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Laura Jean Truman 3/21/22 Laura Jean Truman 3/21/22

Lent Devotion: Everyday Holiness

1. Everyday holiness is bread and wine.

We’re always trying to make our daily lives more holy by making them less human. We don’t make the sacraments “more important,” though, when we divorce them from their whole, embodied, normal physicality, as if our brains are closer to God than our bodies. The holiest things are also the most “normal” ones. This can make us uncomfortable. We prefer to theologize away everyday qualities of the sacraments. We retreat to our brains when talking about “sacred things,” because our bodies feel less holy. But so many of the sacraments are so physical! Eating and drinking and bathing are mundane, delightful, physical, essential, joyful. These are physical pleasures and physical needs, and here is God in them all– calling those physical joys and necessities holy. Perhaps many of us have despised our bodies for so long, or at best, ignored them. It can be uncomfortable to think about body maintenance or desire as holy. Our shame around our bodies, though, and what our bodies want and need, can calcify into a theology of mind that denies the physicality of the sacraments for a more heady brand of spirituality, one that nods its head to the body but does not revel in it. The sacraments, especially Holy Communion, invite us to revel. They invite us to let our minds be still for just a moment, and allow our bodies to need, and to want, and to enjoy. Into our shame and dismissal of our bodies, Jesus comes to us. He comes “eating and drinking,” and inviting us to the table to eat and drink with him (Lk 7:34).

The table invites us to come and eat – not to come and think.
Come – with your body. The table is set. Amen.

2. You don’t have to tidy up first.

I grew up in an evangelical church culture that took “don’t eat and drink judgment on yourself” very seriously. If you had “unconfessed sin” or didn’t feel “close to God” that Sunday, evangelical etiquette demanded that you skip communion. We only had communion a couple times a year at my childhood church. I’d watch folks pass the trays of tiny plastic cups and crackers down the line, passing it on without taking any for themselves. I asked my parents why people weren’t taking communion. If your heart isn’t prepared, they told me, you should skip communion.

Lord have mercy. When is my heart prepared? When do I have all my ducks in a row and my stuff entirely together and my sin rooted out and my heart earnest and kind and penitent and holy? Absolutely not one day. Not one day ever. There is not a single day that I will be worthy to take the bread and the cup. And that, friends, is the entire point of the reckless grace of this table that God has set for us. It’s here for us precisely because we are never going to wake up some Sunday and really have it all together. We’re not going to get close. We need the table. We need the radical, reckless, unbound grace of Jesus because we are never going to be able to get our stuff together and never going to be able to come properly tidied up and never going to be as good as we want to be. And to us – to us, and to our messy, ugly, spiritually and morally unkempt neighbor – God comes.

Unable to get close to our best selves or close to our perfect God, God comes to us, and sets a table, and says – just as you are, this is my body, broken for you. Take. Eat.

This is grace. It’s not what we bring to the table, but how the table is set for us: as we are, in our brokenness, in our pride, in our mess, in our inadequacy. To us – to the strays and disasters and fallen souls – God comes. God sets us a table, just for us. And God invites us home. Amen.

3. Holy hospitality and a family meal

“This is a family meal,” my pastor used to say when he presided over the table every Sunday morning. This is a family meal. There is power in a family meal. There is unique holiness in hospitality. Hospitality invites people as they are, and makes a space for them to come and release their performative self and find refuge. Nothing says you are welcome, come and rest like a very large meal. Working in the restaurant industry for the last six years, I have a front row seat to how every important moment is marked by a meal. Engagements, graduations, and baby showers happen over dinner. Funerals, divorces, heartbreaks also come with casseroles, nights out over nachos – achingly difficult moments accompanied by meals dropped on a back porch.

We need to eat, and also we need to be fed. Food is always more than just food. It’s comfort, tenderness, celebration, nourishment. It helps us run races in the morning and feeds broken hearts at night. Food carries us physically and emotionally into the hard or joyful days we are facing.

This is the gift Communion offers us.

When God wants to tell us we are welcome and we are home in God’s love – God brings us a meal. God invites us to come and eat, whether we come in dancing or heartbroken or everything in between. God invites us, exactly as we are, to come and feel the full acceptance of a home cooked meal. Amen.

4. To make space for a God who makes space for us.

When we think of the table, we think about the hospitality that God offers to us. There is a way, though, that taking communion is also offering hospitality to God. God sets the table for us and welcomes us, and then we offer that welcome back to God, housing God in our bodies as we eat and drink. It’s a strange relationship in this moment, when we dance as equals with the creator of the universe. This is a mysterious and beautiful side of human freedom. Because we are so free, we can consent to the grace of God - and in our consent, we can offer hospitality back to God in the exact moment that God offers it to us.

God as Christ incarnate becomes vulnerable. Like the three Trinitarian strangers visiting Abraham or Jesus coming to the home of Martha and Mary Jesus becomes vulnerable enough to need a place to rest, to sit down and be at peace. Similar to poor stressed Martha who thought she had to make everything perfect, we can think we need to do more or be more or hide the parts of ourselves we’re ashamed of in order to welcome the Divine. Jesus, though, is just so glad to be here - not only giving to us but also, in the wildest mystery of the incarnation, accepting from us, too. Jesus doesn’t just take delight in giving hospitality. Jesus is delighted to be welcomed, too.

This is also love – not only to recklessly give, but also recklessly receive.
The vulnerability of God is a great mystery of the incarnation. Every week, when we take communion, we encounter that mystery again. We are welcomed by God when we put out our hands for the body of Christ. We also, in a miracle of the vulnerability of the Divine, welcome God, too. Amen.

5. Pandemic Communion

It’s just whiskey and the heel of supermarket whole wheat bread, and I am not sure of a theology of Long Distance Communion, but I know I need Jesus and I know it is a pandemic and I know that online church is all I have – so bless my heart, this is going to be what it is going to be.

Sprawled out on my living room floor in my 600sq ft apartment, the computer precariously balanced on the coffee table, and my makeshift communion lined up on the wood floor next to my coffee cup, I don’t feel particular holy. This does not feel like “church.” I do feel a lot less lonely than I did last night, though. The little chat bubble starts popping up, and everyone is saying hello as the announcements start, and then when the sermon starts people pop in with a joke or a quote or a heart emoji. I don’t feel quite so alone, for this half heartbeat of a Sunday morning.

The pandemic has been a very alone time. It has made me anxious and tightly wound, fragile, jumpy about picking fights, less gentle with others and myself. I’m more of an extrovert than I thought. I learned that I meet God most in rubbing shoulders with my neighbor, in joyful, awkward, thoughtful conversations.

I miss those conversations.

I didn’t think I’d be able to be as close to God, or to my neighbor, if all we had were screens. I didn’t think makeshift Zoom community could be as tender. I thought, too, that every week I’d bake real communion bread with my seminary recipe, and pick up red wine at Kroger. Pandemic me is always scattered and behind, though, so all I have this morning is the end of the whiskey bottle and this heel of bread. I’m not sure if it’s holy or if it’s enough, but it’s what I have, on this hardwood floor in this pandemic time.

Like the little boy walking up the mountain with a bag lunch, asking Jesus if it will be enough, I wander into online church with my makeshift communion and anxious heart and ask – am I enough? Is this enough? Is this holy? Is this church? And there, on the floor, with what I have – God comes. Jesus multiplies this “not enough” into comfort, and community, and holiness, and presence, even in this most unexpected place. Like Jesus has always done. Like Jesus will always do.

There is no place that the reckless hospitality of the Divine will not break into our lonely, broken, messy, sinful, heartbroken, scattered lives. “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence,” Abraham Kuyper says, “over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”

Even this hardwood floor. Even this online church. Even this whiskey and wheat bread. Even this lonely pandemic. In every strange and sacred and scattered moment – we are Christ’s, and Christ is ours.

Laura Jean Truman

Laura Jean is a queer writer, preacher, and former chaplain living in Atlanta, GA. Originally from New England, she has a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of New Hampshire and an M.Div. from Emory University Candler School of Theology, with emphases in monasticism and mysticism. She supports her itinerant chaplaining and writing by slinging drinks at a historic tavern in downtown Atlanta.

Facebook | facebook.com/laurajeantrumanwriter
Instagram | @laurajeantruman
Twitter | @Laurajeantruman
Website | laurajeantruman.com

Photo by Eric Sun

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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 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.

Laura Jean Truman 1/5/22 Laura Jean Truman 1/5/22

Epiphany: When God Speaks Our Language

If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.

Psalm 139:7-10 NIV

We can waste a whole lifetime believing that only one way of experiencing God is true. We can waste a whole lifetime ignoring the longings of our heart, because we’ve been taught that God doesn’t speak through those longings.

We can force ourselves into churches that make us uncomfortable for the sake of “discipleship.” We can make ourselves be more “expressive” in worship, or struggle to learn to meditate and be still, because someone important told us once that it was The Way to Know God. Then when we don’t feel safe, or whole, or connected to God through those practices, we assume it’s our fault. We think we’re doing it wrong.

We doubt our own souls before we doubt the religious gatekeepers telling us that their voice is the same as the voice of God.

You must not be trying hard enough, they’ll say. Being a Christian means being discipled, and discipleship isn’t comfortable. Church isn’t supposed to feel easy! Being a Christian isn’t supposed to be fun! What feels good can’t be trusted. What you want is probably bad.

Learn our language, religious leaders says, no matter how uncomfortable, no matter how ill-fitting.

Like a child forced to draw with their non-dominant hand, who grows up assuming drawing is painful and they are bad at it, we are forced into spiritual practices that feel uncomfortable, then naturally assume God is distant, unpleasant, and unsafe. That discomfort in sacred spaces or with spiritual practices can signal that we’ve been doing religion with our non-dominant hand for too long.

But God doesn’t demand we learn a new soul language before God will speak to us. God comes to us in ways we understand.

God is longing to sing us home in our native language.

Epiphany, the story of the Magi, is about a God who sings us all home, in the language we speak, as the people we are.

Epiphany is not a story of the Magi coming to God. Epiphany is a story of God coming to the Magi, speaking to them in a spiritual language they understood, before they took one step towards God. Epiphany, like all the best stories, is a story about Grace.

This Feast of the Epiphany is Thursday, January 6th, the last day after the 12 Days of Christmas. In the Western Christian Church, Epiphany is the celebration of the Incarnation for the Gentiles – it is the first time the Gospel went out to the non-Jewish world, represented by the Gentile “three kings” of the East coming to worship Jesus (Mt 2:1-12).

The word magos (Magi) is sometimes translated “wise men” and sometimes “kings.” These are theologically safe translations, but not entirely accurate (and the number three only comes from the three gifts they brought – Scripturally, we have no record of how many showed up). While we can’t be entirely sure of the Magi’s story, the most common use of the Greek word magos in the New Testament and in later non-Biblical Greek sources is simply magicians.

Oh dear. This makes us uncomfortable. We’d prefer the Magi to be “wise men,” gentlemen scholars engrossed in scholarly pursuits. Gentiles, yes, but safe, tidied up Gentiles. We like the poetry of “God coming for the outsiders” but only for less messy outsiders. And if they must be so heretical to be magicians (or, as Acts 13:6 translates the word, “sorcerers”), at least let’s see a repentance scene when they come to worship Jesus!

Surprisingly, though, the magicians see the star, are “overjoyed,” bring Jesus gifts, worship Him – then return home. They come as they are - weird witchy astrologers - and leave as they are, weird witchy astrologers. There can be exegetical knots tied over whether the Magi are a good example or not, but Matthew is straightforward in his telling – the Magi follow the star, worship Jesus, and when warned about Herod’s intentions in a dream, dutifully go home a different way. For Matthew, these Magi saw God. For Matthew, God came and found these Magi exactly as they were.

If we dig deep enough into what we love, we will always find God waiting for us, like the funky astrologers buried in their star charts while God planted a star in the sky.

If we earnestly and truthfully follow what makes our soul sing, there is God, singing in harmony all along.

It can be hard to believe the things we love can bring us to God, or that we don’t have to sacrifice our deepest self in order to be found by God. The church has certainly spent a lot of time and energy telling us to distrust ourselves for the sake of “sanctification.”

This is not to say that we aren’t in the process growth and development, or that our religious practice can stretch us into new shapes in a healthy way! We are always growing, and sometimes that’s a bit uncomfortable as we learn new skills or practice the fruits of the Spirit we’re a bit weaker in. There is a time, especially, to sacrifice a bit of what makes us comfy to honor the native language of our neighbor. We can sacrifice our preferences for the sake of our neighbor, as act of worship. These are all ways God sings us home.

The process, though, is like pruning a bush, branch by branch – it grows stronger and better and more resourcefully, but the bush doesn’t change into a rabbit. Its essence is the same bush. We’re growing into our best self, not growing into another self entirely. Our extraneous fluff is being trimmed, but we aren’t shaped into a new self altogether.

And when you finally let yourself hear God sing to you in your heart’s first language, it is such a beautiful gift. Coming home to ourselves and finding God there waiting is delightful, like being permitted to be a kid again in the presence of the Divine, opening Christmas presents given to you by someone who really knows you, playing without being worried about being watched. It is so holy to speak the language we spoke before we knew anyone was listening, when we were “naked and unashamed,” and to believe that God not only talks that language back to us, but that it gives Her joy to do so.

Epiphany, at its core, is a story about the primacy of Grace – God coming to us, however God can, wherever God can, in any language God can use, just to make sure we hear Her clearly. We never make a single step on the journey towards God before God has taken so many steps towards us first.

This is the Gospel, beginning to end.

Blessings on your Epiphany. May you hear Grace singing you home to yourself, and to God.

Laura Jean Truman

Laura Jean is a queer writer, preacher, and former chaplain living in Atlanta, GA. Originally from New England, she has a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of New Hampshire and an M.Div. from Emory University Candler School of Theology, with emphases in monasticism and mysticism. She supports her itinerant chaplaining and writing by slinging drinks at a historic tavern in downtown Atlanta.

Facebook | facebook.com/laurajeantrumanwriter
Instagram | @laurajeantruman
Twitter | @Laurajeantruman
Website | laurajeantruman.com

Photo by Eric Sun

Lent in a Box

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Laura Jean Truman 3/4/21 Laura Jean Truman 3/4/21

Lent: Being Human with Our Human God

Come to me,
all you who are weary and burdened,
and I will give you rest …
For my yoke is easy
and my burden is light.
Matthew 11:28,30

I’ve always been a fan of Lent. It’s a good time to make fancy spiritual to-do lists, read important books, and whip ourselves into spiritual shape so that we come out the other end holier. I love the idea of becoming holier! (Unsurprisingly, I also love New Years Resolutions).

Lent hasn’t always been about a frenzy of perfectionism, though. Historically, Lent is the fasting period in the liturgical year between the feasts of Christmas and Easter — 40 days the Church sets aside to meditate on our mortality and repent of sin.

Somewhere along the way, though, the emphasis on our smallness and sin shifted, and the spiritual practices that were supposed to make us feel and mourn our humanity were swapped out for practices to make us more disciplined and stronger, “better” Christians and better citizens. For many, Lent is now time to try to scale impossible heights of spirituality, purity, and self-control. We use Lent to beat ourselves into shape, to tame our human bodies, and to try to become just a bit superhuman.

There’s nothing wrong with self-improvement! But discipleship is the focus of Ordinary Time — that period between Easter and Advent, months of Gospel texts where Jesus preaches and heals and serves, when we work through the steady practice of sanctification. Lent, though, serves a different spiritual purpose, and isn’t a hyper-intense “40 Days of New Years Resolutions!”

