Luke 13:10-17
10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, "Woman, you are set free from your ailment." 13 When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. 14 But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day." 15 But the Lord answered him and said, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? 16 And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?" 17 When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.
Reflection: Not One More Minute
by Rev. Debra McKnight
We can imagine this moment. Jesus is teaching in the synagogue; it's not surprising that going to synagogue is his “custom.” But in this moment he encounters a woman, bent over, bearing the heaviness of an affliction. Something that isn’t really a part of her is bearing heavy on her well being. We can imagine her journey to the synagogue, her posture lowering the horizon, placing one foot in front of the other as she knows each pebble, exposed root and paver on the path. We don’t know her name, but we know that she has born this ‘affliction” for 18 years. Walking into the synagogue perhaps she notices the familiar hems of cloaks and stretches to greet . We don’t know if she is 18 or 48, but we can imagine how she has to turn her whole body to look up, tilting to see each face. She doesn’t ask for healing, and no one asks on her behalf. Maybe they would have if it was the first year, when they noticed, when their own backs ached at the sight of this daughter of Abraham. Maybe they looked for cures once, maybe they listened once, maybe they noticed once, but after 18 years maybe this affliction just blended into everything else or maybe they just felt numb to her needs. This unnamed woman walks into the synagogue, and Jesus cannot wait another minute. He offered healing; she didn’t even ask, but he heals her right there in front of God and everybody.
Some folks look at this scripture and see it as a miracle story. And that is true, but the actual healing miracle is fairly small piece of the whole narrative. Plus, I think we often get caught up in the wrong part of the miracle. Since we often read the Christian Scriptures and not a lot of other stories and narratives from the same time, we think this gift of healing that Jesus has is somehow singular, or entirely unique to him. But the truth is that healing is the work of the temples and synagogues. There are other narratives that share stories of healing, and we shouldn’t assume that ancient people don’t understand when they feel better just because we don’t really understand the methods people are using to bring about healing. We can hear this echoed in the voice of the synagogue leader who says, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day." She could have made an appointment, but so often the healing miracles of Jesus and his disciples are not about the methods or technology, rather it is the accessibility that is a miracle.
This helps us understand the tension between Jesus and the synagogue leader. That is the second way folks often look at this passage, as a debate about rules. It can be so easy for us as modern Christians to read this text and others like it and just fall head over heels for this rule breaking, sabbath defying Jesus. Jesus the great de-regulator. You tell him someone is untouchable and he is giving big hugs. You tell him you can’t eat with tax collectors and he is inviting himself to their home. Don’t heal on the sabbath and it seems to be his favorite time of the week. We love this rebel with a cause and assume he likes bacon too. This is why grown ups will say to my face, “Jewish people loved rules, the Old Testament is about rules and Jesus is about love. Love trumps rules. Christianity is better, we love love.” Of course you say to these same folks, “ok we are going to host a wedding for two cute guys,” and they say, “hey wait a minute there are some rules…haven’t you heard of Leviticus. It's a great book.”
Since we are in a day when Nazis are not history, this is my anti-anti-semitism PSA: Jesus is Jewish and debating religious leaders of his day out of love and rooted in his Jewish identity. When we see him in debate and disagreement with religious leaders of his day, we would be fools to think he wouldn’t also be in debate with just about every single religious leader of our day. Frankly, I can understand the struggle of the Synagogue leader. If someone spontaneously started a new service at the Abbey, I probably wouldn’t be a fan and would definitely ask if they reserved the space. In fact there is one gentleman who frequents us on Saturday mornings, when we are full and meeting new folks, and he wears hand-made t-shirts bearing a message in iron on letters that let’s just say isn’t quite affirming of women’s reproductive rights or of research based sex education. I am always worried that people will think, oh this is a church and oh that man must represent this community’s values. One day, he was about to chat with some young women as they shopped our books, and I was so nervous that I sent three volunteers to just talk to him until he left. Jesus might be pushing the boundaries or crossing some lines, and we can imagine how it would end if some one set up a free clinic in the lobby of the Med Center; it wouldn’t end well, they would probably go to jail. Jesus is healing on the sabbath and this isn’t a life threatening illness. She could have made an appointment and saw the licensed professionals at the synagogue on Monday. We look at this passage and think Jesus doesn’t love the sabbath, but Jesus argues out of a place of deep love of the sabbath. He knows how rest makes his people different from the empires around them; it pauses our pursuit of more stuff and more progress and more production. Honoring the sabbath is woven into the origin stories of God resting, it is woven into the exodus from slavery and it is sacred. Jesus heals on the sabbath as an act of liberation.
See I don’t think this is about a great debate on the theology of the sabbath or even a story about miracles. I wonder if it teaches us something about the Kingdom of God, the kin-dom of heaven. Jesus shares a story about a fig tree that is fruitless; he goes searching for fruit in the synagogue community, maybe wondering if he will ever find the seeds that bring forth life. After he heals this woman and the crowd cheers his liberation, they found the fruitfulness, they witnessed it. He goes on to share the story of a mustard seed and yeast in dough, they are symbols of the kingdom of god. They are small, they are unassuming, mundane and not very important by the world’s standards. No one would put the mustard plant on their flag or passport, and some say the mustard might even be a bit of a nuisance plant. But these essential and small elements point to God’s expansive love. Maybe Jesus heals this woman because waiting delays the presence of the kingdom of God, and delaying the kingdom of God even one more moment is holy unacceptable.
