Marching to a New Ground

Dear People of Christ Church,

This week, there's a strange combination of heavy-heartedness and hope in the air with the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the prospect of military strikes in Syria.   Our situation around racism in this country is much improved, but the gulf remains between the opportunities our society affords to people of color and those who are white.  This past summer, I was camping in the Black Hills of South Dakota struck by so much injustice toward Native American peoples when the George Zimmerman verdict was handed down.  Again, again, again, thought of how Martin Luther King Jr's image of the bounced check (read the whole speech here) -a promise of equality and freedom that simply has not been honored.  It's not just Trayvon Martin; it's not just George Zimmerman. It's not just the idea of "standing your ground," it's the constant human temptation toward violence and force.  Witness: the assumption that more violence can end violence in Syria. As Martin Luther King, Jr, also said that day: "Again and again we must. rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

I'm interested in  that soul force, inhabiting space in a different way.

The usual standing your ground is based on the underlying assumption that one individual's right to the ground trumps the rights of the other person.  But when I read my Bible, it seems to say that even the life of an aggressor is sacred: Love your enemies (Matthew 5: 43-38).  What if we found a different ground?  

Last week, a bookkeeper stopped a school shooting outside of Atlanta.  A man turned up loaded with guns and ammunition declaring that he was going to kill everybody, including himself. With an AK 47, 500 rounds of ammunition, and no will to live, he ought to have been unstoppable.

But he wasn't.

Finding a shared place of suffering, step by step, over an agonizing conversation (all captured on tape in a 911 call), Antoinette Tuff calmly, slowly, was able to connect with the prospective shooter. "We all go through things in life," she said, and talked about how she had felt there was nothing to live for when her marriage ended the year before. Rather than allowing her own pain to cut her off, she was able to reach out from it.  Rather than writing him off as a crazed madman, they had a conversation. This is as good a piece of evidence for the resurrection as I can imagine; in God's solidarity with us, sparing nothing, our own pain can be transformed. Not because God wants us to suffer, or pulls strings from the great beyond.  Nobody was at a keyboard in the sky ending a marriage in 2012 to save the lives of children in 2013. But as Antoinette Tuff prayed that day, thinking of her pastor's sermon the week before about anchoring in Christ, she followed the pattern of love and connection that Jesus embodied.   And yes, drawing on her pain was part of that. And, yes, a black woman saving the life of a white man 50 years later almost to the day from the March on Washington is kind of amazing, too.

It is much, much harder to live this way.  It is impractical, and messy, and slow.  But it's what will save us. It's what has.

Blessings,

Sara+

This Fall

Dear People of Christ Church,
Vestry met on Monday, and it was so good to be back together scheming about all the things we'll do together this year.  One new thing I'll invite us toward on September 1 when we return to the 10:00 service is a blessing over all of our backpacks as we head back to work and school for the new year. Even though I haven't started a new school year for 10 years, I always get a sense of promise and newness in turning toward fall, so briefcases and other work bags will also be welcome (we'll also have our first Sunday of the month children's sermon on that day as well, along with our special diaper collection).

This year we're also trying out a new start time for Children's Education, starting the classes at 9:45 instead of 10.  The structure of our Godly Play program is dependent on being able to start all together, so we're hoping that having more time will enable a smoother transition and opportunity for deeper reflection. The key question for Godly Play is "I wonder," and it's hard to "wonder" freely if you're panicked about whether your kids are going to get upstairs in time for communion.

Yet ANOTHER new thing is an experiment with our coffee hour configuration. As we sang in my Montessori class at age 4, "Make new friends, but keep the old...one is silver and the other's gold."  By making a switch to round tables with food in the middle (separate from the coffee), we hope that we'll be more nimble in being able to talk with different people, but also have sitting room for more in depth conversation. Please offer your feedback to the vestry.

