Alleluia in a time of fear

This year I have missed the snow; there is something about how it shifts perspective just enough to see things anew. I live across the street from a cemetery, and in the winter when the trees have lost their leaves you can see it in a way you can’t in the summer.   Usually the gravestones blend in to frozen winter mud, but today they stand in stark relief against the white ground.

I will miss “our” cemetery when we move to Pittsburgh—it’s where our kids learned to ride their bikes without training wheels and where we go to find puddles to jump in after rain storms. And I’ll miss the daily reminder of death: not an absence of life, but as a marker of transition, life beyond life. Each stone is its own warren of stories of heartbreak and loss and love and hope. As a priest, I love Sunday Eucharists, but funerals will always hold my sacramental heart most firmly. As we commend the dead to God, we declare against all odds and evidence to the contrary, “Even at the grave, we make our song, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” Each of the stones across the street from my house carries its own alleluias.

As it is our job to hold our alleluias high in times of death, so it is in times of fear, and we’ve got plenty of fear now. I don’t really think of myself as particularly patriotic.  My mother is Swedish and even after almost 50 years in this country still hasn’t chosen to become an American citizen, so I was raised with a certain degree of skepticism at the exceptionalist narrative that is sometimes taken for granted. But complicated times bring out complicated feelings, and over the last months I’ve felt more American, not less.

I had this sense most powerfully a few weeks ago at the funeral for a parishioner when military representatives came to present the flag to his widow. I often have mixed feelings about this. In addition to my sometime-ambivalence about patriotism, I’m a pacifist; I believe that war is contrary to Christian practice. Service and sacrifice, of course, have their own beauty, in any form.  The folding of the flag, the saluting, the playing of Taps—it’s as liturgical as anything we do on Sunday.  There was something so lovely about it as two young men of different races (one white, one Latino), stepped into this ritual beyond politics or ethnicity or any other identity.   I had such a sense that our country is bigger than the fear and prejudice that seems to now to be holding the day.  The American ideals of equality and justice are betrayed—all the time. But they are still our ideals. They are still what every  veteran offered themselves for and remember during that same ritual with the flag.  We might all disagree with any particular detail of how to accomplish our ideals, but there they are. My other teary-eyed flag moment came shortly after the end of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, when for the first time I saw a flag handed to the same gender partner of the person I was burying. George and Frank were in their eighties and had lived together as “friends” for many, many years when George died.

So continued gratitude for this strange country, for love, for justice. Even in the midst of all the graves and all the contradictions and all the sorrow and anger and confusion, we make our song. Alleluia.
 

Release to the captives and freedom for the oppresssed

November 10, in response to the Trump election This morning I’m writing in gratitude for the community we share, and in hope for our God who works wonders. Last night we gathered for Eucharist in the choir, about twenty of us, praying for the vulnerable and the afraid, reminding ourselves of God’s great providence and grace. The gospel text I chose for the day was of the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry as told in the Gospel of Luke: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,    because he has anointed me      to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives    and recovery of sight to the blind,      to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Jesus announces that that prophecy is fulfilled in him, that as the people gather there they are seeing the good news brought to the poor and release proclaimed to captives.The oppressed are free and the blind are given sight. Jesus goes on to do those things—healing, saving, transforming. The love of God in his life was so strong, so brave, that nothing could stop it, not even death. Hearing those words, we remembered together that the mission of the church is that same mission. Like Jesus, we occupy the place between the truth of God’s power and love and the truth of our broken and fragile world. In God’s dream of transcendent peace, Muslim women aren’t afraid to wear their veils while walking down the street. Immigrant kids don’t worry that their parents will get deported. LGBTQ people don’t worry their marriages will be dissolved. White supremacists don’t get air time next to legitimate political actors. We rest in that dream, at the same time as we live in a world where all of those things happen. One particular heartbreak and inspiration yesterday was reading the letter superintendent Echelson sent to faculty and staff of Waltham schools. Immigrant students are wondering if they should drop out of school, he said, to start making much money as they can, worried they’ll get deported. Arabic speakers are afraid for their safety. Echelson wrote, “Our students, particularly those students who might not feel safe right now because of their immigration status, perceived religion or any other variable, need us to show up for them.” This is the transcendent, im/possible place: the place of the cross before the resurrection. The love of God is already showing up on the cross. The love of God is with the gay kid getting beat up and the woman being sexually assaulted. The love of God is incarnate in the mosque on Moody Street, at Temple Beth Israel, at St Mary’s and Sacred Heart. The love of God is showing up in Chaplains on the Way, at AA, at the Community Day Center. The love of God has always been there and will continue to be there. There are places where it hasn’t yet been born, but it is there. Our task as people of faith is to be midwives, to stand in support and accompany God’s love into the world. We can do this: to bring that love to the desolate places, to have the courage to speak love to the dark abyss. To show up. That is our mission no matter who is president, no matter what prejudice seems to become acceptable. That is our mission, too, to those who disagree, to whom we are still bound in faith and love, who no less need the gift of God’s love. Blessings, Sara+ (P.S. My sermon from last night is on soundcloud.)

