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

I Am Okay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So ends this reading.

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

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

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Rev. Dr. Valerie Bridgeman

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

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

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.

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

I lift my eyes to the hills

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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Jeff Chu

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

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

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

Tethered Away From God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am tethered to white supremacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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REV. RANJIT K. MATHEWS

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

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

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

Your Words Will Become Seeds

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

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

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

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

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

Or, your words will become seeds.

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

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

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

말이 씨앗이 되다 Your words are seeds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

말이 씨앗이 되다 Your words are seeds.

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

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

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

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

말이 씨앗이 되다 Your words are seeds.

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

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

말이 씨앗이 되다 Your words are seeds.

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

말이 씨앗이 되다 Our words, our seeds.

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DR. CHRISTINE J. HONG

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

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

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

The Playfulness of God

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

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

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

My name is Ophelia Hu Kinney.

She, her, and hers are my pronouns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So people of the global majority.

People of God's deep delight.

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

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

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

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

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OPHELIA HU KINNEY

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

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

Rev. Laura Cheifetz 2/15/24 Rev. Laura Cheifetz 2/15/24

Beyond the Politics of Visibility

Jesus embodies a different kind of knowing, a different ministry and witness that comes with stiff social and economic penalties. His visions of an end to evil and dehumanizing systems so that all might flourish. Those were both popular and exceedingly disruptive.

The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of a talk Rev. Laura Cheifetz gave at our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

Laura preaches because her understanding of the vision of the world God desires is so very different from how things are. Laura preaches to anyone who will listen. Seriously. But most typically, she preaches to the good people of the Protestant mainline. Mainly, the PCUSA.

Laura preaches hard things when called for, and beauty, and love, and body, and radical inclusion. That's when she's had a nap and is hydrated. Sometimes she preaches the gospel. of grace in “just enough”. Like we're all tired, but sometimes just enough is more than enough.

Our friends James and John asked Jesus for positions, you know, in his cabinet, on his pastoral staff. But wait, that's what we do. That's what those of us who are considered leaders in the progressive people of color Christian space sometimes do.

In our defense, it's what we're told to do in our capitalist society. Women are told to lean in. People of color are encouraged to put our names in for prominent positions where only white people have gone before.

It's not just that we are told to live as though we have the confidence of mediocre white men, particularly when we know we are better than that. It's that for generations we have not been given a choice about the shared cup and the shared baptism. Suffering and death have stalked all of us, but some of us faster than others.

Because the society we live in does its best to legally, culturally, economically advantage white people and men with the best we have to give, leaving the rest of us with the dregs.

Of course we are jockeying for our own positions. A place at the table, right? And if it comes with the ability to provide for our families and make positive change?

James and John are playing the system. This is what they know. James and John make the error and become object lessons of asking such a thing of a prophet who healed on the Sabbath, palled around with sex workers, and sat and talked with strange women.

While we are accustomed to writing what could be maybe the next best selling book in our space or the next article that gets a lot of clicks.

Putting forward our names for Bishop, self referring to the open call at that tall, steeple church, Jesus's words echo, “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant.”

James and John see popularity and imagine power as it is shaped in their society. But the way Jesus perceives is paved with consequences.

It is alienation, not comfort. Humility, not power. It is the ill and the unhoused. It is the challenge to the powers that be, unto death. And that, itself, is faithfulness. It is an honoring of all that our ancestors went through so that we could be.

We who are people of color know the danger we already live through our bodies, our ancestries, our cultures. And our ancestors lived this too, although we have had some problematic ancestors.

One of these ancestors is Takao Ozawa. He had the misfortune of living in the United States when the only way to be a citizen was to be white or black. Ozawa, an immigrant from Japan, argued that he was white. And he took this all the way to the Supreme Court in 1922.

He was Christian. His skin was, as he said, white. His children had English names. He had been educated in the United States. Despite all of his efforts, Japanese immigrants remained ineligible for citizenship until 30 years later in 1952. The lesson he took from a life of racism and xenophobia was the wrong one.

But honestly, who could blame him? We have other ancestors who knew the truth about this place.

Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American activist in Detroit, told us to build movements an inch wide and a mile deep.

Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese American activist who engaged in causes ranging from Puerto Rican independence, to freeing black political prisoners, to redress for Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II, urged us to speak out wherever there is injustice.

And she modeled it for us. She didn't want us to be so polite.

Some of us are playing those old politics of visibility and respectability clothed in new social media strategies. How many followers do we have? Do prominent people think of us for speaking or for church positions? How provocative, but still within the basic framework, could we be?

Can we get that photo op maybe in the Oval Office? How can we create change within the denomination? Meanwhile, Jesus is over here making sure the children have a bite to eat.

We are the next ancestors. How will we shape what comes after us? Will we strive for the limits of our imaginations? Are we planning to be James and John?

Or will we be the ancestors willing to serve? Following the way of Jesus, fighting against injustice, a servant all the way to the end.

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REV. LAURA CHEIFETZ

Laura Mariko Cheifetz is the Assistant Dean of Admissions, Vocation, and Stewardship at Vanderbilt Divinity School. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a graduate of North Park University (MBA, ’11), McCormick Theological Seminary (M.Div. ’05), and Western Washington University (BA in Sociology, 2000).
She is a contributing editor to Inheritance, a magazine amplifying the stories of Asian American and Pacific Islander Christian faith. She is the co-author and editor of "Church on Purpose: Reinventing Discipleship, Community, & Justice" (Judson Press) and contributor to "Race in a Post Obama America: The Church Responds" (Westminster John Knox Press), "Leading Wisdom: Asian and Asian North American Women Leaders" (WJK), "Here I Am: Faith Stories of Korean American Clergywomen" (Judson), and "Streams Run Uphill: Conversations with Young Clergywomen of Color" (Judson). She is co-author of the "Forming Asian Leaders for North American Churches" entry in the "Religious Leadership" reference handbook (SAGE Publishing). An occasional contributor to various blogs, her piece "Race Gives Me Poetry" for "Unbound: An Interactive Journal of Christian Social Justice" won the Associated Church Press 2016 Award of Excellence - Reporting and Writing: Personal Experience/1st Person Account (long format).
Laura is multiracial Asian American of Japanese and white Jewish descent. She was the fourth generation of her family to be born in California, and grew up in eastern Oregon and western Washington. Laura has served on various boards, national and international ecumenical bodies, and has been president of two homeowners associations. She is currently the co-moderator of the Special Committee on Per Capita-Based Funding & National Church Financial Sustainability for the Presbyterian Church (USA). As you might imagine, she is well-versed in people and politics.
Laura and her partner, Jessica Vazquez Torres, the National Program Manager for Crossroads Antiracism Organizing & Training, live in Nashville, Tenn. with two rescued Shih Tzus. They enjoy all their nieces and nephews, and hope to be such fabulous aunties that the kids smuggle good booze to them in their retirement home. In their free time, Jessica bakes and Laura delivers the baked goods to friends and neighbors.

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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.

Rev. Eric Shafer 1/26/23 Rev. Eric Shafer 1/26/23

What Will You Tell Your Grandchildren?

I believe we are in another “what we tell our grandchildren” moment with Afghans, Ukrainians, Haitians, Venezuelans, and so many more, fleeing war and violence around the world and seeking protection in the U.S. What will tell our grandchildren when they ask us how we responded?

I began my pastoral ministry in the late 1970’s serving Holy Trinity Memorial Lutheran Church in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania. Just north of Allentown, Pennsylvania, Catasauqua is an old iron and silk town that, even in the 1970’s, was already past its prime. Holy Trinity was a small congregation. The ministry of its former pastor had not ended well. Good people for certain, but lots of work to do.

Shortly after I arrived, a representative of Lutheran Services of the Lehigh Valley (now called Lutheran Community Services), the local refugee resettlement partner with Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, called to ask if our congregation might assume sponsorship of a Vietnamese refugee family who had found an inexpensive apartment in Catasauqua, far from their current sponsorship congregation.

I knew all about the so-called “boat people” and the massive refugee crisis in southeast Asia following the end of the war in Vietnam, with Vietnamese fleeing communism and Cambodians fleeing government-sanctioned mass genocide. I also knew our congregation was small and in recovery. I did not think we could take on this big responsibility so close to the time I had just started in ministry there.

I debated how to respond to this request. In the process, I called my older brother Byron. After listening to my concerns, Byron said simply, “What will you tell your grandchildren? What will you tell your grandchildren about this crisis and how you responded?”

We welcomed the family. It was a life-changing experience for all those involved. Not long afterward, we sponsored two Cambodian refugee families who became integral parts of our congregation.

You will not be surprised when I suggest that involvement with Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) is a good way for each and any of us to respond to this crisis.

For more than 80 years, LIRS has worked with immigrants and refugees from all over this world, helping them to resettle here in the USA. We sometimes forget that after World War II one-sixth of the world’s Lutherans were refugees. And over these 80+ years, LIRS has helped refugees from Hungary, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, and so many others. This work continues as we helped over 10,000 Afghans, hundreds of Ukrainians, and nearly 3,000 other refugees in just last year.

Congregations and even individuals can still sponsor refugee families, of course, but there are also many other ways you can be involved to help immigrants and refugees. They are all outlined on our LIRS website, a website which is easy to remember – www.lirs.org.

For example, LIRS is helping the thousands of unaccompanied minor children who enter our country each year. You might remember the children in cages several years ago. At that time, LIRS was asked by the federal government to find foster care families for these children and was able to place more than 5,600 children into foster care! We also operate welcome centers around the country to help families who enter this country seeking asylum get the help they need to navigate that difficult process, centers which also help provide for their physical needs while the asylum process unfolds for them, a process that can take years. And, we are working with US businesses who are hungry for workers to fill their many unfilled positions, positions that our current citizens do not wish to take.

At our website - www.lirs.org - you will find information on all of these efforts plus suggestions for prayer and study, for financial support, for outreach to those in detention centers, for advocacy with local, state and national leaders and much more. Right now, for example, we need to be asking our representatives in Congress to support the bi-partisan Afghan Adjustment Act so that these refugees can remain in the USA. There you can also find out about local ways you can volunteer to help immigrants and refugees here in your community.

