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Rev. Winnie Varghese 8/23/23 Rev. Winnie Varghese 8/23/23

Lord, Help Me

It is up to people like us to reclaim and rebuild the commons, what we share of what God has given us. And some of that rebuilding is of institutions.

This post was originally shared as a sermon based on Matthew 15:21-28 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 Canaanite Woman who confronts Jesus in Tyre and Sidon is, along with Jesus, on the main stage in this week’s Gospel. I am old enough to remember when her story was the bracketed part, the optional part, of the assigned readings from Matthew.

She is a local woman, of the communities in the book of Exodus that would have been conquered by the children of Israel as they conquered and occupied their land of promise after liberation from slavery in Egypt and that long wandering in the wilderness. The Bible gives us hints that the people already there remain, and this is one of those jarring reminders that there were people there, and those people remain even to this generation.

The way they are “conquered” in this time is that, at least in words and religious philosophy in the time of Jesus, they are made outsiders, outsiders to the law, to purity, in their own place, by Jesus’ people. That doesn’t mean that we know who had more money or power or land. We don’t know if she was poor or wealthy or something else. It is reasonable to assume her town was thriving. I have read that she must have been educated because of the sophistication of the conversation, but I have met many extraordinarily intelligent and articulate people without much education. The storyteller has decided that the only thing we are supposed to know about her is that Jesus goes to her neighborhood, and she gets very close to him to tell him exactly what she needs.

Her daughter is possessed by demons. Jesus goes to her neighborhood after saying it is what comes from the heart that defiles, not what enters the mouth. And then he walks through an area where Canaanites live.

It was Vine Deloria Jr.’s God Is Red that opened my eyes to the Canaanites in the Bible. I had read right past them, because they did not fit my theology, the theology I had absorbed from reading the Bible with Christians. God promised the children of Israel that they would occupy the land of promise, and I assumed from that moment that it was so. I heard as I read that the land must be empty - God would not wish harm on anyone, much less cause it, right? - even as I read the story of the guys with the grapes on the pole coming out of Canaan, and every battle and siege.

You are probably a better reader than me. I’m a believer. I tend to lead with that, I tend to make things fit and leave out what doesn’t fit into the way I have been told life and faith work, until someone points out something else, insistently.

Today’s story is a hard one for me. Not because Jesus seems to change his mind and accept the Canaanite woman’s request. That idea is not unsettling to me, and it does appear to be just that. After calling out her request from a respectful distance and being ignored, after repeating it and being scolded, she gets very, very close and seems to beg - articulately and intelligently - but beg. And he sees her and gives her what she is asking for. Her daughter, possessed of demons, is healed.

I find it hard to read because it feels close. I know that feeling. I try to organize my life to avoid it, and most of the time I can, and sometimes I choose to be or have to be the one who insists, who will not let it go, until the blessing is granted. For some of us, it’s our superpower.

On May 18, I got to stand with Matt Oprendek, Matt Heyd, Stephen Breed, Bruce Jolly, Bob Jacobs, Stephen Lee, and the bishops of the Episcopal Church in New York for the launch of the New York Episcopal Federal Credit Union. A Credit Union is a community-held entity that is owned by its members and can loan on its own terms within its membership. It is a federally insured financial cooperative. Now, I might not be as proud of anything in my professional life as I am to have been a part of seeing it through to a charter.

In 2014, a small group of us from the Episcopal Diocese of New York took a resolution to our convention asking our diocese to permit us to explore the possibility of establishing a credit union. The diocese had attempted this before - it is New York after all; we know a financial institution.

The difference in 2014 was the big bank crashes had happened in 2009. The market crash that had to do with bad mortgages and inflated housing prices, the one that devasted so many pensions, had happened. The big federal bailout of banks had happened. Remembering there was no bailout for those pensions, the cynical or corrupt or unethical practices of banks had been exposed. One study at the time found that one-third of New Yorkers were unbanked or under-banked. At my parish in the East Village, I was meeting people with jobs that the local commercial bank would not serve with a checking or savings account. Every conference or meeting I went to about new inclusive financial services, like community lending apps, assumed you had a bank account. They were required. I remembered the Episcopal Credit Union in Los Angeles and their president, Urla Gomes, who told the stories of giving $500 loans to the woman who ran the tamale cart or a few thousand dollars for the house cleaners to get better supplies so that they could level up to grow their businesses.

A longtime member of St. James in Fordham, where the Credit Union opening was held, Raquel Davis, said many community members she talked to at the church’s food pantry while volunteering told her that they are looking forward to joining the credit union. “Most of us are not wealthy,” she said. “It’s impossible for us to get a loan from the commercial banks, so the only opportunity is to go to the loan sharks,” where the interest charged is “overwhelming,” she said. She said, “Thank you for the opportunity in the credit union because it’s giving us an opportunity to have control over our finances.”

Lord, help me, the Canaanite woman says, and she won’t stop asking.

A decade is not how long I wanted this to take. It took us time to understand how we could staff and structure this organization to serve those we wanted to serve. It took us time to agree to a model. There was an unfortunate time there when we got no response to our inquiries from the federal government. I am sure we were not alone in that. When the administration changed, again, so did the rate of engagement. We could not have done it without Dall Forsythe and Bruce Jolly who brought a lot of professional experience and persistence themselves.

There remains much work to be done to keep this thing capitalized and active. But I’m telling you this story because we need more. Adjudicatories of churches are a wonderful field of membership - the great and mighty among us, we ordinary people, and those left out of formal economy, in one group - placing our giftedness and need in relationship, the true fabric of our lives together, not in offering charity, but in building the institutions that empower those we have narratively erased - the losers. Every time the banks crash or the unemployment rate goes up or a politician decides that hating one another will help them get a few more votes, we are binding together what our public life insists must be separated.

There was a time when churches built institutions: schools, hospitals, later food banks and homeless projects. As our institutions are battered in this nation, what were once the common goods of life together - like housing, land, food, and banks - are all organized to maximize the profit of the investor, not produce the best product or service at a competitive rate with market appropriate compensation of employees. It is up to people like us to reclaim and rebuild the commons, what we share of what God has given us. And some of that rebuilding is of institutions.

At St. Luke’s in Atlanta, where I am now, it is literally also about creating more beautiful green space, maybe growing more food, gathering people in a divided city. Yes, and what if we put our resources to work for those possessed by demons today – the demons of sickness, of endless war that is like armed violence in our streets, the demon of being priced out of housing, the demon of jobs whose salaries cannot pay for the basic necessities of life, the demon of a marketplace that will take the most money from the people with the least, the demon of working children, the demon of hunger? Lord, help us.

Lord, help us and bless us with a portion of the Canaanites woman’s courage and persistence. Help us to find ourselves in this story. Maybe you are like Jesus, passing through this particular patch of suffering. Maybe it’s not for you. Are you clever? Maybe you are a disciple, disdainful of the inconvenience of this crap economy and its victims. You’re just trying to follow Jesus after all, or maybe you are like a woman whose child is lost, strategizing to get access to what you need.

May Jesus meet you where you are and go with you as you find your power to heal.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life. Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Rev. Winnie Varghese

The Rev. Winnie Varghese is the rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta.
She co-hosts the (G)race podcast with The Rev. Azariah France-William and has been a contributor for Church Anew’s Enfleshing Witness events.

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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.

Eric D. Barreto 5/3/23 Eric D. Barreto 5/3/23

Not Knowing

This sermon was originally delivered by one of Church Anew’s advisors, Rev. Dr. Eric Barreto, as part of the opening worship for Renew 2023. To watch all of Renew On-Demand, click here.

Luke 9:28-36

28 Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray. 29 And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. 30 Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. 31 They appeared in glory and were speaking about his exodus, which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem. 32 Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep, but as they awoke they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. 33 Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us set up three tents: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah,” not realizing what he was saying. 34 While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them, and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. 35 Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” 36 When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had these moments in my life when it felt like words tumbled out of my mouth before I could even figure out what I was trying to say. Sometimes those moments are caused by fear and uncertainty, resulting in embarrassment. Sometimes those moments are caused by making a silly mistake, resulting in some humor. Sometimes those moments come in the midst of a conflict with someone I love, resulting in hurt. Sometimes those moments come when I least expect it, resulting in surprise.

In some of these moments, it feels like I can see my words tumbling from my lips as I lunge to try to grab them, but it’s simply too late. The embarrassment has set in. The mockery begins. The hurt I have caused is all too real.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had these moments in my life when it felt like words tumbled out of my mouth before I could even figure out what I was trying to say.

But sometimes, every once in a great while, so very rarely, the words come tumbling out not because I’m stressed or I made a mistake or I was angry or I was frustrated but because it felt like I was no longer the one speaking, the words were no longer mine, some other force was at play.

A story. When I was in seminary, I spent a summer in a hospital serving as a chaplain. I had no idea what I was doing and even less any idea about what to say to the people I met. Day after day that summer, I was encountering patients and their families at their most fragile and vulnerable. I was there as these folks confronted death and all its cruelty. From babies struggling in the NICU to the elderly breathing their last, the hospital provided so many opportunities for me to learn that I didn't know what was talking about.

There was this one day in particular. A young, Latinx couple were in the hospital because they had lost a pregnancy. They were devastated. And I know Spanish. I really do, but you have to understand that though Spanish is my first language, all my education from kindergarten on was in English. At some point, I stopped praying in Spanish and defaulted to English. The whole of my theological education included but a smattering of Spanish. My vocabulary is largely English-speaking. When I’m speaking Spanish, I’m often translating in my head from English to Spanish. I already knew that I didn’t know what to say as a 22-year-old seminarian, but I was the only one around who could even begin to understand their words and share something, anything that might address the grief they were facing. When I went into that hospital room, I was confronted by an impossible situation in this couple’s lives and by my inability to speak comfort to them as well as I could have done in English.

Not knowing what he said. I relate to that, Peter. And perhaps you do too.

This morning, the Gospel of Luke takes us to a mountaintop, to the very presence of God’s glory, to a scene that is both beautiful and just confounding. I mean, what is going on in this scene of Transfiguration? I don’t know about you, but this story strikes me as so, so strange. And yet so, so familiar.

Let’s take a closer look at this beautiful and confounding story.

The action is intense in this chapter of Luke. First, Jesus sends the twelve out into the world to heal and exorcise; that is, he sends them out to do Jesus stuff. Herod hears about this proliferation of the forces of life, and he is perplexed, perhaps because the power of empire is to take life not to multiply it. To illustrate the force of life, Jesus feeds more than 5000 in the middle of nowhere. In light of all this action, Peter confesses that Jesus is the messiah. He gets it! He says the right words! And then Jesus shares some devastating news. His messianic path would not lead to a crown and a throne but to suffering and a cross.

All this action leads us to the quiet of a mountain where Jesus seeks to pray, to connect to the God who had laid a path of suffering before him. Perhaps Jesus knows all too well the burden he is about to carry on the road to a Roman cross. Perhaps he knows all too well that the power he needs is find in the quiet of prayer, not the bombast of empire’s power.

As Jesus is praying, his countenance changes. His clothes dazzle. And suddenly Moses and Elijah jump off the pages of the Hebrew Bible and are present in the flesh. Why Moses and Elijah? Well, because, as you might remember, both Moses and Elijah don’t die in the Scriptures, at least not in any normal human way. Moses is buried by God’s hand in a place no one knows. Elijah is welcomed into the heavens in a chariot. Their return forms part of the universe of messianic expectations that nurtured the Gospel writers. For Jesus to be Messiah, we had to see Moses and Elijah too!

And here, Peter steps in, overwhelmed by all he is seeing and experiencing and offers to put up some tents for Jesus, for Moses, and for Elijah.

And here is where the sermon typically says that Peter, as he often is wont to do, just doesn’t get it. He tries to contain the luminescence of this scene, capture it, stay at this mountaintop forever. Don’t be like Peter, I should be telling you now. Don’t try to explain the unexplainable. After all, doesn’t Luke say that Peter spoke, “not knowing what he said”?

Maybe there’s another possibility for this story. I wonder if we are not meant to be critical of Peter’s utterance here. Even though he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, his instincts are good ones. In the presence of beloved ancestors, in the presence of the radiance of God’s glory, is there a better move than hospitality? We will host you, declares Peter, in a Gospel so full of scenes of the joy-filled tables where Jesus sat. Jesus in Luke loves a good meal. Maybe Peter learned well from Jesus how the shape of welcome, the shape of the Gospel looks like a marvelous dinner party. After all, wasn’t this what was a credit to Abraham when he hosted angels unaware? The last time something like this happened in exodus, Moses stayed for 40 day. In a world in which hospitality is not just a societal nicety but a way of survival, isn’t Peter doing his best here? He doesn’t know what he is saying, but something or some force or someone leads him to the next best thing to say.

