Rising up From Our Roots

April 20, 2025: Easter
Creekside UCC
Matthew 13: 18-23 and Luke 24:1-11

Photo by Jacob Silberberg

It began with whispers on suburban street corners. Candles held by people asking their elected leaders to do something. For months, there’d been rising fuel costs, inflation, rolling blackouts that lasted hours. Why? Sri Lanka boasted a high literacy rate, thriving textile and tourism industries. It had ended a civil war ten years earlier, in 2009. This shouldn’t have been happening. The government, in fact, denied it was happening even as every day the suffering increased – for everyone, but ordinary people the most. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising when the ordinary people – not the NGO activists in the capital or the politicians, not the well-educated lawyers or the clergy – were the first to begin gathering on street corners with one another, lighting candles.

It started timidly, spontaneously, unorganized, but by the end – four months later — something impossible had happened: the impenetrable, nepotistic, increasingly autocratic Rajapakse regime had been toppled. What began with ordinary people, others soon joined – first 6 people, the next day 50. First one protest, the next day six. Wave upon wave of people rising up. Rajapakse’s fear was evident by his reaction: declaring a state of emergency and responding to the growing crowd with batons and tear gas, the go-to move of any emperor who feels his back up against the wall. Those still in their homes saw the state’s violent response and their righteous anger rose up. So they joined the waves of people on the streets… now the artists, who brought puppets and dance moves. Now the clergy, Buddhist monks in orange robes who chanted lovingkindness, the Catholic nuns and priests, Muslim ulema and Hindu priests. They led prayer, sometimes stood on the frontline to protect the people from security forces. The students and young people… they of course showed up in droves, many of them unemployed now because of the Rajapakse regime’s boneheaded economic policies. They had nothing to lose, time to spare, and wanted to be a part of history, so they set up camp on the plazas downtown and didn’t leave. But so did their mothers and grandmothers, their fathers and grandfathers. Businessmen in ties walked out of their offices and joined the protests. They just kept showing up, across the country and in downtown Colombo, not far from the President’s house. Wave after wave. It couldn’t be stopped, once it really got started, this rising tide of people.

What a fool the president was. He thought he could create a moat large enough between him and the people to secure his power. The twentieth amendment to the constitution centralized his power over the judiciary and parliament. The victory he’d led over the insurgent Tamil Tigers strengthened Sinhala nationalist pride and further eroded multi-ethnic solidarity, allowing him to impose majoritarian rule at the expense of minorities. He was the savior of the war-torn country, empowered, cresting a wave of authoritarianism around the world. Everything was going his way.  

But it turns out, bridges are useful tools to get over moats, and the people were able to build them – starting with ordinary people in the suburbs and then growing across class, across race, across religion, across generations. Tamil and Sinhala and Muslim Sri Lankans who all carried inter-generational trauma from periods of violent conflict in their country’s past who in their rising up together were showing the possibility of transmuting rather than transmitting that trauma, of disrupting cycles of violence and suffering wrought by ethnic and class supremacy. A bridge here and a bridge there until Rajapkse saw the rising tide was going to engulf him and he fled the country just before the people took his palace – nonviolently — and threw a pool party in it. A new world had arrived. The people had danced it into being in the streets all the way into the palace of the emperor.

This past November, when I visited Sri Lanka for the first time in years, the commitment to seeing through this building of a new world was palpable. My longtime peacebuilding comrades spoke knowingly to me, because they saw what was happening in my own country… a story unfolding about a man building moats to hold onto power. But they knew the end of the story wasn’t fated. A Buddhist monk friend said to me: “things are always changing. What is happening now in the US is not forever. Step into the change process and direct it toward good outcomes.” My Tamil friend said: “we would not have dreamed of what was possible in 2019, but the darkest times showed us that we can and will rise above the dictators we unwittingly put in charge… people of all walks came together to take on one of the most ruthless, arrogant, and powerful presidents. And we won.” They also said this to me: You are not alone. We are all in this together. Our fate is tied to your country’s fate. We need you to step out and believe what may seem impossible right now. My Buddhist and Muslim and Hindu friends said to me: keep the faith.  

We’ve a lot to learn in the US about democracy from others in the world, in Sri Lanka, South Korea, Bangladesh, and Brazil, who’ve done it in the past few years when the stakes are high. A wave of people rising up higher than the wave of authoritarianism that marks our time, successfully beating it back.

Is it possible for us to be hopeful in times like the ones we’re living here in the US? It ain’t easy, I know. But I want to tell you something that may seem impossible to believe: you can. I am. I am hopeful. I pray it’s not a hopefulness derived from privilege or naivete, but one fully rooted in awareness of the cross operating in our world. Do you believe me? Me, a woman like those in our scripture today seeking to preach the good news to a people who have every right to respond with incredulity, to say like the apostles did: woman, you speak nonsense.

In February, I was in Arizona for the Apache Stronghold’s annual prayer run to protect Oak Flat, their most sacred land the US government seized duplicitously in 2010, during the Obama administration, for copper mining that would destroy it. It’s a story as old as this country, and even older – of land theft and destruction for the sake of feeding an insatiable appetite of economic production. And now, with leaders elected on a platform of “drill, baby, drill” one might assume the Apache were despairing. But they weren’t. Wendsler Nosie, Jr told us: “I’m hopeful. Because I see white people are waking up. We’ve all been in the same shackles imposed by historic and ongoing colonialism, genocide of people and cultures and land, predatory capitalism in this country. Some of us have felt it more acutely than others – especially us Indigenous, African Americans. But white people are also shackled. And now, they are feeling those shackles. I go into white majority churches these days, and I hear them talking about Mother Earth. Something new is happening. The Spirit is pulling you into this fight for life with us, and we’re glad you’ve arrived.”

Last week, Sarah preached that the Palm/Passion Sunday story has everything to do with this moment we’re living in. It does. What we’re seeing now – the abuse of power, the greed and violence – is acute; the power of empire is bold right now. But the Easter message … it also has everything to do with this moment. And maybe this year, we can hear it in a way we never have before… In ways the descendants of enslaved Africans in the 50s heard and that compelled them to rise up in dark times to do the impossible, dismantle Jim Crow. Or the Indigenous in our country who are still here, still alive, despite this government’s best efforts to eradicate them. Those who heard in the Bible a truth older than the Bible, a message by an oppressed man meant for an oppressed people, and for all people – about the ways of life, about how imperial power works, and about the power of Love to defeat it.  

Beloved, do you see the possibility in this moment?

Because something new is happening. The old ways that weren’t serving the cause of life are falling away. The empire’s back is up against the wall, lashing out, because it knows — a new world is emerging, the people are turning toward it, wave after wave. They saw the power and potential of the love uprising that began just a couple miles from here, at 38^th and Chicago, and the uprising at Standing Rock and the protests for Line 3. They saw Occupy Wall Street, the Women’s March and MeToo movement, the students protesting what has been sacrosanct US military policy. They see the growing rejection of the false gospels of individualism, land and water as commodity, Protestant work ethic, all in service to economic production and wealth. They see that we are awakening from our condition of disconnection to our ancestors and to the land on which we live. They know how dangerous that is. They are right to be afraid.

Maybe, in these times for which God made us, the message of Jesus is falling upon soil better able to receive it within us, growing roots stronger and deeper so that we can we rise up higher than any autocrat, higher than empire– each of us, eyes and hearts wide open, with the knowledge and so humility about how the world we’ve inherited came to be. With recognition that no worldly institution will save us. Not the courts. Not Congress. Not any political party or politician. Not Harvard (believe me). “Why do you look for life in the places of death?” Remember: we only have one savior: Love. So it’s up to all of us, together, drawing on the greatest power that exists, the only force that can defeat empire and save us all, Love, who came enfleshed into our world as Jesus.

Sometimes I dream that we’re living in the moment Black Elk and Crazy Horse, both Lakota men indigenous to this Northland, prophesied … a time when Indigenous wisdom that had been entombed by imperial power and the Christian missionaries working for them – including those Congregational — would emerge again from the tomb to save a world that had pushed itself to the brink of extinction by its own hubris and death-dealing … a time when people would reject anthropocentric and patriarchal worldviews in recognition of themselves as part of a living organism dependent on the whole – ideas you’ll find in Celtic and ancient Nordic worldviews, those Mayan, Yoruba (represented in our bulletin cover), Dakota, Anishinaabe, Bon-po and so many others. A worldview that lends itself to a way of being we see in Jesus, our wilderness-wanderer, our preacher of anti-individualism, our God who lived under European imperial colonial occupation whose path is one of decolonizing love.  

This could be that moment, if we choose to rise up with our God, beloved ones. It can be, if we dig into the cracks of our broken world and pull out this new one that is emerging.