And, one other thing we can all do is to go to that website and sign up for the LIRS newsletter so that we can be kept informed of the issues before our church and society relating to immigrants and refugees.

The Rev. Eric C. Shafer

Pastor-In-Residence

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS)

The Rev. Eric C. Shafer is the “Pastor in Residence” for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) and is available to visit your congregation to share LIRS’ ministry. Contact him here.

Founded in 1939, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) is the largest national faith-based nonprofit dedicated to serving vulnerable immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees in the U.S.

Rev. Eric Shafer

The Rev. Eric C. Shafer was Senior Pastor at Mt. Olive Lutheran Church in Santa Monica from April, 2014 until his retirement in July, 2022. He is currently the “Pastor in Residence” for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

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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.

Eric D. Barreto 7/11/22 Eric D. Barreto 7/11/22

When God Surprises Us

This sermon was originally delivered by one of Church Anew’s advisors, Rev, Dr. Eric Barreto, on July 3rd, 2022, as a part of Duke University Chapel’s “Fourth Sunday after Pentecost” worship service. To view a recording of the sermon, click here.

Acts 10:34-35, 44-48

Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”

While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days.

My friends, do you ever wonder what God’s voice sounds like? Do you ever wonder if you would recognize God’s voice if God whispered in your ear or thundered from a mountain? I mean, we confess week after week that the Scriptures are God’s word, but what voice do you hear when we together declare, “The word of the Lord?”

For some of us, I’m sure, God’s voice would sound resonant, deep, something like James Earl Jones but the CNN version more than Star Wars. (“This is CNN.” Not, “Luke, I am your father.” Spoiler alert.) For some of us, I’m sure, God’s voice is gentle, soothing; it’s that whisper we have heard when we were scared, worried, hurt by those we loved most. For some of us, I’m sure, we are not sure what God’s voice would even sound like. I mean, does God have a voice? A mouth? Lips? A tongue? Some of us think this is all very silly.

Some of us grew up in churches where God’s voice was full of judgement and threat. Turn or burn. Obey God or else. God’s voice was like the angry preacher on television or on the soapbox on a street corner.

Some of us grew up in churches where God’s voice felt timid, halting, uncertain. God has some nice words to share with us, but such a God isn’t going to change us, not really. God’s voice was like a Hallmark card. Placid. Saccharine. Momentary.

All this might make me wonder how we would know God’s voice in the first place if we were to hear it. Not only that but let’s be honest, we have a hard time listening to and for God’s voice. Life can be so loud, so distracting that we can easily miss when God is speaking. Even worse is that sometimes, often times we miss God’s voice entirely because we don’t have the imagination to hear God’s voice. Our expectations about what God might say are too restricted, our expectations about how God will sound are too narrow, our expectations about what God might say is not open enough to receive the breadth and the depth of God’s graciousness.

Fortunately, my friends, we are not alone in these problems!

In Acts 10, Peter wrestles with God’s voice, especially when God’s voice seems to lead down an unbelievable path. But first we meet a righteous centurion named Cornelius. Cornelius has a vision. A voice in the vision calls Cornelius to send for Peter. Cornelius listens right away. The next day Peter has his own vision. In this vision, a blanket comes down from the heavens with all kinds of animals. Three times, a voice says, “Kill and eat,” and three times, Peter refuses to do so. And, three times, three times!, the voice tells Peter that what God has called clean, acceptable, we no longer get to call unclean. All this happens three times and yet Peter emerges from the vision really confused. It is at this moment that Cornelius’s men show up. Peter goes with them, but you can sense some uncertainty in Peter. Is this really what God would want me to do? Can I trust that it actually was God’s voice that this Cornelius, this Roman centurion, this Gentile heard? And though he hesitates Peter comes to Cornelius’s house. Though he’s uncertain, Peter follows this strange voice. Though he sees all sorts of problem with where he is going, he dares to believe that God just might be speaking.

Our passage this morning is when it all clicks for Peter. He finally gets it. He is much less confused finally. You see, the vision Peter had, a vision about animals and food was not about what he ought to eat but about with whom Peter ought to eat! The vision was not about food; it was about people. It was about belonging. And if God has called a people clean, then we have lost the right to call those people unclean, rejected. God’s voice has been clear! Crystal clear.

But notice something! Peter gets it, yes. He begins by saying, “I now understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who does what is right is acceptable to God.” He gets its. Finally!

But, I think he’s still a little bit nervous. You know how I know this? Because he keeps preaching! You see, when I get nervous, I’m kinda like Peter too. When I get nervous, I start preaching and preaching and preaching. Which is why we might be here all day!

So notice what happens in v. 44, one of my favorite verses in Acts. Notice what the Spirit does. Look at v. 44. Verse 44 reads, “While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the world.” While Peter was still speaking. While Peter was still preaching, still unsure about what was happening before him, still uncertain that he had actually heard God’s voice, the Spirit says, “Enough, Peter. Enough with your uncertainty. Enough with your preaching. Enough.”

And the Spirit falls upon all those gathered in Cornelius’s house. Not just righteous Cornelius and his righteous family but all his close friends he had invited over. In Acts, the Spirit does not wait for us to be ready. The Spirit moves far ahead of us, surprising us at every turn. The Spirit falls wherever the Spirit chooses.

The Spirit falls, but, still, still!, some are unconvinced. Acts tells us that Peter’s companions are “astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured even on the Gentiles.” Astounded, really?

And here, I am incredibly frustrated with Peter and his companions. I mean, were you not paying attention? Were you not listening? Have you not been reading all along? I mean, when Jesus calls the disciples to go to the ends of the earth, who did you expect to find out there except a bunch of Gentiles? Weren’t you listening? And when Mary and Simeon were singing like they were on the set of Glee or on a Broadway stage, didn’t you listen to their resonant songs? Didn’t you hear when Simeon saw Jesus as a light to the Gentiles? How did you miss it? Or when Isaiah prophesied that all the nations would gather together on the mountain of God to worship the one true God? Or that Abraham was to be a blessing to the nations? Or when God created the world, the whole world, and declared it all good. Honestly, were you not paying attention?

I want to be so angry at Peter and his companions for not seeing the obvious, for being so resistant. So obtuse.

Except I can’t. Not really. Not if I’m being honest.

You see, when God’s grace falls upon people I don’t think deserve it, I get frustrated too. When God opens God’s arms to those who haven’t earned it, I wonder what God is doing. When God is generous and merciful and loving among people who are nothing like me and my communities, I get more than a little anxious. Why? Because, if we are honest, God’s grace, God’s justice is strange to us. God’s grace, God’s justice baffle us. God’s grace, God’s justice is confounding because it breaks every rule we thought we knew, every measure of worth we have been taught, every boundary we have inherited and tried so hard to keep.

You see, the waters of baptism and the belonging they nurture are not ours. The waters of baptism and that belonging don’t belong to us. The waters belong to God and God alone. And these waters are abundant. These waters splash over the aqueducts we build to try to concentrate them in one place. These waters exceed the reserves we use to hold on to them for as long as possible. These waters fulfill every thirst. These waters cleanse every wound. These waters refresh every soul. These waters draw us together. These waters make us one. But these waters belong to God and God alone and God will send these waters wherever God will choose, for God is in the business of subverting our expectations, even our most deeply held convictions.

Do you hear? Listen. Really listen. Close your eyes and listen.

Do you hear? Do you hear what the voice of God sounds like? It’s not always a booming voice. It’s not always a burning bush. Sometimes, God’s voice is a river of water, bubbling, softly. God’s voice is so often subtle, quiet. We have to incline ourselves to hear it. We have to sink into the world to hear it.

And when God speaks, God does not just speak my language, words with which I’m familiar. God speaks in all the languages of the world and even in words we cannot fathom. God speaks in strange ways but in ways that the Spirit opens us up to understand. Because God is, yes, mysterious but God is present among us. Yes, sometimes God’s words are strange in our ears, but the Spirit is a gentle tutor. Yes, sometimes God’s words are surprising and strange and shocking, but they are always words of resurrection and of life.

I don’t know what God’s voice sounds like, at least not all the time. I don’t know what you hear when you hear God’s voice. But I know I have heard God’s voice. I know you have heard God’s voice. And God’s voice contains multitudes.

I have heard God’s voice when I tasted the food my grandmothers made. I have heard God’s voice when my pastor saw gifts for ministry in an awkward teenager. I have heard God’s voice when I was serving as a hospital chaplain to a young Latinx couple who had just lost a pregnancy; I heard God’s voice when words in Spanish I thought I had forgotten spilled from my lips as I prayed for comfort and hope and grief. I have heard God’s voice on the lips of non-verbal people. I have heard God’s voice in the protest cries of the oppressed. I have heard God’s voice in the joyful cry of a child. I have heard God’s voice in the quiet of the night. I have heard God’s voice in the tumult of everyday life.

And God’s voice has always had a different sound, a different tenor. But what has always been consistent, what has always been characteristic of God’s voice is one thing, one transformative thing, one thing that makes all the difference.

God’s voice is always … a surprise because God’s grace is always more expansive than I had imagined. God’s voice is always … a surprise because God’s righteousness is always more generous than I had thought. God’s voice is always a surprise because God’s justice is always more merciful than I could have ever thought or hoped.

The Book of Acts does not tell us exactly what God’s voice sounds like. But Acts does tell us to listen carefully, to expect the unexpected, to hope against hope because God’s voice is always, always, always a delightful, grace-filled surprise.

Listen, my friends. Listen. God is speaking.

Dr. Eric Barreto

Eric D. Barreto is the Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. His passion is to pursue scholarship for the sake of the church, and he regularly writes for and teaches in faith communities around the country.
Twitter | @ericbarreto

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

Erin Raffety 3/30/21 Erin Raffety 3/30/21

Lenten Hope in a Pandemic

A photo of leaves on snow with green buds sprouting out of the ground signaling spring and hope. Image courtesy of Dr. Erin Raffety.