It wouldn’t be the last time that Peter speaks beyond what he understands. In the Book of Acts, Peter will preach the first sermon after Jesus’ ascension, his departure as our story puts it. He will be the first witness to the goodness of God and the power of the resurrection and the transformative force of forgiveness and the power of communities the Spirit has brought together. At Pentecost, Peter will declare that all flesh will receive the Spirit. All flesh! All of us! All of you!, he declares.

But this is the same Peter who will need to be convinced that all flesh means all flesh. In Acts 10, Peter will struggle with what to do when he is called to visit the Gentile, Roman centurion Cornelius and his household. Does all flesh really mean all flesh?

That is, Peter preached more than he was ready to believe, he said more than he understood. Sometimes that’s how the Spirit moves among us.

Sometimes God will teach us words to say to the grieving. Not knowing what we are saying.

Sometimes God will teach us to sing a song about the breadth and depth of God’s grace we will never fully understand. Not knowing what we are saying.

Sometimes God will teach us to speak words of forgiveness and repair. Not knowing what we are saying.

Sometimes God will teach us how to love one another, even to love our enemies. Not knowing what we are saying.

Sometimes God will teach us that we have been so, so wrong about our neighbors, God’s beloved children. Not knowing what we are saying.

But notice that our story does not end with Peter’s words, whether good or bad. The story ends with God’s clear voice calling us to listen to Jesus. And here the disciples are silent. It’s as if all their words have run out.

After all, what is there to say when we have come before the glory of God?

What is there to stay when we have experienced the very brink of losing everything we treasure?

What is there to say when tragedy strikes, when our hopes are dashed?

What is there to say when a relationship we thought was lost is healed, when that one secret prayer is answered, when joy and grace flow over you in an unexpected moment?

What is there to say when we just don’t know what to say?

Perhaps there isn’t much to say because God has already said it all. “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.”

Listen to him, friends. He is always and already near.

Back to the hospital room where I started. I remember walking in with my supervising chaplain. I think he knew somehow that I needed to be in that space or better yet that God had already gone ahead of us into that space. I introduced myself. And our conversation began.

My friends, I began to speak in Spanish using words that I thought I had long forgotten or that I sometimes suspect I had never learned in the first place. It’s as if some reservoir of language had opened up. But more than anything, I kept repeating one phrase, “It’s just not fair.” Sometimes, it turns out, God might even teach us to speak healing words in a language we thought we had forgotten.

Not knowing what he said. I relate to that, Peter. And perhaps you do too.

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.

Char Cox 4/10/23 Char Cox 4/10/23

Defining Roads

There are many roads in this life. Some are actual roads that take us from “point A to point B.” Others are metaphorical, roads that we travel in our hearts. Many of the roads we travel, we never think of again, but some roads are so defining that they become drawn across our story with indelible ink.

The following devotion was featured in Unfinished, Church Anew’s Lent in a Box series for 2023. Learn more about the resources here.

Matthew 28:1-10

1 After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2 And suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. 4 For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. 5 But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. 6 He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. 7 Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” 8 So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to tell his disciples. 9 Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

What are some of your defining roads?

What about the road that you traveled to the first day of school, or the road that you took as you moved from one community to the next, moving with your family, or to college, or for a new job? Or what about the road that you traveled toward a significant relationship or the road away from a relationship? And what about the road home, how would you describe that road?

In the story of Jesus, much of his life was lived on the road. He was born on the road, away from home, in his ancestral town of Bethlehem. When he was very small, he traveled the immigrant road with his family, fleeing a tyrant who wanted him dead. When he was 12, he journeyed with his family to Jerusalem, and there was a frantic search for him on the road home. And the whole of his ministry life was spent on the road, traveling from place to place – teaching, healing the sick, casting out demons, giving sight to the blind, raising the dead.

His was a life on the road.

But at the beginning of the Easter story, it is not Jesus who is on the road: it is the ever-faithful women. They have traveled with him throughout his ministry, tending to his needs, serving him, following him along the various roads he traveled. They followed down the road to Jerusalem, and they walked the road with him during the last week of his life, a road from which most of his followers eventually fled. Then, on the first day of the week, they walked the road to the grave, the road of grief, the road of sorrow, the road of despair.

As they walked this road, they did not know that the grave would not be what they expected it to be. For the first time in forever, the grave had been forever changed. For the first time in forever, one who once was dead, lives to die no more. As if that was not good news enough, the messenger from God then told them, Jesus is going ahead of you, and you will see him.

Jesus is going ahead of you.

That same promise is for you. On whatever road you find yourself, Jesus is going ahead of you. As you travel the everyday road of your daily routine, Jesus is going ahead of you. Whether you travel the road of joy or sorrow, hope or despair, anxiety or contentment, fear or certainty, Jesus is going ahead of you, and that makes all the difference in the world.

May this promise grant you strength for today’s road, courage to keep going when the burdens are heavy and your footsteps are slow, and assurance that whatever roads you travel, you never walk alone.

Prayer

God of Resurrection and Life, you go ahead us wherever the road may take us. In confidence and hope, give us good courage to trust and believe that wherever we go, we never journey alone. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

Dr. Charlene Rachuy Cox

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

Facebook | PrChar
Website | Charlene Rachuy Cox

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

Natalia Terfa 4/3/23 Natalia Terfa 4/3/23

Lent Devotions: The Gift of Awe

The following devotion was featured in Unfinished, Church Anew’s Lent in a Box series for 2023. Learn more about the resources here.

The Gift of Awe

Rev. Natalia Terfa

Matthew 8:23-27

23 And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. 24 A windstorm suddenly arose on the sea, so great that the boat was being swamped by the waves, but he was asleep. 25 And they went and woke him up, saying, “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” 26 And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, you of little faith?” Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a dead calm. 27 They were amazed, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?”

I love to paint a mental picture of a particular moment in this story. It’s the minute or two right after Jesus calms the storm. I imagine the disciples all sitting there, silent and still, just looking at each other in total shock. I imagine Jesus acting normally, no big deal, like he didn’t just rebuke nature and like nature didn’t just listen to him, and the disciples are coming down off one adrenaline rush and heading right into another because DID THAT JUST HAPPEN?! WHO IS THIS GUY?!

No one wants to say anything, but also they all want to say something.

It makes me laugh to picture it.

The disciples quickly go from afraid to terrified. For very different reasons, but still, they aren’t done with their big feelings quite yet. They have watched Jesus heal people, feed people, perform miracles, cast out demons, and yet this is what makes them afraid?

Yes. This is when they realize how powerful God is.

When Martin Luther wrote his Small Catechism, he kept using the language of “fearing God.” It took me well into adulthood to understand that what he spoke of was the very feeling that the disciples shared when the storm listened to God and the sea went calm. It’s awe, but more.

I’m not sure we have too many opportunities to experience this same thing, but I think leaving room for awe in our lives can get us a little closer.

What inspires awe for you?

For me it’s big nature - like the sky at night, or mountains, or the ocean. Things that remind me of my smallness, and the beauty of God’s bigness.

Awe.

I wonder what it might feel like to make a little time for awe in the days we have left in this Lenten season. How might you cultivate a bit of the awe that creates space for faith, just as it did for the disciples on that boat in the moments of calm right after the storm.

Prayer

Awesome God, thank you for the ways you show us the bigness of your creation and love. Thank you for the gift of awe, and help us draw us closer to you each time we experience it. Amen.

Rev. Natalia Terfa

Natalia is a Lutheran pastor and author who lives in Minneapolis with her hubby, kiddo, and kitty babies. She loves to bake, to read, practice yoga, and find nature adventures. She is passionate about the church of the future, one with no boundaries and filled to the brim with love and grace and laughter and snark and a lot of fellow “not that kind of Christians.”
Natalia co-hosts Cafeteria Christian, a podcast for people who love Jesus but aren’t so sure about his followers.

Learn more

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

Char Cox 3/30/23 Char Cox 3/30/23

Vocare: Called to Regret

You are invited to focus on your personal regrets by both naming and reframing them, and by so doing, nourish in a particular way, God’s call for both your present and your future.

The following Vocare spiritual practice is featured in Church Anew’s Lent in a Box for 2023 and was developed by Rev. Dr. Charlene Rachuy Cox as part of the Nourishing Vocation Project of The Lutheran Center at St. Olaf College. We will be offering one piece of the Vocare practice each week.

Vocare is an ongoing spiritual practice designed to help you discern and embrace your various callings so that you can more intentionally live life on purpose for the common good.

Through guided reflection on personal life experiences via the lenses of values, openness, call, attentiveness, regrets, and experiences of God’s presence, the Vocare practice nourishes discernment of three primary questions. Who am I called to be? What am I called to do? Why am I here?

Vocare Practice: Called TO Regret

You are invited to focus on your personal regrets by both naming and reframing them, and by so doing, nourish in a particular way, God’s call for both your present and your future. When carefully tended to so that hindsight becomes insight, our regrets can be powerful and lifegiving voices of call for us. Use the time between the following guided questions for your own reflection and meditation. Bring to mind a circumstance or experience of regret from your own life. Is this a regret that still has you dwelling in hindsight, or is it a regret from which you now have gained insight? How has this regret shaped your life and its horizons?

Reflect upon your regrets

How easy it is for me to name and learn from my regrets?
What are my regrets from today?
What insight do I gain from them?
What do I need for tomorrow?

Prayer

Help me, O God, to learn from my regrets so that I might live more faithfully in each tomorrow. In Jesus name, Amen.

Check out our Instagram reel for a video version of this reflection.

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

Char Cox 3/23/23 Char Cox 3/23/23

Vocare: Called to Attentiveness

You are invited to focus on where you regularly invest your attention by considering what captures your time, energy, thoughts, and imagination in everyday life.

Vocare is an ongoing spiritual practice designed to help you discern and embrace your various callings so that you can more intentionally live life on purpose for the common good.

Vocare Practice: Called TO ATTENTIVENESS

You are invited to focus on where you regularly invest your attention by considering what captures your time, energy, thoughts, and imagination in everyday life. By so considering, you are invited to nourish in a particular way, God’s present-tense call in and through daily living. Use the time between the following guided questions for your own reflection and meditation. Bring to mind a specific day, or season in your own life. Is this day or season fairly typical for you, or is it an anomaly in the rhythm of your life? How has your attention in this specific day or season shaped your life and its horizons?

Reflect upon your attentiveness

How do I typically decide where I invest my attention?
What captured and held my attention today?
Where do I wish I could have invested my attention today?
Did my attention align with my values?
What do I need for tomorrow?

Prayer

Turn my attention to you, O God, that I might recognize you at work in my life. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

Check out our Instagram reel for a video version of this reflection.

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

Natalia Terfa 3/20/23 Natalia Terfa 3/20/23

Lent Devotions: Pressing on the Bruise

The following devotion was featured in Unfinished, Church Anew’s Lent in a Box series for 2023. Learn more about the resources here.

Pressing on the Bruise

Rev. Natalia Terfa

John 4:5-42

5 So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir,give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

27 Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” 28 Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29 “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” 30 They left the city and were on their way to him.

31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. 35 Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting.36 The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.37 For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

39 Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

The story of the Woman at the Well has always felt like poking at a bruise. Painful and vulnerable. She is an outsider three times over. She’s a Samaritan (1), a woman (2), and she has a less than stellar reputation (3). I could take a long, long time to talk about why that last point isn’t quite right - but to keep it short I’ll just remind you that in this time a woman could not initiate divorce on her own and likely had very little say over her own marital status, so calling her a “fallen” woman is to miss the point entirely. Despite all that, it is still likely she was divorced and/or widowed a few times over. Because she avoided the well at the time when most women and children would visit, it meant that she was excluded from the communal act of drawing water.

Like I said, she was an outsider.

Jesus does what no one else has done for her and with her in a long time - he engages with her.

He doesn’t look away, doesn’t walk away, doesn’t pretend he doesn’t see her.

He sees her and tells her he knows all of her story.

He presses on the bruise.

This painful moment is why I have always struggled with this story, but it is also the reason I have learned to love it.

Because it is here that Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God, stands with the outsider to end all outsiders, at high noon, all pretense stripped away, and offers her living water. Not forgiveness, since there’s nothing to forgive, but offers her life and life abundant. Life that cannot be taken away like a husband or a reputation.

This is my story and your story too.

Jesus meets us right where we are, in the bright light of the noonday sun, and lays us bare, everything good and bad, honorable and awful. And then the Messiah, the one who saves, hands us living water: life that cannot be washed away, erased, or lost.

Prayer

O God, you are the water of life. Help us trust that wherever we are thirsty, you will find us, gather us in, and return us to life with you. Amen.

