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Rev. Dr. Neichelle R Guidry 5/16/24 Rev. Dr. Neichelle R Guidry 5/16/24

What We Have

Black women have carried the hopes and the dreams, the expectations, the burdens and even the very members of their communities on their proverbial backs. In this revisit to Enfleshing Witness, Rev. Dr. Neichelle R Guidry preaches about the continued legacy of black women in life and faith.

The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of Rev. Dr. Neichelle R Guidry’s talk from our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

Niechelle preaches because she believes in the liberating and transformative power of the gospel and of the Black preaching tradition. Niechelle preaches to primarily Black women and Black communities. She preaches, love yourself as God loves you. Niechelle preaches at Sisters Chapel of Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, on social media, and wherever the Spirit leads her.

Zora Neal Hurston once famously said that Black women are the mules of the earth.

By this, she meant that for years and centuries, black women have carried the hopes and the dreams, the expectations, the burdens and even the very members of our communities on our proverbial backs. In recent years, it has often been said that black women have heroically saved this nation. Time and time again, we have galvanized our communities and our resources and expended our money and our power and our influence to dig this nation out of the moral holes that it has repeatedly found itself in.

We even save our churches. We provide invaluable labor in spaces where we're not even sure that we're respected, that we're valued. And in some cases where we haven't even been allowed to be ordained into leadership. And most often this heroism happens at our own expense. We know so well now that when we put other people in other places before ourselves and before our needs, we are the last ones to benefit if we benefit at all.

Recently, however, we have been blessed to bear witness to another way of being black women who lead, elite athletes. Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles, both have stepped down recently from incredibly high profile, very powerful competitions in order to preserve their mental health. Allison Felix became the most decorated track and field athlete in the aftermath of walking away from a sponsorship contract with Nike, after they deducted her pay for becoming pregnant. She went on to start her own athletic wear enterprise that centers the stories and the bodies of women. And when she walked away from that deal, that woman took all of her amazingness, she took her force, she took her speed with her. And as I look and think about what it will look like and what it means to enflesh witness to and from our communities, the words that come to mind are creative agency.

See for so long the models and expectations of leadership have been handed down to us. We have enfleshed these roles as they've been taught to us, as they've been dictated to us, as they've been modeled in front of us. We have not always been empowered to ask the question of what does it mean to me to preach and to pastor and to serve the body of Christ.

And when we have dared to ask these questions, we have often ended up bruised and battered and broken simply for trying to show up in our realness and our authenticity and our fullness. So not only right now are we in need of a church that will go into some new directions, but we are in need of some leaders who are healing , and who are whole, and who are free, and who love what we do.

In 2nd Kings chapter 4 verses 1 through 7, we see a woman who is also in need. She's a widow. Her husband has died and she is now in so much debt that her creditors are threatening to take her children away from her. She consults the prophet Elisha who asks her,

“what do you have in your house?”

“Nothing”, she says, “but a jar of oil.” And he gives her very clear instructions to go and get as many jars as possible from your community, take your children into your home, shut the door behind you, and as long as you're pouring this fresh oil into these jars, fresh oil will be there, will be provided.

And in this time of need, this woman became an entrepreneur. She found fresh use for things that she already had. And if I'm being quite honest, what I am finding in this season is that as a result of so many of the traumas that we've suffered in our vocations in these churches and other institutions, so many of us don't even like what we do anymore.

We've lost the sense of excitement and passion for our ministries because they've become so tiring and so political and draining and exhausting. And perhaps like this woman, we have overlooked what's in our houses. In an effort to fit in as we lead, we have overlooked our own passions and curiosities and our innate skill sets and talents because they don't quite fit into the box of pastor that we've seen and that we were taught.

We have dismembered ourselves from our own spirits, trying to walk like and preach like and preside like everybody else. And in the process, we have forfeited our creative agency to create the flourishing that we want in our lives, in our vocations, and certainly in our churches.

As I conclude, I want to invite you to go back into your house, shut the door behind you and take an inventory of all that you have overlooked.

Yes, we do need leaders who are visionaries, but maybe the vision isn't as far off as we thought that it was. Maybe what we need to flourish in our vocation, in our community is right here in our own house, in our own heart, in our own hands. Nobody knows what you need to flourish like you know what you need to flourish.

And what will it take for that need to be met? How do you want to feel even as you are bringing healing to others? How can we begin to center our pleasure and our creativity and our sense of fun and playfulness in our ministries? Can we look to our innate passions and gifts outside of ministry and work for an indication of what God is trying to do in the church in this season?

Let me de-stigmatize these questions. It is not arrogant and it is not selfish to ask yourself, what do you need to do this work? Black woman photographer, Carrie Mae Weems said in one of her pieces, “I knew not from memory, but from hope that there were other models by which to live.” Models. If we want to be models to the future, we have to be not so wedded to what we have seen as much as we are wedded to what we hope for. And if we ask these questions, and we earnestly live into the answers, and we enflesh them in our communities maybe we can then be the models for those who are coming behind us. God's word for God's people. Ashe and Amen.

We are excited to announce a new chapter in the Enfleshing Witness movement: “Enfleshing Witness: Rewilding Otherwise Preaching.” Learn more about this new grant opportunity and sign-up to stay connected as the project unfolds.

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REV. DR. NEICHELLE R. GUIDRY

Rev. Dr. Neichelle R. Guidry is a spiritual daughter of New Creation Christian Fellowship of San Antonio, Texas, where the Bishop David Michael Copeland and the Rev. Dr. Claudette Anderson Copeland are her pastors and where she was ordained to ministry in 2010. She is a graduate of Clark Atlanta University (2007, BA, Lambda Pi Eta) and Yale Divinity School (2010, M.Div.), where she was the 2010 recipient of the Walcott Prize for Clear and Effective Public and Pulpit Speaking. She is also a graduate of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (2017), where she completed her Doctor of Philosophy in the area of Liturgical Studies with a concentration in Homiletics. Her dissertation is entitled, "Towards a Womanist Homiletical Theology for Subverting Rape Culture." She currently serves as the Dean of the Chapel and the Director of the WISDOM Center at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.

Church Anew 5/14/24 Church Anew 5/14/24

Vocation: What do you do?

Erin Weber-Johnson and Rev. Mieke Vandersall always felt challenged when they try to tell strangers what they do for a living. Their profession is far more than a job–it's an expression of their vocation.

***Photo by*** ***Jake Weirick*** on ***Unsplash***

Exodus 36:6-7

“So Moses gave command, and a word was proclaimed throughout the camp: No one is to make anything else as an offering for the sanctuary. So the people were restrained from bringing, 7 for what they had already brought was more than enough to do all the work.”

Erin recently sat next to a Rabbi on a flight. There was a steady stream of people who would interrupt him and ask questions. He leaned over to Erin and quietly whispered, “Sometimes I wish for anonymity.” His vocational expression allowed for people to bring their own narratives, questions, and presuppositions and he became the face for their experiences.

Erin nodded in understanding.

Erin and Mieke always feel challenged when we try and tell strangers what we do for a living. We have far more than a job–but our job is an expression of our vocation.

It’s complicated. As faith-based fundraising and giving consultants for congregations and non-profits, we often hear a number of responses:

I could never do that. Ask people for the money? That feels gross.
God and money? Could you include any harder topics?
Oh you’re one of those…
My hand is on my pocketbook!
Consultants are the worst. They take your watch and tell you the time.

We've thought about trying to find another word for our vocational title. Even the inclination to refer to our consulting work as vocational may be surprising, or feel at odds with the word consultant, given the commonly held perspective that consultants "take your watch and tell you the time."

The alternatives we've imagined for consultants include: Giving Companion and Partner in the Stewardship Ministry. But what do those names mean? In our reflections, we've realized that the word fundraising itself feels imprecise.

We love our work. We love what we do. Because we work collaboratively, we don't see ourselves as mere service providers. This means that while we offer expert advice, we just as readily dream alongside our clients about what's possible. And we do this while focusing each client community's collective gaze on a common goal. We know that when we fixate on a financial goal alone, we are vulnerable to missing what we believe to be the most important point of all: the process of fundraising is itself a restorative life-giving ministry.

The Bible is filled with stories of God preparing a table for us. In many of the gospel stories, Jesus creates a table uniting communities, resources, and people in innovative ways not only build their capacities, but also their imaginations. When we re-meet each other where we are and take a better look at ourselves in relation to our neighbors, we can create powerful new ways of repairing broken systems, reinvigorating our giving and re-energizing our faith.

The spiritual discipline of fundraising within the context of the church is better known as stewardship. When we engage in the acts of asking for and giving gifts, we must acknowledge and confront our own relationships with money, which often bring up feelings of shame, guilt, frustration and confusion, accompanied by perceptions regarding scarcity and abundance.

Often, what's hidden in the acts of inviting and giving gifts is the unique opportunity to be liberated, to not let our past experiences and narratives bind us any longer. The necessary actions in raising funds can heal us, individually and collectively.

This is why we do what we do. Our purpose is not to prioritize care for bigger givers, and we do not seek status symbols for ourselves or for others.

Rather, we have a bold desire to facilitate the redistribution of wealth.

We yearn for communities to understand that what they cannot do individually, they can do together. Our work is guiding communities together to both recognize and build their collective power.

The reason our work is focused on building trust with people is because they haven’t had positive experiences with consultants – or in fundraising. When you don’t know how to raise money well, you rarely succeed, and that does not make people want to engage in this work anymore. In addition, consultants are rarely trusted and often people think we are out there to do as little work as possible and charge as much as we can. We wish there was a different way to describe that this ministry could look in its truest form, as partnership.

Before starting Vandersall Collective, Mieke worked at a small nonprofit that was fighting for queer ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). As the organization’s primary fundraiser, she was face-to-face with many individuals and committees asking for funding. Over time, she began to realize that fundraising was so scary to her because when she was asking for funding, she was asking for acceptance of her as a young, queer woman. To get herself out of this dysfunctional cycle, she had to be confident in her own value, in her own identity. Then “the ask” became much stronger, as it was not a personal ask to heal herself (essentially), but instead to provide an opportunity for others to make a difference in a church that both the donor and Mieke dearly loved. This is why it is a spiritual discipline.

And it is this practice that guides our vocational work. We remain rooted in our purpose.

As we do this work, we believe in God’s call to an alternative economy. Walter Brueggeman, a theologian who has impacted both Mieke and Erin’s theological understanding says it this way: “[A] facet of prophetic imagination…is a new economy that is organized around a love of neighbor and that is committed to the viability of widows, orphans, and immigrants. Widows, orphans, and immigrants are people who in the ancient world did not have advocates who were empowered by the totalism in a patriarchal society. So it becomes a test case for the economy, and it is a redistributive economy of respect and viability for vulnerable persons, and there is no way to cover over or to hide or disguise that we are talking about policies of redistribution.”

Our vocation is so much more than raising money by whatever means necessary.

We acknowledge that vulnerability is at the heart of what we do. It is hard to acknowledge that we have needs. That we need each other. That we cannot do it alone.

Our relationships with money not only shape our relationship with God but impact our relationships with each other. The narratives we tell about our worth intersect with our ability to recognize God’s movement in the world. We are unable to imagine what belonging means in the kingdom of God and create structures around these imaginings without examining the relationship between our worth and work, without reconstructing a theology around money that is liberative.

Our prayer is that one day, as was the case in Exodus, all will have enough—so much so that the people were restrained from giving.

May it be so.

Erin Weber-Johnson

Erin Weber-Johnson is Senior Consultant at Vandersall Collective, a faith based, woman-led consulting firm and Primary Faculty of Project Resource. In 2017 she co-founded the Collective Foundation, which worked to address the gap in giving characteristics in faith communities of color. In 2022 she co-founded The Belonging Project, a movement designed to reimagine belonging across the ecclesial landscape.
Previously, Erin worked as the Senior Program Director at the Episcopal Church Foundation, as a grants officer at Trinity Wall Street in New York City, and served as a missionary for the Episcopal Church. She holds a BS from Greenville University, a Masters of Public Administration for NYU and is currently completing a second masters in Religion and Theology from United Theological Seminary.
A published author, she strives to root her work in practical theology while utilizing her experience in the nonprofit sector. Her co-edited book, *Crisis and Care: Meditations on Faith and Philanthropy is* available through Cascade Books.

Rev. Mieke Vandersall

Rev. Mieke Vandersall, Owner and Principal Consultant, has over 20 years of executive leadership experience in the religious nonprofit arena. Mieke encourages nonprofits, congregations and religious leaders as they work to fund their ministries; this work comes out of a deep knowledge of the particular exhilaration and stress of working for long-term structural change and beginning and sustaining programs.

Prior to her consulting work, she was the Executive Director of Parity, where she founded a program for LGBTQ Future Pastors, as well as Not So Churchy, a new worshiping community. This post spanned from 2003-2014. Mieke and the Future Pastors Program is a feature of the documentary film, Out of Order.

Mieke is currently on the Board of Trustees of the Presbytery of Southern New England. Mieke’s work at Vandersall Collective has also been recognized as a validated ministry by the Presbytery of Southern New England.

Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Church Anew 5/9/24 Church Anew 5/9/24

Holy Ground Without Walls

The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of Reverend Kim Jackson’s talk from our 2022 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

Kim Jackson serves as a Georgia State Senator and is an Episcopal priest. After graduating from Furman University, Kim volunteered as an EMT and led her colleagues at Emory's Candler School of Theology to advocate for criminal justice reform in Georgia. Upon receiving her Master of Divinity from Candler, Kim commenced her vocation as an Episcopal priest.

Over the past 11 years of ministry, she has served as a college chaplain, a nationally renowned consultant and preacher, and a parish priest. As the Vicar of the Church of the Common Ground, Kim co-creates church with people who are experiencing homelessness in downtown Atlanta. Kim and her spouse live on a small hobby farm in Stone Mountain, with goats, ducks, honeybees, and chickens.

