What Easter is About

 

Luke 24:1-12 A few days ago, for the first time in 50 years, some astronauts left earth to travel to the moon. At one point on their journey, they will be on the far side of the moon. If all goes well, for nearly an hour they will be completely out of view of earth, out of communication range, in the cold darkness of the universe all alone, the furthest away any human being has ever been, with no way to connect with any person in the world. If I leave my cell phone at home when I’m heading to the grocery store, I will turn around and go back for it. What must it feel like to be beyond the reach of all that makes us human – other people, communication, the very earth itself?  For astronauts who leave the earth, something really interesting happens with a really boring name, called the “overview effect.” We’re told that seeing the world from outside of it can overwhelm a person with a sense of what the earth as homereally means, where all people are together, and everything is connected, and it’s visibly clear that the divisions and boundary lines we live with are all made up. The beauty of the whole thing can feel, dare I say, earth-shaking.   The Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart describes it this way, You realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you. All of history and music and poetry and art and war and death and birth and love, tears, joy, games — all of it on that little spot out there that you can cover with your thumb. And you realize that that perspective has — that you’ve changed. That there’s something new there. That relationship is no longer what it was. Easter can be kind of fraught. It’s both this not-at-all-religious day of egg hunts, chocolate bunnies and maybe ham, and a highly-religious day, where we say and sing a bunch of things most of us don’t entirely believe, and some things we probably shouldn’t.  We’re confronted with death right at the center of our faith, and the ugly story of the cross which carries with it so much baggage, and has been so misunderstood and misappropriated that some Christians have tried to sidestep it, preferring not to talk about things like sin and salvation, until the one week a year the cross is impossible to avoid, and then uncomfortably recite the words and sing the songs, for the sake of tradition and for the larger commitment to loving God and neighbor and trying to live a good life in a world that seems not to care much about any of that anymore, but all the while trying not to linger too long on the messy details at the heart of the narrative. And yet. This is the heart of the narrative. Our whole story hinges right here.  Christmas is easier to swallow – babies are cute, and angels are cool, and there’s less problematic imagery in Christmas hymns than Easter songs, and as scratchy and uncomfortable as hay may be, being swaddled in a manger is WAY cozier than being nailed to a cross.   But the cross and the manger are together in the story that starts with God coming in alongside us to be with and for us, taking on completely everything it means to be human, not just the cute and cozy parts. If we’re honest, being human is largely uncomfortable and confusing, and there is so much suffering involved, and to cap it all off, there is no bypassing that, no matter what, we are all going to die. That is what Jesus comes to share when he’s placed in the manger.  The cross is where Jesus takes on all the world’s evil and horror, injustice, and pain, when he was murdered by those in power—some greedy, some insecure, some hypocrites—and most everyone else who just went along with it. “Jesus died for our sin.” is what we generally say about that. But, wow, that’s a loaded sentence, and people hear it different ways. Since the ‘s’ word gets used a lot today it might be helpful to define it. Human beings were made in God’s image to love one another and this earth-home we’ve been put on. Sin is when that true order of things is violated. Whenever we degrade someone’s humanity or act against our belonging to God and all others, that's sin.  And the helpful thing about the Christian story is that it says aloud that even when we try our best to love other people or ourselves, or be the good we want to see in the world, very often we are the greedy, insecure hypocrites. And that collectively, sometimes humans are lovely, but often, we can be awful. Most likely we will keep hurting each other and ourselves and harming the planet, and if the future is all up to us things are not looking great.  All our fear and dread, all our worry about our country, or our kids, or our jobs, or our health, or brutal, needless wars, or people being crushed under the boots of the powerful or cast aside as worthless, the cross says: it is as bad as you think it is, and it’s ok to call it that.  And, as bad as it is, as bad as it gets, as bad as it might ever be, we are not alone in this. God came in alongside us and took on all of it with us and for us, all the way to the cross. Jesus died for our sin. God is notwatching us from a distance.  So the death of Jesus means something. But Easter is not really about the cross, it’s about the empty tomb on the other side of it. And that changes everything permanently. It’s worth noting, that when the tomb was found empty, even the people who most closely followed Jesus didn’t suddenly think the whole world had changed or even believe at first that he had risen. They didn’t magically feel compelled to live in a different way. They were stunned, and afraid, and accused each other of lying. In fact, Mark’s gospel has three endings because people were uncomfortable leaving it alone at the most ancient version, which is, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” The most toward faith these first resurrection witnesses can muster is amazement. There is no great epiphany or belief, and definitely no celebration. They simply didn’t know what to make of it. How could such a thing be? It’s not until the living Jesus encounters them that they see things for what they are: Everything has changed. The relationship is no longer what it was. There is no going back. The resurrection means that the pain we suffer and inflict, that horrors we witness or ignore, the damage done by and to us, the powers that dominate and oppress – all these things, in other words, sin and death is not the final word over the human community or this beloved planet.   This world belonged to God already, but when God came into it alongside us, heaven and nature sang. And when Jesus died our death, no longer can anything separate us from love. And when he did not stay dead, the end of the story is decided – life, not death, is what prevails. The relationship between humanity and God, this world and God, has been settled once and for all. The final word is love. Love is where it’s all headed and love is all that will remain.  You and I are not arbitrarily born, making our way by ourselves through a complicated world, doing our best while things around us crumble and decay, and hopefully we have more moments of happiness and sadness, hopefully we dodge the big suffering, and hopefully we manage not to hurt others too badly along the way. And then one day we die anyway, and in a generation—or two if we’re lucky—we disappear completely from living memory and that’s the sum of it.  No. We are made for love, each one of us unique, every person part of the fabric of all things held together in love. We are bound to all others who are also here to love, in a world made for love, living inside time, which is made for love. And we participate in God’s loving and healing of the earth and its people, occasionally in extraordinary, supernatural ways that may leave us amazed, but mostly in the absolute ordinary stuff of life: conversations, tears, laughter, listening, play, rest, work, tending the earth and neighboring our neighbors. The living Jesus is right here, every day, doing this through us and for us. And when our time on this little blue and white ball come to an end, this bond of love that holds us to God and all others still does not break.  If we’re willing to let it, Easter can be offer us the ‘overview effect.’ The little window through which we glimpse the big picture of what the earth as home really means, filling us with gratitude and wonder for the bigger reality we often forget or can’t see when we’re living within all the turmoil and conflicts of our made-up divisions and boundary lines. But we can’t do that to ourselves any more than we can shoot ourselves into space to see the world from the outside, or decide to never sin again.   Resurrection doesn’t mean anything until the living Jesus encounters us. What we can do is show up in our lives, however messy or hard, uncomfortable or confusing things may be, because this is where Jesus is now too. But even if we are not showing up in our lives, even if we’ve cut off communication completely, turned our back on what makes us human, and find ourselves somehow in the farthest cold reaches of loneliness, not one of us is ever beyond the love or grasp of God. There is nowhere we can go, nothing we can do, that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Jesus pursues us, has gone to death and back for us already, and will never stop inviting us deeply into our own lives. The Holy Spirit will never stop giving us specific opportunities to live in God’s love with and for the people here with us. God is persistent, and our defenses may not be as strong as we think they are. And besides that, God can bring healing or hope through us when we don’t even know it’s happening, and even seems to delight in doing so.  We don’t get to exempt ourselves from God’s love. But when we are open, when we assume a stance of least resistance to what we cannot make happen, when we surrender to being found, or freed, or forgiven, how much more joyful life becomes to know our lives are participating in redemption and hope! Mystery invites wonder, the stranger is sibling, and love meets us in the depths of our suffering. “The power that raised Jesus from the grave now works in us”, freeing our hearts to live in God’s grace, helping us love our neighbors, ask for help when we need it, apologize when we’re wrong, forgive when it’s impossible, join together to oppose evil, daily participate in the good God is always pouring into the world, take in the beauty, live awake to the love that holds us all, and die without fear. Christ is risen, everything has changed and there is no going back. Amen.

