indeed of intentional, focused storytelling that were themes of this Convention (not to mention humor, as several bishops displayed during their session Friday). The spirit of the indaba groups that were featured at last summer’s Lambeth Conference also feels connected to this trend. People were careful not to demonize one another in their disagreements. People attended to one another’s humanity. Those of us who testified on the transgender related resolutions benefited from and, I hope and believe, contributed to that spirit.

And that is as it should be. That kind of attentiveness to one another’s humanity is at the heart of the Baptismal Covenant of the Episcopal Church, which asks, “will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” and “will you strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being?” The answer to these questions may seem easy, but sometimes they are not — which is why the response given in the Book of Common Prayer is “I will, with God’s help.” This Christian life we are about is a spiritual discipline that we all pledge to take up upon entry into this beloved community. And I know in my very gut that when we live into that discipline, when we do, with God’s help, we grow. Advent approaches indeed.

I've encountered a bunch of baptismal/membership covenants recently (attending ordinations and such), and my reaction is often, "I cannot vow that," but that one I could, that one I want to.

***

A "when loves come to town" blog entry I read recently (the first in an "Everything belongs..." series) included a YouTube embed of Bob Franke singing "For Real," and I pulled it up and listened to it this afternoon.

"let's be kind to each other -- not forever but for real"

I was struck by this as I had spent much of this afternoon sitting (metaphorically) with a beloved, praying "God have mercy."

There's a hole in the middle of the prettiest life
So the lawyers and the prophets say
Not your father nor your mother
Nor you lover's gonna ever make it go away
And there's too much darkness in an endless night
To be afraid of the way we feel
Let's be kind to each other
Not forever but for real

I forgot about the ending verse:

Some say that God is a lover
Some say it's an endless void
Some say both, some say she's angry
Some say he's just annoyed
But if God felt a hammer in the palm of his hand
Then God knows the way we feel
And love lasts forever
Forever and for real

Love lasts forever

I thought first of recent discussions about what religion means to different people and second of Catie Curtis' song "The Big Reprise."

The previous entry on "when loves comes to town" included an embed of Alison Krauss And Robert Plant performing "Down to the River to Pray."

---

Rest and Bread

Dear Beloved,

We gather this evening for at 6:15 for communion and prayer. We're reflecting on sheep tonight, how we are like sheep, and Jesus the shepherd. Come be gathered in.

We have music for meditation at 6. You may come at 6 to pray.If you'd prefer to come at 6:10 or 6:14, and even if you're late, don't worry about disturbing us. We don't mind you coming in when you're ready, because we're glad to see you.

***

[FirstChurch Mailing List] an act of vandalism in Watertown, a call for witness

Dear Beloved,

The Watertown UU Congregation's rainbow flag was torched. I don't know more details than that, other than to say, that no physical bodies were hurt.

The Watertown congregation has asked for a gathering in Watertown Sq. on Saturday, July 25th at 6 PM. After gathering, we will march to the church, about three blocks away, and reinstall the flag.

The FCS Marching Band will go to lend a hand and to bear witness. Will you come, also?

Between now and then, please will you remember and pray for those who, everyday, must decide how to react in a world that cannot behold their entire humanity. While this prayer may include each of us sometime, I particularly think of Professor Henry Louis Gates, and all who have been taken out of their homes in handcuffs.

May we share the solidarity we crave.

Although we don't know the circumstances of those who burned the rainbow flag or the circumstances of Officer Crowley who arrested Professor Gates, please, may we pray for them, also?

May we share the compassion we crave.

Yours, in solidarity and compassion,
Laura Ruth

***

Psalm 61 ("Lead me to the rock that is higher than I")
Luke 15:1-7

I loved how she talked, really lovingly, both in our pre-service prayer (I was helping her lead worship, as Keith was away) and in her Reflection, about the incident with Prof. Gates and about calling us to be our best selves. In her Reflection, she talked about how God seeks us, picks up and puts us on his shoulders -- "or embraces you in a way that would be more comfortable to you."

[kidney donation] "Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors."

Monday morning of last week, an email came through on the listserv of the local UCC church I attend about writing letters to Legal Seafoods and The Cheesecake Factory. (The email says, in part, "Legal Seafoods and The Cheesecake Factory restaurants in Greater Boston subcontracted with local companies that hired these workers to clean their restaurants. The cleaning companies then refused to pay the workers for both regular and overtime hours, cheating them out of weeks of hard-earned pay. Our mission and justice partner Centro Presente is leading a campaign seeking fair treatment for the workers.")

