Dear People of Christ Church,
This week I’ve continued to mull over what it means to remain spiritually grounded in such a time as this; I preached on Sunday about having God’s vision of the beatitudes to see blessing in places where the world does not. Poverty, mourning, hunger, persecution—those are not particularly comfortable places to be. But Jesus calls them blessed, and calls us to see that as well.
This is a profound discipline: we must be grounded in the vision of God’s love and power as equally as we are opposed to hatred and violence. On the one hand, spiritual sustenance is easy to understand. Of course it’s important. What actually happens when we pray, though, can use some thinking-through. Prayer brings us before God, of course. We make ourselves available to love and be loved. The other important thing about prayer is that we are better able to put struggle, anxiety, and conflict in context. Prayer helps us to widen our view. We are not the saviors of the world. We have some work to do, but it’s not up to us completely.
Hopefully, being able to put ourselves and the world in the context of God’s love, we can also do so for those with whom we disagree. In all the best activism on the part of those who are oppressed, it can be easy to forget that it is hatred and fear that are the enemy, not the people who seem to promote them. In prayer, we glimpse a unitive reality in which we are equally in need of God’s grace and compassion. Even if just for a moment! Jesus tells us, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. When we are hungry for justice, we must know that even in our hunger we are being filled by the grace of God, as that hunger is God’s life living within us.
This evening, take a moment and really pray the beatitudes. Look with God’s eyes to see blessing in the world, and allow your heart to perceive it.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Blessings,
Sara+
Showing posts with label social justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social justice. Show all posts
Thursday, February 2, 2017
Thursday, December 8, 2016
Justice & Bread
Dear People of Christ Church,
This week, our Advent series on Biblical values continued on the topic of justice. Last week we talked about non-judgment, and next week we tackle inclusion. One of our Scripture texts was a foundational one for me in how I try to live my life: “As you did it to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25). Those who are suffering demand our attention not as if Christ were with them, but because Christ is there. I’m all for reading Scripture awake and searching for metaphor, but this isn’t one of those times. Matthew 25 calls for more literalist Bible thumping.
Last weekend I was with our bishops and the Commission on Ministry, of which I’m a member (it’s the team that helps interview and support people for the ordination process who want to be priests or deacons). In a serendipitous turn someone forwarded me a daily Advent meditation on the spiritual dimensions of anti racist work from one of the people we spoke to, Olivia Hamilton, who’s working with the Harvard Episcopal Chaplaincy. She shares this from Anne Braden, a white southern Episcopalian who lived in the Jim Crow south and came to devote her life to ending the culture of white supremacy she grew up in.
Braden writes:
The passage from the Bible that impressed me the most deeply in my early religious training was the one from Christ’s story of the Last Judgement: ‘ for I was hungered, and ye gave me no meat, I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not…Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me.’ I thought about that passage a great deal; it worried me almost constantly. And it would have been hard not to worry about it in those days, for this was the 1930s and there was hunger everywhere. The people I knew tried, I think, according to their lights to practice what Christ taught. My family did. They fed many people who were hungry. Sometimes my mother, growing weary of it, would turn away one of the beggars who came to our door, and that would cause me a sleepless night worrying for fear she was going to hell; but most generally she fed them. Especially, she and my father made sure that the Negro family who worked for us from time to time were not hungry or shelterless or naked. If they were short on money to pay the rent, my father provided the money. The family was always clothed because they got our cast off clothes after they were too faded and old for us to want them any more. But something happened to me each time I looked at the Negro girl who always inherited my clothes. Sometimes she would come to our house with her mother, wearing one of the dresses I had discarded. The dresses never fit her because she was fatter than I was. She would sit in a straight chair in our kitchen waiting for her mother, because of course she could not sit in one of our comfortable chairs in the living room. She would sit there looking uncomfortable, my old faded dress binding her at the waist and throat. And someway I knew that this was not what Jesus meant when he said ‘clothe the naked.’ I recalled that Jesus had also said, ‘therefore all things whatsoever ye would that man should do to you, do ye even so to them.’ And I knew that if I were in her place, if I had no clothes, I would not want the old abandoned dresses of a person who would not even invite me to come into her living room to sit down. And I could not talk to her because I felt ashamed. And as I watched her, I would feel a binding sensation around my own throat. And I would feel to see if my own dress was too tight. But of course it was not. My clothes were always well-cut and perfectly fitted. Instead there was a small straightjacket around my soul. (Anne Braden, The Wall Between, 1958)
Braden goes on to talk about how she began to understand how the racism she lived in was damaging to those who perpetuated it as well as to those who experienced the more severe oppression. “Racial bars built walls…around the white people as well, cramping their spirits and causing them to grow in distorted shapes.” In our conversation about Matthew 25, we talked about the shame of living in plenty when others are suffering; the Gospel tells us that meeting the needs of others is for their material need, but it’s also for our own souls. Or, as a quote from Nicolai Berdyaev has it that José Borrás shared with me a number of years ago has it, “Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.”
Where are you finding bread of all kinds these days?
Who’s sharing with you, and who are you sharing with?
Blessings,
Sara+
This week, our Advent series on Biblical values continued on the topic of justice. Last week we talked about non-judgment, and next week we tackle inclusion. One of our Scripture texts was a foundational one for me in how I try to live my life: “As you did it to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25). Those who are suffering demand our attention not as if Christ were with them, but because Christ is there. I’m all for reading Scripture awake and searching for metaphor, but this isn’t one of those times. Matthew 25 calls for more literalist Bible thumping.
Last weekend I was with our bishops and the Commission on Ministry, of which I’m a member (it’s the team that helps interview and support people for the ordination process who want to be priests or deacons). In a serendipitous turn someone forwarded me a daily Advent meditation on the spiritual dimensions of anti racist work from one of the people we spoke to, Olivia Hamilton, who’s working with the Harvard Episcopal Chaplaincy. She shares this from Anne Braden, a white southern Episcopalian who lived in the Jim Crow south and came to devote her life to ending the culture of white supremacy she grew up in.
Braden writes:
The passage from the Bible that impressed me the most deeply in my early religious training was the one from Christ’s story of the Last Judgement: ‘ for I was hungered, and ye gave me no meat, I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not…Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me.’ I thought about that passage a great deal; it worried me almost constantly. And it would have been hard not to worry about it in those days, for this was the 1930s and there was hunger everywhere. The people I knew tried, I think, according to their lights to practice what Christ taught. My family did. They fed many people who were hungry. Sometimes my mother, growing weary of it, would turn away one of the beggars who came to our door, and that would cause me a sleepless night worrying for fear she was going to hell; but most generally she fed them. Especially, she and my father made sure that the Negro family who worked for us from time to time were not hungry or shelterless or naked. If they were short on money to pay the rent, my father provided the money. The family was always clothed because they got our cast off clothes after they were too faded and old for us to want them any more. But something happened to me each time I looked at the Negro girl who always inherited my clothes. Sometimes she would come to our house with her mother, wearing one of the dresses I had discarded. The dresses never fit her because she was fatter than I was. She would sit in a straight chair in our kitchen waiting for her mother, because of course she could not sit in one of our comfortable chairs in the living room. She would sit there looking uncomfortable, my old faded dress binding her at the waist and throat. And someway I knew that this was not what Jesus meant when he said ‘clothe the naked.’ I recalled that Jesus had also said, ‘therefore all things whatsoever ye would that man should do to you, do ye even so to them.’ And I knew that if I were in her place, if I had no clothes, I would not want the old abandoned dresses of a person who would not even invite me to come into her living room to sit down. And I could not talk to her because I felt ashamed. And as I watched her, I would feel a binding sensation around my own throat. And I would feel to see if my own dress was too tight. But of course it was not. My clothes were always well-cut and perfectly fitted. Instead there was a small straightjacket around my soul. (Anne Braden, The Wall Between, 1958)
Braden goes on to talk about how she began to understand how the racism she lived in was damaging to those who perpetuated it as well as to those who experienced the more severe oppression. “Racial bars built walls…around the white people as well, cramping their spirits and causing them to grow in distorted shapes.” In our conversation about Matthew 25, we talked about the shame of living in plenty when others are suffering; the Gospel tells us that meeting the needs of others is for their material need, but it’s also for our own souls. Or, as a quote from Nicolai Berdyaev has it that José Borrás shared with me a number of years ago has it, “Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.”
Where are you finding bread of all kinds these days?
Who’s sharing with you, and who are you sharing with?
Blessings,
Sara+
Thursday, July 14, 2016
Praying for Salvation, Working for Justice
Dear People of Christ Church,
Last week I was out of the office to attend the Wild Goose Festival, a gathering in the mountains of North Carolina my family and I have attended for the last four years. My shorthand description of it is “Progressive Christians in the mud”—speakers come from all over the map from self-titled “recovering evangelicals” to pacifist Roman Catholics to anti-racist suburban mom bloggers. And folk music rock stars Dar Williams and the Indigo Girls!
The workshops I attended were all over the map—I went to one talk by a lay friend of a silent order of Cistercian monks about meditation, one about pilgrimage and laying down your metaphorical and literal baggage, and several talks by the womanist ethicist scholar Emilie Townes (womanism is a politics centered in the experiences of black women). Jim Wallis, founder of the social justice group Sojourners and author of a whole slew of books about American society and Christian faith and politics, was there this year, speaking again about Racism as America’s Original Sin (also his latest book). What I love about Wild Goose is the sense of community that emerges—I can tell our kids to disappear for an hour and they’ll come back jubilant and covered in dirt, along with a new best friend and an invitation for lunch at someone’s campsite. That doesn’t work in metro Boston.
Backgrounded in all of the beauty, of course, was pain—at this moment the pain of racism in this country and the pain that it is a system that we are all enmeshed in, like a spider web that clings to our bodies and won’t let us free. If everybody believed that black lives matter, we wouldn’t have to say it. The “All lives” of contemporary America does not, when the rubber hits the road, actually include “all.” The Black Lives Matter movement is about changing that.
It is a lifelong task to be aware of how racism works in America and how those of us who are white benefit from that system. We are never finished. We will never have done enough. But it’s not about guilt or innocence, not about being paralyzed by shame or longing for exoneration. It’s a journey. Step by step, thought by thought, day after day paying attention. The way we interact with the racism of contemporary America is a moral and political question. That sounds very “exterior,” but it’s also a spiritual journey. We are called to pay attention to white privilege and racial discrimination because where discrimination happens Jesus is present. Jesus is always present where there is suffering. And white people—we are not suffering in contemporary America in the same way that people of color are suffering. We are not. Jesus is on the other side of that. Always. With Philando Castile and Alton Sterling AND with the Dallas police officers who were murdered. In the same way that the assassin at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando didn’t represent Islam, the shooter in Dallas didn’t represent the Black Lives Matter movement.
Writing about our trip to Wild Goose Festival last year I shared a quote from a talk I attended that year with Paul Fromberg, a priest in San Francisco. He said “I don’t believe in progress. I believe in salvation.” I don’t know if I am making much progress in my own journey around race. Am I doing the best I can? Most of the time. I will pray for salvation, too.
Blessings,
Sara+
PS—Please keep my husband, Noah, and me in your prayers as we travel to Central New York next week for the series of meetings leading up to the bishop election on August 6. I’ll be out of the office from July 19-24. Thanks to the Rev. Thea Keith-Lucas, Episcopal Chaplain at MIT, who will be guest celebrant and preacher on July 24. In case of a pastoral emergency, the clergy from Redeemer Lexington will be on call.
Last week I was out of the office to attend the Wild Goose Festival, a gathering in the mountains of North Carolina my family and I have attended for the last four years. My shorthand description of it is “Progressive Christians in the mud”—speakers come from all over the map from self-titled “recovering evangelicals” to pacifist Roman Catholics to anti-racist suburban mom bloggers. And folk music rock stars Dar Williams and the Indigo Girls!
The workshops I attended were all over the map—I went to one talk by a lay friend of a silent order of Cistercian monks about meditation, one about pilgrimage and laying down your metaphorical and literal baggage, and several talks by the womanist ethicist scholar Emilie Townes (womanism is a politics centered in the experiences of black women). Jim Wallis, founder of the social justice group Sojourners and author of a whole slew of books about American society and Christian faith and politics, was there this year, speaking again about Racism as America’s Original Sin (also his latest book). What I love about Wild Goose is the sense of community that emerges—I can tell our kids to disappear for an hour and they’ll come back jubilant and covered in dirt, along with a new best friend and an invitation for lunch at someone’s campsite. That doesn’t work in metro Boston.
