A sermon for Pescadero Community Church
 
I want to tell you the story about a trip I took this last week and the love that carried me through.

Monday this last week was the anniversary of my grandma's death. In the course of her life, I learned from her to use my white privilege for good, to love people no matter who they love (and to stand with people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer), to drink coffee black, and to choose to see travel issues as an opportunity for adventure.

On Sunday, I was supposed to fly very early to Louisville, through Chicago, for a meeting. Late, late Saturday night I learned those flights were canceled. I was able to rebook and flew into Chicago on Sunday mid-afternoon, in time to learn that my second flight was canceled and that I was rebooked on a flight that would get me to Louisville more than halfway through the meeting where I was supposed to be.

So, I rented a car, with the thought that I'd drive from Chicago to Louisville on Sunday night, arriving by 1am. However, I'd texted my mentor, who lives on the way to Louisville. I drove there first, hoping to get tea, dinner, and a charge on my phone.

The snow was coming down, so I stayed the night....and my heart was full with the unexpected gift of time with my mentor and his wife. Monday I left very early and drove to Louisville, cup of black coffee in hand.

When I arrived at the meeting, two sessions of the meeting had already happened. It was a gathering of PhD students and post-docs, all of us recipients of fellowships from the same organization. Our meeting was to help us learn more about inter-religious conversations and to connect with each other across our different fields.

In the first session I missed, the Jewish scholar who had been invited to speak to the group had dismissed all of liberation theology, saying that it denied her identity as a Jewish woman and the right of the State of Israel to exist in the middle east. Several of my colleagues had studied in the middle east, and several more are students in and experts of liberation theology. One in particular studied with James Cone, the father of black liberation theology. My black colleagues felt that our Jewish colleague had denigrated black theology, missed the struggle of Palestinians for liberation, and refused to be in respectful dialogue.

I arrived after the second meeting of the group—when my small group of colleagues had tried to make sense of what their responsibility was. How could they name the hurt they felt? How could they honor both the experience of our Jewish colleague but also hold her accountable for how her dismissal of a whole field had racist, sexist, and colonial implications?

When I arrived, my colleagues immediately told me their perspective of what I’d missed in this huge conversation.

Later on in our meeting, we had a panel of people from different faiths sharing about their experiences. The Jewish scholar was asked to speak more about which liberation theologians she did not agree with. She dismissed the question, and I could feel the tension in the room rise. One of my colleagues asked all of the panelists to talk about ordination of women, and when the catholic panelist started to speak, I realized that my own heart wouldn’t be able to take this conversation. I left the room, furious that these hard conversations were making the space unsafe, furious that we were missing each other and harming each other. When I returned, our Jewish colleague was sharing about how much of her family was lost to the Holocaust. My black colleagues shared that many of their ancestors were lost to slavery and lynchings.

There was anger and loss and hurt in the room.

Later, my black colleagues held the executive director accountable for what happened. They called on the executive director to see them and to see the hurt that had been inflicted. He listened to them. He saw them. He apologized.

Late on Monday, it became clear that my flight back was going to be affected by winter weather in Chicago. So I rerouted my flight to go through Denver. Early Tuesday morning, I got on a plane. This plane ended up needing a jump. We waited on the tarmac for an hour and a half, with me sitting next to someone who said he didn't believe in climate change (I’m only telling you this detail to illustrate that this flight was not very fun for me!) We flew, finally, to Denver, landing 10 minutes after my connecting flight had left. We pulled up to the gate. The jet bridge didn't work. We moved to another gate, and when I got off, I waited 4 hours for my next flight.

Why am I telling you this story of adventure and scholastic heartache?

Throughout the journey, I thought of my fierce Gramma several times. Gramma taught me to be resilient. And she also taught me that we become what we are called.

One morning, not long before she died, I arrived at her hospital room and she told me she had been up all night. She couldn’t sleep because she wanted somehow to convey to me that we need to be careful how we refer to other people. People matter and they are loved, just as they are in all their diversity.

She wanted me somehow to understand that we must be troubled when other people are hurting, we must be troubled into speaking up or acting when the belovedness of another human is at stake.

This conviction does not belong just to my grandmother.

It’s biblical.

In the gospel reading today, we are reminded that love holds all the scriptures together and that love holds everything together in times of trouble.

Jesus is asked by the religious teachers in his time to tell him what the greatest commandment is. It’s supposed to be a test, a way to determine if Jesus knows the scriptures.

His response is two-fold.

First he recites the shema, the prayer that all pious Jews are to recite every day. He starts with the law. “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.

Then he continues, saying that if we know the law, we know that we are to love each other: “And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

He ends this teaching with: “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” And here he means to say that love is the test of all other teachings—we love God and we love each other.

The teachers of his day are asking Jesus this question because they want to know who he is. In the larger story of Jesus’ ministry, they ask this question in the midst of one of Jesus’ journeys, one of his last. Just days earlier in the story, Jesus has entered Jerusalem. His travel into the city was by an unexpected route—not as a great teacher coming into the city with riches, but on a donkey.

Jesus is not safe in this part of his life… how he answers this question posed by the teachers of his day matters. These are teachers who have opposed Jesus’ ministry and have sought to end his work. He easily could have heard their questions and walked away.

Instead, he listens to them. He sees them. He speaks the truth.

His response is very Jewish and very faithful. Probably not what the teachers trying to test him wanted to hear.
He calls on them to love one another, just as they love God: with all heart, soul, and mind.

He continues to teach, and he continues his ministry of loving everyone with whom he comes into contact. He loves people as he heals them, feeds them, teaches them, corrects them. He loves people as they face trouble. He loves people in all their diversity.

Later in the week, his journey ends. The week that begins with a trip into Jerusalem ends with Jesus’ crucifixion and death. He loves through the deep pain of his death—letting the law of love guide his last breaths.

This week, the United Methodist Church is meeting to talk about whether people who are lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, and/or queer who are called by God to be ordained will be allowed to be ordained. It is a time of deep pain for the denomination. Whatever they decide will have lasting implications for individuals, churches, the whole denomination. More conservative Methodists (and Christians, for that matter) argue that the Scriptures say that homosexuality is wrong, that the scriptures and religious laws forbid it. More liberal Methodists say that love is love—that people who are not straight are beloved by God.

There’s a cartoon that has been passed around this week among my friends who are United Methodist and my friends who are queer. 
​
It reminds me, of course, of what Jesus said to the teachers of his time. Love is central. Everything else must go through the lens of love.

            So: we must stand with people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, tran* and queer. Love is love is love.

The first wedding I ever went to was when my Uncle Paul married my Uncle Steve, in the early 90s… still during the AIDs scares. Nothing about the wedding seemed unusual to me—well, actually everything about it felt unusual because it was my very first wedding! But the love I saw at that wedding is the love that is the lens I see every other wedding through.

Years later, my sister found a picture of my grandmother at this wedding.