When this woman rises, from her affliction, she gives thanks to God. Her moment of standing up after 18 years of struggle shares the same language as the closing elements of the Gospel when Jesus names the next hopes of this work he nurtured with his very life. And this calls us to be a part of this rising. Perhaps we know how this woman feels even if we don’t experience life bent over with eyes to the ground. Maybe we know what it is like to have a heaviness, a weariness, a burden that hinders us. Maybe we know what it is like to long for healing. Maybe we feel the weight of the community, trying to help or looking away or tiring and trying and tiring again. Faith is lived, not always in the absolutes but in the tender relationships that challenge, nudge and even debate out of love. The kin-dom of God calls us all, perfectly imperfect to rise. The kingdom of heaven looks small and tremendous at once, sacred and ordinary, not too important and almighty at once. And we are called to be a part, convenient or not, questions and all; we are called to show up, to be a part, and to not delay the presence of love one more moment. May we be as fruitful as the fig tree Jesus was seeking, as robust as the mustard seed, and as vital as the yeast in the bread dough. May we rise.
Rev. Debra McKnight
Founding Pastor
Urban Abbey
Omaha, Nebraska
Join us Sundays at 9:00 am, 11:00 am & 5:30 pm for inclusive worship or anytime for coffee at our living sanctuary.
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Fire and Brimstone vs. Fire to Transform
Sermon
Luke 12:49-56
49 "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! 50 I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! 51 Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 52 From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; 53 they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law." 54 He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, "It is going to rain'; and so it happens. 55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, "There will be scorching heat'; and it happens. 56 You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
Reflection: Fire and Brimstone vs. Fire to Transform
This scripture is disconcerting with its fire-loving, peace-rejecting Jesus. This Jesus is not the Jesus we see in stained glass windows toting cute little lambs on his shoulder. This Fire and Division Jesus is not the Jesus we see in those classic church prints of a smiling man with a bunch of sweet little ones. We would not put this Jesus in charge of Sunday School. Reading this text makes me nervous, and maybe it does that for you, too. Maybe you think to yourself, where is that whole prodigal son story with its nice God? These scriptures seem strange, perhaps out of character, and are easy to pass by for something else… anything else. But I find these hard spaces to be as instructive as they are challenging and worthy of the deep dive.
Perhaps this passage is so stressful because it is one of the occasions in which Jesus is stressed. Jesus names his destress, “what stress I am under,” and this language bares a resemblance to how we modern folks might think of holding tightly, holding together, squeezing. He is holding the tension of what is not yet and what is to come. Jesus names this further at the close of the section, “He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, 'It is going to rain'; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, 'There will be scorching heat'; and it happens.” Jesus speaks to people who know how to interpret the weather, they know how to engage the world around them because they understand the signs of the environment. Then he laments that they don’t understand the signs of the present time, the signs of God’s presence. In verse 56 he says, “You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
This time is in the breaking of God’s presence, Jesus speaks from the start of God’s kingdom, the reign of God, or as Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz puts it, the Kin-dom of God. His ministry began with proclaiming it, he announces that it is within you, he names it has drawn near, he points to it, he teaches people to lean into it, helps people taste it, and when no one understands he tries it all again. His Mom sang about it in the Magnificat. It changes everything, lifts up the lowly, fills the hungry with good things, and unravels the systems that keep some wealthy and powerful at the expense of many.
This total transformation might be a part of why Jesus names the division experienced. Perhaps the Gospel of Luke’s author is more descriptive here than prophetic (at least prophetic in the sense of predicting the future because it’s already happening). Changing everything makes folks, particularly those benefiting from the system… well, at the very least uneasy at the family dinner table and probably absolutely opposed in every way possible. Change is hard, and this division or stress isn’t easy on any family. Maybe that’s why the Prince of Peace, who talks about bringing peace seven other times in this gospel, is naming division here.
This space of division can strike a nerve, perhaps it gave you pause and reminded you of some fire and brimstone, judgment-loving preacher… I don’t know… yelling at you from a street corner or pounding on a Bible. This passage is easy to deploy in that vein of thought, it has the main ingredient... fire. When we hear fire, we think of an angry, smote-y God. But just a few passages ago, two disciples asked Jesus if they could bring down fire on a community that didn’t receive them, sort of Sodom and Gomorrah-style, and he gave such a clear, “NO,” you can almost hear his hand hitting his forehead in dismay… if you listen between the lines. So when Jesus says, "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled,” what kind of fire is he talking about?
Part of Jesus knowing how to interpret the signs of the present time came from understanding the wisdom of his tradition. Jesus, like us, inherited the stories of a bush burning but not consumed, Moses sees this fire, and it changes the direction of his life. The people of Israel, wandering in the wilderness, unsure, often willing to go back to the status quo of empire and enslavement, follow a pillar of fire to the land of promise. Fire guides them to a new life. Jesus inherits the prophets speaking of fire. Jeremiah speaks of God’s presence as a fire burning in his bones, and he is weary with holding it in. He must speak even as it makes folks angry with him (violently angry), it’s his call to remind the people who they are and how they are created to be a community of justice and compassion. Fire has a transformative power. "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” Fire turns metal into tools that can till the soil. Fire turns dough into bread that can nourish the body, mind and spirit. "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” Fire is transformative, it has a refining role and sometimes a clarifying/purifying function in the way people use it.