So, for the land and the water that has been desacralized and commodified since the industrial revolution – let us rise up. For the protection and dignity of all people whatever their citizenship or economic status or partisan membership or gender or race, let us rise up. Centering those most vulnerable in this moment: immigrants and refugees, queer kids, let us rise up. Out of recognition of our essential mutual dependence, let us rise up. For the long haul required of any birthing process, let us rise up. In whatever way you can, big or small, with candles on street corners or signs on bridges, leaving the office still in your suit to join the people on the street, with boycotts or strikes, with puppets and street theater and humor and joy, with others around the world whose own well-being depends on us doing so, let us rise up. With our roots firmly planted in good soil, knowing who we are and whose we are, knowing full well how we got here in this country, let us rise up. Wave upon wave, welcoming everyone to join us, no purity test, let us rise up. With the great Indian god Shiva who dances destruction and creation, with our ancestors who danced in circles around fires on the solstice, or to drumbeats in the red desert to pray the sun up. With our God, Jesus, whose body the empire killed but whose love message lives on, let us rise up with joy to greet the new world emerging –

…. I mean this literally, people – get up on your feet, rise up, so we can dance the new world into being, empowered with the living spirit of our God who dances with us, singing halle halle halle – Alleluia! Christ is Risen! The ways of death are being defeated! A new world is possible! May it be so!

Benediction:
The old, deadly ways are falling apart in front of us, Beloved. Empire’s back is up against the wall. A new world is possible. Step into the change process to midwife it into being. Go now and rise up to meet these times for which you were made with the God who is always rising up with you. Amen!  

A Queering Faith

June 23, 2024
Pride Sunday
Mayflower UCC
Rev. Susie Hayward

Scripture: Psalm 23 (a Queer translation by M Jade Kaiser, found here)

A Queering Faith

I offer you today a sermon in three acts.

Act I: This is an old, true story

(a story my colleague Rev. John Gage alerted me to, for which I’m grateful)

Imagine this setting: the 5^th century Byzantine Empire, likely around present day Lebanon. A child is born within a Christian family – a girl, as this child is identified to be in the typical way. The child is given a feminine name, and raised primarily by the father, Eugenius, after the mother dies. The child is devoted to Christian faith. And so perhaps it is not a surprise that when it comes time to marry, they do not want this kind of householder life. Rather, they want to follow Eugenius into a monastic life, deepening spiritual practice and formation, living intentionally with and for God. This is their calling.

But there’s a problem, because the child is not the right gender. Understood to be a girl, the norm was to marry, to bear children, tend the home. Certainly girls do not to enter a male monastery. Impossible, says Eugenius.

But it’s not, they reply. Because they are full of faith in God and grit and a subversive, counter-cultural, imagination. And so they proceed to shave their head, change their clothing, their pronouns, and their name – to Marinos — and to identify as male. And with that, Marinos becomes a monk and enters the monastery with his father. Ten years later after Eugenius dies, Marinos remains in the same monastery, clearly enamored with this life of asceticism, prayer, and discipline among his fellow brothers. He does not leave to become a wife to someone. He does not leave to join a female monastery – which existed at the time. He continues to live as Father Marinos, as God called him to be.  

Oh, but that’s not all there is to the story of Marinos, friends.

Because one night, when he is traveling with fellow monks, they stay at an inn. And that night, so the story goes, a Roman soldier beds – probably rapes – the innkeeper’s daughter. And when it is discovered that she is pregnant, she accuses not the soldier but that monk, Father Marinos, of fathering the child. Rather than deny the girl, Marinos begs forgiveness and pays his penance – living in exile outside the walls of the monastery as a beggar for ten years, before he is invited back into the community under the stipulation that he continue to pay penance via hard labor.

But that’s not all there is to this story, Beloved. Because early in the period of Marino’s exile, the inn-keeper’s daughter gives birth to a son, and the innkeeper takes the unwanted child and dumps him with Marinos, who raises him as his own son – both outside and then within the walls of the monastery.  

It’s only later, after Father Marinos dies, when his body is prepared for burial, that the monks discover Marinos could not have been the biological father of that child. The abbot, the innkeeper, many are said to have wept for the wrong they did to Marinos. And miracle upon miracle, during the funeral prayers one of the monks touches the sacred gender non-conforming body of Marinos and is said to have been healed from his blindness. And so today, Marinos is recognized as a saint by the Orthodox, Catholic, and Episcopal Churches. His saint day in the Catholic Church is June 18^th, just this past week, though these institutions often call him by his initial name – what some might call his dead name – and refer to him by feminine pronouns. But not all Christians and Christian churches do. For some, for me, Marinos is venerated as the patron saint of trans people, and of transgender parenting. He is venerated as Father Marinos.  

This is an old story, not a modern one. Because we queers have always been here, Beloved.

(And yes, I saw “we” because I identify as queer myself, for among several reasons the fact that I’ve loved and had long-term relationships with women).

We have always had among our Christian tradition the gender non-conforming, diverse sexualities, gender expansiveness. We’ve had King David, whom the Bible tells us loved his male companion Jonathan more than any woman (2 Samuel 1:26). We’ve had Ruth and Naomi, who became each other’s chosen family, devoted only to each other (Ruth 1:16-17). We’ve had “eunuch” saints, gender non-conforming saints like Joan of Arc. And beyond the Christian tradition, still more: like the Two Spirit among the Indigenous community here on Turtle Island (North America), whose queer identity was often understood to be not a curse but a blessing – something offering them particular insight into the gender-full sacred, setting them apart to serve as spiritual leaders … that is, until colonialism and European culture arrived and imposed its more oppressive understanding of gender upon the Indigenous and their sacred Two Spirit people – a story you hear as well in Asia, in Africa, in so many other places where colonialism enforced heteronormativity and patriarchy that was legitimated by a particular interpretation of Christianity that ignored an obvious fact: we have always been there, always been here, and they are among our revered spiritual ancestors.

And of course we have been, because we were created by a primordial force that was gender expansive, and that created us in their image. A God who never stops pushing against the boundaries that oppress and confine. A God we can see at work in the life of Saint Marinos, and so many queer people – especially gender non-conforming and trans folk in our lives whose very being implodes the confining boundaries of beingness that the world imposes, expanding the borders of gender, calling us to think bigger, to grow our hearts bigger, to love bigger. As God always intended for us. As our faith is meant to do.

Act II: God was preparing us

Many years ago, when Black trans actress Laverne Cox first rose to fame and Time Magazine was declaring we had reached a tipping point of trans visibility, the Rev. Ben Guess – at the time an executive officer of the UCC — wrote something on his Facebook. He said: It feels like God has been preparing us for this time of consciousness about transgender experiences and identities. For decades, decades, in the UCC we’d been paying attention to pronouns. Informed by feminist and womanist thought in the 60s and 70s, we’d sought to understand how our exclusive use of masculine pronouns for God had undergirded patriarchal systems that devalue women and had limited our imagination and understanding of our God who is beyond gender, or who encompasses all genders. And so we got to work. We revised our liturgy and hymns. We wrote new prayers. We paid attention in our preaching to how we talked about God and God’s people – attending to our gendered language. It was awkward, this work of moving towards gender neutral or gender inclusive language. We fumbled, we messed up. We still do! Some resisted or refused to make these changes. And some still do! But over time, as a community, it became easier, even natural. We became more used to awkward language construction to avoid gender exclusive words for God and God’s people. And with it, our understanding of God expanded. Or maybe I’ll just speak for myself – my own understanding of God certainly grew. And my love for this God in whom I could better see my own being.

And so now, years later when my stepchild came out as non-binary, and their cousin has shifted between various gender identities in their journey of self-discovery, I had been prepared by God and this denomination. I was already conscious of pronouns, of gendered words and language. I was better able to meet these children in their journey of becoming their authentic self, with dignity, and I knew already the importance of doing so, why we do so. For liberation. For love. To understand God better and to orient ourselves to this mysterious, gender-full source of our being.

Similarly, as both children changed their names to better reflect their sense of who they were, to names they found more liberatory, more deeply soul-aligned… that too, God had prepared me for. From the Biblical stories of name changes we’ve heard already this summer and will continue to hear throughout our preaching series. From the stories of our saints and ancestors like Marinos. Beloved, God was preparing us all along for this era of growing trans and gender non-binary visibility, for this step in the greater unfolding of liberation for all God’s people. Without our even knowing, our Christian faith was being queered just as God had always intended – by inviting us to reject rigid binaries and marinate in the divine in-betweenness that does not conform to the ways of the world, to disrupt our easy assumptions, and by challenging us. By ensuring that our very language, our pronouns, the names we use, fuel love and dignity for all God’s people rather than harm and pain any of them. Thanks be to God for all She did, for all They did, to prepare us for this moment, and for this work.   

Act III: The work of God is not done

It is easy to be self-congratulatory. The UCC – Mayflower specifically – has a long history and commitment to queer rights. The UCC began ordaining out gay folx in the 1970s and recognized same sex marriage in 2006. Mayflower has been officially Open and Affirming to queer folx since 1992. Our clergy refused to sign marriage licenses until everyone in Minnesota could be married, and we were at the heart of passing marriage equality in this state!

We’ve long understood that what makes a sexual relationship sinful has nothing, nothing, to do with which genders are involved. What makes a sexual relationship sinful is the presence of violence, domineering power, abuse – something that can be found in straight and queer relationships alike. We know that.

This Pride Month, we should be proud. We have every right to be.

But friends, the work is not done. Our work is not done.  

The threat to queer rights at this moment is enormous, including here in our state. Even with our governor’s ban on book bans passed this year, with our declaration of Minnesota as a trans refuge state and the arrival of many displaced trans folk and families from elsewhere in the country – and as of a few months ago from the wider world. We still have work to do. The work of liberation is never done, the forces that threaten it are organized and unrelenting.

And this is a matter of life and death.