Well, first of all, thank you. It's such a blessing to be able to speak to what is now home for me and for my wife. We both come from the country, and so trees have been important to us since before we could walk. And so we've chosen to make home, despite living in an urban area, on an urban farm. We have 10 acres with a forest behind us, with animals that ground us. Animals that don't talk, which is really helpful when I live and work in a world with a lot of words.

And for me, homegoing has really been about being grounded and touching the soil and touching the earth as a way of re-centering after going out into the city that's a concrete jungle where it can be difficult to find life. I have this great privilege of being the church home for people who have to sleep outside, and I've also had the great privilege of being with those folks long enough, knowing them well enough, to be invited into their homes that they've made, that are under bridges, that are in tents.

And I think because of the intimacy that is church, I've become so clear and so inspired by my congregants and the way that they've located home within themselves. Particularly within the songs and the hymns and the verses that they bring with them from their varied histories, right? But I've had so many people say, “you know, no matter where I go, even if I get swept up and all my tent gets moved away because cities, you know, making us move. I still have in my heart all of these songs that, that give me strength, that give me courage, that, that give me a place of home, a sense of home.”

And a home church is, for them, I think the place of stability, right? The place that reminds them that things may get confiscated by police, but they can always come back to their home church and come back to what's in their soul that cannot ever be taken away.

We are a church without walls, and we tell people wherever two or three are gathered together, we don't tell people that. That's what the scripture tells us, right? That whether two or three of us are gathered together, God is in the midst of us and therefore this is church. And because we are saying that in the midst of human feces, and urine, and people sleeping in sleeping bags, and also amazing people who are making music because we're able to kind of declare it and people say it with us, right?

We have this saying together where we talk about how this is holy ground. People believe it, right? It becomes true. I think we are able with our words and with our body in that space to make a home church right there. Whether it's in the park or whether it's literally standing on a street where somebody has had to relieve themselves.

Collectively, we say together, this is holy ground. This is our church. And it is. And I think because it's so raw, people know that they're welcome. Right? Like if you're willing to make church in the midst of all kinds of mess, then people know they can bring their whole selves. And even if they understand themselves to be messy, they know it's a space that's welcoming.

And I think that's a part of what makes it home. And I think it does matter that Common Ground is run by queer black women who know what it's like to not be welcome in a church and know what is necessary to make someone feel welcomed in a church. When I was called to ministry, I was a very young person and I was really clear that my calling to ministry was going to have to exist outside of the four walls of a church.

I was really deeply inspired by my pastors who had been working in the public square. I had a pastor who was a school board member. I had, you know, a pastor who was this huge community organizer, and the very first march that I ever went to was with Jesse Jackson and all these pastors, right?

And so I knew that if I was going to embody this call, that it would be in the streets. And I knew that from, from the moment that God breathed that call into my ear, and I said yes, that my work would be to sanctify streets. And that my work would be to find community and to bring love and to receive love from people who've been often ostracized and literally stepped over.

Amen.

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Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Church Anew 5/9/24 Church Anew 5/9/24

That’s a Stretch

***Photo by*** ***Martin Marek*** on ***Unsplash***

By Elizabeth Lynn and Mark Ramsey

We recently connected with Rev. Mark Ramsey and The Ministry Collaborative through our mutual friend, Dr. Walter Brueggemann. We share the following article with their permission as a reminder of the importance of stretching in our lives, in our discipleship, and in our leadership.

Entering our local gym, we hear the same instructions every time. “Stretching helps prevent bad things and enables good things – lean into it!”

Despite this regular refrain, stretching remains an underappreciated practice in exercise, in life … and in how pastors and church boards guide their faith communities. Often, and especially right now, the focus is not on stretching, but on keeping things the same or breaking things apart.

Seth Godin writes:

There are two polar opposites: Staying still and Breaking. It’s easy to visualize each end of the axis, whatever the activity.

In between is stretching.

Stretching is growth. Extending our reach. Becoming more resilient, limber, and powerful. Stretching hurts a bit, and maybe leaves us just a little bit sore.

But then, tomorrow, we can stretch further than we could yesterday. Because stretching compounds.

If you’re afraid of breaking, the answer isn’t to stay still. No, if you’re afraid of breaking, the answer is to dedicate yourself to stretching.

We’re not suggesting that your board roll out the yoga mat or take Jazzercise classes together (but if you do, please send us a video). Stretching in the context of church means nurturing deeper faith.

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount offers a discipline of stretching. Hungering and thirsting for righteousness, showing mercy, seeking to be pure in heart and to be a peacemaker – these are actions, not just words, that can stretch a congregation.

Think, too, of Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

This way of living is not going to come naturally to most of us, individually – and often, it isn’t the first reflex of congregations. It takes work.

So do these words, just one chapter later:

But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Beautiful words. But to live them? That’s a stretch.

Baptismal vows taken by the congregation, promising to nurture the baptized, ask us to stretch in how we relate to one another. And so do God’s commandments that seek to order the chaos we experience much of the time. And so does the pattern of the early church in Acts. Vivid descriptions of sharing, caring, and resisting the pull of dominant culture. To live into these – takes stretching.

So, how? How can your church board lead your congregation past the instinct to stay still, but also past the understandable urge to break things apart?

In church life, as in faith formation, the best stretches are often achieved by leaning into the largest questions possible – and by letting go of as many assumptions as possible.

Below, American poet Marge Piercy (b. 1936) reflects on the need to let go in order to learn to love differently.

To have without holding

By Marge Piercy

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch ; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

Do you have a regular practice of stretching? What gets in the way of your stretching as often as you should?

When do you know that you are stretching well? When do you know you have gone too far?

What does Piercy’s poem suggest about the stretching that goes along with learning to love differently?

Can you think of a time, in the life of your church, when you as a congregation have successfully stretched without breaking? What made that possible?

Can you think of a time when the congregation stretched too far? What went wrong?

Where in your church is there the greatest need to stretch right now? What is keeping that from happening? What assumptions are getting in the way? What larger questions could you as a church board ask yourselves, to start limbering things up?

Char Cox 5/2/24 Char Cox 5/2/24

Ascension Ponderings

Rev. Dr. Char Cox fondly reflects on her Sunday School exprience in this poem.

***Photo by*** ***Jeremy Perkins*** on ***Unsplash***

I have never really thought about the Ascension,
the Ascension of our Lord,
I mean.
In 33 years of ordained ministry,
I can count
on one hand
the number of times
that I have presided at an Ascension Day liturgy,
or preached on the Ascension texts,
or led a Bible study on the Ascension story.
Perhaps,
it is because Ascension falls on a Thursday,
and, well –
Thursday liturgies are hard.
Thursdays just aren’t days
that we typically gather,
or worship in community,
or think about “church things” –
And who wants to celebrate
an exit
when entrances
are so much more captivating,
and haven’t we already celebrated
the only exit that matters –
the earth-shattering exit,
from the tomb,
I mean,
and wasn’t/isn’t
that the point –
the Resurrection –
the culmination
of the Incarnation,
so who really needs Ascension,
anyway?

Perhaps,
it is because I have served much of my life
in academic contexts,
and Ascension Day always seems to fall
in the midst of
end-of-the-school-year-type-things –
banquets,
and parties,
and Commencements –
and who has time or interest
in celebrating
the leave-taking of Jesus
when there are so many other important
milestones,
and so many more
present-tense leave-takings to acknowledge?

Perhaps,
my lack of attention
and contemplation
on the Ascension
has something to do with
my own
incomprehension
of the significance
of the apprehension
of the enfleshment
of the Holy
into the Trinity
that is the Divine –
and if I don’t really get it,
or think it is noteworthy,
or even mystically grasp
its contribution
to the thinning of the veil
between what is
and what will be,
then, well –
how would I ever
accompany my people
in a liturgical immersion
in the
day,
and the time,
and the experience
when the One
who came
to dwell among us
takes a holy leave?

But this year,
my Holy Week discipline
was not focused
on the footwashing,
or the meal,
or the torture at the hands of the state,
or even on
that holy waiting
between Friday and Sunday
when the whole world
holds its breath,
even if it doesn’t know that it is –
waiting to see
if the belly of whale,
or in this case,
the earth,
emblematically stylized as a tomb,
would expel its holy inhabitant
so that
that which once was,
would be again,
and that which is
would be made new.

No –
this year,
while the Church
in all of her perfect imperfection
was drawn into the
holy upside-down-ness
of the logical consequence of
Incarnation,
And the death-interrupted
of Resurrection –
I was deep in the throes
of wonderment
and prayer –
about the Ascension.

This contemplation grew,
not so much
out of holy curiosity
as it did out of
practical necessity.
You see,
as a part of my call
to steward a project
that leans into how we
Nurture Children through Worship and Prayer,
I have committed to crafting
child-attentive,
arts-enriched,
liturgies for every Festival.
Every includes Ascension.
Every includes
this least celebrated,
most forgotten feast day
(thank you for those words, Barbara Brown Taylor)
That always comes
40 days after
the great exit from the tomb
and 10 days before
the holy winds
and tongue-loosing fire
that made the Word that became flesh
become words once again.

This odd juxtaposition
of the Great and Holy Week
and the lifting up
of the raised-up One
opened up the mystery
of the Ascension
for me
in ways that have felt akin
to the tomb bursting open anew.

Here is where my Holy Week-Ascension-ponderings
have led.

First,
It is the Enfleshed Word that ascends.
That may seem obvious,
but bear with me.
The Word –
enfleshed in the earthly stuff
of blood and bones,
Risen –
still wounded and scarred –
that same, yet made-new-yet-same body
is
who and what that ascends.
The stuff of earth becomes
a part of not just heaven,
but of the Divine.
It is the Ascension,
therefore,
not the Resurrection,
that completes
the Incarnation.
The Word becomes flesh
and the enfleshed-One –
takes the stuff of earth,
our own flesh,
into the unity that is the Trinity.
That has to say
something
about the goodness
of BODIES.

For me –
mind blown.

Second,
and for this, I have the artist Albrecht Durer
to thank.
In his depiction of the Ascension,
most eyes are looking upward
at the disappearing Christ,
yet one figure
is clearly looking
at the ground that had been under Jesus’ feet –
where it is marked
by the footprints of Jesus.
The Enfleshed Word has left –
AND his footprints are left behind –
Footprints, it seems
that are not
simply scars in the sand
to dissipate on the winds
of that holy hilltop,
but FOOTPRINTS
that we
who are called to be witnesses,
we who are now the Body of Christ on earth -
                not metaphorically,
                but literally –
                as in, we really are Christ’s body,
                Enfleshing Jesus -
                Enfleshing
                Love Divine
                In the world today –
we are called to continue to make
the footprints –
                and dare I say
                hand prints
                and heart prints
of Christ on earth.
Begging the question,
of course,
what kind of footprints
                and hand prints
                and heart prints

are we leaving?
Are we –
Are you –
imprinting the world
With DIVINE LOVE?

Mind blown again.

And finally,
Luke tells us
that Jesus led them out –
Out of the city,
Out of their comfort zones
Out beyond
where they were
what they knew
what they understood
what they imagined
what they comprehended.
Out.
Ascension is,
therefore,
about movement –
not just up
– but OUT!
Out –
for those
who first lived this story
and for us.
How are we –
How are you –
Called OUT?

Mind blown one more time.

BODIES
FOOTPRINTS
OUT

There is so much good news in
all of this
that I cannot quite
comprehend
how I missed it
or ignored it
all these years,
probably assuming
that Ascension
is unnecessary,
or inconvenient
or that, like those earlier followers
gaping after the place
where Jesus used to be,
there is nothing to see here.

How wrong I was!
And how captivated
I now am –
by this least celebrated,
most forgotten feast day
that I never used to think about
and now
cannot seem to stop thinking about –
and wondering
and imagining
ways that
the Ascension
can come to life,
not only as a feast day,
but as we seek to
faithfully
be the Body of Christ –
in,
and through,
and with our own bodies –
leaving footprints of Divine Love
Out –
Out beyond where we are
what we know
what we understand
what we imagine
And what we comprehend
so that our lives
as Resurrection people
become lived out
as Ascension people.

If you are interested in receiving the Celebrate! Worship for Every Festival Processional Liturgy with Holy Communion for the Ascension of our Lord from Nourishing Vocation with Children at St. Olaf College, email nourishing-vocation@stolaf.edu

Dr. Charlene Rachuy Cox

Rev. Dr. Charlene Rachuy Cox (affectionately known as “Char”) holds a Doctor of Ministry Degree from the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, with an emphasis in Spirituality; a Master of Sacred Theology Degree from the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, with an emphasis in Preaching and Worship, a Master of Divinity Degree from Luther Seminary, and a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Augustana University, Sioux Falls. She has served as a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for over 28 years, serving in seminary, collegiate, and congregational settings. She loves reading – especially memoirs and historical fiction, and enjoys writing poetry, travelling, and all things winter.

Facebook | PrChar
Website | Charlene Rachuy Cox

Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Church Anew 4/18/24 Church Anew 4/18/24

Wolakota (Right Relationship)

The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of Rev. Isaiah Shaneequa Brokenleg’s talk from our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

Shaneequa preaches because in her Lakota culture Winkte, Two Spirit people, have been called by their communities to be spiritual, social, and emotional healers. Following in that tradition, she strives to live into the role her communities have called her to.

Shaneequa preaches to call the Church and society back into right relationship, wolakota, with itself, with each other, with the Creator, and with creation. Shaneequa preaches among all her relatives, knowing that we are all related, Mitakuye Oyasin, faithful believers, those who doubt often, jubilant atheists, and all in between.