This gets to the challenge of this text. This work of bringing a fire was already promised in his baptism and we explore it vividly at Pentecost when the early followers of Jesus felt so alive with God’s presence they name it as tongues of fire dancing on a head. This fire is not about violent destruction, it transforms us. This fire does’t incinerate, it ignites. And ignited people do seemingly impossible work on their own growth, they change everything about their lives, like Moses did. Folks on fire take risks like Jeremiah did. And together, in community, folks that fan the spark of new life bring about peace through justice and compassion, not force and compliance. This fire refines us. May we have the courage to flan the sparks into flames and tend our fires. Amen.
© 2019 Rev. Debra McKnight, Urban Abbey
Luke 12:49-56
49 "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! 50 I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! 51 Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 52 From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; 53 they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law." 54 He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, "It is going to rain'; and so it happens. 55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, "There will be scorching heat'; and it happens. 56 You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
Reflection: Fire and Brimstone vs. Fire to Transform
This scripture is disconcerting with its fire-loving, peace-rejecting Jesus. This Jesus is not the Jesus we see in stained glass windows toting cute little lambs on his shoulder. This Fire and Division Jesus is not the Jesus we see in those classic church prints of a smiling man with a bunch of sweet little ones. We would not put this Jesus in charge of Sunday School. Reading this text makes me nervous, and maybe it does that for you, too. Maybe you think to yourself, where is that whole prodigal son story with its nice God? These scriptures seem strange, perhaps out of character, and are easy to pass by for something else… anything else. But I find these hard spaces to be as instructive as they are challenging and worthy of the deep dive.
Perhaps this passage is so stressful because it is one of the occasions in which Jesus is stressed. Jesus names his destress, “what stress I am under,” and this language bares a resemblance to how we modern folks might think of holding tightly, holding together, squeezing. He is holding the tension of what is not yet and what is to come. Jesus names this further at the close of the section, “He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, 'It is going to rain'; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, 'There will be scorching heat'; and it happens.” Jesus speaks to people who know how to interpret the weather, they know how to engage the world around them because they understand the signs of the environment. Then he laments that they don’t understand the signs of the present time, the signs of God’s presence. In verse 56 he says, “You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
This time is in the breaking of God’s presence, Jesus speaks from the start of God’s kingdom, the reign of God, or as Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz puts it, the Kin-dom of God. His ministry began with proclaiming it, he announces that it is within you, he names it has drawn near, he points to it, he teaches people to lean into it, helps people taste it, and when no one understands he tries it all again. His Mom sang about it in the Magnificat. It changes everything, lifts up the lowly, fills the hungry with good things, and unravels the systems that keep some wealthy and powerful at the expense of many.
This total transformation might be a part of why Jesus names the division experienced. Perhaps the Gospel of Luke’s author is more descriptive here than prophetic (at least prophetic in the sense of predicting the future because it’s already happening). Changing everything makes folks, particularly those benefiting from the system… well, at the very least uneasy at the family dinner table and probably absolutely opposed in every way possible. Change is hard, and this division or stress isn’t easy on any family. Maybe that’s why the Prince of Peace, who talks about bringing peace seven other times in this gospel, is naming division here.
This space of division can strike a nerve, perhaps it gave you pause and reminded you of some fire and brimstone, judgment-loving preacher… I don’t know… yelling at you from a street corner or pounding on a Bible. This passage is easy to deploy in that vein of thought, it has the main ingredient... fire. When we hear fire, we think of an angry, smote-y God. But just a few passages ago, two disciples asked Jesus if they could bring down fire on a community that didn’t receive them, sort of Sodom and Gomorrah-style, and he gave such a clear, “NO,” you can almost hear his hand hitting his forehead in dismay… if you listen between the lines. So when Jesus says, "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled,” what kind of fire is he talking about?
Part of Jesus knowing how to interpret the signs of the present time came from understanding the wisdom of his tradition. Jesus, like us, inherited the stories of a bush burning but not consumed, Moses sees this fire, and it changes the direction of his life. The people of Israel, wandering in the wilderness, unsure, often willing to go back to the status quo of empire and enslavement, follow a pillar of fire to the land of promise. Fire guides them to a new life. Jesus inherits the prophets speaking of fire. Jeremiah speaks of God’s presence as a fire burning in his bones, and he is weary with holding it in. He must speak even as it makes folks angry with him (violently angry), it’s his call to remind the people who they are and how they are created to be a community of justice and compassion. Fire has a transformative power. "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” Fire turns metal into tools that can till the soil. Fire turns dough into bread that can nourish the body, mind and spirit. "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” Fire is transformative, it has a refining role and sometimes a clarifying/purifying function in the way people use it.
This gets to the challenge of this text. This work of bringing a fire was already promised in his baptism and we explore it vividly at Pentecost when the early followers of Jesus felt so alive with God’s presence they name it as tongues of fire dancing on a head. This fire is not about violent destruction, it transforms us. This fire does’t incinerate, it ignites. And ignited people do seemingly impossible work on their own growth, they change everything about their lives, like Moses did. Folks on fire take risks like Jeremiah did. And together, in community, folks that fan the spark of new life bring about peace through justice and compassion, not force and compliance. This fire refines us. May we have the courage to flan the sparks into flames and tend our fires. Amen.
