Just another WordPress site

Author: Sara Palmer

  • WHEN PROPHETS PREACH: LEADERSHIP AND THE POLITICS OF THE PULPIT

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 51

    When Prophets Preach

    Reviewed by Joseph S. Harvard III

    Durham, North Carolina

    Jonathan C. Augustine, When Prophets Preach: Leadership and the Politics of the Pulpit (Minneapolis, Minnesota, Fortress Press, 2023)

    One of the great joys in life is introducing good friends to other good friends. The Journal for Preachers has been a treasured friend since its inception. Now, it is my pleasure to introduce you as readers of the JP to a new friend who has much to offer. The form of this introduction is a review of an extraordinary book, When Prophets Preach. The author, Pastor Jonathan (Jay) Augustine, arrived in Durham, North Carolina, in 2019 from New Orleans where he had been pastor of the Historic St. Charles AME congregation to become pastor of another historic congregation, St. Joseph AME. It has been my privilege to be closely connected to St. Joseph for over the thirty-three years of my ministry in Durham. We worshipped together and worked to build what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called a Beloved Community. It was soon obvious that Pastor Jay had unique gifts and a passion for social justice. We are living in perilous times when everything seems up for grabs, and the world order is in peril, along with congregations and our common life. I often wonder if the center will hold. In his book on prophetic preaching, the author throws out a lifeline that offers hope and a challenge. As a pastor on my route to the church I served for years, I drove past a small African American church that had a marquee which asked: “Who Needs A Word From The Lord?” followed by a scripture passage. One day I realized the marquee was speaking to me and to the world we live in. We are standing in the need of a Word from the Lord. Prophetic preaching, according to Jay Augustine, listens, hears, and delivers the Word of the Lord! For him prophetic preaching emerges from Scripture. Scripture critiques our lives and world, calling for us to face the divide between God’s truth and justice and the status quo which promotes and supports systematic injustice. We are called to dare to proclaim God’s vision for peace with justice for all. The book is remarkable because it argues that the call for social justice is not an addendum to the Gospel, but it is central to the biblical witness and the teaching of Jesus: “Christianity compels political engagement in responding to oppressive social conditions” (page 20). In these perilous days when everything we value, the climate, democracy, truth, and our religious institutions are under attack, Is there a Word from the Lord? At a time when the identity of what “Christian” means and what the Church of Jesus Christ stands for is uncertain, this book lifts up a vision for such a time as this. Au-

    Page 52

    Journal for Preachers

    gustine calls on pastors and congregations to engage in the ancient tradition of the Judeo-Christian community of prophetic preaching and practicing what we preach. His proposal that we answer the call to seek justice by addressing issues of social justice from the pulpit and in our communal life is deeply rooted in Scripture. This is almost always political which some argue is “mixing religion with politics.” Here is the author’s answer: “The word ‘politics’ as translated from Greek, simply means ‘affairs of the cities .’ Consequently, when the church ‘gets political,’ it addresses matters of the state that morally compels its active engagement and prophetic resistance. Indeed, the Bible is replete with examples of prophetic leaders who get political because their faith compels responses to social injustices” (page 19). Examples he offers include Amos crying out for justice (Amos 5: 4. 24) and Paul calling for gender and ethnic equality (Galatians 3:28). John is political writing from prison on Patmos (Revelations 1: 9). Then there is Jesus calling for release of the captives (Luke 4:18), and those three Hebrew boys, Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego engaging in civil disobedience (Daniel 3). And the list could go on and on. Let me be honest here. Growing up I did not read or hear the Bible read in this way which sees the struggle for social justice as crucial. I was raised in a White Southern Presbyterian Church where social justice was not on the agenda, and frankly , it was scary to those of us who lived privileged lives. I am deeply grateful to my seminary professors and my Black colleagues like Jay Augustine, James Forbes, and Martin Luther King Jr., and many others who have opened my eyes to the centrality of the call for social justice. The argument in this book is that even though prophetic preaching can be uncomfortable and met with resistance, it is crucial at this time. If the church is to have integrity and relevance in these days that cry out for a Word from the Lord, it is important that the church speak with a prophetic voice, a voice that addresses the lies, injustice, and hateful speech that leads to violence. Augustine believes a truth-telling church will give hope and encouragement to those perplexed by the current state of affairs. Pastor Augustine also believes prophetic preaching is not a solo activity. He writes about the importance of building the support and commitment in a congregation of lay people who grasp the biblical vision for social justice and are willing to work to make it a reality. He describes how that has happened in the congregation he leads, and it has been so encouraging for me to watch it happen. One of the dangers that is addressed in the book is Christian nationalism. The grasp of how this powerful force in our society, fueled by the MAGA’s regressive politics, threatens the message of the Gospel is insightful and serves as a helpful warning. Another strong point in the book is the call for reconciliation and reparations. He draws on Paul’s exhortation to us as those who have been reconciled to God through

    Page 53

    Pentecost 2024

    Christ to engage in a ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:17-19). Reconciliation is hard work because it means repairing broken relationships. Repentance and forgiveness are essential. Augustine also explores in a helpful way the issue of reparation, what it requires to repair a relationship! As a biblical example he offers the passage where “Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord: ‘if I have defrauded anyone, I will pay back four times as much’” (Luke 19:8). The author’s call for reconciliation is reflected in these words from the Belhar Confession: “We believe that God has entrusted to the Church the message of reconciliation , and that the Church is called to proclaim and embody this reconciliation; to be peacemakers; to believe and to witness that God conquers all powers of sin and death, of hate and bitterness, and enmity, through his life-giving Word and Spirit.” How about a bowl of gumbo? Jay Augustine is from New Orleans and loves gumbo. He has a remarkable analysis of how the melting pot theory is inadequate to honor the unique gifts of people from different backgrounds. You will appreciate his description of how the composition of gumbo is a good analogy for honoring our diversity . Maybe this will whet your appetite for some gumbo and for a Beloved Community ! I recommend this book because I believe it provides insight and a challenge to a way forward in these times when there is so much confusion and uncertainty. The book also contains a couple of huge bonuses. The Foreword is written by the Reverend William J. Barber II, and the Afterword is by the Reverend William H. Willimon. Both of their messages which endorse the book are insightful and inspiring , Barber and Willimon are both mentors of the author. Jonathan Augustine travels in good company, and I invite you to join him.

  • ‘Gardener of a New Creation’

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 47

    (< Gardener of a New Creation ”

    John 20:1-28, Psalm 25:4-8, Acts 9:1-9

    Miriam Mauritzen

    Kalispell, Montana

    …that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. ” John 20:31

    We have lived through a year where it has looked and felt like the light of the world has gone out. One war entered its third year with no end in sight; while in the fall, we all became witnesses to daily images of horrors in Israel and Gaza. Slaughter exchanged for security. There aren’t enough tombs to bury the dead. Still violence is not far away. In 2023 we beheld over 565 mass shootings in every kind of town and community imaginable. Still, so much violence few ever see. Many carry invisible wounds unseen, unspoken: grief borne alone. We don’t all pay the same price. At the end of 2023, 155 mm artillery shells that sold for $500, then $2,000, now sell for $9,000 a pop and, forecasts were made to ramp up production into 2026 by 500%. These are weapons the US doesn’t even use itself but sells in proxy wars. Some are profiting. Who? Are we profiting from all this violence? The modern prophet Martin Luther King Jr. wrote more than speeches. He cre­ ated a whole philosophy around violence and the non-violent way of Jesus. King argues that violence does not just injure the enemy, it cuts both ways—also injuring self. To resist violence in the face of violence is not simply love of the enemy, King believes nonviolence arises from a more sober, grounding love of self. To use the same weapons of an enemy to defeat them, costs us everything—it indelibly harms our soul. Those trained to extinguish the enemy also carry the violence and invisible wounding done to their soul and psyche. We mask the horrors borne with emblems of valor, token tributes and discounts. Yet, we can easily discount their pain. Another uncounted cost in conflict are survivors. They carry in their bodies in­ visible wounds of violence witnessed, violence they could not stop. Mary Magdalene is one of these witnesses. In John’s Gospel, she and the other women—like so many woman—remain at the cross of execution, inhabiting unsafe spaces. While it is still dark, she approaches the garden to access his tomb. We too, approach though it is still dark. For Mary, the approach means passing by the site of his torture and murder. Smells and sounds flood her being. Her heart accelerates even as all remains silent and still. It’s the stillness she no longer trusts. There is no peace. Yet, she cannot deny there is a piece of her that needs to be near his beaten body. To draw close in spite of the pain and allow her mind a moment to catch up with the

