Today, November 22, 2009 I became a member of Seattle Mennonite Church, effectively transferring my membership from Grace Hill Mennonite Church in rural Kansas. It seems a bit weird, to be joining a church where I can rarely worship, but as life would have it, SMC is really my church home. Here are the words I shared with congregation, having been asked to articlate my faith journey:
My name is Sarah Klaassen. I am twenty-six years old. Today I share with you my faith journey. It’s really my life journey too, because for me, the life of life and the life of faith are one and the same.
When I was five years old, my mom, my twin sister and I were walking down a gravel road in Kansas on one of those days when the sun’s rays spread out from behind the clouds. It reminded me of God, and I confidently proclaimed, God can see us, but we can’t see him. Then I solemnly added, “I wonder how he stands up there,” before dancing on down the road. When I was thirteen, I read through the Bible in a year on a less confident quest for God and truth. When I was sixteen, I began dating my best friend, another girl. I loved her and hated myself and told no one. I thought that God and the church might condemn me but Jesus surely did not. When I was seventeen, I was baptized at Grace Hill, and I shared my conviction with the church that life was hard, but God was good.
When I was twenty, I began the academic study of religion, learning first the many dimensions of the Bible and its varying contours of authority. Later that year, I decided that God was not a “He” and may not even exist, and my life of faith swerved into uncertainty and then settled into a faith of questions. But I never stopped going to church, nurtured by the Disciples of Christ and Mennonite saints I discovered here and there, some in one conversation or tidbit of encouragement, and some in ongoing relationships: Kate Becker, Margaret Penner, Phyllis Bixler, Patty Shelly, Lee Lever, Phil Waite, Dorothy Nickel Friesen, Mary Schertz, Robert Kaufman.
I began coming out, and I began to love myself again, after assurance that I could be gay and still be right with God and with some parts of the church. When I was twenty-two I began my studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, which had pulled me there with the promise of academic rigor and a theological education marked by a social justice consciousness that fit with my Mennonite convictions for active peace living, discipleship, and simple living. When I was twenty-four, I felt a calling to test the waters of pastoral ministry, and as luck, or God would have it, I was brought here to Seattle Mennonite Church. It was a summer of hospitality, grace, and the confirmation of my deep passion for the work of Christ for truth and justice in this world through Christ’s church. It was also the connection with a community that would and could support me on the journey in ways my home church in Kansas would not and could not.
Last year, my partner and life companion, Jamie Haskins, received a job offer from University Christian Church here in Seattle. Shortly after we arrived, I was offered the job as part time Assistant Minister at Richmond Beach United Church of Christ, in Shoreline. That is where you can find me most Sundays, preaching, teaching, and asking questions, Anabaptist sensibilities and all. I am grateful for their welcome and the way they nurture my pastoral skills and challenge my life of faith, but I am convinced that they are not ultimately my home.
In the meantime, there is a blessing that runs around in my head. In his charge to our class last spring, the divinity school dean said, “May you make your home like Ruth with good people, even when they are not your people.” I assure you that on most Sunday mornings, I make my home with good people. But you are the ones I struggle with and cry with, and you are the ones with whom I laugh my deepest laughs. It is here that I follow Christ most authentically, and on this Sunday, I am profoundly grateful to be accepted into you who are my people.
Here are the words the congregation shared with me:
Sarah, we freely receive you as Christ has received us as members of Christ's body. We open ourselves to fellowship with you and to worship, study, service, and discipline together. We commite ourselves to give and receive counsel, to offer and accept forgiveness in the redeemed community. We joyfuly welcome you as a sister in Christ and are grateful for your many gifts and compassionate heart. We also welcome your gifts for ministry, which you have previously manifested here at SMC as our ministry intern and are now exercising in the United Church of Christ. We bless you in this mnistry and look forward to the time when your gifts will be exercised in the Mennonite Church.
Beautiful? I think so. Seems about right, along with all the handshakes and hugs and the special greetings by many of my fellow young adults in the congregation, a testament to the fact that I'm not the only Midwestern kid who's come home in Seattle.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Feels Like Home
Jamie and I had the good fortune to be back in Nashville last week to speak on a panel at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Traveling pains and time differences aside, to be there simply felt like home. The sun shines more and the sky is bigger in Nashville. It's hard to say if that's me thinking the grass is greener on the other side of the fence or if the Pacific Northwest just isn't in my blood yet.
We stayed at the apartment of one of our friends. She's more like family, really - one of those friends around whom we feel more like a relative than a guest. We laughed and told her all our inside jokes that are too embarrassing to tell anyone here yet, and we hugged and hugged and hugged. Jamie's southern accent came roaring back to life in its native habitat and down home colloquialisms were uttered and enjoyed by all, along with margaritas at East Nashville's Rose Pepper.
