sermon on the slaughter of the innocents--yeah, it's rough



Baruch attah adonai elohenu melech ha-olam. Blessed are you Lord our God, ruler of all possibilities.
*          *          *
[begin with long silence and gaze at congregation]
“When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he was infuriated,
and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem
who were two years old or under,”
And Rachel wept, wailed, lamented for her children.
“She refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

I don’t know, guys. I mean, it was Christmas just last week.
It was, you know, fun, and happy, and candlelit and,
I know giving birth in a stable isn’t easy
and it wasn’t as clean and pretty as we like to remember it.
But, good God, it’s so much worse this week.
[rub face]
I don’t really want to preach about this story.
I don’t want to think about it.
But.
So Mary and Joseph and toddler Jesus
and maybe a brother or sister
(yeah, they had other kids—another day we’ll talk about that)
were living in Bethlehem and things were ok.
It’d been a couple years and the magi had come
and given them some embarrassingly expensive gifts
and they’d left only recently, kind of shiftily,
like they knew something was up.
And then Joseph had a dream where an angel told him,
“Dude, it’s bad. You gotta go. Now. NOW.”
So they grabbed what they could and ran.
I imagine they weren’t the only ones.
Maybe they had warning, but once the killing started,
there were families choking the road trying to get away.
They ran and ran and hid and all the while shook with fear,
maybe trying to be strong for the kids.
And what were they running away from?
Their king who was already terrifying,
their king who shifted loyalties to foreign powers to get his way,
who didn’t hesitate to kill off anyone who stood in his way
and who raised taxes to extortion levels
so he could build fancy new cities
and make himself feel immortal.
Their king was so threatened by the idea he heard from the magi
that there could be a new king,
that he had all the little boy babies and toddlers up to age 2
ripped from their mothers and fathers
and murdered in the street.
Or others say Herod knew he himself was dying
and also knew there wouldn’t be anyone mourning his death,
so his slaughter served a dual purpose of
not only keeping the throne to himself
but also creating a ready-made misery when he died.
Their king stopping at nothing to hold on to power,
willing to justify not just murder
but the destruction of the beauty and potential of young lives.
It’s called the Slaughter of the Innocents.
I’m not ready for this, liturgically or emotionally.
Scholars say this didn’t actually happen.
That, even if it did, there were only maybe 1000 people
living in Bethlehem at this point,
so it might only have been 20 children.
As though that makes it better.
Twenty or ten or even five means it’s not horrific.
But most scholars say this is a theological point, not an historical one.
Herod never had these babies killed.
Matthew is the only account,
either in the bible or in historical sources.
He wrote it in himself to make a theological point.
Matthew is big on tying Jesus’ story to the ancient Israelites’ stories—
remember the long genealogy
at the beginning of the gospel of Matthew?
That’s him tying Jesus definitively in to the family of David.
Remember the star that the magi followed?
Related to some passages in the book of Numbers.
The holy family runs off to Egypt? And warnings in dreams?
And massacre of children?
Totally the Exodus story. Jesus is a new Moses,
the one who will change everything
like Moses did but better.
Matthew’s all about bringing in these references
to give legitimacy but also holistic beauty
to the story he’s telling about Jesus.
And it works for him in general. But…but.
We don’t need this story to be factual for that historical time and place.
We don’t need it to have actually happened to tell the story.
We tell the story        because we know the story.
It happens over and over and we don’t know how to stop it.
On Christmas here at Good Shepherd it has become something of a tradition
for the praise team to offer the song “Christmas Eve Sarajevo” by TSO.
It’s fun and exciting and for the first time,
I wondered why it was called that.
I knew it was about the Bosnian War in the nineties—
ethnic cleansing between the Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia.
It was atrocious.
And it looked a lot like the Rwandan conflict and Aleppo,
and so many other conflicts.
For three years they killed each other, both military and civilian.
Families and entire towns were annihilated.
The city Sarajevo took the worst of the damage.
And a cellist sat in the middle of the fighting
and played Christmas carols through the night for days.
The TSO song he inspired is beautiful but it is heartbreaking.
Sarajevo was a massacre
and so many of those massacred were innocent.
This story repeats throughout history.
In the middle ages, the Church sent several crusades
to take back the Holy Land from the infidels.
Leaving aside the seriously problematic nature of that whole cause,
one of them was called the Children’s Crusade.
Because they sent children.
Adults going on crusade often didn’t survive
the long, violent journey to Israel.
And they sent kids?
They didn’t make it. At all.
They all died in the cause of attaining more power
for the rulers, for the adults.
In America, we decided that the native peoples
from whom we’d taken the land needed to be more white.
You think I’m kidding or using modern understandings of racism.
I’m not.
European culture was considered the correct culture
so we took children from their families,
dressed them up like dolls,
refused to let them speak their languages or see their families,
and made them ready for polite society.
Where they wouldn’t be accepted anyway.
How many of them died of suicide or broken hearts?
I’m not being poetic here.
This was a different kind of massacre.
Four years ago a young man took guns into Sandy Hook Elementary
We don’t know why.
He wasn’t King Herod trying to keep power.
He wasn’t trying to reclaim the Holy Land with sacrificial victims.
Yet the result was the same.
Innocents sacrificed for an adult’s dream.
         For years some have thought they could change
a child’s sexual orientation from gay to straight
with prayer and psychology.
It’s called conversion therapy and is increasingly illegal
as scientists show us how damaging it is.
And I’m not talking about “oh, gosh, those kids feel bad
and we need to boost their self-esteem.”
I mean the suicide rates and self-harm rates
and psychological trauma from these programs
are unbelievably high.
I mean these kids have been massacred, in a sense,
for the adults to prove their righteousness.
And this year alone—2016 has a lot to answer for—
this year alone the number of unarmed black men shot by police,
the number of mass shootings in places like
Paris and Orlando and Dallas,
the uptick in gun violence in cities like Chicago,
the length of time Flint, Michigan has gone without drinkable water.
Matthew says Rachel weeps and laments and refuses to be consoled,
because they are no more.
These acts of violence we can’t seem to stop doing
are the slaughter of the innocents over and over.
Maybe we do know how to stop it, but we don’t. It’s too hard.
This is sin: humanity’s propensity to screw things up—
both that we actually can’t stop hurting each other
and that we don’t want to stop, not really.
Jesus the cute baby comes into this world, this sinful, R-rated world.
         And he lives in it, he sees it happening, he doesn’t hide from it,
he walks with us and experiences pain just as we do.
I think it’s important for us, intellectually and emotionally
to juxtapose sweet Christmas with horrible slaughter.
It’s hard but good to hold these different experiences together.
Ugh, but really, experientially?
If God is God, then God should do something.
And, also, shouldn’t we have something more uplifting
here on New Year’s weekend?
We’re always talking about how God is doing a new thing,
how there’s hope, how Jesus changed things.
Where is the good news in the slaughter of the innocents?
All good questions, but all predicated on a rather small God.
God who is entangled by our rules and our physics.
God who is entangled in our expectations of rightness and judgment.
God who isn’t actually as vast as the universe
and as tender and caring as nothing we’ve ever experienced.
God is so much bigger than we know, holding us in massive divine hands,
weaving the fabric of the universe together.
Years ago, I read this amazing and difficult book
Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis.
It’s very odd and heartbreaking, because his premise is
that the Holocaust makes absolutely no sense
unless it’s lived backwards. Do you get that?
There is no sense to be made of the slaughter of the innocents
during World War II as it is.
None. It’s atrocious. Period.
However, if we could live it backwards,
if we could see the smoke in the sky flowing together
into a chimney
and somehow creating bodies which awake and embrace
and are given clothing and handed children
whom they love so much they cry
and then sent on their way to lovely homes…
if we could live it that way,
the massacre of the Holocaust would be beautiful.
Matthew says Jesus is the new Moses
but he also says Jesus is not exempt from horror.
God’s presence doesn’t promise to take away the pain immediately—
         someday it will be gone, next year in Jerusalem, in the Kingdom.
God will wipe away every tear from our eyes
and there will be neither sorrowing nor sighing.
How do we make sense of this,
without being Pollyannaish,
without the science fiction of living it backwards,
without falling into infinite despair?
We don’t make sense of it,
we don’t justify it,
we simply see it, clearly and without argument.
It is a gift to have our eyes opened, to see the world as it is
—beautiful and broken—
and to know we are not alone.
2017 is filled with possibility—possibility of disaster, yes,
AND possibility in the new babies born even now,
possibility for all the generations before and after those new babies
to make different, compassionate choices,
possibility for God to do that new thing.

