Lombriz of Grace

Another sermon for Calvary UMC in Frederick.


Scripture: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 (NRSV)

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!”

…

“Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

Sermon: Lombriz of Grace

Let us pray:
Patient teacher, help us to listen to scripture, the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts. When you tell us many things in parables, open our hearts to receive the word of the kingdom of God, and to live into that kingdom. Amen.

I hope you all will get to meet my grandfather. He and his girlfriend like to travel bit together, so they might come by one Sunday. He doesn’t quite get the whole preacher thing despite the fact that his daughter and granddaughter are pastors. But he dutifully brags about me anyway. That’s what grandparents are supposed to do after all! One of the things he brags about most, though, is about how many places I have traveled to. He always says, “Tell Ruby again how many countries you've been to!” And sometimes, if he wants to tease me, he'll say, “And how many of those trips did you go on for free?” Because most of the trips I raised money for either through missions boards or research grants. And frankly, if someone offers to send me somewhere, I will go. For instance, my last year of college, I took a year-long class on agriculture and politics in Venezuela just so I could go to Venezuela.

Now, I explained last week that Aaron and I are from the country; we grew up around farms and helped our parents garden, but I am not a huge fan of dirt--- or rather worms. I won’t even eat gummy worms. But, as it turns out, dirt and worms are actually a big part of agriculture, even in Venezuela. Taking this class about Venezuela was great, and going to Venezuela was even better, but at one point on the trip, we were standing in this huge pavilion positioned near the top of a mountain, listening to one of our hosts giving a lecture in Spanish about worms. In this pavilion they had huge troughs where they put a combination of manure and dry coffee husks or paper with rice inoculated with a beneficial fungus that prevents disease. They threw some worms in, the worms ate the mixture and secreted the resulting compost that was then taken to the fields. Underneath the troughs, they collected the juices that dripped through the dirt and they bottled it up. Apparently it is really good to then pour on top of the soil or spray on the leaves of plants and stuff. So, here I was, a little grossed out by all these worms, listening to this guy talk about worms in Spanish and throwing some political teachings about socialism in there too, wondering what the heck I signed up for.

I also should confess, that sometimes I feel that way when I read some of Jesus’ teachings. What the heck is this Christian discipleship thing I signed up for? Look at this parable. Jesus shares the parable, and, in a rare teaching moment, also interprets it for us. The seeds are the word of the kingdom, he says, meaning the kingdom of heaven, the world of goodness and mercy that God intends for us. The soil is our hearts. He doesn’t tell us who the sower of the seeds is, so we’ll come back to that. Once he explains what the seed is, he gives us four types of soil, or people’s hearts. He says that some people hear about the kingdom of heaven, but they don’t understand it. Rather than having time to ruminate on it, instead the devil snatches it away. It’s as though they never experienced God’s love at all. Then there are people who receive the word of God, perhaps they start going to church or a Bible study or AA, but as soon as trouble comes their way, they let go of the word they have received, angry that they are still struggling. Bitterness and anger don’t just define them for a season, but shrivel them up until they turn away from God. Still others hear about the kingdom of heaven, start to seek it, but choose wealth and other cares of the world instead. It is the good soil that we want our hearts to be like--- soil so healthy that the harvest is beyond our wildest imaginations and we find ourselves doing mission and studying scripture and inviting others into our community. These hearts make up for the failings of the other hearts, and ending with the abundant harvest leaves us without worry for the future.

Most of us have heard this parable many, many times. So you might be confused about why it makes me wonder what I signed up for. But here is my question: how many of us can say our hearts are that good soil, healthy soil, all the time? What about all the people I love who are like the hard-packed path: people who just never grew up in church and never quite get what’s so good about Jesus or church or the Bible? Or who did grow up in church and were treated so poorly by people calling themselves Christians that they just cannot let those seeds take root? Will they remain that hard-packed path forever? And what about those times I myself feel like the rocky ground, that all the goodness God has showed me withers under the bitterness in or busyness of life? Can I and people like me never become good soil again? Sometimes when you start asking questions of scripture, you begin to wonder if it really is such good news after all.

But then I remembered standing on that mountain in Venezuela listening to a guy talk passionately about worms. Before learning about vermicompost, I assumed the quality of soil was fixed. Rocky soil will always be rocky. Certain weeds or thorns can never be gotten rid of. Missing or depleted nutrients can never be reintroduced. The soil was created that way and thus it shall always be, right? Wrong. Soil can be transformed. Adding compost to soil, fertilizer, or worms--- you can buy thousand-count red wrigglers in packs for vermicompost in case you were interested--- these are ways you can add nutrients back into tired or thin soil, give it a boost to help nourish healthier plants. Can all soil become good soil? Probably not, and definitely not without time or work. But soil quality can be improved. Just as our own love for God can grow and transform us.

