Sermon: To tell a different story

This is a sermon that I preached last night at Kay Chapel at American University. It's about violence in the name of the Christian story, and why I think--given all that violence--we still need to tell the story of our faith. As it turned out, it was also the day when the campus remembers those who died in the Holocaust by reading names from the steps of Kay, so there was a resonance between what I was saying and what was going on outside. The texts were John 20:19-31 and Acts 5:27-32. Let me know what you think.

I. Love. Stories.

When I was a kid, I used to tell stories. I had a really active imagination, so my stories usually involved Martians or dragons or robotic superheroes. I just loved make-believe. Loved creating whole worlds that I could play in, could lose myself in.

I never kept my stories to myself. I would tell them to just about anyone who was around. My mom would sit at our computer and type up the stories that I told her. Then we’d print them out and make a book out of them, and my dad would help me illustrate them.

I’m pretty sure I still have some of those books sitting around, but anyway. That’s a different story.

Stories. What’s your favorite story?

Think about this question for a second. What’s your favorite story?

Why is it your favorite?

Who is the story about?

Last week, we walked together through a story. It’s a story that has all the elements that make for a good story. It has foreshadowing. Tension. Conflict. Betrayal. Redemption. And when we tell it, there’s a lot of singing.

Now, we find out, the story continues. There’s a “what’s next?” And it sounds like it’s going to be another good story. The story of a people transformed in order to transform the world. The story of a church.

 Earlier, we heard the first outlines of this new story. We heard about the disciples, huddled together in the upper room. We heard about their transformative experience with the Risen Christ, with this man who still bears the scars of his terrible death but now, somehow, graciously breathes out the Spirit of peace. We heard about Peter—fearful Peter, Christ-denying Peter—suddenly filled with courage, leading the apostles in front of the council, saying “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” Renewal. Drama. Confrontation. Oh, yeah. This is going to be a good story.

But there is a problem with this story, or at least a problem with the way that this story has been told throughout the history of the church. A problem that makes me cringe even though I want to be thrilling to the themes of redemption and liberation hinted at in these texts. The story that we are hearing the beginning of tonight is good news, but it has not always been good news for those that the Christian community has interacted with. As it turns out stories, even good stories, can be used as weapons.

I notice, when I’m reading the gospel of John, that I cringe a lot. I cringe a lot because John uses a word repeatedly, a word that is used in tonight’s reading. Actually, in the Common English version that we heard read, the Greek word “Ioudaios” is translated as “Jewish authorities.” But traditionally, in the old King James Version and in the New Revised Standard Version that I’m used to reading, the word is translated as “Jews.” And I hear, “the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews.” And I think, instead, of all the times in the past 2000 years when it has been Jews locking doors for fear of the good Christian folks. And I think, instead, of centuries of pogrom and persecution and Holocaust. Of Christian bishops urging emperors to prohibit Jewish communities from rebuilding burned out synagogues. And then I turn to the Acts passage, and I read “the God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree,” and I wonder just how long in Christian history it took for that plural “you” to mean, not authorities or power structures but instead a whole race or ethnic group. I wonder just how long it took for this good, good story of resurrection and redemption and empowerment to turn into a story of violence, of ethnic cleansing of us-versus-them, of othering.

Of course the story didn’t start out this way. When the gospel of John uses the word “Ioudaios,” what’s being referenced is an intra-Jewish conflict. The Jewish community is being pulled apart over the issue of the messiahship of this Jesus of Nazareth character, and the fledgling pre-Christian community is not doing so well. It seems, from other texts in John’s gospels, that Christians—who, remember, are still predominantly Jewish at this time—have been kicked out of synagogues. So what we have in John’s gospel isn’t the story of Gentile Christians against traitorous Jews but rather a struggling Jewish Christian community against, as the CEB would have it, religious authorities. There are even some scholars who argue that the meaning of “Ioudaios” is better understood as “Judean,” that is, from Jerusalem and southern surrounds, in contrast to the predominantly northern, Galilean followers of Jesus.

This same dynamic of intra-communal conflict is at play throughout the book of Acts. The author of the single document that we know as Luke and Acts goes out of his way to absolve Pilate of the death of Jesus, emphasizing the insistence of the Jewish community on the crucifixion of Jesus. But as Barbara Reid writes, “When Jewish Christians spoke of Jews who put Jesus to death, the intra-Jewish nature of the conflict was clear. But when Christians who are no longer Jews speak of ‘the Jews’ as being responsible for the death of Jesus, there is a whole other nuance that fuels anti-Judaism. Luke’s narratives must be understood in both their historical and theological contexts, at the same time, they must not be used to foment anti-Semitism.”[i]

But oh, how our Christian narratives—our Christian stories—have been used to foment anti-Semitism. The story of the crucifixion, with the Jews as the enemy, the killers of Christ, fueled Christian violence against Jewish communities, from riots to pogroms to the ovens of the Holocaust. It was Christian theology—the Christian story about God—based, ostensibly, on the biblical texts, that made this violence possible. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners makes this point, that German anti-Semitism, based on Christian theology and a certain reading of the Bible, created the atmosphere in which genocide could occur.[ii] Our Christian story was wrapped up in the need for violent scapegoating. Our story, our text, was used as a weapon, as a tool for writing other people out of the story. 

Now much work has been done, after the Holocaust, to disassociate biblical interpretation from this pernicious anti-Semitism. But Jewish people are not the only victims of our Christian tendency—can we call it our human tendency—to write people out of stories. Other religions have been the target of our stories-as-weapons as well. I’m thinking particularly of the stereotypes and the fear directed toward Islam, from the blood-drenched saga of the Crusades until today. The story relies on the exclusion of others, of people of other religions, in order to secure the particularity of Christian salvation. And we look to some of our favorite Bible verses and we see the shadow of this looming exclusivity. We see John 3:16, that favorite verse for signs at football games, and we read “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” And somehow instead of the love of God, and instead of the statement against condemnation that appears in the very next verse, somehow this verse comes to mean “You must accept Jesus or you must perish.” And we hear John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” See? Look! It’s in the Bible! If you don’t believe in Jesus, then you are excluded. You are written out of the story.

(This is bad exegesis, by the way. But I think it’s representative of the way these texts have been interpreted over the centuries and throughout modern times.)

Now maybe it’s natural for religious stories to exclude other religions. But the way that the Christian story has been told over the centuries and right up until our current time has been perfectly willing to write people out of the story within the Christian fold. It will come as no surprise to you to hear me say that our texts have been used as weapons against women. I mean, there’s the obvious proof text passages. 1 Timothy 2:12: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” Or 1 Corinthians 11:3, “I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of the wife.” But those passages are the easy ones to critique, to say, “Well, those are just the product of a certain sociohistoric context.” But there are parts of our story that are much closer to home, I think, that have been used to commit violence against women. How many women experiencing domestic violence have been told that the abuse their husbands are pouring out on them is simply “the cross that they have to bear”? How much Christian theology has centered around God as an abusive Father, pouring His—and I say His here on purpose—wrath out on a victim Son? And if an abusive Father, why not an abusive husband? And I could go on and on about texts from the prophets Hosea and Jeremiah that picture Israel as an unfaithful wife and proceed to use language of violence and shame against the feminine depiction of the people of God. So often, too often, the texts that we draw on for our Christian faith have been used to silence women, to hurt women, to write women out of the story.

Of course, the latest fad in violence done in the name of the Christian story is that which is committed against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer folk, whether Christian or not. And again, we can go to the Bible for our prooftexts, for those seven clobber passages that are used to tell gay people that they are inherently wrong, unclean, less-than. During the recent rallies at the Supreme Court in response to the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 court cases, one journalist went and talked to young people who were rallying against marriage equality. He had them write the reason for their opposition to gay marriage on a pad of paper and then snapped a picture of them. Almost every single one of the young people he talked to used some sort of pseudo-Christian argument to make their case that marriage should be between one (cisgender) man and one (cisgender) woman. As Peter Gomes, the late Harvard chaplain and himself a gay man, writes: “Although most contemporary Christians who have moral reservations about homosexuality, and who find affirmation for those reservations in the Bible, do not resort to physical violence and intimidation, they nevertheless contribute to the maintenance of a cultural environment in which less scrupulous opponents of homosexuality are given the sanction of the Bible to feed their prejudice and, in certain cases, cultural “permission” to act with violence upon those prejudices.”[iii] To Gomes I would add that even when overt violence is not acted out against gay people, the violence of closets and of silencing—with all the depression, self-loathing, and all too often suicide that results—is not to be underestimated. For so long LGBTQ people have been the scapegoats, pushed to the margins and written out of the Christian story.

I could go on, of course. I could talk about all the biblical arguments for chattel slavery in the United States. The violence done in the name of the Bible against indigenous people, including ongoing violence against Palestinians sanctioned by the land promises of God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants. The violence of colonialism. I imagine you get the point.

So here’s the question: why not just throw it all out? Why, if the Christian story has been accompanied by, and has fueled, so much violence throughout the centuries, if our texts have been used to write so many people out of the story, then why should we keep the damn thing at all? Why should we read the texts, why should we listen to the stories?

Here’s why I think our Christian stories matter. Because they point the way to the risen Christ. And this Christ, this risen Christ, is the Jesus who knows what it is to be written out of a story. To be pushed to the margins. To be violated, abused, killed. And it is this Christ—this risen Christ who still carries the signs of trauma in hands and side, wounds that Thomas can touch—who, against all reason, breathes the Spirit of peace out onto the disciples who betrayed and abandoned him. This wounded, this traumatized Christ comes to us from the margins of the page, from the places of crushing pain, and gives us the ability to tell a new story. Gives us new lenses to read this old, old story.