Happy New Year.

sermon on Reformation, repentance, and Susan Boyle

It’s hilarious you have the Episcopalian preaching on Reformation.

We were there for it, of course,

had our own version of scholars and lay folk saying,

“What the heck, Rome?”

but we went to the king and said,

“You can be in charge and get a divorce if you let us split, cool?”

So, it was less dramatic, theologically, anyway.

Our closest feast day to Reformation Day is the

Feast of the approval of the First Book of Common Prayer (1549)

It was written in English

which was pretty daring and thrilling for the time,

but still no hammer and nails.

It’s funny, as well, because,

much to the chagrin of one of my former Edge House students

and just massive Lutheran Pam Mills,

I don’t much care for “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”

Except maybe with a beer stein.

Which, come to think of it, Brother Martin would probably have enjoyed.

But I do really enjoy Reformation Sunday.

And I enjoy how much y’all enjoy it.

It’s like going to a part of town you’re not familiar with

and coming across a birthday party

—you don’t know about the family arguments

or the struggles individuals are having,

you only see the delight.

Everyone’s having so much fun being a part of this partying group,

and you want to join in.

From the outside, the red shirts

and the jokes about Minnesota are charming.

Of course it’s not just a party, it’s as serious as the business end of a .45.

Today is a party that celebrates a massive change

in the way the church did things.

It’s a kind of death and resurrection, really.

Do you remember the movie

Network

?

It’s a brilliant parody as well as foretelling of how the news is made.

In it, the national news anchor gets fed up

with news becoming entertainment

and his and his coworkers’ being expendable.

On a live broadcast he snarls,

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more.”

It becomes a rallying cry.

This is our Brother Martin Luther and his 95 Theses.

The church needed reforming in Martin Luther’s time.

He and others were right to point out the sins of the church and say,

“Friends, no, this is no good. Let’s try again.”

But it wasn’t that easy.

His 95 Theses read as a dry topic sentences for academic discussion.

What he was saying was,

“we are hurting each other the way we’re doing things now.

We’ve lost our way.”

But as the internet tells us in its infinite wisdom,

“When you have power, equality looks like a threat.”

Even though the reformers spoke truth,

those in power felt threatened.

Change the way we operate on a daily basis?

Change our theology about Purgatory and really eternity itself?

Consent to the people hearing scripture in their own languages

and being involved in its interpretation?

This is terrifying. It means we in power lose the power we had.

It means we’re not in control any more.