Backgrounded in all of the beauty, of course, was pain—at this moment the pain of racism in this country and the pain that it is a system that we are all enmeshed in, like a spider web that clings to our bodies and won’t let us free. If everybody believed that black lives matter, we wouldn’t have to say it. The “All lives” of contemporary America does not, when the rubber hits the road, actually include “all.” The Black Lives Matter movement is about changing that.
It is a lifelong task to be aware of how racism works in America and how those of us who are white benefit from that system. We are never finished. We will never have done enough. But it’s not about guilt or innocence, not about being paralyzed by shame or longing for exoneration. It’s a journey. Step by step, thought by thought, day after day paying attention. The way we interact with the racism of contemporary America is a moral and political question. That sounds very “exterior,” but it’s also a spiritual journey. We are called to pay attention to white privilege and racial discrimination because where discrimination happens Jesus is present. Jesus is always present where there is suffering. And white people—we are not suffering in contemporary America in the same way that people of color are suffering. We are not. Jesus is on the other side of that. Always. With Philando Castile and Alton Sterling AND with the Dallas police officers who were murdered. In the same way that the assassin at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando didn’t represent Islam, the shooter in Dallas didn’t represent the Black Lives Matter movement.
Writing about our trip to Wild Goose Festival last year I shared a quote from a talk I attended that year with Paul Fromberg, a priest in San Francisco. He said “I don’t believe in progress. I believe in salvation.” I don’t know if I am making much progress in my own journey around race. Am I doing the best I can? Most of the time. I will pray for salvation, too.
Blessings,
Sara+
PS—Please keep my husband, Noah, and me in your prayers as we travel to Central New York next week for the series of meetings leading up to the bishop election on August 6. I’ll be out of the office from July 19-24. Thanks to the Rev. Thea Keith-Lucas, Episcopal Chaplain at MIT, who will be guest celebrant and preacher on July 24. In case of a pastoral emergency, the clergy from Redeemer Lexington will be on call.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Hear Our Prayer
Dear People of Christ Church,
As we continue to unfold ourselves, both personally and culturally, from the grief of the violence in Orlando last week, I wanted to share instead of more words, more prayers. Others have offered wonderful words of challenge, comfort, and Christ—most recently two posts from my Lutheran friend, The Rev. Angel Marrero, pastor of Santuario Waltham: A Pastoral Response from a Gay Latino Priest and, for considering the place of the church in anti-LGBT sentiment, The Pulse Martyrs: Confession Before Communion.
In the meantime, I offer only prayers—here are some I compiled for our Interfaith Vigil service on Monday. We had a beautiful service of light and prayer, and our collection for Waltham House, our local LGBT group home for teens, raised close to $300.
___
From one another and from God, we pray forgiveness for our part in the way our communities have been bruised and our world torn apart. We repent for words and deeds that provoke prejudice, hatred, and revenge. God of compassion and healing
Hear our prayer
Deliver us from suspicions and fears that stand in the way of reconciliation, particularly holding in love those who are Muslim who experience discrimination. God of compassion and healing
Hear our prayer
Deliver us from our unwillingness to confront our own privilege: racial, economic, by gender or sexual orientation, God of compassion and healing
Hear our prayer
For the community of the Pulse nightclub. For bartenders and bouncers, for DJs and dancers. For all who made it a place of refuge and safety, that a sanctuary may be restored. God of compassion and healing
Hear our prayer
We pray in hope that our beautiful world can be transformed through love and beauty. For all who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. For hearts to know God’s love revealed in all God’s children. God of compassion and healing
Hear our prayer
We pray in thanksgiving for our many religious traditions, and for the many names by which you are known, O God. For Yhwh, Allah, Spirit, and Christ. God of compassion and healing
Hear our prayer
We pray for fair politics and brave leaders. For an end to gun violence, for an end to the quiet assumption that nothing can be done and that carnage is inevitable. Give us the gift of holy hope,
And by your grace and healing presence join our hearts to yours.
Blessings,
Sara+
Miss the sermon on 6/12? It’s here!
As we continue to unfold ourselves, both personally and culturally, from the grief of the violence in Orlando last week, I wanted to share instead of more words, more prayers. Others have offered wonderful words of challenge, comfort, and Christ—most recently two posts from my Lutheran friend, The Rev. Angel Marrero, pastor of Santuario Waltham: A Pastoral Response from a Gay Latino Priest and, for considering the place of the church in anti-LGBT sentiment, The Pulse Martyrs: Confession Before Communion.
In the meantime, I offer only prayers—here are some I compiled for our Interfaith Vigil service on Monday. We had a beautiful service of light and prayer, and our collection for Waltham House, our local LGBT group home for teens, raised close to $300.
___
From one another and from God, we pray forgiveness for our part in the way our communities have been bruised and our world torn apart. We repent for words and deeds that provoke prejudice, hatred, and revenge. God of compassion and healing
Hear our prayer
Deliver us from suspicions and fears that stand in the way of reconciliation, particularly holding in love those who are Muslim who experience discrimination. God of compassion and healing
Hear our prayer
Deliver us from our unwillingness to confront our own privilege: racial, economic, by gender or sexual orientation, God of compassion and healing
Hear our prayer
For the community of the Pulse nightclub. For bartenders and bouncers, for DJs and dancers. For all who made it a place of refuge and safety, that a sanctuary may be restored. God of compassion and healing
Hear our prayer
We pray in hope that our beautiful world can be transformed through love and beauty. For all who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. For hearts to know God’s love revealed in all God’s children. God of compassion and healing
Hear our prayer
We pray in thanksgiving for our many religious traditions, and for the many names by which you are known, O God. For Yhwh, Allah, Spirit, and Christ. God of compassion and healing
Hear our prayer
We pray for fair politics and brave leaders. For an end to gun violence, for an end to the quiet assumption that nothing can be done and that carnage is inevitable. Give us the gift of holy hope,
And by your grace and healing presence join our hearts to yours.
Blessings,
Sara+
Miss the sermon on 6/12? It’s here!
Thursday, December 10, 2015
The Light Shines in the Darkness
Dear People of Christ Church,
This week I’m reeling a little from the horrifying rhetoric coming out of certain corners of Christianity and American politics. Whether Jerry Falwell, Jr. exhorting the students of Liberty University to carry guns to “end those Muslims before they walked in and killed us” or Donald Trump wanting to bar Muslims from entering the United States, it seems like whatever level of “too far” I think I’ve heard one week, the next week it goes further.
That’s not my Christianity and not my country. As Shane Claiborne pointed out in a response to Falwell, Jesus carried a cross, not a weapon. When Peter moved to defend him from the Romans and cut the solider’s ear off, Jesus said no. Always, always, the way of Christ is the way of non-violence. I don’t pretend to always live as Jesus invited us, but I hope to recognize it when I see it in others, and hope that I turn away from vengeance when I find it in myself. The power of peace and love is what makes resurrection happen, the power of God in Jesus and for us. We are called to repent, to turn away, from the violent logic of the world that says that you just need to be faster with your own gun before someone else comes at you with theirs.
As Jerry Falwell, Jr. demonstrated last week (as have any number of domestic terrorists who call themselves Christian), Christianity as a whole, not just individuals, has need of repentance and conversion. Just as peace-seeking Muslims don’t recognize their faith in ISIS/Daesh, I don’t recognize my Jesus in Falwell, and I certainly don’t recognize my faith in those who would exclude or promote violence against Muslims. Whether the Crusades, or the Inquisition, or violence perpetrated against Native Americans, there are many examples when our faith, too, has failed to live up to the invitation of Jesus to love.
Again and again, I keep coming back to that reading we hear as part of the first Sunday after Christmas—“the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” I need to keep telling myself this. It is too dark otherwise not to keep lifting up the light. I have to remember that the violence of anti-Muslim hatred—even when perpetrated by those who call themselves Christian—will not win.
The darkness now, though, is very dark. I read a facebook post from a Muslim activist, Sofia Ali-Khan, who talks about how the rhetoric is no longer ignore-able. She invites allies to check in with the Muslims they know, to learn, to stand in solidarity. The causes of big political hatred can seem beyond us, but the reality is that hatred is transmitted person to person, and the place where hearts are changed is from person to person. That could be a gentle “Well, no, all Muslims don’t believe in terrorism” when a friend seems to imply otherwise, to a quiet smile at a woman in a head scarf at the grocery store. These are not earth shattering gestures, but they hold up light in a terribly dark time.
That’s what’s at stake at Christmas—the light coming to be born in this darkest time of the year (literally as well as metaphorically). We are working to make a world for that light to shine as well as looking for ways to allow that light to shine in our own hearts, in quiet and peace.
What does that look like for you these days?
Blessings,
Sara+
This week I’m reeling a little from the horrifying rhetoric coming out of certain corners of Christianity and American politics. Whether Jerry Falwell, Jr. exhorting the students of Liberty University to carry guns to “end those Muslims before they walked in and killed us” or Donald Trump wanting to bar Muslims from entering the United States, it seems like whatever level of “too far” I think I’ve heard one week, the next week it goes further.
That’s not my Christianity and not my country. As Shane Claiborne pointed out in a response to Falwell, Jesus carried a cross, not a weapon. When Peter moved to defend him from the Romans and cut the solider’s ear off, Jesus said no. Always, always, the way of Christ is the way of non-violence. I don’t pretend to always live as Jesus invited us, but I hope to recognize it when I see it in others, and hope that I turn away from vengeance when I find it in myself. The power of peace and love is what makes resurrection happen, the power of God in Jesus and for us. We are called to repent, to turn away, from the violent logic of the world that says that you just need to be faster with your own gun before someone else comes at you with theirs.
As Jerry Falwell, Jr. demonstrated last week (as have any number of domestic terrorists who call themselves Christian), Christianity as a whole, not just individuals, has need of repentance and conversion. Just as peace-seeking Muslims don’t recognize their faith in ISIS/Daesh, I don’t recognize my Jesus in Falwell, and I certainly don’t recognize my faith in those who would exclude or promote violence against Muslims. Whether the Crusades, or the Inquisition, or violence perpetrated against Native Americans, there are many examples when our faith, too, has failed to live up to the invitation of Jesus to love.
Again and again, I keep coming back to that reading we hear as part of the first Sunday after Christmas—“the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” I need to keep telling myself this. It is too dark otherwise not to keep lifting up the light. I have to remember that the violence of anti-Muslim hatred—even when perpetrated by those who call themselves Christian—will not win.
The darkness now, though, is very dark. I read a facebook post from a Muslim activist, Sofia Ali-Khan, who talks about how the rhetoric is no longer ignore-able. She invites allies to check in with the Muslims they know, to learn, to stand in solidarity. The causes of big political hatred can seem beyond us, but the reality is that hatred is transmitted person to person, and the place where hearts are changed is from person to person. That could be a gentle “Well, no, all Muslims don’t believe in terrorism” when a friend seems to imply otherwise, to a quiet smile at a woman in a head scarf at the grocery store. These are not earth shattering gestures, but they hold up light in a terribly dark time.
That’s what’s at stake at Christmas—the light coming to be born in this darkest time of the year (literally as well as metaphorically). We are working to make a world for that light to shine as well as looking for ways to allow that light to shine in our own hearts, in quiet and peace.
What does that look like for you these days?
Blessings,
Sara+
Thursday, November 19, 2015
A Container for Grace
Dear People of Christ Church,
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all who are making our annual stewardship and roof campaign possible. From stewardship co-chairs Heather and Chris Leonardo who have invited us into our dreaming and reflecting on our past, present and future, to Michael Mailman reminding us of how the light comes through the windows and Jonathan Duce presenting us with the shingles that had blown off the roof, to Doug telling us the story of our 2011 campaign and how his family had just joined, and how far we’ve come since then. I spoke in my sermon about how our building is a container for grace—how this is a place where transformation happens. Whether people coming for AA, or Chaplains on the Way contemplative prayer, or REACH’s trainings on elder violence or yoga for survivors, or each one of you, your imagination caught by some indescribable something that reminds you of how God is present and moving in your life—750 Main Street is a place where things happen.
This is a place where things happen for us and for our city. Where the hungry are fed at Grandma’s Pantry, the wet baby gets dry at Diaper Depot, and our Sunday School classes invite our children into times of wonder and joy at the stories of God’s living Word.
Our 2011 campaign is on track—bathrooms and carpets and parking lot are all being funded and rolling along, but to avoid jeopardizing all of that good work we need to attend to the roof. When he started working here last summer, Daniel, our music director, didn’t know that it sometimes rains over the organ! So there is much to do, and so many people passionate for the work of God who are doing it. If you weren’t in church, please check out their videos on youtube. I’m also sharing a recording of my sermon here.
