Birth Announcement

 Some of you know that for the past four years I have been working on a book. Some of you have nudged me along with your supportive cajoling, and buoyed me through with grace when the gestation was longer and more arduous than my own impatience imagined it should be. It turned out to be just what this book needed to become what it was meant to be. So thank you, friends.  And thank you, Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church who recognized this calling and offered accountability and encouragement throughout - this is their story too.

I'm so pleased to announce that The Deepest Belonging is coming out June 1 and is now available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop (independent booksellers).  

Where does God meet us in this life? Rooting Christian faith in joy, freedom, and trust that God interacts with us in this life, The Deepest Belonging: A Story of Discovering Where God Meets Us invites readers to walk through surprising doorways--weakness, vulnerability, smallness, rest, and honesty--into a new perspective of the Christian life and the role of the pastor.

Kara Root draws wisdom from three compelling stories, all about finding freedom on the other side of fear. In one thread, Marty, a member of the small congregation Root serves, learns that he is dying. In the second, Root finds that her once-invincible faith of assurance and answers collapses.

These stories come together in a third, when the congregation does a unique and counterintuitive thing: it commissions Marty to a "ministry of dying." By embracing instead of fleeing death, Marty, this community, and Root herself are infused with life through shared experiences of God. They learn to be vulnerable and brave. They discover--again and profoundly--an unguarded faith of wondering and watching for God's presence.

This is a book for all pastors and church leaders, as well as for those disillusioned with Christianity and the church and longing for something more real and honest. It explores questions such as: How does God meet us? What is church for? What is a pastor? What does it mean to be truly human?

The Deepest Belonging is a call not to resist but to embrace our vulnerability. As a move away from religion seeking security, protection, and influence, this story invites individuals and congregations to return bravely to the core of our humanity: our belonging to God and one another.

PEACE: Living the Permanent in the Temporary

ADVENT 2 

2 Peter 3:8-15a

Sometimes the drama of some of our scripture writers can feel like a bit much, especially in the genre known as apocalyptic literature – something we don’t recognize readily in our time.  Both Jewish and Greek apocalyptic imagery is used in this letter - chaos, destruction, fire and earth-shaking power and upheaval that we find hard to stomach but would have been familiar to those receiving this letter. (I like to imagine a first century person trying to make sense of our sarcastic banter-filled romcom genre).
 
When we struggle with how to read something in the bible, it helps to come back to our question, Who is God and what is God up to?
 
God is bringing about a future, this letter tells its recipients, in which there is a definitive and dramatic end to evil. 
 
Apocalypse in the Greek means to “uncover, reveal, lay bare, or disclose.”  Apocalyptic literature often paints scenes and stories of destruction that tears open the status quo to bring God’s justice and peace by first exposing and revealing all that is for what it really is.
This is good news if you’ve got nothing to hide.
 
Everything done on this earth will be disclosed, we’re told – no powerful secrets, no profiting on the back of the weak, no back room deals, no human degradation, systemic injustice, no abuse or destruction will prevail, all arrogance and greed and cruelty will be revealed for what it really is. 
 
And God is generous and patient with us.  God’s preference is that that everyone let their life and heart be put back in alignment to God’s way of love and connection, so that none have to face the condemnation of judgment. But the bottom line message is that evil will not go on forever, there is an end to it, and what will remain is the very essence of God in Christ – love and belonging goodness, and connection that is stronger, deeper, wider, eternal, and cannot be broken.
That’s what God is up to.
 
Like many people before us, in many times before this, we, now, are in apocalyptic times.  There is a great upheaval and change, things are being revealed, laid open for all to see, and through the chaos and struggle something is coming on the other side of this that we are not yet in.  It’s painful, confusing, and the ground beneath us feels very unstable.
 
And one paradox in apocalyptic times is that when people don’t feel peace, we tend to work against it. In our desperation for security we scramble for footing and we end up pushing away the very thing we long for most.  These times are ripe for conspiracy theories – they’re a way to feel powerful and know “the truth,” so predictably, right now we can see them everywhere. And these times are also filled with invitations to demonize each other, demands to pick sides and pass judgment, to define battle lines and destroy enemies. 
 