    Page 48

    Journal for Preachers

    horrors her body has witnessed and endured. There was no time. Everything hap­ pened so fast. Entering the garden, it all floods back. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone was moved away from the entrance (John 20:1). There is no comfort here. She is robbed even of his battered body. Everything in her has to move … and so she runs. She ran at once to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, gasp­ ing for breath. “They took the Master from the tomb. We don’t know where they’ve put him.” Peter and the other disciple left immediately for the tomb (John 20:2-3). Even they don’t see her. At word his body is taken, they run to see for them­ selves. Awash in new horrors, I imagine her stumbling back to the garden alone, accompanied only by fresh bewilderment and sorrow. By the time she arrives again, the two disciples are long gone. She remains alone. Standing outside the tomb she wept (John 20:11) remembering Jesus wept too for his friend Lazarus. Somehow, Jesus was with her in her weeping. And so “she knelt to look in the tomb.” Strangers were where his body would have been. “Woman, why do you weep?” I weep because it is the only human thing to do … “They took my Lord, and I don’t know where they have put him.” Turning away, as so many have turned away from her in her grief, she encounters the gardener. “Woman, why do you weep? Who are you looking for?” She, thinking that he the gardener, said, “Sir, if you took him, tell me where you put him so I can care for him.” Jesus said, “Mary” (John 20:15-16). I see your grief. Why do you weep? Who are you looking for? This past year I have been flooded with grief knowing the ways we respond to injury and pain with retaliation, humiliation, and tightening the grip, only set the stage for future battles, radicalizing a new generation. Who will rescue us from this vicious cycle of death? Jesus Christ—who came not to condemn the world but that the world through him might be delivered, saved (John 3:16). Serving now among Mennonites, they have focused my mind on nonviolence and peacemaking as a cen­ tral expression of new life in Christ. Suffering violence and coordinated mockery of justice to the point of death, God raises Jesus from the dead—not to start a reign of retribution and breathe out murder like Saul—but to usher in the kingdom by breathing out peace, inciting forgiveness, touching wounds, and drawing close enough to the grieving to know why they weep, what they seek and call them by name. “Woman, why do you weep? Who are you looking for?” I’m weeping for the stories we tell our children from a young age that violence is sad but inevitable in conflict. I weep because our culture pays token tribute to bodies

    Page 49

    Easter 2024

    we’ve called upon to destroy enemies without counting the real cost. I weep because too many from one generation to the next navigate places of untold violence in their neighborhoods, seared into their bodies, while the rest just pass by. Today, we celebrate the age-old story that Jesus conquers death. Yet, how can Jesus conquer death until he also conquers our need for vengeance, for retaliation in the name of safety and security? The truth is, I am only ever as safe and secure as Jesus—and we saw what happened to him. And through his resurrection, Mary sees what God can do! Jesus puts to death retaliation in the name of God, in the name of justice, in the name of righteousness. At sight of the risen Lord there is no gath­ ering an army, no call to arms, no retribution even for those of his flock who betrayed or fled. Instead, Jesus gets right past fears that lock us in and breathes out peace … the peace of a new creation. By announcing peace and calling upon forgiveness, the risen Jesus—the Alpha and Omega—lets go of the right to retaliate and calls follow­ ers to put an end to vicious cycles of violence and death. “Who are you looking for?” I’m looking for someone to not retaliate in the face of violence. Someone to stop us from our warring madness. Someone to reveal another way. I need this Savior. I need this gardener of a new creation. And I need us to see him and believe. This Easter season, may you find ones safe enough to share why you weep and who you are looking for. When we get close enough to safely touch one another’s wounds and breathe out peace, there awaits the risen Jesus, the one who conquers death, gardener of a new creation.

  • Floodlines: The story of an unnatural disaster

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 54

    One New Podcast for the Preacher

    Floodlines: The story of an unnatural disaster;

    https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/floodlines/

    Reviewed by Amy Miracle

    Columbus, Ohio

    I am a prolific consumer of podcasts. I find them immensely helpful for preaching because they are designed to be listened to rather than read or seen. If forced to name my all-time favorite podcast, I would probably choose Floodlines. This eightpart series from The Atlantic tells the story of what happened to the people of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We follow those who lived through the catastrophe of the levees breaking and, through their lives, look at what it all says about America. We hear the voices of people who lived through it, such as Alice Craft-Kerney, a nurse at Charity Hospital, and Fred Johnson, who took refuge in the Hyatt Hotel and got deputized to protect it. (“The level of fear that was in that room, I was trying not to visualize it,” he says.) Chaos shapes the story: chaos generated by extreme weather and human-made chaos. The podcast invites us to ponder why the negative consequences of that chaos do not fall equally on the residents of New Orleans. The podcast explores issues of systemic racism, media consumption and bias, and how the federal government responds to national disasters in a way that never strays too far from the stories of people who lived through it all. The podcast’s host, Vann R. Newkirk II, is a revelation. He is wise and warm as he spins a compelling story. The podcast is beautifully edited and scored by New Orleans jazz trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah. Much of the power of this podcast lies in the way it’s able to link the big picture to more personal, intimate stories. It is masterful storytelling and a great resource for the teacher and preacher. I invited my congregation to listen to it and then I hosted a discussion. The podcast also provides compelling stories that can be integrated into sermons that touch on chaos, fear, the fragility and power of community, death and rebirth.

  • No Past Tense Faith

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 49

    No Past Tense Faith

    Jason Byassee

    Toronto, Ontario

    There is a verbal tic we have in mainline Protestantism. Once you notice it, you’ll see it’s omnipresent, and aggravating. Pointing it out is, I hope, not just being a grammarian diva. I think it shows something rotten in our root system. I hope we can rip it out without harming the good fruit. When we write or preach, we usually speak of Jesus in the past tense. This makes some superficial sense. The Bible does it at times. Modern biblical scholarship has been maniacally dedicated to the task of discerning “what really happened.” If you’re in a more liberal institution, you’re after what the biblical writer concealed, trying to unearth the truth. If you’re in a conservative one, you’re trying to defend the historical veracity of the text, since it’s the means by which God spoke. In either case, the verb tense is all wrong. Jesus isn’t just a long ago figure far, far away. His words and deeds are not just set down for the historical record. He is alive. He did not just do these things once upon a time. He still does them, present-tense. Christian sermons exist to point out how God works now, ongoingly. Jesus did not just stand up for justice once. He stands up for justice now. He did not just raise the dead, heal the sick, restore sight, forgive sins, die on the cross, rise from the dead, or inaugurate a new creation in the inaccessible recesses of the past. He does those things now. If I’m wrong about this, we’d all better pack up and go home. Or else find a more lucrative and socially valued line of work. Or maybe start a religion in which chicken is the prohibited food. Anything but be Christian. It is a very old charge that we are overly scrupulous with mere words in the church. St. Basil the Great in the fourth century responded to the charge of oversensitivity as he insisted that the Spirit is God with the Son and Father:

    Those who are idle in the pursuit of righteousness count theological terminology as secondary, together with the attempts to search out the hidden meaning in this phrase or that syllable, but those conscious of the goal of our calling realize that we are to become like God, as far as this is possible for human nature. But we cannot become like God unless we have knowledge of Him, and without lessons there can be no knowledge. Instruction begins with the proper use of speech, and syllables and words are the elements of speech. Therefore to scrutinize syllables is not a superfluous task.

    Sure, tell me I’m hairsplitting. See you in hell. While we are scrutinizing, the verb “remind” should be struck from Christian vocabulary. Once you have it in for this verb, let me warn you, it will suddenly

    Page 50

    Journal for Preachers

    appear absolutely everywhere. Preachers remind people. Jesus reminds people. Authors remind people. Remind remind remind. What’s the problem? It’s a Christendom verb. It suggests that hearers already know everything that needs knowing about God and the world. They may have just temporarily forgotten it and so need a gentle, benevolent reminder from the person at the mic or keyboard . As a preacher I can only think of several thousand more appropriate verbs. Declares. Shows. Gestures. Demonstrates. Suggests. Insists. You can keep this list going. “Remind” also has a whiff of the Platonist about it as well. For Plato, learning is almost like being reminded of something you already knew. Socrates shows this by “teaching” complex math to an unlearned peasant boy. Perhaps we were all once gazing on all knowledge and beauty and only fell into these unfortunate material bodies and forgot our erudition. Platonism has been a great help, and sometimes a great hindrance, to the church. In this case it is the latter. Often, we need to learn something for the first time. Never use “remind” again, or risk being thrown into a very non-Platonic sort of hell. While we’re ranting, once a writer puts something to the page, it ought not be referred to in the past tense either. The verb tense rule #1 above does not just apply to Jesus, the living Lord. It also applies to any poor schlub who managed to get anything published any time in human history. Basil didn’t wrote. He writes. I know he’s been dead a long time. But his words have not. That’s why you’re reading them and writing about them now. This is not just true historically. It’s true theologically. The communion of the saints means that our hallowed ancestors go on writing, thinking, praying, encouraging, miscommunicating, blessing, and harming us to this day and until the coming kingdom. And not just the saints, but also every sinner who managed to sneak into your local library or Google search. When I engage students’ or colleagues’ work, I nearly always make a reference to one or more of these three theological-cum-grammatical rules. The fact that I have to write them at all shows there is something deeply problematical in our educational and churchly institutions. Surely it is not controversial to suggest that the Lord Jesus lives, that we don’t all know everything, and that literature speaks to us anew. But since these data seem to have slipped from our human consciousness, I declare them afresh. And now, having repaired our language both English and Christian, I shall retire into oblivion. Remember me, and what I wrote.

  • Could it be that simple?

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 38

    ÍÍCould it be that simple?

