faith – Hugh's Blog

Mike’s Bible

Today is Mike’s birthday. Facebook reminded me this morning, which felt like a punch in the gut. So, I thought it was fitting to tell you about Mike’s Bible.

The Bible itself is nothing to look at. If you were looking for a generic idea of what a Bible should look like, it would look like this one. It’s black leather, with gilt edges and a black ribbon to mark your place, and in gold script in the lower right-hand corner, it has Mike’s name embossed.

This Bible is nothing special on its own, but it is very important to me. Thoreau said the value of a things lies in what of we have to give up to obtain it. By that measure, it is one of the more valuable things I own–not from what I gave up, but what was given up for it to come into my possession.

It’s the King James Version – a no longer fashionable version first published in 1611, with archaic language that uses thee and thou as pronouns. In my experience, two kinds of people still use the King James Version. The first is people who grew up using it, who find the language comfortable and soothing, who relish the poetic notes as the language of devotion. The second is people who desire a scripture that is fixed in time, an immutable authority that does not change.

I am the first sort of person. Mike was the second.

He first came in my office about 13 years ago, just off the bus from Virginia. His marriage had ended because of his chemical addiction. He had an ex-wife and a daughter, neither of who would talk to him, and he had been raised by a grandmother, now dead. She had given him the Bible he carried everywhere, with his name embossed in gilt on the front.

Mike would come to the church I was at in those days and lead us in hymns he knew, which were the most strict sort, involving lots of blood atonement and proclamations of our unworthiness. He believed in a wrathful, powerful God in a way I have never believed in anything. He could cite obscure scriptures to “prove” his points, and when he was sober–which admittedly came and went–-he was a kind and gentle soul.

Over the three years I saw him often, Mike would occasionally go away for a while to various rehab facilities, and while there he would write me letters filled with Biblical citations and affirmations of his complete recovery when he was released. Promises made, the Holy Spirit invoked, Satan renounced. This time, it was going to be different.

Sadly, his aspirations always exceeded his abilities, for Matt never lasted more than a month outside of rehab before he was using again.

One day he walked into my office. I had not seen him for a good three months. We always said that when people disappeared on us, it was either really good, or really bad. For Mike, it had been bad. He was dirty, and smelled of sweat and urine. In his hand he held his Bible.

“Preacher, this is my Bible. My granny gave it to me when I got saved at a revival when I was a teenager. I don’t want to lose it – will you hold onto it for me?”

Of course I would.

Mike began a steady descent after that day. I wonder sometimes if the responsibility of keeping track of his one prized possession hadn’t been good for him. I don’t know – I just know that after that, he spiraled down quickly.

One day he came in, relatively sober, and asked if I still had his Bible. I told him I did, and asked if he wanted it back.

“Not yet,” he said. “You keep it for me until I am ready for it.”

That was the last time I saw Mike. He disappeared, and several weeks later we learned he had died one night in a storm, drowning in a drainage ditch while high on paint fumes.

Mike didn’t make it, but I still have his Bible. It sits on my desk, and I will pick it up some days and thumb through it-–sometimes looking for comfort, but other times when I need to be reminded of truths I know, but am prone to forget.

The page at the front of the Bible where marriages are to be recorded has Mike and his wife’s names written in, but her name marked through and obliterated, serves to remind me that things don’t always go like we wish they would.

The underlined verses about the wrath of God and the power of God (but never about the love of God) remind me that people like Mike, who in this life was powerless but loving, needed a God who was what he wasn’t.

The embossed cover with his name on it, a gift from his Granny, reminds me that as broken and discarded as Mike was when I knew him, he was once loved and prized by his family, and that all of us have a back story–none of us are the worst thing other people know about us.

But mostly, this old Bible reminds me that you don’t always win. When I read from it, I am reminded that no one ever wanted to be sober as much as Matt, and that just wanting it is never enough.

But I really wish it was.

Frustration

NB: As I wrote about here, I am writing about the days I did street engagement work among the unhoused population as a way of dealing with the trauma I experienced there. – HH

I was frustrated.

I had been working on the streets of Raleigh for about a year, with no budget, no money, and damned little encouragement. How I had gotten there is another story for another day, but it was out of conviction and an honest attempt to reconcile my faith with what I saw happening around me.

When church folk wanted to talk about homelessness with me at all, they wanted to either pray for folks or get them to heaven.

There was a “street ministry” I encountered early on in my time out there that would take pictures of unhoused people they were praying with, and then post them on their blog to fundraise. No attempt to recognize their humanity, no realization that they had their own stories and pasts and preferences and agency – no, they would post a photo of someone crying with a caption like. “Another of God’s lambs is saved from hellfire!”

The big steeples were more the praying kind. A huge downtown church had announced they were spending 1.8 million dollars on a pipe organ for their sanctuary. I knew several unhoused folks who lived on their property, and so when I met the pastor of that church, I asked if he could help me get some resources so I could provide relational help and pastoral care to those people. He told me the best thing we could do for those folks was to pray for them, and trust God to provide it.

