Swimming during General Conference

Posted on February 25, 2019 by admin

Warm Up

Today you start with breaststroke, the one where your hands scoop in close to your heart and then out towards the world again, like a prayer. But that’s not why you start here. Your head needs to be above water for a while. You need more air while you get your bearings, letting the water hold you up again. It feels good to be surrounded and buoyed and to focus on your breath.

You remember the goodtheology – God gathering together the waters of creation, Jesus baptized in the Jordan, Jesus stilling the stormy waters lapping at the scared disciples, the baby-head damp of your own baptism, flowing into your ordination and marriage vows.

Backstroke gives you even more air. You usually wait to swim backstroke until you’re tired but today you’re already tired. Face up toward the ceiling, as much air as you can get.

Drills

Remember your stroke mechanics. Focus on arm placement and high elbows. Practice breathing to both sides. Use this time to get ready for the long set ahead.

Freestyle

Or maybe today you will call it “crawl” like the Australians. Today, time is the least of your worries, though you’ve been watching that count down clock in the corner of the live feed for hours. It’s OK to crawl sometimes.

Dig in. Freestyle pull set, 1000 yards. It’s only in the last 200 yards you notice how tired your neck and shoulders are, how you completely forgot to use your hips. Small adjustments give surprising results. Remember this when you add the kick back later.

Butterfly

You feel like a bad ass, swimming this at the end of a work out.

All consuming, it clears your mind. You wonder about installing a pool on the floor of General Conference.

You notice the lap-at-a-time boys headed to the locker room, the ones who dart off the wall in the neighboring lane whenever you are about to turn for the next lap. They like to race you, but only for one lap. Not everyone is made for a long workout, or for butterfly.

Warm Down

Today’s swim was about 4 minutes slower than normal for the distance. You didn’t realize how heavy your load was, even dragging along through the water.

You haul yourself out and gravity resumes.

But the lingering scent of chlorine, like the invasive, pestering, life-changing One we know as Trinity, clings to you. You are not alone or left behind.

For Such a Time

Posted on September 28, 2018 by admin

A sermon preached on Esther 7: 1-10; 9:20-22, on September 23, 2018, at the Wesley Foundation at UVA[1].

“For such a time as this.” That’s the money-phrase from the book of Esther. She finds herself in the middle of a situation she did not choose or create. She is one of the people with the least power or choice about what’s happened to her and what she sees taking shape around her. And she isn’t someone who’s naturally inclined to pipe up and insist on changing the course of things. It is certainly not her idea to do so, and it takes her some time to agree that she should. But she looks around at herself and her situation, and those words — Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this[2] — epitomize her placement, perspective, and power.

It was hard for me not to think of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford while considering Esther’s story this week. If you’ve been following the news you know that Ford is the woman who came forward to say that the current Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, sexually assaulted and attempted to rape her while they were both in high school. It was hard to miss this news. And it has been very hard news to hear and contemplate and sit with.

Ford’s story is very different from Esther’s, but what they have in common is a willingness to step up to a hard task because they were uniquely situated to do so. They both exhibit the ability to recognize and use the (limited) power they have to make a choice and try to set things right.

This is not a sermon about the Supreme Court and it’s not about politics. It’s about plans and the lack thereof. It’s about hope and agency. It’s about a story.

The king of Persia is used to getting anything or anybody he wants and one of those is a beautiful wife named Vashti. Well, when the book of Esther begins this king is giving a 7-day-long party. It’s a big blow out and the king is having a great time showing off his power and riches when he decides to call for Queen Vashti. He wants her to come before him wearing all her finest clothes and jewels. But something unexpected happens: Queen Vashti refuses.

The king is so confused by this – nothing like it has ever happened to him before – that he actually has to summon his wisest counselors to consult with him. The men he gathers around him decide that if the queen can flaunt the laws and customs of their society like this, then surely she’ll give other women bad ideas about how to behave. They are going to need to nip this is the bud. So Vashti is banished and it is decided that her title will be given to someone else more suitable.

All this happens in the book of Esther before Esther shows up. But here she comes.

Esther, a Jewish orphan, was raised by her cousin Mordecai. Mordecai hears about the king’s search for a new queen and he takes Esther to the palace to try out like the rest of the girls. “One thing,” he tells her, “There’s really no need to mention you’re Jewish. Just keep it to yourself, ok?” You can probably see where this is going. Of all the beautiful young women, the king chooses Esther to be his replacement queen for the ousted Vashti.

So while Esther is getting used to her new palace digs, cousin Mordecai encounters the king’s right hand man, Haman. Mordecai was spending a bit of time around the palace gates, just to make sure Esther would be ok and maybe to say “hi” every now and then. Along comes Haman, who particularly likes the royal rule that orders all who are at the palace gates to bow any time anyone from the royal court came by. But on this day he happens upon Mordecai, who is the only one at the gates who doesn’t bow. Haman is furious and orders his people to find out why this man so flagrantly disobeyed the royal rule. When word comes back that Mordecai won’t bow to him because Mordecai is Jewish, Haman determines that Jews are not to be tolerated and begins plotting to bring about their demise. In fact, he convinces the king that they need to kill all the Jews in the land.

When this plot comes to light, Mordecai sends word to Esther and expects her to intercede with the king on behalf of all the Jewish people. Her note back to Mordecai says, “You know that an audience with the king has to be at his initiative; he has to hold out the scepter to me before I can approach. I can’t just go in there. I really don’t think it will work. Sorry.” Sensible, by the rules. She knows her place and who’s got the power.

Mordecai’s next note is a little more direct. He writes, “Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s family will perish….Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”[3]

Confronted with this hard truth and perhaps a sense of her own calling, Esther sends word back to Mordecai asking him and all the Jews he knows to fast for 3 days while she and her maids do the same, in preparation for her conversation with the king. She’s now willing to make the request and to accept the consequences. “I’ll go,” she says, “and if I perish, I perish.”[4]

After three days she puts on her finest clothes and goes to stand just at the edge of the king’s inner court, hoping to catch his eye and to be invited in. The king notices her instantly and asks her in to talk. When Esther tells him that her heart’s desire is to host both him and his right hand man Haman at a dinner, he says “yes” at once.

Like a lot of good plans, apparently this one takes time, because it actually takes a couple of dinners for Esther to pop the question. The first night, after the conversation and the fine meal, the king bursts out his appreciation and says to his queen, “Whatever you want is yours, even up to half of my entire kingdom. What is it that you want?”

Esther bides her time, and says, “Sweetheart, what I’d like is to have you and Haman back for another dinner tomorrow night. Would that be all right?”

So the next night the king and Haman show up at Esther’s quarters again.

Allow me to pause here and fill you in on how smug Haman is after the first dinner. He’s on his way home that night and his jubilant mood turns sour when he sees Mordecai loitering at the palace gates. So he stomps home and – after telling everyone in the family and the neighborhood how he was hanging out all evening with just the king and queen – issues the order to build a huge gallows in his front yard. Thiswill be for that pesky Mordecai!

But that very same night the king peruses the royal records and comes across the information that someone named Mordecai had thwarted his assassination. He asks around and finds that this great deed was not properly recognized. Haman is back at the palace, high on anger and gallows-building, when the king brings him in to his chambers. “What would be a great way to honor someone who’s done wonderful things for the king?” the king asks Haman, who, of course, assumes the king is talking about him.

Haman doesn’t hold back. “Well, I really think no expense should be spared. Here’s what should happen: Get some of your own royal robes, ones that you’ve worn yourself, along with a horse which you yourself have ridden. Then get one of your crowns. Next instruct one of your noblest officials to drape these garments on the one to be honored, along with the crown, and conduct the man on horseback through the center of the city for everyone to see.” “Great idea!” says the king. Then he says, “Haman, go and do just what you’ve said. You’ll find Mordecai outside at the gates: Do all this for him.”