I had a visceral reaction to the coming of Lent this year. I’d never felt like this before. But apparently my body remembered that it was this time last year that fear of a highly contagious virus drove us into our homes, cloistered from other people. And then there were the killings, the protests, the political unrest. I couldn’t help but think we had had enough Lent already. Anymore just seemed cruel.

But we are still waiting. We had hope, of course, a year ago that this would all be over in the blink of an eye. As the year progressed and more uncertainty appeared, our hopes flitted from one thing to the next. Hopes delayed, hopes dashed — hope became nearly as unstable as suffering.

Waiting, without hope, is unbearable.

My family knows a thing about uncertainty or two. When my daughter was diagnosed with a rare neurological disease for which the prognosis is death in early childhood, it seemed futile to hope for things like developmental milestones or even birthdays. When she was hospitalized frequently and even doctors did not know what was going on, it was left up to us to manage our emotions. On a daily basis, Lucia has unexplained neurological and gastroenterological symptoms. Sometimes we get to find out what’s going on, but oftentimes we don’t.

Practicing loving her through that uncertainty has taught me that human hope can be a bit of an imposition, with its cathecting toward certainty, its insistence on its own way, its hubris in always knowing better. I don’t always get to know better with my daughter, I don’t even always have the power to make her pain go away, but choosing to be with her in that pain, even when it hurts, reminds me that acceptance is the part of love we’d rather not choose.

But for Christians, this just may be the kind of hope we need.

Will the vaccine make my daughter’s life more accessible? I doubt it.

While the world clamors for a miracle shot, I struggle to pin my hope on a vaccine that may so exacerbate my daughter’s fragile immune system that it leaves her permanently weakened, or may not fully prevent the spread of Covid-19, leaving her vulnerable in the future, unable to go to school, we unable to return to work.

More importantly, though, our society’s beliefs about the exposable quality of disabled lives have revealed themselves (yet again) under these conditions of pandemic: it’s not that disabled bodies present irresolvable challenges to life as we know it, it’s that we refuse to accept disabled lives as viable and valuable. The recent lack of attention to the accessibility of vaccine locations, the lack of prioritization for disabled people and their caregivers in vaccine distribution, and the lack of provisions for people now disabled and living with the long term effects of Covid-19 are just a few ways we prefer to sweep disability under the rug, even wish or hope it away, rather than recognize its importance to humanity.

My point is not just that hope and disability can coexist, but that experiences of pain, uncertainty, and disability cultivate a different, faithful kind of hope that we Christians need.

After all, we serve a God whose resurrection did not leave him without wounds or scars, but whose ultimate fulfillment of hope challenged and transformed our very images of who God is. Yet, here we are, a year out from the beginning of the pandemic, and we are still relying on our own hopes to save us.

Out here in the perpetual wilderness, Jesus reminds us that acceptance is paradoxically crucial to resurrection hope. All throughout Lent, Jesus tells his disciples he must suffer, he must be rejected, he must be crucified, and he must die.

When petulant Peter tries to have it otherwise, Jesus tells him to get out of his way, to stop setting his mind on human things (Mark 8:31-33). Just a few verses later, Jesus tells the crowd, that “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” (Mark 8:34-35)

Gospel hope, Gospel living is not about self-preservation and self-sustenance, but about radical acceptance of both the realities of our human lives and the foolish, earth-shattering difference the resurrection makes.

So this Lent, I’m calling for hope.

It often feels too tender, too raw, to hope when everything is uncertain, but perhaps that’s because we’ve put our hope in human things in an effort to distract us, to forgo the suffering and the pain.

I don’t want a hope that skips over Lent and its harsh reality, because we clearly can’t escape that. But I’m advocating for hope that anchors itself firmly in the resurrected God no matter what comes, as a taking up of one’s cross rather than a futile wish that life were otherwise.

We will still wait, of course: but let us not wait with our hope in lawmakers, returns to “normalcy,” school openings, vacations, or even vaccines. Rather, let us wait with hope and conviction in the resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Our hope often insists on able-bodied dreams and futures; thus, it falls apart in the face of uncertainty. But Jesus’s hope, God’s hope finds us in the wilderness, bidding us to abundant life in the Spirit. This is where we all belong, if we could only let go of human hopes.

Erin Raffety

Erin Raffety is a Presbyterian pastor, a Cultural Anthropologist, and Research Fellow in Pastoral Care & Machine Intelligence at the Center for Theological Inquiry. She is currently working on a book on the ministry and leadership of people with disabilities in the church.
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Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

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

Dr. Mothy Varkey 11/10/20 Dr. Mothy Varkey 11/10/20

Midwives of Life

“The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded all of us of the vital role health workers play to relieve suffering and save lives,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General. Around the world, acts of violence related to the pandemic take place against the background of escalating ‘social untouchability’ and bigoted behaviors against anyone suspected to have been in contact with the coronavirus (‘newer untouchables’). Health resources, patients, healthcare providers, and their immediate family members are at principally high risk of experiencing physical bouts due to the misinformation (‘infodemic’) that they have become points of contagion in a community.

The healthcare professionals who have stood out as the ‘courageous midwives,’ as in the book of Exodus (1:15-22), in todays’ tough times save humanity from a possible ‘health collapse.’ During this time of unprecedented and unparalleled upheaval, they hold the life of humanity in their hands just as a mother holds a newborn baby. They reach out to those who are suffering and save their lives at the cost of their own peace, security, and dreams of their dear ones. They have revealed that ‘fear and pain’ itself is possibly a pandemic even among the frontline workers. The lack of adequate personal protection, poor working conditions, long working hours, constant threat of infection, and subsequent risk to their family and friends worsen the situation.

One of the most riveting chronicles in the Hebrew scripture — the account of the escape of bonded laborers from bondage to freedom — begins in carnage of newborn sons. For his gigantic building projects, Rameses II preferred to conscript foreigners in the area, rather than native Egyptians. This was reported by the Greco-Roman historian Diodorus Siculus. The enslavement of the Israelites falls into the category that Diodorus describes.

Although the people of Israel were a “cheap” labor force, their unbridled growth in population became a major threat to the Empire. The language used to describe the high birth rate of the people of Israel (“fruitful” and “multiplied”) is perhaps an echo of the fertility of humanity of creation (Genesis 1:28) and at the new creation after the flood (Genesis 9:1,7). The Hebrew verb râbâ (“to be/become great, numerous”), translated “multiplied” in verse 7, repeated in verse 9 (as part of the phrase “more numerous”), verse 10 (“increase”), verse 12 (“multiplied”), and verse 20 (“multiplied”). Pharaoh must have thought that the massive populace of Israelites would join his enemies and destabilize his Empire.

So Pharaoh devised a strategy to deplete the Israelites by subjecting them to insufferable working conditions. What the people of Israel are dealing with is state slavery, the organized imposition of forced labor upon the male population for long and indeterminate terms of service under humiliating and ruthless conditions. Organized in large work groups, they became an unnamed biomass, depersonalized, losing all individuality in the eyes of their persecutors.

However, their population continued to grow and were an ongoing perceived threat to Egypt. At this point, foiled in the effort to lessen the Israelite population, another ploy was added to the repertoire of tactics for demographic control: elective infanticide.

Pharaoh ordered Shiphrah and Puah, who served as midwives in Egypt, to kill every baby boy born to a Hebrew woman. In issuing his decree to the midwives, Pharaoh perceptibly trusted upon the ease with which the baby could be killed at the moment of delivery by means not effortlessly noticeable in those days. Some advocate that Pharaoh, dreading an uprising, tried to dupe the Hebrew mothers into believing their children are stillborn. If so, Shiphrah and Puah are simply repaying Pharaoh in his own false coin. What is not clear is whether these midwives were Israelite or Egyptian women, for the Hebrew text can yield the renderings “Hebrew midwives” and “midwives of the Hebrew women.” It would have been strange for Pharaoh to have expected the Israelites to kill the males of their own people.

Another oddity is that only two midwives are mentioned for such a huge population. Either they were the supervisors of the practitioners and were directly accountable to the authorities for the women under them, or the two names, Shiphrah and Puah, are those of guilds or teams of midwives called after the original founders of the order. The conflict between Pharaoh and the Israelites began to take shape as a conflict between life and death.

But Shiphrah and Puah “feared God” more than the mighty Pharaoh. They refused to do the king’s bidding. In not killing male newborns, they engage in what might be termed civil disobedience. They displayed incredible courage. They fought against the agent of death on behalf of the God of life. Like other biblical acts of insubordination, the midwives’ noncompliance involves an element of ducking and diving. Ostensibly powerless, they do not openly defy Pharaoh, but deceive him. The Bible tells many stories in which a weak party tricks a stronger or in which characters engage in reciprocal, even competitive, trickery.

In today’s context, the frontline COVID-19 workers are the Shiphrah and Puah whom the God of life has appointed for our times. Their fear and pain are genuine, but like that of a woman in labor. When a woman goes through labor, she can withstand her agony as she is aware that a new life is about to deliver. They are not just saving the lives of COVID-19-affected people but saving humanity itself. God used the two midwives to redeem his people. Health workers are also few in numbers, like Shiphrah and Puah, but God has now placed the life and future of humanity in their strong and caring hands. It is their pain that shoulders humanity. It is in their sweat and tears, a seed of their untiring commitment that gives birth to a rainbow of hope. We honor them when we wear a mask, social distance, and deter the spread of the virus.

