Badass Monastics: Saint Brigid

Sermon by Rev. Debra McKnight

July 12, 2020

Matthew 10: 40-42

40 "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. 41 Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; 42 and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward."

In this passage, Jesus is sending folks out in faith to practice what he taught them, and this is the nicest part of the chapter, most of it is hard news. Jesus is practicing a way of life that turns the status quo upside down. That’s why they can’t ask for payment, that’s why they can’t take an extra pair of shoes or a change of clothes, that’s why they can’t take a staff for self defense. They are going out vulnerable to change the world. And even through they are going to help folks…Jesus reminds them this will be a point of contention. His understanding of God will set Daughter against Mother, Son against Father and Daughter-in-law against Mother-in-law, which is to say people you love are going to post some things that make you wildly mad on Facebook…okay, so it doesn’t say that, but it does say that the relationships you have are going to be hard as you push against the status quo for a dream of something more. The Disciples share this message with every Christian to follow. The saints and monastics, the Popes and priests all grappled with this in one way or another. We are in a season of exploring with monastics…particularly the badass abbesses who found their way in the world..even if it put them at odds with their kin. 

St. Brigid (Brigit, Brid) once said something like, “Heaven is a lake of Beer, every drop is a prayer and all the people dance merrily on the shore.” She is a Fifth Century Abbess and saint of the church and the stories of her life are woven through with legend and lore. The first writings about her date likely 100 years past her death, and while they may carry their own agendas, we can find her in the kernels of truth that inspire folks to follow her light yet today. While people in the places of power are deciding and debating what is orthodox or right during the 5th Century, she is practicing. While men write creeds she sets the table, churns the butter, prays for abundance, puts herself in the story and invites everyone to share. 

She dwells on the margins of Christian Tradition and lives at the edge of Europe where the the Romans and the church (that would become the Roman Catholic church) begins to weave its way into the life of her people. Her father is a Druid leader, perhaps a chief, and her mother is likely enslaved to her father. From the very start of her life, a Druid predicts she will be a child of radiance and names a special child will come to this enslaved woman. She is known for light and miracles surround her even as the brutal realities of life surround her. Her father sells or sends away Brigid and her mother, some say she churns so much butter she liberates them both and they find their way home. One way or another, and certainly we may never know the facts of her life as much as we are invited to imagine. However, her family, now back under one roof, begins to see her gifts for giving and generosity…even if they wish they didn’t. She is giving food and clothing away and anything else that can be of help to the folks who need it. It so irritates her father that he sets off to sell her in slavery to, or make her a bride of, a local King. I am not sure what the differences are between the two realities, but it doesn’t matter. Because while her father is making a deal with the King, Brigid gives his prized bejeweled sword away to help folks in need. Some stories suggest it feeds a family and some suggest it helps heal a man with leprosy. At the end of the day, the truth rests in helping folks and by the very next day the King sends Brigid home. Her family finally allows her to follow her heart into monastic life even as they were hoping to capitalize on her beauty and radiant eyes. 

She sets her sights on creating community and all of the miracles she embodies draw us to see the sacred in the everyday, the ordinary is extraordinary with Brigid; butter, jam, bacon, feasts, milk and beer are the means of grace. She is ordained and rather than as a nun, the Bishop ordains her a Bishop, perhaps on accident…and apparently he can’t take it back, not that he wanted to. Fire, like a pillar reaches to heaven and the church will bless her leadership of two Abbey’s one in which she herself oversees men. A woman Abbess in-charge without a male Abbot or Priest to oversee her, where she can preach and she supervises the spiritual and organizational life of male monks…that in a life of miracles is probably the most extraordinary miracle of all. 

Her monastic community practices hospitality. Day and night that is the work that shapes and reshapes life. And to do this she needs space, she is exceedingly domestic and her work needs space for tables to be set and barns for cows to be milked. Domestic work is sacred work. Celtic Spirituality blends the sacred with the every moment…prayers for milking cows, prayers for locking the door, prayers for making the bed…every moment is this possibility of mindful space with Brigid. Brigid’s work requires space and to build her community she asks a King for land and he, of course, says no and she prays for him. He has no interest in giving her the land. Then she asks, “Would he give her the land that she can cover with her cloak?” Of course he agrees, I imagine he does so with a smirk. She pulls the cloak from her shoulders and the legends say the cloak stretches, perhaps being pulled by women, running each of the cardinal directions…as it covers hillsides the King agrees to gift her the space she needs. 