She’s dancing with my uncle, celebrating him and the love that sustained him as he got sick with HIV and AIDS.

Love carries us through.

In just a moment, we’re going to pray for several parts of the world that need love in times of trouble.

The Scriptures tell us to love God with all that we are. That we should love our neighbors—love each other—as we love ourselves and as we love God.         

My grandmother showed me how to live out that love. I’m still learning. My grandmother also taught me to be stubborn, to keep journeying when that path gets hard or the flight gets canceled or when our hearts get furious from injustice.

​What is at stake is the belovedness of other people. So: let us love one another and let us love God with our whole selves.

​Last summer, I went to North Carolina to work with a group of students as they discern their next thing.

On the last morning, one of the other leaders took a small group of us to the labyrinth on site.

Labyrinths have been around for millenia.

“The earliest examples, precise symbols found carved on rocks and painted or scratched on pottery, date to the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods…. Popular throughout the Roman Empire as a protective and decorative symbol on the mosaic floors of civic buildings and villas, they were also constructed outdoors at this time as a playground for children and as a test of skill for soldiers on horseback.

During the medieval period the labyrinth symbol developed into a more intricate form, reflecting the complexities of faith, life and philosophy in the medieval mind. Occurring first in manuscripts, it was subsequently laid in coloured marble and tiles on the floors of cathedrals and churches, most famously at Chartres Cathedral, where the labyrinth constructed in the early 13th century survives to this day, and indeed, has become an object of pilgrimage for modern visitors.”[1]

There is only one way in and only way out—and you can’t get lost. Walking the labyrinth is supposed to bring you peace and clarity.

Still, I wasn’t sure I wanted to walk the labyrinth that morning.

I didn’t know why God had called me to walk the serpentine path that morning.

There was, as always, so much on my to-do list: people to see, emails to send, projects to finish before the retreat was over.
 
Still, breathing in, I entered the labyrinth.
 
Here is what I thought: I’m aware of all the things I’m releasing into the world as the rain gently falls on my head and shoulders: Control. Power. Sadness.
 
With each step on the path into the center of the labyrinth, I tried to breath, tried to slow down, tried to quiet my mind. My thoughts kept trying to break in, and my soul kept trying to release everything.
          
Step by step… in I went.

At the center of the labyrinth, I paused with the group of students I’m walking and praying with. We silently looked at the ground, our minds focused on receiving. Our breath mingled, the rain continued to mist around us, as the sky turned grey and wet.
 
As I stared at my feet, I remembered what it was like to do a different kind of pilgrimage from the Sun Gate to Machu Picchu in Peru:
 
At the top of the mountain, my traveling companions and I rested and enjoyed the sun. We’d climbed the Inca Trail as quickly as we could to get to the top and it was good to take a moment to look out across the valley. On the way up, I’d wanted to prove to myself that I was fit enough to climb, and subconsciously I wanted to be the first one to the top to prove that I was more fit than anyone else in our group. What a ridiculous reason to speed up a beautiful mountain. The absurdity hit me as I looked at the sun kissing the valley. I needed to slow down.
 
I took off my shoes and socks.
 
We headed down the mountain. My toes helped me find the way to smoother rocks, gingerly avoiding the rough edges. I was slower, choosing carefully where to step, stopping to look at the valley and the trees and the plants. The ground was cool and damp underneath my feet and step by step, we made it to the bottom.
 
And so, at the center of the labyrinth, I took a deep breath. I reached down and touched the soil and gave thanks for the earthy foundation beneath. I accepted the peace of slowness as the gift that it is.
 
I stepped back into the labyrinth. I breathed again and went into the world.
         
These are two of my walking stories. Walking is one of the things I do when I need to wait—wait for a phone call, wait for something to process at work, wait for a meeting to begin.

Walking helps my body wait, because otherwise I’m antsy and then cranky and then angry because I hate waiting.
 
This last summer I went for a long walk with two dozen friends while we waited for the Presbyterian Church to do something about climate change.

This was a kind of expectant waiting—waiting the way protesters do when they sit in a space, expecting to be seen and heard. This was like the kind of waiting we do in a doctor’s office for news about a diagnosis, expecting answers with hope or with fear.

It was a walk we did while we were waiting to be seen and heard by the church, expecting the church to respond to climate change when we really had no hope.

We were waiting for the church to decide if we would divest from fossil fuels, and so we walked 212 miles. We walked from Louisville, KY (where the PCUSA is headquartered) to St. Louis, MO (where the PCUSA was meeting for its biannual national gathering.)
​
Every morning began with prayer and every evening ended with a teach-in and worship. In between, we walked 10 to 20 miles. We prayed and sang and talked and listened and looked while we walked along the highway and through towns.
We listened and felt cars and trucks whiz past us and walked around decomposing roadkill. Sometimes we’d talk about the animals we’d seen on the road, our hearts breaking at the death we were passing. These animals were casualties of the cars, unseen and unfelt losses by most people as they went by. Some afternoons, we realized we needed to cover more ground in order to make it to the next stop of the day. Those afternoons, those of us with strength and energy took to running.

One late afternoon, I went with the runners. I run long distances — training for half and full marathons — so I’m a slow runner.

That afternoon, I was especially slow.

Frustrated, I wondered just how far behind I’d be at the end of the five miles we were running. I watched the next slowest person disappear around the bend. I was alone on the road. To be honest, my ego was bruised by how slow I was going. 

And then I saw something in the road.  

A little bump. It was a turtle.

She was in the middle of the oncoming lane. The runners who were faster than I am wouldn’t have seen her. Just as I saw her, I stopped to watched as three cars drove over her, her body in between the wheels. I prayed that they would miss her.

And then — when the cars were gone — I walked into the middle of the road and picked her up. I carried her off the road and placed her gently in the grass. I whispered a prayer as I took off, suddenly aware that our walk was about life.

Maybe I was so slow that night, so I’d be there to save that turtle’s life. 

And maybe I was so slow so that my ego would have to be bruised and I could work on my humility. 

And maybe it was a reminder of grace — that step by step, we could love the planet.

We could love it not just as a whole but in each little part. Each little part loved by God. 

It was, for me, a reminder too that all of creation was waiting for a new thing—waiting for God and people to do a different thing so that life and love would prevail over the systems of hate and brokenness in our world.

In Advent, we turn our attention to waiting for God, waiting for God to show up and make the world better.

There is no end to the list of things we want for a better world—no more grief, sickness, war, no more poverty, sadness, hunger, climate change.

I walk while I wait—and I wait best when I do that in community, with other people.

What Advent reminds us is that we are waiting for God to be with us—and that when we are in Advent we are praying “come oh come Emanuel…..”
 
Emanuel means “God with us” … and so we are praying for God to be with us.
 
Come, God—be with us.
Come, God—wait with us.
Come, God—work with us.
Come, God—walk with us.
 
Amen.