It occurred to me that probably plenty of CWM folk would be interested in workers' rights issues, and I continue to feel frustrated at the lack of information-sharing between congregations.

What I've been hearing about these past however many weeks at CWM (my primary church) is the trans-inclusive Massachusetts ENDA [and hate crimes bill] and environmental stuff.

At midweek service at aforementioned UCC church last week, the pastor had flyers for the Hearty Meals outreach at the American Baptist church down the street.

Then later I was thinking about how it probably makes sense for individual congregations to only focus on a few mission outreaches

***

Later that day, I read an article in The Atlantic about kidney donation (which I didn't realize until I hit the end was by Virginia Postrel). Excerpt:

Living with a single kidney is almost exactly like living with two; the remaining kidney expands to take up the slack. (When kidneys fail, they generally fail together; barring trauma or cancer, there’s not much advantage to a backup.) The main risk to the donor is the risk of any surgery. The kidney can now be removed laparoscopically, using tiny incisions and a fiber-optic camera to guide the surgeon, thus avoiding the huge abdominal slice and lengthy recovery time that used to be standard. Kidney donors don’t have to be close relatives of recipients, but they do need to have the right blood type. And kidneys from living donors tend to last many years longer than kidneys from deceased donors.

Since the current transplant system extols altruism, one way to end the list would be to find more altruists. With, say, 50,000 new living donors, deceased donation could easily pick up the slack. Again, the numbers aren’t that big. The Southern Baptist Convention includes 42,000 member churches; the United Methodist Church, whose Web site earlier this year featured the quote, “As United Methodists, we’re life savers,” counts more than 34,000 U.S. congregations. If each congregation produced just one new living donor, the waiting list would disappear. But kidney donation is a more visceral mission than mainstream religious groups want to contemplate. The only sect to adopt kidney donation as a formal cause is a tiny Australia-based group called Jesus Christians; instead of lauding them, critics point to their donations as evidence that they’re a cult.

I still refuse to officially join any church/denomination, but my home church is "wicked Methodist" (TM me), and in recent months I've noticed myself having "you are of my people" reactions to people mentioning having grown up United Methodist, so I was particularly kicked by the mention of the UMC.

Pentecost 2009

The Reflections at Rest and Bread (the meditative mid-week service I attend at the local UCC church) have been a series of biographies of Biblical figures, and the week before Pentecost was Ezekial.

The Sacred Text was Ezekiel 2:1-3:3.

In her Reflection, Laura Ruth talked some about the prophecy Ezekiel is given about the dry bones, and I remembered that at Holy Saturday vigil, one of the readings had been Ezekiel 37:1-14 (Life in the Midst of Death) and when I listened to it being read, I was hearing it literally and was very weirded out, but in her reflection, Pastor Tiffany talked about it as speaking to a people who felt that they were dried up, cut off, without hope.

Laura Ruth said that from a Christian perspective, Ezekiel's story prefigures Pentecost (which she did say we celebrate as the birth of the Church) -- God breathing into people and giving them voice, though she then said that of course God doing that long predates Ezekiel (I later thought, "Yeah, like Adam"), he's just a very good example of it (and apparently it's one of the readings you have the option of doing for Pentecost ... and in fact we read it at my Sunday morning church at Pentecost this year). I thought, "But Pentecost is the birth of the church because it happens in community." As I was articulating to my best friend that night what about the Acts story of Pentecost makes it the story of the birth of the church (like the fact that everyone gathered heard it in their native language, symbolic of reaching out and being so much more than just a Jewish revival/reform movement), I realized that I was so stuck on community being the important part of our Pentecost story in reaction to Laura Ruth's analogy, but if you had asked me previously to tell you what Pentecost is about, I probably would have said: fire, speaking in tongues, birth of the church (in that order).

She also talked about (and this was one of the pieces I was most struck by listening to the reading) God telling Ezekiel to eat the scroll and his finding it to taste as sweet as honey. She talked about embodying the Word by physically ingesting it and pointed out that we ingest the Word every time we take Communion, which I hadn't thought of (hi, I have a low theology of Communion) but which immediately made me think of the time we had milk and honey with Communion at my Sunday evening church once.