Friday on the PBS NewsHour Mark Shields said, “…the first thing I learned when I came to Washington [is] that you don't question the motives of somebody on the other side, that they love their country and their children as much as you do. And they may be mistaken, they may be ill-informed, they may be illogical, but you don't start off with, ‘they're evil.’”
Now we start off calling each other evil.  And when we don’t even hesitate to label each other as evil, we open the door for evil. We downplay evil and open our hearts to welcome in wider division, deeper hatred, greater revulsion toward our human siblings – we make it ok to threaten others with violence and destruction.  We cease to live in our true identity as those who belong to each other and to God. And when we stop seeing others’ humanity we begin to lose our own humanity. 
 
If this is our starting point, how can we ever find peace?  
 
This brings us to our second question. This letter is written to a community struggling to figure out - what is a good life and how do we live it? They were dealing with dissention and strife on top of persecution and suffering, and while people were peddling conspiracy theories among them, they were wondering how to tell what’s true.
 
“Scoffers are going to scoff” the letter says earlier, exposing with colorful language those whose greed and deception are on full display as they manipulate and lie and take advantage of others for their own gain, undermining the message of Christ. But, when we are stirred up, divided and afraid, exposing lies for what they are just entrenches us further in our division.
 
So, what do we do? How should we live? Peter answers: We should live like God’s reality is really real. Live in peace.  Anticipate God’s future with our lives.
 
Remember last week we said: Hope is trust in the future that doesn’t come later.  And it comes not from within us but from outside us- from God. And that we get to hope through contagious patience, through acknowledging our need, naming the despair and waiting for God’s arrival there. 
Hope is what fuels peace.
 
But while hope meets us from outside us, peace is something we can make. Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the peace-makers.” Peace is the experience of life as God intended - everyone belonging to God and belonging to each other. It is Shalom, completion wholeness – of you and me, of creation, of society, of life. So blessed are the wholeness bearers, the rift-menders and pain-sharers, the unity-rememberers and future-forecasters.
 
Peace-making is not weakness, capitulation, burying your head in the sand.  Peace is the strongest, truest form of life –that God created us for and is leading us to. Peace outlasts all conflict and chaos. 
So the most powerful thing we can do in these times is to be peace-makers. 
 
But that means we must first be grounded in peace. 
In challenging and uncertain times, without peace ourselves, we will feel threatened and overpowered by chaos and fear, easily persuaded that we should rise up and fight dirty.  The way of fear convinces us we are in an urgent, constant, competitive battle - for the soul of our nation, for the future of our church, for the honor of our family, for the integrity of our position, for our own well-being and survival, whatever it is, the stakes, we’re told, are life and death.  So we are justified in contributing to the division and pandemonium, because we tell ourselves that if we don’t, then evil –evil ideology, evil decisions, evil policies, evil practices, let’s face it, evil people will win.  
 
But, there’s another way.  If we fueled by hope we can be rooted in peace. And hope tells us that nothing is hidden that won’t be revealed, that evil will not stand, that love is stronger and permanent, that all brokenness will be healed and all injustice and wrong will be made right, and the future that doesn’t come later consists of peace, God’s wholeness, and we can right now live from that place. 
The Holy Spirit is here, now, already doing that work. It will not end.
 
We are made free. We need just to let go our crazy tight grip and trust that.  We can see each other through eyes washed by grace, hear each other with hearts humbled by belonging, reach out to each other with compassion stirred by recognizing the powerful motivator fear wreaking havoc, that needs love to cast it out. 
 
We can embody that love by sharing each other’s suffering, standing with one another where Jesus is - in our shared vulnerability and weakness. We can live our unity, even in disagreement and disappointment. We can sink into our own forgiveness and walk around forgiving excessively.  We can welcome, and welcome, and welcome each other, all others, welcome this whole wide world in all its pain and beauty and let it break us open to welcome it some more, without end, and without fear of losing anything, because we are already found in Christ. We can be people who contribute to wholeness and home, calm and solidarity, people who invest in cooperation, and highlight goodness, and attend to wonder, and celebrate joy, and add harmony whenever, and wherever, and however we can.  We can be at-peace peace-makers.
 