This risen Christ, this resurrected Jesus, calls us to question any place in our story that excludes and scapegoats, because if we read with the eyes of Christ we read with the eyes of the excluded and the scapegoated. This risen Christ, this resurrected Jesus, transforms Peter and the rest of the disciples from marginalized voices huddled in a room to empowered voices that must obey the call of a God of justice and of peace rather than any human authority of violence and dehumanization.  When we read our texts, when we tell our stories, in the Spirit of this resurrected Jesus, we find that our texts can no longer be used as weapons. That we can no longer engage in the project of writing people out of the story.

Because, you see, we are an Easter people. We are an Easter people, and something fundamental has changed. Something that leads us to challenge, like Peter standing before the council, the violent side of our shared story.

What’s your favorite story?

Who is it about?

Who is included, and who is not?

Let me tell you my favorite story. It is one that I have probably told before. You might have heard it in this very chapel, but I think it is worth retelling. The story is about South Africa, in the depths of the struggle against apartheid. The white South African government had outlawed a march against apartheid, so the organizers of the march decided instead to hold a church service at St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town. Then-bishop Desmond Tutu was preparing to speak to the gathered marchers when the doors to the cathedral burst open. In poured members of the dreaded apartheid secret police, making no effort to conceal their identity. They carried tape recorders and pads of paper. The message was clear: speak up, and your name will be taken down. You will be recorded. And we will find you. And we will find your family. And you will regret that you did not hold your tongue.

Desmond Tutu surveyed the situation. The menacing agents. The terrified congregation, eyes moving fearfully from him to the intruders. What would he say? How would he respond?

He began thoughtfully. “You are powerful,” he said. “You are very powerful.”

“But we serve a God who will not be mocked!”

And then, spreading his arms wide in a gesture of welcoming and smiling widely, he proclaimed: “Since, in Christ, we have already won…we invite you today to join the winning side.”

The response was tremendous. The congregation began singing and dancing, and the pressure of their movement slowly moved the secret police out of the cathedral and onto the street. From fear to celebration. From huddled in a room to saying, with Peter, “We must obey God rather than any human authority.”

Now the thing about this story is that when it happened, there was no way, just no way, that Desmond Tutu was right. The anti-apartheid movement was not the winning side. It was, very decidedly, the losing side. But a decade later those same protesters would be dancing in the streets of South Africa celebrating the fall of apartheid, and who knows but they might have been joined by some of those same secret police agents who had been tasked to intimidate and brutalize them. The anti-apartheid movement was carried forward by a hope in the resurrection, a hope that challenged not only state-sanctioned but also church-sanctioned dehumanization and violence. The scapegoated, traumatized Jesus, emerging from the margins of the story to breathe peace.

Friends, we are being invited, today, to meet this resurrected Jesus. This might mean positioning ourselves in some scary places. In the margins of our collective stories. In fearfully locked rooms. In the places within our narratives where prejudice and scapegoating rule the day. In places of trauma and pain. Because it is from exactly these places that the risen Christ emerges, breathing peace. This risen Christ is calling to us, today, from demolished homes in East Jerusalem, from bomb-shattered streets in Syria, from poverty-ravaged and abandoned urban and rural landscapes in the U.S., from psychiatric wards and homeless shelters, calling to us. Calling to us to, today, to tell a different story.

Calling to us, today, to join the winning side.

---

[i] Barbara Reid, “Notes on Acts,” in the New Interpreter’s Study Bible (Abingdon, 2003), 1959.

[ii] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Vintage, 1997).

[iii] Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart (Harper One, 1996), 146.

Easter Monday: On not giving up

Lent is over, Christ is risen, the "alleluias" are back on our lips....and I'm in a total daze, probably brought on by the 11 worship services I've been to in the past 4 days.

God sent me an email this morning that just said "enough already."

Anyway. Back in February, before Lent began, I wrote this:

"I was thinking about "giving something up" this year, and it struck me that giving up is exactly what I've been trying to avoid ever since I got out of Silver Hill more than a year ago now. So I think I'm going to blog for Lent about what I'm not giving up on, what I'm holding on to, what's keeping me going."

A liturgical season later, and  think I only missed three days. Not too shabby given how much of an undisciplined mess I generally am. I've had help. Once people caught wind of what I was doing, they'd ask me, "So, what aren't you giving up on today?" or "Have you blogged today?" It was a cool bit of community accountability that I really appreciated.

A liturgical season later, and what I have is a list of reasons--some seemingly trivial, some almost too big to hold on to--for putting my feet on the ground in the morning, for getting through the day, for taking whatever the next step is in this whole ministry thing that I've committed myself to. Should I say, this whole life thing that I've committed myself to?

Thank you for coming with me on this Lenten journey. There is so much not to give up on. So much to keep going for.

One day, when I am struggling, will you be part of my community of accountability? Will you remind me of this?

Easter Sunday: Not giving up on hope

The Easter Vigil (both of them, in my case) has ended, the alleluias have come out of the cave with Christ, and so I get to say:


Almasih qam! Haqan qam! 
Christ has risen! He has risen indeed!



When I say, Christ is risen, I mean to say:

Violence doesn't win. Oppression doesn't win. Despair doesn't win. Death doesn't win.

Love wins. Justice wins. Life wins. Hope wins.

And I mean to say that this is true, in spite of all the evidence you can bring me to the contrary.

Of course, there are millions of people in this world for whom the counsel of hope seems trite at worst and dangerous at best. Who am I--white, male, straight, physically able, with access to economic resources and a U.S. passport--to lecture people on hope? Who am I to say to those suffering in the shadow of empire, in crushing poverty, in the midst of violence and war, that they should have hope? Am I simply a purveyor of opiate? Or worse, am I only building people up so that they can once again be crushed by oppressive circumstances?

My Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers taught me an important lesson. They taught me that optimism and hope are two different things. That optimism thinks, simply, that everything will turn out alright, that things just get better, that this time, this photo-shoot-posing-as-peace-process will work.

But hope is something different altogether. Hope is persistence. Hope stands firm in the face of darkness and dares, against all reason, to take one more step. Hope keeps walking with children to school, through the checkpoints, through the invasive searches, because hope believes that by walking you are creating a world in which children's education matters. A world without the sin of military occupation. A world worthy of being hoped in.

Hope does not ignore trauma. Jesus does not appear to the disciples scar-free. I'm reminded of a song that my roommate has gotten me hooked on, called "Fergus Falls" by Field Report:

"This is the one in which I miraculously pulled out/Of a free-fall dive over Fergus Falls, Minnesota
And this is the one like 10 years ago/That I told you about
Where my wings iced up in the fall/as it gets colder"

Hope doesn't just leave the past behind. It lives through it, into a new future.

So today is a day that we proclaim hope. We point to an empty tomb. And we sing songs, and we pray prayers, and we ready ourselves to step--all of us, together, with all that we are--into a new future together.

Alleluia. Amen.

Holy Saturday: Not giving up on silence.

"There was silence in heaven for about half an hour."

Sometimes, there is no right thing to say.

This Holy Saturday, I'm not giving up on silence.

Good Friday: Not giving up on the cross

The title of my own post makes me cringe a little bit.

I've thought too much about this not to. The words pop into my head while I sing the Good Friday hymns and look at the black-shroud draped cross: "Substitutionary atonement. Wrath of God. Divine child abuse."

I've heard too many stories. Pastors counseling women being abused by their husbands that the Christ-like thing is just to accept that this is their lot in life, that this is their "cross to bear." People with power insisting that it is people without power who must take up the cross, who must suffer. People for whom just being in a sanctuary with a cross makes them uncomfortable; churches choosing not to have a cross up front because it scares people away.

There are all sorts of problems with the cross. But I'm not giving up on it. 

Because I believe in a God who steps into situations of suffering, of violence, and of pain. Who takes a stance of nonviolence in the face even of devastating violence. Whose human experience includes abandonment and despair. A vulnerable God. A God who unmasks unjust systems and structures. 

I believe in a God who loves you so much, so much, that not even death--the death of God!--can scare God off. So if death can't scare God off, how can mistakes? How can failures? How can depression? How can hopelessness? How can doubt?

At one of today's Good Friday services (I have 3, so the cross is on my mind), I got to read a passage from Romans 8, and it flowed out of me like a sermon. Sometimes Paul knows just what to say: "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor death, nor anything else in all , will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

I am not giving up on the cross because, without understanding it, I don't think the following story makes any sense:

In 1996, in civil war ridden Algeria, 7 Trappist monks were kidnapped from their monastery by members of the Armed Islamic Group and were killed. One of the monks, knowing that violence was growing inevitable, wrote a letter to be discovered after his death. It read, in part:

 "I have lived long enough to know that I, too, am an accomplice of the evil that seems to prevail in the world around, even that which might lash out blindly at me. If the moment comes, I would hope to have the presence of mind, and the time, to ask for God’s pardon and for that of my fellowman, and, at the same time, to pardon in all sincerity him who would attack me....And to you, too, my friend of the last moment, who will not know what you are doing. Yes, for you, too, I wish this thank-you, this “A-Dieu,” whose image is in you also, that we may meet in heaven, like happy thieves, if it pleases God, our common Father."