Easter is an altogether different kind of fact.

We’re pushing 5 weeks of Easter now, almost to the end. We’ve gotten through the empty tomb, “side wound Sunday” with Thomas, and eating fish on the beach.  This past Sunday, the raising of Tabitha in Acts for this Sunday and Jesus talking about his sheep hearing his voice.  All kinds of encounter with Jesus trampling down death.  All kinds of truths, all kinds of people trying to figure it out for themselves.

In my vacation week after Easter, I visited the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, where an exhibition of the artist Walid Raad who, the ICA tells us, “informed by his upbringing in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990), has spent the past 25 years exploring the ways we represent, remember, and make sense of history.”  The exhibit is full of things that are “true” in different ways—in a conventionally factual sense maybe or maybe not, but still true. It also holds a not un-pointed critique of American naiveté, which the Boston Globe’s art critic Sebastian Smee grapples with brilliantly in this review.

In all of my preaching this Holy Week I felt confronted by the wideness of the view of our new stations of the cross, as I wrote here in March. The Raad exhibit asks a similar question. How much are we willing to see? What lives, in the words of writer Judith Butler, in her book Precarious Life, are actually “grievable?” The crucifixion of Jesus only, or also that of the criminals on either side? We can have all kinds of lovely ideas about Jesus and compassion and justice, but if we don’t see those put to death next to him, that’s a pretty thin participation in God’s love.   Any metric of our faith depends more on those criminals and on those in our world now than on Jesus himself.   Too often, we don’t see them, and the American tendency toward tidy narratives and easy answers is literally fatal to those who fall in the cross hairs of our foreign policy.  One of the series of photographs is of shell casings Raad found as a child growing up during the civil war in Lebanon. My kids find Easter eggs; the world that he grew up in is plainly un-imaginable to them. 

In the middle of the Raad exhibit there’s a wall of images where visitors can leave their own categorizations of facts as tending toward one of three categories—emotional, aesthetic, or historical. Easter, it occurred to me, is a different kind of fact altogether.  Factually, the tomb was empty. We can offer explanations about what happened, conjecture about resuscitation or body theft or, even, true resurrection. But the empty tomb is only understood in confrontation with that space of death, at the same time confronting how it becomes a space of life. That transformation, though, doesn’t happen in our heads: the tomb can be empty or not empty, the body stolen by grave robbers or raised by the almighty power of the living God.  The transformation happens in our lives, in our own lives and that of our communities.

I’m not persuaded intellectually that “Christ is raised from the dead and that death no longer has dominion” (Rom 6:9). I have come to believe, day by day and week by week, in what I have experienced and seen of the risen Christ. I don’t believe because I’m afraid of the alternative, of heaven vs hell or joy vs some cartoon of eternal punishment, I believe because I have tasted it and heard it and walked with the truth of the resurrection and I know that that dead don’t always stay dead.   (My sermon about Tabitha is here). It’s not a historical fact or an aesthetic fact or an emotional one. It melts the categories and then knits a scarf out of them.

Just as, or even more powerful than any belief in resurrection, though, is the invitation toward resurrection. I am doing the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace through Dorchester to stand with victims of violence and to go, bodily, in my part of the risen body of Christ to be one with the risen body of Christ of the city.  I am writing Governor Charlie Baker to advocate for full inclusion of transgendered people because the risen body of Christ is a female body and a male body, and a neither, both, between body. All of these encounters with the world are encounters, also of the peculiar kind of truth that Easter is.

So there it is, again—more questions than answers, more labyrinthine steps than journeys  completed. Thanks for reading.

Grace in the gaps between us: Christmas 2015

 Grace in the gaps between us

One of the best known stories from the Christian scriptures is, of course, the story of Christmas. Whether rendered in plastic or clay or straw or glass, you can buy a nativity scene almost anywhere. You don’t have to be a Christian to recognize this old, old story, and have your imagination caught by its meaning: even in these dark days of winter, hope endures, born in the form of a tiny child. Jesus brings together heaven and earth in tiny newborn hands.  I love that we in the cold Northeast receive this gift at this hard time of year.

Looking more closely, though, we also have the opportunity to invite a closer look at the Christmas story, the part that you can’t see in those manger scenes.  Like everything, it’s more complicated than it looks. Here’s the trouble: the Bible doesn’t say just one thing. There are four different accounts of Jesus’ life, and each one says something different about where he came from and why his life was important.