So there is good news in this passage. It’s just such news involves work. We can become good soil through the simple acts of being in community, praying, reading scripture, and serving one another in mission. It may be a long process, even worms cannot transform soil overnight, but it can be done. And then that soil that may have been too inviting to the birds, or too rocky, or too thorny, might slowly be transformed until it can bring forth grain, growing up and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.

Remember who the sower represents, after all. Sowing seeds is an ancient way to farm, but people hearing Jesus tell this story would not be picturing a rich person but rather a poor farmer, a tenant farmer who can only eke out a living. Such a person would want to sow wherever the best possibility of a harvest would be, not on a path where birds could eat the seed, or on rocky soil, or somewhere where there was a weed infestation! But the sower did sow seed all over those places, extravagantly, as though there was an unlimited supply.¹ Do you know anyone so extravagant? Jesus, perhaps. You know, the guy who fed five thousand people with some bread and fish, who could heal people if they just brushed up against his clothing, who stood up to the might of Empire and the power of evil to show us the way of love.

If this is the one who sows the seeds, then this one can help us transform our at times thin and pitiful soil to reap a harvest that you would not believe, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty. Jesus’ audience that day, would consider a twofold harvest to be a good one. And instead their ears hear a story about a sower who throws seed and reaps and abundant harvest. It was yet another story that reminded them and should remind us that, with God, all things are possible. Maybe that first time we hear the word, it will not take root in us. Sometimes we have to talk about it, share it with others, pray about it until we finally get it. But God can help transform the kind of soil we are, so that we will bear fruit of the kingdom of God, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.

I want to end with a prayer written by a pastor on a beautiful blog called Unfolding Light. Let us pray:

Sower God, what hard-worn paths of habit, what packed-down roads drivennness have we trod out across our lives, ruts that do not receive your seed? Soften them.
What birds of desire snatch up your seed before it roots in us? Calm them.
What shallow, rocky soil lies in our hearts, what refusal to open our depths and surrender? Loosen us.
What thorns of bitterness choke your grace? Let them wither, all of them.
And where is your lovely soil in us— humble, human hummus— thick with holy rot and death, rich with all that has failed and fallen, crawling with the secret worms of grace that give life in the dark earth that we are? 

Find those places, fall upon us, sink in, and flourish. Amen.²

In this time of dedication, pray on those worms of grace.


1Some of this was inspired by Sarah Dylan Breuer, “God is a Foolish Farmer: A Farewell Sermon for St. Martin's,” Proper 10 Year A, 6 July 2005, Sarah Laughed: Dylan's Lectionary Blog, accessed 11 July 2017, http://www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2005/07/proper_10_year_.html.


2Edited for first person plural rather than singular. Steve Garnaas-Holmes, “Sowing,” 12 July 2017, Unfolding Light, accessed 15 July 2017, https://www.unfoldinglight.net/reflections/2232pzkreec8354mnsjkp99ywa9bg6.

Absolute Truth

This is the manuscript for my sermon to the Deer Creek Charge on a Sunday (which happened to be Ravens Superbowl Sunday--- we had purple communion bread!). This was the final part of sermon series on 1 Corinthians 12 and 13.

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Sermon:

The last two weeks we have been talking about the apostle Paul's first letter to the Corinthian Christians, focusing mainly on how we are to care for each other as the body of Christ. On how we are to build the kingdom of God here and now.

“It might seem that the imaginative and creative image of a many-membered body of believers caught up in mutual care for one another would be enough to imagine that we were already in heaven, or at least close. But Paul isn’t finished. He says, if you think this is something, let me pull back the curtain a bit and let you in on an even more fantastic vision of the Christian life as prepared for us by the Spirit of God.”¹

First Corinthians chapter thirteen, this even more fantastic vision, is perhaps one of the most famous passages in scripture. Even if someone does not go to church, he or she is bound to hear this passage at weddings, see it up on walls. When I was growing up, we had a similar picture to the one I brought in here that Aaron and I have hanging in our bedroom hanging up in our bathroom. Perhaps a strange place to keep such a scripture reading, but the point is that by associating 1 Corinthians 13 with weddings and homes, we domesticate it. We forget that Paul is talking about a radical love here, not marital love, not familial love--- though certainly those loves can be radical too and reflect the love Paul is describing. But what Paul is talking about is a totally different way of acting with every person we encounter, a Christ-centered life that should not be relegated to our homes alone.

