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  • Loss, Lament, and the Emotions of Young People Today

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    Loss, Lament, and the Emotions of

    Young People Today

    Kyle Bender

    Marriage and Family Therapist, Austin, Texas

    “We may live in a time where our world is changing faster than we are able to adapt,” according to Eric Teller, Director of Google X. We’d most likely agree that it is safe to drop the may from that sentence. This can be a very uncomfortable place to exist. When change outpaces our ability to adapt, we can feel lost in uncharted waters with no clear sense of home. For the young people in our communities and ministries, this has been a par­ ticularly unique and challenging time. The range of emotions young people have experienced has run the full spectrum of feelings. Their mental and emotional health has been an area of concern for many years now, well before the pandemic accelerated the trend. This is not something we can just react to or rely on our old skills or strategies if we want to reach this generation with the gospel. The ability to adapt is going to take time and require new skills and abilities. If the above quote is true, this moment will draw less upon our ability to come up with answers or simply make something happen programatically. We will need the collective wisdom of us all and a few good questions to point us in the right direction. Peter Drucker once said, “The important and difficult job is never to find the right answers; it is to find the right questions.” The truth is that there is not an easy fix to the myriad of concerns young people are facing right now. While this is not great news, as we slow down this Lent to explore this important topic, we can take hope that solutions are not required for our emotions. Emotions are not meant to be fixed; they are meant to be felt. Some of us were raised to not trust or even acknowledge our emotions. However, emotions are part of God’s design for humanity. Emotions provide valuable informa­ tion, information that helps us know ourselves, act in congruence with our values, and process the pain and trauma of our lives. A healthy view of discipleship should acknowledge this reality and help us process our emotions as we encounter them in our day to day lives. For young people growing up in a world that has us all guessing, you can imag­ ine that the lockdown experiences, news cycle, racial strife, school shootings, natural disasters, wars, and disruptions of the last few years have them feeling unsure and uncertain at the least. Take a moment to imagine what they might be feeling about the world they are going to inherit. As you do, you may recognize some of your own emotions as well.

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    Validation and Lament If emotions are meant to be felt, not fixed, then our first task in understanding the reality of young people is to listen. Our goal is not to take away their negative emo­ tions, though we might like to, but to validate them. They don’t need us to remove them from the mess (spoiler alert, we can’t), but to sit with them in it. Much of my time in church ministry involved transitions: transitions around peo­ ple, pastors, and beloved staff, transitions around theology and the moves of people either towards or away, transitions around living in the height of church growth to the longing for the way it used to be. All too often, we were in a hurry to rush past these moments and fix them, to stop the pain and regain the momentum. A more appropriate response in hindsight would have been to stop the movement and activity and sit for a minute in the grief. (This is certainly true of our current transition as well from “normal” to lockdown to a world changing faster than we can adapt.) Lament in the Christian faith is a way of processing our grief in the presence of God, noticing the broken shalom in our world and longing for the day when all things are made new. As a youth pastor, I would often notice that parents felt unqualified or even unable to talk about God with their kids. They felt their faith was not enough and opted to stay quiet instead of feeling clumsy about such an important topic. I heard Reggie Joiner of Orange address this by saying, “Don’t worry about the faith you don’t have; just give them the faith you do. If you will simply open yourself to God and your child, you will give them a front row seat to God’s grace and activity in your life. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”1 This front row seat is what they need right now. They need to grieve with us and hear us grieve the realities of our world today. Lament doesn’t end with answers or solutions. Lament is a way to process our emotions and trust God in the middle of it. As we explore the emotional climate of young people, are you willing to let go of desire to fix or control the narrative and meet young people in their grief and lament? In order to do this, however, we may have to deal with some of our own fears and mis­ understandings. If you fear that in validating someone’s emotions or their experience, you are endorsing beliefs and behaviors that are contrary to your own, you don’t have to be afraid. Validating emotions and experience allows others to be seen, heard, and accepted. Validation builds connection. Connection builds trust and mutuality. Trust allows for deeper conversations, growth, and healing. (Who knows, maybe in this pro­ cess we find our own growth and healing as well!) Mutuality is important here. This generation, as previous generations, desires au­ thenticity in relationships. They want to truly connect. They are looking for guides to help them make sense of the complexity all around them but will move away from power dynamics or authoritarian stances. As Dr. Henry Cloud noted, “Most times the people who invalidate other people’s experience are not aware that they are doing something destructive. In fact, they often think they are helping.”

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    Emotions such as wonder, longing, anger, and anxiety are common experiences for this generation. Experiences of loss, fear, prolonged uncertainty, stress, and trauma have been formative in formative years of development. Are we willing to accept that while we may not have the answers yet, it is enough to lament with them in this moment? Will we allow ourselves to be curious, suspend judgement, and seek to understand? Will we sit with them in the presence of God and validate their experience? The short answer is we must.

    A Generation defined by loss While the pandemic affected us all, we can recognize some of the unique ways young people experienced this historical moment. I was on my way to an early morning class in college, when someone jumping in their car said, “Have you not heard? Class is cancelled. Go watch the news.” I had no idea what to expect when I walked into the building to see the tv screen showing the images of the first tower after it had been hit by a plane. Over the next days, weeks, and months I wrestled with what it meant for the world that I was living in. It was clear that day in September meant things had changed. For this generation, the pandemic and the events of the last few years have been one, if not the defining moment. We know what this is like. We’ve had our defining moments as well— moments that changed the world as we know it. One difference with this generation’s experience is that there was little to no relief. Other generation’s defining moments had some distance to them. It certainly “hit home” and there were consequences, but there was also the ability for some normalcy amidst the pain and chaos. That day at a college in Texas, I knew the world had changed, but New York was across the country, and the terrorists were across the ocean. I could check out of the moment for awhile to be normal before processing more information and making meaning of it. For this generation, there is no distance between them and the pandemic. It was all consuming of their daily lives, habits, emotions, health, and mental well-being. You might be tempted to say “well everyone’s daily life changed,” but as Brad Grif­ fin states, “Losing a year at 16 is so much different from losing a year at 46.”1 (In many ways, it was the youngest and the oldest among us that lost the most during this time. It could also be said that losing a year at 75 is much different as well.) Whether you enjoyed these aspects of your childhood or not, we cannot discount the loss of graduations, proms, sporting events, lead roles in the play, freshman or se­ nior years, the ability to start a lawn business, or earn a paycheck, much less the ability to receive an education without major difficulties and disruptions. It is important to note that different parts of our population have had different degrees of impact here. This generation lost milestones and markers of growing up. They lost daily life of school, friendship, team, and play. They lost boredom and figuring it out with friends and neighbors. Or in some cases, they lost relief from the problems of home life. In re­ turn they got isolation, loss, uncertainty, and a life that was limited to a couple hundred or thousand square feet.

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    If this were all, it would be enough. However, this moment also exposed other places of hurt and pain in our culture. Over the last 2-3 years, they’ve watched the larger adult world struggle to come up with any viable solutions to (and much less any meaningful consensus on) the pandemic, politics, racial strife, climate change, gender and sexuality, gun reform, and more. No doubt young people are resilient, and we are counting on that going for­ ward, but we do know that this experience has taken a tremendous toll.

    Uncertainty and Mental Health There has been a lot of attention during the pandemic to the rise of mental health issues in young people. The US Surgeon General issued a statement on the mental health crisis among young people during COVID – 19.1 Various health agencies came together to declare a national emergency of child and adolescent mental health.1 In many ways adolescence and uncertainty go together. However, it is important to recognize that this generation is experiencing uncertainty at sig­ nificant levels, and it is causing harm to mental and emotional health. In light of this, you can imagine that a young person trying to navigate all of this would have some questions and concerns about how we got here. Commenting on this, Brad Griffin writes, “Forever defined by what they missed, they feel like their government officials, school leaders, families, and God have some explaining to do.” They are looking at all of us and wondering what we have to say for our­ selves. Before we rush to our own defense, let’s name and explore their emotions and experience:

    Anger. They might feel angry that this is the world they are inheriting, angry that their agency is limited to make a difference but their lives are affected nonetheless, angry and sad over the loss of milestones and mem­ ories.

    Anxiety. They might feel anxious that the structures of daily life have been shaken and they have very little sense of control, anxious that those they count on and who are supposed to meet their needs are also shaken, anx­ ious over a sense of ambiguous loss.1

    Trauma. They might experience trauma and pain as they deal with shame, fear, and hopelessness, trauma that as they seek to get their needs met, they cannot, leaving them to wonder if they are the problem, trauma that they were not equipped for or supported through the life-altering effects of the pandemic.

    As we listen and lament with them here, we might also get a glimpse of what they have experienced. If we listen to their anger, we might find some breadcrumbs to understanding their world. Anger is often a secondary emotion, so when we listen to anger, we find other emotions present as well. Feelings of helplessness,

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    insecurity, anxiety, sadness, and grief all can be hiding under our anger and have been a part of their experience of life these few years. If we listen to their anxiety, we gain a glimpse of their view of the future. We know that prolonged uncertainty leads to anxiety. Among other things, we know that anxiety is a form of worry about the future. If adults can’t find meaning or a way forward in our current cultural moment, how might young people feel? Who or what can they trust? Their distrust of institutions is not completely unwarranted. If we listen to their pain and trauma, we may realize that we have been unin­ tentionally heaping pressure and fear on this generation. We want the best for this generation, but if we rush past their pain to answers as discussed above, we will be asking them to be “normal” or “resilient” or “content” in ways that they don’t know how to be. If they can’t live up to these ideals, they may be left believing that they are the problem. You may recognize this dynamic in your own life. Often in the face of difficult situations, we are unable to see things clearly or make sense of what is going on. So instead of critiquing the situation, we turn on ourselves and wonder “what is wrong with me?” In this moment of cultural pain and uncertainty, a young person’s tenden­ cy may not be to wonder what is wrong with the world, but what is wrong with them.

    One Way They Are Coping As human beings, we are constantly looking to make meaning of our circum­ stances, our emotions, and our lives. Springtide Research Institute recently shared data from their report “Navigating Uncertainty: The 2021 State of Religion & Young People.”1 In this report they used the term “unbundling” to describe how young people are approaching faith. Young people are seeking answers to a wide range of difficult questions but gen­ erally do not trust institutions to provide them. So, they are willing to gather these answers from various sources, traditions, and religions. Before we rush to judgement here, the research also shows this is a highly relational process. They live in a diverse world more diverse than the world many of us grew up in, and they are in relationship with this world and its people. This seeking of answers connects them to their peers and helps them navigate and understand the diverse world they live in. In seeking to understand, they are willing to open themselves up to those they trust. They see all of this as a way of sincerely exploring what it means to be human in this world. Part of this is also an exploration of identity. Sprintide’s research notes that Gen Z reports a gap between how much they perceive they care about an issue and how much they perceive the church cares about that issue, issues like LGBTQIA rights, gender equality, gun reform, climate change. Gen Z reports they care about these 20% to 30% more than they perceive the church does. While we might want to chal­ lenge this, we can at least notice that there is a significant gap in perception that we need to pay attention to.

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    They are willing to “unbundle” a system of beliefs in part because it does not align with their values or their relational ethics. You may agree or disagree, but in some ways, this is encouraging data. Young people are curious about the world they live in, they are looking for reasons to hope, they report deep concern over issues that are affecting the dignity of human life, and they are doing their best to honor the diverse world they live in. In this, I see two values that, as a therapist, I’m constantly encouraging in clients: curiosity and compassion. If we look closer, we may also find other emotions present in this generation in the midst of the changes in the world. It’s not all loss, fear, and anxiety. It’s emotions of longing, wonder, joy, and hope—longing for a world where whole selves and those of their neighbor can be fully expressed and realized, wonder at the beauty and the complexity of their world and how it all fits together, joy in connection and relationships, hope that the future is not yet written, and their participation can help steer it towards a brighter future.

    How Might I… As we seek to honor this range of emotions, from trauma to hope, let us borrow their values of curiosity and compassion as our guides. If you were to imagine for a moment a desired outcome of all of this disruption and pain, what would you hope for the young people in your life and ministry? If you were to imagine a future where God redeems these moments in the lives of young people, what do you notice, see, feel, or hear as you imagine this? What images come to mind? Maybe an image of resilience comes to mind, an image of young people growing in wisdom and joy as they learn to walk with God in the midst of harsh realities. Or an image of young people who are better equipped to love their neighbor as them­ selves. As you imagine these realities and bring these future images to mind, I invite you to develop a simple “How might I…” question that moves you toward this better future. How might I lament with young people in my church to give them a glimpse of God’s grace and activity? How might I learn what really matters to young people and show them that the church cares as deeply? How might I be a steady presence in a chaotic, complex world? All of these images and questions push us towards curiosity and compassion. They will give us vision when we wonder whether young people will come back to church. These images will remind us that we often have all we need in the questions we ask. They help us remember that we are not meant to fix emotions but to feel them and to let them guide us towards right action.

    Meet Them Where They Are One way to apply this to our ministry context is to become students of this gen­ eration. Certainly understanding their emotions and experience will go a long way. Making space for them to process these emotions and practice lament will open up space for God to work in the uncertainty. Additionally, as we process research, like

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    the study from Springtide, we recognize that we must begin to assume complexity in our preaching and teaching. Are we preaching for a complicated world where a few key points can give us all we need to get on track, or are we allowing for the complexity and diversity this generation is experiencing? Mark Sayers recently noted that “a more complex world derives from a more connected world.”1 This generation is connected to the larger world in ever increas­ ing ways. The research tells us that they are not only connected, but that they care. When it comes to things like “unbundling” or mistrusting institutions, young people are doing what they are doing, at least in part, because they are connected to this world and to one another. Social issues are not issues, but often people, peers, and friends. In 1 Thessalonians 2, Paul shares a model of incamational ministry among the people of this community. As he’s describing his ministry, we get to these words in verse 8: “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.” Might this verse be our verse for the moment. A phone call can go a long way. One surprising data point in Sprintide’s Re­ search was that 10% of young people reported that a faith leader had reached out to them during the pandemic. During a time when our buildings were closed, 1 in 10 young people report receiving contact from a faith leader. We as the church have become dependent upon our infrastructures and programs as the means of sharing the gospel. The pandemic took that away from us, and we realized that we’ve learned how to do great ministry in the context of institutional structures, but when those are gone, we are not sure what to do. We are good at shar­ ing our buildings, but we are not as good at sharing our lives. As I was beginning my career as a therapist, another therapist heard me lament­ ing about how I might not be up for the challenge of what might come my way. In response, he shared a simple reminder: “When in doubt, be human.” In the midst of this complex and ever changing world, we do know that relation­ ships will always matter. In our work with young people, we can trust that God is not being outpaced by the world around us. We can trust the Holy Spirit is working in the midst of complexity. And we can practice the incamational model of Jesus by simply being human, and being “delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own lives as well.” There will be a time for building and growing again, but for now it might be enough to simply meet this generation in their emotions, lament our grief together in the presence of God, and leam to trust God in the middle of this complex world.

    Notes IThis is my recollection of the quote from a 2011 conference. 2 https://fulleryouthinstitute.org/blog/a-generation-of-survivors. 3 https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2021/12/07/us-surgeon-general-issues-advisory-on-youth-mentalhealth -crisis-further-exposed-by-covid-19-pandemic.html.

