Random

Random was one of the defining popular words of my middle and early high school years. I distinctly remember overhearing one of my camp counselors saying to another, “What is it with these kids and the word random?” My friends and I may not use the word random so often as we used to, but randomness is no less a part of our lives.

It’s always fascinating to play the “What if?” game of random chances that brought me to where I am now. My husband and I talk about it often. What if the Missouri River hadn’t flooded, bringing his family to Texas? What if I hadn’t skipped a grade in elementary school? I never would have met the people I met that shaped me the way I did, and I never would have applied to the University of Texas- I was going to A&M, just like my cousin and my uncles! He never would’ve applied to UT either, because why would he apply to some random state school half the country away? If we hadn’t both ended up at that same freshman orientation session, I never would’ve introduced myself to him. We wouldn’t have been best friends for two years. He wouldn’t have challenged my long-unquestioned beliefs or encouraged me to pursue my call to ministry. We would never have dated or gotten married. I certainly would never have moved to DC of my own volition. I could go on forever- what about our parents’ lives, or our grandparents’ lives? My life would be absolutely unfathomably different if a long string of random chances- stretching back thousands of years!- hadn’t brought me to where I am.

Some people would argue that this unfathomable string of coincidences was all part of God’s plan. Other people would take the opposite tack, arguing that if life is all chance then it has no meaning. I think I come down in the middle. I don’t believe in a deterministic God; I believe that there is a distinction between knowing what will happen and deciding what will happen. Or, as my Hebrew Bible professor liked to say, “All is foreseen but freedom is given.” In high school I read a book by my favorite author, Ted Dekker, where the main character suddenly has the ability to see the future- or, more precisely, the futures. What he saw was the multitude of possible outcomes that would result from each choice he was faced with. That’s kind of how I imagine God. God sees all the ways that we could be, all the things we could do, and God hopes for our good choices, but our free will remains. And to me, that means that every choice I make has meaning. Every choice I make shapes my future in incalculable ways, extinguishing countless theoretical futures in favor of the one I created.

Creation and Discovery

This is actually the text of the sermon I preached this morning, which was Peace with Justice Sunday in the United Methodist Church. It was my first sermon, so it was a little nerve-wracking, but I think I did alright. The passages were Genesis 1:1-2:4 and Amos 2:6-7a, 5:10-12, 24, if you feel like reading them before you read the sermon. Also, I was going for around 10 minutes of speaking, so it's quite a bit longer than my normal posts. I hope you all like it, though, and I'd welcome any comments (as always!).

Claude Monet has always been my favorite artist. I’m specifically drawn to his works of impressionism, and my favorite by far is his water lily series. When I was in high school the Houston Museum of Fine Arts received a large exhibition on loan from the Met that included three massive panels of water lilies- I was SO there! I remember walking into the room and walking straight up to the canvas, my nose just inches from the paint—at that distance, of course, it just looked like dots and dashes of color. But when I’d finally convinced myself they were real, though, that I was actually seeing an original Monet in person, I sat down on the benches provided and I spent a good 20 minutes just reveling in what they truly were- not dots and dashes of color, but an amazing panorama of beauty.

When I read the first creation story in Genesis, this memory is always what I think of: God taking a swirling, chaotic deep and crafting from it a rhythmic order of stunning beauty and purpose. Each layer brings more complexity, more beauty as God stretches God’s self, playing and creating and discovering.

The final stretching of God’s creative powers, according to the Genesis story, the culmination of God’s discovery, is itself a creative being. God’s own image, with responsibility for all that has come before. Artists and creators in our own rite. The breath that brought order to the deep has been breathed into us; God’s ordering, creative spirit is our own.

Famous sculptor and artist Michelangelo is noted as having said that, “every block of stone has a statue inside and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” One of the tips for good writing is to begin the story and see where it takes you rather than to come at it with every plot detail already in mind. Creation, both for us and for God, is an act of discovery as much as it is a work of design.