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

Char Cox 3/16/23 Char Cox 3/16/23

Vocare: Called by God

Vocare is an ongoing spiritual practice designed to help you discern and embrace your various callings so that you can more intentionally live life on purpose for the common good.

Vocare Practice: Called BY GOD

You are invited to focus on the many and varied voices that call to you each and every day. Some of those voices are literal. Others are metaphorical. Some are external, and some are internal. Some of the voices that call to us are life-giving, and while others are life-draining. Some are worthy of our attention. Others distract us and merit being silenced. Reflecting upon the voices that call to us helps us understand which voices we listen to and why. Likewise, it helps us consider which voices we would do well to preference and which it would be wise to dismiss or ignore. Use the time between the following guided questions for your own reflection and meditation. Bring to mind a one of the voices that speaks loudly to you. Is this a voice that builds you up, or is it a voice that tears you down? How has this voice shaped your life and its horizons?

Reflect upon your openness

How do I typically decide which voices I listen to?
What voices called to me today?
Which ones did I listen to?
Which ones did I not listen to?
What do I need for tomorrow?

Prayer

Inspire me, O God, to trust in your call upon my life. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

Check out our Instagram reel for a video version of this reflection.

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

Matthew Fleming 3/14/23 Matthew Fleming 3/14/23

Reading the Bible with the Webb Telescope

As my faith evolved and I began to question many of the traditions I was raised with, the memory verses sometimes stung like fresh cuts or ached like purple bruises.

Photo by James Webb Space Telescope from NASA

A version of this post was shared in a sermon at St. Andrew Lutheran Church and published at Faith+Lead and Enter the Bible from Luther Seminary.

Do you ever get so zeroed in on a project that you completely lose perspective?

A few weeks ago I was stuck in one of those spirals, looking after draft upon draft upon draft of a proposal that would mean a lot to the start-up organization that I lead. I would spend hours on a single paragraph or a few line-items in a budget. If someone snuck up on me at my desk, I’m certain I looked like this guy. The room smelled like burned coffee. I had books half opened all over the floor around me. I was muttering nonsense about footnotes and line-items.

And if you asked my friends? Or my spouse? Or my kids? They couldn’t wait for the project to just be finished.

I’ve been trying to work on getting perspective this year, stepping out of the details to see the bigger picture. I need to make sure that I’m still a present dad for my kids and don’t get too consumed by whatever pressing challenge takes a claim on me first.

I recently stumbled on a set of images that can really put things back into perspective - the images coming back from the James Webb Telescope.

These stunning photographs have returned from this school-bus sized telescope floating in the middle of space, looking as far into space as human beings have ever seen.

The images make for great screen-savers and are shared free for the world from NASA. But I didn’t start gaining perspective until I started to learn a little bit more about these images and the technology that makes them possible.

Take these two images, for example. The image on the left was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1996. It is perhaps one of the most iconic pieces of space photography and it’s titled “The Pillars of Creation.”

A strangely theological title for an image of deep space, isn’t it?

The image on the right was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope just this year. Images like this one are reframing the ways that scientists understand how stars are born. For the science-types, there is endless reading on these topics and more at NASA’s blog. But the story of how we can receive these images is just as compelling.

On December 25, Christmas Day, 2021, the telescope, roughly the size of a semi-truck, blasted off on the top of an Ariane 5 rocket. A little over a year later it arrived at its final destination, one million miles from Earth. Once there, it took nearly six months for giant mirrors to fold out into space like a giant piece of origami. Eighteen hexagonal mirrors, each roughly height of my six-year old folded out into this massive mirror pointed out into space. If you want to learn more about this feat of engineering, take a listen to its coverage on The Daily.

It is the size of this mirror and the fact that the Webb Telescope is in the cold of space that allows it to peer into the deepest, darkest corners of the universe.

The Pillars of creation, for example, in the Eagle Nebula, is roughly 6.5 billion light years away. For perspective, if we imagine the distance between Earth and the Eagle Nebula were shown as the distance between New York and Los Angeles, the Earth would be roughly the size of the point of a pencil. For reference, the James Webb Space Telescope can see more than twice as far as the Eagle Nebula to nearly 14 billion light years away.

It gives us perspective. If we are just one tiny point of a pencil, on this tiny planet called Earth, in all the Webb Telescope can now witness (and beyond!), how might we endeavor to hear God speaking to you and to me?

Well, it happens in a story we call the Bible, this collection of ancient texts passed down from generation to generation. Like Psalm 78 sings, “We will not hide them from their children; we will tell to the coming generation, the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might and the wonders that he has done.”

For many folks raised in Mainline (Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, etc.) or Roman Catholic traditions, the Bible was something that the professional Christians talked about. Or as Jacobson, Jacobson, and Wiersma say in their delightful and Not-So-Stuffy Dictionary of Biblical Terms, “a book that Christians believe is so holy and inspired that they almost never read it for fear that it might draw them closer to God and neighbor or change their lives in some other inconvenient way.”

The Bible was that family heirloom on the coffee table that grandma told you never to touch. Or it was that book that the priest (or pastor) hauled out into the middle of church with all the reverence and pomp and circumstance that comes with it. I didn’t grow up with this understanding of Scripture.

For me, and perhaps for you if you were raised in a more evangelical world, the Bible was a constant companion. It was the rule by which we were judged. It was a manual for morality. It was a script to be rehearsed and memorized over a lifetime.

I attended a conservative parochial (church-based) elementary and middle school. I loved this school. The teachers knew me and loved me, prayed for me and my classmates, corrected me gently when I would get disrespectful (sometimes with lines to write, old-school), and taught me the state capitals, the times tables, and the classics of literature. But as I grew up, I realized that some of this upbringing was unique.

For example, at the beginning of eighth grade I received a full sheet of paper printed on both sides with three columns on each side of all of the scripture verses that I would be expected to memorize by the time the year was finished. We had a verse for each day, a set for each week, a section for each month, and a cumulative test at the end of the year with every single verse on it. My kids will certainly call this my “walking to school uphill both ways in the snow” story.

Not quite that dusty tome on grandma’s coffee table.

At times this long list of Scripture verses has felt like baggage to me, hauling around the bumps and bruises from the constant reminder that “the wages of sin is death” or the strange and disquieting stories from the Old Testament. In eighth grade, it was hard work, and though I frequently rose to the challenge and achieved an “A” in religion or in memory work (what a strange thing to ace!), I just as often resented it.

As my faith evolved and I began to question many of the traditions I was raised with, the memory verses sometimes stung like fresh cuts or ached like purple bruises. I vividly remember Paul’s edicts against “homosexuality” (a word that a new documentary suggests never occurs in the New Testament, at least in any semblance of our contemporary understanding). I can remember highlighting portions of my leather-bound Bible, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it from you.” While it wasn’t only the words of judgment that were marked with orange highlighter, those are the ones that still seem to sting.

“Genesis Quote at memorial site,” *George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art* , accessed March 14, 2023, https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net/items/show/1720.

But as I have walked a little further down the road that many are calling “deconstruction” these days, I am starting to understand how generous this inheritance can be. Some of those edicts of judgment call me out of apathy toward the ache of justice: “What does the Lord require of you, O mortal? But to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Or from the words from the Genesis story of Cain killing his brother, Abel, painted on Chicago Ave in Minneapolis, the summer of 2020 after George Floyd was murdered.

Scripture still has something to teach and is still speaking to me, even if I have tried to outrun it at various times in my life.

I’ve come up with my own definition of scripture so that I can be clear with people I teach how I understand its role in my life and the world: “Scripture is our witness to the living voice of God.” Not quite as witty as Jacobson, Jacobson, and Wiersma, but it helps me stay focused on listening for God amidst these ancient verses that indict, dream, haunt, surprise, and prod me.

When I bump into things in my life, seemingly out of nowhere a passage will smile at me, mid-conversation, mid-thought, mid-dish-washing.

(Ask my spouse, it can be annoying!) Here’s an example.

We bought this hibiscus tree at Costco this summer, watered it diligently, rotated it for sun exposure, and eventually brought it inside for our cold, Minnesota-winter. At that point, I completely forgot about it for more than a month. It’s a miracle anything can live close to my gardening incompetence. After all the leaves fell and the tree looked all but dead, I decided to try watering it for once. With a little attention and love, the leaves started to sprout, and the first bloom came out, just like the prophet Isaiah, dreaming of the lineage that was all but chopped down, “A shoot shall come up from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”

How many places in our lives do we leave behind, lifeless, devoid of meaning, just a chopped off stump? But with a little warmth, a little love and attention, and perhaps the call of a gardener present at the first whispers of creation, blooms might just come forth. God gardens in the lifeless places in our lives and in the world, bringing forth possibility where there was no hope for tomorrow.

And for another example.

My mother-in-law is obsessive about the condition of the roads in the upper-midwest where we live. Dissatisfied with the Department of Transportation’s classifications of pink, blue, and green, she is wont to say, “They say blue, but these roads are definitely pink!” Every Friday, my mother-in-law sends a family text message with a little encouragement, some thoughts on the weather, and often, a verse or two from Scripture. Just before Christmastime, she sent this one:

“It's almost Friday. This weather drove Grandpa Jim absolutely bonkers. He'd be yelling, ‘Just stay home.’ And he loved his whole family together more than any gift. I have no advice for this kind of winter driving because I'm in the passenger seat with my eyes closed. But I'm praying for your wisdom and safety and your travel ahead whenever, wherever you go. If grandpa were here, he'd do the same. He might also share with you how as a child they'd hook up the horse and sleigh, wrap up in blankets and ride the maybe four miles to Emanuel Lutheran Church. It was here that the live trees were decorated with lit candles. Sounds dangerous. Anyway, amidst all the planning, changing and unpacking and stressing, let's not lose sight of the amazingness, of the birth of Jesus and all that has brought to us all hope, love, peace. You are loved. You are blessed.”

That text message isn’t a dusty family heirloom sitting untouched on a coffee table. It isn’t a list of to-do’s or a manual for morality. It isn’t the pomp and circumstance of a beautiful volume floating out into the assembly.

It’s alive. It’s a living, breathing, active word.

Active in the absolute mundane moments of deciding whether or not to drive in a snowstorm; alive in the haunted hallways of a new diagnosis; moving in the daring dreams of a child who wants more for this world; singing in the final breaths of a matriarch who looks back on a life well-lived and greets death with the smile of an old friend.

These passages knit my stories together as much as they stitch my sinews. They’ve rattled around in my bones long enough that they seem to spring out when I least expect them and perhaps when I need them the most. But they only crawl out of my body because I’ve dusted off that volume, spent time wrestling, and walked away, like Jacob did in Genesis, with a bit of a limp.

Contending with Scripture is a bit countercultural these days. But, in my estimation, it’s worth it.

It’s worth it to have hope on the tip of my tongue.

It’s worth it to see a story that stretches long before I’m here and will be around long after I’m gone.

It’s worth it to dance with the generations of witnesses who have written, wrestled, dreamed, and dared to speak of God.

It’s worth it because it’s how we can hear this living voice of God, still speaking to us today.

You might be thinking what all this has to do with the James Webb Space Telescope?

Well, a bit of something.

When they were looking to give a title to this, one of the most famous photos of deep-space, astronomers looked nowhere else than someone I can’t believe I’m quoting: Charles Spurgeon. A lion of fundamentalism, full of all sorts of problems that I could list, but preached a sermon featuring this image in 1859. My late grandmother, Phyllis Fleming, who knit Psalm 1 into the first stole I was given, would be proud of me for quoting Spurgeon! The astronomers knew they needed a bigger story than the precise science of how stars are formed.

The Pillars of Creation sparkle with the love of God that shimmers in every moment of our existence. It swings around every corner of creation from the microscopic speck of a point of a pencil all the way to the edges of the universe that we can't even imagine. These Pillars of Creation sing of a God who is breathing in the Eagle Nebula and singing at my corner bus stop.

The New York Times commented that this image looks like the very fingers of God, reaching out of the heavens. I think I see it too, God daring to breathe creation into being, to spark change in our pencil-point-of-a-world, and to trust the frailty of human language to speak to us still today.

Rev. Matthew Ian Fleming

Matthew Ian Fleming is a recovering evangelical who opens up his Bible bruises with curiosity, wonder, and a fair amount of irreverence. He is the founding director of Church Anew, an international platform equipping church leaders to ignite faithful imagination and sustain inspired innovation. With four colleagues, Matthew launched Alter Guild, a podcasting network with over 350,000 downloads that now features four shows including Cafeteria Christian with Nora McInerny and New Time Religion with Andy Root. Matthew is ordained in the ELCA and serves as teaching pastor to St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. At home, Matthew sings unrequested car-duets with his spouse, Hannah, jams on banjo with their two daughters, and religiously bakes sourdough bread.

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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.