As you can imagine, this is not well received.

Back to banquet #2. The king and Haman enjoy the second fabulous feast. The king is overcome with joy and gratitude again, and again he offers Esther anything she wants, up to half of his entire kingdom.

“If I’ve won your favor, I ask for my life and the lives of my people,” she says simply.

The king asks who is proving to be such a menace and she answers that it is he himself and Haman.

Now the king is in a real bind when he realizes that she is a Jew and that he himself has issued an order to kill her and everyone like her. He leaves the room to walk around the garden for a few minutes and think.

While he’s out, Haman sees that things really aren’t going his way, so he throws himself at Esther’s feet, begging for his own life from one of the very Jews he pledged to destroy. The king re-enters and uses Haman’s prone posture as an excuse… or he assumes the worst… or he surmises the situation correctly… He accuses him of trying to make time (or worse) with his wife while his back is turned and immediately sentences him to death on the gallows he built for Mordecai.

Then the king sends word to all his armies and officials to let them know the hunt is off and the Jews are spared.

Though she ended up with the title of “queen,” Esther had hardly any power in that role. If the king were telling this story, he might have referred to her as “play thing #2,” after referring to Vashti as “that horrible disrespectful bitch.” Or, maybe he would have called her his “beloved wife.” Might have depended upon his mood, how drunk he was, and whether other kings were listening when he said it. He probably wouldn’t have called this biblical book, “Esther,” centering a foreign, powerless, woman. He probably would have called it something like “The King Decides to Save the Jews.”

I said this sermon is about hope and agency. Which means it’s also a sermon about stories. In yesterday’s New York Times, speaking about what’s unfolding in Washington and what it means for all of us, Jennifer Weiner wrote this: “Stories matter tremendously. They’re how we learn about who is real and who’s less consequential; whose pain is important and whose, not so much; who is the hero and who is merely the hero’s reward.”[5]

In this biblical text where God is never mentioned by name, God gives us the gift of seeing how the overlooked, undervalued, marginalized, and powerless are none of those things in God’s eyes.

There are many ways to tell the story of “what happened.” In retelling this one, I could have focused on the sinful pride of Haman (which is abundant), making this story a cautionary tale for those of us who lust for that kind of power-proximity and think of some folks as “the little people.” There’s room for that story, too. But right now, the women are screaming to be seen and heard. Right now, I’m most interested in the story of Vashti, who kicks off the book of Esther by saying a simple “no.” I want to spend more time considering the stories of Esther, Anita Hill, Christine Blasey-Ford…. I want to think about why it’s so hard to tell these stories within the usual storytelling frames (and Bible studies and sermons) we use.

The Bible is the startling, challenging, beautifully surprising, mysterious, maddening, all-wrong-by-human-standards story of God’s presence in the midst of every single one of our stories. It’s a story about looking – sometimes with great tenacity and a “hermeneutics of suspicion” – underneath and behind what’s said, to be certain you can see all of what’s happening….and to be closer to hearing God’s words, as pronounced by fallible, socially situated, sinful folks like the writers of every book in the Bible and every preacher – including this one – whom you’ve ever heard trying to retell those stories.

God gives us stories like this one for such a time as this one we find ourselves in now. Who are we listening to? What are we hearing? What are we going to do about it?

Thanks be to God!

Photo credit: The Banquet of Esther and Ahasuerus, Jan Victors [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

[1]Portions of this sermon retelling the story from the book of Esther were preached originally in 2006 and 2009.

[2]Esther 4:14, NRSV

[3]Esther 4: 13-14, NRSV

[4]Esther 4: 16

[5]Quoted from “The Patriarchy Will Always Have Its Revenge” by Jennifer Weiner, published on September 22, 2018 in The New York Times.

The Pillow

Posted on June 24, 2018 by admin

A sermon preached on Mark 4: 35-41, at Wesley Memorial UMC on June 24, 2018.

One morning last week while we were having breakfast with the news on, I actually said to Woody, “Isn’t that enough for me to be appalled by right now?” I was tired, I was still working on that all-important cup #2 of coffee, and the news was relentless. Again.

It feels like I can’t come up for enough air to withstand it sometimes. Just when I think “this is the worst it can get,” I’m proven wrong. Again. Late last fall, I held my breath each morning to see what famous man had been accused of sexual assault. When Woody or a student or a colleague would say, “Did you see what happened?” I would brace to hear who it was. After one of our hardest years, in Charlottesville right now we are putting people on trial who were defending themselves and our city during last summer’s white supremacist rally. The residents of Flint, Michigan, stilldon’t have clean water. Ordinary citizens are living in tree houses to protest energy companies seizing their lands for pipelines – pipelines which are supposed to be the safest most spill-proof ever, and which, inevitably do spill. Our president cruelly decided to take children away from their parents at our southern border and house them in cages, claiming he was powerless to change this policy. Then, whimsically changed it again when almost the entire country spoke out. Now those families get to stay together – but their detention will be indefinite, which itself is illegal.

It’s relentless. I know there has always been bad news. I know that in some American communities and in some other parts of the world, sadly, they are used to incessant bad news as the norm. I can remember riding in the car with my parents when I was about 8, when the news on the radio said a word I didn’t yet know: “rape.” I’m sure that day, when they had to define that word for me, my parents thought the news was too much and too bad. Still, it does feel like we are in an especially torrential time.

Like the disciples in the boat crossing the Sea of Galilee, the weather has gone menacing and the waves are lapping into the boat, threatening to sink it. It’s not that they don’t know how to handle a boat on choppy water. Jesus chose several fishermen to be his disciples, so these aren’t nervous sailors. Mark tells us “the boat was already being swamped”[i]when the disciples approached Jesus about the situation. Where’s Jesus?

He’s right there in the same boat with them – but he is napping through all of this commotion. On a pillow. That’s the part that really gets me and, I imagine, the disciples. This story is told in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke)[ii]but Mark is the only one who includes the pillow. That pillow delights and confounds me. As a reader at a safe distance from those events, I love it. It’s a delicious detail and it means Jesus was really settled in for a good solid nap. But when I consider the perspective of the disciples, I think it must irk them just a wee bit to see that not only is Jesus managing to sleep his way through the storm, but that he is resting his head on a pillow.

The pillow is a symbol of incomprehensible rest and relaxation. How could anyone sleep through the threatening storm? How could anyone allow themselves to relax and become peaceful enough to sleep with all of this raging weather?

When the disciples approach Jesus, they don’t ask for his secret meditation app so that they, too, might relax. They don’t even ask him to quell the storm. They blurt out, accusingly, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”[iii]

That pillow really got to them.

What does Jesus do? He wakes up, rebukes the wind, and calms the sea. Then, he turns to the disciples and says, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”[iv] One biblical commentator describes the scene like this: “Faith means trust. Jesus seems to imply, ‘Don’t you have any trust that you’re going to be cared for? I’m telling you that God has come near, that the kingdom of God is breaking in, and you’re worried about the wind?’”[v] In their fear and panic, the disciples don’t even ask for what they need. They don’t ask for help. Instead, they accuse Jesus of not caring enough. You know, Jesus, who is right there in the same boat and the same storm with them.

