And to that, we ring out “Merry Christmas” and sing out “Joy to the world!”

New babies simply do that, we know: inspire laughter, smiles, and celebrations.

This baby, though, this baby ushered in joy of cosmic magnitude.

Jesus brought joy to bear not just on the woman who bore him, but to all who encountered him with openness to his presence.

His name, of course (Iēsous [Ἰησοῦς]) means “he saves.”

Of course, Christians believe that Jesus saves, but we’ve tended to tie that salvation to what happens after we die.

But wow do we miss a point, if not the point, with this take.

Think of the tangible salvation Jesus brought to the hungry, the sick, the lonely, the poor, the sinners.

And think of the joy the recipients felt in his wake!

For that matter, think of the joy that he felt, walking away from having just dropped salvation and joy in one fell swoop.

So I wonder whether this Christmas could mark a moment when we trust not just that the incarnate Jesus will save, but that he has and does in every moment.

And, given this season of joy, I wonder whether this Christmas could mark a moment when Christians see their calling as incarnating Jesus’ way of joy.

Perhaps we can see our ministries in the world as serving up joy where there is bleakness, grief, injustice, oppression, hate, exclusion, and despair.

Perhaps we could see joy as being not simplistic, but simply an antidote, not to mention an antithesis, to anxiety, apathy, and antipathy.

Maybe we could see our joy as a righteous retort to the ways and powers of death.

In the name of Jesus and in keeping with his calling, we too could drop joy when we feed, heal, attend, subvert, and forgive.

And we could, because this day, this Christmas Day, marks that Jesus is born, and Jesus lived, and Jesus is risen.

Joy to the world indeed!

Merry Christmas to you and yours from me and mine!

“Be still, then, and know that I am God,” Psalm 46:10.

Sunday, October 29 is Reformation Sunday, a High Feast Day of sorts in the Lutheran Tradition.

This year, we mark the 505th Anniversary of the day, this auspicious moment when German monk and scholar Martin Luther published a…few…objections to the practice of selling “indulgences.”

These, of course, were pieces of paper given out by Catholic priests of the day, notes which promised that any post-death misery brought on by sinfulness would be, to one degree or another, lessened.

But the Church wasn’t just giving these indulgences out like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers Bars on Halloween.

Nope: any sinner wanting to stave off or tamp down eternal judgment had to pony up some pennies—the more the better—to earn God’s grace.

To brother Luther, this practice seemed like a heretical if not well-played racket.

So Luther, never one to mince words, decided to point out 95 ways that the buying and selling of grace was theologically and biblically skiddelywompus.

Here was what got under his craw:

If you have to purchase grace, if you have to earn grace, it’s many things, but it is not grace.

For that matter, no one, not even the pope of his day (especially the pope of his day, actually) is without sin.

When you get right down to it, it’s a matter of definitions, and they aren’t even theological.

A reward is based on merit.

Grace is straight gift.

That’s not to say that there isn’t theology in play though.

Luther was a biblical theologian, and after spending more than a little time in Scripture, Luther (and, now by extension, Lutherans) came to believe that the biblical witness makes it clear that ultimately, God doles out grace rather than rewards.

This discovery is a super fortuitous thing, because when you get right down to it, no one could ever have enough merits to earn any reward from God anyway.

Now, this thesis of Luther’s was, and 505 years later remains, a hotly disputed point among various religious traditions, but to make it, Luther only had to turn to passages like the Romans text above, a passage happily assigned for Reformation Sunday.

”For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.”

Lutherans are all over this take.

We hold this banner high and proud and with huge sighs of relief: there is nothing that we can do to “save ourselves” from our sinfulness or from God’s judgment.

To say otherwise a) renders Jesus’ death and resurrection for naught; and b) renders everyone totally and permanently without hope and screwed.

To trust the idea that works “make up a difference” implies that an intangible and unsullied part of us can carry the rest of our sloppiness through.

But in order for that to be true, there would have to be a sliver of purity within us not in need of redemption, some part that urges the messy parts of who we are, the potentially irredeemable parts of us, to engage in good works—be they indulgences, acts of piety, generosities, etc—to make up the difference and to prove our worthiness to God.

An E for Effort and (if God’s paying attention) Eternity.

Buuuuttttt…mind-bending though it is, at the end of the day, these good works themselves would be in need of redemption!

Their expressions would not be altruistic, but actually be veiled acts of self-preservation rather than pure manifestations of one’s faith and desire to follow God.

In some measure and to some degree, we’d do them to prove to God that we are deserving of heaven and not of hell, as if God trucks in rewards and not in grace, and as if God wouldn’t know that, if we’re honest with ourselves, at least a teensy weensy part of the drive to do good and be good is the hope of being spared rather than scorched.

So that part bugs us Lutherans, yes it does.

And very much along this line, we don’t like equating God to the Big Santa Claus in the Sky, a divine figure with lists of who is naughty and nice.

Luther and Lutherans know that life is messier than those binaries, and God is more nuanced, not to mention charitable, than Santa.

Bonhoeffer, the closest we Lutherans have to a saint, wrestled with this question of the dualistic Good and Bad, not to mention the matter of grace over against works.

His answer—and his execution—was grounded in radical trust in the grace of God over against his own futile efforts to earn it.

But we don’t need to be faced with the stakes of Auschwitz to know something of the wrestle too:

• Does God want us to enjoy a late-Fall hike, to build a bonfire with family, to bake an apple crisp to savor, OR, looking around at all the suffering there is in the world, would God rather that we use that time to volunteer at a food shelf, or advocate for the Least of These, or transform that spare room which no one uses into a space for a homeless person?
• You need a certain phone service or streaming source or retirement investment option, but the more you poke around, the more you learn that the meta-companies fund harm in this world, and so your support of these necessities funds their hate and hurt.
• Do you speak faithful words of prophetic speech from the pulpit as we were baptized and called to do, assuaging the oppressed and suffering but annoying the powerful, or do you remain quiet, to appease the privileged and those who fund the righteous ministries that would be otherwise threatened?
• Do women drink red wine because it is healthy for our hearts, or abstain because alcohol can cause cancer?
• Carbs or no carbs?
• Cloth diapers or disposable?
• Wood heat or propane?
• Be fruitful and multiply or, with an eye toward overpopulation, abstain from bearing children?

Phew.

It’s exhausting to strive for righteousness, or to be righteous, or even to know what righteousness is!

So Luther named all that, and Lutherans claim all that:

• You are justified.
• You can’t accept God, or Jesus as your personal lord and savior for that matter, because God has chosen you.
• You can’t be saved because you already are saved.

Because this theological thrust is so significant to our history and our identity, Lutherans have come to equate the gospel with the statement that our sins are forgiven.

Ask most any Lutheran, lay or otherwise, to preach or identify the gospel, and they will proudly proclaim that we are saved by grace and not works.

We are justified by faith.

And this makes sense, right, because Martin Luther radically re-oriented believers’ trust, wrenching it from faith in ourselves and our own works and to faith in God and God’s mercy.

And this is all right and good and true.

But the trouble is, right and good and true message that the forgiveness of sins is, it isn’t the gospel.

The gospel is that Jesus is risen.

That’s the good news, that’s the thing that makes Christians Christians, that’s the piece that allows Christians to radically enter the world with a new awareness of death and a new definition of life.

Sinfulness is a form of death (obvs), but we are freed from it because Jesus is risen, rendering any death, due to sin or otherwise, ultimately impotent in the face of God’s triumph over it.

See, it’s not like there is some asterisk that hovers next to Jesus’ resurrection leading to some fine print statement that “*some conditions may apply.”

But.

Here’s the thing:

That tendency of ours to trust in grace has made Lutherans almost allergic to works.

We are so acutely aware of how easy it is to fear that God is watching and taking notes, and therefore how a person could be tempted to do a good work in hopes that one would earn an extra notch in our ‘pro’ column, that we have tended to misunderstand grace to mean this:

Because we don’t have to do any good works, we ought not do any good works.

Which, spoiler alert, is malarky.

Lutherans have leaned on grace so much we’ve become prone.

Quiet.

In fact, there’s even a name for it: Lutheran quietism.

We remain still when we could be, should be, at work, stewarding God’s reign in the world.

~~~~~

This brings us to the second text above, the verse from Psalm 46: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

I have long confessed, at the risk of being accused of irreverence (and, to be fair, of actually being irreverent) that I am not a fan of this verse.

But for two reasons, this verse has gotten under my craw.

First, I have had these words said to me—offered in good faith and as good advice—in times when I have been beyond overwhelmed, tapped out, and unable to find a way forward.

These folks meant it well.

But the fact was, had I been still in those times, especially as a single mama of two small and one very wounded children, nothing would have been done by nobody, including by God.

In order for some order to come into the midst of chaos, some reason for hope in the midst of despondency, some actual balm over some actual wound, some body needs to do some thing.

Second, stillness been a dangerous partner to the Lutheran tendency to avoid works and instead to be quiet and trust in God.

The train of thought goes like this: if we don’t have to do any works, because God’s grace prevails, and we do have to be still, because God’s got this, then we can, with God’s blessing, do nothing.

It’s a perfect combination for divinely blessed passivity.

Turns out, though, that the word rendered “still” might not mean what we think it means.

Rather than bidding us to be inert, instead, the word (רפה) rapha is perhaps better understood as “be weak,“ or “be vulnerable,” or “be open,” or “let go.”

In fact, the plural has been used to refer to “the place of the dead.”

See, now I can totally get behind that sort of understanding of ‘still.’

It’s a stillness that is brought about by humility rather than passivity.

It’s a stillness that acknowledges death, but refuses to cede power to it, because we know that God is God, and that this God is a God who brings life out of death, who does not deny our reasons for fear, but who bids us to rise through and above the fear even so.