Char Cox 3/9/23 Char Cox 3/9/23

Vocare: Called to Openness

Vocare is an ongoing spiritual practice designed to help you discern and embrace your various callings so that you can more intentionally live life on purpose for the common good.

Vocare Practice: Called to Openness

You are invited to focus on your own experiences of openness. Openness summons us to dwell in “holy indifference,” focusing our hearts and minds not on outcomes or results, but rather concentrating on being sustained in every present moment by God who works all things for good. Use the time between the following guided questions for your own reflection and meditation. Bring to mind an experience from your own life when you needed to be open to something. Is this an experience of openness that has reached a conclusion, or is it an experience of openness that is still unfolding? How has this particular experience of openness shaped your life and its horizons?

Reflect upon your openness

How do I typically respond to invitations or expectations to be open?
To what was I asked to be open today?
To what did I say “yes?”
To what did I say “no?”
What do I need for tomorrow?

Prayer

Open my heart, O God, to the mysteries of your saving love. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

Check out our Instagram reel for a video version of this reflection.

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

Char Cox 3/2/23 Char Cox 3/2/23

Vocare: Called to Values

Vocare is an ongoing spiritual practice designed to help you discern and embrace your various callings so that you can more intentionally live life on purpose for the common good.

Vocare Practice: Called to Values

You are invited to focus on your own values.

Values are the things that we most hold dear, those principles or commitments that guide how we think, what we believe, and how we act. Values can be both tangible and intangible. They can be consciously present in our actions, and they can contribute unconscious influence upon our choices.

Considering personal values with intention helps us to name what our values really are and to determine if what we aspire to value is actually demonstrated in our everyday lives. Use the time between the following guided questions for your own reflection and meditation. Bring to mind an experience from your own life when you had to choose between conflicting values. Is this a value-centered choice that has been resolved, or is it a value-centered choice that is unresolved? How has this particular experience of value-centeredness shaped your life and its horizons?

Reflect upon your values

What do I value?
How have I lived my values today?
How have my values been in conflict today?
What do I need for tomorrow?

Prayer

Lead me by your Spirit, O God, to value what you value. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

Check out our Instagram reel for a video version of this reflection.

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

Natalia Terfa 2/23/23 Natalia Terfa 2/23/23

Lent Devotions: Lent is not a holiness contest

The following devotion was featured in Unfinished, Church Anew’s Lent in a Box series for 2023. Learn more about the resources here.

Matthew 6:1-6; 16-21

1 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.

2 “So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your alms may be done in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

5 “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

16 “And whenever you fast, do not look somber, like the hypocrites, for they mark their faces to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 17 But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, 18 so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

In this season of Lent, there were (and maybe still are) traditionally three ways you could “work on” repentance - turning back to God. The first is by giving, the second is by praying, the third is by fasting. These are all the things Jesus warns about in this part of his sermon on the mount. It’s important to note that the sermon he is preaching isn’t just this part about giving, praying, and fasting, but it’s a continuation of the sermon that also contains the beatitudes, and reminders we are salt and light in the world for the Kingdom of God. It’s all one sermon.

One sermon that is systematically taking the typical way of doing things and flipping them all upside down. When you remember this, you realize that this part of the sermon is no different. Jesus takes the things that people usually do in order to repent, to turn around, to turn back to God, and says - why? Why are you doing these? For others? For yourself? For God?

“When you give, don’t blow a trumpet so everyone knows you do it. When you pray, don’t do it loudly and where everyone can see you, so they see how holy you are. When you give something up, don’t put on a sad face so that people ask you what’s wrong.”

You know exactly what Jesus is talking about. It’s not that fasting, giving, and praying are somehow no longer good. Instead, Jesus wants people to think about their motivation.

Faith is not a holiness contest. It is not something you win by doing it the loudest and the best.

Lent is a season to reflect on our own motivations so we can turn around, repent, and then use those things (prayer, giving, fasting) instead to reconnect to God and each other - the way it was always meant to be.

Prayer

Merciful God, we thank you for the gifts of prayer, giving, and fasting. Help us see the ways in which we have used these gifts for our own gain, and instead help us use them to turn towards you and each other. Amen.

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

Char Cox 2/22/23 Char Cox 2/22/23

Vocare: Called to Renewal

Vocare is an ongoing spiritual practice designed to help you discern and embrace your various callings so that you can more intentionally live life on purpose for the common good.

Vocare Practice for Ash Wednesday

You are invited to focus on God’s call to renewal for you. Renewal comes in host of different forms and through a variety of times and experiences in our lives. Sometimes, renewal comes through unexpected, unplanned, or even undesired circumstances. At other times, renewal is a conscientious and intentional choice. Either way, seasons of renewal are “between no longer and not yet.” In these “in between times,” we are changed. Use the time between the following guided questions for your own reflection and meditation. Bring to mind an experience from your own life when you experienced renewal. Is this an experience of renewal that is in the past, or is it an experience of renewal that is ongoing? How has this experience of renewal shaped your life and its horizons?

Reflect upon how God is calling you to renewal in this season

Who am I called to be – in this “not yet” time?
What am I called to do – in this “not yet” time?
Why am I here – in this “not yet” time?
What do I need for this “not yet” time?

Prayer

Turn me toward you, O God, to Lenten practices that call me from death to life. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

Check out our Instagram reel for a video version of this reflection.

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

Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D. 12/19/22 Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D. 12/19/22

Holy Blackness: The Matrix of Creation

We share this sermon from Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney to nourish your soul and your biblical imagination. The sermon was originally preached at All Saints Church in Pasadena, CA on December 1, 2019 and follows the readings from A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year A.

Scripture Passages: Genesis 1:1-5; Psalm 8; Romans 8:18-25; Matthew 24:32-44 (Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year A Advent 1) (full text translations at the bottom of this post)

In the velvet darkness of the blackest night
Burning bright, there’s a guiding star
No matter what or who, who you are
There’s a light (Over at the Frankenstein Place)
There’s a light (Burning in the fireplace)
There’s a light, light in the darkness of everybody’s life.

Let us pray:
God of fire and light who dwells in thick darkness,
the light and the dark are alike to thee,
open the eyes of our hearts that we might see. Amen.

In the velvet darkness, darker than a thousand midnights down in a cypress swamp, this luminous darkness, this radiant blackness, the wholly black and holy black womb of God pulsed life into the world against a tapestry of holy life-giving darkly radiant blackness, shaping, molding, knitting, coalescing earthstuff from starstuff from Godstuff. All before uttering the first word.

This more than binary God articulated in the binary idiom of Iron Age folk recalling the testimony of their Stone Age forebears, limited to two gender signifiers but using both to signal to the best of their ability that neither was sufficient even if some would use one more, to the near exclusion of the other, this pluripotent God whose breath-crafted children would bear her, hir, his, zir, our, their image, this God, conjured, confected, and crafted creation out of holy darkness.

The Poet and poetry of creation birth a story made of stories that tells us who we are, who we have been and, who we could be. We are born of blackness, starry night and fertile earth, our first human parents in science and in scripture have Africa’s soil on their feet and in their skin. But somewhere along the way we were taught to fear the dark, to fear the night, to fear the holy blackness that is the swaddling blanket of creation.

Some of our fear of the dark is ancient and instinctual from a time when we were not sure the sun would return from setting or storm or eclipse: Stay with us Lord of Light for the night is dark and full of terrors. The prayer to the Red God on Game of Thrones is in many ways the perfect embodiment of this and perhaps a worthy Advent prayer, (at least in a service where There’s a Light Over at the Frankenstein House from the Rocky Horror Picture Show is the Advent hymn). But some of our fear of the dark is carefully calculated and mercenary.

Some lost sight of or chose not to see the beauty of the diversity of creation having lost the memory of their own ancestral African roots and, when encountering a suddenly much larger world saw that our black beauty was valuable, profitable, salable. Then beginning in 1619 on this continent those ancient fears were seized upon and weaponized to build this nation on a foundation of slavery and genocide and the rhetoric of blackness became all that was wrong in the world just as Malik el-Haj al-Shabazz taught us when he was Malcom X: blackball, black sheep, blackmail, black hearted, black people.

My over-used but nowhere near retirement Black Lives Matter sign says, “Black Lives Are Sacred.” Blackness is sacred. But the world has lost sight of the goodness and sanctity of blackness. That is why it is so easy to kill us and our children and so easy to justify our deaths with fear, fear of the dark. Public Enemy prophesied rightly on Fear of A Black Planet. Fear of blackness. Fear of black people. All in service to a divinization of whiteness and light to the point of idolatry. To this Bishop Stephen Charleston says:

I have heard that the afterlife is a place of perpetual light. That’s a problem. Heaven needs night. Darkness is not evil, but a realm of mystery and imagination. The day is constant, but the night is creative. The stars dance. The moon dreams. The comets write poetry of fire. Without the night there is no dawn or twilight, no moments of sacred ambiguity, no subtle changes of perception, no promises kept or just made, a holy pledge of healing or of hope. No, please, we need the night in heaven. We need that glorious darkness, that obscure beauty, drifting on wedding gown clouds of white across an obsidian sky.

Thus, this the darkest time of the year is one of the holiest times of the year. The bleakest shadows of solar night hold the light in passionate embrace, and where they touch, shades of gray and, every color of the rainbow prism including those we cannot yet see. Our encultured fear, our tribalism, have kept us from seeing that all creation is inherently good. All God’s creatures are good by design. All of God’s children are good, born good, created good, created for goodness, good enough, even when they, we, fail to live up and into the goodness of God within us, it is still there.

We start this new Christian year in this Advent season with the goodness of God and the poetry of creation manifest in the liturgy of the earth. God is Poet and this good God-given earth is her poetry. Indeed, the earth is also both poet and poem, poetry groaning in creation. The liturgy of the earth, its cycles of sun and shadow, ripening and rotting, blossoming and blowing away, drenching and drying, feast and famine, storm and stillness, deep sea and desert wide are fluid ever-changing witnesses to and stanzas in the poetry of our lives, of our world. For we too are her poems, sonnets and ballads, dissertations of rap, rhythm and, rhyme and, more than a few limericks, quatrain and haiku and, forms for which there are yet no names. This great liturgy of creation is a liturgy of transition and transcendence. And so it is with life and death; they are not two separate polar realities for between them lies living.

It is into this life that brown baby Jesus comes to dwell, inhabit, teach, guide, accompany, heal, forgive, redeem, love and, live. And thus are we too called dwell in this good earth in our good incarnations, living, loving, forgiving, healing, accompanying each other on our pilgrim journey. We live in the waiting for the second Advent. Live in a world waiting for the fullness of redemption, restoration and, reparation. Live in this world where people don’t always see our poetry, our obscure beauty, our incarnations as Godstuff, our loving as the goodness of God in this world.

This earth is given into our care and we are given into each other’s care. Advent prepares us to encounter a God who dwells with us in the waiting earth. And Advent tells us that we are loved and worthy of love. Most of the world outside of a very specific set of churches doesn’t know that it is Advent. It is pre-Christmas sale season which began after, or even before, Halloween. Even in the Church Advent is often crushed into Christmas and the first Advent, the Nativity of black baby Jesus, often overshadows the second Advent, the return of the rainbow Christ, the fullness of humanity encompassing the poetry of all flesh, all kinds of flesh, transformed, human and divine, yet retaining enough of the poetry of the past to be recognized as the very same person, Mary’s baby.

Mary’s poor brown migrant baby. Christians the world over will sing their love for the baby Jesus for the next five weeks. But for many their love will not extend to Guatemalan baby Jesus or Muslim baby Issa who share his name. In far too many churches the stories of Advent and Christmas are used to sanctify white supremacy in the church. Introducing children to and reifying adult belief in a white Jesus who is not simply an aesthetic choice but a statement of power and domination. White Jesus is a colonized and colonizing Christ. Until the deaths of black and brown mother’s children mean as much as the deaths of white parent’s children and the windows and walls of our churches do not silently whitewash the brownness and Jewishness of Jesus, his family, friends and followers and his ancestors, the whiteness of Christian art and nativity plays will always be in service to white supremacy.

When Christ returns every system that holds people captive, dominates and subordinates will be unmade. And so we long for the second Advent. But I don’t think we’re all waiting for the same thing. The Church has been waiting millennia and in that waiting, has not only not healed the ruptures that form when we forget that we are all a handful of the same dirt, but in some cases has dug and deepened those fissures. And in some parts of the Church, the more you believe in the literal return of Jesus, the less you believe in or care about climate change because Jesus will just fix it after while.

Some read today’s gospel and see the immanent and unexpected return of Christ and all they can think of is who is going with him and who will be left behind. But that’s not the Jesus I know. The Jesus I know is in the field with the agricultural workers in the gospel. He’s with the women doing undervalued work in that same gospel. He’s not making a list and checking it twice. That’s someone else’s bag. And, I believe he is telling us this story so that we will take notice of who is around us and might not be able to make it alone.