Need I remind you that kids who identify as LGBTQ+ are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers, with roughly half of transgender and gender non-binary youth seriously considering suicide – not because they are inherently more prone than any others, but because of how the world fails to treat them with dignity: to affirm who they are, to call them by their chosen names or recognize their gender, to support them in their journey of discovery about who God created them to be. And let me be clear: I don’t cast blame here on those who sometimes forget to say the right pronoun or name. It takes time and effort, we know this well. But I mean those who refuse to make the effort. And those powers and principalities seeking to wield state power to this end as well: to oppress gender queer kids. This kills kids, including here in Minnesota, and here in Minneapolis. We know this all to well, Mayflower.  

And, the anti-LGBTQI+ rights community has well laid plans. We know because they’ve made it clear: they seek to undo the advances made on queer rights over the past few decades, to eradicate government programs that support queer Americans. To eradicate US foreign programs that support sexual and gender minorities overseas. They unite with authoritarian leaders worldwide – Putin, Orbán, Modi – in this agenda. The threat is very real.  

So what will we do? What will you do?

I pray you do not stop. Do not stop listening to our still-speaking God and queering your faith – understanding how heteronormativity and patriarchy operate in insidious ways in our lives and world to distort love, fuel violence, and suffocate our imaginations. Queer your faith by celebrating love and diversity and subversiveness and the resisting joy found on the margins. I pray you keep working to protect our democracy and the rights of all vulnerable communities as we steadily are pulled toward a consequential election. I pray you remain awake and aware. Because our job is not done yet, and because God has prepared us for this moment.

Amen.

In the resistance is the joy (if you’re doing it right)

May 5, 2024
John 15: 9-18
Mayflower UCC
Rev. Susie Hayward

In the resistance is the joy (if you’re doing it right)

I want to tell you about a woman in Colombia, Sister Norma Ines Bernal. This is a woman I met over a decade ago, when Colombia was still mired in its longtime war with the leftist guerilla movement the FARC – with whom the government has since negotiated peace. And with the ELN, with whom it hasn’t. And a vast network of paramilitary criminal networks, the BACRIM, who wreak havoc across the country, often in collusion with private foreign corporations that terrorize local communities as they steal Colombia’s precious resources. Some five decades of unrelenting political violence that’s morphed into criminal violence, domestic violence, so much violence. And in this crucible, on the outskirts of Bogota in what some refer to as a slum, lived Sister Norma Ines, with a big laugh and a loud voice that seemed to carry the wind rather than be carried by it. Norma was unrelenting. She was insistent in her commitment to the good news, the power of peace. She refused to grant the upper hand to the powerful forces of violence, machismo, or exploitation in Colombia. Nor to the powerful forces of despair, fear, grief, and exhaustion they bred among her people.

Norma Ines, she would burst into any room, her voice high and singing, an uncontainable, unbelievable, against-all-odds joy and warmth and strength just busting out of her. Every email she sent me was written in all caps: yelling greetings and signing off with shouted abrazos. She – like so many other Colombian women whose peacebuilding work I supported during my tenure with the US Institute of Peace – worked hard. At our workshops in monastic settings in the hills, she was up before dawn, leading the charge to meet the rising sun with song. And every night, long after the sun went down, she’d be dancing – shaking her hips to Juanes and Shakira or slow dancing to cheesy Latin ballads with other Catholic sisters, a soft smile on her lips. And in between song and dance, the long strategizing sessions. Sleeves up, brow furrowed, map furled out in front of her, plotting the resistance to worldly forces of violence around her, plotting the nonviolent love revolution led by her Ecumenical Women’s Peacebuilding Network, GemPaz.

Sister Norma Ines died on April 22nd, from cancer. And so this sermon is my ode, offered in her honor.

And it’s an ode not just to Norma Ines, but to so many women – especially women of color – who have taught me what it means to resist violence with joy, to embody a good news gospel, to create heaven now rather than waiting until you’re dead, as the way to peace. This is an ode to Norma Ines in Colombia and to her co-conspirators Sister Maritze, who always carries candles in her purse in case of emergency ritual need, and to solemn, lovely, strong Jenny. This is an ode to Dishani in Sri Lanka with her big visions, who is able to challenge monks when no one else will; to spirited and confident Pastor Esther in Nigeria, and here in the US, this is an ode to Audre Lorde and Mahalia Jackson and Bree Newsome. And, finally, it’s an ode to Mary Magdalene, the first person to preach good news after Jesus’s death – who also happened to be a woman of color.

This is my ode to the joy that these women preached in word and action. A particular kind of joy. I think you know what I mean, Mayflower. Because I’m not talking here about the saccharine, indulgent, consumerized “joy” that is packaged and sold by Lululemon. It’s not the happiness promised to us by retail therapy, or perfect teeth, or fancy spa days. Nor is it the contentment promised by stress-based mindfulness meditation that is embraced by Google to help employees bear the brunt of capitalist grind. What I don’t mean is joy as means to endure violent systems that wear down and destroy our bodies and psyches and spirits and communities. A false joy that breeds complacency. The joy packaged and sold to you by the world as a means to pacify, or to make money. I mean something else.

Have you ever experienced the joy that comes from solidarity, resistance, struggle for justice? From linking arms with folks across generations and races – people you may have just met but with whom you have quickly become soul siblings in the struggle for love?

I have, sometimes in the darkest places. In 2017, I was in Charlottesville, VA when heavily armed militia and white supremacists flooded the city. I was present in the immediate aftermath of the attack by car, as Heather Heyer took her last breaths. I heard, saw, and received forms of anti-women, anti-queer, antisemitic, racist insult slung like weapons by the white men gathered under neo-Nazi flags. I watched supremacists violently rush a line of our unarmed multifaith clergy who were singing, with locked arms, having gathered from across the country to stand in faithful witness against hate. That day – August 12, 2017 — I saw ugliness, hate, violence, and death – forces ever present in the world, and this country, ask any woman or person of color – but one that was unmasked and unleashed that day in full view, unapologetic.

And, would you believe me if I told you I also saw and experienced heaven that day in Charlottesville, and a deep joy that’s not happiness, but another quality altogether? It moved in the sanctuary where the clergy gathered with activists from Black Lives Matter and Standing Up for Racial Justice, in our safe spaces of refuge throughout the day where we sang, and prayed, where we read scripture that resonated so deeply it made me cry, where we checked in with each other and dared to laugh even in the midst of horror. I saw it in those resisting – those of all races, faiths, generations, genders, and sexualities – an Indigenous two-spirit elder who traveled from Tennessee, a New Jersey rabbinical student in kippa and tillit prayer shawl, Cornel West and Traci Blackmon, and so many Christian women in collars – gender non-conforming and cis, white, Black, queer, straight. And in our leader Rev. Sekou, with his long dreads and propensity – like Sister Norma — to break into song at any moment. Rev. Sekou who drew on a long history of showing up in the crucibles of violence – in Ferguson and Beirut and New Orleans post-Katrina — to lead nonviolent, compassion grounded, song-infused, movements of revolutionary love. In the resistance that day, I saw a glimpse of heaven: beloved community, mutual aid, collective care and liberation, solidarity, song, and a deep and abiding joy that stood in distinction from the hate and anger and violence we were confronting. That resisted it. That’s what I’m talking about, Mayflower. And that’s what Sister Norma Ines embodied in her work for just peace; the complete joy Jesus speaks of in the passage we read today, that comes from laying your life down for one another in love. Lululemon has no idea.

What Norma and so many other women peace activists have taught me, is this: there is a connection between resistance and joy, when both are truly of God, who is Love.

They’ve taught me that joy IS resistance against a world bent on destroying so much of what is good. Consider Mary Magdalene, the first follower of Jesus to experience joy and preach good news after his death. A woman trampled and battered by patriarchy and imperial violence in her own time and throughout the history of a certain stream of male-privileged Christian interpretation that has often downplayed her role as an apostle, sought to demean her by calling her a prostitute. Mary who stayed and watched as Jesus died, and to whom Jesus first appeared after his death. Mary, the first he instructed to go out and preach to others the good news – the joy — she experienced upon confronting the Risen One. And I think as well of the late great Black lesbian scholar Audre Lorde, who wrote about the capacity and urgent need for all people – women especially, but surely all oppressed groups – to mine through the layers of socially constructed barriers and socially inflicted despair to experience joy– one that she writes will make us “give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like [the] only alternative in our society” … that will “give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world.”[1] And so, a joy that the world does and should find dangerous. What good news is this that we might receive from these women – Mary and Audre and Norma – who do not claim such joy lightly – women who know precisely the enormity of violence and injustice that we defenders of Love are up against in this world? And who say and show nonetheless that joy is available and necessary, even in the midst of brokenness – just as we’re taught at the communion table. I believe these women when they preach joy.  

And they’ve taught me something else too. Joy is resistance… and resistance is joy, when it’s done right, when it reflects the ends we dream and yearn for. So – do we yearn for equity, love abiding, the marginalized centered, all peoples’ needs tended to, a world where hate in all its forms is eradicated? Well then, our activism must exorcise hate in all forms, it must center the marginalized, it must be love abiding. We cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, Audre Lorde reminds us.[2] This kind of resistance is love, linked arms, singing, dancing, in the face of hate, to fight back the forces trying to demean or destroy you, while in caring relationship with others, and it will give you an experience of heaven – the kindom already arriving among us. It will bring joy. We don’t experience this – or at least I have not — when our activism is rooted in self-righteousness, in hate, in any form of domination, in anything other than joy. That kind of activism is not sustainable, much less helpful in building just peace. Our efforts for just peace must reflect the ends we seek. And you’ll know it’s so when the activism brings joy, when it softens you rather than hardens you – carrying you out of hopelessness, and “inviting you into a world of our own remaking,” as Cole Arthur Riley describes it.[3] The kind that has nuns shaking their hips to Shakira late into the night, after a long day of advocating on the streets.  