They stayed, knowing this would come to pass, simply because the Algerian community in which they had lived and worked could not pack up and leave. They stayed. And they prepared to forgive.

There are all sorts of problems with cross theology. But I need it to challenge me into further vulnerability, into places of pain. Into community with the rest of the happy thieves.

This Good Friday, I'm not giving up on the cross.

Maundy Thursday: Not giving up on footwashing

I posted this over at the On Fire blog, so it was written with an eye to young people working for justice in the UMC, but I think it applies. Today, Maundy Thursday, Christians remember what's often called the Last Supper, which, in John's gospel, which is saturated in eucharistic imagery, is the story of Jesus washing the disciples' feet. (John 13:1-20)

Today, we remember events that it seems impossible for us to remember, events that happened centuries ago. We reenact. We inhabit stories, live into texts. We repeat the words: "Do this and remember me." "If I have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet."

We are supposed to wash each other's feet.

Here is what I think that means, for young people seeking God and seeking justice in the world today.

It means taking care of each other at our most vulnerable places, the places that we want to hide away.

It means that, while we're rallying at the Supreme Court or celebrating divestment victories (and asking "what's next?") or organizing for worker justice or calling our members of Congress, we don't forget to take care of each other. We don't forget that we are all soft and hurting, that we each come with our own stories, our own wrinkles, our own mess.

It means that we never forget that we work for justice because people, real people, are being hurt. That those people have names. That they have stories. That this is not ultimately about particular policies or parties or pieces of legislation--those things are all of vital importance, don't get me wrong--but about people. People we need to listen to. And that often is going to mean, inasmuch as this is at all possible, divesting ourselves of power. Or at the very least being critical of the sort of power that keeps us from caring for each other as equals.

We have a lot to do. A lot of work to take on. A lot of tasks to accomplish. But we have to remember that we will not always be tireless in our work for justice. That we, and the people we work with, will stumble. Will struggle. Will burn out.

We have to be willing to bend down into those places, and to love, to love, to love.

Friends, one thing we have to remember. We gotta wash each other's feet.

Holy Wednesday: Not giving up on solidarity (pt. III)

My best friend's dad died two nights ago, after a long struggle with cancer.

I have some choice words about cancer. I won't post them publicly. Let me just say that if I met cancer in a dark alley, I'd probably leave behind my pacifist principles and kick some ass.

Anyway, I went to MD today to spend time with my friend and his mom. We just talked, and told some stories. Talked a bit about what we were grateful for. Like I said yesterday, there's nothing magical to say.

Just sit. And share. And be present.

I have found that, while not for everyone, beer is remarkably helpful in this endeavor as well.

During Holy Week, we take on roles. We journey through the week together, inhabiting the texts that guide us. And we learn of a God in solidarity with us, in spite of--in the midst of--all of our mess.

This Holy Wednesday, I am once again not giving up on solidarity.

Holy Tuesday: Not giving up on life

Death sucks.

I should probably have some better pastoral response to the one stable reality of life--that it ends--but I don't. It sucks. There. Screw eloquence.

When someone you know and love dies, there is nothing that anybody can say that magically makes it better.

All you can really do is gather around. Huddle. Share good stories. And agree with each other: "This sucks."

Of course, where we are going with this week, in the church anyway, is the victory of life. But we first live in the reality and the shadow of death. And, if we are honestly engaging in the process of this week, we have nothing to do but to stare that reality in the face.

Still. I'm not giving up on life. On life lived in the face of death. On life lived well, life lived so that there are stories to tell.

Clarence Jordan once said that the Christian life is "a call of life, to life, for life." He also said that faith is not a  stubborn belief in spite of evidence but a life lived in scorn of the consequences. That meant a lot to me when I was considering a call to ordained ministry. Which I still am. Because it's a decision that I make, a particular claim that I make, when I say that I am called to life. As Andrew Solomon, who suffers from severe depression, says "Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely and sometimes against the moment’s reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?”

Of course, in our society, there are all sorts of ways that we end up serving death. I'd say more about that, but the poem "Conscientious Objector" by Edna St. Vincent Millay says it better than I do:


I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.



Poets, as it turns out, have this crazy idea that death doesn't get the last word. Take that John Dunne character, for instance:


Death, be not proud, though some have callèd thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.
From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go--
Rest of their bones and souls' delivery!
Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!



Death, thou shalt die. Or as Paul says:


‘Where, O death, is your victory?
   Where, O death, is your sting?’

That's where we're heading, this week. But in the meantime, death sucks, and we have to make a decision. To live.

Let's do it.

This Holy Tuesday, I'm not giving up on life.

Confrontation Monday: Not giving up on laughter

Systematic Theology can be a pretty grueling class.

This is the class that is supposed to explain it all, or equip you to explain it all, or something. Our professor has this habit of lecturing for awhile and then taking a long pause and saying something along the lines of "Know what I mean?" I hardly ever do.

He actually left the following comment on one of my midterms: "I would replace 'precedes' with 'supercedes' to make the point that filiation carries more ontic weight than spiration. Know what I mean?"

Nope. I don't.

Anyway. Today's class was full of hilarity. Take, for example, our professor trying to explain the inexplicable nature of grace. "The person I'm closest to in the world is my wife. Do I understand her? NO! Does she understand me? She THINKS she does!"

Or the following exchange:

Prof: "Barth thinks every knee will bow. Wesley says if you don't walk with God, you burn in hell. ::long pause:: Am I wrong?"

::I raise my hand to ask a question::

Prof: "Dave thinks I'm wrong."

Me: "No no, you're not wrong. I mean, you could be. I don't know."

Prof:: ::cracks up for like 5 minutes::


Anyway. We all laughed and got through it.

Laughter is such a marvelous thing. I think it was C.S. Lewis who once said that the one thing the devil can't stand is people laughing at him. Humor can be subversive. It can unmask powers. It can save a day.

Don't get me wrong. Laughter can also be mean, sometimes. But even that meanness loses its power as we gain an ability to laugh at ourselves.

We don't picture Jesus laughing too much. But the Bible is just full of jokes (the Hebrew scriptures are in love with puns). I think Jesus laughed. I think when he caught Peter as Peter failed spectacularly at walking on water (but dude! He frikin' tried it! What a badass!), that he wasn't angry or disappointed. I think he and Peter shared a (slightly terrified) chuckle as Jesus said, "O you of little faith."

Today in Holy Week is called "Confrontation Monday." It's the day that we celebrate Jesus clearing out the temple. So laughter might seem a bit out of place, might seem a bit out of place in the theme of the week. But if you want to confront power, I'd highly recommend that you start by laughing at it.

There are points in this week that are no laughing matter. But the new week begins with life having the last laugh.

Today, on Confrontation Monday, I'm not giving up on laughter.

Palm/Passion Sunday: Not giving up on humility

Today is Palm Sunday. That's the one where Jesus rides the donkey and everyone is excited and waves branches and sings songs.

It's also Passion Sunday. That's the one where Jesus dies.

It's like rapid cycling bipolar gets its own liturgical feast.

Anyway. That's not exactly what this post is about.

This post is about humility.

It's about how the lectionary readings for today, both Isaiah and Paul, stressed giving of oneself, emptying oneself. Divesting oneself of power and of violence.

It's about how, 33 years ago, Archbishop Oscar Romero was gunned down while celebrating the Eucharist. After pleading with his fellow countrymen, including the government, to stop the killing. After writing to the U.S. pleading the government to stop sending weapons to El Salvador.

This is Romero who was selected as Archbishop as a conservative voice, a counter to the liberation theology that argued that the gospel meant siding with the subversives. But Romero humbled himself. Listened to the voices of the poor. And knew that he had to stand for justice.

This post is about how a man named Gordon Cosby, who could have been the head of a huge national church if he wanted, but instead planted small churches called to social justice and mission in their particular places in Washington, DC. It's about how this man, who died this week at the age of 95, eschewed the national spotlight to instead focus on the hurting and the suffering that he saw right at his feet. This is a man whose model of doing church continues to be cutting edge to this day and, as far as I can tell, he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. (The Church of the Savior wiki doesn't mention his name). I first heard about Cosby when I was taking a nonviolence training at the Servant Leadership School, a ministry of Cosby's Church of the Savior. A ministry of self-giving. Of self-sacrifice. Of love.

This post is about how it's time for me to make some decisions about my life. And about how my head is clouded with questions and with doubts and with mixed motives. And about how the question I am finding myself asking is, "What is the humble choice?"

Today, on Palm Sunday, on Passion Sunday, I am not giving up on humility.

Lent: Not giving up on call

I've been trying to get myself going again on the whole ordination process thing. One thing I've had to do for a long time now, which I've been procrastinating on, is come up with a call statement. Part of the reason that I've been putting this off is that it brings me face to face with a tough question, which is: am I really pursuing this vocation because I am called to it? Is this a nudging, a pulling, from God, or is it just that I like standing in front of people and talking? Because if it's the latter, then this is all a bad idea.

So I wrote a call statement. Or story. Or something. And I think it's genuine. Why don't you tell me what you think?

While studying abroad in Morocco in the spring of 2005, I asked the campus chaplain of the small Christian community at Al Akhawayn University what she did for a living. The only rule for answering was that she wasn’t allowed to use any “church language.” She thought about it for a second and told me, “I try to model vulnerability.” 

