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Border Crossing: A Series Introduction by Robert Schnase
Border Crossing is a series of stories and essays from people who are serving in ministry at the US-Mexico line. We hope these reflections help church people discuss boundaries, borders, and border crossings.
When we cross a border, we discover people we otherwise would count as strangers. We become someone different. Stepping across a border changes how we see ourselves, how we perceive others, and how others view us. Border crossing helps us live in more than one world.
Border Crossing has two meanings. First, it’s a point of departure from one place and the entry point to another. It’s a threshold, a place of transition: “The border crossing is a few miles ahead.” Things will be different when we cross a border, even if we are uncertain about what to expect. Or a border crossing can be intangible, such as the point we cross within ourselves to decide to do something differently or the point of connection when we seek to understand someone unknown to us.
Border Crossing also refers to an experience, such as “We had a difficult border crossing.” In this sense, a border crossing is movement, growth, transition, change, or stepping from one way of understanding to another.
Our lives are comprised of a succession of border crossings. The more adept we become at putting ourselves in situations that change our minds, the more we experience growth. We must cross borders in our communities if we are going to have a better world, because we are so polarized, distant, and distrustful of one another. Border crossing helps us co-exist despite language and cultural divides.
The collection of stories entitled Border Crossing explores borders—both the geographic and spiritual ones. It examines the spaces between one culture and another, and the inner hesitancies and fears that make crossing borders so challenging.
I grew up on the south Texas border with Mexico, experiencing both the intermingling and the clash of cultures. The Border Crossing stories capture real experiences. Some have a playful tone; others represent a fearful picking up of things that long ago I tried to lay to rest. The stories explore the intricacies and nuances of border crossings, and their utter necessity.
For me, border crossing has been done sporadically and imperfectly. At times I’m ashamed of my timidity, and other times I’m humbled by whom I meet and what I learn. The stories include moments of fear, hesitation, failure, resolve, growth. They describe early attempts at composing a life different from the one that was scripted for me.
Christ enters people’s lives and dissolves existing attitudes, perceptions, and assumptions, whatever they may be. Jesus asked his disciples to leave their nets, walk away from their mats, and journey away from their homes to follow him. He invites his followers to make becoming uncomfortable a spiritual discipline.
Jesus was a border crosser. He dined with tax collectors and sinners, breaching Pharisaic restrictions. He told stories of Samaritans, drawing people across borders indelibly etched in their minds, people who could not imagine a good Samaritan. He spoke with a foreign woman at a well, overstepping boundaries of propriety. He crossed borders, literally and figuratively, to reach the poor at the margins, Zacchaeus in the tree, and Nicodemus in the night.
Border crossing should be as natural as breathing for Christians, you would think, because Jesus so instinctively knew that following God meant crossing borders. We are disciples because we have said Yes to Jesus, to following him, even across borders.
When we cross a border, we discover people we otherwise would count as strangers. We become someone different. Stepping across a border changes how we see ourselves, how we perceive others, and how others view us. Border crossing helps us live in more than one world.
Border Crossing has two meanings. First, it’s a point of departure from one place and the entry point to another. It’s a threshold, a place of transition: “The border crossing is a few miles ahead.” Things will be different when we cross a border, even if we are uncertain about what to expect. Or a border crossing can be intangible, such as the point we cross within ourselves to decide to do something differently or the point of connection when we seek to understand someone unknown to us.
Border Crossing also refers to an experience, such as “We had a difficult border crossing.” In this sense, a border crossing is movement, growth, transition, change, or stepping from one way of understanding to another.
Our lives are comprised of a succession of border crossings. The more adept we become at putting ourselves in situations that change our minds, the more we experience growth. We must cross borders in our communities if we are going to have a better world, because we are so polarized, distant, and distrustful of one another. Border crossing helps us co-exist despite language and cultural divides.
The collection of stories entitled Border Crossing explores borders—both the geographic and spiritual ones. It examines the spaces between one culture and another, and the inner hesitancies and fears that make crossing borders so challenging.
I grew up on the south Texas border with Mexico, experiencing both the intermingling and the clash of cultures. The Border Crossing stories capture real experiences. Some have a playful tone; others represent a fearful picking up of things that long ago I tried to lay to rest. The stories explore the intricacies and nuances of border crossings, and their utter necessity.