They are crossing from the Jewish to the Gentile side of the lake. Right before this in Mark’s gospel, Jesus tells parable after parable, all illustrations and promises about God’s in-breaking reign or kingdom. I think the commentator is on to something with her rephrasing “’I’m telling you that God has come near, that the kingdom of God is breaking in, and you’re worried about the wind?’” Maybe there is something about being exposed on the water in a ferocious storm, while also heading away from known territory and into unknown territory that overtakes the disciples’ common sense and faith. Maybe some unfaithful questions lodged in their hearts and minds: Where are we? What’s going to happen next? Why are we going to those places? Who are those people?

I’m conflicted about fear and its role in faith. It’s obviously an impediment since the first thing almost any angel or messenger of God says anywhere in the Bible is “Fear not.” Whatever other message they have to impart, most begin by reminding folks not to be afraid by what comes next. But a lot of fear is involuntary. If I hear a noise in the dark when I think I’m alone, something primal and automatic takes over in me. I don’t engage in a rational self-debate about whether that may have been a tree limb or an intruder, I’m already gripped by fear and on alert. And, whichever way that scenario turns out, fear is at least useful in alerting me to something that could be dangerous. How is it unfaithful or “un-trustful” to experience fear, especially when it’s not a conscious choice? And yet, some of my most faithful moments involve me feeling fear and choosing to act against the advice of that fear. Finally saying “yes” to God’s relentless call to ordained ministry falls into this category of fear.

What if Jesus is telling the disciples that fear is playing an outsized role in their actions on the boat? What if he isn’t chastising them so much as illustrating in the midst of a real-life example how giving in to fear obscures what’s really happening?

Because it seems to me that the disciples miss the rather important fact that Jesus is in the same boat with them. Literally. They are so fearful – and perhaps so rankled by that pillow and the “nerve” of Jesus to be resting when they are fretting – that they miss the point that Jesus is resting. What if, instead of accusing Jesus of apathy, they had pushed their fear aside enough to wonder at Jesus’s nap? Maybe they would have thought,Well, if he can sleep now, maybe I’ve mis-assessed the situation. Maybe we will make it across the lake after all.

Fear about what comes next is causing us to mis-assess, too. There are some in our country who are so fearful about what will happen “if we let them in” that they want to close all borders to all people and operate on lock-down. There are others who are so fearful about our government’s actions on the border that we think we are abandoned – we forget Jesus is in this boat with us, too.

Last week at Annual Conference, right before our closing worship, I was hurrying from the upstairs bathrooms back down to the convention hall. When I got to the escalators, there was a little girl standing at the top, holding onto the glass side, yelling down to her sisters who were already near the bottom of the escalator. They had gone on without her and she was scared to step onto the moving steps. As I approached, I noticed a white man standing a couple feet back from her, not offering help and not pushing past her to get on the escalator. I don’t know how long he’d been there, but he seemed to be wrestling with how to help. The little girl was black. When I got to the escalator, I bent down and said, “Do you need someone to hold your hand?” She shot her hand straight up for me to hold, still looking forward, to her sisters now impatiently waiting for her at the bottom of the escalator. No look, no questions asked. I talked her through the scary moment of stepping out onto the forming step: “OK, we are going to step onto that part right there. One, two, three, ok now…” I kept holding her hand and telling her she was doing a great job. By the time we were halfway down, she looked at me and said, “I used to be scared to do this but now I’m not.” When we got near the bottom, we did the one-two-three again to step off and then I hi-fived her and told her that she was very brave and that it’s hard to have courage when we are scared but that she did it.

Her fear was transformed into confidence. She had it all in her the whole time; she just needed someone to stand with her while she learned to do it. She needed a hand to hold so she could feel her own bravery and faith. My hope is that, besides being her own moment of personal growth, it will be one of many such moments when she can rely on grown ups and on white people to befriend her and stand with her.

I was rushing back for worship that day and I don’t know why I took notice of that little girl in need of a helping hand. I do know that I’ve been trying to pay attention. Ever since the Black Lives Matter movement began, I’ve been challenging myself to take a second look. At my own motivations or preconceptions, and at the way someone “looks” to me on the street, at what I assume about him or her based on only a first glance. Like most white people in our culture, I have absorbed racist notions I didn’t recognize as such. It’s one thing to be scared when confronted by someone with a gun; it’s another thing entirely to walk around assuming that all black men are dangerous.

Centuries of racist fear-mongering have encouraged us to see threats instead of people. I recognize this sin in myself and I see it in the bad news from the border. Surely we need immigration reform, but when we see threats in the innocent faces of children and we think indefinite detention in cages is the best way to proceed, our fear has obscured our vision and compromised our faith. When a Salvadoran family scares us more than a government without compassion or justice, we are afraid of the wrong thing.

There is a ferocious storm out there and it’s scary as hell and I’m not in a position to tell you to have no fear. I’m scared, too, no matter what the angels say. But we have to act in spite of it. In the face of it. Against it.

These are dangerous waters but we are not alone, and we follow the One who told us that when we welcome the stranger, we welcome Christ.[vi] Those faces we see crying for their parents are Christ’s. When the morning news is relentless mayhem and your fear tells you God is absent or not acting quickly enough, remember that the pillow Jesus is sleeping on now is on a floor in a tent in Texas, covered by a space blanket. And he is waiting for us to offer to hold his hand.

Thanks be to God!

[i]Mark 4:37, The Harper Collins Study Bible (NRSV)

[ii]Matthew 8:23-27 and Luke 8:22-25

[iii]Mark 4:38b

[iv]Mark 4:39-40

[vi]Matthew 25:31-46

Advent, patience, and the passage of time

Posted on December 15, 2017 by admin

My grandmother told me more than once that I needed to have more patience. I hated it when she said this. It seemed like a cruel test adults imposed on children who really, really wanted something and couldn’t wait any longer. I remember clearly the first time she said it to me, standing in her kitchen with the windows facing west to the road winding up the hill and out of sight beyond the trees. We were cooking together but my mind was on whatever was next. I don’t remember anymore if it was a trip to visit someone or if I was simply ready for the cooking to be done so we could eat the results. It seems like I was holding a wooden spoon at the time.

She wasn’t exasperated with me. It was a simple statement, something she noticed and was offering so I could attend to it, like pointing out an untied shoelace. She may have even said it this way, “You need to learn patience,” recognizing in the suggestion itself that it is a practice that will take time.

When my grandmother first brought it up, I understood she meant I needed to wait more politely. My focus was on the reward that was coming and patience seemed to be the decorum required en route. It took substantial amounts of energy but it still seemed largely passive. Bide your time; wait it out.

That’s what I thought then and since my southern grandmother also said things like, “Pretty is as pretty does,” she probably did mean it that way, at least on some level. But she knew more than this about waiting. She was valedictorian of her high school class at 16 and desperately wanted to go to college but her father didn’t think it was appropriate for girls. So she kept working on the farm with her family and waited for her life to go in another direction. She married my grandfather at 17 and started having babies at 19. That sounds young and so fast to me now but I wonder how patient she was, waiting for the unknown future as she longed for what she couldn’t have.

My suburban upper-middle-class upbringing had its own versions of expectant time. Study abroad was a formative one, the semester I struck out on my own for France, pre-internet. I was only able to call my parents three or four times the whole semester. My main mode of communication with friends and family back home was through letters squeezed onto every inch of the blue, striped aerogram paper that folded up into its own envelope. I was homesick and spent copious amounts of time in coffee shops writing home while gazing out the window and sipping a café crème. I’m sure if we’d had email or cell phones or social media I would have checked in incessantly and in real time, as today’s study abroad students do.

Like that day cooking in the kitchen with my grandmother, during the space of that semester I was often focused on what would happen next, when I got home. What would fourth year be like? Would the guy I liked when I left still be around when I returned? I wish I could say I was fully present in France and waited until I got home to think about home, but it’s not true. I was impatient to see my friends and family again.