It’s not like the Pope and the Magisterium

held that power for evil purposes, mostly.

They, like so many others, understood themselves

as helping, as upholding sacred practices

and understandings of God.

It’s not that they were caught out in intentional greed,

but that they understood themselves as righteous,

like the people Jesus was talking to in last week’s gospel.

It says he spoke to

“some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous.”

This may be the lasting lesson of the Reformation.

Not the party but the invitation to examine ourselves.

Do we trust in ourselves that we are righteous?

Maybe we’re not selling indulgences any more,

but what do we hold tightly in our fists,

thinking we’re doing good

and in reality hurting each other and the message of love

Jesus came to give us?

The lasting lesson of the Reformation, what we’re celebrating today,

is of repentance.

Repentance,

matanoia

in Greek, is a turning away from the thing.

My dad used to say to us as kids,

“I don’t want your sorrow, I want your repentance.”

He meant, he didn’t just want us to regret the thing we’d done,

because regret isn’t transformative.

It just sits there making us miserable.

Repentance is a change in posture, a change in direction.

Repentance may indeed happen often,

like the process of getting sober

or the way we need reminding to be kind to someone.

Turning away from something hurtful may happen so many times

that it looks like we’re spinning in circles,

but it’s a real change each time.

Maybe a better word for it is a practice,

something we do regularly that shapes us,

something that in trying over and over we get better at.

I practice forgiving and having patience

with one of my husband’s childhood friends

over and over and over.

I think I’m better at it now than I once was.

And I think I have to keep practicing, keep reforming.

Re-forming.

Pastor Larry was all about that version of the word,

do you remember?

He understood it to be about re-shaping ourselves

in a different image,

or, more likely, God re-shaping us into the image of God.

Imago dei

, our original state.

We can’t ever get there by ourselves, not really,

but we can continue to turn towards it.

I did something like this the other week.

I’ve been miserable about how we speak to one another any more.

Maybe it’s not different now then it ever was,

maybe I’m just newly aware of it.

But so much of the conversations online, in speeches,

even between church members,

is so rude and ugly and hateful.

UC, like most college campuses,

has street preachers every few weeks

who carry signs and preach sermons over megaphones

about how we are all of us going straight to hell.

Sometimes they’re decent to talk to,

most times, it’s a mess of judgment.

So I invited some students and colleagues

and took the Edge House’s own megaphone onto campus

to do some positive street preaching.

The others in the group weren’t comfortable speaking yet.

I ended up confessing our sins. Our collective sins.

I didn’t plan anything particular to say and it was really hard,

but I began to confess the ways

that we ourselves need reforming.

How we have treated native peoples over the centuries.

How we have treated Jews and Africans.

How we have treated each other

when our beliefs were deemed heresy.

How we have consistently chosen to see

our brothers and sisters of whatever

orientation or gender or color or status

as less than because it is politically expedient.

Afterwards, because I stumbled over my words and thoughts,

I asked on Facebook “what are the sins of the church

you would like to hear confessed/apologized for?”

I got so, so many responses. Pages and pages of them.

Friends, we are absolutely justified by faith,

we are absolutely saints and saved and living in the Kingdom.

And also we are still sinners, needing to turn back to God.

What needs reforming now?

What is the theme about which we could write 95 theses?

Probably we can think of lots of things out there that need reforming,

but what in here needs reforming?

What is the speck in our own eyes that needs to be removed?

Within the ELCA?

Within Good Shepherd?

Within each of us individually?

We participate in the world, in voting, in civic pride,

but do we put our faith in those systems and leaders?

Do we think that if we put enough money and energy

into the process the country will become Christian again?

As though it was better 50 or 200 years ago?

Perhaps our reformation involves intentionally listening

to the voices of the marginalized

—whether by race, sexuality, youth, status.

Whose voices do we discount?

Or is it simply that we have arrived at this point in history

without meaning to,

doing what we’ve always done because we’ve always done it?

This is what the Reformation is about

—seeing God’s desires for unfettered, active love,

and naming the ways that we block that love.

And we are not about a single Reformation

as much as a call to constant reformation.

Re-forming.

Whether we know it’s happening or not.

Martin Luther didn’t intend to start a new church.

He didn’t want to destroy the church but to call it to account.

He leaned into his challenge to the church because he loved it so much,

because of his respect for the institution

and the people and for Jesus himself.

Whatever we do now to identify the truth of things,

to name our own privilege and to sacrifice power

is because of our love and respect for the church and for people.

We don’t do it because our works will bring the Kingdom here

but because when we repent, when we open our arms in love,

that

is

the Kingdom here.

I'll close with a video from Britain’s Got Talent. At the beginning, look for the judgment. Then look for the moments of turning. As they see what they've done, look for the Kingdom of God on their faces. Look how beautiful, how loving it is to repent.

Watch: Susan Boyle

apocalypse 2016


This is the apocalypse.

Not the actual date, not a specific event, but this experience we are living through in 2016 America.

Rather, I should say this is an apocalypse, because this is not the first one and it won't be the last.

"Apocalypse" is almost always misunderstood. It means a pulling back of the curtain, a revealing. It's a metaphor for seeing things as they truly are. It's not an asteroid-related disaster or trippy, judgmental poetry. It's not even the end of the world as most people understand it. It is scary. Seeing the world as it is rather than as we want it to be is terrifying. Which, now I think about it, is kind of like the end of the world. The end of the world we thought was real.