So I was frustrated. I knew people who were dying because they lived outside, ignored, in a wealthy city, in the shadow of huge steeples. Churches with multi-million-dollar budgets were content to ignore them, and hoped they returned the favor. Street ministries used them as pawns and fundraising tokens, their rich inner lives reduced to being extras in a movie about street preachers. And I was convinced they were made in the very image of God, and that Jesus meant all those things he said when he identified with the poor, saying that when we feed someone who is hungry, we are feeding Jesus himself.

Jesus is fucking hungry and these people with all their fucking Jesus talk are content to let him starve. Goddammit.

Have I mentioned how frustrated I was?

So, I did what I always do when I don’t know what else to do; I wrote.

Ashe, who is now my friend but then was not, ran a popular blog (now defunct) called Jesus Manifesto, which sought to be “a clearinghouse for propaganda meant to frustrate and disrupt quaint notions of Jesus”.

I dashed off a piece and asked Ashe if they would accept it as a guest submission. And they did.

I recently came across it as I began cleaning up my archives. I had been writing for a while about what I was doing on my own blog, but this was the first time I wrote about my work for a wider audience.

As I read it now, even though I would write it differently now, I’m proud of me for being bold, for turning my frustration into action, and for doing both storytelling and preaching in the same piece. The foundations of my personal theology – that it is not we who wait for God to act, but God who waits for us – is there, even in those early days. Later I would learn and then embrace the words of Miroslav Volf, who said that it is deeply hypocritical to pray for a problem you are unwilling to resolve. I did not know those words then, but I already knew the thought.

Anyway, here it is, warts and all. This guy was very, very angry. And it would get worse.

Evelyn and the failure of the church

Content warning – mentions of death and sexual assault, but nothing graphic.

A heavy girl, perhaps 250 pounds, Evelyn’s greasy, stringy hair only served to accentuate her poor skin. Her weight made her shuffle rather than walk and her head was always bowed, seeking not to offend, avoiding eye contact. At 23, most people her age are very conscious of their appearance, but Evelyn’s wardrobe consisted of thrift store finds and cast offs, leaning heavily toward stretch pants and sweatshirts that advertised events she had never seen and places she would never visit.

It was my second month in Raleigh. I was volunteering with a group that fed the homeless in the park on Sunday when I met her for the first time. She shuffled through the line, mumbling thanks for the watery mashed potatoes and chili-mac, eyes on the ground. Several times I tried to engage her, but between my maleness and her demons, it just was not happening. Like a dog that had been struck once too often, she flinched at contact, muttering secrets only she knew to people only she saw.

When there was an open bed, Evelyn would stay at the woman’s shelter, but more often then not she had to make other arrangements. On cold nights, she would trade sexual favors in exchange for a warm bed. To pick up spending money, she would give men oral sex for $5. Because of her weight and mental issues, often the promise of a warm bed was revoked, or the money not paid after the oral sex had been given. Several people later told me Evelyn was often sexually assaulted and raped, unable to resist her attackers.

The last time I saw her was on a Thursday in early November. I remember it was inordinately cold that day, with a sharp, piercing wind.. Evelyn shuffled down the sidewalk, huddled down into her jacket, oblivious to my wave, ignoring me when I called.

That night Evelyn made it into the women’s shelter. In here she could sleep, secure in the knowledge she was safe. In the night Evelyn died of complications from sleep apnea. At age 23, she was another statistic of life, and death, on the streets.

* * * *

I told Evelyn’s story in a church once, and when I was finished they prayed fervent prayers that Evelyn would be at peace in the loving arms of Jesus. They prayed that those who would injure and molest women like Evelyn would be caught and punished. They prayed for God’s kingdom to come and for shalom to rest on our city.

At the end of the talk, a lady came up to me, obviously moved by my story and asked me the question I dread most: “How could God have allowed this to happen to Evelyn? Was this all part of God’s plan?”

If you spend much time working in the inner-city, you try not to ask yourself those kind of questions–not because you don’t know what the answer is, but because you do. Because if you think about it too much you get mad and because if you tell people the answer, you will not be invited back.

What I wanted to tell that lady, but did not, was God did have a plan to take care of Evelyn; God’s plan was us. God’s plan was to put us here to be his hands and feet. We are to show mercy, to love justice. We are to show mercy, as he is merciful. We are to feed those who are hungry, with the assurance that when we do, we are doing it to, and not just for, Jesus himself.

I wanted to tell that lady God did have a plan and we screwed it up. I wanted to tell her that it is not we who are waiting on God, but rather God who is waiting on us and that what Evelyn really had needed was not this lady’s prayers but a safe place to sleep at night. What I wanted to tell that lady, but didn’t, is that it is very obvious that we have the resources to help invisible people just like Evelyn but we simply lack the will to do so.

I did not tell that church lady any of that. But often I wish I had.

The Third Row

Monday morning at 7 AM I was heading north on Interstate 55, heading toward my hometown. A woman I knew had died. She and her husband lived down the road from Mom on a few acres we had sold before I was born, and she and Mom were close.

Growing up, some of my earliest memories were of going to their house. The adults would play Yahtzee, and I would play in the living room, on the improbably white carpet. He was a few years older than Dad, and they had grown up together and had similar interests. They were very much a part of my life growing up.

Our lives revolved around the church down the road. It was a small brick building in those days before they added the fellowship hall and the new sanctuary. My granddaddy’s name was on the cornerstone, and my uncle had run the electrical for it when it was built. And generations of my people are buried across the street, in the cemetery there, including Dad.