Lent is grittier, earthier, and more human.

Lent begins with ashes on our foreheads, reminding us that we came from dust and we’ll end up back there. Lent also ends with death — the sun sets on Holy Saturday with Jesus still in the tomb. The season is bookended by human fragility and transience. The world isn’t the way it should be, and we aren’t the way we wish we were, either. There are aches of sin and death in the center of the world that we don’t know how to heal.

The impulse is to use Lent to fix these aches. But Lent isn’t time to practice saying repeatedly if only we could be better. It’s time to practice being present to the ways we aren’t better: to practice being present to our humanity.

And in this heavy season, we see a God who doesn’t stay removed from our pain or tell us to “get it together!” and “just ignore the suffering!”, but a God who comes to carry our human burdens alongside us.

***

“Come to me, all who are weary,” Jesus says in Matthew. “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light!” (Matthew 11:28,30). This verse feels like taking a deep breath. We’re trying to pull the weight of being human all by ourselves, piling on practices and productivity, ignoring our pain and fighting through. We keep thinking that succeeding at Lent means pulling this weight all by ourselves.

Jesus doesn’t take away the heaviness of being human. But Jesus comes alongside and says, I will pull the weight of being human along with you. When we pull it together, it’ll be lighter.

This is the Gospel — that Jesus “did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself human” (Philippians 2:6). The story of Lent isn’t the story of a superhuman God swooping in to tidy things up while staying clean and in control, or a story about how we can do fantastic, ethical things “through Christ who strengthens us.” It’s a story of a God who is here with us, inside it all.

God Incarnate means “God with a body.” It means God knows everything ugly and scary about being human, all about broken hearts and broken promises, all about having a body with anxiety, insomnia, and the flu.

If Lent is just superhuman-ing through our fragility, we won’t see Christ, aching body and aching soul, not just a popular preacher or successful prophet, but a dusty person as lonely, scared, and weary as us.

This God says to us, “you are entirely human, and I’m with you. You are entirely human, and entirely Beloved.”

In practicing that Presence of unconditional acceptance, maybe we’ll become better people. And maybe we won’t become better people. That isn’t the goal, though. If that hoped-for holiness doesn’t find us, Lent hasn’t failed. Grace, like the theologian Paul Tillich says, comes anyway:

“Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. […] It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.

Tillich continues,

“Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!” If that happens to us, we experience grace” (The Shaking of the Foundations).

This acceptance of ourselves, fully human and fully fallible, but still held and Beloved, is the deepest lesson of Lent.

If we spend Lent pushing against our humanity, muscling past the ways we’ve failed, it’s hard to learn this lesson of radical grace that is the beginning and end of God’s heart for us. We’re permitted to be small and scared, because grace is for that small, scared version of ourselves. Grace is, in fact, especially for that version. This is some good news, because these pandemic days, sometimes that feels like the only self we have left.

***

We’re all experiencing such a lack of control right now, and it makes sense to try to gather our lives back together by making rules to organize ourselves and the world.

But Lent has a better gift for our battered souls. We don’t have to keeping trying to overachieve our way through spiritual practices, attempting to launch ourselves into superhuman spiritual orbit. We can name our weaknesses out loud, to mourn and suffer them together — and to know that Jesus is with us, pulling alongside us.

Into heaviness and sorrow, into sin and failings — God comes.

We are tired, but we are not alone.

Laura Jean Truman

Laura Jean is a queer writer, preacher, and former chaplain living in Atlanta, GA. Originally from New England, she has a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of New Hampshire and an M.Div. from Emory University Candler School of Theology, with emphases in monasticism and mysticism. She supports her itinerant chaplaining and writing by slinging drinks at a historic tavern in downtown Atlanta.

Facebook | facebook.com/laurajeantrumanwriter
Instagram | @laurajeantruman
Twitter | @Laurajeantruman
Website | laurajeantruman.com

Photo by Eric Sun

One Year Changed: Faith in Pandemic

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Angela Denker 2/18/21 Angela Denker 2/18/21

The Lent I Didn’t Want

Every year, I look forward to Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent with the kind of relish that only one raised with a certain sort of Midwestern stoicism and glory in suffering can amass.

Maybe it is the same part of me who brags about walking outside in 15 below, up the hill both ways to school growing up in Minnesota, or having to shovel the church sidewalk before waving palms on a chilly April morning.

At its worst, or sometimes its best, Ash Wednesday is a hair’s breadth away from schadenfreude, a glory in others’, or our own, misfortune. For one day in the church year the George Costanzas of our congregations rejoice! You should fear success! The Christian life is about suffering and pain! Now give up that chocolate and hit the gym. Do your devotions each morning. Trudge your weary winter self to church to eat watery soup supper with paltry crackers. Rejoice in your mediocrity!

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Of course this is a shallow way of looking at one of the richest days of the church year, and yet I also know it’s a message that Americans have often needed. On Ash Wednesday you are invited to come to church as you are. You’re encouraged to wear your pain, your grief, your failure, on the sign of a cross on your forehead.

Today I saw a video a pastor friend made for last year’s Ash Wednesday, to tune of the old TV show, Green Acres:

Ash Wednesday is the day for me! Reeeemembering Mortality!
Get those ashes on top your head.
And remember that one day you’ll be dead.

Thanks Pastor Joseph Graumann Jr.!

The tune has a certain sort of calming and honest simplicity, in a church where too often we over-complicate and over-spiritualize the realities of everyday life, to the point that many people think church has nothing to do with their everyday lives.

And so I was satisfied each Ash Wednesday, knowing that despite the ashes and wreckage and imperfection of my life, this one day the church service would acknowledge and honor that imperfection, and in doing so would remind me that this acknowledgment, this extra-special day of repentance, would usher in eventually a reminder that, like the dust of the earth, I too was created for the glory of God, and that my dust would be like stardust, a promise of eternal life, love, and relationship with God.

Then, COVID-19 came along. Suddenly, ashes were everywhere.

I read this article from the Los Angeles Times about Diego Pablo, the overworked and chagrined cremator of L.A. At 44 years old, Pablo had long worked alone, burning bodies into ashes for grieving families, on staff at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. There were so many bodies to burn this year, especially after a devastating COVID surge hit Southern California, that the cemetery had to add a second worker to burn the bodies. Pablo was training 23-year-old Tristen McBride for the night shift.

Unlike many Americans during COVID, Pablo had excellent job security in the midst of the pandemic. But like most of us, the ashes - the unremitting death - tormented him in sometimes unexpected ways. The L.A. Times called him, as opposed to a first responder, a last responder. Like so many who are employed to clean up after those more privileged than themselves, Pablo cannot take a spring vacation or dwell in the vast dark spaces of the COVID-denying Internet to pretend the pandemic isn’t happening. Instead, he lives with its death each day. Unsurprisingly, he himself contracted the virus, during the havoc-filled Southern California COVID days of December, and the virus spread through the one-bedroom apartment he shared with two cousins.

Pablo survived his bout with COVID. But his heart bears the calluses of the last year, and he talks about it in ways that Christians would do well to recognize on this Ash Wednesday 2021.

Pablo told the L.A. Times: “When it hits us personally, I try to feel what these families feel. When you feel the pain and the tears. But nothing comes out. I feel nothing. Sometimes I worry I have a hard heart. A cold heart. I think that’s what’s helped me do this job for so long.”

Pablo and McBride cremated 58 people in January 2021, compared to just 17 a year earlier. A nearby crematory had to shut down due to Southern California restrictions on air quality, due to so much death and so much burning.

Another nearby mortuary had to stop allowing family members watch their loved ones’ bodies being placed in the chamber. It took too much time. There were too many bodies, too many ashes. The fire raged, consuming everyone in its path. Some, standing in the midst of the fire, they gave it their humanity, becoming cold and hard inside so that the flames couldn’t touch them.

We all have had to do what we do to survive.

And so Pablo sits after the burning in his windowless office, doing paperwork for the dead.

I lay out tiny tins of ashes we bought online.

Usually in the church we would use the palms we burned on Palm Sunday for the following Ash Wednesday, but last year there were no palms. We’d worshiped online together in quarantine, the hollow sound of our voices alone echoing hymns and prayers. Back then we imagined that we’d survive by Zoom and singing and solidarity. Now it is another year and much goodwill has been lost.

Pablo keeps working. He attends a service at work for his own cousin. His heart alternately breaks open and snaps shut. There are so many ashes and so much death. There is work and bills and food and rent. What is a life in these days? What kind of God could gather up this vast dust of death and make life again?

This Lent is different. We do not need more reminders of our own mortality. It surrounds us, haunts us, dwells in the bodies of those first responders and last responders who guard our days.

And so I did not particularly want Ash Wednesday or Lent this year. It has felt like Lent since March 2020. The ever-present shadow of a global pandemic. The angry words traded between family and friends. The mistrust and suspicion. The lack of an off-valve.

This is not the Lent I wanted: services without suppers, sharing the peace without sharing hugs, the vacuity of empty spaces and desperate attempts to pretend we are somehow untouched by the reality of COVID.

Nevertheless, this is perhaps the Lent I needed. And so I will wear my ashes in solidarity with Diego Pablo and the millions of others who have lived next to death for far too long. I will acknowledge that Lent is not about my own shortcoming but about God’s unimaginable ability to pull life out of death, creation out of dust, green buds out of brittle branches, forgiveness out of anger and fear.

The gift of hope this Lent is not that my mediocrity is normal, or the church can embrace imperfect me or you. We learn that each year. This year, in a Lent coupled with far too many ashes and far too much unjust death, the gift of hope is that my standing among the ashes is a recognition that God dwells here, too. In acknowledgement of suffering, death, and pain — in this is God glorified. In the ignominious cross, our ashes - the ashes of our loved ones long dead and newly lost — merge with the promise of a new life that rises from the flames.

This is not the Lent I wanted. I wanted to give up chocolate or wine or commit to a new practice of reading my Bible. I did not want to pay homage and dwell in the grief and death of this year. But this is the Lent I received: the Lent of a God who walked himself into death and grief and pain and shame, refusing to avert his eyes, so that when I entered into that grief and death myself, I would find my God right next to me.

Savior when in dust to you … Low we bow in homage due;
Listen to our humble sigh; Hear our penitential cry!

Angela Denker

Angela Denker, author of Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters who elected Donald Trump (Fortress: August 2019), is a Lutheran Pastor and veteran journalist who has written for *Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Christian Century,* and Christianity Today. She has pastored congregations in Las Vegas, Chicago, Orange County (Calif.), the Twin Cities, and rural Minnesota.
Twitter | @angela_denker
Facebook | @angeladenker1
Blog | http://agoodchristianwoman.blogspot.com
Website | https://www.angeladenker.com

A ready-made virtual Lent retreat for you and your whole church.

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

Angela Denker 1/21/21 Angela Denker 1/21/21

Morning and Mourning in America

This week, after the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States of America, and Kamala Harris as the first Black, South Asian, and woman Vice President of the United States of America, it is morning again in America.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that, after a bitter election and baseless allegations of fraud from former President Donald Trump, the inauguration of Biden and Harris felt like a new day in America. Once commonplace pleasantries between Republican and Democratic congressional representatives were this week an almost unbelievable ode to a nearly forgotten past era, before the meanness and hatred unleashed during the past few weeks and years.

When white supremacy and racism are repudiated from the highest office in the land, it is a new day in America, a transition from the charlatan preachers and so-called Christian leaders who once filled the halls of power only to bow to the powerful and veer far from the Gospel of Jesus that is grounded in love, forgiveness, and truth.

In his final benediction at the inauguration, African Methodist Episcopal Rev. Silvester Beaman spoke of “mourning the dead,” “giving justice to the oppressed,” “seeking rehabilitation beyond correction,” and “making friends out of enemies.”

“Neither shall we learn hatred anymore,” Beaman continued, quoting loosely from the Biblical prophets Isaiah and Micah, “... We will lie down in peace, not make our neighbors afraid.”

Beaman acknowledged the enslaved African Americans who built the White House, the Indigenous Americans whose land was taken from them, and the recent immigrants whose lives and liberty had been threatened almost ceaselessly for the past four years.

Beaman did not say Jesus’ name, but he preached Jesus’ Gospel, with words taken from the Bible itself, including Jesus’ own first sermon.

It was a glaring contrast to the prominent Christians, many of them Evangelicals, who had sanctioned cruel rhetoric and policies against millions of Americans, from victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, to LGBTQ Americans and military veterans, to women, to people of color, to Americans living in poverty. They had done so as part of a cruel exchange, a bargain for political power and judges on the Supreme Court, supposedly to put an end to abortion, while the former President they called “Pro-Life” oversaw the deaths of 400,000 Americans due to Covid, something he still called the “China flu” on his final day in office, an epithet that led to disparagement and mistreatment of millions of Asian Americans.

To hear Beaman’s prayer was a resounding comment on a new day in America, particularly for American Christians. Americans have not heard this kind of Christianity from government leaders and prominent speakers hardly at all in recent memory, with few notable exceptions, including leaders in the Black church, like the Rev. William Barber II, who led the inaugural prayer service this week, and Rev. Raphael Warnock, Pastor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s former Atlanta congregation, and one of Georgia’s two new senators.

It’s important to emphasize, though, as Beaman’s soaring rhetoric reclaimed a gentler and more honest American Christianity, and poet Amanda Gorman led us into a brighter American future in “The Hill We Climb,” that this new day in America is merely at its dawn.

As former President Ronald Reagan claimed almost 40 years ago, it’s morning in America. The claim of a new day is barely at its dawn, the sun peeking out at the edge of the horizon, with trees and meadows and buildings and people in the distance emerging out of their shadowy forms.

Morning in America is perhaps more apropos today in January 2021 than it was in 1984, because, there is a glimpse of a different, newer, more just country just over the horizon. The new day in America does not mean the foes of white supremacy, hatred, anti-semitism, fear, anger, and divisive rhetoric have been vanquished, nor does it mean that the bloodthirsty lust for capitalism and greed and power has any less hold on America.

But maybe, just maybe, there’s an alternative narrative emerging in the morning of the first day. This alternative narrative, this new day, emerges on a morning that cannot be separated from the mourning in America, with more than 400,000 dead due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new day began with the new night, on Tuesday evening, when Biden and Harris asked Americans to take a moment to turn on their porch lights and ring church bells to honor the hundreds of thousands of American dead.

Again during his inaugural address, Biden asked Americans to pause and be silent to honor the dead. To pause and mourn, a practice with which this President is all-too-well acquainted, after the tragic deaths of his first wife, daughter, and later, his son, Beau.

I’m reminded, in this early dawning of a possible new day, of the mourning story of the Hebrew Bible, in Ezra 9-10. Ezra the scribe writes: “At the evening sacrifice I got up from my fasting, with my garments and my mantle torn, and fell on my knees, spread out my hands to the LORD my God, and said:

O my God, I am too ashamed and embarrassed to lift my face to you, my God, for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads, and our guilt has mounted up to the heavens.

As Ezra wept and confessed, he was joined by what the Bible calls a “great assembly of men, women, and children, who also wept bitterly.” Only at that moment did they make a new covenant again with God who throughout the Bible makes and remakes covenants with God’s people, always willing to forgive and to begin anew.

The story of renewal and new life for God’s people begins with mourning, as it did for Ezra, as it did for Noah, as it did for the women who found the empty tomb at the Mount of Olives.