A final word. This past week, I visited two encampments of student anti-war activists – one at the University of Minnesota and the other at Harvard. What I saw was very different from what the media has conveyed. I saw arts and crafts, mutual aid, low-key soccer, music, faculty on the outskirts providing accompaniment and witness, incredible diversity, much Jewish and Muslim religious expression, laughter, shared meals, spiritual chaplains on call, community guidelines banning discrimination, hate, alcohol or drugs. I saw an image of what the Holy Land could be, Muslims and Arab Christians and Jews coming together, with others, in a shared space declared off limits to violence and hate, accountable to and protecting one another. I know some of the students involved in these actions, some of those at Harvard are my former students; I know they are learning along the way about how to protest, to resist, in ways that do not drive hate, nor reinforce binary, simplistic narratives. They are not perfect – what movement ever has been? But they are seeking to create in those spaces of resistance to war and occupation the kind of beloved community they envision for the world, a space of community care and solidarity, of constant learning and unlearning, of play and joy and ideals of justice and peace for all, even as they are demonized by the media and politicians and university administrators, even as they face the threat – and in some cases the reality — of state violence and incarceration. The majority of these students — they are glimpsing something of what it means to experience the joy of laying your life down for your friends (and, they are learning something of what Jesus meant when he said the world will hate them for it).  

Thanks be to God for the fruit that endures – the lessons taught to us by prophets, activists, all the Normas who’ve been, who are, and who will be. Thanks be to God for the joy that sustains and that transforms us and the world.

Amen

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[1] Audre Lorde. “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, Berkley, CA, 2007) xx.

[2] Audre Lorde. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Ibid.

[3] Cole Arthur Riley. Black Liturgies: prayers, poems, and meditations for staying human (New York: Convergent Press, 2024) 164.

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The Language of Land, part ii

April 7, 2024
Genesis 2:8-9; Exodus 3:1-5
Mayflower UCC
Rev. Susie Hayward

The Language of Land

Have rocks ever spoken to you? Or a river? A bush or tree? What kind of wisdom did you receive and where did it land? Was it a knowing beyond human intellect, somewhere deep in elemental self? In bones that share the same substance of the land around you? In your bodies made of stardust and water that have been repurposed and recycled across eons until the entire universe is a part of you, and you it, everything, life, connected and inter-dependent?  

As some of you know, I’m an outdoorsy girl. I cut my teeth paddling the Boundary Waters every summer growing up, and then graduated to 30 and 40 day whitewater river canoe trips in very rural Canada by my late teens (fun fact: those long trips were led by Jim and Ginger Bush’s daughter Carrie and Mary Keepers’ daughter-in-law Cheri). On those trips, I learned to read the natural world around me: to know that wispy clouds on the horizon and a west wind meant a storm would arrive the next day. Or, to look at a stretch of river and know from the eddies and spits what lay beneath the surface. In college, I discovered backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, and then moved on to peaks and forests around-the-world. One of the great joys of moving back to Minnesota after 25 years away is being near to the Boundary Waters again and introducing that holy land to my stepkid – to the call of the loon cutting through morning mist, the velvet coolness of deep waters in glacier-cut lakes, the tartness of young blueberries, the many smells of pine.   

There is something essential that happens for me when I’ve stripped myself of the human-produced world and all its technologies to go off-grid. Many of you here know. Spend enough time out there in the wilderness with all your senses engaged – shinrin-yoku or “forest bathing,” as the Japanese call it — and pretty soon, you click into the register of the earth. She is always singing, though we often don’t hear it between the grocery shopping and grant writing and bill paying and cancer treating and meal making and, well, modern life having. This song the earth sings, it is scripture, just as surely as anything found in our Bible. And it speaks to many of the same things our stories from scripture do: of the miracle and glory of life, of our utter dependency on all of creation to exist, of the reality of both suffering and death and of resilience and persistence of life, even in the places we thought dead. Thanks be to God for our interpreters of earth scripture – the poets like Mary Oliver and Rumi and Wendell Berry and Basho who preach the gospel according to Mama Earth to help us hear her song even in the midst of our on-the-grid grind.

Today we come together for worship in the festal Christian season of Eastertide. I’ve another fun fact for you (I love fun facts – that’s a bonus third fun fact!): this season of Eastertide used to be just 40 days long, mirroring Lent. But in the twentieth century, the boundary of Eastertide was stretched another ten days, to a total of 50, extending our celebration of the mysterious good news we received last Sunday, letting our freedom-from-the-tomb, dancing in the streets party go on just a little longer than our Lenten fasting did. Work hard, play harder. That was the idea.

But it was done for another reason too: 50 days approximates 1/7 of the calendar year. 1/7, as in the equivalent of one day. Not just any day, but a sabbath day. The idea was that this entire season of Eastertide was meant to be an experience of good news, risen-ness, sabbath – a time of living in another dimension – one in which all the work of creating — or producing — is completed, your to do list done. One in which all people are free, and as the late great Rabbi Abraham Heschel put it: “a dimension in which the human is at home with the divine.”[1] Sounds like Eden to me.

But I’m not done yet, folks. Because not only are we in the sabbath season of Eastertide, but we are currently in what’s known as the Octave of Easter – the eight days following Easter that are meant to be experienced as an extended sabbath. A whole week of Eden. And then finally, of course, today is Sunday, the Christian sabbath day. So, to summarize, today marked in sacred time is a sabbath day in a sabbath week in a sabbath season. If ever there was a day for indulgence, for naps, for forest bathing, today is it.

But even as we take our orders from the architects of the liturgical calendar to celebrate an extended sabbath, I want to look back briefly at the season we just came out of – Lent. During those forty days, we heard two themes in our worship and small group gatherings here at Mayflower: one of wilderness-wandering – in recognition of the critical role Jesus’s own desert walkabout – his time connecting with holy land — played in his spiritual formation — and the other of spiritual discernment – the careful work of listening to others and to the Great Other as part of our church life and decision-making. The calendar has pulled us forward now, the Lenten small groups have ended … but as we enter into a season that recognizes sabbath play and rest, and into Earth Month – another holy season at Mayflower we will celebrate at our Earth Day worship on April 21 — I want to pause at the threshold between seasons, to appreciate the confluence of all these themes: wilderness wandering, spiritual discernment, sabbath, earth care. How might these currents come together at this moment?

I wonder if emerging from this confluence is a call for us to disconnect from the grid, and to listen to what the land has to say to us, if we have ears to hear it. Scripture tells us that trees hold knowledge about life, about what is good and what isn’t. Scripture tells us that God speaks to us through bushes. Has the land ever spoken to you? What knowledge did it share?

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, which I suspect more than a few of you have read, you may recall that Robin Kimmerer writes that many Indigenous creation stories, including that of her Patowatomi people, share with Christianity and Darwinism an understanding that humans were the last to arrive on the earth. But for many Native storytellers, that doesn’t mean humans are the pinnacle of creation. Rather, as the last on the scene, humans are understood to be the youngest species in the created order. As such, humans are the ones most in need of listening to our elders: the non-human animals, the plants, the land itself – all of whom have been on the earth far longer and have greater wisdom to offer us about how to exist in healthy, reciprocal relationship with it.[2]

How profound a shift this way of understanding humans’ place in the created order! In so many ways. Not just in how we think of animals and plants as our teachers, but of the land itself – the lakes and rivers and rocks. They are knowledge bearers. They have seen some things, have stories to share. They are alive. And we need their wisdom now, more than ever, as we face climate crisis because of our juvenile human hubris.

What could be the consequences of this shift in human self-understanding? Many. First, it calls us to reconsider our own language about land – away from a thing to be owned. For nothing which is living can be owned, our liberatory God reminds us.

Perhaps you’ve heard, there is a global movement afoot to grant legal protection to the natural order – to ecosystems and species – recognizing them as living entities deserving protection. In the human-centric language our law operates in, this is sometimes framed as granting rights of personhood to the non-human, living world. I have to admit that as a longtime human rights activist, it’s a framework I’m still adjusting to – extend personhood rights to non-human entities? Not just non-human animals, that I get, but to the Great Salt Lake? To Lake Superior, Gitche Gumie?

The unimaginative, ungenerous, human-centric voice in me frets this could mean less protection for humans who are suffering now – in Gaza, in Yemen, in Haiti. But then God speaks as if from a bush, reminding me that love is not zero-sum. And surely, if our courts can grant personhood rights to corporations, as the Supreme Court did in 2010, then they can do so to lakes.

