Tag: jesus

Queer Leaven

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Preached at Creekside United Church of Christ (Minneapolis, Minnesota). Text: Matthew 13:33.

Imagine with me that you’re in an aisle of a grocery store, holding one of those rectangular baskets with handles that flip up. Put your hand out like you’re carrying it. (I’ll look less dumb if you join me.) Standing in the baking goods aisle, you reach for a five-pound bag of flour, and place it into the empty basket. Feel the weight as the powdery paper sack drops into it. Now, imagine that’s one terrible news headline, one calamitous thing, landing heavy as a bag of flour in your basket. How many other headlines and stories are you carrying after these last few weeks? Bombs dropping in Iran and missiles in Israel. Disinvestment in medical research, veteran services, disaster relief, suicide prevention. Five pounds, five pounds, five pounds. The supermarket basket is too full for more, but there’s additional pounds to come. Open your arms wide to a great bushel basket now—it can carry more. Add to it the pounds from Supreme Court decisions, ICE abductions, wildfire smoke, and political assassination. Palestinians murdered waiting for their sacks of flour. Do you feel the weight? You’re holding this awkward bushel basket, needing both hands, moving gingerly, so heavy in your arms, and unable to do anything else. How much are you carrying, the piled-up woes of the world this week? Fifty, sixty, seventy pounds—what to do with all that weight? There’s so much potential in the flour—enough to make more than a hundred loaves! But by itself the flour is just inert, dead weight.

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Open and Affirming: Past and Future

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Preached at First Congregational United Church of Christ (Moorhead, Minnesota). Texts: Genesis 9:8-16 and Mark 12:28-31

In September 2001, I completed a move from Great Falls, Montana to Moorhead here, and started schooling down the street at Concordia College. The first couple days of classes were the usual overwhelm you can imagine—a new school, new place, new friends, and new studies. But then on September 11th, the rest of the world and I sat in bewilderment as we tried to make sense of terrorist attacks that would change world history. The next Sunday, I went looking for a church that would help me make sense of what was going on. That cool September morning, walking north from Concordia, I was heading to St. John the Divine Episcopal Church north of here. But as usual I was running behind, and would be late for that service. Walking past on the sidewalk, I noticed that worship here was also at 10am. I’d be on time here, and I could always go to that other church the following Sunday. So I looked up the stone steps, heard chatting and a friendly invitation, then entered through the open front door. In all the years since, I have never made it to St. John the Divine.

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After Trump’s Reelection

On By Oby BallingerIn Blog1 Comment

I woke up at 2:30am and rolled over, sensing that the space beside me was empty, and then saw that Javen’s bedstand light still on. Turning the other way, I reached for my phone and read the headline: Trump won Pennsylvania. I got out of bed and went downstairs to find Javen where I left him hours earlier—lying on the couch, checking election returns. I heard his rundown of the painful results and took some relief in the Minnesota outcomes, but kept going back in shock to the national trends. Republicans gaining ground almost everywhere, and Trump on track to victory even after everyone knows what he plans. I slumped to the floor, leaned on Javen, and said, “It feels really hard to love my neighbor.”

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Healed

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Forty years ago, in the mid-1980s, an unusual disease began spreading throughout the United States and elsewhere in the world. Its characteristic symptoms included flu-like illness, skin lesions, anemia, and a gradual weakening until eventual death. Because of the communities where it was most often found in early years, the disease was described as a “gay plague”, and it became the source of even greater stigma. It took years, and tens of thousands of deaths that nearly wiped out a whole generation of gay men, before President Ronald Reagan would even call it by name, “HIV and AIDS”. It took longer still for governmental research to commence on treatments, and while things are greatly improved now, we still have no cure or vaccine for HIV.

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Raised

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Not long ago, my husband Javen and I had the chance to see “The Color Purple”—a dramatic staging of Alice Walker’s classic novel at Theatre Latte Da. It follows the life of the main character, Celie, who suffers through a lifetime of forced servitude to abusive men. Celie takes at face value what they say about her, that she is ugly, powerless, and good for nothing but endless labor. We see her virtue in repeated acts of generosity and compassion, but Celie struggles to believe that her life is lovely or valuable. Musical numbers lead the audience along a journey of Celie’s self-discovery, gradually shifting to more hopeful melodies, until a climactic moment near the end. In a showstopping performance, Nubia Monks as Celie declares with operatic conviction, “I am beautiful!!” The audience would have been lifted from our seats by the swelling music, had we not already jumped to our feet, calling back to the stage, “YES!! You ARE, you ARE beautiful!!” I don’t know if every performance has the electricity of the preview night we attended, but it captures for me the affirmation and essence of Easter itself. You are beautiful.

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Outwitted (Edwin Markham)

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I first heard this perhaps twenty years ago in a sermon. I love how the speaker refuses to accept the definition of “outsider” that would be imposed by another. The poet doesn’t even seek to establish a counter-definition: “No, you’re the outsider!” Instead, this leads us from the usual paradigms of “us” and “them” to a place that Rumi called “beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing”, transcending such categories altogether by the power of Love.

He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!

Edwin Markham

In particular this Holy Week, I’m recalling how Jesus sat for his final meal with the betrayer Judas and all the deserting disciples, who would disavow knowing him just a few hours later. Nevertheless, the table of mercy and grace draws a circle that includes all, no matter what.

Change-Ability in Church

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Michael Coffey’s poem “Art of Reformation” uses the metaphor of clay on a pottery wheel, describing how the original unformed block can be shaped “into a dove or a fish or a water bowl”. I’d not thought before about the choice that comes to the potter next—to

put it in the kiln and fire it
preserve its beauty in brittle perfection

or keep it supple and soft, wet and moving
so that when the times require creative reformation
you can give thanks for the dove, the bowl, the vase

then reimagine what this poetic mud can be

If God is a potter and we are clay (as the biblical metaphor goes), God has decided not to fire the clay at a given point of supposed perfection, not to freeze out the possibilities of change, movement, and growth. What a gift—that the church has freedom to keep changing, growing, and reimagining what it means to be mud in the Potter’s hands, serving God’s desires in new ways.

We experience the change-ability of church in the building this weekend at Edina Morningside and Linden Hills UCC. The sanctuary has been transformed into a set for Morningside Theatre Company’s intergenerational production of “Beauty and the Beast”, and worship with communion will take place on that set. This means disruption for those of us leading and participating in worship—where to stand, what microphones work, how to project, whether technology will come through to include folks on Zoom, etc. I can imagine (and have felt myself) occasional dismay that the things we church folk count on to stay the same are shifting instead, requiring extra energy to meet the changing moment. But I also know, trust, and have experienced that what “church” means in the 21st century must morph if we are still to serve God’s people, many of whom are not participating in our traditional forms. I’m proud of how we are practicing flexibility and change, working through discomfort to catch the wind of Spirit. We navigated tech challenges last week with gracious humor, then spent a sacred ninety minutes in the sanctuary afterward sharing our dreams for faith “within, among, and beyond” the church. This Sunday, we will set a communion table right there on the changeable sanctuary stage, a metaphor for all our life together.

I hope you’ll come to see the production that many in the church and community have worked hard on for months. Marvel with me at the gift that a “youth ministry” spirit from a summer theatre camp years ago has morphed into the present moment, where dozens of intergenerational actors and stagehands from the church and neighborhood sing, dance, and create joy for audiences of hundreds. Thank you for trusting the precious gift of this faith community to one another, to me, and to a future church on whose behalf we practice such divine endeavors. Above all, in the poet’s final lines, we trust the “animation of the potter Spirit keeping all things fluid… freeing our joints to be the art of God’s desire”.