We already live in a world where some people get left behind. In this world, people are left behind if they’re black or brown or poor or gay or trans or women or femme, or felons, or, or, or. But it won’t always be that way. While a traditional Advent reading might focus on Jesus’s return, I want to offer another reading. I don’t believe we have to wait for the return of Jesus for things to get better. I don’t believe that our problems are so big that only God can sort them out. I don’t believe that there is nothing that we can do about the quality of human life or the capacity of the earth to sustain life.

Jesus showed us by how he lived and died and lived again on the other side of death that nothing is too big, too much, too hard for God, that human dignity and flourishing are God’s dream for us no matter under what oppressive systems we find ourselves. The Jesus who allied himself with the poor and disenfranchised by becoming poor and disenfranchised will not abandon us to a world that does not love us, fears us and seeks to harm us. Rather Jesus stands with us as we remake the world that is our heritage, our sacred trust, as we rediscover its poetry and the poetry inside of each of us.

The time between the Advents is a pregnant time, indeed the earth is already in labor in apostle’s view. Now is a waiting time. Now is a watching time. And now is a working time. Jesus calls our attention to the people the world, and sometimes the church, says will be left behind. For much of human history women have been kept behind if not left behind. But the One for whose Advent we wait chose the flesh of a woman for the glory of the incarnation, that intimate bleeding flesh that the world of men wanted to leave behind, thus forever sanctifying woman-flesh and all human-flesh. And, for much of our history folk have wanted to leave gay folk and queer folk behind, yet Jesus comes to us through a miracle that transcends and queers gender roles, God-beyond-gender yet disclosed as the feminine spirit conceived a child with a human woman. From as soon as one person had two sticks while another had only one, we have left people behind in poverty and inequity. Yet Jesus came to us poor and under-housed. We are building walls – lying about building physical walls – while building legislative walls and the border-crossing Jesus is an asylum seeker. If we are not careful, we might just leave Jesus behind, not recognizing him because we’ve lost the sight and sound of the divine poetry in every human person.

We wait for the Advent return of the One whose incarnational gender poetry transcends the grammatical categories of frail human poets and translators, with that Advent will come the majesty of God, the manifestation of God’s perfect justice and love, for where God is, there can be no injustice. And dare I say, in God’s perfect justice none will be left behind.

The Scriptural Texts for the sermon from The Women’s Lectionary:

Dr. Gafney selected and translated the readings using an expansive gender-explicit approach and, in the Psalms, explicit feminine language and pronouns for God.

Genesis 1:1 -5

When beginning he, God, created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was shapeless and formless and bleakness covered the face of the deep, while the Spirit of God, she, fluttered over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; so God separated the light from the bleakness. 5 Then God called the light Day, and the bleakness God called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, day one.

Psalm 8
1 WOMB OF LIFE, our Sovereign, *
how exalted is your Name in all the earth!
2 Out of the mouths of children and nursing babes *
your majesty is praised above the heavens.
3 You have founded a stronghold against your adversaries, *
to put an end to the enemy and the avenger.
4 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, *
the moon and the stars you have established,
5 What are we that you should be mindful of us? *
the woman-born that you attend to them?
6 You have made us a little lower than God; *
you adorn us with glory and honor;
7 You give us mastery over the works of your hands; *
you put all things under our feet:
8 All sheep and oxen, *
even the wild beasts of the field,
9 The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, *
and whatsoever walks in the paths of the sea.
10 WOMB OF LIFE, our Sovereign, *
how exalted is your Name in all the earth!

Romans 8:18-25

18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the daughters and sons of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the daughters and sons of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Matthew 24:32-44

32 Jesus said, “From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. 33 So also, when you see all these things, you know that the Son of Woman is near, at the very gates. 34 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. 35 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

36 “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Creator. 37 For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Woman. 38 For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, 39 and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Woman. 40 Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. 41 Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. 42 Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Redeemer is coming. 43 But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, the owner would have stayed awake and would not have let the house be broken into. 44 Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Woman is coming at an unexpected hour.

Sources for opening:
Richard O’brien, “There’s a Light (Over at the Frankenstein Place)” Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975 © Warner Chappell Music, Inc.

Sources for first paragraph in order:

Richard O’brien, Rocky Horror; James Weldon Johnson, “The Creation,” Howard Thurman (title, This Luminous Darkness); “black and radiant,” Rabbi Marcia Falk trans. “The Song of Songs”; “darkly radiant,” Mia McKenzie, The Thing About Being A Little Black Girl In the World: For Quvenzhané Wallis.

Rev. Wil Gafney Ph.D.

Womanist biblical scholar, the Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D. is the Right Rev. Sam B. Hulsey Professor of Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. She is the author of *Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to Women of the Torah and of the Throne*, a commentary on Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah in the *Wisdom* series; *Daughters of Miriam: Women Prophets in Ancient Israel;* and co-editor of *The Peoples’ Bible* and *The Peoples’ Companion to the Bible*. She is the author of a *Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church* and translator of its biblical selections; the first two volumes, Year A and W (a stand alone volume) were published in August. Volumes B and C are due in 2023 and 2024. She is currently writing a second volume of *Womanist Midrash* focusing on women in the Prophets. She is an Episcopal priest canonically resident in the Diocese of Pennsylvania and licensed in the Diocese of North Texas, and a former Army chaplain and congregational pastor in the AME Zion Church.
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Rev. Dr. Dorothy Wells 12/9/22 Rev. Dr. Dorothy Wells 12/9/22

New Lessons from the Grinch

Christmas was not, for me, a time of joy and happiness, and it certainly wasn’t yet about celebrating God in the flesh having been born among us. Christmas was just lonely and sad.

I wasn’t a fan of Christmas when I was a child. Christmas was, for me, a long, two-week winter break during which I felt disconnected from the settled routine of school, learning and friends that brought an escape from the troubles of home. My parents had their own struggles – my mother, with mental illness and my father, with alcoholism. Christmas was not, for me, a time of joy and happiness, and it certainly wasn’t yet about celebrating God in the flesh having been born among us.

Christmas was just lonely and sad.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always been drawn to Dr. Suess’ The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. As a child, I could identify with a Grinch who didn’t experience happiness at Christmas. The good news is the Grinch wasn’t stuck in his unhappy place; I needed to know that I wouldn’t be forever stuck in my own unhappy place, either.

As the years passed, I began to think a bit more critically about this beloved children’s tale – and whether its message was quite as simple as we all might like it to be.

The story introduces us to a Grinch who lived in seeming isolation above the Whos in Whoville, and with little interaction with them, save his growing annoyance with them every year at Christmas (apparently, only at Christmas), with their presents, and feasting, and oh-so-joyful singing and music-making. His annoyance grew so great, indeed, that it became an obsession: He needed to keep the Whos’ happy Christmas from coming, at all costs. And so the “mean one, Mr. Grinch” came down to Whoville and took all of the presents, the food, the decorations, the trappings, thinking that he had stopped Christmas from coming. But to the stunned Grinch’s surprise, the Whos still gathered together, holding hands and singing carols – just as if nothing had happened.

My own puzzler starts puzzling: Just why did the Whos’ happy celebration bother the Grinch so much? Maybe the Grinch was lonely, or felt excluded and cut off from celebrating the day with his Whoville neighbors. Maybe there was some sadness or loss that the Grinch associated with Christmas.

It didn’t appear that those Whos, for all of their joyful celebrating, had ever tried to include their Grinchy neighbor – who didn’t look at all like them, or act like them – by inviting him to join their celebration, or taking him a gift, a plate of their Roast Beast feast, or even a can of Who-Hash.

It seems that the Whos paid no attention to the Grinch at all – that is, until he came down to pay them an unexpected – and, no doubt unwanted – visit.

Maybe the Whos didn’t really understand Christmas, either, not nearly so much as they (or we) thought. Maybe its message had eluded them, just as it had eluded the Grinch.

Perhaps if the Whos had initiated contact with their isolated neighbor, to invite him to share in their joyful celebration, they might truly have shown that they understood the message of Christmas. It’s the very act of radical hospitality that the Whos showed after the Grinch came down to Whoville, after he returned their presents, food and decorations – inviting him to join their celebration, and even to carve the Roast Beast – that helped release him from the unhappy place where he was stuck and gave him a new lease on life.

But the Grinch shouldn’t have had to invite himself to the community by attempting to ruin their celebration – and taking all that the Whos had – in order to get their attention.

All grown up now, and part of the organized Church, I find myself thinking about those Whos – and the larger lesson for faith communities, particularly in a post-COVID world. Here’s what I think: However festively we celebrate our traditions, however joyfully we sing our hymns, however piously we display our faith, if we fail to acknowledge the presence of the neighbor who sits just beyond our doors – the neighbor whom we see but whose story isn’t known to us, the neighbor who may not look like us, the neighbor who may not know our traditions, the neighbor who may be completely alone and struggling – we pay lip service to what we claim that we believe.

After the past two years of sickness, grief, loss, and, of course, the broken habit of church attendance, faith communities are struggling to find their identity and footing. Some churches have closed permanently during this season of our lives because there simply aren’t enough churchgoers to continue to support them. Some churchgoers have indefinitely postponed a return to worship and church activities, while other churchgoers have made no plans to return. And when the habit of worship was broken, some moved on to other activities.

About now, our faith communities should be discerning new ways to connect with suffering neighbors to extend some invitations to holy and radical hospitality. About now, our faith communities should be discerning how we serve in a vastly different environment – and how we visibly demonstrate our relevance as bearers of the love of God and the light of Christ in a broken, fractured world. If ever there were a time that the world needed to see the Church as a unifier, as a place of welcome and caring for all of God’s people, as a place committed to loving neighbor, and as a place of holy hospitality, this is the time. Our buildings are replete with places and spaces to welcome new ministries – to help address needs around food insecurity, childcare, literacy, addiction recovery, mental health, physical exercise, legal aid, immigration support, employment networking, community music lessons – that bring healing of body, mind and spirit to neighbors who desperately need to know that we’re there.

It’s that kind of invitation to radical hospitality that we in our faith communities should prayerfully discern – right about now – so that our neighbors aren’t left to struggle alone.

Rev. Dr. Dorothy Sanders Wells

The Rev. Dr. Dorothy Sanders Wells is an Episcopal priest who often writes about justice and equity issues for God's people.

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Dr. Michael J. Chan 11/21/22 Dr. Michael J. Chan 11/21/22

Preaching and Teaching with Love and Respect for the Jewish People—Introducing a New Resource

This article will introduce readers to a newly-published resource titled, “Preaching and Teaching with Love and Respect for the Jewish People.” This publication is a product of the ELCA’s Consultative Panel on Lutheran-Jewish Relations and was written under the leadership of Dr. Peter Pettit. The title of this new resource echoes the ELCA’s 1994 “A Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to the Jewish Community,” which names an “urgent desire to live out our faith in Jesus Christ with love and respect for the Jewish people.” I was but one contributor to this important work. What follows is my own sense of this document’s significance, goals, and contents. I’ll begin with some reflections on why it is needed in 2022.

Significance in 2022

In measurable ways, Christian-Jewish relations have improved—whether one thinks in terms of public denominational statements, interfaith collaboration, or deeper attention to Jewish sources in Christian circles. And yet corrosive (and often subtle) currents continue to flow through Christian communities of all theological and ideological stripes. Anti-Jewish attitudes and practices are not unique to the political left or right. They are Christian problems with deep historical roots in some of our most cherished understandings of God.

None of this is surprising. Christianity has many dark and disturbing chapters in its history. In far too many cases, those chapters have involved the Christian mistreatment of Jewish neighbors. Lutherans have a particular stake in this conversation, since our namesake (Martin Luther) represented Jews in profoundly disturbing ways, even calling for rulers to adopt explicitly violent policies. (1)

Concern for the impact of Christian theology on Jewish lives remains of critical importance in contemporary America. The FBI gathers data on hate crimes, which are defined as “a committed criminal offense which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias(es) against a: race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, gender identity.” The data are unambiguous: Jews remain at risk in America today. In fact, of all the religious groups the FBI tracks, Jews are the most at-risk religious group in America. According to the 2020 report, there were 683 anti-Jewish incidents (a 28% drop since 2019), 110 anti-Muslim incidents (a 38% drop since 2019), 15 anti-Buddhist incidents (increase of 200%), and 89 anti-Sikh incidents (82% increase). The Anti-Defamation League also does a yearly audit of anti-Jewish incidents. In 2020, they reported 2,024. The numbers tell a shocking story: The Jewish community bears the brunt of anti-religious hatred in America.