    Mattheyv 6:1-6, 16-21

    Hierald Edgardo Osorto

    Minneapolis, Minnesota

    Standing here before you, I am tempted to pinch myself. Am I, the child of a Pentecostal preacher, really leading worship with a Catholic priest and a Baptist minister? As a Lutheran, no less! God must have a sense of humor. As a teenager, the idea of an ecumenical Ash Wednesday service was no laugh­ ing matter. I took very seriously the threat of eternal damnation facing my friends and family members who did not wholly devote themselves to Jesus as we did in my Pentecostal church. Walking through the neighborhood, I would pray for house­ holds with a statue of the Virgin Mary in their front yard. Lord, forgive them! On yearly visits to spend time with my grandmother in El Salvador, I would scoff at her devotion to saints and her ritual participation in mass. Lord, lead her into the truth! Jesus’s caution against outward signs of piety rang in my ears, even while I divided the world between faithful “insiders” and damned “outsiders,” between “us” and “them.” I started following Jesus certain of my destination, but he led me beyond my boundaries to journey with so-called outsiders. Jesus’s path detoured away from heaven, winding its way up Golgotha’s hill, and taking an unexpected turn at an empty tomb. That road led me here, to all of you, my siblings in Christ, that we may travel toward Easter together. Our Gospel reading invites us to imagine ourselves sitting at the Savior’s feet. The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount that we’ve heard in Matthew are intimate instructions to the disciples, and, like the disciples, we come from many different places in life yet are all one in the Lord. Leading up to this moment, Jesus is healing, responding to the needs of the impoverished, followed by crowds hungry to be free from social and economic exclusion. Now, in his teaching about how we relate to God, Jesus is making a subtle point about our relationship to the whole community. “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing … go into your room and shut the door and pray … do not look dismal like the hypocrites.” In all that we do to live out our faith, Jesus calls for a kind of unselfconsciousness. I can hear the Lord’s gentle voice saying. Those worries about being good enough are weighing you down. Set them aside. Simply give. Simply fast. Simply pray. Simply be. Could it be that simple? This evening, we dare to trust that it is so. Today we will remove the TikTok filter, unpose for the Instagram post, and unburden our hearts. We will acknowledge our imperfect humanity and tell some hard-to-hear truths. We will

    Page 39

    Lent 2024

    confess when we have turned the other way when our neighbor was in need, how we have neglected the world’s suffering and injustice. We will lay bare our binaries between “us” and “them,” how from our first breath we have been taught that some people are better than others. In our longing simply to be, authentic and open to con­ nection, we will stand in our shared need of redemption. Our redeemer does not stand apart from us; God is close at hand to create new hearts within us. We hear the prophet’s call to return to the Lord, and find that the Lord has first turned to us, gracious and merciful. Indeed, God abounds in love so much that God transcends our boundaries and meets us in a human body, whose out­ stretched hands are vulnerable to the bite of nails. Such embodied love reminds me of words from theologian and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor: “God chose to bring [ashes] to life. We are certainly dust and to dust we shall return, but in the meantime our bodies are sources of deep revelation for us. They are how we come to know both great pain and great pleasure. They help us to recognize ourselves in one another. They are how God gets to us, at the most intimate and universal level of all.” Dust and ashes, sweat, blood, and stories—we do not need to burden our being with facades of flawless perfection or worries about being good enough. God in Christ is ready to bless us, just as we are. In a moment we will hear ancient v/ords lifted from Genesis: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” You will be invited to receive ashes on your forehead, a symbol of our finitude, our frailties and failings. Yet those ashes will be traced in the shape of the cross, a reminder that the One who shaped you from dust joins you in dust. It is the same cross with which we are marked at baptism, linking us together: my Pentecost siblings and my Roman Catholic grandmother, my newfound Lutheran family and disciples who dig deep in their traditions for gifts to share. And there are more besides, all of us making up one resurrected body, Christ Jesus our head and beating heart. Friends, blessings to you on your Lenten journeys. May Jesus make us traveling companions to one another, with whom we can risk vulnerability. May the Spirit release us from shame and scorn and settled ideas. Should you leave this place with ashes on your forehead, may they be a declaration to the world of God’s undying love for dust, no matter what shape it is in. Amen.

    Note: I preached a version of this sermon at an Ash Wednesday service jointly spon­ sored by Catholic and Protestant campus ministries at Ithaca College, February 26, 2020. At the time, I served the college community as Director of the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life.

  • Converting Statistics

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 8

    Converting Statistics

    Walter Brueggemann

    Traverse City, Michigan

    Timothy Snyder (professor of history at Yale) has recently appeared frequently on progressive cable news. The reason for Snyder’s recurring appearance of late is his remarkable book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, pub­ lished in 2017. This study succinctly summarizes a life-time of work and research by Snyder on the authoritarian “strong men” who have brutally dominated Western international politics. While the book is itself readily accessible, the study behind it derives from research done a great deal earlier. Primary among that long work of research is Snyder’s major book of 2010, Bloodlands: Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010). This book traces in spectacular detail the barbaric policies of Hitler and Stalin in the 1930s and ’40s.The title. Bloodlands, refers to the territory of Ukraine and Poland, the land between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia that became the contested arena for such brutality and barbarism, some of which served policy and some of which appears to have been simply mad, pointless violence. Snyder traces the endless brutality by reporting on the huge number of murders committed by these two regimes, murders on a mass scale in an attempt to wipe out and erase large populations of vulnerable innocent citizens in these states in order to expand “homeland” territory for these two murdering regimes:

    A new Hungarian fascist regime began in May to deport its Jews. About 437,000 Hungarian Jews arrived in Auschwitz in eight weeks. About 110,000 of them were selected for labor, many of whom survived; at the very least 327,000 of them were gassed. Over the course of the war, about 300,000 Polish Jews were shipped to Auschwitz of whom some 200,000 were killed. Taken together, Hungarian and Polish Jews account for the majority of the Jewish victims of Auschwitz (275).

    The flight and deportation of the Germans, though not a policy of deliber­ ate mass killing, constituted the major incident of postwar ethnic cleansing. In all of the civil conflict, flight, deportation, and resettlement provoked or caused by the return of the Red Army between 1943 and 1947, some 700,000 Germans died, as did at least 150,000 Poles and perhaps 250,000 Ukraini­ ans. At a minimum, another 300,000 Soviet citizens died during or shortly after the Soviet deportations from the Caucasus, Crimea, Moldova, and the Baltic States. If the struggles of Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian nation­ alists against the reimposition of Soviet power are regarded as resistance to deportations, which in some measure they were, another hundred thousand or so people would have to be added to the total dead associated with ethnic cleansing (332).

    Page 9

    Fourteen million, after all, is a very large number. It exceeds by more than ten million the number of people who died in all of the Soviet and German con­ centration camps (as opposed to the death facilities) taken together over the entire history of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. If current standard estimates of military losses are correct, it exceeds by more than two million the number of German and Soviet soldiers, taken together, killed on the battle field in the Second World War (counting starved and executed prisoners of war as victims of a policy of mass murder rather than military casualties). It exceeds by more than thirteen million the number of Americans and British casualties taken together, of the Second World War. It also exceeds by more than thirteen million all of the American battle field losses in all of the foreign wars that the United States has ever fought. The count of fourteen million mortal victims of deliberate killing policies in the bloodlands is the sum of the following proximate figures, defended in the text and notes: 3.3 million Soviet citizens (mostly Ukrainians) deliberately starved by their own govern­ ment in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933; three hundred thousand Soviet citizens (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) shot by their own government in the western USSR among the roughly seven hundred thousand victims of the Great Ter­ ror of 1937-1938; two hundred thousand Polish citizens (mostly Poles) shot by German and Soviet forces in occupied Poland in 1939-1941; 4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) starved by the German occupiers in 1941-1944; 5.4 million Jews (most of them Polish or Soviet citizens) gassed or shot by the Germans 1941-1944; and seven hundred thousand civilians (mostly Belarusians and Poles) shot by the Germans in “re­ prisals” chiefly in Belarus and Warsaw in 1941-1944 (411).

    I have selected these pages from Snyder that report these numbers almost at random from his book. The numbers are representative of the massive specific data that Snyder has accumulated. The numbers show unmistakably the scale and intent of the blood spilling in these bloodlands that bespeak the unrestrained violence of the two regimes. Among other matters, this undeniable historical reality constitutes a powerful backdrop for the present conflict in Ukraine. The fierce memory of the bloodbath no doubt fuels and energizes the Ukraine defense of its land against yet another threat from Russia. For good reason such a vulnerable, wounded society has a very long and unforgiving memory! In his summary statement Snyder reflects on the numbers:

    Fourteen million is the approximate number of people killed by purpose­ ful policies of mass murder implemented by Nazi Germany and the Sovi­ et Union in the bloodlands. I define the bloodlands as territories subject to both German and Soviet police power and associated mass killing policies at some point between 1933 and 1945 (409).

    Page 10

    Snyder follows Vasily Grossman in his judgment that,

    the key to both National Socialism and Stalinism was their ability to deprive groups of human beings of their right to be regarded as human. Thus the only answer is to proclaim, again and again, that this was simply not true. The Jews and the kulaks are people. They are human beings. I can see now that we are all human beings (387).

    In his pathos-filled conclusion, the numbers of deaths recur yet again. And then Snyder writes in his last paragraph:

    The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek these numbers and put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity (408).

    The statement invites and requires a long anguished pause:

    The regime: turned people into numbers. The work of humanists (after the work of scholars): Turn numbers back into people.

