Which I am doing both physically and over here on the internets.
I’ve been writing online for over 20 years, and it’s always been public and free. But the internet has changed, and so have I. Over the last year, *circumstances* led me to make this entire blog private and unavailable. And, I’m moving into a weird mid-life transition where my writing is paying (some of) the bills. If you’ve been one of my loyal readers, I hope you’ll follow me over to Substack, where some of what I write will be free and public and some of what I write will be behind a paywall, for subscribers only. You can click the link below to my first Substack post and hit the “subscribe” button at the bottom of the page.
Thanks for spending so much of your time and attention with my words over these last decades.
This is my last sermon with Peace Covenant Church of the Brethren, a tiny, mighty, informal but competent, unity-over-uniformity congregation that I’ve been honored to love for nearly 8 years.
October 1, 2023
Here’s one of my favorite Peace Covenant stories:
The story of the apple butter kettle.
Sometime in 2018, I think, we discovered that our apple butter kettle had gone missing. If you’ve never seen an apple butter kettle, you might not know what an absurd statement that is. Making apple butter is a long-standing tradition among the Brethren in this part of the world. When I grew up, the entire congregation sat aside a whole weekend in the fall to make apple butter together: peeling, coring, slicing, cooking the apples, then spending 8-12 hours slowly, constantly stirring all that applesauce and tons of sugar and spices in gigantic, 40 gallon copper kettles, over an open fire.
(that’s my grandma JoJo stirring some figure 8s at First CoB in Roanoke, VA)
Peace Covenant inherited one of those kettles from another church, and had made apple butter here, several times. The kettle, which was not small and was not light, was stored in the shed out back. But sometime in 2018, I think, the kettle went…missing.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an apple butter kettle to know how hard it would be for one to go missing ANYWHERE, but you’re here, in our tiny building, so you definitely know how hard it would be to lose something of that size and weight on this property. We didn’t even have to search – the kettle was just…gone.
Which meant, we assumed, that someone had discovered it and carefully planned a way to steal it. Seriously, you’d have to bring a big ol’ pickup truck and several strong people to heft it up and out. For the copper, we guessed. It was kind of a big loss, in some ways, not only because the actual kettle was probably worth some money, but also because it was unlikely that we’d find and secure and transport and store another one.
But. When we shared the news of the stolen apple butter kettle at the next Coordinating Council meeting, the entire table sat quietly, digesting the news. No one said a word. And then Nancy Hillsman, in her sardonic way, simply said, “well, I guess they needed it more than we did.”
And we simply moved on. No one ever mentioned the apple butter kettle again.
//
These last few weeks, I’ve been sharing lessons I’ve learned from Peace Covenant over the last almost-8 years. Peace Covenant has taught me that tiny is mighty, that churches can be both informal and competent, and that it’s possible to value unity over uniformity. Another thing I’ve learned from Peace Covenant is the value of what I once heard called “traditioned innovation.”
That phrase comes from the former dean of Duke Divinity School, Greg Jones. I came here to Durham in 2010 to be part of a program through Duke for church leaders, where we learned about traditioned innovation. The idea is a way of thinking that holds the past and the future in tension, not in opposition, and is crucial for any kind of growth. It is a way of existing that takes the past and its traditions seriously while also being radically open to the new possibilities that God is calling us into.
During the months that I spent in the program, we learned about innovation by doing things like practicing improv comedy and hanging out with the Duke jazz ensemble. We learned that the best actors and jazz musicians have the ability to create new scenes and rhythms exactly because they understand what has already happened and are exquisitely attuned to the people around them.
Traditioned innovation requires knowing not just what we DID, but WHY we did it. It is the antidote to the perennial complaint about change (especially in churches): “but we’ve ALWAYS done it that way!”
//
Jesus was the ultimate traditioned innovator. He knew the law backwards and forwards, but he knew, more than the letter of that law, the intention and meaning behind it. In his most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reminds all his followers, then and now, that he has come not to abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfill them.
But take one look at Jesus’ life as presented in the gospels and you’ll see pretty quickly that not everyone believed that he was honoring their traditions and practices. The Pharisees – teacher and scholars of the law – are CONSTANTLY critiquing Jesus for doing things wrong, breaking rules and instigating change.
Constantly. The religious leaders are NEVER painted in a good light in the gospels – they’re more concerned with the maintenance of an institution and rituals of worship than they are with following God’s clearest commands to love one another.
From the perspective of the religious leaders, Jesus did everything wrong: he hung out with the wrong people, he healed people on the wrong day, he exegeted scripture in the wrong way. But Jesus is pretty clear that what he’s doing – and how he’s doing it – are actually more faithful to law and prophets than anything the religious leaders are getting upset about.
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea multiple times: “Go and learn what this means: I require mercy, not sacrifice.” The religious people were caught up in ritual and sacrifice, performing the trappings of religion in the right ways at the right times with the right people. But Jesus is more interested in the meaning at the heart of all those rules and commands.
“You have heard it said,” Jesus repeats, like a refrain here in the Sermon on the Mount. He knows the law, and he knows that his followers know it, too.
“You have heard that it was said,” Jesus teaches, “do not murder. But I say to you, people do a whole lot of damage through anger without murdering anybody.”
“You have heard that it was said ‘you shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you, y’all KNOW that all kinds of harm gets done to relationships before anybody touches anyone else.”
“Again, you’ve heard that it was said ‘you shall not swear falsely.’ But I say to you, just telling the truth all the time is a much better policy than only being honest when you’re forced to swear to it.”
Jesus acted and taught differently not just because he like to shake things up, but because he understood that law and practice are always only signposts pointing toward the deeper, ultimate values and commands. He knew and valued tradition, and he innovated in ways that allowed the core of that faith tradition to be sensible and relevant in the midst of change and upheaval.
Which is what traditioned innovation is about, and what y’all here at Peace Covenant have taught me to be not only possible, but essential; not only tolerable, but fascinating, beautiful, challenging and vibrant.
We’ve changed a lot of things together over the last few years. Some of those changes have felt forced, by the pandemic or changing congregational dynamics or financial realities. But what has amazed and encouraged me is that nearly all the things we’ve changed have been done with an eye and an ear toward WHY we do the thing in the first place.
Think about it.
We changed the arrangement of this sanctuary, because worshipping over Zoom reminded us why we gather, and what’s important.
We got rid of the bulletin (!!!!), because we learned that it was unnecessary, that we were wasting creation’s resources, and the purpose it served was being met in other ways.
We re-oriented how we practice footwashing because our understanding of gender shifted, and we remembered that the point of washing feet is not to underscore cultural gender norms but to reinforce the sweet fellowship of this community.
We recalibrated how our ministry teams work, both because there were fewer people to do the work and because we recognized that when we got down to it, “nurture” and “outreach” weren’t really all that different.
We don’t make apple butter anymore, partly because the kettle got stolen, but also – maybe by now it’s safe for me to say – by 2018, not all of us in the congregation understood the cultural resonance of that Appalachian practice, and the value of being together and working side by side was something we were practicing in other ways.
//
More change is coming here at Peace Covenant, and I have to tell you that I am not at all worried about what that means or how you will navigate it as a community. I’ve walked with you through many seasons of change, now, and every single time you have amazed me with your willingness to engage and make change by taking the past seriously while simultaneously remaining radically open to whatever God is already doing and preparing.