So, we begin again today in America, chastened and mournful, not ignorant of the realities of sin and death, but resolute that joy has come in the morning amidst the mourning.

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

Ulysses Burley III 1/18/21 Ulysses Burley III 1/18/21

Law and Morals

Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, "Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin used for the tax." And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, "Whose head is this, and whose title?" They answered, "The emperor's." Then he said to them, "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.
—Matthew 22:15-22

Law and Order.

When you hear these often-coupled words, what comes to mind first? For many of us it's probably the famed police and courtroom drama that aired on NBC for 20 years, showcasing the sometimes-nuanced process of determining one's guilt or innocence in less than an hour of commercial-filled TV. Often scripted based on real-life events, the show highlighted legal, ethical, moral, or personal dilemmas to which all of us could relate. I imagine that's what made it one of the most popular shows in the history of primetime network television.

However, when I hear the words Law and Order, something quite different registers for me. Instead, I hear that phrase as a political dog whistle with very real consequences for marginalized communities and people of color. In June 2020, Donald Trump declared himself the "Law and Order" president while threatening military intervention to suppress nationwide peaceful protests against police brutality following the state-sanctioned murder of George Floyd. Ironically, the same president incited violent riots at the U.S. Capitol where some law enforcement officers were put in harm's way, while others simply looked the other way.

Nothing about the events at the Capitol resembled law or order, and yet those in power might have us believe that what took place was not only acceptable, but necessary to illegally maintain power, and more dangerously, dictate what is lawful or not.

The challenge to Jesus on the question of paying imperial taxes to Caesar calls attention to the oppressive nature of earthly rulers who pardon allies, loyalists, followers, and other members of the ruling class, yet impose heavy financial burden on everyday citizens. While such economic inequality might be legal, Jesus suggests that what is lawful from Caesar’s point of view isn't automatically righteous unto God. In the process of being challenged, Jesus is challenging us to carefully consider the complexity of that nexus where what is political and what is theological intersect, cautioning us not to blur the lines between what man says law is and what God declares as moral.

Law and Morals.

People pay taxes to Caesar’s oppressive empire as a legal mandate, but Jesus instructs us to also give to God the things that are God's as a moral mandate to promote an alternative kingdom. Paying taxes only legitimizes Caesar’s political power to set laws and enforce them, not his moral authority to rule. That moral authority belongs to God.

My brothers and sisters in faith and goodwill, we are in a political moment where the empire wants to maintain law and order as the status quo — where subjugation and oppression are hidden under the guise of legality — while failing to adhere to law and order themselves. But we are also in a theological moment where Jesus warns us that what is law might not be moral. And while we often participate in Caesar's economy — either out of self-preservation or because we feel like we just don't have a choice — God does not deal in Caesar's currency.

As children of God then, under this earthly rule of legal oppression — we can continue to pay the tax to keep in line with the law, but it cannot be divorced from actively resisting what is lawful yet immoral and working to promote the alternative kingdom where the moral authority to rule is God's alone. That's what being salt and light is all about! People rarely change systems from the outside-in. The change comes from within. Our light shines brightest amidst the darkness. Our salt adds flavor to the bitterness. Jesus understands this, so instead of pushing back on the darkness and bitterness wholesale, Jesus commands a both-and strategy: "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's."

For communities that have and continue to deal with oppressive and violent administrations under the veil of Law and Order, the choices are never as clear cut as paying taxes or flatly refusing to pay; rather, the way forward is likely somewhere left of center — a fair tax. Nevertheless, taxation without representation is theft, and thieves who have come to steal, kill, and destroy democracy lurk amongst us in plain sight.

The Beatitudes suggest that whatever brings wholeness, transformation, and healing to communities is in-and-of-itself a form of resistance against that which seeks to rob us of our livelihood. So, let us RESIST the empire's attacks; let us RESIST racism and white supremacy; let us RESIST partisanship and divisiveness, and let us strike back until kingdom come and God’s will be done.

Dr. Ulysses Burley III

Dr. Ulysses W. Burley III is the founder of UBtheCURE, LLC – a proprietary consulting company on the intersection of Faith, Health, and Human Rights. Ulysses served as a member of the Executive Committee of the World Council of Churches as well as the United States Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) under the Obama Administration. He has been recognized by the National Minority Quality Forum as a top 40 under 40 Minority Health Leader for his work in faith and HIV in communities of color and serves on the NMQF Advisory Board. Ulysses is an internationally recognized speaker and award winning writer on topics including faith, HIV/AIDS policy, LGBTQIA, gender and racial justice, food security, and peace in the Middle East. He is a lay leader at St. Stephen’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chicago, IL.

Facebook | @UlyssesIII
Twitter | @ulyssesburley
Instagram | @ubthecure
Website | www.ubthecure.com
YouTube | Ulysses Burley

Christ | Christmas | Covid

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Church Anew 1/8/21 Church Anew 1/8/21

Chaos in the Capitol: What Will We Preach This Sunday?

Responding to the insurrection at the United States Capitol, Church Anew contacted our network of contributors to ask what they would preach this Sunday. Our prayer is that these words from visionaries, nationally recognized or locally committed, provide witness for your proclamation this Sunday as the nation looks for spiritual leadership and solidarity. May the Spirit ignite your words with fire for justice.

Dr. Valerie Bridgeman
Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs
Associate Professor of Homiletics and Hebrew Bible
Methodist Theological School in Ohio

May You Be Brave

In December 2013, I wrote the blessing below and posted it on my social media. I don’t remember the context for this blessing, what made me write it at the time. But as I was reflecting on what I wanted to say to preachers who must stand and deliver this Sunday, the first Sunday after Epiphany, it seems especially appropriate:

May God Strengthen You for Adversity

A blessing for today:

May God strengthen you for adversity
and companion you in joy.
May God give you the courage of your conviction
and the wisdom to know when to speak and act.
May you know peace.
May you be gifted with deep,
true friendship and love.
May every God-breathed thing you put
your hand to prosper and succeed.
May you have laughter to fortify you
against the disappointments.
May you be brave.

On Wednesday, I watched with sadness as the United States Capitol building was overrun by aggrieved citizens. I want to be clear to note that they were citizens. They’ve been called a number of things, including by me: rioters, insurrectionists, seditionists. But they were citizens who believe that the election was “stolen” from them, who believe that the votes of (mostly) black and brown people should be rejected, that there is “proof” that the current president has been wronged. And so, they were there for the revolution and to “take back their country.” For them, those of us who voted against their will are not true Americans. I was not surprised at all. I have found myself weary from all the handwringing and the “this is not who we are” posts from (mostly) white people. I have found myself weary from the “unbelievable” and “shock” from the media and others. Most of that weariness is because no one I know that is an activist/advocate for racial and social justice found it “unbelievable” or “shocking.” It was predictable. I’ve been saying for many years, “we are not safe,” because I have been in conversations with (white) people who have said directly that they can’t wait for a revolution to “take our country back.” It was as American as baseball and apple pie. White grievance and rage are baked into the DNA of this nation. I know what I just wrote is offensive to people whose mythmaking about this country deifies it and demonizes anyone who says such things. Right about now comes the “if you don’t love this country, leave” or “go back where you came from.” It’s all so very predictable.

I turned my television to a station that is consistently sympathetic to the current president and was reminded that there is no Venn diagram between the world I generally inhabit and the world of those who only dwell in that world. And, as I usually pray, I wondered how in the world will we ever know one another since we don’t live in the same universe. And that’s where the blessing I wrote in 2013 comes in. I don’t have anything deep to write in this moment. But I know that those who claim the gospel as our starting point will have to be brave. Bravery requires precision. It requires thinking clearly about what all the issues are. It requires using language carefully. It requires resisting pablum and platitudes. It requires resisting “what about-ism” when calling out wrong. It requires truth-telling, even in the face of rage and handwringing. It calls for wisdom. But it also calls for friendships, love, and laughter. It calls for strength and God-given companionship. And preachers must invoke all of that. So, friends, may you be brave as you prepare to preach in the breach of these difficult days.

Dr. Raj Nadella
Samuel A. Cartledge Associate Professor of New Testament
Columbia Theological Seminary

Reflection on Terror in Washington D.C.

The violent attacks on our nation’s Capitol and the mayhem that unfolded are disturbing and shocking on many levels. Still, there is much about those attacks that is eerily familiar, especially the absolute sense of entitlement with which thousands of White insurrectionists stormed the capitol complex and the freedom they enjoyed in doing so.

It appears that the insurrection was driven not just by a sense of blind loyalty to Donald Trump but also by an irrational fear of the changing political landscape in the U.S. that has seen many people of color headed for prominent positions. The insurrection occurred as a Black-Indian woman is about to occupy the nation’s second highest office and the most diverse cabinet in American history is about to be sworn in. It occurred on the day a Black American and Jewish American won historic Senate victories in Georgia. Within this political context, the attack in D.C. was a grotesque display of power by White supremacists aimed at maintaining the status quo at any cost.

Many of the insurrectionists displayed, among other things, American flags and Christian symbols. Perhaps it is significant to note that many of them were also unmasked. The image of unmasked rioters carrying American flags and Christian symbols in support of White Supremacy is a metaphor for the ways the insurrection exposed the unholy alliance between White supremacy and some segments of Christianity. As the attacks on our nation’s Capitol were playing out, The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser tweeted about her teenage son quoting Sinclair Lewis, “When fascism comes to America, it will come cloaked in American flags and bearing crosses." The tweet highlights the ways sections of Christianity have been eagerly jumping into bed with the empire the last few years and enabling it to perpetuate ugly aspects of the empire in pursuit of power. Many self-styled Christian leaders have actively aided White Supremacy by weaponizing religious symbols and contributed to the current crisis.

The eighth century prophet Amos spoke of the divine disgust for people who substitute religious festivals, offerings, and symbols for justice, the quintessential divine attribute. Amos encouraged people to pay more attention to ensuring justice for the marginalized than to religious sacraments. What would Amos say in our context? He would ask Christians to focus more on addressing the idolatry of racism rather than on engaging in seemingly religious rituals. He would ask Christians not to engage in a form of religion that might cause them to be blind or indifferent to structural racism that treats armed White people attempting a coup much more gently than unarmed Black people questioning systemic violence, to paraphrase Jelani Cobb. If visible expressions of religion take precedence over commitment to justice, they run the risk of becoming substitutes for justice or even weaponized in service of injustice.

Few progressive Christians would participate in anything remotely similar to the attacks in D.C. but the prophetic call for the Church is to consistently privilege justice over religious symbols.

It is not enough not to actively contribute to the disease of racism. Any indifference to it or a failure to consistently enervate it invariably makes one complicit in it. My prayer is that faith leaders will have the needed wisdom to realize the seriousness of the Church’s complicity in this disease and sufficient courage to confront it.

Dr. Greg Carey
Professor of New Testament
Lancaster Theological Seminary

Preaching When It’s Broken

God bless you, preachers who will address congregations this Sunday and in the Sundays to come. Here in the United States, things are broken, most people know they’re broken, and we all need healing and truth. It’s necessary, but so very difficult, to bring healing and truth together when the truth is painful.

For many of us, this moment feels somehow new; for others, it’s all too familiar. Some communities in our society, particularly black and brown communities, know the brokenness more acutely than those of us who are white. For many of us, the invasion of the Capitol and the response to it by people we know, love, and also admire, brings this brokenness to the foreground.

We learned the things. Don’t make it about you and your emotions. You are pastor to the whole congregation. You’re called to exegete the congregation. We know those things. We also know some congregations will need comfort, while others will need direction. And we know there are times when we must draw the line and speak the truth, come hell or high water. But it’s broken: so now what?

Jeremiah preached when Jerusalem was broken. We just witnessed the desecration of our Capitol; Jeremiah endured the absolute destruction of God’s dwelling place. Commentators remind us that Jeremiah features oracles of judgment alongside laments. Kathleen O’Connor notes how “messages of hope coexist with threats of doom.”* We’re also reminded that Jeremiah physically enacted his message and its consequences, from moldy underwear (ch. 13) to time in the stocks (ch. 20). We might not necessarily preach texts from Jeremiah during this season of brokenness, but our reacquaintance with the prophet may resource our preaching.

I don’t mean to turn Jeremiah into a hero or a role model. The book stands out for its misogynistic language and imagery, aspects of the book that cannot be redeemed. Moreover, it’s rarely helpful to imagine ourselves as biblical prophets. I simply suggest we may relate to the book in ways that lead to wisdom.

In this moment, I commend the voice of lament. Lament allows preachers to take our place alongside our listeners rather than thundering down to them from on high. Just about everyone is hurting right now from Wednesday’s devastation, even when we disagree about what it means. Add on the pandemic and our economic dislocation, and preachers can speak as co-witnesses with their congregations to the pain this moment represents. Voice that pain, preachers. Speak those images. Name those feelings, not the emotions but their bodily manifestations. Name tightness in the gut, hot tears, pillows fluffed over and over again. “My heart is beating wildly,” says the prophet. “I cannot keep silent; for I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war” (4:19).

Lament opens some space for truth. During his election campaign, Rev. Raphael Warnock was attacked for his preaching. Warnock, pastor of Atlanta’s historical Ebenezer Baptist Church and a newly elected senator, decried the racial and economic injustice endemic to our brokenness. We name such preaching the jeremiad. But like Jeremiah, Warnock pronounced truth from within the location of brokenness, not down at it. We are not all victims in the same way, but preachers can voice that brokenness, can walk around in it, and can identify the need for rectification. We can diagnose the fractures, and having done so, speak the truth about them. We do so only as participants in the brokenness.

* Kathleen M. O’Connor, “Jeremiah,” in Women’s Bible Commentary (3rd ed.; ed. Carol A Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 267.

Dr. Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder
Associate Professor of New Testament
Vice President of Academic Affairs & Academic Dean
Chicago Theological Seminary

More Pandemonium in a Pandemic

When my sons were in elementary school, I constantly told them, “You can’t do what white children do. The consequences for you will be different.” My afternoon pickups were filled with trepidation and angst when I asked them, “How was your day?” I always feared there would be report of “misbehavior” from a white teacher or a detention note for an “infraction.” A small slight from a white boy or girl was an almost criminal act for my then small children.

The acts of insurrection yesterday proved the refrain is still true: “Black people cannot do what white people do. The consequences will be different.” In June 2020, innumerable armed guards phalanxed the Capitol ready to pounce Black Lives Matter protesters. However, this past Wednesday was a stark contrast as white seditionists overpowered police officers, desecrated legislative halls, disrespected federal offices, and demoralized congresspersons and senators alike. With the statue called “Freedom” looking down, extremists took much liberty, looted, and ran amok on Capitol Hill. The images of mayhem and chaos from that white, pristine edifice are quite different from those in Ferguson and Baltimore. Why? Race in America makes the difference. Race in America is the difference.

Before some of us could celebrate historic victories in the Georgia senate races, our attention was diverted to efforts to circumvent and upend democracy. While thousands of Americans were dying, still dying, from COVID-19, a narcissistic, political sickness begged our focus. As the liturgical calendar turned the page to Epiphany, a manifestation of mayhem, madness, and selfish motivation demanded center stage. And yet, this is the messiness of humanity. This is the messiness of the season.

Epiphany is the showing, the appearance of the magi, a group of Persian travelers, who come to pay homage to a baby born in Bethlehem. The Gospel of Matthew in chapter 2 records “fear,” “terror,” and “lies” as colors painting broad contextual strokes of the arrival of Jesus. Herod is anxious. The people under him are grossly apprehensive. Herod prevaricates. The magi sniff him out. Herod kills innocent babies. Jesus is born — born in pandemonium. The Prince of Peace appears, and Persians bow when all of Jerusalem is in a panic.