For me, border crossing has been done sporadically and imperfectly. At times I’m ashamed of my timidity, and other times I’m humbled by whom I meet and what I learn. The stories include moments of fear, hesitation, failure, resolve, growth. They describe early attempts at composing a life different from the one that was scripted for me.
Christ enters people’s lives and dissolves existing attitudes, perceptions, and assumptions, whatever they may be. Jesus asked his disciples to leave their nets, walk away from their mats, and journey away from their homes to follow him. He invites his followers to make becoming uncomfortable a spiritual discipline.
Jesus was a border crosser. He dined with tax collectors and sinners, breaching Pharisaic restrictions. He told stories of Samaritans, drawing people across borders indelibly etched in their minds, people who could not imagine a good Samaritan. He spoke with a foreign woman at a well, overstepping boundaries of propriety. He crossed borders, literally and figuratively, to reach the poor at the margins, Zacchaeus in the tree, and Nicodemus in the night.
Border crossing should be as natural as breathing for Christians, you would think, because Jesus so instinctively knew that following God meant crossing borders. We are disciples because we have said Yes to Jesus, to following him, even across borders.
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Discerning our callings: Creational conversation and conversion by Clifton Stringer
Ephesians 1:4 says that God the Father chose us in Christ "before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him." This is the "hope" to which we are "called" (1:18), to be united in Christ along with all things heavenly and earthly (1:10). In this post I'm going to draw out some of the theological implications of these verses of Ephesians for our vocation, or calling. I'm going to draw a bit on the thought of the late Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson, and on a central idea of the poet-philosopher David Whyte.In Robert Jenson's short volume, A Theology in Outline, the idea of vocation turns out to be central for interpreting the doctrine of creation as a whole. This is because, for Jenson, Israel's doctrine of creation aligns with Israel's sense of his identity, and Israel knows himself as having been called into existence by being called to follow God in a conversational relationship. Think of Abram in Genesis 12. Abram is as pagan as everyone else when the mysterious voice of God summons him into a covenant relationship. Or think of how God intervenes later to re-found Israel by raising Israel out of slavery in Egypt in the time of Moses: Moses is called by God through the burning bush. God speaks, or calls, Israel into being in both instances, and the Word of the LORD is heard "to kill and make alive" repeatedly in Israel's history. Similarly, and most decisively, Jesus Christ calls his disciples into relationship.
This primacy of God's call in constituting a people is the lens through which Jenson points out that Israel understands creation itself — and in contrast to various other world religions' answers to the question, "Why does anything exist rather than nothing at all?" For Jews and Christians, God speaks — and the world is. God calls all creation into being like God calls a covenant people into being.
The waters get even deeper and more marvelous in Jenson's theology when we consider his characterization of the Trinity. God, for Jenson, is a dramatic interplay of Father, Son and Spirit, whose love we see active and acting in history on the world stage. Jenson thus calls the religion of the Old and New Testaments "dramatic monotheism." God is talkative. God strikes up a conversation with Abram and Moses and us: prayer. The very life of God is a conversation which includes and engages the world.
Jenson's doctrine of God thus enables a deepening return consideration of his doctrine of creation. Creation is called into being out of nothing and called into the conversation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is where David Whyte's insight comes in: in his marvelous poetry and reflection, Whyte bears witness to the "conversational nature of reality." On Trinitarian grounds, Jenson would concur.
Let's bring all this to bear, now, directly on the issue of vocation. To exist is to be called into conversation within the Triune God. That's our creaturely vocation. We come to be already "in" and "through" Christ, as Scripture teaches; our life itself is, in a deep sense, our vocation to enter the "love that moves the sun and the other stars" (Dante, Paradiso). The creational conversation we're called into is also, always, a conversion. Deepening conversation and conversion are, hence, in some sense mutually constituting in a Christian sense: we're created because we had a vocation before we were created to be holy and blameless in Christ. And within this creational vocation, which is always already mediated by Christ — Christ the lamb slain from the foundation of the world, as it is provocatively put in Rev. 13:8 — we discern our particular callings.
Our particular callings truly do have to be discerned, discovered, heard. We listen to God and we listen to ourselves, seeking to know ourselves in God and in Christ. This takes prayer and sober self-reflection. We listen into God's conversation going on in and with the world — and that conversation refines our spiritual perceptions, convictions and desires. Our vocation is in this sense overheard. We're like children welcomed into a world bigger than we ever imagined as we listen in to the chatty love of the Trinity around the Communion table. Our process of discerning, discovering, hearing, overhearing takes place in the conversation/conversion of the luminous symposium who is the Trinity. We're dialoguing with God with, and within, all reality, unto the unification of all things in Christ.