***

A few days later, I came across an entry on the "When love comes to town" blog -- "Pentecost, peace and grace..." Excerpt [apologies for the masculine gendering of the Holy Spirit]:

How does John’s gospel for today put it?

“I still have many things to tell you,” Jesus said, “but you can't handle them now. But when the Friend comes, the Spirit of the Truth, he will take you by the hand and guide you into all the truth there is. He won't draw attention to himself, but will make sense out of what is going on… indeed, out of all that I have done and said. He will honor me; he will take from me and deliver it to you. Everything the Father has is mine. That is why I've said, 'He takes from me and delivers to you.

And then he concludes with these words: Fix this firmly in your minds: You're going to be in deep mourning while the godless world throws a party. You'll be sad – very sad – but your pain will turn into joy.

Did you hear that? God will be sending Christ’s friend to us – the Holy Spirit – the Spirit of Truth – and the Spirit will come to us and comfort us so that our pain might be turned into joy. And that is what an adult Pentecost is all about, it seems to me: learning how to live and nourish the Spirit within and among us so that we might experience Christ’s joy.

Pentecost, writes Jim Callahan, is not the birthday of the church; that probably happened on Good Friday when Jesus was hanging on the Cross and pleading with God that we might be forgiven for sins we couldn’t even name or imagine. No Pentecost is God’s reply to Good Friday – a day of great joy, power, fire and spirit – that isn’t reserved just for Jesus alone but is poured out upon all of the faithful disciples. How does the book of Acts put it?

When the Feast of Pentecost came, the faithful were all together in one place. Without warning there was a sound like a strong wind, gale force—no one could tell where it came from. It filled the whole building. Then, like a wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread through their ranks and they started speaking in a number of different languages as the Spirit prompted them. There were many others staying in Jerusalem just then, devout pilgrims from all over the world. And when they heard the sound, they came on the run… because one after another heard their own mother tongues being spoken. They couldn't for the life of them figure out what was going on, and kept saying, "Aren't these all Galileans? How come we're hearing them talk in our various mother tongues? Are they drunk?”

Strangers became kin folk on Pentecost. Frightened disciples became fearless evangelists on Pentecost. Women and men became equals on Pentecost. And everyone who experienced this revival could only talk about it like a banquet – or a beer fest – because the sadness was gone and joy filled the air. “In the midst of a numbingly sober and sour world, these women and men looked like a bunch of happy drunks,” Callahan writes, “because at last they knew that they were God’s beloved.”

Every last one of them experienced from the inside out that they were beloved by God just as Jesus had promised. What’s more they knew deep within that the heart of God was love – “not just in poetic theory, but in palpable fact.” They experienced, too, that in belonging to God they were not alone – they belonged to one another – in community. And the joy this gave them not only filled their hearts, “but gave them the inspiration to go out into the streets to heal and redeem.”

· This is what the spirit of the Lord had promised to Ezekiel when he prophesied to that valley of dry bones.

· This is what the prophet Joel had “predicted when he said that there will come a time when the Lord will pour out the Spirit upon all people” so that our sons and daughters might speak truth to power, our old men might live as visionaries again and our young people clear their heads in compassionate ways.

It is what Isaiah shared once and what Jesus took up again: the Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach and bring good news to the poor and all who are wounded and broken. And Pentecost is the proof – the encounter – the experience that God really will turn our sorrow into joy.

And here is where I have to come down out of this wonderful and elevated pulpit… and talk with you as one broken and wounded soul to another. Pentecost, beloved, is not magic. It is not merely the stuff of hope filled myth nor sacred and spiritual fantasy. Pentecost is real. The joy of Christ is real.

+ Release from addiction is real. The end of our sorrow is real. The turning of our pain into joy is real, too.

+ Not that we still won’t have pain – not that all our tears will end in this life or the next – or that our experience of the living kingdom of God in the 21st century won’t also know anxiety, wounds, confusion and all the rest.

Jesus didn’t say that – and neither do I. As John’s gospel continues this morning, Jesus talks about the gift of the Holy Spirit coming to us like a woman giving birth. Listen carefully:

When a woman gives birth, she has a hard time, there's no getting around it. But when the baby is born, there is joy in the birth. This new life in the world wipes out memory of the pain. The sadness you have right now is similar to that pain, but the coming joy is also similar. When I see you again, you'll be full of joy, and it will be a joy no one can rob from you. You'll no longer be so full of questions. This is what I want you to do: Ask the Father for whatever is in keeping with the things I've revealed to you. Ask in my name, according to my will, and he'll most certainly give it to you. Your joy will be a river overflowing its banks!