That’s traditioned innovation. It’s what you do without even knowing that you’re doing it. It’s the ability to say “well sure, let’s try it!” Or to receive the news of a stolen apple butter kettle with some sadness, some admiration for the thief’s logistical prowess and the ultimate understanding that whoever would undertake such an endeavor surely needed that kettle more than we did.
That ability is rooted in this community’s deep understanding of who it is and why it exists: not to simply keep the doors open and make sure worship happens on Sunday mornings, but to exist in gracious, generous, hospitable community together, to live as witnesses to the enormous mercy and justice of God, to be constantly curious and open to whatever unexpected invitation God might be issuing.
And here’s the thing: none of that is something that this congregation has to work hard to be or to do. Yes, some of the work requires hard conversation and humility. It’s not exactly EASY to live with one eye on the past and the other on the future, to be constantly open to change, to be willing to shift again and again. But it is also so deep in the DNA of Peace Covenant, so much a part of who you are and how you’ve always lived together that it does not and will not require you to be anything other than who you already are.
It’s just a matter of owning it, living it, and being willing to be who you are out loud. Who you are is beautiful, and precious, and beloved. Whatever God is inviting you into will not require you to be anyone other than who She created you to be, who She already and has always loved. I am so grateful to have learned that here, with you all.
My penultimate sermon with Peace Covenant Church of the Brethren
Philippians 2:1-4
If, then, there is any comfort in Christ, any consolation from love, any partnership in the Spirit, any tender affection and sympathy, 2 make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.
I was born on a Sunday morning, so when I arrived, my dad called the church. My grandma worked as the church secretary, so she was the one who answered the phone.
“When are you coming to see your granddaughter,” my dad asked her.
“Well,” JoJo said, “whenever she’s born, I guess.”
When she heard that I was indeed born – so legend goes – JoJo ran around the building announcing my arrival to every single Sunday School class. I’ve been loved by the church since literally the day I was born.
First Church of the Brethren in Roanoke is where I grew up, where my dad grew up, and where my grandmother grew up. At the congregation’s 125th anniversary celebration in 2018, the District Executive at the time, said in his remarks that the FCoB congregation has always been a community that has engaged the “isms.” I think that was his way of naming the congregation’s long-standing focus on justice. And it’s true, though I hadn’t been able to articulate that part of my own faith formation until he said it. First Church taught me that engaging the forces of oppression around us was what we did in church.
White supremacy is part of that church’s history. The congregation fled its original building when the neighborhood demographics shifted from white to black in the 1950s. Ironically, the new neighborhood shifted in the exact same way after a few years, but that time, First Church stayed put. I don’t know how or why that happened, but I do know that it meant that my childhood included regular shared worship services and Vacation Bible School with the Black Baptist congregation next door.
I also remember – in a kid’s kind of memory – conversations around sexuality in our congregation in the 1990s. A couple with a calling to make the church more inclusive to LGBTQ+ folks intentionally joined our church, having heard that we might be more open to those kind of conversations than other congregations in the area. I don’t think the conversations went GREAT, but I know that they happened.
In the early 1990s, when a problematic pastor left, First Church had two interim pastors who were women. That was an impressionable time in my life, and I remember how powerful it was to see and hear women in the pulpit, women in leadership.
I learned, only when she died, that my grandmother spent decades as an active member of an organization called Church Women United, an intentionally interracial gathering of women from various Christian traditions and denominations. CWU was formed in Roanoke 80 years ago – in the 1940s, when interracial ANYTHING was suspicious and threatening. But here were these church ladies, Black and White, getting together every month, learning to know each other and work together and breaking down stereotypes and quietly dismantling the systems of oppression that have kept all of us in chains for so long.
A caveat: a white Christian congregation in Roanoke, Virginia in the 20th century, even one that finds itself in the middle of a big Black neighborhood, even one with well-intentioned pastors and leadership, even one willing to give lady pastors a try and host a conversation about sexual orientation, is still a white Christian congregation in Roanoke, Virginia. What I learned was not radical. It was, in the grand scheme of things, probably only barely progressive.
But here’s what it meant, for me: I learned – by osmosis, by practice, through assumption and witness, by simply being around and participating in what a community was doing, or trying to do – that church was a place where you could – and should – talk about hard things, together. More than that: church was a place where we could do hard things, together.
//
Here’s a tragedy: the deeper I got into church leadership, the higher up the institutional ladder I climbed, the more resistance I faced for operating on these deeply-formed assumptions that church was supposed to be a place where we talked openly about complicated, intimate, possibly divisive things, where we worked to find unity and act in service of God’s justice.
In our tradition, leaders are formed and called into structures that insist that they be quiet and neutral, that their job is to serve the majority opinion and never, ever offend anyone. I cannot tell you how often, over the last twenty years, I have been told that leadership does not voice an opinion, how often I’ve been told to be quiet, stop talking or apologize for daring to broach a sensitive subject. I learned how to preach without offending anyone, how to speak without saying anything of substance.
In case you don’t know: this is a deeply harmful way of inhabiting roles of leadership, a deeply problematic way of structuring communities. I have watched friends and colleagues get beat up, scapegoated, shamed into silence, killed, body and soul, by these expectations.
By the time I arrived here at Peace Covenant in 2015, I was pretty beat up. I had been taught and trained to lead in ways that were as inoffensive as possible, which meant being silent about things that mattered deeply, equivocating about matters of justice, pretending “humility” in the face of oppression.
So, when folks in this congregation asked about whether we could start exploring hard conversations together, I balked. I didn’t want to upset anyone. I didn’t want to overstep the boundaries of what I’d been told leadership was. I slowed this congregation down, and asked you to wait a little longer to discern complicated things together.
I was wrong about that. I own that it was my error, and I also recognize, now, that part of my reluctance had to do with this twisted idea of what it means to be a leader, this harmful practice of utter neutrality and deep-seated fear of offending anyone that I had been taught, explicitly and implicitly, by the church. Church wasn’t a place where we talked about and worked at hard things together; it was supposed to be a place where everyone could belong, even if they brought their unjust, harmful, violent beliefs and practices with them.
But you all kept working on me. You wanted to know what I really thought. You kept pushing me to begin conversations about important – and possibly divisive – things. You weren’t scared of disagreement, or offending each other. If you disagreed with me, well, there’s this response time immediately after the sermon and you’d just…tell me that I’d gotten something wrong or incomplete or you wondered if there might be another way of going about it.
This congregation isn’t perfect, and it’s not that we don’t offend or hurt one another. We’re human; that’s part of living together. But time and time again, this congregation has shown me how it is possible to disagree and be curious, how to feel offended and work through it, how to invite conflict and work through it instead of avoiding it at all costs.
I watch it happen in real time. I can see it on your facial expressions over Zoom and in your body language during worship. “I don’t think I like that,” your faces and bodies say. And then, a physical shift or raise of the eyebrows, a hand gets raised and, instead of storming out of the room in anger, you ask a question. Or you just say, “I’m going to have to think about that one for a while.”