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DNA and identity by Laura Brekke
DNA in the newsRecently, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) revealed the results of a DNA test taken in response to a public squabble with President Donald Trump. Trump had mocked Warren on a number of occasions about her prior claims of Cherokee heritage. In one instance, the president offered $1 million to a charity of Warren’s choice if she could prove her Native American heritage.
In releasing the result, Warren revealed that she’s somewhere between 1/32nd and 1/1024th Native American, with the report saying it’s likely Warren had a Native American ancestor six to ten generations ago. The publicity surrounding the results of Warren’s DNA test has led to backlash, both from the Republican Party, which claims the tests disprove her claims of Cherokee heritage, and from Native American leaders, who warn that DNA doesn’t determine identity. The fundamental issue at the center of this debate is the relationship between biology and identity.
The kind of DNA testing in question involves a process by which an individual’s genetic material is compared to a collection of samples from other individuals. Genetic “markers” for certain regions are then flagged, calculated and compared to the general population to create an estimate of what regional genetics make up an individual’s DNA.
In the last few years, DNA testing has come to greater prominence through the rise of mail-in testing companies like 23andMe, Ancestry and Helix. A number of viral videos highlighting the reactions of those reading the results of their own DNA tests have aided in the growing notoriety of these companies.
DNA and identity
Dr. Kim Tallbear, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, warns of the dangers of DNA testing as a means to determine ethnic belonging. “People think that there’s a DNA test that can prove if somebody is Native American or not,” she says in a 2014 interview with New Scientist. “There isn’t.” She argues that something like Native American heritage is made up of more than genetics; it’s a cultural identity that’s born from lived experience.
“I worry about the way Native American identity gets represented as this purely racial category by some of the companies marketing these tests,” says Tallbear. “We have a particular cultural identity, based in a land that we hold to be sacred. That’s what gives our lives meaning. That’s what makes us who we are.”
In her comments, Tallbear is highlighting the intersection between genetics and cultural identity. Culture isn’t passed down through DNA. Having Native American DNA doesn’t mean that the individual in question understands the experience of being Native American. “Who we are — the languages we speak, the traditions we practice, our broader cultures — inform our identities far more than DNA,” writes Krystal Tsosie, a Ph.D. candidate in genomics and health disparities at Vanderbilt University, in The Atlantic. “To ascribe any power to a DNA-test result disempowers those Native Americans who do live according to their traditions,” she says. For Tsosie, a member of the Navajo Nation, Native American identity is about culture, not biology.
For her part, Warren has issued a statement clarifying that she does not claim to be Native American. “I’m not enrolled in a tribe and only tribes determine tribal citizenship,” she said.
Who am I?
For many of those who take DNA tests, the results are surprising. Family narratives may be reinforced or undermined when the test results are returned. Many self-identified “white” or European Americans are shocked to learn that they have African ancestry. In surveying by the DNA Discussion Project, described in The Washington Post, two-thirds of the participants who self-identified as white see themselves as members of only one race. Additionally, those who self-identified as white were more likely to be shocked or unhappy with unexpected African ancestry.
Anita Foeman, a professor of communication studies and co-director of the DNA Discussion Project at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, comments on the number of participants who reject the DNA results. “Many whites would get a new story” and say that they would still call themselves white or Italian, Foeman tells the Post. “They started to less see race as genetic and more a question of culture.”
The discovery of African ancestry came as positive news for Nicole Persley, who grew up as a self-identified “Southern white girl,” the Post article says. Persley’s grandfather, an African-American man who passed as white, left his family to start a new life in Michigan. Her genetic testing results confirmed that Persley is around eight percent African.
“That was a bombshell revelation for me and my family,” she says. “I am absolutely proud of my genealogy and my heritage.” Persley recognizes that the need for her grandfather to end a relationship with his biological family was heartbreaking. “[He] had to completely reinvent himself and cut everyone in his family off, and that’s so tragic.”