How our story begins

Genesis 1-3 (we're using a paraphrase from The Peace Table story bible)

Episode 1: The Beginning

On a walk to the park this week with the 12^th graders from my daughter's school, the German foreign exchange started excitedly pointing and laughing at a row of yellow school busses parked together. She whipped out her phone and snapped photos to show her friends. How American! 

What is “American” culture? High school proms and hot dogs? Hollywood? Infighting? As Americans, are we connected to a shared history or cultural identity that we feel comfortable naming or claiming or can even agree on? (To be fair, our nation isn’t even 250 years old). 

 

Even if you are someone with a strong connection to your particular heritage and cultural identity—like Joyce and Norm and their the Czech Hall, where in two weeks we could all go eat kolaches that Joyce will help make, and hear Czech songs and watch Czech and Slovak dancing—as modern people, more tuned in to our newsfeeds than our neighbors, it's easy to feel these days like we are rootless. How many of us know stories about our grandparents’ parents (or even their names)? In this day and age, each one of us, it seems, is now carving out a life for our own selves from the endless buffet of options. To navigate this super confusing and overwhelming life, we turn to WebMD, YouTube how-to videos, Amazon reviews, and political commentators. 

How do we really know who we are? Where do we turn to remember whose we are?

 

Today I want to remind you that no matter what else is true about who each of us is, we are all people of a deeper story that extends beyond time. We belong to a tradition, ancient and broad, spanning the whole globe and stretching thousands of years into human history. Like all family trees there have been rotten branches, tragedies and trials, happiness, healing and hope.  Among our shared ancestors are villains and heroes, poets and prophets, but mostly ordinary women, men and children whose lives and choices became part of our legacy. 

 

And this is the book of our story. The Story. The biggie. The story of our faith, our ancestors, the tradition that holds us and the God who came in to share this life with us. 

 

This book is messy and it’s confusing, because it is super ancient, and we have so little in common with people who lived so long ago. We don’t even understand how they tell stories, or why, so sometimes we read this book like it’s trying to make us do something, or think something, or coach us on earning God’s approval or avoiding God’s condemnation. 

 

But really, this is a family scrapbook. In this book a whole bunch of different people, in different places and different times, experience in different ways, who this God is and what God is up to in their lives. So, in this way, we also have lots in common with the people in this book. Because we get scared too, and we don’t like feeling weak or vulnerable either, and we tend to think we are not worthy of love, and we compare ourselves to others, and we turn our backs on people who need us, and we wonder what a good life is and how to live it, and we forget whose we are and who we are all the time, just like they did.

Our ancestors told the stories, and shared the poems, and recounted the battles, and prayed the prayers, and sang the songs that made it into this book, because doing these things reconnects us to whose we are and who we are.  

 

But this is also more than a book. It’s a glimpse into a story that’s still going on right now. Christ has risen and lives in and through us, so this book helps us ask who God is and what God is up to here. And we trust that when we read it, the Holy Spirit speaks to us, and helps us hear and see the God of our ancestors right now.

 

And, like any story, the beginning tells us right away whose story this actually is. It all begins with God.  

From nothing, emptiness and impossibility, in the dark, God creates.

God doesn’t paint a still-life and hang it on the Almighty wall. God sets in motion an interconnected eco-system of energy and synergy, plants and animals, days and nights, tides and seasons, creeping things and flying things, microscopic and cosmic geometry and color, joyful peace and noisy harmony. 

And every time God makes more, God looks at it all and calls it good. Ooh! That’s good, and that’s good, and that’s good too! This life is good! Goodness is the beginning and the reason for it all. Our tradition gives us the word Shalom – wholeness, peace, in the complete belonging of all things to God and each other. 

 

When God finishes making everything and calling it good, God rests, and calls the rest good too.  In Shalom, God hangs out with creation and just enjoys watching life be itself.

 

So the first thing we know is that the story of us begins with God. And this world is good and life is for enjoying goodness with God. 

 

Our Peace Table story bible does a great job giving us the gist. But if you decide to read along in the Bible you will see in that in these three chapters we’re looking at today, Genesis actually has two different stories of creation. 

 

The first one we just saw: God creates, God calls it good, night and morning then another day, makes more stuff and calls that good too. In this one, human beings are the pinnacle of creation, made last, and made in God’s image to share in God’s care for all the rest of it. Humans are invited into the work of God and also the rest of God, as agents of shalom.

 

In the second version of the beginning, human beings don’t come last. The human creature comes before the rest, held in God’s very arms with life breathed into its nostrils from God’s own breath.  And this earth creature is there to watch God finish creating, gets to see the plants and trees grow right up out of the ground. God places the creature in a beautiful garden - here is the home I made for you, for you to live in and care for.

 

Then God chooses to be vulnerable. The uncreated Creator loves the earth creature and invites the human to love God in return. But in order for a yes to really be yes, there has to be a no as well. Is it love if there is no other option?  So, among all the fruit trees of the garden, God puts one tree the human must not eat from.This is the boundary I set up; here you do not cross. 

 

And then God notices it doesn’t work for there to be just one human. There needs to be another, a partner, “a helper” it says, the way God is a helper (same verb in the Hebrew).  For there to be the image of God there needs to relationship, like there is relationship in the Trinity itself, so God begins creating animals from the dust, forming them and bringing them one by one to the earth creature– what about this one?