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    4 https://www.aap.org/en/advocacy/child-and-adolescent-healthy-mental-development/aap-aacap-chadeclaration -of-a-national-emergency-in-child-and-adolescent-mental-health. 5 Ambiguous loss is a loss that occurs without a significant likelihood of reaching emotional closure or a clear understanding. 6 https://www.springtideresearch.org/research/the-state-of-religion-2021. 7 https://careynieuwhof.com/episode469/.

  • Deep Dawn: Luke 24:1-12

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    Deep Dawn

    Luke 24:1-12

    Richard E. Spalding

    Old South Church, Boston, Massachusetts

    So arrives the day that recreates us—the day bom out of such an agony of labor this week —the day that in its coming splits time in two. It seems to arrive like light­ ning: the sudden bright reversal discloses something about who we are and hope to be, and seems to teach us to measure all time from the flash. After the flood of events and feeling that suffocated Jerusalem for the past sev­ eral days, the narrow stone streets of the city are hushed and still thick with darkness as the women set off on their errand. For them probably the most pungent thing about the morning is not the burial spices they bring, but the chaos that has been loose in the streets, begging confrontation. Easter morning for these three women starts as a pilgrimage into the binary clarity of things: death or life, abandonment or accompa­ niment, absence or presence-and, eventually, doubt or faith.

    A few summers ago I was in Jerusalem myself, looking for whatever spiritual clarity I could And, and while I was there, I happened to catch a terrible cold. My head and my chest were a misery to me and to the others in my group who had to lis­ ten to all the sounds of my slow suffocation. One of my cohort-mates offered to give me a back massage, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe that mere Angers would reach anywhere near where the congestion was. After several more days of my li­ quidity, though, she offered again, and by then, for the sake of the rest of the group if not my own, it seemed worth a try. Her name was Margaret; she was an Irish nun, now a middle school teacher in Australia. While she worked on my shoulders and neck, we talked about how stepping into the streets of the Holy City felt like stepping into a flood. After a while, as I relaxed, the conversation began to blur a bit; I’m not sure if we were speaking about the past or the present. But there was a moment of silence, just the working of Margaret’s Angers, and then she said something I can’t forget (in an Aussie-infused brogue that made the words glow). Maybe it was even partly the words she said that cured the cold, because it was completely gone the next morning. Margaret said, “You know, I think there’re really only two emotions: love and fear. If you think about it, everything else comes somehow from one or the other of them. Or a combination.’’ The story of this day is an alchemy of love and fear. There must have been enough of each at work in the narrow streets in those few intense hours to give any­ one a chance to catch their death down through the centuries. Every thread of feeling you can trace through the labyrinthine streets of the Easter story, if you think about it, seems to wind its way back to the confrontation between love and fear: the shame of Peter…, the expediency of Pilate…, the devastation of Mary…, the anger of Judas

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    Iseariot…, the skepticism of Thomas…, the astonishment of the two who walked to Emmaus…. Love and fear are the primary colors from which come a spectrum of human shades as wide as the world itself. And maybe it’s as true of the boulevards of Boston on this morning as it certainly is true of the squares of Kiev or the streets of Colorado Springs, that hardly anyone comes on the bright morning errand of this day who hasn’t been following one or the other, or probably both, of those threads, love and fear, and wondering whether one or the other might have finally won the unequivocal victory during the night. Will the heavy stone that blocks the unanswered prayer still be in the way? What will be inside the place that had been so full of death? Has the tender thing that had been planted indeed now been trampled beyond recognition? Will the morning restore the safety that made life seem possible before, reinstate the Presence that made life seem bearable? Will light and color dispel the doubts, or confirm the loneliness, or reignite the grief this Easter? The women of the first Easter, whose footsteps we follow into ours, could hardly have undertaken a more fearful or more loving errand. They knew what they could expect: to sit down in the roaring silence between love and fear and tenderly anoint the shattered corpse of their hero, their teacher, their friend. But what they found was infinitely less conclusive, more ambiguous, than that: the heavy stone rolled aside, the corpse not in its place, the dead one nowhere to be found among the bereft living. The burial spices in which they’d found the small comfort of something, at least to do, now were useless. But Luke tells us that it was something else they brought with them that turned out to be redemptive. For the messengers who greeted the women said, “He is not here. Remember how he told you… that the Son of Man, Humanity’s own Child, must be handed over to sinners and be crucified, and on the third day rise?” Then they remem­ bered, Luke says; then they began to recognize how precious was what they had really brought with them through the darkness before the day. And if it was the threads of love and fear that they followed into the maze of streets, it was remembering that got them out again. It was remembering that helped them navigate the derision of the men who received their news as “an idle tale,” their careful, deliberate putting together of things they had heard, seen, felt, things no one’s scorn could take from them: things he had said before he died, ways he had engaged their hearts, times when fear, for all its looming power, couldn’t hold a candle to love. Perhaps, in their spreading out again and again the fragments of story and promise and hope, like a child spreading out again and again a beloved collection, its priceless value began to emerge. “Perhaps [as the ”1 poet says] in their telling of it, they may happen on the truth of it. Luke is the evangelist of holy memory. The soaring eontribution of his gospel to history was simply, for him, an instanee of the same work that all who had known Jesus were ealled to do, and all who would follow Jesus: to seareh the memory for bits of the truth and pieee them together, to glean from the harvest of a thousand frag­ mentary insights an emerging pieture of a graee and love so expansive as not only to fill history, but to be history.

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    Luke is the one, remember—remember!—who tells how, as the newborn Jesus lay in the manger with awestruck shepherds gathered ’round, Mary ‘‘kept all these things and pondered them in her heart” (2:19). All those things she kept, and pondered: the luminous remembrances of his face among the faces of children, the little waves of delight that rippled out from his stories, the ecstatic kiss planted on his temple by one whose twisted, useless legs he had straightened. And other recollections, too, no less vivid, no less im­ portant: memories of the threats of the authorities, the way the sky above him and even the air around him seemed to fill with shadow and terror in those last few days. Memories of the abuse he endured, each lash of it, and the way attempts to shame him seemed to roll off the bony dignity of his shoulders all the way to the end. All that love and fear in their infinite combinations, retold and pondered ‘til on a certain lightning day that seemed to have taken forever to be bom out of the labor of his life, the remembering finally bore its fruit, and she understood at last where her history was going. Oh, yes, there is haste in the elation of Easter day—a hurried errand through the darkness, like the precipitous unleavened meal of the Jews before their breathless escape into the night, a burst of electric astonishment emanating from an empty tomb in the rock where nothing was as it was expected to be. A mélange of love and fear that, at times, seemed undecipherable, inconclusive, permanently ambiguous. But sometimes it’s only slowly, only by turning over and over again in their memories the pieces, the words, the images, that the followers of Jesus begin to fathom what God is doing at Easter. Through the whole sweep of this gospel, the pieces are there for the taking, for the remembering: one teaching that you’ll hear, then forget, then be stirred to remember later, one guffaw of disbelief that will morph into a question and then into a pale dawn of insight wrapped in a memory and then girded into mission, that then, lo and behold, will have turned out in the end to have changed the course of your history, and of history itself. In fact, the dawn doesn’t break in a bolt, like lightning. Dawn never really breaks at all, any more than love ever vanquishes fear with one final, definitive thrust. A new day doesn’t displace an old one at a line of scrimmage. If peace ever comes to the gun-tortured streets of this country, its coming will be more like dawn than like light­ ning. The very first light of dawn isn’t hostile to the darkness; it starts almost as a part of the darkness, as the darkness is part of the light. At dawn, it almost seems as though the night simply turns, slowly revealing some startling new side of its nature one atom at a time. It’s almost as though light and darkness spend the dawn yearning for each other, reaching into each other, aching to be remembered by us as parts of one whole. Luke alone, among the evangelists, uses a unique pairing of Greek words to open his Easter story: ‘‘in deep da^^n, on the first day of the week….” I suspect that most of us find our way through the narrow streets to Easter through something like “deep dawn”-that time of day when you can’t yet be absolutely sure what it is you’re seeing, that season of the day when things that had seemed to oppose each other hint at oneness, intimations of a scope of grace we can scarcely imagine and would never expect.

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    For some of us, at least some of the time, Easter steals upon us not with a trumpet fanfare or a flash of unequivocal light or insight or evidence, but in an infinitesimal turning of our nature toward its wholeness, a thread-by-thread reweaving of fear and love, a deliberate recollection of all the grace we have gathered and all the story that has ever saved our lives, an atom by atom transfiguration of an old day into a new day. For some of us, the way to Easter through the narrow, winding streets is Luke’s way: keeping things and pondering them in our hearts, turning one memory at a time, one intimation, one attitude, one choice at a time-turning them so carefully toward the light to reveal the startling newness of our resurrected nature in Christ. In deep dawn.

    Note John Drury, in his article on Luke in A Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Alter/Kermode (Boston, Har­ vard Univ. Press, 1987), page 424.

  • Advent: Are We There Yet?

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    Advent: Are We There Yet?

    Mark 1:1-8

    Carla Jones Brown

    Arch Street Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

    John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repen­ tance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Well, here we are in Advent … again. For those of us with a particular set of worship experiences, we are in Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary … again. For some preachers, this means searching our personal database of sermons to see what sounded relevant three years ago when this text made an appearance, so that we can prepare to preach from this text… again. It is easy to feel both connected to and disconnected from Mark’s message about the coming Jesus. Preachers and parishio­ ners might find ourselves asking … Are we there yet? So what do we do to prepare ourselves to receive the Advent directive to wait? We sing! Perhaps “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus” will appear in a Sunday bulletin or “Comfort, Comfort Ye My People” may be the soundtrack of your days and nights for these four weeks. These songs call us to hear or remember the events that culminate in our celebration of the birth of the Christ child, and they provide a tie that binds us across denominations, generations, and other barriers that we have built in our attempt to protect the story of the One who came to break those same barriers. One element of the COVID-19 lockdown that shaped Advent in 2020 was the loss of our ability to sing together and to let our voices join and swell and dance to­ gether in communal worship. We sang our songs to pre-recorded tracks that poured into our ears through headphones, earbuds, or computer speakers. The threat of the Coronavirus was so fierce that we dared not lift our voices and droplets into the air for fear of catching or transmitting the virus to someone else. Our songs were muted by masks, and that beautiful synching of breath that happens when we sing together was momentarily taken from us and we had to adjust. We were reminded of the im­ pact of being isolated from one another, and even the collective act of singing had turned into what felt like the worst of karaoke in what should have been the best time of choral singing. This isolation and non-elective solitude made it difficult for us to sing the songs that heralded the season. Perhaps we might have felt a particular closeness to John

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    the Baptist as it seemed like ours was a voice crying out in the wilderness, but we were not crying out or preaching a word of repentance. We were simply crying out into what felt like an empty space and longing to hear evidence that there was some­ one else out there. I can recall sending screenshots to a friend every time a choir song popped up in my playlist, and I imagined us standing together in a choir loft and singing the alto notes. She would send a laughing emoji or mark it with a double exclamation mark indicating that she understood and felt the same way. Under the threat of this virus, we found ways to connect with one another at a time when it seemed like contending with loneliness might be more dangerous than contracting the virus. We longed for connection and we lamented our separation and this was how we entered the sacred season of the liturgical year that calls us to wait with expectation for the arrival of the One who would change everything. And we found ourselves asking yet again. Are we there yet? Have we moved past this moment of separation? Is it safe to come out and play again? Is loneliness in the rearview mirror yet? How long, O Lord, before we can be together again? Mark’s gospel is an interesting choice for the second Sunday in Advent because as we read his words, we do not get a sense of waiting but rather a sense of immedi­ acy. Mark does not begin with the birth narrative but situates us in a space where we encounter an adult Jesus whose active presence is startling when one expects a meek and lowly child who is dependent on His parents. Perhaps what we need is to be star­ tled out of our old expectations and into a new set of expectations! Perhaps we need to consider what it means to use the word “again” when approaching the text in this season—as if Mark does not describe it as the “beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ” in verse 1. This beginning can function not only as a prelude to the text which follows but also as a sign pointing us away from our old expectations and into fresh, new expectations. Perhaps this is Mark’s way of grounding us in the present moment and acknowledging that we need some good news that will make our hearts glad but that will also bind our hearts together so that we remember that we are not alone in our waiting. The question is not “Am I there yet” but rather, “Are WE there yet?’ »59

    When I read the first verse of the text, I was reminded of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Although Plato’s intent was different, 1 can see us sitting under the weighted blanket of our forced separation. I can imagine us bound not by chains but by the false belief that this separation is our new normal and we need not expect to be together again. We sit looking at the shadows on the wall cast by nostalgia, and we remember what was and long for what can be though it is hard to imagine—let alone expect—that there is something strong enough to help us to break free. The moment is not our friend but our captor, and so we wait, afraid to turn toward the light that is casting the shadow for fear that it might do us more harm than good. Into our space of nostalgia which feeds our loneliness, Mark’s announcement breaks in and reminds us that this is not a time for longing for what was nor for fear of what might be, but.

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    Advent 2023

    instead, it is a time to actively wait with expectation of a promise fulfilled. This is but the beginning of the Good News. Just wait, there’s more! But are we there yet? Mark’s announcement interrupts us and instead of simply propelling us forward, takes us back—^not for nostalgic purposes, but for the purpose of recalibrating our journey and widening our lens. This is the beginning of the Good News but it is not the beginning of our larger story of God’s relationship with us. The story was set in motion a long time ago, and here Mark uses the words of the prophet Isaiah as a bookend to the story. Mark’s community would have understood this reference and been able to follow his logic. Having moved from what was foretold to the present moment, Mark tells of John the Baptizer who appeared in the wilderness. The wil­ derness is supposed to be an uninhabitable place, and yet, there is at least one sign of life in this wilderness. This is not a sign of the life that had become familiar and known, but instead, a new life! If permitted to revisit the allegory of the cave refer­ ence, I would imagine the shrugging off of the weighted blanket that has held us in place, separated from one another by both circumstance and illusion. No longer bur­ dened by the weight of the blanket and now able to move around, we discover that we had companions on the journey all this time, but we were so deeply influenced by our circumstances that we were unable to see new ways to make connections. We thought we were waiting alone and waiting in vain, but perhaps we were in need of a messenger to break into our waiting to help us turn our energy from waiting for the worst to be over to waiting expectantly for what is to come. This text references the words of a prophet, and John comes with the appearance of a prophet. He is the sign of life in the wilderness. He is not waiting for his wil­ derness time to end but rather this wilderness experience is just the beginning, and even he knows that he is one point on the journey and not the endpoint. Even with the appearance of John, we are still… not there yet. John calls for repentance, and suddenly, he is surrounded by crowds of people. Again the uninhabitable wilderness is filled with people who manage to survive the journey and the circumstances. They might have traveled alone, but they have arrived together. I can feel the excitement building as John recalibrates their journey once more and tells them that he is not the final destination. His presence marks one part of the journey but One is yet on the way, and so we change our perspective while we wait to encounter the change and freedom that He will surely bring. As with those in the cave, the One referred to as the Light of the World may seem like too much to take in with eyes that have grown accustomed to shadows, but that is precisely when we are able to walk away from the shadows of the past and walk into the bright future that is promised in the Good News of Jesus—even if we are not there YET. This is the story of us and the promise of Advent. We are on a journey that calls us to remember the past, see the present, and envision and wait for the future. So as we await that which has been promised, let us constantly recalibrate our journey and

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    our vision to see where we are. If we are stuck, let us repent—turn from the shadows on the wall and see things in a new light. Let us continue to enter Advent seasons not with the dread of repeating what has been but with the excitement of what can be. Let us enter these wilderness spaces knowing that they are mile markers with the power to shape us but not the final destination. Welcome to this season of waiting with expectancy and with community. This is just the beginning of the Good News … there’s more Good News awaiting us! The Good News is more the journey than the destination. So, are we there yet?