The phrase has stuck with me because I believe I am called to places of vulnerability, places where hurt and brokenness meet a God of love. 

 I grew up in the church, specifically at Baldwin Memorial United Methodist Church in Millersville, MD. If I close my eyes I can still see the light filtering through the stained glass windows onto the maroon pew cushions, and take a deep breath of that old church smell. I have always been encouraged and supported to take leadership roles in the church, and from a relatively early age some people at Baldwin had suggested I might make a good pastor someday. But by the time I was in high school I was having a hard time, in life and in church. A beloved mentor had died by suicide, and I was having my own struggle with depression. My church wasn’t sure how to help me, but they did know to stand by me and love me, even when I was angry or when I pushed away help. 

As high school ended and I began college, I began feeling the tug of God to reengage with the church. God’s gentle nudging, and encouragement of people in my faith community, not only brought me back to a connection with my faith but also led me to think about how I might serve God and my community in the future. 

 And so it was that I found myself sitting and talking with a campus minister about being a pastor. “I try to model vulnerability,” she said, and thus presented me with a way of approaching Christian ministry that I—broken, hurting, questioning me—could embrace. I didn’t have to have it all together. I didn’t have to have the answers to all the questions that had been plaguing me since high school. I simply had to be ready to serve at places of vulnerability. To listen. To sit with or stand with. To open up space for honesty. And thus to open up space for a vulnerable God, a vulnerable Christ, to enter in. 

 This model of ministry has followed me—through exploring my faith in college, through my 3 years as a Mission Intern with GBGM in Palestine/Israel and Washington, DC, through my time in seminary, and through my experiences with my own mental health struggles. In these places I have met a vulnerable God, a God who exposes Gods’s self to risk and to harm, even to death, in order to show God’s love and acceptance of us. It is this God who, I feel, is calling me into further ministry and service. 

A vulnerable God is not at work simply behind edifices but at intersections, and in many ways I think that I am called to intersections and to voices that are not being heard within the walls of the church. For me, that has meant listening to the voices of Palestinians and Israelis striving for justice and peace. It has meant sitting with people in psych wards, hearing their stories. And it has meant working alongside college students, young adult leaders who often feel unheard by the church. 

I feel called to a vulnerable church. To a church that reaches outside of its own walls to hear the voices that are not being heard. I feel called to help co-create this kind of church with the Spirit of God who is not done with us yet. Together, we can find ourselves, like Peter in Cornelius’ house (Act 10:34-48), amazed at who the Spirit is falling on and what new ways God is working in the world around us.

Well, what do you know. Maybe I am called after all. What do you think?

This Lent, I'm not giving up on call.

Lent: Not giving up on dancing

So if you think that "seminary dance" sounds awkward, you're not the only one.

But Wesley's student council pulled it off, DJ and all, and despite our weird tendency to form one really big circle it was a good time. I had a date because, you know, when you're going to an awkward dance it's good to have solidarity.

And we danced. To ridiculous music, mainly. And all of us, all of our bodies moved, sometimes in rhythm, and sometimes just how they needed to move.

We talk a lot in seminary. It was good to find ourselves in movement. In rhythm. In dance.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on dancing.

Lent: Not giving up on atonement

I just had a long conversation about the atonement. 

Atonement literally means at-one-ment, the remaking at-one of God and the world.

There are all sorts of problems with atonement theology as it has generally been constructed in Christianity. Like the myth of redemptive violence. Like the divine child abuse model. Like its entirely individualistic nature. 

But we talked about broken systems and broken people, and a world in need of liberation, and a God who enters into places of violence and refuses to be complacent, who instead provokes a response. 

We talked about unmasking violence and injustice.

And it seems to me that there is something worthwhile here.

We listened to a podcast of This American Life from a couple of years ago, at my roommate's urging. And in the podcast a man talked about telling his 4 year old daughter about Jesus when she asked him what Christmas was about. And then later she saw a big crucifix and asked, "What's that?" And so he told her, "That's Jesus too."

Then they went out for lunch on Martin Luther King, Jr. day. And she saw a picture of Dr. King. And she said, "Who's that?" And he told her. And she said, "So he said what Jesus said?" And he said, "Yeah, I guess that's true." And she said, "Did they kill him, too?"

We are so broken. We are so in need of healing. And God will do anything--God will die if need be--to bring it about.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on atonement. 

Lent: Not giving up on Mr. Rogers

March 20 is Mr. Rogers' birthday.

I remember watching Mr. Rogers growing up. I didn't watch a whole lot of TV growing up, my parents were pretty careful with what they let us watch. But we watched Mr. Rogers. And we learned. We learned about the world. And imagination. And creativity. And being a decent human being. And respecting differences. And kindness.

I loved Mr. Rogers. Everybody loves Mr. Rogers. Even the ever-snarky Cracked.com loves Mr. Rogers.

So here's to Mr. Rogers, and all the things he taught us, and a vision of a world where imagination breaks down barriers and everybody is a neighbor.

Let's listen to what that wonderful Presbyterian minister (I wonder how Reformed his theology was?) had to tell us. Let's grow some new things in the gardens of our minds:



This Lent, I'm not giving up on Mr. Rogers.

Lent: Not giving up on peace

10 years ago, we attacked Iraq.

I remember going to marches in the cold of winter to oppose the invasion, and how fruitless it all felt when the bombs started to fall. I remember kids in my high school classroom cheering when the invasion was announced.

And I remember the predictions of all those wild-eyed leftists, that this would be a quagmire, a bloodbath, that it would just cause more violence and more hatred.

10 years later, and Iraq is torn apart by violence, thousands upon thousands of Iraqis are dead and thousands of U.S. troops, and the U.S. is billions of dollars deeper in debt, and dammit we were right.

I'm not giving up on peace because when we do, when we give up on creative possibilities outside of the march of war, then Iraq happens.

I'm not giving up on peace because there are so many wonderful and creative people working for it, like the members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams and more importantly the courageous people and organizations that they partner with.

I'm not giving up on peace because war shatters lives, including the lives of the young people we send off to fight it.

I'm not giving up on peace because of the voices of those like my father and other veterans for peace who have been there and have fought and have returned to say that war must end.

It's easy to give up on peace. It seems so soft. So unrealistic. So silly.

But this Lent, I'm not giving up on peace.

Lent: Not giving up on naps

Seriously, they are glorious. Sometimes, a little reboot is just what you need before you finally finish your stupid paper.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on naps.

Lent: Not giving up on baptism

28 years ago today, I was baptized. My godfather, Patrick, held me and promised to do his best to be a spiritual mentor for me.

He has done a great job.

I remember when I was in high school, having a really rough time, and Pat driving me around my neighborhood while I talked to him. "Are you praying about this?" he asked me. It hadn't even occurred to me. I figured I had to do this thing alone.

Baptism is not a lonely act. It is a sign, not only of our own calling and adoption, but of our calling and adoption into a community. A body. In baptism, says Paul, we die to ourselves, and are raised in Christ--and Christ, as understood by Paul, is represented on this planet not by an individual but by a community. We die to individualism and alienation, and we are raised for communion. In baptism, we are marked as God's, but we come to understand ourselves as loved by God in the context of people who love us.

Pat is someone who reminds me that I am part of a community, that I am not doing this alone. I wonder who does that for you?

This Lent, I'm not giving up on baptism.

Lent: Not giving up on justice

Today--March 16--marked the 10 year anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, the USAmerican peace activist who was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip.

There are a lot of things to say. I won't say most of them. I've met Rachel's parents, Craig and Cindy. They are incredibly passionate and dedicated people, who have seen justice denied again and again in the case of their daughter. They are also deeply compassionate. Here are some words that they have to say:

There are a lot of things to say. Rachel was killed by a Caterpillar bulldozer, a D-9 militarized monstrosity, that was sold to Israel through a U.S. military aid package. Rachel was killed by US-made hardware provided by U.S. aid.

There are a lot of things to say. We noticed Rachel's death, in 2003. We can name her. Can we name the thousands of Palestinians killed since Oslo? Do we notice her death because she is American and blond and pretty and well-spoken? I say this with only the deepest respect for her and her family. I think she--and I know her family--would ask the same questions.

There are a lot of things to say. But one thing to say is this: we can't give up on justice. Despite the deaths, the seemingly insurmountable legislative challenges, the growing settlements, the Wall, and on and on and on,
we can't give up. Even though I want to. I so badly want to. And there are days and days and days that I do. Give up, that is.

But there are so many people like Rachel and, even more importantly, the Palestinians and Israelis that she worked with. Patient widows, wearing down injustice.

So we can't give up. We need to hold Caterpillar accountable for their weaponized bulldozer sales. We need to end U.S. military aid to Israel. We need to boycott, divest, and sanction.

So the other day, I sent an email to figure out who to talk to about how Wesley invests our money. It's a tiny little step. Insignificant. But it's not giving up.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on justice.

Lent: Not giving up on tomorrow

Today sucked.

I won't really go into details. And the current guitar playing and wine setup is going pretty well.

But I really need a restart.

Mary Anne Radmacher famously wrote: “Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.”

This Lent, I'm not giving up on tomorrow.

Lent: Not giving up on weeping

I had trouble posting yesterday because I was struggling to come up with words for what I was feeling. Let me explain.