Foeman hopes that more experiences like Persley’s will shift the way Americans understand race. “We are living at a time when people think they have to stick in their camps,” she says. However, she adds, “It’s an opportunity for us to reboot the conversation about race.” Identity is complex. It’s more than DNA, and yet our genetics clearly fascinate us. The popularity of DNA testing speaks to the interest many Americans have in their heritage. Even so, our biology doesn’t ultimately determine who we are. The final answer to that question finds its resolution in the age-old dilemma between nature and nurture. Are we more influenced by our DNA or our cultural experiences? At least in the case of Elizabeth Warren’s DNA results, culture appears to be the more powerful force.
Be sure to check out FaithLink, a weekly downloadable discussion guide for classes and small groups.
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Weekly Preaching November 11, 2018 by James C. Howell
The reading from Ruth would require a retelling of the whole story, which is one of high drama, romance, and wheeling and dealing. Naomi persuades Ruth to get dolled up and seek out her rich kinsman Boaz, and lie down with him in the dark — but not until he’s had a few drinks. The scheme works, they marry and conceive an ancestor of David. Naomi’s bitterness (“Call me Mara”) is turned to joy restored (Naomi meaning “pleasant”). The “point” of so many Bible stories is not “Go thou and do likewise,” but rather noting the pluck, the courage, the resourcefulness of people in our heritage.
Hebrews 9:24-28 continues what Hebrews has been reiterating. Christ the priest offers the sacrifice of himself once and for all. Some fresh twists (if you’re preaching the Epistle):
Christ enters a sanctuary “not made with hands,” reminding us of Paul in 2 Cor. 5:1 where the body, your “earthly tent,” has a destiny of becoming a “house” in the heavens. In Heb. 9, heaven is now the sanctuary not made with hands. The temple we know isn’t, as it turns out, the real sanctuary at all, but merely a “copy” of the true heavenly sanctuary. The preacher could explore this, or just name it: we are sitting in a room that is a replica, an imitation, a xerox of heaven, where worship goes on now and will forever. This is a paradise on earth. So we treat the room, and those in the room with us, very differently, finding ourselves together in this copy of heaven.
The Greek word translated “copy” is antitupa, which means literally to strike against something hard and thus form an image. I think of Karl Barth’s powerful thought (in his Epistle to the Romans), that the activity of the Church’s relationship to the Gospel “is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell and seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself…” Oliver O’Donovan (in The Desire of the Nations) suggested ways the society, while not converted, bears the crater marks of the Gospel’s being lived among Christians.
What do we do together in this copy of heaven? We worship, yes, and we “eagerly wait for him” (v. 28). Are we living, surviving, clinging to life as we know it, anxious for the future, or even hopeful? Hebrews suggests a disposition of waiting — not to die, or for the next titillating experience, or for any thing, but for him, for the coming of Christ. Maybe before Advent arrives we might sing “I’m looking for the coming of Christ; I want to be with Jesus” (“I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light”).
I’m preaching on Mark 12:38-44. I preached on this last go-round, pointing (obviously) to myself as one of the guys “in long robes” Jesus warned about. I get and like favored seating. I worry about my prayers being showy. I worry so much that I’m an anxious pray-er in public; I usually try to get others to pray. Often, when visiting in the hospital, the time comes for our closing prayer and I’ll ask the patient to pray. There's no show with them; they pray wonderful, simple, from-the-gut prayers.
Once there was a boy, born with an acute case of cerebral palsy, who was treated terribly as a young child. He went to another home where his mother noticed how he watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. She believed Mister Rogers was keeping her son alive. Some foundation worked it out for Mister Rogers to visit this boy, and when he did, Mister Rogers asked, “Would you pray for me?” The boy was thunderstruck because nobody had ever asked him for anything. He was the object of prayer, not the one to pray for anybody. But then he prays for Mister Rogers and he doesn’t want to die anymore. A journalist, Tom Junod, witnessed this and privately congratulated Mister Rogers for being so smart. But Mister Rogers didn’t know what he meant. He really wanted the boy’s prayers, saying, “I think that anyone who’s gone through challenges like that must be very close to God.”
Of course the focal point of the text, and the poignant preaching opportunity, is this: “Jesus sat down where they made their offerings and watched.” Without being too manipulative, I will ask people to imagine Jesus watching us and our offerings — which isn’t a fantasy, as it turns out.
