God is not a white man

Last Sunday I headed off for camp.  It was a gray and rainy day in Seattle, even in the middle of July, and my mood, not to mention my attitude, reflected the weather.  I'd hardly been back a week from an emotionally draining week at the Mennonite Church USA convention in Pittsburgh, and I was not ready to be away again, even at beautiful Camp Camrec.  But then I got there and had one of the greatest weeks of my "year as a Mennonite pastor."

I'm sure there will pictures up on Facebook, and the youth tell stories about tubing in the Icicle River, Texas Star Gazing, and pranks - all fun, all memorable.  There are two other things that most excite me though.  

One is the leadership of the counselors and staff, who struck a nearly perfect balance between fun-loving and mature.  They were thoughtful, compassionate, and authentic.  They didn't worry about their images, about impressing others, or about being cool, and our camp of fourteen youth was small enough that we didn't have to worry much about those things from the youth either.  Camrec is a special place like that.  There are at least two or three if not more of these young people, ages 18-25, who I would encourage to explore a calling in ministry or religious leadership.  There's something about the character of a person that they just have.  

And second was the theology.  As camp pastor I led lessons (a.k.a. "Sarah Time") and campfire on the theme of God's Table.  We talked food stories, creation, hunger, and hospitality, and each night we participated in a ritual around a table we had created together on Sunday.  God's Table is a place of radical hospitality, a place where each person has great value, a place where there is a preferential option for the poor and hungry.  And so our next generation of Washington Mennonite youth got a taste each night of inclusive theology, liberation theology, feminist theology, and social justice.  It wasn't just from me though - it was the spirit of the week, and it was captured most in a new song we learned by a group called Gungor, lyrics adapted to reflect inclusive language below.  

Who ever thought a progressive, lesbian camp pastor and a radical, straight, white male camp director would join/lead a bunch of Mennonite youth in singing...

God is not a man
God is not a white man
God is not a man sitting on a cloud

God cannot be bought
God will not be boxed in
God will not be owned by religion

but God is Love,
God is Love,
and God loves everyone
God is Love,
God is Love,
and God loves everyone

God is not a man
God is not an old man
and God does not belong to Republicans

God is not a flag
not even American
and God does not depend on a government

but God is good... 

United States of America v. Sarah N. Klaassen

The title says it all.  We thought maybe by this point there would be no further response to our Good Friday witness, and then two weeks ago I received a "Notice to Appear" from the United States District Court.  It came in the mail with the weekly Safeway ad, return address Central Violations Bureau in San Antonio, Texas. 

We will gather at 8:00 a.m. on July 14 outside the U.S. Courthouse to pray and prepare for whatever will happen that morning.  All are welcome to join us in witness and preparation.  Most likely we will be asked to enter a plea, guilty or not guilty being the standard responses.  And yet, as these new friends and old mentors gently guide us, I am reminded over and over that the witness has not yet ended.  Guilty or not guilty are only two choices, but for followers of Jesus, we always have a third way. 

Teacher, biblical scholar, and experienced protester Wes tells the story of a courtroom overtaken by the spirits of control and power a few years ago.  The protesters fell subject to the rituals of empire, the robed judge, the armed officer, the inflexible liturgy of the judicial process... until he rose and said something like this: As a follower of Jesus Christ, I do not acknowledge the jurisdiction of this court to decide my innocence or guilt.

The other week as we were talking War Tax Resistance at Seattle Mennonite, pastor Weldon spoke eloquently about the power of threat: an abstract force so strong that it can prevent us from acting upon even our most strongly held convictions.  The police, the IRS, the District Court, all made up of individual people, become larger than the sum of their parts and we become in response, less than the body of Christ, weakened by the possibility of negative consequences.  It's something I've been pondering, something for us all to ponder - for despite how things often seem, we often do have the agency to neutralize threat.  Sure, it's the hard path, this third way.  It's the less obvious path; it puts a little less hope in a lush bank account or predictable negotiation of bureaucracy.  But haven't we always known that we have to give something up to follow Jesus? 

In reality, this current journey is not so difficult.  We eleven have been charged with Preservation of Property, and the code is as follows:

§ 102-74.380  

All persons entering in or on Federal property are prohibited from— (a) Improperly disposing of rubbish on property;
(b) Willfully destroying or damaging property;
(c) Stealing property;
(d) Creating any hazard on property to persons or things; or
(e) Throwing articles of any kind from or at a building or climbing upon statues, fountains or any part of the building.
 
Penalties (41 CFR 102–74.450). A person found guilty of violating any rule or regulation in subpart C of this part while on any property under the charge and control of the U.S. General Services Administration shall be fined under title 18 of the United States Code, imprisoned for not more than 30 days, or both.

We are not sure how our action connects to one of these offenses, and we don't know how our day in court will unfold.  Some of us hope for a trial and others of us first-timers are unsure how to navigate all of this.  And yet I can't help but think something new is happening here, not so much in the world but in my little world.  After two weeks with this notice, United States of America v. Sarah N. Klaassen doesn't seem as threatening as it did before. 

Forever bless'd

I found out on Friday night that Grandma Donna was feverish and weaker even than she has been.  It's been well over three years since she was diagnosed with cancer, and slowly she's faded - baking less, sitting more.  She and grandpa moved into town the other year, and they stopped going to so many basketball games.  She put together a scrapbook with the help of her oldest grandchild, and when I would go visit these last years, I would sit for hours looking at that book and asking question about how life used to be.  I loved it - to know her history was to know mine.