She creates an Abbey Church community and they are famous for jams and butter, for hospitality. With Bridget there is more butter than is needed, with Brigid when she gives away bacon to a dog the cook finds the two strips in the pot, with Bridget scraps are woven together into a feast. She asks the cook to prepare a feast, but the cook responds that the Abbey kitchen doesn’t have any of the ingredients she seeks. Brigid sends the cook to pray while she sweeps the kitchen, then goes to pray herself. They return to a feast. With Bridget butter is replaced, bacon is in the pot, stones become salt, water become milk and rather than wine..water also becomes beer. Water becomes beer and sometimes so much beer that she can serve 18 parish churches. I’m not sure how many people that is exactly, but I imagine the oral tradition around these stories means its an impressive amount of beer. With Bridget the lesson of God is there is abundance, there is more than enough. Maybe we don’t feel that way with our time and our budgets but Bridget reminds us to look again for something possible to emerge. 

In her text, In the Sanctuary of Women: A Companion for Reflection and Prayer, Jan Richardson writes of Bridget that, “Hospitality is an action that goes against logic, against what makes sense. It goes beyond what may be convenient or conventional in extending hospitality we acknowledge our resources are not our own, that everything belongs to God” (p101). The stories of the past are powerful if they live in the present and the purpose of divining to the life of this Celtic Saint is not because she so far away from our present, but because we might draw from the well of her experience and practice hospitality as well. Her gifts of healing and hospitality invite us to see her within our own lives and to look at scraps and to turn them into abundance in our own time. 

She not only teaches by modeling hospitality, she preaches and invites us to dive into the the Bible. She shares stories and visions where she is a part of the story, not just reading the narrative, but finding a way into the life of Christ. She will provide food for Mary and Joseph as they travel, she will serve as Mary’s midwife birthing Jesus, and caretaker of the infant Jesus. She explores the stories of faith in her own way, not just seeing herself in the diversity of existing characters but finding a way beyond time to place herself into the story. As Herod’s troops come to find Jesus in Bethlehem she dawns a wreath of candles and dances to distract the soldiers while the holy family escapes as refugees to Egypt. 

This woman, whom echoes a Pre-Chrisitan Goddess, embodies hospitality and places herself at the table with Mary and Joseph as she more than reads the stories of faith. She invites us to see ourselves in the story and the sacred in the ordinary, with Brigid butter and milk, beer and bacon become holy. She spans time and dreams, how she dreams of showing up for Christ is how she shows up for the people right in front of her. It's how she builds an Abbey community rather turning her gifts into profits and wealth for herself alone. May we have the courage to see others as Christ, to set the table, give the bacon and share the butter knowing there will be more. May we have the courage to risk and dream and walk through the thin spaces to find the abundance of God’s grace. May it be so. Amen. 

P.S. If you are looking for more, I can’t recommend In the Sanctuary of Women: A companion for Reflection and Prayer highly enough. Jan L. Richardson offers a beautiful way to explore women of the past, if she was a tour guide she would be Rick Steves. She is poetic and thoughtful at every turn and your will love the way she invites you to explore your present narratives in women like Brigid and Hildegard and Eve and the Desert Mothers and more. It is a devotional with real substance, no substitutes or cheap theological or historical additives. She makes academic research find meaning and I am ever grateful I found this book. I hope you will be, too. 

If you are looking to explore Celtic Spirituality consider Thomas O’Loughin’s Journeys on the Edges or Esther De Waal’s The Celtic Way of Prayer: The Recovery of the Religious Imagination. Of course, you can find a number of interesting resources online , including a Modern community formed around St. Brigid and founded by a Methodist Clergy Woman.