This, you see, is a call for training – an invitation to prepare our hearts and minds for the Spirit – just like Jesus said to his first disciples. Here is what the resurrection/Easter story says without ambiguity: once the shock of encountering the Risen Christ was over, Jesus spent the next 40 days teaching his bewildered disciples new and essential spiritual practices. He had done this in the flesh for three years, but the apparently needed a refresher course.

And at the end of these 40 days – 10 days before the Feast of Pentecost – he told them, “Now I want you to stay together and study and pray. Wait for power from on high. And when it comes… then you will be ready to act.” Now listen to what the book of Acts tells us happened next because it is instructive for us:

· First the disciples went back to Jerusalem as Jesus instructed and spent time in prayer. (Acts 1: 12-14)

· Second, they decided they needed to replace Judas who had fled and taken his life – that is they needed to restore the number of disciples to 12 again – why? To symbolically fulfill their calling as the 12 tribes of Israel.

· And third they studied and shared life together: do you see what is taking place here?

They weren’t looking for a miracle. They weren’t pretending that their grief and confusion wasn’t real. And they weren’t just going through the motions or playing church. They were studying, they were learning new ways of prayer and… they were practicing the unforced rhythms of God’s grace.

Remember those words of Jesus? Back in Matthew 11 he was explicit: Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly.

It is my deepest conviction that what the disciples were doing was practicing the lessons Jesus gave them – they were learning the unforced rhythms of grace – getting ready to both see and experience the Holy Spirit when it was given. And they didn’t have to go anyplace special to receive this gift, did you notice that? They didn’t need to go to a university or a seminar, they just had to be together, open their heads and hearts and practice the unforced rhythms of grace.

Then, in the fullness of time, they were ready to receive, experience and claim the blessings of joy born of the Holy Spirit. Beloved in Christ, what was true then is no less true now… but we have some work to do: some study, some practice, some time spent learning the unforced rhythms of grace.

+ That is the promise of Pentecost: right here – right now – in our lives and in our time we, too, might come to know Christ’s joy.

· We will still weep – Jesus wept. We will still hurt – Jesus grieved for those who wounded him and ached when his body was attacked. We will still die even as the Lord died before us.

But we will also be grounded in a peace that passes all understanding – a joy that will change us from children to adults – a love that will not let us go. For we will know from the inside out that we are truly the beloved of the Lord - and this is where joy is born - when the Friend comes, the Spirit of the Truth, he will take you by the hand and guide you into all the truth there is. He won't draw attention to himself, but will make sense out of what is going on…so that your joy may be full.

***

In looking at the Archives of that blog, I saw a post titled "What if God was one of us..." and wondered if it was like this post (responding to an Onion piece), but actually...

Well, my friends, in case you haven’t guessed, today we’re going to be talking about Jesus: specifically I want to consider what the Cross of Jesus Christ has to tell us about God’s love and our humanity in these early hours of the 21st century. Theologian Douglas John Hall writes that: The cross of Jesus Christ represents simultaneously a high estimate of the human creature, a grave realism concerning human alienation, and the compassionate determination of God to bring humankind to the realization of our potential for authenticity.

Did you get all that? In the tongue of popular culture, we’re going to think about three essential insights in the Cross:

+ God’s deep love for us as beings created in the Lord’s image

+ The profound pain we cause through our alienation

+ And the relentless compassion of God’s grace

Are you with me? Love, pain and grace – or as Hall writes – our experience of being created, fallen and lifted: a new/old encounter with the Cross of Jesus Christ for our generation. So let’s see where this conversation might take us, ok?

Western Christians – conservative or progressive – often forget a spiritual insight that our cousins in Judaism regularly celebrate: namely, that as women, men and children created in the image of God we are just “a little lower than the angels” as the Psalmist tells us. We are NOT sinners first – sin is involved in our human experience – but we were never created in God’s image as sinners broken and wounded.

[...]

