madame future moderator

follow-up to the Ukiah performance

2012-01-13T16:54:00.000-08:00

The students from Ukiah wrote us some of their reflections. My favorite:

◦ I was at the high point of euphoria. They felt like both friends and family. I was so happy and proud. Someone in the audience kept saying they were having goosebumps during the performance. Awesome.

◦ They all danced with their heart. I connected with them through their performances. I was amazed that they still keep their traditions.

◦ I felt they really cherished what they have, so they really appreciated everything they learned. One girl was writing down every Chinese phrase we taught her while talking or walking. It seemed that the knowledge was precious to them.

◦ I was really eager to see them. They were really happy to see us. Their performances were really lively. Their dance is gift for us. Their happiness is our happiness. I was happy we were able to give them something equal

◦ I thought it was cool. There is no difference between them and us. Their dance was really amazing. I want to learn the dance. I felt there is no distance (of strangers) between Ugandans and our students.

◦ We learned so much about how joyful and carefree their culture is, how full of life and positive. Before, we only learned about the depressing part, the suffering and loss and poverty. But it seemed like they could forget everything when they danced, and just be in the moment. We should learn from them to forget the negative past experiences and enjoy the present.

Update

2012-01-13T16:51:00.000-08:00

I realize i have a gaping hole in my blog record. Update: I was in Uganda. Now I'm in America, and I have 20 Ugandans with me for a 7-week tour of the States. Pause for immense gratitude. This is a huge dream come true. I had so many sleepless nights while we planned it, and now that it's a reality... well, i'm still up too late planning, and still having those "working dreams" rehearsing tomorrow's plans in my mind, but mainly I'm just overwhelmingly happy that it is really real. For nearly 2 years now, every time I've flown I've walked through SFO airport imagining what it would look like to the new eyes of Ugandan children who have never flown before. Not a week ago, I walked through the same airport holding 20 passports, counting 20 heads, sending 20 through customs and immigration, counting 31 pieces of luggage, calling ahead to the bus driver and my friend Susan who met us on the other side. I was so unstressed and everything went so smoothly that I had to pinch myself again and again to be sure I was awake.
I'm sure the universe has somehow aligned in our favor. Everything feels like a miracle. We haven't lost a single person, passport, or piece of luggage. Another similar Ugandan organization (Watoto) was traveling on the same plane to London, and their kids were puking left and right while our group sailed sweetly through with only a little dehydration and some sore muscles. Yesterday we made an E.R. trip for stitches on a cut (from playing basketball) and they got us in and out in half an hour. If that isn't miraculous, I don't know what is.

At the Ukiah performance (where it seemed the entire town came to see us) I asked one of the nuns what happened - did they publicize the performance widely? She said no, they had hardly announced it. She told me they believed that these people knew to come because they had a spiritual affinity with the Children of Uganda and the work we do.

One of our Ugandan songs proclaims "I'll sing to the Lord, because God is watching over me." My theological training tells me to be wary of statements like "things are going well so God must be on our side" but at the same time, my gut tells me to trust it. Even though this tour is brought to you with a lot of help from our friends, by the seat of our pants and the skin of our teeth, even though we aren't sure where we'll stay next week, I am finally fully willing to trust and just to keep putting one dancing foot in front of the other.

Children of Uganda's first show

2012-01-11T21:06:00.000-08:00

I write this as we travel home from Ukiah, a 2+ hour drive through wine country and rolling hills.
Ukiah? What's in Ukiah? (my first thoughts…)
What is in Ukiah, as it turns out, is an amazing Buddhist center (City of Ten Thousand Buddhas) including a K-12 day and boarding school, some university students, monks, nuns, organic farm, meditation center and restaurant. One of their high school students has been raising money for Children of Uganda, through Rotary club and other sources. So we decided to make a trip up to see them… one of the best decisions ever made!
We were enthusiastically greeted by a gaggle of uniformed high school girls, and soon introduced to a Ugandan Buddhist Monk who took the COU children on a lecture-tour of the center. He brought them into the Buddha hall and oriented them to the meanings of various statues and paintings, drawing comparisons to Christ very frequently, and with a casualness that surprised our children. They were also surprised to find out that some people were Christian Buddhists. One girl remarked - "in Uganda I could never go into a place like this, it would be seen as totally wrong. But here I can visit and learn about it with no problem." The children participated in meditation as well. We hope all of them have learned something about religious tolerance and even about respectful interfaith dialogue!

After lunch we set up for the performance, but soon we were invited to sit down in front row seats while THEY performed for US. We saw several different dances including the Lion dance and Dragon dance, and Taiwanese drumming as well. The audience of about 500 packed into the room, stood by the walls, sat on the floor, and made a lot of very appreciative noise. At some points it sounded more like a basketball game than a dance performance from the way they whooped and whistled. Children of Uganda performed after the intermission and I couldn't imagine a more supportive audience. At the end the COU kids were each given gift baskets, hand-written cards from kindergarteners (with greetings in Luganda!), and roses. By the time we loaded our things back onto the bus they'd laden us down with boxes of snacks, blankets, jackets, sweaters, and I don't even know what else. Their students came onto our bus for a final goodbye and I do believe I saw some tears as they exchanged hugs.

We're headed home now to our homestay families, most of whom have lamented how little time they get to spend with their guests. We've reconfigured the schedule to allow them another meal together on Thursday and a free day with no commitments but recreation on Saturday. This morning we left at 7 AM, no one's favorite time, but my host family's twin 10-year-olds stumbled sleepy-headed out to the breakfast table so they could get some extra time with their guests.

On Children of Uganda's 2006 tour we went to big professional theaters and stayed in hotels. I will admit that a theater *might* make us twice as much money as a school, and that when you stay in hotels you are subject to no one's lateness but your own. But in my personal opinion, that money couldn't possibly be worth as much as the bedheaded good-mornings and tearful good-byes.

Pictures and video to come soon!

Burials

2011-12-30T03:53:00.002-08:00

Just a quick note to report some sadness. Yesterday I went with six of COU's office staff out to the Busoga region, past a town called Kamuli, nearly 3 hours transport in a private car, to attend a burial. Kamuli district is very poor; we passed roadside stands which in Mukono would be heavy laden with fruit, but here each person was selling two or three bunches of bananas only.
The woman who died was the mother of one of our COU employees, and although none of us knew her personally, it is traditional to accompany your friends to their family burial services. Hundreds of people were there, and it felt festive as they served food and made many speeches praising this woman's good long life (79 years old - ancient by Ugandan standards!). Piles of flowers covered the ornate coffin.
However today I just packed Shirah up to go to another burial, which will be much less festive. She got a call on my phone this morning that her baby cousin passed away at only 4 months. The funeral is actually in the same town Kamuli. I know it will be a sorrowful occasion. And why did the baby die? No one knows exactly but I'll venture it was directly caused by poverty - just too many diseases around, too little soap and clean water, too few doctors, too many challenges.
Please keep the grieving families in your prayers.

Uncle Fred

2011-12-30T03:53:00.001-08:00

At Christmas I spent a while talking with Uncle Fred, who grew up in Daughters of Charity (COU's partner organization) believing that he was a total orphan. It wasn't until he was about to graduate from university that he met some people who encouraged him to find his family. Through personal connections and the use of a village loudspeaker, he eventually managed to reconnect with his aunt (Shirah's grandmother). The family had assumed he died in the war of the 1980s along with his parents. It was a joyous reunion of course. And as he began to re-integrate with his long lost family, he saw how many of his nieces and nephews were sitting at home without attending school. He decided to help Shirah and her sister (a small family, it's just them and their mother, as their father abandoned them a long time ago). Shirah was brought to COU and is now sponsored by my parents, and Uncle Fred personally sponsors Mercy. Their mother does whatever tailoring work she can, but she also struggles with poor health. It's hard to imagine how the family would have fared without Uncle Fred and the Daughters of Charity / Children of Uganda connection.

Christmas in the Country

2011-12-30T03:49:00.001-08:00

Shirah, my "sister" (the sponsored child of my parents) took me to her grandmother's village for Christmas this year. The journey started at 7 AM and took us through exorbitantly overcharged taxi routes to a dirt road where we both clambered onto a boda-boda (motorcycle taxi) and rode 10 km to arrive at their family home. I've been in the country before but this is "really really" in the country. Very few cars travel along that road, only the bodas and bicycles. There is no electricity, and I didn't even see any solar panels. Needless to say, no Christmas lights or lawn ornaments.

We celebrated Christmas morning with 3 hours in church. Comprehending only a tiny portion of the content of the service, I contented myself with singing English lyrics to the carols I knew, and contemplating the people around me. I've known that statistically, half the population of Uganda is under the age of 15, but here it was plain to see. Adults sat on benches, mostly well-dressed, but scores of messy children rustled noisily at our feet, unheeded and unminded. Tiny babies nursed from impossibly skinny mothers, or were passed from lap to lap. The pastor had to step over and around the children to get from pulpit to lectern and back. Even when a child (or two or more) was crying, the pastor simply preached louder. He had no microphone or amplification, but then again there were a lot of things the church didn't have yet -- a roof being one. This was the first Sunday in the new building, and the portion of the roof that hadn't been funded yet was covered by a tarp. We had an auction at the end of the service to try to complete the project.
Shirah's uncle introduced me to the congregation, near the end of the service. The deacon said "Clap for her! When else will we have a muzungu in this church?" I stood up and said Merry Christmas in Luganda and the place shrieked with happiness. Afterward everyone wanted their picture taken with me. I must have posed about a dozen times.

Back at the family home we had a traditional Ugandan meal featuring matooke and chicken. Their home is nice but sparsely furnished. I and two uncles were given stools to sit on and forks to use, while the other few adults and a dozen children sat on mats on the floor eating with their hands as is traditional. After eating we took all the mats outside and sat or sprawled in the shade of a tree while the teenagers did the washing up. We sat there much of the afternoon as neighbors came by to visit, eat cake, and catch up with the family members they hadn't seen in a long time.

Shirah's sister took me on a walk around the village. We greeted many an astonished child and some elderly women as well. "Thank you for coming to our village" was a refrain I heard often, and some of the villagers backed up their thanks with gifts. I came home with three large bags of just-picked peanuts, which we've been shelling for a few days now and plan to roast soon.

Back at Kiwanga that night, we had a teen-oriented Christmas party. Sodas and cake were the main refreshments, and camera flashes the main entertainment as people posed with their sodas, new clothes, and friends. I had brought a suitcase full of donated clothing which served as my Christmas presents, and these were the only presents I saw exchanged this year. I was happy to see some people wearing them at the Christmas party.

My sister Cassie & I used to blog together, back in the day (at http://tandcinuganda.livejournal.com), and she always had some profound closing remarks. In her absence, I invite you to insert profound remarks here by leaving a comment.
Merry Christmas!

Heartache

2011-12-19T07:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had the distinct displeasure of being the one to break the news to one of our girls that she will not be traveling on tour. 3 children have received such news now... 2 because their visas were denied, one because she gets horrible shin splints when she dances too long. All three of them were amazing dancers and we really wanted to keep them on the tour. To all of them we are promising to take them on future tours provided we can work around these problems.
We gathered last night in the darkness of a Kampala power outage - me, Robert (director) and Constance (trainer) and Auntie Maria, the big mama of the home, called this girl to us, and hemmed & hawed for a bit until Robert coughed - Talitha, you do it. I nearly cried myself as I told her. She's one of my personal favorites too and I remember her from when she was in first grade.
The amazing this is how well she took it. She cried a little but then said she wanted to continue training anyway. We all agreed to let her train, and keep it a secret until she was ready to tell her fellow dancers. And I'm taking her shopping today for a new Christmas dress - small consolation but it will help.

As I write this (7:40 AM) the children are in the thick of training. I was awakened this morning by the slapping of their feet as they warmed up by running circles around the home. Sorrow may visit, but the beat goes on.

Uganda - five years later

2011-12-19T05:39:00.002-08:00

I haven't been here since 2007 and have spent my fair share of time looking for what has changed in Uganda. Hemlines are shorter, leggings are in, and ringtones are popular... There's more electricity, and it seems every church and mosque (in a very religious nation) wants to broadcast their services loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. Those aside, here are the specific changes I've seen.

First - prices have risen, roughly doubling for food, fuel, transportation, and most necessaries, although the dollar only rose about 45% during the same time. So things are more expensive even for my dollar. The one exception is airtime -- the minutes purchased on your pay-per-use cell phone. Prices have stayed low due to stiff competition. On some networks you now pay per second, not per minute.
Second - phones are much more powerful. Nearly everyone has one now, and some people have one phone with two or more sim cards so they can use multiple carriers. Our teenagers at COU go out to the market to buy airtime in 25 cent increments. But phones are also used now for money transfers, like a bank account. You can put cash on your "mobile money" account, either to save it and take it off later, or to send it to anyone else - even paying bills or tuition via this method. Thus, any corner shop in any slum can be transformed into a bank.

Third - a few amazing high-rises have sprung up, gleaming bright on top, but with their foundations rooted in the muddy streets of Kampala. A very vivid reminder of the economic disparities which are markedly similar to the US - 1% and the 99%. There's a new Mercedes-Benz dealership, iPhones are advertised widely, and at the same time, millions of people are surviving on one meal a day.

Four - traffic jams are worse than ever before. There are just too many people on too few roads. New roundabouts and flyovers help in a few places, but mainly drivers look for bumpy back roads to escape the jams.

Five - aiya, all these children have grown up so much!

Saturday night - 10:30 PM

2011-12-19T05:39:00.001-08:00

The dance troupe members went home for early holidays, getting to celebrate Christmas with their families ahead of time. They were told to report back today at noon, for a 2 PM training. By 8 PM we had most of them back, and they weaseled their way out of an evening training (negotiating for a 5 AM start time tomorrow instead). But I'd waited a week already to hear and see them, and I wouldn't stand to wait longer. So they put together an impromptu concert in Robert's bedroom... singing hymns and party songs alike, accompanied by harps and fiddle, dancing with side-to-side steps and hand movements. Simple, simple things, fun and easy for them. They all looked at me with such huge smiles and excitement as they sang.

I've been feeling slightly out of it since I got here, but as their music swelled around me, all of a sudden everything clicked into place. Behind me: years of love and learning. Ahead of me: traveling to share this song. And in the here and now: gratitude.

The song they sang first was the first Luganda song I learned when I came in 2005 - tunakuwaki ffe - meaning "what can we give you, [God] but to praise you all our days?" That is the kind of gratitude I'm feeling now -- there is just nothing I can possibly do or say to do it justice. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve, for the huge privilege of bringing these children to America to share their song, and for the life journey that brought me to this place and this time.

Shopping

2011-12-16T01:35:00.000-08:00

The past few days I have spent hauling in various directions around town, searching for items we need for the tour. Shoes & socks were bought today, and we put in requests for bike shorts and undershirts for the girls' costumes. We also got several long rolls of material for drum bags (the tailors are coming in the next few days to construct these bags around the drums). Next up: carry-on bags, legwarmers, and tablecloths for our merchandise tables.
The shopping is challenging. Gone are the days of yesteryear where we carried millions of shillings in our pants pockets and bought things helterskelter at the secondhand market, collecting little scraps of anonymous receipts to hand in... the auditors are much more strict and so we have to buy from legitimate business that can invoice us properly, making a trip to get a quote, a trip to pay, another trip to pick up the materials.

Lead performers Geofrey and Jane spent much of the day stringing together beads for the Rwandese dances. Robert and Geofrey inspect the work:

Robert isn't sure there are enough... especially not if he gets to wear as many as he wants...

Visiting Days

2011-12-16T01:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Rose (one of our social workers) and I spent 10 hours in town. I estimate it at 6 hours in taxis/minibuses/boda-bodas, 1 hour walking, 2 hours waiting, all for the purpose of having 2 half-hour visits.
First visit to Silas, a special child in our program who has always gotten extra attention because of his health problems – cerebral palsy among them. After several phone calls we found him at his uncle’s house for the holidays. They live out in a village where the children called me “Sheila” after a muzungu character in a soap opera – the only white woman they knew of. Silas is shy and didn’t have much to say, but it was good to see him there. He is healthy and when asked what he does for fun he replied “playing football.” This on crutches is quite an accomplishment!

Second visit was to Joseph, my boy from long ago. I was looking for a little terror of an 8-year old, but was happily surprised to see a tall and calm young man walk toward me in the back roads of his town. He is fifteen now and growing every minute, quite a bit taller than me already, and he says he is also growing up in other ways… that he no longer “disturbs” all the neighbors or keeps them from sleeping with his raucous behavior. Needless to say, they appreciate this and praise him for his maturity. I was glad to see, however, that he still has a fresh young sense of humor. In chalk he had drawn a TV screen on the bare wall of their house, complete with advertising slogans.
As we visited, his two little cousins came in and sat wide-eyed across the room staring at the muzungu visitor. I would turn around every few minutes to see another child or two had joined them. It is sobering to consider what a difference COU makes in our childrens’ lives, looking at how much better dressed they are then their neighbors, and seeing the hordes of undersupervised children in need of care.

When I realize how long I spent traveling (and how much money spent on bus fares) I wonder what makes these visits “worth it.” Maybe it was the smiles on their faces, or the surprise when they realized who the “important visitor” was, or just the chance to see little kids growing up. The visits definitely WERE worth it, traffic jams and back roads and all.

Please support our children at http://firstgiving.com/fundraiser/talitha-phillips/2012-tour-of-light ... your gift (before the tour) will be roughly doubled or more (by income on the tour) to support these children for the future.

A quiet beginning

2011-12-13T22:00:00.000-08:00

In a week there will be 20 children and youth drumming up a storm in training sessions night and day. But at Kiwanga home this week, there are only about 2 dozen people besides staff, and holy cow is it quiet! I wish I'd brought my guitar with me, it would help liven things up a bit.

At Children of Uganda we prefer that the children under our care not spend their whole lives in an institution, so during school holidays we encourage all children to visit family. Despite the strong nets of extended family in Uganda, there are some who simply have no one, and they spend holidays here at Kiwanga. The other residents are members of Philip's House, who live with severe disabilities and are cared for here. And a few recent graduates of our program are here while they look for what to do next. Our resident sculptor, Ben, is one of these. He whiles away the time making amazing art. I walked out the first morning I was here, and wondered who the other muzungu (white person) was. For some reason it didn't occur to me ask why she was reading a book to an ostrich and a llama...

Five years ago, here with Cassie and Tim, we put a few trees in the ground. To be honest, Tim did easily 90% of the work. So Tim, here are your success stories! Towering and fruitful.

Agriculture is booming here, with a very successful poultry project to boot. Here Henry (a Philip's House resident) carefully waters his dodo (amaranth) and tomato plants.

I was overjoyed to see my old friend Joseph here.

Midway through his education he took a very unexpected re-route, and by now he is almost done with his training to be a hairdresser and fashion designer. Here he is plaiting some new braids for a friend - a two-day task.

Immaculate has stolen everyone's hearts, so I'll just chime in with the choir: this girl is amazing. She is the youngest of our children with no known relatives... she was raised by her older brother until last year when she came to our program. She arrived sullen and shy but you wouldn't believe it by now. She is absolutely blossoming under the care of the organization. Some times I feel bad for her - the youngest of this group, hanging around all day with no one silly or patient enough to play "monkey" for hours at a time with her - but I take a moment to remember where she came from. I realize that this environment (which would be seen as horribly boring to most American kids) is far more nurturing and loving than any place she's been in before. I realize that she is flourishing and growing in it, simple as it may be.

Gratitude for the day: singing praise songs (by popular demand) with all the Philips House members, plus Immaculate and one of the staff's children in my lap. Some of the Philip's House members have disabilities that affect their voices, and others just seem to mimic their peers' speech patterns, resulting in a whole group of people communicating primarily in vowels without consonants. Immaculate's sweet and clear voice combined with my voice and the heartfelt howls of the Philip's House members for an unforgettable sound. Between songs everyone would clamor for attention, pulling on my hands and sleeves and skirt, with needs and wants of utmost urgency (though they were to be forgotten as soon as I came up with another song). I could stay there forever, endlessly trying to meet everyone's attention needs, but I am trying to give without running dry. The Luganda words for "stop" and "please wait" came back to my brain in a flash of brilliance. Plus the words for "this has been wonderful, but I am going to bed now." Which, now, I shall do.

Sleep deprived and I can prove it!

2011-12-11T00:59:00.000-08:00

En route to Uganda! I'm at London Heathrow in the midst of a 24-hour travel extravaganza, and I'm exhausted. I wasn't able to fit my boyfriend in my duffle bag (much sadness), but I did manage to pack this little friend from Joie. He was sad that I wasn't making many singing telegrams this year, so he convinced me to let him make one himself. I sang along a bit because reindeer have very soft voices, and I subtitled it in case you don't speak Reindeer.
Enjoy.

Advent-ious adventures

2011-12-08T17:44:00.000-08:00

Mary's belly is stretched to the limit and we are expectant.
I am expectant as can be, as I pack and sort and do crazy amounts of work getting ready to go to UGANDA and to pick up Children of Uganda (COU)'s dance troupe, starting their US tour on Jan 8th.
Advent is a time of strain - of living in the in-between - sure of hope, yet not tangible yet. One can never be sure. Yet we are.

I go to Uganda pregnant with hope, stressed to the max, and sure that when Children of Uganda make it to the US that hearts and lives will be changed. They changed me, when i met them as a teenager. I wish such blessings on you all as well, which is why I'm bringing them there to meet you =)

published

2011-12-03T20:45:00.000-08:00

...in Chimes, SFTS' magazine.

6 days until I depart.

donate here.

The text of the article:

I first heard my call to seminary in Uganda. I had just graduated from college, and had been living for several months in a small guest room next to the boys’ domitory in an orphanage run by Children of Uganda. I was sick one week, and lay in bed reading Henri Nouwen during the quiet hours when children were at school and the afternoon hours when their playful noise ricocheted off the cement walls. Nouwen spoke of service and simplicity - these things I was trying to do - and I just knew I had no idea how to put my ideals into practice.

My sister and I went to Uganda hoping for some personal, spiritual benefits. We’d abandoned the numbing American culture of consumption, and we hoped for a pure experience of important and passionate service. Instead we found a bewildering maze of questions. Why do poor people spend so much money on clothing and hairstyle? A lesson about priorities. Why do we feel like we’re in England every day at tea-time? A lesson about postcolonial culture. Why are there no jobs for talented young graduates? A lesson about global economics.

SFTS helped me sort through many of the big questions. Later I ran a summer program for volunteers in Uganda, guided by Dr. Phil Wickeri’s mission class. I also participated in the Muilenberg-Koenig History of Religion Seminar run by Dr. Chris Ocker on the topic of poverty. I was able to learn more about historical approaches to poverty relief, some of which we will try to use in Children of Uganda (I now serve on the Board of Directors).

Children of Uganda (COU) has cared for thousands of children since 1995. All have been affected in some way by the dual scourges of AIDS and poverty that have nearly destroyed Uganda. The adult generation has virtually disappeared; today, half of Uganda’s population is under the age of fifteen. There are 8 million children identified as “orphans and vulnerable children,” and only 11% of them are receiving any outside aid. About 500 are currently in the care of COU. It’s a fragment of the total need, but every tiny bit counts.

COU’s public face is our dancers. From kindergarten on, all COU children receive training in the Ugandan traditions of music and dance. With the adult generation decimated, many of these traditions were nearly lost. But we know and value the power of music to transform suffering, to encourage and uplift, and to maintain a sense of cultural pride. Every few years COU brings the most talented dancers to the US as ambassadors for Uganda’s orphan population. I saw the Tour of Light as a teenager, and the children’s infectious joy was life-changing. I look forward to assisting with the next tour in January 2012. I lie awake at night dreaming of this tour and the lives it may change.

I often am told “you’re so passionate.” I am quick to repeat the lesson I learned: Passion is not something you can choose - not a value add-on to your otherwise lovely life. Passion is something that gets inflicted on you. An orphan child asks “can I call you mum?” and suddenly you no longer have the privilege of ignoring global injustice. The price of food in East Africa is suddenly a live and pressing issue. And so you find yourself setting up a table somewhere, holding out your hands, saying “can I tell you about Uganda?” and asking otherwise comfortable people to sponsor children in need. No matter what else I may do in my life, I can never leave this work behind.

White Meat

2011-11-22T18:52:00.000-08:00

As we approach the festive weekend during which Americans throw out the most leftover food per capita, a couple of thoughts on the meat industry... not something I usually engage (being vegetarian).

My sister was in Haiti recently and wrote a beautiful blog here. Among her observations was the immense problem of NGOs in Haiti. Yes, that is, the problem of too many people trying to help. She asks simple questions: "If 80% of Haiti is unemployed, what is a team of Americans doing building houses for them?" and... "why isn't there any chicken breast available for dinner?"

You may have heard about the way the US/World Bank/IMF requirements ended up flooding Haiti with rice from Arkansas in 1991, or the situation with Montsanto's "gift" of genetically modified corn (Haitian farmers overwhelmingly rejected it because it would contaminate local seed supplies and reduce farmers' ability to support themselves for the next year by saving seeds from their crop). You would think we would learn not to mess with other folks' agriculture. But we like sending food to starving children, so we donate to the organizations that continue to flood foreign economies with American food. And, we like our crop subsidies, so we like to keep farmers overproducing here.

Cassie writes: "Last night I learned that the US sends left-over dark meat to Haiti, since we eat a disproportionate amount of white meat. The cheap prices take away any incentive to raise chickens for sale in Haiti. I've eaten drumsticks for dinner the past two nights."

Think on that when you eat your white meat. Check the supermarket: with the exception of whole birds for sale, there are many more chicken breasts than drumsticks for sale, are there not? By purchasing only the best meat, we choose a system that dumps inferior meat on countries that will take it, destroying their ability to feed, employ, and empower themselves.

I am preparing for a trip to Uganda, and let this be foremost in my mind: to do no harm in your helping.

Leaving my job

2011-11-16T21:54:00.000-08:00

The news went out in our newsletter today... I will not be working at Montclair Presbyterian next year. I've been working at this wonderful, wonderful church for nearly a year and a half, first with youth and children, then with the grownups. I've had a lot of joy there, in singing and Godly-playing, studying and dancing and counseling. However, the job description is changing. I worked quarter time, third-time, then half time, but as of January it's going to full-time, and it will include all of the previous areas I've worked in - and then some.

I applied for the full time job, interviewed with much trepidation, and spent a lot of time wondering, quite angstily, whether I could live up to the high expectations of this job. So when I was told that the committee was pursuing another candidate, I actually breathed a sigh of relief. It's not the right fit, and I'm glad we all know that. It sounds like they really wanted me to be the right person for the job, and it took a lot of discernment on their part as well as mine to come to the realization that this just isn't the right job for me.

I'm sad to be leaving the church. They are a wonderful set of people and as I said, I've had great joys in this job. However I know I'll still find a way to keep in touch, whether as a guest musician or just as a friend. Recently I've had jealousy of those folks who can just be "part of" a church without taking leadership. It looks like so much more fun. Maybe I'll be able to slip in, every once in a while, as a person who's just here... just a part of things... not in the middle of it all. That might not be easy, but I'm going to try my darndest to disappear from the limelight and just be happy to be a part of things.

Up next? Children of Uganda's Tour of Light, of course -- the biggest thing I've ever done in my life. I'll be in Uganda prepping the dance troupe from December 10th to January 8th, then we begin our great 7-week tour of the US. After that, I'll finally put some long-overdue work into my thesis, and apply for CPE programs at local hospitals (clinical pastoral education, otherwise known as emotional boot camp for pastors). Or maybe just sail away and sing sea chanteys for a living. It'll be an adventure.

Moderator!

2011-11-07T13:39:00.000-08:00

When the Moderator of the PC(USA) visits campus, and you write a blog with a title such as this one, you are morally compelled to practice the spiritual discipline of blogging even if you have NO TIME.

Moderator Cindy Bolbach came to SFTS today, preached in chapel, and joined us for lunch. She's fun and funny... I appreciated her sermon and especially her mention of a quote from Fredrick Beuchner: "I don't go to church that often any more because I don't experience God there." While empathizing with that, she suggested: maybe we don't necessarily go to church to have an experience of God. It's awesome when the experience happens, but maybe we go to church to help others experience God, or to meet people who have experienced God, and to be strengthened and supported by one another. Maybe we go to punch holes in the roof and let our friends down on mats so they can experience God.