In January when I was back in Kansas, she was in the hospital.  I visited her there, and we looked at old slides through a mechanical viewer.  When she was discharged back to the apartment, she was on hospice.  The last time I saw her was a Thursday afternoon - January 6, it must have been.  I stopped by the apartment at Kidron Bethel and took my seat on the left side of the love seat next to the end table that holds the peanut M&M's.  Grandma was in her recliner as usual.  While I was there the hospice chaplain stopped by and introduced himself and made small talk with Grandma and Grandpa, which isn't always easy.  There were the serious questions too:

How is it with yourself, with others, with your God?  Good.  Good.  Good.   

We left when she was tired, and as I walked toward my car, I wondered if it was the last time I'd see her.  Probably so.

Yesterday during the Sunday school hour after worship, we had a hymn sing.  We sat in our four parts and used the blue hymnal, singing song after song, acapella.  I sat behind my friends, and next to a woman who also spent some years at Grace Hill and who, yesterday, helped carry me along the alto line.  At about noon PST, someone, another native Kansas in fact, requested "For all the saints," #636: 

For all the saints, who from their labors rest, who thee by faith before the world confessed, thy name, O Jesus, be forever bless'd.  Alleluia, Alleluia. 

It's a funeral song.  Then other songs were requested - one from someone's dad's funeral, another from someone's grandpa's.  And we sang, boy can these folks sing.  As I thought about what song to request, I wondered which ones grandma has chosen for her memorial.  I'll find out soon. 

Surely she is a saint who from her labors now rests peacefully, as it should be.  A good life and a good death surrounded by her husband of decades and her four children.  She breathed her last at about 3:30 CST, less than two hours after we were singing memorial songs in Seattle.  I can't think of a better way to accompany her out of this world.

It is still the Easter season of the church year, a good season to die: death and new life, loss and resurrection, and that eternal sense that our bodies and our lives may not be what we had thought, after all.   Dear Grandma, be forever bless'd, allelua, alleluia.

Bodies of an Uprising

May 1, 2011
Seattle Mennonite Church
Second Sunday of Easter
John 20.19-31

Last Saturday I baked Resurrection Rolls.  This sweet treat is especially for Easter, involving the usual ingredients for bread, plus sugar, cinnamon, and marshmallows.  Let me explain the recipe for resurrection.  The first step is to make a yeast dough and let it rise until double.  Then divide the dough into smaller, roll-size portions and let them rise.  As is fitting for Easter, there’s a lot of rising involved in the process.

Then comes the good stuff.  Melt half a cup of butter and combine a cup of sugar with a few Tablespoons of cinnamon.  Flatten each roll and dip it in the butter and then the sugar mixture and then take one large marshmallow and wrap it into the roll, sealing the edges.  Dip it one more time in cinnamon sugar, and let it rise one more time before baking at 375 for about 15 minutes, and then let them cool.

The marshmallow dissolves inside the roll, and you are left with a sweet empty tomb: a Resurrection treat.

Isn’t this how we often proceed with the Easter season?  Spring is upon us – it’s getting warmer and the sun is shining with more frequency, thanks be to God!  The end of school is approaching, summer vacations are being planned, and after that long Lenten journey with Jesus to the cross, and after those agonizing, messy days of betrayal, arrest, suffering, and death, the tomb is empty.  God through Jesus has power over life and death.  Christ has risen!  Christ has risen indeed, alleluia. Sweet. Tasty.  Neat.

And this takes me back to my Resurrection Rolls.  As I said, the marshmallow dissolves and you are left with a tidy empty tomb… in theory, anyway.  Maybe this is how it works out for a more experienced baker, someone who can seal up the tomb a little better, but for me, after about 15 minutes in the oven at 375 degrees, the marshmallows had not dissolved in the roll but had leaked all over my baking pans: the tombs were empty for sure, but instead of disappearing, the body of Jesus had spilled out into a sticky, gooey mess.

Our Gospel lesson for today begins, When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews…


Now this text came from a Jewish community that was in conflict with the local synagogue.  The animosity here in the text and the animosity that many scholars see behind the text has to do with religious authorities, not with Judaism itself or with Jewish religious traditions.

You see, it’s always the authorities, the people in power who are threatened by an uprising.  It’s those who are privileged, those who benefit from the status quo, who don’t want things to change.

Jesus, that troublesome prophet and teacher had made a mess of things when he was alive, offering a message of radical love through the medium of radical peace and now his death was the way to squash any remnants of that radical uprising.  Be rid of him for good.

No wonder the disciples were afraid.  The one they followed, the one who captured the message of God in real, concrete, fleshly images was gone.  So much for the door, the bread of life, the light of the world, the gate for the sheep, the true vine.  Guess we’re not the sheep or the branches after all.  Goodbye to the Good Shepherd.

An empty tomb and Mary’s encounter with the Jesus gardener were not enough to give new life to the deflated rebellion.  In fact, there was only one thing that could.

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the religious authorities, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”  After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.  Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.


John’s Gospel begins with the stunning, cosmic proclamation.  The Word became flesh and lived among us.  This is what God looks like spilled out into the world, from the neatness of heaven to the messiness of earth.  God looks like Jesus, clothed in radical love that associates with society’s outcasts and washes our dirty, smelly feet.  Then here in the second to last chapter of John, the evangelist brings us full circle.  We hear this most clearly in doubtful Thomas’ exclamation upon seeing Jesus: “My Lord and my God!”  Finally, they get it.  Finally we get it.  The Word became flesh in chapter one and now again in chapter 20, the risen Jesus, a body once again, only this time his body is even a little bit more like ours.