They don’t really use the old sanctuary much anymore. It’s still there, though, and when I had finished eating my spaghetti Monday in the fellowship hall after the service, I crept over to the old building to look around.

It still looks the same as it did 40 years ago, except it doesn’t, mostly because I’m no longer the same. The first thing that grabs me is how small it was, just six rows or so of pews, and none of them really long. No wonder it always seemed packed in my memories.

The hardwood floors are still there, blessedly uncovered by carpet, as is the fate in many churches that tire of the upkeep required for hardwoods. The area behind the altar rail is carpeted now as it was then, although, in my memory, the carpet was maroon instead of the blue it is now. It is, of course, entirely possible they changed the carpet in the last 40 years, but it is far more likely that my memory is playing tricks on me.

The pulpit is now in the new sanctuary next door, with a piano in its place, which in my childhood was in the alcove to the right of the door. There was no sound system in those days, either, forcing Brother Leon to use his preacher’s voice.

The Heinrich Hoffman print of Jesus praying in the garden the night he was arrested is still there, in the same spot it was every Sunday of my youth. Just out of the frame of this shot, there were additional pictures of Jesus on each side wall, one a headshot and the other an improbably young Jesus, also prints from Hoffman. The headshot is still there, but the picture of adolescent Jesus is gone, a nail still sticking from the wall being all that proves I was not making it up.

Adolescent Jesus captured my attention to no end as a child. I would stare at him on the wall, beardless and with unruly hair, and wonder if he knew what he was in for, if he got in trouble a lot, and why his dad didn’t make him cut his hair.

The hymn board is still there, too. It always had the list of the hymns we would sing today, along with how much money folks had put in the offering the week before. I liked that the hymns were enlisted, as I would go through the hymnal and find the songs ahead of time and slip pieces of paper in to mark them so that I could find them later instead of being flustered and pressured when they were announced. Even then, I was searching for coping mechanisms.

In my memories, as a family, we always sat in the third row in this photo, on either side, but always toward the aisle if we could. I have lots of memories here. Mr. Hays interrupting the preacher, mid-sermon, that he had preached too long and it was time for lunch. Billy, who was what my people called slow and would now be considered special needs, always sang off-key but made up for it with volume and exuberance.

And I remember my daddy’s hands, curiously enough. In this memory, we are on the right-hand side of this picture, on our customary third row. He was wearing his one suit, dark blue, with a white shirt and red striped tie. I am to his left, and the preacher is praying. Daddy’s elbows are on his knees, his scarred fingers interlaced, forehead resting on his clasped, callused hands. His eyes were scrunched closed tightly as if, by sheer concentration, his petitions would go to the head of God’s line.

You could not have convinced me then that they did not.

One Year

A year ago today, I bought the domain name for this website, Humidity And Hope.

Yesterday was the 9th anniversary of that time I was threatened with arrest for feeding hungry people.

Those are not entirely unrelated facts.

In the aftermath of that day 9 years ago, my visibility skyrocketed. A fair portion of the people who read my stuff now came to know who I was in the aftermath of that day. I now had a “platform.” I was, at the time, responsible for fundraising for the small nonprofit that I had founded that would eventually serve more than 300 meals a day, and that would start what was at the time the only faith-based LGBT-affirming day shelter for people without homes in the state. A lot of people depended on me. I felt a lot of pressure to write about my work.

For the next five years, I wrote almost exclusively about faith and justice issues, especially as they related to poverty and homelessness. A lot of people still wish I would write about those things. Recently, I asked my Facebook timeline what I should write about on this blog, and more than ⅔ of the suggestions were faith/justice related.

But here’s the thing: I’m not really interested in writing about those things. But I’m very interested in doing those things. Not to say, “Hey, look at me – see this good thing I’m doing,” but because I believe that doing those things is how I want to live.

I don’t know that we need more people, especially guys, even more especially white guys – writing about what people should believe. But more than that – I am not convinced it matters at all what you believe.

I will go even further: I think that there is nothing more useless to the world than what you believe, and there’s nothing more important to the world than what you do.

I wanted a place to write about doing. Not about why you should feed the hungry, or a place to share my sermons, write about how evil the religious right is, or whatever other God-talk people would read. I don’t think in those terms anymore. I actually think it’s all God-talk.

The work I have done feeding the hungry and building the wildlife pond in my backyard comes from the desire – the mandate – to assist creation in flourishing. My time spent preaching sermons and my time walking along the creek by my house are both done in service to God. Whatever God may need from me, none of it is for me to come to God’s defense. However, the turtles and frogs are not as resilient and need my help much more.

In short, I wanted to write about my attempt to live a complete life. What does it mean to live a good life? What is required? What would that look like? I wanted to write about that.

I didn’t think it would be simple. It would be wide-ranging but centered around trying to be a certain type of person in a certain context. And for me, that context is the Deep South, which is my deepest identity.

So, over the last year, I have written about cornbread and gravy and depression and hope and birds and frogs and nature and travel and death and attempts at suicide and also about trying to live. I have published 216 posts containing over 175,000 words. I’m proud of all of them. Not because it’s the best writing I’ve ever done, but because it was all real. There was no agenda behind any of it other than to say, “Here I am. This is what I do and how I want to live. You might be interested.“ The last 12 months of publishing here have been the source of the most genuine writing I have ever done.