Badass Monastics: Catherine of Siena

Garden Party Sermon: July 19, 2020

Rev. Debra McKnight

Catherine is born as the first wave of what we now call the Black Death is sweeping across Europe and into North Africa from Asian trade routes. Fuel is added to this season of sickness by poverty, war, and famine. Modern scientists and scholars may have even pointed to a moment of climate change. When Catherine and her twin are born, her mother had already birthed 22 children. A lifetime of pregnancy and in the midst of waiting for birth, her family has witnessed the death of half of its children. Their loss is not unusual or extraordinary. It is a grim time in history and Angola di Tura of Siena writes a year after her birth in 1348:


“Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through    the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices ... great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night ... And as soon as those ditches were filled more were dug ... And I, Agnolo di Tura ... buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”


In this grim world, Catherine is a bright spot. Her parents are laborers in the art of wool dying and her mother might be poetic. When they see Catherine’s broad and easy smile and joyful presence, they name her “little gayety.” Her father delights in her giving food and such to folks that need it around her, and folks who write about her tell stories of how she, as a child, imagines a monastic life over the life of a princess. At seven, putting bread under her arm and heading out to find a cave to be a hermit. Apparently this little one marching out of the city gate to the nearby hillsides doesn’t stay there forever. She dreams of a monastic life, even as she is vibrant and young and beautiful. Her long blonde hair was rare in northern Italy and, even through Barbie dolls were 500+ years away, somehow in the 14th century, long blonde locks were the height of beauty. Catherine may be flirting with life in the church, but her mother wants her to marry. In fact, eventually she wants her to marry her sister’s widower. Catherine watches her beloved older sister die in childbirth and, if she was on the fence before, she is no longer. She wants a life of celibacy and a life of a monastic. She refuses to marry and, to prove her point, she cuts off her beautiful hair and begins to cover her head like a monastic. At long last, her family gives up on containing her call and she dives into her adventure. 


She joins a community of laywomen, the Mantellates, most of whom are the age of her grandma. They seem unsure  of what to do with this young, beautiful woman and they are not the only ones. She has ecstatic experiences of God; she shares what she hears and her wild visions and she attracts a crowd (and perhaps some concern). She chats with everyone, including priests, monks, and a woman who works as a prostitute. Some folks delight in these moments and interactions; they remember them and are changed by them: like one young, wealthy man who commits to fidelity to his wife and a cleric who said he had theology, but not the spirit. Catherine is drawing attention and folks are getting nervous because they can’t manage her voice. Leaders resort to the easiest way to discredit her integrity: stop her progress and silence her. They call her a “slut” (well, that’s not the exact word they use, but it’s the one we use today when we do the same thing). They accuse her of having sex with the priests and the monks, rather than believing that they find her a worthy theological conversation partner. They say she is faking her experiences of God. They ban her from communion and push her from the church. Even the people she helped with food and clothing fail to support her in public. But she will not stop. She submits to an invasive vaginal exam to prove her innocence and eventually the community that feared her, embraces her. 



By 20, she has formed a famiglia - a community that supports her - and it is a wildly diverse community: lay and clergy, monks and bankers, wealthy ladies and folks in poverty are all around her and they all call her “Sweet Mother.” At 27, her community will be recognized and she will be named its leader by the Dominican order. These folks flocked to her radiant energy long before the full approval of the church. She had a faith based in visions and static experiences. She preached from her learnings that God was the sea and we like the fish. She called God a fool for love; for loving such imperfect creatures, prone to such inhumanity at times. She preached in conversation, “What is my nature, you unfathomable love?” She asked God and then she answered for God to preach for us, “It is fire, because you yourself are nothing but a fire of love. God was fire of love and she spoke of herself as blood and fire. She struggles with severe mental health, which I imagine in a world of plague, war, and poverty she can not be alone in this struggle and trauma. She takes this heartbreak to God and envisions Christ with her; with her in a vision of divine marriage and ring of skin only she could see. She writes to Christ: “ My Lord, where were you when my whole life was filled with horrors?” And she answers for him, “I was in your heart.” She envisions Christ in her heart quite literally as she has a vision of Christ placing his heart within her chest and a dialogue that calls her to action. “You shouldn’t be useful only to yourself, but to others as well, and for that I, too give you my grace. But I don’t send you away from me - on the contrary, love for people will bind you still more solely to me.” 