What is striking about Matthew’s lens is that the magi still bow. Although Herod takes herculean efforts to thwart what is beyond his control, angels still speak. Humanity is no match for divinity. The Creator knows what to do with and in chaos. Creation has chaos in its DNA. The late Toni Morrison’s words ring just as true now: “I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom.”

I am not offering some in the sweet by and by theology. This is not a clarion call for a Kumbaya convening. We are frustrated. Some of us are afraid. We are angry. I am furious. What I told my children years ago does not have to be redacted. What is problematic is that little boys and girls whose entitlement goes unchecked grow up to be men and women who know no boundaries and who are not afraid of the police.

Dr. Ulysses Burley III
Founder, UBtheCURE LLC
Former member, Executive Committee of the World Council of Churches

Law and Order.

Law and Morals.

Rev. Paul Raushenbush
Senior Advisor for Public Affairs and Innovation
Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC)

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits.

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?' Then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.'
—Matthew 7:15-23

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. We have a false prophet in the land who has harkened the susceptible to his Twitter voice, where he, his Senatorial enablers, and Media minions fed them lies, fear and resentment. We have a false prophet in the land who is posing for a photo op - holding the Bible, wrapped in a phony Flag as he blasts those hurting and suffering out of his path. We have a false prophet in the land, declaring himself the keeper of the faith, the protector of faithful, whose craven ministers lap at his feet. Oh, weary people. Oh, wondering populace. We were warned and warned. And now, this false prophet, a president who believed himself a monarch. A ravenous wolf who, when threatened by his electoral loss, told his pack to attack, and they did.

And so many did. So many eagerly made themselves prey to the trump call. Those who break down doors and windows, and parade with Nazi symbols believe themselves to be the righteous ones. Those who wave the confederate flag believe they are saving our country. Those who hang a political flag in place of an American one, believe themselves to be the keepers of our traditions and the hopes for our nation's future. Those whose faces twist with hate, who burn with violence believe themselves to be followers of the Prince of Peace. They do not yet know that Jesus' warning: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of Heaven' — applies to them."

Their deluded minds, their fallen souls is evidence of a terrible failing of the Church and it is our great challenge ahead. Knowing good from bad, right from wrong, truth from lies, figs from thistles — these are the essential lessons of a life lived in the Way of Jesus. We must ask ourselves at every juncture to make a judgement upon which we shall be judged — is this the Way, or have I strayed? If you are not vigilant, if you are not awake, if you follow wolves, you will be led to spiritual slaughter. We are living in an age of disinformation in which the powerful or the clever are able to manipulate the population to make them believe just about anything. How well have we prepared one another for that world? Have risen to this occasion to proclaim a Gospel that pierces through these bubbles of insanity, that plant such terrible trees that lead to such poisonous fruit.

Too many Christians lift up the cross and say "Lord, Lord" even as their theology is based on white nationalism, and their heart is hardened by hate toward immigrants, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Too many Christians cry "Law!" "Order!" as they attack peaceful movements for Black lives, while letting white militias threaten openly and praise good people on both sides. What happened in the Capitol was only the latest offense in a series of terrifying and terrorizing acts that have been given sanctuary and sanction by too many in the church.

It must stop now — in God's name. Now, the wolf in sheep's clothing has been denuded, de-platformed. The emperor has been laid bare, crude and plain for all to see. But that is only half the work. We must find ways to reach out and bring Americans led astray out of a life of falseness, of hate, of hurt into the Way of Truth, of Love- a missional invitation of repentance, reparation and reconciliation. Let the radical, liberation ethic of Jesus show all of us a better way and build together a future based on mutual care, liberty and justice. It will take all of our spiritual power, it will take all of our media savvy, and technology skills, and our shared civic commitment. We must reach out to our enemies, talk to them, listen to them, love them until they come back and become, once again, our neighbors, all part of the beloved community of God.

Dr. Eric Barreto
Associate Professor of New Testament
Princeton Theological Seminary

This Sunday, the lectionary takes us to an illuminating story for these difficult days. A story about wise seekers and a fragile king. The political center, the imperial heartbeat of this story is ever clearer this Sunday.

The magi first come to King Herod and ask, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?”

Let’s consider anew the gravity of this question.

In Herod’s mind, there is not a king of the Jews except him and certainly no child was going to take his place. Even asking such a question is an act of political treason, but Herod is curious. Even more than curious, he is completely insecure, not totally stable, even paranoid. It’s not obvious quite yet in Matthew’s narrative, but Herod was a cruel, oppressive ruler. His cruelty will soon become explicit in Matthew’s account, but for ancient readers Herod’s reputation required no explanation. The simple mention of his name would bring with it images of his cruel rule. If Herod felt his power was threatened, he would lash out violently even against his own family. One historian from that time said of Herod that it was safer to be a pig in Herod’s house than one of his own children. He killed several of his children suspecting them without reason to be plotting against him. When he knew his death was imminent, he ordered that a litany of men be executed so that there would be the sound of violence at his death and thus some grief in the land, even if it weren’t for him. Obviously, Herod’s interest in this baby is not the same as that of the magi. Even on this day of epiphany, threats against the Christ child abound.

In the midst and in the wake of Christmas revelry, we should remember that while the angels proclaimed, “Joy to the world!,” the kings of the earth trembled. When the promise that the world would be turned upside down by a mere child was proclaimed, the powerful only saw a threat to be exterminated.

This is a story we need these days. The birth of the Christ child drew in these distant worshippers. The magi saw in the stars a sign of something hopeful, someone who was about to transform the world. And the magi celebrated. They brought gifts. They rejoiced. Might we dare say that they hoped for something? Might their wisdom entail not so much their relentless chasing of a star but their relentless hope? Hope that the world did not have to be this way.

The magi celebrated.

But Herod quaked.

Herod wondered if his power was so ephemeral that a mere child would challenge him along with the armies and the empire at his back. Herod quaked.

When powerful, narcissistic, fearful people like Herod quake, the rest of us have to worry too. Because in Herod’s fear rests the threat of violence. Herod, it seems to me, was a weak ruler’s idea of what the powerful are like. And followers of an executed Christ should know more than most that the pretentious, narcissistic, vicious exercise of power is utter weakness, total folly, true cowardice, pitiable fragility. The promise of the resurrection is a divine power that heals, loves, and embraces the other. True power does not lash out at any threat. True power does not still the cries of children caught in the crossfire of a king’s insecurities. True power is wise and full of compassion. True power sees the birth of a baby as a possibility not a threat, hope for the future not an anchor or a chain. True power would rather die for the sake of the other than kill in order to preserve what little power we think we have.

That Jesus’ life starts in this way is instructive. Pursued by Herod in his earliest years, Jesus is later caught by the same empire and executed on a cruel cross. Empire thought they had once again defeated the powerless. But Empire could not see the truth. God’s power is not like the purported power of Empire and privilege and supremacy.

In Herod’s cruelty, we may be reminded of the political character of the gospel. From the very first, the gospel threatened the powerful even as the gospel lifted up the lowly, the meek, the powerless. Perhaps after the glitter of Christmas has faded and the revelry of the New Year has abated, we need to be reminded that the light of Christ still shines if we will only open our eyes and step out in faith. Perhaps in the short cold days of January, we need to be reminded what shape true power takes:

Power in a manger.
Power in a humble home visited by magi.
Power as people’s ailments are cast out with a simple word.
Power as words that reshape our imaginations.
Power at tables of abundance and belonging.
Power as life fades on a cross.
Power as friends and followers flee in fear.
Power in the resurrection of the body.
Power in the crumbling of empire’s arrogations.
Power in the flourishing of abundant, liberated life.
Power as we hope against hope.

Dr. Diana Butler Bass
Author, Speaker, and Independent scholar

At the very beginning of the Christian story in Matthew 2:1-12, we are warned that the birth of the peace and justice is intertwined with the reality of imperial violence. As the beloved community comes into the world, evil kings will lie and murder — do anything — to stop the possibility of God’s dream made manifest here and now.

So what do we do?

Be like the magi. And do not give in to Herod.

The best wisdom I have tonight is that the wise men were, indeed, wise. This is the time to pause amid the yelling (and I’ve been doing a lot of yelling on Twitter!) and remember the light of the star. Remember the angelic song of peace. Remember the longing of our hearts for a governance of grace. And remembering, we continue on following the star. It will stop. We can kneel, worship, be overcome with joy. Even through Herod lies, God’s presence does not absent itself. Love is still here.

And then — once we let that truth fill us — we do not go home the way we came. Because there will always be some Herod whose fear leads to violence and death. We will leave this Epiphany by another road.

I don’t know where that other road will take us. But we can’t continue on the road we’ve been traveling. If nothing else, I’m glad we’re on this journey together. There are many who see more clearly today than yesterday, and many who will be searching for the star. Look up. Salvation is at hand.

An excerpt from Dr. Butler Bass’ The Beloved Community and Imperial Treachery. Used with permission.

Rev. Angela Denker
Pastor, Author, and Veteran Journalist

I am heartbroken thinking about the deployment of tear gas and gunfire on Black Lives Matter protesters all over America this summer, including here in my home town of Minneapolis. Meanwhile, we watch armed anarchists and militia members storm the Capitol with very little law enforcement response.

Meanwhile, National Guard troops are finally called in to save America. Ordinary American men and women who signed up to serve their country and maybe get help with college tuition as they serve drill on weekends. They didn't deserve this. None of us did.

None of this is limited to the last four years. For far too long we Americans have valued our lives based on our bank accounts and our social media followers. We have lifted up liars and grifters as role models to emulate.

This year, I am going to try and BE. Focus on the following questions: Who am I? What are my values? How do I love my neighbor as myself? How do I follow the Jesus Ethic? Do I consider what Jesus would do in every critical situation in my life?

My prayer today, as I continue to watch armed protesters punching law enforcement officers on the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C., is that maybe America can reexamine herself, too — especially our leaders. If I may, especially our leaders who have supported the President for the past four years.

Reexamine ourselves. Who are we? What are our values? How do we love our neighbors as ourselves? How do we follow the Jesus Ethic, for those of us who claim to represent American Christianity? What would Jesus do today in America?

May God bless the United States of America — and may justice roll down like waters.

May you and I be those who do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God in 2021.

An excerpt from Rev. Angela Denker’s blog Be: America's Self-Examination In 2021. Used with permission.

Rev. Meta Herrick Carlson
Minneapolis Pastor and Poet
Bethlehem Lutheran Church

A blessing for grieving terrorism

There is sickness
with symptoms as old as humankind,
a rush of power born by
inciting fear in others,
a wave of victory
in causing enemies pain.

There is a push
to solve the mystery,
to isolate the suspect and
explain the evil simply
to a safe distance
from the anomaly.

There is a temptation
to skip the part that feels
near the suffering
that shares the sadness,
that names our shared humanity.

There is a courage
in rejecting the numbing need for data
in favor of finding the helpers,
loving the neighbor,
resisting terror
through random acts of connection.

There is a sickness
with symptoms as old as humankind,
but so is the remedy.

From Rev. Meta Herrick Carlson’s book “Ordinary Blessings: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Everyday Life.” Used with permission.

Naaima Khan 1/7/21 Naaima Khan 1/7/21

Racial Equity as Spiritual Healing

If there’s one thing that the pandemic has taught us, it’s that human connection is absolutely critical for our mental and spiritual health. When face-to-face interactions have not been possible due to public health and safety concerns, virtual methods of connection have become more widely adopted. However, as many of us have found, even virtual connection has its limitations. This is because we are fundamentally physically social beings.

And as social beings, it’s important to pay attention to our patterns of socialization. In her book, White Fragility, author and scholar Dr. Robin DiAngelo comments on how people in the United States are socialized to maintain relatively homogeneous networks. It’s especially uncommon for people who identify as White to be closely connected to many people of color.

Sometimes, what we miss in connection with other humans is not as obvious to us.

But how much more can we learn and how much richer can our life experiences be if our networks are more diverse? If we aspire to be global citizens that are interculturally agile, this raises the question: what is our responsibility for connecting with communities that are racially and ethnically different from us?

America’s history is defined by the original sins of the near genocide of Native American communities and the enslavement of African Americans. If there’s one inflection point that the triple pandemics of COVID-19, racism, and economic inequities have pushed us to, it’s the question of when America will come to its racial reckoning.

And that’s where we often face the social rub.

Race has become, not just a conversation at the forefront of our minds, but also a divisive conversation.

And, in my opinion, that is because we not only have a problem of racial hatred in the form of outright bigotry — we also have a deeper problem of racial denial eating away at the spiritual soul of this nation.

The average American will likely not overtly hate or discriminate against groups of people based on their racial identity. However, our problem is coming to terms with the need to scrutinize and counter the more subtle forms of racism — the problematic narratives we’ve internalized since we were children. For example, seeing the founders of this country as people who perpetrated genocide and enslavement instead of heroizing them to the point of glossing over these realities.

The legacy we’ve established through whitewashed narratives of our country’s past continue to inform how our culture and systems work until today.

Our goal should be to no longer sugar coat realities or talk in abstractions, but to build on the authentic conversations that we’ve begun in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and the subsequent uprisings. The goal is to recognize and confront our own feelings of discomfort and guilt so that we can become more whole.

And this is not easy work.

Talking about race causes visceral reactions within us that include getting defensive or tuning out. But it’s exactly when we begin to notice this discomfort that we need to sit with it. We must lean into exploring why it exists and where there might be opportunities to engage in the conversation in a different way — one that seeks to hold multiple perspectives, including those of your own lived experiences and identities as a person.

A common mistake that I see people who champion racial equity make is internalizing difficult conversations about race as personal condemnation.

And that’s why conversations tend to stop. Yes, we all have work we need to do at an individual level, but it’s also in the context of how we, collectively, participate in larger systems and structures of racism.

We typically understand racism as discrete acts of hate and bigotry, which certainly is part of how racism shows up. But it also entails things that are much more subtle. In her book, White Fragility, Dr. Robin DiAngelo writes:

“[If, instead] I understand racism as a system into which I was socialized, I can receive feedback on my problematic racial patterns as a helpful way to support my learning and growth. One of the greatest fears for a white person is being told that something that we have said or done is racially problematic. Yet, when someone lets us know that we have just done such a thing, rather than respond with gratitude and relief [that we learned not to do it again], we often respond with anger and denial.”

As we enter 2021, I invite us to see this moment as the beginning of an era of our racial reckoning.

It’s an opportunity for us to recognize that White dominance and normativity hurts everyone including White people. It’s an opportunity for us to interrogate the ways that we continue to participate in and reinforce systems that elevate the White identity as the dominant group.

Hundreds of years of apathy and a lack of collectively addressing the legacies of genocide, slavery, and colonization have deepened wounds within Indigenous, Black, and brown bodies until today. But it’s equally important to recognize and discuss how the wounds manifest in White bodies.

You might ask, “how?”

In our faith tradition, Muslims believe that God uses the symbolism of likening all humans to one big human body — and the different communities that make up our human race symbolized by different parts of that body. Seeking collective liberation is about getting to a place where, if one part of our body — if one community — is hurting, we all feel that pain and act to heal it.

We often think about working on racial equity as “head work,” where we look at data, change policies, or work to create more accessible programs. While all of those elements are important, we must start doing the heart work required to make more foundational shifts to how we operate. We must work toward a deeper, spiritual healing that recognizes that in order for our hearts to be healthy and whole, we must all be healthy and whole.