I’m not sure what this place really wants to be yet. But I think it’s beginning to come together. I know I’m glad I’m doing it. I’m glad I get to do it. And I’m glad you’re here.

It means more than you know.

The Spiritual Life

“Can I ask you a question?”

It came over text. I didn’t see it for a while. I have a bad habit of walking away from my phone.

But when I saw it, I replied.

“Sure. What’s up?”

I should say here that it wasn’t a close friend, but someone I know casually. In other words, getting a text from her wasn’t weird, but it was hardly a regular occurrence.

“You’re a preacher, right?”

I used my standard line: “That’s what the piece of paper on the wall says.”

There was a pause of a few minutes.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about. That sort of ‘not taking it serious’ thing you do. You don’t act very spiritual”.

It was my turn to pause. If she needed me to be “Pastor Hugh,” I wanted to be that for her. But if she just wanted to bust my chops because I said “shit” on Facebook, I didn’t really have time for that.

“Is that a question?”

Her: Maybe. Like, even though you act like you don’t, you do take it seriously, don’t you?

Ahhh. Here we are. I didn’t fit her paradigm of what a spiritual person looked like.

I scheduled a time to grab some coffee with her, and we talked for about an hour.

Here is an abbreviated version of what I said.

I told her that while I understood what she meant, I just don’t think in those terms. Like, deciding that this is spiritual, and this isn’t.

There isn’t spiritual work and secular work. There aren’t spiritual people and not spiritual people. There isn’t spiritual music and not spiritual music. And there isn’t a spiritual life and a not spiritual life.

There is just the sacred and the desecrated. That’s it. Those are the only two categories my worldview permits.

It’s all supposed to be holy. It all matters.

So yes, I take it all seriously. I take it very, very seriously.

I’m just not interested in pretending to be something I’m not, I told her. I’m the kind of guy who says “shit.” I’m not the kind of guy who tries to turn every conversation to be about God. Besides, if everything is holy, it’s all about God anyway.

In her book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard says,

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

I think about that a lot. That there is no such thing as a spiritual life – there is just whatever we are doing at any given minute. As Dillard advises, there are practices one can engage in to catch those moments so that we capture them and thus form a pattern, both blurred and powerful. And for me, looking for the beauty that underlies everything is one of those practices. Loudly proclaiming my spiritual allegiance is not.

So, I’m not a guy who is going to say, “Ain’t God Good!” when my car gets hit in the parking lot. But I am the guy who will notice the sunlight refracting through the cracks in the windshield as I wait on the tow truck. And I believe God is in those cracks, too.

And that is my spiritual life.

The Plan

Some years back, I was hanging out in the smoking rea of the day shelter I ran at the time. It was one of my favorite community-building activities – it’s hard to have any agenda in a smoking area, especially if you yourself do not smoke.

If you just hung out there long enough, people would forget you were the guy in charge of everything, and eventually, they would just talk. And if you were willing to just listen, you heard some amazing things.

Like the time I heard how one of our guests had been in a drug deal gone bad, and so the other party to the deal was looking for him to kill him, but our guest had hidden in a dumpster and the would-be killer overlooked him.

He turned to me and then said, “Pastor, that’s why I believe in God. Because he was protecting me that day.”

Well, as the old saying goes, the Lord protects fools, drunks and, I guess, drug dealers.

Anyway. Another time, and to the point of this conversation, I overheard two guys talking. It seems that this was homeless because he had cheated on his girlfriend, and she found out about it, and she had then thrown all his stuff out in the street when he wasn’t home, changed the locks, and also called the woman he was cheating on her with, who was unaware he was cheating, and who also threw all his stuff out and locked him out.

So he’s telling this story to another guy who we will call Guy #2.

Guy #1: I ain’t mad though. This is all part of God’s plan.

Guy #2: Oh, how do you figure?

Guy #1: I mean, I just figure everything happens for a reason.

Guy #2; Sure. But sometimes, the reason is that you did some stupid shit.

Well, yes. There is that.

Our impulse to make meaning from chaos is strong. I have spent more time than most people at the deaths of youths who died violent deaths, and I always hear folks say that God needed them more than we did, or that this is all part of God’s plan, or that God won’t give us more than we can handle – all of which are really stupid things to say that bring comfort to no one but the speaker.

But they say them anyway.

I get how it happens though. As I look back over my life, I see things that turned out poorly – a bad relationship, a job I got fired from unjustly, a friendship gone bad – that at the time seemed horrible, but which, in time, became a turning point for my life, and that led to my finding a better partner, or a more rewarding job, or led to my developing healthier relationships.

And so it is tempting to believe that the bad thing that happened was part of the plan – God’s, The Universe’s, hell – somebody’s – and that it was foreordained that as a result of this bad thing, I would be better off eventually.

But I don’t believe that to be true.

What I believe is that the universe is inherently frugal, and wastes nothing. The leaves that fall from the trees in Autumn become compost that feeds the trees in Spring. The flurried attempts to get nourishment by bees from flowers are also the accidental means by which flowers get pollinated, and thus exist. The spring ephemeral flowers only exist because the leaves fall off the trees, and thus bring sunshine to places that are normally in darkness.