    There Snyder’s book ends. But clearly Snyder’s concern for the recovery of hu­ manity does not end there. His passionate concern lingers as a summons and a man­ date for the work that now is to be done. Snyder does not reflect on how the reversal of “numbers to people’’ is to be accomplished. But he hints that it is the work of humanists through the force of reflective, critical literature. His own acute objective work suggests that the work is to remember with as much specificity as can be mus­ tered, because the killing regimes dealt in wholesale violence without ever pausing to notice the particularity of human persons with specific lives and specific names. Those of us who are active heirs to the Bible may also reflect on how the Holy People, reported in the Holy Book, at times dealt in big numbers and at times re­ duced the so-called land of promise to a bloodland. One may be struck, in the wake of Snyder’s numbers, with the readiness for such numbers in ancient Israel:

    They seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thou­ sand of the Ephraimites fell at that time (Judges 12:6).

    Then on the seventh day the battle began; the Israelites killed one hundred thousand Aramean foot soldiers in one day. The rest fled into the city of Aphek; and the wall fell on twenty-seven thousand men that were left (I Kings 29:29-30).

    Page 11

    The Arameans fled before Israel; and David killed seven thousand Aramean charioteers and forty-thousand foot soldiers, and also killed Shophach the commander of their army (I Chronicles 19:18).

    So the Lord sent a pestilence on Israel; and seventy thousand persons fell in Israel (I Chronicles 21:14).

    I have selected these verses almost at random. The numbers of course are not verifiable. They may indeed be only imaginary figures to enhance the several re­ gimes that did the killing, including the regime of YHWH! But even if not historical­ ly reliable, they exhibit the readiness of Israel, in its God-chosenness, to act out its historical destiny in brutal ways. As with the bloody European regimes, there is here as well no effort to turn numbers back into people. • So now we, in the wake of the Bloodlands of ancient Israel and of our own twenty-first century, have all of these numbers on our hands, and of course many other mass atrocities as well, including the mass atrocities of mass deaths from hunger. • We have among us excessive numbers of Black persons systemically incar­ cerated. • We have numbers of families and children who lack food. • We have the numbers of those who suffer violence, both from unrestrained wildness and from official police work. • We have the unbearable numbers of homeless people who are daily ex­ posed to the violence of the street and of the weather.

    In sum we have the numbers of those who are systemically, willfully, and by default assigned to vulnerability and violence by being excluded from the dominant regime of wealth and property. That numerical reality leaves us, as it left Europe after the bloodlands, with countless, nameless numbers who are, by the mercy of God, to be turned back into persons. Such work means to resist the summarizing statistical propensity of the state and to exercise the actual practice of neighborhood. That is, Gemeinschaft as a refusal of the defining pressure of Gesellschaft. The church is one such prominent and important venue in the community that has the hard, good work of turning numbers into persons. For the church, the sacramental focus of this work is the rite of Baptism, the naming ceremony of the church. Our several liturgic traditions exercise great freedom in the administration of baptism. In its simplest form baptism requires only water and a reiteration of the Trinitarian name. In fuller liturgical formulation it also includes the recital of the creed that nar­ rates the life of the Trinity. And it poses questions for the candidate that sound rather like they have been filtered through the harrowing experience of the bloodlands:

    Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?

    Page 12

    Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God? Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God? Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior? Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love? Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord? (The Book of Common Prayer, 302-303)

    To hear these questions in the context of the bloodlands (here as in Europe) causes us to notice how dangerous an act Baptism is and how urgent is its intent and claim. The sacrament aims to refuse turning persons into numbers and insists that persons have durable names and abiding identities that are not subject to statistical reduction, not even by the state. The questions, moreover, name the “spiritual forces, evil powers, and sinful desires” that skew and distort the world of God-given person­ hood. As the newly named person is identified, the process finished with a prayer and a benediction, and Episcopalians add the lovely formula, “Sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Setting the rite in the context of Snyder’s work might rescue it from the “bour­ geoisie slumber” in which baptism often occurs among us. Of course baptism is not an act of magic. It has force and staying power if and when the community of faith actively sets out to offer, over time, the realities anticipated in the sacrament. As the community lives out those realities, it is engaged in a defiant counter-action against every effort to reduce persons—especially the weak, vulnerable, and disadvantaged persons—to a number. If we are imaginative, we might even mobilize the sacrament (and its continuing remembering in the sacrament of the Eucharist) as a specific response to the great violence all around the world. What if, in our liturgical sacramental action, we were to evoke in our congregations the names lost to numbers? What if, as we say, “name this child,” or “name this adult,” we also asked for the name of a Ukrainian child now perished, or the name of a Russian soldier who unwillingly has been dispatched to war, or a grieving mother in a war-tom zone? Those names are available to us. It could be that the sacrament will not let us settle in our relatively safe place, but works to send us, as we are able, with the grace of God among those whoSe names have been lost and whose names may somehow be re-sounded in an act of defiant resistance. The act of erasure of a name is demonic and fearful, but when we do the work of baptism, it is not the final act. The final act is reinstatement of name and identity. The sacrament is an insistence that evil will not define the world. The world belongs to, is governed by, and is defined by the life-giving resolve of the creator God. We may well school our congregations in alertness to the urgency of defiant affirmation, a defiance that concerns not only European forms of evil that Snyder has so well articulated, but the force of the many “isms” that stalk our own landscape in menacing ways. The work of the sacrament is to insist that the world has a shape

    Page 13

    and a future given beyond the force of fear, hate, greed, and death. The force of the sacrament is against very long odds. It has always been so!

    This article first appeared in the blog, ”Church Anew. ” We are grateful for the ability to share it in JP.

    The College of Pastoral Leaders What could your clergy friends do with $10,000 & 2 years?

    At Austin Seminary we believe:

    • Vital leadership depends on life-long learning and transformation. Transformation happens in community and over time. • Pastors need communities oftrusted peers who know and understand the calling because ministry can be lonely and isolating. • Pastors’ most urgent needs are often contextual. A one-size program does not fit all, so we empower pastors with agency for their own development.

    Learn t^Apply @ AustinSeminary.edu/CPL

    Deadlines for 2024 Grant application deadline is May 10 Awards are announced by June 30 Start date for grants is July 1 AustinSeminary.edu/CPL AUSTIN PRESBYTERIAN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

  • A Safe Place

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 13

    Preacher’s Note: In the summer of 2019, I accepted a call to a senior pastor position at a church in Atlantic Beach, Florida, a small, coastal suburb of Jacksonville, about an hour south of the Georgia border. It was my home state. It was my home presbytery. Yet, as the first woman to be called to the position of senior pastor in this church, and the only black person ever to serve in a pastoral role, at this nearly entirely white church, my arrival in the community was met with suspicion, anger, and open hostility that threatened to end the call to ministry before it began. In 2020, in the midst of the global pandemic, in a season of racial violence and racial uprising, one year to the day after the contentious vote to approve my call to the pulpit in this church, my office in the church was broken into and vandalized. My door was kicked in. My furniture was smashed. My personal items were destroyed. There was no damage or sign of forced entry to any other part of the building or grounds. Nothing was stolen or taken. Only my office. Only my door. Only my space. Only my peace. The official statement from the church concluded that it was a robbery attempt. No one was identified or charged with any crime. I preached this sermon in worship on the Sunday morning after the break-in. A Safe Place

    Genesis 32:22-31 Mark 4:35-41

    Melanie Marsh Miami, Florida

    “The spiritual freedom we seek cannot be found by grasping at, retreating to, or protecting our perceived safe spaces. Our freedom lies in remaining open continuously, not only to Life’s changes but also to the Divine Light within us and others.” – Peter Santos

    “Once upon a time, there was a quiet little village in the French countryside, whose people believed in tranquillité—tranquility. If you lived in this village, you understood what was expected of you. You knew your place in the scheme of things. And if you happened to forget, someone would help remind you. If you saw something you weren’t supposed to see, you learned to look the other way. If by chance your hopes had been disappointed, you learned never to ask for more. So, through good times and bad, famine and feast, the villagers held fast to their comfortable traditions.” -Joanne Harris, Chocolat (2000, Penguin Books)

    Page 14

    So begins the story of the villagers of Lansquenet, a fictional town in the French countryside, whose world was forever altered by their tumultuous, transformative relationship with unusual newcomer, Vianne Rocher, in Joanne Harris’s novel, Chocolat . Vianne and her young daughter arrived in the village on a winter day. On that same day, a strong and unsettling wind from the North began to blow. In the Caribbean, where my family is from, we have a name for this kind of unsettling wind. It is called La Tramontana—the wind that changes everything. Many of us have made The Beaches community our home, and made Community Presbyterian our church because to us, living in this place, feels like “just another day in paradise” every day. We appreciate the tranquility, the beauty, the sanctuary that this community offers us. This is a place that feels safe. For a long time, maybe for our whole lives, things have made sense to us in this place. We’ve been comforted, reassured, encouraged, and maybe we’ve grown to believe that this is a community where we won’t have to encounter many of the ugly, unsightly, or uncomfortable things that go on in the world “over there, across the ditch” on the other side of that sparkling Intracoastal Waterway. Yet, in recent days and weeks, we have come to realize in shocking ways that, even here, we are not immune to the storms and suffering of the world. Even in this place, brutality can break in. Even in this place, our hearts, our lives, and our peace can be shattered. The unspeakable brokenness of this world is making itself known to us, and it does not care what zip code we live in, how pretty our view is, how nice we are to each other. These are mighty times. A Tramontana wind is blowing. It feels like a storm. It is changing our entire world—erasing our places of safety and sanctuary. And it is terrifying.