Portions of this reflection previously appeared in Presbyterians for Earth Care 2018 Advent devotion and on Presbyterians Today.


[1]https://www.labyrinthbuilders.co.uk/about_labyrinths/history.html

Psalm 23
Ephesians 2:13-22
Matthew 6:30-34, 53-56

 
How many of you have Psalm 23 memorized?
How many of you think you’ve heard it more than 100 times?
It’s so so familiar—it’s etched into Christian tradition and so common at funerals to provide a word of comfort.
 
There are two parts in Psalm 23.
                There’s sheep with a shepherd (who is a metaphor for God).
                There’s a table in the household of God, where God is the host for a tremendous feast.
Both of these parts (and the part about walking in the valley of darkness without fear) show God’s care for God’s people.
The framework of the passage is the framework of God’s relationship with God’s people.
                And in that framework there are some themes that emerge.
                                First—there’s grace—throughout the text we’re reminded that we don’t have to be more than sheep. Sheep are common animals, they’re not fancy. There’s folklore that sheep are not very smart and that that’s why they need a shepherd to take care of them—but they’re actually really smart. They recognize faces and people and come to know the shepherd as the person who keeps them safe… just like the writer of the psalm describes God caring for us as a shepherd. The grace comes in just only having to be sheep—only ourselves—and not anything else. And the grace comes in knowing that God takes care of us.
                                Second—there’s hope throughout this psalm. It doesn’t sugarcoat life or say it’s easy (remember the valley of darkness and the table before enemies) it just says that those hard parts are not the only parts of life.
                                That hope is contextualized by God’s abundant hospitality—at the table that God sets for us, there’s a feast (and God sets that feast in God’s house). Not a simple meal… not a meal out together, but in God’s house.
                                And so, the psalm reminds us that we can have faith no matter what in life—it’s honest about how life isn’t easy but that God’s hope, grace, and abundance welcomes us home. In this psalm, we meet a God who shepherds us, calls the sheep to safety and rest. We meet a God who prepares a banquet in a place where we can linger and rest. In this psalm we meet the goodness of God.
 
In the gospel reading for today, we see the metaphors of God’s goodness lived out in the compassionate ministry of Jesus.
                The disciples are exhausted. Just before this text, they’ve been sent out in twos to do mission—teaching and preaching and healing—and they’ve come back to tell Jesus what they’ve done.
                Jesus knows immediately that they’re exhausted and tells them they will go away to rest and eat.
                I imagine their exhaustion is like ours—always so much to do, so many responsibilities, always more people and places to serve and love. Yet Jesus tells the disciples to rest—reminding us that we too need to rest—we have work to do and we must get away to rest.
                And so, they all get on a boat, ready to rest and renew, and we can imagine, maybe learn from Jesus too—because you know, Jesus was always teaching.
                But they land and Jesus’ reputation has preceded them: the crowd is there too (the crowd is always showing up to find Jesus). They are
                                Hungry
                                Tired
                                Broken
                                Weary
                                                                                The people recognize Jesus. They need him.
And Jesus has compassion for them, seeing them like sheep without a shepherd, and sheep need a shepherd.
 
Jesus’ compassion is key here—he is moved by the people. Jesus, God-with-us, is with the people too.
                In bodily, personal ways, Jesus teaches and heals the people, with compassion, like he almost always does in the Gospel.
                It is telling here that we don’t meet the disciples in the second part of the Gospel reading. Jesus himself meets the people. Maybe the disciples were in fact resting. We humans need that rest and renewal.
                Jesus’ perseverance reminds us that God’s love for us will not grow weary. Jesus presses on as the crowds continue to find him—crowds who are desperate to be welcomed into the household of God. In doing so, Jesus is modeling for us what it means to be compassionate—calling us as the church to set the table in God’s house for all who seek to be fed.
 
                The reading from Ephesians is a reminder of how the church can and should respond to Jesus’ compassion—reminds us of who we used to be, particularly in a world that reminds us of who we would and could be if we were not the dearly beloved children of God in Christ who calls us and loves us. T
                The first ten verses of Ephesians 2 (before our text) “describe a world in conflict and heartache, torn between death and life, sin and grace.” It is a text that reminds us that we are indeed sheep who need a shepherd or else we will wander. It is a text that reminds us that we—the church—are now reconciled to be a new thing.
                In our broken world, God loves us into a different world.
                                This is a different world where “we were aliens but now we are now citizens in the commonwealth of God—we are no longer strangers but are members of the household of God”
God’s household—in Greek, that’s OIKOS (and it’s the root of ecology/economy/yogurt) and it’s a word that indicates something particular about a building. It’s a word that translates into a “place where someone resides”…. But also it’s the word to translate into “family.” It’s not just the building but a building that is filled with love. So when we translate OIKOS, we could be tempted to translate it into the word “house.” But it’s really “home.”
I once asked my friend Irma to tell me the difference between the word “hogar” and casa” in Spanish. And she said that they mean similar things—but that a hogar es una casa con un abrazo. A home is a house with a hug.
And that’s what OIKOS is—it’s a place with a hugs, a place filled with love.
And so when the text calls us to dream of a new world, it’s a world in which we are all called into the home of God, a home where God prepares a feast for us. It’s a world where we’re called to make home for other people—to welcome people in and to live with compassion for other people as often as we can. A world where we trust God’s abundant love to take over when we’re exhausted so we can rest and come back to love other people.
Being part of this household unites us—we’re bound together in the places where we’ve been separated…. Crossing political and social boundaries, reaching across divides of class, race, and gender, calling over the abyss of loneliness and discord, illuminating the valleys shrouded in death.
                                We are no longer strangers but members of the household of God.
We’re not there yet. We live in a world of fear and anxiety, emotions that keep us from each other.  A world where we divide ourselves by political lines and social divisions. We need not look far to see how broken we are or to find places of fear.
This week one of my good friends spent time on the US/Mexico border and he heard story after story of migrants who have sought asylum in the US but who must brave ICE. And another friend was arrested for praying in front of the ICE building in Portland, for calling on our immigration system to be built on welcome, not fear.
 
This week, I’ve been helping to prepare for the Climate March in San Francisco, when thousands of people will come together to call for brave and realistic responses to climate change by world leaders who will gather for the Global Climate Action Summit… instead of living in the anxiety that we can’t do anything that would make people with power and money unhappy.
And this week too we need not look too far to see how racism and classism and homophobia continue to be issues in our country and world.
Fear is a power emotion in and of itself, and yet Psalm 23 reminds us to not be afraid—we can have courage because we do not go alone.
In going together—with each other and with God—the text dreams of another day—a day when the whole church welcomes like God creates welcome into God’s household, God’s family.
                We practice this welcome and this active building the family of God whenever we reach out to each other in the Peace of Christ.
                Christ reminds us that building the family of God takes compassion.
                Ephesians reminds us that creating the family of God isn’t easy but we do it to create a new world where we are no longer strangers—not to each other--- not to God
                And in doing so, we remember that OIKOS is more than a building--- whenever we stretch out our arms to our shepherd, whenever we reach for each other, loving in simple or radical ways—we build the family of God.
                And so, it is not just the physical building that makes OIKOS, it’s not just the family that makes OIKOS, it is the act of building together.