Given these contemporary realities, I was eager to accept an invitation from Dr. Pettit to contribute to “Preaching and Teaching with Love and Respect for Our Jewish Neighbors.” His vision for this project and his resolve to see it to its conclusion animated the writing team’s work at every juncture.

Audience and Usage

As the title indicates, this guide is for anyone in the church who has a teaching or preaching role. At first glance, that might seem too narrowly construed. But it all depends on how one defines preaching and teaching. As I see it, this guide was written for anyone involved in the church’s public witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

With this definition in mind, the audience for this guide includes everyone from pastors to digital content creators, from youth leaders to musicians, and from confirmation teachers to adult education facilitators. Regarding content creators, it is especially important to note the significant role played by visual media in the perpetuation of anti-Jewish concepts and sentiments. This observation was true in the period of the Reformation and remains true today. Anyone charged with the task of teaching children (camp counselors, youth workers, teachers) would benefit from this guide, since many of the most problematic anti-Jewish ideas creep in (often unintentionally) when we are very young.

The guide itself can be used in a variety of ways and contexts. As a starting point, it is divided into ten major sections (more on this below), making the document easy to adapt into a curriculum, whether in the context of individual or group-based study. Given the abundance of bibliographic references, the guide can also serve as an entry point into the larger world of Jewish-Christian dialogue. With the slow rise of Jewish-Christian dialogue, an abundance of resources now exist that can help a person navigate both the joys and complexities of this important conversation. And finally, the guide could easily provide scaffolding for a sermon or teaching series. Many other options exist, but these can at least serve as a starting point.

Content and Organization

The guide is structured around 10 topic areas. The first six emerge out of Scripture itself and include the following:

Prophetic language
Pharisees, scribes, priests and Jewish elders
Jesus and the Jewish law in the Gospels
The historical settings of the Gospels
Paul among Jews and Gentiles — and later readings of Paul
Judaisms of the first century and 21st century.

The final four pay attention to key theological categories that have a special place within Christian (and especially Lutheran) theology and liturgy:

Law and gospel; promise and fulfillment
Where sin divides (Luther’s notion of sinner/saint)
The old/new rhetoric of the Letter to the Hebrews
Misleading lectionary dynamics.

Each of these topics is covered in a mini-essay (typically just a few pages long), which begins with a section we title, “Problematic” and “Better.” Here we describe problematic ways the topic of choice has been engaged in the church, followed by a proposal for a better way forward.

Regular call-out boxes draw attention to key biblical texts, practical insights, and other notable facts. Each essay is intended to be theologically rich and eminently practical.

A Handful of Hopes

As a scholar and teacher of the Old Testament, I take great delight in introducing Christians to the fascinating world of early Judaism. This is, quite literally, the matrix of Jesus’ own religious and cultural identity. But more is at stake than mere historical curiosity. Christian love and respect for Jewish people is not simply grounded in the fact that Jews are human beings who bear the image of God—they certainly are, as are all humans. The Jewish people bear an additional mark of dignity: they are a covenant people whose members are the recipients of unbroken divine promises. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection do nothing to alter this. When Christians deny the covenant status of the Jewish people, they undermine the very foundations of Christian hope. Anti-Jewish theology is anti-Christian theology. My first hope is that this guide will encourage a similar conviction among its readers.

I am regularly troubled by how effortlessly we, as Christians, slip into anti-Jewish ways of interpreting the Bible and especially the person and work of Jesus. My second hope is that readers of this guide will develop a deeper awareness of how anti-Jewish currents are still very much at work in Christian churches today—and probably also in their teaching, preaching, and theology.

Finally, I hope this guide will inspire interfaith cooperation. Jewish people are often members of our communities. Jewish children play on soccer teams, participate in 4-H, and make music in the school band. Jewish adults run for local office, manage local businesses, and donate to important causes. It’s one thing to speak more accurately and generatively about Jesus’ Jewish heritage and quite another thing to see Jewish people as important partners in the making of a more fruitful and trustworthy world. Working toward the latter will require Christians first to examine how their own theological tradition works against just such a future.

Footnotes:

(1) Gritsch, Eric, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism: Against His Better Judgment (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 2012).

Dr. Michael J. Chan

Dr. Chan is the Executive Director of the Center for Faith and Work at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota. Prior to this position, he was associate professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He holds a Ph.D. from Emory University and is a graduate of Luther Seminary (M.A. in biblical theology) and Pacific Lutheran University (B.A. in elementary education).

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Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D. 10/4/22 Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D. 10/4/22

Collateral Damage

We share this sermon from Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney to nourish your soul and your biblical imagination. The sermon was originally preached at Princeton University Chapel and follows the readings from A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year A.

Collateral Damage: A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year A, Proper 19: 1 Samuel 30:1–8, 17–19; Psalm 13; Matthew 18:10–14

David smote them from twilight until the evening of the morrow. None of them escaped, except four hundred young men who mounted camels and fled. (1 Samuel 30:17)

David seems quite the dashing hero, rescuing his womenfolk and the wives and womenfolk of his menfolk. But, a text without a context is a pretext and so the word for the morning is “Collateral Damage.”

Let us pray: May we who have gathered to share a preached word from these ancient words encounter a living word. Amen.

When David was on the run from Saul, he became a Philistine mercenary with four hundred dejected indebted embittered men of his own, who went on the run with him (1 Samuel 22:2). Men who no longer had a social stake in the welfare of their people because they no longer had an economic stake and perhaps no longer had the wherewithal to have a finely prepared medium rare steak — that is without purloining the sirloin. David and his merry, rather, morose marauders would go on a rampage leaving very little but collateral damage in their wake.

Now David was no fool. He knew very well that innocents could be and were regularly collateral damage on the battlefield and in its aftermath. So he gathered up the people who were most important to him, his mama and his daddy and took them out of the country to great grandmother Ruth’s people in Moab (1 Samuel 22:3). He didn’t want his family to become collateral damage.

Saul was still trying to kill him and the Philistines only half trusted him so, David and his men were cut off from royal resources. They tried and failed to strong arm a rich landowner; but his wife Abigail, not wishing to become collateral damage herself, gave up the goods after which David said, “Blessed be your discernment woman… Surely as the Holy One the God of Israel lives, who has restrained me from hurting you, unless you had hurried and come to meet me, truly by the light of daybreak there would not have been left to Nabal [your husband] a single male urinating against a wall.” David was prepared to kill every man and boy who was old enough could stand up to pee if they did not give him their property at sword point. (1 Samuel 25:33-34) A suspiciously short time later, after her husband’s convenient death, Abigail and Ahinoam – the next woman David picked up in the next verse with no fanfare or description – rode off into the sunset with all the goods in a three-way marriage neglected by those who romanticize David’s union with Abigail. And Ahinoam becomes exegetical collateral damage.

While he was serving the Philistine king, Achish, David asked for lands of his own as he had just begun his collection of women that would measure in double digits and was going to need a place to settle them while he was off killing the women and men in other people’s families. He was given Ziklag of our first lesson today (1 Samuel 27:5-7). Then David and his now six hundred men made a series of unprovoked raids including against the Geshurites, the Girzites, and the Amalekites and their land:

David smote the land and there was neither woman or man living; and he took sheep and cattle and donkeys and camels and clothing … and,

Neither woman nor man David left living to be brought back to Gath, saying, “Lest they tell about us, and say, ‘Thus did David.’” Thus was his custom… (1 Samuel 27:9, 11)

David slaughtered every woman and man who came across his sword because he wanted what they had. They and their children were collateral damage. The text says he even smote the land. Folk don’t teach or preach these stories often, if ever. They have become collateral damage themselves to the legend of David. A legend bolstered by passages such as the one we heard this morning. Truth is the first casualty of war as Hiram Johnson put it in slightly different phrasing. The truth, truths, or truthiness of the text – thank you Stephen Colbert – is often a casualty of patriarchal, plantation, colonized and colonizing exegesis.

David treated women and children as collateral damage in his rampaging across the countryside. But his enemies, whose women and children he had slaughtered, treated his womenfolk and the womenfolk of his bloody bandits as valuable hostages so that they were alive when David came storming through to take them back. They did not do unto David as he had done unto them. Naturally, David took his womenfolk back in his old style: David smote them from twilight until the evening of the morrow. None of them escaped, except four hundred young men who mounted camels and fled. (1 Samuel 30:17) This time there was less collateral damage.

Collateral damage is the way the military talks about unintended deaths and destruction during sanctioned military violence. Unintended but not unavoidable. I say this as a former Army chaplain. Every military offensive comes with the possibility of collateral damage and someone makes the decision that it is worth the risk to lives and limbs and homes and hearts. It is a tacit and tactical understanding that some losses are worth bearing to achieve an objective, but for the most part those losses will be borne by someone else. As a chaplain I was not in the rooms where those decisions were made just as there was no prophet traveling with David. My critique doesn’t mean I believe military ministry is futile; I remain a strong advocate for the chaplaincy.

It is not just marauders, militias and modern militaries who make calls resulting in collateral damage. As a nation, we have decided that some people, their bodies and their children are collateral damage to the progress, prosperity and the piety of a few in power. Indigenous peoples were collateral damage to the rape and seizure of their land. The bodies and families of enslaved Africans were collateral damage to the profits from sugar and cotton and tobacco plantations and building universities and white houses. The people of Hawaii and their queen, Liliuokalani were collateral damage to the Dole Pineapple Company and, imported Filipino and Chinese workers, sometimes treated little better than slaves, provided the next round of collateral damage. Palestinian patrimony, heritage, culture and multi-generational lives were collateral damage to – not the very real need to create a safe homeland for the Jewish people but – to the intent to place it on top of people who had been living in the land for generations and whose ancestors lived mixed, mingled and struggled together with their own, rather than making nation building a shared proposition. The prospect of peace in the part of north east Africa and west Asia that is fictionalized as the Middle East is collateral damage to a whole lot of bad decisions, worse intent and horrific outcomes. Sometimes folk, past and present, are not collateral damage but, the targets of annihilation, good old-fashioned biblical genocide, conquest and resettlement if you’re lucky. We saw it South Africa and we’re seeing it in Ukraine. We see it’s offspring in environmental racism that smites the land like David and diseases and displaces residents with gentrification rather than genocide. And now, school lunch is collateral damage for billionaire tax cuts and the children born from unwanted and state sponsored forced pregnancies are the collateral damage of christofascist politics. All while immigrants legally seeking asylum are collateral damage in the power plays of white southern governors turning to an old, old playbook.

The very earth is collateral damage to consumption and waste and can-kicking and nuclear posturing. The beauty of the heavens and the earth is being corroded and corrupted and consumed without conservation. The space race is an actual race to get there first, to plant a flag, to build a habitat, to make arable land, and that land too, whether on the moon or on Mars will become collateral damage to unrestrained corruption and consumerism without restraint. Just look at the circle of space junk surrounding this planet. We will need a new heavens and a new earth because nothing in creation will remain uncorrupted by human greed and excess.

But back here on earth, when those of us who have been deemed acceptable losses or collateral damage cry out like the psalmist, How long, Holy One? …Look! Answer me!, we don’t cry out alone. Our prayers are not going unheard no matter how long we’re in captivity or how far we’ve been trafficked from home. Jesus says the angels of God are are in the very presence of God and see her face. Not just any angels. The angels assigned to the little ones, the ones treated with contempt. The ones other folk treat like collateral damage. Their angels have a front row seat in the court of heaven.

And what is it that these guardian angels of God are doing? Using my sanctified imagination I hear them calling God to task, storming the heavens on our behalf from within the very heavens, on our behalf, calling God to rise in the old language:

יְהֹוָ֗ה וְיָפֻ֨צוּ֙ אֹֽיְבֶ֔יךָ וְיָנֻ֥סוּ מְשַׂנְאֶ֖יךָ מִפָּנֶֽיךָ:

Rise Resplendent One! And let your enemies be scattered and let your haters flee from your face. (Numbers 10:35, Qumah *Shekinah! V’yaphusu oyeveka, v’yanusu m’saneka mippaneka!) Get up God! Don’t your hear your children crying?

My people know about calling on God. My people also know about waiting on God. I come from a waiting people who waited four hundred years for a liberation that is being whittled away every day. And I come from a tired people, a people tired of waiting and tired of this incomplete liberation. I am a tired people. But, I also come from a people who know that God will come through. I know that God will come through. God will come through. And I just came by to tell you that God will come through for you too.