These “Rights of Nature” laws have been passed in several municipal governments across the US, in Ugandan and Bolivian national laws. In Ecuador, they’ve been integrated into the constitution itself. The United Church of Christ’s national body passed a resolution in 2021 recognizing the Rights of Nature, calling on its members to advance their cause.[3]

We have an opportunity to do so here in Minnesota. In 2018, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe tribal government passed legislation to grant legal status to manoomin – wild rice, sacred and central to the Anishinaabe people – recognizing its right to exist and flourish, which requires a healthy natural environment and clean water. Perhaps you know of this, as it was part of the struggle against Line 3 in which many of you participated. Now, there is a move to pass a law recognizing the rights of manoomin in the Minnesota state legislature. It is bold. Precisely what we need right now. Bold solutions to defend the life of land and water. There is work here that we may want to step into, Mayflower, as part of our long tradition and commitment to climate care and justice, and as part of our reparative work with Indigenous communities.

But let’s not jump to that yet. After all, we’ve just entered sabbath season. What better time to pause, and to go for a walk? Or a paddle? Because how can we know how to struggle well for the land if we’re not listening to her speak in her own language, following her lead, nurturing our connection with her? For many of us, this land here in Mni Sota Makoce may not be land we are indigenous to, but it is the land we are now in relationship with. I will share what an Indigenous elder once instructed me when I asked him how to integrate authentic land-based spiritual practices into my life, given my disconnection to the land-based Celtic practices of my ancestors, which were designed for land on a different continent, given I did not want to appropriate the land-based practices of the Dakota and Anishaanabe people. He said: “you have to develop your own land-based spiritual practices, ones that make sense for you and for the land you’re in relationship with now. And the only way to do that authentically is to spend time with the land, connect with the land. She will tell you what to do.”

So it goes for spiritual practices and the work of justice – so it goes for all the decisions that lie before us as individuals and as a church, all the time. Listen deeply, with that God-listening heart of yours, to what others say, to what God says, and to what the land says, what the creek and rivers and lakes around you say. Integrate that into your spiritual practices, your justice work, your reconciling work, your daily work of existing, on and off the grid.

Because we were made to live in deep connection to and with our all our relatives (mitakuye owasin, as the Dakota say), including the land, all of which is holy. We are literally made of and for each other. That relationship has been broken in so many ways, or made more difficult by modern life. But it’s not too late. She is calling to you, always. And when Mom calls, Beloved, you better answer.

Amen

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[1] Heschel, Abraham. The Sabbath (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) 16.

[2] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. (Minneapolis, Minnesota, Milkweed, 2013) 9-10.

[3] “WHO WILL SPEAK FOR THE TREES?” A RESOLUTION ON THE RIGHTS OF NATURE – United Church of Christ (ucc.org)

A Story About Us

Note: in February 2024, I began a new position as Associate Minister of Justice Organizing and Adult Faith Formation at Mayflower UCC in South Minneapolis. Mayflower is a vibrant, large UCC church (approx. 800 members) with a long and robust history of active organizing for the sake of justice. I support their seven designated justice teams (immigrant, climate, global, housing, etc.), develop adult education programs, and design and help lead worship. This has been a wonderful re-entry into Minneapolis, my hometown, after twenty-five years living on the East Coast.

Below is the first sermon I preached at Mayflower, on Palm Passion Sunday 2024. Video of my sermon can be found here.

March 24, 2024
Palm Passion Sunday
Mayflower UCC
Rev. Susie Hayward
Texts: Mark 11:1-3, 7-10; Luke 19:41-42; Mark 11:15-17

Twenty-five years ago, I spent six months living in Kathmandu, Nepal, studying Buddhism. I was in college, majoring in Religion. I had chosen to study in Nepal because after sitting in classrooms learning about Buddhism by reading complex philosophical theories written by third century Indian ascetics, I was skeptical that I had learned anything about Buddhism as it’s actually lived and practiced. And so, I packed a bag and shipped myself to Nepal, where I lived in a neighborhood of Tibetans in exile whose life revolved around a large, pot-bellied Buddhist stupa they circled daily while they murmured mantras, lit candles, and gossiped. I had gone to study and practice Buddhism among these Tibetans, but I found pretty quickly a lot of religions in the Kathmandu soup – Hinduism, the indigenous Bon-po tradition, Christianity, Sikhism. Nepal was an amazing place to study religion because it was everywhere – on street corners, on altars in the internet shop where I checked my email, in the middle of chaotic rotaries, nestled into the crevasses of mountains on hikes through the Himalayas.

But by far, the best was religious holidays. Because on those days – often when a sacred statue would be taken out of its enclosure in a temple and paraded on the street – everyone, and I mean everyone would come out. It didn’t matter which religion that statue was claimed by, if there was a religious street party, people were coming. The figure of the Boddhisattva Tara or the elephant god Ganesha or the Virgin Mary would be held aloft by a bunch of folks in the center of a swarm, as everyone cheered and roared, laughed and sang, as the stray dogs darted around our feet chasing the food bumped from our hands. Those in the center of the throng, the ones holding up the statue, were sometimes drunk – usually drunk — and so the statue they held up would inevitably sway back and forth unsteadily like a kid crowd surfing at a punk rock concert. But somehow, miraculously, it stayed aloft.

I think of those scenes, that feeling of being carried along in a raucous, heaving crowd for a ritual gathering that is holy and otherworldly but also very worldly and sweaty and smelly, every time Palm Sunday rolls around again. Those wild religious street parties in Kathmandu took place in the face of a rising Maoist insurgency in the hillside that was displacing thousands into Kathmandu. They took place among the reality of many Tibetans living in political exile, some recovering from political imprisonment and torture. They took place in the face of fairly extreme poverty in a small country caught between the geopolitics of its powerful neighbors India and China. And every time, they were a reminder that those challenging worldly realities the community was navigating weren’t the whole story. There was always another, bigger story about the divine being told simultaneously that we could participate in… ideally with rainbow colored powder and curry dumplings.

This story of Jesus entering Jerusalem holds similarities, but also many differences. It was a time of religious holiday, Passover – the most high holiday of the year — when many pilgrims would travel to Jerusalem to commemorate their ancestors’ liberation from enslavement in Egypt. And these were also a people subject to the power of a foreign force – in this case, the Roman Empire who ruled. Meaning, the Passover celebration of liberation occurred in a context of military occupation. Rome recognized the threat inherent to their occupied people throwing a freedom party, and so every year at Passover, Rome sent its own people to Jerusalem to display its military power, reminding the Jews of their place and not to get any ideas. But Jesus, our Jewish teacher, he was full of ideas – precisely those liberatory ideas Rome found threatening. Ideas about releasing captives and justice for the oppressed. And riding into the city on a colt among campesinos and fishermen and tax collectors and sex-workers and sick folks and immigrants and children – all waving palms – he bore this message to imperial, violent Rome; just as he bears this message for us, today.

Us, here, citizens of the world’s biggest superpower, the modern economic and military empire of the world. Us, the modern-day citizens of Rome.

Beloved, as we begin this most holy of weeks in our liturgical year, I must say a word about what is taking place in Gaza, and in the wider holy land, the setting for our holy week story that begins today. The land where Jesus himself lived as a brown-skinned Jew under occupation, taught, and was killed by the machinery of Rome. Believe me, the Israeli-Palestinian so-called “conflict” would not have been my choice of topic for the first time preaching to a new community. We are only just getting to know each other, to trust each other. This topic is so complex, so raw. Couldn’t I just speak about something easy, like climate or queer justice? But to hear the scriptures read today and not speak to the awful violence taking place in Gaza, much of it funded by our own tax dollars as citizens of Rome, it would be a dereliction of my vows as a minister ordained by the people to preach the message of Jesus.

And what I have to say is this, clearly and plainly: what is happening to the people of Gaza right now is an abomination and it must end immediately and completely. Over 32,000 people killed, at least 70% of them children and women.[1] 13,500 children, dead.[2] 80% of the population displaced.[3] Homes, mosques and churches, hospitals, universities, decimated by military assault, all of which constitute war crimes by international law. Thousands of children orphaned or forced to have limbs amputated without anesthesia. Life-saving medical aid, food, and other supplies not getting to the people who need it. Dire warnings about imminent famine by world bodies and experts.[4] All this to a people who are stateless, who’ve been subjected to military occupation for 60 years and a blockade for 18, without freedom of movement and many other rights that would come with citizenship, thousands detained without charges, now trapped under relentless bombing and unable to find safe shelter. Now dying of hunger and malnourishment, or shot and killed when they swarm the few food aid trucks that get in. A people subjected to five months of carpet bombing on a tiny strip of land that represents one of the most densely populated places on earth, at a rate of death and destruction not seen since the Vietnam War.[5] A people being killed relentlessly by bombs made in the USA, largely funded by our tax dollars – 14.5 billion of them sought by our President to support this military assault — in a campaign that has been able to continue because of US vetoes in the United Nations – at least until Friday when the US finally proposed a ceasefire resolution that Russia and China vetoed. This all should chill us to the core.

Beloved, I do not deny the broader situation in Israel and Palestine is complex. Those who seek to dismiss or deny the reality of the horrors Hamas inflicted on October 7^th against innocent Israeli citizens or of the antisemitism we’ve seen rise in the past five months – a venomous hate that has historically caused untold suffering to Jewish people before and after the founding of the modern state of Israel – do us, and the cause of peace, no justice. Antisemitism is a real and lethal threat in this world.