These thoughts hit close to something I've been wondering about a lot recently... Why does working in a church feel so different from being part of a church? One is, I know, because we don't form the same kinds of friendships when we have a professional role dividing us from those we spend so much time with. But also I know that we see the dark underbelly of Church when we work for her... the ruts of old thinking, the stress and the burnout, the necessity to work constantly to make sure the roof is watertight (thus keeping us from letting our friends down on mats to see Jesus!)
Brian McLaren hits the nail on the head in this article on Patheos. Let's make churches more like seminaries. Moderator Bolbach said that young pastors are one of the places she sees the most hope for the church. Well, those young pastors are going to burn out before they get to be in a place to have much to say, unless church becomes more like the inclusive and stimulating communities we know from seminary.

One cheerful postlude: thank God for social media. At graduation, seminarians are generally scattered far and wide, and the precious community support that we had at seminary is ripped out from under us. EXCEPT FOR ON FACEBOOK! Dear seminary friends, you will never be defriended, because our connections are the kind I need, to keep trying to do this Church thing with all its stresses.

Event recap

2011-10-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

It was amazing and raised $20,000. I'm so grateful to so many of the dancers and friends who made it such a roaring success!
Children of Uganda is still working on closing our budget gap for the tour, however. If you can keep our fundraising in your prayers over the next week it would be greatly appreciated.

This is the biggest thing ever

2011-10-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

When I say my life is full, I mean there is an incredible event coming up on Saturday, and I dream about it all night and work on it all day.

Event Registration Online for Dancing for Uganda powered by Eventbrite

Life goes on

2011-10-10T14:35:00.001-07:00

In order to be a good blogger you have to have:
(1) a life
(2) time to think about your life.
I have SUCH a life right now, a wonderful life, full to bursting with great people and sea chanteys and beautiful places and work and love and city and passion.
...But I have next to nil on #2. Lately I've had to come up with tactics to slow myself down, to forcibly stop myself from working at 10 PM on a weekend. I've improved on that... Still no time to think about life though.
That's all for now
Peace~ T

another blog

2011-09-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

i haven't been ENTIRELY remiss in blogging. But some of them are in other places now. Here's one:
http://www.mpcfamily.org/family_living/enter-my-world/

Trying to be sick.

2011-08-22T10:52:00.001-07:00

I'm sick today. Actually I've been waffling between "sorta sick" and "almost sick" for more than a week now, and I finally gave myself permission to just be "sick" with no adjectives in front of it. The problem then becomes: what do I DO?
An example from a recent sorta-sick-day:

Terra: What are you doing today?
me: Resting. Napping. I'm kinda sickish.
Terra: Are you sure? Because it looks a lot like you're fundraising, and I'm pretty sure there's a difference between napping and fundraising.

(Yes, I'm still fundraising. Because it doesn't count as "work" when you care this much about it, and because Ugandan school fees wait for nobody. more.)

I worked hard all weekend, led a very fun group of teens and parents to volunteer on a farm, spent hours digging up potatoes in rocky soil, brought the kids to a water park, got home near midnight, played jazz bass at church, picked up a friend from the airport, went out for coffee, and finally someone asked me "how are you" and I said "I don't know unless I sit down, and I haven't sat down in days." Then I sat down and my body let go of all the forcing, pushing, stressing adrenaline, and relaxed into its true self, and I realized I felt awful.

GUESS WHAT. I can't be a successful fundraiser unless I let myself chill out and heal. I can't be a successful pastoral-care-giver unless I rest enough to not be yawning and sneezing all over the cared-for. I preach this to others: put on your own oxygen mask first. Mom can't feed her babies unless she's feeding herself. Etc. I wrote a WHOLE ARTICLE about it on the more professional blog I write. But right now the preacher needs preached-to.
Today I'm going to sit on the couch and do those mind-numbing things that normal people usually do to relax, like watching TV and reading novels. Fundraising doesn't count as relaxing today. In order to live in the real world (later) I need to spend a day away from it (now). But the temptations to do meaningful activities are huge, so if any of you have advice on how to trick yourself into forcibly resting, I'm all ears.

Can I talk to you?

2011-08-07T16:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning I went to the GoodFestival in Fairfax, CA, gave my bike to the valet parking attendant, and found my table under the redwoods. Spreading out african cloth, Children of Uganda brochures, and twenty necklaces made of recycled paper, I took my stand in a position of open-eyed prayer. The festival sparked into life around me as the opening band invoked "all the angels" (especially those angels who during their lifetimes had been members of the Beatles). From what I could tell, the theme of the GoodFestival was "things that are good." Simple painted wood signs were hung from the trees with slogans like "Let Go of Everything" and "Peace is on the Increase." Little gender-fluid children ran around in face paint and wings. There were so many good vibes in the place it could make you cry.

So there I was, one little table among many. Every table was a noble cause, from greening your electric bill to sharing free food... from healing massage to creative self-actualization through hula hooping. Even the coffee table had $1 books (of the meaningful variety) for sale as well. My table was next to a bunch of poets and "spiritual artists" selling their wares and trying to revolutionize the publishing industry. I stood there alone and prayed that my cause would not be overlooked.

Can I tell you about the orphan crisis in Uganda? 3.5 million orphans in a country the size of Oregon?

Can I tell you about transforming lives through music and dance? Our upcoming performance tour?

Can I tell you how to make a difference for the most vulnerable? Right here and now?

I sold lots of necklaces, received donations from a child's $1 on up, signed someone up for our mailing list, and met a fellow Uganda-loving muzungu (white person) who spent three years there making a documentary. Not all the conversations were profound. Many people were unwilling to engage farther than their eyes -- "those are pretty." I let them go on as they wished. But still I stood there, stretching out my prayers if not my arms, looking deeply into the swirl of noble causes and playful families, asking God and the universe and all the good vibes to rain down some blessings on Children of Uganda.

About five in the afternoon my energy flow started to run dry. I'd had some free organic ice cream but it didn't kick me back into gear. What I needed was the energy that comes from talking to people who actually care, but the crowds were thinning. Besides, the stilt dancers were commanding most of the festivalgoers' attention by the stage. So I packed up and got my bike from the valet. Coasted downhill to San Anselmo with that clean feeling that comes from accomplishing a goal. I felt Heard. Somehow I knew my prayers had been answered.

Three Stories

2011-06-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

2 Cor 13:11-13

All right folks, here we are and it’s Trinity Sunday, and that means we won’t have a LOT to do with the Bible today. The word “trinity” is found in the bible exactly zero times. It’s a post-Biblical concept.

Suzanne read a blessing – since I missed it I bet some of you did too so I’ll read the last words again: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” That is about as much as we get. “Christ, God, and Holy Spirit.” There’s also a Commission in the gospel of Matthew, where Jesus tells his disciples to go out into the world baptizing people in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And there is also a funny little verse way back in the beginning of it all, where God says “let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.”

The bible has some scraps and pieces of information that helped us to come to an understanding of God. And on the surface, the Trinity just looks like an organizational tool: condensing and aligning three important stories about God.

But what’s interesting is that when we put the three stories together, we get another story – a story about relationships. A parent loving a child, a child trusting that parent. One person starting some work, and giving it to another to finish. Three people working for a common goal, living in harmony and unity. A Trinity is a unity of three. Not a hierarchy, with Father on top and Spirit at the bottom – a unity of three equals. A community.

It’s all a bit ridiculous, of course. God’s not a person. God doesn’t have hands and feet, or a gender, or a brain. For that matter, then, God does not have three brains, and six hands. And God is certainly NOT two old men and a ghost.

Sometimes we try to come up with alternate wording for the Trinity. Mother, Child, and Womb has been suggested… works for some, doesn’t for others… Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer is a great old standby, but it sounds a little bit as if it’s just one person with three hats, three things to do. I could go out and get three part-time jobs, but that wouldn’t make me a Trinity. And when we just describe God’s tasks, we run the risk of abstracting God. The Trinity is three particular stories – not a set of abstractions.

As abstractions go, there are way too many ideas floating around that would have God be, by definition, the top of a hierarchy. God would be omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnicompetent – all the omni’s – a solitary monarch, high up on a throne in the clouds, with no need to interact with anything else except maybe to squash something or smite someone.
Guess what. That’s not God. That’s a monster.
Images of God matter – because no matter how you believe you were created, we all do re-create ourselves in the image of the God we believe in. If we believe God is authoritarian and strict, we become rigid and controlling. If we believe God is creative, we give ourselves permission to be playful. We create ourselves in the image of the God we believe in.
What the doctrine of the Trinity tells us is that we, also, ought not to be solitary monarchs, power-grabbers looking for a nice high throne. On the contrary, God’s image, in which we are created, is interdependence among equals, with hospitality for one another.

Today I want to share with you some images of this Triune God…

Three stories.

God looked down at her hands. Muddy from a day’s work, molding mountains. But it sure was fun work. Watching continental plates crash oh-so-slowly together, keeping a look out for volcanos, opening little springs of water that would cut into the face of the mountains. She could play with this stuff forever and never get tired. She loved watching a mountain stream clean out everything in its way, leaving bare rocks uncovered beneath it. She loved the sharp crags that turned into bright snowcaps, and she loved the green foothills with their soft gentle curves.

God had just recently brought mammals into being, and she loved watching them, wondering where each new species would find its home. She watched as they changed her mountains, the goats eating shrubs down to the stem, the beavers turning streams into ponds. She was wondering what to do about the erosion on a hill that the buffalo had just overgrazed… but she had plenty of time to see about that.

What God really wanted to do next was to work on that new creature. She was going to create it from the soil of the ground, and she had picked a terrific spot to dig that up. Fertile, reddish, rich and damp soil. She knew it was going to be a wonderful creation. She turned the dirt over and over in her hands, kneading it like clay, playing with different shapes. “In Our image,” God mused, “according to our likeness.” She made two legs and laughed out loud as they started twisting and kicking. She made an arm and pushed it in where the shoulder should be – and the little dirt creature pushed back. This was definitely more fun than molding mountains. She made the head and eyes and nose, and used her fingernail to slice a little mouth open. Immediately a flood of speech burst out – “Hey God, why didn’t you make me another arm? The kneecaps are really sticking out, don’t you think that’s poor planning if I fall? Hey, God, I also had an idea about that mountain over there. It’s too steep on the north side….”
God quickly put her thumb on the groundling’s mouth and held it there until she had made it some ears.

When the groundling’s body was complete it said “great! Can you let me down now and let me start fixing things around here?” … but God knew that one creature could never contain the Divine Image by itself. She put the first groundling to sleep while she fashioned a second. Soon they would create another, and God’s threefold image would begin.

God looked down at his hands. They were tied in thick rope and scratched where Pilate’s soldiers had so roughly handled him. He knew that this earthly adventure was coming up to a finale of some sort. He struggled to stay awake in the early morning cold, knowing that he could be called in for his trial at any time. Even in the quiet of his cell he could tell that outside, the drumbeat of the crowd’s frenzy was getting faster and faster.

Ever since Jesus had seen the groundling push back in the Creator’s hands, he had known that there was hard work ahead. He knew that it had been a risk all along to create such powerful and free creatures as humans… but even more, now, he knew that it was a risk to keep loving them. Of course he could abdicate responsibility at any time. He could deny his love for these hurting and hurtful people, call it quits, call in some angels, break the ropes tying him like Samson, fly out of the court before everyone’s watching eyes – but then he wouldn’t have shown people what it is to be fully human.

Jesus almost couldn’t stand it when miracles happened at his hands. Yes, he wanted to see people healed and changed and living new lives, and he was grateful when this happened – but when the crowd saw a miracle, they’d go ooh and aah as if it had been fireworks, and they would be clapping too loud to hear when he said “you could do this too. Your heavenly Father will hear you when you ask.”
It was sad to see people walking around like slaves, wasting their potential – when they were made in the image of God! Even his disciples so rarely understood. He’d say “no – you can do it too – just step out on the water with me –” but then they’d bow down and worship him, which was the last thing he wanted. He wanted them to join him, not put him on a pedestal.
He was working up a little sermon in his mind. Maybe if he’d explain it this way they’d get it: “To be fully human is to be a reflection of God. All that I have comes directly from God, because I just don’t get in the way. If you trust God, you can do anything!”

Who was he kidding? His chance of getting to preach one more time was about the same as his chance of getting a fair trial.

Well, he would have no miracles, today. He was here to show people what it meant to be a child of God, to truly bear God’s image, to love until the end. No tricks, no gimmicks. His hands would stay bound until someone untied them.

God looked down at her hands. They were cradling a small child in a hospital bed, and although none of the grownups in the room had managed to catch sight of them, God was finally satisfied that the child knew her hands were there. The Spirit’s hands were so hard to see, of course. Even when someone did see them, so often they’d chalk it up to coincidence or just good luck. Intuition often took the credit, as if intuition weren’t just one part of being created in God’s image. But it didn’t matter much to Spirit, as long as hatred was changed to love, despair to hope, sorrow to joy, darkness to light. That was her work, and there was a lot of work to do in this room today. The child was actually the most open to the Spirit, and was settling down peacefully to prepare for surgery, but the parents were distraught to the point that almost no consolation could seep through their fear. God wrapped each one of the parents in a blanket of trust and hoped that they’d take it in. Then she winged a quick dose of graciousness to the doctor, whose first reaction to the parents would have otherwise been “calm DOWN already,” and a measure of serenity to the hospital chaplain. She reminded the nurses of the gentleness within them, and gave the anaesthesiologist a extra burst of cheerfulness. Routine stuff, really. None of it was beyond the scope of ordinary human life. But ordinary human life is all in the image of God. Today God knew that she might go completely unnoticed, even by the chaplain. A few minutes ago she had been midwifing with a fearful new mother… empowering a janitor who needed to stand up for his rights… and inspiring a young and starry-eyed nursing student. None of them gave her the credit… mostly they’d forgotten that they had a spirit of any kind within, much less a divine spirit. But it didn’t matter, as long as her work was being done.

God looked down at God’s hands, held in a circle around the dinner table. Of course when you’re God you don’t technically need to say prayers before dinner. But they had a habit of gathering like this, expressing gratitude to one another, enjoying one another’s presence and sharing a meal. There was laughter today, Jesus had knocked over a chair in his typical human clumsiness. There was deep love expressed, great admiration for one another, and a willingness to pitch in and help where the other one needed it. How lonely it would be to do all this alone… with no one to laugh with you, cry with you, and suffer the pain of loving with you. How hard it would be to do this dance alone.

Take a moment and look down at your own hands, created in the image of God. I wonder what work they will do… whose hands they will hold… whose tears they might wipe away… what they will create.

Three Stories”
Take a moment and look at this icon. It is an old and famous picture of the Trinity…. I want to draw your attention to one thing about this picture. Look -- at how the circle is not closed. There is space at this table for you. The Trinity is not a closed community – it is open-ended and hospitable. You are invited in, to share, to feast, to work, and to dance with the members of the Trinity. Bring your work to the table – bring your fears, your sorrows, your joys. And then reach back out of the circle, and take someone else’s hand to bring them in. We belong to one another, and we belong to God.

Holy Impatience (otherwise known as the Ankle Monologues)

2011-06-15T20:50:00.000-07:00

Last week, in a burst of courage, I emailed my doctor saying "don't you think my ankle is taking, oh, well, just a little bit too long in healing? It having been a year already?" and he emailed back "yes" and within an hour a podiatrist called me saying "could you come in for an appointment in an hour?"
(Kaiser Permanente definitely has the internal communications down pat. Thumbs up for that, KP!)

So I went in, trembling, and grateful that I hadn't had more than a minute or two to think about what might actually be wrong with my ankle. Because, well, my ankle was last year's problem - I was done learning from that mistake. Sometime last winter the physical therapist dismissed me to self-scheduled aftercare, and said it'll be slow but sure. So I filed "ankle" in the back of my brain, settled into the self-abnegating practice of Holy Patience, and simply postponed everything I wanted to do, like hiking Mt. Bald, and Mt. Tam, and Tennessee Valley, and the AIDS walk.

I'd learned a lot of spiritual lessons, of course, like grace and humility and new priorities. So many lessons, in fact, that my ankle seemed to be, by now, not much more than a collection of Ideas and Learnings, of Humblings and Challenges. The ankle had ceased to be anything much like an ankle. I no longer thought of it in terms of leaps, or turns, or waltzes, or climbs. I'd even stopped thinking of it in terms of ligaments or tendons, strength or stretch.

It took some good friends and family members to gently push me and say, basically, "you deserve to have a working ankle." I went ahead and emailed the doctor, all but assuming he would answer "You're not spiritual enough. Practice patience." So it was scary when he agreed - "yes you deserve a working ankle."

My ankle is Not Okay, and if the steroid treatment doesn't loosen scar tissue, I could need surgery. That's scary.

What's scarier is to think about how quickly I shut myself up, shut myself off, denied myself the hope of a healthy ankle, and sanctified it under the name of the virtue - Holy Patience.
Impatience is holy too. Check out some psalms. That's the virtue I need to practice today. Today I need to push, demand, stand up for myself, and stop apologizing for the air I breathe. I need to know that I am good enough to deserve healing, and that, being a paying KP member, I am entitled to a doctor's care. Maybe I'll even get brave enough to ask God for some healing, although I'll have to get over the hurdle of wanting not to take up God's precious time.

Today I invite you to take a look at whatever it is you consider a virtue... and wonder about its counterpart. Could the opposite be a virtue, too? Patience - Impatience. Humility - Pride. Diligence - Playfulness.
I wonder....

Kick those cans

2011-06-08T21:36:00.000-07:00

Bold statement of the day: storing up too much extra food can be theologically dangerous.

I’m talking about those cans and boxes in your pantry. Yes, you. Your little Annie’s Mac & Cheeses, lentil soups, refried beans, ricearonis, whatever it is you store up. Theologically dangerous. Yes, I said it. Watch out.

I wouldn't counsel utter foolishness, of course. I know a good deal when I see one. As a matter of principle I won’t say no to 75% off. And certain places can really get me going. When I’m house shopper (we divide it up – one person to the farmer’s market, one to TJ’s, one to Safeway) I find it much harder to shop at Safeway than the farmers’ market. At the farmer’s market, you look around and see what’s good, and guess how much a hungry household will eat in a week, and I almost never have a problem with going over budget. We can only eat so much in a week. At Safeway I’m constantly tempted. They know how my brain works. They offer 50% off sales, or even worse, they say “buy one get one FREE” and my brain sees “free” and says “well it would be a sin to leave that to go to waste, I’d better help them out here.” I end up spending way over the weekly budget and we end up with stacks and stacks of 60-percent-off pasta. We eat it, eventually, of course.

There is a theological side of this story. Ellen Davis talks about the “manna economy” of the desert, and the “empire economy” of Egypt. When the Israelites were enslaved, they looked around and saw silo after huge silo of stored grain. They may not have had direct access to it, but it was there in case of famine, courtesy of Pharoah’s food policy programs. In the desert it was the polar opposite – their manna was not physically capable of being stored. It would rot overnight. Forget building a silo – you'd have to live day to day. The manna story shows the economic implications of relying on your food directly from the hand of God – if there is no storing it up, there is no taxing it either, or running an overpriced supply chain out of Pharoah’s silos. Everyone gets what they need - no more, no less.
The manna economy does not come easily in the real world. We are keepers, storers, hoarders - and recently TV shows have shown us the dark underside of that strain that runs through our culture. It is not that unusual for people to have cans in their closet that end up expiring before they can eat them all – because so many sales have convinced them they absolutely MUST take this cheap little can of food home with them, store it up, feel secure against potential disasters.
It’s a funny philosophy… to think that God would somehow love the perishable food more than the imperishable… and might even want us to face the world without a prudent reserve… but it must come from something like the same theology that says “blessed are the poor” and other such backwards things.
What is your personal food theology? What does your pantry or fridge say about your relationship to God? Or have you intellectualized it out of that realm completely?

Scandalous food

2011-05-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

Ask any of my housemates, my favorite greek word is σκανδαλιζομαι! With lots of exclamation points at the end. “Scandalizomai” – I am scandalized (by whatever gross or otherwise inappropriate thing has just been said)!!!
The Greek word has the sense of “scandal” in the sense of something offensive. But it also has the very concrete meaning of something which causes others to trip and fall. A “stumbling block,” if you will. My housemates don’t necessarily feel hurt if I say I’m scandalized by them – Jesus was scandalous too (1 Cor 1:23) – and still is a stumbling block to many.

Food is a scandalous subject, laden with cultural assumptions. Any new vegan who has gone home at Christmas knows this. What, Grandma’s roast isn’t good enough for you? Whattayawant, anyway? It goes the other way, too – try asking for a burger in a vegan household. We are scandalized by one another’s choice in food.

In a great passage of 1 Corinthians 8, Paul talks about food choices. The choice, in those days, was whether to eat meat (slaughtered in pagan temples) or to be vegetarian (hence not touching idol-tainted meat). My anti-vegetarian friends love to quote this one because it says “those whose conscience is weak eat only vegetables.” Paul was NOT putting us vegetarians down, though. His point is that those who are fully convinced that there is no such thing as a god other than God will not be upset by eating pagan meat. Paul is in that category. He has no moral qualms about meat. However, he is VERY careful not to scandalize his friends.

Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “no idol in the world really exists,” and that “there is no God but one.”… It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. “Food will not bring us close to God.” We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if others see you, who possess knowledge, eating in the temple of an idol, might they not, since their conscience is weak, be encouraged to the point of eating food sacrificed to idols? So by your knowledge those weak believers for whom Christ died are destroyed. But when you thus sin against members of your family, and wound their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.

To me, another question comes up. What about the members of our family who are workers in meatpacking plants? Meatpacking is one of the most dangerous jobs around, due to the speed of the line and the risk of disease. Or what about the members of our family who pick pesticide-laden crops, day after day? Would they be scandalized if they saw us carelessly eating the cheap burgers and strawberries for which they labor? If they saw us preaching “we are all one in the family of God” on Sunday, and saying “$2/pint is way too much for strawberries” on Monday? If we sin against these brothers and sisters, we sin against Christ.

Next time you complain about the price of food, think about the brother or sister (for whom Christ also died) who grew, harvested, processed, or served you the food. If they food should be cheap - are they worthless too? What does your theology say? What does your budget say?

Be ye idealistic

2011-05-11T21:07:00.000-07:00

Idealism gets a bad rap. A bunch of us well-meaning community gardeners and other such rabble were on a Presbyterian Hunger Program webinar recently, talking about the Manna Economy, and the desert experience which taught Israel how to eat. In this economy, and in stark contrast to Egypt, food is gathered locally rather than stored in huge silos, each family has what they need, no more, no less, and there is no way to exploit another by stealing their food. You can only eat what comes down from the sky each day. You get your food from the hand of God.
Beautiful stuff. But it's idealistic, so we shove it aside. No one wants to be called idealistic. A fate worse than rotten tomatoes. Pie in the sky dreamers? No thanks. We want to be realists, grounded in cruel, cold, reality, because it will make us strong and Correct.

BUT GUESS WHAT. THE BIBLE IS IDEALISTIC.
Take a look at this zinger of a passage: Deuteronomy 15
At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite. They shall not require payment from anyone among their own people, because the LORD’s time for canceling debts has been proclaimed. You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your fellow Israelite owes you. However, there need be no poor people among you, for in the land the LORD your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the LORD your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today.

I will contend that God, too, MUST be idealistic - if she's rash enough to say something like "no one should have to be poor."
Hear that? Bible says. No one should have to be poor. If you follow God's ways, even that ridiculous idea of "canceling all debt" every seven years, each of you will be protected from falling into desperation. If you eat what falls out of the sky into your outstretched hands each day, and remember the rhythms of Sabbath, you will not go hungry. If you use the land gently, remembering who your divine Landlord is, you will not face deprivation.

Be ye idealistic. Believe that God has a positive vision for this world, where no one is poor. Take part in building that world. Allow God's gentle grace in, to take the place of that cruel and cold "realism." What is really real is in God, and God is an idealist - hallelujah for that!

How to Help Ugandan Orphans

2011-04-28T13:28:00.001-07:00

Short answer: donate here.
But read more. Listen carefully because this is a difficult one. There are differences of opinion, philosophical debates, historical analysis, and a lot of hyperlinks going into this entry. How DO you help Ugandan orphans?
Unicef estimates as many as 3.5 million children have lost parents in Uganda. Half the population is under the age of 18, due to HIV/AIDS and other diseases, civil unrest, and the ravages of poverty. There are as many people (very young and very old) in need of direct care as there are working-age people capable of supporting them. Statistically this is hugely crippling for Uganda's chance at ever escaping poverty.

In one great class at SFTS this semester we have been looking into the question of poverty. Where does it come from, why is it here, does it help our society somehow? What's the moral quality of poverty - something to be desired, or to flee from? Can one (& should one) voluntarily impoverish oneself as a spiritual benefit? And what about helping? What do we DO? Governmental payments? Entitlement systems? Licensed begging? Church charity? NGOs? International efforts?
It's a dizzying array of uncertainty. Some propose that we can't fix the problems of poverty, but we ought to alleviate them as a good work for the sake of our own souls. Some propose that we CAN fix it, once and for all - but can't agree on how to do it.
States and churches have differed through the centuries as to how to take care of orphans. In some times and places they are taken into institutions for care, but sometimes they are sent out to relatives with a stipend for their care. In Uganda today there are different models among the NGOs. Some run a school for needy children, some simply pay for them to go to boarding school (not an uncommon educational model in Uganda). Some, alternatively, create alternative families - find a widow to be surrogate mom for a bunch of kids - and subsidize their living. Some create scholarships for the most talented, and some take in the neediest regardless of their academic promise. Some just provide microcredit for the adult relatives, and hope the wealth trickles down to the kids.
I have to admit that I do not know which is most effective. I simply have no idea. And there may be no one right answer. You can criticize charity , or look at microfinance critically, or take down the whole bleeding lot with sharp questions. My favorite quote from that last article is Esther Duflo comparing the entire range of aid work (from goodwilled volunteers to the World Bank) to "medieval doctors with leeches. We have no idea what we're doing."

With all this swimming around in my head, one way through it would be to call it all quits, take an intellectual chill pill, and focus on something closer to home. That might seem like the easy way out. But in fact it would be impossibly hard for me to bury my head that far beneath the sand. Even if I de-friended all my Ugandan friends on facebook, they'd get to me in my dreams.
Here are the facts. I support an orphanage - COU - Children of Uganda - because the children captured my heart (on a US tour, and later when I volunteered there), and because I cannot give up on them.
I know that bandages do not cure illnesses,
but I know that lack of bandages is a direct cause for infection.
I know that kids going to school does not solve the problems of the Ugandan economy, but I know that kids being out of school is a huge risk factor for them in terms of HIV infection, and that a small cash handout can keep them safe for at least a few more years (read a study here). I know that I cannot fix the world for the children I love, but I know that maize prices have risen astronomically this year and that if we don't keep the money coming for their support, these children will be the first to go without food. And right now I am fundraising. If you visit my fundraising page you can help me reach my goal of $3,000 this month. The necessary food and tuition fees will not wait for us, while we wonder which charity methods are most effective. The children need food, now.

Please consider how far your $10 donation can go, to cover the basic needs of a child who has nothing.

** For those who are curious about those various models and philosophies of aid, I'll say that COU covers a lot of bases. We run our orphanage for the youngest grades (primary school) like a boarding school, so they receive specialized care from experienced "aunties" and house mothers. We send older students to boarding schools. We have special incentives for the most gifted students (academically or musically), but we also care for the mentally disabled. We send most of the children back out to their extended families during school holidays, so that no one forgets what it's like to live in a family setting. We also work with the people of the village, supporting a women's cooperative by buying their goods, and providing educational opportunities and agricultural training to locals. We try to do everything we can.

childrenofuganda.org and my fundraising page
thanks for reading!

Sermon - I thirst

2011-04-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

It's way past Good Friday, but i forgot to post this. HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE! and now, if you want, you can plunge back into the depths of sorrow:

The fifth word – “I thirst.”
Calvary Presbyterian San Francisco, Good Friday 2011.

John 19:28-29: After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said to fulfill the scripture, “I thirst.” A bowl full of vinegar stood there. So they put a sponge full of vinegar on hyssop and held it to his mouth.
The word of the Lord

The living water is thirsty.
The light of the world has gone dark.
The true vine is withering.
The bread of life is hungry.
The resurrection is bleeding.
The true life is dying.

The king is enthroned - on an electric chair. The priest, dressed in his sanctified, seamless tunic – is stripped of that holy garment and sacrificed alongside the passover lambs. The sky has gone dark in the middle of the day. The world is upside-down.

