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?

Breaking through Fear

And yet again I have been remiss in writing. Apologies! But here is a sermon I preached today at St. Paul and Norrisville United Methodist Churches on the birth of Moses.

This sermon is significant to me for a number of reasons: 1. The book of Exodus is my favorite book in the bible, 2. I relied on my work in college on race as a social construction which was awesome, and 3. This sermon is the one I am using for my Provisional Membership Examination in February where the Board of Ordained Ministry of the Baltimore Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church will decide if I will be commissioned (in non-church speak it basically means that I need this sermon for a big interview that will determine whether or not I'll have a job when I graduate).

I thank both churches my family and my friends Amanda, Laura, Nancy, Kim, and Gavin and of course to my partner Aaron for their support and affirmation of my calling.

So, here's the sermon.

Scripture: Exodus 1:8-2:10 1

Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, "Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land." Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

Jesus' baptism using imagery from this story

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live." But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, "Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?" The midwives said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them." So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live."

Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.


The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him, "This must be one of the Hebrews' children," she said. Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, "Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?" Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Yes." So the girl went and called the child's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages." So the woman took the child and nursed it. When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses, "because," she said, "I drew him out of the water."

Sermon: Breaking through Fear

Good morning everyone! I am excited to be here today. The book of Exodus was the first book of the bible I read in its entirety as a child, probably because I really liked the cartoon version of the story The Prince of Egypt when it came out in 1998. Many of us are familiar with the story of Moses, or at least a version of that story, because every Easter evening The Ten Commandments is shown on TV. It is an epic story, so to preach on the birth story of Moses is challenging, but it is also an honor.

So will you pray with me?

Patient Teacher,
one who has delivered us through times of trial to see your presence among us
grant that this morning we may feel that presence, that you may speak to us
through this scripture, the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts,
so that we might better live out your teachings. Amen.

The world that we begin with this morning is a dark one, beginning with the words, "Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph." At the end of Genesis, Joseph forgave his brothers and brought them to Egypt to escape famine and there they enjoyed Pharaoh's favor. For them, Egypt was a place of refuge. But many many years have passed, so many that the story of Joseph has been lost to the new Pharaoh. And so he begins to oppress the Israelites.

Dennis Olsen, a professor at Princeton seminary writes, "A tempting political strategy for new leaders, whether an Egyptian pharaoh or a Nazi Hitler, involves trying to solidify power by singling out a relatively weak minority or outsider group and calling them an enemy. Fear of others can be a powerful source of unity."2 Fear can bring people together, but ultimately it tears them apart. Fear is not a strategy that can be sustained, and it is a strategy contrary to the very life that God is calling us to live.

Living in the Norrisville area, most of us have not known this systemic fear. Many of us may have heard of it through stories of growing up black in the south before and during the Civil Rights Movement. Or stories of living under Nazis in Europe. These are stories where we can taste the darkness and the horror of what it may have been like to wake up as those Israelites, one day living normal lives and then beginning to see their dignity taken away. In these first and second chapters of Exodus, we see that first the Israelites are conscripted into forced labor, but they continued to multiply and so the Egyptians forced them into complete slavery. The fear here, then, does not just belong to exclusively to the Israelites. Maintaining a culture of fear in which to oppress one group means that the oppressors, the Egyptians here, must also be fearful. Fearful of revolt, of losing power, but mostly they are afraid because they have seen how easy it is to have your dignity taken away.

But some Egyptians and Israelites broke that cycle of fear, as we see in our scripture reading this morning. We're going to explore the Hebrew midwives and Pharaoh's daughter specifically. These women model for us our roles as the Church in the world today. We are to break through fear and move our communities to the abundant living that Jesus calls us to when he says in the Gospel of John, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly."3 The story of Exodus is a story of moving into our calling to abundant living, though the way is difficult.

Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives, are the first we see to stand up to Pharaoh's reign of fear. It may seem strange that Pharaoh would summon these two women, these two lowly Hebrew midwives, and invite them to conspire such appalling and horrific genocide with him. Why not just jump straight to his order to all the Egyptian people in verse 22 to throw all the Hebrew boys into the Nile? The text does not tell us why he whispers his evil plans to these midwives, but we can imagine why. This story of the Egyptians forcing the Hebrews into slavery is not simply a story of finding a workforce, but it is the story of the construction, the creation, of a people who were once favored by another Pharaoh into a hated and feared people.

Many of you have heard me talk extensively about my experience in Bosnia. In Bosnia, Muslims and Christians lived side by side before the war, as Hebrews and Egyptians did before the rise of this new Pharaoh who did not know Joseph. But after the fall of Yugoslavia, leaders like Slobodan Milosevic looking for power used propaganda to turn Christians from seeing Muslims as neighbors, coworkers, and friends to seeing them as monsters who needed to be eliminated. This also happened in Nazi Germany, and in places like Rwanda, and even in the USA in areas for instance where the KKK was prevalent. This culture of fear that functions to create a distinct "us" and "them" between people who used to be friends is common throughout history.

The difficulty I imagine Pharaoh had with his propaganda was the Hebrews' fertility. In most cultures and times, fertility is seen as a blessing from God. So too it was in this case, as the midwives are rewarded in this story with families. So Pharaoh wants to hide that evidence of blessing from the Egyptians, for surely it is more difficult to oppress a people you know are favored by God. He calls the midwives to make murder look like God's blessing is being taken back, so that the Hebrews will be known for their inability to keep their sons alive past birth.4

At very real risk to themselves, these women stand up to Pharaoh, rejecting a part in his evil plan. The text says that these women feared God, and that was their motivation for defying Pharaoh. There is that word fear again, and it seems to conflict with my understanding of Pharaoh's reign as one of fear and God's as a reign of abundant living. And certainly in my understanding of God, fearing God is not something I talk about much. For me, following God comes out of a love for God, not fear. But in this sense, fearing God does not mean being afraid of what punishment God will reign down for disobeying: in the tradition of the Old Testament fearing God is much more complicated. According to J. Cheryl Exum from Boston College, the center of this scriptural concept "to fear God" is a sense of God's mystery that affects our behavior, so that we are "guided by basic ethical principles and in harmony with God's will."5 These midwives have a sense of God's mystery that guides them in their daily walk. They ignore Pharaoh and continue to participate in God's blessing of the Hebrew women.

They are called before Pharaoh again, and Pharaoh asks why the boys are continuing to live. Should the midwives have spat in Pharaoh's face and denounced his evil, he would have them killed and found new midwives. This is typical of those in power even today--- if you hear something you don't like, silence them and find someone willing to tell you what you want to hear. So the midwives play on Pharaoh's own creation of the Hebrews as somehow not human. They say that Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women. They describe the Hebrew women as more like animals because they can just pop out babies without midwives, though more dignified Egyptian women need help.6 This is a lie, but it feeds into Pharaoh's own construction of Hebrews as more like animals than humans. So Shiphrah and Puah catch Pharaoh up in his own lies and go back to work among the Hebrew women, and the people multiplied and became very strong.

I read a book this summer called A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell about the end of World War II and Italian resistance to fascism. She focuses specifically on the actions of a few families living in valleys in Northern Italy at the end of the war. These were families who suffered under Mussolini, many of whom had lost sons to the war, and now they were being oppressed under the German Nazis who has moved in following the collapse of the Italian government. These were ordinary Catholic Italian peasants who hid Jewish refugees in their homes, made them part of their families. It is a story we know little about, but it is a powerful one. Mary Doria Russell ends the book talking about Hitler: "One hollow, hateful little man," she writes. "One last awful thought: all the harm he ever did was done for him by others."7 I always get chills reading that. Because the author of this novel is right. Hitler probably didn't even fire a gun--- all the atrocities he committed were done for him by other people. Pharaoh himself did not kill Hebrew babies. No, his genocidal plans were carried out for him by others. But Shiphrah and Puah stood up and refused to do harm for Pharaoh, and the people multiplied and became very strong.

Theirs is an example for us as the Church. The Church has a long and unfortunate history of being Pharaoh, but we also have a history of moments that we acted as those midwives, as those Catholic Italians did when they hid Jewish families during World War II. But when we choose to live abundantly, those relying on fear to maintain power become desperate.