~~~~~

This Reformation Sunday, one could and should dwell on the grace of God which meets us in the moments of our greatest depravity.

And there is gospel to be found there, to be sure.

If it weren’t for that radical insight, that transformative news that we are:

saved by grace and not by works;

chosen and even as babies sealed by the Holy Spirit in our baptisms;

and justified,

we would have no reason to remember Luther, to celebrate Reformation day, or to live without anything but dire fear of God.

But as grateful as we can be about Luther’s kicker of a theological claim, it is possible that, as people of the Reformation, we could also use this opportunity to reform our definition of the Gospel, and of how we steward that gospel in the world.

It is possible to consider that the gospel, as we’ve typically understood it, is pretty narrow.

So maybe we could use this Reformation Day to reflect on the possibility that:

• Left with Luther’s take on it—key though his take was—we are left with a gospel that is only relevant to the sinners, and not those sinned upon, or who grieve, or who fear, or who hurt, or to the groaning of creation;
• In our reduction of the gospel to the forgiveness of sins, we have also reduced sinfulness to those of the individual, rather than also those of the collective;
• Thanks to Luther’s context (which is not ours) maybe we’ve have focused on the idea of personal post-death salvation, rather than present personal and communal well-being too;
• By focusing on justification we have neglected it’s corollary, namely justice;
• If grace is all there is to say in the matter, it implies that there is little to no need for repentance, and little to no need for judgment;
• Cheap grace means that sinfulness doesn’t matter, because we’re all in, but costly grace claims that although grace wins the day, there is some confession to be offered, some hard truths to be told and heard, and some repentance to be had;
• Lutherans can celebrate Luther’s re-orientation of the Church toward grace, while also, as people who are predisposed to reformation, do some re-orientation of our own toward a new notion of gospel news in today’s context.
• Apart from all conversation and thought about sin, we can engage in joy, delight, appreciation, and celebration of all things beautiful, creative, and which point to the love of God.

Paul was right: we are justified by faith and not by works.

The writer of Psalm 46 was right: we can rest in the trust that we are finite, and that even in the places and times in which we are dead, God is present and active.

Luther was right: we cannot save ourselves, but are already saved.

But this proclamation is also right, and more right than any of these other claims: Jesus is risen.

As followers of Jesus, we trust that death is powerful but not most so; that we follow Jesus into places of death to steward life; and that nothing, nothing in the greatest or in the least, can separate us from the love of God.

(To see me stand even higher on this soapbox, pick up my book I Can Do No Other: The Church’s Here We Stand Moment, published by Fortress Press).

Three distinct clumps were made up of various belongings of ours, like furniture, clothes, toys, books, pots and pans, electronics, and stuffed animals, video cameras and photographs.

Of those heaps, the first one was by far the largest, and impressively so.

The last cluster of chaos, though, moved around and made racket, a lot of both, because it was our two children playing on the floor: Karl, then almost three, and Else, just 8 months old.

“Babe,” he said, “I have had a miserable time packing to go home.”

After five years in Germany, we were to have left just a month and a half later back to the States. Poor Bill was stuck with the task of readying for our move—I was still working, and he was way more organized than I—and taking care of our two beloved twerps.

Lord have mercy and bless him still.

He took a breath, and then proudly said, “But finally, I’ve figured it out.  We’re going to pack only what will delight us to unpack! So this [pointing triumphantly to the largest pile] is what we’ll leave here in Germany to give away.  And this [pointing to the significantly smaller medium pile] is what we’ll ship. This [pointing to the smallest pile] is what we’ll take with us and live off of until the crates arrive in a couple of months. And this pile [pointing to Else and Karl] I’ll be happy to unpack, though [he said with his mischievous grin] they’re a horrible moving crew.”

And that was it.

That was his philosophy.

Pack only what will delight us to unpack.

Months and months later, those crates arrived.

Item by item, I unpacked, alone, everything that Bill had decided would cause us delight.

I fished each treasure out of those boxes, and shook off the shredded packing paper, and wept while smiling as I imagined Bill’s deliberation and delight that he’d decided we’d find together when we rediscovered this object, that memory, these old things with new futures at hand.

~~~~~

This week is a kicker for our family: in quick succession is the anniversary of the accident, Father’s Day, Bill’s and my shared ordination date (26 years…), and his birthday.

This year, Father’s Day and the accident date decided to gang up and do a two-fer, a one-stop shopping, a distilled concentration of rough stuff.

As I’ve often said, the 18th is always worse than the 19th, because on the 18th everything was fine, and we were clueless—blissfully so—of the trauma that the next day, and years, would bring.

But less a catalyst for living with perpetual fretfulness about imminent awfulness, the 18th gives me reason to believe that every moment is sacred, and every moment is reason for gratitude, because the next moment could make the last moment the last moment.

Time, things, and people can stealthily slip through one’s fingers.

I hope I’ve learned to hold and cherish them a bit longer and more intensely before they do—and, I’ve come to learn, before the time has come when they should—slip away.

~~~~~

That said…

Man for decades have I held and cherished stuff—physical and emotional—that I don’t need to.

We have a room upstairs that is called the Craft Room, and it also has a portion of my library in it, but really, if I’m honest with myself, it’s the “We have no idea what to do with it/can’t deal with it/we’ll get to it eventually” room.

As it turns out, this year, the anniversary has tumbled into our calendar after I’ve had the first stretch in over 25 years to make my own piles of delight and definitively not-delight.

That’s the prose way of saying I finally ran out of excuses to face The Daunting-Avoid-At-All-Costs Room.

The relaxed Covid restrictions allowed for Karl to go to school and PCAs to come back into our home, my father’s cancer was caught and treated in time, Trump was ousted, my book was finally turned in to the publisher and launched just last week, Else was launched just last year to her first victorious year at college, and I was launched into a love that makes my life simply, in every possible way, better.

So with newfound time, relative calm, support, a.k.a. no more easy available outs, I stood at the doorway of that room, the room with boxes from my parents, boxes from my childhood, boxes from my late husband’s childhood, boxes from our college and early marriage days, pre-accident boxes of memories of very young Karl and Else, and last, post-accident boxes of grief and unwellness and Doch, and I gulped, and I began to unpack.

~~~~~

Almost straight away I discovered a bin—a wholeass bin—of drawings from my children, the finger-painty/color crayon scribbles on the back of office paper/ripped construction paper collages sort, the kind that one puts up on the fridge for a week, say, and then in the dark of the night makes disappear to make room for the next one(s).

Except I didn’t pitch them, because I was so glad that these two babies of mine were alive, so each preschool artwork became imbued with sacrality—which ok fine, we agree that God is in everything, but we’re hardly talking here of early demonstrations of artistic genius that I could now sell through Sotheby’s and live the highlife from here on out.

So for years and years, I’d chucked the bulk of them instead into the Bin Of Important Things To Be Forever Kept.

And Forever Schlepped.

For almost twenty years, people.

But this time, though, as I lifted up each tattered scribble, I smiled…and found myself easily pitching the bulk of them instead into the increasingly large pile of Thanks-Be-To-God-For-These-Memories-And-For-This-New-Kindling.

Standing up with no small amount of self satisfaction, I shook decades of construction paper dust and debris off my hands, and reached down to next find the boxes of memories from people no longer in my world, like old boyfriends, people once dear to me who for any number of reasons are no longer in my life, people who were apparently once close to my heart but for the life of me I, super sheepishly, don’t recall.

And then the one of old college papers, awards, elementary school report cards, applications to various schools, and the large embroidered “A” from my high school.

No delight to be any longer found here.

So the lot of it was released from the bins, and released from burdening me any longer with attachments to file folders that have no more relevance, or conversely to people or things attached to unwelcome memories, unnecessary guilt, a permanent lack of resolution, or simply attached to nothing, because for the life of me I didn’t know why I’d kept Item X, Y, or Z in the first place.

I stood up, took another deep breath, and reached for the next heap: rediscovered items from both parents, like photos and letters and newspaper clippings I’d never seen from their births on through the years.

I sifted through these new treasures, keeping more than a few tokens and treasures and A-ha moments of the past that I simply didn’t know I had.

Getting the hang of it now, it took but a nanosecond to realize that I don’t need their elementary report cards, their yearbooks, their old college papers, or the cards that their parents received from strangers-to-me at their birth, or at their first birthday, or at their second birthday, or at their first Easter, or at their Confirmations, or at their graduations, not to mention their accumulated and maternally curated artwork through the years.

So this remnant pile will go first to my father, and if there’s a good story attached to any of the accumulated goods the item will be kept.

If not, Bill’s metric moves me—and Dad—to find delight pitching it.

With a deep exhale, I also discovered memorabilia from my late husband and his family: photos of Disney vacations, Marching Band mementos, Bible Camp and Ohio State University swag.

These items were a lot harder to know what to do with, because the sentimental stakes were high.

But while I knew that most everything that touched my hand would have delighted Bill, the somewhat guilt-inducing truth is that they delighted me…not so much.

I had no immediate emotional connection to them, and daughter Else even less so.

So with the heavy, carved, and significantly 3-D oak OSU Marching Band shield in hand, I rang my girl up at college.

Together we decided that, 30 years hence, she didn’t want have her own box-and-memorabilia-filled room, and didn’t want to be tasked with sifting and pitching meaningless memories any more than I wanted to be at that very moment.

So we opted to keep anything that would give my girl a better and broader understanding of her papa, and take pictures of the stuff that would have been important to him but not to us, and present the rest of it to his sister, or, after her pass at it, we’d offer it up to the Sacred Garbage Bins.

Now nearing the back end of the room, I came upon one large, hefty bin devoted to the countless cards that rained down on us after the accident, the deep expressions of sympathy and grief.

In some ways, this collection was the hardest to sort through.

Everything in it had meaning, everything in it had significance, and yet delight was not what I felt when opening it.

Gratitude, though…my God did I feel gratitude.

I’ve told those close to me that now, exactly 18 years after the accident, and reading through these cards again, I could perhaps finally take in their words of compassion, of lament, of solidarity.

At the time, I was like a sponge with no room to absorb anything more. I felt the water of their compassion running over me but I could not take any of it in.

But this time, I read again each and every card, and finally appreciated the shared despair.

Holy despair.

To be honest, many of these people have died, have moved on from or left my world, or were never in mine, though they were in Bill’s.

But their messages were marks of the presence of the Communion of the Saints, this sweet swath of people who represent the tangible reminders of the promise that God’s agenda is not despair, not suffering, not death, but rather hope, and persistence, and life.

I may not have kept all their cards, but I did keep their compassion, their kindness, and their cries of shared lament.