That willingness to make church a place where we investigate complicated, intimate topics together has led us to some powerful places. In the last few years, we have learned about refugees, white supremacy and gender diversity, and then taken collective action to repent or change or work for justice. Together. We have walked through joy and grief together, faced financial challenges and global pandemics and church break-ins, and when the Virlina District put our discernment on trial, we made the four hour round trip to the required meeting together.
You have reminded me that real communal discernment and relationship are possible, and that has been healing and hopeful.
//
When Paul writes to the Philippians that he wants them to “Be of one mind,” and “have the same love,” he is not trying to force them into some uniformity of thought or behavior. Being of one mind doesn’t mean that everyone in the room assents to the same list of doctrinal statements. It doesn’t mean that there should be no disagreement, no conflict, no diversity. Unity is not uniformity.
Being of one mind means exactly what Paul says next: Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.
It means being willing to be open and honest and vulnerable, with the understanding that showing up in the fullness of who we are is honoring and respecting the fullness of others. Being of one mind means not hiding from hard conversations but trusting those around us with our honesty, respecting the holy thing that happens when we agree to discern, together. It means believing that what we can do when we dive in TOGETHER is fuller and richer and more God-like than wherever we end up on our own.
Somewhere along the line, our tradition – at least the institutional parts of it – have gotten this instruction twisted. Looking to the interests of others does not mean silencing ourselves or denying our own realities. Humility does not mean being a wet noodle. Leadership does not require neutrality. Peace Covenant taught me that, again, reminded me of what I’d always known but had been forced to forget.
This tiny, mighty, informal and competent congregation values and practices unity; not uniformity.
//
I’m feeling pretty beat up, again, these days. Because even when I resolved not to participate in the systems and structures that punish leaders for speaking out or having an opinion, for refusing to live life as an inoffensive wet noodle, even after two years of attempting to simply be your pastor here at Peace Covenant, the twisted systems are still coming after me. I don’t know what to do about that, right now, other than simply remove myself entirely from the damaging structures that insist on silence and neutrality.
But I can tell you this: these years here with you have saved me. Had I been in another context, another congregation, some other place that didn’t insist on knowing ME and hearing my honesty, even when you disagreed or thought I was being foolhardy, some place that couldn’t value Dana as a person outside of Dana as a pastor, I would not be as well and healthy as I am.
It’s been a very, very hard season for pastors. Political division and institutional collapse have made congregational ministry nearly impossible under the old rubric of leadership neutrality. There aren’t many of us pastors left, and those of us who are still here have had to fight to stay healthy and whole in the midst of it. I am part of what they’re calling the great resignation.
But I want you to hear loud and clear that it’s not because of YOU. Peace Covenant has reminded me that it’s possible to do hard things, together. It’s possible – and beautiful, and full of JOY, and unbelievably holy – to work toward real, honest, vulnerable unity of purpose without demanding either uniformity or neutrality. I am so deeply grateful to have lived and learned that with you.
This is my antepenultimate sermon with Peace Covenant Church, and in my last few sermons, I’m sharing lessons I’ve learned from being their pastor for almost 8 years.
I’ve told this story before; maybe you’ve already heard it.
A decade ago, I worked in a church whose worship was very formal (formal, that is, for our low-church Brethren tradition) and very planned. It was *good* worship, with regular rhythms and good preaching and meaningful rituals, and I learned a TON about planning and facilitating God’s people gathering for worship in that place.
One Sunday, I was away, working at another job. I was helping to train summer ministry interns, and we were visiting a local congregation as part of the orientation week. During the service, there was a piece of special music planned – a guitar and vocalist accompanied by a beloved drummer who lives with some developmental disabilities. The drummer was poised and ready to begin, but the guitarist had lost the tune and the key. The entire congregation shifted in their pews. The drummer smiled – but was clearly annoyed at his co-musician. We all waited a few minutes as the guitarist picked through chords. I started to get anxious, even though I was not in charge of anything in the room, just a guest in the service. No one else around me was anxious, though. A woman in the pew in front of me pulled out her cell phone (WHAT!? in WORSHIP!?) and opened YouTube to find a version of the song that was to be played. She stood up, where she was, and said, “here it is,” hit play and held her phone aloft. The first few chords of the song filled the sanctuary, the guitarist nodded, the cell phone woman sat down, the service proceeded without another hiccup.
What I remember about those moments in worship was my own startled reaction: that I would be so anxious on behalf of other people, that what I had just experienced was very unlikely to happen in the formality of the congregation where I worked, that I loved this casual, relational, confident, inclusive tone in the sanctuary. I realized, in those few moments, that I was chafing under the formality of my current worship life.
I wrote those paragraphs a while ago, and when I read back through them for this morning’s sermon, I shook my head at how uptight I used to be. Here at Peace Covenant, we’ve done SO MUCH MORE informal things than sharing the opening chord from a cell phone, haven’t we? But that was Dana of a decade ago. I hadn’t met y’all, yet.
At the House for All Sinners and Saints, a Lutheran congregation in Colorado, worship is very traditional and liturgical but also, somehow, informal. The chairs are in a round, and people volunteer for worship leadership duties as they enter the sanctuary. The church declares that they are “anti-excellence and pro-participation.” When I heard their former pastor use this phrase to describe how their worship operates, I immediately took it to heart. YES! Anti-excellence and pro-participation is what I want to be a part of, what I want to facilitate, where I want to be.
Before I arrived here at Peace Covenant, you all had already started self-identifying as “informal but competent.” I think that was a Dave Minnich phrase, and it was and remains a pretty accurate description of this congregation’s personality. When I heard it – and then experienced it – I knew that we were going to get along.
This value isn’t just about being low-key and going with the flow, though. Our informality happens because we want everyone who joins us to feel comfortable participating, to know that they are welcome and can belong, here.
And somehow, people do regularly find us and join us on Sunday morning. When I introduce myself and greet new folks, I always tell them that we’re pretty informal and that they are welcome to join in the conversation during worship. And even though I have issued that invitation very sincerely, I’m still usually surprised when first-time visitors DO contribute!
A year or so ago, a first-time visitor came to worship. We were sharing in joys and concerns about the joys of Buckee’s, an amped up gas station and convenience store, because several of you had recently had your first Buckee’s experience. Trying to translate the excitement to the whole congregation, I tried to explain: Buckee’s is a gas station….but this first-time visitor, who had yet to speak other than to introduce herself, piped up: “AS a TEXAN, I want to make it clear that Buckee’s is MUCH more than a gas station; it’s an EXPERIENCE.”
And a few weeks ago, another first-time visitor joined us on Sunday morning because he had driven by another Church of the Brethren congregation and was curious about who we were. I was preaching about this summer’s events around my ordination, and when I asked for your reflections and responses, this man opened his mouth to speak, but could barely get anything out because he was so overcome with emotion. To this day I do not know what or why he was feeling such strong feelings – I could guess or assume, one way or the other – but I do know that our informality and hospitality here invited him to be open and vulnerable with those feelings.
//
The prophet Amos is absolutely fed up with the Israelites’ inability to live faithful lives. They’re super focused on the details of liturgical worship and sacrifices, making burnt offerings and observing all the religious festivals, but they have trampled on the poor, gotten invested in unjust practices like bribes and cheating and generally assumed that if they went to church and observed the rituals of religion, they’d be absolved.