The living water is thirsty.
And this is hard because I need some living water, and I don’t think I have any water of my own to bring him. Unlike the Samaritan woman at the well, I have no bucket. Or, well, I had one, but it’s at the bottom of the well because I was at the end of my rope and the rope just broke. I’m hot; I’m tired; my mouth is dried up like a leaf. I won’t last much longer. I need that living water. But now the living water is thirsty, and asking me for help.

The bread of life is hungry.
And this is hard because we are hungry. We were born hungry. We have been hungry our whole lives. We have done everything we can to stop the hunger. Sometimes we have found healthy, and life-giving bread to satisfy our desires. Sometimes we have found doritos and beer, and we crammed them in because we were longing for sustenance, but we wound up hungrier than ever before. We’re so hungry we can’t even sort out which is the true hunger, and which is a shallow craving. We hunger, we long, and we need that bread of life. But now the bread of life is hungry, and asking us for help.

Not so many days ago, Lazarus was in the tomb, and we all wept and wailed, and thought there was no answer to our grief. Jesus arrived and showed his glory. The light of the world shone into the tomb, darkness was transformed into amazing light, and our doubts fell away in an instant. Our deepest desire was satisfied, and we celebrated as if it were a wedding feast. But now we are grieving, inconsolable, wanting our loved one back, yearning with all our hearts for this not to be goodbye. We are longing for comfort, longing for a word of assurance. (reach out ) Longing for an answer – if he would only come and speak to us –
But now the living water is thirsty, the bread of life is hungry, and the answer to our problems is asking us for help.

Jesus was always the one who answered a question with another question. Sometimes it was cryptic but lighthearted. Like a riddle. He’d say “I am going away, and you cannot follow.” We’d say “what are you talking about?” and he’d say, “You are from below, I am from above.” We’d ask a question… about the blind man, “whose fault is it that he was born blind?” and Jesus would say, “we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.” What a great puzzle. When asked where to find food for five thousand people, Jesus would say “why don’t you just give them something to eat?” Jesus gave us very few answers. He gave us a lot of questions. And this is the hardest question of all – as he hangs on the cross, he says “I am thirsty.” He wants – he needs - He asks for help. Nothing big. Just some spare change. A little water to moisten his mouth. The Lord of heaven and earth is asking us for the scraps falling off our table. Our Lord is asking us to have mercy on him.

At the cross we see the face of our vulnerable God. And that’s hard, because we want God to be strong for us. We come to God with our thirst and hunger, longing for justice and for bread, and we want God to answer our questions, to satisfy our needs, and to put a stop to the endless wanting, aching, yearning pain of life as we know it. We would really like God to be the one who fixes it all.

We come to the cross with our needs, longing to be satisfied. We don’t get an answer. And we will not be satisfied here. But we get a new question, and we get transformed. We thought we were to be the recipients, but suddenly we see we could be the givers. I thought I was the enemy, but I heard Jesus asking for help – and look, it’s right within my reach – some of this common wine, and a little stick to put the sponge on – we find that we CAN relieve his thirst.

We have always found God in the blessing. We know God is there when we are healed, or satisfied, or answered somehow. Today we find God in the question, God in the wanting, God in the thirst. Today may we open up to an even deeper thirst. May we welcome in the pain of longing for justice, for wholeness, for light and life. May we also be thirsty. Amen.

The Undoing of Creation

2011-04-20T21:03:00.000-07:00

Matthew 27:50-54
Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many. Now when the centurion and those with him, who were keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were terrified and said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”
An orderly creation is characterized by clear demarcations and separations. God separated the light from the dark, the waters from the land, and the clean from the unclean. The Temple is all about separations; the Gentiles excluded on the outside, the women excluded in one court, non-priestly men kept away one degree by a wall, and finally at the center a curtain to veil God’s presence.
We know that Jesus was in the business of re-drawing those lines of separation, and that many were scandalized because of how he did this – accepting women into table fellowship, extending miraculous work even to the Gentiles, touching the leprous, the unclean, and the dead. We know something about “the veil of the curtain rent in twain” signifying the end to the separation between God and humanity. But we can only wonder about the shaking of the earth. Is there no more distinction between rock and not-rock, between the permanent and the temporary, the animate and inanimate?

The rocks mourned Christ’s death, the sun refused to shine, and creation called loudly for people to pay attention to the tragedy unfolding. But then things returned to normal. Men went back to oppressing women, well-meaning bishops built a new temple and set the curtain back up again, and the rocks sat back and kept their silence.
It’s a cloudy, rainy, mourn-y kind of Holy Week where I am, which helps me to feel appropriately solemn. I have remembered so many years when I wanted to stay in the gloomy mood created by the Scriptures, only to have sunshine and happy birds and all kinds of natural distractions pull me into Easter a day or two early. “Happy” vs. “solemn” is only the tip of the iceberg, though. I wish the earth would re-enact for us the uncreating of creation, as it did at Golgotha. I want to remember the earthquake – the shaking, the un-doing, the erasing of boundaries, and the possibility of truly leaving our walls and dividing curtains behind. We need to be disassembled if we are to be created anew with the risen Christ.

Grateful for Apricots

2011-04-13T22:12:00.000-07:00

Gratitude. A visiting scholar from UC Davis, Dr. Robert Emmons, made two presentations at my school last week about gratitude and its power upon our lives.
Gratitude is an expression of thanks to someone or something for a benefit given to us, which we did not deserve or earn. Regularly reflecting on gratitude (an activity as simple as keeping a journal, and each night writing down 5 things for which we were grateful that day) has well-documented positive effects on our lives, moods, actions, and health.

Psalm 147:7-9
Sing to the LORD with thanksgiving;
make music to our God upon the harp.
God covers the heavens with clouds,
prepares rain for the earth,
makes grass grow on the hills.
God gives food to flocks and herds,
and to the young ravens when they cry.
Gratitude is an important part of our Biblical tradition. If the creation stories of the Bible don’t tell us exactly how the earth was made, they do tell us one important thing: we didn’t make it ourselves. Neither did we do anything to deserve the earth and its richness. We are not entitled to it – we are privileged to enjoy it.

I had a moment of gratitude last weekend. My housemates and I were on retreat, and picnicked by Limantour Beach. We set up a picnic blanket in a relatively grassy spot surrounded by wild douglas irises. We had some oranges, a loaf of bread, almond butter, and two jams. One jam was from Trader Joe’s (blackberry preserves). The other was an apricot preserve. It was made by the elderly mother of an SFTS professor, who harvested the apricot tree in the backyard, sliced, cooked, and canned dozens of jars, and gave us some as a gift. Both jams were delicious. However, only one elicited feelings of gratitude. I was entitled to the blackberry, because I handed a few dollars to the clerk at TJ’s. I had no such claim on Grandma Betty’s Apricot Special.

What are you grateful for today?
What have you received as a gift?

...and I wonder what life would be like if we did less buying and selling, and more giving and receiving.

a puzzle - a person

2011-04-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

Daily Lenten Devotional for SFTS
John 9:1-17

Jesus is confronted with a question of theodicy: "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" His disciples pose it to him, as an intellectual challenge. If you start from the (common) assumption that such afflictions are divine punishment, how can you locate the sin for which a newborn was punished? Talk about a theological puzzle! Does life begin in utero? Do responsibilities and sins begin there, as well? Who wouldn't enjoy a little intellectual sparring over that issue? You could show off your theological prowess and end up with the respect of all.

Jesus, however, declines the question. He refuses to treat this man as an intellectual challenge. His disciples have offered him the throne of judgment, but he steps down and kneels in the dirt instead, making mud, touching the presumed sinner, becoming a caretaker rather than a judge. He treats him as a man - not a "blind man," not a "sinner," but a child of God in whom God's glory is being revealed.

Jesus recently said, "You judge by human standards; I judge no one" (John 8:15). His refusal to judge becomes a judgment - a krisis - a distinction - between his behavior and our own judgmentalism. How often have we treated people as puzzles to be correctly or incorrectly solved? How often have we shown off our knowledge and intellect instead of stepping in as a servant?

And how often has God come down to your level, taken hold of you, and opened your eyes?

prayer: O God, it is so easy for us to live our faith at the intellectual, safe, and thus superior level, rather than living into Christ. Thank you for not staying there with us, but seeking to touch our hearts, our eyes.

Wisdom and Milk

2011-04-06T21:26:00.000-07:00

Exciting new developments in the world of biotechnology: Cows can now produce human milk. That's right. Read all about it on the UK's Telegraph.
Leaving aside issues of veganism, animal rights, and whether it's really desireable to nurse from other animals, when we were weaned off our human mother's milk decades ago... there are other questions.

Really, the bazillion dollar question is. "Just because we can, should we?"
We know how to do it. Well, sort of. More than half the first batch of genetically modified cows died, for unknown reasons, but that's probably a minor glitch in the system that can be worked out, eh?
We know that there are certain nutrients found in human milk that are lacking in cow's milk and in most baby formulas. For babies in need these are crucial. We can now turn cattle into living factories for essential nutrients. Awesome?

Genetically modifying plants and animals is a whole can of worms. My Material Theology class did a lot of work on debating their merits and dangers. My side (arguing against genetic modification) acted it out: we placed ourselves in a divine council, and God heard arguments against the dangers of GMO agriculture. In our heavenly council, there was an American farmer who had lost his land due to the monopolization process, an Indian farmer whose land was ruined by bad farming practices, and an activist talking about the agricultural-military-industrial complex. Jesus finally took center stage (in a kilt, to keep a bit of a gender balance - this is the GTU after all) and reminded people of the lessons of Job... to which I now turn.

The book of Job is in the genre of wisdom literature. It is a long debate about the merits of various theologies. How can you explain when bad things happen to good people? Job and his friends debate this for 37 long chapters. Then finally God speaks up:

YHWH answered Job out of the whirlwind:
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements--surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

God further interrogates Job - he may know about domestic animals, being a man of many herds and flocks, but is he such an expert on the wild animals?

“Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?
Do you observe the calving of the deer?
Can you number the months that they fulfill,
and do you know the time when they give birth,
when they crouch to give birth to their offspring,
and are delivered of their young?
Their young ones become strong, they grow up in the open;
they go forth, and do not return to them.

We have plenty of the "words without knowledge." We can talk an endless talk about how we think the world works. Yes, we may understand enough to perform open-heart surgery, and fertilize ourselves in vitro, and drill for oil, but when the next earthquake is coming we really don't know. We can splice the genome apart and together again, but even the best-cared-for pregnancies often miscarry, and no doctor can explain it. We can attack HIV, but we certainly cannot conquer it.

In the face of the wonders created around us, we ought not to stifle our own creativity. But let us never forget the limits of our knowledge. Knowing that there is a God, a power higher than our best intelligence, reminds us to be humble with our creations.

The cows who survive long enough to produce the wonder-milk may have any number of health defects - we simply do not know what we have done to them when we spliced their genes. But for that matter, we choose not to know a lot about animals, as long as they do what we want them. We purposefully ignore the details of their gastrointestinal systems, feeding cattle on corn because it's cheap, and because given the right amount of antibiotics they'll survive anyhow. We know how to manipulate animals to our desires, but we truly do not know, with God's masterful knowledge, what it is that makes them healthy.
God is painted, in Job, as a caring and skillful creator. God is the one who DOES know when a wild deer crouches to give birth, and what a raven needs to eat, how to bring forth grass on the earth, and where the stars travel.

God is the one who truly knows. Let us not be satisfied with the kind of knowledge that gets results, well enough - but let us seek for the true wisdom that God can impart to us through intimate and compassionate ways of living with creation.

Sermon: I once was found, but now am lost

2011-04-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

Sermon preached 4/3 at Montclair Presbyterian. The texts are Ephesians 5:8-14 and John 9:1-41. The John passage was read as a monologue. It's the story of a blind man receiving his sight.

This story is not easy. For one, it’s a miracle story, and we who are so well-educated often have an alarm system set up for miracle stories. Someone we know could be telling a perfectly reasonable story, and we’re listening and nodding, but the moment they seem to suggest that something unseen intervened, the bells tend to go off. MAGIC ALERT! SUPERSTITION AHEAD! EXIT CONVERSATION IMMEDIATELY!

The problem with miracle stories is that if we believe they are literally true, they change the way we view the world. If the world is a place where blindness can be healed by spit and dirt and water, then why is Lisa still blind? If we could heal ourselves simply by praying and believing, then why would I have to spend 5 months on crutches? The miracle stories don’t always fit into our understanding of how the world works.
Some people would say I’m throwing out a dangerous amount of bathwater here, but I will say that in the case of this story, the point is not “miracles happen.” In Jesus’ time, people didn’t question that miracles could happen. The question was whether or not Jesus could perform one. The gospel writer spends only two little verses telling how the healing actually happened. No fireworks around it. The miracle was not the point. The lessons of the story can be found instead in the conversations about the healing.

One useful lesson we can all learn from these conversations is that it’s hard to argue with someone who believes he’s experienced a miracle. This man is interrogated time and time again, but he won’t change his mind. I was blind – and now I see. That’s his story, he’s sticking to it, and we shouldn’t deny him the right to tell his story. Many of us probably have friends with unbelievable stories which are very important to them. This bible story might not convince you that their miracles are real, but at least let it show you that it’s futile to argue about another person’s subjective experience.

At the very beginning of the story, Jesus is tempted to enter into that kind of argument – arguing about another person’s life. His disciples ask a very tricky question. Whose fault is it that God is punishing this man with blindness? If it was his own fault, was he sinning already, before he was born? The disciples tempt Jesus to treat the man like an object, a question, a puzzle to be solved. Show off your brains, Jesus, explain it!

Jesus rejects their invitation to this intellectual performance. He says no – there’s a man here, not a puzzle, and his blindness is just one way in which we can learn about God. The disciples have challenged Jesus to take a seat on the high throne of judgment, but instead he kneels in the dirt to take care of a blind man – an alleged sinner. Jesus was always doing things like that, and people always had a hard time understanding why.

From then on, Jesus disappears from the story for a while, and we have two counter stories. The one is the blind man’s story – coming from darkness into light. He not only receives his sight, but also gains confidence in who Jesus is. He becomes more and more sure, as the story goes along. He begins to speak freely.
On the other hand we have the Jews and their representatives the Pharisees. Their story is the exact opposite. They become more and more close-minded, more and more hostile as the story progresses, until finally Jesus calls THEM blind.

As I said to the children, when Jesus came close to people, they changed. What I didn’t say with them is that apparently not all of them changed for the better. Some of them had their eyes opened and things were good, and some of them shut their eyes as tight as possible and tried to make Jesus go away. When Jesus came close to them, they changed – but not all for the better.

Jesus spoke of this in terms of light and darkness. He said he was the light of the world. He said that he came into the world so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.
That isn’t easy to stomach either! The first half is great – healing – light – yes. The second half is like a dark and ominous shadow creeping over us. Those who see will become blind.
The problem is that it seems very dualist. There’s a sharp dichotomy between light-dark. Good-bad. Acceptable and unacceptable. Where are our precious shades of grey? We know from hard experience that black/white dichotomies lead to extremism in religion and politics, intolerance in communities, and misery in our own thoughts and minds. It is important to us that we can think in relative terms, rather than absolutes.

Here at first glance Jesus doesn’t seem to be helping our cause. He’s separating people into two camps. And we all probably have, at least somewhere in back of our mind, a scary picture of Jesus as a big cosmic judge. He has a desk in the clouds, with an “in” box and an “out,” full of happy souls and tormented ones. Michaelangelo painted it well. Jesus is seen as the last absolute – where there are no more shades of grey. This is not a helpful picture for most of us. But it is the picture that is painted in a lot of Christian history as well as in the book of Revelation.

Revelation says that it is authored by John. The gospel of John actually doesn’t say it’s authored by John, but that is the tradition that developed around it. Both the revelation to John and the gospel of John were probably not written by anyone named John. That’s our first mistake, but a rather harmless one. It doesn’t really matter what his name was. But there is a particularly bad mistake, that many have made, to think that these two books could have been written by the same person. In fact, they were probably written in contrast to one another. (C.H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, p 210). They can be seen as two sides of a great debate. The question is whether or not Jesus is a judge.

In the Revelation we find (20:11-15) Jesus on a throne, holding the book of life, with people’s names written in it, and everyone whose name isn’t written there gets kindly tossed into a lake of fire. Classic.
In the gospel of John, we hear Jesus say “I did not come to condemn the world” (3:17) and even “I judge no one.” (8:15). That’s very different. And we see that side of Jesus in this story. He won’t stand in judgment over the blind man. He refuses.

So the gospel of John gives us a glimpse at a less judgmental Jesus. He did not take the throne of judgment – but still, we see people getting separated. The blind would see, and those who saw would become blind. Something about Jesus caused people to either embrace his message, or to try to stone him – very few people fell in-between. When Jesus came close to people, they changed – in one direction or another.

We know how to speak about the one who was lost and is now found – the man who was blind, but now can see. What can we say for the one who thought she was found, and now finds herself lost, or for the pharisee who could see, but now is blind?

It can be important to get a little lost – on the way to getting found. We know this from experience. A good relationship often needs a good argument, to shake things up and clear the air. Sometimes we need to get a little lost in order to get really found.
But it looks like the Pharisees are getting more than a little bit lost. They’re not just taking a pleasant stroll through the green pastures and the valley of the shadow of death and back again. No, they’re headed straight for that valley, and not looking back. They are bound and determined to reject everything Jesus stands for.

Unfortunately many of us can resonate with that part of the story. A lot of us know what it’s like to slip down into depression, or anger, or despair. Sometimes we are brought into the light, and we shrink back because it’s so bright. Maybe we reject something that we think is too good to be true. Sometimes we just head toward the valley of the shadow of death because it’s easier to roll downhill. And as we roll, our hearts get harder, and meaner, and mainly more miserable.

In this story, there are very few shades of grey. Whatever might be grey at the beginning has been distinguished into bright light and dark shadow by the end of the story. You’re either skipping up the hillside of light with the blind man, or you’re heading down to the dark valley with the Pharisees.
But if the good news were only good to the children of light, it wouldn’t be truly good. If God’s welcome table only seated those who are happy and joyous and free, it wouldn’t be much of a welcome.
And we believe that Jesus preached good news that was – truly – good.

“God so loved the world that she gave her only son.” Familiar words, in a way. Hear them again after I tell you a bit about that word – the world. In the gospel of John “world” is a very dark thing. It is opposed to God. The world is God’s enemy. Hear the verse again. God loved the god-hating world so much that he gave his only son. God so loved her enemies, that she sent them her child.
The Pharisees seem to be Jesus’ enemies. But it is for them, too, that Jesus came. The light does not shine in order to pick out the bright things and throw away the darkness. The light shines so that what is dark may become light. The first scripture we heard today, the mystical passage from Ephesians, says that “everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light.” (we can shelve our objections to the science here, because we’re not reading the Bible to learn physics). Anyway, the way the writer uses “light” is to say that whenever light is present, the darkness is driven out. Anything that is uncovered ceases to be a secret. .. If this entire sanctuary were completely darkened, and then one candle was lit, it would not be dark. Everything that the light touches is transformed into light – it shines in the darkness and thus the darkness is gone.

No matter who you are – a lifelong friend of God, or a sworn enemy – the light of God is for you. It shines on your brightness, and on your shadows, and it is far more powerful than even your darkest secrets.

No matter who you are, this table of welcome is for you. Seated at it you will find prisoners, and sex workers, and Pharisees, and Republicans, and Democrats, and the beautiful, the foolish, and the insane. No matter how dark the path that you’re walking, this table of welcome is for you.

No matter who you are, Jesus is the one who steps away from the throne, and comes and kneels at your feet, offering healing, and light, and whatever he can give of his very own self, for your benefit.

The light shines in the darkness. And the darkness HAS NOT overcome it.

Responding to Catastrophe

2011-03-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

The prophetic book of Joel is all about disasters.
It is kicked off dramatically by a huge locust invasion:
(1:4) What the cutting locust left,
the swarming locust has eaten.
What the swarming locust left,
the hopping locust has eaten,
and what the hopping locust left,
the destroying locust has eaten.

The first response is mourning for the loss of agricultural produce.
(1:5) Wake up, you drunkards, and weep;
and wail, all you wine-drinkers,
over the sweet wine,
for it is cut off from your mouth.
And even mourning on the part of the land:
(1:10) The fields are devastated,
the ground mourns;
for the grain is destroyed,
the wine dries up,
the oil fails.
Just as the plants themselves wither, so does the joy of the people, shrunk to a bare ghost of itself. They cry, they wail, they mourn loudly as if to get God’s attention. Then they appeal to God’s kindness. The people do this first, calling for a solemn assembly (1:14), and then so do the animals:
(1:20) Even the wild animals cry to you
because the watercourses are dried up,
and fire has devoured
the pastures of the wilderness.
The locusts appear to attack again (or maybe Joel’s just being poetically repetitive) and then finally Joel reports God’s response to the frantic pleas for help, with words of consolation.
(2:21-23) Do not fear, O soil;
be glad and rejoice,
for YWHW has done great things!
Do not fear, you animals of the field,
for the pastures of the wilderness are green;
the tree bears its fruit,
the fig tree and vine give their full yield.
O children of Zion, be glad
and rejoice in YHWH your God;
for God has given the early rain for your vindication,
and poured down for you abundant rain,
the early and the later rain, as before.

God’s blessing and consolation is seen in the return of things to their “natural order,” the seasonal rains as expected. God’s word is in the disruption, and God’s word is in the reconciliation.
The reconciliation part is easy to “get.” God loves us and wants to heal our world.
But it’s hard to get your mind around the idea that God may have deliberately SENT the army of locusts…(Joel doesn’t say why)… especially in a world recently rocked by natural disasters, where people say earthquakes are God’s punishment on our sins. I believe it is offensive and wrong to claim God punishes us like this, but nonetheless the idea is represented in scripture: Joel calls the locusts “God’s army.”

I think it is important to listen for God’s word in the world around us. We all know how to learn from experience, and that may be the best way to listen for God’s word. I mourn the tragic events in Japan without calling them divine punishment, but I still hope that perhaps we can hear God’s wake-up call that asks us to question the safety of nuclear power.
One lesson I think we can always learn from the major disasters of the earth is humility – knowing that the world doesn’t revolve around humanity. I kayak in Tomales Bay, which lies right on top of the San Andreas fault. If that fault were to open, the bay water (creatures & kayaks and all) would go cascading down right into it. This is a risk I take on my kayaking days. Although it is scary to think about, I know that my life is, cosmically speaking, smaller than the importance of the continental plates maintaining balance against one another. The continental plates are important, too. The ocean is important, and Good, even when it hurls vast quantities of water up our shorelines. Even Joel’s villain, the locust, is God’s own creature, and treasured in God’s sight. We live in fragile co-existence with many natural powers greater than ourselves – from locusts to tectonic plates. May we learn to live within our limits, to keep ourselves (and others) from perching on those risky edges, and to honor the goodness in all created things.

Our ancestor, the land

2011-03-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

This is a small point but an important one.
Leviticus, again – sorry to you who are Leviticus-haters – here we have a concluding chapter, where the blessings and are laid out – the blessings as reward for good behavior, curses as recompense for unfaithfulness. Blessings are abundance, fruit, grain, and peace. Curses are enemy armies, pestilence and wild animals, and the wasting and withering of your crops and fruit trees. But even after many curses, the land is given a “sabbatical” to rest, and if the people repent, God’s favor will return:
Lev 26:40-42 But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their ancestors, in that they committed treachery against me and, moreover, that they continued hostile to me—so that I, in turn, continued hostile to them and brought them into the land of their enemies; if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled and they make amends for their iniquity, then will I remember my covenant with Jacob; I will remember also my covenant with Isaac and also my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.

These fine fellows usually appear in age order: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Num 32:11, Dt 1:8 and throughout Deuteronomy, Kings, Chronicles, Psalm 105:9, I could go on and on). Some people look at this verse in Leviticus and say, ha, isn’t that funny, they reversed the order! Here it’s Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham.
Don’t laugh it off. There must actually be a reason for this. In the context of such a land-loving book, it is not enough to command gentle and holy treatment of the land. One must be reminded that God has a long-lasting and important relationship with the land. Here, in reverse order, they begin with the most recent covenant (jacob), move back to his father’s covenant (isaac), and HIS father’s covenant (abraham) – but the relationship older and more important than any of the above is God’s relationship to the land. There is no covenant between the land and God, but the land itself is a kind of covenant, a living, adapting, changing token of the relationship between God and humanity. For a people defined by their ancestors, to put God in the place in a lineage where Abraham’s father should be is a high honor indeed. It’s as if the land itself were their original ancestor, and God’s original partner in the relationship to humanity.

Toward a Theology of Happy Vaginas

2011-03-14T15:26:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, feminists burned their bras, eschewed lipstick, attacked patriarchy, and got really loud and angry. This was apparently very necessary, though I wasn’t there to see it. I know for sure that we could not be doing what we do now, if they had not done what they did first. But some things are different now.

I always assumed that feminists don’t wear makeup. But sometimes, these days, feminists put on a lot of lipstick, and expensive bras, and our best (black and pink and red) fancy clothes, and we get on stage and we talk about our vaginas. And about womanhood, and about rape and violence and pleasure. We act out orgasmic moans on stage and this is as important as any march or protest sign.

In some ways this is even harder. For me it is easy to be ugly and outraged. It is much harder to be beautiful and happy. It is easier to complain about what’s bad than to celebrate what is good. When we (group of directors) did casting for the Vagina Monologues, we asked the cast members which monologues they were comfortable with, and people were overwhelmingly MORE comfortable with talking about death, rape, pain, Haiti, and New Orleans, than with pleasure, clitoris, affection, love, and orgasm.

I do not mean to break the world into a gender dichotomy, but I offer a tentative thesis that this is more of a female problem. Theology often reinforces it, because theology is still so steeped in the voices of the only people who were allowed to talk for millenia, men – who often don’t have this problem the way we do.
The problem is that we (women) are too willing to martyr ourselves, and even when we fight for our own rights and power, we end up martyring ourselves in the cause to liberate that very self we’ve just martyred. Oops.

Someone wanted to sing “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” in praise band last week, but I resisted that one. The chorus sings in jubilant tones that the “wonderful” cross “bids me come and die, and find that I may truly live.” This may be someone’s favorite verse, but for us, it is the very opposite of our message. Coming to die is the easy part, for too many women. We are raped every 90 seconds, we die every day, we deny ourselves at each meal, and we internalize this suffering as if it could somehow be our salvation. We swallow it every morning with our nasty medicinal protein shakes, and it goes down easy.
The hard part is to realize we are invited “to come and live.” To live, to breathe, to not apologize for the space we take up, to hunger, to demand justice, to want, to create. Christ came that we might have life, and have it abundantly (Jn 10:10). And so we spit out that medicine of suffering and death, and claim our vocation: to flourish in spite of it all.

Sometimes we do this with arguments, books, debates, seven-point sermons. But sometimes we do it in narrative form. Instead of a counterargument, we tell a counterstory. A story about love and violence and no more violence, a story about how we have stopped hating ourselves and started loving, enjoying, taking pleasure in life. It is a radical statement to be beautiful and happy in the face of such suffering. In our makeup and dresses and artistry and song, we embody our faith – that God loves us, heals us, sets us free, and wants us to have that life abundant. We claim it now and step into it now.
We are giving up silence for Lent.
We will dare to be alive, instead.

More pics on picasa

Hosea and Gomer - Don't try this at home.

2011-03-09T16:15:00.000-08:00

At SFTS we are “giving up silence for Lent” – at least in the particular context of silence about violence. This is important. I remember once having a conversation with a very conservative Christian, and domestic violence was mentioned, and he felt the need to clarify that we were talking about “problematic” or “unhelpful” violence. I assumed this was as opposed to the kind that “builds up” or “teaches” or “strengthens” the woman.
I kick myself when I remember this conversation. How did I not explode with the loud truth that all violence is harmful, and that there is never a good place for violence between adults in a loving relationship?
So today I say it, and I write it. There is simply no legitimation for violence against a spouse or loved one.
And I have to pick up some pieces of the Bible and deconstruct them. Because there you will find what is apparently a legitimation for domestic violence – at least in metaphorical terms.

The prophet Hosea and his “wife” Gomer.
Hosea 1:2-8.
When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea, “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD.” So he went and took Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son.

The two of them go on to have children and to name them all kinds of prophetic names (“not pitied,” and “not my people” among them). In case this doesn’t tip you off that it’s a STORY and not a reality, I have good word from real Biblical scholars that “Gomer” is in no ways a woman’s name. It’s a man’s name, and “she” stands here for the nation of Israel (in the same way that her children do).