There comes a point for each of us, some time early in childhood when we know what it’s like to fall and scrape a knee.  We know what’s it’s like to have a scar.  Then we grow a little bit and there comes a time for each of us, some time maybe middle to late adolescence when we know what it’s like to have a broken heart.  Then we grow a little more, and the world becomes heavier.  We are depressed, or we live with anxiety.  We struggle with addiction.  We recognize our own woundedness and our own failure.  We live through accidents and surgeries and we see other people who don’t.  We know what it’s like to be mortal, to live in a body.

So does Jesus.  Twice.  After being nailed to a cross, I bet he walks with a limp.  I bet when the weather changes, he feels it in his bones now and the marks of the crucifixion, well, those will stay with him forever.

Poet Marty McConnell writes:
…these bodies
are not new countries. crushed
between each vertebrae are notes
written in a language we invented,
forgot, and are only slowly
remembering. there’s an alphabet
to our resurrection, our steady return
to breath.

You see, in our embodiment, the lines of resurrection blur.  Here is the secret of the rising up.  Here is the secret of the uprising.  It takes a body.  It takes a body.

Not just any body.  It’s every body. All ability and different ability is needed in the rising up.  Wheel chairs or walkers – all the better; wrinkles are good too.  Bodies that do quirky or unexpected things – that frustrate us or hold diseases or let us down, changing voices, growing hips, giving hot flashes.  Especially these, because these marginal bodies are the radical bodies, the bodies of an uprising.  Our bodies, each and every one in all their incarnate frailty also mirror the divine.  The Word became flesh, and flesh became the way.

A recent issue of The Mennonite (April 2011) tells the story of protestors lining up outside of an unmarked Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office to draw attention to the building and call for transparency in the legal practices surrounding the detainees.  “The protesters… came with a washbasin and several gallons of water.  As people chanted Psalms and read Scripture passages, [Mennonite pastor] Isaac Villegas managed to wash about five people’s feet before an unmarked white van rolled in, dispersing the protestors.”  In his reflections on that day, Isaac Villegas writes, “Bodies matter…  [Foot washing] is what love looks like; it’s what love feels like – a foot in your hand, a hand on your foot.  Love isn’t simply some flighty emotion that comes and goes depending on your mood.  Love happens when you pour water on someone’s foot and wash it and dry it…”

It’s an old practice, born of the necessity of sandals and dusty roads.  John chapter 13 says that Jesus, in preparing for his death, poured water into a basin and washed the disciples’ feet.  For I have set you an example, he said to them, that you also should do as I have done to you. In the uprising, bodies matter.
It takes both hands and feet. A theologian (Sebastian Moore) once wrote, that we can “look forward to the point when the whole mystery of God will be known in the clasp of your brother’s [and sister’s] hand.”

This is something we’ve known for a long time.  Radical love and radical peace are not abstract ideas.  They are enacted.  They are performed.  They are incarnate.  God revealed in Jesus makes possible a relationship of limitless, servant-style love and we are now the vessels, we as ourselves as individuals and we together as a body.

Last week, Weldon preached us up an Easter challenge, saying God is calling us to see and be God’s rising in Jesus Christ.  God is rising up in each one of us” and in Seattle Mennonite Church.  Our challenge is to prayerfully ask what God is raising up in me. Weldon said, “I cannot name that uprising for you but I am confident that God is rising up in you this Easter.”

If you don’t know quite yet how God is rising up in you this Easter, be patient.  Listen.  Wait.  It will come.  But in the meantime, hear this:  It is in our bodies and through our bodies that Jesus rises up to bring radical love and radical peace to the world.  This is Good News, my friends.  If you do nothing else for the risen Jesus this week, love your body and this body, and in doing so, you will join the uprising.  Through the grace of creation and the mystery of incarnation, the bodies of this uprising are ours.

Empire and Agency

What we see depends on where we stand.  

One of my first and longest lasting lessons from Divinity School was on the importance of social location.  I can't tell you how many assignments we began by naming who we are: I am white, female, lesbian.  I am well-educated and middle class.  I have upward mobility.  And using language I never learned in Divinity School, I am Empire. 

You could see it as simple identity politics: limited individual or group perspectives primarily about self-interest.  OR, you could see it as recognizing agency, or lack thereof.  

For instance, I have never once in my life thought to specially ask for a bag at the grocery store.  If I only have one item, I might not even take the receipt.  Then one day in a discussion group, one of my African American friends said it's a lesson she's had to teach her kids: always get a bag, always ask for a receipt.  Otherwise you'll likely get stopped for shoplifting.  I forgot about it, until one day in a West Nashville Walmart, it happened.  Two black women, about my age were asked for their receipt by a checker next to the automatic sliding doors.  When I reached for my receipt after them, the older white woman said, "Oh I don't need to see yours, but with some people you never know."  

As a white, educated, middle class person in the United States of America, I have never known powerlessness.  In fact, as a white, educated, middle class person I am the epitome of the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world.  I am this country that spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined.  This country claims power over life and death over much of the world.  It's not too radical to name our leadership in global oppression and violence: empire at its finest.  

And so I've never known what it's like to not have power, until Good Friday. 

I was kneeling, my red hands pressed against the cold pillars of the federal building when I heard a click to my left.  My companion in risk and witness had been placed in handcuffs, and my own hands started shaking.  The officer came to me next, taking first my left hand and then my right, behind my back.  Click.  Click.  Stand up please.  Come over here.   