Finally, I can’t let this week go without offering some words about the current moment in our country regarding Syrian refugees. The fact that a Syrian passport was found near one of the terrorist’s bodies after the attacks in Paris has led fully half of US governors, including our own Charlie Baker, to say that Syrians are not welcome in their states. Not only are the vetting processes for refugees coming to the United States among the most stringent in the world, to single out a single nation as somehow more suspect than any other is simple intolerance. You can read their whole letter here, but let me close with these words from Christian leaders across the state, including our own bishops Alan and Gayle, as well as Mass Council of Churches Executive Director Laura Everett:
Refugees do not bring terror, they are fleeing from it.
As Christians we try to live our lives in accordance with Jesus’ Great Commandment—to love our neighbors as ourselves. We want safe homes, the freedom to worship, stable governments and opportunities to thrive. Our Syrian neighbors desire the same. Our faith also teaches us to welcome the stranger. Syrians seeking refuge, as well as the Somalians, Bhutanese, Iraqis, Central Americans and others, are neighbors worthy of our welcome and in need of our care. Our nation is founded on this welcome. We must make sure that we do not allow fear to overwhelm us, crowd out our compassion, or fundamentally change our character. We refuse to live as a Commonwealth scared of those unlike us.
Amen, Amen, Amen.
Blessings,
Sara+
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all who are making our annual stewardship and roof campaign possible. From stewardship co-chairs Heather and Chris Leonardo who have invited us into our dreaming and reflecting on our past, present and future, to Michael Mailman reminding us of how the light comes through the windows and Jonathan Duce presenting us with the shingles that had blown off the roof, to Doug telling us the story of our 2011 campaign and how his family had just joined, and how far we’ve come since then. I spoke in my sermon about how our building is a container for grace—how this is a place where transformation happens. Whether people coming for AA, or Chaplains on the Way contemplative prayer, or REACH’s trainings on elder violence or yoga for survivors, or each one of you, your imagination caught by some indescribable something that reminds you of how God is present and moving in your life—750 Main Street is a place where things happen.
This is a place where things happen for us and for our city. Where the hungry are fed at Grandma’s Pantry, the wet baby gets dry at Diaper Depot, and our Sunday School classes invite our children into times of wonder and joy at the stories of God’s living Word.
Our 2011 campaign is on track—bathrooms and carpets and parking lot are all being funded and rolling along, but to avoid jeopardizing all of that good work we need to attend to the roof. When he started working here last summer, Daniel, our music director, didn’t know that it sometimes rains over the organ! So there is much to do, and so many people passionate for the work of God who are doing it. If you weren’t in church, please check out their videos on youtube. I’m also sharing a recording of my sermon here.
Finally, I can’t let this week go without offering some words about the current moment in our country regarding Syrian refugees. The fact that a Syrian passport was found near one of the terrorist’s bodies after the attacks in Paris has led fully half of US governors, including our own Charlie Baker, to say that Syrians are not welcome in their states. Not only are the vetting processes for refugees coming to the United States among the most stringent in the world, to single out a single nation as somehow more suspect than any other is simple intolerance. You can read their whole letter here, but let me close with these words from Christian leaders across the state, including our own bishops Alan and Gayle, as well as Mass Council of Churches Executive Director Laura Everett:
Refugees do not bring terror, they are fleeing from it.
As Christians we try to live our lives in accordance with Jesus’ Great Commandment—to love our neighbors as ourselves. We want safe homes, the freedom to worship, stable governments and opportunities to thrive. Our Syrian neighbors desire the same. Our faith also teaches us to welcome the stranger. Syrians seeking refuge, as well as the Somalians, Bhutanese, Iraqis, Central Americans and others, are neighbors worthy of our welcome and in need of our care. Our nation is founded on this welcome. We must make sure that we do not allow fear to overwhelm us, crowd out our compassion, or fundamentally change our character. We refuse to live as a Commonwealth scared of those unlike us.
Amen, Amen, Amen.
Blessings,
Sara+
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Welcome, Discomfort
Dear People of Christ Church,
This week, as hopefully we all are, I’ve continued to be moved by the European migrant crisis. I came across a book of sermons by Walter Brueggeman, an Old Testament scholar, where in a sermon about a passage in the book of the prophet Isaiah he writes this:
There is something about [Jerusalem] that forgets the very mandate of fidelity that makes a city work. There is nothing here about removing these failed poor and making them invisible, deporting them because they are an economic inconvenience. No, because widows and orphans are not an inconvenience. They are a measure of the health of the city, to be measured in terms of justice and righteousness, and Jerusalem has failed that measure (p 50).
Jerusalem failed—our world has clearly failed, too. Refugees are not an inconvenience. Homeless people are not an inconvenience. Victims of addiction, war, environmental devastation. Not an inconvenience, but a signal of health or ill health. That’s about the world. No one is an inconvenience to the heart of God. Yes, we are failing. Yes, I falter. But it’s not hopeless.
The harsher realities of the world, a world where children are abandoned and whole swaths of people dismissed as criminals, have always been so. Whatever Jesus himself meant the time he said that the poor would always be with us, over the last two millennia, at least, so far he’s right. But economic poverty exposes spiritual poverty, and meeting economic need fulfills spiritual need. It goes both ways. The thing I love about Brueggeman’s point is that this is that it offers enough of a breather from the usual guilt/shame/despair cycle to allow for the breath of God to enter. It is only when it appears that the problems of the world and our souls rest in our own power that we get lost. If there is no hope, then that makes it awfully easy to do nothing.
I’ll share again here the prayer I offered on Sunday as part of the children’s sermon. It’s based on one from Thomas Keating, a Roman Catholic priest who has worked to return contemplative prayer and meditation into the Christian tradition.
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me today
Because I know that God is with me.
I welcome the world
I welcome joy and sadness
I welcome fear and delight.
I welcome my friends
I welcome those who are difficult for me to love
I let go of my need to be in charge
I let go of my need for people to think I’m the best
I open myself to the love of God.
I open myself to the love of God.
To which, today, I would add: I welcome the discomfort of seeing those who are in pain. I welcome the feeling that I want to do more to help. I welcome the opportunity to see those here who are in need, asylum seekers to the United States who are in no less need than those across the ocean. I welcome the opportunity to ask hard questions, at how our hearts are moved and when, and what makes them blind. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
And what can you do?
Check out Refugee Immigration Ministries,
based in Malden works with local communities to marshal support, from spiritual resources to homestay. Talk with each other about whether a new ministry could be right for Christ Church.
Be informed. What’s a migrant? A refugee? Why is the difference important? Read here.
Remember you’re part of the wider church, and pray. Remember Muslim brothers and sisters who experience violence because of their faith. Ask how your Christian faith can be deepened by knowing those who are different from you. Check out this from the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Blessings,
Sara+
This week, as hopefully we all are, I’ve continued to be moved by the European migrant crisis. I came across a book of sermons by Walter Brueggeman, an Old Testament scholar, where in a sermon about a passage in the book of the prophet Isaiah he writes this:
There is something about [Jerusalem] that forgets the very mandate of fidelity that makes a city work. There is nothing here about removing these failed poor and making them invisible, deporting them because they are an economic inconvenience. No, because widows and orphans are not an inconvenience. They are a measure of the health of the city, to be measured in terms of justice and righteousness, and Jerusalem has failed that measure (p 50).
Jerusalem failed—our world has clearly failed, too. Refugees are not an inconvenience. Homeless people are not an inconvenience. Victims of addiction, war, environmental devastation. Not an inconvenience, but a signal of health or ill health. That’s about the world. No one is an inconvenience to the heart of God. Yes, we are failing. Yes, I falter. But it’s not hopeless.
The harsher realities of the world, a world where children are abandoned and whole swaths of people dismissed as criminals, have always been so. Whatever Jesus himself meant the time he said that the poor would always be with us, over the last two millennia, at least, so far he’s right. But economic poverty exposes spiritual poverty, and meeting economic need fulfills spiritual need. It goes both ways. The thing I love about Brueggeman’s point is that this is that it offers enough of a breather from the usual guilt/shame/despair cycle to allow for the breath of God to enter. It is only when it appears that the problems of the world and our souls rest in our own power that we get lost. If there is no hope, then that makes it awfully easy to do nothing.
I’ll share again here the prayer I offered on Sunday as part of the children’s sermon. It’s based on one from Thomas Keating, a Roman Catholic priest who has worked to return contemplative prayer and meditation into the Christian tradition.
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me today
Because I know that God is with me.
I welcome the world
I welcome joy and sadness
I welcome fear and delight.
I welcome my friends
I welcome those who are difficult for me to love
I let go of my need to be in charge
I let go of my need for people to think I’m the best
I open myself to the love of God.
I open myself to the love of God.
To which, today, I would add: I welcome the discomfort of seeing those who are in pain. I welcome the feeling that I want to do more to help. I welcome the opportunity to see those here who are in need, asylum seekers to the United States who are in no less need than those across the ocean. I welcome the opportunity to ask hard questions, at how our hearts are moved and when, and what makes them blind. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
And what can you do?
Check out Refugee Immigration Ministries,
based in Malden works with local communities to marshal support, from spiritual resources to homestay. Talk with each other about whether a new ministry could be right for Christ Church.
Be informed. What’s a migrant? A refugee? Why is the difference important? Read here.
Remember you’re part of the wider church, and pray. Remember Muslim brothers and sisters who experience violence because of their faith. Ask how your Christian faith can be deepened by knowing those who are different from you. Check out this from the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Blessings,
Sara+
Thursday, July 2, 2015
"Get Up, Girl!"
Dear People of Christ Church,
This week I’ve continued to watch the events coming out of General Convention in Salt Lake City with a bit more focus. One of the highlights was seeing (now outgoing) Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s sermon on Sunday’s Gospel text, in which a girl, a daughter of a leader of the synagogue, is healed of her illness. Even after her father’s friends tell him to stop bothering Jesus, that she’s dead and he has to just deal with it, even when those friends laugh at Jesus when he tells them that she’s sleeping, not dead, this girl’s father keeps his faith and gets his daughter back.
Talitha cum, the phrase Jesus says to the girl, is rendered by Bishop Katharine as “get up, girl!” and what a word for our church. Institutionally, the Episcopal church nationwide is in quite a lot of hot water. Membership declines, money declines, buildings decline. Jesus comes and says, “Get up, girl!” As we celebrate marriage equality coming to every state, Jesus says, “Get up, girl!” As we weep over the nine murdered at Emanuel AME Charleston and rage against Southern churches burned in white supremacist attacks Jesus says, “Get up, girl!”
Get up to celebrate, get up to mourn, get up to speak out. Don’t die before you’re dead. Jesus speaks a word to us all to be the church as fully as we can. Not the church-as-institution, as building, as provider-of-“intangible spiritual gifts” (as our donor acknowledgement letter states). But Church as people-of-God, as disciples-of-Jesus, as body-of-Christ.
This week in Salt Lake City we elected our first African American Presiding Bishop. Just as having a black president didn’t end racism in the US, having a black presiding bishop doesn’t end racism in the church. The House of Bishops passed a resolution to remove references to gender in our marriage canons, so that full marriage equality will be the rule, not the exception in all Episcopal dioceses (currently it’s case-by-case, permitted in our diocese for some time now). And just as marriage equality has become the law in our country and our church, it doesn’t end violence and prejudice against our LGBT siblings. But as Presiding Bishop-elect Curry said: we have a God, there is a Jesus, and we are part of the Jesus movement. And nothing can stop the movement of God’s love in this world. Thanks be to God!
Some links to check out:
Coverage of the bishops’ led march against gun violence in Salt Lake City
Christ Church Cathedral in St Louis gets up: Rebuild Black Churches Fund
Michael Curry’s remarks (the standing ovation stops at about minute 9)
More on the nuts and bolts on the legislation on marriage
For updates from the Diocese of Massachusetts folks at Convention, check out their website here
And last but not least, the video about John Obergefell and his husband I preached about on Sunday, click here. Have tissues available.
Blessings,
Sara +
This week I’ve continued to watch the events coming out of General Convention in Salt Lake City with a bit more focus. One of the highlights was seeing (now outgoing) Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s sermon on Sunday’s Gospel text, in which a girl, a daughter of a leader of the synagogue, is healed of her illness. Even after her father’s friends tell him to stop bothering Jesus, that she’s dead and he has to just deal with it, even when those friends laugh at Jesus when he tells them that she’s sleeping, not dead, this girl’s father keeps his faith and gets his daughter back.
