​Prayer Circle: No to Line 3
December 17, 2020
Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel
 
Over five hundred years ago, my European Christian ancestors embarked on a well-thought, well-strategized plan to dominate the world. It started with the invasion and subjugation of African Muslim’s and pagans and became the Atlantic slave trade. And it continued with Columbus’s campaign of terror in the Americas. This well-thought, well-strategized plan to dominate the world was and is known as the Doctrine of Discovery and there is a bold and direct line between the actions of those terrorists and their blasphemous colonizing in that era to pipelines and extractive economies in 2020. The Doctrine of Discovery is rooted in Empire Christianity and it was blasphemous then and it is blasphemous now. It wreaked untold suffering then and it threatens the very existence of our planet in this moment.
 
It is as an act of repentance and reparation that I stand before you and with you as a white Christian pastor today, seeking to stop Line 3, particularly in this season. Dec 17, 2020 stands in between the third and fourth Sundays in the Christian season of Advent which is a time of waiting and preparation for love and justice to be born in our world. It is also a time when we Christians believe we are invited to find ways to embody the same kind of solidarity with love and justice that God demonstrates in the birth of Jesus.
 
And, so, it seems particularly appropriate to be here with you: in repentance and solidarity.
 
But one of the things about repentance and solidarity is that they are not one-time things. We must practice them again and again if we are to experience healing. And that is certainly true about our work around Line 3. The other thing is that in the face of well-thought, well-strategized doctrines of discovery and destruction, we must pray and organize in well-thought and well-strategized ways, too.
 
For the past almost three years, I’ve gathered with many of you in prayer and ceremony to say no to this pipeline. Following the leadership of indigenous kindred, we’ve protested, we’ve attended committee hearings, we’ve participated in comment periods, we’ve sung and meditated and lamented and organized. We’ve taken action through the Poor People’s Campaign and the Water is Life Ceremony in the Governor’s Receiving Room. We’ve participated in coalitions of all kinds.
 
And now we are here because we know the danger, the destruction and the death that this pipeline represents: for our planet, for the waters that support life and for each of us and all of us.
 
But we are also here because our action isn’t just no-saying, it isn’t just protest and strategic resistance. We are here because we know that water is sacred, that all of creation is bound together in a blessing and is kin to one another. And so I stand here in deepest gratitude for being bound to and with you and these waters and these lands and these creatures. And I return thanks to the Sacred whom I call God for all who are saying no to this pipeline and yes to life.
 
 

Reflections for Earth Day 2020
MNIPL, Minnesota Multifaith Network, Kaleo Center
Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel
 
One of the traditions that has deeply shaped by heart, mind, body and spirit is that of queer theology. And one of the practices within queer theology is to find ways in which spiritual texts can speak and embody a word for the present moment. And, so, as we grapple with COVID-19 and the paradox of grief, colonization and fear on the one hand and on the other, the extraordinary possibility-for-another-world-beyond-this, I share with you a re-imagining of the prologue to the gospel of John. I offer it as a prayer of blessing. Will you pray with me?
 
In the beginning were Desire and Longing:
   Desire for ecstasy and connection, longing for the deepest of communions.
 
And Desire and Longing were with God.
       And Desire and Longing were God.
           Desire and Longing were with God in the beginning.
 
In fact, they were the animators, the prodders, the relentless whispers
       which propelled the explosion of creativity:
            stars and planets and the whole company of creation. These all came into being out
                 of that Desire and Longing and not one thing would have been without
                      the promise of ecstasy, connection and communion.
 
And then, as now, Desire and Longing were threatening to the forces of destruction,
     dis-connection, dis-memberment
         and death.
 
But then, as now, these did not prevail and what came into being because of and through
       Desire and Longing
           were
               Life, and Life abundant.[1]
 
 
May desire and longing—for life and life abundant, find us, claim us, impassion us and inspire us-- this day and every day. Amen.
 


[1] Rebecca Voelkel, “Promiscuous Incarnation” in Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization, ed. Steve Heinrichs (Altona, Manitoba, Canada: Mennonite Church Canada, 2018), 216.