Her faith draws her from prayer to service, with deep care for those in poverty and those in hospitals. She says, you can’t pray for peace and ignore the sounds of war. So she gets political. She writes 380 letters and she isn’t even literate until later in life. She is the daughter of a laborer and reading is a privilege in her world. So she dictates letters to people across Europe and biographers will write of how she could dictate a letter with brilliant arguments, vivid Tuscan poetic images, and sound theology - all without a pause or a reminder if she already said this or that. She writes shoemakers and Popes with the same direct spirit. Her faith teaches her that everyone is small and no one is too important or too powerful for her to write. She writes the Pope and, rather than addressing him with some high title or even Mr. Pope or just Gregory, she calls him “My Sweet Daddy.” It may not mean the same thing as it does today, but there is something badass about a wool dyer’s illiterate daughter writing the most powerful man in the world and assuming they have a relationship that he should tend to and care about. She calls him “My Sweet Daddy” but her letters are never very sweet. She does not hem and haw on the fence about “oh, you are so amazing and it would be so nice if you would consider the possibility of maybe doing this thing that would help a few people, and of course, they would think you are amazing.” She lays it all out, she calls him the name of family and then tells him to stop being a “fearful baby, be a man.” She writes “The reform of the church is the most urgent and important task” and when she writes this, it means a reform of church and state for the betterment of the most vulnerable. She names selfishness as the cause of the desolate condition for the church and states that “wretched selfishness has poisoned the whole world and the mystical body of Christ.” She calls the clerics “Parasites and bloodsuckers of the soul” that “blather away in unbridled vanity and are only after the good life.” She writes, “You are not aromatic flowers, but the stench that contaminates the whole world.” She quips that church leaders are blades of straw rather than pillars of the church, that the bishops are bloated with pride and she chides priests for dealing ruthlessly with their fellow man and woman while filling their bellies and decorating their rooms. The whole world is struggling with poverty. Violence and greed and ego are at the root and she is biased the way Jesus is biased: for the poor and vulnerable. She is direct at every turn and, even when the Pope makes changes, she wants more. Sometimes leaders will attempt to use her voice for their agenda, but her agenda will always be the poor of Europe. She will be disappointed even when she wrote, “Do Not Disappoint Me” and she will feel surrounded by a world of Pilates referencing Jesus’ crucifixion when all of these men fail over and over to let go of power and make real change in the world. We read her today, a peasant girl with a sharp voice, and stand amazed that she is invited to high places to speak her mind even more directly against war, violence and greed. 




I love hearing her call powerful people out.  Perhaps you do, as well. Perhaps we can all take courage in our history as Christians when we follow in their path and remind our own leaders to stop “blathering away in unbridled vanity;” to stop being fearful babies. I believe this is a gift she offers us but, even as a Saint, she is not perfect. She will advocate for the Crusades, one of the most vile moments in Christian history. She, in a sense, does this to draw the waring practices of European leaders away from one another and to focus together on a new mission of Jerusalem under Christian rule. It’s an ugly vision (at least for us today) and I think it is a sign of how deep the violence seeps into us when it is all around us. She also has a theology that is hard on the body; her body in particular. Ascesticism is not new in the 14th century and I believe her practices are the culmination of a theology that emerges with the Church fathers about 1000 years before her birth; a theology that struggles with the body and sees the spirit as not only separate, but preferred. This drive to control the body (or even punish rather than celebrate it) means that her zeal for fasting will lead to starving herself; at some points in her life only eating communion. She will whip herself, sometimes even with chains. These are not practices I can understand or encourage. I think they speak to the harsh world in which folks are living - where life is often bleak and life has little value. So like all humans, there are gifts and there are learnings that teach us a lesson for our time even if we do not follow it exactly. We can take her deep faith, her commitment to justice, her courage to call for the truth and even her bright smile, but we don’t have to hold people as perfect, even Saints. We can love her fire and leave her theology of “Holy Hatred” of her self behind. 