We had group presentations in our Jeremiah class yesterday. Groups were presenting on various motifs in the book of Jeremiah, and one group had the motif of sounds. Jeremiah is an incredibly graphic book. If you read it right, you can hear the thundering of horses hooves, the sound of the trumpets, the wild pounding of Jeremiah's (or is it God's?) heart. So this group presented on various sounds in Jeremiah--sounds of war, sounds of desolation, sounds of restoration.

It was an effective presentation. It was probably too effective.

For the last piece of their presentation, the group played a sound clip that a Gazan woman had recorded in her house. It was the thundering crunch--distant but not distant enough--of the shelling, or the bombing, of the Gaza Strip.

I got up and left the room. Others in the room had incredibly strong, in some cases traumatized, reactions.

It's important for me to say that I was never in Gaza, was never under bombardment. I only have the second- and third-hand accounts. My friend Eric telling me that his friend Basem split up his family so that they wouldn't all be killed in one blast, back in November during the euphemistically named Operation Pillar of Defense. The U.S.-made F-16s flying their test patterns over Bethlehem before Operation Cast Lead in 2008, breaking the sound barrier over crowded civilian areas. Amr Shurrab, talking about his family being gunned down by the Israeli military during a ceasefire. And, as I have done so often, I run out of words.

So I ran out of words, yesterday, and couldn't blog. But later on that night, I met with my partner to talk about our own presentation on Jeremiah, in which we will talk about the motif of weeping in Jeremiah.

And we wondered together what it would be like to provide a space for mourning.

And sometimes, I think that's what's called for. Not reasoning. Not speaking. Just weeping.

I have a dear friend who told me once that tears are a spiritual gift, a gift from God. And I think that's true. So often the tears cannot seem to come, and we are desolate. Unable even to mourn.

That's why, according to theologian Pete Rollins, we need a church that's like a singer-songwriter. Or a poet. Or a professional mourner. Able through its own public struggle with pain to put us in touch with our emotions and our pain, and thus to give us tools to overcome:



Professional mourners, by the way, show up in Jeremiah, too, as does weeping. Even God weeps in Jeremiah. It's a book edited in exile by a community trying desperately to figure out how to overcome trauma.

A community holding open the possibility of mourning.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on weeping.

Lent: Not giving up on therapy...

...even though I really, really, really want to.

Here's the thing. Counseling sucks. You pay a stranger to listen to you ramble. Or, in my case, you pay a stranger on a sliding scale so that you can spend a lot of time staring off into nothing trying to think of something to say. Counseling for me ranges from slightly annoying to really, really, really frustrating. 

I'm going to keep going, though. And after some consideration, I've decided that the reason I'm going to keep going isn't just that at some point I'm going to have to tell my District Committee on Ministry that I'm crazy sauce and at that time I should also probably be able to tell them that I'm in counseling. 

I'm going to keep going because it's a discipline, and like most disciplines one engages in it faithfully not because of some immediate payoff but rather because one trusts that it has a long term formative effect. 

The discipline of therapy, for me, is that it makes me be honest about my feelings, at least once a week. It's not that I'm always dishonest about my feelings. It's that I often try to ignore them, to pretend that they don't control me, when in fact they are the raging currents that drive most of my life. So counseling makes me face that, makes me talk about it, and--the hope is--brings me to some level of acceptance about what it is that I'm feeling.

And then, of course, it leaves me with that frustrating "so what" question that I can only try to answer with the rest of my week.

It is frustrating. But it's a checking-in point in my week, a guidepost that I desperately need.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on therapy.

Even though, seriously, I want to. 

Lent: Not giving up on humans

My roommate and I tend to get into long theological conversations, and drag anyone around us into them as well. Luckily for us we often find willing participants.

Tonight, after some guitar playing and wine drinking, we got to talking about total depravity and sin and all that good stuff.

I won't go into the details other than to tell you that I can come across as pretty pessimistic about human nature.

But I'm not a pessimist, really. I have hope.

This Lent, despite all the reasons to, I'm not giving up on humans.

Lent: Not giving up on worship

So I'm probably going to endanger my ordination process by saying this, but worship is kind of awkward.

I mean honestly. Non-Christian folks who read this. Don't you think what Christians do on Sunday morning is kind of weird?

It's like, a bunch of people who might not even like each other gathered in a room, singing songs that aren't on the radio (or are only on an awfully cheesy radio station) and saying words--let's be honest, often mumbling words--together. And there's a lot of standing up and sitting down.

And then sometimes we eat a chunk of bread that we dipped in grape juice. When else do you dip bread in grape juice?

(It should be noted that in all the Christian communities I'm in love with, people gather together afterwards to eat the rest of the bread. Delicious. When one of the pastors I work with brought me communion in the hospital, we shared it with one of my fellow patients who spread butter on the Body of Christ. Awesome.)

One thing that you learn in seminary is that there is a lot of bad worship out there. You learn how you are supposed to preach and how you are supposed to plan a service and what sort of theology lays behind worship. And we all--at least all those of us who are still bothering with this church thing--have sat through a really snoozer sermon or cringed at the off key singing over the organ or the cheesy lyrics of the latest worship song.

And yet. Every Sunday we give it a try, all over again.

I don't want to get too much into my theology of worship here. To talk about God gathering us together to be formed and re-formed and sent out into God's world to serve.

What I want to say here is that each Sunday, or at least most Sundays, I try again, and each Sunday, or at least most Sundays, I find something surprising happening.

Sometimes it's the lyric to a song, or a bit of a prayer. Sometimes it's shaking the hand of someone who smiles when they say, "Peace be with you." Often, it is simply the ritual of returning, again and again, looking for God. Looking to be changed. Looking for those places in my life that need transformation.

Today, it was singing in worship next to my mom at Metropolitan. My mom is...well...she's not the best singer ever. But she means it when she sings.

And this evening it was singing, with the band at Crossroads, "I won't be silent anymore," and praying, praying, praying not to be silent, and smiling uncontrollably after communion.

I don't always notice it when God shows up in worship. But, believe it or not, God shows up.

If my roommate Andy was writing this, he'd tell you that worship is more than just getting together on Sunday morning (or at any other time for that matter). That it's also the acts that we do to be Christ's body in the world. Like serving sandwiches to unhoused folks after church.

So maybe, writing about how awkward worship is, is an act of worship, too.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on worship.

Lent: Not giving up on remembering

Today, my parents picked me up from school and we headed to the Eastern Shore of Maryland (and still to this day crossing the Bay Bridge with the sunlight sparkling on the water feels like coming home) to celebrate the life of my grandfather, Ed "Pop Pop" Hosey.

I wrote about Pop Pop headin' on out of this world back in December. He wanted his body to go to a useful purpose--Pop Pop was an eminently useful dude--so he is now helping a med student somewhere learn, which is very much in keeping with the character of someone who loved giving of himself and loved learning and loved being helpful. Our family doesn't exactly do things the way most people do, so it took us a little while to get around to this whole memorial service thing. It took us all awhile to gather all of our memories, I suppose. Pop Pop had 103 years of them built up, after all.

Pop Pop's children--my dad and uncle and aunts--shared stories connected with scripture verses, and then we just left the mic open for people to talk. I read a letter from my sister, about animal shaped pancakes and cinnamon rolls and a doll house handmade just for her. I talked about Pop Pop, at age 98, sinking a monster putt on the golf course, and how he did it with such ease. There was a lot of struggle in his life, but there was an ease to him that I so admire.

The overwhelming theme of all these memories was that Pop Pop would help just about anyone, at just about anytime. Like I said, he was an eminently useful dude. He could fix refrigerators, and cars, and could carve dollhouses and toys, and could hold babies, and could paint and dig ditches and rake leaves at the age of...well, at the age of pretty damn old. And he danced. He danced with my mom and my aunt Linda on his 103rd birthday, just a week before he died. He danced and he whistled and he smiled. He is a person worth remembering.

So we sat around, and we told stories, and we laughed a lot, and we remembered.

As we remember, we re-create reality. We breathe in the past and we breathe out life and truth. As we remember, as we rejoin the past with the present, we remind ourselves not only of what has happened but about who we are and who we want to be.

So this Lent, in memory of Pop Pop, I am not giving up on remembering.

Lent: Not giving up on friendship

There have been some jagged edges involving romantic relationships among my circle of friends this semester. I don't want to overdramatize things. But sometimes, relationships suck.

And when they end, or seem to come to a jagged end, they suck really bad.

But then friends are there. To sit next to you. To shake their heads at what's going on. To get angry or to get sad or to laugh. To hug and to hold hands and to tell you that you are a wonderful person. To stammer and stumble along with you on the healing path.

I am not ready to say that I won't give up on romantic relationships, really.

But this Lent, I'm not giving up on friendship.

Lent: Not giving up on school...

...even though I sort of want to. And even though I've been telling my roommate that I'm going to fail out of seminary ever since I found out today that my Systematic Theology midterm is due Monday, and not the next Monday like I thought it was.

But seriously. How lucky and privileged am I. I get to sit around and read theology and write papers about Jeremiah and about what reading Genesis 15 is like for someone with mental illness and experience in Palestine. Every time I complain about school someone should remind me of how lucky I am.

Today I received feedback on a paper to the extent that I should do PhD work. And although I have at least one former Teacher's Assistant who has threatened to come back to Washington, DC, just to punch me in the face if I consider doing a PhD, it's a helluva compliment. It sure is nice to be told that your writing means something.

Just a few minutes ago, my roommate and I were sitting in the lounge in our dorm, talking about the emergent church and whether those words mean anything and whether they mean anything to little ol' orthodox, traditional, Mainline me.