Pharaoh in his desperation gives a new order to his people, "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live."

In the film The Prince of Egypt, a young Moses learns of this order by looking at the drawings on the wall of the temple that depicted history. The drawing describing this order of Pharaoh is haunting: rows of soldiers hold babies by the leg preparing to throw them in the Nile, and more children are drawn falling through the water into the waiting mouths of crocodiles. And it is into this horror that Moses' mother gives birth.

She hides her son as long as she can, but ultimately she turns to the Nile, where so many have died already, and tries to subvert Pharaoh's orders. She does not throw her child into the Nile but places him in a basket onto the Nile.

And then we meet the daughter of Pharaoh, another example for the Church. She is a child of Pharaoh, so surely she knows her father's order to throw all the Hebrew babies into the Nile. Surely she knows this baby is a Hebrew. And yet, she opens the basket, sees the baby, hears its cry, and something stirs within her. Her own father Pharaoh has put so much effort into making a distinction between Hebrew and Egyptian that he believes himself that Hebrews are more animal than human. He raised his daughter to fear the Hebrews. But she sees through the fear and her heart is moved for the baby. She takes him as her son, thoroughly destroying the barrier that her own father was trying to construct between Hebrew and Egyptian.

As the Church, this breaking of barriers is also our work, despite history as the constructors of those barriers. Ephesians 2:14 reads, "For Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us."8 We are supposed to open the basket, know the baby is a not one of us, know that society is telling us that we should shut the basket and leave it there among the reeds, and instead allow ourselves to be moved by compassion to make that baby our own.

The story of Pharaoh's daughter reminds me of the ministry of a church in Tucson, Arizona, a ministry called No More Deaths in which volunteers provide food, water, and medical care to save the lives of people crossing the treacherous border between the USA and Mexico.9 Earlier this summer, volunteers from this church found Gonzalo lying barely conscious on the side of a remote road. He was severely dehydrated from drinking contaminated water from a cattle tank, and he was going to die. But volunteers from this Tucson church found him and laid him in the back of their pick-up. He asked if he was dreaming, and then after being assured he wasn't, he asked, "Are you angels?"

Are you angels? Perhaps that would be what baby Moses would have asked if he had been old enough when he saw Pharaoh's daughter's face.

Now, No More Deaths volunteers have been arrested before while transporting immigrants like Gonzalo to receive medical aid, and some have been stopped by police and interrogated just for leaving water for weary travelers to find. After being treated, Gonzalo was deported--- but he was alive because of the love of these No More Deaths volunteers. They were like the Pharaoh's daughter--- these volunteers opened the basket floating down the river to find Gonzalo, a person they have been told they cannot help at the risk of arrest. But they have compassion. They saw that Gonzalo was a child of God and so they reached out to him.

And so we have seen who we are supposed to be in this story. But who are we now?10 No one here is really like Pharaoh, but almost all of us, myself included, can be like all those Egyptians who may not have come up with Pharaoh's horrible ideas but who still do his dirty work for him from time to time. Sometimes this is just because we afraid for ourselves or our families, sometimes it seems simpler to follow orders, but most of all it is that sometimes the fear we live in tells us that there is no other way to live.

But God pokes a hole in our fear. God strengthens us when we act as those midwives, choosing to honor God rather than fearing Pharaoh, or when we act as Pharaoh's daughter, moved by compassion to use our own place and power for justice and love instead of for fear.

May we all break our own cycles of fear to live more abundantly. Amen.

On Summer Thunderstorms

I wish I had been posting more this summer, like I did last summer with my Beatitudes Fellowship blogs. Unfortunately, though I have one reflection and a sermon up I have not even posted once a week! I have been working as an intern for the Communities of Shalom in York City and Delta, Cardiff, and Whiteford for five of six weeks now. I have been writing a lot, journaling way more than I normally do, but I have felt like posting little of it. And I don't know how much of my final reflection I will want to post either. But I do want to share my reflection from last Monday because last week was a powerful one for me, and I think this reflection captures some of what I have experienced.

11 July 2011

All I wanted today was a piece of pizza. Actually, I don't like paying for food if I can help it, but I need to go talk with folks about what they see as needed in the Delta community, yet instead I've been piddling around. As I did again today. See the two pizza places I was going to go to are closed today! But I walked a ways from Delta United Methodist Church to Delta Pizza, and what I learned then was worth the failed attempt to get some pizza.

It was actually pretty horrifying. I was walking up the street, watching the sidewalk because it is in really bad shape (apparently the borough got some money from the state to fix it but they declined as it would mean they would have to put some of their own money into it as well), and on one of the slate slabs of sidewalk was written in big chalked purple letters, “FAG,” right in front of a house. And then I noticed that again it was right in front of another house written on a telephone pole. And another place where blue chalk outlined something about someone fucking someone was being worn away. This normally would not have horrified me except that the word “fag” is so ugly and used so violently in this community. And it was coupled with a picture that Richard had painted for us today in bible study.

I started the day in bible study at the Senior Center. It was a beautiful group of folks, most of whom I met at church or the senior center already. We read Matthew 25, the parable of the bridesmaids, the parable of the talents, and the judgment of the sheep and the goats.But in the beginning we went around and talked about those blessings we have seen in our lives. Richard said that Sunday morning he woke up and went outside to go to church, only to see that his car was egged. This upset me--- it is different when kids egg each others' cars, or when kids egg someone's car who they don't like, but a stranger's car? Maybe Richard isn't a stranger, but I can't imagine how he would have contact with some kid and incur their wrath enough to have them egg his car! I just shiver to think about how people do certain things to one another, how they think it is okay to egg a complete stranger's car? This is what went through my mind. But Richard saw it as a blessing. He said on his drive to church he saw a car where someone had thrown rocks and not eggs and the windshield was broken. Still, I am left with the fact that there is so little to do around Delta that kids see their only outlet in such destruction, and in the violence of the act of labeling someone as a fag so publicly.

I spent the evening in York with kids who are being kept busy, given an entirely different task than those in Delta. Asbury United Methodist Church, in collaboration with First Presbyterian Church and Yorkshire United Methodist, was hosting 67 youth for the York Mission Week, a week of working on homes and community gardens and at soup kitchens, reaching out to do mission close to their own homes. The bishop and the cabinet were working at the York Mission Week, which is how I got involved. Each night after dinner, they have a time of sharing, a few group games, and then worship. I went today to the time of sharing, listening as the kids talked about what they had done that day. I am certainly not called to youth ministry because I have very little patience for 13 year old boys, but there were a few moments in this time of sharing where some of the kids did voice meaningful experiences and others tried to but couldn't really articulate what had happened. But such moments are still beautiful.

When we were sharing, one of the girls talked about working on a fence to keep a big dog in on Chestnut Street. I told them I had talked to that woman several weeks ago at Northeast Neighborhood Association. She had talked about submitting the application. She said she was glad she had the opportunity to get some help, but she hated to let her landlord get out of his responsibilities. She said she wanted to hold him accountable, but at the same time, she needed her fence fixed. I don't think this story really resonated with the kids at my table, but I think it is a story that is important to remember. We as the church can't just go around fixing stuff without holding the principalities and powers accountable. Otherwise, we are always about being bandaids, which means we aren't really living the kingdom of God!

The powerful part of the evening, though, was when we went out on a silent walk circling around the church, taking the time to really look at these neighborhoods they are working in, rather than narrowly focusing on our tasks which is so easy to do. And the kids really were silent, really were keeping their eyes open. But the sky was getting darker and darker and we heard thunder and began to see lightning. And yet, I couldn't turn back. So I continued to lead the kids until suddenly the sky poured water down on us and so we ran down a little back alley to get back to the church. But after the long hot day, our bodies welcomed the rain, I think. People ran smiling into the building.

