Category Archives: social justice

paradox

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I’m speaking at a rally at the State Capital on Thursday.  It’s a rally in support of a notion that seems a no-brainer:  that all God’s children ought have the ability to live with their beloveds in such a way that they are accorded civic rights assumed by heterosexual couples.

It is a paradox.  In an age and time when our communities are desperate for the living of lives based upon love and mutual respect, there seems an insatiable desire to condemn same-gender-loving people.  Energies and money sorely needed for the growth of grace are expended trying to circle the moral wagons around an institution seemingly under attack from “those people”:  “Those people” who go to work, raise children, pay taxes, and love deeply people of their same gender.

Why the fear?  Will the house of cards based upon culturally mandated roles come tumbling down if same-sex marriages are accorded full rights and respect?  If gays and lesbians are allowed to marry, how does this threaten anyone?  In an age when nearly 50% of heterosexual marriages end in divorce, what would happen if our society’s collective angst were put to use supporting all couples and families?

Some fifty years from now, we will wonder that such injustice against our GLBT brothers and sisters went on.  Our grandchildren will wonder how it was unequal rights were explained and assumed.

In the meantime, rallies are scheduled and advocacy shared because the circle of grace threatens to be made smaller and smaller by the very folk who claim to speak for the heart of our expansive God.

It’s a paradox.

new life for all

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I have been asked to preach at a service of ordination.

I’m terrified and thrilled and moved and honored and oh, so hopeful.  The woman being ordained has been a pastor for years.  She has led and blessed and moved and witnessed as a whole woman of God in a denomination that welcomes her wholeness.

But she had to search far from home to find that denomination.  Because she is a same-gender-loving woman, she has been forced to wander through many places of parch and pain until she found herself in the Metropolitan Community Church where she was welcomed and is welcomed and there she has been.

And, her heart kept calling her home; home to the Lutheran church which, until a year or so ago, would not welcome the full glory of her being.

She is coming home on Sunday.  She will be ordained in the ELCA, a denomination willing to pray and ground and be in the way of Jesus; inclusive and welcoming of All God’s Children.

This is weeping material for my heart.  I feel such gratitude for her courage and tenacious belief that the church can be grace.  I feel hope for a world in which the church is willing to be living grace.  I feel humbled by the preaching task and honored and I pray so very fervently that some day my church, the United Methodist Church, will allow the floodgates of grace to open for all of God’s beloveds.

We need that washing of grace.

clarity

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The amount of money that goes into the misinformation of the American people is far vaster and far more enthusiastically spent than that which goes into the education of the American people. Stuart Ewen

 

Sometimes words land in my belly with the power of a clenched fist.  The above quote is one such collection of words.  I groaned when I read them, because they seem all too true.  Perhaps it is the word “enthusiastically” that hurts the most.

Our nation has been involved in a time of intense mourning and grief, followed within seconds by a time of intense finger pointing and dissembling.  The violence unleashed on a street corner in Arizona has touched us all.  As has the aftermath of that violence.

This Sunday is Human Relations Sunday in the United Methodist Church.  It is also the Sunday when we as a nation celebrate the message and ongoing witness of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The poignancy of considering human relations within the sloggy air of these political and cultural times is piercing.  I have held the task of preaching this Sunday to my heart and have given thanks while being daunted.

I am daunted because we have each been nourished on a steady diet of enthusiastically marketed misinformation.  How do we find truth in the miasma of spin and vitriol?

I am thankful because the core teaching that grounds any preacher’s task is the gospel of the Christ.  Over and over and over again Jesus teaches us to be open to others, to know our common heart beat, to see the holy that walks with each and to know that we are incomplete until all are invited to the table of grace and attention.

I will admit that I am afraid.  The above quote would indicate that we as citizens are more willing to be manipulated than educated.  We go along, it seems, content to huddle with our like-minded like children huddled in snow forts lobbing snow balls over the ramparts.

It’s not enough.  It isn’t enough for us as citizens of this nation.  And surely it is far from enough for those of us seeking to live the teachings of Jesus.

It’s time to put the snow balls down.  It’s time to leave the cocoon of our forts.  It’s time to breathe the sharp and clean air of grown up engagement.

sniff

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I forget. I flat-out forget.

I forget that I am a woman pastor and that somehow my gender combined with my role is offensive to some.

I forget.  And then I run into the barbed wire of suspicion or the distaste of those who are quite clear in their minds and expressed sentiments that I am abomination.

I will admit that it wounds, this sniffing around my being for the sure-to-be-found pollution lurking in my unseemly-vocationed self.  Barely hidden sneers, voiced longings for the “good old days” when pastors were men and a man could have a pastor, the boycotting of community based in some part upon the gender of the Lead Pastor; all are real and on good days they roll off the sure of my soul that speaks of God’s calling of me to this work.