In the beginning, when Wakan Tanka, the Creator, made the heavens and the earth, we were all as one. There was love. We understood that we were all related. We were good relatives to one another. We were home. When I think of home, I think of security and comfort, relationships. I think of a place where I can be myself.

When I think of home, I think of God's kingdom. I think of wolakota. Wolakota is the state when all things are in right relationship, when we are in right relationships with ourselves, with each other, with creation, and when we are in right relationships with the Creator. Wolakota is peace, and wolakota is home.

Sometimes we forget that. Sometimes we forget that we are all related. Sometimes we forget to be a good relative and we wander away from home. We wander away from the kingdom, away from family, and we lose our way. The Western White church has wandered away from home. We know how some of this happened.

First, our church became tied up in empire, in power, in greed. Second, White Jesus.

You see, we all long to have a relatable Jesus, a Jesus like us. Throughout Christianity, cultures often depicted a Jesus who was incarnated and became one of our own. So we got a Greek Jesus, an African Jesus, a Russian Jesus, an Asian Jesus, and we got White Jesus.

The problem occurred when the church, tied up in empire and power and greed, spreading colonization and slavery, failed to present the folks it was evangelizing with a Jesus of color that looked like us, and instead presented us with a Jesus that looked like the slave owner and the colonizer. That imagery is directly opposed to a local Jesus who was born into an oppressed and occupied territory.

Finally, the White church failed to listen to Paul. Remember, in the early church, one of the questions was whether or not someone must become a Jew in order to become a Christian. Paul answered that and said,’ no, you can just become a Christian. You don't have to become a Jew first.’ However, the White church seemed to have forgotten that, and they even took it a step further.

They seemed to think we were supposed to become White before we can become a Christian. And so they didn't like any of our cultural expressions of faith, our languages, our ceremonies, our histories. And today, some branches of our church still think you need to become White, or for that matter straight, or cis-gendered, or able-bodied, or other things before becoming a Christian.

But Paul is clear. We can bring our culture with us when we become a part of the body of Christ. So our White church has wandered away from home.

And their story has many parallels to the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15. Most of you know this story. The son took his inheritance, those shared family resources, went to a distant country, squandered the property in dissolute living, and then famine hit the land. And he ended up having to feed the pigs before he considered coming back home.

The White church has taken our shared family resources. They took our land, our natural resources like minerals, forests, oil, and water. They took our humanity by enslaving our people, stealing our children, and being active in the genocide of so many of our communities.

They traveled to a distant country where they imposed their own cultural rules. They created this idea of rugged individualism that leaves out community. The country they move to values money, power, and material things over people and relationships. It's a country where what you own is far more important than the fact that each one of us reflects the image and likeness of a loving God.

The White church squandered the resources meant for the whole world in dissolute living, trading them for wealth and power that is placed into the hands of a few. And they have put into place systems and idols that help themselves, failing to see our black and brown siblings as relatives. These systems look like the Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, slavery, boarding school, Jim Crow laws, Triumphalism, Patriarchy, or Nationalism, and on and on and on.

And as the story in Luke tells us, a famine hit the country. And we see famine all over in our story here.

We have global warming, climate change, extinction. We have a famine of money with just 1 percent of the people owning over 90 percent of the world's wealth. We have a famine of humanity, of caring for others, of empathy, and we have a global pandemic that cannot be cured because so many people can't vaccinate, or won't get vaccinated, or care about their neighbor enough to even wear a mask.

Our White church has left home. And maybe without realizing it, has been feeding those pigs for some time. Early on, these pigs they fed were triumphalism, empire, and colonization. But later the pigs grew and looked different. They looked like consumerism, multinational corporations, and power-hungry oligarchs.

And I think our White church is at the part of the story where they can begin to see that this is not working and it isn't sustainable. They may be missing home. The Wolakota, right relationship, God's kingdom home, is still here. And many of our Christian communities of color have never left or wandered away.

We have been calling our church back into right relationship ever since they stepped out. We've been reminding them that we are all related. We've been reminding them to come home. However, too often this church hasn't seen or heard us calling because the White Jesus they worship has made them unable to see the face of Jesus reflected in the black and brown faces all around them, calling them home.

If and when our relatives in the Western White church begin their journey home, we need to decide how we will react. Will we be like the brother in the story who is angry and refuses to come into the house? Or will we be like the parent who welcomes them back with open arms?

Coming home can be painful, coming home can be hard, but coming home is healing.

A few weeks ago, we had several of our stolen children come home to our Rosebud Reservation from the Carlisle Boarding School over 140 years later. In our Lakota way, we believe that when someone dies, their deceased relatives and ancestors come for them and guide them on their journey home. These children's souls may have been taken to the spirit world, but their bodies never came home to rest in their own community.

As we prepared to welcome these children home, great care was taken to ensure this was all done in a good way. In Lakota, our word for child literally means sacred one. Each child was assigned a veteran, who was also a mom, who would act as a mother for each of these children. The mothers went to Carlisle and accompanied the box with the bones of the child for the entire ride home.

They were there to grieve for them and to ensure that these children were laid to rest in a good way. The entire way home from Carlisle, other tribal communities asked the caravan to stop and offered prayers, hospitality, and welcome to these children in the caravan.

One community lined the road far as you could see with mothers and children holding their favorite toys. As the children were headed home, another [community] lined the road with orange balloons, parents and children dressed in orange to remember and honor the children who never came home. And when the children finally arrived on Rosebud, the entire community, and then some. welcomed them home, and we buried them in the Lakota way.

These sacred ones who were ripped from the arms of their loving family, whose hair was cut, whose clothes were taken, were now welcomed back into the community in the Lakota language with Lakota songs that they hadn't been able to speak at their school.

Now, their bodies can rest next to their relatives in the arms of Mother Earth, and their souls can rest in the bosom of God with their ancestors.

And while the Western White church left home by choice, some of us left home by force. Some of us were taken away from home because of slavery, boarding schools, reservations, and addictions.

Some of us have left home because we've been rejected by the White church, which in error says we are not White enough, or man enough, able-bodied, pretty, or skinny enough, wealthy enough, straight, or cis-gendered enough, sane enough, or subdued enough to be a part of their heretical White Jesus kingdom. Some of us have been wandering in the wilderness trying to find our way back home.

Home is here. Home is here. Home is here and home is now. Home is where we walk toward wolakota.

I invite anyone who feels like you've lost your way by choice, or by force, or by hate to come home.

Come home to a God who welcomes. Come home to a God who forgives. Come to this place where we are all related, where we walk towards right relationship.

Come home to this place where you are sacred, where you are known, where you are seen, but most importantly, where you are loved.

Welcome home.

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Erin Weber-Johnson 4/16/24 Erin Weber-Johnson 4/16/24

Stewardship during an election

***Photo by*** ***Element5 Digital*** on ***Unsplash***

I have been asked by a number of people about some top tips for what to do this year with giving and the upcoming presidential election. There is concern that divisive politics may monopolize the attention of those in our communities. Or, alternatively, how our communities respond to the election may cause givers to rethink their life choices and keep their annual gifts. Recently a pastor asked me if I could send a top five list for ensuring success this election year.

I want to honor that question and also acknowledge the reality that many of us are tired, feeling the relentless weight of holding too much. The truth is we often look for Top 5 Lists because we need quick help and support. Top 5 Lists offer us the promise of easy to digest information and easy to implement action steps.

Each of us deeply desires to know how to eat right, lose weight, save enough for our retirement, and raise our children. We want to know how to have/be enough. Yet, most “How to” lists are full of things we already know. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve read a magazine headline promising to change my life in three easy steps only to be disappointed when I already knew the answers. There is no silver bullet, no step-by-step process, to the perfect life.

So it is with stewardship. Really, what we need is not “How to raise money positively/effectively,” but to ask what is keeping us from living into stewardship as a holistic ministry while reflecting the context of the moment. I bet the answers to that list would be considerable!

Here is what we know about giving and the upcoming election. In the 2016 presidential election, I made a hypothesis about how the election would impact giving to congregations. I thought it would be congregations that aligned themselves with one presidential candidate or another that would see increases in giving as advocacy and “rage” giving were at a high.

However, the giving data and statistics that would emerge months and years later would show my hypothesis was wrong. Giving was high in congregations that mostly identified as one political party or another. And yet, it was also high in a number of churches considered purple or with a mixed set of views within the congregations.

Instead of my faulty hypothesis, giving was propelled in congregations that clearly reflected what was happening outside their church doors, made a connection between where people were with their giving and how their giving to the church would be meaningful given that moment in the nation’s history, and invited others to be part of the work.

What this demonstrated to me was there were pastoral needs felt by a congregation and giving became an opportunity to meet people where they were. The work of stewardship, in all its wholeness, was not about meeting a budget so the ministry could take place. Rather, stewardship was and is a contextual ministry, one that asks what are the needs of those in our congregation and how do we shape our ministry accordingly.

The work of stewardship leaders is the work of creating connective tissue between the motivations of givers in the wake of emerging national issues and concerns, and a life-giving invitation to explore how their giving can bring healing and repair in the world.

2024 began with some people concerned about the outcome of the presidential election in the United States this year. Regardless of the outcome, we as a country have seen the fallout and experienced the painful divisions from recent presidential elections.

And so, unpacking what stewardship means this year will be important. Stewardship is so much more than a fall drive to meet the regular operating costs of a congregation.

When we think about gifts, there has been a long-held focus in the church on the 3 T’s: time, talent and treasure. I believe initially the idea of holistic stewardship was amorphous, too hard to wrap our minds around. Instead, leaders offered tangible things that could be offered to God. However, our bodies, and souls are not limited to just these three T. We are more than the time we give, our skills and expertise, more than the money we provide. We are flesh and blood bodies. Our minds and souls, connected in profound ways, were created by the same divine power that made the earth and the heavens and called it good.

Stewardship is not limited to these three components. It includes the totality of our beings. In the ministry of stewardship, we bring our whole selves to the Divine.

What does stewardship of our bodies, our minds, our souls look like this year with the election?

Our family has begun having conversations about our values. What does God call us to be and to do the next day after the election? Identifying our values now allows our family to move beyond places that may feel out of our control, to plan proactively who we will be on Day One.

Once our values are identified, we articulate who the people are that may be most impacted by the election. How might God call us to invite, to manage, to give to and to thank in the midst of that reality?

In this season of the election, I invite you to consider stewardship in its totality, to do the work of connecting others' needs to the abiding values of your faith community, and to live in the hope that through giving of our whole selves, we can work for repair of the world.

Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Shin Maeng 4/11/24 Shin Maeng 4/11/24

Walk With Me

Jesus offers us all healing. We all need healing. And I offer you this peace to walk with Jesus. Maybe the question is, can I trust Jesus to walk with me? Will my community walk with me, with my pain?

The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of Shin Maeng’s talk from our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

Shin creates because God has invited him to create and share beauty, brokenness, and redemption; and invites all to be a part of the beautiful, epic story of God and his creation. Shin creates in order to bring a deep awareness of the movement of God in our lives on a daily basis. Shin creates among those who daily walk with the experiences of brokenness, joy, scars, peace, loss, adventure, contemplation, redemption, and love.

Hello, my name is Shin, and I hope you're enjoying this conference. There have been many terrible things that have happened over the past few years. I guess it's been more than that.

However, this past year was difficult in many ways. Black lives not giving the reverence required to thrive and be. Anti-Asian hate boiling over into violence, and Asians becoming COVID blaming targets. Brown brothers and sisters being peddled as unwanted and unclean in our social systems. White nationalistic dogma distorting and corrupting the values of a man from Palestine. He was a brown, unclean, and unwanted target. A man we call Jesus.

While the world has been going through a lot of these tragic events, I live in Scotland, in one of the most beautiful and friendliest places on earth. I love it here. Also, we are the only Asian American family in our town. However, the tensions of the world still strike me and wound me.

It was hard for my friends, my British friends. They all wanted to help but didn't know how to help whilst in a global pandemic. I was getting frustrated with myself because I didn't even know what would help. I just kept on feeling I didn't want to emotionally vomit on my friends who are intentionally wanting to help. Also, I didn't want to lash out in anger towards my friends. I didn't want to say, you should have known, or this, this, and that.

I didn't have that many people to talk to relate a lot of things. And so my wife and I mourned a lot.

My mother-in-law was gifted this Korean illustrated Bible. I've seen many things. It is one of the most beautiful illustrations I've laid eyes on.

Jesus was always dressed as a traditional Korean gentleman. One with a round top hat, indicating his royal lineage. Jesus’s gestures are always gentle and elegant.

Then I remembered this phrase: Walk with me. His response is so gentle. Jesus, in all of the Gospels, invites people to walk with him, to come and see, to see and hear and believe.

To believe that in this broken world, the Son of Man is and was walking with us. I invited my British friends to walk with me, just like my journey of racial reconciliation. My black brothers and sisters walked with me to come and see, and see and hear and believe that in the midst of the darkness, Jesus's redemption still shines.

As Western culture folks, we want answers and deliverables. We want it now, just like our Amazon Prime deliveries. This instant gratification is not a healthy obsession. Just like it's not good for a person to just run a marathon. It takes training. We walk first. We might jog. We might need a massage. An ice bath. We just keep on walking.

I drew this piece as a reminder to walk with Jesus, and with our brothers and sisters. Not everyone knows your story, and may they walk with you in that. Even Jesus says in Matthew 13:15:

“For the people's hearts have become calloused. They hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise, they might have seen with their eyes, heard with their ears, understood with their hearts, and turned and I would heal them.”

Jesus loves us even in our messiness. He holds our pain and doesn't erase it. He waits with us, and he walks with us. We can't do this alone. Jesus knows our pain and struggle. He is gentle and kind. He is not like anyone else we know. He is inviting you to heal and also inviting you to participate in his story.