I leave you with this final invitation to her voice. It is a bit modified quote that I think we can understand her hopes of what reform of self and the world might mean for us today. “When people overcome their own ego and they rejoice over every kind of person they meet, varieties please them better than the uniformity of the sort of people who would all go the same way. And God’s greatness is much more readily visible this way.” 


May we have the courage to speak up, to not listen to the world when it tries to put us in our place, and may we have the relentless fire of God’s great love sparked within when we need it most. May it be so. Amen. 


P.S. Interested in reading more? Well, you can Google her, the Black Death, and you may love God’s Gentle Rebels by Christian Feldmann. There are history text books that have a bit of footnotes and at least give a sense of the context, but Feldmann is a good story teller and fun to read. Thanks to Rev. Dr. Jane Florence for introducing me to her [Catherine of Siena] and even once comparing me to her, though I would never cut my hair.

Prayers of the People for COVID, Part II

Prayers of the People for COVID, Part II

Rev. Debra McKnight

For Exhaustion; the work of not working, the work of thinking and re-thinking, the energy devoted to deciding what to do, what risk to take and what level of engagement is safe. For being exhausted with being home, exhausted with worry, exhausted with being alone, exhausted while working with children begging to play or talk or draw or dream. For the weight of waiting, for the plans made and unmade, for the longing, the worry and the loneliness in a season when nothing seems easy and everything puts us all on edge; grant a deep breath of peace, a moment of centering and discernment on what we really need.  

For Grief at the loss of those beloved and those known only in numbers, stats and stories on tv, for loss of hugs and gatherings and connections we need, for the milestones and moments we missed, for tear stained faces and hearts weary with worry, for nurses holding hands for one last breath, for loss heaped on loss and grief upon grief, grant us healing that we may both receive and also be caregivers and companions on this uncertain road.

For Anger in the face of blatantly cruelty guised as policy enforced as rules, for inhumanity squelching breath and stealing life without a shred of accountability, for white supremacy flying high in Air Force One, for profiting from human pain, for healthcare paid for by church spaghetti feed, go-fund me or medical bankruptcy; for immeasurable lies, for fake news, for every injustice that keeps us all from being free; grant us righteous rage to strike like lightning and finish the American symphony.

For Gratitude in the face of struggle, for phone calls and zoom connections, for laughter that sings straight from the soul or quite moments outside, for blossoms, butterflies and babies that remind us God’s determination for life, for researchers and therapists, doctors and nurses, for caregivers and mask wearers, for words of love that sew hope through our veins, songs that sooth and resilience seeded in our very souls, for bold leaders calling us forward and momentum to change; grant us eyes to glimpse God’s love and give thanks.

For this pregnant pause of on the way to making all things new, the labor pains of new life, the hope held tight that we can heal the wounds we make, grant us the courage to push when the midwife calls and grant us a pause to breathe deep, renew our hearts and fortify our hopes for the work at hand.

For those we name aloud and in our hearts….
for those named and unnamed, let us pray to God, saying,

Loving God, hear our prayer.

Little Crumbs to Abundant Love

Rev. Debra McKnight's Reflection

June 28, 2020

This is an awkward text. A woman approaches Jesus, her child is sick; she asks him for help and he calls her a dog.  She has come to find him, sought him out, broken all the gender norms and approached him at the table. Begged him for help, called him Lord, and he called her a Dog.  

We might say, well he was tired, he was trying to go unnoticed. Maybe he needed a break? Maybe? We are pretty familiar with ‘the perfect’ Jesus who says let the little children come to me, the Jesus that heals people, feeds people and welcomes the outcast. The Jesus that eats with the tax collectors and prostitutes, the Jesus that touches the unclean and sends lepers home well.  Honestly, this cold foulmouthed Jesus, who insults a woman in her hour of need, just doesn't go with our perfect image of Jesus. When we ask the question “what would Jesus do?”, we never think, oh, he would call you a dog or that he would use a pejorative slur. That’s right calling her a dog is more than just being a jerk, it's a religious-ethnic slur.  