And whatever the human names the animal, that is what it becomes. Side by side, God and human, creating and naming. And as much joy as there is watching the rest of life come alive, there is not another creature that can be a fit for the human. 

 

So God causes the lone earth creature, literally this adam, from the earth, adamah, to sleep. Then, instead of from the dust, God takes from the material of the creature itself and forms another – like it, but different. And now there is male and female, sameness and difference, together reflecting the image of God that couldn’t be reflected in one solitary earth creature. The old creature has ended, and the new creature awakens to belonging, and they are named Adam and Eve. They are both naked and not ashamed. They are fully themselves with God and each other, with no desire to be anything other than who they are, no fear or mistrust, and no reason to hide. They’re together in shalom, in the goodness and belonging of God.

 

Now we return to the part of this story where fear comes in and mistrust begins, when the snake convinces the humans that God can’t be trusted, and suggests, why not be in charge like God instead of living as creatures who belong to God and each other? So they cross the boundary of God’s care and do the one thing God told them not to do.

 

Now they really do know it all: all the potential for things to go wrong as well as right, all the places for pain and lies, all the ways we are different and could hurt each other. And they get scared, and sad, and worried, and jealous, and suspicious. Trust is broken. Filled with shame and fear, and they hide from God. 

 

But God never lets go. God never gives up.  God even has compassion for our shame. God meets us where we are and gives us what we need. So, God calls them from their hiding and clothes them. Like a parent dressing a child in jammies before bed, God wraps them up in love and takes care of them.

From the very beginning, and no matter what, we are God’s beloved. And in all of our beginnings and no matter how we might turn away from God or try to be God, God keeps taking care of us and God’s story of Shalom keeps going. 

 

When we go to school and to work, when we stop working or finish school, when we are young and when we are old, when we feel secure and when we feel lost, when we feel connected and when we’re ashamed of what we’ve done, when we care for others and when we break trust, when we remember and practice our belonging, and when we let fear tell us who we are and whose we are and we hide from God and each other, no matter what and always, God holds us in love. 

 

Our story starts and ends with the real, living, present God. 

You and I are people of Shalom, meant to share in God’s care for the world. We belong to a God who takes emptiness and impossibility and brings life out of nothingness and light into darkness, and invites us to rest in the goodness of God. This reality is our root system, our culture, our shared language, and the lens that shapes how we see the world. Let’s keep telling each other our story.

Amen.

As simple and alarming as that

 2 Corinthians 5:14-21

When we moved into our house 19 years ago, we found a stash of letters from the 1940s tucked into the eaves of the garage. They were short, unsigned and cryptic, mostly asking for money and promising not to write again, and in our minds we made up a sordid story a secret affair followed by years long blackmail. The truth turned out to be far more tragic. The man who had lived in our house his entire life had a photographic memory – according to our neighbor who knew him later in life who would ask the man directions to obscure places and he could tell her off the top of his head from having seen a map. During World War II he served as a CIA agent, and when he left the service, they did experimental electroshock therapy on him so he wouldn’t remember the secrets he knew. It worked so well he forgot his family, and his wife and twin daughters left him. He lived alone and reclusive for the rest of his life, every few years a letter arriving, asking for money, and promising it would be the last time. This isolated man hid these letters away in an unfulfilled yearning for reconciliation that never materialized.

I tell this story for two reasons. The first is that reconciliation is the longing within us all. To be in right relationship with God, one another, and with our own selves and the world we live in is what we’re made for. And when we are alienated from this connection, we cry out to be reconciled, whether or not we know that’s what we’re doing.

The second reason I tell this is that having one-sided letters, with gaps between them at that, invites imagining stories. But when the person writing is very long-winded and detailed, like the Apostle Paul, it’s much easier figure out what the story is. Today we read from 2 Corinthians, which is Paul’s fourth letter to the church in Corinth. The first and third are lost; the second we call 1 Corinthians. 

I find it a tiny bit delightful to imagine the other two letters  one day discovered hidden in the cranny of some ancient cave.  Because Paul, who is human, got pretty peeved with the Corinthian church. They’re this savvy, diverse and cosmopolitan group of folks who tended toward arrogance, petty squabbles and blatant misbehavior, after many of them met Paul in person at his first visit after planting the church some years before, their high opinion of Paul evidently plummeted. They insulted him and questioned his authority. Paul was the kids say, “butthurt,” (translation: dramatic, over-the-top, offended), and vowed in anger not to visit Corinth again. 

His missing third letter Paul called his ‘painful letter.’  So, maybe it’s good it got lost. Nobody wants screenshots going around of their text fight with their spouse, or to be caught on film throwing a tantrum at their kid in public.  Let’s just say, only two Corinthian letters ended up in the bible as the trustworthy and authoritative word of God. And we know that at some point – some think in the middle of writing this letter - the Corinthians apologized to Paul, ejected the troublemakers, and they were reconciled. 

 God’s love is what’s real, it’s where our hunger points, our longing originates, and our purpose finds its fulfillment.  But we’re so easily knocked off course from being connected, or reconciled, to God, our deep selves and each other. The desert mothers and fathers from the 3^rd and 4^th centuries were the first to unpack how everything we’d call sin can be grouped into two piles: either aggression or greed, that is, either “a reactive and excluding fear” or “the urge to consume and absorb.”   

If we view the world through resentment and rage, shaped around narratives of victimhood and blame, we will live guarded and hostile, alienated.  If we view the world through competition and self-advancement, striving for bigger and better, or more unique and singular, always trying to be somewhere—or someone—that we’re not, we will live hollow and famished, alienated.  There is no end to ways we can turn the ditches of aggression into yawning chasms, and the potholes of greed into slippery caverns of alienation. 

But, as Rowan Williams says, 

Love is what happens when you stop being aggressive and greedy, and stop to look with your whole self, from the centre of who you are. It’s as simple and alarming as that.

Love has room to flower when you stop either pushing reality away or making reality serve your purpose. In that space, love grows. God…whose life is the ultimate definition of love, has neither aggression nor craving in the divine nature. God is not afraid and God is not greedy. It sounds blindingly obvious, perhaps, put like that; but if we say that the love of God is, in the divine life, the same thing as the absence of aggression and greed, this ought to make us think that perhaps it tells us something of how love works and fails to work in us too. (Passions of the Soul, xxxiii).

God, in love, already claims us and is reconciling the whole world to Godself and each other.  But we humans are wobbly, weak, and easily distracted. And to complicate things, we live in what Williams calls, ‘an entire human environment where, bizarrely, mysteriously, saying no to God feels easier than saying yes.’

So we are to both take sin very seriously, and also have compassion for ourselves and each other around it. Walking this human path, we can’t not tumble into the ditch of aggression and faceplant in the pothole of greed, and striving to avoid them becomes just another way of stumbling into one or the other. What saves us is only God’s grace.  