So if God is the sculptor, the author, that means that we, the stone, the story, have immense creative responsibility. Not only do we have our own creative powers, reflections of God’s own—producing art and story, bringing order to the broken, chaotic places of the world—but we ourselves also guide the story that God is telling. God discovers with us as we guide the pen, the paintbrush, the chisel that is working out our history. This is the responsibility that comes with the word “dominion,” as the word is often translated when the passage talks about God giving humans responsibility over the earth.  

This phrase, “have dominion over,” has long been used to excuse the exploitation of the earth and its creatures. When peoples are seen as less than human it has been made to excuse unbelievable atrocity. This single phrase, “have dominion over,” has masked war, slavery, genocide, oppression, pollution, extinction, depletion of resources and unsustainable living practices.

But this, I think, is not how our part of the story ought to be read. If our relationship with the earth and its creatures is the reflection of God’s relationship with the creation then it is understood differently.

Moltmann writes in God in Creation that if the creator is present in the creation, the relationship to the creation, instead of one of the ruler and the ruled, “must rather be viewed as an intricate web of unilateral, reciprocal, and many-sided relationships. In this network of relationships, ‘making,’ ‘preserving,’ ‘maintaining,’ and ‘perfecting,’ are certainly the great one-sided relationships, but ‘indwelling,’ ‘sympathizing,’ ‘participating,’ ‘accompanying,’ ‘enduring,’ ‘delighting,’ and ‘glorifying’ are relationships of mutuality which describe a cosmic community of living between God the Spirit and all [God’s] created beings.”

This is the “dominion,” the “stewardship,” that we are charged with. In our one-sided relationships, we are charged with “’making,’ ‘preserving,’ ‘maintaining,’ and ‘perfecting’”—we bring order from chaos. But in our relationships of mutuality, which are the vast majority of our relationships, our responsibilities are “’sympathizing,’ ‘participating,’ ‘accompanying,’ ‘enduring,’ ‘delighting,’ and ‘glorifying.’” This is our simultaneous power to guide the story that God is telling and responsibility to discover the story that springs from our own creative work. God accompanies, delights and glorifies with us, and as we order and care for the world we delight, and glorify with it. As we seek right relationships with our fellow humans, they are relationships of honor and equality, where we accompany and sympathize.

Now, this creation story, this laying out of God’s relationship to us and our relationship to the world, this likely comes from the time of Israel’s exile. The covenant relationship that they thought protected them from all harm seemed to have failed. The community in exile and the remnant left behind struggled to work out exactly what had happened and why. It is also from around this time that we heard the voices of the prophets like Amos, reminding Israel of the reciprocal relationship of their covenant. They, the reflection of God, had been given responsibilities, and they had failed. Israel had discovered the distortion of the phrase “have dominion over” way before the modern age got ahold of it.

Sustainable rhythms of sowing, reaping, and lying fallow had been abandoned for constant overproduction of cash crops leading to depletion of resources. Societal structures of enough for all and excess for none had become hierarchies of inequality in a trickle-up economy. Corruption in power and oppression of the weak had become commonplace.

Sounding familiar?

So it is with trepidation and shame that I read Amos’ words, still stinging these two and a half millennia later.

We who have been given the privilege of creation, we who hold the responsibility of guiding the pen that writes our history—we trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth. We take from them their portions of grain. We abhor the one who speaks the truth.

Are we perfecting? Are we glorifying?

Does God sympathize with us? Does God delight in us?

When we step back from the painting that we as humankind are creating, is it a work of order and beauty? Or is it a work of confusion and pain?

Today is Peace With Justice Sunday. It’s one of the six special Sundays in the United Methodist Church, a day when we hear inspiring messages and make a special donation above and beyond our tithe to continue our many good efforts in the world.

But for many people all over the world, today will bring neither peace nor justice. Our world remains in disorder and chaos as wars brew in Africa and the Middle East, as unjust rulers remain in power the world over, as creation waits and groans for our own creative, healing hand. When we pray for peace today, it is not just peace that we pray for. Peace alone often serves simply to preserve the status quo. The peace that we pray for, the peace that we work to create together, is a peace that brings justice rolling down like waters.

This is our responsibility- as members of Dumbarton, as the United Methodist Church, as human beings. We have been given power for a purpose. History’s pen is in our hand, and God waits breathlessly—accompanying us, enduring our failures, delighting in our triumphs, waiting to see exactly what kind of story we will write.