When Kristin, one of those the mission week, had us all back and dried off in the sanctuary preparing for worship, she spoke of how when things like this happen, we just have to laugh in the devil's face and not let it get us down. Now, that is not my theology, and I think it would have been better to lead the kids in thinking about all those homes they were in today, how those roofs were holding up, or in thinking about all the people living without homes in this city. But even beyond that, I saw the storm to be of God. Here we were, eyes opening to the neighborhoods around us, and it was as though God sent this rain to wash us. To wash the dirt from our eyes so we could better see around us. To cleanse us from the old way of doing mission, to cleanse us of our savior complexes, and rather invite us to enter into a different attitude for the week. One in which we were open for transformation, open to the ways God would work in these young people's lives.

And that same rain fell in Delta, washing the glass out of the street, the chalk off the sidewalk, the egg off the cars...maybe even bringing those kids some relief from the heat, a smile to their faces.

I did not get to go back to the mission week, so I do not know how the rest of the week went or if such transformation took place. Too often in my own week, I was not open to transformation in my own life. But I can still feel that refreshing rain on my face. And I know God is still working within me to change me.

Seeking Shalom

This is a sermon I preached July 3 at the combined worship service for Delta and Bryansville United Methodist Churches. These churches are involved in the Tri-Village Shalom Community of Delta, Cardiff, and Whiteford, with whom I am interning along with the York City Communities of Shalom this summer, and so I preached on the concept of shalom and designed a kind of shalom service for them.

It was a difficult sermon to write first of all because I have preached rather infrequently from the Hebrew Scriptures. But more than that it was difficult because though I see the beauty in the text, it is a letter to a people being ethnically cleansed--- and Jeremiah is telling them that it is punishment but that they are to make the best of it and use it for good. It is like all those places in scripture where we read God has a plan for us, and we realize that such a thought is less a comforting thought than a time to question that if God really has these sorts of violent plans for us do we really want to worship that kind of God? And this is not an aspect of the text I confront in this sermon. I chose the text because we use it as the Communities of Shalom scripture. I just say all of that to let you in on the struggle and acknowledge that there is a dark side to this text that I shy away from. What made it easier was using a story I've used in sermons before, but I figured that I might as well reuse my favorite stories now since I won't be able to when I am preaching in the same church every Sunday!

Call to Worship: A Litany of Shalom by Ruth Duck
ONE: Two things we know about the vision of shalom. Shalom is a gift to us from God. And Shalom is our mission.
ALL: Shalom is a personal relationship between God and all God's earthly children.
ONE: Shalom is the home that we seek, the goal of our spiritual journeys, and the valley of our delight.
ALL: Shalom is our sense of security, of being cared for and loved.
ONE: Shalom is the source of our courage and strength for which we so earnestly yearn.
ALL: Shalom is the harmonious relationship with God, which then expresses itself in our thinking, feeling, and doing with ourselves, others, and God.
ONE: Shalom is reconciliation: a body and soul become whole, a house once divided becomes a home again, the lion lies down with the lamb.
ALL: Shalom is justice for all that we so easily forget when we are in control.
ONE: Shalom is our Christ, God's Hoy Child, whom we crucify and bury, but who will not die.
ALL: Shalom is a gift to us from God. Shalom is our mission.

Scripture: Jeremiah 29:4-7 1

(NRSV, adapted: This scripture comes from the prophet Jeremiah. I will be reading from the New Revised Standard Version, but I have adapted it by “untranslating” to include the original word shalom. As we read in the opening litany, the Hebrew word shalom is a rich rich word for which we have no good translation. So we translate it many different ways. The dean of Drew Theological School, Jeffery Kuan, says that shalom is one of those Hebrew words you should never translate because so much gets lost in translation. So look over your shalom litany again and recall those definitions here as I read our scripture this morning.)


Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom.

Children's Sermon: Check out Enemy Pie by Derek Munson about a little boy who gets rid of his enemy by making him his friend. It fit in well with trying to figure out what it means to seek shalom in exile.

Sermon: Seeking Shalom

Will you pray with me?
Patient Teacher,
We give thanks this morning for this time to come together and worship.
And we ask for you to stand with us today, to let these words from my mouth
and the meditations of all our hearts show us what your shalom really means. Amen.
This is a beautiful scripture that we read from the prophet Jeremiah this morning, but it is a difficult one. Sometimes the Gospel stories are difficult because Jesus' time just seems so totally different from our own, so far from our own, but here we are reading something written over 500 years before Jesus' birth! Who was this Jeremiah guy and what was this exile he's talking about anyway? We don't really learn the very ancient history of Israel in one of our high school history classes, after all. So this seems as good a place as any to start to figure out what is going on here.

The book of Jeremiah is Jeremiah's witness to the destruction of Israel by Babylon and the beginning of the Babylonian exile. Jeremiah is a priest, not a bullfrog in case some of you were wondering. For forty years, Jeremiah was a priest and prophet who led Israel, who pastored them through this painful and terrifying period of Israel's history. What we read today is a part of a letter written by Jeremiah to the exiled community, an attempt to breathe a little hope into their despair.

But what Jeremiah tells them is not what they want to hear.
Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.
Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.
Here the exiles are, waiting. They are waiting to see how God is going to liberate them from their Babylonian oppressors. I imagine them sitting alongside the dusty road, their bags still packed. They are watching, waiting, suspended in the moments since being dumped there in Babylon. But they aren't just waiting for something, anything to happen; no, they are waiting to return to Israel. So when Jeremiah's letter gets to them, when they hear God wants them to settle down, can you imagine their horror? They want to go home, but God is telling them to make this new, foreign place their home by building homes and growing food and getting married. But this is not just any new, foreign place: this is the place of their exile, the home of their oppressors, of their enemies.

Jeremiah's message is not a revolutionary one, folks. Jeremiah wasn't telling the Israelites to stand together and revolt against the tyrants who forced them into exile. That's really difficult for me, personally. I want stories where Moses is standing up to Pharaoh, saying "Let my people go!" I want Jesus in the Temple turning over tables and throwing out the money lenders. But in this particular place and time, God has given Jeremiah another message to share with the exiled community:
But seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom.

Shalom. We have already talked a little about this word this morning (see the litany above). Translators have used all of the following English words to describe shalom: welfare, completeness, to cause to be at peace, to make peace, peace offering, at rest, at ease, secure, safe, to prosper, to be whole.2 And it is this word heavy with meaning for holistic living, peaceful living that Jeremiah uses here in his letter to the exiles. He is not saying, just build houses and duck your heads down and plow on ahead through the exile: he is saying build houses and while you do, build God's beloved community right there in exile. Rather than longing for the past, rather than waiting for God to do something Exodus-style like send plagues upon the enemy until they throw in the towel and send the Israelite's back to their homes, Jeremiah called the exiles to live as God’s people where they find themselves, whether it is a time and a place and a circumstance of their own choosing or not.3

Not many of us today in this room this morning know the pain of exile the way these Israelite's did. Dr. Wil Gafney, translates verses two and three of this chapter, which we didn't read this morning because the names are unfamiliar and a little confusing, into our own terms: "Our national government has just collapsed as the result of an invading foreign power. There is no remnant of the military. There is no government. The President, First Lady, Cabinet, and Congress have all been exiled. All of the artists in New York and steel workers in Pittsburgh were separated from their families and exiled as well." We have not experienced such an upheaval here in Delta, though there are so many places around the world suffering such a fate. Many of us have roots deep in Harford County and South Central Pennsylvania and cannot imagine building house and planting gardens elsewhere.

But I think perhaps we know what it is like to feel isolated and alone, to feel that all of what we were certain of has been taken away whether through our own sin or someone else's, or just some catastrophe. Some of us know what its like to live in a hostile environment, as well, whether it be in our own home or in our neighborhood. Often, it is easy to just put our heads down and plug along. It is easy to keep isolating ourselves.

So when we read Jeremiah, it speaks to us even though we are outside of this context of exile. When we read Jeremiah's letter and see God calling us out to live in community, we want to be incredulous, check God's forehead to see if God's sick, you know? It is just a crazy thing to demand of us, to go out and build community among people we don't even know or even consider to be enemies. But here we are, sitting around miserably as those exiled Israelites were on the side of the road, bags still packed, and we realize that we have to make a change in the way we have been living or we will continue to be miserable.