© 2019 Rev. Debra McKnight, Urban Abbey
Monday, August 12, 2019
Help, Thanks, Wow
Sermon by Rev. Rebecca Hjelle
One of the benefits of moving is that you get to re-discover all of those things that you forgot about or lost over the years. Right?! Well, a couple months ago as I was unpacking the boxes from my office, I re-discovered a book by Anne Lamott titled Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.
I read it a few years ago and found it to be refreshingly honest conversation about the messiness of life, the complexities of our faith, and how the spiritual practice of prayer can bring that all of that together in the most beautiful and moving and profound ways. And so that is what we will be unpacking together today…what this spiritual practice of prayer means for each of us as we move through those moments of help, thanks, and wow.
In her prelude to the book, which she titles Prayer 101, Anne unpacks what prayer is and what prayer isn’t. Listen to what she writes and see if it resonates with any of your experiences…
“Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. [In fact,] the opposite may be true: We may not be able to get it together until after we show up in such miserable shape…Prayer is us reaching out to something having to do with the eternal, with vitality, intelligence, kindness, even when we are at our most utterly doomed and skeptical.
God can handle honesty, and prayer begins an honest conversation. My belief is that when you’re telling the truth, you’re close to God…So prayer is our sometimes-real selves trying to communicate with the Real, with the Truth, with the Light. It is us reaching out to be heard, hoping to be found by a light and warmth in the world, instead of darkness and cold.” (p. 5-7)
I so appreciate Anne’s description of prayer because it has nothing to do with flowery language and proper grammar – it’s not just for those who have gone to seminary – it’s not just for those who “have a way with words”. Prayer is the spiritual practice of showing up just as we are – to tell the truth about our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our failures – so that we can reconnect with the truth of who we are – beloved, chosen, and gifted children of God. It is that simple and that profound.
And the best part is that when we take that step, when we reach out, when we open ourselves up and get really real – we will discover a divine love that reassures us of our sacred worth.
Now, I don’t know about you but there are plenty of other voices in the world who are speaking very different messages into my life each day. Voices within and without who remind me of my failures and my shortcomings. Voices of comparison and competition. Voices that shout “not enough!” and “who do you think you are?”. And if I listen long enough, I find myself spiraling down that path of defeat and despair.
Prayer is what keeps me grounded in the truth of divine love and the sacred worth of all people – and that’s why it has become an essential part of my own daily practice.
Now, the first prayer that I ever learned was a bedtime prayer – “Before I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” And in my family, we would then pray for the people that we were thinking of that day. Well, even as a young girl I would pray for anyone and everyone that I had ever met – I didn’t want anyone to be left out.
So, my parents came up with a second part to that prayer that would help me pray for everyone and still get to bed on time – “God bless grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends, neighbors, my mom, my dad, my brother, and me. Amen.” It was so simple but saying that prayer each night reassured me that God was going to be with each of them and that God would help them whenever and wherever they needed it.
Anne Lamott says that “Help” is one of the greatest prayers that we can ever pray for ourselves or for one another because “Help” is where restoration begins – “Help” is where we let go and let God take over – “Help” is where we recognize that we don’t have it all figured out, but that we know the One who does.
And that’s one of the things that I find so moving about our time together on Sundays. Each week during the Communion liturgy we lift up our prayers for one another, our families, and our world. We lift up our struggles and we share our joys – and we stay in that moment for as long as we need to – and by doing that we remind one another that we are not in this alone. And what a gift that is to offer one another!
Now, the 2nd prayer that Anne mentions is simply, “Thanks.” It is one that comes naturally when things are going well, and the details of our lives are all falling into place. But it is also the prayer that we offer when we feel that rush of relief – when we can finally take a deep breath – when real danger is averted – when we emerge from something that felt so dark and so deep.
It takes incredible faith to be able to give “thanks” in those moments – to trust that the divine is working to make a way out of no way. But that is the hope that we have. That even in the messiest moments of life God is present, God is at work, and God is making all things new. And so, we can pray “thanks” for each day and each moment that we’re given.
The final prayer that Anne writes about is “Wow” – it’s the prayer that opens us up to the wonder of it all. The beauty of the world around us, the generosity of a stranger, the joy of a summer sunset, the fragility of life, the heartbreak of a tragedy.
Anne says, “‘Wow’ is about having one’s mind blown by the mesmerizing or the miraculous…Wow, because you are almost speechless, but not quite…When we are stunned to the place beyond words, we’re finally starting to get somewhere. It is so much more comfortable to think that we know what it all means, what to expect and how it all hangs together. When we are stunned to the place beyond words, when an aspect of life takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it’s down to a manageable size and then file it nicely away, when all we can say in response is ‘Wow,’ that’s a prayer. ” (p. 71, 73)
Again, prayer is the spiritual practice of showing up just as we are – to tell the truth about our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our failures – so that we can reconnect with the truth of who we are – beloved, chosen, and gifted children of God. It is that simple and that profound.
And so, whether your prayer is “help”, “thanks”, or “wow”, my hope is that you’ll be reminded of God’s presence in the messiness of life – of God’s faithfulness at all times and in all places – and of God’s love that goes with you through it all. That is the good news we’ve gathered here to celebrate and to take with us out into the world.