Amen.

Humility and Love

I recently finished the book Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism) by Frank Schaeffer. While I felt like he was sometimes harsh and bitter- somewhat like the people he was writing against- I really enjoyed most of what he had to say, and the whole time I was reminded of the last thing that Brian McLaren said that I had wanted to talk about.

Brian said that, “Sometimes rejecting God is itself an act of spirituality because it says, ‘Whatever’s out there, it has to be better than that.’” If God is real, God has to be better than this small-minded, bigoted God that I’ve been peddled all these years.

Schaeffer takes on both the fundamentalist atheists—who militantly and arrogantly claim that God cannot exist because it goes against reason and that reason will eventually unravel all of the questions of the universe—and the fundamentalist Christians—who have put God in a box of their own beliefs and condensed salvation into a single prayer confirming “right” doctrine. Both reject mystery in favor of their own arrogance and certainty.

His response is that, “with all due respect to Dawkins, mystery trumps everything,” and that “according to traditional Christianity…the process of salvation was lived out in a community. Salvation was a path toward God, not a you’re-in-or-out event, as in ‘At two thirty last Wednesday I accepted Jesus.’”

God is so much bigger, so much better than that. So don’t mind me if I do reject your God. If your God demands that I hate or even kill my GLBTQ friends, if your God condones the pollution of the earth and the oppression of its peoples because they don’t look and sound and believe like me, if your God wants me to vote straight Republican because they’re God’s chosen people, then no, I don’t want your God. And if your not-God means that we’re all there is, that human reason is the best thing to come out of this galaxy, well, I don’t want that either.

“Some of the earliest Christians,” as Schaeffer notes, “wrote that God is not to be defined or hedged in by theology.”

I may know a person very well, but that person is still a distinct entity from me and therefore still foreign and, in a sense, incomprehensible. If I can’t even know another person entirely, how can I claim to know God entirely? How can I be so arrogant as to claim that I speak for God? For that matter, how can I claim to know the workings of the universe so entirely that I can say with confidence that there is no God at all?

What I can do is say that, “whatever is out there, it has to be better than that.” God has to be better than even my best, most hopeful imaginations. What I can do is share what I believe about God, what I believe about salvation, what I believe about my own responsibilities as a Christian. But I share with humility and love. Maybe God revealed something differently to you than to me. Maybe I’ve gotten something wrong. I’m human, so I probably have. But I can’t force anything on you. I can’t tell you with 100% certainty that you’re wrong.

So if you think that whatever’s out there is better than my God, go for it. Ask questions. Tell me about it. We can work toward God together. But if you share, share with humility and love. They’re the best we’ve got.

Roughing It

Well, last week I had quite the lifestyle change.

I had spent the better part of a week with my good friend as she house-sat this incredible house in north DC. This house was truly amazing (and excessive). A gorgeous (and obviously rarely used) kitchen, two dining rooms, three sitting rooms, three bedrooms, two patios, a study, a workout room, a home theatre, and seven bathrooms. Who needs seven bathrooms?! Not these people.

Oh, and a pool. Though I have to admit, the pool was my favorite part. I could spend the afternoon lying out by the pool, taking a dip, and when it got too hot just retreat into the gigantic, air-conditioned house.

And from there I went… camping! Last weekend was my church’s annual church-wide retreat at the West River Retreat Center in Maryland. As the youth minister I stayed with the youth in their lodge, which was not air-conditioned, and slept on the little camp pallets on bunk beds that I got so familiar with several summers ago at Lutherhill. I went from having just about every luxury at my fingertips to living with what I crammed into my backpack and the food from the camp cafeteria.

Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t rough it the whole weekend. The main lodge was air-conditioned, the food wasn’t too bad, and we did get to spend some time in the pool when it wasn’t raining Saturday afternoon. The drastic change did bring something home to me, though. How much do I really need? How much of my stuff actually matters? It’s kind of like when you clean out your closet or find a box that somehow never got unpacked (which I’ve also done recently- oops), and you discover all of this stuff that you actually managed to forget you had. Clearly it was incredibly important to you! How much do I really need if I can literally forget that I owned something?