The Universe is a very frugal place.

And I exist in that frugal universe. And so do you. We don’t just exist in it – we are part of it. Like the leaves, or the bees, or the flowers. And so, since the universe wastes nothing, the tragedies that befall all of us are not debris left over from disasters, but building materials from which we build our lives.

And so the fact that I spent most of my 20’s doing a job that I hated, that required me to do things I found abhorrent and that led to my drinking an unhealthy amount to survive was neither a personal disaster nor part of a benevolent god’s plan, but rather the source of the skills (such as public speaking, persuasive writing skills, and confidence in dealing with people) that I have used to build a 15-year career advocating for people who have their backs against the wall and effecting culture change. Work I would not have had the tools to do had I not learned them then, in that ugly period of my life.

Like bones and water, which, with time. Heat, and intention, form broth, the things in our past are the materials with which we build our future.

I once knew a lady who lived in a van. Her story was harsh and brutal, and she had legitimate grievances about the circumstances that led her there, and her reasons for being unable to be rehoused. But she wasn’t angry. I asked her why not, and she told me she never really thought of it that way.

“I don’t focus much on what got me here. I just ask myself what I’m supposed to be doing now that I’m here.”

That sounds like a plan to me.

The Giddiness of God

Tony is a Black man who lives on the edge of homelessness, with occasional bouts of sheltered living. Tony is also a gay man, but not completely out, largely due to concerns about his safety in the world he lives in. And Tony is also Christian in a very intense and Evangelical way, mostly, I suspect, as a way of dealing with his shame around his sexuality.

So when Tony came into my office and asked if he could talk to me, I knew this was going to be interesting.

I want to say upfront that while I know that there is no single Black Church Experience and that there are many positive manifestations of the Black male-led church, Tony is involved in none of those. Instead, he regularly attends a storefront Pentecostal church led by a power-hungry man who preaches prosperity theology with a side dish of shaming, who demands that people refer to him as “Pastor”. Like it’s his name.

One of Tony’s friends is Jimmy, and Jimmy is very gay and very out. Jimmy had been going to Tony’s church, and was recently “convicted” about his sexuality, and had recently been, at the encouragement of the pastor over there, committed to praying that God will take away his “homosexual desires”.

Earlier in the week, Jimmy had confessed to the pastor that it wasn’t working. Despite all his praying, Jimmy was still just a big old gay man, and this made Jimmy feel ashamed and made the pastor angry.

So at the Wednesday night prayer meeting, and at the leadership meeting afterward (that Tony was a part of), Pastor doubled down. They had a ‘Come to Jesus” meeting, Tony told me, where Pastor let it be known in no uncertain terms that being gay was a sin, against the law of God, and to prove it, they had a verse by verse reading of Romans chapter one.

Everybody in the room was supposed to read two verses out loud, and when it got to Tony, he was supposed to read verses 26 and 27 out loud.

For this reason, God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

There was a long pause while they waited for Tony to read.

“I can’t do it. I won’t do it.” Tony said. And then he left.

Pastor was upset, obviously. He isn’t used to being defied. He sent Tony several texts, basically threatening his eternal salvation if he didn’t repent and come back to church.

So Tony thought about it and came to see me. Because that’s sort of what I do. I’m the pastor you come to when you don’t have anyone else to talk to. The conversation went like this:

Tony: Pastor told me last night that my being gay was a sin, and that God was angry at me.

Me: Well, what do you think?

Tony: I really don’t think it is a sin. I think God made me this way. What do you think, Hugh?

Me: I think you’re right Tony. I don’t think it is, either, and I think God made you this way.

Tony: You do? (This two-word phrase was so filled with hope, tears, and pain that it almost broke my heart.)

Me: I really do. God made you, and God doesn’t make mistakes. You are exactly the way God meant for you to be, and God loves you, and God loves that you are gay. You being gay is exactly what God wanted, and it makes God happy.

Tony, thru tears: No pastor has ever told me that before. I wish they had.

Me: I really wish they had, too.

We talked a bit after that about what Romans chapter one was actually talking about, and I lent him a couple of books that would be helpful to someone from an Evangelical background. But mainly, I let him know he was loved, by both me and by God.

As he was getting ready to leave, I asked him if he would let me read another Bible verse to him. He agreed.

So I read Romans 8:38 and 39 to him.

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 depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Him: That sounds like it’s saying that nothing can come between me and God.

Me: That’s exactly what it’s saying.

He hugged me, and then, heading to the door, stopped and turned to look back at me.

“No pastor has ever told me that before, either.”

And he walked out the door.

# # #

If you are gay, and like Tony, you have never had a minister tell you that God is happy you are gay, then please, allow me to be the one to say it.

You are made, the book of Genesis tells us, in the very image of God. You are not an afterthought or a mistake. You are not defective. Your being gay was part of the plan, and has been all along.

And because every creator delights in seeing their creation being fully utilized, God is delighted that you are gay. Not just delighted that you are attracted to other people, but your expressing your sexuality makes God happy. In exactly the same way that it makes God happy that you like to paint, or that you like to run, or that you enjoy singing songs or making music.