For those who know the suffering of others, humbly walk with them. Hear their stories, walk with them just as Jesus walks among you. This is an invitation to holy ground. Come and see. Hear what Jesus is moving in our hearts.

May we know that Jesus walks with us.

May the Holy Spirit guide us to people to walk with and bless us.

May we walk, hear, see, heal, believe, and seek His kingdom come, His will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

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SHIN MAENG

Shin Maeng resides in St. Andrews Scotland. He grew up in Bridgewater, NJ, New Haven, CT and Cambridge, MA. He is married to Sarah and has a wee lass. Shin loves to create on his iPad and also loves to get his hands dirty. He has a Masters of Urban Leadership from GCTS Boston. Music, cities, stories, Marvel comics, dancing, most things on YouTube, food, justice and the movement of God's hand are a few things that inspire Shin's hands to create.

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Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Ryan Panzer 4/9/24 Ryan Panzer 4/9/24

When We Crowdsource the Church: The Challenge of Digital Recommendations

***Photo by*** ***Rodion Kutsaiev*** on ***Unsplash***

I recently stumbled upon a social media post from an area parent. She was looking to take her young children to church for the first time, and needed recommendations. She wanted a church that was welcoming, inclusive, and ostensibly non-denominational (though I wonder if she was actually looking for a non-partisan congregation). Dozens of other area parents responded to the post. Most recommended the area megachurch for its great kids programming. Some suggested the up and coming congregation that may soon become a megachurch. Only one person suggested a Mainline Protestant church with liturgical worship. Nobody recommended a church because it provided an encounter with the living God, a taste of divine grace, or an experience with the presence of Christ. This is unsurprising, as social media is poorly suited for such depths. Taken together, these comments revealed what social media users prioritize when discussing our church-going: amenities, programming, and not too much in the way of commitment or formality.

Crowdsourcing is a digital and public form of word-of-mouth recommendation. When we crowdsource a decision, whether we are looking for a restaurant recommendation or a realtor, we are asking the public web for opinions. There is certainly some wisdom built into crowdsourced decision making. We crowdsource decisions for the same reason that pollsters seek large, representative samples. Obtaining a large quantity of opinions helps us to see certain trends: which options are most popular, which choices are easiest, which offerings are the least controversial. We also crowdsource for the same reason we check online reviews. It’s a fast method of consideration, far quicker than face to face or phone conversation. This explains why it’s such a popular form of consideration in our social media landscape, why so many young parents rely on digital opinions to make decisions for their families. The efficiency of crowdsourced decision making explains why some have crowdsourced their church affiliation. Why sort through the abstraction of theological commitments and doctrine when word of mouth recommendations are a click away?

Whether through social media, or increasingly, through AI chatbots, we are crowdsourcing our church-going, leaving decisions about church attendance and membership to the wisdom of our connections (or the algorithms of ChatGPT). As AI systems collect more of our personal data, they will become more confident in their ability to prescribe a church home. Ironically, at last glance, Google’s AI-powered Gemini chatbot only seemed capable of recommending Mormon churches to my family. One wonders about the possible LDS affiliations among Google’s software engineers.

Despite Google Gemini’s inability to recommend more than one denomination for my family, parents will continue to turn to AI for their church-shopping. And it will do so by scouring the web for reviews, social media posts, and church websites. So unless one asks a chatbot for a liturgical, mainline Protestant congregation, we might expect an algorithm’s recommendations to mirror those of parents on social media. Chatbots, as it turns out, are unsure what to do with theological or doctrinal nuance.

I worry about the crowdsourcing of the church in a culture enveloped by AI. In his book “The Innovative Church: How Leaders and Their Congregations Can Adapt in an Ever-Changing World,” Scott Cormode of Fuller Theological Seminary invites congregations to faithfully innovate. He urges church leaders to adapt for the future by utilizing spiritual practices to make “spiritual sense” of the “longings and losses” and the community. This is a wise approach for a time of rapid change. Yet I wonder if any church leader will take such a thoughtful approach when chatbots and social media users alike prefer programming, popularity, and relevance instead of spiritual wisdom. Our culture’s preference for crowdsourcing therefore contests wise and faithful practices of innovation.

A church leader might respond to this challenge by enhancing their online reputation. They could source online reviews and step up their web development. They could fill their social feeds with images and videos of all their church had to offer. By doing all of this, they might make it more likely that a chatbot - or a parent on social media - would suggest them during a crowdsourced conversation. But this approach seems contrary to the church’s call to proclaim the Word and administer the sacraments. Does building up one’s digital relevance make God any more present in the congregation? Does a popularity amongst the chatbots make our congregations any wiser or more discerning?

Perhaps the best thing for a church leader to do amidst this tension is not to do more but to do less, not to speed up but to intentionally slow down: to commit to returning to the spiritual practices of prayer, discernment, and contemplation. As Brian McLaren teaches, “Spiritual practices are ways of becoming awake and staying awake to God. Through these practices, we might inspire a few in our community to invite their connections. Such a recommendation would result not from our relevance or vibrancy - but because these practices facilitated an encounter with a gracious God. When we create the space and practices for such encounters, we are unlikely to grow our congregations through crowdsourced recommendations. But we will remain rooted in our mission in an ever-changing world. Such rootedness is crucial as AI pushes us deeper into technological disruption.

Ryan Panzer

Ryan Panzer is the author of “Grace and Gigabytes: Being Church in a Tech-Shaped Culture” (Fortress Press, 2020) and "The Holy and the Hybrid: Navigating the Church's Digital Reformation" (Fortress Press, 2022). Ryan has spent his career in the worlds of church leadership and technology. He received his M.A. from Luther Seminary while simultaneously working for Google. Ryan serves as a learning and leadership development professional in the technology industry and as a speaker and writer on digital technology in the church. Ryan also serves as the Resident Theologian at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Madison, WI. For more writings and resources, visit www.ryanpanzer.com.

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Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Jared E. Alcantara 3/28/24 Jared E. Alcantara 3/28/24

Without our wound, where would our power be?

Jared E. Alcantara is Professor of Preaching at Truett Seminary at Baylor University. He was born and raised in New Jersey and came to faith in Christ at the age of 14. He is half Latino, Honduran, and half white and, in 2022, he mentione that, in an age marked by loss, there are plenty of reasons for us to lament, but there are not nearly enough lamenting groups to go around. Let's revisit his talk from Enfleshing Witness 2022.

The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of Jared E. Alcantara’s talk from our 2022 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

Jared E. Alcantara is Professor of Preaching at Truett Seminary at Baylor University. He was born and raised in New Jersey and came to faith in Christ at the age of 14. He is half Latino, Honduran, and half white. An ordained Baptist minister, he has served as a youth pastor, associate pastor, and teaching pastor in Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, and New Jersey.

Before coming to Truett, from 2014 to 2018, he served as an associate professor of homiletics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. Dr. Alcantara is passionate about equipping students to preach God's word in ways that are faithful, effective, clear, and inspiring. He also plays piano, enjoys disc golf, and is a rabid Philadelphia Eagles fan, which I try really hard not to hold against him.
He lives in the Waco area with his wife, Jennifer, and their three daughters.

Greetings, everyone.

My name is Jared Alcantara, and I teach preaching at Baylor University's Truett Theological Seminary. Normally, I want to rush to express gratitude to all manner of people, so I'll try to keep this part short, just because our time together is short.

So thank you to the organizers of Enfleshing Witness for extending this gracious invitation to me. Thank you, participants, for the ways that you serve in and alongside the Church, the church for which Jesus died. And thank you for the gift of your attention as well, which I do not take for granted. Our attention is a gift that we bestow on one another rather than a right or a demand that we should expect. Thank you.

In our brief time together, I'd like to draw on an image, an idea, and a scene. Let me start with the image. This is Paul Bartholomew's sculpture, “Lamenting Group.” Here it is from another angle. Perhaps you see yourself in it somewhere. Now there are many things that I could say about this image, but I'll stick to just one.

In an age marked by loss, there are plenty of reasons for us to lament, but not nearly enough lamenting groups to go around.

You don't need me to tell you that our world has seen better days. There's battles in our government, and battles on social media, and battles at the border, and battles for democracy itself.

The losses pile up. Losses from natural disasters, and losses to human rights, and losses from the war in Ukraine, and losses to human life on account of the havoc that's been wrought by COVID 19. You don't need me to tell you that our churches have seen better days. Denominations are splitting, are in danger of such. Cases of clergy abuse harm and even destroy our public witness. Some churches are struggling with membership losses and decline. And other churches sound way too much like psychophants of the state, rather than voices crying in the wilderness. There are plenty of reasons to lament. Not nearly enough lamenting groups to go around.

In light of these truths, these truths about our world, Let me also introduce an idea or consider an idea together with you. And I'll call on Gardner C. Taylor, the great poet laureate of preaching, civil rights leader, and advocate in New York City. Here's what Taylor says:

“Any authenticity that we're going to have as persons of faith, and any authority that we're going to have as witnesses to the gospel of Jesus Christ, will become or will come because of our exposure to bruises and scars. There is no other way to authenticity.”

What if our bruises and our scars are somehow conduits of gospel hope in the world? What if others can know through our bruises and scars that there is a God before whom they can bring their bruises and scars? So often we conclude wrongly that we must insulate ourselves or protect ourselves from pain.

So we put on that famous Sunday morning smile. We insist that it's spring rather than winter in our souls. We project a false self rather than who we are. We avoid knowing and being known by others. You know of that which I speak. Now, if you insulate yourself and you protect yourself from pain, then you may go through life with fewer bumps and bruises, but will you truly live?

Moreover, will you be able to reach others through authentic and enfleshed witness?

And now we come at the last to a scene. A scene. Jesus goes to the pool of Bethesda. Some of you have Bethsata. He encounters a man lying on a mat, and he heals him on a Sabbath, which means that he gets into all kinds of trouble.

Now, a tradition developed around this text, which is reflected in the fact that verse four does not appear in many of our Bibles.

Tradition was that an angel would come and trouble the waters or stir up the waters and those who were ill would rush in, in order to be healed. It's depicted right here in this scene, Robert Batesman's, “The Angel That Troubled The Waters.”

Thornton Wilder also wrote a play based on the tradition.

Now two men stand beside large stone steps leading down to a pool. Their names are Newcomer and Mistaken Invalid. Others join them at the water's edge, the sick, the blind, those who are ill. And hope feels like it's giving way to hopelessness, despair, entering into this painful scene, the first scene in Wilder's play.

But suddenly, as so often happens in scripture and in life, an angel appears.

Hope breaks into an impossible situation.

There, on the top step, the angel comes, and Mistaken Invalid cannot contain his excitement, for he's seen hundreds of people healed there at the pool by the angel. “I shall be next,” he exclaims.

Newcomer, who is a physician by trade, he comes to the pool less often. He comes from his bustling clinic in the city, but his injuries, his wounds, are less dire than those of his friends, less apparent and obvious to others. Nevertheless, he comes anyway, hoping to be healed, just like his friends, hoping against hope that things will change. He offers a fervent prayer for healing.

The angel responds in a way that he does not expect. The angel says, “Draw back physician. This moment is not for you, healing is not for you. For without your wound, where would your power be? The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living.”

“In love's service, only the wounded soldiers can serve,” the angel says. This is the beautiful and awful thread that runs throughout the scriptures and throughout our lives. There is no rainbow without a flood, no burning bush without the desert, no exodus without bondage, no return without exile. There is no birth of Jesus without the childbirth of Jesus.

There is no Resurrection Sunday without first passing through Good Friday. Pain and loss do not need to put a stop to our ministries. Indeed, they can authorize and even galvanize our ministry. For in love's service, only the wounded soldiers can serve. You see, as the Scriptures declare, God is especially good at turning our deserts into pools, our parched lands into springs.

Yes, the water tastes bitter to us at the time, but as an act of mercy, God transforms the water into wine in the lives of those to whom we minister. I'll put it another way:

Without our wound, where would our power be?

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DR. JARED ALCÁNTARA

Jared E. Alcántara is Professor of Preaching and holder of the Paul W. Powell Endowed Chair in Preaching at Truett Seminary at Baylor University. He was born and raised in New Jersey and came to faith in Christ at the age of fourteen. He is half-Latino (Honduran) and half-White. An ordained Baptist minister, he has served as a youth pastor, associate pastor, and teaching pastor in Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, and New Jersey. Before coming to Truett, from 2014-2018, he served as an associate professor of homiletics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.
Dr. Alcántara is passionate about equipping students to preach God’s Word in ways that are faithful, effective, clear, creative, and inspiring. He also plays piano, enjoys disc golf, and is a rabid Philadelphia Eagles fan. He lives in the Waco area with his wife, Jennifer, and their three daughters.

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Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Char Cox 3/26/24 Char Cox 3/26/24

Nurturing Children in the Faith

Rev. Dr. Char Cox fondly reflects on her Sunday School experience in this poem.

***Photo by*** ***Ben White*** on ***Unsplash***

I can still smell
the sweet musty scent
of the church basement
where I went to Sunday School
as a child.

I can still see the
white plastic, church-light-coin-box
in which we deposited our pennies
on the Sundays
closest to our birthdays –
one penny for each year of our age.

I can still hear the old upright piano,
slightly out of tune,
and so familiar
as we sang our Opening songs
every Sunday –
He Leadeth Me,
O God our Help in Ages Past,
Savior Like a Shepherd Lead Us.

I can still see the little chairs
on which we sat,
the tables around which we gathered,
the steps that we climbed to the sanctuary,
and the clusters of children and adults
throughout the one big room,
learning Bible stories
and Luther’s Small Catechism,
and that there are people of faith
who love you
and care about you
and who want the best for you in life
and want you to know
and trust
and believe
more than anything else in the world
that God loves you
as God’s own beloved child –
full stop.
No exceptions.