Anyway, here are a few pictures from the weekend, which really was quite lovely. None from the house, but oh well. Enjoy, and have a lovely day!

My awesome top-of-the-giant-swing face.

The pretty campsite.

My toes in the West River.

Bandaids and Antibiotics

I know I said that there were several things that Brian said last week that I wanted to process, and then I stopped for a few days after just one. So today is a two for one! One post but two related things- charity and justice.

For me this topic actually goes back to a guest speaker we had in one of our classes in the fall. A woman from the General Board of Church and Society came to speak to us about doing charity work versus working for justice. She compared charity to putting a band-aid on a patient with systemic failure; working for justice, on the other hand, is like looking for and treating the source of that failure. Sometimes the work that we do- though it is good work- is really just treating the symptoms, putting on a bandage that staunches the flow a bit, rather than actually healing the disease. That's what injustice is- the disease of our world.

To that end, Brian made two points about injustice. One of the people at the discussion brought up the verse in James: "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world." They actually only quoted the first half of that verse, the bit about orphans and widows. The second half, keeping oneself unstained by the world, has been used for a long time to support total abstinence in all of its forms- abstaining from sex, from alcohol, from certain kinds of music or movies, even from spending time with non-Christians.

I'm not saying that any of those aren't good for certain people in certain places of life (except that last one- I'm pretty sure that it's completely counter to the life and ministry of Jesus to avoid anyone who doesn't fit the goody-two-shoes bill). What Brian suggested, though, is that keeping oneself unstained by the world might perhaps mean something bigger. Rather than living a cloistered and antiseptic life for fear of being stained by the world, he suggested that it meant refusing to participate in the injustices of the world. That seems to me to be more in line with the message of the verse and of James as a whole.  Religion is living out your faith by the things that you choose to do and the things you choose not to participate in. We choose to give aid; we choose not to harm. We choose to work for justice; we choose not to support injustice.

That brings us to the second thing Brian said- that "charity always moves toward issues of justice." Feeding the homeless, working in food pantries, sponsoring children for school or medicine or even just Christmas presents- these are all good things. But who hasn't felt the sting of doubt? How can I keep doing this when the need never seems to end? There are always more homeless, more poor, more oppressed. It gets so overwhelming. No matter how many sandwiches I hand out there is always another hand reaching for the next one. Eventually we realize that all the good we are doing just isn't enough.

Technically, you have two choices once you reach that point. The first is to simply give up. Throw your hands in the air and say "I'll never succeed, so I just quit!" This is simply unacceptable to me. Quitting when the journey gets rough makes me question the sincerity of the commitment in the first place. Were you doing this because you believe in it or because it made you feel good?

For me, the only real choice is to take the energy you've been putting into charity and to throw it into work for justice. That's what Brian meant. Eventually you realize that despite all of your pretty band-aids, the patient is still sick. The world is still diseased. Injustice permeates it, sickening everything it touches. Then you start looking for what's causing the sickness in the first place. You start trying to root out the injustice wherever it is found. It's like running a long and intensive course of antibiotics- it turns out to take a lot more effort than just putting on a bandage, but it's a lot more effective. It takes a long time but it's so worth it in the long run.

That's what religion is about. It's not about being some cultish, cloistered movement living by some obscenely long list of rules; it's about caring for the world. Working for peace and justice, not participating in systems and tools of oppression. We participate in the world, for good or for ill. Personally, I want that to be for good. And not just good that offers a quick fix to a long term problem, but a real work of healing in a world plagued with hatred and injustice.

Loving Alone

Thursday night I got the opportunity to go to a discussion and book reading with one of my favorite authors, Brian McLaren. When I was in college it was his books (along with some wonderful people) that challenged me to finally question for myself the beliefs I'd held forever and come up with a set of beliefs that are actually mine. That makes him a big part of the reason that I am who I am and that I am where I am. There were so many great things said that night and I want to process a few of them over the next several days, so here we go!