Christians have much to repent for in this regard. Our tradition has been complicit in driving antisemitism and anti-Jewishness. By how we talk pejoratively about the Hebrew Scriptures – or “old testament” – and the God described in them. By how we have historically described the events of holy week and the treatment of Jesus in his time, drawing from the language in our Christian scriptures. And still today, by how we all too often identify ourselves out of this story about who Jesus is confronting in ways that make us feel comfortable– not recognizing that these texts are not about some “them” – whether the Jews or Romans, or even conservative Christians or violent terrorist organizations. These stories are about us.

The truth is, as Americans, we are Rome. And, as followers of Jesus, we are the Jewish people of these texts – all of them. Those precious few who defended Jesus and the many more who condemned or abandoned Jesus when things got nasty and complicated and unsafe. Even more so we are the overwhelming silent majority in the story who stayed away because they were afraid, or didn’t want to offend, or thought what was going on wasn’t about them.

This story of Palm Passion Sunday is about us.

And, this story of Israel and Palestine, Gaza specifically, it’s about us too, as both Americans and Christians.

And I believe this year in particular, Jesus is confronting us.

So what will we do? How will we respond?

I pray that we listen to Jesus and follow his lead. Listen in a few days to what he says about those who live by the sword. And just as Jesus served as both pastor and prophet, I pray we hold – deeply hold – the anguish of all those connected to our holy land – both our Jewish and Muslim neighbors, the trauma experienced by both Israelis and Palestinians over time – without letting pastoral compassion supplant the prophetic call to speak out in defense of the oppressed. I have faith that through following the example of Jesus we can do what may sound impossible: we can recognize the vast power differences in Israel and occupied Palestinian territories and speak for the systematically oppressed without demonizing the oppressor nor dismissing Jewish vulnerability in this world. We can condemn hate and violence in all its forms, as Jesus did – rejecting the claim that to criticize violent Israeli state action is antisemitic or that naming and criticizing Hamas violence sets back the cause of Palestinian liberation. We can recognize that Palestinian and Jewish liberation is bound up together and work for a future when both can share the land – and the world — safely and freely.

We must. Because what’s happening in Gaza is not just about Palestinians and Israelis, it’s about us, too. It is U.S. Christian ideologies that have offered justification for the ongoing displacement, occupation, and oppression of indigenous Arab Muslims and Christians and now the current atrocities taking place in Gaza. We must because US policy and billions of our own tax dollars every year have fueled the cycles of violence on the holy land and in the broader Middle East, without securing safety for Israelis, much less Palestinians. We must in keeping with the reckoning sparked at 38^th and Chicago [George Floyd Square] that calls us to account for the persistent violence seeped into so many of our systems that harms brown and black bodies disproportionately — here in the US and outside our borders. We must because the gospel tells us that violence and war will never, never solve our problems, particularly our must complex and protracted ones.

We must because Love demands it of us, even as He walks toward his own death this week.

Praise be the one who comes in the name of peace, who calls us to see the things that make for peace. Will you follow him into Jerusalem? Into DC? Calling for war no more, a permanent ceasefire, the release of all hostages and captives, comfort for the grieving, food for the hungry, healing for the sick and injured, liberation for allthe oppressed and the occupied, security for all the vulnerable so that the temple of the holy land might become a place for all nations. And then will you do the work to make it so? Put your body on the line for it, like Jesus? It is not as easy as it sounds, friends. This is a path that will ask things of you that are hard, and a faith in the nonviolent path to justice that many – on all sides — will say is naive. But it is a path that brings a reward beyond measure. Just wait, you’ll see.

Come and follow, Beloved.

Come and follow.

Amen.

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[1] National Public Radio. Gaza death toll surpasses 30,000 but it’s an incomplete count. February 29, 2024. link to NPR print and radio stories; France24. US and Israel hold tense talks as Gaza truce plan fails at UN. March 22, 2024. link to article on france24.com

[2] UNICEF. More than 13,000 Children Reported Dead in Gaza as Famine Nears. March 19, 2024. link to article on unicef.org

[3] CNN. More than 80% of Gazans have been displaced since Israeli-Hamas war began, UN agency says. December 4, 2023.  link to article on cnn.com

[4] The Guardian. We are about to witness in Gaza the most intense famine sine the second world war. Op-ed by Dr. Alex de Waal. March 21, 2024. link to article on Guardian.com. See also this article by the World Heath Organization.

[5] Meanwhile, in the West Bank, there has been a surge in civilian-led violence and military raids against Palestinians to displace them and the building of roads and illegal settlements since October 8^th, as attention is on Gaza. Wall Street Journal. Visual Evidence Shows Illegal Settler Construction in West Bank Surging. March 6, 2024. link to video journalism piece on wsj.com. see also: Reuters. Israeli forces kill 10 Palestinians in West Bank in 24 Hours, WAFA news agency says. March 21, 2024. link to article on reuters.com

Busyness

Tuesday Morning Eucharist
Harvard Divinity School
October 10, 2023 

Luke 10:38-42: Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village where a woman named Martha welcomed him. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks, so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her, then, to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things, but few things are needed—indeed only one. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” 

Twenty-five years ago, I piled into Mom’s Volvo station wagon and we drove from Minneapolis to Boston where she deposited me at the steps of Tufts to begin college. I was so eager to burst out of the Midwest and try something new, some place new, and Boston seemed like as good a place as any. I was treating it like a four-year study abroad until I inevitably settled down where I was meant to be: Portland, Oregon, with the other outdoorsy purple-haired misfits. But twenty-five years later, here I am, still on the easside, with blond highlights and a closet full of pant suits.  

There is so much I’ve loved about my time out here – the creative energy, the intellectualism, Boston Red Sox games, the awareness of events beyond our country’s borders, the ability to get someplace entirely new in just a two-hour drive, the salty bite of the sea air and the people. But being back in Minnesota for extended periods over the last few years, I’ve also come to appreciate how much of a toll some of those same things have taken. In particular, I’ve grown more skeptical of the culture of busyness that sometimes thrives here (though I hasten to add this cultural mode is certainly not exclusive to just the East Coast).  

On any given day, I ask a colleague how they are doing, and nine times out of ten they answer: busy. Maybe you experience the same thing. Over and over again we affirm our busyness to one another, often with a mix of pride and exhaustion, perhaps also as a defensive move to keep from being asked to do another thing.  

And it’s true, we are all busy with things that truly matter: caring for loved ones, cultivating our mind and body, tending to the urgent needs of the world. There is, objectively, so much to do. Always, maybe, but especially now as the world splinters and convulses around us in a million different ways, as news of the horrific torture and death of civilians by state and non-state actors in Palestine and Israel pours in, as the mercury rises, the number of world refugees rises, our blood pressure rises. These times are urgent ones and surely our God of Life and Love calls us to respond to them with our heart and our hands fully engaged. Yes, yes, absolutely.  

And yet, and yet, I wonder what deep stories are operating that feed a culture of busyness in ways that are not so godly. Like so many things, there is a tight line for us to walk along a double-edged sword: the times are urgent, and we must respond with urgency to the needs of the world – yes we must attend to what is happening in Palestine and Israel — but in these times we are called to something more than sheer busy work – called to something more than frenetic doing of what we deem to be Important Work (whether we consider it all in service to the Lord or not, whether we recognize some of it is in service to The Man).  

How do I know? Well, the Bible tells me so. Here, in Luke, with this story we know well of Martha darting around in service to the Lord while Mary sits still, listening to him. Martha, Jesus says. Martha. Stop. Just stop for a moment. And don’t consider yourself the important one because of all you are doing, because in the midst of your frenetic busyness you are missing something. You are missing an opportunity that is right in front of you to sit down, to sit still, and to be with God.  

I am so very guilty of succumbing to the toxicity of busy-ness. When I feel myself doing it, I don’t ask myself enough: why? Why must I do all the things? Sometimes, for me, it’s a way to keep ahead of hard feelings. If I sit still, the grief, the past traumas, the loneliness, the anxieties – those little demons catch up with me and steal my breath. Sometimes it’s based on self-importance: a narrative I tell myself that I’m necessary to keep trains running on time, or that I can put out the world’s fires if I do more, just do the right thing and quickly. Sometimes it’s based on insecurity: that if I’m not busy then it means I’m not wanted or liked, that I don’t matter. Maybe for you there are other deep stories you tell yourselves, or that the world tells you, for why you must do, do, do. What are they, for you? 

And what do we miss when we succumb to those stories? How often have I missed God in the midst of my busy-ness, even as I told myself I was serving Her? How often do we jump to react and to do something, without ensuring we’re going about it the right way, with others, in ways that are different and don’t just reproduce the harms we’re seeking to eradicate? I wonder, and I invite all of you here – all us hamsters running on the Harvard hamster wheel – to stop, with Martha, at the urging of Jesus, who was himself living during a time of unfolding crisis, to wonder as well.   

This is not a story about Harvard alone, of course. Nor about the East Coast alone.  Nor is this a story of modernity or capitalism or the Protestant work ethic or white supremacy culture alone. This is a story that rang true in ancient Israel, one that’s preserved in our sacred text precisely because it’s a story of human nature: that we come to believe our worth is about what we do rather than who we are.  

And who we are, is beloved of God. All of you. That is why you’re important, not because of your resume which frankly, Jesus could care less about. Stop for a moment, and take that in.  

Thanks be to God.  