Before the curtain was pulled back, we had thought, perhaps, that things were getting better. Or, at any rate, they weren't getting worse. But that "we" was the people it wasn't happening to. "We" felt comfortable and unthreatened, but now we can see what our brothers and sisters knew all along.

It's not getting worse, it's already really bad. There are news stories all the time about yet another mass shooting, yet another unarmed black man being shot by police, yet another execrable statement by Mr. Trump, yet another scandal in the life of someone we thought we could trust. But I'm not convinced that things are getting worse. We've always had people doing shitty things to each other. In the post-internet world, what's scary is not our propensity for evil but our ability to see it happening.

Mr. Trump's anti-everyone-but-rich-white-guys screeds aren't just about him, they reveal the same thoughts in our fellow Americans that have been there all along. They reveal a deep hurt and insecurity that folks attribute to immigrants or PC culture, but the hurt is there nonetheless. A few police officers shooting unarmed black men aren't themselves horrible racists, they reveal a culture that has not valued black bodies. They reveal a world in which we have only made surface attempts at reconciliation. Mass shootings aren't just about the mental state of the shooter and his political leanings, they reveal our inability as a culture to deal with difference.

The most famous apocalypse--the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible--isn't about a literal beast or a literal whore of Babylon, it's a long metaphor for hope. It says this misery we see won't last forever. But the New Jerusalem and the wiping away of our tears doesn't happen until the world sees itself for what it is: violently self-interested. We have to experience the death of the world we thought was real--literally or spiritually--before new life can come. Maybe that death is as simple as relaxing our grip on the ideologies we hold dear, maybe it's as extreme as confessing our individual and corporate sins and looking for ways to atone.

Maybe 2016 is heralding that death before new life. Will we allow ourselves to experience it? Will we open ourselves up to hearing other peoples' stories and pain, knowing that doing so will change us? Or will we pretend that everything's fine and we've done all we can and push the revealing back another year?

meditation after the Orlando massacre

Written for the vigil held at Below Zero Lounge.
(Unrelated, no idea what's going on with the font sizes here.)

I have two things to say tonight.
One is that we need to mourn.
A man went into the Pulse night club yesterday
and opened fire and in the end
there are 49 of our brothers and sisters dead on the floor,
another 53 wounded,
hundreds mourning their loved ones,
and tens of thousands more bearing the wounds of fear.
This is bullshit.
This is not how we care for one another as human beings.
This is the time for anger and pain and misery.
We don’t want to go over the events of yesterday again, but we must.
It’s important to name the evil and the pain and the anger we feel.
When even a single person dies of natural causes, we should be sad,
we should mourn.
How much more should we mourn when so many die,
when their deaths are caused by hate and fear,
when their deaths are used as political ammunition.
It is important for us to feel sad and angry
and confused and numb and violated and unsafe
and infuriated and vulnerable.
I imagine that many of us here remember other times when we have been hurt,
when someone has tried to destroy us.
Maybe it was being beaten because of who you were holding hands with
or because of how you walked.
Maybe you’re remembering someone who was dressed like me,
a clergy person, or some other flavor of religion
that made you feel that you were wrong in your very existence.
Maybe it was harsh words, spoken low but intended for you to hear.
Maybe you’re remembering the AIDS epidemic of the 70s and 80s
or Stonewall or chemical castration and hard labor camps.
People the world has called queer for centuries
have many, many reasons to mourn today.
But…and this is one of my favorite words in the English language…but…
This is not the end of the story.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the author of the book of Psalms says,
“Weeping will endure the night but joy comes with the morning.” Weeping will endure the night but joy comes with the morning.
This one little word tells us something huge.
It’s a hinge where everything changes.
You are weeping now, of course you are,
BUT that’s not the whole of reality.
We are overwhelmed by repeated acts of violence
against the LGBTQ community and against just humans
all over the world
BUT there’s something else happening,
love and love and love and love.
My experience of the world is that God is present in that one tiny word,
calling to us in our misery and showing us what else is happening.
I need to hear this so much that I had it tattooed on my body.
Well, something similar.
It says “Everything will be okay in the end.
If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
This is the second thing I want to tell you.
Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
This is what my faith tells me, and this is what my experience tells me.
When my college friend Ed was diagnosed with HIV, we wept.
And when new drugs helped his T-cells, we rejoiced.
When Leelah took her own life, we wept.
And we came together and rejoiced
over the Cincinnati trans community.
It’s not okay right now, so it’s not the end.
Bad news is not the end of the story.
As a nation, we are fumbling our way out of homophobia
—it’s not done, but it’s happening.
Slowly.
Forty years ago at Stonewall, the police raided the bar
as they had for decades, arresting and beating the people in the bar.
Yesterday, the police did the hard work
of breaking through the wall into the Pulse,
taking out the shooter,
saving so many people.
It’s different now. They’re outside now protecting us tonight.
And we here tonight,
and others in the LGBTQ community and allies,
all across Cincinnati and beyond,
we stand up for each other,
not hiding and hoping it will all go away.
We love, all of us, deeply, openly,
in ways that may leave us open to hurt.
This community isn’t perfect—we have our own brokenness to atone for.
But—(there’s that word again)—but we will go on,
we will make art and love
and live our lives more intensely, more beautifully,
more devotedly than before.
Last night, watching the Tony’s,
I met the musical Bright Star for the first time.
Carmen Cusak sang these words that made me cry:
If you knew my story
You’d have a good story to tell
Me I’m not alone
Tell me I’m not alone
Even though I’ll stumble
Even though I’ll fall
You’ll never see me crumble
You’ll never see me crawl
If you knew my story