This is what I kind of love about 2 Corinthians.  Whatever aggression or greed filled Paul's painful third letter, there’s plenty of both left over for this one. But even though he uses parts of this letter to prop himself up, he also admits to it. He keeps throwing himself back on the grace of God and letting himself be reoriented to the real, and then reorienting us there too.  We see him living in real time what he is also teaching: that we have died in Christ and been raised to Jesus’ complete connection to God and all others, and so even though we keep succumbing to these temptations, they are not ultimately what define us or direct our lives. 

It reminds me of the story told by desert fathers and mothers of frustrated demons shuffling dejectedly through the desert, complaining that they can’t draw the monks into sin, but neither can they force them to anguish over their sin. When they try, the “‘great, old men and women’” just say, “‘Of course I’m a sinner! So what! I rely on the mercy of God!’” (Williams, 16) and go back to seeking a reconciled kind of life, that is, praying, serving others, practicing living from and for love in ordinary, unimpressive ways.

So what are we to do? Paul demonstrates in his fourth letter the simple but profound prescription of the desert monks that left the demons shuffling dismally in the wilderness, once we recognize we’ve stumbled into sin we’re to be honest about it, hand it over to God, and get on with our lives. Literally, that’s it. 

We don’t wallow in it. We don’t dwell deeply on our division, examine extensively our fears of one another, ponder relentlessly our selfishness, or probe exhaustively how appalling we’re convinced we are. We have died to sin and been raised to new life. To act as though, by the might of our own understanding, the strength of our own efforts, or the force of our own egos, we could pull ourselves out of sin and alienation, is just to fall back into it.

Whatever exciting or bland ways ‘our reactive and excluding fear’ or ‘the urge to consume and absorb’ is being expressed in us in the moment, we’re to look honestly at it, give it over to God, then we simply get on with it, whatever it is that God would have us get on with. We pick up where we left off, practicing living from and for love in ordinary, unimpressive ways.

God reconciled the world to Godself in Christ, and does not hold our trespasses against us, Paul says. Which is to say, God does not look at us with disgust or condemnation and neither is God convinced to love us because we are so impressive or interesting. God’s view is that we are inherently loveable. Like a new grandma stunned by her tiny grandson who does nothing yet but eat, sleep and poop, utterly loved for simply being and nothing more.  God holds us in love, and transforms us by grace to do the same for one another. 

So from now on we regard no one from a human point of view. When we’re resting in God's affection for us, it’s impossible to view others with hostility or fear. Instead, we find ourselves participating in the reconciliation of Christ, becoming instruments of God’s love, ambassadors of reconciliation. When we know ourselves to be held in love, we will love others. 

 So, we live our lives, in the moments we’re in and the people we’re with. We sin, we confess, we give it to God, and we go back to seeking a reconciled kind of life. Because to be in right relationship with God and one another is what we’re made for. It’s the longing within everyone, and the boundless gift of God in Christ, for us all.

Amen.

(I'm grateful for Rowan Williams' Passions of the Soul for the  direction of this message and insights about the desert fathers and mothers!).

Again, For All

Matthew 15:29-39

There is a skill to storytelling. A way of drawing on what people know or suspect to build suspense, working with the element of surprise, saving the exciting part for the end, not telling the same story less impressively just a few minutes later... 

So maybe it’s not a surprise that after having been ordained for 17 years, and a Christian my whole life, I was this week old when I realized that there are two separate feeding a multitude stories. I guess I wasn’t really paying attention, and assumed one gospel told it with 5000 people, one with 4000, they had their reasons, but it was the same basic event.  

But no. The feeding of the 5000 appears in all four gospels. But in both Matthew and Mark a few chapters after that story, there is a whole second feeding-a-hungry-multitude-with-a-few-loaves-of-bread-and-a-couple-fish story. 

Why in the world would you tell it all over again, with less impressive stats? Even if it actually happened twice, why say, oh, and then he did that whole thing again.

Perhaps that is how Luke and John, the lectionary folks, and every Sunday school teacher I ever had felt, because nobody ever retells the 5000 story with 4000 people.  

Except the bible does.

 

Why?

 

We are going slowly through stories of Jesus this summer, so we can linger here a bit.  Several weeks ago, when we talked about the feeding of the 5000, we saw how it came fast on the heels of the news of cousin John’s (the Baptist’s) murder, and Jesus was devastated, and tried to go be alone but the crowds sought him out and in a day of connection and healing, abundance and hope, they were all reminded that far beyond the power of a petty and murderous king is a kingdom of love without end unfolding even now among us.  

 

Then Jesus went off by himself- and found his solitude and space to grieve, as one deeply grounded in his belonging to God and all others. He met up early the next morning with the disciples, who went directly from an exhausting day of impromptu, large-scale event-hosting to an exhausting night fighting to stay alive in a raging storm until dawn when Jesus walked out to them atop the choppy waves.  After the failed water-walking attempt by Precocious Peter, Jesus quieted the storm, and they complete their journey,  pulling up their boat onto gentile shores, where the preaching and healing begin again. 

 

Then we met the Canaanite woman, who, with whopping courage and a witty comeback, refused to take Jesus’ rude no for an answer, and after praising her persistent faith Jesus heals her daughter.  

 

That catches us up to this moment.  We are three days into another mass healing event, when Jesus—who must have an impish twinkle in his eye when he says it—tells the disciples he wants to feed all these people out here in the middle of nowhere because he doesn’t want them “fainting from hunger on their way home.”  And the dear disciples, who are nothing if not predictable, respond, But Jesus, where are we to find food for so many when we are so far away from everything?

 

Gospel means “good news.” And every part of scripture is oozing with it. Good news is leaking through the details, rising up between people and reaching out to you and me even thousands of years later. 

 

And the gospels apparently want us to know that, no, this feeding 4000 right after feeding 5000 no memory slip, or sloppy second-telling, this is its own event, and Mark and Matthew both see it worth telling.  But to be honest, I almost skipped it. We just heard a story just like this.  

 

I had planned to jump to the next chapter, where Jesus gets into it with his disciples for not getting a clever bread-related analogy he is making about the Pharisees, except in that chapter, he says, basically, What is up with you guys? How can you think I am speaking about actual bread right now when you’ve just witnessed me feed 5000 people with a couple fish and five loaves of actual bread, and then shortly after that, 4000 more people with some fish and seven loaves of literal bread? 

 

What IS up with those guys? And what is up with Jesus doing an encore show? Is it because it went so well the first time? Were the people clamoring for a greatest hits moment? Did Matthew and Mark lose their storytelling chops?