On June 30, 2019, several thousand folx from MIRAc (Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee), CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) and dozens of co-sponsoring organizations marched in protest against the torturous family separations that are happening at our Southern border in the Stop Separating Families March and Protest. Below are the words I spoke at the rally.

I need to start with a shout out: As we marched down Lake Street today, five million people marched down Christopher Street on this 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising against state sanctioned violence. I am only able to be here because they paved the way for me and so many other LGBTQ folx.
 
A little over 500 years ago, several Popes wrote letters to the kings and queens of Portugal, Spain and England urging them to go first to West Africa and then to the Americas. In both locations, these letters, which were really commands, told the white Europeans to try to convert any pagan or Muslim folx they encountered. If they couldn’t convert them to Christianity, they were ordered to kill them and take their possessions and land. These letters are known as the Doctrine of Discovery or the Doctrine of Christian Dominance.
 
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the genocide, brutality and suffering the Doctrine of Christian Dominance has caused. And one of its core practices has been breaking up families and separating children from parents. African American parents were regularly sold away from children during slavery by Bible-carrying, church-attending white Christians. Native children were, for several generations, stolen from families and put into boarding schools run by churches in order to “civilize” them. In both cases, sexual and physical violence were rampant.
 
The painful truth is that what is happening at our southern border has happened before and it’s all been done in the name of God.
 
And so, as a white, Christian pastor, I stand before you today to confess the truth of this violence done in the name of the collar and stole that I wear. The weight of the sin of genocide must be named--over and over again.
 
I also stand before you to turn away from this violent and distorted version of Christianity and toward the gospel of justice and love. We call this turning, repentance.
 
As part of repenting, is also important to name that the kind of Christianity that calls for genocide and dominance is bad Christianity, it is worshiping the false idols of capitalism and war. It is Empire Christianity, not the gospel of Jesus Christ which calls us to justice and love.
 
The true gospel of justice and love also calls us into repair and reparations. And so, as we march and protest and powerfully resist, we must also continue the work of healing and repair and find ways for concrete reparations.
 
I thank God for each of you and all of you. And may God bless us all in this sacred, holy work of resistance and repair. Que Dios nos bendiga en la lucha. Gracias.

Here is video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THFIqDcBfrU&feature=youtu.be

I was born on March 5, 1969, almost four months before the Stonewall Riots. As we gather here tonight, I am profoundly aware of the fact that my life has been  intertwined with and deeply impacted by the life of the modern LGBTQIA+ movement. I’m also profoundly aware that many of those rioters and resisters who rose up at Stonewall, people like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and other trans+ women of color like those in STAR—the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries-- didn’t make it to age 50, nor were they honored in their lifetimes in the way they deserved for all they were and did. So, particularly as I am honored with a Courage Award, I want to name the reality that I stand here because so many have loved and laughed, struggled and died to make the path I’ve trod.
 
So the first image: the path I’ve trod has been made by others, or at least they’ve laid cairns and other markers to guide me on my way.
 
A second image I want to share was referenced this week at National Gathering by Rev. Nekira Evans-Hernandez. The giant redwoods in California—some of the tallest trees in the world-- don’t have very deep roots. Instead, in order to withstand storms and grow to great heights, their roots are connected with all the roots of the other redwoods around them.
 
These two images form the core of what I want to say tonight: while I am deeply honored to receive this Courage Award, nothing I have done is singular. I am because so many others are. And much of who I am, much of any courage I have is because of you and the Open and Affirming movement in the United Church of Christ.
 
In order to illustrate this truth, I want to do two things. I first want to name a few folx whose being and struggle for intersectional, queer liberation within the UCC have been the roots intertwined with mine. Some of them are older than I and some of them are younger.