~~~~~

Bill’s pre-move rubric was also pre-Marie Kondo.

Last week I joked with my dearest friend from forever ago that if I’d only known the gold I was sitting on…

But I’ve learned that the discernment process is not as simple as holding on to something and deciding whether it gives you delight.

Sometimes it takes years to come to the time when a person is ready to face that question, let alone know the answer to it.

And that is supremely ok.

Turns out that while delight is one lens through which something can be decided—and let me say here that our bonfires, our recyclers, and our garbage company have been very pleased with all the work I’ve done in the last several months—there is another one too: holy truths.

Take today’s date, for example: the dreaded June 19th.

It does not delight our family to open the box of this week.

We do not look forward to the cascade of events tumbling out from the bin of June 18-June 23, dates that remind us of what we had, and who we had, and what and who is no longer here.

But each year that the week of the 19th rounds the corner, it is both holy and not a little bit painfully true.

Opening a box of grief and pain is both: holy and true.

But just like I have lived for decades without (re)discovering some of these memorabilia, so too I can go—have to go—for days, weeks even sometimes at a stretch, without taking a deep dive into the losses that we have felt since that awful day.

In fact, on a day-to-day basis, I must go about my life without consciously acknowledging those painful, holy and true memories and still-present realities.

To open up that box and sift through it all on the regular, just like to open up these boxes in our “I’ll deal with it another day” room every day; entirely unsustainable.

A person can’t function while persisting to sit on the floor to sift through boxes, real or metaphorical, not one little bit.

But those griefs and those those memories—good and bad—make up who we are.

They’ve defined our lives.

They are holy and true.

We can’t, and shouldn’t, discard the holy and true grief, and what has emanated from it, and who we are because of it.

These mid-month-of-June dates are simply markers that cyclically invite us into the room where, just to function, we stuff our grief, our holy truth.

And each year, every June 19th, I find that I fish each treasured—and traumatic—memory out of those boxes, and shake off the intervening years, and I weep.

But as the years go by, I find myself smiling a bit more from the years before, grinning as I imagine Bill’s rediscovery, and even delight on behalf of those of us who remain yet here, of this object, that memory, these old things with new futures, and even new previously unfathomable delights, at hand.

Doch. Doch. Doch.

Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.

On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.

Psalm 22:9-10

Once you’ve been betrayed by someone whom you’ve trusted, two things happen, and it’s hard to know which is most devastating.

First, you learn that this person, or relationship, or institution, or Way Things Have Always Been, render your investment of time, vulnerability, and faith as utterly dismissible, utterly misplaced, and utterly for naught.

Second, you learn that if it’s possible to be betrayed by this one whom you trusted with all your being, it is possible to be betrayed by anyone whom you trust.

With that in tow, you can never trust in the same way again.

You can lose faith in faith.

~~~~~

 The two verses topping the blog come from Psalm 22.

It’s the psalm from which we hear these wrenching words on the dying Jesus’ lips, words lifted from the very first verse of what is nothing less than a hymn of betrayal:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”

In these three holy days, we tend to focus on this verse, and perhaps also on the writer’s words a bit further down the psalm’s pike, verses which describe not just the psalmist’s despair, but Jesus’ despair, anguish reflected centuries later in his torment on the cross too.

But this year, it’s the above passage, these two verses quoted at the very top, that won’t let my spirit go.

Look at them again: “Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast. On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.”

They’re astonishing.

First, God is identified as a midwife.

A midwife!

This God rendered almost exclusively in the Christian tradition as male, as father, as baptized omnipotent Zeus, here this God is the woman who ‘took’ (but all the more literally, in the Hebrew, ‘pulled’ or ‘yanked’) the child from the womb (belly [!] in Hebrew).

And—as midwives are wont to do—this God knew to bring the safely delivered infant safely to the mother’s breast to suckle.

In that move, God the Midwife provided milk, bonding, and oxytocin to shrink the uterus and calm the spirits of mother and child.

But, magically and suddenly, in the next verse, God the Midwife morphs into God the Mother.

God now becomes the breast-bearer, the life-giver, the embracer.

(And people say that God is male.  Harrumph.)

I often draw people to scriptural references and to theological notions that God is a woman and mother, not because I feel God is female rather than male—God transcends gender—but rather because when one thinks of a woman and a mama one naturally conjures up images of tenderness, of suppleness, of softness, of fierce protection, of enveloping arms and hands that wipe tears and exclaim in joy.

It’s a stark welcome and faithful contrast to images of God the Father, which can be naturally associated with sternness, criticism, judgmentalism, power, authority, and evocable fear. To make the point, for a week—better more—pray to Heavenly Mother rather than Heavenly Father, or Mother God rather than Father God, and see if or how your perception of and relationship to God changes.

So how radical is this: the writer of Psalm 22 grounds their understanding of God as woman, first as midwife, and then as mother.

But how all the more disorienting, then, that it’s this God, this life-creator/life-bringer/life-sustainer/life-cherisher to whom the psalmist cries out for protection, who suddenly, no longer laying the psalmist on the mother’s breast, later lays the hymnist in the “dust of death!”

From life-giving breast to death-dealing dust.

That right there is a betrayal of archetypal power.

And that right there is precisely what Jesus felt on the cross.

For all the times that Jesus called God abba, ‘father,’ at his moment of death, he called to God as imma, as ’mother.’

That’s breathtaking, and breathtakingly tragic.

Reading the texts in these Holy Days, those who loved and followed him felt the same tragic betrayal too.

They knew the psalm.

They trusted Jesus.

They put their faith in them.

They gave their lives to him.

He’d given them new life.

But now, there they were, in the dust at the base of the cross, in the dust of the road bringing his limp body to the tomb, in the dust that swirled as the stone was rolled before the cave’s mouth.

Life to dust, the lot of them.

~~~~~

Holy Saturday is not Easter.

It’s not Good Friday either, of course.

On this day one enters this liminal space between experiencing the bewilderment of betrayal and the recognition that one must trust again to live again.

On this day we encounter the disorienting sensibility of knowing that one has good reason to have lost faith…

…and yet.

See, that’s it.

Holy Saturday is the day of ‘and yets’ and ‘still and even sos’ and ‘neverthelesses.’

It’s a day when, despite it all, one still feels the stirrings of faith pulling oneself into belief—dare we say trust?—that despair must be refused, cynicism must be quashed, hope must be given room to root.

~~~~~

Roman Catholic theologian Anthony Kelly writes:

“Optimism is no bad thing in itself. It is a kind of implicit confidence that things are going well in the present situation…Optimism is happy enough with the system.  In contrast, genuine hope is always ‘against hope.’ It begins where optimism reaches the end of its tether.  Hope stirs when the secure system shows signs of breaking down.  Hope is at home in the world of the unpredictable where no human logic or expectation is in control…In this respect, it is never far from humility, for it acknowledges that in birth and in death…human existence is never a realm of total control.  We are not the center of the universe that has brought us forth, and the ultimate.” (Anthony Kelly, Eschatology and Hope, Orbis Press, 2013. P. 5. 

Holy Saturday is a day for honesty and for hope.

Optimism has reached the end of its tether.

Hope, like grace, is what comes about precisely when a very different response seems to be called for, reasonable responses like despair or fear.

But hope bridges the abyss of betrayal and begins to lead one to faith, maybe even joy, again.

~~~~~

Turns out that the psalmist discovers this truth too, even within the confines of the hymn.

This God “did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted,” but rather showed the divine face again, and heard the writer’s cries.

So not only does the psalmist wrap up the hymn by saying “I shall live for him,” but the author speaks of those who are not yet born, of “posterity” and “future generations.”

Betrayal be banished, despair be damned.

That psalmist is throwing his/her/their lot to life.

~~~~~

The truth is we want to rush to that sensation, that posture, that way of being.

We want to rush to Easter.

But the truth also is, the day-to-day truth is, there are good reasons to feel despair, to feel abandoned, to feel betrayed.

Whether we are talking the ravages of illness or of tyrants or of zealots or of capitalists or of victimizers or of cancer, brain injuries, ticks, the stomach flu, and unnecessarily complex tax forms, life is not what we want it to be, and is not what it should be.

I’ll be the first to tell you, no one has a good answer as to why these hardships exist, and if anyone says that they have it figured out, walk away.

There is good reason to feel betrayed by God.

If Jesus felt betrayed, as did the psalmist whose words were in Jesus’ mouth while dying, then so can we.

And yet.

Though I won’t be the first to tell you—that would be the women on Easter morning, thank you very much, not the men, who skedaddled and were content with wallowing despair and self-imposed impotence—I will tell you this:

Brimming with the news that arrives with the dawn of Easter, we know that God is not a God of betrayal but of promise.

We know that God does not will or create suffering but calls life out of it.

We know—by faith and sometimes even by experience—that this is true not just by looking back at God’s intentions as seen in the first stories of creation, but by looking forward to, leaning in to, our own discovery of the empty tomb.

Today, it’s all true.

The disorienting betrayal.

The asphyxiating despair.

The defiant hope.

The anticipatory joy.

Today, and, in fact, every day, the whole lot of it is true.