But God is super unhappy about that:
I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
22 Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
23 Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
And this, the insistence that faithful worship trumps ethical living, is the context for Amos’ famous lines. I do not care about how you’re worshiping or sacrificing or singing to me, God says. No, the whole point of being faithful is to let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Amos isn’t the only prophet who makes this comparison. Isaiah says the same thing, in the very first chapter:
Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. 15 When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. 16 Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove your evil deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil; 17 learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow.
Every congregation worships differently. That’s partly personality, partly theology, and partly tradition. But over the last few years, as Covid changed so much of our lives, these texts from the Hebrew prophets about the value of worship relative to the importance of living full, just lives have become important to me. As American congregations and church leaders smugly refused to adapt their worship practices in the face of a deadly pandemic, my gratitude for this congregation and its already-existing identity as being informal but competent deepened.
What is the point of worship? If worship endangers people, then it isn’t faithful. If communities spend all their time and energy on making sure worship is formal, perfect and well-produced but fail to consider how they are participating in injustice or doing evil, how their practices are excluding siblings and neighbors, then what good is that pitch-perfect worship?
Peace Covenant joyfully shifted our worship practices when Covid made gathering in the building dangerous. We figured things out, made Zoom work as well as we could, and discovered that actually, in some ways, the changes helped us become even more of who we knew ourselves to be. Worship got even more informal. Our music practices shifted. We found ways to include people from all over the world, and moving the sanctuary around so that the people on Zoom are part of the congregation meant that we now worship in the round – like the House for All Sinners and Saints.
And, during that time when some others were spending *immense* time, energy and expense on perfecting one hour of weekly worship, do you know what this congregation did? We poured ourselves into interrogating our own white supremacy and then, on the heels of that transformation, entered into prayerful communal discernment about becoming fully inclusive of LTBTQ+ siblings and neighbors. We turned our energy away from the “show” and toward being people who live God’s own justice.
We are, in addition to being informal but competent, also anti-excellence and pro-participation. It is more important that whoever shows up gets to be a part of what we’re doing than it is that what we’re doing is done “well.” That is a deep, core value that Peace Covenant helped me name and live into, and the practice of it in this congregation has meant that folks who show up find a place where they are not only welcome to observe but fully welcome to contribute and participate, too. Thanks be to God.
This is my preantepenultimate sermon with you all at Peace Covenant. PRE ANTE PEN ULTIMATE.
In case your Latin is a little rusty, that means “fourth-from-last.” In two weeks, I’ll preach my antepenultimate sermon, then the penultimate sermon, then, on October 1, the ultimate sermon. Watch out for that one.
In these last few sermons with you, I wanted to share some of what I’ve learned over nearly 8 years as your pastor. We have been through a lot together in eight years, y’all. It has been full and rich and juicy, as Aubrey likes to say. It has been beautiful.
The first lesson I’ve learned from y’all is that tiny is mighty. I don’t mean that small things CAN be good, I mean that small IS good. I arrived here in 2015 from a job at a large, programmatic, multi-staff church with a budget that was approximately ten times the size of this congregation’s. On the first Sunday, I made sure to arrive extra early – a full thirty minutes before the service – to make sure I was prepared and ready. I don’t think I had keys, yet, and no one else was here. I sat in the parking lot, and then I sat a while longer. Finally, Dave and Lynette arrived and let me in, maybe 12 minutes before 11am.
Even before I came, y’all had recognized and embraced the tininess of Peace Covenant. This building is a part of that story of actively choosing smallness and appreciating its power. And in my interviews for this job, you all told me that you had gone through a season of discernment and decided that God was not calling this congregation to start or found NEW ministries, but rather to be a sturdy, energetic support of all the good work that was already happening right here in the neighborhood. That clarity of vision and action was a huge gift to me and, I think, to us as a community.
Not tiny BUT mighty; tiny AND mighty. Peace Covenant has taught me the power of being intentionally small.
That’s biblical, too, you know?
Last fall, we shared a study of Jesus’ parables, and this story about the mustard seed was one of them.
“The kingdom of heaven,” Jesus says, “is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field;it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
Jesus is always throwing out these one-liners about the kingdom. The kingdom is like this, the kingdom is like that…and they’re usually about weird and unexpected things. This one – the kingdom is like a mustard seed – seems on its face to be kind of simple: a tiny thing grows into something big.
Except it’s not actually that simple. Someone goes out and SOWS a mustard seed in their field. They did it on purpose. This is not a story about kudzu, an unwanted weed taking over where it isn’t planned, although I have heard that interpretation before. Matthew is very careful to tell us that this mustard seed was planted on purpose.
And, it doesn’t grow into a giant tree – mustard actually doesn’t do that. Here, Jesus says that the seed grows into “the greatest of shrubs.”
I don’t know how prestigious that title – the greatest of shrubs – is. But I have, recently, been paying attention to one particular shrub outside my building. It’s pretty nondescript, clearly planted as a decoy to hide away the ugly HVAC units needed to heat and cool the twenty apartments in my building. It is not a centerpiece of any kind of landscaping; it’s not very pretty or noteworthy. It’s just a shrub. It hides the machines.
But in the summer, this boring old shrub grows these tiny little white flowers – they bloom from April all the way through September. And lately, I’ve been noticing just how many pollinators LOVE this shrub. There are always a couple dozen bees buzzing around, drinking nectar from the tiny little white flowers. But a couple of weeks ago, the butterflies also started hanging around, sometimes drowsy with the spoils of those flowers. And the other day, there were even DRAGONFLIES flitting up and down the length of this boring old shrub. This shrub, completely unremarkable in its color, size or generally existence, turns out to be very important to the pollinator population at my house. It’s providing a home.
The artist Kelly Latimore writes modern icons – you should follow him online if you don’t aready. Last week, he shared a new icon: from the parable of the mustard seed. Here it is:
Kelly says about this icon:
All of the birds in this icon are native to the Holy Land. Birds in the icon: Palestine Sunbird, Scrub Warbler, Common Rosefinch, Laughing dove, Barn Swallow, House Sparrow, Fire-Fronted Serin, Red- Rumped Swallow, Rufous-tailed Scrub Robin, Woodchat Shrike, European Greenfinch, Tree Pipit, Nubian Nightjar, Northern Wheatear, Green Bee Eater, Eurasian Golden Oriole, European Roller, Eurasian Jay, Great Tit, Hooded Crow, Eurasian Blackbird, Common Chiffchaff, Rock Bunting, Crested Lark, and White Spectacled Bulbul.
The parables, like the sermon on the mount, have always been crucial for the church to imagine the kind of community it is called to be. We discover again and again that Jesus’ parables significance points to everyday life. The parables are meant to be lived.1
Our good friend from last year’s parables study, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, has some insightful wisdom about this particular parable, helping us imagine the kind of community we are called to be. She says that explaining this parable as a story of something small growing into something big is fine and technically correct but also BORING: “To speak of the parable as demonstrating that great outcomes arrive from small beginnings is correct, but it is banal. To note WHAT outcomes might occur provides better provocation.”2
The parable of the mustard seed doesn’t tell us that the kingdom is like something small growing into something big; that’s kind of routine. This parable – which is helping us imagine the kind of community the church is called to be – is telling us that even a tiny seed grows into a great shrub that provides a home for all kinds of creatures.