Bill Johnson, Nancy Krody, Loey Powell, Jan Greisinger, Ann B. Day, Donna Enberg, John Selders, Margarita Suarez, Barbara Satin, Sam Lolliger, Tim Tutt, Bishop Yvette Flunder, Gwen Thomas, Phil Porter, Ruth Garwood, Tim Brown, Ashley Harness, Sonny Graves, Lesley Jones, Mak Kneebone, Kevin Tindell, Peter Barbosa, Roberto Ochoa, Elaine Kirkland, Lisa Lally, Cathy-Ann Beatty, Mitzi Eilts, Janice Steele, Patrisha Gill, Yvonne Delk, Sharon Day, Paul Sherry, John Thomas, Traci Blackmon, John Dorhauer, Kathie Carpenter, Edith Guffey, Malcom Himschoot, Oby Ballinger, Andy Lang, Kimi Floyd Reich, Ann Randall, Lawrence Richardson, Louis Mitchell, Liz Aguilar, Marguerite Unwin Voelkel, Bill Voelkel, Maggie George and Shannon MacKenzie George Voelkel…
 
And, secondly, I want to recognize so many of you in this room whose names I may or may not know but whose lives are woven with mine.
 
If you in the room have ever come out in any church-related space, please raise your hand and keep it raised. If you have ever participated in an ONA process, please raise your hand. If you have ever preached or sung in a worship service celebrating the LGBTQIA, same-gender loving, two-spirit community, raise your hand. If you have ever been to The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries Convocation or National Gathering or an event hosted by El Proyecto, raise your hand. If you have ever marched with your collar on or your church’s banner with Black Lives Matter or Mi Gente or been at Standing Rock in the Two Spirit camp or danced in a Pride parade or shut down Capitol Hill with disability justice activists, raise your hand. If you have ever baked a hotdish or brought pizza for a campaign to repeal anti-trans+ laws or knocked on doors to get people to vote against voter suppression or got arrested with the Poor Peoples Campaign in support of minimum wage laws, please raise your hands and keep them raised. I invite you to look around.
 
You are the root system, the unbreakable connections that allow any of us to have courage to act for justice and liberation and God’s bodacious, sexy, intersectional realm of God which is here and is coming. But we need to keep reaching wider if we are going to truly hearken the realm of God and withstand today. We desperately need our connected, collective courage.
 
Because a storm of Empire Christianity, woven with a virulent white nationalism, deploying the practices of family separation on our Border that devasted indigenous communities through Boarding Schools and African American communities during slavery at auction blocks, this storm is blowing through the trees of our movement and we must withstand and resist.
 
So, hold fast to one another. And know that I am holding fast to you and to the deep roots of the Open and Affirming Movement.
 
I need you, you need me, we’re all a part of God’s Body…. I pray for you, you pray for me, I love you, I need you to survive.
​​

​195 Years of Activism: A Few Reflections on Loving, Fighting and Legacy
May 30, 2019
Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel
 
I was born on March 5, 1969, almost four months before the Stonewall Riots. As we gather here tonight, I am profoundly aware of the fact that my life has been  intertwined with and deeply impacted by the life of the modern LGBTQIA+ movement. I’m also profoundly aware that many of those rioters and resisters who rose up at Stonewall, people like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and other trans+ women of color like those in STAR—the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries-- didn’t make it to age 50, let alone 60 or 85. I stand here because so many have loved and laughed, struggled and died to make the path I’ve trod.
 
I’m also thinking of many smaller moments and how they have, collectively, knit together my story.
 
It was 1972 and I was riding the bus with my Grammie. She sat next to me as I stood on the seat and pointed out all the churches along our route into downtown Cleveland because she and my parents had already taken me to so many organizing meetings. It was also 1972 when Bill Johnson, who’d been ordained earlier that year as the first out gay person by the United Church of Christ, was invited by my parents to stay in our home.
 
It was 1977 and the United Church of Christ published its sexuality report that then sat on my dad’s library shelf for several years before I took it and kept it hidden under my mattress so I could consult with it as I talked with my best friend about whether she’d have sex with her boyfriend.
 