~~~~~

Commentaries by Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, a womanist theologian who studies the First (Old/Older) Testament; readings by Rev. Dr. Soon-Cha Rah, particularly his book Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times; insights from  Second (New/Newer) Testament Theologian Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope; and insights about the feminine metaphors of God in Psalm 22 as noted by Jonathan D. Parker in The Expository Times, October 19, 2019, in his article “‘My Mother, My God,’ ‘Why Have You Forsaken Me?’: An Exegetical Note on Psalm 22 as Christian Scripture,” were not only helpful for my reflection on these Holy Three Days, but also are worth the read—especially by white and white male Christians—to be all the more informed and enriched by womanist, black, Asian, and feminist theologians and theological perspectives.

We say we want it.

Who wouldn’t want, as faith language so often puts it, to be “delivered from sin and death?”

Turns out pretty much those who don’t want to be confronted with their sin and the death it causes, or those who benefit from the sin, even if it causes death.

~~~~~

Case in point: as I’ve said before (OK fine: lots of times before), my New Testament professor at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, Mark Allen Powell, taught that one can argue that the primary message of the Gospel of Luke is this:

Just as the poor should and will be redeemed from their poverty, so too should and will the rich be redeemed of their wealth.

That’s a, if not the, key takeaway via Luke: the redemption of economic inequity and all the messed up nonsense, not to mention death, it causes.

Right.

So who would want to be redeemed of poverty?

The poor, of course.

Who would want to be redeemed of wealth?

[looks around]

Anyone?

[waits a spell]

Right.

Not a lot of takers.

So why would this be?

Because being rich has perks: if you have money, especially more than enough money, you have food, you have secure housing, you have safe housing, you have clothing, you have health care, you have better schools, you have tech and internet access, you have leverage-worthy connections, and a Starbucks double latte is not a splurge but a choice: it’s either that or the triple macchiato.

As far as the perks of being poor…not so much.

The thing of it is, the poor and the wealthy are both harmed by their respective circumstances, by these two sides of the same coin: the poor do not have enough, and the rich have more than they need.

The set-up is death-dealing to the poor, and it’s death-dealing to the rich.

The only difference is that one group can see it, and the other doesn’t want to.

~~~~~

Redemption means a reversal, a righting, a re-writing of how things have been, so that things can be made new, more just, and more whole.

This is why the poor want redemption, and the rich do not.

Redemption changes the circumstances of the poor, which is a soon-and-very-soon long time in coming, and of the wealthy, which, if they’d have their druthers, would be staved off for a long time longer.

More fundamentally, redemption changes them.

The poor are no longer defined by their poverty, nor the rich by their wealth.

And that, that right there, that’s the tricky, scary piece about redemption, at least for those who are redeemed from their privilege.

Your privilege matters only long enough for it to be taken away.

Now, you have just you, the grace of God, and the mercy of others, including mercy extended by those whom you have had a history of oppressing.

~~~~~

Black Lives Matter.

There are so many reasons to say these words, but just saying them is a sign that redemption is en route.

To say Black Lives Matter means, just like Mary said (in the Gospel of Luke, of course), that we’re in the process of seeing that “…[The Lord] has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly…”

This is precisely why these spoken, redemptive words, “Black Lives Matter,” so unsettle white people in power (and who among us who is white does not hold some modicum of power).

Redemption is coming.

The power dynamic is changing.

Circumstances are changing.

And we are being asked to change.

This is why redemption sounds good, but is way less welcome than you’d think.

Whites don’t want to change, at least not in the deep ways to which redemption calls us, because we like our privilege more than we like being redeemed of it.

~~~~~

We’ve seen all too often, and horribly, terribly, just again three days ago here in Minnesota, that Black Lives do not matter if you are a Black life stopped by the police.

If you are Black, that you have outdated tabs, or an air freshener hanging down from your mirror, or passed a counterfeit bill regardless of whether you knew, or were driving a new vehicle, or had a broken tail light, or are sleeping in your own bed, or are playing in your street, or are Driving While Black, all of these non-essentials matter more than your actual esse, more than your actual life does.

Because of this and for far too long, people of color have been crying out for the redemption of this system that kills them, of this way of policing that shows time and time and time again that racist violence is baked into the Blue.

Blacks want policing to be redeemed; to be made new, to be made more just, and to not be so damn broken.

But you know who doesn’t seem to want this redemption?

The police writ large.

Yes, there have been internal reforms.

Yes, there have been codified reforms.

Yes, millions have been spent on policing reforms.

But still and even so, Black people, Black men especially, keep getting shot by the police.

Racism is more powerful than reform, it seems.

That right there, that’s a circumstance, that’s a way of being, that’s a truth in need of redemption.

Blacks, and police, are both harmed by their respective circumstances, two sides of the same coin: Blacks are victims of racism, and policing is racist.

~~~~~

So of course Blue Lives Matter.

But the Blue Way of Life does not matter more than Black Lives.

The Blue Way of Life—one fueled not just by racism, but by classism, violence, mistrust, hostility, power, incarceration culture, and indemnity—is killing Black Lives.

From headquarters to holsters, policing policies and culture kill Blacks.

So it needs to be redeemed, it needs to be made new again, it needs to be made more just, and it needs not only to be not so broken, but to stop breaking so many people.

After so many attempts at reforms, whether policing can be redeemed in its present form is no longer a question: it can’t.

Whether policing is open to being redeemed at all, that is a question.

Policing is fully aware that, if redeemed, it will have much to lose: authoritarian power, presumptive immunity, and the addiction to white supremacy.

But better that policing loses its way of life than that one more Black life get lost to policing.

Reform is not enough.

Policing needs to be redeemed, delivered from sin and death, freeing blacks who suffer them at the hands of police, and freeing police who wield them against Blacks, whose lives do, indeed, all evidence to the contrary, matter.

~~~~~

Further information related to police reform:

Nine criminal justice experts offer suggestions how to reform police found here.

Human Rights Watch offers 14 ways that police can be reformed, including community investing, here.

The New York Times engaged five experts to discuss police reform here.

The Guardian delves into why police reform has failed here.

Yale University analyzes the last five years of police shooting and its static racial disparity here.

The Nation digs into the history of policing to show its inherent and intransigent racism here.

The word isn’t randomly chosen: as of the mid-13th Century, the word ‘holocaust’ had come to mean “sacrifice by fire,” and “burnt offering,”

The term is rooted in the Greek word holokauston, meaning “a thing wholly burnt,” or “a thing burnt whole.”

This, of course, is precisely what happened: not things, but people were wholly burnt, and burnt whole.

The corpses of human beings—babies, even, slaughtered by gas, by gunfire, by hangings, by disease, by starvation, by experiments on their bodies, by cold, by despair—people who were just days or weeks before playing ball in the streets, selling wares in their stores, reading books by their windows, buying groceries in their town, worshipping God in their synagogues, making love in their beds, these people were fed to hungry, hot-breathed crematoria, thrown in like mere logs by other human beings who had lost their own humanity.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, 340 bodies could be burned per day at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.

In this beyond-tragic Greek sense of the word, what occurred under Hitler’s reign—and by way of those who enabled him both by their active and their silent enabling—was, indeed a holocaust.

We want to say it is unimaginable, but it isn’t.

Someone imagined it.

Many brought the imagined into being.

And we have actual images for what should, in fact, be unimaginable.

~~~~~

So the horrors of those days are often referred to as ‘the Holocaust,’ this ‘sacrifice by fire.’

But the word can be troublesome here.

These humans were burnt, this is horrifyingly true, but they were no sacrifice, at least not to anything holy.

Given that, there is reason some prefer to use the term ‘Shoah,’ a Hebrew word found in Zephaniah and Job meaning “calamity,” “catastrophe,” “desolation,” and “whirlwind of chaos.”

And what occurred under Nazi rule was indisputably all of that.

Today, many English speakers call this day the “Holocaust Day of Remembrance.” But by many Jews and others, especially those in Israel, this somber day is also known, and some believe better known, as Yom Ha-Shoah, the Day of Remembrance of the Catastrophe.

~~~~~

On June 9, 1974, the New York Times published a column entitled “In Search of God at Auschwitz.” The author, a man named Israel Shenker, told of a seminar that had just been held with a theme of that name. Among the presenters was a philosopher, a survivor of the Shoah, Prof. Emil Fackenheim. He is quoted as saying this:

“In Judaism there are two archetypes of experience—one is the saving experience [the Red Sea], the other is the commanding experience [Sinai],” Professor Fackenheim also said. “If one tries to hear a redeeming voice at Auschwitz, there is only silence. But a commanding voice speaks to those willing to listen: A Jew is forbidden to give Hitler posthumous victory, and to consent to despair is to give that victory. The moral‐religious contradiction can be resolved only by affirmation that there can be no second Holocaust.”

In other words, Prof. Fackenheim believes that Judaism tends to see God either in events which reveal God’s salvatory, redemptive presence, or in events which reveal God’s presence via God’s expressed divine, righteous mandates for living.

Prof. Fackenheim rejects the notion that Auschwitz has any value as a redeeming moment, that God intended this desolation of humans—and of our sense of humanity—as a way of saving God’s people or the world at large.