Which is part of what I’ve learned from you, tiny, mighty Peace Covenant. In the eight years that I’ve been your pastor, we have not grown into a great, tall Cedar of Lebanon, or even a Longleaf Pine of North Carolina. We are still tiny.
And you know what? I think that’s great. Our tininess has been a great advantage in these last few years: it gave us the agility to shift worship practices during Covid, it allows us to experiment with new ways of being together, and our tininess has meant that we have been able to provide a home for a lot of beloved people.
I’ve been thinking about some of those people this week, imagining what the birds in an icon of Peace Covenant’s great shrub might look like.
There would be Z and J birds – the young couple who found us and the Brethren tradition during their time here at seminary, discovered that their faith and worldview and call to ministry was in THIS kind of community. Z and J got ordained in the Church of the Brethren last Sunday – a commitment that signals just how deeply their sense of home in our tradition is.
There would be K and H birds – who moved to town during the height of a pandemic and needed a community to hold them and celebrate them, who found a home where they were welcome not only as they were but also where they were welcome to become who they were meant to be.
There would be an A bird – someone with a strong, clear call to ministry but whose previous congregations couldn’t support her well in that call, who found not only a supportive congregation for that ordination journey but a home for her family and herself to continue to be deeply connected to her Brethren roots even as she works far and wide, ecumenically and with folks from all different faiths.
There would be T and P birds – a couple finding their footing together after seasons of big life changes, who showed up at coffee with me before they committed themselves to joining our congregation to make sure that we were people who loved, respected and included people of all gender expressions and sexualities, who kept finding home with us even after they moved in the midst of the pandemic.
There would be G and R birds – who found a home here not only for themselves but for their tiny chihuahua Peggy, too, who showed up to worship in her Sunday best, friends who continued calling this congregation their home on Zoom, sharing jokes and music all through a pandemic.
There would be an M bird – someone with deep, lifelong faith who felt God calling her to be a part of our tiny congregation in order to be a part of hard, intimate conversations around race and relationship, who found a home with us despite differences and lived the last season of her life as part of this congregation.
There would be birds that looked like each of you – some who’ve been here all their lives, some who swooped in just this season to see what all the commotion was about, some who’ve made this place their home for the long-term and others who are welcomed in for the season in which they really needed somewhere to belong.
And there would be a Dana bird, too, because Peace Covenant has been my home since 2015, where I have found faithful community, deep relationships, and people ready to meet challenges and engage hard conversations together, where you have allowed me to teach and preach and show up in some very vulnerable moments of your lives.
Our great shrub is FILLED with birds. From a tiny seed, a mighty refuge. The kingdom of heaven is like that. The kingdom of heaven is like THIS. Because that is the other thing the parables teach us: God’s kingdom is not far away, pie in the sky by and by: it is as close as single coin, a barnyard animal, a boring shrub in the front yard.
The kingdom of God is HERE, and it is NOW. We have been living in it together, all this time. Thanks be to God.
A District Board voted – by a 2/3 majority – to terminate my ordination unless or until I agree not to officiate another same-gender wedding or the Church of the Brethren changes its position on them.
I could write a detailed, footnoted and cross-referenced brief about how this was possible in part because of flawed interpretation of intentionally ambiguous ecclesial polity. I could write that brief for you because I’ve written some of that intentionally ambiguous ecclesial polity, myself.
I could write a meditation on what happens when institutions refuse to acknowledge, much less address, power dynamics, when generations’ worth of leaders spend their lives – sacrifice them, in many cases – maintaining a delicate and unjust status quo. I could write that meditation because I was called and formed to be exactly that kind of leader.
I could also write an outright screed about how the church’s ingrained bigotry and gender essentialism have hurt people for generations, how it is Christians in America doing the most damage these days, how homophobia, misogyny and self-righteous violence have been hallmarks of Christian practice for centuries. But I’ve already written that screed several times over.
Instead, I’ll write about how much it hurts to have a couple dozen people who KNOW you [who KNOW me] decide that you’re [I’m] no longer fit to serve as an ordained minister. There are 30-some people sitting on the Virlina District Board. It’s enormous, twice the size of our denominational Mission and Ministry Board. (Did you see that, the way I used “our,” even though, effective immediately, I have no further formal accountability whatsoever to the Church of the Brethren, Inc. or the Virlina District?)
Of those thirty people, plus a few ex-officio members, I knew all but a handful sitting around the table when they interviewed me. This is the place I grew up, the district that taught me how to live as a follower of Jesus, where I sang in children’s musicals and attended Vacation Bible School and learned to love creek stomping.
They even use my not-real middle initial, because everyone from childhood calls me “Dana Beth.”
One member of the Board is my congregant. An ex-officio sitting in the room was my pastor for a few months when I was a kid. I have officiated funerals for folks these people loved. They have heard me preach, and teach, and pray. I went to Camp with their kids for years. We’ve served on committees together, shared meals together, sung hymns in four-part harmony together. Some of these folks have been dedicated readers of this very blog for years; most of them are my friends on social media. I’ve had to call more than one of them up and apologize, repair a rift borne of miscommunication or my own overzealous, know-it-all tendencies. Several of them have known me since I was born. Most of them know my parents. The majority of them knew my grandparents, whose reactions to this mess I can only begin to imagine.
And sure, maybe a few of them dislike who they’ve known me to be so much that they’d been waiting for this chance to punish and defrock me. But for the most part, I don’t believe that’s true. For the most part, I believe that these folks were not excited to do what they did, and yet they did it anyway. It would hurt less, I think, if they’d been clear and demanding about it. It would hurt less, I think, if I didn’t know them.
It’s dangerous to write this little reflection instead of any of the other things I could write, because this one is relational. The people I’m writing about might read this and know that they hurt me. They might choose to hurt me more by responding. They might hurt me more by choosing not to respond. But a beloved friend and mentor reminded me today that in the end, relational is the only way to be. None of our positions or politics or power analysis will save us. Choosing people over polity might not save anybody, either, but it is the only way I know to live with integrity, so I’ll just keep doing it. In a funny kind of way, it’s way easier, now.
Here’s one of my favorite stories from Brethren history, a story that doesn’t get much airtime these days:
In 1762, a teenager named Catherine Hummer, one of the first Brethren in America and the daughter of one of the ministers at the White Oak congregation in Pennsylvania, started seeing visions of angels. She said that she looked into heaven and saw people who were baptized after they had died. The visions would have been controversial enough, but once she saw them, Catherine Hummer started PREACHING about them. In church. A teenage girl in 1762, preaching. In church.
Her preaching caused a HUGE controversy. Some people were upset that a young woman was given the privilege of preaching. Some people were convinced that her visions were not actually from God and might be harmful to the congregations (because, of course, Catherine’s preaching was powerful, and she was invited to preach all over the place). Others heard her preaching, her visions, and seem to have had visions of angels themselves. To add to the controversy, Catherine’s visions only happened when she was alone or when she was with her doctor – a young man named Sebastian Keller, who was married but whose wife had joined a sort of sectarian movement – maybe a cult – at the Ephrata Cloister. Scandalous.