Sadly, and I believe incorrectly, most of Christian tradition has focused on our fallen and sinful relationship with God. And God knows that sin is real – any newscast or newspaper is documentation – but we have forgotten that alienation and separation from the Lord is not our primary condition. Rather, “the Hebraic/Jewish origins of our faith teach us to respect the goodness of creation and the promise of human life.” (Hall, p. 94)

Blaise Paschal, the 17th century French physicist and religious philosopher, suggested that loving Christians adopt a dialectic of grandeur and misery to keep us from acting too proud or too stupid. We like to make life seem either black or white he said – we tend to emphasize either optimism or pessimism – when in reality it is always both. At the same time, however, we must remember that the balance between these:

…two polarities is an asymmetrical one. The two sides of the dialectic – the yes and the no – are not equal. The weightier of the two is the first – the grandeur, not because humankind in itself and as such is so grand, but because we are God’s creation, created for a purpose that entails and affects all creation.”

The first insight the Cross of Jesus offers us is that we are the beloved of the Lord – created in God’s image just a little lower than the angels.

[...]

To be the church of Jesus Christ – the body of our Lord alive in the world today – demands that we start with an affirmation of our original blessing because God don’t make junk. “It is imperative for Christians to counter defeatism… in a sane and nuanced way” for we were created by the Source of ALL creativity.

That is the first insight from the Cross – we have been created by the Creator as a little less than the angels – the second is this: sometimes we despise this truth. If the story of the scriptures tells us anything it is that many times we don’t want to be LESS than the Lord: we want to BE the LORD. Douglas John Hall says it best:

The Scriptures of both Testaments demonstrate that humankind from the mythic Adam of the first Garden to the historic Adam of the second Garden, Gethsemane, “cannot stand God.” Even Jesus pleads with God to “remove the cup,” to take away the destiny of his vocation. And in between the two gardens every one of the prophets tries valiantly to resist his or her calling. Israel itself, as the name suggests, “struggles with God,” contends with the Unnamable... because our election is not a privilege but a responsibility. Even in the New Testament, where the central image of the kingdom of God is depicted poetically as a great banquet feast… everyone wants to flee from it. Even St. Paul himself, the most articulate and fervent of all the apostles of the early church, could only be brought into the sphere of Christ’s lordship kicking and screaming! (Hall, p. 101)

Isn’t that right? That the whole testimony of the Bible points to the fact that while God loves us we spend most of our lives running away – not towards – the Lord? If nothing else, the Cross of Christ shows us what it looks like when we keep on running: we wound and destroy the very heart of love itself. The Cross, you see, is not about God’s will, it is about what happens when we choose to flee from the responsibility of love.

To put forward the events of Holy Week and the Cross as a kind of divinely predetermined Oberammergau play whose author and director is none other than Almighty God is to have substituted fatalism for Biblical faith. Because the crucifixion is no more the direct will and plan of God than the fact that a million innocent children were slain in the Holocaust. (Hall, p. 103)

The Cross exposes the consequences of broken relationships – it makes clear for all with eyes to see what life looks like when we run away from our deepest commitments – and it is a sad and ugly picture. No wonder Jesus speaks to us of a vine and its branches: we are all connected. The disciple, John, amplified this when he told us:

If anyone boasts, "I love God," and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won't love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can't see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You've got to love both. God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we're free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ's. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love. So we are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first." (I John 4)

First we are created a little less than the angels. Second we have fallen and run away from the responsibilities of love. And third we are lifted – raised beyond the filth by God’s compassionate grace – that like the old American hymn tells us, “is a love that wilt not let me go.” We may get tired – we may feel lazy or beaten down – but God’s grace endures for ever.

· Let me say that again: God’s grace endures – and searches – and lifts us up over and over again because God’s love endures for… what?

· Forever! Remember what St. Paul told us? Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled. When I was an infant at my mother's breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good. We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love. (I Corinthians 13)

There is a brokenness in the world, an incomplete aching in our hearts, and the third insight from the Cross is clear: the only way through it is with the grace of God that gives us a strength from the inside out. It cleanses. It heals. It renews us over and over again so that we can be fully human.

+ We’re not called to be God – we were created to be human – fully human – by grace we are humanized.

+ By grace the word becomes flesh and dwells within and among us.

+ By grace, we are made whole.

Not the same as God – that would be arrogant and stupid – but only a little less than the angels, too. One of the best expressions of this truth in popular culture came from the soul singer, Joan Osborne, who put it like this in a song called, “One of Us.”