Your being gay, realizing you are gay, seeking to express your gayness – all of that makes God giddy with joy.

And as to what can separate you from the love of God?

Not a damned thing. Not a single damned thing.

Miracle Enough

I spent this morning among Pentecostal folk.

I have never seen a blind man regain sight.
I have never seen a cancerous tumor go away untreated.
I have never spoken in tongues.

When I prayed over the dying, they still died.
Despite intense prayer, my church still has a hole in its roof.
And praying in Jesus name has yet to bring me wealth.

But each day about 5PM, the birds gather
in the bamboo grove near my house
And sing songs of praise as they prepare to sleep.

And for me, that is miracle enough.

Making Room

NB: The following is a sermon I delivered at Presbyterian New England Congregational Church in Saratoga Springs, NY on October 6, 2019.

Making Room
Presbyterian-New England Congregational Church
Matthew 26:20-35
10/6/2019

It was a holiday weekend. Everybody was in town, and all of the shops were crowded.

And the word on the street was that the police were going to arrest Jesus. There was a warrant out for his arrest – the police had an informant who had given them the goods on Jesus, and now it was just a matter of finding him.

I find it interesting, and somewhat reassuring, that on the night Jesus knew he was going to be arrested, he decided to be with his friends. He could have run and hid. He could have left town, or hidden in someone’s attic. Instead, he had supper with the people who mattered to him.

We don’t know an awful lot about his mood that night, or what he was thinking. Thanks to a different witness to the story, we know that during dinner, a fight broke out at the table about who was going to be in charge after Jesus left.

I have to wonder if that frustrated him. I mean, over the preceding three years, they had seen the blind be given sight, had watched him raise Lazarus from the dead, had seen him tell beggars and paupers how to claim their dignity in the face of the most powerful regime the world had ever known.

And Jesus had told them that they could do it too. They could do even greater things.

Together, they had crisscrossed the countryside, telling people the Good News that the Kingdom of God was at hand. They had healed the sick, cared for the dying, gave meaning to those who had theirs taken away, fed the hungry, confronted the Powers that Be, and bore witness to the goodness of God to people who had legitimate reason to doubt that goodness.

And on the night when he is in grave danger, on the night he could have ran away, but instead decided to be with them – on that night, they are still not getting it. They are still bickering. Trying to grab power for themselves.

So, I think it’s safe to say he had to be frustrated.

We also know he was scared. The story goes that after supper was over, he is going to take his best, closest friends and go into the garden and pray – hard. He is going to fervently ask God to for this to go down any other way. He is asking for mercy, and he is so upset that he is sweating giant drops as he prays.

The New Revised Standard translation of the Bible tells us he is in anguish as he prays, but the old King James I memorized as a child said that he was in agony.

All of that had to be building up while he was eating, while he was watching the infighting and the bickering.

Frustrated, and afraid.

Judas had betrayed him to the cops – he knew that.

And then Peter. Oh Peter.

Mark Twain once said that no man was completely worthless, as he could always serve as a bad example. I feel that way about Peter sometimes.

Peter just kept going on and on about how much he loved Jesus, and the whole time, Jesus knows he is going to betray him too. Before the night is over, Peter won’t even admit he knew Jesus, let along stand up with him.

So it is in the midst of this, surrounded by fears and doubts and unworthy friends that Jesus does something both simple and yet radical.

He took the bread and the wine off the table. He blessed it. He shared it. And he told them that when they shared food with each other, they were to remember.

It was that simple. And that complex.

Because it wasn’t just about sharing food – but the sharing of the food was important. It wasn’t just about being with your friends, even though they were betraying you – but loving your friends in their failures was important. It wasn’t even about having a community that was large enough to include both a government employee and a zealot who wanted to overthrow that government, large enough to have people of various races and a wide range of educational levels – but the diversity of people at the table is important too.

No, Jesus showed them that sharing a meal with people – with people who are at odds with you, with people who frustrate you, with people who are different than you, with people who share your values but don’t always live up to them – that sharing a meal like that is an act of resistance to the Powers that seek to make us afraid of each other.

Imagine a world if we made room for meals like that to happen?

In a world like that, the supper table is an altar, and the meal spread out on it an offering of faith to the idea of a better world than the one we live in now.

* * *

My wife and I have some friends, Linda and Hank*. They are in their 70’s, and they have had a life full of adventures. As a result, they have a wide range of friends from all over the world. And when we lived in their city, so far from our own families, they sort of adopted us. A mutual friend said once that Linda and Hank collect people. And we were part of their collection.

They lived in a large old house, filled with knick-knacks from their travels – there is the ancient Turkish rug, over there the Buddha from India, the buffalo skin from the Southwest, the antique couch from Goodwill. It was an eclectic house, but in a good way.

And when we lived there, we went to their house for Thanksgiving. Everyone brought something, and just as their friends were eclectic, so was the meal – there was American style turkey and dressing, for sure, but there was also babaganoush, and eggrolls, and empanadas, and baklava. They would put out the invitation – if you don’t have a place to eat Thursday, well, now you do. Come as you are and bring what you can.