The shepherds only show up at the manger when the author of the Gospel of Luke tells the story. The magi, wise ones from the East, visit Jesus after his miraculous birth takes place in a house (in the book of Matthew). The Gospel of Mark mentions not one word about Mary as visited by the Holy Spirit or Jesus’ birth—he just starts off right away with Jesus’ ministry as an adult. The Gospel of John offers a fourth account, talking about Jesus not as miraculously given to Mary, but the one through whom the whole world came to be, the Word of God. No manger or house, in that one, no Holy Spirit and a young girl, or her profound declaration of “yes” to God.

So what gives? Why couldn’t the church have gotten its stories straight? With something as important as the birth of the one we call our savior, shouldn’t we at least have one answer about where he came from? We can try to harmonize the accounts like we do in our greeting cards, but I think we miss something when we impose an order that’s not there. Those shepherds are important, but not the whole story.  They symbolize the birth of God at the margins, in the outcast—the pregnant homeless teenager. Those wise ones, coming from the East, symbolize the universal nature of God, the fact that sometimes truth is recognized by those outside your own kin.   We need shepherds and kings, cosmic Christ and Jesus just appearing out of nowhere.

I don’t know how these many different stories sounded to the earliest Christians, but I believe in our world now the message of these different ways of believing couldn’t be more timely. In a world rife with religious strife, what we all need most is some humility.  We need, crucially, to remember that it could be otherwise—there could be many truths, many different ways to understand.  God speaks many languages and tells many stories to God’s people.

As an Episcopalian, with my planned-out worship in a big stone church, I need to remember that the storefront Pentecostals also know Jesus. As a Christian, I need to remember that my Muslim brothers and sisters also know One God, Creator of heaven and earth.  I need to remember that in my human mind, I can’t know how all the stories come together: not the stories of my own faith, and not where those stories touch the sacred stories of others.   I need to remember the mystery of love, and the grace of God that fills in the gaps between us.

  

Printed in the Waltham News Tribune Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2015.

More Christmas is here--listen in on my sermon from our service at Christ Church on Dec. 24!

Wild Goose Festival 2015: some light reading on jesus, anti-racist work, humilty, and salvation.

I’ve written several versions of this post trying to get to the bottom of what, exactly, I was doing for my time at WildGoose Festival last week.   First I wrote a very tidy “what I learned on my continuing education time” post for my parish newsletter. Then I wrote an uber-confessional piece for this space, and finally managed to put them together.  I’ve been noticing a lot as I’ve blogged more here how my Respectable Lady Rector voice differs from my Free Range Mama Priest voice. So what follows is the result of trying to bring them closer together (and is also with a few edits basically what I sent to the parish).


Trying to share a weekend of gathering with people in the North Carolina heat, a tent revival with real tents (for people who don’t go to tent revivals) it’s easy to share links of what I saw. Information is one thing. But the experience isn’t about data.  The incredible part of it was the amazing sense of how God was working in the lives of the people I met and listened to.   Every person I heard had a deep sense of Scripture. I did the math and I’ve preached at least 400 sermons. I know some things about the Bible. But the way that Mark Charles,  a Navajo activist and educator, talked about how white settlers in the Americas lacked a “land covenant” with God to guide our relationship, or the way Bree Newsome talked about how Jesus worked for peace, not order, or how Tony Campolo talked about the love of Jesus moved in his heart to advocate for GLBT persons in the evangelical movement—literally, OMG.


I worked pretty hard to get my spirituality to fit into the Episcopal Church box. I came to this church, which I love, through sacrament and mystery and astonishment at being fed in the Eucharist, and that was enough fuel wading through the muck of HE-god language and hierarchy and institution. I have often had occasion to remember a conversation with my bishop, Tom Shaw,, when I was first studying to be a priest. I went on this long rant about how much I hated the patriarchy and insularity and pointless attachment to history and tradition of General Seminary. Very patiently, buddhalike, he listened to all of it and finally said, “Well, how is that different from the church you’re eventually going to serve?” 


13 years later, I think I’m glad to say that the rest of the church where I have found myself is totally not as uncomfortable as I was at General seminary (with apologies to all those happy GTS-ers out there).  However, the side effect of all of that squeezing and prodding and poking into more traditional forms was that it came to pass that my faith was most comfortable in a very abstract articulation. I could love the big ideas of the incarnation of God in Jesus and the sweeping movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives.  But that’s my theology. My passion for Jesus is more in sacrament and symbol. It's a lot less clear than "Ok, Lord, I’ll climb that pole.”  I’d be afraid to climb a flag pole just for the sake of the height, much less risking arrest and the legitimate possibility of being shot. But Bree Newsome pointed out that Jesus was mostly just in the Temple when he was knocking things over. He was out in the world doing his ministry where God called him to be.