Martin Luther, the father of our Protestant tradition, told those who had ears to hear in the 16th century: “Christian living does not mean to be good, but to become good; not to be well, but to get well; not being but becoming; not rest, but training. We are not there yet, but we shall be. It has not yet happened, but it is on the way.”

… and that way is love - a love exposed paradoxically and honstely on the Cross. So let those who have ears to hear, hear.

I think it's somewhat sloppy exegesis to extrapolate all this from the Cross -- though I do agree with the basic ideas about humanity being "created, fallen and lifted," and certainly the ideas that we are each a Bright Brilliant Beloved Beautiful Child of God and that God never stops seeking us in love [though I don't actually know if the blogger would say "never;" I don't know his salvation theology] and that we are called to love everyone and that Christian living is constantly a process.

I'm also uncomfortable not only with the blogger's constant use of masculine language for all the persons of the Trinity, but also with the "quoting" of Scripture which not only sounds somewhat The Message-like in its contemporary sound, but also feels a bit to me like it's rewriting a bit beyond what's in the original text.

I love the editorial comment in Walter Wink's "translation" of Jesus' final prayer on behalf of his disciples (which we read on Ascension Sunday this year), but I also had a squick moment because that's not actually in the original text -- that's commentary. And commentary is awesome and important, but... I dunno, it's a difficult line. Because yes, every single translation makes choices -- you can't retain all the resonances of imagery and wordplay and sociohistorical relevance (though I think footnotes are AWESOME), and you want to make it understandable and accessible and relevant and relatable to your audience in this particular moment. But... I dunno.

Velveteen Rabbi wrote (in a post worth reading in full):

This kind of interaction with the text -- turning it in different directions like a prism to see how it refracts the light of holiness -- is a, maybe the, quintessential Jewish act. One of my favorite teachings on that subject comes from the former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Ismar Schorsch, who writes:

[I]n Judaism precisely because the Torah is revered as divine, it becomes susceptible to unending interpretation. It would be a denigration of God's word to saddle it with just a single meaning. In contrast to human speech, which carries a finite range of meanings, the language of God was deemed to be endowed with an infinity of meanings.

Within the infinity of meanings compressed into this one line of Torah, there are many which celebrate the full personhood of all, regardless of gender or orientation. We owe it to ourselves, to our loved ones, and to God to wrestle with the text until it yields these blessings.

After a dialogue session on human sexuality (by which we mostly mean queers) and the United Methodist Church, one of the women I'd gone with was expressing frustration at the universalizing -- couldn't God have said something to Adam and Eve and be saying something else to different people at a different time who are reading those same words?  She mentioned that someone recently was telling her about someone in like the 2nd century (Clement?) who was saying, "Okay, we've fulfilled the 'be fruitful and multiply' commandment -- we're starting to have too many people, in fact -- so we can stop doing that."

***

I wasn't that taken with most of the Pentecost stuff from actual Pentecost Sunday this year, but one of the things I liked best was from the Children's Time our seminary intern at my Sunday morning church did. She said she had been trying to program her husband's radio alarm clock but it wasn't working, and she asked the kids what they might try if they were having that problem. One kid said, "I would check if it's turned on or plugged in." And indeed that was exactly the problem. She said, "It's very important to plug in electrical appliances before you try to program them."

It actually reminds me somewhat of the Pentecost blogpost I quoted above.

***

From a Pentecost sermon ("See My People Through") at a church I didn't attend on Pentecost Sunday:

When we are done, when we can’t go on any longer, when we are all dried up, when we’re toast, when we have put down the bags, spent our last dime, when we have woken up in someone’s bed and we don’t remember whose, when we have alienated our last friend and relative, when we have drunk everything in the house including the mouthwash, when we have stolen from those we love and been caught, when we are too ashamed to live anymore, when we have sold our birth rite, when we can’t remember our essential sweet goodness, when we have sold out our friends and family, when we have been conquered, when someone not interested in our welfare is occupying our heart, our homeland and our minds, God will blow life back into us.

Even though we are a heap of desiccated bones, if we watch and notice, God will bring us back to life. God will help us to reassemble ourselves, to grow into the people God made us to be, humans whose essence is the same essence of God.

And more than that, and it is the story of that day of Pentecost, if we remember to ask for the presence of God, she will come and not only save us, but give us the gifts we need to heal and to become like Jesus, bring justice, she will set us free to be fully human, fully free.