    When Jesus said to them, “Let us go across to the other side,” the disciples had no idea what was in store for them. But then, like so much of their experience with Jesus, this moment in the boat was about encountering the unknown, the unimaginable , the unthinkable. Here we see Christ teaching them how to break free of the human bonds of fear, the illusion of control, and the sedative of comfort. The storm may have been all around them in the story, but we can be sure that there were other storms raging under the surface of this story. It is there, under the surface, where the greatest lesson lives for us in this story. It may not be something we want to acknowledge or admit, but sometimes the unsettling storm lives within us. Sometimes the storms are created by us. We may not even realize what is happening until something, or someone, pushes us out into uncharted waters, and the tranquil surface of our lives is troubled. Then, like the

    Page 15

    Pentecost 2024

    disciples, we may be tempted to panic or escape or push away the thing we see as a threat to our tranquility. Still, Jesus urges us to stay present within the storm. “Do not be afraid,” Christ says to us, “Have Faith.” When everything inside us wants to panic, to rage, or to lash out in fear, Jesus shows us in word and deed that whatever storms may rage within us or around us, they are nothing compared to the power of the love of God. They are nothing compared to the peace that the presence of God can instill in us. What’s more, when winds begin to blow our lives into places we don’t recognize, that don’t feel at all comfortable, if we can breathe deep and still the disquiet within us, we may find that the Spirit is actually moving us toward new horizons, to places that will help us to grow and to transform, through the disquieting storm. When Vianne Rocher arrived in the village of Lansquenet, she was met with curiosity, suspicion, even open hostility from many of her neighbors. They believed if they could just stop her, avoid her, or make her go away, their tranquillité would return. But that is not what happened. In the end, Vienne did not leave the little village in the French countryside. And their tranquility did not return. She did, however, eventually do something her neighbors never expected. She won them over. Vienne Rocher changed everything in their lives with her relentless hospitality. She handed it out to any and every person who walked through her door. She had an uncanny ability to disarm them with the delicious creations that came from her kitchen—her love poured out in chocolate. It feels like it was not an accident that it was around her table that the people of this tranquil village began to see that the very things they feared could—if they let them—make them strong, and vibrant, and resilient. The same is true for us. The world right now feels unrecognizable. We cannot make sense of it. Waves of uncertainty are coming at us fast and they are not stopping. The Holy Spirit is moving through our safe places like the wind of the Tramontana , changing everything. As we move into the fall, we begin an exploration of our church name and our mission. We will ask ourselves, “What does ‘Community’ mean to me?” Right now, that might feel like a difficult question to answer. Maybe the meaning is changing like so many other things around us these days. As we sit here this morning, and in the weeks to come, we may feel like Jacob, wrestling with God, as we try to reconcile all that we see and feel around us. We may feel like the disciples in the boat, overwhelmed and grasping for any sign of safety.

    The Good News of these Mighty Times is that like Jesus, there with the disciples in the boat, God’s love is already right here. Within us. All around us. Between us when we are near to one another, and when we are far apart.

    Page 16

    It can be easy to miss in the chaos, but it’s here. In our quiet moments, we can feel it being poured into our hearts. Maybe today, our simple call is to move toward that love. Maybe today, we meet one another here and care for those who are in pain. Maybe today, we welcome those who are desperate or different or alone. Maybe today, God’s love will pour into us, Maybe we can all start again and again, and again, Recognized for who we are Known at our deepest level Loved no matter what else might be true about us. When we feel like there is no safe place, God invites us to meet one another around the table. Here God says to us, “When you are Broken Angry Hating yourself Hating others When you feel the world shifting around you When you feel abandoned or afraid I will be your home. I will make you whole.” Amen.

  • ‘Two Stories’

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 14

    “Two Stories ”

    John 20:1-10

    Kate Haynes Murphy

    Charlotte, North Carolina

    Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!” So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’s head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed.(They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.

    Literary scholars say that there are only seven stories in the world. All the books, all the novels, all the songs, poems, folk and fairy tales, there are only seven stories between them: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage & Re­ turn, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. Every story you’ve ever heard and every story you’ve ever told fits in one of those seven plot categories. There are only seven sto­ ries and infinite variations of them. That’s what the experts say. But I say there are only two stories, really. Only two stories, and infinite varia­ tions of them. There’s the story of the Fall and the story of Redemption. There’s the story of the crucifixion and the story of the resurrection. The story of Good Friday and the story of Easter Sunday. There is the story of how humans are destroying cre­ ation and there is the story of how God is redeeming it. There is the story told by the powers and principalities that are passing away, and the story of the eternal Kingdom of God. There are only two stories. And we become the one we believe. The Nigerian Poet and novelist Ben Okri puts it this way, “One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way. We are also living the stories we planted—knowingly or unknowingly—in ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change

    Page 15

    the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.” Easter is the day we final­ ly understand that God has changed our story. When Mary Magdalene got up early on the first day of the week, when she went out to the tomb where they had laid the broken, mutilated body. When she walked there while it was still dark, there was only one story she could believe in. It was the only story she’d ever known. The story of the crucifixion. The story of the fallen world. The story of “the way things are,” when the powerful do what they want be­ cause might makes right. The story that says all you are is what you have, your whole worth is what you own, and you better protect it at all costs. You better look out for number one because no one else will. For a moment, a season, she had dared to believe there might be another way. When Jesus of Nazareth came into her life, for a moment she had hoped there was another way. A way of abundance, a way of forgiveness, a way of new life. She wasn’t like his other disciples, she didn’t run away from his agony. She didn’t aban­ don him after his arrest. She didn’t look away as he was tortured and shamed. She stayed with him until his last breath. She stayed because she loved him. And maybe she stayed because she still hoped. Until the last moment, she still hoped that the one who calmed the storm and cast out demons and raised the dead might have one last great triumph. But she saw him die. She saw his lifeless broken body wrapped in linen cloths and taken away. So, much as she wanted to believe in his way, his story, she knew there was only one story. In the end mercy is weakness and the weak are fools and there is no other way. Like many of us, she loved him and his stories, she just knew there was no place for them in this world. Still, she loved him and so she rose early on the third day and she walked to the tomb to honor him. The one who said he came from God. The one who proclaimed that there was another way and that he was that way. She went to mourn the death of his story. Mary walked to the tomb early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, bitterly resigned to living the other story we all know so well. It’s the story of Derrek Chavin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck. It’s the story of refugees turned away at the border. It’s the story of poor children starving and dying of preventable diseases while the rich throw birthday parties for their dogs. It’s the story of death, destruction, and despair. It’s the winner-take-all story of our world. Mary walked to the tomb while it was still dark and that was the only story she knew. She couldn’t change it, but she walked to the tomb to grieve it. When all you know is the story of the crucifixion, when all you know is the story of Good Friday, when all you know is that no matter how brutal and evil the powers that be are, there is no getting around them, when all you know is that story, then what you believe is this: In the end, sooner or later, everything beautiful, everything kind, everything good will be crushed. And your only choice is to harden your heart

    Page 16

    and conform to the story or be crushed by it. It’s only a matter of time. There are only two choices. You can live in that Good Friday story or you can die in it. She walked to the tomb early in the morning while it was still dark and there was only one story. And after what she’d seen on Friday, she knew there would only ever be that one story. Because if the one who walked on water, calmed the storm, and multiplied loaves and fishes; if the one with the power to heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, cure the lame, and raise the dead, if he couldn’t survive, if he couldn’t change the way things were, then no one ever could. If evil and violence and injustice could destroy him, then those powers would eventually crush us all. All you can do is hide and cry and hold on as long as you can. When she got there, she could see into the tomb. The stone that sealed the en­ trance had been moved. And she knew exactly what had happened. It wasn’t enough for the ones who hated him to kill him. They’d come back for his body. They’d taken his corpse to mutilate it and disgrace him further. Burial practices were very sacred to the Jewish people. The Talmud said it was better to be a stillborn baby than a man who didn’t receive proper burial. So when Mary got to the tomb and the body was gone, she knew what happened. Because she knew the story. They’d taken his body, for no good reason other than they knew it would cause even more pain and shame. For those who live and believe in the Good Friday story, the desire to cause pain is insatiable. So Mary ran back to the other disciples to share the terrible news, and Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, ran to see. They raced to see the empty tomb, the final wound. And the beloved disciple got there first, but couldn’t bear to go in. And Peter, bless him, when he caught up, couldn’t bear not to. But all he saw when he went inside were the linen strips Joseph of Arametha used to wrap Jesus’s bloodied body and the grave cloth they’d placed over his face. Peter saw the burial clothes lying there. And nothing else. But the beloved disciple, who came in behind him, saw those same strips of linen and grave cloth. And in that moment, he saw a whole new story. In that same space, in those same items, he saw a new holy story. The beloved disciple saw holy vindication, saw life triumphing over death, for­ giveness over sin, love over hate. The one who loved Jesus saw that Jesus was not in the tomb, not because he’d been taken, but because he’d been risen, just like he said. And if Jesus’s death on the cross on Good Friday—if that had (gloriously, impos­ sibly) not been the end of him, then that means Good Friday is not the only story after all. If what Jesus endured had not destroyed him, if the betrayal and abandonment and false charges and unjust trial and false condemnation and torture and scorn and shame and humiliation and beatings and the crucifixion and Death itself, if none of that had the power to stop his life … And if it did not have the power to change him (and it didn’t, we who kept watch