Making us into this is also what God is up to.
 
Heads up, though: When we live that way in this climate, we will get pushback.  
It might look to some like we’re not on “the right side.” 
 
We’re not. 
There are no sides. That’s fear talking. 
 
So look past the rhetoric and the noise. See the tender, fearful hearts of our human family members. See the longing of the tired earth and the anxiety of shaky governments and uneasiness of the apocalyptic moment of revealing that we are standing in and, hear this promise today, children of God: 
 
Evil will not prevail. God’s peace will one day be all in all.  
 
So pay attention. God is doing this in the world. And we get to be part of it.  
By the Spirit of God moving through our own words and actions, you and I can actually help bring that peace into this life now from the future that is coming. May it be so.  Come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.

HOPE: Contagious Patience for a Future that Doesn't Come Later

 ADVENT 1 

Isaiah 64:1-4

Hope doesn’t come from us. It doesn’t come from what we do, or how things are going. It’s not wishing, or propping up expectations or anything shallow or flimsy like that.  Hope comes from outside us, reaches from before us and stretches beyond us. Hope is when we exist inside the promise from the Divine about a future we can’t create.  

For us to be seized by hope, it is necessary to be grounded in reality, both the real reality that we all belong to God and we all belong to each other no matter what, but also the reality of whatever we are living in and experiencing right now.  Hope can only come in reality – not in fantasy, or religious platitudes, or sanitized scenarios that settle for the appearance of good rather than good itself.
 
This means that to feel hope, to find ourselves hopeful, we need to first embrace the experiences we are in – even the fear. We need to be willing to look at our sin – which is just a fancy word for our disconnection from God and each other in all the many ways that plays out. We need to tell the truth about the brokenness and even evil, inside us and around us. We let ourselves feel it and grieve it, and we say boldly, Things are not as they should be! because we know there is more.  Hope is knowing it could be different, it should be different, it will be different.  Hope is always about wrongs being made right.  So we need to look wrong in the face and call it wrong.  
 
Hope is the promise that we will see God’s goodness not when everything is ‘all better,’ but now, in the brokenness, in the cries for justice and the suffering of injustice, in the midst of an earth in crisis, in the grips of a worldwide illness, the corruption of governments and the selfishness of commerce notwithstanding, not apart from but right within the frailty of the human body and the vulnerability of human bonds.
 
We have talked about having an eschatological imagination – being people who live now shaped by what will be, by God’s future. A big word for those with eschatological imagination is nevertheless.  Nevertheless, we will see the goodness of God. Anyway.  Here. now. It’s like we said during Lent: Fear asks, What if? And Hope answers, Even if. 

David Steindl-Rast calls hope, "opennesss for a future that does not come later."  He says, 

Some people imagine that hope is the highest degree of optimism, a kind of super-optimism.... A far more accurate picture would be the hope happens when the bottom drops out of pessimism.  We have nowhere to fall but into the ultimate reality of God's motherly caring.
 Hope is a passion for what is possible... And since patience is as contagious as impatience, it will also be our way of strengthening each other's hope.
 
Christ has come, the light shines in the darkness. God is here with us in this life, always, always, always bringing life out of death and speaking hope to despair, meeting us here, in the real moments of our real lives and the real brokenness of the real world.  
 
Fredrich Buechner says,
"Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in the stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant's child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too."
 
So we watch for God. We wait for God.  In any and all circumstances. We are the people who live in openness for a future that does not come later.  The aliveness God brings is not just a remix of what is, it's something new and different, that comes into our impossibility with a new possible. 

So we long for God’s aliveness, we expect God’s aliveness, we watch for God’s aliveness in the places of deadness, with an “even if” and “nevertheless” patience that is as contagious as impatience.  
 
Advent is the season of contagious patience. We are the people of contagious patience. 
God comes in, so we watch for God. Christ is here, so we seek Christ. 
We live in openness for the future that does not come later, and God makes us people of hope.
Amen.
 

This Thanksgiving...

This Thanksgiving...