Editor’s Note: The author wrote this blog before the latest killing by the Minneapolis Police Department of Dolal Idd and the events of Jan. 6.

Naaima Khan

Naaima Khan is Owner and Principal of Create Good, a consultancy that helps organizations more effectively pursue anti-racism work with a special focus on using keen insights from data and evaluation. Prior to starting her own business, she worked in philanthropy for over eight years, advocating for it to be a more accessible space for IBPOC professionals and communities. Naaima has spoken about race equity and inclusive design at Ignite Minneapolis, Black Ignite, TEDx Mahtomedi and the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits annual conference. You can follow Naaima on LinkedIn, or on Twitter @naaimak.

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

Meta Herrick Carlson 1/6/21 Meta Herrick Carlson 1/6/21

Coming Back Together: Church and Consent Culture in 2021

Sometimes I catch myself thinking about the last handshakes and hugs I shared with parishioners before Covid-19 and the Holy Spirit sent us out of our buildings. I can recall the veins in a matriarch's hand, the exuberant high five of a child, the desperate embrace of a widower. I miss the energy of being proximate in crowds, but 2020 has me wondering about those who have not missed the pressure to share contact and personal space.

In my new book Speak It Plain: Words for Worship and Life Together (Fortress Press, 2020), I offer some tips for creating a trauma-informed worship space. What if our faith communities spend this season apart learning to talk about trauma and developing new hospitality practices to support folks on the other side of Covid-19? Here are a few ideas.

What is Consent Culture?

This means creating patterns of behavior that ask for permission and respect each unique response. When we build habits that check-in before and after interactions, we're normalizing options for gathering, honoring the personhood of others, and recognizing whole people. Developing these practices can feel awkward for the majority or dominant culture, which is now engaging the social and emotional work that was previously left to those whose needs had not been noticed or prioritized. But stick with it! With patience and practice, the shared responsibility for safety and welcome can become a long-term trait and active characteristic of the whole system.

Normalize Options

Every community develops patterned behavior and expects newcomers to find their way into the mainstream. But safe and healthy communities regularly examine what's been normalized. If it is essential, we learn to speak to why we've made it central to the shared practice. If it is not, we work to provide a variety of options to decenter and dissolve that norm into one option rather than a requirement.

Think about the rituals in your faith community. Can you name a practice that requires apology, explanation, or avoidance from those who do not conform? Here are a few examples:

The greeters extend their hands to shake mine, and I'd prefer not to. So, a friendly greeting turns into me awkwardly apologizing for waving instead.

My kid doesn't go up front for the children's time. Other adults want to hear that he's just shy, and he will eventually join the others. But he's just not interested and that's okay.

There's social pressure to eat sweets and drink coffee at church gatherings. I have dietary restrictions and my partner doesn't like coffee, and it becomes a topic of conversation every time we refuse. I don't want that to be our only identifier.

I appreciate verbal and written announcements that expect someone will be brand new every week. It sets me at ease on behalf of guests to hear that my community does not require conformity, but invites participation in ways that are comfortable and meaningful for them. The review helps me remember why we do what we do.

By regularly examining our patterned behavior, we will build brave spaces where belonging does not require conformity and people can safely be their whole selves.

Honor Personal Space

While Covid-19 has trained our bodies to prefer six feet of personal space, everyone defines personal space differently. It's common for folks who don't need much space themselves to assume the same about others. He's a hugger. She's a close talker. They pull you in while shaking hands. These intentions are usually friendly, which can make it difficult for those impacted to say something or set boundaries. The church has an opportunity - and a responsibility - to create space that honors the felt safety and boundaries of every person.

The lectionary is filled with stories about Jesus noticing and responding to the needs of others, acting with attention to the impact, and modeling bodily autonomy. Is there a text coming up that invites people to think about what personal space will be like when we're back together in one place?

What if communion servers are trained to ask children before touching their heads to bless them, or if you crowdsource kids about what mutual interactions they prefer when they come to church?

By consistently honoring the personal space of others, we show our young people how to honor bodies and voices in God's name.

Recognize Whole People

The collective grief and trauma of Covid has stretched more than 10 months, which means we are learning to engage small talk with more vulnerability and paradox. I hope the messy and complicated answers to, "How are you, really?" continue when we're back together at church.

I asked my kids for a few ideas:

If you don't actually want to know how someone is, or you don't have time to listen to the answer, don't ask, "How are you?" Just say, "I'm glad to see you," or, "I'm really glad you're here." Or just, "Hi."

Grown ups try to talk to me by talking about what I'm wearing and what I look like, but they can ask questions about what I'm reading, playing, learning, wondering, and feeling, too.

I have a few more:

What if our hospitality volunteers have local resources saved in their cell phones - and are trained to help a person call a mental health, domestic violence, or housing service instead of dialing 911?

What if we learn to ask different questions of newcomers, so we can learn what "getting involved" means to them? What if we expect to be challenged and changed by their investment rather than shored up for our existing, internal priorities?

What if we come back to our space with fresh eyes and ask, "What story is this space telling?" Invite neighbors and ask your newest members. Consider artwork, accessibility, and historic precedent. So many of our congregations steward spaces that tell stories about the ghosts of pastors past, theology colonized, or that the community has already peaked and is finished becoming.

It will be powerful and emotional to be back in one place. Before we do, let's consider the trauma that will surely come with us and prepare spaces to help all people to find welcome, safety, and wholeness.

Meta Herrick Carlson

Meta Herrick Carlson (she/her/hers) is a pastor and writer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She serves a two campus congregation all learning how to let go and lean in for the sake of a shared future. At this time, Meta is safe at home with three children who cannot ration snacks. Meta’s first book *Ordinary Blessings: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Everyday Life* proves a worthy gift in these uncertain times. Her second book *Speak It Plain: Words for Worship and Life Together* with more ordinary blessings and resources for church nerds and liturgical communities was released in December 2020.
Website | Instagram

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

Ulysses Burley III 12/29/20 Ulysses Burley III 12/29/20

What Kind of Neighbor Are You?

I was raised in a black upper-middle class neighborhood on the Southeast side of Houston, Texas. At the time my mother was one of the top black residential realtors in the city. She was an expert in neighborhoods, and many of the houses in my neighborhood were either sold by her or under contract with Bookman-Burley Realties.

MacGregor Terrace was my neighborhood — three-story homes on two acres of land with circular driveways, swimming pools, and fireplaces with brick chimneys. To our right was a couple who were both college professors at Texas Southern University. To our left was a family who owned one of the few black pharmacies in the city. Behind us were more homes owned by doctors, judges, restauranteurs, entrepreneurs, architects, school principals, city councilmen, an Olympic gold medalist named Carl Lewis, and a future multi-platinum, Grammy award-winning recording artist named Beyonce.

These were my neighbors growing up — black people experiencing some level of middle-class comfort despite a legacy of denial by historical racism and segregation in housing that prevented us from accessing the American Dream. For centuries, Blacks were the property, and for decades Blacks were denied the right to own it. MacGregor Terrace is where affluent Blacks in Houston found peace and prosperity in property ownership, even after segregation was no longer the law of the land as whites simply refused to sale to Blacks in certain neighborhoods well into the 1990s.

This is the legacy of my childhood community. Back then black people didn’t really have the freedom to choose our neighborhoods or our neighbors. Today, we can pretty much move where we can afford — and those who can afford more often leverage that to choose what are classified as safe, family-focused residential communities inhabited by homeowners. Despite this, we still can’t choose our neighbors.

No one can. And the best neighborhoods don’t always translate into the best neighbors.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, a lawyer poses a question to Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus had this funny way of never answering questions directly — always answering a question with another question. He reminds me of many of my professors who used to challenge us to not focus so much on having the right answer, but more so on making sure we were asking the right question. Because the right answer for the wrong question is still the wrong answer.

From this parable the lawyer determined that the Good Samaritan was the most neighborly to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers, but that still didn’t answer his initial question of “who is my neighbor?” And that’s because I believe it’s the wrong question. Instead, the question the lawyer should have pondered, and the question we should all ask ourselves in the year of our Lord 2020 is: “What Kind of Neighbor am I?” Because it’s the only question we can answer for ourselves.

America is our neighborhood. The wealthiest country in world, with great diversity of thought and culture. A democracy where “we the people” have equity in our future as a country. It’s a neighborhood that boasts the mightiest military on earth, guaranteeing our safety and security. Our public health infrastructure is the best and our resources rank us the country most prepared for a pandemic. Opportunity and prosperity abound. U.S. citizens are proud and immigrants flock to our borders hoping to share in a piece of the American dream.

And yet, the U.S. has the highest rate of poverty among developed countries. People are vilified for their diverging sociopolitical views in the public square daily. We’re the only democratic Republic on the planet that intentionally makes participating in democracy difficult. In our neighborhood there are more guns than there are people and sometimes those sworn to protect and serve us pose the greatest threat. America has the deadliest COVID-19 pandemic in the world, and it’s made worse by our lack of leadership and absence of accountability to our neighbors. And to think: those looking to relocate here risk being locked in a cage and separated from their families.

If the events of this year have taught us anything, it’s that living in the “best” neighborhood doesn’t guarantee that we’ll live amongst the best neighbors. Whether it’s doing something as simple as wearing a mask, or overwhelmingly voting in favor of science, or equality and human rights, or common decency after these values escaped us for four years — we have failed each other as neighbors, especially those who consistently find themselves in ditches on the side of the road.

Our neighborhood is such that the neighbors we’d most expect to aid us in our deepest moments of distress, may in fact pass us by. Even worse, it may be people in our own families, or people who profess a shared faith that at the very least asks us to love our neighbors.

Rev. Dr. Stephen Ray, President of Chicago Theological Seminary, explains that, “Evil requires religious people for atrocity to become mundane. It requires people whose habits of life and faith subordinate the material well-being of others to some higher ‘good.’ This is one reason I try hard to never be religious. I fear too greatly that I will come to believe God requires something of me greater than the love and care of my neighbor; particularly, when they are the least among us.”

So who is my neighbor? 2020 has proven this to be the wrong question.

A better question that we should all be asking going into 2021 is, “What kind of neighbor am I?” The good news of the parable of the Good Samaritan is that while some people may choose to knock us down, and others choose to step over us, there’s always someone good and noble willing to lift us up, and it might be the least likely suspect. My prayer is that we as people of faith and goodwill are not so religious that we believe God requires something greater of us than the love, care, and uplift of our neighbors, regardless of who they might be.

Dr. Ulysses Burley III

Dr. Ulysses W. Burley III is the founder of UBtheCURE, LLC – a proprietary consulting company on the intersection of Faith, Health, and Human Rights. Ulysses served as a member of the Executive Committee of the World Council of Churches as well as the United States Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) under the Obama Administration. He has been recognized by the National Minority Quality Forum as a top 40 under 40 Minority Health Leader for his work in faith and HIV in communities of color and serves on the NMQF Advisory Board. Ulysses is an internationally recognized speaker and award winning writer on topics including faith, HIV/AIDS policy, LGBTQIA, gender and racial justice, food security, and peace in the Middle East. He is a lay leader at St. Stephen’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chicago, IL.

Facebook | @UlyssesIII
Twitter | @ulyssesburley
Instagram | @ubthecure
Website | www.ubthecure.com
YouTube | Ulysses Burley

With seven-minute talks from faith leaders, activists, artists, and more, we will memorialize the way this moment has shaped us and will continue to influence us far into the future.

Angela Denker 12/17/20 Angela Denker 12/17/20

Renouncing State Violence

Content Warning: This blog contains reference to violence, sexual assault, and abuse.

The stories of their crimes make for harrowing reading.

Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row in the U.S., strangled a pregnant woman and brutally murdered her unborn baby.

Brandon Bernard, executed on Dec. 10, was involved in the murder of two youth ministers.

Alfred Bourgeois, executed a day after Bernard, was convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter after subjecting her to physical and sexual abuse.

Ten Americans have been executed by the federal government in 2020, a year of unspeakable American death. They are the first Americans to be executed by the federal government in 17 years.

The crimes for which they were sentenced to death are unspeakably horrible. Murder, rape, white supremacy, death of children, sexual assault, dismemberment.

For none of these convicted criminals did the horror begin with their crimes. Uniformly, they too are victims of traumatic childhood experiences, of unspeakable cruelty, of poverty, of hatred, of drug addiction. Violence begets violence. Once we knew this.

Only a federal government set upon cruel and unusual punishment, equipped only to rule under a reign of terror and hatred, would inflict upon our nation government-sponsored homicidal violence in a year of mass American death, when more than 300,000 Americans have died of COVID-19.

We stand alone among nations atop of towering heap of discarded corpses, deflated lungs unable to breathe, dead healthcare workers with discarded PPE dangling around their necks. Our government sees the grief and destruction and collective despair and opts only to kill more and more.

LAW AND ORDER!

A return to normalcy and predictability is understandably desirable on the part of everyday Americans. But those in power twisted that desire for peace and turned it into war, knowing that chaos and fear would only tighten their grasp on undiluted violent might. They suggested that it was kill or be killed, that only more death would feed the insatiable beast of a nation propped up by consumerism and celebrity more than shared commitment and sacrifice and democratic ideals.

The crimes of the ones our government killed are horrific, and so are their deaths.

They’re strapped down, unable to move. They’re injected against their will with a powerful sedative otherwise used in euthanasia for animals, or, in lower doses, for sedation. Medical experts can’t be sure if the high doses of the drug used for executions cause pain or suffering before death. Drug companies in America are skittish about providing drugs used in executions. States have had a tough time obtaining pentobarbital for purposes of execution.

After a 17-year break from the business of death, the federal government authorized pentobarbital for lethal injection under Attorney General William Barr in 2020. Barr chose to retire after overseeing the federal government’s return to death. His work was completed, but it carried with it a shroud of shame and secretive dealings. The Department of Justice would not comment on where it would obtain the drug it used to kill 10 Americans, according to TIME magazine.

Death is shameful business.

Killing is expressly condemned in the Bible. And yet research has shown that a combination of being white and being a biblical literalist is the strongest predictor of Americans who would rather punish the innocent than let the guilty go free, according to research by Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead, in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

The year 2020 has shown that white American Christians are unduly predisposed to inflict harsh punishment on others, and worry little about unjust punishment, whether that’s in treatment of Black Americans by law enforcement, or the disparate effect of Covid on Americans of color and Americans living in poverty.

This blood-thirst betrays how far we’ve strayed from Jesus, whose birth on Christmas again we desperately await next week. Yet in our churches’ preparations for Christmas, with our outsized light displays and garish Christmas trees laden with ornaments purchased online, we would do well too to prepare for Christmas by returning to the words of our Savior, particularly when it comes to our understanding of our federal government’s recent return to the business of death and execution.

You’ve heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

These are the words of Jesus himself, from his Sermon on the Mount. American proponents of the death penalty, among them purported Christian leaders, suggest that death is the only righteous and worthwhile deterrence.

But I suspect I am not the only parent of a willful child reading this article. And no matter how I scream until my lungs wear out and insist upon timeouts and lost privileges and early bedtimes and harsher and harsher punishment, I know my words are not truly heard until we nestle together, heads bent quietly, and in the trustworthiness of love and mercy, we hear what one another have to say.

Two thousand years ago, God had every violent punishment available at God’s disposal, and God still does. But in God’s infinite wisdom, God knew that the greatest deterrent of unremitting and horrific violence and sin was not violence and sin itself. God had tried that.