When you got there, the table was already full, but Linda would always say, ‘Don’t worry – we will make room”, and another chair magically appeared and people would scooch their chairs and now there was room for one more person at this most unlikely of feasts. By the end of the day there would be several tables added to the end of the dining room table that now extended into the living room.

And I am here to tell you, that would be the best meal you had all year, and the most diverse. The last year we were there we ate with, among others, an undocumented house painter, a professional dulcimer player, a nurse who worked on death row, a Syrian mathematician, a folk singer, and the woman who worked the front desk at a nearby retirement community.

I think of those meals often when I think about the sort of meals Jesus envisioned. A table that is full, but there is always room for more. A table where there is already plenty, but we accept what people bring with them, and we can always scooch over to make room. A table where honest conversations can happen, where we can enter as strangers but leave as friends.

It’s worth noting that such meals do not happen by accident. They never went to a thrift store without hunting for folding tables and chairs so they could fit more people. They had a huge stock of serving platters and mismatched flatware and plates. There was an intentional invitation – in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, if you had a conversation with them, you would be invited, and had a standing invitation from then on. These meals were planned to be wide ranging and inclusive from the beginning.

If we are going to have the sort of meals Jesus had, we are going to have to plan for them too. If you put it out in the world that everyone is welcome, and you really mean it, you can’t be shocked when the person who eats with you betrays you later. You can’t be shocked when one of your closest friends won’t stand with you when it counts. You can’t be shocked by who shows up.

And if you invite everyone and mean it, it means it’s Ok when the person who shows up doesn’t look like you, or vote like you, or live in a house like you, or have the same sort of manners you do. No, all you can do is scooch your chair over and say, “We will make room.”

And when we do that, the world changes. Not huge, earth-shattering changes, but in small, incremental ways, the world becomes better. We move closer to the better world Jesus imagined.

And we feel less afraid.

I don’t know about you, but from where I sit, the world seems pretty scary right now. There are days I am afraid to listen to the radio or look on social media, because I am just happier not knowing what new atrocity is happening.

When we are most afraid, when we are in anguish, when we are in agony about the future, when we are begging God to not make the inevitable happen – that is when we ought to share a meal with others, and remember.

When we share that meal, we bear witness to the Principalities and Powers that we are greater than our differences, and that while we may be afraid, we will not let that fear deter us from working to make God’s Kingdom a reality. That despite our fears, despite our frustrations, despite our bickering and infighting, we will persist in seeking the make it on Earth as it is in Heaven.

When we scooch our chairs over and make room at that massive, diverse table, we remember.

We remember that Jesus did amazing acts of power, and said that we could too.

We remember that Jesus showed love to the downtrodden, and we can too.

We remember that Jesus said the Kingdom of God is not some far off country, but that it is within us.

We remember that Jesus tried to love the Hell out of the world, and showed us that we can too.

We can go out into the world and share the good news that another world is possible,

It begins when we make room at that table.

It begins with a meal.

* I have changed names and some details to protect the privacy of folks, but otherwise, this is completely true, and those were the best meals ever.

Power

Open Door Mennonite Church
July 29, 2018
2 Samuel 11:1-17 (NRSV)

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.

It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, “This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. The woman conceived; and she sent and told David, “I am pregnant.”

So David sent word to Joab, “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” And Joab sent Uriah to David. When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab and the people fared, and how the war was going. Then David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house, and wash your feet.” Uriah went out of the king’s house, and there followed him a present from the king. But Uriah slept at the entrance of the king’s house with all the servants of his lord, and did not go down to his house. When they told David, “Uriah did not go down to his house,” David said to Uriah, “You have just come from a journey. Why did you not go down to your house?” Uriah said to David, “The ark and Israel and Judah remain in booths; and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field; shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? As you live, and as your soul lives, I will not do such a thing.” Then David said to Uriah, “Remain here today also, and tomorrow I will send you back.” So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day. On the next day, David invited him to eat and drink in his presence and made him drunk; and in the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his lord, but he did not go down to his house.

In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the letter he wrote, “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.” As Joab was besieging the city, he assigned Uriah to the place where he knew there were valiant warriors. The men of the city came out and fought with Joab; and some of the servants of David among the people fell. Uriah the Hittite was killed as well.

Over the last month I have been here in Jackson, I have been in a lot of meetings. I have had meetings with City officials, with school board members, with local activists, with bankers, with normal folks who just want Jackson to be better for them and their children.

But the biggest thing I have been trying to figure out since I have gotten here is how does Power work here. In community organizing circles, they call it power mapping, or power analysis. It’s important as a first step, because sometimes the people who look like they are in power really aren’t, and the ones who look like they don’t have any actually have a lot.

You have seen this first hand in your relationships. Like, when granddad bullies and blusters, but grandma is the one who really decides things. Granddad thinks he has the power, but really, he doesn’t.

Power mapping isn’t just useful in community organizing. It is helpful in personal relationships. It is helpful at work. And most importantly for our purposes today, it is a powerful spiritual practice.

Take, for example, today’s story.

History, they say, is written by the victors.

It has also largely been written by men.

Here in the US, we often talk about the Founding Fathers – men like George Washington, John Addams, Benjamin Franklin. Where were the women in these stories? Other than Betsy Ross, who was only notable because the Founding Fathers asked her to do something, I would be hard pressed to tell you any of their stories. Where were the women?