So that’s my real invitation from Wild Goose Festival.  Where am I muting the invitation of the Holy Spirit because of fear? Where am I unfree from a disordered attachment to comfort? In church, in my family, in my prayer?  How often am I willing to do the hard work for genuine, holy, peace?  To learn from marginalized voices, not because it’s my “duty,” but because Jesus is there. It’s very comfortable to say that “education” is the key to success and social mobility, and that’s often true. But where we need to lean harder on education is for people like me who don’t get arrested for failing to use a turn signal, to learn what we don’t know.  As a person of privilege in this country I can be like a fish in water and not have to understand what water is.  But that is not the way of Jesus.

A white anti-racist response has to come from humility. This country was founded on the theft of land and came to economic dominance through slavery.  It is coming toward democracy, and is founded on some amazing ideals of freedom and equality that are coming toward being for all people. But those ideals aren’t a reality for all of its people.   The inspiring part, though, is that if the truth really will set us free—and I think we have to believe it does—is that we are all on our way to the vineyard. Some will be on time, some will be late, and some will be really, really late. (I know someone made this reference at WGF and I don’t remember who it was). But as Episcopal priest Paul Fromberg said in his talk on “An apocalyptic of peace:” I don’t believe in progress. I believe in salvation.”

As a Christian I, too, believe in salvation.
 

The Death Penalty: Wrong Now, Wrong All the Time.

This week, I’ve been praying around sin—appropriate enough for Lent, of course—but in particular around criminal justice as well. The trial of Boston Marathon bomber  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, of course, is impossible to ignore, and on Tuesday I was also drawn into another case through a colleague in Georgia.  Georgia was set to execute Kelly Gissendaner, convicted for her role in the murder of her husband. In her time in prison, her life was changed; she studied theology and began a correspondence with the theologian Jurgen Moltmann, ministered to her fellow prisoners and was, by all accounts, completely changed. Her story was a compelling one; Georgia hasn’t executed a woman in more than fifty years, and her story of conversion and compassion reminded me of everything we want to believe about human nature. We can change and we do change, even under difficult circumstances, even living through the consequences of the depth of our sin.  

 

For our Tuesday night services, we’re using a Eucharistic prayer from the Church in Scotland which contains this line:

Lifted on the Cross, [Christ’s] suffering and forgiveness spanned the gulf our sins had made.  

To which, of course, I would add—Christ’s ministry, and suffering, and forgiveness spanned the gulf of our sins. What I like so much about this phrasing is the visual metaphor—our sin separates us from God. We can sense that God is there, that there is hope and joy and forgiveness—but we can’t get there on our own.  That gulf of sin is not intractable.  God has already bridged it. But I need to acknowledge it as there, because without the awareness of sin, I slip into thinking that I’ve got everything figured out. Not because Jesus died as some blood sacrifice for my guilt, but because the crucifixion is a mirror of reality.  Twelve year old kids getting shot by police who are supposed to protect them, immediately seen as suspicious because of the color of their skin. Muslim women being harassed (and worse) for wearing headscarves. Synagogues defaced.  The Charlie Hebdo massacre, girls kidnapped in Pakistan and Nigeria for going to school. The Marathon bombing. Human trafficking.  The crucifixion happens every day.  When crucifixion happens, how do we respond? 

Too often, we lash out with more violence. The death penalty is a prime example of this. The old Biblical injunction “an eye for an eye” gets quoted a lot, but in its initial context, that was intended to minimize punishment, not maximize (we might also recall that Jesus said some things that un-did that logic). Kelly Gissendaner wasn’t executed, after all—after thousands of petitions  and phone calls to the governor’s office, the prison said that the drugs for lethal injection looked “cloudy.”  Maybe if all the petitions and phone calls hadn’t been made, she would have still been put to death; I don’t know.  She’s alive, though, and that is a blessing. 

In Massachusetts, no one has been executed since 1947, though governors and legislatures have tried to bring it back a number of times.  The Tsarnaev trial is a federal one, so even though our state doesn’t have the death penalty, federal prosecutors are asking for it and most of the defense, at this point, is around convincing jurors that mitigating circumstances make Tsarnaev less culpable of his crime. 

I’m not on the jury, so it doesn’t really matter whether I think Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is guilty, not guilty, or somewhere in between.  I do, though, think it matters what all of us think and do about the death penalty itself. (It's probably worth noting that my opposition to the death penalty in all circumstances would have disqualified me from being on the jury at all). I signed the petition for Kelly Gissendaner because I was moved by her story.  I’m glad to know about her and I’m glad she’s not been executed. But the death penalty isn’t about how good or how bad the defendant is. The death penalty is about what kind of society we create. And that’s about all of us.   If we promise to respect the dignity of every human being every time we baptize someone, that includes the possibility—even the certainty!—of how those human beings fail.  We are always bound by those vows, no matter how we think we can justify breaking them.