2:2-3
Plead with your mother, plead--
for she is not my wife,
and I am not her husband--
that she put away her whoring from her face,
and her adultery from between her breasts,
or I will strip her naked
and expose her as in the day she was born,
and make her like a wilderness,
and turn her into a parched land,
and kill her with thirst.
2:5b-6.
For she said, “I will go after my lovers;
they give me my bread and my water,
my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.”
Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns;
and I will build a wall against her,
so that she cannot find her paths.

The plot thickens. “She” is unfaithful. She loves the “lovers” (or foreign trading partners) who provide her with food. God proposes some wilderness solutions, to the point of starving her in the desert. These are interesting. They have real connotations of real economic situations – are the people of Israel remembering the God who fed them manna in the wilderness, or are they relying on the deceptive abundance of other kings?

No matter how we take the metaphor, it all looks like a nice case for the therapeutic values of violence. The [prophet’s wife / God’s people] is unfaithful to [the prophet/God], and so [the prophet / God] remedies the solution by making her suffer until she repents. Someone could try to preach it straight up: we are bad, so God will make us suffer until we repent. I’ll take that back. People DO preach that. Preachers legitimate suffering and violence all over the place. They call this a story of unconditional love, and say that the line “kill her with thirst” is spoken in love. They say that the sinful person must be loved back into obedience, through violent “tough love” and plenty of suffering.
You cannot preach this story without legitimating violence. So we must preach against it. We must tell people that this is horrific. That’s one of the problem with the detached, ungrounded way we read Scripture. We don’t even realize when it’s terrible, and we accidentally swallow a legitimation of violence. We read it all in “stained glass language” and couldn’t possibly hear it as sarcastic, or biting, or ironic. We’re blind to the harsher aspects of the text – and so we unwittingly accept the unacceptable.
Prophets speak from a place of desperation and urgency. The stakes are so high that they try to scare people into doing what is right. Sometimes this works. But even if it does, when it has costs as high as this we must not read such prophecy as sacred. It is indeed the story of God’s people struggling together with God and God’s prophets – but God is not the abuser, and violence is never okay.

Art-Work

2011-03-09T15:49:00.001-08:00

Art is work. It’s good work and fun work but work nonetheless. You can’t just expect it to burst on you from out of nowhere, as if creativity were something that happens to you. Put yourself in the right frame of mind, a little emotional, maybe a little drunk, and art is supposed to magically explode within you… or that’s how the story goes. You know what, I’ve been waiting a long time for that to happen to me, and so far nada.

Exercise #1 in debunking that myth:
A Master Class in Pre-Renaissance Sacred Art.
This was my “fun” class for winter term. We broke marble (the stone, not the little round toys) into pieces and made mosaics. I started with grand ambitions along the line of my friend Charles’ great work, thinking I’d do some kind of Biblical scene. I learned how to cut marble, and immediately realized I’d have to scale back by about 97%. I made three circles and it almost killed me. Hello, discipline.

Exercise #2. The Vagina Monologues.
I am in charge of stage, costumes, props, and music. The simple idea “we should process in carrying candles” turned into a huge shebang with 15 glass jars and melting a lot of wax and carefully cooling it at just the right pace. And I’ll have to re-melt and replace them all with a new set of candles before the performance. I’d rather just trust they will, but apparently other people want to be sure. Okay. Accountability.

Also, my monologue didn’t come to me in a flash of brilliance. I tried voices and attitudes that didn’t fit at all, and my friends told me “try again.” and again.

Exercise #3. The Artist’s Way (ongoing).
This is a book given to me by my boyfriend for Christmas, but it’s more than a book, it’s a course and a challenge. Julia Cameron asks you to do affirmations on themes such as “there is a divine plan of goodness for my work" and to express yourself regularly and mandatorily – regardless of whether or not your internal censor tells you “it’s crap, throw it out.” Just write. Keep writing. You don’t need to show it to anyone, but you DO need to practice, and you DO need to express instead of squelching the stuff you’re “not supposed to say.”

Exercise #4
Work can be art?
Telling stories to children, designing curriculum for youth group.
If that isn’t art I don’t know what is.
How about treating it as such?

Consider the Lilies, How They Fade.

2011-02-27T19:32:00.000-08:00

TEXT: Matthew 6:24-34
Preached today at Montclair. Enjoy.

Oliver just read us a scandalous text. Throughout the history of Christianity, people have appreciated the poetry of the lilies and the birds, but they also have tried very hard to find ways to get around it, to say somehow that it doesn’t say what it says. What it says is: Consider the lilies. Don’t worry. Consider the birds of the air. God takes care of them, and therefore God will take even better care of you.
This is a problematic statement, in all kinds of ways. The first problem that comes to my mind is a Peanuts cartoon, in which Woodstock the bird hears this verse, asking if a human being is not “of more value than many birds,” and he goes off totally depressed, and Snoopy has to cheer him up. That verse is not fair to birds.
The second scandal, this one a little more serious, is that it doesn’t necessarily WORK, at least not to cure us of our worrying. If you don’t believe me, find an anxious person – I bet there are many of us who identify as such – tell them to consider the lilies, and stuff some flowers under their nose and see if they are cured. Better yet, tell them “the Bible Says, you shouldn’t be anxious,” and watch them have a panic attack because now they feel guilty for feeling anxious. I do not recommend using this as a treatment plan for anxiety.
The text is also scandalous because it seems to tell us not to work. And what would happen to our society if we all stopped working? We can’t ALL be hunter-gatherers in the woods, there just isn’t enough to go around.
What’s more, it’s upsetting because we know we need more than food and clothing… education, for example, and technology… so it’s insulting to compare our complex needs and requirements with the simple existence of birds and lilies. This text is riddled with problems. How can we interpret it?
One hint for interpretation is that Jesus may not have addressed this message to everyone. The Sermon on the Mount begins by saying “his disciples came to him,” so it probably includes the twelve famous disciples, and an inner circle including women as well, but it’s not addressed to “everyone.” These are verses of particular encouragement to a particular group of people. Some of them were fishermen, but some may have been farmers, and some of the women were employed in spinning and weaving. The point is that these are people who used to sow and reap and labor and spin, who no longer work in those vocations, because they have given them up to travel on the road with Jesus full-time. These are people who know well what it is to work, but who have willingly put their work behind them. By leaving their work to follow Jesus, the disciples have abandoned their means of supporting themselves. So maybe the message about birds and lilies isn’t meant to challenge us to STOP working, but to console people who are no longer working.
So some of us can heave a sigh of relief. Jesus isn’t addressing this to us, after all! Some, however, are in a similar life situation – where you do not sow or reap or labor or spin – some are there willingly, because you have saved up enough from your previous work to retire or take a self-supported sabbatical…. But some are in this kind of situation unwillingly, because of injury or misfortune or old age. Keep in mind that regardless of how we are living now, most of us at some point will face such a situation, where we are no longer ABLE to work, and these words will take on a new meaning for us.

When you can’t work, and your savings run out, these words need no interpretation. They speak for themselves, with good advice. God loves you. Don’t worry about the future. Just take it one day at a time.
I did my internship in the hardscrabble hills of Eastern Oregon, where many people live off the produce of the land and have known what it is, at least at some point, to be in need. One woman told me that when she had more than enough, she could go out hunting – for fun – and never get a deer, but somehow whenever she was desperate and wondering what she could put on the table for her children, it seemed like a deer would just walk up to her in the woods and offer himself to her. Or a neighbor would ring the doorbell and drive off, leaving a basket of food just exactly when she needed it. Some call this coincidence and some call it providence. In such situations, the verses about lilies and birds need no explanation. They are a comfort and consolation.

But for those of us who fortunately have clothes and food and don’t need that kind of comforting, what does this passage do for us? What can we say about it?
No matter what our context, everyone can hear this as a challenge and an invitation to simplicity. Of which most of us are in desperate need.

Everything around us teaches us to fight, to scramble, to survive. Work harder, worry more, save more, plan more. We’ve been groomed our whole lives for the culture of competition and the evolutionary scramble to the top, and along the way, if we step on some other people, that’s just the cost of doing business. We push them down so we can stand on their heads, because we need to rise to the top.
But in Jesus’ words of challenge, we are being invited BACKWARDS, going down that ladder of competition instead of up it. We’re being invited to remember that we are, simply, animals; to compare ourselves to plants. But that is not easy to do.

Consider the lilies – how they grow.
Consider how they poke their heads up, early in the spring,
Consider how they bloom, how gorgeous they look.
But consider how they fade, how they wilt, how they scatter their seeds and die back down to a bare root for the winter.
Consider the birds – how they live.
Consider the food they find all around them without working and farming the land.
But consider the birds that find NO food around them.
Consider the birds of the Gulf Coast.
Consider the birds whose habitat is being destroyed.

I don’t want to compare myself to that kind of bird! So we might think that here the metaphor breaks down, that Jesus only wanted us to naively consider the happy birds. But let’s try to take it farther.
Consider a lily in harsher climate than ours, one that came up too soon, one that has been snowed on – a flower that is freezing, wilting, and dying.
It still doesn’t worry! It still doesn’t fret about the future, or the seeds it hasn’t produced. The grass of the field is alive today, and tomorrow it is burned in the oven, and all of this is part of its natural life cycle.
I remember as a child when our family’s cat was slowly dying. I was worried about him. Was he scared? Was he confused? And although no one knows what was really going on in the cat’s head, my mother told me that cats don’t worry about dying.
I may be leaning away from the Christian and more toward a Native American kind of understanding here, but in some sense I believe that animals know some simple things that we have forgotten, and one of those things is that death can be a friend.
It’s not just in the animal world that we see such radical trust and acceptance. In Jesus’ example himself we see that although he admitted his fear, in the end he was not too worried to give his life away.
It’s not necessarily because Jesus believed he was going to heaven. That idea took a long time for the early Christians to develop. Even before we put pearly gates and golden streets in our minds, Jesus and his disciples were able to face death as a transition, knowing that even death could not separate them from the boundless love of God.
(turn page)
It’s a hard world out there. And we are taught to fight, and to deny the reality that we will ever die. We keep our mortality at bay by constantly struggling up the ladder of achievement. We may not THINK we’re stepping on anyone’s shoulders to get to where we are, but we still buy shoes made in sweat shops, and blueberries picked by underpaid immigrants, and we fill our cars with the same sludge that swamped the Gulf of Mexico. We are stepping on a lot of shoulders – whether human or any other creature. Because we have to keep ourselves UP, you see, and we will sacrifice anything to keep ourselves on top. But the painful truth is that this struggle doesn’t even work. It hurts us, it hurts others, it lays waste the earth and pollutes the seas. We are finding more and more that we cannot be healthy and whole while we destroy the world around us. When we get to this point we realize – even if the Bible doesn’t tell us how the earth was really created, it does tell us one important thing: we didn’t create it ourselves. And for the most part, we can’t control it either.

The good news that comes with this recognition is that another way lies open before us. We can recognize the world around us as a gift, and we can take a path of simplicity, of trust, of natural connection. On this path we will not be the ones on the top, who control everything from a place of untouchability, immune to every disaster – but just grateful, humble participants.

I wonder, what this path will look like?

For some of you I may have just touched very close to home by mentioning the fear of death. For some that’s a nearby reality, and I certainly can’t pretend to know what you should do, especially in questions about your medical care. I, and we as a church, can only offer our respect and honor for the path you walk, and offer a blessing – may you trust and feel God’s presence, day by day. May God’s love protect and sustain you, day by day.

For others this path may lead to some self-examination. How much of my energy do I spend competing? How much do I put into building my power base, gathering my supporters, preparing arguments for those who will disagree with me? What would happen if I showed up open-handed instead of armed and defensive? Can I be simply one part of a greater whole, or do I feel I “need” to be on top?
What if we even took this farther – out of our personal relationships? What if I saw myself as a sister or brother to the non-human creatures of the earth? It takes a radical shift to get there, and to really escape from the default position, which is that the natural world doesn’t matter except when it’s useful to us. We could act, instead, as if the lily’s joy were our joy, and the Gulf Coast seagull’s pain were our pain.
It raises the question of generosity. Do I hoard my treasure like a dragon, or do I give it away trusting that others will do good things with what they receive?
It raises the question of sufficiency. Do I have enough? Am I in need? Do I have clothing and footware to spare? Isn’t there a three-week supply of food in my pantry? Or am I in need?
Sallie McFague writes: “Theology by relatively comfortable North American Christians ought not to focus on personal salvation, in this world or the next, but on lifestyle limitations, on developing a philosophy of “enoughness,” and realizing that the cruciform way of Christ means making sacrifices so that others might live.”
But this path is not about bucking up and being grim. It’s about truly being grateful for the abundance we DO have. And it’s about joy. Considering the natural world around us, we do see death and suffering, but we also see abundant life, multiplying like crazy every springtime, and now is a great time to be out in the parks looking for it. When we see the world with the Loving Eye of kinship rather than the Arrogant Eye of objectification, we ourselves will be happier.
This path is liberating. Because with all we have done to keep other people and creatures down, we find we have been bound, ourselves, in the same oppression. As we free other people, we find we are freed. And as we work to heal the earth, the earth works to heal us.

Jesus invites us to take a radically different path from the one we have learned… but deep in our souls, somehow we know that it is joyful, and beautiful, and good. Jesus invites us to receive the grace that allows us to back off our competitive scramble and take our rightful place in the order of things.
Let us receive that grace from God…

A grateful heart
Generous hands
And feet standing on the solid ground of God’s good earth, rather than climbing on the shoulders of those we must push down.

Let us pray.
God, pour out your grace on your people gathered here. Give to those who need it, trust and provision, one day at a time. Give to all of us who struggle, grateful hearts, generous hands, and grounded feet. Lead us forward on a simple path of joy and compassion. We ask these blessings in the name of our teacher, our brother, and our friend, Jesus Christ – Amen.

Waiting for the Season

2011-02-23T21:23:00.000-08:00

Strawberries are coming into season. At least in the warmer parts of California. As of this week, they are showing up at my farmer’s market, which is enough for me to say FAIR GAME! Of course I write this here with great trepidation, because my kind readers, being from all over the country, may hurl spite and jealousy in my general direction. But just think of what you can look forward to.
Strawberries from the grocery store just don’t do it for me. The white and mealy insides, the lack of juicyness, their ridiculous size – they smack of unnaturalness. The worst are the strawberries you buy in November. They’ve been flown from Chile or somewhere, and aborted prematurely off their vine so they can survive the flight before ripening (and rotting). But a local, fresh strawberry is something else entirely. Red all the way through, ripened thoroughly on the vine, intoxicating in their sweetness, and so delicate they will bruise in a minute, if you don’t eat them – nevermind flying them to another country. They are truly worth waiting for.

The Bible verse that most immediately comes to mind is Ps 104:27. “[all creatures] look to you to give them their food in due season; you open wide your hand and satisfy the needs of every living creature.”
The proper course of things, the rightness of seasonal changes, the appropriate time to receive and to eat – the goodness of waiting!

But a more ominous verse comes to mind as well. This is from the wilderness wanderings, Numbers 11:4-6: “The rabble among them had a strong craving; and the Israelites also wept again, and said, ‘If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.”’
The truth is, we can get our cucumbers and melons any season of the year, but we get it at a price. We can have raspberries on our Christmas desserts, flown on little petrochemical wings from faraway lands, to save us from the boring manna diet of what CAN be grown (or stored) locally in the winter. We get it at a price: pollution across our skies, insecurity for our own local farmers, and mealy white strawberries.
The Israelites got access to their wonderful, Nile-irrigated vegetables while they were in Egypt, and got it at a price: their freedom. It is useless to pretend we do not also give up our freedom when we allow Dole and other multinational corporations to feed us, hook us in, teach us the attitude of entitlement that keeps the dollars flowing and the strawberries flying.

Barbara Kingsolver writes in vivid terms about our lack of (gastronomic) patience, which may be said to have negative effects on other realms of society. Patience and restraint, great virtues, are only applied selectively in our culture: “…browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. “Blah, blah, blah,” hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires.” (Barbara Kingsolver, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.” page 31).

Dare to cut loose and be free. Cut loose from Pharaoh’s addictive provisions of food-with-a-price, and wait for the Real Deal. I promise (though I have perhaps not waited as long as you in colder climes will) that the strawberries will taste way better.

Created in God's image

2011-02-09T20:50:00.000-08:00

There's something difficult in the word "dominion" which the humans are commanded to exercise in most translations of the Bible: "have dominion over the fish and the birds and the animals." It should be translated somewhere on the fine line between "stewardship" and "domination," because its meaning is about midway between, but the problem is that the word resembles one much more than the other. So I take Ellen Davis' recommendation to call it "skilled mastery" (from her full article which you can download right here) which indicates that our rule is not arbitrary or forceful. In order to take good care of it, we must have knowledge and respect for it.
Also, the "be fruitful and multiply" is mostly quoted with reference to humans, but the fish & birds & all are also commanded to be fruitful and multiply. Let us not forget our kinship.

A reading modified from Gen 1:26-28

God said, “let us create humankind in our image, according to our likeness, and let them exercise skill and mastery over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humankind, Adam, (earthling), in God’s image.
In the image of God,
God created him,
Male and female,
God created them.
In much the same way God had already blessed the animals, God now blessed humankind, and God said, “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and exercise skilled mastery over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

AND A PRAYER.
Great God, you have created us in your image,
and imprinted upon us your attributes.
You have created us to be creators,
you have created us to be creative.
Deep in our souls is imprinted
your limitless vision of this world’s fertility and abundance;
sharp on our hearts is your call
to exercise good stewardship and loving care over what is entrusted to us.
We feel the true goodness of the world you have created
And the particular goodness of our little corner of the world.
We are standing on holy ground; ought we to have removed our shoes?
Great God,
Into your servants breathe the inspiration of your holy spirit,
Scrub away whatever is covering your image hidden inside.
Allow us to pray and to think and to speak from that place of creativity, of wisdom, of love and tender care.
Be in our work, and in our play. Be love in our hearts today.
In the strong name of Jesus Christ we pray, Amen.

( i prayed that for the trustees of SFTS as they opened their meeting yesterday. I'm an avid recycler. )

Sermon: Wormwood & Poison

2011-02-08T19:11:00.000-08:00

Preached in class today. I preached it scriptless, but this is my first draft, which then I edited a bit thanks to my classmates' feedback. We're supposed to "take risks" in this class. Scriptless is definitely risky for me!

I teach Godly Play to children at church. In this curriculum we use small props to tell a sacred story. I am telling the story of the prophet Jeremiah next week, and when I got the story box out to prepare, I found a plate and a cup of wormwood and poison. I had some questions about that, so I decided to look into the context and to preach from that scripture for you today.
I found the wormwood and the poison in Jeremiah 23, in a tirade against the false prophets of Jerusalem. It seems there was competition between groups of prophets, and God may have had some punishments in mind. Listen now to verses 15-22:

We have been learning about prophets a lot in Godly Play. The children have heard it so many times that they can rattle the line off unprompted: “A prophet is someone who comes so close to God, and God comes so close to them, that they know what God wants them to say and do.”

Two weeks ago we had a real live prophet in worship. The Rev. Dr. Janie Spahr was there, who is an outspoken advocate and witness for the rights and full inclusion of LGBTQ folks in the church.

Pastor Beth told the congregation we might have a prophet in worship. She invited the children up and asked if any of them would like to ask and find out if there was a prophet. Nory raised her hand and came up to the front, where Beth said – this is Janie – why don’t you introduce yourself – and ask her a question. Nory stared for a moment, the congregation got restless, Beth asked if she needed help. Nory said no, I want to think of my own question. She looked Janie in the eye and asked her, “what does God want us to do?” The congregation was dead silent as child and prophet looked at one another, and as Janie said, “to love justice, and love God, and love each other.”

Most of us did not have an experience like that at the age of nine. But imagine being that child. Imagine searching for a question in your soul, wanting to know what God wanted us to do, having the courage to ask, receiving that answer, nodding, saying thank you, sitting down. Remembering that – God wants us to love justice.
Janie is a wonderful prophet. She is a prophet of love, and inclusion – a prophet of “stop hurting other people” and a prophet of “be nicer to each other.” Although the moment may have been hugely serious and holy, Janie is not a scary prophet.

Another prophet comes to mind – one I haven’t met face to face, but I’ve only encountered through the internet. Her name is Annie Leonard and her prophetic platform is a video series called “the story of stuff.” It’s appropriate for children as well as adults, and is often shown in schools. She shows in vivid terms how the cycles of production, consumption, and disposal are ruining our planet, our health, our lives. She paints a picture – just a cartoon, but a good one – of the clouds of pollution encircling our planet, of fish going cross-eyed up in the rivers, of corporate barons sitting on piles of cash, and piles of garbage forming a floating island in the Pacific. She puts arrows between them all and makes it so direct – the things we buy and use and throw away are killing us.
And imagine being a child who encounters THAT prophet. That prophet is a little scary. Imagine going home after you watched this movie at school, and looking at your shelves and toy boxes and thinking. Look at all of my STUFF. Look at all those battery-powered toys. Annie said, “toxics in, toxics out.” Are batteries toxic? Who made them? Did their fish float belly-up in the river next to the factory? Where does it go when it breaks and I put it in the trash? Do I really need a whole set of legos? That prophet is a little scarier.

Imagine being a child who has met both of these two prophets – and maybe even one or two others, some nice, some scary... Imagine the question burning in the in-between – What does God want us to do? Is it okay to have a general idea or do I need clear instructions? Maybe I need to find another prophet who can give me specifics. And what then do you do when one prophet’s message is really different from another’s? Sometimes they don’t agree.

In Jeremiah’s time, the conflict between prophet of happiness and prophet of doom was so tense and so important that the issues rose to a pitch where they used fighting words like “God will feed you poison and wormwood” in their arguments against one another. This is not a light little issue. Prophets are people to be reckoned with. They affect many people’s lives. How do you know what God wants us to do?

Jeremiah says that in order to know what God wants us to do you have to stand in God’s council. You know, that throne room up in heaven where Yahweh-God calls all the other little gods to come and advise on heavy matters, or depending on your view, if we’re done with polytheism at this point, maybe they are just angels. Anyway, the idea is that Jeremiah, the true prophet, WAS there in the council, and that the false prophets weren’t. Jeremiah had a TRUE message – which was watch out, Jerusalem is going to be destroyed – while the other prophets were using a message that maybe wasn’t completely WRONG, it was just out of date – a message of peace and prosperity. That message works 95% of the time, but those prophets didn’t get the status update that let Jeremiah know the time was over, and that the people should be bracing for impact.
Being a prophet is different from being a faithful scholar, or a true mathematician, or a good preacher. It is not enough to find something that is true, and say it. Prophets must be so close to God as to be in the divine council – to get the updates – to be open, day by day, to news and revelation.

I wonder who is in the divine council. I don’t think they are angels and demi-gods in a divine throne room in the clouds. But if there is a divine council, who is there? Who are the true prophets listening to, these days?
I think if we could see into the divine council we’d see… the wind and the rain. They must be saying something… between the ridiculously warm weather here, and the equally mindboggling cold and storms on the east coast… the earth, and the weather, must be trying to deliver some message they’ve heard in the divine council. Trying to get us to pay attention to the painful cries of the earth we pollute, perhaps?
If we could see into the divine council, maybe we’d see… polar bears? I don’t know, it just seems to me that a species getting shuttled around from iceberg to ever-smaller iceberg, trying to find enough space to live, ought to deserve to send at least one or two representatives.
And along with the polar bears maybe some other special interest groups. Incarcerated African-Americans, people excluded from the church because of their sexuality, the disabled and the elderly, the people who keep getting swept off to the margins and ignored.
I’m just imagining, of course. I’m not up there myself. And I wonder what you think. I’m imagining a pretty large and open council, but it could be smaller. How we imagine these things affects who we think might be a prophet.

A prophet is someone who comes close to God, so close that they can stand in God’s council and hear the testimonies of God’s people and creatures and creation, hear these testimonies and KNOW what God wants us to do. Prophets can be boys, and prophets can be girls. They could even be grown-ups. May we find even today, that prophets are among us. Amen.

Inclusive language: including "Lord."

2011-02-06T21:01:00.000-08:00

We work very hard in the PC(USA) to make sure we use inclusive language for people (i.e. not gender-specific so that women don't feel left out) and expansive language for God (i.e. more than just "King" and "Lord" and other such patriarchal labels). We work very hard at Montclair Presbyterian to keep God in a gender-neutral space, although you could accuse us of just being allergic to tradition.

This week we did some spirituals and some other songs that used a lot of "Lord" language. It was occasioned by wanting to include my bassfriend in celebration, and Isaiah Jones' lovely communion liturgy setting. I did some editing of the songs ahead, but although you can easily substitute "God" in for "Lord" in prose, that gets iffy when you get to particular phrases like "Lord our God" which need to have three syllables and a certain musical rhythm. In total syllabic frustration I gave up the efforts at lyrical transposition, and we started talking - at staff meeting - about how (and whether) we could reclaim a positive use for the word "Lord."
After lots of groupthink and collaboration, we ended up printing this in the bulletin:

“Inclusive language is not a fad. It is not this year’s ‘cause,’ to be soon replaced by another. The growing use of inclusive language is the result of serious commitment on the part of many people to use words more responsibly, to speak more precisely, and to communicate more truthfully and sensitively.” (From “More Than Words” by Schaffran and Kozak)
We have changed the words of some of the music in our liturgy this morning to reflect our commitment to inclusive language. The word “Lord” in its traditional use is exclusive and patriarchal. When we use it, we do not use it in the same manner. When we use the word “Lord” in a description of God, we are using it ironically to bring to mind and heart the God who would become incarnate to bring us to wholeness. Our “Lord” -- our “boss” or “master” or even our “king” should we choose to say it – our “Lord” is the one who voluntarily gave up all forms of domination and power, who became the weakest of the weak, and whose greatest power is love. We do not give this respect to anyone who coerces it or demands it; we only give it to the one who subverts and transforms the very idea of power, and who gently loves us into our own strength and empowerment.

What do you think? Does that work? Are you comfortable with applying the word "Lord" to God, despite its connotations? And if so - how do you think of it?

The Dandelion Tree

2011-02-02T21:25:00.000-08:00

It's hard to understand about 80% of the Bible if you don't live in an agricultural society, and do at least a little bit of growing things. And sometimes even the Bible makes it hard to understand what's going on.

Take Matthew 13:31-32: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the
air come and make nests in its branches.”

Right. Great story. The Kingdom (or the realm of God, as I like to say) is a thing that grows. When we tell it in Godly Play with the kids, we roll up a piece of cloth and hide it in our hands and unroll it - it's shaped like a tree. The kingdom is like something small becoming big.
uh-uh. We're missing a major part of the story, because, well, have you ever seen a mustard tree? GUESS WHAT - mustard is a weed. A shrub, maybe a bush at best. Mainly, a weed. It spreads ferociously. And when the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches, I'm slightly concerned given that earlier in the chapter, the story of the "sower and the seed" was told, and the birds' role in that was to eat the seeds on the path. Birds aren't necessarily great for your seed-sowing endeavors. So the story could be re-told....
The Realm of God is like a dandelion, which is a small seed when blowing on the wind - it is too small to catch, even, or to keep off your lawn - but when it grows it becomes a TREE, full of pigeons and crows and rats and squirrels.
(not as pleasant).

The thing with trees, is that trees and especially the "greatest" trees, the majestic cedars, were often compared to the house of Israel. It's not just about size, it's about your past as well. YHWH has a long history of planting and uprooting that house - that tree. Ezekiel prophesied that a cedar tree would be planted on mount Zion, and that all kinds of birds would come to roost in it. And now there's another plant, a lowly shrub, which will take its place and shelter its birds. Ezekiel said "all the trees of the forest will know that I the LORD bring down the tall tree and make the low tree grow tall. I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish." .... but he may not have imagined that the "low tree" and the "dry tree" wouldn't even be a tree, but a weed. If cedar trees are majestic institutions, mustard plants and dandelions are subversive movements. And Jesus has deliberately mixed these images, creating a mustard plant which does what cedar trees do.

What are we? As followers of the parable-telling Christ, are we planting cedar trees, pruning rosebushes, training topiaries in a good-looking, majestic church? Or are we tossing dandelion seed to the wind like playful children, spreading mustard seed in the dry and rocky ground where it can dig its tenacious roots in?

Here's the other beautifully disorienting thing. Mustard is an annual. It does NOT grow bigger and bigger as time goes on; it dies every year and grows again from the seed it has spread abroad. So if we and all the nations of the earth are to come like birds and roost in the shade of the mustard plant, we will not be guaranteed that there even IS a particular mustard plant in the same place it was last year. The Realm of God shifts and grows and changes. Notably UNLIKE cedar trees. Do we shift and grow and change?