It’s a familiar pejorative for Jesus. It relates, in part, to the woman’s religious community. Ancient people thought the Cynics were aggressive, and loud, and even shameless in their opposition to social norms, they were dogs (Mary Ann Tolbert, Mark, Women’s Bible Commentary).  She is a part of a non-Jewish upper class, her daughter’s sick bed is not a peasant’s pallet (krabbatos): they are free-citizens of Tyre. Her people eat well. They fill their bellies with the grains grown in Galilee, while Jewish peasants working in the fields hunger (Rhoads, 370.). It is in this setting that a Gentile woman asks a Jewish man for help and Jesus in all of his humanity and divinity, responds saying “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the little dogs.” And given the context of pain, that might seem a reasonable response. It just doesn’t seem very much like Jesus. 

And to make it worse, Jesus calls her a doglet, a little dog.  He takes the pejorative from the culture and adds a diminutive. He had to add ‘little.' It’s like the -line of Frauline or the ita/ito in Spanish or the little before Debbie, not that I would know personally.  All of which can be used out of affection by a parent but also as a way of making people feel small or insignificant; little can put people in their place. 

He calls her a doglet and I have to wonder if the slur even shocked her, because without missing a beat she responds, “Sir, even the dogs eat the little crumbs from the master’s table.” With quick wit she turns his metaphor on its head. She strikes like lightning, brilliant and quick. She’s not begging anymore, she doesn’t appeal to pity or fairness, she is makes a theological statement (Matthew L. Skinner, “She departed to her house”: Another Dimension of the Syrophoenician Mother’s Faith in Mark 7:24-30”, Word and World, Vol 26, Number 1, Winter 2006, (pgs 14-22) p17).  She says God is bigger than your vision and somehow he listens. Somehow he lets the walls down and changes. Who is he to ration God’s gifts. Who is he to set a boundary at God’s table and turn someone away. He grows in his ministry. His faith in the abundance of God means no more crumbs for anyone at God’s table.  She challenges him and it goes directly to his values, does he really believe in God’s abundance and offer crumbs or worse refuse them? 

She has the best line of the whole story. This book is about Jesus, he’s supposed to have the good lines, deliver the witty prophetic response, share the hard truth in profoundly simple earth shaking metaphors and she schools him. She is the only person to push back on Jesus and change him. The Religious leaders push back, the political leaders push back, and sometimes even the disciples push back. None of them change Jesus. He will answer their questions with questions, he will quote the scripture, he will give them another parable, he will get the whole town so upset they want to stone him and sometimes he will turn over the tables and send the money changers out to prove his point. What is it about this woman and her challenge that makes him change, he lowers his defenses and hears this woman’s critique.  He doesn’t try to prove why he is right or why she is wrong…like most of us would…I’ve heard. He receives this challenge and is better for it. 

It’s hard for us to imagine Jesus learning, it's hard to imagine him needing to. We like to claim the prepackaged perfect Jesus, the one who says the right thing.  I wonder if we shy away from this earthy, real man because this Jesus holds us more accountable than the perfect one. Perfect Jesus just might take care of everything for us, but this human Jesus growing asks us to do the same. If Jesus has to grow, we have to grow, as well. If Jesus has to rethink his assumptions and his language, we do, too. Growing is painful and challenging, often it’s just too much work. We are in a collective space of growth, a moment in history that requires us to grow into the values we think we possess, and I just am not sure how we will come out of it. 

I have been struggling with how Jesus changed. He changed his mind and his heart in almost a moment and then changed the course of his ministry. Suddenly he wasn’t just focused on the children of Israel, suddenly his ministry was to the whole of humanity. I have been thinking about how we open and how we close, how we change and if we can change. And as I watch folks post things on social media, I often think, we need a class for this. We could fix this crisis with some better Social Studies curriculum or a program or a book. I have a bias. I was a Social Studies teacher before seminary and learning was what changed and challenged and broke my heart over and over. I keep thinking if folks understood the 1930’s in light of the 1920’s we could chart a better economic course. If folks understood the impact of Woodrow Willson showing Birth of A Nation from our highest office leads to blood and violence we could understand the impact of the President today. If folks understood that even the most progressive legislation that raised folks out of poverty furthered White Supremacy. If we just had better social studies classes that didn’t just go from the Revolutionary war to the Civil War to World War Two or focused on critical thinking and research skills rather than memorizing dates. When I was preparing to teach, there were some states that teachers couldn’t even say civil war, they had to say the war between the states, and you can imagine where those states are located. We have so much work to do on really understanding the violence of our past and the choices folks have made at each step. History is heartbreaking and most of our textbooks don’t share the heartbreak or even make it interesting. I keep thinking, we have a thinking problem and that we could really solve a lot of our struggles with “A Moment of Zinn” and I mean Howard Zinn. 