A few tears rolled out then, and I realized for the first time in my life what it is like to have no agency, to be completely at the mercy of powers outside of oneself.  I could no longer say, "Just kidding.  I didn't mean it."  I could not walk away.  I could not wipe my own tears or brush my windblown hair away from my face.  We were led up to a hallway on the fifth floor, and then one by one we were searched.  "Do you have any weapons or anything sharp in your pockets?"  No.  The female officer put on gloves before she touched me.  Then she unzipped my jacket and ran her hands up and down my legs and inside my shoes.  She reached into my jeans pocket and took my cell phone, keys, and wallet, tossing it all into a plastic bag.

This is what it feels like to oppose a system: swallowed into something that makes you invisible.  

Within two hours I had it all back: plastic bag full of my personal items, wrists and hands only slightly worse for the wear.  Within a day my shoulders were no longer sore from the way my arms rested pulled back in handcuffs.  Within the month I'll likely have paid my fine to the federal government and be restored in all my glory as a white, middle class, educated American citizen.  

I want to say I was bearing witness to an alternative that doesn't succumb to those platitudes we tell ourselves because of our agency:

• The federal government does good things too, funding social services and providing for the public good.
• We can't do anything to change the system, so might as well not try.  
• Life is short.  Why make it harder than it already is?

I want to say I was following this radical, political Jesus. I want to say we proclaimed the truth that Jesus' life, death, and resurrection even now tell the story of shalom, of transforming and reconciling love stronger than powers of violence, apathy, and death itself. 

Ultimately I wonder how I might be changed.  Certainly somehow, for because of those three hours on Good Friday, I'm not standing in the same place anymore.  

Good Friday, 2011

We were about fifty, gathered at the Federal Building in downtown Seattle yesterday at noon, gathered to participate in worship and witness in a most public place.  Weldon, Wes, and Sue have led this service for years, proclaiming the Passion story from the Gospel of John, here in the shadow of Empire.  It seems innocuous as a structure and yet the building represents power, domination, and violence – these forces wrapped into the history and current practices of the United States of America. 

It was my great privilege to celebrate communion and remember the story yesterday, and to play a role in leading the worship.  We read the scripture in five acts, each part followed by sharing prayers, stories, names of those affected by persecution and those opposing violence in our neighborhoods and around the world. 

It was then my great privilege to participate in an extended liturgical act with nine others.  A bloodlike substance was poured over our hands, and as we sang, we moved toward the building finally placing our red hands on its cold walls.  This building is the modern day equivalent of the Roman governor’s local headquarters where Jesus was held, questioned, and abused, and so our action was reminder and remembrance. 

But it was more than that too: it was a witness, a call to pay attention, to notice the blood that is on our own hands as citizens of and participants in this Empire of domination.  It was an indictment of our government’s policies of ongoing persecution, military funding and spending, economic and social violence.  It was an action of recognition: our own abilities to oppose these systems are so small and limited.  It was then as much as anything, an action of hope, that even in spite of us, God still is doing something, persuading the universe toward shalom. 

We were arrested, booked, issued violation notices, and released in the span of about two hours.  Likely I will write more, add some layers to the story, but this is all I can muster for now. 

Closets and Caves

April 10, 2011
Seattle Mennonite Church
Fifth Sunday in Lent
John 11.1-45

You may not know this, but our church has some pretty great hiding places.  I only know this because I’ve had the great privilege of spending the night here for a youth lock-in.  These overnight festivities inevitably involve the mysteriously fun game of sardines.  One or two youth get a few minutes to hide somewhere, anywhere in the dark church building, and then the rest of us go and find them.  When you find them, you hide with them, until one by one the searchers disappear into the dark.  (As a side note, you younger kids, be thinking about best hiding places for when you get to youth group, and yes, bathrooms are off limits.)

Now sometimes the best hiding places don’t seem like the best, for instance when Nate hid under the very chairs you are sitting on and none of us could find him except by accident.  When it came my turn to hide, Sara and I decided to try out the worship closet.  For those not oriented to our church, the worship closet is through that door right there, and if you haven’t peeked in, I highly recommend it.  It is a wealth of treasures that transform our sanctuary for any season of the church year.  Anyway, Sara and I hid there and before long David found us but no one else.  It wasn’t until others started calling us: where are you?  come out! that we emerged.  Who knew the closet could be such a good hiding place?

I suppose most of us have also found ourselves in the closet at one time or another: playing hide and go seek; seeking a place of safe darkness where we can show our most vulnerable emotions.  We keep our clothes in the closet and the old luggage that we only use once a year is shoved way in the back.  Those of us from the Midwest know it’s a relatively safe place to go during a tornado too, interior walls, no windows.  Most of us know the closet.

I myself know it well.  I was in the closet until I was twenty-one, which really isn’t all that long for a gay person.  But it was long enough to know that closets aren’t always cozy or safe.

Our Lenten journey began four and a half weeks ago with those first steps out into the wilderness, tracing the footsteps of our example and friend, Jesus of Nazareth.  We ask much of ourselves this season as we meditate on temptation, doubt, and struggle.  We have been richly blessed by stories of thirst and recovery, of blindness and sight.  But we have been stretched as we look into our own weaknesses, as we attend to the burdens we each carry.

Today we go even further into fear, mourning, isolation, separation, alienation.  Today’s Lenten stories take us to death itself.

Our Old Testament reading from Ezekiel brings us to the middle of a valley full of bones.  There were masses of bones, heaps of bones lying scattered about the valley.  And as if dead, bare bones weren’t enough, the prophet tells us these bones were dry.  The image sends shivers up and down our spines.  It was a place of isolation and barrenness.  The air was stale with the smell of death.

