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 125^th 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 20^th 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.