Instead, he files the Shoah under an event which harbors a commandment of God: Never Again.

Never again shall Hitler and those who burn with such hatred burn others, and never again will Hitler and those of his ilk receive despair as compensation for their evil.

~~~~~

I have often referred to a rabbi’s words, though I can’t recall where I saw them nor, alas, who said them, which said, essentially, this:

Whatever you say about God has to be said in Auschwitz, with the ashes of burned Jews on your shoulders. If you can’t say what you want to say about God there, then it ought not be said.

You can’t say in Auschwitz that what occurred under Hitler was part of God’s plan, was reflective of God’s intention for God’s people, was a holy warning or a punishment or a lesson to be learned.

No.

The Shoah and all that brought it into being and sustained it was an utter abomination against humanity and against God.

But you can say there a holy Never Again.

And you can say there that Never Again is always Now.

Now you can be aware that evil which shouldn’t even be imagined can begin to take form.

Now you can be aware that the unimaginable is on the cusp of becoming horrifically real.

Now you can be aware that you are called to refuse to cede evil a victory.

Now you can become more aware of what happened, and why, and how, so that in knowing, in remembering, it will never, ever happen again.

#NeverAgainIsNow

~~~~~

Because hate is on the rise across the world, and terrifyingly sharply so here in the U.S., seen in the increasing power and presence of white Christian nationalists and supremacists, please check out and share widely these resources sponsored by the Auschwitz Museum.

panorama.auschwitz.org
lesson.auschwitz.org

For those of you on Twitter, I urge you to follow @AuschwitzMuseum, which posts daily pictures and stories of those killed in the Shoah.

You are welcome to learn more about Dietrich Bonhoeffer here, Kaj Munk here, the both of them here, Martin Niemöller here, anti-Semitism here, and resisting evil here.

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Matthew 13:34

~~~~~

Thinker and commentator Heather McGhee has her fingers on the pulse of politics and economics, but feels for the blood of racism flowing through both.

This morning, she posted this piece: Witnesses Should Not Have to Apologize for Not Saving George Floyd.

McGhee can’t shake the wrenching words and tears from those on the witness stand, innocent people who saw Derick Chauvin put his knee on George Floyd’s neck, citizens who were going about their normal day-to-days: shopping, strolling, working, and even simply being a nine-year-old girl who simply happened to be standing right there simply wearing the T-shirt she picked out that day: “LOVE,” it said, simply, across the front.

She noticed the guilt that wracked these people, that cracked their composure on the stand when they had to reenact what happened on that day, a day that began in an ordinary way, when they were ordinary people going about their ordinary business until the moment when they couldn’t counteract the killing.

They couldn’t save George Floyd—even though they tried.

They couldn’t, McGhee points out, because of the law of the land which threatened them as much as it did George Floyd.

“In the middle of the night,” she writes, “I lay awake wondering: What are all the laws and institutions that stop us from being able to do what our humanity cries out for us to do? To protect one another, to cherish the lives of our neighbors?”

It’s a Maundy Thursday set of questions.

~~~~~

Today is called Maundy Thursday, Maundy being directly related to the word ‘Commandment,’ meaning, well…commandment. The original Latin is mandatum (hence, also ‘mandate’) and carried then sense of a “legal order.”

So in the sphere of the liturgical church, we pay this day attention because on it, Jesus gave two new commandments, two, if you will, new laws, i.e., “Do this,” namely give thanksgiving to God and share Holy Communion with one another (see 1 Corinthians 11:23-25); and love one another as God has loved us.

But in McGhee’s sphere, she pays attention to every day.

She pays attention to how the commandments, that is how the laws, of prevailing systems circumvent, supersede, suppress what those in the Christian tradition might see as God’s Maundy Thursday law (though rooted far into the Old Testament) to love God and love your neighbor.

It’s difficult no matter what, sometimes, but she knows it’s especially difficult always if you aren’t white.

McGhee begins her article by speaking of empathy, this remarkable capacity with which humans have been given to know someone else’s perspective, to care about someone else’s experience, to feel someone else’s emotions, and to therefore be invested in them.

But in this case, it’s exactly empathy which causes these ordinary people extraordinary pain: they knew George Floyd’s helplessness, they cared about his life slipping away, they felt his fear, and they were invested in saving his life.

See, I think these witnesses did exactly as God commanded.

They loved George Floyd powerfully.

In that moment, even though they’d never known him, these children of God, loved by God, loved George Floyd.

And oh, did it, does it, hurt.

~~~~~

On that first Maundy Thursday, Jesus wanted the disciples to understand that love is risky.

He was not talking saccharine Precious Moments-like love here.

Jesus was talking about the sort of love that recognizes that every moment is precious, and every moment is precarious, and every moment calls us to passionate love.

Christians call this week “Passion Week.”

It causes some head tilts, because the word ‘passion’ is typically associated with sensual, sexual love.

But it’s rooted in the Latin word passionem, which means suffering.

To love is to suffer.

These people, these unwitting witnesses and would-be rescuers, they loved George Floyd and they suffered for it.

Any of us listening to this trial are also suffering, for we have come to love both George Floyd and these bystanders, and we suffer for our love.

~~~~~

McGhee ends her reflections on the witnesses who have wept on the stand with this observation and this question:

“We are all bystanders. How are we going to take our stand?”

I think what she’s saying is this: We are all witnesses to injustice, all the time.

I think what she’s asking is this: How are we going to love?

This Maundy Thursday, I think Jesus is saying and asking much the same thing.

It has been far too long since I have blogged!

Covid—not the virus, but the consequences of its broad scale havoc played out in our little world—has claimed our family’s attention, complicated by a significant three-fer brain, spine, and abdominal surgery for my son in mid-July, which happily resolved issues that have been causing us consternation and deep concern for about ten months.

We’re just now catching our breath, right in time for the breathless beginning of school—however that will look!

While I haven’t been able to write as I’d like, I do have several blogs in my mental queue.

But the below is the first of several in the upcoming weeks that I’ll put forth.

It’s a sermon I preached last Sunday, August 30th, at my beloved home congregation, Gloria Dei Lutheran Church.

You can find the video of the worship service here, although it is a trimmed version of what I have written below.  The sermon begins at 33:30 into the service.

Here is also an audio link of the sermon, recorded while I was sitting crouched on the floor in a second-floor very Harry-Potter-esque and quite full closet, because my beloved 83-year-old father was downstairs, bamming nails into a floor he’s brilliantly installing for us, because he’s amazing.

So if you don’t watch the video, that scene can be your substitute visual!

In it, with great assists from Soroya Chemaly, Hannah Arendt, and, of course, the texts (found at the end of this blog, from Jeremiah, and the Psalms, and Paul, and Matthew) of the day and the contexts of the day, I fuss with the uncertain, uncomfortable relationship Christians have with anger.

Despite our reluctance to express, let alone recognize, our own anger, anger itself is a force for justice, a calibration to righteousness, and a rejection of acquiescence to the powerful and corrupt.

In the texts from the 13th Sunday after Pentecost, we hear that very notion powerfully expressed, in more ways than one, from Jesus.

With that:

~~~~~

Grace to you, and peace, from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Siblings in Christ, we Christians, we have an anger problem.

And our problem with anger, our anger issue, is that we have no idea what to do with anger.

And I am here to say that, at first blush at least, the texts for today are not in the least helpful to us to sort matters out.

Jeremiah, in not one of his most bright-spirited, optimistic moments, prays for retribution upon his enemies, and lays the reasons for his own indignation squarely at God’s feet.

And not mincing a single word or leaving anything to the imagination, the psalmist condemns the worthless—among whom, he makes a point of noting, he has not “sat” (using a Hebrew word which doesn’t mean, literally, to ‘sit’ with, like on a bus or park bench or coffee hour table, but rather “hung out with,” or, more starkly, “became like,”) nor did he cozy up with the deceitful, and moreover, the psalmist even ‘hates’—hates!—the evildoers!

That all seems to give anger some room to do its thing, and with some measure of divine blessing.

But then along comes Paul, far more placid, far more diplomatic—and far more pleasing to and resonant in our ears—who speaks not of hating the evildoers but of hating evil, and of living in peace, of feeding enemies and giving them refreshment, and of overcoming evil with good.

And yet along comes Jesus, who seems to have known the freedom of Jeremiah and the psalmist, and he steamrolls right in to our lectionary on this day, this paradigm of love, this model of benevolence, seen in our collective minds’ eye as laughing with his head thrown back, as gently carrying that lost and forlorn sheep, as gathering the (always well-behaved) children around him, we see this one whirling around to Peter, the one he’d just called the Rock, and up and call him a stumbling block, of all things, instead. 

Like, clever as that is, what an epic slam: from rock to block. 

But even more shocking, Jesus bellows out, “Get behind me SATAN!” 

Satan! 

He called Peter Satan!

Were Matthew to have had a wide-eyed emoji at hand, he would have totally whipped it out onto the sheepskin parchment, right here, I tell you what.

Yet as often as not, we hear the text read, “Get behind me, Satan.”

But if you have enough energy to say those sorts of words, you absolutely have enough energy to yell them.

Get behind me Satan, said our Lord Jesus, the Christ, to Peter. 

That is not Minnesota nice. 

That is not tactful. 

That is not “appropriate.”

How, we might wonder, as these days is often expressed with a shaking head and scolding finger and with wishes for civility instead of anger, how will Jesus win Peter to his side if he raises his voice?

If he speaks so bluntly?

If he speaks truth?

If he calls a thing what it is is?

He should just be nice.

~~~~~

So what’s the collective Scriptural take-away here?