When resurrection isn’t helpful

Harvard Divinity School
Tuesday Morning Eucharist Service
Sept 19, 2023

Lk 7:11-17: Soon afterward he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow, and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he was moved with compassion for her and said to her, “Do not cry.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stopped. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them, and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has visited his people!” This word about him spread throughout the whole of Judea and all the surrounding region.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more skeptical of the helpfulness of these resurrection stories in the gospel. This has nothing to do with whether I think resurrections happened around Jesus when he walked the earth – or whether they continue to happen, miraculously, around us all the time – whether in real life or metaphorically. Of that, I remain a believer. The resilience of life and spirit in the face of everything is incredible.

What I mean is that I’m skeptical of whether these resurrection stories are truly a comfort to the afflicted, the grieving, the lonely. I fear that all too often, they just piss those folks off; they break their already broken hearts. And as one who wants to ensure the stories we tell about God and the world help people to live well, justly, to live with hearts full and open, I wonder sometimes about who might be in the room when these resurrection stories are recounted … who might be aggrieved by them. And I wonder what that means we – as folks training to be better ministers to the grieving and oppressed — should do with them.  

For the moment here in Boston, as I make my transition to living full-time in Minneapolis beginning in November, I live with a widow and her son. We’ve prayed for Meena and Rajan as the TME community many times before. And a little over two years ago, we prayed together for Paul, Meena’s husband and Rajan’s father, as he was dying of colorectal cancer in the home where I now live with his beloved.

Meena is not comforted by passages like this one in Luke. She is not comforted by the idea of a God who resurrects some, but not others. Lazarus may live, this son may rise again, but Paul – her Paul — is still very much dead. She knows that he is not coming back, physically, anytime soon. She knows that, and I know that. And I can speak to her about how maybe for us living now the resurrections in the gospel are meant to be thought of metaphorically – like the ways in which Paul’s spirit remains very present, shaping Rajan as he grows, with Meena as she grieves. And yeah, that might be true. But let me tell you, that’s not a comfort to Meena when all she wants is Paul – bodily – here to hold her, talk with her, get excited like a little kid about some stupid thing and yap on incessantly while she’s trying to get something done, like he used to. Metaphorically alive Pauls aren’t able do these things. Metaphorically alive Paul is too ephemeral, too ghostly. And a future risen Paul is too far away.

So Meena hears this passage of Jesus raising a widow’s dead son back to life and thinks: well, that’s little comfort to me. In fact, it just makes me mad. It feels like a slap to my bruised heart. Nah, don’t tell me your miracle stories of resurrected dead loved ones, she says.

Because too many in the last two years have done just that to Meena – priests and family members and good-intentioned friends who’ve told Meena that Paul lives on, that she’ll be reunited with him in heaven, that eternal life and resurrection are somehow, unbelievably, real. She doesn’t say it to them, but she thinks to herself, and later says to me: yeah, not helpful.

And I get it. In A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife, C.S. Lewis wrote: “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.” Even for a great Christian theologian like CS Lewis, the story of resurrection couldn’t offer any shortcut through his suffering. And maybe that’s the point worth taking – that resurrection stories aren’t meant to be a solace or a form of consolation to the grieving. That’s not their point, and we should be wary of using them that way.

***

But that’s not all that’s in this passage.

After reading it to Meena last week, she told me: I’d throw it all away, except for that one line. The line that describes how in the midst of his caravan of friends, Jesus, God, looked out and saw the grieving widow and felt compassion. That is something, Meena says to me.

So that’s where I’m at today with this passage, friends: reading it with Meena.  Today, at a time when I’m facing the decline of my own father, when I’m living with a newly widowed, don’t speak to me of resurrection. I don’t want to hear it. All I want to take from this passage is that one line, that one small detail that God sees us grieve and feels compassion. That is enough. For Meena, but also for me and maybe for you too, training to be ministers of the Word, pastoral caregivers, interpreters of meaning for those doggypaddling through some of the worst moments of their lives, trying to keep from drowning.

I am not God. I cannot raise Paul from the dead. But I can see Meena, and Kerry, and all those who lost loved ones. And I can feel compassion.

Is that enough? In all honesty, no. 

But it’s not nothing. It’s something.

Thanks be to God for the gift to see – and for the reminder to witness to – the grieving of those around us. Thanks be to God for the Love at the center of it all.

Amen.

Believe women

Tuesday Morning Eucharist
Harvard Divinity School
April 11th, 2023

John 20: 11-18: But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Aramaic,^[a] “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”—and that he had said these things to her.

Welcome to the festal season of Eastertide, friends. The 50-day period between Easter and Pentecost when we marinate in the mysterious good news we received several days ago, reveling in it, wrestling joyously with it, and just sitting in confounded delight in this happy warm broth, long enough to get pruney. As some of you may know, traditionally this season lasted only 40 days – that holy number of days the scriptures lead us to believe it takes for deep understandings to break through and real habits to form, whether on Mt Sinai, in Ninevah, in the wilderness, or in Lent.  

But in the twentieth century, the liturgical calendar was revised, extending Eastertide to 40 + 10 days: 50, approximately 1/7^th of the calendar year, making this season metaphorically represent the great seventh day – the great Sabbath – of the calendar year. The time when we rest and live as if the Messiah has arrived among us and made all things right. And moreover, we are now in the midst of the Octave of Easter – the 8 days from Easter onward that are celebrated as one Great Day – the Sabbath of Easter. Sabbath upon Sabbath, that’s where we sit right now in sacred time. Glory upon glory.

(and while I have you here, before I move on, an aside about the beauty of the liturgical calendar in the form of another fun fact: Good Friday takes place roughly nine months before Christmas – meaning that even as Jesus died at the end of last week, and laid in a dark tomb, he was already being conceived anew in the great, dark womb. The liturgical calendar, people. It’s a beautiful thing.)

And so given that today remains the Sabbath, it’s not surprising that our gospel passage has us still present in the empty tomb with Mary Magdalene, who comes to us weeping – distraught to believe that cruelty upon cruelty, not only has Jesus been killed but now they’ve stolen his body. Until, Christ calls her name – Mary – tenderly in a dark tomb, and understanding dawns – not an understanding that is intellectual or doctrinal, for Jesus does not explain anything to her as such – but rather a deep sense of understanding – an ineffable knowing — that comes through experience. A resurrection experience that stops Mary’s tears and clearly transforms her – for the Mary we were met with – a Mary immobilized by anguish and hopelessness — is not the Mary we are left with at the end of this passage. And then Jesus reminds her that his God is her God – is our God — and directs her to go out from the tomb and into the world.

Nearly two thousand years later, in 1980, in the midst of a period of intense persecution of peasants, human rights activists, and Mayan people in Guatemala, the poet Julia Esquival wrote a poem about death and resurrection. Speaking of the hundreds of thousands who’d been killed or disappeared by the Guatemalan junta, backed by the United States government, she penned this:

They have threatened us with Resurrection
because they are more alive than ever before,
because they transform our agonies
and fertilize our struggle,
because they pick us up when we fall,
because they loom like giants
before the crazed gorillas’ fear.

For Julia and her fellow people, as for Mary and hers, they have experienced the reality and the threat of death on an enormous scale – both of particular loved ones, fellow activists, but also of their community as a whole. And in the face of it, could we blame Mary or Julia if they settled into hopelessness and despair? If they gave up and gave in to the hellbent imperial forces of Rome or Guatemala? But they didn’t, because we are told, they had an experience of resurrection that stirred them. Because they came to understand that the ancestors, like our teacher Jesus, are not ever fully dead, but that they fertilize our struggle, more alive than ever before. Mary and Julia knew this not because they could explain its truth intellectually or scientifically, but because they experienced it from the midst of the tomb and thereby knew it to be true, going on to share it in proclamation and poem for us to receive. Praise be.

Might we believe these women – Mary of Magdalene, a woman trampled and battered by patriarchy and imperial and religious violence in her own time and throughout the history of a certain stream of male-privileged Christian interpretation that has often downplayed her role as an apostle and the one called by Jesus to serve as the first preacher of the good news – and Julia Esquival, a woman of an oppressed Mayan community that had experienced (and continues to experience!) extreme levels of violence, a prolonged and systemic genocide across centuries… Might we believe them when they tell us not to despair? That those who died are not truly, fully dead but are with us in the struggle? What good news is this, from two women who do not claim such hope lightly – two women who know precisely the enormity of what they were up against, who in a worldly sense lacked the power to defeat empires, who in a worldly sense were vulnerable and marginalized. These women, whose descendants persist, and who are themselves not dead yet precisely because they are still speaking to us of resurrection, here and now, in this place in Swartz Hall. And I believe them.

I pray that we linger there today, in this Sabbath week in a Sabbath season. That we forgo any attempt to intellectualize or theologize the resurrection, despite our inclination as students of divinity to do so. In this 50-day Eastertide season – occurring in a Good Friday world where gun violence and racism and climate collapse can feel unstoppable — I pray that we might seek rather to hear God call our name and experience this resurrection truth ourselves: so that we might know, deeply, truly, despite what the mathematic odds or our pessimistic rationale might tell us, that in the end, Love will always win, not death – and that it might stir us, like it did Mary and Julia, to go out into this grief-filled world and keep doing the work to make it so.