Help. Thanks. Wow. Amen and amen.
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Social Principles of Community at the Abbey
Guest Sermon by Jeff Spiehs
Scripture
2 Timothy 1:7-8
7 for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.
8 Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God,
Sermon
Our family has had a fantastic time being part of the Abbey community. It is great to see such support and validation for the things that we are deeply connected to and passionate about. We’ve learned so much from you and the voices that are brought to the Abbey to teach us. These social principles and the idea of the integrated social community strives to bring about justice in our everyday lives locally and globally. The Methodist social principle today is the social community and the rights of racial and ethnic persons.
The passage from 2nd Timothy is often understood as a pastoral letter meant to encourage the church and offer practical advice. We’d be wise to take to heart what it means not to have a spirit of timidity, but of power and of love and a sound mind.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that religion and education must change one’s internal feelings, but it is scarcely a moral act to encourage others to patiently accept injustice until a mans heart gets it right. With the wisdom of our social community, we can know what power, love and a sound mind can do.
Social community:
We affirm all persons as equally valuable in the sight of God. We therefore work toward societies in which each person’s value is recognized, maintained, and strengthened. We deplore acts of hate or violence against groups or persons based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, age, gender, disability, status, economic condition, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religious affiliation.
To deplore these acts and support human rights means that we have the opportunity to provide real stability in the lives of our community. Stability can be a real, tangible thing for us. Sometimes there is a conviction that can come along and disrupt our day to day lives, and that conviction is the desire for community.
The realization that we all need each other and committing to community and stability is never easy, but always worth fighting for. In todays society, sticking around is not a hot commodity. In some ways community and stability are the antithesis of the relentless seeking that is so prominent in the american dream. Community is a chance to settle down and find out who we really are. Community’s wisdom insists that growth depends on all of us rooting ourselves in a place with others. Most of us as modern people get uncomfortable talking about commitment and stability, we worry that vows like community can be dangerous.
Should we ever leave the place we are? I don’t know, but I trust we are able to best discern the call of God in the company of friends. The trouble is we can’t find community within ourselves alone. We have a desperate need to find something solid to give us bearings. Left to ourselves we will simply float along without something greater to ground our existence. Our fragmented lives easily become like that of an old house sitting on a poor foundation.
When we commit to community, which we can feel strongly the urge to do so, we are called into a tension. We are asked to commit to the practices of hospitality, listening, forgiveness and reconciliation, the daily tasks of life with other people.
Poet, author and agrarian Wendell Berry says, “Stability demands that we do the long, hard work of life with other people in the place where we are.”
I recall an experience about 10 years ago when my community had a coffeeshop/art gallery/church in the Benson neighborhood. We were coming to a time when we realized after 5 years that it was time to close up our physical location. We were out of money and felt burned out but were looking for the next evolution in our work in the Benson neighborhood. Two of our friends who lived above the coffee shop, Brad Hoshaw and Dan Cummings were sitting with me on the couch on a hot July day in the coffeeshop. I vividly remember Dan suggesting that we split the one beer he thought he may have in his fridge. So, he brought it down and the three of us split the 12 oz 90 shilling by O’Dell’s in little plastic kids drink cups. We reflected on our time together, the meaning that it had on our lives and how good it felt to sit in solidarity sipping on sort of skunky beer at 2 pm on a Tuesday. The moment on the couch reminds me that we don’t exactly know the plans that are ahead of us. Just six months before sitting together on the couch, I tweeted out “this year is going to be a great year for us in Benson. Exciting things to come!” We had no idea that just six months later we’d be closing our shop. That time on the couch was a distinct marker of a transition for all of us, that we were outgrowing one ideal and letting the intentionality of social community take us where it needed to lead us, which for me meant getting a “real job” for awhile, but staying rooted in community.
In a fast paced and fragmented world, we feel our need for community intensely. But the paradox of community is this: those of us who long for it most intensely are least capable of making the kind of commitments that make community possible. We feel the need for community because we sense that something is missing-that we’ve lost something essential. But like children who have never known their parents, the lack we feel so strongly makes us afraid, slow to commit, and unable to find the very thing we most want.
It doesn’t take long in community to realize that people are at times broken and in need of repair. The minute we realize this we are liable to think “I can name this problem much better than they can. Maybe I can fix them. We do this because we love them and we want these communities to be better. The problem is that people and communities are not like cars, they aren’t made to run just fine on their own.
This work of community is the work of everyone. In todays political climate it is easy to find your side and assume you are right. We can easily become defensive when called to check our assumptions or to recognize our own place of privilege and power. We assume God must be on our side. When we fall into this temptation we can start to build up fear based ideas about others and build up fortresses that keep us from interrogating ourselves.
When we isolate ourselves we are no longer able to bear witness to hope, hear the voice of those so often left on the sidelines and begin to convince ourselves that we’ve got it together. One of the most pervasive places I’ve seen this is when we talk about race.
It is easy to hear chants of “send her back” or read tweets about rat infested places and s-hole countries and pat ourselves on the back and say “I’m not like that.” Like most of you, I am concerned about the blurring of the lines between white nationalism and evangelicalism.
But this has always been the case in the history of the church, searching for power and control and keeping and building empire.