They say, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder,"
we know absence makes the heart grow poignant.
The absence of those we love and miss today 

comes like a lump in the throat, 

a pressure in the chest,

tears, gulped away.

Their faces rise before us,
their voices echo in the silence,
the touch of their hands brushes us in the stillness.

Longing has asked for a seat at the table of our heart today.

But we're tender and afraid,

and this day is for thanks, not for sadness,

so we turn away from longing,

pretend it isn't here,

and ask ourselves instead, with forced 

smile, "What are you thankful for?"

batting away the hand of longing 

as it reaches for our heart.

Let's not.

Today, instead,

let's welcome longing in.

Let's take its coat, 

hug it tenderly, 

offer it a seat, 

and then feed it generously.

Given a place at the table,

longing will speak kindly to absence, 

pat sorrow's shoulder,

laugh with memory, 

draw out awareness,

and pull up a chair to pat the seat of honor

for gratitude.

Our heart will be full.

 

And we may end up feeling, after all, 

the presence of all who are not alongside us today,

here within us.

We may sense our belonging to them,

connection not only unbreakable

but strengthened this day.

Because longing 

given place and welcome,

made comfortable and free,

settles in,

makes itself at home,

and eventually reveals in us

its true and full self:

Love. 

-Kara Root
 
Happy Thanksgiving.

The Context of Our Lives

Ephesians 1:15-23

This is a hard week, friends -- Thanksgiving without most of what we think of Thanksgiving as being, in the midst of a frightening surge of covid and tightening of restrictions. More loss. More hard conversations. More boundary-setting. More disappointment. More loneliness. More grief. More frustration.  More unknown.  

We are weary. That weariness is real and everyone is feeling it. Nobody is doing fine.  None of us is feeling great.
 
But when we we come together, like this, over zoom, when the body of Christ gathers, we are putting ourselves in back in context.  We are again being whose and who we are.  We are placing ourselves to receive the blessings God always has for us. 
 
We come here with our hearts open – our broken hearts and our weary hearts and our grateful hearts and our determined hearts—and the prayers of those gone before are prayed over us even now.  In the timelessness of God, Paul and all the saints, including those we’ve personally known and loved and let go from this life, are gathered here with us, and they’re rooting for us, just as we are rooting for each other and longing that each other be well.  We are part of this community of saints that bridges time and space, transcends continents and centuries, and we’re all in this together.  This is hard to fathom, but it's true.
 
So imagine, dear ones, that Saint Paul has us in mind, that he is even now, face to face with the Divine, thanking God for us, and praying for us that we might recognize God at work, see who God is and what God is up to in this world.  I know about you, dear sisters and brothers gathering as Lake Nokomis Church. I’ve seen your trust that Jesus is right here with you as you are with and for each other, the way you seek to live in love and courage, and I celebrate you and never stop thanking God for you. 
 
And he’s asking God to open the eyes of our hearts to know without a doubt the hope to which God has called us, that we could see and know what is a truly good life, deep and sure, despite any circumstances or struggles, that we might recognize and receive the boundless love and abundant life right here in front of us. 
 
I want to know that hope, I want to see God right here in the world and feel the gift of my life. I want to receive that life however it comes to me, and especially when things feel hard, when grief and gratitude are right here side by side in us like they are right now and will be throughout this week and the holiday season.  
 
Paul says that God’s power, beyond our comprehension or ability to measure is here for us who trust God. I don’t know what that means, to be honest, my heart and head can’t begin to take that in.  I don’t believe it means we get out of pain or escape our mortality, since God chose not to avoid the limitations and discomfort of being human but to come right into it with us.  But he says that the power of God, power beyond measure is available to us right here, in the midst of everything we might be facing right now.  It's this power that helps us to trust.

This power that raised Jesus from the dead, this power that assures us that beyond any president or dictator or regime, greater than any virus or crisis, is the One who was there when the world was spoken into being, who came in vulnerable weakness to share with us every single thing we endure on this earth as human beings, all the senseless suffering and also every breathless moment of joy too great for words to express, who died our death and took death and separation into the heart of God, where it was healed so that even death itself is not to be feared.  This is the power that holds us. This is the love that claims us.  This is the reality in which we belong.  This is the context of our lives.