The kingdom of God is like a dandelion tree. May it be so. Amen.

Working or worshipping the land?

2011-01-26T23:16:00.000-08:00

When Adam is placed in the garden of Eden he is placed in relationship to the fertile soil for which he is named: he is to “till it and keep it,” if you read the NRSV, or to “work it and take care of it,” in the NIV, “work the ground and keep it in order” if you’re partial to Eugene Peterson’s Message, or “tend and watch over it” if you read the New Living Translation.
What on earth is he doing?
Two Hebrew verbs. One is abad, to “serve,” most literally, as a servant serves a master, or to “worship,” as a person does to God. It does have the rarer meaning of “to work” without an indication of for whom you work – but usually it indicates a service rendered by an inferior for a superior. My California soul is deeply delighted at the notion of our first ancestor “worshipping” the soil. And I’m also thrilled to see that there was a positive paradigm for a human’s labor rendered to the soil, before the fall and expulsion from Eden whereupon we are told “in toil you shall eat of [the fruit of the land] all the days of your life.
Two is shamar, to “watch,” most literally, to observe with one’s eyes, OR as a watchman watches over a castle, to keep, protect, or preserve. I respect and appreciate the idea of protecting and preserving the land, but there’s also the aspect of watching it that takes a learner’s eye – to learn what the land can do, what it needs, how it will react to rain and sun and tilling and any other interaction it may have.
Ellen Davis comes up with four words: when it comes to the land, Adam is to “work it and serve it, observe it and preserve it.” We must fall to our knees, learn from it, respect its limitations, appreciate its art, marvel at its wonders, protect them from harm. This is our call.

(Scripture, Culture, Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. p30)

"God did so totally not just say that"

2011-01-24T16:25:00.000-08:00

Sermon title got a lot of giggles. Here it is on our website... and it's also
podcasted. I love that our church speaks podcast language.

I have to mention, however, the children's sermon. I began with a simple question: "what is a prophet?"
And one little girl said, perfectly confidently, in her high squeaky voice, the words we use in Godly Play:
"A prophet is someone who comes so close to God that they know what God wants them to say and do."
The church gasped and applauded.
We talked a bit about prophets. I asked if they knew any prophets... or if they had ever FELT like a prophet (with something very important they had to say)... and got nothing, so I just finished with "Prophets can be men, or women, or boys, or girls, so.... watch out."

Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 49:1-7 (my modifications on NRSV translation)
Listen to me, O islands,
pay attention, you peoples from far away!
The LORD called me before I was born,
and named me while I was in my mother’s womb.
God made my mouth like a sharp sword,
and hid me in the shadow of God’s hand;
God made me a polished arrow,
and hid me away in God’s quiver.
And God said to me, “You are my servant,
Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”
But I said, “I have labored in vain,
I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity;
yet surely my cause is with the LORD,
and my reward with my God.”
And now the LORD says,
who formed me in the womb to be God’s servant,
to bring Jacob back to the Lord,
and that Israel might be gathered to God,
for I am honored in the sight of the LORD,
and my God has become my strength--
The Lord says,
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

Thus says the LORD,
the Redeemer of Israel and of the Holy One,
to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations,
the slave of rulers,
“Kings shall see and stand up,
princes, and they shall prostrate themselves,
because of the LORD, who is faithful,
the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.”

Full text of the sermon:

OK here’s my topic:
God did so totally not just say that.
Let’s jump into this story. I’m using my imagination a lot, so you’ll have to go with me. I’m imagining the prophet Isaiah having an attitude. Prophets don’t always agree with the message they’re given… so let’s imagine Isaiah is talking back to God, even though there’s not a lot of evidence for that per se.

What there IS evidence for is that it’s hard work being a prophet. You’re unpopular, and in constant danger of being killed. Nobody would really choose to be a prophet, but this prophet didn’t have a choice in the matter. He says “The LORD called me before I was born, and named me while I was in my mother’s womb.”

There IS evidence that the subject of this passage – someone often called “the suffering servant,” was less than thrilled with the work he did. It says that God made him sharp like an arrow – and then hid that arrow in a quiver. God sharpened and prepared this prophet – and then didn’t send him out to USE that weapon. And he says “I have labored in vain.” Prophets can get discouraged.

There IS evidence that this prophet expected to be a bit of a home-town hero. He had been talking about the return to Jerusalem after exile, and how glorious it would be, and he would be out there leading the best journey ever taken. You know, OUR God, saving OUR people, restoring OUR land, bringing US home. What could be greater?

And then. God says this:
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
but I will give you as a light to the Gentiles,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

And if I were that prophet, that’s where I’d say uh-uh, God did so totally not just say that. Why would God’s salvation be going to the end of the earth? We’re all here. So, I’m supposed to be a light to the who? Those god-forsaken Gentile nations don’t need a light. Save US and forget about THEM.
And although I have been using my imagination here, it’s not all imaginary. People who heard this message were surprised. They felt it was a blow to their pride, and some tried to change it. One of the earliest translations of this text, the Septuagint, takes the phrase “it is too light a thing for you to be my servant to restore the survivors of Israel” and unabashedly changes it to “it’s a great thing for you to be my servant to restore the survivors of Israel!” Early interpreters took that line about “salvation reaching to the end of the earth” and spun it a bit, so it meant that the prophet would find all the Jews who were exiled at the ends of the earth, and bring them home to Jerusalem. We always want it to be all about us.

A popular prophet, you know, is the one who prophesies the home team wins, the opponent loses. But this prophet has just been asked to say “forget about the home team – prizes for everyone!” It’s ridiculous. It’s scandalous.

You know, there’s a lot of scandalous stuff in the Bible… and some of it offends more than our pride. Some of it is just offensive. Violence, misogyny, militarism, racism, the list goes on.
One of the biggest scandals is when we discover that a lot of the prophets and kings and heroes of the Bible didn’t appear to believe – as we do – in a God of universal love. You know – Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world? The idea is that God wants everyone to know and receive God’s love. But we don’t find that message everywhere in the Bible. Isaiah is developing the idea of God being UNIVERSAL, and it’s a scandalous new idea.
Everyone knows that Jonah – the backwards prophet – completely missed that message. He got swallowed by a whale because he was running away from what God told him to do – preach to his enemies. But in addition to Jonah, there were others who didn’t get the universal love idea.

Abraham, for example. In his story we have an interesting mix of local loyalty and a little universalism. God says to Abraham, basically, you’re my favorite: “I will bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen 12:3). This is definitely a partisan God, one who takes sides, but one who is generous to the other families of the earth as well. That’s nice. But it’s not quite universal, and it’s not very fair to the others.

Elijah is another example. The prophet Elijah arranged for a cosmic duel between Yahweh, the Israelite god, and Baal, a Canaanite god. They set up rival altars, (1 kgs 18:20-40), and waited for fire from heaven. And when Yahweh won the showdown, Elijah had his people kill all of Baal’s people. Elijah didn’t believe in a very universal God – just that his god was stronger than their god – and it certainly was not the kind of God who tells you to love your enemies.

There’s another example – even though I hate to tarnish her image – Mary. Mother of Christ. She sings her song, “my soul magnifies the Lord,” a beautiful song about how the rich and the poor will dramatically be reversed, but that song ends with a specific promise to a specific people – to Israel, Abraham, and his descendants. Did she even have a clue that it was so much bigger than that? She probably didn’t, because we’re not even sure if Jesus knew his message would be addressed to non-jewish audiences, far beyond the borders of Israel. Depending on what gospel you look at, Jesus’ attitude toward the Gentiles ranges from begrudging acceptance to outright indifference.

Looking at all these stories, there is an overarching theme of expansion. People who thought that God just cared for their family, find out that God cares for their entire tribe. People in a tribe, with their own god, hostile to all the neighboring tribes, find out that the same God cares for twelve tribes– not just one. It happens again, because those twelve tribes get together but then they split apart, and again they have to be told – it’s about everyone, not just about you. And then twelve tribes find out that they are just the beginning of the story, and that their light is to shine out to the ends of the earth. The story keeps opening – widening – pushing against the boundaries we construct. It’s natural to have a close circle of people around us – our friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors… It’s natural to love them in a special way, and to want to help them more than we would help a stranger. And it might be natural to assume that God would love them more too… but God keeps pushing us to redefine those circles of who is eligible for compassion. God is always surprising us, and daring us to look farther than the circle of “our” people.

And lest we think sacred history ends at the end of this book, let’s look further. The long arc of history keeps bending toward inclusion despite its fits and starts in the other direction. In process right now are women, who are deemed equal to men around much of the world… though not everywhere. We see this as God’s call. We can point to some powerful words written by the apostle Paul, many centuries before the world was able to truly hear them… he wrote the words “there is no more Jew or Greek, there is no more slave or free, there is no more male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). Many have heard this call from God, still pushing us toward acknowledging God’s universal love.

Race is under consideration too, although we are SLOW with that in the church. You all have heard the saying that the most segregated hour of the week is 10 AM on a Sunday. Our denomination the Presbyterian Church (USA) is currently voting on whether or not to add the Belhar confession to our book of confessions. This confession was written in South Africa. It systematically strikes down all the rationale for apartheid and affirms our oneness in Christ across the races. And unfortunately, it is controversial. The controversy surrounding the vote proves that race issues are NOT behind us. God is still calling us, urging us, PUSHING us to expand our circle of compassion. We know too well the struggles in our society to have equal rights recognized for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. The boundaries must be expanded.

Robert Wright, in his book The Evolution of God, looks at it as if God were growing. As we move from ideas of “God loves my tribe” to “God loves my nation” to “God loves other nations,” from “God loves everyone like me” to “God loves all kinds of people,” our image of God grows accordingly. And Robert Wright thinks this growth in our consciousness may be a reason to believe that there is a God, or some kind of higher power, drawing all of humanity toward an expanded sense of compassion, and toward a universal sense of moral order.

To get even wider with these circles of compassion – there is a growing sense, now, that it’s not even just about people… that the non-human participants in our global ecosystem should be included in our view. That God has a relationship with the earth itself, and its creatures and plants and minerals, and that we should also widen our view. We could treat the earth as a Thou and not as an It – as a relation, not as a resource to be exploited. We hear that call, and we hear it from God. We find it rooted in the Bible, and we find it growing in our hearts. We can no longer continue to abuse the earth. The boundaries must be expanded.

But the problem is that at each step of the expansion, there’s a harsh surprise. At each stage there is SOMEONE standing with their hands on their hips looking at God and saying uh uh no you didn’t. Jesus comes, and they say “You want us to listen to someone from Galilee?” Jerusalem is the spiritual center of Israel, and Galilee is so far away it’s practically Gentile. Prophets get a message and say, “what? you want us to ‘be a light’ – to our enemies? HEY GOD, WHAT ABOUT THE HOME TEAM?!”

So then we try to rationalize how God could possibly be telling us this very scandalous thing. Isaiah puts it this way, in the very next verse, verse 7: “Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves.”
Really, the only way Isaiah can get his mind around the concept that God could be bothering with other people, is that maybe “salvation” for these other people means that they bow down in submission before the Israelites.
If you don’t get the point about Isaiah’s attitude, let’s jump ahead in the chapter, to verse 22. He says:
I will soon lift up my hand to the nations,
and raise my signal to the peoples;
and they shall bring your sons in their bosom,
and your daughters shall be carried on their shoulders.
With their faces to the ground they shall bow down to you,
and lick the dust of your feet.

Those nations will learn to be respectful. They’ll take their proper place in the order of things. If God really cares for them, then God will make them submit to us, because we’re God’s favorite, and that’s how the story goes.
Unfortunately this is not just an ancient story, it’s a human story. Something in our nature still fights back against actually accepting people who are different from us. We want to put them into our boxes. Well-intentioned missionaries fly all over the world these days, still trying to make “savages” into “civilized Christians,” because they have this idea “God loves you – so God wants you to be more like me.”
It’s hard to stop doing this kind of stuff.
Hard to change our patterns of thinking.
It’s hard to comprehend that God loves other people just as they are.
But this is the scandal. This is the story of God and God’s people: we just don’t get it, and yet God keeps pushing us forward, pushing us to be more and more generous with our tight little circles of compassion. God’s love is for everyone, and God will never be satisfied until ALL people, and ALL of creation, live in love and harmony with one another.

So here we are. All of you, as a church, pay me to stand up here and say God’s love is for everyone – and then everyone says Amen – because it’s true and we know it. God’s love is for everyone. By the way, from my perspective, this is the best job ever. But that message is not just about this pulpit. You say that message with your lives every time you make God’s love tangible to someone else. You can’t put that in a box and say it’s a job for the pastor, or the Christian Ed director, or the youth advisors, or the music director. That is everyone’s work.

So when we say “God’s love is for everyone,” what does it look like? How do we extend and express God’s love to others? Does it look like ME inviting YOU to be part of MY group, at MY house, talking about MY favorite issues – or do I actually want to get to know you on your terms? Are we genuinely curious about one another, or do we just hope that the others will get on our bandwagon? Are we relating, or are we recruiting? It’s so much easier to recruit. You just talk, you never have to listen. Really relating with love takes all we have in us.

Every action we take can support - or distract from - that central message, “God’s love is for everyone.” Little things we never even think about can be a roadblock to other people. If we say that God’s love is for everyone, but it’s announced by email, we’ve blocked out the people who don’t have their own computers and blackberries and iPhones and whatnot. If we say that God’s love is for everyone, and you can hear about it on Tuesdays at 2, we’ve blocked out everyone who goes to school or work on Tuesdays. If we say God’s love is for everyone, and let’s all have dinner tonight at an expensive restaurant that isn’t wheelchair-accessible, that message is not going to make perfect sense to some people. If we choose an affordable and accessible restaurant, however, we send a very different message.
Every little assumption we make can get in the way of someone else hearing that message. Have you ever entered a different culture and seen all the little things that make you feel uncomfortable? People are talking about bands or movies you didn’t see… there’s a unspoken hierarchy of leadership and you accidentally step on the wrong person’s toes… everyone is using a gadget you didn’t even know existed… When we enter a strange place and feel this way, we often feel embarassed and we just leave. And whatever message of love those people may have wanted to convey to us, we missed it. Most of us have had this kind of experience, but we may not ever think about whether other people feel that way in OUR presence. Every little action we take can support - or distract from - that central message, “God’s love is for everyone.”

The good news is it’s not ALL up to us. God is really insistent on loving this whole world, whether God’s prophets are on the right boat or not. It’s not all up to us. But we can participate. Breaking down the walls that divide person from person – and person from God – and person from earth – breaking down these walls is an important part of the sacred story in which we place ourselves, that never-ending love story between God and God’s creation. God is always pulling us, pushing us, calling us, coaxing us, enticing us, to turn away from our brokenness and choose a better way, a way that leads us forward through expanding circles of compassion. Let’s do our best to tear down those walls. Here, and out there, and “in here,” and wherever we may go. May it be so – Amen.

Leviticus rediscovered

2011-01-19T20:45:00.000-08:00

I commend to you a little reading in Leviticus.
What?
Nobody commends Leviticus. That’s the backwardest part of the Bible. When my youth group performed the “Bible in 15 minutes” we summarized Leviticus as:
Don’t have sex with your daughter.
Don’t have sex with your sister-in-law.
Don’t have sex with your great-aunt.
If you have an oozy skin discharge, OR if you touch a corpse…
And in the interest of fitting the rest of the Bible into 15 minutes, the whole cast yelled “ew gross!” and ousted Leviticus from the stage.
Today, I commend to you a few verses from Leviticus. Specifically, from the collection known as the “Holiness Code” (chs 17-26). You can skip the parts about whom not to have sex with (just do it with someone you love and aren't related to, ok?), and go on to chapter 19.

Now you need a little Hebrew, but I’ll provide it. NOTICE how people, creatures, and land are all treated similarly, even with the same words: you shall not reap the edge (pe’a) of your field (19:9) nor will you shave the edge (pe’a) of your beard (19:27). NOTICE that your fruit trees are to remain uncircumcised (‘arelim 19:23) for three years, whereupon its first “cutting” or harvest of fruit is dedicated to the Lord. If that’s not telling us “treat your trees like people,” I don’t know what it is. NOTICE that the land doesn’t just take male metaphors, it’s female too: “Do not profane your daughter by making her a prostitute, that the land not become prostituted and full of depravity” (19:29).
This is the same great chapter that tells us “love your neighbor as yourself” (19:18) and even “you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (19:34)… and I wonder. Hidden under this code, are we actually being told…
*to tenderly care for our fields as we do our own bodies?
*to protect our land as fiercely as we protect our daughters?
*to honor and celebrate the fruit of a tree the same way we would celebrate the life of a baby boy?

I commend to you a little reading in Leviticus 19. Enjoy.

Leaps and Bounds

2011-01-18T13:39:00.000-08:00

In Detroit, at the US Social Forum, I had the great fortune to see Leaps and Bounds presented by The Affording Hope Project. This exuberant one-woman show is touring the country, speaking, singing, and dancing the story of just about everything from creation to a future resurrection - looking at the intersection of faith, ecology, and the global economy.
Luckily you can still see it at the Ecumenical Center of Berkeley (1798 Scenic Ave) on Wed, Jan 26th, 8:30-9:45pm. Or contact them to find a performance in another state/area/month/etc.

Why?
Because she makes connections that need to be made. We can't leave all the talking about wasted rivers and extinct species to the scientists - faith has to say something too. We can't leave all the talk about economics to the brains - our hearts need to say something there too.
Because art is transformative and powerful in a way that nothing else can be. I saw her show after a long (Presbyterian Hunger Program) roadtrip of learning, seeing, learning, digesting, learning learning learning about agriculture and various elements of food crisis, and I needed something that could touch both my exhaustion (there is so much work to be done!) and my energy (just let me get my hands on that work!). Tevyn's show gave me not only a dream to dream, but a song to sing while I work.
Because we need fresh eyes, ideas, and strength to tackle the ever-rising pile of panic-worthy situations in which we find ourselves (and find our less fortunate brothers and sisters).
Because, really, who DOESN'T want to hear all the latest from the show's co-writer Ched Myers?

ENJOY THE SHOW! see ya there ;-)

Stepping on faith

2011-01-17T20:32:00.001-08:00

I am a board member for Children of Uganda. In the mix of so many church-related activities I have this work with COU, a non-faith-based organization.... which is truly odd from a personal point of view, because it tries, tests, and uses my faith far more than any sermon ever has.
Right now we are preparing for a tour in September 2011. The tour allows Ugandan children to share their traditional music, drumming, and dance, as well as their stories of hope, with an American audience. We connect and re-connect with donors and sponsors, and use our public visibility to educate people about HIV/AIDS and the orphan crisis in Uganda, a country with nearly 3 million orphans out of a total population of 27 million people - where half the population is under the age of 18 and many live in child-headed households.
We need to raise over $100,000 to make this happen. That's where the faith comes in. Nine months to go, of course, but instruments and costumes need to be purchased, and airplane tickets, passports, visas, and van rentals all need to be paid for well in advance.
One of my theology professors planted the notion in my head that "faith" is less about "agreeing to some dogma" than it is about existential trust. Faith in organic veggies means not an intellectual construct about their healthfulness, but a choice to feed them to your baby. This kind of faith is a trust that allows you to step out believing that the water will hold solid beneath your feet, and to throw yourself into the arms of the world believing that you will be caught.

We're stepping onto the water. The website announces the tour... people are making donations, small and large, to bring it from dream to reality. My September calendar is completely blocked off to be with the troupe 24/7, even if it costs me my job (and it might not - they are understanding and adventurous folks at Montclair). Our little tour committee is organizing fundraisers, making connections, and pounding out the appeals for corporate funding.

The faith is hard to muster up sometimes. "What if we fail?" is the faith-killer lurking behind every corner. I'm terrified of embarrassment. I demand proof from God that this will succeed, and I'll scarcely be satisfied with proof less than a $100,000 check... I am looking not for a still small "yes" voice, but a guarantee, a shout, a billboard flashing YES.
The hidden "yes" is there, however. Even the work we have done so far (merely convening the troupe, purchasing instruments, and running several weeks of training intensives) has been transformative. I heard the tale of one girl, stubborn and severely dyslexic, who has turned into a different creature since she started training. She has found her confidence, her "groove," and is becoming cooperative at school, where she now assistant-teaches dance and music to the youngest classes. How could this transformation be anything other than a strong message of "yes" to the work we do?
THAT is a piece of water I know I can stand on.

That's me with the 2006 tour, which I blogged on livejournal... in the good old days when people used livejournal... I was a chaperone on that tour, barely a few years older than the eldest performers, and the grownups did all the planning. This time I'm a grownup, stepping out in faith, waiting with outstretched hands for the blessings to flow, dreaming of those first deep drumbeats as the first curtain rises.

Dream with me... pray with me... step out in faith... and in the meanwhile do let me know if you have connections to get plane tickets donated =)

Humus humans

2011-01-12T20:25:00.000-08:00

Many of us have heard too many times in the Adam & Eve story that “Adam means dirt.” Humans are made of humus, blah de blah. How cool and ancient and mythical and overimaginative of those ancient Hebrews – right?

No, there’s a little more to it than that.
First of all – “dirt.” Mistranslated “dust of the ground” by King James and the RSV family of Bibles, the word means “fertile soil.” Adamah in the Hebrew (you see how closely it’s related to Adam). This is a particular word, not just any old dirt. It is soil – arable land. Think not about the dust of a desert, but about potting soil… an obviously fertile soil, the stuff from which all land plants and animals ultimately take their nourishment. But our potting soil is usually pretty blackish brown, and this is not the adamah’s color. The words adam and adamah are not only related to one another, but are related to the word adom, “ruddy,” reddish. This is particular soil – for the Israelites this is the color of the hills of home.
It tells them not only THAT God made them, but WHERE God made them. Egyptian soil and Babylonian soil have nothing on that particular soil from which a chosen group of people were made.

We can all say that God made us here – on this earth. Some of us have (over the millennia) wandered to northern regions where our skin didn’t need the melanin so much, and so we got a little paler, and so it’s funny, nearly ridiculous, to say white people were made from soil. Contrary to the pictures in many a Children’s Bible, however, people in biblical times didn’t have that problem. They understood that they belonged to that land, as surely as their skintone matched the fertile soil.

In a world of cheap travel, adventure, frequent voluntary relocation, and of the nonvoluntary diaspora and exile of many people-groups… we lose our sense of belonging to a land.

Where do you belong? Where were you made? What color is your dirt? What is the land you cannot abandon?

Grounded Scriptures

2011-01-05T15:53:00.000-08:00

So I’m a seminarian, a New Yorker transplanted in California, a musician, a Sunday School teacher, a feminist, and an aspiring farmer.
Whaa? You may ask. What kind of well-educated, urban, pulpit-bound woman aspires to spend her days digging in the dirt? What kind of feminist is eager to do more canning and preserving than her grandmother did? Odd, I know. I often keep this part of my self-identity under wraps, because people do just that – “Whaa?” … and then I have to explain about how I might not have to operate a tractor, it could be urban community gardens, or how I could have a seedling nursery… But the fact remains, surprising many – I want to farm. I'm itching for more than a few square feet of land to do it on.

I have to blame a lot of the “why” for this unfortunate vocation on the Bible. Ever since my Old Testament professor Marvin Chaney shouted at our Prophets class “you can’t read this in stained-glass language!” about the sin of land-grabbing, I have had a vivid sense that the Way described and commanded in the biblical texts had plenty to do with how we work, live, spend our money, relate to our neighbor, and how we eat… perhaps more than with how we pray. And through reading (lots of Ellen Davis) and learning (with the Presbyterian Hunger Program roadtrip) I’ve come to believe that the particular realm of how we grow and distribute food in America is drastically opposed to the ideals set out in the Bible.

The rubber hits the road in my new blog series, posted here & elsewhere on Wednesdays, “Grounded Scriptures.” I will search each week for a Bible verse we tend to read in that “stained glass language,” extricate it from my piously cerebral assumptions, and look for a way to understand it in terms of the relationship of God’s people to the land, the soil, and the plants and creatures that grow in and on it.
Read & join in!
http://presbyterian.typepad.com/foodandfaith/
http://pcusablog.blogspot.com/

No More Singing Telegrams

2010-12-27T13:53:00.000-08:00

I am so, so, so done. The last few days tested my endurance, as I did 4 or so each day while last-minute orders came in. Although a few days before I'd been wondering if I could find a way to do singing telegrams professionally & full-time, I definitely hit my "max" and fizzled out. They are all available on my youtube if you're concerned about missing any of them.
The good news is that this project raised $500+ for Children of Uganda's music and dance program, and is going straight to the work on the ground in Uganda as our dance troupe has a special training over December and January break, in getting ready for a September 2011 Tour.

The blizzard has hit New York, where I'm spending Christmas. We had great fortune - left the city just as it started, had some fun up in Albany with a lighter snowfall (12"), and then came back as the sun shone and as people dug their cars out. New Yorkers are so WEIRD - they shovel snow by tossing it away from their car and into the center of the road. One, this means you can barely drive. Two, the snowplow comes and shovels it right back on the car, and then they have an excuse to bitch and moan - is this why they do it? or they just don't understand the principles of shoveling? Anyway, we were planning to find a vacant parking space and spend an hour or so digging the snow out so we could park our car there, but by some amazing luck we found one that had JUST been vacated - and no snowplow had come by - meaning we slid into a pre-dug parking spot, right across from our house. Sweet deal.

I wrote this

2010-12-27T13:38:00.000-08:00

Meditation for Dec 27th, SFTS Devotional

Today’s passage: Proverbs 8:22-30
This passage speaks of a personified wisdom – Sophia. The Hebrew Hochmah and Greek Sophia are both feminine nouns and so have been understood as a glimpse into the feminine aspects of God. The Hebrew understanding of Sophia includes the kind of wisdom that Solomon was reputed to have, with insight and understanding of complex situations, but also includes skills and abilities. Sophia was with the carpenters, weavers, and other workers who constructed the tabernacle. She indwelled them to such degree that they were said to have “the spirit of God.” (Ex 31:6). Her grace-filled gifts are given not only to the mind, but to the hands as well. She is, above all, creative.

We can understand this Sophia as God’s first creation, made not begotten, but we can also see her as a female manifestation of God and of Christ. She is “the first of God’s acts of long ago,” just as Christ is “the Word, in the beginning with God” (John 1:2). She is a co-worker in creation, a “master worker,” similar to the Word through whom “all things came into being” (John 1:3). Paul calls Christ “the wisdom of God” – God’s Sophia (I Cor 1:24).

As we continue to celebrate his marvelous coming into the world, let us seek to be in touch with Christ, the wisdom of God.
The one who makes fools out of the worldly wise;
The one who is understood by fools, women, shepherds, pregnant teens, tax collectors... and dismissed by many others;
The one who came to her own, and her own people did not accept her;
The one who has been “daily God’s delight,” on whom God’s favor rests, descending like a dove;
The one who has seen the creation of all things, who creates, who recreates, who allows us to be recreated.
All these things, wrapped tightly together in story-cloth, laid in the straw he created – all these things made real in one tiny baby.

God – Sophia – Christ.
Be in our hearts and minds and hands today.

A lot more singing telegrams.

2010-12-23T12:25:00.000-08:00

We're going gangbusters in the singing telegram business! Children of Uganda has received at least $400 so far from these efforts, and possibly more. If you're wondering what this is all about check out my original pitch at http://presbybug.blogspot.com/2010/12/singing-telegrams.html

Boisterous angels

The Twelve Days of Christmas, Oregon style:

A Barbra Streisand fantasia (my personal favorite):

A music-box singalong

"Star Child" for Stephen, who is always a child at heart

putting the pieces together

2010-12-20T12:43:00.000-08:00

More singing telegrams coming soon. In the meanwhile, I had some thoughts about SCHOOLWORK even though the semester is over.
A theme running through class this semester (and by "class" I mean the only class I cared about, my elective in Old Testament) was how to take our complex thoughts out of the academy and into the real world.