And I can still see Eunice.
Eunice was my Kindergarten Sunday School teacher.
Eunice played the guitar
and she sang songs
and she wore white fashion boots
and smiled a lot
and she taught us about Jesus.

I remember one Sunday
in particular.
It was a day that we left the basement
for Sunday school.
We didn’t have to sit
on the little wooden chairs that day.
We didn’t have to sit still
for the whole hour that day.
Instead,
Eunice led us up the steps
that came in the back of the church,
and we went up the aisle
and got to sit on the floor
inside the altar rail.
We never got to go
inside the altar rail –
But that day we did.
And Eunice told us
to look up –
Look up at the picture that
was above the white and gold-trimmed altar.
Look up,
She said.
What do you see?
She asked,
when you look at the picture?

I was a shy five-year-old,
so I kept my thoughts to myself,
But someone said what I was thinking.
A man sinking in the water.
Someone else said,
Jesus standing on the water.
Someone else said,
Jesus pulling the sinking man up.

And Eunice smiled and nodded.

After she heard
everything we had to say about the picture –
the picture of Peter sinking
in the water
and Jesus holding on for dear life –
Eunice asked us
if we knew what the name of our Church was.
I thought it was a trick question
because our church had two names.
And somebody said “Rosehill.”
Somebody else said, “Emmanuel.”
And Eunice told us
that both were right.
Our church was
Emmanuel Lutheran Church of Rosehill Township.
And then she said,
Today I want to talk to you about
Emmanuel.
She asked us if any of us
knew what “Emmanuel” meant.
When we all shook our heads,
She said,
Emmanuel means “God with us.”
It is one of the names of Jesus.
She had us say Emmanuel
with her several times,
And then she told us to
look up at the picture above the altar again.
Look up.

As we did so,
Eunice told us the story of Peter,
stepping out of the boat,
and trying to walk toward Jesus
on the water.
She told us
how he started to sink
and how Jesus reached out to save him.
She told us
that there would be times in our lives
when we would feel like Peter,
when we would feel like we were sinking,
but to always remember
that Jesus is always with us,
that Jesus will always reach out to help us,
to pull us up to his safe arms.
She told us
to always remember
that whatever happened to us –
whatever we experienced –
good or bad –
happy or sad –
Jesus would always be with us –
just like Jesus was with Peter
that day on the water.

I can still see Eunice –
the passion in her eyes,
the smile on her face,
the joy in her voice
as she told us about Emmanuel –
God who is always with us.

I have frequently thought
about that day
over the years –
how formative it was,
how it has stuck with me,
how often I return to it,
and how,
when I close my eyes,
I can still see that picture
that was above
that old church altar –
and if I let myself
imagine it –
I can feel the arms of Jesus
reaching out
in both gentleness and power
to hold onto me,
especially when life is hard.

Eunice
is in her eighties now,
and I am fortunate
that I still have a relationship
with this one who taught
me the faith
so many years ago.
In many ways,
I am still a Kindergartener
and she is still my teacher.
Eunice continues to embrace life,
to be full of laughter,
love, and joy,
still singing about Jesus,
still reminding me
that more than anything else in the world,
Jesus is always with me.
God loves me.
as God’s own beloved child.
full stop.
No exceptions.

Several years ago
when my wife and I
were getting married,
there were some
in our small, rural community
who were less than kind,
and Eunice sent us a card
and to let us know
how much she loved us both,
to congratulate us,
to speak a word
of acceptance,
love,
and grace.
It was a holy,
life-giving,
sacramental gesture.

Every once in a while,
we will get a letter in the mail
with a clipping
from the newspaper,
or rainbow bracelets,
or a simply profound word of kindness,
And when those missives come –
We got one such letter last week,
prompting me to write this reflection –
it is as if I am five years-old again,
sitting at the foot of that old wooden altar,
staring up at Peter sinking in the water –
Jesus holding on for dear life –
and hearing again
and anew –
Jesus is always with you –

And I am reminded
how utterly important it is
to keep on speaking
words of
acceptance,
grace,
and love
into people’s lives.
No one can ever hear too many times,
Jesus is always with you.
No one can hear too many times
God loves you.
No one can hear too many times
You are God’s own beloved child.
Full stop.
No exceptions.

And so, dear readers,
If you are a Eunice
in other people’s lives,
thanks be to God for you.

If you need a Eunice
in your life today,
I’ve got a word for you:
Jesus is always with you.
God loves you
as God’s own beloved child –
full stop.
No exceptions.

And finally,
thank God
for sweet, musty church basements
and the messages of grace
that get planted there.

Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Dr. Valerie Bridgeman 3/20/24 Dr. Valerie Bridgeman 3/20/24

I Am Okay

The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of Rev Dr. Valerie Bridgeman’s talk from our 2022 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

Rev. Dr. Valerie Bridgman is the founder and president of Women Preach, and she serves as Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. Dr. Bridgman is a graduate of Trinity University, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and Baylor University. Dr. Bridgman has written several published works and has edited and contributed to the Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures From Africa and the African Diaspora.

Hello, everyone. I'm glad to be able to speak to you. Hear these words from the Common English Bible Translation from 2 Kings 4:8-37. It's a long reading, but it's worth it:

One day, Elisha went to Shunem. A rich woman lived there. She urged him to eat something. So whenever he passed by, he would stop in to eat some food.

She said to her husband, “Look, I know that he is a holy man of God and he passes by regularly. Let's make a small room on the roof. Let's set up a bed or table, a chair and a lamp for him there. Then when he comes to us, he can stay there.”

So one day Elisha came there, headed to the room on the roof and lay down.

He said to his servant Gehazi, “Call the Shunammite woman.” Gehazi called her and she stood before him. Elisha then said to Gehazi, “Say to her,’ Look, you've done all, gone to all this trouble for us. What can I do for you? Is there anything I can say to you on behalf to the king or to the commander of the army?’”

And she said, “I am content to live at home with my own people.” Elisha asked, “So what can be done for her?” Gehazi said, “Well, she doesn't have a son and her husband is old.” Elisha said, “Call her.” So Gehazi called her and she stood at the door. Elisha said, “About this time next year you will be holding a son in your arms.” And she said, “No, man of God, sir, don't lie to your servant.” But the woman conceived and gave birth to a son at about that time the next year, this was what Elisha had promised her.

The child grew up. One day he ran to his father who was with the harvest workers.
He said to his father, “Oh, my head, my head.” The father said to a young man, “Carry him to his mother.” So he picked up the boy and brought him to his mother. The boy sat on her lap until noon. Then he died.

She went up and laid him down on the bed for the man of God. Then she went out and closed the door. She called her husband and said, “Send me one of the young men and one of the donkeys, so that I can hurry to the man of God and come back.” Her husband said, “Why are you going to him today? It's not a new moon or Sabbath.”

She said, “Don't worry about it.” She saddled the donkey, said to the young servant, “Drive the donkey hard, don't let me slow down unless I tell you.” So she went off and came to the man of God at Mount Carmel. As soon as the man of God saw her from a distance, he said to Gehazi, his servant, “Look, it's the Shunammite woman. Run out to meet her and ask her, are things okay with you, your husband and your child?”

She said, “Things are okay.” When she got to the man of God at the mountain, she grabbed his feet. Gehazi came to push her away. But the man of God said, “Leave her alone. She's distraught. But the Lord has hidden the reason from me and hasn't told me why.”

She said, “Did I ask you for a son, sir? Didn't I say, don't raise my hopes.” Elisha said to Gehazi, “Get ready, take my staff, and go. If you encounter anyone, don't stop to greet them. If anyone greets you don't reply, put my staff on the boy's face.” But the boy's mother said, “I swear by my life and by the Lord's life, I won't leave you.”

So Elisha got up and followed her. Gehazi went on ahead of them. He set the staff on the young boy's face, but there was no sound or response. So he went back to meet Elisha and said, “The boy didn't wake up.” Elisha came to the house and saw the boy laying dead on his bed. He went in and closed the door behind the two of them.

Then he prayed to the Lord. He got up on the bed and he lay on top of the child putting his mouth on the boy's mouth, his eyes on the boy's eyes, his hands on the boy's hand and as he bent over him the boy’s skin grew warm. Then Elisha got up and paced back and forth in the house. Once again, he got up on the bed and bent over the boy, at which point the boy sneezed seven times and opened his eyes.

Elisha called Gehazi and said, “Call the Shunammite woman.” Gehazi called her, and she came to Elisha. He said, “Pick up your son.” She came and fell at his feet, face down on the ground. She picked up her son and left.

So ends this reading.

I don't know if you've ever listened to that entire story, but let me say this: As a black woman from the deep south of the USA, I know what it's like to grieve and to want for something that doesn't seem like you can have it. She was vulnerable in the patriarchal society of her time. If her husband who was older than her were to die, and she did not have a son, particularly a son, to take care of her she would be a widow in the midst of this country and vulnerable, for who would take care of her?

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Rev. Dr. Valerie Bridgeman

**Rev. Dr. Valerie Bridgeman** is the Founder and President of WomanPreach!, Inc., the premiere non-profit organization that brings preachers into full prophetic voice around issues of equity and justice both in the pulpit and in the public arena. Her mission is to produce a network of preaching women and men who will use their voice in service to the gospel of Jesus Christ, especially as it relates to Womanist/Feminist concerns of equity and justice.
She serves as Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. She also is Associate Professor of Homiletics and Hebrew Bible since 2015, after having served as Visiting Professor for a year and a half.
Dr. Bridgeman is a graduate of Trinity University with a double major in Communication and Religion. She holds a Master of Divinity degree from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, where she won the Charles L. King Excellence in Preaching Award for graduating seniors. She pursued further studies at Baylor University, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Biblical Studies with a concentration in Hebrew Bible.
Dr. Bridgeman has written several published works which include "Homiletics and Biblical Interpretation," in *The Oxford Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation* (2016), "A Perspective on the David Narratives (Rizpah)" and "A Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus (Syrophoenician Woman/Mark 7:24-30)" in *Global Perspectives on the Bible* (Prentice Hall, 2011). She has edited and contributed to *The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora* (Fortress Press, 2009) with “Jonah” and “Nahum,” and co-edited *Those Preaching Women: A Multi-Cultural Collection* (Judson Press, 2008).

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Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Church Anew 3/19/24 Church Anew 3/19/24

In This Crucial Election Year What Will Your Community Do on Day One?

On Day One of the next administration (and in whatever follows), communities of faith must continue the work being God’s people. Regardless of whether you see the outcome you desire or not, the work will need to go on. You’ll either be working in alignment with those you trust, or you’ll be in the resistance against those you do not trust. Either way, there will be work to do.

By ERIN WEBER-JOHNSON and REV. THIA REGGIO

***Photo by*** ***Element5*** ***Digital***

“As for you, you will keep my covenant, you and your offspring throughout the generations.”
—Genesis 17:9

We, the people of the Abrahamic traditions, are keepers of God’s covenant. That is our charge, established millennia ago and carried on from generation to generation into the present age. It is a charge that exists both within and outside of human history.

In the moment in which we are living, with the forces of greed, fear-mongering, and power-hungriness that have always been at work in the world now amplified by media and transmitted around the world with lightning speed, it’s easy to lose sight of the longer view that connects us across the ages to our ancestors and to generations yet to come.

We are trained to focus on much shorter timelines: 24-hour news cycles, crises that hold our attention for a few weeks at a time before they’re subsumed by the next crisis, political rhetoric punctuated by election year trends.

In 2024, the U.S. is anticipating a November presidential election in which it’s not an exaggeration to say that Americans face a choice which may well determine the future of our democracy, with impacts that will be felt around the globe. With such high stakes, it’s easy to be hyper-focused on securing the outcome you believe will be the right one.

As people of faith, as bearers of God’s ancient covenant, we cannot allow our vision to be so exclusively near-sighted. We must recalibrate our focus to include a much longer horizon. We must understand that the work of God’s justice does not begin and end with an election cycle. Vote, yes. Work for the near-term outcome you desire. But remember that your commitment to keep God’s covenant will continue when the election results are in.

Rather than succumbing to a sense of overwhelm or becoming paralyzed by dread, the time is now to reflect on your values and priorities and to discern where your energies need to be focused. In addition, this is a moment to consider what groups of people may be impacted depending on the outcome. As you consider this, you can think how your strategies can show care in the days, weeks, and years to follow.

As soon as you’re able, here are steps you can take:

Gather as a community and envision together the world as you believe God desires it to be based on scripture, your tradition, and your core values.
Identify 1-3 priorities where your community can focus sufficient energy.
Call leaders to create a plan of action to support these priorities in light of each potential outcome.
Organize people to start laying the groundwork to bring the plans to life.
Prepare for a new phase of work to begin on Day One of the next administration, adapted for whichever outcome occurs.

Creating a Day One Strategy gives people a sense of agency. There are things that can be done. By allowing us to plan now, this gives us collective power.

Remember, you are not alone. God is with you. God’s promises have been active since before our history began. Powers and principalities have risen and fallen many times in God’s presence and the covenant still stands. So must we stand in God’s promise to work toward the world of peace with justice that God is calling into being—whether we live in an age that reflects those values or obscures them, God’s promise will prevail.

Rev. Thia Reggio

Rev. Thia Reggio, collaborator, seasoned pastor, worship leader, community organizer, disaster response coordinator, career discernment counselor, strategist, writer, simplification consultant, and mother of three. Thia is at her most joyful in an eclectic environment. Connecting and communicating varied aspects of life—like those between a plant pushing up through the soil and the challenges of life in a busy city, between ancient battles and psycho-social structures in organizations, between children learning a language and adults facing retirement, this is what Thia finds life-giving.
After more than twenty years as a process and communications consultant to Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, Thia heeded the call to seminary and the ministry, graduating from Union Seminary with a Master of Divinity in 2012 and a Master of Sacred Theology in Christianity in a Multi-Religious Context in 2013. Thia currently serves as pastor of The Second Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, and on the Advisory Board of the Center for Earth Ethics.