It was 1978 when I begged Mrs. Cunningham, my third grade teacher, for one of the flyers about the YMCA summer baseball league she was giving to all the boys. When she relented and gave me one and I signed up and we got the word that I wasn’t eligible because I was a girl, my mom organized a petition that reminded the YMCA that there was this thing called Title IX and that she would sue them if they didn’t let me play. I was one of three girls in the league that year. I played for the Dodgers and we lost our first game 44-11. But it was the beginning of a life-long love of organized sports which has included softball, basketball, volleyball, soccer, biking, running and swimming. And all of it taught me to love and trust my own body and its power and vulnerability.
 
It was 1983 when Melissa Gilbert played Jean Donovan in the made for TV movie about El Salvador’s US-funded death squads and I transferred my crush on Melissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls Wilder to Melissa Gilbert as Jean Donovan and read everything I could find about her and Archbishop Oscar Romero and Latin American Liberation theology. And then it was 1987 and 1988 and 1989 when that crush led me to participate in the Accompaniment movement and to live and study in Central America.
 
It was 1989 and, because of the courage of the Co-Madre movement in El Salvador and witness of a faith that was necessary for survival, I came home and both broke my silence about being a survivor of sexual violence and came out as a lesbian.
 
It was the 80’s and the 90’s and the 00’s and the 2010’s and there are so many Marches on Washington—against wars, for queer justice, for reproductive justice, for indigenous justice, for racial justice, for all of these together. I particularly remember marching with Queer Nation against the first Iraq War in which we staged die-ins at the height of the AIDS crisis and chanted hilarious, smart, sexually-explicit chants against the war (ask me what they were, I’d love to tell you!)
 
It was 2010 and Maggie, my parents and three year-old Shannon and I were driving in a car in which we’d put Shannon’s carseat in the third row of the rental car, surrounded by luggage. Not five minutes into the drive, Shannon, remembering the protest she’d been to when Prop 8 passed, improvs from the back seat, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, discrimination has got to go, get me out of the trunk!”
 
It was 2013 and I stood with many of you in a packed church across from the Minnesota State Capitol the night before the Minnesota House passed marriage equality and we listened to Rabbi Latz talk about the symbolism of the chuppah and pagan leader Robin cast the circle and David Lohman lead us in singing For Everyone Born. And how, for a brief moment, we touched that elusive space of joy and justice.
 
 
It was 2018 and the temperature with the windchill was close to 30 below zero. Under the guidance and leadership of Kandace Montgomery and other Black Visions Collective folx, several of us who were clergy prayed and supported a dozen folx, including Rabbi Lekach-Rosenberg, who locked themselves to the fences to block the train coming into the SuperBowl to demand an end to business as usual.
 
In every year since March 5, 1969, there have been several through-lines:

• None of what I am or do is simply about me. I am because so many others are. And my liberation is deeply woven with yours.
• It is my duty to pass on to others the legacy that has been passed on to me.
• To be someone who claims to be spiritually and religiously grounded is to be called time and time again to resist Empire, injustice and violence and to help co-create God’s extravagant, bodacious, sexy world. And worship and protest, praying and breaking unjust laws, singing hymns and chanting in resistance are all sacred, spiritual practices.
• Our movements are at their best when they return regularly to healing trauma, celebrating the blessedness of embodiment and focusing on making love and justice in the world in small and big ways.
• Blessing upon blessing has been mine—through my biological family, through my chosen family, through Maggie and Shannon, through my movement families and particularly with so many of you in this room with whom I’ve had the honor and privilege of making sacred trouble. In particular, knowing and working and playing and praying with Beth and Barbara is sheer gift.

 
Thank you to Stacey and Sayre and the Task Force and thank you to each of you and all of you for being here tonight.
 
I’d love to end with some Holly Near. Please join with me. I am open and I am willing, for to be hopeless would seem so strange. It dishonors those who go before us. So lift me up to the light of change.
 
 

These are times in which the Christian claim that God embodies Godself as radically with and for us is desperately needed. Chaos, violence which threatens, turmoil and anxiety surround us.