Yet that semester was not all about thinking ahead to what came next. Amidst homesickness and my impatient tendencies, I also experienced a companionable presence. The time itself was like a character in what was happening to me as I became a world traveler, explored other cultures, learned to be on my own. Passing through those months, I was aware I was between things, in a space both large (scary) and generous (intriguing). I let things unfurl. I was not in a position to manage them.

There are some things I have to learn over and over.

I find myself, this tension-bursting year, longing for a less tension-filled Advent. Can’t this be the season of quiet manger scenes and soft snowfalls and small epiphanies about the perfect gift for so-and-so? Must there be bridesmaids with no oil and locust-eating weirdos in the dessert? Must it take so long between the already and the not yet of God reconciling the whole world to Godself? This year, especially, I don’t want to wait out Advent to get to Christmas.

“You need to learn patience.”

I don’t get a say in the waiting but I do get to determine how passively or actively I wait.

It occurs to me that time can do a certain amount of healing all on its own. Just making it through counts for something. But our active, anticipatory waiting is less like biding that time and more like physical therapy. It hurts, it sucks sometimes, and there is every temptation in the world to not engage – but doing physical therapy while you are healing leads to more healing. And the use of that arm again. What’s happening in this kind of physical-therapy-Advent-waiting space? I look around at the world and I want to warn God off. But it’s this world that God loves so much She decided to live in it, in our skin for a while. Are we paying attention?

Almost 40 years have passed since I held that wooden spoon and received my grandmother’s wisdom. I’m still learning to be patient. If I were cooking with my Goddaughter in the kitchen I’d ask her what she’s been noticing. I’d have her describe it to me. I’d talk to her about how it feels to want something that isn’t here yet. I’d ask her where God is in the waiting—what does God do when waiting? I’d brainstorm with her about what we do in the meantime. Then we might take our brownies and sit by the window, watch snow fall, and, after a while, bundle up and walk out into it.

Rewriting History

Posted on August 27, 2017 by admin

Taking the next step…

A sermon preached on Exodus 1:8-2:10, at Wesley Memorial UMC on August 27, 2017.

I wonder if those midwives saw it coming.

When the Pharaoh shows up to speak to them directly, are they ready? Have they noticed the nervous decrees coming from the king’s palace, first forcing the Hebrew people into work gangs with harsh overseers and finally enslaving them (vv. 11-13)? What complaints and laments have Shiphrah and Puah heard as they spend hours at the bedsides of laboring women – women with husbands still out in fields and making bricks and forced into “all kinds of other cruel work” (v. 14)? Do they know their history – how it hasn’t always been this way between the Hebrews and Egyptians? Do they see how close the injustice and oppression are getting to their own door and the work of their own hands before they hear the Pharaoh’s knock?

Let’s say they do.

Let’s say they know it will come to this, eventually, this murderous decree in which they will each be complicit: “When you are helping the Hebrew women give birth and you see the baby being born, if it’s a boy, kill him. But if it’s a girl, you can let her live” (vv. 15-16). Let’s say they see it from a mile away and they know exactly how bad it will be and what they will be asked to do. How long do they watch it get closer? How many hushed conversations do they share with one another before the knock sounds? Do they rehearse different scenarios or do they know all along that they will lie straight to his face and save every last baby?

Do they know the next step after that?

I imagine they know they’ll get away with it for a little while, birthing being the domain of women. It will be easy to birth the babies without the king or his men seeing what happens. But after that, when Pharaoh’s snoops notice girl and boy babies, what then? Are Shiphrah and Puah ready with the next step or do they find it along the way?

This time he calls them in to his house and challenges them directly: “Why are you doing this? Why are you letting the baby boys live?” Well, sir, Hebrew women are much stronger and they give birth before we even arrive on the scene (vv. 18-19). And, birthing being the domain of women, he doesn’t have any information to the contrary so he buys it.

The next time, he takes another course. He gives up on the midwives and goes straight to his own men, commanding them to throw live baby boys into the Nile to drown (v. 22).

But justice is a team sport.

Though none of them is named at this point in the story, we move now to the family of Moses. His mother gives birth to him and, like God surveying the light and the waters and the animals at creation, she sees that her baby is good and she keeps him hidden and safe with her for three months (cf. Genesis creation and Exodus 2:2, as noted by Karla Suomaia at Working Preacher). When she thinks it’s too dangerous to keep him hidden any longer, she puts him in a waterproofed-with-tar basket and floats it in amongst the reeds at the river’s shallow edge (2: 2-3).

And while the baby is floating there the Pharaoh’s own daughter happens to be bathing nearby and she finds the basket. And she feels sorry for the baby. The prescribed response for someone in her social and family position is to have the baby killed or at least to show the basket of insubordination to her father. But she steps out of her prescribed role and feels sorry for the baby, and her response is compassion (vv. 5-6).

At which point, the baby’s sister, who’s been nearby, watching protectively ever since her mother gently placed the basket in the river, steps up to the Pharaoh’s daughter. Helpful royal subject that she is, she offers, “Would you like me to find one of the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” (v. 7).

This is a handy solution for everyone involved: The baby goes back home, of course. But maybe the Pharaoh’s daughter judiciously buys some time. Would her father kill the baby himself if she brings him home that day? Does she know that in a few months, when the baby is a toddler, he will be out of danger?

The last leg of the insurrectionist journey – at least in this part of the baby’s story – is the day his own mother hands him over to the daughter of the Pharaoh, right into the family of the man who wanted him killed before his first breath. What does she do when she gets back home? Does she hatch plans to free him from the palace or does she hang around the gates hoping for a glimpse of him as he grows up? Does she know what she will do if she ever sees her boy again?

I’m asking a lot of questions because this story demands it. (Be suspicious of anyone who wants to tell you once-and-for-all, case-closed, exactly what a biblical text means.) This story is the against-all-odds origin story of the man we know by the last verse of the passage is Moses – the man God will continue to call out of the water and into new lands and up mountains and across deserts, leading a nation behind him. It’s a foundational story, on which a huge swath of the Jewish and then Christian story builds.

And right there, at the very beginning, are Shiphrah and Puah. Without them, the rest of it can’t happen. Notice how crucial their bravery is. Notice how they are able to influence the beginning of a nation from their precise social situation, in the course of their every day work.

Do Shiphrah and Puah see it coming? Does the baby’s mother know what she will do after those first three months? Does his sister know what she will do next, from her perch by the riverside, waiting to see who will happen upon her baby brother? Does the baby’s mother break her own heart every day she nurses her own son while wondering what will happen when he is weaned?

I don’t know about y’all, but I have a fondness for plans. I like knowing the next step. I find comfort in the thought that my efforts are “going somewhere.” Even if you have a more relaxed relationship to planning, you know our culture loves the idea of “cost-benefit analysis” and “demonstrated results.” As a people, we tend to be reluctant to risk when we can’t see the payoff. Even when it comes to something we are passionate about, we might want to study it a while longer and be sure that if we set off in a certain direction, we will get where we think we are headed.

This is what intrigues me about Shiphrah and Puah. I don’t think they have this luxury or this hang-up. They seem guided by their knowledge of and relationship with God, so that it is crystal clear to them that they will never be killing babies for Pharaoh. I doubt the rest of the story is clear. I doubt they have any idea of their next step until they take it.

I want to be more like Shiphrah and Puah. I’m afraid that if I were in their situation I might say very “reasonable” sounding things like, So I don’t kill the babies and then what? Someone else kills them anyway – and then comes to kill me? How does that help our cause?