Whether you have wandered off or been run off, God in Christ Jesus will come see about you. God herself will come see about the little one, the vulnerable one, the one treated with contempt, the one treated as collateral damage. God will come see about her child. And when God finds that precious one, if they are entangled in brambles like white supremacist patriarchal colonizing manifest destinal translation, exegesis and theology, God will cut it down and if necessary burn it out from the root. If God’s children are being harried by a pack of transphobic and homophobic wolves, God will beat them down with her rod and staff that are offensive as well as defensive weapons and snatch her children from the ravening teeth, bruised but breathing, battered but believing. And if God’s child is teetering on the edge of a cliff unaware or even fully aware of the danger looming ahead but past caring, God will snatch them back from the gates of death and leave no collateral damage behind. And if they are simply lost, God will guide them all the way home, nudging them when they start to wander off and when they get tired, God will pick them up and carry them in her bosom or sling them across her shoulders, bearing the weight of the work of the walk home.

God will come for her child. And those who ravage the earth that is God’s handmade creation and the children that God has hand crafted and planted upon her along with every good thing, they will mess around and find out that God will come for them too. Because no one is designed to be collateral damage. There there is no acceptable margin of loss to God because there are no acceptable losses to God. No not one.

Not even a mama’s boy from Nazareth whose people were collateral damage to empires from the east and empires from the west across the span of time. Who bore in his body all the vicious and depraved damage one human being can do to another in the name of an empire that policed and prosecuted a radical revolutionary coming for their power with a love that transcends fear and death. And in so doing he ransomed all of us into a life where no one is collateral damage, using his own life, torturous death and glorious resurrection as the collateral for our souls.

Colonizers fall. Empires fail. The descendants of the people who were bought and sold and trafficked flourish and remake the old empires and the new commonwealths and, the colony turned colonizer is finding itself transformed into a new world populated and led by people who were once not counted as people. The old empires will become collateral damage themselves, to a way of love that says, See to it that you do not treat one of these little ones with contempt. No one is an acceptable loss to God. There is no room in salvation for collateral damage. Amen.

Princeton University Chapel

18 September 2022

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.

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

Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D. 6/15/22 Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D. 6/15/22

The Other Woman

This sermon from Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D. originally appeared on Day 1 for Sunday June 19, 2022. We share it with permission and the hope that it will inspire you!

Today’s Scripture reading is 1 Samuel 1:1–6 in part [1 Samuel 1:1–2, 4–6], from the reading for Proper 7, Year A in A Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church, the source of the translation.

1 Samuel 1:1 Now there was a particular man of Ramathaim of Tzophim from the hill [country] of Ephraim, and his name was Elkanah ben Yerocham ben Elihu ben Tohu ben Tzuph, an Ephraimite. 2 And he had two women; the name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the second was Peninnah. And it was that Peninnah had children, but for Hannah there were no children… 4 Now, it was the day on which Elkanah would offer-sacrifice and he gave portions to Peninnah his woman and to all her daughters and sons, 5but to Hannah he gave an additional portion, because he loved her, because the Holy One of Old had closed her womb. 6 Now her rival vexed her; vexation for the sake of producing contention because the Holy One had closed her womb.

May the spoken word draw us into the written word where we may encounter the living Word. Amen.

The Other Woman.

A familiar story can become too familiar. If you know the story, just a couple of words are enough for you to know where it is going, what happens, who is the heroine, and who is the villain. Some stories tell us how to read them. Today’s passage in 1 Samuel is one of those. Set in the man-centered world of the Hebrew Scriptures, it begins with a man even though it is going to be about one woman and another woman – the other woman – presented as her rival. Though, if we tell the truth, the whole thing is a setup to tell the story of a man who will be responsible for getting yet another man on the throne of Israel. But this is not that story. Today the story is about two women and, more particularly, the woman we have been taught to see as the other woman.

As it is written, the women’s story is about Hannah. She is named first and the story is told from her perspective, though not in her voice. Peninnah, the other woman, is presented as her, Hannah’s, rival. But what about Peninnah’s story? Who speaks for her? What would she say were she allowed to speak in her own voice, tell her own story, and not just as a character in Hannah’s story? What happens to the story when we hear it from the woman we’ve been trained to categorize as “the other woman”? Would it be the same story, perhaps just from a different perspective? Or would it be an entirely different story? And would we, in hearing that story, discover a word that leads to life, love, liberation - a word that we would have missed if we had continued to tell the old story the old way?

The rabbinic practice of midrash is a story-telling practice. It is a series of literary and linguistic techniques rooted in the study of the Hebrew text of a passage and in the interpretative practices of the rabbis in the first few centuries of the Common Era. With these tools in their tool kit, the rabbis ask questions of the text and their characters that others might have missed. They give voice to and sometimes names to characters who are on the margins of the scriptures. They provide a model for reading between the lines of a text and staying faithful to its interpretive tradition. Following in their footsteps while making a few of my own, I ask Peninnah to tell us her story even if it isn’t in the text.

Peninnah tells us a story of the pain of a loveless marriage. She tells us of the degradation of being used for her body and then left for the woman she considers the other woman. She tells of the humiliation of welcoming her husband back each time on his terms knowing he is going to leave again. She tells a story of unanswered prayer. Peninnah tells a story of being trapped in a patriarchal system with people who have the power to overturn it but are too busy enjoying its benefits.

“That’s just the way it was; everybody did it.” That’s what they said about slavery too. “They just didn’t see it back then like we do now.” But you know who always knew that slavery was wrong? The enslaved. The ones who are never asked or accounted for when people say that’s just the way it was. It’s easy to say polygamy was the norm in those days. But that is never true and I almost never speak or preach in absolutes.

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob put the patriarch in patriarchy, yet Isaac did not follow in his father’s polygamous footsteps. He did not force enslaved women to bear his children. Perhaps because he grew up in a family where that was the norm and he saw it all - all the ugliness of it - up close and personal. He decided to go another way. Then his sons had two models from which to choose: they had his model of a lifelong monogamous love, and they had his father’s model of sister-wives in bitter competition using the bodies of enslaved women to score points with him in a baby-making contest. And they chose the option that put women in competition with each other for love and security.

Hannah’s husband Elkanah also chose polygamy. He chose to take another woman because being without children, being without a son, was a great shame in his culture and he refused to accept it. And because he lived in a system that gave him options even though it limited those of other people – women – he embraced them. He made a choice, and from that moment he had the responsibility to live as justly as he could in an unjust system. To do justice by the two women he brought into his household. And for that matter, to do right by Peninnah’s children, his children, who saw him slight their mother in public. But he couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Elkanah loved Hannah, but he seems to have had no love for Peninnah. He commiserated with Hannah over the pain in her heart from the emptiness of her womb, and he demonstrated his love for her publicly but, more than that, he demonstrated his partiality and preference for her and her love, her hurts and her hopes in Peninnah’s face before God and everyone else when they went to worship. In biblical language, he put Peninnah to shame when she had done nothing wrong and everything right according to their shared cultural values and the patriarchal system she found herself trapped in.

And so, she acted out. She acted out against the one who symbolized her hurt, but not against the one whose power hurt her and kept her in her hurt. That’s how patriarchy and other systems of power work: they keep the people at the bottom fighting each other rather than joining together and fighting the systems that trap us, as the Rev. Dr. Renita Weems taught us in her analysis of Sarah and Hagar.

The text makes it sound like it was because of his love for Hannah that Elkanah disregarded Peninnah. That’s a mighty thin love. I’m not talking about a love that binds two people together closer than to anyone else in their lives. I’m talking about calling something love that is used to hurt someone else and hurt them publicly where everyone can see. That’s not love, at least not a mature love. For there is enough room and grace in a full-grown, well-rounded love that it spills over to folk not inside its inner circle.

If you ask Peninnah, she might’ve told you that she was willing to get by on the crumbs of love that fell from the table of Hannah and Elkanah’s love. In fact, the gospel lesson with which this lesson is paired is the story of a woman begging Jesus for crumbs of healing like a dog begging for scraps under the master’s table. In that story, what looks like a stingy love for some soon becomes a full-throated, open-hearted love embracing everyone and welcoming them to the table.

Peninnah’s story is a story of hard truths that looks more like the world in which we live today than Hannah’s story. She teaches us that you can do what’s right as far as you know how and still get your heart broken. She teaches that people with power will almost always choose power and use that power to get what they want no matter who they hurt. And she teaches that no system of domination survives on the power of the powerful alone. Rather, patriarchy survives because patriarchal women embrace its bankrupt promises in order to get a little privilege, just as some Black people and people of many colors embrace white supremacist cultural values and biases in hope of being granted the perilous protections of being counted as “one of the good ones.”

Though the biblical narrator’s intent was to tell a glorious story of David’s rise and fall starting the long way around beginning with Samuel, they left us an entirely different story in the words of Peninnah, even though she doesn’t open her mouth or say a mumbling word, syllable, or letter credited to her in the text. Yet, she speaks volumes. She speaks of the love of power, hierarchy and domination that endures today. She speaks of those who use whatever privilege they have to grind someone else down rather than lift them up. And she speaks of the idolization of romantic love in a world that is starving for true love, love that never fails, love that is wide enough and deep enough to feed every hungry heart.

The love of God surrounds us though it can be hard to see when we focus on our bitterness and brokenness. It can be even harder to recognize when our litmus test for God’s love is the one thing we’ve been praying and aching for that has never come to pass and perhaps never will. Even so, the love of God is still there. Yet, the love of God can be hard to feel when the people who are supposed to be ambassadors of God’s love are too busy networking in the systems of power to love one another as God loves us.

The good news to Peninnah – and she is still in the world today – is that the love of God is with us and will never leave or forsake us. God has always been Emmanuel, God with us. Through fire and through flood, through exodus and through exile, through slavery and liberation, through war and peace, though conquered or conquering, through want and plenty, in sickness and health, in and out of love.

And now, the love of God has come into the world in warm brown human skin. Jesus is the Love of God incarnate. And with the love of Jesus come the ability and the responsibility to tear down the systems that dominate and subjugate, that we might truly be the love of God in the world as the sisters and siblings, brothers and mothers, fathers and friends of Jesus, who loved us to death and then into life that we might never stop loving.

In the name of God, who is love; Jesus, the love that is stronger than death; and the Holy Spirit, who covers us and fills us with her love, Amen.

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

Church Anew 5/26/22 Church Anew 5/26/22

Uvalde: Church Anew Writers Respond

Following the horrific shootings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX we invited our contributors to share their thoughts and wrestle with the continuing epidemic of mass shootings in America. We pray their words guide you in your own lament and push us all to consider how we might be part of writing a new more peaceful future.

Sincerely,

The Church Anew Team

Acts 1:1-11 in Uvalde

Eric D. Barreto

Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary

I wonder how the disciples felt.

They walked with their friend and heard him bless the poor, saw him heal the sick.

They found themselves confounded by his hard teachings about a kingdom of the weeping and stories about an unjust judge. They were uplifted by the words he spoke.

And so they had hoped. They had hoped he would deliver them from the weight of grief and death and loss and conquest and demonic forces. They had hoped for life in the midst of death. They had hoped for freedom in the shadow of an empire.

And then their hopes were dashed. Their friend was arrested and killed. Empire flexed its muscles and its most terrible weapon. Their hope was no more. Their hope died on a Roman cross, a sacrifice to empire’s arrogant power.

I wonder how they felt.

When he was with them once again. When his scars matched their grief. When they felt their hopes rising again, though perhaps more tentatively than before. Maybe this time things will be different, they might have thought

I wonder how they felt.

When they saw him lifted into the skies. When he promised they would receive a gift from God.

But, most of all, I wonder how they felt when he told them they would be his witnesses to the ends of the earth.

I worry that too many of us have made a mistake: a witness is not a spectator. There is a difference between bearing witness and looking on to a scene as an onlooker. There is a difference between the kind of witness that enters the pain of a hurting world and a spectator who gawks from a distance.

Witness is a high calling; often it is a burden. For witnesses to the ends of the earth will see stunning instances of God’s expansive grace but also crushing visions of death’s cruel rule.

I wonder how they felt.

I wonder how they felt when their feet were pointed out to the ends of the earth, about to strive through an unjust world, a world riven by empire and warfare and death. I wonder how they felt when only 120 of them were called to proclaim a kingdom that promises to set right an upside-down world.

I wonder if it felt like a hard-won hope, a hope honed by the realities of death and loss, a hope that had been dashed over and over again, a hope that persists not because we choose to be naive but because God has made a promise. And because God has made a promise then we cannot stay in one place gazing into the heavens waiting for Jesus to return. No, we are called to be witnesses to a kingdom we can barely begin to imagine, one where death and violence and grief are no more. One where the weapons of war give way to the generosity of God’s grace.

I wonder how they felt. I wonder how they felt taking that first step into a world so familiar yet so strange.

Perhaps they wondered if they could really believe that this time would be different. Perhaps they wondered if life would once and for all conquer death. They had seen it happen once before.

Could it really happen again?

A Little Life After a School Shooting, a Mother’s Prayer

Angela Denker

Minnesota Pastor and Veteran Journalist

God,

He came from you to me.
Tiny, writhing, mouth open wide in a primal scream.