What a privilege, to have the time to do something like that.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on school.

(Although, if you want to give up on school and, for example, live in the wilderness of Colorado and teach teenagers how to light fires and wrestle bears, then I probably will think you are a complete badass and like the coolest sister ever. Hypothetically.)

Lent: Not giving up on soup

Sometimes, it's the simple things.

Today was a wet, gross day. Snowy but not in a pretty way, at least not in DC. My roommate and I and two of our friends got soup at Panera for lunch, and then we gathered at a friend's house for dinner--more delicious soup, this time homemade.

There are days that just require soup, and this was one of them. We just needed something warm. And delicious.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on simple pleasures. I'm not giving up on soup.

Lent: Not giving up on disorganized group guitar playing

I've been really falling down on the job with the blog thing here. Yesterday I was going to blog that I wasn't giving up on days in which I do absolutely nothing productive, but then writing a blog would have ruined that, so I didn't post.

Tonight, I'm hanging out with friends playing guitar and waiting for snow to fall. All four of us have a guitar and we're just seeing what we can figure out how to play together. It's not the prettiest, but as my friends have pointed out everybody has a place and nobody is paying attention to how well anyone else is playing. It's just the fun of making music together. 

And that, in and of itself, is a beautiful thing.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on disorganized group guitar playing. 

Lent: Not giving up on joy

I missed a post, mainly because this weekend has been packed. I've visited folks in the hospital and in a retirement community, played a gig, lead worship, and preached. It's been busy and a bit stressful. But it has been full of meaning, and full of joy. The following is the sermon I preached at the Crossroads worship service at St. Luke's Mission Center this evening. The texts were Psalm 30 and Philippians 3:7-14. This Lent, I'm not giving up on joy:

In order for what I’m going to say about joy and happiness to make much sense, I think I’m going to need to tell you some of my story. This is a story that many of you know a part of. Some of you might even know all of it. I don’t relish telling this story again, really, but I feel safe doing so, and here’s why: once, during the ordeal that I’m going to describe, I had the chance to visit Crossroads and look at your prayer wall. My name was on the wall, and had been circled multiple times. This community—whether you as an individual realized it or not—was praying for me, week after week. I can never express my appreciation for that enough.

On with the story. It begins about a year and a half ago. I had just finished my first year of seminary, a highly successful year marked by good grades and new relationships. I was beginning a rather intensive summer class schedule, and I thought I was doing quite well. Reflecting back on things, however, I realize that I should have recognized the signs that everything was not alright. I had recently ended a relationship in a messy and ungraceful manner. My beloved roommates of two years were planning on leaving DC and I was having absolutely no luck at finding new living arrangements. I was in two intensive summer courses. Looking back, I realize that something had to give.

It was a Sunday night, and some friends had come to look at my house and see if they wanted to live there. It hadn’t gone well. I had a few drinks and then, without thinking, did something I hadn’t done since high school. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen, went downstairs to my room, locked myself in, and started cutting my arm.

If you’re not already familiar with self-harm, it’s a remarkably common phenomenon. People hurt themselves for a variety of reasons. For some people it’s a form of self-punishment; it certainly has that effect for me. It’s also a means of communication. It says something like, “This is how broken and hurting I am on the inside. I don’t know how to communicate this to you. So I’m going to write it out on my skin.” So for me, I was hurting myself because I wasn’t sure how to tell people how badly I was hurting. But I was also ashamed that I was doing it. So I went through a whole week, in the middle of summer, covering my arms up for fear that someone would see the cuts but on the same time hoping, hoping that someone would see and know that I was in pain.

Here is how my week went: I didn’t sleep, much. I woke up early, feeling awful. I went running in the midsummer heat. I played guitar, loudly, sang hoarsely. I went to my Hebrew class. Did well in class. I went home with two classmates to study. I came home. I drank. I cut myself. I tried to go to sleep.

This went on, like I said, for a week. And finally it was Friday night, and I was staring at a bottle of pills on my bedside table, daring myself to take them. Some months ago I had saved in my phone the number of a suicide hotline, on some understanding of past experience and some premonition of future need. So I called the number, and they talked to me for awhile, and then they asked me if I had a friend who I could call, and it just so happened that my friend Lindsey had called me earlier and I had ignored her, so I called her. She talked me through the night. When I was tired enough to go to sleep she told me to call her in the morning. I called her when I woke up, told her that bottle of pills was still looking tempting. So she got me to call Mark Schaefer, the United Methodist chaplain at American University. And Mark took me to Sibley Hospital. I joked with him the whole time he drove me there. And that was the beginning of a six month journey, in and out of three hospitals, on the way to a new understanding of myself and my mental health.

Any description of that week, and of the six months that followed, is necessarily going to come across as much more neat and meaningful than the experience actually was. In actuality it was a broken, fragmented, mess. But I do have to say that I was so incredibly blessed and lucky, because I didn’t do it on my own. I had so much support and so much love during those six months, including from members of this community, even when I tried to push that support away. Not everyone who goes through mental health challenges has such support. Once, in the hospital at Sibley, the social workers asked us to do an activity in which we named 5 people who supported us. Out of the group of 5 of us, I was the only one who could name 5 people. One person couldn’t name any. There is such loneliness in this world. We have to remember that.

I was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Bipolar is also called manic-depressive. It can mean a lot of different things but for me it means that my moods can fluctuate really wildly, from very high to extremely low. For me bipolar also means that I struggle with suicidal thoughts and tendencies. I would venture to say that a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about killing myself. And there’s that constant temptation to hurt myself, something I haven’t done now in more than 200 days. Thanks be to God.

I’m hardly alone in all of this. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “an estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older, or one in four adults, suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.”[i] That includes 14.8 million American adults living with major depressive disorder, 5.7 million with bipolar disorder, and 2.4 million with some form of schizophrenia. Every 17 minutes in the U.S., somebody kills themselves. Suicide is the number 3 cause of death for Americans under the age of twenty-one, and it is number two for college students.[ii]

I am telling you all of this just to say this: I struggle with the concept of happiness. It’s not that I don’t experience happiness. I do, and I’m so grateful for that. But I know that the illness of my mind and my emotions can whisk away that experience of happiness in a heartbeat. And I was in the hospital with too many people for whom happiness is a foreign experience. So for the gospel to make any sense to me, it has to be able to speak into situations where happiness is a stranger.

Paul’s letter to the Philippians, part of which we heard read earlier, fascinates me for this reason. Many people consider this to be the most joyful of Paul’s letters. And yet the letter is written while Paul is in prison. His mission is in real danger. And while celebrating the ministry of the church in Philippi, Paul goes out of his way to describe the suffering that he has undergone to carry the gospel message. “Whatever gains I had,” he says, “I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.” “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things.” It doesn’t appear as if the gospel message has brought much happiness into Paul’s life. And yet this is the same Paul who, a few verses later, will say to his Philippian sisters and brothers, “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice.”

How is this possible? How is it that for Paul, joy and suffering, struggle and meaning are all wrapped up in each other? And what does this mean for those of us for whom happiness is a struggle?

The pesky thing about the gospel message is that it doesn’t offer us easy answers. We worship a God who suffers and dies on a Roman cross. We worship a resurrected Messiah who still has scars on his hands. For Paul there’s no separating the two: “I want to know Christ,” he says, “and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings.” For Paul, following Christ does not necessarily remove a person from suffering. In fact, it might do the exact opposite.

This is a rather shocking message to those of us who have been raised on a diet of feel-good Christianity. “Follow Christ and suffer” doesn’t seem like very good news. But what I want to argue tonight is that, for people suffering, for people struggling to feel happy, the fact that the gospel emerges from places of suffering is good news indeed.

See, when I'm suffering, when I'm struggling to feel happy, it’s easy to feel like there is something deficient about me. That I am lacking. “Why can’t I be happy like everyone else?” I ask. “Why can’t I be normal?”

And from there, it’s just a short step to believing that since I am not happy and normal, I am not really experiencing God. That I am somehow outside of the boundless love of God. Because surely God wants me to be happy, right? And if God wants me to be happy, and I’m not, then I must be doing something wrong, right? And now not only am I unhappy, but I feel guilty for it to boot. And the long spiral downwards continues.

But then there’s Paul. Sitting, chained, alone, in a Roman prison. Writing about suffering. And holding open the possibility of joy.

Because for Paul, joy is a possibility even when happiness seems like a distant dream. Because, I would argue, joy is a possibility even when we don’t feel particularly joyful. Don’t get me wrong. Our feelings, our emotions, are important. But for folks who are suffering from mental illness, feelings can be enemies, out to trip you up. Even out to kill you.

So I think joy is something that has to transcend feeling. Joy draws you out of yourself, out of the habitual cycles that trip you up, that entangle you. Joy calls you into relationship with others, relationship that holds up and holds together. Joy provides meaning. For Paul, joy comes through offering the gospel to people, the good news of a God who loves us so much that God is willing to put God’s whole self on the line for us.

Joy has to do with calling. We are all called. We are called into community. We are called to be ministers, to each other and to a broken world. And we are called to be ministers, not because we are happy and not in order to be happy, but exactly because in our places of hurt we can recognize and stand in solidarity with all that is hurting in the world.

In the psalm that we read together, Psalm 30, joy is something that comes in the morning after a night of weeping. It is something we are clothed in to replace our clothes of mourning. But a different psalmist—or is it the same one—says in Psalm 31, “my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing.” For the psalmists, for Paul, and I would argue for God, joy and sorrow are not at a far remove from each other. There is joy in a life lived with God, yes. But it might often be joy in the midst of suffering.