Or, closer to home: So we take down some statues, and then what? What part of history do we “rewrite” next?

But they don’t have to know the next step – only the one right in front of them at that moment. And they take it. They do everything in their power, at each point in time where any bit of power is in their hands, to do the next right thing. And when the story moves away from them – when the power to act moves into the womb and the hands of the baby’s mother – she does the next right thing. And then her daughter and the Pharaoh’s daughter each do their things. The ball gets passed – inelegantly, surprisingly, in a completely unplanned fashion – from one woman to the next, resisting and refusing to cooperate with evil, one decision at a time.

Justice is a team sport and it’s also a marathon, not a sprint. Shiphrah and Puah don’t complete the mission – just their mission. It’s the combined efforts of all of these women, one by one, over time that moves the needle of justice and begins the building of a nation.

None of us needs to know where this will end in order to risk for Love. None of us needs to be an expert in American or Confederate history in order to listen to the pain spoken by our black and brown and Jewish and LGBTQ brothers and sisters. I don’t have to know, specifically, what I’ll do next week in order to take a step for justice right now. And if obscure Hebrew midwives like Shiphrah and Puah have enough power to start something important enough to become a nation, then so do we.

Whether you saw it coming or not, whether you joined the counter-protests when the white supremacists marched here two weeks ago or not, there is a faithful next step. You do not have to know what city council should do or how to fix Virginia’s open carry laws. You do not have to re-learn and broaden your knowledge of history before you make a move, though reading might be one next step. On August 12^th, Jan was stationed at the jail and our United Methodist colleagues Robert and Phil were providing safe space and medical care at First church; other ecumenical colleagues like Seth and Brittany were on the front lines, staring evil in the face. We are not all called to the same next step. Justice is a team sport and it’s a marathon. There will be more headed our way. If the invitation to cooperate with evil can find its way to Shiphrah and Puah, it will pound on our doors, too. Again.

I don’t just mean the doors of our town. The church has work to do. The United Methodist church has been complicit in the evils of racism, once splitting into northern and southern churches over it and, even earlier, birthing the AME Church by our refusal to recognize Richard Allen’s call to preach. We have been content to offer charity when we’ve been called to work for justice. We are all called to be midwives for God, helping to bring about the kingdom of God and to live here in this community as if that reality is already here in its fullness. We are all already set free to do this justice work. In Christ, we have been made one family: neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female (Galatians 3: 28)… Which does not mean Yeah, we’ve treated one another poorly in the past but Jesus fixed all that. Nor does it mean that the church has already arrived. Evil pounds on these doors, too. And sometimes, as in the culture at large, we can’t hear it or we call it by other names like “law” or “custom” or “how it’s always been” or “what the bible says.”

We are set free to live radically loving, rule-breaking, decree-defying, justice-flowing lives – and we are called to start from exactly where we are without much time to plan and with whatever tools we have on hand. Right where we are in the birthing room, the board room, the lecture hall, the barista counter, the cookout, the family dinner, the school PTA meeting…

Without Shiphrah and Puah and the women who took the ball after them, we might have an entirely different story. It’s the same here in Charlottesville and in our country right now.

We’ll be writing history, one way or another. One step at a time.

All you have to know right now is which direction Love is.

Thanks be to God!

Photo © Woody Sherman, used with permission.

Jesus Promises They Will Hate Us

Posted on November 14, 2016 by admin

Walking into Oceti Sakowin Camp with the sun rising, Standing Rock Sioux Nation, 11/3/16

A sermon preached on Luke 21: 5-19 and Isaiah 65: 17-25, on November 13, 2016, at the Wesley Foundation at UVA.

As I think you all know by now, last week I traveled to North Dakota, to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. I had been watching the news for more than a month, learning about the multiple Native tribes who had come together to camp out on the prairie to protect the water of the Missouri River, where a company from Texas has been making its way across four states with an oil pipeline (called the Dakota Access Pipeline), including plans to tunnel under the Missouri River, just north of the Standing Rock reservation. I had read about the original route for the pipeline, which was supposed to cross under the river north of Bismarck (about an hour’s drive north of the reservation). But the people in Bismarck thought that sounded dangerous and risky to them and their water, so the plans changed to avoid that town – but not to avoid the risks to water contamination all together. I had read about the peaceful prayerful protests and about indigenous people from all over the globe traveling to North Dakota to support and stand with the Standing Rock Sioux. Since last April, thousands of people have been camping and protesting and trying to protect the water. In the last month, a highly militarized police and security force began shooting rubber bullets at peaceful protestors and at even at their horses. A private militia hired by the oil company set dogs on protestors, some of whom were mauled. Authorities in riot gear have used pepper spray and sound cannons on peaceful, prayerful protestors exercising their first amendment rights – protestors and water protectors who are bathed every day in prayer and who pray daily for those officers. Authorities have locked up journalists who have tried to cover the events and have thrown over 400 people in jail on contrived charges in attempts to intimidate them into stopping and disbanding. In jail they have needlessly strip-searched people in order to humiliate and further intimidate them. They have shipped some of those in custody to jails several hours away, to make it harder to get back home again or find rides when they are eventually released, sometimes on bail as high as $1500 per person. When their court dates come around, they will be required to travel hours back to those other towns to appear. Police are using helicopters and drones constantly circling overhead and they have road blocked the main highway between the reservation and Bismarck. They constantly stand guard at the roadblock with additional forces keeping watch from the nearby ridges.[i]

As things came to a head and became violent in this past month, the Standing Rock Sioux Nation and other Native groups I’ve been following began asking explicitly for more people to join them. We need numbers, they said. We need them to see we won’t go away and we aren’t alone. Please help us. I kept reading and following and praying. I didn’t really think about going. It’s the middle of the semester. It’s a really long way away. Wouldn’t it be better to send them money for winter supplies? It didn’t seem reasonable or feasible. Then Rev. John Floberg, a feisty crusty old Episcopal priest who’s been serving in the communities on and near the Reservation for 25 years, sent out a call to clergy. It’s time to come, he said. I know it’s inconvenient and this is short notice but this is it. They need us. We can provide a protective witness for their struggle. He was hoping to get 100 clergy and over 500 of us answered the call. But I told colleagues and friends who were going “no” at least twice before I changed my mind. I told God “no” more than that. But it wouldn’t leave me alone. All the same “reasonable” things popped up – money, time, effort, inconvenience, family commitments… As I pondered and said “no” and delayed, the airline tickets kept going up. Wouldn’t it be better to send them $1000 for food and warm clothes and winter camping supplies? What am I going to do? But the Holy Spirit would not leave me alone and the people of Standing Rock kept saying, We need help. We need you to come. At some point in that epic week of wrestling with God about this decision, I realized that, unlike so many many things in the world, this is something I am qualified to do. I am a person who prays; I am a visible sign of the church; I have a body and I’m able and well enough to travel. I don’t know what to replace pipelines with or how to implement renewable energy plans. I don’t know how to map an alternate route for this pipeline. I couldn’t convene a meeting with President Obama or film a documentary about this struggle. But I was absolutely qualified to put on my clergy garb and say “yes” to my far away neighbors who needed help I could provide, and spend some money and travel in the middle of the night and stand in the middle of the prairie with them and pray.

I am not telling you this so you will praise me or come tell me after worship how amazing it is that I went. I do appreciate the support and prayers from Wesley folks and others in Charlottesville as I answered that call, but that’s not why I’m telling you this now. I’m trying to let you in on, as best I can, how inelegant and clumsy and wrestling-match-like my discernment was – and how blessed I was by choosing to go where and when I was asked, to offer what was asked of me, and not to rationalize or monetize my way out of it.