Talitha cum, the phrase Jesus says to the girl, is rendered by Bishop Katharine as “get up, girl!” and what a word for our church. Institutionally, the Episcopal church nationwide is in quite a lot of hot water. Membership declines, money declines, buildings decline. Jesus comes and says, “Get up, girl!” As we celebrate marriage equality coming to every state, Jesus says, “Get up, girl!” As we weep over the nine murdered at Emanuel AME Charleston and rage against Southern churches burned in white supremacist attacks Jesus says, “Get up, girl!”
Get up to celebrate, get up to mourn, get up to speak out. Don’t die before you’re dead. Jesus speaks a word to us all to be the church as fully as we can. Not the church-as-institution, as building, as provider-of-“intangible spiritual gifts” (as our donor acknowledgement letter states). But Church as people-of-God, as disciples-of-Jesus, as body-of-Christ.
This week in Salt Lake City we elected our first African American Presiding Bishop. Just as having a black president didn’t end racism in the US, having a black presiding bishop doesn’t end racism in the church. The House of Bishops passed a resolution to remove references to gender in our marriage canons, so that full marriage equality will be the rule, not the exception in all Episcopal dioceses (currently it’s case-by-case, permitted in our diocese for some time now). And just as marriage equality has become the law in our country and our church, it doesn’t end violence and prejudice against our LGBT siblings. But as Presiding Bishop-elect Curry said: we have a God, there is a Jesus, and we are part of the Jesus movement. And nothing can stop the movement of God’s love in this world. Thanks be to God!
Some links to check out:
Coverage of the bishops’ led march against gun violence in Salt Lake City
Christ Church Cathedral in St Louis gets up: Rebuild Black Churches Fund
Michael Curry’s remarks (the standing ovation stops at about minute 9)
More on the nuts and bolts on the legislation on marriage
For updates from the Diocese of Massachusetts folks at Convention, check out their website here
And last but not least, the video about John Obergefell and his husband I preached about on Sunday, click here. Have tissues available.
Blessings,
Sara +
Thursday, June 11, 2015
A New Take on Being the Body of Christ
Dear People of Christ Church,
This week, I had the privilege to sit next to Sister Simone Campbell, keynote speaker at the Episcopal City Mission Annual Dinner. She is the executive director of the Roman Catholic Sisters’ social justice advocacy organization, NETWORK. I first heard about Sisters Simone’s work in 2012, when she and her sisters began the “Nuns on the Bus” tour and offered their critique of the much-discussed Ryan budget, a budget passed by the US House that would have gutted safety net provisions for poor Americans nationwide. Subsequent trips have promoted support for new immigrants and their 2014 “We the People” tour encouraged voters to step up and claim their place at the table. I bought her book and would be interested in talking about it with a group—please let me know if you’d be up for some light summer reading! (It really is light—she’s charming and totally conversational).
One of the things that Sister Simone talked about was the image of the Body of Christ—I know, I know, you’ve thought about it before. But she didn’t talk poetically about how she thought she was the feet or the hands of Christ. She said she thought her ministry was in being the stomach acid. Yes, the stomach acid. To digest and process and get the protein and nutrients broken down and sent to where they need to go. All you need to do, she said, is find your part to play in the world—you don’t have to fix every problem, you need to find the one thing you are called to.
The other fantastic part of the evening was watching this video about the Burgess Urban Fund. The fund was started 40 years ago as the Joint Urban Fund between the diocese and Episcopal City Mission. The seeds for it were planted in 1968, when Bishop Anson Stokes offered $10,000 in response to activists’ demands to build affordable housing on a vacant lot at Dartmouth and Columbus Streets in Boston. That action set the tone for what would become the Burgess Urban Fund, named for John Burgess, the first African American diocesan bishop in the Episcopal Church. The fund grew, supported by every parish, and over the years has given five million dollars to community organizations (including our local partner WATCH!). Our own Rev Norm Faramelli has long been affiliated with ECM and tells much of the story. Watch it here! (no, really. Watch it. It’s 8 minutes, and totally worth it).
Bishop Burgess said that he wanted to show how the Episcopal Church could be relevant to the lives of the poor. That was his “one thing,” as Sister Simone said. Not a small thing, but one thing. What’s your thing? Where are you called to meet God working in the world? Are you a hand, a foot, a heart? Or maybe something more specific, like stomach acid or blood or veins? A whole body needs every part.
Blessings,
Sara+
P.S.—for another thing I wrote this week…check out my reply to a recent New York Times article on feminism and transgender rights on my blog—”Why politics needs theology: or why feminism and trans rights are part of the same train.”
This week, I had the privilege to sit next to Sister Simone Campbell, keynote speaker at the Episcopal City Mission Annual Dinner. She is the executive director of the Roman Catholic Sisters’ social justice advocacy organization, NETWORK. I first heard about Sisters Simone’s work in 2012, when she and her sisters began the “Nuns on the Bus” tour and offered their critique of the much-discussed Ryan budget, a budget passed by the US House that would have gutted safety net provisions for poor Americans nationwide. Subsequent trips have promoted support for new immigrants and their 2014 “We the People” tour encouraged voters to step up and claim their place at the table. I bought her book and would be interested in talking about it with a group—please let me know if you’d be up for some light summer reading! (It really is light—she’s charming and totally conversational).
One of the things that Sister Simone talked about was the image of the Body of Christ—I know, I know, you’ve thought about it before. But she didn’t talk poetically about how she thought she was the feet or the hands of Christ. She said she thought her ministry was in being the stomach acid. Yes, the stomach acid. To digest and process and get the protein and nutrients broken down and sent to where they need to go. All you need to do, she said, is find your part to play in the world—you don’t have to fix every problem, you need to find the one thing you are called to.
The other fantastic part of the evening was watching this video about the Burgess Urban Fund. The fund was started 40 years ago as the Joint Urban Fund between the diocese and Episcopal City Mission. The seeds for it were planted in 1968, when Bishop Anson Stokes offered $10,000 in response to activists’ demands to build affordable housing on a vacant lot at Dartmouth and Columbus Streets in Boston. That action set the tone for what would become the Burgess Urban Fund, named for John Burgess, the first African American diocesan bishop in the Episcopal Church. The fund grew, supported by every parish, and over the years has given five million dollars to community organizations (including our local partner WATCH!). Our own Rev Norm Faramelli has long been affiliated with ECM and tells much of the story. Watch it here! (no, really. Watch it. It’s 8 minutes, and totally worth it).
Bishop Burgess said that he wanted to show how the Episcopal Church could be relevant to the lives of the poor. That was his “one thing,” as Sister Simone said. Not a small thing, but one thing. What’s your thing? Where are you called to meet God working in the world? Are you a hand, a foot, a heart? Or maybe something more specific, like stomach acid or blood or veins? A whole body needs every part.
Blessings,
Sara+
P.S.—for another thing I wrote this week…check out my reply to a recent New York Times article on feminism and transgender rights on my blog—”Why politics needs theology: or why feminism and trans rights are part of the same train.”
Friday, May 8, 2015
Mother's Day Walk for Peace
Dear People of Christ Church,
So many great things going on this week!
Friday night, please join us for our parish arts and talent show. There will be everything from bellydancing to singing to poetry about cats, along with pieces from the Community Day Center’s Photo Exhibit, “Homelessness Through Our Eyes.” And there will be pizza.
Saturday, come over to help with Post Office food drive. The USPS’s annual “Stamp Out Hunger” event allows you to put food out at your mailbox to be delivered to local food pantries, and our own “Grandma’s Pantry” is a grateful recipient. Often times the haul is very generous, which means we need lots of help. Please be in touch with Sally Lobo if you can make it.
Sunday, please join Christ Churchers for the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace. In the last few years we’ve had 15-20 participants—let’s make it 30 this year! Meet at 7:30 am near the B Peace for Jorge tent on the Common. The Walk benefits the Louis Brown Peace Institute, founded by Tina Chery after her son Louis Brown was murdered. Money from the walk this year will go for a new grant program for advocacy groups and a new fund for those who need assistance with burial costs when their loved ones die by violence. We’ll be walking as part of the B Peace for Jorge team, which convened under the leadership of Bishop Tom Shaw after Jorge Fuentes, a counselor for St Stephen’s B Safe Program (for which we will volunteer later this summer!), was shot walking his dog. The year after Jorge’s death, Bishop Tom did the walk and celebrated the Eucharist at the end, a tradition Bishop Gates will continue this year.
With a lot of “walk” events—for breast cancer, or hunger, or suicide—the walking can feel sort of secondary. They are an important occasion to raise awareness—to turn our attention and offer support. For several years my kids did the Walk for Hunger with Grace Medford, and I know it gave them a tangible sense of focusing their attention on those who have less than they. But there is no direct correlation between putting one foot in front of the other and ending hunger. It’s a means, not an end.
The thing about the Peace Walk that is so compelling to me is that this is a time when the walking actually DOES make a difference. Many of us never have occasion to visit places we hear about on the news where yet another young person has been shot. We aren’t confronted with the reality of not allowing our kids to play outside for fear of random gunfire. The news tells us about these crimes, and maybe we pay attention and maybe we don’t—but we forget that there are communities and churches and schools full of kids and moms and dads and teenagers who walk their dogs who confront this as reality all the time. But illegal guns are a problem for everyone. Racism is a problem for everyone. 500 people from the suburbs descending on Dorchester once a year doesn’t change much. But bit by bit, it might change us. Maybe you have a conversation with someone or maybe you see racism in a different light. Maybe just one piece of the puzzle of race and inequality snaps in place. There’s hope.
This year, it feels especially important—this year’s march isn’t tied specifically to the Black Lives Matter Movement, but of course they are related. Police officers will be stationed throughout the walk to help guide walkers—we are grateful to them! But it’s the same racism that has led many police officers to immediately find people of color suspect. It’s the same racism that still lingers as suspicion and mistrust. It’s the same racism that infects our justice systems, our schools, and our streets. One poisonous well, many different outflows. Sunday, we will be one people of God, trying to find our way back to each other and to the grace of Christ that makes us all whole.
Blessings,
Sara+
So many great things going on this week!
Friday night, please join us for our parish arts and talent show. There will be everything from bellydancing to singing to poetry about cats, along with pieces from the Community Day Center’s Photo Exhibit, “Homelessness Through Our Eyes.” And there will be pizza.
Saturday, come over to help with Post Office food drive. The USPS’s annual “Stamp Out Hunger” event allows you to put food out at your mailbox to be delivered to local food pantries, and our own “Grandma’s Pantry” is a grateful recipient. Often times the haul is very generous, which means we need lots of help. Please be in touch with Sally Lobo if you can make it.
Sunday, please join Christ Churchers for the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace. In the last few years we’ve had 15-20 participants—let’s make it 30 this year! Meet at 7:30 am near the B Peace for Jorge tent on the Common. The Walk benefits the Louis Brown Peace Institute, founded by Tina Chery after her son Louis Brown was murdered. Money from the walk this year will go for a new grant program for advocacy groups and a new fund for those who need assistance with burial costs when their loved ones die by violence. We’ll be walking as part of the B Peace for Jorge team, which convened under the leadership of Bishop Tom Shaw after Jorge Fuentes, a counselor for St Stephen’s B Safe Program (for which we will volunteer later this summer!), was shot walking his dog. The year after Jorge’s death, Bishop Tom did the walk and celebrated the Eucharist at the end, a tradition Bishop Gates will continue this year.
With a lot of “walk” events—for breast cancer, or hunger, or suicide—the walking can feel sort of secondary. They are an important occasion to raise awareness—to turn our attention and offer support. For several years my kids did the Walk for Hunger with Grace Medford, and I know it gave them a tangible sense of focusing their attention on those who have less than they. But there is no direct correlation between putting one foot in front of the other and ending hunger. It’s a means, not an end.
The thing about the Peace Walk that is so compelling to me is that this is a time when the walking actually DOES make a difference. Many of us never have occasion to visit places we hear about on the news where yet another young person has been shot. We aren’t confronted with the reality of not allowing our kids to play outside for fear of random gunfire. The news tells us about these crimes, and maybe we pay attention and maybe we don’t—but we forget that there are communities and churches and schools full of kids and moms and dads and teenagers who walk their dogs who confront this as reality all the time. But illegal guns are a problem for everyone. Racism is a problem for everyone. 500 people from the suburbs descending on Dorchester once a year doesn’t change much. But bit by bit, it might change us. Maybe you have a conversation with someone or maybe you see racism in a different light. Maybe just one piece of the puzzle of race and inequality snaps in place. There’s hope.