The work of anti-racism and dismantling white fragility is not only about the obvious racism, but in everyday racism, personally and structurally. It comes in subtle and sometimes invisible ways. Then events like yesterday happen and we still see the misery of racism. We had another senseless mass shooting by a terrorist. A white man walked into a mall and began shooting because of his racist motives. May the Lord have mercy on all of us and may we do more than we can imagine to dismantle the fear and intimation our leaders are pushing to keep their empire.
Are we okay with pay disparity? Housing discrimination? Preferring the candidates resume who has a name that is white sounding?
Our call is to not ask if God is on our side? We know the side that God is on, God stands with those who are on the other side of power, who are fighting against empire. Our task is to join them, lift and center their voice and provide resources and stand behind.
It is personal, social, political and therefore spiritual.
This past week I was part of design workshops along the N. 24th Street corridor. We were working with the community to develop strategies of housing affordability, racial justice, and access to transportation, jobs and public health. I met Lynette.
Lynette shared with me that she has lived in North Omaha her entire life, her grandkids also live in North Omaha. At this workshop was the first time she had heard of redlining, and structural housing discrimination. She and her community have been deeply and severely negatively impacted by racist policies and tactics that were sometimes overt and most of the time covert.
Fighting white fragility means asking ourselves how we feel knowing that for most of us, our wealth, stability and sense of place is due to the fact that we had access to credit, infrastructure and so on that others did not have and still today are missing. We are busy building our lives, preparing for college, sending our kids to school while others are just trying to survive and fear for their lives when pulled over by the police.
As a cisgendered white male, I must be the ideal person to share about racism. The theology of liberation is not a special interest theology. We all have a role to play. Pay attention to the lives of people who are experiencing grace under pressure. Paul says in 1st corinthians that we are a body, when one part of the body is suffering, we all suffer.
Centering whiteness, being complicit in everyday racism is part of contributing to the suffering of the body.
Why is it so difficult for us to talk about race? We get defensive. “I have a black friend!” “I voted for Obama!” We’ve allowed ourselves to be isolated from the impacts of racism. We rarely lament about the segregation in our communities and what we are missing. We can think we are exempt from the root causes of racism. We can have guilt that paralyzes us from taking action.
Standing in solidarity can help us find ways to make use of our differences for the common good. To see our role in making the body healthy.
God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power and love. This power fuels us to see racism and seek ways to take action. Once you let yourself see racism, you begin to see it all the time.
What can we do? The Methodist social principles give us some structure and guidance:
Rights of Racial and Ethnic Persons
Racism is the combination of the power to dominate by one race over other races and a value system that assumes that the dominant race is innately superior to the others. Racism includes both personal and institutional racism. Personal racism is manifested through the individual expressions, attitudes, and/or behaviors that accept the assumptions of a racist value system and that maintain the benefits of this system. Institutional racism is the established social pattern that supports implicitly or explicitly the racist value system. In many cultures white persons are granted unearned privileges and benefits that are denied to persons of color. We oppose the creation of a racial hierarchy in any culture. Racism breeds racial discrimination structurally and personally.
We assert the obligation of society and people within the society to implement compensatory programs that redress long-standing, systemic social deprivation of racial and ethnic persons. We further assert the right of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic persons to equal and equitable opportunities in employment and promotion; to education and training of the highest quality; to nondiscrimination in voting, access to public accommodations, and housing purchase or rental; to credit, financial loans, venture capital, and insurance policies; to positions of leadership and power in all elements of our life together; and to full participation in the Church and society.
What can we do?
We can start by recognizing all Biblical reading and interpretation is affected by the situation of the reader. but they continue to be dominated by ways of thinking in male-centered, white, European heritage. Especially in the case of race/ethnic identities, these points of view may not lie at the surface of the consciousness of the reader. But they must be probed in order to acknowledge the difficulties of recognizing privilege that racism causes.
Don’t silence marginal voices-lift them up, center them.
Confess your privilege.
Use your platform for anti racist policy and advocacy.
Transfer resources.
MLK letter to American Christians:
Yes America, there is still the need for an Amos to cry out to the nation: "Let judgement roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream."
May I say just a word to those of you who are struggling against this evil. Always be sure that you struggle with Christian methods and Christian weapons. Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love. Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. Always avoid violence. If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.
In your struggle for justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for injustices that he has heaped upon you. Let him know that you are merely seeking justice for him as well as yourself. Let him know that the festering sore of segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro.
Many persons will realize the urgency of seeking to eradicate the evil of segregation. There will be many Negroes who will devote their lives to the cause of freedom. There will be many white persons of goodwill and strong moral sensitivity who will dare to take a stand for justice. Honesty impels me to admit that such a stand will require willingness to suffer and sacrifice. So don't despair if you are condemned and persecuted for righteousness' sake. Whenever you take a stand for truth and justice, you are liable to scorn. Often you will be called an impractical idealist or a dangerous radical. Sometimes it might mean going to jail. (sometimes there may be protestors on the sidewalk-emphasis mine) If such is the case you must honorably grace the jail with your presence. Don't worry about persecution America, but stand in power and love.
Are we standing in power and love? Are we on the side of God?
I’d like to finish by reading the lyrics of a Bob Dylan tune, "With God On Our Side":
Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.
Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.
But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.