Amen

Preparing for a treatment

HDS Tuesday Morning Eucharist 
March 28, 2023 

Nm 21:4-9
From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom, but the people became discouraged on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze and put it upon a pole, and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

Jn 8:21-30 
Again he said to them, “I am going away, and you will search for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going, you cannot come.” Then the Jews said, “Is he going to kill himself? Is that what he means by saying, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’?” He said to them, “You are from below, I am from above; you are from this world, I am not from this world. I told you that you would die in your sins, for you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he.” They said to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, “Why do I speak to you at all? I have much to say about you and much to condemn, but the one who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him.” They did not understand that he was speaking to them about the Father. So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he and that I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me. And the one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what is pleasing to him.” As he was saying these things, many believed in him.

***

I swear, y’all, there’s not a group I love more in the Bible than the grumbling Israelites wandering in the wilderness. I tell you, truly. This fickle group of toddlers in the backseat asking are we there yet, not listening when you tell them to pee before getting back in the car, fighting with their sister, saying they hate you and hate this road trip (completely forgetting they were bored out of their skulls back at home), being told to do something and then forgetting it immediately. Yessss! I love this bickering crowd that is sunburnt and tired with sore feet sick of walking toward an unknown destination who start wondering aloud if maybe it would have been better if they’d just been left back in Egypt. And, you know, I can love them easily precisely because I’m not Moses, their Mother Hen who has to deal with all their bickering, resolve fights, both cajole and console, all while keeping his eyes on the road. And I’m not God – the same God who in a fit of broken-heartedness last time I preached chose to wipe out nearly the entire human race with a flood – and who reminds the grumpy Israelites now that it can always be worse – there could be poisonous snakes. It’s a great set up to make Moses look good when he prays for the people and God responds, ordering Moses to make a bronze serpent on a pole with the power to heal those who’ve been bitten, those who have taken in poison. Turns out God is into homeopathic treatments, the alternative system of healing that operates with the belief that a dose of the same thing that is making you ill can stimulate your immune response, and so bring healing. Treat like with like, God through Moses tells the Israelites: take look at this rendering of the source of your suffering and you shall live.  

Lest we need a reminder that the lectionary is not constructed randomly, we can note that there are a lot of echoes in these two passages from the Bible we read today – from the Hebrew Scriptures and John’s gospel. We jump forward in time from the Israelites in the wilderness and their snakes on a desert plain to the Mount of Olives, where these very human social patterns are still playing out – a Mother Hen named Jesus, a group of folks who don’t quite get it, and so God sending a harsh reminder – a horrible and hard truth… this time not in the form of snakes, but of a crucified teacher splayed on a cross, held up grotesquely before us to bring truth and so, perhaps counterintuitively, healing.  

Just as Jesus tells the crowd in this passage that this event will happen soon, so he tells us in the present moment. This will happen, soon. Good Friday is just around the corner, when we’ll relive it all alongside those disciples and fellow toddlers on this road trip of life. We’ll read about the One we love being lifted up on a cross to die slowly before us and we will be asked to behold. And we must, because it is in the not looking away, in watching like those female disciples at the foot of the cross, that we shall live.  

Will we look? And if we do, will we understand?  

You can’t get to Easter – to the good news –without going through Good Friday. You must take in the hard truth that is revealed on that day, both about who Jesus is, but even more so about who we are – those who would crucify God if he were standing right in front of us. Like that snake that is the source of both pain and deliverance – in looking upon the cross and the truth it reveals we behold our failings and our sin – the truth that our sin is the source of our suffering and the world’s suffering. It’s a bitter medicine to take, a hard pill to swallow, but most treatments for disease are. And it is precisely in taking this medicine in that we can achieve healing – that we can truly hear the Easter message that Love will not be destroyed despite our best efforts, and that ultimately, “every little manner of thing shall be well” (Julian of Norwich).   

In these coming ten days, between now and then, a great deal more will happen in Jerusalem – as Jesus processes in on a donkey, and celebrates Passover with his disciples in the upper room, as he prays in the garden of Gethsemane and pleads with his friends to stay awake with him. And here in this millennia, over these next ten days we’ll hear this familiar, ancient story in the midst of an insanely busy season at this school – between completing work assignments, attending events, complaining about the rollercoaster weather, planting seedlings indoors, leaving behind women’s history month and entering into earth month, and, of course, during a time when we’ll have the cosmic alignment of the Islamic, Christian, and Jewish holidays of Passover, Holy Week, and Ramadan. It’s a full time. And it’s an easy time to let yourself get distracted with busy-ness, to put your head down, to keep barreling along.  

Maybe… don’t do that, our scriptures remind us today.  

Because it’s coming.  

Will you take your medicine?  

Will you look up? 

Amen 

The cost of love

Tuesday Morning Eucharist
Harvard Divinity School
Feb 14, 2023

Gen. 6:5-8; 7:1-5, 10: The Lord saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the humans I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air—for I am sorry that I have made them.”  But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord. Then the Lord said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation.  Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and its mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and its mate;  and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth.  For in seven days I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.”  And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him. And after seven days the waters of the flood came on the earth.

In her book See No Stranger, HDS alumna Valarie Kaur writes that “the cost of love is grief.” You cannot love without getting your heart broken, that’s just the way it is. And that’s true even for God, as today’s passage from the Hebrew Scriptures say, who upon looking out upon humanity, sees the harm humans cause themselves, others, and all that God created and called good, and the Great Parent who birthed it all – They grieve. I guess not even omnipotence can immunize One from a broken heart.

What better day than Valentine’s Day to meditate on broken hearts, eh friends? Sorry, Hallmark.

No, but seriously, what better day than Valentine’s Day to meditate on broken hearts? And what better place than a Eucharist service, at which we break a consecrated bread that represents the body of a Love incarnate who walked on this earth and among people and powers who tried to break him forever, who tried to destroy the beating heart of Love itself.

Recently, my partner’s 12-year-old kid, Wren, got their first girlfriend. They were so excited, y’all. Literally floating. And then, a week later, they got their first experience of being dumped by a girlfriend. They saw it coming. We were all three of us far away from home, on vacation in Colombia, and they got a text from Kai that read: don’t be mad at me. And Wren threw their phone down on the bed and walked over to where Nick and I were sitting and said to us: I think I’m about to be dumped. I looked at them and saw their dread manifesting, that look of helplessness as you see the grief coming at you like a freight train and you just want to make it stop, to make what’s happening not happen. But you can’t. Three hearts were sinking in that room. And as I looked at Wren standing there paralyzed, not wanting to go back to their phone, I thought back to a few days earlier – just a couple days after Kai told Wren she liked them — when we’d been driving at night on a sketchy dirt road in the mountains, and I asked Wren if they were scared and they replied: “Maybe a little. I just don’t want to die because, I mean, life was just starting to get good.” We didn’t fall off the cliff that night, but they sure were standing at a precipice of another one now.

Viewer, they went back to look at their phone. And yes, Kai dumped them (at least for now, but let me tell you 7^th grade romance drama is a rollercoaster and they may be back together again now; it’s unclear; I can’t keep up. I’m so glad I’m not 12 anymore).

Of course, heartbreak from a whirlwind 7^th grade weeklong romance is one thing, and heartbreak from watching a loved one die from cancer, or discovering your partner has betrayed you, or from witnessing untold suffering from an earthquake in Turkey and Syria, or hearing that 22 animals went extinct in 2021, or from losing a child… that kind of heartbreak is another … Or is it? I don’t know. The depth, how long the heart aches, how much it transforms us, yes, maybe, sure, but in other ways, I know from the millions of ways my own heart has been broken that heart break is heart break. Every time. It just sucks – it steals your breath, makes you feel angry and wild, makes it feel like the waters of a cataclysmic flood are rising that could destroy you and your entire world.

Speaking of.

As it goes with Wren, so it goes with God. At least, that’s what I’m reading in this well-trod scripture passage from Genesis on this Valentine’s Day: a story not about cute animal pairs, nor genocide and destruction, nor about the resilience of humanity and rainbows – not those stories today. Today the truth I’m hearing sing out from the text is about love and the broken heart that inevitably accompanies it and the choice before God and all of us to keep choosing to love again, even knowing what grief will come.

Because look at our main protagonist here – not Noah, but God — who looks out on humanity, has Their heart broken, and then does something so human – something I recognize too well. God goes a little wild with grief, and makes a decision in the midst of that hurt that is not based on love, but on grief: to shut it all down, to make it stop, make it go away, to wish They’d never created and fallen in love with this human race to begin with. A decision to protect themselves by rejecting the love that made them feel this way. God throws their cell phone down on the bed and gets as far from it as They can. Because in that moment, the cost of loving these complicated, sometimes sweet but far too often salty, wayward humans is too high. They’d rather just flood it all to oblivion.  

But of course, the story doesn’t end there. We know where this story goes after the piece of it we read today. A change of divine heart, a promise never to destroy humanity by flood again, a rainbow, and the flourishing of a resilient creation. Maybe what happened here is that God realized there is no way to Love and to be loved and to protect oneself simultaneously. A divine blink of the eye later, and Jesus himself will love and be broken by it – at least for a time. Maybe to show us that the kind of Love that is sacred – the kind of love that can transform the world and bring life from death – you can’t have it without being vulnerable, without heartbreak. And still, it’s so worth it, all of it — every lovely and excruciating bit of it, glorious.

Thank God.

& Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.

Amen.