Your story, our story, is hard and beautiful and not over yet.


sermon on Psalm 1, privilege, and racism

Psalm 1, has a lot of meat. It reads:
1 Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers;
2 but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.
3 They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.
4 The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
6 for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
On a first reading, it’s fairly innocuous.
Yes, we’re happier when we’re not terrible to each other.
We’re more fulfilled and connected to God
when we participate in what God is doing.
We are more fruitful when we pay attention to God’s desire for love.
I’m into it.
And wickedness—or sinfulness,
we often experience as that rootlessness,
that powerlessness over our wrongdoing
that the psalm describes as chaff that the wind blows away.
We get bandied about by our desires.
And we crave justice—“those wicked people need to be punished,”
maybe even “I’m so wicked I need punishment.”
We long for a just universe where good is rewarded and evil punished.
I’m still into it.
Maybe we just end the sermon here?
Maybe not.
There’s a thread in modern theology that says
this psalm and many other bits of scripture
are about something more concrete.
It’s about the haves and the have nots.
Certainly those who “have” God, as it were, and those who don’t.
But also about those who have prosperity and lots of stuff
and those who do not.
As though those things are entirely related to whether you have God.
The righteous have much, are blessed, succeed.
The wicked have little, are miserable, and fail.
So, it follows from this simple reading that
those who have little, are miserable, or fail must be wicked. And those who have much, are blessed, and succeed
are righteous.
No?
Don’t we say God helps those who help themselves?
Sure, it’s not in the Bible, but it’s true, right?
And look at statistics: look how closely crime and poverty line up.
But this reading is from a place of privilege.
Let me complexify this for us.
A number of years ago,
I took my diocese’s required Racism Awareness workshop.
There was a mix of folks from across the diocese there.
As a conversation-starter,
we were given an envelope with 26 notecards inside.
On each notecard was a question
and we were asked to put those cards into two piles:
“this does apply to me” and “this doesn’t apply to me.”
Let me share with you some of the statements on the cards.
Maybe you can keep a tally of where you’d put them:
“I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the person in charge,
I will be facing a person of my race.”
“I can turn on the television or open the front page of the paper
and see people of my race widely-represented.”
“I am rarely asked to speak for all people of my racial group.”
“I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials
that testify to the existence and contributions of their race.”
“I can worry about racism without being seen
as self-interested or self-seeking.”
“I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color
and have them more or less match my skin.”
“Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash,
I can count on my skin color not to work against
the appearance of financial responsibility.”
“If a traffic cop pulls me over, or if the IRS audits my tax return,
I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my color.”
Hearing where each person put their notecards was
—and I cannot put this dramatically enough—
earth-shaking for me.
I had put 25 of the 26 cards in the “it does apply to me” pile.
And the white folks around me were similar.
All of the people of color in the workshop
had put a majority of the notecards
in the “it doesn’t apply to me” pile.
In this moment, I had a sudden, intense, clear vision
of the privilege that I enjoy as a white person.
Just recently I read an article in which the author spoke
of grocery-shopping with her half-sister at their regular store.
Both of them are of mixed-race, but the author “passes” for white,
that is, she has more Caucasian features,
whereas her sister looks clearly black.
The sisters were in line to check out with their groceries.
The author was first in line, wrote a check, was not asked for ID,
and began bagging her groceries
while her sister’s were being scanned.
The sister then began writing a check as well
and the cashier immediately asked for ID
and looked intently, the author says “suspiciously,”
between the ID and the check.
The author called attention to this behavior,
asking what she was looking for.
The cashier replied it was policy to ask for ID.
The author asked why she herself hadn’t been asked for ID
moments before.
The store manager was called. It became a bit of an issue.
I’m aware that this is an anecdote,
but one which our black brothers and sisters
would not find surprising.
What is going on here?
I want to be clear that there are all kinds of privilege,
not just this example of embedded racism.
In this country there’s the privilege of being comfortable or even wealthy,
of being male, of being straight, of being educated.
And being privileged in some way doesn’t mean things haven’t been hard.
Of course wealthy people have depression and anxiety
and difficult family situations,
but they know they’re going to eat for the foreseeable future
and they’re going to be respected.
And of course a poor white family will have significant struggles
just as a poor black family will,
but that poor black family will have other struggles as well.
And an educated white woman might enjoy many privileges
in her hometown
but be targeted by rape and death threats in some online communities
because she is a woman.
Privilege changes and overlaps with lack-of privilege
—we call this intersectionality.
Now, I suspect that by my bringing this up in church,
some folks out there are tensing up.
If it’s because you disagree with me, I understand, but please hear me out.
I think scripture has something to speak into our lives here
that’s both difficult and freeing.
If it’s because we don’t talk about this kind of stuff in church,
I have to ask why not?
Why wouldn’t we talk about the ways in which
we Christians act like Pharisees, whether we know it or not?
Why wouldn’t we open our eyes to systems of oppression
and do what we can to make folks’ lives better?
Isn’t that basically what the prophets and Jesus were doing?
My point is this:
It is very easy to fall into the belief that something is not a problem
because it’s not a problem to us personally.
It’s so difficult to identify with this idea of privilege
because by its very nature, it’s invisible if you’ve got it.
And my second point is that
privilege isn’t a bad thing per se,
it’s a question of what we do with it once we see it.
How do I respond, for example, when I get pulled over for speeding,
and the officer literally backs away from me and says
“I can’t give a priest a ticket!”
Rejoice at my good fortune? Insist he give me a ticket?
Give him a lecture about privilege?
Ask some other officers about policy and practice and begin dialogue?
Our scriptures are rife with folks getting away with things
because they’re in charge or favored or pretty.
And those stories portray privilege sometimes as violent and terrible
like David’s sending the husband of the woman he lusted after
to the frontline to be killed.
And sometimes as the only way to save thousands of lives,
like Esther’s ability to speak to the king her husband
to spare the lives of the Jews.
And they’re rife with stories of people on the other side of things,
seeing the imbalance of power,
experiencing the oppression of invading forces
or economic pressures.
They’re rife with stories of the outsider and the rejected
pushing back against power and privilege.
This is Ruth. This is Tamar.
This is Moses in Egypt. This is Mary Magdalene and Peter.
This is too many people to list.
Looking back at my first description of Psalm 1,
I think we’re being called to awareness and compassion.
I said, “we are happier when we’re not terrible to each other.”
Which means we need to notice when we’re being terrible.
And when someone else is being hurt by our privilege.
How do we use that awareness to show that person love?
We are more fulfilled and connected to God
when we participate in what God is doing.
Maybe we ask what God is already doing in our community
rather than plowing forward with what we know needs to be done?
We are more fruitful when we pay attention to God’s desire for love.
Not productive, mind you, that’s our consumer culture speaking.
No, we make the fruit we were meant to
when we’re paying attention to love and forgiveness
and understanding and creativity.
How do we educate ourselves about issues
that don’t affect us personally?
And how do we learn to forgive?
This is where Psalm 1 gives us some beautiful grace.
It doesn’t say that the Lord watches over the righteous
but the wicked will perish.
It says “the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.”
The way. The way in which we do things.
The path we walk. The way of seeing the world.
God watches over and fosters and delights
in the path of love that each of us walks.
I even imagine God,
with one of those brooms they use in curling,
shuffling backwards in front of us,
sweeping the broom back and forth,
smoothing out the path when it gets rough…
And God will allow/is allowing the path of sin and misery
that each of us walks to fall into disrepair.
Psalm 1 is maybe foreshadowing Psalm 30,
“weeping may linger the night, but joy comes in the morning.”
In other words, everything will be okay in the end.
If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
And God invites us to participate in making things okay.
It will be uncomfortable for us to face how we are complacent
in the face of suffering.
It will be hard to begin dismantling our individual and corporate sin.
But we don’t do it alone.
God is walking that path with us,
nudging us towards the one that’s been cleared,
raising us up when we fall,
and celebrating with us when we succeed.
This is one message of the cross:
in Jesus’ death and resurrection that we celebrate this Easter season,
it is not that Jesus reminds an angry God that we are God’s beloved,
we are reminded that we are created in God’s image,
that we are God’s beloved, that we were made for love.
God’s been there all the time, maintaining the universe,
shining love on all of us.
We just forgot.
On the cross, Jesus showed us
where all our grasping and violence and moralizing lead us.
And in the empty tomb, Jesus shows us
all the possibilities of creation.
We can be and are like trees planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.
May it be so.