Catherine’s father, the minister, defended her, as did other ministers. Tension and dissent grew among the Brethren. The next year, in 1763, the gathered body took up the question at their big Annual Meeting. Should Catherine be allowed to continue preaching about these visions? The group was divided, but their position was, ultimately, not to pronounce a decision on whether or not her visions were valid. Instead, the gathered body made a pronouncement regarding the disunity that was raging in the wake of those visions.
“…we felt constrained not to criticize or judge this strange happening,” they said, “but rather urge everyone to a God-like impartiality and patience.”
Can you imagine that? Can you imagine any one of our current disagreements or debates about this or that issue ending with this kind of admonishment?
The Meeting’s statement went on:
“We advise, out of brotherly love, that on both sides all judgements and harsh expressions might be entirely laid down, though we do not have the same opinion of that noted occurrence, so that those who do not esteem it, should not despise those who expect to derive some use and benefit from it.”
And, by all accounts, this is what happened. The controversy ended. Things went so still that Catherine Hummer and her story were all but lost to history – we don’t even know her dates of birth or death.
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I love this story because of its improbability. I cannot imagine a body – inside or outside the church – with the conviction and authority to say, in this day and age: “we feel constrained not to criticize or judge this strange happening, but to urge everyone to a God-like impartiality and patience.” Maybe you run in circles more generous or gracious than I do, but can you imagine anything like this happening in any of the scenes of conflict today? In a church meeting? In the Tennessee state legislature? At a Durham City Council meeting? In the US Congress? At a court hearing?
When Brethren history gets told, today, we mostly focus on the conflicts that led to division. Just like the timeline of world history is measured from war to war, church history is marked from conflict to conflict. But that’s not the only way to tell the story of who we are and how we came to be. In fact, telling the story by hanging it on war, conflict and division leads us to EXPECT more war, conflict and division. What if, instead, we learned to tell the story of history as one of resolution to resolution? What if we told the stories of commitment, patience, and movements toward justice, instead?
I suspect that we would understand ourselves and the world around us very, very differently.
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Here’s a question for you: why did the women show up at the tomb early on the morning of the third day after Jesus was crucified? What have you been taught?
Yes – they were bringing spices to anoint Jesus’ dead body, right? That’s how the story goes, when we mash up all four gospels into a single narrative. And Mark and Luke DO give us that detail – the women come to the tomb to complete their responsibility in the burial practices. But Matthew tells the story differently: the women are empty-handed. They have not come to deal with a dead body. They come, he tells us, to SEE the TOMB. As Matthew tells it, the women are not there to act out of their grief and loss. They have not come armed against death. Matthew says they came to see about the tomb. To inspect it, to check it against what they remember Jesus teaching them.
Because Jesus had been preparing all his friends for this moment. In Matthew’s gospel, he tells them over and over that he “must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering… and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” Three times, as he’s traveling and preaching and healing with his followers and friends, Jesus tells them that this is how it will go. Yes, he says, I will be killed. And on the third day, I will be raised. This wasn’t a casual, one-off revelation that Jesus let slip in the course of conversation: he told them, intentionally, three times over that this is how things would go down.
So, when Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James (who, by the way, was probably also the mother of Jesus) to “to see” the tomb, they are not rubber-necking, and they are not dutifully marching to prepare a dead body for burial. Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of God REMEMBERED what Jesus had been telling them all along. They were listening. They comprehended what Jesus was telling them, and they remembered it. And, more than that: they BELIEVED HIM.
Believed him so much that they would show up at the appointed hour, expecting resurrection.
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I hadn’t noticed this detail of Catherine Hummer’s story until I was studying this morning’s Easter text: Catherine saw angels, which is exactly what the women who arrived at Jesus’ tomb as day was dawning on the third day after his death saw. Matthew tells us that there was a great earthquake, and an angel of the Lord appeared and rolled back the stone that was sealing up the tomb. His appearance, we learn, was like lightning. A vision of an angel, who opened up the empty tomb: that’s how the resurrection is revealed. And the women, who remembered and believed Jesus’ promise that he would be raised, who showed up expecting that to be true, get commissioned as the first to proclaim the good news. And, as they run to tell everyone else that Jesus was not lying, that what he promised had indeed come to pass, that what they remembered was what happened, they also became the first to encounter the risen lord, who tells them not to be afraid, but to go and tell everyone else.
My friend Meredith gave me this icon that hangs over my desk. Mary Magdalene Announces the Resurrection, an icon written by Sr. Mary Charles McGough, O.S.B
I wonder how much attention the people who got upset by Catherine Hummer’s visions and Catherine Hummer’s preaching had paid to these stories of the resurrection, where it’s the women who encounter angels at the tomb, where it’s the women who become the first preachers of resurrection. I wonder what those angry folks remembered about Jesus’ story. And I wonder if they would have reacted differently if this was the story that they heard preached on Easter Sunday morning.
Walter Brueggemann once wrote that “memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.” What we choose to remember shapes how we behave. Remembering Jesus’ teaching of rising on the third day shaped the women’s choice to show up that morning and see what happened. Remembering biblical stories of women seeing visions of angels could have changed the way people reacted to Catherine Hummer’s experience. Remembering the story of the church’s final response – to withhold judgement and urge patience – might change the way we participate in our own conflicts, today.
What would our lives look like if we refused the narrative that insists we organize our worldview around despair? What choices would we make if we remembered that resurrection is not only possible but already here? How would we live if we walked around expecting dead things to be raised into new life?
Living lives shaped by resurrection might mean that we find ways to live without judgement when strange things happen. It might mean that we we willingly show up at tombs expecting something surprising and new to take place. It might mean that we submit ourselves to the fear and great joy that come with living in the depths of the unknown, choosing to believe – even when it is extremely unclear how things will end up, even when we might be almost certain that they’ll go badly, even when all the signs point to death, destruction and despair – choosing to believe that even this is part of the world that has already been redeemed, already been made new, already been transformed into something good and full of grace.
Resurrection isn’t just a promise of new life after we die a physical; it is a powerful testimony that everything – every wound, every rupture, every loss, every grief, every impossible situation, up to and even including the murder of God himself – can be and, in fact, already is being transformed. What would happen if we walked around expecting THAT?
For the last 15 years, part of my work has been facilitating conversations with young adults about the concept of “vocation,” or “calling.” I worked with Brethren Volunteer Service and a bunch of other faith-based long-term volunteer programs. I traveled all around the country, and over the course of those years, I probably facilitated 100 conversations about how we discern God’s call in our lives. I loved doing that work, and as I listened to young people talk about how they sensed God at work leading them toward lives of faithfulness, my understanding of vocation changed pretty radically.
In the beginning, I used a video of the author Donald Miller to help start conversations. Miller had written a book called “Blue Like Jazz,” which was a NYT bestseller that told the story of how he found his way back to God. The book was so popular that it was made into a movie, and Miller ended up writing a second book, called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, a reflection on what it’s like to see your own life made into a movie. At those vocation sessions, we watched an interview where Donald Miller talked about the second book, and what he learned about the process of story-telling and how that could change the way we live our lives.
It was a good activity. We’d watch Donald Miller, discuss what we heard, and then do an activity where the young people would try to imagine their own lives made into a movie. But after a few sessions, I started hearing interesting feedback: the way Miller talked about how people’s lives change – how the plot advances – was filled with privilege. He had transformed his life by undertaking a cross-country bike trip and hiking Machu Pichu in Peru, but these volunteers were spending their lives working with underserved populations – people in poverty and affected by addiction, violence and hunger. Advancing the plot of our lives by taking an expensive vacation to South America just wasn’t relevant, they said. They – and I – started getting annoyed with Donald Miller for assuming everybody’s life looked like his.