And just to help the point hit home, Paul goes at great lengths to say that this One who embodies our complete belonging to God reigns, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. There is simply no one and nothing greater.

And then he says that we are Christ’s body, we are the fullness of him who fills all in all. You and I, us!, in our little lives, our ordinary bumbling lives, together, side by side, suffering and laughing with one another, determined to see God in the world, committed to joining Christ in loving the world: the fullness of the one who cannot be contained lives in us.

So you guys, I know we are going to get through this. This part, and the part that comes after. We are going to get through it. We will let ourselves feel it – both the grief and the gratitude, we will let it break our hearts open so we can embrace more of this life that is so generously given to us. We wont be afraid to celebrate, and we wont be afraid to mourn, and we’ll even be so bold as to do both at once when the situation calls for it, as it seems to right now. 

And we won’t just get through - because God will use even this, this extraordinary, unfathomable muddle of year, to bring us deeper into hope, wider into love, to bring healing and hope into this world that needs it so badly. God will use these experiences in this time to open our hearts to see the big picture that we are made for and called to, to help us welcome this ridiculous, bighearted, painful and glorious life that we are given to share with each other in this the world.  

Wisdom, revelation, fullness, hope… I receive that prayer, brother Paul! I welcome that blessing!

True Story

 

Psalm 78:1-7

Life is more than just our experiences, it’s the stories we tell – to ourselves and to others – about our experiences. Story is how we understand them and the meaning we make of them.
 
We are in the middle of a big experience right now.  A new president has been elected.  A new chapter is opening up for our country.  But what you think that means depends on the stories you are listening to, and the ones you are telling yourself.  The future in front of us is either terribly hopeful or horribly terrifying.  Same set of facts, different stories. How we face the world, the choices we believe we have, the choices we will choose to make, depend on the story we are telling about this moment. 
We are part of this story. This is part of our story. Absolutely.  It shapes who we are as Americans; it will impact the experiences we have with each other in the coming months and years. But this is not the whole story.
 
There is a bigger story. A longer trajectory. A deeper narrative that holds us. 
Beyond the 244 years of this country’s existence, and the 45 presidents we’ve had, you and I are part of a people and tradition that extends over two thousand years, and we are shaped by those who’ve gone before, even as we are connected by the God who holds the universe in love to all those around us and every human that has ever been or ever will be, so our story is even broader, deeper, wider: it’s timeless and eternal.
 
We live inside our experiences, but they are not our story. The Psalmist encourages us to remember this, and to tell the bigger story.  
The rest of Psalm 78—nearly 70 more verses past this encouraging part—gets specific and uncomfortable. It goes into great detail to tell the Israelites story through the Exodus and wilderness into the generations that follow, up to King David. And it’s not too flattering. It tells the story of a people who over and over again doubted and turned away from God, and a God who over and over again cared for them.  God provided and they complained. God delivered them, and they chose captivity. God gave them what they asked for and more, and they chose scarcity and turned on each other. God led them and they refused to follow. 
 
Back and forth the Psalm goes, like a boat rocking on the waves: the people complain; God gets angry and still provides. The people turn away; God gets angry and punishes them. Then God comes to God’s senses and restores them again. They repent and say good things about God, but they don’t mean it, and they continue tearing each other down and turning their back on God. God gets angry and calls them out, and then welcomes them back in with great compassion and provides for them once again.  Over and over the people are unfaithful. Over and over, God is faithful.
 
That is our story. That is the ancient story of humankind and the ageless story of our faith, and our scriptures don’t sugarcoat it. The bible doesn’t make its protagonists shiny and perfect. It tells of their failures and their infidelity and God’s consistency and salvation nevertheless and always. Telling this story is what the Psalmist is suggesting we do, and with the rest of this Psalm, he shows us how.  Humans are unfaithful and inconsistent. God is faithful and trustworthy.
 