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Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Jeff Chu 3/14/24 Jeff Chu 3/14/24

I lift my eyes to the hills

Jeff Chu wears several hats, including writer, reporter, and editor. He's also the co curator and co-host with Sarah Bessie of Evolving Faith. He's an occasional preacher. Some days, Jeff says he believes in God. Other days, he wants to believe in God.

Let’s revisit Chu’s talk from our 2022 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of Jeff Chu’s talk from our 2022 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

Jeff Chu wears several hats, including writer, reporter, and editor. He's also the co curator and co-host with Sarah Bessie of Evolving Faith. He's an occasional preacher. He's also a teacher in residence at Cross Point Church in North Carolina. He's an ordinand in the Reformed Church in America. He's a cook, gardener, and dog walker to Fozzie in Michigan, where he lives with his husband.

Some days, Jeff says he believes in God. Other days, he wants to believe in God.

I lift my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from?

My first home in scripture was Psalm 1:21. This was the psalm that my grandmother taught me in Cantonese when I was a child. This was also the psalm that went with her when she and my grandfather were forced onto the refugee road during World War II, the psalm that crossed an ocean with them to a new country years later.

The psalm that stayed lodged in my heart as I veered off the straight Baptist path that they and my parents had marked out for me, and the psalm that accompanied me even as I left the Church. The Church that couldn't be my home because I wasn't straight, the Church that didn't want me on equal terms because of this skin and these eyes and this hair, the Church that still isn't sure what to do with me.

I lift my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from?

I don't know that my grandmother meant for this psalm to meet me in the fullness of my intersecting identities. In my youth, I didn't know enough to be honest about them to myself, let alone to her.

I do know that these ancient lines had met her in the fullness of her identities: a lone daughter in a family with eight boys in a patriarchal culture, an educated pastor's wife who taught Bible in her own right, a deacon, a poor person, an immigrant.

Perhaps she'd bargained, just as she had taught me to stash away a few twenties in case of emergency, that tucking a few lines of biblical poetry in my heart might just come in handy someday.

I lift my eyes to the hills, where does my help come from?

The old Sunday school psalm about the foolish man building his house on the sand wasn't that wrong after all. What if, in a world that idolizes certainties and fundamentalisms, (progressive or conservative) with their right opinions, what if they're finally revealed to be the sham building materials and shaky foundations that they've always been? What if the human welcome that you wish for, and then the human affirmation when that mere welcome doesn't satisfy, and then the human celebration when affirmation seems paltry, what if they prove insufficient? After all, it's still human, and what your soul longs for is the divine.

What if it's no lasting shelter? No ultimate comfort because what your heart craves, what your heart was made for, is to be loved above all by a God who isn't fickle like people are.

I lift my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from?

My help comes from the one who made heaven and earth. I might once have told you that my help, my sense of home, came from the one who made me fried rice. My grandma's battered old wok produced the most marvelous version, always with extra scallions, both because I love them and because the Chinese word for scallion is homophonous with the first character in the word for intelligence, and my people, even the Christians, are superstitious like that.

The crust got crispy. Egg and soy and sesame oil hugging each grain of rice much as my grandmother seemed to embrace me each time I ate the dish. But then my grandmother died, or as she would have said, she went home to her lord. Did she? I want to think so. I want to believe that before the one who made me fried rice, there was the one who made rice itself. Who created rice to begin with.

My help comes from the one who made heaven and earth. In a world that can feel so far from home, I lift my eyes to the hills, searching the horizon, seeking divine fingerprints in the ragged silhouette of those hills, against the heavens and in the tree line. In the clouds as they race against the sky, and in the stars as day turns to night. God is there, everywhere, in my own scallions that I grew the way my grandmother taught me, in the sesame and the soy that sing of faraway lands, in my own fried rice, cooked the way I learned from her.

I take a deep breath, smell the damp earth and the bright alliums. And the fragrant rice, and slowly I stumble back into the embrace of the one who makes home for all who struggle to find it.

My help comes from the one who made heaven and earth. Rooted and grounded in God's ever present love, I, a Hakka son, whose tribe carries the nomad's legacy because our people's name literally means guest family, I, the child of the immigrant, make home nowhere and everywhere.

Once a wise teacher told me that she creates her own belonging wherever she goes, never expecting it to be offered by any other human, always trusting in the presence of home wherever her body happens to be.

My help comes from the one who made heaven and earth. My help, but also our help, right? We recited this hymn in the little congregation in my grandparents living room, but generations of ancestors before us also sang this psalm. Perhaps there, in the continuity of the centuries, in the echoes of the ages, in the company of the great congregation of sinners and saints, I can find my home and make it for someone else.

My help is not mine alone. nor is home to be mine alone. I can make enough fried rice to share. We're invited to borrow hope, and maybe even home, and to lend it to one another too.

In the name of that one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator mothering one who longs to collect her chicks under her wings and companion to us all.

Amen.

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Jeff Chu

I wear several different hats to cover my coarse Chinese hair, which requires too much product to tame:
Writer, reporter, editor. Co-curator and co-host, with Sarah Bessey, of Evolving Faith. Occasional preacher. Teacher in residence at Crosspointe Church. Ordinand in the Reformed Church in America (RCA). Cook, gardener, and dog walker to Fozzie in Michigan, where my husband and I moved two years ago. (First time living in the Midwest. Snow tires are a revelation!) Some days, I believe in God; other days, I want to believe in God.

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Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

Ryan Panzer 3/12/24 Ryan Panzer 3/12/24

Preaching the Word in a World of Memes

Digital technology has triggered three transformations in how we communicate, or use our words. Each of these transformations in our words has significance for those called to preach the Word.

***Photo by*** ***NASA*** on ***Unsplash***

Language constantly changes. This explains why Merriam-Webster adds new words to the dictionary each year. Last year, their editors added “Rizz” (slang for charisma) and Deepfake (an AI-generated deception), along with approximately 1,000 others. But it’s clear that we’re living through changes not just in the words we use, but in how we use those words.

Digital technology has triggered three transformations in how we communicate, or use our words. Each of these transformations in our words has significance for those called to preach the Word.

The first transformation is that of pace. Our written communications accelerate with new technological developments, conditioning us to send, receive, and react at faster speeds. It takes far less time to compose an email than to write a memo by hand, leading to more frequent communication that is less thought out and often more intense in tone than before the rise of electronic messaging.

The second transformation is that of length. As we communicate faster, we communicate with brevity. Our written words are often devoid of detail or context, subjecting our messages to an ambiguity of meaning. The standard character limit for a text message has historically been 160 characters, just longer than a Tweet. Opinion and judgment fits within this word count, though nuance and supporting detail are often left out.

Because of this ambiguity, a third transformation has occurred. Perhaps in response to the lack of contextual clues in rapid textual communication, the written word, once textual, has become pictorial. From emojis to GIFs, the words of the digital age are often illustrated. To live in a tech-shaped culture is to communicate through a mash-up of text, image, and symbol.

One of the most popular forms of this new pictorial language is the meme. A meme is a widely known visual that is typically annotated with text. Writing for The New York Times on the history and meaning of the meme, writer Alexis Benveniste defined a meme as a “self-replicating” unit of knowledge, one that “rips through the public consciousness.”

Memes are the reason why a friend may make a controversial point with an image of a smug-looking coffee drinker inviting you to change his mind. They explain why a co-worker may have used an image of the character Boromir from “The Lord of the Rings” to tell you why your idea wouldn’t work, or why your significant other expressed skepticism about your ideas using a picture of Fry from “Futurama.”

By some indicators, the typical Millennial views 20-30 memes every day, usually through messaging channels or social media. Millions of memes are shared daily on Instagram, making them one of the leading sources of content in our social feeds. Meme-based communication is so popular that some companies, most notably Google, even have internal meme generators on employee intranets.

Alongside emojis and GIFs, memes are a daily experience within our tech-shaped culture. And this experience is undoubtedly influencing not just how we communicate - but how we learn, and how we come to believe in something

The popularity of memes, GIFs, and emojis shows that our communication is losing the capacity for abstraction. As our culture comes to expect additional visual context via a meme or emoji, we also come to expect that language will appear alongside an external reference point. Ideas that spread tend to connect to shared cultural experience. Jokes are told in relation to pop culture events. Political arguments are made relative to sports images. Business decisions are made alongside the context of sitcom characters. These visual references have become a stand-in for the crucial contextual details that accompanied the written word in a more analog age.

The emergence of a world of memes has significant implications for preachers and pastors. When we step into the pulpit, we are proclaiming the unseen, telling of a God whose action in our world can feel subtle, even invisible. This stands in contrast to a culture whose communication preferences are becoming increasingly visual.

This also challenges our ability to teach the foundational doctrines of our faith. Salvation, justification, and sanctification are abstract concepts that defy simple visualization. Indeed, we preach the good news of a triune God, whose relational nature is challenging to define through images.

I am not suggesting that preaching ought to involve more memes or emojis, or that our sermons would be more effective if accompanied by a popular animated GIF. The last thing the church needs is to subject our sermons to pop culture references, or to inundate our congregations with attempts at cultural relevance.

Instead, I think the implication is that the preacher must work to anchor the unseen promise to concrete stories and experiences. To preach effectively in a digital age is to tilt the balance in our message away from abstraction and towards the lived stories of God's work in our contexts. By doing so, we ignite the imaginations of our context so that others might visualize how God shows up in the particulars of our time and place. While our surrounding culture utilizes references to media and entertainment, we will reference the particularity of God’s work within our context.

In a meme-loving culture, congregants don’t need a snappy reference to the latest movie, sporting event, or awards show.

But they might need a sermon that helps them to visualize the specifics of how a member of the community has experienced the in-breaking of a relational God. They might benefit from a Bible study that helps them to consider the promises of God and how they have specifically supported a fellow congregant through challenging times. These references to specific people, places, and stories are the references our proclamation needs to reach a meme-based culture.

Preaching the Word to a world full of memes will require us to give new life to this ancient and sacred story. That new life emerges when we shift from the abstract to the concrete, from theoretical concept to lived experience.

Ryan Panzer

Ryan Panzer is the author of “Grace and Gigabytes: Being Church in a Tech-Shaped Culture” (Fortress Press, 2020) and "The Holy and the Hybrid: Navigating the Church's Digital Reformation" (Fortress Press, 2022). Ryan has spent his career in the worlds of church leadership and technology. He received his M.A. from Luther Seminary while simultaneously working for Google. Ryan serves as a learning and leadership development professional in the technology industry and as a speaker and writer on digital technology in the church. Ryan also serves as the Resident Theologian at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Madison, WI. For more writings and resources, visit www.ryanpanzer.com.

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Rev. Ranjit Mathews 3/7/24 Rev. Ranjit Mathews 3/7/24

Tethered Away From God

The Reverend Ranjit Mathews preaches because God has called him to prophetic and embodied witness to those with ears to hear. His vocation is to love extravagantly, and to invite the shedding from systems of white supremacy, purity culture, patriarchy, and the gospel of production. Let’s revisit his talk from our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of Rev. Ranjit Mathews’ talk from our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

The Reverend Ranjit Mathews. Ranjit preaches because God has called him to prophetic and embodied witness to those with ears to hear. His vocation is to love extravagantly, and to invite the shedding from systems of white supremacy, purity culture, patriarchy, and the gospel of production. Ranjitt preaches with vulnerability, knowing he is deliciously imperfect.

Ranjit preaches to the Episcopal Church, and has served in parishes in New London, Connecticut; Long Beach, California; and Milton, Massachusetts, and as a midwife to the Jesus Movement with Anglican partners in Sub Saharan Africa. He preaches about the realm of God, and how it touches all parts of us, from our bodies to our minds and our souls.

Ranjit preaches among his ancestors of Indian Christian healers from Kerala in India. He preaches as a Catholic. Personality who has lived and learned from so many beautifully open personalities.

The truth is… truth is… is that I am worshiping something other than God. I have been so attached and tethered to systems in this world. Every day I see on my work calendar at 2:30pm, I've inscribed it in for a 2:30pm “nap.”

And every day I move beyond it. I push it away, recognizing that in my body, more than likely, I need to take a nap. I need to rest.

Friends, I share that because I know in myself that my worship is not of God.

I know that from when I grew up, (and this could be maybe a cultural upbringing, and in my time in a more fundamentalist Christian upbringing in college), that I was so interwoven with a sense of purity theology, or purity culture, that had me so disconnected or disembodied from myself.

Or even if I were to be connected with myself and enjoying the pleasure of my own body, I was told that that was wrong. I was told that that was a sin. Early on.

And so then I learned very intentionally to disconnect from myself. So then a whole understanding that I am invited into by God of connecting not only with my mind and my soul, my spirit, but also my body, that was cut off.

So is it any wonder, is it any wonder that at 2:30pm on a given day when that pops up just inviting me to take a nap, that I do not listen to that part of myself, of my whole embodied self?

I just dismiss it. Because, in fact, I've done that already because of my indoctrination, because of this purity theology, and also because I'm so tethered, that purity theology is so tethered to the market.

As if, ‘Ranjit, you are not worth shit if you take a nap.’ You're not goddamn worth it, right? You need to get on and be productive. Is that not anyway connected again from my distancing from my own body, my own bodily intuition, because I'm so tethered again also to the market, that then I lift up a sense of toxic masculinity within myself, right?

Because I do not connect it again to my emotions, to where my body is on a day-to-day basis. And when I'm disconnected from that, then I bring things in. I let any sort of trauma or emotion to just bubble up within me and harden, thus disconnecting myself from my emotions, from my feelings, and becoming more of a patriarchal man.