Is anger ok or not? 

Is rage holy or unrighteous?

It’s a question, of course, that’s presently pressing upon us politically, culturally, socially, and even within our own families. 

En masse, we are in every one of those very spheres steeped in anger, like a bag of tea left too long in the cup, the hot beverage becoming thick and bitter.

But we tend drink it, we drink it anyway, lips pursed in both disgust and forced politeness. 

“No, no, it tastes fine, really,” we say, swallowing the sludge down with a taut smile.

Everything is fine.

Everything is awesome, we say politely.

In fact, of course, everything is everything but fine, and few things are awesome.

~~~~~

So our ambivalence about anger has to do with many things, I believe.

Politeness, for one: it is not polite to be angry. 

Anger is not nice.

And in the land famous (infamous?) for being nice, being angry is out of decorum, is a breach of ethic, it defies the code.

And anger causes conflict…though more precisely, this perceived emotional problem child is only recognizing and naming conflict.

Anger forces people to wrestle in the open with disagreement, to own what one says and to dispute that which is claimed by another.

Anger is neither pleasant nor pretty: red faces, raised voices, rapid pulses, and sometimes irreparable breaches.

And so it is better, we tend to think, it is in fact best, of course, to gloss the problem over.

To ignore it.

To pretend it doesn’t exist. 

But here’s the thing.

The reasons for the anger do exist. 

There are legitimate reasons, not least of all during these deeply troubled, troubling days, to be angry, and, like Jeremiah, like the psalmist, to be angry precisely in the very name of God.

See, I read Paul’s words and I worry about the women and girls who perhaps just last night, perhaps even this morning, have been abused verbally, physically, emotionally, sexually by men in their lives, by people who should be trusted but have squandered that privilege, and they come to hear the Word of God on Sunday which, they might think, tells them to bring their abuser another latte to them in the early morning and it will get better, promise. 

And I want to say to them: wait! Wait! 

No, no, that’s not what Paul meant. 

That’s not what God meant. 

You are not meant to be harmed. 

You, too, are to be loved, to be tended, to be safe.

Instead Paul’s words are, in part, a promise to not doubt that God knows justice, and will wield it.

It’s a reminder to, as Michelle Obama so famously said, go high when they go low.

Do not sit with them.

Do not become like them.

Do not let your anger be denied so that you lose hope and lose yourself.

~~~~~

It turns out that the more that we suppress our anger, that we gloss it over, that we stay silent instead of speaking up with righteous indignation at wrongs in the world at large or in our small, personal world, the more we end up protecting those causing harm rather than those suffering it—including ourselves.

We write them a carte blanche, we give them a pass, there are no repercussions for their actions, we allow it and thereby endorse, and empower, whatever it is that in fact is reason for, gives root to, legitimate, righteous anger.

But even that, even that, isn’t quite the full story, because a competing truth is that the more that we suppress our anger, that we gloss it over, that we stay silent instead of speaking up with righteous indignation, we even leave the harm-causers vulnerable to their own harm.

Our silence, our fake smiles, our let’s-pretend-that-didn’t-happens, our it’s-best-to-be-nice-s, it all continues not only to allow the sufferers to continue to suffer, but it continues the harm-inflicters to continue to harm. 

They never know it’s not ok. 

They never see the pain that they inflict on others and therefore that they inflict on themselves.

The “pinned tweet” on the ELCA Twitter page says about the rampant killings of black people, “This is an existential threat to people of color. It must be an existential threat to white people too.”

So who’s gonna tell ‘em?

Someone’s got to tell them.

~~~~~

Recently, for some research on a project I’ve got before me, I picked up Soroya Chemaly’s book Rage Becomes Her. Chemaly has dived into the study of women’s anger: the way we suppress it, the way it is disdained and disallowed by the world, and how instead we, and the world, ought rather to pay acute attention to it. 

In 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted after killing Trayvon Martin in 2012, Alicia Garza inadvertently founded the Black Lives Matter movement, simply by ending a Facebook post rueing the verdict with the words “black lives matter.” Seven years later, with the hashtag #BLM, adorned with T-shirts and pins and bumper stickers, people are walking the streets, kneeling in stadiums, postponing games, and, moreover, painfully, still needing to.

Chemaly spoke with Garza about her activism, and what inspires her to engage with the Powers That Be. Garza replied, “Anger at injustice is one part of what motivates me. But it is not a sustainable emotion in and of itself. It has to be transformed into a deep love for the possibility of who we can be. Anger can be a catalyst, but we cannot function on anger alone. When it’s not used properly, it can quickly become destructive. That’s why love is important: love connects us to what we most care about; what we yearn for,” (251).

See, says Garza, and Chemaly throughout her entire book, anger is an emotion that lets a person know that something is off: there is an unacceptable distance between what is and what should be. Justice is wanting, and righteousness is therefore too.

And anger is an indication that you care enough to notice, to react, and to do something about it.

But what is the ‘ït?’ 

What deserves anger?

Our texts today begin to give us some ideas.

The anger with which the texts dance is not capricious anger, is not petty anger, is not anger that is mistaken for aggression or unhinged, unfounded violence.

It is righteous indignation based not on our evaluations of what should be vs. what is, but on God’s.

Jesus hauled off and called out Peter, with the added nice-touch detail of calling him ‘Satan,’ because Peter didn’t believe that following Jesus means you’re going to run into discomfort, awkward moments, conflict, and even death.

He still didn’t grasp that Jesus’ ways are not the world’s, by and large.

Arguably, we who call ourselves Christians still don’t either.

For example: 

Jesus welcomed strangers, and exhorted us to too. 

Instead, we build walls. 

Jesus said to let the children come to him. 

Instead, we put them in cages and tear them from their parents. 

Jesus said to feed the hungry. 

Instead, we cut SNAP funding.

Jesus said to heal the sick. 

Instead, we scream at employees who insist that customers wear masks, and we create policies which make access to health care an impossibility for the poor and unemployed.

Jesus said to love our neighbors, and instead we segregate neighborhoods.

It is outrageous.

While Jesus was informed by his heavenly father, let’s be clear: his earthly mama shaped him too, this woman who declared in the name of God that the powerful did not deserve their thrones but deserved rather to be thrown from them, that the rich would learn of emptiness while the poor would learn what it is to be sated, that the proud would be humbled and the humble would know pride.

She understood the agenda of God. 

She spoke uncomfortable truth.

She lays out the grounds for righteous indignation: where you see disparity in any of these ways, there is reason to rise up in holy anger, because if you do not, you acquiesce to evil or succumb to a dangerous, willful obliviousness to it. 

Peter, of course, Peter knew the risks.

He knew that the powers that like things the way they are do not like to have holy, and contrary, truth pointed out. 

Peter knew that if Jesus felt it incumbent upon him to, as years later brother Martin Luther would say, “call a thing what it is,” he’d die.

And we can’t have that.

But here’s the thing: one of the most harmful tendencies of the Christian Church is to spiritualize death, or at the least, to restrict it to “taking a last breath.”

Any of us know, however, any of us who have an aversion to, say, anger, we know you don’t need to croak to die. 

Speaking out, calling out, being outraged at injustice will cause death. 

That’s a promise.

Righteous anger can and will cause the death of friendships, of love relationships, of familial relationships, of collegial relationships, of Facebook friends, of security on any number of levels. 

But here’s the freeing thing: naming evil can also bring death to evil.

You expose evil for what it is.

Rather than allowing injustice to prevail at the expense of the least of these, who depend on your voice—and let us not forget that you yourself might deserve your anger on your own behalf—, rather than trusting the power of death more than you are trusting the promise of life, rather than ceding death a win, your anger can recalibrate a situation so that it is aligned not with evil, not with death, but with gospel hope and life.

See, here’s the thing that Jesus knew, and what he longed that Peter knew, and that I long for Christians to know is this: the Gospel is not “be nice.” 

The Gospel is not “avoid conflict.” 

The Gospel is that Jesus is risen from the dead. 

And, if that is true, as my mentor Walt Bouman said time and time again, “Now that you know that death doesn’t win, there is more to do with your lives than preserve them.” 

“Now that you know that death doesn’t win, there is more to do with your lives than preserve them.” 

When, that is, when we refuse to give expression to our anger, we are preserving our lives, and we are preserving, we are protecting, the power of death. 

That’s no way for a Christian to be, for we are resurrection people. 

We live according to the call of Jesus, which, as this text makes clear, will call us to death, but which also calls us to life.

Jesus was angry with Peter because when push came to shove, quite literally, in the end, Peter trusted death rather than Jesus.  

When our mouths stay silent, when we let dysfunctional systems stay intact, when our silence, our our apathy, or our pleasant smiles allow leaders and those who support them to, for example, pass white supremacists as very fine people, we are no better than Peter.

And you can bet that Jesus is not saying to us gently, sweetly, nicely, “Get behind me Satan.” 

He’s bellering it out! To us! “GET BEHIND ME SATAN!”

Because Satan, the ambassador of death, lives off of benign silence and feigned politeness.

That’s how Satan gets its power.

 A Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt spoke of that very thing when she detailed the Nürnberg Trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of Hitler’s Nazis, and an architect of the Holocaust.

Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil,” as she mused about how ordinary people, folks like you and me, can empower totalitarian regimes of hate, racism, bigotry, and violence.

Evil can become, and in some cases arguably has become ordinary. The norm. Tolerable.

But not if you follow Jesus.

Chemaly writes, “Anger has a bad rap, but it is actually one of the most hopeful and forward thinking of all our emotions. It begets transformation, manifesting our passion and keeping us invested in the world. It is a rational and emotional response to trespass, violation, and moral disorder. It bridges the divide between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought’ to be, between a difficult past and an improved possibility.” (xx) “In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth…Anger is the expression of hope” (295).

Anger is the expression of hope. 

Now there’s a plot twist.

Sort of like the dead guy rising again.

See, when we are angry, whether we realize it or not, we are announcing to ourselves and to the world both truth and that there must be a better way. 

And as Christians, we announce to ourselves and to the world that we know that there is a better way, for our selves, for those crushed by systems of violence, degradation, bigotry, racism, misogyny, classism, and self-absorption, and also by those who wield such things with finesse, willfulness, and neither compunction nor consequence. 

Anger, that is, is just as Chemaly, just as Jeremiah, just as the Psalmist, just as Jesus, and if you squint, even Paul in this text says, anger is an indication that something is not right. 

And if it is not right, it is not righteous. 

And if it is not righteous, it is an ambassador of some form of death. 

And Christians, in contrast, are ambassadors of life, are those who defy death, are those who call a thing what it is, are those who get angry, and in so doing, do not reward evil with evil, but rather reward it with goodness and truth and life.