Pescadero Community Church
John 6:35, 41-51
 
In her book “Take this Bread” Sara Miles remembers her first visit to church, St. Gregory’s in San Francisco, and the first time she ever took communion. She writes:

I had no earthly reason to be there. I’d never heard a Gospel reading, never said the Lord’s Prayer. I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian—or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut. But on other long walks, I’d passed the beautiful wooden building, with its shingled steeples and plain windows, and this time I went in, on an impulse… [there were about twenty people sitting there.]

I walked in, took a chair, and tried not to catch anyone’s eye. There were windows looking out on a hillside… and I could hear birds squabbling outside. … We sat down and stood up, sang and sat down, waited and listened and stood up and sang, and it was all pretty peaceful and sort of interesting. “Jesus invites everyone to his table,” the woman [leading the service] announced and we started moving up in a stately dance to the table in the rotunda. It had some dishes on it, and a pottery goblet.

And then we gathered around that table. And there was more singing and standing, and someone was putting a piece of fresh crumbly bread in my hands, saying “the body of Christ,” and handing me the goblet of sweet wine, saying, “the blood of Christ,” and then something outrageous and terrifying happened to me. Jesus happened to me.[1]
 
Jesus happened to me.

I wonder where in our lives we have let Jesus happen to us. When have we set aside plans and acted on impulse (and maybe some faith) and let Jesus happen to us in outrageous ways.

Have you had these moments?

The times I’ve felt Jesus happen to me have often been over food. This Easter, in the midst of traveling back and forth between CA and NJ for school and work, I found myself sitting outside our house in El Granada with Nathan and two close friends. The meal was a collection of Midwestern Easter food (loads of carbs and cheese) and in between bites, I suddenly felt so much love well up in me that I had what I am sure was a goofy grin on my face—that was a moment when I knew I was where I was meant to be, surrounded by people who have loved me deeply. It didn’t matter in that moment that we were a very small group or that I had spent months wondering if I would ever really have good friends again…. In those Easter bites, I understood that at that table I was called and, in those Easter bites, I understood that all my traveling and moving was about responding to God’s call for my life… that in the midst of the extraordinary days of traveling and teaching and studying... this was an ordinary moment when Jesus showed up and I was fed.

Later in her book, Sara wrestles with the idea in communion that we are eating the body of Christ, that we’re somehow ingesting another human, and the idea—even a metaphorical one—is a little off putting. I imagine this is a common response; I certainly have non-Christian friends who have suggested tongue-in-cheek that Christians are cannibals. This is not a metaphor rooted in one of the core sacraments of our faith that lends itself to attracting many followers.
 
Indeed when Jesus claims to be the bread of life, he’s setting in a motion a tension that ends up dividing his followers and the disciples, a tension that means that in the scope of his known world, only a few will follow Jesus and his teachings. Early followers of Jesus were a small group and faced threats and expulsion from the larger Jewish community because they believed that Jesus was the Messiah who fulfilled the promises in the Israelite scriptures and traditions… yet they struggled to understand why so few Jews believed as they did.

For comfort, they turned to the stories of the Israelites who complained about Moses, just as many people in their time complained about Jesus. They remembered in this text how the Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years after following Moses out of their enslavement by Egypt and that the “escapees from Egypt complained that Moses has led them from the safety of slavery to the dangers of freedom in an unknown land and an insecure future.”[2]

Do you know this story?
From Exodus:
2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3 The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”
4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day.
9 Then Moses told Aaron, “Say to the entire Israelite community, ‘Come before the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling.’”
10 While Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they looked toward the desert, and there was the glory of the Lord appearing in the cloud.
11 The Lord said to Moses, 12 “I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, ‘At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.’”
13 That evening quail came and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. 14 When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. 15 When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was.
Moses said to them, “It is the bread the Lord has given you to eat.
21 Each morning everyone gathered as much as they needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away. 
31 The people of Israel called the bread manna.[d] It was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey. 32 Moses said, “This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Take an omer of manna and keep it for the generations to come, so they can see the bread I gave you to eat in the wilderness when I brought you out of Egypt.’”
35 The Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a land that was settled; they ate manna until they reached the border of Canaan.
 
That’s the story of the Israelites that the Jews in Jesus’ time looked to see their own community in the Israelites.

The Israelites who were led through a parted Red Sea and away from deadly slavery.

The Israelites who were accompanied by God on the journey.

The Israelites who were fed by bread falling from the sky and yet still had so little faith that God eventually told them that their generation would not live to see the new land promised to them—that their descendants would see it instead.

The wandering Israelites didn’t believe that God could happen to them—not in parted seas or pillars of fire in the desert, not in bread falling from the sky.

And so the early church could look around at their community who didn’t believe in Jesus as they did and find comfort.

What could this mean for us?

 We easily complain about how we need more people in the pews or that we need God to show up in a different way.

We ask God to be exciting or extraordinary—we want God to again show up in the mysterious and the magical. And sometimes God does still show up like that.

But it is sometimes something ordinary that will save us or bind us together in a community of faith.

• A conversation.
• A trip together.
• A meal.

Maybe you hear in this text the sense that only Jesus will save us… maybe you shudder as I do at the thought that only certain people will be “saved” and you wonder if you can stand the idea that some of us will be loved by God and some of us will be left out.

But here is how I also hear this text: that God is asking us all to come to the table and be fed. That in the context of Jesus’ ministry it doesn’t make sense to hear this part of Jesus’ teaching as only for a few people. All who come will be fed. Jesus invited all different kinds of people to learn from him, to walk beside him, to eat with him.

So, in this text Jesus is naming how God will call us and provide for us.

God will call us in all sorts of ways… we can’t contain or classify God’s call on our lives.

God’s call to us will meet us where we are—call us in ways that we will be able hear it if we listen.

God’s call to us will make sense to us as we are.

Which means that, to extend the carb metaphor—we will be fed with the bread that makes the most sense to us.

Bread is ordinary to us—it’s part of our everyday lives and can be incorporated into all sort of meals: French toast, bread pudding, croutons for salads. But in some communities, its tortillas or rice or beans… we each have food that is a staple in our lives, food that feeds us day in and day out, food that we can’t help but bite into and savor as we chew it. Food that reminds us of who we are, so that we find ourselves sitting at the table with a big goofy grin on our faces. Food that reminds us that we are loved.

Jesus is the bread of life—the bread of life.  The bread of life that draws us to God through faith. We don’t come to faith on our own, and we are not sustained on our own… instead we “are wooed, invited, even cajoled” to the table of God.[3] We eat and then we bear witness to the meal that is both extraordinary and ordinary… a meal that we each are invited to and that all are invited to.