  • Sermon Crafting for Intercultural Preaching

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    Page 39

    Sermon Crafting for Intercultural Preaching

    Pamela Hosey Long

    Parroquia St. Mark’s, Guadalajara, Mexico

    A decade ago, I was sitting in a large historic Episcopal church in a Southern city, interpreting for our Mexican parishioners as a retired priest began his sermon with an old joke. It was the old chestnut about an American businessman with a Harvard MBA that pretends to lecture a poor Mexican fisherman about how to improve his business so that he can go from one boat to a fleet of boats. The Mexican says he has a full life: “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my friends.” The American thinks this life is insufficient. If the Mexican just fished more hours, bought more boats, hired more fishermen, invested in Wall Street, paid into a pension, he’d be able to retire at 65 and then he could fish, play with his grandkids, drink with his friends, and take a nap every day.1 It’s an old joke that Mexicans know well. The fool in the story, of course, is the Harvard MBA. But this preacher continued: “What a waste of a life,” he intoned. Just a little more effort on his part, and allowing an American to advise him, and that fisherman could have been happy. I was so stunned by the turn of the sermon that I stopped in­ terpreting.2 I’ve also been asked by bishops and other visiting dignitaries to interpret their sermons in Latino congregations. It doesn’t always go as planned. Images and illustrations that refer to American baseball or football, American sitcoms, or Brit­ ish literature are not easily transferrable. Does it do the original sermon justice—is something lost?—if the reference needs to be explained? Preaching, at its best, is part of a conversation between the preacher, the Scrip­ tures, and the congregation. If the preacher only listens to the text of Scripture, he or she has only done part of the work of preparing a sermon, which may only be partial­ ly heard and probably at least partially rejected. Listening to the congregation—by taking stock of the diversity present in the congregation, the history, the habits of thought, the taboo topics—is an essential component in that conversation as much as the “delivery” of the message. Leonora Tubbs Tisdale describes getting to know one’s congregation as practic­ ing a kind of cultural ethnography in a pastoral context: listening, observing, analyz­ ing, and reflecting on the cultural practices of your congregation in order to be better equipped to preach to them. She says preaching is local theology, developed from within the culture and experience of the local congregation. It’s a kind of preaching that is hearer-oriented rather than speaker-oriented, and requires the preaching on the congregation’s grounds, not on one’s own. She compares this to Calvin’s theology of incarnation: “Reflecting the image of the God who (as Calvin reminds us) accom­ modated Godself to us in order to enter our frame of reference and aid our under­

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    standing, the preacher lets go some of his or her own communicational prerogatives in order to proclaim from within the congregation’s own symbolic framework, the transformative message of the gospel.” 3 Tisdale likens this kind of pastoral ethnography to contextual theology, which centers the hermeneutic activity on the Scriptures but expands into the local culture to provide illustrations and illumination. In contextual theology, anything is material for theological insight, and context weighs heavily.4 For Bevans, contextual theology is an approach to bringing the Incarnation into a local setting, a way, he says, of “do­ ing theology in which one takes into account the spirit and message of the gospel; the tradition of the church; the culture in which one is theologizing; and social change within that culture….” Bevans says that the secular or religious culture of an ethnic group can prove a rich source of theological raw materials as well as personal and communal experiences. Attending to both Tisdale and Bevans, I realized recently that over the years, I’ve been practicing both ethnography and contextual theology with my multicultur­ al parish. As I grew to know my dual-culture parish in depth, my observations and some online reading, plus a 42-year university career in Intercultural Communica­ tions served to give me a door into the cultures, so that I could “enflesh” the message of the Gospel in ways that were appropriate to their cultures. For three years, I served as deacon-in-charge of an historic African American congregation in Alabama that had played a central role in the Montgomery Bus Boy­ cott and the Civil Rights movement but now was suffering from the same challenges of many small Episcopal parishes—an aging congregation with limited resources and dwindling attendance (18). The deaths of two “pillars” of the congregation made its survival even more challenging. I was invited to be “long-term supply,” and I was able to continue to minister at another location to a Latino congregation that I had shepherded for 12 years. Eventually, when the Latino congregation’s presence at an all-white congregation became untenable, the African American congregation invit­ ed me to bring the Latino congregation to their parish. Because of my long association with the Latino congregation, I was aware of the unique ethnic characteristics and had developed methods of formation and pastoral care, as well as ways of preaching that seemed to be working. Membership grew from a dozen in 2005 to about 265 in 2019 (35). Although in most urban areas in the U.S. the “Latino/Hispanic” population is usually highly diverse, with Mexican, Dominican, Cuban, Venezuelan, and US-born members, the Latino population in this small city is not at all diverse. It is overwhelmingly Mexican, with a small number of Hondurans and Guatemalans; even within this almost homogeneous group, there was little regional diversity. The largest group of the city’s Latino population was from two states in southern Mexico, Guerrero and Chiapas.5 The Christians from the state of Guerrero represented a new challenge for me— they were not dominant Spanish-speakers. Most of the adults were native speakers

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    of an ancient indigenous language, Mixteco, and a specific dialect of that language, Metlatónoc. Because most of the older adults had never had formal schooling, which in Mexico is in Spanish, they had never learned Spanish. Some of the younger adults had had up to a fifth grade education and could hold a conversation in Spanish but spoke Mixteco at home with their parents and children. The school-age children were learning English at school but were never exposed to Spanish. So on any giv­ en Sunday, I could expect there to be 20-30 Mixteco-speaking adults, with varying degrees of Spanish proficiency, a dozen or so children with only Mixteco and fairly high English proficiency, and a handful of people from Chiapas who were Spanish dominant. The result was that finding lay readers for the Spanish service was com­ plicated, and many times there were no Spanish-literates at all, and I’d have to do all the readings myself. Not only had the Mixtéeos been marginalized linguistically in their home state of Guerrero, but they had been pastorally abandoned as well. Most of them had only seen a priest once or twice a year. Their only regular pastoral contact was with lay ministers called rezanderos, or pray-ers, who were hired by families to say memo­ rized prayers at the anniversaries of funerals. So although they were baptized Roman Catholics, their religious formation was minimal. Having come from a rural setting in Mexico, most of my parishioners sought out work in agriculture when they arrived in Montgomery, but this took on a specific tone in Alabama. Although some worked in landscaping, ranching, and farming, the vast majority worked in the chicken processing plants—hard, dangerous, revolting work that risked their lives and health on a daily basis. However, their knowledge of the life cycles of animals and plants was much greater than that of most native Montgomerians. The challenges of low literacy, low Spanish (or English) proficiency, and recent immigration status taught me about ministry in ways that few people ever experi­ ence. I could not depend on written materials, as many people didn’t read at all, and those who did might be self-conscious of their abilities to read aloud in public. It meant that I would have to migrate into an oral world and minister orally, placing most of my ministry “eggs” into the preaching basket. I further realized that since no published formation materials existed that bridged the gap between the dominant U.S. culture and the Mixteco culture, preaching was going to have to do double duty as evangelism and formation. The African American congregation, however, was much more diverse. An ac­ tive community of 25 souls contained about 10 who were college educated, with degrees in law, nursing, management, or education, and some were retired military. About half were working class, and a few were disabled. Some were life-long Angli­ cans who had immigrated from Jamaica; others were descendants of enslaved people from Alabama’s plantations who had grown up in the Baptist tradition. There were very wealthy individuals and some mothers on welfare. There were also 3 white con­

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    gregants, all of whom had advanced degrees but were diverse in terms of life expe­ riences—a retired Episcopal priest, an educator, and a retired businessman. The life experiences of the African American congregation—from former addicts to former clergy—were more varied than those of the Mexican congregation. As I’ve described it above, I had done my ethnography—I had observed my congregations for over a decade, absorbing a great deal of information and insight into their lives, and I had a reasonably good idea of what was going to be meaningful in a sermon. The challenge, however, was that the two congregations were so differ­ ent—but I was preaching from the same texts every week! The 1996 Nairobi Statement on Worship and Culture,6 crafted by the Lutheran World Federation, proposes that there are four ways in which worship, and by inclu­ sion, the sermon and culture, can intersect. If the worship is “transcultural,” the as­ sumption is that there is some substance (texts, sermons, imagery) and form (liturgy, music) in worship that transcends culture, and everyone participates in the worship service in more or less the same way. Another way in which culture and worship intersect is in contextuality—like dynamic equivalence in translation, worship lead­ ers attempt to substitute elements from the source culture for “equivalent” elements in the target culture, for example using praise songs from the target culture rather than traditional English hymns in the case of Anglican worship. Another possibility, which may be interrogated by a post-colonial perspective, would be “counter-cultur­ al” worship, in which worship leaders challenge elements in the target culture that they deem to be contrary to the Gospel, such as the use of images of saints or national flags. The fourth possibility is “cross-cultural,” an approach that seeks to share cul­ tural practices between two distinct local cultures. My Latino congregation “shared” the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe with the African American congregation, who in turn hosted a Fourth of July picnic with the Latino congregation. These four approaches to intercultural worship can be applied to sermon craft­ ing. A transcultural approach, Lisa Lamb says, can be detrimental to both congre­ gations. She says the best preachers are those who “actively celebrate diversity in their sermons and work hard to name the distinctive treasures, heartaches, and even sins, of the cultures in their midst, calling their members to risky repentance and deep unity.” 7 This meant that my preparation for preaching began on Monday with printing out the texts, in Spanish and English. One might assume that preparation would be the same for both languages, but often the Spanish translation differed somewhat from the English. I couldn’t build a whole sermon on one word or phrase without checking the other version to see if that would work. As I worked to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the weekly Scripture passages, I intentionally looked for images and phrases that would ignite the imag­ ination of both groups. I discovered over time that there were three kinds of images that fell into three categories: 1. Images that would work well cross-culturally and

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    mean basically the same for both groups; 2. Images that would work, but they’d work differently for the two groups; 3. Images that would only work with one group, if at all. These were only effective for one group. Usually, I developed the sermon for the African American congregation first and prepared extensive notes to be used during my homily, rather than a fully scripted sermon. This approach allowed me considerable flexibility to adjust my sermon for the Mexican congregation, as I noticed who was arriving. I could eliminate or sub­ stitute images accordingly. Among the images that worked in both congregations were images from na­ ture—the love of growing plants and caring for animals is transcultural. But the contexts are different—the relationship with animals, for example, in a small town in Mexico will be different from that in suburban Montgomery. But images from agri­ culture and animal husbandry were not very far removed from the life experience of the English-speaking congregation. I used a story about a kitten in a Christmas tree for a sermon on Luke 8:43-48 (Proper 16C), about Jesus teaching in a synagogue and healing a woman bent double. The effect I was aiming for was an over-loaded system that can’t handle a small intrusion—as a Christmas tree overloaded with beautiful decorations that couldn’t handle the weight of a kitten, so the purity laws with all their accretions could not heal a woman with a flow of blood. On another occasion, the propers were from Lent 2C, where Jesus longs to gather the people of Jerusalem to his breast like a mother hen sheltering her chicks (Luke 13:31-35). In the news that week was the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and many news outlets were mentioning how the people of Ukraine were attempting to escape with their small pets hidden in their coats. This was an image that had moved both the Mexicans and the English-speakers. On Christmas Eve, I told a combined congregation of a trip I had made with my son to the archaeologi­ cal site of Monte Alban in southern Mexico. I told of how he and I had climbed the highest pyramid there, and were able to see the beautiful city of Oaxaca below. We returned at night and climbed the same pyramid—but our gaze was shifted to the extraordinary view of the stars from the same position. The stars at Monte Alban, like those on the starry night that Jesus was bom, were calling us to change our per­ spective from the world to the heavens. Not all images that one can think of as sermon illustrations will work in one con­ text the same way they work in another. The image of the desert, for example, is a metaphor for most North Americans, including my African American congregation, but it was a lived experience for the Mexicans, who had crossed the life-endangering Sonoran desert some months before. It was not an image of beauty and mystery, but a traumatic experience. I had to think carefully about how I talked about exile and law enforcement, as the experiences of all my congregants were fraught on many levels. Sometimes I used similar images but adjusted the culture context, using what Nairobi refers to as the “contextual” approach. I wanted to talk about the “mystery”

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    of the Eucharist, and I began by talking about how we use the term in everyday conversation. For the African American congregation, I referred to the American tradition of summer road trips, and the “Mystery Spots,” roadside attractions that one finds all over the U.S. map, usually in small towns, with “amazing” natural phenom­ ena such as crooked houses where gravity “doesn’t work,” or creeks that flow uphill. Instead of Mystery Spots, I mentioned the Mexican town of Real de Catorce, which is widely known for its mysterious phenomena. This was an example of “dynamic equivalence,” similar to the way a translator substitutes a folk saying from one cul­ ture for the folk saying of another, giving a culturally appropriate equivalence rather than a word-for-word translation. There are probably more cases in which the image appropriate for one congrega­ tion will not work at all for the other. If you’re preaching to a diverse congregation, be aware that the following kinds of images are not going to “translate”: references to commercials, slogans, or lyrics of songs (even hymns!); characters from literature or television (Movies may actually work, as they may be dubbed in many world lan­ guages.); references to courtship rituals and family structures; folktales like “Br’er Rabbit” or “The Little Red Hen.” In order for some of these to work, you may have to spend half your sermon explaining, and then the sermon becomes about the folk­ tale, not the Gospel. On Advent 1C, I used the lyrics of a folk song to open the sermon in the African American congregation: “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat. Please put a penny in the old man’s hat.” Curiously the Jamaican’s were more familiar with that tune than the native-born Americans! But it was clear that the Mexicans were not going to know that song at all—so I completely reframed the opening of the sermon for that congregation. In the sixth chapter of Acts, the apostles have to solve an intercultural conflict— the Hellenistic widows are being slighted at the meals, in favor of the Hebrew wid­ ows. The Twelve delegated the daily feeding to representatives from both ethnic groups so that cultural sensitivity could be considered. In our sermon-crafting, we pray for our congregations, and we open our hearts and minds to the Holy Spirit in the process of exegesis. As we do, let us pray that the Spirit will guide us in choosing culturally appropriate images, stories, and illustrations that speak to the hearts of our diverse congregations, so that the “word of God [can] continue to spread” (Acts 6:7) and God’s transcendent love be made manifest through our cultures.