The temple was outfitted with trumpet-shaped offering boxes so that when people “threw” in their coins, the clanging announced loudly the generosity of the giver. It’s hard not to think of Luther’s annoyance at Tetzel and the sale of indulgences: the indulgence hawkers toted around large brass chests and sang their ditty, “When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”
Jesus contrasts the poor widow who would satisfy the old saying that “God notices not how much but from how much.” Of course, in church we have anonymous giving. This worried Martin Luther King Sr. (“Mike”) when he began his ministry at Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1931. He believed “anonymous giving” provided a grand excuse for what he called “anonymous non-giving.” So he opened up the registers, and listed what each person gave for all to see. Donations soared in just a week.
What we see in Jesus’ story is the poor giving to support the poor. It’s a Christian obligation for all… incumbent upon even the poor. The preacher can find some story about the poor being in powerful ministry
"What can we say November 11? 25th after Pentecost" originally appeared in its entirety at James Howell's Weekly Preaching Notions. Reprinted with permission.
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The end of America’s Protestant political majority gives Republicans cause to worry By Mark Silk / Religion News Service
(RNS) — A quick and dirty anaylsis of how the midterms played out in the religious landscape, according to Tuesday’s exit polls, shows that politically the United States is no longer a majority Protestant country.The unsurprising fact of the election is that white evangelicals, the folks everyone from the White House on down has been focused on for the past two years, went 75 percent for the Republican candidate in races for the House of Representatives and 22 percent for the Democrat. The gap is five percentage points down from the 2014 margin of 78 percent to 20 percent margin in favor of the GOP, but holding form.
White evangelicals constitute 26 percent of the electorate, as they did in 2016, when they went for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, 80-16. All in all, they constitute a constant one-quarter of the electorate, maybe trending slightly less Republican.
Overall, non-Catholic Christians (Protestants and others) preferred Republicans to Democrats by a 14-point margin, 56-42. That’s a little more than half the margin Republicans enjoyed in 2014 (61 percent to 37).
But for the first time in American history, Protestants constituted less than half the electorate, at 47 percent.
Catholics favored Democratic candidates by the slimmest of margins, 50-49. This represents a significant shift from 2014, when they split in favor of Republicans, 54-45. Catholics also voted in higher numbers, with their proportion of the entire vote growing by 2 percentage points over the last midterm to 26 percent.
Those shifts may reflect the higher turnout in the Latino vote, representing a larger, more Democratic portion of the Catholic vote as a whole.
The biggest shift in terms of faith may turn out to be the Jewish vote. In 2014, Jews voted 2-1 for Democratic House candidates, a pretty low margin for them that perhaps reflects unhappiness with President Obama’s relatively tough stance on Israel. On Tuesday, Jews went better than 4-1 for the the Democrats (79 percent to 17), showing that Trump’s embrace of Israel did nothing to counterbalance the rest of his agenda.
Very possibly, the increased margin was also a reaction to the Pittsburgh massacre, which, along with the bomb threats to Democratic politicians, suggested to Jews that resurgent anti-Semitism on the right is a clear and present danger — and that if it has not found a home in the Republican Party, it has found aid and comfort in Trumpian white nationalism.
Finally, there are those who identify as belonging to no religion, known as the nones. They voted Democratic 70 percent to 28, almost the same as in 2014, when they did so 69-29. Significantly, however, their portion of the overall vote has steadily increased over the past three national elections, from 12 percent in 2014 to 15 percent in 2016 to 17 percent this year.
A closely aligned group, those who say they never attend religious services, voted Democratic 68 percent to 30, a gap half again as large as the margin of 62 percent to 36 in 2014. As with the nones, their proportion of the electorate is growing, from 18 percent in 2014 to 22 percent in 2016 to 27 percent this year.
Meanwhile, voters who say they attend religious services weekly favored Republicans 58 percent to 40, holding steady at the 20-point (give-or-take) split that has been the case with them in most elections since 2000. But their proportion of the electorate shrank from 40 percent in 2014 to 32 percent in 2018.
The bottom line, as moving parts of the American religious system continue their recent trends, is clear: Republicans beware.
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Breaking bad theology By Rebekah Simon-Peter
Thomasina stood up among a group of fellow pastors to tell us her vision for herself. “I am committed to self-regulation and to be the pastor my people need me to be.” As we dived deeper into her vision, it became clear that she had a bad case of impostor syndrome. Highly successful in the world of education and administration, somehow her gifts had been unwelcome in the church. While she thought more self-regulation was the answer, I doubted that would solve the problem. Too much self-regulation translates into self-suppression. Then we can no longer express our gifts or passions.
