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+