    Notes

    1 Numerous examples of this story can be found online. Here’s one source: https://startsat60.com/media /lifestyle/jokes/daily-joke-businessman-fisherman-advice.

    2 By interpreting, we mean the rendering of speech communication, rather than written communication (translating).

    3 Leonoro Tubbs Tisdale, Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 139.

    4 Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2002), 1.

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    5 The 2020 Census shows Montgomery with a 3.79% Hispanic population, with 5301 people from Mexico and 2786 from Guatemala. Since the Census does not inform us of the regions of origins of the immigrants, I’ll simply state that those of us who collaborate in Latino ministry agreed that the over­ whelming majority of the Mexican population was indigenous peoples from Guerrero, with Chiapas and Veracruz much further behind. My own estimate would be that there were at least 4000 adults bom in Guerrero, and probably three times that many children of Mixteco heritage bom in the US. https:// datausa.io/profile/geo/montgomery-al/#:~:text=Foreign%2DBorn%20Population&text=As%20 of%202020%2C%205.05%25%20of%20Montgomery%2C%20AL%20residents%20(,the%20national %20average%20of%2013.5%25. 6 Federation, Worship, and Culture, Lutheran World Federation Study Team on Worship, and Culture, Nairobi Statement on Worship and Culture: Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities, Lutheran World Federation, 1996, https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=KSmmGwAACAAJ. The document is also available at several sites online.

    7 Lisa Washington, Blessed and Beautiful: Churches and the Preaching that Sustains them (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014), viii.

  • Shiny Enough: Facing Envy

    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 28

    Shiny Enough: Facing Envy

    Luke 4:1-13

    Amy Miracle

    Broad Street Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio

    Introduction In the last two years, I have found myself preaching many a sermon focusing on emotions. This is not an obvious approach for me! I am a thinker, not a feeler. I am much more comfortable problem solving than sharing emotions. But early in the pan­ demic, I realized that I could not be an effective leader unless I took care of my own emotional life. I set about learning more about emotions, taking classes and reading books and spending time identifying and exploring my emotions. This work was im­ mensely helpful to me as a pastor and as a human. I pastor a congregation filled with thinkers, and I figured that focusing on emotions might be helpful to them as well. I preached this sermon at Broad Street Presbyterian Church in Columbus, Ohio, in March of 2022. The sermon was preached three times, at two live services and one pre-recorded online service. It was a time of anxiety and fatigue, a season that con­ tinues. The sermon focuses on the emotion of envy. According to the “Field Guide to Emotions” (reviewed in this issue), the story of this emotion is: I would like to have what that person has. The opposite emotion most likely is satisfaction. The story of that emotion is simple: I have enough. The sermon is shaped by this question: What would it look like to envy less and experience more satisfaction? That felt like an appropriate question for Lent. This would be an effective sermon introducing a series focusing on the emotions of Lent. Following the sermon, a trio accompanied by gui­ tar sang the song “Lovely Needy People,” by a band called “The Many.”

    The Musical Damn Yankees tells the story of Joe Boyd, a middle-aged fan of the unsuccessful Washington Senators baseball team. He is tired of seeing his team lose to the Yankees. He offers to sell his soul to the devil to change that. The devil takes him up on the offer. The devil has an assistant, Lola, described as a sexy and beauti­ ful homewrecker. Her big song is “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets.” As a senior in high school, I was cast in the role of Lola. I know this may be hard to believe, but this role wasn’t a natural fit for me. I don’t think I was very good at being a temptress. I feel like I’ve never really understood temptation. Self-control comes pretty easily to me, which means that I have never really connected with this biblical story. This is how I have always imagined it: I picture the devil going up to Jesus and say­ ing, “Psst. Jesus. Hey, man, let’s steal a car, drink a fifth of gin, go to a strip club, and then blow all of our money at a casino. What do you think?” For me anyways, that just isn’t tempting. At all. And that’s not what the devil says. It’s not even close. The devil is playing an entirely different game—a much

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    more subtle one, a much more interesting game. He says, “Look over there. See what your life could look like. Shinier. More important. You could be someone. Really make a difference. Have an impact.” I was in my late twenty’s, attending the wedding of a college friend. At the re­ ception, I was catching up with another friend from college. He had been a Rhodes scholar, graduated from Stanford Law School, clerked for a Supreme Court Justice, and was at the time working at the State Department. That summer, I was a maid in a hotel. A voice inside me said, “See what your life could look like. Shinier. More im­ portant. You could be someone. Really make a difference. Have an impact.” I com­ pared my life to my college friend, and yes, I felt inadequate, a failure. I saw his big important shiny life, and I envied it. I wanted it. Or something like it. The devil knows what’s he’s doing. The devil isn’t asking Jesus to rob a bank. He’s tempting Jesus to think that things are better somewhere else. He’s tempting Je­ sus to conclude that his own life doesn’t contain holiness and meaning and purpose. The devil knows what he’s doing. Who among us hasn’t gone down that path? If only.. .if only I was ten pounds lighter, if only my house was bigger or smaller or better organized, if only I lived in a bigger city or a smaller city, had a more import­ ant job. If things were just different, then my life would be shinier, better, blessed, whole, complete. I would be shinier, better, blessed, whole, complete. The devil is playing on that dissatisfaction that comes from comparison. We are drowning in comparison. Social media, Instagram in particular, offers almost infinite capacity for comparison. It’s just easy for us to see glimpses of other people’s lives on social media and find ours lacking, insufficient, dull. Our whole economy is built on comparison and envy. Buy this car, try this hair product, purchase this new and improved smartphone, and your life will be shinier and better. And then there is “Home Edit.” Are you familiar with “Home Edit”? I love “Home Edit.” It’s the home organization method that will change your life. That’s what it says on their website. It’s a full-service operation. The Home Edit team will come to your home and organize. They have a blog. They sell books. There is a show on Netflix. I watched it. They sell lots of over-priced plastic containers that will help you better organize your life. If I could just fully embrace their system, if I could finally get around to organizing my closet so that all like colored items are adjacent to one another, my life would be shinier, better, blessed, whole, complete. I would be shinier, better, blessed, whole, complete. The devil knows what he is doing. So does Jesus. He says “no” to all that the devil offers. It’s a great story with which to begin our emotion focused Lent. I want us for a minute to be honest about the life of one Jesus of Nazareth. He is a small fish in a tiny pond. He has a dozen followers and draws some modest crowds. If there had been an ancient world equivalent of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, Jesus wouldn’t even have been considered for the list.

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    Yet we make the claim that God lived in his life in an unprecedented way, not be­ cause he was famous and did important things and won awards and accolades, lived this outwardly shiny life, achieved greatness. No, because he allowed God to dwell in him fully. He chose to embrace his actual, limited, challenging, beautiful life and invited God into every comer of it. Our Lenten project this year is to try to do a little bit of that—to be honest about our temptations, our yearnings, our restlessness, our dissatisfaction. There is Jesus saying the ingredients for wholeness are already here. Look around: God is here. In our actual life, with the people we are actually sharing our real life with. Right here. Right now. What we really, really hope for is the beginning of the end of a pandemic, but we’ve thought that before, so we are trying not to be too hopeful. God is here. In the midst of a war in the Ukraine—God is here. What if for Lent this year we give something up? What if we give up envy and comparison? Daunting, I know. I’m thinking this might be more transformative than giving up chocolate. Let’s give up envy and comparison. For forty days, what if we stop with the

    If only…, if I could just…, when I finally…. For forty days, what if we do a little less of I wish my life were more like your life, if I could just be a little more like you.

    What if we give up envy and comparison for Lent? Or at least try to. Do a little better. That may mean spending less time on social media. That may mean spending less time watching HGTV. That may mean looking around at our actual life—at the people we share that life with—at the home we actually live in—at the way we live our daily life, and see it as blessed enough. Shiny enough. Whole enough. I want to circle back to that conversation I had with my college friend. Remem­ ber, envy and comparison were filling my soul. I said, “Wow. The State Department, how is that?” He answered, “Frankly. It’s kind of boring most days.” Then his face lit up. “Tell me everything about your summer. How is Yellowstone?” What I failed to mention was that I was a hotel maid in Yellowstone National Park, preaching there on the weekends and hiking or fishing literally every day. It was an amazing experience. My friend added, “I’m so jealous of you. Being in Yel­ lowstone. Wow.” There we had been, both envying each the other. When we realized that, we had a good laugh. After our conversation, I like to think that he went back to D.C. and I returned to the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel with a new appreciation for the amazing opportuni­ ties we both had, for the gifts that were available to us if we only had eyes to see them. Did any you of get outside yesterday afternoon? May it be noted for the record that in central Ohio on March 2, the temperature climbed to 75 degrees. It was an

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    absurdly beautiful day. It was a buoyant day. Everywhere I walked, people were smiling and nodding to one another, and we know that there’s still some winter to come and spring isn’t here yet, but it was magnificent. It was such a strong reminder (and we need these reminders all of the time) that God is present and active in our actual lives. This Lent, Jesus invites us to envy less, compare less, settle into our real lives. See God in all of the less than perfect parts of them. See our lives as good enough.

  • Seeing, Hearing, and Knowing: John 20:11-18

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    Seeing, Hearing, and Knowing

    John 20:11-18

    Carol Lynn Patterson

    First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens, New York, New York

    11But Mary stood outside the tomb erying. As she wept, she bent over to look

    into the tomb ^^and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. ’^They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” “They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” ’W this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. ^^“Woman,” he said, “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” ^^Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabbonì!” (which means Teacher), ^^esus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” ‘^Mary Magdalene went to the dis­ ciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her. John 20:11-18

    For Mary Magdalene, it wasn’t a good Friday. The world-as she had come to know it with Jesus- ended when His life ended. This was the man who had ushered her into the kingdom of God. Mark and Luke say He cast seven devils out of her. Matthew says, “While Jesus was dying on Calvary’s cross, darkness covered the land.” It was pitch black on Friday from 12 noon to 3 p.m. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. There was a thick, eerie darkness in the middle of the day. It wasn’t supposed to be dark at that time. The sun should have been high in the sky. As I was growing up hearing old time preachers say “The s-u-n refused to shine, ” I imagined it was because the light of the world was fading. I envisioned a S-O-N set. Even yvhen the sun came back out, it remained dark and dreary in Mary Magdelene ’s world. Matthew and Mark tell us she was watching when Jesus’ body was placed in the tomb that Joseph of Arimathea had donated. That’s the last thing the Bible tells us she saw on Friday-the tortured body of her Deliverer and Teacher being buried. Do you remember the television commercials for the anti-depressant drug Zoloft? In them, a little grey cloud follows people around. Perhaps life was in muted shades of grey for Mary. She couldn’t get to Jesus’ grave to grieve His death and burial on Saturday because it was the Sabbath Day. You know how slow time passes when you

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    can’t get to the one you love. Magnify that feeling a million times to imagine what Mary Magdalene was experiencing. This was no temporary separation. Death had darkened her world. We’re not talking about puppy love or eros, romantic love. Jesus had changed her life. He had given her a purpose, and, not just her. She witnessed Him ushering men, women, girls, and boys into the kingdom of God. As one of the women who funded the earthly ministry of our Lord and Savior, Mary was there as Jesus changed the lives of hundreds and thousands. When they buried Him in that borrowed tomb, they buried the hopes and dreams of His followers as well. I tell you, the world wasn’t just grey for Mary Magdalene. Those 24 hours between Friday and Sunday must have felt like an eternity—and not Calvin Klein’s romanticized kind. On Friday, she saw the One she left everything to follow beaten, battered, bruised, and buried. On Saturday, she could do nothing except remember the trauma from Friday and possibly prepare to visit his grave on Sunday. John tells us it’s still dark outside when Mary makes her way to the tomb where she saw Jesus’ battered body buried. Can you see her stumbling and fumbling through the darkness? It’s dark outside. It’s early Sunday morning, before dawn. It’s dark inside. She’s all alone. She’s numb from the pain and the palpable hatred she witnessed. And she’s desperately making her way to Jesus. On Friday she saw them seal the tomb. On Sunday the stone has been rolled away. She can’t believe her eyes. So, she rushes to tell Peter and John. They follow her back to the tomb and discover it’s empty. They go home. Again, Mary is alone standing outside Jesus’ borrowed tomb weeping. In his fareyvell discourse Jesus predicted the men would scatter-each to his own home. That’s why our focal text begins ‘‘But, Mar)P When the men scattered from our Savior, Mary went seeking Him. After Peter and John saw the empty tomb, they left. Mary lingered. There was a pull on her spirit to stay. She couldn’t walk away.

    ii’ Mariah Carey has a song about what I believe Mary must have been feeling: ‘Even though I try, I can’t let go. Do you even realize the sorrow I have inside? Do you know the way it feels when all you have just dies?’ Mary was captivated by the revelation of the empty tomb. So, she stayed there when the others scattered. She lingered when Peter and John left. This is how she ends up being there alone for a personal and private encounter with Jesus. Mary wait­ ed on the Lord. We have to wait on the Lord if we want a personal encounter with Him. We can’t just say our prayers and walk away. We have to sit in silence and let Him speak to us. Prayer is hvo-y^ay communication. It’s speaking and listening. It’s having a little talk mth Jesus not to Jesus. The King James Version tells us that Mary was ‘‘^veeping” as she stood there. That’s a more accurate description. Crying can sometimes be low key. A tear may well up in your eye that you can blink away. A stubborn tear may roll down your cheek, but it’s one you can wipe away. Crying isn’t always intense. But, weeping…

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    weeping is far more forceful than crying. Weeping involves sobbing, heaving, snotting , and passionate crying. Mary is weeping because she’s distraught. She had re­ cently witnessed the crucifixion. And now Jesus’ body is nowhere to be found! Mary is weeping. She’s sobbing. She’s heaving. She’s snotting. Her tears are flowing like a fountain. If Mary had simply been crying, she would have been all cried out by the time she talks with Jesus in verse 15. But the text tells us she’s weep­ ing in verse 11. The angels ask her why she’s weeping in verse 13. And by the time Jesus speaks to her in verse 15, she’s still weeping. I tell you, Mary is distraught. She came looking for a dead body, so, she doesn’t recognize the risen Savior. When she’s unable to find what she came looking for, she turns around; she sees Jesus standing there, but she doesn’t realize He’s Jesus. Could it be that her tears have distorted her vision? Or is she so depressed that she has no discernment? Un­ derstandably, her heart is heavy. Her weeping isn’t the problem. There’s nothing wrong with grief. Expectation is what prevents Mary Magdalene from recognizing Jesus. She came to the garden alone looking for a dead body. She wasn’t expecting to encounter a living Jesus. So, she sees what she believes. She thinks she’s talking to the gardener. That’s what’s wrong with some of us -we don’t wake up in the morning ex­ pecting a miracle. So, we miss out on the presence and the power of the Lord in our lives. Too many times-just like Mary Magdalene-we see w^hat we believe. We make up our minds about a situation, or a person, and that’s all we see. We miss the truth that’s right there in front of us because our suppositions are leading and guiding us. We would do well to trust in the Lord with all of our hearts and lean not to our own understanding. Things would go better for us if we were to acknowledge God and allow the Lord to direct our path. Proverbs 3:5 and 6 is a popular passage. Verse 7 cautions us to “¿e not wise in [our] own eyes.”‘ We have to stop believing what we see and start trusting what the Lord said. Jesus told His followers that He would rise on the third day, yet Mary isn’t ex­ pecting to see Him alive and well. Let’s not judge her too harshly. She wasn’t expect­ ing to see Him ‘‘despised and rejected.” She didn’t fully understand that He “became flesh and dwelt among us” to be “wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities.” She couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw Him being taken from prison to judgment on Thursday night. She was in shock when she saw Him struggling to carry His cross up a hill called Golgotha. She never imagined He would be led to a place outside the city where criminals were crucified. She kept expecting a miracle of intervention as the nails were driven through His hands and the nails were driven through His feet. I shudder to think about what Mary Magdalene was feeling when she finally realized that