Rev. Dr. Mothy Varkey

Rev. Dr. Mothy Varkey is an ordained priest of the Malankara Mar Thoma Church, India. He is the Professor of New Testament at the Mar Thoma Theological Seminary, Kerala, India. He is also the visiting fellow at the Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. Among his many and influential works are Concept of Power in Matthew: A Postcolonial Reading (CSS, 2010), Salvation in Continuity: Reconsidering Matthew’s Soteriology (Fortress, 2017), and Church and Diakonia in the Age of COVID-19 (ISPCK, 2020), Inheritance and Resistance: Reclaiming Bible, Body and Power (CWI, 2020).
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Rev.Mothy
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MothyVarkey
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/user/31msdhkqxmsosderdr2o54wl445a
https://anchor.fm/mothy-varkey
Website: https://murdoch.academia.edu/MothyVarkey

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Thursday, November 19 | 10:30am Central

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Dr. Mothy Varkey 10/6/20 Dr. Mothy Varkey 10/6/20

Break the Rituals, Break the Chain

In every human community, there are religious, cultural, and political ‘normals’ pertaining to human behavior, body ethics, and cultural codes. These ‘normalcies’ are not divinely ordained but constructed by the elite and the powerful with their seemingly consensual discourses and ritual practices. Those who control this process of manufacturing what is ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ eventually determine ‘who’ and ‘what’ are ‘normal.’ Divinization and absolutization of such ‘Babel normalities’ make alternative voices and imaginations marginal and ‘abnormal’. The absence of liturgical alternatives and counter-practices not only deprive people of their agency but, more importantly, reduce them to mere biomass.

People are not biomass, but free persons/individuals created in the imago dei (Genesis 1:26-27). For Walter Brueggemann, this means that humans are to be understood as being situated in the same transactional process with the holiness of Yahweh, as in Israel. The covenantality of human personhood reimagines ‘new normals’ that transcend ritualized ‘normalities.’ It decapitalizes the essence of the privileged and makes the ‘image of God’ the ontological capital and democratic alternative of all human beings.

Sabbath was a covenantal alternative to the imperial and cultic ‘normalities’ that ruled the ancient world (Exodus 20:9; Deuteronomy 5:13).

Through the institution of sabbath, God denaturalized and deritualized ‘normalcies’ that reinforced the interest of rulers and kings. As an alternative to the ‘normals’ of the then empires, sabbath was a disruptive ‘new normal’ which provided the possibility for a new covenantal social space. The ‘new normal’ (sabbath) disillusioned the naturalized ‘normals.’ In the first century Graeco-Roman world, it was seditious and subversive even to envisage a ‘new normal’ because Caesar was the ultimate embodiment of normality. Caesar was normalized as the ‘divinely ordained’ being. This naturalized the imperial power of Caesar. On the contrary, Jesus invited the people of Israel to reimagine the kingdom of God as a new possibility wherein their freedom and dignity would be defined not by Caesar but by the image of God, justice and compassion.

In Luke 13:10-17, Jesus reinforces the original meaning and liberative purpose of the sabbath by disenchanting its ritual priorities.

As Jesus was teaching in a synagogue on a sabbath day, there ‘appeared’ a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years (Luke 13:10–11). As Joel Green rightly contends, “bent-over” (συγκύπτω) is not a sign of humility (cf. Sir 12:11), but a metaphor for her ignominious position in the social ladder. Her physical condition was not so terminal that her presence would be noticed. This is what happens when church becomes a mere ambulance.

Jesus ‘saw’ her and called her over to him (Luke 13:12). The deixis of the word ‘saw’ (ὁράω) may be understood as an eschatological gaze as in “all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:6). Through Jesus becoming flesh (John 1:14), God took the ‘flesh’ of the entire humanity upon himself. In this respect, the ‘flesh’ which Jesus took in incarnation is not a male/white/brown/black/Jewish flesh, but the very flesh of humanity itself. By laying his hands on the crippled ‘flesh’ of the woman, Jesus materialized her flesh which is otherwise immaterial and invisible to the people in the synagogue.

The crippled woman now stands ‘straight’ in the synagogue (Luke 13:13). For Jesus, contrary to that of the religious leaders who saw the woman’s ‘crippled status-quo’ as ‘normal’, it is not ‘normal’ to be (or to remain) ‘bent-over’ on the sabbath. Jesus consciously disturbs their liturgical obsessions and ritual rigidity by healing the woman. Jesus “releases” her from the chain of ritual credulity and sabbath scrupulosity (Luke 13:15), which fulfills his mission manifesto (Luke 4:18-19; Isaiah 45:16 [LXX]). When ‘binding’ is ‘normal’, “releasing” becomes the ‘new normal’. Breaking the ritual is the norm in the new normal. New normal is an eschatological straightening up of the naturalized ‘bent-overs’ and normalized ritual priorities. The posture of ‘straightening up’ of the crippled woman (Luke 13:13) is the anticipation of the eschatological redemption (ἀνακύπτω-Luke 21:28); “All flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:6).

Jesus called the religious leaders in the synagogue “hypocrites” because they twisted his healing activity into an issue of breaking the sabbath laws (Luke 13:15).

Healing on sabbath was already an issue (Luke 6:6–11). Meeting the needs of the ox or donkey on a sabbath day in no way mitigates its sanctity. “All flesh” must be protected and taken care of, including all of creation. For Jesus, hypocrisy meant the prioritization of wrong things (Matthew 23:23). Jewish leaders domesticated sabbath rituals and rubrics in such a way that it ‘normalized’ their priorities and ‘naturalized’ their privileges. Consequently, instead of a day of ‘rest’, the sabbath became a day of ‘arrest’ for the weak and weary.

The juxtaposition of Jesus’ healing (Luke 13:10–17) and the parabolic teaching of the mustard seed (Luke 13:18–21), which is achieved by the conjunction “therefore” (οὖν) in 13:18, is very relevant in the age of COVID-19. Jesus’ disruption of the sabbath normalities and priorities by ‘seeing’ the woman (S), ‘moving’ her to his side (M) and making her ‘stand’ straight (S) are like ‘mustard protocols’ of the kingdom of God. Like the organic process of the growth of the mustard seed to a ‘nest of rest’ for the birds of the air, Jesus’ kingdom of God interventions would eventually become a ‘nest’ for the poor, the brokenhearted, the captives, the blind and the bruised (Luke 4:18-19).

Although the World Health Organization protocols (SMS) such as social distancing (S), using mask (M), and sanitizers (S) to curb the coronavirus might look inconsequential like a mustard seed, it is through such mustard seed-like intercessions that we endeavor to flatten the genocidal curve. Like the kingdom of God protocols in the healing of the crippled woman, WHO protocols also paradoxically inverse our understanding of ‘normals.’ ‘New normal’ means ‘new protocols.’ New protocols break conventional rituals. It is by breaking the ‘normalized’ practices and ‘naturalized’ rituals that we can “release” people, whether from the chain/bondage of Satan or from COVID-19.

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Church Anew Unequivocally Denounces White Supremacy

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Church Anew unequivocally denounces white supremacy.

We value diversity of opinions and believe deeply in setting a table of mutual learning across political and confessional boundaries through our blog, events, and connections with others. And hate, discrimination, and corrosive, violent ideologies such as white supremacy have no place at Church Anew. Opposed to the teaching, embodiment, and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, these ideas should have no space in the walls of the church, or anywhere in God's world. We at Church Anew are dedicated to continuously rejecting and dismantling racism wherever it appears in pursuit of God's vision of beloved community.

Peter Wallace 9/29/20 Peter Wallace 9/29/20

Anger in the Service of Justice: Following Jesus’ Example

I am angry, and I am not alone.

The multitude of injustices perpetrated against Black Americans by police – spotlighted just now by the complete lack of appropriate justice regarding the grievous death of Breonna Taylor – is infuriating. Also infuriating are the blatant efforts on so many levels by elected “public servants” to deny simple access to the vote for all, to stifle economic equality and protect the wealthy, to remove much needed health care protections, to avoid responsibility for COVID-19 pandemic alleviation, to scheme in order to protect their own small-minded views in the federal courts, to ignore if not vilify the poor and cut off their safety net provisions, to intentionally deplete our hurting planet of active environmental protections – well, I could go on and on. My anger feels bottomless.

These combined tragedies are, at least, waking up a vast number of people of faith, who are channeling their anger into seeking just responses to these and other crises.

We find a perfect example for doing so in the person of Jesus. Because when we read the Gospels with open eyes, we may be surprised to find Jesus getting angry at injustice — and doing something about it.

Of course, we are ceaselessly bombarded by anger in our society: vicious arguments about political and moral views on radio and cable news programs; honking horns and rude gestures in mall parking lots; maskless minions fomenting terror in the name of freedom in supermarkets; mean-spirited, vulgar and often anonymous comments blowing up our Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, or blogs; a silly disagreement with a family member or co-worker that becomes fueled by deep stress or fear and explodes into a nearly violent altercation. We face more than enough anger in our lives.

Yet, there’s a category of anger that we must recognize as distinct and necessary: moral or righteous anger. Such anger can give us courage to do what we might otherwise not be able to do, helping us to overcome the paralysis of fear. It can fuel outspokenness to rebuke evil or injustice, giving force to reproaches that otherwise we’d keep to ourselves or simply mumble in complaint.

As Scottish Presbyterian devotional author, Robert Law, wrote a century ago that anger “is merely a force, a gunpowder of the soul which, according as it is directed, may blast away the obstructions of evil, or defend us from temptation as with a wall of fire, or which again may work devastating injury in our own and in other lives.”

Time after time throughout the Gospels, Jesus angrily challenges the hypocritical religious authorities, mocking them for their self-serving, self-promoting ways. He drives the elite crazy by spending time with and showing favor to the poor and marginalized. He questions assumptions and challenges the status quo. And as a result, he becomes the target of those in authority. Ultimately, those authorities tried to satisfy their hurt feelings by killing him. You know how that turned out.

Nevertheless, Jesus showed us that there are times when we must stand up and express truth to power in constructive, meaningful, unyielding ways despite the possible consequences.

Consider how often, and in how many ways, Jesus expressed anger in the Gospels. He was clear and direct, possessing a particular purpose: to bring about justice or reveal malice or ignorance. He made no personal attacks, but rather sought to uncover the evil behind the actions. There is no record of Jesus being angered by a personal offense no matter how wrong, unjust, or violent it may have been. He lived and taught that the one who is persecuting us is also created in the image of God and loved by God, and in that reality we can love our enemy.