I've worked on my elevator-speech (you know, the one you give when you only have 20 seconds to speak) about what my thesis topic is, and I've settled on "analysis of the verse "She shall be saved by childbearing" through the lens of greek medical treatises on women's health in chastity and in pregnancy," which is a mouthful but it's accurate.
The paper I wrote in the Old Testament class is not so easily distilled to one sentence. The class focuses on the Persian period, post-"exile" if you choose to call it that, the 6th century BCE to the 3rd or so, as narrated by Ezra and Nehemiah's stories and witnessed in the many other Biblical texts produced during that period of time. It takes THAT complicated a sentence to even DESCRIBE the class? So no wonder the paper seems obscure. Anyway, when I started my paper, I had the idea that I would find evidence for a change in the Judean society (it's still developing and can barely be called Jewish - agh, more qualifications on my statements), a change FROM a rural society of a not very stratified social structure, with family (extended family) centered agrarian production.... TO a structure with an urban elite (those are the ones who do all the talking, and writing biblical texts) with an ignored or oppressed rural population. I looked for this change by checking the vocabulary of Biblical texts - statements such as Genesis 2's focus on the soil and its cultivation indicating a population who cared about the land - and prophets such as Hosea who call the land as partner in lament over the broken relationship between God and people. In the older texts there is a clear sense that God, land, and people are all interwoven in relationships together, and the land and its weather frequently communicate for God. We don't typically understand God that way anymore, so we go looking for when it changed, and people often point to the exile, when the Hebrew people got citified, and when they stopped understanding God as localized and saw God as universal. so that's what i went looking for.
Guess what. I didn't find it. I found that the post-exilic texts were AS concerned with caring for the land, with God's communication to God's people through the land, and with the rights of God's people to work the land and get their basic family subsistence off it (rather than working for large landholders in a more commercial arrangement.)
Conclusion: The idea of a people (and a religion) being wholly disconnected from the land that supports them is our modern fantasy, unfounded in Biblical realities. If we continue to pursue such a disconnected lifestyle we will find it unsustainable; if we continue to justify it based on the Bible’s alleged disregard for ecological and agricultural issues, we will find ourselves trapped and condemned by the very text we look to for justification – no matter what time period of text we look to.

HA.
and what, you ask, am I going to DO about this?
I'm going to start writing little bits about this, hopefully weekly, starting in January - bite-size bloggable bits about how much the Bible thinks land is important, and how wrong we are in our modern mentality of ignoring it.
coming up. more bloggage. hurray!

Two more singing telegrams

2010-12-16T23:34:00.000-08:00

It was getting tedious to post them every time i made a new one.
Here's the deal:

***Singing Telegrams for Children of Uganda! Donations made in each recipient's honor will support COU's music and dance program. For a $25 suggested donation you'll receive a singing telegram, completely customized for your recipient. Donate at www.childrenofuganda.org and email talitha (at) childrenofuganda -dot- org for your telegram!***

Here are the telegrams.

Douglas Serrill compared to Douglas Fir

And ... "Rudolf moves out."

Bill's telegram

2010-12-14T19:19:00.000-08:00

This is what you get when you put the Given-Phillips family together to make a telegram for their FAVORITE family friend and fiddler!

emily's telegram

2010-12-14T13:02:00.001-08:00

for Emily on her birthday...

first singing telegram - for Cassie

2010-12-13T20:50:00.001-08:00

Presenting: Singing Telegrams

2010-12-04T14:25:00.000-08:00

This is my FUN fundraising program for Children of Uganda. All donations will support our music & dance program as they prepare for a 2011 performance tour.

To ORDER a singing telegram, you should simultaneously
1) Donate at www.childrenofuganda.org (specifying it's for a singing telegram)
AND
2) send me an email at talitha ((at)) childrenofuganda //dot// org

Sacred songs, secular songs, Christmas carols, and sea chanteys are all options.

If you live nearby / are my friend, I can do them in-person, but anyone can get one through YouTube - completely personalized, or I can make a video that's not posted, and send it to you through email.

Sliding scale depending on what you can afford and what features you want. $25 is the basic price. If I'm delivering it in person, please add to your donation at least as much as I'll spend in gas to get there. And if you are MORE generous with your donation you may receive bonuses in the forms of lights, costumes, background singers, etc.

Eco-nut

2010-12-03T15:00:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling hedged in, a bit. Partly I think it's a case of Nature Deficit Disorder. Normally during this time of year I cope with the shortened hours of the day by spending plenty of time well-bundled up and working up a sweat on the hiking trails... but my ankle is still healing and it's hard to keep warm when you only go about 1.5 mph. I have a longer leash, now that I can walk nearly 1/2 mile per day, but that doesn't quite do the trick.

Partly, though, it's the seminarian's conundrum: so much thinking, so little action! Our ethics class (on food systems) read Animal Vegetable Miracle together and I am practically hopping up and down with the pent-up desire to DO the local-eating, mad-farmer-for-fun thing, but hopping is hard on one foot, and gardening is hard work too, and I'm barely finding the time to keep my basil plants trimmed.

On Sunday I preached yet another incarnation of my manna sermon, going off script to tell stories from last summer's Presbyterian Hunger Program Roadtrip. I compared the US' food system to Egypt and the food movement (an amalgam of the locavore-gleaner-community-gardening set) to the Hebrew people setting out into the wilderness. I want it too. I want OUT of the enslavement of Egypt, the cheap bad food that's poisoning us. I want to no longer have any complicity in the enslavement of my immigrant brothers and sisters in unspeakable field labor conditions, or in the dumping of cheap corn on the international market, destroying traditional agriculture worldwide.
But it's nice in Egypt, because my food is delivered to me by the industrial food complex. It's convenient. I don't have to get my hands dirty. So i'm still here, idly wondering when I'll get around to getting the heck out.

What's interesting is how much my ethics professor's prodding DOESN'T affect my desire to get out of Egypt. She writes long lists of things we should feel guilty about on the board, and I get stubborn and reactive and dig my heels in. Don't you dare try to guilt-trip me out of my time-honored ways. When I leave, I'm running not away from guilt but toward a better life. When I leave, I'm leaving for love and joy.

Retirement Home Preaching

2010-11-29T14:46:00.000-08:00

So I say "I'm preaching in a retirement home tonight" and you think -- easy peasy, how cute, I hope the residents don't fall asleep during your sermon. The Vespers service is at 7 PM (isn't that past their bedtime?) and we have retirement-home food for dinner at 5:15. "Harvard Beets" and potatoes. When was the last time I ate dinner at 5:15? God knows.

However, Piedmont Gardens is no typical retirement home. I'm not saying that I wasn't asked some very alzheimery questions several times in a row, or that nobody nodded off, or that the pianist didn't play Somewhere Over the Rainbow for the prelude. But I came to realize that I was preaching for several former professors, including a professor of my seminary, and for a former moderator of the PC(USA).

Duly humbled.

Call

2010-11-17T20:18:00.000-08:00

My beloved housemate Elizabeth preached a great sermon on Monday. Taking Matthew 18 as her text, she talked about conflict, church conflict, world conflict, and finally she landed on "being conflicted" rather than causing conflict. The Gospel will cause us to be conflicted within, she said, and spoke of being "conflicted with our call" to ministry.

I understand this well. Although we sang a different song in chapel, the song that came to my mind in response was "I have decided to follow Jesus." That solemn and slow spiritual... none going with me... the cross before me... no turning back, no turning back. And I think of the times when I have steeled myself to sing that song, conflicting myself inside, as if the song were a bitter medicine and I a weak patient. I sang it to myself in a bare little room in Uganda, willing myself to face the day and work harder, love better, and for goodness sake not to get so squeamish over children's illnesses and injuries. Sometimes I've used my "call" and even the name of Jesus to justify punishing myself (so that I can ultimately feel proud of how humble I've become, of course...). Conflicted with a call? Sometimes it felt like nothing but conflict. Afflicted with a call is closer to it.

But that song - and my call - opened up this summer on my amazing roadtrip. It was by a campfire in North Lima OH where a young Goodness Grows intern picked up a guitar and sang that song, upbeat and with a hint of bluegrass twang. And she added a verse. Her clear voice rang out:
//When he calls me
I'll come running //
Maybe my call could be like her song - jubilant, wholehearted, free. Maybe it could untwist from its snarly harshness, and taste less like medicine and more like freshness. I like that idea and I've been following it, trusting it, leaning into it. This is a good place to be. But still the sense of being conflicted does come up. Even in church work, sometimes. A dissatisfaction arises after a long day of planning logistics - doesn't someone want to just talk about God with me? Or at seminary, where we are famously stuck in our heads - doesn't anyone want to quit talking about God and actually DO something?

The call conflicts us because it never ends. No area of our lives can be considered off-limits. Jesus calls us ever and always away from the grooves we've worn for ourselves - those well-trodden paths of exploitative power, chemical dependencies (sugar and petroleum are chemicals), abuse and denial. He calls us forward and out, calls us toward all that is good and lifegiving and just and beautiful and resurrection and Yes.

The call never ends - not when we're working 50 hours a week "for the Lord," not when we're professor emeritus of Deep Pious Thoughts, not when we've singlehandedly saved the orphans of one small nation or another. The call never stops.
But the ultimacy of the call is not why we follow. We follow because the one calling is joyful - jubilant - irresistible.
When Christ calls - let's come running.
O be swift, my soul, to answer God!
Be jubilant, my feet!

barnyard leadership

2010-10-28T19:17:00.000-07:00

So this blog got reviewed in Presbyterians Today, and they included a little pic of farmer talitha:
They gave it a caption - "church leadership in her future?" And one might think, yes! in some kind of barn-church.

Right. So the word "pastor" means "shepherd" as in sheep. In fact that small animal in my arms is not a sheep but a goat, long-standing symbol in Christian literature of an outsider/bad person, as in fact are dogs (and Samaritans). Score. Pastor to the less than perfectly sheepish. I could live with that.
But I was reminded that my sister & brother-in-law have definitely got me beat in terms of ministering to the less stereotypical flocks. They did a brief stint in Uganda as pig missionaries.
So if you ever tire of the sappy Christian songs about shepherding, or just DON'T WANNA BE A SHEEP, rest assured that my family has got the rest of the barnyard metaphors covered.

Listening to the Locusts

2010-10-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

Preached today at Broadway Presbyterian in NYC. There was a lot of good music courtesy of Patrick Evans & our choir... my favorite is a song called "the blue green hills of earth."

Here's the sermon... Listening to the Locusts.
(That's a picture of a locust swarm btw)

read these scriptures first:
Psalm 65
Joel 2:21-32

It’s a pleasure to be back home at Broadway Presbyterian, and a privilege to preach for you. It was a particular pleasure to find these two passages from the First Testament scheduled for me in the lectionary. These are beautiful and poetic passages, with a lot about nature and the goodness of God’s creation.
Psalm 65 is especially lovely, and especially for reading now in the autumn, around harvest time. I love the line “your wagon tracks overflow with abundance.” It can be hard to relate to that in the city where grocery stores always overflow with abundance... but imagine if you will a farmer going out in the fall to harvest his vineyard, with his family and a few neighbors. Usually they have no trouble fitting the entire harvest into a single wagon. But the harvest is bountiful this year and even though the children are eating fistfuls of grapes right off the vine, armload after armload keeps coming in, until the wagon is loaded to the very top... and spilling over. When they are done, and headed home, people walk alongside the wagon keeping their hands ready if anything falls, but there is more than anyone could manage to catch, and besides, the harvest is so much more than they need, and everyone’s so busy laughing and having fun... that they leave a long line of fallen grapes behind in the road.
That’s what our God is like. Nature may bestow this kind of abundance on a farmer once every few years, but God’s wagon tracks are always overflowing with abundance.

The Scripture lesson from Joel also tells us about this aspect of God, the generous God who blesses the land. “Do not fear, O Soil!” The prophet talks to the fields and the creatures as if they were dear friends. Do not worry – in fact, be glad – God is sending you blessings of rain and produce. God is giving you food and drink.
This is a beautiful passage. But it hints at a darker side. To be fully honest, we skipped most of the book of Joel, and the rest was much more somber. Often prophets work like that – they start with the bad news, and then move on to the good. But often WE like to read the blessing and skip the cursing.
The prophecies of Joel, pleasant as they sound, were actually given in response to a very unpleasant, massive swarm of locusts that destroyed all the crops – a hostile army’s attack. So listen to just the first few verses of the prophet Joel that were NOT included in the lectionary reading for today:
Hear this, O elders,
give ear, all inhabitants of the land!
Has such a thing happened in your days,
or in the days of your ancestors?
What the cutting locust left,
the swarming locust has eaten.
What the swarming locust left,
the hopping locust has eaten,
and what the hopping locust left,
the destroying locust has eaten.

This is in-your-face nature. Farmers everywhere throw their hands up in surrendur. There’s no fighting this army. The digestive tract of a locust is specially adapted to accomodate just about anything. They are eating machines. Whatever you’ve planted, THEY will feast on, and lick the wagon tracks clean. It’s a good thing locusts and grasshoppers are technically a kosher food, permitted by traditional law for Israelites to catch and eat (Lev 11:20), because after the few hours it takes for them to devastate your year’s labor, that’s about all you will have left... a plateful of bugs.
So there goes the mythical and romantic notion that nature is always kind. Nature is awesome, and powerful, and majestic, and at times, overwhelming.
God is, at least somewhat, like that too. Surprising. Mysterious. And far beyond our comprehension.

God (as the Israelites understood God) communicated in a variety of ways. There was written law, of course, and traditional stories passed down, and priests who interepreted these, and prophets who defended them. But one of the other primary ways the Israelites experienced God was directly mediated by the world around them... by wagon tracks full of spilled grapes, by the constancy of sunrise and sunset, by the long-awaited spring rains, by water in the desert, by fire on the mountain, and even by swarms of locusts. These were the ways they learned about God’s generosity, God’s constancy, and God’s awesome power. What’s more, the people had a contractual relationship with God – a lease on the land, if you will – telling them how they could and could not live on the land. The land belonged to God, and the people were tenants, and sometimes when the people were not honoring this three-way covenant, the land itself would express God’s dissatisfaction. A few centuries before Joel, the prophet Hosea made this connection clear, between the people and their land:
Hosea chapter 4.
There is no faithfulness or loyalty,
and no knowledge of God in the land.
Swearing, lying, and murder,
and stealing and adultery break out;
bloodshed follows bloodshed.
Therefore the land mourns,
and all who live in it languish;
together with the wild animals
and the birds of the air,
even the fish of the sea are perishing.

The biblical scholar Ellen Davis puts it this way: As a rule of thumb – in the Hebrew scriptures – the best index for the health of the relationship between God and God’s people, is the health of the land. From the lush garden of Eden to the harshness of the desert, the condition of the land mirrors the relationship between human and divine.
So Joel is speaking a well-known language here. When he says “God has poured down for you abundant rain,” he is saying “God loves you.” When he says “God will pay back the years the locust has eaten,” he is saying “God is merciful and generous.” And Joel’s fellow Judeans understand that language. They have to! because they live in close contact with the land. Mainly, because they are farmers. They may not live at a day-to-day subsistence level, but they certainly live harvest-to-harvest, or year-to-year. Any little change in the weather could mean the difference between a year of feasting or of famine. They understand the connection between spring rain and God’s love, as easily as we connect a diamond ring and an engagement. They speak that language – the language of the land. Jesus spoke it too, and his parables are infused with agricultural language.
Unfortunately, those of us who are not farmers are missing out on deeper meanings throughout the Bible. We say “the Lord is my shepherd,” blah blah blah, but we don’t GET it in the way they did. Something like weather is a curiosity in an urban world where no crops depend on it. It’s a trivial conversation topic, or an inconvenience. It’s not important to us. And so we don’t understand how a swarm of locusts can be a life-or-death matter.
We might miss half the meanings in the Bible because of this, but there are other parts, of course, which we hold onto. For example, you may have noticed that the Joel reading was in two portions. There are two promises, two forms of consolation. The first promise is tangible – that God will pour out rain. The second is spiritual – that God will pour out the Spirit. And THAT is the famous one, that gets repeated at Pentecost. In our reading of the Bible, we have chosen to value the one and abandon the other. We will pray for the spirit, but we don’t really pray for rain.
Maybe we don’t want to be caught praying for rain, because it seems superstititous. We think that we are more enlightened now, and have our minds on higher things, and so we assume that God does too... that God cares about deep intellectual thoughts more than about grapes and grasshoppers.
Or maybe it’s just easier to ask God to bless us with some kind of intangible thing, so that we can’t really be proven wrong if we don’t get it. It’s less risky to ask for inner peace, sometime, please... than it is to ask for rain, and I need it, this season. It’s really going out on a limb, to believe that God would directly bless us, here and now, with tangible, edible proof – with the kind of grace that you can chew.
The other thing is, we really value our disconnection from the land. Dirt is dirty, after all, and we have invented a lot of machinery to keep us from touching it. We’ve got machinery to keep even our agriculture nicely insulated from the variances of the weather. We irrigate. We fertilize. We keep the locusts away with tons & tons of petrochemical pesticides. And we also just get away. Over the past few decades Americans have made a mass exodus from farms, turning the work of the land over to a few corporations. Farming is done by specialists with machines, helped by immigrant day laborers.
The loss of our cultural connection to the land extends even as far as losing our connection with the very food we eat. We eat fresh strawberries twelve months of the year, even though ten of those months they taste like styrofoam, but we don’t notice they taste lousy because we’re shutting down our own bodies. We only pay attention to them for the work they can do, or their usefulness in delivering pain or pleasure signals. And we approach the spiritual life the same way - just give me a shot of deep thoughts straight to the brain, please, and let me get on with my disembodied life!
We forget that the first person – Adam – was created out of the earth – the Adamah. We forget that the human was created from the humus – from the soil. There is ancient and timeless wisdom in the Hebrew Bible, about practical and physical stuff... wisdom that we simply skip over, looking instead for interesting thoughts to distract us from the very physical, concrete reality of a life lived in right relations with God and our fellow humans – and with the land. A Christian spirituality can never truly abandon this ancient sense that our lives are physical realities, interconnected with the world around us. If we disconnect from the land, we disconnect from our fellow humans, and we disconnect from God. And that is our loss.

When we disconnect we lose other benefits as well. For one, it’s healthy to be connected. It’s good for the body... and good for the soul. A little story about Children of Uganda... just a few years ago there was an agriculture project started at the orphanage... with the goal of feeding the children from our own land, instead of solely relying on USAID and the local vendors for a steady supply of 100-lb sacks of corn flour. They started a huge garden, a fruit orchard, and a chicken house. Now the project has done little more than inching slowly toward the goal of not needing to buy sacks of flour. THAT goal is not within reach. BUT even without that goal, they discovered that farming is totally worth the time and energy. The children participate, and learn to wonder at strange and marvelous new vegetables, they take pride and joy in raising their food, and they even express compassion as they gently nurture their chickens... or even their squash plants. When we take care of the earth, the earth takes care of us.
Another benefit of feeling connected to the land is that we often find it very easy to connect to God when we’re out in nature... mountains, trees, lakes, rivers... Sometimes it’s a sense of being stunned or overwhelmed by beauty, and sometimes it’s a quiet sense of peace and calm. Spending time in nature can be such a powerful experience that people honestly feel more connected to God there than they do in church. There’s nothing wrong with that. We are natural beings, we belong in nature. And God does still speak to us that way.
It’s an unfortunate loss for us that we should have turned away from the land, and forgotten its language. I’m not saying that we should all go back to subsistence farming. But we could do a better job of paying attention to God, and to hear God speaking to us through creation.

So first, pay attention. Look for the joys. There are still wagon tracks overflowing with abundance. The sunrise and sunset skies still shout for joy, as the Psalmist said, and it only takes a second to lift your gaze from the sidewalk below you and notice what’s above. The wind still whistles around playfully shaking up leaves on the sidewalk. The world around us teaches of God’s generosity, and constancy, and playfulness. How could a God who created chipmunks not be playful at heart? We may be losing our ability to communicate well in the language of the land, but that language can never completely leave us. If we take time to find a sunset to look at – or even just a single leaf – and to wonder at the beauty there, we can always see the fingerprints of God. I remember well Bruce Johnson, a member of this congregation who passed away last year, who took note of these signs. Every spring, there would be a time when he would stand up in church during the community announcement time, and simply say “go to Central Park! The cherry blossoms are in bloom!” He helped us all to pay attention.
Pay attention as well to the harder parts. Listen for the dreadful swarm of locusts telling us we’re not in charge of things – that life is painful – that things just aren’t fair. Listen for the cries of seabirds in the gulf, months after the bp accident, who are still struggling to clean their feathers of the oil. Listen to the mournful cries of land across the country: mountains falling for the sake of coal, and formerly fertile fields being stripped of topsoil by the wasteful, harsh practices of industrial agriculture. This morning’s opening hymn called us to “join the happy chorus which the morning stars began.” Join that chorus, and you may notice that the ranks keep thinning. Our choir is missing some seabirds, and entire species of frogs, and the tops of many mountains. When we hear these things we know that God is calling us to more reverent and careful ways of interacting with the land and the creatures entrusted to our care.
In the second part of our reading, Joel introduces the idea of an apocalypse. Apocalyptic thought was developing in early Judaism, especially in the few centuries before and around the time of Jesus. Joel says “the sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes.” And Jesus repeats similar ideas. Apocalyptic thought can be very important, especially when people are being oppressed and need to know that God will ultimately redeem and vindicate them. We need to be careful, though, because in regard to the land, such lines of thinking have lead many Christians down a dangerous path. The danger is that if we believe we are getting a new heavens and a new earth, real soon, that we decide to trash the land we have. This makes about as much sense as an addict saying, “well, since I’ve decided to get clean and sober tomorrow, tonight I’ll go all out.” And the Christian scriptures witness against the idea that this is a disposable earth, and we’ll get a new one. It is THIS world, this creation, that God loves and cares for and wants to restore to its original beauty and dignity. Paul’s letter to the Romans (8:22) speaks of all creation groaning, in labor pains, longing for redemption by God. Note: not just people. All of creation. And even the book of Revelations, which is full of terror and destruction, has an ultimate plan of redemption that includes the earth. Chapter 22: Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
No... we should not turn away from the earth God created. The land has cared for us since the beginning of human existence. It has expressed to us something about who God is. It has called to us in joy and in distress. And it is part of God’s ultimate plan. We will not be saved alone, but in the company of all creation, to which we are bound.
We should not turn away from it. But since we – collectively – as a culture – HAVE turned away, we are now invited to turn back toward the earth. Teach our hearts once again to speak the language of the land. Listen to the locusts... listen to the seabirds... hear the cries of all creation, both rejoicing and groaning. Listen to nature, not as an audience member in a symphony hall, but as a friend.... with an open heart ready to be touched and moved to action.

Let us pray.
God, may our hearts and minds be open to listen to the messages you send us in so many ways. Give us wonder and reverence for all your creation. Give us compassion for everything that suffers. Speak to us, Lord, help us to listen, and show us a way to respond. Show us the paths that lead to justice and peace, and that help everything in creation to flourish, to live, and to rejoice before you. May we be your instruments of mercy and renewal in the world. Amen.

Moderation

2010-10-21T13:42:00.000-07:00

I got to be madam moderator for a whole hour on Tuesday, while my polity classmates and I examined two candidates for ordination and membership in the Presbytery of Mock. It was a fun presbytery, made up of minister members from such churches as "Heritage Presbyterian Church of Narrowville" and "Happy Presbyterian Church of Sunnyside" and "the church of we never dress up on sundays."
It was simple work... our candidates were eminently ordainable, no one wanted to interrogate them on their understanding of church governance. We didn't even have any points of order raised, and I got the sneaky feeling that not everybody there thought Robert's Rules were the funnest thing since skip-its.
It's ok. I read Roberts Rules for fun. G-E-E-K.
I embrace that about myself.

Still on crutches?

2010-10-04T19:27:00.000-07:00

Five & 1/2 months ago, in a liturgical dance rehearsal, I tore a ligament in my ankle. I've been the butt of many a joke since then but it's finally starting to work a bit better. I do half an hour of physical therapy a day, ride a bike daily for 6 minutes exactly, and sometimes I walk without crutches. I have a cane, a very stylish little thing, and tap around with that sometimes. I walk slowly around the house, completely unaided. But I've never made it to school without crutches. The one block walk up a hill is just too far to manage. So every day I continue to receive oh-so-sympathetic comments, mostly along the line of "I can't believe you're still on crutches!"
Believe it, people.
But I don't want to complain. It may feel ridiculous, but my recovery is only a little bit slower than scheduled. We're moving forward. Mountains (or at least big hills) are in my list of goals for the end of 2010.

And other than the stretch-before-dancing lesson, I've learned a lot of other important things from the experience. For example a bit of patience, and not being ashamed of asking for help. Priorities, too. At least for the first few months, the crutches slowed me down so much that there were just not enough hours in the day to do all the things I wanted to. So you decide. What's important? I move slower now... I take my time. I used to bounce everywhere, and bounce off walls in the meantime, and I can't really do that anymore. I asked a friend what the difference felt like to her and she said "it's easier to connect with you when you're not jumping up and down." Point taken. It's also easier for me to connect to things myself. I went to the beach last weekend, and between concentrating on the difficult work of walking on sand and bugging my friend to slow down to my pace, I found the time to notice the sand beneath my feet. That sand was frikking beautiful. Not just a PT exercise, it's amazing, colorful, pebbly stuff, and different from any other beach. They say when one sense is taken away, the others sharpen. When speedy/unencumbered motion is taken away, perhaps, the looking-listening-paying ATTENTION parts of me get strengthened.
So I've been richly blessed. And am willing to keep waiting. But I have my eyes on the prize, and won't stop pressing forward... I WANT TO SKIP AND JUMP!

Godly Play

2010-10-04T19:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at Montclair Presbyterian Church we had children and youth incorporated into the morning service. Instead of a sermon, the youth gave their slideshow and report from last summer's mission trip. The children provided some of the music, and young people of all ages participated in leadership.
Joy of all joys, though, *i* got to do a Godly Play story with the children for the children's sermon time. Godly Play, for those who don't know, is a Montessori-based education method for Sunday School, and we use it at MPC for preschoolers through 6th graders (in separate classrooms). It's not a didactic teaching style... the "teacher" is called a "storyteller" instead, and for most of the story they keep their attention not on the children but fully on the story they are telling through the use of toy-size props. The stories are very rich in the tangible sense... the story items are well-made of wood and cloth, with significant use of color. Most people's favorite item is the "desert box" (which is not a playground sandbox! but you might mistake one for the other...) where the various Old Testament stories of desert wanderings are all told. Following the story the storyteller will bring their attention back to the children and ask "wondering" questions - open-ended and creative. The children are then given free time to work on art projects, to re-tell a story with props, or to freely play with the story elements. They re-gather for "the feast," share joys and concerns, and pray. It feels more like church than it does like school, even Sunday School.

So I shared the story of "the Good Shepherd and World Communion," based on John 10 but incorporating Lord's Supper references, with a mixed group of children, at the front of MPC with all the grown-ups watching. Godly Play storytellers don't usually wear lapel mics, nor is there usually an audience, but circumstances called for adaptation. We had set the communion table with white and green linens, and in front of it we put a smaller, child-size table, also draped in white and green, and I told the story on that. On the story board was a tiny table with dollhouse-size bread and wine... so we had a table on a table next to a big table... a story within a story within a story. The Good Shepherd led his sheep around the sheepfold, over to the good grass, and gathered them around the table. Then I reached down and picked up a basket of people-figures and started adding people to the circle, until finally the table was surrounded by people of all races and ages and manners of ethnic dress.
At the end of the story I asked the wondering questions. The first two flopped - no responses - but then I asked "I wonder if you have ever seen such a crowd of people gather around the table of the Good Shepherd?" The littlest ones bantered back and forth "i did." "i didn't!" "well I did," until one child's voice rang through - "I see it! right here right now!" and we suddenly entered into sacred time & space.
We kept wondering. I wondered who was invited to the table, and was gravely informed by a little boy, "all the people, and all the aminals too." I repeated his answer for the group, with only slight spelling correction.
I wondered where the people came from, and whether the people were hungry, and what they might say when they got to the table. "Thank you!" "MMMMMMM!" "hi to the Good Shepherd." "yummy." "Thanks."

Spend as long as you will in confirmation classes and catechumenate, I will contend that these kids "get it" - the essentials of communion. The food is good, everyone's invited, we are one family in the Lord. What a holy moment, and a privilege to facilitate it.