    Jesus, the One who had walked on the water; Jesus, the One who fed 5,000 with 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread; Jesus, the One who gave sight to the blind;

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    Jesus, the One who raised Lazarus from the dead; and Jesus, the One who was celebrated the previous Sunday, the day we call Palm Sunday,

    was allowing Himself to be brought as a sheep to the slaughter right before her eyes. Mary’s hopes and dreams were snuffed out when she and the women who sat on a hill not far away from the tomb saw Isaiah’s prophecy fulfilled: “He poured out his soul unto death. He yvas numbered with the transgressors. He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. How could she possibly expect a mir­ acle on Sunday morning? When Jesus speaks to Mary Magdalene, He asks the strangest questions. I love the language in the King James Version: ‘‘UTzy yveepest thou? Whom seekest thou? ” Jesus isn’t asking Mary these questions for His information. He’s hoping to give her revelation to remind her that He is risen from the deadjust as He said. Jesus is speaking to Mary, but she doesn’t recognize His voice. She’s not expecting the Lord to speak to her anymore. So, she doesn’t hear Him when He does. How many times might you and I have missed the answers to our prayers be­ cause they didn’t come when, where, or how we were expecting them? Don’t ever give up hope. Today’s text teaches us it’s never too late for Jesus! In Mary’s mind, Jesus is the gardener, the one who takes care of the grounds at the cemetery. So she commands him: “Ifyou have moved Jesus’ body, tell me where you put Him. And, I will go get Him myself. ” Isn’t it funny that we conduct ourselves differently with people based on who we think they are? I was talking with one of my preacher friends the other evening, and she was telling me that when she meets people in certain settings, they’re very real with her. They let it all hang out. Then when they find out she’s a preacher, they want to pull it all back in. They start saying, “God is good. I used to go to church f stuff like that. So, it is with Mary. Supposing Jesus to be the gardener, she commands him. Whenever we make decisions based solely upon suppositions, we end up with regrets. Consider the degree of difficulty if Mary ended up having to move a dead body by herself. What situations have you allowed your feelings to get you into? In the past, my temper has taken me farther than I intended to go a time or two. Impulse buying has left me with more bills than I’ve had money. Where are your feelings taking you these days? Jesus knows Mary. He knows her sight is clouded by her suppositions. He knows she’s talking crazy and not thinking straight. It’s time to bring her back to reality. It’s time for her to stop seeing what she believes. Instead, she needs to believe Who she is seeing and hearing. Aren’t you glad the Lord brings us back? He reveals truth to us. In spite of what we think or how we feel, the truth is eventually revealed.

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    Mary recognizes Jesus yvhen He calls her by name. Was it like that for you? I know it was for me. I was raised in the church. I knew the stories in the Bible, but I didn’t believe them. They weren’t real for me, not until the Lord called me by my name, not until I encountered Christ for myself, not until I lingered in the presence of the Lord. As long as I was going to church because my mother made me, Jesus wasn’t quite real to me. I didn’t recognize Him until life caused me to weep and cry out to the Lord in prayer. Then He came and talked with me. Jesus calls Marys name! Immediately, she recognizes Him. She turns to Him and calls Him ‘‘TeacherThat’s who Jesus is…isn’t He? He’s the One who teaches us all truth. The cure for all of our individual blindness is in the Word of God. When we don’t know what to do, Jesus does. Whatever problem you’re trying to solve, take it to the Lord in prayer, ^you linger there. He will speak with you. He will call you by name and answer your prayer. Can I try to make it plain for you? I already told you about the temper I used to let have me. One day, some years ago, something happened at work. I had already made up my mind about the person that offended me and the place where I worked. I didn’t feel appreciated or valued. So, when the offense occurred, I was ready to quit. My emotions said “You don’t have to take this. Smack her in the face and leave this placed Little did I know… it was a set-up. It turned out that the one who offended me was envious of me. She knew I was getting a promotion. I didn’t. Sometimes the enemy can see our potential before we can. Thank God I had recently heard my pastor preach about taking a prayer break before making decisions. I really couldn’t afford to quit, so I prayed. The Lord said, “You need not fight this battle. Stand still and hold your peace.” It was a little late for me to hold my peace. While I didn’t smack the woman with my hand, I had already given her quite a tongue lashing. Praise be to God, I didn’t say or do anything else to aggravate the situation. The next day I was called into my boss’s office. I was scared. I expected to be reprimanded for my behavior the day before. Instead, I walked out as a Vice President with a significant pay raise and a larger office. My emotions didn’t quite get the best of me. They took me farther than I should have gone the day before, but God’s grace wiped my slate clean! Like Mary, I was first misguided by my emotions. Then the Lord brought me back and elevated me! In today’s text, Mary moves from seeing Jesus and not being able to identify Him to hearing Jesus and not being able to discern His voice. She doesn’t know who Jesus is until He calls her by name. In her excitement, she grabs Him and clings to Him. As distraught as she was when she thought He was dead, she is now that overjoyed be­ cause He lives! At first, Mary Magdalene didn’t kno^v who Jesus was. Now, she does! And, she has no desire to leave His side. But she and Jesus still have work to do. The shift in the narrative is exciting! Once Mary understands that Jesus is risen, the dialogue is no longer about His dead body. Her dark night of the soul is over. Though it was dark outside as she stumbled to the tomb, day is now dawning. The

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    grey clouds in Mary’s world are departing. The s-u-n is rising as she speaks with the S-O-N of God! Birds begin to chirp as she realizes she’s in conversation with the Risen Savior! Jesus instructs Mary Magdalene to preach the gospel. He commissions her to tell the twelve men who walked and talked and ministered with Him about His as­ cension: “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘1 am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Jesus makes Mary the apostle to the apostles! Standing where we stand on the other side of Resurrection Sunday morning, we can look back and declare that dark and dreary day for Mary Magdalene was a “Good Friday” We can celebrate the fact that God raised Jesus from the dead early on Sunday morning! We can shout hallelujah because Mary discovered an empty tomb! We can declare with the angels that Christ is Risen! Just as Mary did, we can linger in the presence of the Lord until we see what He said has come to pass, hear Him call us by our names, and know the plans He has for us! There’s an assignment with your name on it. You’ll discover what it is if you dare to press your way into the presence of the Lord and linger there until you see it, until you hear it, until you know it for yourself!

  • Wounded Souldiers: What a therapist wants the preacher to know

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    Wounded Souldiers: What a therapist wants the

    preacher to know

    By Adrienne Mixon, MSc, ALC, NCC

    Birmingham, Alabama

    He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.

    Psalm 147:3 (ESV)

    Helping professionals are real heroes … period! Granted, much attention was paid to doctors and nurses who risked their immune system during the pandemic, but what about the helpers who sustained our spiritual needs? Who was there performing magic tricks to engineer livestream services off the cuff? Who were the ones praying over the phone with members in place of hospital visits? Who continued preaching the good news while getting bad news that their loved ones died of COVID-19? While the world was hyper-focused on local business reopening, pastors were also on the front lines of an intense, unpredictable battle, taking blows of depression, anxiety, grief, and—well. I’m sure you could add to this list, too. And speaking of battles, I can’t help but see a correlation between soldiers and spiritual leaders. In both positions, each person is drafted, dresses for battle, develops relationships in the trenches, and reports to a higher authority. I imagine men and women who en­ list are apprehensive about their orders yet remain faithful to the call. Yes, that call always comes to suit up, remember your combat training, and march off to war. For this reason and the nature of your calling, I will be referring to spiritual leaders as Wounded Sow/diers. At first glance, you may have assumed I misspelled “soldier,’ 99

    but I literally put “u” in it—as in “you,” the pastor, and how you tend to the souls of your congregations! Therefore, it is my prayer to offer simple tips and/or strategies from a mental health perspective, to help spiritual leaders with the following: protect yourself at all times, avoid burnout, and develop new ways to assist those in crisis.

    Wounded Souldiers What image comes to mind when you hear the word “wounded”? If you said someone who has been injured or harmed, then we’re off to a good start. Maybe you visualize a soldier based on a certain branch in the military, a specific uniform, unique skills, and how each troop works together for a common goal. Based on the descriptions given, I could stop writing as that both describes your role as clergy and allows you to reflect on such a solemn responsibility. As you continue reading, the term “Wounded Souldier” will be applied to pastors or clergy fighting the good fight, who may have overlooked the importance of their own mental, emotional, and spiritual triage and have failed to dress their own wounds before returning to battle. No, I’m not a pastor nor have I been in the military, but I am married to a well-spo-

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    ken Baptist preacher and have learned the art of telling a good story to illustrate a powerful message—so let’s begin! My father, Robert Cunningham, was drafted by the United States Army shortly after marrying my mother. He served two tours in the Vietnam War, taking shifts working burial duty and operating artillery. Earning a bronze star and enduring a life-altering experience, he managed to return home in his right mind. During my childhood, my father shared his photo albums with me, accompanied by vivid stories of how he survived, keeping his sanity by playing his guitar in his free time. To my young eyes, I did not notice many battle scars, giving me the idea that my history books depicted Vietnam all wrong. My dad worked as a letter carrier for thirty-two years, raised a family, and made others smile with his music. He was living proof that not all veterans are unable to reconnect with society. The last few years of his life were spent in and out of hospitals due to a long list of health issues, including a weak heart, prostate cancer, kidney failure, and thyroid problems. Initially, I assumed genetics were to blame and that we should pay more attention to our eating habits. After speaking with several doctors, we found they all agreed on the origin of his conditions: Agent Orange. If you are unfamiliar with it. Agent Orange was a pesticide used as a tactic against the enemy to destroy Vietnam’s vegetation (Cleveland Clinic, 2023). It is estimated that close to three million people were exposed to Agent Orange. Not injected. Not smoked. Exposed.

    Protect Yourself at All Times Pastors, please take the following words to heart: Protect yourself at all times. Because you are open to your member’s lives, your community, spiritual wickedness, and even the criticism of the world, you are vulnerable to a host of harmful diseases on every level. For my father. Agent Orange attacked his health in later years; for pastors, what hurts you may not take years to surface. As a counselor, I hope to make you aware of a different aspect of vulnerability: the silent battle in your mind. I like to refer to this with yet another military term: “flying under the radar.” This phrase originated during World War II, where fighter pilots noticed the enemy attempting to fly at a lower altitude to avoid radar detection, but leaving them vulnerable to an all-out attack (Imperial War Museums, 2023)! Are you aware of the negative words you rehearse in your mind? How often are you triggered by someone else’s trauma? How often do you consider leaving your post? Depression, burnout, financial strain, transitions, shifts in how we gather after the pandemic, death, divorce, balancing the multi-vocational ministry, and temptation—all these and more might be actively flying under the radar at a lower frequency in your head. Thank God there is a way forward, but you may not like what it requires: Seek professional counseling. What does the therapist want pastors to know? Open up and talk about how being a pastor, or life in general, can at times feel unbearable. All the years of seminary or professional training can never prepare you for the wear and

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    tear on your soul. And no one else knows better than you the kinds of injuries pastors and clergy sustain. Recently, I read an article in Psychology Today (June 2023) where they inter­ viewed heavyweight boxer Deontay Wilder. A famous boxer, Wilder revealed how fighters struggle with protecting their mental health, and he shared his own personal bouts with depression. What got my attention was when Wilder said, “A lot of boxers don’t want to reveal what’s going on with them … I think a lot of fighters should get checked out” (p. 10). If a boxer who takes punches for a living is encouraging others to care for the wounds “flying under the radar,” then maybe it’s time for change. Before marching off to fight, soldiers take inventory of what’s in their backpack. A compass, first-aid kit, water, or a flashlight are all essential for daily survival. Each item you carry holds weight, and over time your body will notice, which means car­ rying anything extra can slow you down. Talking about what you carry as a pastor is another way to unpack what is unnecessary, making it easier to maintain a posture for pressing forward. Wounded Souldiers, if you are faced with the struggle of finding a reputable ther­ apist or a lack of funds for session fees, getting together with other pastors may be just as effective. I am grateful to God for a group called The Ministry Collaborative (formerly the Macedonian Ministry). In 2012, my husband, Adam, was invited to become part of a three-year cohort, where pastors and clergy from various denom­ inations met for fellowship and a sponsored pilgrimage to the Holy Land. From his experience alone, I witnessed his strength slowly return after years of feeling isolat­ ed, burnt out, and frustrated. Adam had the opportunity to meet other clergy from all over and exchange stories and experiences on how to stay focused, encouraged, and empowered by God’s word. Now, he serves on the board as Content Curator, men­ toring other spiritual leaders who also bear the same wounds. Protect yourself at all times, souldiers—and that’s an order!

    Avoiding Burnout Givers attract takers. Spiritual leaders attract people needing healing, direction, and answers to their unique sets of problems. If one is not careful, the pastor may almost be mistaken for one’s personal savior. This may include, but is not limited to, drawing off your strength, incessant phone calls (at the worst times, I might add), or unreasonably high expectations for the pastor to bail them out from yet another emergency. Because of your disposition and caring heart, there is a part of you that wants to rush in, take the reins, cue the hero(ine) music, patch up their wounds, and still make it home in time to prepare a sermon. Friends, this is a dangerous position and here’s why. Remember the risk of being vulnerable? A Wounded Souldier who hasn’t been through triage is vulnerable to the temptation of appealing to their own ego, taking credit for the good that ultimately comes from God. Instead of appealing to the desire to take over during a time of distress, let it become a teachable moment.

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    This next part may sound odd, but God led me to encourage you to lean on the fundamentals of basic math. When presented with another’s issues, pastors and clergy are often expected to “”solve for x” while most people only share and show you a fraction of the real problem. Add to this, their judgment is clouded by pain and their level of spiritual maturity. Take away the idea they are ready to reveal how they can be agents of change in the process. Keep your focus when listening to the volume of problems, to discern if someone is using an angle to manipulate your authority. In these types of situations, the best strategy may be to find the common denominator. This strategy begins with an order of operations. This requires discernment and reli­ ance on the Holy Spirit, and a skillful use of scripture that reminds us where to divide our ability with God’s power. By following the order of operations, you multiply the opportunities for others to experience the light of God’s love in dark places. As the teacher, you ultimately demonstrate that factoring God in always equals the correct answer. I understand how operating as a helping professional may give a false sense of security. I’ve learned as a counselor that there is one major assumption made by all clients: We have all the answers. It would be so much easier to just tell them where to go and how to make sense of their trauma—wouldn’t it? But, as a Wounded Souldier on the way to being restored, take comfort in knowing that our Commanding Officer is still responsible for His troops! I’m reminded of the story in Acts 3 where Peter and John encountered a crippled man, begging for alms. Peter’s response was straight and to the point. He offered the man, not what was in his hands, but rather who was in his heart. “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you” Acts 3:6 (NIV). Jesus. Healer. Wonderful Counselor. Refuge. By offering to others, your congregation, or even your family what you possess through personal experiences and in trials—along with the Word of God—God be­ comes their solution to solving for x … not you. In older textbooks, the answers to math problems were in the back of the book. I believe God may sometimes use a problem in our lives just to see if we will open the Book. So, if someone comes to you only seeking an answer, you can guide them through the steps toward the ulti­ mate answer—the solution will always equal trusting God.