As Christians, we are a people called to abundant living as Jesus said in John 10:10, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly." God through Jeremiah was calling the Israelites to abundant living too. That's what shalom is about; shalom is abundant living. It is about looking at the circumstances around us and instead of retreating inside ourselves, shutting ourselves off from everyone around us, we live as God's people by building God's beloved community.

One of the stories I keep coming back to that really illustrates for me this call from Jeremiah to seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom, comes from Peter Storey, a Methodist Bishop from South Africa. Many of you may remember apartheid in South Africa, the racist system of white governance over the majority back Africans. It was a terrorist government, really, forcing all people, black and any whites who thought the system was wrong, to live in fear. Hear this story from Bishop Storey in his own words:

"I once received a phone call," Bishop Storey writes, "in the early hours of the morning telling me that one of my black clergy in a very racist town sixty miles from Johannesburg had been arrested by the secret police. I got up and drove out there, picked up another minister and then went looking for him. When we found the prison where he was and demanded to see him, we were accompanied by a large white Afrikaner guard to a little room where we found Ike Moloabi sitting on a bench wearing a sweatsuit and looking quite terrified. He had been pulled out of bed in the small hours of a freezing winter morning, and dragged off like that. I said to the guard, 'We are going to have Communion,' and I took out of my pocket a little chalice and a tiny little bottle of Communion wine and some bread in a plastic sachet. I spread my pocket handkerchief on the bench between us and made the table ready, and we began the Liturgy. When it was time to give the invitation, I said to the guard, 'This table is open to all, so if you would like to share with us, please feel free to do so.' This must have touched some place in his religious self, because he took the line of least resistance and nodded rather curtly. I consecrated the bread and the wine and noticed that Ike was beginning to come to life a little. He could see what was happening here. Then I handed the bread and the cup to Ike because one always gives the Sacrament first to the least of Christ’s brothers or sisters— the ones that are hurting the most— and Ike ate and drank. Next must surely be the stranger in your midst, so I offered bread and the cup to the guard. You don’t need to need to know too much about South Africa to understand what white Afrikaner racists felt about letting their lips touch a cup from which a black person had just drunk. The guard was in crisis: he would either have to overcome his prejudice or refuse the means of grace. After a long pause, he took the cup and sipped from it, and for the first time I saw a glimmer of a smile on Ike’s face. Then I took something of a liberty with the truth and said, 'In the Methodist liturgy, we always hold hands when we say the grace,' and very stiffly, the guard reached out his hand and took Ike’s, and there we were in a little circle, holding hands, while I said the ancient words of benediction, 'The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all.'"5

This story for me is evidence of what living shalom looks like in exile. It isn't about giving in, but it isn't about taking up arms either. It is about finding your shalom by praying for your enemies and by helping them find theirs. Here, the Bishop was a patient teacher of this white Afrikaner guard, seeking his own shalom and Ike's shalom through leading the guard to live more abundantly. Despite the horror of the apartheid system, the Bishop used such a little action, communion--- a simple life-giving action like building houses, planting gardens, and getting married--- to act our what it looks like to be part of God's people even in an ugly time. This is an example for us as we seek our shalom wherever we are. Again, we see how we are called to live as God’s people wherever we find ourselves, whether it is a time and a place and a circumstance of our own choosing or not.6

We see this morning in Jeremiah, in this example from Bishop Storey, our interconnectedness, which is where the revolutionary message is in this text. This is a new way of living for us, this way of shalom, and it is counter to the way we have been living. And those of you who have heard about Communities of Shalom, the grassroots, faith-based, community development network, know that this is what we are trying to do. We recognize that to live abundantly as Jesus called us, we can't just sit at home, or go to church, without reaching out to the community around us, without actively praying for them, building relationships with them, learning to love them until there isn't an us and them anymore, there is just one community.

Let us pray,
Gracious and loving God,
We give thanks for the opportunity to glimpse your message of love this morning.
Pour your Holy Spirit on us gathered here, enable us to live out that message,
to seek the shalom of the city wherever we are,
to be the people of God in all times and places. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Ants in My Pants

"Doubts," Pastor Judy Walker at Delta United Methodist Church announces Sunday morning, "are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving." She was quoting Frederick Buechner and preaching on a little piece of Matthew 28:17: "but some doubted." Matthew 28:16-20 is usually called the Great Commission, the story in which Jesus tells the Eleven to, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations." But before Jesus commissions the Eleven, we see that not everyone believed that he had resurrected from the dead. And Pastor Judy focused on that, knowing that so few of us have heard it admitted in church that some doubted. Some still doubt. I shivered a little when I realized that she was preaching on the merits of doubt for faithful people: my answer to the provisional membership question for United Methodists seeking ordination concerning my personal experience of God was about the importance of struggle in my faith journey, and I even compared myself to Doubting Thomas, wanting to place my hands in the wounds of the Resurrected One.

But then Pastor Judy asked us to write down on a note card we had in our bulletin our answer to the question: What are the ants in your pants? There are times when naming holds a crushing kind of power, and naming through written word holds even more of that power for me. So here I am, preparing to be ordained in the Church, doing community organizing for a summer internship out of churches, thoroughly enjoying seminary, attributing my radical politics to my faith, and yet the first question that comes to my mind, the question that I have really been struggling with since first recognizing my call to ministry, is

What difference does Christianity make?
Notice that my question is not about if God's really there or who this Jesus guy is. It's not "What difference does Christ make?" I was thinking about why this was the other day while I was listening to mewithoutYou, and in "The Sun and the Moon," Aaron Weiss sings, "I used to wonder where you are. These days I can't find where you're not." That is how I feel. I have not always felt that way, certainly, and probably will not always feel that way, but now I can usually close my eyes and breathe in deeply, and then when I open my eyes again I see God in the laughter of a baby or the purring of a cat or in the mountains or even in the eyes of my sisters. Finding God is not the problem. I see God all the time, whenever I open my eyes even half-way--- the problem, for me, is that I often have difficulty seeing God in the Church.

In the sermon "Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity" on Jeremiah 8:22, a heartbreaking sermon written later in his life, John Wesley asks, "Why has Christianity done so little good in the world?" He saw, as so many of us have seen and continue to see, that despite the teachings of Jesus that show us a new way of living together, a way of wholeness and love, our world is just as unjust, as oppressive (if not worse) today as it was over two thousand years ago as Palestinians struggled under the yoke of the Roman Empire. But I think we have to expand the question out even more: not only why has Christianity done so little good in the world, but why has Christianity done so much evil in the world? People who call themselves Christians can often be such ugly people. I can often be such an ugly person, you know? So what's the point? What's the point of this whole organized Christianity thing if it is often the author of the ugliness in the world?

This is not a question I want to be asking myself as I seek to become a pastor.

And I can't end this blog post with an answer. I did not have some magical revelation that made Christianity, that made the Church, make more sense to me this week. I still hurt when I am rummaging through my bag and find that folded up piece of paper. I don't even read the question, but I see it in my mind, staring at me, asking me, What difference does Christianity make? But, though I still doubt, my heart was touched this week, soothed just a little bit so I don't hurt quite so much when my thoughts return to that question. And this story might not soothe you, but here it is.

On Wednesdays, I volunteer to work with the elementary school kids at York City Day Camp. I am super awkward with kids, though I love them, because I have always just let Kate and Suzanne work their magic on kids and considered myself not gifted in that department. Also, I am not even a little bit cool. So I usually let the kids make the first move, let them decide if they like me before I try and just get disappointed. Luckily for me younger elementary school kids are much more gracious to the uncool, and so I found myself sitting at breakfast with a bunch of six year olds who decided that we were friends. They just kept talking and laughing and being cute until one little girl started to sing. And then the rest of them joined in. It took me a moment to register what she was singing. It wasn't a silly song, it wasn't a camp song, it wasn't an upbeat praise song either. No, she was singing "Sanctuary."

Lord prepare me to be a sanctuary,
pure and holy, tried and true,
with thanksgiving, I'll be a living sanctuary,
for you.