This fall, we also have some great educational opportunities to look forward to. Last spring, we were part of a Hartford Seminary study of growing congregations and many people participated in focus groups and filled out surveys about what's working well and where we need to focus our energy.  As part of our learning, we'll send a team of 4-6 people to a series of consultations (4 Saturdays, at different locations) for leadership training and coaching in our area of growth.  If you'd be interested in being part of that group, please let me know.  For five or six weeks over September/ October, we look forward to a series on looking for that elusive life balance of work and play, time and money, based on the work of Mark and Lisa Scandrette in their book, Free: Spending Your Time and Money on What Matters Most.  Come September, I'm looking forward to trying a "sermon talk back" conversation one Sunday a month to hear more about where you are hearing the word of God both reflected in preaching (where I kind of get to monopolize the floor) as well as in your life in the world.  

I'm also looking forward to the diocesan resource day on peace (see below), our yard sale (coming up in just a few weeks), and all the ministries we engage in that bring us closer to God and one another. Don't forget to talk with Anna Jones (annapeacebaby@gmail.com) about whether you might be able to bring a meal to the Community Day Center; we're now on the third Thursday of the month, and hope to get a schedule down for the whole year.

Peace!
Sara+

Emergence

Dear People of Christ Church,
I'm glad to be back writing to you after my recent whirlwind tour of our country. My family put just over 10,000 miles on our car driving to San Francisco and home, via the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina.  Mostly camping, mostly national parks, mostly 3 year old Adah and 6 year old Isaiah coexisting peacefully in the back seat.

I'd never been to Wild Goose before--a four day annual gathering of "a community gathered at the intersection of justice, spirituality, music and art." When I was planning the trip, I told the Christ Church vestry it was a conference.   Noah and I told the tow truck driver who helped us get out of the woods that it was a revival.  Both were right.

We heard speakers from across the spectrum of Christian expression, from Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber (tweeting @sarcasticluther) to veteran civil rights activist and historian Vincent Harding, to post-evangelical, post-modern, post-everything minister Brian McLaren, to Momastery blogger Glennon Melton... several of the sessions were interviews with NPR's Krista Tippett, and will air on her show, On Being, over the next month or two.

As someone who grew up in a liturgical tradition, I didn't quite fit along with the primarily evangelical (or formerly evangelical) crowd, but we were all asking similar questions. How does the church respond to a world that doesn't settle for the same old answers (if, in fact, it ever did, which is a whole other issue)? How do we make our churches vital, compassionate communities across all kinds of difference? How do we invite Jesus into the way we parent, spend our money, relate to our bodies, advocate for justice?  Theologically, of course Jesus is already there-but day to day, it's easy to forget that. We have to do that work in and through each moment, not just intellectually answer the question in the abstract and be done with it.

Personally as well as politically-Jesus is there.  He has gone to Emmaus, to the picket line, to the hospital bed, to the boardroom.  The hope and energy of Wild Goose was a good way to end a drive across the country-day to day, even in this cradle of early America, I don't think a lot about where this country came from-all the promise and freedom as well as the suffering.  Driving through Indian reservation after reservation, I couldn't ignore that question anymore--hearing from my friend Rob, a priest serving the Episcopal Church on the Standing Rock Reservation, who talked about how divided the white community there was from Native Americans even now. I couldn't ignore hearing about how sacred the Black Hills were to the Lakota, and how treaties were broken again and again. Seeing the wide-open spaces of the West, I could also imagine how early settlers saw that space and wanted to find their own success there.  

In one of his talks, Vincent Harding talked about the call for each of us to "make it our concern" to bring real democracy to birth in this country. Despite all our history, we are still emerging as a democracy, he said-there is more to do to bring about the circumstances for flourishing and equal participation for every person.  For every person-including those who are on the opposite side from us.    The discipline, Harding said in a forum on non-violence, is to constantly try to look at others with compassion-even those who might deny your own humanity, to remember that they are still a sister or brother. That's how Jesus saw others-it's not an easy invitation, but it's the one we're given. We may or may not be successful, but that's the work. Rev. William Barber talked about the prophetic call-God told Ezekiel to preach to the people: "Your job is to speak to them. Whether they listen to you is not your concern. Just because they don't listen doesn't give you the authority to quit."

So that's what I come back mulling over-what kind of church are we, will we be, in this new day? What kind of priest am I called to be?  What kind of city do we want to inhabit?  As we begin our ninth year of ministry together this fall, I look forward to what we will discover! 

Blessings,
Sara+