    S.P.A.M. At this point, I’ve tried to encourage every Wounded Souldier to protect them­ selves when exposed and warned about the temptation to be a rescue hero. This last tool can be used as a simple checklist when guiding someone through a crisis, and it may possibly shed light on how well a person is processing a situation. It consists of four areas and may help direct some immediate triage. I call it S.P.A.M. S-spiritual. Nothing reveals more about one’s faith than when they’ve been knocked down by adversity. When confronted with offering support, pastors and

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    clergy can be prepared for the spectrum of reactions that may follow by locating their solid ground. Even if you are in a public sector addressing unbelievers, meet­ ing people where they are builds trust. Trust in a relationship allows for both parties to listen as well as be heard. It is also in those spaces where the world experiences Christ’s compassion and love through you. Remember, if they are seeking the truth, they will find God. P-physical. There’s an African proverb that says, “When the heart acts, the body is its slave” (Idlehearts.com, 2023). Think of the physical aspects of trauma as a chain reaction from the heart to brain—^weighing its options to fight, flight, or freeze. In his book The Body Keeps Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk expounds on how the nervous system and our emotions directly impact muscles, adrenaline levels, heart rate, breathing, and intestines, thereby complicating one’s ability to control bodily reactions when emotionally overwhelmed. If the body allows the heart and mind alone to become the master, what follows may be a downward spiral toward isola­ tion or worse, thoughts of suicide. By simply asking a person what story their body is telling them may cause them to pause and acknowledge the physical consequences of stress. Again, here’s another simple opportunity to remind a person to breathe, maintain safe blood sugar levels, to eat or to even drink water. And never underesti­ mate the power of a short walk to gain clarity. A-While the first two letters in the acronym seem basic, the “A” acts as the glue for understanding the individual’s toolbox when handling a crisis. The “A” stands for ability, or the degree to which one can apply coping mechanisms that lead toward healing and resilience. Ability depends on the following criteria but is not limited to: an individual’s education on healthy coping, access to safe spaces, vocabulary for emotions, age, and brain development. If you recall the math analogy, a person’s judgment is often skewed in a crisis, making it more difficult to find the common de­ nominator. The quickest way to measure a person’s ability is to hone their reactions the day after an event occurs. Why wait a day? Dr. Bessel van der Kolk found that the immediate human reaction to threat is always to self-protect, forcing us to stay in the fight, flight, or freeze response. However, when the nervous calms down, it is easier to observe how any coping skills may be applied as reality sets in. M-mental. This part is slightly different from ability in that the mental portion focuses less on cognition and more on emotional memories. The American Psycho­ logical Association (2023) confirmed that both subconscious and conscious mem­ ories are stored in the amygdala. Once an event occurs, we log a specific emotion, further building a foundation for future responses to similar events. If the building blocks warrant a reason to protect, the brain trains that person to go in survival mode (Ex: childhood abuse). The same is true for a foundation built on safety and love. Here is a quick rule of thumb: if someone’s initial reaction to a stimulus is hyster­ ical in nature, you can likely assume there’s a historical reason. As a pastor, you may never know exactly what your members have lived through, but based on their

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    responses, you will have a better chance of providing some trauma-informed care while guiding them to resilience and hope. Wounded Souldiers, investing in your health is not selfish, it’s called being a wise steward. I pray that if you haven’t started yet, you will go forward stronger and wiser. Please understand that counseling is NOT a substitute for God’s ability to heal and restore your strength. In fact, God uses other people through prayer, fellowship, and talk therapy to aid in the renewal process. Allow other trained professionals to dress the wounds that are keeping you from marching forward. What does the therapist want the pastors to know? 1) Protect yourself at all times—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually because you’re on the front lines. 2) Avoid burnout by continuing to trust God’s ability to care for His children, while you act as a guide. 3) Check your S.P.A.M. folder. It’s a simple tool God gave me to share to helping professionals that doesn’t require a degree in psychology. For those of you who qualify as restored souldiers, you are in a wonderful position to help someone else! Start a mentoring group for spiritual leaders. Plan a fundraiser to offer scholar­ ships to offer pastors a sabbatical. Demonstrate your concern for other souldiers by gathering names for a prayer list for pastors suffering from burnout. And for the rest of you Wounded Souldiers, keep marching and know when to get some help. You’re at your best when your wounds are dressed … first. It is an honor to share my father’s story as a Wounded Soldier who sacrificed his life for this country. It is a privilege to tell of my husband’s journey, who also served in the Army and has been a multi-vocational pastor for twenty-two years. Finally, I am humbled to encourage every pastor or clergy person, fighting the good fight, leading their congregations onward in battle. From the heart of a pastor’s wife and mental health counselor, pastors … I salute you!

    He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. Psalm 147:3 (ESV)

  • Surprise: Genesis 18:1-15

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    Surprise

    Genesis 18:1-15

    Sarah Johnson

    The New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C.

    It was the longest-running World Series drought in Major League baseball. It all started with a man named William Sianis and his goat Murphey. William, a native Chicagoan, and owner of Billy Goat’s Tavern, had two tickets to the Chicago Cubs baseball game on the afternoon of October 6, 1945. It was game four of the World Series, and the Cubs were leading the Detroit Tigers 2 games to 1. The Cubs only needed to win two of the next four games played at Wrigley Field to take the Cham­ pionship. William, a die-hard Cubs fan, hoping to bring his team some good luck at the ballpark that day, took his pet goat and tavern mascot, Murphy, with him and headed to the game. But when he and Murphy arrived at Wrigley Field, an usher at the park’s entrance informed him that no animals were allowed inside, and he would have to either leave Murphy outside or give up his tickets. Frustrated, William appealed his case to Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley who responded,

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    and a sign around the goat’s neck reading “All is forgiven. Let me lead the Cubs to the pennant.’’ But the goat was again denied entrance by the park’s ushers, and the Cubs saw their tentative first-place lead wither away to another unsuccessful season. In the nineteen nineties and early two-thousands, amid new Cubs’ ownership and chants from the crowd at a 1994 game, “Let the Goat in!” the goat was invited to the field for opening day games only to be tragically left behind in postseason travel, a mistake that correlated with more losing seasons. When I arrived in Chicago in the fall of 2008, the Cubs had not won a World Se­ ries Championship in one hundred years. That meant one hundred seasons of selling tickets, seeding the field, adding new paint along the first baseline, restocking the hot dog buns, filling the hand-cranked onion stations, taking the field, and not a single championship. It had been so long since the Cubs had won that there was no longer anyone alive who could remember it. I quickly learned that locals had resorted to calling them the city’s “lovable losers,” and the unofficial annual motto of every Cubs fan was “wait until next year.” Much to my confusion and respect. Cubs fans were steadfastly loyal, showing up every April at Wrigley Field in their coats and gloves in the forty-degree spring weather, with an icy wind blowing across the outfield from Lake Michigan, to watch another season. But the team was a joke. A laughingstock. One Sunday during wor­ ship, a colleague of mine leaned over in the chancel as the congregation sang our opening hymn, “Our God our Help in Ages Past,” and said, “You know which verse this is, don’t you?” We were preparing to sing verse five, and looking down at my hymnal, I scanned the page for some deep theological meaning in the text but found nothing. Seeing my confusion, he leaned over again and whispered, “Verse five. It’s the Chicago Cubs verse.” And sure enough, there it was, truth so eternal that it was even embedded in the Presbyterian Glory to God Hymnal,

    Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly, forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day.

    Abraham and Sarah must have felt that way-the butt of everyone’s joke, a laugh­ ingstock, the town’s “loveable losers” who were always “waiting until next year.” Once upon a time, a long time ago, the voice of God came to them and called them to go on a new adventure, to start a new life in a new place rich with opportunities for life and ministry and growth if only they would dare to follow. And they did. Abra­ ham and Sarah responded with faith and hope, risking everything to answer God’s call. “I will make you parents of great nations; I will bless you,” God told them. The trouble was that three decades had passed, and nothing had happened. Abraham and Sarah, “getting on in years,” at the youthful age of seventy-five, were now-and there isn’t a delicate way to say this-old. I once heard a pastoral colleague joke, “Abraham

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    and Sarah are so old that when they were bom, the dead sea was just getting sick.” God’s promise to them was so long ago that barely anyone alive could remember it. Added to the pain of this seemingly impossible dream of days gone by with life fading into the rearview mirror, we also learn that Sarah and Abraham have no children. The writer of Genesis tells us that Sarah is “barren.” It is hard not to say that word without cringing a little; it is something of a problematic word that sounds insensitive to our modem ears, and particularly so in our culture where women are deemed broken or incomplete if we cannot, or choose not, to have spouses or chil­ dren. Not to mention, the pain of not being able to conceive a child is a grief that we don’t speak about openly or often enough, leaving many couples to carry this terrible grief silently or alone. But what is important to note here and elsewhere in scripture is that in the Bible, barrenness is not so much a judgment as it is a metaphor. Barrenness in scripture conveys emptiness, hopelessness, and resignation. This means that many things can be barren. As Rev. Bob Henderson notes in a sermon on this text, “Land can be barren, an era can be barren, a nation can be barren, a man can be barren. Barrenness indicates the end of creativity, passion, productivity, and future hope. And so, in that way, both Sarah and Abraham are barren in this story.’’^ Once filled with a sense of hope and the promises of God, here they are now all these years later with no children, no future to speak of, devastated by the cruelly of grief and false promises, and without hope. How foolish they must have felt to themselves and their neighbors, embarrassed by their youthful optimism, tmsting God all that time ago. But one day, this decades-long barrenness comes to a head as Abraham sits in the shade outside of their tent and sees three strangers approaching on the hori­ zon. Quickly leaping into action to do what his culture required, Abraham offers the strangers hospitality, food, and drink, only to discover these are not ordinary strangers but messengers from God. Thus, they already know Abraham and Sarah’s names. “Where is Sarah?” they ask. And Abraham dutifully points inside. Knowing that she is close by and can overhear them, the strangers stand in front of Abraham and repeat the long-ago promise of God: “I will return to you, and when I do, Sarah will have a son.” I don’t know how closely you followed along with the scripture, but this is hi­ larious, completely laughable. Sarah and Abraham are now ninety and one hundred years old, respectively. Telling them that they will now have a baby is as much of a joke as if someone sat down in their seats at Wrigley Field on the first day in April and proclaimed “I know for certain that this year the Chicago Cubs will win the World Series.” And so, Sarah does what I imagine almost all of us would do. She laughs. She laughs with a kind of hard-earned cynicism that quietly covers over deeper grief, slapping her knee with her ears hunched up in her shoulders, belly shaking, and tears streaming into the crevasse of her now worn and weathered skin. She can hardly contain herself while considering building a nursery wing addition to the retirement home.

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    And when she is finally all out of breath and laughter and tears, there is a delight­ ful little exchange as the messengers of the Lord ask Abraham and Sarah “Why did Sarah laugh?” Sarah responds, “I didn’t laugh. 99 at.’Oh yes, you did!” they reply. ‘‘No,

    I didn’t,” Sarah counters. “Yes, you did!” And then, the messengers ask the question that lingers at the very heart of this story and the one that I think almost all of us ask deep down in places we don’t like to talk about very much: Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? Twentieth-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr famously wrote, “Humor is, in fact, a prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer,”^ which, in this case, turns out to be true because fast forward, and sure enough, Sarah conceives and bears a son whom Abraham and Sarah name Isaac, which in Hebrew means laughter. And when Isaac is bom, Sarah laughs again as she holds her son in her wrinkled arms, but this laughter is different. This time, Sarah’s laughter is not bom out of pain but emerges from God’s surprising and unlikely grace. “God,” she says, “has brought laughter to me.” In his commentary on the book of Genesis, distinguished Old Testament scholar Walter Bmeggemann says that this story is foundational to the roots of our faith because, ultimately, it is a story about the very character of God.^ God, who is not known as an abstraction or a stmctured set of beliefs or a remote power somewhere far up in the clouds creating the world and then leaving us to our own devices, but God, who is a tmsted presence, God as active love. A God who showed up in the bar­ ren lives of two people who are resigned to their closed future and interrupted their circumstances with the kind of grace that moves them from hopelessness to hope, from resignation to possibility, from barrenness to abundance, and from death to life. And when God does, Abraham and Sarah find great humor and joy in God’s ability to break into their lives with something completely surprising and new. Although, I am not sure we are tempted to see it that way in every circum­ stance. Tmth be told, sometimes life’s surprises aren’t welcome. I love something that distinguished preacher Edmond Steimle once said on the subject. “At my age,” he quipped, “the promise that God’s mercies are new every morning is, at best, a mixed blessing. I have come to a point in my life when I don’t want anything new in the morning. I want my slippers right beneath my bed where I left them the night before. I want my orange juice and bran flakes for breakfast as normal. At my age, I can do without a lot of newness.”^ If you are like me, perhaps you can think of times when you can appreciate how Steimle feels, especially in seasons where we are essentially satisfied and settled with our lot, sometimes even inviting a sense of control—however false—over our circumstances. God’s surprising grace can sound more like a threat than a promise in those moments. But when life is hard and our circumstances are difficult, this God who interrupts our lives and the world is very good news indeed. It is a fundamental promise of our faith, witnessed repeatedly throughout scripture: God who will make a way where

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    there is no way. God who will make a way through the sea, through the diagnosis, through the divorce, through the grief, through the job loss, through the addiction, and through the pain. And this is not about trusting in a prosperity Gospel where God shows up like Santa Claus to fix it all or give us exactly what we want exactly when we want it. But it is about a God who can be trusted to be faithful and promises to show up and be with us no matter the depth of pain or the hopelessness of our cir­ cumstances, and, not to give us what we want but to provide us with all the surprising grace we need, reminding us that the future is always open with God. Shortly after midnight on the evening of November 3, 2016, with a slim onerun lead, two strikes, two outs, and a man on base in the bottom of the tenth inning, Chicago Cubs closing pitcher Mike Montgomery struck out Cleveland Indians hitter Michael Martinez, breaking a one hundred and eight-year losing streak. The once ‘‘lovable losers” of the near northside, the Chicago Cubs, had won the World Series. Sadly, I no longer lived there but watched along with the world. There was complete bedlam in the city as Chicagoans of all ages poured into the streets from inside the bars and out from behind their television sets. People were cheering and dancing and crying and, yes, laughing. But this time, their laughter was different. It was no longer the cynical laughter of a losing team and countless losing seasons, but the laughter of unexpected, surprising joy. And the image they chose for the side of their cham­ pionship ring? A goat. Truth be told, I don’t think God’s love intercedes in the outcome of baseball games-even for the Cubs. But I believe God’s love intercedes in your life and mine. I believe in a God of beautiful surprises who makes a way where there is no way, a God who, precisely when we are resigned and without hope, breaks into our lives with new life and new possibilities, a God so surprising that death itself becomes an occasion for new life, a God of an empty tomb and a risen Lord, a God for whom nothing is too wonderful.