The one I want to start with is important to me because it relates to what I talked about yesterday- relationships with and within the Church. Brian said this: "If your spirituality is not just about feeling good but about making a difference in the world in the direction of love, here's the problem... you can't learn to love alone." You can't learn to love without people who are hard to love. People who challenge you. People who disagree with you. People who don't like you. People who hurt you.

Sounding much like Annual Conference to anyone? Or perhaps like those people you are quite content to leave outside the arms of the Church?

I can't learn to love without the people who just made me want to scream in anger and frustration last weekend at Conference. They can't learn to love without people like me (who probably make them spitting mad, too).

Hardcore Democrats can't learn to love without hardcore Republicans. Republicans can't learn to love without Democrats.

Atheists can't learn to love without evangelicals. Evangelicals need atheists.

I could go on forever here, but you get the picture. Learning to love people is like learning patience- you can't learn it without being tested on it. It's easy to love the people who are just like you, but it's the people who are nothing like you who teach you how to love truly. It's easy to love the people in your oh-so-homogeneous little congregation, but it's the people who won't set foot in your door that you truly need to love, and you need them in order to even learn how to do it properly. That means you can't ignore them. That means you have to be out with them. You can't learn to love alone.

This Post Doesn't Matter

Alright. I'm embarrassed.

It's officially been over a month (just a day, but over nonetheless) since I last updated. I daydreamed during finals about how over the summer I would have plenty of time to do all of the things I've wanted to do, like update my blog regularly. It turned out that after finals all I wanted to do was sleep and let my brain rot for a few weeks.

But no more. I've spent this week in a deadly boring intensive course on leadership (alright, alright, I'm sitting in that course right now- clearly, it's life-changing) and I think my brain is actually functioning again. Let's give it a shot.

Truly, the only important thing in my life the last few weeks has been Annual Conference. It was last weekend and it was a strange mix of soporific, frustrating, and exhilarating.

For those of you who are not United Methodist, Annual Conference technically refers to a geographic area; I'm a member in the Southwest Texas Annual Conference, but I'm currently living and working in the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference. Every year, however, the Conference gets together for the- wait for it- Annual Conference. Yeah, we're good at names.

This year's Annual Conference was particularly important because next year is the General Conference, when representatives delegates from every Annual Conference come together to evaluate the state of the church. That means that this year's Annual Conference is when motions are put forward that, if passed, will go before the whole General Conference to be discussed and voted on to in some way modify the stated beliefs or actions of the United Methodist Church.

Because I'm still a member in Southwest Texas, I technically didn't need to be at the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference. I wanted the chance to observe it, though, before I am in the position of being able to participate. As interesting as it was to be learning so much about the inner workings of the church, I also couldn't really participate. Thus, the soporific. Those three days of sessions and voting and legislation and worship are long.

Being so restrained was also frustrating at times. There were many times when I wanted to jump into a conversation or cast a vote but I simply couldn't. More frustrating than that was simply seeing the discord- the downright nastiness- that was sometimes a part of the discussion. Deep emotion is to be expected, I know, when you bring together such a diverse group of people to talk about such important topics. It hurts my heart, though, to see the church so divided.

What was amazing and exhilarating, then, was to see the Church come together. To see the incredible steps for justice that were made as people around me wept for joy. To see people come together after a divisive vote and to embrace one another from across the metaphorical aisle. To see the Church being the Church- growing, adapting, and coming together for good.

You know what the best part was, though?

The best part was when we were discussing ways to reach out to, to serve, to welcome, to love on all of the people that the Church has alienated and ignored, and the bishop himself wept in front of God and all of us talking about the people the Church has failed. His words were, "Until we change, it just doesn't matter." None of this- not the legislation, not the Conference, not anything we say or do- none of it matters until we fundamentally change the way we think about our relationship to the world. Until our relationship with the world is one of humility and love- not condescension, not judgment, not correction, not arrogance, not even charity- nothing we do or say matters. Our attitude infuses everything we do and it is that attitude that condemns us with the people we reach out to. Our bitterness and arrogance won't make a difference. It doesn't matter. Love makes a difference. Love brings the Church together when it disagrees. Love brings peace and change. Love matters.