I remember the first time he blinked.
Eyes staring up into mine.

“I’m here.”
“I need you.”

Instinct merged with anxiety
Those first long hours

Then days
And chaotic, screaming nights

Exhaustion curled up together on the dark green couch
He fit next to me cozily, molded against my stomach like clay

Where he once had all he needed
I couldn’t put him back in

He got bigger
Huge

2 then 4 then 6 then 8
Big snow boots stomping off

Kindergarten and recess
And COVID lockdowns

He gave me morning hugs
He ate so many little bags of Goldfish crackers

I sent him back gingerly
He leapt onto the football field

He dashed around the playground
He laughed uproariously with his friends

He ate three pieces of pizza
The torn-up toes of his worn shoes flapped in the wind

The snow melted and the rain fell
He pulled up his hood and walked to school, unafraid

He’s only 21 inches taller
Than an AR-15, stood on its end

A little life can’t outlast
A little bullet

Propelled by the latest technology
And a country’s bloodlust

And our leaders’ cold calculations
Of little lobbyists and big donations

So many little bullets
Sprayed out over little lives

Little lives that are no more
No more backpacks or books

No more school drop offs or pickups
Just casings on the ground

All we have left
Of little lives

I wanted him to make 3-pointers
I wanted to go to his piano recital

I wanted to send him to college
And cry alone under the covers when he was gone

Proud. So proud.
I wanted to dance with him, poorly, on his wedding day.

To music I didn’t know.
And smile as he laughed again.

Mostly, though.
I wanted the little things.

End-of-school picnics.
Slip-n-slides.

Popsicles melting down his chin.
Letting me smooth petroleum jelly on his scrapes.

Hugging me.
With two arms.

Ma .. ma
Mama

Mommy
Mom

Mom
Mom

I wanted so much for him
And so little

A childhood
Books

Games
Gloves

Tests
Tennis shoes

Lemonade
Long legs

A little life
A little boy

Please, God
Let him grow old

Let him have
His little life

AMEN

Poem inspired by John 10:10

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

I Believe the Children

Luke Powery

Dean, Duke University Chapel and Associate Professor of Homiletics at Duke Divinity School

“I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be”
—from “Greatest Love of All,” sung by Whitney Houston

We don’t believe the children are our future when we kill them in the present in their elementary schools, robbing them of innocent laughter and flourishing lives. When we live in one nation under guns, we can’t see the beauty inside the victims nor victimizers. This violent, virulent ugliness is not of God but reveals how many bow at the throne of the trigger and inhumane evil at the expense of others, especially children.

This is nothing new. At the time of the New Testament, children of the Greco-Roman world were held in low esteem, lacking status, being vulnerable, and socially and physically powerless. Some estimates are that half of 1st century ancient near eastern children died before their 16th birthday. They were there but not there for long in presence, voice or perspective.

Even the disciples of Jesus are dismissive towards children because we learn in the Gospel of Mark that when “people were bringing the little children to [Jesus] in order that he might touch them,” “the disciples spoke sternly to them” (Mark 10:13). Sometimes, many times, followers of Jesus miss the mark, too, when it comes to the role of children in the world. To scold the people who bring children to Jesus for a blessing is a sign of how we can dismiss children. It’s not enough that we never hear their voices in the Gospel of Mark or that we sometimes get antsy if they make too much noise in a church service, the disciples have to scold the constructive attempt to bless them.

In contrast to the mores of his day and also the impulses of his own disciples, Jesus says, “Let the children come” (Mark 10:14). Jesus is a child advocate extraordinaire. He responds to his followers and doesn’t want the children to stop coming to him. He welcomes them and holds them up as models for the kingdom. Jesus then goes one step further. “He took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them” (Mark 10:16). Jesus literally, “blesses fervently.” It’s an intense force signifying his intense love for children. One translation says Jesus “hugged the children.” If so, his hugging is a form of holy resistance to hate-filled violence against children.

We need to follow the way of Jesus. He embraces children as a sign of his own self-identification with the least of these (Mark 9:33-37). He reveals that how we treat children is an indication of what we think about God and who God is and how close we are to God.

We need to imagine and re-imagine what it means to be a child because welcoming children is a way of welcoming the Christ Child into our midst. We need to “Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be,” as Whitney Houston sings, or as poet Michael Coffey writes, “Take our sticky adult minds and thin our thick thoughts until our flowing childhood wonder returns at every cricket and we are moved by every chocolate kiss…”

Our treatment of children is a test of the truth of our faith—a faith in the God who came into the world as a child. If we hate and kill children, we hate God and our life is a lie.

It Takes a Village, or Perhaps A Nation, to End this Epidemic of Gun Violence

Raj Nadella

Associate Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary

Yet another mass shooting in a long list of massacres that have marked an epidemic of gun violence in the U.S. Can anything be done to end this cycle of violence, and who has the power to do it? As with many other issues, Americans have been responding to these questions in vastly different ways.

Many have been insisting, rightly so, that our elected officials have the power to tame the gun lobby and limit people’s access to deadly weapons. Many politicians who have been refusing to act are quick to suggest that the blame lies elsewhere: mental illness, lax security, our failure to arm more people, etc. So much deflection, but really, who has the power to end this crisis?

The story of John the Baptist in Luke 3 offers some insights. John was ministering in the context of a very different crisis—extreme poverty in the first century—and encountered people who professed a desire to alleviate the crisis even as they were likely perpetuating it to varying degrees. They collectively asked John, “What then should we do?” The question assumes that they didn’t know what needed to be done, or that they might lack the agency to resolve the crisis.

John places the onus solely on them and highlights their agency in remedying the crisis. He asks some to give away one of their shirts or share food, others to not collect any more than what they absolutely had to, and yet others to not abuse their power in order to accumulate wealth. John’s point is that remedying a major crisis is not about making grand, abstract commitments, but about committing to specific, concrete steps.

John also suggests that everyone has agency to varying degrees. Even as John critiques people in power, he called upon individuals to undertake changes at the individual and community level. And he offers specific suggestions they can undertake within their contexts.

Many of us are rightly angry with politicians who seemingly express a commitment to end the gun violence but deflect blame during each crisis only to continue with business as usual once the public outrage abates. We should certainly hold them accountable for their failures in preventing the epidemic of gun violence, but we should also focus on our own potential complicity in perpetuating a culture of gun violence.

Specifically, there is the rampant ethos of violent imagination that stems from a culture of violence and in turn perpetuates a culture of gun violence. And we have become a nation that encourages, or at least, condones violent imagination at an early age. Recently, I was at a birthday party for my son who is eight. Many kids were passionately discussing a violent video game called Fortnite. At one point, when a kid used a cuss word, many parents were appalled but none of them, myself included, said a word about the violent imagination in which the kids were engaged.

We cannot normalize violent imagination at age eight and hope that none of it will translate into lethal violence at age eighteen. We should perhaps actively explore ways of stigmatizing anything related to gun violence. What if we respond with disgust and horror at the very mention of violent video games just as we do when we hear of a shooting incident?

While our elected officials have a moral obligation to enact stringent anti-gun laws, the rest of us too have the power to make a difference. May we not become numb to a culture of violence. May we cringe and be disgusted when we hear the words “guns” and “shooting” at birthday parties, schoolyards, and playdates.

Yes, it takes a village, or perhaps a nation, to end this epidemic of gun violence.

Lamentations in the Night

Char Rachuy Cox

Program Director for Congregational Thriving at St. Olaf College

Like many of you,
I found myself unable to sleep last night.
My heart literally ached within my chest.
My thoughts could not be stilled.
The images in my mind’s eye
Played like an unending,
Ever-expanding reel -
On repeat.
The news images from Uvalde
Intermingled in my memory
With those of Buffalo
And Parkland
And George Floyd
And Mother Immanuel
And Sandy Hook
And Breonna Taylor
And San Bernardino
And Aurora
And Ahmaud Arbery
And on, and on and on …
An idolatrous love of violence
That invades
And pervades
And degrades.

In the deep of the night,
I recalled another time of
Tragedy
And violence
And loss –
That time it was poignant and personal –
Painful in its particularity -
Holding my dearest friend in my arms
As the sobs rose from within her
Like bitter incense
When her son was murdered by police –
And last night,
In remembering that night -
I felt again her sorrow,
And I wondered who was holding
The parents of murdered children
Amid the strangling sobs of this night.

I found myself hoping –
And wanting to trust –
But not completely believing that it was so –
Hoping –
That the Spirit was indeed interceding
And pleading
Amid the bleeding
And the grieving
But wondering –
Wondering –
If perhaps,
Amid our own collective, cultural obstinance
That the Spirit has taken a sabbatical,
Turned God’s back -
And left us to live with –
And continue to die with –
Our choices,
Our idolatry,
And our inaction.

But then,
I believe –
(statement of faith) –
That the Spirit whose presence –
And providence –
I was questioning,
Prompted me to turn
To the only place within our Sacred text
That my heart –
In the deepness of the night,
In the depth of despair –
Was open to both
Voicing and hearing,
Uttering and understanding –
Lamentations.

While I know that these words
First arose from a past-tense-time
And amid a past-tense
Profound circumstance
And need –
They both spoke to me
And for me –
Amid this present-tense sorrow.

How lonely sits the city…
She weeps bitterly in the night,
   with tears on her cheeks….
When her people fell into the hand of the foe,
   and there was no one to help her,
the foe looked on mocking
   over her downfall….
O Lord, look at my affliction,
   for the enemy has triumphed….
Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
My children are desolate,
   for the enemy has prevailed.

On and on I read,
And as I read,
My tears
And my anger
And my sorrow
And my helplessness
Mingled with the generations
Upon generations
Of voices
that rise in lamentation
and supplication
amid that which is beyond
comprehension,
beyond control,
beyond consolation.

And as I found
Not necessarily comfort –
But shadows on the edges of solidarity –
In the echoes of these ancient words,
I came once again
And anew
Upon an assurance that
Has sustained me at other times
Of confusion,
Sorrow,
Grief
And disbelief:

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….
Therefore I will hope.

God is faithful;
Therefore, I will hope.
I.
Will.
Hope.

I will hope in the comfort of God
For all who grieve.

I will hope in the strength of God
For all who suffer.

I will hope in the restoring power of God
For all who are despairing.

And I will hope for the people of God
To take up space on this earth
That does not destroy,
But that gives life.

I will hope that the fire of the Spirit
Will fall again from heaven –
Fill us,
Move us to repentance,
Stir us from our complacency,
Blow through us
On the rush of a mighty wind –
And provoke us to act.

I will hope that prayers will rise up
In an embodied defiance
Of words-become-deeds
That value life more than weapons of war.

I will hope that God –
The Author and Giver of Life –
Will compel in us
A will
And a resolve
To cast out
Faux outrage
And cast off
Fear –

So that
Hope becomes more than wish.
Peace becomes more than a possibility.
And life abundant edges out
A resignation that
The way things are
Is the way things have to be.

Because we do
Trust and believe
(statement of faith)
That Jesus does make all things new.
God is faithful;
Therefore,
I will hope.
I.
Will.
Hope.

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

Blog Posts

Rev. Winnie Varghese

The Rev. Winnie Varghese is the rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta.

She co-hosts the (G)race podcast with The Rev. Azariah France-William and has been a contributor for Church Anew’s Enfleshing Witness events.

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

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His was a life on the road.

Jesus is going ahead of you.

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Natalia co-hosts Cafeteria Christian, a podcast for people who love Jesus but aren’t so sure about his followers.

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Reflect upon your regrets

Prayer

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Vocare Practice: Called TO ATTENTIVENESS

Reflect upon your attentiveness

Prayer

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Rev. Natalia Terfa

Natalia co-hosts Cafeteria Christian, a podcast for people who love Jesus but aren’t so sure about his followers.

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Reflect upon your openness

Prayer

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Rev. Matthew Ian Fleming

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Reflect upon your openness

Prayer

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Vocare Practice: Called to Values

Reflect upon your values

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Natalia co-hosts Cafeteria Christian, a podcast for people who love Jesus but aren’t so sure about his followers.

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Rev. Wil Gafney Ph.D.

Rev. Dr. Dorothy Sanders Wells

The Rev. Dr. Dorothy Sanders Wells is an Episcopal priest who often writes about justice and equity issues for God's people.

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Audience and Usage

Content and Organization

A Handful of Hopes

Dr. Michael J. Chan

Host: Gospel Beautiful Podcast

Rev. Wil Gafney Ph.D.

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

The Other Woman.

Rev. Wil Gafney Ph.D.

Acts 1:1-11 in Uvalde

A Little Life After a School Shooting, a Mother’s Prayer

I Believe the Children

It Takes a Village, or Perhaps A Nation, to End this Epidemic of Gun Violence

Lamentations in the Night