So, we started incorporating that – a conversation about privilege and what other events might change the course of our lives into the discussion. But eventually, I just couldn’t, in good conscience, keep asking these young people to use Donald Miller’s very white, rich, privileged example of story-telling as a guideline for their own lives, which they were attempting to live in solidarity with the poor, oppressed and hurting.
And then, Donald Miller made it even easier for me to delete him from the curriculum: he sold out. I and all those young people I was working with were living on very small stipends, living in community, and dedicating our lives to living simply and radically. Donald Miller wrote his books and then pivoted his fame and success into a very, very lucrative marketing and branding company. I remember when I learned that he was hosting weekend retreats that cost $10,000 to attend. I threw my hands up in disgust, and cancelled Donald Miller in my heart. How in the world, I wondered, could someone who was so obviously motivated by profit and wealth be a trustworthy guide for me or my people who were determined to live by other values? Ugh. Double ugh.
Donald Miller grew his brand, and then grew it some more. Today, he’s a multi-millionaire who never talks about finding God anymore. He used the fame he gained by being honest and vulnerable about his faith to become very, very rich and traffic in ways for other people to get rich, too. Ugh. Double ugh.
I started working in a congregation, and then came to understand that it was time for me to move on. Right around the time I was starting to think about what would be next for me if I left the Manassas CoB, the senior pastor gave me a Christmas gift. “I left it on your desk,” he said. “I saw it and thought it might help you with your discernment.” I unwrapped the present, already skeptical, and laughed out loud. It was a copy of Donald Miller’s newest publication – not a memoir or spiritual reflection, but a personal branding workbook, a course in how to market yourself. I laughed out loud, tucked the book deeper in my desk, and mostly forgot about it.
But my season of discernment continued, and one day, at a loss for how to move forward in deciding what to do or where to go next, I picked up the workbook, opened to a random page, and did the activity there – a way of mapping out your life, like screenwriters map out the plot of a movie, in order to notice patterns and themes. The reflection at the end of the activity opened doors in my brain, calmed my anxiety about what was next in life, and helped me decide to actually resign from the church, even without a new job. I was so MAD that it was Donald Miller, the sell-out, who had gotten me out of my funk.
I kept leading sessions on vocation, and I’d tell this story and use this new exercise from Donald Miller – the lesson being, of course, that you might find direction and guidance even from the person or place that you least expect it. I laughed at myself, the volunteers had meaningful experiences with the new story-mapping exercise, but I continued to think of Donald Miller as a sell-out whose profit-driven, capitalist sin just happened to be helpful for those of us who actively wanted to live very different lives. This went on for a while.
This year, I’ve been in another season of vocational discernment. I spent a few months applying for full-time jobs to complement being a ¼ time pastor, but nothing took root. In December, a member of the Manassas congregation who works in marketing sent me an email asking if I’d be interested in doing some marketing copywriting for him. He had recently done some professional development and was implementing a new marketing strategy for the company that included all new branding and a new, story-telling approach to their product. I’d write several blog posts each month, he said, being consistent with their new marketing language and themes, and if I was interested in learning about the theory and process underlying his new approach, he’d also love to pay me to read the books that had helped him get to this place.
I eagerly agreed, because I like and trust this guy and was curious about what marketing copywriting might entail. It seemed like a good first step into freelance writing, which is what I am doing a lot of now, three months later. Freelance writing has unexpectedly become where most of my energy and time are happily spent. He sent me the title of the book.
Can you guess?
Yep. Building a StoryBrand, Donald Miller’s latest capitalist profit-driven offering. I called my friend Callie, who had been with me through all those years of loving and then hating Donald Miller, who had joined me in bashing him for selling out and laughed at me for finding his later work so poignantly helpful in my own life. We laughed together. I’m still kind of mad about it. And I am chastened, humbled, corrected: that I have found direction for my life’s work from the very last person I wanted it from not once, but TWICE. Donald Miller just won’t leave me alone. Dang it.
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I still really dislike Donald Miller. I am still deeply skeptical about the way he used his Christian fame and his story of finding God to become a millionaire. I do not want to pattern my life after his. And also: I cannot escape the fact that his work has, in some strange ways, shaped my life. I keep having to eat that humble pie.
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I told this story yesterday morning in a sermon on 1 Samuel 13, the scripture where the prophet Samuel names David as the next king of the Israelites.
Samuel and God have had a long, winding relationship over the years. Before Samuel showed up on the scene, the people of Israel have spent generations being led by judges – they had no king, and God liked it that way. But the people looked around and saw that all their neighbors had KINGS, not a panel of judges, and they thought it sounded like a good idea. They insisted. God relented, and even though he sent the prophet Samuel to warn the people that having a king would lead to no good, he also had Samuel anoint Saul to be the king the people were clamoring for.
It didn’t go well. Saul was big, a military star, and humble to boot. But he couldn’t bring himself to obey God completely, and so God sent Samuel to remove him from his throne. And then, God sent Samuel to the house of Jesse, because God had chosen a new king from that set of brothers.
Samuel shows up, invites the household to worship with him, and explains his task. Bring out your sons, he tells Jesse, so I can see which one is God’s choice for king. So Jesse parades his sons before Samuel, each one bigger and mightier than the last, but Samuel says NOPE to every alpha male in the line. The whole crowd is exhausted by the end, and Samuel sighs: “Is there really no one else? These are ALL your sons?”
And Jesse says, well, there’s the baby, but he’s not even grown yet. We knew he couldn’t be the next king, because he’s barely out of elementary school. We kept him out in the pasture with the sheep while we had this meeting. “Good grief,” Samuel says, “get him in here!”
And so here comes David, a tiny, young, bewildered kid. The way scripture describes him makes it sound, to us, like he’s good looking, a prize of a man. But the Hebrew language makes it clear: this is a pretty boy. He’s not big and muscular, he has no military experience, he’s barely even of legal age. He’s such an unlikely candidate that his father didn’t even invite him to the meeting! But when David comes in from the pasture, the Lord says “there he is! This is the one! Anoint him!”
And so Samuel, long used to God’s strange ways, anoints the kid David as the next king of Israel. And we learn that from that moment on, the Spirit of the Lord was upon him in powerful ways.
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The story of King David’s life is long and complicated. He wasn’t always a fantastic king, and he wasn’t always a fantastic leader. But from that moment he was dragged in from his place with the sheep, he was God’s choice. His life shaped the lives of many, many others. God anointed him, and worked through him in ways that no one – not even his own father – could have imagined.
I think sometimes we are amenable to the idea that God works through the people we ignore when those folks are people on the margins. And, honestly, that’s how a lot of scripture tells the story. I wonder, though, how willing we are to consider that God works through people we ignore because they’re NOT on the margins. What if God does show up in the work of millionaires like Donald Miller? What if we DO learn from famous people and politicians? What if we can find ways to draw nearer to God even in the life and work of people we deeply, deeply disagree with? What if God cares way less about our human hierarchies than we do?