Thank God I did not cry because then I would have really given away how uncool I really am, but I did choke up. See, I learned the song "Sanctuary" when I was in Bosnia and Herzegovina the first time in 2004. I always associate that song with my first intense spiritual experience, when I was assured of God's love for me (which I have written about here and here). And here were these children singing this song out of the blue in their slightly off-key fairy voices. I usually don't have as strong a reaction to the song when I hear it in church, but I had never heard it coming from just children before--- it's not one I've usually heard taught to kids, though they had learned it last year at the Day Camp.

And I don't know what it means, but now every time my fingertips brush against that folded-up index card, I hear those little fairy voices singing about being living sanctuaries. And maybe that's enough for me in this moment.

Reviving the Stones

Every time I land at the airport in Sarajevo, the same thing jumps out at me when we land. The buildings there are filled with holes, silent witnesses to a war that happened fifteen years ago. You drive along the road south from Sarajevo to Mostar and you still see damage from the shelling in town after town.

But the difference between Bosnia as I know it today in 2011 and back when I first visited in 2004 is huge. While there is still a heavy police presence in places like Sarajevo, gone are the SFOR and EUFOR troops that were around every corner in 2004. There are more roadsigns, better roadsigns. And there has been rebuilding. Though the bank remains as it did then, a skeleton, the old Turkish bath house has been rebuilt, though what it is now I don't know. And 2004 itself marked an important milestone in the rebuilding when the Mostar Bridge, a bridge that stood as a symbolic link between the Croatian and Muslim sides of the river, was rebuilt. I had thought for some strange reason when it reopened that they had fished the old stones from the river and used them to rebuild the bridge when in actuality they used stones from the same quarry, but I still like to think of those stones as bathed clean by the river. Indeed, the rebuilding of the bridge reminds me of how Nehemiah organized the people to rebuild the wall in Jerusalem, restoring Jerusalem: they have revived the stones out of the heaps of rubbish--- and the burned ones at that (Nehemiah 4:2).

But in the process of rebuilding, stones are not the only things to be revived but it is people who must pick up the burned and ravaged pieces of themselves and their homes to rebuild their lives. One of the ways communities are rebuilt comes through weddings. Coming from a culture of Say Yes to the Dress and Bridezillas, seeing a wedding as rebuilding is not a natural way to see a wedding. Weddings are usually productions to entertain (though sometimes also to celebrate). But Đana and Enis' wedding was different. It was a coming together of families and the community.

Now I don't want to completely idealize this wedding. The culture is patriarchal (as ours is) and one of the places in which that plays out most is in weddings. Women move to live with their husband's families the majority of the time, and the ritual reflects that. But all in all, the focus on coming together in this wedding, traditional though it was, really overpowered those more patriarchal elements. The party starts at her house. She waits in a room, visited by neighbors and family all congratulating her, but she stays in the room until family members from his side come to bring her out of the room (where they also give money to her family) and out to the front porch of her house where they have a banquet for her family and friends. Then, she leaves with her witness and her fiancé and his witness and the rest of his family who came to get her and they begin the journey to his home, where they will have the religious and civil ceremonies followed by the reception.

And it is a long day of eating and more eating. But it was such a cool drink of water as I think about Aaron and I getting married soon. Despite the fact that Suzanne got a little snippy because she didn't eat all morning and then we didn't know who was driving us to the wedding, this day seemed more stress-free, more community oriented than ours (as portrayed in the media) are. Đana didn't have to make any food (which was good because the week leading up to the wedding was filled with people coming to visit her until almost eleven in the evening!) or decorate, friends and family chipped in. It was a real coming together, which was important to everyone since Đana is such a presence there in their village near Mostar. She will be missed so much, and she will miss them so much, though she will probably be back often.

The whole day just felt as though we were all coming together to build something. Taking pieces of ourselves and offering it forward to the community. All night Suzanne and I laughed, sitting with Đana's cousins, taking funny pictures and drinking juice and eating cheese. It might sound weird to say it, but it was a spiritual experience for me. That laughter was an indicator of how different life could be, about how even when life may be sad, joy breaks through. Always. And I guess why this metaphor from Nehemiah of reviving the stones was so important to me was because I really felt run down after a year of taking too many classes, being too far away from Aaron, and having a challenging supervised ministry assignment. This wedding felt like not only a creation of Đana and Enis's new family, but it felt like Suzanne and I were drawn in too. I already had seen all of these people as my family, but the wedding felt as much a joining of my family with theirs with the way Suzanne was welcomed as a joining of Enis and Đana's families. And I needed that.

When the wall around Jerusalem was rededicated, the book of Nehemiah tells us that, "The joy of Jerusalem was heard far away" (Nehemiah 12:43). Đana and Enis' wedding was a day in which our joy was heard far away, I think. And many people around the world, from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Norway to Chicago to Maryland to South Carolina entered into that joy as well.

In the Breaking of the Bread

So I know last month I said was my last sermon at Bernardsville United Methodist Church in New Jersey, where I have been preaching once a month as part of my supervised ministry, but I was lucky enough to preach another Sunday. I give thanks for the wonderful people at that church for loving me and welcoming me. They gave me a going away gift and were just so affirming! And I thank Rev. Dr. Tanya Linn Bennett, my supervisor, for inviting me to be a part of this church community this last semester. It has really been a healing and empowering experience for me.

Now, this is one of those weeks where there are a million things to preach about in response to current events. And the text for this week is such a rich text that you can preach on so many different aspects of it. And today is Mother's Day. So this week when I began preparing the sermon, all these things were rolling around in my mind, which certainly affected how I read a text. So if it seems strange to you that when I first read this passage from Luke I thought of the ways our Christian family comes together, just bear with me and let's see where it goes.

Scripture: Luke 24: 13-35 1 from the Inclusive Bible Translation

That same day, two of the disciples were making their way to a village called Emmaus--- which was about seven miles from Jerusalem--- and discussing all that had happened as they went.

While they were discussing these things, Jesus approached and began to walk along with them, though they were kept from recognizing Jesus, who asked them, "What are you discussing as you go on your way?"

They stopped and looked sad. One of them, Cleopas by name, asked him, "Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who doesn't know the things that have happened these last few days?"

Jesus said to them, "What things?"

They said, "Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet powerful in word and deed in the eyes of God and all the people--- how our chief priests and leaders delivered him up to be condemned to death and crucified him. We were hoping that he was the One who would set Israel free. Besides all this, today--- the third day since these things happened--- some women of our group have just brought us some astonishing news. They were at the tomb before dawn and didn't find the body; they returned and informed us that they had seen a vision of angels who declared that Jesus was alive. Some of our number went to the tomb and found it just as the women said, but they didn't find Jesus."

Then Jesus said to them, "What little sense you have! How slow you are to believe all that the prophets have announced! Didn't the Messiah have to undergo all this to enter into glory?" Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus interpreted for them every passage of scripture which referred to the Messiah. By now they were near the village they were going to, and Jesus appeared to be going further. But they said eagerly, "Stay with us. It's nearly evening--- the day is practically over." So the savior went in and stayed with them.

After sitting down with them to eat, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, then broke the bread and began to distribute it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized Jesus, who immediately vanished from their sight.

Then they said to one another, "Weren't our hearts burning inside us as this one talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?" Then they got up immediately and returned to Jerusalem, where they found the Eleven and the rest of the company assembled. They were greeted with, "Christ has risen! It's true! Jesus has appeared to Simon!" Then the travelers recounted what had happened on the road, and how they had come to know Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

Sermon: In the Breaking of the Bread

Let us pray:
Patient Teacher, you come again to us this week,
walking along the road with us though we don't recognize you.
May you walk alongside us now, as we explore this scripture together this morning. Amen.

Two people are walking along the road together. The text calls them disciples, so I at least think the text is referring to one of the twelve until we hear the name Cleopas. Hmmm. Peter, Thomas, a couple of Judases then a couple of Jameses, John, Andrew, Philip, Matthew, Simon, and my personal favorite because it is the least common name Bartholomew. No Cleopas in there. So Cleopas is one of the many who, like the women who are mentioned but so rarely named, are there following Jesus alongside the Twelve Disciples. And so is his companion, of whom we have even less information. All we know of these characters then is that they are followers of Jesus.