The apartment where we spent our nights was not more than a mile from the first place I ever lived in Nashville. The train tracks run behind the place - close enough to wake us up and even to be annoying but for those two days it felt more like a nostalgic country song... as did the brown grass and trees and leaves. Football was in the air, and you could feel basketball too coming fast to accompany us through winter. How a place stays the same strikes me and touches me. I understand what it means to have your being wrapped up in a place, in the streets - the cracks of a sidewalk or the angle of a stop sign or the hills (or lack thereof).
bell hooks has a new book out called Belonging: A Culture of Place. She, a visionary and prophetic academic returned to Kentucky after thirty years away. She quotes Scott Russell Sanders in capturing the sentiment that at least the three of us share: "It is rare for any of us, by deliberate choice, to sit still and weave ourselves into a place, so that we know the wildflowers and rocks and politicians, so that we recognize faces wherever we turn, so that we feel a bond with everything in sight. The challenge, these days, is to be somewhere as opposed to nowhere, actually to belong to some particular place, to invest oneself in it, draw strength and courage from it, to dwell not simply in a career or a bank account but in a community" (67-68).
It is an accident of the universe that bell hooks coincided with my first trip back to Nashville, but it has me wondering - where is home? Tennessee? Kansas? I don't think it's here, where the mountains in their rugged beauty block the possibilities along the horizon of somewhere else. Here is a season but there is another place where we will live seasons into years.
In the meantime, I am renewed and refreshed and infused with a jolt of confidence, having spoken with passion and pride about VDS, having soaked up eye contact, having reveled in memories, having been immersed in love and love and love.
Among the home-like events over the weekend:
Accompanying dear friends to the city championship junior high football game as they supported a young member of their church family
Breakfast with the dear Viki Matson, complete with catching up on news and dreams
A swing by the old West Nashville home place and the Humane Society where Betsy and Wyatt used to live
A "quick" hour long chat with Sharon Howell, mentor, fellow Kansan, and leader extraodinaire
Tennessee sunshine and the Nashville skyline
We stayed at the apartment of one of our friends. She's more like family, really - one of those friends around whom we feel more like a relative than a guest. We laughed and told her all our inside jokes that are too embarrassing to tell anyone here yet, and we hugged and hugged and hugged. Jamie's southern accent came roaring back to life in its native habitat and down home colloquialisms were uttered and enjoyed by all, along with margaritas at East Nashville's Rose Pepper.
The apartment where we spent our nights was not more than a mile from the first place I ever lived in Nashville. The train tracks run behind the place - close enough to wake us up and even to be annoying but for those two days it felt more like a nostalgic country song... as did the brown grass and trees and leaves. Football was in the air, and you could feel basketball too coming fast to accompany us through winter. How a place stays the same strikes me and touches me. I understand what it means to have your being wrapped up in a place, in the streets - the cracks of a sidewalk or the angle of a stop sign or the hills (or lack thereof).
bell hooks has a new book out called Belonging: A Culture of Place. She, a visionary and prophetic academic returned to Kentucky after thirty years away. She quotes Scott Russell Sanders in capturing the sentiment that at least the three of us share: "It is rare for any of us, by deliberate choice, to sit still and weave ourselves into a place, so that we know the wildflowers and rocks and politicians, so that we recognize faces wherever we turn, so that we feel a bond with everything in sight. The challenge, these days, is to be somewhere as opposed to nowhere, actually to belong to some particular place, to invest oneself in it, draw strength and courage from it, to dwell not simply in a career or a bank account but in a community" (67-68).
It is an accident of the universe that bell hooks coincided with my first trip back to Nashville, but it has me wondering - where is home? Tennessee? Kansas? I don't think it's here, where the mountains in their rugged beauty block the possibilities along the horizon of somewhere else. Here is a season but there is another place where we will live seasons into years.
In the meantime, I am renewed and refreshed and infused with a jolt of confidence, having spoken with passion and pride about VDS, having soaked up eye contact, having reveled in memories, having been immersed in love and love and love.
Among the home-like events over the weekend:
Accompanying dear friends to the city championship junior high football game as they supported a young member of their church family
Breakfast with the dear Viki Matson, complete with catching up on news and dreams
A swing by the old West Nashville home place and the Humane Society where Betsy and Wyatt used to live
A "quick" hour long chat with Sharon Howell, mentor, fellow Kansan, and leader extraodinaire
Tennessee sunshine and the Nashville skyline
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Buy Nothing Christmas
I stumbled across a new favorite web site on Monday: Buy Nothing Christmas. As far as I can tell, it was started by Canadian Mennonites a few years ago as a response both to rampant consumerism and to the desire to live out a simple life, even around the holidays. Good stuff. It's too late for a totally buy nothing Christmas in my world, but it will be a Buy Very Little Christmas. Actually, I think I may become my own kind of evangelist for the cause.