Jesus is the bread of life—come and be fed. Amen.

ENDNOTES
[1] Take this Bread, 57-8

[2] Feasting on the word 337

[3] Feasting on the Word 334

May 20, 2018

 
I am tired—I am not sure what time it is right now—my brain is still in the Eastern Time Zone and my body is here on the west coast. I’m a little confused too. I don’t know if it’s just about time to have breakfast or lunch, and now I am preaching about Pentecost, a story when Jesus’ disciples are accused of being drunk at nine o’clock in the morning. I might not make a ton of sense this morning, but
 
To be clear I have not had anything to drink this morning.
 
When the disciples begin to talk at once in a variety of languages, a crowd comes to watch the spectacle. In Jerusalem during the Second Temple, there would have been Jewish people from all over the ancient world living in the city—and they would have already struggled to understand each other across a variety of language barriers.[1] And yet, here they were all gathered together listening to a group of people speaking and then hearing their own languages out of nowhere.
 
It’s like traveling to a foreign country and hearing your own language spoken. It reminds me of when I was in Nicaragua last summer and spent the whole trip navigating in Spanish. My brain got tired from working in the language that was not native to me and then when I met a woman from New York who spoke English to me, I breathed a sigh of relief at simply being understood and being able to understand.
 
I’ve thought a lot about Nicaragua these last few weeks as their dictator Daniel Ortega, a “president “ who was once thought to be a liberator of the people “has cut pensions and social security, the community responded with protests, and then over 50 people were killed. Negotiations continue—and I’ve watched videos of the protests, trying to understand how a government could support the killings of protestors. Such violence is hard to understand.
 
There have been a lot of hard, confusing, and unbelievable things happening in the world in the last few weeks.
 
Last week, the US embassy in Jerusalem opened and Palestinian people protested. “The protests had been dubbed the Great March of Return, in support of the declared right of Palestinian refugees to return to land they or their ancestors fled from or were forced to leave in the war which followed Israel's founding in 1948.
 
The Israeli government, which has long ruled out a mass return of Palestinians, said terrorists wanted to use the protests as cover to cross into its territory and carry out attacks.
​
While most Palestinians have demonstrated at a distance from the border, others threw rocks and incendiary devices towards the fence and tried to break through.”[2] More than 60 people were killed and the United Nations has opened an independent investigation to determine if the state of Israel responded with more force than necessary and how to hold the nation state accountable.
 
And just days ago, there were two school shootings—one at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, where ten people died and one in Georgia at a graduation, where one person died. There have been 22 school shootings this year in the United States—and mostly I wonder how any student can go to school in the United States without being terrified.
 
This week I finished my coursework in climate change and theology—which means I have spent the last two years thinking about the reality of global climate crises. The process of icecaps melting in the Arctic is now irreversible, heat waves are killing people around the world, and we can expect that global temperatures will rise another five or six degrees by the end of the century.[3] And that means that thirty-six percent of people will face some kind of water scarcity.[4] Climate change will effect communities that are already marginalized hardest. Wen Stephenson writes in What We’re Fighting For Now is Ourselves that “catastrophic warming, by any humane definition, is virtually certain—indeed, already happening … [and] even in the very near term, what’s “catastrophic” depends on where you live, and how poor you are, and more often than not the color of your skin.”[5]
 
I was finishing course work when I got two emails from our Pescadero community—that Kathy had died, leaving us her poetry and her spirit of words…. And that Don Lupe, a dear farmworker in the ESL classes at Puente, was killed in a car crash. And so there are these great big heartaches around the world and then these heartbreaks in our community—these people who touched our lives and brought creativity and joy into our worlds.
 
Grief and violence do not make sense. It’s hard to know what to do in response.
 
But other things have happened too.
 
In these last few weeks, the New Poor People’s Campaign was launched on Mother’s Day. “The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is uniting tens of thousands of people across the country to challenge the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and the nation’s distorted morality.”[6] Communities have gathered around the country to dismantle the systems and circumstances that separate us from each other.
 
And so I’ve found that I’m grateful for the capacity of communities to respond to the struggles and heartache of our world.

The story of Pentecost—this story of the spirit of God reaching out like tongues of fire onto the gathered disciples—is also the defining story of the church. They are gathered together in one place, in the days just after Jesus has left them. They have lived through the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus—and now he’s really gone. And so they’re gathered together, confused by the mystery of who Jesus is in the world, because he is like no other teacher they have known.

And yet:

God reaches out and calls them to be the church to the world—to dream dreams, and see visions, and prophessy a new world that is governed by the love and justice of God’s new kingdom. God calls them in their grief, exhaustion, and confusion to live with courage.

What will we do in the face of the hard reality of the world? Part of the gift of the Holy Spirit is that it descends on all of us gathered in this place—calling each of us into this work of the church with courage. What courage will we use to respond to the violence, suffering, grief, racism, and ecological devastation in our world?

The trick, love bugs, is figuring out how to respond when our courage to do new things in the world makes us seem like we have lost our minds.

 “When the day of #Pentecost had arrived, they were all gathered together in one place. Suddenly, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind – they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began speaking...in different languages!
 
Now, at that time, there were people from every nation living in Jerusalem. And at this sound, they were amazed and astonished, saying,
 
"Aren't all of these people...ya know...Galileans? How is it that we hear in our own native tongue? Méxicans, Venezuelans, Cherokee, Sioux, and residents of Brazil –– Iceland and Finland, Nigeria and Burundi, Iraq and Mongolia, Japan, Taiwan, and the parts belonging to the United Nations –– and visitors from all over: Hmong and Somali, members of the African and Jewish diasporas –– in our languages, we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power!"

But...there were some who grumbled, saying, "These maniacs are drunk, and should go back to where they came from.”
But the people stood their ground, raising their heads and saying, "We're not drunk, y'all. It's 9:00 a.m., and we got stuff to do.”[7]
 
We have stuff to do.

In the church calendar, from here to Advent is what is called Ordinary Time. From Pentecost to waiting for Jesus’ birth, we are called to be the church in ways that change just what ordinary means, to change the narrative of heartache to something else—to love the stranger, to dismantle racism, to love each other radically, to care for creation, to be moved by God in ways that will make other think we have lost our minds or at least had a little bit too much to drink.

In a moment, we will practice through prayer stations, but I want to end with excerpts from a poem from the farmer-poet Wendell Berry:
Every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
 Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
Practice resurrection.
 


[1] Feasting on the Word 5

[2] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44167900

[3] Ibid., 20. Stephenson, What We’re Fighting for Now is Ourselves, x.

[4] Ibid., x.

[5] Ibid.