So our next question is where is it that they are going? Emmaus, the text tells us. A village seven miles from Jerusalem. We don't know much at all about the village itself, even today. And we do not know why they are going. Is that where these two disciples are from? We just don't know. So we have to imagine. I thought maybe they running from all the despair turned confusion in Jerusalem. But why would they run away from the other disciples? Of course, it is always unfair to read too much into the text. We have no idea why they were leaving Jerusalem. But in approaching this text on Mother's Day, I couldn't help but see these disciples leaving Jerusalem as them leaving the other disciples, leaving their family. As we have seen throughout the Gospels, Jesus calls the disciples to leave families and not look back. In the Gospel of Luke, we read,

To another [Jesus] said, "Follow me." But he said, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." But Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." Another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home." Jesus said to him, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."2

These are harsh words we think today, but they illustrate for us that this estrangement between family and home would force the disciples to make a family of their own choosing, a family out of those who followed Jesus.

Now this was a dysfunctional family, to say the least. Simon Peter was impulsive, and I always pictured him as an attention seeker and loud. The twelve disciples argued amongst themselves--- even over who was the greatest.3 This collection of people ranged from fishermen, to the formerly possessed, to tax collectors, to wives of politicians--- it was quite a motley crew. And perhaps the moment in which the family was most dysfunctional, as is the case for so many of our families, was the moment in which they needed each other most: death, the crucifixion of Jesus. But many were in hiding. Many were still silent. Many were in denial.

And so perhaps Cleopas and his companion left Jerusalem because Jesus was dead, and so there was nothing left holding them to the other disciples. Yes, they had heard rumors that Jesus was alive, but the last thing they say to this stranger on the road about what had happened to Jesus in Jerusalem was, "but they didn't find Jesus." The body was gone, yes, but they didn't find Jesus. So maybe, Cleopas and the other disciple are leaving this confusion, leaving the dysfunctionality, to try and move on with their lives. Maybe they were going to go back to their old lives, trying to return everything to normal, the way it was before they met Jesus.

If that is the case, Jesus is not so interested in letting everything return to normal. And so he walks with them along the road. He questions them, draws out of them their story of all that has happened. And he shares his own interpretations of the scripture to shed light on what has happened. Then, he turns to go, but he is stopped.

Stay with us.

They have not yet recognized Jesus as their teacher. But they do recognize something familiar within this strange companion, something that makes them reach out to him, to bring him into their home, to invite him to supper. To make him family. Because that is what they are doing here. Hospitality was an important aspect of Near East culture at that time, but taking the concept of hospitality and expanding it to cover not just family and community members but the lowest of the low was something Jesus had taught them. And here they were inviting a complete stranger in with them to eat. I see echoes here of Jesus' teachings, like this one for Matthew: Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.4

Maybe that family thing really did stick with them. And maybe Jesus' presence there on the road that day was a mothering presence, one to help the disciples remember that they have had a glimpse of the kingdom, a glimpse of how to live together as a family, and so they cannot go back to life as it used to be.

This semester I had a kind of road to Emmaus experience. I took a class at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, New Jersey's only women's prison. Drew has a program in which Drew professors will teach classes in the prison, half the class will be "outside" students, and half will be "inside" students, inmates at the prison. This class was called Race, Ethics, and Women's Lives, and we talked about everything from clothing and food to violence, breast cancer, and sexuality. One class was devoted to motherhood. We were asked the question what mothers you? A lot of us were confused by this question at first, but the point was that there are many people and aspects of culture that mother us, that give birth to us, form us, and nourish us. Now mothering is not always a positive thing--- for instance, my professor thought that prison could be a mother, a formative experience whose lessons are not healthy ones.

But this class in the prison mothered me in a healthy way this semester. At the beginning of the year, I felt like I imagine those disciples did. While I never wanted to throw in the towel or anything, I wasn't happy the beginning of the year. I was taking too many classes in the fall, doing supervised ministry, I didn't get to see Aaron, who is my partner, or the rest of my family very much. I was stressed and I just wasn't taking care of myself. Because of this, seminary became not the joyful challenge it was my first year, but rather something I had to get through, something I had to get over. And there were many things like working here this semester that has made the Spring much more happy for me, but this class in the prison was one of the places in particular along the road where I felt like Jesus was walking beside me. Like I was being pushed not to spend so much time studying alone in my room trying to just get this year over with, but being out with family, with friends. Remembering that Jesus calls us now and not after we are finished school. I felt like I was being nudged back to face Jerusalem--- not just to get through the rest of seminary but to really start living that kingdom vision I saw Jesus to be calling me to--- that kingdom vision I saw in class.

The women in the class were Jesus, walking alongside me on the road throughout the semester, showing me great hospitality, even though I was worried we would have little in common. The women in the class, both inside and outside, opened my eyes to seeing God in new places, like within the khaki uniforms of incarcerated women. I felt that driving from Clinton after class every week with the other outside students, we would say to one another, "Weren't our hearts burning inside us as these women talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?" As we heard the stories of these women, as they greeted us with hospitality, sharing their little juice boxes and packets of off-brand Nilla Wafers that had a weird aftertaste, I felt what those disciples must have felt on the journey to Emmaus when Jesus showed up and broke bread with them.

My mom in her Mother's Day sermons sometimes quotes this piece that begins with a verse fro the Gospel of John that she read in a magazine years ago:

"In truth I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. What is hope if not belief in rebirth -- our own and our neighbors? Because we glimpse another kingdom, we live with different expectations. Caught in stormy passages, we are part of a birthing that is beyond our control and our imaginings. We are all in labor. We are all midwives."5

I think this quotation is beautiful and really fits with my understanding of what happened in that prison class for me this semester. It was one of the many moments of renewal and rebirth in my life. Jesus calls us to these moments of rebirth--- of ourselves and our neighbors. Too often, we like those disciples on the road to Emmaus are tired and confused. We might know that Jesus is alive, but maybe we can't find him. Those moments of rebirth are when we see that he is walking along the road with us. And yes, it is often stormy, and always out of our control, but those moments of rebirth remind us that as Christians we have glimpsed another kingdom, another way of living as a family, and we cannot let that vision go. And so we all have to enter into labor, we all have to become midwives to bring in that vision of new living that Jesus has shown us.

As Jesus is teaching Cleopas and the other disciple on that road to Emmaus, they were reborn and reminded that they are midwives. They can't leave the work that needs to be done, no matter how confused or scared they are. And they realize that, even before they realize who Jesus is, that is why they say, "Stay with us," when it looks as though Jesus will go on ahead. They are remembering that work that begins with the hospitality, with making Jesus part of their family by breaking bread with him as he taught them to do.

And it was in the breaking of the bread that their eyes were opened. In this communion moment where we who are many become one body, become one family, dysfunctional as it may seem, called to the work of bringing in the kingdom of God. Cleopas and the other disciple turned right around that night to go share the Good News with their brothers and sisters.

Then the travelers recounted what had happened on the road, and how they had come to know Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

Let us pray,

Help our hearts to be Spirit-filled, O Christ.
Help us to burn with passion for you and for your people throughout the world.
May our passion ignite flames of justice and hope in the midst of hopelessness, pain, and confusion.
May the warmth of our fire be a sign of your mothering presence in the world.
In the name of the Risen Christ, Amen.6

Lighting the Cave

This is my adapted final sermon from my introductory preaching course with Dr. Gary Simpson. We had to write an Easter or Resurrection sermon. I still am working out the beginning of the sermon, but here it is as a little resurrection for the week after Easter. And away we go...

Scripture: John 20:1-18 1

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him."

Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him."

When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?"

Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher).

Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers [and sisters] and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'"

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

Sermon: Lighting the Cave

This text presents us with the picture of Mary Magdalene, eyesight blurred by tears, stooping down to look into the tomb, bent over to look into that empty place that is supposed to hold Jesus' body. This image of Mary bending over to look into the tomb, which was essentially a cave, was one that spoke to me when I first read this passage. I don't know how many of you have been in caves, but picturing the tomb as this carved out cave really captured my attention.