Happy to be Presbyterian

2010-09-25T16:00:00.001-07:00

I'm taking polity this semester, (church governance & PCUSA history) which is draining a LITTLE bit of the joy out of being Presbyterian, fun classmates notwithstanding. There are problems in our church... one of my friends was recently booted out of the ordination process by an unsupportive congregation... I could write the "unhappy to be Presbyterian" entry in honor of those who are still excluded, and in mourning over the congregations closing their church doors each week.
BUT even so, today when facebook informed me it was international "Happy to be Presbyterian" day I decided to be happy. I'm glad to be in a denomination that spans churches from my current "home" at St Andrew, a small congregation in a traditionally African-American neighborhood, where we sing traditional gospel, and say "amen" whenever we feel moved, and where we open the doors of the church (nearly but not always quite an altar-call) every week... to my current job at Montclair Presbyterian in Oakland, demographically much richer, where the men of the church still wear political slogan buttons from the 60's, and the sacred music is Bobby McFerrin, and where not all the teenagers in youth group even believe in God at all. I love the fact that these wildly different congregations are part of the same church, and that they gently pass me from one to the other and expect me to contextualize the good news of God in words that make sense to everyone from adopted 4th graders to octagenarian matriarchs. The Presbyterian Church (at its best) is diverse, varied, and seeking to speak truth to people in all kinds of situations. That's the church I love.

Yes, i do blog

2010-09-20T20:13:00.000-07:00

sometimes.

The important thing to know right now is that living in community is JOY. I've lived in Trinity House since I first arrived at seminary God-knows-when ago, but this year is shaping up to be one of the best times we've had. It's seminary housing, a big old house that used to house professors back in the days when professors had more than half a dozen children. Now it has room for 8 students, and with 7 full-time members and a few visitors, we're full up half the nights of a week.

Usually the nicest thing I have to say about living in community is that "it teaches you how to love, when it hurts." That's big, and important. We have our disagreements and get through them, pray for each other even when we're cranky, and treat dishwashing as a form of expressing love to one another. It's work... it's a trudge. It's family life, with the ups and the downs... yes, that's true.
Somehow, though - maybe I got an attitude adjustment - maybe the new housemates just ROCK - it's quite nearly pure joy this semester. We've had house dinners with at least a few of us sitting down to eat together, 4 or 5 nights a week. We've had random cookies baked, random acts of cleanliness, and two surprise parties already (i was the recipient of a great one). This weekend we had a "thrift store disaster" potluck, doors thrown open wide to anyone who wanted to come, provided they wore the least stylish item they could find. The band that formed that night around the campfire featured 3 guitars, a ukelele, both mountain and hammered dulcimers, and bass of course.
I keep looking around for trouble... for disagreements to mediate, strife to pre-empt, dirty dishes piling up, or something... and finding nothing but spunky smiles, offers of some snack or another, ridiculous items of clothing, and brilliant ideas for outings and activities. It's hard to trust it - that life in the house is just that good, and that it could just stay that way. Sometimes it's hard to trust happiness... but that's the assignment I've laid upon myself. Just to live it, enjoy it, soak it in, and give back what I can.

Ode to my Bookgroup

2010-09-07T21:04:00.000-07:00

This is the first Tuesday night in a while I haven't spent eating, drinking, praying, and talking with a particularly awesome group of people - my Christian Community reading group. But, well, school started. sigh. trudge.
Keeping my mind in the happy past - we had a really awesome summer reading program! We did 12 chapters in 12 weeks of this book written by many, many people and edited by Rutba House, a community in Durham NC.
We also read (more or less) 12 other books, from Benedict's ancient rule for monasteries to Thomas Merton's reflections on the contemplative life... to Wendell Berry's call to care for the land, to Mary Elizabeth Hobgood's call to dismantle the privileges of race, gender, and sexuality... and to the Transition Handbook's take on impending oil collapse and how we need to Restructure Everything into a localized and inter-dependent economy. These all have something to do with our wide sense of call as young Christians, wanting to live out our faith with 100% of our lives, and to do it together - building and participating in community, learning to truly love one another, and listening to the call of Jesus and the early church to share our possessions and life with the poor and with one another.

Dear bookgroup! how do I love thee? let me count the ways...

* there was that time when we were reading Dorothy Day, and hospitality, and feeding the poor, and learning about multiplying loaves and fishes... and so that week we ended up having bookgroup on the borrowed floor of someone else's house, and dinner was tea, and cucumber salad, and cinna-twist-sticks, and somehow it was enough.

* there was the lovely check-in question "how is it with your soul?" that finally the last week erupted into a chorus of "it is well, it is well..."

* there was the chance to read Merton together. Once upon a time I encountered a few words of Thomas Merton's writings, and was so thoroughly enthralled that I immediately put the book away. For a long time I would not read him at all, for fear that a word of his would touch my heart deeply enough to prevent me from living any life other than his -- a life of contemplation. As in 100%, and in a monastery, in a habit, avowed, & forever, or it's worthless. Having discovered, however, that I am most certainly NOT called by God to be a contemplative nun, Merton got back onto the "safe" list.... and it was great to unpack his rich treasures of wisdom with such a great group discussion for perspective.

* there was that time we took "mid-term break," played some salt n pepa, and talked about issues of SEX that come up in community houses -- how much privacy do married couples need? what about single people - especially those who are circumstantially single but don't intend to stay that way - how do their respective bf/gfs fit into the mix? and ACK, what if someone has BABIES?

* there were all those times the various brewers brought their various homebrewed beer. Brian's coffee stout and Grant's Saizon (sp?) were highlights.

* mostly, i loved the irony of the fact that I drove across the Richmond Bridge in order to talk about living lightly on the earth, and that I left my housemates (and other people left their neighbors) in order to talk about being closer in community, and that we used a heck of a lot of technology to organize ourselves to do some very simple work. It was a beautiful, beautiful mess of all kinds of things, and so many different people over the course of the summer, and overall I just want to say wow, and thanks to them for sharing their hearts & minds, and to God for helping all our lives briefly align!

blogging

2010-08-09T17:36:00.000-07:00

hey, i'm behind on the blogworld - sorry. My life goes on, (in endless song), with much German to learn, which is distracting me. At this point, 3/4 through a 4 week intensive, I'm confident of passing the final and thus of qualifying to start my MA thesis in New Testament... but I am much less convinced of my ability to play in the academic sandbox with such a majority of biblical scholars working in German. My German instructor is rigorous, yes. She introduced the class with the memorable words "the structure of this class is, we begin every morning at nine, and we go until you faint" ... but she's turning out to be very kind and not too harsh after all. My thesis advisor, on the other hand, is in a whole 'nother world of demandingness, as she told me that after this summer she will no longer use English with me -- German exclusively.
All this to say, I'm busy.

BUT I am still reading and thinking in English, and I made some new feminist blog-friends over at Elizabeth Esther's Saturday Evening Blog Post which I didn't get to on Saturday evening, because I was singing sea chanties on a ship, which is just how much my life rocks.

Glorious Nature

2010-07-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

Thoreau told me once:
"My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know God's lurking places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature."

Usually when I bring this to mind I have a solemn moment with me and God and a tree or something, and a bit of Beethoven comes to mind.
But today's contemplation was definitely of the comic opera type - opera buffa. I am housesitting, dogsitting, goatsitting, beekeeping, chicken-tending for a friend of a friend. The house is great; it's a wonderful gig. The goat has two little kids about 3 weeks old. They climb on top of one another to try to be king of the mountain; they jump off of high things and stumble; they dare the dog to chase them.

Yes, God is like this too. It's not always about splendor and majesty. Sometimes God does not go disguised as stunningly powerful and timeless lakes and rocks and stuff, but would prefer to sneak up behind you and nibble on your boots and say PLAY WITH ME! And we do.

Future Church

2010-07-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

Over at Patheos where I have contributed a few blogs, the mainline Protestants are all discussing the future of the Church. As part of that they asked me what a vibrant mainline church "would" look like... with an eye to the future, i think... but I choose to remain in the present. My answer is a church that is very much already in existence.

On the amazing HEART roadtrip with the Presbyterian Hunger Program last month, we visited Common Ground Church Community in North Lima OH (near Youngstown). The story, in a nutshell, is that they were a NCD (new church development) meeting as a "house church," owning no house nor land, and wanted to remain that way, but through a turn of events they ended up buying property. The property they bought, however, used to be a seedling nursery and mail-order seed company, so with their main building they also got greenhouses, fields, acres of forest, and a tractor. They turned all these into local mission projects, and learned to work the land. They now feed hungry people, train the uneducated in agricultural skills, wonder at creation, and call for a large-scale relocation from industrial agriculture to local and sustainable food systems. They get covered positively on local news too.
I fell rapidly in love with this church... and not just because of their hospitality. They welcomed us (weary travelers) enthusiastically, fed us well, provided a campfire and singalong for entertainment, and let us take over their sermon time in worship the next morning. They shared their story, walked us around their gardens, let us ramble in their woods (cross-country crutching, my new Special Olympics sport), shared their passion for the creative permaculture methods with which they are experimenting.
I like the way this story happened. They didn't get interested in local agriculture, make a strategic plan, and then achieve their dreams. They didn't do this. God did it to them, inflicted greenhouses upon them, dumped a challenge in their laps. They said the all-important "yes," of course, and with enthusiasm... but it seems they got caught up in God's dreams for the agricultural land so rapidly being abandoned in so many places. They took up the orphaned land and learned to be a blessing on and with and through it.

I came to realize, over the course of our roadtrip, that my interests in local, sustainable, and community-oriented agriculture are not necessarily going to be a burden that I would have to convince a congregation to take on. In fact this passion is part of a movement, and it even seems we might be bold enough to say it is part of the future of the church. I know my future in church needs to be mission, local mission, and I am thrilled to discover that it may not be horribly hard work, but in fact a blessing and a natural joy. I might not have to fight for it -- it might just grow.
I drew that picture on the last day of the roadtrip in reflection upon my dreams for the future. I believe that the Church of the future will increasingly look like Common Ground: the withdrawing to an alternative lifestyle, the healing and giving, and the engagement outward with the powers that be.

Agrarian Roadtrip

2010-07-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

I have a backlog of blogs in my brain, some of which are in progress, others in extremely inchoate forms, BUT the good news is that others take up the slack. yay for community. So please, if you're interested in the agrarian roadtripping wonderfulness that was HEART, take a look at Bethel's latest post: http://presbyterian.typepad.com/foodandfaith/2010/07/agrarian-road-trip-part-six.html

and at the whole blog: http://presbyterian.typepad.com/foodandfaith

Ten random little things I LOVE about General Assembly #ga219

2010-07-14T17:06:00.000-07:00

1) Courtesy. Madam Moderator. Mister Vice-Moderator. “Thank you, commissioner...” Formal scripts not read drily but with enthusiasm for our orderliness!

2) Working until an inhuman hour and then getting roped into drinks til the even-later-hours. Meeting members of my Presbytery without an agenda before us, or a standard by which they wait to approve or disapprove of me.

3) The Witherspoon Society Dance. I do believe that John Calvin himself was in attendance. I wonder if he’d ever danced to Lady Gaga before?

4) Networkings of inspiration: randomly meeting people who come from AWESOME congregations and who give me hope for a fun future in pastoral ministry.

5) Worship songs before each plenary. Singing loud. Also, there was that time when all the bow-tie-d men on stage, Stated Clerk included, got up and shook whatever Jesus gave them to shake. In bowties.

6) Bowties.

7) Young Adult Advisory Delegates. Those who dared to break the conventions of appearance and formality, and to appear in tie-dye, bandana and barefoot like Jesus himself. Those who spoke trembling through shyness on something that Mattered to them. And of course those who led us in crazy energizer dances!!

8) Westminster Presbyterian Church’s hospitality. 2 blocks from the church, they had free (& high-caliber!) concerts every day, and lunches at reasonable cost, and free chair massages which my crutch-weary shoulders did surely appreciate.

9) National Association of Presbyterian Clergywomen (NAPC) and their luncheon. I appreciated (1) being allowed to use my per-diem to pay for the luncheon, but more so (2) being in a room of ordained, affirmed & affirming women in pastoral leadership. I think it’s time to re-start that feminist reading group that has been hibernating at SFTS... PC(USA) may have been ordaining women since 1956, but even if it's old news, some of us will still take jobs in towns where an ordained woman has never preached, and besides which, we think differently than men do, and we need to ask each other if our heresies might actually make good sense.

10) OUR FANTASTIC MODERATORIAL TEAM!!! Follow them on facebook. They rock.

5 things I DON'T love about General Assembly #ga 219

2010-07-14T17:03:00.000-07:00

1) Fighting the raging desire to be 18 places at once. Slightly better than 2 weeks ago at the US Social Forum, where I wanted to be a full 50 places at each hour of the day, but still a source of significant gnashing of teeth on my part.

2) Confronting the fact that collectively, we are a multibillionaire, and that it’s a drop in the bucket to spend a couple million on our grand Assembly.... when our Savior and Boss said “sell all you have and give it to the poor,” and while I’m looking for role models in the effort to take him seriously.

3) Polarization. 49-51% votes, winner take all. Winning. Losing. Knowing that some commissioners read speeches pre-written by advocacy groups (whether left or right).

4) Staying in fancy hotels. I may be channeling the spirit of my Quaker grandmother... who, when placed in a hospice facility for the final days of her life, though nearly blind, was able to see clearly enough to pronounce the chandeliers “too fancy” and petition for a less decorated room. Also, I’m reading Dorothy Day, who believed there was “always enough for one more if everyone takes a little less” – whether food at supper, or blankets on the floor.
Anyway, I oscillated rapidly between basking in luxury on my double bed with 347200 count cotton sheets, and questioning my beloved Church – did you really have to buy this for me?

5) Looking for healthy food. I wondered if one could get scurvy in a week. Actually, this will be a whole nother blog post. Upcoming.

Protests, Consensus, Community.

2010-07-14T16:40:00.000-07:00

On Friday, 18 protesters entered the General Assembly hall, marched past some temporarily absent (volunteer) gatekeepers, held up signs, stood at the front of the hall, and sang while our moderator first led us in prayer and then called for a temporary recess. They remained, singing, until they were carefully arrested in a very orderly fashion -- they had informed the police of their plan in advance -- and taken out in handcuffs.
Their signs said: "prayer!" and a checklist: "Ordinations. Marriage. Pensions." referring to the 3 areas of discussion where LGBTQI issues were in play at the Assembly (ordination standards, the definition of marriage, and extending coverage to church employees' same-sex partners and the partners’ children). Two of this issues had already passed favorably to LGBTQI folks (ordination standards is once again, as in 2008, sent to the presbyteries for ratification, and the insurance is effective now)... so somehow I was not sure if they were protesting the 2/3 that had passed, or advocating for the 1/3 that had failed and not been revisited.

So... when they came in, I was on stage running Session Sync. You'll note from my previous entry that this was a challenging job because of the kind of neutrality it calls for. You can only imagine the unsettledness I felt when these folks entered. I had a bit of a "what is going to happen?" moment and a confused moment (who were they? left or right? do i agree with them? are they here with authorization, or trespassing?) but then as the moderator abruptly closed debate and advised us to stand in prayer, I got a very sinking feeling that I was in the wrong place – that maybe I was supposed to be on the floor with the radicals, not up in the institutional, status quo, center of power on stage. It didn't help that I was standing next to lawyers in suits who put on a bit of a secret service face. I was not ready to play that game.

you'll notice my institutional (& prayerful) presence in the upper left hand corner... (btw it feels SO wrong to know you're being photographed while you pray)

I do believe now, however, that I did not want to be in that group of protesters. The news clarified the details: the group, Soulforce, is an LGBTQI advocacy group standing in protest of our assembly's decision not to look at marriage questions. I support their goals 100%. But I do not like the method.

I'm liberal. If I'd had voice privileges I would have spoken on just about every issue in a leftward direction. If anyone with voice asked me to, I would've slipped them a carefully worded substitution motion or two (just kidding! so wrong!). I hate the idea of making up voting sheets ahead of time as the Layman did, checking off which way to vote on each issue, but if I were to make one up it would be easy -- take theirs and reverse it.
From this perspective I can easily count the Assembly up in terms of liberal gains and losses, votes and non-votes, 51% in my direction, or 51% to my enemies. But if we all do that, we're all losers. The intention behind GA is not to have a debate between two sides, winner take all. Commissioners and Advisory Delegates are instructed to come not as representatives of a demographic or constituency, but as spiritual people seeking the will of God. And this works, because you end up seeing people change their minds in committee and even in plenary. In communal process you see entrenched "sides" moving toward mutual forbearance, toward understanding, and even (!) toward consensus, where one is allowed to either actively agree with or passively "live with" the decisions made. I love it when I see conservatives moved thusly in a more liberal direction. LOVE IT.

I guess I got a taste of my own medicine. I had my liberal mind changed in a mildly more conservative direction. I would still NEVER vote for the measure they took on Thursday night -- to dismiss all pending items in the civil union/marriage debate and give the presbyteries and congregations 2 years to discuss the study papers created in that area -- because justice delayed is justice denied. But looking at it in retrospect, although I cannot in decent conscience actively agree with this decision, I can live with and hence submit to it. I can believe myself to be in "consensus" with the assembly whose conservative members cried out "too much! this is more than we can chew! Give us one task at a time!" I disagree, of course.... *I* think they should buck up and deal with the issues of justice. I think they're being ridiculous. But I hear pain in their voices, and I have not yet walked a mile in their shoes.

We have a lot of communal processing to do. In the next two years, congregations and presbyteries are supposed to discuss civil union and marriage, and vote on the Belhar confession, changes in ordination standards, and the New Form of Government. I know presbyteries will vote, but may not discuss. Some may as well submit their votes now -- they do not intend to have their minds changed. I know that many congregations will not even look at these, much less discuss. But in order to prevent our church from looking like our government (two entrenched opposing sides) we NEED more discussion, more communal process. I believe that the depth of our relational & communal processing might make or break our unity as a denomination. Minds are never going to be changed by 51% votes one way or the other. They were apparently not changed by Soulforce's protest. They will only be changed by relationships.
The question before us is whether we are a relational church or not - a church that knows and loves one another. We are in relationship, but a dysfunctional one where there's a lot of divorce talk... "I'll leave if XYZ..." I wonder if this dysfunctional relationship needs outside intervention as Soulforce tried to supply, or needs a vacation from our issues, (a tactic favored by conservatives -- but LGBTQI folks don't have the privilege of taking a break), or whether as an alternate tactic, we can ask God to somehow rekindle our love and commitment to one another. Like a 30-day “marriage mender” course, adapted to churches? =) The problem is, one side will ask "how can there be love where there is injustice?" and the other will want to love the "sinner," but cannot love the "sin"... but I want to believe that love can in fact break down those barriers. We cannot force love, but we can ask for it. I pray that this will be God's gift to those of us who stay in the denomination: that we will be afflicted (even against our own desires) with a holy compassion for those against whom we are currently entrenched. That the conversations shared over the next two years will enable us to re-engage with firmness and confidence, neither stalling nor forcing others to rush. This is MILES from where we are now... but we serve a great God. We can imagine, ask for, trust in, and act upon our best hopes and intentions.
conversation. compassion. a ferociously loyal, caring love. Too much to expect, yes -- but not too much to ask! PLEASE GOD - MAY IT BE SO.

Self-Segregation #ga219

2010-07-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a seemingly innocuous overture came up.... appearing as only 3 lines in the committee report. It asked for the creation of a new non-geographic presbytery in the Synod of the South Atlantic. Generally our governance is a series of groupings: many congregations (in an area) make up a presbytery. Many presbyteries (in a larger area) make up a Synod. All the synods gather to create General Assembly. But sometimes within a synod there will exist a non-geographic presbytery, such as the Hanmi presbytery (Korean-speaking).
This overture was to create a new Korean-speaking presbytery in the South Atlantic Synod. It would allow them to conduct all business in Korean. The Korean congregations made this request, and without much controversy it was accepted -- unanimously at the synod level, and 43-2 for it at the GA committee level. It looked like a shoe-in (shoo-in? definitely not a shewin).
However, when this recommendation to approve the creation of the new presbytery came before the assembly, a few young female Korean pastors stood up to speak against it. Their contentions were that Korean-language presbyteries segregate and insulate themselves, cutting their actions off from local accountability, and that they nurture dangerous cultural attitudes that prevent women from serving in ordained positions and shush (if not silence) the voices of all but older men.
The assembly, having heard vibrant speeches to this effect (as well as opposition) voted 514-125 to deny the creation of such a new presbytery. And I rejoice in it. I don't want the Korean congregations leaving us alone -- i want to keep our presbyteries multiracial. But I recognize that rejecting this overture takes us way less than halfway there. It is one thing to say to a group "please don't leave," and another entirely to say "be welcome here." To truly address the relationships between Korean-speaking and English-speaking churches, we must work away from self-segregation and toward INTENTIONAL integration.

Concrete ideas toward this end?
(A) Provide translation at all presbytery meetings, into Korean, Spanish, or any other actively used languages. Practice the radical idea that it is a person's RIGHT to participate in their native or preferred language.
(I wonder if any presbytery that already does this would consider sending an overture to this effect to GA220?)

(B) Practice cultural engagement. Taste some kimchee. Get curious about the strangers in your midst. Coax them, by your love and invitation, out of self-segregation.

(C) White people. this is to you. Get off your cultural supremacy horse. Everything does not need to be done according to our tradition. At my seminary luncheon, a Korean staffperson insisted we all stand to recognize our president. I rolled my eyes at this mandatory deference, and a friend hissed under her breath at me: "you are SO white!" In Korea you cannot deny such honor to a person of high rank. And sometimes even if we are in America, we out of love and respect for another choose to participate in their cultural norms. We volutarily give up the privilege we have of always feeling comfortable -- of being an "insider" -- because in Christ there is no worldly rank or status. We need to willingly give up our dominant status (do you have dominant status? think about it), and to serve one another as Christ did. May it be so.

Poker Face

2010-07-09T10:10:00.000-07:00

On our first day of training, we student assistants were given staff name tags, ID cards to give us platform access, REALLY attractive blue smocks, and instructions: we may not accessorize these symbols with pins, scarves, or T-shirts from any advocacy groups. As representatives of the GA we must appear neutral. Difficult as this is, I understand, and I now appreciate what it does socially -- conservatives don't IMMEdIATELY look at me askance.
Last night my job was to run pc-biz Session Sync, a computer program that allows commissioners and observers alike to be updated on the business before us in real time. To do this I was seated ON STAGE (!) and sans smock, to be in plain view of the assembly. I sat there through assembly actions on Arizona's SB 1070, on our marriage/civil union taskforce's report, and through the completion of unfinished business on G-6.0106b's ordination standards. Being of plain view, of course, my neutrality was of even heavier importance. No raised fists (as i could do backstage), no jumping for joy or consternation (as it may be), not even a sympathetic nod or visible gasp. I watched our moderators. They poker-faced it. They do have opinions, i know, but their sole job is to facilitate the conversation. They cannot sway it.

Being a very physically expressive person this was torture for me. I splurted a few tweets out to relieve some of the pressure, but mainly I tried to channel the Zen that our moderators appeared to convey. I like the challenge. And it will be so necessary for civil discourse. We do not applaud when our favorite overture is passed. We do not groan when it fails. We say silent prayers. Joy. Sorrow. Petition. Over it all, empathy.

We sang today to Christ:
Thou hast the true and perfect gentleness;
No harshness hast thou, and no bitterness.
Lord, grant to us the grace we find in Thee
That we may dwell in perfect unity.

we're far away -- but in trust we pray -- let it be so.

n-fog at #ga219 - yay acronyms =)

2010-07-07T21:39:00.000-07:00

It is with great joy and dancing (would be cartwheels, if not for my crutches) that I announce the 219th General Assembly of the PC(USA) voted 468-204-6 (69%-30%) to recommend we adopt a new Form of Government (n-FoG). I was excited about it at the 218th GA (2008) where it more narrowly squeaked by, and I kind of knew it would *pass* but I'm just overjoyed to see how very many people have gotten on board and envision it as a part of our future!

We Presbyterians have an enormous Book of Order, one part of which the n-FoG would replace, if it's ratified in the next year by 2/3 of our presbyteries. The BoO is larger & heavier than many Bibles, and in many cases harder to understand. It has been amended 300 times in not very many years (how many times has the US' constitution been amended? think about it). The new FoG will not bring our document down to the concise level of a constitution, but it reads MORE like a constitution and less like a manual of operations. Where the old FoG gave 27 responsibilites to presbyteries (G-11.0103), the new proposal says three things: Provide that the Word of God may be truly preached and heard; provide that the Sacraments may be rightly administered and received; and nurture the covenant community of the disciples of Christ. The same three calls are given to church, presbytery, General Assembly. Each is explained (for example "nurturing the community" for the presbytery includes ordaining, dismissing, and disciplining ministers) but it's all under a much more sensible (and to my ears, spiritual) rubric. Plus, it's all about mission, and so am I.
The stripping away of rules and regulations is hard for some people to stomach. I heard someone say that we would need to be "so much more alert" to the dangers of misuses and abuses. Yes. He was right. But maybe we'd also need to be more alert to one another, and to our faith, and to the church. We are risking some pain and struggle, but are we not also "risking" great benefits? Maybe we'd wake up and think about things instead of consulting a manual that tells us what to do next. The question asked might be "what would Jesus do?" instead of "well what does the BoO say we have to do?" While we can never quite govern a church based on a bracelet slogan, it would not hurt to have that question more active and alive, and if we need to break out of complacency and force ourselves to ask that question, I believe that the n-FoG will provide many options for such questioning.

If you want to geek out (btw i am getting SO in touch with my geeky side here...) take a look at the comparison of old FoG to new: http://pc-biz.org/IOBView.aspx?m=ro&id=3565

I'm cross-posting these blogs at http://www.patheos.com/community/mainlineportal/

Race, Nationality, Immigration, Solidarity?

2010-07-06T20:18:00.000-07:00

When assembling, the Presbyterians gather as a whole first for the selection of a moderator, but then they break into 18 groups and do business there. Starting tomorrow these committees will reassemble and present their findings to the assembly, but the decisions made in committee tend to heavily sway the decisions of the body as a whole.

Just two notable ones for today...
In the Middle East room, we appear ready to make strong statements against the continuance of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but less ready to adopt positions regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. Many positions have been proposed and rejected, so we remain at a middle ground. An overture to call the Israeli occupation of Palestine "apartheid" was rejected as "too offensive" to many ears. In particular, we are charting an uncomfortable middle line with regards to Caterpillar and their involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict. For those who don't know, Caterpillar is a major supplier of the equipment used in demolishment work in Israeli settlements in Palestine. The committee recommends that we denounce Caterpillar's profit-making off such non-peaceful endeavors as settlement-building, BUT would not go so far as to recommend we divest from Caterpillar. The discussion mainly centered around what would be effective in terms of swaying Caterpillar's actions (i.e. if we keep our investments, we as share-holders can remain ethical conversation partners....?) and steered clear of language of solidarity. To me the pressing issue is that of solidarity -- that we should refuse to take profit from what hurts our far-away neighbors -- than of tactical engagement. To me it seems that our tactics so far have failed. The interesting thing is that the commissioners who opposed this overture, those who have more complexified connections due to Caterpillar being a major employer in their area, would actually prefer that we quietly divest and that we not denounce. As it is, we keep our money in the company while scolding them. I doubt it will be effective OR that it will seem to Palestinians that we are in solidarity.

However, in another committee we seemed to make great strides toward a kind of solidarity. Social Justice Issues (B) recommends a resolution that we as a church refrain from having conferences or major events in states where our ethnic minority members are threatened by such measures as Arizona SB 1070. The text of this resolution can be seen at http://pc-biz.org/IOBView.aspx?m=ro&id=3587 ... After much discussion at a late hour (they were the last committee to adjourn), the tenor of the committee conversation shifted from "what is to the advantage of our hispanic brothers and sisters in Arizona" (some of whom, to be fair, in the short term would benefit from us having conferences there, because we bring money into the area, some of which they receive) to "are we a white church? or a multi-racial one?" Because if we are indeed multi-racial, SB 1070 targets us as a church, not "them" the others. So in this case we are choosing to throw our lot in with the victims of a policy we condemn. If only we were able to say "we are Palestinian, too" as easily as we can say "we are Hispanic, too," we would be able to make the same kind of stand. Would that all people of this earth could recognize their brother and sister in any human face, not only of their own race or nationality.

Virtuous Consumption?

2010-07-06T19:49:00.000-07:00

I went looking briefly through the “global village” upstairs in the Exhibit hall. It's totally guilt-free shopping. The principle behind the gifts for sale is that instead of just throwing money at charitable endeavours, we can purchase items produced by organizations in partnership, to help them empower themselves and their community. Instead of dropping kids off at orphanages, women form cooperatives, create textiles, sell them to us, make money, put their own kids through school. Super. I love it. It’s important. The ancient charity model (literally giving money to the poor) is great when you’re in a face-to-face relationship with someone, and can negotiate the power problems you create by charity, but it begins to massively break down when there are miles, oceans, cultures, languages, and glossy magazine advertisements separating the donor from the recipient. Money is never given with truly “no strings attached,” and the longer those strings get, the more they get tangled in outside issues (moral judgments, cultural domination, international relations...) The alternate model of commercial empowerment isn’t string-free, but they are transactional strings only as long as the distance between the product and the price. It at least looks simpler and more helpful. I give money not with expectations of some poor person's gratitude, but with expectations of a tangible item in return.