    Notes 1 “The Billy Goat Curse—the World-Famous Billy Goat Tavern,” 2016, https://www.billygoattavem. com/legend/curse/. 2 Bob Henderson, “Covenant Presbyterian Church, Charlotte, NC, Worship Archive,”n.d. www. covenantpresby.org. 3 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Humor and Faith,” in The Esssential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses, ed. Robert MacAfee Brown (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1987), 4960 . 4 Walter Brueggemann, “The Laughter of Sarah,” in Genesis (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press), 157-162. 5 Thomas Long, “Crowning Old and Wise on Easter,” Journal for Preachers, Easter 2001.

  • Preaching Graveside

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    Page 3

    Preaching Graveside

    Jennifer L. Lord

    Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Austin, Texas

    I

    Dear Preacher: I understand some of you approach this coming Easter Sunday with trepidation. This may not only be because some of you find Easter to be the most difficult preach­ ing day of any year. Nor is it because Easter Sunday falls earlier in 2023, shortening the time between packing up Christmastide themes and readying for Lent and Holy Week. Rather some of you are already apprehensive about preaching Easter Sunday because we are not back to normal. And we are not sure that we will ever be back to normal.^ We have participated in these discussions of normalcy. During the severest stretch of time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were counseled on many fronts that we must adapt to a new normal: more pandemics on the horizon, derailed supply chains, economies unable to right themselves, and that all our losses and all our griefs would change us forever. Some of us had never been through times quite as trying as those intense pandemic months (that stretched to years), and we were dis­ covering that as individuals, we would never be the same. We coped differently with these stressors and traumas. Then came the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, galvanizing millions. Many of us whites became aware, as if for a first time, that BIPOC identified-persons live with the constant simmering threat of violence that erupts (at the most benign and mundane of daily activities like changing driving lanes) because of racially mo­ tivated violence against them. The names we read and heard like those of Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, and Philando Castile now cease being categorized as iso­ lated deaths but are revealed to be the violent warp and weft of the whole racially woven cloth of our nation.^ The vast and deep political wound of the nation finally gaped open, erupting with vitriolic speech and actions poured as into the wound like salt. Armed persons in brash and freakish dress assembled, and so many of these rioters, adapting tactical ‘‘stack” formation, stormed the capital building on January 6, 2021. We must add to this the ever-lengthening list of mass shootings: in a grocery store, a movie theatre, and elementary schools. Mourning the death of one is too many, but the death of the littlest ones…. The new normal includes these collective traumas and more. This remembering is what those of us in ministry touch on again and again, naming these truths for our­ selves for purposes of pastoral care and as a reality check. Is it all true? Have we truly

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    had to endure all this? Yes, the pandemic fractured local, national, and international governance. Simmering anger and fear spilled out in general public incivility and on social media. Heightened anxiety and desperation make for wakeful nights and increased crime as we gazed at new wars that continue old wars, identifiable nuclear threats, schisms in churches, a volatile marketplace, increased costs of living, and threaded through it all, the vitriol and brutality of racism. As I write, 2022 draws to its close, and more than ever these recent years feel like a bad dream, a nightmare, another twelve months of terrors to keep at bay. More than ever pastors are working in triage manner, attending to the most dire situations without time to attend to all the rest. As a result, pastors focus on what needs to happen at a local level.^ Mantra-like, we say to one another the poetry of William Yeats:

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.^

    The centre cannot hold. The centre is not holding.

    II

    In the midst of the pandemic, the word liminality found prominence. ‘‘Some are using the word liminal to describe our time: the unrest, the instability, the very blurring of much that seemed normal for commerce and life.”^ Liminal captured the sense of being in the midst of great flux without a way forward. “Liminality, used this way, focuses on describing the ‘betwixt and between’ as not normal… as a time of chaos.The word named our reality: the center was not holding; everything was unstable. But liminal means more than chaos. Originally it described a place and time of transformation that involved both an undoing of what came before and an intentional re-forming toward something new. The ethnographer Arnold van Gennup gave the world this word, and he meant it to describe the middle of three stages in a rite of

    7 passage.

    The liminal state, in its classical anthropological usage as referring to life-cri­ sis ritual passages, for example from boyhood to manhood, is always clearly defined both temporally and spatially: there is a way into liminality and a way out of it. Members of the society are themselves aware of the liminal state: they know that they will leave it sooner or later, and they have masters of ceremony to guide them through the rituals.^

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    During the pandemic, some people found affinity with the concept of liminality because it captured the pandemic sense of being adrift, of unending unknowing, and world-weariness {ennui). According to Bjorn Thomassen,

    Compared to liminality in ritual passages, two evident differences appear when the concept is applied to large-scale situations of wholesale collapse: (1) the future is inherently unknown (as opposed to the initiand whose personal limin­ ality is still framed by the continued existence of his home society, awaiting his re-integration); and (2) there are no real masters of ceremony, since nobody has gone through the liminal period before.^

    These comments offer critical insights for the church and our leadership: the pandemic and the societal traumas we must navigate (which are chronic) are instanc­ es of liminality-as-inherant unknowing^^ The #PandemicP as taring report refers to the work of educational theorist Deborah Kerdeman, who speaks of pastors and lay leaders being

    Ill

    How, then, to preach this year for Easter Sunday? Given all the traumas, the expe­ riences of inherent instability, yvhat should be preached this year for Easter Sunday? Of course preachers reading this essay represent distinctive ecclesial commitments

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    and live out a variety of preaching traditions. That said, one image repeatedly comes to mind when I think about preaching on Easter Sunday in such upended times. What I see in my mind’s eye is the preacher, the minister, standing graveside and leading that final part of a funeral service, proclaiming resurrection. I am invoking a pastoral memory. In my mind’s eye, I see myself standing at the head of a freshly dug grave, having arrived from the funeral (whether funeral home or church). The body has been processed to the grave. Now we have arrived at the place of burial, the place of committal.’® This is a poignant moment among all the stations of the funeral. Now the cas­ ket is closed, the cemetery grounds’ keepers linger on the outskirts of the circle of mourners waiting to begin their work lowering the casket and filling the space with soil, nestling the deceased into the tomb of the earth. The mourners may add dirt too after the minister casts dirt on the casket at the words

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    they ought to feel glad. It does not pretend like our life of sufferings and struggles are non-existent. It does not erase pain, indignities, violence, or oppression. It ac­ knowledges with Martha at Lazarus’s grave that death ‘‘stinks” and that this death is pervasive, an ever-present rot in the world (John 11:39). My tradition accepts the creation of the world by God as original blessedness— the created natural world and humans dwelling together, all things in harmony. And yet forsaking God and forsaking God’s ways not only defames humans but the nat­ ural order as well. Another way to say this is that God did not create a sacred sphere and a profane sphere, e.g. church versus world, but all was created and called good (Gen. 1). All was sacred. And we profaned it. All was good. And we profaned it. All was harmonious. And we profaned it. All was in balance. And we profaned it. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). I do not mean that our Easter sermons are a litany of the decay of the world and of the life that God has given. I do mean that hearers of the word recognize their reality and are not asked to pretend that their lives are perfect, content, void of difficulties, but instead that the decay of things around us and the tombs of our pains and struggles and sufferings are exactly the tombs addressed by the preacher’s pronouncement of Good News. These things do not have the last word. These things will not have the last word. Christ came among us to restore the world and raise us to life abundant now. Even now the power of resurrection is unleashed in the world, and the Spirit of the Risen Christ is making all things new. Not new things, but all things new. In a pastoral sermon, St. Gregory the Theologian says.

    Yesterday I was crucified with Christ; today I am glorified with Him. Yesterday I died with Him; today I am given life with Him. Yesterday I was buried with Him; today I rise again with Him.. ..Let us make recognition of our own dignity. And let us give honor to Him in whose likeness we are made.^^

    Easter proclamation is standing in the presence of death and decay and proclaim­ ing resurrection. This is the good news that caused followers of Christ in the early centuries to risk persecution and gather together: “Christians meet because of the resurrection of Christ, around the resurrection of Christ.”18 This weekly keeping of the day of resurrection is attested to in scripture and in the practice of early Christians. The followers of Jesus gathered every Sunday to hold fast this good and life-changing news: that Jesus of Nazareth was not dead but risen as he promised, all-powerful in the face of death. Preaching repeatedly reorients us again and again to this reality, to this world-view. Of course there is much to say about this one word, resurrection, lest it be repeated like a cliché. It is not a simple word; it contains, rather, many layers of meaning. Recall the songs and hymns that we sing at Easter and notice how a variety of phrases and images are needed to articulate the cosmic range of good news contained in that one word. We need more than one word or one image to say what resurrection means.

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    In my spouse’s church tradition, an Orthodox church, one particular song sum­ marily announces the news of resurrection: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tomb bestowing life.” This is the wording of their paschal troparion, one of the thematic songs for Pascha/Easter.^^ It succinct­ ly says several things at once: Death is not what God wills for us. Trampling down death by death means that God dies in order to kill off the power of death once and for all. God enters inside the very power of death and so destroys its power. Death in God now becomes a passage to life (Romans 6). God’s life-giving power extends to those in the tombs; we are all caught up in this life-bestowing act of the risen Christ. God is about new life, and this new life is for us all now. The Eastern Church’s paschal troparion speaks directly of death and of the dead. The song does not ignore suffering and death, it does not only speak of joy and tri­ umph, but it pointedly connects these realities. Resurrection always speaks to the tomb-like realities of suffering, of death, of sin because the resurrection is insepara­ bly related to the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. Resurrection cannot mean joy, triumph, and release from suffering as if all sorrow and grief is forgotten or erased. To speak (or sing) of the resurrection of Christ always includes his passion and death as he is raised from death (meaning in relation to it) and is raised in spite of suffering and death. Scripture tells us that his risen form included the very wounds of his suffering and dying. This is to say that the wounds, which visually and tactilely mark suffer­ ing and death, remain present in his resurrected body (John 20:20). The deep and abiding juxtaposition of the one raised from death still bearing the wounds of death confirms that his resurrection continues to hold our woundedness, our sufferings, and our death. It does not pretend they did not happen. In his resurrection Christ is still closer to our sufferings and death than our own breath. There is no place that we can go where he has not been, even suffering and the grave. The crucified-risen One holds the losses and traumas and grief of our lives and, as his body (i.e., the church as the body of Christ), we each hold the wounds of one another and of the world,^^ writes Gail Ramshaw. And in all of this, we trust God to be the one who makes all things new (Rev. 21:5). Dear Preacher: each week you guide us through actions of worship that are mi­ crocosms of our baptismal liminality, turning us from our own tombs of death and decay and turning to who we are as restored beings in Christ for the life of the world. As Gordon Lathrop says, “The wiping away of tears has begun in the resurrection, and that beginning is washed over us in baptism. God’s grace for the world is washed ”22 over us, and we are made a witness of the coming.

    • You lead us in our baptismal growth each week as we confess our sin and accept the truth of the assurance of pardon. • You lead us to renounce the powers of death and decay that fragment,

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    disintegrate, and estrange our life together in God. • You lead us to exercise our baptismal identity as we pray intercessions and act for others and the life of the world. • You lead us to be nourished at the Lord’s table so that we can be bread and cup for the needy world. • You lead us as ones charged to live as salt and light.

    Dear Preaeher: you are our trusted guide as we grow in the likeness and image of Christ. You eontinually show us that weighed down though we are, there is a way forward, which is to trust our true life in the One who is The Way. You boldly proclaim resurrection and new life so that our eyes may focus on that horizon, and we live it here and now. You feed us with this good news each week. You help us see how weekly worship actions are intense liminal moments when we turn from the ways of death and decay in the world and turn to who we are as restored beings in Christ for the life of the world. Your preaching is world making, a counter-proposal to all evidence at hand. Dear Preacher: be of good courage because you are given power to stand graveside, proclaim resurrection, and call us forth from our tombs for the life of the world.

    Notes 1 Eileen Campbell-Reed, “Ministry is taking on shape and form not previously inhabited,” #Pandemic Pastoring: A New Report, https://eileencampbellreed.org/pandemicpastoring-report-download-2022/. 2 https://sayevery.name/say-their-names-list. 3 See #Pandemic Pastoring. 4 William Butler Yeats, “TheSecondComing,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming. 5 Jennifer L. Lord, “Our Baptismal Liminality: The Church’s Betwixt and Between,” Re Shaping the Liturgical Tradition Ecumenical and Reformed, ed. Jonathan Hehn and Martha Moore-Keish (Franklinville, NJ: Order of Saint Luke Publications, 2021), 225. See also Susan Beaumont, Hoy^ to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You Ye Going: Leading in a Liminal Season (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Pub. Group, Inc., 2019). 6 Lord, “Our Baptismal Liminality,” 226. 7 He introduced the concept and coined the word liminality in his 1909 publication Les Rites de Pas­ sage. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage: A Classical Study of Cultural Celebrations (Chicago IL: Chicago University Press, 1960 [1909]). Through his study of indigenous rites he noticed a com­ mon three-fold pattern: rites of separation (the pre-liminal), transitional rites (the liminal), and rites of incorporation (the post-liminal rites). 8 Bjorn Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between (Surrey, UK: Ash­ gate Publishing Ltd., 2014), 210. Liminality is from limen (Lt., threshold). It is easy to see why the word threshold is substituted for liminal; we speak of being on the threshold of a new thing or a new way. A threshold, like a doorway, is transitional space. However we tend to pass through thresholds quickly. In these rites of passage the liminal rites required time and a separate space. 9 Thomassen, 210. 10 This version of a liminal state is pervasive and has been called permanent liminality. Permanent liminality includes the recognition that sometimes liminality is coerced. See “Our Baptismal Liminal­ ity,” 238-242. 11 See #Pandemic Pastoring. 12 Lord, “Our Baptismal Liminality,” 232. 13 Gordon W. Lathrop, The Pastor: A Spirituality (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 117. See

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    Rom. 6:6; Gal. 2:20. 14 See 2 Cor. 3:18; Col. 3:9-10 (NRSV). 15 David Willis, “The Sacraments as Visible Word,” Theology Today 31, no. 4, (January 1981): 455. 16 I am imagining an earth burial rather than burial at sea, for instance. 17 “The Paschal Sermon by St. Gregory the Theologian,” https://www.goarch.org/-/paschal-sermon -of-st-gregory-the-theologian#:~:text=’Let%20us%20give%20all%2C%20offer,put%20to%20 death%20with%20Him. 18 Many are familiar with the saying “Easter is a big Sunday” or “every Sunday is a little Easter.” Lathrop helps us understand the relationship between the weekly and the annual: “What the eighth­ day meeting is to the seven days, the Easter festival is to the year.” Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 39 and 68. 19 See Justo L. González, A Brief History of Sunday (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2017). 20 Pascha is the term many Christians around the world use instead of Easter. Pascha derives from pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover, hearkening to Paul’s words in Romans 6. Using Pascha em­ phasizes Jesus’ passing over from death to life and our own share in that passing. The saving mystery of Christ is our pasch, our passover, our being carried in Christ in his Passover from death to life. 21 See Gail Ramshaw, Treasures Old andNeyv (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002), 77. 22 Gordon W. Lathrop, Central Things: Worship in Word and Sacrament (Minneapolis, MN: Augs­ burg Fortress, 2005), 62.