Good Friday meditation on Psalm 31 and bodies


Let’s talk about sex offenders for a moment.
If we can’t talk about them on Good Friday
when Jesus gave up his body for the sins of the world
—including not just we God’s faithful people
but also all the people we look down on or are disgusted by
—when can we?
I’ve been in a pastoral relationship
with someone on the Sex Offender Registry for several years now.
And I’ve been pondering for most of that time
why there are such extreme reactions to this person’s offense.
Over and above other kinds of offenses, that is
—it’s a different reaction than if you disclosed to me
that you’d stolen a watch
or even that you’d murdered someone.
It’s a powerful, visceral, angry reaction
which leads not only to creating the Registry in the first place
but also to everyday folks regularly checking out that Registry
for people in their neighborhood.
Because…why?
Registered sex offenders are the second least likely to reoffend…just behind murderers.
Why do we do this to ourselves? And to them?
It’s something to do with our essence, our being, our bodies.
A sex offense is…intimate and personal,
and an offense against our bodies
is somehow an offense against more than our bodies.
It’s like when you’re badly hurt with a broken leg, say,
or when you’re throwing up everything you ever ate,
the world condenses to this one primal, vulnerable space
where your body is.
All your being is concentrated on the misery of your body.
But somehow a sex offense magnifies that feeling.
Regardless of what the offense was
—and believe me, there is a wide spectrum
represented on the Registry—
knowing that a hurt was sexual in nature
brings up bone-deep revulsion
which seems to be the only truth.
To be clear, yes to all those feelings.
Violation of the body is deeply painful and emotional
and no one who perpetrates such violation should be given a pass.
If you’ve experienced such hurt, please tell someone
—don’t suffer alone.
It turns out, the violence of those encounters
leaves its scars on the perpetrators as well.
This person whom I know has struggled and been to jail
and to all the therapy and has transformed themself
in ways I frankly envy.
Even after all that, they fear reoffending
and even more the emptiness that comes
when a new friend finds them on the Registry.
Which happens all the time.
This person is outcast from social media, from employment,
and from more than one or two long-term friendships.
Perhaps you might justifiably say, “good.”
And perhaps you might also notice
the similarity between this person
and the people Jesus spent much of his time with.
Not because they were paragons of virtue
but because they were imprisoned by something
and wanted to be set free.
*       *       *
Let’s talk about close male friendships for a moment.
There was a time, as recently as the first World War,
when men who were friends
might be seen holding hands or hugging in public,
slinging their arms around each others waists, cuddling of a sort.
If you don’t believe me, just Google “male affection photo”
for an article called “Bosom Buddies.”
Human beings need touch—you know the studies
about babies who die because they’re not touched.
But more than that, we all need loving, gentle, consistent touch
for brain development and for spiritual development.
Our children are built for it,
demanding cuddling at wonderful and inopportune times.
But in the last 50 years, such touch between adult males has become rare.
Some folks wonder if societal homophobia
has robbed us of close male friendships.
My husband tells me his high school students
can’t even express the bare minimum of verbal friendship
without someone suggesting they might be gay.
Could we as a people be so concerned over the possibility of a come-on
that we’ve lost something precious?
“Boys imitate what they see.
If what they see is emotional distance, guardedness, and coldness
between men they will grow up to imitate that behavior…
What do boys learn when they do not see men
with close friendships, where there are no visible models
of intimacy in a man’s life beyond his spouse?”[1]