My family went on vacations across the USA when I was a kid, and we would go to different caves opened as parks to the public--- we weren't like spelunkers or anything--- and without fail in the middle of the tour, the guide would shut off all the lights and tell us that in the world you can only experience absolute darkness in two places, the bottom of the ocean and in a cave. And the guides would then always say that a person cannot survive in absolute darkness very long. They told of cavers whose candles or later flashlights would go out, leaving them stranded underground. They would go blind, eyes constantly searching for some sort of brightness that just did not exist inside the cave, and slowly they would be mentally consumed as well, minds craving sunlight as the body did. This kept running through my head as I bent down with Mary to look in the tomb.

And so, will you pray with me:
God-With-Us, this Holy Week we read of a time of confusion and fear,
culminating in this Easter morning moment. As we explore this text together,
might we remain open to the workings of the Spirit,
actively listening for the ways in which you are leading us.
In the name of the Living One. Amen.

In the Gospel of John, which we read today, Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb alone. She has lived in fear the last few days, wondering as so many of us did at the quick turn around from Palm Sunday to the terror of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. She has lived through the abandonment of the disciples named the Twelve in the gospels2--- those who are supposed to be Jesus' closest friends and companions. She has stood watching with her own eyes the crucifixion of her teacher. And then there was Saturday. She must not have been able to wait any longer. She slipped out of the house where she must have been staying with other followers of Jesus, making a pilgrimage by herself to see the body. At this point, it was all she had. Jesus' crucifixion was someone blowing out the candle in the cave, and she has been searching for a little light. Finding the lifeless body there would not be that light, but she did not know what else to do.

So when she approaches the tomb in that early morning and she sees the stone had been removed from the tomb, I imagine her heart stopping, sinking into the pit of her stomach, and her lips mouthing no. The way you feel when you feel like the world has done its worst to you but then it throws out one thing more. Mary is robbed of even the shell of a memory. Even that has been taken from her. At this moment, the fear is just too much, and she can't stay in that place. So she runs to Simon Peter and the other disciple, seeking someone to stand with her in her grief and confusion. But she is left alone again weeping at the mouth of the tomb, unwilling to go in, just crouching down, tears filling her eyes. And her tears do not slow even when she sees down into the darkness two figures seated where the body should be.

"Woman, why are you weeping?"

"They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him."

She needs to see the body, to touch the body again, but it is gone and she does not know where it is. She is so preoccupied with finding this body again, preoccupied with finding this object of her grief that she does not respond to the fact that these are angels in the tomb. These angels could be those spots of brightness in the absolute darkness of the cave, but they aren't for Mary. Not even angels can pierce through her grief.

So she turns away from the tomb. Perhaps it is too difficult for her to sob in that crouched position, looking down into the darkness. But in turning away, she faces yet another who asks her, "Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?" She thinks it is the gardener. Who else would be out here at this time of the day when everyone else had abandoned her. She ignores the gardeners questions, instead, head down, wringing her hands asks slowly so as not to belie the fear and confusion she feels through her voice. "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." She will not ask questions, all she wants, all her bereaved mind can think of now is fulfilling the purpose for which she came here on this morning.

But Jesus reaches through that grief, that confusion, and calls her by name. "Mary!" And it is the sound of his voice, the sound of that familiar voice she has heard day after day teaching her, loving her, this voice she hasn't heard since Friday when it came from him in great gasping breaths as his life left him--- left her, standing there watching. This is the moment where her eyes stop straining for light even when she closes them because it is there in front of her. This is the moment when her eyes begin to drink in the light after her days in the absolute darkness of the cave.

The text, while not describing in detail her response, leads us to believe it was a physical one, her reaching out to hold onto that body she has so longed to see, to touch, to invoke her memories of what these not only past few days but past few years of her life with Jesus, to figure out what that has meant. Because all morning, she was left to think that it meant nothing. Even Peter and the other disciple had left her alone, sobbing outside the empty tomb of her teacher. But then she hears his voice, and she hears his voice saying her name, calling her out of her grief, calling her to discover that he is still with her, though she feels so alone.

Her response is one that I think is so common with those of us who are pulled out of suffering by good test results or speedy recovery--- we want to hold onto that which is calling us out of suffering. We want to stare unblinking into the light after being alone in the darkness of the cave. But Jesus says, "Do not hold on to me..." And I think it would have been so easy for Mary to reach out and attach herself to Jesus and never let him out of her sight, let everything else go just to create this little world of the two of them, a safe world, one in which he will never get taken away from her again. But Jesus says, "I have not yet ascended to the Father." Not yet. See, his time with her now is to break through that fog of grief, to help her to move on with the work he has called her to do, reminding her that his presence will always be with her. He is the light within her that will not go out.

So Mary's joy at feeling Jesus' presence is redirected outward. She cannot sit still in the cave, transfixed by the light her eyes have so longed for. No, she must use that light to find a way out, towards living that kindom vision that Jesus her Rabbouni, her teacher, had taught her. And so, after Jesus urges Mary to go out to her brothers and sisters, to remember that his presence is not for her alone, she becomes the first witness to Easter morning. She is not the only one grieving, though so often in our grief we feel as though we are the only ones. Rather, hearing Jesus call us out of our suffering, feeling Jesus' presence again after this great loss beckons us to continue to work for the living.

Jesus is reaching into our grief and our confusion, calling us by name.
How will we respond? 

Can't We Leave Jesus Out?

Crossposted at OnFire for the #Why MFSA campaign April 25-May 4 (the approximate dates for General Conference next year) during which a whole host of different people are blogging about why they are connected to the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA). It's about getting ready to change the Church folks!

When I turned eighteen, I thought it would be a good idea to get a cross and flame tattoo on my back. I had grown up United Methodist and attributed much of my radical politics to my mother, who is a pastor, and because of that, I also attributed those radical politics to The UMC. Both my parents taught me social justice as a Christian value. So I was pretty surprised after I turned eighteen to see that The UMC was not as radical a place as I thought it was. I was appalled to find out that The UMC did not ordain what the Discipline names self-avowed, practicing homosexuals.

Later, after becoming a lay delegate to Annual Conference as a Junior, I was appalled at the opulence of the hotels our conference is held in and the slow-moving bureaucracy that is our church. So I wondered: what were some of the ways I could transform that tattoo into something else, something no longer Methodist-related? But then I went to Student Forum, where I learned about MOSAIC and OnFire, the young adult chapter of MFSA. Here were places where I saw hope for making The UMC into that church I thought it was growing up, that church that practiced the justice that Jesus taught us.

As a seminarian at Drew Theological School, I have had the opportunity to participate in the OnFire Borderlinks immersion trip to the border between the USA and Mexico and later to mobilize with others, including so many United Methodists, on Washington for immigration reform. Those moments were moments where I was proud to be United Methodist, amidst these people working for justice in the world and in our church.

Last semester, I researched Methodist publications for their reactions to the Red Scare, in light of the fearmongering in our time, and was so inspired by what I read about MFSA. In the new history of United Methodism, for instance, the authors write,

"In 1953 [Rev. Jack] McMichael [of the Methodist Federation for Social Action] appeared before the [House Committee on UnAmerican Activities] and challenged its accusations of Communist subversion with such telling references to the ministry of Jesus that an aggravated committee member shouted, 'Can't we leave Jesus out.'" 1

MFSA has shown me that Jesus' ministry is one of subversion, and that The United Methodist Church can live into that same ministry with the help of a few folks committed to justice. Why MFSA? Because they won't leave Jesus out of it; they are working to bring the church into that vision of justice Jesus taught us.

1 Russell E. Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt, The Methodist History in America: A History, vol. 1, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010) 420.

Who is this?

The monthly sermon post! This is a sermon for Palm Sunday, that I first used on my preaching class with Dr. Gary Simpson at Drew. Today, I preached it at Bernardsville United Methodist Church in New Jersey, where I have been preaching once a month as part of my supervised ministry. It is a very small congregation, and the people are so wonderful and friendly. I thank them for their support of me as a student pastor and will be sad to go, since this was the last Sunday I will preach there. But that means supervised ministry is almost over and I will have some time to write something for my blog other than a sermon!