This year, it feels especially important—this year’s march isn’t tied specifically to the Black Lives Matter Movement, but of course they are related. Police officers will be stationed throughout the walk to help guide walkers—we are grateful to them! But it’s the same racism that has led many police officers to immediately find people of color suspect. It’s the same racism that still lingers as suspicion and mistrust. It’s the same racism that infects our justice systems, our schools, and our streets. One poisonous well, many different outflows. Sunday, we will be one people of God, trying to find our way back to each other and to the grace of Christ that makes us all whole.
Blessings,
Sara+
Friday, January 23, 2015
Being Beloved, Being Changed
Dear People of Christ Church,
Sunday, my sermon was all about the love of God—God’s all the time, unconditional, unchanging love. It doesn’t matter how much better we could be through self-improvement—more exercise, more prayer, more attentiveness, more simplicity—still, no matter what, God loves us now and won’t love us more even if we could become “better” somehow.
This week, I’m feeling vividly the paradox of that profound truth—God literally could not love us more—at the same time as I feel the truth of God’s pull toward being, yes, better. Some of it is the New Year; writing all of our annual reports, I’m excited about what else we can do having seen how far we’ve come. Some of it is Martin Luther King, Jr Day—thinking of the “more” to which the Civil Rights Movement called our country and thinking of just how far there still is to go.
The love of God invites our total and profound surrender to God’s will. The love of God invites our perfect rest in God’s sufficiency and care for us. The love of God is a raging fire, that burns in your heart until you’ve shared it with others. The love of God is the knowledge that you are valued beyond measure and—and—for that very reason—for the very reason of your soft cuddly love of God feeling—you are also made brave beyond measure to go out into the world to make God’s dream real.
I don’t know the answer of how, exactly, to do this. I’m starting small—in how I teach my children, in how I spend my money, in how I do my job. Jesus said something about being a neighbor, loving with action and word those who are closest, allowing the sphere of our affection to broaden. Not turning away from suffering. Last week, like many were, I was swept away in the “Big Ideas” about the shootings in France while as many as 2,000 people were murdered in Nigeria with hardly a media ripple.
So I’ll soak in all of God’s love and acceptance that I know is mine in Christ. I will pray not to allow myself to feel God’s love as an insulating cocoon away from the world, but as a fire behind me that allows me to go out into the world. I will pray to be willing to face suffering and pain, knowing that God’s love will always be enough.
Blessings,
Sara+
Sunday, my sermon was all about the love of God—God’s all the time, unconditional, unchanging love. It doesn’t matter how much better we could be through self-improvement—more exercise, more prayer, more attentiveness, more simplicity—still, no matter what, God loves us now and won’t love us more even if we could become “better” somehow.
This week, I’m feeling vividly the paradox of that profound truth—God literally could not love us more—at the same time as I feel the truth of God’s pull toward being, yes, better. Some of it is the New Year; writing all of our annual reports, I’m excited about what else we can do having seen how far we’ve come. Some of it is Martin Luther King, Jr Day—thinking of the “more” to which the Civil Rights Movement called our country and thinking of just how far there still is to go.
The love of God invites our total and profound surrender to God’s will. The love of God invites our perfect rest in God’s sufficiency and care for us. The love of God is a raging fire, that burns in your heart until you’ve shared it with others. The love of God is the knowledge that you are valued beyond measure and—and—for that very reason—for the very reason of your soft cuddly love of God feeling—you are also made brave beyond measure to go out into the world to make God’s dream real.
I don’t know the answer of how, exactly, to do this. I’m starting small—in how I teach my children, in how I spend my money, in how I do my job. Jesus said something about being a neighbor, loving with action and word those who are closest, allowing the sphere of our affection to broaden. Not turning away from suffering. Last week, like many were, I was swept away in the “Big Ideas” about the shootings in France while as many as 2,000 people were murdered in Nigeria with hardly a media ripple.
So I’ll soak in all of God’s love and acceptance that I know is mine in Christ. I will pray not to allow myself to feel God’s love as an insulating cocoon away from the world, but as a fire behind me that allows me to go out into the world. I will pray to be willing to face suffering and pain, knowing that God’s love will always be enough.
Blessings,
Sara+
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
The Sacrament of Stillness
This week, I’m passing on a bit from Walter Brueggeman, whose book I read this week while home on a sick day: Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now. I’ve written a lot in this space about feeling impatient about social justice and the Advent of Christ’s restoration of all things—I’ll try to be faithful to that holy impatience. Unholy impatience, however, is the kind I fall into more often. Short tempered with my kids when they take what seems like EIGHT YEARS to brush their teeth. Impatient in traffic, trying to avoid the distracting allure of the little red notifying sign that I have a Facebook message from someone. These kinds of impatiences are habits of thought absorbed in our technological world, when it feels like anything worth having must be eligible for overnight shipping, and anything worth doing must be able to be finished in an afternoon.
Here’s what Brueggeman says about that.
The divine rest on the seventh day of creation has made clear:
a. that Yahweh is not a workaholic
b. that Yahweh is not anxious about the full function of creation and
c. that the well-being of creation does not depend on endless work (6).
Hear that? Creation doesn’t depend on your constant work. It doesn’t even depend on God’s constant work. Sabbath, Brueggeman says, is as necessary to God as it is to us—and rather archly reminds us that God did not just “check in” on creation on God’s day off. God knew it would be fine.
Sabbath, Sabbath, Sabbath. Rest, faithfulness, joy.
I feel like I’ve been writing and preaching grief and tragedy for too many weeks, and the sin of our world is still glaring, still there. But we will not be made more compassionate or more fruitful in our work in refusing to trust God. I’ve been so moved by all the stories of protest that have come out recently—high school students all over Boston leaving their classrooms, Harvard Medical School students in their white jackets leaving their lecture halls. To cease to operate in the usual economy of accomplishment and “business as usual” seems to me a sacramental response. The holy is revealed in the ordinary.
There is often a complaint that protest actions don’t directly impact the issues the protestors want changed. Blocking a highway entrance does nothing against police violence. Laying down on the street does nothing directly to end the racism that leaves black children more likely to be expelled from school than their white peers. 9 years of the Waltham peace vigil (see below), has not ended any wars. Those critiques may be compelling, but both racial injustice and war politics are so woven into our judicial and economic system and into our very habits of mind that there is no simple chain of cause and effect, anywhere. The critique just doesn’t fit.
Justice comes in God’s time, with all of us needing to pray and hope and work and, yes, rest. We already know the end of the story. Jesus was born among us. God, in our midst. God just came to be with us. The birth of a holy child has no apparent causal relationship to the end of sin and suffering. Still in one week at the manger we will adore him, still we have confidence that the child, Emmanu-el, is God with us. Still, that light will shine.
Blessings,
Sara+
Here’s what Brueggeman says about that.
The divine rest on the seventh day of creation has made clear:
a. that Yahweh is not a workaholic
b. that Yahweh is not anxious about the full function of creation and
c. that the well-being of creation does not depend on endless work (6).
Hear that? Creation doesn’t depend on your constant work. It doesn’t even depend on God’s constant work. Sabbath, Brueggeman says, is as necessary to God as it is to us—and rather archly reminds us that God did not just “check in” on creation on God’s day off. God knew it would be fine.
Sabbath, Sabbath, Sabbath. Rest, faithfulness, joy.
I feel like I’ve been writing and preaching grief and tragedy for too many weeks, and the sin of our world is still glaring, still there. But we will not be made more compassionate or more fruitful in our work in refusing to trust God. I’ve been so moved by all the stories of protest that have come out recently—high school students all over Boston leaving their classrooms, Harvard Medical School students in their white jackets leaving their lecture halls. To cease to operate in the usual economy of accomplishment and “business as usual” seems to me a sacramental response. The holy is revealed in the ordinary.
There is often a complaint that protest actions don’t directly impact the issues the protestors want changed. Blocking a highway entrance does nothing against police violence. Laying down on the street does nothing directly to end the racism that leaves black children more likely to be expelled from school than their white peers. 9 years of the Waltham peace vigil (see below), has not ended any wars. Those critiques may be compelling, but both racial injustice and war politics are so woven into our judicial and economic system and into our very habits of mind that there is no simple chain of cause and effect, anywhere. The critique just doesn’t fit.
Justice comes in God’s time, with all of us needing to pray and hope and work and, yes, rest. We already know the end of the story. Jesus was born among us. God, in our midst. God just came to be with us. The birth of a holy child has no apparent causal relationship to the end of sin and suffering. Still in one week at the manger we will adore him, still we have confidence that the child, Emmanu-el, is God with us. Still, that light will shine.
Blessings,
Sara+
Friday, December 5, 2014
Advent Waiting for (Truly) All Lives to Matter
Dear People of Christ Church,
As I mentioned in my sermon on Sunday, this week I continue to feel very “Adventy”—longing, hoping for the restoration of all things in Christ. Our reading from Isaiah on Sunday begged for the intervention of God—“Oh, that you would tear down the heavens and come down!”—the prophet speaks for a people lamenting that even their most righteous deeds are not enough.
There are no easy answers. It’s easy to say “Don’t be racist,” but harder to change the fact that our society still struggles with the legacy of years of inequality and injustice, structures of poverty and prejudice that entrap generation after generation. Yesterday, again, another grand jury chose not to indict another police officer for killing an unarmed black man. Eric Garner’s death was ruled as a homicide, and still, no indictment. As Garner said he couldn’t breathe, did the man choking him realize he was taking a life with his own hands? That one of God’s own beloved children was dying? Did he realize his own belovedness at the time? Did he remember he was created for more than fear?
The reason these grand jury cases are so troubling is that the message is that there is no chance—no chance—to ask if something illegal happened. The job of a grand jury is not to decide whether someone is guilty or innocent; its job is to decide whether there’s a question. The protest phrase “Black Lives Matter” is not to contradict the sentiment that all lives matter; it’s to contradict the idea that Michael Brown’s and Eric Garner’s (and so many others’) lives don’t. And that’s the message being sent here. In his testimony Darren Wilson described Michael Brown as looking like “a demon.” Wilson was afraid and felt threatened, but this comment exposes the attitude that the black man in front of Wilson did not seem human. That’s not a reasoned, personal decision based on evidence; that’s a response absorbed by living in a world in which certain lives may not quite be worthy. It’s sin, personal as well as communal.
This goes far beyond the question of police training or practice. As I said on Sunday when we dedicated altar linens in Jim Hewitt’s memory, there are great people who are police officers. And it’s not a zero sum—for one doesn’t mean against another. This is about all of us. When we don’t talk about race and racism, that’s on all of us. When we pretend that everyone gets a fair chance in America, that’s on all of us. When we don’t see our brothers and sisters of all races, economic circumstances, and nationalities as worthy of protection—that’s on all of us. We grow up in a society torn by racism—that’s not our choice. But it is our choice to acknowledge racism and its impact on us—or not.
In my sermon on Sunday I talked about waiting for Jesus. Waiting for reconciliation, waiting for justice. This Advent waiting isn’t passive—it’s the kind of waiting, Mark Allen Powell says, that people in love do. Edge of your seat, heart in your mouth, waiting, longing for the one you love to come. That’s the waiting we’re called to in Advent—to wait for Christ as though we could see him coming already. And this waiting for the one we love is about loving those Jesus loves. The imprisoned, the imperfect, the riotous, the weeping. It’s love in action, love in protest, love in reality. It’s love that has the power of God to confront injustice, to know that all of us are created by one God who loves us, a God who will accompany us in difficult conversation and forgive us when we fail.
Blessings,
Sara+
++
Wondering what you can do to remember that all lives matter? Check out the Enough is Enough Rally planned at Boston Common tonight at 7pm for the Garner family; stop by the Immigrant Experience potluck that WATCH is hosting at 6:30 (at First Parish); give for gift cards for GLBT teens for our Christmas Outreach. Next week, think about joining our bishop and diocese at the vigil for an end to gun violence on the anniversary of the Newtown School Shooting. There is far to go, and much love to give.
For some fascinating research on the science of prejudice, see this essay on Bill Moyers; for an opportunity to explore your own biases, take the “Implicit Association” Test (there are quizzes both for gender and race).
As I mentioned in my sermon on Sunday, this week I continue to feel very “Adventy”—longing, hoping for the restoration of all things in Christ. Our reading from Isaiah on Sunday begged for the intervention of God—“Oh, that you would tear down the heavens and come down!”—the prophet speaks for a people lamenting that even their most righteous deeds are not enough.
There are no easy answers. It’s easy to say “Don’t be racist,” but harder to change the fact that our society still struggles with the legacy of years of inequality and injustice, structures of poverty and prejudice that entrap generation after generation. Yesterday, again, another grand jury chose not to indict another police officer for killing an unarmed black man. Eric Garner’s death was ruled as a homicide, and still, no indictment. As Garner said he couldn’t breathe, did the man choking him realize he was taking a life with his own hands? That one of God’s own beloved children was dying? Did he realize his own belovedness at the time? Did he remember he was created for more than fear?