    Page 17

    with him on Good Friday, we who heard his seven last words, we who kept watch to the end, we saw that through it all Jesus was love; Jesus was forgiveness; Jesus was mercy; Jesus used his power not to destroy but to endure. Jesus used his power, not to cause suffering, but to bear it in love and transform it into a manifestation of his glory). . . If all of that evil didn’t end or altar Jesus’s story, but became part of it, then that changes everything. This changes everything. This is a new story. In the empty tomb, in those grave cloths laid aside, the beloved disciple, the one who Jesus loved, the one who loved Jesus, he saw that everything Jesus said was true. He saw that everything Jesus was is true. Jesus is truth. And the way into life and new story. And so, in the empty tomb we see, there is another story. There is another, eternal indestructible Kingdom where all are welcomed and none are coerced; where those hungry for food and those hungry for justice are filled; where the poor and the poor in spirit are blessed; where those who weep are comforted; where the meek inherit the whole earth; and where the children of God are peacemakers—reconciling and blessing, transforming their enemies, for love’s sake. In that empty tomb, in those cloths laid aside, the beloved disciple saw that there is a life which swallows up death. There is a power in forgiveness that breaks the bondage of sin. And there is a freedom of Spirit that comes from God and can never be incarcerated or executed. In the empty tomb, the beloved disciple saw that we now belong to that holy Kingdom with its holy story. The kingdom of the second story. And from now on, the very worst things that happen to us do not have the power to overcome us or define us. And those who put their trust in the God of all creation will never be for­ saken. The beloved disciple looked into that empty space, where the burial cloths had been cast aside and saw: there is another story, a better story, a second story. He saw that, and he believed. Beloved ones, we become the story we believe. Not the stories we know, or the stories we live, or even the story we prefer. We become the story we believe. And there are only two stories. Here on this side of eternity, we will always know both of them. We will always live both of them. The story of Good Friday and the story of Easter Sunday. The story of the beautiful and good suffering on the cross, and the story of wild new life unleashed on the world when they pierced his side. The story of his life blood that can not be stopped by death, that cannot be imprisoned in the tomb, flowing into us and all creation, transfusing his life, his grace, his way, his resurrection power, his story—into us, into all who believe. We will always know both stories. And we will always live both stories.

    Page 18

    Here in the time between the first and second coming of the Lord, when the Kingdom has come but has not been fully established, when the powers and princi­ palities of evil are passing away but not without a vicious fight, we will always know both stories and live in both stories. Here and now, both stories are true. But we have the power to choose which story we believe in. We can choose to believe in the story of Good Friday, which says that power is righteousness. Or we can choose to believe in the story of Easter Sunday (which is also the story of Good Friday—if only we have eyes to see) which says righteousness is power. The beloved disciple looked into the empty tomb. He saw that Jesus had risen, just as he said. And he believed a new story. I’m glad you are here on Easter. I’m glad you hear the Easter story. But the invi­ tation this morning is to hear and believe. Because we become the story we believe. And you may say, as a desperate father said to Jesus in the gospel of Mark, “I believe, help my unbelief.” And, Good news! That is enough. If you want to believe, you believe. And Jesus does help us in our unbelief. Your mustard seed faith will grow into a wild and living tree of faith. Jesus understands that it is hard to believe in his Kingdom, when we live in the midst of destruction and death, when all that is around us testifies to the brutal power of the enemy. That is why, on the night before he went out to battle the enemy of our souls, he sat down at table with his disciples and took bread and gave thanks to God and gave it to them saying, this is my body, which is broken for you. And in the same way took the cup and said, this is my blood, which will be shed. And with it I make a new covenant with you, between God and the holy whole of creation: My bloodshed is not for condemnation, but for forgiveness of sins. He said, here is my story. Eat and drink and believe. He said to those around that table, and to all of us here and now, all of us who believe and struggle against unbelief, he said: take this bread, drink from this cup. My body, my blood, my Spirit, my story within you, until the day I come again. The other story of power and destruction and despair may be all around us, but his story, his life are within us. Through this bread and this cup, he is in us and we are in him and nothing, nothing, NOTHING can separate us from his love and remove us from his story. Alleluia! Amen!

  • Making Visible the Invisible

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 19

    Making Visble the Invisible

    DeAmon Harges

    Indianapolis, Indiana

    In 2013,1 was visiting an indigenous community in Thunder Bay, Ontario. I was there with a friend, Mike Green, to facilitate an asset-based community development training. Before our session started, one of the elders set the context for the day. He said, “We aren’t here to build community, we are here to remember it!” It took me about six months to digest the words of that elder. I realized he was helping us to reconnect the body. At Broadway United Methodist in Indianapolis, we have a tradition once a year that reminds us to remember our baptism. The ritual reminds us that we are the body of Christ. This tradition is not an Easter tradition but a libation. It happens well after Pentecost in the summer. It’s one of my favorite traditions because it’s a remind­ er—as humans, as Christians, and as beloved children of God—of how to live as if the gospel is true. One of my closest friends, the Reverend Mike Mather (former pastor of Broadway UMC) would help us to remember our baptism. He would take a pitcher of cold water and splash us with it. As we braced ourselves for the shower we would laugh with the excitement of children, sometimes hide behind our friends in the pews as if it was a game on a playground, as though for only a moment we became as children. There was no alter call or reminder of what great sinners we were, nor how inadequate we were the other six days of the week. Instead we were all reminded that our lives are abundant. In the words of the poet Mary Oliver, in her Instructions for Living a Life, our call is to “pay attention, to be astonished, and to tell about it.” The eschatology of the gospel also reminds us that we are to be witness of where God is working in the world and celebrate our brothers and sisters. It tells us that the crosses we carry aren’t unnoticed and that we are to lift up and celebrate people who may not always be seen. Before and after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the gospel offers powerful examples. In Acts of the Apostles, Peter and John help us to reflect how we religious leaders so often miss the boat with the traditions of our religious institutions. The scriptures give us practices that help us pay atten­ tion deeply. When Peter and John approached the lame man, it says that they “saw” the man—they intentionally looked at him. At the end of the passage, it tells us that the whole congregation recognized the man and knew him as the formerly lame beggar from birth. What does it mean to recognize? If we take the word apart we get “re,” meaning to look again, and then the root, “cognize” which means to be clear. At that time, people who were lame, or otherwise deemed “lesser,” were thought of as not having the ability to be whole. So, the recognition of the lame beggar was a shift in sight,

    Page 20

    that he was indeed whole and more than enough. I would even argue that the healing wasn’t of the man, it was of the congregation or the community that had previously been blind to the man’s wholeness. What makes a good Easter sermon? What should laity walk away with? How do we celebrate those who are living the gospel, and how do we make visible the stories that help the scales fall off our eyes? Growing up, Easter Sunday was my least favorite service to attend. I reflect back to when I was about ten and the church bus would pick up me, my brother Andy, and my sister Barbara for church. My friend Archie’s dad was a preacher. I don’t remem­ ber the name of the church, but I recall it was a storefront on West Washington Street. One Easter I was convinced to take the altar call and I got saved! I was so excited because after church they dropped us off at our grandparents’ house and I would get to tell them everything was going to be ok. When we got there my grandmother greeted us at the door and waved to Archie’s parents as we excitedly hugged her. As she closed the door and showed us into the kitchen for an Easter snack I yelled, “Grandma I got baptized today!” She replied, “You just went down a dry devil and come up a wet devil.” This response set a tone for me, not because my grandmother left me slightly discouraged, but because she was telling me that it wasn’t the service that made you better, it was who you were outside of Sunday. My grandparents didn’t think much of pastors because they didn’t help people in her community. They lived the John 10:10 scripture. We kids would get dressed up in our best hand-me-downs as my mom contemplated whether she would be going or not, fearful the pastor might ask why she had she not been to church. Looking back, I didn’t want to go to Easter service because of the guilt I felt after the sermons. I knew People like us would never match up to the call of Christ dying on the cross for our sins. Even though my parents were not church going people, they were Christians. They cared about their community and their children. They took homeless people into their house and fed those who were hungry. They worked hard, they loved us and they taught us to love thy neighbor, stand up for those who can’t advocate for themselves, and always welcome the stranger. At the time I didn’t really understand scripture, and I realized that the preachers I grew up hearing preached sermons of shame and hopelessness—unless you took the altar call. As if, then, it all would go away, and life will be abundant forever. That is until next Easter! By the time I was 16 I was probably at one of the lowest points in my life. My parents were now divorced and both struggling with addictions. Of course, my par­ ents completely gave up going to church and talking about the altar calls didn’t work. I felt Sunday mornings were no longer in my future, especially not attending another Easter service. Like some, I couldn’t wash my sins away with a nice size offering. What does it mean when the scriptures say, “Pick up your cross?” My mother is our story keeper in the Braylock family. She is what my grand-