I keep thinking this is a thinking moment. But, I am not sure thinking is really going to save us. We are in a place where one debunked paper can upend previously solid vaccination practices. We are in a time when one outlying story or voice can challenge statistics or science that show a vast impact. We are in a place where conspiracy theories and fake news get around fast. We are in a place where masks are political. We can’t apply the same line of thought to different concerns. Often the same folks who name they are “pro-life’ are not shouting for children separated from their parents at our southern border, they are not marching against the death penalty, demanding more funding for education and less incarceration, access to healthcare, the end of police brutality or military conflict and more. We can’t have a nuanced conversation about life and what is life giving, we can’t even have a conversation about black lives being taken without folks reacting as though reform and accountability are anti-police or that somehow this is in conflict with all lives mattering.

I keep thinking this is about thinking, but I wonder if it is more about feeling. We don’t have to be Doris Kerns Goodwin to know that something is amiss when Lincoln is pictured in a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat.  There is something visceral in the conversations of the moment that I don’t think a program or a history course can impact. Perhaps life was better before social media or cable news, but it's a place where we see folks grappling and debating without the real presence of one another. It is a minefield and it is heartbreaking to see people you love post things that feel so hurtful. Everything is a struggle. I see people posting sarcastic comments about how can people be so offended by a syrup bottle or a rice box, but they are clearly offended by this change, or frankly, they wouldn’t be mocking it. Minimizing its importance or questioning this action. This is clearly more than a rebrand, somehow that syrup bottle changing matters even to them and perhaps they don’t quite want to think about it.

Resmaa Menakem, a therapist with a deep focus around trauma and the body, speaks of how our bodies inherit the trauma from those generations before us, all of us, those in white bodies and those in bodies of culture, as he says. He notes how challenges or moments of interaction might make us uncomfortable, perhaps even enraged, how we inherited generations of violence and sacristy and desire for safety. His work asks folks to sit with their being, to notice their feelings, their rage, their worry, their fear after interactions. Perhaps some moments don’t get past our protective lizard brain to our thinking brain. He works with people and asks them to do their own work. To breathe deeply and reflect after interactions or in the midst of rage. What does it mean to feel anger about the phrase Black Lives Matter? What is happening when you feel angry or hurt or afraid perhaps it's not even an interaction with a person, but rebranding a syrup bottle that is causing some kind of gut response. 

Menakem speaks about elders, not just folks who grow old, but folks who are comfortable in their being. People who have done this deep work of reflecting on their presence in hard spaces and they carry wisdom that not only attract us to listen, but models this work of self reflection and practice that gives us pause before we act or re-act. I wonder if this is why Jesus can change. He has done the work of praying, centering, listening to God’s nudges and reading the stories of those who have gone before. He has sat with all kinds of folks and is practicing his commitment to life that is abundant for all people. So, when this woman challenged him, he didn’t wall up or send her a meme to put her in her place or say something smart or rude or angry. He changed. Her challenge made him look at the values he thought he believed and he practiced living and then he saw how he missed the mark. He changed his ministry, his door opened wide and the table invited more people to feast. He changed his ministry. Her critique landed and he grew ever more surely himself. 

The values of our country are exposed. We have work to do if we intend to live into the values of our founding. This work is hard, it requires us to dig in deeply and reflect on who we are if we are going to be who we are called to be. May we have the courage to hear the challenge that will make us grow, may we have the courage to get comfortable in our skin and to grow into the people God created us to be. May it be so, Amen.