The reason these grand jury cases are so troubling is that the message is that there is no chance—no chance—to ask if something illegal happened. The job of a grand jury is not to decide whether someone is guilty or innocent; its job is to decide whether there’s a question. The protest phrase “Black Lives Matter” is not to contradict the sentiment that all lives matter; it’s to contradict the idea that Michael Brown’s and Eric Garner’s (and so many others’) lives don’t. And that’s the message being sent here. In his testimony Darren Wilson described Michael Brown as looking like “a demon.” Wilson was afraid and felt threatened, but this comment exposes the attitude that the black man in front of Wilson did not seem human. That’s not a reasoned, personal decision based on evidence; that’s a response absorbed by living in a world in which certain lives may not quite be worthy. It’s sin, personal as well as communal.
This goes far beyond the question of police training or practice. As I said on Sunday when we dedicated altar linens in Jim Hewitt’s memory, there are great people who are police officers. And it’s not a zero sum—for one doesn’t mean against another. This is about all of us. When we don’t talk about race and racism, that’s on all of us. When we pretend that everyone gets a fair chance in America, that’s on all of us. When we don’t see our brothers and sisters of all races, economic circumstances, and nationalities as worthy of protection—that’s on all of us. We grow up in a society torn by racism—that’s not our choice. But it is our choice to acknowledge racism and its impact on us—or not.
In my sermon on Sunday I talked about waiting for Jesus. Waiting for reconciliation, waiting for justice. This Advent waiting isn’t passive—it’s the kind of waiting, Mark Allen Powell says, that people in love do. Edge of your seat, heart in your mouth, waiting, longing for the one you love to come. That’s the waiting we’re called to in Advent—to wait for Christ as though we could see him coming already. And this waiting for the one we love is about loving those Jesus loves. The imprisoned, the imperfect, the riotous, the weeping. It’s love in action, love in protest, love in reality. It’s love that has the power of God to confront injustice, to know that all of us are created by one God who loves us, a God who will accompany us in difficult conversation and forgive us when we fail.
Blessings,
Sara+
++
Wondering what you can do to remember that all lives matter? Check out the Enough is Enough Rally planned at Boston Common tonight at 7pm for the Garner family; stop by the Immigrant Experience potluck that WATCH is hosting at 6:30 (at First Parish); give for gift cards for GLBT teens for our Christmas Outreach. Next week, think about joining our bishop and diocese at the vigil for an end to gun violence on the anniversary of the Newtown School Shooting. There is far to go, and much love to give.
For some fascinating research on the science of prejudice, see this essay on Bill Moyers; for an opportunity to explore your own biases, take the “Implicit Association” Test (there are quizzes both for gender and race).
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Thanksgiving Joy and Sorrow
Dear People of Christ Church,
Whenever I send out the e-crier during Thanksgiving week, I always share the litany from the prayer book for thanksgiving—a very theological idea for a secular holiday. This year, though, in addition to my gratitude for my life and our life together in this parish, I’m also carrying a heaviness of heart for our country, for the family of Michael Brown, and for all of the conflict, sorrow, and oppression that we are all enmeshed in in twenty first century America. There are so many wise people analyzing and speaking on this, so I won’t add to the sound waves other than to invite you to prayer and to remind us of our faith in a God who “makes all things new,” who also needs our hands and voices to make justice in the world. Every life, of every person of every color, matters. For an excellent reflection, see this from Bishop of Washington Marianne Budde and Dean Gary Hall of the National Cathedral. Our readings for the first Sunday are about keeping awake; we need to be awake not just to where Jesus is coming, but where we need to bring him.
On a very different note, but yet another question of life and death, I also want to pass on resources for conversations about end of life care. Every year, our own Rob Atwood, a social worker for hospice care and I lead a conversation about planning for the end of life. What kind of medical interventions do you think you want? Who is authorized to make those decisions for you? What hymns shall we sing at your funeral? Answering as many of these questions in advance as possible is one of the greatest gifts you can give your loved ones. The guide Rob and I put together is here.
Some other resources:
MOLST Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment is a Massachusetts state document that presents clear and concise summaries of choices that are made at the end of life; this is filled out by a patient in cooperation with their doctor
A 2013 WBUR story on home death care has fabulous information. One of the people they interview likens it to the choice for a home birth as not right for everyone, but still a right that everyone has.
The Conversation Project was founded by journalist Ellen Goodman and has locals like Liz Walker and Donald Berwick among their advising team, has great conversation starters and a “starter kit” you can download to get yourself thinking about what you want for the end of your life.
Finally, the Litany for Thanksgiving…
Let us give thanks to God for all the gifts so freely bestowed upon us.
For the beauty and wonder of your creation, in earth and sky and sea,
We thank you, God.
For all that is gracious in the lives of your people, revealing the image of Christ,
We thank you, God.
For our daily food and drink, our homes and families, and our friends,
We thank you, God.
For minds to think, and hearts to love, and hands to serve,
We thank you, God.
For health and strength to work, and leisure to rest and play,
We thank you, God.
For the brave and courageous, who are patient in suffering and faithful in adversity,
We thank you, God.
For all valiant seekers after truth, liberty, and justice,
We thank you, God.
For the communion of saints, in all times and places,
We thank you, God.
Above all, we give you thanks for the great mercies and promises given to us in Christ Jesus our God;
To Christ be praise and glory, with you, O Father, and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever.
Blessings,
Sara+
Whenever I send out the e-crier during Thanksgiving week, I always share the litany from the prayer book for thanksgiving—a very theological idea for a secular holiday. This year, though, in addition to my gratitude for my life and our life together in this parish, I’m also carrying a heaviness of heart for our country, for the family of Michael Brown, and for all of the conflict, sorrow, and oppression that we are all enmeshed in in twenty first century America. There are so many wise people analyzing and speaking on this, so I won’t add to the sound waves other than to invite you to prayer and to remind us of our faith in a God who “makes all things new,” who also needs our hands and voices to make justice in the world. Every life, of every person of every color, matters. For an excellent reflection, see this from Bishop of Washington Marianne Budde and Dean Gary Hall of the National Cathedral. Our readings for the first Sunday are about keeping awake; we need to be awake not just to where Jesus is coming, but where we need to bring him.
On a very different note, but yet another question of life and death, I also want to pass on resources for conversations about end of life care. Every year, our own Rob Atwood, a social worker for hospice care and I lead a conversation about planning for the end of life. What kind of medical interventions do you think you want? Who is authorized to make those decisions for you? What hymns shall we sing at your funeral? Answering as many of these questions in advance as possible is one of the greatest gifts you can give your loved ones. The guide Rob and I put together is here.
Some other resources:
MOLST Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment is a Massachusetts state document that presents clear and concise summaries of choices that are made at the end of life; this is filled out by a patient in cooperation with their doctor
A 2013 WBUR story on home death care has fabulous information. One of the people they interview likens it to the choice for a home birth as not right for everyone, but still a right that everyone has.
The Conversation Project was founded by journalist Ellen Goodman and has locals like Liz Walker and Donald Berwick among their advising team, has great conversation starters and a “starter kit” you can download to get yourself thinking about what you want for the end of your life.
Finally, the Litany for Thanksgiving…
Let us give thanks to God for all the gifts so freely bestowed upon us.
For the beauty and wonder of your creation, in earth and sky and sea,
We thank you, God.
For all that is gracious in the lives of your people, revealing the image of Christ,
We thank you, God.
For our daily food and drink, our homes and families, and our friends,
We thank you, God.
For minds to think, and hearts to love, and hands to serve,
We thank you, God.
For health and strength to work, and leisure to rest and play,
We thank you, God.
For the brave and courageous, who are patient in suffering and faithful in adversity,
We thank you, God.
For all valiant seekers after truth, liberty, and justice,
We thank you, God.
For the communion of saints, in all times and places,
We thank you, God.
Above all, we give you thanks for the great mercies and promises given to us in Christ Jesus our God;
To Christ be praise and glory, with you, O Father, and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever.
Blessings,
Sara+
Friday, September 12, 2014
Forgiving Again
Dear People of Christ Church,
Peter came and said to Jesus, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.
77 times.
Peter, here, in the Gospel we’ll read this Sunday, thinks he is going after the gold star. He knows Jesus is a big fan of forgiveness—so, he thinks, I’ll just suggest some wild number of times to forgive, and he’ll be impressed with me. As usual, Jesus blows him out of the water—not 7, but 77.
How many times do I have to forgive. How many times do I have to feel the tightening in my throat, the stinging in my eyes, the sense of exposure. How many times, again and again. 13 years later, now, and probably 23, 10 years from now.
Today, the thirteenth anniversary of September 11, 2001, how many times do I have to tell the story. My first day of seminary. Living 2 ½ miles from the World Trade Center, the chapel bells ringing and ringing. How many times remember the blue of the sky, how many times grieve war without end, today as President Obama commits the US more deeply into strikes against militants in Syria and Iraq. How many times forgive. Not just terrorists, not just politicians starting wars, not just myself, for feeling like I’m not doing enough to work for peace. How many times. How many Saturdays will Sue and Jose and Norm and friends stand on Waltham Common keeping vigil for peace, as wars turn into other wars.
Yes. I am tired of remembering and tired of forgiving.
Forgetting, of course, is not an option. Last year in this space I complained about the “Never Forget” slogans about 9/11/01—nobody’s forgetting that it happened. Maybe, though, we are forgetting about the long work of mourning and forgiving, and the way that forgiveness means living differently. Maybe we’re forgetting about that initial drive not to be defined by the attacks themselves. My seminary classmates and I were all gallows humor in 2001—you HAVE to have another piece of pie, because otherwise “the terrorists win”—you have to go to the movies, buy some beer, finish your ten page paper— or “the terrorists win.” There were many examples. President Bush at the time said we should go shopping—unfortunately he wasn’t kidding.
“The terrorists” is not a moral category. Violence, however, is. The “powers of evil that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God” (as the Baptismal Covenant puts it) is a moral category, too. And violence does win when we respond to violence with violence. That’s the whole point of the cross—it becomes the way of life because Jesus lived, and died, in peace and love. Only the full, self-emptying love of God can overcome death. Difficult to translate into foreign policy, for sure, but what’s the alternative? More death? Today President Obama said Americans never give into fear. But it is not fearless to march into another war.
The call to peace is complicated. It’s messy. The way is not always clear. In our own lives and in the world, we have to tell the story again and again. We forgive again and again. We get angry again and again. But in the labyrinthine ways of the will of God, our spirits do come closer. We can live into the power of Christ that transforms the world through love. As Martin Luther King Jr said, “hate is too great a burden to bear.”
Blessings,
Sara+
Peter came and said to Jesus, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.
77 times.
Peter, here, in the Gospel we’ll read this Sunday, thinks he is going after the gold star. He knows Jesus is a big fan of forgiveness—so, he thinks, I’ll just suggest some wild number of times to forgive, and he’ll be impressed with me. As usual, Jesus blows him out of the water—not 7, but 77.
How many times do I have to forgive. How many times do I have to feel the tightening in my throat, the stinging in my eyes, the sense of exposure. How many times, again and again. 13 years later, now, and probably 23, 10 years from now.
Today, the thirteenth anniversary of September 11, 2001, how many times do I have to tell the story. My first day of seminary. Living 2 ½ miles from the World Trade Center, the chapel bells ringing and ringing. How many times remember the blue of the sky, how many times grieve war without end, today as President Obama commits the US more deeply into strikes against militants in Syria and Iraq. How many times forgive. Not just terrorists, not just politicians starting wars, not just myself, for feeling like I’m not doing enough to work for peace. How many times. How many Saturdays will Sue and Jose and Norm and friends stand on Waltham Common keeping vigil for peace, as wars turn into other wars.
Yes. I am tired of remembering and tired of forgiving.
Forgetting, of course, is not an option. Last year in this space I complained about the “Never Forget” slogans about 9/11/01—nobody’s forgetting that it happened. Maybe, though, we are forgetting about the long work of mourning and forgiving, and the way that forgiveness means living differently. Maybe we’re forgetting about that initial drive not to be defined by the attacks themselves. My seminary classmates and I were all gallows humor in 2001—you HAVE to have another piece of pie, because otherwise “the terrorists win”—you have to go to the movies, buy some beer, finish your ten page paper— or “the terrorists win.” There were many examples. President Bush at the time said we should go shopping—unfortunately he wasn’t kidding.