Aren't these all symptoms also of a deepening of white supremacy within myself?

We all know that, you know, I'm invited into perfection. I'm invited to cut myself off from my body in a very intentional way.

So, my friends, I name these things because, in fact, I do not worship God. Hell no.

I am tethered to white supremacy.

I am tethered to purity theology. I am tethered to market based capitalism. I am tethered to patriarchy.

Those are the systems, those are the idols in which my body and myself [are tethered]. That's who we worship.

So I share that with you all, my friends, folks, people of color living in the United States, maybe abroad, of how important it is to just let go and to grieve all the ways in which you, maybe, certainly me, have been attached to those systems. Giving a space to just grieve it all and fall apart.

During this pandemic time, that shifted for me. Where I realized that, you know, I do not have it all together.

And I was awakened to this portal within me of brokenness, and how I might be invited forward if I just allow myself the space to grieve, to not go forward and do something more productive, but maybe to rest.

I share that with you all, hoping that we are not tethered to becoming more productive within a sort of capitalist market based understanding, but that we lean ourselves more deeply into flourishing.

But what does it mean to flourish as people who are made in the image of God? Does that not mean to untether from those systems? Create space where maybe we have rest so that then we can then dream what a new world might be inviting us into?

My friends, I confess that I worship these systems and that I am not a person of faith, but I'm struggling to become one of them. Thank you.

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REV. RANJIT K. MATHEWS

The Rev. Ranjit K. Mathews was called as Rector of St. James, New London, on May 21, 2017. Rev. Mathews most recently served on the staff of the Presiding Bishop as the Partnership Officer for Africa.
Prior to his work with the churchwide office, Rev. Mathews was associate rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Long Beach, California, a bilingual parish where he worked to build connections between the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking community members and led the youth group. Before that he was a theology lecturer at the Msalato Theological College of St. John's University in Tanzania, and he has also served as assistant rector of St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Milton, Massachusetts. Starting September 14th, he will be the Canon for Mission Advocacy, Racial Justice and Reconciliation for the Episcopal Church in Connecticut.
Throughout his work, Rev. Mathews has followed the example of Jesus' ministry of presence, compassion, justice and reconciliation, whether in pastoral care, or in the diplomacy involved with the Anglican partnerships in sub-Saharan Africa, or in anti-war protests before the Iraq War, or in investigations of immigrant detentions, or in building community partnerships to address local needs.
Rev. Mathews was born in Brighton, Mass. and grew up in Sharon, Mass. He majored in business administration at George Washington University and received his Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York. As a seminarian, Rev. Mathews served at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Harlem and also studied theology at United Theological College in Bangalore, India. His father, Rev. Koshy Mathews, is interim rector of Gloria Dei Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Rev. Mathews lives in New London with his spouse, Johanna, and their two young boys, Dhruv and Kabir. In addition to his extensive world service experiences in Africa and Asia, Rev. Mathews brings to us an ability to speak Spanish and a working knowledge of Malayalam, as well as a love of New England sports teams, national and world politics, books, nature, travel, movies, hip hop music and playing tennis!

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Dr. Christine Hong 2/29/24 Dr. Christine Hong 2/29/24

Your Words Will Become Seeds

Dr. Christine Hong usually mostly writes and teaches, instead of preaches, as a seminary professor. But after her writing and teaching slips into sermon mode, and she's mostly sorry about it, Christine mostly teaches and preaches to seminary students and their loved ones at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Christine preaches among an amazing group of colleagues and friends with the spirits of her ancestors.

The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of a talk Dr. Christine Hong gave at our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

Christine usually mostly writes and teaches, instead of preaches, as a seminary professor. But after her writing and teaching slips into sermon mode, and she's mostly sorry about it, Christine mostly teaches and preaches to seminary students and their loved ones at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Christine preaches among an amazing group of colleagues and friends with the spirits of her ancestors.

The word comes today from Psalm 19:14, “but the words of my mouth. And the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight. Oh God, my strength and my redeemer.” Amen.

In Korean, we have a saying, "말이 씨앗이 되다" (Mal-i ssiga doenda)

Or, your words will become seeds.

My grandmother would say this to me as a warning whenever she would catch me saying something she felt was rude or plain mean. And believe me, it happened way too often in my adolescence. As I grew up, these words were always lurking in the back of my head. I hear my grandmother's voice telling me, watch what you say and don't say things that you don't want to become reality.

She meant don't wish people harm and even don't wish something good for yourself if it will bring harm to other people. In some traditions, we believe that words aren't just words, they are spells. Words are the result of things that lay brewing in our hearts and even in our dreams. They reveal our innermost thoughts.

What's in your heart? What do your words reveal about you? About the things that you want most in this life?

말이 씨앗이 되다 Your words are seeds.

What my grandmother taught me continues to be true for me. Words, as I understand them, can commit violence and damage into generations. Think about any type of federal or local policy or law that was created to dehumanize, steal people and land, and facilitate the legal oppression and suppression of entire peoples.

Those aren't just legal words on a page. They were and are also thoughts and values in the hearts of people. Think about the residential boarding schools for native children in Canada and in the U. S. and the children who are right now being found. Their bodies recovered from mass graves as we speak. The church which supported, funded, and facilitated these boarding schools is complicit in sowing the words, the seeds, which turned into acts of genocide.

In the church, when we don't ponder carefully the thoughts in our hearts, they can become words, seeds, and acts of violence and injustice everywhere. Recently, there's been story after story coming out of a popular mainly Asian American and Korean American church stories of sexual and spiritual abuse by pastors and members steeped in a culture of purity culture and theologies of justified violence.

And I'm talking about it because we have to start talking about it.

Words were used to plant seeds and deeds of violence. Words were used to justify and hide dehumanizing actions. Words veiled in theological frameworks like salvation, called, purity, righteousness, chosenness, and even love.

These stories enrage me because I recognize those places, cultures, and the misuse of these words from my own experiences. Words that were meant to comfort and uplift, but became weaponized and used to violate instead.

This isn't you. This is not a single church. or a single time. Abuse in churches, sexual and spiritual often co-occur and happen all the time. And still the church uses its words meant for care and nurture to commit acts of deceit and to cover up its complicity with even more violence.

말이 씨앗이 되다 Your words are seeds.

Yet in the face of the mess that the church has wrought throughout its history and in our present time, there's this other side to the same. We can plant different types of seeds.

The meditations of our hearts can also be seeds for liberative and freedom oriented futures. It's through the planting of the words and seeds for liberation that we refuse the way the church has too often let its words and actions harm the lives of our beloveds.

If words are the seeds planted for the future, then let's plant different seeds of flourishing for all. Especially for those of us upon whose backs the systems and structures of oppression through white supremacy, colonization, heteronormativity, and ableism have been built. Let's become bold and claim that our words are the seeds that beckon collective action.

Seeds of a collective liberation and freedom that is coming and coming soon. Seeds of justice that's already here, rooted, and ready to blossom in our midst. Your dreams of joy, of love, of thriving can and must become the seeds of the future church. This is one way that we refuse the way the church has and still is harming through its words and actions.

말이 씨앗이 되다 Your words are seeds.

What are the meditations of your heart? Are they acceptable to our God of love and justice? Our God who loves justice? Our God who is the rock and redeemer of those who are oppressed in this life? Our words are a reflection of what dwells in the innermost spaces of our hearts, our dreams, our visions.

They are our dearest meditations. What types of seeds are you planting? Which dreams are being seeded through your words in your teaching, in your preaching, your parenting, and your neighboring. For too long, the church and those within it have used the words that they say to plant seeds that lead only to death and death dealing.

말이 씨앗이 되다 Your words are seeds.

Let us plant a different type of word, a different type of seed, words and seeds of life, a life where everyone gets what they need, a future where the church no longer harms but works to mend, repair, and heal. May the words that come from our freedom dreaming scatter in the wind like dandelion seeds, adhering to the earth in every place and time and blossoming as justice and joy for us and for the generations to come

말이 씨앗이 되다 Our words, our seeds.

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DR. CHRISTINE J. HONG

Christine J. Hong is Associate Professor of Educational Ministry and the Director of the Doctor of Educational Ministry Program at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. Her research includes anti-colonial and decolonial approaches to religious and interreligious education. Hong's research interests also include Asian American spiritualties, and the spiritual and theological formation of children and adolescents among people of color communities. Hong is ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and has spent time as both as a religious educator and youth and young adult minister in New York and Southern California. She is the author of two monographs, the first is, Youth, Identity, and Gender in the Korean American Church, published by Palgrave, and the second, Decolonial Futures: Intercultural and Interreligious Intelligence for Theological Education from Lexington Press. Hong is the current Steering Committee Chair of the Association for Asian/North American Theological Educators, serves as a faculty mentor at the Louisville Institute for doctoral fellows, and is a committee member for the Women of Color in Scholarship and Teaching Unit at the AAR.

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Dr. Michael J. Chan 2/27/24 Dr. Michael J. Chan 2/27/24

An Analgesic Faith: Reflections on Psalm 77

Lent has recently become Dr. Michael J. Chan's favorite season in the church year. The 40 Lenten days commemorate Jesus' time in the wilderness, where he was tempted both by the devil and the harsh environment.

***Photo by*** ***Danist Soh*** on ***Unsplash***

Lent has recently become my favorite season in the church year. The 40 Lenten days commemorate Jesus' time in the wilderness, where he was tempted both by the devil and the harsh environment.

Lent is bookended by bleak events: it begins with Ash Wednesday, reminding us that we are but dust (Gen 2:7; 3:19) and ends just before Holy Week, which highlights Jesus’ execution and resurrection.

In the season of Lent, death is everywhere.

No wonder Psalm 77 found itself into the lectionary’s daily readings. Verses 2-3 capture the spirit of the psalm and of the season:

In my day of distress I seek Yhwh;

At night, my arms are stretched out without ceasing

my soul refuses comfort

I think of God and I groan

My spirit meditates and becomes feeble. Selah (my translation)

But the spirit and season of Lent are often far removed from the experiences of many American Christians, and most especially those whose traditions are not structured according to traditional church calendars.

Too often American Christians as asked to numb their pain. Instead of a faith big enough for this whole human life, broken-hearted people are offered shallow platitudes like “God has a plan” or “God won’t give you more than you can handle,” or “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” so stop asking questions.

This is an analgesic “faith.” But a faith numb to the world is no faith. It’s a delusion.

If all our faith can do is numb pain, then it’s a faith worth rejecting. Lent is there to remind us of what a durable, trustworthy faith should look and feel like.

If Christian faith has no room for broken hearts, messy human stories, and scarred bodies then it is precisely the kind of religion that Karl Marx described when he said: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

We must do better.

“Things Take the Time They Take”

Unlike American culture, Lent doesn’t ask us to hurry up and get over sorrow or to paper over the shocking violence of this world. Lent doesn’t shuffle us along from sorrow to happiness.

It’s worth remembering that Jesus’ own 40 days in the wilderness evokes the narrative of Israel’s much longer 40-year period in the desert, known especially from the book of Numbers. Jesus relives those years of wandering, adversity, and delay. The season of Lent allows us to experience these narratives according to ritual time.

Lent creates space for us to sit with life’s pain and to feel it fully and collectively. The author of Psalm 77, for instance, does not end in praise or thanksgiving, like other laments. It turns to the memory of God’s actions in the past (see vv. 11-20), but the God of memory never materializes in the present. At the end of it all, the psalmist’s sharp-edged questions still stand: “Will Yhwh reject forever? . . . Has God forgotten to be gracious?” (vv. 7- 9).

The fact that Lent is a season for the entire church also tells us that we aren't meant to sit in this heaviness alone.

We aren’t meant to rush through the darkness to get to the light. We can’t speed the night in order to get to morning. You can’t rush your way to Easter.

When you try to shortcut the journey you never actually leave the driveway.

As Mary Oliver puts it: “things take the time they take”

The Spirit of Lent, the Spirit of Lament

As a church we often fail tender-hearted people. Instead of offering a faith that is spacious enough for all of human life, we hand them a cheap plastic mask and call it, “faith.”

Doesn’t the world feel so much better when you wear it? Isn’t the world so much happier and sunnier when you choose the blue pill, rather than the red pill? (The Matrix, 1999). Go ahead. Forget reality and live in a dream.

But poet Cleo Wade is correct when she says, “You can either have a mask or a real life. There isn’t a Third Option.”

Lent is a season to recover a real life. It’s a season of self-reflection and of turning away from the things that leach life away.

If Lent is the season for recovering honesty, psalms of lament (like Psalm 77) give us the language for doing so. Laments are poems in which human beings complain about this world, one another, and of course God. Laments are the human clapback to God, who is often accused of being distant and unresponsive.

Lent gives us permission to sit in dust and ashes but also to push back against a culture that is so deeply uncomfortable with pain, disruption, loss, and death.

A Worthy Rebellion

Just because Lent is a season of sorrow, lament, and self-reflection, however, doesn’t mean that it isn’t also a season of hope.

But Lent teaches us something important about the shape of hope: True hope always has scars.

That may be the difference between hope and optimism. True hope comes from tilled soil. It springs up out of broken ground. Like all green and growing things, hope takes time. It’s a seed. Seeds begin their lives in darkness.

But hope doesn’t always arrive on our timeline. We don’t get to control when the light arrives. In that way, it’s less like the sun and more like a lightning strike.

Hope also takes honesty. But honesty is hard and painful, because it requires us to look at ourselves and our world through clear, undistorted lenses. We can’t get to the lands of hope and healing without first crossing the bridges of honesty. There are no detours, no shortcuts, and no alternate routes.

People often give something up during Lent. Instead, I’ll ask you to pick something up--a worthy rebellion: This Lent, don’t settle for an analgesic faith. Insist on a kind of faith that is spacious enough for this entire life—the mess, the joy, the hurt, the injury, and also the recovery.