And then the Gospel drama from John we travel with Jesus to Bethany to a tomb – a cave actually the text says, a cave with a stone laid upon it.  It was the grave of Lazarus, dead before his time, dead already for four days.

Burial didn’t involve embalming in first century Israel.  Instead the body was covered with perfume and wrapped from head to toe.  This was pleasant enough for the first little bit, but by day four, the smell of decomposition was stronger than the smell of perfume.  What’s more, the mention of four days underscores the finality of death.  It was popular Jewish belief that the soul hovered around the body in the grave for three days after death, hoping to reenter the body.  But after the third day the soul leaves for good.  The unpleasant smell in the air was not only decay; it was the sickly finality of absence.  Lazarus’ cave on the fourth day was a place of ultimate despair and grief.

Our scripture readings for today don’t mention any closets.  But then again, our lives today don’t mention many valleys full of bones or caves covered with stones.  Closets or caves, they are just the same – places of isolation and pain and death.

When I was in divinity school, every fall during GLBT history month, one of our student groups hosted what we called “Coming Out Stories.”  One evening in October we would gather with food and drink to celebrate our stories of those first steps we took from secrecy and hiddenness to life.

I remember one year Ryan shared his story.  That night he was on parent duty because his wife was busy, so he brought his son along and was holding this precious two-year-old in his arms as he began talking.

The year before he had been back home in California over the summer and his family conversation turned to politics and religion.  I don’t remember what it was exactly, but they shared ideas about the sinfulness and perversion of homosexuality.  The talk became increasingly uncomfortable for Ryan.  But he sat in silence.  It would be risky to say anything there, to stir up conflict in the family.  Easier to just disagree privately, he thought, and let the moment pass.

Our closets and our caves are powerful places.  Sometimes it’s about us.  We are afraid of what other people will think of us if we reveal our truest self.  We are wounded and every impulse tells us to protect those places of vulnerability.  Close ourselves off.

Sometimes it’s about the abuses of other people.  We have been told so often that we are not good enough or normal enough or beautiful enough that those words become life commandments which bind us.  And sometimes it’s about systems of domination and distortion, empires that ties us in the closet – religion that says you have to be this way or that way if you want to be loved.  We may not even be conscious that these powerful grave clothes tie us up.  We mistakenly think they are keeping us safe and so we protect them.  Until one day we hear a muffled voice from outside our closets and our caves.  From our death-dealing darkness we hear again the life-giving words of Jesus as he stands facing the cave:  “Lazarus, come out!”  Lazarus, come out.

Ryan was ready to let the conversation with his family go, but then he remembered his young son and the spirit moving inside prompted him to finally say something: “I do not want my son to grow up thinking it is okay to talk this way.  We have many gay and lesbian friends, and I want my son to know that God celebrates their stories and their relationships, and if my son is gay, I do not want him ever to feel condemned to death.”

Seattle Mennonite Church, you have a coming out story of your own, a story that stretched years through long congregational meetings, disagreements, persistent community, engaged and prophetic voices of youth, discipline and discomfort from the wider Mennonite church.  Not long ago you declared this statement of welcome as a body of people: We desire that all who enter here may be received as Christ. We celebrate and affirm the image of God in persons of every age, gender, race, ability, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, and strive to find common ground on which to build relationship with our neighbors near and far. We publicly affirm that LGBT** persons are welcome to participate in the full life and ministry of our church, including membership, baptism, marriage, leadership, and pastoral ministry.


Today we can confidently celebrate together this hospitality and welcome of Christ, which offers freedom to those who enter.  But our work together is not done.  The work of coming out has to be done over and over and over again.

There is risk in responding to Jesus’ call, risk especially for GLBT people who may be victims of violence or ostracism.  The timing for coming out is not always now.  But when the timing is right, when Jesus calls, when it is time to take the risk and step forward we know that we, like Lazarus meet Jesus on the other side.

This is Good News, my friends, not only for gay and lesbian people but for anyone bound by secrecy or fear or other death-dealing powers.  This is news we must live and share, that Jesus gives life not just to Lazarus but to us, not just once but again and again and again.

Every year at the Coming Out Stories celebration, after a couple of people share, the stories start flowing.  The stories are about overcoming for some of us what was nearly unimaginable fear and doubt.  We celebrate the speaking of truth and giving of life, even in the face of opposition.  We celebrate who we are and whose we are.

And with each celebration, each coming out, with each affirmation of life, is a small resurrection.  Friends, Jesus calls us out of our closets and our caves.  May we but have the courage to respond.

The Sacrament of a Championship

Tonight Texas A&M played Notre Dame for the NCAA national championship.  It was a great game - in fact the best game I've seen on t.v. all year, men's or women's.  The game was well played and well coached; the athletes played with remarkable a combination of athleticism and fundamental skill.  At least one of them, Skylar Diggins, will be one of the greatest to ever play the game and may be one of those players who elevates the quality of the sport as we know it.

Yet what matters most tonight is not the significance of the championship or the thrill of victory and the agony of loss.  It wasn't how far the teams had come or how many others they'd defeated or their will to win or the most valuable thirty points of Danielle Adams.  All in all winning or statistics are not so important and is never what's moved me about this game.

Tonight the liturgy of sport was on display in layers beyond the obvious. 

We saw and celebrated many shapes and sizes of women there on the court, bodies and abilities to be celebrated whether wide or skinny, stocky or thin.  We saw and honored a vast array of personalities - fiery and fierce and cool and unemotional.  We saw small kindnesses like a Notre Dame player helping up a fallen Aggie and young women trying to get their old coach to dance on national t.v.  We saw the integrity of two first rate coaches and players who were articulate and available. 