And so on Christmas more than 2,000 years ago, God chose to respond to sin, evil, and death with forgiveness, love, and mercy. Would that American Christians advocate for the same of our all-powerful nation and those who would seek to lead it.

Christ | Christmas | Covid

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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.

Laura Jean Truman 12/2/20 Laura Jean Truman 12/2/20

Advent: When Waiting Is the Work

I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,
and in his word I put my hope.
I wait for the Lord
more than watchmen wait for the morning,
more than watchmen wait for the morning.
Psalm 130:5-6

I’ve been trying to develop my meditation practice this year. The science is clear that meditation improves mood, decreases stress, increases attention span, even increases creativity. Contemplative practices have been a staple of Christian spirituality for thousands of years, as a way to encounter God and our deep self. There are a hundred good reasons to learn to meditate.

And yet, predictably, practicing meditation has not been going well. It is just too still for me.

Sitting still makes me uncomfortable. I’d rather be doing something. When I’m sitting still, I notice everything out of place — my ankle pushed against the wood floor, the too-dry air sucking into my nose, the so-loud music from my neighbor’s apartment. My mind whirls. When I stop moving, all I can think of is what needs to be done.

This is a hard inner voice to resist, because it seems so reasonable. There is always just so much to be done. Injustice is everywhere and the work is never-ending. When we look at the suffering of the world, being still feels like a sin. How can we justify stopping, resting, breathing, waiting?

Into this anxiety and restless busyness, the liturgical year invites us into the holy waiting of Advent.

Into a culture that prioritizes productivity over presence, Advent invites us to believe that we have value even when we are still. Into a culture that tells us if we don’t do it, it won’t get done, Advent asks us to stop working for a season. God is going to do a new thing, and all we have to do is wait.

There is a time for everything, Ecclesiastes reminds us, and the liturgical year leads us through this sacred time that runs alongside secular time — through a time to feast, a time to fast, a time to repent, a time to be forgiven. Yes, there is time to work alongside God bringing in the redemption of the world. And there is also a time to stop working, to sit and be still. It’s tempting to say that the “sitting still” is just a preparation for the work, but it would make just as much sense to say that the work is preparation for sitting still. Neither the steady work of Ordinary Time or the patient waiting of Advent is more important.

During Advent, the waiting is the work.

The work that happens in stillness is echoed by the seasonal shift from fall to winter. When the earth rests in the winter, it’s not non-productive. In death, the earth is waiting for resurrection. In stillness, the earth is replenishing. In waiting, the earth works.

It is an act of humility and trust to stop moving and fixing and tending and meddling. In Advent, we acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our own heady dreams of fixing the world. We admit that even when we stop, God still works. We put down our tools and put down our pride, and wait for the morning that God always brings in.

***

As we wrestle with our anxiety and impatience and the difficulties of learning to be still, it’s important to be gentle with ourselves. Waiting is hard because our culture has worked tirelessly to disciple us into the myth that life’s meaning is tied to our productivity. The world has taught us to be unsatisfied and to always strive for more – to be more, have more, get more, do more, fix more. Unlearning that is hard work, and it takes practice.

No one has taught us that the work goes on, even when we are still. No one has ever taught us that God can break into the world even when we have stopped working.

It's hard work to train ourselves to sit still and wait for the sunrise, instead of bustling around trying to make the sun do its thing. But practicing stillness is so important because it teaches us to decenter ourselves in the story of redemption. We remember how small we are. We remember that we do not run the world. We don’t control as much as we wish. The sun will rise in the morning whether we bustle or not.

And practicing stillness is so important because in this pandemic winter of 2020, everyone’s most important vocation is to be still and wait.

Whether we are essential workers, working from home, unemployed, corralling our kids’ education and mental health, or some combination of these – we are all being called to wait this winter. We are being asked to wait to hug the people we love. We are waiting to write in coffee shops, waiting to eat at our favorite tavern, waiting to fly to see the ocean we love, waiting to run races and go to book signings. We are waiting to be able to work safely outside of the home. We are waiting with aching hearts to visit our family. We are waiting with aching souls to worship together in our sacred spaces.

It’s very hard to feel like it’s productive work to stay inside drinking tea, trying not to let seasonal depression clog up our souls. Does this stillness matter? Can we survive it? In the stillness, does God still work?

But the stillness is exactly what will save our neighbors’ lives. This winter, the waiting is the work. This winter, the most important way that we can love our neighbor is to practice stillness.

This winter, we practice Advent as an act of love and an act of hope – hope that this too shall pass.

Advent teaches us how to wait and be still, because in the rhythms of the church year, just like in the rhythms of the seasons and the rhythms of night and day – the darkness and cold is not forever. Winter always moves to spring. Night always shifts to day. The loneliness of Advent always gives way to the God with us, Immanuel, of Christmas.

In this dark night where we cannot force the sun up into the sky, where we cannot wish the night to end faster, where we have no control and no power and only this aching loneliness and fear and anger that makes it so hard to sit still – the Psalmist reminds us that the night will pass. “I wait for the Lord,” the anonymous poet sings, “more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.” Like the watchman, there is nothing we can do to speed up time. And like the watchman, we know that no matter how long the night feels, there is always morning on the other side.

Advent helps us practice stillness. Advent teaches us to trust that the sun is always going to rise, that the night never goes on forever, that into dark long periods of history - God comes.

Every time.

Laura Jean Truman

Laura Jean is a queer writer, preacher, and former chaplain living in Atlanta, GA. Originally from New England, she has a BA in Philosophy from the University of New Hampshire and an MDiv from Emory University: Candler School of Theology, with emphases in monasticism and mysticism. She supports her itinerant chaplaining and writing by slinging drinks at a historic tavern in downtown Atlanta."

Facebook | facebook.com/laurajeantrumanwriter

Instagram | @laurajeantruman

Twitter | @Laurajeantruman

Website | laurajeantruman.com

Photo by Eric Sun

Christ | Christmas | Covid

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Ulysses Burley III 12/1/20 Ulysses Burley III 12/1/20

Advent and World AIDS Day 2020

Founded in 1988, World AIDS Day was the first public health awareness day recognized globally. Observed on December 1st of every year, World AIDS Day is when organizations and individuals around the world endeavor to increase HIV/AIDS awareness, and rally to eradicate HIV related stigma to move closer toward ending the HIV epidemic. World AIDS Day offers a global platform to recognize the role of networks of people living with or affected by HIV, peer educators, counselors, community health workers, door-to-door service providers, and faith-based organizations, at a time when COVID-19 demands an urgent response of unlimited resources, while funding cuts and visibility for civil society are jeopardizing the sustainability of services and advocacy efforts.

The 2020 international theme for World AIDS Day is “Global solidarity, shared responsibility” to highlight the necessity of oneness, togetherness, and connectedness in the HIV response at the international, national, and local levels. The theme for the 2020 United States observance is “Ending the HIV/AIDS Epidemic: Resilience and Impact” - an effort to unite the 2020 international theme of “Resilience” set by the International AIDS Society (IAS), with the federal “Ending the HIV Epidemic” plan introduced in 2019.

More specifically, "Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America," is a ten-year, $291 million investment beginning in fiscal year 2020. The plan leverages the powerful data and tools now available to reduce new HIV transmissions in 57 geographic focus areas where more than 50 percent of new HIV diagnoses occur. With an ambitious but achievable goal to decrease new transmissions by 75 percent in five years and by 90 percent in 10, the U.S. HIV epidemic would be reduced to less than 3,000 new diagnoses per year by 2030.

“Resilience” refers to resilience in science, resilience in policy, resilience in financing, resilient communities, and resilient individuals in what has been our relentlessness to stay the course of ending HIV as public health crisis despite being in the midst of a competing public health crisis created by COVID-19. As such, local and international interfaith communities have not only called for resilience, but also for renewal of a movement so abruptly interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

For Christians in particular, World AIDS Day presents a unique opportunity to theologize resilience and renewal in the context of HIV and AIDS given that December 1 falls within the first week of Advent. The word ‘advent’ is a Latin derivative of adventus meaning “coming.” For Christians it’s a time of expectant waiting for the coming of new life in the birth of Jesus Christ. Yet it’s a season that has the potential to transcend faith and meet people living with HIV where they are at this time in the epidemic’s 39 year history. At the height of the scourge in the late 80s and early 90s, the church was often the final resting place for people who had died from HIV related illness; a place to dignify the dead where they were not always dignified in life.

In a 1994 New York Times article titled, “Ritualizing Grief, Love and Politics; AIDS Memorial Services Evolve Into a Distinctive Gay Rite,” Tom Viola of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS was quoted saying to a priest, "I'm tired of being welcome in the Catholic Church dead. Until they welcome us live, it would be ridiculous for them to have the last word at memorial services." HIV was a death sentence back then, and the church had gotten good at welcoming people dying with HIV. For many Sundays since, churches have observed World AIDS Day by re-memorializing the fallen through prayers and litanies of remembrance.

But what about the living?

HIV is no longer a death sentence. It no longer has the last word. People living with and at risk for HIV are in a season of Advent - experiencing new life in the birth of innovative treatment and prevention modalities. The advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has birthed the Undetectable Equals Untransmittable (U=U) movement, where a person being treated for HIV can achieve a viral load so low that HIV is undetectable in their bodies, thereby ensuring they cannot transmit HIV to someone else. Similarly, the advent of Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) has ushered in an era of HIV prevention for people at high risk for HIV transmission, with just a once daily single-pill regimen of HAART.

This renaissance has gifted us the first generation of people living with HIV over the age of 50, and we’ve never been closer than we are right now to achieving the first generation without HIV/AIDS. Greater global solidarity and shared responsibility is urgently required to get there, ending the epidemic once and for all.

The strong advocacy role played by communities is needed more than ever to ensure that HIV remains on the political agenda especially in the era of COVID-19, and that decision-makers and implementers are held accountable. Even more than that, the faith community is needed to lead the charge in humanizing the response to ensure that we treat people and not just disease.

On this World AIDS Day and in this season of Advent, churches are called into expectant waiting not for the coming of death – or even the remembrance of it – but for the coming of new life to be enjoyed by the fellowship of people of faith and goodwill who include people who have not only survived HIV, but who are thriving. Churches are encouraged to redefine theological healing as not just the complete absence of disease, but the presence of life through treatment and prevention. And finally, churches are morally mandated to love our neighbors as God loved us - eradicating stigma, embodying love, and ending the epidemic – one day, each year, until we find a cure.

What a tremendous opportunity before us to give people living with HIV their roses while they’re alive and well!

Dr. Ulysses Burley III

Dr. Ulysses W. Burley III is the founder of UBtheCURE, LLC – a proprietary consulting company on the intersection of Faith, Health, and Human Rights. Ulysses served as a member of the Executive Committee of the World Council of Churches as well as the United States Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) under the Obama Administration. He has been recognized by the National Minority Quality Forum as a top 40 under 40 Minority Health Leader for his work in faith and HIV in communities of color and serves on the NMQF Advisory Board. Ulysses is an internationally recognized speaker and award winning writer on topics including faith, HIV/AIDS policy, LGBTQIA, gender and racial justice, food security, and peace in the Middle East. He is a lay leader at St. Stephen’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chicago, IL.

Facebook | @UlyssesIII

Twitter | @ulyssesburley

Instagram | @ubthecure

Website | www.ubthecure.com

YouTube | Ulysses Burley

Christ | Christmas | Covid

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Angela Denker 11/23/20 Angela Denker 11/23/20

The End of Dialogue?

You should know that I begin this article from a frustrated, and maybe even angry place. That’s not a comfortable place for me to be. I much prefer hope to despair, compromise to acrimony, and love to hate. I’m not there right now. God usually has to lead me through the truth before we can get to the hope. Cross before resurrection, something like that.

About four years ago, after Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States over Hillary Clinton, I reached out to my conservative family and friends who had supported him. I am someone who rarely shares partisan opinions and had worked for a Republican congressman in the past, but I had shared publicly that I was voting for Hillary partially because she was the first female candidate for president from a major American political party. I knew how it felt to be a woman in male-dominated professions, as a current pastor and former sportswriter.

In my message to my family and friends after the election, I said that as Trump had proven victorious, I wanted to acknowledge that perhaps I’d missed something that they’d seen.

I wanted to listen and to understand, to have the opportunity to move into the next four years together.

I did more than just send that message. I ended up spending a whole year traveling the country and interviewing Christians in red states and counties about the 2016 election, resulting in my first book, Red State Christians.

One reviewer said I’d displayed “intrepid forays of empathy,” and I liked that. I liked the idea that ordinary Americans could listen to each other and gain insight; that we could burst out of partisan stereotypes to share our truths and learn from the truth together. I saw this happen in several people and places where I went: from Florida to Texas to Appalachia.

And so I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years talking about the hope I see in America, even in the midst of a devastating pandemic and a much-needed and overdue reckoning with racism and white supremacy, particularly in the church.

The truth is that humanity gives me hope. Most of the time.

A couple of weeks ago, after Election Day 2020, I re-read that conciliatory message I’d sent to my family and friends after the 2016 election. I waited to see more messages like it after the 2020 election, particularly from Trump supporters.

I am still waiting.

And I keep hearing questions from pastors and teachers and grandparents and grandchildren and parents and college students and ordinary Americans all over this country. They’re asking me how we can move forward together again after 2020: how I can help them facilitate healing conversations that enable “both sides” to be heard.

Ecclesiastes tells us that for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. There is a time for dialogue. And there is a time for hard truths.

Dialogue, hope, and reconciliation cannot be a one-way road.

We have to meet each other in the middle. Far from a desire to listen and grow and learn from 2020, as we also had an impetus to do in 2016, instead the overarching message from President Trump is a blind refusal to consider that those who disagree with him have a legitimate right to even be heard, much less listened to and understood. Regardless of their efficacy, Trump’s attempts to undermine America’s electoral and democratic process are wantonly destructive of our nation itself, driving ordinary Americans to cynicism, despair, and hatred.

What are Christians to do?

At my Southern Baptist Bible camp in rural northern Minnesota, we sang a song:

He has shown thee
Oh Man
What is good and what the Lord requires of thee
But to do justice
And to love mercy
And to walk humbly with thy God

So we are called, unremittingly, to mission, to action, to love, to forgiveness, to justice, to reconciliation with our neighbor.

Jesus has some advice as well. These are the words he sent his disciples out into the mission field with, words I often repeat to Americans seeking dialogue, community, and hope:

As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for laborers deserve their food. Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. (Matthew 10:7-14)

“If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.”

In the days, weeks, and months ahead, American solidarity is needed to defeat the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. American solidarity, especially among white Christians, is needed to confront and repent and repair the devastating effects of racism and white supremacy in our churches. None can do this work alone. We need each other, like urban Americans need food from farmers; and rural Americans need broadband connections and engineering from urban tech workers. We need desperately to talk, listen, understand, and forgive one another.

And we are faced with some tough choices. I still believe that my utmost task is to see the God-given humanity in every single person. That every single person has a sacred story to share, and that their story and their world matters. I desperately believe in the power of listening and sharing and knowing each other deeply, so that we can love each other as God has first loved us.

But there will be times when dialogue isn’t working, when the truth crowds out empathetic understanding, and when failing to speak painful truths is more enabling than kind.

There will be times when we all are called to shake the dust from our feet: to refuse to stand silently by when ugly and hate-filled venom tainted by lies is spewed into the American atmosphere, threatening our country’s long tradition of bipartisan democracy and at least the idealistic hope that every single person has inherent value, no matter their political beliefs.