Ophelia Hu Kinney 2/22/24 Ophelia Hu Kinney 2/22/24

The Playfulness of God

The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of a talk Ophelia Hu Kinney gave at our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

Ophelia most frequently speaks to peoples who may misunderstand each other. She is a queer Asian American who belongs to Hope Gateway, a progressive congregation in the whitest state in the country. There she serves on staff to open the pulpit up and all facets of Sunday worship to all, bringing forth the collective and unique wisdoms of the community.

Ophelia preaches about a creator who is kin and parent alike to our inner children, a god who is playful, imaginative, queer, and courageous. To Ophelia, preaching is an act of translation. She preaches because she externally processes the divine, and because the news is good indeed.

My name is Ophelia Hu Kinney.

She, her, and hers are my pronouns.

I am a child of emigrants from China, and I am a sister and a wife. I come from many streams, many traditions of playfulness, from peoples for whom play is part and parcel of survival and heritage and meaning making.

There is the high art of Chinese opera, for example, an extravagant commitment of imagination to fantastical storytelling, lavish makeup, exaggerated vocal performance, the whole nine yards. Of course, of only the most exquisite fabric.

And I also come from a queer lineage, a people who, like many peoples, have responded to marginalization with audacious joy. One public expression of that joy is pride festivals. which began as, and still are, riots against normativities, against marginalization and oppression.

And another public expression of that joy is drag. This is a performance, or a mythology, of gender. And I can't speak of a divine, of play, or of drag, without invoking the poetry of the great Sufi Muslim poet Hafiz, who said, “You are the sun in drag. You are God hiding from yourself. Sweetheart, oh sweetheart, you are God in drag.”

I come, as I've said, from traditions of play, of playfulness, and sweetheart, oh sweetheart, I believe that you do too. Deep and alive and co-mingled like the mycelia, that oceanic neural network that connects fungi and plants, that is the vastness of our respective traditions of play, of imagination, of exploration and fantasy and curiosity.

Play is how we first made sense of the world into which we were born. It was how we explored ourselves and our worlds, our divine outer and our divine inner realms. Unless we change and become like children, right? Then perhaps we will find our hands cupped and overflowing with the kingdom of God. Above this mycelium, Above the vast and rich traditions of playfulness that buoy and connect our cultures is what is visible on the forest floor of our existence.

Up on the forest floor, we are planted in churches and communities where playfulness too often has little value, and where play itself is subject to judgment. Leisure is what we call the play of the wealthy and the powerful. And laziness is what we call the play of the poor and the disempowered. Up on the ground level, our peoples are held captive by the belief that some of us are permitted to be playful, and some of us are not.

We may even believe, about ourselves, that we are not allowed to be playful. That as people of the global majority, as people of color, our nobility and our worth are inextricable from our productivity. We may believe that we are only as valuable as what can be extracted from us.

This is not a message about rest, which is also vital, and which is very different.

To be playful is to be wasteful, to be unproductive in the colloquial sense of the word, to be uninhibited by the immediacy of what is, and to have little ulterior motive. Up on the ground level, far from our roots, we are susceptible to commodifying even our joy, a hustle culture that lures us to ossify our happiness into an income stream.

We live in a culture where people of color must achieve far more than white people do in ministry, in our careers, and in our academic lives to compete for this seeming scarcity of empathy, respect, and opportunity. So what, then, is the purpose of play in a world that strips us of our playfulness, that profits off of, even banks on us, forgetting that we were ever a people of play?

Consider Jesus in his first act of public ministry. A party, a wedding, where he turned water into an overabundance of wine. This lavishness and playfulness, cupped and overflowing. There is the kingdom of God.

And then consider the woman with the alabaster jar of expensive perfume poured out over Jesus' feet the night before he was betrayed. A wastefulness, someone called it. A foolishness. And there too, overflowing, is the kingdom of God.

In our propensity for playfulness, in our childlike capacity for delight and mischief and wonder, is something like the image of God. A God who exhibits what we might call lavish and playful and wasteful and foolish.

That image of God remains unextinguished by the puritanical anti-tradition in which we live. And that deprives us, especially people of color and other marginalized peoples, of play and its associated innocence, youth, and grace.

In the realm of psychotherapy, there's an approach to viewing the mind called Internal Family Systems, or IFS. And IFS imagines the mind as an interactive system of parts protecting a truer self. And what our truer selves have in common is our propensity for playfulness, openness, and curiosity. Our response to subjugation is to suppress that inner child so that it cannot be hurt or exploited. But at our core, the theory implies, when we are unguarded, we are playful.

And when we forget the value of play, we forget God in us, and we lose a vital mode of connection to the divine. In the miasma of this puritanical anti-tradition, do we dare to encounter God playfully? Do we believe that God has room for our questions, our what-ifs, our unorthodox methods of reaching for God's self?

What God has called playfulness, let us not call a slippery slope or an idle or heretical simply because it balks against the anti-tradition of an unadventurous fundamentalism. Therein is the possibility of finding a God and an us that cannot be so easily controlled or manipulated.

So people of the global majority.

People of God's deep delight.

We were once children, too, made in the image of God. We were playful and imaginative and full of trouble.

And may it be that we recollect that we are cast in the image of God the child, full of mischief and wonder; God of a thousand stories, some of which we have called silly make believe through our collective history; God the child who dressed themselves up in the drag of human flesh.

And aren't creation and recreation a form of play?

God of joy, holy child, who breathed us into becoming, saying,”hmm, I wonder…”

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OPHELIA HU KINNEY

Ophelia Hu Kinney serves as the Director of Communications for an organization seeking LGBTQ justice and inclusion in The United Methodist Church and on the staff of a fiercely loving, justice-seeking church in Portland, Maine.
She also shares her time with Beloved Arise and the Equality Community Center of Maine.
Her pronouns are she/her.

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Rev. Susan Sparks 2/20/24 Rev. Susan Sparks 2/20/24

The Hidden Secret of Winter Trees

In order to grasp this great truth, the first thing we need to do is to get off our human high horse. We aren’t all that, especially when you compare us to the world of trees.

***Photo by*** ***Jan Huber*** on ***Unsplash***

Shared with permission by the Rev. Susan Sparks and www.day1.org.

Today, I’d like to share the secret to life.

Where might I have found this great wisdom?

Oprah? No.

Dr. Phil? Nope.

Tik Tok? Definitely not.

No, I found this great wisdom by doing something very simple: walking out and looking up at the winter trees.

How could trees—let alone dead, lifeless, winter trees—hold the secret to life?

In order to grasp this great truth, the first thing we need to do is to get off our human high horse. We aren’t all that, especially when you compare us to the world of trees.

Trees have lived longer than we have. In fact, trees are the oldest living organisms on the planet. Trees, mold, and jellyfish are older than human history. The oldest tree is a bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California that scientists date as around 5000 years old. That is Tigris and Euphrates, early Mesopotamia, Bronze Age stuff. Its name, appropriately, is Methuselah.

Trees are also smarter than we are. In the book, The Hidden Life of Trees German forester Peter Wohlleben shares some astonishing discoveries. He talks about trees as social beings and explains how they actually communicate with each other, give warnings to other trees in the forest, share food through their root systems with their own species, and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors. Why? Because one lone tree is vulnerable, but a forest offers strength and safety. In short, trees nourish community.

If only human beings could learn that simple lesson.

At least the writers of the Bible realized the importance of trees. In fact, there are three things the Bible mentions more than anything else: God, people, and trees. The Bible speaks of the great cedars of Lebanon and tells how Moses used acacia wood for the ark of the covenant. Zacchaeus climbed a sycamore tree, and Jesus’ followers are described as oaks of righteousness. David crafted his musical instruments from the wood of a fir tree. A branch from the olive tree signified safety after the flood. A tree formed the wooden manger, and a tree formed the cross.

Trees are an intimate part of the holy narrative, but they’re even more than that because out of all creation, God chose trees for self-revelation. We see this in the beautiful passage Isaiah 41:19-20, where God recognizes the suffering of the people and offers them a sign: “I will put in the desert the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive. I will set junipers in the wasteland, the fir and the cypress together, so that people may see and know, may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this.”

God chose trees—the myrtle and the olive, the fir and the cypress—to reveal God’s self, making trees the sacred keepers of holy wisdom.

This brings us back to the secret of life, which, in my humble opinion, is to be found in trees. Specifically, it’s in winter trees.

The day I walked out to look up at the trees was dim and dreary. The trees, leafless and bare, formed an almost lace-like pattern against the gray winter sky. To a brief passerby, they probably appeared lifeless, dead even.

I think we all know how that feels. Sometimes everything in life can feel and look bare and brittle, lifeless, even dead. However, there is way more going on under the surface than we realize.

Consider those bare winter trees. Inside their seemingly dead branches and trunks, a magical transformation is happening. Months before, in the fall, the trees dropped their green leaves in order to conserve water and centralize and focus their energy. I think of a tree in this stage as being like a sprinter in a quiet, motionless crouch before a race. All energies and focus are drawn down into that moment before the runner springs into action. What appears in winter to be a quiet time of death for those trees is, in fact, the combustion engine of life.

We always think of the season of spring as the beginning of life, but in fact, spring is not the beginning. It’s the manifestation of the transformation happening inside those great trees right now, in the winter.

In writing about wintering trees, the author Katherine May explains, “The tree is waiting. It has everything ready. Its fallen leaves are mulching the forest floor, and its roots are drawing up the extra winter moisture, providing a firm anchor against seasonal storms . . . It is far from dead. It is in fact the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with it quietly.”

We see the same pattern in human life. William Bridges in his book, Transitions talks about the passages of life, such as those that take place in a job, a relationship, a move, or another life change. He explains that all transitions are composed of three things: (1) an ending, (2) a neutral zone, and (3) a new beginning.

The ending is when we let go of the old. The neutral zone is that time of unknowing when we listen, focus, think, and wait. Then, eventually, the new beginning gleams forth. The key is that it all starts with an ending.

The problem is that unlike trees, we humans tend to fight this truth. We want to focus only on the new beginning. We think that to figure out our plan, to make our choices, we’ve got to get going. If we aren’t producing something, who are we? Endings are seen as unpleasant, and the neutral zone is seen as unproductive. It’s also scary.

When we’re in the neutral zone, we stand bare, like the trees in winter. It’s a time when we can no longer hide our truth behind our agendas, lists, or busyness. Who are we without our leaves? We humans hate asking that, but vulnerability is the place of greatest beauty.

There is a tiny, wonderful book called Trees at Leisure written in 1916 by Anna Botsford Comstock. In it, she talks about the beauty of winter trees: “In winter, we are prone to regard our trees as cold, bare, and dreary; and we bid them wait until they are again clothed in verdure before we may accord to them comradeship. However, it is during this winter resting time that the tree stands revealed to the uttermost, ready to give its most intimate confidences to those who love it.”

The true secret to life lies in the deep wisdom of trees, the place where God chose to reveal God’s self. The trees know that spring is not where life is truly generated. Transformation takes place in winter—that time of ending, that quiet neutral zone, that gap that exists when the old is gone but the new isn’t fully formed.

What parts of your life feel like those bare, brittle, lifeless branches? Who are you without your leaves?

While life can sometimes look and feel like a tree in winter, remember that there is more going on under the surface than we realize. Like the energy humming inside those trees, there are unseen things happening within us. We are changing, churning, transforming inside.

If you doubt that, just walk outside and look up.

While it may feel like loss, while we ourselves may feel lost, winter is simply a time when our energies are gathered deep into our souls, waiting like a sprinter in a crouch ready to spring into new life.

Amanda Gorman, the inaugural poet, put it best: “If nothing else, this must be known: Even as we’ve grieved, we’ve grown . . . We are battered, but bolder; worn, but wiser . . . If anything, the very fact that we’re weary means we are, by definition, changed; we are brave enough to listen to, and learn from, our fear. This time will be different because this time we’ll be different. We already are.”

Rev. Susan Sparks

JAs a trial lawyer turned standup comedian and Baptist minister, the Rev. Susan Sparks is America’s only female comedian with a pulpit. A North Carolina native, Susan received her B.A. at the University of North Carolina, law degree from Wake Forest University, and Master of Divinity at Union Theological in New York City.
Currently the senior pastor of the historic Madison Avenue Baptist Church in New York City (and the first woman pastor in its 170-year history), Susan's work with humor, healing, and spirituality has been featured in *O (The Oprah) Magazine*, the New York Times, and on such networks as ABC, CNN, CBS, and the History Channel.
A featured TEDx speaker and a professional comedian, Susan tours nationally with a stand-up Rabbi and a Muslim comic in the Laugh in Peace Tour. In addition to her speaking and preaching, Susan writes a nationally syndicated column through Gannett distributed to over 600 newspapers reaching over 21 million people in 36 states.
She is the author of three books, *Laugh Your Way to Grace: Reclaiming the Spiritual Power of Humor,* *Preaching Punchlines: The Ten Commandments of Standup Comedy.* and *Miracle on 31st Street: Christmas Cheer Every Day of the Year – Grinch to Gratitude in 26 Days!* (May 2020).
Most importantly, Susan and her husband Toby love to fly-fish, ride their Harleys, eat good BBQ, and root for UNC Tar Heel Basketball and the Green Bay Packers.

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Rev. Susan Sparks

She is the author of three books, Laugh Your Way to Grace: Reclaiming the Spiritual Power of Humor, Preaching Punchlines: The Ten Commandments of Standup Comedy. and Miracle on 31st Street: Christmas Cheer Every Day of the Year – Grinch to Gratitude in 26 Days! (May 2020).

Most importantly, Susan and her husband Toby love to fly-fish, ride their Harleys, eat good BBQ, and root for UNC Tar Heel Basketball and the Green Bay Packers.