But some days, I gets tired.  Some days, I ache for a world in which we are seen as the Christ first, and the dreaded other, second.  Some days I want to let fly my anger about being assumed upon.  Some days I want to weep, knowing that what I am living is a picnic compared to my sisters who have gone before.

And the waste of the power of the Holy is ongoing.

a day in the life

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One hundred and fifty people came to Richfield UMC today.  Each left with two bags of food, a birthday bag, a children’s book, and please God, a sense that the community of Jesus followers do more than talk about justice and grace.

We have come to know each other through the years of fourth Saturday food ministry.  We work side by side to unload the truck, sort food, bag potatoes and onions and today, briny hard-boiled eggs.  We communicate with smiles and broken English and while we spend this time together there is so much we do not know about the lives lived outside the doors of the church.

People leave with bags of groceries.  We feel good about that.  But as important for the privileged that call our church home, we have a sense of who the often unseen neighbors are who are made in the image of our creator God.

One woman told me today of her dying husband, her incarcerated son, her battered body, and her sense of impending doom as the months tick by before she has to vacate her home.  I watched English-speaking and Spanish-speaking youth work together to sort and distribute bags of goodies provided by the Richfield Rotary.  They had a job to do and savored the work and the gift of partnership.

Following the food distribution I visited a member of the church who has been in the world of dementia for years.  She had fallen and broken a hip, survived the surgery, and on the other side had begun to fail.  When I entered her room her daughter was there and her eyes lit up and while her words indicated her presence in another realm, her eyes communicated joy and life and oh, to be witness to the love of a daughter and the spirit of a woman some ninety years old.  I left blessed.

There are zillions of questions to answer, prayers to breathe, a sermon to write, chores to be done and wonder to be named. 

This life called ministry is rich beyond the telling.

stress

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The gnarl is near constant:

How is it that we as followers of Jesus are grounded in the biblical vision of justice and to speak of such things is near blasphemy?

I hear almost weekly of those who boycott worship at church because of perceived “politics”.   They don’t want to hear so much about the growing and glaring inequity between the rich and poor.  They don’t want to hear about the teachings of Jesus that have to do with serving as societal corrective to the mad romp for power and privilege which seems to be our assumed due.  The cry of the earth and the inclusion of the outcast are voices to be muted whilst pew sitting since to speak of biblical vision is to collude with some sort of political conspiracy.

Oh.  When the voices of the prophets as sounded through scripture and throughout the ages are unwelcome in our sanctuaries, we are on rocky ground.

It is tightrope walk, this living of the gospel.  Nets we have, but the wobble of stepping out is real.  God grant us the courage for the living of these days.

so different

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Bishop Desmond Tutu said this:

“Unless we work assiduously so that all of God’s children, our brothers and sisters, members of one human family, all will enjoy basic human rights, the right to a fulfilled life, the right of movement, the freedom to be fully human, within a humanity measured by nothing less than the humanity of Jesus Christ Himself, then we are on the road inexorably to self-destruction, we are not far from global suicide – and yet it could be so different.”

Would that Pentecost be unleashed by the people of Jesus.  Would that we found a way to stop sniping at each other and instead saw the Holy in all.  Would that we let go of fear and opened to possibility.  Would that the church be grace and light, joy and delight; affirming the unique shine of each.

Why are the people of Jesus so shuttered and closed?  We know the Way.  Would that we lived it.

again and still: humility

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I am blessed to be colleague with a pastor very different from me.

Phillip was born in Vietnam.  He came to know the power of Jesus and knew from that moment on that he could not be still; even in Communist Vietnam, even at the risk of his freedom and life, even when jailed, even when cast adrift as a boat person, even and thank God, now.

Phillip serves here as the Vietnamese Language minister.  His congregation is new.  Members of his church are first generation immigrants and their children.  Some speak English fluently; many over the age of twenty do not.  They are members of Richfield UMC and there is much to be learned from them about what it means to be thrown into a new culture, language, customs and mores.

And there is much to be learned through them about this thing called being a Christian.

What I am moved by is the power of wonder and how that transforms faith.  For Phillip and his congregation, being a right-out-loud Christian is yet a marvel.  It is gift, this walk with Jesus, and sharing the gift has the urgency of life unbound. 

I am humbled.  I am humbled by the ways my brother Phillip and his congregation share their witness.  The teachings of Jesus are shared with  joy and gratitude and newness of life and when did the mainline church become so bored by transformation that we lost our urgency?

I am humbled.  God sends into our lives those who jiggle complacency and so it is for me.  Again and still, I grow in the rich loam of humility.