Our experiences and the things that have happened in our lives, in our families, in our country, in our world, they are the ingredients, but they are not the story. How we tell them – to ourselves and to each other, to the next generation, and the one after that – that is the story. And sometimes we get the story wrong, and we need to go back and look at what happened again and tell a different story. And sometimes we think the story goes just one way, but the real story, God’s story, is always bigger than our premature conclusions. And God’s story – the true story – is always about hope and redemption. 
 
We are in an important moment as a country – and our children are watching and listening. They are watching us go back and look at how we’ve told the story of race and equality in this country, how we’ve told the stories of economic opportunity and fairness and justice for all and they are seeing us realize we weren’t telling ourselves the truth, we weren’t facing the whole story. Our kids are watching us start to listen more carefully to our past, and listen more intentionally to our siblings in this country whose experiences are different than this story, and different from our own. They’re watching us sort out what all of this means and begin to wonder what it might be like to tell our story differently, and to try to figure out how we go forward together into a different story, how we build a nation together that is what we all long for it to be.
 
But even as we do this work, we are part of a bigger story – one that puts this smaller story into context. The Story we are living in understands that human beings are consistently unfaithful and God is consistently faithful.  And in order to live in hope (which is always from God) and not despair (which is never from God), we need to tell the bigger story. The story of God teaching us that we belong to God, no matter what, and we belong to each other, no matter what, and nothing we do or don’t do can break that belonging – even when we pretend it’s not true, or forget it is true, or actively argue that it can’t possibly be true. It remains the true story. 

So we will claim this story, and let it claim us, and will live in this story, and tell this story to each other to help each other remember.  And we’ll tell those who come after us so they can live in it too, and they can tell those who come after them, so they can set their hope on God and not forget who they are and what God does, and they too can live in God’s way instead of the way of fear.   
 
Our kids need to hear about when we messed up, when we said something that hurt someone deeply, when we didn’t come through for someone, when we lied, or cheated, or turned our back on someone, or turned our back on God.  They need to hear about when we gave up hope, and lost our faith, and forgot who we were and whose we were.  Because the true story is about what God does.  They need to hear about forgiveness, and redemption, and healing, and fresh starts and new beginnings – because they need to know that who they are is not defined by their failure and unfaithfulness but by the love and faithfulness of God.
 
This is who Church is - those vulnerable and brave enough to tell the stories about our own unfaithfulness and God’s faithfulness even so, working through it all, to move us into life, with and for each other. 
 
One day we will tell stories about this time– about our country and about the pandemic, about the seismic changes happening in the world, the climate crises and catastrophes, and all the upheavals of this time.  And if the stories we tell are true, they will not be about good verses evil, or us verses them. They will not make us look good or cover over our mistakes. They will be about God’s faithfulness through our unfaithfulness. About how normal humans came alongside each other in our brokenness and God worked through us to achieve remarkable things. How we were saved not through might and power, or by violent acts or vile words, but by God acting through our smallness, and sameness, and willingness to look each other in the heart and recognize that the one I want to hate belongs to me too. 
They will be stories of how we forgot that we are meant to care for each other, but then God spoke through a photo of a child in a cage, or the cries of a man with a knee on his neck, and turned our hearts back toward each other. 
Or how we forgot we are meant care for this earth and its creatures, but God spoke through a fierce child from Sweden, and terrible raging fires in Australia and California, and restored us to our place of responsible stewardship for creation. 
Or how we forgot that we are not invincible and indispensable, on demand at every moment, but God spoke through our quarantines and lockdowns and suddenly, when our busy was taken away from us—and it was terribly disorienting, and we were afraid a lot of the time and bored just as often—God woke us up to the deeper life that can only come to us when we’re moving slower and listening more closely, and God showed us how much we mean to others, and what they mean to us, and God gave us new and different ways to stay connected, and the Holy Spirit helped us to hang on tighter and love more deeply, and God reminded us that we are not indispensible but we are integral. 
Or how we forgot that our neighbors are beloved children of God until they got sick or we did, and with masks on someone brought soup and bread to someone else—someone learned how to make soup and bake bread and then brought it to someone else—and God touched our lives through culinary contributions, and through needing each other this way God helped us start seeing other people we need too, like doctors, and nurses, and mail carriers, and teachers and grocery store workers, and garbage collectors, and we realized that the people we’d taken for granted were the essential ones all along, and God showed us that we all belong to God and we all belong to each other, and we listened and obeyed and let God change our hearts.
 