 

So I circled back. 

And I found the good news.  First, I want to tell you what some scholars like to say. Then I want to tell you what I needed to hear.

 

Scholars like to point out that the first miracle uses the number 5 – five loaves of bread, 5,000 people – and Matthew’s uber Jewish audience would have immediately thought of the five books of the law of Moses, the Pentateuch, (Genesis, Exodus, and so on) – giving this story some grounding and gravitas. Add to that then, that there were 12 baskets of food left over and they’d connect that to the 12 tribes of Israel, and think to themselves, yeah, this is our kind of story. There’s a solid continuity, a through-line with the God of Israel and the people of this God.  Jesus must be the Messiah, right?

 

But now, just a few days later, Jesus is no longer in Jewish territory, no longer preaching to Jewish people. He’s in Gentile lands, coloring way outside the lines, and not only did Jesus just give faith props to a cheeky Gentile woman who talked back to the Messiah, but, what?!  Jesus is repeating the special, abundant-feast miracle that he had just done for God’s chosen people, here, with these strangers, these others.  They have not grown up on the promises; they were not waiting for Messiah; they have not faithfully worshipped Yahweh through the centuries, and now they are praising the God of Israel too. Do they even have any idea what they are really receiving?  Maybe it’s like knowing you were mom’s favorite and then overhearing her tell the dopey neighbor kid that they’re her favorite too. 

 

Not only that, but (the apparently better-than-I-first-thought storyteller) Matthew decides to throw in some number nods here at the gentile multitude feeding too, with the seven loaves of bread and the seven baskets of leftovers. Not only is it a recollection of the seven days of creation, the origin of all humanity, but for both Jews and Gentiles, seven was the number of completeness. Matthew is telling the story of Jesus to the Jews – Jesus comes from us, is one of us, is here for us – but the story doesn’t stop there, Jesus comes to us all, comes for us all, is here to redeem us all. Nobody gets to claim him as their own personal savior – Jesus is here for the whole world, and through him, all people belong to God.  All people belong to God. 

 

So, yeah, there’s definitely some gospel busting through there. But here’s what’s cool about the gospel, and the bible: the good news we hear is usually the good news we need to hear. And we don’t all need to hear the same thing at the same time. 

 

And what really grabbed me this week is the dummy disciples.

 

What is up with you guys? He asks them later on, in chapter 16. Did you not just see me feed thousands of people?  Twice?  And he might as well add, Did you not watch me walk to you on top of crazy huge waves, and tell a wild storm to pipe down? As person after person for days and days on end has come in desperate need and found healing and hope, have you not been right here by my side watching it all happen? 

 

Oh my goodness, but I can relate. I believe God loves me unconditionally and some people do too, and yet I constantly try to make myself worthy of love and act like my value depends on my competence. I know there is nothing I can do to avoid suffering or prevent pain for those I love, or keep them always safe, and yet I strive for control, and make an idols out of security and the good opinions of others.

 

I love God, and I want to follow Jesus and share in what God is doing in the world.  But I get persuaded by the power of the storm and immediately start to sink. I get frustrated with the annoying stranger and ask Jesus to send them away. I get overwhelmed by the daunting task and the vast need, and wonder how we will feed all these people, with resources, way out here in the middle of nowhere. Even when I have just experienced God’s love, or seen God provide, I get scared and worried all over again like it never even happened. I stop trusting.

 

When faced with our brokenness, our need and our fragile, dependent humanity, we default to self-protection and fear, instead of leaning into our belonging to God and others. The shorthand word for that tendency and the behavior that it produces is sin. It’s the deep internal forgetting of God’s goodness and our humanness and the love that holds and calls us toward God and one another. Sin is inside me, but here I see it in the disciples too.  

And when we recognize sin in us, we to like to think it must disqualify us from participating, or the shame might crush us, or we will lose our belonging, or our place, or God’s love.  But all it gets the disciples here is some tender teasing, and an invitation back to trust. 

 

Because all people belong to God. And Jesus has come to break us free from the grip of sin and the power of death. And where the world is most broken, where I am most broken and in need of healing, where the need feels impossibly huge, that’s where Jesus brings forgiveness and healing.

 

Forgetting, being reminded. Doubting, trusting. Fearing, flailing, then trusting again. That’s how faith lives in us. The disciples were excited and impatient, terrified and skeptical, wobbly and unsure, and that’s how we participate. 

 

Beyond all the forces outside us and within, is a kingdom of love without end, unfolding even now among us. It floods the scene with abundance and hope, and is received alongside stranger and friend in connection and healing. This reality is not created or sustained by you and me, and nothing we do or don’t do can stop it, not even death. And there is no limit to the reach of God’s love and so no end to how often this story can be told: 

Jesus looks on us all with compassion, and will not send us away hungry, but instead becomes for us all the very bread of life. 

 

Amen.

No Condemnation

Devotion for Being Apart -
July 12

This summer, I will share new devotions from time to time,
and invite you to browse through devotions that have been posted at this blog.

Romans 8:1-11

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.  For the living reality of connection and life through Christ has set you free from the way of fear, disconnection and deadness.  For God has done what an ethical framework for a good life, weakened by our division and selfishness, could not do.  By sending Jesus, God-with-us, to share humanity with us to deal with our brokenness and division, God condemned this disconnection from God and each other, so that we might actually live in right relationship with God and each other.  We live not led by disconnection, fear and self-centeredness, but guided by our deep and secure belonging to God and each other.

For those who live in the way of fear are consumed with pursuits that bring disconnection from God and each other, but those who live guided God’s Spirit focus on the things that reflect our belonging to God and each other. To live in the way of Fear is to live as though dead and toward death, but to live in the way of God is to be truly alive and to participate in life and peace.  For this reason, the mind that is set on selfish pursuit and discord is hostile to God – it does not submit to God’s reality – indeed, it cannot, and those who are living toward disconnection and selfishness cannot please God.

But you are not in the way of fear, disconnection and deadness, you are in the living reality of connection and life through Christ, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.  Anyone who does not live in this way of life guided by Christ’s Spirit does not experience this reality. But if Christ is in you, though death and discord still affect you, your deepest reality is your aliveness and unshakeable connection with God and each other.  If the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead inhabits your life, God—who brings life from death—will bring life to all the places of deadness in you, by the Holy Spirit who is in you.

(paraphrased by Kara Root)

I wonder what Paul would think of our culture today.  When he says, “There is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” I think, Sure, Paul, but have you seen us?  We are condemnation experts, condemnation ninjas—fast and skillful, stealthy and lethal with our condemnation talents.  We’re experienced professionals at condemning each other; and sheer geniuses at condemning ourselves. We dole out condemnation for what we do wrong, what we forget to do, and for what we do right if it’s for the wrong reasons. 