So let us pray together:

Patient teacher, come alongside us this morning

as we focus on this scripture together. Teach us the meaning of this love

you call us to. Amen.

When I was in my first year of college, I was part of a campus Christian organization that had dynamic worship on Friday nights. I loved the music we sang, and we all sounded so good together. After singing and prayer, the leaders of the group invited a preacher, usually from the surrounding community, to come and preach.

Well one week a man came to preach about Absolute Truth. I don't remember what scripture he preached from, but I do remember his lesson and it still pains me to this day. He said that Absolute Truth was marriage between a man and a woman. Now, I know that many of you may believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman. My point is not how we ought to define marriage this morning. My point is that the Good News we read in the bible, the Absolute Truth we read here is not a definition of marriage. Not even close, and it makes me so sad that here were forty or so college students, broken people in a campus culture that had little room for Christ-centered living, being told not of the poetic love of God but lectured on a narrow political hot-button issue.

Because friends the Absolute Truth we should have named that night is summed up in 1 Corinthians 13: Love. Love Never Ends. Not a tame love that sounds nice at weddings and poetry that looks nice on your living room wall. Rather, a powerful love that is modeled off of Jesus' own love for us. This love patterned off of Jesus' own love for us is the key to the whole gospel.² So today, let's focus on Paul's words about love to un-domesticate them.

It is worth remembering that these past few weeks we have spent on Paul's first letter to the Corinthians have only focused on chapters twelve and thirteen. So what was Paul talking about before he got to love? Well, he was adjudicating arguments that kept popping up all over the place in the young Corinthian church. People were arguing over which mentor and teacher to follow, about what kinds of food they could and should eat, about how to worship, about who had the most important spiritual gifts, about marriage and sex. You know, easy stuff that we certainly never fight about today.

Paul addresses these arguments. But chapter thirteen is something different. I feel as Paul has been writing he takes a moment to set aside his letter, cover his head with his hands, and pray harder for these troubled and argumentative Corinthians than he has prayed before for them. And so when he comes back to the letter, he is renewed, and he points them and us to the real way to get in on the gospel. You see, the real practice that is the key to the gospel is not what teacher we follow, Calvin or Wesley, Mark Driscoll or Adam Hamilton. We have not unlocked the gospel if we discover whether contemporary worship or traditional worship styles are better. We do not unlock the gospel when we define marriage, and we do not unlock the gospel when we polish our spiritual gifts. Certainly all these things are important questions as we explore our faith, but they are not the Absolute Truth of the Gospel. Rather, what unlocks the gospel for us is the practice of the discipline of love. We cannot discern our other questions properly unless we first start with love.

Rev. Lauren Winner, Episcopal priest and professor of Christian spirituality at Duke, used that term the discipline of love in a sermon I heard this week and so I had to use it. Too often we don't think of love as a discipline. We think of love as magical, using phrases like “love at first sight” and talking about how we “just know” when we find the right person for us. The discipline of love reminds us that love is something we should grow at with time, something that we must focus ourselves to do, center ourselves. It is something that we should model on Jesus' love for us. Lauren Winner describes this as, “God's love for us. A love expressed in creation and a love expressed on the cross. And it is a love that is always Other-directed, or, more accurately, a love directed to Two Others: to one's Beloved and to the God who created her and sustains her.”

Love, of course, can become an occasion for sin. And that's why Paul explained what he was talking about when he was talking about love, why he defined love for us. Too often we seem to be attending to our Beloved, but we are using the other to make ourselves feel good. And sometimes we love the other person for what we think they should be or could be, rather than for who they are. Romantic love seems to be particularly susceptible to these problems, I think.

But Paul saves the definition of love from the limited definitions of romantic love, conjugal love. He corrects our selfish forms of love through his definition of love as patient and kind. He tells us that jealousy is not really love, that insisting on our own way is not really love. But when we read 1 Corinthians 13 at weddings, we sometimes miss that part. To really take it seriously, we have to recognize that Paul is not talking about marital love here, but Paul is talking about the love we should have for everyone as Christians. About how our every action should be rooted in love--- a love that reflects not our own selfishness, but that reflects God.