“The terrorists” is not a moral category. Violence, however, is. The “powers of evil that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God” (as the Baptismal Covenant puts it) is a moral category, too. And violence does win when we respond to violence with violence. That’s the whole point of the cross—it becomes the way of life because Jesus lived, and died, in peace and love. Only the full, self-emptying love of God can overcome death. Difficult to translate into foreign policy, for sure, but what’s the alternative? More death? Today President Obama said Americans never give into fear. But it is not fearless to march into another war.
The call to peace is complicated. It’s messy. The way is not always clear. In our own lives and in the world, we have to tell the story again and again. We forgive again and again. We get angry again and again. But in the labyrinthine ways of the will of God, our spirits do come closer. We can live into the power of Christ that transforms the world through love. As Martin Luther King Jr said, “hate is too great a burden to bear.”
Blessings,
Sara+
Thursday, August 21, 2014
Racism, healing, and providence in the real world
Dear People of Christ Church,
On Sunday in my sermon, I was wrestling with the idea of God’s providence—God has a redemptive plan and will give us what we need—and the idea of our freedom, a crucial aspect of the gift of human life. The idea of God’s will sometimes can seem like it conflicts with our will. This came up in the context of the story of Joseph, forgiving his brothers for selling him into slavery, as he ascends to the heights of power and ultimately saves their lives when famine strikes. How does God allow terrible things to happen to people? If God was planning for him to be powerful and wealthy, couldn’t God have just as easily have prevented him from getting thrown into that pit in the first place? Does the positive outcome outweigh the suffering?
So, too, with our Gospel on Sunday—Jesus behaves terribly toward a Canaanite woman looking for healing for her daughter—he calls her a dog. In response, she bests him—even the dogs get the crumbs, she snaps. BAM. Even Jesus needs to be converted sometimes. Was he testing her? Treating her cruelly to see how she’d behave? I don’t think so. Jesus’ encounter with her shows us that even the Son of God can be transformed, that transformation is essential, like freedom, to what it is to be human.
Jesus was transformed—he was pushed out of his previously narrow assumption of what he was called to do. Joseph was transformed—he forgave his brothers for their violence, and saw God’s hand in the world around him. God was working there, but I reject entirely the notion that God intended the events that lead up to them. Our world is a place where God dances—but it’s not always God’s choreography from the beginning.
I can point to all kinds of places I need to be transformed, and this week, I’m particularly aware of where our country needs that grace, too. A study was released on Tuesday that said that 37% of white Americans believe that the shooting and protest in Ferguson, MO raises important conversations abut race. 80% of African Americans think so. So, just for the record, let me say: The events of the last ten days raise important issues about race. Our country is an amazing experiment of seeking equality, democracy, and fairness (see my July post about patriotic humility). There is a lot that we get right. But the evidence at how we think about difference, and how people of different races are treated in the courts and in law enforcement, makes it clear to me that we’re not all there.
God’s providence means that there will be reconciliation, there will be salvation. But, like Jesus and the Cannanite woman, like Joseph and his brothers, we have to take some risks around vulnerability and truth-telling. What could we do at Christ Church to more faithfully embody God’s healing for this world? Where does God’s providence lead us in fighting racism and confronting prejudice?
I’ll close with a prayer I found from the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska, and their anti-racism work:
God, Creator of all things, we come broken with a heart that has been torn like Jesus on the cross, the cross that draws together your children of many colors.
You know our suffering.
We ask in Jesus' name that you heal your people.
Where there has been unearned advantage because of the color of our skin,
give us courage to repent and to fight the injustice and sin of racism.
Holy God, who created all colors of people, allow us to honor your light in every soul.
Help us to see you in one another, to hear your voice in all people, and to work to end racism in our church, our communities, and the world. Amen.
Blessings, Sara+
On Sunday in my sermon, I was wrestling with the idea of God’s providence—God has a redemptive plan and will give us what we need—and the idea of our freedom, a crucial aspect of the gift of human life. The idea of God’s will sometimes can seem like it conflicts with our will. This came up in the context of the story of Joseph, forgiving his brothers for selling him into slavery, as he ascends to the heights of power and ultimately saves their lives when famine strikes. How does God allow terrible things to happen to people? If God was planning for him to be powerful and wealthy, couldn’t God have just as easily have prevented him from getting thrown into that pit in the first place? Does the positive outcome outweigh the suffering?
So, too, with our Gospel on Sunday—Jesus behaves terribly toward a Canaanite woman looking for healing for her daughter—he calls her a dog. In response, she bests him—even the dogs get the crumbs, she snaps. BAM. Even Jesus needs to be converted sometimes. Was he testing her? Treating her cruelly to see how she’d behave? I don’t think so. Jesus’ encounter with her shows us that even the Son of God can be transformed, that transformation is essential, like freedom, to what it is to be human.
Jesus was transformed—he was pushed out of his previously narrow assumption of what he was called to do. Joseph was transformed—he forgave his brothers for their violence, and saw God’s hand in the world around him. God was working there, but I reject entirely the notion that God intended the events that lead up to them. Our world is a place where God dances—but it’s not always God’s choreography from the beginning.
I can point to all kinds of places I need to be transformed, and this week, I’m particularly aware of where our country needs that grace, too. A study was released on Tuesday that said that 37% of white Americans believe that the shooting and protest in Ferguson, MO raises important conversations abut race. 80% of African Americans think so. So, just for the record, let me say: The events of the last ten days raise important issues about race. Our country is an amazing experiment of seeking equality, democracy, and fairness (see my July post about patriotic humility). There is a lot that we get right. But the evidence at how we think about difference, and how people of different races are treated in the courts and in law enforcement, makes it clear to me that we’re not all there.
God’s providence means that there will be reconciliation, there will be salvation. But, like Jesus and the Cannanite woman, like Joseph and his brothers, we have to take some risks around vulnerability and truth-telling. What could we do at Christ Church to more faithfully embody God’s healing for this world? Where does God’s providence lead us in fighting racism and confronting prejudice?
I’ll close with a prayer I found from the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska, and their anti-racism work:
God, Creator of all things, we come broken with a heart that has been torn like Jesus on the cross, the cross that draws together your children of many colors.
You know our suffering.
We ask in Jesus' name that you heal your people.
Where there has been unearned advantage because of the color of our skin,
give us courage to repent and to fight the injustice and sin of racism.
Holy God, who created all colors of people, allow us to honor your light in every soul.
Help us to see you in one another, to hear your voice in all people, and to work to end racism in our church, our communities, and the world. Amen.
Blessings, Sara+
Friday, September 27, 2013
Thanksgiving and Abundance
Dear People of Christ Church,
I think I'm still feeling unsettled by Sunday's Gospel--the story of the corrupt manager who, upon finding out he's going to get fired, cuts the debtors' bills so they'll be nice to him when he's out on the street himself. On Sunday, the corruption of the whole system seemed the most important thing; rigged from top to bottom to benefit those who had over those who had not. A lot in our own economic system works that way, too; I likened the situation the debtors found themselves in to one of those "cash 'til payday" lending places that charge exorbitant rates of interest, when suddenly a $150 car repair loan ends up costing twice that when the person just can't quite get on top of it.
There is something about the way we humans seem to "do" society where everything gets messed up; exploitation and greed seem part of our social DNA. Add racism, sexism, homophobia, and all those other structural oppressions to the mix, and it's quite a toxic stew we find ourselves operating in. Jesus always confronted those powers-as we say in the baptismal covenant, "The powers of evil which corrupt and destroy the creatures of this world"--and we're called to do the same.
So Jesus cast his lot in with those on the bottom of the pile. But what do we do when we find ourselves somewhere closer to the middle? We met for our first Tuesday night book group on Mark and Lisa Scandrette's Free: Spending Your Time and Money on What Matters Most, and our conversation thus far is so illuminating. It's one thing to sit back and critique a corrupt system, and in some ways a fairly easy thing to work in the world to change that system. I mentioned in my sermon the Raise Up Massachusetts ballot initiative campaign to increase the minimum wage from $8.00 to $10.50 and secure sick pay for all workers by 2015. That's one thing we can do. But what about our day to day lives? In between soccer and swimming and work commitments and bosses? What are we called to sacrifice? And what kind of sacrifice are we talking about here?
One of the things that I'm loving about the book so far is how honest the authors are. Including sidebars by their daughter, they admit that it's been hard to live as simply as they have (on one non profit income with three kids in the city of San Francisco). The center of their simplicity, though, isn't some kind of harsh moralism that stands outside the world and shakes its finger. The center of their simplicity is faith in God and God's abundance. Holding the things they have lightly makes it possible to receive what God gives (for a taste of Mark's writing, see Helping Kids Develop a Sense of Abundance and Generosity). In the book, Hailey Scandrette talks about how she gets better clothes from thrift stores, and Lisa talks about how she has a weakness for craft supplies. Mark has a thing for designer shoes; there's nothing inherently wrong with these desires--but they have to be held in perspective. Our desire for "more" always has to be grounded in our gratitude for what we have already. In that light, the things we lack are suddenly a lot less important.
The "powers and principalities" of this world are rigged against human flourishing. Whether the Roman empire, or a medieval lord, or a CEO who makes 800 times their employees (Walmart's CEO's $17.6 million total compensation to the average worker's $22,100)(cited from cnn.com).
"The system" has never equally served everyone. But there have always been cracks, places where the light gets through. Jesus teaches us to work on multiple levels; the social as well as the personal. With every diaper we give out, with every phone call to Congress on behalf of kids on food stamps, a little more light squeaks out into the darkness. The power of God's love won't be contained, and there is nothing that can separate us from it.
Blessings,
Sara+
I think I'm still feeling unsettled by Sunday's Gospel--the story of the corrupt manager who, upon finding out he's going to get fired, cuts the debtors' bills so they'll be nice to him when he's out on the street himself. On Sunday, the corruption of the whole system seemed the most important thing; rigged from top to bottom to benefit those who had over those who had not. A lot in our own economic system works that way, too; I likened the situation the debtors found themselves in to one of those "cash 'til payday" lending places that charge exorbitant rates of interest, when suddenly a $150 car repair loan ends up costing twice that when the person just can't quite get on top of it.
There is something about the way we humans seem to "do" society where everything gets messed up; exploitation and greed seem part of our social DNA. Add racism, sexism, homophobia, and all those other structural oppressions to the mix, and it's quite a toxic stew we find ourselves operating in. Jesus always confronted those powers-as we say in the baptismal covenant, "The powers of evil which corrupt and destroy the creatures of this world"--and we're called to do the same.
So Jesus cast his lot in with those on the bottom of the pile. But what do we do when we find ourselves somewhere closer to the middle? We met for our first Tuesday night book group on Mark and Lisa Scandrette's Free: Spending Your Time and Money on What Matters Most, and our conversation thus far is so illuminating. It's one thing to sit back and critique a corrupt system, and in some ways a fairly easy thing to work in the world to change that system. I mentioned in my sermon the Raise Up Massachusetts ballot initiative campaign to increase the minimum wage from $8.00 to $10.50 and secure sick pay for all workers by 2015. That's one thing we can do. But what about our day to day lives? In between soccer and swimming and work commitments and bosses? What are we called to sacrifice? And what kind of sacrifice are we talking about here?
One of the things that I'm loving about the book so far is how honest the authors are. Including sidebars by their daughter, they admit that it's been hard to live as simply as they have (on one non profit income with three kids in the city of San Francisco). The center of their simplicity, though, isn't some kind of harsh moralism that stands outside the world and shakes its finger. The center of their simplicity is faith in God and God's abundance. Holding the things they have lightly makes it possible to receive what God gives (for a taste of Mark's writing, see Helping Kids Develop a Sense of Abundance and Generosity). In the book, Hailey Scandrette talks about how she gets better clothes from thrift stores, and Lisa talks about how she has a weakness for craft supplies. Mark has a thing for designer shoes; there's nothing inherently wrong with these desires--but they have to be held in perspective. Our desire for "more" always has to be grounded in our gratitude for what we have already. In that light, the things we lack are suddenly a lot less important.
The "powers and principalities" of this world are rigged against human flourishing. Whether the Roman empire, or a medieval lord, or a CEO who makes 800 times their employees (Walmart's CEO's $17.6 million total compensation to the average worker's $22,100)(cited from cnn.com).
"The system" has never equally served everyone. But there have always been cracks, places where the light gets through. Jesus teaches us to work on multiple levels; the social as well as the personal. With every diaper we give out, with every phone call to Congress on behalf of kids on food stamps, a little more light squeaks out into the darkness. The power of God's love won't be contained, and there is nothing that can separate us from it.