[6] https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/

[7] Jason Chesnut

On June 23, I woke up to a bunch of texts and emails from people in a variety of parts of my life. They all said similar things: “we’re sorry that the PCUSA did not divest from fossil fuels. We’ve been praying for you.” Most of these people hadn’t said a word to me in the previous three weeks—when over 30 of us walked 212 miles from the headquarters of the PCUSA to the General Assembly. Most of them hadn’t offered support as we planned. Most of them hadn’t told me that they were praying, hadn’t share posts or written to their commissioners.

I was already stinging from the loss—and already angry with the state of our denomination—anger and hurt that will eventually transform into more words and action. What I needed at the moment wasn’t words from people who had been silent, and I did not need the “opportunity” to teach these dear ones just how to support people who are engaged in community organizing and action.

I’m still stinging—still a little angry and a little hazy about how to face the world and our denomination after they voted to continue to profit off climate change. I’m still resisting the urge to respond to the texts and emails of people who just now are writing. But that resistance isn’t about anger—isn’t about saying now that they should have been there for me when we were in the middle of the struggle.

It wasn’t their struggle.

It was mine—and the struggle of those of us called to hold the PCUSA accountable to putting our treasure where our hearts are.

When I look up from the sting, I’m amazed again by the cloud of people who loved me through the most difficult three weeks. My parents and siblings have been stellar, and I have been privileged to work alongside a cohort of brilliant and wonderful people who have put their hearts and souls (and soles…) into organizing in the PCUSA. Seriously: everyone should get to do a hard thing with a bunch of their favorite people!

But a few days ago, my mom (who was at General Assembly with me) asked me how I keep my head and heart together in the loss, and I smiled at the gift of my six white dudes.

I work professionally and academically to dismantle hetero-white patriarchy, even making a reputation for myself in coursework for being the one to complain about the collection of white philosophers we’re support to read. (But let me note too that I will spend much of the rest of my life wrestling with how to use my white privilege for the good.)

I often find myself marveling at how my life in hardest moments are buoyed by six individuals who are white men (a reminder that individuals are different than systems.)

And so, on June 23, I focused on the snarky note from one of my six white dudes—the note that said, basically, “hi. Come home now please. This part of the world needs you to save it, now that you’re done with your Presbyterians.” That’s the one who would randomly send me notes about his cat or junk food… and the one who gave up driving for most of the time I was walking and who (while not a Presbyterian) watched most of the livestream of the plenary debate on divestment.

One of them wrote to me every morning. To be fair, he writes to me every morning—every morning for the last four years—to remind me to greet the day and to check in. We’re peer mentors to each other and in this three week span, his notes reminded me that a new day brings new challenges, but also the same necessities of every other day: be kind, seek joy, put on sunscreen.

One of them wrote to me every evening: the first week of the walk, he reminded what day of creation in the story of Genesis was happening, and the second week, he made up other parts of creation that were coming into being. He is my mentor in the more traditional sense, and he reminded me that most of my schooling has prepared me to be hopeful in the face of failure (and also he reminded me on more than one occasion that the whole thing was a miracle and that I could be proud of myself and our whole team.)

One of them called me nearly every afternoon for three weeks, heard me at my crankiest, reminded me that I’m stubborn to a fault, and then loved me into some hard conversations. (To be honest, at one point on the walk, I yelled at him and told him he was the meanest human I’ve ever met, and he still picked up the phone the next day and asked, “hey: did you tell the patriarchy to smash itself yet Well: damn.)

One of them (my partner) called me every night—when I wasn’t out of my mind exhausted—to tell me he loves me and that somehow it would be alright. And when I was exhausted and needed to just go to bed, he reminded me that actually this three week adventure was objectively exhausting.

One of them was on the walk with me—and simultaneously told the most embarrassing story of me on the walk and also over the course of those three weeks said again and again that he followed me (and then did.) If ever I needed perspective on just how seriously I should take myself in this work—here it is.

Soon it will be time for me to walk again and to help listen to where God is calling us in our work for eco-justice in the PCUSA.

​I am so grateful that we do not have to do it alone.

I am so grateful that my little cloud of witnesses teaches me to keep walking and to be surprised.

There is no biography written about the person who has transformed my discernment and sense of myself. She was not famous, had very little formal education, and until her death she drank terrible instant coffee and made hard, crispy cookies. As grandmother’s go, mine wasn’t the sweet fairy tale you imagine. She was often cranky and short-fused. She was in almost constant pain; the sun gave her migraines, a trait I partially inherited.

She once told me she would give me LEGOs for Christmas, brought over a wrapped box that made LEGO-sounding noises when you shook it, and when I opened it…. It was an anatomy kit.

She was a self-taught expert in the Civil War, and I somehow convinced my fourth and fifth grade teachers that she should come lecture at our elementary schools. I have no idea how she kept our attention, but I remember sitting in awe as she faithfully recounted battles and explained racism to our little ears and brains.

She and I would sit at her kitchen table as I got into middle school. She’d chain smoke and I’d suggest that if I’d been a white women in the South during slavery, I’d be nice to my slaves. I remember her looking at me and saying, “no, you’d be awful to them because you would have been socialized to be racist.”

I was in college interning at a domestic violence shelter when my grandmother got sick. We wrote each other letters about the women I was meeting and about how I was learning more about theory behind just why people are socialized to be racist.

I finished college a semester early so I could be one of my grandmother’s caregivers. I was turning in seminary applications in between medicine routines and visits from her friends. One day her pastor came to visit—her pastor who didn’t believe that women should be ordained. The first time I met him, he asked what I would do now that I was done with college. My grandmother looked at me, looked at him and said “she’ll be the best pastor!” and then lit the fuse on a very long and unhelpful argument on women’s ordination. Later, on a return trip, the pastor asked me who I was voting for in the primaries for president. I looked at him, looked at my grandmother and said, “John McCain.” And he said, “I would have thought you’d be like your grandmother and support Hillary.” And later my grandmother said, “You better not vote for McCain.” And I said, “You better not make me talk to that guy again.”

She loved me fiercely, argued for me in the inevitable fights I got into with my parents, believed that I could go on adventures and survive with my own fierceness. A week before she died, I curled up on her hospital bed with contraband M&Ms, and she said, “you know, we become what we are called. And you are beloved.”
​
She died ten years ago. Sometimes I hear her voice urging me into new adventures or to ask harder questions about race and sociology. But mostly I look around the places I call home and remember that I have always been beloved.

I have worn the same cross around my neck since I was confirmed in the PCUSA in eighth grade—now eighteen years ago. My parents gave the cross to me, a simple silver shape with a fish stamped into it. It came to symbolize to me the waters of baptism.

Over the years I’ve added to the necklace. A charm with anam cara on it from my sister-friend/my partner’s chosen sister--heart. A Huguenot cross from my twin sister, a bird soaring gracefully from the bottom—air. A glass teardrop with dried flowers pressed inside from my partner—earth. A compass from my partner’s boss—pointing me home. A red wooden bead from one of my close friends—fire.