Just as God is righteously angered over oppression and injustice, so should we God’s children be. Learning how to balance these teachings and actions is a lifelong process for those who choose to follow Jesus’s ways.

Jesus’s mission is to liberate human souls into a loving way of life. He is all about going after what matters to God. And so he reveals dishonesty, fights injustice and subjugation, causes change, sets thing right.

Undergirding every expression of his anger is love – Jesus speaks the truth in love.

In every case the anger of Jesus is the passion of love. His love of God, his zeal for the ways of God, his mission to open the way of God to all, together make him indignant at whatever dishonors God and whatever impedes others from knowing and experiencing life as God intends.

To simplify the matter to the extreme, we might say there are two kinds of anger: natural anger, or the anger of fear and selfishness; and holy anger, the anger of love and justice. When we witness wrong done to others, particularly those who do not have the strength or means to defend themselves, then as people of faith we need to express the anger of love — the anger that gives us boldness and outspokenness in defense of what is right.

As Robert Law put it:

“Holy anger… is one of the purest, loftiest emotions of which the human spirit is capable, the fiery spark that is struck by wrongdoing out of a soul that loves what’s right and just. When a person is destitute of such emotion – when there is nothing in them that flames up at the sight of injustice, cruelty, and oppression, nothing that flashes out indignation against the liar, the hypocrite, the swindler, the betrayer of sacred trusts—there is much lacking for the strength and completeness of moral personhood.”

There are numerous ways people of faith can be involved in helping set things right. For one thing, as we wrestle with, for example, the impact of a shooting tragedy, we can advocate for stricter, common-sense gun laws, or work toward offering much-needed services for those suffering with mental illness. Or we can take on another needed effort — whether it is helping to shelter the homeless, feeding those in poverty, visiting women or men in prison, helping to clothe children in need, volunteering to serve in voting precincts or get out the vote, serving those with special needs, working with youth who need an adult mentor. The needs are endless, the inequities abound.

Above all, we can vote, and do whatever we can to make sure others can vote.

As Election Day approaches, this is a good time for each of us to ask ourselves: How might my anger be channeled into loving action? For this is how we make our anger holy and righteous.

Jesus’s example and teachings reveal to us that anger, channeled and directed in love, can proclaim a better way and fuel positive acts. At this time of anger-fueled soul-searching, of disturbed grief, as we prepare for whatever is next, may we open ourselves to the guidance of the Spirit of peace to determine how best to express our moral anger, and, in all matters, how to speak and act in love.

Adapted from an article that originally appeared at HuffingtonPost.com/Religion and Day1.org. Republished with permission.

PW Wallace Studio 9-2020.JPG — Peter Wallace

The Rev. Peter M. Wallace, an Episcopal priest, is executive producer and host of the “Day1” weekly radio program and podcast (Day1.org). He is the author of 10 books and editor of 3; the most recent are *Bread Enough for All: A Day1 Guide to Life* (2020, Church Publishing, Inc.); *Heart and Soul: The Emotions of Jesus* (2019, Church Publishing, Inc.); and *Comstock & Me: My Brief But Unforgettable Career with The West Virginia Hillbilly* (2020, Amazon).
Twitter: https://twitter.com/pwallace
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peterwallace1
Website: https://day1.org/
Website: https://petermwallace.com

Erin Raffety 9/28/20 Erin Raffety 9/28/20

Trading Our Ropes for God’s Faithfulness

At the beginning of the pandemic, it was inevitable that we’d all come to the ends of our ropes. By now, however, we’ve all come to the ends of our ropes over and over and over again—people continue to die, whether from police brutality or this deadly virus, there’s no safety net, no childcare for working parents, no school for kids or support for people with disabilities, there’s no security, no hope in sight, it feels like what we give is never enough, and then the day starts over.

What do you do, how do you live, when there is no rope left?

You know the story where Jesus is walking on water and Peter wants to do it, too? Jesus commands Peter to come, and Peter’s doing it, he’s walking on water until the wind comes along, he becomes frightened, and he begins to sink. Just as Peter begins to sink, Jesus immediately reaches out his hand, pulls him into the boat and says to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:28-33) We often read this story as a cautionary tale about Peter’s lack of faith, but I wonder if we’re too quick to judge and our judgment clouds what God is showing us.

After all, we have all been faithless before.

A few weeks ago, not being able to be with a few of my dearest friends who were experiencing death and life transitions and challenges, began to break me. I felt so helpless and worthless and horrible. If I’m honest with myself, maybe I felt as upset about not being a good friend as I did about being apart from them and watching them suffer.

You see, I wanted to swoop in — I get a lot of satisfaction from swooping in — from helping people, especially helping them to solve their problems. Take that away from me, and maybe I’m not such a good pastor, maybe I’m not such a good friend, or even a good Christian.

It seemed to take proud, self-sufficient, busy, self-important me a long time to get to the end of my rope, but eventually, because there was literally nothing left to do, I cried out to God in prayer. I sat on my porch, morning after morning and just because there was nothing else I could do for anyone, I prayed.

Isn’t it ridiculous that it took a pandemic for me to lay down my work, my ministry, my problem-solving abilities, and call on God to help?

Isn’t it ridiculous that it took me getting to the absolute end of my rope to see my need for God’s faithfulness? Isn’t it ridiculous that we often think that ministry as primarily about our faithfulness rather than God’s faithfulness to us?

I think we’re often very proud that we never get to the end of our rope, but isn’t that somewhat the same thing as not truly letting God rescue us? I wonder how many of us are there on the water—sinking, flailing, drowning—yet too resolved to admit our weakness, our helplessness, our need for God.

The point of this passage is not that Peter is faithless—we’re all faithless at times—but rather that God is faithful. And that no lack of faith on Peter’s part, your part, or my part can screw up God’s ministry. When Peter cries out, “Lord save me!” Jesus immediately reaches out his hand and catches him.

He would never not catch him. God’s faithfulness endures even when ours falters.

But that is also not the end of the story. Out of heartbreak and helplessness, mercy ministers and hope is birthed. Out of the heart-wrenching book of Lamentations comes the promise, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, God’s mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:22-23)

We’ve been cooped up like you all in quarantine, perhaps even a bit more because my daughter has multiple disabilities and is immunocompromised. But she and her nurse have also been walking the neighborhood morning and afternoon and by now, they’ve met neighbors who we never knew existed in ordinary times. The older man just down the street from us told us recently that now that he has to move, the thing he will miss most about the neighborhood is seeing Lucia everyday, especially her smile.

As we walked home from a short visit with our neighbor my husband mused, “I wonder why it is that so many people respond to Lucia that way, that they feel like they have a special connection with her even when they’ve only just met her.” Lucia neither walks nor talks: she doesn’t see well and she can’t really move her arms or legs purposively. I try on a few explanations for Lucia’s magnetism until I finally reply, “I think that when Lucia interacts, she doesn’t hold back. Like when she laughs, she chortles and cackles and carries on, and when she smiles, she’s not stingy, she gives you a huge, effusive, effervescent smile. She doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. And to feel like you can make someone that happy in an instant, and to receive that kind of abounding love from someone is something none of us can get enough of.”

The glorious truth of the gospel is that we don’t need to save ourselves: God’s already done that.

And although the human condition is depraved and arduous and painful and really sucks a lot of the time, there are these antidotes to it, these gifts of joy and hope that we know are from God, because they bubble up like laughter, the break forth like smiles from somewhere well beyond, outside ourselves. The faithfulness of God meets us in our most faithless hour, pulling us up and out of the water, where the steadfast love of the Lord engulfs us in seemingly impossible ways.

Who would have thought that in despair, God would meet me in prayer? Who would have thought that in a pandemic, my daughter would bring joy to the neighborhood? Who would have thought that God can restore us in our very helplessness, if we only let go of our own ropes and reach out for Jesus’s hand? Who would have thought that God’s mercies would be new, even this very morning?

“You of little faith,” I hear God saying. “Through it all, I am faithful. I will never, ever forsake you.”

Paul Raushenbush 9/2/20 Paul Raushenbush 9/2/20

Images of Love, Hope, and Unity Surround Kenosha

'Love is the answer' painted on plywood walls in Kenosha, Wisconsin, photographed by Veronica King.

Ugly tan plywood appeared on windows around the city of Kenosha in the aftermath of the shooting of Jacob Blake on August 23, as the city braced for protests and potential damage to property. In response, a group called Kenosha Creative Space came up with the idea of encouraging residents of the city to paint the plywood with the themes of Love, Hope, and Unity, and soon, what was an idea became a reflection of a city grappling with violence responding in a way that did not diminish the pain, but insisted on a better future.

Veronica King was one Kenosha resident who loved the result. As King drove around the city, she noticed how many of the images contained scripture passages and she began to photograph them and share them on Facebook as part of her work with Congregations to Serve Humanity (CUSH), an Interfaith organization in Kenosha where she is Vice President. “This is one way to help begin the healing of our community,” says King, describing the messages and images of hope.

Another part of healing came through an Interfaith prayers service held at Second Baptist Church of Kenosha on Sunday afternoon outside of one of the churches that is a member of CUSH. On a sunny, warm afternoon, religious leaders from Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Episcopal Baptist, and other traditions gathered outdoors at a safe social distance to offer prayers of hope and show interfaith solidarity in this difficult time in their community.

CUSH is focused on love and healing but also on acknowledging the persistence of racism that afflicts the city. In a statement on their website they also insist that prayers are not enough and the time is now to act:

We know that hopes and prayers are not enough to stop a speeding bullet or to counteract centuries’ worth of systemic racism and the calculated oppression of our siblings of color so ubiquitous in this nation’s history that many of the privileged among us still do not recognize it even exists. We know that in addition to the hope of our hearts and the prayers of our souls we must act.