No matter what happens next or what comes after that, we follow a God of unfailing faithfulness and infinite compassion who works even in our consistent unfaithfulness and through our weakness to bring hope and life to us all. This is the true story, ancient and eternal. And we will keep telling it.
Amen.

PRAYER
God, please show me the stories I am telling myself
that are holding me back from the fullness of life you have for me.  
Destroy my stories of self-protection 

and make me vulnerable and open.
Heal my stories of injury 

and make me a conduit of your healing.
Forgive my stories of enemies 

and make me a courageous peace-maker.
Break open my stories of irreconcilability 

and make me a willing listener. 
Redeem my stories of wrong 

and help me join in your ongoing justice.  
Release me from my stories of grievance 

and help me to grieve.
Break my stories of despair 

and teach me to hope.
Set me free 

to know and share your joy,
to receive and share your love,
to bear and share your hope.
Help me to live in your true story.
Amen.

I don't accept the results of the election

 I am grieved and sobered. But I don’t accept the results of the election.

I don't accept that we are against each other and unable to find common ground.  I reject the assertion that we are hopelessly polarized and divided.  I don’t agree to see us as on opposite teams with opposite viewpoints and concerns. I will not concede that some people don’t care about basic human needs, their own or others'.  We all need food and home and belonging and love.  We all want a stable economy filled with opportunity. Nobody want dirty air or water, or to pass on an uninhabitable earth to the next generation. We all want to be safe, to live in safe neighborhoods and a safe country.  We all want to be seen and heard, and to know our lives are valuable and our contributions matter.  We all want to trust we will be well cared for when we’re sick or injured, and we want to know our futures are secure.  All of us want and believe in justice and liberty for all.  Working for these things is not undermining them; being passionate about some of these things does not mean rejecting others.  I do not accept that this is so.  I will seek common ground, and join in a shared reality that uphold the needs and lives of all.

I don’t accept the urgency and intensity. I refuse to greet each day with anxiety and hand-wringing about the future, predictions of doom and insistence on vigilance.  Instead I will welcome each day as an opportunity to live into our fundamental belonging to each other.  I will watch for ways to affirm our intrinsic connection, to notice our shared humanity, and to join in strengthening the patriotic cooperation and mutual respect of this nation that together we are. 

I don’t accept that we are in “battle between good and evil.” I refuse to surrender to exaggeration and hyperbole. I decline any invitation and rebuff any insistence to depict other human beings as caricatures, or distortions of their humanity, in order to label them more effectively, so I can dismiss them guiltlessly, or acquiesce to them thoughtlessly.  Instead I will remind myself that we all are a mess of contradictions: selfishness and beauty, love and obliviousness, trying and failing.  I will not let this election take away the exquisite complexity of each human being with whom I share this country.  

I don’t accept that cooperation is impossible, or that to meet my needs I must deny yours, or to meet your needs you must deny mine.  We need each other. I don’t accept that I am better off without you. 

 

I don’t accept that some voices should be silenced, even if those voices grieve me.  Instead, I pray that the voices that sadden or frighten me might stir me to compassion and curiosity about the person behind the rhetoric, the humanity that is just like my own, armored and defending a frightened and tender heart that longs to love and be loved. 

 

Right now our brokenness is on full display.  But I do not accept that this state of being is permanent or dire. Instead I welcome it as a sign of breaking open, the possibility of our soul healing differently, stronger.  I will not be afraid of the pain. I will not be afraid of the struggle.  I know the joy that is found in shared suffering, and the peace that comes in coming alongside. I have seen how new life comes from death. I have seen how the loss of what we thought we were can lead to what we can be. I have learned that being human means we are always in process, never complete. Each of us is always learning, always growing, always invited (and sometimes forced) to begin again and dream anew. Why would our collective of human beings called the United States of America be any different? 

So, no matter who ends up being our president for the next four years, I do not accept fear as the winner of our nation. I will be led by love and guided by hope.  

America is us; it’s you and it’s me. This I embrace.