I came across this story by Charles Moore, a former seminary professor who now lives in a Christian community. The story is about the transforming love that Paul is talking about here. As a student at Cal Poly, Charles met a physics major named Alan. Alan was virtually blind, able to get around well enough, but he struggled with reading and needed to rely on others to drive him places. He was a straight-A student, later returning to Cal Poly as a physics instructor.³

Now, Alan was very happy to discuss religion, but he was extremely skeptical of anything religious, especially Christian. He was well read and well versed, and he argued his doubt like a scientist. He said he was an agnostic: there simply wasn't enough evidence to warrant belief in God. Charles and his friends trued to convince Alan, give him some kind of “proof,” but Alan would gently explain that he needed an assurance of truth.

What was intriguing about Alan, according to Charles, was that he liked to hang out with Charles and Charles' “Christian friends.” They reached out to him, always inviting him to the beach or midnight runs to Taco Bell or whatever else they were doing.

One evening, Charles' group of friends had a praise night on the beach. Alan said he would go to enjoy the sunset and roaring bonfire. But by the time the evening was over, Alan had made a commitment to follow Jesus. No one had spoken to him, nor did anyone even know at first.

“You see,” Alan explained to Charles, “while everyone was singing around the fire, I realized that whenever I am around you Christians I am happy. Even when we disagree with each other, I find myself liking to be with Christians.”

Charles, not understanding, said, “But, Alan, I thought you were never going to become a believer unless there was first enough evidence.”

“Yes,” he replied, “and I still require it. But that's precisely why I now believe. It's how you all love each other that strikes me most. I never considered that evidence before. A good scientist, you know, considers all the facts. I simply haven't found the love you Christians have for each other anywhere else. That's evidence enough for me that Jesus is Lord.”

That's what Paul is talking about when he's talking about love. What makes a difference in people's lives in not whether we speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, or whether we have prophetic powers, or even faith--- it is about love for all our brothers and sisters, a simple patient love. I say simple, but certainly this discipline of love is not possible for any of us without the Spirit's aid. Certainly it is a practice we will have to work at all our lives. But friends, love is our call as Christians. So let us go forth to love, each and every day.

Benediction:

Friends, may we go forth from this place remembering our calling to love. Let us remember in the difficulties of the week ahead, and in the joys, that love never ends. Jesus' love never ends. May that give you strength. So let us go out and embody Christ-centered love for all whom we meet. Maybe even fans of the 49-ers. Amen.

 

1James Boyce, Commentary of the Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, Working Preacher, 3 February 2013, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=2/3/2013&tab=3

2Much of this sermon is inspired by or borrowed from Lauren Winner, “Corinthian Cross-Stich,” Sermon given at Duke Chapel on 31 January 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVMgzALSG34

3Charles Moore, “The powerful witness of community,” Beyond Argument, Intervarsity 1997 http://www.intervarsity.org/slj/wi97/wi97_beyond_argument.html.

Belonging

This year I am a Jurisdictional Organizer for Reconciling Ministry Network, the Methodist Federation for Social Action, and Affirmation's coalitional campaign Love Your Neighbor (to read about last year's campaign, I have a reflection here). I organize United Methodists in the Greater New Jersey and Upper New York (RMN and MFSA sites) Annual Conferences for a more inclusive, more loving church. Our strategy to transform the church is through building relationships, which we do through stories. This is one of my public narratives (you can read another one here) that answers the question of why I am a Reconciling United Methodist and why I am committed to change the church.

My parents always taught me welcome and acceptance as the way Jesus was calling us to treat everyone. We weren't perfect of course, but I'm sure many of us learned about Jesus' love for even our enemies in Sunday school. Jesus is that guy who loves you no matter what you do. Except the church often acts the opposite of that. Though I love my home church, I still do not feel that I can always be authentic there in worship, sometimes because of the expectations placed on me as a preacher's kid and sometimes because churches are often just such judgmental places. Especially after I started college I heard over and over about how many people liked Jesus but just feared the church, perceiving it as this place where too many people are phony. I didn't know why I kept going back to church--- it felt dead. It was not a place where I saw the body of Christ at work.

I began to go to a church in Washington D.C. where I found a community that embraced Jesus' call to love everyone, to welcome everyone. It was a Reconciling United Methodist Church, so every Sunday people of all sexual orientations and gender identities were expressly welcomed, but more than that I felt welcomed because of the community prayer in worship. This was a place where anyone could lift up personal prayer concerns and joys in the same moment one could plead for prayers for far away war-torn countries. It was a church where people could open up their hearts and use their hands and feet to do the work of Christ in the world.