“We can live peacefully and safely if we work together, to work through our differences, get rid of systemic racism and have a strategic plan to move forward,” King further explained, emphasizing that CUSH is working with the Mayor’s office along with the Chief of Police and other community leaders to help bring the faith voice, and increased diversity to the committees that are being formed to address racism and to heal the city.

Veronica King brings her own history as a community leader to the effort as the former local NAACP chapter president, as well as her history as a social worker, a profession she decided upon when she was 10 years old and had a dedicated social worker who would check on her monthly at her foster home. King’s work with faith communities started with her own foster parents who were active in their church who offered her “Footing and my grounding."

Even as people come from the outside, eager to disrupt with a rhetoric of division and acts of violence, Veronica King and so many other residents in the Interfaith and artistic communities are working hard to fight against racial injustice and heal Kenosha with hope, love, and unity.

This post originally appeared on IFYC.org, September 1, 2020, and is used with permission.

Religious leaders of diverse faiths offer prayers and reflections at the CUSH Interfaith prayer service held at the Second Baptist Church of Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Messages of peace painted on walls around Kenosha, Wisconsin

Messages of hope painted on walls around Kenosha, Wisconsin

#KenoshaStrong painted on a banner hangs over the ruins of a building, and another painted wall portrays a message from scriptures.

An MLK quote and messages of peace and love are painted on walls around Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Scriptures quoted on walls around Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Scripture quotes and message of strength and resilience painted around Kenosha, Wisconsin

Paintings of Love, Unity, Justice, painted on brick walls around Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Paintings of love and hope around Kenosha, Wisconsin

Black Lives Matter and messages of unity painted on plywood walls around Kenosha, Wisconsin

Paintings of love and peace around Kenosha, Wisconsin

Paintings of love and equality on plywood walls around Kenosha, Wisconsin

Messages of the power of love painted on plywood walls across Kenosha, Wisconsin

Paul Raushenbush

Paul Raushenbush is Senior Advisor for Public Affairs and Innovation at IFYC (Interfaith Youth Core) promoting a narrative of positive pluralism in America, while researching and developing cutting edge interfaith leadership. He is the Editor of Interfaith America.
Facebook | @raushenbush
Twitter | @raushenbush

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Erin Raffety 7/2/20 Erin Raffety 7/2/20

Leaning into Disability, Lamenting with Freedom

I remember how it felt to choke out those words. I remember how my teeth clenched around them. I remember how my chest tightened as I stammered in our living room to my spouse.

“I’ll be dammed if after all Lucia has been through, this virus is what kills her.”

It surprised me a bit when the words came tumbling out. I thought I had made peace years ago with my young daughter Lucia’s medical fragility and especially with her terminal diagnosis. But the global pandemic—especially the shortage of PPE and other medical supplies, the overwhelm of physicians and hospital staff, and the increased vulnerability for individuals who rely on full time nurses and caregivers—has created new challenges for people with disabilities.

On the one hand, the rest of the world is gaining a glimpse into the many challenges people who live with chronic pain, disease, and disability face every day. The world has also benefited tremendously from people with disabilities’ ingenuity in confronting such challenges through the use of technology, universal design, and creativity. People with disabilities have always utilized a combination of online and in-person platforms to network strategically, protest boldly, and adapt courageously in an able-bodied world.

But the pandemic has also revealed how deep the roots of ableism run and how intertwined they are with sexism and racism.

People of color and people with disabilities are dying at much higher rates than average citizens. Plus, the medical needs of some are so often positioned as an additional burden for the country rather than an invitation to justice or care.

Indeed, as churches especially are clamoring to return to face-to-face worship, nostalgic for the simplicity and straightforwardness of ministry in the pre-Covid days, it often feels as if they presume all their challenges will be erased with this return to “normalcy.” Sometimes it feels like we want to sweep aside any perceived weakness or suffering if only we could get back to the “good old days.”

We incessantly talk about the pandemic. We try to control the logistics of returning to worship. We so rarely talk about how it feels to be terribly, utterly afraid.

Sometimes it’s easy to get the idea in the church that being fearful is a sign of faithlessness. If “perfect love casts out all fear,” you certainly can’t be scared and trust God at the same time.

But squashing our fears with logic or brute strength doesn’t seem to make us more faithful. Ironically, as we bury, stifle, and stuff down our fears, we drive more social distance between us than this virus ever could. We shut ourselves off to real relationship. We become numb before God.

In mid-March, a class I was co-teaching with students with intellectual and developmental disabilities at The College of New Jersey and master’s students at Princeton Seminary had to go online like all others. As we fumbled through our new virtual ways of relationship, we figured we at least knew how to pray together. The other instructor, the seminary students, and I carefully crafted beautiful, theologically astute prayers for patience, healing, resilience, and strength in the face of a global pandemic. These prayers were abruptly punctuated by the TCNJ students’ cries against the injustice of those they knew who were getting sick (“It’s not fair! This is scary!,” they said), their hurt from being alone (“I’m sad at home. I miss my friends”), and their fears about what might happen in the future (“What if this never ends?” they worried).

It was not only a profound teaching moment for my seminary students who were taken aback yet strangely comforted by the earnest expressions of emotion that poured out of their friends and classmates. This moment was also a powerful reminder of how the ritual of lament in the Bible provides a container for our seemingly out-of-control emotions to be honored, held, and known by God. With lament, God essentially says, “Let it all out, I can take it. Faithfulness is not about keeping it all together when the going gets tough.”

In light of these laments, I can now see clearly how my clenched teeth and tightened chest were but an attempt to control my own anger, frustration, fear, and trembling. I didn’t want to open up to the possibility, yet again, of losing my daughter. If I stood before God and others in my deepest fears, would I not become utterly powerless, defeated, and obsolete?

Leadership and lament are not about us. Leadership and lament are about God’s faithfulness—about how God crouches down in the dirt with us, envelopes us precisely when we let go, grieving with us, laboring with us, growing us back toward one another. What if in leaning into chaos and fear, we don’t lean away from, but into God? Where can we flee from God’s presence? Even in our powerlessness, won’t God find us, even more so?

God has promised to turn our mourning into dancing. But maybe we who refuse to mourn also cannot dance.

A country that remains numb to its pain, fear, and injustice cannot feel God’s comfort. Churches that do not have the courage to open themselves up to the deep-seated fear of their people will never preach hope.

But God will not forsake the broken-hearted. Would that we would bear our broken hearts with one another in faith so that God’s Kingdom and God’s justice might come quickly to this earth. Would that we would be known to the world as a sanctuary for the broken-hearted so that no one would have to be afraid alone.

Eric D. Barreto 6/29/20 Eric D. Barreto 6/29/20

The Death of Death (Romans 6:1-11)

“So you also must consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 6:11)

Dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus? There are days when that confession seems easier to voice than others.

When death is not stalking our communities in the twin forms of pandemic and racism, police violence and anti-black prejudice, it may be possible to confess confidently with Paul that I am dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. But when sin entangles every aspect of our everyday lives, when racism and sexism and homophobia worm their way into every corner of this world, it may prove that much more difficult to proclaim along with Paul that I am, that we are dead to sin.

Is Paul right? Are we dead to sin? Really, are we? How can we say that?

Perhaps we have to move carefully here so that we can connect this ancient confession and the realities of the world today. I wonder if Paul is describing not the world as it was, the world he saw with his own eyes. After all, he lived in a world where empires reigned and spilled blood, a world of hunger and want, a world of disease and plague. I don’t think that Paul was simply being naive or optimistic here.

Even more, I wonder if Paul is describing not even the world as it could be, some placid dream, some intoxicating promise that lets us float on the high of a heavenly destiny while we suffer in the moment.

No, I wonder if Paul is describing the world as God is making it, the world God is crafting right here and right now and forever.

I wonder if Paul’s declaration that we are dead to sin is a way to collapse the future of God’s promises and the present of our realities, a way to know and feel and be the resurrection people Jesus has already made us to be.

But Paul does not start here. He starts earlier. And we should too.

With Paul, we have to start at the beginning. Not just the beginning of Paul’s letter to the Romans but to the beginning of the story he weaves in this letter, the narrative into which he invites us, the divine tale Paul hopes we see as our own story.

You see, I worry that too many Christians see the letters of Paul as a pile of confessions, a litany of doctrine, a list of things we believe on a check-list. In the church where I grew up, Paul was often a favorite source for all our deepest convictions. Paul’s letters leapt out from a distant culture and time and place with the freshness of the moment because they were letters written directly to us, to address every question of doctrine, every inquiry about dogma. The letters were distillations of what we believed. The letters were carriers of Paul’s thinking, injected directly into my mind so that I too might know the mind of Christ.

But what if we realized that Paul’s letters were not the careful, organized thoughts of the theologian as much as the anguished, desperate story-telling of a preacher at the cusp of a world being turned upside down? What if Paul was writing theology not for the calm of everyday life? What if Paul was telling a story for the end of days, a story to make sense of a world seeming to be crumbling that much more with every unjust day that passed?

When the world seems to be falling apart, when communities are frayed, when nations shake, that is when we most need Paul’s letters, not as an escape into some ethereal imagination about doctrine and thinking the right things, but as a pathway into the soil of everyday life, the cries of the harmed, the lament of the dying.

Why? Because Paul’s letters invite us into a story, a story whose beginning Paul narrates right before our passage.

You see, Paul recalls, there was once a person whose transgressions, whose trespass caused us all to fall under the shadow of condemnation. All this hurt. All this brokenness. All this death. It had a start. It started when one person’s disobedience created a crack between us and God, a crack through which Sin and Death found a way to make of that crack a wedge of separation. A wedge that separates you and me and God from one another.

But this one person was not the end of the story for there was another, another who would not precipitate our imprisonment but our deliverance, one who would deliver us into the bounties of resurrection through obedience to God, even obedience that led to a cross. With Jesus, we are no longer bound to Sin and Death, no longer captured by these destructive forces. We are free. We are alive in Christ.