I titled this article with a question I’ve been wondering about. Is this the end of dialogue?

I will never say that. I will never lose hope in ordinary people’s ability to listen to each other and come together to work for the greater good.

But for me, I will no longer enter into unbalanced dialogue, meaning that dialogue without a shared commitment to understand each other is unproductive and harmful to the truth.

Jesus guides us in this way. We are called to go to one another, in this Covid era perhaps via Zoom or on the phone, and we are called to share God’s love and God’s word. We are called to radical mutuality. And we are called to the truth. Without a shared commitment to hearing the truth, we are called to shake the dust from our feet and walk away.

Christ | Christmas | Covid

A virtual event providing spiritual leadership and comfort for church leaders (clergy, lay, and volunteer) and a space to grieve, lament, and reclaim the prophetic hope of this season.

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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.

Dr. Jennifer Harvey 9/25/20 Dr. Jennifer Harvey 9/25/20

Jesus is in the Streets

“You do have a choice. You don’t have to be a part of the world of the lynchers. You can join the other America.” -Anne Braden

Four words.

What can I do?

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked this question in the last five years by white Christians from diverse parts of the theological eco-system. The way I hear the question varies tremendously, depending on my mood; more responsive to the news cycle than I like to publicly admit. Now, as the nation reckons with news that the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor will not be charged in her death, I’m bracing to hear it again.

On my best days, I hear it as genuine: “I’m newly waking up to the catastrophe of white supremacy in our land, and I don’t know where to begin.” As someone also raised in the belly of the beast of whiteness, I feel compassion when I hear the question this way. I remember my own confusion and disorientation. I recall the sense of being truly lost when, as a student at Union Theological Seminary, Black, Native, and Latinx Christians demanded I open my eyes and engage the gospel in a different way. For so long, I didn’t even know what I was seeing when I looked in the mirror of my own racial history, and the histories and contemporary habits of the white institutions — including the church — that had formed me. I surely didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Those days were lonely and difficult.

But other times I hear the question differently.

It can sound like an attempt to put one’s “good concerned white person” credentials on display. As if the asking, in and of itself, contributes to justice somehow. And I can feel in my gut that it doesn’t matter what I offer back because the asker doesn’t plan to take me up on it.

Sometimes, especially of late, I hear despair. Those of us who are white are so used to having the systems in which our white lives unfold simply respond when we make demands of them. More of us have stepped into the racial justice struggle since young people rose up in Ferguson, the same place from and of which a group of clergy and theologians wrote a year after Michael Brown was killed: “We found the church in the streets among people whom many of us did not recognize and the voice of God called us to join it.”

It’s a new experience for white people to discover systems that don’t just magically give way to us. Our question thus exposes a truth: we’re not ready.

We’ve not prepared to be in this long-haul journey Black people have been walking generation after generation.

However I hear it, I’ve always tried to take the question seriously as part of my own slow, imperfect commitment to living anti-racism as a white Christian. To give a helpful answer: we must do our own work to understand how whiteness and white supremacy is shaping us every day. We need to plug in hard with people of color-led organizations; support them with time, energy, and resources. We have to recognize we have power in predominantly white organizations, workplaces, and institutions, and get loud, courageous, and savvy, interrupting and challenging the many ways these institutions — including the church — are harming Black people and other people of color.

But I’m finding I can’t take it seriously anymore. As Black grief and outrage passes the tipping point, that question has increasingly sounded like an obscenity; a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal. I went to bed Wednesday night after praying for Breonna Taylor’s family, Black Lives Matter leaders and protestors in Louisville, Black and Latinx students enrolled where I teach, Black clergy across our denominations and woke up determined to start responding with four words of my own.

Stop asking that question.

Stop asking that question: What can I do?

It’s passive. It’s individualistic. It centers the presumed needs of white people; needs we presume but which are not actually real, because for generations and with increasing visibility, clarity, volume, and desperation Black people have told us and told us and told us.

The question reveals the sinful malformation white Christianity has perpetuated and produced. And we are close to the point past which repentance will be too late.

To be sure, there is much we need to do to become the siblings, comrades, and co-conspirators that people of color in this nation desperately need and have always deserved. In the predominantly and historically white church, this includes reckoning with white U.S.-American Christianity’s institutional embeddedness in legacies of white supremacy and colonial-settler capitalism and understanding that, short of such reckoning, the same institutions so embedded simply cannot morally and spiritual form us the way we must be if we are to hear and respond to the voice of God calling us to join the church in the streets.

This is bitter dross.

Given the moral and political capital and, yes, the financial wealth of white U.S.-American Christians — yes, denominations are shrinking but collectively white Christians are rich — a meaningful break with white supremacy towards and in radical support of Black communities would have already meant the full birthing of that other America of which Anne Braden speaks.

Instead, after collectively enabling the demonic to be unleashed in this land, even justice-inclined white Christians who are horrified, have institutionally equivocated while children have been wrenched from their mother’s arms at the border. We’ve allocated to committees the work of crafting careful statements that may result in a BLM banner draped on our church building but failed to determine to completely and utterly participate in shutting this nightmare down; this nightmare we are watching and that Black, Native, and Latinx people are living.

We’ve continued weekly worship inside our sanctuaries — or, now, on screens — while, all this time, Jesus has been dying in the streets.

Dear white Christians, there are no more questions to be asked right now. Not by us.

There are only questions being asked of us.

What will you/I do (white Christian)?

What will we do (white church)?

In response, there can no longer be any equivocation. Only one answer reflects the gospel in this year of 2020; a year when Black women are killed while sleeping in their own beds and Black men are found burning in ditches.

Four more words; the only words I/we dare utter as prayer, confession, commitment and promise while we move our bodies out of our sanctuaries and into the places where the church is tending to the body of Christ:

“Join the other America.”

Jennifer Harvey

Rev. Dr. Jennifer Harvey is professor of religion at Drake University. She has a Ph.D. in Christian Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Her most recent books include the *New York Times* Bestseller *Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in Racially Unjust America* and *Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation*. Dr. Harvey is also ordained in the American Baptist Churches (USA).
Twitter | @drjenharvey
Website | jenniferharvey.org

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

Angela Denker 9/24/20 Angela Denker 9/24/20

RBG and the Death of Shared Humanity

When I found out Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last Friday, I felt like a rapidly deflating balloon, with the air leaking out of me.

I was on the phone with my mom, trying to sort out school issues and upcoming family birthday parties in the midst of a global pandemic, and we weren’t really hearing each other. We were talking above and around each other, as people do when we’re stressed and anxious.

It didn’t help that I had reserved this tiny window to write an article I’d been reporting for weeks. I was trying to do too much at once and failing, and then I got the alert about Ginsburg’s death.

A few minutes later, my husband ran home from the park, sweating. He couldn’t find his wedding ring.

Maybe bad things come in threes, though when I say that I remember resurrection on the third day.

***

Since her death I’ve been trying to track my own understanding of Justice Ginsburg. What I knew and didn’t know, and how her death had sparked a mixture of grief, fear, and partisan vitriol in America.

She was confirmed to the Supreme Court when I was 8 years old, by then-President Bill Clinton. I don’t remember hearing much about her at the time, which is sad, considering she was only the second woman to ever serve on the Supreme Court. I remember later in life seeing photos of her tiny, almost-antique looking frame, with thick glasses, and finding little I could remember. I didn’t realize at the time how she impacted my life directly, particularly as I was a three-sport female high school athlete, an opportunity that wasn’t afforded to my mom and grandma before the passage of Title IX, which Ginsburg defended.

I remember a vague sense that Justice Ginsburg was “really liberal,” though I’m not sure where that came from. I grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, and I once served an internship for a Republican congressman, but through consistent experiences (sportswriting, the ministry) as a woman in a male-dominated field, I had little option but to be a feminist and somewhat left of center.

Ginsburg, at her core it seems, understood that and to some extent, understood me. I read this week that she had difficulty finding her first job in law, despite finishing first in her class at Columbia. I’m sure she understood the feeling that you were always proving yourself as a woman in a male-dominated environment, and that there was little - if any - room for even perceived error when you were blazing a trail.

I also read this week that Justice Ginsburg was confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 96-3. I repeat, 96-3.

This was only 27 years ago, yet it seems nearly impossible now. There’s no question the partisanship of Supreme Court justices was heightened by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2016, when he failed to give a hearing to President Obama’s relatively moderate nominee, Merrick Garland, and prior to that, when the Republican Senate confirmed just 20 of Obama’s nominees during the final two years of his term, compared with 68 confirmed nominees from Republican President George W. Bush and a Democratic Senate in 2007-08.[1]

Right-wing focus on the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court has far outweighed left-wing judiciary focus for several decades, notably since the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, protecting women’s right to abortion without excessive government restriction.

Still, the increasing partisanship of America in general and the Supreme Court in particular is not one-sided. I’ve been reading tributes to Justice Ginsburg throughout the week, many of them from celebrities, and many of them referencing her nickname, RBG, a reference to fellow Brooklyn native, the late rapper Biggie Smalls.

The nickname became marketing and corporate gold, spawning films, t-shirts, mugs, all sorts of swag for Americans of a certain left-leaning political bent. Netflix even released the biographical film entitled RBG in 2018, and it went on to gross $14 million and be nominated for two Academy Awards.

It’s important to note that the nickname didn’t come from a Hollywood marketing meeting. Rather, it was coined in 2013 by a second-year law student, Shana Knizhnik, at New York University, writing about one of Ginsburg’s famed dissents, in a decision that held a part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act unconstitutional.

Ginsburg’s dissents were a big part of what made her legendary and important, especially to women and to many who were marginalized in America, whether by race, sexual orientation, poverty, or religion. Despite her own proximity to privilege, Ginsburg took time to understand the lives of others, and she never forgot what it felt like to be discounted simply because of her sex.

Still, as I read tributes to Ginsburg this week that mentioned over and over again her “rock star” status, and featured more and more opportunities to sell items bearing her image, and referencing the dissents that made her a heroine to American women, I wonder also what we’ve lost this week in America in the highly politicized reaction to Ginsburg’s death.

Side by side on social media with stories of young boys and girls reading books about the Notorious RBG and dressing up in Justice Ginsburg costumes for Halloween, you see men and women alike commenting that her legacy couldn’t possibly be worth celebrating because she supported “killing babies,” an apparent reference to Ginsburg’s support of abortion rights.

These reactions lost any sense of nuance. Many of us didn’t even see the reactions of the “other side,” or if we did, we didn’t dare bring it up with one another.

It all makes me sad. McConnell didn’t waste any time (literally, not more than an hour or so) releasing a statement mourning Ginsburg’s death and, at the same time, promising a Senate hearing and vote on her replacement. You got the sense McConnell had been waiting for this moment. Cynics would say of course he was, that this was his role as a political leader, to grab whatever he could for his party and for his movement.

Most Democrats responded in kind, however they could, with snarky memes or anger or reminiscence of past GOP statements about Garland, attempting to shame Republican leaders into going against their party, forgetting that public shaming is never, ever a good tactic to coerce lasting change.

I read an article this week that while Democrats were winning the culture wars, and their narratives about America were winning Academy Awards and scoring at the box office, Republicans were stacking the federal judiciary and rewriting American laws and legislation to reflect conservative values.[2] I think there’s truth to that, and we saw it play out in kind in Ginsburg’s death, though, as a Christian in America, I have to think there’s a more important end than winning.

Uncharacteristically, Trump showed more discipline than McConnell over the weekend, at least waiting two days after Ginsburg’s death to proudly promise that he’d be nominating her replacement very soon, despite the upcoming Presidential Election.

Many Americans already twisting in anxiety and grief over the Covid-19 pandemic and a national reckoning over racism and police violence clenched their collective jaws. Grief and anxiety spilled over strange ways, in masked and unmasked confrontations at grocery stores and schools, and in dimly lit kitchens across America, as parents cried silent tears once their kids were in bed after another unpredictable school day.

Everything that happened in this country, it seemed, even the death of a long-time, once bipartisan-confirmed judge, broke everything down again along the same fault lines it always did. Fox News vs. MSNBC; red vs. blue; no room for understanding or compromise or even grief.

I feel a sense of incompleteness or dissatisfaction when I think about Justice Ginsburg and her legacy and her death. I think of what country we could have today if her dissents could have been shared opinions, written together with others who wanted to find common ground and listen for the rights of the ones who are too often ignored and cast aside.

I feel a sadness too, reflected in those I saw who posted laments that Ginsburg’s strong yet elderly and diminutive shoulders were forced to hold up our whole country, a country the rest of us should have devoted more time to holding up and putting back together, instead of tearing it apart.

I feel a sadness that even in death Ginsburg’s humanity was ripped from her right away. She had to be the liberal lion, the RBG darling of the left; or she had to be the villain, maybe an easy target for Evangelical Christians because she wasn’t “one of them.” Ginsburg was just the second-ever Jewish Supreme Court Justice, another witness she bore and blessing she gave to American Jews and to future Jewish Supreme Court Justices who would follow, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, and others to follow.

I wonder if it could still be possible in America for us to mourn together, if not just for Justice Ginsburg then also for the more than 200,000 Americans who have died of Covid, and for the countless Black Americans who’ve died before their time due to the myriad consequences of systemic racism.

Collective mourning is a precursor to hope for resurrection, as it was for Jesus, who was also a Jew.

In John 11, Jesus first hears from his friends Mary and Martha that their brother, his dear friend Lazarus, has become deathly ill. First, Jesus waits. He recounts the promise of God, but he does not move immediately.

When Jesus comes to see Mary and Martha after Lazarus has already died, they all imagine that it’s too late. Too late for hope; too late for new life.

Then, Jesus mourns openly and collectively with all those gathered who loved Lazarus. In the Bible’s shortest verse, Jesus weeps.

In this shared mourning, those gathered gain hope and strength. Their renewal of faith comes first, then the resurrection.

I write this not to impose a Christian story on a Jewish Supreme Court Justice, who had her own rich faith and a very different understanding of Jesus and of the resurrection.

I write it instead for those of us who would call ourselves Christians and Americans, to suggest that before we work together and grow together and govern together and worship together, that perhaps we might first need to mourn together, not the image of RBG and what she represented to the right or the left, but for Ruth Bader Ginsburg the woman, created in the image of God, our human sibling who cared so very much for humanity.

[1] “The GOP is confirming Trump judicial nominees it stalled under Obama.” Roll Call. Aug. 26, 2019. <https://www.rollcall.com/2019/08/26/the-gop-is-confirming-trump-judicial-nominees-it-stalled-under-obama/>

[2] Hornaday, Ann. “RBG and the empty triumph of liberal pop culture.” The Washington Post. Sept. 21, 2020. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/rbg-as-pop-culture-icon-while-right-cemented-its-agenda/2020/09/21/97773e80-fb45-11ea-8d05-9beaaa91c71f_story.html>

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

Angela Denker 8/20/20 Angela Denker 8/20/20

Why Christian Values Demand Women's Rights

This year, my ordination anniversary fell on the same day as the 100-year anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. This amendment gave some American women the right to vote, though still denied many women of color such rights until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as Senator and Vice President-hopeful Kamala Harris pointed out in her nomination acceptance speech last night.

These two symbolic anniversaries, commemorating my role as a Pastor and faith leader, and my rights as an American female citizen, seem rarely to coincide. But this year, their being placed together on the same day seems worth reflecting on, especially as the role of so-called Christian voters looms ever-larger in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.