That’s hard for me. It is, honestly, kind of offensive. I would much, much rather write those people off, have them cancelled, and never have to consider the complicated realities of their humanity ever again. I would really like to have been able to categorize Donald Miller as a faithless sell-out whose life and work could be tossed in the bin of “never going to be relevant or important for my life.” Unfortunately, it seems like that’s not how God chooses to work.
To be honest, I don’t really like this thing that I’m preaching this morning. It’s much easier to give into our human tendency to categorize people as good or bad, progressive or conservative, with us or against us, and then orient our lives so that we only interact or take guidance from the people we’ve determined to be on the correct side of that line – whatever the line is that we’ve chosen to draw.
But I don’t think God ever cancels people. I don’t think God ever writes anyone off, or throws any person into a bin of “irrelevant” or “unimportant.” And I would like to have my heart shaped like God’s – or at least spend my life in pursuit of that kind of love and grace.
The calling of King David, and the subsequent mash up of his life as King, filled with some good choices and plenty of very, very bad ones, makes me consider the ways that God views us. My own experience with writing off Donald Miller and then having his work shape my life over and over again makes me re-think the way I choose to categorize and interact with people across all the spectrums of life.
I wonder, who in your own life would you be least likely to willingly learn from? Who in our life together have we written off that just might have some priceless guidance or instruction or pathway to God? I don’t know the answers to those questions, and I am, honestly, sort of reluctant to even speak a name aloud, lest I be drawn, again, into the process of having to eat humble pie and realign my understanding of the way the world is organized. But I’m curious enough to hear what you think.
The gospels are not of one mind on the question of whether or not Jesus carried his own cross. John is pretty quick to tell us that Jesus hiked up to Golgotha carrying the cross by himself. The other three gospels tell us that Simon of Cyrene, who Mark calls a “passerby,” got conscripted into the cross-carrying task. Like folks in my bible study said last night, Jesus would have been pretty beaten up by that point, and carrying gigantic pieces of lumber up a mountain would probably have been beyond his bodily capacity.
But we still talk about it like John is telling the gospel truth, even though everybody else disagrees with him. Jesus lugged the thing up the mountain. That image is in a lot of Christian art, and threads throughout a lot of Christian imagination. He had a cross to bear, right? Just like we’ve got our own crosses that we need to lug around behind us.
In another version of the story – not found in any gospel – Jesus starts out carrying the cross alone, but can’t manage it. When the soldiers see what’s happening, they grab Simon off the street and finish the hike with a stranger bearing Jesus’ cross for him. It makes sense that this has become the narrative of that moment, mashing the gospel accounts together and providing an explanation for why they’re different.
I like the traditional version the best, if I get to choose. Of course the Roman soldiers would try to force a criminal to lug their own torture device up a mountain themselves – that’s what systems of oppression do. But whether from physical exhaustion or spiritual wisdom, Jesus refused to carry his own cross. They had to conscript someone else – an innocent bystander – into their murder plot. In fact, the Romans had already recruited an entire echelon of religious leadership into their death cult. If you read that passage in John’s gospel, you hear the priests tell Pilate not to worry, that they have no king but Caesar, that their ultimate loyalty already lay with the state oppressing their people.
Which makes me wonder: how often do we get conscripted into structures of violence because we refuse to see or believe someone else’s pain? And how often does our reluctance to name our own suffering enable the continuation of those systems and structures?
I was formed – by culture, theology, and personality – to encounter the public, vocal suffering of another with some skepticism, and to keep my own suffering far from the public eye. Sometimes, we humans do use our pain as a means of manipulation or a vehicle for accumulating attention. But for the most part, I think people share their pain because it HURTS. We hear about someone’s suffering when the suffering has become too much to bear alone.
Jesus didn’t choose stoicism. He cried out, he demanded explanations from God, he bled and stumbled right there in public. I’m not great at witnessing suffering, much less admitting it or contemplating it. But I do wonder whether we’d be in a better place if we sharpened our abilities to encounter and stand in solidarity together when suffering happens, if we learned how to share the weight, if we insisted on bearing those crosses *together.*
The first station of the cross asks us to reflect on Jesus being condemned to death. I wrote the other day about Jesus being not the judge or jury, but the defendant, and how the religious leaders put the entire thing in motion. You know what religious leaders are putting into motion, right now? The condemning of trans kids to death.
Don’t believe me? Haven’t thought much about it? Start paying attention. Because all those inter-church squabbles over the last few years with “traditionalists” and “conservatives” insisting that they are only following scripture and only working to protect children and only using their ecclesial power to hold people “accountable” has, as it so often does in our near-theocratic country, bled over into legislation.
There are 350 anti-trans bills being considered in 36 states right now. These bills are attempting (and, in many cases, succeeding) at things like banning drag shows when children are present (you probably heard about that one, since the Governor championing it has been in drag, himself), forcing parents to end life-saving medical treatments for their children and attempting to DEFINE what it means to be a man or a woman.
Transgender teens are 8x more likely to attempt suicide than their cisgender peers. Some studies show that 50% – HALF – of trans kids have considered ending their own lives. Receiving gender-affirming care – the medical care that these bills are attempting to block – has been shown to lead to a 60% drop in depression risk and a 73% drop in suicidal thoughts, on average.
Instead of addressing *actual* threats to children like hunger (1 in 8 kids don’t have enough to eat and the federal emergency SNAP supplemental support just ended this week. More kids are hungry today than they were last Sunday.) and gun control (the #1 cause of death for American children, period.), politicians are making a big deal about an imagined threat, fomenting fear and unwarranted disgust, and KILLING some of the most vulnerable among us.
Maybe you don’t want to pay attention to this. Maybe you think casual ignorance is appropriate. It’s the second Sunday in Lent, a season when Christians are invited to reflect on how we might draw nearer to Jesus, y’all, and instead Christians are out here systematically killing vulnerable children by stigmatizing them, ostracizing them, denying them essential medical care, and passing laws that are turning entire families into political refugees seeking safety and asylum far from home. I know some of them.
This post could have just been a single meme:
But here are a couple resources I’ve found helpful, in case you want to stop ignoring the hypocrisy and violence, too:
An interview with Dr. Izzy Lowell, who offers gender-affirming care to trans folks across the US. Her explanation of the details of what’s involved in transitioning, especially with kids, was super helpful in my expanded understanding.
Trans 101: A Brief Guide, from the Brethren Mennonite Council on LGBTQ Interests, for those of you who share my Anabaptist faith tradition:
This beautiful Dunker Punks podcast episode with Jon Bay, who talks about being trans in language that turned my brain upside down (he’s a poet, so, you know, it tracks.)
The readership of this little blog is heavily tilted toward people in the Church of the Brethren and clergy. This movement got its start and is being fueled by Christian nationalism; by Christians. Challenging homophobia and transphobia in your congregation, with your pastor, in the denominational structures, in the minds and hearts of people you study scripture with IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. The tentacles of this violence are far-reaching, and its consequences are deadly. If we’re here, participating in the Christian sector of American life, we have a responsibility to be honest and vocal about how those loud, angry voices insisting on more punishment, more condemnation and more murder are not only wrong but also dangerous. I’ve got one foot out the door, but as long as I’m around, that’s what I’ll be doing.
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