  • Seek the Welfare of the City

    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.

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    Seek the Welfare of the City

    Psalm 65:1-4; Jeremiah 29:1-7; Luke 19:41-42a

    Dean K. Thompson,

    Pasadena, California

    It’s not always easy being urban. Some folks can’t stomach it. Some folks have neither heart nor gut for it. Some folks just don’t have a love for it. As I’ve traveled and lived in urban centers across the United States, I’ve heard lots of good folks confess these anxious words about the city: “We don’t go downtown much anymore, not if we can help it. We don’t like it downtown; it makes us nervous, makes us feel unsafe. It’s too big a mess. Too many problems downtown.” Well, since Sunday Presbyterian worship should always include the practice of confession, I need to confess to you; I mean, I dearly want to testify to you today that I love it downtown. I love approaching the exquisite skyline of this particular downtown. I love our Art Deco style and decor of the late 1920s and the 1930s here in the heart of our city. I love our sculptures and murals. Indeed, every time I behold our Flat Iron Building, I confess to you that it’s like seeing it for the first time. Today, I want to testify to you that I even love the mess. I personally love what the Social Gospel hymn writer Frank Mason North sensitively called “Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life.”11 want to testify to you today that I am even drawn to the grit of the city. I strangely/compassionately like the grit. Please don’t get me wrong: I’ve had my own share of anxieties about “where cross the crowded ways of life.” I’ve had my own deep urban anxieties. When Re­ becca and I were interns at the East Harlem Protestant Parrish in the summer of 1966, I started experiencing an uneasy inner churning that I had never felt before. Those unique and churning feelings were prompted by having to step over passed-out hu­ man beings as we walked to work every morning at 7:30, from our Parrish railroad flat on 2nd Avenue and 106th Street to the Church of the Resurrection on 101st. My caring Jewish physician chuckled mercifully, after asking me where I had grown up. “Huntington, West Virginia,” I said. “Well, you’re having what we call ‘panic attacks,”’ he said. “And I’ve got just the thing for a seminary student who grew up in West Virginia to be able to make the transition here in East Harlem. I’m giving you some tranquilizers.” Well, I took them diligently and, praise God, they worked, and I’ve never had to look back or waver when it comes to my love for the city. Of course, Rebecca didn’t need tranquilizers; she’s always been stronger. Yet I testify to you today, 50 years later, that both of us have been made stronger in our commitments to “where cross the crowded ways of life” by these remarkably formational words prophesied decades ago by Lord George Macleod, words which served as a clarion call for both the Iona Community in Scotland and the East Harlem Protestant Parish in Manhattan.

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    I simply argue that the Cross be raised again at the center of the market­ place as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a Cathedral between two candles, but on a Cross between two thieves on the town garbage heap; at a crossroads so cosmopol­ itan that they had to write his title in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek…; at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse and soldiers gam­ ble. Because that is where he died and that is what he died about. And that is where church[people] should be and what church[people] should be about.2

    Nowadays, in a similar vein, Rebecca and I are also made stronger in our com­ mitments to “where cross the crowded ways of life,” by these haunting/riveting words by hymn writer Carl P. Daw Jr., which we have used for our Christmas card:

    Friend of the streetwalker, beggar, and child, Lifting and blessing the weak and reviled, Welcoming those the devout turned away: Jesus, we need your example today.

    Take from us prejudice, hatred, and scorn, Fear and suspicion of anyone bom Outside of our fences of money and race: Help us, O God, not to shun, but embrace.

    Open our hearts and our heads and our hands, Let us experience how caring expands Past all the labels and limits we learn: Spirit of mercy, enlarge our concern.

    Three-personed Mystery, multiple One, Joined by diversity never undone: May we more truly your image reveal, Coming together to make your love real.3

    Standing strongly on those moving and insightful theological perspectives about the city, I am therefore compelled, indeed driven, to testify to you today that the greatest ongoing source of strength, vision, and instruction I have ever received about urban existence in “where cross the crowded ways of life” comes from the Bible-God’s word written. Surely the Psalmist loved the city: the city of Zion, Jerusalem, and its holy tem­ ple, that blessed center of sacred space within the city gates, where worshippers were gathered and welcomed, where vows were kept, prayers were lifted up, confessions were offered on bended knee, where guilt was robbed of its power and sins were forgiven, where God’s people were satisfied with goodness and sent forth to serve their Creator and neighbors and to work steadfastly for shalom.4 Yes, the power of a city’s sacred space is great.

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    Jeremiah, the brave, resilient, and sagacious prophet of God, also dearly loved the city. To be sure, my own all-time favorite testimony about the city comes from his Old Testament prophecy, written some 600 years before Jesus wept because of city Jerusalem’s crucifying conditions. Indeed, I confess to you, reverently and ex­ pectantly, this holy day, that Jeremiah 29:7 is a most crucial, perhaps indispens­ able, verse for the people of God gathered here in this sacred space on 40 Church Street, Asheville, North Carolina, day by day, week after week, and year after year in “where cross the crowded ways of life”: “Seek the welfare of the city… and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare (shalom/peace) you will find your welfare.” In a letter brought by emissaries from Judah to Babylon, Jeremiah amazingly prophesies: “Seek the peace and welfare of all cities-even the peace and welfare of Babylon, where Jeremiah’s Judean people are in exile.” It is an unusual prayer of hope for one’s own enemies! In other words, relate to those Babylonian city dwell­ ers that you do not even particularly like. Seek the welfare and peace of those who are different from you. Welcome difference or diversity as a gift from God-a gift of peace and shalom. In their welfare you will find your own. No, “God’s imagination” will not be bound by our “dividing walls of hostility” constructed by our conflicts and prejudices.5 Perhaps you are aware, from your own Sunday School and Faith Development studies, that Dr. Luke refers to the city of Jerusalem no less than 90 times in his Gos­ pel of Luke and in his Acts of the Apostles. In Luke 19, he tells us that Jesus wept or lamented profusely because Jerusalem had chosen to puff itself up with pride rather than to pour itself out with service, that Jerusalem had failed once again to recog­ nize, embrace, embody, and proclaim “the things that make for peace” or welfare. Jerusalem: once again “blind to its own need for repentance and forgiveness of sin;” Jerusalem, choosing violence over shalom. Yes, as one Bible teacher reminds us, Jesus weeps “with a voice of love and profound caring, of vision of what could have been and of grief over its loss….” Such was “the depth of passion present in Jesus,” our Savior, rabbi and friend—passion for the city6 and its precious people. With power and authority, Luke also testifies that the Apostle Paul loved the city. Correction: cities. That’s where the Holy Spirit led Paul with the peacemaking mes­ sage of the risen Christ, whom he had persecuted so unmercifully. According to Luke the physician, Paul’s method was to go to a major urban center and then to move on to another with fervor. Luke tells us that Paul never stayed in one city more than two years. That was his style of discipleship as he feverishly planted city churches wherever he journeyed. Praise God, I’ve walked that expansive ancient mall at Corinth, Greece, where Paul preached and taught for 18 months, seeking the welfare of that city. Mystically, as I walked there 2,000 years after Luke’s New Testament narratives were recorded, I could see Paul walking and talking on that mall. Mystically, I could see Paul also at Philippi, in Macedonia, where Paul preached his first sermon in Europe, where he bap­

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    tized Lydia, where he taught at the city forum, where he was flogged and put in the city slammer. Again, I could mystically imagine seeing Paul as I traversed the port city of Thessalonica, a Greek urban center under Roman rule, a city that praised many deities, where Paul labored diligently with Silvanus and his beloved protégé Timothy. The same was mystically true in the Turkish city of Ephesus, where Paul preached in the great theater there, with its capacity for 24,000 people. Moreover, as we stood in the Areopagus in Athens, I testify that I could feel and imagine Paul there, 2,000 years earlier, teaching and debating with those pluralistic Athenian urbanites “where cross the crowded ways of life”: Paul, in Acts 17, listening pastorally and having a bold dialogue with Jews, Stoics, Epicureans, and agnostics, in a town loaded with idols, the town of Pericles and Plato.7 Someone has rightly called Paul a Christian Socrates, a minister to searchers, some who even mock him. Yet others miraculously believe, including a woman named Damaris and a man named Dionysius the Areopagite . Many other Athenians, through the miraculous power of the Holy Spirit, also come to believe that the spirit of the risen Christ (unbounded and uncontained by time and space) is alive in this world where they are and where they are going! And I testify to you, here in this sacred space on Church Street, that we too feel those same spiritual vibrations in this pluralistic city of Asheville, 2015, in “where cross the crowded ways of life.” Not unlike Paul, Jesus, Jeremiah, and the Psalmist of old, we also love our urban center. Yes, we also live, love, and worship in a pluralistic city of searchers, strangers, secularists, wanderers, agnostics, atheists, and believers from many economic, educational, religious, theological, cultural, and philosophical backgrounds. And, by the grace of God and the leadership of the Holy Spirit, we too are strangely bold to believe that the spirit of the risen Christ (unbounded and uncon­ tained by time and space) is somehow and miraculously in our midst, where we are and where we are going. George Docherty taught me this powerful hope about Christ’s unbounded and uncontainable risen spirit and miraculous incognito presence as we talked together in the booming city of Austin, Texas, 30 years ago. I was conducting an oral history interview with him for Austin Seminary’s faculty journal. It was focused on George’s exemplary ministry in Washington, D.C., from 1950 to 1975. The historic church he served was New York Avenue Presbyterian, located across the street from the White House. Lincoln had worshipped there a century earlier, as have many illustrious na­ tional leaders across the decades. During the 25 years of George’s prophetic and pastoral leadership, the New York Avenue Church hosted scores of landmark racial justice and peacemaking events. Once, following a very demanding peace conference weekend during the turbulent 1960s, which featured hosts of national political figures and folk musicians, including hundreds of students who had slept at the church, George was in a state of near exhaustion. Listen to his testimony: “Finally, at 2:30 p.m., when the last student had gone, I was about to close the church. At the door, another student confronted me. I said

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    somewhat gruffly, ‘And what do you want!’ He said, ‘May I have a glass of water please?’ I said, ‘Come in. There’s the water fountain.’ He satisfied his thirst and said, ‘Thank you.’ He walked to the door, put his pack on his back, and asked, ‘Where is the bus station.’ I gave him the directions and as he walked away; suddenly it all became clear to me, and I remembered an old Highland Rune:

    I saw a stranger yestreen. I put food in the eating place. Drink in the drinking place, Music in the listening place,… And the lark said in her song, Often and often and often Goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise.8

    Another wise mentor in the city of San Francisco once asked me passionately, “What in the world would our towns and central cities be like if all the sacred space were removed-the churches, cathedrals, synagogues, temples, and mosques?” He asked: “Is not such sacred space utterly indispensable to the health, welfare, shalom, fabric, warp and woof of our cities?”9 Well, surely. I mean, I knew a wonderful woman in the city of Pasadena. De­ pressed and suicidal, she sat every week for two years in her psychiatrist’s office located on the top floor of a building across the street from our church. Every week, she pondered the tower and the patio of Pasadena Presbyterian. For two years. Then, one Sunday morning, the Holy Spirit gave her the guiding and comforting courage to walk onto our patio beneath our church tower. And there she was greeted by an 80 year-old saint named Helen Reeves, who saw her anxious countenance. “You’re a visitor, and I have no one to sit with,” said Helen Reeves. “Won’t you please sit with me?” She did, and Helen held her quivering hand throughout the service. And the next week, and the next week, for weeks and weeks, again and again, that same anx­ ious woman came back to the sacred space where a church tower soars over “where cross the crowded ways of life.” And, a couple of years later, she became a Deacon there. In the now famous words of Father Henri Nouwen, she became a “wounded healer” there. Yes, both recognized and unrecognized, the ongoing miracles of the peace-giving spirit of the risen Christ happen all around us in “where cross the crowded ways of life.” And yes, I know that such miracles happen in many different venues. Christlike miracles also happen in the countryside, in the wilderness, in the suburbs, and in far­ away places on both land and sea. But I want to testify to you today that I am peculiarly and temperamentally drawn to city miracles. Go figure. Who can explain it; who can tell you why? Well, in my own heart and mind, no one explains it more profoundly and eerily than my dear friend Peggy Shriver in her incredible poem “The Spirit of 34th Street.” Behold her magnificent and spiritually empowering urban pictures:

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    Doors opened with a silent scream, like photographs of anguish; the subway paused, shed cargo and raged on. She lurched aboard, sagged into a vacant seat, frail weight of her gray years hunched with cold. Numb fingers plucked at rags, drawn close against raw misery. Knuckles, cracked and swollen white, clutched into a plea for warmth. He, dark and lithe, swung down the aisle, taut jeans dancing rhythmically. With Latin grace he, sidling past her patient form, in one smooth gesture disappeared through subway doors, leaving in her lap, like folded dove wings, his black leather gloves.10

    What can we say to this? In faith, hope, and love, we here on Church Street can lift up this prayer, with all our hearts, minds, and souls:

    Breathe on us, Breath of God; fill us with life anew, that we may love what thou dost love, and do what thou wouldst do.11

    *This sermon was preached at First Presbyterian Church, Asheville, North Carolina, in 2015.

    Notes

    1 See Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal, No. 343, “Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life, ” text by Frank Mason North, 1903.

    2 Quoted in George W. Webber, God’s Colony in Man’s World (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1960), 48.

    3 Carl P. Daw Jr., “Friend of the Streetwalker” (Carol Stream, Illinois: Hope Publishing Co.), 1996.

    4 Psalm 65:1-4. See Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publish­ ing House, 1984), 135.

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    5 See John M. Bracke, Jeremiah 1-29, Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 222-224; and Patrick D. Miller, The Book of Jeremiah, The New Interpreter s Bible, Vol. VI (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), 792. 6 See Fred B. Craddock, Luke, Interpretation Series (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990), 228-229. 7 See William H. Willimon, Acts, Interpretation Series (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), 142-145. 8 George M. Docherty, “George M. Docherty Reminisces: Presbyterian Ministry in America’s Cap­ ital, 1950-1975.” Oral history interview with Dean K. Thompson, Austin Seminary Bulletin, Faculty Edition 102, No. 4 (October 1986): 67-68. 9 Browne Barr, in a conversation. 10 Peggy L. Shriver, “The Spirit of 34th Street,” in Pinches of Salt (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 66. 11 See “Breathe on Me, Breath of God,” No. 286, in Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal (Louis ville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013) adapted.