Blessings,
Sara+
Friday, September 13, 2013
September 11: Remembering, Again
Dear People of Christ Church,
As I write, it's September 11, and I'm thinking about how impossible it is not to mark anniversaries like this, year by year. You see bumper stickers and facebook status updates that say "never forget," and I'm not quite sure what that means. I don't think anybody's in danger of forgetting. Someone commented about how September 11 is a dose of perspective: to always value the ones you love, to be aware of the precariousness of life. I also hope that it can generate perspective in a different way: to also be aware of how the security we normally feel in this country is an abstract fantasy for so many all over the world. We are called to compassion and solidarity as well as gratitude.
Sitting down at my computer, I don't know what else I could possibly think about other than that morning in New York City twelve years ago, the blue blue of the sky, a fall chill under the late summer sun, the sense of expectation and promise of beginning seminary. I am also aware of how many times I've written this exact account of those days; how my now-husband Noah and I had moved to New York a few weeks earlier for school, not married yet and still figuring out who we were individually as well as together. Each year on this day, I remember kneeling in the seminary chapel hoping, praying, for violence to stop, and each year I remember that day and add up another year of violence. Afghanistan, then Iraq, Libya, Syria. Our violence against ourselves: Islamophobia, the erosion of our civil liberties, the billions that could have relieved poverty and instead funded war. Our polarized political landscape. Guantanamo. I go back to where I was September 11, 2002, passing through a border checkpoint in the Holy Land on the first anniversary of that day: again, violence.
In the Gospel last Sunday we heard Jesus lashing out at the crowds who were following him-he's fed up with their desire just to see the next big thing, watching him do a healing here, an exorcism there. The crowds seem uninterested in real transformation: they want entertainment. Are you in this for real? Do you have what it takes to follow me? Do you? "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple." You can't, Jesus, says, just come along for the ride. You have to be in it, all the way, asking hard questions and making hard choices.
By that standard, nobody can follow. And I do think Jesus was being a little sarcastic-I have a calling from God as a parent and a spouse, and I'm sure I'm not called by Jesus to abandon those I've made a life with. And I do have to commit. Still, the truth is that real discipleship of Jesus is impossible on our own. Our somewhat clunky prayer for this Sunday begins, "O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts." The subject/object/agency in that sentence is pretty convoluted: the Holy Spirit moves in us, prays in us- but as we are made in the image of God, there would be no "us" at all without our Creator.
Forgiveness is certainly impossible on our own. If it's the life of God within us that makes it possible for us to follow God, it is certainly the life of God in us that enables us to forgive. It is the providence of God, too, to forgive where we just aren't ready at the same time as it's the providence of God to enliven our anger at injustice and oppression.
So there's the muddle for today-grief and pain, hope and righteous anger-all one holy stew of God's presence with us and God's being intertwined with ours.
Blessings,
Sara+
As I write, it's September 11, and I'm thinking about how impossible it is not to mark anniversaries like this, year by year. You see bumper stickers and facebook status updates that say "never forget," and I'm not quite sure what that means. I don't think anybody's in danger of forgetting. Someone commented about how September 11 is a dose of perspective: to always value the ones you love, to be aware of the precariousness of life. I also hope that it can generate perspective in a different way: to also be aware of how the security we normally feel in this country is an abstract fantasy for so many all over the world. We are called to compassion and solidarity as well as gratitude.
Sitting down at my computer, I don't know what else I could possibly think about other than that morning in New York City twelve years ago, the blue blue of the sky, a fall chill under the late summer sun, the sense of expectation and promise of beginning seminary. I am also aware of how many times I've written this exact account of those days; how my now-husband Noah and I had moved to New York a few weeks earlier for school, not married yet and still figuring out who we were individually as well as together. Each year on this day, I remember kneeling in the seminary chapel hoping, praying, for violence to stop, and each year I remember that day and add up another year of violence. Afghanistan, then Iraq, Libya, Syria. Our violence against ourselves: Islamophobia, the erosion of our civil liberties, the billions that could have relieved poverty and instead funded war. Our polarized political landscape. Guantanamo. I go back to where I was September 11, 2002, passing through a border checkpoint in the Holy Land on the first anniversary of that day: again, violence.
In the Gospel last Sunday we heard Jesus lashing out at the crowds who were following him-he's fed up with their desire just to see the next big thing, watching him do a healing here, an exorcism there. The crowds seem uninterested in real transformation: they want entertainment. Are you in this for real? Do you have what it takes to follow me? Do you? "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple." You can't, Jesus, says, just come along for the ride. You have to be in it, all the way, asking hard questions and making hard choices.
By that standard, nobody can follow. And I do think Jesus was being a little sarcastic-I have a calling from God as a parent and a spouse, and I'm sure I'm not called by Jesus to abandon those I've made a life with. And I do have to commit. Still, the truth is that real discipleship of Jesus is impossible on our own. Our somewhat clunky prayer for this Sunday begins, "O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts." The subject/object/agency in that sentence is pretty convoluted: the Holy Spirit moves in us, prays in us- but as we are made in the image of God, there would be no "us" at all without our Creator.
Forgiveness is certainly impossible on our own. If it's the life of God within us that makes it possible for us to follow God, it is certainly the life of God in us that enables us to forgive. It is the providence of God, too, to forgive where we just aren't ready at the same time as it's the providence of God to enliven our anger at injustice and oppression.
So there's the muddle for today-grief and pain, hope and righteous anger-all one holy stew of God's presence with us and God's being intertwined with ours.
Blessings,
Sara+
Friday, August 30, 2013
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+
Thursday, February 28, 2013
From Feb 28: Economic Justice
Dear People of Christ Church,
As I do every so often, this morning I was with the Sisters of Saint Anne in Arlington, saying Mass for the convent. Our Gospel was the story of Lazarus and the rich man-Lazarus who suffered at the gate of the rich man's house, poor and begging, and the rich man, who after death found himself in burning flames while Lazarus and Abraham snuggled together in heaven. As I wrote last week, I'm pretty agnostic about an individual "Big Bad" (i.e., Satan/the devil) but I do believe that there must be some sense of wholeness and restoration for us in the passage from life to death, and that must certainly include a sense of sharing in the suffering that we've inflicted.
Let me explain a little more.
I don't think that everything is unicorns and fluffy clouds after we die. Even for the purest in heart, our puny minds can't even imagine how grace-filled and beautiful it is to be united with God. I think we are fully known-that we will see "face to face" (1 Corinthians 13.12) and know as we have been fully known. As we are known, now-then we will know. And part of that knowing surely must be how we are linked to others, how the suffering of one person hurts us all. In our life together now, we hide those connections; we don't see the suffering of the animals we eat, or the panic of polar bears losing the ice they depend on. We don't visit the factories that make our stuff, don't feel the depth of the unending fear of those who live in war zones and suffer genocide. We allow them to stay far away-frankly, we prefer it that way.
How would our world change if we enacted Christ's call to love our enemies? We barely even try to imagine because we're too afraid they'd shoot first.
But in that "face to face" encounter? All of that has to fall away. The cost of our lives comes into focus. Suffering will no longer be invisible. And yes, I think it's going to hurt. Not because God wants to punish us-and likely not with literal flames (IT'S A METAPHOR!)-but because seeing the real nature of reality that we can only dimly imagine now will show us how we are linked. And if a Pakistani woman whose husband has been killed by a drone strike really is my sister, those unicorns and fluffy clouds are going to feel pretty far away.
Still, the heart of the Gospel is forgiveness; still Jesus forgave even from the cross. I also don't believe that what we do is forever. Only God can "do" forever. All we can do is pray with our hearts and our hands, asking God for the grace to be bold enough to witness suffering and strong enough to do something about it. We're called to inhabit the space between, of grieving and seeking to right the injustices of the world but also thanking God for full bellies and access to health care.
But getting back to the rich man-the specific question of economic justice is still an important one, and I don't want to get too far away from it. In our Tuesday Lenten conversation on Scripture quite a bit of energy was generated by Jesus' words about how it's harder for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle. As Jose said, God doesn't want us to be poor-but as Sasha said, God's not quite letting us off the hook, either. What do we make of our own comparative wealth, or the American economy that so lavishly rewards a very few at the expense of everyone else? Compared to a Somali orphan, I'm doing pretty well. Compared to the CEO of Google, it's a wonder I can survive in this world at all driving my little Toyota by myself instead of having a personal limo driver.
Our bishops have invited the diocese to read together a book by the theologian and activist Cornel West and the journalist Tavis Smiley called The Rich and the Rest of Us-I've created a short online survey to discern how it might fit into our spring and summer plans for adult education at Christ Church. Please take a few minutes to fill it out here. I promise it's short!
As part of that same endeavor, they've also invited the diocese into the "B Peace" endeavor, a partner to B Safe in response to the murder of Jorge Fuentes, a B Safe graduate, last year. They're inviting congregations to be part of organizing in partnership with schools and against gun violence-also let me know if you want to hear more about their plans.
A lot is wrong, but a lot is possible, too. And we know we're not working alone.
Blessings,
Sara+
PS: Follow Jesus, but also look at what I post on twitter: your rector has joined the 21st century @revsarai
As I do every so often, this morning I was with the Sisters of Saint Anne in Arlington, saying Mass for the convent. Our Gospel was the story of Lazarus and the rich man-Lazarus who suffered at the gate of the rich man's house, poor and begging, and the rich man, who after death found himself in burning flames while Lazarus and Abraham snuggled together in heaven. As I wrote last week, I'm pretty agnostic about an individual "Big Bad" (i.e., Satan/the devil) but I do believe that there must be some sense of wholeness and restoration for us in the passage from life to death, and that must certainly include a sense of sharing in the suffering that we've inflicted.
Let me explain a little more.
I don't think that everything is unicorns and fluffy clouds after we die. Even for the purest in heart, our puny minds can't even imagine how grace-filled and beautiful it is to be united with God. I think we are fully known-that we will see "face to face" (1 Corinthians 13.12) and know as we have been fully known. As we are known, now-then we will know. And part of that knowing surely must be how we are linked to others, how the suffering of one person hurts us all. In our life together now, we hide those connections; we don't see the suffering of the animals we eat, or the panic of polar bears losing the ice they depend on. We don't visit the factories that make our stuff, don't feel the depth of the unending fear of those who live in war zones and suffer genocide. We allow them to stay far away-frankly, we prefer it that way.
How would our world change if we enacted Christ's call to love our enemies? We barely even try to imagine because we're too afraid they'd shoot first.
But in that "face to face" encounter? All of that has to fall away. The cost of our lives comes into focus. Suffering will no longer be invisible. And yes, I think it's going to hurt. Not because God wants to punish us-and likely not with literal flames (IT'S A METAPHOR!)-but because seeing the real nature of reality that we can only dimly imagine now will show us how we are linked. And if a Pakistani woman whose husband has been killed by a drone strike really is my sister, those unicorns and fluffy clouds are going to feel pretty far away.
Still, the heart of the Gospel is forgiveness; still Jesus forgave even from the cross. I also don't believe that what we do is forever. Only God can "do" forever. All we can do is pray with our hearts and our hands, asking God for the grace to be bold enough to witness suffering and strong enough to do something about it. We're called to inhabit the space between, of grieving and seeking to right the injustices of the world but also thanking God for full bellies and access to health care.
But getting back to the rich man-the specific question of economic justice is still an important one, and I don't want to get too far away from it. In our Tuesday Lenten conversation on Scripture quite a bit of energy was generated by Jesus' words about how it's harder for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle. As Jose said, God doesn't want us to be poor-but as Sasha said, God's not quite letting us off the hook, either. What do we make of our own comparative wealth, or the American economy that so lavishly rewards a very few at the expense of everyone else? Compared to a Somali orphan, I'm doing pretty well. Compared to the CEO of Google, it's a wonder I can survive in this world at all driving my little Toyota by myself instead of having a personal limo driver.
Our bishops have invited the diocese to read together a book by the theologian and activist Cornel West and the journalist Tavis Smiley called The Rich and the Rest of Us-I've created a short online survey to discern how it might fit into our spring and summer plans for adult education at Christ Church. Please take a few minutes to fill it out here. I promise it's short!
As part of that same endeavor, they've also invited the diocese into the "B Peace" endeavor, a partner to B Safe in response to the murder of Jorge Fuentes, a B Safe graduate, last year. They're inviting congregations to be part of organizing in partnership with schools and against gun violence-also let me know if you want to hear more about their plans.
A lot is wrong, but a lot is possible, too. And we know we're not working alone.
Blessings,
Sara+
PS: Follow Jesus, but also look at what I post on twitter: your rector has joined the 21st century @revsarai
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