We can even time-travel our condemnation – we condemn people for things they said or did years ago, or for not coming clean in the present about things they said or did years ago, and we condemn ourselves for not knowing then what we know now, or even not knowing yetwhat we may know eventually. 

We actually wake up and go into the world ready to condemn. From the mildly irritating in our own homes to truly evil in our country, there are disagreeable people everywhere doing appalling things, and we are primed to notice and ready to condemn them.  

And we even help each other practice!  Social media is filled with videos of people behaving badly that some helpful agent of condemnation recorded and shared online so the rest of us can condemn this person too.  

We’d probably have to sit Paul down and explain it to him. Paul, dear, modern people believe it’s our right, in fact, our duty, to “call out” others.  And those who have done something especially offensive to us or awful to others should be rigorously condemned, which we today call, “canceled.” It’s like saying life really would be better if this person didn’t even exist.  

This puts a lot of pressure on us.  Judgment is a problem for us, we’d tell Paul.  Our culture says “Don’t judge,” because to judge is to condemn, isn’t it? We can’t imagine that it would be otherwise. So we all live a bit terrified of being judged by others because their judgment has some kind of power to erase us or dehumanize us somehow.  We’d explain that if he were going to live here with us, he’d have to strive to be “non-judgmental,” while also being quick to condemn religion or ideology that seems judgmental, and simultaneously not hesitate to immediately judge and roundly condemn those who judge and condemn others, while insisting he’s not judgmental. 

But here’s our problem: we are wired for judgment. We need good judgment to make good decisions. We have to be able to size up situations and immediately make judgments about danger or safety, about whether something is trustworthy or untrue, about the best way to respond to someone in need or react to someone’s request. Human beings need judgment. In fact, those with poor judgment or no judgment don’t often live very long.   

So we can’t really escape judgment, nor, apparently, should we. But clearly, where there is judgment, there is condemnation. And here we are, participating in the whole cycle. Just trying not to live in self-condemnation won’t keep that from happening, and it’s impossible to try not to judge each other.  Especially when so many people around us are complete morons.

We are stuck. Paul told us last week, there’s nothing we can do to get unstuck. Just knowing what’s right doesn’t mean we’ll do it, and besides, getting all caught up on doing it right is another way of being stuck.  We keep living in ways we don’t want to live, and not living how we do want to live.

And then he tells us, There is now, therefore, no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 

In Christ Jesus, God becomes a person, just like us, with us.  God affirms personhood by taking on personhood.  The One who made human beings in God’s own image enters in and shares our place as a person, and so in this way God makes personhood the place of holy encounter with the Divine.  Every time we condemn others or ourselves, we violate the fundamental belonging to God and each other that defines us as people.

The law, a strong ethical framework, cannot save us – it is so weakened by our division and selfishness. The law makes us better at condemnation.  But by sending Jesus to share our humanity, to enter into our brokenness and division, God exercised the power to condemn, and what God condemns is not you or me, not vast groups of people, or people who do certain things or don't believe certain things. God does not condemn people at all; God affirms people.  What God condemns is our division, our broken relationship with God and each other. God condemns the things that take away our personhood.

And so, Paul can say with confidence, and so can we, that there is now, therefore, no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.  No condemnation. Not of myself, not of others. Dehumanizing others and dismissing them as worthless, overlooking those in need, calling out and labeling people as monsters, idiots or enemies - that will not stand. That has been put to death in Christ.  That is sin, which God condemns. That is ignoring their personhood, their humanity, when those people belong to God and to us.  And that way of being doesn’t control us any more; we’ve been set free.  When we are in Christ Jesus, Jesus’ connection to God and each other is now ours.  God makes it possible for us to live in our complete belonging that cannot be shaken.

So there is no condemnation for us, or in us, or through us, because condemnation has been condemned, and we have been made alive to belonging.

This achieves a remarkable thing—it separates condemnation from judgment.  It redeems the purpose of judgment. It restores something to the law and makes it a means of grace.  The judgment of God comes in grace – it comes to us as persons and calls us back to our personhood.  God’s judgment reveals the places of death in us or between us so that God’s Spirit can make us alive.  We can receive judgment instead of fear it – it uncovers our failures, our jealousy, pride or self-hatred.  We can even judge ourselves with God’s judgment, without condemnation.  This judgment comes with grace that meets us in our stuckness with the possibility of healing and transformation.  

You and I can walk into a situation and use judgment to see what is hurtful and what is good, what sows division and what affirms connection, because we see people as people.  We must judge, so we can celebrate the things that affirm life, so we can join the things that bring peace, so we can live in our true connection to God and each other.  But we must remember that in Christ Jesus there is no condemnation, except the condemnation of our disconnection from God and one another.  So we live free from condemnation, and reserve condemnation for the things that strip people of their personhood.  We are free to notice and judge when our own behavior is dehumanizing to others, so we can change it. We are free not to participate in a tragic culture of condemnation. We live in a different reality; we practice our belonging. 

What an invitation, then!  Whenever we feel the urge to condemn—whenever we feel judgment lead us toward the temptation to see anyone as less than a beloved child of God, less than our sibling in this life—we are reminded that not only is condemnation not a right, it’s a violation of personhood, ours and theirs. We are in Christ Jesus, and there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 

Instead, the Holy Spirit makes us able to look at each person with compassion and curiosity, to look again until we can see their personhood, to look until we can recognize the humanity underneath, and say here is a person who shares my humanity. Here is one of God’s beloved, with the same feelings and needs that I have—someone who gets lonely, sad, or desperate, someone with loved ones and dreams and hopes, someone who has suffered, perhaps someone whose behavior at the moment is what NVC calls a “the tragic expression of unmet needs,” or makes southerners say, “bless their heart.” We are not permitted to dehumanize anyone, to dismiss or strip humanity away from anyone, not even ourselves.  We are those who are set free to live into our belonging, bound in Christ to live into the belonging of God.  For us there is now therefore no condemnation.

Amen.

Can't seem to get it right

Devotion for Being Apart -
July 5

This summer, I will share new devotions from time to time,
and invite you to browse through devotions that have been posted on this blog.

Romans 7:15-25

Paul's letter just got awkward.  The renowned teacher has been talking about God, and the church, and big ideas about faith, and now he’s suddenly talking about himself. But he’s not saying things he's proud of, he’s talking about what he’s not proud of – where he feels helpless or lost.
It’s a little too personal, like he’s had one too many, and the deep down feelings are coming up and, we want to say, Paul, dude, it’s ok, and try to get him back on track to with the big ideas. Or tell him to save it for his therapist’s office.  Besides, instead of good news, this kind of feels like bad news.  Or like he’s telling us this bad news to set us up for some good news, but we’re clearly not there yet.  It’s uncomfortable to stop here. Let’s get to the gospel!