~~~~~

The Texts for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost, August 30, 2020

FIRST READING                                                  Jeremiah 15:15-21

15O Lord, you know;
remember me and visit me,
and bring down retribution for me on my persecutors.
In your forbearance do not take me away;
know that on your account I suffer insult.
16Your words were found, and I ate them,
and your words became to me a joy
and the delight of my heart;
for I am called by your name,
O Lord, God of hosts.
17I did not sit in the company of merrymakers,
nor did I rejoice;
under the weight of your hand I sat alone,
for you had filled me with indignation.
18Why is my pain unceasing,
my wound incurable,
refusing to be healed?
Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook,
like waters that fail.
19Therefore thus says the Lord:
If you turn back, I will take you back,
and you shall stand before me.
If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless,
you shall serve as my mouth.
It is they who will turn to you,
not you who will turn to them.
20And I will make you to this people
a fortified wall of bronze;
they will fight against you,
but they shall not prevail over you,
for I am with you
to save you and deliver you,
says the Lord.
21I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked,
and redeem you from the grasp of the ruthless.

PSALM                                                                             Psalm 26:1-8

 1Give judgment for me, O Lord, for I have lived | with integrity;
I have trusted in the Lord and | have not faltered.
2Test me, O | Lord, and try me;
examine my heart | and my mind.
3For your steadfast love is be- | fore my eyes;
I have walked faithful- | ly with you.
4I have not sat | with the worthless,

  nor do I consort with | the deceitful. 
5I have hated the company of | evildoers;
I will not sit down | with the wicked.
6I will wash my hands in inno- | cence, O Lord,
that I may go in procession | round your altar,
7singing aloud a song | of thanksgiving
and recounting all your won- | derful deeds.
8Lord, I love the house in | which you dwell
and the place where your glo- | ry abides.

SECOND READING                                                  Romans 12:9-21

9Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; 10love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. 11Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. 12Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. 13Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
14Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 15Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. 16Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. 17Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. 18If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 19Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” 20No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” 21Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

GOSPEL                                                                   Matthew 16:21-28

21From that time on, [after Peter confessed that Jesus was the Messiah,] Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 22And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” 23But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
24Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? 27“For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Christians (Lutherans perhaps especially) like to talk all the time about forgiveness.

We love love love forgiveness.

And as an extra bonus, we can even talk about forgiveness in polite company.

But unless we’re reading those super uncomfortable Advent texts featuring John the Baptist (that wild-haired, wild-eyed, wild-mannered guy in our lectionary about whom we’re always a bit embarrassed, looking at each other with wide eyes whenever Sundays in December come around, knowing that this strange man got in our scriptural tradition somehow, and so apparently the right thing to do is to figure out how to welcome him into our lecterns, even though we all know we’re not so sure we’d even let him into our pews, and definitely not our pulpits), this man who wields the word ‘repentance’ all the time (much to our chagrin), we have (in stark contrast to ‘forgiveness’) gotten away for far too long without talking about repentance so very much at all.

But this is good, we think.

To tell someone to repent, you see, is awkward.

It’s impolite.

It’s even insulting.

It’s definitely conflictual.

And Christians aren’t supposed to make people feel awkward, and we are not about being impolite, and we shouldn’t insult, and of course we ought not cause conflict in the name of Christ, no matter what this John the Baptist said and did.

But on this tragic, grief-ridden day of the Emanuel Nine, a day that is bundled into other days that have spilled into weeks where our nation has begun to name and claim our racist underpinnings and undertow, it is precisely a moment, in fact a very, very, overdue moment, to speak directly about repentance.

You see, as unwelcome as repentance is as coffeetable, let alone pulpit, discourse, to indict someone by announcing that they must repent…well, arguably, you can’t really get more Lutheran.

Why?

Because telling someone to repent means that we are Calling A Thing What It Is.

Martin Luther used this phrase in the 21st Thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation, a series of propositions he presented to his Augustinian Order after he caught a little attention the prior year by nailing some 95 other theses onto a certain door in Wittenberg.

Point is, in this particular thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation, the 21st, he wrote this:

“The theology of glory calls ‘evil’ ‘good,’ and ‘good’ ‘evil.’

A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.”

Telling someone that they need to repent simply calls a thing what it is.

White people, and we as a nation, and we as the ELCA, must repent of our racism, and we can’t do that unless we call it what it is.

~~~~~

Today we mark the Emmanuel Nine, and we say their names.

Reverend and Senator Sharonda Coleman-Singleton

Mrs. Cynthia Graham Hurd

Mrs. Susie J. Jackson

Mrs. Ethel Lee Lance

Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor

Reverend Clementa Pinckney

Tywanza Kibwe Diop Sanders

Reverend Daniel Lee Simmons, Sr.

Mrs. Myra Singleton Quirles Thompson

These black children of God died because Dylann Roof, a 21-year old far-right white supremacist and member of an ELCA congregation—and, lest we forget, also a child of God—sought to incite a race war by massacring black people whom, he believed, were “taking over the world.”

Somehow his online far-right radicalization held more power over him than did the call—if one was uttered clearly, or loudly, or at all?—to repent of it.

It is overwhelmingly poignant that the commemoration of this horrific crime falls just weeks after George Floyd was murdered and our country—even including the NASCAR community (!!)—is beginning to notice our entrenched, latent, systemic racism.

That’s the first step, of course, to Calling A Thing What It Is.

Noticing.

But we can’t notice, really, unless things are pointed out, unless things are named.

Only then do we have a chance to engage the holy act of repentance.

~~~~~

Rostered leaders are called to be pointer-outers, to be name-ers, to be Calling-A-Thing-What-It-Is-ers.

They are called by the Church at Large and then are called by specific congregations to steward the gospel which, contrary to a pretty decent share of Lutheran understanding, is not that your sins are forgiven.

The gospel, instead, is that Jesus is risen.

So when you invite someone into your community to a ministry of Word and Sacrament or Word and Service, you are calling them into your community to preach, teach, and live out the gospel.

That latter part, of course, this living out the gospel thing, isn’t just their professional vocation, but is their—our—baptismal one too.

The thing of it is, of course, is that the gospel would be positively irrelevant and in point of fact unnecessary if everything were fine, fine, just fine.

There is no need, that is, to pronounce life if life abounds for all anyway.

Nope.

But the thing of it is, the gospel is precisely relevant because there is still death, and an abundance of it.

And be not mistaken: death is present not just of the six-feet under kind, but of the kind that steals hopes, and spirits, and possibilities, and even our very humanity.

Racism is a tool of death.

And we need leaders of and in the Church to Call That Thing What It Is, because they are called—by all baptized Christians, including you!—to be theologians of the cross, to know that where there is death, precisely there is where there can be possibility of life.

If you want a theology of glory, if you want to be told that all is well when it is not, if you want a (self-proclaimed) leader who says “Peace, Peace,” when there is not peace, go MAGA (and look up Jeremiah 6:14 and surrounding verses).

MAGA puts babies in cages, and separates children from parents, and builds walls, and removes rights, and calls the KKK good people, and after violently forcing peaceful demonstrators off of the streets uses a holy church as a mere backdrop to score a political point with an upside down Bible held by a man who neither opens the book nor enters the building, and MAGA calls all such evil good.

(The leader of that Church’s synod, by the way, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, Called a Thing What It Is about all that nonsense, I’ll tell you what.)

But if you want a pastoral leader whose primary vocation is to proclaim the gospel, which means announcing life, you also called a leader who, inherent to that very call, needs to announce death.

So sit tight, then, because leaders are themselves becoming all the more aware that we all have some repenting to do.

That means it’s about to get awkward, and impolite, and insulting, and conflictual.

We can now appreciate how the crowds who heard John the Baptist felt.

But perhaps unbeknownst to them, and even to us, it is also about to get life-out-of-death-y too.

~~~~~

As it turns out, of course, it’s not just the primary vocation of a pastoral leader to announce and engage in repentance: it’s the primary vocation of any baptized Christian.

Pick up your cross, says the one who was himself baptized by, of all people and inconveniently, John the Baptist, yes, the one and the same, this wild-eyed, wild-haired, wild-way-ed man who at most every turn announced repentance as a mark of the reign and way of God.

“Be willing to die to all that is not of God, and follow me,” says Jesus.

Don’t follow MAGA.

Don’t follow racism.

Don’t follow white privilege.

But follow, rather, Jesus.

Repent, you see, repent of all that is not of God.

Let that die, so that you and others may live.

~~~~~

All of this is true.

But what is also true, on this tragic day five years ago, is that righteous people, faithful people, sisters and brothers in Christ people, died so that racism, rather than righteousness, could live.