I’ve seen impostor syndrome — the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved — afflict pastors all across the country. I think the core of the problem is bad theology. It’s time to break it.
Thomas Merton writes that at the core, we are in deep and inescapable contact with the Divine. Paul tells us that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. The Psalmist writes that there is no place we can go that God is not. The ancient writer of Genesis tells us that we are made in the very image and likeness of God.
Then came Augustine. We have him to thank for the gift of original sin. Original sin is the concept that while God made us good, we “fell” from that grace. Only something outside of ourselves can fix us. And only if we are somehow repentant enough. The question is how much is enough? Most of us deal with “never good enough.” You don’t even need to be Christian to absorb this theology. It’s part of our culture. It’s transmitted to us in silent invisible ways we don’t even know about. It eats away at our very bones like a cancer.
Here is the outgrowth of this bad theology: God’s love is conditional. We believe we are never really good enough. We are separate from God. We are on our own. We don’t belong. We are “other” to God.
Hogwash.
Thank goodness Jesus didn’t have to deal with this bad theology. He might have dealt with impostor syndrome too. Can you imagine? “Beloved son, me? Nah, not really. You’re well pleased? I doubt it. Don’t you think I need to do better first?”
As I teach apostleship to church leaders, it’s clear that Jesus wasn’t weighted down by any sense of original sin. More importantly, neither were the apostles. We see no hint of impostor syndrome in them. They were free to learn from Jesus, to try out the stuff that he taught them, to wrangle for first place, and to even develop the faith of Jesus so that they could perform miracles alongside him. Jesus would have had a hard time empowering and authorizing them — tapping into their sense of agency — if they had been hindered by a persistent sense of unworthiness.
We are called to co-create miracles with Jesus. To do that, we need a better theology. One that doesn’t trap us with the idea that we are never enough, or that we are separate from the very God who gives us life. Rather, one that empowers us to recognize our inherent goodness, the innate divinity within our humanity and our essential oneness with God.
Rebekah blogs at rebekahsimonpeter.com.
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Border Crossing: The Baptism by Robert Schnase
Border Crossing is a series of stories and essays from people who are serving in ministry at the US-Mexico line. We hope these reflections help church people discuss boundaries, borders, and border crossings.
The Border Crossing story below is entitled The Baptism. It describes events that took place thirty years ago when Bishop Robert Schnase was a young pastor.
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A stewardship of privilege By Kira Schlesinger
Many churches are into their fall stewardship campaign with a focus on getting members to pledge of their time, talent, and treasure for the upcoming year in order to develop a budget. Unfortunately, the way that a lot of churches talk about stewardship tends to equate it with one several-week period of emphasis in the fall (“stewardship season”) and our monetary giving to the church. Of course, there are the obligatory mentions of other ways of giving by donating time or skills to the church, but most people will still hear stewardship sermons as being about money.
The theological concept of stewardship should underpin almost everything we talk about — yes, our finances, but also our time, our impact on the natural world, and the ways our church buildings and land are used. Our natural tendency is to be like the seagulls in Finding Nemo, chirping “Mine, mine, mine,” at everything around us. Or we proudly declare that all that we have is because we “earned” it, that our success is “self-made,” neglecting the roles that community, privilege, grace, and sheer luck often play in our lives.
The truth is that our lives are an undeserved gift from God. Everything we have and everything we are is by the grace of God. In return, God asks us to be good stewards, to use our resources rightly and for God’s Kingdom. This includes supporting the church, the local community of faith, with our resources, but it also includes our relationship to our broader community and our environment. As we close in on our national midterm elections, Christians might understand our freedom and our privilege of voting as an act of stewardship. For me, the knowledge that women did not always have the right to vote in this country and are forbidden from voting in other countries makes it particularly important that I am a good steward of this privilege.
As we continue to emphasize stewardship in our congregations, I wonder if we could talk about a stewardship of privilege. Despite the forward strides we’ve made on issues of gender, sexuality, and race, our society continues to privilege the cis-straight, white male voice and person. Obviously, no one can help the circumstances into which they are born, but they can use the privilege granted by society to lift up others and ensure that their voices are heard. In my own career, many of my successes have been due to men deliberately making space for and amplifying my voice. In turn, I have many privileges as a straight, college-educated white woman that I can use to advocate for those without the same privileges. There is no reason to feel bad about the privileges we have if we are good stewards of them, using them to further the justice and equality that are hallmarks of the Kingdom of God.