    Page 21

    father was before he passed. He shared all the stories, photos, and records with my mom. He kept them in his Bible. In those collections there was a tin plate photo­ graph from the mid 18oos of my great-great-great-grandfather, Isham Dupree, and his daughter, my great-great-grandmother, Big Momma Julia Taylor. My mom has had a fascination with finding out their back stories. As she dis­ covers information she saves it and shares it with the family. About three years ago I received an email with updated information about Isham. It was the bill of sale multiple for young men—no photo—just numbers and one name. All were ten years of age with the name Dupree, and one of them was him. It was really hard to look at. I wondered, why is God showing me this? Showing me that, once upon a time, we were invisible and expendable? Showing me that the contributions people who look like me have made to this world, in this country, aren’t recognized? This was not the feeling I was looking for leading up to Easter Day. Yet God lives with us. The attention of the church must be on the fringes of religious life, preand post-resurrection Sunday. My mother’s stories were my grandparents’ stories, and the libation of my ances­ tors. They reminded me that, even though un-Christlike things happened, abundance was still present. Those same stories were passed to my mother from her granddad, who would gather neighbors around a tree he planted in the housing projects in South Bend, Indiana, in the 1950s and 60s. They did this as a reminder that God is always present even when things aren’t going so well. He would quote John 10:10, where Jesus says, “I come so that you may live life abundantly.” This includes times when life is not as we expected. My family have been Hoosiers since the 1930s. We migrated to South Bend from New Madrid, Missouri, and Rutherford, Tennessee. It used to be illegal for Blacks to have permanent residence in this state. They were segregated to almost uninhabitable parts of the city. The only place African Americans could live in South Bend was a housing projects in a swamp. Memorial Hospital (where I was born) would dump its biohazard waste there. The city would dump its trash there. No one in the city treated these Black families as if they were sacred. They were treated like the lame beggar in Acts, being taken to the beautiful gate to ask for the drippings from those who are visible. But listening to my aunts, uncles, parents, and their friends … growing up there was beautiful! They always laughed, they shared, and Lord knows they partied. They were a community that held things together because they believed that no con­ tribution should go unnoticed. In 2003, my family and I moved from the west side of Chicago to Indianapo­ lis. My wife, Janeen’s, job transferred us there. Rev. Mike Mather (who I had met in South Bend three years prior) and I had become friends and often kept in touch with one another. We would have intense conversations about what it meant to live

    Page 22

    in abundance in low wealth communities, where dis-investment and over-policing had shaped our own “beautiful gate.” The Rev had moved to Indianapolis six months prior; he was now the senior pastor of a place where he previously served as an as­ sociate pastor under Reverend Phil Amerson. Mike was known as the “pastor of the streets,” and also as the “hoodlum priest”! Now as senior pastor, he knew that things needed to change. Though years had passed, little had changed since he left in 1991, except the membership had declined. In the ’50s we had been the largest congrega­ tion in the state of Indiana, boasting 5000 members. My family ended up living four blocks from the church, at Fairfield and Park. Our new neighborhood was similar to where we had lived in West Chicago. Over the last forty years or so, congregational life has changed. Most people commute to worship services. Most members are disconnected from the actual communities surrounding the church, even while trying to solve the needs of the neighborhood. As a congregation we started examining our practices. We made some shifts in our community. We moved away from a “needs based” approach to starting to recognize the gifts we were missing. Before we acted as though problems and needs were the only things that were present. We probably assumed this because most people in the neighborhood were black and brown, and because it was a histor­ ically disenfranchised community. Now I find myself having to admit—we weren’t the cause of this disenfranchisement, but we were also not the solution. As I was currently a stay-at-home dad to our one-year-old daughter, DeJanae, and eight-year-old McKeith, I had a chance to spend significant time in the neighbor­ hood. I had developed a practice of discovering what brought people joy and what moved them to get off the couch. Rev. Mike would ask me what I learned from the four-block radius around the church. Well, one of the things I discovered was that the people who live there weren’t United Methodist! Many of us try to label people here; we make assumptions because people are poor. And, because of those assumptions, we had missed where God was actually working in the world, in our parish, and in the homes of the mothers and fathers, children and grandparents. Every Sunday in the beginning of service (especially on Easter!), we will chant in unison our mission statement. It ends: The mission of the people at Broadway United Methodist Church is to seek, welcome, and value all people. We began to realize that we needed to find new ways to welcome and to be wel­ comed as a good neighbor. We were currently falling short of the part of our mission that is to “value” all people; we realized that there was much we didn’t know about our neighbors—that there was a plethora of gifts and talents and people who really cared the community. We saw that God’s abundance was right in front of us. What does this mean for an Easter sermon, to speak to a community or a parish about the crucifixion of Christ? What does this mean for pastors preparing an Easter sermon that connects with laity and the rest of the community? In Mary Oliver4 s ad­ vice on living the gospel, I think she understands what Jesus was trying to say before

    Page 23

    and after the resurrection. Rev. Mike helped me understand that a good sermon, es­ pecially on Easter Sunday, reminds us that God is right in front of us! That we have to practice hard to see, pay attention, and to remember our stories of baptism. We need our pastors to be good neighbors by witnessing to the abundance in our communities. As a Wesleyan, I think it is important for pastors preaching Easter sermons to make visible the invisible in our parishes. Parish stories of hope, affirmation and the abundance, and the agency of our souls must be sought out. John Wesley says, “the world is our parish.” It is important to celebrate the community around the church so that we can build the capacity of the agency around us. Reverend Mike helped us cultivate such a space in our liturgy. We called it the LCC—“Lesson from the Contemporary Church”—because God didn’t stop when the book (the Bible) went to press. The LCC has become a time of testimony, inviting residents and church members to share where they see God working in the world. It usually is right before the sermon. After the service, people who care about what was shared have a chance to get to know one another. That experience feels like a true altar call.

  • The ‘ We-ness’ of it All

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 14

    iiThe ‘We-ness’ofitAll…

    Romans 8:26-39

    Nancy J. Benson-Nicol

    Chicago, Illinois

    When we arrive at the point of “Joys & Concerns” each week during our Wednes­ day Morning Prayer service in Buchanan Chapel, often the paster introduces the con­ cerns in this manner: According to today’s report from the City of Chicago, last week, there were:

    • 12 murders • 40 criminal sexual assaults • 235 robberies

    • 154 cases of aggravated battery • 143 burglaries • 508 thefts • 612 cases of motor vehicle theft making a total of1,704 incidents, not including the additional 71 shooting incidents. And we ‘re barely into the second quarter of the year…

    She then hands a small piece of paper (on which these statistics have been handwrit­ ten) to the worship leader and urges us to pray that God will use us to help find some solution to the terrible violence that grips our city and cities, towns, countrysides, and places everywhere. Her consistent witness amplifies this truth that we experience in so many differ­ ent ways: we live in an alienated world. Add to that our rising awareness of the increase in and negative effects of iso­ lation, and our sense of alienation is compounded. In her recent article critiquing the “self-love” phenomenon as magnifying the condition of loneliness, journalist Maytal Eyal cites a 2021 study commissioned by Cigna that found that nearly 80% of adults from the ages of 18 to 24 reported feeling lonely. The study itself also re­ ports that adults with physical health issues are approximately 50% more likely to be lonely than those with strong physical health. My perspective on this is that our society places outsized emphases on escapism and individualism (be it through the “self-love/care” movement, the renewed popu­ larity of stoicism, or other trends), which breeds further alienation and isolation that fuels cycles of violence and dis-ease. Eyal writes,

    Today, we live in a climate where needing help can evoke shame and em­ barrassment, where cut-throat competition takes precedence over compas­ sionate collaboration, and where self-sufhciency is celebrated as the ultimate

    Page 15

    achievement. To navigate the harsh terrain of radical individualism, self-love has emerged as our tool for survival. But it can come at a cost, especially when the type of self-love we turn to is the kind that has been manipulated by cor­ porate ad campaigns and social media. In its commodified form, self-love is not really self-love at all; instead, it’s more like self-sabotage, convincing us to hyperfocus on ourselves at the expense of connecting with others.

    There will never be enough spa treatments, microbrewery tours, or sleep-ins to fix what is broken within and among us. To be fair. I’m not advocating for opposite extremes. For example, I agree with Eytal in acknowledging that, “Self-love is a powerful tool; it can be used for good or bad, for connection or disconnection,” and that an indication of its healthy practice is “when we feel connected to our bodies and our communities.” On the renewed interest in stoicism, it must be said that the essence of what the ancients, and what many practitioners today appreciate about the philosophy, is that its emphasis on self-mastery and “conquering our limits” is meant to contribute to the well-being of society at large through our careful discernment of what is within and outside of our control. And, on the significance of the individual in relationship with the whole, I treasure the verse of 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi: “You are not a drop in the ocean / you are the ocean in one drop. 99

    Rather, what I find corrective within Paul’s word to the Romans is his determina­ tion to inspire, equip, and connect a community of believers who, even in the experi­ ence of their own suffering and persecution, are joined together in their weakness by the all-encompassing power of God who names, claims, and sustains them. I’ve recently been invited to explore what might be resources for finding love and connection in an alienated world, so I am pleased that this passage appears in our lectionary today to serve as a beacon. Paul’s pen, in making his case to the community of believers in Rome that the presence of Gentiles among Jewish followers of Jesus demonstrates rather than dilutes God’s redemptive plan, ultimately makes the case that Christ’s love in us, Christ’s love with us, Christ’s love through us, come what may, is antidote to alien­ ation and isolation. For Paul, divine power resides in the act of Jesus taking on the cross—the para­ dox of the manifestation of God as a body that suffers and dies—so that, even as we experience suffering in this life, awash in our weakness and vulnerabilities, we are met with the loving presence of our God who knows what it is to suffer. Our weak­ ness is not a barrier to God, but a point of encounter with God. The “we-ness” of it ail, so to speak, is important: Paul grounds his words in community, even as so many contemporary Christians champion his message as if it were part of some sort of individualistic self-help plan of salvation. It’s the we that matters, especially if we are indeed desperate to structure our lives in contrast to the burdens of alienation and isolation rooted in hyper-individualism that dominates our

    Page 16

    society and worldview. And it’s the we-ness of it all that the church, in this day and age, is uniquely positioned to amplify and celebrate, even as it so often struggles to envision and achieve this aim. We, as the church, can choose to stem the tides of alienation and isolation, and confess and repent, mindful of all the ways the church has functioned as a source of these ills—buying into the myths of rugged individu­ alism, of the quest for “power-over” instead of “power- with” God calls us to be a model of healthy “we-ness” in the world. Not every institution in society is currently struggling to convincingly communi­ cate an inclusive “we.” If you’ve ventured out to the cinema recently, you’ve likely been greeted by the likes of Academy Award-winning actress Nicole Kidman, striding across the screen in a gray Michael Kors suit with bedazzled pinstripes, to declare:

    We come to this place … for magic. We come to AMC theaters to laugh, to cry, to care. Because we need that, all of us, that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim. And we go somewhere we’ve never been before; not just entertained, but somehow reborn. Together.