An ordained elder attending the church who was working at a faith-based, non-profit invited me to Student Forum's MOSAIC service, which in that year was held in DC. MOSAIC is the young adult extension ministry of Reconciling Ministries Network working for a fully inclusive church for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. It was there that I could no longer deny God's call on my life.

The lights were dim, the chapel small but filled with warm bodies swaying slightly to the music from the guitars. And my friend walked up to the altar where communion lay and she took the bread and broke it. It was rainbow challah bread. And at that moment I felt like I belonged, I felt that this was home. It was a feeling of completeness that I wish for everyone. And it is a feeling that is not accessible to everyone in the church. The woman who broke the bread that night is a lesbian. She has a wife and a beautiful baby boy. And yet the church polity tells us that she is incompatible with Christian teaching.

The Christian teaching I know in that moment of communion is that Christ's body was broken for me and for my friend. And as United Methodists, our open communion table reminds us of that. I worked at a church in Delta, PA, where an artist in the congregation drew a picture one Sunday of Jesus in which Jesus' body consisted of the faces of each person present in church that day. It is a picture that shows us that we are all the body of Christ, as we learn in communion. Yet our Church's exclusionary policies are erasing faces from the picture of Christ's body, choosing who and who is not worthy to live out God's call on their lives.

As a church we need to make a choice. And this isn't just a choice that will be made though polity changes we hope for in 2012. No, this is a choice that each of our churches makes every day. Are we going to be churches that live as the Body of Christ in all it's colorful splendor? Or are we going to continue to erase faces from that body?

Castor Oil: A Reflection on Being a Radical Feminist and a Progressive Christian

This is a reflection documenting where I'm coming from, trying to bridge some gaps. It was written in preparation for my summer work as a Beatitudes Fellow at Faith in Public Life. The Beatitudes Society is a progressive Christian resource center for and network of faith leaders that offers seminarians like me internships at key national social change organizations. Faith in Public Life is one of those organizations, focusing on "advancing faith in the public square as a positive and unifying force for justice, compassion and the common good," a lot of which is in making the progressive faith voice audible in the media. I believe God has called me to parish ministry, yet I felt strongly that I needed non-profit experience if I want to be an effective pastor working for a just world. I have not been disappointed with this decision. I will write a few reflections on this experience throughout the summer.

"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."
-Che Guevara

I have been a feminist and a Christian from the time I was able to make conscious decisions for myself. The two go hand in hand for me really: the vision of a just society that feminists are fighting for is for me the kindom about which Jesus preached. Yet in USAmerican society, these two have been separated, particularly with the coming to power of the religious right that culminated in the 2004 election in which George W. Bush was re-elected. So as I was finding a place for myself, I initially grounded my work in secular feminist organizations, avoiding the Christian label that was so often tangled in the rhetoric of the right. While I hold the work of secular feminists, particularly radical feminists, to be of absolute importance to transforming society, I found the radical-ness of progressive Christian organizations to speak better to my understanding of the transformed society I was working towards as a feminist and a Christian.

I consider myself to be a radical feminist (though I know many radical feminists would disagree with my assessment because we're kinda judgmental like that) because I am committed to radical transformation that is not rooted solely within gender equality, but rather rooted in standing up against all forms of oppression as they intersect. As a senior in college I and several friends threw ourselves totally into a feminist project of addressing sexual violence on campus and violence by Christians against women at a local clinic that provided abortions. We stood as witnesses, refusing to allow such violence go on in silence assent. Yet I felt like Jonah--- not in the sense that I ran from the work, but I felt like Jonah at the end of Jonah 4 when he's sitting under the castor oil plant sulking.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Jonah preaches to the sinful people of Ninevah, telling them that God knows their crimes and will destroy their city. The people of Ninevah repented, so God decided not to destroy them after all. God's act of forgiveness makes Jonah angry because Jonah does not like those in Ninevah and wants to see them destroyed. He goes off out of the city in a rage. He sits down, sulking, and God causes a castor oil plant to grow over him, to protect his head from the sun. Because castor oil is used as a laxative, this is God's way of telling Jonah he's full of shit and has no business sulking. Jonah doesn't get it. Then God kills the castor oil bush and Jonah gets mad again. The God says to him:
"You feel sorrow because of a castor oil plant tht cost you no labor, that you did not make grow, that sprouted in a night and perished in a night. Is it not right, then, for me to feel sorrow for the great city of Ninevah, in which there are more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, to say nothing of all the animals?"*