We didn't see families or early morning workouts or teams sitting in study hall, but that's all part of it too, whenever the ball goes up at center court.  Persistence, belief, community, ritual and the diverse beauty of these young women and the people who love them, that's what mattered most tonight.

Our sport is not yet so tainted by scandal and money.  It's empowering little girls and offering life-long lessons on strength and work ethic and belonging.  It's crossing all kinds of lines - race, gender, sexual orientation, economics.

Texas A&M won tonight, their first championship ever in women's basketball.  Coach Gary Blair was a class act, Texas accent and all.  They'll be remembered longer on those lists of champions, but that's almost besides the point.  A liturgy like this is never about outcomes.  It's the work of the people, and its power transcends the championship ritual itself. 

How could you not love this game?  How could you not want every little girl you know to catch a piece of such a sacrament?

Upset

Today the Kansas men's basketball team lost in the NCAA tournament to end their season.  It was an upset.  They lost to a team that perhaps they should have beat, a team who played well beyond their statistical capabilities, a team who almost didn't make it into the tournament and is now Final Four bound.  Perhaps if they played again, the outcome would be different, but that's the beauty of the tournament: Virginia Commonwealth can go on a run and play better than the body of their work.  Many congratulations to them.

In fact, that's the beauty of this game, for it reminds us that our potential is well beyond the ruts that tend to guide our common living.  It also reminds us that we can be worse then we usually are, and there, perhaps, is humanity in sum.  And that is the good thing with sports. 

I didn't watch the game.  I live on the west coast and the first half was during Sunday school and during the second half I took one of our precious teenagers out to lunch.  We talked college selection and art and music, and I didn't think much of missing the game.  When I got home I saw the score.  I talked to a couple of folks who watched the game, and I read some good analysis about three point shooting and personnel mismatches and the style of officiating.

Then I read some fan comments, folks who were incredibly supportive, and I was proud to be a Kansas fan.  People wrote about how hard the boys played and how much heart they had and how grateful they are for another successful season.  People encouraged these young Jayhawks to keep their heads up, to be proud of themselves.  These are the good things about the game. 

Then I read on, folks saying the boys choked again.  Folks calling into question the coaching ability of Bill Self, the talent of the Kansas guard play, the shooting ability, the heart.  A few conversations devolved into placing blame for the loss or into criticizing individual players or mocking the Kansas basketball program.  This is the problem with the game.  This is upsetting.

Maybe it seems like friendly banter, these criticisms that come with this kind of loss, all part of the game.  And no doubt these precious young men will bounce back.  After all, they are strong and resilient mentally, physically, and emotionally.  You have to be to do what they do, but this blaming is upsetting.

There's a fairly heartbreaking clip of Marcus Morris trying to respond to reporters in the locker room this afternoon.  He doesn't have a lot to say, except that he feels like he let everybody down.  And no wonder - he put his heart and soul into it.  Here we could say a lot about the consumerism of sports, the waste of money, recruiting violations, academic fraud, etc., and we are right to be critical about our participation in these unjust systems.

But Marcus Morris is twenty-one years old.  Some student-athletes aren't role models; some are.  But they are all young adults, growing and changing, seeking and learning while their lives are full of pressure imposed by self and others.  They and their programs should not be criticized or blamed or mocked.  They, like each student-athlete, should be celebrated for they gifts they have and the joy and heartache we have the privilege to share with them. 

The best advertisements of any tournament are the ones produced by the NCAA itself.  You know the tagline: "There are over 400,000 NCAA student-athletes, and most of us will go pro in something other than sports."  Likely, Marcus Morris will go on to the NBA this year or next, but Tyrel Reed and Brady Morningstar and so many will be professionals in other ways.  Yet they've granted us the privilege of journeying with them, and it is indeed a privilege for which we owe them and their programs our gratitude.

Rock Chalk Jayhawk. 

The Laws of Violence

Today I was watching basketball and planting seeds in my kitchen when President Obama came on with a declarative statement in his role as Commander in Chief of the United States Military.  For me it was a symbolic interruption, activities of celebration, play, and new life interrupted with a message of power, a show of strength, and the threat of force.  I couldn't help the tears that began flowing. 

This Sunday (March 20) will be the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.  Then too, the new life of spring and the celebration of play and sport in the basketball tournament were foremost in my mind as my team was in Lubbock, Texas preparing to play Texas Tech in the first round of the women's NCAA tournament.  I sat there stunned in my hotel room at the La Quinta Inn when I heard about the invasion.  I sat there with my roommate for the trip, completely deflated, overwhelmed by the human capacity for violence and forceful terror, overtaken by this country's intimate and often unquestioned participation in systems of violence. 

Many have said and many will say that force is necessary and the manipulation of power by shows of military might are a natural part of international relations.  Military intervention against a terrorist or a dictator is a necessary evil.  It is "our" job to protect people who can't protect themselves.  There are many questions to raise in this common and seemingly innocuous logic, questions that followers of Jesus in particular must raise. 

To that end, the late French social critic and radical lay theologian Jacques Ellul has written with clarity and conviction about violence and peace, deconstructing the arguments and assumptions that prop up the logic of violence.  In his book Violence (1969), he asks Christians to take seriously these laws of violence (pp 93-108):

1. Continuity: once you start using violence, you cannot get away from it.
2. Reciprocity: there is no distinction between a good and bad use of violence; violence begets and procreates violence.
3. Sameness: it is impossible to distinguish between justified and unjustified violence, between violence that liberates and violence that enslaves.  Every violence is identical with every other violence.
4. Violence begets violence, nothing else. No government established by violence has given the people either liberty or justice - only a show of liberty (for those who supported the movement) and a show of justice. 
5. The [person] who uses violence always tries to justify both it and [her/himself].  