Most importantly, I am telling you this in the hopes that when you hear someone’s request or see someone in need of help and solidarity, you won’t take as long as I did to wrestle it out.

The pipeline may or may not be stopped or re-routed and you may or may not think pipelines are a bad idea – but there are not “two sides” to this situation. For Christians, the only side is to stand up for and to stand with those who are being beaten and jailed and harassed and intimated without any just cause.

This sermon is not about the election, exactly. It’s about how Christians are called to act no matter who is in power, no matter how prosperous and peaceable the times, no matter how war-torn and uncertain.

Luke records Jesus saying, as the disciples admired the stonework and the architecture of the temple, “As for the things you are admiring, the time is coming when not even one stone will be left upon another. All will be demolished.” When Luke writes down those prophetic words of Jesus the temple’s destruction is already 15 years ago for Luke’s own audience.

Jesus says, This is impressive and beautiful but it will be dust. It will not stand the test of time. It will be destroyed. He stands in the shadow of the empire and the religious institutions of his day telling his band of followers that everything will crumble and war will break out and they will be arrested and persecuted – but that, even in the midst of all that, God is still counting the hairs on each of their heads. By enduring, holding tight to God alone, they will “gain their lives” (v. 18).

Jesus does not promise wealth or peace between the nations of the world. He does not promise that the institutions and the things they love about the current regime will be spared. He promises natural and human-made destruction, famine, health epidemics, kingdoms collapsing, prison, religious persecution, and betrayal by loved ones. Jesus promises that people will hate us because of him.

Since Election Day incidents of hate speech, graffiti, and intimidation, targeted at Muslims, Blacks, immigrants, and women, have increased. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center and as of 5pm on Friday night, there were over 200 such incidents since Election Day. People have been approached in the street, found graffiti on their apartment doors, been directly put down and threatened in school cafeterias, and more, told to “get out of our country” and “If you aren’t born here, pack your bags.” A Black woman was standing at a traffic light in Louisiana when a truckload of white men pulled up and shouted at her, “F*** your black life!” They laughed and chanted “Trump!” as they drove off. According to Inside Higher Ed, at New York University’s engineering college someone defaced the door to a designated Muslim prayer room, by scrawling “Trump!” across it. Even before Tuesday’s results, we here at UVA have experienced a spate of hateful speech and harassment directed towards Jews, the LGBTQ community, Black students, Muslims, and women. We have seen enough of this here that a collection of student organizations has come together under the name Eliminate the Hate and they are sponsoring a week of activities and events on Grounds this week, to speak out and up against this rising tide.

In the middle of another tumultuous and destructive time, Isaiah wrote (Isaiah 65: 17-19):

For I am about to create new heavens

and a new earth;

the former things shall not be remembered

or come to mind.

But be glad and rejoice forever

in what I am creating;

for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,

and its people as a delight.

I will rejoice in Jerusalem,

and delight in my people;

no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,

or the cry of distress.

Isaiah wrote these words to the war-torn remnant of Israel who were finally returning home after 60 years as captives in Babylon. They are words of hope but they must have been a teary and anguished hope to the people’s ears as their eyes took in their destroyed homes and vineyards and towns. Nothing was intact or as they had left it. They had to start over again. “The former things shall not be remembered or come to mind”…”be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating”…It must have seemed impossible to those returning exiles that they would forget what had happened, that standing in the rubble of their former lives they could ever forget the world-shifting loss or that moment or any of those long 60 years. It must have seemed insane to stand in that situation in that moment and be told to “rejoice” in what God was creating. Where, God? Exactly where in this mess is your beautiful handiwork?

But God promises that the houses and vineyards they build will not be in vain. They will make it through to live in them and to harvest the fruit. Their hard and faithful work of rebuilding will not be in vain. God promises to answer before the people even ask, before they call out again.

Spoken into a broken time of uncertainty and great fear, Isaiah proclaims that even though you may not be able to see it yet, God is still working. What looks ugly and destroyed is the fertile soil for what grows next. Hang on and hope, because here’s what you will see soon.

Sunrise over Oceti Sakowin Camp, Standing Rock Sioux Nation, 11/3/16

One of the things I noticed at Standing Rock was how the Native people referred to others as “relatives.” There is a loudspeaker in the camp and as the morning was getting started around the sacred fire, someone came on and said, “Good morning, relatives!” When indigenous people from around the world arrive at Standing Rock, they say, “Our relatives from New Zealand and Hawaii are here.” This deep recognition of their connection as indigenous people, across country and landscape, is the basis for this huge gathering of tribes (nothing like this has been seen in more than a hundred years).

Since I returned home, I’ve been following Lyla June Johnston, a Navajo woman who spoke to the clergy group and joined us in our prayer and protective action. She impressed and humbled me when she described the Walk of Forgiveness she was organizing for the Sunday after we were there. She talked about how important it was for all of us to join them in their stand and encouraged those of us who are white, descendants of colonizing settlers, to be proud of our own family lineage but also to admit to what our people have done. She said, “Your job is to acknowledge what happened and Native peoples’ job is to forgive.”

This week after the election she posted this prayer to Facebook: “Creator may you bless my dear uncle Donald Trump. May you help him to heal. May you help him to feel Your Love. May you help to ease his fears and help him to sense Your True Blessing. Help him to forgive himself and others so he may be free. And most of all, just give whatever blessing you would have for Your son, and my uncle. May we continue to retain our nature in the spirit of Your unconditional and restorative love and forgiveness. May we continue to work for health and justice with love for the unhealthy and the unjust. #NotMyPresident #JustMyUncle #Ké” [K’é means kinship]

This is the result of seeing one another as relatives. This is what a Christian prayer ought to sound like. This prayer has meat on it and it’s more daring and courageous and faithful than the mere lip service we sometimes give to the theological understanding that we are “brothers” and “sisters” in Christ. This is the kind of prayer that seeks to create connection and solidarity with some people – and might also make others hate you. Just as Jesus promised.

I don’t think it is a surprise to many of us that we live in a divided country. But it seems this week that we were surprised by just how divided. Almost no one thought Trump would win the election. No one thought the vote would be half and half.

However you voted, half of our brothers and sisters, our relations, voted differently than you did. What I’ve heard most Americans saying this week is “They” didn’t know how many of us there were, or, “They” didn’t know how dangerous their vote was. I have not heard most Americans this week confessing that we have been just fine up until now not knowing or caring about those other relations in that other half. Those aren’t my neighbors.

Rev. John Floberg, who called us out to Standing Rock, reminded us on the night before our protective witness with the Native people, that the police officers we would see across the divide, that barricaded highway bridge, were not our enemies. He reminded us that on the cross Jesus did not rebuke, he forgave – with his dying breath. So, John Floberg said, “We greet the officers with prayer and love and compassion, too.”

This is hard.

Those stones are beautiful but they will be rubble one day. This will not stand.

My life is not in the Democratic Party or even my personal shero Hillary Clinton. My neighbor’s life is not in Trump or the Republican Party or Bernie or any candidates or parties. Our lives, patriotic and democracy-inspired as they may be, are not in these United States. Or in the dream of moving to Canada or making this country “great again.”

Our lives are in Jesus Christ. They will hate us because of Jesus. Keep going. All this destruction and despair? Raw materials for the beautiful new creation of God.

This is not the time to keep your head down and wait for the uneasiness to pass. This is not the time to think I’m not a racist/ I love Muslims/ I don’t sexually assault women/ I welcome immigrants / I care for the disabled and then be done with it as if you have completed your task. This is not the time to think I’m happy with my vote and I’m nice to people and that’s enough.