Scripture: Matthew 21:1–11 (from the Inclusive Bible translation)1

As they approached Jerusalem, entering Bethphage at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent off two disciples, with the instructions, "Go into the village straight ahead of you, and immediately you will find a tethered donkey with her colt standing beside her. Untie them and lead them back to me. If anyone questions you, say, 'The Rabbi needs them.' They they will let them go at once."

This came about to fulfill what was said through the prophet:
"Tell the daughter of Zion,
Your sovereign comes to you without display,
riding on a donkey, on a colt---
the foal of a beast of burden."

So the disciples went off and did what Jesus had ordered. They brought the donkey and her colt, and after they laid their cloaks on the animals, Jesus mounted and rode toward the city.

Great crowds of people spread their cloaks on the road, while some began to cut branches from the trees lay them along the path. The crowds--- those who went in front of Jesus and those who followed--- were all shouting,
"Hosanna to the Heir to the House of David!
Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Most High!
Hosanna in the highest!"

As Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred to its depths, demanding, "Who is this?"

And the crowd kept answering, "This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee!"

Sermon: “Who is this?”



I saw Godspell at Bernards Township High School a few weeks ago. It is one of my favorite musicals--- I prefer hippie musicals. And, though the song "Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord" is a John the Baptist song, calling people to repent, I always hear this song and think of Palm Sunday. If you have seen the musical live, you may associate the rushing forward in the song--- which at the high school due to that large cast sounded like a herd of elephants--- with the forward motions of the crowd, proclaiming as loudly and joyously as you have to do to sing "Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord."

And so this is the image I have in my mind of Palm Sunday, a rushing forward, a joyous preparation of Jesus coming to Jerusalem to assume his role as King, really. The occasion is one of such brightness and color that we almost skip over that verse, the one that is foreshadowing the events coming later in the week. You see,

As Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred to its depths,
demanding, "Who is this?"
Who is this guy riding a donkey with her colt alongside her into our city? Who is this person that has so invigorated the masses? Who is this and what does he want? What does he want with us?

Will you pray with me?

Gracious God, Patient Teacher, we ask your presence among us as we gather here. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts bring us closer to understanding who is this Jesus and how can we become better followers of him. Amen.

Thoughout my study of this passage this week, the question I kept coming back to was that "Who is this?" question. The text, though, makes it pretty clear who this is. In the beginning of the passage, we see Jesus as a great teacher, as one who gives instructions that are followed, as one who says "you will find a tethered donkey" there and it is so. And the author of this gospel tells us that this happened to fulfill what was said through the prophet. So who is this Jesus? The Promised One. The One the people have so longed for. The sign of this king was not a warhorse, not chariots drawn as Caesar would have it, no the sign of this promised one given to the people by God through the prophet was that a simple man would ride in without display on a dinky old donkey, still tied to her young colt. The people are clear that this man on the donkey is prophesying a change, and that is why they shout Hosannas.

I think the scene was one so like what we saw in Egypt. The people so overflowed with joy at the thought of their freedom. They stood in Tahrir--- which means liberation--- Square, together surging forward with a vision of the end of oppression and the beginning of a new way to be Egypt together. The whole city stirred to its depths is the world, people glued to the TV wondering what will happen next, asking who are these people?

But too often the asking of the question who is this? is the signal of fear. It is clear from the passage that Jesus has come to Jerusalem to change some things--- we can say that before he even overturns the tables in the Temple, which in the Gospel of Matthew, he does the same day as his entry into the city. A Palestinian man, who must be obviously poor, obviously dusty from extensive travel, sits on top of a donkey, rides through the streets, and is given the welcome of a great king. This is frightening for those in power; this is the time when their fear translates into a need to quash the uprising. Yet others are out in the streets shouting Hosannas.

The whole city is stirred to its depths as it is presented with a choice, to continue with the old way of living, the way of warhorses, or to try to do something new. To follow this strange man on a donkey.

The Who is this? question is really one about what truths we will admit to ourselves, about whether or not we are willing to let the God who is stirring us to our depths do something new in our lives or whether we are going to quash it within us, close our eyes, turn our backs on the processional.

We all have these who is this? moments in our lives, these moments when we see God and know who God is but we have to ask if we are willing to admit that to ourselves.

One of the most important Who is this? moments for me in my life happened when I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina on a mission trip for the first time. My sister and I were picky eaters, but we certainly were nowhere near starving, but our host, a tiny firey woman named Saja decided we were wasting away and so whisked us away from the rest of the group, bringing with us one of our translators named Ðana since Saja herself knew little English, to the home of her friend for a special dinner. Now, I was sixteen, out of the country for the first time, sitting at a table outside a home still riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel from the war, listening to three strange women chatting in Bosnian. Bosnian is not a language like French or Spanish where a lot of the words are similar to English either. But despite the confusion of the situation, my sister Kate and I just sat quietly, absorbing it all. Ðana became quiet soon too, and then she reached over to Kate and I and told us she loved us. She had known us for two days, and here she was telling us she loved us.

Who is this?It had to be God. I had known the woman for two days. I had lived an extremely sheltered life and spent my childhood planting pumpkins in my backyard that didn't grow until the year we moved, playing with kittens, and writing science fiction. Ðana spent her childhood hiding from the Serb and Croat armies. Her father was killed during the war and every day she leaves her house she passes the marker along the road where he had been murdered. She had never spoken English outside of class before she met us, and the only Bosnian word I knew at that point was the number 8 because it sounds like the word awesome. She was a Muslim whose people were targeted by Christian genocidaires and I was a USAmerican Christian in a post- 9/11 world. And yet the God within her reached out to me beyond all of those barriers and loved me.

And this is one of the moments in my life where I did recognize God, and that I still today rely on as the assurance that God loves me. Me of all people. This is what I imagine those folks along the road that day celebrating. Of course, my who is this? moment is not completely parallel to that of Palm Sunday. There, God had given them this radically different picture of kingship, but in that picture they felt God saying, as I felt in Bosnia, I love you. And I have a better way of living planned for you.

But with this recognition comes a call to a change. Are we going to be those people shouting Hosannas, or are we going to insist that we do not know the answer to the question Who is this?

Of course, even when we are in that crowd, shouting Hosannas on a Sunday,

where do we end up that Friday?

For sometimes we shout Hosannas on Sunday only to go into hiding Friday or even become the bloodthirsty crowd. We must remember that not all revolutions end peacefully. Right now many of us are praying for Libya, mowed down by a dictator. This is not another Egypt revolution, which though it did come under siege briefly by Mubarek's thugs, was overwhelmingly peaceful and joyous. But Libya resembles less this joyous parade to Jerusalem than it does the way Jesus left Jerusalem on Good Friday. We read in Matthew,

On their way out [of Jerusalem], they met a Cyrenian named Simon who they pressed into service to carry the cross. Upon arriving at a site called Golgotha--- which means Skull Place--- they gave Jesus a drink of wine mixed with a narcotic herb, which Jesus tasted but refused to drink.

Once they had nailed Jesus to the cross, they divided his clothes among them by rolling dice; then they sat down and kept watch over him. Above his head, they put the charge against him in writing: "This is Jesus, King of the Jews."2

Jesus' entry into Jerusalem is a scene of rich color and vibrance, not the darkness pressing down on us of the scene of Jesus leaving Jerusalem.

Both scenes are full of topsy-turvery reversals: in the first, a man is given the welcome of a king, though he comes without display, riding a donkey; in the second, a man is named a king mockingly as he is killed as a political criminal. But this Jesus is just as much our king here in this Good Friday scene as he is on Palm Sunday. This Good Friday scene is a fulfillment of that Palm Sunday picture. It shows that the answer to the Who is this? question is the one that got him killed.

We are in our last week of Lent, a time of renewal, a time of bringing life from ashes. We are spending this season of Lent, particularly this Holy Week, preparing ourselves for the Way of the Lord. And when we are preparing ourselves for the Way of the Lord, we have to prepare ourselves for those Fridays too, prepare ourselves to be willing to answer the question Who is this? even when we are stirred to our very depths.