I don't have some hokey message about Jesus being the "Reason for the Season," but I do have a strong and growing disdain for the many interfaces that we all have to deal with on a daily basis. Advertisements are everywhere - Fisher Price is driving me nuts, as if I'd ever think buying a horsey you can hook up to the t.v. would be a good way to teach my child how to count. And damned if I'll communicate my weekly youth group plans in five ways every day just because this kid prefers text messages and those others prefer Facebook and the parents prefer email and the web site needs to be updated and some need telephone calls to remind them in case they forget. It's not my responsibility to make others' lives convenient. Convenience is a market value, and I prefer kingdom values. Now about that horsey, I'm reviving an old household mantra: when we see an ad, our refrain is not, "Oh, I want that / that looks fun (tasty)." Rather, we say aloud, "You have GOT to be kidding me."
The "Christmas Season?" You have GOT to be kidding me. As far as I'm concerned, this year, December is about Advent and purple is the color of the season, not red and green. In fact, I've got a sermon coming up for the first Sunday in Advent: November 29, people, get it on your calendar. It's hope Sunday as far as the liturgical calendar goes - so where is our hope and what do we hope for? The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) text for that Sunday is from the prophet Jeremiah, who writes that a righteous branch will spring up to execute justice and righteousness in the land (33.14-16). Now that I can hope for, and hope doesn't cost a penny.
I don't have some hokey message about Jesus being the "Reason for the Season," but I do have a strong and growing disdain for the many interfaces that we all have to deal with on a daily basis. Advertisements are everywhere - Fisher Price is driving me nuts, as if I'd ever think buying a horsey you can hook up to the t.v. would be a good way to teach my child how to count. And damned if I'll communicate my weekly youth group plans in five ways every day just because this kid prefers text messages and those others prefer Facebook and the parents prefer email and the web site needs to be updated and some need telephone calls to remind them in case they forget. It's not my responsibility to make others' lives convenient. Convenience is a market value, and I prefer kingdom values. Now about that horsey, I'm reviving an old household mantra: when we see an ad, our refrain is not, "Oh, I want that / that looks fun (tasty)." Rather, we say aloud, "You have GOT to be kidding me."
The "Christmas Season?" You have GOT to be kidding me. As far as I'm concerned, this year, December is about Advent and purple is the color of the season, not red and green. In fact, I've got a sermon coming up for the first Sunday in Advent: November 29, people, get it on your calendar. It's hope Sunday as far as the liturgical calendar goes - so where is our hope and what do we hope for? The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) text for that Sunday is from the prophet Jeremiah, who writes that a righteous branch will spring up to execute justice and righteousness in the land (33.14-16). Now that I can hope for, and hope doesn't cost a penny.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Being Installed
Last Sunday (October 25) was my official installation as the "Assistant Minister to Youth and Young Adults" at Richmond Beach Congregational, United Church of Christ. I didn't expect much. After all, it was a simple, one-page litany to be read somewhere in the middle of the service, between a song and a scripture reading - five minutes maximum, something that had to be done to make me completely official. I figured, "installations" are something you do with hardware in a kitchen. I didn't expect much.
Then, what actually happened last Sunday took me by surprise. I stood up on the front stage, three steps higher than the congregation, between the lectern and the pulpit, between Pastor Joy and our moderator. It is always a bit of a sacred moment to be in front of a congregation and to see all the faces turned toward you, waiting expectantly. Joy read her affirmation of my calling and asked me if I would serve the church to the best of my ability. "I will, relying on God's grace." The moderator spoke and then the congregation. As we bowed our heads in prayer, I could not help the few small and silent tears that came.
This is what it feels like to be called by a church. They don't even know that I don't really belong in a suburban UCC church. Or maybe it's that they know I belong there, can serve there, can covenant with them, in ways that I haven't yet realized.
Then, what actually happened last Sunday took me by surprise. I stood up on the front stage, three steps higher than the congregation, between the lectern and the pulpit, between Pastor Joy and our moderator. It is always a bit of a sacred moment to be in front of a congregation and to see all the faces turned toward you, waiting expectantly. Joy read her affirmation of my calling and asked me if I would serve the church to the best of my ability. "I will, relying on God's grace." The moderator spoke and then the congregation. As we bowed our heads in prayer, I could not help the few small and silent tears that came.
This is what it feels like to be called by a church. They don't even know that I don't really belong in a suburban UCC church. Or maybe it's that they know I belong there, can serve there, can covenant with them, in ways that I haven't yet realized.
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