This time of the year when we preach and teach about stewardship, we should encourage those in our pews to consider the variety of privileges and freedoms that we enjoy, that they are gifts given to us both by happy accident and the grace of God, and that we are called to use them in service to God and our communities.
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"It hurts so bad. I just don’t understand.”
I haven’t actually uttered these words. But these last days my soul has been howling as news stories reported acts of deadly violence driven by searing racial and religious hatred.
Maurice Stallard and Vickie Lees Jones had each made a routine grocery-store run. They were gunned down in the aisles by a stranger intent on killing black people for being black. Confronted by another customer, the murderer reportedly said, “Whites don’t shoot whites.”
On the following Shabbat, the congregation of Living Tree Synagogue had gathered for worship. A man opened fire, killing eleven of the faithful. Among them were Sylvan and Bernice Simon, married in that same synagogue over 60 years ago. 97-year-old Rose Mallinger. Brothers, Cecil and David Rosenthal. A regular at an alt-right web site, the shooter had posted that Jews are a mortal threat to the white race.
“It hurts so bad. I just don’t understand.”
Still reeling with emotional vertigo, I began to feel a spiritual nausea as another thought occurred to me. We can say that these are the latest horrifying news stories. They are not one-offs. They are “the latest.” Shootings occur with dreadful regularity — in our schools, at our workplaces, in our movie theaters, at concert venues, and in our very homes.
And there is more.
Racially motivated violence and anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise. More than six hundred women are sexually assaulted every day in our country. Twenty-two veterans take their own lives each day.
Death by opioid overdose numbers one hundred fifteen a day.
In the US, fifteen million children live in families whose incomes are below the poverty line. That number stretches to three billion around the world.
“It hurts so bad. I just don’t understand.”
We say that God is love. We should not be surprised when people ask, "Where is the God of love in a world drowning in such sorrow?" But I do not think that this is a cynic’s question that people of faith must answer.
On the contrary, I believe that it is our question for ourselves. It is the question that can awaken and animate people of faith to be who we say we are: people of the Way of Love.
There is biblical precedent for taking this question as our own spiritual challenge. Jesus’s close friend Mary, sister of Lazarus and Martha, asked him precisely this question, only from her own set of personal circumstances. (John 11:1-44)
Her brother Lazarus had died. While he was still desperately ill, Mary and Martha sent for Jesus. They felt certain that he would come and work one of the miracles he had become famous for. But he didn’t show. Not until Lazarus had lain rotting in the tomb for days.
When Jesus finally got there, Mary said, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Her heart was crying, “It hurts so bad. I just don’t understand.”
Jesus’s delay is one of the central points of the story. Jesus had not been belatedly informed that Lazarus was gravely ill. Neither was he was occupied with healings elsewhere. Nothing had detained him from rushing to Lazarus’s sickbed. He chose to wait. And he made that choice in order to illustrate God’s mission.
Jesus did not come to keep us from dying. Jesus came to raise us from the dead. That is the pattern of eternal life: dying and rising. It begins right here on planet Earth and extends beyond the grave.
God created us to live, to navigate this planet as the image of God. In other words, to live as a human being is to love. When Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself, he meant that our own personal well-being is inseparable from our neighbor’s quality of life.
So, sometimes, love means that I will die to a narrower sense of my self—to my own narrow self-interest—in order to bring about a greater good. To make this world a better place for us all instead of fortifying my own place of privilege.
When we die for the sake of others in this way, Jesus raises us to new and greater life. And in this dying and rising right here on planet Earth, we show the world that God is at work in our midst... through us.
God says, "I am there
- wherever people resist hate and fight for the dignity of every human being.
- wherever people dismiss false equivalencies and denounce the wrongs of white supremacy and every form of racism, classism, and sexism.
- wherever people feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and welcome the stranger no matter their place of origin, their language, their creed, or their skin color."
When we walk the way of love, we show the world that God dwells where it hurts. God’s love shows up. And God’s love changes the world.
Along the way we’ll encounter obstacles and setbacks. We’ll shuffle and stumble, grow tired and discouraged. But we can take heart. Eventually, God’s love wins.
"Where It Hurts" originally appeared at Looking for God in Messy Places. Reprinted with permission.
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