State sponsored chaos: Jamal Kashoggi, the Saudi-born, US legal resident and Washington Post journalist whose murder was ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman… the seventeen investigations which keep getting closer and closer to the sitting US President who seems more and more desperate… US Military troops shooting tear gas across the border at unarmed Central American refugees…

And personal tragedy: the fifty-one year old friend who entered hospice this week… the brilliant gay man who addiction and depression finally caused his death by suicide last week…
Both in the ambient national atmosphere and in the personal lives of many I love, it seems as if chaos and violence; sorrow and turmoil are the state of the world.

The same is true of the world into which Jesus was born. And yet, in the Christian tradition, as she prepares to give birth, Mary is reported to have sung... in resistant, resilient joy: My soul proclaims your greatness, O God, and my spirit rejoices in you.
​
How does she do this? And why? Here are some reflections and possible answers to read or listen to: 
​http://www.lyndaleucc.org/sermons/advent-4-preparing-to-sing-the-world-right-side-up/

I'm honored to have contributed a re-interpretation of the Prologue to John's Gospel in this wonderful collection. As we seek to both resist the forces of colonization and to build a more just, verdant and joyous world, it is critical to engage our scriptural traditions-- particularly those texts that have literally baptized the violence and death of the colonizer. This book is an attempt at just such a task.

Here's what folkx are saying about it: For generations, the Bible has been employed by settler colonial societies as a weapon to dispossess Indigenous and racialized peoples of their lands, cultures, and spiritualities. Given this devastating legacy, many want nothing to do with it. But is it possible for the exploited and their allies to reclaim the Bible from the dominant powers? Can we make it an instrument for justice in the cause of the oppressed? Even a nonviolent weapon toward decolonization?

In Unsettling the Word, over 60 Indigenous and Settler authors come together to wrestle with the Scriptures, re-reading and re-imagining the ancient text for the sake of reparative futures.

Created by Mennonite Church Canada’s Indigenous-Settler Relations program, Unsettling the Word is intended to nurture courageous conversations with the Bible, our current settler colonial contexts, and the Church’s call to costly peacemaking. 

Contributors include:

Marcus Briggs-Cloud, Kathy Moorhead Thiessen, Kwok Pui-lan, Christina Conroy, Leah Gazan, Joerg Rieger, Norman Habel, Stan McKay, Rachel and Chris Brnjas, Jennifer Henry, Lori Ransom, Rebecca Voelkel, Peter Haresnape, Robert O. Smith, Susanne Guenther Loewen, Carmen Landsdowne, Cheryl Bear, Joshua Grace, Rarihokwats, Darren W. Snyder Belousek, Joy De Vito, Tamara Shantz, Marc H. Ellis, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Sara Brubacher, Benjamin Hertwig, David Driedger, Pekka Pitkanen, Celine Chuang, Alain Epp Weaver, Musa W. Dube, Katerina Friesen, Anita L. Keith, Derrick Jensen, Roland Boer, Neil Elliott, Daniel Hawk, Randy Woodley, Lisa Martens, Tobin Miller Shearer, Walter Brueggemann, Miguel A. De La Torre, Vivian Ketchum, James W. Perkinson, Sara Anderson, Deanna Zantingh, Peter C. Phan, Sheila Klassen-Wiebe, Bob Haverluck, Mark Bigland-Pritchard, Chris Budden, Ellen F. Davis, Rose Marie Berger, Wes Howard-Brook, Gerald West, Julia M. O'Brien, Dan Epp-Tiessen, Ryan Dueck, Mitzi J. Smith, Sylvia McAdam, Robert Two Bulls, Ched Myers, Jonathan Dyck, Sarah Travis, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, Kyla Neufeld

​To order your copy, go to: https://www.commonword.ca/ResourceView/2/19793​ 

Palm Sunday has been hopelessly domesticated by much of the Christian tradition. But, in truth, Jesus' entry into Jerusalem is a brilliant, perfectly planned and executed non-violent direct action. Its wisdom has much to teach us as we seek to navigate in this political moment in ways that are creative and strategic.

​Read more here.