Women may be more able to show affection,
yet we participate in a culture of homophobia and touch-me-not.
We are made in the image of God and we are built for physical intimacy.
Perhaps you might justifiably say,
“But it can go so wrong so easily, even without assault.”
And perhaps you might also note that Jesus spent the Last Supper
reclining beside the beloved disciple John
whom our Celtic brothers and sisters say was so close
he heard the heartbeat of God.
No matter how enlightened we are,
we are imprisoned by our fear of closeness and we need to be set free.
*       *       *
Let’s talk about being unworthy for a moment.
I know students at UC who can’t fathom
that anyone would respect or love them.
They may seem happy or calm on the surface,
but it’s a cardboard cutout of themselves.
I know folks at UC who fill their days and nights with work
because they can’t trust themselves or others
to have their back and they fear failure.
I know friends who know deep in their hearts
that they’d never really be welcome in church
because they haven’t attended in years
or because they think God hates what they do with their bodies
or because they’re not good enough.
I know people who, because of their gender identity or homelessness
feel invisible.
And when they hear that God loves them,
they scoff or cry or get angry because how could God possibly love them. It’s patently ridiculous.
Peter at the Last Supper shows us a silly version
of this deeply-held self-revulsion.
When Jesus arrives at Peter’s feet, Peter says,
“wait, what? You can’t wash my feet! They’re gross.
And you’re…you know…God or something.”
And Jesus patiently explains it again and Peter says,
“Oh, right, I’m so filthy, I need you to wash my whole self!”
We don’t wash the feet of our dinner guests anymore.
But my friends Chris and Kevin once did something similar for me.
After my entire family had been sick simultaneously
with a stomach bug for several days,
my friends came to our house and cleaned up.
While we were still weak,
they swept and mopped and did dishes
and sanitized counters and doorknobs.
They didn’t hesitate to touch
where our disease had made things unclean.
How could I have been worthy of such a gift?
Perhaps you might justifiably say, “oh man, that’s me. I’m just the worst.”
And perhaps you might also recall
just how many times our scriptures record
the consistent and overwhelming love of God
for some really filthy people.
All of us are imprisoned by sin and we need to be set free.
*       *       *
Now, let’s talk about Jesus’ body.
We say that he was God made human
and centuries of theologians have written
about how he was REALLY HUMAN.
It’s not that he just looked like us but was actually smoke and mirrors.
He didn’t have a glowing God center with a crunchy human shell.
He was really, really, physically, emotionally a person.
Jesus is God becoming a vulnerable, squalling, pooing baby
and a vulnerable, squalling, pooing adult
—that’s his whole deal.
That’s the whole point.
Our God who created the universe,
who made this world in all its amazing variety,
who made us—
these complex, thinking bodies charging through space—
our God didn’t just watch from afar,
munching popcorn like we’re some kind of soap opera.
God got themselves a body and ate hummus
and snuggled with Mary and Joseph
and in the teen years refused to be touched
and walked the dirty roads of Jerusalem
and touched disgusting sick people
and touched unworthy prostitutes and office workers
and touched cruel sinners
and then died in extreme pain in front of his earthly parents,
watching them sob.
And then—spoiler warning—came back to life for real.
It’s all about God’s body.
Jesus body standing in for all the bodies in the world.
All of them.
Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection
is about our bodies being strong and resilient
and vulnerable and imprisoned and…worthy of being set free. And it’s about God loving us more than enough to do it.
That freedom is scary.
It’s a painful and fascinating transition.
But as the Psalmist says in the 31st Psalm,
“Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord.”


[1] Kindlon and Thompson, Raising Cain

sermon on Luke 1, Mary the mother of Jesus, prophecy, and bad good news


A       Mary the mother of Jesus was a prophet.
Like Isaiah and Micah and Amos and Habakkuk.
Let’s dig into that for just a moment.
There in Luke is a great example of what we call an annunciation form—
basically, there are bits of scripture
that are very similar to each other,
things like the traditional form of a pastoral letter,
or love poems, or proverbs,
or the form of announcing a miraculous birth.
You remember Abraham and Sarah
and their miraculous, late-in-life birth, right?
Or Hannah mother of the prophet Samuel?
Their stories, when the angels or God visit
and tell them of their impending pregnancy,
generally follow a particular form.
Interestingly, while Mary’s story is indeed
a birth announcement and fits that form,
it actually fits a different form much more closely
—the prophetic call.
Like Moses, Gideon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel before her,
Mary encounters an angel
who calls her to some sort of difficult action,
Mary objects to the call,
she is reassured and given a sign.