Now do not get me wrong: no one repented at Dickinson. None of the protesters outside of the women's clinic who harassed women as they entered the clinic repented. Yet, my activism in this context was one in which I preached about how wrong THEY were. When people in Greek life wanted to meet with us and discuss how to change, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with these people. I loved to tell them how wrong they were and then wanted to go off and sulk outside off campus, waiting for it to implode, I guess. I was angry all the time and I hated most people. Now, I want to note here that anger is necessary, but for me it was unhealthy to be in that constant state of anger that was driven as much by hate and disgust as by desire for transformation. So I was not happy.

It was in seminary, in my faith community, that I felt restored to be able work towards transformation in a way that to me was less like the way Jonah worked for transformation and was more like...well like Jesus, someone who preached, certainly, but someone whose message of transformation was lived out in community. Someone who worked with the "sinful" people rather than just preaching at them and then leaving. This is not to say that such transformative work does not happen in radical feminist and queer communities (see a great blog post from Enough, an awesome anti-capitalist blog, on transforming community that is not connected to faith work and is beautiful), but it is within the faith community that I have best experienced what radical societal revolution can look like.

The revolution that is transforming our society to look like that kindom is not someone preaching repentance and then leaving to sulk under a castor oil bush. That person (me) is full of shit. The revolution involves a love of people that nurtures a hope that we can all work together for transformation. Sure, as Che said, the love aspect of revolution sounds hokey, but if we really want to begin to live in something like that vision of a transformed society, we ourselves have to transform, have to make an effort to reach out instead of retreat within ourselves. To be guided by a great feeling of love.

***

*Jonah 4:10-11, The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation, Priests for Equality (Sheed and Ward 2007).

Trust Women

We were standing out on the sidewalk, the cold air from the Susquehanna blasting into us as we looked out over the water, trying not to listen to the shouting beside us. I looked over at my friend and shrugged apologetically when they began to pray over us, then gripped my sign--- Who Would Jesus Harass?--- tighter and straightened my back ready to withstand whatever they threw at us, just hoping to make ourselves some kind of barrier between them and the women entering the clinic.

A bunch of us went every Saturday morning before the 2008 election to counter-protest outside of a women's health clinic in Harrisburg that provided abortions to women every other Saturday morning. The health care workers came outside to thank us every time, saying that no one had ever supported them like this before. One of our professors who lived in Harrisburg brought us coffee one morning. Another woman walked past us, read our signs, and then, after telling the protesters what she was doing and why, she went into the clinic to make a donation. For me, though, it was just about drawing the violence of the protesters away from the women going into the clinic.

One week, a woman had gotten into the wrong lane and had to cross over a lane last minute to make the driveway. Another car hit her, but luckily there was not much damage. Still, both cars pulled into the driveway and the woman got out of her car to exchange information. There was a younger woman who waited in the passenger's seat. As soon as the older woman got out of her car, the protesters started talking to her, telling her what a mistake she was making. She was shaking as she turned around to face them. "You have no idea how hard of a decision this was for us!" she shouted with such emotion that it shut them up. I choked up because of the force of her emotion,the force of her pain.

While not every woman's decision to have an abortion is a painful one, this woman's answer will be imprinted in my mind forever. Her face, the tone of her voice, her clenched fists will always be in my mind whenever I think of what reproductive freedom means to me.

Today marks thirty-seven years that Roe v. Wade has been in effect. Yet, control over their own bodies has always been a struggle for women in this country. Abortion providers face violence daily. Dr. George Tiller, a gentle man of faith who said at a conference I was at in 2008 that he continued providing late-term abortions for women because of he would never want his own daughter to suffer an unwanted pregnancy, was brutally murdered in his church. His killer claims it was in self defense to save the "unborn." Sick.

And in 2007, the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Abortion Ban (the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003) to protect women from decisions they may regret later: as Justice Kennedy said,"It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form." Despite the medically inaccurate statement, the most frightening thing here is that fact that still in the second millennium old men are finding it necessary to curtail women's control over their own bodies "for their own good."

If we are so concerned with the dignity of human life, why is it that women are continually denied the dignity of making decisions for themselves? "Trust Women" to me means allow us the dignity to make our own decisions because I know what is best for my body better than Justice Kennedy or those protesters outside of the clinic in Harrisburg. Trust women.