May we have the courage to ask questions, speak truth to power speak not out of timidity, but of love and stand on the side that God has been all along. Amen.
Scripture
2 Timothy 1:7-8
7 for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.
8 Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God,
Sermon
Our family has had a fantastic time being part of the Abbey community. It is great to see such support and validation for the things that we are deeply connected to and passionate about. We’ve learned so much from you and the voices that are brought to the Abbey to teach us. These social principles and the idea of the integrated social community strives to bring about justice in our everyday lives locally and globally. The Methodist social principle today is the social community and the rights of racial and ethnic persons.
The passage from 2nd Timothy is often understood as a pastoral letter meant to encourage the church and offer practical advice. We’d be wise to take to heart what it means not to have a spirit of timidity, but of power and of love and a sound mind.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that religion and education must change one’s internal feelings, but it is scarcely a moral act to encourage others to patiently accept injustice until a mans heart gets it right. With the wisdom of our social community, we can know what power, love and a sound mind can do.
Social community:
We affirm all persons as equally valuable in the sight of God. We therefore work toward societies in which each person’s value is recognized, maintained, and strengthened. We deplore acts of hate or violence against groups or persons based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, age, gender, disability, status, economic condition, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religious affiliation.
To deplore these acts and support human rights means that we have the opportunity to provide real stability in the lives of our community. Stability can be a real, tangible thing for us. Sometimes there is a conviction that can come along and disrupt our day to day lives, and that conviction is the desire for community.
The realization that we all need each other and committing to community and stability is never easy, but always worth fighting for. In todays society, sticking around is not a hot commodity. In some ways community and stability are the antithesis of the relentless seeking that is so prominent in the american dream. Community is a chance to settle down and find out who we really are. Community’s wisdom insists that growth depends on all of us rooting ourselves in a place with others. Most of us as modern people get uncomfortable talking about commitment and stability, we worry that vows like community can be dangerous.
Should we ever leave the place we are? I don’t know, but I trust we are able to best discern the call of God in the company of friends. The trouble is we can’t find community within ourselves alone. We have a desperate need to find something solid to give us bearings. Left to ourselves we will simply float along without something greater to ground our existence. Our fragmented lives easily become like that of an old house sitting on a poor foundation.
When we commit to community, which we can feel strongly the urge to do so, we are called into a tension. We are asked to commit to the practices of hospitality, listening, forgiveness and reconciliation, the daily tasks of life with other people.
Poet, author and agrarian Wendell Berry says, “Stability demands that we do the long, hard work of life with other people in the place where we are.”
I recall an experience about 10 years ago when my community had a coffeeshop/art gallery/church in the Benson neighborhood. We were coming to a time when we realized after 5 years that it was time to close up our physical location. We were out of money and felt burned out but were looking for the next evolution in our work in the Benson neighborhood. Two of our friends who lived above the coffee shop, Brad Hoshaw and Dan Cummings were sitting with me on the couch on a hot July day in the coffeeshop. I vividly remember Dan suggesting that we split the one beer he thought he may have in his fridge. So, he brought it down and the three of us split the 12 oz 90 shilling by O’Dell’s in little plastic kids drink cups. We reflected on our time together, the meaning that it had on our lives and how good it felt to sit in solidarity sipping on sort of skunky beer at 2 pm on a Tuesday. The moment on the couch reminds me that we don’t exactly know the plans that are ahead of us. Just six months before sitting together on the couch, I tweeted out “this year is going to be a great year for us in Benson. Exciting things to come!” We had no idea that just six months later we’d be closing our shop. That time on the couch was a distinct marker of a transition for all of us, that we were outgrowing one ideal and letting the intentionality of social community take us where it needed to lead us, which for me meant getting a “real job” for awhile, but staying rooted in community.
In a fast paced and fragmented world, we feel our need for community intensely. But the paradox of community is this: those of us who long for it most intensely are least capable of making the kind of commitments that make community possible. We feel the need for community because we sense that something is missing-that we’ve lost something essential. But like children who have never known their parents, the lack we feel so strongly makes us afraid, slow to commit, and unable to find the very thing we most want.
It doesn’t take long in community to realize that people are at times broken and in need of repair. The minute we realize this we are liable to think “I can name this problem much better than they can. Maybe I can fix them. We do this because we love them and we want these communities to be better. The problem is that people and communities are not like cars, they aren’t made to run just fine on their own.
This work of community is the work of everyone. In todays political climate it is easy to find your side and assume you are right. We can easily become defensive when called to check our assumptions or to recognize our own place of privilege and power. We assume God must be on our side. When we fall into this temptation we can start to build up fear based ideas about others and build up fortresses that keep us from interrogating ourselves.
When we isolate ourselves we are no longer able to bear witness to hope, hear the voice of those so often left on the sidelines and begin to convince ourselves that we’ve got it together. One of the most pervasive places I’ve seen this is when we talk about race.
It is easy to hear chants of “send her back” or read tweets about rat infested places and s-hole countries and pat ourselves on the back and say “I’m not like that.” Like most of you, I am concerned about the blurring of the lines between white nationalism and evangelicalism.
But this has always been the case in the history of the church, searching for power and control and keeping and building empire.