I’d often hang onto these pieces when I needed to think or when I needed to find my grounding, and more frequently in these last months of living bicoastally and in a constant state of discernment and transition.

This morning I felt a weird sensation on my skin and I found the wooden bead pressed between my chest and my bra strap. Somewhere along my journey to class in NYC the whole necklace fell off and fire was all that was left.

At first I was devastated and fought back tears as I retraced my steps through the seminary building. Already my heart is grieving that first cross, wondering how to tell my parents it’s gone. How will I get grounded again? How can I replace these pieces?

Ah—but yesterday was the tenth anniversary of my grandmother’s death. I miss her and think about her most days. She loved me unconditionally and pushed me in ways I’ll never be able to articulate. She saw things in me that continue to buoy me—and I know that I am stubborn and smart and fierce because of her. When she died, it felt like the pieces of my heart might never be knit back together. She was my grounding; she is the one who taught me that we call people into who they are.

Now I’m just openly weeping in the seminary café—but now just in gratitude for the life of this woman who loved me. I am in no way surprised that fire is what is left—not with her looking out for me.

So, I have a choice. I can grieve all the pieces (and I will) and then I can choose what will ground me in the next stage of my life. Who will I call myself?
​
There’s a charm that my sisters and I each have, with the word “fearless” stamped into it. I think it will be the first to join fire on this new necklace. But first, I’m going to let the space on my chest breathe.

A Sermon for Pescadero Community Church on August 13, 2017. 
​
“Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by." Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.
When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"
 
Let me tell you a couple of things about Elijah.
                Elijah is called to be a prophet to God’s people—to remind them that they belong to God and God belongs to them. The nation of Israel is divided, and the people have ignored the commandments of God.
In the stories about him in the Bible, Elijah runs 100 miles to escape Queen Jezebel who gets angry with him after he kills her prophets. That story goes that he’d been asked by God to go tell the Queen that she and her priests have led the Israelites astray and to prove that her priests are false. That’s the story in the Bible where the priests of Queen Jezebel and Elijah have a show down to prove who is the most powerful.
                Several times in his life story, he gets so overwhelmed by his calling as a prophet that he asks God to just kill him—it’s too hard. God asks him to do things like yell at the queen or say that the government is corrupt. He’s had to stay with foreigners and perform miracles, including the first instance of raising someone from the dead. When the people meet Jesus in the stories of the New Testament, they think he is Elijah returned.
 But here in this story of Elijah, we meet Elijah in this text at Horeb, in a cave on Mt. Sinai, the same place where Moses heard God and received the Ten Commandments.
 
Let me tell you a couple of things about the people of Israel at this point in history when this story from 1 Kings was told.
                They are a people in exile, a people who have been led by corrupt leaders who destroyed the kingdom of Israel. The Kingdom is now divided into North and South and the North is being ruled by a king who does not follow the laws given to the Israelites by God.
                They are a people who have learned to question authority, because their history is full of kings who have been corrupt or unethical or who have made laws and decrees that favor one kind of people over others.
                They are a people who have been on their own journeys- traveling to a land that was promised to them and then taken to Egypt as slaves and then out of Egypt by Moses and then wandering for forty years. They are perpetual immigrants in a strange land, trying to decide what parts of their identity to hang on to and what to let go of.
                In the Bible, whenever the people of Israel are wandering and a little confused about who they are, God sends prophets to teach the people and help them come back to the teachings that they have been given by the prophets and Moses. Many of the prophets are written as angry and frustrated because the people are written as confused and forgetful—and I always feel a little better about my faith journey when I realize that my questions and doubts and confusion are just the same as what the questions and doubts and confusions have been for the people who try to follow God for generations.

                But I also get their wandering and wondering about their identities. Many of you know that I now live part of the time in California and part of the time in New Jersey as I’m working on a PhD in religion. I’ve never felt more out of place living in New Jersey—I’m older than a lot of my colleagues… I’m one of the only religious members of my cohort (though no one is particularly hostile to faith)… and I often take notes in class by drawing. I’m also the student in many classes who argues when other students focus on just white theologians… and I got some strong glares at a conference when I told a panel on agriculture and religion that they really missed the mark by not even mentioning farmworkers. I’m making a lot of friends! But really, being in a new place with new people has helped me understand what’s most important to me, and has helped me see who I’m called to be. And to be fair, I’m not this ornery on my own—I have good mentors and friends at school who support and guide me when I have doubts about whether I should even be in New Jersey. It has, indeed, felt like a calling to be there, however, even as I try to find God there. It’s harder to hear and see God in New Jersey when I’ve gotten used to feeling God at the ocean or in the woods or on a trail.
                This summer I went to Nicaragua and Peru for six weeks as a sort of pilgrimage. I studied Spanish and did a lot of painting and learned a lot about Andean cosmology and climate change. But I also spent a lot of time running, covering 110 miles in the month of July and those miles felt like wandering. Those hours running in the mountains were good opportunities to think about what I’d learned during the day but also to think about how God is calling me in my life—how I’m being changed by the world around me—how what I know about God is being informed by other people. And it was time for me to listen to whatever God was calling me to next. I didn’t ever hear a voice out of the silence, and there were moments when I wished for something flashy and loud like a windstorm. But instead I listened to the silence of rural Peru and stopped to look at the river and tried to remember who I am.
               I’ve been thinking about those moments a lot this week as I’ve been watching the events unfold in Charlottesville, NC. I wasn’t listening when there was a call for 1000 clergy to come to hold vigil during the time when members of the Alt Right and the KKK were gathering to protest the removal of a General Robert E. Lee statue from a park. I wasn’t really paying attention when the KKK-related protesters surrounded a church full of those clergy in a prayer service—didn’t really hear that they came with torches and angry shouts and death threats. Instead I’d been paying attention to our family who had come to visit and to the small world around me which I love so much. But I started to listen when a car plowed through the people who gathered to face off against the group of white supremacists. I started to hear the words of my friends and colleagues who stood in those lines who said that to not actively denounce white supremacy in our country would be to denounce Jesus the Christ and his teachings of love, acceptance, healing and justice. And then I heard the President of the United States refuse to denounce white supremacy and heard colleagues say that we who are white must put our bodies and safety on the line for antiracism because people of color have been taking the brunt of race-based violence for centuries.
                It feels a little like we in the United States are a people who are wandering and who have forgotten who we’re meant to be. If we identify as Christians, as people of God, we must claim who we are going to be in our country. What do we hear when we listen?
                I wonder if the windstorm, earthquake, and fire were meant to try to distract Elijah with flashiness—would Elijah assume that God would appear in whatever was loudest or scariest? Instead, God comes in the silence, like a calm that cuts through the noise.
                Elijah meets God in a place where God has appeared before and God does not ask for anything new. God simply says to Elijah, “what are you doing here?” And then God sends Elijah back to do the work he’s been called to do—to love the people and to call the people to love God. It is a simple—and hard—task, one that is at the heart of the work of a prophet.
                And what will we hear today? As we listen to the outcry about Charlottesville, will we be distracted by calls to militarization or flashy explanations about how racism is just a problem in the South? Or will we be distracted by people who call themselves Christians but say that racism has a place in the church or in the world? Or will we be moved by our calling to love all people, but especially people on the margins, across boundaries and borders, across race and gender and sexual orientation, welcoming the stranger and working for justice—hard tasks but simple because these are the tasks we’ve always had.  
                What are we doing here, church, to be God’s people?
 
