A Walk In Beauty
Photo by Daniel Cabanas on Unsplash
This post was originally shared as a sermon based on 1 Kings 19:4-18 on Day 1 . We share it with permission and with the hope that it is a source of inspiration and nourishment as you work to create vibrant communities of faith.
The readings for today have me thinking about indigeneity. Indigenous people. The people of the land. And food that lasts.
A rabbi friend shared an article recently about the idea of indigenous being a thoroughly modern and post modern idea, it comes from colonialism --it is a way of being because of colonialism. It’s not an endless going back in history to find a more old past and who lived where. People have always moved after all. For over 10,000 years just in North America.
Indigeneity is about colonialism happening to you or your ancestors in the modern era, after 1492, and wrestling with the violence of that time of nation- and empire-building and what it means for us today.
Colonialism. Either exploitative colonialism, like India, where I’m from, and/or settler colonialism, like here, where I live.
Exploitative colonialism is when colonizers, usually corporations, take stuff. All the stuff, and take labor, for their own wealth.
Settler colonialism is exactly what it sounds like, claiming land and a place for us as outsiders to stay, giving away the land of the indigenous or stealing it.
Indigeneity is fascinating to me because I am a person whose ancestors are from a place where we had been for a long time, and colonizers came, and I live in a place where others have been removed and that is why we can be here and want to be here in the way we are.
I am thinking about this for two reasons, one- Elijah finds bread when he awakes in the wilderness, Bedouin bread. Local people, not the children of Israel or the Hebrew people, or the Philistines. We actually never hear of Bedouins in the Bible.
But there they are, or rather, there is their bread. Made the way they still make it today. There are still Bedouin, from Morocco to Iraq but primarily exactly where they are in this story, or where their bread is, the Sinai area.
A bread left for the man of God, plenty of it, and a vessel of water, for the fleeing man, the stranger. Enough for a very hungry man to eat twice and be well fortified.
Enough for a man ready to die, to live another day.
This Summer the Episcopal Church met in its every three year governing body, general convention. One of the resolutions was to establish the missionary diocese of Navajoland. The geographic area of that ministry had been called a ministry area, meaning there wasn’t money for the independence to elect their own leadership and plan their ministries. One of the implications of that was lack of presence in the bodies of General Convention:
In the course of passing the resolution, Navajo or Dine elders, lay persons and clergy stepped up to microphones to tell the convention why this was important and what it meant. One elder remembered being blessed before going to the floor of convention in the past because they had not been allowed into that space, our space, the church’s leadership and governance. Our church was a place of marginalizing the indigenous, and worse. There is a legacy of boarding schools, land theft and prejudice in our communities
As they spoke in Dine and then English, I found myself standing up, maybe to mark in my self the holiness of the moment.
Their voices. Their language. Their name for God, Who had brought us together despite our histories. The One who had sheltered them. The one who speaks to us today.
At the conclusion the Rev. Cornelia Eaton led a song that they sang together.
A song she said had been sung on the Long Walk, also called The Trail of Tears, the forced 300 mile walk at gunpoint by U.S. federal troops of 10,000 Dine people through the desert from their homes to a desolate place. Thousands died.
They sang a song from that time. From that walk. To invoke our collective memory, the song of their ancestors, as they proclaimed their dignity and independence in our body. It was simply stunning to witness.
Like bread on stones and a cool vessel of water for the tired traveler prepared to lie down and die.
A church wrestling with its diminishment and its purpose.
An ancient people offering bread from their own journey as a people.
More bread that we did not know to ask for. We did not want. But God had said, get up and eat. Get up.
Some of those speakers are my friends. All, people of my faith, calling me to a deeper reckoning with my place in this nation, with indigeneity, the people that have long made bread here.
Walk in beauty they say. I hear that means live in balance, with all things, the past and future. The created order. Our feelings and desires. Beauty - Balance.
In our reading, Elijah the prophet will next travel to Horeb, for forty days, sustained by that bread from strangers.
Horeb, another name for Sinai, He will wait for God there. To find what is next for him. The choosing of a successor
The great man has failed. The king has not followed the ways of God and will not. Elijah could not make it happen. Despite his mighty acts of power.
Isn’t it interesting, that when the man of God gives up, God sends Bedouins, or is it that Bedouins practice their hospitality, even for the man the king wants to kill. The hunted man.
Indigeneity is on my mind today. The people of the land when the nation builders arrive. Who bless us to this day with their beauty and compassion and profound connection to what was before and critical eye towards what is, what we believe are the powers that rule this world. God acts through them, among them, sometimes with us, often times it seems despite us. Even in those days, when a holy man of God, Elijah the prophet, the miracle worker, had no life left in him.
So let us watch for bread on hot stones. Seek out some pita or fry bread or a tortilla if you can. Especially on those days when you have nothing left. When even the miraculous power of God has somehow not won the day. Food for the journey. From the people of the land. Enough. Until you see God again. Face to face.