B       It turns out lots of early church writers saw this well before I did,
but it’s an image of Mary that we’ve lost over the years
—somehow we are left with a quiet, obedient Mother
 without the firebrand language of the Magnificat
she sings immediately afterwards.
She sings about God’s greatness and mercy
but she also sings this,
“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
It’s reminiscent of the song of Moses
and of basically all of the Hebrew prophets.
God is indeed great and merciful
AND ALSO is about justice and significant change to the status quo.
If you’re poor or afflicted, you’re gonna get fed.
Also, if you’re comfortable or in power,
you’re gonna get taken down a peg or two.
Prophets, you see, are a bit difficult.
They’re not domesticated.
They speak from their own oppressed group.
They speak the languages of challenge and hope.
Prophets, Mary included, see clearly what is,
the patterns of human behavior
and how we consistently screw things up.
And prophets, Mary included, see what can be,
the potential for beauty and compassion and grace.
Prophets, Mary included, speak to their own oppressed people
and say, “This is terrible but it won’t last.
If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
It’s good news, but it might not seem like it.
C       Pastor Larry and I used to argue this point.
He’d say, “Good news is always good news.”
Being contrary, I’d say, “No it’s not.”
The word “Gospel” literally means “good news”
and I agree that it is in fact always good.
BUT it doesn’t always feel like it.
That the rich—spoiler warning, that’s us
—that the rich will be sent away empty sounds like a threat.
That the proud—spoiler warning, that’s also us
—will be scattered sounds like bad news.
This is the Gospel which says you lose your life to find it
and that’s damned hard. That’s miserable. I don’t want that.
The leveling of the playing field that Mary sings about
and that Isaiah writes about and that all the prophets
and law-givers and poets of our scriptures talk about
—that leveling means we might all lose something
and we will all gain something even better.
Past that loss of wealth or status or security,
         past Good Friday, past the pain of pregnancy and childbirth
is the New Thing that God is making.
Mary says to us,
“This is terrible but it won’t last. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
“When a person in a marginalized group is voicing their concern over something you’ve done, it’s a natural reaction to jump and try to defend yourself. Taking the time to listen and truly understand goes an incredibly long way to promoting the understanding that is so desperately needed...”[1]

As we continue in this Advent season,
as we wait for something new with increasing agitation,
when every one of us is pregnant with possibility,
I invite you to listen to Mary’s story retold.

D      Mary stands in her home, kneading bread for dinner
and looking absently out the window.
She sees her little son Jesus running around with the neighbor kids
playing chase and she corrects herself
—not little son, not any more, was he ever little,
seemed pretty big when he came out,
where has the time gone.
Mary watches as her son stops to help up one of the smaller children
who’s fallen in the dust,
then takes off like a shot around the corner of another house
and the Roman soldier keeping an eye on their neighborhood.
Mary presses down hard with the heel of her hand into the dough,
flips it over, presses again,
the repetitive motion part frustration and part meditation.
Her thoughts drift gently from her son’s momentary kindness
to his tantrum this morning about breakfast
to his sleeping face last night
to that same face, softer, rounder, more covered with snot,
lo, these many years ago.
Mary remembers swaddling her baby boy in that warm, dirty stable
and weeping with joy and terror at this new thing
—why didn’t anyone say, I can’t believe how amazing he is,
Joseph can you even…, how could I love someone this much.
And she remembers the day of the angel with the same joy and terror
—how can you be so beautiful and so frightening,
of course I’m afraid, you want me to do what,
from…Hashem, but…a baby?
Mary’s hands press down hard into the dough,
flipping it over, pressing it again.
Her hands covered in flour and callouses ache
as she remembers the early days of pregnancy
—the painful joints, the exhaustion,
the fluttering in her belly which she kept thinking was the baby
but which was only gas.
And later when the fluttering took her breath away
and she grabbed for Joseph’s hand to feel the tiny elbow pressing up
against her belly.
Once she remembers that elbow coming up and her pushing it back,
tapping it like a message. And the elbow tapping back.
She smiles as she flips the dough over to let it rest
and wipes her hands on the towel at her waist.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Jesus and his friends
run helter-skelter back into sight.
She begins to hum as she takes out a knife to cut up garlic.
It’s a song she’d all but forgotten, but in the quiet of a rare moment alone,
she remembers.
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”
Ah, yes, she thinks, and sighs aloud.
How that song had welled up in her that day in cousin Elizabeth’s house.
They were both pregnant,
commiserating about aches and pains
and husbands who were attentive but in the wrong ways.
They talked of swaddling and breastfeeding
and the births they’d been present for.
They talked about how the world wasn’t good enough for their sons,
hands resting protectively on round bellies.
They talked about their awe
that they could be making people within themselves.
They talked about their awe that Hashem had given them this chance,
that maybe their boys would be the ones to change things.
And Mary began to sing her gratitude.
It was an old tune but the words came from deep within her,
from the knot of baby growing in her belly and in her heart.
She sang about her own unworthiness to be a mother
and how overwhelmingly giddy it made her.
She sang about Hashem’s attentiveness to the people with no power
and about Hashem’s power to remake the world.
She sang about justice and regime change and transformation.
She sang about her sadness
and she sang about her hope that all would see the face of Hashem
and know the truth of their sin and blessedness.
In the end, a breathless silence
and then cousin Elizabeth applauded
and called her Prophetess
and they laughed.
Mary begins chopping the cloves of peeled garlic
piled up like coins in front of her and hums.
This child will change everything, she sings.
This child has already changed everything.




[1] Jessica Lachenal, “Why the Batgirl #37 controversy is the conversation we need right now.” www.themarysue.com 12/15/14 6:30pm