Joy dances furiously, even if off beat. Joy sings even when her voice is breaking. Joy isn’t afraid to shed tears.

The author Andrew Solomon, in his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, writes about the difference between joy and happiness. Himself suffering from clinical depression, he has this to say: “The opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital, even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It’s a precious discovery. Almost every day I feel momentary flashes of hopelessness and wonder every time whether I am slipping. For a petrifying instant here and there, a lightning-quick flash, I want a car to run me over and I have to grit my teeth to stay on the sidewalk until the light turns green; or I imagine how easily I might cut my wrists; or I taste hungrily the metal tip of a gun in my mouth; or I picture going to sleep and never waking up again. I hate those feelings, but I know that they have driven me to look deeper at life, to find and cling to reason for living. I cannot find it in me to regret entirely the course my life has taken. Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely and sometimes against the moment’s reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?”

Sisters and brothers. Friends. I began by telling you some, just some, of my story. I want to tell you that I am in recovery now. I am healing. And I do experience happiness, and am so grateful for that. I am certainly not trying to tell you that happiness is a bad thing or that it is not possible. But for me, and I imagine for all of us, there are some days that seem like a mortal struggle. In this Christian life, we will not always be happy. But we will always be called into something beyond ourselves, something good, something vital. In those moments when we struggle with happiness, we are not far removed from God. In those moments, there can still be meaning, still be calling, still be life. In those moments, we are invited to stand next to each other, even in the midst of suffering, even in the midst of unhappiness, and to proclaim, loudly, fiercely, boldly: “Yes. Yes. God is here.” Is that not a rare joy?

---

[i] http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml#Intro

[ii] Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 248.

Lent: Not giving up on stories

Mental illness sucks. 

Talking about it means that, sometimes, people who are going through hell are willing to talk about it with me.

And the shared stories make everything a bit less lonely for everyone.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on stories. 

Lent: Not giving up on nonviolence

I'm in a class on Gandhi and Martin Luther King this semester, so my classmates and I have been talking a lot about nonviolence. This has me thinking. I talked a lot about nonviolence in college, and talked about it more and in a different context while I lived in Palestine. I think I've gotten a bit jaded. It's a bit harder for me to talk about now.

So this semester has been a good exercise for me. Today, the topic of Gandhi's response to WWII came up.  And the question of whether nonviolence could have been effective against the Nazis. And I brought up Denmark.

It's remarkable what human resistance to evil acts can look like.

This Lent, despite all evidence to the contrary, I'm not giving up on nonviolence.

Lent: Not giving up on solidarity (pt. II)

Sometimes, the only thing to do is to sit.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on solidarity.

Lent: Not giving up on singing

I don't have much of a voice.

My voice has been described as "Dylanesque," which is a nice way of saying "you should stick to writing lyrics." In my senior year of high school I played Applegate in Damn Yankees. My vocal coach, who knew me quite well, sat me down and said, "David, you don't have the prettiest voice. But you have a loud voice, and we're going to use that." I took it as a compliment.

This lack of a beautiful voice has never stopped me from singing. I love it. I love people who sing. I don't care if they "can" or not.

Today a student asked me to bring my guitar to office hours, so I did, and I sang a few songs. My voice was sort of worn and raspy--I've been losing my voice lately--so I didn't sing that much.

But there was a quiet joy to it. A joy worth repeating.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on singing.

Lent: Not giving up on Andy and Rachel

I told Andy and Rachel that I was going to give up on them for Lent because they kept me up until 3am talking about whether or not we have enemies.

Tonight, though, I changed my mind, and we talked about whether the church is like a crack house or a singer songwriter.

So I suppose that this Lent, I won't give up on them after all.

Lent: Not giving up on complexity

Today I had lunch with my good friend Eric. Eric and Judy are friends who I met in Jerusalem. They've saved my butt on any number of occasions. Eric and I have been trying to get together all week so it was good to get caught up.

Eric is really interested in studying complexity. He tells me that understanding complexity affects all sorts of different research arenas, from biology to international development. He says that in his field--international public health--people are always trying to quantify predictions of the results of various projects. It doesn't work, he says. The systems involved are too complex.

(As a disclaimer, this is my own interpretation of what Eric told me. See Facebook for his corrections).

He pointed out that one can see an understanding of complexity playing out in current approaches to anthropology, in which the researcher starts--not by being "objective"--but by naming where they are coming from, the lens they are seeing through. Moving away from a view of "soft science" that tries to make it as much like "hard science" as possible. Recognizing the complexity of systems.

Anyway. I like this idea. Because it gets us away from a view of the world where everything is deterministic and mechanistic. Because it leaves room for freedom, even in creation. That evil in the world isn't part of some inexplicable plan, that it's just evil, and needs to be confronted, freely, as such.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on complexity.

Lent: Not giving up on moving karma

I hate moving.

I have moved 4 times in the last 4 years.

And oddly enough, each time has been an experience of grace.

I don't actually believe in karma, but I do believe in moving karma. Every time I've moved, I've just had such incredible help from so many people. The intertwining, overlapping communities that I'm so blessed to be a part of show up again and again. There was the time, for example, that I had to move in between trips to the hospital, when an eclectic group of Wesley folks showed up to help me move and my new housemates had painted my room for me before I arrived.

Because of this kind of experience, I try to help out whenever I hear anyone needs help moving. I've helped a lot of people move in my four years in DC. It's always been worth it.

Today was the last push to get all of the stuff out of the 906 before the power gets shut off and the doors get  locked. I rented a Zipvan and we loaded stuff into it to take to Goodwill and Heather and Jeff helped me get there and John Forrest and Ben, having already gone through the effort of Craig's Listing just about everything in the house, cleaned up. And then Andy helped me get a mountain of garbage out of the van and into the Wesley dumpster.

Not sure we were supposed to do that, but anyway. It worked.

So today was another stressful moving day and another experience of grace. Another experience of community coming together. Sometimes it's the little things that matter, but it sure is nice when the big things come together too.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on moving karma.

Lent: Not giving up on books

I just got back from a fantastic dinner. Mary Kay, my wonderful pastor at Dumbarton, is on a mission to learn how to make fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and gravy, like her mom does. By "learn how to" I mean she's figured out how to make it pretty damn well, and so my friends Heather and Jeff and I got to be her guinea pigs.

It was frikin' delicious.

So I was thinking of not giving up on fried chicken, which I'm not, but what I really want to talk about is how we had a great conversation after Mary Kay asked, "So, what are your favorite books?"

We talked about classics, and fantasy novels, and Heather read us beautiful Victor Hugo quotes.

I know books are sort of passe these days, and most of what I read on a given day (if it's not theology) is between the length of a tweet and a blog. But I just love books.

This is not where I go on a rant about e-readers. I don't mind them at all. But you can't loan them out, really. And there just something about being down in the basement of the library and being overwhelmed by that old book smell. And there's something home-like about the piles of books in my room, that I have to move back and forth to travel between desk and bed.

I can look up Bible passages at any time on my computer. But when I gave my Bible away, I wanted to get another one that I could carry around, that I could read on the bus and mark up and throw in my backpack and bend the cover of accidentally. I want to feast on the thing. You can look up pictures of food on your computer, but you can't feast.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on books.

Lent: Not giving up on Paul

So Paul--the epistle writer that is, not just some guy I know--thinks that the only reason you should get married is if you can't possibly restrain yourself from having wild rabbit sex any longer.

At least that's how I translated 1 Corinthians 7:8-9 when talking about the letter with a few college students tonight. I don't think it's that far off.

We spent a whole hour tonight talking about Paul and sex. Paul's views of sexuality are wildly unconventional when read from a modern--dare we stumble into post-modern--perspective. At times Paul comes off as a strict fundamentalist. At other times he's startlingly subversive. And other times you might accuse him of just being pathological.

It would be easy to give up on Paul. Too many of his writings have been used as battering rams against women, LGBTQ folk, African Americans under slavery, and any one else who could be painted with the brush of "outsider" from the standpoint of the privileged ones.

But I'm not going to give up on Paul. Because he's so damn human. He gets angry. He gets confused. In 1 Corinthians he goes off on long rants that even he admits are just his opinion. But he aches for his communities, aches for them like a parent aches for a hurting child. And out of this ache and this humanness he tries to interpret and understand what could possibly be good news about a homeless rabbi being killed--what could possibly be sensible about the claim that this same homeless rabbi was raised from the dead.

And if that last sentence could ever be said about me, I would be quite happy.

So this Lent, I'm not giving up on Paul.

Lent: Not giving up on the psalms

Today I gave one of my favorite professors a gift. It was a framed piece of art that I made in the hospital, an abstract, multi-colored, vaguely wing shaped pastel piece with the words "She will cover me with her pinions, and under Her wings I will take refuge" framed by two black swoops.

It was a midrash of sorts, a playful sort of interaction with the text of Psalm 91.

I gave it to her because I read the psalms a lot in the hospital, because in the psalms you can find the whole range of human emotion, because in the psalms you can hear the voices of people communicating with God out of rage, despair, hopelessness, because the psalms are broken and beautiful and made things make some sense to me.

And the reason I knew to turn to the psalms was because of this professor's class. Hence the gift.