To understand this story fully, however, we have to understand that when Paul writes about Sin and Death in Romans, he is not just referring to lower-case s sin, the things I do wrong in my everyday life, the missteps and mistakes that haunt me and not just to lower-case d death, the moment when my lungs will cease and my heart will stop beating and my thoughts will draw to a close. As Katherine Grieb has explained, Paul refers here to capital-S Sin and capital-D Death, to forces that invade, to personified realities in our lives that wreak havoc wherever they tread. Capital-S Sin is not just that which I do wrong but the forces of destruction that separate us from our neighbors and our God. Capital-D Death is a usurper who takes lives that do not belong to capital-D Death.

Sin and Death once ruled over us, but no more, Paul declares, for when we are baptized in Christ, we die and the dead can no longer die to capital-D Death. Sin and Death lose their hold on us through Christ.

Death is dead. Sin is dead. This what Paul urges us to confess not because Paul is naive, not because Paul is closing his eyes and stopping his ears to the pain of his neighbors, to the realities of his own life in an empire that would take his life.

Death is dead. Sin is dead. This, my friends, is a radical proposition in this moment in history. We declare that Death is dead not because we will pretend that all lives matters. Not because we will refuse to face squarely an upside-down world. Not because we will neglect the nearly 120,000 of our neighbors who died, too many of them alone. And let me just say that I’ve updated that last sentence several times in the last weeks. Each time was more devastating than the last.

No, we will confess that Death is dead and Sin is dead when we live “Black Lives Matter.” We will confess that Death is dead and Sin is dead when we confess that the systemic, sinful tentacles of racism and colonialism and homophobia are coursing through our veins, but that those logics have died at the cross of Christ, those ways of structuring have no power over us because Death is dead and so is Sin.

But notice that the death of Death comes at a high cost. It’s not some easy and magical exchange. That “in Christ” at the end of v. 11 carries a great deal of weight. That “in Christ” is the sacrificial love of Christ. It is Jesus’ death that makes Death die. It is Jesus’ death at the hands of the empire that crumbles the throne room of Caesar. Jesus dies as we roar approvingly at the foot of the cross that empire is keeping us safe by terrorizing someone else. It is Jesus’ death that liberates us from the false promise of prosperity on the backs of those who suffer.

The death of Jesus clarifies who we are but also whom God has made us to be.

Death it turns out is clarifying.

When we see into the eyes of those dying under the weight of empire and fear, when we hear someone breathing their last. When we are witnesses as someone calls out to their mother, we run directly into the clarifying power of death, the way death exposes our frailty and brokenness and injustice.

My friends, hear the good news of Jesus. You are dead to Sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. You have been baptized with Christ. Sin no longer holds you captive. Death is no longer your enemy, for Death has been defeated.

But there’s more. Verse 10: “The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.” Death had one shot and missed. Death came for the king, and Death missed. But Jesus’ life is so much more than the empire’s failed attempt to kill him. His life is abundant and free, full of grace and love and transformation and, yes, the judgement that sets the world right.

And his life is now ours. Verse 5: “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” My friends, that is our life now. A life liberated from the sting of Death, the shackles of Sin.

But it’s one thing to say it aloud; it’s a whole other matter to live as if what we confess is actually true.

If Death is dead, then a pandemic that deals death in ways that show us how deeply imbedded racist structures are in every aspect of life is a call to action towards life. If Death is dead, then the death of people of color whether because of pandemic or racism is not just an accident of history but a call to a different world. If Death is dead, then the cries of our Black neighbors are not just another protest, but a holy demand that Death stay dead. If Death is dead, then protest is not just a way to signal our holiness but a way to align our hopes and our lives with those who cannot breathe.

“So you also must consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

Dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus? There are days when that confession seems easier to voice than others.

But there are no days when that confession is no less true. There are no days when that confession does not bear upon us as we leave this place to enter a world God has already made new.

Dr. Eric D. Barreto originally preached this sermon as part of the Montreat Summer Worship Series on June 21, 2020. Church Anew is honored to share the text with our blog readers.

Used with permission.

Eric D. Barreto is the Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. His passion is to pursue scholarship for the sake of the church, and he regularly writes for and teaches in faith communities around the coun… — Eric D. Barreto is the Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. His passion is to pursue scholarship for the sake of the church, and he regularly writes for and teaches in faith communities around the country. Twitter | @ericbarreto

Rabbi Shosh Dworsky 6/25/20 Rabbi Shosh Dworsky 6/25/20

Torah, Darsheini, and Black Preaching in Response to the Killing of George Floyd

Photo courtesy of Deanna Thompson at the memorial site for George Floyd, 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis

I offer these words on the murder of George Floyd as a “d’varTorah” – words of Torah, in the broadest sense of the word. Torah is not only what’s in the scrolls in the synagogue, though I will draw on them. Torah is also life, our lives today, which, like what’s written in the scrolls, cry out ‘darsheini’ – explain me, interpret me, dig deep. The African–American Christian preaching we heard at Floyd’s memorial service and funeral also drew both on our shared sacred texts and our lived experiences, in the effort to bring comfort and find meaning.

I was moved by the preaching of Rev. Al Sharpton at the memorial in Minneapolis. I know Sharpton is a problematic figure for many in the Jewish community. I acknowledge this, but also want to dispose of it for the moment and talk about his preaching.

[Sharpton] spoke not only about Floyd’s death but about death itself, about his belief in a world beyond this one, where justice and peace already exist, a place where the wicked have no power.

Sharpton used the well-known verse from Ecclesiastes – “There is a season and a time for every purpose … ” urgently charging listeners that now is the time to address meaningfully and courageously both racism and police practice. He spoke not only about Floyd’s death but about death itself, about his belief in a world beyond this one, where justice and peace already exist, a place where the wicked have no power. “Go on home, George”, he said; “Get some rest, George;” words spoken with love and anguish, offering a pathway from the horror of Floyd’s murder, to an exquisite and eternal peace that we on earth can only imagine.

Sharpton’s sermon went from real time to the timeless and eternal nature of God. By the end he was shouting the words God is, God has, God shall. It was powerful; he had me. These words are part of the Hebrew hymn Adon Olam, a hymn sung at the conclusion of Shabbat services; v’hu haya, v’hu hoveh, v’hu yihiyeh – He was, He is, He shall be. Jews who join in Shabbat communal prayer sing those words regularly but I’m not sure we feel the words as an urgent statement of faith that could bring great comfort, especially when this world seems so broken.

By the end he was shouting the words God is, God has, God shall. It was powerful; he had me.

Like many of you I’ve been going over in my mind the scene of George Floyd’s killing, wondering what I might have done had I been among the onlookers. I’ve been fixated on the two rookie cops sitting on Floyd’s back and knees. Why didn’t they stand up and say, “This is wrong, I won’t be part of this”? If I’m honest with myself I can imagine a partial answer. While I think of myself as strong and courageous, I know there have been times when I’ve chosen, whether out of fear or uncertainty, to not question the chain of command (though not with catastrophic consequences like here). It takes role models, experience and maturity to find one’s voice and use it. It has taken me years to find mine, and I’m still a work in progress.

The scene of Floyd’s dying brings me back to the scene of Joseph and his brothers when Joseph was nearly murdered. People love to say of the young Joseph, “He was spoiled, clueless, and arrogant.” But his flaws pale next to the murderous actions of his brothers.

Yet those ten brothers were not a monolith. The original plan was to murder Joseph and throw the body in a pit. But oldest brother Ruben intervened, saying, “Don’t kill him, throw him in this pit alive, so we won’t have blood on our own hands.” Hard to know why he didn’t simply stand up and say, “Don’t do this, it’s wrong.” Nonetheless his intervention saved Joseph’s life. He accomplished what we are hearing from parents of Black children, who teach them, “Your job is to survive the encounter. Do whatever you have to do to survive the encounter.”

Then we hear from Judah. Joseph is crying out from the pit when a caravan is passing by, and Judah gets the idea, “Let’s not leave him to die, let’s sell him. After all he is our brother, our flesh and blood.” His words are often interpreted as morally flimsy; I hear in them a spark of moral awakening. And some courage: he dares say to a mob bent on murder, that the intended victim is a human being and their brother. “We are connected,” he seems to realize. Selling Joseph was an imperfect intervention, but the result was that Joseph survived. Maybe there is a hint of divine help in Judah’s awakening – after all not one but two caravans just happened to come by.

[Judah’s] words are often interpreted as morally flimsy; I hear in them a spark of moral awakening. And some courage: he dares say to a mob bent on murder, that the intended victim is a human being and their brother.

One of the preachers at Floyd’s memorial services referred back to this very story, quoting Joseph’s words to his brothers later in life: “You meant to do me harm, but God has used this for good.” The preacher continued, “God doesn’t make everything happen, but God knows how to use what happens.” This is just how Joseph evaluated his own suffering, which ultimately brought about good for his entire clan. The preacher at Floyd’s funeral carefully expressed a similar sentiment: Floyd’s killing was a very bad thing, but what God does with it, what we do with it, need not be.

I’m grateful to have been brought into the world of these African American Christian preachers these past few weeks. I will appreciate Adon Olam more now. And I share with them a passion for our timeless stories, mirroring as they do aspects of our own realities: the dynamics among the brothers, the hierarchies, the hatreds, the naïve but perhaps genuine yearning on Joseph’s part to be one with his family; Judah and Ruben, who despite growing up with some violent brothers still had the flame of humanity alive in them, and were able, however imperfectly, to raise their voices and save a life.

Violence and hatreds persist; in every generation we are called upon anew to stand up to bullies, to listen, and to develop the skills and the courage to raise our voices.

Violence and hatreds persist; in every generation we are called upon anew to stand up to bullies, to listen, and to develop the skills and the courage to raise our voices. We each must work hard to recognize the humanity in each other, so that when conflict arises, no one has to die in order that what God intends for good can come about.

These words by Rabbi Shosh Dworsky, Associate Chaplain for Jewish Life at St. Olaf College, were originally delivered at Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, MN. Rabbi Dworsky’s position at St. Olaf is funded by The Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community, and the open-hearted interaction she models between Jewish Torah study and Black Christian preaching in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death embodies the kind of interfaith engagement the Center hopes to foster at St. Olaf and beyond.