But one thing we Presbyterians believe about scripture is that it’s all gospel - It’s all good news, even the “bad news.” Each time we open the bible, God can speak truth to us.
So we’re sticking here today with Paul’s personal lament about knowing the difference between good and evil, and even wanting to choose good, but watching himself choose evil anyway.  An inner battle between sin and the law.

Just before this part, Paul explains that the law of God is good – it shows us how God designed human life to work best, connected to God and each other, so it’s a gift to us. But once we know, we are also suddenly aware of how often we choose not to live that way.

It was easier not to know right from wrong, just to be selfish or ignorant of the ways we contribute to disconnection and brokenness.  Doing harm to ourselves and others because we didn’t know better, feels better than realizing all the harm we’ve done.  And worst of all is knowing, and continuing to do it anyway.

And once we start to have this awareness, we often look back at our previous self, or at those who are where we were, and feel disgust or contempt.  How could we have believed what we did, done what we did, said what we did?

I think about this when it comes to language.  Imagine we’ve just learned that a word or phrase we’ve used a lot is racist, which is to say, it contributes to brokenness and disconnection.  First of all, with that new awareness comes shame and regret, for having used the word.  Now we have the law, in other words, we know this phrase is bad and we add it to the list of words we should not use.  This is a helpful list, it guides us toward respect for others, so we are on board with the law.  We can see how life would be better if everyone followed the law and avoided the words on the list.

Now having been given the law, we are awake, and aware in a way we were not before. So when we hear other people use the word or phrase we know should not be used we get upset, angry.  We tell them they should not use that word or phrase.  They, perhaps, are not under the law yet, have not been converted to see how that word or phrase causes harm, so they tell us to back off and mind our own business, they can talk however they want.  Well, that makes us even madder. So mad, in fact, that we call them some words and phrases off that list.  But that’s ok, because they don’t deserve respect because they are refusing to show it.
Now we are trapped right back in sin  - only this time, we are contributing to brokenness and division knowing better.

Or to bring it closer to home, I know how I want to treat my children, I have read all the books and articles that give me clear guidance for the parenting I believe in and choose to practice. But in the moment of flared tempers, or exhaustion, or frustration, all that goes out the window.  And I can see myself behaving in ways I absolutely do not believe in.  O wretched mom that I am!

Knowing what is wrong isn’t enough to keep us from doing wrong. The law itself can’t set us free. In fact, it first makes us more miserable.  Now, having this second, awakened self within me, I can turn and look at the yelling self and say, What are you doing? This is not how you should be acting! And that feels awful.

We are not slaves to sin anymore – we are not helpless to those urges that are self-serving or divisive, we are not ignorant of our behavior and its impact.  We agree the law is good! We delight in the ideals we stand for – that everyone would be upheld and respected, and we could work together and listen to each other. Of course this is how we want to live, we say.  But that doesn’t mean we do it.

The law can’t save us, Paul says. In other words, awareness, being woke, knowing what’s right, recognizing the difference between good and evil, this doesn’t keep us from doing evil. It can’t ultimately fix what’s broken.
The law is good and necessary, but it also creates one more thing we can become a slave to.  We go around policing each other, and living in harsh judgment of ourselves, thinking change can come from just more knowledge and insight.  Of course knowledge and insight are important – they move us forward. But the place we’re moved to first is a greater awareness of our sin, of the ways we are trapped. The law illuminates our need for something beyond us to save us, because, wow, it’s all so much worse than we realized.

The big good news is coming in the next part of this letter, but the little good news of this part is that if you feel hopeless because you’ve done so much work and learning, and tried to change, and keep feeling stuck, that’s normal. It’s actually good. You are actually on the way of transformation.  We, as a nation, in a new reckoning with our history and systemic racism, are on the way of transformation.  People starting AA, facing their addiction, are on the way of transformation.
Awareness of how bad it is, and how trapped we are in repeating the cycles of destruction or dehumanization again and again, even generation after generation, is part of how we are set free.

And here Paul models for us what we can do with that: We can confess it. We can repent of it.  We no longer say, “I didn’t know!” Instead, we say, “I knew, and I did it anyway.”  We can speak boldly of our sorrow and shame; we can claim our guilt as part of our story.  We don’t pretend we are perfect, or even enslave ourselves to the quest to be perfect. We confess our brokenness. We draw closer to the pain instead of trying to flee or fix it. We let ourselves say the deep down feelings that are coming up; we tell the uncomfortable truth.

This Christian life is a life of deep honesty.  And the hardest things to be honest about are not the things we did by accident. They’re the times we hurt others on purpose, or went against what we believe, or lied to protect our reputation, or turned away from someone instead of acting for them.

So instead of pretending we don’t need saving, and covering up or making excuses for the brokenness and division we contribute to, we can face it and tell the truth about it.
And instead of thinking the law can save us, we can admit how hard it is to realize how very far away we are from the goal, and how trapped we feel by the ever-increasing list of rules for doing it right, and how it can even can make more judgmental of others and ourselves.

In other words, instead of avoiding doing what’s right, or obsessing about doing it right, we confess. We repent.  We tell the truth about it and grieve it. We join Paul in the discomfort, and let ourselves feel how hard all this is.  And we boldly acknowledge that we need someone from outside this mess to save us.  Wretched person that I am, who will rescue me from this body of death?  Paul says. Then his outrageous and hopeful whiplash declaration, Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Hear the good news: We can't get it right.
Amen.

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before we go to bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we can pray in this way, and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:

A good way to end the day might be with an adaptation of the prayer of confession from worship:

God, I pause at the end of this day
to let my awareness catch up with me.
I can see the sin and brokenness within me.
I don't turn away, but welcome that awareness now,
and name now those places in us me, where I long for your healing and wholeness...

Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy. 

And God, as I think about my relationships, with those close to me, and those I don’t know so well, I welcome awareness of the sin and brokenness between us.
Into all the ways I act as though we do not belong to each other, bring your healing and wholeness, especially....

Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.

God, I welcome awareness of the sin and brokenness around me. I lift up those places in my community, my country and your world, where I long for your healing and wholeness, especially....

Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.

Hold me in your forgiveness.
Speak to me your peace.
Rest me in your grace. 

Amen.

Imperfect Together

Daily Devotion - June 4

I will send a brief message each day (except Mondays)

while we are pausing gathering in person.

- Kara

This morning I read this article: “Paternalistic Racism of Nice White People.”  

  

I recognized myself, both because I had this messaging in my own upbringing, and also because I contributed to groceries that day at Sanford Middle School.