 ***
Litany against white supremacy
By Elizabeth Rawlings and Jennie Chrien
 
Gracious and loving God,
In the beginning, you created humanity and declared us very good
We were made in Africa, came out of Egypt.
Our beginnings, all of our beginnings, are rooted in dark skin.
We are all siblings. We are all related.
We are all your children.
 
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
 
Violence entered creation through Cain and Abel.
Born of jealousy, rooted in fear of scarcity,
Brother turned against brother
The soil soaked with blood, Cain asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?
 
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
 
When your people cried out in slavery,
You heard them. You did not ignore their suffering.
You raised up leaders who would speak truth to power
And lead your people into freedom.
Let us hear your voice; grant us the courage to answer your call.
Guide us towards justice and freedom for all people.
 
 We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
Through the prophets you told us the worship you want is for us
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke;
Yet we continue to serve our own interest,
To oppress our workers, to crush our siblings by the neck because we are afraid.
Because they don’t look like us, act like us, talk like us.
Yet, they are us. And we are them.
 
 We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
 
In great love you sent to us Jesus, your Son,
Born in poverty, living under the rule of a foreign empire,
Brown-skinned, dark-haired, middle-Eastern.
They called him Yeshua, your Son,
Who welcomed the unwelcome, accepted the unacceptable--
The foreigners, the radicals, the illiterate, the poor,
The agents of empire and the ones who sought to overthrow it,
The men and women who were deemed unclean because of their maladies.
 
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
 
The faith of Christ spread from region to region, culture to culture.
You delight in the many voices, many languages, raised to you.
You teach us that in Christ, “There is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no male and female.”
 
In Christ, we are all one.
Not in spite of our differences, but in them.
Black, brown, and white; female, non-binary, and male; citizen and immigrant,
In Christ we are all one.
 
We are all siblings, we are all related, we are all your children.
 
Each week, we confess our sin to you and to one another.
We know that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.
We are captive to the sin of white supremacy,
Which values some lives more than others,
Which believes some skin tones are more perfect than others,
Which commits violence against those who are different.
We confess our complicity in this sin.
We humbly repent.
We ask for the strength to face our sin, to dismantle it, and to be made anew
We trust in your compassion and rely on your mercy
Praying that you will give us your wisdom and guide us in your way of peace,
That you will renew us as you renew all of creation
In accordance with your will.
 
We ask this, we pray this, as your children, all siblings, all related, all beloved children of God.
 
Amen.

It started on Easter. My partner and I went to celebrate the miraculous resurrection of Jesus with a local church in the morning, and in the afternoon, we released the ashes of our recently deceased sweet cat into the ocean.
I watched the waves carry her out into the open, and it felt like we’d done the impossible, letting go.
I remembered my years as a pastor preaching and teaching on Easter, claiming that this pivotal day in our Christian calendar is God’s promise that the impossibility of life is conquering death
–that death does not have the final say. The impossible is possible.
As Christians, we’re called to believe the impossible. I began to wonder if we’re also called to live the impossible.  What might it be like to do impossible things between Easter and Pentecost? How would I change?
I started out wanting to do an impossible thing every day.
I had hard conversations with people… entering into dialogues which were vulnerable and honest. I tried to be unafraid. I worried that I would come across as angry or negative, instead of clear. After a couple of these conversations, I realized that these hard conversations weren’t impossible, just hard.
In the meantime, I deepened relationships with several colleagues and friends over conversations and explorations that we otherwise wouldn’t have had together. (Also, I learned to say “you are driving me crazy” in a life-giving way, and I learned to stand up for myself more than once.)
And after a couple more, they just felt real.

I pushed myself physically too, looking for joy while I run… and being more mindful about who I am in the world, and coming up with impossible goals for exercise. The more I ran, the more joy I found. And one week I took 100k steps in five days. The second time I did that particular impossible thing, it was easier, and I realized that I was conditioning myself—that the more I did the impossible, the easier it became.

I began to think I was in training for a big impossible thing. And it became less important that I did an impossible thing every day… and more important that I keep an eye out for the opportunity to try.
As my impossible muscles stretched and moved, I thought about perspective and power and possibility. When I was in Washington, DC, it was painfully obvious that a lot of what I do on a regular basis (fly across the country, for example) is impossible for so many people.  I felt like my brain was being trained to think outside of my own experience… to re-think exactly what I mean by the impossible.
And I wondered if God is God and I am not, who am I to do the impossible?
Still, I thought a little about my capacity to do the impossible. And there were still things I couldn’t do (like yell at a white male staffer in DC who was totally rude to my African American BFF or plan to bring my sister-by-choice to the San Diego Zoo to see the pandas because it could jeopardize her immigration papers). But my power and privilege changes my sense of  those limitations and my capacity to exercise my ability to do the impossible.

Later I discovered what I thought was going to be the biggest impossible thing. In April, I accepted a spot in a PhD program Drew University, which means I’ll leave a job I love working with people I love. To do this, I’ll move across the country, away from my partner and start something new. It felt scary but also exciting… and like I was crossing the finish line at my first half marathon. And just like a marathon finish—it feels a little less impossible now that it’s done.

Weeks later, after a few more hard conversations and refusing to work on my days off, on one of my long runs, I began to think.
I realized that more than a decade I’ve spent trying to forgive one person in my life and the last two years trying to forgive another two people--
I spent a few miles thinking about how my inability to forgive that old hurt had let the new hurt emerge. But that old hurt was huge—it changed the course of my life and changed almost all the relationships in my life at the time. That old hurt welled up in me, with anger and fear and hopelessness.
And at point on that run, I said to myself, “I think forgiving this person is impossible.”
I stopped midstride.
Impossible was the point of this season of my life.
I started to think about what it would mean to forgive and what and who I really needed to forgive. And I began to think about where that forgiveness needed to take place.
And so I found myself back at the ocean.

On the way home from that trip to the sea, I thought about how far I’d come since Easter. I thought about how little I understood about the impossibility of Easter before I tried to do the impossible.
And then suddenly, from the shadows of some memory, came a passage from “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carrol:
“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen.
“When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Believing in and practicing the impossible takes practice. When we try the impossible little things, we prepare ourselves for the great big impossible things we can’t imagine. And I can’t wait for that next impossible thing.

Originally published at reneeroederer.com/2016/06/09/choosing-the-impossible/