The election may or may not have gone in the direction you hoped for – but there are not “two sides” to this situation of increased, targeted hate crimes and speech. For Christians, the only side is to stand up for and to stand with those who are being harassed and intimated simply because they are Black or Muslim or immigrants or people with disabilities or women or….

This is not the time to put your head down in prayer and hope it will pass. This is the time to lift your head up, take in the destruction you see, and stare straight in the face of hate while you proclaim and enact and witness to Love.

Love in these times means refusing to eliminate half of our country when you consider who your neighbors are. That means you don’t have “elite” and “uneducated” neighbors; you simply have neighbors with different life experiences than yours and if you don’t understand those, it’s time to learn and to meet some new people, and work on loving them. Love in these times means resisting and standing up to hate in its many insidious forms. Speak out, stand with, and offer to walk alongside those in this community who are targets of bigotry. Literally, offer to walk with students in unsafe situations around Grounds. Use the Just Report It system. Call for help. Keep watch when something seems off. Do not remain silent when people are degrading and demeaning and intimidating and targeting others in speech or action. State unequivocally that hate speech and “us” and “them” commentary is not OK with you. Attend the Eliminate the Hate teach-in to learn about your own blind spots and to walk across some of our community’s divides to meet your relations.

No matter how uncertain and fearful the times, no matter how unfamiliar the landscape, no matter how unknown and un-relatable our neighbors, our relatives – God is creating a new heaven and earth, right now. In the middle of this huge mess. Believe it.

The only temple that will not fall – not even in the face of death itself – is Love. Let’s work with God to build it.

Thanks be to God!

Photos are my own.

Endnote:

[i] This is a compiled account from months of reading and following the news. A few good places to learn more and follow the ongoing stand are: https://www.facebook.com/Indigenousrisingmedia/

http://www.democracynow.org/topics/dakota_access

http://standwithstandingrock.net

http://ictmn.lughstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/DAPL-Magazine-2016_PREVIEW_r1.pdf

http://westernjurisdictionumc.org/wjumc-bishops-send-letter-to-president-obama-in-support-of-standing-rock-sioux-nation/

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-showdown-at-standing-rock-20161108-story.html

Prayer, pizza, and blazing signs of hope

Posted on November 11, 2016 by admin

post-election-prayer-and-pizza-at-wesley-at-uva-on-11-9-16

The table was set at Wesley last Wednesday night, and they came.

It’s been a long week, folks. If you are preparing to preach or to listen to preaching this weekend, you have my heartfelt sympathy and blessings as you make your way to that moment and beyond. In the midst of all this, it’s been a hope-filled week in campus ministry. I hope you will head over to Ministry Matters today to read my latest reflection.

Belief’s back side

Posted on August 27, 2016 by admin

Ruined book cover_everhart_aug 2016

It was when I lived in the heart of Appalachia for three years between college and seminary, that I started to cringe whenever I heard sweet, well-meaning folks say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” I knew what they meant, these generous volunteers from around the US who spent vacation weeks to help repair and build homes for low-income people. For some of them, it was a huge step to get to the place of uttering this phrase. It meant they could see how similar they were to the people they had come to help. When people said this, they meant it was hitting them fresh in the face that a paycheck or an illness or birth into a different family would have put them in the same position of poverty and need.

My cringe response developed because of what was not said. If – except for the bounty of God’s grace – you might be in the same situation as that person over there, does that mean God’s grace ran out for that person? If the only thing separating you from that person over there is the grace of God, does that mean God does not bestow grace upon him?

Ruth Everhart calls it the “back side” of our theology, these second-thought obvious questions and holes exposed by our first-thought confident statements of faith. It’s a helpful term, focusing on what’s behind/beside/beneath what we say. Everhart’s new memoir, Ruined, explores the experience she and her college housemates had of being sexually assaulted in their home, and how her life, love, and faith unfolded in the years that followed. As she and her housemates attempted to make sense of what had happened to them, the language and theology they used to do so betrayed the differences in their experience and theology.

One housemate, Cheryl, had not been raped. Everhart overhears Cheryl saying to another friend, “I just kept reciting the Twenty-third Psalm over and over, and I guess God heard me.” Everhart continues, “Didn’t she know that we’d all been saying that psalm while our heads were smashed into the nap of the carpet? I kept my distance from Cheryl after that. She’d had her own experience of the crime and her own reaction. Her belief that God had intentionally spared her obviously gave her comfort. Who knows? Perhaps in her shoes, I would have felt the same. But Cheryl seemed unaware of the back side of her belief about being spared. What did that mean for the rest of us, who had not been spared?” (Ruined, p. 79).

Everhart, who was raised in the Dutch Calvinist tradition and eventually became an ordained Presbyterian minister, frames her story with stark markers of “back side belief.” She begins the book with this sentence: “It happened on a Sunday night, even though I’d been a good girl and gone to church that morning” (p. 3). In the epilogue, she reflects on the moment, decades later, when one of her young daughters first learns about the assault on her mother. Her daughter finds an old news clipping Everhart saved: “’Rapist-robber? Oh, Mom’ – your face twisted up – ‘you mean you weren’t a virgin when you married Dad! Poor you!’ It was a shock to realize that your understanding of sexual violence was being filtered through the language of sexual purity” (p. 317). It was shocking to me, as a reader and a Christian, to consider her daughter’s reaction. How odd to have compassion (“Poor you!”) so misplaced (“you weren’t a virgin”). How strange and twisted a “Christian” belief whose back side is worry over purity/virginity rather than over a violent attack.

What we profess is important. But if we have not examined the back side of those beliefs, we don’t know what we are saying – or what we really believe.

There is so much to recommend Everhart’s book, beginning with her writing, that manages to be both incisive and humorous in exactly the right places. Everhart is not an untouchable hero in this story, making all the “right” choices about her life, but she is deeply relatable, even if your own experience of sex, violence, and faith have been different than hers. I admired the intentional way she attempts to overcome her fear of black men after the attack. Everhart is white, from an overwhelmingly white community and church, and had very few interactions with black people before the black attackers broke into her home. As she describes her post-attack encounters with black men, she is honest about her unflattering knee-jerk reactions while also being kind with her still-terrified younger self. Her later church shopping struck me as genuine and wise, when she trusts God’s “Spirit to do something important in this hour every week, even if I didn’t know exactly what that was” (p. 275).

This is an honest and important book – especially for the church, where we so often have trouble discussing sex and sexual violence and where the unexamined back side of our belief heaps harm upon violation, for those in the pews and for our neighbors.

If you have read a blurb about Ruth Everhart’s memoir and were pretty sure it wasn’t going to make your reading list, I hope you’ll do yourself a favor and read it anyway. Despite the title, this is not a story of ruin, but of profound and inviting redemption. If you’re brave enough to accompany Ruth as she so beautifully describes her life and faith, you realize the only thing ruined was the theology that claimed that word.

Full Disclosure: I received a free advance reader copy of this book from the author, in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Photo credit: Ruined book cover. Used with the permission of Ruth Everhart.

This summer I went swimming

Posted on August 24, 2016 by admin

swimming in lake george_2016

Almost anything can be a spiritual practice, if you let it. It’s about the practice – the routine and prioritization of it, the days upon weeks turning into months of it – in the presence of an open spirit, willing to learn and be led. Molded, over time. Swimming is like this for me. I’ve written before about how swimming helps keep me focused on the present moment, and how flip turns are teaching me about energy, rest, and resilience.