We don't need to trust ourselves to make some kind of change, to argue with the global empires that threaten creation and convince them of a better way.  Instead we go on planting seeds, trusting that with water and light, God will make them grow.   

Into the Wilderness

March 13, 2011
Seattle Mennonite Church
First Sunday in Lent
Matthew 4.1-11

This morning’s gospel lesson begins: “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil…”  In the first three chapters of Matthew, Jesus has been conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.  He has been visited by wise men from the East and then fled to Egypt with his parents.  It hasn’t been a dull life.  A few years pass before he is baptized by John the Baptist in the river Jordan, anointed the Son of God… and now we can get started.  But to be led with Jesus to the desert, you can’t simply begin here in Matthew.  To know where you are, you have to know where you come from.

So our New Testament story for today doesn’t begin with Mathew chapter 4, verse 1.  It doesn’t even begin with those other stories in Matthew.

This gospel belonged to a mixed first century community, some of whom who grew up with Jewish stories and Jewish customs.  They believed that their Christian community of both Jews and Gentiles was a continuation of the people of God, another chapter in a story that began long ago – long ago, before time started flowing, long ago in that poetic, prelapsarian paradise.  There was Adam and there was Eve and one day in the garden there came the serpent, clothed in temptation.

You were confronted there with Adam and Eve, confronted by something that promised to make you different, another person besides the you God created you to be: smarter, prettier, stronger, wealthier, younger, skinnier, less human.

The trick is that we fell for it, there in paradise.  The tempter said, “For God knows that when you eat of the fruit your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  The tempter’s taunting voice echoes today – you will be less like yourself and more like who you think you should be, smarter, prettier, stronger, wealthier, skinnier, less human.  And so they picked and ate.  No doubt when its first fresh drops of juice landed on their tongues it was tasty, but the aftertaste, oh the aftertaste.

We didn’t become more like God that day, not by a long shot.  If anything we became less – we saw our own ugliness, our tendency to blame others for our mistakes, our capacity for shame, guilt, and alienation.  The world began spinning, subject to the centrifugal force that propels us away from each other and away from ourselves into fragmented reality.  Out of the garden we fell, angels blocking the gates, thrust into a wilderness ruled by systemic forces of oppression and injustice and personal forces of insecurity and despair.

And that is where the story began, Eden, temptation, wilderness.

It’s no surprise that Matthew picks it up again, this wilderness.  In telling powerful truths about the human condition it was part of his story as it is part of ours.  So we arrive back at Matthew chapter four verse one.  “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”  There’s no Eden any more – we lost that back in Genesis chapter three and so the gospel finds us here.

“He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.”

These forty days of Lent that we just began recall Jesus’ fast in the wilderness.  Think what that would be like – alone with your thoughts for forty days.  Every mistake, every deficiency recalled, humanity stripped the core, bare, naked.  Those times you missed the mark coming up in your spirit again and again through the incessant rumblings of hunger.

Most of us run from this kind of confrontation with ourselves and our own limits.  The spiritual journey into the wilderness flies in the face of those formational American myths:

• you can do anything you put your mind to
• be all you can be
• just do it
• bigger is better

Success, security, achievement, and the pursuit of happiness mask the exposed humanity we encounter out here.  Oh to look deep into our addictions, to slow down and face who we really are – it’s tempting to avoid such a wilderness, to resist the Lenten journey.  It’s easier not to live down our fears, not to sit in mortality, or ponder that haunting line: Seattle Mennonite Church, you were created from dust and to dust you will return.

Jesus could have resisted the wilderness confrontation too.  He could have turned around, headed out of the wilderness and walked right back to Nazareth away from temptation. Temptation is a powerful part of the human condition,  after all, overlapping desire and satisfaction, pleasure and need, sacrifice and ease isolation … as we constantly seek something outside of ourselves to soothe the loneliness and find fulfillment.  It’s no coincidence that many of us pray every day the words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation…”  The testing, pushing our very beings to the limits.  Who wants to go there?

But we know the story.  Instead of turning around, our Jesus stands right in the middle of it, dialoging with the devil.  For each temptation he has a response:

• Stones to bread?  I don’t think so, for God sustains us as much as any food.
• Jump down from the heights into the arms of angels?  I don’t think so, for God’s realm is beyond testing.
• Worship the devil in exchange for the power of the greatest king?  I don’t think so, for I worship the Lord God whose isn’t about power and dominion.

Our temptations may be the same or they may be different.  They may come through evil personified, a modern day devil on the shoulder or maybe they come through systems of domination that seem benign as we participate out of habit each day.  We are tempted to bypass suffering, to win the approval of others, to justify our mistakes by blaming others or fulfill our own longings without regard for the consequences.  We are tempted by individualism, self-sufficiency, wealth, popular culture.

We are tempted to put something besides God at the center of our lives.  To flee from that wilderness confrontation, and head the other way.

And sometimes we do hightail it out of the wilderness.  We take one look at Jesus on that journey to the cross and run the other way.

And sometimes by the grace of God we don’t.

The tempter was wrong back in Eden, you see, when he said you’ll become more like God and less like yourself.  The devil was wrong in the gospel when he says that bread or power can make you whole.

Saint Augustine famously wrote: “Our hearts are restless until they find our rest in thee.”  I think this is what Jesus knew there in the wilderness – that nothing can replace God at the center of our lives.  Maybe it was easier for him with that whole incarnation thing – he was God put on flesh, after all.  But maybe it wasn’t – he was human too.