Used with permission from The Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community at St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN.

Rabbi Shosh Dworsky is the Associate Chaplain for Jewish Life at St. Olaf College and the Associate Chaplain for Jewish and Interfaith Life at Carleton College.

Church Anew 6/23/20 Church Anew 6/23/20

Rise Up: A Four Week Preaching Series

Church Anew is excited to provide practical resources to preachers and other church leaders including curricula, sermon series, and ministry ideas to spark imagination for your congregation. These are free to adapt and use in your context, with your people.

This sermon series has been adapted from use at St. Andrew Lutheran Church, where it was used in May and June of 2020. These texts have provided a Spirit-filled online worship series for our community, and we hope that the adaptations made make it possible for you to use in your congregation as well. The descriptions of each week are not intended to provide rigorous textual analysis, but rather to ignite biblical imagination for preachers and faithful people.

Rise Up: Sermon Series Overview

Rise up. From a song by singer/songwriter, Andra Day, that might as well be an anthem for this moment:

“When the silence isn’t quiet
and it feels like it’s getting hard to breathe
and I know you feel like dying
But I promise we’ll take the world to its feet
and move mountains.”

Uprising is happening all around us. People on the streets, calling for a more just world. People in their homes, rising above the quarantine to love their neighbor. In this sermon series, we will closely study the story of the prophet Elijah from the Old Testament book of 1 Kings. This prophet enters a book that tells the national history of the people of Israel, chronicling the rise and fall of Israel’s kings.

What can at times read like an ancient piece of national propaganda is radically interrupted by a narrative that takes a completely different turn. Elijah enters the story uninvited as “the troubler of Israel” (1 Kings 18:17). Together, we will study this ancient book and listen for God’s voice in acts of overwhelming kindness from a widow, dramatic debates with political leaders, displays of God’s commitment, and even the sound of sheer silence.

Week One: From Death to Life
1 Kings 17: 7-16 (and if time, 17-24)

Every hero has a backstory. Every prophet has a call story. Elijah’s call story comes when he is confronted by the suffering left in the wake of the political regime of Israel. Elijah doesn’t encounter this theoretically by reading a newspaper account or reading about it on Twitter. Rather, the Widow of Zarephath articulates the injustice in her being. Indeed it was the responsibility of the political leaders, the king, to care for the widows, orphans, and immigrants in the land. But it is God who brings life from death—food for the hungry, resurrection for the sick. Elijah’s short speech provide words to live by: “Do not be afraid.” If we name our fear, it no longer has power over us.

Week Two: From Fear to Hope
1 Kings 18: 1-10; 17-19

Elijah’s short sermon from last week (“Do not be afraid”) creates new possibilities in all of his interactions. As Walter Brueggemann writes, “This authorized utterance creates a new circumstance and a new prospect for well-being, especially among those who have no alternative resources of hope.”[1] The king is on the lookout for the prophet, calling him a “troubler of Israel.” Elijah’s curt response indicts the king on behalf of the widow and all those whom the government has left behind—forsaking the law is forsaking the call to care for the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant in the land. In a dramatic encounter with the most powerful person in the land, Elijah’s confidence creates a new possibility for well-being, and even for hope.

Week Three: From Unanswered to Eternally Spoken
1 Kings 18: 20-40

The prophets of Baal and the prophet Elijah stand for a showdown. Whose god will answer their prayers? This passage has a rhythm as Elijah taunts the other prophets: “How long will you go limping with two different opinions?” You can’t have it both ways! The prophets of Baal receive no response, no answer, no voice. Elijah’s speech, once again creates new possibility: “Answer me, O Lord, so that this people may know that you … have turned their hearts back.” In this dramatic display of God’s ongoing care of the people, we can trust that God will not go without voice. We follow a God with a living Word.

Week Four: From Justice to Peace
1 Kings 19: 9-13

A common chant in the protests these weeks has been, “No justice. No peace.” Some may read this text and hear God’s presence “in the sound of sheer silence” as a peaceful, airy sound. But this peace only comes through fire, earthquake, and hurricane winds. Elijah’s persistent call for justice for God’s people ends with a question that haunts us even today: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” What are each of us doing here? How are each of us responding to the call that comes uninvited, unbidden, and at times unwelcome?

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Rev. Dr. Valerie Bridgeman

Jeff Chu

REV. RANJIT K. MATHEWS

DR. CHRISTINE J. HONG

OPHELIA HU KINNEY

REV. LAURA CHEIFETZ

Rev. Eric Shafer

The Rev. Eric C. Shafer was Senior Pastor at Mt. Olive Lutheran Church in Santa Monica from April, 2014 until his retirement in July, 2022. He is currently the “Pastor in Residence” for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

Dr. Eric Barreto

Eric D. Barreto is the Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. His passion is to pursue scholarship for the sake of the church, and he regularly writes for and teaches in faith communities around the country.

Twitter | @ericbarreto

Erin Raffety

Erin Raffety is a Presbyterian pastor, a Cultural Anthropologist, and Research Fellow in Pastoral Care & Machine Intelligence at the Center for Theological Inquiry. She is currently working on a book on the ministry and leadership of people with disabilities in the church.

Rev. Dr. Mothy Varkey

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Rev.Mothy

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MothyVarkey

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/user/31msdhkqxmsosderdr2o54wl445a

Website: https://murdoch.academia.edu/MothyVarkey

Christ | Christmas | Covid

Sabbath was a covenantal alternative to the imperial and cultic ‘normalities’ that ruled the ancient world (Exodus 20:9; Deuteronomy 5:13).

In Luke 13:10-17, Jesus reinforces the original meaning and liberative purpose of the sabbath by disenchanting its ritual priorities.

Jesus called the religious leaders in the synagogue “hypocrites” because they twisted his healing activity into an issue of breaking the sabbath laws (Luke 13:15).

Rev. Dr. Mothy Varkey

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Rev.Mothy

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MothyVarkey

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/user/31msdhkqxmsosderdr2o54wl445a

Website: https://murdoch.academia.edu/MothyVarkey

Christ | Christmas | Covid

These combined tragedies are, at least, waking up a vast number of people of faith, who are channeling their anger into seeking just responses to these and other crises.

Nevertheless, Jesus showed us that there are times when we must stand up and express truth to power in constructive, meaningful, unyielding ways despite the possible consequences.

Undergirding every expression of his anger is love – Jesus speaks the truth in love.

As Election Day approaches, this is a good time for each of us to ask ourselves: How might my anger be channeled into loving action? For this is how we make our anger holy and righteous.

Peter Wallace

Twitter: https://twitter.com/pwallace

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peterwallace1

Website: https://day1.org/

Website: https://petermwallace.com

What do you do, how do you live, when there is no rope left?

Isn’t it ridiculous that it took a pandemic for me to lay down my work, my ministry, my problem-solving abilities, and call on God to help?

He would never not catch him. God’s faithfulness endures even when ours falters.

The glorious truth of the gospel is that we don’t need to save ourselves: God’s already done that.

Erin Raffety

Erin Raffety is a Presbyterian pastor, a Cultural Anthropologist, and Research Fellow in Pastoral Care & Machine Intelligence at the Center for Theological Inquiry. She is currently working on a book on the ministry and leadership of people with disabilities in the church.

Paul Raushenbush

Paul Raushenbush is Senior Advisor for Public Affairs and Innovation at IFYC (Interfaith Youth Core) promoting a narrative of positive pluralism in America, while researching and developing cutting edge interfaith leadership. He is the Editor of Interfaith America.

Facebook | @raushenbushTwitter | @raushenbush

But the pandemic has also revealed how deep the roots of ableism run and how intertwined they are with sexism and racism.

Sometimes it’s easy to get the idea in the church that being fearful is a sign of faithlessness. If “perfect love casts out all fear,” you certainly can’t be scared and trust God at the same time.

God has promised to turn our mourning into dancing. But maybe we who refuse to mourn also cannot dance.

Erin Raffety

Erin Raffety is a Presbyterian pastor, a Cultural Anthropologist, and Research Fellow in Pastoral Care & Machine Intelligence at the Center for Theological Inquiry. She is currently working on a book on the ministry and leadership of people with disabilities in the church.

Is Paul right? Are we dead to sin? Really, are we? How can we say that?

No, I wonder if Paul is describing the world as God is making it, the world God is crafting right here and right now and forever.

Sin and Death once ruled over us, but no more, Paul declares, for when we are baptized in Christ, we die and the dead can no longer die to capital-D Death. Sin and Death lose their hold on us through Christ.

The death of Jesus clarifies who we are but also whom God has made us to be.

But it’s one thing to say it aloud; it’s a whole other matter to live as if what we confess is actually true.

[Sharpton] spoke not only about Floyd’s death but about death itself, about his belief in a world beyond this one, where justice and peace already exist, a place where the wicked have no power.

By the end he was shouting the words God is, God has, God shall. It was powerful; he had me.

[Judah’s] words are often interpreted as morally flimsy; I hear in them a spark of moral awakening. And some courage: he dares say to a mob bent on murder, that the intended victim is a human being and their brother.

Violence and hatreds persist; in every generation we are called upon anew to stand up to bullies, to listen, and to develop the skills and the courage to raise our voices.

Rise Up: Sermon Series Overview

Week One: From Death to Life1 Kings 17: 7-16 (and if time, 17-24)

Week Two: From Fear to Hope1 Kings 18: 1-10; 17-19

Week Three: From Unanswered to Eternally Spoken1 Kings 18: 20-40

Week Four: From Justice to Peace1 Kings 19: 9-13

Join Our List!

Facebook | @raushenbush
Twitter | @raushenbush

Week One: From Death to Life
1 Kings 17: 7-16 (and if time, 17-24)

Week Two: From Fear to Hope
1 Kings 18: 1-10; 17-19

Week Three: From Unanswered to Eternally Spoken
1 Kings 18: 20-40

Week Four: From Justice to Peace
1 Kings 19: 9-13