All this to say, I support purchasing items from partner organizations. I was actually pretty excited about this global village, because I need a new bag, and I could get one there.
I was disappointed, however. You see, I was looking for a useful bag, and all they offered were pretty bags. They were a little on the flimsy side (I wouldn’t carry a computer in one) but most importantly, none had more than one or two pockets. I'm willing pay a higher price for a fairly made product, but not for a bag whose main value is in appearance, not function. And the transaction seems less than perfectly straightforward now. A line from one of the vendors explaining why the partnership was valuable: “they know how to sew, but they need to know what gringas will buy,” caused my heart to sink. Women who are perfectly skilled at creating useful items for home use are taking lessons in the school of creating flimsy, pretty things that white people will buy. They are feeding our addiction to consuming trivialities, and building for themselves a dangerous dependency on foreign buyers. If our fashion tastes change, they are left with useless product until someone transmits the valuable information of “what gringas will buy.”
So I’ll continue to use my ripped and fraying bag until I find (or make) one that is sturdy and serviceable. I wish I could participate in the “empowerment via consumerism” deal, and send a few of my dollars in the right direction, but as long as it’s marketing impractical and luxurious goods (if not outright luxuries) I have to step out and look for better things to do with my money, my purchases, and my fashion statements.

Habemus Mamam #GA219

2010-07-03T21:56:00.000-07:00

When the Catholic council of superarchbishops or whatever it is gathers to choose a new pope, they sequester themselves in a room and send up a plume of white smoke when they come to a choice, and the word goes out: habemus papam! we have a pope! Presbyterians do much the same, minus the secrecy, plus electronic voting machines which do a little better than Florida's (but you have to do it slowly so the elderly get their votes in - the 8-second timer didn't go over so hot), plus about 3,000 more folks present, and tweets instead of white smoke, and, well, it's a she, so... habemus mamam?

The Moderator of the 219th PC(USA) General Assembly (like pope for two years, minus the discretionary power, fancy garb, and infallibility) will be Cindy Bolbach, a lawyer, elder, and co-moderator of the New Form of Government (n-fog) taskforce.

The election was quite a deal. There were SIX candidates. SIX. Each was presented by a 5-minute speech, and spoke in person for 5 minutes. Some chose to tell stories, some to preach, some to share songs, poems, jokes... and some to lecture on their Theories of Everything (i do believe the phrase epistemological parochialism was used). I timed that, which was easy work, but the hard part was NOT to get to exercise that timer during the open debate & questions (90 long minutes). Cindy might have won because she was concise and didn't go on pastoral tangents, OR maybe because of her dry humor - when asked "what's at stake for the church if you are not elected moderator?" she kicked off her reply with "total chaos."

Our electoral process is a bit unique. We vote and re-vote until someone appears with a clear majority. Standing orders are not to drop anyone from the race (although if it had gone on longer it appears the assembly would have been ready with a 2/3 vote to overrule that procedure). The first round of votes had Cindy slightly ahead (near 30%) but all the other candidates were evenly matched. The Ecumenical Advisory Delegates' first advisory vote was split exactly evenly -- the six of them gave one vote per candidate. As voting went on (there were 4 rounds) she began to gain ground, as other votes shifted around to second choices -- or perhaps as the Spirit moved. We did ask for that to happen, didn't we? And we trust that it did.

cross-posting at Patheos

We Assemble #GA219

2010-07-02T20:46:00.000-07:00

Nearly 3,000 Presbyterians have descended upon Minneapolis, with nametags flapping, outfitted in everything from suits to sloganed T-shirts, meandering like tourists around the convention center & associated hotels. We stick out like a circus. I watch us bumbling around and wonder -- what ARE we doing?

When we invest gadzooks of money into a week of imposed togetherness in some chosen city... one of the bluntest ways to put it is that we are taking our collective temperature. How hot are we on gay ordination this year? Because it comes up year after year, and a slow shift has been taking place. So every GA we test it -- is the church prepared to make a change, or has it not yet reached critical mass? And some of the issues change over time. The situation in Palestine has been worsening -- are people ready to get outraged? Of course we know that some are, and some aren't, but we get together to take a lot of votes and see where the median and majority lie.
....that hardly makes sense, though. That's a wickedly expensive poll -- I could administer one through surveymonkey.com for zero dollars, and have it done ten minutes ago.

To put it in a more positive light, we're struggling together for common ground. We gather from far-flung lands, states, schools and theologies, and try to affirm the things we can all agree on. Sometimes our minds get blessedly changed in the process, and sometimes it's just an exercise in holding on to the major things and letting go of the minors.

But most of all (though most invisibly) we come together to try to see Christ in the other, see God in our common work, and open our hearts to Spirit above, around, and among us all. We gather to seek transformation and inspiration together, and to hold one another accountable. We surround our communal impasses and ask God to make a way. We wait, quieten, listen, pray, read Scripture, and look up for the Spirit brooding over us - we try to get on that ride. Sometimes it sweeps us off our feet and sometimes our heels are stuck in and dragging, but God always shows up. May it be so this week at General Assembly!

GENERAL ASSEMBLY #GA219

2010-07-01T11:44:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,
I might have another blog or two in me regarding the awesome HEART trip, BUT the next item of business, closely approaching, is General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in Minneapolis MN! I arrived way too early this morning, and God bless the Hilton for giving me early check-in before 7 AM. I proceeded to nap all morning, and finally ventured out to find a farmers' market not three blocks from the hotel! Orientation as an "assistant" begins today. Most of the assistants are doing gopher stuff. Me being on crutches, I suppose we'll find less running-around types of activities for me to be helpful with. And of course there's always helping folks with the online system pc-biz, which I am CLEARLY qualified to help with, because I navigated to the website already. Nevermind forgetting my password, and other failures of technology. Hopefully that'll get straightened out before I try to help others =)

I am a preacher

2010-07-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

My preaching class (“New Treasures from the Old Testament”) at ABSW last semester was taught by an amazing older man, honorably retired and serving as Pastor Emeritus (Pastor E for short), J.Alfred Smith Sr. His classroom manner was gentle and encouraging most of the time, but nearly every week we had a little fire put into us. We’d all stand up, make a fist for emphasis, and repeat after him:
I am a preacher!
I am a preacher!
I didn’t come to seminary to become a preacher!
God made me a preacher!
I came to seminary to become a better preacher!

This refrain runs in my head often, but it took on greater meaning during the HEART trip. I was kind of hoping to acquire a new identity, maybe an “I am a community organizer!” or an “I am a food justice advocate!” or even an “I am a farmer!” They are not mutually exclusive, of course, but the trip gently showed me that at the heart of it, though I love me some compost, I am a preacher.
We started of course (three weeks ago, though it feels like months) with Ellen Davis’ amazing Old Testament exegesis, which woke me up inside and inspired a sermon I gave in three different incarnations through the course of the trip, all well-received. And my experience at the USSF ended happily with an encounter with Ched Myers! He had collaborated on the creation of Tevyn East’s Leaps and Bounds (http://www.affordinghopeproject.com ) and was present for its performance. I owe that show a blog entry of its own, but suffice it to say it took the impending crises of population explosion and resource depletion and wrote them in Biblical terms, from creation onward to hope and resurrection. After that I participated in a Bible study Ched led on Sabbath Economy, and thrilled at his exegesis of Mark 9:43-48 in terms of our societal addictions to the things that are killing us, and his reading of the implicit “body” in that passage as the corporate and not the individual body. This is what I want to study! And preach on! And live! There is no doubt that Friday’s performance and Bible study meant more to me than any other of the other legitimately amazing workshops I had attended at the forum. So I’ve come to realize where my joy lies: speaking sacred, ancient text to troubled postmodern ears. And I can preach about community organizing, food justice, and farming – without struggling for expertise, status, and identity in each of those areas. I can be amateur in those, in the root sense of amateur, which is one who does it for love (latin amare).

Of course the next thing that comes to mind is... if I’m not called to be a farmer, maybe I can just marry a farmer and get some recreational raised veggie beds, restoring-of-creation, and strawberry feasts thrown in the bargain. Keep your eyes peeled on my behalf... =)

Growing Power!

2010-07-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

Having concluded our HEART activities in Detroit, I headed to Chicago for a few days and from there on to Milwaukee to visit friends and hear good music at Summerfest! Yesterday Emu and I decided to do some MORE agrarian roadtripping, so we drove across town to Growing Power, Milwaukee’s only two acres of land zoned for agricultural use. On those two acres the organization (headed by Will Allen) manages to raise over 30,000 fish (perch and tilapia), copious amounts of salad greens and other veggies, ducks, chickens, goats, turkeys, and a LOT of red wriggler worms. They also raise farmers from age 7 on up, and raise funds for scholarships, and raise awareness of nutrition beyond that provided at the fast food joints nearby, and try out new and innovative methods of sustainable farming. The major operation there is an aquaponic interrelation of veggies and fish. Water is cycled through 10,000 gallon tanks, and pumped up into flats of watercress, sprouts, and salad greens. The plants (1) are fertilized by the fish waste, (2) filter and clean the water that returns to the fish, and (3) get harvested not only for human consumption but for the tilapia to eat.

Erin looking in

Fish on bottom, plants on top

Young learners and helpers

One worm, creating Growing Power’s most valuable crop: nutrient-rich soil!

Massive pile of compost, the foundation of growth: “it all starts here”

Burying a few rotten bananas acts as an aphrodisiac for the compost worms. Come back in a few days, it’ll be a snarl of breeding worms and new babies.

Mushroom operations (the mushrooms are still at spore stage, but they will grow on the logs and out of the hanging bags).

Urban Agriculture

2010-06-26T19:08:00.001-07:00

On the first day of the HEART trip, Jud Hendrix, our designated asker-of-spiritual-questions, asked us a deep one: If the roadtrip is the answer, what is the question?
The question that immediately came to mind for me was “urban or rural?” meaning all kinds of things, from “where shall I live next” to “where shall I raise my children” to “where will I retire” and on and on. I was born and raised in the heart of New York City, where all but one member of my immediate family remain, but last year I took an internship in a small town of 220 residents... and totally lost my love for the city. I assumed I’d never live in a city again. However this trip has re-seeded the possibility of enjoying urban life.
It started in Youngstown, OH. The prophetic Maurice Smalls (a.k.a. the Jamaican Farmer) gathered us on a block that had 2 occupied buildings, half a dozen empty shells of long-abandoned houses, and the rest vacant lots. All the lawns were more or less mowed by the remaining neighbors, and the lone boy who lived on the block rode his bike up and down all afternoon, monitoring us warily. Maurice and a bunch of neighborhood co-conspirators had started a fruit orchard on the corner, and he expounded on the importance of children having healthy snacks to pick each day on their route to school. Healthy food directly affects brain performance. More than that, a garden in the shadow of abandoned houses will give this little boy something to care for and believe in.
Maurice took us to a building perched on a few corners, with no foundation underneath, still owned by a disinterested absentee landlord who made his money in steel decades ago. He patted the trunk of an ailanthus tree, calling it “the mother of thousands,” and said, “this is God.” God is digging invasive roots into that house’s foundations, sinking the symbol of oppressive pride, and taking the block over, plant by plant. Maurice works with God – helping the vegetative takeover of the abandoned shells, through the use of straw, huge bales of discarded paper, table-scrap compost, woodchips, a few seedlings, and the salvageable scraps of hope remaining in the neighborhood. Contemplating the hole left underneath the house he asked us all sharply, “what is God going to send YOU to destroy?”
Maurice also took us around Cleveland (he works everywhere) and we saw food growing in alleys, in tin cans tied to fences, and in straw-bale beds raised above polluted ground or pavement. His confidence is indomitable, his style rapid. “It doesn’t take ten years and a strategic plan. This garden went up in three weeks.” He looks the murder rates and crime statistics in the eye, and unflinchingly leaves his gardens unfenced, knowing that the best protection is the goodwill and investment of the neighbors. One of my roadtripmates heard that he works with interns, and handed him a resume on the spot.
In Detroit we found the same phenomenon on a massive scale. There are uncountable vacant houses and lots, and nearly 1,000 community gardens. Most of these gardens are technically forbidden by city code, and every one of the chickens, goats, beehives, and horses within city limits is an illegal squatter – yet they are wildly proliferating. Neighborhoods are forming organizations where the children and youth can work on a “market garden,” bringing their produce to market and sharing the proceeds. Schools are contributing to their own cafeteria fare. The organization Greening Detroit provided us with a tour of just a few of the agricultural sites. Our traditional car-ride game of pointing out ridiculously large lawns (“that’d be a nice one to garden on”) turned into rapid successions of “look at that garden! And that one!”
Detroit, no less than Cleveland and Youngstown, has been abandoned by many. The city of nearly one million people has not had a major supermarket since the last one pulled out in 2007. A great percentage of Detroit food stamp money is spent at gas station convenience stores. Only five in 100 teenagers of employable age can expect to find work in the area. The entire area is in a quiet but persistent crisis.
Crisis is another way to spell opportunity, and while we hope and pray the “wrong” folks won’t make it into an opportunity for exploitation, we see the seeds of a new future sprouting in the empty soil. There are pockets and places where the “powers that be” are looking away while new communities and creative ways of life begin to flourish – and I want to be part of those!
A word of caution from our prophet, however. He looked at our mainly white group and told us not to relocate just for fun. He asked “do you have work to do where you come from?” and said “I don’t want you here unless you belong here – or if you’re planning to stay for a long time.”
I have to remember that my mobility and freedom to pick a place to live actually reeks of privilege. If I relocate to a place actually abandoned by everyone, fine – but if I’m moving to someone else’s “wasteland,” I need to be invited and welcomed.
But that in mind, I am excited for the future, as now I have a widened and inspired view of places I could be invited to work – urban or rural!

cross-posted to presbyterian.typepad.com/foodandfaith

US Social Forum

2010-06-23T15:06:00.001-07:00

Today we gave a workshop at the US Social Forum. About 60 people attended (including the 15 of us) out of the, oh, 15,000 or so attendees at the forum! But for this we were very grateful, especially as the room could hold just about exactly 60. They were a diverse crowd from all over the (US) map and of different faith backgrounds. Our presentation was entitled:
Faith Communities in the Local Food Movement: Sustainable and Just!
We began it with a rocking rendition of "Looking East" by Jackson Browne, organized in small groups, introduced the trip as a whole, ourselves as individuals, some of the places we'd been, etc.

This is the portion I did:

Thank you for being here today and participating. The experiences you share are enriching us, and we hope and pray it is mutual. I want to speak for a few minutes on rooting our food justice efforts in our faith, and specifically in our sacred traditions, by which I mean texts, rituals, and wisdom passed down the ages.
In approaching the issues of hunger, food insecurity, and injustice in the food system, it is easy to look to the moral teachings of our respective religions. For many people our entry into food justice work is one of the variants of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is a perfectly strong and compelling reason to work for justice and sustainability in our food system. None more is needed. Good ethical reasoning and a healthy sense of moral compunction can take us far, whether we are of any religion or none.
However, our work can only be strengthened, our spirits encouraged, and our faith deepened, by connecting the work we do in the world with the faith we profess. I will be speaking from the Christian tradition, specifically Presbyterian, and I do not pretend to speak FOR my entire church. However, as I relate to you my own reading of a text I hold as sacred, I hope you will be encouraged to look to your own faith, your sacred texts and traditions, and explore whether you can find similar connections. The human relationship with food and with soil is as ancient and essential as the breath of life itself, and so rightly takes a prominent place in many religions.
The story I would like to bring before you today is from the book we know as Exodus. It takes place after the first Passover liberated the Hebrew people from Egypt, and their flight through the Red Sea. I will begin in ch 16 vs 2:
The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, “if only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meatpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into the wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” Then the LORD said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.”
Thus begins the establishment of the nation of Israel. The very first question facing the group, released from the laws and social structures of their former life, is “how do we eat?” The answer to this question defines who they will be.
The story goes on. God does indeed send a mysterious breadlike substance down from the sky, called manna, and the people gather enough to eat. They are tested in this. Each person is to gather only what they need. If you try to gather extra, it will rot overnight. EXCEPT on the sixth day of the week when they are each to gather a double portion, so that they have something to eat without going out to gather it on the Sabbath day. God is testing the people. Some don’t trust, and they hoard their food, and others don’t listen to the commandment about the Sabbath, and they are surprised to find there’s no bread from heaven that day.
God needs to test the people in this story, because they are too attached to their old ways. They have been led by miraculous means out of slavery, yet they don’t trust these miracles, and they wish they were back in Egypt eating their regular allotments of meat. In the words of Dr Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity School, the problem is that the Israelites have “learned to trust the deceptive abundance of empire.” In Egypt they were not free, they were not secure, their lives lay at Pharaoh’s very whim, YET Pharaoh always had a lot of grain in his silos, and he fed the slaves just well enough to convince them that they were happy under his thumb – as any cunning government, or corporation, will do to those under its sway. It was a hard task to be weaned out of this pattern of exploitative dependence. Much of the next few books of the Bible are devoted to several sets of divine instructions: how to live, how to eat, how to use the land. How to pattern a society that is the polar opposite of Egypt’s centralized, oppressive, command economy benefitting the few at the expense of the many. Instead, the new nation will guarantee that everyone has a plot of arable land; everyone must have the means of subsistence.
The lessons learned by eating manna from heaven were: 1) trust God to provide, (2) gather only what you need, and (3) take a break. Take a Sabbath. The concept of Sabbath was foundational to ancient Israel, and one of the things that distinguished them from other nations. The law codes prescribe not only on a weekly Sabbath, but also letting your LAND lie fallow, to rest once every seven years to regenerate the soil’s fertility. It’s good technique. Take a break.
Clearly there are a lot of people in this world who need to hear the word: “gather only what you need.” There are a lot of people who need to hear “take a break.” A lot of people need to get out from under the thumb of Pharaoh’s deceptive abundance, and start trusting God instead. And many of these people belong, at least in name, to one of the religions that holds this story as sacred. They need to hear such stories -- and there are many – taught and preached in a way that actually affects their economic practices.
It doesn’t only need to be preached to outsiders, though. Those of us who work actively for food justice and reform need to hear these stories too. We need to know that although today’s situation may be unique, it is NOT entirely new. We need to draw on the wisdom of the ancient storytellers who brought us the story of the Israelites in the wilderness. The details are amazing. Later on when they’ve been eating manna for a while the people complain again, (Num 11:5) remembering Egypt’s fish, and cucumbers, and onions, and leeks, and garlic… and we might do that today, maybe one week when the CSA delivers a few too many root vegetables, we could start moaning about the way we used to buy asparagus year-round, who cares if it’s local or organic… I bet we will fall into some of the same traps. We need to hear the stories of those who have gone before us. We also need to hear their poetry, their longings, their desperate prayers and pleas to God, and know that we are not alone. Just as important as it is for us to connect to one another as we are doing here and now, it is important to connect to those who have gone before us.
I want to end by asking you what traditions inform your work with food justice and sustainability. Is there another text, sacred to you, which speaks of food or the land? Is there a ritual which enacts your care for the land? Is there a saying or a song which inspires you? How do you keep your work rooted in your faith?

(we had a great discussion, went on to meditatively eat a blueberry, contemplate our role in the food revolution, and commit to action. Awesomeness.)
cross-posted at presbyterian.typepad.com/foodandfaith

A letter to West Virginia

2010-06-22T16:58:00.000-07:00

We spent Friday, and Saturday morning, at the Rural Appalachian Improvement League (RAIL) in Mullens, West Virginia. This is a town of about 2,000 in the heart of coal country. We saw a few flat-topped mountains on our way in, as well as machinery ticking away, and coal cars heaped full of the dusty black stuff. Mullens was a “railroad town” which used to be a hot place in the thirties and forties, or so the rumors go – if you’d go there on a Saturday night, you wouldn’t be able to walk through the streets, for so many people were packed in, shoulder-to-shoulder, partying. Needless to say there are more abandoned buildings than crowds these days; ever since coal became a mainly mechanized business, the jobs have dwindled. These days there are only 800 mining jobs in a county of 20,000, where the coal and timber companies combine to control the use of over 85% of the land. The result of this corporate control of land is a systematic approach to controlling the livelihood of the residents of Mullens. In the early mining days, the coal towns would literally forbid gardening – so that the residents would be completely reliant on the company store and hence unable to strike. Today’s methods are less overt but no less effective. As a result of the lack of public control of their land, Mullens’ freedom has been hidden behind an invisible veil of corporate non-accountability.
RAIL is working to bring freedom and hope back to Mullens through various community projects. The projects are headed up by Jack and Rebekah. Jack arrived two years ago, funded by a grant “to start a farmers’ market.” He found there were no farmers... (dramatic pause).... so instead his work shifted toward local agriculture. We saw the fruits of his labors... they do indeed now have farmers’ markets, supplied from folks’ backyards and several small community gardens. These gardens are on slots of land as small as 1/8 acre, squeezed between roads, rails, and the river, shaded by the hills to end up with only a few hours of sunlight per day, and subject to frequent flooding due to the devastation of logging and mining. Due to these constraints the local agricultural practices more resemble urban gardening, trying to grow as much food as possible on the tiny scraps of land they have.
The rivers and creeks were greatly polluted. This is not just because of the effects of logging and mining, but also because of a “build ‘em cheap” philosophy on the part of those who developed the land, ever since the earliest mining days. Even today 65% of the houses in the area lack septic systems, and dump straight into the streams. The bacterial count is astronomical, yet some folks still fish in the streams.
In such a heart breaking setting of poverty, long lines at the food banks, environmental degradation, and lack of economic options, it was encouraging to see so many good folks working to create a local economy. It was also great to have a little guitar and banjo jam session before we left, and to lift our spirits through music, from traditional bluegrass to a very nontraditional fun new composition we started – to express our own feelings. Rebeckah, another RAIL intern, sent us off with her beautiful little demo CD to listen to in the car, which kept our hearts aching as we drove away.

A Letter from our heart,

Thank you Rebekah, for the words on your CD allowed all our emotions to flow…
My Heart is crying as we leave your beautiful land. I cry because of my great sorrow and pain for what has happened to you and because of my great disgust of what will happen to you. The people of your land, more so the people of Mullens, Love you. ….I can’t hold back the tears anymore… they have begun to stream down the contours of my face. My emotions are raining. I have never seen so much beauty while simultaneously experiencing so much pain.

The World Must Know...People Must Know!

Our Land is bleeding and our people are covered in the green hue of Mother Earth’s blood. One must ask why but the answer is far too disheartening and far too destructive for one person to swallow. As we move closer to the realization that our perpetual state of denial is killing us, individuals are standing tall in a fallen forest of despair. As we continue on this path based upon a superficial existence and the ideal of short-term gratification, our land and her inhabitants are dwindling.

But there is Hope, there is Spirit and there is Jack and Rebekah! Thank you Rebekah, Jack and the community of Mullens – you all are truly amazing. You have shown me that in the face of overwhelming destruction, sorrow, and despair, the hope and optimistic persona of the human spirit will continue to prevail.

So West Virginia, as I put my heart on paper on your behalf, my tears are streaming down my face, so pure and true like your rivers used to be. As I write, my blood flows between the chambers of my heart allowing for the support of my body... as your clean and pure soil used to be the vital blood of the animals that existed on it. In the wise words of Mr. Doomsday, “the land has been ruined in historical time, but its recovery is now in geological time.” The Stewards, the shepherds of your land have failed you and your inhabitants. Our time to attempt to do what is just and equitable is up, we now must put back our faith in you – as it should have been since the beginning.

By Blain Snipstal and Talitha G Phillips
cross-posted from http://presbyterian.typepad.com/foodandfaith

Wisdom from Dr. Ellen Davis

2010-06-15T18:34:00.000-07:00

As a student in Biblical Studies, I was thrilled to find the entire roadtrip kicked off on the right foot -- with in-depth Biblical study. Way to go, Presbyterians! We do not neglect our foundations.

Dr Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity School presented to us her agrarian reading of the Old Testament, recently published as "Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture." She took us carefully through her points, from the creation of humankind in the color and word of "fertile soil" (don't let them fool you that it's "dust" - we are humans from humus); through the first law and the first sin -- regarding how we shall and shall not eat; to the creation of the nation Israel, new-born out of the waters of the Red Sea with two commandments, to take only as much manna as they needed, and to rest on the Sabbath; through the law codes regarding land use; and to the harsh words of the prophets crying against injustice, telling the people to look to their infertile land as evidence of God's judgment.
What she did that I had never encountered before was to compare these thoroughly agrarian texts of the Old Testament to the surviving texts from Israel's neighbors, Egypt and Babylon. Both these nations lacked much literature on agrarian issues. They both dwelt in agricultural security, Egypt from the abundance of the Nile, Babylon through irrigating out of the Tigris and Euphrates. It may have been that they actually had all they needed, and did not need divine commands for their land use. Israel, on the other hand, lived in a fragile ecosystem where four out of ten years were drought or dry -- and they developed complicated codes of divinely sanctioned land use.
Wendell Berry said, "in order to be a true agrarian, you need to have just a little land." If you have an unlimited supply, or if your land appears to be infinitely fertile (like in Egypt), you will never learn to care in the way the ancient Israelites had to. Dr. Davis pointed out that ever since Europeans began pushing out Native Americans, we have been living under the delusion that our land is secure and limitless. Therefore we have exploited it, to the degradation of our topsoil, our water, our seed diversity, and even our own rapidly decreasing set of skills in the arts (not just the sciences) of land care and management.
She helped us understand that we are on the brink of something new (and very old). As our land and ecosystems begin to deteriorate all over the world, are suddenly and with a new urgency called back to the words of the Bible we have so long been reading without our agrarian glasses on. Suddenly we are called to account by the God who made us in God's image, soil-colored, with the wind of the Spirit in our lungs. These images and words take on a new urgency as we finally realize we are no Egypt, we are no Babel(-on) with our invincible heads in the clouds. Once again we are returning to see that our soil is fragile, not to be taken for granted, and only as fertile as God gives it blessing.

This challenging but hopeful reading of the "signs of the times" is one I can put my weight into. A return to Biblical wisdom on land use? We can do this. This, however, contrasts markedly with another, more doomsday-ical interpretation which we heard today in Berea Kentucky, about which I will challenge any of the other tripmates to blog...

Stay tuned at http://presbyterian.typepad.com/foodandfaith/

on being preached to

2010-06-13T17:54:00.000-07:00

Someone told me once, I think in a preaching class, that what folks hear (when we preach) is based 5% on our actual words, 10% on our tone of voice, 20% on our facial expressions... and 65% on who we are. That what people listen for is not a brilliant string of inspiring words... but for a person of character and integrity.

I get that. A few weeks ago we had a guest preacher at St Andrew Pres, and I disagreed with about half of what he said about the Bible, BUT still felt preached-to, and well. He's short, and at one point (a total sidetrack) he went across the room talking about how people think size matters, and degrees matter, and that you can measure people up somehow, and he just opened his arms at the front of the room saying "here i am! I'm just me! and that's okay." It had to be imbedded in the structure of a sermon, of course, but that one moment for me was his sermon. I was preached to -- because his short but steady, faithful, funny self just spoke to my short self with authority and confidence.

Today I heard a sermon of a wholly different sort, and with which I can find nothing to disagree. Dr. Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity School (author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: an Agrarian Reading of the Bible) preached on the story of the Israelites and their Manna. She talked about the problem with the Hebrew people (while in Egypt) learning to trust the deceptive abundance of Empire. She marveled at how the very first thing that comes up, in how to create a new nation, is how to eat. She said Israel and we heard America. She said "the Biblical story condemns us" and our foolishly grasping at the false prosperity of agriculture and economy based on scarcity and fear instead of abundance and Sabbath rest. EVERYTHING SHE SAID WAS AMAZING.
But I felt the most powerfully preached-to when at the end of the service she blessed us, in Hebrew and English. She had authority and power as she fluently recited the Hebrew words, and as she stood there with hands lifted high. The sermon I heard today was actually just me saying to myself "I am in the presence of a woman of formidable academic credentials who BELIEVES and proclaims and preaches that we need to reform our agricultural system, for a host of reasons including spiritual ones."
AND she has hope.
yes. let's do this. here we go!