Head into the wilderness and miraculously, through no effort of our own, we begin to become more human, sharing with Jesus the hunger and weakness, our pain and his mixing together.  Despite all appearances to the contrary, this is extraordinarily Good News, my friends.

No you are not defined by your addiction or your temptation or that mistake you made last year or yesterday.  No you don’t have to take on the world or fix it either.

The truth is to become more yourself is to become closer to God and to become closer to God is to become more yourself.  The authentic spiritual life is rooted in who we are as human beings, temptations and all.  Created in God’s image, the truth is, you are already worthy.  You are already enough.  You are already loved.

Thanks be to God.

Kansas Year

Kansas is no mere geographical expression, but a "state of mind," a religion, and a philosophy in one. 

-Carl Becker, 1910

As of January 29, we have entered the 150th year in the life of the great state of Kansas.  The more sophisticated among us call this the "Sesquicentennial Year."  There are all kinds of celebrations going on in the Sunflower State and facebook pages and blogs.  My favorite is this one: 150 poems for 150 years.  Every few days the Kansas poet laureate posts a new poem, something that captures Kansas somehow. 

I haven't found any celebrations here in Seattle, but I did celebrate Kansas Day the other month with a fellow Kansan, and I have a picture to prove it.  This is my celebratory baked good, a "sunflower swirl."   

You see the resemblance to our state flower also captured in more than one of the quilted wall hangings that I own.  

I'd also like to take this opportunity to celebrate our state mammal (buffalo), our state song (Home on the Range), our state bird (the Western Meadowlark), our state reptile (the Box Turtle), and our state motto (Ad Aspera per Aspera: "to the stars through difficulties").  These are the good things they teach us in the Kansas public schools, good things that stay with us and carry us through a lifetime even here in the wild west. 

So much of my reading and thinking is about place, and really it always has been.  I think that's why I love Wendell Berry so much and why deep down I have never been at home in my transient urban life.  It's because I grew up on a generations old farm and in a state where we connect to who we are by where we are: cardinal directions, weather, fields, big sky.  It's because I will always associate work ethic, community, and faith with the homeland.

I'm not in Kansas any more as many a northwesterner has quipped when I claim my place, but Kansas isn't just about geography.  So here from Seattle, Washington let it be proclaimed that I am a proud Kansan.  Happy Kansas year to all.  

On Money

"Money isn't real." 

The other month down at God's Lil' Acre those were the words that riled up my insides.  It happens more often there than anywhere, the prophetic word.  Yes, instead of reading Martin Luther King, Jr. or a radical blog of educated, mobile young adults, the razor sharp Word shows up at a drop-in populated by folks without jobs who wear their addictions on their bodies (unlike most of us who hide ours deeper down).  Every Thursday morning for four hours I sit in that little house, that little "rehumanization center" as one of our homeless friends has called it, and I listen and learn and notice what is happening to me in the process. 

Now more than once I've had to stand up for women's rights or treating others with respect and dignity, but that's no different from any old unfortunate conversation with an overly talkative seatmate on some plane ride to Denver.  (Yes, I speak from experience.)  The difference at GLA, though is that the profound mixes with the profane, and I have to pay attention and think, and wade through frustration to figure out the difference.

Of course money isn't real.  It's a socially constructed, material phenomenon, and every Thursday I sit with folks who live their lives without much of it.  What if we did everything through a barter system, eliminating the false middle idol of cash?  What if we didn't barter but gave of ourselves, our possessions, our time freely?  What if we walked the dusty road of life relying on hospitality and seeing from the margins things that those with power and privilege cannot?  What if we followed Jesus on that journey to the cross with the sacrifice and simplicity it requires?

Recently we held a memorial service for a community member who didn't seem to notice the boundaries between himself and other people.  I'd walk down the stairs into the yard and he'd say to me, "Boy I'd sure like to see you in a bikini!"  See?  No appropriate boundaries.  But he'd also get his check first of the month and start handing out money and he'd say, "They need it more than I do."

Money isn't real.  It takes someone on the very margins of this money-drive society to name such a profound truth.  So I'm thinking it's time to start listening to something besides televisions and engaging something besides mobile devices.  Or how else will we see what is real? 

Bodies to Earth

all go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again

-ecclesiastes 3.20 

The liturgical season of Lent begins in a short two weeks.  There are many reasons why this Lent in particular promises meaning and growth.  Uncertainty is ahead and it has begun to creep into my present, with my interim pastor position ending in August and our place Seattle possibly ending too.  None of this is good or bad but it calls us to a trust beyond what has been required so far in this life.  So we enter Lent, the forty days of fasting and prayer, almsgiving and introspection, wondering and wandering,  journeying toward the cross.  

Wendell Berry often writes of limits and of knowing our place.  It is tempting, especially these days, to wrest control from the universe - to find our own solutions, to plan our own paths.  We leave the dinner table to google an answer to a question, leaving our common place for instant, fleeting gratification.  For many of us, we can neither change nor know our own future much less change or know our whole world.  For all of our living, truly we move from ashes to ashes and dust to dust.  In becoming human we are set in time and place, boundaried into an existence that we have not chosen.  So was Jesus.  In our limits and knowing our place, we keep good company.  

Lent invites us to relationship with finitude and the profound spirituality that comes knowing our bodies belong to the earth and are always returning home.  

 

The resting place of my great grandparents, Fred and Hannah (Harms) Klaassen, whose bodies are part of my own.  Grace Hill Mennonite Church cemetery in rural Whitewater, Kansas