The work of anti-racism and dismantling white fragility is not only about the obvious racism, but in everyday racism, personally and structurally. It comes in subtle and sometimes invisible ways. Then events like yesterday happen and we still see the misery of racism. We had another senseless mass shooting by a terrorist. A white man walked into a mall and began shooting because of his racist motives. May the Lord have mercy on all of us and may we do more than we can imagine to dismantle the fear and intimation our leaders are pushing to keep their empire.
Are we okay with pay disparity? Housing discrimination? Preferring the candidates resume who has a name that is white sounding?
Our call is to not ask if God is on our side? We know the side that God is on, God stands with those who are on the other side of power, who are fighting against empire. Our task is to join them, lift and center their voice and provide resources and stand behind.
It is personal, social, political and therefore spiritual.
This past week I was part of design workshops along the N. 24th Street corridor. We were working with the community to develop strategies of housing affordability, racial justice, and access to transportation, jobs and public health. I met Lynette.
Lynette shared with me that she has lived in North Omaha her entire life, her grandkids also live in North Omaha. At this workshop was the first time she had heard of redlining, and structural housing discrimination. She and her community have been deeply and severely negatively impacted by racist policies and tactics that were sometimes overt and most of the time covert.
Fighting white fragility means asking ourselves how we feel knowing that for most of us, our wealth, stability and sense of place is due to the fact that we had access to credit, infrastructure and so on that others did not have and still today are missing. We are busy building our lives, preparing for college, sending our kids to school while others are just trying to survive and fear for their lives when pulled over by the police.
As a cisgendered white male, I must be the ideal person to share about racism. The theology of liberation is not a special interest theology. We all have a role to play. Pay attention to the lives of people who are experiencing grace under pressure. Paul says in 1st corinthians that we are a body, when one part of the body is suffering, we all suffer.
Centering whiteness, being complicit in everyday racism is part of contributing to the suffering of the body.
Why is it so difficult for us to talk about race? We get defensive. “I have a black friend!” “I voted for Obama!” We’ve allowed ourselves to be isolated from the impacts of racism. We rarely lament about the segregation in our communities and what we are missing. We can think we are exempt from the root causes of racism. We can have guilt that paralyzes us from taking action.
Standing in solidarity can help us find ways to make use of our differences for the common good. To see our role in making the body healthy.
God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power and love. This power fuels us to see racism and seek ways to take action. Once you let yourself see racism, you begin to see it all the time.
What can we do? The Methodist social principles give us some structure and guidance:
Rights of Racial and Ethnic Persons
Racism is the combination of the power to dominate by one race over other races and a value system that assumes that the dominant race is innately superior to the others. Racism includes both personal and institutional racism. Personal racism is manifested through the individual expressions, attitudes, and/or behaviors that accept the assumptions of a racist value system and that maintain the benefits of this system. Institutional racism is the established social pattern that supports implicitly or explicitly the racist value system. In many cultures white persons are granted unearned privileges and benefits that are denied to persons of color. We oppose the creation of a racial hierarchy in any culture. Racism breeds racial discrimination structurally and personally.
We assert the obligation of society and people within the society to implement compensatory programs that redress long-standing, systemic social deprivation of racial and ethnic persons. We further assert the right of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic persons to equal and equitable opportunities in employment and promotion; to education and training of the highest quality; to nondiscrimination in voting, access to public accommodations, and housing purchase or rental; to credit, financial loans, venture capital, and insurance policies; to positions of leadership and power in all elements of our life together; and to full participation in the Church and society.
What can we do?
We can start by recognizing all Biblical reading and interpretation is affected by the situation of the reader. but they continue to be dominated by ways of thinking in male-centered, white, European heritage. Especially in the case of race/ethnic identities, these points of view may not lie at the surface of the consciousness of the reader. But they must be probed in order to acknowledge the difficulties of recognizing privilege that racism causes.
Don’t silence marginal voices-lift them up, center them.
Confess your privilege.
Use your platform for anti racist policy and advocacy.
Transfer resources.
MLK letter to American Christians:
Yes America, there is still the need for an Amos to cry out to the nation: "Let judgement roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream."
May I say just a word to those of you who are struggling against this evil. Always be sure that you struggle with Christian methods and Christian weapons. Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love. Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. Always avoid violence. If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.
In your struggle for justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for injustices that he has heaped upon you. Let him know that you are merely seeking justice for him as well as yourself. Let him know that the festering sore of segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro.
Many persons will realize the urgency of seeking to eradicate the evil of segregation. There will be many Negroes who will devote their lives to the cause of freedom. There will be many white persons of goodwill and strong moral sensitivity who will dare to take a stand for justice. Honesty impels me to admit that such a stand will require willingness to suffer and sacrifice. So don't despair if you are condemned and persecuted for righteousness' sake. Whenever you take a stand for truth and justice, you are liable to scorn. Often you will be called an impractical idealist or a dangerous radical. Sometimes it might mean going to jail. (sometimes there may be protestors on the sidewalk-emphasis mine) If such is the case you must honorably grace the jail with your presence. Don't worry about persecution America, but stand in power and love.
Are we standing in power and love? Are we on the side of God?
I’d like to finish by reading the lyrics of a Bob Dylan tune, "With God On Our Side":
Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.
Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.
But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.
May we have the courage to ask questions, speak truth to power speak not out of timidity, but of love and stand on the side that God has been all along. Amen.
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