They were there, but their stories were not told. Mostly, I suspect, because it was men doing the telling.

And why did the men get to tell the stories? Because men had power, and in those societies, women did not.

You see this constantly in the Bible stories, too. You could, if you grew up in the church, perhaps tell me the story of Noah and the ark. If you were a hard-core Sunday School attendee, you could perhaps even tell me the name of his three children. But I bet you could not tell me the name of Mrs. Noah. Or the names of his son’s wives.

You couldn’t do it because their names were not considered important enough for us to learn. Because they were women, and it was men telling the story when it was first written down.

It’s about power. Men had the power, and they got to tell the story. And whoever tells the story gets to shape the story.

Like in this story. There are multiple ways of telling the story, depending largely on who does the telling.

The way I learned it was that David, God’s favorite, saw a beautiful woman, and they slept together. Then she got pregnant, and to cover it up, he had Uriah killed. That is the way I learned the story, and largely the way the story has been taught for generations.

That is how the story gets told – but that isn’t what happened.

What happened is that David, who was King and thus had power, saw something he wanted and he took it. Nowhere is the story is it even implied that Bathsheba was a willing participant. In fact, when one party has all the power and the other doesn’t, it is hard for there to be any consent. When the person who literally has the power of life and death over your spouse tells you to do something, you don’t really feel like you have a choice.

What we call the story of David’s adultery was actually the story of the sexual assault of Bathsheba.

But even that way of telling the story centers David. It centers the man, the person in power.

Another way of telling the story would be to center the story on Bathsheba.

Her husband Uriah was sent to war because, the Bible tells us, it was springtime, and that was the time to go to war. But David didn’t go – he stayed home, where it was safe, but men like Uriah got sent off instead.

So one night, after she got finished with her bath, she got summoned to the King’s palace, where she was sexually assaulted by the King. And then she discovered she was pregnant, and the King had her husband killed and made her move into the palace.

Bathsheba was a woman in a system that allowed no power to women, and on top of that, she was pregnant. And your only option is to fend for yourself or be protected by the man who sexually assaulted you and killed your husband.

Some choice.

Let’s look at this story from the framework of power.

In the story, we have four main characters: David, Bathsheba, Joab, and Uriah. Let’s rank them in order, according to who has power and who doesn’t.

David is king, appointed by God. David has ultimate power.

Joab is a military commander, in charge of men. He has the next amount of power.

Uriah is a man and a soldier. He has the next amount of power.

And Bathsheba is a woman, in a society run by men. She has the least amount of power.

Having mapped out the power, let’s look back at the story. The way it is written, who is the story about? Who is the main character? David, the person with the most power.

To who is no blame attached, but was complicit in the crimes? Joab, the person with the second most amount of power.

Who are we made to feel sorry for? Uriah, another person with power.

And who is the only person in the story who is only passive, who only has things happen to her, but doesn’t have any agency of her own? Bathsheba, the person with the least amount of power.

So that is a different way of telling the story. A story that centers the voice of the victim, the story of the person with the least amount of power.

I have spent, at this point, nearly 1000 words telling you about power analysis because I think it is perhaps one of the most important things we in the church can do. I think the Jesus story is ultimately about power, who has it and who doesn’t, how you use it if you do, and for whom.

Jesus was incredibly concerned with power. Most of the healing stories in the New Testament are about people who have little power being restored to a position of equality. Think about the man born blind, whose sight is restored. Or the woman who was constantly bleeding and thus considered impure being made whole, so she could return to society. The man possessed by demons, the man who could not get healed because he couldn’t get to the pool to get in because, you guessed it, people with more power than he had got there first.

In the story of the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus told the Pharisees that the one without sin should cast the first stone, whose side did Jesus take? The side of the one with the least amount of power.

In the parables Jesus told, they were always stories about power as well. The story of the rich man and Lazarus is all about power. I mean, the rich man is in hell and still thinks he has the power to tell Lazarus what to do. The wealthy landowner that won’t forgive debts, the rich young ruler who stored up his riches, the inequity of pay in the story of the talents.

Over and over again, the Jesus story is all about power. And I believe that is because God is concerned about power. The Exodus story is about people with Power using it against people who don’t, and God taking the side of the ones who don’t. The stories of the exile – Daniel and the lion’s den, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the fiery furnace and all the rest – are stories of God taking the side of the people with the least amount of power. The prophets constantly warned those in power that they were not aligned with God’s will.

Power is not bad – it just is. What is bad, however, is when those of us with power use it to harm others. Instead, Jesus believed that those of us with power had an obligation to use it on the behalf of those who do not.

The apostle Paul gave an example of Jesus doing this in Philipians when he quoted an old hymn as saying that Jesus

who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

Jesus had power, but didn’t use it for his own benefit, but for the benefit of others.

This story today is the story of power, and who has it and who doesn’t. And the clear witness of scripture is that God is always on the side of the one with the least amount of power.

So where does this leave us? I think it means that as followers of Jesus, we have to look for the power dynamics around us, and ask who has the power and who doesn’t. And then if we want to be like Jesus, we have to be on the side of the people with the least amount of power.

And if we are with them, then God is with us.

Amen.