Today, that is, there are nine six-foot-under deaths—nine of them—which need to be recalled.

Their deaths matter.

Remember their deaths, and remember their names.

And then in their honor be willing to also name the death-dealing ways of racism and our unwillingness to call it—on personal, congregational, denominational, national, and systemic levels—what it is.

And then repent.

If we can find the courage to hear racism be called what it is, namely not of God, not good, and in fact evil, we will discover that John the Baptist, as wild as his hair and his eyes and his ways were, was right.

Repent, he said, for the Reign of God is, indeed, near.

You’re not even conscious that you’ve got a song going on your soul, and then suddenly you hear your lips hum, your mouth sing, or even your fingers tapping out the rhythm of the beat.

I’m willing to admit that it happens to me, but I am not willing to admit how often.

On occasion, when I discover that I’ve got some notes and lyrics in my mind…and others external to me are noticing…it’s because a certain apparently random tune was in fact triggered by a word or a phrase or an event: when I’m standing before an open fridge, an exasperated, “I’m all out of milk,” becomes “I’m All Out of Love,” or while making stew I discover myself singing our family favorite lullaby “Little Potato,” or (back in the days when my beloved baseball was actually played), when I’m looking for the weather radio to take into my garden so I can hear the Minnesota Twins play (sigh), I discover that I’m humming “Brown Eyed Girl,” which, by all informed accounts, is the best song ever, and while it may have overtly nothing to do with a baseball (though I’m sure that the ‘stadium’ which is mentioned is obviously one built for baseball and no other) has everything to do with baseball, not to mention young love, the best of which has to do with baseball.

But the other day, I woke up with Tracy Chapman in my head.

 Straight away, at 5:37, eyes opened and there she was.

But because it was 5:37, it took me about 15 minutes into the day and a couple of sips of my coffee to realize that she was singing me into the day, and quite possibly into a new world.

It was released in August of 1988, and I was entering my second year of college at St. Olaf.

By that time, I’d fully embraced the Birkenstocks/head-wrapped-in-scarf/meeting-at-friends’-homes-to-make-broccoli-tofu-and-rice vibe, and therefore, in all of my hippy naïve whiteness, I loved Tracy Chapman.

I stuck her cassette tapes in the player of any car the driver would let me, I bought my mama a copy so that she could be enlightened like her daughter, and I felt so very very cool.

So, yeah; I heard her music all the time.

But I didn’t listen to her.

And I sure as the hell our nation is in right now didn’t understand her.

I’m also sure that by virtue of the color of my skin that I never entirely will.

~~~~~

Cities are in shambles, across the U.S., and I fully expect that more protests and destruction are in our collective near future, and our far future too.

Our President (may God have mercy on our souls) had his own peaceful citizens teargassed and shot with rubber pellets so that he could stand in front of a Church he never attends while holding upside down a Bible that is not his for a photo op that captured more of the moment and who he is than he intended.

~~~~~

“Thus says the Lord:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more.”

Jeremiah 31:15

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe,” cried Mr. George Floyd.

And to whom did this child of God cry?

Not just to the white police officers who kept a knee on his neck while they turned their hearts away.

But Mr. Floyd cried out to and wept for his mama, his dead mama, who was no more.

~~~~~

White Christians, we are culpable for this chaos and for Mr. Floyd’s death in every possible way.

Etymologically, the word ‘culpable’ means ‘worthy of blame,’ and ‘deserving of censure.’

It’s a key point, one that we have shirked to own, itself a very sign of the privilege we are willing to own even less.

But, as Tracy Chapman says, the poor people are gonna rise up.

The tables are being turned.

People aren’t just talking about a revolution: a revolution is happening.

White culpability is being exposed, and the censure which is long in coming for whites is coming, and, in fact, may already be here.

~~~~~

All to often, Christians do not understand that our baptism and our faith change our allegiance and therefore change our lives.

As Father Robert Farrar Capon said,

“…it is not only that the human race’s business-as-usual desire to be on the side of a winner is inappropriate to Jesus’ mission: it’s that none of our usual bits of business, however virtuous or proper, has the last bearing on the mystery of redemption.

‘Follow me,’ [Jesus] says flatly. ‘…Nothing counts now expect being last, least, lost, little, and dead with me.”

I fret a lot that we don’t grasp that truth.

There is nothing of American culture, and what is indeed American religion, that emulates being last, least, lost, little, and dead with Jesus, or anyone else for that matter.

Trouble is for Christians, it is fundamentally impossible to both embrace the tenants of Christianity and the tenants of United States of American exceptionalism, and don’t even get me going on capitalism.

Can’t do it.

To be clear, it just can’t be done.

~~~~~

Christianity, turns out, is neither a social club nor a cultural norm, but is an upheave-your-life’s-identity-thing.

Christianity is not just about going to services on Sunday, but about being in exclusive service to the Lord on every day.

Christianity is more than bringing the lemon bars to church (bless those who do), and is more like bringing bottles of water or, as we’ve seen necessary these days, jugs of milk, to protests.

Christianity may be about belonging to book groups gathered in comfortable living rooms, but it is certainly about belonging to protest groups gathered at uncomfortable spaces in our society.

Christianity may move you to wear a cross around your neck, but then it should move you to walk the way of the cross.

Christianity, it turns out, may not be all that down with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” but might hear Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution” as a modern Mary’s song, or the “Canticle of the Turning” as a hymn for the ages and the Church universal.

And by no means is Christianity about condoning, let alone supporting, let alone remaining mum about a leader who separates children from parents, who puts children in cages, who mocks people with disabilities, who disdains the care of creation, who removes protections from GLBTQIA people, who rejects policies which care for the rich over against caring for the poor, who lies faster than fact-checkers can keep up with him, and who uses the sacred word of God as a photo op which necessitated gassing and shooting his own peacefully protesting citizens.

Instead, Christianity is a way of life, not a way of condoning, ignoring, or dealing in the ways of death.

It certainly is not about self-protective life.

It’s about living life convicted by and living according to the conviction that now that we know that death doesn’t win, there is more to do with your lives than preserve them.

It’s about being neither quiet nor passive in the face of abominations or injustice.

It’s about rejecting anything and anyone who puts their agenda before Jesus’, including our own.

It’s about understanding that this Scripture passage below (that would be this last section from Matthew 25) is not a theory, but is the mark of those who follow Jesus.

Pro tip: after reading it, note that you can’t follow Jesus and follow Trump, or, for that matter, much of the agenda of the present day GOP.

³⁷Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? ³⁸And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? ³⁹And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’

⁴⁰And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

Christians, this is a moment that calls us to righteousness.

We are called as baptized people to renounce the Devil and all his empty promises.

Racism and systemic racism is a sure mark of the Devil.

Whites are called, therefore, to renounce it.

That means, of course, that we are called to renounce the privilege that we gain from it, and those who engage in it.

I renounce racism.

I renounce the racist policies and culture of policing in the US, and of the politics of the US.

I renounce Donald Trump.

I renounce the inexcusable repression of those who protested peacefully.

I regret the violence but I renounce that which led to its expression: when a word or a cry or a shout is not heard, even over centuries, sometimes, as Martin Luther King said, a riot is the language of the unheard.

I renounce what happened to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and Sean Reed and Tony McDade and a host of other names that must be said.

~~~~~

I imagine all of us have had an opportunity to wonder: if I’d been alive during slavery, during the Holocaust, during the Civil Rights moment—heck, even when Voldemort was on the run, what would I have done?

If I’d been alive when a black Jesus was being lynched by the authorities, what would I have done?

Now’s your chance to check it out.

Because finally the tables are starting to turn, and a righteous revolution is going down, right now.

These days, it’s sounding less like a whisper, and more like a holy clamor long in coming.

~~~~~

We have just entered the season of Pentecost.

Long has the Holy Spirit been imaged as a dove, also associated with peace.

She’s also, though, especially in Celtic traditions, been seen as a goose.

Geese are not pleasant.

They nip and attack and cajole you into doing what they want you to do and going where they want you to go.

They are neither peaceful nor safe.

Turns out that the same can be said of the Holy Spirit.

“Come, Holy Spirit,” we say and pray, but I do not believe we really mean that.

First thing that the Spirit did on Pentecost? Got the disciples in a mess of trouble.

We seem to forget that, we who tell children to not play with matches, and then gather these same children together for worship and pray “Come Holy Spirit, breathe your fire upon us.”

Of course, the Holy Spirit would never burn down our structures, we fool ourselves into thinking.

Just those bad ones.

Of course, the Holy Spirit would never blow away our ways of having done things, we lull ourselves into believing.

She’ll Just blow away the riff raff chaff.

Come Holy Spirit, we pray.

Just come, please and of course, and even stay, but in a respectable, predictable, controllable way.

We actually and intentionally and audaciously say that to the Holy Goose!

We audaciously say such things to the unquenchable, unrestrainable, Holy Fire.

~~~~~

I can’t help believe that the Spirit has been in the streets these days.

She’s not respectable, not predictable, not controllable.

But She is Holy nonetheless, and She is ushering in a Revolution.

~~~~~

Personal note: I very much should have written sooner about Mr. Floyd and the protests.

I am sorry.

These days have been full of heaps of personal commitments, and so I haven’t been able to string thoughts together—or, rather, amidst other clamors for my attention, there are so many strings of thoughts that I haven’t been able to pull them together.

This entry is but one of five or six blogs that I’ve set out to write, truth be told.

If you would like to follow my more…succinct and immediate thoughts, feel free to follow me on my personal Twitter @RevDrAnnaM, or find me on Facebook.

Peace, and moreover shalom, be with you all.