Psalm 91, coincidentally, was in the lectionary on Sunday, the first Sunday of Lent, because it's a psalm that Satan quotes in the desert while tempting Jesus. Funny to have something in the lectionary because it's Satan's favorite.

And coincidentally enough, in the morning Sunday, sitting at the kitchen table at the student's house where we all crashed during our service trip to New Jersey before everyone woke up, I flipped my Bible open to Psalm 91 and started reading. And I remembered gripping on to this psalm like a talisman in the hospital, reading it out of this place of brokenness and fear, and hearing: "You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday."

"The destruction that wastes at noonday," by the way, is a phrase that the Vulgate Bible translated as "the noonday demon," which then went on to become the title of a book about depression by Andrew Solomon. Solomon writes that it was Cassian who interpreted "noonday demon" as melancholia, depression, and adds:

"I have taken the phrase as the title of this book because it describes so exactly what one experiences in depression. The image serves to conjure the terrible feeling of invasion that attends the depressive's plight. There is something brazen about depression. Most demons--most forms of anguish--rely on the cover of the night; to see them clearly is to defeat them. Depression stands in the full glare of the sun, unchallenged by recognition. You can know all the why and the wherefore and suffer just as much as if you were shrouded by ignorance. There is almost no mental state of which the same can be said."

Leave it to the psalms to carry such meaning.

The psalms keep me connected to God. Even when I'm down. Even when I'm hurting. Frankly, even when I feel like screaming at people, like losing it. And even, even, even when I am experiencing joy. As one of my students once said--a member, obviously, of the iPhone generation--"There's a psalm for that."

This Lent, I'm not giving up on the psalms.

Lent: Not giving up on sharing

I was walking back to the Dupont bus stop from a counseling session at Foundry UMC (which, I'm happy to report, made me feel less like shit than the last time I was there) when I heard Ricky's familiar voice. Ricky hangs out on a milk crate outside of the CVS at the corner of 17th and P. He has a deep voice that calls out in a slow, steady rhythm: "Oooonly if you can. If you can help. Oooonly if you can." He keeps the beat with a pouch seeded with change that he shakes, shakes, shakes.

I've talked to Ricky a couple of times before. Sometimes I'll get him food and something to drink from CVS. Sometimes I'll give him some change, or just say hello. Most of the time I rush by, head down, possessed with that demon Hurry and surrounded, as most of us are in DC, by my own portable isolation booth.

Tonight I said hello, asked him how he was doing, dropped a dollar in his pouch. He shook my hand and asked me how I was doing. And then:

"Is that a Bible?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said. I had my little NRSV with the faux gold leaf and the blue page marker that matches the blue spine.

"Can I see that?" Of course he could.

"This is a nice Bible. I bet this got passed down to you from your parents, didn't it?"

"No, it's new. It's just beat up because I carry it around everywhere."

"This is a nice Bible."

::Awkward pause::

I break it.

"I mean, do you need a Bible?"

"Yeah, I could use a Bible."

"Ok. Well take that one then."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah! I mean, the word of God is meant to be spread, right?"

This is a hopelessly evangelical thing for a wild-eyed liberal like me to say, although it will confirm my roommate's suspicion that I am in fact hopelessly orthodox.

So I gave Ricky my Bible. I told him it had all my notes in it, but he didn't mind. He told me it looked like a minister's Bible. I told him I was training to be a minister. He told me his brother is a minister and sometimes comes up to feed folks in Dupont.

The point of this story isn't that I successfully evangelized a homeless guy. I didn't tell him to read the Bible, he asked to see mine.

The point is just that a little act of sharing turned into a conversation. An exchange. Perhaps the seeds of a relationship.

And that's certainly worth giving my Bible away for.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on sharing.

Lent: Not giving up on late night study sessions with friends

There are four of us in my poor friend Rachel's room doing our best to distract her from schoolwork. So far we've solved all of my roommate's problems and have played "guess the middle name." Also we ate Chinese food. Including Rachel. She's supposed to be juice fasting.

And it's wonderful.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on late night study sessions with friends.

Lent: Not giving up on 'home'

So first of all I had an amazing weekend and I'm just so darn impressed with the students I work with at American University and also with the amazing people of the Jersey Shore who continue to struggle with the impact of Hurricane Sandy. And also I got us and our 15 passenger van home safe despite wind, snow, traffic, and crazy drivers (and a brief trip the wrong way on the beltway. Oops).

So there's plenty to write about and be grateful for. But right now I don't really want to write much. I just am glad to be home.

And that alone is something to write about, because I suppose this--my shared dorm room at Wesley--is home now. It feels like home to come back to. And that is saying a lot. There is a lot of transition in my life right now--transitioning out of a house into a dorm, transitioning from being a commuter to an on-campus student, transitioning from part-time student status to full-time, transitioning out of a relationship and into...well, I'm not sure into what, yet. And in all of that, it would be easy to get lost on questions of what home is. Is home my room at the 906 that I've moved out of? My room at the 914 that I still miss? Is home where I grew up? Or my parents house in Greensboro, which I've only been in a few times?

But for now this--typing away at my computer while my roommate taps away at his, chatting about school and church and random bits of metaphysics--this feels like home. I'll take that.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on home.

Lent: Not giving up on solidarity

Today I drove 7 AU students to the Jersey Shore to do relief work with Habitat for Humanity. These students are amazing, as I said yesterday, and I can't say enough good things about their energy and creativity and commitment to serving others.

We had a somewhat frustrating morning, through nobody's fault. There was a miscommunication about the first site where we were supposed to work. Another group was showing up to work there and there was no way they could use that many volunteers. So we headed to another site, which then had too much structural damage for us to work on--a timely reminder of just how seriously these communities were affected by the climate-change-fueled Hurricane Sandy.

So we ended up at a third site, sanding and ripping up flooring. But it was obvious right away that there was more of us than there was work to do.

But even as we were getting all this sorted out, the homeowner, Esther, showed up. And she was so just so happy to see us, and so grateful we were there, even though--as one of the students pointed out--we were strangers in her home, even though it would be possible to feel not grateful but violated or humiliated.

Esther had her son with her, and she said she hadn't brought him by to see the house before but wanted him to see it now that it had walls. And it was heartbreaking.

But you could tell that she was glad that there were people there. That it mattered that she, and the community of Union Beach--a sign in a window read "UBStrong"--were being remembered. She and her son had just come from a march aimed at raising awareness of the ongoing hurt of Union Beach and surrounding towns.

A smaller group of us moved to the house of a woman named Margarita, where we painted a basement. And she, too, was incredibly grateful, in seeming disproportion to the work that we were actually able to do. She told one of the students that she had given money to one of her sons, whose home had been destroyed, and you could tell she was hurting but glad to be able to help. According to this student, Margarita said, "These are what keep me going," gesturing to the pictures of her family.

We did some good work today. Some necessary work. We made the job of other volunteers and families easier. And I do not underestimate the importance of that. But more importantly, I think that we showed a few people that they are remembered. That they are re-membered, part of a wider community that hurts when they hurt, struggles when they struggle.

We were only on the Shore one day, but for that day we did something important. We stood with people who remember.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on solidarity.

Lent: Not giving up on students

In an hour I'm going to load up a 15 passenger church van and drive a group of American University students to the Jersey Shore to do some Habitat for Humanity work.

This idea was entirely conceived of and organized by the students. I'm just along for the...well, along for the drive I guess would be the way to put it.

The students I work with at AU organize service trips. They volunteer at homeless shelters. They start campaigns to divest their school from fossil fuels in order to do their part to respond to our ecological crisis. And they get together to pray, to hold each other's hands, to sing, to share life together.

They are leaders, and I respect them immensely.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on students.

Lent: Not giving up on music

Tonight I'm going to a wake.

This is the last night ever for bluegrass at Sova, my favorite grungy little place in DC. I'm going with some good people to drink good beer and listen to good music. To let the shared auditory experience bring us all into a form of community that only music can provide.

Today was an awful day. Not for a particular reason. I suppose Valentine's Day might have had something to do with it, but honestly some days are just harder than others and this was a hard day.

So tonight I'm going to a wake. And we're going to tell stories about Sova, and raise our glasses or our bottles, and most importantly we are going to let music fill us up until we overflow.

I plan to be transported to a place that is not here, that is not this broken day. And at the same time is a place accepting of me, as I am, accepting of this broken day. Opposites, held in tension.

Music can do that. It's magic.

This Lent, I'm not giving up on music.

Lent: Not giving up on doubt

Tonight was Ash Wednesday, and my roommate Andy offered a sermon at our seminary chapel about the necessity of doubt, of confronting God, when we are in the hurt places of our lives. He drew our attention to the tendency among Christians to want a God who "makes everything ok," who rescues us out of our darkness without our ever having to dwell there. And he highlighted places in scripture where the speakers call God out for the suffering of the world and for individual suffering. The willingness of the scripture writers to doubt, to speak out of experiences of alienation and brokenness.

In particular, Andy drew on Psalm 88, in which the psalmist accuses God of causing despair and loneliness. Unlike many lament psalms, Psalm 88 does not have a redemptive ending. It ends in darkness.

And yet this psalmist, feeling alone, feeling abandoned by God--this psalmist still adresses God. Still argues with God, even if it feels like a one-sided argument.

The very doubt and despair of the passage continues to serve as a connection to God.

So this Lent, I am not giving up on doubt--and the connection that it gives me to God, even and perhaps especially in the midst of doubt.