    Dazzling images, on a huge silver screen. Sound that I can feel. Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this. Our heroes feel like the best part of us, and stories feel perfect and powerful. Because here, they are.

    “Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this …” Might Paul have reso­ nated with this sentiment to describe the aspirations of a believing community? As we think about the church today, we ought to feel that our individual stories and ex­ periences of heartbreak, weakness, and vulnerability would be at least as compelling to us as a sort of “connective tissue” as what we could expect from the endeavors of corporate shareholders churning out vehicles of entertainment, yes? Too often, for many, that experience is “no.” Too often, we have regarded and/ or experienced church, and/or Christian community, as the place of pretense and stagnation; a place where the most challenging truths of our individual stories find no company in the presence of others; where we will not be expected to have our pres­ ence bear any significance to a whole that is wholly—and holy—unique to the sub­ stance of its parts; where we feel required to wear a happy face and pretend that all is well within us in order to conform—as if conformity were the only stake involved in being truly Christian. Church should not be the place where we deny the existence of suffering, especially when the movie theater, of all places, doesn’t require this of us. Paul meant for the Romans, and ultimately for us, to encounter God’s awe-in­ ducing power searching our hearts, cradling the Holy Spirit within us, stirring

    Page 17

    up what God intends to inspire within us to enliven us to live into God’s purposes for us in—and beyond—the world. Paul invites all, even today, to recognize our kinship with Christ as the firstborn among us as family—a family of belonging. To feel, with­ in the marrow of our bones, that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” and that, in its wake, we are bound to one another. While I emphasize the importance of valuing community over individualism as essential to overcoming isolation and alienation, I also value the importance of indi­ vidual experience as a part of what shapes community. As Kidman reminds us, “our heroes feel like the best part of us,” and so, if we’re asked to consider Paul as one of our heroes (by virtue of the fact that we’re hearing his words today), then we ought to reflect on aspects of his story that influence his message. The mere notion for some, however, of Paul as a heroic figure is challenging. I mean, have you read Paul? In portions of his own writing and even in some literature about him, Paul comes across as strident, arrogant, presumptuous, “man-splainy,’ 95

    and “apostle-splainy” (to tediously coin a term). The fact alone that Paul, formerly Saul, was not among the Twelve Apostles yet audaciously argued against crucial elements of Peter’s gospel (yes, “that” Peter, whom Jesus dubbed “the rock” among his disciples) speaks to this unease. Some even argue that Paul’s past as an entitled religious authority might’ve carried over post-conversion. I think back to a conversation on Paul nearly two decades ago among my clergy covenant group, in which many of us grumbled about preparing to teach copious amounts of Paul to adult Sunday school classes. One among us cheerfully shouted, “ohhhh, no, I love Paul! See, if you read Paul as a mystic …” Before Paul was “Paul,” Paul was “Saul.” As a Pharisee, a religious authority in Judea, Saul was infamous for his active pursuit and persecution of Jesus’s followers. The Book of Acts even links him to the stoning of Stephen, a deacon in the early church in Jerusalem. Saul was well-versed in Mosaic law and enforced rigid separa­ tion between Jews and Gentiles to preserve purity requirements. That is, before Saul was struck suddenly by a power that, as the benediction says, could do “infinitely more than he could ask or imagine.” One day, en route to Damascus in search of more Jesus-followers to “ravage the church” (see Acts 8:3), Saul and his traveling companions were met with a blinding light—startling him enough to knock him to the ground. Amid the spectacle of light came the presence of the resurrected Christ, crying out, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” The voice instructed Saul to be led to Damascus where he would receive further instruction. After three days of blindness while sheltered there, Saul’s sight was restored by a disciple named Ananias. Saul experienced conversion and was baptized. Now filled with zeal to proclaim the good news, Saul partnered with other disciples to advance what had been known as “the Way,” and his name eventually changed from Saul to Paul. Con-

    Page 18

    victed by the Holy Spirit to expand the gospel among the gentiles, Paul would con­ duct three missionary journeys throughout the Roman Empire, establishing house churches throughout. He would endure imprisonment, shipwreck, starvation, and subterfuge along the way. It was nothing so ordinary as “movie magic” that transformed Paul, but the mighty power of God to turn him upside-down, inside-out. To consider Paul’s stub­ bornly audacious tone exhibited in much of his writing is to also appreciate his miraculous and mystical encounter with the triune God—Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit. His experience of God’s mystical realm became the way he understood him­ self and the world. It ignited his passion. It shaped his story. It assured him that a heart broken is not a heart lost. New Testament scholar Michael Gorman describes the function of such story as ‘narrative spirituality,” by which he means ‘‘a spirituality that tells a story, a dynamic life with God that corresponds in some way to the divine ‘story’.” From this under­ standing comes the primary concept that Gorman introduces to the field of the study of Paul: cruciformity. Simply stated, “cruciformity is, in sum, what Paul is all about, and what the communities of the Messiah that he founded and/or nurtured were also all about… the experience by which the church—at least according to Paul—stands or falls.” To elaborate, Gorman defines cruciformity as “the all-encompassing, in­ tegrating narrative reality of Paul’s life and thought, expressed and experienced in every dimension of his being, bringing together the diverse and potentially divergent aspects of that existence.” At this point. I’ll borrow Paul’s words to ask, “So what are we to say about these things?” What’s the point? For one thing, it is to say that to be beloved community in Christ is not to deny, diminish, or ignore the realities of suffering. To pretend that we are neither subject to, nor complicit in, the existence of suffering, is to deny the presence of God in our healing and in our call to repentance. For Christ in his expe­ rience as a body in the world on a divine mission of teaching, healing, feeding, and commissioning his followers, there was “no way out but through,” even to the cross. Saul as oppressor wielded the violence of the lash; Paul as apostle knew both its sinfulness and its limits. Christ’s grip on his life is where the lash was impotent and the power of God omnipotent. To this end, it is not that suffering is to be understood as divine, it is to say that, even in the midst of suffering, it is the life-giving presence of God, bathing us in love. Paul rejoiced that we, yes we, are “more than conquerors through him who loved us,” with an exuberance that gives us permission today to end our addiction to rely­ ing our individual, herculean efforts to soothe the complex pain of being human in this dehumanizing world. So, together, let us, with courage and hope, acknowledge our weaknesses, both individually and collectively. Let us be built into communities both transformed and transformational, through the power of Christ that mends us and re-members us. Let

    Page 19

    us as the church hold space for the lonely, the forgotten, and the neglected, for, in so doing, we more than likely hold space for ourselves. Christ s love in us, Christ s love with us, Christ s love through us—come what may. Amen.

    Sources Anna M.V. Bowden, “Commentary on Romans 8:26-39,” Working Preacher, July 30, 2023, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-17/ commentary-on-romans-826-39-6, accessed June 12, 2023.

    Jessica Buechler, “The Loneliness Epidemic Persists: A Post-Pandemic Look at the State of Loneliness among U.S. Adults,” The Cigna Group News Room, https://newsroom.thecignagroup .com/loneliness-epidemic-persists-post-pandemic-look , accessed July 24, 2023.

    Chicago Police Department, “Compstat: Week 30,” https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content /uploads/l_PDFsam_CompStat-Public-2023-Week-30.pdf, accessed July 29, 2023.

    Maytal Eytal,“Self-Love is Making Us Lonely,” Time, April 15, 2023. https://time. com/6271915/self-love-loneliness/, accessed July 24, 2023

    Michael Gorman and Nijay K. Gupta. Cruciformity: Paul s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross, 20^h Anniversary Edition (Kindle ed.) Eerdmans: July 27, 2021.

    Ryan Holiday, “What is Stoicism? A Definition & 9 Stoic Exercises to Get You Started,” Daily Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Everyday Life, https://dailystoic.com/what-is-stoicism-adefinition -3-stoic-exercises-to-get-you-started/#what-is-stoicism, accessed July 23, 2023

    Mary Hinkle Shore, “Commentary on Romans 8:26-39,” Working Preacher, July 4, 2011, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-17/ commentary-on-romans-826-39-2, accessed June 12, 2023