Well, this summer I went swimming. A lot. A very few stormy days I swam inside at the gym, but most of the time I swam outside. I was a regular in the lone roped-off lap lane at our neighborhood pool, I practiced with a group in a lake in Richmond, and I competed in my first open water swim in another lake near Charlottesville. (And came in third in my age group. And got a medal. But who’s keeping track?) When we visited family at another lake in New York, I recruited my husband to kayak alongside me as I swam so boats wouldn’t run me over. In South Carolina, I swam in the bathwater warm ocean, but the best swims were in the outdoor lap-swimming-only pool that was cooled. (Yes, they “air conditioned” the pool and it was so scrumptious I don’t really care how non-environmental that may sound.)

To throw yourself into something you love is, simply, delicious. Giving yourself over to its rhythms and routines, watching yourself with curiosity to see where the love will unfold and take you. Allowing yourself to be unreasonable and devoted, depleted and good-tired. This is what I did this summer, when there were very few rules and obligations, the expansiveness of summertime and sabbatical overlapping. I absolutely organized my days around my swims.

And it was worth it.

Part of what sustained spiritual practice teaches you is how much you need it. I am not the same swimmer I was in May. I am not entirely the same person.

pre race cgl_july 9 2016

It may surprise you, but the open water swim was not the most daunting thing I did this summer. It was the open water practice swim I joined a couple weeks before that in Richmond. I had to drive over an hour away to a place I didn’t know, to meet up with people I didn’t know, to try out swimming in a body of water I’d never seen, while wearing my bathing suit in front of complete strangers. Buttons were pushed. I almost bailed. I woke up that day feeling nervous about it, uncertain about whether I could keep up, whether I’d be able to site the buoys, how thin and athletic all the other swimmers would likely be. I wasn’t sure I’d even like open water swimming, so wasn’t this kind of a waste of time and money?

I talked myself down. I recognized all those demons and agreed they could even be right. And I agreed to go to this one practice session anyway and just see. If I hated it, fine, no obligation to continue or do other open water swims after that. But I was not going to bail based on fear, anxiety, lack of confidence, and what ifs. (During the academic year, it would have been much easier to bail. The time and money concern trolls would have had a lot more sway if that evening’s jaunt to Richmond had been sandwiched in between meetings and a buzzing phone.)

I was glad I went. Not everyone there was athletic and skinny. I was not the slowest. I loved it when we swam straight out into the middle of the lake to make a loop around an instructor standing on a paddle board. I loved it even more when the complete stranger I got paired up with said to me after one lap, “You go first and don’t worry about me. I could barely keep up with you.”

Spiritual practice involves repetition and new territory, ritual and change.

I was never particularly worried that I might have drowned, but when I heard Lucy Kaplansky’s “Swimming Song” for the first time late this summer, I recognized my own bravery and playful pride, swimming my way up and down the waters of the east coast. Kaplansky sings, “This summer I went swimming. This summer I might have drowned, but I held my breath, and I kicked my feet, and I moved my arms around.” Sounds simple and it kind of is, but simple can also be hard.

Spiritual practice takes trust and bravery, allowing yourself to be held up by something you are participating with but that’s not you. This is also one of the “tricks” to open water swimming, especially when you get scared or unnerved by the vastness and the murky depths. The key is to remember, “The water wants to hold you up.”

1-mile medal_cgl_july 9 2016

Today the cicadas are singing summer towards the door. We are experiencing an unusually temperate and humidity-free start to the week and we got to open up the windows again yesterday. It won’t last long. By Friday it will be sweltering, but that won’t last long either. Fall is on the way.

I’ll get in a few more swims in the neighborhood pool before it closes for the season. And I have designs on a quarry, where a new friend swims as late into the fall as she can. I’ve started wondering about open water swims for next year. In the meantime, after a summer of peripatetic swimming, I will log a lot of miles in the gym, same place each day, but never the same “river”—or swimmer – twice.

Adding the flip turn

Posted on July 5, 2016 by admin

Practicing open water swimming in the lake. No flip turns required.

Flip turns have a mystique about them. Walk up to any pool and watch folks swimming laps. Your eyes will immediately go to the swimmers who do flip turns at the walls. It doesn’t matter if they are faster than the other swimmers, they will look fiercer because of the flip turn. Conversely, if, instead of doing flip turns, you saw Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps sticking their heads up at the walls, gulping air, turning awkwardly half out of the water, then plunging back in for the next lap, they would seem significantly less fierce.

On swim teams in junior high and high school I did a lot of flip turns. Even with the flip turns, I never looked particularly fierce but they were a regular part of my swimming. When I started swimming again a few years ago, I gave myself permission not to include flip turns. It seemed like a good deal: expend my limited energy on the strokes and the laps themselves and give myself a little extra breath and time at the walls. I made this decision intentionally and unapologetically. The goal was more swimming, not “perfect” swimming. During these past few years, I have reserved the occasional flip turn for special circumstances, like the time I felt strong and energized hitting lap number 100 and joyously flipped at the wall to celebrate it.

Lately, I’ve been adding the flip turn back into my freestyle laps. I’m not entirely sure why. I’m considering an open water swim this summer but flip turns are completely unnecessary in lakes, so that’s not it. This most excellent and inspiring ode to the flip turn encouraged me but didn’t push me over the edge. I think it’s just time. Like it was time to get back in the pool a few years ago. Back then, I gave myself permission to swim without flip turns. Now, I’ve given myself permission to flip again (and sometimes, not to flip – as with the earlier deal with myself, I’m not after perfection and I’m not requiring all or nothing).

One of the things I hope this summer’s sabbatical will show me is how to distinguish between the need for rest and the need for persistence. How do I know when I’m hitting a groove I should explore and stick with, versus knowing when to back off, versus knowing when to go harder even though I’m already losing steam? Maybe I’m seeing part of the answer in swimming.

When you hit the wall you have several choices: 1) call it a day, stop swimming, and hang on for dear life, 2) grab as much air as you can every single second your head is out of the water while you turn around inelegantly but practically, then push off and carry on as best you can, or 3) make the turn as smooth and seamless a part of your stroke as possible, flipping around and using the wall itself to propel you in the next direction. They are all valid choices. I’m thankful for my unapologetic miles logged choosing #2. And really curious to see where #3 sends me.

Photo credit: Screen grab of video shot by P. Chambers, June 2016. Used with permission.

Campus Ministry Stocking Stuffers

Posted on December 16, 2015 by admin

There comes a time when you need to make a list and leave it out next to a plate of cookies… Here’s one I made, with a few suggestions for campus ministers (and others) who are looking for new books, shows, and resources for enlivening faith and community. Take a look over at the National Campus Ministry Association blog…and feel free to leave your browser open where someone jolly might see it and pick up a thing or two for your stocking.

WoodySherman2014_close up Xmas tree with bow and lights

Expectations Met

Posted on October 15, 2015 by admin

Blaha_1024px-Serpentine_wall_UVa_daffodils_c2010

What did your parents tell you to look for or look out for when you headed to college? What are you telling your own kids as they leave home? What we say – and don’t say – matters.

Do you know what your church says about campus ministry? What’s that – you’ve never heard anyone say anything about campus ministry? Unfortunately, you are not alone on that one. I’ve got a few thoughts about this, over at the blog for the National Campus Ministry Association.

Snow Day

Space to play, rest, create, feast.

Category Archives: Campus Ministry

Swimming during General Conference

For Such a Time

The Pillow

Advent, patience, and the passage of time

Rewriting History

Jesus Promises They Will Hate Us

Prayer, pizza, and blazing signs of hope

Belief’s back side

This summer I went swimming

Adding the flip turn

Campus Ministry Stocking Stuffers

Expectations Met