Here’s the gift of this time. Discomfort. Confession. Recognition of the sin (another word for division from God and each other) that has a hold on us, sin we join in without realizing it.  

Also, I do not regret sharing groceries.  The call came from the community and it was something I could respond to.  

A risk of this time is that we try so hard not to do it wrong that it could paralyze us.  We live in a time when we tell each other what to do, what to think, how to act, what to say, and then we are terrified we’ll do, think, act, say the wrong thing and get called out. 

When I get caught up in this, it helps me to return to some things I know are true: 

• God made us to be with and for each other. God intentionally created us diverse and different from each other, each single person unique. We ALL belong to God and we ALL belong to each other.  
• Sin / the Way of Fear / systemic evil tells us we have to earn our way, some lives are of higher value than others, we are in competition, there is only so much  - voice, justice, respect, resources – to go around, so we have to decide who gets it and who goes without.  These are lies.  
• We believe the lies most of the time. Even when we are trying to do right in the world, even right in the middle of it, we are often believing the lies.  The response is not to judge ourselves for not getting it right – that’s part of the lies too.
• We will never get it right.  It’s not about getting it right. It’s about being a human being alongside other human beings. 
• Being human is vulnerable. It feels uncomfortable a lot of the time because it feels risky, scary, weak.  
• The greatest strength we have is when we are in our most honest place of weakness, when we can receive each other and allow ourselves to be received. We can actually live our shared belonging.

Sin would have us do the wrong things, or the right things for the wrong reasons, or nothing at all because we are so afraid of doing the wrong thing.  It’s a game with no winning.  But the game is false.

As the above article so beautifully said, 

Part of the trouble with the Paternalistic Racism of Nice White People that has been a part of my own experience, is that white people assumed we were to serve as saviors. A quick mistake all of us often make when attempting to change this is to reverse it. And quickly we look to the first black person we're in relationship with to be our savior, to imagine that now instead, it's their turn to save us. 

Part of being a Christian, for those of us who are, is knowing that there's only one Savior, and that's Jesus. We shouldn't make gods of others just as we can't make gods of ourselves. So in working to build relationships, to create a more equitable community, we have to remember our shared humanity first. White people don't need to save black people, and black people also don't need to save white people. Jesus promises to save us all.

And, 

My vessel is imperfect. I was born in a culture that taught me to sin, and into a family that also taught me to love. In this imperfect jar I can lament my imperfections or I can whitewash them and cover them up with good deeds and nice words and passive aggressive utterances of racism. 

Or I can stand, blemished and unblemished, at the foot of the Cross. I can try to tell the truth. I can try to work harder for justice. I can hand off the microphone. I can build authentic, honest relationships with white people and black people alike. I can confess my sin, I can be forgiven, and I can forgive others.

I’d add to this – and so we can forgive ourselves.   

There is never a pure motive or a completely perfect approach, and we are actually not called to that. We are called to know ourselves to be sinners in need of saving. (Remember what salvation is? Wholeness.). And we are called to see each other as children of God.  

We are in need of being restored to our wholeness – to live consistent to our belonging to God and each other. We can’t do this for ourselves, and we can’t do it for each other. But we can come alongside one another in our brokenness and confess, and listen, and offer care to, and be willing to receive care from, each other. When we do that, God restores us to wholeness.

As for the Sanford food drive that requested 85 bags of food for their impacted families, the school called in The Sheridan Story, who took over distribution of the food to the whole impacted community.  Because while Paternalistic Racism certainly plays a huge role in our lives as Minnesotans, and is undoubtedly woven into what’s happening when white Minnesotans from outside the most impacted areas respond, the other thing that is happening is whole communities coming together, across perceived boundaries of culture, race, city lines, income, and religion, and trying to support each other, drawing on the strong networks and organizations who have already been bringing us together and know how to do this to help guide us.

Here’s the update from The Sheridan Story:

We have distributed most of the food from the food drive at Sanford Middle School on Sunday out in the community.

This was one of the biggest food drives we've ever seen… and perhaps one of the largest-ever in Minnesota. In less than a day, we estimate that over 2,000 families were served. Our amazing community came together, some waiting in line approximately 14 blocks long, to provide a total of about 18 semi-trucks of food. Of these:

•  3 semi-trucks of food were distributed to families the day of the food drive
•  4 semi-trucks of perishable food went to our friends at Loaves and Fishes and Minneapolis Public Schools Culinary and Wellness Services
•  4 semi-trucks of non-perishable food went to us
•  7 semi-trucks have been re-routed to additional collection and distribution points throughout Minneapolis

God uses whatever we give.   

Even while seeking to make us more real – to remove hypocrisy and sin from within our hearts – God calls us to join in our belonging to each other right now. 

To believe we have to earn the right to live in this belonging by making sure we’ve rooted out all sin, or racism, or brokenness from ourselves first is also sin / the way of fear / the lie.  

(By the way, this is the gift of seeking to be “anti-racist” as opposed to the false notion of  “not racist.”  Racism has infected us all; it’s in our un-thought thoughts, and we all operate inside its strictures.  But we can acknowledge its hold on us and also act deliberately against it.  This is a great resource to learn more about anti-racism).  

We can help each other. We can seek to see and hear each other. We belong to each other. Each of us can participate in whatever ways we can, in what God is doing in our communities, city, state, nation and world, to bring wholeness and healing into all our brokenness and division.  We can be imperfect together.

One more message from The Sheridan Story:

POP-UP FOOD DRIVE

As we continue to distribute this extraordinary show of support for those most in need, we hear both the need for food and the desire to help. The calls are loud and clear!

We are collecting donations of food and other essential items at our warehouse.

• Where: 2723 Patton Road, Roseville
• When: Monday - Friday from 10 am - 2pm
• What: Non-perishable canned food, rice, pasta, diapers, wipes, feminine hygiene items, and baby formula
• How: Follow the food donation signs and you'll be able to drop off items in tents we've set up in our parking lot. 

All of the donations we receive will be re-distributed to our community partners in neighborhoods across the metro as quickly as possible!

THANK YOU for showing the positive power of what our community can do together!

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CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:

I seek your presence, O God,
not  because I have managed to see clearly
or been true in all things this day,
not because I have succeeded in loving
or in reverencing those around me,
but because I want to see with clarity,
because I long to be true
and desire to love as I have been loved.
Renew my inner sight,
make fresh my longings to be true
and grant me the grace of loving this night
that I may end the day as I had hoped to live it,
that I may end this day restored to my deepest yearnings,
that I may end this day as I intend to live tomorrow,
and I intend to live tomorrow.
Amen.

- J Philip Newell, Sounds of the Eternal