I would not be a Pastor if I did not believe Jesus had called me directly into this role, to devote my life to preaching the Gospel and helping people grow in their faith; to see Jesus’ words, witness, and life, death, and resurrection as relevant to their lives inside and outside the church. This is the conviction that led me out of sports writing and the secular world of journalism and into seminary and life in the church, serving Lutheran congregations in Las Vegas, Chicago, Southern California, the Twin Cities, and rural Minnesota.

Still, many Christians continue to believe that because I am female, my call into ministry itself is anathema to their understanding of the Gospel.

Many American Christians, including those I know and love, continue to subscribe to a theory called “complementarianism,” which states that men rule over women at the “head” of a family and society, and women should be silent in church: general instructions taken from a particular situation referenced by the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. I wrote about this three years ago and have preached about it several times in the past, so I won’t go into a lengthy exegesis here of why those biblical passages should not be generalized in support of a theory of male dominance in American Christian circles, as they have been in much of 20th and 21st Century American Evangelicalism. For more on this, read here, here, here or my book chapter on Evangelical women here.

Instead, I’ll talk about the ways that male headship language and governance has hurt America and hurt the church. It has enabled a devastating undercurrent of sexual abuse against women among Christian clergy members, including Catholic, Evangelical, and mainline clergy, as documented by the #ChurchToo movement. Male headship language has also enabled domestic abuse against women in marriages and relationships. Male headship language has even excused physical, verbal and sexual abuse of children in the church.

Male headship language has hurt men and boys, forcing them to stifle their emotions and present themselves to the world in ways that are inauthentic and damaging. Patriarchy in the church has made it costly and daunting for men to share their emotional struggles and pain with the world, leading to a generation of male pastors who live with depression, sometimes even leading to death by suicide for a generation of Christian men who found themselves floundering and unable to live up to a false idol of biblical manhood.

Male headship language has also limited the prophetic and Gospel-centered witness of female preachers, pastors, leaders, and teachers.

Men have not been able to benefit from Bible study and scholarship taught by women in churches. Female church leaders have been shut out from important leadership positions and networking due to the “Billy Graham rule,” which forbids men from socializing with women on a one-on-one basis. While this “rule” shut out strong female leaders from positions of power and influence in the church, it sadly did not prevent rampant infidelity and sexual misconduct among male pastors and church leaders.

With lack of exposure to female colleagues, too many male Christian leaders continued to view women as either mothering figures or objects of sexual desire, as evidenced recently by the scandal over Liberty University President Jerry Falwell’s Instagram account, and his liking of swimsuit photos of young women.

While female Christians like Beth Moore and Jen Hatmaker have large social media platforms and influence, most positions of formal leadership in American Christianity continue to be held by men. Thus, the American Church has been slow to own up to its failings of American women due to conservative doctrine about gender roles and male headship.

Even in my denomination, where women have been ordained for 50 years, female pastors still receive mailings for Mr. and Mrs. Husband’s Name, failing to use their title as Rev., even from church offices and organizations.

Women who wear clerical collars are often stared at in public and asked, “Can I call you Father?”

The American version of Christian leadership continues to be predominately male and patriarchal, so perhaps it’s no surprise that women’s rights have never been lifted up as an important part of Christian values.

As a Pastor and a Biblical scholar and a theologian, I would humbly suggest that it’s time to change this.

We must first look to Jesus to see why Christian values demand women’s rights. Many of Jesus’ most important life experiences happened alongside women, such as his conversations with friends Mary and Martha, sisters to Lazarus, who Jesus raised from the dead. Jesus’ vision of his mission to the world was changed during conversation with a Canaanite mother who was desperate to heal her daughter. After his crucifixion, it is Jesus’ female friends and disciples (though they aren’t named as such by 1st Century biblical writers) who first come to the tomb and share the news of Jesus’ resurrection with the world on that first Easter morning.

In the early church, women like Priscilla, Chloe, Lydia, Apphia and Nympha led house churches.

Junia is mentioned in Romans 16 as “prominent among the apostles.” It’s clear the Apostle Paul worked closely with many women in the early church. But the American church has instead chosen to prioritize a few cherry-picked verses about head-coverings and headship to silence and denigrate women in the church, instead of paying attention to the broad breadth of Paul’s ministry and collaboration with early Christian female leaders, without whom the church would not have survived.

Throughout the history of the global church, female mystics, religious sisters, writers, musicians, preachers, and revolutionary leaders have carried on Jesus’ work of redemption, liberation, and love. Widows were also singled out for special care in the book of Acts and in Paul’s letters in the New Testament. Widows continue to form the backbone of churches across America, sewing quilts, organizing food drives, teaching Sunday School, and filling up Bible studies.

But for too long, the American church has somehow seen women’s rights as contrary to the mission of American Christianity.

Feminists are portrayed as asking for “abortion on demand,” and the debate over being Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice in America has rarely considered the impact of forced birth or lack of contraceptive options on women’s health and flourishing. Meanwhile, America far surpasses other developed countries in maternal mortality; this is particularly striking for Black American women, who despite their vast contributions to American Christianity, are rarely lifted up or celebrated in popular American Christian culture.

As the 2020 election approaches, conservative Christians continue to speak about abortion and being Pro-Life as the only reasonable position for Christian voters and values to take. Left out of the conversation is the idea that rights for women: the right to vote, the right to preach, the right to health care, the right to support for raising children, the right to equitable wages — these are all also important parts of Christian values. Jesus stated as such clearly in his first public sermon, recounted in Luke 4:18-19:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

For a Savior who spent so much time in the company of female friends and colleagues, and who witnessed the difficulty borne by his young, unwed mother - the idea that this mission extended to supporting the rights of women seems axiomatic.

In the United States, single mothers are dramatically overrepresented among our nation’s poor. According to the 2010 Census, nearly 30 percent of families led by a single mother lived under the poverty line. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, women and single mothers have continued to suffer disproportionately, asked to carry the bulk of responsibility for child-rearing while schools, daycares, and summer camps have closed. Poor women, many of them women of color, are also overwhelmingly employed in the essential caregiving work that puts them at highest risk to be infected with COVID-19. The health risks of pregnancy are too often ignored for women; so much so that the idea that a mother’s health is part of the abortion debate is rarely a part of discussions about abortion in America, especially among American Christians.

It does not seem a revolutionary idea to state that women are people too, in 2020 America.

But too often, American Christians have viewed women as second-class citizens, somehow less worthy of human rights than men are. This is anathema to the witness and ministry of Jesus and to the witness of the Bible, which calls for special care and consideration for the poor and oppressed, who in America, are disproportionately women and mothers.

Too long have advocates for women’s rights in America been silent about the ways that Christian values insist upon rights and consideration for American women. This year, as my ordination date fell on the anniversary of women’s right to vote in America, I am compelled to no longer remain silent. Christian values demand women’s rights. Any Christian leader or politician who suggests otherwise is distorting the witness of the Bible and of Jesus himself.

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

Angela Denker 7/10/20 Angela Denker 7/10/20

Smash the Monuments: a New Christian Iconoclasm

About a month ago, I watched people surround the statue of Christopher Columbus outside the Minnesota State Capitol building less than 20 miles from my house.

Many of them were Dakota and Ojibwe, members of the American Indian Movement of the Twin Cities. Their ancestors, their distant relatives, had been beaten and killed by Columbus and his men, a terrifying precursor to the Trail of Tears and Indian boarding schools and smallpox and death and poverty on the reservation.

They surrounded the statue and lifted a rope around it, daringly and fearlessly yanking the man of bronze from his granite pedestal. They had waited many years, seen many legislative bills pass and attended committee meetings with no action taken. In the wake of the gruesome death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police — in a country where Native Americans are the most likely ethnic or racial group to be killed in police encounters — the wait was over. Something had to fall. Something had to die, or change would never come.

The people surrounded the fallen statue. They beat their drums. They sang songs of sorrow and songs of hope. They took photos.

When the statue hit the ground, it made a loud, thudding noise. Underneath the ground, for a while anyway, tiny tremors shook the earth. They vibrated beneath the roots of the trees and foundations of buildings that held up the city.

It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gon’ come,
oh yes it will. (Sam Cooke)

***

I’ve been to the Minnesota State Capitol before. As an elementary school student, I marveled at the golden horses, the statue called Quadriga that stands on the middle of the building’s second level, just below the gleaming white rising dome.

Turns out the statue only appears to be golden. It’s copper, gilded with gold. The male figure, of course, represents the state. The two women, their naked breasts bursting out of their blouses, represent agriculture and industry, unintentionally signifying the role of women as the true engine of the economy. The four horses, bucking but bridled, tied to the chariot carrying the man, represent earth, fire, water, and wind. The statue’s official name is Progress of the State.

I remembered the golden horses, their simulated movement driving us forward, the way the sun’s rays caught their gilded golden coat even on 0-degree January days. Unlike most statues, this one suggested motion - impermanence - movement.

I did not remember Columbus.

His bronze statue was so commonplace it faded into the background. He was white and male and so powerful he’d been cast into stone that he might be worshiped for generations to come. I’d seen figures like his all over America and Europe. I’d been to Mount Rushmore multiple times. The gray statues, unlike the golden one above, symbolized stolid, immovable power. They witnessed to the permanence of social, racial, and class order. Rarely if ever were these statues of Black people, or of women. They said to me: “We are in charge.”

Their dominance was so deeply entrenched, centuries after Columbus mistakenly sailed to America, that I never questioned them. I walked past them and bowed my head.

***

In seminary, I read a great deal about the Protestant Reformation in Europe, which happened not a century after Columbus ignited his reign of terror on the Americas. Looking back now, that’s fitting. The powerful nobility and clergy of Europe saw their power slipping away in the old country, so they salivated at the opportunity of tyranny in another land, of colonialism, of more people who might be readily oppressed, weakened as they were by lack of immunity to European diseases and cruelty.

The European peasants were among the first to cry for Civil Rights.

It was they, the ancestors of American Evangelicals and Protestants and Catholic reformers, who first rushed into European cathedrals and smashed statues and altars and icons and stained glass windows.

I remember this because I read the word so many times in my textbooks. Again and again the historians and theologians wrote of iconoclasm and of iconoclasts, and again and again I had to look up the word.

Today’s dictionary calls an iconoclast one who would attack cherished beliefs or institutions, or secondarily, destroy images used in religious worship. But now the lines have blurred between religious and national worship, as Christian nationalism has wrought its hold over American Christianity, and American flags and bunting decorate sanctuaries, and we sing patriotic songs as we share the bread and wine of Holy Communion.

So too iconoclasm today melds with the holy iconoclasts of the Protestant Reformation. Gleefully and purposefully they destroyed the beautiful sanctuaries and altars. They smashed the monuments to Europe’s Holy Roman Empire, where the King and Emperor and the Pope together shared power and worship.

Anytime we bleed these lines of national power and religious worship, we are in trouble.

Like the boiling down of the golden calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai, the God of the Bible demands the monuments to power be smashed, idols to ideology be broken, and statues to success be pulled down.

***

A better woman than I would have wondered the first time I saw Columbus at my state capitol, why a man from Spain who didn’t understand global navigation, committed mass genocide of indigenous peoples, and never set foot in what is now the United States, was erected here on grand scale as a monument to a country that called itself free.

A better woman than I would have recognized that Columbus’ message carved in stone to all the people of America, that while perhaps all may live here, only some may truly be free, and only a few are fit to rule. Columbus was a standard-bearer—wealthy, audacious, white, and male. His Christianity, if you can call it that, was in service to a greater master, the pursuit of wealth and power. He paid it lip service in his writings to the European royals who financed him, the same way some politicians today tell us they are praying in the sight of injustice, only to trot out a few repeated incantations to suggest that they worship the God of the Bible.

But the God of the Bible is pretty clear about idols.

Almost a decade ago, I walked the dusty streets of the Old City of Jerusalem and knelt at the foot of the site of Jesus’ tomb, on top of which European Christian crusaders had built a massive sanctuary, called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or Latin for tomb.

I was awestruck the entire length of my visit, moving slowly through the massive, hollow space with hundreds of other pilgrims. The air was heavy with incense. I was grateful for this place where I could worship Jesus, could remember His death.

And yet the Church of Holy Sepulchre, for all its grandeur, has not been able to stem millennia of warfare just outside its doors. Different Christian sects have battled one another for its stewardship. Christians, Jews and Muslims have fought holy wars, killing one another, bleeding for access to the land. The church holds the tomb of Christ but not his grace, his mercy, or his peacemaking. For that we need living stones, built into a spiritual house, to witness to the justice and power and mercy of a God who abhors cruelty and killing and oppression.

***

I hear the laments of those who wail as the statues tumble, and I think some are lamenting their own loss of power and influence, the waning righteousness of an “American Gospel” that demanded worship of the wealthy and powerful, who hide behind their dusty statues as proof of their once rightful lordship.

I hear them worry about what will come next. Where will we look without our statues, our history, to guide us?

When we stop relying on the men of stone, we, as people faith, can look instead to the tablets of stone, whose challenging words and insistence on worship only of God led to the erection of the first monuments, the golden calves, which Moses would smash and destroy for the Word of God.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water underneath. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Exodus 20:4-6)

So let the monuments fall and tumble to the earth. Let the Columbus statues be toppled. And then let us gather up the dust, spread it across the land, add water, and plant seeds anew for our nation. Iconoclasm is not an end, but a beginning.

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Photo by Eric Sun

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If we earnestly and truthfully follow what makes our soul sing, there is God, singing in harmony all along.

Laura Jean Truman

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This acceptance of ourselves, fully human and fully fallible, but still held and Beloved, is the deepest lesson of Lent.

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Then, COVID-19 came along. Suddenly, ashes were everywhere.

Angela Denker

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Angela Denker

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Dr. Ulysses Burley III

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Christ | Christmas | Covid

Sometimes, what we miss in connection with other humans is not as obvious to us.

Race has become, not just a conversation at the forefront of our minds, but also a divisive conversation.

The legacy we’ve established through whitewashed narratives of our country’s past continue to inform how our culture and systems work until today.

A common mistake that I see people who champion racial equity make is internalizing difficult conversations about race as personal condemnation.

As we enter 2021, I invite us to see this moment as the beginning of an era of our racial reckoning.

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Christ | Christmas | Covid

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I wanted to listen and to understand, to have the opportunity to move into the next four years together.

The truth is that humanity gives me hope. Most of the time.

Dialogue, hope, and reconciliation cannot be a one-way road.

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I titled this article with a question I’ve been wondering about. Is this the end of dialogue?

Angela Denker

Twitter | @angela_denkerFacebook | @angeladenker1Blog | http://agoodchristianwoman.blogspot.comWebsite | https://www.angeladenker.com

Christ | Christmas | Covid

But other times I hear the question differently.

It’s a new experience for white people to discover systems that don’t just magically give way to us. Our question thus exposes a truth: we’re not ready.

Stop asking that question.

Stop asking that question: What can I do?

We’ve continued weekly worship inside our sanctuaries — or, now, on screens — while, all this time, Jesus has been dying in the streets.

Jennifer Harvey

Twitter | @drjenharvey

Website | jenniferharvey.org

Angela Denker

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Still, many Christians continue to believe that because I am female, my call into ministry itself is anathema to their understanding of the Gospel.

Male headship language has also limited the prophetic and Gospel-centered witness of female preachers, pastors, leaders, and teachers.

Women who wear clerical collars are often stared at in public and asked, “Can I call you Father?”

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